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On Translating Religious Reasons: Rawls, Habermas, and the Quest for a Neutral Public Sphere

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 January 2016

Sonia Sikka
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Abstract

Through a critical analysis of the positions of Rawls and Habermas, the article argues against the proviso that religious language be “translated” into an allegedly neutral vocabulary as a condition for full inclusion within public political reasoning. Defending and expanding the analysis of Maeve Cooke, it maintains that both Habermas and Rawls mischaracterize the nature of religious reasons in relation to reasons alleged to be “freestanding,” “secular,” or “postmetaphysical.” Reflection on the origins of religious discourse and the component thought to be retained when such discourse is “translated” demonstrates the untenability of a sharp distinction between “rational” and “religious” discourse on matters pertaining to morality. The article nonetheless affirms the need for common acceptance of the justificatory language of coercive political policies, but contends that this language is best conceived as a historically evolving wide (not universal) agreement, and as a confluence of various types of agreement.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 78 , Issue 1 , Winter 2016 , pp. 91 - 116
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2016 

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References

1 See Nicholas Wolterstorff, “The Role of Religion in Decision and Discussion of Political Issues,” in Religion in the Public Square, ed. Robert Audi and Nicholas Wolterstorff (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997); Paul Weithman, Religion and the Obligations of Citizenship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Christopher J. Eberle, Religious Conviction in Liberal Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

2 Rawls, John, “The Idea of an Overlapping Consensus,” Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 7 (1987): 14CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Rawls, John, “Political Liberalism: Reply to Habermas,” Journal of Philosophy 92 (1995): 134Google Scholar.

4 Rawls, John, “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” University of Chicago Law Review 64 (1997): 767CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Ibid., 767–68.

6 Ibid., 769.

7 Ibid., 771.

8 Ibid., 783–84.

9 Ibid., 775.

10 Rawls, “Political Liberalism,” 132–33.

11 Jürgen Habermas, Between Naturalism and Religion: Philosophical Essays, trans. Ciaran Cronin (Cambridge: Polity, 2008), 142.

12 Ibid., 131.

13 Jürgen Habermas, Postmetaphysical Thinking: Philosophical Essays, trans. William Mark Hohengarten (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 51. Habermas adds a question mark here —“for the time being?”—leaving it open and uncertain whether religious discourse's resistance to translation is a permanent condition.

14 Habermas, Between Naturalism and Religion, 131.

15 Ibid., 130.

16 Ibid., 309.

17 Ibid., 132.

18 Ibid., 134.

19 Jürgen Habermas, Religion and Rationality: Essays on Reason, God and Modernity, ed. Eduardo Mendieta (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 2002), 73–75.

20 Habermas, Between Naturalism and Religion, 143.

21 Habermas, Religion and Rationality, 73.

22 Habermas, Between Naturalism and Religion, 6.

23 Ibid., 142.

24 Ibid., 149.

25 Jürgen Habermas, The Future of Human Nature (Cambridge: Polity, 2003), 114.

26 One will be reminded here of the Euthyphro dilemma, which in its Christian theological incarnation asks whether something is good because God commands it, or whether God commands it because it is good. I am arguing for the latter as a genealogical rather than theological thesis, regarding the nature not of God's commands but of human judgments about these. At the same time, though, my analysis challenges the common supposition that this thesis supports a “rational” rather than “religious” basis for ethics, for that is precisely the dichotomy I am problematizing.

27 Waldron, Jeremy, “Religious Contributions in Public Deliberation,” San Diego Law Review 30 (1993): 817–48Google Scholar.

28 Jeremy Waldron, “Two-Way Translation: The Ethics of Engaging with Religious Contributions in Public Deliberation,” Mercer Law Review 63 (2012): 845–68Google Scholar.

