Is Nothing Sacred? A (Secular) Philosophy of Incarnation

During his Papal Visit to the United Kingdom in September 2010 Pope Benedict XVI gave an Address in Westminster Hall[1] in which he expressed his concern ‘at the increasing marginalisation of religion, particularly of Christianity’. He went on to say that ‘There are those who would advocate that the voice of religion be silenced, or at least relegated to the purely private sphere’. Using strikingly similar language the Catholic philosopher John Haldane has remarked in a recent collection of essays on ‘the exclusion or ‘silencing’ of religion within philosophy’. ‘Religion has become an unwelcome presence’, he says, ‘and efforts to introduce it are generally resisted’.[2]
Meanwhile, In a recent interview (July 2010) in the New Statesman[3] the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, was invited to respond to the question, Can we make sense of morality without a religious notion of a transcendent or supernatural being? He resp0nded to this question in the following terms:
I think that to make sense of unconditional rights or claims, we need to be clear that there is such a thing as universal human nature and that this has some intrinsic dignity or worth. To try and ground this independently of the idea of a transcendent source of value seems to me not finally feasible. People do, of course, make such claims, and do so in good faith, but I don’t see how you can define a universally shared, equal, independent-of-local-culture-and-habit conception of human flourishing without something more than a pragmatic or immanent basis.
In other words, I think morality ultimately needs a notion of the sacred—and for the Christian that means understanding all human beings without exception as the objects of an equal, unswerving, unconditional love.
And, echoing this talk of the necessity of reference to ‘the sacred’ the philosopher Gordon Graham has written in the following terms[4]:
(I)f we characterise ‘the sacred’ in terms of absolute requirements and prohibitions, it appears that something more needs to be said about the authoritative nature of these absolutes. Since ‘absolute’ here contrasts with dispensable or negotiable, and nothing that arises from human will or inclination alone … is non-negotiable, we need some further step that makes submission of the will intelligible. In most religions the further step is evident, because encounters with the sacred are encounters with a divine or supernatural realm, a different order of reality that is (in some sense) beyond or greater than the natural world of human pleasure and welfare. Anyone who wishes to retain sacred value while abandoning the supernatural must therefore explain what it is that enables the sacred to require veneration, to forbid desecration and so on.
Pope Benedict went on to urge his audience ‘to seek ways of promoting and encouraging dialogue between faith and reason at every level of national life.’ He remarks that ‘the world of reason and the world of faith—the world of secular rationality and the world of religious belief—need one another and should not be afraid to enter into a profound and ongoing dialogue, for the good of our civilisation’. The Pope supports this contention with the following brief outline of a position:
The Catholic tradition maintains that the objective norms governing right action are accessible to reason, prescinding from the content of revelation. According to this understanding the role of religion in political debate is not so much to supply these norms, as if they could not be known by non-believers … but rather to help purify and shed light upon the application of reason to the discovery of objective moral principles, this “corrective” role of religion vis-à-vis reason is not always welcomed … partly because distorted forms of religion … can be seen to create social problems themselves. And in their turn, these distortions of religion arise when insufficient attention is given to the purifying and structuring role of reason within religion. It is a two-way process. Without the corrective supplied by religion, though, reason too can fall prey to distortions, as when it is manipulated by ideology, or applied in a partial way that fail to take full account of the dignity of the human person.
Benedict talks about his Church’s ‘overriding concern to safeguard the unique dignity of every human person, created in the image and likeness of God’, and he remarks in terms that echo those of Rowan Williams, that ‘if the moral principles underpinning the democratic process are themselves determined by nothing more solid than social consensus, then the fragility of the process becomes all too evident.’
Benedict’s measured remarks take the form of an invitation to a dialogue with ‘secular rationality’ in a cultural atmosphere, as he perceives it, and not without grounds, of indifference or hostility to religion. It is certainly true that the more populist exponents of secularism have sometimes been intemperate in the expression of their opposition to religion, and usually in ways that identify it with the distorted forms that Benedict refers to, those of fundamentalism and sectarianism. However, the irony of popular polemic and public pronouncements on both sides is that each views the other as the harbinger of moral catastrophe.
But the conditions for the possibility of a dialogue between religion and secularism are not unavailable. They do, however, involve a frank assessment by both parties of the terms in which they and their partners in the dialogue conceive the terms of the discussion. The way that Benedict casts those terms naturally reflects his own understanding of the world of faith or religious belief, but it also reflects his understanding of the world of reason. Although the Catholic Church has a tradition of vindicating the reasonableness of faith, it is noteworthy that in referring to the way in which reason and faith need each other, and after he has glossed ‘reason’ as ‘secular rationality’, Benedict talks about ‘the purifying and structuring role of reason within religion’ (my italics). This is an unlikely role for ‘secular rationality’ and suggests some suppressed scepticism about the reality of the mutual need—‘secular rationality’ can be ‘corrected’ by religion, whereas the latter has nothing to learn from the former. The context here is the very specific one that related to the traditional Catholic view that ‘objective norms’ can be discerned through the use of reason. ‘The “corrective” role of religion is to help to purify and shed light upon the application of reason to the discovery of objective moral principles’. But why can religion offer this “corrective” role?—because although reason has access to ‘objective norms’ prescinding from revelation, these norms are nevertheless also revealed and so religion is in a privileged position: it can determine whether or not ‘secular rationality’ gets it right. Secular thinkers may agree that reason can fall prey to distortions in the form of ideological manipulation, for instance, without agreeing that reason is to be saved from this by the corrective supplied by religion—though this is not to say that the religious tradition cannot be one of the sources by which distortions of reason can be corrected. For one thing, distortions in the particular uses of reason can be corrected by further particular uses of reason, as any good Marxist would tell us.
