Relative Harm

On the day of the Virginia Tech shootings, I had a particular reaction. However, I decided that I should wait a couple of weeks before posting that reaction. I was concerned that people would react to it emotionally, and not actually think about what I was saying.

The thought that came into my head within minutes of hearing about the shooting was, “How would you like to live in a community where something like this happened on average three times per day?”

I had Iraq in mind at the time, where the casualty count last year was approximately equal to 3 Virginia Techs per day, seven days a week.

One of the responses that I thought would come to such a question would be, “How dare you trivialize the deaths of our loved ones like that!”

That misinterprets my question. I am not saying that we should hold our attitudes towards the deaths in Iraq constant and reduce our response to the deaths at Virginia Tech proportionally. Rather, I was suggesting holding our response to the deaths at Virginia Tech constant, and adjust our concern with the fatalities in Iraq accordingly.

The next response that I imagined was, “But these are our own children – young lives ended in their prime.”

Yet. The same can be said of the 3,200 young Americans who have died so far in Iraq. One hundred died this month alone – three times the number killed in Virginia. If the level of grief that we showed for Virginia Tech was appropriate, then we should be showing a comparable level of grief every ten days for the young Americans who are killed and wounded in Iraq. Their families, also, are our neighbors.

A Digression into Theory

If I can wander off into moral theory for a moment, desire utilitarianism, unlike standard forms of utilitarianism, allows for people to give special attention to those who are closer to home. Standard utilitarianism says that all well-being is equal, and that the well-being of somebody half-way around the world should not be treated as less important than the well-being of one’s own children.

Desire utilitarianism says that this is true on one level, but false on another. We evaluate desires on their tendency to fulfill other desires. If “preference for the well-being of one’s own children” is a desire that tends to fulfill other desires, then “preference for the well-being of one’s own children” is a virtue under this model.

And, indeed, special affection for those who are near to a person is something that tends to fulfill other desires.

One way to start to see this is to imagine a business, whose job is to increase overall profits. To do so, it takes its business and divides it into regions. There is a New England region, Mid Atlantic, Midwest, South, Southwest, Plains, Rocky Mountain, and Pacific Coast region. To each region, it assigns a regional vice-President. The business does not tell each regional vice-President, “I want you to consider the profits of all regions equally in all of your decisions.” It says, “You job is to maximize profits in your region. In doing so, there are certain ways in which you may not interfere with other vice-Presidents doing business in their region. However, you do not have to consider their profitability. That’s not your concern.”

Similarly, we can see how a society can benefit if we tell people, “We need all of our children taken care of. To do this, we are going to assign certain children to each of you. Your job is to take care of those children assigned to you. Do not think of taking care of all children equally. Instead, each of you is to focus specifically on the children under your care. You will, however, be limited to what you may do to others in caring for your children.”

There is another element of desire utilitarianism that needs to be considered here. Desire utilitarianism deals with malleable desires only. Parental and spousal affection (love) are not sufficiently malleable. “Love all people equally” fits in the same moral category as “do not permit any child to get sick”. It is not possible – and, drawing on the principle ‘ought’ implies ‘can’ – it is not an obligation.

Tomorrow (Tuesday) my 20th wedding anniversary. Last year, she almost died. It would not even make sense to say that my grief for her should be equal to my grief for a stranger half way around the world. That which we have shared and experienced together makes it impossible that her life would not be of special significance to me. I assume that the same is true for others – for their friends and families. No sane moral theory can prohibit the acquisition of friends and the special bonds to one’s family and neighbors.

So, I can understand giving some special significance to the deaths at Virginia Tech. I have a harder time treating the deaths of 3,200 American soldiers in Iraq as less important than the deaths at Virginia Tech. And even though I recognize that it is permissible to feel a stronger sense of loss at the deaths of Americans, I cannot forget that second moral level – the level at which desires are judged good or bad – where they are not different.

(Note: Those who are familiar with the writings of moral philosopher R.M. Hare will notice similarities between what I have written above about two levels of moral evaluation, and the distinction between the ‘archangel’ and the ‘prole’ that Hare uses in his rule utilitarianism. Only, I apply it to the evaluation of desires, rather than rules.)

Other Harms

At that second level of moral reasoning, we must weigh the deaths of 32 Americans at Virginia Tech with the deaths of 32,000 Iraqis just last year, the equivalent (like I said) of three Virginia Techs per day.

I also thought about Darfur. At Virginia Tech, a lone gunman went up and down the hall shooting students sitting in a classroom. In Darfur, armed bands would walk in and do the same to an entire village. The casualty rate there is estimated to be in the millions, with the additional cost of people being driven from their homes.

I also thought about the people – particularly the children – who will die from malaria and other preventable childhood diseases. Where morality permits a special affection for one’s own children, this means an unbearable grief for those parents who will lose a child in this way.

I thought about the expected casualties caused by global warming – with estimates in the hundreds of millions. Now, it is true that these fatalities will occur over the course of several years. If we were to draw a comparis2on, we must look at all of the school shootings that may occur over that same time period. Yet, it does seem to be somewhat inconsistent to be willing to put so much effort into preventing the next killing of 32 students at some future date in some future school, yet care so little about saving the hundreds of millions of lives put at risk as a result of global warming.

“The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic.” This phrase (often attributed to Stalin though there is no source to confirm this) seems to be an accurate description of how people think. While a nation grieves over the death of 32 students, they let 320 million people die without a moment’s diversion from their day’s entertainment.

Selling the Iraq War: A Moral Perspective

I have been spending the weekend listening to the online version of Bill Moyers’ “Buying the War” about how the Bush Administration sold the American Public on the idea of invading Iraq and how the Press, either intentionally or foolishly, assisted in this campaign of deception.

Mental Gymnastics

First, I want to say that I do not yet know of any evidence that the members of the Bush Administration ‘lied’ in the most sinister definition of the term. When I see the evidence, I will vote to convict them. In the mean time, I suspect that they viewed the case to go to war the same way they viewed the evidence that the Earth is only 10,000 years old or that there is a God. They believe it. It must be true. From this assumption, one can look at the evidence. Evidence consistent with this unquestioned truth is good evidence, and evidence inconsistent with this unquestioned truth is bad evidence.

The reason they continued to insist that aluminum tubes meant that Saddam Hussein was building nuclear weapons is because of this method of using evidence. The story was consistent with their conclusion, so it must be right. It does not matter if them ‘scientists’ and ‘analysts’ and ‘experts’ held a different opinion. This was no different than those ‘scientists’ who held a different opinion on the age of the earth or the evolution of humans. ‘Scientists’ and ‘experts’ are inherently corrupt, claiming whatever absurdities come into their mind that would help to push their atheistic, liberal agenda. The only real evidence was the evidence that said that God created the earth 6,000 years ago, or that said that Saddam Hussein was a threat to the United States.

Here is a level of consistency that I think many people gloss over. We are dealing with people who can look at the tremendous amount of evidence that the Earth is more than 6,000 years old and sincerely believe that the world is 6,000 years old. These are people who can look at the tremendous amount of evidence for evolution, yet sincerely believe that evolution is ‘just a theory’. These people can look at the tremendous evidence for human contributions to global warming and sincerely believe, at the same time, that (1) there is no warming and (2) it is all natural.

Anybody who has debated these people on any of these issues knows how easily they swallow whatever evidence they can find that seems to support their position and sincerely believe that this is good evidence.

Nobody should be surprised to discover that these same people can dismiss the scientific facts about what it takes to build nuclear weapons and that Saddam Hussein could not possibly be manufacturing nuclear weapons using any process short of magic or divine intervention, and yet sincerely believe that Saddam Hussein was building nuclear weapons.

People look at what has now become known as the absurdity of the Administration claims – that there is no conceivable real-world way that Iraq could have had the infrastructure for building nuclear weapons and keep it a secret – and they conclude, “The Administration must have known that their position was insane; yet, they still defended it.” These are people who think that the scientific evidence actually supports a 6,000 year old Earth, proves evolution is a fraud, and that humans cannot possibly contribute to global warming. Believing that Saddam Hussein was building nuclear weapons in spite of the lack of evidence is child’s play compared to these other examples of mental gymnastics.

The Culpability of the Press and the Public

The bulk of the show asked the question, “Why did the Press not call the President on these absurdities? Why did they not educate the American people on what it would take for Iraq to build a nuclear weapon and ask, “How could any country ever hide that type of infrastructure?”

The question that I have, however, is not why the Press did not raise the questions that should have been raised. Actually, it appears to me that the answer is quite clear. The job of the media industry is to draw eyeballs to advertisements. The reason the Press did not question the President and his policies is because it would have been bad for business.

The real campaign was simple. “If you watch those other news programs – those programs that question the President and his policies in this time of war, then you are watching traitors out to sabotage our this country. They are trying to destroy America. We are trying to protect it. Nobody who cares about America would dare to question the President at this time of crisis.”

It was not the Press that decided that America was a country that would go to war without seriously asking itself whether it had a good reason to go to war. It was not the Press that decided that America would support a war on false pretenses. It was not even the President or his administration that made this decision. They would not have made this decision unless they knew that the social climate was one in which they stood a reasonable chance of getting away with it.

It was the American people themselves – or a sufficiently large majority of them – who made the decision that America was going to be a nation willing and eager to go to war with no questions asked. Indeed, it was the American people themselves – or a sufficiently large majority of them – that decided that asking questions about the justice of killing other people before killing them was going to be made un-American, and that branding those who would ask questions as traitors would be our model of moral virtue.

Things could have been different. Things would have been different if the American people themselves – or a sufficiently large majority of them – held to a different moral standard. It would have been a standard that said, “When we consider punishing a criminal, we hold that punishment is so terrible that we must presume the person we punish is innocent, and we must require proof as to his guilt. Going to war is even more terrible. Justice demands that the same standards apply, that we hold to a presumption of peace unless evidence beyond a reasonable doubt compels us to the alternative.”

What we had in the months leading up to the invasion of Iraq was the psychology of a lynch mob on a national scale. A lynch mob will, sometimes, have a trial of sorts before they lynch the accused. However, the lynch mob makes it clear that anybody who actually dares use this opportunity to defend the accused, and who speaks ill of the mob, will suffer for it. The lynch mob bullies the opposition into silence.

I am not saying that Saddam Hussein was an innocent man. I have argued (e.g., “Richard Perle: Morally Assessing Iraq”) that I thought that there was just cause to remove Hussein from power, by force if necessary. My opposition to Bush’s invasion sprang entirely from the fact that Bush was incompetent and would probably do more harm than good – like a cop who would toss a hand grenade into a crowded subway car to apprehend a purse snatcher.

Part of what is involved in giving a case a fair hearing is not only figuring out whether the accused is innocent or guilty, but the appropriate way to deal with the problem so that a lot of innocent people do not end up getting killed. The Bush Administration pushed for immediate action, arguing that there was no time for a debate on the subject. We had to act immediately “before the smoking gun came in the form of a mushroom cloud”. As such, our options were poorly considered, poorly planned, and poorly executed – exhibiting exactly the incompetence I had expected from this administration.

It is easy, it is even natural, for people to find scapegoats for their wrongdoing. Nobody likes to admit that they were wrong. Yet, there is a certain necessity for calling those who scapegoat on what they are doing. Getting people to admin their own responsibility is an important step to preventing some terrible wrong from repeating itself in the future.

Yes, the Bush Administration was evil, casting aside principles of justice and morality like so much waste as they pursued their objectives. Yes, those members of the Press who became popular by declaring anybody who questioned them to be anti-American traitors in league with the terrorists are guilty of wrongdoing as well. Yet, another group that is just that guilty are the people who decided to use their market power to tell the media, “Yes, I will enthusiastically support the doctrine of unquestioned obedience and unjust war by attaching my eyeballs to the advertisements of those who deliver this message.”

It is probably the most important role. Because, if the American public – or a sufficiently large majority of them at least – would have been enthusiastic about justice and the presumption of peace, then the Press and the President would not have gone on a drumbeat towards war.

Think of how much better off we would have been if a majority of Americans would have had sufficient moral character to have done the right thing.

Immorality does have a price tag.

Sam Harris: Morality and Religion

Old Business: Atheists in Foxholes

On April 15th, in a posting called “Standing Up to Bigotry”, I wrote that I wanted to see the phrase “there are no atheists in foxholes” to be treated like the bigoted slam that it is – and I gave the moral argument for that position.

Austin Cline has information on another use of this denigrating and demeaning phrase. I wanted to bring the incident to your attention today, in the hopes that you will write to The News and Observer and express your disapproval of this bigotry. Austin Cline has the contact information in his posting.

New Business: Sam Harris: Morality and Religion

The first speaker on the third and last day of Beyond Belief 2006 was Sam Harris, who was introduced on the first day of the conference.

Side note: For those who wish to view the Beyond Belief 2006, all sessions have two options; a ‘view’ option and a ‘download’ option. For this, the 9th out of 10 session, the ‘view’ option has 1 hour and 27 minutes of additional content.

Anyway, today, Harris wishes to talk about the relationship between religion and morality. He starts off by claiming that the way some theists defend their specific religion is to say that, even if religious beliefs are false, they are still useful. We get both morality itself (a set of ideas on what is right and what is wrong) and our motivation to do the right thing (to serve God, to enter heaven, to avoid hell) from religion. If we get rid of religion, we have no motivation to do the right thing. Plus, even if some of us were still motivated to do the right thing, atheism gives us no ‘right thing’ for us to do.

This fear of a society without morality then motivates people not only to promote religion, but to view religious people as the only ‘safe’ neighbors to have (or the only ‘safe’ legislators to elect), and promotes an overall fear and hatred of atheists as dangerous and immoral. People are afraid of a society without God and religion.

Harris makes so many mistakes in this presentation that I simply cringe in frustration just to hear him speak. It is the same when I hear Richard Dawkins discuss morality, as I wrote about in “Morality and the Selfish Gene”

Useful Does Not Imply True

We can throw out the second half of Harris’ presentation. There, he argued that the fact that a belief is useful does not imply that it is true. This is certainly true. However, it does not address the issue of defending religion because it is useful. Yes, it is true that the usefulness of a belief does not imply that it is true. However, a useful but false belief is still useful.

Happiness and Suffering

In the first half of his talk, Harris attempted to argue that there are reasons for being moral that have nothing to do with religion. He specified two reasons for being moral; happiness and the avoidance of suffering.

I argued last Wednesday in the post, “Evaluating Moral Theories” http://atheistethicist.blogspot.com/2007/04/evaluating-moral-theories.html, a moral theory, like all theories, needs to be able to account for a range of observations relevant to that subject. Happiness and suffering theories fail this test.

Would you prefer life in an experience machine (or in “The Matrix”) over life in the real world? Many people say that they would not. In fact, some people are strongly repulsed by the idea. However, the “happiness and suffering” theory cannot account for these facts.

Take a person who wishes to provide medical care to sick and dying people in Africa. Tell this person, “I have a save-the-sick-and-dying program that I can put into my computer and feed into your brain as a completely realistic set of experiences. While you are attached to the Matrix, my program will feed you all of the impressions that will make you think that you are a great humanitarian saving sick and dying people in Africa. You will believe that everything you see and hear is real, and your memories about life before you entered the machine will be replaced by false memories relevant to your life in the Matrix. Now, do you want to enter the machine?”

Many (most, almost all) of those who want to save the sick and dying people in Africa would refuse. They would see no reason to enter the machine. For ‘happiness and suffering’ theory this is a problem, because the person who enters the machine will experience just as much if not more happiness, and be better able to avoid suffering, than a person in the real world. If ‘happiness and suffering’ are the only reasons for action that exist, or that are worth considering, an agent would have no reason to refuse the machine.

Yet, they do refuse.

The machine simply cannot give these people what they want. What they want is not the happiness that comes from saving people. They want to actually save people. This is something that they simply cannot do from inside the Matrix.

I often hear people respond to this by suggesting that the happiness that one would get from the experience machine is not ‘true happiness’. What is “true happiness”? It turns out to be a vague, ill-defined term that allows the person who uses it to engage in circular reasoning. They tell us that we only pursue ‘true happiness’. When asked to define this term, they say that ‘true happiness’ is defined as the only thing that we pursue.

We need a theory of (reasons for) action that explains how people can have a reason to refuse to enter the experience machine even though they will be happy inside the machine.

Desire-based theory has no problem with this. It says that all people seek to fulfill the more and the stronger of their desires. A desire is a propositional attitude that can be expressed in the form of “desires that P”, where P is a proposition. A desire that P is fulfilled in any state of affairs S where P is true in S.

If somebody has a “desire that I am saving the sick and the dying in Africa”, then this person is motivated to bring about states where “I am saving the sick and dying in Africa” is true. He is not motivated to enter the experience machine, because the experience machine cannot make that proposition true.

You can probably find some people who would enter the machine. These people have a desire for personal happiness and avoidance of pain. The experience machine can give them this. The experience machine can make the propositions, “I am experiencing happiness” and “I am not suffering” true.

The next objection raised to this model is that it treats all desires as equal. What should we do, for example, with people who desire to rape and torture young children? These, for them, are ‘reasons for action’.

This is false. If we can evaluate entering an experience chamber versus helping the sick and dying in Africa on whether they will actually fulfill desires, we can evaluate desires themselves according to how well they fulfill (other) desires. When we do this, we see that there are desires that tend to fulfill other desires (the desire to help the sick and dying in Africa), and desires that tend to thwart other desires (the desire to rape and torture young children). Consequently, we can even evaluate ‘reasons for action’ as ‘reasons for action that we have reason to promote and encourage’ and ‘reasons for action that we have reason to inhibit or discourage’.

We have criteria for categorizing people as ‘virtuous’ (as having those reasons for action that we have reasons to promote), and ‘vicious’ (as having those reasons for action that we have reasons to inhibit).

We have ‘reasons for action’ for promoting virtue and for combating viciousness.

The next challenge that comes along is typically to complain that evaluating desires by their tendency to fulfill or thwart other desires is circular. It is circular, in the same way that coherentist epistemology is circular, in the same way that linguistics is circular, and in the same way as the process of “reflective equilibrium” is circular. A sufficiently large and complex system is considered virtuously circular, compared to the tight and direct circles of viciously circular arguments. The evaluation of desires relative to other desires is sufficiently broad and complex to be considered virtuously circular. Now, let’s apply desire fulfillment theory to the question Harris was trying to answer. Are there ‘reasons for action’ for being moral that do not depend on God? The answer is clearly ‘yes’. These desires that tend to fulfill the desires of others are a moral system that requires no reference to God.

So, I have answered the same challenge that Harris sought to answer. However, I did it with a better theory of value than the archaic 19th-century theory that Harris appealed to.

The Value of Truth

Now, I wish to return to the second part of Harris’s presentation, the part I originally tossed out because it was irrelevant. There was something important in that part of the presentation. However, Harris could not see it clearly because of his (defective) lens of happiness and suffering theory. Through the lens of desire fulfillment theory, it becomes more clearly visible.

Harris argued that, just because religious beliefs are useful, this does not make them true. This is fine, but it does not prove that they are not useful.

He uses an example of somebody who claims to be the fastest runner on the planet, even though he never runs, never competes, and is clearly in worse shape than professional Olympic athletes. When asked to defend this claim, he defends it on the basis that being the fastest runner on the planet gives his life meaning and purpose. Harris correctly points out that the desire for purpose does not make the belief true. However, he only hints at the real problem. “I’m sorry to tell you this, but you are NOT the fastest person on the planet. You may believe that you are the fastest person on the planet. From this, you may believe that your life has meaning and purpose. However, since the claim that you are the fastest person on the planet is false, your claim that your life has meaning and purpose is false as well.”

People may claim that serving God gives their lives meaning and purpose. However, in fact, nobody has ever served God. Nobody will ever serve God. Nobody has ever acquired a life of meaning and purpose by serving God. The only way for a life to have real meaning and purpose is if the things they accomplish, themselves, are real, and God is not real.

On the other hand, the person whose finds meaning and purpose in saving the sick and dying in Africa can actually find meaning and purpose, because this is something that can actually happen.

All of this ties neatly into the theory that we are beings who seek to fulfill the more and stronger of our desires, and our desire that ‘P’ is fulfilled in a state of affairs where ‘P’ is true. There is no state of affairs in which the desire to serve God can be fulfilled. However, there are states of affairs in which the desire to save the sick and dying people in Africa can be fulfilled.

Plus, we have an account where some desires (those that tend to fulfill other desires) are themselves better than others.

The Religious Argument

Now, I want to go back and discuss the argument that Harris started off addressing: “Even if there is no God, we should believe in God because, if we do not, we will have no reason to be moral.”

This argument commits the moral crime of fear-peddling. The speaker is trying to sell fear, and doing so on the basis of reasons that a good and moral person would know to be flawed.

The argument invites the audience to imagine a society without morality – a society of wonton violence – a society much like Baghdad, Iraq is today. It adds the claim that religion is the only way to avoid this state. In this way, it uses fear of entering a Baghdad-like state to sell hatred and fear of atheists.

This argument requires the assumption that people we have reason to avoid living in a society without morality. It says, (1) because people have reason to want to live in a moral society, and (2) because there can be no moral society without God, that (3) people have reason to promote belief in God and to fear and condemn (as a threat to society) those who do not believe.

However, premise (2) in this argument says that, without belief in God, a person has no reason to promote a moral society. For all practical purposes, it states can be completely indifferent to the immorality going on around him. For this claim to be true, we would have to say that an atheist can live in Baghdad, can go about his shopping while bombs scatter body parts around him, have his daughters taken from him, tortured, and killed in front of his eyes, all with complete indifference to what was happening.

There are few purer examples of bigotry in the world today than this argument that atheists have no reason to be moral.

If we reject this – if we allow that atheists can be concerned about the fact that they and those they care about are safe – then atheists have reasons to form a moral society even though they do not believe in God.

Conclusion

My suggestion is that this model does a better job of answering the challenge that Harris sat out to answer than the model that Harris actually uses. The “happiness and suffering” model cannot explain human choices nearly as well as the “desire fulfillment” model. The “desire fulfillment” model can answer the challenge of the experience machine (or The Matrix), where the “happiness and suffering” model stumbles. It also accounts for the value of truth – of why a person who values helping the sick and dying in Africa would not enter an experience machine to gain the experience of helping the sick and dying in Africa. It even answers the challenge of how desires themselves can have different values (depending on whether the desires tend to fulfill or thwart other desires).

I have also criticized the argument claiming that religion is useful for promoting morality on the grounds that it contains conflicting premises. It assumes that we all have reason to promote a moral society. It also claims that religion is the only way to form a moral society. However, this second premise requires the assumption that, without belief in God, we have no reason to promote a moral society – that an atheist would be indifferent towards the prospect of living in a society such as Baghdad. These types of claims are not only absurdly false, they are contemporary examples of fear-peddling bigotry.

Ann Druyan: Popular Science

Another weekend is upon us, so I return to the presentations at Beyond Belief 2006. Our next speaker is Ann Druyan, the CEO and co-founder of Cosmos Studios.

Druyan worked on some of the best efforts at explaining science that have been done in the past 20 years, much of it with one of the most effective science teachers – in terms of teaching science to a mass audience of television viewers – of the television era, Carl Sagan.

I grew up in a family that viewed Carl Sagan as one of the greatest people who had ever lived. My father pointed to him constantly as a role-model for his children, and he was worthy of that position. I even suspect that, for a while, he had hopes that I could grow up to be just like Carl Sagan. I had a love of science in general and astronomy in particular, and nobody doubted that I could become an astronomer.

I was immensely curious about how stars came into being and what happened when they died, how life evolved, what things were made of and how they fit together, how continents moved over time and how everything from thunderstorms to volcanoes actually worked. However, it turned out that the one thing I wanted to know more than anything else was how value worked.

The question on the table here concerns the value of science. Perhaps there is something useful that I can contribute to this conversation.

I will start with the proposition that people act so as to fulfill their desires given their beliefs, and people seek to act so as to fulfill their desires. This suggests several ways in which we can get people to pay more attention to science. The most important of these is an option that people tend to overlook, though it comes directly out of these fundamental propositions.

The Direct Value of Science

If people seek to act so as to fulfill their desires, then one way to promote science is to point out to people that science can directly fulfill some of their desires. Science is fun. Science is interesting. Science is wonderful (in the sense that it has the power to fill a person with wonder).

For many of us who follow science, even if we are not scientists, science has value for its own sake. I check the Astronomy Picture of the Day daily, read the caption, and, if I can fit it without distortion, select the day’s picture as the wall paper on my computer. While other people turn to sports news every morning to find out how their favorite team is doing, I turn to science news to determine how my favorite teams are doing. My teams, however, are teams who are trying to discover cures for disease, better ways to detect extra-solar plants, predict the future climate and prevent the worse of those effects, understand volcanoes, tsunamis, earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes, and other natural forces that threaten life.

Technically, direct value is formulated as a state of affairs in which an agent has a desire that P, there is a state of affairs S, and P is true in S. This is simply a desire to know. One wants to know how volcanoes work. One wants to know about the planets that orbit far distant stars. One wants to know about the interactions of plants and animals in some part of the world or another. One want to know what human life was like 10,000 years ago. When asked why, the real answer is nothing more than, “Because I want to. Why do you eat chocolate? Do you have to have a reason other than the fact that you like to eat chocolate?”

This form of value does not help us much in our quest to promote science. This method of value suggests that the people who will be attracted to a television show or a museum exhibit are those people who are already interested in the subject. The provider gives people something that they already like.

Indirect (Instrumental) Value

Another way that science (or anything in the universe for that matter) can have value is to have indirect or instrumental value. Science, in this sense, would be a useful tool.

Science is, in fact, a very useful tool. Science provides us with the formulae that do the best job of explaining and predicting events in the real world. Being able to predict events in the real world give a person a way to manipulate the world to fulfill the agent’s desires.

Without science, my wife would have died twice – the first time when she was a young teenager with a brain tumor, and the second time last year when she became ill.

In addition, we simply do not know how often science has prevented her death, or mine. We are both immunized from a wide range of ugly diseases from small pox to polio. We drink pasteurized milk, there is iodine in our salt, and our breakfast cereals are fortified with vitamins and iron. We have enough food to eat. We have warnings from storms and know how to protect ourselves from their effects.

Science also gives us options that fulfill our desires that would not have otherwise existed. All my life I have said that what I would really like to have a newspaper column where I could comment on the events of the day and apply my understanding of moral philosophy to those events. Here I am, writing a blog that gets transmitted around the world every day. Well, almost every day. Pretty darn close to every day.

Science is good because science is useful. Science provides us with the most successful formulae around for explaining and predicting real-world events. Those who ignore science are more likely to suffer consequences they do not anticipate, and they are likely to be consequences they do not want.

So, a second way to get people more interested in science is to show them how useful it is. Such a person has no reason to pursue science beyond its usefulness, but has a reason to follow science at least that far – once they are shown its usefulness.

Changing Values

The way of looking at value that I describe in this blog provides us with a third way of promoting interest in science, which is to actually change people’s desires. When we do this, we are not trying to convince them that science contains something that they already like. Nor are we trying to convince them that science is useful in bringing about something they already like. We are trying to cause them to have different likes – to acquire likes that science can then fulfill.

