CHRISTOPHER J. EBERLE
The last several decades have witnessed a vibrant discussion about the proper political role of religion in pluralistic liberal democracies. An important part of that discussion has been a dispute about the role that religious and secular reasons properly play in the justification of state coercion. For various reasons, a veritable pantheon of contemporary political theorists (including John Rawls, Jürgen Habermas, Richard Rorty, Martha Nussbaum, and Thomas Nagel) as well as an accompanying chorus of editorialists (Richard Cohen, E. J. Dionne, and Andrew Sullivan, for instance) and even politicians (most prominently, Barack Obama) have endorsed a restrictive understanding of the justificatory role available to religious reasons. As I understand it, the “standard view” advocated by the members of that pantheon, and by many others as well, includes two claims, namely, that religious reasons cannot play a decisive role in justifying state coercion (what I will call the “Principle of Religious Insufficiency”) and that citizens and public officials in a liberal polity should not endorse state coercion that requires decisive religious support (what I will call the “Doctrine of Religious Restraint”).
I doubt that there is any compelling reason to accept general restrictions of this sort. Of course, I do not deny that various other constraints delimit the justificatory role of religious reasons, such that certain religious reasons cannot decisively justify state coercion or such that citizens and public officials should not employ certain sorts of reasons as a basis for endorsing state coercion. Rather, I am skeptical about the standard view’s restrictions on religious reasons as a class, restrictions that apply to any and all religious considerations, to religious reasons as such. My main aim in this chapter is to motivate this skepticism regarding the standard view. I will try to achieve this aim by reflecting on what I take to be the paradigmatic case of state coercion, namely, the use of military violence in war. This somewhat unusual focus provides an opportunity to bring to bear on the topic a vast body of literature on what makes for justified military violence, and also enables us to avoid the fixation on contentious domestic issues like abortion and homosexuality that has often obfuscated the main issues of principle at stake.
THE STANDARD VIEW OF THE RELATION BETWEEN RELIGION AND COERCION
I will begin by articulating what I take to be the core commitments of the standard view. In order to do that, let me identify an assumption held in common by both its advocates and its critics, namely, the claim that there is a general presumption against coercion. This is a very plausible and widely affirmed claim. It seems particularly compelling with respect to the most brutal kind of coercion, the use of military violence in war. Given that waging war obliterates soldiers, terrorizes civilians, dehouses populations, orphans children, and so on, each and every community has powerful reason to refrain from waging war. Consequently, many have argued that we should understand the dominant Western conception of justified war—the so-called Just War Tradition (JWT)—to include the claim that each and every war is presumptively wrong.1 But, of course, this presumption applies more broadly. For example, when the state incarcerates citizens who refuse to comply with a duly enacted law, it deprives them of the goods of friendship and familial belonging that are an important component of human fulfillment. There is always reason to refrain from depriving human beings of such morally important goods, and so the state always has presumptive reason to refrain from threatening citizens with incarceration. Similarly for other coercive measures: the execution of criminals, the banishment of traitors, even the imposition of fines. All of these are presumptively wrong.
The presumption against coercion is not an absolute prohibition. It will not uncommonly be the case that weighty normative considerations count in favor of coercion in particular circumstances. In some cases the use of military violence is just, and in some cases the state must incarcerate criminals. So, while there is a general presumption against coercion, coercion is sometimes permissible, and thus the presumption against coercion is sometimes overcome.
But what makes it the case that the presumption against coercion has been overcome? Here we have a crosscutting and disharmonious blizzard of options. In order to keep this discussion manageable, consider the manner in which advocates of the JWT answer that question. According to that tradition, the presumption against war can be overcome only if a number of substantive conditions are satisfied: a political community must have just cause to wage war, legitimate authorities in that community must authorize war, those legitimate authorities must do so with the intention of securing a just peace, waging war must achieve an acceptable balance of relevant moral goods and moral evils, and so on. At least some of these requirements specify the kinds of consideration that can overcome the presumption against war. So, for example, the just cause requirement seems best understood as a condition that specifies the kinds of reason that can and cannot overcome the presumption against war: certain kinds of moral wrongs, such as unprovoked military attacks or massive violations of human rights, provide a community with sufficient reason to respond with military violence, but other kinds of wrong, such as insults to communal honor or delinquency on debts, do not. So the JWT includes a specific set of restrictions on the kinds of reason that can justify a particular kind of coercion.2
Advocates of the standard view of religion in politics take a similar approach: they assume that state coercion is presumptively wrong and propose a very broad set of constraints on the kinds of consideration that can overcome that presumption. But the constraints they favor tend to be far more capacious than those incorporated into the JWT—the restrictions they favor apply to all instances of state coercion and to a very broad range of justifying reasons. One such restriction is particularly relevant, namely, that religious considerations cannot play a decisive role in overcoming the presumption against coercion.3 To put it a little more precisely, when the coercing agent is the government in a liberal polity, religious considerations cannot decisively justify coercion. Although religious reasons can corroborate (certain kinds of) secular reasons that are by themselves sufficient to overcome the presumption against coercion, state coercion that would not be justified “but for” some religious reason is morally impermissible.4 This restriction applies irrespective of the content of a given religious reason. Let us call the claim that religious reasons cannot decisively justify state coercion in a liberal polity the “Principle of Religious Insufficiency.”
