Secular Conscience: Why Belief Belongs in Public Life [Hardcover]

I am not a philosopher by training, and so, from a philosophical standpoint, most of Austin Dacey's excellent prose is as familiar to me as reading Homer in the original ancient Greek. However, in his terse, well-reasoned, polemic, "The Secular Conscience: Why Belief Belongs in Public Life", Dacey has made his case for a renewed version of Secular Humanism to find itself entrenched, along with organized religions, in American and world society. For him it is imperative that secular liberalism reclaims the moral high ground in advocating its liberal - if not strictly libertarian - perspective, warning us of the ever constant danger of religious intolerance as seen, for example, in some of the most orthodox, and repressive, Muslim societies. He urges liberals to claim a moral high ground by emphasizing the moral value of conscience, arguing that it is the philosophical equivalent of a free press, and, as such, acting as the guardian of civil liberties, including that of freedom of worship as one pleases. His is an argument that is most worthy of consideration, especially in a time when there are still hostile, indeed fanatical, attacks upon science and reason by those who consider themselves religiously devout. "The Secular Conscience" is not just a compelling statement by Dacey, but perhaps, more importantly, a potential blueprint for achieving a more rational society governed by secular conscience.

Austin Dacey is an American philosopher and a representative at the United Nations of the Center for Inquiry, which promotes the secular, scientific outlook. He is also on the editorial staff of Skeptical Inquirer and Free Inquiry.
In this brilliant and original book, Dacey advocates a public, objective and secular ethics. He argues that matters of conscience are fit subjects for public discussion guided by shared evaluative standards, evidence and experience.

Conscience must be free from coercion, but not free from judgement. Conscience is protected so that we can pursue the vital questions of meaning, truth and value in public dialogue and forums.

But the Roman Catholic Church has decreed, "Freedom of thought or expression ... cannot imply a right to offend the religious sentiments of believers." But this would end freedom of expression, because any criticism of religious doctrines could `offend the religious sentiments of believers'.

The assertion, `I'm right, you're wrong' is not intolerant; it is the nature of thought, as is then moving forward to saying, `and these are the reasons why you should change your mind'. This is not imposing one's opinion on others: persuasion is the opposite of coercion.

To defend one's point of view by saying, "I'm entitled to my opinion" is to refuse debate. The only opinions worth respect are those derived from investigation and debate.

The basis of ethics is independence of mind, with which we can evaluate all ideas and ideologies in the light of reason. Dacey argues that "the secular conscience stands prior to and independent of all religions." Religion is unnecessary to ethics: if God approves an act because it is good, then God is superfluous: if an act is good because God approves it, then there is no ethics, just assertion of authority.

As Dacey writes, "The real sceptics about ethics are those who think that human beings are incapable of fairness, responsibility, care, and compassion without divine enforcement." These sceptics privilege religion at the expense of ethics, faith at the expense of reason, and dogma at the expense of people.

Being secular and being liberal often means being on the back foot when it comes to certain kinds of talk. Words like "conscience", "sacred", "values" and "soul" are all used with such confidence by the religious that the non-believer shuffles along, as if past a crime scene, rubbernecking to see what all the fuss is about but glad not to be involved. Austin Dacey is not so squeamish: he's rolled his sleeves up and produced a magnificent book for secularists who suspect they too have a conscience, a few values, an idea of the sacred and even a soul of sorts.

The traditional image of the conscience is as a mirror of revelation, a "still, small voice" within. Matters of conscience - religion, ethics, values - are supposed to be private, so that sectarian beliefs are kept out of politics and public life. This backfires in two ways. First, "freedom of belief means believers are free to speak their minds in public" anyway. Second, if private means personal and subjective, then questions of conscience are "placed out of bounds of serious critical evaluation". This is not a good for secularism.

Dacey identifies two important fallacies. "Conscience is personal, so politeness and civility forbid bringing it up in public. Call this the Privacy Fallacy. Conscience is free, so it must be liberated from shared objective standards of rightness and truth. Call this the Liberty Fallacy." Instead of encouraging conscience to retreat inwards, Dacey suggests that the sound of conscience should be the clamour of conversation, "not the eerie whisper of revelation".

