180029 PS The Contested Morality of Public Reason (2012S)

Secularism and secularization, both as descriptive categories and as normative aspirations, have over the last decades entered a phase of crisis that can be perceived all over the world, but especially in Europe. In stark opposition to earlier predictions, religious affiliations and organizations have, even in highly modernized societies, not withered away. On the contrary, we are today confronted with multiple forms of politicizing religions around the globe. New contributions to both the sociology of religion and democratic theory have emphasized that these developments must not be interpreted as signs of failed or incomplete modernization. Rather, they have highlighted the need to reconsider the relationship between religion and politics in a critical and constructive way.
In recent years, debates about the legitimate place of religion in the public sphere have gained visible prominence in moral and political philosophy. Departing from John Rawls's view of public reason, it has been argued that liberal regimes should not only be compatible with, but even endorsing of, arguments that emanate from religious belief systems. Moreover, it has been maintained that the principle of political autonomy requires from every democratic regime to enable all its citizens, no matter whether they are secular or religious, to become the authors of the laws to which they are subjected. At the heart of this debate lies a discontent with two issues: The first one concerns the above-mentioned tendency in neutralist accounts of public reason to deprive religious citizens from the right to exercise political autonomy by forcing them to abandon their visions of the good in the civic arena. The second issue derives from a critique of toleration as a means to foster solidarity in deeply diverse societies. Mere toleration, it is often said, strengthens societal cohesion in the wrong way because it narrowly defines it as the product of bargaining processes, posited against the backdrop of power structures. The consensus many liberal defenders of religion in the public sphere wish to advance, however, aims at something radically dissimilar: particular institutions and arrangements need to be endorsed "for the right reasons", i.e. based on arguments with which all citizens could hypothetically agree.
In light of these socio-political transformations and theoretical conceptualizations, the questions this seminar shall try to address are: How is the state today supposed to deal with the claims of religious citizens? In what way can religious citizens articulate their concerns in the public sphere without endangering democracy? Should their contributions to the public sphere be translated into a generally accessible language? What kind of respect, if any, must non-believers cultivate when they are responding to, and engaging with, arguments exclusively grounded in religion? These and other issues will be discussed through a close reading of seminal texts that have invigorated the current debate. Although the focus shall lie on recent contributions, we will also connect these debates to the history of philosophy. Further, an important goal of the seminar will be to contextualize theoretical interventions and expose the socio-political background against which they are formulated. To achieve this end, examples from contexts close to home shall be introduced so as to break the abstract reflections in the literature down to empirical tests.