Distinct from, but closely related to, the Principle of Religious Insufficiency is a familiar claim about the duties of citizens and public officials in a liberal polity. Presumably, citizens and public officials ought to do their level best to refrain from endorsing morally impermissible state coercion. But, if the Principle of Religious Insufficiency is correct, religious reasons cannot suffice to overcome the presumption against coercion, and so state coercion that requires a religious rationale is morally impermissible. Consequently, citizens and public officials have a moral duty to restrain themselves from endorsing state coercion that requires a religious rationale. This is what I call the “Doctrine of Religious Restraint.”
The Principle of Religious Insufficiency and the Doctrine of Religious Restraint capture an important component of the standard view: that religion should be subject to some important political restrictions in a liberal democracy. More precisely, they capture the assumption, crucial to the standard view but often unstated, that religious reasons are subject to restrictions that do not apply to all secular reasons. These claims are related in the following way. Advocates of the standard view are liberals, not anarchists, that is, they are committed to the claim that the presumption against state coercion is sometimes overridden. Because religious reasons cannot decisively do so, it is presumably the case that at least some secular reasons can, and do, suffice to overcome that presumption. Nearly every advocate of the standard view accords to at least some secular reasons a justificatory potential that they deny to any and all religious reasons, namely, the capacity decisively to justify state coercion. This kind of asymmetry between religious and secular reasons is deeply embedded in a great deal of contemporary political theory.5
But why accept this kind of discriminatory treatment? Given the coruscating diversity of religious considerations, given the varying properties possessed by distinct religious reasons, given the widely divergent intellectual virtues (and vices) possessed by different religious adherents, given that secular reasons exhibit an equally bewildering diversity of sociological, substantive, and epistemic properties, how could it be the case that no religious reasons can even in principle decisively justify coercion, but that some secular reasons can?
THE ARGUMENT FROM RESPECT
Advocates of the standard view regularly answer this question by appealing to some variation of the “argument from respect.” Fundamental to that argument is the claim that human beings possess a distinctive moral status—equal dignity, worth, or sacredness. The worth of a human being is a function of the fact that she is a moral agent who has her own distinctive aims and aspirations. Due respect for the worth of our fellow human beings forbids us to treat them as mere playthings, objects to be manipulated at will, mere means to our ends. Now, very plausibly, if respect for the worth of human beings implies that human beings ought not be treated merely as manipulated objects, then proper respect grounds a presumption against coercion. To subject a human being to coercive measures for which there exists no compelling rationale is to disrespect that human being. So far, advocates and critics of the standard view need not disagree.
But advocates of the standard view argue that due respect for the worth of human beings implies a further constraint on justified coercion. They claim not only that the presumption against coercion must be overcome by some objectively sound rationale, that each coercive measure must be justified, but also that each coercive measure must be justified or justifiable to those who are coerced. For a coercive measure to be justified to the coerced, the coerced must see for themselves that the measure to which they are subjected is legitimate. Presumably, this condition is satisfied only if the coerced have access to what they regard, or would regard on due reflection, as a decisive rationale for the relevant coercive measure. So, due respect requires that each coerced human being have, or at least have access to, some rationale that each would on reflection regard as providing a sufficient justification for the coercive measures to which they are subject.
