Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

Meanwhile, many Muslims—for instance—would agree that moral relativism is beneath contempt, while insisting that they have the only true insight into what ought to be done in the world. Many Hindus think likewise, of course. The more one learns of the different passionately held convictions of peoples around the world, the more tempting it becomes to decide that there really couldn’t be a standpoint from which truly universal moral judgments could be constructed and defended. So it is not surprising that cultural anthropologists tend to take one variety of moral relativism or another as one of their enabling assumptions. Moral relativism is also rampant in other groves of academia, but not all. It is decidedly a minority position among ethicists and other philosophers, for example, and it is by no means a necessary presupposition of scientific open-mindedness.

We don’t have to assume that there are no moral truths in order to study other cultures fairly and objectively; we just have to set aside, for the time being, the assumption that we already know what they are. Imperialist universalism (of any variety) is not a good way to start. Even if “we” are right, insisting on it from the outset is ultimately neither diplomatic nor scientific. Science is not supposed to have all the moral answers and shouldn’t be advertised as providing them. We may appeal to science to clarify or confirm factual presuppositions of our moral discussions, but it doesn’t provide or establish the values that our ethical judgments and arguments are based on. We who put our faith in science should be no more reluctant to acknowledge this than those who put their faith in one religion or another. Everybody should consider adopting the stable middle ground that Balkin provides: an open-minded (“ambivalent”) stance that permits a rational dialogue to engage the issues between people, no matter how radically different their cultural backgrounds. We can engage in this conversation with some reasonable hope of resolution that isn’t simply a matter of one culture overwhelming the other by brute force. We cannot expect, Balkin argues, to persuade others if we leave no room and opportunity for them to persuade us. Success does depend on the participants’ sharing, and knowing that they share, two transcendent values of truth and justice. What this means is only that both parties accept that these values are inescapably presupposed by human projects that we all participate in, simply by being alive: the projects of staying alive, and staying secure. Nothing more parochial need be assumed, and even “Martians” should be able to agree on this.

The idea of a transcendent value is rather like the idea of a perfectly straight line—not achievable in practice, but readily comprehended as an ideal that can be approximated even if it can’t be fully articulated. At first this may look like a dubious dodge—an ideal that we all somehow accept even if nobody can say what it is! But in fact, just such ideals are accepted and inescapable even in the most rigorous and formalistic of investigations. Consider the ideal of rationality itself. When logicians disagree about whether classical logic is to be preferred to intuitionistic logic, for instance, they have to have in mind a prior standard of rationality, by appeal to which one logic could be seen (by all) as better than another, and they have to presume that they share this ideal, but they don’t have to be able to formulate this standard explicitly—that’s what they’re working on. And in just the same spirit, people with radically different ideas about which policies or laws would best serve humanity can—indeed, must—presuppose some shared ideal if there is to be any point in talking it over at all.

Balkin provides an imaginary dialogue that illustrates the appeal to transcendent values in its simplest form. A marauding army massacres the people and we call them war criminals. They object, saying that their culture permits what they have done, but we can turn their point back on them.

…we can say to them: “If standards of justice and truth are internal to each culture, you can have no objection to our characterization of you as war criminals. For just as our standards can have no application to you, your standards can have no application to us. We are as correct in proclaiming your evil in our culture as you are correct in proclaiming your uprightness in yours. But your very assertion that we have misunderstood you undermines this claim. It presupposes common values of truth and justice that we are somehow obligated to recognize. And on that ground we are prepared to argue for your wickedness.” [p. 148]