Why Respect Religion?
I have so far assumed that the moral foundation of the law of religious liberty is to be found in the idea of principled toleration. But am I entitled to that assumption? Martha Nussbaum, for example, has recently argued for the attitude of “respect” as the moral foundation of religious liberty,1 though, as I will suggest, her account is ambiguous between two senses of respect.2 In particular, I shall claim that in one sense of respect (hereafter, “minimal” respect), it is compatible with nothing more than toleration of religion; and that in a different sense (hereafter, “affirmative” respect, and which Nussbaum appears to want to invoke), it could not form the moral basis of a legal regime since religion is not the kind of belief system that could warrant that attitude.
“I really respect her intellect” and “You should show some respect for his feelings” both employ the same word, but express two different concepts of “respect”: the former I will call the “affirmative” concept of respect, the latter the “minimal” concept. Nussbaum has defended an account of the moral foundations of the law of religious liberty as based on a principle of “equal respect for conscience,”3 which she takes to be different from “mere” toleration of religion.4 I shall argue that the minimal concept of respect does not, at least with regard to religion, move us far beyond the moral ideal of toleration, and that only if religion warrants the affirmative concept of respect would we have reason to think our law of religious liberty should answer to a more demanding moral standard.5 In this chapter I argue that there is no case for application of the affirmative concept.
The minimal concept of respect—as expressed in “You should show some respect for his feelings”—maps onto what Stephen Darwall dubbed many years ago as “recognition respect.”6 This kind of respect, in Darwall’s formulations, involves “giving appropriate consideration or recognition to some features of its object in deliberating about what to do,” for example, “by being willing to constrain one’s behavior in ways required by” those features. In short, “Recognition respect for persons … is identical with recognition respect for the moral requirements that are placed on one by the existence of other persons.”7
Darwall’s recognition respect is a minimal form of respect in two regards: first, it is agnostic about any other dimension of value that might attach to the particular manifestations of the features of the object to which the respect is owed; second, it is silent on the nature of the “moral” constraints on behavior that are demanded by the respect. The first kind of minimalness is central to demarcating Darwall’s recognition respect from its more affirmative cousin, what Darwall calls “appraisal respect” (about which more momentarily). The second kind of minimalness is what makes it hard to distinguish recognition respect from toleration, as I shall argue below.
If the claim “You should show some respect for his feelings” invokes the minimal concept of respect, the statement “I really respect her intellect” depends on a more affirmative concept, what Darwall dubs “appraisal respect.” In Darwall’s terminology, such respect “consists in an attitude of positive appraisal of that person either as a person or as engaged in some particular pursuit”; as a result it “is like esteem or a high regard for someone” and it is compatible with having no “particular conception of just what behavior from oneself would be required or made appropriate by that person’s having the features meriting such respect.”8 When you “respect her intellect” you admire and appraise highly the caliber of her mind, whereas when you “respect his feelings” you act in such a way as to show an appropriate moral regard for how your actions might affect them.
Notice, again, that the minimal concept of respect—Darwall’s “recognition respect”—makes no substantive moral demand on the kind of action that is appropriate: it requires only that one honor whatever “moral requirements … are placed on one by the existence of other persons.” The substantive content of these moral requirements is open; indeed, it seems that recognition respect is morally otiose, “only an exhortation to perform the (other) duties that we already owe,” as Leslie Green puts it.9
Yet appraisal respect also makes no substantive moral demand on action, but for a different reason: it demands only “esteem” or high appraisal of certain features of persons, not that one act toward them in a certain way. Yet appraisal respect can also result in moral demands on action, when the highly appraised features are ones with moral value or that one has a moral obligation to support or protect. One ought to “respect” genius, and the more genius there is in the world the greater the well-being of persons, or so one might think. So a certain kind of consequentialist might think that appraisal respect for someone’s genius generates prima facie obligations toward that person.
