This picture is routinely challenged by those who contend that secular reasons and secular discourse in general don’t tell the whole story; they leave out too much of what we know to be important to human life.
No they don’t, is the reply; everything said to be left out can be accounted for by the vocabularies of science, empiricism and naturalism; secular reasons can do the whole job. And so the debate goes, as polemicists on both sides hurl accusations in an exchange that has become as predictable as it is over-heated.
But the debate takes another turn if one argues, as the professor of law Steven Smith does in his new book, “The Disenchantment of Secular Discourse,” that there are no secular reasons, at least not reasons of the kind that could justify a decision to take one course of action rather than another.
It is not, Smith tells us, that secular reason can’t do the job (of identifying ultimate meanings and values) we need religion to do; it’s worse; secular reason can’t do its own self-assigned job ”” of describing the world in ways that allow us to move forward in our projects ”” without importing, but not acknowledging, the very perspectives it pushes away in disdain.
I think he is right on. But the comments to the article are fascinating as they reflect the very “bootstrapping” he says secularism does as those doing the bootstrapping deny that they are doing it.
For example comment 23 states: “What secularists advocate instead is a set of principles that a large majority of people can agree upon as the basis for a just society. The right to work for a reasonable wage (“the economy”) and the right to live without fear of violence (“national security”) are two.”
Well this just simply says the ethics are what ever the majority of the society says that they are and then gives two examples. But where does society derive these values? He assumes meaning to the words “reasonable wage” and “just society” have some sort of intrinsic meaning without resorting to some sort of presupposition as to what they mean.
By this standard Nazi Germany was a moral society and applied to the Jews the morality of the majority of the society.
Well, actually I think he is distracted by the philosophical conundrums to see the real problem: the refusal to admit that Judaeo-Christian religion is right about sin. Not just theologically right, but practically, empirically right. There’s little point about talking about principles for a just society without the admission that, even to the degree that such principles are agreed upon, people will violate them routinely; and the discussion itself is contaminated anyway by the same sin. The secularists doggedly refuse to understand that the central principle of their rebellion against religious authorities is not irreligion, but rebellion; they cannot gain that authority for themselves because, after all that, they are just someone else to rebel against.
Yes, many of the comments are exercises in missing the point. The point Fish, and Smith presumably, is making is that both secular and religious ethical norms rest on first principles that cannot be proven. These first principles can only be accepted as given by some source that we recognize as having an objective, or at least underived, normative authority, whether we regard that source as a philosophical first principle or revealed dogma.
But #364 in the thread has already made my point, so I’ll defer to it.