But now, although the doctrine is that reason has access to ‘objective norms’ independently of revelation, it does not follow from this that the objectivity of these norms can be grounded independently of revelation—as reflecting God’s will, for instance. There seems to be a convergence here in the thinking of Benedict XVI, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the philosopher Gordon Graham, a convergence on the idea of the necessity of ‘the sacred’ as a transcendent grounding. There is a further convergence on the idea of the special role of religion in protecting the dignity of the human person, in the absence of which this dignity is in jeopardy.
2
In casting ourselves in the roles of partners in dialogue we need to articulate at some point not only our general sense of our own position but also our sense of our interlocutor’s—both parties need to stand ready to be corrected in their version of the other. As we have seen, Gordon Graham has offered a challenge to the secular thinker about the nature of their commitment to ‘sacred value’ and this provides a convenient starting-point, since he makes certain assumptions about what must be a difficulty for such a person, a difficulty he expands on as follows[5]:
Distinctive attitudes separate moral and religious absolutes, however, the latter being more naturally characterised by the language of veneration and desecration. The difference enables us to explain the following sort of example … if circumstances were to bring it about that you were driven to steal from your mother, it is sufficient (perhaps) to explain the wrongness of doing so in terms of quite general moral obligations and prohibitions and/or her well being. But suppose you are invited to trample on a photograph of your dead mother. What exactly is objectionable about doing this? There is no obviously moral dimension—since no right is violated and you could not be doing her harm in any obvious sense …. Yet at a minimum most people would be deeply reluctant to do this, and need some very strong reason to counter this reluctance. Anyone who finds this reluctance puzzling and thinks there is no real objection because ‘it’s only a picture’ reveals themselves as oddly inhuman … to this extent they lack any sense of the sacred; which is to say, while they can judge what is useful and beneficial, they have no place for the veneration of things.
There are several things I want to draw attention to here. The first is the idea that if we are to talk of the absolute we need an account of its ‘authority’ which will render intelligible submission of the will; the second is that whatever can properly be called ‘absolute’ cannot derive from human will or inclination alone; the third is that there is a distinction between a sense of the sacred and ‘morality’; and the fourth is that in talking of the sacred we are talking of absolute requirements and prohibitions.
The direction of thought, if I understand Graham correctly, is that someone can practise ‘morality’ without having any sense of ‘the sacred’. But it is the sacred which gives morality its absolute force in the form of requirements and prohibitions which compel the will’s submission—and in the absence of any such source ‘morality’ would become no more than a negotiable product of the will. A religiously-minded person will refer ‘sacred value’ to a supernatural source—and the challenge to the secular thinker is that they need to give an alternative account of the sacred—if they wish to retain the notion—if they wish, that is, to resist the thought, as they surely should, that morality is a dispensable product of the will, They need, in other words, to explain
what prevents it from collapsing into a mere affirmation of the Ubermensch, in itself groundless and without implications for others (as Nietzsche acknowledged). We can interpret Kant’s Groundwork as an attempt to attach veneration to morality (through ‘reverence for the moral law’) and this is a move that contemporary thought often makes in its assertions that human life is ‘sacred’ and human rights ‘inviolable’.[6]

Graham goes on to remark that ‘the secular aspiration to retain sacred value without supernatural warrant has more work to do’ and voices the suspicion that ‘any purely naturalistic account of the sacred will reveal a philosophical instability that can only be resolved when the supernatural is invoked as its ground’.
When we make claims as philosophers there is usually something that we wish to resist through the contrary force of what we assert. I am sympathetic to Graham’s resistance to the idea that morality can be grounded in the bare affirmation of the will, but am not so sure that I want to turn in the same direction as he does—I suppose, indeed, that I should want to offer a purely naturalistic account of the sacred, if I were convinced that it had any (grounding) role to play at all.
