Beyond Establishment and Separation: Political Liberalism, Religion and Democracy

Does John Rawls??s political liberalism require the institutional separation between state and religion or does it allow space for moderate forms of religious establishment? In this paper I address this question by presenting and critically evaluating Cécile Laborde??s recent claim that political liberalism is ??inconclusive about the public place of religion?? and ??indeterminate about the symbolic dimensions of the public place of religion??. In response to Cécile Laborde, I argue that neither moderate separation nor moderate establishment, intended as regimes of religious governance that fix specific interpretations of principles of social and economic justice, are compatible with Rawls??s political liberalism. Furthermore, I claim that a state can ensure that both its religious and non-religious citizens enjoy a sense of self-respect and identification with their polity by leaving issues of symbolic establishment and separation open to democratic debate. I conclude that Rawls??s political liberalism transcends the standard distinction between moderate establishment and moderate separation and leaves the public place of religion open to the democratic contestation of ordinary legislative politics.     

Lehrer on consciousness

Keith Lehrer distinguishes three kinds of questions about consciousness: scientific questions, metaphysical questions, and epistemological questions. He leaves the scientific questions to the scientists. He articulates and answers the peculiar epistemological questions posed by consciousness. And he boldly contends that no metaphysical questions about consciousness remain, once the epistemological questions have been answered. This is an astonishing claim. What happened to the metaphysical questions? Were they pseudo-questions? Were they epistemological questions masquerading as metaphysical ones? And isn??t it possible that Lehrer??s epistemological account of consciousness raises metaphysical questions of its own? I will argue that Lehrer??s account of consciousness does leave a metaphysical remainder. To deal with this remainder, Lehrer could try to expand his explanatory framework??but this would involve to a substantial revision of his current views. I end with a speculative proposal that might allow Lehrer acknowledge all the points raised in this paper, but without forcing him to revise his account of consciousness in a substantial way.     

Ethics and the Science of Animal Minds

Ethicists have commonly appealed to science to bolster their arguments for elevating the moral status of nonhuman animals. I describe a framework within which I take many ethicists to be making such appeals. I focus on an apparent gap in this framework between those properties of animals that are part of the scientific consensus, and those to which ethicists typically appeal in their arguments. I will describe two different ways of diminishing the appearance of the gap, and argue that both of them present challenges to ethicists seeking a firm scientific basis for their claims about the moral status of animals. I argue that more clarity about the role of appeals to science by applied ethicists leads to questions about the effectiveness of such appeals, and that these questions might best be pursued empirically.     

THEOLOGY IN THE UNIVERSITY: ONCE MORE, WITH FEELING

Stanley Hauerwas and Gavin D'Costa develop theological arguments for inclusion of constructive theology in Universities' curricula; Andrew Shanks offers an equivalent. They share the conviction that the practice of theology cannot be separated from religious practices. Beyond that, however, their arguments scarcely intersect, in part because of differing analyses of the "secularity" that underwrites the academy's skepticism of theology as a "discipline." Hauerwas analyses secularity theologically; Shanks urges that even secular societies exhibit "will to Honesty" (think, perhaps, "ultimate concern") that is inherently religious and theological; D'Costa argues that central to secular liberalism is a commitment to genuine pluralism that ought to foster theologies in their particularities.     

Evidentialism and skeptical arguments

Cartesian skepticism about epistemic justification (??skepticism??) is the view that many of our beliefs about the external world??e.g., my current belief that I have hands??aren??t justified. I examine the two most influential arguments for skepticism??the Closure Argument and the Underdetermination Argument??from an evidentialist perspective. For both arguments it??s clear which premise the anti-skeptic must deny. The Closure Argument, I argue, is the better argument in that its key premise is weaker than the Underdetermination Argument??s key premise. Next I examine ways of motivating each argument??s key premise. I argue that attempts to motivate them which appeal to one??s having the same evidence in skeptical scenarios, to skeptical hypotheses?? alleged ability to explain our evidence just as well as real world hypotheses, or to the fact that if skeptical scenarios were true everything would appear just as it does all fail to provide any motivation for the premises or for skepticism. But I close by considering a different argument for the key premises and skepticism that lacks the central defect of these other arguments. Future work on skepticism should focus on this final argument at the expense of the others.     

