When, if ever, should liberal states exempt citizens from laws that hinder them in pursuing their conceptions of the good? This paper defends two jointly sufficient conditions: (i) a legitimate law L forces a citizen C to violate a demand of C’s conception of the good; (ii) granting exemptions to C does not preclude the state from realising justice and security. I call the theory of legal exemptions that emanates from these conditions the ‘moderate-accommodationist account’. The bulk of this paper is devoted to showing why liberals should prefer my moderate accommodationist account to four rival theories of legal exemptions, namely those proposed by Brian Barry (2001), Gerald Gaus (2003), and Andrew Shorten (2010).
