Disputed practices and reasonable pluralism

This paper addresses the problem of disputed cultural practices within liberal, deliberative democracies, arguing against the currently dominant view, advocated by Susan Okin among others, that such problems represent a fundamental tension between two liberal values: gender equality and cultural autonomy. Such an approach, I argue, requires the state to render normative judgements about conceptions of the good life, something which is both arbitrary and unfair in societies characterised by reasonable pluralism. Disputed practices, I claim, are defined by the existence of reasonable disagreement over their legitimacy, which means they need to be resolved in a way that abstains from morally evaluating the religious or cultural doctrines of the group in question. The paper therefore articulates a cost-based approach to such problems. The cost-based approach focuses our conceptual attention on the sorts of publicly identifiable costs that any state decision will have on the various parties to a dispute. By restricting itself to public reasons, this method thereby avoids arbitrarily privileging certain conceptions of the good at the expense of others when determining the boundaries of reasonable pluralism. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

POLITICAL LIBERALISM WITHOUT SCEPTICISM

Political liberalism famously requires that fundamental political matters should not be decided by reference to any controversial moral, religious or philosophical doctrines over which reasonable people disagree. This means we, as citizens, must abstain from relying on what we believe to be the whole truth when debating or voting on fundamental political matters. Many critics of political liberalism contend that this requirement to abstain from relying on our views about the good life commits political liberalism to a kind of scepticism: we should abstain from relying on our views about the good life because we should be uncertain about the truth of those views. But this kind of scepticism is itself a controversial epistemic position which many reasonable people reject, thus apparently making political liberalism internally incoherent. This is the sceptical critique of political liberalism. This paper shows the sceptical critique to be false. The paper argues that the epistemic restraint required of citizens in political liberalism does not assume or imply any version of scepticism about our ability to know the good life. Liberal neutrality is motivated not by scepticism about our own views, but rather by a desire to justify fundamental political principles to others. ¹ 1 I would like to thank Rebecca Stone, Steve De Wijze, and an anonymous referee for many helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. The paper was completed while I was a visiting Faculty Fellow at The Murphy Institute's Center for Ethics & Public Affairs at Tulane University, and I gratefully acknowledge the Murphy Institute's support, as well as the generous support of Washington & Lee University, which housed the Center after hurricane Katrina.