The (im)possibility of secular judgment
Stanley Fish (whose articles consistently elicit a response from me) has an interesting piece up on two troublesome distinctions in liberal thought: the distinction between religious and secular reasons and the distinction between public and private reasons. As is often the case, the article is really a supportive book review in disguise – this time of law professor Steven Smith’s “The Disenchantment of Secular Discourse.”
“Classical Liberals,” according to Fish, have long argued that when it comes to political debate, religious or value-laden arguments are inadmissible, since they operate on assumptions that are not universally shared or provable. Instead, they argue, we should rely squarely on “secular reason” to do the job of here-and-now policy-making.
But according to Smith / Fish, “secular reason” can’t actually solve ANY of our political problems. At least not without “smuggling in” some of that which it despises – metaphysical assumptions, values, and comprehensive doctrines. Science and reason can’t tell us what to do with data; we must choose how to use the tools of reason, what to aim them at, how to interpret information, and which facts really matter. Reason alone can’t do all of that picking, choosing, and ranking – we need some kind of substantive value system to do that.
By now, this is a very, very familiar argument, and I tend to think that Smith and Fish are beating a dead horse. Or perhaps the wrong horse. The authors set up an extreme dichotomy between substantive values and cold reason, between religion and science, and smash down the so-called “scientistic” view with ease. But first, who is really making these exclusionary arguments? It’s certainly true that many secular liberals would like to exclude religious arguments from public discourse, if not formally, at least normatively. But perhaps this isn’t so much because religious arguments are “value judgments,” but because they are bad arguments in and of themselves…
It’s possible to think (as Austin Dacey and Noah Feldman do) that both reason and morality are part of a broader philosophical frame, in which we approach problems with the discerning eye of skepticism but recognize the relevance of metaphysical foundations. Perhaps the distinction to draw is between those (like postmoderists) who question our ability to decide at all between value sets, and those who believe that applying reason to values can help to flesh out better and worse prescriptions.
The danger in Fish and Smith’s line of argument is the implication of moral relativism – the notion that anyone claiming the high ground in a non-mathematical debate is guilty of arrogance or naivety. I would submit that secular discourse can be at once rational and value-laden; that participants of faith and of no faith can and must test their claims in an open exchange of ideas.
There is no one source of moral reasoning – instead we are influenced in our judgment by our biology, by our experiences, and by our cognitive capacity as mammals with the ability think in abstraction. Even ethics grounded in a religious tradition are not so simple as they seem – how, after all, does one come to choose a religion over another, or decide which interpretation of each scripture is ethically superior? Such judgments require inspiration from outside of the tradition itself.
Professors Fish and Smith would benefit from grappling with a more nuanced version of secular discourse – one that does not invite attack so easily by pretending to avoid ethics. Beating up red herrings only takes us so far.
-Colin
Related posts:
- Douthat on religious dialogue
- Fish on Habermas
- Reason and faith in higher education
- Faith in the Supreme Court
- Sacred (but political) texts
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2 Responses to “The (im)possibility of secular judgment”
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Every political debate has inherent value judgments. It simply sounds more clinical and authoritative to say: “I’m going by the numbers”. Neutrality (or at least the appearance of it) is a great way of avoiding the label of “ideologue”.
Well, I haven’t read the piece you refer to, but this sounds pretty typical. It is true that most/all social decisions require some kind of values or weightings. The question is why we should allocate special attention to values *just* because they are associated with a religion. I’d like to see someone answer that without tying themselves into knots or saying something logically equivalent to ‘because God said so’.