Introduction: Contextualized Morality and Ethno-Religious Diversity

Abstract

Many recent events dramatically highlight the political and societal importance of ethno-religious divisions that have long been overlooked in political philosophy and modern sociology. The situation has rapidly changed in the past twenty years or so, and the changes affected the dominant style of theorizing. In the social sciences, the strong evolutionary and structural necessities of modernization theories have been criticized (Bader, 1995a, 9ff., 14ff.), ethno-religious diversity has re-emerged as an important topic, and contingency, path dependency, and institutional diversity are the new catchwords: institutions and contexts matter (Bader and Engelen, 2003). In political philosophy, we see indications of a similar contextual turn in recent theories of justice (Shapiro, 1999; Hacker-Cordon, 2003) as well as theories of immigration and incorporation of ethno-national and religious diversity (Walzer, 1994, 1997, 2003; Kymlicka, 1995, 2001, 2002; Carens, 2000; Parekh, 2000; Baubock, 1994; Bader, 1995a, 1995b, 1997, 2001, 2003a, 2003b, 2004a, 2004b; Rosenblum, 2002; Greenawalt, 1995; Spinner-Halev, 2000). In our view, three main reasons generally inspire more contextual approaches in political philosophy: (i) moral pluralism, (ii) under-determinacy of principles, (iii) the complexity of practical reason and judgement.