Religious Autonomy

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Finally, Conly discusses the right to religious autonomy. This is an especially robust debate in the United States, a theologically diverse country with strong religious principles and constitutional protections for religious freedom. In this country, “religious beliefs are generally accorded a high priority within beliefs of conscience”, and most of us believe deeply in respecting others’ right to practice their religion. This is evident in many existing United States laws and policies. For example, it is widely accepted that prisoners—who have been stripped of many of their rights through incarceration—maintain “a moral right to have their religious preferences respected, and for that reason to be given food according to their religious …show more content…
According to Conly, a one-child policy would not overly burden individuals or their religious groups: “Many churches have changed their stance on the use of contraception, without any seeing any collapse of their organizations”. Having satisfied part (a), Conly concludes that it is permissible to curtail some degree of religious autonomy if the justification for limiting procreation is sufficiently strong.
V. EQUALITY AND EQUITABLE POLICY
According to Conly, equality is “essential to our well-being […] that we are equal to others, and that others recognize that”. It is an intuitive principle for people across countless cultures and geographies, and it becomes especially important in the administration of laws that may not be equitably enforced: “if we think drugs are [de facto] outlawed only for minorities, we do feel resentment, because then the law is no longer a statement about drugs but instead is a statement about a particular kind of people”. Even when laws are equitably enforced, they can still violate our sense of equal standing or respect. In an initiative to prevent obesity, the mayor of New York recently enacted a policy that prohibited the sale of large sodas. His citizens were outraged: “The idea that other people have better ideas than we do about what we should drink […] seemed to drive people crazy”. It is easy to see how a one-child policy could be offensive to our sense of
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To do this, I will begin with my own perspective on the issue, and then discuss my thoughts in the context of the work of Russell Sinnott-Armstrong and Shelly Kagan, two consequentialist moral theorists who have written on the topic. In most of my moral reasoning, I tend to start from a relatively libertarian and consequentialist perspective. I believe that in almost all cases we should have the right to do what we desire—including having as many children as we want—unless our actions result in significant harm to