_________________________________
INTRODUCTION
1. For defenses of the doctrine of neutrality, see John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971) and Ronald Dworkin, A Matter of Principle (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985). It is interesting that many of the critics of this doctrine describe themselves as liberals. See Amy Gutmann, Democratic Education (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987); Stephen Macedo, Liberal Virtues (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990); Joseph Raz, The Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968); and George Sher, Beyond Neutrality: Perfectionism and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). I discuss the reason-tradition dichotomy in Ethics after Babel, expanded ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), pt. 2.
2. I explain all of this Rawlsian terminology and give the relevant references to Rawls’s works in chapter 3 (page 65 and following).
3. Notice that I do not define modern democracy simply as rule by the people. Nor do I place emphasis primarily on the electoral process. “The heart of the matter is a principle about access to public deliberation” see (Oliver O’Donovan, The Desire of the Nations: Rediscovering the Roots of Political Theology [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996], 269–70).
4. O’Donovan, Desire of the Nations, 270.
5. John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (Athens, Ohio: Swallow Press, 1927), 144, 146.
6. Dewey, The Public, 143.
7. Rebecca S. Chopp, “From Patriarchy into Freedom: A Conversation between American Feminist Theology and French Feminism,” in The Postmodern God: A Theological Reader, ed. Graham Ward (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 237.
8. Dewey, The Public, 149.
9. On Emerson’s deliberate use of this tactic in Representative Men, see Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Emerson: The Mind on Fire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 415.
10. The conception of religion I am taking for granted here and throughout part 1 is indebted to George Santayana, The Life of Reason (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1998), and to the excellent exposition of Santayana in Henry Samuel Levinson, Santayana, Pragmatism, and the Spiritual Life (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992).
11. For an explanation of what I mean by “expressive rationality,” see Robert B. Brandom, Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), 105–11, 130. This usage differs from George Lindbeck’s use of the term “expressivism” in The Nature of Doctrine: Theology and Religion in a Postliberal Age (Philadelphia: Westminster John Knox Press, 1984). Lindbeck distinguishes “propositional,” “experiential expressivist,” and “cultural linguistic” theories of religion. The last of these types approximates the form of expressivism one finds in Wilfrid Sellars and Brandom, neither of whom is an expressivist in Lindbeck’s sense. The form of expressivism Lindbeck has in mind is the essentially subjectivist form associated with the Romantics; it views religious language as the expression of a prelinguistic dimension of human experience. The Sellars-Brandom form of expressivism began to take shape in Hegel’s reaction against precisely this aspect of Romantic antirationalism, which he diagnosed as “Begeisterung und Trübheit” (ardor and muddiness) early in the preface to The Phenomenology of Spirit.
12. Whitman was also influenced to some extent by Hegel, as Richard Rorty points out in Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 20–21.
CHAPTER 1
CHARACTER AND PIETY FROM EMERSON TO DEWEY
1. Walt Whitman, Democratic Vistas, in Whitman: Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, ed. Justin Kaplan (New York: Library of America, 1982), pars. 15, 14. Hereafter cited as “DV,” with paragraph number.
2. Harold Bloom, The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), 22–25.
3. Montanus, who lived in the second century, claimed that the Holy Spirit spoke through him during his trances. His followers advocated more spontaneous liturgical celebration and emphasized that the Spirit might speak through anyone. The Montanist heresy was their claim that speech directly inspired by the Holy Spirit possessed more authority than the official pronouncements of any church official or even the scriptural record of Christ’s teachings. Pelagius was a British monk who argued that if God holds human beings responsible for their sins, they must be free to behave responsibly. Augustine argued against the Pelagians that we are always already in a state of sinfulness, a condition for which we are nonetheless accountable as the result of our choices and from which only God’s grace can save us. See William Placher, A History of Christian Theology: An Introduction (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1983), 50–51, 115–20.
4. Michael Lind, The Next American Nation (New York: Free Press, 1995), chaps. 4 and 5.
5. Of course, Robert Bellah and many others pose it in terms borrowed from Tocqueville. For an extended treatment of Bellah and his associates, see Ethics after Babel, expanded ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), pt. 3.
6. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. J.G.A. Pocock (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 79.
7. Augustine of Hippo, City of God, trans. Henry Bettenson (London: Penguin Books, 1984), bk. 19, chap. 4.
8. Stanley Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).
9. Cavell borrows the term “perfectionism” from John Rawls, who uses it to name a position rejected in A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971). But Cavell appears not to mean by it what Rawls does. For Rawls, perfectionism is committed to arranging political institutions so as “to maximize the achievement of human excellence in art, science, and culture” (325). Cavell sees the achievement, enjoyment, and respect of excellence as values that matter deeply to a democratic sensibility, but he does not set out to maximize them in a consequentialist spirit. In this respect, his position is closer to the one Robert Merrihew Adams defends in Finite and Infinite Goods: A Framework for Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), chap. 14, than to what Rawls calls perfectionism. Adams adopts Rawls’s usage, and so rejects perfectionism in this restricted sense. I will employ the term in Cavell’s looser sense—according to which perfectionism need involve neither the consequentialist aim of maximizing excellence nor the notion that there is a fixed goal of perfection that all human beings should aspire to attain.
10. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emerson: Essays and Lectures, ed. Joel Porte (New York: Library of America, 1983), 458; emphasis in original.
11. Emerson, “The Divinity School Address,” in Emerson: Essays and Lectures, 83. By “the gift of tongues,” he meant the inspiration to stand up and speak eloquently for oneself, not “as the fashion guides.”
12. Consider this sentence from Whitman’s “Letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson”: “To me, henceforth, that theory of any thing, no matter what, stagnates in its vitals, cowardly and rotten, while it cannot publicly accept, and publicly name, with specific words, the things on which all existence, all souls, all realization, all decency, all health, all that is worth being here for, all of woman and all of man, all beauty, all purity, all sweetness, all friendship, all strength, all life, all immortality depend” (Whitman: Poetry and Prose, 1335). This is the language of pious acknowledgment of dependence, but the topic he is discussing is sex.
13. Preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, in Whitman: Poetry and Prose, 24.
14. Ibid., 233.
15. Ibid.
16. John Dewey, A Common Faith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1934), 53. Hereafter cited as “CF.”
17. Emerson, Emerson: Essays and Lectures, 88, 302, 268. These words come from “The Divinity School Address,” “Compensation,” and “Self-Reliance,” respectively.
18. A more plausible story is the one Robert McKim tells at the beginning of Religious Ambiguity and Religious Diversity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001): “Once upon a time the religious traditions were distanced from each other, both geographically and mentally. The typical member of the typical tradition would learn about other traditions from travelers’ tales, for example. There was us and there was them. Now they are our neighbors, and we are no longer at a distance. If they are our neighbors, and we are no longer distanced from them, then what can we do but try to find out what they think? What can we do but ask what is the appeal of their point of view?” But this, as McKim says, is the rub: “Taking other traditions as seriously as they ought to be taken may shake one’s tradition to the core: in particular, it may require a different attitude toward one’s own beliefs” (vii). McKim hopes for the emergence of “some awareness that the traditions represent a number of honest attempts to grapple with something obscure” (viii), but he wisely makes no predictions.
19. “Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents” (1770), in The Works of the Honourable Edmund Burke, vol. 1 (Boston: John West and O. C. Greenleaf, 1806), 388.
20. Sabina Lovibond, Realism and Imagination in Ethics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 227.
21. “Love,” in Emerson, Emerson: Essays and Lectures, 337.
22. Meridel Le Sueur, North Star Country (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 11. This book, originally published in 1945, has chapter titles that are pure Whitman: “They Shall Come Rejoicing,” “The Light Is Sweet,” “Woe to My People,” “Thunder On, Democracy,” “Rise, O Days,” “Struggle,” and “Stride On, Democracy.”
23. David Bromwich, A Choice of Inheritance: Self and Community from Edmund Burke to Robert Frost (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 168.
24. “Shall I say, then, that as far as we can trace the natural history of the soul, its health consists in the fulness [sic] of its reception,—call it piety, call it veneration—in the fact, that enthusiasm is organized therein” (Emerson, “The Method of Nature,” in Emerson: Essays and Lectures, 125).
25. Whitman: Poetry and Prose, 1208f.
26. Emerson, Emerson: Essays and Lectures, 491.
27. Emersonians go further than this, expressing similar reservations about the capacity of churches to exercise authority over individuals in spiritual affairs.
28. Whitman: Poetry and Prose, 475.
CHAPTER 2
RACE AND NATION IN BALDWIN AND ELLISON
1. James Baldwin, Collected Essays (New York: Library of America, 1998), 319, 315.
2. Ellison’s remark on style and ideologies appears in “A Very Stern Discipline,” in Ralph Ellison, Going to the Territory (New York: Vintage, 1986), 294. Larry Neal discusses Ellison in his essay, “Ellison’s Zoot Suit,” reprinted in Speaking for You: The Vision of Ralph Ellison, ed. Kimberly W. Benston (Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1990), 105–24. The quotations given here all appear on 115, the reference to Ellison’s remark on 114.
3. Going to the Territory, 21f.
4. This is the approach to such controversies recommended by William James in Pragmatism (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1991), 22–38. For a more technical treatment of the same sort of approach, see W. V. Quine’s classic discussion of explication as elimination in Word and Object (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1960).
5. Baldwin, Collected Essays, 333.
6. Ibid.
7. Bernard Yack, The Problems of a Political Animal: Community, Justice, and Conflict in Aristotelian Political Thought (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), chaps. 1 and 2.
8. Baldwin, Collected Essays, 308.
9. Ibid., 325.
10. Ibid., 17.
11. See Bethel Eddy, “The Rites of Identity: The Religious Naturalism and Cultural Criticism of Kenneth Burke and Ralph Ellison,” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton, 1998), chap. 5, for a superb discussion of Ellison’s treatment of “the vernacular pieties of an American identity.” Chapter 2 of the same work offers an interpretation of Kenneth Burke’s conception of piety, which forms part of the background against which Ellison’s treatment of piety can be understood. Eddy shows that Ellison needs to be seen, in part, as belonging to a tradition of cultural criticism that descends from Emerson and includes Santayana and Burke. I am here only skimming the surface of an aspect of Ellison’s work that Eddy has considered in depth.
12. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Noonday Press, 1972), 16. Hereafter cited as “M.”
