1. Both historically and today, there are different kinds of liberalism. The (only) kind I criticize in this article is the liberalism the goal of which is neutral politics. Cf. Rosenblum, , “Introduction” to Liberalism and the Moral Life, ed. Rosenbaum, N. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 1, 9–10CrossRefGoogle Scholar (listing “three main approaches to the question of liberalism's relation to moral life”, including the approach that “defends the idea of neutrality in public life”).

2. This article is an excerpt from a work-in-progress, tentatively titled Love and Power: A Postliberal Reflection on Religion, Politics, and Human Rights. In Love and Power I pursue issues I began to address in Morality, Politics, and Law: A Bicentennial Essay (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988)Google Scholar. For critical commentary on the latter work, see “Symposium: Perry's, Michael J.Morality, Politics, and Law,” Tulane Law Review 63 (1989): 1283–1679Google Scholar. For a discussion of “neutral politics” that complements this essay, see Perry, Morality, Politics, and Law, chaps. 3 and 4.

3. See Neuhaus, R., The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America (Grand Rapids, MI: W. B. Eerdsman Publishing Co. 1984): “Pluralism, in this [context], does not mean simply that there are many different kinds of people and institutions in societal play. More radically than that, it means that there are contenders striving with one another to define what the play is about —what are the rules and what the goal” (p. 84).Google Scholar

4. Ackerman, B., Social Justice in the Liberal State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980)Google Scholar. For present purposes I omit discussion of Ackerman's second requirement for a neutral politics: that political justifications not presuppose that any person (or group) is “intrinsically superior” to any other. See Perry, , Morality, Politics, and Law, pp. 64, 257 n. 31.Google Scholar

5. Ibid., pp. 66–71.

6. Ibid., pp. 63–71.

7. Thus, government cannot be neutral between/among all possible competing positions: for example, competing positions about whether to be neutral between two competing positions.

8. See Ackerman, , Social Justice; Ackerman, “Neutralities,” unpublished ms. (1988).Google Scholar

9. See Beiner, , “What's the Matter with Liberalism?,” in Law and Community: The End of Individualism, ed. Hutchinson, A. and Green, L. (Agincourt, Ontario: Carswell, 1989), pp. 37, 45Google Scholar: “[A]ll social theory is addressed to the question what is good... the possibility of circumventing the theory of the good is bogus...” See also Perry, M., Morality, Politics, and Law, p. 68Google Scholar. Cf. Gamwell, , “Religion and the Public Purpose,” Journal of Religion 62 (1982): 272, 281CrossRefGoogle Scholar: (1982): “[E]very political decision takes sides among religions, because it implies some judgment about the character of religious truth. As long as the body politic decides not to proscribe abortion, for instance, it decides implicitly against the religious convictions of the Moral Majority and (at least some of) the Roman Catholic Church.”

10. See Ackerman, , “What Is Neutral About Neutrality?,” Ethics 93 (1983): 372, 387.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11. Larmore, , “Liberal Neutrality,” Political Theory 17 (1989): 580, 580.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12. Ibid., p. 581.

13. Ibid.

14. See Benhabib, , “Liberal Dialogue Versus a Critical Theory of Discursive Legitimation,” in Rosenblum, , Liberalism and the Moral Life, pp. 143, 278 n. 17 (“disagree[ing with] Larmore that a ‘neutral justification of political neutrality’ is possible”) (1989).Google Scholar

15. Ackerman, B., “Why Dialogue?” Journal of Philosophy 86 (1989): 5, 12–13.CrossRefGoogle Scholar As Ackerman emphasizes, the claim that political justification should be neutral among all or even a range of conceptions of human good cannot be justified in a way neutral among all conceptions of human good, given that some conceptions of human good decry such neutrality. There is no such thing as a neutral justification of the practice of neutral justification. See Ackerman, , “What Is Neutral about Neutrality?” pp. 372, 387.Google Scholar

16. Ackerman, , “Why Dialogue?” pp. 17–18.Google Scholar

17. For Kent Greenawalt's recent extended argument to that effect, see note 45 and accompanying text. See also Lovin, , “Perry, Naturalism, and Religion in Public,” Tulane Law Review 63 (1989): 1517, 1520–21.Google Scholar

18. Ackerman, , “Why Dialogue?,” p. 22Google Scholar. See note 27 (quoting Thomas Nagel: requirement that “the premises be actually accepted” is an “impossibly restrictive condition on [the exercise of] political power”). Moreover, when is a normative premise “shared”? What counts as evidence that a premise is shared? Reading Ackerman's Social Justice in the Liberal State retrospectively through the lens of his later essay “Why Dialogue?” we may fairly interpret Ackerman to be suggesting that a distribution-of-scarce-resources-according-toworth principle (see Perry, , Morality, Politics, and Law, p. 65Google Scholar) is shared across our society. But is it? People mean such different things by “worth”: worth-in-God's eyes, worth-according-to-the-laws-of-nature, and so on. Superficial sharing may conceal deep disagreement. See ibid., pp. 155–56.