Many people who talk about making science popular assumes that everybody else is like them. Once others are exposed to science, it is like being exposed to cocaine. The person having the experience of science will be hooked, unable to get enough science, and unwilling to go back to the type of person they once were. All we need are shows like Cosmos and Connections to show people how wonderful science can be.

Only, people are not alike. Most people – all people – will have desires that science can fulfill directly only if others go through the effort of changing an individual’s desires.

As I have also argued in this blog, we do not change desires through reason and argument. Reason will tell a person whether a state will fulfill the desires he has, or whether it can be used to create a state that fulfills those desires. To change desires themselves – to make people love science for its own sake – we have to use other tools.

When it comes to actually promoting tools, one of the most effective tools of the past century has been the Soviet Union’s launch of the Sputnik satellite. This took a whole generation of individuals who had a passive interest in science, and converted many of them into people with a huge interest in science, mathematics, and engineering overnight. It is not that Sputnik suddenly made people love science. Rather, it gave science a whole new usefulness – one that would protect them and their liberties from the aggression of the Soviet Union. Whether this value was genuine or merely perceived, the belief that science had this new value motivated many people to take a look at science.

It is often the case that the things we pursue because they are useful become things that we value for their own sake. A child may behave because he wishes to avoid being yelled at by his parents. Yet, the behavior that begins as a useful tool for avoiding punishment becomes something that child likes to do for its own sake – something the child will continue to do even when the parental threat goes away. This is how parents – at least, good parents – raise children to become morally upstanding adults.

That is to say, parents influence the values of their children through praise and condemnation. People influence each other’s values using these same tools.

If you wish to promote a love of science where it does not exist, and to inhibit a love of superstition where it does exist, the best tools to use are to praise those who love science, and to condemn those who love superstition.

In the debate over whether atheists should pursue kindness as a political strategy, my position is to argue against that tactic. If we praise and coddle the love of superstition, we promote the love of superstition. Those who condemn those who love reason and use them as scapegoats for all the world’s ills promote an aversion to reason.

This is the reason why I so strongly detest the motto “In God We Trust” and the pledge to “One Nation Under God.” These can only be understood as giving national praise to those who trust in or who are under God, and they condemn and brand as inferior those who do not. This, then, has an effect on our nation’s values. It gives people a special affection for those who trust in and who are under God, while promoting hatred and contempt for those who are not. We then see these effects in national surveys of attitudes towards atheists.

There can be no progress in promoting a love of reason over superstition as long as it is our national policy, our national motto, and our national pledge, to praise superstition and condemn reason.

Action Items

So, the task is not to find ways of providing people with science that they already value. The task is to promote a love of science and a love of reason. Reason has nothing to say about or ends – our desires. Reason only has something to say about the means to the ends we already have. Influencing desires themselves requires the judicious use of the institutions of praise and condemnation.

Yet, there is a way in which the instrumental value of science can help in this regard. When those who promote superstition ignore reality, the effect will be death, suffering, and other harms. Any time these harms exist, there is an opportunity to point out how these harms could be avoided through science and reason, and are protected by those who ignore science and reason. This, in turn, justifies praise for those who accept science and reason, and justifies condemnation for those who condemn it. It justifies these results in terms of the harms prevented and the harms permitted.

Keith Olbermann: Fear Peddling

MSNBC commentator Keith Olbermann had another “special comment” last night in which he condemned Rudi Giuliani for a speech that Olbermann translated into “vote Democrat and die.” Giuliani asserted in a speech before (group) that the Democrats plan to change our stance in the war on terror from offense to defense, and that this defensive strategy would lead to another terrorist attack on this country.

Olbermann’s criticisms were like a shotgun blast against Giuliani in that he made a number of points, but did not offer much in the way of a coherent criticism. One of his complaints is that, given the Republican track record for the past five years, there is reason to doubt that the Republicans actually do have the ability to protect us. There are strategies (such as continuing to pursue Al Queida in Afghanistan and Pakistan) that would have been more effective than an invasion of Iraq, would not have cost as many lives, and would not have supported America’s enemies by eroding the respect that people around the world once had for this country.

Yet, elsewhere Olbermann seemed to suggest that this is not his argument, and that it would be contemptible for anybody to run for office on a campaign of “vote for me or die.” Of course, Giuliani did not say this. What he said was that if a Republican were elected President, the chance of dying in a terrorist attack is greater than if a Democrat is elected President. This is what Olbermann translated into “vote for me or die”.

As a general campaign policy, I see nothing wrong with running on a ‘vote for me or die’ platform, if it is true. If I were running for office, and I were running against an arch-Conservative, I would probably run that type of campaign.

“My opponent wishes to ban all embryonic stem-cell research and prohibit all further developments along this path. Doing so will do irreparable harm to the progress of our medical knowledge, which will hinder our capacity to save lives. Vote for me, and I will support the research that may very well save your life or the life of somebody you know.”

Or, “My opponent is bought and paid for by some of the biggest carbon dioxide emitters in the world. The scientific consensus is that this will put over a hundred million lives at risk. Some of those casualties will be in the United States from new diseases, more violent storms, and heat. Vote for me, and I will support legislation to deal with global warming so that more people can live.”

Or, “President Bush’s foreign policy has turned huge segments of the world who used to respect for the United States, weakened our ability to draw upon the help of those who would have otherwise been our allies, and strengthened our enemies. Those who wish real progress to be made in the war on Terror needs to vote for somebody who rejects those failed missions.”

All of these arguments fit into the mold of running on a “vote for me or die” as Olbermann applies the phrase. Thus, if his claim that running on such a platform alone is worthy of condemnation, then I would be guilty. So will any real candidate worthy of the job. A President is supposed to be protecting us from those things that would otherwise kill us.

In fact, many of my posts would all into that category. A couple of days ago, in “Hate Peddling,” I accused hate peddler of making the situation worse by obscuring the true scientific explanations for events such as the Virginia Tech shootings. In other words, I said that their intellectual recklessness and attempts to shift the public focus from scientifically verifiable cause to their favorite hate group would interfere not only with the research but with the public understanding of their findings. This, in turn, will interfere with the possibility of predicting and preventing some future event. In other words, “Vote for me or die.”

I simply see nothing wrong with these types of claims.

What is a person supposed to do if he is confronted with somebody with a plan that puts the lives of innocent people at risk, what would Olbermann have us do? Ignore the fact? Refuse to talk about it?

I wonder what Olbermann would say about my own writing – about my own ‘side with me or die’ arguments?

Actually, my guess is that he would not criticize them. Yet, I fear that this is because he would consider me a political ally. A more important question is how he would respond to somebody who criticized my writing – some Republican candidate who had blasted me for my “support my side or die moral arguments. I suspect (and this is only a suspicion) that he would condemn that person, saying, “How dare you, sir, assert that anybody who says your policies may be wrong is an ally of Bin Laden.”

I suspect this for three reasons. First, because Olbermann has condemned Republicans before when those Republicans accused attackers of being comparable to the forces of evil. Second, because Olbermann seems to have a tendency of assuming that Republicans can do no good and Democrats can do no evil. Finally, because he does not seem to be able to explain exactly what was wrong in Giuliani’s statement.

So, what specifically was wrong with Giuliani statement?

As I argued above, the fault was not that he said, “Vote for me or die,” or – what is, in fact, more accurate – “my plans and the plans of other Republicans will make you safer than the plans that the Democrats are pursuing.”

The fault is not that Guiliani was wrong. A person can be wrong about a potential threat without being evil. If I think that a wire is still live and tell you not to touch it, I have committed no crime in warning you not to touch the wire, even if the wire happens to be dead.

The fault here is the same as the fault identified in my earlier post, “Dinesh D’Souza: Hate Peddling.” There, I argued that D’Souza’s fault was that he wanted to promote hatred of atheists so badly that he was willing to sacrifice a serious look into the factors responsible for the events at Virginia Tech that would allow us to prevent future attacks.

In order for Olbermann to make good on his condemnation of Giuliani, Olbermann needs to show that Giuliani said, “vote for me or die,” or even that he was wrong, but that his attitude showed a stronger desire to make the public fearful of Democrats than in saving lives.

Olbermann made this. He identified a number of pieces of evidence that suggested that the Republicans were doing a particularly poor job over the last five years of making the world safe for Americans.

Which party held the presidency on September 11th, 2001, Mr. Giuliani?

Which party held the mayoralty of New York on that date, Mr. Giuliani?

Which party assured New Yorkers that the air was safe, and the remains of the dead, recovered - and not being used to fill pot-holes, Mr. Giuliani?

Which party wanted what the terrorists wanted - the postponement elections - and to whose personal advantage would that have redounded, Mr. Giuliani?

Which mayor of New York was elected eight months after the first attack on the World Trade Center, yet did not emphasize counter-terror in the same city for the next eight years, Mr. Giuliani?

Which party had proposed to turn over the Department of Homeland Security to Bernard Kerik, Mr. Giuliani?

Who wanted to ignore and hide Kerik's Organized Crime allegations, Mr. Giuliani?

Who personally argued to the White House that Kerik need not be vetted, Mr. Giuliani?

Which party rode roughshod over Americans' rights while braying that it was actually protecting them, Mr. Giuliani?

Which party took this country into the most utterly backwards, utterly counter-productive, utterly ruinous war in our history, Mr. Giuliani?

Which party has been in office as more Americans were killed in the pointless fields of Iraq, than were killed in the consuming nightmare of 9/11, Mr. Giuliani?

However, for Olbermann this was an afterthought.

. . . even if we have become so profane in our thinking that it is part of our political vocabulary to view counter-terror as one party's property and the other's liability… on what imaginary track record does Mr. Giuliani base his boast?

“Even if . . . .”

What was actually the necessary core piece of evidence that Olbermann needed to make his moral case, was presented as, “Oh, yes, and by the way, one more thing.”

I argue in this blog that the judicious use of condemnation is an important tool for making the world a better place. However, the judicious use of condemnation requires an understanding of what needs to be condemned. Saying, "My policy will save more lives than your policy" is not necessarily wrong. A lot depends on whether or not the claim is true. Even more depends on whether the person making the claim has shown a proper level of concern for the possibility that it might be false. It is this latter measure that deserves condemnation. The bulk of Olbermann's condemnation simply misses the mark.

Affirmative Action Bake Sale

I have a question from the studio audience.

The College Republicans held an "Affirmative Action Bake Sale" where the price of the cookies depended on your gender and race. Women and African-Americans pay less for the same cookies as whites (and, strangely, Asians). Question: Should I be offended? Or is their point valid and logical?

The next time that somebody sets up a booth such as this, do me a favor.

Grab a table and set up a booth next to theirs.

Let us assume that the offending booth is selling cookies for 50 cents to whites and 25 cents for African-Americans and women (and, strangely, Asians). When you set up your booth, put up a help wanted sign.

HELP WANTED:

DAY LABORERS: 5 cents per minute

MANAGERS: (psst, white males only): 10 center per minute.

When you set up this booth, remember that you cannot explicitly state that only whites are permitted to be managers. You have to come up with some other reason for rejecting non-white candidates. They ‘do not fit into the corporate culture’ or ‘their performance is not up to the standards that we expect from our employees’ or ‘they do not get along well with others – will not fit in as a member of the team’.

I am writing about a hypothetical booth here. If you have a chance to set up an actual booth, I could recommend something like having a list of legitimate-sounding reasons handy, for refusing to hire any minority candidate into a manager’s position, and rolling randomly for a reason on the list for each minority candidate who applies.

After all, discrimination does not work by causing an employer to say, “I am not going to hire you for this position because you are black.” Discrimination causes a person to say, “As much as I would like to, I really cannot see giving the job to the black candidate. It’s not that I’m prejudiced. It’s just that this particular candidate does not seem as creative or as energetic as I would like. He seems less intelligent, I question his honesty, or I sense he will lack loyalty to the company.” In short, bigots convince even themselves that they have legitimate reasons for their decision. It is only when we look at their decision from the outside that we can see that these reasons are simply excuses that have no bearing in fact.

There are several ways to test for these. Researchers look for help-wanted advertisements, create two candidates, and give them identical resumes. Then, when they get the interview, the researchers send a black candidate and a white candidate (or some other mix). The research controls for all variables – education, experience, where they went to school, hobbies, everything. If the assignment of jobs is based on objective criteria, then we should expect the job assignments to be random. Instead, we the research shows that employers have a strong preference for white males in upper-paying jobs, and minority gates are turned down for some legitimate sounding reason.

Would you like to find out how bigoted you are? Consider taking one of the sample test at Project Implicit. These are online test that measures the ease with which a person associates certain individuals with stereotypes.

This is a very useful test. You can’t cheat, so it can be self-administered. This would be a good test to conduct on the Republicans who are manning the booth in question. You can’t cheat, so the test can even be self-administered. It measures the reaction time – the speed at which a person associates a trait (good or bad) with a face (black or white).

You can find an example of a different version of the test, measuring sexism, in the presentation given by Mahzarin Banaji at the Beyond Belief conference, where it was applied to a significantly liberal audience which contained both men and women.

These are the forces that keep blacks and women in the jobs that pay the lower rates, and that allow white males to earn more money. I wonder, often, what my life would have been like if I had to compete with blacks and women on an equal basis – if I did not obtain the benefits accorded to my race and gender.

Given that even the most radical liberals show these hidden biases, it is reasonable to look for ways to remove them, if we want to be fair. For example, we may discover that employers tend to give black candidates an automatic 20 point deduction for being black. Remember, the employer will actually convince himself that he has some other, legitimate reason for ranking the candidate as he does. He will base it on a feeling – that the guy just seemed lazy, or unreliable, or like somebody who would not fit in. If, however, people are giving an automatic discount due to race, then it is quite appropriate to demand that they start by giving minority candidates an automatic credit.

Or, alternatively, one can simply say, “If you were being fair, then X% of your employees will be minority candidates. If X% of your employees are not minority candidates, this demonstrates that you are using bigotry to discount the qualifications of those candidates. To help to ensure that this does not happen, we will require that X% of your candidates be minority candidates.”

The complaint here would then be, “Because of the quota, I had to bypass a superior white applicant and accept an inferior minority candidate.”

Answer: “Are you sure? Your hiring practices suggest that you only think that the minority candidates are inferior, and you think that because of your bigotry against such candidates. If you choose to hire an obviously inferior minority candidate, this is your bigotry telling you that you that you cannot find something better – that all minority candidates are intrinsically flawed in some way.”

It is also interesting note that one of the leading predictors of fairness has to do with the subject’s experience of people in various roles. The best predictor against bigotry is whether the agent has experience with these individuals that break the stereotype. Youngsters who have experience living in a world with women and black teachers, then they are more likely to grow up to be people who do not show a bias when they take these types of tests. Therefore, putting minority candidates in these positions is an effective tool for ending discrimination in the future.

Again, if you have an opportunity to actually have a booth next to the College Republicans, you can have a computer set up to take this test. With this, you can either goad the Republicans for refusing to take the test or, if they take it, report whatever bias appears in their results.

This type of program does require extensive empirical research. It needs to determine how much of a handicap that minority candidates face, and respond accordingly – just so much as to create an even playing field and to help to establish a future environment where these prejudices do not limit the opportunities for minority candidates.

So, if you are offended by invalid and illogical points, this would qualify. The College Republicans you talked about took a specific statement out of context in order to criticize it. Statements that lose their context change their meaning. These College Republicans are complaining about a position that nobody holds. They are, in fact, builders of straw men.

In doing so, they are being intellectually negligent. A person exercising normal care to make sure that what he claims is true would have noticed the mistake. Your College Republicans did not notice the mistake. Thus, they are people who do not apply reasonable care to beliefs that may result to harm to others. They are negligent.

There is still a question of how much affirmative action there should be. This question actually has to come from the scientific research. One needs to measure the economic cost of the bigotry that currently exists to the victims of bigotry, and apply sufficient affirmative action to compensate.

Evaluating Moral Theories

Makarios asked a series of questions yesterday which, though I clearly could not answer in a comment, and cannot even answer completely in a post, I would like to give a partial answer to. For all practical purposes, Makarios asked, “How do you, Alonzo, know that your moral principles are correct?”

It is an important question for me. Every once in a while I discover a case of people actually applying the position that I defend. When I do, I get this sudden burst of anxiety and think, “Oh no! What if I am wrong?” I feel obligated to run through the arguments again to look for holes. Mostly, I go through the objections that others have raised and see if I have answers.

I do have reasons for thinking that I am not wrong, and it never hurts me to review them.

Another reason for this posting is that it is an important addendum to an earlier post where I criticized Richard Dawkins’ claims about morality. In “Richard Dawkins: Morality and the Selfish Gene” I complained that Dawkins may have made a case for genetic altruism, but he never did get around to talking about morality. In making this objection, I asked a set of questions that Dawkins’ theories do not even touch.

Can I answer those questions?

Success or failure here determines if one is working on a viable moral theory.

The Phenomena of Morality

A moral theory, like all theories, is to be judged according to its ability to account for the various elements of that which the theory is about. A theory of star formation best explains the phenomena of star formation and the types of starts that result. So, a theory of morality best accounts for the components of morality.

‘Ought’ implies ‘can’. It makes no sense to say that a person ‘ought’ to do something that is impossible. For example, it is not the case that a person ‘ought’ to teleport a child out of a burning building unless it is within his powers to do so. Many theories hold that this requires a force of ‘free will’ with which humans have the power to suspend the laws of physics. This solution is highly suspect. What is this ‘free will’? How does it work? Desire utilitarianism, on the other hand, suggests that this implication captures the fact that morality is concerned with molding malleable desires – those that social forces can influence. It says that it makes no sense to apply these social forces where they can have no effect.

‘Facts’ and ‘values’. Philosophers have generally held that there is a distinction between facts and values. Scientists deal with facts, and values are . . . what? Accounting for values as entities that affect the real world but are not facts is problematic. A better distinction is to say that ‘values’ are claims about relationships between states of affairs and desires, while ‘facts’ are about everything else. The reason we cannot derive ‘ought’ from ‘is’ is because we cannot derive a conclusion about how a state of affairs relates to a set of desires – unless our premises contain facts about those desires. Once we add desires to our premises, we can derive oughts.

‘Prohibition’, ‘Permission’, ‘Obligation’. There are three categories of morality as applied to action. All forms of act-utilitarianism say that there are only two; ‘obligation’ (that which maximizes utility), and ‘prohibition’ (everything else). All act-utilitarian theories fail here. Desire utilitarianism accounts for these three categories because they represent three different types of desires. There are ‘good’ desires that we have reason to promote everywhere. There are ‘bad’ desires that we have reason to inhibit everywhere. And there are ‘neutral’ desires that we have reason to promote for some people but not everybody. These ‘neutral’ desires – the desire to paint, to teach, to study astronomy, to design a building, to play football – is the source of our moral permissions.

‘Negligence’. Moral theories that base moral judgments on the intentions of agents cannot account for negligence. The negligent person does not intend to harm others. Yet, because of his inattention, he does so anyway. Desire utilitarianism defeats intention-based moral theories because it can account for negligence. The negligent person’s fault is that he lacks a good desire, or that good desire is not sufficiently strong. That good desire would have motivated him to take precautions to avoid causing harm to others.

The Bad Samaritan. The Bad Samaritan is the term used to represent the moral problem of the person who does the right action, but does it for a bad reason. He saves a drowning child because he wants to be seen as a hero (so he can win the next election). He turns in a notorious criminal for the sake of the reward. His actions are not wrong, but his desires do not allow us to classify him as a good person. Desire utilitarianism says that the right act is the act that a person with good desires would perform. It does not care about the agent’s actual reasons. It is quite possible for an agent to do what a person with good desires would do, only do so for bad reasons.

Weighing Rights. Rights are not absolute. They have weight. The right to freedom of the press ends where the state has a legitimate interest in protecting national security. The right to freedom of the press ends does not extend to libel or slander. Desire utilitarianism classifies a ‘right to X’ to mean ‘people should have a strong aversion to depriving people of X’. , and in some instances one person’s rights are outweighed by duties to others. We must weigh the right to freedom of the press with the government’s obligation to provide for national security. The right to freedom from religion is not a right to force others to attend one’s church. Desires also have weight (or strength). Rights, understood as things for which people generally should have a particularly strong aversion, is compatible with the idea that rights have weight.

‘Mens rea’. In order to prove moral culpability, one must prove ‘mens rea’ (or ‘guilty mind’). Mens rea comes in four flavors; intentionally, knowingly, recklessly, and negligently. Desire utilitarianism holds that moral judgment rests in determining whether agents have good desires or bad desires. Bad desires and the absence of good desires is the ‘guilty mind’ that culpability is looking for. All four of these moral categories can be understood in terms of evidence for the presence of bad desires or the absence of good desires.

‘Excuse’. When a person does something that, at first, appears to be wrong, he can sometimes save himself if he can offer a legitimate excuse for his actions. A driver runs over a pedestrian, but defends herself by showing that the car had an unforeseeable mechanical failure, or she ran over a terrorist who was about to detonate an explosive vest. There are several different types of excuse. What all of them have in common is that they break the implication from a prima-facie bad action to the agent’s desires. They prevent people from inferring that a person with good desires would not have done the same thing.

Moral Subjectivity and Objectivity. Values seem to be subjective. Desire utilitarianism can handle that. Values are relationships between states of affairs and desires. They cease to exist where desires cease to exist. Yet, at the same time, moral values seem to be objective. They do not depend on the agent wants. Here, desire utilitarianism holds that the value of a desire depends on its tendency to fulfill or thwart other desires. It concerns whether people generally have reasons to promote a particular desire universally (a virtue) or to inhibit it universally (a vice). Moral virtue and vice depends on desires, but is substantially independent of the desires of the agent.

These are only some of the elements of morality that desire utilitarianism can account for. There are others that I have not mentioned. Other challenges for a moral theory include accounting for: (1) moral dilemmas (a rare state in which very strong desires one should have demand conflicting actions), (2) the moral education of children, (3) accounts for all value terms such as illness, injury, beautiful, useful, crisis, healthy, beneficial, fortunate, and the like (explaining not only what all terms have in common that make them value terms but also what makes each term different from another), (4) supererogatory actions (above and beyond the call of duty), and (5) the relationship between value and reasons for action.

All of this is superficial. The book listed up there on the right side of this blog, “A better place,” examines each of these issues in far more detail. For my purposes here, consistent with the space allowed, I can offer only a brief outline

External Connections

Another way to evaluate theories is through the strength of its connections to other fields of study. A zoological claim has merit not only because it explains and predicts the behavior of the animal, but because the claim is consistent with what we know about chemistry, physics, climatology, geology, mathematics, logic, history, and the like.

Some of the reasons why I believe that the theory I use in these posts has merit is the strength of its connections to other fields of study.

Metaphysics. The theory only makes use of regular every-day phenomena. It talks about desires as propositional attitudes – a desire that ‘P’ is a line of brain code that motivates an agent to make or keep the proposition ‘P’ true. It talks about states of affairs. And it talks about the relationships between them: A desire that P is fulfilled in S if and only if P is true in S. There is no ‘free will’ that allows us to suspend the laws of physics, no intrinsic value, no God, no ‘categorical imperatives’, no meeting behind a veil of ignorance, no ideal observer, no social contract, no ‘man qua man’. There are desires, states of affairs, and relationships between them.

Action Theory: This theory employs the most widely used theory of intentional action. It is a theory that explains intentional action as the product of beliefs (a belief that ‘P’ is the attitude that the proposition ‘P’ is true), and desires (a desire that P is a mental attitude that the proposition ‘P’ is to be made or kept true). This produces intention, which (in the absence of a physical defect or restraint) produces intentional action.

Evolution. Evolution has certainly influenced our desires so that we tend to want those things that, in turn, tend to cause the replication of one’s genes. We tend to desire sex, to care for our children, the types of food that kept our biological ancestors alive, a particular climate, and an aversion to pain where pain tends to be caused by that which threatens our reproduction. However, evolution also gave us a brain that is molded by interaction with our environment. We learn, and through learning we acquire beliefs and desires that do not come from our genes. Clearly, there is no gene for believing that today is Thursday or that Saturn has rings. There are also no genes determining some of my desires. Morality is concerned with those malleable desires. Not only is morality about malleable desires, but it is concerned with how those desires can be molded – particularly through praise, condemnation, reward, and punishment. These facts also fit into evolutionary theory.

Economics. Value in terms of relationships between states of affairs and desires are easily translated into economic concepts of goods (ends – states of affairs in which the propositions that are the objects of one’s desires are true) and price (types of effort that go into creating those states of affairs).

Overall

So, why do I think that desire utilitarianism is a good theory? Because no other theory accomplishes so much (in terms of accounting for the elements of morality as well as connecting to the other branches of knowledge) with so little (uses only desires, states of affairs, and relationships between them).

If there is another theory that does as well, then we should use it.

Either way, the test is: Which theory provides the most efficient account of that which we know as morality?

Dinesh D’Souza: Hate Peddling

It was my intention not to write on Dinesh D’Souza’s recent postings (which PZ Myers covers here), mostly because there are more important things in the world to write about. D’Souza is a hate-peddler. Sometime back in his life he discovered that he can acquire fame and fortune by manufacturing hate and selling it in the press. Or maybe he just discovered that he enjoyed hate-peddling. The virtues of truth and fairness are far beyond his grasp.

Yet, unfortunately, we live in a culture that cherishes the products of the hate-peddler, so D’Souza has indeed found a route to at least some measure of notoriety and wealth.

It is because our society pays hate-peddlers so well, in terms of cash, honor, and respect, that we have so many of them. If one were to think that a society would be better off without hate-peddlers – if one were to think that their contribution to society has more in common with that of the thief or arsonist than that of the honest laborer or scholar – then one would treat the hate-peddler the same way that we treat members of these other groups.

D’Souza would probably claim that I complain about his writings and call him names because I am angry at God for some offense.

No, Mr. D’Souza. I complain about your writings because I believe that hate-peddlers are like thieves and arsonists. You make this world a worse place to live, for everybody.

There are those who might think that D’Souza only makes the world a worse place for atheists (and the other target of his hatred). However, he does not. In being a hate-peddler, he promotes hate-peddling itself. This inspires other people to go into the business, and they will not all choose the same target. In fact, once people like D’Souza capture the market for hate against one group, the wise competitor has reason to pick a different target. They spread the hate around, so everybody can have some.

It is ironic that D’Souza argues that an atheist suffers from an inability to make moral judgments, when D’Souza himself is unable to perceive the immorality of his own actions. He does not understand that goodness and evil is found by making universal the principles of one’s actions – the idea that one should ‘do unto others what one would have others do unto you’.

I am certain that D’Souza would condemn anybody who make unfounded denigrating generalizations about any number of groups and call it wrong. I am certain that D’Souza would condemn the hate-mongers who pick any of a long list of targets. Yet, he does unto others exactly what he would condemn others for doing. He knows that this type of behavior is immoral, but he engages in it anyway.

Scope

The careful reader will notice that I am only writing about D’Souza himself. I do not generalize my remarks to make broad-brush claims about ‘Christians’ or ‘Theists’. D’Souza’s fault is not that he is a Christian or a theist. His fault that he is a hate-peddler. He happens to be a Christian hate-peddler. However, it is the quality of being a hate-peddler that makes him evil, not his quality of being a theist.

