Abstract
In a now famous article, “Moral Argument and Liberal Toleration: Abortion and Homosexuality,” an article which has been reprinted in revised versions in two collections of essays and which forms the basis of the final chapter of his 2009 book, Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? (The original version of this article appears in California Law Review 77, 1989, 521–538. Sandel offers revised versions of it in Democracy’s Discontent, Cambridge, MA.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996, 91–119 and Public Philosophy: Essays on Morality in Politics, Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 2005, 122–144, and a substantially revised version of it, now entitled “Justice and the Common Good” and dealing with same-sex marriage instead of homosexuality, as the final chapter of Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?, New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2009, 244–269), Michael J. Sandel points out that recent Supreme Court decisions that are intended to uphold laws that promote the toleration of various lifestyles, such as homosexuality, have employed “sophisticated” arguments that attempt “to set aside or ‘bracket’ controversial moral and religious conceptions for purposes of justice” and insist instead “that the justification of laws be neutral among competing visions of the good life” (521).
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
The original version of this article appears in California Law Review 77, 1989, 521–538. Sandel offers revised versions of it in Democracy’s Discontent, Cambridge, MA.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996, 91–119 and Public Philosophy: Essays on Morality in Politics, Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 2005, 122–144, and a substantially revised version of it, now entitled “Justice and the Common Good” and dealing with same-sex marriage instead of homosexuality, as the final chapter of Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?, New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2009, 244–269.
- 2.
See, for example, Stanley Fish, “Liberalism Doesn’t Exist,” Duke Law Journal 1987, 997–1001.
- 3.
See, for example, Claire Rydell Arcenas, America’s Philosopher: John Locke in American Intellectual Life, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022; David Lewis Schaefer, “Locke’s American Legacy,” Law and Liberty, Liberty Fund, Inc., February 4, 2021, https://lawliberty.org/lockes-american-legacy/; Jerome Huyler, Locke in America: The Moral Philosophy of the Founding Era, Lawrence, KS: The University Press of Kansas, 1995; Thomas L. Pangle, The Spirit of Modern Republicanism: The Moral Vision of the American Founders and the Philosophy of Locke, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988; Merle Curti, “The Great Mr. Locke: America’s Philosopher 1783–1861,” Huntington Library Bulletin 11, April 1937, 107–151.
- 4.
All citations from the Letter are from John Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration, edited with an introduction by Patrick Romanell, New York: MacMillan/Library of Liberal Arts, 1950.
- 5.
See, for example, Matthew 7:15–23; Mark 16:16; John 3:18, 8:21–26, 16:8–11; Romans 10:6–13, 14:22–23; 2Thessalonians 2:11–12; John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book Second, chapters 1–6, translated by Henry Beveridge, Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmanns Publishing Co., 1964 [1845], 207–298; Martin Luther, “A Commentary on St. Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians,” in Martin Luther, Selections from His Writings, edited with an introduction by John Dillenberger, New York: Anchor Books/Doubleday, 1962, 99–165, esp. 107–108, 116–126; “The Freedom of a Christian,” in Dillenberger 1962, 42–85.
- 6.
See Robert K. Faulkner, “Preface to Liberalism: Locke’s First Treatise and the Bible,” Review of Politics 65, no. 3, 2005, 455.
- 7.
See also Pangle 1988, 131–133.
- 8.
See, for example, the following: Samuel C. Rickless, Locke, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley Blackwell, 2014, 4–5, and consider Rickless’ overall presentation of Locke’s thought; Steven Forde, Locke, Science and Politics, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013, 2; Ruth Grant, John Locke's Liberalism, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987, 22–23; Richard Ashcraft, Locke's Two Treatises of Government, London: Allen & Unwin, 1987, 233–234, etc.; James Tully, A Discourse on Property: John Locke and His Adversaries, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980, 3–34; John Dunn, The Political Thought of John Locke, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1969, 198; Sterling P. Lamprecht, Moral and Political Philosophy of John Locke, New York: Russell and Russell, 1962, 49.
- 9.
John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, edited by Peter H. Nidditch, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975. Hereafter, we will refer to this text as “Essay.” For Locke’s rejection of innate moral and theoretical principles, see 65–103.
- 10.
“It is in the empiricist development, as we know, that the new psychology, which was required as a correlate to pure natural science when the latter was separated off, is brought to is first concrete execution. Thus it is concerned with investigations of the introspective psychology in the field of the soul, which has now been separated from the body, as well as with physiological and psychophysical explanations. On the other hand, this psychology is of service to a theory of knowledge which, when compared to the Cartesian one, is completely new and very differently worked out. In Locke’s great work this is the actual intent from the start. It offers itself as a new attempt to accomplish precisely what Descartes’ Meditations intended to accomplish: an epistemological grounding of the objectivity of the objective sciences.” Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, translated, with an Introduction, by David Carr, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970, 84. See also, for example, 84–86 and 231–232 in this same volume; Husserl, Logical Investigations, v. 2, translated by J.N. Findlay, New York: Routledge, 2003, 278, 335–336.
- 11.
All citations to “Philosophy as Rigorous Science” (hereafter PRS) and “Philosophy and the Crisis of European Man” (hereafter PEM) are from Edmund Husserl, Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy, translated with an introduction by Quentin Lauer, New York: Harper and Row, 1965.
- 12.
See also, for example, Husserl 2003, v. 1, chapter 7 (“Psychologism is a skeptical relativism”), 75–100. Sections 37 and 38, the latter of which Husserl entitles “Psychologism in all its forms is a relativism,” are especially relevant. See also Baghramian 2010, 40. For an overview of Husserl’s “life-long engagement with relativism” (93), see Dermot Moran, “Husserl on Relativism,” in Kusch 2019, 93–109.