13. Scapegoating and various other forms of sacrifice are major themes in Ellison. See, for example, Shadow and Act (New York: Vintage Books, 1972), 124, and the treatment of lynching in Going to the Territory, 177ff. For a discussion of Ellison on sacrifice, see Eddy, “Rites of Identity,” chap. 6.
14. Cornel West, Prophetic Thought in Postmodern Times (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1993), 72.
15. Ellison, Going to the Territory, 53; my emphasis.
16. Ellison, Going to the Territory, 185. Ellison understands that comparable motives were at work in both Emerson and Whitman, two authors who have often been dismissed, as Ellison often is today, for being either too optimistic or insensitive to evil; see, for example, 311.
17. Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act, 120; see 252 for a similar argument against Amiri Baraka (then called LeRoi Jones).
18. Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Vintage, 1990), xviii. Compare Baldwin’s discussion of the blues in “Down at the Cross”: “In all jazz, and especially the blues, there is something tart and ironic, authoritative and double-edged. White Americans seem to feel that happy songs are happy and sad songs are sad, and that, God help us, is exactly the way most white Americans sing them. … Only people who have been ‘down the line,’ as the song puts it, know what this music is about” (Collected Essays, 311; emphasis in original). I am saying that readers of Baldwin and Ellison who complain that these authors fail to come to terms with black rage and the systemic evils of racism are making the mistake of wanting their sad songs to be sad. Both of these writers had been “down the line.” Ellison, who thought Emerson and Whitman had developed a lyrical sensibility analogous to the blues, discerned the sadness in their happy songs. He credited them, too, with having been “down the line.” For a discussion of the blues and the theme of comic transcendence in Ellison, see Eddy, “Rites of Identity,” chap. 7: “I believe Ellison chooses the blues, in part for piety’s sake, because he knows where he comes from and the sources of his being, but also because he believes that the blues, with its comic component, has more resources for coping with the absurdities [of life] … than does tragedy” (266).
19. Ellison, Invisible Man, xx, 581. My emphasis on the reference to “the lower frequencies” in the novel’s last line is influenced by conversations with Al Raboteau.
20. Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form, 3d ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 160; emphasis in original.
21. Ellison, Going to the Territory, 21.
22. See Cornel West’s The American Evasion of Philosophy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), esp. 232ff.
23. See especially his contribution to Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Cornel West, The Future of the Race (New York: Knopf, 1996), which is entitled, “Black Strivings in a Twilight Civilization.” For a much more hopeful book and one more in keeping with my democratic instincts, see Roberto Mangabeira Unger and Cornel West, The Future of American Progressivism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999), where the authors invoke what they call “the American religion of possibility,” and leave out the extreme highs and lows of West’s prophetic Christian rhetoric. I believe this is easily West’s best book so far, but given that the book is coauthored, it is hard to tell how fully it expresses his own perspective on the grounds for democratic hope. The book is also commendable for its elegant style, the specificity and imaginativeness of its practical proposals, and for allowing the rhetoric of reform and democracy to displace West’s early rhetoric of revolution and socialism.
24. I started thinking seriously about Ellison while reading West’s first book, Prophesy Deliverance! (Philadelphia: Westminster John Knox Press, 1982), where Ellison functions as a moral hero.
25. Emerson, “Man the Reformer,” in Emerson: Essays and Lectures, 145. He adds: “But I think we must clear ourselves each one by the interrogation, whether we have earned our bread to-day by the hearty contribution of our energies to the common benefit? and we must not cease to tend to the correction of these flagrant wrongs, by laying one stone aright every day” (emphasis in original).
CHAPTER 3
RELIGIOUS REASONS IN POLITICAL ARGUMENT
1. John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993; paperback ed., 1996). Hereafter cited as “PL.” For a detailed account of the social contract as a set of principles “that could not reasonably be rejected, by people who were moved to find principles for the general regulation of behavior that others, similarly motivated, could not reasonably reject,” see Thomas M. Scanlon, What We Owe To Each Other (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 4 and passim.
2. Nicholas Wolterstorff, “The Role of Religion in Decision and Discussion of Political Issues,” in Religion in the Public Square: The Place of Religious Convictions in Political Debate (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997), 94; emphasis in original.
3. John Rawls, Collected Papers, ed. Samuel Freeman (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 573–615. Hereafter cited as “CP.”
4. For useful criticism, see Kent Greenawalt, Religious Convictions and Political Choice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988) and Private Consciences and Public Reasons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); and Wolterstorff, “The Role of Religion,” 67–120. The most thorough and powerfully argued treatment of the general topic is now Christopher J. Eberle, Religious Conviction in Liberal Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). See also Ronald F. Thiemann, Religion in Public Life: A Dilemma for Democracy (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1996).
5. Wolterstorff briefly discusses the relationship between entitlement and the Rawlsian sense of “reasonableness” in “The Role of Religion,” 91.
6. Wolterstorff, “The Role of Religion,” 105; emphasis in original.
7. Wolterstorff makes a related point about respect and particularity in “The Role of Religion,” 110f.
8. Notice that even on the amended version of Rawls’s position, this would not be enough.
9. For illuminating remarks on the importance of attending to the “concrete” other, see Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self: Gender, Community, and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics (New York: Routledge, 1992), esp. chap. 5. In chapter 7, I will discuss this theme in Benhabib’s work. In chapter 12, I will clarify what a dialogical model involves by discussing Brandom’s distinction between “I-we” and “I-thou” conceptions of sociality.
10. Wolterstorff, “The Role of Religion,” 109.
11. I am not addressing the distinctive issues surrounding the roles of judge, juror, attorney, or public official.
12. I will consider Hauerwas’s arguments and give relevant references to his works in chapters 6 and 7.
13. One could also reasonably complain that the now rather baroque theory is simply too complicated to serve its intended public purpose as an action guide. If these scruples were to be followed by the masses, we would all need catechetical instruction from the Rawlsians.
14. The term “public” is to be understood here in its ordinary sense. Hauerwas was not speaking at a campaign rally or before a congressional committee. So Rawls might say that this case does not involve the “public forum,” and that his scruples would therefore not apply. But why should this matter? Suppose another Christian pacifist did speak at a campaign rally for a political candidate representing the Green Party. Wouldn’t it be good, all things considered, for her arguments to circulate publicly? How can we know in advance that they won’t be persuasive? Suppose the speaker resists translating her arguments about the sanctity of human life into a Rawlsian vocabulary. Must we then condemn her for failing to satisfy the proviso?
15. The phrase appears as the title of chapter 4 in Stanley Hauerwas, Dispatches from the Front: Theological Engagements with the Secular (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), where Hauerwas portrays Walter Rauschenbusch and Reinhold Niebuhr as complicit in “the exclusion from the politics of democracy of any religious convictions that are not ‘humble’ ” (104). Hauerwas asks: “Does that mean I do not support ‘democracy’? I have to confess I have not got the slightest idea, since I do not know what it means to call this society ‘democratic’. Indeed, one of the troubling aspects about such a question is the assumption that how Christians answer it might matter” (105). In this book, I am trying to say what it might mean to call this society “democratic” and why it might matter how Christians answer that question.
16. John Rawls, Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy, ed. Barbara Herman (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), 329–71.
17. In the next several paragraphs, I will be relying on Robert Brandom, “Freedom and Constraint by Norms,” in Hermeneutics and Praxis, ed. Robert Hollinger (South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985), 173–91. Brandom mentions arts and sports on 187.
18. Robert Brandom, “Some Pragmatist Themes in Hegel’s Idealism: Negotiation and Administration in Hegel’s Account of the Structure and Content of Conceptual Norms,” European Journal of Philosophy 7, no. 2 (1999): 164–89; emphasis in original.
19. Brandom, “Some Pragmatist Themes,” 179.
20. Ibid., 166; emphasis in original.
21. These expressivist considerations explain why Wolterstorff is right to say that we do not need a political basis of the kind that Rawls is seeking: “We aim at agreement in our discussions with each other. But we do not for the most part aim at achieving agreement concerning a political basis; rather, we aim at agreement concerning the particular policy, law, or constitutional provision under consideration. Our agreement on some policy need not be based on some set of principles agreed on by all present and future citizens and rich enough to settle all important political issues. Sufficient if each citizen, for his or her own reasons, agrees on the policy today and tomorrow—not for all time. It need not even be the case that each and every citizen agrees to the policy. Sufficient if the agreement be the fairly gained and fairly executed agreement of the majority.” (“The Role of Religion,” 114, emphasis in original.)
22. Brandom, “Freedom and Constraint,” 189.
23. Compare Wolterstorff, “The Role of Religion,” 112f.
24. Richard Rorty, “Religion as a Conversation-stopper,” in Philosophy and Social Hope (London: Penguin Books, 1999), 168–74. Hereafter cited as “PSH.”
25. Robert B. Brandom, Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), 228; Articulating Reasons: An Introduction to Inferentialism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), 105; hereafter cited as “AR.”
26. Greenawalt, Religious Convictions, chaps. 6–9.
27. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 73.
28. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979).
29. Johanna Goth made a similar point in her senior thesis for the Department of Philosophy at Princeton University (spring term, 2000).
CHAPTER 4
SECULARIZATION AND RESENTMENT
Personal correspondence, quoted with permission of John Bowlin.
1. From the introduction to Radical Orthodoxy, edited by John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, and Graham Ward (London: Routledge, 1999), 1, 14, 3; hereafter cited as “RO.” See also John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990); hereafter cited as “TST.”
2. Richard John Neuhaus The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America, 2d. ed. (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1995), 25, 80, 82; emphasis removed.
3. Christopher Hill, The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution (London: Penguin Books, 1994), 413. Hereafter cited as “EB.”
4. See EB, 407–9, 420.
5. See Stout, Ethics after Babel expanded ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), chap. 3.
6. In this context, the term “liberal” does not imply that the society in question is committed to a version of “liberalism,” which is a philosophical view.
7. I do think that it is dangerous to bring religion into political discourse in countries where religious hatred is severe, but the United States is no longer such a place.
