Jon Mahoney

Part I of this paper examines liberal toleration and its relevance to the debate on polygamy. The remaining sections consider Marci Hamilton’s claim that polygamy should not be accommodated. Hamilton’s position rests on three kinds of arguments which I call: 1) the argument from public reason; 2) the argument from democracy; and 3) the argument from exploitation. Each of these fails: 1) fails because Hamilton’s conception of public reason is too restrictive; 2) fails because it rests on a procedural test which attempts to balance claims about rights against claims about the public good—and thus presupposes a flawed conception of rights; 3) is the most compelling of Hamilton’s arguments but could be met in principle if one can show that the right design of background institutions can accommodate polygamy without sponsoring an exploitative form of marriage.

The aim of this article is to consider the prospects of a liberal conception of religious freedom in some Muslim-majority states. Part I offers a brief sketch of three approaches to religious freedom that inform my view. Part II then presents a liberal framework for religious toleration that draws ideas from Rainer Forst’s Toleration in Conflict, as well as some perennial themes in classical liberal thought. I briefly examine three case studies in Part III: the Turkish Republic; the Arab Spring states; and the post-Soviet republics of Central Asia. This is followed by a short conclusion.

I argue that Habermas’s proposed system of rights fails to offer an adequate account of the relation between rights and moral injury. In providing a non-moral justification for rights, Habermas’s functional-normative argument excludes the moral intuition that persons are worthy of being protected from a class of injurious actions (i.e. false imprisonment, religious persecution). Habermas does offer clearly stated reasons for his proposed normative, yet non-moral foundation for a legitimate legal order, including the claim that the functional imperatives of modern legal systems cannot be reduced to morality. My positive thesis is that at least some rights are moral norms whose content and justification derive from a moral point of view informed by the idea of persons as free and equal.