19. See note 40.

20. See Quine, W. and Ulian, J. S., The Web of Belief, 2nd ed. (New York: Random House, 1978)Google Scholar.

21. Nagel, , “Moral Conflict and Political Legitimacy,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 16 (1987): 215, 218Google Scholar. Nagel emphasizes that by “justification” he does not mean “persuasion”: “‘Justification’ … is a normative concept: arguments that justify may fail to persuade, if addressed to an unreasonable audience; and arguments that persuade may fail to justify. Nevertheless, justification hopes to persuade the reasonable …” (Ibid.).

22. Ibid., p. 223. Nagel explains: “This would be implied, on one reading, by the second formulation of Kant's categorical imperative — that one should treat humanity never merely as a means, but always also as an end. If you force someone to serve an end that he cannot share, you are treating him as a mere means — even if the end is his own good, as you see it …” (Ibid., n. 8).

23. Cf. ibid.: “If liberalism is to be defended as a higher-order theory rather than just another sectarian doctrine, it must be shown to result from an interpretation of impartiality itself, rather than from a particular conception of the good that is to be made impartially available. Of course any interpretation of impartiality will be morally controversial — it is not a question of rising to a vantage point above all moral disputes — but the controversy will be at a different level.”

24. Ibid., p. 229.

25. Ibid., p. 230.

26. See ibid. (emphasis added and deleted): “The idea is that when we look at certain of our convictions from outside, however justified they may be from within, the appeal to their truth must be seen merely as an appeal to our beliefs, and should be treated as such unless those beliefs can be shown to be justifiable from a more impersonal standpoint. If not, they have to remain, for the purposes of a certain kind of moral argument, features of a personal perspective — to be respected as such but no more than that. This does not mean that we have to stop believing them —that is, believing them to be true. Considered as individual beliefs they may be adequately grounded, or at least not unreasonable: the standards of individual rationality are different from the standards of epistemological ethics. It means only that from the perspective of political argument we may have to regard certain of our beliefs, whether moral or religious or even historical or scientific, simply as someone's beliefs, ratherthan as truths — unless they can be given the kind of impersonal justification appropriateto [the perspective of political argument], in which case they may be appealed to as truths without qualification.”

27. Ibid., pp. 231, 232. Nagel goes on to emphasize that “[b]y a common ground I do not mean submerged agreement on a set of premises by which the claim could in principle be settled in a way that all parties would recognize as correct” (ibid.). See: “[Impartial justification involves] neither an appeal to my own beliefs nor an appeal to beliefs that we all share. It cannot be the latter because it is intended precisely to justify the forcible imposition in some cases of measures that are not universally accepted. We need a distinction between two kinds of disagreement —one whose grounds make it alright for the majority to use political power in the service of their opinion, and another whose grounds are such that it would be wrong for the majority to do so. “For this purpose we cannot appeal directly to the distinction between reasonable and unreasonable beliefs. It would be an impossibly restrictive condition on political power to say that its exercise may be justified only by appeal to premises that others could not reasonably reject (though less restrictive than the condition that the premises be actually accepted by all).... “Reasonable persons can disagree not only over religious doctrines and ultimate conceptions of the good life, but over levels of public provision of education and health care, social security, defense policy, environmental preservation, and a host of other things that liberal societies determine by legislative action. What distinguishes those disagreements from the ones where liberalism rejects majority rule?” (ibid., pp. 231–32).