Thus far, the argument from respect specifies a broad constraint on what makes for justified coercion, and so for justified state coercion. It says nothing explicitly about the justificatory role of religious reasons. But the implications of the argument from respect are easy to draw out when we make explicit the relevant social and political context. A well-functioning liberal democracy just is a kind of political structure that effectively protects a number of rights that allow citizens to decide for themselves what to believe about religious matters. That is, any liberal democracy worthy of the name effectively protects the right to religious freedom and thereby the right of each citizen to decide for him- or herself which religious tradition, if any, to embrace. But, as John Rawls and Rodney Stark have both argued, when human beings have the freedom to determine for themselves what to believe about religious matters, they will inevitably reach different and often conflicting conclusions. As a consequence, then, of its constituent normative commitments, one of the defining features of a liberal democracy will inevitably be a pervasive pluralism of religious belief and practice.
In that pluralistic context, only certain kinds of reason can satisfy the required constraints on justified coercion. As Charles Larmore has argued, reasonable and respectful citizens resolve their differences by retreating to common ground—shared premises that provide some deeper basis for resolving the disagreement at hand.6 So the only kind of rationale that can justify coercion in a pluralistic liberal polity are reasons that are shared by, can be shared by, or are accessible to a diversely committed population.7 Michael Blake articulates this position with admirable clarity.
Liberalism is motivated, at heart, by some idea of moral dignity and worth of persons. What makes liberalism distinctive—as well as attractive—is this notion that individual moral agents deserve to be treated with equal concern and respect. … Reciprocity offers a means by which we respect these notions of moral equality. … Reciprocity, as I use it here, means simply the methodology of justifying political power with reference to principles acceptable to all those affected. … The methodology begins with what we already share—with the reasons we are already presumed to find motivating—and uses what is shared to provide us with reasons to support and defend principles of political justice. These principles are then used to justify and criticize those political institutions we share. Thus, political power is justified with reference to reasons we already share and accept.8
But here is the crux. The only shared or sharable premises are secular: only the secular is the universal, natural, and common; the religious is invariably particular, sectarian, and idiosyncratic. Religion always divides; the secular can unite. Hence, coercion in pluralistic liberal polities cannot be justified on decisively religious grounds. Thus the Principle of Religious Insufficiency: only the secular can decisively justify state coercion in a liberal polity, never the religious. Of course, given that principle, citizens and public officials should restrain themselves from endorsing state coercion that cannot be justified absent some religious rationale. That is, the social role of citizen and public official in a liberal democracy is partly constituted by a moral requirement to comply with the Doctrine of Religious Restraint.
FIRST OBJECTION TO THE ARGUMENT FROM RESPECT
What should we make of the argument from respect? I will begin by laying out two objections, each of which requires a drastic, and fortuitous, revision in the standard view. This will lead to a brief discussion and evaluation of a more capacious and inclusive alternative. Although I reject that “convergence conception” of the standard view as well, I regard it as a serious competitor to the even more capacious position I favor.
As I have shown, the argument from respect moves from the claim that respect for human worth requires coercion to be justified to those who are coerced, through the claim that justifying state coercion to the coerced in pluralistic liberal democracies is possible only by recourse to shared or accessible reasons, to the conclusion that religious reasons cannot decisively justify state coercion in liberal democracies. But I believe that the second premise in this argument—the claim that state coercion in liberal polities can be justified only by shared or accessible reasons—is false. Moreover, that claim is false for reasons that have nothing in particular to do with its implications for the political role of religious reasons.
It is possible to see why by reflecting on a case of state coercion in which religious considerations do not even purport to play a justificatory role. So, imagine a possible world very different from the one we actually inhabit. In that possible world, the United States invades Afghanistan, American citizens and public officials fully endorse that invasion, and they do so for fully secular reasons, but they diverge radically as to why the United States is justified in doing so. For convenience’s sake, focus on three stylized profiles:
Citizen A is an advocate of the JWT, and believes that the invasion is decisively justified as an act of righteous punishment for the wrongful attacks on September 11, 2001, but denies that the invasion is justified as an act of liberation, or to spread democracy, or to further US security interests.
Citizen B is a utilitarian who denies that war may be waged merely to punish prior wrongful attacks or to further the narrow self-interest of particular nation-states, but believes the invasion is justified by virtue of its excellent consequences—the promotion of democracy, free markets, religious freedom, the liberation of women, and so on.
Citizen C is a realist about war who thinks that invading Afghanistan is absolutely crucial to the long-term security of the United States, but denies that moral reasons are even relevant to the justification of military violence and so denies that the invasion could be justified on the basis of either punitive or humanitarian considerations.
