The Routledge International Handbook of Education, Religion and Values

James Arthur, Terence Lovat

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415870559
• eBook ISBN: 9781136677434
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The academic fields of religion and values have become the focus of renewed interest in contemporary thinking about human activity and its motivations. The Routledge International Handbook of Education, Religion and Values explores and expands upon a range of international research related to this revival. The book provides an authoritative overview of global issues in religion and values, surveying the state of the academic area in contributions covering a wide range of topics. It includes emerging, controversial, and cutting-edge contributions, as well as investigations into more established areas.

International authorities Arthur and Lovat have brought together experts from across the world to examine the complexity of the field of study. The handbook is organised around four key topics, which focus on both the importance of religion and values as broad fields of human enquiry, as well as in their application to education, inter-agency work and cross-cultural endeavours:

-The Conceptual World of Religion and Values
-Religion and Values in Education
-Religion and Values in Inter-agency Work
-Religion and Values in Cross-cultural Work.

This comprehensive reference work combines theoretical and empirical research of international significance, and will be valuable reading for students, researchers and academics in the field of education.

Part I

The conceptual world of
religion and values

1

Religious meaning, practical
reason and values

David Carr

UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH, UK

Introduction

We speak easily and readily of religious values – and assume that the meaning of such talk is transparent or unproblematic. On closer scrutiny, however, the clarity and coherence of such familiar idiom may seem – philosophically and otherwise – rather less evident. This chapter aims to identify and explore some awkward issues about the very idea of religious values.

The question of religious values

What, then, could we have in mind in speaking of religious values? We might say that John handed in the lost wallet because he is honest, and honesty is one of his religious values. But, to begin with, it is not obvious that honesty is always and anywhere a religious value: since Marxists, atheists or agnostics may be equally, if not more, honest, honesty is not especially a quality of religious believers. More strongly, the idea that someone's honesty follows from his or her religious convictions may seem actually objectionable – if, for example, it suggests that an agent only behaves honestly because (say) a particular divine commandment says that he or she should. Indeed, if people only behave honestly because their god (or God) tells them to, we might want to say that they are not really behaving honestly at all. Arguably, there is something of the same trouble here as there is with any ‘extrinsic’ account of morality or virtue. Thus, we may object to familiar ‘contractarian’ theories of ethics – those that seek to justify (say) honest conduct in terms of some hope or expectation that others may see the social wisdom or prudence of reciprocating – that such prudence is not really honesty either. To be really honest, we might say, is rather to see the intrinsic moral value of honesty: to recognise that it is something worthwhile for its own sake irrespective of any extrinsic individual or social ‘pay-off’.

To be sure, we do frequently explain the conduct or apparent commitments of agents in terms of their religious beliefs or convictions. We may say, for example, that the religious terrorists tried to blow up the plane because they believed that their god instructed them to destroy all infidels. The trouble here, however, is that it is not clear whether one should regard any and all human commitment of this kind as a matter of value in any significant sense. The basic difficulty is that genuine values would seem to be matters of voluntary or active choice for which agents might be expected to provide reasons: in short, they ought to be what I have elsewhere (Carr, 1991, 2011) called rational or ‘principled’ commitments. But might it not count as a genuine reason for blowing up the plane that one has been commanded to do so by God (or a god)? On the one hand, however, if religious terrorists have been simply conditioned or indoctrinated to believe that they should behave as a god (or God) tells them, it is difficult to interpret this as a reason for (rather than a cause of) anything much worth calling rational agency. On the other hand, if we take them to be acting on a genuine reason – that God/a god decrees the destruction of infidels – we ought to seek the grounds or evidence of such a belief. If we are told that the only grounds for so believing is that it was long ago written in some ancient book, we might therefore reasonably doubt – especially, if the book commands us to do what is on the face of it wicked (see Geach, 1969: chapter 8) – whether this counts as a rationally compelling reason. In sum, there may not here be enough to substantiate significant talk of religious reasons upon which genuine values might be founded.

