OK, if the atheism debates are so squalid, then what's the moderate, "philosophically respectable" approach to some of the issues that come up in them?
A recent episode of the University of Chicago philosophy podcast Elucidations featured philosophy uber-blogger Brian Leiter (who taught my philosophy and the law class at U. Texas). Leiter addresses the question, "Do matters of religious conscience deserve special protection in law?"
His answer is a qualified "no," in that yes, matters of conscience deserve protection, but not in virtue of their being associated with a religion. Of course there are historical reasons why we needed special protections for religion, and certainly it's easier, when faced with someone who claims that he can't follow the law due to a matter of conscious, to procure evidence that the person isn't just lying if he is associated with an established religion (e.g. Quakers have predictable anti-war beliefs), but ideally, we should broaden the law to provide some protection for all matters of conscience and omit the reference specifically to religion.
This is part and parcel of new atheist claims that religion gets undue deference both socially and legally, and it's ironic that a group that often decries "special rights" for homosexuals (when the issue is, of course, merely guaranteeing them equal rights) is itself singled out for special protection as a matter of Constitutional law.
Leiter provides a more moderate tone, though, and suggests a working definition of religion that sounds like Sam Harris's but is phrased as value-neutral: a view is religious when at least some of its claims are purposely insulated from the typical standards of justification that the rest of our beliefs are supposed to be subject to. In other words, at least some claims need to be taken on faith. Second, the system must make categorical demands on action: typically moral action, but other kinds of action too (e.g. how to dress).
Leiter provides a number of insights about the interaction between religion and law; for instance, given his definition of religion as issuing categorical demands, it follows that religious folks will (if they are strictly religious) be particularly resistant to society-level madness like Nazism or the red scare, though the same stubbornness can of course point in a radically wrong direction as well.
Another good conceptualization is the distinction he makes between recognition respect and appraisal respect: though we have the duty to "respect" each others' religion in the sense of recognizing that we all have the right to our opinions, particularly on matters of conscience, this doesn't entail that we have to actually respect their opinions in terms of assessing them as to any degree correct or wise. Tolerance, for Leiter, is all that's required to do our civic duty here.
The Elucidations method is to interview U. of Chicago faculty and alumni about things they're working on. The interviewers (including Matt Teichman, who's tentatively agreed to come on P.E.L. to talk about Frege with us!) ask some leading questions but more or less let the interviewees go on and on as long as they want. In some cases, this can be messy, but Leiter does a great job keeping things clear and cogent. It was great to hear him speak again (and makes me feel a bit better about how mean he sometimes is on his blog).
Ethan Gach says
October 16, 2010 at 12:07 pmSo I really liked what Leiter had to say.
What confused me though, was both distinguishing between attitudes and beliefs, and distinguishing between beliefs that necessitate certain action and those that don’t.
Isn’t a belief by definition something which initiates certain actions over others?
And are there any beliefs which don’t at base take certain assumptions as first principles in order to establish themselves?
Mark Linsenmayer says
October 21, 2010 at 2:27 pmI think he’s making prima facie distinctions. Astronomical or historical beliefs, for instance, don’t have any obvious outputs for action. Beliefs have linguistic content, attitudes don’t (though certainly you could try to articulate and justify the latter). He’s also just distinguishing between descriptive and normative claims. The latter are typically reputedly based on the former but don’t have to be (and logically speaking, can’t solely be; can’t get ought from is).
I don’t think Leiter is going to be particularly sympathetic to the view that all beliefs are faith based, because, e.g. we have no rational grounds re. whether to trust our own senses or the testimony of others or in our reasoning processes, including the principle of induction which we take to ground our belief in our senses and in others’ testimony. There’s a big difference between those assumptions, which we take ourselves to have rational grounding for even though they’re still open to skepticism and those beliefs which the believer admits are based purely on faith.
Ethan Gach says
October 22, 2010 at 8:11 pmI’ll preface the following with saying that I am not forwarding it as settled opinion or to be an argumentative ass, rather I have instinctive misgivings about Leiter’s distinctions and would like to analyze them further.
Does their (historical beliefs/beliefs about the natural world) not having “obvious outputs for action,” do anything to change the fact that they do have outputs for actions? For instance, if I have a belief that it will rain today, and another belief that I will have to sit at work all day without a change of clothes, and then an intervening belief about not wanting to spend that day sitting at work wet, would the output of those beliefs not be my action of finding and carrying my umbrella to work?
And in case you want to distinguish between my belief about the weather, and my seeming “preference” for not being wet, what would be your grounds for distinguishing my “belief” in the one instance, from my “preference” in the second?
And while he does make a distinction between normative and descriptive claims, is that distinction warranted? For instance, the fact that their is increasing research to show that the brain processes that take place with regard to “descriptive belief” are nearly indistinguishable from those that take place with regard to “normative beliefs”?
Thanks a lot for any responses!
Mark Linsenmayer says
October 23, 2010 at 2:36 pmOy, you’re going to make me have to actually turn on my brain here.
Usually when people try to analyze beliefs in terms of actions, it’s a behaviorist move, like this belief is equivalent to the tendency to act such and such under some circumstances. I’d like to revisit this at some point on a podcast, but overall the historical tide seems to have turned such that solutions like that bring about more problems than they solve, so I don’t mind logically separating the two and acknowledging that beliefs are real. This was probably not your concern, though. I don’t think much in Leiter’s argument hinges on there being beliefs that ultimately have no effects on action.
Do you have a link or something re. these “brain processes?” I’m not sure what bearing the psychology would have here, though; it’s supposed to be a logical feature of a claim that it’s normative or descriptive, not a psychological one. I wrote a paper at one point the gist of which was that all normative claims can be reduced to identifications, which sound descriptive. I started to type here an explanation of this, but it’s too complicated for me to bother to try to make it make sense at this moment for me, but yes, I am sympathetic to the idea of reducing all normative claims to descriptive ones, though things I’ve subsequently read (like G.E. Moore, W.D. Ross, and some of the guys I read in a “British Moralists” seminar I had… John Ballguy maybe?) have made me more inclined to think that there are just, in our experience, irreducible normative claims.