The assumption that ‘it is wrong to impose your moral beliefs onto others’ is almost unilaterally accepted in society. Everyone knows this, only zealous religious types seem to believe that it is acceptable to try to foist their morality onto others; the concept of respecting other people’s beliefs seems to be lost on the religious.

One does not have to look far to see this assumption at work; in the Aotearoa Ethnic Network Journal atheist commentator, Ken Perrott, writes,

Non-religious people have the right to be free from interference by religious people and organisations, freedom from proselytising, and freedom from imposition of values, morality and practice. I don’t think religious people should see this as in any way violating their rights. If anything, it helps preserve the sacredness of their beliefs –imposition on others degrades a belief.

Perrott is clear; those with religious beliefs should not demand that others comply with their views on morality. This criticism is not new, we see it regularly in the media and it is equally prevalent in academia. In her book, The Abortion Myth, bio-ethicist Leslie Cannold writes,

In the United States, the feminist rejection of the moral had a strong connection to the anti-choice religious right’s promotion of itself as the “moral” voice of the Republican movement. The agenda of the Christian right is, to put it rather baldly, to make the Bible (rather than the secular U.S Constitution) the supreme law of the land. The United States religious right, like most religious extremists, believe their political beliefs are actually God’s will. ... [Feminism is opposed] to one religious group’s imposition of its rather narrow version of morality on a pluralistic society.

Cannold states that any appeals to Gods will, as laid down in the Bible, constitute an imposition of moral views onto others. Feminists such as her, she assures us, oppose such things.

I find the claim, that it is wrong to impose your moral beliefs onto others, strange. Despite widespread acceptance to the contrary, I see nothing objectionable in imposing moral beliefs onto others.

While this comment may strike many as absurd, I assure you it is not for the following reasons. First of all, to claim that it is wrong to impose your moral beliefs onto others is self-defeating. Second, the contention is subject to serious counter-examples. I’ll explain what I mean.

If it is wrong to impose one’s beliefs onto others then it follows that one is required to refrain from such impositions; further, any attempt to impose moral beliefs should be prevented. However, this claim is itself a moral belief and as we’ve just established, it is being imposed on others. Therefore the claim is self-defeating, those who defend it are attempting to impose a moral belief about not-imposing moral beliefs onto others.

As for the counter examples, consider acts such as rape, assault or infanticide. I personally believe each of these practices is wrong for me to engage in. Further, I think it is wrong for others to do these things. In fact, I even support the commission of these acts being considered a crime punishable by the state. I am sure most would agree with me. However, if it were wrong to impose moral beliefs onto others then our position on rape, assault or infanticide would be unacceptable. We would have to leave others free to choose whether they wished to rape, assault or kill children – to do otherwise would be to impose our moral beliefs onto others.

Perhaps I am being uncharitable; Perrott and Cannold and others who advocate the claim, do not object to such impositions in an unqualified manner and certainly do not intend to promote anarchy. Their objection is that it is inappropriate to impose certain kinds of moral principles upon others.

The types of principles Cannold means to catch are those she labels “narrow”. What is meant by this spatial metaphor is unclear; however, I presume she means that this is a minority religious view, held by only a small segment of society.

Implicit in this argument is the claim that a necessary condition for any principle to be advocated as a basis for rules binding on all people is that the majority accepts the principle. However, this majoritarianism modification to the claim that it is wrong to impose your moral beliefs onto others is equally flawed.

Consider a culture where the majority believes that a husband has the right to beat his wife. Would Cannold contend that in such a society criticism by a Christian-feminist minority of this practice and their advocacy of norms forbidding spousal abuse is an unacceptable imposition of a narrow religious perspective in a pluralistic society? Would it be true that in such a society public policy could not be based on the moral principle that it is wrong for a man to beat his wife?

The objection to imposing one’s “narrow” moral beliefs onto others is flawed. What is wrong is not the imposition of someone’s values but the imposition of values that are incorrect, irrational, unethical, oppressive or unjust. If the principles expounded are correct and accurately reflect justice then there is nothing wrong with imposing them onto others, even if they are religious beliefs.

I write a monthly column for Investigate Magazine entitled Contra Mundum. This blog post was published in the September 09 issue and is reproduced here with permission. Contra Mundum is Latin for 'against the world;' the phrase is usually attributed to Athanasius who was exiled for defending Christian orthodoxy.

