Why I Don't Talk About Religion

I know many people for whom religion is a fixation. The historical impact and philosophical implications of what we call "religion" provides an allure to people young and old, devout and atheist. I, however, seldom write, talk, or think about religion. In this post I will sketch out the reason why.

My unwillingness (or, more accurately, disinterest) in addressing the topic centers on the inability for what we call "religion" to contribute to either the deep philosophical or everyday practical problems of our day. For the purposes of this post, I consider "religion" to be "a set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe" (dictionary.com), which entails a comprehensive system of belief which provides a basis for all truth.

The problem with religion as such is the inability to coherently say anything about it. To understand this, it is instructive to appeal to Immanuel Kant's famous analytic/synthetic distinction. This distinction is used to separate propositions into two different categories.

An analytic proposition is one in which a description is implied within the definition of the subject. Thus, "red is a color" is an analytic proposition. Another way to look at an analytic proposition is to say "if the subject were not described by the predicate, it would be logically incoherent." It makes no sense to consider "red" as anything but a color, therefore the statement "red is a color" is analytic.

A synthetic proposition is one which combines two concepts that do not entail one another. An example of this is "red is a pretty color." "A pretty color" is not an essential property of "red," so this proposition is providing information not entailed in the subject. In addition, if red were to turn out to not be a pretty color, it would be no stretch of the imagination to say that it would still be "red."

Using this distinction, the problems with making statements about religion begin to become clear. I will use two statements important to religion (or to most anything related to man for that matter), "religion is true" and "religion is good" to illustrate this point. If these statements are treated as synthetic, then the predicate is a concept divorced from the subject. This means that religion would continue to be what it is without the qualities of "good" or "true." But if religion as a comprehensive doctrine of ethics and beliefs is to be of any use, then it must be both good and true. Thus, these statements cannot be synthetic if religion is useful.

Thus, in order for religion to be useful, the questions of its goodness and validity must be analytic propositions. But that means that the statements "religion is true" and "religion is good" hinge on a definition of religion that implies both truth and goodness. In this case, if religion is good or religion is true, then religion cannot be questioned as either false nor evil. Any evidence we have to the contrary of religion being both good and true (negative outcomes of religion, times that religion has turned out to have untrue tenants) must be thrown out to preserve the statements as analytic. This approach makes the qualities of "goodness" and "truth" subservient to religion, which means that reason, intuition, emotion, or any other determinants of goodness or truth will always lose when they disagree with religion. Even if we are to ignore the glaring intuitive absurdity of declaring the two statements analytic, the outcome of such a declaration surrenders every other tool man has to understand the world.

While the synthetic route renders religion hopelessly useless, the analytic route renders religion terrifyingly dangerous. This, however, leads to some silver lining in the usefulness of religion: religion identified not as a philosophical concept but as a sociological concept can still have merit. Religion can provide social capital, solidarity, and brotherhood that has spearheaded such mass movements in the United States such as abolition and the civil rights movement. As much as a society of perfectly rational people who could see the inherent evil of slavery or Jim Crow has an intuitive appeal, it does not fit with the nature of homo sapien, a species that has progressed on the back of certain unjustified analytic assumptions since the dawn of time.

Thus, religion, like the doctrine of natural rights, provides a convenient social glue that holds society together but is ultimately based on a shaky foundation. Can society ever persist without such convenient falsehoods? Is the statement "man is an irrational animal" synthetic or analytic? The answer is yet to be determined.

Guantanamo's Decision to Force-Feed Prisoners Recalls Age-Old Questions of Ethics

At this very moment, 100 prisoners at Guantanamo Bay are participating in a mass hunger strike. Of those 100 prisoners, 21 are so badly starved that medical authorities at the base have approved their force-feeding through nutritional supplement tubes that are run through the prisoners' noses.

This decision to force-feed Guantanamo Bay prisoners has not been made without controversy, however. In particular, many American medical professionals are taking issue with the military's decision. Most prominent of these is Jeremy Lazarus, president of the American Medical Association, who wrote a letter to Secretary of Defense Chuck Hegel on the matter.

In the letter, he spelled out that the decision to force-feed Guantanamo Bay inmates "violates the core ethical values of the medical profession." He then quoted the World Medical Association Declaration of Tokyo:

Where a prisoner refuses nourishment and is considered by the physician as capable of forming an unimpaired and rational judgment concerning the consequences of such a voluntary refusal of nourishment, he or she shall not be fed artificially. The decision as to the capacity of the prisoner to form such a judgment should be confirmed by at least one other independent physician.

Lazarus and the professional medical community argue that force-feeding the prisoners in Guantanamo is a violation of their right to self-determine by refusing treatment.