In this case, A, B, and C have what each regards as a compelling secular reason to endorse a coercive act of considerable brutality. Nevertheless, there is no shared reason that each regards as decisively supporting the invasion and they do not retreat to common ground. This is because there is no common ground to which they could retreat, given their fundamentally incompatible conceptions of the morality of war. Here we have an act of coercion committed by the government of a liberal polity that each citizen has a secular reason to endorse absent recourse to anything like shared reasons.9
Now it seems that the (highly unlikely) state of affairs I have sketched need not involve a jot or a tittle of disrespect. Given that each citizen has what each regards as decisive reason to believe the invasion justified, neither A, nor B, nor C can justifiably claim to be treated as a manipulated object. Each is treated with due respect despite their disagreement as to why the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan is justified. So it seems that due respect provides no reason to prefer state coercion justified by some “ecumenical” secular reason over state coercion justified by a diverse spread of “sectarian” secular reasons. Of course, we could easily expand the example to include a more diverse and exotic spread of reasons. We could, for example, include citizens who take the invasion to be justified on religious grounds, such as the idea that the invasion would improve the conditions of oppressed coreligionists. No matter—so long as each of the coerced has what each takes as decisive reason, none must be treated with disrespect. It follows directly that due respect does not require that state coercion be justified by shared reasons.
The implication of this claim about what makes for justified coercion has direct implications for the duties of citizens and public officials. At least with regard to the requirements of respect for human worth, there is no morally relevant difference between a citizen or public official who articulates one reason that convinces A, B, and C to endorse the invasion of Afghanistan and another who articulates three distinct, incompatible, and highly sectarian arguments that severally provide A, B, and C with what each regards as decisive reason to endorse that invasion. So long as each ends up with what each regards as a decisive reason to endorse the invasion, and therefore is not forced to go along with a policy she rejects, how could it be that the norm of respect provides us with reason to require citizens or public officials to achieve that end by one means rather than another?
We might be skeptical. After all, respect for persons forbids us to manipulate others, and a citizen or public official who tries to justify an act of coercion like the invasion of Afghanistan on the basis of a spate of sectarian reasons, many of which she must regard as defective, might seem to manipulate her compatriots in a manner that disrespects them as moral agents. For example, if the realist supports the invasion merely in order to further the security interests of the United States, but can persuade fellow citizens to support it by appealing to high-minded ideals like the liberation of oppressed women and the promotion of democracy, hasn’t she merely manipulated her compatriots?10
Here, I think, we should not be excessively high-minded. The realist need not manipulate her compatriots so long as she makes clear, or so long as it is clearly understood, that she does not regard as decisive the reasons that she hopes her compatriots will regard as decisive. This is, in fact, a very common practice in political discourse regarding the morality of war. So, for example, pacifists often object to the morality of some particular war, not on the basis of the reasons that persuade them to object to waging war in general, but on the basis of normative principles that the vast majority of their compatriots regard as marking off just from unjust wars. This is entirely sensible and hardly a matter of secrecy: well-known pacifists have implored advocates of the JWT to refrain from endorsing the U.S. invasion of Iraq by appealing to the justificatory constraints constitutive of that tradition, even while making it clear that they disavow the JWT. So long as they make clear their own reservations, so long as it is understood that they are appealing to commitments that they disavow but that are affirmed as a matter of moral principle by their compatriots, they surely need not disrespect their compatriots.11
A SECOND OBJECTION TO THE ARGUMENT FROM RESPECT
Suppose that advocates of the standard view persist in affirming the claim that only shared or accessible reasons can decisively justify state coercion in liberal polities. That claim has the desired implication—that religious reasons cannot decisively justify coercion—only if no religious reason counts as shared or accessible in the relevant sense. Here again, I doubt.
Again, it is helpful to reflect on a particular case. Consider certain considerations that are, I believe, relevant to the justification of military violence. According to the JWT, the presumption against war can be overcome only if the relevant goods to be achieved by a given war are proportionate to the relevant evils associated with that war. Given this proportionality requirement, the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan was justified only if the following claim is true:
(P) The normative goods to be achieved by securing the just causes that count in favor of the US invasion of Afghanistan are proportionate to the evils that will occur as a direct consequence of that invasion.12
I take (P) to be a kind of reason that plays a decisive role in justifying war and so in justifying the most brutal kind of state coercion. This is certainly the manner in which proportionality judgments are regarded in the JWT: as ordinarily conceived by advocates of the JWT, war is unjust when disproportionate. On the plausible assumption that (P) is a secular consideration, (P) plays a justificatory role disallowed to any and every religious consideration. So, then, inquiring minds will want to know: What is so impressive about (P)? What is so defective about the infinitude of possible religious reasons? That is, what is it about secular (P) such that (P) can play a justificatory role that is disallowed to any and every religious consideration?
