The Honor Of God

Review by Ryan Anderson 

A review of Uncovering the Constitution’s Moral Design, by Paul R. DeHart 

“Is the Constitution any good?” That’s the question Paul R. DeHart considers in his new book Uncovering the Constitution’s Moral Design. It may seem like an odd question or, at least, an incomplete question: good for what? Ensuring peace and stability? Protecting civil liberties? No; DeHart is after something deeper. He wants to know if the “Constitution’s normative framework [is] philosophically sound. Does it make moral assumptions that correspond to moral reality, whatever that reality happens to be?” For DeHart, the Constitution is good if it embodies true moral principles.

While the title might suggest that the book is primarily about constitutional interpretation, what emerges is a much broader discussion of analytic philosophy, metaphysical and moral realism, natural teleology, and moral theory. An assistant professor of political science at Lee University, DeHart builds on the work of Hadley Arkes, J. Budziszewski, and the analytic philosopher Robert Koons. The result is a unique blend of Budziszeski’s What We Can’t Not Know approach to natural law thinking, Arkes’s “logic of morals” going Beyond the Constitution, and Koons’ philosophical Realism Regained.

DeHart begins his investigation by discussing methodology. The intellectual historian, he argues, might approach these questions by looking not only at the text, but to the arguments the framers made in defense of the Constitution, their other political writings, and the political theorists they referenced. By understanding the framers’ larger worldview, we would understand the moral framework they presupposed in writing the Constitution—and thus that the Constitution must presuppose as well. DeHart rejects the historian’s approach, however, because the “Constitution’s meaning is distinguishable from the framers’ meaning or intentions.” As DeHart sees it, we need to look at the Constitution’s content and structure and ask what philosophical positions one must assume to make sense of it. A logical examination of the Constitution itself reveals “an objective, institutional arrangement that embodies normative presuppositions and ends.” To uncover these, DeHart proposes a new method for analyzing constitutions using the philosophical device of “inference to the best explanation.”

Noting that the historian will try to classify the Constitution as classical, modernist, or positivist, DeHart argues that a constitution’s moral presuppositions will not necessarily fit into any one of these categories. Instead, he says, we should “disaggregate” the contents of the labels by distinguishing and examining conceptual categories: the Constitution’s implicit views about sovereignty, the common good, natural law, and natural right. The investigation of these topics forms the core of the book.

His method is applied in three steps. First, for each topic, DeHart creates irreducible and mutually exclusive options (the sovereign, for instance, could be wholly popular or not wholly popular, constrained or unconstrained) and tests these against what the Constitution establishes (popular election, for example, scores against an unpopular sovereign). Second, after eliminating the obviously contradicted options, he chooses among the remaining options by applying two tests: consilience (how much of the Constitution’s structures a particular option explains) and simplicity (how many auxiliary or ad hoc theses are required to make the theory fit the facts). Third, he tests “teleological fitness”—how each theory measures up against the “purpose” or “proper function” of the Constitution. Here he sets off on something of a tangent as he defends natural teleology (as developed by Koons and Alvin Plantinga). Just as we can read teleology off of natural substances and artifacts, DeHart argues that the Constitution’s design demonstrates its goal-orientation.

DeHart then applies his theory to his chosen topics. Take sovereignty. He sketches four alternative theories possibly embodied in the Constitution: the Constitution assumes that the sovereign is either wholly popular and constrained, wholly popular and unconstrained, not wholly popular and constrained, or not wholly popular and unconstrained. He then takes readers through his three steps to conclude that a constrained popular sovereign best explains the Constitution’s design and structures. The sovereign is popular, he says, because no one serves in government without being chosen, either directly or indirectly, by the people, whom officials serve in limited terms or appointments subject to removal from office for misconduct. Ultimately, the people have the final say, as they can amend the Constitution and there is no will of the government wholly independent of the people’s will. At the same time, though, the people’s will isn’t boundless. DeHart argues that the Constitution’s provisions—the bicameral congress requiring geographically diverse majorities and, along with the checks and balances from the other two branches, favoring the long-term over the short-term will of the people—provide procedural constraints on the citizenry in an attempt to unite their will with the demands of justice.

