SQUARE PEGS AND ROUND HOLES

            Moral And Religious Convictions : Private or Public ?

   Why should we not bring our moral and religious convictions to bear in public discourse about justice and rights ? Why should we separate our identity as citizens from our identity as moral persons more broadly conceived ? Rawls argues that we should do so in order to respect "the fact of reasonable pluralism" about the good life that prevails in the modern world. People in modern democratic societies disagree about moral and religious questions ; moreover, these disagreements are reasonable. "It is not to be expected that conscientious persons with full power of reason, even after free discussion, will all arrive at the same conclusion."
   According to this argument, the case for liberal neutrality arises from the need for tolerance in the face of moral and religious disagreement. "Which moral judgments are true, all things considered, is not a matter for political liberalism," Rawls writes. To maintain impartiality between competing moral and religious doctrines, political liberalism does not "address the moral topics on which those doctrines divide."
   The demand that we separate or identity as citizens from our moral and religious convictions means that, when engaging in public discourse about justice and rights, we must abide by the limits of liberal public reason. Not only may government not endorse a particular conception of the good ; citizens may not even introduce their moral and religious convictions into the public debate about justice and rights. For if they do, and if their arguments prevail, they will effectively impose on their fellow citizens a law that rests on a particular moral or religious doctrine. 
   How can we know whether our political arguments meet the requirement of public reason, suitably shorn of any reliance on moral or religious views ? Rawls suggests a novel test : "To check whether we are following public reason we might ask : how would our argument strike us presented in the form of a supreme court opinion ?" As Rawls explains, this is a way to make sure our arguments are neutral in the sense that liberal public reason requires : "The justices cannot, of course, invoke their own personal morality, nor the ideals and virtues of morality generally. Those they must view as irrelevant. Equally, they cannot invoke their or other people's religious or philosophical views." When participating as citizens in public debate, we should observe a similar restraint. Like Supreme Court justices, we should set aside our moral and religious convictions, and restrict ourselves to arguments that all citizens can reasonably be expected to accept.
   This is the ideal of liberal neutrality that John Kennedy invoked and Barack Obama rejected. From the 1960s through the 1980s, Democrats drifted toward the neutrality ideal, and largely banished moral and religious argument from their political discourse. There were notable exceptions. Martin Luther King invoked moral and religious arguments in advancing the cause for civil rights ; the anti-Vietnam War movement was energized by moral and religious discourse : and Robert F. Kennedy, seeking the Democratic presidential nomination in 1968, tried to summon the nation to more demanding moral and civic ideals. But by the 1970s, liberals embraced the language of neutrality and choice, and ceded moral and religious discourse to the emerging Christian right.
   With the election ofRonald Reagan in 1980, Christian conservatives became a prominent voice in Republican politics. Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority and Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition sought to clothe the "naked public square" and to combat what they saw as the moral permissiveness ofAmerican life. They favored school prayer, religious displays in public places, and legal restrictions on pornography, abortion, and homosexuality. For their part, liberals opposed these policies, not by challenging the moral judgments case by case, but instead by arguing that moral and religious judgments have no place in politics.
   This pattern of argument served Christian conservatives well, and gave liberalism a bad name. In the 1990s and early 2000s, liberals argued, somewhat defensively, that they, too, stood for "values," by which they typically meant the values of tolerance, fairness, and freedom of choice. But these were the values associated with liberal neutrality and the constraints of liberal public reason. They did not connect with the moral and spiritual yearning abroad in the land, or answer the aspiration for a public life of larger meaning. 
   Obama's claim that progressives should embrace a more capacious, faith-friendly form of public reason reflects a sound political instinct. It is also good political philosophy. The attempt to detach arguments about the good life is mistaken for two reasons. First, it is not always possible to decide questions of justice and rights without resolving substantive moral questions ; and second, even where it's possible, it may not be desirable.

              THE ABORTION AND STEM CELL DEBATES 

   Consider two familiar political questions that can't be resolved without taking a stand on an underlying moral and religious controversy --- abortion and embryonic stem cell research. Some people believe that abortion should be banned because it involves the taking of human life. Others disagree, arguing that the law should should not take sides in the moral and theological controversy over when human life begins ; since the moral status of the developing fetus is a highly charged moral and religious question, they argue, government should be neutral on that question, and allow women to decide for themselves whether to have an abortion. 
   The second position reflects the familiar liberal argument for abortion rights. It claims to resolve the abortion question on the basis neutrality and freedom of choice, without entering into the moral and religious controversy. But this argument does not succeed. For, if it's true that the developing fetus is morally equivalent to a child, then abortion is morally equivalent to infanticide. And few would maintain that government should let parents decide for themselves whether to kill their children. So the "pro-choice" position in the abortion debate is not really neutral on the underlying moral and theological question ; it implicitly rests on the assumption that the Catholic Church's teachings on the moral status of the fetus ---that it is a person from the moment of conception---is false. 
   To acknowledge this assumption is not to argue for banning abortion. It is simply to acknowledge that neutrality and freedom of choice are not sufficient grounds for affirming a right to abortion. Those who would defend the right of women to decide for themselves whether to terminate a pregnancy should engage with the argument that the developing fetus is equivalent to a person, and try to show why it is not wrong. It is not enough to say that the law should be neutral on moral and religious questions. The case for permitting abortion is no more neutral than the case for banning it. Both positions presuppose some answer to the underlying moral and religious controversy. 
   The same is true of the debate over stem cell research. Those who would ban embryonic stem cell research argue that, whatever its medical promise, research that involves the destruction of human embryos is morally impermissible. Many who hold this view believe that personhood begins at conception, so that destroying even an early embryo is morally on a par with killing a child. 
   Proponents of embryonic stem cell research reply by pointing to the medical benefits that research may bring, including possible treatment and cures for diabetes, Parkinson's disease, and spinal cord injury. And they argue that science should not be hampered by religious or ideological interference ; those with religious objections should not be allowed to impose their views through laws that would ban promising scientific research.
   As with the abortion debate, however, the case for permitting embryonic stem cell research cannot be made without taking  stand on the moral and religious controversy about when personhood begins. If the early embryo is morally equivalent to a person, then the opponents of embryonic stem cell research have a point ; even highly promising medical research would not justify dismembering a human person. Few people would say it should be legal to harvest organs from a five-year-old child in order to promote life-saving research. So the argument for permitting embryonic stem cell research is not neutral on the moral and religious controversy about when human personhood begins. It presupposes an answer to that controversy ---- namely that the pre-implantation embryo destroyed in the course of embryonic stem cell research is not yet a human being.