Grappling with the Good: Talking about Religion and Morality in Public Schools

MUTUAL RESPECT AS A FOUNDATION FOR ETHICAL DIALOGUE

to make the case that engaging with religious perspectives as a part of Ethical Dialogue is a matter of mutual respect, and thus an essential component of citizenship in any good society. The latter half of the chapter then offers a more concrete analysis of why religiously-informed ethical frameworks deserve significant attention in our public schools. The basic theoretical argument of the chapter unfolds as follows: 1. Mutual respect is a vital feature of any good society. 2. Amidst ethical conflict, mutual respect requires that we strive to understand others’ ethical frameworks. 3. Many people’s ethical frameworks are deeply informed by religion. 4. Ethical Dialogue will often need to foster understanding of religious perspectives. Much of current ethical education, in practice if not in theory, presumes the detachment of ethical and religious identity. Dialogue amidst these conditions of (at best) ignorant tolerance fails to understand the diverse ethical perspectives of students and thus fails to respect students themselves . It also fails to prepare all students to be citizens able to engage thoughtfully and productively with ethical disagreement in our pluralistic society. Our students and our society deserve and require better. MUTUAL RESPECT AS A FOUNDATION FOR ETHICAL DIALOGUE The starting assumption for this chapter is that a good society depends in part on people living in mutual respect. The argument for Ethical Dialogue also rests on this foundational premise that we owe respect to others as persons. If we endorse this idea, it naturally raises the question, “Well, what then does respect for others entail?” In order to answer this, we must begin a bit farther back and ask, “What is it about our status as humans that merits respect in the first place?” Stephen Darwall responds by suggesting a dual notion of respect: recognition respect and appraisal respect. The latter is what we usually mean when we say someone deserves our respect; we evaluate and commend features or characteristics of a person , such as honesty or generosity. In contrast, recognition respect doesn ’t measure a person but instead acknowledges that the fact that she simply is a person gives her a particular moral status.1 36 Grappling with the Good Recognition respect emphasizes the incommensurable worth of others . It is an egalitarian attitude that, unlike appraisal respect, makes no distinction based on merit. It is the respect owed to (all) others as equals. This universal emphasis resembles a Kantian version of mutual respect, where each person is treated as an instance of the universal and thus accorded respect simply by virtue of her personhood. While the egalitarian nature of recognition or universal respect is vital, such a conception alone is insufficient, because none of us are mere instances of the universal . Rather, we are particular individuals whose very uniqueness contributes to our worth and hence the respect we are owed. What we need is a conception of respect for persons that integrates the universal unconditionality of Kantian respect with one more attentive to human particularity and personal identity. One promising possibility is offered by Loren Lomasky, who points to humans’ natural pursuit of “projects” as a foundational rationale for mutual respect. He describes projects as the ends of human actions that “reach indefinitely into the future, play a central role within the ongoing endeavors of the individual, and provide a significant degree of structural stability to an individual’s life.”2 Projects are, in a sense, a narrative structure. Some projects address external states of affairs in our lives, such as a goal to help cure cancer. Others focus on the kind of person one wishes to be, for instance, someone who values a happy family life over career advancement. While our various projects generally have some sort of internal consistency, this human characteristic of project pursuit need not involve some sort of fixed, fully rational “master plan.” The status of humans as project pursuers provides this integrated notion of respect we seek, one that includes both impersonal and personal considerations. It is impersonal in its applicability to everyone, but personal in that ultimate value resides in the particularity of each project pursuer . Gregory Vlastos suggests the image of parental love to analogize the relationship between universal respect and attention to individuality. A parent properly loves his or her child unconditionally, but this love manifests through an intimate understanding of the child’s individuality; a love missing either facet would be found somehow wanting.3 Similarly, we cannot merely respect people in the abstract but must often...