 So thanks very much for inviting me Trevor, it's great to be here. I haven't actually visited St Mary's before, although I feel guilty and I feel like I should have, but I haven't, so it's great to have the opportunity to come and speak to you this evening. So the topic is the title of this talk is Should There Be Freedom of Dissociation? I want to begin with some examples of many I could have chosen to illustrate the theme of the talk. So take these examples. Health insurers in California required by the state to provide health cover for abortion even if the employer is a church. That's a recent case that came up which is now sort of entangled in litigation. Another example the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario now requires all Ontario doctors to refer requesters of euthanasia if the doctor objects. Another example Catholic care home in Belgium fined for refusing euthanasia. And another case which actually Trevor brought to my attention a few days ago in Sweden of a Swedish midwife who lost in the appeal court after having been sacked from her job for refusing to perform abortions. A bit of an outcry about that and that's probably going to go to the European Court, but at the moment her status is she was blackballed by the entire medical community for actually refusing on conscientious grounds to perform abortions. So two of these cases concern Christians and Christian organisations and all of them concern healthcare. So let me give you an example not involving Christians so consider this. In a recent survey of medical students 36% of Muslims said they would object to performing an intimate examination of a patient of the opposite sex. The General Medical Council's Education Committee however said in 2006 that it would not be possible for a doctor to practice in that environment while refusing to examine for example half of all patients on grounds of gender. And here's an example not involving healthcare at all. In 2007 the University of Delaware was forced by adverse publicity to drop a treatment program in residence halls for the ideological manipulation of students. Students were required to meet with their advisors to answer questions such as the following. When did you discover your sexual identity? What do you think about environmentalism, diversity, racism and were you in some way privileged or oppressed? One student unsurprisingly when asked about their sexuality replied that it was none of your damn business and after intense pressure I mean it took a lot of pressure through the media and various advocacy organisations the program was dropped but it didn't you know it didn't go that easily there had to be a lot of pressure brought to bear for that and then there are programs like that all around the States and probably other countries as well. It's just that some of the kinds of example that had really been bothering me for a while now I could have chosen many others. What these sorts of examples have in common as far as I can see is that they involve people being compelled by law or by regulation or by general expectation to act in a way contrary to their sincerely held religious and or ethical beliefs. Healthcare is a lightning rod for this sort of problem but it can be found across society from solemn legal environments to everyday situations. And some of you might know about the following as far as healthcare is concerned there was a recent consensus statement proclaimed by 15 bioethicists and philosophers in which they insist among other things the following. Medical practitioners should normally allow their professional obligations to override their consciences. They must if they refuse to carry out a particular treatment refer the patient to someone who will or if this is impossible they must do it themselves. Tribunals should be established to assess the sincerity and reasonableness of a practitioner's conscientious objection. The burden should be on the practitioner to prove that their objection is sincere and reasonable. The burden should be on the practitioner, sorry practitioners who receive an exemption on grounds of conscience should compensate society by doing some other work of public benefit. Students should be trained in performing basic medical procedures even if they believe them to be morally wrong and finally practitioners should be educated about their professional obligations and the possibility of what they call cognitive bias in their conscientious objection and you can find that on the Oxford Practical Ethics website. So clearly there are rumblings of concern within healthcare about the problems caused by people of differing religions and ethical outlooks working in the same environment and all aiming at providing the same overall kind of service and the problem is only magnified outside healthcare even in a multitude of relatively quotidian ways whether it be an objection to having to use for example a gender neutral bathroom sunning oneself on the beach next to a Muslim woman in a burqa compulsory sex education in schools and so on and so forth. The choice of illustration is not relevant to the present discussion even though individual examples are interesting and worth discussing nor to be frank are the merits of any particular case relevant to present purposes. My focus is on the increasing conflict between significantly different viewpoints in a liberal pluralistic and largely secular society. The conflict might be between different religious outlooks or between a secular and a religious outlook and involve variations within those overarching perspectives. Now note just just to be clear that by liberal I don't mean something as specific as for example classical liberalism to the exclusion of to the exclusion of social liberalism or vice versa although the social liberalism of contemporary society is what will most readily come to mind throughout the present discussion I don't see as greater difference between it and classical liberalism as others might might do. Both kinds of liberalism privilege the secular pluralistic state and aim at a kind of harmony between the various groups within that state whereas the classical liberal expects the aim to be realized voluntarily the social liberal is not afraid to enlist the government in enforcing the harmony in diversity with social liberalism now dominant and given its emphasis on the role of the state the threat to freedom of religion and conscience clearly comes from that direction rather than from the classical liberalism of a million you know a follower of say John Stuart Mill. At the moment the way western societies deal with conflicts between various ethical outlooks whether religious or secular is in what seems to me to be a very piecemeal fashion on a case-by-case basis so the courts mainly in the USA are loaded with litigation either challenging some law requiring a personal group to violate their religious or ethical beliefs or attempting to overturn a refusal by some personal group to act in this way whether it's wearing a cross at one's place of work wearing a bikini on the beach or baking a cake for a gay wedding governments and courts try to handle the situation in a way that does not set an overall precedent for these