He sets up similar analytically distinct choices on the other topics and concludes that the Constitution assumes a real common good, that people can know the natural law by non-instrumental (substantive) reason, and that duties precede rights. A real common good (”objective good” might be a more appropriate term) best explains the Constitution’s design, which promotes not simply choice for its own sake, or mere peaceful co-existence, but deliberation about how best to serve substantive goods related to what DeHart calls the “human design plan” (I would have preferred him to call it simply “human flourishing”). Likewise, the inference that there is a natural law accessible to everyone best explains the deliberation that the Constitution provides for (in legislative chambers and in elections): people reason about the inherent value of ends and not simply about means to some (sub-rationally) predetermined end. Lastly, DeHart argues that the Constitution’s framework is best explained not by a centrality of rights but by a focus on duties—rights protect people’s performance of these duties. (Here I wish he would have placed the emphasis on “goods”; the Constitution takes the goods of human well being to be central, and rights and duties are two sides of the same coin in promoting and protecting these goods.)

DeHart’s unsurprising conclusion is that, in essence, the Constitution supposes classical philosophical positions on each of these topics, and in doing so it has gotten moral reality right. While Madison, Hamilton, and Jay might have thought they were embodying Locke, Hobbes, and Rousseau, their Constitution is in fact thoroughly Aristotelian and Thomistic. This might explain the title DeHart gave to the work when it appeared as his dissertation: “Better Than They Knew: The Constitution’s Implicit Moral Design.”

While one could quibble with much in the book—DeHart’s natural teleology will be resisted by many; his embrace of Suarez’s Thomism is questionable; and, given his topic, more than a footnote on John Finnis’s landmark Natural Law and Natural Rights would have been appropriate—the overall trajectory is appealing. But one wonders if the Constitution is as logically consistent as DeHart’s method forces it to be. Inference to the best explanation might not be the best tool for analyzing a document written by committee, where multiple explanations might be needed. This, of course, is one of the risks of assuming that the document as a whole has a single purpose.

Overall, though, the book is an impressive accomplishment and should be useful to anyone interested in questions of jurisprudence and ethics. At times it can read like a free-ranging dissertation, referring to every book the author has read and going into long theoretical digressions, but on the whole it’s quite readable.

But turning the book’s method on itself, we might ask: what is its purpose? Does DeHart propose his method as an approach to constitutional interpretation and judicial review? I hope not, for we the people have committed ourselves only to the text’s clauses, not the underlying philosophy that “best” explains them. And can we really conclude that what makes a constitution good is its correspondence to moral reality irrespective of whether it effectively secures peace and promotes the common good? Lastly, given DeHart’s rigorous defense of moral realism, I fear that his method might force one to conclude that any intelligible modern democratic constitution is good in the sense of conforming to moral reality, making his conclusion about our Constitution not very remarkable. Unless, of course, you take a historian’s approach, and see just how remarkable our Constitution really is.

A review of A Secular Age, by Charles Taylor 

Everyone knows that we live in a secular age. But what exactly does it mean to say that our age is marked by a decline in religious belief and practice? What brought about faith’s decline? What has become of the spiritual needs to which religion once provided an answer? How does a secular age affect our understanding of human nature and human flourishing? Has the decline in religious belief and practice liberated and enriched, or narrowed and impoverished, the human spirit? And what has been its impact on the religions that have survived, indeed multiplied, in our time?

Merely to ask such questions is to cast doubt on the conventional wisdom that represents secularism as the triumph of morality and reason over priestly authority and popular superstition. It is to admit that our secular age may not be the solution to the human predicament or the highest and final stage of human progress. But if secularism is none of the things it is so confidently asserted to be, then what is it?

One could hardly find a better guide to such timely questions than 2007 Templeton Prize winner Charles Taylor. It’s true, also, that his extraordinary new book, A Secular Age, is dauntingly long and suffers from loose organization. It visits too many out of the way places and lingers there too often. It roams and rambles. And yet with Taylor’s easy conversational prose, wealth of learning, openness to life’s ends, capacity to distill philosophical controversies, and ability to render striking judgments, thoughtful readers will recognize their interest in forging through to the final page. A Secular Age is one of those rare books that put familiar and defining features of our world in a better, brighter light.

In a sense, he has been writing this book all his professional life. One of our greatest living philosophers, Taylor, now 76, is a professor of philosophy at Northwestern University and a professor emeritus at McGill University in Montreal. Before that, in the 1970s and 1980s, he taught moral and political philosophy at Oxford. Throughout his career, he has defended claims of classical philosophy and religious faith against the criticism of modern philosophy, and he has defended modern claims against the criticisms of classical philosophy and religious faith. He seeks a philosophical account that gives all parties their due in the great debates about human nature and the good life.

