Taking Christian Moral Thought Seriously

By Jeremy A. Evans and Daniel Heimbach

The Death Penalty, Environmentalism, Public Reason, Voting, Abortion. Where does Christian faith belong in discussions about these issues?

In Taking Christian Moral Thought Seriously, editor Jeremy A. Evans establishes that separation of church and state is not a principle of the United States Constitution (or any other founding document). Thus, there should be a social interest in not hindering any religious person’s full participation in the American marketplace of ideas. As such, Evans addresses readers from both the Christian and non-Christian communities through the related scholarship here, knowing either side’s failure to consider one’s well-prepared thoughts in science, politics, and education undermines the very idea of seeking the truth.

Topics include:

* The death penalty
* John Rawls’ theory of public reason
* Whether or not a non-voting stance is permissible for Christians
* Religious disagreement and its impact on the justification of religious beliefs
* How the current models of scientific explanation are not incompatible with religious beliefs
* Creation care—what is our responsibility to the environment?
* Are theologians and philosophers missing the point on the abortion problem?

Acclaim for Taking Christian Moral Thought Seriously:

“This is a long-overdue book. Although there are scores of accessible books written by Christian philosophers addressing traditional topics, such as God’s existence, the problem of evil, and the miraculous, few have broached the areas of ethics, public reason and science while critically and respectfully engaging the most influential philosophers writing on these subjects. Professor Evans has managed to put together such a book. It is a model of clarity without sacrificing philosophical rigor. It is the sort of book that should be in the hands of any Christian desiring to engage the wider culture in an informed and thoughtful manner.”

Francis J. Beckwith
Professor of Philosophy and Church-State Studies, Baylor University

“This text is a great place to get ‘up to speed on aspects of crucial issues that we too seldom ever hear being discussed in evangelical circles.”

Gary R. Habermas
Distinguished Research Professor, Liberty University & Theological Seminary

"Taking Christian Moral Thought Seriously truly models what the title itself expresses--a serious-minded, Christianly engagement of important moral and cultural themes.  Without exception, each contributor writes with scholarly rigor, insight, and creativity.  This book well illustrates how practical, robust, and explanatorily rich the Christian faith is."

Paul Copan

Professor and Pledger Family Chair of Philosophy and Ethics, Palm Beach Atlantic University

• Language: English
• Publisher: BH Publishing Group
• Release date: Oct 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9781433673658

Book preview

Richmond.

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Introduction

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Contemporary American culture has dramatically recast the relationship between the church and state; part of this change is derivative of a trickle-down effect from the supposed need for political correctness. The easy, ad hoc way to accomplish this political correctness is to void any belief set of social import derived from religious premises as politically impractical and Constitutionally religion-establishing. Neither of these views is warranted. The separation of church and state is not a principle of the Constitution (or any other founding document of the United States). Thus, taking the respective views of religious citizens into consideration for policy is not establishing a religion—unless of course the policy proposed is to establish a church-state. Quite the contrary, in order to maintain the principles established in the Constitution and articulated in the Bill of Rights there is a social interest in not hindering the free exercise of religion, part of which includes allowing religious persons to be full participants in the domain of ideas in the American marketplace. Such a proposal allows the voices of the religious to be heard and those not of a religious bent to understand the warrant behind religious beliefs. One upshot of being a considerate reader of Christian scholarship (for instance) is that even though non-Christians may disagree on some important issues, understanding the intellectual framework of another’s worldview helps to avoid oversimplifications and misrepresentations of their belief set. We invite readers from both the Christian and non-Christian communities to consider what we have to say. Though this is not a work specifically on the problem of church/state relations, it is devoted to the interaction of Christians and Christian thought in a pluralistic society.

This book is a compilation of Christian scholarship ranging over a number of themes. Some of the topics are explicitly moral, such as the problems of abortion and creation care. Other topics are broader in scope but center on the legitimacy of Christian thought in the secular world. Such concerns highlight the effects of the metanarrative in ethical discourse; beyond issues that are explicitly moral, we have certain duties to other areas of research and inquiry. Failing to take seriously well-prepared ideas in science, politics, and education shirks our intellectual obligations, even undermines the very idea that we are seeking the truth. This shirking has taken place both among persons of faith and in the secular academy. At its roots, the idea of the university was to evaluate ideas, not to disparage the fair consideration of ideas—including religious ones. Building a culture of disenfranchisement in our universities has stigmatized the merits of Christian thought as unreasonable. Equally interesting is that the Christian contribution to most of our areas of discourse (especially science) is hardly even a historical footnote to a course’s content—and the historical note that is made typically undermines the contribution of the church by revising the facts. In our schools and our communities the message is tolerance—at least until we do not like the consequences of the ideas that we are hearing (never mind that we tolerate things that are against our grain). Given these concerns, we seek to offer cogent insights into a small but important range of issues. Without a doubt what we provide here will not be the last word on any of the topics. We do hope that what we provide will foster fruitful discussion and solidify (even in disagreement) the reasonableness of the Christian worldview.

