by A fascinating op-ed, in The New York Times, by the often-fascinating Stanley Fish, “Does Reason Know what it is missing?” Here’s a bit (presenting Habermas):
What secular reason is missing is self-awareness. It is “unenlightened about itself” in the sense that it has within itself no mechanism for questioning the products and conclusions of its formal, procedural entailments and experiments. “Postmetaphysical thinking,” Habermas contends, “cannot cope on its own with the defeatism concerning reason which we encounter today both in the postmodern radicalization of the ‘dialectic of the Enlightenment’ and in the naturalism founded on a naïve faith in science.”
Postmodernism announces (loudly and often) that a supposedly neutral, objective rationality is always a construct informed by interests it neither acknowledges nor knows nor can know. Meanwhile science goes its merry way endlessly inventing and proliferating technological marvels without having the slightest idea of why. The “naive faith” Habermas criticizes is not a faith in what science can do — it can do anything — but a faith in science’s ability to provide reasons, aside from the reason of its own keeping on going, for doing it and for declining to do it in a particular direction because to do so would be wrong.. . .
As Norbert Brieskorn, one of Habermas’s interlocutors, points out, in Habermas’s bargain “reason addresses demands to the religious communities” but “there is no mention of demands from the opposite direction.” Religion must give up the spheres of law, government, morality and knowledge; reason is asked only to be nice and not dismiss religion as irrational, retrograde and irrelevant. The “truths of faith” can be heard but only those portions of them that have secular counterparts can be admitted into the realm of public discourse. (It seems like a case of “separate but not equal.”) Religion gets to be respected; reason gets to borrow the motivational resources it lacks on its own, resources it can then use to put a brake on its out-of-control spinning.
The result, as Michael Reder, another of Habermas’s interlocutors, observes, is a religion that has been “instrumentalized,” made into something useful for a secular reason that still has no use for its teleological and eschatological underpinnings. Religions, explains Reder, are brought in only “to help to prevent or overcome social disruptions.” Once they have performed this service they go back in their box and don’t trouble us with uncomfortable cosmic demands. At best (and at most), according to Habermas, “the encounter with theology,” like an encounter at a cocktail party, “can remind a self-forgetful secular reason of its origins” in the same “revolutions in worldviews” that gave us monotheism. (One God and one reason stem from the same historical source.)
But Habermas gives us no reason (if you will pardon the word) to believe that such a reminder would be heeded and lead to reason’s being furnished with the motivation-for-solidarity it lacks. Why would secular reason, asked only to acknowledge a genealogical kinship with a form of thought it still compartmentalizes and condescends to, pay serious attention to what that form of thought has to offer? By Habermas’s own account the two great worldviews still remain far apart. Religions resist becoming happy participants in a companionable pluralism and insist on the rightness, for everyone, of their doctrines. Liberal rationality is committed to pluralism and cannot affirm the absolute rightness of anything except its own (empty) proceduralism.
The borrowings and one-way concessions Habermas urges seem insufficient to effect a true and fruitful rapprochment. Nothing he proposes would remove the deficiency he acknowledges when he says that the “humanist self-confidence of a philosophical reason which thinks that it is capable of determining what is true and false” has been “shaken” by “the catastrophes of the twentieth century.” The edifice is not going to be propped up and made strong by something so weak as a reminder, and it is not clear at the end of a volume chock-full of rigorous and impassioned deliberations that secular reason can be saved. There is still something missing.
Any thoughts? Steve Smith?
It’s an odd claim for Fish to make, since he isn’t obviously religious. Nor is his postmodern criticism of liberal neutrality religiously based. Of course some religious believers have adopted similar criticisms. These criticisms are fairly typical now (to the point of being rather tired), and Fish appeals to them in some of his work. But one doesn’t have to be religious to argue that liberalism isn’t neutral and that it represents a particular conception of the good.
So here are two questions for Fish: First, unless all conceptions of the good are “religion,” what is the alternative to secular reason for those who aren’t “religious” in the traditional sense, as I assume he’s not. Second, it seems rather contradictory to accuse liberalism of lacking neutrality but then claiming that it is merely a form of “(empty) proceduralism”. Either liberalism has strong substantive content, or it doesn’t. Which is it? And if it does have content (as nearly all actually existing liberals have thought, do think, and will continue to think), why isn’t that enough?
As to Oxlan’s last question, “why isn’t that enough?”, I suppose this might be a quick answer: Insofar as liberalism purports to be neutral as to the good or the good life, then liberalism, as Fish says, is “missing in self-awareness.” Insofar as liberals drop the pretense of neutrality and are upfront about their views of the good life (and it seems to me that this is basicaly what Mill does), then the question is whether those views can be justified, grounded in anything, defended as anything more than something that particular liberally-oriented people happen to value. I take it that Fish, Habermas, and others are coming to see that this is the secular liberal’s predicament– which is why they are beginning to wonder whether something more substantial, or maybe religious, is needed. But that’s an admission that secular liberals are reluctant to make, which is why for the most part liberalism is reluctant to drop the posture of neutrality.
As for Fish’s own views as to what the deeper Truth is, I think it’s hard to tell. I agree with Oxlan that Fish is not obviously religious, but it’s not obvious that he isn’t religious either. He tends to be pretty coy, I think, about what at bottom he really believes. I once had an opportunity to ask him, but he declined the opportunity to answer. My guess is that he’s honestly not sure. He can see that a lot of modern moral and moral-political thought is unsatisfactory and often deceptive, and he enjoys pointing that out, but maybe he really isn’t sure what the deeper Truth is, or whether there is one. I can’t exactly fault him for that.
