Toleration after Babel: God‐Talk and the Politics of Reasonableness

Abstract

The current debate over the place of religious claims in public discourse has, to a certain extent. become a battle over "reasonableness. " In the wake of the influential work of John Rawls, several prominent political theorists have argued that citizens have a moral duty to limit their political deliberation to a particular set of propositions that can be recognized as reasonable, while critics respond that such a limitation is not only impracticable, it is exclusionary In this essay I return to Lock's A Letter Concerning Toleration and Kant ' s Conflict of the Faculties in order to show that the continuing struggle over the place of religion in contemporary liberal society is not simply the result of afailure to apply a liberal doctrine with the proper rigor and precision. It is the inevitable consequence of the enduring presence of moral disagreement that an appeal to doctrine can neither transcend nor dispel.