I realise that I’ve written very little for this blog since its creation towards the end of last year. After Christmas, I was offered some academic teaching at short notice, and like many part-time lecturers I’ve been experiencing the travails of attempting to provide hours of lectures on a subject outside my specialism.
Now that term’s over, though, I’m hoping to post more frequently again. As many Christians recount the narratives of Christ’s betrayal and trial today, I wanted to share a few thoughts about the activity of judgement: evaluating another person’s moral character. In particular, I’ll be concerned with the responsibility which humans face when evaluating God’s moral character, and (by extension) claims about who God is, and what He does.
One verse of the Bible which perhaps chimes with modern attitudes towards judgement is Christ’s saying in Matthew 7:1: “Do not judge, so that you may not be judged”, or (colloquially) “Don’t judge [me]!”. When used properly, this last phrase is basically equivalent to the point which Jesus is making in Matthew’s Gospel, as illustrated by the parable of the mote (Matthew 7:3-5). The speaker intends to point out the danger of hypocrisy involved in moral judgement, and perhaps also the attendant difficulty of evaluating another person’s moral responsibility correctly given our partial knowledge of their circumstances and our tendency to apportion blame unfairly.
But there is another interpretation of “Don’t judge!”, which is less helpful. On this reading, the exclamation (or command?) is an assertion of one’s (basically unrestricted) right to determine for oneself the appropriate moral standards for one’s behaviour, and the corresponding duty of others to forego moral evaluation of one’s conduct. In our present society, such claims are underpinned by the attitude which St John Henry Newman described as “liberalism”: the belief that moral or religious judgements are essentially sentimental preferences or matters of taste. Of course, in the liberal worldview, a cordon sanitaire is placed around certain forms of action which can readily be condemned: discriminatory practices or beliefs (racism, homophobia, misogyny etc.) are subject to strong censure. But it is noteworthy that one popular liberal objection to these forms of discrimination is not simply that they are harmful, or even that they produce harm which is unbalanced or unjust in its distribution. Rather, what makes racism (etc.) so bad is that it is the activity of judgemental people, who unfairly judge others as morally unworthy of certain goods. [Note -- After posting this, I realised that I ought to clarify here that my point isn't that racist actions and the like aren't iniquitous, either as regards the harms they produce or the judgements which they involve. I want rather to highlight the tendency to reduce the harm of racist actions to the harms involved in prejudiced judgements.] It is worth noting in passing that the liberal outlook is historically and practically tied to an endorsement of free-market capitalism: nothing must interfere with the freedom of business parties to enter contracts and to pursue personal profit.
One elegant expression of the desire to avoid the judgements (both moral and legal) of others is found in some lines from A.E. Housman, although the underlying sentiment betrays more than a hint of ethical immaturity:
The laws of God, the laws of man, He may keep that will and can; Not I: let God and man decree Laws for themselves and not for me; And if my ways are not as theirs Let them mind their own affairs. Their deeds I judge and much condemn, Yet when did I make laws for them? Please yourselves, say I, and they Need only look the other way.[1]
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Housman’s attitude to judgement will probably be familiar to many readers. But I now want to briefly reflect on the relationship between these attitudes and the question of our religious judgements which I mentioned above. Recently, I was discussing the relationship of faith to scepticism with a close friend, whose broad and deep knowledge of philosophy and theology (to say nothing of literature and history) put mine to shame. My friend defended, in good Kantian fashion, a form of scepticism: the denial that we can know the “nature of things in themselves” and doubt about philosophy’s ability to offer guidance on questions of religious or metaphysical truth. Thus scepticism is “Pyrrhonian” rather than “Academic” – it involves uncertainty as to whether knowledge of these can be attained through philosophy, but not certainty that it is impossible.