Leaving aside whether liberal neutrality can be defended across a range of conceptions of the good, as nearly all advocates of neutrality have argued (including Rawls, et al.), it’s harder to see why the argument against perfectionist (or pluralist) liberalism gets much traction. It’s certainly not for Fish’s reasons — liberals like Mill were quite “self-aware” about the axiological basis of their views. (Mill had a nervous breakdown about it!) Mill’s heirs, and perhaps Raz foremost among them, can hardly be accused of lacking well-developed and self-reflective conceptions of the good.
If the claim is that those conceptions of the good aren’t justified by something transcendent, then the argument isn’t about liberalism, per se. It’s just about whether any conception of the good that isn’t religious, transcendent, etc., can do whatever it is that conceptions of the good are supposed to do. And given that lots of people who don’t have transcendent conceptions of the good lead what are seemingly happy lives, in what are seemingly stable and relatively happy societies, the (strong) argument for religion suggested above looks harder to defend. It’s not that religious people can’t be happy, and that religious societies can’t be stable (and happy) — though the latter claim may be questionable under certain conditions — but rather that these aren’t exclusive paths to important goods.
There’s another issue lurking about the so-called “secular predicament,” which is that those who pose it seems not to be terribly concerned about an equivalent “religious predicament” — namely, that after thousands of years of arguing about religion, we don’t seem to have made much headway on basic theological questions. And given the diversity of religious views in the world, including (and increasingly) the rejection of religion, it’s a little puzzling why the “secular predicament” should lead back to religion — as if it’s harder to justify the value of pluralism or autonomy than it is a theonomous morality premised on claims about the existence, nature, and will of the divine. Maybe secular liberals can be forgiven for thinking that the latter project has proven to be even more difficult to justify than their own.
In thinking about these issues, I suspect that it’s helpful to distinguish between what we might call “practical” questions and “philosophical” questions. A practical question would be whether a person (or a society) can in fact live a good and happy life (or be virtuous, or whatever) on the basis of (or only on the basis of) religious (or secular) values, commitments, and beliefs. A more philosophical question, if I can call it that, would ask whether any adequate justification can be given for the values and commitments a person or society happens to embrace. [Yes, I'm bracketing the hard question of what counts as an “adequate justification.”]
If these questions are provisionally separated out, then a range of possible positions becomes available. It might be, for example, that a person can live a happy and praiseworthy life on the basis of secular commitments, but that if we asked how those commitments could be justified or what they presupposed, we would be pushed into the “religious” domain. [These terms–“religious” and “secular”– are so unsatisfactory, but what can we do about it at this point?] Or, conversely, it might be that a person lives a happy, admirable life on the basis of a religious faith, but if we were to really examine the matter we’d find that the faith is based on false beliefs but that the goodness of the person’s life could be accounted for in more secular terms. I take it that a lot of people might say something like this about, say, Mother Theresa.
Same for societies. Indeed, I think there are fairly familiar views which hold a) that religion is false but societies need it– to support civic virtue, law abidingness, etc., or b) that societies can get by quite well without religion, or without the “true religion,” but (unbeknownst to them) their just and true commitments are nonetheless ultimately grounded in realities that are “religious.” A certain kind of natural law view may explain the flourishing of “pagan” societies in this way, for example. Indeed, it’s possible to believe, I think, that societies depend ultimately on religious assumptions but that it’s better (under certain circumstances, anyway) that societies not be conscious of or explicit about this fact.
Distinguishing these kinds of questions doesn’t supply answers to the questions Oxlan asks, of course. And it’s surely true that religious approaches provoke plenty of problems and questions of their own. Still, conflating the questions can cause difficulties, I think. For example, people who argue for a “religious” basis of morality are sometimes taken as denying that there can be virtuous atheists. That’s unfortunate, and a misunderstanding, I think. Similarly, arguments about the attractiveness of societies during religious periods in comparison to more secular societies seem more directly responsive to the practical than the philosophical questions.
I’m not entirely sure about the distinction between practical and philosophical questions. There is a healthy part of the liberal tradition that is skeptical of distinctions like this one. Beginning at least with social contract theorists and up through the classical utilitarians (but not Sedgwick), liberals of various sorts have emphasized that part of living well is living according to principles that one can understand and accept for oneself, rather than living according to superstition, opaque tradition, or noble lies. How we live as a practical matter should be something that we can justify, at least to ourselves, and, perhaps optimistically, to others. So the practical should follow the philosophical on this view.
This is partly why enlightenment forms of liberalism have been opposed to esoteric moral theories (whether religious or consequentialist) and conservative traditionalism. Our practices ought to be able to survive personal and public scrutiny, at least if the standards set for such scrutiny is reasonable, whatever that means (i.e., whatever it means to have an adequate justification). Skeptics will say that our practices can’t be justified, or that it’s practically harmful to seek justification. (It seems like David Brooks gives a popular version of this argument about once a month in the Times.) But of course those claims, too, must be justified.