I very much doubt that there is a principled and otherwise defensible answer to that question. My suspicion is that (P) differs in no relevant epistemic, sociological, or moral respects from at least some religious claims, and so the differential treatment of religious and secular reasons presupposed by the standard view lacks a principled basis. So, for example, it seems doubtful that proportionality judgments like (P) possess any epistemic excellence unavailable to any and all religious reasons. Frankly, this is because (P) is not very epistemically impressive, even if it is true. After all, vindicating a proportionality judgment like (P) requires that we possess factual information about temporally distant events that is exceedingly difficult to acquire, much less to verify, that we weigh many barely commensurable normative considerations, that we identify a disparate spread of goods and evils relevant to the moral permissibility of war, and so on.13 Put more concretely, even if we could uncontroversially identify all of the relevant goods and evils to be engendered by the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, the epistemic status of the overall judgment that that invasion was “worth it,” all things considered, is exceedingly murky. Put even more concretely, if we grant that the U.S. invasion has prevented some future unjust attacks by Al Qaeda, established even a very fragile democracy, and provided all manner of educational possibilities to a previously oppressed population, it is exceedingly difficult to show in a principled manner that the achievement of those goods is worth the suffering engendered in the population by many years of low-intensity conflict, the perception that the United States has imperial aspirations, the destabilization of nearby countries, and so on. Perhaps this is in fact the case, but our basis for believing it seems “subjective” and contentious in ways that cannot but remind us of the manner in which believers form some of their religious convictions.
Clearly, if we can be epistemically justified in believing that (P) is true, we will not be so justified to anything like the degree to which we are justified in believing that something exists, or that torturing innocents is generally morally bad, or the like. And this will be true not only of (P) in particular, but of proportionality judgments in general. But consistency requires that whatever epistemic status a reason must possess in order decisively to justify coercion, that epistemic status cannot be more demanding than the status that (P) and other proportionality judgments enjoy. Given (P)’s rather pedestrian epistemic credentials, then, it is likely that at least some religious reasons will pass muster. Otherwise put, when we appreciate the tenuous epistemic hold we have on some of the secular reasons, like (P), that are crucial to the justification of military violence, it seems hard to believe that no religious reason enjoys the normative credentials needed to play a decisive role in justifying coercion.
Reflection on proportionality judgments like (P) thus suggests a general argument. Any plausible version of the standard view must grant that some secular reasons can decisively justify coercion, but it is extremely implausible to suppose that all secular reasons can do so. Secular reasons are a mixed bag, sociologically, morally, and epistemically. So if the advocate of the standard view is to show that no religious reasons can decisively justify coercion, she must articulate some criterion that isolates coercion-justifying secular reasons and then show that no religious reasons satisfy that criterion. But whatever the criterion that isolates coercion-justifying secular reasons, some religious reasons satisfy that criterion: there just is no relevant property that all coercion-justifying secular reasons possess and all religious reasons lack. This is in large part because many of the secular reasons that are relevant to the justification of coercion are not all that impressive, epistemically or otherwise. Consequently, there is no good reason—it is arbitrarily exclusionary—to grant that some secular reasons decisively justify coercion but to deny that any religious reasons can do so.14
A CONVERGENCE CONCEPTION OF THE STANDARD VIEW
I believe that the two objections I have articulated constitute a decent prima facie case against many popular versions of the standard view based on the argument from respect. To be sure, there are other creditable arguments for insisting on shared or accessible reasons. But here I would like to reflect on a more capacious version of the standard view, one that replaces recourse to shared, common, or accessible reasons with an appeal to a “convergence” of disparate reasons.15
This convergence conception incorporates the claim that due respect for human worth requires state coercion to be justified to those coerced, such that only those coercive measures pass moral muster for which each citizen has what he or she takes to be a decisive rationale. But it lays down no general, substantive constraints on the kinds of reason on which citizens may rely when determining whether a given coercive measure is acceptable to them. Most particularly, it does not require that state coercion be justified on the basis of shared or accessible reasons, though of course it might be so justified. So long as each citizen has access to what each regards as decisive reasons, it does not matter whether those reasons are widely appealing or intransigently particularistic. Any reason counts—Hindu or Habermasian, Christian or Kantian, Utilitarian or Unitarian. Convergence on policy is required, not consensus as to why that policy is required.