His early writings include seminal papers criticizing the social sciences and exploring the limits of the liberal tradition. In 1975 he published a long, sweeping volume, Hegel, which examined the ideas and sentiments behind the great philosophical synthesizer’s work. That book was followed by a short, focused one, Hegel and Modern Society, spelling out the significance of Hegel’s political and social doctrines. In 1989 Taylor published Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, a formidable volume tracing many of modernity’s proudest achievements back to pre-modern religious sources. A few years later, his brief The Ethics of Authenticity defended individual freedom but insisted that the self’s satisfactions in choosing its own ends and fashioning its own life were inextricably tied to goods found in community and beliefs about transcendence that modernity sought vigorously to suppress. One hopes that Taylor will soon follow up A Secular Age with a more succinct work that makes explicit the nerve of the argument.

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In the meantime, his new book, an outgrowth of his 1999 Gifford Lectures at Edinburgh, provides an excellent point of departure for future thinking about morality, politics, and religion. Taylor begins with a straightforward question: “Why was it virtually impossible not to believe in God in, say, 1500 in our Western society, while in 2000 many of us find this not only easy, but even inescapable?” Although the pre-modern unification of religion and politics greatly assisted religious belief, Taylor is not concerned really with explaining the separation of church and state. Rather, his interest is in “the conditions of belief,” or the “move from a society where belief in God is unchallenged and indeed, unproblematic, to one in which it is understood to be one option among others.” The aim is to reconstruct and assess the “whole context of understanding in which our moral, spiritual or religious experience and search takes place.”

According to the conventional account, the rise of secularism is simple to explain: modern science refuted religious belief, fair and square. But the theories of Newton, Darwin, and Einstein, monumental achievements though they are, tell us nothing about what, if anything, lies beyond the natural world, argues Taylor. Extraordinary experiences of wholeness or harmony, of joy or exaltation, remain available to believers and unbelievers alike. And nothing we have learned from the natural sciences, according to Taylor, prevents believers from interpreting these experiences as gifts that come from a power outside of nature or beyond the self. At the same time, they know that otherwise reasonable and decent people will reject this interpretation as self-deluded or worse.

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In contrast, before 1500 in Latin Christendom and stretching back throughout the history of mankind, belief was the default option; the natural world was assumed to be shot through with spiritual causes. Since 1500, unbelief has become the presumption, or at least the default option. That story is familiar enough. What distinguishes Taylor’s analysis is his exploration of modern unbelief’s roots in, and persisting dependence upon, pre-modern belief, and his illumination of the opportunities for faith to which modern freedom and pluralism give rise.

“Exclusive humanism” is the name that Taylor gives to the form that unbelief takes now in Western civilization. A crucial early step towards it was the overthrow of the Aristotelian understanding of the cosmos as an ordered whole. Another closely related step was the development of modern science, driven by the ambition to master and control nature, to purge nature of the spiritual and reduce the world to the natural.

While science is typically seen as responsible for, in Weber’s famous phrase, the “disenchantment of the world,” Taylor emphasizes instead the new ethical stance that emerged as both a cause and effect of modernity. In the modern dispensation, reason is disinterested, disengaged, and merely instrumental. Though incapable of authoritatively ranking ends, reason is able—and declares it obligatory—to construct a political order that recognizes the right of all citizens to pursue their self-chosen ends, provided that they respect the right of others to engage in the same pursuit. Reason presses also for increasingly inclusive definitions of citizenship. This is part of its larger demand for laws that recognize the freedom shared equally by all humanity. And thanks to the uses to which individuals put their newfound freedom, many understandings of human flourishing proliferate. Nevertheless, exclusive humanism recognizes limits: it resolutely understands freedom in this-worldly terms.

Taylor shows brilliantly that the modern conceptions of reason and the modern moral order stem partly from the Protestant Reformation. Though a believing Catholic, Taylor insists that the Reformation responded to genuine problems arising out of the division between a cloistered clergy and a lax laity. By rejecting Church-sanctioned hierarchy, proclaiming a priesthood of all believers, and discovering religious significance in the ordinary life of work and family, production and reproduction, Protestantism laid the foundations for modern morality. It also brought Catholicism into closer harmony with the original Christian promise of a humanity transformed by agape—the love of God that is inseparable from love for our fellow human beings.

