Austin Dacey
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From The Secular Conscience, IntroductionEverywhere secular values are under assault, and almost nowhere are they being defended. On questions of religion, ethics, and values, secular liberals are strangely silent. At the moment their perspective is most needed, they have lost their moral identity, self-confidence, and voice in public affairs. Where did secular liberalism go wrong? It has been undone by its own ideas. The first idea is that matters of conscience—religion, ethics, and values—are private matters. The privatizing of conscience started with two important principles: religion should be separated from the state and people should not be forced to believe one way or the other. But it went further to say that belief has no place in the public sphere. Conscience belongs in homes and houses of worship, not in the marketplace. By making conscience private, secular liberals had hoped to prevent believers from introducing sectarian beliefs into politics. But of course they couldn't, since freedom of belief means believers are free to speak their minds in public. Instead, secularism imposed a gag order on itself. Because “private” is equated with “personal” and “subjective,” questions of conscience were placed out of bounds of serious critical evaluation. Subjective phenomena—like the thrill of skydiving or the taste for spicy food—are just those that are determined by the attitudes and thoughts of the subject experiencing them. How can I evaluate your experiences? It seems I must simply accept them for what they are. If conscience is beyond criticism, however, liberals cannot subject religion to due public scrutiny when it encroaches on society. The result: in public discourse it is acceptable to say that addicts should give up heroin for Jesus, but not to ask obvious policy questions such as whether faith-based social programs are actually proven more effective than secular alternatives (it turns out there's no good empirical evidence that they are). Worse still, since secularists want belief to be left at home and not “imposed” on others, they are unable to unabashedly defend their own positive moral vision in politics. No wonder they are accused of having lost their moral moorings. Call this liberal confusion the Privacy Fallacy. The Privacy Fallacy consists in assuming that because conscience is private in the sense of non-governmental it is private in the sense of personal preference. A related confusion comes from the idea of freedom of conscience. This confusion begins in the core liberal principle that conscience must be left free from coercion. The mistake lies in thinking that because conscience is free from coercion, it must be free from criticism, reason, truth, or independent, objective standards of right and wrong. The indispensable principle of freedom of belief has mutated into an unthinking assumption that matters of belief are immune to critical public inquiry and shared evaluative norms. This is the Liberty Fallacy. Fortunately, there is another way to conceive of secular liberalism, and it comes from understanding what can be called the openness of conscience . The basic idea of the open conscience (open as in “the open society”) can be illustrated by the example of the press. In a free society, the press is to be protected from autocratic control by the state and other power-wielding institutions. We want wherever possible to allow it to pursue its own course autonomously. But we don't say that therefore it is “private.” The press is protected, left free and open, not so that it may be private, but so that it may perform a vital function in the public sphere. In the same way, conscience is protected in order that it may pursue—in dialogue with others—its vital questions of meaning, identity, value, and truth. The press may say what it wants, but we don't say that therefore it is subjective or arbitrary. The press is free, but not a free-for-all. It is liberated so that it may be constrained, freed to abide by the standards that define its distinctive nature. These are the standards of journalistic objectivity, transparency, truth, and service to the public interest. In the same way, conscience is free so that it may respond only to the standards that define its nature, the standards of reason, impartiality, and concern for others. Conscience is open to the public. . . . The Privacy Fallacy and Liberty Fallacy are not historically inevitable. In fact, they are relative new-comers in the West's intellectual and political life. In some forms, these confusions have only been with us since the latter half of the twentieth century. The secular liberal tradition did not always understand itself this way. The great promise of America , and of Western liberalism itself, was the promise of a moral foundation for society that could transcend religious differences. That moral foundation, which 17 th and 18 th Century liberal thinkers described in terms of natural rights evident to a universal moral sense, would support a new kind of government, a secular civil order secured against sectarian persecution and war. The public values of this civil order would be those enunciated in the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution: justice, tranquility, common defense, general welfare, and liberty. For the architects of the secular liberal tradition, like Spinoza, Adam Smith, John Locke, James Madison, and John Stuart Mill, the aim was not to ignore the moral and spiritual dimensions of human life. Less still did they want to deny all dimensions but the economic, reducing all value to market value and all interests to self-interest. Rather, the point was to move matters of belief from the governmental arena of law and coercion into the arena of conscience and conversation. The West has achieved their dream of an open society but forsaken the public ethics that it needs to defend itself and endure. Justice, welfare, and liberty have become words from a catechism, not living, breathing arguments. The sphere of conscience has collapsed into the private sphere. Secularism has lost its soul. Secularism is not dead. Those of us who identify with the secular liberal tradition can reclaim the language of ethics and values. We can relearn to speak with the voice of conscience, and make it our own. This means rejecting the Privacy Fallacy. It does not mean commingling conscience with government, making it a subject for coercive law or decision by majority vote. Between the private sphere—of personal property, preferences, and relationships—and the civil sphere—of state power and institutions—there is a public sphere. This is the social space in which citizens carry on debate about their shared life, in newspaper editorials, letters to the editor, blogs, houses of worship, local government forums, office break rooms; it is the argumentarium, the agora, the marketplace where we weigh and exchange each others' reasons for what we think and do. The public sphere is the proper domain of conscience. Secular liberals must lift the gag order on ethics, values, and religion in public debate . We can no longer insist on precluding controversial moral and religious claims from public conversation. Let believers and unbelievers speak their minds and let honest debate ensue. This is not to say anything goes in public discourse. Claims of conscience in politics should be held to the same standards as other serious public proposals: honesty, consistency, rationality, evidential support, feasibility, legality, morality, and revisability. This means understanding and avoiding the Liberty Fallacy. Susceptibility to public criticism is the price of admission to public debate. Religious conscience does not get in free. Many secular liberals have convinced themselves that freedom of belief entails respect for all religions, and that respect means refraining from criticism. But that is not respect; it's just blanket acceptance, even disregard. Understood correctly, respect is not just compatible with criticism—respect entails criticism. To respect someone we must take him seriously, and taking someone seriously sometimes means finding fault with him. Finally, secular liberals must rediscover and defend the ideal of the secular moral conscience , against the old shibboleth that secularism equals amorality. Secularists are constantly accused of believing in nothing greater than themselves. However, if you look carefully at the connection between religion and morality, it turns out that the relationship is in fact exactly the other way around. The story of Abraham and Isaac—foundational to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—is usually presented as a paradigm of religious faith in which ethical obligation flows from obedience to religious authority. And yet, Abraham is always free to obey or disobey. If his act of faith is to be genuine, it must flow from his own reflective judgment about what he has most reason to do. All normal people naturally have capacities of reason and empathy—the ability to feel and understand what it would be like to be in another person's situation—and with these faculties we can form judgments about what makes most sense to believe or do, taking into consideration all the relevant interests and reasons. This is conscience. Other writingsBooksThe Secular Conscience: Why Belief Belongs in Public Life (Prometheus Books, 2008) The Case for Humanism: An Introduction (with Lewis Vaughn), Rowman & Littlefield, 2003 Selected papers and talksThe Civilizations of Dialogue An American secularist in Bangladesh Believing in Doubt Putting the "natural" in natural history: Darwin exhibit opens in New York Does God belong in science ? The non-science of good and evil Why should anyone be a naturalist? Reading Madison in Tehran The bioethics of information: Intellectual property and global bioscience Is science making us more ignorant? Upgrading Humanity Human nature is _____ (fill in the blank) What is the proper place of religion in presidential politics? Atheism is not a civil rights issue Atheism and civil rights: A response to Tabash and Downey Does God Exist? |