Morality is Not Hard Wired

The Atheist Jew, in an article titled, “For the 50th time, morality is hardwired,” has pointed to an article in the Washington Post that purports to show further evidence that morality is hard-wired.

In this case, researchers asked subjects to imagine donating a sum of money to charity or keeping it for themselves. They reported that the thought of giving money "activated a primitive part of the brain that usually lights up in response to food or sex."

According to the author of the article, this suggests that morality is “basic to the brain, hard-wired and pleasurable.”

Desire utilitarianism holds that all actions, even moral actions, aim to fulfill the desires of the agent. The difference between moral and immoral actions is grounded on whether those actions would fulfill good or bad desires (which are desires that tend to fulfill or thwart other desires respectively). As such, it gives an important role to play for structures that are “basic to the brain”, including states associated with pleasure.

However, hard-wired?

Nothing in the experiment suggests that these traits, insofar as the concept of morality applies to them, are hard-wired (as opposed to soft-wired or programmed through social conditioning). In order to determine this, the authors would have to know how those states came into existence, and that they could not have been altered (redirected, strengthened, or weakened) through social factors.

It is interesting that the researchers would compare what they call moral behavior to eating and sex. They claim that they have discovered something about these three realms that make them similar. However, they also need to explain what makes them different. Why is altruism ‘moral’, but sex and eating typically ‘amoral’ and sometimes ‘immoral’?

If one of their subjects obtained the same pleasure in thinking about keeping the money for herself rather than donating it, what would prevent that from being moral?

In addition, if morality is hard-wired, then how do we account for the link between right and wrong actions, and praise and condemnation? The way that I link them is by saying that morality is concerned with desires that can be altered (created, destroyed, strengthened, weakened) by praise and condemnation. What do the advocates of a hard-wired morality offer as an explanation for this relationship?

I find it interesting that, towards the end of the article, the author investigates the option that knowing how the brain works could open up new moral possibilities. Specifically, it looks at the fact that we may be hard-wired with a preference to help those who are close to us, and be apathetic towards the fate of others who are distant. The suggestion is that this research may provide a way to give us a more general sense of altruism that extends to distant others.

This creates a problem for the thesis that morality is hardwired. If morality is hardwired, then a preference for those who are near to us is moral, and extending altruism to include those who are not next to us would be immoral.

Alternatively, if morality recommends some sort of altruism for those who are not near to us, and this general altruism is not hard-wired, then this shows that morality is not hard-wired.

Either way, the suggestion that we need to alter what is hardwired to do that which is moral creates serious problems for the thesis that morality is hardwired.

Grafman and others are using brain imaging and psychological experiments to study whether the brain has a built-in moral compass.

Before we go about trying to discover whether the brain has a built-in moral compass, let us first give some thought to the type of experiment that would reveal these facts?

If you find a metal rod with a point on one end laying on the ground, this would not be enough to argue that you have found a ‘compass’ of some type. Even if the rod was pointing north as it lay on the ground, this would not justify calling it a compass. Even if you pick it up, let it dangle from a rope, whereby you note that as it spins about it sometimes points north, it would be absurd to argue, “Here is an instant in which the rod is pointing north; therefore, it is a compass.”

In order for something to be a compass it has to reliably point north. This means that you have to know where north is by means of some other source, and you have to show that this alleged compass points in the same direction.

In order to determine if we have a moral compass, we have to know what moral is. In addition, we have to know the answer to this question by some means other than knowing the direction in which the alleged compass is pointing.

What these researchers are doing is comparable to a scientist dangling a metal rod from a string and saying, “This is a compass. It always points north.” Then, when they are asked what ‘north’ is, they answer, “North is whatever direction the rod points to at the time that you ask the question.” In this case, the claim that the compass always points north (or that we have a mental faculty for pointing out what is moral) is empty. It has been made true only by virtue of a very tight question-begging definition.

The more researchers learn, the more it appears the foundation of morality is empathy.

What is it that makes empathy moral?

Why is it not the case that empathy is immoral?

[S]ome wonder whether the very idea of morality is somehow degraded if it turns out to be just another evolutionary tool that nature uses to help species survive and propagate.

First, my objections have nothing to do with the idea that morality is somehow degraded if it turns out to be an evolutionary tool. Somebody might be just as tempted to argue that morality is degraded if it is described as relationships between malleable desires and other desires, which I defend. However, to say that something is ‘degraded’ is to make a value judgment. Making a value judgment requires a theory of value. Theories of value are what this whole debate is about. At best, such an argument begs the question.

Second, morality will never come down to “a tool that nature uses to help species survive and propagate.” This is because it cannot make it past a Euthyphro dilemma for hard-wired morality. If morality is hard-wired, then whatever helps a species to survive (or, more accurately, genes within that species, since genes are the natural units of selection, not species) is moral. If slaughtering those who do not share a particular gene helps that gene to survive, then reducing morality to what helps genes survive would argue for that this slaughter is morally justified, perhaps even obligatory.

When I read articles such as this, I call to mind an image of a group of scientists huddled around a table studying a grapefruit. Yet, when I listen to them speak, they keep talking about grapes. As they study their grapefruit, they say things like, “Grapes are about six inches in diameter,” and “Grapes grow individually on grape trees”.

I think that they are mistaken. However, I am not going to say, "By studying grapes you will lose the mystery and awe that we should hold towards grapes."

I’m going to say something like, “Um . . . doc . . . you know that round fruit you are studying? Well, I hate to tell you this, but that’s not a grape. That’s a grapefruit. Grapes are . . . well . . . something a bit different from what you are looking at.”

Or, in this case, “Um . . . doc . . . you know those basic brain states that you are studying? Well, I hate to tell you this, but that’s not morality. Those are desires. Morality is . . . well . . . something a bit different from what you’re looking at.”

[One] implication is that society might have to rethink how it judges immoral people.

The same objection applies here. This time, imagine a group of scientists studying a grapefruit, discovering that grapefruits are about 6 inches in diameter and grow individually on trees, telling us, “Society might have to rethink what it believes about grapes.”

How about, “You need to rethink the idea that what you are studying are grapes. If you were actually studying grapes, then you would discover that we do not have to rethink our beliefs about grapes at all – or very little.”

In fact, this claim suggests that these scientists are engaging in a bit of cherry-picking. They look at the grapefruit, notice the things that the grapefruit have in common with grapes. After all, they are both fruits. They ignore the differences between grapefruits and grapes. Then they proclaim, “Look at what we have discovered about grapes!” When others point out the differences between what they are studying and the common concept of ‘grape’, instead of making a mistake, these researchers claim, “This is all your fault. Obviously, you do not understand grapes as well as you thought you did.”

In another experiment . . . patients with damage to an area of the brain known as the ventromedial prefontal cortex lack the ability to feel their way to moral answers. When confronted with moral dilemmas, the brain-damaged patients coldly came up with "ends-justifies-the-means" answers.

And by what moral theory do you hold that ends do not justify the means?

Maybe ends do justify the means, and this ‘brain damage’ that you are studying unlocks a natural barrier that prevents people from doing that which is right. Maybe we evolved a basic disposition towards immorality – towards ‘feelings’ that get in the way of our making sound means-ends moral calculations.

How do you researchers know that this is not the better explanation?

Researchers cannot do this without having an independent standard for determining right from wrong. Do they want to trust instinct and natural inclinations? If they did this, then they would end up defending the morality of whatever prejudices exist in a society at the time.

Among a society of slave-owners, they would be able to show how the disposition to enslave others was wired into the brain – because, certainly, there is something going on in the brain of those who condone slavery.

In a racist society they would be able to look into the brain and see that there is something going on in the brain whenever people make racist judgments, and from this be able to conclude how the morality of racism was wired into the brain.

In a society where women are treated as property, there is almost certainly some brain state that can be measured associated with treating women as property, allowing researchers using this method to conclude that the morality of treating women as property is wired into the brain.

If we take the assumptions of those who claim to have found morality wired into the brain to their logical conclusions, these would be the types of conclusions that these researchers would end up defending.

Al Gore: The Assault on Reason

It appears that Al Gore does not fully appreciate people’s ability to believe what they want to believe in the face of contradictory evidence.

In his new book, “The Assault on Reason,” Gore suggests that members of the Bush Administration was repeatedly presented with evidence that Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction and that there was no evidence that he was involved in the 9/11 attacks. On the basis of having been presented with evidence, Gore asserts that the Bush Administration was aware of these facts and that it intentionally deceived the public about what it knew.

More generally, Gore writes his book using the assumption that people have a fundamental ability to reason. However, in order to reason correctly, people need true premises – that is to say, they need accurate information. The ‘assault on reason’ that Gore write about is an assault on the institutions for providing the people with true premises (facts).

This assault on reason comes from corporate interests with the capacity to profit by misinforming the American people. Those same interests have control of the media through which they can promulgate their misinformation. Plus, they have purchased and put into place a administration that endorses the same policies of advancement through campaigns of misinformation and misdirection.

It is difficult to fix a problem if we do not accurately diagnose it to start with. I would like to suggest that the “assault on reason” is not limited to a failure to provide the people with facts. It also involves an inability to deal with those facts reasonably.

I would like to offer the Creation Museum that opened earlier this week in Kentucky as Exhibit A. This museum illustrates how easy it is for people to believe the most absurd things, and to continue to believe then in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. The best explanation for the observation that the Creation Museum has been built is not one that involves a conspiracy by people who seek to profit through deceiving the public. The best explanation is that a lot of people lack the fundamental ability to reason – even with complete access to all of the relevant facts.

[Note: I really enjoy this whole scientific method thing. Observation. Theory. Prediction. Test the prediction. Prediction fails. Offer an new theory or make modifications to the existing theory. I think people ought to use it more often.]

For example, one of the events that Gore wrote about was a request the Bush Administration sent to the intelligence community to find evidence linking Saddam Hussein to the attack on 9/11. When the report came in that there was no evidence of such a link and reason to believe that Hussein represented just the type of secular Arab government that the theocratic Al Queida despised, the Administration sent the report back with the comment, “Wrong answer.”

Gore seeks to interpret this as indicating that there was a group of people in the Bush Administration that did not care about the fact of the matter as to whether Hussein’s involvement with 9/11 was true or false. They wanted to present it as being true even while they knew it to be false, and needed a report that fit their policy.

I would like to suggest a different model for interpreting these events. To see how this model works, imagine the organizers and financiers of the Creation Museum going to the National Academy of Sciences and saying, “We want a report showing that there were dinosaurs on the Arc.” The National Academy sends back a report that says that the dinosaurs died off 65,000,000 years ago and could not possibly be on the Arc, if there was an Arc, which itself is a dubious proposition. The Creation Museum then hands back the report saying, “Wrong answer.”

The comment in the case of the Creation Museum does not mean, “Okay, I know that the evidence doesn’t support my position. However, I want you to come back with a report that does support my position because I want to use it to mislead others.” In this case, “Wrong answer” means, “I have a different and far more reliable source of information. If your report contradicts my more reliable source then this proves that you have not done a good job preparing your report. Get it right.”

The question is: Which view best explains and predicts the Bush Administration’s behavior.

It may be difficult to believe that people can be so deaf to such strong evidence that contradicts their views. However, the presence of the Creation Museum itself stands as clear testimony to the possibility.

Gore also reported that members of the intelligence community felt intimidated not to turn in information that the Administration did not want to hear. People who did so felt that their career – their chance for advancement – was put at risk. Gore explains these observations by suggesting that an administration willing to mislead the public to promote a sinister agenda was willing to intimidate anybody who said anything that they did not want to reach the public.

My alternative explanation suggests a different attitude. “We know that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction and was tied to the 9/11 attacks. We know this from a higher and more reliable source (sometimes described as ‘Bush’s Gut’ though often given additional weight by calling it the voice of God or Jesus). If you are too incompetent to find the links that we know are there, then you have proved that you are not a very good agent. Clearly, we are not in the habit of promoting incompetent agents such as yourself.”

If it becomes too difficult to believe that a large number of agents are too incompetent to find the links, the next step is to accuse them of belong to some sort of conspiracy that is not actually concerned with defending America and Americans from attack. Since the Administration ‘knows’ about the weapons of mass destruction and the ties to Al Qaeda, one can only conclude that people who are hiding the information have hidden sympathies for the terrorists and, perhaps, want them to succeed. At best, those who fail to find the link are too lazy to concern themselves with the implications (in the form of a mushroom cloud) of their failure.

Again, we see this type of thinking from people like those who constructed the Creation Museum. Scientists who do not come back with evidence of dinosaurs on the Arc or poor scientists. Or, if it is too difficult to believe that so many scientists could be so poor at their job, then they are involved in a liberal alliance working against God by pushing an atheist agenda. As agents of the dark side, they are intentionally trying to bury or distort evidence that does not serve their political ends.

There is another pair of options to mention supporting the thesis that the problem rests in a failure to reason. The campaigns to bury the facts have buried them from everybody equally. However, we clearly see that the tendency to believe that which is unreasonable to believe affects the same people. Those who fail to reach the reasonable conclusions regarding evolution and the age of the earth are the same people who fail to reach reasonable conclusions regarding global warming, which are the same people who continue to believe that Hussein was responsible for 9/11 and had weapons of mass destruction.

The same inability to reason infects all three issues. Those who cannot deal rationally with the evidence on one issue, it seems, also cannot deal rationally with the evidence on the others.

I will offer a cautionary remark. At this point, I am at risk of cherry-picking my own data. I may well have selected these three examples because it supported my thesis, and simply tossed out (or failed to consider) examples that would have contradicted my thesis. So, there is a weakness on this point.

Still, the human capacity to draw absurd conclusions in the face of clear public evidence to the contrary is an observed fact. A solution that says that all we need is to present people with the facts, and they will certainly draw the most reasonable conclusion, is idealistic at best.

Notoriety

It appears that the Wikipedia people want to delete the newly created site on Desire Utilitarianism. The reason is because it is not notorious enough. There are not enough people talking about it to give it the type of ‘star power’ that makes it worthy of a Wikipedia entry.

The alternative view, used by those who are defending the page, is that it should be included because the theory is well-developed and defensible.

One implication that I would like to note is that, if the criteria for including the page is notoriety, then I would correct the default by engaging in some sort of publicity stunt that would get me and the ideas that I present into the news. Whereas if the criterion for including the page is the quality of the position and the arguments offered in its defense I would correct the default by seeking to do a better job developing the theory.

However, I did not bring this up to protest about how I am being unfairly treated, that Wikipedia is seeking to impose censorship on ideas that they consider unworthy of including, or any other nonsense. I object to the habit that some people have of stomping their feet and crying, “I’m being oppressed!” simply because others did not put them on a pedestal.

The reason that I bring this up is to discuss a topic that has been rattling around in my skull for the past couple of decades which I do not know how to resolve – the issue of marketing.

Package and Product

I want to make sure that I fit in here a note that I am humbled and honored by those who have made an effort to put this page on Wikipedia. They have put a surprising amount of effort into defending their actions. In a sense, I am concerned that I may not have done what I should to be worthy of these efforts, by giving them what it would have taken to make their work easier.

Seriously, take a look at this site. Take a look at the length of my posts and the way that I write. It should be obvious that, among my various desires and aversions, that I do not have a particularly strong interest in packaging. I create essays, and I throw them up onto a rather traditional page, then I start working on the next article.

However, it is packaging that sells product. At least, it is an extremely important factor.

Those who created the Creation Museum understood this fact. Much of the harm that the Museum and those who built it will have is due to the fact that they have put nonsense in a pretty package, and packaging will sell the idea.

All major religions use the principle that the packaging sells the product, whether they acknowledge it or not. The package comes in the form of religious architecture, art, music, and ceremonies.

Moral Issues

The intellectual part of my brain (regarding beliefs) is well aware of the importance of packaging. I am not so foolish that I think that, “If you build it, they will come,” is a good business plan.

At the same time, affective part of my brain (regarding desires) does not care about these facts. In fact, I have an aversion to using packaging to sell my product. Again, look around at this web site. Isn’t it obvious?

I reject the very practice of using packaging to sell an idea. “Proposition P was presented to me in a pretty package; therefore, P is true.” This is nonsense. However, this nonsense is a fact about how the real world works. Could I, in good conscience, use a method of selling product that I find not only distasteful but morally objectionable? I want to present my arguments, and have people accept or reject my position on those standards.

Wikipedia’s concern with notoriety, however, exposes a flip side of this coin. Just as there are people who think, “The proposition that P was presented to me in a pretty packages; therefore, P is true,” there are people who think, “Proposition P was presented to me in an ugly passage, so P is false.” If I know that people are going to do this, then is there not some principle of morality, or at least of prudence, to put that product in a package that is at least good enough to get past the doorman?

Quality of Content

Of course, when it comes to selling my own product, one of the things that I constantly worry about is whether it is worth buying.

This is another problem that I have with trying to sell product by putting it in a better package. What if it is not good enough to buy? I have seen far too many people sell ideas that are simply too stupid to be worth a presentation – such as the Creation Museum. I certainly have no interest in taking people such as those as my role model.

I have mentioned in earlier posts that, to deal with the issue of quality, the best option that I see is to simply put my ideas out into the public and to see if anybody raises objections to them. However, in doing this, I want people to accept or reject the ideas that I propose based on the quality of the defense that I can put up. I do not want them accepting the position on the basis of a pretty package. Then again, I do not want then ignoring the position on the basis of an ugly package.

Yes, I think that the positions that I defend are correct – though I am more confident of some than of others. However, a decent respect for others as thinking beings is not to assume that I am correct and use whatever methods will ‘work’ to convince others to accept what I claim. A decent respect for others requires limiting myself to presenting my reasons, and letting those with reasons against my view a chance to speak to those reasons.

Dividends

Quite often, I think to myself, “Alonzo, it is time for you to start to put some effort into marketing your ideas. Just writing them up and putting them on a web site is not going to do you any good.”

After all, what I would really like to be doing with my time is working on these projects full-time. I could easily spend a day, where I get up and start work at 4:30 in the morning, and turn my laptop off and go to sleep at midnight, working on the type of subjects that I write about here. I am envious that some people get to do this. However, I notice that the job tends to go more to people who are showmen first, more interested in ratings than in the accuracy and sensibility of what they say.

The Creation Museum can collect $27 million for nonsense. One would think that sense could generate a bit more income.

With these particular concerns, I was actually saddened to read that one concern being voiced in favor of deleting the entry on desire utilitarianism is because I have focused my attention on the quality of my arguments rather than the quality of my marketing.

Even now, I call to mind (once again) a list of things that I could do to market my ideas better. And I simply do not wish to do so.

Yet, it costs me.

Doug Giles: Atheist Theft of Christian Morality

Doug Giles has an article in TownHall.com called, “Hey Atheists . . . Get Your Own Moral Code,” where he asserts that atheists borrow their morality from Christianity. Of course, atheists cannot have their own morality – morality comes from God and atheists have no God. So, the only option left is to borrow somebody else’s.

Actually, Giles gets the cart before the horse in this case. Every moral code – including the moral principles written into the Bible – were invented by humans. Some humans saw fit to assign their moral beliefs to a God as a way of saying, “It’s not me saying this – I can understand why you would not want to listen to me. It’s God saying this, and God will visit great suffering upon you if you should dare disobey me . . . I mean . . . him . . . if you disobey him.”

We can get a hint that religious ethics were invented by humans and assigned to God by their content.

When Moses came down from the mountain with the 10 Commandments, he found the people he had left worshipping a golden calf, so he slaughtered 3,000 of them. Of course he said that their sin was not following God. However, it seems that a benevolent God could think of something better than a slaughter to get the point across. On the other hand, a self-important mortal without divine powers angry at people who were serving some other so-called priest might face a more limited set of options.

