Rights, Claims, and Duties of Opinion

Rights, Claims, and Duties of Opinion is a work by Orville Dewey (1794-1882), the American Unitarian minister, addressing the philosophical and practical questions about individual conscience, public opinion, and the proper limits of toleration in nineteenth century American society.

The question of how a democratic society should handle differences of opinion was a substantial subject of mid-nineteenth century American thinking. The country was divided on numerous major questions including slavery, religious denominational disputes, immigration, temperance, and various other matters where individual conscience and majority opinion frequently conflicted. American liberal Protestant thinkers like Dewey produced substantial writing on the philosophical and practical dimensions of these conflicts.

Dewey’s general position was the broadly liberal Protestant tolerationist position that combined commitment to individual conscience with the practical need for social cooperation across difference. The work pairs with the broader nineteenth century American Unitarian literature on conscience, religious liberty, and the practical conduct of democratic life.