Abstract
In several papers, published over a period of almost a decade, Robert Audi has worked out an account of what he takes to be the proper role of religion in the politics of religiously pluralistic democracies. His recent book, Religious Commitment and Secular Reason, sets forth a fully developed and comprehensive version of that account. In this paper, I examine critically the part of Audi’s account that is devoted to the ethics of democratic citizenship. I focus on his treatment of this topic in the book for two reasons. Since the book’s discussion of the ethics of democratic citizenship advocates views that have been revised in the light of criticism of the work in the earlier papers, this discussion is the strongest available version of Audi’s position. Moreover, it comes closer to representing his current thinking on the topic than do the earlier papers. Fairness to Audi demands that I concentrate my critical fire on the strongest and most recent version of his treatment of the ethics of democratic citizenship.
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References
Judith Shklar, Ordinary Vices (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984). See especially chapters 1 and 6.
Robert Audi, Religious Commitment and Secular Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 174. Hereafter page references to this book will be made parenthetically in the body of my text.
For more on this point, see Philip L. Quinn, “The Divine Command Ethics in Kierkegaard’s Works of Love,” in Faith, Freedom, and Rationality, ed. Jeff Jordan and Daniel Howard-Snyder (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1996), pp. 29–44, which recounts and reflects on a particularly striking story about works of love performed by an Armenian nurse for her Turkish enemy.
Philip L. Quinn, “Political Liberalisms and Their Exclusions of the Religious,” in Religion and Contemporary Liberalism, ed. Paul J. Weithman (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997), p. 139.
For a recent exposition by Rawls of his idea of reflective equilibrium, see John Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, ed. Erin Kelly (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), pp. 29–32.
Søren Kierkegaard, Practice in Christianity, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), p. 81.
For further discussion, see Philip L. Quinn, “Kierkegaard’s Christian Ethics,” in The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard, ed. Alastair Hannay and Gordon D. Marino (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 349–375.
For an eloquent presentation of this point of view, see Susan Wolf, “Moral Saints,” Journal of Philosophy 79 (1982), pp. 419–439.
When I presented an earlier version of this paper at the Conference on Philosophy of Religion at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century in honor of Eugene T. Long, James Harris was my commentator. I am grateful to him for remarks that helped me to make revisions. I am also indebted to members of the audience on that occasion for stimulating discussion.
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Quinn, P.L. (2004). Religion and Politics, Fear and Duty. In: Hackett, J., Wallulis, J. (eds) Philosophy of Religion for a New Century. Studies in Philosophy and Religion, vol 25. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-2074-2_18
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-2074-2_18
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