(I do know of some atheists who need to pay a bit closer attention to this type of distinction.)

The hate-peddler, in a sense, lets immoral people off of the hook, as it were, by transferring the guilty person’s guilt to some group – to whomever he is in the market of peddling hate against.

So, we hear that the murders at Virginia Tech are not really Cho’s moral responsibility. Cho was the unwitting victim of liberals who took prayer out of the schools. Or who argue that the real killers were liberals who refuse to allow college campuses to be modern versions of the old west, where everybody walks around with a gun on his or her hip ready to draw down on the first transgressor. Or is it the video-game manufacturers who are at fault? Or the movie industry? Or parents who spank their children?

Or was it perhaps Cho himself who murdered those students?

A look at the empirical evidence might actually uncover some statistical relationship between these other items and the disposition to murder. They might be able to uncover a relationship that says, “If we do X, then we can decrease each individual’s risk of being murdered – or of having somebody they care about from being murdered – by Y percent.” Then we can make informed decisions about which policy to pursue.

However, the hate-peddler is notoriously unconcerned about these types of relationships. The hate-peddler is only concerned about channeling the public’s pain, suffering, anguish, and desire for revenge against its target hate-group; motivated, not by a genuine interest in saving lives, but by an interest in profiting from the manufacture and sale of hate.

Truth

D’Souza’s accusation is that the atheist has no words of comfort to offer to those who suffered the loss of a loved one at Virginia Tech. When it comes to comforting those who are in grief, the atheist must remain silent.

Of course, D’Souza’s comfort comes in the form of a lie.

“Don’t grieve, Ms. Smith. Your daughter is not really dead. No, she hopped onto a plane with 31 of her friends and flew off to Tahiti. Sure, she’s having the time of her life – all expenses paid. Yes, she’s safe. She is well chaperoned and nothing bad can happen to her there. No, I’m afraid that you can’t contact her. Tahiti does not have phone service. No, I’m afraid it doesn’t have internet service either. Yes, you’ll see her again. We’re making arrangements to send you to Tahiti as well – all expenses paid.”

Yes, when reality proves to be particularly harsh, a lie can be comforting. It is fitting that those with no love for the truth would be the ones who are in the best position to lie.

However, one of the problems with this comforting lie is it downplays the magnitude of what happened in Virginia. These students are not enjoying an all-expense paid life under a perfectly benevolent chaperone in Tahiti. They are dead. Dead and gone. When they died, everything they were, and everything they wanted to become, died as well.

Is this too harsh? Is this difficult to accept?

This type of killing should be difficult to accept, because it clearly is unacceptable. The less people accept it, the more they are inclined to do something about it. Something useful. One of them, perhaps, might be motivated to grab D’Souza by the lapel and shout into his face loud enough to penetrate his thick skull, “YOU . . . ARE . . . NOT . . . HELPING!”

He is not helping. Ironically, D’Souza peddles hate for the very people whose capacity for empirical research and theory formation are in the best position to discover how to explain events. That which can be explained can be predicted. That which can be predicted can be avoided. Anybody who has an interest in explaining, predicting, and avoiding events such as this has an interest in rejecting and even condemning the hate that D’Souza loves to sell. Anybody who is in the market for D’Souza’s hate can’t be all that concerned with being able to explain, predict, and avoid events such as Virginia Tech.

It was my intention not to write about D’Souza’s postings because there are more important things to write about. Then I noticed, through D’Souza’s postings, that our abilities to explain, predict, and avoid events such as those in Virginia Tech are being threatened. I noticed how D’Souza trivializes the death of these people with a make-belief story in which they are all healthy and happy in a far-away land still enjoying themselves.

I noticed that there is something important to talk about here – the saving of innocent lives, and those who would rather peddle hate than save lives.

Pharyngula: Rudeness and Conflict

P Z Myers of Pharyngula had a posting called, "We aim to misbehave" that criticized the "be nice" approach to advancing atheism. There is a core truth to what he wrote. However, he wrote it in what appears to be the complete absence of any type of moral backdrop.

The core truth is actually an argument that I have repeated often in this blog, including Thursday's posting "Framing" and Friday's posting "Disagreement". It points to the absurdity of blaming anti-atheist bigotry on the atheists because they are not being nice. Bigotry does not respond to "being nice". It makes no sense to blame the subjugation of women, for example, on the idea that women were - at least until the early 1900s - rude and obnoxious individuals and that only by 'being nice' were they able to obtain political equality. Myers provides some clear examples of how not being nice was the cause of their political liberation.

One of the better objections ever written against those who demand that one 'play nice' came from Martin Luther King in his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" - an argument that I covered in the posting, "Culpability of the Moderates".

However, exactly how 'not nice' are atheists allowed to be?

Are there limits to political action?

There Is a Line

Let me put the question bluntly. "If you could end religion 500 years earlier by detonating a nuclear bomb in the Vatican and Mecca, would you do it?"

At this point, I expect somebody to assert, “Hold it, Alonzo! Nobody, least of all PZ Myers, is talking about nuking religious centers.”

This is true, they are not. However, there is a point of order here. The first point is to establish that there is a line that can be crossed. The second point is to ask where the line is.

Now, in answering the original question about detonating the bombs, some might say, "No I would not. Ultimately, I don't think it would be useful. It would turn people against atheists and have other unfortunate consequences."

However, the person who gives this answer is still telling us, "Well, if I had a way of avoiding these consequences, then I would do it." He seems to be suggesting that if he could make sure that the Muslims are blamed for blowing up the Vatican, and the Christians are blamed for blowing up Mecca, this might generate an anti-religion attitude that could be useful. Under these circumstances, he could set off the bomb.

Unless, of course, there are moral limits to what one might do in obtaining a political goal.

In Myers' article, he quoted an article in which the authors said that the Women's Social and Political union engaged in the breaking of windows and arson to obtain their ends.

Does Myers advocate destruction of property and arson as a legitimate form of protest?

He also writes,

Successful revolutionaries ignore the admonitions about which fork to use for their salad because they care only to grab the steak knife as they launch themselves over the table.

Does Myers advocate murder?

I would say that he does not. However, his words to - in this passage. The defense that 'any sane person would realize that I wasn't talking about actually killing somebody' begs asking the question, "Really? Do you know that as an empirical fact? Whose life are you willing to bet on that?"

I hold to a certain amount of moral responsibility in my writing. The responsibility exists because it is all too easy for somebody to get carried away. There is always . . . always . . . a bottom or most extreme one percent who are at risk of carrying any political activism too far.

Myers does not mention limits. He quotes, without qualification, statements that accept vandalism, arson, and attacking others with a stake knife – all without suggesting that there might be moral limits to what is acceptable.

So, what is he advocating? If he does not mention limits, then what is his message to the bottom one percent?

I argue that there are limits, and that it is important to keep them in focus at all times. Whenever I speak in defense of protests – and I am very much a defender of protest – I take care to mention the limits of morally legitimate protest. Words and private action (including protest, and even including non-violent civil disobedience) are the only legitimate responses to words, and a political campaign is the only legitimate response to a political campaign in an open society. Nothing more is justified.

I do not advocate or even condone ‘being nice’ – not to those who are unjust or whose recklessness threatens the life, health, well-being of others. Imagine catching a guy beating a child and ‘being nice’ to him. Imagine catching an organization withholding food from a whole village of children. Imagine catching a church banning the medical research that will free countless children of disease because they think God prefers a state where the children to be sick and dying. It is very difficult to defend the idea of ‘being nice’ to such people.

However, there is a difference between being nice and being fair – between condemning those who deserve to be condemned and condemning those who have done no wrong simply because they share some trait with those who are justifiably condemned.

Some of the claims that atheist activists make are dishonest, intellectually reckless, and unjust. Those claims lie outside the moral limits of political activism.

Ignoring Morality

One could say, “Damn the morality, full speed ahead. We have a cause to fight for here, and morality will only slow us down.”

Yet, it is somewhat problematic to toss morality aside for the sake of a political end while condemning others for tossing morality aside for the sake of political ends. One could say that this type of attitude is somewhat ‘hypocritical’. That’s the first (and not the most serious) of its faults. The person who tosses morality aside tells others that they may do so as well.

As an ethicist, one of my complaints about President Bush is that, in tossing morality aside and setting up secret prisons, endorsing torture, engaging in rendition, holding prisoners without trial or charges, bypassing the legislature through signing statements, simply refusing to deal with the courts, and the like, that he is setting a moral standard for countries around the world to follow. These are not the types of actions that we have any reason to see become international standards.

These are the fruits of tossing morality aside.

So, I ask again, where does PZ Myers speak of the moral limits of political activism?

Conflict

In another post the next day, PZ Myers tells us, “Conflict sells. Use it.”

Conflict does sell. Conflict is profitable. However, is that what Myers is after? Profits?

Shout television is profitable. Shout television is what the cable news networks engage in when they get two attack dogs to go after each other in front of the cameras. It involves a lot of shouting and rhetoric – a great deal of heat, and little light.

Research shows that shout television is very popular, however it is not at all informative. People who watch shout television end up much more firmly set in their own views, and less capable of understanding the opposing position. In short, shout television weakens the middle and promotes the extreme on any issue they cover.

But, it brings eyeballs to advertisements, and that is what matters.

If we create a situation, with a more strongly polarized population, with a week and ineffective middle, and with no moral limits to what may be done in the name of political activism, then the only option left is civil war. No doubt, people on both sides will assert that they are only defending themselves against the aggression from the other side. Both sides will make-believe that they are the aggrieved and wronged party reluctantly entering into the fight. The ‘lovers of conflict’ will be there at the lead demonizing the ‘others’ while convincing ‘us’ that the cause is noble and just.

Yes, conflict sells.

But, answer the question, “WHAT, exactly, does conflict sell? And is this something we have any interest in selling?”

Conclusion

Yesterday, while writing about ‘scientism’, I mentioned that I agreed with Harper. When scientists begin talking in the realm of value, they tend to abandon the principles of intellectual rigor that they insist on in their own field.

This is an example.

Once again, I am not disputing the claim that there can be no progress by being nice. Myers’ best and most accurate line in the first article was, “They won't stop (calling atheists rude) until we're completely silent.” This is true. The accusation of “rudeness’ is simply a rhetorical trick to get the opposition to shut up. There is no way to avoid the accusation without simply accepting second-class status. So, either ignore the accusation and stand up against it, or accept your position in the only place where you will not be called ‘rude’ – as a silent and impotent part of society.

However, no discussion of the importance of fighting back should be without some mention of the moral limits of fighting back. For the sake of all potential victims, this is a line that we are ill advised to ignore.

I am not going to be a fan of any discussion of activism that includes mention of arson, vandalism, and attacking people with knives that does not offer some sort of disclaimer recognizing the moral limits of protest.

Charles Harper: Scientism

In Sir Harold Kroto’s presentation at Beyond Belief 2006, which I covered yesterday, he made some critical remarks of The Templeton Foundation – claiming that the foundation was involved in promoting religion. Charles Harper, Senior Vice President of the John Templeton Foundation, was at the conference and given an opportunity to present a rebuttal.

Though Harper’s presentation seemed to be a last-minute invitation, he gave a prepared speech with slides explaining the work of the Templeton Foundation. Before doing this, Harper established his credentials as a scientist, having worked at Harvard and at NASA, where he invented techniques used in the dating of features on the moon and Mars.

When confronted with a speaker like Charles Harper, it is easy to jump to the conclusion that he must be wrong – the same conclusion it was easy to jump to in discussing Richard Perle’s defense of the Iraq War a couple of days ago. In these cases, it is particularly important to listen to what the person has to say and to admit to the truths that are contained in their beliefs. People who are this smart cannot be wrong about everything

Three Facts

Harper presented three facts that I hold to be particularly important.

(1) It is notoriously difficult to communicate scientific facts to the public. I said as much yesterday, when I said that broadcasting the proceedings of a science symposium on some scientific version of C-SPAN would be like broadcasting C-SPAN itself in a language that only 10,000 on the planet could understand. Your average every-day secretary or truck driver is not going to know anything about carbon dating, other than it has something to do with carbon and it is used to determine how old something is. Those few secretaries and truck drivers who could give more than this explanation are not ‘average’.

Any policy or program that expects non-scientists to communicate scientific facts at the same level as a scientist – or even at the same level as a college student with an undergraduate degree in science – is absurd and irrational. This is not a policy or a program geared for success in the real world.

(2) I will warn in advance that, in the conference, this claim seemed to get peoples’ blood-pressure up. It was the claim that conflict sells and that the reason there were so many attack books on the market today was because of the profitability of conflict, particularly religious conflict.

Some members of the audience seemed to interpret this as saying, “The only reason that people are writing these attack books (and, by this, we may assume that we are talking about Dawkins and Harris) is to make money. They do not really care about the issues they are writing about at all. Profit is the motive behind these publications, not edification.”

Harper did not say this at all. I think it is obvious that Dawkins and Harris wrote their books because they wanted to make the world a better place and that they were attacking something they believed to do significant harm to the present and future quality of life. However, the reason that a book was written and the reason that a book becomes popular do not have to be the same. These books became popular because of their harsh and uncompromising position.

What Harper did say, and what I think is true, is that conflict sells. I have also written in several posts that if Dawkins and Harris had softened their tone – if they had written in the compromising tone that many say they should have used - only a few of us would ever have heard of these books. They would have been popular among a small circle of diplomatic atheists and unheard of everywhere else.

“Shout television,” where two (or more) attack dogs on a news show shout at each other for 5 minutes, is the staple of the cable network news shows because people are entertained by these verbal gladiatorial matches. Nobody walks away from these better informed. However, the networks walk away from them a little wealthier because they have succeeded in their quest to draw eyeballs to their sponsors’ advertisements.

Anybody who thinks that it is important to live in the real world rather than in a world of fantasy and make-believe has reason to recognize that this is a part of the real world.

(3) When scientists talk about policy matters outside of their field of expertise (e.g., except when climate scientists talk about global warming or pediatricians talk about childhood obesity), they tend to drop the standards for proof and reason that they apply to their own field. In other words, they tend to speak from sentiment and prejudice rather than from an empirical understanding of the data.

I believe that the recent debate on framing in science illustrates this well enough. The scientific disposition towards precise definitions, empirical verification of claims, and skepticism went straight out the window in most of that debate.

It is not necessarily the case that scientists discuss policy matters with the same lack of intellectual rigor as ‘the man on the street.’ It is a tendency, but a tendency that each individual scientist can choose to buck whenever he or she writes or speaks on policy issues.

Harper’s False Implication

From these three facts, and from one false but misleading assumption, Harper comes out with two absurd question-begging rhetorical questions.

Question-I: Is it a good method of representation of science to the non-scientific public to seem to suggest that the core agenda of science is to attack extra-scientific aspects of culture that are for many people the carriers of their deepest and most cherished values?

Question-II: Do ideological assaults against religion well represent science to a broadly religious public that over the past century in the United States has supported a massive expansion of scientific research totally unprecedented in human history and that has generated a situation where about 90% of the world’s top scientific research institutions are based there?

Thank you, Mr. Harper, for providing an excellent example in defense of the point that when scientists talk about matters of policy, intellectual rigor tends to go out the window.

Turning first to Question-II – this is an example of “Argumentum ad Baculum” – or an appeal to the stick. Effectively, this is blackmail. “Dear scientists – quit telling us things that we do not want to hear or we will take away your funding. We do not care about quality of evidence or reasons for belief. All we care about is getting our most cherished beliefs verified. If you can’t do that, shut up, or suffer the consequences.”

If a criminal drags you into an alley, menacingly waves a bat around, and demands your money, you might have a good reason to give it to him. This ‘appeal to the stick’ certainly gives a person ‘reasons for action’. However, this appeal to the stick is a very poor ‘reason to believe’ that a particular proposition is true or false. In fact, just as the robbery victim is fully justified in feeling anger and contempt for the thief who appeals to the stick to get him to part with his money, the scientist rightfully feels the same anger and contempt for the threat to use funding to manipulate science.

So, this leaves us with Question-I.

As an atheist who, since I was 16 years old, been most interested in the question of value (what is 'better'?), I deny that there are “aspects of culture that are for many people the carriers of their deepest and most cherished values” that are, at the same time “extra-scientific”. I deny this in the same way that I deny that there are explanations for real-world events that are super-natural.

Extra-scientific holders of value do not exist. Any argument or essay that employs these entities when discussing real-world events, including policy questions, is making a false claim. Any time somebody brings up one of these mythical extra-scientific entities as a reason for pursuing policy option A over policy option B, given that people also have a real-world stake in which option we choose, that person is sacrificing real-world interests for the sake of imaginary goods.

It’s true that people can invest a great deal of their “deepest and most cherished values” in mythical entities. However, if the entity is not real, then the realization of their “deepest and most cherished values” is not real either.

A person can take it as his mission in life – as the only thing that can possibly give his life meaning and purpose – to protect the dryads that live in each and every tree. He can be successful in saving a whole forest of trees from being harvested. Yet, in doing so, and in spite of all of his efforts, he never has and never will protect a single dryad from harm. All of his pride and satisfaction comes to nothing. As a matter of real-world fact, he has accomplished nothing.

If, through his actions, he deprives people of food, heat, and shelter, then he has caused real-world suffering for nothing. As far as the real-world effects of his actions are, he has made the world a worse place. That pride he feels for the dryads he has saved is a mistake.

Values exist in the form of relationships between states of affairs and desires. Moral values exist in the form of relationships between malleable desires and other desires. Values as relationships between states of affairs and desires are as real as the relationships that exist between planets and stars, or between different atoms. The study of value is no more extra-scientific than the study of any of these other types of relationships.

Any person who proposes a ‘reason for action’ for or against a policy, where that ‘reason for action’ does not relate to a desire, is bringing up a ‘reason for action’ much like ‘for the sake of protecting the dryads’. They are inflicting real-world costs on real-world people for the sake of accomplishing something that cannot be accomplished. It can’t be accomplished because ‘reasons for action’ that do not refer to desires are not real.

At this point, I need to add something that I think is important, but is missing from much of the debate. Atheism is not a virtue, and promoting atheism is not the same as promoting virtue. Atheists deny the existence of a God, and deny the existence of any ‘reasons for action’ that come from God. However, many atheists can and do believe in 'reasons for action' that are as fictitious as those that come from religion (e.g., Ayn Rand Objectivists, Marxists). Many atheists also deny the existence of ‘reasons for action’ that are just as real as relationships between planets and stars (post modernists, common subjectivists). If the problem - the threat to society - is the belief in false values and lack of belief in real values, religion is not the only place to find fault.

Scientism

The points that I have raised so far can be used to evaluate Harper’s comments (or condemnation, really) of what he calls ‘scientism’. He defines scientism as:

The ideology which projects itself into the cultural (and actual) politics as being representative of science, but which does not utilize the scientific method, and which is not constrained by the usual institutional rigor of scientific research publishing, and which is not delimited to scientific matters, and is meta-scientific/ideological in nature.

.

Naiveté

In one of his specific criticisms, Harper says,

When scientific communities go beyond their domain of intrinsic expertise, and become ideologically engaged, it is typical that what results is naïve in the sense of its being disconnected from the best relevant scholarship.

This is true. When scientists enter the realm of value they tend to do so with a layman’s understanding of value. They tend to make crude mistakes that experts in value theory easily see as flawed, such as equating altruism with morality, deriving 'ought' from 'is' premises that contain no reasons for action, or failing to see the distinction between what an agent will do given a particular brain makeup and what an agent should do.

However, this problem does not prove that Harper is right. All that we need to correct this problem is to introduce scientific facts about desires, states of affairs, and the relationships between them. When scientists start adding informed opinion about relationships between states of affairs and desires to their conclusions, then they can speak scientifically about value.

Ideology

Science itself . . . almost never obtains ideological/philosophical conclusions. “God does not exist” or “Atheism is true.’ These are not scientific statements following from scientific research.

In an important way, these are scientific conclusions that follow from scientific research. “God does not exist” is simply a shorthand way of saying, “God is not a variable in any scientific equation, and plays no role in explaining and predicting real-world events.”

One can respond that the scientist does not know everything, and there may be some future formula that requires a God variable in it somewhere, or a “Divine Uncertainty Principle” where results are best explained by inserting a decision by a supernatural agent.

However, we can invent an infinite number of entities that might play a role in some future equation. It certainly does not follow from the fact that a force or entity might have a role to play in some future equation that we have reason to act as if that force is real today. It is not even possible to do this, since the set of things that might be having an influence that we do not yet know about are contradictory. A “good God” is just as likely to have a role in this future equation as an “evil God” or an “indifferent God” or a “bipolar God”, or any of an infinite list of God types, as well as an infinite list of non-God explanations.

So, if ‘existence’ means ‘having a role to play in predicting and explaining real-world phenomena,’ then it is quite telling that no God variable appears in peer-reviewed scientific journals. For the sake of real-world decision making, this is all we need to know.

On the other hand, desires do exist. Relationships between states of affairs and desires do exist. Relationships between malleable desires and other desires do exist. All of these entities are a part of explaining and predicting real-world phenomena. What is true of these relationships is objectively true and subject to scientific study. If this were not the case, then we should categorize these entities the same as we categorize God and the dryads in the forest.

Conclusion

Ultimately, Harper built his presentation on the assumption that there is a distinction between fact and value, that science is concerned with the realm of fact, and to study value we must turn to something outside of science – something ‘extra-scientific’.

Many of the things that Harper says about scientists when they write in the realm of value is true. Those scientists have a naïve understanding of value, and typically do as poor a job discussing values as ‘the man on the street’ does discussing their particular branch of science.

Yet, this does not imply that there is something ‘extra-scientific’ about value. Astrophysicists cannot say much about the behavior of bees, and on average can be expected to know as little about bees as ‘the man on the street’. Yet, this does not justify calling the study of bees ‘extra-scientific’. It is only ‘extra-astrophysics’.

Even if one does not share the specific views about value that I assumed in writing this post and have argued for elsewhere, these examples at least show that there is a huge gap between Harper’s premises, however true they may be, and the conclusions he sought to draw from them. Those conclusions require additional premises which are, at best, highly questionable.

Sir Harold Kroto: Communicating Science

This is the twelfth weekend that I have spent discussing the presentations at Beyond Belief 2006.

Our next speaker at this conference is Sir Harold Kroto, 1996 co-winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry and Chairman of the Board of the Vega Science Trust, a UK educational charity that produces science programs for television.

I regret to report that I found Kroto’s presentation somewhat disjointed. I had a hard time picking out an overall theme to his presentation, let alone a coherent argument in defense of some position. That makes it difficult to comment upon.

Ultimately, if I were to characterize the presentation, Kroto’s objective was to describe and to promote “The Vega Science Trust” described as “An Independent Broadcaster of Informed Scientific Visual and Audio Media”

Making Room For Religion

However, it was clear that Kroto placed himself in the Dawkins/Harris camp with respect (or with the lack of respect) to religion. He considers religion to be the antithesis of science and wishes to encourage his fellow scientists to avoid anything that might be thought of as encouraging religion. For example, he criticized the Templeton Foundation for promoting a message that the study of science is the study of God’s design – arguing that science and religion can fit together. He is so opposed to that philosophy that he called upon fellow scientists to boycott Templeton Society grants.

In light of my previous criticism of Dawkins and Harris, I feel that I should add a clarifying comment. I do not have any objections to people condemning religion and promoting reason in its place. My objections have focused on claims made against religion that are not true, or claims made in favor of reason that are impractical. I hold that there is enough to say that is critical of religion without exaggerating its faults.

I have no objection to Kroto’s policy of rejecting relationships between religion and science. As a matter of fact, core religious claims are almost certainly false. It is absurd to demand that a scientist who thinks he has a perfectly workable theory of X to insert claims that are outside the scope of available evidence and almost certainly false is absurd. He should state his theory and be done with it. If others wish to add a divine element to his theory, let them do so on their own time.

The Campaign For and Against Science

Sir Harold Kroto was obviously concerned with the amount of money that churches drew in, and perceived this as a threat. With so much money devoted to the marketing of myth and superstition, Kroto was concerned to put something up against it. Therefore, he talked at length about using the power of the internet to promote a scientific view of the world. He spoke about his own efforts, and encouraged those attending the conference to do the same with whatever tools available.

Indeed, there is a great deal of money that is going to promote the falsehoods of religion. False beliefs, as I said in the past, stand in the way of people fulfilling their desires (including promoting that tend to fulfill other desires). These mistakes get in the way of agents obtaining that which really is good, and bring about death and suffering that could have otherwise been avoided.

So, there is good reason not only to invest in a campaign to replace false beliefs with truth. Unfortunately, Kroto is right, pathetically few resources are devoted to this activity.

However, very little is actually being invested in such a campaign. Organizations devoted to debunking paranormal behavior and promoting truth and reason are orders of magnitude smaller than campaigns on the other side that promote myth and superstition. Even if we consider per-capital expenditures of effort, there are organizations of fewer members who do a better job of getting things done. This is in spite of the fact that promoting reason is one of the best ways to get things done.

If there is one thing that will best serve all other projects not devoted to myth, regardless of what those projects are, it would be to promote a population capable of reasoning their way through these problems and inventing rational solutions. In this sense, reason is the core value providing the foundation for all attempts to bring about states that are actually, truly good.

As a result, if one is disposed to make a contribution to any charity at all, one has reason to donate to those who are seeking to promote a culture of reason and critical thinking. Every other project worth doing will benefit from such a cultural emphasis. Plus, I would argue, such a culture would have an easier time discovering which projects are worth doing, and what they are worth (as the relationships between states of affairs and desires become better known).

CSPAN for Science

In the middle of his presentation, Kroto made a remark that what we need is a “CSPAN for science”. I assume that what he had in mind was a television channel that obtained its material by covering the conventions, symposiums, and colloquia of the scientific community.

I do not think it is wise to take this idea too literally. The fact is, few people would be able to understand such a presentation. It would be like broadcasting the events on the floor of the House of Representative (as C-span does), translated into a language that only 10,000 people on the planet could understand. The rest of the population would have no reason to watch.

However, Kroto was not there to propose that method of communication as much as he sought to inform the audience that there was this thing called ‘the internet’ which was a tremendous tool for communication that all of us can use. He uses it as a mechanism for giving the best scientists the opportunity to speak on any issues that interest them. Each of us can find our own ways to contribute.

Of course, the forces of evil have access to the internet as well, and some of them know how to use it quite efficiently. Just because somebody has a microphone, this does not imply that he has something important or useful to say.

Having something useful to say takes a little extra effort.

Richard Perle: Morally Assessing Iraq

Recently, I have been watching a series on PBS called “America at a Crossroads”, which concerns a range of topics such as Iraq, Afghanistan, and terrorism in the United States and Europe.

In last night’s episode, ‘neoconservative’ Richard Pearle was given an opportunity to present his case for continuing the conflict in Iraq and elsewhere. Today, I would like to comment on some of his arguments.

First, in principle, I agree with the basic moral standards that Pearle defended.

To many people, this would be taken as similar to claiming that I am a fan of Hitler – they hate Pearle so much. No amount of explanation would allow me to redeem myself. Still: here is my explanation.

