Freedom of Conscience: To What Extent?

[Draggingtree]

Ludwig von Mises Institute :

 

Freedom of Conscience: To What Extent?

Mises Daily:Wednesday, December 12, 2012 by David Gordon

[Why Tolerate Religion? • By Brian Leiter • Princeton University Press, 2012 • xv + 192 pages]

In this very thoughtful book, Brian Leiter calls our attention to a paradox. In most liberal democracies, including the United States, religious believers often are exempt from laws that violate the tenets of their religion. By contrast, parallel claims of exemption on non-religious grounds tend to receive less consideration.

Leiter offers an apt example. In a Canadian case, a Sikh student was allowed to wear a ceremonial dagger, mandated by his religion; but a secular student who claimed that wearing a dagger was an integral part of his lifestyle would almost certainly not receive the same consideration. “The conscientious obligation a devout Sikh has to wear a kirpan [ceremonial dagger] is thought to be too serious---too important for the integrity and identity of this religious believer---to require him to forgo it because of the general prohibition on what anyone else would see as a weapon and a danger to school safety. But now suppose that our fourteen-year old boy is not a Sikh but a boy from a rural family whose life ‘on the land’ goes back many generations. . . . A boy’s identity as a man in his community turns on his always carrying the family knife. . .There is no Western democracy, at present, in which the boy in our second scenario has prevailed or would prevail in a challenge to a general prohibition on the carrying of weapons in the school.”(pp.2-3)

Why is this disparity in treatment a paradox? The problem arises