Dealing Morally with Religious Differences

Abstract

Our already acquired attitudes, beliefs and virtues considerably inform the way in which we formulate principles of toleration. For they affect our understanding of the needs, views and practices of other groups, and, as a result, they also affect our conception of how those groups should be treated fairly. But, if what we take to be tolerant turns out to be a practice, attitude or virtue which subtly discriminates against other groups, then all we end up with is another form of intolerance. In this paper, I defend an approach to the problem of accommodating religious differences, which makes possible the formulation of such fair principles of toleration. One of the keys elements of this approach is a Kantian, critical account of moral normativity. Such an account can explain how principles can have a normative force which is stronger than that conferred by intersubjectivity, but which need not be committed to the demanding assumptions of moral realism. While the approach I defend here is also appropriate more generally for the problem of dealing fairly with any morally relevant differences, I argue that the focus on religious differences and on a concern for accommodating differences morally make it particularly adequate for the issue of toleration.