types of conscientious objection case now I don't think this is a particularly stable solution and it may be that there is no stable solution but some solutions might be more stable than others moreover it's not merely a question of stability but of morality can any overarching principle be proposed to justify a general approach to these cases well you can have the principle of compulsion right you can say that conscientious objection should have no recognition and any person may be compelled by the law to violate their conscience for a good reason that what the law deems to be a good reason and the authors of the consensus statement on conscientious objection I just read from seemed to have a slightly milder form of that position as regards healthcare the only rider that they add is that the treatment needs to be in the best interests of the patient but you know by that sort of reasoning that the best interests of the patient reasoning what might one say about for example this horrendous term apatemnophilia which some of you may have heard of which is a person's persistent desire to amputate a healthy limb um if the amputation were to remove that desire and spare the person mental distress might that be required treatment even if it violated the consciences of most doctors religious or not but that aside the principle of compulsion leaves the crucial question untouched what counts as a good reason a religious person might well sign up to the principle that conscience can be overridden but they would differ markedly from a secularist about the conditions under which that can be done abortion is a classic example wearing a bikini on the beach is a relatively new one so the principle of compulsion would bring us back to square one as I say it moreover I would have thought that in a liberal society compulsion was supposed to be a last resort isn't freedom of religion a fundamental right at the very best shouldn't it entail that religious people cannot be compelled to act in violation of their deeply held religious beliefs at at least those beliefs that are central to their religious outlook religious freedom has had the occasional notable success recently but perhaps the most famous being the landmark us supreme court case of of hobby lobby in which a for-profit corporation was actually exempted from providing employee contraceptive cover as part of obama care which involved a mandate for requiring employer health insurance plans this particular company were received an exemption and the ground was that the company owners complained that the mandate violated their sincerely held belief religious beliefs and the court did agree with them in that case however the plaintiffs were able to rely on a very strongly worded piece of legislation known as the religious freedom restoration act of 1993 and yet even that legislation is hedged in many American states by non-discrimination clauses or supplementary statutes containing for example lgbt and anti anti-discrimination provisions it's fair to say as a matter of fact that it's religious believers who are very much on the back foot in the current state of things and increasingly so I can't think of a single case where in one of the modern liberal democratic secular pluralistic societies a secular person that is to say one who's not religious or who even if privately religious doesn't take religion to be a guide to how they should act publicly has found themselves under legal pressure to conform to a religious norm there aren't any such cases that I know of but the definition of the kind of societies we're talking about it's going to be rare on the other hand you will find a small minority of cases where secular people have objected in conscience to the legal pressure of secular norms um the most well-known being conscientious objection in wartime run as the most famous example there's also compulsory sex education in schools to which even many secular people object so if you look at the history of litigation in this area it nearly always involves religious individuals or organizations objecting to laws that compel them to act against their beliefs now whatever the ultimate objective solution to these problems I question whether in a society of the kind that I'm concerned with there can be any solution short of the one that I'm going to consider secular compulsion a general governmental right to override conscience is incompatible with a liberal society as liberalism is commonly understood so is blanket protection for conscience as an inviolable right a piecemeal approach seems to me unprincipled and to postpone the problem rather than resolving it but there might be another way although it would be consistent with the main characteristics of a liberal society it would not exactly live up to its ideals but then I'm not sure that its ideals or perhaps its ambitions were ever acceptable to large portions of the citizenry of most liberal states even for more pragmatic liberals the solution might fall short of expectations but it's a question of weighing alternatives and it may be that if a solution consistent with liberalism is available and has the least cost it is the one behind which liberal should rally whether they like it or not so I propose then not to start from freedom of religion or freedom of conscience but from freedom of association freedom of association is another one of those rights are always officially recognized in liberal societies so the UN declaration universal declaration of human rights enshrines it as follows everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association no one may be compelled to belong to an association the european convention on human rights says everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and freedom of association with others followed by specific reference to trade unions and listing of many exceptions based on law national security public safety and so on to the point that maybe at least in the european convention the right doesn't seem particularly contentful but that aside for now the wording of such statements does seem the wording of such statements seems narrow it seems confined explicitly or implicitly to trades unions political organizations and other semi-public bodies but the right surely is not that narrow whatever we think of the way it is worded in conventions and declarations the right to free association I mean you think about it the right to free association includes such things as the following and some of these are also recognized in international treaties not all of them some of them are the right to found a family and choose your spouse the right to choose your friends the right to choose where you live with whom you socialize who you let onto your property where you shop where you enjoy leisure time your business relationships your political associations and more clearly freedom of association is a broad right whatever limitations it may be subject to note that freedom to choose where and with whom you do business is reflected in the legal right to freedom of contract but this specific right is found that on the moral right to freedom of association the same for freedom to choose whom to let on your land where the