Justice_ What's the Right Thing to Do_ - Michael Sandel [118]
Many have noted the similarities between John F. Kennedy and Barack Obama. Both were young, eloquent, inspiring political figures whose election marked the turn to a new generation of leadership. And both sought to rally Americans to a new era of civic engagement. But their views on the role of religion in politics could hardly be more different.
The Aspiration to Neutrality
Kennedy’s view of religion as a private, not public, affair reflected more than the need to disarm anti-Catholic prejudice. It reflected a public philosophy that would come to full expression during the 1960s and ’70s—a philosophy that held that government should be neutral on moral and religious questions, so that each individual could be free to choose his or her own conception of the good life.
Both major political parties appealed to the idea of neutrality, but in different ways. Generally speaking, Republicans invoked the idea in economic policy, while Democrats applied it to social and cultural issues.9 Republicans argued against government intervention in free markets on the grounds that individuals should be free to make their own economic choices and spend their money as they pleased; for government to spend taxpayers’ money or regulate economic activity for public purposes was to impose a state-sanctioned vision of the common good that not everyone shared. Tax cuts were preferable to government spending, because they left individuals free to decide for themselves what ends to pursue and how to spend their own money.
Democrats rejected the notion that free markets are neutral among ends and defended a greater measure of government intervention in the economy. But when it came to social and cultural issues, they, too, invoked the language of neutrality. Government should not “legislate morality” in the areas of sexual behavior or reproductive decisions, they maintained, because to do so imposes on some the moral and religious convictions of others. Rather than restrict abortion or homosexual intimacies, government should be neutral on these morally charged questions and let individuals choose for themselves.
In 1971, John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice offered a philosophical defense of the liberal conception of neutrality that Kennedy’s speech had intimated.10 In the 1980s, the communitarian critics of liberal neutrality questioned the vision of the freely choosing, unencumbered self that seemed to underlie Rawls’s theory. They argued not only for stronger notions of community and solidarity but also for a more robust public engagement with moral and religious questions.11
In 1993, Rawls published a book, Political Liberalism, that recast his theory in some respects. He acknowledged that, in their personal lives, people often have “affections, devotions, and loyalties that they believe they would not, indeed could and should not, stand apart from. … They may regard it as simply unthinkable to view themselves apart from certain religious, philosophical, and moral convictions, or from certain enduring attachments and loyalties.”12 To this extent, Rawls accepted the possibility of thickly constituted, morally encumbered selves. But he insisted that such loyalties and attachments should have no bearing on our identity as citizens. In debating justice and rights, we should set aside our personal moral and religious convictions and argue from the standpoint of a “political conception of the person,” independent of any particular loyalties, attachments, or conception of the good life.13
Why should we not bring our moral and religious convictions to bear in public discourse about justice and rights? Why should we separate our identity as citizens from our identity as moral persons more broadly conceived? Rawls argues