PART TWO
Who are you indeed who would talk or sing to America?
Have you studied out the land, its idioms and men?…
Have you possess’d yourself of the Federal Constitution?…
Do you see who have left all feudal processes and poems behind them, and assumed the poems and processes of Democracy?…
What is this you bring my America?…
Have you not imported this or the spirit of it in some ship?
Is it not a mere tale?
—Whitman
Chapter 3
RELIGIOUS DIVERSITY, like racial diversity, has been a source of discord throughout American history. Most Americans claim to be religious, but their convictions are hardly cut from the same cloth. Given that some of these convictions are thought to have highly important political implications, we should not be surprised to hear them expressed when citizens are exchanging reasons for their respective political views. Secular liberals find the resulting cacophony deeply disturbing. Some of them have strongly urged people to restrain themselves from bringing their religious commitments with them into the political sphere. Many religious people have grown frustrated at the unwillingness of the liberal elite to hear them out on their own terms, and have recently had much to say against the hypocrisies and biases of secularism. Freedom of religion now strikes some prominent theologians as a secularist ruse designed to reduce religion to insignificance. Part 2 of this book tries to make sense of this controversy.
Freedom of religion consists first of all in the right to make up one’s own mind when answering religious questions. These include, but are not limited to, such questions as whether God exists, how God should be conceived, and what responsibilities, if any, human beings have in response to God’s actions with regard to them. Freedom of religion also consists in the right to act in ways that seem appropriate, given one’s answers to religious questions—provided that one does not cause harm to other people or interfere with their rights. Among the expressive acts obviously protected by this right are rituals and other devotional practices performed in solitude, in the context of one’s family, or in association with others similarly disposed. More controversial, however, is a class of acts that express religious commitments in another way, namely, by employing them as reasons when taking a public stand on political issues. What role, if any, should religious premises play in the reasoning citizens engage in when they make and defend political decisions?
The free expression of religious premises is morally underwritten not only by the value we assign to the freedom of religion, but also by the value we assign to free expression, generally. All citizens of a constitutional democracy possess not only the right to make up their minds as they see fit but also the right to express their reasoning freely, whatever that reasoning may be. It is plausible to suppose that the right to free expression of religious commitments is especially weighty in contexts where political issues are being discussed, for this is where rulers and elites might be most inclined to enforce restraint. Any citizen who chooses to express religious reasons for a political conclusion would seem, then, to enjoy the protection of two rights in doing so: freedom of religion and freedom of expression. And these rights not only have the legal status of basic constitutional provisions, but also hold a prominent place in the broader political culture. Otherwise, the framers of the U.S. Constitution would not have had reason to affirm them explicitly in the Bill of Rights.
I have no doubt that the expression of religious reasons should be protected in these ways. Indeed, I would encourage religiously committed citizens to make use of their basic freedoms by expressing their premises in as much depth and detail as they see fit when trading reasons with the rest of us on issues of concern to the body politic. If they are discouraged from speaking up in this way, we will remain ignorant of the real reasons that many of our fellow citizens have for reaching some of the ethical and political conclusions they do. We will also deprive them of the central democratic good of expressing themselves to the rest of us on matters about which they care deeply. If they do not have this opportunity, we will lose the chance to learn from, and to critically examine, what they say. And they will have good reason to doubt that they are being shown the respect that all of us owe to our fellow citizens as the individuals they are.
Of course, having a right does not necessarily mean that one would be justified in exercising it. Clearly, there are circumstances in which it would be imprudent or disrespectful for someone to reason solely from religious premises when defending a political proposal. But some philosophers hold, more controversially, that such circumstances are more the exception than the rule. Richard Rorty, the most important contemporary pragmatist, has claimed that reasoning from religious premises to political conclusions is nowadays either imprudent, improper, or both. The late John Rawls, the most distinguished political philosopher of our time, at first defended a similarly restrictive view. He later made a concession to free expression by qualifying that policy somewhat, but still considered it improper to introduce religious reasons into public discussion of matters of basic justice unless those reasons are redeemed in the long run by reasons of a different kind. In this chapter, turning first to Rawls and then to Rorty, I will explain why their arguments for these positions fail to persuade me. The point is not to refute them, but to provide a rationale for approaching the topic differently.
RELIGION AND PUBLIC REASON
In a religiously plural society, it will often be rhetorically ineffective to argue from religious premises to political conclusions. When citizens are deeply divided over the relevant religious questions, arguing in this way is rarely likely to increase support for one’s conclusions. Sometimes such reasoning not only fails to win support, but also causes offence. Reasoning from religious premises to political conclusions can imply disrespect for those who do not accept those premises. For example, such reasoning can be calculated to convey the undemocratic message that one must accept a particular set of religious premises to participate in political debate at all. In the United States, such a message is now often reserved for atheists and Muslims, but Jews and Catholics can still occasionally sense it in the air. Therefore, there are moral as well as strategic reasons for self-restraint. Fairness and respectful treatment of others are central moral concerns.
Rawls begins with such concerns, arguing as follows. Political policies, when enacted in law, are backed by the coercive power of the state. To be recognized as a free and equal citizen of such a state is to be treated as someone to whom reasons must be offered, on request, when political policies are under consideration. The reasons that are demanded are not just any reasons. Each citizen may rightfully demand reasons why he or she should view the proposed policy as legitimate. It does not suffice in this context to be told why other people, on the basis of their idiosyncratic premises and collateral commitments, have reached this conclusion. It is not enough for a speaker to show that he or she is entitled to consider a proposal legitimate. The question on each concerned citizen’s mind will rightly be, “Why should I accept this?” Fairness and respect require an honest effort, on the part of any citizen advocating a policy, to justify it to other reasonable citizens who may be approaching the issue from different points of view.
So far, so good. Proper treatment of one’s fellow citizens does seem to require an honest justificatory effort of this sort. When proposing a political policy one should do one’s best to supply reasons for it that people occupying other points of view could reasonably accept. I wholeheartedly embrace this ideal when it is phrased in this (relatively weak) way. But Rawls goes much further than this.
He argues that citizens should aspire to fulfill a much more demanding ideal of public reason. The unqualified version of this ideal, put forward in the original clothbound edition of Political Liberalism, held that our reasoning in the public forum should appeal strictly to ideals and principles that no reasonable person could reasonably reject.1 By agreeing to abide by such principles and to rely solely on them when reasoning in the public forum, citizens enter a social contract. The contract specifies the fair terms of social cooperation in the form of justice as fairness. According to this conception of justice, the principles of the social contract are those we would select as a basis for social cooperation if we were behind a “veil of ignorance.” Behind the veil, we would not know such facts about ourselves as our race, gender, medical condition, intellectual capacities, religious commitments, or comprehensive moral outlook. In ignorance of these facts, but still looking out in a reasonable way for our interests in the resulting system of social cooperation, we would be bound to select fair principles. Political liberalism does not put forward this conception of justice as a component of a comprehensive moral outlook, whether religious or secular. This conception of justice is not premised on a doctrine of what our true good ultimately consists in, on a view of the meaning of life, or even on the full-fledged Kantian liberalism Rawls had defended in A Theory of Justice. It is a “free-standing political conception,” put forward in the hope that it can become and remain the object of a stable “overlapping consensus” among reasonable persons holding conflicting comprehensive doctrines. As such, it gives priority to the rightness of fair social cooperation, insofar as this might conflict with some idea of the good.
Many of Rawls’s religious readers have been prepared to grant that some version of the veil of ignorance would be useful in fleshing out a defensible notion of fairness. A principle designed to regulate economic life, for example, should be chosen from a point of view in which we don’t know whether we will end up being among the least well-off. A principle regulating discrimination in hiring should be chosen from a point of view in which we feign ignorance of our gender and racial identities. Fair enough. But Rawls’s critics have long expressed doubts about similarly excluding knowledge of one’s comprehensive religious and philosophical commitments. Rawls allows those behind the veil of ignorance to have access to a “thin” conception of the good, but his critics hold that in drawing the line between a thin conception and their own comprehensive doctrines, he is begging the question in favor of his own liberal views. For this is the move that underwrites two key components of Rawlsian liberalism: the priority of the right over the good and the conception of public reason with which we are concerned here. The critics protest that neither of these key ideas can meet the high standard Rawls proposes for judging such matters: these are both notions that a reasonable person could reasonably reject.
