Autonomy v Respect
Some more on this question of comprehensive v political liberalism, and respect, and what is meant by it. G has been arguing for a more limited reading in comments, but I’m not convinced that the quoted passages fit such a reading.
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.
That seems pretty clear to me. Surely she’s not talking about leaving ‘our private differences over comprehensive conceptions of the good out of political discourse and negotiation, and certainly out of political institutions themselves’ there. Isn’t it pretty unequivocal? Such respect requires, at least in the public sphere, 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. She doesn’t say ‘in the political sphere at least’ – she says ‘public’. I take that to mean public talking and writing, not purely public political talking and writing – since she says the former and not the latter. Respect requires us not to adopt a public – not political, but public – conception of truth and objectivity according to which the claims of religion are false. Do public sphere and public conception actually mean political sphere and political conception in Rawlsian language? Maybe they do, I don’t know. But the multiculturalism essay was in the Boston Review, which is not a technical journal of philosophy – surely Nussbaum must have intended to use ordinary language there.
The autonomy question – as G said, ‘even this minimal notion of respect has a problem with conceptions of the good that advocate political subordination of others (women, ethnic groups, adherents to other religions, etc.), because respect for individual autonomy is so basic to political liberalism.’ But…
I think it is plausible to read [Okin] as endorsing a form of comprehensive liberalism, in which liberal values of autonomy and dignity pervade the fabric of the body politic…her view resembles the views of John Stuart Mill and Joseph Raz, who see the fostering of personal autonomy in all areas of life as an appropriate goal of the state. Such moral liberals can still recognize the intrinsic worth of religious liberty and thus respect the choices of religious believers – up to a point. But, given their view that autonomous lives are better than hierarchically ordered lives, they are bound to play favorites among the religions, using the state and its persuasive apparatus to wean people away from religions that do not foster personal autonomy – as John Stuart Mill explicitly urges in On Liberty, where he excoriates Calvinism…There can be little doubt that a Millean liberal state will show public disrespect for Calvinism in all sorts of ways and will make frequent pronouncements about human flourishing and human nature that go well beyond the core of the political conception.
So – valuing autonomy will cause the Millean liberal to show public disrespect for Calvinism in all sorts of ways – and surely I’m not reading uncharitably in thinking that Nussbaum is critical of such an outcome. In fact she sounds (to me) unpleasantly like all the would-be censors who are always zipping up and down telling us not to disrespect their cherished beliefs. Very unpleasantly, in fact. This passage (it’s on pages 108-109 of the Okin book) makes me more twitchy every time I read it.
She goes on:
The political liberal, by contrast, begins from the fact of reasonable disagreements in society, and the existence of a reasonable plurality of comprehensive doctrines about the good, prominent among which are the religious conceptions. By calling them reasonable, the political liberal shows respect for them and commits herself to a political course that is as protective of them as it is possible to be, compatibly with a just political structure.
I still don’t see how to read that other than as a condemnation of showing ‘public disrespect’ for religions in public discussions, and as something of a warning about putting autonomy ahead of a certain (rather peculiar) idea of respect.
“The political liberal… commits herself to a political course as protective as possible to be, compatibly with a just political structure.” I think in theory this is fine, and it doesn’t entail the sort of censorship that you imply it does. After all, a genuinely just political structure first and foremost protects basic freedoms for its citizens, such as freedom of expression. Thus, the protections extended to religious comprehensive doctrines of the good could not logically include protection from public criticism or dispute by other citizens.
But in a truly pluralistic society, it seems both pragmatic and logically coherent to impose this limitation: Criticism and dispute of religious doctrines should not in any way come from the organs of the state – which is where Nussbaum disagrees with Okin (and Mill and Raz), as the passage clearly states: “There can be little doubt that a Millean liberal state will show public disrespect…” Not the Millean liberal, the Millean liberal STATE. I mean, yes, of course the Millean liberal will show public disrespect to Calvinism (and all sorts of other stifling religious doctrines). But the problem arises when the state is the source of the criticism, not when individuals are.
