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 [our] 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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