Killing a child who talks back to his parents; some ancient scribe must have been particularly angry at his child that day. In fact, I can easily an abusive parent – a pillar of the community, no doubt – losing his temper and killing his child, wanting some way to keep the villagers from turning against him. So, he tells them, “God said that I can kill my child. In fact, rather than condemn me, God said that I should be able to bring my child before you and you should kill him.”

This is not to say that everything in the Bible is mistaken. If, as I have written, morality is a rational attempt to promote good desires and inhibit bad desires, it would be quite surprising if people 2,000 years ago got everything wrong.

In the realm of physics, this is not the case. The ancient Greeks and Romans knew that the Earth was round and that things were made up of atoms. Of course, they got the details wrong. However, they went surprisingly far with what they had.

Similarly, it is not unreasonable to hold that ancient cultures could also recognize that they would be better off if others simply told the truth – so they invented a commandment against bearing false witness, and claimed that this was one of the rules that came from God. They certainly did not want their neighbors to be sneaking into their house and killing them – or those they cared about – so they promulgated a moral prescription against killing.

Of course, ancient writers would also realize that they needed a way to make sure that people obeyed these rules, even when they could not get caught. One simple solution is to tell them, “Even if you kill me while I am alone and my back is turned, God sees all, and will make sure that you are punished in the afterlife.”

Actually, I do not believe that there was a great historical conspiracy by a bunch of atheists to promulgate a god belief that the conspirators knew to be false. The people who promulgated this belief were victims of their own ignorance as well. Yet, this does not change the fact that religion (and religious morality) is invented, and that the inventions that showed the greatest promise would be those that caught on. Along with some twisting and manipulating by those with power to help make sure that they stayed in power.

The Enlightenment

The Enlightenment, from which we got the principles written into our Declaration of Independence and Constitution, was perhaps the greatest borrowing of all time. In the 17th and early part of the 18th centuries, philosophers tried to do to morality what they had done to physics and chemistry – tried to discover a set of ‘natural laws’ without looking at scripture.

John Locke, for example, did not quote scripture when he derived his two Treatise on Civil Government. He turned to reason – imaging humans in a ‘state of nature’, and looking for the moral laws that would govern people in such a state. He showed that one can take moral philosophy a significant distance without looking to scripture, coming up with a set of principles that made far more sense than anything the Church had been saying for countless centuries.

Locke wrote, for example, that if we look at man in a 'state of nature', we can see them coming together. However, reason finds no clear and unambiguous mark that identifies one as 'he who has a right to rule' and another as 'he who has a duty to obey'. Without such a mark, reason tells us that all people in a state of nature are morally and politically equal. When they come together and form a civil government it derives its power from the consent of the governed, not from some natural right to rule for some and natural duty to obey for others.

Locke was a religious man, but his morality and his methods were firmly grounded on enlightenment principles of reason over faith. When he was done, he, and other theists, took those conclusions and assigned them to God.

Another moral system, invented by humans, and assigned to God.

Actually, if the dispute over whether moral truths that can be known by studying the real world were put there by God or emerged through natural process, I would have a different response. This would be like a group of people in the grips of a famine spending the time they should be spending in harvesting food debating whether food comes from God or evolution. Debate this in your spare time as you wish. However, regardless of how they got here, let’s at least make sure we harvest enough to survive.

Giles, however, has no interest in the possibilities of theists and atheists deriving the same moral principles by reason – the same way that we derive the same periodic table of elements by reason, wondering only where it came from, but not what it says. He has so much hatred that he needs to see a difference – a condescending and denigrating difference – between their moral views.

Slavery

Another significant place where religious ethics borrowed from an outside source is on the issue of slavery. Many abolitionists were religious. However, they did not find their arguments against slavery in the Bible. If those arguments were in the Bible, then where had they been hiding for the previous 2,000 years? Why is it that the Christians living in the Roman Empire never heard that slavery was wrong?

In fact, those who defended slavery were able to find substantial support for their position in scripture. If God was against slavery, then why were there so many passages in the Bible where God commanded people to take slaves? Why were there passages on the proper care and feeding of slaves? Why instead of a commandment that says, “You should not own another human as if he were cattle,” there was a commandment that said that, “You should not even have your slaves do work on the Sabbath?”

The argument for the abolition of slavery comes from the same root as the argument for government from the consent of the governed - that reason does not see in nature any natural and unambiguous mark identifying one person as a right to rule and another the duty to obey. It does not matter that scripture tells us of such a right, we find no such mark in nature.

Once again, there was no appeal to scripture in this argument. It was an appeal to reason alone. Once reason showed the immorality of slavery, theists took the lessons of reason and assigned them to God.

Giles then comes along and asks, “Why do atheists seem to follow Christian morality?”

The answer is, “Because what passes for Christian morality these days is non-scripture based morality adopted because of its reasonableness and then assigned to God.

The Future

People are going to continue to adopt secular moral principles. The reason they will do so because people who look at morality through the light of reason are finding real-world solutions to real-world problems. People will see the way these principles will make their lives better, and will adopt them.

Those who do not wish to give up their religion – who also want to think of an afterlife and a God – will continue to mix the two. They will take reason-based morality and continue to assign it to God, ignoring whatever elements of scripture contradict morality and asserting that those fragments of truth found in the Bible are proof that morality came from God.

In short, people such as Giles are like the apprentice, stealing the masterpiece of a much more skilled student, holding it out in public, and saying, “Look what I did!” Not only does he fraudulently claim to be a master craftsman, but he claims himself to be the moral superior of those he robs from as well.

Rally for Reason

A $27 million Creation Museum opens Monday in Boone County, Kentucky, and a group calling itself “Rally for Reason” will be there to . . . well . . . to rally for reason, I suppose.

In reading about the museum and the rally for reason, I have noticed a few interesting topics of discussion.

For example, should there be such a demonstration at all?

Claim against: a demonstration against such a museum simply gives it legitimacy.

Okay, imagine that you are on trial for a crime you did not commit. The prosecution stands up and spends the day presenting the evidence against you. This includes, of course, the eye-witness testimony of people who have claimed to have seen you at the scene of the crime committing the act, circumstantial evidence, and physical evidence misinterpreted to fit the prosecutor’s theory that you are guilty.

After this is done, your defense attorney stands up and says, “The defense rests, your honor. For me to stand here and refute everything the prosecutor has just put before you would simply give it an air of legitimacy that it does not deserve.”

What do you think? Good strategy?

If that’s such a good strategy, then I am surprised that we do not see more of it in today’s court rooms.

The fact is, the position that this rally is against already has legitimacy. Furthermore, the cost of the museum alone is going to give the presentation an air of legitimacy. Particularly in the mind of a young child, everything in the museum is going to seem real. The fact that they are seeing it in the context of trusted parents and other authority figures is going to give it a cloak of legitimacy that will transcend resent far into the future – quite possibly for the rest of that child’s life.

Opening day is the day in which the Museum will get the most publicity. Opening day is the day in which it is important that those reporting on the event note, even if in passing, “Plus there were these people protesting that the Museum does not give an accurate account of the scientific findings.”

In standing in opposition to the Creation Museum and what its founders are trying to accomplish, there are two stands that one could take.

One form of objection is to argue the factual claims. “The Creation Museum says X. We say not-X. Here is the scientific evidence for not-X.” This debate has been going on for as long as I can remember, and does not seem to be going anywhere. It is time, I think, for those who use this strategy to ask why, and to ask if there is something that they can do differently that would be more effective.

The other form of objection (which is not independent of the first, but which builds upon it) is to point out the moral faults of those who organized this project, and those who financed it.

When I was in high school, and I decided that when I died I wished to leave the world better than it would have otherwise been, I knew that my first goal was to find out what ‘better’ was. I was surrounded by people who claimed to know, even though they were adamantly opposed by people who were just as certain that they were wrong. I had made my oath during an American History class, where we were discussing the Civil War. In that war, 250,000 Southern soldiers died, though not before killing 350,000 northerners, on the certainty that they were right.

The first of the moral rules that I yielded to when I started my project was the duty to intellectual responsibility. If I was going to advocate policies that affected the lives, health, and well-being of real people, then I had an obligation to give those policies close scrutiny.

I spent 12 years in college studying different aspects of value theory, trying to make sure that I got the facts right. I felt that this was necessary before I was even qualified to write a blog such as this one.

If only the organizers and financers of the Creation Museum had felt anything like intellectual responsibility – enough to consult experts in the field and to say, “It is my moral responsibility to make sure that I get the facts right. So, tell me, have I met my moral responsibility in this case?”

The answer, of course, is not only, “No,” but, “Hell no!”

Of course, they claim to have consulted their own experts. However, their view of ‘experts’ is quite at odds with the concept of intellectual responsibility. In other words, it is not the view of ‘experts’ that a person would adopt if that person wanted to make sure that he did no harm to innocent people. Their view of ‘expert’ is like the view of a company wanting to poor a substance into the ground water that risked making thousands of people sick and killing some.

This is a view that says, “Canvass everybody in the field and, if you can find even one who says that the chemicals we dump into the soil are harmless, then that is the one we will listen to. We will ignore everybody else.”

This is, of course, the view of ‘expert’ drawn by somebody who sees nothing wrong with taking the lives of innocent people, as long as it puts money in his pocket to do so.

The organizers and financiers of the Creation Museum are, in fact, demonstrating a similar lack of concern with who lives and who dies. Except, they will cause their deaths, not by polluting the groundwater, but by polluting minds, making people less able to understand – thus, less able to explain and predict – a real world that is notorious for its ability to kill people without a second thought.

The people that this Creation Museum target for condemnation are people who keep over 6 billion people fed, and who have found cures for whole sets of diseases that would otherwise have taken the lives of even those who financed the Museum. It is, indeed, quite hypocritical of these people who condemn not only science but scientists – asserting that they are the root of all evil in this country. While, at the same time, they use what these scientists have learned to extend their own lives and preserve their own health.

They would show more sincerity and integrity if, while they lay on the operating table, before they go under the knife, they tell the doctor what they think of the ‘scientific method’ and the reliability of the knowledge this method makes available.

The scientific community could do much better if it had a larger pool of minds to draw from for making future scientists. They would also do much better of those who did not go into science, but who went into teaching, or went into politics, understood the real world well enough to teach others how it worked and to use that knowledge in making real-world decisions. However, scientists have to draw their raw material from a resource that has been polluted by individuals seeped in their own ignorance and superstition.

So, as a matter of fact, more people will die, and more people will suffer the debilitating effects of disease, because polluted minds are not able to make sound policy.

At this point I think it is important to add, in case somebody never caught my earlier posts, that there is no moral sense to be made in turning somebody away from nonsense to sense by use of legal prohibitions in believing nonsense. Rather, a decent respect to human dignity requires that we limit ourselves to gentler forms of persuasion. Accordingly, those who built the Museum certainly had a right to do so, since the money came from their own pockets.

Moral philosophers have long recognized the difference between liberty and license. Liberty does not mean, “Whatever I do cannot be wrong.” Liberty means, “The wrong that I do may only be met by private censure, and not by public law.” The right to freedom of speech includes the right to say, “You’re wrong. Not only are you wrong, but you are being morally reckless. You are showing a disregard for the well-being of others that would shame any decent person.”

That is the case with those who have organized and financed this Creation Museum.

It is one thing to tell the public that these people are wrong. That is only a part of the message. The other part is to make an example of them – to let the people know, “These people are shamefully wrong, and no decent person would ever want to be like them.”

Neil DeGrasse Tyson: Meaning

In Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s second presentation at Beyond Belief 2006, he spoke about the process of assigning meaning to things.

He spoke specifically about his attitude when he is on a mountain top with a telescope attempting to discover what is going on at the center of the universe. He attempted to express a particular sense of awe and wonder at capturing a photon that left the region around the center of the universe 30,000 years ago, travelled all this distance past stars and through interstellar dust clouds, to crash into his digital detector carrying information about the center of the universe 30,000 years ago.

As it turns out, Tyson picked something that is particularly easy for me to relate to. When I was young, one of my first interests was astronomy. I bought myself a telescope, and I read avidly about the subject. I remember seeing a map of the galaxy that showed what we knew then of the spiral arms. Only, the region towards the center of the Milky Way was not mapped, because our techniques did not allow us to gain information from that direction.

So I assumed, with sadness, that I would not get to see what the center of our Milky Way looked like.

I was wrong. Scientists have since looked at wavelengths of radiation that can make it through the dust and clouds from the center of the Milky Way. Just within this last year I have seen the images that were created, and computer simulations created out of that data. It turns out that there is a black hole with 3 million times the mass of our sun, and stars that orbit it like comets orbit our sun, coming in close, then zipping back out. Whole suns, acting like comets.

Actually, these time-lapse simulations tell me what I really wanted to know about the center of the Milky Way. Though I would definitely like the opportunity to look on it with my own eyes, my real interest was in knowing what was happening, which the simulations tell me far more accurately than I could ever learn from direct observation.

Tyson wants somebody to attach electrodes to his head (or do similar experiments) to determine if the sense that he gets when he marvels at the fact of his studying the center of the universe is anything like a religious experience. If it is, he says, then this is something that he, as an educator, can offer people.

However, Tyson’s experience will have one important quality that will separate it from any religious experience. Tyson’s experience relates to real-world events. It is an appreciation of something that is actually happening – a part of the real world.

In earlier posts, I have compared the so-called ‘meaning’ that a person gets from religion to The Matrix or some sort of experience machine. It is like the person who is tremendously proud of himself as he (imagines himself) doing great things in providing the starving and thirsty people of a remote village with clean water and nourishing food. Only, the ‘good’ this person does is purely illusionary. There is no village. There are no villages. There is no food or water. The agent is simply laying in a cot with a machine hooked up to his head making him believe he is providing villagers with food and water.

Yet, our agent refuses to be woken up from this illusion because, he claims, it gives his life meaning. He would see himself and his life as a waste if he were doing something other than providing villagers with clean water and nourishing food.

But you are NOT providing anybody with clean water and nourishing food! You are laying in a cot doing absolutely nothing, merely imagining yourself providing villagers with clean water and nourishing food.

And so no person serves God. “You are only imagining yourself to be serving God when, in fact, you are promoting ancient myths and superstitions that, for the most part, are not even good for the people you convince to accept them. This has the moral quality of warning a group of thirsty people to stay away from clean drinking water to please God, or to force starving people to sacrifice their food at a religious ceremony.”

Even here, we may find some who report to be providing food and medicine to the poor for religious reasons. However, we can divide these up into two groups, depending on how they answer one simple question.

“If there was no God, would you still continue to feed the hungry and cure the sick?”

If the person says, “No. If there is no God then everything is worthless. The only reason that I feed the hungry is because God wants me to – so, if there is no God, then I have no reason to feed the hungry.”

People such as this live a meaningless existence. If they are alive, aiding the poor and the sick, then this is a mere accident. What they truly want is something that they can never achieve in the real world. What they have the capacity to achieve in the real world is something that they do not care about.

Others might answer, “Yes. Even if no God exists, I would still feed the hungry and cure the sick, because . . . well, because the sick and the hungry are suffering.”

These people can leave a meaningful life, even though they claim to be serving God. This is because something that they really want – to feed the hungry and cure the sick – is something that they can accomplish in the real world. They are never going to get the God thing they always wanted. The only potential problem is if their religious beliefs prevent them from effectively feeding the hungry and curing the sick. If their religion bans the eating of foods that the hungry are in need of, or prohibits medical procedures that the sick need, then, even here, the religion gets in the way of a meaningful life more than it contributes to such a life.

Specifically, the person who lives a truly meaningful life is somebody who does something real with his life. The person who spends his life plugged into a fiction – to whatever degree his life depends on the fiction – is somebody whose life is wasted.

I am discouraged, to some extent, when I hear atheists answer the challenge to provide meaning to one’s life by being defensive. “We atheists find meaning in life. Honest we do. Over here. I’ll show you. Here, we have meaning. See? Can’t you see how meaningful this life is?”

Of course, to the person whose ‘meaning’ is locked into having some sort of relationship with God the answer is, ‘No.’ They will not see meaning in such things unless it is something that they already care about.

I would argue that a far more meaningful response (pardon the pun) is to point out how worthless a life is if it is spent hooked up to a lie. To spend a person’s one and only life hooked up to a lie, without getting a chance to do anything real, truly is a wasted life. Indeed, it is about the only way that a life can truly be wasted.

Of course, it is possible for a theist to still find value in things that are real. However, it is possible to find value in real things as well. So, between these two people, there is not much of a difference in their capacity to have a meaningful life. Those who have truly wasted the one and only life they will ever have are those who spent that life dedicated to a lie and, in particular, a lie that causes harm to others.

Unless you are talking about something real, it does not even make sense to start talking about something being meaningful.

VS Ramachandran: Cognitive Illusions

We are in the final hour of Beyond Belief 2006, which has been the subject of my weekend posts for the last four months. The conference is starting to wrap up, so when Ramachandran gets up to give his second presentation of the conference, it was with the intention of responding to the claims others had made that he thinks he has an important response to.

In Ramachandran’s first presentation, which I discussed in “Brain States” he spoke about optical illusions – about how the brain is hard wired so as to make certain mistakes in perception. These mistakes are caused by using a trait that works particularly well in the world we typically live in, and using them to interpret events in a modified representation of that world. For example, those traits allow us to accurately perceive three-dimensional objects, but to make mistakes when perceiving two-dimensional representations of those same objects.

This had similarities to the topic of a presentation by Mahzarin Banaji, which I discussed in, “Bugs of the Mind”, she talked about prejudice, on how experience can cause us to form a habit of categorizing things in a particular way.

Ramachandran pointed out that these associations are not necessarily irrational. He asserts that our brain is constantly looking to form associations. If, as a matter of experience, we find women often associated with cooking, then our brain is going to get into the habit of associating women with cooking.

This is true in the same way that, if we listen to a Top 40 radio station during a particular summer job, and end up listening to a particular set of songs that was popular at the time, we will continue to associate that song with memories of that job long into the future. There is no necessary, logical relationship between those songs and that job. However, the association will be easy. Just as there is no necessary, logical relationship between cooking and women. However, repeated exposure to this relationship will make it easy for that relationship to come to mind.

The mistake we make is when we take these relationships as moral principles – as the way things should be. For example, we get used to associating women with cooking, so we draw the conclusion that cooking should be done by women, and then act so as to push women into that role. This is as foolish as using a relationship between a song and a particular job to conclude that one should be performing that job whenever one listens to that song.

However, Ramachandran went on to discuss other cognitive mistakes that we make in a context that made it clear that they can be and often are prejudicial (harmful) to others. For example, he recounted a story in which he and a friend were walking when they noticed a black man behind them. Shortly thereafter they found themselves walking faster (out of fear).

This started a discussion (continued in the question and answer session after Ramachandran’s presentation) about how the brain processes statistical information.

An unidentified member of the audience pointed out that even if black men are more likely to mug people than Caucasian men, since there are more Caucasians than blacks, one is still more likely to be mugged by a Caucasian man than a black man.

Another unidentified member of the audience pointed out that for every incidence of being followed by a black man that resulted in a mugging, there are billions of incidences of being followed by a black man that did not result in a mugging. At that moment there were probably countless threats that were statistically more likely than being mugged (such as tripping on the sidewalk) that the pair were irrationally perceiving as less significant than the threat of being mugged.

The fact is, the human brain is not very good at processing statistical information and making rational choices. For example, I am currently reading Al Gore’s new book The Assault on Reason. He identified research that showed that people are willing to pay more for insurance against terrorism than they are for insurance against all causes of harm. This is in spite of the fact that ‘insurance against all causes of harm’ would cover terrorism.

The word ‘terrorism’ generates a fear response which exaggerates the risk of harm in the minds of many people, causing them to irrationally evaluate the risk of harm from terrorism as greater than the risk of harm from all causes.