It looks as though the thought is that if we cannot locate the ground of morality in the human will then there is nowhere to go but the divine. I say it looks as though this is the thought, but it is rather the case that Graham is re-asserting the status quo ante in the form of a very specific theology—that the source of the good is to be found in God’s will. The peculiar thing is that Sartre’s atheistic existentialism shares that theology: if God does not exist then the source of the good must lie not in his will but in the will of human beings. I agree with Graham that this will not do and that we must find something that informs and compels the will. It is significant that in his lecture Sartre does make a significant concession and offers us just that—the consideration that in choosing for myself I choose for all. We have to ask the question, with what does he thereby seek to inform the will, what is the essential guiding information? By the same token philosophers have been dissatisfied with Kant’s appeal to reverence for the moral law since it raises the question what is it about the moral law that merits reverence and if we seek an answer to that question we go outside the terms of Kant’s own discussion. My problem with Graham’s position, though, is that it moves too quickly back to the default theology, to the thought that if we cannot ground absolute value in the human will then we must return to the original position and locate it in the divine. It is not that we cannot have something that we call morality in its absence—though it is most likely to be the tense negotiation of power and interest that belongs to the state of nature or as commended by the hard men of Plato’s Republic—but what we cannot have is the idea that human life is ‘sacred’ or that human rights are ‘inviolable’. We might have a brief consensus, to use Benedict’s word, in favour of treating human rights as ‘inviolable’ but that is not what makes them such and is no kind of ground.
I want to look more closely at the way in which Graham is using this term ‘morality’ as it emerges in his discussion of the case of the photograph. Here someone is invited to trample on the picture of their late mother. It seems to me that the repugnance most of us would feel is a moral repugnance. But Graham remarks that there is ‘no obviously moral objection’ and does so on the grounds that since she is now dead no harm is done to her and no rights have been violated. But this position relies on a deracinated notion of morality in which judgment and action are cut off from their own moral grounds and distinctive reasons. It is obvious that many people will want to say that to trample on her image would be an act of ‘desecration’, and also that in using this expression we reach into a religious lexicon, and in doing so register our sense of the gravity of the act. The invitation is to an expression of contempt towards a representation of the mother and therefore of the filial bond that grounds concern for her well being. The photograph is a representation in both senses of that term: it pictures the mother but also serves as a concrete universal, evoking the parental relationship more generally. If you say, but you don’t harm her, I reply that you have been invited to show contempt for a moral idea. It is inviting someone to express an attitude that is contrary to that which would inform their conduct.
Part of the problem is that the notion of morality has been reduced to a system of requirements and prohibitions, which thus understood would always be thought of as an external constraint upon one’s freedom rather than an expression of inner necessity—and if that is a false impression the language needs to be altered. Paradoxically, the focus is not exclusively on requirements and prohibitions, but also on judgments of harm or well being. But such judgments are an expression of our moral intelligence in the presence of which it is difficult to see the function of the language of requirement and prohibition. The motivation to avoid what one sees will harm someone is different from the motivation to avoid what is prohibited. It is true that we are unreliable and double-minded beings and there is room for the imperative voice within a divided self—but such an imperative is self-addressed to a recalcitrant but morally responsive intelligence. By contrast, the motivation to do what is required and avoid what is prohibited must presumably be obedience to the authority that such language presupposes, in this case the will of God. But it seems strange to think that the source of one’s reluctance to trample on the image of one’s own mother is that it is against God’s will.
Graham’s challenge had been that anyone who wished to ‘retain sacred value while abandoning the supernatural must therefore explain what it is that enables the sacred to require veneration, to forbid desecration and so on’. The qualification of ‘value’ by the term ‘sacred’ is intended to mark our readiness to talk of human rights, say, as ‘inviolable’, or of human life as ‘sacred’, so that this inviolability is properly an object of veneration and can be desecrated. What I have sought to resist is the introduction of the language of requirement and prohibition here on the grounds that they are external to what is venerated or desecrated, so that we are looking for reasons for action that are external to the nature of the acts themselves, reasons connected with obedience to authority. We have by contrast to find an aspect of the object that is venerated that compels or draws out our veneration, not as a requirement but as an expression of necessity. The theistic version of this is that ideally the believer is conformed to God’s will and falls in with it (love God and do what you want), but not for the sake of obedience to that will.
3
As far as the silencing or exclusion of religion in philosophy is concerned many would respond, perhaps too precipitately, that it is not suppression but ennui: it is a story we have stopped listening to. The New Statesman interviewers had asked Rowan Williams whether we can make sense of morality without a notion of a transcendent or supernatural being and although this question lacks definition I would hazard that most philosophers would say that of course we can make sense of morality without this religious notion. The trouble is that we are not operating with a single and commonly understood notion of morality and even those who wish to give a religious account might differ in their view of how we should understand morality. I said ‘too precipitately’ because we might not have got the story right and, to return to the theme of the responsibility of partners in a dialogue, some religious thinkers may protest that indeed the secular thinker has not understood the story. My concern in what follows is to explore whether there is a religious account that a non-theistic, secular thinker can do business with. I believe that Rowan Williams offers the sketch of such an account, but first I want to examine a popular picture of what is involved in bringing God into morality, and the discussion will continue themes from Graham’s account of sacred value.