Public reason, Rawls says, “is public in three ways: as the reason of citizens as such, it is the reason of the public; its subject is the good of the public and matters of fundamental justice; and its nature and content is public, being given by the ideals and principles expressed by society’s conception of political justice, and conducted open to view on that basis” (PL, 213). The limits of public reason are meant to apply to deliberation on essential constitutional provisions and matters of basic justice, not to political deliberation on lesser matters (PL, 214). The ideal of circumspection pertains not only to the reasoning of legislators and other officials, but also to the reasons citizens use when arguing for candidates for public office and when deciding how to vote “when constitutional essentials and matters of basic justice are at stake” (PL, 215). These are the sorts of contexts Rawls has in mind when he refers to the public forum. He classifies reasoning expressed in other contexts, such as a university or church colloquium, as private (PL, 220). All of these points are essential from Rawls’s point of view. Neglecting any of them makes the ideal of public reason seem much more restrictive than he intends it to be.
Now consider the crucial notion of ideals and principles that no reasonable person could reasonably reject. What is a “reasonable person”? As Rawls sees it, “knowing that people are reasonable where others are concerned, we know that they are willing to govern their conduct by a principle from which they and others can reason in common” (PL, 49 n. 1). What public reason requires of citizens is that they be reasonable in the Rawlsian sense. And this means being willing to accept a common basis for reasoning that others, similarly motivated, could not reasonably reject. In short, to be reasonable is to accept the need for a social contract and to be willing to reason on the basis of it, at least when deliberating in the public forum on basic constitutional and political matters. This definition implicitly imputes unreasonableness to everyone who opts out of the contractarian project, regardless of the reasons they might have for doing so. “Persons are reasonable in one basic aspect when, among equals say, they are ready to propose principles and standards as fair terms of cooperation and to abide by them willingly, given the assurance that others will likewise do so. Those norms they view as reasonable for everyone to accept and therefore as justifiable to them” (PL, 49; emphasis added). “By contrast, people are unreasonable in the same basic aspect when they plan to engage in cooperative schemes but are unwilling to honor, or even to propose … any general principles or standards for specifying fair terms of cooperation” (PL, 50). It is clear from the context that the general principles or standards at issue in the last quoted passage are those that meet the requirement I have italicized in the previous one. Notice that someone can count as unreasonable on this definition even if he or she is epistemically entitled, on the basis of sound or compelling reasons, to consider the quest for a common justificatory basis morally unnecessary and epistemologically dubious. To count as reasonable, in the sense of “socially cooperative,” Rawls assumes that one must find his contractarian quest for a common justificatory basis plausible. My problem is that I don’t find this quest plausible. Or more mildly: I am not persuaded that it is going to meet with success. For this reason, I want to explore the possibility that a person can be a reasonable (socially cooperative) citizen without believing in or appealing to a free-standing conception of justice.
Rawls is quick to move from imagining the basis on which citizens “can reason in common” to concluding that only by conducting our most important political reasoning on this basis can we redeem the promise of treating our fellow citizens fairly in matters pertaining to the use of coercive power. And this conclusion leads, in turn, to a restrictive view of the role religious reasons can play in the public forum. It is clear that, in our society, religious premises cannot be part of the basis on which citizens can reason in common, because not all citizens share the same religious commitments, and nobody knows how to bring about agreement on such matters by rational means. Religion is a topic on which citizens are epistemically (as well as morally and legally) entitled to disagree. If so, it follows from the considerations just mentioned that using religious premises in our reasoning on basic political issues conflicts with the ideal of public reason as originally stated by Rawls. If the point of the social contract is to establish a basis on which citizens can reason in common, and religious premises are not part of that basis, then introducing such premises in the public forum automatically fails to secure the legitimacy of whatever proposal this basis was meant to support.
This conclusion strikes me as extremely counterintuitive, given that it seems so contrary to the spirit of free expression that breathes life into democratic culture. As Nicholas Wolterstorff says, “given that it is of the very essence of liberal democracy that citizens enjoy equal freedom in law to live out their lives as they see fit, how can it be compatible with liberal democracy for its citizens to be morally restrained from deciding and discussing political issues as they see fit?”2 Rawls seems to be saying that while the right to express our religious commitments freely is guaranteed twice over in the Bill of Rights, this is not a right of which we ought make essential use in the center of the political arena, where the most important questions are decided. Is it always wrong for citizens in the public forum to reason solely on the basis of religious premises, at least when considering matters of basic justice and constitutional essentials?
Rawls implied as much in the first, clothbound edition of Political Liberalism, but amended his position in the “Introduction to the Paperback Edition” in 1996 and in his paper, “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited.”3 His amended view is that reasonable comprehensive doctrines, including religious doctrines, “may be introduced in public reason at any time, provided that in due course public reasons, given by a reasonable political conception, are presented sufficient to support whatever the comprehensive doctrines are introduced to support” (PL, li–lii). According to this “proviso,” a citizen may offer religious reasons for a political conclusion, but only if he or she eventually supplements those reasons by producing arguments based in the social contract. The amended Rawlsian view is that religious reasons are to IOUs as contractarian reasons are to legal tender. You have not fulfilled your justificatory obligations until you have handed over real cash. I find this version of the position slightly more plausible than the original, simply because it is less restrictive. It makes a bit more room for such instances of exemplary democratic reasoning as the religiously based oratory of the Abolitionists and of Martin Luther King, Jr. But Rawls confesses that he does not know whether these orators “ever fulfilled the proviso” by eventually offering reasons of his officially approved sort (PL, lii n. 27). So, strictly speaking, from a Rawlsian point of view the jury is still out on these cases.
I see it as a strong count against Rawls’s current position that these particular speakers will barely squeak by on his criteria, if they manage to do so at all. The alleged need to satisfy the proviso in such cases suggests to me that something remains seriously wrong with the entire approach Rawls is taking. Two main types of reason-giving are to be found in the relevant speeches, but Rawls classifies both of them as private, because they do not appeal to the common justificatory basis. In the first type, which Rawls calls “declaration” (CP, 594), the speakers express their own religious reasons for adopting some political proposal. In the second type, which Rawls calls “conjecture” (CP, 594), the speakers engage in immanent criticism of their opponents’ views. As immanent critics, they either try to show that their opponents’ religious views are incoherent, or they try to argue positively from their opponents’ religious premises to the conclusion that the proposal is acceptable. What they do not do is argue from a purportedly common basis of reasons in Rawls’s sense. Rawls does not examine these forms of reason-giving in any detail. He merely classifies them as private and moves on. He does not show why a speaker who combines them when addressing fellow citizens on constitutional essentials, like the right to own slaves and who gets to vote, needs eventually to offer argument of some other kind.
Rawls is similarly ambivalent and therefore unpersuasive on Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, perhaps the highest ethical achievement of any political speaker in U.S. history. What gets Lincoln barely off the hook is that “what he says has no implications bearing on constitutional essentials or matters of basic justice” (PL, 254). I am not certain that this is true. The speech is about the question of how a nation at war with itself over slavery can remain a union. Lincoln’s answer, in effect, is that it can do so only if, at the moment when one side wins the war, the people and the state representing them behave “with malice toward none; with charity for all.” This includes behavior intended to “achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace,” which in Lincoln’s view obviously includes taking the right stand on constitutional essentials and matters of basic justice. In any event, suppose he had addressed such matters directly and at greater length, continuing the theme, introduced earlier in the speech, of two parties that both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, whom they believe to be a just judge of wrongdoers. Suppose he had spelled out his immanent criticisms of the self-righteous religious views, the moralistic dualisms, that both sides were then preparing to enact politically. Would the religious content in Lincoln’s speech then have been improper? Would he be engaged in private speech, despite speaking as the president to the people on a very public occasion? Something is deeply wrong here. The speeches of King and Lincoln represent high accomplishments in our public political culture. They are paradigms of discursive excellence. The speeches of the Abolitionists taught their compatriots how to use the terms “slavery” and “justice” as we now use them. It is hard to credit any theory that treats their arguments as placeholders for reasons to be named later.