Recognition respect demands only, to quote Darwall again, that one honor whatever “moral requirements … are placed on one by the existence of other persons.” But surely among the “moral requirements” one has to abide by are those demanded by principled toleration, as I have already argued. Has one discharged all one’s moral obligations of respect toward the religious beliefs and practices of a person if one tolerates them? Only an argument that morality demands more by way of our attitudes and practices toward religion would support a negative answer.
Nussbaum, in her recent lengthy defense of religious liberty (more precisely, liberty of conscience), thinks that tolerance of religion is “too grudging and weak” an attitude.10 We need, she says, a “special respect for the faculty in human beings in which they search for life’s ultimate meaning”—namely, their “faculty” of conscience.11 We should follow Roger Williams in “rever[ing] … the sincere quest for meaning,” since “everyone has inside something infinitely precious, something that demands respect from us all, and something in regard to which we are all basically equal.”12 But how can we distinguish “respect” here from toleration, the attitude Nussbaum deems “too grudging and weak”? We are all probably more or less equal in our capacity for self-deception, for example, but that demands nothing more than toleration: as long as your self-deception doesn’t harm someone else, we ought to let it alone. So, too, it might seem with “conscience” and the “sincere quest for meaning”: that ought to be tolerated, even when your “sincere quest for meaning” leads you to feel disgust for homosexuality as violating the dignity of the family.13 Humans are roughly equal in many faculties, but it seems odd to think that deficient exercises of those faculties should elicit a moral attitude beyond that of tolerance.14 That is the dilemma that afflicts something like Nussbaum’s view of liberty of conscience15: yes, the faculty of conscience, which we all possess (however deficiently we exercise it), might be thought to elicit a kind of minimal recognition respect from others. But why is that minimal notion of respect not fully discharged by the moral attitude of toleration?16
Is Religion a Proper Object of Affirmative Respect?
So, can we justify respect for religious conscience in some sense stronger than the minimal kind of recognition respect discharged by toleration? I want to turn, again, to a contemporary philosopher who has grappled with a version of our issue—namely, Simon Blackburn.17 Blackburn tells the story of being invited to dinner at a colleague’s home and then being asked to participate in a religious observance prior to dinner. He declined, though his colleague said participating was merely a matter of showing “respect.” His host seems to have viewed this as a matter of simple recognition respect, but Blackburn interpreted it (perhaps rightly) as something more:
I would not be expected to respect the beliefs of flat earthers or those of the people who believed that the Hale-Bopp comet was a recycling facility for dead Californians who killed themselves in order to join it. Had my host stood up and asked me to toast the Hale-Bopp hopefuls, or to break bread or some such in token of fellowship with them, I would have been just as embarrassed and indeed angry. I lament and regret the holding of such beliefs, and I deplore the features of humanity that make them so common. I wish people were different.18
Blackburn’s reaction brings out starkly that recognition respect—which requires us to treat others as morality requires in virtue of some morally relevant attribute of theirs—does not entail that we view them as appraisal respect might require. Blackburn himself remarks that respect “is a tricky term” since it “seems to span a spectrum from simply not interfering, passing by on the other side, through admiration, right up to reverence and deference.”19 He dubs as “respect creep” the phenomenon by which “the request for thin toleration turns into a demand for more substantial respect, such as fellow-feeling, or esteem, and finally deference and reverence,”20 which is what his dinner host expected and Blackburn declined to offer.
But given the ambiguity of “respect”—marked by the continuum from “toleration” to “esteem” and “reverence”—what is it that should incline one to one end of the spectrum or the other? Here Blackburn’s own account of his resistance to offering the appraisal respect his host asked for is a bit unclear. We can distinguish three considerations:
1. Religious belief is false belief. The falsity of religious belief is clearly part of the reason Blackburn is resistant to offering it respect, but surely falsity is not enough. After all, if his host had asked that Blackburn raise his glass in a toast to “my beautiful and intelligent children,” surely Blackburn would have raised his glass even if the offspring were homely and dull-witted. We are, all of us, in the grips of a multitude of false beliefs—I believe you are enjoying this book, you believe your colleagues think well of you, she thinks her research breaks new ground, he believes he is a clever conversationalist—but these usually do not elicit disrespect, contempt, or ridicule from our peers. Indeed, one might well admire, for example, my confidence and a colleague’s enthusiasm for her research, so the falsity of belief is plainly not enough to explain why there is a special problem about respect for religion.
