Don't Fight The Wrong Battle
Values, beliefs, Jurgen Habermas........ and maybe not fighting at all
There is a difference between values and beliefs, but we often conflate the two.
I think this makes conflict between people worse than it needs to be.
An example: two parents both value their child’s health. One believes the child should be vegetarian to be healthy, the other thinks they need to eat meat. If they understand they have the same value but different beliefs, they can debate the beliefs and find a compromise or agreement of some kind to move forward.
The confusion enters if one parent shifts from debating beliefs to attacking the other parent as not sharing the value of caring for the child’s health. People are sensitive about their values, and also about the perception that they are being accused of not having an important value, or in other words, being an immoral or bad person.
“You don’t care about the child’s health, just your pet ethical crusades. Otherwise you’d let the child eat meat.”
“Don’t you care about the earth, and about the child’s morality? How can you say you care about children and then feed them food from abused animals whose cultivation destroys the ecology?”
This conversation is not going anywhere besides towards hurt.
Abortion
A more serious example which shows this problem on a societal level: two factions in a culture war both value life, or in other words, they believe in reducing violence.
One of them believes that abortion is a form of violence towards an existing lifeform and their future development into a person, and possibly also believes that it is a worse form of violence to kill a feotus than to force a woman to carry a baby to term.
The other person also values life and non-violence, but does not believe abortion is a form of intolerable violence, or maybe not violence at all. They believe a feotus is not developed enough, in terms of consciousness, nervous system, independence or personhood, to be the object of violence. Possibly they also believe that even if there is some form of violence involved, the violence involved in forcing a woman to carry a child to term is a worse form of violence than killing a very basic, more or less barely sentient and unformed life.
The beliefs here differ a lot. There is certainly room for them to be explored in an open minded way, and for the degree to which they match the evidence to be examined. Not every aspect of the situation may be amenable to being proven to be true or false definitively, and so compromise is almost definitely going to be needed if these people want to work together within a diverse society.
Again here the same problem as in the first example may happen, however. One person attacks the other as not sharing the same value: “You don’t value life. If you did you’d value the mother’s life. You don’t care about the baby. If you did you’d only want desired babies to be born. You’d rather have unwanted babies born and abandoned to poverty or neglect than question your own religious beliefs, which is all you actually care about, not people.” Or they accuse the anti-abortion person of being motivated by something totally different, totally other than caring about life as they claim. Their real motivation is controlling women, or making women suffer, or hating women, or upholding the patriarchy.
On the other side, the anti-abortion folks will also attack their “opponent” as not really valuing life. “You don’t care about women. If you did you’d want to save them from the trauma of becoming baby-killers. You’d support a culture where men and women were less promiscuous. What you actually want is a sexual free for all, you’re a nihilist and a hyper-individualist who doesn’t care about the next generation or the morality of our culture. You just care about being able to do whatever you want without consequences. In the end, you’re more concerned with jumping on the woke bandwagon and being accepted by your woke friends then thinking deeply about the issue.”
I think its obvious this conversation will never go anywhere as it is framed. Reading this, you might have found yourself getting angry at some of the assertions and concocting counter-arguments already!
As I argued in Finding Moral Common Ground in Divided Times, the only hope is to start with finding shared values. We need to honour the other person’s values and the reality that they are a moral agent, someone who has things they value deeply, who is seeking to enact those values in the world.
Attacking someone else’s values never goes anywhere. Honouring them, and then discussing what type of implementation everyone can agree on, is a method with hope. It might not work, but unlike going into attack mode, it actually might.
“Ok, so we both agree that we want to feed Mary healthy food. The disagreement is over whether a vegetarian diet or an omnivorous diet is more healthy. I get that you believe that some meat is needed for our child’s health. Can we look at some nutritional advice and see if we can limit meat to just what is needed, and not eat it casually?”
Or: “Ok, so we both agree that we want to feed Mary healthy food. The disagreement is over whether a vegetarian diet or an omnivorous diet is more healthy. I get that you believe vegetarianism is ethically, ecologically and physically more healthy. Can we agree to feed the child some meat and fish which are sustainably sourced, organic and as cruelty-free as possible?”
All of this requires an authentic spirit of compromise, of course. Compromise comes from roots which mean “to promise together.” This suggests an agreement made together, which is of course the rub. There needs to be a willingness for the eventual mutual promise to actually represent both people’s concerns, not just the one who can manipulate, threaten, force, or exhaust the other.
