Devout annexation
Quarreling with Martha Nussbaum.
I think that in all religions there are people who want to live a traditional life and people who want to be part of modernity, and we ought to make room for both and show both equal respect.
That depends on what you mean by ‘live a traditional life’ and what you mean by ‘show both equal respect.’ Or to put it another way, that sounds nice, if you don’t pay too much attention; it sounds very kind and caring and generous; but what if ‘live a traditional life’ means ‘raise their children to believe that women are inferior to men’ or ‘coerce their daughters into marrying strangers’ or ‘forbid their wives and daughters to leave the house’? Those are among the things ‘live a traditional life’ can mean, and I have no intention of showing equal respect to any of them, and furthermore, I think we ought not to show them equal respect.
What is Nussbaum doing talking in such sweeping vague terms? She knows better than that, so what’s she doing?
What we see in some nations, then, is not Islam itself, but a politicized version of Islam that is not a necessary interpretation of those religious texts. That point has been made repeatedly by dissidents in the societies in which this politicized version of Islam is influential, such as Shiran Ebadi and Akbar Ganji in Iran. Both are devout Muslims, and both insist, with convincing argument, that there is nothing in their sex-equal democratic proposals that is incompatible with Islam.
That’s good, and I hope they win the argument. I really do – but does it need to be pointed out that they’re not winning it at the moment, and that there are a lot of other ‘devout Muslims’ around who insist very much the opposite?
Perhaps a good democracy is one where people express themselves in their own way, and still live with one another on terms of equal respect. I’m just finishing a book on the USA tradition on the topic of religious liberty, and I think for once that there is something to be said in favour of the traditions of my own nation. Namely, people who are different from the norm not only get scrupulous fairness under law, which even John Locke advocated, they also get what is called rights of “accommodation”, namely, they do not have to observe certain laws that burden their conscience, unless there is a “compelling state interest”. In other words, if you are a Jew and you receive a subpoena to testify in court on a Saturday, you may refuse without legal penalty…I believe that this tradition of “accommodation” expresses a spirit of equal respect for minorities living in a majority world. Writing to the Quakers about why he was not going to require them to perform military service, our first president George Washington says, “The conscientious scruples of all men should be treated with the greatest delicacy and tenderness”. I wish I saw more of this delicacy and tenderness in Europe today.
I think that’s disgusting stuff, because of the implicit endorsement of the idea that conscience is religious, or that ‘conscience’ deserves special, extra (‘tender’) accomodation when it is religious that it does not deserve when it is not religious. Well, why? Notice that she never says why. (If she does, the editor dropped it.) Notice also that she chooses the easier cases (the elided ones are comparatively easy too). Notice that she chooses a Jew refusing to go to court on a Saturday; how often do courts sit on Saturdays? What about people who refuse to go to court on a Friday or a Wednesday, when courts do sit? Why doesn’t she use that as an example? But much more important, why on earth does she choose to perpetuate the idea that ‘conscientious scruples’ are a monopoly of religious people and hence that atheists don’t have them? And where does she get off dressing up that nasty bigoted coercive prejudice in the glow of self-righteous disapproval? Why is she so pleased with herself for wanting to give special privileges to religion and religious believers that atheists don’t get? Why is she so smugly boastful about identifying conscience with religion?
I’ve questioned this talk about delicacy and respect from Nussbaum before. There was this, in Hiding from Humanity:
But to claim that freedom of speech promotes truth in metaphysics and morals would be to show disrespect for the idea of reasonable pluralism, and to venture onto a terrain where one is at high risk of showing disrespect to one’s fellow citizens. Mill is totally oblivious to all such considerations. He has none of the delicate regard for other people’s religious doctrines that characterizes the political liberal…One may sympathize…without feeling that he understands the type of mutual respect that is required in a pluralistic society. I agree with Rawls: such respect requires (in the public sphere at least) not showing up the claims of religion as damaging, and not adopting a public conception of truth and objectivity according to which such claims are false.
