Particularity and Neutrality

Jennifer at Scandal of Particularity has an answer for those who want religious believers to butt out of public affairs:

…I reject the position that I have my opinion, and you have yours, and thus you should not attempt to force your “opinion” on mine. (Kind of a “get your rosaries off my ovaries” slogan – if you’re against such and such, just don’t do it!) It is scandalous to claim that the Church has some universal claims to make. I recognize that not everyone will agree with them. But science, technology, the state, etc. are sure making a lot of universal claims, too. To pretend that they aren’t, that they are merely presented us with “choices” and “options” is naive.

Jen puts her finger on the crux of the issue here, I think. It’s the notion that there is a “neutral” public space that properly excludes “thick” notions of the good from public deliberation. But as many people have argued, this “neutrality” itself embodies substantive views about human flourishing. One aspect of this view is that “choice” is the highest good and trumps considerations about the content of choice. But this is an eminently contestable proposition. And it’s ultimately incoherent because there will always be some choices that are considered out of bounds.

Here’s Paul J. Griffiths making a similar point:

Among the causes of our present difficulties, both at home and abroad, is a deep sense (usually incohate but not the less deep for that) on the part of many religious people that the rhetoric of toleration is being deployed in a duplicitousand underhanded way to bring about legislative and social goals that are every bit as particular and every bit as contestable as those commended by any religion while simultaneously obscuring these facts.

What Griffiths calls toleration only appears to occupy the moral high ground above all substantive moral positions because it obscures the fact this it also makes moral judgments. To realize this is to level the playing field and recognize that we are dealing with a competing moral vision rather than a pre-moral “neutral” stance.