2. Religious belief is perniciously false belief. This consideration, I suspect, comes closer to the mark for someone like Blackburn: it is not just that his host has false beliefs—though Blackburn’s rhetoric could suggest that is the issue—but that he has false beliefs whose falsity is pernicious. False beliefs can be pernicious in various ways: for example, in how they affect the believer’s behavior or to the extent they are part of an institutional web of false beliefs whose consequences are pernicious—licensing, for example, harassment of and discrimination against gay men and lesbians, attacks on science education in the schools, and opposition to valuable scientific research in a variety of areas. If Blackburn’s host had said, “And now let us bow our heads in honor of my personal hero, Adolf Hitler, a great and honest man who led the fight against the poisonous influence of world Jewry,” one might easily understand Blackburn’s refusal of recognition, let alone appraisal, respect: his host has a perniciously false belief. And if Blackburn were attending dinner with his host in North Carolina (one of his academic homes) in 1959, and the host had asked everyone to raise a glass “in salute to the brave leaders of the White Citizen’s Council who strive to keep the Negro in the position to which his intellectual and moral character suits him,” we can easily (at least today) understand why Blackburn would refuse, since the beliefs expressed are not only perniciously false but part of an institutional structure that caused immeasurable harm to human beings.
But these are not the dinners Blackburn attended. So our real question is whether there is any reason to think that a Jewish prayer before Friday evening dinner (what was at issue in Blackburn’s case) is a case of comparably pernicious false belief in either sense? More generally, is there any reason to think religious belief per se is comparably pernicious?
3. Religious belief is (epistemically) culpable false belief—that is, it is unwarranted and one ought to know it is unwarranted. This is probably the real concern for Blackburn, and it certainly distinguishes the case of religious belief from some of our other false beliefs, such as those involving our children or ourselves. (Blackburn’s host may falsely believe his children are intelligent and attractive, but he is hardly epistemically blameworthy for so believing!) Why should culpably false beliefs elicit respect rather than indulgence or toleration? That is surely the point of Blackburn’s scenarios such as being asked to “respect” those who believe the Hale-Bopp comet is a recycling facility for dead Californians. These beliefs are false, and ridiculously so, and no one in their right mind should accept them.
But are religious beliefs—say, belief in the resurrection of Jesus Christ, or in the existence of an omniscient, omnipotent, nonmaterial being—such beliefs? They differ from the Hale-Bopp beliefs in several obvious respects: they have more adherents, are more familiar to nonbelievers, and are more deeply integrated into the cultural and normative practices of our society, even among the normative practices of those who do not accept the beliefs in question. (Recall Friedrich Nietzsche’s quip about putative “free thinkers” who say, “The church, not its poison [i.e., its moral teaching], repels us…. Leaving the church aside, we, too, love the poison.”21) Is that enough to think they warrant respect in some sense more affirmative than mere toleration?
One might suppose, for all kinds of practical (e.g., Hobbesian) reasons, that the category of widely accepted culpable false belief deserves different treatment than the category of idiosyncratic culpable false belief, though it is hard to see why that would add up to anything like the affirmative kind of appraisal respect that Blackburn’s host expected or Nussbaum’s “precious faculty” account would suggest. So perhaps our focus should not be on the quantity of culpable false belief involved, but on its culpability, which seems to be the relevant factor. After all, if I believe that I am Zeus, and you are mere mortals and so should not be so insolent as to ask me hard questions about this book, then I have a culpably false belief, which does not warrant affirmative respect (and probably not even tolerance!).
