I appreciate your willingness to sustain the conversation this far. If and when you do have the opportunity, I’d be happy to see it continue. It’s a tough topic, and I value your challenges to my own underdeveloped ideas.

If not, then your above claim may be trivially true, and yet irrelevant to criticizing Rawls. If so, then your above statement is clearly false.

Also, while I meant the last comment to be clear and pointed, I didn’t mean for it to be combative. My aim was to press for clarity, since I don’t yet see a cogent position here.

But to have the state power invade any given woman’s womb and life to prevent the abortion of her child at a decent time before scheduled birth, seems to me a statist ideological invasion of the sphere of her responsiblity as to whether or not to give birth. Obviously, I do not subscribe to the Roman Catholic Church’s “consistent ethics of life” or the stigmatization of those women who do choose to abort.

Pope Benedict has finally come to terms with the fact that the Church has lost a lot of power over women by conceding that birth control and condoms have a place in the non/reproductive plans of Catholic couples. But all the misery this magisterial doctrine has caused in the meanwhyld! The whole conceptual appartus of this “ethics” is too biotistic and too Aristotelian for me. The woman making the choice needs no Aristotle; the existentialists give a better environment in which she may want to think.

The woman may be given a chance to apply to a judge (with expedited time-arrangements) to be heard — say, against her husband, her parents, her other children (if any), the hospital, the doctor/s, even the state. She may need restraining orders against any and all of them. Her think-thru with a judge may allow her to make a choice for carrying the child to term, or to make the choice to abort. There’s a time for everything, for this woman to have a(nother) child, or not.

“There is simply no way that flesh and blood persons can divorce their reasoning capacities from their thick commitments to some vision of the good.”

Your statement here seems either trivial true and irrelevant, or obviously false. When you are solving a mathematical equation, is your reasoning capacity divorced from your “thick commitments to some vision of the good?” If so, then your above claim may be trivially true, and yet irrelevant to criticizing Rawls. If not, then your above statement is clearly false.

“Rawls’ endeavour is inevitably coloured by his own ultimate commitment, viz., to a certain conception of liberty and equality….”

But so what? It is no objection to Rawls to say say that some elements of his proposal are motivated by his own ultimate commitments. As suggested earlier, it should be obvious that the reasonable overlapping consensus needn’t be purged of all elements that also happen to comprise someone or other’s “ultimate commitment.” It would be a complete confusion to object to a liberal theory of fairness simply because some people happen to be ultimately committed to that theory. (Think back on the suspicious roommate’s objection in the earlier comment.)

If, however, there is some truly illegitimate bias in Rawls’ argument, it would be best just to identify the precise content of that bias and to locate exactly where it enters the argument. I was attempting to help you in this direction by distinguishing three distinct stages at which you might object.

Finally, suppose it is true that the “large measure of agreement amongst citizens” is “due to our common status as God’s image-bearers”. Are you suggesting that it is unreasonable to suppose otherwise? If not, then I’m curious as to why you think that your claim here is relevant.

Yes, there is a large measure of agreement amongst citizens otherwise differing in their basic worldviews, but once again this is due to our common status as God’s image-bearers and not to our supposed ability to think without reference to these worldviews.

Regarding deeply valued individual liberties, it’s hard to believe that there’s not a good deal of reasonable overlapping consensus shared between American Christians and Americans of other persuasions. To characterize such liberties, we might look to the “public political culture,” or we might consider the sorts of liberties that anybody would have good reason to value simply as a citizen with a propensity to develop and to deeply value our own beliefs, commitments, and ways of life.

Rawls, as I understand, proposed a way that a set of such liberties might be characterized independently of the biases which ordinarily hinder us from reaching a reasonable consensus on such things—namely each person or group’s bias of favoring their own particular “conception of the good” or “comprehensive doctrine.” Rawls proposed that we think about the sorts of liberties we would prioritize if we didn’t know which such views and commitments we would have (within, of course, the range of the reasonable). Deliberation behind this veil of ignorance leads, plausibly enough, to substantial set of prioritized individual liberties.

I call these ideas to mind simply to help me locate your point of disagreement (I’m not supposing that any of this is new to you). I see three really significantly distinct places where you might objecting. Here they are in order of decreasing ambition:

1. You might be rejecting the idea that we should prioritize the sorts of individual liberties that each of us would have a good reason to deeply value simply as citizens with a propensity to develop and to deeply value our own beliefs, commitments, and ways of life—where such a prioritization places a significant burden of justification upon anyone wishing to constrain such liberties of others via state power.

2. You might be rejecting the idea that the veil of ignorance removes (only) our politically illegitimate biases in characterizing these prioritized liberties.

3. You might be simply rejecting the idea that liberties relevant to a woman’s choice to have an abortion are among that set of prioritized liberties (even though the veil of ignorance may be a good tool for reasonably characterizing those liberties).

