Reason in the Public Square, Part I

When public discourse on moral issues is good for the culture and when it’s not

In a marvelous little book written twenty-three years ago entitled Amusing Ourselves to Death, writer, educator and communications theorist, Neil Postman theorized—on the very eve of the internet-based media and communications revolution—that Americans were (already) so overloaded with (televised) information “that the content of much of our public discourse has become dangerous nonsense.”[1] A valid observation in many respects in 1985, it is even truer today. Toward the end of the book, Postman observes:

[Everyone] in America…is entitled to an opinion, and it is certainly useful to have a few when a pollster shows up. But these are opinions of a quite different order from eighteenth or nineteenth-century opinions. It is probably more accurate to call them emotions rather than opinions, which would account for the fact that they change from week to week, as the pollsters tells us.

Those of us who like to read books like Postman’s are often wont to explain that what regularly passes for ‘opinion’ or ‘argument’ in the public square is little more than knee-jerk emotional reaction and the expression of blind personal preference. We often point to ‘emotivism’ or, more broadly ‘moral relativism’ as the root causes of these moral ailments.

I recently came across a pair of essays by Robert T. Miller, assistant professor at the Villanova University School of Law, which challenged this, perhaps, simplistic analysis. (You can read Miller’s article at the First Things blog ‘On the Square’ here: part I and part II).

Is the problem really that ‘relativism’ or ‘emotivism’ has occasioned the perceived dearth of reasoned discourse on moral matters in the public square? Miller makes the excellent point that commentators on cultural health of many stripes (he is off the mark, however, exclusively to fault “Catholic thinkers”) wrongly bundle many principled moral arguments into the category of “relativism”, arguments “none of which … involves a wholesale rejection of rational argumentation on normative issues.”[2]He rightly concludes by insisting:

Religious believers who are committed to participating in the public square need to understand these arguments and be prepared to answer them. They cannot escape this hard work by invoking the bogeyman of ethical relativism.

Miller makes the further valid observation when he notes that:

Generally speaking, our society is more concerned with producing and responding to arguments than probably any other in the history of the world. Whether the issue is abortion or gay rights, tax policy or the trade deficit, global warming or third-world debt, everyone seems ready to adduce arguments in support of some position or other. In learned periodicals like the Journal of Philosophy or the Harvard Law Review, on the editorial pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post, in the rough-and-tumble opinion journalism of National Review and The Nation, in the postings of bloggers and the ramblings of barroom blowhards, we find nothing but arguments about morals and politics.

Postman was absolutely right when he foresaw that the TV sound-bite would in many ways disqualify television as a medium for the serious exchange of thought. He did not, however, foresee the advent of the blogosphere or other e-media that have actually enhanced, as Miller observes, our ability to engage in reasoned moral discourse.

One might, nevertheless, be tempted to infer from Miller’s sanguine account of things that, because there is plenty of argumentation going on in the public square, everything is fine and dandy with the state of our moral culture. Such a conclusion—I hope this is not Miller’s contention—would be breathtakingly naïve. True, our culture is awash in what passes for “argumentation” on pressing moral issues. But should we be so quick to discover here a putative sign of moral health? I think the matter requires much closer examination.

As Alasdair MacIntyre has cogently observed, today “on every substantive social and moral issue intellectuals appear on opposing sides.” And whether it comes in the form of formal argumentation, or the mere assertion of cultural convention, “there are too many rival conventions, too many conflicting anecdotes; and the repetition of assertions and denials does not constitute conversation.”[3] An abundance, that is, of argumentation in the public square, does not, in and of itself, assure or guarantee a healthy moral fabric for contemporary culture.

In fact our current overabundance of argumentation suffers from two endemic flaws which can be, over time, potentially lethal for Western liberal democracy as we know it. Both of these have been masterfully examined by MacIntyre. The first is that we encounter these arguments entirely untethered from the moral traditions which generated them. The second is that, given that we find them entirely out of their relevant contexts, history has suffered for centuries from our very evident inability to adjudicate between those rival arguments. Next week, I will explore these two flaws in greater detail, and examine how they give rise to another profound error, namely, the assurance that ‘public reason’ as it is sometimes called can give rise a viable public consensus on difficult and contested moral issues.

For now, let’s just say that even poor argumentation in the public square is preferable to none at all. We can never tire of promoting a form of civility which demands coherent argumentation, namely, that conclusions follow validly from principled premises. After all, western culture in the tradition of liberal democracy has, by and large, remained faithful to its roots in the democratic ideal born in Athens two and a half millennia ago, favoring moral discourse that employs reasoned argumentation over moral speak which simply gives utterance to emotional aversions or preferences. Would I be too naïve to think that most Americans still believe that moral converse in the public square should be based on the use of human reason? I hope not.

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[1] Postman’s thesis in this book and other essays is that the media we use to express ourselves in cultural contexts has an astounding impact on the contentlimits of what we are able to express. Writes Postman: and

For although culture is a creation of speech, it is recreated anew by every medium of communication—from painting to hieroglyphs to the alphabet to television. Each medium, like language itself, makes possible a unique mode of discourse by providing a new orientation for thought, for expression, for sensibility… But the forms of our media… are rather like metaphors, working by unobtrusive but powerful implication to enforce their special definitions of reality. Whether we are experiencing the world through the lens of speech or the printed word or the television camera, our media-metaphors classify the world for us, sequence it, frame it, enlarge it, reduce it, color it, argue a case for what the world is like.

[2]As one example, he points to a perceived tendency among Catholic moralists to lump the moral theory of Consequencialism into the broader category of “moral relativism.” Consequencialism is a moral theory which proposes to guide moral determinations based on our putative ability to perform a kind of moral calculus that would weigh potential negative vs. positive outcomes (consequences) of our actions. “Right” moral answers would be based on that calculus. Miller is quite correct to insist that “[Consequencialism], though mistaken, contains nothing that threatens the rational discussion of normative questions.” Though emerging from false premises, consequentialist arguments, and more broadly speaking, the entire set of theories, along with Consequencialism that fall under the umbrella term of Proportionalism, can be quite coherent. Proportionalism, in fact, began as a reaction against more subjectivist tendencies in moral theory and was motivated by the desire to get back to a kind of moral reasoning that was principled and objective.

[3] "Moral Arguments and Social Contexts: A Response to Rorty," Journal of Philosophy, 80 (1983), 590-91. Reprinted in Hermenteutics and Practice, Robert Hollinger, ed. (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985), 296.