The Trouble with Principle

The Trouble with Principle. By Stanley Fish. Harvard University Press, 328 pp., $24.95.

STANLEY FISH argues that it is dangerous to believe you have principles and still more dangerous to speak and act as if you did. By "principles" he means abstract, neutral and general standards for judging and resolving particular substantive differences. Things like fairness, impartiality and justice, for example, are supposed to be so neutral, general and abstract that they can be deployed to mutual advantage by people with deeply different views about the nature of human beings and their proper ends. A radical feminist and a conservative member of the Southern Baptist Convention both ought to be able to recognize and accede to arguments about public policy based on fairness and impartiality, the proponent of principle argues. In the name of impartiality they ought, perhaps, to be able to agree that neither the views about male-female relations advocated in Paul's Letter to the Ephesians nor those advocated by Andrea Dworkin should be taught in public schools.

Fish will have none of this. There are, he says, no neutral principles, no standards not already inflected with substantive commitments about the way the world is--and thus no neutral tools for the resolution of disagreements between devotees of deeply different views of the world. To pretend the contrary is the characteristic error of liberalism, and disposing of this error has been the central theme of his work for the past couple of decades.

An unprincipled politics, Fish writes, works better and is more honest than one based on appeal to principle. Working and arguing for naked preference is how politics in fact proceeds. Appeals to such principles as fairness are inevitably just appeals to preferences, but clothed in such a way as to obscure their intent and impede their efficacy.

Given this line, it should come as no surprise that Fish is especially interested in religion. He made his name as an interpreter of the religious poets John Milton and George Herbert. While his recent work has mostly been more strictly theoretical, his understanding of what it is like to have Christian commitments informs his argument that the state should drop the pretense of neutrality with respect to religion. More than one-third of the essays in this book treat "reasons for the devout"--reasons, that is, for the devout to accept the principles called upon by the liberal state to justify its legislative, judicial and executive acts. But Fish thinks that such "reasons" ought not to convince the devout, and that the extent to which they are convinced is precisely the extent to which they are not really devout.

Consider the 1980s case of Vicki Frost, a Christian mother who objected to her sixth-grade child being assigned materials about the variety of human religious belief and practice. Frost argued that Christian children's free-exercise rights were infringed by this program, since it required them to study beliefs other than their own, and such study was against their religion. Frost and her co-plaintiffs lost their case on the grounds that the school board was requiring not that their children assent to the beliefs studied, but only that they know about them.

Fish agrees with Frost that her child's religious freedom was being infringed. He argues that the court rulings in favor of the school board amount to an enforcement of a particular, non-neutral view of what human beings are meant to be--just as particular and nonneutral as Frost's Christianity is, although of course deeply different substantively. According to the school district, the nature of human beings is such that it is good for them to be exposed to as many different religious ideas as possible; according to Frost's view, this is not what human beings are like. Since there is no neutral ground for adjudicating this dispute, the courts use "an act of power, of peremptory exclusion and dismissal" to bring it to an end.

Or consider Fish's use of Milton to disagree with Richard John Neuhaus, the Lutheran-turned-Catholic editor of the journal First Things. For Fish, Milton is the ideal type of the devout person, one who wants "a unified conception of life in which the pressure of first principles is felt and responded to twenty-four hours a day," and who also wants those principles to inform and order all that the state does. Milton, then, has no interest in fairness or impartiality, does not believe what he believes because he thinks the evidence favors it or that reason demonstrates it; he has, therefore, no interest in being religious as the modern liberal state would understand that condition.

Milton is, instead, obedient to Christianity as a comprehensive and nonnegotiable view of things: his is an ethic of acknowledgment and submission, not of unfettered inquiry and choice, and he is interested only in the substantively good, not the procedurally right. For Fish, it is the contemporary Miltons, too often mute and inglorious though they are, whose presence guarantees that the primary hope of liberal political theory--that we all just get along--will never be realized.