- 13.
“The whole thing, however, depends on one’s seeing and making entirely one’s own the truth that just as immediately as one can hear a sound, so one can intuit an ‘essence’—the essence ‘sound,’ the essence ‘appearance of thing,’ the essence ‘apparition,’ the essence ‘pictorial representation,’ the essence ‘judgment’ or ‘will,’ etc.—and in the intuition one can make an essential judgment” (PRS, 115); “The spell of inborn naturalism also consists in the fact that it makes it so difficult for all of us to see ‘essences,’ or ‘ideas’—or rather, since in fact we do, so to speak, constantly see them, for us to let them have the peculiar value which is theirs instead of absurdly naturalizing them” (PRS, 110).
- 14.
“All that bears the title of ‘consciousness-of’ and that has a ‘meaning,’ ‘intends’ something ‘objective,’ which latter—either from one standpoint or another is to be called ‘fiction’ or ‘reality’—permits being described as something ‘immanently objective,’ ‘intended as such,’ and intended in one or another mode of intending” (PRS, 109; my italics).
- 15.
See also Richard Velkley, “Edmund Husserl,” in History of Political Philosophy, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987, 870–887, and especially 875–878.
- 16.
Moreover, Husserl seems to think that since all of the objects of consciousness are “intended” objects, that is, “since every consciousness is a consciousness-of” and since the meanings of these objects are totally dependent on consciousness or in no way physically “contingent,” the meanings of all of consciousness’s objects are in principle knowable (PRS, 90–91; 96; 119; etc.).
- 17.
“Intuiting essences conceals no more difficulties or ‘mystical’ secrets than does perception. When we bring ‘color’ to full intuitive clarity, to givenness for ourselves, then the datum is an ‘essence’; and when we likewise in pure intuition—looking, say, at one perception after another—bring to givenness for ourselves what ‘perception’ is, perception in itself (this identical character of any number of flowing singular perceptions), then we have intuitively grasped the essence of perception” (PRS, 110–111).
- 18.
Husserl also says at this point that if we think through the relation of phenomenology and experimental psychology “… it would be possible to foresee that any psychologistic theory of knowledge owes its existence to the fact that, missing the sense of the epistemological problematic, it is a victim of a presumably facile confusion between pure and empirical consciousness” (PRS, 92). It is important to note that in this context he qualifies the status of experimental psychology, that is, of the science of “empirical consciousness,” by reminding us that it is not genuinely knowable, and of “… the truth that psychology is not nor can be any more philosophy than the physical science of nature can…” (PRS, 91–92; my italics).
- 19.
“Now, to what extent is something like rational investigation and valid statement possible in (the phenomenological) sphere? … It goes without saying that research will be meaningful here precisely when it directs itself purely to the sense of the experiences, which are given as experiences of the ‘psychical,’ and when thereby it accepts and tries to determine the ‘psychical’ exactly as it demands, when it is seen—above all where one admits no absurd naturalizings. One must … take the phenomena as they give themselves” (PRS, 108).
- 20.
“That the ‘essences’ grasped in essential intuition permit, at least to a very great extent, of being fixed in definitive concepts and thereby afford possibilities of definitive and in their own way absolutely valid objective statements, is evident to anyone free of prejudice. The ultimate differences of color, its finest nuances, may defy fixation, but ‘color’ as distinguished from ‘sound’ provides a sure difference, than which in the world there is no surer” (PRS, 111; my italics).
- 21.
Husserl remarks in PEM that once we have overcome “objectivism and psychological naturalism” by means of transcendental phenomenology “(t)hen, too, the ego is no longer an isolated thing alongside other such things in a pre-given world. The serious problem of egos external to or alongside of each other comes to an end in favor of an intimate relation of beings in each other and for each other” (190).
- 22.
For a review of theologians, such as St. Augustine and Calvin, who hold this view, and for a very helpful reflection on the meaning and implications of divine omnipotence, see Thomas L. Pangle, Political Philosophy and the God of Abraham, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003, 29–47.
- 23.
In contrast to the approach of the scholars listed in footnote #8, there is growing recognition by other scholars of the importance of the First Treatise for, and perhaps even as the foundation of, Locke’s thought. See, for example, Faulkner 2005, 451–472; Pangle 1988, 131–151; Nathan Tarcov, Locke's Education for Liberty, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989 [1984], 9–78; Michael P. Zuckert, Launching Liberalism: On Lockean Political Philosophy, Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2002, 129–146; Stanley C. Brubaker, “Coming into One’s Own: John Locke’s Theory of Property, God, and Politics,” Review of Politics 74, no. 2, 2012, 207–232; Ross J. Corbett, “Locke’s Biblical Critique,” Review of Politics 74, no. 1, 2012, 27–51; David Foster, “The Bible and Natural Freedom in Locke’s Political Thought,” in Piety and Humanity: Essays on Religion and Early Modern Political Philosophy, edited by Douglas Kries, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997, 181–212; Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1965 [1953], 202–251. We follow the approach of this latter group of scholars.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Davis, M.K. (2023). Husserl and the Problem of Epistemological Relativism. In: Ancient and Modern Approaches to the Problem of Relativism. Recovering Political Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22304-4_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22304-4_1
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-22303-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-22304-4
eBook Packages: Political Science and International StudiesPolitical Science and International Studies (R0)