Is our religious believer in the same situation? Certainly any answer depends, in the first instance, on the available evidence and thus the standards for what would constitute blameworthy epistemic irresponsibility.22 In the fourteenth century, religious belief was quite plainly neither irrational nor unwarranted—and thus not culpably false belief—but after the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, it is less clear. Of course, there is a large literature in Anglophone philosophy devoted to defending the rationality of religious belief.23 I shall not, here, be able to address this literature in any detail. Suffice it to observe that its proponents are uniformly religious believers, and that much of it has the unpleasant appearance of post-hoc—sometimes desperately post-hoc—rationalization. Alex Byrne, a philosopher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, captures the dominant sentiment among other philosophers about this literature rather well:
[I]t is fair to say that the arguments [for God’s existence] have left the philosophical community underwhelmed. The classic contemporary work is J. L. Mackie’s The Miracle of Theism, whose ironic title summarizes Mackie’s conclusion: the persistence of belief in God is a kind of miracle because it is so unsupported by reasons and evidence.24
Of course, our prior account of what makes a matter of conscience religious did not include any reference to theism but to the categoricity of at least some religious commands, the fact that some religious beliefs are insulated from evidence, as evidence is understood in commons sense and the sciences, and the contribution of religious belief to existential consolation. (The insulation from evidence is, to be sure, central to what makes theism possible, as Mackie argues.) The so-called reformed epistemology of apologists for religious belief like William Alston and Alvin Plantinga is, thus, predicated on an attack on “Enlightenment-approved evidence.”25 I am going to assume—uncontroversially among most philosophers but controversially among reformed epistemologists—that “reformed epistemology” is nothing more than an effort to insulate religious faith from ordinary standards of reasons and evidence in common sense and the sciences, and thus religious belief is a culpable form of unwarranted belief given those ordinary epistemic standards. Even allowing that that is true, does it follow that such beliefs do not warrant a more affirmative kind of respect than mere recognition respect, which could be discharged by “toleration”?
To think there is a problem here, we do need to assume that culpable failure of epistemic warrant is a reason to withhold appraisal respect from a belief. Is that true? Often when we admire someone’s loyalty or devotion to a cause or a person, we admire their willingness to remain committed to it notwithstanding countervailing evidence. She thinks her son is a wonderful pianist, even though his piano teacher would sooner take gas than give the boy another futile lesson. He continued to support Senator McCarthy’s presidential bid in 1968, even after it was clear one of the prowar candidates would get the nomination. The mother and the supporter ought to know better as a purely epistemic matter, but there is something admirable about their stances. In these cases, though, we think the loyalty or devotion has some value either to the person or the cause so valued, or that it exemplifies a trait of character or habit of mind that is otherwise valuable.
Let us suppose, as seems most plausible, that religious belief in the post-Enlightenment era involves culpable failures of epistemic warrant. Can it be redeemed by the kinds of considerations just noted? This, it seems to me, is the central and hard question about whether the law of religious liberty should embody mere toleration or a more affirmative kind of appraisal respect. Do matters of conscience that issue in categorical demands on action and are insulated from reasons and evidence, but which also produce existential consolation, have a special kind of value that we should appraise highly or merely tolerate?
It might be tempting in the United States in the early twenty-first century to think the answer obvious. After all—to take an example close to home—religious believers overwhelmingly supported George W. Bush, widely considered one of the worst presidents in the history of the United States, whom many think ought to be held morally culpable both for the illegal war of aggression against Iraq as well as the casualties resulting from domestic mismanagement. Of course, if we really thought there were some connection between religious belief and support for the likes of Bush, then even toleration would not be a reasonable moral attitude to adopt toward religion: after all, practices of toleration are, themselves, answerable to the Millian Harm Principle, and there would be no reason ex ante to think that Bush’s human carnage is something one should tolerate.
