Disagreeing Virtuously: Religious Conflict in Interdisciplinary Perspective

By Olli-Pekka Vainio and Rob Barrett

Disagreement is inevitable, particularly in our current context, marked by the close coexistence of conflicting values and perspectives in politics, religion, and ethics. How can we deal with disagreement ethically and constructively in our pluralistic world?

In Disagreeing Virtuously Olli-Pekka Vainio presents a valuable interdisciplinary approach to that question, drawing on insights from intellectual history, the cognitive sciences, philosophy of religion, and virtue theory. After mapping the current discussion on disagreement among various disciplines, Vainio offers fresh ways to understand the complicated nature of human disagreement and recommends ways to manage our interpersonal and intercommunal conflicts in ethically sustainable ways.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Release date: Apr 27, 2017
• ISBN: 9781467447164

Olli-Pekka Vainio

Olli-Pekka Vainio has served as Acting University Lecturer of Systematic Theology at the University of Helsinki since February 2014. Vainio's research is focused on following themes: 1) Contemporary Systematic and Philosophical Theology 2) Philosophy of Religion, 3) Social Epistemology, and 4) Theology of Reformation. In his doctoral dissertation, Justification and Participation in Christ: The Development of the Lutheran Doctrine of Justification from Luther to the Formula of Concord (2007), Vainio studied various interpretations of justification in Early Lutheranism. His habilitation Beyond Fideism: Negotiable Religious Identities (2010) focused on the recent discussion on theological method and religious identity. He has published over forty articles, authored or co-authored nine books and edited or co-edited six volumes. His current research project deals with the problem of religious disagreement from interdisciplinary perspective. Vainio was a visiting faculty member at the Faculty of Theology and Religion at the University of Oxford (2011-12) and a member in Philosophical Psychology, Morality and Politics Unit (2008-13), which was one of the National Centres of Excellence in Research funded by the Academy of Finland.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

We Are All Heretics Now

The Heretical Imperative

The general fragmentation of our societies creates a challenge concerning how to deal with the plurality of worldviews and values in politics, religion, ethics, and aesthetics. As a result of this fragmentation and the inherent plurality of our society, we are faced with the heretical imperative: we are always heretics to a vast number of people.¹ Disagreement is something we cannot escape in late-modern society. The question remains, then: How to deal with it?

Answering this question calls for an interdisciplinary approach. In this book, I seek to combine the history of ideas, cognitive sciences, analytic philosophy of religion, and virtue theories to provide a new way to look at the nature of disagreement. The general aim of the project is to understand the ways in which our thinking, more precisely our cognitive setup, affects the reasoning, judgments, and ultimately our behavior in the state of disagreement. The dynamics of disagreement are relatively similar in all cases, be they moral, political, or religious in nature. I thus aim at a metalevel analysis, which can be applied to multiple instances of disagreement. A further aim is to use these results to draw lessons about the nature and the ethically acceptable management of interpersonal and intercommunal disagreements and conflicts.

In brief, this book has the following as its main goals:

Analyze how disagreement has been portrayed in historical traditions.

Map out the current discussion on disagreement among different disciplines.

Offer ways to understand the complicated nature of human disagreement and recommend ways to manage it in ethically sustainable ways.

A distinctive feature of recent discussion about disagreement has been the lack of holistic approaches. Research in general has been relatively restricted within particular disciplines. My attempt is to bring together some of these discussions. For example, there is a lively debate within analytic philosophy on the epistemology of disagreement, but so far it has been extremely theoretical and conceptually orientated.² One of the central topics in this discussion has been the notion of epistemic peerage and its effects on our beliefs. Should we give up our beliefs or can we retain them? Despite meticulous analysis, suggestions for the wider scientific community have been scant.³ However, religious disagreement has received special attention, representing one of the main fields in which the results of this discussion have been applied.

