This chapter offers a unified account of sacred values by drawing on empirical psychology and philosophical work. While different research programs have analyzed sacred values in varying and sometimes conflicting ways, this chapter argues that sacred values have three core features. In contrast to ordinary values, sacred values are treated as inviolable (tradeoffs with ordinary values are forbidden); incontestable (even contemplating such tradeoffs is prohibited); and dialectically invulnerable (no rational considerations can disrupt the agent’s commitment to the value). The chapter analyzes these features and reviews several other factors that are characteristically associated with sacred values, including particular emotions (such as reverence and awe); a sense of subjective import or meaning; and inarticulacy about one’s sacred values.
This chapter examines individual fanaticism. Several philosophers in the early modern period, including Shaftesbury, Locke, and Kant, argue that fanaticism consists in a certain type of dogmatism. A person takes herself to have an incontrovertible justification for some ideal, and she insists that this justification—being based on personal experiences of divine communication, insight into the nature of reality, or some such—outstrips ordinary rational standards. The chapter explores this Enlightenment account of fanaticism and argues that it is inadequate. While the Enlightenment account does identify one type of epistemic failing, this failing is not correlated with fanaticism. Therefore, we need a new account of fanaticism.
Sacred values might seem ethically problematic. After all, sacred values are treated as inviolable (tradeoffs with ordinary values are forbidden), incontestable (even contemplating such tradeoffs is prohibited), and dialectically invulnerable (no rational considerations can disrupt the agent’s commitment to the value). So, can maintaining sacred values ever be justifiable? This chapter argues that it can be reasonable to maintain sacred values. Moreover, in certain cases, treating a goal, activity, or relationship as possessing ordinary rather than sacred value constitutes a moral failure: the refusal to adopt sacred values involves a pernicious form of devaluation, in which the agent fails to be appropriately moved by important values.
This chapter considers possible ways of manifesting devotion without risking fanaticism. Previous chapters have shown that devotion plays an important role in ethical life; that devotion involves accepting sacred values, which are inviolable, incontestable, and dialectically invulnerable; that close examination reveals the pervasiveness of sacred values; and that sacred values stave off normative dissipation. More worryingly, these chapters have shown that the person who holds sacred values risks meeting the Enlightenment conditions for fanaticism; that when this person displays certain additional features, he does indeed become fanatical; and that fanatical groups encourage individuals to display these additional features, fueling both individual and group fanaticism. So we now need to ask: is there a way of holding sacred values in a non-pathological way? This chapter suggests that there are ways of rendering values dialectically invulnerable—thereby enabling devotion—without lapsing into fanaticism. Non-fanatical ways of expressing devotion differ from fanaticism in that they enable the agent to recognize a form of contingency, optionality, or revisability in her basic commitments. The chapter investigates whether we can be devoted through irony, through affirmation, or through what is termed the deepening move. Each stance enables a wholehearted form of devotion that nevertheless preserves flexibility and openness, avoiding the dangers of fanaticism on the one hand and normative dissipation on the other.
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