Unintelligible! Inaccessible! Unacceptable! Are religious truth claims a problem for liberal democracies?

I The requirement of general intelligibility

The requirement of general intelligibility means that arguments and reasons must be comprehensible to anyone who inhabits a particular collectively shared evaluative horizon, for example, the evaluative horizon of secularized western modernity or of a modern democracy committed to values of freedom and equality. Intelligibility is a matter of competence in a particular socio-cultural vocabulary. ⁴ A vocabulary of this kind is a collectively shared reservoir of reasons. Lacking a common socio-cultural vocabulary, speakers will be unable to provide the kinds of reasons that would make their utterance intelligible to others, and hence potentially acceptable. ⁵

In his book A Secular Age Charles Taylor gives a striking example of such a situation. This is Tocqueville’s account of his visit to America in 1831. Travelling in the Michigan territory, Tocqueville, as a young Frenchman of the Romantic era, wanted to see the wilderness. Taylor writes:

But when he tried to explain his project to the local frontiersmen to enlist their help, he met a wall of incomprehension. Somebody wanting to enter the primeval forest just to behold it; this made no sense. He must have had some undeclared agenda, like lumbering or land speculation. ⁶

As evaluative horizons change (which they do for multiple, complex reasons), old kinds of reasons lose currency and new kinds gain it, with the result that different kinds of reasons stock the existing socio-cultural reservoir of meaning. Taylor’s discussion of Tocqueville in Michigan helps to illustrate this point too. Cautioning against too hasty comparisons between Tocqueville’s encounter with the frontiersmen and, say, a clash between ecological militants and loggers in British Columbia, he observes: ‘[L]oggers today are all too familiar with ecological militants, and no longer need to have explained to them that such people exist.’ ⁷ Although Taylor does not pursue the point, his observation draws attention to an important difference between the two situations. In the case of the Michigan frontiersmen and Tocqueville, we see what I have described as a lack of mutual intelligibility; by contrast, in the case of the loggers and ecological militants we see what is better described as a lack of mutual accessibility. In the first case, Tocqueville’s reasons for wanting to see the wilderness were not collectively available; the frontiersmen did not oppose his wish to see the wilderness, they were simply unable to make any sense of it. We could say they did not know the kinds of reasons Tocqueville would have had to provide in order to justify this wish. ⁸ By contrast, the British Columbia loggers are able to oppose the ecological militants precisely because their utterances are intelligible to them; the difficulty here is not lack of intelligibility, but a lack of accessibility, which is a problem on the level of personal experience rather than the level of a collectively shared vocabulary.

Three points are especially relevant here. First, socio-cultural vocabularies are always in motion. This thought is well captured by Wittgenstein’s metaphor of a ‘riverbed of thoughts’, which like the bank of a river ‘consists partly of hard rock, subject to no alteration or only to an imperceptible one, partly of sand, which now in one place, now in another gets washed away, or deposited’. ⁹ Second, translations (in the broad sense) can play a role in the rendering comprehensible of unintelligible viewpoints and positions. For instance, works of fiction often fulfil important functions of translation by enabling us to enter historically and culturally alien worlds and gain an understanding of their vocabularies. ¹⁰ Third, as Taylor’s examples make clear, lack of intelligibility is not a problem peculiar to religious arguments and reasons but a difficulty that can arise for any kind of utterance, religious or non-religious, due to lack of a collectively shared vocabulary.

II The requirement of general accessibility

Habermas’ writings on religion are a useful starting point here, for the question of accessibility is central to his argument against religious arguments and reasons in the institutionalized public sphere. ¹¹ He argues that religious validity claims lack the general accessibility possessed by claims made for the validity of non-religious conceptions of the good. By lack of accessibility he means lack of openness to unconstrained debate in public processes of deliberation. This perceived lack is the backdrop to his well-known ‘translation proviso’: the requirement that religious arguments be transposed into a secular language by way of cooperative processes of translation undertaken by religious believers and non-believers alike. ¹² It is also the prima facie reason he offers for prohibiting the use of religious arguments and reasons in democratic processes of legislation and decision-making. In a key passage he writes:

