has another excellent article on TCS today.

I imagine that while Feser believes that beliefs that are both “rational” and “religious” can legitimately be brought to bear on public policy, he also believes that not all moral norms that are both rationally and theologically grounded should be enforced by the state. It might have been wise for him to include a caveat to this effect in his essay, so as to ward off misunderstanding.

I think he goes slightly wrong at the end, too, with these lines: “This is not to deny that the fact of pluralism poses a serious political problem: it does, and I frankly confess that I have no idea how to solve it. But then, neither does the liberal, whose favored ’solution,’ as I have argued elsewhere, basically amounts to the proposition that all views in a pluralistic society can be tolerated only so long as they submit themselves to the liberal’s own idiosyncratic and highly contestable conception of justice.” Why should we imagine that there is a solution to the problem of pluralism (if, indeed, it is right to think about it as a problem)?