28. See Ibid.: “Public justification in a context of actual disagreement requires, first, preparedness to submit one's reasons to the criticism of others, and to find that the exercise of a common critical rationality and consideration of evidence that can be shared will reveal that one is mistaken. This means that it must be possible to present to others the basis of your beliefs, so that once you have done so, they have what you have, and can arrive at a judgment on the same basis.... “Public justification requires, second, an expectation that if others who do not share your belief are wrong, there is probably an explanation of their error which is not circular. That is, the explanation should not come down to the mere assertion that they do not believe the truth (what you believe), but should explain their false belief in terms of errors in their evidence, or identifiable errors in drawing conclusions from it, or in argument, judgment, and so forth. One may not always have the information necessary to give such an account, but one must believe there is one, and that the justifiability of one's own belief would survive a full examination of the reasons behind theirs. These two points may be combined in the idea that a disagreement which falls on objective common ground must be open-ended in the possibility of its investigation and pursuit, and not come down finally to a bare confrontation between incompatible personal points of view.”

29. Cf. Lovin, , “Empiricism and Christian Social Thought,” Annual of Society of Christian Ethics (1982)Google Scholar: “[M]oral reality... [is] about an interaction between persons and the world which can only be known from the reports of those who experience that interaction” (pp. 25, 41).

30. As most religious-moral discourse reflects, a religious-moral vision typically comprises a set of beliefs about how it is good or fitting for (some or all of) us human beings to live our lives. Whereas in contemporary political-philosophical parlance such a set of beliefs, whether religious or not, is often called a “conception of the (human) good,” in the parlance of much religious ethics such a vision is commonly thought of as a conception of the human, of what it means to be “truly” or “authentically” human. See generally Kung, , “What is True Religion?: Toward An Ecumenical Criteriology,” in Toward a Universal Theology of Religion, ed. Swidler, L. (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1987), pp. 231, 239–43.Google Scholar See also Steinfels, , “The Search for an Alternative,” Commonweal, 30 11 1981, pp. 660, 661Google Scholar (commenting on the importance of the distinction “between the human and the ‘truly human'”). For example, the Dutch Catholic theologian Edward Schillebeeckx has written that “[t]he ethical has essentially to do with the question: ‘What really is human being?’, and because of this, with the question ‘How does one want to ultimately live out one's being human?’ or ‘For which way of being human does one finally decide?’” (Schillebeeckx, E., The Schillebeeckx Reader, ed. Schreiter, R. [New York: Crossroad, 1984], p. 262)Google Scholar.Consider, too, these passages in a recent essay by James Burtchaell of Notre Dame's Theology Department: “The Catholic tradition embraces a long effort to uncover the truth about human behavior and experience. Our judgments of good and evil focus on whether a certain course of action will make a human being grow and mature and flourish, or whether it will make a person withered, estranged and indifferent. In making our evaluations, we have little to draw on except our own and our forebears' experience, and whatever wisdom we can wring from our debate with others.... “What we are trying to unpuzzle are things like childbearing and immigration and economic policy and infant mortality and drug use and family fidelity and so much else about which we must frame moral judgments. With our fellow communicants we share commitments and assumptions: that we are happier giving than getting, that there is no greater love than to put down your life for your neighbor, and that your neighbor always turns out to be the most unlikely person” (Burtchaell, , “The Sources of Conscience,” Notre Dame Magazine 13 [Winter 1984–1985]: 20, 20–21).Google Scholar (On our neighbor always turning out to be the most unlikely person, see Luke 10:29–37 [“Parable of the Good Samaritan”].) Burtchaell continues: “Nothing is specifically Christian about this method of making judgments about human experience. That is why it is strange to call any of our moral convictions “religious,” let alone sectarian, since they arise from a dialogue that ranges through so many communities and draws from so many sources. And when debate and dialogue and testimony do fructify into conviction, and conviction into consensus, nothing could be more absurd than to expect that consensus to be confined within a person's privacy or a church's walls. Convictions are what we live by. Do we have anything better to share with one another?” (Burtchaell, p. 21). (For a revised version of Burtchaell's essay, and for several other illuminating essays by Father Burtchaell, see Burtchaell, J., The Giving and Taking of Life [Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989].)Google Scholar See also Kung, , this note, pp. 239–43Google Scholar; Fuchs, J., Christian Ethics in a Secular Arena (Washington, D. C.: Georgetown University Press, 1984)Google Scholar; Ladd, , “Politics and Religion in America: The Enigma of Pluralism,” in Religion, Morality, and the Law, ed. Pennock, J. and Chapman, J. (New York: New York University Press, 1988), pp. 263, 279Google Scholar, (commenting on and recommending “the pragmatic attitude that... most people in America take towards particular religions [and particular religious doctrines],” in which they are understood not as absolutist, dogmatic, authoritarian systems but simply as “experiments in living with other people in a shared world of suffering and hope"). Cf. Battaglia, , “'Sect' or ‘Denomination'?: The Place of Religious Ethics in a Post-Churchly Culture,” Journal of Religious Ethics 16 (1988)Google Scholar: “[David, ] Tracy's aim is to reintroduce into public life a reasonable discussion of the possibilities of human life. His great accomplishment is to make comprehensible to both believers and outsiders his willingness to let the public explanation of Christianity stand on that basis—as a profound and challenging disclosure of what it means to be human” (pp. 128, 137)Google Scholar