Religiously rooted existential convictions, by dint of their if necessary rationally justified reference to the dogmatic authority of an inviolable core of infallible revealed truths, evade that kind of unreserved discursive examination to which other ethical orientations and worldviews, i.e. secular ‘conceptions of the good’, are exposed. ¹³

Habermas’ reference to ‘dogmatic authority’ merits closer consideration. I will do so in two steps. In the present section I discuss his objection that the dependence of religious convictions on revealed truths impedes their unreserved discursive examination; he sees this as resulting ultimately in what I have called epistemological authoritarianism, a pernicious stance in the domain of truth and justification in which certain individuals and groups set themselves up as unquestionable authorities. In the final section I address a concern, not explicitly voiced by Habermas but perhaps implicit in his objection, that institutionalized religious authority is intrinsically authoritarian.

The revelatory component of religious truth claims is central to Habermas’ objection that they appeal to a dogmatic authority. However, he over-inflates the importance of this component. He fails to appreciate how, in our everyday lives, understanding an argument or reason often requires a moment of revelation or disclosure. ¹⁴ By this I mean that, in our everyday lives, coming to feel the force of an argument or reason often requires an epistemically significant shift in perception. In other words, gaining access to arguments and reasons often requires a fundamental change in cognitive position, whereby we come to see the world in a new way. I regard this as a feature of ethical arguments and reasons in general, not just religious ones. Indeed, it seems to hold also for philosophical and aesthetic arguments and reasons and perhaps for other kinds. Such shifts in perception are epistemically significant in the sense that they impact on our assessment of the epistemic quality of the validity claims in question – of their rationality or truth. Importantly, how such shifts in perception come about is an open question; certainly the factors involved are multiple, complex and typically biographical as well as contextual. Importantly, too, the decisive factors may not be personal experiences of arguments but rather personal experiences that take place in non-argumentative contexts.

My main points here are similar to the ones I made in the case of intelligibility. First, the accessibility of arguments and reasons is contingent on lived experiences over time, in this case of a personal rather than collective kind. Just as collective vocabularies change in response to the pressure of lived experiences, personal vocabularies also change in response to such experiences. Second, translation in the broad sense can play an important role in facilitating such shifts in perception, enabling us to gain imaginative access to ways of seeing ourselves, others and the world that are not readily accessible to us. Third, lack of general accessibility is not a problem peculiar to religious arguments and reasons, but a contingent feature of several kinds of arguments and reasons.

Before turning to the last of the three requirements, I want to make one further point, which is relevant for Habermas’ theory in particular. On at least one defensible reading of his theory of law and democracy, Habermas defines the normative legitimacy of laws as rational acceptability under idealized justificatory conditions: laws are normatively legitimate when they could be accepted on the basis of rational insight by participants in an idealized procedure of argumentation. ¹⁵ If my remarks on intelligibility and accessibility are correct, however, they call into question this definition. Rational acceptability presupposes intelligibility and accessibility. I have just suggested that, on occasion, meeting the conditions of intelligibility and accessibility requires epistemically significant shifts in perception that occur in non-argumentative contexts. This implies that even ideal justificatory conditions could not guarantee intelligibility and accessibility and, hence, their rational acceptability to all participants in deliberation. If this is so, then we have to sever the link between validity and rational consensus that Habermas asserts in the case of law (and also in the case of morality). ¹⁶ This has advantages and disadvantages. An advantage is that it permits a more robustly pluralist model of democratic politics than is possible within Habermas’ (or Rawls’) framework; a disadvantage is that it seems to open the door for one social group tyrannically to impose its conceptions of the good on all citizens; the latter problem is addressed, however, with the help of the intersubjectivist account of individual freedom I sketch below. ¹⁷

III The requirement of general acceptability

Finally, I turn to the requirement of general acceptability. By ‘acceptable’ arguments and reasons I mean ones that are non-authoritarian. Authoritarian arguments and reasons undermine deep-seated normative intuitions and expectations that shape the modern western evaluative horizon; in particular, intuitions and expectations regarding autonomous agency. ¹⁸ On account of this, they are generally regarded as objectionable. In my terminology, as mentioned earlier, arguments and reasons are open to the objection that they are epistemologically authoritarian when they claim privileged access to truth or validity; authoritarianism of this sort is typically connected with appeal to an absolute, final truth that is deemed to be attainable by human beings.

