“is what is moral agreed on by rational people because it is moral, or is it moral because rational people have agreed it is moral?”

or am i just being mr thicky here?

b’shalom

bananabrain

You also misread Williams on the consequences of the decline of religion for morality. His point seems to me that whilst agreement on a central range of moral cases is possible and indeed likely, that agreement will not extend to the reasoning behind those cases. You and I may both agree that torture is wrong, but we will not agree why. Further, there is going to be a wide range of cases about which there is not just going to be explanatory disagreement, but also disagreement about content, and that if we are going to share a society with each other, that requires that we exhibit certain kinds of understanding; specifically, atheists and agnostics need to understand what difference it makes to the way morality is experienced if it is understood as divine command. This is the same point he is making when he talks about denying the sacred as a point of relevance for one’s own moral experience and denying it as a point of relevance for anyone’s moral experience. This is not so far from Rawls: the emphasis on the demands that moral pluralism makes on us, the willingness to see that there are some things that we cannot require people to give up and so on. There’s a point in Political Liberalism where Rawls says something like ‘anyone who wouldn’t protect freedom of religion just doesn’t know what religion is’. Williams seems to be making that sort of plea about questions relating to the freedom to be (deliberately) offensive. Neither has to be read as demanding that the religious get everything they might want.

Also, I know I’m hardly one to go on about this, but 13 line sentences?

ER: Ibrahim Lawson, how would you define the purpose of your Islamia school?
IL: Well, the essential purpose of the Islamia school as with all Islamic schools is to inculcate profound religious belief in the children.
ER: You use the word “inculcate”: does that mean you are in the business of indoctrination?
IL: I would say so, yes; I mean we are quite unashamed about that really. The reason that parents send their children to our school is that they want them to grow up to be very good Muslims.
ER: Does that mean that Islam is a given and is never challenged?
IL: That’s right…

So there would appear to be plenty of scope for bitter conflict, possibly escalating to hatred, between Christians and Muslims as to who has the religious ‘truth’.

Second, the Archbishop repeatedly referred to Muslims in Britain as a victimised group who feel unfairly ‘excluded’ from wider society. They do indeed portray themselves, very successfully, as a victimised group; but whether they wish or intend to espouse the values of our wider, liberal, secular society and play a constructive role in it is far from clear. All too often, their vocal spokesmen heap contempt upon it.

Williams seems to think that this is not a remark to which he should take offence because I have less power than he does. This does seem remarkably confused to me, since I presume he is in favour of empowering the powerless (in some general sense) – yet he also seems to me to want to impute some kind of moral worth to powerlessness itself.

This conundrum arises because he wants to be able to make an a priori distinction between those cases when offence is wrongly given and those when it is wrongly taken. Even if such an a priori distinction is possible (rather than a shifting cultural sandbank – think of the history of the word “queer”) it seems to me odd that a Christian would not interpret the doctirne of suffering to hold that offence is only taken, never given. Football crowds often chant words which, taken in isolation, seem to give offence to the opponents’ fans, but those fans never take offence. (Football violence so far as I know is almost always pre-meditated before the match even starts.)

Surely the only distinction the law can hope to make successfully is that between offence (about which it can say nothing useful) and threat – has there, for example, ever been a conviction under anti-harassment legislation of any kind where the prosecution could not convince the jury that there was an element of “threat” involved? I doubt it.