The nature and logic of values

Thus, the question for this chapter is nothing less than that of whether it makes much sense to talk of distinctly religious values – as opposed to those genuine values or virtues, such as honesty, that may happen to be associated with religious beliefs or practices – at all. To be clearer about this question, we need to look at some basic philosophy of value – and we begin with some attention to the notorious fact–value distinction. It is nowadays fashionable – especially on so-called idealist or anti-realist perspectives – to insist that this distinction is false or untenable. On some more radical contemporary (post-modern and other) accounts, all human discourses are socially constructed and it can therefore make little sense to suppose that there is any universal language of objective ‘fact’ that is untainted by local bias or ideology. However, any such extreme view seems difficult to sustain. In any human discourse the word ‘fact’ (and/or its equivalents in other languages) is a perfectly serviceable if not indispensable term for those statements that may be confirmed or disconfirmed by observation, such as ‘humans normally have thirty-two teeth’, ‘frogs develop from tadpoles’ and ‘Everest is the highest mountain in the world’. To state a fact is just to say what is the case and it would be hard in any language to deny – against the evidence – that things simply are as here indicated. What is true is that there is some theoretical interplay or overlap between fact and explanation, so that many claims that people are inclined to call facts – such as that modern apes and humans have a common ancestor – may be at some stage of human knowledge (past or present) only provisional or tentative hypotheses. That said, it is nevertheless the more basic facts of common observation that such hypotheses set out to explain and there could be no theoretical explanation without such factual basics. So the (nowadays fashionable) idea that there are no theory-free facts is hardly credible: if there were no such facts, then there could hardly be much in the way of theories either.

In this respect, there is also a clear enough distinction – of actual logical grammar – between facts and values. To assert a fact is to offer what one takes, on evidence, to be a true description of some part of the world: to express a value is to say what one regards as of merit or worth in human affairs. Thus, whereas the basic logical form of a fact is ‘p is true’, the logical form of a value is ‘x is good’ (where ‘p’ stands for some proposition and ‘x’ designates some object). Perhaps the best-known (or notorious) modern philosophical analysis of the distinction between facts and values is that provided by David Hume in his Treatise of Human Nature (Hume, 1969) and elsewhere. Briefly, since Hume regards values – unlike facts – as unsupported by evidence, he construes these as expressions of subjective attitude or sentiment rather than as objective data of reason and inference. For Hume and his later logical positivist heirs, whereas to recognise p as a (matter of) fact is to judge, on the basis of evidence, that p is true, to say that one values x is to express one's liking or approval of x. To state a value is to appraise an object or event in terms of its personal appeal (or otherwise) in the language of ‘good’, ‘bad’, ‘beauty’, ‘ugliness’, ‘right’, ‘wrong’ and so on. The main philosophical upshot of Hume's view (sometimes called ‘Hume's fork’) is that none of those forms of discourse deeply implicated in evaluation or value judgement – such as, most notably, ethics, aesthetics and theology – may count as rational. A human agent could have no genuine evidence-based reasons for judging that ‘it is a sin to eat pork’, ‘Helen of Troy was a great beauty’ or ‘God is good’.

The standard objection to such ‘emotivist’ analyses of value in the wake of Hume is that judging something to be good is not the same thing as approving or liking it. Indeed, since one may reasonably dislike something that one takes to be good, or approve of something one takes to be bad, liking is neither necessary nor sufficient for judging something to be good or valuing it. In terms of some obvious examples, a smoker may enjoy smoking while regarding smoking as a thoroughly bad habit, or a patient may regard visiting the dentist as a very good thing while utterly hating it. On an emotivist account of value – especially one that endorses a non-cognitive view of emotions – values appear to be little more than tastes that one might or might not have, irrespective of reasons. If I like anchovies, or prefer anchovies to sardines, I am not bound to justify my choice with reasons: indeed, it is less that I need not justify with reasons, more that reasons do not really enter into it. On the other hand, in calling an object, action or event good, or in counting it among the things I value, I may be asked to support my judgement with reasons: statements of value are inherently normative and frequently the site of reasoned debate, which – while no doubt sometimes inconclusive – may just as often be susceptible of right or wrong answers. To be sure, valuing something involves rather more than simply judging it to be good (bad or ugly), since – as I have argued elsewhere (Carr, 1991, 2011) – values also imply something like commitments or dispositions to act consistently with such judgements; but the judgements on which values are based might seem nevertheless answerable in principle to reason and evidence.