The basic principle is that it is a good thing to promote change around the world so that people do not have to suffer under tyrannical and unjust governments. It is a bad thing to have millions of people suffering from poverty and oppression as virtual slaves to the leaders of some political regime. The world would be a better place if these situations did not exist.

My standard analogy for this type of case is to imagine somebody home at night trying to watch television when he hears screams coming from the parking lot. He goes to the window and sees somebody drag a screaming young girl into a dark alley. Annoyed, he shouts down, “Some of us are trying to watch television!” slams his window shut and goes back to the show.

The person who would ignore the suffering in Iraq, Darfur, and North Korea turns his back on millions of people whose one and only life is being destroyed by people seeking unearned power for themselves and their friends – becoming annoyed only when the violence becomes so loud that the victim becomes an annoyance. (Though, there are some who would stand at the window and watch, considering the images and sounds to be entertaining.)

These are the principles that I applied to the case of Iraq in 2002. I was in favor of devoting significant effort to removing Saddam Hussein from power because innocent people were suffering and they would never be able to get back what they lost. Hussein was an evil person. Bringing down an evil person is a good thing; and being the person to do so is heroic.

I was in favor of the first Gulf War. By standing up against this act of aggression, the United Nations was putting tyrants of the world on notice that, at the very least, we are going to require that their evil remain confined to their national borders. We are not going to let them conquer new lands. I think that Papa Bush did an excellent job of pulling together a global community to stand up to tyranny on a large scale.

Yes, some people supported the conflict for less noble reasons. However, the fact that there are some bad reasons for performing an act does not prove that there are no good reasons for performing the same act.

I was also in favor of Clinton’s actions regarding Kosovo. Protecting innocent people from slaughter and ‘ethnic cleansing’ is a good thing. Those who engineered that operation have a right to be proud of what they accomplished.

However, even though I favored the principle of eliminating tyranny, I was against Bush’s invasion of Iraq. I had two reasons for objecting to the invasion.

Reason 1: A Matter of Competence

By 2003, President Bush had already proved himself to be an arrogant, incompetent idiot, particularly in foreign affairs. His unilateral withdraw from the Anti Ballistic Missile Treaty, the ending of talks with North Korea, and pulling out of Kyoto, were all major foreign policy blunders. It is important to note that I am not saying that Bush’s position on any of these treaties was a mistake. The fault was how he handled these events – making unilateral decisions that stunned and angered the rest of the world. My argument, back before September 11th, 2001, was that it was stupid to alienate the whole world. One of these days we may discover that we need friends, and it would be nice to have some friends when that day came.

The difference between a competent individual and an arrogant, incompetent idiot rests largely in one’s ability to anticipate what could go wrong and either prevent it or mitigate the harm done. Arrogant, incompetent idiots tend to think that they already know everything. Their idea of ‘reason’ is, ‘I believe it; therefore, it must be so. Now, go find the evidence I need to prove it.”

Reality is annoyingly unforgiving. It has no qualms against destroying life, health, and well-being when fools give it an opportunity to do so.

One example of Bush’s incompetence comes from the fact that any fool could see that Bush would be charged with attacking Iraq for the oil. Allowing the enemy to have this propaganda weapon meant that it would be easier for them to raise money and to recruit soldiers to fight the imperialist aggressor. In failing to deal with this issue, Bush made our country weaker, and our enemies stronger.

Bush could have easily demonstrated that he was taking the moral high ground by announcing, at the start of the war if not before, that Iraqi oil would be handled by an impartial unilateral commission and that the United States would not be a member. Certainly, some Muslims would still assert some sort of conspiracy. However, there would be a segment of the population who then would have been more sympathetic and supportive of the United States than they would have otherwise been.

Instead, the Bush Administration argued that the war would be cheap, because we could pay for the war by selling the oil – as if it was ours to sell.

Reason 2: A Matter of Principle

Bush’s invasion of Iraq was not only stupid, but it violated several basic moral principles, that also made the world a worse place in which to live.

There is a right to do violence against those who aggress against innocent people. However, given the destructive nature of violence, and the tendency for people to ‘rationalize’ evil by conceiving of it as good, it is a right that must be restrained by the institutions and principles of justice.

The right to self defense is not a right to kill anybody who might, possibly, some day in the future, perhaps be conceived of as trying to kill an innocent person. In arguing for the invasion of Iraq, Bush argued for a pre-emptive invasion of a sovereign state that posed no immediate threat to the United States. He argued that unfounded paranoia justified violence.

Imagine living in a community where the law stated that killing somebody was legal as long as the killer believed that the person he killed might be plotting some act of violence. If I suspected that you might enter somebody’s house and kill the occupant, I could enter your house and kill you. This is a society that is guaranteed to be drenched in blood. A world of nations governed by the principle that the mere suspicion of the possibility of wanting to attack somebody justified an attack, this is a recipe for unending war.

If you want to protect innocent people from harm, you need to uphold and defend those institutions and moral principles that are designed to inhibit violence. The moral prohibition> on pre-emptive violence is justified precisely because, with such a prohibition, we can reduce the number of people who get killed for little or no reason.

Another moral principle designed to preserve peace that the Bush Administration ripped to shreds and tossed aside says that, except in the case of immediate genuine self-defense, there is a moral duty to appeal to a neutral third party to judge the merits of the case.

The idea of a court system is not just some quaint style or fashion that people adopted for a time, like powdered wigs. It is a moral rule adopted precisely because the option is unrestrained acts of violence among people who think that they have been wronged by their neighbors. People have a bad habit of pretending that they have been wronged when they have not, and of thinking that the wrongs they inflict on others are justified. To avoid the unending bloodbath that this tendency can create, people long ago saw the wisdom of saying, “Take your case to the judge, and let him decide.”

It is better than living in a perpetual state of war.

In March, 2003, the United States was not under imminent threat. The case for ‘self-defense’ was largely the result of conveniently cherry-picking the evidence so as to construct an imaginary pretense for war. There was time for the United States to find and present its case to a neutral third party (NATO, for instance) to make sure that it actually had a case, and that it was not ‘filtering’ the evidence for convenience.

Ignoring this rule and allowing countries to take resolve their differences ‘on the street’ as it were is as stupid as creating a community where citizens can opt to avoid the courts and settle their differences on the streets through bloodshed.

What type of community do we want?

By ignoring these moral principles – by working to destroy freedoms and obligations any good person would fight to protect – the Bush Administration has made the world far, far worse than it would have otherwise been.

Conclusion

I admire the goal of getting rid of evil people so that the rest of us can live the one and only life we have. However, good intentions are not enough. Good plans are important. Good plans require an intelligent and competent agent – something Bush does not have. I did not favor the invasion of Iraq in practice because it was under incompetent leadership. However, I agree with Richard Pearle on one important matter; removing tyrants from power is a good thing.

I might not have favored an invasion of Iraq, even if there was somebody competent in government. This blog posting is not a defense of unrestrained violence. I argued that violence must be tempered by the application of a number of moral principles. Yet, even where violence is permissible to bring down a tyrant, what is permissible in a given situation, might still be stupid. If I wanted to travel to New York, it is permissible for me to walk there on my hands, but not necessarily wise.

But, then, this is why we need competent people making decisions. We need somebody with the moral character to know what is permissible, and the intellectual ability to know what is wise. We do not have such a person in power today.

Disagreements

I have always been interested in the phenomenon of disagreement. I find it interesting to observe, from a casual distance, as people go about arguing with each other over some issue or another.

One of the things that interests me is the huge inefficiency of disagreement – the way that disagreements generate a great deal of heat, but very little light, because of the way that people go about the project.

The current debate on framing, which I weighed in on yesterday, is providing enough bytes of data to make some interesting observations.

Tone

Actually, the ground was prepared for the current dispute on ‘framing’ by an earlier article that said that atheists were split between ‘militant, fundamentalist’ atheists such as Dawkins and Harris, versus ‘appeasement’ atheists such as Greg Epstein.

Please note the use of scare quotes in the above paragraph. These are the derogatory terms that people on each side have used to denigrate the others. They have become more widely known than any other term used to describe the group. This is largely because the people who use these terms wanted to find something that generated in their listener an emotional reaction of fear or loathing that was quite independent of the evidence – to ‘poison the well’ as it were.

So, even now, we do not really have a value-neutral way of describing each side of the debate. ‘Militant atheists’ have argued for the term ‘atheist activists’ – yet this implies that ‘appeasement atheists’ are not activist. They are active. They simply prefer a different set of tactics.

We could, perhaps, call them ‘confrontational atheists’ versus ‘diplomatic atheists’.

However, the issue I want to focus on is not, “What do we call these two groups?” It is the fact that so much heat is generated over the question of, “What terms should we use?” This problem emerged in the first place because of an interest that many outspoken individuals had in scoring ‘first blood’ by using a derogatory and demeaning label when discussing their opponents. Instead of focusing energy on an enlightening discussion of what ‘they’ said and whether those claims were true or false, we get derailed into a heat-generating discussion on the use of terms.

Now, I am more than happy to admit that I use emotional language in some of my writings. I call people liars, bigots, and sophists. I insist that emotional language is essential to moral discourse. We promote that which is good and avoid that which is evil by using the tools of praise and condemnation. However, I aim to tie my value-laden language to a foundation of fact. “Here are the qualities that define a bigot. Here are the reasons why those qualities are deserving of moral condemnation. Here we see the agent exhibiting those qualifications. Therefore, I condemn this agent as a bigot.”

There is no fault in calling a person who has committed murder a ‘murderer’ or a person convicted of rape a ‘rapist’. Nor is there any fault in calling a person who lies a ‘liar’, a person who uses obviously invalid reasoning to advance his position a ‘sophist’, or a person who promote hatred against members of a group without just cause a ‘bigot’.

If there are atheists who call for taking up arms in order to violently respond to the theist oppressors, it would be perfectly legitimate to call them 'militant'. If there were atheists who were actually arguing for giving theists the power the feed their enemies to the gas chambers, it would be fitting to call them ‘appeasers’.

Specific vs. General

Here is another example of inefficiency.

When Nisbet and Mooney presented their argument that scientists should do a better job of ‘framing’ their discussion, they made the mistake of including a recommendation that scientists show religious beliefs some measure of respect. This touched a sore spot for those who hold that religion is the root of all evil and deserves no respect. Those who had this attitude did not only respond by condemning this particular recommendation for framing science. They turned this into an objection to framing altogether.

This response is misguided. It is as if I wrote an article saying that people should save for their retirement. In the midst of doing so, I used the example of investing in XYZ Company. Somebody else comes along and says that XYZ Company is a poor company to invest in. The next thing I know I am faced with 100 rebuttals from people who are condemning the idea that people should save for their retirement. At which point, those who are in favor of saving for one’s future jump to the defense of that principle. The critics respond as if to say, “Everybody who thinks that one should save for their future is somebody who believes that people should invest in XYZ Company.”

Of course, there is nothing inconsistent with believing that people should save for their future without investing in XYZ company. There is nothing inconsistent with holding that scientists should learn how to ‘frame’ their findings without saying that they should deny that many religious beliefs are not only un-scientific but are things that science has proved wrong.

The gears keep slipping between the general question of framing and the specific question of how to treat religious beliefs, and these slipping gears continue to generate heat, rather than light. It would be useful if people could separate the two issues, specify which of the issues they are going to write about, and make an effort to stay on subject. If they did this, perhaps we could see more light, and less heat.

Evidence

One of the claims that I often hear people make is that people like Dawkins and Harris are actually making things worse for atheists by giving their opponents ammunition and reason to hate. Others deny that this is true, claiming that the confrontational nature of Harris’ and Dawkins’ writings is good for atheism.

I would like to point out to the disputants in this case that these are empirical claims. As such, they should be tested by the ability of the general principles that lie behind these claims to explain and predict real-world events.

I am on the side that believes that ‘being nice’ will do no good. This would suggest that atheists are the least trusted group in America today is due to the fact that atheists are ‘less nice’ than other groups. Yet, I would like to see even a shred of empirical evidence to back that up. A group of atheists file lawsuits in court to enforce the laws that exist on the book and in the Constitution. A group of Christians assassinate abortion providers and blow up clinics. A group of Muslims crash airplanes into sky scrapers. This suggests a poor correlation between social status and ‘being nice’.

More importantly, I want to know if anybody wants to argue that negro slavery could be blamed on the fact that Africans were not sufficiently nice, or that Jews lacking civility were responsible for the Holocaust, or whether women who were inappropriately abrasive in their comments were the cause of the subjugation of women.

These assertions are not only false, they are denigrating in their own right. They are clear examples of ‘blaming the victim’. They state in effect that the people we should blame for negro slavery were the Africans, that the Native Americans brought about their own near extinction, and that the Jews created the Holocaust. At least, this would be the implication if anybody actually tried to make these arguments.

It is just as absurd to name atheist brashness as the cause of the public distaste over all things atheist as it is to name Jewish arrogance as that cause of the Holocaust. Bigots do not need to find an excuse to hate. They are going to hate no matter what. There is absolutely nothing that their victims could possibly do that the bigot will not interpret in a way that ‘justifies’ his bigotry.

The point that I want to make here is that these counter-examples count as evidence for my claim that atheist ‘kindness’ will do no good. It represents the type of evidence that is lacking in much of this debate on the question of ‘framing’. Who can actually show me the empirical evidence that Dawkins and Harris are having a net negative effect on atheism and providing a net positive effect on creationism?

Does anybody have any data to back up their side of the debate?

Conclusion

This blog entry was meant to highlight ways in which people pursue a debate that end up generating more heat than light, and end up getting nowhere. It involves using derogatory names as a way to score ‘first blood’ in a debate over actually speaking about the issues. They involve failing to focus precisely on exactly what one is disagreeing with and exactly why one thinks that it is wrong. It involves mere assertions without providing empirical support for one’s position.

It is also a debate that seems to assume that everybody must be involved in the same project. For some reason it is not considered acceptable for one branch of debate to be concerned with one project (identifying the flaws against religion) while another group pursued a different task (promoting acceptance of policies based on sound science). At the same time, we have a third group – the scientists – whose concern is with getting research published in the peer-reviewed journals.

Objecting to this is as absurd as saying that everybody must either collect stamps or collect baseball cards or read science fiction novels. Is there anything wrong with allowing different people to address different interests?

Framing

Today, I wish to step into this framing debate that is going on, because I think that it raises some important moral questions, and people are missing some significant facts.

See “Framing Science – The Dialogue of the Deaf” for one take on the current debate with relevant links.

First, let me fill in some background on the current debate.

Framing

“Framing” is a rhetorical tactic grounded on the fact (and it is a fact) that people adopt most of their beliefs ‘on the fly’ without taking the time to look at the details or study the evidence. Even those of us who love details and evidence only have the time to apply our interest to a small number of subjects. Because of this, if you wish to reach the public and actually affect their attitudes and behavior, you have to ‘package’ your message in a way that they will actually accept and listen to what you say. If you do not do this, then your message will simply bounce off of their defenses and you will accomplish nothing.

However, in many cases, ‘framing’ is just another word for ‘lying’. The goal is to get people to adopt a particular attitude. The means involve wrapping the message in some sugar-coated pill that will not set off any alarms. In other words – to ‘frame’ an issue is to lie just enough to get a core truth through a listener’s defenses.

The Consequences of Framing

The issue of framing is a hot topic today because of an article that appeared in Science Magazine, and a similar article in the Washington Post, where Nesbit and Mooney argued that scientists need to do a better job of ‘framing’ their findings. On issues such as global warming, evolution, and stem-cell research, the authors contend that scientists need to give a better focus on those parts of the issue that will make it through the public filters.

For example, on the issue of global warming, Nesbit and Mooney argue that scientists should use the ‘frames’ of “economic development” and “social progress.” On the issue of stem cell research, the ‘frames’ of social responsibility and medical progress should be useful in getting people to change their attitudes towards this research.

The major controversy, at least in the atheist community, that this article has generated comes from the claim that people like Dawkins and Harris should tone down their language, and that scientists should not be so outspoken in their ridicule of religious beliefs. These ‘frames’ simply cannot make it through the filters that most people use to judge what they see and hear. As such, important truths are being condemned to sit at a permanent minority position.

The evolution issue also highlights another point: Messages must be positive and respect diversity. . . . many scientists not only fail to think strategically about how to communicate on evolution, but belittle and insult others' religious beliefs.

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In fact, Nesbit and Mooney argue that the anti-religious ‘frames’ used in science have actually given anti-science a boost. It has allowed anti-science types to ‘frame’ science as atheistic and a threat, thus putting science at a disadvantage.

Dawkins, Harris, and Playing Nice

I am going to start by mentioning a couple of points I made in an earlier post, “Atheist Evangelism and Political Strategy” on ‘playing nice’.

When it comes to bigotry, ‘playing nice’ does not work. Hate and bigotry will find reasons to express itself even if it has to make up those reasons out of whole cloth. It is simply baseless to assert that the Holocaust, negro slavery, the near-genocide of the native Americans, and the subjugation of women as mere property, existed because the victims were not being sufficiently ‘nice’.

Second, Dawkins and Harris acquired the audience they did precisely because of their uncompromising position. Some people seem to think that if Dawkins and Harris had written more kinder and gentler books that they would have been just as popular, but atheism would not have been tarnished by their words. In fact, if they had written kinder and gentler books, their sales would have been insignificant. Nobody would have heard of them, and atheists would still be hiding in the corner.

It is simply contrary to fact to assume that atheists get to choose their spokespeople, or that an individual will becomes a spokesman regardless of whatever message that person decides to give. The media will decide who speaks for atheists, and they will make that decision based on the criteria of, “Who has the power to connect eyeballs to advertisements?” The ‘nice’ person simply does not have the power to do this.

‘Being nice’ simply means ‘being easy to ignore’. Thinking that one can end bigotry simply by ‘being nice’ is just wishful thinking. It will take a form of protest that forces the wrongness of bigotry out into the open for everybody to see before it will be recognized as such and ended.

Everybody Frames

In one important sense, it makes no sense to oppose framing. We all do it. We all have to; the laws of nature leave us no choice. The only issue is that some people do it better than others.

What I mean by this is that, before I start writing each blog, I have to make a set of decisions. What will I write on? What aspect of that issue will I focus on? What points am I going to bring up? What things am I going to ignore?

Each day, I can post only one blog, and I only have 1500 to 2000 words to spend on that issue.

I have to make choices.

Writing is an intentional act, which means that those choices will necessarily be a product of my beliefs and my desires or my values. This is true of everybody who chooses to write. This is even true of the scientist who creates a paper that he intends to submit to a peer-reviewed journal. The mere fact that she has decided to try to write and submit such a paper reflects not only her beliefs, but also her values. I would argue that a desire to better explain and predict natural phenomena, a devotion to truth, and respect for the institutions of peer-reviewed research using the forms of argument that scientists have found beneficial for so many decades, are good values. However, the point remains that this is not a value-free enterprise.

The scientist ‘frames’ her paper to fit into – to make it through the filters – for such a journal.

Everybody is engaged in framing.

Quick Facts

I started off defending ‘framing’ because the concept is, in fact, grounded in truth.

Nobody has the time to (1) learn all of the arguments for the existence of God and the philosophical rebuttal of those arguments, (2) study and understand all aspects of climate change relevant to future policy, (3) obtain a sufficient understanding of international economics sufficient to form an informed opinion on NAFTA and LAFTA, (4) fully understand the physiology of drug dependence and addiction in order to determine the best drug policy, (5) become an expert in the sociological effects of capital punishment and factors that may affect murder rates, (6) understand the ways in which chemicals may interact with the ozone layer and the rule that the ozone layer plays in human health, (7) obtain a sufficiently in-depth understanding of the culture and situation in Iraq so as to determine the most effective policy, not only for America for the sake of all innocent people who might get killed or maimed.

Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

We have to pick and choose what we are going to spend time on, and we can only spend time on a small fraction of the issues that are important.

In order to regulate our time, we perform triage on all of the beliefs we come into contact with. That which we can easily digest and add to our store of existing beliefs we accept without question. That which seriously conflicts with our existing framework we reject as a waste of time. There is room for only a small number of items in the ‘middle ground’ where we consider it important enough to take the time to look at the issue carefully.

Even here we can do little more than to compare these beliefs to those that we had previously let in without filtering.

The demand that everybody be perfectly rational in everything they do is as much a fantasy as heaven. Such a world will never exist. The vast majority of our beliefs are not acquired through the careful application of reason.

There is not enough time.

If you want to write a blog where your words might actually impact people’s lives, then you need to write something that can get past the gatekeeper and actually get stored in the brain of your reader or listener. You need to write short, quick headlines that connect your truth to something that is important to the reader, allow them to digest the truth, then move on quickly.

Framing versus Lying

However, whenever I hear people advocate ‘framing’ as a rhetorical technique, I find it very difficult to distinguish between what the speaker calls ‘framing’, and what an ethicist such as myself would call ‘lying’. When I hear some people talk about ‘framing’ I have an image pop into my head of some teenager arrested for stealing a car who tells the police, “I didn’t really steal the car, I was just borrowing it.”

Rationalizing theft as ‘borrowing’, is itself a form of framing, as much as rationalizing graffiti as ‘artistic expression’ or rationalizing theft as under some Robin Hood concept of Justice.

So is the moral crimes of intellectual recklessness and engineering false beliefs - performed by people who have no love of truth who have no moral objection to deceiving others for profit.

The invasion of Iraq was ‘framed’ as a necessary and justified step to defend America from somebody who had weapons of mass destruction and was not afraid to use them against the United States. These claims, if not outright dishonest, were at best intellectually reckless. ‘Framing’ the evolution debate in terms of ‘teach the controversy’ is a manipulative lie, and ‘framing’ the global warming debate in terms of the uncertainty of science is not only intellectually dishonest but immoral.

Asking people – and, in particular, scientists – to embrace what so many people have turned into a fundamentally dishonest practice has serious problems.

Roles

Ultimately, the most questionable part of this whole debate on ‘framing’ that I have heard so far is the unspoken and undefended assumption that everybody should be doing the same thing. Nesbit and Mooney seem to believe that everybody should be participating in a campaign of ‘framing’ material for the public, and that those who do not do so are behaving inappropriately.

I would argue that there are certain advantages to be had in specialization, with different people putting their different talents to work in those areas where their talents best fit.

The scientist’s quest is for theories that best explain and predict real-world events. This quest sets her mind against forms of thinking that simply do not produce these types of results. It is quite appropriate that they would respond to ‘magical thinking’ with ridicule; there is no place for it in their culture.

Yet, this leaves room for another group of people to perform yet another task. Their job is to take the findings of science – the theories that best explain and predict real-world events – and translate them for the sake of their chosen audience. Some might write for farmers, some might write for interested high-school students, and some might write for public policy decision makers.

If anybody thinks that ‘framing’ is a good idea, they should consider themselves more than welcome to pick an audience and start ‘framing’ the science to that audience; as long as their ‘frames’ show a proper respect for the truth. But there is no sense in condemning others who have different interests and different goals.

Constitutional Changes

In writing yesterday’s blog about the atheist activists’ passive acceptance of many forms of discrimination, some thoughts came together that I would like to comment on.

I have known atheists for quite some time to use the fact that anti-atheist bigotry appears in many state constitutions as proof of social bigotry against atheists.

What I have not been able to figure out is why atheists in those states have not done anything to change this situation.

Here is a list of state constitutional provisions that denigrate atheists (taken from “State Constitutions that Discriminate against Atheists”)

Arkansas State Constitution, Article 19 Section 1 ("Miscellaneous Provisions") No person who denies the being of a God shall hold any office in the civil departments of this State, nor be competent to testify as a witness in any court.

Maryland's Declaration of Rights, Article 36: That as it is the duty of every man to worship God in such manner as he thinks most acceptable to Him, all persons are equally entitled to protection in their religious liberty; wherefore, no person ought by any law to be molested in his person or estate, on account of his religious persuasion, or profession, or for his religious practice, unless, under the color of religion, he shall disturb the good order, peace or safety of the State, or shall infringe the laws of morality, or injure others in their natural, civil or religious rights; nor ought any person to be compelled to frequent, or maintain, or contribute, unless on contract, to maintain, any place of worship, or any ministry; nor shall any person, otherwise competent, be deemed incompetent as a witness, or juror, on account of his religious belief; provided, he believes in the existence of God, and that under His dispensation such person will be held morally accountable for his acts, and be rewarded or punished therefore either in this world or in the world to come.

Massachusetts' State Constitution, Article 3: Any every denomination of Christians, demeaning themselves peaceably, and as good subjects of the commonwealth, shall be equally under the protection of the law: and no subordination of any one sect or denomination to another shall ever be established by law.

Mississippi State Constitution. Article 14 ("General Provisions"), Section 265 No person who denies the existence of a Supreme Being shall hold any office in this state.

North Carolina's State Constitution, Article 6 Section 8: Disqualifications of office. The following persons shall be disqualified for office: First, any person who shall deny the being of Almighty God.

Pennsylvania's State Constitution, Article 1 Section 4: No person who acknowledges the being of a God and a future state of rewards and punishments shall, on account of his religious sentiments, be disqualified to hold any office or place of trust or profit under this Commonwealth.

South Carolina's State Constitution, Article 4 Section 2: No person shall be eligible to the office of Governor who denies the existence of the Supreme Being; ... Note: If you continue reading you will find that (in Section 8) the Lieutenant Governor must also meet the same qualifications as the Governor.

Tennessee's State Constitution, Article 9 Section 2: No person who denies the being of God, or a future state of rewards and punishments, shall hold any office in the civil department of this state.

Texas' State Constitution, Article 1 Section 4: No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office, or public trust, in this State; nor shall any one be excluded from holding office on account of his religious sentiments, provided he acknowledge the existence of a Supreme Being.

So, my question is, why are there not movements in these states to get these provisions changed? Put the issue on the ballot. Force the citizens to look their bigotry square in the eye and decide if they want to endorse it (and prove their moral backwardness in the eyes of the world) or renounce it.

I am well aware of the fact that, in the face of the U.S. Constitution, these claims are unenforcable. Yet, they still serve as a constant reminder - an affirmation of the idea that atheists are unfit for public office. The fact that it has no legal effect does not argue that it has no practical effect. Besides, it is still a symbol. It is in these Constitutions because a segment of the population whishes it were true. It is time to get them to either admit their bigotry or change the law.

It would be hard for anything but good publicity to come from these measures. Besides, it would get the atheists and those who value fairness and honesty to the polls.

Now, I could be wrong. There may be organizations actively pursuing these changes that I simply do not know about. If anybody knows of such an organization, please let me know by sending me their contact information so that others here can get involved. Of particular use would be information on how to send donations if one wants to make a contribution

Standing Up Against Bigotry

It is strange that, at the same time that I am defending a post seen as being too soft on theism, I am writing a post that will accuse even atheist activists of not being hard enough on (certain forms of) theism.

A couple of days ago I read a post on “Atheist Revolution” titled, “This Progressive Values Free Speech: Reacting to Imus.”

I'm all for fighting intolerance in all its forms, but I've never understood how any reasonable person can think that restricting the sorts of free speech which make them uncomfortable is the appropriate way to do this.