Habermas has a tendency to see religious arguments and reasons as intrinsically authoritarian, at least in the final instance. This is evident in his characterization of religious convictions as ultimately appealing to a ‘dogmatic authority’, consisting, as we saw, of an ‘inviolable core of infallible revealed truths’. One could say, he regards such appeals as epistemologically authoritarian. But if this is his position, it is too hasty. There is no inevitable connection between religious conviction and an authoritarian attitude towards knowledge and the conduct of life.

Dogmatism as such is not a problem for Habermas. In the last paragraph of Between Facts and Norms he ascribes a core that is dogmatic ‘in a harmless sense’ to the paradigmatic understanding of law he develops in his book. ¹⁹ Its dogmatic core is the idea of autonomy, according to which human beings act as free subjects only insofar as they obey just those laws they give themselves in accordance with insights they have gained intersubjectively. ²⁰ In light of this, his objection to dogmatic authority in the case of religious convictions must be seen as an objection to a kind of dogmatism peculiar to religious arguments and reasons.

We have already considered the connection he draws between the revelatory component of religious arguments and reasons and their consequent resistance to thoroughgoing discursive examination, resulting in an appeal to dogmatic authority. I endeavoured to defuse the Habermasian objection. Nonetheless, in practice many contemporary forms of institutionalized religion are authoritarian in matters of religious truth, demanding unquestioning acceptance, for instance, of the core dogmas of holy texts as disseminated by spiritual leaders. So far I have suggested that its dependence on ‘revelation’ does not make religious truth authoritarian. But there may be other reasons to worry about the authoritarianism of religious arguments and reasons. The general question I address in this final section, therefore, is whether institutionalized religious authority is intrinsically authoritarian.

My short answer is ‘no’. My longer answer is a proposal for a model of non-authoritarian authority that fits well with the self-understanding of modern religious believers and the religious institutions to which they belong. I will sketch this model now.

In my concern to develop a non-authoritarian conception of authority I take inspiration from Hannah Arendt, who writes: ‘Authority implies an obedience in which men retain their freedom.’ ²¹ I endorse the connection she draws between authority and individual freedom. However, I move beyond a view of authority as simply compatible with freedom, arguing instead for a view of authority as enhancing freedom. As I construe it, a non-authoritarian account of authority is one that not only allows ‘men [to] retain their freedom’; it fosters the full development of their freedom. Evidently, this calls on us to think about individual freedom in a particular way.

I propose a conception of individual freedom that is engendered in social relations and enabled by (and enhanced within) modern social institutions. As such it is an intersubjectivist, non-individualistic, conception of individual freedom.

In elaborating this intersubjectivist account of individual freedom, I begin with Charles Taylor’s thesis that modern (western) selves are ‘strong evaluators’; by this he means persons who construct their identity in reflective engagement with a range of questions about the good. Strong evaluators are concerned not only with the questions of where or who they are, but also where they are going and who they want to be. ²² Taylor draws attention to the orientation to the good implicit in such evaluation. To ask such questions is to position ourselves reflectively in relation to ideas of the good; ‘the good’ is that which is picked out as comparably higher in a qualitative distinction and hence a ‘higher good’. ²³

I see Taylor’s idea of strong evaluation as a productive starting point for a conception of individual freedom as autonomy. It enables us to rethink the concept of autonomy in the wake of Nietzsche, Foucault and the communitarian and feminist critiques of the 1980s and 1990s. ²⁴ For, if developed in certain ways, it can accommodate the self-determining aspect of the concept of autonomy, while avoiding the unwelcome connotations of self-ownership and self-containment it has acquired in the course of western modernity. As it stands, however, it has three significant weaknesses.

One shortcoming is its lack of an inbuilt intersubjective dimension. While Taylor acknowledges the modern self’s formation within webs of social relationships, he does not build intersubjectivity into the very concept of strong evaluation. A further, connected, problem is his underdeveloped account of ethical justification and truth. A third inadequacy is his insufficient attention to the institutional contexts within which strong evaluators form their identities.