right to property presupposes freedom of association without freedom of association or with severe curtailment of the right totalitarianism seems to me to be a likely consequence I mean one of the hallmarks of a totalitarian regime is its coercion of membership in officially approved organizations only only and the expulsion of people from the rest another is its virtually total surveillance which severely constricts a person's choice of friends associates and even family totalitarianism seems to me to contain denial of freedom of association at its core so I think we can all agree that freedom of association is a fundamental right though not without limits I'm not free to associate with others for a criminal purpose that's called conspiracy I'm not free as the law currently stands to marry five women at the same time even if they all freely consent associations that break the law are forbidden and of course the devil is always in the detail what should those limits be but I want to focus on the converse of freedom of association what I call freedom of dissociation after all if we're free to associate with whomever we choose why are we not free to dissociate from whomever we choose just as I'm free to choose my friends so I'm free to drop them just as I'm free to join a trade union a political party or for that matter a gym or a dance club so I'm free to end my membership nor am I required to join in the first place so by dissociation I mean both non-association and withdrawal from association people are free to marry or remain single they're also free under law to separate or divorce some religions forbid divorce and one may debate the ethics of divorce but that's just not the point we have already noted that issues arise over where the limitations are to be drawn which I'm going to say more about for now I'm arguing that there is a moral right to freedom of dissociation I'm noting that the law does reflect this so now a very quick aside of the kind typical among philosophers one might question whether there's a general right to freedom of dissociation even though there is a general right to freedom of association perhaps there are specific rights to dissociate from certain kinds of relationship but no more well I think that every right has to use the technical parlance a contrary does the right to educate one's children imply a contrary right not to educate them does the right sorry the right to keep a promise hardly entails the right to break a promise obviously where a right entails or is entailed by an obligation to act in some way there won't be a contrary right but that notwithstanding most if not all of the rights we find clustered together with freedom of association do seem to have contraries it's plausible to hold that every right that has the form of a permission but without a corresponding obligation has a contrary working out what the contrary of a right a right is can be tricky but consider for example freedom of speech I have the right to speak but also a contrary right well what is that contrary right the contrary right is either seizing to speak which is obviously a right or not speaking when one can that is deliberately remaining silent deliberate silence again has limitations you know for example is there a right to be silent after witnessing some horrific crime but it looks pretty general isn't the famous right to silence of the common law part of the general right to be silent when one might speak how about freedom of religion itself well I'm free to belong to a religion but I'm also free to end my membership whatever the consequences may be for me personally I'm also free to be an atheist deliberately to espouse no religion freedom of movement means I have the right to live wherever I want within my country but I'm also free not to move even if the opportunity arises to move and I'm free to settle once I've made my choice it would be absurd to hold though that freedom of speech entails freedom to silence someone else so that is obviously not a contrary right since the contrary of speaking is remaining silent not silencing the contrary of moving is staying still not making someone else move and so on in other words the contrary rights pertain to a person's not doing what they have a right to do in a way that does not violate the rights of others and that seems to me to be just rights theory 101 but it is important for what I'm going to argue there may be rights with no contrary only a contradictory that is to say although every purely permissive right to do x entails a right not to do x it may be the not every right to do x entails to put it loosely a right to I couldn't think of that there's no real word for it but a right to unex or dis x or dx and so on for all the other verbal prefixes apart from non I'm not sure what rights they may be which is why I assume for now that there are no what I call hotel california rights that is to say rights that you can exercise but not withdraw from exercising even if my assumption was false though it seems clear that the rights clustering together with freedom of association all do have contraries which means the owners should be on my opponent to show why freedom of association is an exception so let's accept them that there is a right to freedom of dissociation what consequences might this have well my central claim is that invoking freedom of dissociation and putting it into practice is probably I even wonder whether probably is too strong quite possibly verging on probably the best way of handling the conscientious objection problem growing ever greater in liberal pluralistic multicultural secular democratic societies it might be a way of solving the problem rather than either managing it or overturning liberalism altogether and replacing it with a kind of secular authoritarianism and I've given this paper a couple of times in the past people of secular authoritarianism all that's too strong well now I think it's a real possibility I mean religious authoritarianism doesn't look like much of a goer secular authoritarianism hardly seems to me to be so strong and so kind of unlikely ever to eventuate so before outlining what I think dissociationism means in principle and practice I want to make clear what it's not so dissociation okay so let's get a little bit clearer on this dissociation is not internal secession or vulcanization that is to say it does not mean the breaking up of liberal society into distinct independently governed societies so vulcanization can work for a while look at the Balkans after the fall of the Soviet Union it usually is a recipe for instability though often leading to war or perpetual unrest so dissociation is not like that dissociation is not supposed to be some sort of geopolitical strategy applied to one state it's not about who governs us or about independence ethnic preservation or the like rather it's about how people and groups interact with each other within a state note at once that freedom of dissociation can work at the group or into or individual level unlike vulcanization at the individual level a person who's deeply held religious or ethical convictions are violated by they're having to do x in respect of some other person y should not be