Book Review

The limits of factual morality

The Secular Conscience: why belief belongs in public life

In this philosophically intelligent but sociologically naive book the American philosopher Austin Dacey argues against the expulsion of belief, whether or not religious, from the public sphere, and against subjectivist theories of ethics making that plausible. As a secularist, he laments the decline of the great tradition of secular liberalism reaching back to Spinoza and coming to fruition in John Locke, Adam Smith and J.S. Mill. He pens a passionate Areopagitica to recover the "lost soul" of secular liberalism and to show why unbelievers like himself should be glad publicly to encounter illiberal beliefs, in particular as put forward by Islamists, but also as advanced by Catholics and conservative Protestants. The rationally informed and compassionate conscience, itself nurtured within the Jewish and Christian tradition, reigns supreme over all other sources of appeal, whether to faith, divine decree, religious tradition, holy Scriptures - or to science, for example an evolutionary "ethic" based on biology.

Dr Dacey's attack on ethical subjectivism incorporates a critique of the American philosopher John Rawls for his unduly restrictive account of what is allowable as a public reason. He believes Rawls assisted the move to exclude basic beliefs from the public square by not acknowledging the impossibility of moving from the idea that government decisions require only legitimacy to the idea that they must be first and foremost rationally defensible. For Dacey, "a policy can be justified when it is favoured by a convergence of citizens' varying reasons, without there being any consensus on those reasons themselves".

Dacey also attacks a multiculturalism which implicitly respects all cultures equally, even though they may breach basic liberal principles, and exaggerates Western defects. This is because secular liberals fear an objective view of ethics means telling people how to live their lives. Dacey believes you can have an objective ethic and adopt the maxim "live and let live". Unfortunately you can't, not if you feel obliged, as Dacey does, to tell Islamists to stop oppressing women and to do something about it.

For Dacey, a course of action is not good simply because some authority says so. Agreed. Yet no society can operate simply on the maxim "live and let live". Consider only the unavoidable pre-emptive decisions that any legitimate authority, whether parent, teacher, manager, legislator, or international peacekeeper, has to make to maintain order. Of course, pre-emptive authority easily becomes corrupt and authoritarian, but you need it, even in a university, to hold the reasoned conversations of which Dacey approves.

Dacey's arguments for an objective, non-religious ethic based on impartiality and universality are complicated. He claims there are moral facts, like those of geography, which are embedded in practical reasoning with conversation partners who may not agree about basic values but implicitly share norms about how to negotiate differences.

He claims, moreover, that few of us want simply to have a "good" time, and that in any case your good is not necessarily what you think it is. He concludes that if "objective wellbeing" is a value then a consideration of consequences is the "natural" response to that value: promoting it impartially. "Operating in individual experience and over human history conscience leads to the discovery of reliable practices of ethical conduct," writes Dacey. To me this appeal to moral facts about human relations constantly smuggles in an irreducible "ought". As for shared agreements, I cannot imagine what is shared in a confrontation between those who live by a code of honour and shame and those who live by the principles of forgiveness and reconciliation.

Nor, I feel, does Dacey give proper consideration to a religious account of what is discovered or uncovered as intrinsically authoritative in the very nature of a just and loving God, and of rebuke and acceptance in the presence of the holy.

In his chapter "Darwin Made Me Do It" Dacey is quite clear that the facts of the process of evolution, including what serves the interests of the so-called "selfish gene", cannot undermine or justify ethical principles. There is, as he points out, no science of friendship, which is true, but it is a pity he does not go on to say just how many other things cannot be treated in a naturalistic scientific mode. Maybe, Dacey speculates, we are disposed by the evolutionary process to some advantageous mixture of egoism and altruism; but again, he does not go on to look into the ethical problems of when and where to be egoistic or altruistic, and in relation to whom. This is just the point where he could have demonstrated in detail the ancillary nature of evolutionary facts to moral decisions.

Dacey defends our status as human beings able to make judgements through interaction with others, facilitated by language. However, here he is not only defending the autonomy of the ethical but implicitly placing himself on the cultural side of the contentious border between social science and the imperial claims of some contemporary biologists. He says evolution has made "us" easy to indoctrinate, chronically anxious about status, and prone to divide the world into us and them. Which "us" has he in mind? Moreover, how are we to decide that the division into us and them does not arise from the dynamic of social relations as much as or more than from biological evolution? And, incidentally, if evolution and/or social dynamics have made us this way then we should understand why universal and egalitarian religions, and their secular analogues, are constantly subverted by hierarchy and tribalism, and beware of selectively blaming religion for the human condition.

I am surprised by Dacey's suggestion that a religious account and a scientific account overlap to the extent that they are rival explanations which are either empirically true or false. If there is, as he says, no science of friendship, and if, as I would add, no science of any number of modalities of apprehension and understanding, then we need to investigate, or rather appreciate, the nature of religious language - celebratory, confessional, responsive, invocative, performative or whatever - within the vast universe of those modalities.

To divide our varied human apprehensions and affirmations into true or false is grossly restrictive when one thinks of the range of ways in which the word truthful is used, as, for example, when one says that a narrative is profoundly truthful or, indeed, that the gift of God in Christ is full of grace and truth.

Dacey offers a history of philosophy that suggests why he so restricts the range of autonomous human apprehensions, ethics excepted. His account is largely Anglo-American in the liberal empirical tradition: no Wittgenstein, Husserl or Heidegger, and, among contemporaries, no Alisdair MacIntyre.

Although he describes how secular liberal intellectuals flounder in a morass of multicultural indifferentism, he does not analyse why. Perhaps it is not surprising after the recent history of logical positivism, emotivism, non-qualitative versions of utilitarianism, Sixties' antinomianism, postmodernism, and reductionist determinisms, not to mention the secular ideologies of Freud, Marx and Nietzsche. I really wonder if what John Rawls or Jürgen Habermas prescribe about acceptable public debate really matters. Politics is about interests and visions as well as "reasons", and polities in different cultures with varying histories apply their own rules of thumb about acceptability.

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