1. INTRODUCTION
The Audi/Smith article is full of rich material, and I find myself in sympathy with a great deal of it, so, for the most part, I will not directly address their practical conclusions, but will concentrate on two of the principles in the core framework that they spell out. The first of these is the Principle of Natural Reason (PNR) and the second is the Principle of Interpretive Charity (PIC).
2. BACKGROUND TO THE PNR AND ITS BUILDING BLOCKS
The PNR is a development of an emphasis that has been prominent in Audi's work in this area in the past, where it has usually been offered as the requirement for a certain prioritising of secular reason over religious reasoning in arguing for or supporting any law or public policy that restricts human conduct. The principle is one of a complex philosophical family of principles and outlooks that have had a powerful influence in the discussion of democratic citizenship for many decades now to the point where it is plausible to call it, as Paul Weithman does, ‘the standard approach’.1 Proponents, besides Audi and Smith, include most notably John Rawls, who coined the expression ‘public reason’ for his influential version, then, Robert Audi himself, Cass Sunstein, Charles Larmore, Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson amongst others.2
I call the approach a family because there are differences and disagreements (as indeed in most families) within the group. In my writings upon the approach, I have also called it ‘exclusionist’ because the various dicta are aimed at removing or subordinating the role of religious reasons from key areas of decision‐making in the public arena of pluralistic democracies. Differences between Audi and Rawls in this area are important, in particular, the fact that where Audi is concerned with a certain exclusion of only religious reasons from such employment in the public arena, Rawls more expansively excludes all of what he calls ‘comprehensive’ doctrines. There are further qualifications to be made in fuller exposition of this and other differences, but this picture is broadly correct, and I have addressed such qualifications elsewhere.3 The second principle, the PIC, is meant to apply particularly to political or policy discussions, and states that citizens in a democracy have a prima facie obligation to seek mutual understanding through careful listening and reading, civil discourse and attention to democratic principles. My worries about the PNR are more fundamental than those about the PIC, and the latter is, in any case, produced more tentatively by the authors than the former. Although they call the PIC an ‘obligation’, they introduce it by saying that it ‘may guide institutions and individuals in disputes’ and add later that ‘This suggests ways in which individuals and organizations can non‐coercively improve public discourse’.
With that background, I turn to the Audi/Smith PNR and raise five principal difficulties I have with it. But first, a brief explanation of their basic underpinnings for the PNR.
The PNR builds upon two considerations: the first is that in a pluralistic democratic society, we owe each other a form of ‘mutual respect’, and the second is that such respect requires that when we engage in public debate and discussion about laws that are or will be coercive of human conduct, we offer, or hold ready to offer, reasons that are acceptable to all adult citizens religious or nonreligious, or in the current phrasing of Smith/Audi, those reasons that will produce significant policies ‘which they can all accept’. And here, adult citizens are understood as those who are ‘reasonable’ (in Rawls’ formulation, and in those of others) or ‘normal’ in one of Audi/Smith's specifications where they refer to ‘normal secular adults’. There are variations in the way these two supporting pillars are put, but, as the authors note, this does not mean that religious persons should not in fact be ‘strongly motivated’ by religious reasons, and (as I understand the position) they need not suppress the reasons altogether in discussion, but prioritise for that context the secular or natural reasons.4 The motivation admission is a response to objections sometimes made to principles like the PNR, that they are anti‐religious or somehow disrespect religious citizens. Their essay also qualifies the applicability of the PNR by treating it as prima facie so that there may be circumstances in which departure from the PNR can be justified.
3. PROBLEMS WITH ‘ACCEPTABLE REASONS’
So then to my difficulties with the PNR. The first concerns the notion of ‘acceptability’ or its equivalent locutions. I say equivalent locutions because Audi and Smith do not use the expression in this paper, but in their much longer discussion in the Journal of Medicine and Philosophy in 2021, they refer to secular reasons being offered as ‘considerations they can share simply as rational and adequately informed persons as common ground’.5 But some concept of acceptable or shareable considerations needs clarification since it cannot mean that the parties to the debate or discussion must actually accept each other's reasons no matter how secular they may be, nor can it mean that they simply understand them. The former interpretation makes no sense of even polite disagreement; the latter would, for ‘normal’ people, put most religious reasons back in play, since most religious claims are palpably understood even and especially by many of those who vehemently reject them because they understand them. Something in between these extremes is needed, and I think it is hard to find something that all secular persons will share. An obvious move is to say that ‘acceptable’ or shareable just means that secular reasons are those that the hearer could in principle accept. One trouble with this is that if religious reasons are those that the secular hearer cannot in principle accept, then there are also plenty of other reasons that also fail that test. I doubt that there is any sense of ‘in principle’ in which many secular citizens could accept racist reasons, jingoist reasons or even strictly act utilitarian reasons for public policy. Nor does it seem that I am exceptional in this because many reasonable liberal democratic citizens find, for example, that they cannot accept even in principle deep ecology reasons for environmental concern, though they may actually accept similar concerns on other perhaps more human‐centred grounds. Consider, for example, deep ecological claims about the equal dignity that humans share with all animals or even all living things. Of course, one's current incapacity to find some form of reason‐giving acceptable may change to actual acceptance, as in conversion to religion or to some other world‐view like deep‐ecology or Marxism, and, moreover, without converting, one may become sufficiently sympathetic so as to come to see that one might possibly do so, and thus, for example, see a measure of persuasive power in some religious reasons.