29 Waldron, “Religious Contributions,” 817–19; “Two-Way Translation,” 846, 850.

30 Waldron, “Two-Way Translation,” 860.

31 Ibid., 860–61.

32 Ibid., 859.

33 Cited in “Religious Contributions,” 817–18.

34 Cited in “Two-Way Translation,” 846, 850.

35 Maria Pia Lima, “Is the Postsecular a Return to Political Theology?,” in Habermas and Religion, ed. Craig Calhoun, Eduardo Mendieta, and Jonathan VanAntwerpen (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), 70.

36 J. M. Bernstein, “Forgetting Isaac: Faith and the Philosophical Impossibility of a Postsecular Society,” in Habermas and Religion, 155.

37 Ibid., 157.

38 Habermas, Between Naturalism and Religion, 129.

39 Ibid.

40 Ibid., 348.

41 Habermas, The Future of Human Nature, 109.

42 Waldron, “Two-Way Translation,” 863–64.

43 Ibid., 853.

44 This is still not, I would maintain, because such a form of argumentation is inaccessible to secular reason. Kevin Vallier convincingly argues that “plausible versions of the accessibility argument allow appeal to practically any reason, including many controversial religious reasons” (“Against Public Reason Liberalism's Accessibility Requirement,” Journal of Moral Philosophy 8 [2011]: 368Google Scholar). There is no bar in principle to reasoned debate about whether a certain text should be regarded as infallible, for instance. We often have such debates, in very public contexts. However, we may reasonably choose to limit conversations regarding public policy on practical grounds, because of time constraints, or because we judge it better to leave aside when possible matters that are highly sensitive for a substantial number of citizens, and not court conflict unnecessarily.

45 Chambers, Simone, “Secularism Minus Exclusion: Developing a Religious-Friendly Idea of Public Reason,” The Good Society 19 (2010): 19Google Scholar. See also Wolterstorff, “The Role of Religion,” 112; Bohman, James and Richardson, Henry S., “Reasons That All Can Accept,” Journal of Political Philosophy 17 (2009): 253–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

46 Cooke, Maeve, “Salvaging and Secularizing the Semantic Contents of Religion: The Limitations of Habermas's Postmetaphysical Proposal,” International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion 60 (2006): 199CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

47 It would apply, therefore, to religious discourses wanting, paradoxically, “to enter the political arena making public claims on the basis of private truths,” as Richard John Neuhaus wrote of the dilemma facing the religious Right in The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1984), 36. I have argued elsewhere, though, that liberal provisions excluding religious reasoning from public political discussions inadvertently encourage such fundamentalist and generally dogmatic forms of religion, by shielding religious beliefs from critical reasoning and encouraging a conception of religion as consisting of fixed and unrevisable doctrines (“Liberalism, Multiculturalism and the Case for Public Religion,” Politics and Religion 3 [2010]: 580–609CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

48 Chambers, “Secularism Minus Exclusion,” 18.

49 Maeve Cooke, “Violating Neutrality? Religious Validity Claims and Democratic Legitimacy,” in Habermas and Religion, 249–76.

50 Ibid., 255.

51 Ibid., 250.

52 Ibid., 256. Nikolas Kompridis argues for this point at length in Critique and Disclosure: Critical Theory Between Past and Future (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), drawing on Heidegger, from whose thought the notion of “world-disclosure” is taken. Although I cannot pursue the argument within the scope of this paper, I agree with Kompridis that this idea of disclosure does not leave us with the sort of arbitrary decisionism that Habermas accused Heidegger of endorsing (69).

53 Cooke, “Violating Neutrality?,” 257.

54 This does not mean that religious claims regarding divine commandments can simply be reduced to moral ones, let alone that religion in general can be reduced to morality. Not all religious beliefs concern moral issues, and those that do are still connected with the metaphysical and soteriological beliefs of specific traditions. To believe that the universe has a moral author who issues commands and who rewards or punishes people after death certainly involves a commitment to views, and accompanying practices, that will not be shared by all citizens in a plural society. The content of those commandments, however—the basic judgments they contain about what is right and wrong—does not depend for its meaning or validity on such views and practices, nor is it intrinsically opaque to reason.