President Bush has bragged that he thinks with his gut. He has also spoken as if he thinks that his ‘gut’ is transmitting messages from Jesus, guiding him as to the correct course of action. What is happening in fact is that he is ‘listening’ to these cognitive illusions, and giving these cognitive illusions the status of unshakable truth, against which he then evaluates the evidence.

In the case of the agent buying a ticket above, somebody who thinks like Bush would take the fear generated by the word ‘terrorism’ to conclude that the risk of terrorism is greater than the risk of harm from all causes (including terrorism). This would be taken as a message from God that he then needs to focus his efforts on protecting the country from terrorism – which is greater than his need to protect the country from harm from all causes (including terrorism). Any suggestion that this course of action is irrational would then be dismissed, since it conflicts with God’s word.

Such is the case when we have leaders who think with their gut.

Now, there are cases where it is appropriate to think with one’s gut. We evolved these dispositions for a reason. When we face a sudden crisis that demands immediate action, we simply do not have time to think everything through rationally. We must act immediately. In these cases, a quick ‘rule of thumb’ which is fast but sometimes wrong is much better than reasoned deliberation which is much slower though less likely to be wrong.

The ‘cognitive illusions’ that Ramachandran is talking about come about by taking these rules of thumb meant for emergency situations and assumes that their conclusions are more reliable than the conclusions of deliberation and reason. This is as much of a mistake as taking the input from an optical sense designed to work in a 3D universe and applies it to a 2D picture.

This explains many of the mistakes that Bush has made in his tenure as President. Unfortunately, we are living under a President who is too stupid to even comprehend these facts – let alone allow them into his decision making. He simply cannot understand how or why a reasoned conclusion can contradict a gut feeling and still be right. So, unless reason actually has the power to change his gut feeling, he will not see reason to change his mind on a policy.

Yet, reason does not have this power.

We have seen, with optical illusions, that even when an agent knows that this is an illusion, he does not suddenly ‘perceive’ the object correctly. He still sees the illusion. The best that reason gives him the power to do is to say, “In these types of circumstances, I know that I cannot trust what I see. These are cases where I need to trust reason even more than I trust what is right before my eyes.”

Similarly, reason does not have the power to change one’s gut instinct. At best, it will show when gut instinct cannot be trusted. The gut will still be there demanding that the agent do X, while reason suggests not-X. In these circumstances, somebody like President Bush, who lacks the ability to grasp the distinction, will choose the wrong option, and the whole nation will suffer for it.

One thing that we could really use are leaders who not only understand these elements of human psychology, but who have the moral character not to exploit them for personal gain.

Game Theory and Desire Utilitarianism

Announcement

I have discovered that somebody saw fit to write a philosophy stub on Wikipedia on Desire Utilitarianism. I am honored by whomever did this. My policy shall be not to touch the Wikipedia site (which, as I understand it, is also a Wikipedia rule), but allow others express their interpretation through the edits they make.

Main Article

Yesterday, I presented some problems with game theory as an account of morality. Specifically, I argued that game theory cannot handle issues of rare but extreme benefit, anonymous defection, or differences in power. Today, I want to explain how desire utilitarianism can handle the same issues.

Game Theory Review

Imagine that we are playing a game. Each turn, we must each pick a crystal ball (C) or a dark ball (D). If we both pick (C), we both get 8 points. If we both pick D we get 2 points. If I pick C and you pick D, then I get 0 points and you get 10 points, and vice versa.

In any one round, if you pick C then I am better off picking D (10 points vs 8). If you pick D then I am still better off picking D (2 points vs 0 points). However, you are in the same situation. Therefore, you are also better off picking D, no matter what I choose. However, if we both pick 2, we get only 2 points. If we both pick C, we get 8 points. If we are both going to pick the same thing, it would be better to both pick C than to pick D. But, how do we get each other to pick C?

Game theory suggests solving this problem, at least in cases where we are going to play this game through multiple turns. One of the winning and stable strategies is called tit-for-tat.' This strategy says, “Pick C on the first turn. Then, for every subsequent turn, do what your opponent did on the previous turn. If he picked D, then you pick D. And if he picked C, then you pick C. He should learn soon enough that he (and you) is better off picking C every turn.”

Yesterday, I argued that the principle that sits at the root of game theory, “Do that which will get you the most points,” does not suggest a tit-for-tat strategy under several real-world assumptions. It suggests exploiting rare situations with an unusually high potential payoff. It also recommends anonymous deception where possible, and exploiting power relationships to force opponents to make moves that are not to his advantage.

Desire Utilitarianism: The Choice of Malleable Desires

Desire Utilitarianism would suggest an alternative strategy. “Use social forces to add a malleable desire that I choose C (or desire to cooperate) worth 3 points to both players.” Now, if you pick C, I should pick C (11 points vs 10). If you pick D then I should still pick C (3 points vs 2). The same is true for you. Under this moral impulse, we both get 11 points.

I need to explain the role of malleable desires in the formula above. Evolutionary biologists might want to investigate the possibility of a natural desire to cooperate that evolved due to its survival value. Their success or failure will have nothing directly to say about morality. They will only be able to study a genetic influence that mimics morality.

This is true in the same way that an ant, finding a dead moth and dragging it back to the colony, merely mimics altruism. It is no more an example of genuine altruism than an animal dropping manure on the grass is a case of altruism for providing a benefit to the grass. Morality itself requires an element of social and individual choice. Since we cannot choose our genes, we do not deserve either moral praise or moral condemnation for the result.

Choosing Desires

In our hypothetical game, you and I have an option to promote an institution that will use praise and condemnation to promote a universal desire to cooperate that gives cooperation 3 points of added value.

If we succeed, then I will have no need to worry that you will take advantage of an opportunity to engage in anonymous defection or abuse of power. Even if you have an opportunity to anonymously defect, to choose D under circumstances where I would not discover it, you will still not choose D, because C is what you want.

Nor will I need to fear what you would do if you were in a position of power. Certainly, that power would give you the opportunity to do whatever you want – to choose D without fear of retaliation. However, if you do not wish to choose D – if you should have a preference for C – then this possibility of choosing D is not a real threat.

Even the problem of rare but exceptional benefit can be mitigated by a desire for C, so long as the desire for C was higher than the value of whatever exceptional benefit the rare circumstance provided. It may still be the case that everyone has a price at which they can be bought, but with a sufficiently strong desire for C, that price may not be reachable in the real world.

We get a mirror set of effects for using social institutions to promote an aversion to D. Lowering the value of D by 3 points will also make it the case that potential anonymous defectors and potential power abusers will not want to choose D. This can be done by forming a direct aversion to D, or by associating the act of choosing D with negative emotions like guilt and shame.

Punishment and Reward

Another flaw with game theory as a model of morality is that it has a heavily distorted view of the role that punishment and reward play in society.

In game theory, I ‘punish’ you for picking D by picking D myself in the following turn. I will continue to pick D until you start to pick C again. As soon as I notice this, then I will return to picking C.

This is not a good model for reward and punishment. Reward and punishment are not decisions about what to do ‘the next time’ a similar event happens. They are decisions about what to do with respect to the current situation.

Specifically, before the next turn starts, I say to you, “Do not even think about picking D because, if you do, then I promise you that I will inflict three points of negative value on you.”

With this threat in mind, if I choose C, you are now still better off choosing C over D (8 points vs 7). If I choose D, then you are still better off choosing C over D (0 points vs -1). Either way, by means of a threat to do you harm in the current turn depending on your choice, I have coerced you into choosing C no matter what.

Reward is the mirror image of punishment, in the same way that virtue is the mirror image of vice in the section above. Instead of promising to inflict 3 units of harm on you if you should choose D, I can get the same effect by promising you 3 units of benefit if you should choose C. By offering you this reward, if I choose C, you are better off choosing C (11 points vs. 10). If I choose D then you are better off choosing C (3 points over 2).

The issue of reward seems to suggest a complication. Where am I going to get the 3 points? Am I to subtract it from the value of my payoff?

There is no reason to require this. Just as I can find ways to harm you that do not provide me with any direct benefit, there are ways in which I can benefit you without necessarily suffering a cost. Most people value praise – plaques, ribbons, cheers, and other rewards. We do not need to clutter the basic principles that I am trying to illustrate with such things. They can be saved for a future post.

Reward, Punishment, and Power

A doctrine of reward and punishment has some drawbacks that the doctrine of virtue and vice (promoting and inhibiting desires) does not have.

Reward and punishment does not solve the problem of anonymous defection. The anonymous defector escapes punishment. At best, the threat of punishment gives an incentive against choosing D where this can be known, even in the case that there is only one turn to be played.

Reward and punishment also do not solve the problem of unequal power. In the example that I gave above, I used the threat of punishment to coerce you into choosing C. Now, with your choice of C coerced, I still benefit from choosing D over C (10 points vs. 8).

The situation would be different if you and I were in a position of mutual coercion. If you could punish me for choosing D, just as I punish you for choosing D, we would both have an incentive to choose C, to our mutual benefit. However, as soon as one of us has power that the other does not have, then the one with power has the option of increasing his benefit by choosing D, significantly worsening the well being of the one without power.

One conclusion that we can draw from this is the value of a system of checks and balances, where two or more decision makers have the power to hold others in check. As soon as too much power gets concentrated in the hands of a single decision maker, the situation becomes dire for those who lack power.

Conclusion

The main purpose of this post is to illustrate that, on the question of modeling morality, choosing a strategy for winning a repeated prisoners’ dilemma where the value of outcomes is fixed does a poor job compared to choosing malleable desires before entering into a prisoners’ dilemma.

This is not to say that game theory has no value. The study of photosynthesis is not the same thing as the study of morality, but it is certainly a field worthy of investigation. Indeed, game theory can have important implications for ethics – more so than photosynthesis. It may help to determine which desires we have reason to promote and which we have reason to inhibit. Still, something that has implications for morality is not the same thing as morality.

Game Theory and Morals

This week, I am devoting my efforts to catching up questions raised through email and comments. One issue that came up in comments was the idea that “game theory” can tell us something about morality. Specifically, some people hold that the principles of morality can be understood in terms of the principles of a strategy that one would use in a particular type of game known commonly as a ‘prisoner’s dilemma.’

Game theory is a complex mathematical model that in some respects is said to provide a meaningful account of the relationship between morality and rationality. Rationality says, “Always do what is in your own best interests.” Morality says (or is often interpreted as saying something like), “Do what is in the best interests of others.” Game theory suggests some interesting ways in which these two apparently conflicting goals can merge.

The most common way of presenting game theory is to use the idea of two prisoners – you and somebody else whom you do not know. You are told the following:

If you confess to being a spy and agree to testify against the other, and he does not, then we will imprison you for 1 year, and execute the other. If he agrees to testify against you, and you do not confess, then we will execute you and free him in a year. If both of you confess, you will both get 10 years in prison. If neither confesses, you will both be imprisoned for 3 years.

If the other prisoner confesses, you are better off confessing – it is a difference between execution and 10 years in prison. If he does not confess, you are still better off confessing – it is a difference between 1 year in prison and 5 years. However, he has the same options you do. If he reasons the same way, he will confess, and you are both doomed to 10 years in prison. If he refuses to confess, and you also refuse, you can get away with 5 years. Clearly, 5 years is better than 10 years. Yet, it requires that both of you refuse to confess, when neither of you (taken individually) has reason to do so.

In trying to figure out how to handle this prisoner’s dilemma, some researchers made a game out of it. In this game, people submitted strategies to use in repeated prisoners’ dilemmas – cases where people were repeatedly thrown into these types of situations.

A particular strategy tended to be particularly stable – a strategy called ‘tit for tat’. The rules here were to cooperate on the first turn and, in each subsequent turn, do what your opponent did in the previous turn. Participants quickly learn the benefits of cooperation, and they do so.

Participants noticed certain similarities between these rules and a moral system – namely, the idea of ‘punishing’ somebody who ‘defects’ as a way of encouraging a system of mutual cooperation. Since then, researchers have thought that this holds the key to morality.

Of course, these reiterated prisoners’ dilemma games do not have death as one of the payoffs – since that would terminate the game at the first defection. They make sure that the payoff for cooperating when the other defects is the worst outcome, but also insist that it is not fatal.

As I see it, the fact that they have to impose this arbitrary limit should be seen as a cause for concern. In fact, the arbitrary and unrealistic limits that game theorists have to put on their games is only one of the problems that I find with the theory.

Altering the Payoffs

First, game theory takes all of the payoffs as fixed. It does not even ask the question, “What should we do if we have the capacity to alter the payoff before we even enter into this type of situation?”

For example, what if, before you and I even enter into this type of situation, we are able to alter each other’s desires such that both of us would rather die than contribute to the death of another person. Now, when we find ourselves in this type of a situation, the possibility that I might contribute to your death is the worst possible option. I can best avoid that option by not confessing. The same is true of you. We both refuse to confess, and thus end up harvesting the benefits of cooperation.

I am not talking about us making a promise not to confess if we should find ourselves in this type of situation. A promise, by itself, would not alter the results. However, if we back up the promise with an aversion to breaking promises – that I would rather die than break a promise that results in your death (and visa versa), then this would avoid the problem.

Desire utilitarianism looks at the prisoners’ dilemma and says that, if a community is facing these types of confrontations on a regular basis, then the best thing they can do is to promote a desire for cooperation and an aversion for defection. This raises the value of the outcomes of cooperation – changing the payoffs – so that true prisoners’ dilemmas become more and more rare.

What about the pattern, which we find in the tit-for-tat strategy – or following up cooperation with cooperation and defection with defection?

Please note that reward and punishment are not the same as deciding whether or not to cooperate or defect the next time that a similar situation comes up. A reward is a special compensation for what happened last time – a punishment is a special payment. We use reward and punishment as a way of promoting those desires that will make prisoners’ dilemmas less frequent.

Uneven Payoffs

Second, one of the assumptions that are used in these reiterated prisoners’ dilemmas – these games – where tit-for-tat strategy turns out to be so effective is that the payoff is always the same. However, in reality, the payoffs are not always the same. Some conflicts are more important than others. If we relax the rules of the game to capture this fact – if we vary the payoffs from one game to the next – I can easily come up with a strategy that will defeat tit-for-tat.

My strategy would be this: Play the tit-for-tat strategy, except when the payoff for defection is extraordinary high, then defect. Using this strategy, I could sucker the tit-for-tat player in to a habit of cooperation until the stakes are particularly high, than profit from a well-timed defection. The tit-for-tat strategist will then defect on the next turn. We will then enter into a pattern of oscillating defections. However, if the payoff on the important turn was high enough, then my gains would exceed all future losses.

My strategy would be particularly useful if, at the time of the big payoff, I arrange to kill off my tit-for-tat opponent so that the game ends on that turn. As I said, game theorists do not allow this option. Yet, in reality, this option is often available.

Anonymous Defection

Third, game theory does not consider is the possibility of anonymous defection. The cost of defection in game theory comes from the fact that, if I defect, my opponent always finds out about it. My opponent then defects against me on the next turn. However, let us assume (as is often the case) that I can defect without anybody finding out about it? I have found a wallet and can take the money without anybody finding out about it. How does game theory handle this type of situation?

Game theory would seem to suggest that I take the money and run. In fact, it says that I should commit any crime where the change of getting away with it, and the payoff, make it worth the risk. It is not just that this would be the wise thing for me to do. It would be the moral thing for me to do. After all, the game theorist is telling us that what game theory says is wise, and what is moral, are the same thing.

This means that anonymous defection is perfectly moral.

Power Relationships

Fourth, game theory presumes that the participants have approximately equal power – that one cannot coerce the choices of the other. Let’s introduce a difference in power, such that Player 1 can say to Player 2, “You had better make the cooperative choice every turn or I will force you to suffer the consequences.” The subordinate player lacks the ability to make the same threat.

When this happens, we are no longer in a prisoner’s dilemma. We are in a situation where the subordinate player is truly better off giving the cooperative option with each turn, and the dominant player is better off giving the defect option. The problem with game theory – or, more precisely, with the claim that game theory can give us some sort of morality – is that it says that, under these circumstances, the dominant player would have an obligation to exploit the subordinate player if it is profitable to do so.

Conclusion

Ultimately, game theory will have something important to say about morality. Game theory provides formulae for maximizing desire fulfillment in certain types of circumstances. As such, it will have implications for what it is good for us to desire.

However, it is one input among many. The idea that morality is nothing more than the rules of game theory has no merit.

Game theory uses the fundamental assumption that if an agent can actually get ahead by doing great harm to other people, then it is right and perhaps even morally obligatory for him to do so. Some game theory seems to suggest such a situation is not possible. Even if that is true, it is still the case that game theory says, in principle, if you should find yourself in such a situation, then by all means inflict as much harm as necessary to collect that reward.

This, alone, gives us irreparable split between morality and game theory.

Unfortunately, as the paragraphs above point out, the assumptions behind game theory morality not only say that a person has a moral right or even duty to great harm to others when it benefits him to do so. There are several likely scenarios that fit this description – scenarios where unusually great benefit, anonymity, or inequality in power can allow an agent to benefit in spite of, and perhaps because of, the harm he does to others.

Whatever morality happens to be, it is not going to be found in game theory.

So, you want to be a desire utilitarian

“Not really,” is the response that I imagine.

Okay, pretend that you are somebody who wants to be a desire utilitarian. A natural follow-up question seems to be, “Okay, I’m ready. What do I do next?”

This seems to fit into the theme of this week. A lot of people seem to be asking – in email and in comments, “What do I do?”

Well, here’s what you do. You pick up the tools of praise and condemnation. You apply praise to those who exhibit malleable desires that tend to fulfill the desires of others. You apply condemnation to those whose malleable desires tend to thwart the desires of others. In this way, you nudge people into having more and stronger malleable desires that tend to fulfill other desires, and nudge people into having fewer and weaker desires that tend to thwart other desires. In doing so, focus particularly on the young.

One example of people that fit into the category of people with desires that tend to fulfill other desires is the scientist – particularly those who are working to cure or treat disease or forewarn us and mitigate the effects of natural disasters.

One example of people whose desires tend to thwart the desires of others are those who are intellectually reckless when it comes to subjects that can cost people their lives, health, and well-being. Obviously, these people do not care enough about the welfare of others to take the task of considering these issues seriously. If they did, they would show some contempt for those who use weak arguments to support conclusions potentially harmful to others.

In the former case, it is not enough to say, “I agree with your hypothesis.” Devoting one’s life to defending us from these harms warrants more than agreement, it warrants praise and honor. We certainly have reason to try to persuade more people to adopt the same lifestyle.

In the latter case, it is not enough to say, “Your arguments are weak.” It is more important to add, “How dare you treat this subject so recklessly that you offer this sorry excuse for reasoning when lives and health are at stake! The world would be a far better place with fewer people like you in it, in the same way that it would be a better place without drunk drivers. Please show the moral decency to deal with the subject responsibly.”

Being a Desire Utilitarianism

We are in a habit of treating moral theories like religions. Each moral theory is seen as a sect, looking for followers to sign on and become members. One is a Kantian, or a Marxist, or an (Ayn Rand) Objectivist, or a Utilitarian. This is not much different than being a Christian or Hindu or a Zoroastrian. Each of them, in fact, even tends to have its own sacred text.

One thing that I do not want is to be thought of as providing a sacred text. I am offering a theory of value – a theory that, even if it is the best theory around today, will be replaced by a better theory some day.

[Note: I fear that it sounds a bit arrogant to suggest that desire utilitarianism is the best theory around today. However, it would sound even stranger for me to say that I am defending desire utilitarianism, while holding that it is inferior to some other theory that I have decided not to defend. Of course I think that the propositions that I defend are true and that propositions that contradict them are false. If I did not have those beliefs, then I should not be defending them.]