In the field of psychology, the study of human rationality has seen several interesting new theories in the last twenty years, such as the debates on heuristics and biases, and the consequences of our cognitive limitations for our reasoning. But what do these findings actually mean? Is rational judgment natural despite (or because) of our biases, or is our thinking in the need of constant debiasing? This field of problems is sometimes called Rationality War, where different theorists frame our cognitive life in at least partially mutually excluding ways.⁴ This is an important debate because it touches on the very notion of rationality, which, particularly after the Enlightenment, has been the main source of hoped-for consensus: if we just act reasonably, disagreements will be solved. The current discussion frustrates these expectations.

Especially after 9/11, religion’s role in conflicts has been a subject of renewed interest. However, the evaluation of religion varies a great deal, from purely negative (New Atheist critiques in general) to positive (where religion is seen as a major tool for reconciliation).⁵ Scientific inquiry concerning religion and its ability either to prevent or cause violent clashes is still young, contains many prejudices, and lacks sufficient data.⁶ The role of religion in conflicts gives rise to a set of interesting debates, for example, regarding the notion of religion per se and our ability to assess the role religion plays in human conduct.

But disagreements are not something that humans have encountered only recently. The history of the human race is a series of different kinds of disagreements. Recently, our story has been written from viewpoints particularly focused on food, drink, and of course weapons.⁷ The story of humanity is one in which we have fought over food, got drunk, and invented more efficient weapons to solve our disputes. If this is what our kings and queens achieved, our philosophers have not fared any better. The history of Western philosophy starts with elemental disagreements and develops into more complex forms of divergence as time goes on. The cynical question is, why bother with philosophy in the first place? The quick answer: there really is no other option for us. Everything we do is affected by philosophy. Even if the history of philosophy cannot provide us with clear answers, that does not mean we cannot learn any lessons from it. Here my attempt is to examine how our predecessors have encountered the problem of disagreement and to propose ways to benefit from those discussions.

The ambiguous state of discussion in the sciences that analyze human conduct and thinking, and the human race’s relatively poor track record in problem-solving, leaves us with few choices. To spoil the end of this book: disagreement is a natural part of human existence, and it is highly probable that most of our disagreements can never be solved. Furthermore, there are cases when we should favor disagreement over consensus, since disagreement is not necessarily negative. However, if disagreements are solved (and by this I mean genuinely resolved, not brushed aside or treated with mere force), the resulting reconciliation is always an act of virtue.

After these admittedly pessimistic accounts of the human condition, I turn to virtue theories, which manifest no less variety than all the other fields of human theorization. Nevertheless, I argue that we have access to virtues that may help us to survive persistent disagreements. Of course, few of us succeed in living virtuous lives, and often our attempts to become more virtuous are frustrated by severe failings. Despite this possibility of failure, I see no other way to treat the persistent existence of disagreement since the other options attribute a morally subpar ideal for human conduct.

Defining Disagreement

In contemporary intellectual contexts we tend to isolate disagreements to different types within their respective spheres, such as scientific, philosophical, political, moral, religious, or aesthetic disagreement. Even if human conduct in all of these instantiations of disagreement is similar, the reasons why we disagree are different. Figure 1 below illustrates how different causes bring about disagreement in a given stratum of reality. The point of the figure is not to suggest that the three levels are so sealed from each other that, for example, biases would not affect the reasoning of mathematicians. Instead, in the upper levels it is reasonable to hope that time and effort will bring about an increase in knowledge, which will eventually put the disagreements behind us. However, in the lower levels, we cannot reasonably hope that simply adding more reason will resolve disagreements.⁸ Although reasoning is necessary, it alone does not suffice; reason needs to be balanced with wisdom.

Figure 1. Disagreement and various types of inquiry

At this point, it suffices to note that disagreements about ethics, politics, religion, philosophy, and aesthetics can be causally very complex. There are several causes that bring about conflict in these areas, which makes simple explanations unwise. My intention is not to offer a total explanation but simply to point out some things that need to be taken into account when we discuss the reality of disagreements in these spheres.