55 Cooke, “Violating Neutrality?,” 255.

56 Ibid., 265.

57 Waldron, “Religious Contributions,” 838.

58 Rawls, “Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” 775.

59 Rawls defends his position through reference to Lawrence Solum's 1996 article “Novel Public Reasons” (Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review 29 [1996]: 1459–85)Google Scholar. Solum replies to Waldron's charge by arguing that, for Rawls, “public reasons are those that could be widely shared by those who considered them,” and need not conform to premises that are already universally agreed upon (1477–78). However, Bohman and Richarsdon point out that such an interpretation of “reasons all can accept” is too indeterminate to act as a prospective normative constraint in any meaningful fashion (“Reasons That All Can Accept,” 260–61).

60 Rawls, “Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” 767.

61 Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, ed., Spiritual Ecology: The Cry of the Earth (Point Reyes, CA: Golden Sufi Center, 2013).

62 Ibid., i.

63 Spiritual Ecology, 66.

64 Ibid., 69–70.

65 Ibid., 122.

66 Ibid., 88.

67 Ibid., 97.

68 Ibid., 42.

69 Ibid., 43.

70 Ibid., 186.

71 John Rawls, Political Liberalism, expanded ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 245.

72 Spiritual Ecology, 179.

73 Joanna Macy, referring to Arne Naess, in Spiritual Ecology, 145.

74 Rawls, Political Liberalism, 245.

75 Ibid., 246.

76 Ibid.

77 In this respect, the case is in fact like that of abortion. Sandel's point—whose force Rawls does not fully appreciate—about the latter issue is that if abortion is morally tantamount to murder, as the Catholic Church claims, then the state is not being “neutral” in granting women the freedom to terminate their pregnancies (“A Response to Rawls' Political Liberalism,” in Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, 2nd ed. [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998], 184–218). People cannot be asked to tolerate murder on the grounds of a reasonable pluralism. The fact is that the state's willingness to “bracket” the issue of the moral status of the fetus already involves a substantive decision about that status. Cf. Melissa Yates: “it seems likely, for example, that the conception of personhood informing abortion legislation can only be informed by controversial world-views: any law about abortion must affirm some conception of when a fetus is a person” (“Rawls and Habermas on Religion in the Public Sphere,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 33 [2007]: 888Google Scholar).

78 Jürgen Habermas, “Reply to My Critics,” trans. Ciaran Cronin, in Habermas and Religion, 364. Against Heidegger in particular, Habermas writes in The Future of Human Nature: “If posthumanism is to be fulfilled in the return to the archaic beginning before Christ and before Socrates, the hour of religious kitsch has come” (113).

79 Habermas, Religion and Rationality, 148.

80 Ibid., 151–52.

81 Habermas, Between Naturalism and Religion, 6.

82 Habermas, “Reply to My Critics,” 374.

83 Water on the Table, documentary film, directed and produced by Liz Marshall (Canada: LizMars Productions), http://tvo.org/video/164593/water-table, 19:39–21:00 mins., accessed April 19, 2015. I realize that a documentary film would not be counted as belonging to the spheres of public political discourse that either Rawls or Habermas want to restrict. However, not only are those spheres in practice difficult to specify with precision, but liberal restrictions on them both reflect and influence attitudes in other arenas. See Sikka, “Liberalism, Multiculturalism and the Case for Public Religion.”

84 For an account of the legal implications of these ontologies in the context of Canadian law, see John Borrows, Indigenous Legal Traditions in Canada: Report for the Law Commission of Canada, January 2006, esp. 18–20, 39–51, http://publications.gc.ca/site/archivee-archived.html?url=http://publications.gc.ca/collections/collection_2008/lcc-cdc/JL2-66-2006E.pdf, accessed April 18, 2015. Cf. also Glen Sean Coulthard's Red Skin White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 60–65, 75–78, on the meaning of “land” within indigenous struggles in the United States and Canada.

