Are Social Conservatives Just Trad Wordcels? A Response to Richard Hanania

Conservative moral arguments are more than wordplay.

For the last couple weeks, I’ve been arguing that religious people should make secular arguments in the public square. 

I was struck to find a prominent Substacker arguing otherwise this week. Richard Hanania described those of us “who try to argue for policy they have religious motivations for in secular terms,” as “wordcels.” In online discourse, “wordcels live in the land of philosophy and books and liberal colleges, clinging to ideals,” while their counterpart “shape rotators are out here coding, building businesses, doing engineering, etc. etc.”

While conservative discourse has pegged the woke as wordcels, Hanania thinks the term applies equally to religious philosopher-types. The woke have their “gendered,” “systemic,” and “construct,” and we have our “substantial forms,” “act and potency,” and “social animal.”

Hanania points out that he can train Chat GPT to produce “trad wordcel” arguments for anything he wants, often the opposite arguments of traditionalists.

Tim Carney writes that IVF threatens “to dissolve our bonds with one another. Reproductive technology can break down the idea of humans as ultimately social creatures who can best be understood in relation with others.”

Hanania turns this around: “Reproductive technology can reinforce the idea of humans as ultimately social creatures who can best be understood in relation with others.” After all, why not? More people are involved in IVF, so it’s more social, not less, right?

Hanania points out several problems with these kinds of arguments:

1. They appeal to second- and third-order effects, rather than first-order ones, like life and liberty.

2. They lack an evidentiary foundation. Where is the evidence that embracing IVF leads to weaker social bonds?

3. These arguments lack persuasive power, unlike the contrary arguments: IVF helps people have children, creates life, and is founded on voluntary transactions, i.e., liberty.

In Hanania’s analysis, such arguments are only persuasive to coreligionists. And “we all know Carney is against IVF for religious reasons.” In short, the only purpose for such arguments is to shore up agreement among the faithful.

The goal of putting religious arguments in secular terms is misguided from the start.

Are These Arguments Religiously-Motivated?

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While non-utilitarian arguments come under Hanania’s critique, utilitarian, sociological arguments for conservative conclusions are unscathed. For instance, Tim Carney recently wrote Family Unfriendly, highlighting ways society has become inhospitable to children and parents. To that I would add Melissa Kearney’s Two-Parent Privilege and Brad Wilcox’s Get Married. I don’t think Hanania would object to these attempts by the “religiously motivated” to put their arguments in secular terms.

Instead, Hanania’s critique is that, in a case like that of IVF, such utilitarian arguments are absent. Carney cannot provide evidence that allowing for IVF leads to weaker social bonds. Accordingly, his assertion that IVF “breaks down the idea of humans as…social creatures” is revealed to lack empirical evidence and so to be merely religiously motivated. Carney is obligated, as a Catholic, to hold that IVF is wrong. He is attempting to articulate an essentially religious objection in secular terms.

In other words, there is no evidence for the connection Carney alleges, so it’s clear he’s just shilling for the papacy.

This seems like a poor read on what it is to be “religiously-motivated,” and why someone religious would make a secular argument. Why, after all, does Carney believe a religion that makes baseless claims about IVF?

Perhaps the secular arguments Carney provides are not simply cover for religious motivation. What if they are the reason Catholicism makes sense to Carney? After all, the Catholic Church did not invent natural conception. The fact that we are born to parents via conception causes human beings to be enmeshed in familial relations from the outset.

The fact that the church views artificial intervention in the natural process of conception with suspicion may be a point to its credit on this accounting.

On this view, the secular argument may not be “religiously-motivated.” It may be a secular reason to adopt Catholicism. And in fact, some people do become Catholic because of the moral witness of Catholic church. My thesis-advisor Candace Vogler would be an example.

Secular arguments for conclusions commonly held by religious people are not necessarily religiously-motivated. They may instead articulate the secular motivation for religion.

Ethical Naturalist Arguments

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But perhaps you think that such appeals to human nature are incorrect. The fact that this is how procreation naturally occurs says nothing about how things should be. It is a knock against the Catholic church that its arguments are Luddite, oppose technological progress, and romanticize nature.

Let’s call the kind of argument Carney makes an “ethical naturalist” argument. They argue that there is some moral significance in a natural process, in this case, that of procreation, that is neglected by proponents of human artifice and technology.

Ethical naturalist arguments are notoriously difficult to make. They may be accused of the Is-Ought or Naturalistic fallacy. They can appear to favor anything that is natural and oppose all that is technological, to favor the pre-modern and oppose the modern.

Hanania fabricates with Chat GPT an argument against pain medication of this character: “Numbing the pain a woman feels while in labor breaks the bond between childbirth, struggle, and the renewal of life.”

It is easy to mock such arguments.

And yet, if there is no limit on the technological refashioning of procreation, the logical conclusion - not causal - is that described in Brave New World, in which human beings are conceived in labs from hand-selected genetic sources, gestated in artificial wombs, and birthed without parents.

The ethical naturalist (for natural childbirth is not simply a “tradition”) sees the loss of something significant in the trajectory from natural childbirth to fully artificial childbirth. And not the ethical naturalist only. It would be easy to demonstrate that hormones and attachment would not form without natural gestation, motherhood, and fatherhood. In this future, we would be living in a trans-human way, leaving aspects of human nature behind.

But the objection will come that it is fear-mongering or “4D-Chess” to complain of these things at the level of IVF. After all, IVF is assistance to the process of conception, followed by gestation of a baby by its mother. That is the reason that the arguments against IVF fall on deaf ears. IVF seems to be obviously a use of technology to assist nature, not to oppose or replace it.