In this book, I wish to concentrate on religious disagreements, though the discussion is applicable beyond religion. In order to give an accurate account of what we are talking about, the following distinctions need to be made:

Religious disagreements in the public sphere

Violent clashes between religions and worldviews (ideologically motivated violence and war)

Clashes between ideologically motivated values (arguments about abortion, euthanasia, marriage, etc.)

Intrareligious disagreements

Disagreements between members of the same community in a smaller scale (such as the Anglican Communion crisis or the Great Schism of 1054)

Disagreements between the members of neighboring communities (ecumenical debates)

Personal conflicts

Disagreements among family members and other close peers

Individual feelings of cognitive dissonance

First, I would like to point out that we could easily replace the word religion with politics. Religion is one more thing that we can disagree about; whether it is a cause of especially problematic disagreement will be discussed later. In the course of the book, I will (when appropriate) designate the type of disagreement using the aforementioned scale. This taxonomy functions as a heuristic reminder of all the various instantiations of disagreement. Some of these forms of disagreement are more serious than others. Some may be, even if painful, ultimately beneficial. Not all disagreements are bad. Often we need disagreements to make progress. In principle, all three types of religious disagreement can have some positive value. The challenge, of course, is to gain the skills to see this and manage the disagreement so that the negative effects are mitigated.

Type 1 disagreements are more serious and usually draw more media attention. For example, the New Atheists are more concerned with type 1 religious disagreements, while the religious institutions themselves are usually more concerned with type 2 disagreements. As they concern the life of religious communities, and therefore concern the least number of people outside the communities, type 2 disagreements seldom appear in secular media but are often highly important for the members of the communities themselves.

Type 3 disagreements, in contrast, typically manifest as individual feelings or in close interpersonal relations. These disagreements interest secular media more than type 2 because the story involved often draws curious attention to the effects of a religion on its adherents. Covering all the forms of religious disagreement is beyond the scope of this book. Instead, I will concentrate on general dynamics of disagreement, while offering deeper analyses of some of these more particular types of disagreements.

Structure of the Book

The first chapter of this book explores how the nature of disagreement has been viewed in the history of Western philosophy. I will briefly examine the accounts and proposed solutions from pre-Socratic philosophers to recent postmodern thinkers. History offers a comical lesson here: our greatest thinkers disagree not only about how we should solve our disagreements but also about what disagreement essentially is, that is, why we disagree in the first place, and about the role of disagreement as part of the human condition.

The book’s second chapter introduces several social, psychological, and cognitive factors that create disagreements. Human life is limited by these factors, which effectively disable our knowledge acquisition. Time and resources are among the most crucial material factors and, along with the structure of human psychological and cognitive makeup, set us within a relatively well-sealed bubble, which distorts everything outside of our immediate surroundings. The overview of the limiting factors of the human psyche point toward the fact that disagreement is an integral part of human existence. We can escape from it as effectively as we can live without breathing—or thinking.

In the third chapter, I will examine the nature of religious disagreement from cognitive and philosophical perspectives. There is a lively conversation on the nature of disagreement among analytic philosophers, and there have been some applications of this discussion in the philosophy of religion as well. I shall build on this existing discussion and attempt to move it forward by offering some perspectives from the cognitive science of religion, which helps us to understand, first, the factors that cause religious disagreements and, second, the practical constraints that need to be taken into account when we are searching for possible solutions to inevitable disagreements.

The fourth chapter investigates the nature of virtue and whether we can be trained in moral and epistemic virtues. Recent studies in psychology suggest that learning virtues is indeed possible, though highly difficult. Religions have a dual role in virtue formation, as they tend to foster some epistemic vices while simultaneously enabling habituation in many beneficial virtues. Last, I offer a model of tolerance that is able to accommodate thick religious convictions and enable conviviality of mutually contradicting identities.

1. Peter Berger, The Heretical Imperative: Contemporary Possibilities of Religious Affirmation (Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1980). John Locke expressed this in inverted form in A Letter Concerning Toleration 1: Everyone is orthodox to himself.