85 In his survey of “dark green” religion, Bron Taylor acknowledges the potential for harm and violence in the extreme branches of this movement. He concludes, however, that the risks are modest owing to a general recognition, even among extremists, of “the mutual dependence of human beings, nonhuman organisms, and the entire environment” (Bron Taylor, Dark Green Religion: Nature Spirituality and the Planetary Future [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010], 218).

86 Waldron, “Two-Way Translation,” 847.

87 We must keep in mind that what is considered “respectable” is also historically evolving. It was not so long ago that environmental concerns, as well as concerns about the welfare of animals, were not taken seriously within dominant moral and political discourses in North America. That is no longer the case.

88 Waldron rightly proposes that the idea of consensus needs to be loosened: “Either the extent of what counts as a consensus among the population (everyone? a majority?), or the notion of what makes something a consensus (agreement on details? agreement only on the basics?), will have to be relaxed—and probably both. We are likely to end up talking about views that are shared by “many” or “most,” rather than “all” (Waldron, “Religious Contributions,” 839). Others have argued for abandoning altogether the ideal of consensus through deliberation in favor of a more agonistic model of democratic pluralism; see Mouffe, Chantal, “Deliberative Democracy or Agonistic Pluralism?,” Social Research 66 (1999): 745–58Google Scholar; and Bader, Veit, “Religious Pluralism: Secularism or Priority for Democracy?,” Political Theory 27 (1999): 597–633CrossRefGoogle Scholar. If interpreted in a looser fashion, however, the goal of agreement retains value as a regulative ideal, in light of the goods of social stability and democratic legitimacy.

89 Charles Taylor, “Why We Need a Radical Redefinition of Secularism,” in The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere, ed. Eduardo Mendieta and Jonathan VanAntwerpen (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 51.

90 Ibid., 50.

91 “Shared,” “agreed,” or “commonly accepted” principles might be a more accurate description, given that the language of the state is no longer conceived as freestanding here.

92 Cf. Maeve Cooke: “I understand historical learning as entailing openness to the need to revise perceptions, interpretations, and evaluations in light of new situations that arise as a result of intercultural exchanges, technological innovations, social changes, ecological developments, and so on” (“A Secular State for a Postsecular Society? Postmetaphysical Political Theory and the Place of Religion,” Constellations 14 [2007]: 233Google Scholar).

93 Compare Linda Zerilli's suggestion that “unshackled from the constraints of public reason, the reasonable might also be understood as a form of making political judgments and claims that generates agreement on matters of common concern by enlarging our sense both of what so much as counts as a common matter and who counts as a political speaker” (“Value Pluralism and the Problem of Judgment: Farewell to Public Reason,” Political Theory 40 [2012]: 9Google Scholar).

94 Spiritual Ecology, 200.

95 Native interventions in contestations over the Alberta Tar Sands and the proposed Keystone Pipeline provide an example. See, for instance, Jorge Barrera, “Keystone XL ‘Black Snake’ Pipeline to Face ‘Epic’ Opposition from Native American Alliance,” APTN National News, January 31, 2014, http://aptn.ca/news/2014/01/31/keystone-xl-black-snake-pipeline-face-epic-opposition-native-american-alliance/, accessed April 19, 2015; and “International Treaty to Protect the Sacred from Tar Sands Projects,” posted by Jon Ramer, January 26, 2013, on the website of Nawt-sa-maat Alliance, http://www.protectthesacred.org/international_treaty, accessed April 19, 2015.