I do not intend to go very far into the details of the debate between Rawls and his critics.4 My purpose in this section and the next is rather to determine what it is in his contractarian starting point that leads Rawls and others to say such counterintuitive things. If my diagnosis is correct, then the amended version of his position, while it is less paradoxical than the original, does not overcome the basic difficulties in his approach to the topic. My conclusion will be that we ought to reframe the question of religion’s role in political discussion in quite different terms.
The trouble is at least partly a matter of epistemology. I suspect that Rawls has overestimated what can be resolved in terms of the imagined common basis of justifiable principles, and has done so because at this one point in constructing his theory he has drastically underestimated the range of things that socially cooperative individuals can reasonably reject. He has underestimated what a person can reasonably reject, I suspect, because he has underestimated the role of a person’s collateral commitments in determining what he or she can reasonably reject when deciding basic political questions. What I can reasonably reject depends in part on what collateral commitments I have and which of these I am entitled to have. But these commitments vary a good deal from person to person, not least of all insofar as they involve answers to religious questions and judgments about the relative importance of highly important values. It is naïve to expect that the full range of political issues that require public deliberation—issues on which we need some policy—will turn out to be untouched by such variation. Rawls would grant this. Indeed, it may be part of his reason for viewing “the diversity of reasonable comprehensive religious, philosophical, and moral doctrines found in modern democratic societies” as a central problem for political liberalism to address (PL, 36). The question is why constitutional essentials and matters of basic justice are not also affected, for it is reasonable to suppose, when discussing such elemental issues, that the relative importance of highly important values—a matter on which religious traditions have much to say—is a relevant consideration. Rawls might wish to deny this on the basis of his doctrine of the priority of the right over the good, but this doctrine also strikes me as the sort of thing over which epistemically responsible people have good reason to disagree.
I am tempted to put the point by saying that this doctrine is the sort of thing reasonable people would be entitled to disagree over. For the moment, let me use the term “reasonable” in a way that departs from Rawls’s definition. In this sense, a person is reasonable in accepting or rejecting a commitment if he or she is “epistemically entitled” to do so, and reasonable people are those who comport themselves in accord with their epistemic responsibilities.5 I do not see how the same epistemology can consistently (a) declare the people holding various comprehensive views to be reasonable in this sense, and (b) declare the people who dissent from the social contract not to be reasonable in the same sense. To make (a) turn out to be correct, one would need to assume a relatively permissive standard of reasonableness. But if one then applies the same permissive standard of reasonableness to those who dissent from the social contract, (b) is going to be very hard to defend. According to my epistemology, the more permissive standard seems to be the right one to apply in both instances. But if we link the term “reasonable” to epistemic entitlement and apply the term in a relatively permissive way, it will be very hard to make those who reject the contractarian project on epistemological grounds qualify as unreasonable.
This appears to be why Rawls has a stake in introducing his definition of reasonableness. The point of doing so is to guarantee that a reasonable person will be committed to the contractarian project of trying to find, and abide by, a common basis of principles. But this move only begs the question of why the contractarian project of establishing a common basis is itself something no one can reasonably reject in the sense of epistemic entitlement. We still need an answer to this question. There appear to be sound epistemological reasons for rejecting the quest for a common basis, reasons rooted in the permissive notion of epistemic entitlement that lends plausibility to the doctrine of reasonable pluralism in the first place.
Rawls gave an interview to Commonweal, a liberal Catholic journal, in 1998 (reprinted in CP, 616–22). In it he asks how we are to avoid religious civil wars like those of the sixteenth century without adopting his position. “See, what I should do is to turn around and say, what’s the better suggestion, what’s your solution to it? And I can’t see any other solution.” He continues: “People can make arguments from the Bible if they want to. But I want them to see that they should also give arguments that all reasonable citizens might agree to. Again, what’s the alternative?” (CP, 620) Let us see whether we can find one.
Rawls’s amended position entails that it would be inherently unfair, when speaking in the public forum on questions of basic justice, to rely solely on religious premises. This would hold, presumably, even in a case where my epistemological suspicions were realized and it proved impracticable to reason on the basis of a principle that all reasonable citizens could reasonably accept. But suppose this did turn out to be impracticable—for the simple reason that some epistemically responsible people who desire social cooperation have reason for rejecting each candidate principle. Must we then not consider the matter at all? Must we remain silent when it comes up for discussion? How could a requirement of silence in such a case be deemed reasonable—that is to say, justified?
For that matter, how could it be deemed fair in a society committed to freedom of religion and freedom of expression? I do not see how it could be. As Wolterstorff argues:
It belongs to the religious convictions of a good many religious people in our society that they ought to base their decisions concerning fundamental issues of justice on their religious convictions. They do not view as an option whether or not to do so. It is their conviction that they ought to strive for wholeness, integrity, integration, in their lives: that they ought to allow the Word of God, the teachings of the Torah, the command and example of Jesus, or whatever, to shape their existence as a whole, including, then, their social and political existence. Their religion is not, for them, about something other than their social and political existence; it is also about their social and political existence. Accordingly, to require of them that they not base their decisions and discussions concerning political issues on their religion is to infringe, inequitably, on the free exercise of their religion.6
It might be thought that offering religious reasons, without supplementing them by appeal to the social contract, is inherently disrespectful. But why need this be a sign of disrespect at all? Suppose I tell you honestly why I favor a given policy, citing religious reasons. I then draw you into a Socratic conversation on the matter, take seriously the objections you raise against my premises, and make a concerted attempt to show you how your idiosyncratic premises give you reason to accept my conclusions. All the while, I take care to be sincere and avoid manipulating you (CP, 594). Now, I do not see why this would qualify as a form of disrespect. Yet it does not involve basing my reasoning on principles that no reasonable citizen could reasonably reject.
The conception of respect assumed in the objection seems flawed. It neglects the ways in which one can show respect for another person in his or her particularity.7 The reason Rawls neglects these ways is that he focuses exclusively on the sort of respect one shows to another individual by appealing to reasons that anyone who is both properly motivated and epistemically responsible would find acceptable. Why would I be failing to show respect for X if I offered reasons to X that X ought to be moved by from X’s point of view?8 Why would it matter that there might be other people, Y and Z, who could reasonably reject those reasons? Suppose Y and Z are also part of my audience. If I am speaking as a citizen to fellow citizens, unconstrained by expectations of confidentiality, they might well be. This is all I would mean by “speaking in public.” Does my immanent criticism of X then show disrespect to Y and Z? No, because I can go on to show respect for them in the same way, by offering different reasons to them, reasons relevant from their point of view. Socratic questioning is a principal tool of justificatory discourse as well as a way of expressing respect for one’s interlocutor as a (potential) lover of justice and sound thinking. But it does not proceed from an already-agreed-on, common basis.
It appears that Rawls is too caught up in theorizing about an idealized form of reasoning to notice how much work candid expression and immanent criticism—declaration and conjecture—perform in real democratic exchange. Immanent criticism is both one of the most widely used forms of reasoning in what I would call public political discourse and one of the most effective ways of showing respect for fellow citizens who hold differing points of view. Any speaker is free to request reasons from any other. If I have access to the right forum, I can tell the entire community what reasons move me to accept a given conclusion, thus showing my fellow citizens respect as requesters of my reasons. But to explain to them why they might have reason to agree with me, given their different collateral premises, I might well have to proceed piecemeal, addressing one individual (or one type of perspective) at a time. Real respect for others takes seriously the distinctive point of view each other occupies. It is respect for individuality, for difference.