4. A CONTENTIOUS DIVIDE BETWEEN THE SECULAR AND RELIGIOUS
This leads naturally to my second difficulty, which is that the secular and religious divide is more amorphous than much philosophical writing on ‘public reason’, ‘secular reason’ and so forth supposes. ‘God told me so last night’ is an obvious religious claim, but much else that religious people draw upon is unlike that. Audi and Smith show awareness of this when they speak of values that ‘are sometimes difficult to distinguish from religious values’ and cite the values of ‘an eco‐ethical lifestyle’. The problem here is that there are many outlooks that will generate reasons for political action and yet remain so obdurately closed to many other ‘normal’ citizens as even to be derogatively cast as ‘quasi‐religious’ or even outright religious. Deep ecology is a candidate but something similar seems true of the initial and for some the ongoing impact of feminism that has dramatically expanded the realm of standard ‘secular’ reasons by a visionary revolution in the understanding of women's capacities and rights. Other more obvious religious outlooks have played a part in generating what are now regarded as part of the realm of natural/secular reason. The anti‐slavery movement of the 18th and 19th centuries was significantly promoted by religious people, especially Quakers, drawing on elements in the Christian tradition (which had indeed been ignored or misunderstood for centuries by so many of their co‐religionists) and that figured prominently in their public reason‐giving for abolition. (It may be that the slavery example is one that is an exception allowed by the prima facie nature of the PNR. If so, it may open the door to a much wider interpretation of ‘prima facie’ than they seem to intend.) In any case, the deeper understanding of the implications of God‐given human equality that the abolitionists appealed to has now become a stock in trade of secular discourse without the reference to God.
5. THE DANGER OF INSINCERITY
My third difficulty concerns the fostering of insincerity that the prioritising of secular reason can promote. In the context of dealing with purported conscientious objections to receiving or giving medical treatment, there can be a problem about insincere religious objections that conceal nonreligious reasons.6 My point here, however, is about insincere or contrived secular reasons that conceal religious reasons, and the fact that the PNR is likely to encourage the production of this category. Some Catholic authorities, for instance, during the AIDS crisis in Africa, argued that condoms did not work as a preventive measure, which was not of course their real reason for opposition, but was produced as likely to be more persuasive than reasons based on religious authority. The ‘secular reason’ was of course palpably false, and it should have been known to be false by their educated proponents, but was unfortunately persuasive to many less informed people. But other dubious secular reasons proposed may be more widely plausible, and even where the proffered secular reasons happen to be correct, the insincerity of their production hardly exhibits a contribution to civic virtue in the way Audi and Smith require.
6. RELIGIOUS REASONS AND MUTUAL RESPECT
My fourth difficulty concerns the underlying claim that offering religious reasons (without the secular reason backup) for public policies offends against some form of ‘mutual respect’ that pluralist liberal democracies should involve and thereby fails the demands of civic virtue. Certainly, there could be contexts in which this is so, for instance, when religious reasons are proffered in a tone of arrogant superiority, as surely happens too often. But this need not be the context, and indeed, it may be that sometimes offering the reasons that count most for you, whether you understand them as secular, religious or strongly ideological (in the ‘comprehensive doctrine’ sense), shows more mutual respect for others than publicly minimising or downplaying them.
I agree of course that religious people should engage respectfully with their nonreligious brethren and with those of different religions and be ready to learn from them. It is also a good practical idea to engage with anyone about a public policy by finding common ground where possible for advancing the discussion. It is a virtue of the PIC that it calls attention to such requirements, and I would add that the institutional aspect of religion, which Audi/Smith rightly recognise, is important here. That connects to my next difficulty.
