Faith And Reason

Quite a bit of the recent blogospheric noise about the (in)commensurability of faith and reason in politics is traceable back to this post by Kevin Drum a few days ago. Responding to a LAT op-ed ostensibly aimed at defending the jurisprudential philosophy of Clarence Thomas, Kevin writes the following of Thomas's cited belief that "our rights come not from government but from a 'creator' and 'the laws of nature and of nature's God'":

Coming from a priest or a preacher, this would be fine. Coming from a Supreme Court justice who's supposed to interpret the constitution on secular grounds, it's an embarrassment.

Of the right-blogosphere's reactions and responses, I thought this post by Pejman Yousefzadeh was the smartest and the most likely to foster dialogue. Pejman's main point is that the views to which Thomas adheres are an expression of natural law theory, and not to be so easily mocked. He writes:

I find it bizarre that Kevin Drum seems to think that Clarence Thomas is an "embarrassment" simply because Thomas is an adherent to the concept of natural law...[N]atural law has a rich intellectual history behind it, and indeed, the key portion of the Declaration of Independence is founded on natural law principles...Again, I do not subscribe to the natural law theory of jurisprudence when natural law comes into conflict with an originalist or strict constructionist interpretation of the Constitution. But the debate over natural law and its role in American jurisprudence is a far more serious one than Kevin appears to realize. As such, the debate--along with Justice Thomas--deserves far more respect than Kevin appears willing to afford.

In the body of the post, Pejman goes on to cite Thurgood Marshall in an approving reference to "natural rights." I'll step up and answer Pejman's rhetorical question: Kevin Drum would (I assume) not consider Thurgood Marshall an "embarrassment."

Kieran at Crooked Timber came up with what strikes me as the perhaps decisive synthesis of this dialectic:

My feeling is that objections to Clarence Thomas’s jurisprudence should focus on what we think people’s rights are, substantively, rather than where we think they come from. But let me comment on the God vs Man question anyway. Actually, let Roberto Mangabeira Unger comment on it, from his Politics:

Modern social thought was born proclaiming that society is made and imagined, that it is a human artifact rather than an expression of an underlying natural order.

The Constitution of the United States is a decisive political expression of this conviction. It doesn’t preclude deep and shared religious convictions — it just doesn’t presuppose them.

Needless to say, I agree with Kieran (and Mangabeira), but I want to table this for now in order to set up a related problem. About a month ago, Eugene Volokh enunciated a very-persuasive looking challenge to the position I've been endorsing recently:

Imposing One's Religious Dogma on the Legal System:

I keep hearing evangelical Christian leaders criticized for "trying to impose their religious dogma on the legal system," for instance by trying to change the law to ban abortion, or by trying to keep the law from allowing gay marriage. I've blogged about this before, but I think it's worth mentioning again.

I like to ask these critics: What do you think about the abolitionist movement of the 1800s? As I understand it, many -- perhaps most or nearly all -- of its members were deeply religious people, who were trying to impose their religious dogma of liberty on the legal system that at the time legally protected slavery.

Or what do you think about the civil rights movement? The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., after all, was one of its main leaders, and he supported and defended civil rights legislation as a matter of God's will, often in overtly religious terms. He too tried to impose his religious dogma on the legal system, which at the time allowed private discrimination, and in practice allowed governmental discrimination as well.

Or how about religious opponents of the draft, opponents of the death penalty, supporters of labor unions, supporters of welfare programs, who were motivated by their religious beliefs -- because deeply religious people's moral beliefs are generally motivated by their religious beliefs -- in trying to repeal the draft, abolish the death penalty, protect labor, or better the lot of the poor? Perhaps their actions were wrong on the merits; for instance, maybe some anti-poverty problems caused more problems than they solved, or wrongly took money from some to give to others. But would you condemn these people on the grounds that it was simply wrong for them to try to impose their religious beliefs on the legal system?...

So people should certainly criticize the proposals of the Religious Right (or Religious Left or Secular Right or Secular Left) that they think are wrong on the merits. But they would be wrong to conclude that the proposals are illegitimate simply on the grounds that the proposals rest on religious dogma. Religious people are no less and no more entitled than secular people to enact laws based on their belief systems.

And they would be quite inconsistent to (1) say that religious people ought not enact law based on their religious views, and nonetheless (2) have no objection when religious people do precisely that as to abolition of slavery, enactment of antidiscrimination laws, abolition of the death penalty, repeal of the draft, and so on.

The difference between the point Kevin Drum made and Pejman Yousefzadeh criticizes, versus the point I made and Eugene Volokh criticizes, is that the former concerns the politics of the metaphysical origin of human and civil rights, whereas the latter concerns the legitimacy of the source for beliefs about rights. These two arguments are more than superficially related; there are a variety of biconditionals that would follow from the various orientations they could take relative to one another.

My hunch is that the second argument, about an ethics of political foundationalism, is logically prior, at least from the standpoint of political philosophy. And here, I have no problem conceding, Volokh's criticism is essentially valid and correct. Indeed, I said as much when, clarifying my YDN piece on politicized Evangelicalism, I wrote the following in response to Lukas Halim's objections to the piece:

Where Lukas got the impression that I was referring either to all religious believers or to all Christians is beyond my ability to guess, but it certainly wasn't from the column.