Rawls builds strong assumptions about the nature of discursive sociality into his conception of a “reasonable person.” Such a person is by definition someone who is prepared to play by the discursive rules of the imagined common basis on all essential matters. But why not view the person who takes each competing perspective on its own terms, expressing his own views openly and practicing immanent criticism on the views of others, as a reasonable (i.e., socially cooperative, respectful, reason-giving) person? Why limit oneself in the Rawlsian way to the quest for a common basis, given the possibility that a common basis will not cover all essential matters? I do not see any convincing answers to these questions in Rawls’s writings or in the works of other contractarian theorists. These questions reveal, I think, that the social contract is essentially a substitute for communitarian agreement on a single comprehensive normative vision—a poor man’s communitarianism. Contractarianism feels compelled to reify a sort of all-purpose, abstract fairness or respect for others because it cannot imagine ethical or political discourse dialogically.9 Its view of the epistemological and sociological dimensions of discursive practices is essentially blinkered.
Wolterstorff puts the point in a slightly different way:
So-called “communitarians” regularly accuse proponents of the liberal position of being against community. One can see what they are getting at. Nonetheless, this way of putting it seems to me imperceptive of what, at bottom, is going on. The liberal is not willing to live with a politics of multiple communities. He still wants communitarian politics. He is trying to discover, and to form, the relevant community. He thinks we need a shared political basis; he is trying to discover and nourish that basis. … I think that the attempt is hopeless and misguided. We must learn to live with a politics of multiple communities.10
My qualm about this way of putting the point I want to make is that it concedes too much to group thinking. We do have multiple communities in the sense that the points of view many citizens occupy fall into recognizable types. And some of these communities work hard, for legitimate reasons, at reaching consensus on topics that matter deeply to them. But the differences that set off one such community from another are not the only differences that make a difference in political debate. There are also differences that set off individuals from the communities in which they were raised or with which at some point they became affiliated. Respect for individuals involves sensitivity to the ways in which they can resist conformity to type. Wolterstorff calls for a “consocial” (114) model of discursive sociality for a democratic society. By envisioning a multitude of discursive communities exchanging reasons both within and across their own boundaries, such a model advances well beyond the social-contract model Rawls employs. But we need another layer of complication to make the picture fully realistic.
On my model, each individual starts off with a cultural inheritance that might well come from many sources. In my case, these sources included the training I received in Bible school, the traditional stories my grandmother told on Sunday afternoons, and the example of a pastor committed passionately to civil rights. But they also included an early exposure to Emerson, Whitman, and Thoreau; the art, novels, and music brought into my home by my bohemian older brother; and countless other bits of free-floating cultural material that are not the property of any group. And they included interactions with hundreds of other people whose racial and religious backgrounds differed from mine. It would simply be inaccurate to describe my point of view as that of my family, my co-religionists, or my race. One would fail to show me respect as an individual if one assimilated my point of view to some form of group thinking. The consocial model still fails to do justice to the kinds of individuality and alienation that modern democracies can promote.
Rawls derives his idea of public reason from conceptions of fairness and respect that are in fact to be found in the political culture of modern democracy. But he develops this idea in a way that brings it into tension with conceptions of free expression and basic rights that also belong to the same culture. It is not clear why this tension should be resolved by adopting a Rawlsian conception of public reason.11 It seems more reasonable to suppose that one should try to argue from universally justifiable premises, whenever this seems both wise and possible, while feeling free nonetheless to pursue other argumentative strategies when they seem wise. This would be to treat the idea of public reason as a vague ideal, instead of reifying it moralistically into a set of fixed rules for public discussion. The truth in the contractarian argument for restraint is that it would indeed be ideal if we could resolve any given political controversy on the basis of reasons that none of us could reasonably reject. But it has not been demonstrated that all important controversies can be resolved on this sort of basis, so it seems unwise to treat the idea of public reason as if it entailed an all-purpose principle of restraint. The irony here is that the contractarian interpretation of the idea of public reason is itself something that many epistemically and morally responsible citizens would be entitled, on the basis of their own collateral beliefs, to reject.
The contractarian position has a descriptive component and a normative component. The descriptive component is an account of what the norms of democratic political culture involve. It distills a rigorist interpretation of the idea of public reason out of various commitments that are found in that culture. The normative component endorses a principle of restraint as a consequence of that interpretation. I worry that religious individuals who accept the descriptive component of contractarianism as a faithful reconstruction of what the norms of democratic political culture involve will, understandably, view this as a reason for withdrawing from that culture. Why should one identify with the democratic process of reason-exchange if the norms implicit in that process are what the contractarians say they are? I believe this thought is in fact one of the main reasons that antiliberal traditionalists like Stanley Hauerwas, Alasdair MacIntyre, and John Milbank have largely displaced Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, and the liberation theologians as intellectual authorities in the seminaries, divinity schools, and church-affiliated colleges of the wealthier democracies.
We are about to reap the social consequences of a traditionalist backlash against contractarian liberalism. The more thoroughly Rawlsian our law schools and ethics centers become, the more radically Hauerwasian the theological schools become. Because most of the Rawlsians do not read theology or pay scholarly attention to the religious life of the people, they have no idea what contractarian liberalism has come to mean outside the fields of legal and political theory. (There are a few Rawlsians in religious studies, but they are now on the defensive and vastly outnumbered.) One message being preached nowadays in many of the institutions where future preachers are being trained is that liberal democracy is essentially hypocritical when it purports to value free religious expression. Liberalism, according to Hauerwas, is a secularist ideology that masks a discriminatory program for policing what religious people can say in public. The appropriate response, he sometimes implies, is to condemn freedom and the democratic struggle for justice as “bad ideas” for the church.12 Over the next several decades this message will be preached in countless sermons throughout the heartland of the nation.
Rawls found it frustrating that Hauerwas and his allies tend to ignore the careful distinctions he draws between liberalism as a comprehensive moral doctrine and the strictly political liberalism he had been trying to perfect in his later years. His Commonweal interviewer asked whether he denied that he was “making a veiled argument for secularism.” He responded by saying, “Yes, I emphatically deny it. Suppose I said that it is not a veiled argument for secularism any more than it is a veiled argument for religion. Consider: there are two kinds of comprehensive doctrines, religious and secular. Those of religious faith will say I give a veiled argument for secularism, and the latter will say I give a veiled argument for religion. I deny both” (CP, 619f.). But nobody is charging Rawls with giving a veiled argument for religion. The charge being made by his secular and religious critics alike is that he is wrong to expect everybody to argue in the same terms, which just happen to be a slightly adjusted version of the same terms dictated by his comprehensive secular liberalism. The critics doubt the need for the kind of decorum the liberal professor wants to impose on the discussion. And they doubt that a reluctance to adopt justice as fairness as a common basis for discussion makes someone unreasonable. These suspicions would not subside, it seems to me, even if Rawls’s critics took full measure of all the distinctions and qualifications he has added to his theory. From the vantage of the religious critics, in particular, the complications would still seem both ad hoc and excessively restrictive.13
In a later chapter, I will question whether Hauerwas’s critique of liberal democracy exemplifies the ideals of Christian charity and Aristotelian friendship that he himself embraces as alternatives to contractarian liberalism. In doing so, I will offer him reasons for embracing the democratic struggle for justice, reasons that ought to carry weight from his point of view, not merely from my own idiosyncratic point of view as an Emersonian perfectionist. They are not reasons that derive from the social contract, however. They do not belong to the common basis. They are reasons rooted in his theological commitments, which, needless to say, are not universally shared. I intend the exercise as a demonstration of respectful, sincere, nonmanipulative, immanent criticism.