Anyway, nobody has to actually join a desire utilitarian club.

The Fundamentals

Here you are, a person with desires. You have a desire that P, a desire that Q, a desire that R (and others). As such, you will seek to act to create states of affairs in which P, Q, and R are true. You will act so as to make P, Q, and R true given your beliefs. However, false beliefs can thwart your efforts to make P, Q, and R actually true.

If you can’t make all of these propositions true, then you will seek to fulfill the more and stronger of your desires. If you want P and Q more than you want R, you will choose actions that (given your beliefs) will lead to states of affairs in which P and Q are true, while foregoing (regretfully) R. If you value R more than P and Q, then you will choose actions that (given your beliefs) will lead to states of affairs in which R is true, forsaking P and Q.

I suspect that it would come as no surprise if I should tell you that you live in a universe in which there are other people, and that they also have desires. As it turns out, though some of those desires are fixed by nature, you have the power to mold and modify those desires to some extent. Specifically, you can influence their desires with the judicious use of such tools as praise and condemnation.

You desire P, Q, and R – which means that you have reason to act so as to bring about states of affairs where P, Q, and R are true. By molding the desires of others, you can cause them to act in ways that will be more likely to make P, Q, and R true. You can do this either by causing them to desire P, Q, and R, or by causing them to desire things that will bring about P, Q, and R as a side effect, or by inhibiting desires that will interfere your attempts to realize P, Q, and R.

At the same time, they also have desires, and your desires are as malleable as theirs. If your desire that P is malleable and tends to thwart the desires of others, others have reason to use the tools of condemnation to inhibit the desire that P in you and others. If, at the same time, a desire that S is malleable and tends to fulfill the desires of others, then they have reason to offer praise and reward to encourage in you the growth of a desire that S.

Of course, if a desire that P tends to thwart other desires, then you also have reasons to inhibit in them a desire that P. And if a desire that S tends to fulfill other desires, then you also have a reason to promote in them a desire that S.

These desires that all of you have reason to inhibit in others we can call ‘vices’. These desires that all of you have reason to promote in others we can call ‘virtues’.

Regardless of what club you belong to, you have reason to promote those desires that tend to fulfill other desires, and reason to inhibit those desires that tend to thwart other desires. You will still seek to act so as to fulfill the more and stronger of your desires, and be confounded in their attempts to do so by false beliefs, giving you reason to promote an aversion to false beliefs and the intellectually reckless and dishonest acts that promote them.

Which Beliefs? Which Desires?

Now, this still gives us only a vague answer to questions such as, “Which beliefs are true? Which desires do we have the more and stronger reasons to promote, and how do we promote them? Which desires do we have the more and stronger reasons to inhibit, and how do we inhibit them?”

Even if two people agree fully that desire utilitarianism is the best theory of value, they can still disagree on the answers to these questions.

I have attempted to argue for some desires we have reason to promote or to inhibit. These include:

An aversion to intellectual recklessness. A person should feel (and be made to feel) humiliated to be caught engaging in intellectually reckless behavior. Of course, all of us will make mistakes from time to time. I have made some in this blog. However, a mistake should still be a source of embarrassment, and a redoubling of efforts to be less careless in the future. This particular virtue should be made a key criterion for public office. One thing we do not need is policy makers who are intellectually reckless themselves or who embrace (or lack the ability to detect) intellectual recklessness in others.

An aversion to the use of violence (legal penalties or private violence) as a response to words, or as a response to a political campaign executed in an open society.

A desire to reunite lost property with their owners (proportional in strength to the value of the property – let us not get carried away with returning a penny found in a parking lot to its rightful owner).

A desire to understand those force of nature that threaten to thwart desires on a wide scale, to understand them, and to take action to either prevent them or defend ourselves from the harm they can potentially do. This includes entities such as climate change, viruses, asteroid impacts, and tsunamis.

We have some moral questions that are difficult to answer, where reasonable people can disagree. However, we also have a foolish tendency to ignore what are easily demonstrable wrongs and harms that they cause. In these cases, I think it is time to do a far better job of picking up the tools of praise and condemnation and putting them to work.

Morality at the Moment of Decision

As my project to catch up on answering questions from the studio audience, I have a follow-up question.

Your response to question 4 does not seem to address the problem of making "real time decisions". How can we use desire utilitarianism as we go about our everyday lives, making decisions mostly without thinking about them? For example, if we are walking through the train station, and a woman asks us for $3 to buy a ticket, how can desire utilitarianism help us to make an on-the-spot decision, when there is no time to think about it?

Okay, I can see that. My defense of desire utilitarianism that, “No other system does a better job,” does leave open the question, “Better than what?”

The Moment of Action

At the moment of action, a person will perform that act that fulfills the more and stronger of his desires, given his beliefs. If there literally is no time to think about it, then there is no sense in asking what answer an appeal to desire utilitarianism will generate. I must assume that we have at least a little time to think about it.

Let us say, somebody has 1 minute to ask himself, “What morally-should I do?”

What this means is that the agent will act in about 60 seconds. At the time he will do the act that best fulfills his desires, given his beliefs. One of his desires is a desire to “do the right thing.” Finally, he is a desire utilitarianism, which defines a ‘right act’ as ‘the act that a person with good desires would perform’.

Establishing Context

This decision is going to take place in a particular context, and the context will be important. So, I need to spend some time establishing the background conditions before actually looking at the problem.

In most cases of moral decision making, we do not think about it. A person sees an expensive camera sitting on a wall at a zoo with no discernable owner in site, she picks it up, and she takes it to Lost and Found. The thought of taking the camera does not occur to her, or it occurs to her only as something that some other person – some moral degenerate – might do.

[Note: I will return to the case of giving the $3.00 to somebody asking for money for a ticket. That case is more complex. Before adding complexities, I want to illustrate some important elements with an easier case.]

In fact, most of our moral behavior is carried out without a thought to doing the alternative. We tell the truth without giving a thought to lying. We pay our debts without giving a thought to defaulting on them. We keep our promises without thinking about breaking them.

Because we always act to fulfill the more and stronger of our desires, given our beliefs, this is best explain by such things as an aversion to taking what belongs to others, an aversion to deceiving others, a desire to get one’s debts paid off, and a desire to keep promises, and so on. With such desires and aversions, we are no more likely to select the wrong action than we are to select food we do not like at a buffet.

We all have reasons to promote in others a desire to reunite people with their lost property because, the more and stronger this desire, the better the odds that each of s will be reunited with our lost property. We also have many strong reasons to promote an aversion to deception, a desire to pay off one’s debts, and a desire to break promises – precisely because it makes others more prone to behave in these desire-fulfilling ways.

Here, I would like to note that taking the expensive camera to Lost and Found requires more than an aversion to taking property that belongs to somebody else. This aversion would inhibit the agent from taking the camera. However, it will not cause the agent to go to the effort of taking the camera to Lost and Found. This requires an actual desire to help reunited people with their (valuable) property.

Also, I want to eliminate the option that the agent is motivated by a desire to take lost property to Lost and Found. It is a desire to reunite owners with their property. Assume that, the next day, the agent finds a wallet on the sidewalk. She looks through the wallet, finds a driver’s license with an address that is just up the street. Delivering the wallet to the owner would, in this case, best fulfill a desire to reunite people with their lost property. It would not fulfill a desire to take lost property to a Lost and Found.

This is just some quick notes about what desires are and how they work in situations such as this. Now, let us apply this to the case in question.

The Question to Ask

So, now, somebody is asking for $3.00 for a train ticket. “Should I give this person the money?” I am going to act within the next 60 seconds. What should I do?

Question: Do people generally have more and stronger reasons to praise or condemn those who would give the money?

Note: I am not asking, “Will people generally praise or condemn such a person?” I am asking whether they have reason to. It may be the case (e.g., homosexuality) that people will condemn others when the beliefs behind their condemnation are false, or the desires that motivate the condemnation are bad desires. Sociologists study the question, “Will people condemn . . . .” Ethicists are concerned with the question, “Do people have good reason (true beliefs, good desires) to condemn?”

The answer appears to be ‘Yes’ at first glance. Any person is at risk at finding herself in a situation where a small amount of aid from others could produce a huge benefit. We have reason to have others ready to provide that assistance when we need it – as they have reason to make us ready to provide that assistance.

Note the similarities here between desire utilitarianism’s, “Act on those desires that you can will to be universal desires”, compared to Kant’s categorical imperative, “Act on that maxim that you can will to be a universal law.” Only, desire utilitarianism does not have the messy metaphysics of a Kantian categorical imperative.

However, once we answer, “Yes,” then, the parasites come out. These are people who lie to us, claiming to need money for a ticket that they have no intention to buy. (Note: I am using the term ‘parasite’ specifically for people who misrepresent their situation in order to exploit this disposition to help others.) If we reward deception with cash, then we will simply reward (and, thus, foster) deception.

We have many and strong reasons not to reward dishonesty and similar practices of taking advantage of those we are trying to give a desire to help.

Now, our agent faces two conflicting desires – a desire to help somebody in crisis, and an aversion to promoting deception. These desires would motivate the agent to look the situation over carefully. Does this person asking for money appear to be somebody who is in genuine need of a bus ticket, or is she being deceptive and taking advantage of my good nature?

In other words, desire utilitarianism says that a good person would feel some anxiety at this point, caused by the fact that two important values are in conflict.

By the way, this is significantly different from the outcome that the ‘moral claims are arbitrary’ thesis would generate. If the decision is truly arbitrary, then it does not matter which option one picks – both are equally good or bad. Anxiety comes from the fact that it does matter, and our good agent wants to get the answer right.

If this is a person in crisis, he should give her the money. If she is a deceiver, he should not reward her. He then looks for signs that will tell him which option is the most likely.

If the person asking for $3.00 has a business suit on, talks about an important meeting downtown, and claims that she lost her wallet, we have reason to infer that this is a person in general crisis, and offer assistance (if it is at a small cost).

If the person asking for $3.00 has dirty clothes on and has not washed in a while, we have reason to question whether she is in an immediate crisis. Here, we have reason to direct this person to some institution built to care for the homeless and destitute, where a number of her needs can be cared for at once. They can make an assessment of her need for a train ticket.

I am not talking about being ungenerous here. I would argue that these institutions should be well funded and competently staffed. I am only saying that the aid is best provided through such institutions, than through handouts on the street.

In some cases, it is going to be difficult to tell. These are the cases that, in a good person, would cause the most anxiety – causing him to worry, even for a considerable amount of time after he acted, whether he did the right thing or not.

So, this is what the agent should do. If the likely legitimate benefit to the recipient is high, the likely cost is low, and the likelihood of deception is small, then one should give the money. If, on the other hand, the likely benefit is small, the cost high (you need that $3.00 to get to work), or the likelihood of deception is high, then you should not give the money. There is no easy way to determine whether these factors apply.

Easy Answers

This is not an ‘easy answer’ in many cases. However, where is the rule that says that there must be a clear and easy moral answer to all situations? As I wrote yesterday, I consider it a mark in favor of this theory that it can account for, explain, and predict the fact of difficult moral choices.

Sometimes we have to make an important choice in a situation where we have limited information. This does not imply that the choice is arbitrary. Arbitrary choices imply no difficulty in weighing different options because one can’t get the answer wrong. Difficult but impossible to determine means that it will take effort to determine the right option, and one still has a chance of getting it wrong.

Investments provide a good case study for difficult choices under limited information where the right answer is not arbitrary. An arbitrary choice would be like choosing between two Certified Deposits, both paying identical interest rates over identical time periods. Difficult choices under limited information concerns which mutual fund one should invest a whole company’s pension money in.

The only thing you can do is the best that you can do. However, different options really are better, or worse, than others, and there really is a best you can do.

Questions from Atheist Observer

I am sooooooooooo far behind on answering questions from the studio audience. I am going to try to concentrate on that this week.

From Atheist Observer

Question 1: Do you think desire utilitarianism leads you to your moral positions, or do you think your moral positions come from your “heart” and you developed desire utilitarianism to match them?

There are two different levels to this question.

Level 1: Is desire utilitarianism itself something that I created to match my previous moral positions?

Level 2: When I use desire utilitarianism to draw a specific moral conclusion (e.g., on abortion, capital punishment, etc.), do I seek a conclusion that matches my moral positions?

I have worried about the answer to these two questions a lot. Anybody who simply observes the world around him will see how easy it is for somebody to adopt a belief and then to hold firm to it with utmost conviction even in the face of clear evidence to the contrary. I am human, with absolutely no reason to believe that I am immune to this type of problem.

I have seen this, not only among theists, but also among atheists. Ayn Rand Objectivists, in spite of that theory’s own expressed love of reason as a near perfect good, still casually brush aside fundamental problems (e.g., their inability to deal with the is-ought problem).

I think that it is far more likely that I would make a mistake such as this when answering a Level 2 question (e.g., on pornography or capital punishment) than with the Level 1 question. Desire utilitarianism itself is not a prescriptive theory. It explains what a value is (a relationship between a state of affairs and some desire) and its relationship to reasons for action (desires are the only reasons for action that exist). However, to get real-world prescription out of this theory, you actually have to have desires. Without desires, there is no value.

As I see it, the best way to find out if I am making a mistake of this type is to expose my ideas to public scrutiny and to see what objections they come up with. (For which, Atheist Observer, I want to take an opportunity to say that I am grateful for the efforts you have made in this regard, as well as those of the other readers.)

This does not eliminate the possibility that I will blind myself to clear objections, but it at least gives me an opportunity to look at them.

Ultimately, the objection that I am, in fact, guilty of blinding myself to clear objections to my theory requires that there be clear objections that I am blinding myself to. It is not a valid argument to assert, “A lot of people have adopted positions on these issues and blinded themselves to clear objections – therefore, you have blinded yourself to clear objections to your theory.”

A valid argument would be, “Here is a clear objection to your theory. However, you seem to have the traditional problem a lot of other people have had in blinding yourself to clear objections to your theory, such as this one.”

Show me the objection to my theory, and if I do not take it seriously, then you can accuse me of closed-mindedness.

Question 2: Have you had instances where you felt something is wrong, but desire utilitarianism convinced you it was morally OK?

When I first came up with the idea, I started to apply it to contemporary moral issues to see what came out of it.

My position on abortion, before coming up with this theory, was that abortion is a prima-facie wrong. It involved the killing of an innocent person. However, a greater wrong could be found in the use of one person’s body by another person without her consent. On this theory, an entity with no desires has no interests, and an entity with no interests cannot be wronged. So, an abortion carried out before the fetus has desires is not even a prima facie wrong.

My position on capital punishment is that it is not substantially different from any other punishment. It is not even a most extreme form of punishment, since (speaking personally) I would rather be executed than imprisoned for life – particularly if I was innocent. The possibility that my captors would find out about the mistake in 20 years time is of no interest to me. However, when I looked at the statistics of capital punishment through the lens of desire utilitarianism, the evidence seems to suggest that a society that teaches such an aversion to killing that they will not execute prisoners raises fewer children to be murderers. For our own safety and the safety of those we care about, we have reason to promote an aversion to killing that is strong enough to save prisoners from this fate.

Question 3: Do you think desire utilitarianism is precise enough to actually use as a prescriptive tool, that everyone attempting to apply it would come to the same moral conclusions, or that it could be interpreted in different ways, so that “what a person with good desires would do” or “the desires that fulfill other desires” are sufficiently general that a great variety of moral conclusions is possible?

Do you think that science is precise enough that no two people will come to the same conclusions? Note: I did not say “two scientists will come to the same conclusions,” I said “two people”. We seem to have people coming up with different answers all the time – about the age of the earth, about the origins of human beings.

Even within science, there is always a maximum potential level of description. We can only know answers within a certain degree of certainty. Below that, we cannot go. There is no reason to demand that a theory of ethics must give us perfect precision on all issues. All we can expect is that it give us as much precision as is possible.

If you know of a way to get more moral precision using another method (one that doesn’t simply make things up), then that theory is obviously to be preferred over the theory I defend here. Without the possibility of finding greater precision elsewhere, then this is the best we can do.

I answered this question in part in the essays on pornography. Desire utilitarianism is substantially a theory on what value is – a relationship between states of affairs and desires. We can lament about our inability to come up with precise answers to all moral questions. However, this will not change the fact about what value is. We simply have no choice but to make decisions in the face of imperfect information.

However, some wrongs are extremely easy to detect using desire utilitarianism – including some that get a pass in our current culture. One of the most significant sets of wrongs is intellectual recklessness. The wrong of drunk driving is clearly illustrated using desire utilitarianism methods (the lack of concern for the well-being of those that one might harm). That intellectual recklessness is just as wrong as drunk driving is also easily demonstrated. The lack of concern with the soundness of one’s arguments when addressing issues that affect the life, health, liberty, and well-being of others is, I would argue, the most underappreciated moral wrong in our society today.

Question 4: Another measure is does it provide something that is actually useful in making real time decisions in real life, i.e., does it provide a better guide than simpler concepts such as “be fair, be honest, and treat others as you want to be treated?”

What is fairness? How do we tell if we are being fair or not?

There are clear exceptions to the moral requirement to “be honest.” There are the famous example of lying to the Nazi soldiers who come to ask if you know about any Jews in the area and feigning loyalty to the Fuhrer while you sabotage the German war effort. There’s the white lies to your significant other so as not to hurt feelings. There are the lies used when planning a surprise party or a practical joke. How do we distinguish when to be honest and when not to be honest?

As for “treat others as you want to be treated” – what if the person you are talking about likes to be treated differently from the way you like to be treated? How about, “If I were gay, I certainly would want others to do everything in their power to save me from this sick and disgusting lifestyle; therefore, I must do whatever I can to save others from this sick and disgusting lifestyle.”

Or, “Given the great value in being a Christian, I would certainly want others to do whatever they can to convince me of the truth of Christianity, in spite of all of my protestations to the contrary. Therefore, I am obligated to do whatever I can to convert others to Christianity, ignoring all of their protests to the contrary.”

I would argue that desire utilitarianism does a far better job than any of these types of rules. “Fairness” is too vague of a concept to be useful without a theory of fairness.

“Honesty” comes with exceptions – just as we can kill an aggressor to protect an innocent victim we can clearly lie to an aggressor to kill an innocent victim. Similarly, just as a surgeon can slice into a patient for his own benefit, we can, under certain circumstances, have our aversion to lying outweighed by our desire to benefit the person we are lying to.

And a far better rule than “treat others as you would want to be treated” is “act on those desires that you would want everybody to have” or, in other words, “act as a person with desires that tend to fulfill other desires would act.” This takes into consideration the fact that others need not always like the same things that you like.

Conclusion

Like I said, I know that there is a want to find a simple set of rules that everybody can instant see are the best rules no matter what their background. It’s a fantasy. It’s not going to happen. Anybody who claims to have come up with such a set of rules is living in a fantasy universe. If morality could guarantee such easy answers, we would have found them by now.

However, the fact that some moral facts are hard to discover does not discredit those that are more easily known. Nor does it prevent the possibility of moral progress. Some scientific facts are hard to discover as well. But, some are easy, and we can make scientific progress.

It just takes work

Richard Sloan: Medicine and Religion

We are now entering the last session in the Beyond Belief 2006 conference. Our first speaker is Richard Sloan. It is particularly fitting to have Sloan speak at this moment – after reading Dennett’s letters, since Sloan seeks to address the question, “Is religion good for your health?” Sloan wishes to argue that mixing medicine and religion is bad science, bad medicine, and bad religion.

Before getting into that, Sloan makes an interesting observation about the press dealing with the issue of religion and health.

I interviewed a number of journalists and actually startled to learn something that may be obvious to you that journalists and media conduct polls in just the way that politicians do and they want to determine what the issues are that will sell their product, and the biggest issue that sells the product is religion. The second biggest one is health and so there’s a very nice confluence of stories about religion and health for market purposes only.