While some may see this situation as a question of law and some may see it as a question of medicine, what it really does is force us to engage in a philosophical exercise. In particular, the situation poses a serious question to us: Is inaction equivalent to action if consequences remain the same?

This question reinvigorates a classic philosophical disagreement: that between Immanuel Kant's categorical imperative and Jeremy Bentham's consequentialism. To spare the details, Kant tends to focus on the content of an action, while Bentham tends to focus on the result of an action. We see this dilemma every day. When a car backs out and accidentally bumps into someone else, the person hit will say "look at what you did to my car!" He is upset about the result or consequence of the action. The person who backs out says "I didn't see you there, I did not mean to hit your car!" The content of the action is innocent. In our legal system, we have to take some side, so the person who pulled out would be held legally responsible, but the pull of the importance of content of an action is still strong. The law can only be justified by saying the consequence was negative (the car was damaged) and the content was negative (the driver must have been neglectful, so he must be at fault).

To bring this back to the force-feeding decision, mainstream medical practice allows doctors to restrain patients from inflicting self-harm. If a patient wants to take a knife to his own throat, then both the content and the consequence of the action is negative. Mainstream medical practice does not, however, permit doctors to force medical assistance on patients who refuse treatment, even if it results in dire health problems or death of the patient. In this way, mainstream medical practice is Kantian. It maintains that inaction and action with the same consequences should be treated differently. The military, on the other hand, makes no distinction between inaction and action if they result in the same health problems for the patients. Slitting my own throat has the same ultimate result as refusing medical attention if my juglar spontaneously ruptured. Thus, a hunger strike is the same thing morally as suicide. In this respect, the military is utilitarian in their appraisal.

Now if mainstream medical practice condoned active self-harm (such as suicide), then a different debate emerges, but it is one that is no less philosophical. There is further conversation to be had about what it means to make an "unimpaired and rational judgment" as well. Only by engaging with philosophy can we get a handle on what rationality looks like and how it could be impaired.

In the words of Michael Sandel, "to engage in...practice is already to stand in relation to theory." How we act depends on whether we decide to be rigorous about that theory or to to be blind to how it affects our every decision as individuals and as a society.

What kind of people do you want to buy from?

Think of your favorite restaurant. Now think of what you like about it. Maybe it's the food. Maybe it's the "ambience." If you're a particular cheapskate, it may even be the price. But something that is important for almost any dining experience is that the hosts treat you well. Of course, there are exceptions, but a rude server can be the make-or-break component for a good evening and even a customer's permanent personal opinion of the locale.

This attitude doesn't only apply to restaurants, though. The appeal of good barber shops, bakeries, car shops, insurance salesmen (I could go on) is that they provide a good service coupled with a good attitude. In his book Good to Great, Jim Collins says that successful companies require people who are passionate for their work and believe they are providing a valuable service. This is more true than ever at the point of interaction between seller and buyer.

This analysis, though, clashes sharply with one of the most famous lines in classical economic literature. In Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, Smith says "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest."

While some have argued that this statement comes a bit out of context, it is nonetheless a building block of our understanding of market economics. People create not as a way to help others, but as a way to get what they want from others. One incisive critique of this viewpoint, however, comes from Alasdair MacIntyre in his book Dependent Rational Animals. He imagines an experience in which we walk into a butcher shop and observe the butcher suffering from a heart attack. He says that our first inclination would not be to move on and find another butcher who is in more of a position to sell us meat, but we would rather feel compelled to find help.

While this is a good point, I would argue that it does not take so dire a situation to find mutual interest in a routine economic exchange. All in all, we are best benefitted when we are sold meat by someone who A) wants to be a butcher and B) we want to support. There is a certain value that we gain from supporting the community butcher instead of buying at Wal-Mart, something that goes beyond the quality of the good. The best economic exchanges are ones in which we not only are happy to get what we want, but ones in which we are also happy to give.

Economics is often presented as a zero-sum game, but the best economic transactions are not ones in which people rationally balance gains and losses, it is the ones where people collapse the benefits bestowed with the benefits accrued. This means that an economic transaction must be viewed as more than just a means to an end, but as an end in itself. Think back to your favorite restaurant. When they are at their best, they aren't serving you food because they see you as an instrument, but they are undergoing the essential Kantian moral obligation by treating you as an end yourself.

This takes us back to Collins. In Good to Great, Collins says that the most successful companies are focused on on quality in particular: excellence. While the classical economist says that profit is about Xs and Os, companies like Apple, Chic-fil-a, and Chipotle continue to defy this logic by putting excellence first and letting the profits follow from that. And they've done pretty well for themselves.