But I can see why there's a certain amount of lingering ambiguity, so I want to try to clarify further.

I can't imagine how it would be possible to construct a politics that isn't both formally and substantively foundationalist; that is, I can't picture even the most enthusiastic supporters of coherentism and infinitism in abstract epistemological debates trying to argue away from foundationalism in politics. That's because, in the case of coherentism for example, there's nothing at all incoherent about political systems we find abhorrent; indeed, the worst tyrannies are often strenuously consistent in their ruling principles. But any political foundationalism is going to run up against the problem that all foundationalisms encounter, namely, that at some point in the explanatory chain, we're going to find a premise or set of premises that are primitive and aren't subject to an analysis. There's a meta-justificatory move that philosophy students can point to without much trouble, but all that really achieves is laying the dilemma of primitivity onto a meta-justificatory criterion rather than the foundational premises they explain.

So the seemingly insoluble problem looks something like this: How can I claim that my political primitives---which correspond roughly to the four freedoms plus rights to democratic participation and the privileging of personal autonomy over collective concerns except in extreme cases---are any more "legitimate" or "appropriate" than the primitives of the Christian right? My meta-justificatory move would be to point to the Constitution, which is a way of ducking the question (okay: now justify the Constitution). Theirs would be to point to the revelation of Almighty God, and I've got to say, they're on mighty firm ground if they've deciphered the will of God correctly. The temptation, faced with competing sets of brute values, is to adopt a thorough-going relativism. Traditionalists, who overlap the religious right to a significant extent, often accuse what they call the "secularists" (who are far more diverse in their views than their opponents tend to admit) of being apologists for such relativism. By the same token, we're in the midst of a new, right-wing relativism in everyday political discourse (watch a solid hour of Fox News and you'll see what I'm talking about), whereby any normative judgements made against Christianity are to be condemned, even before they are assessed, on the grounds that sensitivity to religious people's views takes precedence over truth.

As you might guess, I'm not sympathetic to any of these suggestions, all of which, I think, find their origin in the problem of intractable primitives I've alluded to. If relativism is "true"---and let's assume for the sake of argument that relativism isn't a priori self-defeating---then any pragmatic rationality against adopting it is unpersuasive (I have in mind the Straussian justification of the white lies without which a society cannot cohere).

My suggestion for saving unanalyzable primitives both from the kinds of holy wars they can inspire and from the relativism that looks like a reasonable meta-philosophical conclusion to draw from them, is to borrow the concept of "sensitivity," which was Robert Nozick's proposal for solving the problem of epistemic skepticism. Rather than justify the primitives of political ideologies in terms that include a justificatory element, I think we can analyze them in terms of the sort of subjunctive (counterfactual) conditionals that Nozick envisioned, but in this case, the criterion is empiricism-sensitivity rather than truth-sensitivity. It would go something like this: The legitimate primitives are the ones that would not close themselves off to fundamental reassessment in the face of disconfirmatory evidence. In the possible worlds in which I am given reason to doubt my own primitives, I will be forced to reconsider those primitives, adjusting some and jettisoning others. (And for the sake of the example, we're controlling for psychology---the adaptation of primitives is solely a function of their content.) Under this framework, I think the intuitive argument in favor of Mangabeira's (and, incidentally, Hume's) conception of society as a "human artifact" that is the product of complex historical contingencies as a legitimate foundation for ideology looks awfully compelling; whereas the Aristotelian/Thomistic (both in the sense of Aquinas and Clarence Thomas) vision of society as a collective and more or less inevitable telos looks like exactly the sort of foundation we ought to ditch. It is a system geared towards interpreting mildly disconfirmatory evidence as confirmatory evidence, and grossly disconfirmatory evidence only as proof that such evidence is faulty.

Now, by the way, we have an answer to Pejman Yousafzadeh: "natural law" and "natural rights" don't mean the same thing, even though the philosophy behind them has a shared intellectual history (at least causally), and some of the advocates of the latter saw themselves in the tradition of the former. "Natural rights" dialogue is the product of the Enlightment, of empiricism, and of an ideologized Humeanism; "natural law" dialogue is the product of hyper-rationalist, unarguable Scholastic certainty, and the Aristotelian rejection of empirical science.

And we have an answer to Eugene Volokh as well: What makes certain religious beliefs illegitimate as primitives is not that they are religious; it's that they are substantively incommensurate with empiricism, and are both politically and epistemically "non-sensitive."

UPDATE: Before I get myself into trouble, Rawlsian reflective equilibrium is not the kind of coherentism I had in mind when I said that a coherentist politics struck me as unlikely. The process of arriving at reflective equilibrium is strongly foundationalist in a formal sense (cf. Ernest Sosa's "The Raft and the Pyramid for further explanation). I simply meant that no one involved in political philosophy is going to be satisfied by the justificatory criterion of thorough-going coherentism, namely that internal coherence justifies a system of beliefs.