Like Taylor I hold that strong evaluators form their identities in multiple kinds of engagement with other human subjects. I move beyond Taylor by arguing that these other human subjects, too, must be strong evaluators. My argument for this starts with Taylor’s connection between strong evaluation and higher goods. However, it adds to this an idea of ethical truth that is dependent on deliberation with others. This enables me to show that strong evaluators can develop fully as such only in interaction with other strong evaluators.

While Taylor often grapples with the question of conflict between rival conceptions of the good, he does not confront the question of how to assess claims to ethical truth; by this I mean a subject- and context-transcending idea of validity relating to the good. I fill this gap by positing an idea of ethical truth that is at once radically context-transcending and justification-dependent. ²⁵ My contentions are twofold. I contend, first, that truth in the ethical sense transcends the justificatory practices of any human community, actual or idealized; second, that truth in the ethical sense is conceptually tied to social practices of open-ended, inclusive and fair argumentation; for this I offer an argument in terms of a relatively stable set of values shaping human identities in western modernity. ²⁶ This leads me to conclude – in the spirit of Taylor – that a constellation of ideas connecting truth conceptually to public justification is an important element in the formation of modern selves as strong evaluators and, by extension, autonomous agents.

To accommodate this aspect of strong evaluation, I introduce a second core element into my account of autonomy: rational accountability. By this I mean the human subject’s willingness and ability to take responsibility for her or his actions, judgements and self-interpretations in the sense of giving an account of them to others if called upon to do so. Rational accountability is an interpretation of what it means for individual human subjects to be able to call reasons their own; this too is important for the self-determining aspect of autonomy. However, the emphasis shifts from ownership of reasons to responsibility for them: ethical reasons are not owned by individual human subjects, but owed to others (I include religious reasons here as a subcategory of ethical reasons ²⁷ ). In my conception, moreover, ethical reasons are not guaranteed protection from the critical gaze of others, but rather opened up in principle to their critical judgements. I emphasize ‘in principle’ since in any given social context there may be good reasons for individual human subjects to refuse to subject their ethical views to critical interrogation. Here it is important to bear in mind that particular reasons may not be readily accessible (or, indeed, even intelligible) to others. This does not relieve the subjects in question from their responsibility to account for their position to others; rather it increases the need for receptivity to the epistemic significance of ethical experiences formative of other identities, for hermeneutic sensitivity in discussions of such experiences and for acknowledgement of the relative fragility, in the sense of epistemic contestability, of one’s own ethical convictions.

Thus, in my account, as we can see, the development of autonomous agency calls not only for critical engagement with one’s own multiple, possible conflicting conceptions of the good; it also calls for critical engagement in interaction with other selves with the multiple, possible conflicting conceptions of the good orienting their lives.

There is a further important implication of the connection I make between strong evaluation and rational accountability, together with my assertion that strong evaluation is oriented towards a justification-dependent idea of ethical truth. It implies that full development of the capacity for strong evaluation requires encounters between selves who recognize each other as strong evaluators. This is not to say that only such encounters are important for the development of strong evaluation. However, for its full development strong evaluation calls for relationships of critical engagement with other strong evaluators; otherwise, the preconditions for public justification (in particular, the requirement of fairness) would not be met. The modern ideal of public justification through the exchange of arguments demands that everyone participating in the process of deliberation is given an equal opportunity to contribute to the discussion and that their contributions are treated as equally important in principle. This presupposes that everyone participating is acknowledged as a strong evaluator. I argue, therefore, that strong evaluation requires the kind of institutional framework that is provided only in modern institutions, which formally recognize the equal capacity for autonomy of all their members (broadly understood). I contend, furthermore, that even institutions (such as the family) that are not political in the narrow sense depend for their functioning as modern institutions on modern legal and political institutions, which guarantee formal recognition of the equal capacity for autonomy of all their members.

There is yet another part to my proposal. This makes individual autonomy dependent on active engagement in social life; specifically, on engagement in the construction of the social institutions within which human subjects develop their identities. The identities of modern selves are formed in webs of social relationships within multiple social institutions. I use the term ‘institution’ in a broad sense to refer to entities established to serve some purpose or set of purposes. Such entities include schools, families, sports clubs, communities of religious scholars, courts of justice, churches, dramatic societies, parliaments. As the examples show, institutions are not always formally constituted. However, despite significant differences between kinds of social institution, they share in common three features. First, social institutions are human constructions, produced in complex ways by social interactions over time in specific social-cultural contexts. Second, they have an identity that is not reducible to the identities of their individual members. Third, social institutions are incorporations of particular (often plural) ideas of the good. As such their identities are ethically inflected.