I would like to add that this marketing, combined with the fact that people are more likely to buy something that tells people what they want to hear, means that there is market pressure in the press to promote the idea that religion benefits health independent of the idea having any merit. We live in a society that does not recognize that there is something morally problematic with misdirecting people (interfering with their ability to make rational choices concerning their own welfare) for the sake of money.

Sloan first tackled the subject of scientific investigation that purports to show that religion has a positive relationship on health. The main conclusion that one can draw from this presentation is that a great deal of the work done in this area represents bad science – or bad reporting.

For example, Sloan reports that he and a collegu, Emilia Bagiella, read the abstracts for all 266 papers that came up in a Medline search for articles dealing with religion published in the year 2000. They found that only 17 percent (45 papers) were relevant to the question of the health benefits of religion. The claim that there are thousands of papers covering the issue of medicine and religion is true, but most of those papers are irrelevant to the question of the health benefits of religion.

Of those that are relevant?

To answer this question, Sloan read all of the documents cited in two chapters of Harold Koenig's book Handbook of Religion and Health (those chapters dealing with cardiovascular disease and hypertension, which is Sloan’s area of medicine) to see how many of them were solid enough to ground claims about the health benefits of religion.

He found that only four papers out 89 were methodologically sound.

He gave an example of one of the papers which Koenig's Handbook claimed, “Meditation subjects had lower blood pressure at follow-up.” Sloan discovered that membership in each group was self-selected (students choose whether to be members of the control or study group), and members of the study group were cloistered in a Monestary where they had no activity other than walking a mile each day to receive food.

This was not a double-blind study and the study did not correct for possibly confounding influences (e.g., the fact that the members of the study group were not doing anything). Claiming that this study supported the idea that there were health effects of religion simply misrepresents the facts of the case.

A great many of the studies that are identified by proponents as supporting the claim that religious practices are good for the health suffer from significant methodological flaws like that. The failure to control for confounders and covariants, and . . . the failure to control for multiple comparisons.

This ‘failure to control for multiple comparisons’ is also known as ‘the sharpshooter’s fallacy’ – exemplified by a person who shoots a bullet at a wall then draw a bull’s eye around the bullet hole. The specific technique is to test for a long list of relationships at the same time. Inevitably, there will be some results far enough outside the statistical norm. The researcher then takes the one item and claims that this proves a relationship.

In the discussion that followed Sloan’s presentation, one person in the audience (who I could not identify) cited an article studying the effects of prayer on patients in a critical care unit. The paper reported that when the patient and the doctor were blinded as to whether the patient was being prayed for, the patient being prayed for had better outcomes.

In fact, this study measured a long list of potential outcomes such as total mortality and number of days in the critical care unit. The one area where the researchers found a benefit among those patients prayed for was the need for diuretics. This illustrates how, if you test for enough possible outcomes, simple random variation will give you one where you can claim to have discovered a benefit.

Another important question that came up in the discussion asked how all of these bad papers with flawed methodology (80 out of 89) ended up in published journals. This comes about because there are hundreds of journals having to do with medicine, and, as Sloan said, some journals were better than others.

A great deal of the papers that are supportive of the health benefits of religious practices are published in The International Journal of Psychiatry and Medicine. That is the 71st, according to the Institute for Scientific Information, the 71st most important psychiatry journal.

Reading this from the point of view of an ethicist, I have to ask, where is the condemnation that is deserved by people who do such poor work in a field as important as medicine?

This strikes me as another example of an issue that I have complained about in the past, where we have clear examples of intellectual recklessness, we explain what is wrong with the document, and yet we give the people who did the work a moral pass on their actions.

I have repeated the argument several times that intellectual recklessness has the same moral status as physical recklessness. A drunk driver is condemned because he shows such a low level of concern for the well-being of others that he feels free to take risks with their life, health, and well-being in driving a car. This is contemptible behavior, and we respond to it in a rational way. We use moral condemnation to promote desires that would reduce this carelessness, and even threaten criminal penalties against those who refuse to take reasonable care.

It is just as rational to demand reasonable care in what people say and write, particularly when they are saying and writing things that are used to determine medical practices. Now, we have a clear argument against using penalties against mere words. The benefits of freedom of speech tell us to limit the legitimate response to words with words and private actions. However, the condemnation and private actions against those who recklessly put our health at risk is mysteriously absent.

This ties in with a similar point that I tried to make in my recent essay on the moral nature of pornography. I pointed out how the issue of pornography was morally ambiguous (though a love of liberty argues for an assumption of legitimacy unless a case beyond a reasonable doubt, appealing to reasons for action that exist, can be made against it). However, in the discussion of the moral merits of pornography, we find a great deal of behavior that is not morally ambiguous. This is the morally objectionable behavior of those who use weak reasoning when discussing the moral quality of pornography.

On the issue of pornography, people claim that it an uncertain improvement in the quality of life in our society is sufficient reason to ban this type of content. Clearly, it would significantly improve the quality of life in our society if we could clear out – not the pornography, but the sloppy reasoning that appears in the discussion of pornography. We find equally sloppy thinking and writing, even in the 71st most important journal on the subject of psychiatry. In terms of its moral quality, this type of work should rightfully be considered as worse than pornography and its authors given a level of social standing below that of pornographers.

This is where our moral wrath should find its first target. Once we deal with the demagogues and sophists, then we can start to deal with questions of pornography and the effects of religious practices on medicine intelligently. Until that happens, it is foolish to expect decent people to wade in among all that filth and still have an intelligent conversation on the relevant subject matters.fs

Daniel Dennett: Thank Goodness

Daniel Dennett was invited to give a presentation at the Beyond Belief 2006 conference, and had accepted. However, at the time of the conference he was in the hospital recovering from a near fatal heart ailment. Paul Churchland was invited to speak in his place. In addition to Churchland’s own presentation on John Rawls’ theory of justice, he read a letter that Dennett had written to the attendees at the conference.

Dennett wrote the letter to ‘thank goodness’ that he was alive. Then he went on to say that this was not just a euphemism for ‘thank God’. He truly meant ‘thank goodness’. In his stay at the hospital, he had found a model of morality – a model of virtue – a model of goodness – that he could truly thank for the fact that he was alive.

An important part of that model of goodness was the fact that hospital staff members were constantly asking themselves, “What if I am wrong?” They recognized a duty to be careful about everything that they did, to make sure that they made no mistakes. He emphasized that this did not only apply to the doctors and nurses who cared for him. It also applied to those who prepared his meals, those who wheeled him to X-ray, and everybody who worked at the hospital. They all recognized (or, they would be severely reprimanded if they neglected to recognize) a duty to ask, “What if I am wrong.”

Furthermore, nobody in the hospital was allowed to obtain any level of certainty from scripture and divine guidance. No doctor was allowed to walk into a patient’s room and begin treatment, claiming that he had received a revelation from God that this was ‘the right thing to do’. Instead, he was to gather the evidence (symptoms), conduct tests, form a theory, test the theory, and use the results of this scientific method to determine what was wrong and how best to fix it.

In Dennett’s case, the original diagnosis of his problem was mistaken. Doctors looked at his symptoms and offered an initial theory as to what the problem was. However, one doctor disagreed with that theory. He offered another theory, and he proposed a way to test it. “If I am correct, then this test would produce the following results.” They conducted the test, it produced the results he expected, and they treated him (to 9 hours of surgery during which time they stopped his heart and chilled him to 45 degrees to prevent brain damage) according to the new theory.

Here is a question that needs answering. Where did doctors learn that by chilling a body to 45 degrees they can prevent brain damage? Did they go through scripture hunting for the correct interpretation of the many pages of instructions on how to deal with illness and injury? As a matter of fact, scripture tends to be missing a great deal of knowledge about how to treat illness and injury that an all knowing God could certainly have provided – if he cared to do so. Instead, the scientists relied on their scientific method.

I had an experience much similar to Daniel Dennett, which I wrote about in much the same way. I returned home from work one night to find my wife substantially unresponsive. She would look at me, but did not answer my questions. I called 911, she spent 9 days in intensive care, and left the hospital with a brand new pacemaker.

I discussed these events in a posting called, “Atheist Materialist Scientist”. I did not turn to God to save her life – because there was no God who could do so. Her survival depended on her doctors having a competent understanding of the facts discovered through the application of ‘atheist materialist science’, that taught them how the human body works and how to fix it. That is who I thank for her survival. And, today, one can hardly tell that she had been in the hospital. The two most obvious symptoms that she has from her illness is a scar on her chest (for the pacemaker) and a tendency to take better care of herself (exercise, diet, etc.).

I returned to this subject in a subsequent essay that had become one of my most popular, an essay called, “Faith Hospital”

Dennett next took up the question of whether he ‘worships’ medical science. He says ‘no’. Quite the opposite, he advocated that every aspect of medicine continue to be held up to utmost scrutiny against an ever growing body of evidence. In thanking goodness, a part of the goodness that he thanked was the peer-reviewed science of medicine.

He thanked the editors and reviewers of those journals who upheld a moral standard that actually prohibited them from ‘respecting’ all positions (and, in particular, positions grounded on faith). Instead, they had an obligation to disrespect and to dismiss all submissions that was not well secured by available evidence.

He also commented about religious friends who had told him that they had prayed for his recovery. At first, he expressed gratitude – the person who gives a prayer for the well-being of another person does, after all, press an interest that the other person was well.

Or does he?

Upon reflection, Dennett suggested that there might be something morally problematic with praying for somebody.

If you truly wish somebody to do well, then would it not be better to take the time and resources devoted to prayer and devote them to doing something that is actually useful? There has been medical research done on the effects of prayer, with the findings showing that the prayer is utterly worthless. A person who foregoes something useful for the sake of doing something useless (or, even worse, provides only the person giving the prayer with a pleasing jolt of self-satisfaction without doing anything to help the patient) hardly qualifies as a model of moral virtue.

Dennett applies this model of moral virtue to those who would pray for him, and he invites them to ask, “What if I am wrong?” – particularly in the face of medical evidence that says that they are wrong.

If a doctor insisted on using a medical procedure that evidence showed to be ineffective, the doctor would risk censure by the medical community and possibly a loss of license (if he persisted).

I suspect that even those who pray for a friend or family member in the hospital do so only after they have provided necessary real-world assistance, or during a few minutes that their mind is free. As such, they are not taking away from the real-world help they can provide. There are exceptions – including those who insist on a witch-doctor’s remedy over that of a physician trained in the medical sciences. However, I wish to leave those aside as a special case.

A person is not required to spend all of his time doing something useful. We have some moral permission spending our time relaxing – watching television, listening to music, attending and/or participating in some sort of performance (e.g., a religious performance at a church). So, the accusation that somebody who prays is not doing something useful is a weak objection, equally applicable to somebody who still takes time to watch his favorite TV show while his friend is in the hospital.

I admit, while my wife was in the hospital, I wasted some time playing computer games and watching television, and I feel no guilt over it.

The story changes for somebody who engages in activities that are actually harmful to the institution that is providing this life-preserving aid. There is, in fact, a moral and intellectual standard required in hospital care – a standard that demands evidence-based thinking and constant questioning of one’s beliefs.

Activities that weaken those standards – that preach against evidence-based thinking or that block access to medical care for religious reasons – are not harmless activities. They are cases where a person’s religion drives him to do harm to others, uncomfortably similar in effect to that of a person who straps on a vest of explosives and detonates it in God’s name.

The standards and practices of medical science that Dennett writes about do, indeed, embrace a moral standard, a ‘goodness’, that Dennett (and I) both have reason to thank. Thank goodness we have an institution that puts these standards to work. They provide us with extremely important life-saving goods, and we have many and good ‘reasons for action’ to see these standards encouraged, rather than denigrated and degraded in ways that we find in some religious traditions.

Pornography II

Yesterday and today I have been trying to illustrate how desire utilitarianism works by applying it to a real-world concern of pornography.

In our Previous Episode

What we are looking at reasons for action that exist for and against a prohibition on pornography. Yesterday, I ruled out reasons for action that do not exist. Intrinsic value and divine rights are reasons for action that some people bring into this debate. However, these reasons for action do not exist. Desires are the only reason for action that exist.

I also ruled out desires that cannot be fulfilled. A “desire that P” (for some proposition P) is a reason for action for bringing about a state of affairs in which P is true. If P can never be true, then the desire that P cannot be fulfilled in any state of affairs, and does not serve as a reason for any action. Even if P can be true in some states of affairs, but action A will not help bring about that state of affairs, the desire that P is not a reason for action A.

I used this to throw out desires to do God’s will and desires to realize something of intrinsic value (since these desires cannot be fulfilled under any real-world states of affairs).

I then started to look at some of the reasons for action that do exist both for viewing and for banning pornography. For example, given that everybody acts to fulfill the more and stronger of their desires, given their beliefs, that many people use pornography, and that there is no evidence that those viewing pornography suffer a defect of belief, we have reason to conclude that the viewing of pornography fulfills desires. A prohibition on pornography would, then, thwart those desires. That would be bad.

However, on the other side, we have a potential for an aversion to pornography that is like an aversion to certain smells. To prevent thwarting those desires, one might argue for confining pornography to certain regions were those who would be offended by the ‘stink’ of pornography would not have to experience it, and to warn people of its presence.

Finally, I looked at desires that certain states of affairs exist and not exist, and argued that these desires are as legitimate as any other. The desire that a state in which a person is viewing pornography not exist (even where the agent will not experience it) is at some level the same that the desire that a certain wilderness state does exist (even though the agent will not experience it).

The next relevant question to answer is to look at the quality of the reasons for action relevant to the viewing or banning of pornography. Are these ‘reasons for action that exist’ good reasons or bad reasons? A good reason is a desire that tends to fulfill other desires. A bad reason is a desire that tends to thwart other desires.

At first glance, the desire that a state in which a person is viewing pornography not exist looks like a bad desire. It is a desire that tends to thwart other desires. However, the desire that a state in which a wilderness exists would also count as a bad desire at first look, because it thwarts the desires that would be fulfilled by the use of those resources.

We need to look at bit deeper than this.

Love of Liberty

One desire that we have reason to strengthen and promote is a love of freedom. As John Stuart Mill argued in ‘on Liberty’, if we wish to bring about the most desire fulfillment, then we want to trust the fulfillment of desires to the person who has the best information on what those desires are, and are least corruptible. The agent who is best informed and least corruptible when it comes to fulfilling a particular person’s desires is that person himself or herself. So, we have reason to promote a love of liberty – an aversion to interfering with a person’s ability to fulfill his own desires.

However, that love of liberty is not an absolute. It is not the case that a person who loves liberty can love nothing else – that he cannot, for example, have an aversion to pain or be indifferent to the health of his child. The love of liberty offers for a presumption in favor of liberty – a desire that can be thwarted in extreme circumstances when other desires are at play; just as a desire for chocolate can be overruled by a desire for health and long life.

In this way, a concern for the well-being of others can outweigh a love of liberty, denying liberty to those who wish to act in ways harmful to others. We have reason not to grant liberty to those whose actions would spring from desires that tend to thwart other desires – desires to rape, desires to take from others. It also applies to actions that evidence a lack of good desires – an indifference to the well-being of others that would cause a person to knowingly, negligently, or recklessly do harm to others. The love of liberty does not argue for absolute freedom. It argues for a presumption in favor of freedom – a presumption that can be outweighed.

This presumption of liberty works like the presumption of innocence in a criminal case. In a criminal case, the presumption is that an individual is not to be harmed unless the prosecution can show, beyond a reasonable doubt, in a fair hearing, that the accused is one who deserves to be harmed. This is how a person with an aversion to doing harm – though an aversion that can be overridden by other concerns – would act. “I don’t want to harm you. We need to work something out here,” he would plead. But, backed into a corner by sound reason, he will do harm.

Applying the presumption of liberty to the current case, we get a presumption against a prohibition on pornography. The individual who seeks to ban pornography is saying that the harm to others is justified. It is not the duty of those he would harm to prove that it they should be left alone. A good person would begin with the assumption that others are to be left alone. It is the duty of those who would do harm to assemble the evidence and show, beyond a reasonable doubt, that a person with good desires (that tend to fulfill other desires) would have other, compelling reasons to act against liberty.

Desires that Thwart Other Desires

Clearly, it is a good working hypothesis that some of the desires that are fulfilled in using certain types of pornography are desires that we have reason to inhibit. These are desires that clearly could be fulfilled only in a state that thwarts the desires of others. These include desires for rape and other forms of sexual violence.

If it can be shown that exposure to (certain types of) pornography will strengthen desires that we have reason to inhibit – will cause people to acquire desires that make them a threat to the well-being of others – then our reasons for action for inhibiting those desires translates into reasons for preventing those exposures to (certain types of) pornography.

Arguments Against Harmfulness

I want to give some space to the moral character of those who use poor arguments when it comes to making this type of case. On one side, we have people who will make claims like, “I have used pornography and I have not suffered any ill effects,” or “I know of people exposed to pornography and they are all decent human beings.”

This is not the only place we see this type of argument used. On the question of violent video games or rock lyrics, we can expect to hear people proclaim, “I played those games and I turned out okay,” or “My friends and I played those games all the time and we did not get the urge to walk down the hallways killing our classmates.”

However, imagine somebody trying to protest laws against drunk driving by saying, “I drove last night while I was drunk and I made it home without killing anybody,” or “I know lots of people who have driven while drunk without getting into an accident.” These arguments are pathetically poor. The question is not whether this person or those people happen to have undergone the experience without harming others. The question is whether the experience tends to promote harm to others.

If you remove all of the hearts out of a deck of cards, it is foolish to argue that every diamond you draw is proof that the odds of drawing a black card has not been changed.

Arguments For Harmfulness

I also want to address the moral character of those who too willingly accept evidence that a limitation on liberty is good. These are people who ‘cherry pick’ the data on an issue such as pornography. They wish to see the ban, so they eagerly embrace any and every claim of harm as proof that their position is correct. At the same time, any evidence against your position is immediately branded ‘bad science’ or attributed to some conspiracy among ‘liberals’.

These people have the same moral character as somebody who is so intent on seeing his neighbor suffer that he frames his neighbor for a crime, doing whatever is in its power to rig his neighbor’s conviction. A person who truly loves liberty and justice will be adverse to doing unjustified harm. This aversion to doing unjustified harm means drawing conclusions based on the evidence, not using a desired outcome to cherry-pick the evidence.

It is one thing to proclaim an accused person guilty on the basis of little evidence when one is reading about a trial in a newspaper or on television – when one is not a part of the jury. However, once one becomes a part of the jury that those responsibilities change. Making a snap judgment based on partial evidence is no longer permissible. One has a duty – to justice, to the accused, to society – to listen to the evidence and to base one’s judgment on a sound consideration of that evidence.

When it comes to matters of public policy, we are all members of the jury, because we all get to vote. Some of us may decide to abstain. The decision to abstain gives us permission to remain ignorant. However, the permission to remain ignorant does not imply a permission to pretend to knowledge we do not have. Everybody else – those who choose to take a position on the issue – has an obligation to cast an informed and responsible vote. It is not a vote cast by a person who shouts, “Guilty! Now, let’s take a look at the evidence. Remember, if the evidence supports guilt, it is good evidence. If it does not support guilt, then it is obviously flawed.”

Addiction

There is a second way in which pornography may promote bad desires. Above, I talked about promoting desires that tend to thwart the desires of other people – desires for rape and sexual violence. Another type of desire-thwarting desire is an addiction.

A person acts so as to fulfill his current desires, given his beliefs. Future desires have no power of backwards causation. Present actions fulfill future desires either through a present desire that future desires be fulfilled, or present desires that fulfill future desires as a side effect. A fondness for exercise would be an example of a present desire that has a side effect of fulfilling future desires.