7. FOCUS ON PNR CAN OBSCURE A MORE IMPORTANT PROBLEM
My fifth difficulty with the PNR is that such typical philosophical emphasis on reason‐giving can obscure the fact that the main danger that religion can pose to liberal democratic pluralism comes from the tendency of religious institutions to push political agendas in morally unhealthy ways. This can be fostered by the power relations that accompany religious authority and the rigidity of belief structures that can arise thereby (amongst other power corruptions). It is easy for religious conviction in such a context to harden the intellectual arteries so that the flow of understanding is at least partially blocked. Such blockage can create a failure to appreciate the value of new developments in the cultural and intellectual world around the institutions and even within them, developments that can provide new insights into and even revisions of previously standard religious beliefs. Indeed, something similar applies to nonreligious institutions and their associated ideological commitments.
Without this more open attitude, there can be a fortress and warrior mentality within religious institutions towards new developments in ‘the world’, so that congregations become marshalled in dubious ways to do battle with an often misperceived enemy. Religious pressure‐grouping during the Trump administration displays many features of this, and a striking example in Australia was the secretive anti‐communist organisation The Movement in the 1940s and the 1950s that, backed by a large majority of Bishops, furtively recruited Catholics not only to fight communist influence in the unions with underhand methods but also to infiltrate the Australian Labor Party. The upshot of this was the split in the ALP in 1955 that helped keep conservative governments in power for 16 years.
The issue of the morality and legalisation of abortion that Smith/Audi discuss sensitively illustrates much of this as well. The Catholic hierarchy in many countries not only makes the issue lopsidedly dominate its religious concerns but also ignores the wide variations in belief on the matter in their Catholic communities. In the United States, for instance, in a 2020 Pew poll, 56% of the Catholic lay population surveyed in the United States did not agree with the hard‐line stance that all abortion should be illegal, 7 and only 10% held that it should be illegal in all cases. Indeed, in a later Pew poll in 2022, 76% of those Catholics surveyed held that abortion should be illegal in some cases and legal in others.8 What such results reinforce is that the Catholic hierarchy tends to be blind to the fact that the morality of abortion, especially early abortion, is very understandably morally contentious by its nature, as well as requiring a nuanced legal response, points that are related to Rawls' discussion about acknowledging ‘the burdens of judgement’ that Audi/Smith cite in a footnote. But I have discussed the abortion debate elsewhere, as they mention, and have left myself no space to do so here.9
8. EXCLUSIONISM AND THE CONCEPTS OF MYSTERY AND FAITH
A final ‘and yet’ thought about the PNR provides a possible line of support for it not explicitly invoked by Audi/Smith. Perhaps exclusionism about religious reasons is made more plausible by the fact that the major religious traditions and many with fewer adherents are committed at heart to an idea of mystery that other ways of thinking and believing seem not to be. There is obviously a great deal of reasoning in the Abrahamic faith traditions as their elaborate and highly intelligent theological, philosophical and apologetic developments show. Yet, there remains at the core of religious belief and commitment a direction of mind and heart towards what contains ultimately an element of mystery, most notably the nature of the Godhead itself. This is partly why such religious commitment deserves the name of ‘faith’. Perhaps this distinctiveness can inform the exclusionist focus on religious reasoning.
The plausibility of this, however, is diminished by two considerations. The first is that the moral views developed within a religion can begin in a context of faith and mystery, but take on a life of their own in the give and take of public debate and can then appeal to nonreligious people in a more stand‐alone way. An example of this may be the way that the already mentioned religious objections to slavery, based on scriptural appeals and the mystery of God's love for all of us, resonated eventually with nonreligious people who then forged different sources for the same egalitarian conclusions. This impulse may have been entirely absent but for the advocacy invoking religious outlooks. The second consideration is that the concepts of faith and of mystery are not unique to religion; they have at least analogues in the nonreligious world. Although hardcore secularists are ill at ease with the idea, it is arguable that our ‘ordinary’ world contains an inherent element of the mysterious, and not merely that it presents us with numerous difficult intellectual puzzles, even those puzzles that we cannot for various contingent reasons solve at all, for example, what people in preliterate times thought about this and that when no records can remain to provide evidence. Rather, a strong concept of mystery is evoked for many people by the reality of dedicated love to the point of sacrificing one's life for another, by a certain bonding with the natural world and by the thought that splendid as our intellectual powers may be, there are almost certainly things in the world that our intellectual equipment is essentially, rather than contingently, too limited to discover.
