Justice_ What's the Right Thing to Do_ - Michael Sandel [119]
According to this argument, the case for liberal neutrality arises from the need for tolerance in the face of moral and religious disagreement. “Which moral judgments are true, all things considered, is not a matter for political liberalism,” Rawls writes. To maintain impartiality between competing moral and religious doctrines, political liberalism does not “address the moral topics on which those doctrines divide.”15
The demand that we separate our identity as citizens from our moral and religious convictions means that, when engaging in public discourse about justice and rights, we must abide by the limits of liberal public reason. Not only may government not endorse a particular conception of the good; citizens may not even introduce their moral and religious convictions into public debate about justice and rights.16 For if they do, and if their arguments prevail, they will effectively impose on their fellow citizens a law that rests on a particular moral or religious doctrine.
How can we know whether our political arguments meet the requirements of public reason, suitably shorn of any reliance on moral or religious views? Rawls suggests a novel test: “To check whether we are following public reason we might ask: how would our argument strike us presented in the form of a supreme court opinion?”17 As Rawls explains, this is a way to make sure that our arguments are neutral in the sense that liberal public reason requires: “The justices cannot, of course, invoke their own personal morality, nor the ideals and virtues of morality generally. Those they must view as irrelevant. Equally, they cannot invoke their or other people’s religious or philosophical views.”18 When participating as citizens in public debate, we should observe a similar restraint. Like Supreme Court justices, we should set aside our moral and religious convictions, and restrict ourselves to arguments that all citizens can reasonably be expected to accept.
This is the ideal of liberal neutrality that John Kennedy invoked and Barack Obama rejected. From the 1960s through the 1980s, Democrats drifted toward the neutrality ideal, and largely banished moral and religious argument from their political discourse. There were some notable exceptions. Martin Luther King, Jr., invoked moral and religious arguments in advancing the cause of civil rights; the anti—Vietnam War movement was energized by moral and religious discourse; and Robert F. Kennedy, seeking the Democratic presidential nomination in 1968, tried to summon the nation to more demanding moral and civic ideals. But by the 1970s, liberals embraced the language of neutrality and choice, and ceded moral and religious discourse to the emerging Christian right.
With the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, Christian conservatives became a prominent voice in Republican politics. Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority and Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition sought to clothe the “naked public square”19 and to combat what they saw as the moral permissiveness of American life. They favored school prayer, religious displays in public places, and legal restrictions on pornography, abortion, and homosexuality. For their part, liberals opposed these policies, not by challenging the moral judgments case by case, but instead by arguing that moral and religious judgments have no place in politics.
This pattern of argument served Christian conservatives well, and gave liberalism a bad name. In the 1990s and early 2000s, liberals argued, somewhat defensively, that they, too, stood for “values,” by which they typically meant the values of tolerance, fairness, and freedom of choice. (In an awkward reach for resonance,