This sets a challenge to social conservatives. We must not oppose attempts to assist nature, but we must at the same time maintain our witness to the moral worth of humans in embryo. We may also be protective of the normativity of natural human gestation.

In the public square, our arguments about IVF should recognize that, unlike people seeking abortions, those seeking IVF are people interested in having biological children, gestated in the mother’s womb. What is more, the main purpose of IVF is to assist a natural process. The primary conservative objections are to the creation and potential destruction of additional embryos.

But arguments like Carney’s (and Matthew Lee Anderson’s) remind us of the normative significance human nature, and they are not wrong to do so.

The Moral Foundations of Trad Wordcel Arguments

Hanania effectively recommends that conservatives limit their arguments to the three libertarian moral foundations, of Jonathan Haidt’s moral foundations theory. But wordcels should be free to explore the other three foundations.

Famously, Haidt argued that conservatives are sympathetic to appeals to all six of his moral foundations: Care, Fairness, Loyalty, Authority, Sanctity, and Liberty. Meanwhile, liberals are sympathetic to only three: Care, fairness, and liberty. And libertarians only to two.

Hanania is basically explicit in the piece that he only accepts appeals to utilitarian arguments that reduce to two goods, life and liberty. Given Hanania’s basically libertarian leanings, it seems easy enough to class him with the libertarians who are sympathetic only to Liberty and Fairness.

Yet the best “trad wordcels” have been writers who defend the intellectual and ethical legitimacy of the other moral foundations. The most obvious example is Leon Kass, whom Hanania criticizes. Kass wrote “The Wisdom of Repugnance,” against human cloning, defending the instincts contained in the emotion of repugnance or disgust. On Haidt’s foundations, this emotion is associated with Sanctity.

Roger Scruton defended loyalty and authority in his political philosophy against liberal orthodoxies. He defended the sanctity of beauty and sexual love in his other works.

Pope John Paul II’s Theology of the Body did the same for the sanctity of the body.

The pursuit of valid philosophical wisdom beyond the domain of liberal-libertarian morality is a perennial goal of those Hanania calls “wordcels.” I don’t think it is a pursuit that should be abandoned.

Nevertheless, such arguments are notoriously difficult. Their evidentiary basis is difficult to pinpoint. The best arguments usually prove too little. Many arguments prove, or attempt to prove, too much.

Roger Scruton’s Sexual Desire is a positive example. Over 400 pages, Scruton mounts an ethical account of sexual desire as a desire, not for sex, but for another person. He considers what sexual ethic follows from this account of desire, and suggests that exclusive and committed love is its implication. The institution of marriage codifies this norm, even though it cannot be logically deduced from his account. He makes a few suggestions as to the reasons for the traditional proscription on homosexuality, but no strong defense of heteronormativity (as its critics call it).

Because of Scruton’s care, his case proves, we may say, too little. And yet it is the more likely to persuade on that account.

Today, the same case has been made, though more journalistically, by Louise Perry in The Case Against the Sexual Revolution.

The “wordcel-ing” of Scruton spoke up for restraint in a time when few would. Whether his tome persuaded many, the realities of which he spoke have become more and more apparent as the consequences of the sexual revolution have played out.

The word-cel has a duty to speak intellectually of the full range of moral foundations.

Do Good Arguments Persuade?

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Hanania is exactly right on this: “The way you make credible arguments is by starting with premises that those you are trying to convince agree with and then proceeding from there.” This is why I have argued that religious thinkers must make arguments that start from common ground between believer and unbeliever.

Good arguments must be directed toward persuading their audience.

However, an argument is not incorrect simply because it does not persuade. Some arguments do not persuade because parties disagree about the fundamental premises. In such cases, what is needed is not a better argument. What is needed is moral insight.

There is no argument that can persuade all hearers that humans in embryo are and ought to be treated as moral persons. After all, the argument is simple: “I was once a fetus, and before that, an embryo.” This admission is not a demonstration from prior premises,” but a coming-into-focus of a basic premise.

Moral argumentation requires the prior task of bringing things moral into focus.

And that is a task, I think, for which “trad wordcels” are particularly suited.

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Top Wordcel Recommends:

By secular liberals, proving that such arguments are not always religiously motivated:

“Against Perfection,” by Michael Sandel

In the Atlantic article, and the book by the same name, Michael Sandel argues the liberal ethical case against genetic engineering. He contends that there is significance in receiving are children as a “gift,” and not as a product of our design.

Beyond Price: Essays on Birth and Death, David Velleman

Velleman makes, in the opening essays, a unique liberal case that every person has the right to know, and be raised by, his or her mother and father. He concludes that it is wrong to produce children intending that they be separated from one of their biological parents.

By secular conservatives:

Sexual Desire, by Roger Scruton (or his talk, “Sexual Morality for Heathens”)

“The Wisdom of Repugnance,” Leon Kass

By religious conservatives:

Begotten or Made? by Oliver O’Donovan

“I Was Once a Fetus: That Is Why Abortion Is Wrong,” by Alex Pruss

“The Biblical Case Against IVF,” First Things, by Matthew Lee Anderson

Theological Epistemology Course

If you enjoy considering the question of how religious and secular knowledge interrelate, you’ll be interested in my online course, Theological Epistemology.

In my most recent lecture, I argued that Christian arguments should begin from secular premises. This is because the order of being is distinct from the order of knowing. God is foundational in the order of being. But he cannot be the first premise of our knowledge.