Monday, November 14, 2011
Reflections on secularism
As always, the annual Center for Ethics & Culture conference at Notre Dame provided plenty of opportunities for rich conversation on provocative topics, particularly in light of this year's secularism theme. Among the highlights:
Alasdair MacIntyre explained how secularism loses the capacity to adhere to absolute moral principles because everything is a matter for pragmatic judgment, and disagreement focuses on the question of whether the proffered justification for violating a principle is sufficiently compelling. MacIntyre used the deaths of 100,000 Iraqi civilians in the aftermath of the U.S. invasion as an example. When an audience member objected that MacIntyre was ignoring the 300,000 deaths caused by Saddam Hussein, MacIntyre noted that the nature of the objection underscored his point.
Christian Smith offered a guided tour through the sociological reality of secularism, as reflected in the rise of survey respondents who indicate no religious affiliation ("the nones"). Among the dozens of interesting facts he pointed out were the nones' lower scores on empathy and altruism compared to religious respondents. He believes, however, that a much more pressing threat to Christianity is from the predominance among churchgoers of what he calls "moralistic therapeutic deism."
John Breen provided an update on his project (with Lee Strang) about the history of Catholic legal education. This presentation focused on the mid-century critique of legal realism by Catholic legal theorists, a critique which did not gain a lot of traction or attention within the academy. Hopefully this broader Breen/Strang project will be the subject of many MoJ conversations in the months to come.
There was also a lovely passing of the torch from outgoing center director David Solomon to the incoming director, and good friend of MoJ, Carter Snead. The place is obviously in good hands.
https://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/2011/11/reflections-on-secularism.html
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Does MacIntyre have anything written on the topic? From the summary it sounds like he's concentrating on a specific type of ethics, not "secularism" as a whole, and I'd be interested to see if he engages and how he responds to secular theories that posit absolute moral principles without the need to an appeal to divine law.
As for the Smith bit: I'm inclined to be wary of things that suggest a normative evaluation of an ideology or belief system based on characteristics of their members. Where can I find more precise numbers on those studies? And more generally, it seems like there are plenty of explanations beyond what seems to be the implied one (secularism will lead us to be less empathetic.) For instance, the less empathetic are generally more willing to take on outside or 'alien' views (and pure secularism is still such a view in America) because they're less susceptible to the pressures of dominant community feeling. Additionally, there's a large familial influence on religious affiliation. Because of that, it's natural to see a rise in secularism first among those who grow up without a strong family support structure, which may independently explain lower "empathy scores." Additionally, secularism is younger and smaller than religious traditions. Even though there's lots of good secular ethics and moral philosophy out there, there's much less low-level, accessible secular moralism than there are low-level, accessible religious traditions. Any comparison between religions and secularism needs to account for the difference in ages in addition to the difference in nature.