I have heard that Hauerwas expressed the religious reasons for his criticisms of U.S. militarism in public, before a religiously mixed gathering of citizens in the nation’s capital, not long after September 11, 2001. In my view, it was good that he did, regardless of whether he intends to satisfy Rawls’s proviso. Hauerwas’s audience on this occasion presumably included people who were concerned about such basic questions as whether states have a right to fight wars of self-defense and whether the constitutional provision requiring Congress to declare war continues to apply. These citizens were anxious to hear the arguments of a highly influential pacifist and also to hear those arguments subjected to public criticism from other points of view. Democracy would not have been better served, it seems to me, if these reasons had been circulated only behind the closed doors of churches and religiously affiliated schools, where they would be somewhat less likely to face skeptical objections. Especially given that Hauerwas now enjoys wide influence among American Christians, he ought to be encouraged to speak in public so that the citizenry as a whole can inform itself about the content and strength of his arguments.14 And if he someday chooses to address a congressional committee or speak on behalf of political candidates, so much the better.
One factor to keep in mind when considering the new traditionalism is that Hauerwas and his allies accept the descriptive component of contractarian liberalism. That is, they take this form of liberalism at face value as an accurate account of what the ethical life of modern democracy involves. It is because they view it as a faithful reflection of our political culture that they are so quick to recommend wholesale rejection of that culture. I hold that the contractarians have distorted what this culture involves by wrongly taking a sensible, widely shared, vague ideal to be a clear, fixed, deontological requirement built into the common basis of our reasoning. If I am right about this, the new traditionalists are wrong to reject that culture as implicitly committed to the contractarian program of restraint—what Hauerwas calls “the democratic policing of Christianity.”15 Rejecting what contractarianism and the new traditionalism have in common will permit us, I hope, to reopen the entire question of the role of religious reasoning in public life.
BETWEEN KANT AND HEGEL
The contemporary contractarian version of the question is, “What moral constraints on the use of religious premises in political reasoning are implied by the common basis of reasoning affirmed in the social contract?” The sought-for principles might not turn out to be Kant’s exactly, but the requirement that they be conceived in terms of a common justificatory basis on the model of a social contract is recognizably Kantian in lineage, self-consciously so in Rawls’s formulation. Rawls does depart from Kant in a number of ways, and at some points appears to be conscious of his debts to the expressivism of both Hegel and Dewey. These latter debts are most obvious in his theoretical aspiration to make explicit the central elements of the shared political culture and in his closely related doctrine of reflective equilibrium. On both of these points, Rawls is borrowing ideas from the expressivist tradition in an attempt to transform “Kantian constructivism” into a “political constructivism” tailored to the needs of political liberalism. The theoretical aspiration is a version of Hegel’s notion that the task of philosophy is to comprehend its own age in thought. The doctrine of reflective equilibrium articulates a Hegelian conception of dialectical reasonableness. But in his commitment to the metaphor of the social contract and in the definition of the “reasonable person” he uses to explicate that metaphor, Rawls remains a Kantian. From an expressivist point of view, his departures from Kant improve on the work of his distinguished predecessor, but they leave him in an untenable position—in effect, halfway between the coherent alternatives of Kant and Hegel.
Norms, according to an expressivist conception, are creatures of the social process in which members of a community achieve mutual recognition as subjects answerable for their actions and commitments. It is the business of reflective practices to make norms explicit in the form of rules and ideals and to achieve reflective equilibrium between them and our other commitments at all levels of generality. The social process in which norms come to be and come to be made explicit is dialectical. It involves movement back and forth between action and reflection as well as interaction among individuals with differing points of view. Because this process takes place in the dimension of time and history, the beliefs and actions one is entitled to depend in large part on what has already transpired within the dialectical process itself. Hegel considered Kant’s preoccupation with universally valid principles epistemologically naïve, and was suspicious of the adequacy of the social contract when construed in expressivist terms as a model of rational commitments implicit in the shared political culture. Rawls briefly discusses Hegel’s criticisms of social-contract theories in Political Liberalism (285–88), claiming that while these criticisms might be effective against some versions of the social contract, they do not tell against his. I am not persuaded, however, that Rawls takes Hegel’s full measure in this response, for he focuses too narrowly on Hegel’s explicit commentary on the social contract, without exploring the implications of Hegel’s philosophy, taken as a whole. Rawls discusses Hegel at greater length in Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy. But in focusing primarily on Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and in his understandable attempt to steer clear of Hegel’s metaphysical doctrines, he ends up paying too little attention to Hegel’s epistemology and his account of concepts, both of which figure heavily in his critique of Kant.16
Consider any art, science, or sport you please.17 It should be clear that the norms of the practice at a given time constrain the behavior of those who participate in it by supplying them with reasons not to do certain things they are physically able to do. Behavior within the social practice is open to criticism in terms of the norms as they have come to be. But conformity to the norms opens up the possibility of novel performances, which have the dialectical potential to transform the practice, thus changing its norms. In the possibility of novel, practice-transforming performances one catches sight of what Brandom calls “the paradigm of a new kind of freedom, expressive freedom” (“Freedom,” 185; emphasis in original). By foregrounding the dialectical process in which social practices, and the norms implicit in them, evolve over time, Hegel was both borrowing from Kant and moving beyond him. Kant had drawn the crucial contrast between constraint by norms, which he calls freedom, and constraint by causes. Hegel was able to extend the Kantian conception of freedom as constraint by norms by setting it within his dialectical account of norms. For if norms are creatures of social practices, then the sorts of free expression made possible through constraint by norms will vary in accordance with the social practices under consideration and with the dialectic of normative constraint and novel performance unfolding in time.
Once this point is fully understood, it is no longer clear why we need to tether our social and political theory to the search for a common basis of reasoning in principles that all “reasonable” citizens have reason to accept. The principles that one might have reason to reject will depend on one’s dialectical location—on the social practices one has been able to participate in and on the actual history of norm-transformation they have undergone so far. Among these practices will be religious practices, which carry with them their own styles of reasoning, their own vocabularies, and their own possibilities of expressive freedom. If the thoroughly dialectical view of epistemic entitlement is correct, why expect all socially cooperative, respectful persons to have reason to accept the same set of explicitly formulated norms, regardless of dialectical location? It is of course possible that they will, and they may indeed do so for a time, but the substance of a common ethical life, according to Hegel, does not reside in the explicitly formulated abstract norms that arise from the dialectical process in which we strive for reflective equilibrium. It resides in the myriad observations, material inferences, actions, and mutually recognitive reactions that constitute the dialectical process itself. This changes at least a bit with every discursive move that is made by every interlocutor. The abstract norms are often misleading or inadequate attempts to make explicit what is implicit in the ethical life of the people. Moreover, they are typically a full step behind the dialectical process—because the Owl of Minerva takes flight at dusk.
We can get at this from another angle by considering the two quite different paradigms of the reasonable person that one finds in the Kantian and expressivist traditions. The Kantian paradigm of the reasonable person is the individual who is prepared to agree to rules that everyone else, acting on the same motivation, would have compelling reason to accept. The Hegelian paradigm is rather the individual who is prepared to engage in discursive exchange with any point of view that he or she can recognize as responsibly held. As the expressivist sees it, the series of exchanges need not operate on a single common basis, tailored to all, but might well involve improvisational expression of one’s own point of view and ad hoc immanent criticism of one’s interlocutors. The expectation is that different improvisations and different immanent criticisms—indeed, different vocabularies—might well be called for in response to each interlocutor. The one thing upon which a reasonable person can more or less count is the need to transcend whatever set of rules and concepts a distinguished philosopher has described as demanded by our common use of reason.
The point of the contractarian program of restraint was to provide us with security against illegitimate forms of coercive interference on the part of rulers and fellow citizens. This is a matter of negative freedom, freedom from something. We still have ample reason to concern ourselves with this sort of freedom when assessing the political arrangements that are open to us. But there is also another sort of freedom to nurture and protect, namely, expressive freedom. And this ought to make us hesitant to embark on a Rawlsian program of restraint. Expressive freedom is positive, the freedom to transform both oneself and one’s social practices through a dialectical progression of novel performances and their consequences. To take expressive freedom seriously is to see our capacity to engage in reasoning, including ethical and political reasoning, as something that cannot be captured definitively in the mere application of rules that no reasonable person could reasonably reject. For a reasonable person, in the Hegelian sense, is someone who is always in the process of transforming the inferential significance of the normative concepts at his or her disposal by applying them to new situations and problems.
