“The universal moral aspect is a positive element in the different religions that can potentially be used for good in diplomacy,” Anderson told the Mehr News Agency in an interview conducted by H. Kaji and J. Heiran-Nia.
“It is helpful in international relations to remind each other of these fundamentally shared moral commitments, on the basis of which alone a stable and just world peace can be achieved,” she noted.
Following is the text of the interview:
Q: Is the 20th century the best century in the history of philosophy? Why?
A: I would say it is too soon to tell whether the 20th century is the best century in the history of philosophy! Only future generations can make this judgment, by canonizing works from the 20th century and continuing to use the analytic tools and conceptual innovations of that century.
In general I think that philosophers of the 20th c. have made tremendous advances in concepts and tools--especially in logic, philosophy of language, and rational choice theory. More important, to my mind, is a trend toward re-integrating philosophy with the natural and social sciences. So, in terms of methods and tools, there has been great progress. But in terms of viable philosophical systems or answers to philosophical questions, we'll just have to see.
Q: Which elements can shape the identity of a person in a globalized world?
A: Social theorists distinguish between "objective" and "subjective" social identities. When other individuals or institutions count a person as a member of a particular social group for the purpose of allocating benefits or burdens to that person, or subjecting that person to specific social norms, expectations, reputations, or group-based attitudes, that group becomes part of one's "objective" social identity. Of course, people may have multiple cross-cutting social identities, as of ethnicity, religion, gender, language group, caste, race, nationality, immigrant/citizen status, and so forth. Objective social identity is not a matter of individual choice; it is determined by others. However, individuals may adopt different stances toward their objective social identities--they may affirm or reject those identities, publicize or hide them, or try to transform them by publicly challenging stereotypes about those identities, or by demanding rights or benefits because of, despite, or irrespective of certain identities. Individuals may also choose to associate with or disassociate from others to whom the same objective identity is ascribed; they may try to create new identities and get them recognized, and so forth. All of these ways an individual has of relating to or transforming his or her identities amount to his or her "subjective identities."
The state is commonly regarded today as a key identity-maker. But it is not the only one. Churches, community organizations, mass media and numerous other institutions play various roles in constructing social identities. People can organize in civil society to create new identities on their own and challenge the state and other institutions to get those identities recognized.
Q: What is the role of religion in shaping the identity of man in a globalized community?
A: Social identities of all sorts, whether religious or otherwise, have a subjective and an objective dimension. Subjectively, one's identity is what one takes it to mean for oneself. Objectively, one's identity is what it means to other people. Globalization has dramatically expanded the scope and variety of audiences for objective religious identities. This entails that the individual has less and less control over how his or her self-presentation as a member of any particular religion is understood by others, since the individual is now presented before diverse audiences with conflicting understandings of diverse religions--audiences that often do not share the individual's own subjective religious identity. Nowhere is this more evident than in the debates over the meaning of the hijab in France, the Netherlands, and other European countries. When a young woman wears the hijab in Europe, she does not control the public meaning of her act simply through her own understanding of her own religious identity. To non-Muslim Europeans, this act is rarely seen simply as an individual's affirmation of her religious identity, or as a commitment to modesty. It is seen, variously, as a rejection of Western values, a submission to male domination, a threatening symbol of solidarity with religiously-inspired terrorism, a sign of inability to be assimilated into a Western culture, a challenge to secular citizenship. Her objective religious identity becomes entangled in international conflicts between Western and Muslim countries and is thereby politicized and wrested from her control and even from the control of her local religious community. In this way we encounter the deepest irony of globalization: just as subjective religious identities are becoming more important for individuals in our globalized, mobile world, individuals are less and less able to communicate to others the kind of meaning and importance their identity has for them, and even their religious communities lack control over what that religious identity means to others.
Q: Can religion act as a facilitator in diplomacy (religious diplomacy)?
A: Most religions have two aspects: a universal moral aspect, and an exclusivist claim. The universal moral aspect prescribes rules of conduct that are binding on everyone and that protect everyone. For example, the major world religions all say that there are duties not to kill, steal, lie and rape as well as positive duties to promote peace, relieve suffering, and help the poor. At the same time, the major religions include an exclusivist claim. Each says that its adherents alone are on the true path to salvation, or have some special relation to God, or follow the true and final prophets. The others are on a false path, perhaps even a path to damnation, and hence alienated from or rejected by God or doomed to some lesser fate.