8. Victor Anderson opens his book, Pragmatic Theology (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), by attributing to me the claim that theology is essentially obsolete, a casualty of secularization, a lost cause. The epigraph of his first chapter is a passage from my Ethics after Babel, 165, that appears to commit me to this claim. But Anderson omits two crucial sentences from that passage in which I make clear that “the language spoken in the public arena” is “compatible with belief in God.” So he ends up attacking a position I do not hold. In Wilderness Wanderings: Probing Twentieth-Century Theology and Philosophy (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1997), Stanley Hauerwas complains that, according to Ethics after Babel, “no good reason can be given in ‘our’ kind of world for holding [religious] beliefs” (108). But I explicitly reject this view on 187 of that book. I did once argue for a negative conclusion on the rationality of modern religious belief, but Ethics after Babel withdrew both the argument and the conclusion. The old argument had two major flaws. First, it wrongly posited modernity as a more or less uniform megacontext in which all modern persons should be assessed epistemically. Thus it ignored many factors, of the sort typically mentioned in spiritual autobiographies and conversion narratives, that separate one individual’s epistemic context from another’s, even in the same epoch. Religious differences need not be explained by saying that only one group is justified in believing what they believe, while the others are not. This bears on the second flaw in the old argument. For my early work employed an implausibly rigorist standard of justification, which did in effect stack the deck against the possibility that a modern individual could be epistemically responsible in holding religious beliefs.
9. William T. Cavanaugh, “The City: Beyond Secular Parodies,” in Milbank, Pickstock, and Ward, Radical Orthodoxy, 182–200; I am quoting from 190.
10. For a spirited refutation of the standard form of secularization theory, see Mary Douglas, “The Effects of Modernization on Religious Change,” in Religion and America: Spirituality in a Secular Age, ed. Mary Douglas and Steven M. Tipton (Boston: Beacon Press, 1982), 25–43.
11. I owe this phrasing to John Bowlin.
12. See especially R. A. Markus, Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of St. Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970). Milbank argues his case against Markus in Theology and Social Theory, chap. 12. For excellent critical discussions, see John R. Bowlin, “Augustine on Justifying Coercion,” The Annual of the Society of Christian Ethics 17 (1997): 49–70, and James Wetzel’s paper on Milbank and Augustine, forthcoming in the Journal of Religious Ethics.
13. I have learned much about Ruskin and about the limitations of Milbank’s interpretation of him from David Craig.
14. George Hunsinger, Disruptive Grace: Studies in the Theology of Karl Barth (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), 74–75.
15. Hunsinger, Disruptive Grace, 80.
16. I am quoting directly from Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, I/1, trans. G. T. Thomason (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1936), 60; hereafter cited as “I/1.” Hunsinger quotes this line in Disruptive Grace, 80.
17. George Hunsinger, How to Read Karl Barth: The Shape of His Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 234–80. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, IV/3, trans. G. W. Bromiley (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1961), 3–165. Hereafter cited as “IV/3.”
18. Hunsinger, How to Read Karl Barth, 279.
19. Recall that I am not using the terms “expressive” and “expressivist” as some theologians do. As I explain in note 11 to the Introduction to this book, what I am saying here does not put me at odds with what George Lindbeck calls a “cultural-linguistic” approach.
20. Cass R. Sunstein, Republic.com (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).
21. On the connection between the small group and rituals of this kind, see Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology 2d ed. (London: Routledge, 1996), chap. 7.
22. The nostalgic note is struck in the first paragraph of the first chapter of Milbank’s Theology and Social Theory: “Once, there was no ‘secular’. And the secular was not latent, waiting to fill more space with the stream of the ‘purely human’, when the pressure of the sacred was relaxed. Instead there was the single community of Christendom, with its dual aspects of sacerdotium and regnum. The saeculum, in the medieval era, was not a space, a domain, but a time” (TST, 9). The utopian note is especially prominent in Cavanaugh, “The City: Beyond Secular Parodies,” 182, 194–98.
23. See John Milbank, “Postmodern Critical Augustinianism: A Short Summa in Forty-two Responses to Unasked Questions,” in The Postmodern God: A Theological Reader, ed. Graham Ward (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 269.
24. See William Werpehowski, “Ad Hoc Apologetics,” The Journal of Religion 66, no. 3 (July 1986): 282–301.
25. Barth, Church Dogmatics I/1, 61.
26. Hunsinger, Disruptive Grace, 86–87.
CHAPTER 5
THE NEW TRADITIONALISM
1. Milbank, whom I have described in the previous chapter as the leading proponent of radical orthodoxy, refers to chapter 11 of TST, as “a temeritous attempt to radicalize the thought of MacIntyre” (327).
2. After Virtue, 2d ed. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 253, 255. Hereafter cited as “AV.” Neuhaus refers to the line about modern politics as a form of civil war no fewer than four times in The Naked Public Square, 21, 99, 111, 163.
3. Alasdair MacIntyre, A Short History of Ethics (New York: Macmillan, 1966). Hereafter cited as “SH.”
4. Marxism and Christianity (New York: Schocken, 1968).
5. I allude of course to another of MacIntyre’s books from this period, Against the Self-Images of the Age (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, repr. 1978).
6. Herbert Marcuse: An Exposition and a Polemic (New York: Viking, 1970), 70. Hereafter cited as “HM.”
7. In the remainder of this paragraph, I am echoing David Bromwich’s discussion of the sublime in Hazlitt: The Mind of a Critic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 191.
8. William Hazlitt, The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe (London: J. M. Dent, 1930–1934), vol. 4, 124–25.
9. Alasdair MacIntyre Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988). Hereafter cited as “WJ.”
10. For my earlier criticisms of the narrative, see Stout, Ethics after Babel, expanded ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), chaps. 9–10, and “Virtue among the Ruins,” Neue Zeitschrift für systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie 26, no. 3 (1984): 256–73.
11. In a review of George Forrell’s History of Christian Ethics, vol. 1, Ethics 91, no. 2 (1981): 328–29.
12. Stout, “Virtue among the Ruins,” 267–68.
13. I do not mean to imply complete agreement with MacIntyre’s reinterpretation of Aquinas. For example, I believe he is overly impressed by Aquinas’s rigorist account of truth-telling. He is overly impressed, I suspect, because he is insufficiently attentive to differences between Aquinas’s approach to that topic, where “natural law” influences predominate, and his approach to such topics as violence, where he is more nearly Aristotelian. To describe these differences properly, MacIntyre would have had to give a more detailed account of Aquinas’s conception of practical reasoning, especially his account of the moral species of an act, and then ask whether Aquinas adhered to that conception in treating truth-telling and sexuality. The person who first drew my attention to these differences was Victor Preller.
14. This difficulty mars his treatment of anything English and especially of Scottish and Irish thinkers, like David Hume and Edmund Burke, who acquired sufficient empathy with English modes of thought to adopt them as their own and raise them to new heights. Consider, for example, the long quotation from Roy Porter that MacIntyre uses to smear the English social order (WJ, 215), and ask yourself whether it shows a rare gift of empathy. Or, review the sentences I have already quoted about the “savage and persistent conflicts of the age,” and ask yourself whether Hume’s views on religious fanaticism and enthusiasm are given a fair hearing (WJ, chaps. 15–16).
15. Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopedia, Genealogy, and Tradition (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990). I discuss this book in more detail in the postscript to the Princeton edition of Ethics after Babel.
16. MacIntyre’s most recent book, Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues (Chicago: Open Court, 1999), is refreshingly free of his usual rhetoric about liberalism and liberal society. But the contrast between Aristotle and Nietzsche with which it ends echoes the partition first introduced in chapter 9 of AV. And his criticisms of both “recent social and political philosophy” and “the modern state” (130–31) show that he has not changed his mind on these points.
17. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage, 1966), 746–61.
18. Christopher Lasch, The True and Only Heaven (New York: Norton, 1991), 181–84.
19. William Cobbett, A History of the Protestant Reformation in England and Ireland (London: C. Clement, 1824).
20. William Cobbett, Rural Rides (London: Dent, 1913; originally published in 1830).
21. William Cobbett, Thirteen Sermons (New York: John Doyle, 1834).
22. Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1986) and The Hidden Wound (San Francisco: North Point, 1989).
23. Susan Moller Okin, Justice, Gender, and the Family (New York: Basic Books, 1989), 60–61; emphasis in original.
24. MacIntyre is, at this point, clearly assuming the need for what Brandom calls an “I-we” model of discursive rationality. The “we” in this case is constituted by a traditional consensus on the good. I will discuss Brandom’s alternative to such models in the final section of chapter 12 below.
25. WJ, 8, 217–18, 353. To MacIntyre, Burke essentially sold out his Irish compatriots by becoming complicit in English imperial rule. Politically and socially, he personifies what MacIntyre has always tried not to be. But for Burke to play this role in the story being told here, MacIntyre needs to omit reference to his writings on the Irish question, on the wisdom of conciliation with the American colonies, and on the misdeeds of Warren Hastings. Before we discard Burke too quickly and without ambivalence, it may be worth recalling what the radical critic William Hazlitt wrote of him in 1807: “It has always been with me a test of the sense and candour of any one belonging to the opposite party, whether he allowed Burke to be a great man.”
26. Richard Bernstein, Philosophical Profiles (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986), 138, 140.
CHAPTER 6
VIRTUE AND THE WAY OF THE WORLD
1. Stanley Hauerwas, A Better Hope: Resources for a Church Confronting Capitalism, Democracy, and Postmodernity (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2000), 10. Hereafter cited as “BH.”
2. Hauerwasian perfectionism resembles Emersonian perfectionism in that both are rooted in a reaction against austere forms of Protestantism in which justification eclipses sanctification. And to a large extent, these two forms of perfectionism propose similar remedies in emphasizing excellence, virtue, self-cultivation, the value of exemplary figures and spiritual guides in the ethical life, and a conception of sanctification according to which individuals are swept up into some kind of divine abundance. But these parallels are not merely coincidental. Emerson and his followers were self-consciously radicalizing the kind of sanctification- and virtue-centered Protestantism that Wesley and various others had set in motion. Historically, these forms of perfectionism represent two phases in the development of religious Romanticism. The Emersonian phase, of course, moves outside the ambit of Christianity.
3. The dissertation eventually appeared in revised form as Character and the Christian Life: A Study in Theological Ethics (San Antonio: Trinity University Press, 1975). Chapter 2 discusses Aquinas and Aristotle. Chapter 5 explicates the doctrine of sanctification.
4. Personal conversation.
5. In addition to the published dissertation, see two highly influential essay collections: Stanley Hauerwas, Vision and Virtue: Essays in Christian Ethical Reflection (Notre Dame: Fides, 1974) and Truthfulness and Tragedy: Further Investigations into Christian Ethics (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977). Hereafter cited as “VV” and “TT,” respectively.
