Marilie Coetsee

Focusing on current efforts to persuade the public to comply with Covid-19 best practices, this essay examines what role appeals to religious reasons should (or should not) play in leaders’ attempts to secure followers’ acceptance of group policies in contexts of religious and moral pluralism. While appeals to followers’ religious commitments can be helpful in promoting desirable public health outcomes, they also raise moral concerns when made in the contexts of secular institutions with religiously diverse participants. In these contexts, leaders who appeal to religious reasons as bases of justification for imposing Covid policies may seem to fail to show respect for the autonomy of those who lack the relevant religious commitments, and—especially when a leader herself rejects the religious commitments she makes reference to to persuade others—her appeals to religious reasons may seem to constitute ethically problematic exercises of manipulation. This essay draws on the resources of contemporary political philosophy to analyze and respond to these concerns and concludes that they are not sufficiently well-founded. To the contrary, it contends that there are good moral grounds for leaders to appeal to religious reasons as (partial) bases of justification for why followers should accept Covid policies. In the course of the argument, this essay also highlights how contemporary political theory can enrich discussions about the distinctions between coercion, manipulation, and leadership, and thereby give insight not only into the ethics of leadership but also—at least by the lights of central theories of leadership like that of James MacGregor Burns (1978)—into whether and how appeals to religious reasons can figure into genuine exercises of leadership, in contrast with mere instances of the wielding of social power.

James Sterba uses the Pauline Principle to argue that the occurrence of significant, horrendous evils is logically incompatible with the existence of a good God. The Pauline Principle states that (as a rule) one must never do evil so that good may come from it, and according to Sterba, this principle implies that God may not permit significant evils even if that permission would be necessary to secure other, greater goods. By contrast, I argue that the occurrence of significant evils is logically compatible with the existence of a good God because victims of significant evils may themselves reasonably consent to their suffering. In particular, I argue that they may be able to accept their suffering if it turns out that there was no way for God to secure relevant greater goods (or prevent other, greater evils) except by way of allowing their suffering, and God also provides them with other compensating, heavenly comforts. After using this consent-based argument to address Sterba’s logical problem from evil, I briefly consider how this argument may also help address a related evidential problem from evil, which suggests that while it is possible that victims of significant evils would consent to their suffering, it is unlikely that they would do so. While I do not provide a definitive solution to this evidential problem of evil, I highlight one important example of a trade-off that God may need to make that would—along with the provision of compensating, heavenly comforts—potentially persuade victims of significant evils to consent to their suffering. Specifically, I argue that there may be a necessary trade-off that God needs to make between permitting significant evils (on the one hand) and protecting a certain, morally significant form of free will (on the other hand).

Huckleberry Finn believes that by helping Miss Watson’s slave Jim escape to freedom, he is doing something wrong. But Huck does it anyway—and many want to give him moral credit for this choice. If Huck is to be worthy of such moral esteem, however, it seems there must be some implicit way of appreciating and responding to considerations as moral reasons that does not involve explicitly believing that those considerations are moral reasons. This chapter argues that an agent like Huck can implicitly appreciate a consideration as a moral reason to φ by presenting it under the light of a particular phenomenologically-mediated mode of presentation: one that presents that consideration via the light of a felt directive force “pointing” towards φ-ing—lending weight to it, or soliciting it—in a particular authoritative way. Thus, I suggest, Huck may be understood on analogy with a young jazz piano virtuoso. As she may appreciate that the G-seventh chord having been played just so constitutes an aesthetic reason for her to ease into the C-major-seventh chord just so by virtue of experiencing the former as pointing or directing her to the latter, so also, I propose, Huck may appreciate the considerations speaking in favor of helping Jim as moral reasons to help Jim by virtue of experiencing them as pointing or directing him to help Jim. The chapter also examines and rejects four alternative proposals for how to account for implicit reasons-appreciation: first, a de re account of appreciation and then three additional accounts of appreciation derived from major theories of mental representation (inferentialist, causal tracking, and functionalist theories).

Some religious requirements seem genuinely arbitrary in the sense that there seem to be no sufficient explanation of why those requirements with those contents should pertain. This paper aims to understand exactly what it might mean for a religious requirement to be genuinely arbitrary and to discern whether and how a religious practitioner could ever be rational in obeying such a requirement. We lay out four accounts of what such arbitrariness could consist in, and show how each account provides a different sort of baseline for understanding how obedience to arbitrary requirements could, in principle, be rational.

