The Secular Question

Posted on February 7, 2009
Filed Under Politics, Religion | 7 Comments

There’s an ongoing debate at LDS-Phil over what kind of arguments should be put forth in the public sphere. This is presented as the central question of secularity. I’ve noticed this debate raging in many of the very secular blogs I read as well. At LDS-Phil there were basically two arguments put forth. Both hold a degree of strength but I think have some problems on closer examination.The first is akin to this:

If religious belief is justified at all then it is justified in a way that bars (in the sense of rational prohibition) religious beliefs from playing a significant role in public discourse about public policy.

Religious belief is based on something transcendent

Belief based on the transcendent is not inter-subjectively verifiable (it is based on evidence that is only privately available, not publicly so)

Therefore only public knowledge should play a role in public policy discourse.

Some thought this was a strawman of the secularist position (although I’ve personally seen many advocate it). The reformulated (and probably stronger) argument is:

One should not to offer arguments that are not at least plausibly persuasive to most of your audience.

Religious arguments have a plural and sometimes private nature. (Not all are religious, not all religions agree on important questions, etc.)

Therefore religious arguments tend not to be possibly persuasive to most of the audience in discussions of public policy. One should therefor not offer religious arguments in discussions of public policy.

The second argument is to my mind the strongest. However it seems a fact that Americans overwhelmingly share a lot of religious beliefs. Yes there are differences but there is a lot many agree upon. So this isn’t at best an argument against religious arguments but rather an argument against too narrow of religious arguments.

I also think that there are obvious examples that go against this version of the argument. Say what one will about their merits but largely religious arguments against gay marriage, abortion and related issues have been quite persuasive to a significant portion of the populace. (Although clearly not all — which is the obvious secular response) The problem with this line of reasoning is that it rests upon the question of what is persuasive and not whether it should be persuasive.

It just isn’t clear to me why arguments should possibly be persuasive to all the population. It seems to me that most of the compelling issues of the day have the populace separated into groups because they simply don’t agree on basic premises. The Libertarians among us, for instance, have some basic stances that many fundamentally don’t agree with. Should one say that Libertarians should only make arguments that could plausibly be persuasive to folks who disagree with basic Libertarian values?

The secular question then becomes how to conduct reasoning in the secular sphere when premises are not sufficiently shared by people to come to agreement.

The first argument, while not as strong as the second, at least does point out that religious beliefs are grounded in ways that other kinds of beliefs (say science) aren’t.

The best argument against this seems the democratic argument. Surely people ought be able to vote legitimately on their values and not merely values they can publicly defend. But I think it a fair counter-point to say that even if democracy allows such moves we shouldn’t say such moves are wise or good. To draw an analogy, democracy allows politicians to make dishonest or misleading arguments to persuade people. Yet we recognize that such sophistry is bad while good solid arguments are good. The question then becomes whether religious arguments can be made good in this sense. (Or put an other way, what form should good public arguments take?)

The problem is that if we reject arguments based upon whether people can verify evidence we run into a big problem. What people are we talking about? Let’s say 1/3 of the population are of reasonably below average intelligence. How many public policy arguments can they really follow? Would we be forced to say no science could be offered that these people couldn’t comprehend? The ignorant and the less intelligent simply are an important part of society and we can’t pretend they aren’t.

So simply saying we should only make arguments everyone can follow is bad. Yet if we change the argument to appeal to the typical voter or majority voter then you have the trouble that America is such a religious country that most voters would agree with many kinds of religious arguments.

Is there a way to reframe the argument that doesn’t have these problems? I think the secularist wants to imagine an “ideal voter” rather than a “typical voter” and have arguments that appeal only to the ideal voter. As I practical matter I suspect the ideal voter is to the secularist’s mind the secularist themselves. Although perhaps that’s me being a tad too cynical.

Related posts:

  1. Are there Examples of Accepted Conceivability Arguments?
  2. Private and Public Morality
  3. Anselm’s Ontological Argument and the Problem of Evil
  4. Spatially Located Souls
  5. Arguments from Evil
  6. Duffy on Postmodernism and Mormon Apologetics

Comments

7 Responses to “The Secular Question”

My question is what is meant by “should” in the arguments you state above. I can see two possible reasons for restricting oneself to secular arguments: a utilitarian reason and a constructivist reason.

First, we should use secular arguments because our goal is persuading people to join us in our policy goal. Whether this is true or not would largely depend on the audience. Certainly if you only had one chance to relate your message, you would want to have it appeal to as broad an audience as possible. But that is almost never the case. You can reiterate your message, adapting it to what each target audience cares about. That’s likely to be more effective than relying on only one broad and shallow message.

Second, we should use secular arguments because our discourse reconstructs and reinforces societal norms. Sectarian arguments are bad because they rely on shibboleths that promote divisiveness and ingroup-outgroup thinking. Even if we could co-opt and use this rhetoric to achieve a good outcome, our use of it still legitimizes and strengthens the rhetoric and its harmful consequences. It would be better to avoid that rhetoric and try to eradicate it from public discourse entirely. I’m not sure I agree with this argument, but I have seen variations of the argument from time to time.