6. Edmund Pincoffs, “Quandary Ethics,” in Revisions: Changing Perspectives in Moral Philosophy, ed. Stanley Hauerwas and Alasdair MacIntyre (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983), 92–112. The quotation is from 104.
7. For the purposes of argument, I am not going to dispute Hauerwas’s interpretation of Yoder. But Scott Davis has persuaded me that Yoder probably had a more subtle position on justice than Hauerwas thought he did. See John Howard Yoder, The Original Revolution (Scottdale, Pa.: Herald Press, 1972), 76–84. When I speak of Yoder in the remainder of this chapter, I mean Yoder as understood by Hauerwas.
8. Stanley Hauerwas, A Community of Character: Toward a Constructive Christian Social Ethic (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), and The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer in Christian Ethics (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983). Hereafter cited, respectively, as “CC” and “PK.”
9. See Stanley Hauerwas, Against the Nations: War and Survival in a Liberal Society (Minneapolis: Winston Press, 1985), and Dispatches from the Front: Theological Engagements with the Secular (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), esp. chap. 4, “The Democratic Policing of Christianity.”
10. Stanley Hauerwas, Christian Existence Today: Essays on Church, World and Living In Between (Durham: Labyrinth Press, 1988), 3–21. Hereafter cited as CET.
11. Oliver O’Donovan, The Desire of the Nations: Rediscovering the Roots of Political Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 216.
12. See Stanley Hauerwas, After Christendom? How the Church Is to Behave If Freedom, Justice, and a Christian Nation Are Bad Ideas (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1991), 45. Hereafter cited as “AC.”
13. For an example of a book that sets out such reasons in detail, see Nicholas Wolterstorff, Until Justice and Peace Embrace (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1983). It is a pity that Hauerwas chooses to focus his critical remarks so often on Rawls rather than on Wolterstorff, whose theologically conservative but politically radical Calvinist outlook offers a more challenging alternative to his own position. In A Better Hope (26–27), he discusses Wolterstorff briefly, but only for the purpose of borrowing from Wolterstorff’s critique of Rawls. But see also Nicholas Wolterstorff, “Christianity and Social Justice,” Christian Scholars Review 16, no. 3 (March 1987): 211–28; Stanley Hauerwas, “On the ‘Right’ to be Tribal,” Christian Scholars Review 16, no. 3 (March 1987), 238–41; and Nicholas Wolterstorff, “Response to Nash, McInerny, and Hauerwas,” Christian Scholars Review 16, no. 3 (March 1987), 242–48. In this exchange, Hauerwas criticizes Wolterstorff for relying on the language of rights when discussing South African politics, but to my mind Wolterstorff’s response to Hauerwas on this point is conclusive. As far as I know, Hauerwas has not responded further. For a response to Hauerwas’s criticisms of the language of rights, see chapter 9, below.
14. Gloria Albrecht, The Character of Our Communities: Toward an Ethics of Liberation for the Church (Nashville: Abingdon, 1995).
15. Hauerwas’s critique of liberation theology echoes the account of “absolute freedom” that Hegel offers in chapter 6 of The Phenomenology of Spirit, where he argues that the ideals of the French Revolution, pressed to their logical conclusion, led inevitably to the Terror. Hauerwas seems unaware that here, as in his critique of formalist ethics, he is recycling ideas and arguments from the Phenomenology. As in MacIntyre’s case, Hauerwas fails to acknowledge his indebtedness to a tradition of modern thinking—a tradition that includes the feminism and expressivist pragmatism that I am advocating as well as his version of the new traditionalism. By presenting his arguments as if they did not have a history, Hauerwas is able to reinforce the impression that modern thought is essentially bankrupt.
16. See, for example, the following passage from Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (San Diego, New York, London: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1938), 33: “Surely … you must consider very carefully before you begin to rebuild your college what is the aim of education, what kind of society, what kind of human being it should seek to produce. At any rate I will only send you a guinea with which to rebuild your college if you can satisfy me that you will use it to produce the kind of society, the kind of people that will help to prevent war.” If Hauerwas and MacIntyre were right about modern ethical discourse, the existence of this passage and countless others like it in the writings of major democratic authors would be very hard to explain.
17. George Hunsinger, Disruptive Grace: Studies in the Theology of Karl Barth (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), 84.
18. Stanley Hauerwas, With the Grain of the Universe: The Church’s Witness and Natural Theology (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2001), esp. 145, 191–204.
19. Stanley Hauerwas, In Good Company: The Church as Polis (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995), 12f. Hereafter cited as “IGC.”
20. It is hard to imagine Hauerwas feeling anything but excitement and joy under such circumstances.
21. Scott Davis pointed out the parallel in correspondence.
22. See especially Stanley Hauerwas, “Virtue, Description, and Friendship: A Thought Experiment in Catholic Moral Theology,” Irish Theological Quarterly (1998): 170–84. I thank Gene Rogers for providing this reference and for criticism of an earlier draft of the arguments offered in this chapter.
23. As Oliver O’Donovan points out in his perceptive discussion of Hauerwas in The Desire of the Nations: Rediscovering the Roots of Political Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 216.
24. In a poignant exchange in the February 2002 issue of First Things, Hauerwas responds to an editorial published in the December 2001 issue, which claimed that “those who in principle oppose the use of military force have no legitimate part in the discussion about how military force should be used.” He infers that he is being “silenced” in the wake of 9/11, and wonders aloud whether his friendship with Neuhaus and the other editors has been brought to an end.
25. On the divorce question, see PK, 132, where Hauerwas suggests that perhaps “the prohibition against remarriage … was more rigorous than it needed to be to maintain the Christian commitment to fidelity in marriage.” Hauerwas briefly addresses what Jesus says to the rich man in a sermon entitled, “Living on Dishonest Wealth,” which can be found in his book, Sanctify Them in the Truth: Holiness Exemplified (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1998), 249–52. He treats this teaching as a hard saying, but without drawing any costly practical implications from it. He says, “Being generous with our wealth is a good. But our generosity will not save us” (251). The first sentence does not say that Christians are obliged to give away their wealth to the poor. And the second sentence deflects attention from the ethical question to the doctrine of justification by faith. This is not the way Hauerwas addresses the pacifism issue. The sermon ends with a comforting thought: “Our salvation is that God has given us one another and in that giving we discover that we are no longer slaves, but friends of one another and of God and perhaps even friends with those who suffer because we are wealthy. That does, indeed, seem to be ‘good news.’ Amen” (252). See also Stanley M. Hauerwas and William H. Willimon, The Truth about God: The Ten Commandments in Christian Life (Nashville: Abingdon, 1999), 115.
26. There are also many questions concerning the biblical basis for Hauerwas’s pacifism. God’s way of dealing with evil is said to be revealed definitively on Good Friday. Hence, Christians are called to deal with evil nonviolently. Who, then, authorizes the killing of the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites in Deuteronomy 20? Who ordains in Matthew 25 and Revelation 20 that the accursed shall be cast into the fire on judgment day? And who says in Matthew 10:34 that he has “come not to bring peace, but a sword”? See PK, 163 n. 11, where Hauerwas emphasizes that Yahweh, as portrayed in the Old Testament, does not fight through the armies of his people, but rather by means of miracle. Here he seems to acknowledge that God does sometimes deal with evil violently. The point Hauerwas wants to insist on is that God’s people are not authorized to do so. But this way of formulating his position is in tension with the claim in the main text that “the very heart of following the way of God’s kingdom involves nothing less than learning to be like God” (PK, 75). Well, is God nonviolent or not? And if so, then why does the Bible repeatedly portray him as using violence to separate his chosen people or the members of the kingdom from the accursed? Perhaps Hauerwas feels that Yoder dealt with these questions decisively, but I, for one, have never found Yoder’s biblical scholarship persuasive.
27. For an example of an antimilitarist political theology that neither neglects the struggle for democratic justice nor gets distracted by polemics against liberalism, see part 1 of Hunsinger’s Disruptive Grace. I would urge readers to compare Hunsinger’s critique of Neuhaus in chaps. 2 and 3 with Hauerwas’s critique of Neuhaus in Against the Nations: War and Survival in a Liberal Society (Minneapolis: Winston Press, 1985), chap. 7. It seems to me that this comparison allows the deficiencies in Hauerwas’s rhetoric to stand out in sharp relief.
28. In this and the following paragraph, I am borrowing the quoted phrases as well as my argumentative strategy from the discussion of “Virtue and the Way of the World” in G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 228–35; emphasis in original. Hegel was criticizing a position—namely, Shaftesbury’s—that resembles the new traditionalism only in some respects. The most important thing the two positions have in common is that they both attempt to recover an ancient conception of virtue in modern conditions. See Terry Pinkard, Hegel’s Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 105–11.
CHAPTER 7
BETWEEN EXAMPLE AND DOCTRINE
1. Robert Musil, The Man without Qualities, trans. Sophie Wilkins (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), 273. Hereafter cited as “MWQ.”
2. Peter Brown, “The Saint as Exemplar in Late Antiquity,” in Saints and Virtues, ed. John Stratton Hawley (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), 3–14; I am quoting from 4.
3. Stanley M. Hauerwas and William H. Willimon, Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony (Nashville: Abingdon, 1989), 98–103.
4. Throughout this paragraph, but especially here, I am indebted to Oliver O’Donovan, The Desire of the Nations: Rediscovering the Roots of Political Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 268–71.
5. Stanley Hauerwas, Dispatches from the Front: Theological Engagements with the Secular (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 31–57.
6. John D. Lyons, Exemplum: The Rhetoric of Example in Early Modern France and Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), xi.
7. My accounts of “example of” and “example for” rely in a general way on Brandom’s inferentialist theory of language, but Brandom does not himself discuss these concepts. In fact, he claims that “there is nothing corresponding to the authority of testimony in the practical case” (MIE, 239). But this seems wrong. The authority of testimony in theoretical reasoning does have a parallel in the realm of practical reasoning, namely, the authority someone enjoys as an example for someone to follow, which authority a person often acquires when his or her life is taken to be an example of certain virtues.
8. For an attempt to unveil such complications in the Gospel of Mark, see Frank Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979).
9. Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel, trans. Linda Asher (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), 18.
10. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emerson: Essays and Lectures, ed. Joel Porte (New York: Library of America, 1983) 259. See David Bromwich, A Choice of Inheritance: Self and Community from Edmund Burke to Robert Frost (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), 22–23.
