Tag: Brian Leiter

Discrimination isn’t always wrong

America

John J. Conley

Is discrimination always wrong?

To listen to the current national debate on the topic, it would appear to be so. Virtually all international human-rights covenants categorically reject discrimination on the basis of race, religion and gender. Even contemporary professional philosophers tend to treat discrimination as an unalloyed evil. The University of Chicago’s Brian Leiter has led a very public philosophical campaign to eliminate religious exemptions to anti-discrimination laws and to declare unethical religious practices that appear to be discriminatory, especially in the area of gender and sexual orientation.

But our crusade against discrimination seems to rest on a fundamental confusion. There is a difference between discriminating against someone because of the group to which he or she belongs and discriminating against someone on the basis of his or her actions. . . . [Full text]

Claims of Conscience

Religious Freedom and State Power

Commonweal
3 May, 2013

William Galston

Is religious conscience special? And what kinds of claims (if any) does conscience warrant? These are two of the many questions Brian Leiter raises in his provocative book Why Tolerate Religion? (Princeton University Press, $24.95, 192 pp.).

Note that in principle one could answer the first question in the negative—by denying the distinctiveness of religion—while endorsing broad claims for conscience as such. Imagine a two-by-two table: In the upper left quadrant is an expansive notion of conscience coupled with a broad conception of conscientious claims; in the bottom right is conscience restricted to religion with few or no claims to which the law must yield. The two remaining quadrants are broad/narrow and narrow/broad, respectively.  [Read more . . .]