But God torments me. That is the only thing that is tormenting me. What if he doesn’t exist? What if Rakitin is right, that it’s a fiction created by mankind. For if he doesn’t exist, then man is the master of the earth … But how can he be virtuous without God? That’s the question. For whom will he love then? Man, that is … Rakitin says that one can love humanity without God. Well, only a little snivelling half-wit can maintain that. I can’t understand it.[7]
These remarks of Dmitry Karamazov (Mitya) repay attention, of course, but the comment that has received popular philosophical attention through Sartre’s treatment of it is his brother Ivan’s reported comment that if there isn’t a God then everything is permitted. As Mitya puts it, ‘if there is no God and no afterlife, you can do what you like. Everything is allowed.’[8] Sartre’s purpose is to underline our abandonment and our responsibility, and, indeed, the real apodosis is not that everything is permitted but that we should stop thinking in terms of permission—which is only dubiously a moral category at all, implying, rather, a Kantian heteronomous subject. The common nineteenth century anxiety about the consequences of the loss of belief was partly about social control. In terms of the moral education of the species, sapere aude notwithstanding, the general population is not only incapable of making moral judgments independently but the loss of belief removed the significant sanction of eternal punishment.
The description of Mitya’s perplexity reflects this background. The object of his anxiety is the loss of a moral compass and of sanctions. But this alarm is driven by the standards themselves. His concern that if there’s no God then you can do what you like posits a rampant human subject who lacks moral discernment and instruction and can act with impunity. It would be self-defeating to claim that this is the condition of the human subject as such, since it is a description offered by a human subject from a position that transcends what it describes. But the anxiety about moral heteronomy thus conceived tends to conflate the idea that an action is wrong with the idea that it is prohibited, with the result that the idea of transgression, which is always prompted by the forbidden, strays into the ethical. Indeed it would be bizarre if the protest against their father’s murder was that it’s not allowed rather than that it’s an act of murder. We act morally when we refrain from an action because we have some reason to judge that it is wrong, not because we believe it to be prohibited. An action’s being wrong is one reason for public prohibitions and sanctions imposed on unreliable moral agents, but if we can see the reason then the prohibition is redundant. If there were no God, to continue with this simplistic theology, the reasons we have for judging that certain actions are wrong would still obtain, even if God wasn’t around to ban them as it were.
But Dmitry’s anxiety thus expressed locates the motivation for moral action outside of what otherwise might be counted as a moral reason for acting. The grossness of the idea that someone would refrain from murder because it is not allowed rather than because it is murder shows, even as we multiply examples of people thinking in just this way, that motivation is being sought outside morality. Someone may be moved to refrain from violent action through the threat of dire consequences. But this is precisely a motivation outside morality itself and it depends upon a notion of effective authority. By the same token, and to repeat, we have a similar problem with the language of moral requirements and prohibitions. If we think of it as a moral requirement that we should do no murder we are already locating our motivation for this outside reflection on the nature of the act itself and we should have to ask what it is that would move us to act according to a requirement. If we simply refer back to the nature of the act then we have already cancelled the need to talk in terms of requirement and prohibition. Otherwise we should have to locate it in obedience to authority: we are moved to do what is required of us, to refrain from what is prohibited, and we as a human subjectivity stand over against what is thus perceived as a restraint, rather than invoking the internal language of what we might feel compelled to do or what we might recoil from.
I labour this point about the language of requirement and prohibition because, if we persist in using it, there are consequences for how we understand the motivation for moral action. It would have to be understood as a motivation for not doing what is prohibited and it is hard to see how this could be grounded in anything other than obedience to authority. If God is conceived as the source of what is permitted and what is prohibited then if we stop thinking theistically we need also to abandon talk of permission and prohibition at all, unless we can show that there is some alternative basis for that talk, some alternative basis for the notion of authority that is implicitly appealed to. But it is not so easy to disentangle oneself from the theological conception and the forms of language we inherit from it. I have heard a well regarded philosopher declare that the fundamental question in moral philosophy is ‘what may we do?’—and philosophers routinely talk of ‘moral requirements’ and ‘moral prohibitions’. But this seems to reflect a particular experience of ‘morality’, one which sees it as a constraint upon rather than an expression of one’s human freedom. The model is too obviously that of political obligation, the necessity of obedience and the threat of sanctions, a language which is superimposed upon and then distorts the theistic doctrine of love.
When we start to reflect philosophically upon morality we are all too likely to find a moral language ready to hand and we enter it unthinkingly and systematise and rationalise what is thus presented as a given, but which for all that determines a conception of moral life which ought really to have been brought into question. Nevertheless, with the language of requirement and prohibition ready to hand, it is relatively easy for a theorist to transfer the source of the authority from the will of God to the consenting will of human beings who see such an arrangement as in their interest. Whether this is adequate to the complexity of moral psychology is another matter.
4
How else can we understand the question raised by Rowan Williams’ interviewers—Can we make sense of morality without a religious notion of a transcendent or supernatural being? Surely they can’t be asking whether morality tout court would be possible without such a notion—but what conception of morality can we sustain if we break the connection? This indeed is the thrust of Graham’s challenge to the non-theistic thinker. Perhaps we can frame the question in this way: is the idea of an ‘absolute’ morality an essentially theological conception that is unavailable to the secularist? I shall in what follows contend against this ‘essentially’ and suggest instead that this idea has one of its settings within a theistic culture but is not limited by that setting.