Well there’s some classic respect creep (to quote Simon Blackburn again) for you. Here’s an earlier and more carefully argued example from Sex and Social Justice (page 110):
US constitutional law has standardly granted special latitude to religion, by contrast with other forms of commitment and affiliation. Religious reasons for exemption from military service, or for refusing to work on a particular day, are granted a latitude that is not granted to other forms of conscientious commitment, such as the familial or the artistic or even the ethical. This remains controversial for the way it appears to privilege religion over nonreligion…[T]his is not the place to make a normative argument on such a complex and vexed matter. Suffice it to say that such privileges given to religion, though highly contestable, can be strongly supported by pointing to the special importance of the liberty of conscience as a fundamental right and the consequent need to give religious freedom special protection from the incursions that, throughout history, have threatened it.
I couldn’t agree less. That works only if you take ‘conscience’ to mean ‘religious conscience,’ and why would anyone take it to mean that? It doesn’t mean that. I looked it up in the Concise Oxford: the definition doesn’t mention religion. Religion does not get to help itself to the word ‘conscience’ and pretend it has the thing while non-religious people don’t; ‘conscience’ is about morality, not religion, and religion has no, repeat no monopoly on either one. Both conscience and morality are secular terms, secular ideas, secular principles, and religion has no business trying to annex them, and Nussbaum has no business helping them do it.
I used to admire Nussbaum, but I’ve gone right off her now. I’m really allergic to this annexation thing.
We really need another word for the special kind of “respect” these people keep demanding. Personally, I favor “obeisance”. Or possibly “capitulation”.
Nussbaum is very smart, and very good on certain subjects, but she has blind spots that are really amazing for a thinker of her caliber. That bit about “not adopting a public conception of truth and objectivity according to which such claims are false” just makes your jaw drop.
So in private we can admit that religion is false, but in public we have to “adopt a conception of truth” that makes it true? A philosopher writes this? Amazing.
I generally agree with OB that Nussbaum is just too blindly generous and uncritical about religious privilege. But JonJ, I think your critique misses the point of political liberalism. Not that you’re necessarily wrong – I’m not 100% behind political liberalism by a long shot. But perhaps it would help to understand WHY political liberals would ever take such an absurd-sounding position.
The whole point of political liberalism is that it’s political – it involves all sorts of compromises, and not all compromises are necessarily rational. In fact, it seems that political compromises between persons with different values cannot be rational, because reason would demand that we determine whose values are correct rather than compromising. Even if such a determination is possible – and it may not be – it seems an injustice on the face of it to make that determination. As long as someone’s values do not involve harm or interference with the rights and welfare of others, should the body politic have the power to dismiss or reject them? Even if your values are unsupportable or absurd, is it up to anyone else to decide that for you? Values are not like factual claims, amenable to relatively simple (or even very complicated) objective verification. (Or if they are, it is hardly obvious and uncontroversial that they are.)
The basic principle from which the political liberal tradition attempts to generate a just political system is that EVERYONE ought to have a say in it – albeit a say constrained by conditions of basic fairness. If everyone has a say, that means religious believers get a say too: But with their say circumscribed by fairness, they are required to leave their usual religious bigotry and sexism out of public policy-determining discourse. The compromise is that we who recognize that the religious believe implausible things for epistemically questionable reasons, again constrained by fairness, should leave our doubt about their values (and their intelligence) out of public policy-determining discourse. They have a right to value their subjective feelings and preferences more than sound epistemology, and we have a right to sound epistemology over subjective feeling – and political compromise requires us both to find ways to work together despite those profound differences.
So, just with regard to the necessity of circumscribing public policy-making discourse in ways that exclude no one, Nussbaum’s statement of epistemic double-standards isn’t quite so crazy-sounding. The epistemically-challenged are ALSO citizens with equal rights of self-determination and political participation. The have a right to the place at the table, and if the only way to get them at the same table as us is to politely ignore their epistemic challenges, that is what is required of us. They also have to give up things important to them to get us at the same table – such as any inclination they might have to force their values on anyone else.