As for faith, it is an ever‐present reality in both our cognitive and personal lives. The idea of faith is closely related to that of trust and, although faith should never be merely ‘blind’, it is often resistant to reductive justification by reason alone. A child's faith in its parents or spousal trust in one's partner is undermined by the idea that it is established or sustained solely by rational argumentation or even, in certain ways, by continued rational scrutiny. Indeed, our basic epistemic resources such as memory, perception, inference and testimony are arguably beyond any sort of independent rational justification of their general reliability and no amount of philosophical scepticism can dent our faith in that reliability, although of course each of them can lead us astray in various contexts.10
These brief remarks about the roles of faith and mystery in the natural order indicate ways in which these concepts need not be so exclusive to religious discourse as to support exclusionist positions, though of course my argument needs more elaboration than is possible here.
9. A CAVEAT CONCERNING THE PIC
And finally, a caveat about the PIC, or at least expectations it may give rise to. Clearly, I have sympathy with the idea of attempting to understand fully the specific claims and arguments of people with whom one is engaged in discussing public policy proposals, and to do so in a civil way, but mutual understanding needs to be based on realistic expectations and the fact is that people sometimes hold fast to political views that are irrational, deluded or just deeply mistaken. In such a context, it may be better spending time on something achievable rather than engaging politely in futile pursuit of agreement. Many climate denialists, for instance, or passionate ‘stolen election’ advocates in the United States, are so entrenched in their view and in its connection to wider outlooks and real or unreal grievances that attempting the path of PIC is bound to be futile. Where friends or relatives are involved, persistence in it may even be destructive of friendship. The PIC should not lead one to a principle of charity that attributes to others an openness to views or reasons that it would be good or reasonable for them to hold, but that they doggedly will not consider. It is one thing to be charitable towards political opponents as persons, quite another to be invariably charitable to their views.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
Open access publishing facilitated by The University of Melbourne, as part of the Wiley ‐ The University of Melbourne agreement via the Council of Australian University Librarians.
CONFLICT OF INTEREST
The author declares no conflict of interest.
Biography
C. A. J. (Tony) Coady is professor emeritus at the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, University of Melbourne, and professorial fellow at the Australian Catholic University, Melbourne division. His most recent book is The meaning of terrorism, Oxford University Press, 2021.
Coady, C. A. J. (2023). Religious reasons, natural reasons and ‘exclusionism’: A commentary on Robert Audi and William Smith, ‘Religious Pluralism and the Ethics of Healthcare’. Bioethics, 37, 52–56. 10.1111/bioe.13116
Footnotes
See Weithman, P. J. (2006). Religion and the obligations of citizenship (pp. 6–9). Cambridge University Press and throughout.
There is also a family of writings and books that have developed in opposition to ‘the standard approach’ to become almost standard in its own way. In addition to Weithman's book, there are others such as McGraw, B. T. (2010). Faith in politics: Religion and liberal democracy. Cambridge University Press; Eberle, C. J. (2002). Religious conviction in liberal politics. Cambridge University Press.
Most recently in ‘Religion and Politics’ in LaFollette, H. (Ed.). (2013). The international encyclopedia of ethics. Blackwell; and ‘Religion and Politics’, and in Edmonds, D. (Ed.). (2019). Ethics and the contemporary world (pp. 107–120). Routledge.
They note that ‘secular’ (which Audi has regularly used) may seem to be anti‐religious, whereas ‘natural’ may be better in some contexts because it has broader scope, including ‘standard logic and scientific method’. I will not quibble about this, though it seems to me that ‘secular’ always included such scope anyway.
Smith, W. R., & Audi, R. (2021). Religious accommodation in bioethics and the practice of medicine. The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy: A Forum for Bioethics and Philosophy of Medicine, 46(2), 188–218.
In the context of dealing with purported conscientious objections to receiving or giving medical treatment, there can be a problem about insincere religious objections that conceal nonreligious reasons. As pointed out by Francesca Minerva, some Italian Catholic doctors, for instance, refuse on supposed conscience grounds to perform abortions in public hospitals, but more profitably do so illegally in private practice. See Minerva, F. (2015). ‘Conscientious objection in Italy’. Journal of Medical Ethics, 41(2), 170–173.
‘Catholic Identity and the Abortion Debate’ extended review article in Eureka Street (2002) reprinted in Conscience the U.S. journal published by Catholics for Free Choice (Washington, DC) (2002): 33–37.
I have argued the case for such independence for testimony in various places including my book Testimony: A Philosophical Study (Oxford University Press, 1992). In this respect, testimony is on all fours with the other basic resources.