by Secularists who desire the bundle of rights, liberty, and equality associated with the secular liberal state have a serious intellectual problem, namely, what is the source of these rights, liberty, and equality? With only a very thin conception of the person and the person’s place in community, the secularist struggles for thick answers to these pressing questions.
Theists, and particularly Christians, in the United States have two different problems. First, we have a proposed source of rights, liberty, and equality based on our thick understanding of the human person and her place in community, but our reasons are rooted in faith or a faith based philosophy that is not accessible to all. In short, in our diverse and pluralistic society, we suffer from seemingly non-universally accessible reasons for acting this way rather than that. Second, we have a reputation, deserved or not, of being intolerant of those who seek to lead lives that diverge from traditional Christian teaching and practice.
Can and should theology and theologically informed philosophy provide a foundation for the rights, liberty, and equality we cherish (the inalienable rights mentioned in the Declaration) in our pluralistic society? Is Christian intolerance of difference a real concern? Is it any more of a concern that secularist intolerance of Christian belief? How do we achieve the right balance between communal needs – the common good – and individual freedom to diverge from communal norms? Is the right balance more likely to be achieved in a secularist state where religion is privatized and marginalized or in a theistically informed secular state where the ultimate questions are welcomed and robustly debated in the public square?
Michael,
I look forwards to seeing more of your posts on this blog, as well as the other intelligent writers I see will contribute!
–Jonathan
Er…
Didn’t John Stuart Mill address this – the question of a secular source of rights and liberties (liberty) – fairly coherently more than 150 years ago?
Brad: Haven’t Nietzsche, Rorty, and others seriously undermined secular sources of rights and liberties?
That’s an odd response. If Nietzsche and Rorty have undermined secular sources of rights and liberties (and certainly Rorty didn’t think he was doing that), how much worse must their challenges be for theists. Why should their arguments only be corrosive for secularists and not for religious believers who were much more the targets of their philosophical criticisms?
More generally, it’s very hard to see the force of the critique with which this post begins. It seems fairly clear that citizens who aren’t religious can have deep commitments to the values of freedom and equality without a “thick” conception of the person — and the post above clearly implies that only religious conceptions can be “thick” in the right sort of way, which is also rather odd. Only religious people can value community? Since when did secular become synonymous with liberal individualist?
And to fill out the debate a little more, religious believers face a bigger challenge here than accusations of intolerance. Part of the reason that secularists aren’t nearly as worried about providing “deep” or “thick” foundations for their views about rights, etc., is that this problem, while interesting and philosophically challenging, seems rather less challenging than grounding those views in religious beliefs, but then having to provide an account of the divine, its existence and attributes, a theodicy, etc. As if those questions can be magically waived away, such that the conception of rights based on them is stable without regard to their foundations.
The problem for religious believers in this particular debate isn’t just the inaccessibility of their views, if those view are indeed inaccessible. It’s that those views are philosophically questionable, often even dubious, and, in an age of incredible diversity and freedom of belief, can no longer make claims to demand universal, or even widespread, assent. It’s not that some people can’t understand religious arguments, it’s that they do understand them and don’t think they have good reason to accept them. Or, at least, no more reason than they would have to accept the secular philosophical foundations of human rights and equality, which might be, well, easier to justify than religious belief.
(Reply to Ox’s first paragraph) Thank you Ox for your reply. I was hoping to develop the argument along these lines. Rorty clearly understood himself as undermining the secular sources of rights and liberties. In “contingency, irony, and solidarity,” he says that Hitler’s project was repulsive to him but that he can’t morally condemn it because there is no right or wrong, no absolute truth about human beings and how we ought to live and order our lives together. He’d prefer a world of liberal egalitarianism, but he admittedly can’t give thick reasons for why his preferences ought to prevail.
(Reply to Ox’s second paragraph) This is a grave misunderstanding or misdirection (I can’t ascribe motives) too often seen in these debates. I know many very good nontheists who are deeply committed to the values of freedom, equality, dignity, and community. Some give their lives in the service of others. I also know many selfish and shallow theists. To be clear, I am not talking about individual commitments but the reasons for the commitments. Where do we get the standards by which we judge this particular nontheist good and that particular theist less good or even bad? By what criteria do we judge Hitler’s project evil and America’s project much better? To borrow from Arthur Leff, “sez who?”