In any event, secular liberals can happily acknowledge the distinction between practice and justification, while arguing that former should track the latter. Their religious critics may have a harder time of it. They have to explain why secular citizens who believe they have secular justifications for their practices are either living badly (practice) or mistaken about their justifications (philosophy). But, returning to the point above, both of those claims turn out to be very hard, if not impossible, to demonstrate. That is especially true when the type of foundational (or postmodern) skepticism applied to liberal theories of value is turned on religious theories. Another way to put the point might be: how would religiously-based morality hold up under Fish’s gaze? If you think the answer is: “Not well,” then maybe there is something wrong with the gaze. Maybe Fish’s brand of skepticism is not how we should go about determining whether our moral theories are justified. There are other, and rather more plausible, alternatives.
IN suggsting that the practical and philosophical questions should be “provisionally separated out” for some purposes, I didn’t mean to suggest that they are wholly independent or unrelated. But sometimes people seem to be talking more about one type of question, and it can be confusing if we don’t recognize that. As I suggested, for example, someone can believe that “secular” societies have functioned better than “religious” societies, or vice versa, without necessarily being committed to the superiority of secular or religious accounts of ethics as a philosophical matter. That’s all. I agree that ultimately, both in our understandings and in our lives, it’s good to try to bring these dimensions together.
Would “religious” theories be equally vulnerable to Fish-type skepticism? I’d be reluctant to say, in part because, once again, “religious” and “secular” cover so many different things. However, it does seem to me that although questions can be raised and doubts registered about any theory of value or morality or political morality, the doubts and vulnerabilities can be different in nature. Sometimes the objection is, basically, “Your views seem to be conclusions in desperate need of plausible premises (which you don’t seem to reocgnize).” Sometimes the objection is more along the lines of “Your premises seem to me in need of support (which I don’t think you can give).”
I think the Fish-Hambermas concern is that modern secular accounts invite the first type of objection. Classical religious accounts, by contrast, seem more likely to elicit the second type of objection.
To the extent that we can distinguish “religious” from “secular” moralities — and we do seem to distinguish them somehow — it’s of course possible that they are vulnerable to different sorts of objections. But in this context, how different really are these two objections:
1. Your views are conclusions that need justification.
2. Your views are based on premises that need justification.
Premises can be easily reframed as conclusions. So the secular liberal says: “All human beings are entitled to equal respect.” That is a conclusion, and the objection is that secular liberals have no plausible premises concerning the qualities of human beings that entitle them to such respect. (Of course, to that objection, there are now many competing secular moral, meta-ethical, and axiological theories.)
Now the religious liberal says: “All human beings are entitled to equal respect because all human beings are made in the image of God.” If the premise is true, then (maybe?) the conclusion follows. But the premise needs justification. The premise is a conclusion based on a series of complicated arguments about the existence and nature of God. And the objection follows that this conclusion is in need of plausible premises, or that those premises are themselves conclusions that require justification, and so on.
Does it help the religious liberal that the argument takes place one (or more) steps down the inferential chain? It’s hard to see why.
My claim is that the Fish-Habermas debate suffers from excessive anxiety about liberal premises, which is partly due to a double-standard regarding the nature of justification. If Habermas turned his critical project toward religion, it’s doubtful that he would find most existing accounts satisfactory. There is almost nothing in Fish’s work which suggests that he would reach any different conclusions. And even if I’m wrong about Habermas or Fish, others would no doubt have these reactions, and likely for reasons similar to those given above.
I’m just sort of thinking out loud here (or thinking on the keyboard). I think I was mistaken if I implied that the important difference is over how far up or down the argument chain the disagreement occurs. It’s something else.
How about this? Some objections basically assert that “Your claim [about equal moral worth, or whatever] needs justification, but given your view of how the world is constituted, it’s not clear how an adequate justification could be given.” This seems different than an objection that basically asserts, “I can see how your claim makes sense given your view of how the world is constituted, but I think that view is likely false, and I doubt that you can give adequate justifications for that view.” These objections seem to call attention to different kinds of (asserted) failures– even though both objections could be described as pointing to a lack of adequate justification.
It seems to me that Fish-type criticisms of secular liberalism raise more the first kind of objection. And I think that that type of objection is likely to have less force against (some) classical theistic positions. Whether there is a God is of course very contestable. But the theist believes (rightly or wrongly) that there is, and given this belief, the rest may follow. (Obviously there’s room for separate debate about that . . . .)
So the distinction is between (1) epistemic incoherence, and (2) epistemic falsity? The problem with secular liberalism is that it’s based on naturalism, non-cognitivism, or something along those lines, and those broader philosophical theories can’t support their political claims. Is that the gist of the argument?
If it is, then (again) secular liberals have lots of responses, depending on their meta-ethical views. Some, like Raz, are moral realists, who believe in objective values. And they would argue that their beliefs about value cohere with plausible epistemologies. Those in the Kantian tradition, or who embrace some version of moral constructivism, will claim a different form of objectivity for moral values, and they will also argue that this form of objectivity is consistent with their epistemological and metaphysical views.
The point here isn’t to engage those liberal views. It’s just to note that, in this limited sense, realist and constructivist secular liberals are like religious believers — they claim to have internally coherent views. We can debate those views, but the same is true on the religious side of things.
I apologize if this is becoming repetitive, or if I’m harping on the same themes. But it strikes me that Fish-type criticisms (and critics) are deeply impressed with a certain criticism of liberalism, and not much impressed with classical criticisms of religion, to which many liberal theories developed in response. And it’s hard to see why exactly that is.