This came after a post called, “Call Us Passionate Atheists, Call Us Atheist Activists,” in which Vjack said,

We are passionate about what we are doing because it is personally meaningful to us. We care about our fellow humans and want to help make the world a better place, free of superstition. We are activists because we work for positive change. Much like the activists of the Civil Rights era, passionate activism can accomplish worthy goals which originally seemed impossible.

I commented on the latter article that I do not qualify as an “atheist activist” because atheism does not entail any particular set of values. I write about moral theory, and “atheist activism” has as many moral implications as “heliocentric activism” has – that is to say, none at all.

Yet, lacking in atheist activist credentials, it seemed to me that Vjack was not being activist enough when I read the next article.

He calls the type of activism an attempt to limit ‘free speech’. However, I do not see how it qualifies under that label. Jackson did not talk about passing laws prohibiting speech. He did not talk about throwing people in jail, nor did he issue a fatwa against broadcasters who make bigoted claims. He spoke only about using his own right to free speech and to private actions to persuade people not to do or to support things that he asserts are immoral, and to instead support options that are more just and fair towards others.

So, I fail to see how this makes speech any less free.

Indeed, asserting that Jackson should not engage in these types of activities ultimately means asserting that Jackson ought not to express certain opinions or try to convince others of those opinions (solely) through the use of words and private (non-violent) deeds.

What Jackson talks about trying to accomplish with respect to racial discrimination, I would like to see done in the area of discrimination against atheists.

I would like to argue for a program where the major networks tell their employees that they are not to use the phrase, “there are no atheists in foxholes.” I would like to see that phrase removed from the public airways. I am not advocating any type of legislation where those who express the opinion, “there are no atheists in foxholes” are thrown in prison. However, by means of words and private action alone, I would like to get the network executives to realize that this is an unjustly denigrating and derogatory statement – that it brands atheists as cowards unwilling to fight to defend just institutions, or as insincere in their beliefs. As such, it is not a claim that an honest and fair broadcaster would use.

Of course, the broadcaster can still report, “The spokesman said that there are no atheists in foxholes” when it is in fact true that some person had said it. However, this is different from the broadcaster herself saying into the microphone, “There are no atheists in foxholes.”

Another comment that I would like to see cleansed from the airways is the claim that there is some necessary disconnect between atheism and morality. Here, I have in mind an opinion piece that appeared on Yahoo News called, “Atheism isn’t the final word.”

What would a world without God look like? Well, for one, morality becomes, if not impossible, exceedingly difficult. ‘Thou shalt not kill’ loses much of its force when reduced from commandment to a suggestion. . . .

In terms of morality, a denial of God leads nowhere. A universe that isn't God-centered becomes ego-centered. People come to see choices through the prism of self: what promotes the individual's well-being and happiness. Such a worldview does not naturally lead to benevolence or self-sacrifice.

There are no secularist counterparts to Pope John Paul II, Mother Teresa, William Wilberforce (the evangelical responsible for abolition of the British slave trade), Martin Luther King Jr., or the Christians - from France to Poland - who rescued Jews during the Holocaust.

This is bigotry. And the fact that it comes wearing clerical vestments does not keep it from being bigotry. Today, we would hardly grant sanctuary to somebody who defends negro slavery on the basis of biblical teachings. We would hardly allow him to protest, “You denigrate the teaching of my religion if you do not allow me to have the descendents of Ham as my slaves.” Nor would we give sanctuary to somebody who used the Bible as justification for calling for a crusade against Jews or Muslims.

Denigrating claims about atheists should be no more common on the airwaves than denigrating claims about blacks and Jews based on religious passages. This requires educating people into exactly what is wrong with these types of claims.

More to the point, a general campaign to rid the airways of bigotry and denigration is not evil. It is a worthy goal – though it must be carried out in a particular way. It may not be accomplished through violence – only through words and private actions.

It is no violation of free speech to condemn the bigot – to condemn the person who unjustly denigrates others. Indeed, it is a violation of free speech to prohibit people from condemning the bigot, and from expressing their disapproval through private non-violent acts. If speech is to be free, then harsh response in the form of words and private deeds to those who denigrate others is speech that is very much in need of protection.

I would like to know how I would be violating anybody’s free speech to say that such a person is not only wrong, but the nature of his error rests in a moral failing – a willingness to judge others negatively based, not on their own deeds and words, but on the basis of a label. I would like to know why it would not be a violation of free speech to prohibit me from calling Don Feder a hate-mongering bigot, and for condemning those who are responsible for giving him a podium from which to spew his message of hate.

It is not accurate to brand somebody as being opposed to free speech, simply because he wishes that certain errors are not repeated. The charge of censorship does not depend on the goal. It depends on the means that people use to reach that goal. The scientist who wishes to exterminate the idea that the earth is 10,000 years old is not a ‘censor’ who is ‘opposed to free speech’ so long as he limits his tools to open dialogue and private action.

It is not wrong to hope that, some day, everybody will be smart enough to realize the stupidity of young-earth claims. It is not wrong to pounce on those who make these false claims as a way of containing the damage that they may otherwise do. It is not wrong to tell those with money that there are serious problems with promoting such falsehood and nonsense.

So, I find myself in this awkward position.

On the one hand, I condemn atheist activists who, in their zeal, blame people who are guilty of no wrongdoing by creating this lump of people, sticking a label on them, then condemning everybody they have labeled, without regard for individual differences. This is bigotry.

At the same time, I condemn atheist activists who allow theist bigots to get away with their bigotry, when the protests against their denigrating and derogatory statements should be swift and merciless until somebody loses their job and everybody is put on warning.

Scott Atran: Is Religion to Blame?

The next part of the Beyond Belief 2006 conference was not a presentation from an invited speaker, but the continuation of a point that Scott Atran (Research Director at the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris, France) made in comments given to other speakers.

It is my habit to begin by listening to what somebody else is saying, and to find an interpretation that makes it seem as credible as possible. It has served me well. There have been a number of instances when I began to write an essay critical of what somebody has stated. However, on review, I came across an interpretation that avoided my criticism.

There have also been instances where I have started an essay endorsing what somebody has said. However, as I try to fit my essay to the speech I come to the conclusion, “The speaker did not really say that.” Both of the essays on Richard Dawkins’ presentations underwent substantial revision when, after writing the essay, I went back to the speech, and discovered that I could not support the interpretation I used in the essay.

I say this as a prelude to the fact that I am going to start by giving Scott Atran’s views as much weight as I can.

I will be handicapped by the fact that Atran did not have a prepared presentation. He presented his ideas in discussion, which means that they were not organized into a smooth flow from premises to conclusion.

Atran is currently involved in a research group for NATO studying suicide terrorism. What does it take to turn a person into a suicide terrorist? His claim is that it is not religion. Making religion the ‘fall guy’ for suicide terrorism is a problem. It distracts our attention to the real dynamics of suicide terrorism, and because we do not properly understand it, we cannot properly combat it.

Religion vs. Group Dynamics

Atran’s first comments came a few days ago when he complained that those who were blaming religion for the world’s problems did not present any scientifically valid empirical evidence in support of their conclusions. Instead of empirical research, they made broad intuitive statements that took the form, “Look around you at all of the problems of the world. We can see that all of our troubles are caused by religion. By eliminating religion, we can eliminate all of our problems – or, at least, a significant portion of them”

The actual empirical evidence, according to Atran, does not support this conclusion.

In his own studies, he reports that the greatest predictors of suicide bombings is not religion but group dynamics. A group of people get together, they eat the same foods, they dress they same, and they become ‘fictitious kin’ – blood brothers, as it were. They are willing to die for each other.

I have heard the same story used to describe how the U.S. military (or any modern military) creates a military squad or team. A group of people from diverse backgrounds are brought together. They train alike. They dress alike. They eat the same foods. They endure the same hardships. The squad becomes ‘fictitious kin’. Eventually, its members are ready to die for each other. They are then given a mission, and they carry out that mission.

Soldiers do not actually live and die for a cause. They live and die for the other guy who is in the fox hole with him. This is why trained soldiers can live or die for any cause whatsoever. This is why it is possible to create an army willing to fight for the likes of Hitler, and why Bush – if he were to order a holocaust anywhere in the world – would likely discover that the military will execute its orders.

Religion really does not matter – the same model works for any ideology.

The Atheist Suicide Bomber

Would it be possible to create a group of atheist suicide bombers or what would actually be ‘militant’ atheists – militant in the sense that they take up arms and go out to kill people?

I do not know of any reason to believe that this is impossible, or even any harder to do with a group of atheists than for any other group. It is true that the atheists will not kill in the name of God. However, they may be caused to kill for some equally irrational reason.

Take such a group of atheists, and give them a message that religion is the cause of all of the world’s problems.

If only we could rid the world of religion, we would be rid of all of this irrationality and the problems that it causes. What we can then have would be, if not ‘utopia’, at least far better than we have today. It’s those religious people who are ruining everything for all of us and there is no activity more noble and worthwhile than to bring about ‘the end of faith’.

All of these ‘patient’ solutions of dialogue, tolerance, argument, and proof – they do not work. These people have abandoned reason. How can we possibly hope to use reason to argue them out of something where abandoning reason is what got them into this position to start with? No, there is only one way to deal with people like this – and it is not through reason and dialog.

In fact, we should think of irrationality – faith – as a disease. Like any disease, it must be removed, so that the healthy tissue will not become infected.

Readers may look at this and say, “I would never fall for anything like this.”

Are you sure?

Are you not human? Do you not think that you are immune to the forces of group dynamics? What gives you reason to think that? Is it, perhaps, just wishful thinking?

Do you have any empirical evidence at all to support your claims?

Besides, even if you would not fall for something like this, the real question is whether you think it is impossible to find eight atheists in the world who would fall for it? If it is possible, than atheist suicide bombers – truly ‘militant’ atheism – is possible.

We can only protect ourselves from it if we accept this possibility. There is no reason to stand guard against something that one does not think could exist. This type of complacency is a dangerous thing. Harris’ Response

In opposition to this view, Sam Harris attempted to argue that beliefs are important, and that religious beliefs are an important part of this type of behavior. He asserts that we can explain, at least in part, the behavior of the Muslim compared to the behavior of the Tibetan Buddhist in terms of their beliefs. Tibetan Buddhists, he asserted, are less likely to form groups that can be sent out on missions to kill others than Muslims. This is because Tibetan Buddhists have a religion that stresses an extreme form of compassion that says that it is wrong to kill anybody, while Islam repeatedly calls for the killing of infidels and the glory of martyrdom. It is absurd to deny that these beliefs have an effect on behavior.

On this matter, Harris has a point. Suggesting that a belief or a desire has no effect on actions is as bizarre as suggesting that there is a force that has no effect on the movement of matter through physical space.

I can assert, “The universe contains Force 10. This force cannot be felt in any way, and it has no effects on anything that can be measured. Yet, it still exists.”

I cannot prove that no such force exists. However, I can assert that there is no reason to believe that such a force exists. If it has no effects on the real world, then it has no effects on the material that makes up the brain, and no effects that could possibly justify believing in it. “Force 10 does not exist,” even though it cannot be proved true, is still true for all practical purposes.

The same line of reasoning applies to beliefs and desires that have no effect on action. Even if these beliefs and desires are real, it is still the case that for all practical purposes it is as if they do not exist. If they have no effect on the real world, we have no reason to believe that they exist.

If religious beliefs and religious values exist, then they are affecting action. If they are not affecting action then, for all practical purposes, they do not exist. If they are affecting action, then we have reason to ask if their affects are positive or negative. In the case of beliefs, we also have reason to ask if they are true. In the case of values, we can ask if there is any possible real-world state of affairs in which the thing valued can actually exist.

However these questions get answered, one thing is certain – the existence of religious beliefs and values do have a real-world effect. If they did not, then we would not know of their existence.

Richard Dawkins Part II: Morality and the Selfish Gene

I am, as many of you know, spending my weekends commenting on the presentations made at the Beyond Belief 2006 conference. I have reached the end of Session 7, where Richard Dawkins is our presenter. Dawkins actually talked about two different subjects. The first subject was “Consciousness Raising” (which I discussed last weekend). This week, we are looking at what was billed as a discussion of “Morality and the Selfish Gene”.

In fact, Dawkins did not discuss morality much at all. He gave an interesting account of how a selfish gene can select for what he called ‘altruistic’ behavior. However, altruism is not the same as morality. The two have some things in common (certain types of altruism are called moral), but they also have a long list of significant differences.

Dawkins does get around to making a few claims about morality. However, this is toward the end of his presentation. About the only thing he says on the subject is that whatever it is, it does not come from religion.

The situation surrounding Dawkins’ presentation was something like going to a lecture where the speaker said he was going to talk about stellar physics, only to have him spend his time instead talking about the standard combustion found in a camp fire. There are some similarities between stars and campfires – both put out heat and light. However, there are also some important differences. The differences are important enough that it is simply not true that a presentation on campfire combustion can taken for a presentation on stellar physics.

Dawkins’ Case

First, let me explain what Dawkins said about the relationship between ‘morality’ and the selfish gene.

The Selfish Gene

Dawkins is (or, perhaps, was, until recently) most widely known among both professional and lay scientists for his idea of conceptualizing of evolutionary forces by imagining a ‘selfish gene’. This gene is interested in only one thing; its own replication. Of course, genes do not actually ‘care’ about anything. Dawkins does not say that they do. What he says is that we can best explain and predict events in the biological world is by thinking in terms of a selfish gene.

For example, a selfish gene would have reason to select for a host that has the ability to detect others with the same gene. In protecting those others and helping them reproduce, it is succeeding in its task to replicate itself. Replicating a copy of itself and replicating itself both have the same value in this way of thinking. Thus, we get behavior like that of a mother nurturing its young. This is the way that the mother’s ‘selfish genes’ help to ensure that copies of themselves continue into the future.

Four Forms of Altruism

Dawkins presented four ways in which ‘selfish genes’ may bring about altruistic individuals.

(1) Kin selection. Genes can replicate themselves by creating individuals who are prone to nurture and defend and otherwise aid in the reproduction of other individuals who have the same gene. We see instances of this in parental affection for a child, nieces, nephews, and grandchildren. The more distant the relationship becomes, the weaker the biological urge to nurture that individual.

(2) Reciprocity: Genes can promote their own replication by aiding individuals who, in turn, aid those who have the gene. Dawkins provides an example of the honey guide bird and the honey badger. The badger cannot find the honey, and the bird cannot break into the hive. So, the bird leads the badger to the honey, the badger breaks in, and they share the bounty.

(3) Reputation: Genes promote their own survival through reciprocity by creating individuals who can recognize who are reliably generous. The vampire bat shares its food when it has a surplus with others who share their food when they have a surplus.

(4) The Handicap Principle: Here, Dawkins’ mentions the case of the Arabian Warbler where, apparently, the strongest and best take on the most dangerous jobs of watching for hawks and providing for the less fortunate. The suggestion here is that these birds declare their superiority by showing that they can afford to take risks and to provide charity. This method of attracting a mate replaces colorful plumage or dances.

In our own biological past, our genes could have selected for these effects because they lived in small communities. Chances are good that they knew everybody in that community and would have opportunities to deal with them again and again. This would have given an opportunity for ‘reciprocation’ and ‘reputation’ to emerge. Of course, communities provided ample opportunity for individuals to aid and be aided by their kin.

However, Dawkins claims that this Darwinian account runs into trouble when it tries to explain altruism outside of these small tribal bands. It cannot, for example, explain why we give charitably to tsunami victims on the other side of the world. Those people are not, in any biologically meaningful way, our ‘kin’. We can expect no reciprocity, and our ‘reputation’ is largely anonymous. Nor is our generosity some form of ostentatious display that we have reason to hope will make us more attractive to potential mates.

According to Dawkins, the best Darwinian account that he can give for this type of behavior is that it is a mistake.

There is nothing in Darwinian Theory that requires a precise match between a trait and its benefit. Some traits over-extend their benefit. Our desire for sex, for example, overextends its effect in terms of reproduction. Our desire to eat overextends our need for calories, particularly in modern societies. Along similar lines, our altruistic sentiments can overextend our local tribe.

The fact that a desire overextends its trait does not make it bad. We have no reason to give up sex simply because the desire for sex is independent of the desire to procreate.

We can find an example of what Dawkins is talking about in our reaction to the offspring of several species. Evolutionary forces caused in us an impulse to nurture and protect small humans who have the physiological characteristics of children. This same quality also probably accounts for the fact that many of us get a similar impulse to protect and nurture kittens, puppies, and the children of species other than human. Our tendency comes from a broader trait among mammals. It still has an effect on our affections even though its evolutionary function is, shall we say, inefficient.

Altruism and Intention

Let’s say that everything that Dawkins said in his presentation was true.

We still have a couple of problems.

The first problem is that a lot of what Dawkins calls ‘altruism’ isn’t really altruism.

Altruism requires an intention. It is not enough to note that I engage in behavior that happens to benefit another person. That benefit could simply be a side effect of something that I like to do for other reasons. I could care less if others benefit. In a case like this, it would be absurd to suggest that my behavior is in any way ‘altruistic’.

An animal dies in the woods, providing worms with food. The worms help to aerate the soil, which causes the plants to grow, which the animals then eat. There is no altruism in any of this.

Altruism requires that the animal dies because it wants to provide the worm with food, and that the worm aerate the soil because it wants to provide the animals with food. At the same time, the animal has to forego any intention or interest in reciprocation. If he performs an act because it wants to get paid for it, this is not altruism either.

Dawkins has not given us any reason to believe that we can find the intentionality necessary for altruism in any of these actions. The Darwinian explanation does not require intentionality either – any more than we need to find intentionality

Altrusim Is Not Morality

Even if Dawkins can explain intention in Darwinian terms, he has another hurdle to cross. Altruism is not morality. It’s true that many moral obligations are altruistic – they involve sacrifice for the benefit of others. However, morality is far more complex than this. In some cases, it requires selfishness and condemns sacrifice.

For example, an employee takes money from the cash register on a regular basis and gives it to homeless people on the street on the way home. His actions are altruistic, but they are not moral.

It is also possible to do the right thing for selfish reasons. It you report that a political rival takes bribes, you are doing the right thing even it you only did it no you can win the election.

At the same time, if I am on a cruise ship with my own children, and the cruise ship starts to sink, I not only have a permission, but I have an obligation, to take care of my own children first. Willingness to sacrifice my own child to save somebody else’s child will not earn me condemnation for abdicating my parental responsibilities, not praise.

One could argue that it is possible to explain parental affection in Darwinian terms. Consequently, this does not provide an objection to Dawkins’ claims. However, Dawkins cannot possibly be claiming that whatever has a Darwinian explanation is moral. If he did, then he would probably have to conclude that a male disposition to rape and racism are moral in the same way that preferring to save one’s own children in an emergency is moral. His theory needs to provide a way to distinguish moral dispositions from immoral dispositions.

What I am arguing here is that ‘altruism’ does not work as a way of distinguishing ‘moral’ from ‘immoral’. Some altruistic acts are immoral, and some selfishness is obligatory. The concepts of ‘altruistic’ and ‘moral’ do not occupy the same logical space. They are not the same thing.

‘Serving genetic replication in past generations’ does not work either. Some traits that served genetic replication in the past are wrong. These concepts do not occupy the same logical space.

Above, when I said that listening to Dawkins is like going to a presentation billed to be about solar physics and discovering a presentation on common combustion describes this objection. Stars and campfires have some things in common, but they do not occupy the same logical space. They are not the same thing. So, a discussion of one is not the same thing as a discussion of the other.

Moral Questions

These are just some examples of where Dawkins’ presentation fails to talk about morality. If he was truly talking about morality, he would have to be talking about something that would be useful in explaining and predicting the whole range of phenomena that those who study morality take themselves to be talking about. His theory would have to be useful in answering questions like:

(1) Why is it that moral concepts only apply to intentional actions? Unintentional actions – including actions that benefit and harm others – are neither moral nor immoral.

(2) How do we account for the distinction between moral responsibility and ‘not guilty by reason of insanity’? Many insane actions are still intentional. Yet, they still sit outside of the realm of moral responsibility.

(3) Why are there three moral categories – obligatory, permissible, and prohibited? What accounts for the difference between them?

(4) What is an excuse and why is it that an excuse can protect somebody from a claim of moral responsibility?

(5) What is the relationship between moral wrong and condemnation or punishment, and between right action and praise or reward?

(6) Why is negligence wrong even though negligence does not involve an intention to do harm?

(7) How can your theory help us to determine whether the following are moral or immoral: early term abortion, capital punishment, the use of animals in experiments, homosexuality, torture, rendition, drug use, privacy, adultery, birth control, etc,?

(8) How is it possible for apron to do the right thing for bad reasons? (the bad Samaritan)

(9) What is the relationship between fact and value?

(10) How is moral argument possible?

(11) What is involved in the moral educational children? (It would seem that if morality is genetic, that it would require no education or training.)

(12) What m the relationship between law and morality? What is an unjust law and is there an obligation to obey unjust law?

I hold Dawkins’ presentation up to this list of questions and I am forced to ask, “Okay, Dawkins, everything you said so far is great, but when are you going to talk about morality? When will you start giving me something that I can use to help to answer these questions?”

The Shifting Moral Zeitgeist

After presenting his Darwinian account of altruism, Dawkins next focuses his attention on what he calls “the shifting moral zeitgeist”. This is the phenomenon of rapid moral change on a large scale over a short period of time. He provides quite a few examples of the type of observations that are to be explained.

From Abraham Lincoln:

I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races - that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And in as much as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.

From H.G. Wells from “Utopian New Republic”

And how will the New Republic treat the inferior races? How will it deal with the black? . . . the yellow man? . . . the Jew? . . . those swarms of black, and brown, and dirty-white, and yellow people, who do not come into the new needs of efficiency? Well, the world is a world, and not a charitable institution, and I take it they will have to go. . . . And the ethical system of these men of the New Republic, the ethical system which will dominate the world state, will be shaped primarily to favour the procreation of what is fine and efficient and beautiful in humanity - beautiful and strong bodies, clear and powerful minds. . . . And the method that nature has followed hitherto in the shaping of the world, whereby weakness was prevented from propagating weakness . . . is death. . . . The men of the New Republic . . . will have an ideal that will make the killing worth the while.

These changed quickly – far too quickly to have a Darwinian explanation. Yet, when it comes to accounting for them, Dawkins knows that the moral zeitgeist changes far too rapidly for us to expect a Darwinian account.

I don’t know what causes it. I’ve got ideas. We could talk about it. I think it’s a kind of composite of just plain ordinary conversations among people, dinner party conversations, newspaper editorials, legal decisions, congressional votes. These all feed into the shift that takes place from decade to decade to decade.

So, Dawkins has nothing to offer on this account.

However, he is not even looking in the right direction. Dawkins is looking for a sociological explanation about what causes our beliefs to change. He is not at all looking at the content, much less the truth value, of what we believe.

We can pursue the same project when it comes to evolution. We can provide quotes about what people were saying about the origin of humans in, say, the 1850s. We can compare that to what is believed today. We can look for changes in those beliefs, and seek an explanation for those changes. Those explanations will likely include an account of events such as dinner party conversations and newspaper editorials. It would even include legal decisions and congressional votes.

However, no sane person would try to assert that this is what evolutionary biologists actually study the ‘shifting biological zeitgeist’

It is as absurd to claim that this investigation is what scientists do when they study evolution, as it is to claim that the complimentary investigation is what ethicists (such as myself) study when we study ethics.

Conclusion

By the end of his presentation, even though Dawkins claimed that he was going to talk about morality, he never actually accomplished this. He talked about a Darwinian account for altruism. Some of what he talked about does not even qualify as altruism and, even if it did, altruism is not morality. “That which we are disposed to value for Darwinian reasons” does not count as morality either.

It is also not the case that studying what people think has moral value is not the study of morality itself, any more than a study of what people think is true about the origin and change of living organisms over time is the same as the study of evolution itself.

With all of his words, Dawkins never once talked about morality.

One of these days I actually would like to hear, or read, what Dawkins thinks about the relationship between morality and the selfish gene. But that is not this day.

The Pigovian Tax

In my post from two days ago, Limitless Harm Morality, Blacksun posted a comment that brought up the concept of a ‘Pigovian tax’ . Some people may know of this as an ‘externalities tax’. It is a tool that the government can use to help ensure that one group of people do not prosper by, effectively, robbing another group of people of life, health, and property without some form of compensation.

The Pigovian tax has a strong moral foundation. There are those who argue against its use. For the most part, they can be shown to be people who want to promote a society in which killing and otherwise harming others for profit remains legal.

The Problem of Externalities

On the whole, markets tend to do a far better job of promoting social welfare (making the world a better place than it would otherwise have been) than governments. Whenever powers are entrusted to the government, we are far more likely to find legislators auctioning off those powers to the highest bidder, than using them for the public good. Legislators tend to be the agents of those who buy them a seat in Congress, and the average citizen typically lacks the resources to participate in the bidding.

In earlier years, people may be counted on with a reasonable degree of certainty to vote their interests. However, the modern age, where those with wealth can use the science of marketing and manipulation to confuse people as to what their interests are, even this is far less assured than it once was.

‘Markets’, understood as these machines of social welfare, require that certain rules be in place and enforced. When these rules are violated, markets are distorted, and a ‘misallocation’ of resources results.

One of these rules is that each person pay his own way. If somebody has open access to your bank account to buy whatever he wants, you would expect that person to buy things that he would judge ‘not worth the cost’ if he were spending his own money. Assume he sees a television set that costs $1000. It is really worth only $500 to him – he would not pay more than that. However, since he is using your credit card, it costs him nothing. He buys the television set worth $500 to him, but you are out $1000.

Let’s say, I barbeque a pig in my back yard with the intention of selling off the meat for a handsome profit. However, my activity puts sparks in the air, which set your house on fire. The loss of your house is a ‘negative externality’. It is a cost of my doing business, but it is a cost that I can shift onto somebody else. Because I can force others to pay those costs, they do not affect the profitability of my barbequed pork business.

In terms of social welfare, this is economically inefficient.

In economic terms, these ‘costs that are passed on to others’ are called negative externalities.

The paradigm example of a negative externality is pollution. I engage in some activity that is ‘good for me’ in that I make a profit. My factory puts chemicals in the air or water, which causes cancer in people who live downwind or downstream. The increased number of people dying of cancer is a part of the overall social cost of my doing business. Yet, I do not pay those costs. Therefore, I have no reason to stop doing business.

For all practical purposes, I am living off of the profitability of robbing others of their lives and their health; gaining personal wealth, while I make the world a worse place than it would have otherwise been.

It is also possible for a ‘Pigovian tax’ to also deal with positive externalities. It does so in the form of subsidies. For example, when a person obtains an education, he does not obtain all of the benefits of his actions. His education will tend to produce ‘positive externalities’ in that his better-informed decisions will benefit people other than himself. So, it makes sense to subsidize education as a way of internalizing some of those positive externalities.