The implications of this capacious conception of justified coercion for the justificatory role of religious reasons are far reaching. Why? If state coercion must be justified to the coerced on grounds that the coerced regard as decisive, but the coerced need not have recourse to shared or accessible reasons as a basis for evaluating a given coercive measure, then it follows that state coercion must be justifiable to religious believers as religious believers. That is, if a citizen or public official has what she regards as a decisive religious objection to some coercive measure, then that coercive measure cannot be justified to her, in which case it would be disrespectful and so impermissible to impose it on her. So the convergence conception of the standard view accords to religious citizens and public officials a potentially decisive role in determining the legitimacy of state coercion: should a citizen or public official have what she takes on due reflection to be a decisive religious objection to some coercive measure, then that measure would lack legitimacy, even if it would be legitimate absent her religious objection.
It seems to me that the convergence conception of the standard view should be attractive to religious believers for at least three reasons. First, many religious believers have a deep distrust of government. So, for example, there is a venerable, broadly Augustinian tradition of theological reflection for which the state performs morally and religiously important functions (serving as a “straightjacket for sin”), but is also a perpetual danger, competing with God for loyalty, and used by the proud to oppress the humble, and so in need of severe limitation. Those who self-identify with that broad Augustinian tradition may very well find attractive a conception of justified coercion that allows religious convictions to play a decisive role in undermining the legitimacy of state coercion.
Second, many believers are politically active, not because they aspire to impose their religious convictions on an unwilling population, but because they want to protect a way of life that they take to be under assault by an ever more intrusive state. They want to be left alone, not to dominate the world. They want to raise their children as they see fit, not to ensure that everyone raises their children as they do. But as anyone who has children knows, it is extremely difficult to raise your children well without going to bat against the harebrained schemes of local, state, and even federal officials, much less a popular culture that revels in self-satisfied indolence and gratuitous violence. The convergence conception comports well with the political objectives of those for whom religiously guided political activity is primarily needed to defend an embattled community against a regulatory state guided by normative commitments hostile to an unpopular way of life.
Third, the convergence conception does not treat religious reasons with the sort of invidious discrimination to which many advocates of the standard view seem attracted. Precisely because religious and secular reasons can play the same decisive role in defeating state coercion, the convergence conception does not need to involve anything in the vicinity of the claim that religious reasons are epistemically defective, morally substandard, or otherwise normatively disreputable. Given its implicit commitment to the equal status of religious and secular reasons, the convergence conception should be far more attractive to religious believers than those versions of the standard view married to the claim that there is something defective about religious reasons as such—to such dubious claims as that religion is a conversation-stopper, that religious folks are particularly prone to intolerance, that religious claims are inaccessible, unreplicable, uncriticizable, whatever.
CRITICISM OF THE CONVERGENCE CONCEPTION
In significant respects, the convergence conception is far more inclusive than more familiar formulations of the standard view: it accords to religious reasons a far more robust justificatory role than its consensus-oriented competitor. Nevertheless, not everything goes. For it is still a version of the standard view. How could that be? If there is nothing to be said from any secular perspective that decisively justifies some coercive measure, and if the only plausible rationale for that coercive measure is a religious rationale, then there will inevitably be some secular citizens to whom that coercive measure cannot be justified. According to the view under consideration, such a coercive measure would be disrespectful and so illegitimate.16 Thus secular citizens too can undermine the legitimacy of otherwise justified coercion. So this version of the standard view maintains the core conviction that religious considerations cannot decisively justify state coercion in pluralistic liberal politics and thus includes as a necessary constituent the Principle of Religious Insufficiency. The implications for the duties of citizens and public officials are direct: they must restrain themselves from endorsing state coercion when they know that their compatriots reject the religious considerations that they regard as decisive and lack access to any other reasons that they regard as decisive. That is, citizens and public officials must comply with the Doctrine of Religious Restraint.
