Religious diversity: Where exclusivists often go wrong

Abstract

halls this year have been given the names of values students are to emulate. To get to my son's room, I start down Honesty Boulevard, take a left at Fairness Road and then finally turn down Respect Lane. And although the parents in our school district disagree on almost everything almost all of the time, I suspect that the school has not received a single complaint about this clear attempt to promote a specific set of values in the public school setting. The reason this is so, I assume, is that almost all of us, as parents, believe these values to be ones that children ought to learn and accept. But with respect to many, if not most issues - from sports to politics to religion - there usually do exist significant differences of opinion. Of course, as I will note in greater detail later, there are many contexts in which diversity of thought is not itself problematic for one who believes her perspective to be superior. Sometimes a person - hopefully, for instance, a philosophy professor in a debate with undergraduate students in the classroom - clearly has access to more relevant information than do those with whom she disagrees. At other times - for instance in the political arena - it may well be clear that those with whom one disagrees know the truth but do not want to acknowledge it. But what of those cases in which seemingly knowledgeable, sincere people differ on issues of significance? What, especially, of those cases in which seemingly knowledgeable, sincere people differ on religious issues? I have argued previously that religious exclusivists are under a prima facie obligation to attempt to resolve this type of epistemic peer conflict.1 The primary purpose of this essay, however, is to argue that, even if religious exclusivists are under no such obligation, there still remain good reasons for exclusivists to assess their relevant beliefs in the face of peer conflict