The Value of the Pigovian Tax

The Pigovian tax is a mechanism that theoretically puts an end to this type of theft. It is a mechanism that forces polluters to pay for the harm that they do to others. The polluters pay a fee for every unit of pollution that they create, and that money goes to compensate the victims for the losses that they suffer. This way, the social costs of pollution are added to the cost of doing business. If the business does not produce enough social benefit to overcome the social costs, then the business ceases to exist. If the business can still make a profit, at least it does not leave a pile of innocent victims in its wake.

Some argue that it is not possible to compensate a person for the loss of a life. However, we trade other things for life all the time. There is a long list of things each of us could do to extend our lives that we do not do. We do not do these things because we consider the benefits in terms of an extended life to be less than the cost. Another piece of evidence supporting this same conclusion is the mere fact that we do not devote all of our resources to saving lives. We spend money on sports, movies, dining in restaurants, and a long list of other activities that do not ‘save lives’. In short, we trade other goods for life all the time. The idea that life is of infinite value is simply false, and no sound social policy can be built on false premises.

In addition to promoting justice (in that people are not permitted to find profit in robbing others of life, health, and well-being), the Pigovian tax makes economic sense. It makes non-polluting and less-polluting options more competitive in the market place. In other words, it ends the subsidy that the polluting industry has had by being allowed to force its costs of doing business onto innocent third parties.

The Pigovian tax also promotes innovation right where we need the most innovation. When businesses have to suffer the costs of pollution, they have a reason to invest in finding ways to stop that pollution. This enhanced investment in forms of production that produce less or no pollution benefits everybody, including the business, who will no longer have to pay the tax.

Arguments Against the Pigovian Tax: Economic Harm

The first argument we hear against the Pigovian Tax is that it is bad for the economy.

Consider, for example, a Pigovian tax on carbon to pay for the costs of global warming. This raises an outcry that the higher price of energy means fewer jobs and other forms of economic destruction.

This is utter nonsense. The Pigovan Tax is used in situations where somebody is going to suffer a loss.

Let’s look at the example where I have my pork barbeque, and I end up burning down your house. The economic destruction here is the loss of your house. The Pigovian tax only answers the question, “Who pays?” Without the Pigovian tax, you suffer the loss of your house, and must either buy a substitute or go without. With the Pigovian tax, I pay for the cost of your house. The tax money goes to compensate you for your loss.

Either way, the economic destruction is caused by the burning down of the house, not by the tax. The tax only determines who pays for that destruction – the victim, or the person who caused harm for profit.

Arguments Against the Pigovian Tax: Imprecision

In Blacksun’s comment, he mentioned people who tried to insist that the tax could never be used because we lack the ability to determine the precise value of the tax.

There are three problems with this objection.

The first problem is that it commits the fallacy ‘argument from ignorance’. Thousands of years ago, people made the amazing discovery that ‘zero’ is a number. It is considered one of the great advances in mathematics. Taking this into consideration, we can see that this objection actually says, “We lack the ability to determine the best level for a Pigovian tax; therefore, the best level for a Pigovian tax is zero.”

If we lack the ability to determine the best level for a Pigovian tax, then we also lack the ability to determine that zero is the best level for a Pigovian tax.

If we truly are as ignorant of the best level for such a tax as this argument assumes, then a tax of $1.00 per unit is just as likely to be the right level as a tax of $0.00; and no argument can be given for preferring one option over the other. Any argument that $0.00 is better than $1.00 will violate the original assumption that we cannot determine which value is best.

The second problem is the inference, “If we cannot tell precisely what the effects of our action will be, then we should do nothing.”

I cannot tell precisely what the results of writing this essay will be. I have certain hopes, but I have no guarantees. If this inference were valid, then I should not write this essay until I was certain of the results. In fact, I should not do anything unless I was certain of the results. However, I can never be certain of the results of anything that I do. Therefore, this argument seems to suggest, I should do nothing.

Unfortunately, I also cannot predict the results of doing nothing, so I can’t do that either.

It seems as if I am doomed. I can’t do something. I can’t do nothing. In both cases, the results are equally unpredictable.

This argument reveals the absurdity in the idea, “If you cannot tell precisely what the effects of our actions will be, then we should do nothing,” We have to act in the face of uncertainty. That is a law of nature. Given this fact, what we need to ask is, “Allowing for uncertainty, which of our available options has the best chance of producing the best results?”

The third problem with this argument is the assumption that we cannot know if we are doing good. Even if we cover the most obvious costs of pollution, and leave the less obvious costs uncovered, we would be doing obvious good. If a factory increases the cancer rate in a community from 10:1000 to 20:1000, then we know to collect the costs of 10 cases of cancer from the company. We do not know exactly which of the 20 patients to give the money to. Perhaps the best option is to pay for half of each person’s bills. Either way, the costs of doing business is paid by the company causing the cancer, not the people who get cancer.

A third argument is that if we permit legislatures to implement these taxes that political lobbying will distort the tax to favor special interests. Once again this ignores the fact that those special interests are already at work to set the externalities tax at zero.

Conclusion

If we want to find an explanation for why people use these arguments against a Pigovian tax, we are not going to find our answer in the strength of these arguments. The objections are so absurd that nobody could believe that they made sense unless the person wanted to believe that they made sense.

That shows us the type of person we are dealing with here.

We are dealing with people who have no moral qualms against profiting by killing and otherwise harming others. In some cases, their victims number in the hundreds of millions. However, rather than worry themselves over the harm they may be doing to others, they grasp at whatever straws float within reach for a chance to continue business as usual.

If somebody offered a million dollars to push a button, and said that scientists have reason to believe that pushing the button would take the lives and health of a million people, what type of person is it who would take the money and press the button?

Should we be working to fill our society with such people?

When we reward these people who harm others, when we protect their profits and give them a seat at the head of the economic and political table, we are telling our children, “When you grow up I want you to be just like him. If you have an opportunity to get a million dollars, I don’t want you to give a thought to the people you might hurt. I want you to take that money regardless of the consequences.” You are giving the same message to everybody else’s child. In such a world, do not be surprised if it is more likely that your child will become one of the victims of such a person than somebody who successfully victimizes others.

That is, if this is what you really want.

Uncompromising Positions

Preliminary Comment: The next time a major broadcaster says, “There are no atheists in foxholes,” I want to see that broadcaster get at least a two-week suspension for doing so. I want you, reader, to think about this. Plan for it. Insist upon it. And help make it happen.

Truth, Error, and Compromise

In the recent flurry of discussion over the use of the term ‘atheist fundamentalism,’ which I in a post called, “Intolerance, Militancy, Fundamentalism, and Trying to Eradicate Religion”, I encountered another term that I had an opportunity to think about.

What does it mean to say that a new atheist is ‘uncompromising’?

My first thought was that this was a rather odd term to use. My favorite model in discussing these things is to consider a dispute between a heliocentrist (one who holds that the sun is at the center of the solar system) and a geocentrist (one who holds that everything revolves around the earth). What would the heliocentrist have to say or do – how would he have to behave – for it to be the case that he is guilty of being ‘uncompromising’?

What would a ‘compromise’ in this case look like?

“Okay, geocentrist, just to show you that I am willing to compromise, here is my offer. You say that the Earth is at the center of the solar system. I claim that it is the sun. So, let’s compromise. Let’s say that the solar system revolves around a spot that is halfway between the Sun and the Earth. Will you find that position acceptable?”

Actually, I find that position absurd.

Reality does not yield compromise. You cannot take one person who says that 2+2=4, and another who says 2+2=5, and say, “We must show respect for each other’s opinion. To show our moral virtue, we shall hereby declare that in all dealings between our two people, 2+2=4.5.” The fact is,2+2=4. If somebody comes along and asserts that 2+2=5, the proper response is not to ‘respect their opinion’ and agree to give it equal weight with our own in all. The proper response is to say, “You are wrong.”

In the real world, it is either true or false that the sun is at the center of the solar system. If the best available evidence points in that direction, then that is what you go with. If the best available evidence points in that direction, then anybody who does not agree with that conclusion holds an opinion that conflicts with the best available evidence. We cannot magically transform the solar system into a place where its center is half-way between the earth and the sun simply because those who are in error demand that their opinion be respected. The center of the solar system will remain inside the sun in stern defiance of arrogant human wishes that it be otherwise.

Regarding Error

The next question to ask is what we should when we must deal with people who hold false beliefs about how the real world is put together. “How should we treat people who (we think) are wrong?”

In this blog, I have argued for the principle that, with a few exceptions (e.g., national security, privacy concerns, perjury, fraud), the only morally legitimate response to words are counter-words. In an open society, the only legitimate response to a political campaign is a counter-campaign.

This is how a society keeps the peace, and keeps from denigrating into a state like we have in Iraq. The problem with Iraq is not that it’s people are religious, but that it has not adopted the principle that the only legitimate response to words is words alone. A religious people who agree to limit the response to other people’s words with words alone can still live in peace, while a group of atheists who forsake this principle will be just as much at war.

(Of course, some will argue that it is because of their religion that they think it is appropriate to respond to a difference in religious opinion with bombs and bullets.)

My experience has been that the so-called ‘new atheists’ have behaved in a way that is consistent with these requirements. They have reason to continue to do so. When the only life you have is that life here on earth, you have good reason to keep your society from degenerating into an anarchy that kills hundreds of people per day. So, instead of weapons and bombs, the new atheists use books and speeches and, occasionally, turn to the courts for a peaceful adjudication of their disputes.

So, when it comes to claiming that these ‘new atheists’ are uncompromising, it would be simply false to assert that this means that they are unwilling to keep their dispute within the moral confines that allow for a civil society; namely, words against words, political campaigns against political campaigns, and a refusal to turn to violence to resolve a difference of opinion.

I feel compelled to offer a warning that things can change. Psychologists tell us that good people can turn bad quite quickly. So it remains possible that the ‘new atheists’ could change to something more brutal and violent. To protect against this option these ‘new atheists’ must be ready to disown and denounce any of their member who decides to advocate violence as a political tool.

Political Alliance

In the previous section we entered into the realm of politics. Politics is the realm of compromise. Politics is the art of taking two groups with different goals and objectives and finding a solution that they can both agree to. So, if there is a sense to be made of the claim that the ‘new atheists’ are uncompromising, it may be found in the claim that their words are not politically wise.

Everybody knows that it is sometimes politically foolish to tell the truth. Go ahead, tell your boss what you really think of him, and see what it will get you. We bite our tongue all the time when there are more important values at stake. So, perhaps, the problem with these ‘new atheists’ is that they have a fondness for being blunt when bluntness brings a heavy political cost.

This may be true. I do not write this blog to discuss political strategy. I write this blog to discuss morality. If the truth is not politically useful, it is still true.

When it comes to biting one’s tongue about, in this case, somebody else’s foolish beliefs, the rightness or wrongness of the act depends on the number of people (and the innocence of the people) who will be caused to suffer. We all know people with harmless foolish beliefs, where we bite our tongue and refuse to criticize them. When we offer our opinion, we do so softly, making it clear that we are willing to drop the subject if it upsets the listener too much.

However, we have less liberty to bite our tongue, or to speak softly, when the people we speak to are doing real harm to real people. It is one thing to foolishly believe that the way one organizes one’s furniture will improve one’s chance of winning the lottery. It is quite a different thing entirely to believe that it would be healthy to add large quantities of arsenic to the city’s water supply.

For quite some time, people in this country were willing to see religion as a set of harmless beliefs. Its practitioners did little harm to others, and some of them even did some good. So, this was a good case for biting one’s tongue.

However, the belief that these people were harmless was forcefully shattered on 9/11.

Since then, many people who once thought that religion was harmless and should be left around looked around to see just how destructive it had become. Israel/Palestine, The Balkans, Ireland, Niger, and India/Pakistan are just a few examples in which religious belief was far from harmless.

Even in this country, we saw a powerful political movement filled with people who believed that the only way their lives could have meaning and purpose is if they spent those lives promoting religious fictions that threatened the lives, health, and well-being of other citizens. If one looks at the agenda of the evangelical movement, they have made their most important issues those that bring misery and, sometimes, death to harmless people.

The greatest example of this is their opposition to embryonic stem-cell research, where their devotion to ‘persons’ who exist as persons only in their imagination compels them to stand in the way of real people preserving their lives and their health.

Now, I disagree with some of these ‘new atheists’ in that they extend the blame for these harms to those who are not responsible. At the same time, I, too, am disinclined to suggest ‘biting one’s tongue’ when it comes to those who directly and purposely campaign for policies that inflict so much harm on harmless citizens. That these people inflict harm on others in God’s name is no defense. Their claim that these harmful actions fill their lives with meaning and purpose is irrelevant – they should learn to find their meaning and purpose in beneficial, rather than harmful, activities.

Compromising – biting one’s tongue – with the worst of these offenders is the same as saying that the life, health, and well-being of their victims is of lesser moral worth. That is a difficult case to make.

Limitless Harm Morality

Let’s say that I decide that I want to have an old-fashioned barbeque in my back yard. I want to dig a pit in my yard, fill it full of wood, set it on fire. Unfortunately, the wind being what it is, there is a good chance - in fact, it is highly likely - that sparks from the fire will cross over onto your property and likely burn your home to the ground.

You might think that it would be morally wrong for me to go ahead and have the barbeque. At the very least, if I have the barbeque and burn down your home, then I would owe you compensation for your loss.

However, there is a new system of morality in use today, a system that allows people to harm others with impunity, a system embraced by many Republicans in Congress, that says that I have no obligation to refrain from having the barbeque. This Limitless Harm Morality goes on to say that if I have the barbeque and burn your house down, I am not morally obligated to provide compensation. Any idea that punishment would be justified is out of the question.

How would I, using Limitless Harm Morality, defeat the claim that having the barbeque at all would be wrong? Quite simply, all I need to do is to point out that if I accepted your moral objections to having the barbeque, then I would not be allowed to do what I want. No moral principle can hope to stand up against the claim, “This is what I wish to do; therefore, it cannot be wrong.” It is absurd to hold that the risk of burning your house down provides a moral objection to my having a barbeque. That’s all there is to it.

So, now, let’s say that I go ahead and have my barbeque. As predicted, the wind carries sparks from my fire over onto your property and burns your house to the ground. Now, you are saying that I owe you compensation for destroying your home. How can I defeat this claim?

Limitless Harm Morality says that there is no duty to provide those harmed with compensation if that compensation will leave the person paying it economically worse off. If I were to pay you compensation for the loss of your property, then I would certainly be made poorer than I would be if I paid you nothing. Since the moral value of a policy is to be judged by its impact on my economic well-being, it is obviously wrong to say that I owe you compensation.

I’m sorry about the home, by the way. However, I hope that you find solace and comfort in the fact that God must have wanted you to be homeless, or He would never have let this happen.

The Real World Case

The real world situation that is analogous to the barbeque pit concerns global warming. I have been spending some time listening to congressional testimony on the subject of climate change. The arguments given above are my recasting of the claims made during these hearings. Their objections to legislation that aims to control global warming are quite similar to those that one might use against a ‘no sparks’ rule applied to backyard barbeques.

Cost

For example, speakers protested that those concerned with fighting global warming did not consider the cost of adopting this ‘no-sparks’ policy.

Imagine a person who is supplementing his income by robbing convenience stores telling his wife that he is planning on giving up this activity. He says that it is wrong to live a life where he does so much harm to others, and he wishes to put an end to it. His wife shouts back, “All you do is talk about how wrong it is to rob convenience stores. I never once heard you talk about the cost of this new plan of yours. You ignore the fact that if you do this we simply will not have as much money to spend.”

Of course, the wife is appealing to Limitless Harm Morality to defend her husband’s theft. A more conventional morality says that it is not a ‘cost’ in any legitimate sense to give up something that one has no right to. If I leave my co-worker’s $1500 camera on her desk, when I could otherwise take it without getting caught, my morality did not “cost” me $1500 dollars. Saying that this is a cost is the same as saying that I have a moral right to take the camera.

So, when the advocates of Limitless Harm Morality speak about the ‘cost’ of legislation to fight global warming, in essence they are saying that we have a right to do limitless harm to our neighbors for the sake of maintaining our standard of living. This is how Limitless Harm Morality gets its name.

Compensation

On the moral system that I am more familiar with, if I burn your house down, then this really is a cost, and it is a cost that I have a duty to bear. I may not force you to suffer this cost. You may be forced to endure the cost if I simply have no way to compensate you. However, barring this, justice demands that the cost of harms I inflict on you come out of my paycheck.

Those who hold to Limitless Harm Morality say that there are no costs associated with providing compensation for harms done. If it is the case that I do not have an obligation to compensate you for the loss of your house, then the loss of your house is not a ‘cost’ to me, and any discussion of costs would not mention it. However, if I do have an obligation to pay you for the harms that I do to you, then these are ‘costs’, and any discussion of the ‘cost’ of various options has to cover it.

This debt that comes from burning your house down would have to be considered a part of the ‘cost’ of having the barbeque. If I have to figure the cost of compensation for your house in my calculation to have a barbeque, I may discover that the costs exceed the benefits. The only way to make the barbeque worthwhile again is if I can force innocent people, such as you, to suffer the costs yourself – forcing you to suffer the loss of your own house without compensation.

This act of forcing others to suffer costs against their will - robbing them of life, health, and well-being for personal benefit - is exactly what Limitless Harm Morality is all about. Under its principles, the profitability of throwing out these greenhouse gas emissions (as long as we refuse to provide compensation to those we harm) is all that matters.

Granted, America is not the only country producing greenhouse gas emissions. We produce only 25 percent of those emissions. So, let’s just say that we are responsible for 25% of the costs. We would still be talking about trillions of dollars per year in compensation to our victims - if we are a fair and just people. Or, we could talk about spending those trillions of dollars on ways of making sure that we do not kill, sicken, or impose other suffering on our neighbors.

Denying Responsibility

Limitless Harm Morality begins with the acceptance that one is acting in ways that put others at risk of losing their life, health, or well-being. Another way that somebody may avoid moral responsibility for one’s actions is to deny that one does harm.

On this measure, those who oppose climate initiatives have shown themselves to be much like child rapists – who chronically deny that raping a child does harm. They simply ignore all of the scientific evidence to the contrary, and insist that their actions are perfect innocent and harmless.

Yesterday, I found an article in Sci-Tech Today that identifies some of those reality-denying changes.

A comparison of the original document, written by scientists, and the finished paper showed major reductions in forecasts for hunger and flooding victims. Instead of "hundreds of millions" of potential flood victims, the report said "many millions."

Imagine the Nazi sympathizer editing a history book, crossing out a sentence that says that there were “tens of millions” of people killed in World War II and replacing it with a sentence that says “many hundreds of thousands” of people were killed.

A key mention of up to 120 million people at risk of hunger because of global warming was eliminated.

Again, I wonder if these people think that if they cross out the fact that 120 million people are at risk of hunger that they will not starve; the same way that if the Nazi sympathizer crosses out any reference to 6 million Jews killed that they can change the facts. These people simply ignore the harmfulness of their actions, so they do not have to face up to its immoral character.

In fact, an effective way to make sure that these people will be made to suffer from global warming is to bury the warning. This way, nobody will read about it, and nobody will take serious action to prevent it. Scratching out this line is simply a way of saying, “Your hunger is of no moral significance; forget about it.”

The article mentions other items in the scientists’ report that political representatives of the Bush Administration thought unimportant.

More than one sixth of the world population live in glacier- or snowmelt-fed river basins and will be affected by decrease of water volume." And depending on how much fossil fuels are burned in the future, "262-983 million people are likely to move into the water stressed-category" by 2050.

Global warming could increase the number of hungry in the world in 2080 by anywhere between 140 million and 1 billion, depending on how much greenhouse gas is emitted into the air over the next few decades.

"Overall a 2 to 3 fold increase of population to be flooded is expected by 2080."

Malaria, diarrhea diseases, dengue fever, tick-borne diseases, heat-related deaths will all rise with global warming. But in the United Kingdom, the drop in cold-related deaths will be bigger than the increase in heatstroke related deaths.

In eastern North America, depending on fossil fuel emissions, smog will increase and there would be a 4.5 percent increase in smog-related deaths.

But what does it matter? The people doing the killing will not have to worry about these things. The additional money they put in the bank will help ensure that they will not suffer.

The Politician’s Victory

There is one other item in this article that strikes a note of concern with me. According to the article, the politicians were able to score a victory over the scientists by playing out the clock.

With such deadline problems, some countries - especially China, Saudi Arabia and at times Russia and the United States -- were able to play hard ball.

They could force scientists to remove mention of hundreds of people put at risk of harm simply by refusing to accept the document. This is far easier than the old days, when the Church had to resort to threats of torture to get scientists to recant their findings in public.

It strongly grates on the moral nerves to have bad people win by manipulating the rules. For one thing, it teaches a moral lesson by example – teaching a new generation to profit through manipulation regardless of the harms others might suffer. We promote virtue by making sure virtue is rewarded; and we discourage vice to make sure that the vicious do not prosper. Events such where evil prospers deals a significant blow to any quest to make a more moral society. Where evil people win and prosper, why be good?

We now know that the people who demanded these concessions are the type of people who will hide massive harms to hundreds of millions of people if it will profit them to do so. The next time you give your child a drink, think about the moral character of the person who handed you the glass. Is it somebody who would willingly hide the fact that the water is poisoned if it profits him to do so?

If he subscribes to this Limitless Harm Morality that American negotiators at the Climate Change conference appealed to in deciding how to behave, then he clearly is somebody who would hide the toxicity of the water he gives you if it profits him to do so.

Solar System Warming

When it comes to the moral crime of epistemic negligence, you don’t have to disagree with somebody else’s conclusions to recognize that they are guilty. Their guilt is found in how they reach those conclusions (and the degree to which people who hold such conclusions are a threat to the welfare of others), not in the conclusions themselves.

An Example of Reckless Thinking

For example, you do not have to believe that a person is innocent of a crime to find fault with the man who says, “I know he is guilty because he is black.”

It’s just like with any other type of negligence. You do not have to believe that there is something inherently immoral with driving a car to recognize that the person who drives down a residential street at 80 miles per hour is being reckless.

Imagine that a person has just flipped a coin 10 times. Another person then goes to him and asks, “Can you give me an example of five times when the toss came up heads?” The coin tosser answers, “Yes. For example, the second, third, fourth, seventh, and tenth tosses were heads.” Other coin tosses could have been heads; the questioner simply did not inquire about those. We have reason to suspect that the coin tosser would have announced any other coin toss as heads if they were heads, and his silence weakly implies that they were not. However, let us just pretend total ignorance with respect to the other tosses.

Now, our questioner suddenly exclaims that this is an amazing result. He insists that for these five tosses to come up heads, there must have been some exotic force acting on the coin. Suddenly, he exclaims that all five of them could have been influenced by the wind – and insists that we should consider the wind the cause of these five tosses turning up heads.

He says this, even though he is standing next to a device that measures wind speed, and it shows that there was no wind.

Actually, it would be difficult to describe this as an instance of epistemic negligence. It has more of the qualities of insanity.

Now, let’s add a few things. Instead of talking about something as mundane as the flipping of a coin, we are talking about an event that threatens the lives, health, and well-being of billions of people. In a room filled with people working tirelessly to understand this threat, there is this lunatic in the corner shouting, “The coin came up heads five times because of the wind!” Shouting back at him that the devices for measuring wind shows that there was no wind does not deter him.

In addition, let us also add people who, evidence suggests, may be responsible for costing billions of people their lives, health, and well-being. These people wish to deflect blame. More importantly, they wish to continue to act in ways that threaten the lives, health, and well-being of billions of people; presumably because the well-being of others is not important to them. They have the capacity to enjoy their own life in complete indifference to suffering that they may well be causing others.

To protect themselves from these accusations, they hire a public relations firm to make the questioner more convincing. The PR firm buys him a suit and cleans him up, performs market research that tells them how to market the story so that people are more likely to believe it. They coach him, then use their contacts to give him an audience among people who do not know any better. They use focus groups and surveys to make the most attractive package possible for this product. Then they sell it to the very people whose lives, health, and well-being their clients put at risk.

Now, we have gone from an insane person making insane claims, to a group of people covering up a moral crime on a magnitude not seen since the Nazis.

It does not matter whether these people are guilty in fact. The fact remains that they are trying to divert the public attention away from a potential threat to billions of lives. They do not want an honest and objective evaluation of the facts. They want to hide the truth behind clouds of false uncertainty and confusion.

The Sun

In the real-world version of this story, it is the sun, rather than the wind, that is being made the scapegoat.

In the real world case, some skeptics have noted that, on 5 of the 10 planets in the solar system that have climates, the temperature is rising. Therefore, they assert, the sun is responsible for global warming. They ignore the fact that the same sun shines on all 10 planets with climates, and the sun would also affect the surface temperatures of planets without climates.

They ignore the fact that we have had instruments measuring solar output for several years now and that they record no such increase. In spite of these facts, they dress up their skeptics and send them out to create a diversion – to distract the population from a potential threat to the lives, health, and well-being of billions of people – because from their death, sickness, and suffering, comes profits.

I have seen this argument emerge and grow over the past several months. Most recently, I found the argument discussed in an online article at nature.com; “Hot Times in the Solar System,” by Oliver Norton.

In his rebuttal of this argument, Norton mentions the responses I gave above. He also pointed out that the same science of climate change that attributes our global warming to human activity also explains the temperature rise found on these other planets.

Pluto, for example, has just passed by its closest approach to the sun. On Earth, we see that the hottest days in the year are not the longest days. They occur considerably later than the longest day. This is because a climate has inertia. It takes a while for shorter days to slow down the warming of summer and start the cooling of winter. The same is true on Pluto, which is still being warmed by the fact that it is closer to the Sun than it usually is.

On Mars, global winds have exposed black basaltic rock in the southern hemisphere. Black rock absorbs heat, and makes the climate warmer.

These facts mean that our coin tosser story is still missing an important component. It turns out that the coin tosses were filmed in slow motion. Each case that the coin came up heads, scientists have an explanation in terms of initial position, angular momentum, distance traveled, the force of gravity determining travel time, and the like. Yet, even with this, those who value money and are indifferent to the death and suffering they cause continue to guiltlessly cloud the issue with brightly packaged absurdities.

So what these disparate observations actually tell us is that the scientific community — the scientific community that enjoys a firm consensus on the causes of Earthly climatic change — has a fairly impressive grasp of the fundamentals of how weather works elsewhere, as well. It's a rather inspiring insight. But it is not the lesson that climate skeptics want their readers to learn.

This brings me to the one thing missing from Norton’s article, which really should have been there.

He addressed the scientific absurdities, but he did not address the deserved moral condemnation of those who make these arguments.

Recklessness

In the past, I have compared epistemic negligence to the crime of drunk driving. Both types of negligence evidence the same moral crime. The drunk driver and the reckless thinker are indifferent to the death and suffering that might come from their actions. A person who cares will take steps to protect the innocent from harm. Those who do not take these steps, we may conclude, do not care. That is what makes them evil.

Note that the drunk driver does not intend to kill the people that he ends up killing. He only wanted to get home. Only, he did not care that the method he was using to get home put others at risk.

The global-warming skeptic does not intend to harm billions of people. He only wanted to make some money. Only, he did not care that the method he was using to make money put billions of others at risk.