Despite its considerable attractions, there is good reason to be skeptical of the convergence view. Although it is quite permissive in its treatment of religion, it is still overly demanding in its conception of what makes for justified coercion. Why? Given the pervasive pluralism endemic to a liberal democracy, some coercive measures crucial to a liberal democracy cannot be justified to some citizens, even for different reasons. But then liberals have good reason to reject the convergence conception of justified coercion: better to jettison the conception of justified coercion that undermines measures central to a liberal democracy than to deny the legitimacy of those measures.
Why think that coercive measures crucial to a liberal polity cannot be justified to some citizens? Few claims are more central to liberalism than the claim that each human being has great and equal worth and should be treated accordingly. Liberal polities express their commitment to this claim by limiting what government can do to citizens. For instance, by institutionalizing a right to religious freedom, we prevent government from tearing down churches and forcing citizens to attend meetings of Fundamentalists Anonymous, thereby violating them in pretty fundamental respects. But respect for human worth does not only ground policies that limit what government can do to citizens by way of coercion. Although coercion is dangerous, a failure to coerce can be just as dangerous. After all, “there are two kinds of injustice,” Cicero tells us, “the one on the part of those who inflict wrong, the other on the part of those who, when they can, do not shield from wrong those upon whom it is inflicted.”17 Given that there are various nongovernmental actors who intend to violate their fellow human beings, the absence of governmental coercion can be just as morally troubling as its presence. Consequently, liberal polities must protect the innocent from those rights-violating nongovernmental actors. Most particularly, they must arm police with guns and authorize them to kill the murderous, and they must arm soldiers, sailors, and marines with weapons systems and authorize them to repel aggressors. These protective measures are absolutely crucial to the overall liberal aim of treating human beings as befits their great worth: given the broken world in which we live, we cannot effectively protect citizens from violation unless government authorizes some of us to kill others. Liberalism is a killing creed.
But some citizens believe that it is never morally permissible for one human being to kill another, and so oppose any measure that authorizes any governmental agent to use lethal violence. We can see this by reflecting on the figure of the “agapic pacifist,” a citizen who takes Jesus’s command that we love our neighbors as ourselves to forbid the lethal use of violence and therefore war.18 According to the agapic pacifist, for any human being to use lethal violence is for her to violate a divine command to love her enemy-neighbor as herself. Consequently, it is never morally permissible for any human being to intentionally kill another human being, even if doing so is required to prevent egregious violations of human rights. From the perspective inhabited by the agapic pacifist, compelling theological reasons count against coercive measures that are in fact absolutely essential to the effective protection of basic liberal rights. Lethal violence is apostasy.
No doubt agapic pacifists are an exceptionally small proportion of the population. But that is precisely why they might be so attracted to the convergence conception: that conception requires that state coercion be justifiable to them, and they have principled objections to any and all lethal violence and so to any and all wars. To be sure, their objections depend crucially on contentious theological claims. But for the convergence conception, this is unproblematic: state coercion must pass muster before the agapic pacifist’s sectarian convictions, no less than before the normative commitments of the just war theorist or the realist about war.
The moral of this story is rather straightforward: liberalism cannot survive the convergence conception of justified coercion. Judged before the bar of that conception, all manner of commitments that are crucial to a liberal democracy lack legitimacy.19 Because the liberal commitment to human dignity and rights cannot be effectively implemented absent the state’s willingness to use lethal violence (in war and otherwise), and because pluralistic liberal democracies will always include citizens who have excellent reason from their own perspective to reject all lethal violence, liberals have excellent reason to reject a conception of justified coercion that would allow these citizens’ reasons to render impermissible the state’s use of lethal violence.20
That said, liberals are not the only ones to have excellent reason to reject the convergence conception of justified coercion.21 As I have noted, I am interested in reflecting on how the morality of justified military violence is articulated with the conceptions of justified coercion that constitute the heart of the standard view. I am an adherent of the JWT and I take it that advocates of that venerable tradition should also reject the convergence view. How so?