Having said all that, those same basic conditions of fairness which are supposed to underlie political liberalism OUGHT to exclude the possibility of granting the special privileges that Nussbaum seems to want to grant religion. I believe she is being quite inconsistent in this regard.
Thanks, G. I’ve just been re-reading bits of Hiding from Humanity with precisely that thought in mind – does she mean political liberalism and no more, or is she letting it spread? I’m still not clear about that – but I think she does at least give that (the second) impression in places; I think she is at least careless about specifying. She’s also sometimes (or actually often) rhetorical about it, which makes it hard to remember that what she is urging is meant to apply to political liberalism as opposed to everything. For instance that ‘[Mill] has none of the delicate regard for other people’s religious doctrines that characterizes the political liberal’ reads to me like pure moral exhortation, as broad-spectrum as you like. It seems to me ‘delicate regard’ indicates a desired general moral stance, not an attitude assumed while in the political arena.
To me there’s a huge difference between saying ‘Okay here we get together to work things out so we’ll just bracket all metaphysical concepts and ideas of the best life, while we’re here and for the purposes of this process’ and saying ‘You and everyone ought to have a delicate regard for other people’s religious doctrines.’ And Nussbaum much of the time seems to slide from the first to the second.
Also, G –
Would political liberals in general put the matter the way Nussbaum did there? (That’s a real question – I have no idea – maybe they would.) That ‘such respect requires (in the public sphere at least) not showing up the claims of religion as damaging, and not adopting a public conception of truth and objectivity according to which such claims are false.’ You cite values, and I can certainly see why they would say that about values, but I take a public conception of truth and objectivity to be about facts rather than values, is rather than ought – and that’s why I find that sentence so repellent, and I daresay why it made Jon’s jaw drop. (It did mine too, the first time I read it. I can tell by looking at the margin.) Is that sentence just pure orthodox unexceptionable political liberalism, or is it a Nussbaumian expansion?
I’m not sure. It’s been a while since I’ve read Rawls or Nussbaum, actually. As I recall, Rawls himself seemed occasionally to have a soft spot for religious ideologies – excuse me, religious comprehensive conceptions of the good. But I’m not sure he ever went so far as to muddle values and epistemology in the ways Nussbaum seems to in the passages you’ve been citing.
Upon reflection, though, I’m not sure it’s quite as easy to separate epistemological and moral norms as your criticisms seem to imply. After all, my oft-stated (and still developing) criticisms of faith as a moral failing all revolve around the ways in which epistemological and moral values intersect.
I place extraordinary value on critical reasoning grounded in publicly available evidence – in a word, objectivity. I am decidedly suspicious of subjectivity, of purely private “evidence” – so suspicious that I think the scare quotes are required. Clearly, my attitudes about the value of objectivity and the disvalue of subjectivity express (or embody) my epistemological values. But aren’t they also moral values? I dunno, maybe. Sometimes I seem to treat them that way, or at least feel that way about them.
I’m not disagreeing with you, nor am I agreeing with Nussbaum. But I am concerned about the possibility that I am universalizing my own perspectives without warrant. That is, I harbor serious doubts about the extent to which I can and do separate epistemological and moral norms.
When I write it down, it seems a strange sort of concern. Objectivity is objectivity, right? But what if the extraordinary value I place on objectivity is itself subjective: Value claims are notoriously much more difficult to establish in any objective fashion than factual claims, and it’s not immediately obvious that the value of objectivity itself automatically bypasses those difficulties.
I still think Nussbaum goes too far. But the more I think about it, the more the whole area seems so fraught with difficulties that I can see where her apparent muddle comes from.
Hmmm. I need to think about all this some more.
Off-topic, thanks for posting the link to Julian Baggini’s excellent editorial today. But really, you should always post a warning with links to The Guardian that readers should avoid the comments section below the article.
AAAAaaaahhhh!!!! The stupid! It BURNS!!