Attempting to advance an ancient apologetic line which one finds particularly in Christian thought inspired by Augustine – and developed by French 17th Century authors including Pascal – I suggested that Pyrrhonian scepticism about philosophy’s ability to grant us knowledge of metaphysical or religious truth provides a powerful reason to embrace some form of religious faith which offers such knowledge. As Pascal suggests in the Penséees:
“Let us allow the Pyrrhonists what they have so often claimed, that truth is neither within our grasp nor is it our target. It does not reside on earth but belongs in heaven, in God’s bosom, and we can know it only as much as he is pleased to reveal. Let us then learn our true nature from the uncreated and incarnate truth.”[2]
So perhaps Pyrrhonian sceptics ought to embrace a form of Pascal’s famous wager here. Given that religious and metaphysical knowledge are potentially very great goods – they possess intrinsic epistemic value, hold importance for one’s broader moral conduct, and are on many accounts morally obligatory or praiseworthy -- should mere scepticism about possibility of religious knowledge be enough to prevent someone from committing to engagement with a religious form of life which plausibly claims to foster such knowledge? After all, Pyrrhonian sceptics have little to lose by way of religious, metaphysical or (perhaps) moral knowledge. Of course, those taking such a wager to secure the epistemic and moral goods which come from religious knowledge risk deception. But it seems that the putative epistemic and moral benefits of embracing some plausible religious systems which offer access to important truths will often outweigh the risks.
However, my friend’s reply essentially suggested that if one is sufficiently sceptical, such wager arguments are unpersuasive. In particular, one might doubt whether metaphysical or religious knowledge is much worth having, when one can continue to engage in suspense of judgement or philosophical speculation which doesn’t aim at knowledge. One might believe, for example that there is something divine about engaging in playful or exploratory philosophical argument which does not aim at knowledge. Perhaps, for example, engagement in philosophical speculation is a glorious means of participating in a God who is “beyond good and evil”, and to whom we have no ethical obligations. If one is dubious about the value of religious knowledge, one might therefore reject epistemic “wager” arguments and uphold Pyrrhonian scepticism in the face of purported revelation on purely sentimental or aesthetic grounds.
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I was reminded of my friend’s attitude a few days ago, when re-reading St John’s account of the Passion, which Catholics and many other Christians will hear read today, on Good Friday. In the course of passing judgement on Christ, when confronted with Jesus’ claim “to testify to the truth”, Pilate replies with infamously laconic resignation: “What is truth?”. It’s clear that this question is largely rhetorical: Pilate immediately declares Jesus innocent before the crowd, but then at the crowd’s mere preference for the release of Barabbas, orders Jesus to be flogged. Despite further enquiry into Jesus’ identity, when Pilate does not receive clear answers to his questions, he eventually capitulates to pressure from the crowd to have Christ executed.
In reading St John’s account of Jesus trial, we might ask the following question: was Pilate at fault for his scepticism and subsequent abandonment of Christ? In Pilate’s defence, we might note his epistemic situation: he apparently doesn’t know much about Jesus (John 18:35) and finds it hard to get clear information from Jesus himself about his identity, or crimes which he might have committed. Moreover, Christ makes it clear that it is only those “who belong to the truth” (18:87) who are able to listen to Him and to discern who He is. This “belonging” is not universal, but a gift of grace. It involves being “from God” (John 8:47): being “born from above” (John 3:3) as “God’s children” (John 1:13). So given that Pilate can neither in fact or in principal recognise Christ, can he be blamed for his actions?
But in fact, Christ’s words to Pilate imply that he is guilty for his judgement – although not as culpable as others (John 19:11). Why is Pilate guilty? Plausibly, on St John’s account, for several reasons. Firstly, even granting that his scepticism is morally and intellectually legitimate, it is wrong to condemn anyone to death on insufficient evidence. Secondly, elsewhere in the Fourth Gospel, it is suggested that those who do not recognise Jesus’ identity are culpably ignorance: they refuse to know the Light for fear of exposition to moral judgement (John 3:17-21). But finally, I am inclined to suggest that Pilate is guilty because even given his legitimate scepticism about Jesus’ nature, he fails to fulfil his moral obligation to seek the truth as best he can, and to act prudentially on the basis of the information which he has.