11. Emerson, Emerson: Essays and Lectures, 264.
12. Ibid., 623.
13. Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics (New York: Routledge, 1992), 1. Hereafter cited as “SS.”
14. Seyla Benhabib, Critique, Norm, and Utopia: A Study of the Foundations of Critical Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986).
15. For a discussion of transcendental arguments in Habermas and Karl-Otto Apel, see Cheryl Misak, Truth, Politics, Morality: Pragmatism and Deliberation (London: Routledge, 2000), 35–47.
16. Nor is it implicated, as Benhabib’s appears to be, in the so-called philosophy of consciousness she spends much of her time dismantling.
CHAPTER 8
DEMOCRATIC NORMS IN THE AGE OF TERRORISM
1. I will be referring to Brandom and Lovibond, from whom I have learned much, but my debts to these and other contemporary pragmatists are too extensive to be fully acknowledged in the notes. Robert M. Brandom, Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994) and Articulating Reasons: An Introduction to Inferentialism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000). I will refer to these books throughout part 3 as “MIE” and “AR,” respectively. Sabina Lovibond, Realism and Imagination in Ethics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983) and Ethical Formation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002). Cheryl Misak, Truth, Politics, Morality: Pragmatism and Deliberation (London: Routledge, 2000). Nancy Fraser, Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). Rebecca S. Chopp, The Power to Speak: Feminism, Language, God (New York: Crossroad, 1989). Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989).
2. See Bernard Williams, Moral Luck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 125 ff., 130.
3. The thinkers I have in mind include Avishai Margalit, The Decent Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996); Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); and Judith N. Shklar, Ordinary Vices (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984).
4. MIE, 235–49. The term “shall” is used in each of these examples (in the manner of Wilfrid Sellars) “to express the significance of the conclusion as the acknowledging of a practical commitment” (MIE, 245).
5. “The humean denies that a mere obligation or commitment could provide a reason for action, unless accompanied by some desire to fulfill it. And the kantian denies that a mere desire (sinnliche Neigung) could provide a reason for action, unless accompanied by the acknowledgment of some corresponding obligation or commitment” (AR, 92).
6. According to Thomistic moral theology, the appropriate attitude for such a priest to adopt is not one of guilt and repentance but rather one of velleity and regretful sadness. Velleity can be defined as subjunctive willing. The Thomistic teaching is that the priest’s will ought to be such that if he were not constrained by an absolutely overriding responsibility, he would provide the information. He may also feel saddened that he is thus situated. But there is no reason for guilt, because he has done nothing wrong. The thought that he has done something wrong would, by Thomistic lights, be a prideful misconstrual of his responsibilities, for it would involve the notion that he, and not God, was responsible to make the overall consequences turn out for the best.
7. See Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, 3d ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2000). See also Walzer’s important essay, “Political Action: The Problem of Dirty Hands,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 2, no. 2 (1973): 160–80.
8. For a concise account of this passage, see Charles Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 175. For a detailed commentary, see Terry Pinkard, Hegel’s Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), chap. 5.
9. This sort of discursive responsibility is one of Brandom’s major themes in MIE, part 1.
10. Chapters 2–4 of MIE reinforce this conclusion by giving a precise account of how the semantic content of norms depends on a background of (cognitive and practical) material inferential commitments. If a background of such commitments were not—for the time being—taken for granted, the normative language being employed by the critic of some aspect of received tradition would be meaningless. Whether Hegel is right in charging Kant with the error exposed by this argument is another question.
11. Richard Rorty, “Justice as a Larger Loyalty,” in Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation, ed. Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 52.
12. I will not attempt a full specification of what “democratically” means here, but a few words are in order. I mainly have in mind what is sometimes called the requirement of equal voice in contemporary representative democracies. This entails the progressive elimination of certain restrictions on who may participate in the exchange (relating, for example, to class, gender, race, religion, and ideology) and the relaxation of feudal and ecclesiastical expectations concerning who must defer to whom while the exchange is carried out. When Machiavelli raises the problem of dirty hands in The Prince, he is not offering advice to leaders like ours but to princes. The problem has a different social significance in a setting where, as Whitman put it in the 1855 preface of Leaves of Grass, the president takes off his hat to the people, “not they to him.”
13. Similarly, my language has the expressive resources to allow me to speculate about what would have been the case if climatic conditions had been different several eons ago and language users had never come to walk the face of the earth. When I say that there were rocks and lava long before human beings existed, I am discussing a distant past that lacked human beings (and thus the concepts they alone employ). But in talking about a preconceptual age, I am still using my concepts of “rocks,” “lava,” and “human beings.” There is no paradox in this. By the same token, I am able to use my moral concepts to say of someone who lacks those concepts that he should not have tortured his victims.
14. Statements about what a person should do or ought to do tend to be ambiguous between attributions of obligations of the sort I am discussing and what Gilbert Harman calls “inner judgments.” For discussion of Harman’s views and citations of his works, see my Ethics after Babel, expanded ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 87–90. If all “ought-to-do” statements express inner judgments in Harman’s sense, then what I am calling unconditional obligations will have to be rephrased as judgments about what ought to be the case. For example: “It ought not to have been the case that the monk tortured the heretic.” In Harman’s view, this would not imply that the reason against torturing people is a reason the monk himself accepts.
15. MIE, 193–98, 259–62, 270, 596–97.
16. The concept of an absolutely overriding obligation can be explained in Brandom’s technical language as follows. “To endorse a practical inference as entitlement-preserving is to take the [cognitive] premises as providing reasons for the practical conclusion.” A norm that made such an endorsement explicit would express commitment to a prima facie reason for action—perhaps role-specific, perhaps not. To treat the obligation in question as absolutely overriding is to take the relevant practical inference as “not only entitlement-preserving but also commitment-preserving,” that is, to take it “that anyone committed to the [cognitive] premises is thereby committed to the practical conclusion” (MIE, 252; emphasis in original).
17. It also reflects a commitment to a theologically motivated division of moral labor that strictly limits any human being’s responsibility for the unintended consequences of an act required by justice. This commitment turns out to be extremely important, of course, in Thomistic responses to the problem of dirty hands.
18. “[W]e can retain the idea of language as expression—of linguistic institutions as embodying the objective spirit of a community—without making fanciful claims about the degree of internal cohesion or harmony which can be attributed to our own form of life” (Lovibond, Realism and Imagination in Ethics, 127).
19. “It happens not infrequently that because of the incompleteness of intellectual authority within the moral language-game … people may disagree about the instantiation of moral concepts (about what is permissible, or obligatory, or in bad taste, etc.) without it being possible to refer the dispute to any kind of arbitration which will command general assent” (Ibid., 179).
20. I do not go so far as to define anyone as religious who takes something to be most important—William A. Christian’s variation on Paul Tillich’s theme of religion as ultimate concern. See Christian, Meaning and Truth in Religion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964). But I do think that religious commitments often take the form of commitments about what is most important. I also think that many of our most recalcitrant moral disagreements are, at bottom, differences over the relative importance of various very important things that we care about. These moral debates are connected with religious differences.
21. Someone might object that I have here reverted to a description of the problem as a matter of conflicting desires. But, as Harry Frankfurt has argued, what one cares about has more to do with one’s will than with one’s desires or preferences. See the title essay in Frankfurt, The Importance of What We Care About (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); and Necessity, Volition, and Love (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), esp. 110, 155–58. My argument in this section is influenced by Frankfurt’s claim in the latter volume that caring about something can involve a sort of “volitional necessity” that “renders certain actions unthinkable” (111; emphasis in original). This is the bridge I use to get from Shklar’s idea that cruelty is the worst thing we do to my commitments on the problem of dirty hands.
22. To put the point in Frankfurt’s terms, I recognize that not all of my fellow citizens care about individual human beings in a way that renders targeting innocent civilians unthinkable even in supreme emergencies. What, if anything, one should care about in this way is among the hardest questions anyone can try to think about. It is so hard, in fact, that it would be foolish to require a religiously plural society to agree on such matters before proceeding with political deliberation.
23. This commitment is what is at stake, for example, in the debate raging among Catholics since the 1960s between what Elizabeth Anscombe called “the method of casuistry” and what her opponents have called “proportionalism.” For my own attempt to show that traditional just-war reasoning of Anscombe’s type is not best viewed as a process of “weighing” prima facie responsibilities, see Stout, “Justice and Resort to War: A Sampling of Christian Ethical Thinking,” in James Turner Johnson and John Kelsay, eds., Cross, Crescent, and Sword: The Justification and Limitation of War in Western and Islamic Tradition (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990), 3–33. Citations of Anscombe can be found there.
CHAPTER 9
THE EMERGENCE OF MODERN DEMOCRATIC CULTURE
1. For a detailed account of early-modern political thought that plays up the important contributions of the conciliar movement in Catholicism, see Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978).
2. For an account of the relationship between world-formative Protestantism and the low degree of ascriptivism in modern democratic cultures, see Nicholas Wolterstorff, Until Justice and Peace Embrace (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1983), 3–22.
3. Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man (London: Penguin, 1984), 168.
4. Walt Whitman, Whitman: Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, ed. Justin Kaplan (New York: Library of America), 955.
5. Nicholas Wolterstorff, Until Justice and Peace Embrace (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1983), 84.
6. Annette C. Baier, Moral Prejudices (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), 225–26.
7. AV, 68–70.
8. Whitman, Whitman: Poetry and Prose, 6.
9. For an explication of the notion that facts are true claims, see MIE, 327–29.
10. Brandom usually refers to the former as “doxastic” commitments, but I prefer the less forbidding term, “cognitive,” which he uses in AR, 83.
11. With this caveat: that the ordinary notions of “belief” and “intention” are ambiguous, whereas the technical notions of cognitive and practical commitment are designed to be univocal. See MIE, 195, 256–59.
12. The issue of Heidegger’s relation to pragmatism is a complicated one, which I cannot pursue here, aside from noting that his later work does attempt to rehabilitate a kind of serious questioning. On the pragmatic themes in Heidegger’s early work, see Robert Brandom, “Heidegger’s Categories in Being and Time,” Monist, 66, no. 3 (1983): 387–409; and Mark Okrent, Heidegger’s Pragmatism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988). See also James C. Edwards, The Plain Sense of Things (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997).
13. See, for example, Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. J.G.A. Pocock (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 26–27, 34–35, 41–42, and 72–73.
