The Exclusion of Religious Reasons
Abstract
This thesis is comprised of three articles, all of which seek to answer the question of how religious reasons for political action are excluded in the public sphere. They answer this question in three ways, corresponding to what I take to be three forms of exclusion: a political kind, an epistemic kind, and a testimonial kind. Supporters of ‘the standard view’ of political liberalism have traditionally argued that these are acceptable and justified forms of exclusion. I argue, in contrast to these views, that such forms of exclusion are unfair. More positively, I suggest that religious reasons for political action ought to be included politically, epistemically, and testimonially, in a way that is consistent with the project of political liberalism. In the first article, I argue for this conclusion by reinterpreting John Rawls’s view on the role of religious reasons in public. I argue that while Rawls does exclude religious reasons in one way—in his claim that they lack justificatory power in a distinctly political sense—he includes them in another. On my reading, Rawls saw the expression of such reasons as fundamental to citizens in their capacity to know themselves, and one another, and in this way, they can encourage community and civic friendship. In the second article, I engage with a debate that arises post-Rawls, concerning the accessibility, or lack thereof, of religious reasons. In that debate, I argue, contra the standard view, that religious reasons are epistemically accessible. However, unlike current accounts, I argue that in order for citizens to understand and ultimately include the religious claims of their fellow citizens, it is not enough for those claims to be grounded in various sources of justification. Citizens must also understand the emotional thrust of such claims, and the messages they are embedded in more broadly. Finally, in the last article of my thesis, I argue that we exclude religious citizens as ‘knowers’ of their own religious testimony when we treat them with epistemic injustice. To better include them, I suggest that we treat such testimonies with epistemic justice, particularly the testimonies of those who face multiple axes of oppression.