Proportionality: A Way Forward for Resolving Religious Claims?
This essay gives an introduction to the idea of proportionality as a public law concept and argues that it is ideally suited to deciding conflicts between religious claims and the public interest or the rights of others. In particular it argues that a fact-specific resolution of claims can reduce societal tensions.
Should Religious Groups Be Exempt from Civil Rights Laws?
Should a private religious university lose its tax exempt status if it bans interracial dating? Should a religious school be able fire a pregnant married teacher because her continued work would violate the church's view that mothers of young children should not work outside the home? Should a religious social service agency, such as Catholic Charities, be exempt from a state regulation banning discrimination in the delivery of social services on the basis of sexual orientation? Should religious organizations be exempt from civil rights laws? This article argues that these questions raised difficult normative issues that have been answered practically by reference to the varying effects of historical social movements, producing the differential treatment of race, gender, and sexual orientation laws. The article explores avenues for negotiating solutions other than full exemptions or no exemptions. Besides the instrumental goal of solving - or avoiding - complex political and legal problems, this question of stance injects the dimensions of virtue ethics and value-added negotiation. In so doing the article proposes ways to pursue productive stances toward clashes over religious exemption claims is highly relevant to sustaining and replenishing both American pluralism and constitutional protections for minority groups.
EL TRATAMIENTO NEOPRAGMATISTA DE LA VERDAD EN RICHARD RORTY NEOPRAGMATIST TREATMENT OF TRUTH IN RICHARD RORTY
Richard Rorty, one of the most influential authors of our time, presents a critique of the philosophical concept of truth as correspondence. The conclusion of Rorty's neopragmatism is that the idea of truth as correspondence between language and facts is ineffective because it no longer works. The neopragmatist conception of truth indicates the only possible uses for the term «truthful,» revolving around the idea of jus - tification. In this article, the neopragmatist notion of truth is presented in order to