Marital Cakes and Conscientious Promises

The U.S. Supreme Court has recently been tasked with determining—both metaphorically and literally—whether in matters of marriage equality and religious freedom, those within society can have their cake and eat it too. This came to the fore in Masterpiece Cakeshop (2018). In most of scholarship which has followed, the respective parties’ rights in this case are parsed in terms of rights to religious expression and free speech (on the one hand), and a statutory right to non-discrimination (on the other). By approaching this matter through a primarily philosophical (rather than legal) lens, I aim to present a new perspective. Where cases involve same-sex marriage, it is argued that both sides are predicated upon religious or conscientious convictions. This is established through a philosophical argument, which examines the nature of the marital promise to love and seeks to demonstrate how this promise entails a characteristically religious sort of belief.