State neutrality: refraining from judgement, or treating everyone equally?
Almost everyone expects the state not to favour any conception of the good life. The agreement ends as soon as one has to say what neutrality requires in practice.
A principle invoked on all sides
In a society where different religious, moral and philosophical convictions coexist, the idea that the state must not take sides between them is widely shared. Yet it serves to justify opposing positions on the same questions.
The reason is that neutrality can bear on three distinct objects: the reasons that justify a law, the effects of that law on different groups, or the appearance of public officials and public places. These three requirements do not coincide, and the same measure can satisfy one while contradicting another.
Neutrality of justification
John Rawls, in Political Liberalism in 1993, defends a neutrality of aim and of reasons. The state must justify its decisions by arguments acceptable to reasonable citizens who do not share the same comprehensive doctrine.
Rawls specifies that this neutrality does not guarantee equal effects. A law justified in a neutral way may burden certain practices more than others, and this inequality of effect is not, in his view, a violation of the principle.
Neutrality of effect
Others find this answer insufficient. A general rule, designed on the basis of the majority's habits, weighs above all on those who do not share them. To be truly neutral, the state should correct these effects through accommodations.
Their opponents object that accommodations create different regimes depending on people's convictions, which contradicts equality before the common rule. For them, a rule identical for all is the surest form of neutrality, even if its effects vary.
A rival position: perfectionism
Another tradition challenges the ideal itself. Joseph Raz, in The Morality of Freedom in 1986, argues that the state may legitimately favour valuable forms of life, provided it preserves a range of choices that makes autonomy possible.
Its defenders argue that no state is truly neutral: funding culture or education already presupposes value judgements. Its critics reply that acknowledging this limit does not authorise extending such judgements to matters of personal conviction.
Where to stand
The first question concerns the object: do you expect the state to rely on no particular conviction to justify its laws, to offset their unequal effects, or to keep visibly at a distance from all of them?
The second concerns the domain. Many people defend strict equality of treatment in some public services and accommodations in others, without inconsistency, because the stakes differ from one domain to another: the relationship with a member of the public is not the one that binds the state to its employees.
A general question about neutrality thus elicits a misleading consensus. Only specific situations make it possible to tell the conceptions apart, and to see that one can defend the same principle while arriving at opposite rules.
Key points
Neutrality can bear on justifications, on effects or on appearance, three distinct requirements.
Correcting unequal effects and applying an identical rule to all both appeal to equality.
Perfectionism challenges the very ideal of neutrality, in the name of the autonomy that ideal claims to serve.
This article describes documented mechanisms and disagreements. It recommends no position, no party and no vote, and commits to no reading other than that of the work it cites.
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