If the choice we face is epistemic incoherence or epistemic falsity, why is the latter preferable? We could set aside this philosophical problem, and just focus on practice. But somehow we do seem driven to ask philosophical sorts of questions about practice. Again, liberals might be forgiven here for thinking that objections to traditional forms of religion are so deep and long-standing, with little sign of progress, that it makes sense to tackle the incoherence problem. Maybe some headway can be made on that front. Some might take a tragic or pessimistic view about their prospects, but, with a few exceptions, liberals tend to be an optimistic, progressive lot. Maybe that helps explain why they persist with secular theories.
Oxlan, I noticed you had similar concerns about religious critics of secularism in regard to an early post at this blog. While there are plenty of religious critics of secularism or liberalism who don’t notice the parallel weaknesses of their own position (which seems natural enough), I think there are also many who do understand, and whose defensible criticisms are twofold: one, secularism is no more rational than religion when it comes to foundational issues of values, morality and meaning (often a defensive posture), and two, secularism seems to have some practical disadvantages, or lack some practical advantages, in regard to such matters, which would go to why the challenge of religious epistemic falsity might be preferable to that of secular epistemic incoherence.
I don’t think we can look at secular people and culture and reach any very useful conclusions, as you seem to want to do, about how well people can do without reliance on religion (or faith, if a broader term is needed). It seems to me that even the most secular person or culture has been deeply formed by things that have religious roots. Secularism seems bound to remove itself from those roots eventually, but that could take many more generations, if it ever happens.
I don’t find the philosophical attempts to ground an objectivist morality all that rationally promising, or the attempts to consciously substitute a subjectivist morality (or argue it doesn’t matter) so practically promising as I’d like. I may be subject to what you regard as excessive anxiety about such things. You’ve argued the secularists haven’t been at it so long as the religious, but as I see it the attempts go back to the beginnings of philosophy. Not that such a consideration is decisive. It’s the story of nature that science tells that makes me think there’s no likely place for objectivist morality and values (which is reflective of Steve’s latter formulation of the objection to liberalism). The most promising secular explanations of our moral experience, which is the data of moral theory, don’t rely on or even make plausible room for any robust moral realism, and the forms of “realism” that are more restricted and fit well with science are simply forms of subjectivism, in my view, in that they ultimately depend on desire, belief, accepted practice or some other subjective/intersubjective factor. (This doesn’t necessarily line up with Fish’s views.)
This has been a helpful exchange, for me anyway, but I also regret that I haven’t managed to capture what seems to be missing in modern secular ethical positions, and that leads even someone like Habermas to wonder whether something more religious is needed. A distinction between epistemic incoherence and epistemic falsity may help to identify the difference (and I take it we’re recognizing that these criticisms will be contested and probably can’t be evaluated at the wholesale level– “secular” and “religious”). But my sense is that there’s something more and different going on here.
What we’d want is to consider something like “thinness,” or “substantiality.” I’m not sure what the right term would be. But the concern is that many secular moralities, in their commitments to things like intrinsic human worth, have a very thin quality to them. They mor or may not satisfy some standard of “coherence,” but the real concern is that they seem to be more verbal than substantial (which is how modern secular professions of moral realism often seem to me).
It’s as if someone proposed to march the army across a frozen lake, and people started looking to see if the lake is frozen all the way across. A sensible observer might think, “Well, it’s true that if the ice has large holes in it, you wouldn’t be able to march the army across it. But actually, these questions miss the more fundamental point, which is that whether or not there are holes, this ice just isn’t think enough to hold an army.”
Steve, I’m not sure what you have in mind, but one kind of “substantiality” religion often does well is to give room for a rich framework for value and meaning that goes all the way up and down and side to side, as it were. That is, to take an example already touched on by Oxlan, in Christianity (among others) we are created in the image of God and this grounds our worth in a more vast and eternal way than the leading secular alternative that we have worth ultimately because we happen to value ourselves and each other and what we do (we’re just wired that way). The Christian view ties our worth into an absolute worth, the sum and source of all good, all-powerful, eternal.
All of that can appear pretty abstract and “thin” too, and you still run up soon to the end of the why answers (why is God good, why does God exist, etc.), but the story is at least theoretically suffused with value and meaning through and through, from beginning to end (as it were), from the atoms to the cosmos, rather than merely locally, as it seems secular value and meaning must be (value and meaning happened to arise as we evolved and will eventually die with us, etc.). Both the Christian and secular frameworks can be enriched and filled in with all manner of articulation with stories and possible explanations, but the Christian framework is bigger and can accommodate a broader set of possible meanings (we’re here for an eternal, transcendent reason, etc.).
Christianity also ties the theoretical framework into a practical one in ways that extend beyond what secular alternatives can. Our purpose fundamentally includes seeing and acting in accord with the divine in ourselves and others. It isn’t merely something we are obliged to do in some way because it’s moral; it’s something that reaches out from and to us and draws us to act if we only keep an eye fixed on the basis for it, the divine in us and others. Besides that direct inducement, there is also the promise of eternal consequence and import related to our behavior (at least on many views of Christianity). While in some situations, on the secular view, only I see what I do, in Christianity God is always with me.
And so on. These are what I class as practical advantages of religious morality. They’re obviously open to strong criticism as to the truth of their basic claims, but if accepted (and reasons can be had to accept them that are frowned on in secular circles) there’s good reason to expect they will work better for some people in some circumstances than the alternatives.
That’s a very helpful explanation, I think.