The relationship between current action and future desires is the same as the relationship between current action and the desires of other persons. An individual will not act so as to fulfill the desires of other persons unless he has a current desire that the desires of other people be fulfilled, or current desires that fulfill other desires as a side effect. Someone who dances because of a love of dance may also have a desire that fulfills the desires of those who may become a member of his audience.

An addiction is a particularly strong present desire that tends to thwart future desires. It serves to diminish a person’s ability to fulfill other desires by taking away his health, and distracts him away from activities that would secure those future desires. For the sake of fulfilling future desires, it is advisable that one avoids addiction.

If a certain experience tends to cause addiction, we have reasons for action (in terms of those desires that would then be thwarted) to make sure that the experience does not take place. Our ‘reasons for action’ for reducing the incidents of addiction are ‘reasons for action’ for prohibiting experiences that tend to bring about addiction.

A person might want to remark that, “Other people’s problems with the possibility of addiction are not my concern.” However, this would be a cold and callous individual who clearly does not have desires that tend to fulfill the desires of others. We have reason for action to condemn such attitudes, so as to make them weaker and less common than they would otherwise be.

Final Verdict

As I approach the end of this posting, a reader may be expecting me to pass judgment on the moral legitimacy of a prohibition on pornography. That is not going to happen. In the argument above, I have presented two instances where empirical data is needed – in determining whether experiencing pornography promotes desires that tend to cause harm to others, and whether pornography can become addictive.

It is no more possible to determine the morality of a prohibition on pornography by sitting back and contemplating the idea of pornography, than it is to understand nuclear fusion by contemplating the idea of the sun. Real research must be done – and it must be enough research to be able to comprehend, if not contribute, to the peer-reviewed literature on the subject at hand. I have not done that research, so I cannot render a verdict. Anybody who does pretend to be able to render a verdict without doing the research is arrogant, presumptuous, and irresponsible.

My next step, if I were to pursue this further, is to look for some appropriately trained body of professional scientists who have investigated the issue and accept their educated opinion on these matters. If they are confident beyond a reasonable doubt that pornography contributes to harmful desires and addiction, then I would support a prohibition (though I would also have to consider the costs of prohibition in creating a criminal black market). If they are uncertain, or they believe there is no evidence of harm, then the presumption in favor of liberty shall stand.

If I had a position of political authority, I would convene a panel of experts to look into the issue and produce a report. These experts would be psychiatrists and economists. Religion is no expertise in these matters. Nobody would be appointed merely because he thinks he has a direct line to God. We are dealing with a real-world issue, and we need real-world answers.

However, though the moral quality of pornography itself is hard to determine, the moral quality of the vast majority of things written about pornography is extremely easy to determine. The author displays a level of intellectual recklessness that is absolutely shameful. They show in what they write that they have no real concern over who may be unjustly harmed or helped. They accept arguments, in defense of actions harmful to others, on the weakest and most unreasonable evidence they can find, as long as that evidence supports the harm they wish to see done.

A person who uses weak arguments in favor of a prohibition has proved that he has no love of liberty, and is at best apathetic about the harm he may potentially do to others. Those who use weak arguments against a prohibition show that they lack a proper measure of concern for harms that might be prevented.

There is also the arrogance of the person who has not studied the scientific literature thinking that he can nonetheless give an informed opinion as to which option would fulfill the most desires and prevent the least suffering.

Those who produce this demagoguery are the true producers of 'pornography' (in the derogatory sense). We would be much better off if they could learn to take responsibility for the moral quality of what they produce and release to the public.

Pornography Part I

I regret that I am getting way behind in answering questions from the studio audience, and I promise to make a concentrated effort to remedy that lapse.

Fortunately, I think that I have a chance to address several questions at once – though it will take me two posts to do so.

In an email, DC said:

[T]here are some elements of your exposition that could use shoring up. The most important . . . is a clearer exposition of that paragon, the Person Of Good Desires. . . . I keep hearing the voice of a troubled person saying, "I just don't know what to DO," and the wise ethicist replying, "Just do what the POGD would do." "But--what would that be?" the troubled person asks.

Atheist Observer asked in a comment:

Do you think desire utilitarianism is precise enough to actually use as a prescriptive tool, that everyone attempting to apply it would come to the same moral conclusions, or that it could be interpreted in different ways, so that “what a person with good desires would do” or “the desires that fulfill other desires” are sufficiently general that a great variety of moral conclusions is possible?

And Eneasz asked in a comment:

These sorts of problems are fascinating, but it almost goes without saying that the 1000 Sadists are always morally wrong. Seeing how a particular theory explains this (or fails to) can be very informative, but it's fairly irrelevant on a practical scale. I'm interested in how a more contemporary issue would be tackled. For example, pornography (of the legal variety).

So, let’s apply this system to the issue of pornography, and see what we get.

Ease of Use

Before getting in to actual application, I need to present an important meta-principle. The philosophy of science says that, all else being equal, the simplest theory is the best theory. However, this does not imply that the best theory is necessarily simple. It only implies that the best theory is simpler than all of the other theories that can handle the same set of observations.

In morality, the same principle applies. The best moral theory will be the simplest moral theory. However, it is not a sufficient reason to reject a theory that it does not give easy answers to all moral questions – that it takes some effort. There are many theories that can give a simpler account than the one I will give here. Yet, all of them will fail one crucial test – they will postulate ‘reasons for action’ that do not exist, or they will deny ‘reasons for action’ that do exist. These theories will always fail when held up against a theory that gets the issue of reasons for action that exist right.

We would hardly accept, in science, that Newtonian physics wins out over Einsteinian physics merely because it is simpler. If the two were equally potent in handling physics, then the simpler explanation would win. But the more complex defeats the simpler where it better handles the subject matter.

’Should’ questions are questions about reasons for action that exist.

Any question about what we ‘should’ do is a question about what reasons for action exist for doing or for forbearing from some course of action. In this post, we are going to look at ‘reasons for action’ for the manufacture, distribution, consumption, and criminalization of pornography. The main focus of my attention will be, “What reasons for action exist for a criminal prohibition on the manufacture, distribution, and consumption of pornography?”

Desires are the only reasons for action that exist.

Desires are the only reasons for action that exist. Therefore, answering the question of, “What reasons for action exist for and against a criminal prohibition on pornography?” means answering the question, “What desires would be fulfilled or thwarted by a criminal prohibition on pornography?”

Some people will try to bring other ‘reasons for action’ to bear on this debate. For example, some will assert that God has commanded them to round up all pornographers (manufacturers and consumers) and imprison them. This ‘reason for action’ has much in common with the claim some people make that God commanded them to walk into a restaurant and blow themselves up. In fact, the suicide bomber does far less harm – because the blast radius from a suicide bomb is far smaller than the blast radius of a criminal statute, and does not last as long.

At the same time, there are also crucial differences. It takes far more effort and cooperation to construct a statute than it does to construct a bomb. We have a far greater opportunity to disrupt the plans of those who think that God commands them to do harm to their neighbors through statute than we do to disrupt the plans of those who think that God commands them to do harm to their neighbors with bombs.

Also, I must insert the principle at this point (though its defense will come later) that the only legitimate response to words are words and private actions, and the only legitimate response to a campaign in an open society is a counter-campaign. Nothing in what I write justifies a violent response when people in an open society attempt, and even succeed, in doing harm to their neighbors in the name of God through statute.

Note that ‘intrinsic value’ claims do not need to depend on God. An atheist can also claim that the manufacture or sale of pornography is intrinsically bad, stating that this intrinsic badness is an emergent property (like consciousness). Or, he might claim that pornography is intrinsically good – or that a right to liberty is intrinsically good, and that these argue against such a prohibition. ‘Intrinsic values’ do not exist. Therefore, when we look at ‘reasons for action that exist’ for and against a prohibition on morality, we can dismiss intrinsic value claims on both sides of the debate. They are making reference to ‘reasons for action’ that do not exist.

People Seek to Fulfill their Desires

People act so as to fulfill the more and stronger of their desires, given their beliefs. When a person views pornography, it is because this fulfills the more and stronger of their desires, given their beliefs. In the absence of evidence that a person is acting on false or incomplete beliefs, then we may conclude that viewing pornography fulfills the more and stronger of a person’s desires. A prohibition on pornography is a prohibition on people fulfilling the more and stronger of their desires.

People also act so as to ban pornography because this fulfills the more an stronger of their desires, given their beliefs. In the absence of evidence that a person is acting on false or incomplete beliefs, we may conclude that viewing pornography fulfills the more and stronger of that person’s desires.

As it turns out, we can already dismiss many claims in favor of a prohibition on pornography on the basis that the agent for prohibition is acting on false or incomplete beliefs. A person may think that banning pornography fulfills his desire to do God’s will or to realize a state that has intrinsic value. However, the fact of the matter is that this is not the case. A desire to do God’s will cannot be fulfilled except in a state of affairs in which the proposition, “I am fulfilling God’s will” is true. A desire to realize something of intrinsic value cannot be fulfilled unless the proposition “I am realizing something of intrinsic value” can be made or kept true. Neither proposition can be made or kept true. Neither desire can be fulfilled.

However, there may also be people who simply hate the idea of others viewing and distributing pornography. His reaction to pornography may be like a reaction to a bad smell – it is simply in his nature to have an aversion to such a state. He does not have any false beliefs about that state – it just stinks. In this case, the person who acts so as to ban pornography will be acting so as to fulfill the more and stronger of his desires, given his beliefs.

Now, one aspect of the ‘bad smell’ analogy is that if a bad smell can be confined to a place where the agent it offends cannot smell it, than no harm is done. We can respect the interests of those who have a ‘bad smell’ reaction to pornography by simply confining pornography to certain locations and situations, and clearly identify them as places where those who have a bad smell reaction to pornography should stay away from.

Desires For and Against Existence

Recall that a desire that P (for any proposition P) is fulfilled in any state of affairs where P is true. A parent can have a desire that his child is happy. That desire is fulfilled by any state of affairs in which the proposition ‘my child is happy’ is true. The parent does not have to experience that happiness. The parent might even believe that the proposition is false. However, what ‘really matters’ to the concerned agent is that the proposition is true. Everything else is a separate and distinct concern.

Consequently, it is possible that an agent can simply have a desire that graphic depictions of sexual acts not exist – or that a state in which somebody is viewing such a depiction not exist. This is not the same as a desire not to experience such a state. The agent might also have an aversion to such a state. However, like the mother who desires a state in which her child is happy, the anti-pornography agent mist simply desire that no pornography exist.

I have a suspicion that, because I am talking about pornography, some liberals will immediately dismiss these ‘desires that a state not exist’ as irrelevant. They would probably assert that there is something intrinsically wrong with considering such desires. However, liberals have very similar concerns. The nature of the desire does not change; only the object of the desire changes.

For example, many liberals have a desire that certain wilderness areas exist. They know that they will never experience those wilderness areas. They do not wish that the area exists as wilderness because they wish to experience that area. They know that this will never happen. (Think: Antarctica, or the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge). Yet, it is sufficient to motivate their activism that they desire that such a state exists.

At a very important level, there is no difference between these two cases. In one case, the agent seeks to prohibit people from obtaining the fulfillment of desires that pornography provides because he has an aversion to the mere existence of such a state. In the other case, the agent seeks to prohibit people from obtaining the fulfillment of desires that would come from using the resources in a particular area because he has a desire for the mere existence of a state of wilderness. An argument that desires that a particular state exist or not exist are automatically irrelevant would apply to both cases.

More importantly, such an argument requires postulating the existence of intrinsic values. Either that, or they need to provide us a ‘reason for action that exists’ for excluding these desires. Since desires are the only reasons for action that exist, the appeal to a desire not to include an particular desire as justification for not including it is somewhat lame.

This will then lead us to a discussion of the value of different desires. I will discuss these considerations tomorrow.

The Good that Atheists Would Not Do

My wife always tells me, “Don’t post angry. You’ll say things you regret.”

But, some days, something touches a little bit of ire.

Once again (in a clip on Crooks and Liars in a post "Hitchens vs. Hannity on Religion and God,") I have heard some theist offer the argument, “Look at the good that religion has done!” Hitchens was given little time for a reply, but the reply he gave was far from what Hannity deserved.

Hannity: Religion also has provided food and water and medicine and supplies and housing and there has been in the name of religion much good that has been done both in this country and around the world.

Hitchens: But if you reduce religion to social work then so does USAID do all that at, actually a secular organization, actually rather more convincingly. Most of the great philanthropists in the United States have been atheists. That does not prove that atheism is correct.

Technically, this answer is correct. However, it completely ignores the stench at the core of Hannity’s remark.

I have offered a response to this claim in a couple of posts, but I want to bring it front-and-center and shine a spotlight on it.

[Note: No interviewer would sit still and allow you to recite everything I have written below. So, think of the first paragraph as the actual response. The paragraphs that follow are talking points that can be added to any follow-up comments.]

Do you realize how amazingly bigoted that remark is? When you say, ‘Look at the good that religion does,’ as an argument for religion, you are saying, ‘look at the good that atheists would not do,’ which is the same as saying that atheists are inherently selfish and lack compassion.

Think about this: Would you dare sit there and tell a Jewish guest that Christian charity is proof that Jesus is the son of God – because of all the good done in the name of Jesus? If you even tried that, you would be out of a job by the end of the week. You know this. You are so instantly aware of the bigotry inherent in such a claim that the words would not leave your lips. Claiming that Christian charity is proof that Jews are mistaken about Christ would imply that Jews are not charitable. The roar that would result from such blatant bigotry would be deafening and end only in your resignation or termination.

But you say such things against atheists – even though you do not have a shred of evidence to back it up – without the slightest hint that you appreciate the appalling bigotry in your assumptions.

You probably won’t be fired for this – and will probably be rewarded – for the same reason that Don Imus would have perhaps been rewarded if he had delivered the same remark against blacks in the 1920s. Anti-atheist bigotry is so pervasive in this society that you can’t even notice it. It’s a stench that you have gotten used to because you spend your life in it. It is just as easy to today to divide the country between a 'we' who 'trust in God' and a 'they' who do not as it once was to divide restaurants and restroms among ‘white’ and ‘colored’.

You see nothing wrong in the sickening stereotype of atheists as cowards unwilling to risk their lives for others with the cliché “There are no atheists in foxholes” when there are atheist soldiers, police officers, firemen, and other heroes buried from one end of this country to another and in several foreign countries as well.

You do not see the bigotry inherent in having the government tell its school age children every day, ‘Good Americans are 'under God'. If you are not under God, then you are no different than those who are against a nation that is with liberty and justice for all.’

I say that it is not religion that causes people to do good deeds, but innate human kindness. Some of that human kindness finds its expression through church. However, it will find expression through whatever institutions are available.

I know many atheists who show their charity through a church because helping those in need is far more important than petty disputes about the existence of God. The only qualms that atheists have about making contributions through a church is they want to be sure that the money goes to food, clothing, and medicine, on building hospitals and promoting sanitation, on things that have real-world value, and not wasted on churches and Bibles.

Do you want to know why there are no atheist hospitals or charities? It’s because atheists do not drool over other people’s suffering as an opportunity to coerce them into joining one’s club. We are not going to force starving people to attend Darwin lectures in exchange for a bowl of soup. Nor are we going to require that they profess unbelief before we inoculate them against disease. Nor are we going to use their natural gratitude to coerce them into joining our meetings and buying membership into our clubs because they owe us.

We don’t paint religious symbols on our good deeds when we hand them out. We simply hand them out. Because our good deeds bear no mark, because they are unconditional, bigots like you think that you can ignore them – pretend they do not exist – and smugly tell your viewers/listeners, ‘Look at the good deeds that atheists would not do.’ You will not recognize the good that we do because you do not know what charity without strings looks like.

The fact is, the vast majority of atheists are too busy bringing good to the world to worry about who believes in God and who does not. You are alive today, almost certainly, because of the good that atheists do. Atheist scientists provide most of the medical breakthroughs that keep you alive – much of it using this theory of evolution that you love to denigrate. Atheist earth scientists have discovered ways to warn you of tornadoes, hurricanes, tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions. They have also taught you how to build structures that can withstand earthquakes, predict your weather. Atheist science, using this curse you love to spit at called ‘evolution’, make sure that you have enough food – clean, healthy food - to eat, clean water to drink, and clean air to breathe.

If all of the religious people were to disappear out of the scientific community, science would barely notice the loss. But if the atheist scientists were to suddenly disappear – as you seem to want them to do – most people in this world would quickly end up dead, and the prospects for future generations would look no better.

‘Look at the good that religion does; look at the good that atheists would not do,’ you say.

Find some good that atheists would not do, and I will be pleased to examine it with you. However, I assert that the good that atheists would not do – this denigrating bigotry you express towards atheists – exists only in your very narrow mind.

The point of this being – I express again – to make clear the fact that, “Look at the good that religion does,” stated in this kind of context means nothing other than, “Look at the good that atheists would not do.” It is a denigrating, mean-spirited, bigoted statement that would never cross the lips of any fair and just human being.

The 1000 Sadists Problem

There are two Big Questions that people trying to understand desire utilitarianism will eventually ask. Atheist Observer asked one of them two days ago.

This question asks me to imagine a world with 1000 people who seek do to harm of one form or another (child rapists, Nazis, slave owners) and 1 person whom they desire to harm (a child, a Jew, a slave). The question then is, “Doesn’t your theory say that the harmful acts in this type of situation are obligatory, since they fulfill the most desires?

[Note: For the sake of completeness, Big Question #1 is, “Why should I care whether the desires of others are fulfilled or not?” I have addressed that question in the post, “The Hateful Craig Problem.”]

My answer is that the theory still condemns the harmful act.

We must distinguish between two theories:

Desire fulfilling act utilitarianism: That act is right that fulfills the most desires.

Desire utilitarianism: Desires (like everything else in the universe) are good or bad according to whether they tend to fulfill or thwart (other) desires. Acts are right or wrong according to whether or not a person with good desires would perform that act.

Desire Fulfilling Act Utilitarianism would say to harm the child in these imaginary circumstances.

Desire Utilitarianism says that we need to look at the desire to see if it tends to fulfill or thwart other desires.

So, take the desire to rape children, for example. In any society, the more prevalent and the stronger this desire becomes, the more other desires are thwarted. As we turn the desire up, making it stronger and more common, either more children (and those who truly care for children) are having their desires thwarted, or those with this desire to rape children are having their desires thwarted.

Either way, ‘up’ in strength and prevalence means more desires being thwarted. ‘Down’ on the other hand means fewer desires being thwarted. If we can dial this desire all the way down to zero, then children would be safe at least from this type of harm, and nobody in society would be suffering the frustration of not acting on such a desire.

So, this desire counts as a bad desire.

Then, an act is right according to whether or not a person with good desires would perform that act. A person with good desires would have no desire to rape a child (and several reasons not to). So, a person with good desires would not perform that action. Which means that the action falls in the category of “morally prohibited” in desire utilitarian terms.

The key difference, again, is the difference between evaluating actions according to whether or not they fulfill the most desires, and evaluating desires according to whether they tend to fulfill or thwart other desires.

Intrinsic Value vs Relational Value

This distinction actually has at its roots another distinction – a distinction between the idea that value is an intrinsic property (found, in this case, in states of affairs where desires are being fulfilled), versus the idea that value is a relational property (a relationship between states of affairs and desires).

I can illustrate this difference by asking you to imagine two possible universes. In Universe 1there is a single person, Agent A, with a desire that P (for some proposition P) and a state of affairs in which P is true. In Universe 2 there is no such agent A. The question is: Which universe is better?

The theory that says that desire fulfillment has intrinsic value would argue that Universe 1 is better than Universe 2. This is because Universe 1 contains this intrinsically valuable state of desire fulfillment, while Universe 2 does not.

