One would have to be very morally lazy to be unconcerned with the possibility that the prevailing morality of one’s culture had something seriously wrong with it.
— Thomas Nagel, “MacIntyre versus the Enlightenment”
Michael Brendan Dougherty recently described an article in Tablet by Jeremy England as an authentically Jewish argument about justice in the Israeli–Hamas war and said that, while the Christian tradition has its own views of war, he took the Jewish argument seriously. I was glad to read it; Michael and I don’t always see the world the same way, but his thoughtful posts always give me something to think about, and the same goes for England’s essay. I’d like to comment not on its assessment of the war but on the justification given for that assessment.
England writes that
the ultimate decision about who lives and who perishes in calamity is the Creator’s choice, and while you can plead with God to spare the righteous, you must also have the moral humility to trust that He knows what He’s doing. As for you and what you can do: The Torah commands you to accept that the world’s Creator put you in the circumstances you are in, and that He only wants from you that you should do the most correct thing possible according to the Law, given the circumstances. And among the constraints and instructions given by the Torah is a specific one: “Choose life.” Accepting one’s own death because the other options are ugly and seem heartless is not on the menu.
As for present circumstances:
Israel must stop pretending it is a nation like any other, begging to be judged fairly by whatever standards the current hegemon has decreed we all agree upon. We need to look for standards from within our tradition to set a moral example for the whole world, while making it more practically possible to defend our homeland.
Instead of bragging about the extra danger our soldiers experience for the sake of sparing enemy noncombatants, we should reject the premise that we Jews bear any responsibility for protecting the human shields employed by our enemy.
Instead of threatening Jews with arrest for praying on the Temple Mount, we should take a hint from the “Al-Aqsa” moniker our attackers gave to their day of savage invasion and let kohanim up there on the hill to slaughter lambs for Passover.
And above all — given that land is nearly all that matters to this death-worshipping foe — instead of repeatedly withdrawing troops from areas we have just taken over so we can deny having unchristian territorial ambitions, we should conquer, annex, and resettle parts of Gaza so that Jews and friendly gentiles both can live there safely.
There are two streams of thought here. The first contains, its author’s announced particularist traditionalism notwithstanding, a stubborn universalist ethics by which prescriptions are to be defended. The justness of self-defense is not a specifically Jewish idea, for instance, but one that anybody would understand. Or take the proposal that Israel “conquer, annex, and resettle parts of Gaza.” I would not favor such a project, but, despite not being Jewish or knowing the tradition well, I have no trouble seeing why someone might want “Jews and friendly gentiles” (potentially anyone) to be able to “live there safely” (a universal need). England goes so far as to say that Israel should “set a moral example for the whole world.”
The second current is the headline particularism founded in Jewish scripture: “The Torah commands,” we are all told, and what it commands is “law.” But since I am not Jewish, I do not believe the Torah is or contains God’s binding law simply because it is the Torah. To ask me to accept it as law just because it is the Torah is no longer to offer a reason that anyone, me included, could in principle understand (even if not all of us do understand it). It is instead something like an invitation to convert, out of place as that concept might normally be in Judaism. To accept the Torah as God’s law is the belief and practice of those who share a certain faith, and so if I am to accept the Torah as God’s law just because it is the Torah, I must share that faith too, at least insofar as it pronounces on matters of state.
Someone might of course argue that the Torah’s ethics are correct, in which case I should indeed follow them. But then I am following because they are correct, and not because I accept the Torah as God’s law by definition.
Alternatively, someone could try to argue that as a matter of provable historical fact the Torah is indeed God’s law — so if I know what’s good for me I had better follow it, in the way of giving rational obedience to a true authority. But as I do not think it is a matter of provable historical fact that the Torah is God’s law, or even know what kind of evidence could be invoked to establish that claim, I set this possibility aside.
* * *
Are you also reaching for your copy of Political Liberalism? I hear they have discussion groups about it on National Review cruises, but for the rest of us this will have to do. John Rawls in Political Liberalism tries to distinguish between “public reason,” which comprises the arguments that in principle any citizen could understand, from “comprehensive doctrines,” which are something like all-encompassing worldviews and life programs, often but not always religious. The claims and beliefs constituting comprehensive doctrines are not, according to Rawls, suited to justifying political projects such as the passing of laws or the writing of constitutions. For a liberal democracy will include people from various traditions, with varying ideas about precisely what is good and precisely how to live their lives, and not everyone will subscribe to any given comprehensive doctrine and be able to accept it as authoritative qua that doctrine (though, again, people may find some or all of its teachings to be sound independently of those teachings’ happening to belong to the tradition to which they do belong).
Religious people are sometimes offended by this, perhaps understandably. It can seem as if Rawls wants to exclude from political discourse people’s most important and cherished beliefs, or as if legislators should never quote scriptures, etc. In fact, Rawls did not mean this, as he explained to Commonweal in 1998:
PRUSAK [interviewer]: . . . Who determines the terms of public reason[?] A religious believer might say, well, revelation isn’t only private — it’s here in this book. How come I can’t make an argument from this background? Or more to the point, how come I have to argue in terms everybody agrees with, or might agree with? Given who I have to argue with, it seems that those terms slide into secularism. Take the argument for the sacredness of life. The believer might say that this has been revealed. But by having to make arguments in terms everybody recognizes, I’m being asked to renounce the truth as I know it . . .
