Thomas Brewton

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Choosing human reason alone as the road to understanding means that morality is no more than the result of the latest public opinion poll.

Read Richard John Neuhaus’s commentary on Austin Dacey’s The Secular Conscience: Why Belief Belongs in Public Life. Mr. Dacey is the editor of Philo, a journal of secularist philosophy.

Despite its title, Mr. Dacey’s book is a confrontation with spiritual religion. Mr. Neuhaus writes:

On almost all the hot-button issues—abortion, embryo-destructive research, same-sex marriage, Darwinism as a comprehensive philosophy, etc.—Dacey is, in my judgment, on the wrong side. But he is right about one very big thing. These contests are not between people who, on the one side, are trying to impose their morality on others, and people who, on the other side, subscribe to a purely procedural and amoral rationality. Over the years, some of us have been trying to elicit from our opponents the recognition that they, too, are making moral arguments and hoping that their moral vision will prevail. But in the world of secular liberalism, morality is the motive that dare not speak its name. Austin Dacey strongly agrees. I expect he would not agree that the secularist moral vision entails a quasi-religious understanding of reality, but one step at a time, and The Secular Conscience is a critically important first step.

Dacey has quibbles with Pope Benedict’s analysis of moral “relativism,” but he admits that “secular liberals find it had to shake the lingering feeling that there is something to the pope’s diagnosis. Something disquieting has been happening to the Western mind over the last half century.” He writes about a philosophy professor who reports that none of his students are Holocaust deniers, but an increasing number are even worse: “They acknowledge the fact, even deplore it, but cannot bring themselves to condemn it morally.” Who are they to say that the Nazis were morally wrong? And so it is also with apartheid, slavery, and ethnic cleansing. For these students, passing moral judgment “is to be a moral ‘absolutist,’ and having been taught that there are no absolutes, they now see any judgment as arbitrary, intolerant, and authoritarian.”

…Secular liberalism “has been undone by its own ideas,” Dacey writes. “The first idea is that matters of conscience—religion, ethics, and values—are private matters. . . . 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.” Dacey recognizes the gravely flawed view of John Rawls that public decisions must be advanced by public reasons recognized by all reasonable parties. That is not the case with most questions requiring political decisions. He writes: “A policy can be justified when it is favored by a convergence of citizens’ varying reasons, without there being any consensus on those reasons themselves. And there is no reason why the claims of conscience can’t be a part of such convergence…”

Several points touched upon by Mr. Neuhaus in his commentary need emphasis.
Continue reading “A Liberal-Progressive Wrestles with Morality”