Once again I've found myself trying to decode a
philosophical writing, this time an article
in The New York Review of Books,
excerpted from Ronald
Dworkin's forthcoming book Religion
Without God. It has more than a touch of metaphysics, so I probably
wouldn't have finished reading it had I not been spurred on by my cousin
G. He is ever so much more
into philosophy than I.
Dworkin makes a case, already appreciated by some religions
of the East but not sufficiently in the West, that being religious doesn't
require belief in a deity. He
starts by defining "religious attitude"—in essence the conjoining of
awe at the beauty of the universe with a faith that an objective set of values
exists.
(As we shall see, the crux of this definition is the word objective.) To
Dworkin, being religious simply means having such a religious attitude, which
can be theistic or atheistic.
Abrahamic theists, for example, may be
awed by God's creation of the cosmos from the void; atheists may be awed by
creation from the Big Bang.
Theists might believe that cruelty is wrong because God says so from on
high; atheists because they "cannot [have a conviction that cruelty is
really wrong] without thinking that it is objectively true." (There's circular reasoning here, which
Dworkin later defends—see below.)
In thus virtually equating the nature of religious attitudes that theists and atheists may
have, Dworkin makes the inclusion of God by the former and not the latter seem
of little import. History, of
course, says otherwise.
Let's leave that contentious issue
aside and go to the crux: the meaning of "objectivity." By objective
values, Dworkin has in mind Platonic ideals that are independent of the mundane
world. They may be endowed by a transcendental deity; but he denies that they can originate
from naturalism—the belief "that nothing is real except what can be
studied by the natural sciences."
Values, he maintains, "are real and fundamental … as real as trees
and pain," and there is no way of discovering them by naturalistic inquiry.
In thus rejecting naturalism, Dworkin
a priori takes evolution out of the
picture as a source of values. He
says, "Suppose we find undeniable evidence that we hold the moral
convictions we do only because they were evolutionarily adaptive, which certainly
did not require them to be true. Then, in this view, we would have no
reason to think that cruelty is really wrong." (My
italics, emphasizing Dworkin's insistence that objective moral truth cannot be
grounded in natural inquiry.)
Instead, Dworkin relies on
"ungrounded realism" to be in touch with moral truth. He says that "the world of value
is self-contained and self-certifying," which we accept as a matter of
faith. He admits to circularity
here, but claims it is not much different from physical science, which
ultimately depends on faith in assumptions such as causation. "In each domain we accept felt,
inescapable conviction rather than the benediction of some independent means of
verification as the final arbiter of what we are entitled responsibly to
believe." (This is a
misleading comparison, because scientific assumptions are always tentative and
subject to invalidation; Dworkin's objective values, being self-certifying, are
not.)
Dworkin is of course entitled to define
"religious attitude" as he wishes, including a definition that excludes
naturalists from being capable of it.
Yet, materialist that I am and philosopher that I am not, I don't
understand why he would insist on doing so. Why can it not be that cruelty is considered wrong just
because it tends to be deselected by the evolutionary process? Recall from E. O. Wilson's book The
Social Conquest of the Earth, which I
discussed in a previous posting,
the contention that human evolution proceeds by competition among groups as
well as among individuals, the former trumping the latter in conformity with an
"iron rule": selfish individuals beat altruistic ones, yet
groups of altruists beat groups of selfish individuals.
According to Wilson, different groups choose different
sets of values with which to compete.
Some values, however, have become universal among groups and societies
at large, which is not evidence that they are transcendentally objective
truths, only that they have become pragmatically necessary for the competitive
survival of a society in a given era.
A core set of universally accepted
values therefore might well have arisen through the evolutionary process. Philosopher Philip Kitcher, in his
book The
Ethical Project, looks on this
evolution as a collective enterprise taken on by the species over tens of
thousands of years as it sought ways to live successfully in larger and larger
groups. In this light, for
example, the natural rights proclaimed during the Enlightenment are not a human
discernment of objective values
"endowed by their Creator"; rather they represent a stage in the evolution of values achieved by humankind during the 17th
and 18th centuries.
My response to Dworkin's article is
twofold. First, I think he has
unnecessarily conflated two concepts: "religion," which in both
common parlance and Dworkin's lexicon has preternatural elements; and
"religious attitude," which—despite Dworkin's strange definition of
it—need not have that tinge. A
naturalist, following Einstein, can have a religious attitude by simply being
in awe of the sublimity of the universe, without also subscribing to a preternaturalness of values.
Second, while again I am assuredly no
philosopher, in my estimation a blending of Dworkin's and Kitcher's value
constructs is possible, by replacing objectivity with universality. Instead of demanding that values be
"self-contained and self-certifying," beyond human jurisdiction,
think of them as continuing reformulations by the species itself, under
evolutionary pressure as it climbed out of savagery. As Wilson points out, for example, proscription of incest is
now universal among societies, initially dating well into pre-historic times. Proscription of murder is more recent,
dating at least to the Judaic commandment. Proscriptions of slavery and cruelty are very much more
recent still. In this merged
construct, Dworkin's "felt, inescapable conviction" that these values
are true would itself stem from the same evolutionary forces as the values
themselves.
Thus, one can conceive of
quasi-objective (in the sense of universal) core values that are evolutionarily
modified with time. As with
objective values, they are ideals that humanity strives for in a given era,
usually without total success.
They are the forward-looking what-should-be of value as opposed to
what-is. They are the substance of
Kitcher's ethical project, which—as he points out—is a work in progress.
I'll end by apologizing for what may appear an unseemly
posthumous quarrel with Professor Dworkin. (Sadly, he died in February prior to the publication of both
his NYRB article and the book from which it was drawn.) He was an eminent philosopher and scholar
of law, and I am a less than a novice in both those fields. Yet I feel that a response to him is
warranted from a materialist, someone whose awe at the universe's majesty is
matched with a belief in evolutionarily rather than preternaturally derived
values.