96 Tellingly, there is on the Internet another religious document called “The Cry of the Earth,” this one subtitled “A Pastoral Reflection on Climate Change from the Irish Catholic Bishops' Conference.” It speaks of “creation as gift and as a responsibility,” and while this “gift” is conceived as being given to human beings, in line with Christian teaching, the document also says: “In 1979, Pope John Paul II proclaimed Francis of Assisi as the patron saint of ecology. Francis did not look at the natural world in terms of human usefulness alone, how it provides food, clothing and shelter for humans. Rather, his response to the gift of creation was joy, wonder, praise and gratitude. One of the great legacies of Francis is that he expanded the concept of ‘neighbour’ to include not only the human race, but the whole of creation and all of its creatures” (“The Cry of the Earth: A Pastoral Reflection on Climate Change from the Irish Catholic Bishops' Conference,” November 10, 2009, http://www.catholicbishops.ie/2009/11/03/the-cry-of-the-earth/, accessed November 1, 2014).

One should not, however, overestimate the level of agreement between Christianity and green religion. Compare Neuhaus, writing in criticism of Lynn Townsend White's “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis” (1967): “what was so impressive in Francis, is the unremitting focus on the glory of the Creator. Francis' line of accountability drove straight to the Father and not to Mother Nature… . It was not the claims of creation but the claims of the Creator that seized Francis.” From In Defense of People (1971), cited in Joel Garreau, “Environmentalism as Religion,” New Atlantis, Summer 2010, , http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/environmentalism-as-religion, 62–64, accessed April 18, 2015. For other examples of this genre of negative Christian reaction to green religion, see Richard A. Baer, “Sorting Out the Motives behind Environmentalism,” Center for Public Justice, September 1990, http://www.cpjustice.org/stories/storyReader$1047, accessed April 18, 2015; and the website of the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation (2014), http://www.cornwallalliance.org/about/what-we-do/, accessed July 7, 2015.

97 In practice, it is also not easy to distinguish clearly between political essentials and basic matters of justice, on the one hand, and their interpretation and application, on the other, or between these essentials and other issues. See Greenawalt, Kent, “On Public Reason,” Chicago-Kent Law Review 69 (1994): 685–87Google Scholar.

98 Cf. James Bohman: “Political liberalism needs to assume that ‘public’ and not merely ‘nonpublic’ reasons may conflict deeply as well” (“Public Reason and Cultural Pluralism: Political Liberalism and the Problem of Moral Conflict,” Political Theory 23 [1995]: 259Google Scholar).

99 If substantive decisions of this type are inevitable, it is better that the state be honest about them. Doing so does not necessitate its “denigrating” or treating in a derogatory manner those who hold contrary views, as Nussbaum contends in her defense of a purely political liberalism (“Perfectionist Liberalism and Political Liberalism,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 39 [2011]: 22, 33Google Scholar). The use of such terminology slants Nussbaum's argument. A person is not “disrespected” if she is given to understand that the state must make a judgment one way or another on certain matters and that at this time, all things considered, it has judged that, for instance, homosexuality is not a sickness, the fetus is not a person, and astrology is not a sound basis for making decisions. After all, the language of court decisions will not read, “Given that those who believe x are fools… ”

100 “Readers cannot miss noticing that Habermas operates with a certain understanding of the nature of the person—operates with a certain anthropological ontology” (Nicholas Wolterstorff, “An Engagement with Jürgen Habermas on Postmetphysical Philosophy, Religion, and Political Dialogue,” in Habermas and Religion, 110).

101 That is, however, all it requires, and it is less than the acceptance of fallibility for which Cooke argues (“Salvaging and Secularizing the Semantic Contents of Religion,” 199). Someone who believes that nonhuman animals are deserving of moral consideration or that homosexuality is not a disease, for instance, does not have to hold these convictions to be fallible when arguing with people who disagree. She only needs to be prepared to give reasons and respond to opposing views. As Cristina Lafont argues, that is sufficient for treating the views of other citizens with respect (“Religion in the Public Sphere: Remarks on Habermas's Conception of Public Deliberation in Postsecular Societies,” Constellations 14 [2007]: 239–59).