31. Surely he means much more than the exercise of common logic. That would be a trivially weak requirement. Cf. Maclntyre, A., Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 1988): “It is not then that competing traditions do not share some standards. All the traditions with which we have been concerned agree in according a certain authority to logic both in their theory and in their practice. Were it not so, their adherents would be unable to disagree in the way in which they do. But that upon which they agree in insufficient to resolve the disagreements” (p. 351).Google ScholarDoes “the exercise of a common critical rationality” partly involve, in Nagel's view, “consideration [only] of evidence that can be shared”—so that the evidencethat-can-be-shared requirement is simply an aspect of the common-criticalrationality requirement?

32. A conception of rationality is best understood as a criterion or set of criteria for determining what claims it makes sense — what claims it is “rational” or “reasonable”— to accept or to reject or to neither accept nor reject. According to the coherentist or holist conception of rationality that has come to dominate contemporary epistemology, the basic test or measure for determining what claims it makes sense for a person to accept or reject (or neither) — what beliefs it is “rational” or “reasonable” for her to accept or reject — is coherence with whatever else she happens to believe: coherence with beliefs that are, in the moment, authoritative for her. Beliefs that were, in the previous moment, authoritative for her may not now be: one or more of her longstanding beliefs may not cohere, at least not easily, with a new belief that has arisen and gripped her. A belief that is a candidate for a person's acceptance or rejection may be one she had long accepted but is now in question — has now been put in question — for her. Cf. Hollenbach, , “Remarks on Alasdair Maclntyre's Whose Justice? Which Rationality? [1988],” unpublished ms (1989)Google Scholar: “[C]ritical reasoning and enquiry can become necessary [within a tradition] for a number of reasons, chiefly three: either the received tradition finds itself subject to a number of interpretations that require adjudication; or the tradition encounters new questions which its mode of enquiry up to now has not prepared it to answer; or the tradition meets an alternative tradition that confronts it with an alternative but understandable account about the truth of how things are or with an account that simply cannot be understood.” The coherentist conception does not entail that old beliefs invariably have authority over new ones. See Elgin, , “The Relativity of Fact and the Objectivity of Value,” in Relativism: Interpretation and Confrontation, ed. Krausz, M. (Notre Dam IN: University of Notre Dame, 1989), pp. 86, 91.Google Scholar Nor does the conception entail that every belief a person accepts is coherent with every other belief she accepts. Not every belief I accept is coherent with every other belief I accept. Some of the incoherences I am unaware of, others I just live with—at least for now. While “[t]he identification of incoherence within established belief will always provide a reason for enquiring further,” it is “not itself a conclusive reason for rejecting established belief, until something more adequate because less incoherent has been discovered.” Maclntyre, A., Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, p. 359.Google Scholar For a careful discusion of revision of belief, see Harman, G., Change in View: Principles of Reasoning (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986).Google Scholar Moreover, coherence is a matter of degree. At the one extreme, some beliefs are entailed by other beliefs. At the other, some beliefs are merely not inconsistent with other beliefs. Nonetheless, whether it makes sense for a particular person to believe something—whether the belief is “rational”—depends on what else she believes. A belief quite rational for her might be quite irrational for another person. Similarly, a belief rational for a particular community, given the other beliefs shared by the members of the community—or by most of them —might be irrational for another community. Of course, as the possibility of a person or community having beliefs that do not all cohere among themselves suggests, one or more of a person's/community's beliefs can be irrational for her/it, given her/its other, stronger beliefs. See Meiland, J. and Krausz, M., eds., Relativism: Cognitive and Moral (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982).Google Scholar See also Devine, , “Relativism,” Monist 67 (1984): 405, 406.