Earlier I asserted that modern institutions must formally recognize the equal capacity for strong evaluation (and, by extension, autonomy) of all of their members. My further claim is that they must also substantively recognize their members as strong evaluators. By ‘substantive recognition’ I mean recognition of the substance of the ideas of the good orienting their members. Put differently, modern institutions must be open to transformation in response to the ethically oriented challenges they encounter from their members; these challenges will be directed at some aspect or aspects of the institution’s ethically inflected identity: at its operation, its organization, or its incorporated ideas of the good. This means, in turn, that social institutions must see themselves, and be seen by their members, as in a permanent process of construction: they must recognize their own ethical identities as inherently unstable. They must acknowledge, furthermore, that this process of construction is ethically motivated: driven by a concern by their members to make the institution in question expressive of the good as they conceive it. Since the conceptions of the good orienting the members of modern institutions are often plural and sometimes conflicting, the process of construction will be agonistic rather than harmonious. Nonetheless, each member of the institution, insofar as he or she is a strong evaluator, may see himself or herself as part of a common project of construction – as co-author of a common good that defines the (unstable) identity of the social institution in question. In short, modern institutions and their members are involved in a perpetual process of mutual identity-construction.

In some institutional contexts – for example, political, educational or religious ones – the ideas of the good incorporated by a particular institution may be articulated in the form of specific laws, ordinances, policies, doctrines, exemplary figures, texts, narratives and the like. As articulations of (the constellation of higher goods comprising) the common good they possess authority, in the sense of offering ethical direction. The point of the offer is individual freedom: as we have seen, individual freedom is a process in which human subjects, engaging with other subjects and with the institutions of which they are members, position themselves reflexively in relation to conceptions of the good. Particular articulations of conceptions of the good are authoritative, but not authoritarian, when they offer ethical orientation in the service of freedom. This means that they do not command unquestioning obedience, but rather gain acceptance for reasons for which the human subjects in question are accountable to others, when called upon to give an account. Furthermore, for strong evaluators rational acceptance of authority is not something static; rather it is a moment within a never-ending process of engagement with other strong evaluators and with the (unstable) ethical identity of the institutions to which they belong. In this account, accordingly, (non-authoritarian) authority, too, is permanently under construction: it is constituted in a dynamic movement in which particular human subjects feel the power of specific articulations of the common good, engage with them and respond to them, thereby strengthening or challenging their claims to authority.

A crucial assumption underlying this discussion is that religious believers, and the religious institutions to which they belong, can embrace the proposed picture of identity-formation, and the corresponding picture of autonomous agency, without compromising the religious faith central to their identities. I see no reason to think that they cannot. For I see no reason to think that religious believers cannot be strong evaluators; nor do I see any reason to think that religious institutions cannot see themselves as constituted in significant measure through practices of strong evaluation.

In my picture, to recall, strong evaluation involves acknowledging the dependence of the validation of higher goods on personal experiences in particular contexts that may not be readily accessible (or even intelligible) to others. I emphasize, however, that the consequent possible inaccessibility of arguments and reasons is contingent on multiple, complex factors, which may change over time. In other words, no arguments or reasons – religious or otherwise – are inherently inaccessible to any human subject, for no experiences are inherently inaccessible. Those who prohibit appeal to religious arguments and reasons in the institutionalized public sphere often assume that they are.

In these turbulent times of global migration, many liberal democratic societies are confronted with the increased presence in the public sphere of multiple kinds of religious conviction. A value-pluralist model of democratic politics that places emphasis on individual freedom must have good reasons for prohibiting religious arguments and reasons in public deliberation on matters of concern to all citizens – at the institutionalized level of deliberation as well as in the informal public sphere. My discussion has questioned the main reasons offered for such a prohibition: unintelligibility, inaccessibility and unacceptability. If there are other reasons, the onus is on the objectors to provide them.