Toward epistemic justice.

• Author: Balestra, Dominic J.
• Position: Response to article by Steven Goldberg in this issue, p. 39

I want to thank the Law School of Fordham University, Dean John Feerick, Professor Russell Pearce, Amy Uelman and Professor Goldberg for the opportunity to participate in this Conference and to display my ignorance of the law! Many of my students would enjoy the latter. Before I begin, please allow me a caveat--since I am only a philosopher and not a lawyer, and claim no expertise about the law, I asked myself, "How do I even begin to make comment on the paper of a highly regarded Professor of Law before a gathering of professors of law and practicing lawyers?" This question becomes even more vexing as I recall that the closest I have ever come to contributing to our justice system, was when summoned on two different occasions to jury duty and then, upon questioning in the voir dire, dismissed both times by the lawyers. Now, I wonder why I accepted yet a third invitation to contribute. Therefore, I would like to preempt any blunder in my remarks this morning by recourse to a claim of nonculpable ignorance of the law.

Professor Goldberg's paper represents a call to lawyers, policy makers, and even legislators to step out from the shadows of a silence created by the privatization and the exclusion of the religious voice of the individual from the polis.

I could begin by quarreling with Professor Goldberg's remark about the genome or take pause at his quick resort to the "is/ ought" distinction for what sounds like too Cartesian a standpoint. (1) But to do so would mislead you and Professor Goldberg, for I find much more sympathy with the Professor's position fully presented in his recent, provocative book, Seduced By Science: How American Religion Has Lost Its Way. (2) So rather than focus on where we might differ, I shall proceed from what I take to be a strong commitment to the freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment of our Constitution, specifically, the freedoms of speech and exercise of religion. It is a convergence of these two aspects of freedom that Professor Goldberg points to in his lecture this morning and in his book. Accordingly, I want to briefly sketch an argument for an intellectually acceptable space for a religious perspective in our attempts to arrive at the "right" course of action in response to the challenges presented by today's sciences and technologies, including those addressed in this conference. What follows might be aptly called a brief for "epistemic fairness," if not full epistemic justice, in matters religious and scientific.

In its most general articulation my remarks are about inverting the place of values in a world of fact, and transforming the question, "whence the place of values in a world of fact?," into the question of, "whence the place of facts, scientific facts, in a world of values?" More specifically, it is about the relationships among the sciences, humanities, ethics, and theology, and the question of legitimate, epistemic authority within the matrix of these relationships. In particular, I want to provide some reasons for the legitimacy of an intellectual space for religious perspectives in the public discourse from two sides of the fact/value question.

If your conception of the structure of the sciences is linear with chemistry well-founded upon a quantum theory of the atom, (3) and with a cell biology built upon a biochemistry, proceeding upward through psychology to a widening constellation of political science, sociology, and other social sciences, then one side might be construed as top-down and takes its departure from the prevailing, postmodern tendencies in the social sciences. The other side is from the bottom up and takes its departure from the results of the recent philosophy of science.

The top-down reasons for a religious perspective turn on diversity arguments and the relatively recent acceptance of multicultural perspectives in the social sciences and humanities. If feminist, gay and lesbian, African-American, as well as the "older" Marxist, Freudian, and other secularist perspectives are admissible into the court of intellectual discourse and debate, then does not a kind of epistemic fairness entail that various religious perspectives should likewise be admissible? Inasmuch as religion is an essential dimension of most cultures, religious understandings of many public issues should be included in the debate in a pluralistic society. And a fortiori, since virtually all of the social or human sciences today acknowledge that social dimensions such as gender, race, and culture constitute portions of an individual's identity, they must also admit, as no less legitimate, the religious dimensions for those individuals for whom religion is an inseparable social dimension...