compelled to do x not merely because of freedom of conscience but because of freedom of dissociation now this is not playing with words as though the two rights amounted to the same thing freedom of dissociation is clearly a lot wider than freedom of conscience so if i choose not to be friends with you it's unlikely to be because it would violate my deeply held religious or ethical beliefs but it could be in some cases probably not going to be our choice is about who to do business with or who to choose as a spouse or whether to get married or do any particular bit of business at all are unlikely to be matters of conscience nor is whether to join the local tennis club now within the scope of freedom of association there will lie matters of conscience not all matters of conscience are matters of association but many of them do fall within the broader ambit so my question is why shouldn't individuals or groups be allowed as a matter of law and policy to dissociate themselves from relations with others when such relations would violate their conscience and the follow-up question is if they should be allowed then as long as the people or groups from whom the former dissociate are still able to obtain what they want why should they object to such a freedom one which they too would possess so let's start with health care so you know i got thinking about this this general problem because of the health care the conscience problem in health care so if you start with health care we're so much of the concern currently exists in the uk there's a virtual government monopoly on health care something that seemed i have to say you know the editorializing it's always seemed odd to me that there should be a government monopoly on health care i mean why don't we have a government monopoly on food provision which we did have for a short time after the war but you know other emergency situations why don't we have a national food service if we have a national food is more important than health so i've never quite understood it but anyway there you go in the uk abortion has been legal since 1967 if you want to work in health care at least in a clinical setting and you are opposed to abortion you're going to have a problem there's a conscience clause in section four of the abortion act that will exempt you from participating in any treatment authorized by the act but as the midwives dug in and would found out when they lost their supreme court case in 2014 the protection does not extend beyond the abortion procedure itself to related tasks such as supervising staff involved more directly in abortions and providing pre and post treatment care to patients seeking abortions given the wording of the act in my view the court reached a reasonable decision that what the plaintiff the what the plaintiff subjected to on conscience grounds just was not covered by the exemption in the legislation just as a matter of law suppose however that there was a more expansive provision of private health care alongside government provision sufficient to give conscientious objectors to abortion or some other procedure a realistic choice about whether to expose themselves to activities to which they object at the same time those with no objection to the relevant activities would still have a practical option to work within the government health care sector abortion or whatever activity it may be would remain legal and freely available but objectors would be free and legally permitted to avoid it altogether why at least in principle should such an arrangement be objectionable and that's pretty much the arrangement in the USA because they have a much bigger private health care system and it's not that hard as I understand it for a practitioner who health care practitioner who objects to abortion on conscience grounds just not to work in hospital where that's done there'd be no need for piecemeal conscience clauses or ad hoc litigation though of course cases would still need adjudication and a body of common law a common law precedent would need to develop the situation would be in many respects as I say similar to the to to the USA and the USA has these what they call the federal church amendments which have nothing to do with any church but with the name of the senator who introduced it the federal church amendments which give extensive conscience protection to workers in hospitals in receipt of federal funding so in the USA you've got both the church amendments in federally funded hospitals which give conscience objections and you have an expansive private sector where you can basically shop around and work for the hospital of your choice because there's a far more expansive private health care sector in the USA than in the UK then there is already far more employment choice and health care workers can generally avoid getting into difficult conscience situations now as a solution to conscience problems in health care more private sector choice would seem very promising we should though look immediately at probably the hardest kind of case the sort of case that's obviously bizarre although in my view not beyond the realms of possibility and this is a case that's been brought up to me on more than one occasion by people I've talked to about this this topic it's the one that may be occurring to some of you already so take the case of the Satanist nurse who refuses to treat Christians because it goes against her Satanist code of conduct should her conscientious objection be respected in law and policy well there are three reasons why she might a nurse like that might find herself in that situation one it was deliberate two it was an accident or three it was necessary well if it was deliberate that is to say if the nurse wanted to be in a situation where she could refuse to administer lifesaving treatment to a Christian she would be no different to the diabolical serial killer nurses we occasionally hear about in other words she'd be liable to prosecution for homicide so I'm not suggesting the current laws regarding crimes against the person should be changed to accommodate conscientious objections to not killing on the other hand if the Satanist nurse were thereby accident she obviously didn't know what she might be exposed to so she lacked information the remedy would be for every hospital to make it abundantly clear what kinds of treatment they provided and whether their patient base was universal or restricted the third reason she might be there is that the nurse had nowhere else to go to work and knowing the problem she might have of having to treat a Christian she held her nose and went to work there anyway well the solution is obvious she shouldn't have to work there so on my proposal she should not have to find another profession any more than dug in and would then the midwives should have to find another profession rather the Satanist nurse would have the option of working in a private Satanist hospital where the Satanist code of conduct would be a precondition of employment and the hospital advertised quite clearly and unambiguously who they treated and what services they offered now needless to say the hospital should not expect a large clientele in fact many hard-headed Satanists