14. Thomas Paine, Common Sense, ed. Karl Heinz Schönfelder (Halle: Niemeyer, 1956), 67, 73–80, and 92.
15. It will take feminists like Mary Wollstonecraft to argue that these normative statuses should be attributed to women as well. And it will take abolitionists like Sojourner Truth to argue that these statuses should be attributed to slaves.
16. Sellars and Brandom both emphasize the first way, because their accounts of ethical uses of language focus mainly on “ought” judgments. As far as I know, Sellars neglects to mention the second way, and Brandom discusses it only in contexts (MIE, 123–30; AR, 69–76) where his primary concern is to correct Michael Dummett’s account of the relationship that ought to obtain between the circumstances and consequences of application of a concept. I am simply taking over what Brandom says in those contexts about “highly charged words” like “Boche” and “nigger,” extending it to equally evaluative terms like “courage” and “cruel,” and then making explicit the role such terms can have in noninferential observation reports.
17. For an analysis of the role played by the emotions in scientific revolutions and religious conversions, see Bas C. van Fraassen, The Empirical Stance (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002), 64–110. For a discussion of the role of imagination in ethics, see Sabina Lovibond, Realism and Imagination in Ethics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983).
18. Edmund Burke, Reflections, 17, 67, 142.
CHAPTER 10
THE IDEAL OF A COMMON MORALITY
1. David Lewis, Counterfactuals (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973), 91.
2. See especially Michael Walzer, Interpretation and Social Criticism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), 41–43.
3. Ignazio Silone, Bread and Wine, trans. Eric Mosbacher (New York: Signet, 1986).
4. Robert Brandom, echoing Sellars, remarks that “ ‘Justification’ has the ‘ing/ed’ ambiguity …: justifying, a practical activity, or being justified, a normative status.” The remark appears in his “Study Guide” in Wilfrid Sellars, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), 157.
5. See Nicholas Wolterstorff, “Can Belief in God Be Rational If It Has No Foundations?” in Faith and Rationality: Reason and Belief in God, ed. Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983), 135–86.
6. For a pragmatic account of explanations as answers to why-questions, see Bas C. van Fraassen, The Scientific Image (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), chap. 5. If van Fraassen is right, explanations are answers to questions of the form, Why P? I am suggesting analogously that (epistemic) justifications are answers to questions of the form, Why believe that P?
7. Compare van Fraassen: “An explanation is not the same as a proposition, or an argument, or list of propositions; it is an answer. (Analogously, a son is not the same as a man, even if all sons are men, and every man is a son.) An explanation is an answer to a why-question. So, a theory of explanation must be a theory of why-questions” (134; emphasis in original).
The discussion of explanation went wrong at the very beginning when explanation was conceived of as a relationship like description: a relation between theory and fact. Really it is a three-term relation, between theory, fact, and context. No wonder that no single relation between theory and fact ever managed to fit more than a few examples! Being an explanation is essentially relative, for an explanation is an answer. (In just that sense, being a daughter is something relative: every woman is a daughter, and every daughter is a woman, yet being a daughter is not the same as being a woman.) Since an explanation is an answer, it is evaluated vis-à-vis a question, which is a request for information. But exactly what is requested, by means of the question “Why is it the case that P?”, differs from context to context. In addition, the background theory plus data relative to which the question is evaluated, as arising or not arising, depends on context. And even what part of that background information is to be used to evaluate how good the answer is, qua answer to that question, is a contextually determined factor. So to say that a given theory can be used to explain a certain fact, is always elliptic. (Scientific Image, 156; emphasis in original).
8. Thus Alasdair MacIntyre is right to claim that in ethics, as in science, “what we have to aspire to is not a perfect theory, one necessarily to be assented to by any rational being, because invulnerable or almost invulnerable to objections, but rather the best theory to emerge so far in the history of this class of theories.” He continues: “The possibility has always to be left open that in any particular field … some new challenge to the established best theory so far will appear and will displace it” (AV, 270).
9. I qualify and expand upon this conclusion in Stout, Ethics after Babel, expanded ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), chaps. 1–4.
10. This God is omniscient by definition, which means that he knows every truth there is, including the moral ones. If he knows all of the moral truths, he must be justified in believing them. On my account of being justified in believing something, this means (roughly) that God is epistemically without fault in believing the moral claims he believes. It does not mean that God is able to justify his beliefs to himself. This is a good thing, for what would count as an omniscient being’s relevant reasons for doubting? Of course, this does not prevent God from justifying a belief to someone else if he pleases, for an omniscient being would know what everybody else’s relevant reasons for doubting are and also every possible way of eliminating them by presenting justificatory arguments. Compare van Fraassen, Scientific Image, 130.
11. Mark Johnston, “Objectivity Refigured: Pragmatism without Verificationism,” in Reality, Representation, and Projection, ed. John Haldane and Crispin Wright (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 112.
12. Translated by Elizabeth Wyckoff, as quoted in Lloyd L. Weinreb, Natural Law and Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), 22.
13. Martin Luther King, Jr., “Letter from Birmingham City Jail,” in A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr., ed. James Melvin Washington (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1986), 293.
14. Quoted in Lewis, Counterfactuals, 73. See F. P. Ramsey, Foundations of Mathematics (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1931), 242.
15. For present purposes, the distinction between moral and nonmoral sentences can be drawn in virtually any way you please. Because of my holistic inclinations in the philosophy of language, I would not in any event want to place too much weight on the distinction or to draw it in terms of the use of particular words that are sometimes thought to be distinctively action-guiding. For a discussion of the vagaries of the concept of a moral language, see Ethics after Babel, chap. 3.
16. In the next chapter, I will discuss a version of divine-command theory that does not mystify in this way. Whether the version of natural-law theory advocated by John Finnis and Germain Grisez avoids this problem is an interesting question. What makes the theory prone to ideological abuse is its highly questionable conception of inviolable, self-evident, basic human goods. Scott Davis, a secular Aristotelian, argues that the Finnis-Grisez position, especially when applied to questions in sexual ethics, “is just one more way of smuggling” a medieval Christian understanding of deviancy “into the discussion without paying the price of putting its theological commitments on the line.” Davis, “Doing What Comes Naturally: Recent Work on Thomas Aquinas and the New Natural Law Theory,” Religion 31 (2001): 407–33; quotation from 429. Russell Hittinger argues to a similar conclusion from a theological point of view in A Critique of the New Natural Law Theory (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1987). I do not see how Finnis and Grisez can escape the resulting crossfire without abandoning their position. For the most influential statement of the “new” natural-law theory, see John Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980). For an application of the theory to sexual issues, see Robert P. George, In Defense of Natural Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). The new natural lawyers are at their least ideological, it seems to me, in John Finnis, Joseph Boyle, and Germain Grisez, Nuclear Deterrence, Morality, and Realism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), a work for which I have the utmost respect. One might wish that Finnis’s followers were as rigorous in dissociating themselves from politicians who disagree with them on capital punishment and nuclear deterrence as from those who disagree with them on abortion and same-sex coupling.
17. For this reason, there is no point in defining moral truth as what we would believe about moral topics at the end of ethical inquiry. See Richard Rorty, “Life at the End of Inquiry,” London Review of Books (2 August–6 September 1984): 6; and Mark Johnston, “Verificationism as Philosophical Narcissism,” Philosophical Perspectives 7 (1993): 307–30, esp. 319–27.
CHAPTER 11
ETHICS WITHOUT METAPHYSICS
1. Here my phrasing is influenced by the following remarks by Mark Johnston:
Let us say that metaphysics in the pejorative sense is a confused conception of what legitimates our practices; confused because metaphysics in this sense is a series of pictures of the world as containing various independent demands for our practices, when the only real legitimation of those practices consists in showing their worthiness to survive on the testing ground of everyday life. … So defined, metaphysics is the proper object of that practical criticism which asks whether the apparently legitimating stories which help sustain our practices really do legitimate, and whether the real explanations of our practices allow us to justify them. There then ought to be a critical philosophy which not only corrals the developed manifestations of metaphysics within philosophy but also serves the ends of practical criticism. Such a critical philosophy would be the content of anything that deserved the name of a progressive Pragmatism. (“Objectivity Refigured: Pragmatism without Verificationism,” in Reality, Representation, and Projection, ed. John Haldane and Crispin Wright [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993], 85).
2. Victor Anderson raises this question in his book, Pragmatic Theology (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), chap. 1; see especially 18. Anderson is puzzled as to how I propose to accept Dewey’s claim that truth is warranted assertibility while also insisting that truth is a nonrelative concept. But I do not say that truth is warranted assertibility. What I say is that the concepts of truth and warranted assertibility behave similarly in some first-person, present-tense contexts. The similarities lend credence to the notion that our interest in truth ought always to be an interest in accessible truth. I emphasize, however, that the two concepts do not behave similarly in various other contexts. Anderson breaks off his quotation from Ethics after Babel immediately before the line in which I explain that “it would be better to avoid [Dewey’s] dictum altogether.”
3. Anderson holds that I have defined truth: “Because Stout defines truth in terms of traditional philosophy, simplicity, a high grade of certainty, and universality, his characterization of truth is hard to square with his rejections of metaphysical ontology and theology” (Pragmatic Theology, 19). I would maintain that because I have not offered a definition of truth, it follows that I have not defined it in terms of certainty, universality, or simplicity. I have never said or implied that the truth of a belief, claim, or proposition entails its certainty, and have on various occasions expressed suspicion of the Cartesian quest for certainty as a guarantor of truth. The term “universality” has at least two senses—one of which pertains to a proposition’s logical form, another of which pertains to whether everybody accepts a proposition. In neither of these senses would I be inclined to identify universality with truth. The logical form of a proposition and the number of people who accept it are two distinct matters, and both are distinct from its truth-value. A proposition that is universal in scope, logically speaking, and a proposition that is universally accepted could both turn out to be false.
As for “simplicity,” I assume that what Anderson means by this is the familiar notion that truth is one. This notion is simply an implication of the familiar logical principle that a proposition and its negation cannot both be true. This is indeed a traditional philosophical notion, and there have been some interesting arguments against it in recent years by philosophers associated with pragmatism, but it is not implicated, as Anderson implies, in the metaphysical realism of traditional philosophical theories of truth. You can deny the so-called metaphysical realism of a correspondence theory of truth and still accept the standard logical notion that no set of true propositions, including the infinitely large set that includes all true propositions, includes a contradiction.