Jeremy Evans

Wake Forest, North Carolina

Chapter One

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A Critique of Public Reason

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James Noland

Introduction

Following in the tradition of Kant, a critique is an uncovering or unmasking of something. Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason was an attempt to uncover and discuss reason in its pure form. Pure in this context did not mean necessarily good or virtuous but something more like unmixed. Kant did not suppose that his critique was necessary because reason had somehow been obscured or contaminated in some way; his critique was a philosophical pursuit of clarity rather than a moral mission of rescue. Later critiques, such as those of Marx and the critical theorists of the twentieth century, viewed reason as being in need of reclamation and undertook not only to uncover reason itself but to expose those causes, forces, and persons who were responsible for its having been obscured or masked.

For reasons I will discuss at length below, I have serious misgivings about critique as a method and as a general philosophical approach. However, I have titled this chapter A Critique of Public Reason because I want to discuss what I take public reason to be and to uncover some of the implicit (and, I believe, mistaken) assumptions necessary to make public reason seem a viable concept. My project here is a critique insofar as it is an attempt to discern just what public reason is, or rather, how it fails to be what its proponents want it to be.

My central thesis is that public reason is a contemporary myth; for, in reality, there is no such thing as public reason, at least not in the sense proposed by philosophers such as John Rawls.¹ Despite its widespread appeal and popularity, public reason as it is usually conceived cannot be found in reality. Those more inclined to conspiracy theories might call public reason a lie, but for several reasons—one of which is autobiographical—I think this would be too strong. Typically, public reason is promoted by those genuinely searching for some way for persons and peoples of various religions and cultures peacefully and fairly to adjudicate among themselves disputes over how they should order their lives together.

In some cases, such people have strong commitments to a particular religion but recognize that crafting political structures, laws, and policies on the basis of this religion will not be well received by those who do not acknowledge its teachings. For example, I have distinct memories of taking ethics as a young philosophy major and being very concerned to find arguments for moral truth that did not depend on an appeal to Christianity. I was a Christian, and I believed strongly in moral truth. I was dismayed by utilitarianism because it could justify all sorts of actions I took to be inherently wrong. I was troubled and frustrated by the moral relativism I saw practiced all around me and promoted in some of my philosophy texts. I was certain that morality was about truth, not about emotions, and I was therefore somewhat insulted by emotivism. But, all this being the case, I wanted to make arguments for moral truth—for the universality of human rights, among other things—that did not appeal to Christian teaching because I wanted to make arguments that non-Christians, even atheists for that matter, could recognize and accept. I wanted to make arguments based on reason alone. I thought this was wise practically, and I also remember having some vague notion that this was one of the rules of the game, so to speak. Though I did not know it at the time, I believed in public reason.

John Rawls, one of the foremost proponents of public reason, also describes admirable and familiar intentions for public reason. He takes it as a basic, normal, and unavoidable feature of contemporary society that it is comprised of people holding many varied comprehensive doctrines. A doctrine is fully comprehensive, he says, if it covers all recognized values and virtues within one rather precisely articulated system.² Rawls explains that a plurality of reasonable yet incompatible comprehensive doctrines is the normal result of the free exercise of human reason within the framework of the free institutions of a constitutional democratic regime.³ Religions, for example, are comprehensive doctrines: they provide accounts of personhood, morality, and meaning. The issue, says Rawls, is that citizens realize that they cannot reach agreement or even approach mutual understanding on the basis of their irreconcilable comprehensive doctrines. In view of this, they need to consider what kinds of reasons they may reasonably give one another when fundamental political questions are at stake.⁴

Public reason is the means by which members of a community might make judgments about political justice and the common good in such a way that these judgments do not appeal to comprehensive doctrines, but rather to reasons that adherents to any reasonable comprehensive doctrine might endorse or accept irrespective of their comprehensive doctrine. The questions to which public reason is applied are not to every detail of public life but to questions of what Rawls calls basic justice such as who has the right to vote, or what religions are to be tolerated, or who is to be assured fair equality of opportunity, or to hold property.⁵ More specifically, and most significantly, public reason is to settle debates between peoples about the question who are the holders of human rights?

Rawls’s basic idea seems to make good sense. For Christians, for example, to argue for or against laws because some behavior is either mandated or proscribed in the Christian Scriptures is for them to appeal to reasons that do not count as such for non-Christians. In the first place, it seems to be a tactical mistake to rest one’s case on evidence that others do not recognize as such. Appealing, for instance, to the authority of Paul’s teachings when others do not believe in the authority of Paul’s teachings is not likely to be very effective.