Letters to the editor should be sent to: editorial@investigatemagazine.DELETE.com

Ken Perrott, at Open Parachute, took issue with some comments I made in my recent defence of Plantinga’s stance on Evolution being taught in state schools. To gain focus let’s look at one thing I said to Ken in the comments section on that post,

I went on to say

Central to this argument is a distinction between all the relevant scientific evidence and all the relevant total evidence. The argument assumes that science, while a reliable method of gaining truth in many areas, is not the only source of reliable information we have about the world, that on certain topics we can also discover truths about the world through faith and revelation; hence, on these topics an accurate view of the world must utilise both sources of information.

Ken was clearly displeased with this statement and labeled it the “other ways of knowing argument.” On his own site he asked me to respond to his criticisms; I will do so below.

1. Much of Ken’s response to this appears to be based on a failure to grasp what I actually said. In the above citation I did not say that evolution was not true nor did I say evolution was not probable on all the relevant evidence. Everything I have said is entirely compatible with theistic evolution, where a person comes to a position based both on the scientific evidence and the theological reflection. I did not say, as Ken repeatedly attributes to me, that “theology trumps science” or that theological reflection is more reliable than science. What I said was that a theory which is probable on all the evidence, that is all the theological and all the scientific evidence, taken together, should be believed over a theory which is only probable on the scientific evidence alone. I also maintain the opposite is true; a theory which is probable on all relevant evidence, drawn from both theology and science should be believed over a theory which is supported by theological considerations alone.

The issue then, is not that one discipline “trumps another,” it is that a theory is not worthy of consent unless it takes into account all the relevant information from both disciplines. I think that theological and scientific reflections are both reliable methods and our interpretation of both the theological and empirical data can be fallible.

These clarifications address an awful lot of Ken’s argument such as his statement, “To assert today that we should revert to a pre-scientific era, that theology or philosophy should trump scientific knowledge, is to claim that mythology/logic/reason is more reliable than evidence.” Given that I never said that theology should trump science, this statement is irrelevant.

Similarly, Ken’s claim that my position “is consistent with the Wedge strategy” is misleading. While it is true that my position is consistent with creationism, as I note above, it is also consistent with evolutionary theory. Contrary to what Ken thinks, the mere fact that two views are consistent provides no basis for linking the views together in a kind of guilt by association argument. Creationism is, after all, consistent with the view that Wellington is the capital of New Zealand; however, this does not mean that everyone who claims that Wellington is the capital believes that the world was created in six 24-hour days. Consider a less palatable example; Hitler’s belief in the superiority of the Aryan race is consistent with the claim that there is a city called Cairo this does not mean that anyone who remembers visiting Cairo is a Nazi.

2. Ken’s response also appears marred by a failure to adequately understand the meaning of some philosophical terms I use. In the above citation I use the word “true,” Ken says, in response to my use of it, that “the word [truth] means different things to theologians, scientists and people on the street.” In fact, in the above citation I am using the standard Aristotelian concept of truth which is common to both disciplines. Aristotle stated, “To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true.” By this definition the claim that the earth is round is true if the earth is, in fact, actually round, and it is false if the earth is, in fact, not round. Similarly in theology, the claim that God created the world ex nihilo is true if there is, in fact, a God and he did, in fact, create the physical universe out of nothing a finite period of time ago.

Ken seems similarly confused about the meaning of the word “logic” and goes to great lengths to assert that “logic must follow evidence.” However, this simply shows he does not understand logic; logic is the study of rules of inference, that is, logic tells one how to deduce conclusions from evidence. Once this is realised, the claim that logic should follow evidence makes no sense. One cannot deduce or infer anything from evidence without logic in the first place.

Similarly Ken’s suggestion that science is more reliable than logic is questionable. Science utilises logic to infer its conclusions from the empirical data; logic, therefore, is a presupposition of science that science needs if science is to conclude anything. Moreover, some axioms of logic clearly are more certain and reliable than many empirical claims, the claim, for example, that Both A and Not A cannot both be true, in the same sense, at the same time is more certain that speculations about how first life arose. Similarly with the rule modus tollens, something of which we can be relatively certain, which states: if A, then B, not B, therefore, not A.