But such a posture is not warranted: there is no reason to think that beliefs unhinged from reasons and evidence and that issue in categorical demands on action are especially likely to issue in “harm” to others. As I noted earlier, there are plenty of cases—for example, resistance to Nazism or opposition to apartheid—in which religious believers pursued what now seems the obviously morally correct course long before others. On the other side, take the au courant case of Bernard Madoff, who swindled thousands of individuals out of billions of dollars by promising unrealistic returns on purported “investments.” Although Madoff exploited his religious connections, to be sure, it is quite clear that he himself was acting on the basis of hypothetical imperatives (where the consequent of each conditional was his own enrichment) that were keenly attuned to reasons and evidence: he was clearly an astute student of the facts about human psychology! Perhaps beliefs that issue in categorical demands on action and that are unhinged from reasons and evidence are more harmful, on average, but it seems to me much more empirical evidence would actually be required to support that conclusion.
Do we really need such evidence, though, to answer our initial question? The default position, as argued in chapter 3, is that we ought to tolerate—that is, show recognition respect—toward religious beliefs, but do we have any reason to accord them a more affirmative form of respect, such as Darwall’s appraisal respect? That is the central issue here. And it is now difficult to see how any of the preceding considerations would support the conclusion that religious matters of conscience warrant esteem or reverence. Only if there were a positive correlation between beliefs that were culpably without epistemic warrant and valuable outcomes would it seem that we should think them proper objects of appraisal respect. But the evidence on this score is, as we have already had occasion to note, mixed.
Two Final Strategies for Establishing Religion as an Object of Appraisal Respect
Perhaps the argument for appraisal respect for religious beliefs and practices could be redeemed by the following argument.26 Think of the National Science Foundation or the National Endowment for the Humanities. Most of the work these institutions fund turns out to be of little or no value to anyone other than the grant recipient. Some of it is positively dreadful or, in retrospect, foolish. Yet we might have reason to appraise these institutions highly because they do make possible some research of great value by anyone’s estimation. Since we have conceded already that religious commitment, with its distinctive commitment to categoricity and indifference to reasons and evidence, is in fact conducive to distinctively good outcomes in certain circumstances (e.g., resistance to fascists and racists), and since we have also noted the positive contribution to existential consolation made by religious belief, might we not have analogous reasons to appraise highly religion? To be sure, it often leads to horrors and abominations, but it also yields “moral gems.”27
If this argument is to be persuasive, however, everything turns yet again on questions of degree: does religious belief and practice yield valuable outcomes often enough relative to the bad outcomes it yields? If the National Science Foundation mostly funded work in alchemy, intelligent design, and Lamarckianism, while occasionally footing the bill for genuinely cutting-edge research in chemistry or biology, we would not highly appraise the institution but instead think its existence barely justified given the track record. The track record on religion is, quite obviously mixed—indeed, sufficiently mixed, that it is hard to see the kinds of considerations noted above supporting the attitude of appraisal respect.
But perhaps a much more forceful case can be made for religion as an object of appraisal respect. Such would be the import of John Finnis’s bold claim that
[r]eligion deserves constitutional mention, not because it is a passionate or deep commitment, but because it is the practical expression of, or response to, truths about human society, about the persons who are a political community’s members, and about the world in which any such community must take its place and find its ways and means. Even the many seriously misguided religions tell in some respects more truth about the constitution’s ultimate natural (transcendent, supra-natural) foundations than any atheism or robust agnosticism can.28
Finnis follows Thomas Aquinas in claiming that “the rationality norms which guide us in all our fruitful thinking also, and integrally, summon us to affirm the existence and providence of God….”29 These are astonishing claims, which, if they could be made good, would require a wholly different approach to the law of religious liberty, as Finnis well appreciates. We must, then, ask what arguments Finnis has in support of these ambitious theses?
