Convergence, Incommensurability, Contradiction, or Overlapping Consensus? A Response to Daniel Weiss

Contemporary religious and scientific perspectives make various metaphysical truth claims that are frequently perceived to be either competitive or contradictory. Two dominant approaches that have been employed to explain and to resolve such conflicts are those of convergence, where one view trumps over and assimilates the other, and incommensurability, where the views in question come to be regarded as actually non-competitive. Drawing on recent models of inter-religious dialogue, in his essay, ‘The Fruits of Contradiction: Evolution, Cooperation and Ethics in an Inter-Religious Context’, Daniel Weiss proposes by way of analogy a third approach, that of critical yet constructive interaction between religious and secular ethical perspectives where metaphysically contradictory commitments remain held in unresolved tension. In this essay, I engage Weiss’s proposal and raise questions about the analogy that he develops. Drawing on the political theory of Rawlsian liberalism, I propose a fourth conceptuality—that of overlapping consensus—which I argue bears important similarities to the model that Weiss advocates.