It is time to consider Rowan Williams’ response to the original question, which I shall reproduce here for convenience:
I think that to make sense of unconditional rights or claims, we need to be clear that there is such a thing as universal human nature and that this has some intrinsic dignity or worth. To try and ground this independently of the idea of a transcendent source of value seems to me not finally feasible. People do, of course, make such claims, and do so in good faith, but I don’t see how you can define a universally shared, equal, independent-of-local-culture-and-habit conception of human flourishing without something more than a pragmatic or immanent basis.
In other words, I think morality ultimately needs a notion of the sacred—and for the Christian that means understanding all human beings without exception as the objects of an equal, unswerving, unconditional love.
Instead of taking up the generic and opaque ‘morality’ Williams refers to the ‘intrinsic dignity’ of human beings and of unconditional rights or claims in terms which echo the reflections of Gordon Graham and Pope Benedict.
To seek to ground these ideas independently of a transcendent source of value is, he thinks, ‘not finally feasible’. This is a brief answer at the opening of a more wide ranging interview and we cannot expect any further elaboration. The idea of a ‘source of value’, transcendent or otherwise, is not quite clear as it stands but I shall seek to concur in one possible interpretation, viz that we are talking about the idea of a source of our moral evaluations, though whether we can think of that source as ‘transcendent’ is another matter.
I take it that Williams is insisting that in the absence of such a ‘transcendent source of value’ we cannot sustain or are not entitled to the idea that the ‘dignity’ or ‘worth’ we accord human beings is ‘intrinsic’ or that human rights, for instance, are properly to be thought of as ‘unconditional’. To a secular mind, as Williams knows full well, this does not seem remotely plausible. Surely, we might say, if we talk about human rights as ‘unconditional’ we simply imply a determination not to allow any other consideration, such as expediency, to take precedence—and, since we let such considerations take precedence rather frequently, imply that at least when other people override them it is a crime. We do not allow their possession to be determined by any specific privilege of status or citizenship, for instance. When we say that a human being’s dignity or worth is ‘intrinsic’ we imply that it belongs to them simply as a human being (and then, of course, we owe an account of what a human being is in virtue of which we accord them this dignity). And we deny that a particular way of treating other human beings (‘never merely as a means’) depends upon privilege or social status, race, gender or sexual orientation. To use a phrase deployed by Gordon Graham, we are simply insisting that these things are non-negotiable, that you need to meet no further condition to be the recipient of such a right than that you’re a human being.
But to say that these values are ‘non-negotiable’ does not mean that we cannot betray them; when we talk about human rights as ‘inviolable’ we do not mean that they cannot be violated because we violate them all the time, that is why there are rights:—the ‘cannot’ here is that of moral impossibility. We do not give expression to a metaphysical truth but to a moral ideal towards which we are determined to strive—and the significant thing for our purposes lies in the source of that determination to strive. The point is that if we ‘negotiate’ over something non-negotiable we do not register a simple alteration in the direction of the will but a betrayal … of those for whose sake we conceived the ideal.
If we are not to ground our claim that human rights or other moral claims are unconditional or absolute in the bare act of our so willing—because this is no kind of ground at all—it must lie in something that informs and governs the direction of the will and only those who are already theistically inclined will see God’s will as the conceptual alternative ready to hand, though it is a popular error to suppose that this is to replace one arbitrary will for another, since God’s will is that of a being whose essence is goodness. This is not to deny that wicked things are done in the name of this will. Nevertheless Williams’ thought does seem to be that we are not entitled to this unconditionality unless we can refer it to a divine or transcendent source, that if we cannot draw on the divine will to secure it then nothing is unconditional. If we insist that values are absolute then we are committed to a transcendent source, committed to the ‘sacred’. Otherwise all we have left as it were is a morality or, better, a politics of expediency, calculation, advantage, the state of nature. The secularist is unwittingly drawing on a theological view of the world when they seek to defend an absolute conception and since they have rejected that view they have lost the support that secures such claims.
Part of the problem with coming to address this position lies in the opacity of the idea of a source of value, as opposed to a source of moral evaluations. The metaphor of setting a value on something leads us to think that it is something that we confer and that this intentional act is an act of choosing and it all looks like a bare act of will or affirmation again—and, again, the thought is then that if it is we who thus confer value on an object the act is defeasible. Whereas the real point is to see what reasons bring us to attach importance to the object since it is these reasons that inform and direct the will. If we were to talk about what we attach importance to rather than about what we attach value to the voluntaristic language would have less of a foothold and we could replace it by talk of what compels us and what we recoil from. We do not so much confer value as find it and to say that we don’t confer it does not imply that another, divine, will does so confer value, as in conferring dignity on human beings. We do not choose that one kind of reason governs our thinking rather than another.
5
However, it seems to me that Williams himself is thinking in rather different terms, terms which depend upon the idea that would anyway be endorsed by Graham—that it we are to talk of God’s Will we are also talking about the God of Love. The issue for us is not whether as non-theistic thinkers we should steal quietly away, but to see whether there is the possibility of common ground, the possibility of dialogue.