would probably avoid such a hospital as well but at least the nurse would have somewhere to apply her satanic trade but I said that I mean and this sounds flippant but it's not I mean you could pick a more realistic perhaps case but I'm trying to pick the most extreme case I can think of to make the point but I said that dissociation dissociation ism should apply to individuals as well as groups so what if the nurse was as it were the only Satanist in the village that freedom of dissociation applies to individuals as well as groups does not imply that an individual can manage without a group to back them up conscientious objectors in wartime generally benefit from well worked out procedures enabling them to avoid violating their consciences whether they be moved to medical work administrative jobs and so on an individual pacifist may well feel himself alone but he knows that there will be others scattered about and many that have gone before him and he can benefit from that shared history by contrast if there really were only one satanist health care worker with no satanist support to rely on it would alas in my view be bad luck if the person in that society is so idiosyncratic in their beliefs as to find themselves out on a limb they might just have to make some sacrifices so to speak they might well have to retrain or else leave the country a small price to pay I should think for a blanket right to dissociation now that's obviously an outlier case as I say not beyond the realms of possibility but it's an outlier case in discussing this sort of case I'm not trying to to be facetious or dismissive on the contrary if such an outlier case can be handled more realistic and less bizarre cases probably can as well so in 2013 is probably all of you will know or at least most of you will know in 2013 the UK Supreme Court dismissed a final appeal by Mr and Mrs Bull owners of a guest house in Cornwall against Mr. Freddie and Mr. Hall a gay couple who had sought to rent a double room from the owners they were refused a room because the owners as Christians disapproved of homosexuality in fact of all extramarital sexual relations Freddie and Hall claim discrimination under the Equality Act Regulations of 2007 and they were successful once again given the law as it stands it's hard to see how a different decision could have been reached I'm not as sure about that as I once was reading the the case of the the the bakers of the wedding cake for the gay couple which I may come on to I'm not not as sure legally speaking as I was that the case was decided reasonably but anyway as Lady Hale writing for the court put it quote now that at long last same-sex couples can enter into a mutual commitment which is the equivalent of marriage this is before gay marriage was was legalized the supplies of goods facilities and services should treat them in the same way now it seems to me that this sort of case raises very serious wide-ranging problems of what might be called a structural nature having nothing in particular to do with gay rights or Christians the UK Supreme Court ruled that a Christian who objects to homosexuality must rent their guest house room their guest house room to a gay couple renting means selling a time limited portion of one's property in the case of a guest house it also means selling whatever services come with rental of a room such as making meals cleaning the room providing various amenities and so on so if the law requires a person to sell their goods and services to another person even though they object on conscientious grounds to doing so why shouldn't the law also require a person to work for another person even though they object on conscientious grounds to working for that person after all working for someone is just another contract of sale the sale of one's labour moreover if the law as it does requires a person to hire another even though they object on conscientious grounds to doing so why shouldn't it require someone to work for another despite conscientious objection in other words if you are compelled to sell your goods and services to someone despite conscientious objection why not your labour and if you are compelled to buy someone's labour despite such an objection why shouldn't you be compelled to sell it yet being compelled by law to work for someone you don't want to work for is tantamount to a form of slavery or at least forced labour and for what it's worth forced labour has long been condemned by the international labour organisation in conventions dating back at least 70 years in fact the 19 the first convention the 1930 convention which has been ratified by 178 countries condemns the following quote all work or service which is exacted from any person under the menace of any penalty and for which the said person has not offered himself voluntarily the only exceptions are military service normal civic obligations including minor communal service punishment for conviction in a court and emergency service under that so and various kinds of emergency service under normal civic obligations one might include such paid or unpaid labour as jury service and assisting law enforcement among others there's no suggestion that it includes routine employment the 1957 convention ratified by 175 countries explicitly condemns quote forced or compulsory labour as a means of political coercion or education or as a punishment for holding or expressing political views or views ideologically opposed to the established political social or economic system and as a means of racial social national religious discrimination on the face of it it seems that being compelled to sell one's labour to a specific person or group despite a conchanger's objection to doing so is ruled out under those conventions yet if one must sell one's goods and services as in the guesthouse case what is the difference if freedom of dissociation were given the force that it deserves many of these sorts of problem could be obviated so a christian couple for example could refuse to rent their room to a gay couple as long as there were other providers willing to supply a room why should it matter that there be other providers in other words why should freedom of dissociation depend upon whether one of the parties can have their wants fulfilled by a third party well the answer is that i'm trying to find a practicable solution to the problem that respects both sides so for example suppose bill and bob are starving and they come across one lifesaving piece of food that if divided between them would not be enough to save either of them who should get the food assuming that there are no other factors to differentiate them in terms of entitlement it looks as though in a case such as this morality has no answer so who should get the food but it does it might be morality does have an answer and the answer is toss a coin after all to say that neither bill nor bob should have the food and so both should die seems morally repugnant to say that both should have the food is morally impossible because it's physically impossible to say that one should be preferred over the other given a differentiating factor seems objectionably arbitrary because it's ungrounded in any good reason so