The theory that says that value is a relationship between states of affairs and desires says that both universes have equal value. Within Universe 1, states of affairs in which P is true has value to Agent A. That is to say, Agent A has ‘reasons for action’ to create or preserve states of affairs in which P is true. However, the fact that A exists and P is true has no value unless there is somebody with a desire that can be fulfilled by a state of affairs in which A exists and P is true.

Many readers would likely choose Universe 1 over Universe 2, saying that Universe 1 is better. However, this is because you, my reader, have desires. If you had to choose between Universe 1 existing and Universe 2 existing, you would likely choose Universe 1, because this would fulfill the more and stronger of your own desires.

However, imagine how a creature with no desires would choose in this case? By definition, this person would not care one way or the other. He has no reason to choose Universe 1 over Universe 2 if he has no desires that can be fulfilled by Universe 1 but not Universe 2.

Argument Against Intrinsic Value

The section above is not an argument that aims to show that desire utilitarianism is correct. It simply exists to illustrate the difference between theories that state that desire fulfillment has intrinsic value (which would support desire-fulfillment act utilitarianism), and that value exists as a relationship between states of affairs and desires (which supports desire utilitarianism).

The argument against the intrinsic value theory is simply an application of J.L. Mackie’s “Argument from Queerness”. We can quite adequately explain all relevant observations in the real world by postulating desires (as motivational propositional attitudes – a desire that P motivates the agent who has it to bring about or preserve states of affairs in which P is true). We do not need any other type of entity. By the powers vested in me by Occam’s Razor, intrinsic values do not exist. Only relationships between states of affairs and desires exist.

If somebody wants to claim that desire fulfillment has intrinsic value, I am going to ask, “What is this intrinsic value? Do states with intrinsic value somehow emit some form of ‘goodon radiation’ that we have evolved a faculty to detect? Why would evolution have given us such a faculty? Evolution is going to give us a tendency to like that which promotes our genetic replication, not that which radiates goodons, unless there is some reason to believe that these are the same thing. You have no way of making sense of this ‘value as an intrinsic property’ theory. So, I am going to stick with my ‘value as a relational property’ theory.

By the way, relational properties exist. They are as much a part of the real world as the objects or states they relate. So, the theory that value is a relational property is still a theory that says that values are real, they can be known, and that they are things about which people can be (objectively) mistaken. So, this is still, very much, a realist theory of value.

It is a theory that says that the value of desires themselves rests in the relationships that they have to other desires – that claims about the value of a desire are objectively true or false.

Acts and Desires

The next question is: Why is the evaluation of actions tied to desires? Why not evaluate actions directly by their consequences?

The answer to this question is because there ain’t no such thing as a free will.

A lot of moral philosophy is wasted on the idea that we can evaluate actions on their own intrinsic value. However, if this is the case, then we must somehow be able to perform an action based on its intrinsic value. That is to say, the property of the intrinsic value of an action must somehow be causally linked to the muscle contractions that cause the action.

The fact is, there is no such power. Intentional actions are the product of beliefs and desires. Whenever we say that an agent “ought to have done X” we must infer that the agent “ought to have had those desires that would have caused him to do X.” Since desires are persistent entities that will influence a number of actions over time, in saying that an agent “ought to have done X” we have to ask what those desires would then cause the agent to do under other, common, every-day circumstances.

If that desire would produce a good result in this highly unusual circumstance, but bad results in more common circumstance, then it is NOT the case that we have reason to promote that desire. That is to say, it is not the case that the agent ought to have done X.

For quite some time moral philosophers have been trying to argue that morality requires some form of free will. This conclusion came from the fact that moral philosophers were busy trying to evaluate actions independent of the desires that caused them. The fact that this practice requires such an absurd metaphysics is reason enough to discard it, and replace it with the idea that actions are evaluated according to whether or not they would fulfill good desires, where good desires are desires that people generally have reasons to promote or inhibit through social forces.

Do people generally have more and stronger reasons to turn the dial on a desire up – making the desire stronger through social forces? Or do they instead have more and stronger reasons to turn the dial on a desire down, making it weaker and less common? Which option will lead to more overall desire fulfillment, and less desire thwarting?

What will be the effect, in terms of desire fulfillment, of turning the dial for the desire to rape children up, or down? Down is the only option that reduces the thwarting of somebody’s desires. This tells us that there is more and stronger reason to bring the weapons of social influence to bear on inhibiting such a desire.

A Chat on Social Activism

Greetings:

I am having one of those days in which I would rather chat than write about any subject in details.

The item which has my attention now is a clip on Bill Moyers’ Journal “Keeping the Faith” about the graduates at Regent University. This is Pat Robertson’s university, whose objective is to create a cadre of lawyers who are particularly devoted to Christianity.

Cherry Picking and the Sources of Morality

I have written recently on the “cherry picking” that religious people do with respect to biblical moral principles. I find it difficult to think that we could ever revert back to a form of barbarity that would come from true biblical fundamentalism. That is to say, I see very little real-world possibility that we will become a country that executes those who work on the Sabbath or children who talk back to their parents.

These people do not, strictly speaking, get their morality from biblical sources. They get their morality from something else, using religion as a cover when it is useful to do so, and otherwise simply ignoring or rewriting scripture that they do not like.

One question to ask is, "What is this 'something else'?" Where do these people actually get their morality?

Bluntly, the “something else” is the political whim of the leaders of a group. The leaders decide what they like and dislike, and the group blindly follows. All the leaders need to do is find a boogey man and point.

Now, I am not talking about a conspiracy, headed by people who are fully aware that the claims they make are nonsense and whose only goal is personal power. The mind is more subtle than that. The leaders, too, think they are doing good. However, they do not get their ideas of goodness from scripture (which we know for the reasons given above). They get their measure of good and evil from their own 'hearts'. This means that they get their sense of good and evil from their own likes and dislikes.

They think that their ‘hearts’ tell them the word of God. What their ‘hearts’ really tell them is what they have learned (through their culture) to like and dislike. They dislike homosexuality, so they brand it as evil, and use scripture for cover when it is available. They do not dislike people working on the day of the Sabbath, and they particularly do not dislike the business of banking or the charging of interest, so they ignore scripture in these cases. The differences here is not a difference between what scripture says and does not say. The difference is what the preacher likes and does not like.

Another part of the dynamic, for getting the sheep to huddle together into a single mass, is to identify some threat - some group of them that are the source of all of our problems. In this case, them are homosexuals, feminists, atheists, and liberals.

At this point, I think that it is important to note that atheists are capable of the same type of thinking. There is no law of nature that prevents atheists from getting involved in the same type of social dynamics, where a small numbers decide what is good and bad by listening to their own hearts (only, they may call this an evolved sense of right and wrong), and uniting their followers behind them by pointing out some group of them as the enemy. When this sort of dynamic takes over, no atrocity will seem undeserved or unjustified against them who are the source of all of our problems.

And, yes, this does concern me from time to time. Atheists are human. (Or, at least, all of them that I know are.) As such, the psychological facts that make these the dynamics I warned about above possible are facts about humans. A serious study of the forces that lead to these types of attrocities should show that a belief in God is only one way that they can manifest themselves. Those who put too much attention on the idea that religion is the root of this evil, rather than a convenient scape goat for some manifestations of it, may not recognize in themselves their own potential for the same type of attrocities. To avoid these attrocities, harms, it is important to recognize and respond to the psycho-social facts that make these types of acts possible in any group.

Anyway, that concern is for a future time. Today, my concern is with the fact that we have this flock of graduates heading out in the world dedicated to doing things that they (wrongfully) think as good, who will in fact be living their lives delivering endles harm to others. They will do so in the name of God and for the greater glory of their not-quite mortal leaders.

How do we deal with these threats? How do we protect people from the harms that these people will inflict?

I see a lot of electrons being spilled on the questions of how to organize atheists or whether atheists should form alliances with others.

Which reminds me . . .

Richard Dawkins: The Roosevelt and Churchill Analogy

I read (or, rather, heard, since I do much of my reading over the head phones as I exercise) Dawkins discussing arguments about whether to form alliances with other groups. Dawkins addressed the argument that Roosevelt and Churchill, during World War II, saw fit to ally with Stalin to defeat Hitler. It was a wise move.

Dawkins’ response was to say that the situation he is concerned with is different. His enemy is religion itself. It makes no sense to form an alliance with those who say that science is compatible with religion if what one wants to do away with is religion.

Yet, Dawkins ignored (or did not allow himself to see) the obvious counter-reply. Roosevelt and Churchill could have said, “Our enemy is against tyranny itself. Therefore, it is more important to us that we sever our alliances with China and Russia and drive them into the hands of the enemy, so that we end up fighting them, too.”

Yes, it would have been a good plan . . . to refuse to give any help whatsoever to Russia and China, because they, too, were ‘the enemy’. It would have been a perfect plan, assuming that Roosevelt and Churchill wanted to loose the war and to help Hitler and the Japanese Empire take control of the bulk of the world. Assuming that it was important to actually stop Hitler and Imperial Japan, allying with China and Russia was not an entirely a foolish idea.

Organizing Atheism

I have argued in the past that I see no particularly great value in organizing atheists, because atheism does not entail any particular moral view. A more important goal is to tackle the actual issues facing the country and the world today. In doing so, I would argue that it is important (vital and necessary) to point out where religious thinking is the cause of great harms. Yet, the goal remains, not to end religious thinking, but to end great harms.

If an atheist were to join a gay rights group, and speak forcefully about the stupidity of drawing anti-homosexual bigotry out of the Bible, one would probably find a lot of people receptive to that message. If one were to join an environmental group, and ridicule and attack the argument that the impending rapture means that we can ignore environmental concerns and go ahead and destroy our planet one would likely find people willing to listen.

Go to the environmentalist organizations, join them, and form and strengthen a subgroup there whose main argument is how this same millennial thinking is putting every species on the planet (including humans) at risk of great harm.

Join a group that is fighting Parkinson’s disease, or Alzheimer’s, or diabetes, and let them know how religious thinking is killing the people they love.

Join an anti-war group and complain about how the backwards thinking of the Bush Administration – its religious disposition to take certain facts as given and accept or reject evidence based solely on whether it supports a pre-drawn conclusion – has gotten so many Americans killed or wounded and cost us hundreds of billions of dollars.

In all of these cases, one would be fighting religion where religion is doing some significant real-world harms, and talking to people who have a real stake, in terms of life, health, and quality of life, in listening to the message.

Atheism does not entail any particular position on any of these issues. I draw my moral conclusions, not from atheism but from desire utilitarianism. However, atheists in all camps have a unique position for fighting arguments that effecitively boil down to, “The harm that comes from our policies is harm that we inflict in the name of God, so it is justified.”

It is, I think, quite important to try to say something that will let people like those graduating from Regent University see the magnitude of the gap between the type of person they want to be, and the type of person they have been trained to become. They could be somebody who does good in the (real) world. Instead, they are being trained to be people who will live their lives delivering harms to others, blind to the harms that they do. I think it is important to speak, not strictly (or even mainly) to the existence of God, but to the existence of great harm.

Paul Churchland: Rawls' Theory of Justice

Paul Churchland, professor of philosophy at University of California, San Diego, rose to address the Beyond Belief 2006 conference to present the moral/political theory of John Rawls.

Churchland began his presentation by reporting that he was asked to speak about the moral and political philosophy of John Rawls probably because the conference organizers wanted to show the audience a system of morality that did not rely in any way on scripture. Rawls’ theory of justice certainly met that objective.

Rawls: A Theory of Justice

Briefly, Rawls suggested that we can best intuit justice by asking what a rational person would choose for a political system if he were placed behind a ‘veil of ignorance’. This veil left the agent ignorant of any of the particular facts of his life – his intelligence or access to education, his economic standing, who his friends were, his physical appearance, his race, etc.

According to Rawls, the position that a rational person would choose is one that provided the highest standard of living for those who were the bottom of the social and economic ladder. Such a system, for example, would allow for great inequalities of wealth if the system that produced that wealth left the least-well-off people better than they would have been in a system without such inequalities.

The idea was that the option which raised the position of the least well off was a uniquely rational best option.

Churchland’s Criticism

Churchland then threatened pulled the rug out from under the conference organizers by claiming that this theory of justice does not work. Of course, what good does it do to assert that we can have a system of ethics that makes no use of God if there is no system of ethics that works.

Churchland’s objection was that Rawls’ theory of justice employed the same type of reasoning that Rene Descartes used to defend particular facts of nature, including the existence of God.

Descartes argued that if he can form a clear and distinct idea of a natural principle than this demonstrated that the principle was a natural law. This meant that all that scientists needed to do was to sit around and measure the clearness and distinctness of their ideas in order to understand nature. Descartes also asserted that one of these clear and distinct ideas was the idea of God; therefore, God exists.

Rawls is using his veil of ignorance to form “clear and distinct ideas” of moral principles. It promises to be no more useful in helping us come to a theory of justice than Descartes plan.

As a matter of fact, science has not made the progress we have seen by testing ideas for clearness and distinctness. It would, in fact, be quite nice if all a scientist has to do is sit back in his office, put his feet up on his desk, and test his ideas for clearness and distinctness.

Yet, science requires a lot of hard work. The scientist has to get up off of his desk, go to the lab (which often is a very uncomfortable place such as a hot desert where he looks for dinosaur fossils, a damp and sweltering jungle, or an arctic research station where he is picking up ice cores). He has to carefully and meticulously take and record precise measurements. Then he needs to fit his favorite theory to those measurements or – GASP! – discover that his theory does not fit.

Churchland’s argument is that morality and justice require the same type of experimentation. He described human history substantially as a social science experiment, with an emphasis on science. We set up a society. We observe the results. From our observations we evaluate whether the assumptions on which our society are validated or falsified. We make adjustments. We then establish a new society, or modify the existing society, to take into consideration what we have learned. We make a new set of observations. And so on.

Churchland used Prohibition as an example of a social experiment. People devised a theory, they set up an experiment, they drew some observations that suggested that prohibition was a bad idea. They tossed out prohibition. I suppose we are to think of inquisitions, slavery, monarchy, Nazi Germany, and Soviet Russia as failed experiments.

This may be a salient point against Rawls’ methods for arriving at moral truth, but it is strangely hollow. Imagine somebody responding to a theory of planetary formation by saying that current theories are only the most recent component of millennia of scientific study and hard work that can be traced back to the first civilizations. This may be true, but it does not help us to decide which theory of planetary formation is correct. It suggests that certain methods should not be used to judge theories of planetary formation, but it says nothing about the methods that should be used.

I have encountered a similar issue with respect to the desire utilitarianism that I have defended here. One of the more frequent objections that I receive says that desire utilitarianism must be rejected because, if desire utilitarianism were true, some moral questions would be difficult to answer. The objector makes the completely unfounded assumption that a moral theory would make all moral questions easy to answer, and that desire utilitarianism must be rejected for its failure to do so.

I would argue for rejecting any theory that distributes answers to moral questions like answers to scientific questions. Some of them are easy to answer. Some are difficult. Some may even remain outside of our ability to answer forcing us to live in a universe with some measure of moral uncertainty. Yet, over time, we have the ability to make moral progress as we make scientific progress, never quite arriving at perfect moral knowledge (just as we will always lack perfect scientific knowledge), but getting closer over time – as long as religion doesn’t muck things up by insisting on teaching moral (scientific) myth.

Other Objections to Rawls

I would like to take this opportunity to throw in a few additional objections to Rawls’ theory of justice.

(1) Implications of the Veil of Ignorance

Rawls asks us to imagine the choices that one will make from behind a veil of ignorance. He then says that these conclusions apply to the real world in which we live. But why would implications drawn from obviously false premises have any relevance in the real world?

Imagine, as you read this, that a fire breaks out nearby filling the room with smoke. What would you do? No doubt, you can come up with a plan. You can pick an escape route and imagine yourself using it. However, it does not follow from the fact that you would perform a particular set of acts in an imaginary world in which there is a nearby fire, that you should – in the real world where there is no fire – perform the same actions.

Similarly, the mere fact that you would choose a particular political system when behind a veil of ignorance certainly does not imply that you should choose that same political system in the real world where you suffer from no such ignorance.

(2) The Extent of Ignorance

Another problem arises from the question, “How ignorant am I supposed to be?” Are we supposed to be ignorant of our beliefs?

For example, am I to assume that I do not know from behind a veil of ignorance whether I am a Christian Scientist? It would seem that I must be ignorant of this if I am going to vote for a system that treats Christian Scientists justly. However, am I also supposed to be ignorant as to the cause of diseases? If I am not to be ignorant of disease, then I would likely support a system that helped Christian Scientists realize their error and would force doctors (rather than priests) to attend to my illness.

Consider the choices that a person who believes in an arrogant and megalomaniacal God who condemns to eternal damnation any who do not believe in him. What would this person choose behind a veil of ignorance?

Or the person who believes that homosexuality is fundamentally wrong? To such a person would likely vote for a society where homosexuals are compelled to seek some sort of treatment that he would want even for himself.

In short, if people are not allowed to take behind the veil of ignorance their beliefs about the nature of the world – the causes of disease, the existence of a God, the intrinsic value of various states of affairs – then we will be too ignorant to make rational decisions. On the other hand, if we can carry our beliefs about such things behind the veil of ignorance, people will end up promoting substantially the same principles behind the veil of ignorance that they promoted in front of the veil.

Conclusion

In short, Rawls’ theory of justice is a secular theory, but it does not work. As such, it is a poor candidate for proving that it is possible to have a system of morality that does not depend on God. This job must be given over to theories that actually work.

Discussion: Faith as a Vice

In my continuing weekend series discussing the presentations at Beyond Belief 2006, we are at the end of the second-to-last episode. We have heard presentations from Sam Harris, Jim Woodward, and Melvin Konner on the nature of morality and religion. At the conference itself, this seemed to be an alliance of Konner and Wooodward against Harris. (Soon, Richard Dawkins would take the stage as Harris’ ally.)

I hold that Woodward made the strongest case, while Konner presented the worst case. In fact, I would nominate Konner for giving the most intellectually bankrupt presentation at the conference. I discussed many of his mistakes and misinterpretations in my discussion of his presentation. The discussion that followed brings to bear another of his mistakes.

Konner’s Response to Harris

At one point in his presentation, Konner pointed out the difficulty in convincing religious people to give up their religion. He said that they know all of the arguments – arguments about God’s evil character, the contradictions that can be found in scripture, the scientific evidence that overwhelmingly supports theories that the believer rejects. Dawkins and Harris are not saying anything new. It would be foolish for them to expect that their efforts would have any effect.

After giving an inventory of these arguments that fail to impact religious belief, Konner gives Harris’ definition of faith as something that closes down discourse. It closes the mind to evidence, allowing the faithful to hold on to their belief no matter what. In response to this, Konner simply said, “Yes, that’s what it is. Get over it.”

Taking these objections [to religion] we need to recognize that none of them is new. All of them have been heard or independently thought of by most intelligent people, and most important none has posed or is likely to pose a serious obstacle to belief in the minds of the vast majority of believers. . . . [M]ost religious people don’t care about proofs. It is not news to them that religion has caused great harm, or that their sacred texts are flawed, or that science explains most things. They have been meeting these objections with aplomb for centuries. Most don’t care, they will proudly tell you, about argument. They don’t care about evidence. They don’t even care that they can’t clearly define ‘God’. Most think that all these conversations are silly.

So what do they care about? Faith, defined in Letter to the Hebrews as ‘…the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.’ Sam [Harris’] definition is or one of his basic statements is, ‘Religious faith . . . forms a kind of perverse, cultural singularity – a vanishing point beyond which rational discourse proves impossible.’

Yes, that’s what it is, Sam.

