A reader writes:
The key step in explaining the difference between religiously and secularly-motivated moral claims is almost reached in the excerpt from your most recent correspondent, but he’s not quite there. After your counterpoint about, “My gut feeling says X” being on no firmer grounds than “My deity whom you don’t believe exists says X,” there is another point open to the side endorsing the principled difference between the religious and secular claims. This point is that Rawlsian (or another variety, but I think most are familiar with it from Rawls) reflective equilibrium is possible between the gut feeling and an overarching ethical principle, and may lead to the gut feeling changing (or to the principle being dismissed). Reflective equilibrium is not, as far as I can tell, possible between a deific decree and an overarching ethical principle, because the deific decree cannot be reconsidered.
It seems to me that there are two problems here.
1. I don’t see why people’s arguments for laws somehow become illegitimate — or the laws enacted based on those arguments become unconstitutional, as some argue — simply because the people refuse to reconsider their arguments. Many people are quite unwilling to reconsider certain fundamental moral principles, for instance their rejection of infanticide, slavery, rape, and the like.
Perhaps one can fault these people for not being sufficiently reflective; perhaps all of us should be willing to challenge even our deepest beliefs. But it seems to me that in a democracy, the obstinate and unreflective are just as much entitled to enact their views into law as those who are constantly reexamining their moral commitments (even if the unreflective people, religious or secular, may be properly faulted at times for being too self-confident about matters on which they should have more humility.)
2. As best I can tell many people’s religious beliefs are indeed subject to reconsideration. Quite a few people change their religions, or at least their denominations. Many others drift from more literalist readings of their sacred texts to less literalist. Many change their understandings of divine decrees, which in many instances are quite ambiguous or incomplete. (As I understand it, Christian views on abortion come from interpretation and inference, since the Bible doesn’t explicit focus on this.)
Many change their views about how much of their religious law should be enacted into secular law. They sometimes change these views as a result of deliberate reconsideration; and sometimes, as with secular people, they change them because their intuitions and outlooks are changed over time by new experiences. The process of reflective equilibrium that my correspondent describes — the process of one’s overarching philosophies affecting one’s intuitions and vice versa — psychologically operates for those religious people as well as for secular ones. And, conversely, there are many secularists who are quite rigid in their worldviews, uninterested in considering the possibility that their understanding may be mistaken or incomplete, and psychologically inclined to resist revising their views.
So this again reinforces my view that religious people are as entitled to enact their religious views into law as secular people are entitled to enact their secular moral views into law.
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