The problem is not simply that the power of the state makes even mere expression of opinion coercive in some way, although that argument might be made. Rather, the problem is simply that, in a genuinely pluralistic society, the state cannot coherently be in the business of persuading its citizens to become more uniform. As Nussbaum says, political liberalism starts by recognizing the brute fact of pluralism and working from there.
I don’t have my library handy so I can’t find the context for the first passage you quote, OB, but I think that “public sphere” in that context probably IS intended as primarily political (although I agree with that it’s a poor word choice if that’s what was intended). So let’s take a step back and ask what the heck it means to “adopt a public conception of truth and objectivity” at all. What the hell is a public conception in this sense? I had to puzzle over that to figure out what it might mean – which requires thinking from the pure political perspective. From that angle, a public conception would have to be whatever minimalist conception of truth and objectivity the entire (reasonable) public could agree upon. Such a beast is not going to resemble any respectable, fully-realized epistemology you and I would embrace, I imagine. Because if it did, it would in fact exclude a majority of the public, which wouldn’t make it much of a public conception. So it would seem that the idea is primarily political: We cannot as a PLURALISTIC society adopt an official public standard of evidence which utterly rejects people’s deeply held beliefs if those beliefs lack any evidentiary or rational support – because those different belief systems, however irrational, are what that plurality of society consists in.
That said, I don’t buy any of it. There is something deeply wrong with political liberalism, even if you and I don’t quite agree on what it is. Here’s my take on the problem, as briefly as I can coherently explain it:
The idea behind these attempts at purely political conceptions of justice/ liberal society is to separate the political foundations of a pluralistic society as much as possible from peoples’ comprehensive conceptions of the good, their deepest held value commitments and ideals. Why? Because those are the very ideas and opinions on which people differ so substantially that joining them all together in a pluralistic society is nigh impossible.
Difficulty immediately arises for such a project, however, because so many comprehensive conceptions of the good are just plain bad! Comprehensive conceptions of the good which are at odds with core values of fairness and justice, especially those pesky religious ideologies which insist on imposing their conceptions of the good on others, undermine the very possibility of uniting the plurality.
Drawing the distinction between rational and reasonable comprehensive doctrines seems at first like it might save the project: If we exclude those comprehensive doctrines directly at odds with basic principles of equality and such, we can figure out from there what sort of accommodation can work for the rest of us. But if the only way to ensure some sort of accommodation amongst the various reasonable positions is to gloss over any differences in rationality between them – such as by paring down our shared, publicly acknowledgeable epistemology to the point where it can accommodate sheerest nonsense – I’m not convinced that any coherent political discourse or institutions can ever result.
I’ll stick with my comprehensive doctrine which includes a fully developed, universally applied set of standards for evidence and reasoning along with uncompromising core ethical values, thanks. Call me old-fashioned.
Thanks, G. One small point – “it doesn’t entail the sort of censorship that you imply it does.” I don’t mean to imply it does, but rather to try to figure out if Nussbaum implies it does. In some places she seems to – that’s part of what I find so puzzling.
But fair point about the state. I sort of knew I was cheating by saying liberal when she said liberal state – except that in other places she does say just liberal.
Anyway, whatever Nussbaum does or doesn’t mean, I’m with you: it appeares that I’m a comprehensive liberal. I too think there’s something deeply wrong with political liberalism, hence twitching while reading The Law of Peoples.
“There can be little doubt that a Millean liberal state will show public disrespect for Calvinism in all sorts of ways and will make frequent pronouncements about human flourishing and human nature that go well beyond the core of the political conception.”
This doesn’t make much sense, unless it means that the Millean liberal state won’t countenance burning heretics and blasphemers.