Although it may be misleading to talk in terms of a ‘source of value’ it does make sense to talk about a source of our moral evaluations, or, more to the point, about a source of a language and tradition of recognisably moral evaluation. The root question in all of this is why anyone would care, except for the sake of their own self interest. What is the source of or the motivation for our readiness to accord any human being a dignity that is intrinsic to their being a human being at all, so that the reduction of anyone to ‘bare forked animal’ is a reduction and a violation? The poignancy of the question is marked by the limited scope of the first person plural here. It must have something to do with a view of and an attitude towards what it is to be human at all. The attainment of such a view and such an attitude depends upon the development of a particular formation of subjectivity that is itself what we seek to protect when we seek to protect humanity ‘as an end’.
In order to get a sense of this we need to start with the formation of human solidarity that depends upon a widening of our sympathies, of what david Hue called the natural sentiments of humanity. A condition of such widening is the achieved access to reflection upon one’s situation as that of a human being, rather than, say, as a member of a slave class or warrior caste. An example of this would be the first person plural reflections we might come to have when we confront affliction, mortality or contingency—‘For we brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out’ or ‘as flies to wanton boys are we to the gods ….’. the solidarity here is of recognised common human experience.
David Hume’s comments about the natural human sentiments are made already from such a position of human solidarity:
Tho’ there was no obligation to relieve the miserable, our humanity would lead us to it; and when we omit that duty, the immorality of the omission arises from its being a proof, that we want the natural sentiments of humanity. (Treatise (Book III Section V)
The remark is made from a position of solidarity (‘our humanity would lead us to it’) which already represents a widening of natural sympathy to human beings generally and it is from this perspective that Hume criticises indifference as wanting the natural sentiments of humanity since such indifference afflicts the miserable. But it is out of the formation of such an educated sense of common human experience that the possibility of human solidarity begins to form, as when one starts to recognise one’s own adversity as an instance of human affliction. To put it another way, to see oneself as one person among others is a moral achievement rather than a demand of rationality. Sympathy , however, is not enough.
Now Williams claims that the idea of the intrinsic worth of a human being cannot be merely ‘pragmatic’. I take him to mean that such a notion makes no sense as a matter of policy or strategy, for instance, that might be altered if our interests change and it becomes an inconvenient burden. He also says that the grounds cannot be ‘immanent’, a term he doesn’t explain in his interview, but which I take to imply that the notion cannot simply be left ungrounded, as when we might say, this is just what we do, this is our practice, it is self evident that human rights are sacred, and so forth. What he is saying, rather, is that love is the source of the dignity we accord any human being. Williams is not talking about sympathy or solidarity here, but refers to God’s love, and I think this is instructive and helpful, as introducing an additional and necessary dimension which, however, I should prefer not to treat theistically:
I think morality ultimately needs the notion of the sacred—and for the Christian this means understanding all human beings without exception as the objects of an equal, unswerving, unconditional love.

This position seems to come close to Graham’s—morality needs a transcendent source of value—a notion of the sacred—and for the Christian this is the unconditional love of God … if you are not a believer you need some other notion of the sacred, some other notion of what would constitute a transcendent source of value. What is there to commend itself to a non-theistic humanist in this position?
It is worth pointing out that there is indeed a non-theistic analogue of this claim, in the sense of a perspective on humanity—in the form of the Bodhisattva who weeps in compassion for the state of suffering humanity. It is important to repeat that this is not an instance of human solidarity, which is a matter of a sympathetic response to fellow human beings rather than compassion for the state of humanity as such. This looks as though it is a perspective on humanity from a position beyond it, an idea suggestive of some kind of ‘transcendence’. (The Buddhist version of ‘love’, metta or loving-kindness, expresses itself as mudita or sympathetic joy when it encounters well being and karuna or compassion when it encounters suffering or distress).
But isn’t a secular thinker going to look askance at this implied claim that their passion for justice, say, ‘needs the notion of the sacred’? I think that they might want to reply that ‘morality’ understood as moral action needs a source—precisely the passion for justice, they may say, and may go on to say that we can dispense with the idea of the ‘sacred’, though someone may want to say, perhaps, that this passion is ‘sacred’. Some people may use this term to register our proximity to that whose loss would destroy our humanity. But wouldn’t it be a mistake to regard, say, the passion for justice as the candidate here? Is there not an additional dimension which makes sense of the passion for justice, the compassion of the Bodhisattva, for instance, which drives that passion? In that case it is this self-conscious vision of what it is to be a human being at all and the perspective on humanity, whose loss is to be feared. The fear of such a loss is the fear of our losing what may be regarded as most precious—not a self-regarding, individualist fear but a moral fear about the loss of a perspective in whose absence humanity would destroy itself.
