Secular and religious foundations of normative standards: Liberalism, naturalism, and rationalism in political philosophy

In speaking of norms the philosopher and the statistician tend to mean different things. Philosophers usually have in mind normative standards, and statisticians typically mean patterns with a certain frequency. The link between the two usages is probably the idea of normality. That in turn can have either a normative significance, as it does for natural law theorists, or a statistical meaning. My concern is normative standards - roughly those concerning right and wrong or matters of intrinsic value - and I begin by clarifying these in relation to the theory of democracy. The main work of this paper, however, is to explore how religious and secular elements may be fruitfully combined in a theory of the ethical standards appropriate to liberal democracy as a form of government.