4. “After all, the only concept Plato succeeded in defining was mud (dirt and water)” (Donald Davidson, Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001], 155–56). For a critical discussion of atomic, contextual, and implicit definitions of truth, see Paul Horwich, Truth, 2d ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 33–36.
5. “What is not clear in Stout’s position,” Anderson writes, “is what one is to make of truth, since it apparently is connected with justified beliefs but not identified with them” (Pragmatic Theology, 18).
6. Richard Rorty, “Pragmatism, Davidson, and Truth,” in Truth and Interpretation, ed. Ernest LePore (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 333–55. Rorty discusses the second and third uses, but under different names. In this paper, he distances himself nicely from both realism and antirealism. Unfortunately, he is more famous for other writings that appear to commit him to antirealism, thus muddying the water.
7. Hilary Putnam, Reason, Truth and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), chap. 3. See also Sumner Twiss, “On Truth and Justification in ‘Ethics after Babel,’ ” in The Annual of the Society of Christian Ethics (1990): 37–53. Twiss confesses puzzlement about how I propose to conceive of truth “beyond noting features of ordinary usage,” and he charitably resolves the puzzle by taking me to be committed to Putnam’s position. The trouble is that I do not accept Putnam’s position.
8. See Horwich, Truth, chap. 4, and Michael Williams, Unnatural Doubts: Epistemological Realism and the Basis of Scepticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), chap. 6.
9. Mark Johnston, “Verificationism as Philosophical Narcissism,” Philosophical Perspectives, 7 (1993): 307–30, 307 (emphasis in original). For his criticisms of Putnam, see 319–27 of the same article as well as Johnston, “Objectivity Refigured: Pragmatism without Verificationism,” in Reality, Representation, and Projection, ed. John Haldane and Crispin Wright (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 87–99.
10. Arthur Fine, The Shaky Game (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), chaps. 7 and 8.
11. Mark Johnston, “Reasons and Reductionism,” The Philosophical Review 101, no. 3 (July 1992): 590.
12. Johnston, “Objectivity Refigured,” 85.
13. Scott Soames, Understanding Truth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 229.
14. I discuss Donald Davidson’s antidefinitional view, Brandom’s deflationism, and Rorty’s wavering between antirealism and minimalism in “Radical Interpretation and Pragmatism: Davidson, Rorty, and Brandom on Truth,” in Radical Interpretation in Religion, ed. Nancy Frankenberry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). More important than the details of Brandom’s theory of truth, I argue, is his attempt to resituate the topic of truth within the overall structure of his philosophy of language in a way that dramatically lowers the philosophical stakes associated with truth theory. He does this by reversing the relationship of semantics and pragmatics, as understood in the representationalist tradition. He calls his own approach “inferentialism.”
15. Horwich, Truth, 62. I should emphasize that a minimalist approach to truth, as I understand it, need not entail that the value of having true beliefs is a trivial matter. For an insightful treatment of this value, see Bernard Williams, Truth and Truthfulness (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002). I agree with Williams’s criticisms of the view that “since truth does not … [according to minimalism] come to much, so the value of truth cannot come to much” (65).
16. Horwich, Truth, 104–5. See also Grady Scott Davis, “Tradition and Truth in Christian Ethics: John Yoder and the Bases of Biblical Realism,” in The Wisdom of the Cross: Essays in Honor of John Howard Yoder, ed. Chris K. Huebner and Harry J. Huebner (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 282.
17. In “Radical Interpretation and Pragmatism,” I respond to Rorty’s qualms about speaking in this way.
18. “Stout writes about the significance in moral judgment of the logical space between what a competent judge holds and what actually obtains. Without this distinction, the nature of moral agreement and the criteria of competence are radically altered. Thus the judgement [sic] ‘slavery is evil’ does not reduce to a series of statements about what ideal observers would agree on” (David Fergusson, Community, Liberalism, and Christian Ethics [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998], 101). Fergusson refers to me as a “moral realist” on 192 n. 53.
19. See Davis, “Tradition and Truth in Christian Ethics,” 278–305.
20. For example, starting from the equivalence use, one can account for the acceptance use as follows. If p is true if and only if p, as the equivalence use implies, then this explains why “believing that a theory is true is a trivial step beyond believing the theory” (Horwich, Truth, 57). Other forms of minimalism take the acceptance use as primary, and proceed to explain other uses on that basis.
21. Horwich takes the concept to be useful because it enables “explicit formulation of schematic generalizations” (Truth, 37). Brandom, in contrast, takes it to be useful mainly as a pro-sentence forming operator (MIE, chap. 5). It was fatal to redundancy theories that they accounted for the use of the term in a way that made it appear virtually useless.
22. Horwich, Truth, 2.
23. In fact, there are many things that we assess as true or false: a carpenter’s level, a singer’s notes, one’s friends, and so on. Nicholas Wolterstorff tells me that he is studying the full range of such usages. But here our interest is confined to beliefs, claims, and the propositions they have as their content.
24. As Brandom puts this point: “What must not be lost is an appreciation of the way in which our discursive practice is empirically and practically constrained. It is not up to us which claims are true (that is, what the facts are). It is in a sense up to us which noises and marks express which claims, and hence, in a more attenuated sense, which express true claims. But empirical and practical constraint on our arbitrary whim is a pervasive feature of our discursive practice” (MIE, 331; emphasis in original).
25. To take only three vastly different but concise examples, consider Jean-Luc Marion, “Metaphysics and Phenomenology: A Summary for Theologians,” in The Postmodern God: A Theological Reader, ed. Graham Ward (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 279–96; Bas C. van Fraassen, “Against Analytic Metaphysics,” in The Empirical Stance (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002), 1–30; and Cornel West, “Dispensing with Metaphysics in Religious Thought,” in Prophetic Fragments (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1988), 267–72.
26. Thus minimalism is not to be confused with such metaphysical views as physicalism, materialism, or naturalism.
27. Timothy P. Jackson, Love Disconsoled: Meditations on Christian Charity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 136.
28. Timothy P. Jackson, “The Theory and Practice of Discomfort: Richard Rorty and Pragmatism,” Thomist 51, no. 2 (April 1987): 294. “It seems a psychological, if not a theological, truth that in the absence of standards and interests ‘not just our own,’ we tend to be incapable of any standards at all, even prudence” (295).
29. Jackson, Love Disconsoled, 139.
30. At one point Jackson acknowledges the possibility of a position that is neither realist nor antirealist with respect to truth, but then dismisses it abruptly: “I do not see how such an a-alethiological stance can be sustained psychologically, however, given that I cannot conceive of how one can live without concern for truth” (Love Disconsoled, 137n). But this remark wrongly assumes that concern for truth psychologically involves commitment to a metaphysical theory of truth. As Williams makes clear, moreover, a minimalist account of truth need not entail that concern for truth is a trivial matter.
31. Twiss, “On Truth and Justification.”
32. As Iris Murdoch argues in The Sovereignty of Good (New York: Schocken Books, 1971).
33. Robert Merrihew Adams, Finite and Infinite Goods: A Framework for Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). As a philosophical account of ethics from a theistic point of view, this book is unequalled in our period, and my remarks on it here will hardly do it justice. I believe its accounts of moral horror, the sacred, devotion, idolatry, martyrdom, and vocation contribute much to our understanding of ethics and religion.
34. It is not necessarily the same question as what water is, however. It might be that Adams’s way of talking about water conflates constitution with identity or essence. See Mark Johnston, “Constitution Is Not Identity,” Mind, 101, no. 401 (1992): 89–105. The final four pages offer minimalist arguments against the metaphysical temptations of scientism in this area of philosophy.
35. Similarly, chapter 14’s treatment of politics could easily serve as a model for theists who wish to avoid the pitfalls of the new traditionalism and maintain a proper respect for the significance of democracy.
36. There is a brief reference to the cautionary uses of “good” and “true” in Richard Rorty, “Response to Haack,” in Rorty and Pragmatism: The Philosopher Responds to His Critics, ed. Herman J. Saatkamp, Jr. (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1995), 150.
37. For both of these authors, intrinsic worth can also be sacred worth, in the sense that violation of it is abominable or horrible. See Jackson, Love Disconsoled, chap. 4; Adams, Finite and Infinite Goods, chap. 4. I now hold that this notion, or something like it, is indeed indispensable, and have found their criticisms of my earlier views on abomination instructive.
38. I am alluding to Mark Johnston, “Dispositional Theories of Value,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, supplemental vol. 63: 139–74; and Johnston, “Objectivity Refigured,” 111–119. But I am not endorsing what he calls a “response-dependent” account of values.
39. The quoted phrase appears in Johnston, “Objectivity Refigured,” 105 and elsewhere.
40. “The most important basis for a response to this objection,” according to Adams (Finite and Infinite Goods, 31), “is still the point that the imaging of God by creatures is a matter of distant and fragmentary resemblance.” The trouble is that the more distant and fragmentary the resemblance is, the weaker and vaguer the explanation of excellence is. In many cases, the resemblance relation between the finite thing and the transcendent God appears to evaporate into something too indeterminate to do the explaining it is meant to do. The property being explained is much better understood and more determinate than the relation being invoked to explain it. So why bother with the explanation? This problem brings out a worry close to the heart of Pascal and Barth. The metaphysical urge to explain things theologically has a tendency to shrink God. To perform the function of an explanans, the posited divinity must not itself be a mystery.
41. Adams discusses the sort of issue I am raising in Finite and Infinite Goods, 46f. He ultimately says he is inclined to reject the supposition that “God could have failed to exist or to be a good candidate for the role of the Good” (47). Thus, there is no possible world in which God does not exist, in which case my thought-experiment cannot get off the ground. Adams admits that he knows of “no conclusive proof” of God’s necessary existence. So for now, at any rate, my thought-experiment stands.
42. For explanations of Barth’s distinction between analogia entis and analogia fidei, see George Hunsinger, How to Read Karl Barth: The Shape of His Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), esp. 283 n. 2; and Bruce L. McCormack, Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Genesis and Development 1909–1936 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), esp. 17. Hunsinger discusses “speculation,” the term Barthians use when referring to metaphysics in the pejorative sense, on 51f.
43. Jackson’s book is extremely interesting in this connection. He affirms the existence of a perfectly loving God, as we have seen, but he rejects faith in immortality as wishful self-consolation. In this life, it is permissible to hope for immortality, but not believe in it. Hence the title, Love Disconsoled.