This exchange has been helpful to me as well. A few quick thoughts:
1. I’m still not sure what “substantial” means here. It might be (1) the claim that there is some transcendent meaning in the universe, which gives us value and orients us toward the good; or (2) whatever its source, the pervasiveness of value and meaning in a belief system; or (3) the power of an ethical or moral view to motivate action in accordance with its requirements — or maybe all of the above, and then some?
2. If this discussion is really about moral motivation, people like Fish and Habermas who have already taken a postmodern/post-metaphysical stance must have mixed views. On the one hand, they might, like Habermas, appreciate the depth of motivation that seems to accompany some religious moralities (though that turns out to be, and forgive the pun, a mixed blessing). For that reason, they might be nostalgic for an enchanted world. But, on the other hand, that won’t be sufficient to accept what they otherwise view as an entire system of false beliefs. So maybe they have some lament, or a tragic view of modernity, and, in response, they try to forge relationships with those who still view the world in an enchanted way. I might not be able to walk my army across the lake, but maybe you still can? (Though I have my doubts about the lake metaphor. What if you think the belief that it’s frozen is false?)
3. If the concern is about moral motivation, then we have to ask whether people with secular moral views have it, or not. Sanpete comes close to suggesting above that we can’t know whether secular people can lead good lives or act morally. That is because their views still depend on religious concepts, values, etc. But this argument strikes me as implausible, indeed almost desperate in its attempt to deny the motivational strength of secular belief systems. Secular people behave morally (and not only because it’s the right thing to do, as if they have a code separate from all the rest of their personal and ethical commitments), raise decent families, rescue other people, promote social welfare systems, have solidarity with others, etc. It seems counter-productive to deny this, or to claim that all of these effects are lingering practical benefits of religion.
4. No one is denying that religion can motivate people. There is certainly plenty of evidence for that. So what Sanpete says is true: “there’s good reason to expect they [religious moralities] will work better for some people in some circumstances than the alternatives.” But if that were all there is to it, there would be less hand-wringing among some post-metaphysical liberals. They aren’t worried (at least not in this debate) about religious moralists preaching to the choir. They’re worried about whether secular citizens are missing something. And, as I’ve been arguing, even if they think something is missing, it will be very difficult, probably impossible, for them to counsel that the proper response is to adopt what they otherwise think are false beliefs.
5. If that’s right and if getting religion isn’t an option, then the question for such liberals is: what is the proper response?
Oxlan, my point you address in your paragraph 3 doesn’t deny that secular people, as we commonly classify them, behave morally or live happily, or assert that this is due to the lingering effects of religion. My claim is that it’s hard to tell what secular life would be like without the lingering effects of religion by looking at secular life as it is now. Do you think secular life isn’t still shaped by its religious roots? This isn’t only a matter of belief systems, though those seem influenced by religion, but of all areas of life touched by religion.
The issue as I see it isn’t whether secular belief systems can motivate people, but how that motivation compares with the religious versions. It seems to me from both personal experience and a comparison of the types of motivational factors each can offer that there is a significant difference. It’s hard to tell how significant that difference could become. I think there are good reasons to think it could matter enough to worry about.
As for what should be done, I was hoping you would know! My own very limited idea is that for the time being people shouldn’t be reckless in attacking religion as though we knew there was already an equally good alternative in place. Of course, that tidbit of wisdom may well not be enough. You’re surely right that it would be a hard sell to argue that people should believe things that appear not to be true, even if that would be rational and people are inclined to it anyway.
I don’t think there is any mystery about what life without religion is or would be like. I don’t think religion exercises much of a lingering affect for most self-consciously secular people, and, the effect it does have on some (especially for gays and lesbians) is oppressive and repudiated.
At a societal level, there are actually existing liberal secular cultures that provide perfectly good models for what a society without religion can look like. The basic social structure of those societies is so vastly different than anything that would be ordered according to traditional religion that I don’t think it’s plausible or helpful (in an explanatory sense) to attribute those structures to religious concepts. The basic concepts of those systems are deeply humanist, not at all oriented toward anything transcendent. And there is no need to posit anything transcendent to explain why they are this way, why they function as they do, and why they are sustainable over time.
So the short answer is: some secular social and moral systems can supply the necessary motivation and sense of community. Some religious systems can also do this in non-destructive ways, but they aren’t necessary for a well-ordered society.
What’s the alternative for people like Fish and Habermas? Stop worrying so much. In Habermas’s terms: therapy. That’s one function of philosophy, namely, to help us reconcile ourselves to the world (and the universe) as we best understand it. Religion does this in one way, but it’s not the only way. Philosophy can also provide some consolation, and, for liberals, even some hope.
Oxlan, my concern isn’t only with religion in a narrow sense but also what I see as faith-based foundational principles in general. Most self-consciously secular people I know, like most other people, don’t think rigorously about the foundations of their values; they soak up some vague, not entirely coherent mix of subjectivism and objectivism (which would require a transcendent fact), some deontological ethics and some consequentialism, and whatever values are in vogue or happen to appeal. It’s highly intuition- and faith-based, in that it’s not adequately founded rationally. In that respect, I’m not aware of a culture that accepts and understands morality in a non-faith-based way, though I may not understand what culture you have in mind.
Most secularists I’ve encountered don’t apply the same skeptical arguments to the foundations and content of morality as to the foundations and content of religion, but I don’t see why they won’t eventually, and it’s hard to tell what it will be like if they do and reach similar conclusions. I do know what it’s like if a few theorists do, but not if a broad group makes the attempt over a long time.