Let’s try this with the more difficult abortion example:
“Ok, so we both care about life, avoiding violence, and women’s wellbeing. Can we agree on setting limits on how far along during pregnancy abortions are legal? Can we agree that the greater the threat the mother’s mental and physical health, the more accessible an abortion should be to her? Can we agree that abortions will be treated like serious moral decisions with serious consequences, not casual, neutral decisions?”
Or: “I get that you care about life, avoiding violence, and women’s wellbeing. Can we agree that women who would suffer real mental or physical harm from carrying a baby to term can free access to stigma-free abortions? Can we agree that as well as caring for the child she may carry to term, we also have to focus on women’s physical and mental health, and respect their autonomy, ensuring we are truly caring for rights and their whole person?”
Ultimately, some issues have a wide spectrum of opinion which allows little compromise, or cannot be settled in the universalist language of the public sphere. Rather than forcing the opinions of one group on everyone else, in these cases we need to accept that the government cannot legislate a universal solution and the matter must be left up to individual conscience1. Though some groups will always press for enacting the most conservative possible position in law, the logic of democracy suggests the opposite: that a minimal position should be legislated with families and individuals free to adopt more stringent restraints on themselves.
Habermas and The Public Sphere
A political decision of this kind requires that all parties recognize the existence of the saeculum, or the democratic, universalist space where all such decisions are made. The philosopher Jürgen Habermas, who passed away a week ago — something I was startled to find out as I did my final edit, may his memory be for a blessing— called this the “public sphere.” It’s not that this space is value- free— it’s not, shouldn’t be, and actually can’t be— but the values that create the basic commitments of the space should embrace the views of its diverse residents without requiring a shared ethnic or religious culture, as Habermas argues.
In other words, the values and beliefs asserted within the space of the saeculum must be capable of universal demonstration and articulation, and be aligned with the basic values and commitments of the community itself, not just a sub-community within the community. Habermas argued that religions can be the source of moral intuitions and commitments within this context, but they can only become legislation if the moral intuition can be communicated in a “publicly accessible register” justifiable in secular terms. Otherwise they must remain private commitments.
What happens if those we are attempting compromise or alignment with are not entering in good faith? This makes compromise, or promising together, impossible. On a personal level, the answer is either to leave the relationship or, if we can’t, become very strategic indeed. In extreme cases, we may seek external support in the form of mediation or the intervention of the law.
It also means that when debating an issue within the family, or between friends, we must leave aside our private moral or religious commitments and debate only within the sphere of the values we share and the things that we can agree on.
On a political level, it’s much the same. The best is to vote them out of office or prevent them from attaining office in the first place. After that, we will need to rely on the intervention of the law.
Yet this is out of the scope of this piece, in which I’m assuming a reasonable level of good faith on everyone’s part.
In The Kitchen
In Leonard Cohen’s prescient and timely Democracy he links harmony in public diversity to harmony in the furnace of domesticity, saying democracy is coming from the sorrow in the street/the holy places where the races meet/from the homicidal bitchin'/that goes down in every kitchen/to determine who will serve and who will eat.
I don’t expect that if we all start arguing less we’ll miraculously wrest our democracies back from those who do not have the tolerance for diversity and readiness to make real promises together and to each other that democracy relies on.
It will, however, make our homes happier and free up more energy for the bigger issues which so many of us feel too harried, stressed, drained and distracted to address. At the end of the day, how we’ve behaved in the little saeculum which we directly share with others is likely what matters most. Saeculum means, after all, simply “world.” As the Yiddish saying goes, its a velt mit veltlich, a world filled with little worlds, and it is those little worlds that we actually live in.
This is my own view with regards to abortion. I believe it should abortion is only justifiable when there is a real threat to the mother’s mental or physical health, but do not think this matter should be legislated, because it is an issue with too many complex and intimate details and one with too much diversity of moral opinion. I am privately pro-life and politically pro-choice.
I hadn't thought to make the distinction with "values" vs. "beliefs" this way before, but it makes so much sense. Of the very few things I feel certain of, one of them is that we live in a world where humans always have and always will disagree on things. That, right there, has helped me detach a bit and question my own beliefs (and sometimes even values) whenever I find myself getting a bit agitated.
Really enjoyed reading this, thanks Matthew!