Abstract
To what extent is individual conscience social in character? Anti-individualist critics have taken issue with the individualistic account of conscience that they find prominent in liberalism. I consider Rawls’s accounts of conscience and the liberty of conscience with a view to understanding the role that sociality might play in the formation and significance of conscience. I defend Rawls against these anti-individualist critics. However, I demonstrate that Rawls’s account of conscience remains bound to a specific metaphysics of the person that is at odds with the anti-foundationalist aims of political liberalism. I argue that, in place of this metaphysics, liberals should adopt a social ontology of the self.
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Notes
- 1.
Defenders of conscience argue that it is the means through which we take on and adopt the justified norms and expectations of those with whom we share our social life, or of the voice of divinity. See Howard (2014). Critics aim to show that conscience merely expresses the demands of the disciplining parent (Freud) or the heroic ancestor (Nietzsche), demands that the individual has internalized, falsely (and heteronomously) claiming as their own a voice which does not belong to them.
- 2.
- 3.
This idea animates the recent account of the demand for toleration in Leiter (2013).
- 4.
See, in this vein, Nussbaum 2008, 19–20.
- 5.
I focus on Vischer 2010.
- 6.
In general, I assume broad familiarity with Rawls ’s views, though I have made some efforts to avoid relying too much on his technical terminology, and to provide independent explanations of key ideas.
- 7.
- 8.
Leiter argues that religion merits no special protection, but should be tolerated on the grounds that it is an expression of conscience.
- 9.
- 10.
For example at Rawls 2005, 11.
- 11.
- 12.
For a critique of such conceptions, see Howard 2014.
- 13.
Rawls 2005, 318–320. In addition to this appeal to self-respect, Rawls identifies two other grounds for the liberty of conscience : the contribution that liberty of conscience and the other basic liberties make first to the stability of justice as fairness, and second to a well-ordered society.
- 14.
The categorical imperative procedure “specifies the content of the moral law as it applies to us as reasonable and rational persons in the natural world, endowed with conscience and moral sensibility, and affected by, but not determined by, our natural desires and inclinations” (Rawls 2000, 164). It bears noting that Rawls’s lectures provide little guidance on this question too. We find the only other mention of conscience in the lectures in the context of a discussion of Hume , in which Rawls provides a rough outline of Butler’s view of the source and function of conscience.
- 15.
In general, Rawls argues that “from the standpoint of justice as fairness, [moral or religious] obligations are self-imposed” since “they are not bonds laid down by this conception of justice” (Rawls 1971, 206). See also Rawls 2005, 33–34. However, this notion is at odds with one plausible conception of moral obligation and of conscience, according to which the roots of our obligations lie in others or the demands they make on us, and we do not simply have those obligations because we claim them as our own or take responsibility for them.
- 16.
Vischer 2010, 4. Vischer does not reject the need for nondiscrimination laws entirely, arguing that the Civil Rights Act, for example, is justified because the extraordinary and significant forms of discrimination that predominated in the south were seriously detrimental to the “common good.” See Vischer 2010, 26–29.
- 17.
On finding he appropriate balance among the basic liberties, see Rawls 1971, 203.
- 18.
- 19.
- 20.
For a helpful introduction to the central ideas of social ontology and its connection to the self, see Ikäheimo and Laitinen 2011, 1–21.
- 21.
Searle 1995, 1. Along similar lines, “We need not look for any inherent features or properties that are the markers or conditions of personhood. Rather, someone is a person (in the relevant sense) if he is in fact caught up in a network of discursive holdings—that is, if others successfully recognize him, through speech acts containing vocative moments, as a user and receiver of speech acts, or as the kind of being who can transform the normative status of others and have his own normative status transformed through discourse with other community members.” Kukla and Lance 2009, 192.
- 22.
For such an expressive conception of reason, see Brandom 1994.
- 23.
Such an account need not depend on a specious teleology by appealing to a purpose inherent to human nature. For one account of the sort of historical change I have in mind, see Pippin 1999, 73–77.
- 24.
Though, it bears noting, that it is unclear whether he understands reason to be at work, progressively realized, in history, or whether he understands these domains to be only contingently connected.
- 25.
See especially Rawls 2005, xliii.
- 26.
Of course, Rawls acknowledges the Kantian roots of his idea of the person even in Political Liberalism . See, for example, Rawls 2005, 48n1. I am challenging the extent to which we can separate out a political conception of the self from the comprehensive framework in which these ideas have their ultimate roots.
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Brownlee, T.L. (2017). The Sociality of Conscience and Rawls’s Liberalism. In: Speight, C., Zank, M. (eds) Politics, Religion and Political Theology. Boston Studies in Philosophy, Religion and Public Life, vol 6. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-1082-2_6
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