Specter of Reason

I've completed my masters thesis.  It's over one hundred pages, by far the longest thing I've ever written.  And it's not half bad, in my opinion, though there are a few arguments I would have liked to flesh out in more detail. The first half is on the history of the concept of subsidiarity and its relation to the foundations of human rights law, including some criticism of the liberalism we find in Mill, Rorty and, most recently, Nussbaum.  I advocate an alternative, which I call pragmatic secular constructivism .  It is secular in the sense that it does not give religious belief a privileged place in political discourse; however, I take an accepting position towards the inclusion of religious language in political affairs.  My argument is that religious perspectives are going to influence politics one way or another, so long as religion is an influential factor in social life; and that if explicitly religious language is barred from entrance into the politic...

In " Veiled Threats? " and again in " Beyond The Veil: A Response ," Martha Nussbaum defends the right to cover one's face in public. Laws against veils are a hot topic in Europe, with several EU countries pushing for legislation which would prevent many Muslim women from wearing full-face Islamic veils. Nussbaum goes over and rejects several arguments which are commonly made in support of such a ban. Though I'm not quite sure where my mind is on the issue, I have some problems with what she says. One of the arguments she rejects is that the full-face veil depersonalizes women. To counter this argument, Nussbaum begins by suggesting that Muslim women may not be degraded or depersonalized by this tradition. This suggestion is not persuasive, however, because some Muslim women have spoken out against the full-face veil for just that reason. More importantly, we have reason to be suspicious of reports by women who say they like the full-face veil. Thes...