Furthermore, Rawls contends, to appeal to one’s comprehensive doctrine when making political arguments treats one’s fellow citizens not as free and rational individuals but as socially situated or otherwise rooted, that is, as being in this or that social class, or in this or that property and income group, or as having this or that comprehensive doctrine.⁶ We might think of public reason as the language we should use when we are operating as citizens attempting to engage other citizens in discussions about our lives together as citizens. We might use public reason, then, the way scholars of previous centuries used Latin: as a universal language, a lingua franca that facilitates engagement and understanding between persons from different countries (or, in our case, persons holding different comprehensive doctrines).

To continue with this analogy, if failing to engage others through the use of public reason is analogous to failing to engage others in a language they not only understand but can use fluently, then failing to engage others through the use of public reason is really a failure to respect others as free, rational persons. That is, it would be a failure to engage others in genuine dialogue aimed at understanding, if not agreement. Imagine a group of people, some of whom only speak English and some of whom only speak Spanish, and imagine this group trying to devise rules that will govern how they live together. If the members of the group claim they want to operate as a democracy, respecting each other’s rights and freedoms, then they must find some way to actually communicate. If the group fails to find some common language, they will fail to achieve communal deliberation and meaningful participation. In other words, they may speak to each other, but they will not be able to offer reasons to one another and they will not be able to achieve consent from one another. Should they vote on anything, this vote will only be an expression of individual interests and will really be more of a show of force (insofar as it is a show of greater numbers) rather than communal decision-making.

This respect for others as free rational persons with whom one wants to cooperate and engage as a fellow citizen is what Rawls terms reasonableness. Reasonableness, then, has to do with one’s disposition and attitude towards engagement with others rather than with one’s being right-thinking or intelligent or clear-headed. Such reasonableness is admirable and certainly attractive as a general characteristic of persons.⁷ To the extent that reasonableness resembles the disposition of charity, it is something to which Christians should aspire. However, it is a mistake to suppose that employing something called public reason is the proper means—for Christians or anyone else—for practicing reasonableness. One reason this is a mistake is that public reason is not truly neutral towards various comprehensive doctrines. Others before me have made the case, and made it well, that the ostensible neutrality of public reason is an illusion.⁸ I agree with this assessment, but for now I want to focus instead on what I take to be a more fundamental problem with the very concept of public reason. I want to show that the plausibility of public reason as a concept depends upon a mistaken view of reason in general and that this mistaken view leads to other unfortunate misconceptions about personhood and freedom of which Christians in particular should be wary.

The first step in beginning to make this case is to parse some terms that are sometimes used interchangeably and often vaguely. We have already seen that reasonable as used by Rawls has to do with disposition or attitude. I will continue to use the term in this way. The other terms that I want to spend some time discussing individually are logic, rationality, and reason. Below I will offer brief explanations of these terms, distinguishing them from one another. I think that my explanations and distinctions, while admittedly not as precise as one might wish for in a different context, are uncontroversial and defensible, though I will not be providing such a defense here. Making these distinctions is important because sometimes the words reason and reasoning are used loosely to refer generally to thinking. Upon consideration, though, we can see that thinking can be done in different ways, with different purposes. It is necessary to distinguish between these various ways in order to make clear just what public reason must be if it is to do the work Rawls and others assign to it.

Logic

SIMPLY PUT, LOGIC HAS TO DO with drawing inferences. As such, logic does not necessarily have to do with truth; or perhaps a better way to say this would be to say that it does not necessarily have to do with the way the world actually is. Instead, it has to do with the relationships between ideas. We can, for example, say, If A then B, and if B then C, therefore if A then C, without knowing what the symbols A, B and C stand for, or whether A is actually true. Similarly, I can know that if today is Monday, then yesterday was Sunday. Whether or not today actually is Monday is irrelevant for purposes of making or evaluating this inference. We use logic when we determine that if murder is always wrong, and abortion is murder, then abortion is wrong. We do not use logic to determine that murder is wrong or that abortion is murder, unless we do so by way of inference from other statements. Logic alone is insufficient for determining the truth or falsity of any given statement about the world.

Insofar as logic at its most basic level has to do with forms and structures that are necessary for thought, it is, by definition, public. The Law of Non-Contradiction, for example, holds universally and is a prerequisite for coherent thought. To appeal to the Law of Non-Contradiction is to appeal to something universally accessible as opposed to something private or unique to a particular comprehensive doctrine. If someone were (meaningfully or coherently) to describe someone else as following his own logic, it would be more appropriate to say that the purposes motivating this other person’s behavior are not apparent to others rather than to say that he was actually using his own logic.

