The four main chapters of this book began life as separate papers and, although they have been reworked, they remain four distinct essays on related subjects. The book's unifying theme is, as its title indicates, religious pluralism. For Goodman, ‘religious pluralism’ describes not a mere state of affairs but a stance he espouses on how we should understand and respond to the fact of religious plurality. While accepting that people can intelligibly hold different and conflicting beliefs and that we can learn from our differences, the pluralist holds that we can also properly adhere to our own beliefs. We should take seriously the beliefs of others, but that does not mean we should forsake our own. Nor should it entail relativism or scepticism or the tragic view that conflicting views on the good indicate an underlying incoherence in reality. Goodman is also suspicious of ecumenism and of claims that religious plurality merely disguises an underlying commonality of belief. Instead he accepts that religious disagreement about an objective reality is a fact of life and one that should be met with mutual toleration based on respect for human dignity.
The toleration sanctioned by Goodman's pluralism is not indiscriminate. The human dignity that provides the ground of toleration also sets limits to its scope. He devotes a chapter to the minima and the maxima of morality. He identifies a number of practices as intolerable violations of human dignity, including genocide, induced famine, terrorism, the impressment of children as soldiers, slavery, polygamy, incest, rape and FGM. Such practices are widely condemned and in some cases almost universally condemned, but for Goodman it is their intrinsic wrongness, rather than widespread recognition of their wrongness, that places them below the moral minima demanded by his pluralism. His maxima relate to ways in which human dignity can be fostered rather than remain merely unviolated. His candidate for those maxima is the Decalogue. This, he concedes, is rooted in cultural and historical particularity but its precepts can still serve as universal ideals. His case for those maxima is, however, markedly different from the case he makes for his minima. He gives a biblical commentary on the commandments conceived as laws prescribed by God specifically for the Israelites and makes little effort to explain why their appeal should reach beyond their original biblical context to those who subscribe to other faiths or to none.
Goodman's religious pluralism is not, in the first instance, a political position. It addresses those who hold religious beliefs and considers how religious plurality should affect their conception of their own beliefs and their response to those who hold different beliefs. Even so, his pluralism clearly has political implications. As we have seen, he uses it to make a case for religious toleration, but he also suggests that states, as the agents of societies, should go beyond toleration and positively foster religions, ‘pluralistically and even-handedly’ (p 51), much as they should foster the arts and sciences. Most of his political commentary is, however, devoted to criticising what he rejects, particularly the political philosophy of John Rawls, which absorbs two of his four chapters.
Rawls and Goodman share some common ground. Both emphasise the ‘fact’ of pluralism (the existence of a plurality of beliefs within modern societies) and both accept the ‘reasonableness’ of that pluralism. Both want a political order that accommodates rather than shuns pluralism and both accordingly describe themselves as liberals – Rawls as a ‘political liberal’ and Goodman as a ‘Mosaic liberal’. There, however, the resemblances end. Goodman is highly critical of Rawls's efforts to construct a specifically ‘political’ form of liberalism which all citizens of a plural society can embrace because the principles on which it is founded owe nothing to the ‘comprehensive doctrines’ and conceptions of the good over which they disagree. Comprehensive doctrines include, though they are not limited to, religious doctrines. Thus Rawls wants a political order whose basic structure stands free of religious doctrine. If it were based on the doctrines of a particular religion, it could not be accepted by those who subscribed to other religions or to none and it would treat those dissenting citizens unjustly in imposing upon them a religion other than their own. Public deliberation in Rawls's just liberal society would ideally be based on ‘public reason’, rather than on ‘non-public’ reasons drawn from the comprehensive doctrines over which citizens disagree.
Goodman, like many others, takes exception to Rawls's efforts to separate political argument from metaphysical and religious belief. His objection is, in part, that any such separation is impossible. Making generous use of rhetorical questions, he cites a series of public policy issues that necessarily touch on people's deepest moral commitments and that are impossible to resolve merely by reference to Rawls's public reason. But he also argues that, even if we could achieve the separation that Rawls seeks, we should not. Such an endeavour would discriminate unfairly between the holders of different sorts of belief, particularly to the advantage of the secular and the disadvantage of the religious. It would also induce deliberators in the public square to be disingenuous about the true nature of their beliefs and would deprive politics of the motivation and drive that stems from people's deepest moral and religious commitments.
Goodman is no more persuaded by Rawls's proposals for a just international society. While Rawls dismisses outlaw states and dictatorships as having no claim to membership of that society, he does not limit legitimate membership to liberal peoples. Some non-liberal peoples can also be ‘decent’ and they should be tolerated and respected by liberal societies as possessing a standing equal to their own as members of international society. He presents a model of a ‘decent hierarchical society’, the fictional ‘Kazanistan’, that is non-aggressive, that respects basic human rights and that meets other internal standards of decent political conduct. Goodman is scathing in his response to Rawls's international thinking for its lack of realism with respect to international politics in general and to the character of Islamic societies in particular. No contemporary Islamic society approximates to Kazanistan and, even if it did, Goodman reckons that its treatment of its citizens, especially its minority citizens, could still be internationally unacceptable.
There is no doubt that Goodman identifies real problems in Rawls's thinking. His criticism mostly takes the form of broad swipes couched in colourful, figurative, aphoristic prose, rather than delicate forensic examination. His lack of sympathy with Rawls's project sometimes makes him less charitable than he might have been about the difficulty of the issues with which Rawls wrestles. How would Goodman himself deal with these? His main proposal is that we should respond to diversity with ‘openness’, particularly open and inclusive debate. We can then learn from one another's differences. ‘Let the conversation begin’, he concludes (p 201). That's fine, but in politics we have also to decide, implement and coerce. It is when the talking has to give way to decision-making – including decision on matters that bear upon people's religious beliefs – that the difficult questions arise.