3. Putting aside these misinterpretations and philosophical mistakes, Ken’s main objection is,

Elsewhere he claims,

Here Ken raises a fairly standard argument:

This argument is problematic and has been refuted numerous times in the literature; here I can be brief. Turning to [1] Larry Laudan notes “It is now widely acknowledged that many scientific claims are not testable in isolation, but only when embedded in part of a larger system of statements, some of whose consequences can be submitted to test.”[1] Take the claim that there is at least one electron in the universe. To test the truth of this claim we would need a theory about how electrons act under various conditions, what their predicted effects upon things would be and theories about how one could detect these effects if they occur and so on. Only with this kind of background information can we can use the relevant tools to test the predictions; however, in isolation, the claim that there is at least one electron is untestable.[2]

Second, many theological claims are testable in precisely the same way. Take the claim made by Archbishop Usher that the world was created 6000 years ago. This claim is testable; we can muster empirical evidence to assess the age of the earth. The same is true for other theological claims; take the claim, for example, that the cosmos had a beginning in time, an implication of the theological views of St Augustine or that the universe is governed by laws that can only be discovered by empirical means, an implication of the voluntarist theology of the late middle ages or the claim made by 14th-15th century theologians that, contrary to some interpretations of Aristotlian physics, God did make the universe such that the earth orbited the sun or Augustine’s claim that God created the world with seed principles, via which, the whole creation of the universe could unfound over time or Bonaventure’s theologically based contention that the cosmology of his day was mistaken in claiming that the universe was infinitely old.

Turning to [2] the suggestion that only testable claims can be utilised in answering a question about the world is also questionable. Ethical statements, such as, “it is wrong to cause pain just for entertainment” cannot be, by themselves, empirically tested yet in answering many questions about what we ought to do it is impossible to get an answer without appealing to them. Moreover, one cannot empirically test anything without presupposing some truths that themselves cannot be empirically established. Hume showed for example that it is impossible to non- circularly justify the reliability of inductive reasoning. William Alston has argued persuasively that one cannot empirically verify the reliability of one’s senses (the reason for this is quite obvious, to empirically demonstrate anything one needs to use one’s senses, and hence, one needs to presuppose the reliability of the source one is trying to prove the reliability of). It is hard to even conceive of a situation where basic axioms of logic, such as the law of non-contradiction, could be observably false. Yet science proceeds by presupposing the reliability of the senses, the reliability of inductive reasoning and the rules of logic.

Ken’s central argument then is mistaken. His other arguments fair no better, such as his attempt to try to link my position with Stalinism;

Apart from the fact that I did not espouse creationism or claim that theology trumps science, Ken here seems to think that telling state schools that they can teach a theory is true , as opposed to merely saying that it is the best scientific theory, is akin to arresting scientists, censoring their research, persecuting and executing them!

Unfortunately, this logic can be turned on its head as the same logic would entail that refusal to teach Christian theology as the truth in state schools is akin to persecuting Christian theologians, censoring their research, persecuting them and executing them; hence, any atheist who objects to their children being taught religion at a state school is advocating some kind of quasi-Stalinist policy.

Somewhat ironically, however, Ken makes some claims that if taken seriously suggest he is not adverse to religious persecution. Ken states that,

Ken here implies that state schools should teach that a particular religious perspective is false if “that’s reality.” In other words, if a person’s religious beliefs really are false then it is not unjust for the state to teach this.

Now as I stated in my original post and as I have repeated several times in correspondence with Ken, this argument is problematic. Both Ken and I agree that Islam is false, that Mohammad is not a prophet. If Ken’s claims were correct then, justice would require that the government run re-education programs for Muslim students telling them that Mohammad is not a prophet. After all, as Ken grants, “this is reality” and the religious sensibilities of other people cannot justify not teaching reality.

Ken’s second argument is that to fail to tell children that evolution is true is “child abuse.” As I pointed out, however, if this were true then the many Muslim, Christian and Jewish parents who home school their kids with creationist texts or send their kids to private schools where creationism is taught should be arrested, charged with child abuse and punished at law on par with child abusers; further, their children should be placed in state care and sent to state re-education centres. The logical implication of both Ken’s arguments is religious persecution.

Now I pointed both these points out to Ken when he raised them in previous discussions. Ken’s response was to apparently ignore the response and just repeat the argument. This, however, is not a rational response at all; simply repeating the same mantra over and over does not make it true.

[1] Larry Laudan “Science at the Bar -- Causes for Concern” Science, Technology and Human Values 7: 16-19.
[2] For example see, Alvin Plantinga “Religion and Science” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

RELATED POSTS:
Evolution should not be taught in State Schools: A Defence of Plantinga Part I
Evolution should not be taught in State Schools: A Defence of Plantinga Part II