Logic would certainly be a necessary feature of public reason, but the disagreements public reason is meant to resolve are not alleged to stem from faulty logic. It is possible, even likely, that citizens arguing from premises provided by their respective comprehensive doctrines could each make logically valid arguments for their positions and yet remain at odds with one another. Their dispute would be over the substantive truth of the premises of each other’s arguments, not the formal validity; and logic alone cannot determine the truth or falsity of the disputed premises.

Rationality

RATIONALITY HAS TO DO WITH IDENTIFYING the best means for reaching ends and for identifying appropriate intermediate ends for given final ends. In other words, rationality has to do with choosing the best way (or means) to get from A to B. To choose rationally is to employ logic in one’s decision-making. Perhaps more often than not, the type of logic employed will be inductive. That is, one will choose the means for achieving one’s goal on the basis of experience, determining the steps most likely to be successful. Significantly, the rationality of a particular choice cannot be evaluated without some knowledge of the chooser’s goal. If I do not know what a person is trying to achieve, I cannot determine whether or not his behavior is rational. Sometimes, I may safely assume that certain goals such as good health are commonly, if not universally, held, so that I can describe a stranger’s behavior as rational or irrational depending on whether or not the behavior is conducive to good health. For the most part, however, if I am ignorant of a person’s ends (or goals), I am unable to judge the rationality of his behavior.

Imagine, for example, that my friend tells me he is hungry but is declining my offer of food. If I know my friend is trying to lose weight, I may consider his behavior rational. If I know my friend is trying to gain weight, I may consider his behavior irrational. Absent the knowledge of my friend’s purposes, I may be puzzled by his behavior but still not qualified to judge whether or not it is rational. If I do come to know his immediate goal of losing weight and therefore judge his behavior in this instance as rational, I must still refrain from judging whether the fact that he is pursuing this goal is itself rational or irrational until I know what further purpose this intermediate goal is meant to serve. If my friend has been told by his doctor that he is overweight and unhealthy, then I can easily determine that his goal of losing weight is rational insofar as it is instrumental in his quest for better health. The important points to remember here are that behavior in and of itself is neither rational nor irrational and that, because rationality has to do with identifying means to ends, it does not apply to choices of ends themselves, except when those ends are instrumental or intermediate to some greater goal.

Although ends or goals may be privately or uniquely held, to the extent that these are made known, rationality can also be considered public. One need not share another’s goals in order to understand whether this other person has behaved rationally in pursuit of those goals. A Christian may easily be able to understand, for example, a Muslim’s decision to undertake a pilgrimage to Mecca or a Jew’s refusal to work on Saturdays.

As we saw with logic, rationality will certainly be an important component of public reason, but it will not be sufficient for resolving the disputes public reason is meant to address. I anticipate, however, that some might think this claim too strong. After all, it is supposed that public reason will only be exercised by those who have already committed themselves to reasonableness. To be reasonable is to respect one’s fellow citizens as one’s peers, that is, as one’s equals, and therefore as free and rational. This entails engaging one’s fellow citizens in such a way as to offer them reasons for one’s positions that they are able to evaluate and, potentially at least, accept as reasons for themselves. Assuming we are rational in choosing to be reasonable, this must mean that our common, overarching goal for our lives together is for each of us to be able to live freely, exercising our own rational plans for our lives to the greatest extent possible. If we considered other goals to be more important, it would not be rational to be so strongly committed to reasonableness. We might, instead, hold reasonableness to be good except in those instances when our goal of realizing the greatest possible freedom for one another is trumped by some greater goal.

If we are committed to reasonableness because we are committed to cultivating a society wherein freedom can flourish, then it seems that public reason might very well be a matter of exercising our rationality in pursuit of this goal. Reasoning publicly, then, would be a matter of supporting positions by appealing to evidence available to others that such positions are most conducive to freedom flourishing. Here, however, we come to a problem. What, exactly, do we mean by freedom? And, furthermore, about whose freedom are we talking; that is, whom exactly are we counting as members of our society?⁹ When we begin to ask these questions we can see that, as is the case with logic, exercising public reason cannot simply be a matter of exercising rationality. When proponents of public reason appeal to public reason as a means for resolving difficult political questions, they are not merely advocating the use of logic or rationality; they are talking about something more basic.

Reason

IN ORDER TO EXERCISE EITHER LOGIC or rationality we need concepts and information to provide content. My logical powers may be Vulcan-like, but my talent alone will not allow me to know anything about the actual world. I need to have some data—some input—to be able to conclude anything about the world in which I live. Similarly, I may have access to the most extensive and reliable set of actuarial tables imaginable, but if I do not know who I am and what I want to accomplish, I cannot use this information to make any rational decisions. Reason provides us with the concepts and content necessary for us to use logic and choose rationally.

Rawls explains just why public reason must entail more than thinking logically and rationally:

Public reasoning