Saturday, June 4, 2011
Conscience and "concession": A response to Patrick
Patrick's post, responding to mine, makes me worry and regret that I was unclear, and gave the impression that I think "[d]emocratically pedigreed enactments can[] reduce what is God's by right." I don't. My statement that "in a democracy, requests for 'conscience'-based exemptions from validly enacted regulations, are almost always requests for concessions, for toleration, and not claims of right" was intended only as a description of what seems to in fact "go on" as requests for conscience-based exemptions are processed by the relevant political authority. But, I can see that I didn't say very well what I meant to say. So, I agree with Patrick, though I also think (maybe he does not?) that, in fact, the political authority grants requests for conscience-based exemptions when that authority decides that it is not costly to do so and not really because it thinks it is required, by virtue of the claimant's "right", to do so.
https://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/2011/06/conscience-and-concession-a-response-to-patrick.html
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Thanks to Rick for the clarification of what I suspected was his true view. I do agree with Rick that the civil authorities we have in mind make what concessions they do *not* because they think they are honoring the claimant's "right," but because they think it's not too costly to do so. I find this troubling, however. Where does the civil authority gets its warrant implicitly to undermine the Church's claims of right? I know that people will respond that the civil authority is *incompetent* to opine as to the truth or falsity of religious claims. But is it true that if some people set up a new state tomorrow and wrote into its constitution that said new state was to be ruled by the true principles of the Gospels, we would say that they were *incompetent* to do so? Or is the argument from incompetence just an inaccurate way of justifying a pragmatic tolerance in the face of the stubborn fact of pluralism?