AMONG the bitter jeremiads and bubbling jeroboams of champagne pouring forth from the respective ranks of liberals and conservatives this month, political pundits have re-focused the national spotlight on the so-called "religious right." Many of these pundits have attributed President Bush's election success to the strong turnout of evangelical Christian voters, who were spurred on by social issues to support the Republican Party at the polls. Whether or not this analysis has any merit, it has reinvigorated discussion regarding the proper relationship between politics, morality and religion.
The palpable worry among secularists these days seems to be that under the Bush administration, religious fundamentalists will succeed to some degree in foisting an irrational and unjustifiable morality upon our society. This concern has a good deal of merit behind it, but it also raises difficult questions about the justifiability of the morality that underlies our legal and political system. It is not so simple as to say that religious justifications for morality are irrational and unsustainable while secular ones are pure and unproblematic. In fact, moral justification is equally difficult to defend from both religious and secular perspectives. So if we want to impose limits on the extent to which religion can serve as the basis for our moral and legal system, we had better devise some new and improved reasons for doing so.
Out of necessity, our legal system is closely tied to our social morality. Our courts punish murder on something like the normative assumption that it is wrong to intentionally kill innocent people. We say that this moral tenet is secular because it tends to be accepted even by most people who are atheists or agnostics like me. But how are we to distinguish such secular moral tenets from religious moral tenets, such as the belief that blasphemy is wrong? Why do we have reason to make our legal system punish things like murder but not blasphemy?
It is tempting here to say that the secular moral belief about murder is rational, while the religious moral belief about blasphemy is irrational. But can we really sustain the idea that the wrongness of murder is a matter of rationality? The answer to this question lurks deep in the shadowy territory of philosophical ethics, but it seems that the answer is no, reason alone cannot tell us that murder is wrong. Our reason tells us the way the world is, not the way it should be. As the famous English philosopher David Hume forcefully pointed out long ago, it is invalid to argue from the way things are to the way things should be. To do so is to commit the famous "ought-is fallacy."
If Hume is correct and morality is not grounded in reason alone, then we must look elsewhere for our moral justifications. A good place to start this search would be within the practical social interactions of the individual agents who are the constituents of any society. When we do this we see that people have all kinds of goals, values and other aims that motivate them and give their lives meaning. Thus every person has a vested interest in the ability to direct his own life according to his own will, free from coercive external interference. Once we see this, we can begin to sketch the outlines of a morality that both conforms to our intuitions and rests on solid foundations.
On this view, to do something immoral is to interfere with someone else's life in such a way as to give them reason to resist and even condemn your actions as wrong. As long as individuals have an interest in securing their lives against such external interference, they have reason to tailor their legal code so as to uphold the paramount importance of non-interference among members of their society. Submitting themselves to the law will be well worth the protection they receive from it. Construed thusly, social morality can be seen as arising out of the optimum conditions of social interaction for individuals of diverse pursuits and lifestyles.
Importantly, this view is far from being a brand of moral relativism. Rather, this social justification of morality is quite capable of labeling certain actions as absolutely wrong, regardless of cultural trends or norms. This is because any human society will necessarily consist of individuals living and working together, and these individuals will always have their own goals, desires and values to pursue. Thus your interference with the life of another person will always qualify as being morally wrong, in the sense that it will always give other people reason to resist and condemn your actions.
The practical moral importance of non-interference makes it clear why it is justifiable to entrench prohibitions on things like murder in our legal system. Things like blasphemy, homosexuality and other "self-regarding" activities, however, cannot justifiably be banned on this conception. That is why the motto of a truly free society is "live and let live." You're free to condemn the actions of other people or praise them, or do whatever else you want with your own life, just so long as you don't interfere with anyone else's.
Anthony Dick's column appears Mondays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at adick@cavalierdaily.com.
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