a coin a coin toss or the equivalent looks like the only decent alternative if bob wins the toss then his getting the food is not objectionably arbitrary because this is because the coin toss is a way of recognizing rather than denying the equal entitlement of both individuals random selection is precisely the reason for awarding the food to one rather than the other return now to the case at hand suppose we were in the unlikely situation where the gay couple could not find another guest house that was sufficiently suitable to meet their needs now in the particular predian hall case they found a guest another guest house you know within hours I mean it was not a problem suppose they couldn't find another guest house to meet their needs and there was no other compromise they could reasonably be asked to make such as abiding by the rules of the christian guest house or not taking a holiday in that area or that time and so on in that case given the assumption that both sides had an equal entitlement to have their rights respected and that's an assumption I've been making all along then a coin a coin toss looks like the only solution you know heads you get the room tails you don't so if the christian owners win the gay couple doesn't get the room if the gay couple wins they do we cannot say that freedom of dissociation should prevail because that would make one side a winner and the other a loser despite their equal entitlement hence the requirement that the gay couple hence the requirement that the gay couple should have a reasonable prospect of meeting their requirements in another way of course what counts as a reasonable prospect is going to be difficult to unpack so minor inconveniences or minor inconvenience does not make a prospect unreasonable having to you know having to go one mile down the road for example to get another room is not unreasonable having to make a total change of plan does make a prospect unreasonable you know again perhaps the devil is in the detail but here I tend to think that the details should not detain us at this stage my main point is that if dissociationism is to be a viable policy all parties have to have a reasonable prospect of respect for their rights in a conscience case the objector must have a reasonable prospect of their conscientious objection being respected and the opposing party must have a similar prospect of their rights being respected so now consider a particularly difficult case take the owner of a guest house who refuses to rent a room to someone because of their ethnicity or their religion or their gender should freedom of dissociation have any sway here at all many of us would think not just as many would object to dissociation in the christian guest house case gay couple case in the latter case however dissociation does not seem repugnant on its face in contemporary liberal society in fact dissociation might lead to a thriving market in guest houses for gay couples perhaps only gay or perhaps mixed and perhaps also in guest houses for christians there's no reason in advance for thinking that either group would not be catered for to a good standard yet when it comes to ethnicity religion or gender and perhaps other groupings we tend to think immediately that old prejudices will raise their head and one group or another will end up with a short end of straw we think of certain we think of certain groups being treated as second-class citizens with access only to second-tier facilities this is not inevitable mind you something fun fact that you might not know it's still legal in the uk to have male-only clubs do not admit females but there has been a surge as a result in female-only clubs in classy parts of london it's still legal legal in the uk to refuse membership to a club or association on grounds of among other characteristics religion or ethnic origin as long as the club is set up precisely for the purpose of restriction to the characteristic on the basis of which refusal of membership is made so it's not as though it is inexorable that lower-grade facilities would be all that became available to persons or groups refuse a mission to decent facilities and even if this was the result why couldn't the government step in and mandate certain standards for all associations they already do it for food retail doctor surgeries and so on now despite these reassurances perhaps i haven't yet met the heart of the worry maybe it's not about second-class standards but it's about the kind of society that we want to live in about our attitudes towards each other if there were wholesale limitations on association available to any and every group and even every individual what would this say about our common citizenry and about the inclusiveness that is supposed to be the hallmark of a liberal diverse secular tolerant pluralistic society now i can see the worry but i also see how the issue of tolerance and respect cuts both ways on one hand we show tolerance and respect by encouraging association among fellow citizens rather than discouraging association the governments of pluralistic societies as well as many liberal minded citizens want people to be happy together not apart the desire is hardly unreasonable and it would certainly be illiberal to encourage dissociation among people who don't want it in other words it's not as though dissociation should trump free association rather it is merely the converse of an existing right and if the former is downgraded the latter ceases to be a mere right and becomes something like an obligation and that looks like a recipe for friction rather than a social lubricant on the other hand an essential element of tolerance and respect is the recognition that we all have certain freedoms in the way that we organize our space of social interactions a personal group might not wish to form a certain association because of a deep and sincerely held objection to involvement in an organization that requires performance of certain actions violating their religious or ethical beliefs or at the other end of the spectrum they might simply not want to form a certain association due to personal or group preference people do this sort of thing all the time for example in the choice of where they live where they work or where they send their children to school now a given preference may or may not mask an attitude worthy of deprecation i might i might not want to be your friend or less strongly i might not seek your friendship because for example i haven't noticed you or i have enough friends already such situations hardly involve reprehensible attitudes it might also be that i suspect that you are not loyal or that you are untrustworthy or just plain boring here attitudes are in play but they may be perfectly reasonable and they may be found that on good evidence they may also involve honest beliefs founded on insufficient evidence yet without any sort of cognitive irresponsibility on my part but now suppose i don't like the color of your hair or i don't want to be seen with you because i find you ugly or i just don't like the color of your skin probably all of us would see such attitudes as worthy of deprecation worthy of disapproval and yet no law forces us to make friends with