David Golemboski

Fair compromise is often taken to involve reciprocity and proportionality in concession-making. This paper examines challenges posed to this ideal by value pluralism: the proposition that there are multiple, irreducible basic goods. Value pluralism entails that parties to a potential compromise will sometimes act on the basis of non-shared interests not fully amenable to reciprocal determinations of proportionality. Specifically, certain judgments of value pose problems of epistemic inaccessibility and/or value incommensurability. I show that these problems arise with special visibility in conflicts involving law and religion, and suggest that in such cases the best that can be hoped for is a “blind compromise” in which the magnitude of the other party’s concessions remain uncertain. However, I suggest an interpretation of the U.S. Constitution’s Religion Clauses as framing a meta-compromise that brackets these problems and enshrines reciprocal concessions between law and religion as dual sources of authority.

Legal and philosophical theories of religious exemptions have primarily understood them as a means toward one or more moral ends: protecting rights and securing equality, primarily. But exemptions also serve an under-theorized stabilizing function in resolving conflicts between law and belief. In this paper, I argue that these conflicts pose a challenge to public justification, and ipso facto to political stability. I then show how religious exemptions can support stability by ameliorating these conflicts, and elaborate parameters for identifying those exemptions most likely to achieve this stability-enhancing effect.