Markets,Choice and Agency

John Tomasi’s Free Market Fairness (2012) introduces several powerful arguments in favour of a novel and surprising thesis: the best way to realize Rawls’s principles of justice is a free market society, rather than the arrangements that Rawls himself believed would best promote justice. In this paper, I adduce three arguments against Tomasi. First, I suggest that his view rests on a faulty understanding of what constitutes conventional property rights. Second, I argue that many market solutions generate choices which are not valuable ones for the agent to have to make. Third, I show that many choices created by the market systems Tomasi favours create the illusion that citizens are making their own choices when in fact they are not. I suggest that taken together these three arguments are sufficient to defend Rawlsian institutional arrangements against Tomasi’s challenge.     

The Irrationality of Choosing Egoism—A Reply to Eshelman

Despite the vast literature on Rawls's work, few have discussed his arguments for the value of democracy. When his arguments have been discussed, they have received staunch criticism. Some critics have charged that Rawls's arguments are not deeply democratic. Others have gone further, claiming that Rawls's arguments denigrate democracy. These criticisms are unsurprising, since Rawls's arguments, as arguments that the principle of equal basic liberty needs to include democratic liberties, are incomplete. In contrast to his trenchant remarks about core civil liberties, Rawls does not say much about the inclusion of political liberties of a democratic sort – such as the right to vote – among the basic liberties.

In this paper, I complete some of Rawls's arguments and show that he has grounds for including political liberties, particularly those of a democratic nature, in the principle of equal basic liberty. In doing so, I make some beginning steps toward illustrating the genuinely democratic nature of Rawls's arguments. Rawls believes that a few different arguments can be given for democratic institutions and that these arguments work together to support the value of democracy. In this paper, I focus on Rawls's arguments relating to self-respect. I focus on this set of arguments because they are among the strongest of Rawls's arguments for equal political liberty and its fair value.     

Secularism,Religion and Spiritual Development

An important issue in recent discussions of spirital development in educational contexts is the relationship between spirituality and religion. This paper explores, with particular reference to a series of articles by Mike Newby, the position that religious perspectives should not be allowed a formative role, and that spiritual development in schools must have a secular basis. The paper examines two lines of argument put forward by Newby. The first appeals to the post-religious and/or plural nature of the social context. The second evaluates religious frameworks negatively, regarding them as restrictive, exclusionary and fictitious. I argue that there are significant problems with each of these arguments, that Newby's case for a secularist approach does not hold, and that religiously oriented accounts remain viable. The paper concludes with reflections on the relationship between secularism and pluralism.     

Can religious arguments persuade?

In his famous essay “The Ethics of Belief,” William K. Clifford claimed “it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.” (Clifford’s essay was originally published in Contemporary Review in 1877; it is presently in print in Madigan (1999)). One might claim that a corollary to Clifford’s Law is that it is wrong, always, everywhere, and for anyone, to withhold belief when faced with sufficient evidence. Seeming to operate on this principle, many religious philosophers—from St. Anselm to Alvin Plantinga—have claimed that non-believers are psychologically or cognitively deficient if they refuse to believe in the existence of God, when presented with evidence for His existence in the form of relevant experience or religious arguments that are prima facie unassailable. Similarly, many atheists fail to see how believers can confront the problem of evil and still assert their belief in a benevolent, omnipotent, and omniscient Creator. In this paper, I propose to explain why religious arguments so often fail to persuade (I take the term ‘religious argument’ to include arguments whose conclusions are either assertions or denials of religious claims). In doing so, I first offer an account of persuasion and then apply it to religious arguments. I go on to argue that at least some religious arguments commit a form of question-begging, which I call “begging the doxastic question.”~An argument begs the doxastic question, on my account, when a subject would find the argument persuasive only if she antecedently believes the argument’s conclusion. This form of question begging is not, strictly speaking, a case of circularity and thus, is not a fallacy; rather, it would explain why one coming to the argument would fail to be persuaded by it unless he already accepted its conclusion. This has the effect, when applied to religious argumentation, that religious arguments are rarely persuasive, which raises the further question: what good are religious arguments? I end by suggesting some non-persuasive functions of religious argument. Finally, I suggest that a full understanding of religious argumentation should give evidentialists pause, for religious beliefs look less like belief states that are sensitive to evidentiary states and more like framework principles or fundamental commitments.     

