The New Religious Intolerance: Overcoming the Politics of Fear in an Anxious Age - Hardcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Martha C. Nussbaum is Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago and, with Amartya Sen, a Founding President of the Human Development and Capability Association.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter 3: First Principles: Equal Respect for Conscience

How can we best address the current climate of fear? A good approach has three ingredients: good principles, an emphasis on non-narcissistic consistency, and a cultivation of the “inner eyes,” the capacity to see the world from the perspective of minority experience.

Why principles? Given the distracting and distorting potential of fear, which can so easily render particular judgments self-serving and unreliable, it seems a good idea to approach these delicate and complicated issues armed with some general principles that we can cling to, as we attempt to avoid confusion and panic. If these principles are going to help us address fear’s tendency to self-privileging, they should incorporate a focus on the good of others, correcting for fear’s partiality. Supplying principles to guide democratic political practice has been a central purpose of political philosophy, which, ever since its (Western) start in ancient Athens, has seen its goal as practical, not merely theoretical. I’ll argue that philosophy really does have the sort of practical important that the Greeks claimed for it, offering insight to every person who wants to think about these matters. So what does political philosophy have to say about religious difference and the anxieties it provokes?

The tradition I shall map out is specifically Euro-American, but we’d do well to bear in mind that similar thoughts can be found in the history of India, which developed policies of religious toleration earlier than did the West: at least by the third-second centuries BCE, when the emperor Ashoka, himself a convert to Buddhism from Hinduism, put up a series of edicts mandating toleration throughout his empire. These policies did not endure through the entire pre-modern period, but they were revived and further developed in the Moghul Empire of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, particularly in the thought and practice of the Muslim emperor Akbar, who proclaimed toleration among all religions and created a state cult that included elements from all the major religions in his empire. Akbar was a famous figure in Europe, and his ideas had a significant influence on the development of European ideas of toleration – as did the ideas and laws of the Ottoman Empire. I shall say no more about this history here, but we should remember it: our goals are fairness and understanding, and we would be thrown off from the start if we were to think, mistakenly, that the ideas of mutual respect and toleration are exclusively Western. It’s particularly important, perhaps, to be keenly aware that some of their most influential architects were observant Muslims.