What is bigotry, really?

Recently, I was discussing Christianity with an atheist online, and homosexuality was raised (not by me). The traditional Christian view that homosexual activity is wrong was called a “horrible and oppressive teaching”, and I was labelled a bigot for holding this view.

No-one likes being called a bigot, including me (which is why some people use it as a debating tool), and I spent some time discussing their reasons in detail. In the process, I gradually began to build a picture of what they meant by the term.

Bigotry: the Internet definition

The first point made was that bigotry was when we didn’t treat people with respect. Apparently, “saying that someone’s sexual orientation is sinful or wrong is not treating people with dignity or respect”. I hadn’t actually said this, as I don’t believe an orientation is sinful, but rather certain behaviour. But it is fair to say that the traditional Christian view is that a homosexual orientation is not what God intended, and obviously behaviour is closely related to orientation.

Can you treat someone with dignity and respect without agreeing with or condoning their behaviour or sexual orientation? It seems obvious that this is possible. We can treat political opponents with respect despite strong disagreement. We can even treat criminals with dignity and respect despite their behaviour or their propensity to commit crimes. So we can criticise behaviour we disagree with without violating a person’s dignity.

The next claim was that “you’re only a bigot if your discrimination is based on certain categories, namely, categories about WHAT a person is”. This sounds reasonable, until the different possible categories a person can be classified as are explored. Then it gets problematic. Do we condemn the behaviour of those sexually involved with their siblings or parents? It quickly becomes apparent that what a person is does not seem to excuse certain behaviours such as incest.

When I pointed this out, they shifted their ground somewhat to claim that opposing incest was not bigotry because “the REASON for discriminating is the mitigation of harm”. So apparently the reasons for calling behaviour wrong are important, and if the behaviour leads to harm then calling it wrong is acceptable. Harm continued to be a key part of the argument, as they went on to say that “I have the right to force you to not harm gay people by not allowing them to marry. You do not have the right to harm gay people who want to marry, since that action has no tangible negative consequences”.

Basing an argument on harm is risky, of course. Since SSM is a relatively new phenomenon, we don’t know what harm might result to individuals or society in the future. Perhaps little or none. Perhaps harm might even be somewhat subjective when it comes to societal harm. But to assume that SSM has no “tangible negative consequences” is premature.

As Christians, we also must be wary of basing our arguments on harm. If we hold to the traditional Christian position of marriage as designed by God and between a man and a woman, we believe that ultimately this definition of marriage is good for the world. Conversely, we believe redefining marriage will prove harmful. But believing this does not mean it can be empirically demonstrated. Eventual harm may be many years in the future, or even unquantifiable. It might be that in the short-term, some research might indicate there are benefits to SSM. So it is unwise to base our argument on evidence of harm.

Bigotry: the dictionary definition

Rather than rely on the dubious musings of an Internet atheist determined to prove a point, I decided to examine the dictionary definition of bigotry.

The Oxford dictionary defines bigotry as “intolerance towards those who hold different opinions from oneself”. Ironically, that describes my opponent rather well, but it is premature to call them a bigot.

The Cambridge dictionary’s definition is “a person who has strong, unreasonable beliefs and who does not like other people who have different beliefs or a different way of life”. Merriam-Webster defines a bigot as “a person who strongly and unfairly dislikes other people, ideas, etc. : a bigoted person; especially: a person who hates or refuses to accept the members of a particular group (such as a racial or religious group)”.

These latter two definitions seem to capture an important point – bigotry is about dislike or hatred for those who hold different beliefs or different ways of life. Bigots hate, and hatred is wrong.

But is disagreement or disapproval about behaviour, opinions or lifestyle bigotry? No, not if no hatred accompanies these views. Of course, sometimes hatred does come with these views, and that is bigotry. But disapproval of behaviour doesn’t require hatred – ask any parent.

Philosopher Ed Feser makes this point stating that “disapproval of homosexual acts simply does not entail hatred of homosexuals themselves, any more than a vegetarian’s or vegan’s disapproval of eating meat entails hatred of meat-eaters”.

Redefining bigotry

Nonetheless, it is common to attempt to redefine bigotry as disapproval or disagreement on issues such as SSM that are supposedly “settled”.

This is a strategy whose aim is to shut down opponents and win debates, and it is an effective one. For example, Mark Joseph Stern states that a bigot is “anybody who opposes equal rights for gay people“, which implies anyone opposing SSM. Opposing views are automatically labelled as bigotry, and no further discussion is possible. What is there to discuss with a bigot?