The social-contract metaphor is too static to serve as an apt model for this process. What contractarianism seems to be looking for is a way of identifying the norms of social cooperation that fixes their inferential significance in advance, so that discursive exchange can be conceptually (and socially) stable. The norms are then taken to be settled and in need only of application in the approved procedures of deliberative discourse. This approach is analogous to what Hegel, in his critique of Kant’s theoretical philosophy, calls the faculty of the understanding (Verstand), whereas Hegel prefers the more flexible, pragmatic, improvisational faculty of reason (Vernunft), which he plausibly associates with the concept of spirit (Geist). Brandom develops the contrast between Verstand and Vernunft as follows:
Understanding concepts in terms of the categories of the Understanding is treating them as fixed and static. It allows progress only in the sorting of judgments into true and false, that is, in the selection from a repertoire fixed in advance of the correct concepts to apply in a particular instance. But Hegel wants to insist that if one ignores the process by which concepts develop—what other concepts they develop out of, and the forces implicit in them, in concert with their fellows, that lead to their alteration (what Hegel calls their “negativity”)—then the sort of content they have is bound to remain unintelligible.18
I am saying that this idea is also at work in Hegel’s worries about Kantian practical and political philosophy. Social-contract theory is an attempt to tame the concepts of ethical and political discourse in the interest of stabilizing the social order. It hopes to settle the basic question of the fair terms of social cooperation so that deliberative discourse can proceed within a stable “contractual” framework. It imagines itself as an alternative to two threats: the communitarian threat to individual autonomy, which achieves stability but in the wrong way, and the anarchic threat of a war of all against all, which does not achieve stability at all. Social stability is to be achieved by fixing the terms of social cooperation, the conceptual framework implicit in the notion of the reasonable person. The practical expression of social-contract theory is, unsurprisingly, a program of social control, an attempt to enforce moral restraint on discursive exchange by counting only those who want to reason on the basis of a common set of fixed rules as reasonable. It is no wonder that the result sits uneasily with the aspirations of expressive freedom. Hegel wants to avoid this outcome by redefining “reasonable” in terms of the dialectic of expressive freedom.
It should now be clear why a democratic expressivist would never be tempted to discount Abolitionist oratory, Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, and King’s sermons as mere IOUs. For such an expressivist sees democratic discourse as an unfolding dialectic in which the paradigmatic instances of “reasonableness” involve either dramatically significant innovations in the application of an entrenched normative vocabulary or especially memorable exemplifications of discursive virtue. They are paradigmatic because they move “reasonableness” forward, thus exercising some (defeasible) authority over future applications of the relevant concepts.19 For this reason, we cannot tell the story of the unfolding dialectic without giving them a prominent place in it. Any view that makes them appear marginal or something less than paradigmatic instances of “reasonableness,” simply because they do not conform to an abstract account of discursive propriety, deserves rejection.
According to Brandom, “Kant tells a two-phase story, according to which one sort of activity institutes conceptual norms, and then another sort of activity applies those concepts. First, a reflective judgment (somehow) makes or finds the determinate rule that articulates [a] concept. Then, and only then, can that concept be applied in the determinate judgements and maxims that are the ultimate subjects of the first two Critiques.”20 It is this two-phase story that Hegel rejects, and he rejects it when it appears in Kant’s account of empirical concepts, in his moral philosophy, and in his social-contract theory. Hegel’s alternative, dialectical story implies that contractarianism is incorrect in thinking that something like the social contract is needed as the basis of social cooperation. Our normative concepts are not instituted at the contractual level and then applied on the basis of the constitutive contract. They are instituted in the process of mutual recognition in which individuals hold one another responsible and implicitly impute to others the authority to keep normative track of one another’s attitudes. This process does not need the social contract to get going or to get along.21 The process of exchanging reasons is already a system of social cooperation; it needs no help from the formal structure of the social contract to become one. But if the social contract is unnecessary, if our norms are instituted in a different way, then why define a “reasonable person” as someone who is motivated to forge and live by the principles of the social contract? Why not count anyone as a “reasonable person” who participates responsibly in the process of discursive exchange which has reflective equilibrium as its ever-evolving end? Why not see this process as the way in which democratic citizens strive, at least in their better moments, to become a more perfect union of responsible, socially cooperative selves?
There are at least three commitments that a pragmatist sensitive to these Hegelian concerns would want to bring together in an acceptable self-understanding of democratic practices. Implicit in our way of treating one another is a conception of ourselves as citizens who (a) ought to enjoy equal standing in political discourse; (b) deserve respect as individuals keeping track of the discussion from their own distinctive points of view; and (c) have a personal and perhaps religious stake in the exercise of expressive freedom. Given (a) and (b), we have reason to accept an ideal according to which it would be appropriate, much of the time, to reason from widely justifiable premises in the political arena. But given the emphasis in (b) on the distinctive points of view from which individuals keep track of the discussion, a pragmatist will not be tempted to construe this ideal as an absolute requirement to reason only from a common basis of principles. If we then interpret (c) in terms of the dialectic of normative constraint and novel performance, it seems reasonable to expect that various sorts of hard decisions will have to be made as the dialectic unfolds. By applying normative concepts, participants in the process of reason-exchange effectively decide which social and political constraints to accept in the hope of enhancing, among other things, the expressive religious freedom of the citizenry.
Pragmatic expressivists accept the Kantian insight that there need to be constraints if there is to be freedom. But they reject the two-step procedure of social-contract theory—that is, the notion that to have any constraints, we must first fix the terms of social cooperation contractually and then simply abide by the agreed upon rules. They also see the central problem to be addressed in social and political deliberation as the question of which forms of expressive freedom we, as individuals and as a group, wish to promote and enjoy. There are infinitely many possible forms of expressive freedom. We opt for some over others not by signing a social contract but rather by promoting some social practices at the expense of others, both through our direct participation in them and the institutional arrangements we make for them. But as Brandom says, the expressivist way of framing the central problem of social and political deliberation does not “even begin to settle questions about the trade-offs between different varieties of negative and positive freedom.”22 For this reason, expressivism has been the preferred idiom of starkly incompatible forms of resistance to contractarian liberalism. On the all-important questions of which social practices to promote and how to promote them, expressivists divide sharply, with Emersonians at one end of the spectrum and traditionalists at the other. Emersonians, who place high value on the possibilities of novel expression, are inclined to use the freedoms afforded by the First Amendment as an institutional framework for promoting nonstandard social practices and the forms of spirited individuality they foster. Traditionalists, however, have argued on expressivist grounds for a much less permissive vision of social life. They have claimed that the higher forms of ethical and religious self-cultivation are possible only within the normative constraints of a relatively strict regimen of established communal practices. Expressivists of this sort have sometimes been willing to impose fairly severe restrictions on the expression of religious dissent in order to reap the rewards of expressive freedom and spiritual excellence they take to be possible only within a religiously unified community.
In the United States, such proposals have not made much headway, but milder versions of them, which involve shrinking the divide between church and state instead of eliminating it entirely, are gaining ground. One thing counting against traditionalist proposals in the American context is that relatively strict church-state separation and ample freedom of religious expression comport well with a political culture that was shaped in large part by immigrants in flight from restrictive religious orthodoxies. Another count against traditionalism is the sheer extent of religious diversity in this society. Members of minority traditions—including those who join me in seeing Emerson, Whitman, and Thoreau as among the greatest spiritual exemplars of expressive freedom yet produced by America—have every reason to oppose restrictions on the public expression of religious dissent against majority views. One can hope that they will do so successfully for the foreseeable future.
My version of pragmatism endorses major themes from Hegel’s critique of Kant. It then combines Hegel’s dialectical normative expressivism with the Emersonian conviction that the most substantial spiritual benefits of expressive freedom are to be found in a form of social life that celebrates democratic individuality as a positive good. One can see this combination of ideas initially come together, I believe, in Whitman and Dewey.