The Kantian Moral Hazard Argument for religious fictionalism

In this paper I do three things. Firstly, I defend the view that in his most familiar arguments about morality and the theological postulates, the arguments which appeal to the epistemological doctrines of the first Critique, Kant is as much of a fictionalist as anybody not working explicitly with that conceptual apparatus could be: his notion of faith as subjectively and not objectively grounded is precisely what fictionalists are concerned with in their talk of nondoxastic attitudes. Secondly, I reconstruct a logically distinct argument to a fictionalist conclusion which I argue Kant also gives us, this time an argument to the conclusion that it is a good thing if our commitment to the existence of God is nondoxastic. And finally, I argue that this argument is of continuing interest, to Kantians and non-Kantians alike, not only because it raises interesting questions about the relation of morality to belief in God (which go in the opposite direction to most discussions, which focus on whether and to what extent belief in God can be an aid to morality), but also because this ‘Moral Hazard Argument’ seems to be available to religious realists and non-realists alike, thus suggesting that religious fictionalism is not by any means just an interesting version of religious non-realism.     

The twofold role of diagrams in Euclid’s plane geometry

Proposition I.1 is, by far, the most popular example used to justify the thesis that many of Euclid??s geometric arguments are diagram-based. Many scholars have recently articulated this thesis in different ways and argued for it. My purpose is to reformulate it in a quite general way, by describing what I take to be the twofold role that diagrams play in Euclid??s plane geometry (EPG). Euclid??s arguments are object-dependent. They are about geometric objects. Hence, they cannot be diagram-based unless diagrams are supposed to have an appropriate relation with these objects. I take this relation to be a quite peculiar sort of representation. Its peculiarity depends on the two following claims that I shall argue for: (i) The identity conditions of EPG objects are provided by the identity conditions of the diagrams that represent them; (ii) EPG objects inherit some properties and relations from these diagrams.     

The Metaphysical Foundations of Reproductive Ethics

Many bioethicists working in reproductive ethics tacitly assume some theory of diachronic personal identity. For example, Peter Singer argues that there is no identity relation between a foetus and a future individual because the former shares no robust mental connections with the latter. Consequently, abortion prevents the existence of an individual; it does not destroy an already existing individual.
Singer's argument implicitly appeals to the psychological account of personal identity, which, although endorsed by many philosophers such as Derek Parfit, is contentious. Singer does not attempt to defend the psychological account before applying it to the moral permissibility of abortion. Indeed, with some notable exceptions, very few bioethicists attempt antecedently to defend their chosen theory of personal identity before applying it to their ethical arguments. In this paper, I look at the issues of abortion, embryonic stem cell research, and human reproductive cloning in order to illustrate how many of the arguments made by bioethicists on these topics are, at least partly, based upon veiled metaphysical assumptions. My objective is to illustrate that progress can be made on these topics by attending to their fundamental metaphysical claims.     

Neo-positivist metaphysics

Some philosophers argue that many contemporary debates in metaphysics are ??illegitimate,?? ??shallow,?? or ??trivial,?? and that ??contemporary analytic metaphysics, a professional activity engaged in by some extremely intelligent and morally serious people, fails to qualify as part of the enlightened pursuit of objective truth, and should be discontinued?? (Ladyman and Ross, Every thing must go: Metaphysics naturalized, 2007). Many of these critics are explicit about their sympathies with Rudolf Carnap and his circle, calling themselves ??neo-positivists?? or ??neo-Carnapians.?? Yet despite the fact that one of the main conclusions of logical positivism was that metaphysical statements are meaningless, many of these neo-positivists are themselves engaged in metaphysical projects. This paper aims to clarify how we may see a neo-positivist metaphysics as proceeding in good faith, one that starts with serious engagement with the findings of science, particularly fundamental physics, but also has room for traditional, armchair methods.     

The Import of the Original Bradley’s Regress(es)

Much of the recent metaphysical literature on the problem of the relational unity of complexes leaves the impression that Bradley (or some Bradleyan argument) has uncovered a serious problem to be addressed. The problem is thought to be particularly challenging for trope theorists and realists about universals. In truth, there has been little clarity about the nature and import of the original Bradley’s regress arguments. In this paper, I offer a careful analysis and reconstruction of the arguments in Bradley’s Appearance and Reality (1893). The analysis reveals that no less than three regress arguments against relations can be found. I show that none of them are compelling. I argue that, as a result, it is a serious misstep for philosophers today to offer metaphysical theses based on the unchallenged assumption that Bradley has established his regress result. I further analyze the underpinnings of the Bradley problem as it is frequently cast in contemporary literature and show that they rely on certain confusions and biases, which once brought to light, make current Bradley-inspired arguments against relations unconvincing.     

