THE CASE FOR INSINCERITY

• Date: 11 June 2003
• Published date: 11 June 2003
• Pages: 143-164
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/S1059-4337(03)29006-2
• Author: John M Kang

THE CASE FOR INSINCERITY

John M. Kang

ABSTRACT

Much of the philosophical debate between religionists and secularists has

focused on whether to permit people to invoke publicly religious arguments

to justify their position on laws and policies. There is a question related to

this debate whose answer is often regarded by both liberals and religionists

as intuitive and straightfoward: May religionists offer secular justifications

in the public square to support or oppose laws and policies without sincerely

accepting such reasons as consistent with their respective religion? Some

religionists and especially some prominent liberals tend to answer in the

negative, disdaining the thought of embracing an alternative that seems

duplicitious. I argue that such negative responses tend to neglect the value

of insincerity in public justifications.

1. INTRODUCTION

Much of the philosophical debate between religionists and secularists has focused

on whether to permit people to invoke publicly religious arguments to justify

their position on laws and policies. Prominent liberals like Robert Audi, Kent

Greenawalt and John Rawls argue that in some instances, people should abstain

from both invoking religious arguments in the public square and from consulting

religious sources alone in arriving at judgment,1while religionists like Michael

Perry,Nicholas Wolterstorffand StephenCarter assert thatreligionists bepermitted

greater freedom in both areas.2

Studies in Law, Politics, and Society

Studies in Law, Politics, and Society,Volume 29, 143–164

Copyright © 2003 by Elsevier Science Ltd.

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ISSN: 1059-4337/PII: S1059433703290062 143

144 JOHN M. KANG

There is a question related to this debate whose answer is often regarded by

both liberals and religionists as intuitive and straightforward. The question is

this: May religionists offer secular justifications in the public square to support or

oppose laws and policies without sincerely accepting such reasons as consistent

with their respective religion? Some religionists and especially some liberals tend

to answer in the negative, disdaining the thought of embracing an alternative that

seems duplicitous. Liberals have leveled sustained criticism against the thought

of such insincerity by religionists in public discourse. Kent Greenawalt labels

such insincerity “deceitful” and “dishonest” (Greenawalt, 1995, p. 163); Robert

Audi derides it as “manipulative” and its propensity “a moral defect” (Audi,

2000, pp. 110, 128); and John Rawls rebukes it as “hypocritical” (Rawls, 1996,

p. 215). These liberals’ critical responses find systematic expression in formal

objections stemming from “consequence” and from “fairness.”3The former

asserts that insincerity by religionists leads to negative results like alienation

or civil strife, while the latter holds that it violates a principle of equal respect

which insists that people be entitled to rational justifications for coercive laws or

policies.

In this essay, I respond to these liberals’ objections from the perspective of

liberalism itself and not from some other political ideology. In doing so, I will not

challenge the purposes animating the fairness and consequence objections which

I regard as consistent with the broad aspirations of liberalism. While specific

conceptions of the fairness and consequence objections are debatable, I think it

apparent that the concerns driving both are reasonable in the abstract, and that

what’s generally at issue in fair-minded people isn’t their intrinsic value, but the

scope and depth of their meaning and application. Indeed, it’s telling that even

regimes or groups that undermine equal respect or civic harmony often justify

their actions to the public in terms of such values. So instead of critiquing the

premises of either objection, I argue that sincerity is at best irrelevant and at worse

harmful in achieving either good consequences or fairness between religionists

and secularists.

As for my method, it derives from a response to highly idealized accounts by

someliberalsabout theduty forsincerity.Their arguments,Ishow,are insufficiently

attentive to political context. They derive a duty for sincerity from vague notions

of fairness, unrealistic expectations for civic virtue, or from some hypothetically

idealized condition. I juxtapose these approaches to politics as practiced to show

that the objections to insincerity rest on impractical premises that fail to generate

workable standards. By this, I do not mean to suggest that I plan to marshal

hard empirical evidence; rather, I seek to write from the perspective that political

differences often are not amenable to open discussion, for the worldviews from

which they derive are sometimes incompatible and mutually resistant.