2. These two volumes gather together the central voices in the discussion: Richard Feldman and Ted A. Warfield, eds., Disagreement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); David Christensen and Jennifer Lackey, eds., The Epistemology of Disagreement: New Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

3. There have been very few attempts to discuss how disagreements are dealt with in the scientific community and in the philosophy of science, and how that might help expand reasonable philosophical policies on disagreement. In the hard sciences, disagreements are usually solved when enough time is given, which is not always the case with value disagreements. However, climate-change debates, for example, have fueled the recent discussion on how we can argue the facts. See Dan M. Kahan et al., The Polarizing Impact of Science Literacy and Numeracy on Perceived Climate Change Risks, Nature Climate Change 2 (2012): 732–35.

4. See, e.g., the essays of Gerd Gigerenzer and David Matheson in Stainton, ed., Contemporary Debates in Cognitive Science (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006) and Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (London: Allen Lane, 2011).

5. For discussion see, e.g., Scott Atran, Talking to the Enemy: Violent Extremism, Sacred Values and What It Means to Be Human (London: Allen Lane, 2010); Desmond Tutu, No Future without Forgiveness (London: Rider, 2000).

6. It appears that there is a pervasive trend to emphasize the negative effects of religion. See, e.g., John Perry and Nigel Biggar, Religion and Intolerance: A Critical Commentary, in Religion, Intolerance, and Conflict: A Scientific and Conceptual Investigation, ed. Steve Clarke et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 253–61. William T. Cavanaugh has analyzed how the notion of religious violence functions as a mythic notion that is invoked to support certain antireligious public policies. See William T. Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). Also Atran (Talking to the Enemy) has argued that religion has actually very little to do with contemporary acts of terrorism.

7. Tom Standage, A History of the World in Six Glasses (New York: Atlantic Books, 2005); Standage, An Edible History of Humanity (New York: Atlantic Books, 2010); Chris McNab, The History of the World in 100 Weapons (London: Osprey, 2014).

8. For example, C. S. Lewis expresses his hesitation with the suggestion that the solution to the problems of human knowledge is simply more reason. Increasing reason does not necessarily help because reality is often too complicated to be known in the first place. See C. S. Lewis, De Futilitate, in Essay Collection: Literature, Philosophy and Short Stories (London: HarperCollins 2000), 270.

CHAPTER 1

We Have Been Here Before

But what differences are there which cannot be thus decided, and which therefore make us angry and set us at enmity with one another? I dare say the answer does not occur to you at the moment, and therefore I will suggest that these enmities arise when the matters of difference are the just and unjust, good and evil, honorable and dishonorable. Are not these the points about which men differ, and about which when we are unable satisfactorily to decide our differences, you and I and all of us quarrel, when we do quarrel?

Plato, Euthyphro 7

For human reason is very deficient in things concerning God. A sign of this is that philosophers in their researches, by natural investigation, into human affairs, have fallen into many errors, and have disagreed among themselves.

St. Thomas Aquinas, ST II-IIae.2.4

The first philosophical writings that have been preserved for us give mutually conflicting accounts of the nature of ultimate reality and the possibility of knowledge. Although history does not offer consensus, there are multiple lessons to be drawn from the writings of our predecessors. The philosophical problem of disagreement has been with us from the beginning, and over the centuries we have tried to solve the problem in myriad ways, some of which I will summarize in the following pages. Against this background, we may come to understand our own disagreements and proposed solutions more clearly.

