Studying and Advocating

Upon reading Scott Davis’s compelling work Believing and Acting, I am struck that the pragmatic turn in religion and ethics has taken three primary forms. That is, pragmatism has been understood as (1) a scholarly approach to the study of religious ethics; (2) a description of the social practices of reasoning by which communities work through disagreements and come to shared norms; and (3) an ethical program suggesting a way that human communities ought to come to such agreement and disagreement; or some combination of these three. Davis’s book falls primarily into the first category, as he outlines a pragmatic approach to the study of religion and comparative ethics. In my brief remarks here, I want to recount the key features of this approach, which I do indeed regard as the most productive avenue of studying religious ethics. However, I would also like to suggest that it may be difficult to separate the pragmatic scholarly approach from options (2) and (3) for understanding pragmatism as listed above. In other words, it may be that a more robust, normative form of pragmatism follows logically from the way in which Davis has outlined his approach to inquiry.

The Pragmatist Approach to Scholarly Inquiry

Following C. S. Peirce, Davis understands pragmatism as a particular mode of investigation, responding to moments of doubt by seeking fixity of belief. He insists that the pragmatic approach he recommends is not a theory. Indeed, Davis opposes the quest for theory in religious studies, which he understands as the desire to arrive at predictive laws of human behavior. Davis rightly points out that human behavior is too complex and too unpredictable to be captured in universal laws. As he puts it, the closest we could come to formulating such a law would be to affirm that “[h]uman beings at time T, in place P, when confronted with circumstances C, will do X, unless they choose not to” (2012, 97)—not much of a law at all. Thus, rather than attempting to elaborate grand theories, scholars of religion and ethics ought to focus their efforts on the skillful interpretation of historical and ethnographical reports of what people in religious communities are saying and doing: “[U]nderstanding religion and religious practices needs nothing more, theoretically, than the imaginative juxtaposition of the sort of data provided by history and ethnography” (120). To keep scholarship moving forward, scholars should limit themselves to putting forth testable, revisable hypotheses.

Though Davis rejects theory, he is careful to emphasize that he is not rejecting several aspects of what has often been identified as theory. Most crucially, he is not rejecting truth. Scholarship, even of the pragmatic sort he recommends, aims at truth, even as it acknowledges its fallibility (2012, 20, 35–36). Davis also does not reject the scholarly practice of giving explanatory accounts of what people are doing—and why—when engaging in religious and moral practices. Even functionalist explanations are acceptable so long as they avoid certain pitfalls (64–66). Finally, even though Davis denies universalism, he does not reject the possibility of translation between different moral languages. With Donald Davidson, Davis maintains that the existence of disagreement and difference does not lead to unintelligibility (128–35). Thus, Davis argues against both cognitivist theory, with its aspirations to universal predictive laws for religious behavior, and postmodernist theory, with its claim that responsible scholarship cannot accommodate translation of “other” practices and beliefs.

Davis recommends an approach he calls “pragmatic comparativism” to assess whether the explanatory and interpretive accounts scholars do provide push inquiry in the proper direction (toward truth). Competing accounts of the same practice, text, or belief are compared with reference to three “self-critical moods” Davis adopts from art critic Michael Baxandall. Scholarly explanations are best when interpreters take care to ensure their historical legitimacy, coherent order, and critical necessity (Davis 2012, 160–61). A big part of what this means is that interpreters cannot dismiss the explanations their subjects themselves give for what they are doing. Scholars ought to avoid attributing anachronistic or otherwise foreign intentions and meanings to the behaviors of their subjects. Like a critic judging...