As I read John’s narrative, Pilate begins to seriously consider the plausibility that Jesus is in fact the “Son of God” (John 18:7). But ultimately – perhaps, affronted at Jesus’ refusal to provide definitive confirmation of this fact – Pilate hands over Jesus to be crucified as a common criminal. In other words, Pilate refuses to make a practical judgement on the question Christ’s identity for Himself, or to remain open to the possibility that Christ is the “Son of God” and to offer Him protection accordingly. He allows circumstances and the desire of others to make the choice for him. Pilate’s placement of the inscription “King of the Jews” over Jesus’ cross, rather than Christ’s opponents preferred “This man said, I am King of the Jews” is, on this reading, perhaps a continuation of an attempt at hedging on the issue of Jesus’ identity.
Of course, it’s not entirely clear why Pilate refuses to make a practical or interim judgement about who Jesus is, but there are two obvious suggestions. Firstly, to refuse to condemn Jesus will be politically and practically uncomfortable. Secondly, doing so risks admitting that Pilate may himself have responsibilities before Christ – that rather than being in the position of power and authority. So strangely, fear of being judged (by his Judean subjects, by his Roman colleagues, or even by Christ himself) obstructs Pilate from judging appropriately here.
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With this in mind, we can return to the question of whether Pyrrhonian religious sceptics – who are unsure whether even it is obligatory or very beneficial for us to arrive at knowledge of religious or moral truth – can rationally reject epistemic wager arguments for embracing religious systems which they consider plausible. Whilst I’m not certain about this, I’m inclined to think that such sceptics can’t rationally resist the force of wager arguments by simply denying that we know that we have the moral obligation to seek religious truth.
Why so? Because I think that even the (reasonable) epistemic possibility of securing the truth – especially, it is plausible that we are morally obliged or ordered to know such truth – should trump whatever non-moral goods we can attain through scepticism. One might argue that non-moral or epistemic goods, such as the putative glory of participation in divine philosophical play, can rationally dissuade sceptics from seeking religious and metaphysical truth in religious practice.
But in fact, even the glory of philosophical scepticism and the moral goodness of discovering Christ’s truth are value-incommensurable on their own terms, one can note that as far as our own responsibility is concerned, moral goodness – or at least, some form of obligation -- comes out trumps. That is, the putative moral goods secured by seeking religious truth necessarily outweigh non-moral goods (i.e. in a broad sense, goods which we are not in some broad sense obliged to seek) which might attend continued the practical and theoretical scepticism with Pyrrhonian sceptics prize. This plausibly follows from the very nature of obligation or ordering: it is just a first principle of practical reason that one should fulfil one’s all-things-considered (moral) duties or (in Aristotelian vein) that one should purse the end to which one is properly ordered. As Aquinas famously put it, “bonum est faciendum et prosequendum, et malum vitandum” (ST IaIIae 94.2). We should not, like Pilate, be tempted to conclude that because it is uncertain that we have a moral obligation to believe something or someone, we in fact lack that obligation. Perhaps there is some form of moral scepticism which doubts even this moral first principle, but it’s plausible that such scepticism involves a failure to even understand the content of moral claims. And of course, it’s trivial that if one can’t understand moral claims, wager arguments which appeal to the moral value of knowledge to be gained through religious practice will be unpersuasive.
A better way to motivate sustained Pyrrhonist scepticism in the face of wager arguments like the one sketched above would be to claim that it is just as plausible that we are morally and/or epistemically obliged to remain aloof from religious life and the putative knowledge which it brings, as we are to engage in it. But for my part, I suspect that such reason is difficult to come upon a priori.
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All this has been rather rambling, so are there any general lessons which we can draw from the foregoing musings on judgement? Here’s one suggestion which we might take away today. It is sometimes necessary to judge other people’s characters, or the truth of what they say, in order to respond to them correctly. In some circumstances, it might be obligatory or beneficial to seek knowledge by engaging with others in ways which might transform our ways of thought, even at the risk of self-deception. Or even if we lack enough information to engage with other people – or religious systems – in this way, it might nevertheless be important that we don’t just practically dismiss such people or systems through our actions, condemning them when it becomes convenient.
Sometimes, we must judge, lest we incur judgement ourselves.
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