Maybe we would be better off with a bit less “respect” and settle for a cooler “toleration.”
The practical impact should be the same — one is free to do what one wants within the bounds of civil law — but there is less sense of approval, which “respect” seems to grow into.
BTW, I went back to the interview with Nussbaum and she seems to be trying awfully hard to be “nice;” she would fit-in well in Seattle, OB.
And I found this funny sentence: “However, the condition of Muslim women is not worse, on balance, than the condition of Hindu women in each region: in other words, the pertinent variations are regional rather than religion-based.”
The inference which I draw is that women in, say Saudi Arabia, should they be unhappy with their lot, should move to the USA as their condition is based on more on location that culture.
Another inference mightbe that Hindu women are mistreated, too.
She also seems to rely on an awful lot of anecdote:
“My Muslim friends in India do not fit any single stereotype – and why should one expect them to? – any more than do my Buddhist or Hindu friends”
and
“We might also mention Bangladesh, a democracy where 85 percent are Muslims and women (both Muslim) lead both of the two main political parties.”
“My Muslim friends in India do not fit any single stereotype – and why should one expect them to? – any more than do my Buddhist or Hindu friends.”
Also silliness: “The claim that veiled women on the street pose a security risk is really quite comic…we deal all the time with people whose faces are covered, from surgeons and dentists to Chicagoans out in the freezing snow and ice.”
I’m not familiar with this woman and based on this interview I don’t expect to be.
It’s a shame that the Nussbaum interviewer didn’t try to establish the limits of her idea of ‘respect’. It’s noticeable that the two examples she gives in your extracts are identical – Jews on Saturday and conscientious objectors/Quakers and military service. Easy-peasy as OB notes.
How about ‘honour’ killings, stoning of adulterers, chopping off the hands of thieves, sheltering paedophiles from prosecution? What’s her position on ‘respect’ for these religious customs?
For respect read obsequiousness.
“Clearly, my attitudes about the value of objectivity and the disvalue of subjectivity express (or embody) my epistemological values. But aren’t they also moral values?”
Very interesting question. Yes, I suppose so – but perhaps they are moral values at one remove? (Metavalues?) Perhaps not so much a moral value that holds that people should share the attitudes in question as a moral value that holds that people should grasp (realize, understand) why there are reasons that they ought to share the attitudes in question. I dunno, maybe that’s a distinction without a difference. But I think I’m trying to distinguish between valuing objectivity, and seeing why one ought to value objectivity – between an emotion or value (or both) on the one hand and understanding on the other.
I think we ran into much the same problem when writing Why Truth. I felt obliged to admit right at the outset that humans don’t always value the truth and that that’s often very understandable.
I can much more easily accept Cass Sunstein’s version of the idea, ‘incompletely theorized agreements’ – but he doesn’t dress that up with cloying talk of tender regard. Nussbaum’s habits haven’t infected his yet; let’s hope they never do.
Nussbaum appears actually to dislike and oppose secularism and the separation of religion and state. That would be the simpler version of political liberalism: never mind respecting other people’s comprehensive views, just bracket them for purposes of political endeavor. Things that are bracketed for particular purposes aren’t necessarily being disrespected or trivialized (Stephen Carter to the contrary notwithstanding), they’re just bracketed. It’s no disrespect to a hammer not to use it for cooking.
Respect is one of those words, like “love” and “virtue” and “family” that is always used with a positive connotation, but can mean nearly anything. Even Kant, who thought about respect more deeply than many others have, insists that capital punishment is obligatory out of respect for the humanity of the criminal, while also claiming that masturbation is a lack of respect for oneself. As for Nussbaum, I think we often underestimate the careerism of academics who must always make sure their postures are “correct.” That Nussbaum has done decent work and succeeded wildly in her field does not exempt her from that habit.