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Moreover, as the possibility of “stronger” (and “weaker”) beliefs suggests, the rational acceptability vel non of a belief is not all-or-nothing; it is, rather, a matter of degree. See Geuss, R., The Idea ofa Critical Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981);Google ScholarPerelman, C., Justice, Law, and Argument (Hingham, MA: Kluwer Boston, 1980).CrossRefGoogle Scholar Just as some beliefs are more fundamental than others for a person, some beliefs are stronger than others for her —though, of course, some less fundamental ones may be stronger than some fundamental ones. The coherentist/holist model of rationality has replaced what Bernard Williams has called “the linear model,” which, as Williams explains, “is wrong. No process of reason-giving fits this picture, in the sciences or elsewhere.... [T]he foundationalist [epistemological] enterprise, of resting the structure of knowledge on some favored class of statements, has now generally been displaced in favor of a holistic type of model, in which some beliefs can be questioned, justified, or adjusted while others are kept constant, but there is no process by which they can all be questioned at once, or all justified in terms of (almost) nothing. In von Neurath's famous image, we repair the ship while we are on the sea.” Williams, B., Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 113.Google Scholar For a dissenting voice, see Audi, , “The Architecture of Reason,” unpublished ms. (1988)Google Scholar (Presidential address, American Philosophical Association, Central Division, 1988). However, it is not clear to what extent, if any, there are real differences between Audi's carefully revised “epistemological foundationalism” and a sophisticated coherentist epistemology. What is true of reasoning generally, including scientific reasoning, is true of moral reasoning, including religious moral reasoning: “For the holist... the justification of moral knowledge neither depends upon independently known foundations nor is called into question by the impossibility of placing any given moral judgment beyond doubt. Practical justification is a dialectical affair, intelligible only in relation to the simultaneously social and intellectual setting of a particular time and place.” Stout, , “Holism and Comparative Ethics,”Journal of Religious Ethics 11 (1983): 301, 312.Google Scholar The coherentist conception of rationality does not entail that there are no beliefs common to all persons —or, therefore, to all communities. “[O]ne can maintain that truth is framework-relative while conceding for a large range of propositions nearly all frameworks coincide” (Devine, , “Relativism,” p. 412Google Scholar). Moreover, there is no reason to doubt that there are common beliefs. After all, we human beings are all members of the same species and we all inhabit the same planetary environment. See Baker, , “On the Very Idea of a Form of Life,” Inquiry 27 (1984): 277, 279.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Cf. Anderson, Sharrock, “Criticizing Forms of Life,” Philosophy 60 (1985): 394, 395, 398.Google Scholar Indeed, as Richard Rorty has sensibly observed, “everything which we can identify as a human being or as a culture will be something which shares an enormous number of beliefs with us. (If it did not, we would simply not be able to recognize that it was speaking a language, and thus that it had any beliefs at all.)” (Rorty, , “Science as Solidarity,” in The Rhetoric of the Human Sciences, ed. Nelson, J., Megill, A., and Mccloskey, D. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), pp. 38, 43.Google Scholar Cf. Stroud, , “The Study of Human Nature and the Subjectivity of Value,” in The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, No. 10 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 211, 252–53Google Scholar: “We cannot make sense of other people believing something we know to be obviously false unless we have some explanation in the particular case of how they come to get it wrong. And that explanation will work only if we understand them to share in common with us other beliefs and attitudes in the midst of which their particular, localized error (as we see it) can be made intelligible.” Nor does the coherentist conception deny that some beliefs are not merely common but “foundational” or “transcendental” in a sense: beliefs about space, time, or causality, for example, that either are preconditions to us human beings experiencing the world as we do or are presupposed by our common beliefs about the world.

33. I am not suggesting that Nagel has done so wittingly. Cf. note 27 (quoting Nagel: requirement that “the premises be actually accepted” is an “impossibly restrictive condition on [the exercise of] political power”).

34. See note 36 and accompanying text.

35. See Nagel, , “Moral Conflict and Political Legitimacy,” pp. 231–34.Google Scholar

36. For a critical comment on such question-begging moves in political theory, see Ackerman, note 8.

37. See note 40.

38. See Nagel, , “Moral Conflict and Political Legitimacy,” pp. 232–33Google Scholar. Nagel, struggles but, in my view, ultimately fails to specify, much less administer, a distinction — which he acknowledges to be “vague” and problematic — between (1) moral disagreements, including religious-moral disagreements, that “come down finally to a pure confrontation between personal [religious or] moral convictions” and (2) a “perceptibly different” kind of disagreement: “disagreement[s] in judgment over the preponderant weight of reasons bearing on an issue” (p. 233)Google Scholar. See pp. 233 et seq. “Perceptibly different” to whom? To Nagel? Certainly not to me. But then perhaps my perceptual apparatus isn't up to snuff. In any event, by the second kind of disagreement Nagel cannot mean either disagreements about the facts or even disagreements in reasoning from shared premises. Nagel, specifically disclaims to be addressing political conflicts in which there is “submerged agreement on a set of premises by which the claim could in principle be settled in a way that all parties would recognize as correct” (p. 232)Google Scholar. See note 27.