In comparing these two, we should not think of the reckless thinker in terms of an average drunk driver. Think of the drunk school bus driver, with a bus load of children, deciding to race a train through a railway crossing. Even here, you would have a person who would be a saint when compared to the reckless thinker who advances this particular argument.

Why?

Well, there is a limit to the number of children that one can fit into a school bus. Quite frankly, the drunk school bus driver can’t kill nearly as many children.

In case I have not made this point clear yet, it does not matter if the drunk bus driver actually beats the train and the children are not killed. We certainly would not forgive the driver and sigh, “No harm, no foul” unless there is an actual collision. He took an unwarranted risk with the lives and well-being of others. That is enough.

Fred Thompson

Before closing this blog, I want to point out that one of the people who embraced this argument is a potential Republican candidate for President, Fred Thompson.

In an article called, “Plutonic Warning”, Thompson repeated the argument in a most derogatory and arrogant manner.

This has led some people, not necessarily scientists, to wonder if Mars and Jupiter, non signatories to the Kyoto Treaty, are actually inhabited by alien SUV-driving industrialists who run their air-conditioning at 60 degrees and refuse to recycle.

Thompson is not a scientist. One might want to suggest that he be forgiven for listening to idiots. Yet, we have to ask, with so many scientists making claims on this issue, why did Thompson decide to accept this argument? What does it say about Thompson – what does it say about the type of President he would be – that he thinks that the insane coin tosser is worth listening to?

It is quite clear that he would be yet another Republican who comes to an opinion first, and looks for evidence later. In looking for evidence, he will accept anything, no matter how insanely stupid, that suggests support for his opinion. He will cherry-pick the data, and has no capacity even to judge the quality of the cherries.

We see the effects of living for six years under such an idiot. We have two more years to go under this idiot. We do not need to follow him up with somebody who will carry his idiocy into the next decade.

Ignoring Reality

In today's blog entry, I want to bring together two recent subjects.

In "Too Much of a Good Thing" I expressed concern for the future of the human race because of our apparent inability to take long-term threats seriously. Our economy and our culture is a huge machine with a massive amount of inertia that takes a considerable amount of energy to turn. If we do not have the ability to recognize distant threats, then we do not have the ability to avoid them.

Yesterday, In "Richard Dawkins Part I: Raising Consciousness" I expressed the importance of promoting intellectual responsibility as a moral virtue. When it comes to defending actions that are harmful to others, one has an obligation to ensure that those beliefs are firmy anchored.

In a nationally sindicated column, E.J. Dionne quoted Michael Novak's book Belief and Unbelief.

Christianity is not about moral arrogance," Novak insists. "It is about moral realism, and moral humility."

Moral Realism and Moral Arrogance

Actually, this is not the case. A substantial portion of religious fundamentalism is not about moral realism, and it is arrogant to think so. It is about moral fiction. Many of the moral principle drawn from ancient scripture promote death, illness, and ignorance, and decrease quality of life for almost everybody on the planet.

Their moral beliefs are, to put it bluntly, wrong. And, when people get morality wrong, innocent people die or suffer for no good reason.

Yet, as I have constantly argued, the fact that many theists live in moral error does not imply that all theists do so. And the fact that atheists do not believe in God does not make them immune from moral error. The real culprit here is not one's degree of error when it comes to the existence of God. It is one's degree of error when it comes to moral facts.

Rewriting Climate Change Science

In Brussels this week, scientists have gathered to put the finishing touches on the second of three 5-year climate change reports.

This phase of the writing is particularly bizarre. The scientists have put together a document representing the best scientific consensus at the moment.

Now, the politicians can get involved and rewrite the sections they do not like. (Time: "Political Heat over the Planet")

The scientists are complaining that the politicians are changing their conclusions, negotiating as if they had the power to determine the laws of physics.

I would like to be a politician with that type of power. "My voting constiuency would be best served if water evaporated at 35 degrees F rather than 32. Oh, and let's reduce the blackbody radiation formula by 10%, shall we?"

Scientific watch: "Iceberg, dead ahead!"

Political Captain of the HMS Earth. "Are you sure it's an iceberg? You know, it would be really inconvenient to have an iceberg dead ahead at right this minute. I mean, I have a huge paid constuency who has paid for an uninterrupted voyage. Why don't you check again, just to be sure."

Scientific watch: "It's a bleedin' iceberg, captain. Here, I took a picture for you."

Politician: "I don't know, it's kind of fuzzy. It could be anything. It could be a whale. It could be a mirage. It could be . . . well, pass the picture around the crew and see how many ideas they can come up with for thinking that it's not an iceberg."

Scientific watch: "And if they think it's an iceberg?"

Politician: "Then, obviously, their loyalty to the company is suspect and I will begin a campaign to have them terminated and replaced by people who will say that it is not an iceberg. In the mean time, keep your eye on it. In five more minutes, if you still think that it is an iceberg, you let me know."

Science watch: (5 minutes later). "Here are our best estimates of how big the iceberg is, how far away it is, how much it weighs, and a computer simulation showing what happens when a ship travelling at our current speed hits a block of ice that massive. It isn't pretty."

Politician: "What do you mean that you know its size and weight. Did you actually climb on it and weigh it? I happen to know that 90 percent of an iceberg is underwater. You can't see it. You can only estimate its size. It may be orders of magnitude smaller than you are predicting. And, as for those computer simulations, you can't trust them. You believe that it would be a bad thing for the ship to hit an iceberg, so you program the computer to make it look bad. Come back in five more minutes when you have better data."

Science watch: (5 minutes later). Okay, captain. Here, I have a slide show for you. I am going to start here with pictures of the front of the ship crumpling as it comes into contact with the iceberg . . ."

Politician: "Okay, there's an iceberg out there. However, you haven't given me any evidence that human activity is responsible for this conclusion, or that there is anything we could have done to avoid it."

Science and Values

There is said to be a problem with science. Science can give you the facts. However, in order to determine policy, you must add values to the facts to determine what to do.

This is almost true. However, the truth is in the details.

When we act, we seek to fulfill our desires. When we act, we choose the act that will fulfill the more and stronger of our desires, given our beliefs. False or incomplete beliefs prevent our acts from fulfilling our desires.

Science gives us facts. The science of climate change can tell us the relationship between cause and effects. However, it cannot tell us the value of those effects.

This is not entirely accurate. Science can tell us about values. It is true that climate change science alone cannot tell us the value of climate change. However, the science of climate change, combined with the science of desire, can tell us the value of climate change options.

A science of desire can also tell us the value of value - the capacity that desires have to fulfill or thwart other desires. This 'value of value' is moral value.

Still, today, it is the political process that brings scientific fact in contact with value to determine policy.

Still, it is one thing for the politician to bring fact into contact with value. It is quite another for the politician to try to change the facts.

There is no moral justification for this process.

The politicians are effectively saying, "If X is true, given our values, it would recommend doing Y. However, we have reason not to do Y. Therefore, we reserve the right to state that X is not true."

It's a bit like saying, "If my bank account runs out of money, then I will not be able to buy some of the things that I want to buy. Therefore, I deny that my bank account has run out of money."

Some people live this way. No moral person advocates it as a policy.

Richard Dawkins Part I: Consciousness Raising

Richard Dawkins: Consciousness Raising

Our next presenter at Beyond Belief 2006 is Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene and The God Delusion and holder of the Charles Simonyi Chair in the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University.

Dawkins actually gave two distinct presentations; a short initial presentation on “Consciousness Raising,” followed by a longer presentation on “Morality and the Selfish Gene.” Following his example, I am going to write two essays on his presentation, the first having to do with consciousness raising, and the second with morality and the selfish gene.

Consciousness Raising

Consciousness raising is a way of correcting a type of cognitive error known as ‘chauvinism’. This is an assumed false assumption that something is true of everybody, when it is not. His illustrative example is a science fiction movie within which a character nostalgically mentions that it is springtime back on Earth. Dawkins labels that ‘northern hemisphere chauvinism’, because the statement is true only in the northern hemisphere, and it is false to assume that everybody lives in the northern hemisphere.

The first thing that he wants to raise consciousness about is the habit of calling young children ‘Sikh’, ‘Muslim’, or ‘Christian.’ This, he claims, is as absurd as calling three children, ‘Monitorist’, ‘Keynsian’, and ‘Marxist’. He calls this type of labeling ‘child abuse’.

On the first charge, the absurdity springs from a false analogy. When I was young, I lived in a rural community near a Hutterite colony. It was common practice to refer to the members of that community as Hutterites – even the children. The statement merely meant that the child was a member of a Hutterite community. There is no chauvinism involved in saying that a child is growing up in a Hutterite community. In fact, the statement is an objectively true statement about the child.

Furthermore, as I argued in, “Theism as Mental Illness or Child Abuse,” using the term ‘child abuse’ in a true statement requires that the object of condemnation display a willingness to harm or, at best, a lack of concern for the child. In other words, Dawkins’ claims imply that the people in my home town were somehow exhibiting a desire to harm, or at least a disregard for the well-being of, the children in that community simply because we called the people who lived there ‘Hutterites’. There is no ‘consciousness raising’ to be found in making such a claim. Dawkins’ claim is simply false.

The same can be said if somebody who operates a daycare center reports to the others who work there that a particular child is a vegetarian. Nobody assumes that this means that the child is fully conversant in the different theories regarding diet and has consciously selected a vegetarian diet. They fully understand that this means that the parents wish that the child is being raised in a culture that follows a particular set of rules. Not only is the statement a true statement, it in no way shows a willingness to harm or a disregard for the well-being of a child to say, “Tommy is a vegetarian.”

Now, bear with me, after that brief recap, I want to carry the argument further this time, adding new dimensions to the debate.

Sam Harris, in The End of Faith has an argument that may be said to answer this. He responds to the claim that Muslims clearly must love their children as much as Christians do. He refutes this claim with an example – that we can know whether a person loves another by their actions. The evidence that Lee Harvey Oswald did not ‘love’ Kennedy can be found in the fact that Oswald shot Kennedy. The action disproves the statement. Similarly, we can tell that Muslim fundamentalist parents do not love their children because they raise their children to go out and kill themselves in a Jihad. This is incompatible with love. This would allow us to classify their actions as ‘child abuse’.

The argument fails.

Assume we discover that a mother has drowned her five children. This would seem to be incompatible with the claim that she loved her children. Yet, on talking to her, we find out that she believed that the devil was after them, and the only way to keep them save was to turn them over to God. Now, we apply the principle that though a person always seeks to fulfill their desires, they always act to fulfill their desires given their beliefs.

This means that, to get at what the mother desires, we have to look at her behavior as if these beliefs were true. If a creature as evil a the devil were after a child, and the parent could only protect them by shoving them throw a door into a safe area, then the parent who loves her children would certainly push the child through the door. The parent who refuses to do so is the parent who shows a callous disregard for the child’s welfare.

Now, a counter-move to this will draw on statements that I have made about obligations to believe. In several postings, and most recently in “Reckless Argumentation”, There, I argued that intellectual recklessness is a moral crime.

A physically reckless person is somebody who does not care enough about the consequences that his actions might have on others to refrain from behavior that puts others at risk. My paradigm example of this type of person is the drunk driver.

An intellectually reckless person is one who does not care enough about the welfare of others to critically examine his beliefs, making sure that he does not promote falsehoods that are harmful to others. A person who refuses to go through these efforts proves that his concern for others is lacking. When the victims of a particular habit of intellectual recklessness are children, it would be legitimate to charge the person with child abuse.

However, not all false beliefs represent intellectual recklessness. False beliefs can come from a mental illness, causing a person to hear voices or to see things that are not there. Yesterday, in “Mahzarin Banaji: Bugs of the Mind,” I showed evidence that even properly functioning brains do not always generate true beliefs. Furthermore, as I wrote in “Theism as Mental Abuse and Child Abuse,” we simply do not have the time or the ability to hold all of our beliefs up to rational scrutiny – particularly when we are young. We must use rules of thumb. One of those rules of thumb is to simply accept the beliefs that surround us when we are children. These beliefs are quite reliably (though fallibly) true.

The demand for perfect rationality is, itself, irrational.

The case of moral culpability in “Reckless Argumentation” rests on the fact that the author had an easy and widely accepted method available to him for checking his premises, and did not use it. He could have simply asked those whose view he was criticizing, “Did I get your view right?” He did not. The only reasonable conclusion to draw is that he did not care about the truth – that he was, in fact, intellectually reckless.

So, Dawkins’ first topic of consciousness raising missed the mark.

Evidence

Dawkins then goes on to illustrate two other differences between religious ways of thinking and scientific way of thinking.

In the first illustration, he puts up a map that divides the world into predominant religious beliefs – some areas showing up as Protestant, some as Catholic, some as Muslim, and others as Buddhist, Sikh, Hindu, and the like. He then expresses the absurdity of putting up an identical map of scientific beliefs, illustrating regions where people believe that the dinosaurs were killed by an asteroid, other regions where people believe that a comet killed the dinosaurs, disease-theorists, and the like.

I think that it is important to note that we could put up such a map. It might even show some regional preferences for different theories. It might even be the case that a person is more or less likely to embrace a particular theory because it is the most widely accepted theory in the place where he was raised. However, the important difference between science and religion in this respect is that, even though these things may be true, to the scientist, it does not matter.

In particular, the asteroid theorist has no obligation to ‘respect’ the beliefs of the disease theorist. It would be particularly absurd to have an asteroid theorist publish a paper showing evidence that the disease theory has a fatal flaw, then have the disease theorists fire back article after article accusing the author of being an ‘asteroid fundamentalist’ or ‘asteroid militant’. The disease theorist who would respond in this way simply proves that he has lost touch with the nature of the issue under debate.

This is the point that Dawkins makes best in his third example. He puts up a table of contents for hypothetical special issue of “The Quarterly Review of Biology”. The articles included in his table of contents are:

(1) “Iridium layer at K/T boundary and potassium argon dated crater in Yucatan indicate that an asteroid killed the dinosaurs.”

(2) “The President of the Royal Society has been vouchsafed a strong inner conviction that an asteroid killed the dinosaurs.”

(3) “It has been privately revealed to Prof. Huxdane that an asteroid killed the dinosaurs.”

(4) “Professor Holdley was brought up to have total and unquestioning faith that an asteroid killed the dinosaurs.”

(5) “Professor Hawkins has promulgated an official dogma binding on all loyal Hawkinsians that an asteroid killed the dinosaurs.”

(Note: I am not sure that I got the names right in these articles. The slide, as displayed, was blurry and his speech was not entirely clear.)

Given that Dawkins’ began this part of his presentation with an example of chauvinism, I find it ironic that he would assume here that a peer-reviewed scientific journal is the best place to illustrate the differences between scientific and religious claims. Is it not reasonable to suggest that the scientific paper has a home-court advantage here? Let us put these types of claim in a different context, and see how they measure. It would not be difficult to level the charge against him that his examples exhibit ‘science chauvinism’.

Before I get into too much trouble for that statement, let me change the context slightly so that I can illustrate its importance.

Most people do not read scientific journals. Most people are going to hear about the claim that an asteroid killed the dinosaurs through traditional media. Items (2) through (5) can appear in the mainstream media pretty much as Dawkins wrote them. However, a reporter reading (1) in a scientific journal would need to make an important change to turn it into a news article. He would have to write something like:

(1’) “According to an article in The Quarterly Review of biology, an asteroid killed the dinosaurs.”

Now, all five statements are alike. Every one of them tells the reader that an authority has decided that a particular proposition is true. In all five cases, the average reader lacks the inside knowledge of how the field works to be able to determine if the claim is true or false. They must trust somebody else to read the scripture or tea leaves or entrails or scientific instruments, and to communicate the results. To the common reader, they are all very much alike.

I happen to know of an important difference. I know that science is in the practice of comparing different claims with reality. Scientific theories have to be able to explain and predict real-world events. Those that fall short are constantly being thrown out in favor of those that do a better job.

So, now, let us assume that you have five bowls of soup in front of you. Every one was selected from a large supply of soups, some of which were poisoned. One of them comes with the claim that scientists have conducted a number of tests – including feeding soup samples to subjects who are much like humans - and they predict that this soup will not kill you. Another was selected by somebody who meditated while thinking about soup until he received divine inspiration to pick a particular soup. Another read a random piece of scripture and interpreted it as saying that he should pick yet a third soup.

Which soup would the wise person eat?

Which soup would the truly compassionate and concerned parent feed to her children?

There are those who would make decisions over which soup to eat, and which soup to feed their children, based on these other methods. The result is untold, and incalculable, death, disease, and depravation. At the same time, the history of the last 400 years is a history of scientists doing a better and better job of determining which soups are poison and which are nourishing, and feeding the world as a result.

Then there are priests who, when asked which soup scripture recommends, peek over at the scientist’s answer, before finding that interpretation of scripture that happens to give the same answer.

Where there is consciousness to be raised, I recommend that it be done here. One method champions better and better ways of detecting poison through gathering an increasing body of evidence, keeping those methods that are empirically shown to be the best at predicting which soups will kill those who eat them and which will nourish them, and constantly throwing away those that are less reliable. The rest demand that we must continue to use methods invented 1300, 2000, or more years ago and have faith that they give us the right answer.

If there is consciousness to be raised, then I suggest that it be done here: If you do not wish to feed your children poison, then it is wise to go with those who, by their nature, are constantly tossing away less reliable methods for detecting poison for more reliable methods.

Conclusion

Ultimately, I am going to end this post with the same set of claims that ended yesterday’s post. Instead of defending atheism over religion, I would suggest that it would be more useful to focus on epistemic responsibility, particularly when a person is arguing about actions and policies that do harm to others. This, in turn, would recommend the same lessons in epistemic moral responsibility that I mentioned yesterday.

Mahzarin Banaji: Bugs of the Mind

Today, we start Session 7 of Beyond Belief 2006. Our leadoff speaker is Mahzarin Banaji, Richard Clarke Cabot Professor of Social Ethics at Harvard and Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

She is here to talk about ways in which the brain misperceives reality.

Some of these examples are visual, and I invite any reader to watch her presentation. The conclusion she listen to her draws from these examples is clear enough – it is extremely easy, and in fact even natural, to draw mistaken conclusions from a given set of evidence.

Banaji shows a shape in two different context, side by side. Our brains interpret these as two different shapes. Yet, a simple demonstration shows that they are in fact the same shape. Our brains have misinterpreted the context in which the two shapes occur to give us a misperception of their relative sameness, perceiving a difference where none exists in fact.

How does this relate to anything important?

Banaji mentioned that studies routinely show that when people are asked if the gender of their boss is important, responders will report that it is not. However, when presented with a series of questions that are designed to root out biases, people are willing to give up $3000 in salary to have a male boss. (Or, in other words, a company can lower its payroll costs by having male managers.)

Another set of studies asks people to choose a partner in an intelligence-based game. They are provided with a set of statistics about various partners they can choose from – years of college, profession, and the like. They are also given a picture of their partner. The research shows that people will give up 9 points of IQ to have a slender partner. This 9 IQ points represents 41% of the population.

She mentions other examples in which “standardized patients” are sent to 100 doctors. These standardized patients are trained to give doctors an identical description of symptoms. By an 8 to 1 margin, males are more likely to be sent on to specialists than females, and by a 24 to 1 margin are more likely to be sent to surgery.

She provides a demonstration in which she proves a gender bias in the audience of participants at the Beyond Belief 2006 conference among people who substantially tend to be atheist and liberal.

When I discussed Patricia Churchland’s presentation, she gave a similar demonstration, showing that two objects that are, in fact, the same color are perceived as being of different color, because the brain assumes that it is looking at a three-dimensional world with a source of light, when it is in fact looking at a two dimensional drawing. Churchland uses this in a discussion of our ability to draw inferences of ‘ought’ from the perceptual world, without stopping to consider the possibility that her example demonstrates, that these perceptions of ‘ought’ could easily be misperceptions of ‘ought’.

In a great many cases, I would argue, people often see an illusion of ‘ought’ where none exists and are making poor judgments about who shall remain free or go to prison, who shall live and who shall die, based on these illusions. Also, just as atheists are not immune to the illusion of the shapes appearing different when they are they same, or the gender bias that Banaji demonstrated in her audience, they are not immune from perceiving illusionary oughts (or values) and using them to ‘justify’ real-world harms.

Having tools for the mind sciences to show that there are these bugs in our mind that make us do and feel and think things that are not true, the onus is on us to design and develop techniques of shoving their faces in front of it so that they can see, and that is in a sense the simple hope of this research program

It is extremely important to know how the mind generates illusions so that we do not act on the false impressions they generate, prudentially in ways where we harm ourselves, and morally in ways where we harm others.

I have spoken somewhat tentatively in the past, and will likely speak more forcefully in the future, of the need for rationalists to set up sort of curriculum for children (aged 12 and above) to teach them the many ways in which it is possible to make mistakes and to derive truth.

During “Wish Week” last year, my first wish was for “Logic Circles”. These would be informal clubs where members would meet to improve their knowledge and understanding of areas of reasoning. At the time, I suggested:

(1) The Informal Fallacies

(2) The Scientific Method in Everyday Life

(3) Techniques of Neutralization (Rationalization)

(4) Formal Propositional Logic.

In light of Banaji’s presentation, I would like to include:

(5) Bugs in the Mind (unconscious bias).

Because the more people know and understand these bugs, the less likely they are to give them authority in their decision making. Once a person sees the demonstration whereby the two shapes are shown to be identical, they still look different, but the perceiver is now far less likely to conclude that they are, in fact different.

It is unreasonable to expect that the public school system in a vast majority of the country would ever adopt a ‘rationalist’ curriculum. Parents simply will not allow it.

To show this, all one needs to realize is that “The Scientific Method” module would have to include a less on in why ‘intelligent design’ is not science. Anybody who thinks that intelligent design is science does not understand science. Yet, I assume (though I could be wrong) that only a very small fraction of the school districts would allow a teacher to teach and test their student’s understanding of why intelligent design is not science.

Schools may well adopt some of these ideas. Yet, the few examples that I have run across – examples that I mentioned in have been diluted to such an extent that they seem useless. Logic classes do not use actual real-world arguments. Rather, they use examples such as:

(1) All dolphins eat peanut butter

(2) Sam is a dolphin

(3) Therefore, Sam eats peanut butter.

These are examples that pretty much ‘teach’ students that logic is concerned with entirely stupid things that no intelligent person would ever want to bother with. However, as soon as a teacher starts using real-world, relevant examples, some kid is going to go home and accuse their parent of using an “argument from ignorance” or “affirming the consequent,” that that teacher’s career will be over.

So, if one wants children to learn a rationalist curriculum, this curriculum will have to be developed and taught outside of the public school system. It will have to be an independent class – an independent project – with meetings in the evening or on the weekend, where children are provided with this type of knowledge without the schools getting involved.

Then, maybe, in some future generation, there will be enough rationalists to get the curriculum adopted in more and more schools.

I do not know what resources are already available for teaching these things to 7th through 12th grade children in a way that shows real-world relevance. So, I would like to ask you, the reader, to comment and identify any resources that you are aware of.

I would like to take a look at them.

I consider it important that we do so.

Misinterpreted Statements

Greg Epstein and Atheist Fundamentalists

I have two loosely related issues that I would like to discuss today, before too much time passes.

I am feeling sorry for Greg Epstein recently, because a misquote in an Associated Press article that Atheists are Split over their Message.

The Associated Press article reports that Epstein calls atheists such as Dawkins “Atheist Fundamentalists,” which sent a huge number of electrons flying criticizing the use of the term. I offered criticism as well, interrupting my normal weekend postings on the Beyond Belief 2006 conference to comment on the article’s use of terms.

Since then, Epstein has offered a correction.

In fact, what happened that Epstein wrote about atheist “fundamentalists” – putting the term in scare quotes. This is a writer’s way of saying, “I am mentioning how others are using this term, but I do not endorse its use.” The proper way to read the use of scare quotes is to insert the phrase ‘so-called’ before the term. So, “atheist ‘fundamentalists’” means ‘atheist so-called fundamentalists’. His use of the term was fully appropriate.

However, the article put the whole phrase “atheist fundamentalist” in quotes and attributed the quote to Epstein, as if Epstein was not only mentioning the term, but endorsing its use and actually using it in the same way.

Epstein calls them "atheist fundamentalists."

Actually, I did a search of the web site that he referenced in his comment to my blog entery, http://www.thenewhumanism.org. The term “fundamentalism” only showed up in relation to this article.

I fear that, the way the press works, Epstein is going to forever suffer for the Associate Press’s sloppy writing. The truth will always trail far behind the fiction, never actually catching up with it.

Yet, we can take the time to give the truth a shove, which is what I am trying to do here.

Imaginary Value

On a related issue, because of space limitations, I left a huge hole in my post yesterday where I discussed ‘should’ and ‘good’.

I gave a list of items that a theist might use to support the claim that a person cannot be moral without God.

You permit homosexuality, condemn abstinence education, drive God from the schools and the public square, and argue that we allow abortion. You rob the wealthy of their rightly earned property through taxation and give the money to those who make the least contribution to society. You coddle criminals and condemn their victims. You oppose Israel’s right to establish its historic borders. You promote ignorance in the classroom by teaching evolution and do not even have the courtesy to grant us equal time. You put a few spotted owls above the man who needs a job to provide for his family. You defend cultural relativism that says that there is nothing really wrong with slavery, the Holocaust, or Stalinist Russia.

I then wrote that the theist claim can often be reduced in the following way:

In short, the claim, "You cannot be moral without belief in God" often reduces to, "You can't eagerly sacrifice real-world life, health, and well-being in the pursuit of the same imaginary (fake) values that I do without belief in God."

This leaves me vulnerable to the demagogue who would want to claim, “Alonzo believes that every value expressed on the list represents sacrificing real-world life, health, and well-being for the sake of an imaginary value.”

That inference would not be accurate. The inference requires the assumption that I think that no theist can recognize real-world value, and that no atheist can end up promoting imaginary values. I explicitly denied this in yesterday’s article, but that would not prevent the demagogue from advertising a misleading interpretation.

Example 1: Consider the claim that a defender of morality without God has to defend the equal value of slavery, the Holocaust, or Stalinist Russia. Of course I do not think that those who condemn slavery, the Holocaust, or Stalinist Russia is promoting imaginary values. These three sets of institutions represent very real harms to life, health, and well-being for a great many people. The problem with the theist assertion in these cases rests in the assumption that the atheist cannot defend these as real-world evils. There happen to be many liberals who will readily assert that there are no real-world evils and, against them, the objection would have some traction. Yet, one of the things that I hoped to demonstrate in this blog is that the assertion rests requires the false assumption that an atheist cannot defend real-world value.

Example 2: The accusation of “robbing the wealthy of their rightly earned property through taxation” begs the moral question. In what sense is it that the money was rightfully earned? Many wealthy people acquire wealth by manipulating the political system to funnel money into their pockets. They do this through special legislation, by exploiting the candidate’s need for campaign contributions, and by using the principle, “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know that matters”. They also benefit by creating externalities (pollution) that allow them to harvest the benefits of an activity while pushing the cost onto others, and they gain their money as beneficiaries of a set of institutions that have to be paid for. All things considered, there is good reason to question how much of that property is “rightfully earned”. Besides, we need to look at what is required for property to be “rightfully earned”.

