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Full-Text Articles in Religion Law
Religion, Conscience, And The Law: Reasons, Bases, And Limits For Exemptions, Kent Greenawalt
Religion, Conscience, And The Law: Reasons, Bases, And Limits For Exemptions, Kent Greenawalt
Faculty Scholarship
Kent Greenawalt discusses the permissibility, scope, and rationale for law to provide exemptions to protect religious and nonreligious conscience in the United States. It may be difficult for the law to determine which sentiments amount to conscience given differences in individuals’ perception and the strength of their convictions. Even the notion of a religious conscience is complex. Religious citizens’ conclusions about matters of interest to religion may proceed from both religion and reason, or only from reason. It is not clear what should count as religious, given differences between denominations and their ideas over time. There are a host of …
The Significance Of Conscience, Kent Greenawalt
The Significance Of Conscience, Kent Greenawalt
Faculty Scholarship
Conscience, like most words that describe human experience and recommend human action, has changed its meanings over time and takes on subtly different meanings in different contexts. Since the time of Thomas Aquinas, when conscience referred to moral judgments about action, and our founding era, when “freedom of conscience” dominantly referred to individual religious liberty, our understanding has evolved. In this paper, I concentrate on present usage. My aims are partially descriptive and mainly normative. My hope is that by clarifying various ways the notion of conscience is conceived, I can contribute to a thoughtful elaboration of normative issues …