44. Timothy Jackson urged the inclusion of this point.
45. Adams carefully avoids concluding that if there is no God, there is no ethical objectivity either. “If there is no God, or if God is in fact not a suitable candidate for the role of the Good, then my theory is false, but there may be some other salient, suitable candidate, and so some other theory of the good may be true” (Finite and Infinite Goods, 46). But his critical discussion of alternative theories leaves a strong impression that he finds them unpromising, so ethical objectivity does seem to hang in the balance after all. I am asking whether love of wisdom in this dimension of life actually involves searching for “a suitable candidate for the role of the Good.” The metaphysician’s script has put undue pressure on the casting director to find something godlike to play the part.
46. I allude to both 2 Corinthians 4:7 and James Gustafson, Treasure in Earthen Vessels: The Church as a Human Community (New York: Harper, 1961).
47. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Experience,” in Emerson: Essays and Lectures, ed. Joel Porte (New York: Library of America, 1983), 471.
48. The assertion could still be wrong, of course. The realization that the view from this stair is not truly excellent might dawn on me as I ascend further. Most adults look back on something they once considered excellent—a favorite book, movie, or song—as mediocre or poor. Acquaintance with better things transforms their understanding of excellence in a way that requires rejection of evaluative beliefs they once held.
CHAPTER 12
ETHICS AS A SOCIAL PRACTICE
1. The social-perspectival dimension of scorekeeping turns out to be essential to Brandom’s account of propositional contents themselves. See MIE, chap. 8.
2. MacIntyre discusses the way in which “human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended” in AV, 187ff.
3. Of course, there are senses in which only scientific discourse would qualify as objective, but they are irrelevant for our purposes. See van Fraassen, The Empirical Stance (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002), 153–96, for an account of the uniquely objectifying dimensions of science. The purposes of ethical discourse would obviously be defeated if it aspired to the kinds of objectification scientists aspire to in their strictly empirical investigations.
4. Sabina Lovibond, Realism and Imagination in Ethics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 148; emphasis in original.
5. This would be analogous to siding with Stephen Douglas against Lincoln regarding how the issue of slavery was to be resolved. Douglas had said, in effect, that we are in a democracy, so whatever the majority in a given state or territory says on the slavery question ought to hold there. Lincoln responded that commitment to democracy involves striving to determine whether it is true that democratic principles and the institution of slavery are compatible, which is not a matter able to be decided by a majority vote.
6. Whitman refers to “the leveler, the unyielding principle of the average,” but argues that this is “offset” by “another principle, equally unyielding,” that is “join’d” to it—that of “individuality.” See Walt Whitman, Democratic Vistas, in Whitman: Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, ed. Justin Kaplan (New York: Library of America, 1982), par. 59.
7. For an account of expressive freedom worked out along something like these lines, see Robert Brandom, “Freedom and Constraint by Norms,” in Hermeneutics and Praxis, ed. Robert Hollinger (University of Notre Dame Press, 1985), 171–91.
8. Brandom briefly discusses the Hegelian version of this idea, and mentions its influence on Karl Marx and T. H. Green in “Freedom and Constraint,” 188–89. The Hegelian version emphasizes the state’s supervisory role in cultivating established forms of expressive freedom and integrating them into a harmonious social whole. The Emersonian version tends to play down that role, suspecting that the state is necessarily too clumsy and ignorant to perform it properly. The state’s proper role is in large part to protect the marginalized and unpopular from harm—a more daunting task now, no doubt, than in Emerson’s day. Emersonians expect the expressive freedom actively cultivated by poets and artists to place constant pressure on the conservative, integrative tendencies of established institutions. Small pockets of intense individuality and spiritual aspiration proliferate constantly in a democratic culture. They may take the form of consciousness-raising groups, sects, political uprisings, or avant-garde artistic communities, but they are always in danger of provoking retaliation from a society anxious to maintain the silence and docility—as well as the virtue—of its members.
9. Robert Merrihew Adams advocated the sort of divine-command theory being discussed here in his “A Modified Divine Command Theory of Ethical Wrongness,” in Religion and Morality: A Collection of Essays, ed. Gene Outka and John P. Reeder, Jr. (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor, 1973), 318–47. I assessed the limitations of such a theory, making roughly the same points I have just made, in my “Metaethics and the Death of Meaning,” Journal of Religious Ethics 6 (1978): 1–18. Adams revised his theory, eschewing his previous focus on meaning in favor of claims about the nature of ethical wrongness, in “Divine Command Metaethics Modified Again,” Journal of Religious Ethics 7 (1979): 66–79, and in Finite and Infinite Goods: A Framework for Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). I discuss the latter in the previous chapter.
10. David Little and Sumner B. Twiss, Comparative Religious Ethics: A New Method (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1978), 103.
11. Little and Twiss, Comparative Religious Ethics, 102.
12. David Little, “The Present State of the Comparative Study of Religious Ethics,” Journal of Religious Ethics 9 (Fall 1981): 210–27.
13. In short, I reject what Brandom calls “regulism” (MIE, 18–26). For influential arguments against regulism, see Ludwig Wittgenstein’s discussion of following a rule in Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1953) and Sellars, SPR, 321.
CONCLUSION
Bill Holm, The Music of Failure (Marshall, Minn.: Plains Press, 1985), 12. Holm writes wonderfully affectionate essays about the people of Minneota, Minnesota, complains eloquently about American greed and foolishness, and often quotes Whitman admiringly and with understanding.
1. George Kateb, Hannah Arendt: Politics, Conscience, Evil (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Allenheld, 1984), 172.
2. The phrase enclosed by quotation marks is Michael Walzer’s. He is characterizing Foucault’s view in “The Politics of Foucault,” in Foucault: A Critical Reader, ed. David Couzens Hoy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 62.
3. George Orwell, “Inside the Whale,” in An Age Like This, vol. 1 of The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968), 507.
4. George Orwell, “The Lion and the Unicorn,” in My Country Right or Left, vol. 2 of The Collected Essays, 107.
5. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Fate,” in Emerson: Essays and Lectures, ed. Joel Porte (New York: Library of America, 1983), 943.
6. David Hollinger, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 15f.
7. I have learned much about this topic from George Kateb. See his The Inner Ocean (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992).
8. Individuality and community are linked here in a way for which neither side of the liberal-communitarian debate adequately accounted. Each of these notions needs to be construed in a way that makes the linkage possible—namely, by being set within an account of social practices. On the one hand, as I have just been stressing, it is shared practices that make the virtues of individuality possible. On the other hand, and equally important, practices held in common are the substance of the relevant kind of community. Neither shared ethnic roots nor shared doctrines of ultimate ends are required. Notice also that identification with community is the key concept being employed here, not loyalty to or pride in community, the concepts Richard Rorty favors in “Justice as a Larger Loyalty,” in Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation, ed. Pheng Cheng and Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 45–58, and in Achieving Our Country (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998).
9. Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon, Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony (Nashville: Abingdon, 1989).
10. I take the quotation from the back cover of Hauerwas’s With the Grain of the Universe: The Church’s Witness and Natural Theology (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2001).
11. A better way of characterizing my position in relation to contemporary political theory would be to classify it as a pragmatic version of deliberative democracy. Like other proponents of deliberative democracy, I emphasize the discursive dimension of democratic culture. But my pragmatic expressivist model of democratic deliberation differs significantly from the social-contract model favored, for example, by Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson in Democracy and Disagreement (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996). In many respects, Gutmann and Thompson are much closer to Rawlsian liberalism than I am.
12. I am here responding to the challenge issued to me by Hauerwas in After Christendom? How the Church Is To Behave If Freedom, Justice, and a Christian Nation Are Bad Ideas (Nashville: Abingdon, 1991), 33. An excellent account of the distinction between nations and nation-states by a Christian author is given in Nicholas Wolterstorff, Until Justice and Peace Embrace (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1983), chap. 5. See also John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (Athens, Ohio: Swallow Press, 1927), 143–44. Hauerwas credits the line about the telephone company to MacIntyre in Resident Aliens, 35.
13. For more on this definition, see Bernard Yack, The Problems of a Political Animal (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 1–87.
14. Robert Mangabeira Unger and Cornel West, The Future of American Progressivism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999).
15. This is part of what Hegel appears to mean when he declares that the rational is actual. Hegel was too quick to identify the social form taken by rationality in the modern era with a kind of nation-state. Left-wing Hegelians and their pragmatist cousins see the state as a particular set of institutional arrangements that might or might not be in conformity at any given moment with what rationality demands. The actual locus of rationality, as they see it, is not the state, but the nation, people, or public, conceived as a discursive community committed to actualizing an evolving set of norms and ideals. What Hegel calls rationality, Dewey calls critical intelligence. It is crucial to understand that these are normative notions.
16. Ben H. Bagdikian, The Media Monoply, 6th ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000), x.
17. Edward S. Herman and Robert W. McChesney, The Global Media (London and Washington: Cassell, 1997), 1.
18. Jeffrey C. Isaac, Democracy in Dark Times (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), 113. “At the level of the nation-state the ‘rule of the people’ must always be more or less metaphorical, channeled, diluted, and corrupted by mass political organizations and bureaucratic structures. But partial alternatives to such a politics … are not only conceivable. Such oases are a part of our political landscape, though an often ignored part” (120). Among the examples of such oases that Isaac mentions are “the Green movements in Europe” and “the many local chapters of Planned Parenthood,” as well as “battered women’s and rape-crisis shelters” and “the religious and social action committees of synagogues and churches.” The list, he adds, “could be easily expanded.”
19. See David Bromwich, “Literary Radicalism in America,” in A Choice of Inheritance: Self and Community from Edmund Burke to Robert Frost (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 145–59. “A change for the better usually happens like this. A small number of writers get together, agree that their culture has lost its vitality, and decide to blame everything on its habitual arrangements, which they hold in contempt. If their analysis succeeds in fostering a literature that is powerful, the analysis and the literature stand doubly vindicated. But the important moment for a literary radical comes earlier, when he discovers that his analysis is widely shared; and the effect of such moments is to give fresh life to other radicals, who seek political remedies. There is a sense—better understood by historians than by critics—in which an Emerson makes room for a William Lloyd Garrison. What began as a program of literary revisionism thus works its way into all the channels of reform” (149–50).
20. I once heard Michael Walzer argue along these lines.
21. Walt Whitman, Whitman: Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, ed. Justin Kaplan (New York: Library of America, 1982), 485.
22. Meridel Le Sueur, North Star Country (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 321.