Assumptions on Religion and Morality Made in This Course

This page last revised on July 19, 2002

Ethical reasoning always takes place against a cultural background and in a community of some sort. You may be familiar with a religious community that has answers to most of the moral problems that are likely to arise. Different religious communities will make different assumptions, they will take different positions as their starting points, and they will arrive at different conclusions as to what a person should do.

Religious communities like this have what we shall call a comprehensive doctrine or view. There are many comprehensive doctrines, as there are many religions.

But religious communities are not the only communities that have comprehensive doctrines of this sort. Some political groups also have comprehensive views, for example, members of the various political clubs or movements, e.g., Franklin Delano Roosevelt-style liberals, socialists, fascists, libertarians. And there have been philosophical schools of which the same could be said.

If you belong to such a group, then you start out sharing basic moral assumptions. When there is a question of what to do, you naturally try to determine what should be done by reasoning from these assumptions.

But I can make no such assumption in this course. I assume that you belong to diverse religious, political, and philosophical communities, or that you have not yet made up your mind as to which you belong to. Let's call these first-level communities.

I assume that we belong to a broader, more inclusive community, a community that includes a variety of first-level communities. (Philosopher John Rawls refers to such a community as "a social union of social unions.")

In such a community we have to work out the rules by which we are going to live, recognizing that our comprehensive doctrines, the positions of our first-level communities, are going to differ. We come together in a public space (it could be a town hall meeting, or it could be public university or public school classroom) to try to reach some sort of mutual understanding. Just as you might go to a Christian or Muslim group and have discussions about what your moral views as Christians or Muslims might be, so we can go into a university ethics course and try to work out what our moral views as citizens should be. As a Christian will form his or her religiously based moral ideas in dialogue with other Christians, so citizens must work out their public sphere ethics in dialogue with other perspectives within the public sphere.

Public-sphere and religious ethics may harmonize with one another--we don't rule out that possibility--but we cannot assume it in advance.

In an inclusive community, such as the U.S. claims to be when it says that it has room for persons of all faiths, we have the obligation to address moral issues in ways that we can reasonably think others might find reasonable, even those who do not share our own comprehensive views. This means that we have to try to put ourselves into the mental framework of others and give them reasons they might be expected to find at least somewhat persuasive. Doing this is a way of showing respect to others as persons. It is an application of reciprocity. We propose as rules of justice rules not only that we respect but that we anticipate that others could reasonably come to respect as well. Reasonableness involves putting yourself in another person's shoes.

An example of an approach that clearly does not exhibit reciprocity is this.

The holy book we read says that the gods forbid us to eat beans. So it is morally wrong for anybody to eat beans. For this reason the police should be empowered to prevent you from eating beans.

This approach does not exhibit reciprocity because there is no reason to expect persons outside this particular group to understand the will of the divine in this way.

An example of the very different approach that clearly exhibits reciprocity is this:

People, including supporters of the war in Afghanistan, should defend the free speech rights of everyone, including opponents of the war. Even war supporters can see the point of free speech rights because they can imagine disagreeing with the dominant policy and wanting to criticize it, even if they do not happen to disagree with it now.

Because of the importance of reciprocity in reasoning in the public sphere I am stating the following assumptions of this course:

FOUR BASIC ASSUMPTIONS OF THIS COURSE

If you enter this web page here and wish to read about the logic behind these assumptions, go to the top of this page.

I. This course takes place in the public context and therefore takes no strictly religious teachings for granted. (Religions are understood as "comprehensive doctrines.")

II. Time permitting, any ideas bearing on ethical issues may be discussed, whether the origin of these ideas is religious or not.

(In fact, ethical ideas are produced from many sources. Religions are certainly one of the most active in this area. But we also get our ethical ideas from

a) our family (may or may not overlap with religion).

b) the law--laws against stealing and murder and bribery make these legally wrong but they also suggest that they are morally wrong.

c) collective and individual experience (over the long run). The discovery that religious tolerance is important arose in this way.

III. Any reasoning using religious premises may be subject to the same logical evaluation as reasoning that does not use religious premises.

Premises are starting points used in reasoning. When you try to prove, defend, or establish a position you provide premises, that is, your grounds or reasons, to back your conclusion, that is, your position.

IV. You may be exposed to views opposed to yours, unfamiliar to yours, or even distasteful to you, but for the purposes of this course you are requested to try to keep intense feelings under control. You are asked to suspend judgment on these views until you have studied the reasoning for them as well as reexamined the reasoning for your own views.