Posted by Eugene Volokh:
Religious Arguments and Intransigence:
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2005_05_29-2005_06_04.shtml#1117613910
A correspondent proposes to distinguish religious reasons for
decisionmaking and secular reasons this way:
The difference between religious justifications and purely moral
justifications is that moral questions are debatable. For instance,
any person of any philosophical or religious persuasion can debate
both the philosophical question of what duty we have to protect the
earth to future generations, and the more specific question of
whether protecting the snail darter is necessary to discharge any
such duty. These questions cannot be resolved, but they can be
debated with reasoned argument.
Similarly, one can debate whether aesthetic justifications are
sufficient to prohibit the eating of a certain sort of meat,
whether horses have a "higher consciousness" sufficient to justify
a ban, to what extent customary practices should be considered,
whether meat should be eaten at all, whether horses who are
slaughtered feel pain, and all sorts of other questions.
But once someone says "a little man in the sky whom you don't think
exists ordered humans not to do something", that ends the debate. I
realize that I am being sarcastic, but to the nonbeliever, that is
exactly what it means to say that God ordered something. To the
nonbeliever, saying God ordered something is no different than
someone saying that he was visited by an apparition who ordered him
to do something, or that his palm or tarot card reader told him
that the spirits have ordered it. To the nonbeliever, the
justification that "God" ordered something is nothing more than a
hallucination, a completely irrational justification to restrict
his conduct. And even to the believer, the justification that
someone else's God, that he doesn't believe in, ordered something,
is precisely the same. To anyone other than an adherent of a
religion, an argument that a religious text says something is
simply not a reasoned argument and therefore does not provide any
justification to bind the non-adherent. A contested moral claim, in
contrast, is still a reasoned argument.
It seems to me that this misses the mark. One can make reasoned
arguments, in the sense of an argument that adduces reasons for
action, about religious beliefs as well as secular beliefs. People
argue all the time about how to interpret contested provisions of
religious texts, or how to resolve seeming tensions in the text, or
whether there are implied exceptions to the text, or for that matter
whether a religious commandment -- even one that both parties to the
argument agree is religiously binding -- ought to be turned into
secular law. They give reasons, they use syllogisms, they argue by
suggesting counterexamples, they engage in all the hallmarks of
reasoned argument.
Of course, at some point the capacity of reasoned argument to drive
our judgment runs out, as people come up against their axioms. But
that's true whether the people are religious or not. Secular people
who want to ban others from eating horse don't say "a little man in
the sky who you don't think exists ordered humans not to do
something." Rather, if they're candid, they say "a little feeling in
my belly that you don't think is morally obligatory ordered humans not
to do something."
To those who don't agree with California voters' view about eating
horsemeat, "the justification that [the majority's morality] ordered
something is nothing more than a hallucination, a completely
irrational justification to restrict his conduct." Yet in a democracy,
the objectors aren't allowed to buy horsemeat, even though this means
they're being governed by others' nonrational preferences (not
irrational preferences, but nonrational preferences in the sense of
being the axioms on which rational arguments rest rather than
statements that can be proven rationally).
The same applies to abortion. I suspect that many secular people (or
religious people who do not make this decision on religious grounds)
believe that the right to life starts some time before birth --
perhaps at viability, perhaps at the second trimester, perhaps when
some specific developmental milestone is reached. They can adduce
reasons for their decision, just as religious pro-life people can
adduce reasons for theirs. But ultimately, when you get to the core of
the argument, you have people's moral intuitions, gut feelings,
axioms, or whatever else you want to call them. No logical argument
can provide "proof" that one place and not another is where the right
to life attaches.
These positions then get enacted into law; to the best of my
knowledge, in most states abortions are not allowed very late in
pregnancy, precisely because of these concerns. Whether the backers of
such prohibitions support the prohibitions for religious reasons or
secular moral reasons, the prohibitions interfere with some women's
decision to abort a fetus late in the pregnancy. (We can say the same
about infanticide, but I wanted to use a case that was somewhat more
controversial.) "To the nonbeliever [in the secular
life-begins-some-time-before-birth argument], the justification that
[the fetus's right to life mandates] something is nothing more than a
hallucination, a completely irrational justification to restrict [her]
conduct." Yet such justifications do restrict our conduct. I don't see
why religious people's justifications, based on their religious
axioms, should be condemned as illegitimate, while nonreligious
people's nonreligiously based justifications, based on their secular
axioms, are somehow proper.
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