The Hegelian component of my pragmatism has a number of things in common with the most plausible forms of the new traditionalism. These include an emphasis on the importance of self-cultivation as an exercise of expressive freedom and an understanding of the dialectically social basis of norms. On Hegelian grounds, I sympathize with the traditionalist’s distaste for the contractarian liberal’s program of restraint. But I do not see resentment of contractarians as a reason for alienating myself from democratic hopes and freedoms. The traditionalist story that a particular religious tradition in fact functions as a community of virtue over against the sinfulness of the surrounding social world strikes me as extremely dubious as well as exceedingly prideful. I do not propose to replace the contractarian program of restraint with its traditionalist counterpart—a different set of restrictions, typically designed to maintain a patriarchal orthodoxy, instead of a liberal professor’s idea of discursive decorum.
Finally, I oppose the contractarians and the new traditionalists on the most important point they share. For they both hold, as I do not, that the political culture of our democracy implicitly requires the policing or self-censorship of religious expression in the political arena. If Rawls is right, contractarian theory may require this. But the descriptive component of his contractarianism is only one competing account of what the ethical life of democracy involves. If its picture of our culture is distorted, then we are not already implicitly committed to the social contract featured in that picture. The picture neither supports the contractarian argument for restraint, nor provides a reason for the traditionalist to reject the political culture it depicts. In this one respect, our political culture is a nobler thing than its leading theoretical defenders and detractors make it out to be. Judging by how the members of our society behave, they are more deeply committed to freedom, and to a more substantive, positive kind of freedom, than the theorists suspect. For historically they have not restrained themselves in the way contractarians have proposed. That is why Rawls has trouble corralling his historical examples. The Abolitionists did not restrain themselves in this way. Abraham Lincoln did not. Martin Luther King, Jr., did not. Dorothy Day did not. Rosemary Radford Ruether does not. Wendell Berry does not. Furthermore, many members of our society would resist with considerable fury any traditionalist attempt to establish an orthodox alternative to freewheeling democratic exchange. More power to them.
Let me now sum up how I would want to construe our implicitly recognized norms for employing religious premises in political reasoning. First, I would insist that the ideal of respect for one’s fellow citizens does not in every case require us to argue from a common justificatory basis of principles that no one properly motivated could reasonably reject. Second, I would recommend the mixed rhetorical strategy of expressing one’s own (perhaps idiosyncratic) reasons for a political policy while also directing fair-minded, nonmanipulative, sincere immanent criticism against one’s opponent’s reasons. Arguing in this way is not only extremely common, but also easily recognizable as a form of respect.
Third, I would refer, as the new traditionalists do (and as a liberal like Stephen Macedo also does), to the importance of virtues in guiding a citizen through the process of discursive exchange and political decision making. There are people who lack civility, or the ability to listen with an open mind, or the will to pursue justice where it leads, or the temperance to avoid taking and causing offense needlessly, or the practical wisdom to discern the subtleties of a discursive situation. There are also people who lack the courage to speak candidly, or the tact to avoid sanctimonious cant, or the poise to respond to unexpected arguments, or the humility to ask forgiveness from those who have been wronged. Such people are unlikely to express their reasons appropriately, whatever those reasons may be. When it comes to expressing religious reasons, it can take a citizen of considerable virtue to avoid even the most obvious pitfalls. I know of no set of rules for getting such matters right. My advice, therefore, is to cultivate the virtues of democratic speech, love justice, and say what you please.23
IS RELIGION A CONVERSATION-STOPPER?
The contractarian program of restraint is a moralistic one. Richard Rorty’s argument for restraint in “Religion as Conversation-Stopper” is pragmatic.24 He claims that the public expression of religious premises is likely to bring a potentially productive democratic conversation grinding to a halt. “The main reason religion needs to be privatized is that, in political discussion with those outside the relevant religious community, it is a conversation-stopper.” When someone does introduce a religious premise into a political discussion, Rorty says, “the ensuing silence masks the group’s inclination to say, ‘So what? We weren’t discussing your private life; we were discussing public policy. Don’t bother us with matters that are not our concern’ (PSH, 171). Assuming that we want to keep the conversation going, we have good reason for excluding the expression of religious premises from public political discussion.
Rorty sounds a bit like a contractarian when he endorses what he calls the “Jeffersonian compromise that the Enlightenment reached with the religious” (PSH, 169) and an epistemology he associates not only with Dewey and C. S. Peirce, but also with Rawls and Habermas (PSH, 173). The content of the Jeffersonian compromise, he says, is that we should limit conversation to premises held in common, thereby excluding the expression of religious premises. But he does not go on to theorize about universally valid principles, about which he has expressed doubts on other occasions. So the Jeffersonian compromise implies the same program of restraint that the social contract does without having the same purported epistemic status and without being expressed in the same moralistic tone. Why Rawls and Habermas emerge as model epistemologists in this context remains unclear. Rorty does not say that employing religious premises in public conversation violates a universally justifiable principle of respect; he says that doing so is in “bad taste” (PSH, 169).
This argument is hardly Rorty’s most rigorously developed contribution to public life, but it is, I think, a more accurate reflection of our political culture than is the Rawlsian argument. There are in fact many situations in which the introduction of religious premises into a political argument seems a sign of bad taste or imprudence on the part of a speaker. This is what I was getting at near the end of the previous section when I referred to the need for practical wisdom and tact. The reason that relying on religious premises is often imprudent when debating matters of public policy is not, however, that it violates a compromise supposedly reached between “the Enlightenment” and “the religious.” It is rather that, in a setting as religiously divided as ours is, one is unlikely to win support for one’s political proposals on most issues simply by appealing to religious considerations.
Is it true that religion is essentially a conversation-stopper? I would have thought that the pragmatic line should be that religion is not essentially anything, that the conversational utility of employing religious premises in political arguments depends on the situation. There is one sort of religious premise that does have the tendency to stop a conversation, at least momentarily—namely, faith-claims. We can understand why faith-claims have this tendency if we describe them in the way Brandom does. A faith-claim, according to Brandom, avows a cognitive commitment without claiming entitlement to that commitment.25 In the context of discursive exchange, if I make a faith-claim, I am authorizing others to attribute the commitment to me and perhaps giving them a better understanding of why I have undertaken certain other cognitive or practical commitments. I am also making the claim available to others as a premise they might wish to employ in their reasoning. But I am not accepting the responsibility of demonstrating my entitlement to it. If pressed for such a demonstration, I might say simply that it is a matter of faith. In other words, “Don’t ask me for reasons. I don’t have any.”
It should be clear how this common sort of discursive move tends to put a crimp in the exchange of reasons. If, at a crucial point in an argument, one avows a cognitive commitment without claiming entitlement to that commitment, and then refuses to give additional reasons for accepting the claim in question, then the exchange of reasons has indeed come grinding to a halt. But there are two things to keep in mind here. First, a claim can be religious without being a faith-claim. It is possible to assert a premise that is religious in content and stand ready to demonstrate one’s entitlement to it. Many people are prepared to argue at great length in support of their religious claims. So we need to distinguish between discursive problems that arise because religious premises are not widely shared and those that arise because the people who avow such premises are not prepared to argue for them.
Second, as Brandom points out, faith is not “by any means the exclusive province of religion” (AR, 105). Everyone holds some beliefs on nonreligious topics without claiming to know that they are true. To express such a belief in the form of a reason is to make what I have been calling a faith-claim. One would expect such claims to be fairly common in discussions of especially intractable political questions. When questions of this kind get discussed there are typically hard-liners on both sides who not only propose answers, but also claim to know that their answers are right. Yet there is typically a group of people in the middle who are prepared to take a stand, if need be, but would never claim they knew that they were right. The abortion debate is like this, and so is the debate over the problem of dirty hands in the fight against terrorism. In fact, the phenomenon of nonreligious faith-claims is quite common in political discourse, because policy making often requires us to take some stand when we cannot honestly claim to know that our stand is correct. That is just the way politics is.