There is a huge difference between the power of the state and the state of public discourse. This is what Mill was all about, and the conflation of those two things actually destroys the Millean state. It as as if one were to imply, from the fact that a chessplayer opposes another chessplayer, that chessplaying countenances knocking down one’s opponent and stealing his pieces.
While the liberal state won’t produce laws that begin, “Seeing that those damned Calvinists are wrong…,” it will preserve the right of anybody to say: those damned Calvinists are wrong. It provides rules of thumb for speech occassions. Thus, it allows some further protections and constraints on speech in situations in which one is constrained — for instance, at work. If I am a Jew working for X, and X continually calls me a kike, I have grounds for complaint under the Millean state. The reason is that the contract between us does not give X all the rights while denying them to me (I cannot, for instance, call X a fatheaded bigot without risking being fired).
I don’t see that Nussbaum, from your quotations, is really clear about what is going on here, or that the introduction of ‘respect’ captures the kinds of constraints in various speech games regulated or allowed in the liberal state.
ps — and unlike G., I don’t think the universal application of rules even makes sense over the diverse speech situations found in a modern, capitalist society. It is like applying the rules of one game to all games. Instead, one wants to apply a rule that tells gameplayers to respect the rules, without specifying what those are. I think Mill’s model is the best framework to approach a non-uniform, non-univeralizing, plural society. I think alternatives have proved pretty awful.
“This doesn’t make much sense, unless it means that the Millean liberal state won’t countenance burning heretics and blasphemers.”
No, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. It’s weirdly rhetorical, and even hyperbolic, in kind of a silly way – I think that’s one reason it irritates me so much. The ‘state’ doesn’t make pronouncements. It’s a little hard to imagine this Millean state wandering around the landscape making frequent pronouncements about human flourishing. Sounds like an alternative universe.
roger – I’m not sure I buy any of that either. I was trying to pin down what Nussbaum really means, but I don’t buy it. I’m thoroughly in the principled liberal camp. I understand the motives behind pure political liberalism, but I ultimately don’t think it works.
On the other hand, I do think that there’s a certain intuitive appeal to keeping certain kinds of disagreements out of certain kinds of political discourse and institutions. I would just want much clearer definitions of which disagreements and which contexts. For example, I think religious political parties undermine the very concept of a pluralistic society: Several European parliamentary polities contain parties named “the Christian Democratic Party” and the like. But surely the “Christian” part of that title ought to have little or nothing to do with the political discourse and activity of a party within a pluralistic society…
G., I’d say the proof is in the pudding. Has the Christian Democratic Party undermined pluralism? While it is not on my list of favorite parties (I prefer ones with cocktails), surely the CD has existed simultaneously with the most tolerant and pluralistic period in Germany’s history (not counting the Weimar period).
I think clearer definitions of the rules involving what is and is not condoned in speech are only required if one can argue that, for some reason, circumstances require them. I’d argue that Fuzzy definitions, or alternative interpretations of rulemaking (which compete with each other or succeed each other globally) are socially useful. The reason is that they indicate where rules don’t have to be laid down by a legal authority, or can adhere in a number of ways. Far from being the mark of imperfection, I’d say a society that has significant ‘holes’ in its network of rules governing speech is preferable to one with totally clear rules; or at least arguments have to be made for filling those holes beyond the idea that “there isn’t a rule there.” This is why I think hate speech laws are generally bogus, and the Blair governments resurrection of multi-culti blasphemy laws is also bogus. Often the argument proceeds as if, once we propose a set of rules, that we’ve already established that we must have rules — and so you read, for instance, opponents of the Blair laws making some adjustment to the rules being proposed. Liberal governance, as I see it, does not mistake the proposal that there be rules for x situation as meaning that there must be some kind of rules for x situation — the bureaucratic momentum has to justify itself much more than that. Otherwise, we are simply governed on the basis of the latest moral panic.
Good points, roger. I’m generally wary of rules/laws myself. Universal proscriptions rarely accommodate the real complexities of life in any context, political or otherwise. Aristotle had that right, as so many other things.