Liberals are especially prone to these fallacies. Under the Liberty Fallacy we "fall into an all-values-are-equal relativism" and make the mistake of thinking "that because conscience is free from coercion, it must be free from criticism, reason, truth, or independent, objective standards of right and wrong". Dacey reminds us that "there is nothing illiberal about asserting an objective truth, a claim that is made true by the way the world is". When you give the time of day to someone, you don't force that person into believing it is noon, you give him a reason to believe it.

The Privacy Fallacy assumes "that because matters of conscience are private in the sense of nongovernmental, they are private in the sense of personal preference". Rejecting this fallacy does not mean making conscience "a subject for coercive law or decision by majority vote" but it does mean bringing conscience out into the open, into the public sphere. Secularists who insist that belief be left at home will find it hard to defend their own positive moral vision in politics, and leave the field open to religious leaders and politicians who have no compunction in appealing to the baser kinds of religious sentiment.

Pope Benedict is not right about many things, but he is correct to think that secular values can turn a society inside out. In post-Christian Europe, "entire nations have been plunged into endemic health, skyrocketing education, and hopelessly low rates of violent crime" (see also Steven Pinker's compelling argument in The Better Angels of Our Nature: The Decline of Violence in History and Its Causes). The secular values responsible for these changes - "honesty, consistency, rationality, evidential support, feasibility, legality, morality, and revisability" - do not require supernatural aid. In dismissing what he calls "relativism" Benedict would do away with the values of secular liberalism: "individual autonomy, equal rights, and freedom of belief". (In his latest book The Future of Blasphemy: Democracy, Faith and Freedom of Expression: Speaking of the Sacred in an Age of Human Rights Dacey argues that these are sacred values in the sense of being inviolable and incommensurable. While the religious often bandy the word "sacred" around as a fig leaf for their own prejudices, Dacey provides compelling reasons why certain rights and values really are sacred.)

The standards that define the nature of conscience are the thoroughly secular "standards of reason, impartiality, and concern for others". "Secularism does not privatize conscience. It keeps conscience open... Conscience weighs what we have most reason to think or do. Therefore, it constantly seeks out the interests and reasons of others... there is no viable alternative to reasoning together... The common, impartial point of view - conscience's eye view - expands to include more and more reasons and interests, and the commonwealth of conscience is enlarged and enriched."

No viable alternative? What about God's law? The Ten Commandments? The moral lessons of scripture? The traditions of the church? Religious leaders down the ages have rehearsed the mantra that, when it comes to ethics, there is no viable alternative - to religion. There are many ways to defeat this claim. Consider the antislavery enterprise, bearing in mind the biblical endorsement of slavery, and Abraham Lincoln's position in the middle of the Civil War. He was receiving the counsel of clergy both for and against the Emancipation Proclamation: "I am approached with the most opposite opinions and advice, and that by religious men, who are equally certain that they represent the Divine will." He recognized that no revelation was going to decide the matter one way or the other: "I must study the plain physical facts of the case, ascertain what is possible, and learn what appears to be wise and right."

This is a powerful illustration of Dacey's argument. "With his talk of facts, practical wisdom, and moral right, Lincoln was using a vocabulary of public discourse that is secular in the most important sense - nonreligious, grounded in human reason, and oriented toward the human affairs of this world." What the religious forget is that "God is always of many minds" and can be wheeled in to support virtually any position. What is needed is "a law higher than God's" if we wish to coexist in peace. "That higher law is the rule of conscience."

The caricature of secularism put about by influential public figures such as the pope needs to be challenged, and substituted with a positive argument for secularism. For Spinoza, for example, questions of religion and value could be discussed critically and openly on the basis of shared norms. For Dacey, faith "cannot escape the judgment of reason" and conscience "is the soul of secularism". We are all members of the community of conscience, the people who must choose for themselves.