(Reply to Ox’s third paragraph) You say: “Part of the reason that secularists aren’t nearly as worried about providing “deep” or “thick” foundations for their views about rights, etc., is that this problem seems rather less challenging than grounding those views in religious beliefs.” If it’s less challenging, then why not do it. As you say, these questions can’t magically be waived away. With respect to the challenges facing theists, Ox is quite right that those can’t magically be waived away either, which was the point of my original post – the challenges have to be listened to and answered.
(Reply to Ox’s fourth paragraph) You say: “It’s not that some people can’t understand religious arguments, it’s that they do understand them and don’t think they have good reason to accept them.” According to a recent Pew survey of religious affiliation in the United States, only 4% identify as atheists or agnostic while 78.4% identify as Christian and 4.7% as Jewish. In total, 88.9% of Americans identified themselves at some level as religious. I don’t think it unreasonable to conclude that a vast majority of Americans are at least somewhat open to exploring transcendent foundations for liberty, equality, and the ordering of human society.
A few replies:
1. I never heard Rorty say that he couldn’t morally condemn Hitler (quite the contrary), and I never read anything by Rorty which said that either. What Rorty did say and write is that he had no transcendental or foundational justification for his moral condemnation of Hitler. But that doesn’t mean that Rorty didn’t have “thick” moral commitments. He absolutely did. All it means is that he didn’t think there was any way to prove to nonbelievers that those commitments were Rational, True, Absolute, Divine, Real, or whatever other “skyhook,” as Rorty liked to say, you might want to use to tell other people you really, really think that your belief is the right one.
I’m not saying I agree with Rorty, but we should be clear that, if you take his challenge seriously, his view is equally applicable to religious claims as to secular ones. What was odd about Scaperlanda’s response above is that it suggests Rorty is a problem for liberals, but not for theists. If anything, it’s just the reverse. If you take Nietzsche and Rorty seriously, they give theists no end of trouble. Now, if you don’t take them seriously, that’s fine. But then why shouldn’t liberals do the same?
2. It’s good to know that secularists can have commitments to important values like equality, liberty, community, etc. And that presumably they can lead good lives according to those commitments. If all of that is possible, then why do they need foundational (i.e., theological) justifications for those commitments? Why isn’t the answer to Leff’s question: “us,” as Rorty would say; or “our liberal tradition,” as Burke might say; or “these beliefs are the ones we have arrived at as our most confident, most settled moral judgements after carefully and systematically working through our intuitions and principles in a process of wide reflective equilibrium — and, really, what else is there?” as Rawls might say. From the flippant (anyway at least as much as Leff’s question) to the morally serious, there are perfectly good and respectable answers here that don’t require moral foundationalism of the theological variety, and which tend to avoid puzzles that have been problems for theological views for hundreds, if not thousands, of years now.
Another way of putting the point: if you’re not satisfied with one of these answers to Leff’s question, do you really want to have to answer these alternative questions: How do you prove the existence of God? What is God like? How do we know what God wants us to do? Are Gods commands always moral? Why does God allow evil in the world? etc. And these are not insouciant questions. They are difficult and terrible questions. Unless you’re already committed to a theological project, it’s hard to see why you would think they are any less difficult than answering Leff’s question.
3. Survey results? I didn’t think the issue here was a geographic one. It doesn’t matter what most Americans think. (If you run the survey in Europe you get radically different results.) And if the number of atheists rises to 20% or 30% or 50%, then what? The point is that, in a free society, no one is required to hold theological beliefs. They have to be persuaded to hold such beliefs. And it’s hard to see why the arguments above — namely, we need “thick,” theological descriptions for our moral commitments — ought to be persuasive to anyone who isn’t already persuaded. Maybe this is all about preaching to the (mostly Christian) choir? If that’s right, then I missed the point of mentioning Rorty as a criticism of liberalism above.
“If it’s less challenging, then why not do it. As you say, these questions can’t magically be waived away.”
I missed this sentence earlier. The answer, of course, is that secular moral philosophers are working on these questions all the time, and there is no shortage of answers, just as there is no shortage of competing theological views. But systematic secular ethics (deontic and consequentialist) are still, as Derek Parfit noted, fairly young, as moral theories go. These theories take time, even generations, to work out, adapt, etc. Christianity has had a long time to make its case. Let’s not be too quick to judge on the other side.