Practical Ethics

A Secular Foothold?

“Insofar as modern liberal discourse rests on a distinction between reasons that emerge in the course of disinterested observation — secular reasons — and reasons that flow from a prior metaphysical commitment, it hasn’t got a leg to stand on.”

And so Stanley Fish concludes his recent column about the role of secular reasons and religion in public life. While he briefly touches on a number of issues that stem from this ongoing debate, he focuses his commentary on the ideas of Stephen Smith, whose new book is called The Disenchantment of Secular Discourse. Since much of Smith’s argument circles around the notion of secular reasons, Fish begins by explaining what these reasons are all about.

Aid Beyond Belief

The days following the devastating earthquake in Haiti saw a surge in fundraising efforts from organizations all over the world. In this charitable climate, the atheist scientist Richard Dawkins set up an aid campaign of his own: Non-Believers Giving Aid. Why donate through his group? In addition to rallying fellow non-believers, Dawkins claims this offers a chance to “counter the scandalous myth that only the religious care about their fellow-humans.” There are a host of issues that could be discussed in relation to the aid effort and belief – why we feel compelled to help distant strangers, the problem of suffering, the idea of natural disasters as divine punishment – but I’ll concentrate on two main objections to Dawkins.

One objection would be that the entire project is simply a shameless propaganda scheme to get more “data” on charity giving among non-believers. Its purpose is to give the non-believers some numbers to point to, some “proof” that they give lots of money to charity. And for that reason, it is just an opportunistic ploy that is deeply inappropriate in a time of real crisis and tragedy.

Why the minaret ban?

I would like to try and throw additional light on the motives that led a majority of Swiss voters to a surprise acceptance, on November 29, of an initiative forbidding the construction of future minarets – already commented on by Russell Powell in his entry on this very blog yesterday. Some supporters of the initiative, such as far-right politician Ulrich Schlüer, who co-launched it (and was already notorious for his questionable campaign in 2004 against simplified naturalisation procedures), might simply want to prevent any minority with a cultural and religious background different from their own from expanding and expressing itself. Others might have been misled into thinking that all Muslims are extremists, supporting terrorist attacks. Yet I also suspect that a significant proportion of those who endorsed the minaret ban, while not being fundamentally hostile to Islam, might have been motivated by the worry that the further expansion of the Muslim community in Switzerland (and Europe in general) poses a threat to certain core values of Western liberal democracies, such as gender equality, freedom of speech, and the separation between church and state.

 

A controversial use of taxpayer funds

The health care reform bill currently being debated in the United States has re-ignited controversy there over abortion, and in particular over the availability of federal government funding to pay for the procedure. Earlier this month, the House of Representatives version of the health care bill passed narrowly, and with a last minute amendment that will restrict provision of abortions. The so-called “Stupak amendment” says that no health care plans receiving any subsidy from the federal government may offer abortions, except in the case where abortion is the result of rape, incest, or to save the woman’s life, and it maintains this restriction even if the government subsidies are kept separate from the private payments made into the plans, and no government subsidy is ever used to pay for abortions. The Stupak amendment represents a tightening over existing policy, according to which the federal government is prohibited from directly funding the provision of abortions, but may provide funds for hospitals, for example, that also provide abortions – so long as the hospitals pay for the abortions themselves by some other means.

The argument for Stupak’s additional restrictions on abortion funding is supposed to be that since money is fungible, the old prohibition does not really work to prevent federal funds indirectly playing a role in providing for abortions. Whatever the merits of this argument, it’s worth noting that many of its proponents in congress make it hypocritically; they are more than willing to accept generous campaign contributions drawn from the profits of health insurance companies that provide insurance for abortions as a component of their plans. But I want to focus here on the question of having any restriction of this kind at all. Can the federal government legitimately be prohibited from funding abortion?