In addition to that larger concern, it does seem to me secular morality is still importantly shaped and sustained by religion in the more narrow sense. The Western focus on human rights, for example, has received all along support from Judeo-Christian beliefs about the God-given value and birthright of humans; some trace the idea itself to that religious influence. In other cultures the idea didn’t come to have the same central place, if it arose at all. Because of its central place in our culture, theorists have been occupied with giving secular accounts that comes as close as possible to the faith-based versions in strength and basic logic. Non-faith-based explanations of human rights aren’t as direct or strong, however, and presently appear to be of influence mainly among theorists.
In my experience, secular people in the West are still about as likely to cite “Love your neighbor,” the Good Samaritan and Jesus as “the greatest good for the greatest number,” “freedom ends where harm to others begins” and Mill. Something that has so thoroughly influenced society for ages, up to the present, isn’t the kind of thing one escapes the influence of, or which is likely to quickly lose influence even if people no longer accept the legitimacy of its foundations. (The influence of religion isn’t always good, as you point out.)
You don”t directly address the comparison of kinds of motives secularism and religion can provide, other than to say secular motivations work well enough based on your view that we can already see that in practice. There’s a strong prima facie case that losing the religious motives will make a difference. And as I mentioned, my personal experience is that it does make a difference. When I was trying to be a good Christian my sense of morality was stronger, more vivid and more motivating. I haven’t become an axe murderer, but now my moral concerns are more restricted and less urgent. And the fact that they were formed in a religious context has shaped my morality in distinctive ways for which I have no strong secular justification. Indeed, I’m not persuaded that non-faith-based justifications for morality really hold water in a very strong way, e.g. as to why we shouldn’t cheat if we can get away with it.
Maybe I just need therapy, but I still see reason to worry. That’s not inconsistent with hope.
Here’s one pretty obvious general observation: how one thinks about some of these issues is surely influenced by how plausible or implausible one takes one or another more “religious” worldview to be. If you think any such worldview is just beyond the pale, sort of in domain of Zeus and Athena et al. wrangling on Mt. Athos, then you will naturally be inclined to make do with secular moralities because it’s those or nothing. Such moralities may be thin and subject to telling criticisms, but what else is there? Conversely, if a religious worldview seems more plausible (or even true!), then the thinness and deficiencies in the secular views will seem more glaring and unacceptable.
It’s possible that some people are in between. They might have once had a religious faith, for example, and though they no longer embrace that faith, it’s still fresh enough in the memory that they perceive what has been lost. I take it, though, that this isn’t Habermas’s case? He seems to be moving ever so slightly in the opposite direction.
There are a lot of distinct issues raised here, and I’m sorry I don’t have more time to respond to them. But just a few:
1. If secular people are as critical of their own moral foundations as they are of religion, will their moral beliefs survive that criticism? I don’t see why they wouldn’t. There are plenty of philosophical examples of this over the last few hundred years, include some giants in the fields of moral and political philosophy (from Hume to Rawls). I don’t see why skepticism has to be boundless. (Again, my point above was only that if you’re a post-metaphysical critic of liberalism, it’s just a little strange that you wouldn’t have some skepticism about religion — isn’t that implied by being “post-metaphysical”?)
2. Can secular believers and secular societies live well? I don’t see any evidence that they can’t, and plenty of evidence (not merely anecdotal) that societies with ever-declining indices of religious practice (along with pervasive reported agnosticism/atheism, high confidence in scientific institutions, belief in evolution, etc.) are doing as well as societies with very high levels of religiosity. (Phil Zuckerman’s book, Societies without God, is useful reading in this regard.) Some might have a Burkean worry that we’ve never had a truly secular society before — what if it doesn’t work out? But this kind of objection seems to be pervasive in the history of toleration: We’ve never had a society that doesn’t demand religious uniformity; we’ve never had a society that tolerates Catholics, Jews, and atheists; we’ve never had a society that doesn’t provide general support for religion; and so on. This is a continuous, mainly conservative, trope, but the sky never seems to fall.
3. Can people have moral motivation without religion? Again, I’ve never seen any plausible evidence for thinking otherwise. If you define “religion” so expansively as to include any beliefs about morality, then any action motivated by moral belief is tautologically religious. But then the argument is also trivial.
On this issue, Sanpete says, “There’s a strong prima facie case that losing the religious motives will make a difference.” I don’t know what this case is, except perhaps anecdotal. Did you have something more in mind?
4. Given that many important moral concepts (e.g., human rights) have a religious historical pedigree, can those concepts continue to motivate people without belief in their religious foundations? Again, it would be odd if this argument moved people to accept religious belief. That would be rather backwards. But even so, the fact that certain ideas had a particular history doesn’t show that they must continue to carry the same foundations going forward. Many people believe in human rights (and are motivated to great sacrifices to support them) without believing that they are religiously justified. Indeed, providing religious foundations for certain rights may unduly constrain them. Locke’s exclusion of Catholics and atheists is a good historical example. Some of Locke’s ideas may need to be reformulated, put on a new footing, and expanded to include considerations he neglected. This is partly how the development of ideas works. We don’t have to be 17th-century Anglicans, Arminians, or what have you, to think that Locke was on to something.
I agree with Steve that what you make of these issues is almost certainly influenced by your view about the plausibility of various religious and secular moralities. And that might make Habermas a more interesting case than even Fish has suggested.
ps: This is just a suggestion, but it might be helpful to have a preview function for the comments on this blog.