1.1.Malleable Men and the Council of the Wise: Plato and Aristotle

One of the first philosophical treatises from the pre-Socratic period comes from Parmenides of Elea (515–445 BC), whose Poem focuses on the opinions of simple men who are misled by naively following their senses. Because the world of senses is in a constant state of flux, we are not able to form correct opinions about what is and what is not and we are therefore doomed to form contradictory convictions. Philosophers, instead, know a better way: the meditation of uncreated and imperishable . . . whole and of single kind and unshaken and perfect.¹

Here, among the early Greek philosophers, we observe that a question about knowledge is immediately transformed into a question about metaphysics.² Heraclitus (fl. 500 BC), Parmenides’s contemporary, argued that unchanged and motionless being is not the object of true knowledge; instead change is eternal. For Heraclitus, the ultimate nature of reality is not static and harmonious in the way Parmenides thought. The underlying harmony is to be found in corresponding states that are in eternal opposition. This leads him to conclude, It is necessary to know that war is common and right is strife, and that all things happen by strife and necessity.³ This river-like constant change shows people their true place in the world: War is the father of all and king of all, and some he shows as gods, others as men, some he makes slaves, others free.⁴ War and strife are eternal; their cessation would indicate the end of the world.

Here we have two basic stances that were to become the two opposite poles of stability and change, being and nothingness, toward which all metaphysical solutions gravitate in the history of Western philosophy. These disputes, which go back to the first serious attempts to philosophize, illustrate the complexity of disagreement. If our disagreements were only about perception, things might not be that serious.⁵ However, we are immediately faced with metaphysical questions, which are consequently linked to questions of value. In ancient philosophy the different topics of philosophy were so intermingled that it was not possible to distinguish between epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and political philosophy, as happens in modern philosophy.

Plato

Plato’s epistemology is tied directly to his metaphysical views. In the Republic, for example, Plato argues that perceptible things cannot be the object of proper knowledge since perceptible things can present themselves in ways that contradict each other. That is why convictions regarding perceptible objects are just opinions (doxa). Knowledge (epistēmē) is possible only in relation to Ideas. Sometimes it seems that Plato restricts knowledge only to the knowing of the One (hen) and immediately related ideas, with the result that one actually knows very few things. Consequently, if knowledge proper is only about hen, epistemology regarding ordinary things loses much of its value as a reasonable pursuit. We should not let the shadows on the wall drag us into senseless disputes because our opinions about them are necessarily deficient.⁶

Nevertheless, even if Plato is not interested in the justification of beliefs in a modern sense, he believes that things such as goodness and justice are worth serious examination. In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates points out that we tend to agree on simple things but get easily confused when faced with issues like justice and goodness, especially if we fall under the influence of a master rhetorician.⁷

Socrates: Every one is aware that about some things we are agreed, whereas about other things we differ.

Phaedrus: I think that I understand you; but will you explain yourself?

Socrates: When any one speaks of iron and silver, is not the same thing present in the minds of all?

Phaedrus: Certainly.

Socrates: But when any one speaks of justice and goodness we part company and are at odds with one another and with ourselves?

Phaedrus: Precisely.

Socrates: Then in some things we agree, but not in others?

Phaedrus: That is true.

Socrates: In which are we more likely to be deceived, and in which has rhetoric the greater power?

Phaedrus: Clearly, in the uncertain class.⁸

The above dialogue underlines the need for criteria and standards against which values are evaluated. The criticism of rhetoric arises from the debaters’ analysis of Lysia’s speech on love. Socrates and Phaedrus criticize Lysia for not defining the concepts he is using. This way Lysia begins at the end: from the conclusions without properly introducing his arguments, necessary concepts, and their definitions. Consequently, masses are led astray by rhetoricians who make complicated things look simple. Against this view, Socrates argues that dialectic (philosophy) is greater than rhetoric because it leads people to understand the things as they are.⁹

Nicholas White notes that the peculiarity of Plato’s metaphysical epistemology is found in the cases of puzzlement regarding particular goods. There is no talk about different contexts or ways of knowing (because the context is always less than ideal for humans). Plato simply goes on to explain what this particular good consists of in reality.¹⁰ In the Republic, Plato’s suggested solution to value disagreements is the meditation of Ideas. But is our knowledge of Ideas more secure?