According to Finnis, the “norms of rational enquiry” necessary for any inquiry into reality end up leading us to a rational belief in God.30 I quote at some length from Finnis, so as not to be accused of misrepresenting the position:
Such norms guide all scientific inquiry, all scientific discovery and all scientific achievements and applications—and are the source, equally, of all enquiry, discovery and judgment in fields which lie wholly or partly beyond the methods of natural science, fields such as mathematics, logic, philosophy, history, and the interpretation of texts and conversations. In all these fields, truth is found and knowledge of reality is won by hypothesizing (and then, when evidence and argument fail to disconfirm it, appropriately concluding to) some explanation, some explanatory factor or state of affairs or reality … in preference to mere chance or inexplicable (“blind”) necessity. So, one of the many rationality norms is: an adequately explanatory reason why something is so rather than otherwise is to be expected, unless one has a reason not to expect such an explanatory reason.31
There is a large literature on the epistemic norms operative in scientific practice,32 but that literature is not in evidence in Finnis’s discussion. No citation is given, either, for the curious proposition that it is a norm of rationality that one should expect an “explanatory reason” (I assume that is a causal reason) “why something is so rather than otherwise.” To the extent we expect that phenomena have causal determinants it is because of past experience, because it has turned out so often (at least since the Scientific Revolution) that things that seemed inexplicable actually have causes. It is not a norm of rationality—Finnis has no account of those—that things we observe are explicable in terms of antecedent causes; it is an inductive inference based on past success. It is clearly defeasible, which belies its purported status as a “norm of rationality”: no one is unreasonable should they conclude that a particular phenomenon is a product of chance (chance, itself, being an object of study since the scientific revolution, but put that to one side). Norms of rationality, one might have thought, have the feature that should you violate them you are, necessarily, unreasonable. But since it is reasonable—that is, since it answers to norms of rationality and evidence—to sometimes conclude that a particular phenomenon is purely a “product” of chance, it would follow that there is no “norm of rationality” at work here.
Finnis is surely right that “science progresses constantly by treating chance as the residuum of coincidence in a domain dominated by what is explicable because it is not by chance,”33 but that is an a posteriori fortuity, not any a priori or “transcendent” (as he sometimes calls it) reality. Finnis adduces no evidence from actual scientific practice that it is otherwise. There are not, contra Finnis, any “lines of thought that converge on the conclusion that one should affirm a transcendent cause.”34 What there is, instead, is actual scientific practice that finds that a combination of deterministic and probabilistic laws describe wide swaths of natural phenomena, and the recognition that some phenomena have no causal determinants at all.
I should emphasize that Finnis, a distinguished philosopher of law and Aquinas scholar, as well as a devout Catholic his entire adult life, represents the intellectual best that contemporary Thomism has to offer. The dogmatic incantation of “norm of rationality” functions, alas, in Thomistic discourse as a bludgeon meant to cow the opposition and vindicate the epistemic bona fides of irrational and long-discredited positions without any actual argument or evidence. The dialectical bankruptcy of Thomism, which is apparent to everyone outside the relevant sectarian group, will not, I am afraid, salvage an argument for appraisal respect of religious conscience.
Conclusion: A Nietzschean Postscript
It bears emphasizing that the argument of this chapter—that religious conscience per se is not a proper object of appraisal respect—is in no way an argument for any other propositions with which it might be confused on a superficial reading—for example, that no particular religion might be a proper object of appraisal respect35; or that religious belief per se deserves disrespect (e.g., intolerance). The last pernicious conclusion is one that is no part of the argument of the book: I have adopted throughout what seems to me the clearly correct Nietzschean posture—namely, that the falsity of beliefs and/or their lack of epistemic warrant are not necessarily objections to those beliefs; indeed, false or unwarranted beliefs are almost certainly, as Nietzsche so often says, necessary conditions of life itself, and so of considerable value, and certainly enough value to warrant toleration.