anyone however bad our reasons for not doing so it is hard more importantly undesirable to legislate against bad attitudes per se and downright totalitarian to compel particular friendships whatever the reasons people have for not forming them so you know the law doesn't punish bad bad attitudes and i think it would be a step in a totalitarian direction if the law started doing that but that's something we can maybe we can talk about in in discussion now it's not clear to me why civic friendship if i can put it that way is especially different in this regard we all have civic duties of course both to the state and to each other and these require a certain amount of association i have to associate with her majesty's revenue and customs to the extent necessary for me to pay my taxes not an association i particularly relish absolutely as tax protesters aside we rightly find this sort of compelled association desirable whenever someone takes on a certain social role or enters into certain communal activities having understood and tacitly accepted the rules surrounding those activities they are to a degree compelled to associate with particular persons and groups rather than others if you choose to shop in sainsbury's you'd better accept the need to associate minimally with the other shoppers if you choose to send your child to school x rather than school y you had better be ready to associate perhaps to a relatively high degree with the other parents as well as the teachers now this idea of tacit acceptance is important and it clearly undergirds many of our social interactions the critic of dissociationism might object that civic friendship is disanalogous to personal friendship precisely due to this tacit acceptance of certain rules and conventions one does not have to be a sort of social contract theorist about morality to recognize that there is a sense in which we have all signed up in scare quotes to certain kinds of behavior merely by dint of being a citizen of a certain state whether or not we choose we chose to be one for the purposes of the present discussion what we signed up to for the purpose of the present discussion i asked the question what have we signed up to in virtue merely of being citizens rather than citizens who have adopted certain roles or social environments we have signed up to kinds of association necessary for the fulfillment of our civic duties whether it be paying taxes being good neighbors obeying the law keeping the peace and so on if we are capable of working and have no prior duty not to work we have signed up to being productive members of society i would have thought if we can do it we have not i contend signed up to associating with any particular individual or group though we have signed up to being as it were good to being as it were good associates of both those with whom association is unavoidable in the circumstances and of whomever we have chosen to associate with in the first place other than that i contend we are to put in a slightly negative form free to be left alone i'm not averse to calling the freedom of dissociation the right to be left alone because this formulation wears on its face the notion of personal space the freedom without which a person truly is a cog in a totalitarian regime personal space is not undermined by the simple fact that when you do associate with others with other citizens whether through choice or necessity you are obliged to be civil to them in the literal etymological sense of the term only anarchists or sociopaths think that one's very presence in a state living with its citizenry is an affront to one's personal space that space is undermined in my view by state sanctioned requirements of particular association such requirements shrink one's personal space almost a vanishing point if applied across the board if not applied across the board yet still applied broadly in a way that rubs increasingly against one's deeply held beliefs or even against one's simple personal and day-to-day choices as is the case now once personal space is severely constrained and diminished but it could be object that i'm still missing the point because isn't it just for the good of society that the state can compel certain kinds of association from which people might otherwise resile well that raises the question of exactly what the good of society consists in isn't that part of what the disagreement is all about in particular whether it is for the good of society that there be a legally recognized right to dissociation one that has both passive and active components whether passive component is the right to be left alone ab initio and the active component is the right to withdraw from associations imposed upon a person or group that do not come under the umbrella of general civic duties and similar ones mentioned earlier now if the good of society is just what is being contested then appeal to it by either side has no weight to put the point more clearly consider an illustration slightly detailed here so it's not crucial that you follow all of this but i'll go through it anyway take for example 16th century florans or 17th century england consider the state impose compulsory contribution from maintenance of the church for example the catholic church in florans or the church of england more specifically consider the obligation of a person residing within a certain parish to contribute to the building of a new parish church there are four relevant situations to consider first the citizen might accept that there is a higher obligation overriding their personal choice about whether to contribute namely the transcendent good of the church and then suppose there does exist such a good as an objective fact second the citizen does not accept that there is a higher obligation but in fact there is a transcendent good grounding such an obligation thirdly the citizen accepts that there is a higher obligation but there is no such transcendent good fourthly the citizen does not accept a higher obligation and there is no such transcendent good now in case one the citizen accepts there is a higher obligation overriding their personal preferences, and there does exist such a good, such an obligation based on a real objective good. The citizen has no right to decline to pay, nor would they even consider not paying. In case two, the citizen does not accept that there is a higher obligation, but there is in fact such an obligation. They have no right to decline to pay, so if they did decline due to non-recognition of a higher good, the most they could be afforded by the state would be a degree of tolerance in the strict sense. That is, for the greater peace and stability of society, the state might tolerate their non-payment or a derisory payment. In case three, the citizen accepts a higher obligation, but there is no such transcendent good, right? We're assuming there that there's no higher good. The society, be it Florence or England, is founded on a big mistake. Yet the citizen frankly accepts a higher obligation, however ill-founded. In other words, they have signed up to certain civic duties recognized in that society. Objectively, they might be under no unqualified obligation to help pay for a new