Naturalizing Ethics: the Biology and Psychology of Moral Agency

Moral agency is a central feature of both religious and secular conceptions of human beings. In this paper I outline a scientific naturalistic model of moral agency making use of current findings and theories in sociobiology,developmental psychology, and social cognitive theory. The model provides answers to four central questions about moral agency: (1) what it is, (2) how it is acquired, (3) how it is put to work, and (4) how it is justified. I suggest that this model can provide religious and secular moral theories with a basis for a common understanding of moral agency.     

Rawls and the Problem of Honour

In this paper, I consider the difficult relationship between Rawls, religion and the values that religious believers might consider important in order to lead the good life. Contrary to many of Rawls’ defenders, I argue that at least some of the values that religious citizens are likely to hold cannot be accounted for under Rawls’ theory or under his conception of the good life. I argue that the model of goods which Rawls takes to be part of a thin theory of the good is tied to his belief that under the Original Position justice can be derived from calculations of self-interest alone. To perform my critique, I consider the paradigmatic case of honour in so-called traditional societies. I argue that the way Rawls thematizes primary goods in A Theory of Justice, including concepts like esteem, cannot account for the way honour manifests itself inside traditional communities. I conclude the paper by considering how Rawls might be able to defend his theory against my objection, by considering the relationship between Rawls’ theory, and the rationalization and secularization of society.     

Salvaging the self in a world without soul: William James's The Principles of psychology

This article explores William James's transformation of the religious soul into the secular self in The Principles of Psychology. Although James's views on the self are familiar to many historians of psychology, the article places his treatment of the self within the broader social and cultural context of a secularizing, industrializing society. There were palpable tensions and anxieties that accompanied the cultural shift, and these are particularly transparent in James's Principles. James attempted the project of secularizing the soul in order to promote a natural science of the mind but with marked ambivalence for the project, because it left out some of the moral and metaphysical questions of great interest to him.     

SCIENCE,RELIGION, AND THE MEANING OF LIFE AND THE UNIVERSE: “AMALGAM” NARRATIVES OF POLISH NATURAL SCIENTISTS

This article deals with phenomena occurring at the interface of the existential, the religious, and scientific inquiry. On the basis of in‐depth interviews with Polish physicists and biologists, I examine the role that science and religion play in their narrative of the meaning of the Universe and human life. I show that the narratives about meaning have a system‐related (“amalgam") character that is associated with responses to adjacent metaphysical questions, including those based on scientific knowledge. I reconstruct the typical amalgam questions of Polish scientists and come to a conclusion about the stability of religious and nonreligious amalgams in this group. Critically referring to the thesis concerning the secularizing impact of science, I conclude that science by itself does not have a destructive effect on Polish scientists’ confidence that life and the Universe are meaningful, but is rather an exacerbating factor of the existing worldview system.     

Secular and religious: the intrinsic doubleness of analytical psychology and the hegemony of naturalism in the social sciences

In recent years a number of prominent social theorists, including Jürgen Habermas and Charles Taylor, have voiced concern about the hegemony of naturalistic, secular assumptions in the social sciences, and in their different ways have sought to address this by establishing greater parity between secular and religious perspectives. This paper suggests that C.G. Jung's analytical psychology, which hitherto has been largely ignored by social theory, may have something to contribute on this issue as it can be understood coherently both empirically, without reference to transcendent reality, and metaphysically, with reference to transcendent reality. It is argued that, despite his denials of any metaphysical intent, Jung does in fact engage in metaphysics and that together the empirical and metaphysical vectors of his thought result in a rich and distinctive double perspective. This dual secular and religious perspective can be seen as part of Jung's own critique of the hegemony of naturalism and secularism, which for Jung has profound social as well as clinical relevance. The concern and approach that Habermas and Taylor share with Jung on this issue may provide some grounds for increased dialogue between analytical psychology and the social sciences.     

Predicates in perspective

A familiar strategy of argument to the effect that natural-language predicates are semantically context dependent rests on constructing what I term Travis cases: different contexts for the use of a predicate are imagined in which its semantic (typically, truth-conditional) properties are claimed to differ. I propose an account of the semantic properties of predicates that give rise to Travis cases; I then argue that the account underwrites a genuine alternative to the standard explanations of Travis cases to be found in the literature; I close with a brief sketch of the connections, required by a fuller development of my account, among the semantic notion of a predicate??s content, the metaphysical notion of a property??s instantiation, and the cognitive notion of a language user??s perspective in using a predicate.