Example 3: Concerning the issue of ‘coddling criminals,’ it has been a major theme of this blog that punishment and condemnation are important tools for promoting good desires and inhibiting bad desires. I am fully in favor of using them to the degree that they are useful in creating a community whose members are less likely to do real-world harm to others. This means harsh treatment of those who are bad, and reward and praise for those who are good. If we look specifically at capital punishment, I have pointed out that societies that practice capital punishment tend to have more murderers. I have suggested that this may be the effect of teaching children to love to kill – to celebrate (certain) deaths. Not all children will learn those lessons as intended. It will take only a small number of children learning the wrong lesson to create people who are a threat to the life, health, and well-being of others.

In other cases, condemning homosexuality, opposition to teaching children the truth about sex and evolution, treating a blastula as if it has the rights of a full person, and pushing for Israel to re-establish its historic boundaries so that Jesus can return, are all excellent examples of promoting real-world suffering in the pursuit of imaginary values.

In making the list, I wrote each item the way a demagogue would write them – filled with question-begging assumptions that made them sound true by definition. The demagogue uses this to make anybody who would deny those claims sound like a fool. However, it accomplishes this by misrepresenting the issue. It assumes that the wealth that the rich person accumulates is all rightfully earned. It assumes that promoting a vicious reaction to criminals is the best way to protect innocent people from viciousness. It assumes that there can be no real-world value if there is no God.

It is a very popular rhetorical trick, used to manipulate people into accepting things that have not actually been defended. It is just another way in which a person who is more interested in winning than in being right can mislead others into doing things that are harmful to themselves and to those they care about.

'Should' and 'Good'

I want to use as a foil for today’s post, a posting by Marymyk at “Agnostic Atheism” on “Why should I Be Good?”

I hold that atheists do themselves a lot of harm by being unable to give a satisfactory answer to this question.

Let me start with a disclaimer that it is pure coincidence that Mary posted these comments on the day that I decided that I wanted to address this issue. I dislike some of the aspects of using her post as an example to illustrate my points. However, it is useful, and I hope that I can be excused for any transgression.

I can even be accused of taking Mary’s post somewhat out of context, since she was responding to comments made elsewhere.

Also, learning to answer this question correctly will not cause atheists to be embraced with open arms. We can imagine an atheist charging into a burning building, saving the six children inside, and dying in an attempt to save the family pet. The mother will still thank God for the saving her children, and still complain that kicking God out of the schools is the cause of everything from teen sex to tsunamis.

Those who claim that all atheists need to do is be nice and they will be loved do not understand how bigotry closes peoples’ minds.

Anyway, on the question “Why should we be good?”

Good

Mary begins her essay by making a stipulation about ‘good’. She writes, “[L]et’s assume that goodness includes love, mercy, compassion, kindness, generosity, etc).”

That begs a lot of very important question.

The theist says that you cannot be moral without God.

The atheist says, “Yes I can. Look at how moral I am!”

A theist may well answer, “Yes, I see that. You permit homosexuality, condemn abstinence education, drive God from the schools and the public square, and argue that we allow abortion. You rob the wealthy of their rightly earned property through taxation and give the money to those who make the least contribution to society. You coddle criminals and condemn their victims. You oppose Israel’s right to establish its historic borders. You promote ignorance in the classroom by teaching evolution and do not even have the courtesy to grant us equal time. You put a few spotted owls above the man who needs a job to provide for his family. You defend cultural relativism that says that there is nothing really wrong with slavery, the Holocaust, or Stalinist Russia.

“You do all of this, yet you stand there and say to me that without God you can still be moral. This is so absurd and contradictory that it is absolutely amazing that you can stand there and utter it with any sincerity. Any sane person would instantly see the contradiction. If you could truly be moral without God, you would be on the same side of the line as the rest of us on these issues. The fact that you oppose us on this is proof that you cannot be moral without belief in God. You cannot even know what morality is.”

As it turns out, many of the things that many theists call ‘moral’ is, in fact, the sacrifice of real-world life, health, and well-being for the sake of values that are as imaginary as God. Because the harm these people do is real, while the good they seek is imaginary, these people are devoting countless hours and dollars to making the world a worse place than it would have otherwise been. There might be some comfort to think that those who inflict these thoughtless harms will be punished in the afterlife, and their victims will obtain compensation as well, the real world that does not work this way. Those real-world harms are . . . well . . . very much real.

In short, the claim, "You cannot be moral without belief in God" often reduces to, "You can't eagerly sacrifice real-world life, health, and well-being in the pursuit of the same imaginary (fake) values that I do without belief in God."

Which is not necessarily a bad thing.

In her essay, Mary reported that one of the things she missed about being a Christian was the motivation she had to be moral. Yet, as the list I gave above indicates, theism gives a lot of people motivation to be immoral as well. The ‘good’ they claim to pursue is imaginary. In real-world terms they do pursue an evil that they merely think is good because it is disguised in clerical garb.

However, (and this is an extremely important caveat) there are many theists who have shown themselves to be quite good at realizing and promoting real-world value. At the same time, atheists are not immune from the problem of causing real-world harm in the pursuit of imaginary goods. This is the reason that I maintain that the important moral question is not whether a person believes in God or not. It is whether this person is promoting real-world harm in the pursuit of imaginary values or not.

Should

When asked the question, “Why should we do good?” it is important not to confuse this question with the question, “Why do you do good?” These are two distinct and separate questions.

Mary titles her post, “Why should we be good?” She then starts her second paragraph with the question, “Why do I bother?”

This is not the same thing.

If a person breaks into a house and kills the entire family, we can ask the question “Why did he do this?” It will have an answer. It does not matter what a person does – it does not matter how good or how evil – we have an answer to the question, “Why did he bother?”

However, if we ask the question, “Why should he do this?” it requires an entirely different answer.

Mary explains the fact that she does that which is good by claiming that it makes her happy. However, the counter to this is easy enough. “What if it made you happy to be cruel? What if you were a happy slave owner in Georgia in 1790? Or you were a happily Roman emperor who found enjoyment killing blind and lame Roman citizens in the arena? What if you enjoyed battle, or you had a child locked up in your basement that nobody would ever find that you enjoyed torturing? Then what would your happiness wrought?”

In this case, “Why did he do this?” has an answer, while “Why should he do this?” probably has a false assumption that makes the question unanswerable.

In order to answer the question that was actually asked, we need to understand what the term “should” means.

I hold that “should” refers to “reasons for action”. “X should A” says that there are reasons for action for X to do A. Saying that X should do A, while saying that there is no reason for X to do A, is nonsense.

However, these reasons for action are not explanatory reasons. Every action can be explained. Every search for an explanation is a search for the reasons why that action happened. Yet, even here we notice that there is a distinction between the reasons why an action does happen, and the reasons why an action should happen. The same reasons that explain why the man did murder the family does not explain why the man should have murdered the family.

So, what is the difference?

Well, a person acts so as to fulfill the more and the stronger of his desires, given his beliefs. However, he seeks to act so as to fulfill the more and the stronger of his desires. If he acts on a false belief, he typically thwarts his own desires. The difference between the two questions, “What will I do?” and “What should I do?” is “Which action will best fulfill my desires, given my beliefs?” and “Which action will best fulfill my desires?”

Now, there is also a distinction between practical “should” and moral “should”. The above question gives an answer to the question, “What practical-should I do?” Now, we need to answer the question, “What moral-should I do?”

The difference here is that practical-should considers the desires that the agent has, while moral should considers the desires that the agent should have. The practical agent asks, “What would a person with my desires do if his beliefs were true and complete?” The moral agent asks, “What would a person with good desires do if his beliefs were true and complete?”

So, now we need to ask what a “good desire” is.

A “good desire’ is no different than a “good knife” or a “good map” or a “good movie”. It is a desire (knife, map, movie) that tends to fulfill (other) desires.

When we ask the question, “Why did the man go into the house and kill the family?” we are asking about his current beliefs and desires. When we ask the question, “Why practical-should the man go into the house and kill the family,” we are asking about the action of a hypothetical man with the same desires, but with true and complete beliefs. When we ask the question, “Why moral-should the man go into the house and kill the family,” we are asking about the action of a hypothetical man with good desires and true and complete beliefs.

These are three different questions.

Good and Should

I have looked at the concepts of ‘should’ and ‘good’, so now I can return to the question, “Why should I be good?”

This is really an ambiguous question, with several different possible meanings. Some of these are:

(1) “Why (practical) should I do that which is (practical) good?”

(2) “Why (moral) should I do that which (practical) good?”

(3) “Why (practical) should I do that which (moral) good?”

(4) “Why (moral) should I do that which is (moral) good?”

The two versions where ‘should’ and ‘moral’ both have the same extension are trivial questions. Ultimately, (1) asks, “What reasons do I have for doing that which I have the most and strongest reasons to do?” While (4) asks, “What reasons does a person with good reasons have for doing that which a person with good reasons would do?” It’s like asking, “What color was George Washington’s white horse?”

In the case of questions (2) and (3), the question sometimes does not have an answer. It is not always the case that a person (practical) should do that which is (moral) good. And, sometimes, a person finds himself in a situation where what he (moral) should do is not that which is (practical) good.

Where this gap between what a person (practical) should do and what is (moral) good gets large enough, this person is evil. Here, we are talking about a person who has desires or, in milder cases, lacks good desires, such that he causes others to suffer while he pursues his interests.

When I call this person ‘evil’, I mean that people generally have a lot of very strong reasons to act so as to make it the case that this type of person does not exist. We have reason to bring what this person (practical) should do closer into alignment to what is (moral) good. We can do this with threats of punishment if he does what he (practical) should do – making it far less practical. We can also do this by changing his desires, so that what he (practical) should do is more like what a person with good desires (practical) should do – which makes him less evil.

Conclusion

These, then, are the answers to the question, “Why should I do good?” The question is ambiguous – ‘should’ and ‘good’ mean different things. This means that the question has several answers – one for each meaning of ‘should’ and ‘good’. In some cases, the question answers itself, like, “What color was George Washington’s white horse?” In other cases, the question it may be the case that a person does should not do good. However, people generally have a lot of good reasons to make sure that such people are rare, because people who (practical) should do that which is not (moral) good are a threat to others.

Too Much of a Good Thing

I am wondering if you optimistic or pessimistic about the long-term survival and well-being of the human species?

I try to be optimistic, but sometimes it is hard. When I see some of the foolishness that can become widely accepted, I fear that the human species has the capacity to walk straight off of an evolutionary cliff into extinction and either denies that the cliff is there, or admit that there is a cliff but that humans are immune to the effects of gravity.

These thoughts are inspired, in part, by a recent Supreme Court decision that the Environmental Protection Agency needs to do more to justify the claim that excess carbon dioxide is not harmful to human health, before it can justify its claim that the Clean Air Act does not require its regulation.

Of course, for the purposes of this blog, I am not here to report what the Clean Air Act does or does not require of the EPA. My interest is in the widespread popularity that carbon dioxide cannot be considered bad for us because, at historic concentrations, it produces beneficial effects.

Let’s see . . . how many substances are good for us when we are exposed to them within certain confined ranges, but will kill us when its concentration goes outside of those limits?

Like . . . radiation. We would be unable to survive in a universe without radiation. Heat is infrared radiation. Without a source of heat, we would all be dead by now. In fact, the human body produces radiation in the form of infrared energy. Visible light is another band of radiation. The radio waves that we use to communicate provide another example of useful radiation.

Now, imagine somebody trying to argue that because all of these forms of radiation are useful or even necessary for life, that an atomic bomb could not possibly have any ill effects. “Radiation is our friend. Radiation is a source of life. All of those people who are claiming that an atomic bomb can kill people and destroy cities are simply using scare tactics to push a political agenda.”

Pharmaceuticals provide another example of chemicals that can be useful within certain prescribed limits (and I use the term ‘prescribed’ intentionally). Certain pain relievers are quite effective when taken in small quantities. Take too many of them all at once, and you will die. Anti-depressants are another group in this category. Toothpaste is great for helping to build strong teeth; yet swallowing enough toothpaste is fatal.

Even water is poisonous in large enough quantities. Not long ago, a radio station in held a contest where it would give an iPod to whomever can go the longest without going to the bathroom. They required that their contestants drink a certain amount of water over that time, and the last one to go to the bathroom won. One of those contestants, a mother of three, came in second. Later, she died. Cause of death – water intoxication.

This idea that too much of a good thing is not necessarily good is widely known. We draw on these principles every day. Yet, some people argue that because carbon dioxide is not harmful in normal concentrations, that it cannot produce ill effects at higher concentrations. People say this, and other people allow themselves to be convinced by it. In fact, enough people allow themselves to think this way that they can affect national policy.

It’s stuff like this that makes it clear that enough people can lead the human race right off of an evolutionary cliff, and either deny the existence or deny the importance of that cliff.

I’m not saying that global warming itself threatens the well-being of the human species. I am saying that if something like global warming were to threaten the well-being of the human species, that too many humans will blind themselves to the threat until it is too late.

When we combine this uncanny ability on the part of most humans to ignore reality with another human trait, the threat becomes all the more serious. This is the fact that a great many wealthy and powerful people, concerned only about their immediate short-term well being, if given a choice between a few hundred million dollars today or the long-term well-being of the human race, will choose the former, and will face no moral censure because of it.

The problem here is not the fact that some wealthy and powerful people are evil. Among a sufficiently large population, that is to be expected. The problem is not that wealthy and powerful people can commit great evil and get away with it. Sometimes, they are simply too powerful for good people to resist.

But where to wealthy and powerful people get their power?

Hitler would have been nothing but an impoverished criminal without an army of regular people willing to serve him. The same is true of Lenin. This makes me wonder whether the founding of this country was the result of people actually, intelligently binding themselves to an enlightenment morality, or whether we got lucky and, just this once, people blindly flocked to an idea that, quite by chance and not at all by skill, actually had some merit.

The executives at Exxon-Mobile would be greeters at Wal-Mart if not for the fact that there is an army of regular people contributing to their practice of destroying trillions of dollars of future well-being (mostly paid for by the poor people of the world) for the sake of adding millions to their own bank accounts.

Tobacco companies would be impoverished, if not for an army of regular people helping to get one generation after another addicted to their products.

The Bush Administration would not be able to engage in all of the moral crimes that it has committed without a sufficiently large number of regular people willing to support his actions and even to execute them.

Without the willing cooperation of regular people in large numbers to contribute to these movements – ignoring every-day facts such as, “In some cases, too much of a good thing can kill you,” when they are told to do so.

When a sufficiently large percentage of the population is willing to blind themselves so thoroughly, it is not at all unreasonable to worry if that majority could ignore an obvious cliff, that somebody who cared more about current wealth and power than the future well-being of humanity, told them to ignore.

It is a cause for concern. We could sit back and confidently assert that nothing bad could possibly happen - that everything will work out in the end. However, this is not entirely true. In the history of the universe, it is not unreasonable to expect that more than one society will reach our level of technological and social development, and wipe itself out. The question of whether humans will be in that list has not been answered.

The Right to a Speedy Trial

The Supreme Court has provided me with another case to discuss. It has decided to refuse to hear an appeal from 45 Guantanamo Bay prisoners that the government has an obligation to prove its case against them or let them go. The Supreme Court ruled that the prisoners must exhaust all other options before they may appeal to the Supreme Court.

The case is Boumediene v. Bush (06-1195) and al Odah v. U.S. (06-1196).

I want to remind my readers that when I discuss a Supreme Court issue I do so as a mechanism for forcing on socially important moral questions. I do not write about whether a law is constitutional or unconstitutional. I write about whether a particular law is just or unjust. Having made that determination, I leave it to others to determine the correct interpretation of the law and whether that interpretation corresponds more closely to justice or injustice.

Justice is not ‘whatever the law says’. If it was, then the British taxation of the American colonies, slavery, and the Holocaust were all just, since they were all legal. Justice is “that which conforms to good law. To whatever degree a nation’s laws are good laws, to that degree a nation is just. To the degree that a nation has immoral laws – laws that deviate from what the law ought to say, to that degree a nation is unjust.

The question then becomes: Is America a just nation? Or is America an unjust nation?

Morality and the Law

In fact, like all nations, it is a little of both. No nation is perfect. However, let us look into the laws in play in this Supreme Court decision, and decide on which side justice would cast its vote, if justice was actually given a vote.

I argued in a previous post, “The Ten Amendments”, that the Bill of Rights represent moral principles thought to be true even if they were not written into the Constitution. The Bill of Rights did not create a right not to be subject to cruel and unusual punishment, a right against unreasonable searches and seizures, or a right to a speedy trial. Rather, these rights already existed in nature. With the Bill of Rights, the founding fathers said, “This government promises to institute just law by respecting natural human rights; and acknowledge that any laws passed that violate these rights are unjust laws.”

The question to ask here is, “Would it be wrong for the government to do X if the Constitution did not prohibit it?”

Assume that there was no First Amendment. Would it then be moral for the government to punish people who wrote things that the President did not like? Or is it the case that Presidents would still be morally obligated to protect even those who say harsh things about him from physical harm, including harms inflicted by the government?

The way a person would answer this question represents an important distinction. There are those who say that the law determines the difference between right and wrong – that whatever is legal is thereby permissible, and whatever is illegal is immoral. The first group would say that no moral objection can be raised against a President who arrests and tortures those who disagree with him, as long as the law did not prevent it. The second group holds that the President may not arrest and torture those who disagree with him, even when the law says he may do so.

This difference is easier to see if we look at the 13th Amendment. Before the 13th Amendment was passed, slavery was legal in the United States. But was it right?

Anybody who argues that morality is grounded in the law would have to conclude that anywhere slavery is legal, it is also moral – that nobody does anything wrong if they own a slave in a society where it is legally permissible to own slaves. Slavery does not become wrong unless and until slavery becomes illegal.

The alternative view is that that the concepts of just and unjust law appeal to moral standards outside of the law itself. Slavery was wrong before it became illegal, and nothing the government did to make slavery legal could ever make it right.

Anybody arguing for the abolition of slavery when slavery was legal was assuming that there is a moral standard for evaluating the law, and that the law must conform to that outside standard to be just. The Declaration of Independence states this philosophy where it says that humans have rights independent of government and the purpose of government is to protect and secure those rights. The American Revolution itself was fought under the assumption that laws can be held to an independent moral standard, that laws that fail a moral test ought to be abolished, and governments that refuse to abolish them lose their right to govern.

Bush Policies

In spite of this relationship between law and morality, it is interesting to note that whenever the Bush Administration gets into trouble over secret prisons, warrantless searches and seizures, secret trials based on secret evidence, and the like, they always answer by saying, “We did nothing illegal.”

Well, the slave owners in the antebellum South did nothing illegal either.

The ultimate question is not whether these acts are illegal. The question is whether they are moral or just – which is a question that an appeal to law cannot answer. There are a great many things for which we will not be punished, which some loophole in the law or the direct result of bad law makes legal, that no good person would do. “I do not care if it is legal, it is still wrong.”

In an earlier post, “Bush’s New Moral Order,” I suggested that we can test the morality of Bush’s policies by imagining that Iran is appealing to those same policies with respect to the 15 British soldiers that it had captured. To apply this test we will have to imagine that it is now September, 2012. All 15 prisoners are still in Iran. They have appealed to the courts to put them on trial so that they can either be convicted or released. The government is stalling (while it insists on secret trials where the only thing the public gets to hear is that a secret group of Iranians agree that the defendants are guilty).

We must imagine the Iranian Supreme Court rendering a decision that Iranian law views this 5.5 year confinement, and the promise of additional years of confinement, before there is even a trial.

If this happens, would we say that the Iranian legal system is just or unjust? However we would judge them if their court system behaved in this way, we must also judge ourselves.

We should realize that the person demanding that his right to a fair trial be respected is not demanding to be set free. He is demanding that the government prove its case and, if it cannot prove its case, admit that they are doing harm to somebody that may well be an innocent person – a person who is no different than you or I hauled off the street.

“Prove that I deserve this,” is what the prisoner demands.

The criteria for a fair trial are then set. The government must be able to show that it has the evidence to convince a pool of reasonable people that its conclusions follow from their evidence.

This right to a fair and speedy trial is a moral right. This means that the government cannot make it permissible to inflict these harms by passing laws and making it legal. The government has no more power to do this than it has the power to make slavery right by making it legal, or to make any of the violations of the Bill of Rights right simply by appealing the amendment.

Now, if these rights are moral rights, then this means that it is wrong to do this to any human.

To say that slavery is wrong is not to say that no American may be enslaved, and that enslaving anybody else is permissible. If we say that enslaving others who are not Americans is morally permissible, then we are saying that slavery is not really wrong. Indeed, we are saying that enslaving Americans is not really wrong and nothing that Americans can object to on moral grounds – so long as we claim that we may enslave the citizens of other countries.

To say that a fair in speedy trial is a person’s right is not to say that no American can be denied a speedy trial, but against everybody else it is permissible. If we say that denying others a speedy trial is permissible, then we are saying that it is not really wrong to hold people indefinitely. If we say that this is not truly wrong, then it is not truly wrong to confine Americans indefinitely – it is nothing that Americans can object to on moral grounds – so long as we claim that we may deny the citizens of other countries a speedy trial.

That’s the way morality works.

Yet, clearly, the Bush Administration and its supporters and enforcers do not understand these simple moral concepts. Because of that, they continue to make the world worse than it would have otherwise been, by promoting policies that no just and moral person could support.

Atheism and Charity

I have encountered a couple of instances recently where theists were particularly concerned with atheism being a motivation for charitable actions.

One is a challenge from the blog parabiodox for proof that "The Morality of Atheism is superior to that of Christianity."

The other came through private email, which contained the statement,

[I]sn't that a mark in favor of theism, since it encourages the religious to do good things, since they feel inspired by God to be good people?

and

As for Gates and Buffet, they are very generous men. But I don't think they give explicitly because they are atheist or agnostic. Since you seem to be preoccupied with this subject you might have some quote at the ready from Gates about how being an agnostic makes him a generous man.

These comments provide excellent examples of missing the point. The argument is trying to say that because atheism does not imply a moral view, that this is a mark against atheism.

Atheism and a Moral View

I have stated repeatedly that atheism does not imply a moral view. In this regard atheism is like heliocentrism (the view that the sun is at the gravitational center of the solar system). Heliocentrism also does not imply a moral view - it implies nothing about the difference between good and evil. However, we would not argue that it this is a fault with heliocentrism - that it is a reason to reject it. Similarly, atheism's lack of a moral view is not an objection to atheism. Both beliefs are equally compatible with the option that, if you want to study morality, you look someplace else.

We would certainly not argue that the propositions of mathematics or geology should be tossed out because they fail to provide any particular motivation for charity. This is not what mathematics and geology are about. Mathematics and geology effectively say, "If you want to study motivation for charity, you need to study some other subject. We do not cover that topic here."

Atheism is the same way. It is simply a belief that, "The proposition, 'At least one god exists' is (almost certainly) false." This does not tell us anything about what we should or should not do. The study of reasons for and against doing things looks elsewhere.

Holding Charity Hostage

Now, I want to look at the argument more closely. When we do, we see that the argument actually travels in a very small and tight circle. The argument states that belief in God is necessary for a motivation to behave charitably and that it is a fault with atheism that it does not motivate a person to act charitably. This is what makes theists 'better' than atheists - because they have a foundation for charity without which the motivation to give to charity would die.

However, while the argument asserts that belief in God promotes charity, the argument actually uses the value of charity to motivate belief in God. It takes the value of charity as a given - saying that it is a good thing that none of us would want to be without. Then, it holds it hostage, threatening dire harm to charity unless there is belief in God. Like a kidnapper who insists on the payment of a ransom or else the kidnapped child will die, the theist in this argument insists on a payment of 'belief in God' or 'charity' will die.

Unfortunately, for this hostage scenario to work, charity has to first have value - it has to be something that people want to protect. If somebody were to try to extort money from me by, say, threatening to smash some random rock into several pieces, they would scarcely get my attention. They have to choose something that I value. The hostage takers, in this case, have to assume that charity has value. Otherwise, threatening to destroy charity in the absence of belief in God is an empty threat.

Determining What God Values

Ultimately, it is not the case that humans love charity because of God. It's the case that humans love charity and, as a result, assign a love of charity to God. Humans created God and endowed God with the things that humans value - things that humans came to value without any belief in God.

Indeed, religious ethics all work this way. The reason why priests find the things that they value in God's will is because the priest assigned the things that he values to God. He then goes out among the people and says, "Behond, God himself values all of these things that we hold dear." Of course God values these thing - because the priest assigned the things that we hold dear to God.

Of course, the morality written into the Bible is not the morality of the priests living today (except, insofar as the priests pick and choose which biblical passages to obey and how to interpret what they read). The morality written into the Bible represents the values held by priests who have been dead for millenia. The reason the Bible says nothing particularly bad about slavery and held women in such low respect is because the priests at the time were slave owners who demanded that their women "love, honor, and obey".

The problem is that the people who wrote the Bible and who invented the morality written into it were far less than perfect. Many of the things they wrote, in ethics as in science, were siply wrong. As a result, to the degree that we follow their instructions, we would be repeating their mistakes - judging based on their ignorance - and doing things we should not be doing (behaving imorally) as a result.

It is not God who wanted these things, it was people in a position of political and social power who wanted them. And it is simply not the case that everything they wanted and that they claimed God wanted as well was something that they (or God) had a right to want.

Slogans

If I were designing T-Shirts with catch phrases, this is one that I would include in my inventory.

Claiming that the Bible is the final word in morality is like claiming that Hippocrates is the final word in medicine.

It is not the case that everything that Hippocrates wrote about medicine was wrong. It was just primitive and ill informed. Still, he did pretty well for a person from that era. Today, we know much more. As a result, a patient is much better off going to a modern hospital than following the prescriptions of a doctor who insists that anything after Hippocrates that contradicts his teachings are rubbish.

It is also the case that those who wrote the Bible did not get everything wrong. They recognized the wrongness of murder, theft, and lying, even where they still condoned many acts that reasonable people today would recognize as murder and theft (particularly the murder of and theft from those who did not share their religion). However, they got a lot of things wrong, including a failure to mention that slavery and rape were moral crimes, a failure to promote democratic institutions and freedom of speech, and sanctioning the murder of those who belonged to different religions. We know better. As a result, people are better off following the prescriptions of modern moral thinkers than following the prescriptions of an ethicist who insists that civilization reached moral perfection 2000 years ago and everything we have learned since then is rubbish.

So, yes, it is the case that atheism does not imply any set of moral principles. This is because atheism says that morality comes from 'someplace else'. It's the same 'someplace else' that was used when humans invented God and attributed moral worth to him. Only, we have an additional 2000 years of knowledge under our belts - knowledge that rational people would use to correct the bigotries and prejudices that are 2000 years old.

So, one does not have to worry about the fate of charity if people started to doubt the existence of God. If it was not for an independent love of charity, the theist's threat of, "Obey my instructions or sweet charity will get one right between the eyes," would not have any power. Charity is one of the values that humans assign to God because humans value charity, and would continue to do so, even if they ended the practice of assigning its favorite values to a diety. Those values would still exist.