Stephen Law has an interesting new post on his CFI blog about whether and when public policy should carve out exceptions on account of religious conscientious objection.
[S]houldn’t religious conscientious objections sometimes be accommodated? Our answer to this question needs to be carefully qualified. Yes, a religious conscientious objection should sometimes be accommodated. But not because it is religious. . . .
Take the objection of our Catholic doctor who objects to performing an abortion. Should her objection be accommodated? In certain circumstances, yes. But not because her objection happens to be religious. What matters is her deep moral conviction. The fact that it is a religious conviction is beside the point. For surely a non-religious doctor who similarly had deep-seated moral objections to performing abortions should also be exempt. The conscience of an atheist objector should not carry any less weight than that of a Roman Catholic. The religious and non-religious should be treated equally. There should be no double standard: no special, privileged treatment for religious folk.
Similarly, I have no objection to Sikhs being exempt from the helmet law that applies to other British motorcyclists. But not because Sikhism is a specifically a religious movement. I would just as willing to exempt Sikh men that law if their turban-wearing were just an important moral and cultural, rather than a specifically religious, requirement
Read the whole thing, it is certainly worth your time. While I agree with much of the thrust of his argument, it doesn’t seem to me that he goes quite far enough. Firstly, his approach seemingly puts government officials in the position of having to discern which moral convictions are indeed profound enough to give the holder of said convictions a pass respecting laws of otherwise general application, rather than simply allowing citizens to swear or affirm for themselves using some predetermined neutral procedure. Presumably the bureaucracies of the UK are more efficient than those of the US, but I doubt that they can really be all that good at weighing up the innermost minds of women and men.
Relatedly, it is unrealistic to expect that irreligious people will be given the same consideration as religious people even if strict legal neutrality is formally the rule of the day. To take an example from relatively close to home, my Mennonite relatives would be readily exempted from a military draft because it is widely recognized that uniformed service would shame them in the eyes of their friends and family, not to mention the heavens themselves. A lone ideological pacifist has only her own testimony as to inner convictions, a religious pacifist is backed by generations of tradition and all of the social pressures of an insular community. Even aside from “belief in belief,” people of faith are bound to enjoy a significant advantage over those with profound individual beliefs, when it comes to persuading others (including government officials) of the depths of their moral convictions.
Finally, it seems clear that people of faith are bound to have many more options open to them than people of reason, because faith allows you to believe pretty much anything whereas reason tends to converge upon specific solutions. Motorcycle helmets, for example, make perfect sense to those of us who understand that we are literally our brains and bodies rather than disembodied souls riding around in meat suits. People of faith, however, may place that faith in a dizzying array of worshipful silly hats instead, secure in the belief that the gods will watch over them as they tool about town. People of reason will vaccinate their kids, whereas people of faith may well file for a religious exemption to state vaccination requirements, secure in the belief that the gods will keep their children safe, somehow. People of faith have come up with all sorts of theological justifications for various forms of child genital mutilation, whereas people of reason cannot. Further examples abound, but the pattern is the same.
In short, people of faith would have more (bad) options open to them and they would more readily believed and accommodated by government officials, even under Law’s proposed reforms. What we need instead is an elimination of religious privilege in favor of sensible laws which are impartially applied.