Oxlan, using your numbering:
1. To the extent the metaethical and some ethical views of most people are self-contradictory, ill-founded and/or false (as indicated in the brief description I gave of them), they can’t survive the kind of critical analysis often applied to religion. This isn’t a matter of boundless skepticism, I hope, only the same skepticism typically applied by the secular to religion, as I said.
Yes, there are skeptical foundations for morality such as Hume and Rawls provide that withstand, to some degree or other, the kind of critical analysis applied to religion. They’re all subjectivist, to the extent they hold water, and as such they all have certain weaknesses that go with that. Why not cheat if I won’t get caught? is a (classic) example I mentioned in my previous post. I also outlined earlier some of the additional motivational factors available in religion, lacking in secular morality. Thus the issue arises what effects the comparative weaknesses and lacks of subjectivist, secular morality would have over time. (That’s the prima facie case I referred to.) You haven’t directly engaged that comparison and its implications. You’ve only indirectly argued it doesn’t amount to anything because everything seems fine.
2. I’m afraid the thread of the argument is getting lost. My point isn’t that there’s observational evidence that secularists can’t live well; my point about the observational evidence is that it isn’t as plain as you apparently take it to be, because of the remaining influence of religion (some of which can be thought of as a sort of cultural inertial momentum). My positive argument that there’s reason to worry there may be a problem lies in comparing the motivational factors.
It is heartening that the sky remains in place after all these years, and many scares.
3. I don’t define “religion” so expansively as to include “any beliefs about morality.” As I said, in this context I include with religion in a broad sense faith-based foundational principles, i.e, those accepted without adequate evidence. As I’ve directly implied several times, there are moral theories that aren’t faith-based (some of which are actually true).
4. I’m not able to tell what you have in mind about motivating people to accept religious belief. (In speaking of Christianity I may have given the impression I’m a religious believer. It may help to track the argument better to know I’m an atheist.)
My point about the example of human rights isn’t that secular foundations can’t be given. The point, as I said, is that the religious foundations remain influential, while the influence of the secular foundations, which are weaker and less direct, is mainly among theorists. That was by way of illustrating why current evidence about ostensibly secular culture can’t be taken at face value.
Steve makes a good point, though it may not apply here entirely as expected. The part about perceiving what is lost applies to me, at least.
Thus the issue arises what effects the comparative weaknesses and lacks of subjectivist, secular morality would have over time. (That’s the prima facie case I referred to.) You haven’t directly engaged that comparison and its implications. You’ve only indirectly argued it doesn’t amount to anything because everything seems fine.
As best I can tell, you have two arguments for thinking that religion (folk, or systematic, or either way?) provides better moral motivation than either (1) secular moral theory, or (2) some jumble of secular moral attitudes, with no deep foundations or serious theological content. The first argument is that God is watching, and there are eternal consequences. (This was Locke’s reason for excluding atheists from political society — they didn’t believe in an afterlife, so they had no reason to keep their promises.) The second argument is anecdotal: when you were religious, your had stronger moral motivation.
I have nothing to say about your personal experience. If that’s how you feel about things, so be it. But I don’t see any reason to generalize from that experience. I’m not a sociologist or a psychologist, but I have yet to come across any study showing that avowed atheists, on average, have diminished moral motivation.
The psychological evidence seems to point in the other direction, given that even pre-linguistic babies (10 month olds, according to some recent experiments) show awareness of and responsiveness toward altruism and reciprocal behavior. It looks increasingly likely that some level of moral motivation is hard-wired.
Where sociologists have done studies, less religiosity (across all indices) doesn’t show less moral behavior. Actually, it turns out that the most secular societies in the world (e.g., Denmark, Sweden) turn out to have some of the lowest crime and prison populations in the world.
Now you might say that those societies are getting by on implicitly religious beliefs. But that argument won’t do. First, for the reason I gave above, namely, that what were religious concepts have lost their transcendental foundations, and don’t seem to be less functional for it. Second, on the spectrum of more religious to less religious — that is, as societies become comparatively more secular — social life actually improves. Now, that might not be true for all secular societies. But there are actually existing societies, vastly less religious than our own, to the point of not being seriously religious in any meaningful sense, which are comparatively better off along many dimensions.
So what to make of this? There might be all kinds of explanations. But the one that doesn’t look like it’s doing much work is religiously-based moral motivation.
Let’s get away from the anecdotes. If you know of sociological or psychological studies showing that religion provides stronger moral motivation for uncontroversial moral behavior (i.e., cheating, not murdering, etc.), I’d certainly be interested. Of course, that wouldn’t be the end of the story. Even if religious motivation is higher, we would also want to know whether there is motivation to engage in behavior which is objectionable to those who reject religion. Very strong levels of motivation might also be oppressive if tied to beliefs about the wrongness of practices that others reasonably believe ought to be permissible. (An extreme case might be killing abortion doctors, but we certainly wouldn’t need to go that far to make the point.)
In any event, this debate is better conducted on a more scientific basis. Given the long history of arguments about motivation, I find them presumptively dubious. But I’m willing to consider the evidence and whatever complexities emerge. Maybe some religions are better than others in motivating certain kind of behavior? Maybe some secular societies do a better job at this than others? There are all kinds of possibilities.
On its face, if my concerns are valid, it does seem some effects ought to be visible already, even if they shouldn’t be as pronounced as would occur in a more thoroughly secular culture over a longer time. If there is no obvious effect, the puzzle is why not? The motivational advantages of religion aren’t limited to belief in eternal consequences and God watching. There is also the more expansive, stronger metaphysical basis for morality and meaning. Given the power religion has to motivate in some contexts (even to the point of oppression), we should expect some effects. Right?
