Religion Law Commons^™

Religious Toleration And Claims Of Conscience, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

One aspect of the issue of toleration of religion is how far the government and others should recognize religious claims of conscience. Such claims will be present in any liberal democracy. The particular controversies on which attention is mainly focused shift, but certain underlying themes remain.

In this essay, I outline what I take to be the major issues about government recognition of religious claims of conscience. I then address the special problems created when a claim of conscience ends up competing with an opposing claim of conscience or with basic premises about fairness and justice. We can conceive of …

Moral And Religious Convictions As Categories For Special Treatment: The Exemption Strategy, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

My topic differs from the usual inquiries about morality and law, such as how far law should embody morality, whether legal interpretation (always or sometimes) includes moral judgment, and whether an immoral law really counts as law. Concentrating on exemptions from ordinary legal requirements, I am interested in instances when the law might make especially relevant the moral judgments of individual actors. I am particularly interested in whether the law should ever treat moral judgments based on religious conviction differently from moral judgments that lack such a basis.

A striking example for both questions is conscientious objection to military service. …

On Public Reason, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

Since the publication of A Theory of Justice in 1971, John Rawls has refined, qualified, and enriched his political philosophy, responding generously and with patient analytical care to difficulties posed by critics. Political Liberalism embodies the major developments in Rawls's thought during those two decades. Rawls continues to be a strong defender of political liberalism, but in various respects his philosophical claims are more modest than those he offered in 1971, and the political life he recommends involves more accommodation to the diverse perspectives and ways of life one expects to find in liberal democracies. In most of the chapters …