The problem of religious reasons

In his Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals and Critique of Practical Reason, the great German metaphysician Immanuel Kant (1967) clearly recognises the serious shortcomings of a Humean or positivist analysis of value and value judgements. Kant appreciates that moral judgements, for example, are not simply expressions of feeling, emotion or liking, since what they enjoin often conflicts with what we might actually – prior to reflection – prefer to do. In short, moral actions evidently require reasons – though, according to Kant, these cannot be the evidence-based reasons of theoretical (natural scientific) enquiry. In the event, Kant argues that moral rationality involves a distinctive kind of non-empirical reasoning rooted in the idea of universalisable prescription: moral (as opposed to prudential) prescriptions involve judgements – concerning, for example, promise-keeping or respect for others – that no rational agent could possibly wish to be ignored or disrespected on any occasion. Thus, while Kant's non-naturalist account of moral reason is ethically controversial, he clearly shares with later ethical naturalists (such as utilitarians) the view that practical human agency – including the various value commitments of such agency – is an inherently rational matter. Still, Kant is also sympathetic to Hume's empiricist epistemology and its anti-metaphysical attitude to the unverifiable claims of theology. In short, while we may ground moral claims – that, for example, promises should always be kept – in the idea of universalisability, we cannot ground faith in God on the commandment that ‘one should worship only Yahweh’, since we could not possibly have epistemically reliable evidence for such a claim.

Unlike Hume, however, Kant (as a Lutheran) is sympathetic to the claims of (Christian) religion and to its positive human benefits. He therefore thinks that although we cannot have rationally compelling grounds for religious (Christian or other) commitment, such commitment should not be considered entirely unreasonable. For one thing, the practical teachings of Christian faith – not least the reciprocal ethics of the so-called ‘golden rule’ (do not do unto others what you would not have them do unto you) – are not too far removed from Kant's own rational ethics of universalisable prescription. But, for another, Kant argues that his ethics of duty clearly presuppose free will – an idea also beyond actual empirical demonstration of proof – and, yet more strongly, ideas of immortality and divine judgement as necessary for the final justice of reward and punishment he supposes entailed by such moral voluntarism. Kant calls such notions of free will, immortality and God (as divine judge) ‘ideas of reason’: although the existence of free will, immortality and God cannot be demonstrated empirically or proved by traditional a priori arguments for the existence of God (which Kant deliberately sets out to refute) these may be accepted on the basis of a faith that, while not rational, is not exactly unreasonable. But what Kant's arguments do imply is that what have traditionally been taken as rational grounds for religious conduct and values – such as the claim that Jesus has divine status – cannot count as genuine reasons. One might well rationally justify Christ's injunction that we should love one another in terms of universalisable prescription, but one cannot do so on the grounds that it is divine fiat.

Kant's view that religious faith and any theistic claims upon which it might be based lie beyond the bounds of demonstrable truth and determinate sense is clearly no less ‘Copernican’ than the rest of his epistemology and its influence on subsequent Western – primarily, but by no means exclusively, Protestant – theology can hardly be overstated. It is clearly the prime source of a significant and vigorous tradition of fideism notably exemplified by Kierkegaard (Hong and Hong, 1980) and his numerous ‘existentialist’ heirs. Still, there can be no doubt that such fideism has been much welcomed by both modern and ‘post-modern’ theologians as a way of liberating belief in God from the constraints of reason: even if God's existence cannot be proved, belief in ‘Him’ may yet be justified in terms of some higher spiritual commitment that transcends reason. However, the implications of any such perspective for the current issue of making sense of religious values is clearly problematic. At first blush, any such perspective would seem to imply that there are no rational religious values, since all religious belief must involve a non-rational ‘leap of faith’. But if values (as opposed to mere tastes or preferences) are forms of practical commitment that presuppose genuine agency, and what distinguishes genuine agency from mere human movement is that it is grounded in or motivated by reasons, it might be more accurate to say that there cannot be any religious values. Certainly religious believers may have genuine values – such as that one should never do to others what one would not wish to be done to oneself: but this is not as such a religious value. If, on the other hand, one believes that one should attend regular confession in view of humanly inherited sin, this could not count as a value, because it is not based on any kind of (true or false, right or wrong) reason.

It has seemed to some that there is one obvious philosophical way out of this impasse and that is simply to reject Kant's (or any similar) rationalist epistemology and the positivistic or ‘foundationalist’ conception of knowledge acquisition that it seems to have fostered in ‘modern’ times. Essentially, this is the strategy adopted by such nineteenth-century post-Kantian German idealists as Fichte and Hegel, by those American and other ‘pragmatist’ philosophers of science much influenced by idealism, by many twentieth-century European continental neo-Marxists and post-structuralists and by so-called contemporary ‘post-modernists’. Briefl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I The Conceptual World of Religion and Values
• Part II Religion and Values in Education
• Part III Religion and Values in Inter-Agency Work
• Part IV Religion and Values in Cross-Cultural Work
• Index