RAWLS: No, you’re not being asked to renounce it! Of course not. The question is, we have a particular problem. How many religions are there in the United States? How are they going to get on together? One way, which has been the usual way historically, is to fight it out, as in France in the sixteenth century. That’s a possibility. But how do you avoid that? . . .
People can make arguments from the Bible if they want to. But I want them to see that they should also give arguments that all reasonable citizens might agree to. Again, what’s the alternative? How are you going to get along in a constitutional regime with all these other comprehensive doctrines? And just put it in those terms.
That would be something like civic considerateness, or civic inclusiveness: a conscious effort of believers to avoid lapsing into a private code in which faith claims and group membership are thought to settle arguments. Inclusiveness is perhaps served by the various pains Rawls takes to establish which claims belong to public reason and which don’t. He does not just present a distinction or a criterion; he gives examples.
But it would also be possible among sufficiently fair-minded citizens to ditch the labeling project and apply a simpler, purer method: to ask “Why?” of any given claim, and then to ask “Why?” of the why, until the whys terminate in something that is sufficiently well demonstrated or self-evident that discussion comes to an end or else it becomes clear that no such agreement can be reached.
For example, “National self-defense requires such and such a policy” — if we reach this kind of statement and its truth is knowable, then we are done, since citizens can be presumed to understand why the nation to which they belong must defend itself and to have the ability to assess what self-defense requires.
Whys can also be requested of faith claims when they are offered as grounds for legislation and policy. E.g., to a Christian nationalist: “Why must one accept Jesus as one’s savior, and why is that a concern of the state’s — what can you say to a non-Christian to bring him around to thinking that America should be defined as a Christian nation?” Or to England: “Why should one accept the Torah as God’s law and consider Jews a chosen people — what can you say to a Gentile to induce his acceptance of these ideas?” In other words, we need not say ab initio that such claims are excluded from public reason. We can instead politely ask those who bring them into politics to justify them. If they can do so, then more power to them.
Much though I disagree with him, the Harvard Law professor and Catholic Integralist Adrian Vermeule is an interesting example of someone who has tried to do something like this. When he summarized in the Atlantic and elsewhere the sort of legal philosophy and doctrines he would like us all to embrace, which just so happened to be largely coextensive with Catholic teachings, the typical liberal reaction was, “How dare you try to impose your personal religious views on the rest of us?” But Vermeule had argued that adopting his views was in the public interest for nonreligious reasons; he had tried to justify the program according to reason. So the correct reaction, as I see it, was not “How dare you try to be a theocrat?” but “Thank you for trying to explain why I should accept your views. I think the effort failed, for reasons X, Y, and Z, but it was good of you to respect reason enough to make the argument.”
* * *
To a religious person what I am saying could seem very proud, as if one were putting oneself above the authority of religious tradition or even God: “I, the Great Autonomous Self, shall judge heaven and earth alone.” It would be as if a vertical line divided two sets of claims on opposite sides of a page, one set under a heading such as “Rationality” or “Conclusions of Autonomous Individuals” or “Public Reason” and the other under a heading such as “Tradition” or “God’s Law” or “The One True Comprehensive Doctrine.”
But the reality is that even the most orthodox are necessarily making their own judgments for themselves. It is by their own reason and reflection that they conclude that they should follow tradition, or God’s law (as they have judged it to be), or what have we. Reason and individual judgment are not a particular body of claims, but a faculty used to assess all claims. If you say, “I choose God’s will over my own” or “I follow tradition because it has been tested and is likely to be superior to my own judgments,” you are the one making that choice. If you have not been coerced, then you are not submitting; you are agreeing.
So it’s not “God’s will vs. man’s will” or “secular claims vs. religious claims” or “revelation vs. reason” or “tradition vs. self.” It’s “Man chooses what he considers God’s will rather than what he considers man’s will,” or “what he calls ‘religious claims’ as distinct from what he calls ‘secular claims,’” or “what he accepts as revelation rather than what is known as ‘Enlightenment rationalism,’” or “what he inherits as tradition rather than his own counsel when the two conflict”; or else the converse. The grounds for such a choice might be good or poor, rational or irrational. The successive whys we could request of the individual — or that he might request of himself — will clarify, as much as is possible, which is the case. But there is no escape from thinking for oneself, even if what one thinks is that one should accept a form of authority.
And there is also no such thing as a “Jewish argument” or a “Christian argument” if this is to mean more than that the argument happened to develop in a particular tradition. There are Jewish and Christian beliefs; and then there are arguments. Arguments may overlap with a tradition’s beliefs, but an argument is by definition presented with reasons, which by definition are not the exclusive property of any tradition. Otherwise, outsiders to the tradition cannot, after all, take seriously the arguments it makes — not because they bear the tradition any ill will, but because they literally cannot understand it.