39. Cf. The Williamsburg Charter: A National Celebration and Reaffirmation of the First Amendment Religious Liberty Clauses (1988): “The Framer's intention is indisputably ignored when public policy debates can appeal to the theses of Adam Smith and Karl Marx, or Charles Darwin and Sigmund Freud but not to the Western religious tradition in general and the Hebrew and Christian scriptures in particular” (p. 21).

40. See Nagel, T., What Does It All Mean? (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987Google Scholar), chap. 10 (discussing “The Meaning of Life”). Cf. Nagel, , “Agreeing in Principle,” Times Literary Supp., 8–14 07 1988, p. 747Google Scholar (reviewing Maclntyre, A., Whose Justice? Which Rationality? [1988]Google Scholar). See also Ackerman, B., Social Justice, p. 368Google Scholar: “There is no meaning in the bowels of the universe.”

41. Neuhaus, R., Naked Public Square, p. 86Google Scholar. For examples of a rather different attitude in contemporary Anglo-American philosophy, see Braine, D., The Reality of Time and the Existence of God (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988)Google Scholar; Clark, S., From Athens to Jerusalem: The Love of Wisdom and the Love of God (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984)Google Scholar. See also Kolakowski, L., Metaphysical Horror (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988)Google Scholar.

42. See Greenawalt, K., Religious Convictions and Political Choice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).Google Scholar

43. Ibid., p. 7.

44. Ibid., p. 26. See also pp. 20–21. The requirement that laws have a secular purpose seems to mean, for Greenawalt, that a belief that an act is wrong without regard to any physical or psychological harm it might do, directly or indirectly, to the actor or to others — indeed, even if it does no such harm — is not a good reason for restricting someone's liberty. See pp. 87–95.

45. Greenawalt summarizes his basic (twofold) argument at several points. See, e.g., ibid., pp. 12, 49, 87, 144–45. Cf.: “For our purpose, a person is relying on religious convictions if their abandonment would force him seriously to reconsider a position he takes” (p. 37). For Greenawalt's tentative, inconclusive comments on whether reliance on religious convictions is appropriate if shared premises and reasoning from shared premises are determinate, see pp. 203–11. To claim that such reliance is inappropriate because shared premises and reasoning from shared premises, if determinate, are dispositive is to privilege a particular set of beliefs about human good: beliefs common to the various conceptions of human good prevalent in the society. Of course, there is nothing “liberal”— in the sense of neutral or impartial —about such privileging.

46. For example, Ronald Dworkin. See note 5 and accompanying text.

47. Nagel comes closest to distinguishing between personal convictions that are religious in character and those that are not, but in the end he moves beyond that distinction and makes his argument in terms of personal convictions whether religious or not. See Nagel, , “Moral Conflict and Political Legitimacy,” pp. 233 et seq.Google Scholar

48. See. Greenawalt, K., Religious Convictions: “Neither the systematic accounts of Rawls and Ackerman nor the proposals offered by [David] Lyons and [Louis] Henkin single out religious grounds especially for disqualification. The reasons for excluding them from political decisions also apply to certain other possible grounds of decision. The common theme of the writers is that the grounds of decision should have an interpersonal validity that extends to all, or almost all, members of society; decisions should be based either on commonly shared premises or on modes of reasoning that are accessible to everyone” (p. 56).Google Scholar

49. See ibid., pp. 156–62.

50. See ibid., pp. 215–30.

51. For example, see ibid.: “To say that a liberal government rests on secular justification is not necessarily to deny that government generally, or liberal government in particular, may also be ordained by God. Supplemental justifications accepted by religious believers need not be at odds with unifying justifications that can be accepted by citizens regardless of their religious beliefs” (p. 17).

52. This is not to deny that one can locate some writers who have made (unreflective) comments to the effect that it is illegitimate for a citizen to take the religious path. See ibid., p. 50. But the basic positions of the principal contemporary liberal theorists ought not to be confused with such comments.

