Leontiev, Kim Igorevich;
(2024)
Faith in Justice or Legitimacy? Two Puzzles About Liberalism and Religion.
Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).
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Abstract
How are religious and conscientious commitments to be regulated within the liberal state? Can it endorse religious rationales or legitimately enact laws upon purely religious considerations? Are citizens with religious or conscientious commitments entitled to legal accommodations? And when, if ever, should states grant exemptions to a general law to those citing conscience or religious faith against compliance? Since John Locke’s classical appeal that the liberal state limit itself to matters of the civil or ‘public’ good and leave the spiritual or ‘private’ be, liberals have struggled to find a stable position between, on the one hand, protecting religious freedom with extensive differential rights (accommodations and exemptions) and, on the other, imposing special constraints like disestablishment. These tensions disclose foundational differences on justice and neutrality, including the relevant metrics, baselines of comparison, weighting, ordering, salience and more, culminating in deep, intractable disagreements. This dissertation argues for a radically different approach. It proposes that the above matters might be more promisingly resolved via considerations of legitimacy or the limits of state political power. It first undertakes an interdisciplinary analysis of the current legal and philosophical debates to highlight the tendency of ignoring or otherwise conflating what are actually two discrete, albeit interrelated puzzles. Concerns about whether religion or any other category warrants “special” regulatory treatment are distinguished as the ‘Salience-Demarcation Puzzle’ about salience from the more fundamental ‘Justificatory-Puzzle’ regarding the permissibility of differentiation itself. From there, the proposed solution is developed via a more finely-granulated account of liberal legitimacy and identifying a novel, under-theorised, dimension of modal legitimacy concerning application and enforcement of otherwise legitimate laws. This cements the liberal basis for disestablishment and offers the possibility of something like exemptions in certain cases of objection. A pragmatic and lateral solution thus emerges, circumventing the prevailing deep disagreements about justice.
| Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Qualification: | Ph.D |
| Title: | Faith in Justice or Legitimacy? Two Puzzles About Liberalism and Religion |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © The Author 2025. Original content in this thesis is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Any third-party copyright material present remains the property of its respective owner(s) and is licensed under its existing terms. Access may initially be restricted at the author’s request. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Dept of Philosophy |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10202712 |
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