Matt Zeitlin: Impetuous Young Whippersnapper

Michael Gerson, on the occasion of the Pope’s visit, once again chastises us for failing to remember that to recognize human dignity and universal human rights, one needs to reject a material conception of humanity, and secularism while you’re at it:

Secularism has traditionally taught that human beings will eventually outgrow religious conviction and moral absolutism — that skepticism is evidence of maturity. Benedict contends that modern men and women, unguided by reasoned moral beliefs, turn toward adolescent self-involvement. Their intellectual growth is stunted. In a world where all moral claims are seen as equally true and equally false — the world, for example, of the modern university — human conscience is reduced to biology or prejudice. Moral behavior may continue to ride in grooves of socialization or genetics, but moral assertions are fundamentally arbitrary — always trumped by a two-word response: “Says you.”

Ok, Gerson is jumping all over the place. There’s the false connection between secularism and relativism. The idea that a secular philosophy can’t capture “reasoned moral beliefs” is just false. Just look at the last 200 or so years of moral philosophy. There have been plenty of deontologists who derived universal, absolute human rights in a totally secular fashion. There’s also the historical trend that the belief in universal human rights has traditionally recognized by explicitly secular institutions, like the French Revolutionary government or the UN (yes yes, the French weren’t exactly the best protectors of these rights, but they sure got around to recognizing the Rights of Man quicker than the Church). Not to mention that the Church, which has always held a spritual conception of humanity, hasn’t been above massive human rights violations.

Gerson also implies that secularism inevitably means relativism. That if we don’t adhere to a belief in God and that humanity is more than physical, then we’ll be “In a world where all moral claims are seen as equally true and equally false.” This again, is a horrible misrepresentation and simplification of the state of secular moral philosophy. Utilitarians, who Gerson no doubt despises, don’t believe that all moral claims are equally true and equally false. Please, call Peter Singer a relativist and see what happens.

Sure, moral non-cognitivists think that the truth of moral claims is debatable, but Gerson is attacking the entire secular ethical tradition, not just a small subset of it. If you want moral absolutism, or deontology, or non relativistic ethics (three different things, despite Gerson’s muddling the issue) you don’t need to believe in god! Just go to a philosophy class!

Gerson claims that us secular materialists, who see humans as “the meat and bones of materiality” make oppression and exploitation easier. Well, Gerson, I recognize universal human rights, and I’m a secular materialist, so what now? Even Peter Singer, who surely gives Gerson nightmeres, supports an angelic ethics, whereby the rich devote themselves to the betterment of the poor. How does this square with Gerson’s impugning of secular morality?

Gerson also refuses to mention the War in Iraq. Of course, the Church opposed it and Gerson supported it. How did Gerson respect the dignity of the approximately 100,000 dead Iraqis, the millions internally displaced and hundreds of thousands maimed? Could Gerson say to the families of those dead Iraqis that “every apparently worthless life is not really worthless at all.”? Sure, he feigned at supporting it purely in the name of humanitarianism and human rights, but considering his inside view of the Bush administration, he should have known that the intention was not to secure the dignity of the Iraqi people or to remove a horrible dictator. He also should have known, or at least by now admitted, that unjust, imperialist wars do little to advance the cause of human rights.