53. Ibid., pp. 155–56. See also ibid.: “[S]ome people believe that the premises of liberal democracy, properly understood, either do not reach at all to the actual decisions of individual citizens of set very few restraints on them; it is on this view when citizens enter the political process more actively by engaging in public justifications of their positions or by becoming officials that constraints derived from liberal democratic premises really matter” (p. 215).

54. See ibid.: “This substantive position [see note 53 and accompanying text] turns out to be the one I largely endorse, as Chapter 12 in particular reflects” (p. 156).

55. For example, see ibid., p. 12.

56. Ibid., p. 215.

57. Ibid., p. 216.

58. Ibid., p. 218.

59. Ibid., p. 220.

60. Ibid., pp. 216–17.

61. Ibid., p. 228.

62. Greenawalt believes that the “ground rules” derive from the fact, as Greenawalt sees it, “that now in the United States there is (1) a substantial consensus on the organizing political principles for society; (2) a shared sense that major political discussions will be carried on primarily in secular terms; (3) a respect for religious belief and activity and a hesitancy to attack religious practices as nonsensical; and (4) an assumption that one can be a seriously religious person and a liberal participant in a liberal society” (ibid., p. 216).

63. Ibid., p. 219.

64. Ibid.

65. See note 49.

66. See ibid., p 217.

67. See ibid. Greenawalt offers strategic advice in setting forth many of his exceptions. With respect to this second exception, for example, he counsels: “The Catholic bishops' statement [on the use of nuclear arms] should make some effort to root the positions it takes in Catholic understandings about war and military weapons, but if the statement is designed to have general influence, it should also contain language and ideas that have a broader appeal. In part, the effort should be to cast ideas that conform to Catholic understandings in as generalized a form as is possible” (ibid.).

68. Ibid., p. 218.

69. See ibid., pp. 217–18.

70. See ibid., p. 218.

71. See ibid., pp. 218–19.

72. See ibid., pp. 219–20.

73. For thoughtful, critical comments on Greenawalt's book, see Lovin, “Perry, Naturalism, and Religion in Public.”

74. Rawls has argued that the following interpretation of his early effort is mistaken. See Rawls, , “Justice as Fairness: Political, Not Metaphysical,” Philosophy Public Affairs 14 (1985): 223.Google Scholar But see Ackerman, “Why Dialogue?”: “Despite Rawls's subsequent disavowal of this interpretation, … I do not believe critics were simply engaged in tea-leaf reading in finding this theme (uneasily co-existing with many others) in Rawls's major works” (p. 15 n. 7).

75. See Perry, , Morality, Politics, and Law, pp. 59–61.Google Scholar

76. See ibid., pp. 59–63. See also Ackerman, , “Why Dialogue?” pp. 15–16.Google Scholar

77. On the distinction between GpR theories and RpG theories, see, e.g., Taylor, , “Hegel's Ambiguous Legacy for Modern Liberalism,” Cardozo Law Review 10 (1989): 857, 857–58.Google Scholar

78. Raz, , “Liberalism, Autonomy, and the Politics of Neutral Concern,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 7 (1982): 89, 105.CrossRefGoogle Scholar “[T]he common feature of most routes will be the reliance on a rational reconstruction of a process of bargaining by which the common overriding goal to reach an agreement leads the parties to compromise by accepting a less than perfect doctrine as the optimally realizable second best” (ibid.).

79. See Rawls, J., A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971).Google Scholar

80. Rawls, , “Justice as Fairness: Political Not Metaphysical,” Philosophy Public Affairs 14 (1985): 223, 225–26.Google Scholar

81. Although Rawls sometimes distinguishes loosely between “comprehensive doctrines” and “conceptions of the good,” the distinction is unimportant for present purposes. See Rawls, , “The Idea of an Overlapping Consensus,” Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 7 (1987): 1, 4CrossRefGoogle Scholar: “[A workable conception of justice] must allow for a diversity of general and comprehensive doctrines, and for the plurality of conflicting, and indeed incommensurable, conceptions of the meaning, value and purpose of human life (or what I shall call for short ‘conceptions of the good') affirmed by the citizens of democratic societies.” See also Rawls, , “The Priority of Right and Ideas of the Good,” Journal of Philosophy and Public Affairs 17 (1988): 251, 252-53Google Scholar: “[A moral conception (as distinct from a political conception of justice)] is said to be general when it applies to a wide range of subjects (in the limit to all subjects); it is comprehensive when it includes conceptions of what is of value in human life, ideals of personal virtue and character, and the like…. There is a tendency for religious and philosophical conceptions to be general and fully comprehensive.”