The universal moral aspect is a positive element in the different religions that can potentially be used for good in diplomacy. It is helpful in international relations to remind each other of these fundamentally shared moral commitments, on the basis of which alone a stable and just world peace can be achieved. However, the exclusivist claims of the different religions pull in the opposite direction. They tend to make people think that adherents of other religions are willfully, obstinately turning their backs on the most important truths, or on God, that they are in league with the forces of evil, that their beliefs pose a mortal threat to the salvation of one's own people, that their very presence in certain holy territories is an affront to God. Such beliefs provide an ideological rationale and motivation for warfare and crimes against humanity--a giant loophole in the otherwise universal moral duties through which certain religious zealots drive warriors, tanks and airplanes.
No diplomacy can be based on the exclusivist claims, since they insist on principles that the other side (if its members adhere to different religions or sects) rejects at the core, and that offer the other side no terms other than capitulation. That is a "diplomacy" of pure force or coercion. If religion is to play a positive role in diplomacy, it must focus on its universal moral commitments.
Q: Are there persistent ethical principles in the international system?
A: One must distinguish principles of morality from principles of international law. The fundamental principles of moral obligation are universal and owed to everyone, regardless of nationality. Each individual is the bearer of fundamental human rights that bind all actors in the world. However, institutions are required to fully realize these rights for all. There are multiple possible ways to attempt to institutionalize human rights, which implicate other human interests--for example, in local self-government. This multiplicity and potential tradeoffs with other interests introduces a conventional element in international law. Legitimate disagreements may therefore arise over the international institutional arrangements needed to fulfill universal principles of moral obligation. In addition, of course, there remains the profound political obstacle of getting international actors to respect the interests of others to the same degree that they demand that others respect their own interests.
Q: If so, which actors shape ethical principles and norms in the world?
A: In our globalized era, we can no longer limit ourselves to a finite list of international actors shaping international norms. Nation states, of course, remain central actors. However, international organizations such as the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, and the International Monetary Fund, are playing important roles in shaping international norms. In addition, we are witnessing the emergence of a global civil society, mediated by the Internet and other forms of global communication, in which a global public is emerging with critical capacities to criticize and resist international arrangements and to propose new international norms, or to demand respect for existing norms. We witness this to some extent in NGO human rights and environmental groups, but also in less organized forms. I see the emergence of a global civil society as one of the most significant features of the contemporary world, likely to have a profound impact on the future development of international norms.
Q: Technology has affected both our lives and knowledge. Do you believe that technology has changed the concept of “moral actor” in ethics? Can we use the Kantian meaning of the concept in ethics now?
A: Technology has greatly expanded the powers of human beings for both good and evil. One of its chief consequences has been to expand the scope of human communication and cooperation to a global scale. This makes new and bigger collective agents possible. By a collective agent, I mean any group of people who have pooled their wills to advance a common project or to uphold common norms, customs, or laws. It has always been the case that collectives, and not only individuals, can be morally responsible agents. For example, citizens hold their government, which is a type of collective agent, responsible for upholding the laws and protecting the population from external and internal aggression. All agents, whether individual or collective, have moral responsibilities. What technology does is expand the size and scope of collective agents. So I would not say that technology has changed the concept of moral actor. That concept remains the same. What it has done is expand the set of moral actors to encompass collectives that are no longer in face-to-face relations or united by common citizenship in a single state. Our challenge, then, is to devise institutions to ensure that such dispersed collectives are able and willing to uphold their moral responsibilities. For example, we want the global cooperation enabled by the Internet to be a force for good, and not just an instrument by which criminal gangs can defraud others in distant lands, safe from fear of prosecution because they reside in a separate country from that of their victims.
Q: Is it morally correct that university professors defend of their own viewpoints in class?