What is crucial here is the idea of humanity as a possible object of attention in the first place. we are familiar with the mythological representations which provide the means of looking at humanity from afar, as it were, whether this is the archetypal Buddhas and Bodhisattvas whose gaze and intervention is incorporated into the Wheel of Life which turns around the greed, hatred and delusion of humanity, or the Olympian gods looking down satirically, though sometimes with concern, on the dealings of human beings, or the God of Genesis regarding the waywardness of his own creation. All of these represent ways in which humanity becomes an object of attention for us, an object of attention from a perspective that regards us with love and concern. So that we can come to ‘love’ humanity, see the humanity that we are part of, with an attitude of love, pity, compassion for the human struggle, for the conflicted human animal, for the species that is destroying itself, and so forth.
I suggest that in this perspective we have a source of morality—or at least, one way of understanding it is as humanity regarding itself from a position beyond what we might call the state of nature—humanity regarding the turmoil of the all too human world. The way we understand Hume’s talk of ‘wanting the natural sentiments of humanity’ is instructive here since it has a double aspect. On the one hand we can feel sympathy for someone on the wrong end of this indifference, who is adversely affected; but we can also feel pity for mankind and its progress, vitiated by the prevalence of its indifference and cruelty, and so forth—a compassionate diagnosis of our condition which, as such, is the object of a particular kind of distress whose disposition is to intervene.
These representations of humanity come from a position ‘beyond’ it as it were and from a perspective of which it is largely unaware, from the point of view of which, however, humanity needs to be ‘saved’ from itself. But the ‘beyond’ is of course misleading. The perspective depends upon a capacity I have already mentioned, that of seeing the universal in the particular, seeing the particular as representative—so that we can suddenly stand back from some tribal skirmish, say, and see the epitome of human folly, the pity of war.
What Williams says puts him in a position of dialogue with this non-theistic humanism. He does after all talk about understanding all human beings as the objects of unconditional love. What we can share is the vision of, the brief participation in, such a fugitive perspective, and the common task of embodying it in a naughty world. Now it is natural to take his comments as a form of the assertion (the ‘faith claim’) that we are all God’s creatures and that each of us is the object of an enduring divine love. But Williams doesn’t quite make this traditional claim, or at least not explicitly, and it is this reticence that puts him in dialogue. The explicit reference to deity is omitted. Disagreement would arise at the point at which those of us who are non-theistic humanists would take the view that the faith claim that we are all the creatures of a loving God is one, culturally determined, expression of a vision, aspects of which can be shared. I emphasise the word ‘vision’ because what we have here, whether it is contemplation of the wonder of the world or of the universal in the particular, is a rare, fugitive experience of a nevertheless potent perspective inhabited briefly by exemplary human beings whose representations of that vision have entered the written and oral traditions, influencing the forms of culture and language, including the forms of expression of practical imperatives that derive from the perspective but which are in competition with the instincts and imperatives of our ‘lower’ nature, the gredd, hatred and delusion that keep the Wheel of Life turning.
Humanism can share aspects of this vision, though they may prefer other forms of imaginative representation than those of the traditional scriptures. But it seems to me that reference to the vision or the perspective thus disclosed is a conceptual necessity.
We might talk, in shorthand, as Richard Norman has done, about the ideal of universal benevolence that we have inherited from Christian and other traditions. And we might add that the ideal has generally been expressed in the midst of the countervailing forces of tyranny and arbitrary power. Against this background, in the midst of which the ideal is conceived and into which it is thrown, talk of universal benevolence sounds both benign and bloodless, lacking battle experience as it were, and as a phrase it fails to catch the passionate note which belongs to its barely heard and self-sacrificing presence in our bloody histories—Christ before Pilate is the enduring image of the meeting of spiritual and worldly power. So we need to make a distinction between this perspective on humanity and the ‘love of humanity’ that Dmitry Karamazov refers to:
But how can he be virtuous without God? That’s the question. For whom will he love then? Man, that is … Rakitin says that one can love humanity without God. Well, only a little snivelling half-wit can maintain that. I can’t understand it.
I imagine that part of the point of this dismissive gesture is that to a believer like Mitya engaged in his own spiritual struggle, it must look like an attenuation and parody of the great commandment of the New Testament, whose spirit subverts the whole idea of commandment—to love God with your whole strength and to love your neighbour as yourself. The energy, as it were, goes into loving God and the love of the neighbour is an expression, a natural outflowing of this. Or at least it is if we conceive loving God as participating in the life of love that constitutes his nature. In its absence the love of the neighbour must appear effete and ungrounded, nerveless and abstract, since it has lost its driving, motivating force. But perhaps there is a clue here and the scepticism is itself suspect.
It insinuates that love of the neighbour could not become the commanding passion of subjectivity. Nevertheless, if we are to talk about a passion in such terms then we need an objective correlative in the form of a representation of humanity that makes it an intelligible object of that passion, so that love of the neighbour continues to be an expression, but of a love of humanity that sees it for what it is, and sees it with compassion, a commanding perspective that reveals the plight of the neighbour—as a member, like ourselves of a self-conscious species, riven by division and inner conflict, which needs to be saved from its own excesses, is capable of cruel tyranny and heroic self-sacrifice.