That Christian citizens might not be entirely satisfied with this approach can be seen in the authors’ treatment of the abortion issue. Admitting that both pro-life and pro-choice arguments have a right to be heard in the deliberative process, they nevertheless argue that, based on the principle of reciprocity, “it is unreasonable to deny that a woman’s basic liberty is at stake in the case of abortion” (p. 141). Though they admit that “people may reasonably disagree over whether fetuses have interests that limit women’s liberty” (Ibid.), their overall reasoning favours giving such liberty clear priority. This conclusion is further bolstered by their argument, in a different context, that “[j]ustifying laws on the basis of sacred value comes close to legislating religion, and any democracy that values basic liberty must be wary of encouraging that kind of legislation” (p. 159). This would apparently exclude any effort to enshrine in positive law a particular view of the sanctity of life. Nevertheless, that the authors themselves have effectively ascribed “sacred value” to basic liberty seems to have escaped them. And it makes their espousal of a moderate pro-choice position somewhat less than credible, despite their professed desire to “acknowledge as far as possible the moral legitimacy of the pro-life position” (p. 86).

Of course, if they were willing to admit that their own principles were as ideologically laden as those of the “moralists”, their case would collapse. This is why I cannot follow the Rawlsian approach and believe it is a nonstarter.

Think of it this way. Suppose three guys have to share an apartment. Each is used to having his way, but now this has become impossible; they have to decide on rules. One of the guys makes a proposal: in deciding how to share this apartment, let’s avoid making really serious rules that we can’t reasonably expect each guy to accept. Now, if one of the other two roommates immediately objects to this proposal , we rightly wonder why. If the only reason he can give us is that the proposal is what the first roommate regards as a good idea (and so it seems to already bias the deliberation in the first roommate’s favor), then this should strike everyone as a very poor objection.

But that seems to be exactly the sort of objection that one often hears of Rawls. I hope that’s not the objection you are suggesting.

Whatever we might propose to come up with as a restriction on state power would inevitably be rooted in our ultimate commitments, with which we cannot necessarily expect others to agree.

However, insofar as these claims are true, they’re not quite relevant to the issue at hand, nor do they constitute an apt criticism of Rawls. Rawls wrote of grounding a conception of justice in what he called “reasonable overlapping consensus” (where “reasonable” leaves some room for not having to accommodate those ideologies which don’t meet the most minimal requirements of rationality, or which reject the shared goal of civility and the view of individual citizens as “free and equal” in a minimal, normative sense).

Substantive restrictions on how individuals use coercive state power against one another can indeed be plausibly justified in terms of reasonable overlapping consensus. In that sense, such restrictions would be essentially independent from the ideologies we cannot reasonably expect our fellow citizens to accept. None of this, of course, does entails any claims about what is “necessarily” the case, nor does it deny that some elements of our reasonable overlapping consensus are also part of some people’s “ultimate commitments.”

John Rawls tried in vain to come up with a way to do precisely what you are looking for by appealing to an hypothetical original position of equality in which all participants, behind a veil of ignorance to guarantee their apparent neutrality, choose the principles of justice applicable to all. As it turns out, of course, Rawls’ own approach is based on a “thick” comprehensive doctrine concerning the good, even as he denies it. Since the publication of his A Theory of Justice in 1971, numerous critics have pointed this out.

This does not mean that our respective worldviews are entirely incommensurable. We can indeed talk with each other, but this is due, not to our having found a point of neutrality, but to God’s common grace given to all. We share God’s world irrespective of our different worldviews, and that world necessarily impresses itself on us, whether we acknowledge it or not. This is where we find hope for some form of agreement.

As for placing limits on the state, any limits we come up with will be rooted in a basic conviction of what the state is for and properly does. This is in turn rooted in a worldview in which the state finds a place. There is simply no way to get beyond such worldviews.

Any conceptions of civility we have will inevitably be rooted in some community’s conception of the good, which is conditioned by its basic religious beliefs.

I again appreciate your thoughtful and generous reply–especially considering the venue and the virus.

While your authority idea seems promising for those issues for which we can agree to defer to experts (and for which the experts agree with each other), or for which we can agree upon the domains and divisions of authority (whether because we all endorse a religion that defines such domains, or because we simply agree), I’d be concerned about the theist who, supposing that the contours of authority are defined by God, has rather peculiar views about these matters–views which he can’t reasonably expect others to accept. Should such peculiar views win by majority vote, is it just tough luck for those who don’t share these ideologically defined conceptions of authority?

I suggest, rather, that–if we’re to take your robust conception of civility seriously–we need a restriction on state power (and our individual uses of it against one another) that is essentially independent from the ideologies we cannot reasonably expect our fellow citizens to accept.