Bad Faith?

A conversational response to an ethical or political conflict sounds like something relaxed and congenial. In fact, few things are more challenging, for the interlocutors must be truly willing to listen to each other, and hence be open to making sometimes radical transformations of their own positions. It goes almost without saying that this challenge is especially acute in a multicultural democracy such as Canada.

One would think that David Novak is aware of this. Novak is an academic philosopher and a Conservative rabbi. He is also one of the Harper government’s appointees to the board of Assisted Human Reproduction Canada, a body that oversees the use of new reproductive technologies—making his perspective on societal norms particularly worthy of attention. This is why it is so disconcerting that, while Novak begins his latest book, In Defense of Religious Liberty, by telling us that it is about religious liberty in the sense of “the freedom of a...