I think the question about should is apt. I think the question is ultimately about the ideal form of discourse we ought be seeking in our politics. As you note the question of effective persuasion is part of that but I think the deeper question is about effective techniques which are somewhat unethical. However cast that way it seems doubly difficult to understand why Evangelicals making arguments to Evangelicals is bad. I don’t think Democracy is about consensus building although sometimes consensus is a good thing.

But then I’ll be the first to admit that my knowledge of political philosophy is sketchy. I’m much more pragmatic (in the looser sense) about all politics.

The idea of freedom of speech INSISTS that any argument short of declarations of physical violence is permissible. First and foremost, the U.S. Constitution is not about logic, but about fairness and freedom. How the arguments are made should be left up to the speaker and the acceptance of those arguments should be left up to the listeners. Besides, even secularist arguments can sound logical to some (and hence persuasive) and b.s. to others.

Clark: This is basically the very battle that Alvin Plantinga believes is a capitulation by Christianity. If Christians must adopt only premises that secular opponents accept, then they have already lost the battle. Why should I have to adopt a lowest common denominator approach to do philosophy? If my purpose is to transcend a horizon or bring students beyond what they already accept as a common standard, then I must violate the very principle of the “strong argument” because I go beyond what will be generally accepted by my audience. For example, Charles Dawrin certainly was arguing against what almost everyone accepted when he introduced his theory. So the implication of the argument is that scientific theories that upset our worldviews ought not be presented because they present a view not generally accepted. That appears to me on its face to be ridiculous.

Certainly what is persuasive is a function of background knowledge and information. The real battle is over what we present as the background information — things like ID and whether physics is grounded in anything more than unverifiable hunches and intuitions. The real battle is over public education and what we will count as legitimate to pass on to the next generation.

However, those who adopt a radical post-modern approach have long argued that what counts as an argument can have meaning only within a specific cultural context (which kinda makes their arguments self-defeating since they intend such observations to be cross-cultural). If all arguments have only such relative meaning, then arguing to sub-groups is inevitable and their is no meaning to consensus beyond such a subgroup that shares the same beliefs. What that entails is that we only get to make arguments to those who already buy our assumptions in the first place — which ends up preaching to the choir.

Clark,

I agree–I tried to make a deontological argument but gave up because it didn’t make any sense. I am also a pragmatist when it comes to politics. I don’t put much stock in the constructivist argument i pose above because I think that the legitimizing effect described is so minuscule as to be meaningless when compared to achieving your policy agenda.

Jettboy,

I agree with your conclusion, but just because an argument is permissible to make doesn’t mean one should make it. If the only constraints we put on our speech or behavior are those that the law imposes upon us, we cannot be called ethical beings by any stretch of the imagination.

Jettboy, just to second Nate’s comments. The issue isn’t what is permissible but what we ought do. As I mentioned in one of my comments it’s quite legal for a politician to lie and whip up a frenzy blaming some scapegoat knowing they are lying. It seems hard to say such behavior is praiseworthy.

There is a position that thinks that if you put all the ideas out there that only the good arguments will rise to the top. However in the short term that seems demonstrably false.

Blake, while I disagree with Plantinga on numerous things I tend to agree with the basic thrust of his comments here. That said I think clearly that some premises are wrong and some right. And some have better strength than others.

Ironically last night I was out with friends for dinner and the topic turned to global warming. He thought it was false because he didn’t think humans could make any significant effect on climate. I asked why and he said that because it would have happened. That is the evidence for global warming was false because climate change was impossible and climate change was impossible because there was no evidence for global warming. Now regardless of whether you accept or reject global warming I think we can all agree that is pretty bad reasoning and pretty bad premises. I clearly won’t be able to convince him though.

The biggest problem I think there is in politics is that everyone thinks they are rational. However I personally think that even the most ration differ from the so-called ignorant masses only by being not quite so irrational. That is I think most of us (myself included) think we are being rational and objective when we’re really just reflecting hidden biases. This is also why I think philosophy and introspection is so important. So we bring to light those hidden biases so we can come to better understand how we reason. The big danger is that when we think we are the rational ones. That’s when shoddy thinking really rises. (I’ve been reading Scienceblogs a lot and there’s a ton of that kind of “I’m being rational” shoddy self-justification going on – in fact I was working on a post on the subject.)

Let’s examine this argument:

One should not to offer arguments that are not at least plausibly persuasive to most of your audience.

The majority in America are religious.

Religious arguments have a plural and sometimes private nature. (Not all are religious, not all religions agree on important questions, etc.)

Almost all religions have some level of commonality between them.

Therefore religious arguments tend not to be possibly persuasive to most of the audience in discussions of public policy. One should therefor not offer religious arguments in discussions of public policy.

thus false.

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