Political liberals argue that religious citizens should exercise religious restraint: they ought, at least as a rule, not to rely directly on religious reasons in public political debates, and should instead draw only from the contents of a ‘reasonable’, secular political conception of justice. Political liberals hold that direct religious reasoners’ who fail to follow this rule fail to be ‘reasonable’ (in a technical sense) and contend that liberal polities may thus dismiss their religiously-motivated objections to otherwise justified democratic laws. However, I argue that political liberals’ own principles of ‘reasonability’ forbid such a dismissal. Those principles themselves, I argue, require liberal polities to offer direct religious reasoners who are reasonable in the basic, colloquial sense of being fair-minded and reciprocitous, deep reasons—that speak to their comprehensive religious doctrines—for why they should accept and reason from a ‘reasonable’, political conception of justice. I call the position which requires such deep justification of a ‘reasonable’, political conception of justice Deep Inclusivism, and draw on the work of Sayyid Qutb, an Islamic political thinker, to help illustrate what a fair-minded, reciprocitous religious reasoner might look like.

Political liberals claim that liberal polities may legitimately dismiss the objections of ‘unreasonable’ citizens who resist political liberals’ favored principles of justice and political justification. A growing number of other political philosophers, including post-colonialist theorists, have objected to the resulting insularity of political liberalism. However, political liberals’ insularity also often prevents them from being sensitive or responsive to these critics’ complaints. In this article, I develop a more efficacious internal critique of political liberalism: I show that political liberals’ own core principles of liberal legitimacy sometimes require liberal polities to engage with the objections of those who hold ‘unreasonable’, and even illiberal, views. First, I draw on the work of Sayyid Qutb, an illiberal Islamic political thinker, to argue that – contrary to what political liberals often imply – even ‘unreasonable’, illiberal citizens may be fair-minded: that is, they may be actively concerned to cooperate with others on fair and mutually endorsable terms. Second, I contend that a liberal state’s own core commitment to treating citizens as free and equal requires it to offer fair-minded illiberal citizens like Qutb deep reasons – that don’t presuppose agreement on liberal principles of justice and so can speak to them in the dialectical position they start from – for why they should accept the liberal laws with which the state coerces them to comply. By showing how political liberals’ own commitments oblige them to address even ‘unreasonable’ political perspectives, I open the door to their more robust engagement with their critics, including not only comparative political theorists but also the growing number of illiberal citizens who challenge democratic regimes.

In this paper, I argue for a _(pro tanto)_ _moral duty against dogmatism_: I argue that the _social costs_ of a disagreement can give those who are party to it added moral reasons to reconsider their controversial beliefs and (so) not to be dogmatic. In Sect. 1, I motivate the idea _that_ the social costs of disagreement may give rise to reasons to reconsider our beliefs by considering intuitive examples to that effect. I suggest that some of the stock intuitions that epistemologists of disagreement have depended on to make their arguments are implicitly influenced by social costs that are salient to the disagreements in their cases. In Sect. 2, I respond to a _Practical Objection_ to my argument that political philosophers might be keen to press. According to this objection, the social costs of disagreement do not give rise to a moral duty against dogmatism because we can adequately address those costs just by compromising on how we _act on_ our beliefs in the context of the disagreement. In Sect. 3, I address a contrasting objection to the moral duty against dogmatism that might be pressed by epistemologists, which I term the _Truth Objection._ This objection points out that the social costs of disagreement do nothing to affect the strength of the _evidence _for or against one’s contentious beliefs, and so complains that those who reconsider their beliefs just on account of the social costs of disagreement ‘cave in’ to social pressure in a problematic way. In the course of addressing the Truth Objection, I more carefully explain _how_ the social costs of disagreement give rise to a moral duty against dogmatism by distinguishing between ‘truth-motivated’ and ‘truth-indifferent’ reasons for inquiry.

In his seminal Orientalism and Religion, Richard King argues that Western scholars of religion have constructed a conceptual dichotomy between “mysticism” and “rationality” that has caused them to systematically distort the claims and arguments of Eastern thinkers. While King focuses primarily on Western scholarship on the Buddhist and Hindu traditions, this essay shows that his argument can also be extended to apply to Western scholarship on al-Ghazālī, whose sympathy for Sufism and apparent rejection of Greek philosophy has often earned him the reputation of being a champion of Islamic mysticism. I argue that al-Ghazālī transcends the dueling categories of ‘rationality’ and ‘mysticism’ that have been imposed on him by offering a conception of experiential knowledge that retains its roots in the ‘mystical’ Sufi tradition, even while also highlighting the rational merits of experientially-grounded modes of knowing. In particular, I argue that al-Ghazālī shows us how experiential knowledge is both important to providing motivation for rational action and also critical to underwriting persons’ genuine understanding of the evaluative properties of that which is known.