Franz Magnis-Suseno, Dialogue Ethics and Public Reasoning of Religions

The return of religion in politics is an important issue in a contemporary democracy. Franz Magnis-Suseno, a Jesuit, ethician and interfaith figure in Indonesia, provides a raft of interesting insights for interreligious dialogues in a pluralistic democracy. Through his publications, he seeks to assist Muslims and Christians to build an ethics of citizenship in a pluralistic democracy with the second Vatican theology of religions as his intellectual foundation. In this article, the author attempts to reconstruct the important points of Magnis-Suseno’s thoughts on dialogue ethics and identifies their relationships to the public reasoning of religions in a political public sphere. He comments that Magnis-Suseno demands more of religions than do Rawls and Habermas in terms of moderating their doctrinal positions vis-à-vis other religions.

Moderate Inclusivism and the Conversational Translation Proviso: Revising Habermas' Ethics of Citizenship

Habermas’ ‘ethics of citizenship’ raises a number of relevant concerns about the dangers of a secularistic exclusion of religious contributions to public deliberation, on the one hand, and the dangers of religious conflict and sectarianism in politics, on the other. Agreeing largely with these concerns, the paper identities four problems with Habermas’ approach, and attempts to overcome them: (a) the full exclusion of religious reasons from parliamentary debate; (b) the full inclusion of religious reasons in the informal public sphere; (c) the philosophical distinction between secular and religious reasons; and (d) the sociological distinction between ‘Western’ and ‘non-Western’ religions. The result is a revised version of the ethics of citizenship, which I call moderate inclusivism. Most notably, moderate inclusivism implies a replacement of Habermas’ ‘institutional translation proviso’ with a more flexible ‘conversational translation proviso’.

Religious Accommodation, Social Justice, and Public Education

The question of what religious practices modern democracies should accommodate is urgent and widely discussed. This essay provides a framework for dealing with accommodation issues in pluralistic societies. It does this in part through examining Kevin Vallier’s Liberal Politics and Public Faith: Beyond Separation, which defends an accommodationist liberalism. His view is more permissive than this chapter’s both in accommodationist policy and on some broad normative questions; for example, this chapter gives a larger role to natural reason as a capacity shared by normal human beings and a basis for reasons not dependent on theology or religion. For secular citizens, identifying and appraising natural reasons for lawmaking is valuable both for clarifying their own thinking and communication; for religious citizens, seeking such reasons is also beneficial and need not be unduly burdensome. The essay concludes with applications of the proposed ethics of citizenship to both politics and public education.