Which laïcité do we want? Three sliders to set together

Once it is demonstrated that neither extreme holds — neither the excessive containment of pluralism nor the complete absence of its regulation —, it remains to choose where to stand between them. This column shows that the choice is not a problem of truth but of collective decision. To define a secularism is to position three shared sliders — closure, recognition, and the translation of convictions into shareable reasons —, and there is but one set of them for millions of inhabitants. Three questions follow that no theorem settles: which settings, who chooses them, and how each is expressed. The average lands on a setting no one wanted; the median locates the point of balance and the line of cleavage, but says nothing of the dispersion of opinions. Collection itself is never neutral, and representation does not abolish that question: it shifts it to the legislator. Condorcet, Borda and Arrow had established it: no aggregation rule is perfectly neutral, and the choice of the rule is itself political. A sequel to "Can we assert anything about laïcité?". Op-ed no. 5, published on laiciscope.org; critical material tied to the book "Laïcité through the Lens of Reason" (D. A. Zighed).