One of Warnock's philosophical achievements was her significant contribution to the renewal of the study of the imagination.12 Hume and Kant saw imagination as a. Warnock's view of fantasy turns out to have major implications for her view of morality and religion. Putting Warnock's position in dialogue with this literature flows more naturally when framed with religious arguments in mind.
Warnock's position has important similarities with other accounts of exclusion on religion, and is vulnerable to some of the same criticisms. Mary Warnock's argument for excluding religious arguments from public moral disputation rests on her views of religion, morality and the relationship between morality and law. Contrary to Warnock's claim, religious arguments do not necessarily impede moral progress, nor do they have the effect of imposing religious authority on non-believing members of the public.
This thesis also argues that Warnock's view of the imagination is too broad for it to perform all the functions she demands of it. Another reason is perhaps that there is no immediate need for Warnock's work to be interpreted.
IMAGINATION
Recent studies on the different senses and definitions of imagination include Neil Van Leeuwen, "The Meanings of Imagine Part I: Constructive Imagination". 35Kind, 'Heterogeneity', 151; Aaron Meskin and Jonathan Weinberg, "Puzzling Over the Imagination: Philosophical Problems, Architectural Solutions," in The Architecture of the Imagination, ed. The moral imagination considers an issue in the light of the whole [and] broadens and deepens the context of decision-making.”.
66Part of the explanation for this is the combinatorial power of the imagination, which is explored in the next section. One of the challenges of integrating poetic and philosophical imaginative narratives is precisely this: Guy Sircello, "How is a theory of the sublime possible?" The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 51, no.
Call representation in the sublime false or fallacious, Sircello, "How is a theory of the sublime possible?". Another possibility is to take the object of the sublime to be nothing or emptiness, as in some Eastern thought. The value of the sublime is found in the experience itself, not in the reality to which it belongs.
Furthermore, many religious experiences do not share the characteristics of the sublime experience because they have moral implications and are not indescribable.
MORALITY
The moral view is voluntary; it cannot be forced on people as a motive for action.3 The moral point of view can be acquired, however, by those who want to acquire it. Although the idea of "putting oneself in another's shoes" is quite common in ethical thinking (it has been supported to varying degrees by R. M. Hare, Thomas Nagel, and John Rawls), David Carrier, "Three Kinds of Imagination," The Journal of Philosophy 70, no. Mary Warnock, “Moral Thought and Government Policy: The Warnock Committee on Human Embryology,” The Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly 63, no.
74 For example, the case of walkers in Britain who felt morally entitled to walk through other people's private property before the law relented and gave them the right to do so. 75Warnock, "Moral Thinking and Government Policy," 512, writes: "The more certain people are of the correctness of their views, the more vocal they usually are. And then there is a danger that 'public opinion' may come to be identified not with the views of the relatively confused, relatively unprejudiced majority, but with the views of the committed and the fanatical.” Warnock, Imagination and Time, 183, explains that if laws are based on too idiosyncratic or sectarian a view of morality, she fears that "the law will cease to be considered".
See her acknowledgment in Warnock, An Intelligent Person's Guide, 38, 53, and Teichman's rebuke in Teichman, “The Uses and Abuses,” 29. 79Alexander writes: “The heart of the problem of rules and law is this: there is always—a potential gap between what we have reasons to do, all things considered (including the value of the rules and the effects of our conduct on the maintenance of cherished rules), and why we have reasons to have our rules (and the officials who promulgate and enforce them) require us to we do.” Larry Alexander, “The Gap,” Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy. Larry Alexander, “With Me, It's All er Nuthin': Formalism in Law and Morality,” The University of Chicago Law Review 66, no.
Teichman, "The Uses and Abuses," 30, finds Warnock's view of private morality confusing: "First, she says that private morality is based on principles that individuals try to adhere to. Piers Benn, “An Intelligent Person's Guide to Ethics by Mary Warnock, The Philosophical Quarterly 49, no. 111 Teichman, 'The Uses and Abuses', 28, finds Warnock inconsistent on public morality: "In some places, Warnock says that public morality is aimed at justice and securing rights."
If, as we believe, our task was to try to discover the public interest in the broadest sense and to make recommendations in the light of it, then we needed, in the words of one philosopher, a steady and general point of view. '" "The Warnock Report," 1. Nicholas Wolterstorff, "The Role of Religion in Decision Making and Discussion of Political Issues," in Religion in the Public Square: The Place of Religious Convictions in. 148Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press) puts it: “The point here is that the public sphere is a place that is necessarily (not just contingently) articulated by power.
RELIGION
Warnock does not believe, however, that losing faith in the literal truth of religious doctrines requires a total rejection of faith. 136 Nicholas Wolterstorff, “The Role of Religion in Decision Making and Debating Political Issues,” in Robert Audi and Nicholas Wolterstorff, Religion in the Public Square: The Place of Religious Beliefs in Political Debate (New York: Rowman & Littlefield Daniel M. Brendan Sweetman, Why Politics Needs Religion : the place of religious argument in the public square (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity.
Warnock's second complaint is that religious arguments rely on religious authority—the authority of God, the Bible, or a religious body such as the magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church—whether or not that reliance is expressly stated in the argument. Drawing on Rawls, Audi defends two claims for religious people arguing in the public square. 73Robert Audi, "Liberal Democracy and the Place of Religion in Politics," in Robert Audi and Nicholas Wolterstorff, Religion in the Public Square: The Place of Religious Convictions in Political Debate (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997), 25.
In the second case, like the first, the objection to religious arguments comes prematurely. The answer lies in the reasons why justificatory liberalism should be rejected, at least insofar as it requires the exclusion of religious arguments from public discourse. Nicholas Wolterstorff, "The Role of Religion in Decision and Discussion of Political Issues," in Robert Audi and Nicholas Wolterstorff, Religion in the Public Square: The Place of Religious Convictions in Political Debate (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997) 109 .
If people in the public square do not think that religious arguments are infallible - which should not be the case - then the complaint of arrogance disappears. The previous chapter explored the first two of Mary Warnock's three reasons for thinking that religious arguments are illegal in the public square. This chapter examines the third reason—the argument that people who advance religious arguments do so dishonestly—and its conclusion that religious arguments should not be allowed in the public square.
54 Warnock acknowledges that the cultural place of religion in the United States differs from its place in Britain. 64 Brendan Sweetman, Why Politics Needs Religion: The Place of Religious Arguments in the Public Square (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity. A third objection to religious arguments in the public square is that they may serve not to reflect theological convictions but to hide prejudices.
Each of the complaints in the previous four sections that arguments can be manipulative, dishonest, misleading or evasive relates to the use of religious arguments in the public sphere. 108 Robert Audi, "Liberal Democracy and the Place of Religion in Politics," in Audi and Wolterstorff, Religion in the Public Square, 1, 16.