OB- Re. valuing objectivity:
Why not say that one can value reason or not. Valuing reason would mean being open to adjusting one’s other values when a reason for doing so arises (e.g., fot the sake of consistency). It would mean being open to and seeking out reasons in light of which one could adopt and adjust one’s values. Refusing to value reason would manifest itself in, for example, insisting on the authority of a sacred text and refusing to give a reason for doing so. Even someone who wants to claim that honor killing is virtuous might value reason if the person is willing to openly defend and reconsider their values in the light of argument. Of course, most of us have neither the time or energy to argue points that seem evident to us but might not be evident to others, especially if arguing those points might make others look like more worthy opponents than we want them to be.
Angelo – If you look at how I first introduced the word ‘objectivity,’ you’ll see that there really isn’t much difference between that and how you’re suggesting the discussion focus on valuing reason.
The question remains whether or not valuing reason/objectivity is something one ought to (as a political liberal, or as a mere liberal) insist on universally as a sort of prerequisite for legitimate participation in public debate. Taking the attitude that any contributions to public (policy-setting) debate are not worth considering to the extent that they fail to reflect the value of reason/objectivity has it’s attractions, I admit. But I’m not sure it’s justifiable. And even if it’s justifiable, I’m not sure it’s practically workable. Both of which concerns might be behind this peculiar attitude of Nussbaum’s towards those who believe implausible things for epistemically questionable reasons*, although she seems to carry it too far.
*Can you tell I just love this little turn of phrase? Thanks OB!
Heh – you and our cartoonist friend. My pleasure!
Hmm. I’m not sure I would frame it quite that way – ‘that any contributions to public (policy-setting) debate are not worth considering to the extent that they fail to reflect the value of reason/objectivity’ – because the starting moral commitments that people bring aren’t necessarily particularly rational. Compassion isn’t particularly rational, nor is a desire for justice, nor is egalitarianism, and so on. But…when those commitments are contested, it is hard to defend one against another in persuasive ways without offering reasons of some kind; rational reasons are in principle if not in fact more universalizable than irrational ones; at least I think they are.
Still, I see what you mean…dammit.
G, I prefer the word “reason” rather than “objectivity” when the issue is public debate because “reasoning” is a process that takes place through debate and discussion. Objectivity is hard to turn into a process, unless it is objectivizing, which isn’t what I have in mind, at least. Objectivity means something like striving to ensure your beliefs match reality, and that can be checked through experiment and reasoning. It might not be a bad thing to insist upon objectivity in a debate, but the objectivity of a belief is often the very issue in the debate, an issue decided by appeal to reasons.
OB, I have no idea what you could mean by distinguishing “irrational reasons” from “rational reasons.” Is an irrational reason one for which you cannot give another reason in turn?
Angelo: I wasn’t objecting to your terminological preference. In fact, normally I don’t use “objectivity” for some of the reasons you cite. I was just pointing out that when I introduced the term, I defined it in a particular and clear way that was consistent with the way you seemed to be using the word “reason.”
Why it’s even worth mentioning is that any given word – and most especially “reason” – has multiple possible uses (and misuses), and it’s always best in any complex discussion to define exactly how one is using a term so it doesn’t go all slippery somewhere in the midst.
And your question of OB is an example of that slipperiness. By “irrational” reasons, I believe OB meant subjective reasons as I defined them above: Having a “reason” to believe a claim often means nothing more than having a motivation to accept the truth of the claim – and motivations are often found outside the realm of publicly available evidence and sound reasoning. One might accept a given conclusion based solely upon publicly available evidence and defensible arguments, or one might accept a given conclusion based on private, unshared (and possibly unsharable) evidence and arguments which haven’t undergone (and wouldn’t stand up to) any critical review whatsoever – or anywhere in between. Still, all of those would be “reasons” why a person accepts a given claim.
The matter at hand is that when the different conclusions people arrive at in different fashions clash in the realm of public debate, how much weight should be placed on the quality of the methods by which those conclusions were arrived at, i.e. the justifications for those claims? Also, how much weight can practically be placed on justification quality if debate is to move forward to any meaningful degree? One of the ugly facts of political life is that it is not always possible or desirable simply to agree to disagree, and so the various ways in which people justify the positions upon which they disagree become… problematic.