The philosophical community has also moved in this direction, with many philosophers considering that the SSM debate is over, and discussion is no longer required or even legitimate. Christian philosopher Richard Swinburne felt the wrath of this view recently when he was invited to present a lecture on sexual morality at the Society of Christian Philosophers (SCP) meeting. His view that homosexual acts are immoral and that homosexuality is a disability that should be cured are widely known, and he was predictably criticised. However the President of the SCP felt compelled to apologise for “the hurt caused” by his lecture, despite Swinburne’s position being a commonly held view amongst Christian philosophers (and others) throughout history.

Feser’s discussion of this incident is instructive, particularly on the issue of hurtfulness. He points out that philosophers discuss all sorts of ideas that can cause offense, but that is no reason to end the discussion. Abortion is a prime example, where arguing that abortion is murder is likely to offend women who have had abortions – and yet it is very much a live topic in ethics. Citing hurt feelings should not be used as a tactic to shut down debate.

The question then is at what point is an argument “settled”? At what point should debate largely cease, and it be acknowledged that further argument is unproductive? There seems to be no easy way to determine this, but there is still widespread disagreement about SSM. We don’t seem to be at the point where we can declare it settled – except in the minds of those who want to declare victory for their view.

Christian hypocrisy

It is all very well to conclude that disapproving of certain behaviours is not bigotry, but the commonly cited adage of “hate the sin, love the sinner” seems trite given the apparent hate for gay people that some Christians have demonstrated. Often we have been and are bigoted, and the church has serious work to do in repairing relationships with the gay community.

We have also been hypocritical in condemning gay sex but tacitly or even blatantly condoning other damaging behaviour in our churches. As John Stonestreet and Sean McDowell note “it’s not lost on the gay community that the church held no (or at least very few) marches or rallies against no-fault divorce, adultery, or other things that have done even greater harm to marriage and families. There is a reason that the gay community feels singled out. Though we are often unfairly accused of bigotry and hate, we have been inconsistent”. I would add that at times we have been fairly accused of bigotry and hate.

Conclusion

Charles Taylor, in his opus A Secular Age, describes our current age as one of “expressive individualism”, and the prime value is personal choice, irrespective of the choices made. Consequently, the only virtue is tolerance of people’s choices, and “the.sin which is not tolerated is intolerance”. The result is the abuse of those who make the judgement that some behavioural choices are morally wrong.

Real bigotry, however, involves hatred for others, not disagreement on controversial issues. Redefining bigotry to denigrate those who hold that certain behaviours are wrong is an attempt to shame and bully opponents into silence or reluctant agreement.

Christians are not bigoted in regarding homosexual behaviour as immoral, provided they are not disliking or hating those whose behaviour they are criticising.

A caution though: we need to carefully examine our hearts to discern whether we are truly loving those who we disagree with, and whether we are disproportionately highlighting one sin and treating it as somehow worse than others.

Are there objective moral values?

Objective moral values are moral values that are “independent of human desires, perceptions, beliefs and practices”. Those who hold that moral values are objective are known as moral realists, and they believe that statements such as “slavery is wrong” are true or false regardless of who says them, and where and when they were said.

Atheists such as Nietzsche, Hume and Mackie all agreed that there are no objective moral values in a godless universe. Although this is a common position, not all atheists hold to it, and a recent post concluded that it is possible to maintain that objective moral values could exist without God. This involves accepting that brute moral facts just happen to exist in our universe, and that they match our moral beliefs.

By contrast, theists explain moral facts by appealing to the necessary existence of God, which neatly explains moral obligation and why moral facts are correlated with our moral beliefs. The theistic view seems more persuasive, but of course the theistic worldview entails many other commitments which atheists find untenable.

Why do atheists like Wielenberg even think objective moral values exist? Given their commitment to an evolutionary account for our existence, it seems logical to attribute our moral beliefs and our intuitions about these beliefs to natural selection, at least indirectly. But doing so makes it difficult to be a realist about moral values, as it leads to Sharon Street’s “Darwinian dilemma” – either evolutionary forces have somehow conspired to produce moral beliefs that match these objective moral values, or our moral beliefs don’t coincide with whatever objective moral values exist at all. If objective moral values are jettisoned, the Darwinian dilemma dissolves, so why hold to this position?