A: There are two schools of thought about presenting controversial moral, political and social views in class. The first school of thought stresses the distinction between teaching and preaching. On this view, professors are not entitled to preach, but only to present the different points of view and their respective pros and cons in as "objective" a fashion as possible, so that students can learn of the various possibilities and remain free to choose whichever they prefer on the basis of their own personal values. The question is, what counts as "objective"? Some say a presentation is "objective" if it is "balanced"--presented in such a way as to represent every side as having equally weighty things to say in favor or against it. The difficulty with this is that some points of view are fundamentally flawed in ways that others are not--they may be internally inconsistent, based on false beliefs, or logically unsound, for example. It would be dishonest for a professor to hide such flaws, or downplay them, just in order to be "neutral"--in fact, hiding such problems is a way of putting one's thumb on the scales of incoherent views. A better account of objectivity is, as the great sociologist Max Weber insisted, to present the facts that are "inconvenient" to each view. Instead of hiding the flaws of a view, one must expose them rigorously--and do so as much for the view one favors as for all the other views.
The second school of thought says that certain points of view, especially if they are not well known or unpopular, will not get a fair hearing unless they are passionately presented by an advocate. The real strengths of the point of view can best be made vivid by such an advocate, and not by a dispassionate "neutral" presentation. Students learn by encountering a bracing presentation of points of view that challenge their own complacent assumptions.
I believe that there is room for both schools of thought, and that the social context of education plays a large role in determining which style of teaching should be adopted. The second school of thought works only in contexts where it is taken for granted that students are both entitled and expected to think for themselves, to challenge the professor, to dispute what he or she says. In such contexts, there is no better training than having to defend one's point of view in the face of bracing challenges. Passionate advocacy is permitted as itself a teaching tool, forcing students to give an account of themselves and think more clearly through the deepest parts of their own view. However, this mode of teaching fails in contexts where either students are afraid to challenge their teachers or expected to conform, or where the point of view being advocated is already believed by the students. In those contexts, advocacy-style teaching degenerates into mere preaching and has no pedagogical value. It works only in contexts where opposing views can be expected to be aired. In addition, in advocacy-style teaching, the teacher must bend over backwards to signal that students are not required to conform to the teacher's opinion, that challenges are expected and indeed required, and that the view being advocated has its own problems, which must be aired.
The first school of thought works best in contexts where the conditions for the advocacy style fails, as well as in introductory courses, where students don't yet know enough about the alternatives to be able to think for themselves about the merits and deficiencies of any point of view in the field being discussed. It may also better fit the personal style of the teacher. The dangers of the first school of thought are that it can lead to a tepid, boring presentation of the alternatives, and that it may merely reinforce intellectual complacency on the part of students by failing to challenge their ideas sufficiently. They simply find the one on the menu that they like, and stick with it, insisting in a lazy way that in their view, the pros of their view outweigh the cons, without giving it further thought. When the latter danger looms, it pays to push students by means of the advocacy mode.
It should be plain in all of this that the view the teacher advocates need not be the teacher's personal view. The proper goal of a teacher is to develop students' powers to critically analyze views and think for themselves, not to spread the teacher's own partisan opinions. For this proper purpose, a teacher may have to passionately advocate a view he or she disagrees with, just because it is complacently dismissed by students who lazily stick to some common opinion in their group.
At the same time, it cannot be the obligation of any teacher, under either school of thought, to present as legitimate points of view that are plainly unsound, merely because some people hold that view. In the United States, there are some fringe neo-Nazi groups that advocate white supremacy and race war against nonwhites. Such views rest on such a vast foundation of lies, absurdities, and malicious attitudes that anyone pretending that they are worthy candidates for adoption would have to be actively misleading students in ways that undercut the entire mission of education. Not every view deserves a hearing in the classroom. Of course, for purposes of historical, political, or cultural study such views can be examined as ideological phenomena, but that is not the same as taking them seriously as potential candidates for adoption.
Elizabeth Anderson is John Rawls Collegiate Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies in University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Professor Anderson specializes in ethics, social and political philosophy, feminist theory, and the philosophy of economics and the social sciences. She is currently writing a book on the ideal of ethno-racial integration in democratic theory. Anderson was nominated and elected as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2008.
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