It's been a week and a half since I gave a sermon titled
"Moral Foundations" at the Unitarian Universalist Church in San Juan,
Texas. I'm still psyched, and I will probably give some more sermons in the
future if they want to have me again. I also collected the names of several
people who might like to work through Ronald Dworkin's Justice for Hedgehogs in a reading group with me this fall
semester.
I've recorded the sermon and I'm going to make it available
on youtube for the people who were interested but couldn't get to the church
that day. Something went wrong with the camera that I don't immediately know
how to fix: sorry about that big black rectangle. I'm going to post it anyway, even
with its flaws. And I'll also make available on Facebook the powerpoint I created for the sermon after the
fact. This should make it simple for anybody who wants to follow along. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMLA7tTl1KA
Extended response to V.:
On the day of the sermon itself, during the Q and A, one
person made a pointed commentary about my decision to use honor killing as an
example of an atrocity (the word I used in the sermon was
"abomination"). He thought it was inappropriate for me to use what he
called a statistical "outlier" in philosophizing about the sort of
ordinary functional moral theory that my U.U. audience was probably interested
in, and likewise inappropriate to go pointing fingers at a culture not my own.
(He claimed I had "typified an entire culture" by one hideous
practice.)
I was just unsettled enough by his critique to want to
respond at leisure and in depth, so here we go. First, I had no intention of
"typifying" any culture: I don't consider myself an authority on any
society but my own, and not even all parts of that; that's why I specifically
built into that example a thought experiment in which I would meet and debate
with an alternate-reality version of me who was raised to believe (and does
believe) that honor killing is a moral necessity in some circumstances. I don't
think that hypothetical alt-Jean is inferior to me; I don't think her culture
is inferior to mine across the board; very probably it is superior in many
respects which she understands deeply but that I have little sensitivity to.
All I say is that she's wrong on this
point, and also on some other preceding moral premises or rules that she may
have relied on to reach that conclusion. ("Men rightfully have moral
responsibility for women"? "Loss of face injures a high-ranking
person even more than bodily assault or death injures a low-ranking person"?
"Nothing really bad can happen to a truly innocent person, because God (or
'the universe' or 'karma' or whatever) watches over and protects the
deserving"? I'm only guessing at exactly what's amiss in alt-Jean's moral
reasoning, but I do know that something is amiss. NB: I am far from supposing
that my own moral reasoning is flawless.)
Second, it's true that I chose a relatively unchallenging
example of morally wrong behavior, given the audience to whom I was preaching. There
are of course a wide variety of examples I could have chosen to illustrate the
concept of "abomination" and why I have chosen to retain the concept
in my own thinking rather than dismiss it as naïve or antiquated. I could have
spoken of things I find shameful in what my own country's highest-ranking folks
have ordered or let happen in recent years: Abu Ghraib, extraordinary rendition,
Guantanamo, "enhanced interrogation techniques," prison privatization,
etc., etc. Maybe it was just a bit too easy, choosing something very clear-cut
and also very far away that I knew my audience could comfortably deplore. But….
But I only had 20 minutes and my thesis was not about any
particular moral conclusions nor was it a call to any particular moral actions.
The sermon was not intended to be of the genre that exhorts the flock to behave
better their own selves. (Not yet, anyway! Foundations come first, before building.)
Au contraire, it was intended as encouragement to those who, like me, lack
moral confidence. The one thing I wanted
to establish in this, my maiden sermon, is that "hedgehogs"—believers
in right and wrong—don't have to be fundamentalists, nor ignoramuses, nor arrogant
self-righteous power-grabbers. In other words, you don't have to lack all
conviction, just to distinguish yourself from folks you find distasteful who
are full of passionate intensity.
Finally, even if honor killing is a bit of an outlier, in
the sense of being relatively rare, I think it's deeply connected with other practices
which are more widespread. Female genital mutilation, for instance, or closer
to home the impulse to deny reproductive autonomy to women. Close inquiry into
what we in our neck of the woods all pretty much agree is the faulty moral
reasoning of the proponents of honor killing could still provide useful insight
into our own possibly disordered thinking.
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