82. Rawls, , “Justice as Fairness,” p. 247.Google Scholar

83. Rawls, , “The Idea of an Overlapping Consensus,” pp. 1, 19.Google Scholar

84. Rawls, , “The Priority of Right and Ideas of the Good” pp. 252, 251.Google Scholar

85. Ibid., pp. 252, 253. “A doctrine is fully comprehensive when it covers all recognized values and virtues within one rather precisely articulated scheme of thought, whereas a doctrine is only partially comprehensive when it comprises certain (but not all) nonpolitical values and virtues and is rather loosely articulated” (ibid., p. 253).

86. Ibid., p. 251. See also ibid., p 252, 253.

87. Rawls, , “The Idea of an Overlapping Consensus,” p. 5.Google Scholar

88. For an interesting argument that “a Christian affirmation of [Rawls' political conception of justice] is impossible,” see Jackson, , “To Bedlam and Part Way Back: John Rawls and Christian Justice,” unpublished ms. (1989).Google Scholar Compare Beckley, , “A Christian Affirmation of Rawls's Idea of Justice as Fairness: Part I,” Journal of Religious Ethics 13 (1985): 212;Google ScholarBeckley, , “A Christian Affirmation of Rawls's Idea of Justice as Fairness: Part II,” Journal of Religious Ethics 14 (1986): 229.Google Scholar

89. Rawls, , “The Idea of an Overlapping Consensus,” p. 7.Google Scholar

90. We have already considered Ackerman's efforts to imagine a neutral politics. In his 1988 essay Rawls distinguishes among (1) “procedural neutrality,” (2) three kinds of “neutrality of aim,” and (3) “neutrality of effect or influence”. See Rawls, , “Priority of Right and Ideas of the Good,” pp. 260–64Google Scholar. He acknowledges that his political conception of justice is neither procedurally neutral nor neutral in effect or influence. He acknowledges, too, that his conception is neutral in aim only in the weak sense that “the state is to secure equal opportunity to advance any permissible conception [of the good, i.e., any conception not ruled out by the political conception; and the social, political, and economic] … institutions are not intended to favor any [one of the permissible conceptions of the good]” (ibid., p. 262). This is a weak sense of neutrality, because the political conception of justice tolerates only some, not all, conceptions of the good. Given the turn in Rawls' thinking—as marked in particular by his 1985 essay (note 80)—it is not surprising that Richard Rorty has revised his earlier characterization of Rawls as a Kantian and now sees him as more Deweyan than Kantian. See Rorty, , “The Priority of Democracy To Philosophy,” in The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 257, 264–65Google Scholar. However, the fact that Rawls' theory is fundamentally of the Good-prior-to-Right sort has implications that Rorty, in his recent discussion of Rawls, seems not to understand. Such a theory implicitly claims that, contrary to what Rorty maintains, there is a need, sometimes, for “a religious or a philosophical preface to politics” (see ibid., p. 264) — especially in circumstances like our own, in which there is no political conception of justice supported by an overlapping consensus and there are only few determinate shared political-moral premises. Rawls seems to understand this — e.g., see Rawls, , “The Idea of an Overlapping Consensus,” p. 14Google Scholar (“in affirming a political conception of justice we may eventually have to assert at least certain aspects of our own comprehensive... religious or philosophical doctrine”) —even if Rorty does not. For an excellent critical commentary on Rawls' recent writings and, in particular, an argument that political philosophy must be “metaphysical,” see Hampton, , “Should Political Philosophy Be Done Without Metaphysics?,” Ethics 99 (1989): 791CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a conclusive demonstration that political participation by religious citizens often requires their resort to religious premises, see Greenawalt, Religious Convictions. See also Perry, , Morality, Politics, and Law, 87 and 102–04.Google Scholar

91. Ackerman, , “Why Dialogue?” pp. 12–13.Google Scholar

92. See Neuhaus, , Naked Public Square: “[T]he naked public square [i.e., neutral/impartial political discourse] is not possible. It is an illusion, for the public square does not and cannot remain naked. When particularist religious values and the institutions that bear them are excluded, the inescapable need to make public moral judgments will result in an elite construction of a normative morality from sources and principles not democratically recognized by the society” (p. 86).Google Scholar