Plato’s imagined republic reflects the human soul’s ideal condition: the rational part of the soul rules over the irrational part. In like manner, society’s lower classes behave rationally when they submit themselves to the upper classes, and the upper classes are rational when they rule wisely over the lower classes.¹¹ The utopian state is needed to educate people in the right way; namely, if people are subjected to a substandard moral environment in their youth, it is almost impossible to correct them later. As an example of perfection, Plato envisions an ideal judge who has not been familiarized with crimes in his youth, but who should have learned to know evil, not from his own soul, but from late and long observation of the nature of evil in others.¹²

Plato has no rosy view of humanity.¹³ Truth is easily corrupted, and human nature is prone to go astray if not properly tutored. This leads him to create a utopian (and totalitarian) state, which enables humans to achieve harmony and happiness (eudaimonia). Plato argues that conflicts typically arise in situations when there is some question of ownership. As a result, conflicts can be avoided by removing standard family structures and private property. This radical reorganization of social life should lead to equitable treatment. However, the sense of ownership extends to one’s own body and makes the complete uprooting of the notion of the private (idion) impossible. Here we face the crucial moment in Plato’s theory, summarized by Martha Nussbaum: For the body is not only the biggest obstacle to stable life and to true evaluation; it is also the most dangerous source of conflict, and therefore the biggest obstacle to impartial and harmonious civic justice.¹⁴

It is not only the commoners who suffer from their bodily restrictions; philosophers are subject to it as well. In Plato’s utopian state, philosophers rule the other classes, who willingly submit themselves to philosophers’ tutelage. For this reason, philosophers cannot have any private property either; honor is their only salary. However, other classes do not easily yield to philosophers’ rule. Even if philosophical knowledge is available for all, it is easily lost, and it cannot be promulgated to the society as a whole if the correct system, namely, a utopian state, is not in place.

Plato senses that even philosophers can become corrupt, which consequently makes it harder to use the Ideas as the starting point from which to start intellectual enquiry.¹⁵ This underscores the fragility of his utopian state, and eventually leads him to conclude that such a state will never come into being. Instead, we should strive for the Republic’s ideals without the state’s support. Even in the less-than-ideal state, it is the philosophers’ task to enter the cave they have left behind and educate the cave dwellers.¹⁶

Plato offers several enduring pieces of advice on managing disagreement in our time. The rhetoricians are still among us and continue to lead people in multiple directions. However, the means of bringing the desired state about are not well suited for contemporary democracies. For Plato, politics is not about coming together from different backgrounds and trying to find a common way; the common people have nothing worthwhile to say. Knowledge is restricted to the philosophical elite. Plato’s state is an intellectual aristocracy, which, sadly, is not able to secure its own internal consensus, as the later history of philosophy demonstrates, and which Plato himself also anticipates.

Aristotle

Aristotle follows the basic division of the parts of the soul that was assumed in Plato’s Academy. According to Aristotle, the human soul consists of three parts: vegetative, appetitive or animal, and rational. The vegetative soul joins us together with the world of nature, and it does not actually have an effect on our actions. The animal soul is responsible for those actions that we have in common with living beings, such as sensations, desires, and emotions. The properly human part is the rational soul, and it is divided into theoretical and calculative parts. The theoretical part deals with scientific reasoning, while the calculative part determines which actions we should perform.¹⁷

An action (and the person who performs it) can be regarded as good when the rational and appetitive parts work together harmoniously so that the action resonates with the particular good that is the action’s goal.¹⁸ If the calculative part does not rule over the appetitive part, the person in question behaves like an animal driven by its involuntary desires.

How, then, does the person engage with the world in a rational way? Aristotle’s philosophy of mind is simple and even optimistic: the world appears to the observer simply as it is. The standard model of Aristotelian knowledge acquisition operates with the following sequence: sense perception, apprehension of single essences, and discursive reasoning. The central notion in any act of perception is the intelligible species (species intelligibilis), or the secondary form. The classic passage in Aristotle’s De anima reads as follows:

In general, with regard to all sense-perception, we must take it that the sense is that which can receive perceptible forms without their matter, as wax receives the imprint of the ring without the iron or