Statements that seem to be common sense to the speakers are nonetheless often profoundly religious in nature. Imagine that:
Ms. A argues that all safety nets for the poor should be removed, in the name of “survival of the fittest.”
Ms. B might respond, “The poor have the right to a decent standard of living-they are human beings like the rest of us!”
Ms. A could then come back with the fact that many bioethicists today think the concept of “human” is artificial and impossible to define. She might continue that there is no possibility of treating all living organisms’ as ends rather than means and that some always have to die that others may live. That is simply the way nature works.
If
Ms. B counters with a pragmatic argument, that we should help the poor simply because it makes society work better,
Ms. A could come up with many similar pragmatic arguments about why letting the poor just die would be even more efficient.
Now
Ms. B would be getting angry. She would respond heatedly that starving the poor is simply unethical,
but
Ms. A could retort, “Who says ethics must be the same for everyone?”
Ms. B would finally exclaim: “I wouldn’t want to live in a society like the one you are describing!”
In this interchange
Ms. B has tried to follow John Rawls and find universally accessible, “Neutral and objective” arguments that would convince everyone that we must not starve the poor. She has failed because there are none. In the end
Ms. B affirms the equality and dignity of human individuals simply because she believes it is true and right. She takes as an article of faith that people are more valuable than rocks or trees-though she can’t prove such a belief scientifically. Her public policy proposals are ultimately based on a religious stance.
This leads a legal theorist, Michael J. Perry, to conclude that it is “quixotic, in any event, to attempt to construct an airtight barrier between religiously grounded moral discourse … and [secular] discourse in public political argument.” Rorty and others argue that religious argument is too controversial, but Perry retorts in
Under God? Religious Faith and Liberal Democracy that secular grounds for moral positions are no less controversial than religious grounds, and a very strong case can be made that all moral positions are at least implicitly religious. Ironically, insisting that religious reasoning be excluded from the public sphere is itself a controversial “sectarian” point of view.
When you come out into the public square it is impossible to leave your convictions about ultimate values behind. Let’s take marriage and divorce laws as a case study
(you could also use same sex marriage). Is it possible to craft laws that we all agree “work” apart from particular worldview commitments? I don’t believe so. Your views of what is right will be based on what you think the purpose of marriage is. If you think marriage is mainly for the rearing of children to benefit the whole society, then you will make divorce very difficult. If you think the purpose of marriage is more primarily for the happiness and emotional fulfilment of the adults who enter it, you will make divorce much easier. The former view is grounded in a view of human flourishing and well-being in which the family is more important than the individual, as is seen in the moral traditions of Confucianism, Judaism and Christianity.
The latter approach is a more individualistic view of human nature based on Enlightenment’s understanding of things. The divorce laws you think “work” will depend on prior beliefs about what it means to be happy and fully human. There is no objective, universal consensus about what that is. Although many continue to call for the exclusion of religious views from the public square, increasing numbers of thinkers, both religious and secular, are admitting that such a call is itself religious.
The following above is an except out of the book ‘The Reason for God’ by Timothy Keller.
Thank you for reading
Josh