Interestingly, it’s a very common position. In fact the majority of philosophers surveyed are moral realists. Given that over two thirds have a preference for atheism, it seems moral realism is widespread even amongst atheists.

Why?

David Enoch contends that believing morality is objective has considerable appeal to us, and he gives three reasons why this is so.

Firstly, Enoch uses a joke to illustrate what he calls the spinach test. A child who hates spinach says “I’m glad I hate spinach, because otherwise I might have eaten it, and it’s yucky!”. It’s funny because the only reason for not eating it is because of personal preference. If you did like it, it wouldn’t be yucky.

But it isn’t funny when it’s about a moral position. It seems quite reasonable to say, “I’m glad I wasn’t born in an era when slavery was acceptable, because I would have accepted it, and I think slavery is wrong”. This sentiment seems reasonable because we are thinking beyond our personal preferences. We think slavery is objectively wrong.

Enoch’s second test is about how moral disagreement feels – the phenomenology of disagreement. When we have an argument about a topic such as abortion, or some other issue we care deeply about, it doesn’t feel like an argument about personal preferences such as the taste of chocolate. It feels like an argument about something objective. Enoch compares it to a debate on global warming, which we know to be an objective matter irrespective of our position on it.

The third test is the “what if?” – or counterfactual – test for objectivity. If our beliefs or practices were very different, would it still be true that so-and-so? Enoch gives the example of smoking causing cancer. If we believed smoking was harmless, would it still be true that smoking causes cancer? Of course – it is an objective fact that smoking causes cancer, no matter what we believe. We can apply the same test to moral beliefs. If we believed slavery is acceptable, would it still be wrong? It seems clear that the answer is yes, slavery would still be wrong. We would want a society that believes slavery is acceptable to change their views.

Enoch contends that these tests demonstrate that we very much want to regard morality as being objective. We want to be able to say that torturing babies for fun is objectively wrong no matter what some people may think.

But we are still left with the Darwinian dilemma and consequently have at least one good reason to think that morality is not objective. Of course, some sort of theistic evolution can counter this, but are there any good arguments for objective morality other than our intuitions?

Yes, and they will be explored in part two, coming soon!

Does it matter if ID isn’t science?

The Philosophical Apologist (PA) recently published a series of essays arguing that Intelligent Design (ID) is a pseudoscience. A pseudoscience is a non-scientific field whose proponents deliberately try to create the impression that it is scientific.

The conclusion stated that ‘based on ID’s clear failure to satisfy the necessary criteria of testability and empirical adequacy, ID as a discipline cannot be considered to fall within the realm of science’.

Fundamentally, ID is not testable in its current state, and testability is a key criteria for scientific status. ID is not science.

What does this mean for ID? Does it matter if ID isn’t science?

Yes and no.

Yes, it matters, because ID proponents repeatedly claim that ID is science. It seems very important to them that ID has this status. Science has a privileged position in modern society, and ID proponents obviously desire the associated privileges (prestige, funding, educational influence) for their field. And yet almost every philosopher of science disagrees with them about ID’s status. By insisting that it is science, ID becomes a pseudoscience.

On the other hand, consider the consequences if the ID world freely admits ID is not science, and that they are not seeking it to be. Scientists and philosophers of science would probably respect ID more, and there would be far less negative press about ID. Importantly, ID would no longer be considered a pseudoscience, because it would not be claiming to be science.

Of course, ID would no longer be a viable candidate for inclusion in science curricula, but since the Discovery Institute (the main organization behind ID) opposes the mandated teaching of ID in schools that should not be a major issue. There would be fewer damaging lawsuits like Kitzmiller vs Dover.

Presumably, ID proponents are more concerned about how this approach would change the general public’s perception of ID – perhaps it would lose the mantle of authority that the label of science provides, and consequently seem a less respectable position to hold.

That need not be the case. If ID isn’t science, what is it? Philosophy, of course – philosophical argument that is informed by science. So the desired mantle of authority can still be indirectly utilized to marshal evidence for ID. Modern ID arguments draw on the latest scientific research from a wide variety of scientific fields.

It’s also worth stating that ID’s scientific status has no bearing on whether ID arguments are good arguments or not.

Finally, it should be noted that design arguments have a long and distinguished history in philosophy. ID proponents would do well to embrace ID as philosophy rather than science, and not worry that they are somehow acknowledging ID as inferior.

The philosophical apologist

Month: September 2016