I have some theories about about that puzzle, nothing esoteric. The part about eternal consequences doesn’t matter as much as we might expect because it’s generally unclear how the consequences are related to the behavior (will a lie keep me out of heaven?), and they’re distant and vary in certainty of applying at all, according to level of belief.
As for God watching, the effect may not be so different than than that of the conscience, which is experienced by many as a (somewhat) independent entity watching and telling us what’s right. As long as someone believes in or accepts the importance of the conscience, the effect may be much the same regardless of whether that belief is tied to God.
That leaves the more expansive, stronger metaphysical basis for morality and meaning. The effects of this would mostly be less direct. People who want to know why it’s so important to love your neighbor, why life matters and so on may be influenced directly. Most people don’t think so much about such things, and the effects on them are further in the background in most circumstances.
These and other such considerations would tend to predict more subtle effects, but not no effects. Any effects would tend to become more pronounced as culture becomes more secular, religion more remote, and as morality, conscience and such are increasingly demystified. Locke’s argument doesn’t take into account that that an atheist (these days at least) is still likely to have a strong, partly faith-based, sometimes even quasi-mystical view of morality and conscience. The atheist I’m concerned about doesn’t. (I think the appeal to “the long history of arguments about motivation” is rather broad.)
I agree that the way to settle this is with empirical studies. I don’t know of any very strong research on this. The studies I’ve seen about the effects on morality in particular appear of little value. There’s generally little or no control for potential confounding variables, and the standards of morality involved are often controversial (as you seem to have noticed) or not very telling. This applies to much of the research I’ve seen comparing more secular societies with less secular ones in terms of murder rates, crime, income, well-being measurements, etc. Prevalence of guns, ethnic diversity, economic inequality and *lots* of other things can skew the data in various ways, and how to sort out the results in regard to morality is generally not so clear. I have seen studies that do use some controls and seem to show some advantages to mental health from religion, but it’s hard to say how that would tie to morality. (Of course, maybe mental health is as important as morality anyway.)
I’m sure some aspects of morality are hard-wired, but it’s plainly something susceptible of environmental influence as well.
“First, for the reason I gave above, namely, that what were religious concepts have lost their transcendental foundations, and don’t seem to be less functional for it.”
What I said that I intended as a response to this is that secular moral beliefs continue to be largely accepted on faith, including in forms that imply transcendent facts. The non-faith-based, non-transcendent versions are mainly influential among theorists, who haven’t ever made up a large part of a study about the effects, as far as I know, so it’s hard to say how the functionality of their versions compares.
This may be of interest. I read this 2001 comprehensive review study of the effects of religion and spirituality on mental and physical health some years ago. It may have been superseded by now.
“Religious involvement, spirituality, and medicine: implications for clinical practice”
by Mueller PS, Plevak DJ, Rummans TA
Division of General Internal Medicine, Department of Anesthesiology, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minn., 55905, USA
http://www.mayoclinicproceedings.com/content/76/12/1225.full.pdf
Abstract
“Surveys suggest that most patients have a spiritual life and regard their spiritual health and physical health as equally important. Furthermore, people may have greater spiritual needs during illness. We reviewed published studies, meta-analyses, systematic reviews, and subject reviews that examined the association between religious involvement and spirituality and physical health, mental health, health-related quality of life, and other health outcomes. We also reviewed articles that provided suggestions on how clinicians might assess and support the spiritual needs of patients. Most studies have shown that religious involvement and spirituality are associated with better health outcomes, including greater longevity, coping skills, and health-related quality of life (even during terminal illness) and less anxiety, depression, and suicide. Several studies have shown that addressing the spiritual needs of the patient may enhance recovery from illness. Discerning, acknowledging, and supporting the spiritual needs of patients can be done in a straightforward and noncontroversial manner. Furthermore, many sources of spiritual care (e.g., chaplains) are available to clinicians to address the spiritual needs of patients.”
A quote from the conclusion. (Levin is some authority on showing causality in medical research.)
“According to Levin, to verify a causal relationship between a variable (eg, religious involvement) and a health outcome (eg, mortality), 3 questions must be answered. Is there an association? If so, is the relationship valid? If so, is it causal? Regarding the first question, a majority of nearly 850 studies of mental health and 350 studies of physical health have found a direct relationship between religious involvement and spirituality and better health outcomes.
“The association between religious involvement and spirituality and better health outcomes seems valid. This association has been found regardless of the study design (eg, prospective, retrospective) and the population studied. In addition, religious and spiritual variables were not the primary ones or the only ones used in most studies. These study design features limit bias. Furthermore, recent well-designed studies have shown a direct relationship between religious involvement and spirituality and better health outcomes even after adjustment for potential confounding variables.
“Whether religious involvement and spirituality cause better health outcomes is more difficult to determine. Levin describes 9 features of a causal epidemiologic association: strength, consistency, specificity, temporality, biological gradient, plausibility, coherence, experiment, and analogy; for some of these features (strength, consistency, temporality, plausibility, analogy), the published studies support causality, whereas for the others, the evidence is insufficient.”
I’ll leave you the last word on the substance of this exchange, but I just wanted to say thanks again for the back and forth.
Thank you, Oxlan. You’ve given me plenty to mull over.