Exclusive humanism, however, long ago lost sight of its religious spirit. Once the individual had been liberated from the Church’s authority, modern philosophy turned its sights on all forms of belief that might limit the individual’s complete freedom to define his own happiness in this world. Thus as the recent bestselling polemics in praise of atheism by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens have illustrated, exclusive humanism, in its current incarnation, seeks to wipe out faith in all forms. Emblematic of this determination is the progressive Left’s fascination with Nietzsche, whom they often revere as the supreme authority on the critique of religion.

Read the full review at the Claremont Institute >>>>>   http://www.claremont.org/publications/crb/id.1521/article_detail.asp

By Ross Douthat 

I confess that I approached this book with a certain degree of trepidation. Our moment feels ripe for a revival of Christian apologetics, and there was a time when I would have thrilled to see Dinesh D’Souza enter the lists on Christianity’s behalf—the D’Souza of Illiberal Education (1991) and The End of Racism (1995), the D’Souza who was combative and compelling, polemical yet rigorous, eager to take the fight to his opponents on turf they thought they owned. Since then, though, D’Souza has gone from disappointment to disappointment, penning a series of books (including a Reagan hagiography and a post-9/11 ode to American exceptionalism) generic enough to have been written by any right-of-center pundit, and then stumbling into the debacle that was last year’s The Enemy At Home, which called for cooperation between American social conservatives and Muslim traditionalists, and seemed to have difficulty distinguishing between a social conservatism that frowns on abortion and pornography and one that endorses polygamy, genital mutilation, and the execution of adulterers.

I’m pleased to report, then, that What’s So Great About Christianity, D’Souza’s defense of the faith that he and I share, is a considerable improvement on its immediate predecessor, a reminder of its author’s skill as a polemicist, and a fitting rebuke to the recent spate of atheistic tracts that it sets out to contend with. His measured tone alone makes for a refreshing contrast with the bitchy, condescending style favored by the bestselling anti-theists, and his promise “to meet the atheist argument on its own terms” likewise stands in sharp contrast to the “new atheist” habit of making a caricature of religious belief and then gleefully smacking it around. (One can only hope that his antagonists will make a careful study of D’Souza’s habit of actually quoting those with whom he disagrees.)

The book is organized around the various strands—political and moral, scientific and philosophical—of the “atheist argument” that it sets out to unravel. Against the secularization hypothesis, with its vision of a humanity moving steadily away from superstition toward the broad sunlit uplands of godlessness, D’Souza argues for religion’s resilience, and indeed for the demographic advantages enjoyed by religious populations, who multiply fruitfully while secular societies grow steadily more sterile. To the litany of crimes against liberty and progress that are laid at Christianity’s door, the author responds by tracing everything that contemporary atheists claim to value—human rights and church-state separation, the faith in reason and progress that makes scientific advancement a possibility—to the modern West’s Christian roots. Against the argument that the universe itself seems essentially meaningless and accidental, D’Souza lays out the not-inconsiderable evidence that the entirety of creation has been designed with conscious life in mind, and then dryly limns the attempts by modern scientists to explain this possibility away with ever-more-elaborate, ever-less-testable hypotheses.

Much of this argument I would happily recommend to anyone foolish enough to believe that Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and their co-believers have permanently settled religion’s hash. But the strength of D’Souza’s book as a rejoinder to atheism sometimes feels like its weakness as an apology for Christianity. D’Souza seems constrained, in a sense, by the narrow-mindedness of his antagonists. Nothing has distinguished the “new atheism” so much as the predictability of its case against religion, and perhaps inevitably, What’s So Great About Christianity’s rebuttal sometimes feels predictable as well. D’Souza is engaged in intellectual brush-clearing and by the end of the book the weeds have been cleared away—but many thorny questions remain untouched and unaddressed.

Part of the problem is that one can only spend so much time rebutting glib and facile arguments without slipping into glibness oneself. It ought to be enough, for instance, for him to note that the Christian emphasis on charity is distinctive and its influence on world affairs unique, without claiming that “nowhere else” besides Christendom do we find icons of unselfishness like Vincent De Paul and Mother Teresa. It ought to be enough to note that the crimes committed in the name of Christianity pale before the mass murders perpetrated by secular regimes without seeming quite so blasé about, say, the Inquisition, Reformation-era witch-burnings, or the slaughter that accompanied the Crusaders’ conquest of Jerusalem. It ought to be sufficient to demonstrate the folly of the atheistic dream of a world without religion, without being quite so confident about the looming “global triumph of Christianity.” (One billion Muslims—and counting—might yet have something to say about that.)

Read the entire review at http://www.claremont.org/publications/crb/id.1531/article_detail.asp