God and Chance

As Paul Ewart points out in an interesting recent Guardian article ‘Why God Needs Chance’ --
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2009/nov/03/god-chance-philosophy-atheism -- chance events which result in certain individuals’ suffering undeservedly raise a version of the traditional ‘problem of evil’ for theists. If God, who is meant to be all-good and omnipotent, were to exist, how could he allow such chance events to occur?

Ewart goes on to argue that, if God is indeed to be omnipotent, chance may in fact be required. Here’s how I understand his argument. If the outcomes of our actions were entirely predictable, and we had free will, we could, in theory, force God to act to prevent some bad outcome. ‘So’, Ewart says, ‘God would no longer be in control – his actions would be determined by ours.’ But, because of chance, we can’t in fact predict the outcomes of our actions for sure, so we’re unable to distinguish what would be an act of God from a random event. So God remains omnipotent, because we can’t force him to act.

Who defines a Jew?

by David Edmonds

 

Here are some of the relevant facts about a landmark legal ruling last week – involving a dispute that illustrates an irresolvable tension within multi-culturalism. 

 

JFS is a Jewish ‘faith school’ in North London.  It achieves impressive academic results.  Faith schools’ are perfectly legal – indeed, they seem to have been encouraged by this government.  If oversubscribed, as the JFS usually is, faith schools are allowed to favour members of their faith.  There are many Christian and Islamic faith schools.

 

The legal case involved a boy, ‘M’.  JFS refused M a place because his mother, who was not born Jewish, converted to Judaism in a Progressive synagogue.  This conversion process is not recognized by the Office of the Chief Rabbi (OCR).  The family of the boy regularly attended Progressive synagogue.  

The Court of Appeal has just ruled that the JFS’s admissions policy contravened the Race Relations Act because of the requirement that for a pupil to qualify for admission “his mother must be Jewish, whether by descent or by conversion’.  This, the court said, was a “test of ethnicity”.

Here are a few minor comments about this case.

 

Is it simply “Killing a Mass Murderer”? Why anti-abortion zealots need to reconsider their arguments.

Recently, Dr. George Tiller was shot dead. Three hours after his assassination in Kansas, a pro-life activist was arrested and charged with first-degree murder.

Yad Vashem and the Pope

Today I just want to put a question. 

Pope Benedict is in Israel.  When a visiting VIP is in Israel – and they don’t get more VI than the Pope - he or she is invariably taken to the Holocaust museum, Yad Vashem.  Walking around Yad Vashem is an overwhelming experience.  As a museum it’s more raw, less professional, more gut-wrenching, than the vast and stunning Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.

Ecclesiastical gaydar: should churches be allowed to discriminate priests?

Melbourne's Catholic Churches have decided to test potential priests for sexual orientation, banning those that appear to be gay. This is in accordance with the Vatican recommendation that even celibate gays should not be allowed in the priesthood. Needless to say, both people within and outside the church have reacted negatively to it. But to what extent can a church declare who is fit to hold positions in it? And would the testing be fair?

Is Reality Just a State of Mind?

In a recent article in the Guardian entitled ‘Quantum Weirdness: What we call ‘reality’ is just a state of mind’, quantum physicist and winner of the 2009 Templeton prize Bernard d’Espagnat argues against the commonsense view, championed by realist philosophers, that reality is objective and importantly independent of our thinking about it. ( See: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2009/mar/17/templeton-quantum-entanglement). Like many before him d’Espagnat appeals to some of the findings of quantum mechanics, which appear to defy commonsense, to support his case. In particular, he appeals to the phenomenon of quantum entanglement, under which particles that have interacted with one another remain importantly connected to one another even when far apart. D’Espagnat points out that this phenomenon has important consequences for our conception of space and time. Somehow he seems to think that it is also important for debates about realism in general and not just to debates about the nature of space and time, although he does not explain why this is the case. According to him:

 

This reality is something that, while not a purely mind-made construct as radical idealism would have it, can be but the picture our mind forces us to form of ... Of what ? The only answer I am able to provide is that underlying this empirical reality is a mysterious, non-conceptualisable "ultimate reality", not embedded in space and (presumably) not in time either.