Which, incidentally, is another way to frame the problem which (I think) avoids the problems you (rightly) pointed out in my original wording, OB.
Exactly, about not always possible or desirable to agree to disagree.
Interestingly enough (interesting to me anyway), I made a very similar point in this article I’ve mentioned that got some overzealous editing; it was a drastic, meaning-reversing edit of precisely that point that made me give up and reject the whole edit. My claim was that people often take truth to be political in the sense of thinking it lies somwhere in the middle of whatever is in dispute, and that that’s wrong. I had:
“We are often told the truth lies somewhere in the middle. In politics or morality this may be at least a metaphor for a reasonable solution: a matter of X and Y both desiring A, so if A is divided between them, they both get less than what they wanted but more than nothing.”
The edit made the second sentence:
“In politics or morality this may be at least a metaphor for a reasonable solution: compromise.”
So I was made to endorse exactly what I was rejecting. That’s when my head hit the desk with a loud bang.
The question of whether or not contributions to public discussions of political issues should always be based on strictly rational grounds, or whether ideas not so based shouldn’t also be treated with respect, is an interesting and important one. I don’t quite know where I would come down on that in principle.
For example, is opposition to abortion on moral grounds purely irrational, and even if it is, shouldn’t one have some respect for those who are strongly opposed to it based just on an emotional repugnance?
The reason my jaw dropped at the sentence of Nussbaum’s that I referred to was different, however. It seemed to me (and perhaps I am misreading her) that she was suggesting that when we secular types speak in public we should not mention that we think that we think religion is epistemologically questionable, to say the least, because we shouldn’t “show up the claims of religion as damaging” or “adopt a public conception of truth and objectivity according to which such claims are false.”
It sounded to me, at first blush, as though she were saying that we could have our doubts about religion as long as we whispered them to each other, but we shouldn’t mention them in public because it would be disrespectful of religious folk to make them look bad. And of course, in the modern age of the internet, etc., religious people quickly become aware that some people do think that religion is bunk.
But perhaps I was not interpreting her correctly. Perhaps she meant by “a public conception of truth” a special sort of concept of truth, to be used only when debating political issues, according to which irrational claims of “truth” would be put on the same level as rational ones.
But I still have a problem with this. What about the issue of climate change? Should irrational ideas about climate change be given the same respect as climate science? Discussing whether it is economically feasible to make drastic changes in our use of technology is certainly a rational discussion to have, but what about someone who says, “The Bible says God gave us dominion over the earth, so whatever we want to do with it is OK”? Does Nussbaum think that such a religious idea should be treated with the same respect as science? I would certainly hope not.
Believe me, JonJ, I’m not all that certain myself. Even giving Nussbaum the benefit of charitable reading, sometimes it’s hard to believe – given the way she herself phrases things – that she isn’t letting this “hands-off” attitude towards religion bleed over from the very specific political disputes arena to a more general notion that would count as what OB has labeled “respect creep.”
And as to whether even the smaller “hands-off” attitude is justified, I have the same doubts you do.
Well, just let me tell you something Ms. Benson. Martha Nussbaum has her very own entry in the Italian encyclopedia “Enciclopedia Garzanti della Filosofia”, and you do not. So there!!
Just so, Jon – I’ve been wondering exactly what she meant by ‘a public conception of truth’ ever since I first read that. (Not all the time though, I’m happy to report.) It’s not entirely clear even in context. But then – she should have realized that; if she didn’t mean it in a sweeping way, she should have said it more cautiously. It just does seem like an odd thing to say.
“given the way she herself phrases things”
I’ve just been finding some more interesting phrasing. I wasn’t specifically looking for it, but I found it. She does use some very tendentious vocabulary on this subject – uncharitable, even. I’ll try to do a post about it, rib permitting.
Good point, Francesco! I think she has her very own entry in the big Anglophone encyclopedias too, for that matter, and I do not: so doubly there!