church, nor may any other citizen. However, to put it glibly, they have to play by the rules. Less glibly, the citizen is under an objective but qualified obligation to abide by the conventions of that society, if for no other reason than the sake, peace and stability. So what about case four, where the citizen does not accept any requirement to pay and there is no higher good justifying a supposed obligation? Here, it is hard to see how anything could override a right by the citizen to dissociate from the relationships requiring payment. There might be grounds involving peace and stability, but only if the objective citizens were to suffer some sort of marginalization or ghettoization that denied them fair and equal access to the civic amenities they wish to enjoy. That is precisely why fair and equal access, practically speaking, is so important. What about from the other side, the difficulty the church might find itself in of not benefiting from contributions that are being withheld? Well, that too might cause instability among the citizens who fully accept an obligation to pay. Yet, I do not see how that sort of risk in any way morally obliges the objectors. If you give me some spurious reason why you need my property and I know the reason is baseless, the friction caused by you're not getting your way hardly obliges me to cough up. So, in cases one to three, the first three cases I mentioned, there's no clear right to dissociation or at least in case three, not one that any citizen would seek to exercise. But I submit that our current predicament is akin to case four. Objectors to certain forms of association, in particular conscientious objectors, do not recognize an obligation to associate in those ways that they object to. The slight but interesting difference from four is that with respect to four, I suggested the state might be laboring under an illusion about whether a transcendent good underwrites the obligations they seek to impose on recalcitrant citizens. Perhaps the religion to which the rulers appeal is a mistake, for example. In our case, however, in the case of liberal society, it's not that liberalism might be wrong, which is a whole other discussion about the merits or otherwise of liberalism. It's not that liberalism might be wrong, but that liberalism itself offers no higher good to underwrite the obligations of association it seeks to impose. In other words, what exactly is it that liberalism can appeal to that, if it existed, would underwrite a wholly general obligation to associate in ways the state deemed desirable? Is it, for example, progress? But appeal to progress is either vacuous or question begging in this context. What progress could it be other than the progress that involves citizens associating in the way the state wants? The same applies to a term such as harmony. What about getting along? Again, the risk of begging the question is front and centre. There are various ways of getting along, and one of them might be by not getting along. That is to say, going one separate way to a large extent. The same goes for peace. The peace of separation can be as effective as the peace of togetherness. Sometimes the peace of togetherness is as illusory as the peace of separation is enticing. By peace, one might mean peace and stability, the absence of conflict. In that sense, there might of course be an overriding reason to prevent dissociation. But that, to repeat, is precisely why fair and equal access is essential to preventing the sorts of conflict that an appeal to peace and stability is designed to avert. So just to briefly conclude now, what does all of this fairly abstract theorizing have to do with practical politics? How would a society look if freedom of dissociation were given the respect they deserved? What would a dissociationist society look like in practice? The practical aspect of dissociationism, apart from my rather abstract recommendation concerning fair and equal access and the like, are not my concern. Indeed, as a philosopher, I don't think I'm equipped to say anything of great substance. That is why we have politicians. What I would insist is that a dissociationist society that was recognizably liberal can exist. By definition, it would be secular and pluralistic, with a government and a state apparatus that had to be professedly neutral in its dealings with different individuals and groups. There would of course be fierce competition for resources, but then that exists already with various groups and organizations that constantly lobby and even hijack government in order to benefit from taxpayer funds. There seems to be, to me, to be no reason in principle why a system of revenue sharing and equitable distribution could not be implemented. A dissociationist state would, I presume, be highly federalized. Now recall, as I said, I'm not talking about balkanization or anything else. The issue is not one of borders and sovereignty, but of internal freedoms for individuals and groups. The degree of federalization would depend on the extent of dissociation, not something anyone can predict in advance. But there would have to be mechanisms for recognizing dissociation in various walks of life. So take the sort of example that I started with and that's provoked my kind of thinking about these areas, namely healthcare. A single monolithic state-run service might not be inherently inconsistent with dissociationism, but the complexity of implementing it might mean that a fully or partly privatized service was the only practical solution. One could not rule out a fully state-run service broken into multiple subsidiaries that service different groups with equitable sharing of resources. But again, the cost and complexity might be prohibitive compared with the efficiencies of a private system of healthcare. Again, it would depend in large degree on the extent of dissociation. What do people want? What would best service the requirements of the different individuals and groups in a given society? Well, I leave it to experts to think about the ways in which freedom of dissociation could be implemented. What I want to emphasize is that for all the distaste or aversion, many might feel towards the dissociationist proposal. The key idea remains, either there is freedom of association or there is not. If there is, then there must be freedom of dissociation. Either freedom of conscience and freedom of religion are taken seriously, or they are not. If there is no freedom of religion or no freedom of conscience or no freedom of dissociation as a broad general right, then liberalism itself seems to me to be a myth. To call oneself liberal while resiling from the rights and freedoms liberals should take seriously is to be a liberal in name only. Rather than focusing on our worst instincts and the many ways in which dissociationism can go wrong, perhaps liberals should do what they've always professed to do, which is to show some faith in human nature and in the possibility for people to get along, despite their differences, if the social arrangements are right. If they are, if they're not right, if diversity combined with proximity leads to conflict, then maybe the best way out is just to dissociate. Thank you very much.