Process Studies

Volume 40, Issue 2, Fall/Winter 2011

The Virtues of Eclecticism

Rawls and others have held that political agents in a liberal democracy should argue for their positions without adverting to religious grounds. I suggest here that this is because moral claims in general should not be grounded in religious views. Morality, I argue, consists in norms and ideals that can be defended from many different comprehensive views of the good life, not from any single one (whether that single view be religious or not). It follows that politics, even insofar as it is a sub-domain of morality, need not and should not depend on religion.