This is a God’s eye or Bodhisattva’s view of humanity: a species in need of salvation, a conception of it as a whole and from a great height, from a position beyond it, a view imbued with pity and delight. But these high attitudes, once refracted in the dense obscuring light of human life, express themselves in our evaluations of and responses to human conduct—including our own. The perspective on humanity is one thing, but if it compels action it needs to find forms of expression in the transformation of the human community, saving ourselves. This necessary duality of perspective, the global vision and the immersion in action, may be one of the insights that a non-theist may find in the myth of the Incarnation. How does the pity for the human world express itself in the world, make its voice heard. Seeing the plight of humanity God sends his only begotten son into the world … the world knew him not, and so on … and even the Olympian gods were sometimes oved to intervene in human folly, the Buddha draws quiet attention to the diagnosis and the remedy.
We are at once capable of this vision and go on to act in the world in ways that reflect or neglect it, with Jesus as the exemplar or ideal embodiment of a life and mind wholly ordered by this vision and impulse of sacrificial love. However, the picture is of a human duality that ‘morality’ both confronts and represents in its own language. It has to be added that the representations of this vision, the forms of its reception, coming into the world, are perverted by virulent movements that appropriate this language to their own ends; and that it can become an oppressive ideological tool.
I can see, then, that a Christian might want to say that to the extent that we live this kind of life we participate, although imperfectly, in the life of God, and that loving God is this participation, whose natural expression is love of the neighbour. And to this extent they will want to say that God’s love for his creation is the transcendent source of value. What a humanist can find here is a more muted form of transcendence: this perspective is rarely achieved and is usually beyond the horizon of, even as it is the condition of, recognisably moral evaluations.
Those of us whose thinking is secular or at least non-theistic have the same evanescent experience of or access to this revelatory perspective on humanity and the conceptual point is that to the extent that it has been culturally received, it determines a recognisably moral outlook and sense of justice. We can call this a source of value if we like.
Seeing love as the source makes good sense of moral scepticism in the spirit of the hard men of the Republic, who do not think in these terms. Someone who demands to know why they shouldn’t use violence to achieve their ends is not, as was sometimes claimed by philosophers, ignorant of the meaning of their own words but, rather, express their alienation from and contempt towards the evaluation that is inscribed in the language. You might say they don’t understand the real nature of the evaluation. The point here is that we should not be thinking of this fundamental perspective as embodied or active in any particular individual or set of individuals: they may be wanting in the natural sentiments of humanity, and unaware of or contemptuous of the spirit of Hume’s description. Its penetration into human life is variable, unstable, ‘fragile’. What does have to be assumed, however, and this is a feature of the intrinsic dignity we have referred to, is a capacity for responsiveness in these terms. The idea of a moral appeal is an appeal to care, to love, embedded in the culture (it has ‘taken’) but the appeal is to an individual, is made by someone on behalf of someone to someone else. As an appeal it seeks a response that it may not find. But the form of the appeal is crucial because it shows the connection with love. It is not to the fact of a requirement or a prohibition, or to the rightness or wrongness of an action, but is rather made by or on behalf of someone in terms of how they are to be affected. The action or restraint that is called for, in other words, is for someone’s sake. If we were to talk of sympathy here we should recall that sympathy is precisely for someone and towards remedial action. It does not engage abstractly with ‘distress’ but with ‘someone’ who is in distress.
6
I have to acknowledge that these reflections are inchoate and theologically unsophisticated. But they are intended as an opening of a conversation, on the part of a non-theistic humanist, a Buddhist, with religious thinkers who have challenged the coherence or ultimate feasibility of an absolute conception of ethics without a transcendent or supernatural grounding. I take that challenge as the expression of an honest anxiety about the consequences of a failure to understand the world aright, as it were. That is a matter for serious conversation, not for cheap polemic. What I have sought to make sense of as a necessary aspect of what we call morality is the translation of pity for the world into the way that such pity might express itself in the world. Moral philosophers tend not to discuss such topics, leaving it to the theologians, but it seems to me that if we can indeed make sense of the idea of pity for the world then our thinking needs to be incarnational, at least in the sense that we need to arrive in our own world and save ourselves from further disaster.
St Tredwell’s House
Papa Westray
Orkney, UK
KW17 2BU
mcghee@liv.ac.uk
[1] http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/news/2010/09/17/papal-visit-2010-the-popes-speech-in-westminster-hall-full-text/
[2] Haldane, J. 2010. Reasonable Faith. Abingdon, Routledge, p 4f
[3] http://www.newstatesman.com/religion/2010/07/interview-religious-human
[4] Graham, G. 2009. ‘Religion and Theology’ in Cornwell, J & McGhee, M. (eds) Philosophers and God, London, Continuum, p 229
[5] Ibid p 228
[6] Ibid p 230
[7] Dostoyevsky, F. (1880) trans Magarshack, D. 1958. The Brothers Karamazov. Volume 2. Harmonsworth, Penguin, p 695 (Part Four Book 11)
[8] Ibid p 691