It is important in this context to recall the distinction between being entitled to a belief and being able to justify that belief to someone else. Even in cases where individuals do plausibly claim to be epistemically entitled to religious premises, they might still be unable to produce an argument that would give their interlocutors reason to accept those premises. To assert such a premise would not qualify as a faith-claim in the strict sense that I have just defined, but it would create a potential impasse in conversation. Yet here again, the same sort of difficulty arises for all of us, not only for religious believers, when we are asked to defend our most deeply engrained commitments, especially those that we acquired through acculturation instead of through reasoning. We are normally entitled to hold onto commitments of this kind unless they prove problematical in some way—for example, by turning out to be either internally incoherent or too hard to square with newly acquired commitments that strike us as highly credible. If the reason for excluding the expression of religious commitments is that they create this type of discursive impasse, then the only fair way to proceed is to exclude the expression of many nonreligious commitments, as well. But if we go in this direction, Rorty’s view will require silence on many of the most important issues on the political agenda.
As Rorty grants, many citizens in fact affirm political conclusions that are influenced in some way by their religious commitments. Such commitments typically have a bearing on how one ranks highly important moral concerns. When President Truman was deciding what strategy to pursue in bringing World War II to an end, for example, he had to come to terms with two conflicting moral concerns. One of these had to do with his hope to minimize the number of deaths resulting from his strategy. The other had to do with his qualms about dropping atomic weapons and firebombs on civilian targets. When the question arises of how we should instruct our future leaders to act when they face a similar conflict, citizens are free to speak their minds. If a group of citizens deems the latter concern more important than the former, or vice versa, they should feel free to say so. But when they do, they are likely to be pressed for reasons. Suppose their actual motivating reasons are religious ones not widely shared among their fellow citizens, and it is clear that some citizens, employing their own reasonably held collateral commitments as premises, would be entitled to reject them. In that case, there appear to be three options: (1) to remain silent; (2) to give justifying arguments based strictly on principles already commonly accepted; and (3) to express their actual (religious) reasons for supporting the policy they favor while also engaging in immanent criticism of their opponents’ views.
I see nothing in principle wrong with option (3), especially in circumstances that tend to rule out option (2). It could be, for example, that option (2) is difficult or impossible to pursue because the principles that supposedly belong to the Jeffersonian compromise, when conjoined with factual information accessible to the citizenry as a whole, do not entail a resolution of the issue. It is plausible to suppose that the problem of dirty hands has been hard to resolve precisely because some reasonable citizens are justified in rejecting one solution of the problem, while other reasonable citizens are justified in rejecting the opposite solution. But even if this is not granted, it is clear that there are other issues that cannot be resolved solely on the basis of commonly accepted principles. Kent Greenawalt argues persuasively that the debates over welfare assistance, punishment, military policy, abortion, euthanasia, and environmental policy all fall into this category.26 It appears, then, to be a consequence of Rorty’s argument for restraint that we should leave a long list of important political issues both unresolved and, even more implausibly, unaddressed.
In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Rorty has this to say:
All human beings carry about a set of words which they employ to justify their actions, their beliefs, and their lives. These are the words in which we formulate praise of our friends and contempt for our enemies, our long-term projects, our deepest self-doubts and our highest hopes. They are the words in which we tell, sometimes prospectively and sometimes retrospectively, the story of our lives. I shall call these words a person’s “final vocabulary.”27
Rorty then explains this term as follows: “It is ‘final’ in the sense that if doubt is cast on the worth of these words, their user has no noncircular argumentative recourse. Those words are as far as he can go with language; beyond them there is only helpless passivity or a resort to force.” What Rorty is describing here is the sort of discursive commitment one can be entitled to even though one would not know how to defend it. I can imagine no way of banning the use of final vocabularies, in this sense, from political discussion, even if it were a desirable thing to do, which it plainly is not. What makes some people religious is that the vocabularies in which they tell the stories of their lives—including their stories of our common political life—have religious content. Like Rorty, they tend to be speechless when pressed for linear reasons for adopting their final vocabularies. But unless those vocabularies become severely problematical, what reason would they have for abandoning them?
Rorty grants that there is “hypocrisy involved in saying that believers somehow have no right to base their political views on their religious faith, whereas we atheists have every right to base ours on Enlightenment philosophy. The claim that in doing so we are appealing to reason, whereas the religious are being irrational, is hokum.” He is also realistic enough to admit that “religious beliefs, or the lack of them, will influence political convictions. Of course they will” (PSH, 172). So his point in endorsing the Jeffersonian compromise appears to be simply that it is always wise, pragmatically speaking, to confine the premises of our political arguments to commitments held in common. Religious premises are to be excluded not because they involve faith-claims and not because they involve vocabularies that cannot be defended without circularity, but rather because they are not held in common. He seems to mean actually held in common; he is not referring, as the contractarians do, to what all reasonable persons would accept. But the problem remains the same. Reasons actually held in common do not get us far enough toward answers to enough of our political questions. The proposed policy of restraint, if adopted, would cause too much silence at precisely the points where more discussion is most badly needed. The policy would itself be a conversation-stopper.
Suppose you are debating an issue of the type Greenawalt highlights, and you are still trying to argue your case solely by reference to commonly accepted principles and generally accessible information. Imagine that one of your interlocutors, sensing that you are not fully disclosing your own premises, says, “But what’s your actual reason? What really moves you to accept this conclusion?” Now you must either dissemble or choose between options (1) and (3). But why not choose (3)? There are many circumstances in which candor requires full articulation of one’s actual reasons. Even if it does lead to a momentary impasse, there is no reason to view this result as fatal to the discussion. One can always back up a few paces, and begin again, now with a broader conversational objective. It is precisely when we find ourselves in an impasse of this kind that it becomes most advisable for citizens representing various points of view to express their actual reasons in greater detail. For this is the only way we can pursue the objectives of understanding one another’s perspectives, learning from one another through open-minded listening, and subjecting each other’s premises to fair-minded immanent criticism.
Like the contractarians, when Rorty discusses the role of religion in politics, he completely neglects the potential benefits of ad hoc immanent criticism in overcoming momentary impasses. But he does, in other contexts, recognize the value of carrying on a discussion at this level. His name for such discourse in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature was “conversation.”28 There Rorty suggested that “conversation [be seen] as the ultimate context within which knowledge is to be understood” (389; emphasis in original). What he meant by conversation was a kind of discursive exchange in which “Our focus shifts … to the relation between alternative standards of justification, and from there to the actual changes in those standards which make up intellectual history” (389f.) The role of edifying philosophy, as Rorty presented it in that book, is to keep discursive exchange going at those very points where “normal” discourse—that is, discourse on the basis of commonly accepted standards—cannot straightforwardly adjudicate between competing claims. Conversation is a good name for what is needed at those points where people employing different final vocabularies reach a momentary impasse. But if we do use the term “conversation” in this way, we shall have to conclude that conversation is the very thing that is not stopped when religious premises are introduced in a political argument. It is only the normal discourse of straightforward argument on the basis of commonly held premises that is stopped. The political discourse of a pluralistic democracy, as it turns out, needs to be a mixture of normal discourse and conversational improvisation.29 In the discussion of some issues, straightforward argument on the basis of commonly held standards carries us only so far. Beyond that, we must be either silent or conversational. But we can be conversational, in the spirit of Rorty’s most edifying philosophical work, only by rejecting the policy of restraint he endorses.
I came of age ethically, politically, and spiritually in the Civil Rights movement, where I acquired my democratic commitments from prophetic ministers. In college, when I moved rapidly down the path that leads from Schleiermacher to Feuerbach, Emerson, and beyond, I found myself collaborating mainly with dissenting Protestants, secular Jews, and members of the radical Catholic underground in the struggle against U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. I have known since then that it is possible to build democratic coalitions including people who differ religiously and to explore those differences deeply and respectfully without losing one’s integrity as a critical intellect. This book is offered in the hope that similarly diverse coalitions and equally full expression of differences remain possible in democratic culture today, if we can only summon the will to form them.