I have been exclusively concerned with the justification of state coercion to the citizens of a liberal polity. In so doing, I have followed the self-understanding of every advocate of the standard view with whose work I am familiar. But it is hard to espy any principled reason to limit the scope of the convergence conception to domestic coercion. And advocates of the JWT cannot in good conscience deny that due respect for human worth should govern the manner in which military violence is employed. After all, the principle of noncombatant immunity—the wrongfulness of direct, intentional military violence directed at those who do not participate in any unjust military attack—is an absolutely essential component of the JWT and seems to depend on the claim that the dignity of the members of any political community imposes potentially severe restrictions on the military violence directed at them by outsiders. So if advocates of the JWT must respect the worth of any and every human being, if respect for human worth requires that state coercion be justified to those coerced, and if waging a war is a paradigmatic act of state coercion, then respect for human worth requires that military violence be justified not only, or even primarily, to the citizens of the political community that wages war, but also, and most importantly, to those against whom that violence is directed.22
But it is implausible to suppose that this requirement could actually be satisfied. Given familiar details regarding the vastly different ways in which the members of warring communities are socialized, their differential access to relevant information, the competing normative traditions regarding the morality of war that are dominant in distinct cultures, and so on, the members of warring communities will often rely on vastly different evidential sets when they reflect on the morality of the military conflicts in which their community is involved. Given their dependence on such vastly different information and normative principles, the members of warring communities will often, and perhaps typically, be in a condition of what Vitoria called “invincible error” regarding the justice of the wars their community wages: they will wrongly evaluate the justice of the wars they fight no matter how responsibly and conscientiously they evaluate the available evidence.23 So, for example, I take it that American sailors at Pearl Harbor justly defended themselves with lethal violence even though the Japanese soldiers whom they killed were not epistemically well positioned to realize that they were initiating an unjust war. Again, American Marines were morally permitted to invade Okinawa even if large numbers of Japanese defenders were in no good epistemic position to believe anything other than that they were defending their homeland against an unjust, and indeed monstrous, aggressor.
It seems, then, that if the norm of respect requires the justification of coercion to those coerced, and if human beings are typically invincibly ignorant of the justice of the wars their communities wage, it will only very seldom, if ever, be the case that a political community may actually wage war. The killing that occurs in a just war will not be justified to those against whom military violence is justly directed. This kind of practical pacifism is unacceptable to advocates of the JWT, who therefore have excellent reason to reject the conception of justified coercion that would otherwise drive us to that dubious conclusion.
CONCLUDING REFLECTION: LESSONS FROM THE JUST WAR TRADITION REGARDING JUSTIFIED COERCION
Let me draw this critical discussion to a close by reflecting on some of the larger issues raised by my objections to the convergence view. Basic to the JWT is the claim that war must be justified, and that there must exist some appropriate rationale for a given war, but that there is no expectation, much less a requirement, that those against whom war is waged will be in a strong epistemic position to appreciate that rationale. So I take it that the conception of justified coercion implicit in the JWT is inconsistent with any and all versions of the standard view: the latter affirms, and the former denies, that the presumption against coercion can be overcome only if a given coercive measure can be justified to the coerced. It seems to me that the JWT is correct on this fundamental point: waging war is sometimes permissible in the actual world, but this is the case only if a given political community may wage war against human beings who have what they regard as no compelling reason to believe that the war that is waged against them is just, and therefore only if the constraints on justified coercion affirmed by advocates of the standard view do not apply to the use of military violence in war.
This moral fact has all manner of important implications for our understanding of the moral texture of war. For example, it shapes the way in which we think about, and treat, enemy combatants. A political community that satisfies the JWT’s ad bellum requirements may permissibly kill enemy combatants, but it may not blame enemy combatants for resisting and it certainly should not prosecute them for using lethal violence in their own defense. Precisely because those who prosecute an unjust war typically are not in any decent epistemic position to know that the war they prosecute is unjust, blaming them, much less prosecuting them, is beyond the moral pale. Kill them we may, but blame them we must not.
I take it that the sharp distinction between justice and blameworthiness that we must employ in order to make sense of the moral status of unjust combatants can also be appropriate in domestic politics. Admittedly, whereas in war it is typically the case that soldiers are in no good epistemic position to evaluate the justice of the wars they fight, in domestic politics it is sometimes the case that citizens and public officials are in no good epistemic position to evaluate the justice of the coercive measures to which they are subject. But from this difference it follows only that whereas in war we must ordinarily decouple justice and blame, in domestic politics we must sometimes do so. Indeed, given the reasonable pluralism that characterizes a well-functioning liberal democracy, it seems to me that we should assume as a matter of course that those on whom we are morally compelled to impose some coercive measure reasonably reject that measure, and so we should refrain from blaming them for opposing us. But impose on them we will and must.
Notes