Get over it.

Now, I would like you to imagine a person giving a presentation in which he pointed out all of the various ways in which rapists rationalize their actions – giving them a cloak of legitimacy, ignoring any evidence about the harmfulness of rape and the incoherence of their own attempts to rationalize it. He also makes claims about the high recidivism rate for sex offenders and how hard it is to convince people not to commit rape. After all of this, the speaker says, “Smith defines rape as sexual penetration without consent. Yes, that’s what it is, Smith. Get over it.”

Get over it?

A short digression. A religious fundamentalist or anybody else with more interest in scoring rhetorical points than intellectual honest debate would say, “How dare you compare faith to rape!” As a matter of fact, I said nothing to compare faith to rape. What I did was compare an statement about faith to a statement about rape to show that the statement of faith contained certain question-begging assumptions that will become clear shortly.

Faith as a Vice

Harris is not presenting the case against faith as a matter of competing beliefs. Harris is presenting faith as a moral problem – as a pattern of behavior which is extremely dangerous and the cause of significant harm to others. The command to “get over it” is a command to stand by with one’s hands in one’s pockets while innocent people around the world are being made to suffer and die horrible deaths, without lifting even a finger to help protect those innocent lives. For a morally concerned individual, that is not an option.

Konner’s response, “Get over it,” assumes either that there is nothing morally culpable in an act of faith. Konner accepts many of Harris’ points in favor of thinking of faith as an a vice. Yet, ultimately, he says, “Yes, we have all of these reasons to condemn faith. But you should simply accept it.”

One possible reason to accept faith, in spite of its social costs, is because we cannot eliminate it. There will always be people who will engage in faith-based thinking. The idea that we can turn everybody into perfect reason-based thinkers is simply wishful thinking.

However, this same argument can be applied to any moral objective – and it fails against all of them. There is no way in which we can convince everybody to be perfectly honest, yet this is not an argument against raising moral objections against those who lie, bear false witness, or engineer false beliefs. We will never be able to completely eliminate theft, yet we still have many good reasons to condemn theft. And there will certainly be rapes far into the foreseeable future, but this does not imply that we must accept and tolerate rape.

Nor is the fact that there will always be faith-based thinkers imply that we must passively accept faith-based thinking; particularly when it is responsible for far more death and suffering than lies, theft, and rape.

That is how Harris’ argument goes, and Konner’s response does not even begin to touch it.

Intellectual Recklessness as Vice

At this point, I want to make another careful distinction. It is a distinction between, “Harris’ argument is that faith is a vice,” and “Faith is a vice.” I can present Harris’ argument here, and point out that Konner fails to address it, without agreeing with Harris on the claim that faith is a vice. In fact, I do not agree with Harris on this matter.

Intellectual recklessness is a vice. However, the wrong of intellectual recklessness is like the wrong of drunk driving. Drunk driving is wrong when it puts the well-being of others at risk. However, if the drunk driver confines himself to his own 10,000 acre ranch, on which nobody else is permitted to trespass, he threatens nobody, and he does no wrong.

Similarly, reckless thinking is a vice when it is done in areas that put others at risk of harm, but not when it is confined to beliefs that only affect the thinker. A person who believes that a God exists, that he will survive death, and that God will allow him into heaven if he is good to others, and who is not reckless about what constitutes good for others, is not somebody we need to worry about. Yes, he is a reckless thinker, but he is reckless only in the privacy of his own life.

Harris speaks as somebody who would condemn even reckless driving on one’s own property on the grounds that allowing even a little bit of reckless driving would tear down the walls that would otherwise keep people from reckless driving in public. In fact, Harris’ argument would actually be more like saying that all drinking is to be condemned because, if we allow drinking, we will inevitably suffer the effects of those who choose to drink and drive. By refusing to condemn all drinking, Harris’ argument would say, we give license to those who would drink and drive.

Regular readers will remember that I had harsh words last week for Konner when he said that Harris and Dawkins were arguing for a religious version of Prohibition. They argued for no such thing. My argument here does not accuse Harris of arguing for religious prohibition. There is no inconsistency in condemning something while, at the same time, saying that it is foolish to pass a law against it. A person can argue for abolition while saying that the only legitimate force for abolition is moral persuasion.

I (and many atheists) apply these same principles to the greatest absurdities of religion. Though we hold that those who speak these absurdities deserve ridicule and scorn, and condemnation where they prey on others who are vulnerable, we would object to any legal prohibitions against these speech acts. Moral persuasion and the force of reason are the only legitimate tools to use in these cases. The force of law is off-limits.

So, here I compare Harris’ condemnation of all faith as a response to harmful acts based on faith to the condemnation of all drinking as a response to drunk driving. I, on the other hand, argue that faith becomes worthy of condemnation only when it becomes a risk to others, in the same way that drinking becomes worthy of condemnation when it becomes a risk to others.

If somebody were to come to me with a belief in God and the afterlife, with a belief that God will save those who promote goodness in the real world, that scripture is clearly a poor moral guide, and that reason provides a better tool for determining the difference between what is good and what is bad, I would rather have him as my neighbor than many of the atheists that I have come across. Here is somebody who confines his reckless thinking to areas which do not cause him to be a threat to others. While many atheists, who get the right answer with respect to God’s existence, can still be extremely reckless thinkers when it comes to what causes harm to others.

Harsh Language

This consideration of faith as a vice also explains and, if the premises are correct, wold justify the harsh language that Harris uses.

There are two ways to get a person to change their attitude towards something. Belief is an attitude that a proposition is true or false. The way that one affects beliefs is through reason – by showing evidence against the proposition, thus proving to the listener that the proposition is false. Desire, on the other hand, is a mental force that motivates an agent to make or keep a proposition true. We affect desire through praise and blame, reward (for those good, clear, rational thinkers) and punishment (e.g., in cases such as medical malpractice where intellectual recklessness can be directly linked to harm to others).

It is simply absurd to treat a love of faith as a matter for reason. If faith is a vice then, like all vices, we have good and strong reason to inhibit its influence by morally condemning those who engage in faith-based thinking. The goal is to make them feel embarrassed and ashamed, so that these emotions will inhibit them from continuing to engage in behavior that is a threat to others.

Once again, I believe that Harris’ objection to faith itself is much too broad. Therefore, I would argue that harsh language directed at all the targets that Harris would commend directing it is not always just. However, to the degree that Harris is correct in his claim that faith is a vice, to that degree it does follow that harsh language against those who engage in the practice of faith is appropriate.

Limits of Condemnation

At the same time, it is important not to go overboard in this condemnation of alternative ways of thinking. Too often, those who assert that others are being reckless and who call for punishment tend to be the poorer thinkers themselves. We do require a certain amount of humility, where we give others the benefit of the doubt. We shall presume another person’s thinking to be within moral bounds.

It shall not be a crime to disagree with another person, even when a person’s argument is pathetically poor. However, when poor belief causes a person to pick up a weapon (or conspire to wield a weapon) to kill or maim others, then it is time to step in and physically restrain the reckless thinker.

These are the standards that I have used throughout this blog. The only legitimate response to words are counter-words. The only legitimate response to a political campaign in an open society is a counter-campaign. Only when one side picks up weapons is it permissible to take up arms in self-defense.

Failure to abide by these rules – and even failure to use praise and reward to promote them, while using condemnation and punishment to inhibit violations – risks moving us towards, if not actually to, a state much like that of Baghdad.

Brain Science and Morality

Egads. I have too many themes going on at the same time.

Today’s post, however, is of central importance to two of those themes.

It is relevant to the genetic morality theme covered recently in:

Richard Dawkins; Morality and the Selfish Gene

Evaluating Moral Theories

The Genetic Morality Delusion

It is also relevant to the Morality and Mental States theme covered recent in:

Sam Harris: Moral Irresponsibility

Morality and Mental States

My point in this post is to deny a common assumption about a relationship between morality and brain science.

So, let’s assume you are going to conduct an experiment. You are going to un a series of tests on a series of patients. This test involves hooking the patients up to various brain-scanning machines. Then, you are going to give the patient a complex math problem to solve. Let’s say, you are going to ask them to multiply two three-digit numbers together (e.g., 847 * 446). You give them the assignment, they go through the process, they put their number on a note card, and the experiment is over.

After you have collected all of this data, there is still one question that you will not be able to answer by looking ONLY at the brain scans. Did the subjects get the right answer?

Clearly, it is not the case that if the agent got a wrong answer that your machines will come back with no data. Your machines are going to give you data regardless of whether the answer is right or wrong.

You might even be able to discover a pattern that allows you to distinguish right answers from wrong answers just by looking at the scans. Perhaps a particular blip on one of the instruments becomes reliably correlated with a right answer such that all those who show the blip get the right answer, and those who do not make a mistake.

Yet, even this requires that you have the ability to acquire, through some method other than brain scans, an idea of what the right answer is, so that you can make the correlation to start with.

In other words, all of the brain science in the world will not give you a theory of right answers. It will only give you a theory of how people come up with their answers, independent of whether those answers are right or wrong.

For some reason, on the issue of morality, a lot of people think that you can hook a person up to a bunch of brain-monitoring machines, give them a moral question, and that the measurements will tell you how morality is done. Those brain scans will tell you how the subject got the answer that she did. However, one thing that the brain scans will never be able to answer is the question of whether the answer she came up with, using whatever method she used, is the right answer. To do that, you need an independent theory of right moral answers.

The first objection that this model would encounter is the claim that there are no correct moral answers. Morality is nothing more than the judgment that the person comes up with when she is asked the question.

If there are no moral right answers, then whenever an agent judges something gas right or wrong, then her judgment is in error. Sheh is looking at X and saying, “X is right”. However, the doctor is saying that “X is right” is false. This patient, in seeing the rightness of X, is seeing something that is not really there. She is simply delusional – as are all people who perceive things as right or wrong.

One could say that these delusions are an innate part of how we are wired – and that evolution has made us this way. In fact, evolution has almost certainly made us disposed to perceive things that are not there. Scientists can identify and replicate a number of optical illusions as well. Yet, one inescapable fact about optical illusions is that they are illusions – reality is different from how we perceive it. If we act on these illusions, then we are acting on a mistake.

If we have a faculty for perceiving things as moral or immoral, and there is no such thing as something being moral or immoral in fact, then these perceptions are nothing other than moral illusions. They are mirages manufactured in the brain that gives us a false impression of the real world.

We may be polite and say that a moral illusion is “true for” the subject who perceives it. That is to say, the subject genuinely perceives the object of evaluation as being moral or immoral. Yet, this is still true in exactly the same case as the appearance of a mirage is “true for” the person who sees it. It is still a mirage. It is still a distorted and false view of morality.

As it turns out, these distorted and false views of morality are precisely those that people use to punish (fine, imprison, and execute) other people. These moral illusions are not simply some harmless tricks of the mind. People refer to these all the time as justification for laws that determine who lives and who dies, who lives free and who is imprisoned. If they are, indeed, illusions, then basing decisions on whether to harm others on these illusions appears to compound the mistake.

That is, unless there is something to be said about an object of evaluation being moral or immoral in fact. Then (and only then) do we have the power to look at our moral perceptions and discover which of them perceive moral value correctly, and which are mistaken. We can then say that it is legitimate to take accurate moral perceptions seriously, while false moral perceptions can be dismissed as mistakes (moral illusions).

However, all of this requires a theory of right moral answers that you cannot get out of brain scans.

Now, nothing I have written in this post proves that there are moral facts. What I have argued for is that, either there are moral facts, or there are not. If there are moral facts, then you cannot get those facts by looking at brain scans. Those brain scans tell you what happens in the brain when people think about morality, but they do not reveal morality itself. If there are no moral facts, then these brain scans are the study of an illusion – of a disposition to perceive something as having a property it does not have.

In other words, these scientists studying brain scans can say that they are studying beliefs about morality, though what they study tells us nothing about the truth of those beliefs. Or they can say that they are studying the phenomena of moral illusion, if there are no moral facts. However, they cannot truthfully claim that they are studying morality itself.

Imagine coming across an article in a psychology journal in which the researcher is reporting on the findings of his most recent work. He hooked a bunch of monitoring equipment up to people, then told them to think about stars, planets, asteroids, and comets. He shows them pictures so that he can measure the effects that the picture has on the brain, and asks them to say something about the object depicted in each image. All the while he says that he is an astronomer and that he is engaged in the study of astronomy – of stars, planets, asteroids, and comets.

The sensible reaction would be, “Hey, doc. I’m not saying that the work you are doing isn’t important. What I am saying is that what you are studying is not astronomy.” Whenever I read an article from some scientist reporting on what happens in the brain while his subjects think about moral matters, my answer is quite similar. “Hey, doc. I’m not saying that the work you are doing isn’t important. What I am saying is that what you are studying is not astronomy.”

Failure to recognize and respect this distinction generates a great deal of wasted effort and confusion.

Mental States and Moral Wrongs

Yesterday’s discussion about the context of Sam Harris’ statement leads to the question, “What is the relationship between belief and justified killing?”

Imagine that you are taking care of your neighbor’s four young children while she goes to a counseling session with her pastor. After her session, she shows up at your house with a shotgun. She is obviously upset and confesses that she must kill her children. She tells you that Satan is out to get them, and the only way to protect them from this unspeakable evil is to put them in the hands of a more powerful protector – God. The only way to do that is to kill them and send them to heaven.

She also says that she will kill anybody who gets in her way.

Would it be permissible for you to kill this woman if it is the only way to prevent her from killing you and the children?

The answer is clearly, “Yes.”

Why is it permissible to kill her?

Ultimately, because she intends to kill (murder) four innocent people (five, if you try to stop her).

Why does she intend to kill the children?

Because (1) she loves them and wishes to protect them, (2) she believes they are in danger, (3) she believes that only God can protect them, and (4) she believes that they can only have God’s protection if they are dead.

The four mental states in this example make up the mother’s reasons for attempting to kill the children. Prohibiting her from killing the children means that it is perfectly okay for her to love her children and want to protect them, as long as she does not believe that the only way to protect them is to kill them. Or, she can go ahead and believe that the only way to protect her children is to kill them, but not at the same time that she loves and wants to protect her children.

However, we will not allow her to both, at the same time, love and want to protect her children while she believes that the only way to protect them is to kill them. If this is the case, then we will exercise our right to restrain her by force if necessary, or even to kill her if she should succeed in getting into a position where we have no other option.

Every action that we prohibit – from robbing a bank to raping a child – is a prohibition on whatever combinations of beliefs and desires that would result in an agent performing such an action. It is entirely incoherent to say, “You may do not do X; but you have a right to have those mental states that cause people to do X.”

So, even though moral prohibition bans a specific desire or a specific belief, every prohibition prohibits certain combinations of desires and beliefs. Every prohibition is a prohibition on combinations of mental states. A prohibition on speeding is a prohibition on those mental states that would cause one to speed – or a prohibition on those who have such mental states from getting behind the wheel of a car.

We can also see this in how we determine whether a person has actually performed an immoral act, or whether he could be excused.

For example, we do not punish people for accidents. It simply makes no sense to do so. To punish somebody is to say that they are at fault for what happened, that they could have done otherwise. An accident, by definition, is something that was outside of the agent’s control. In the case of an accident, the agent could not have done otherwise. So, punishment is inappropriate. (In law, there are some exceptions to this. In morality, I would hold that exceptions make no sense.)

An intentional action is a conglomeration of a set of beliefs and desires. When we have a person on trial for a crime, the whole purpose of the trial is to determine what the accused believed at the time of the crime, and what he desired at the time of the crime. What we learn about his beliefs and desires determines whether or not we are going to punish him.

Let’s say, he shoots somebody. The mere act of shooting somebody does not make him guilty of a crime. He might have shot that person in order to eliminate a competitor for a job opportunity. Or, he might have shot that person in order to stop her from killing her four children.

The difference between homicide and self-defense rests in what the shooter believed and what he wanted to accomplish at the time of the shooting. Did he desire to protect the children from harm and believe that the person he shot was going to harm the children? Or did he desire a particular job and believe that the person he shot would otherwise get the job instead of him?

One set of beliefs and desires means that the accused did nothing wrong and is, perhaps, a hero. Another set of beliefs and desires means that the accused is morally contemptible and deserving of punishment. It is beliefs and desires that determine one from the other. All of the effort at the trial goes into determining which set of beliefs and desires the agent had.

We may say that we are trying to find out what the agent did so that we can punish his action. However, the “action” is defined by what we learn about the agent’s beliefs and desires. With one set of beliefs and desires the “action” is one of self-defense. With a different set of beliefs and desires the “action” is murder.

We may say that we punish people for their actions while we leave them free to have whatever mental states they like. However, it is almost always the case that what we call wrong is an ‘action’ defined as a collection of mental states, accompanied by some physical movement – the twitching of muscles - that has no moral quality independent of the mental states they are associated with.

Now, I would like to go back to our original example. When we prohibit a mother from killing her children, what we are in fact prohibiting is any set of mental states which would cause a mother to kill her children. This includes the set of our mental states that I mentioned at the start of this post.

However, if we are going to ban this particular set of mental states, which states are we going to ban? Clearly, the desire to protect one’s children is not on the chopping block. We want to encourage this state. So, the only option is to ban one or more of the beliefs that make up this set. In short, mothers are not permitted to believe that the best way to protect their children is to kill them.

Or, at least, they are not permitted to believe this except when they can provide good evidence. If one’s child is slowly burning to death, with no possibility of rescue, screaming in pain, a sharpshooter parent may shoot the child to prevent several minutes of agony before death. In this case, the parent may be let off, but only because her belief in the child’s suffering is on such solid footing.

I also cannot help but mention that desire utilitarianism is compatible with all of this. Desire utilitarianism, which is the idea that morality is concerned primarily with promoting desires that there are the more and stronger reasons to promote, and inhibiting desires that there is the more and stronger reason to inhibit.

Misquoting Sam Harris: Culture of Irresponsibility

It appears that the propagandists for anti-atheist bigotry have found a weapon to use in a quote from Sam Harris’ book “The End of Faith.” There, Harris wrote:

[S]ome propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing in them.

This is being used around the internet in a campaign of fear, representing Harris (and those who approve of his work) of arguing for a state much like the Inquisition, where people are arrested and executed merely for having the wrong beliefs.

In Context

As posted on A Load of Bright in “Misquoting Harris”, this quote is taken out of context. Harris is talking about somebody whose beliefs cause him to threaten others. His account would apply, for example, to a case where a neighbor of mine took seriously the commandment that those who work on the Sabbath shall be put to death. Noting that I publish blog entries every day of the week and deciding that this constitutes work, he decides that I must be put to death. While I am sitting on my patio working on my next post, he comes over with a machete in order to execute God’s will.

Clearly, I would have the right to defend myself and to use deadly force to do so. Of course, additional principles such as a clear and present danger also apply – nothing in Harris’ actual quote even hints at overruling these caveats. Yet, those who wish to believe otherwise are free to add their own (false) assumptions in order to season the words to taste.

A consistent use of the principles employed by some hard-core fundamentalists may dispute this conclusion that I would have a right to defend myself. They may protest that any act of self-defense on my part constitutes ‘militant atheism’ – an attempt on my part to force my religious views (that there is no wrong in working on the Sabbath) on my neighbor by preventing him from freely exercising his religious requirement to kill me. These are people who refuse to recognize that a “freedom of religion” is not an absolute moral permission to do whatever one wants, to whomever one wants, as long as one can find a piece of scripture to support it.

Yet, let’s leave these anomalies aside, and work within the common-sense view that the right to freedom of religion is still constrained by moral limits that are higher than scripture – limits that would allow me to defend myself from my religious neighbor’s attack regardless of his ability to find biblical passages to support his view.

In this context, his ‘belief’ – and the fact that it has driven him to be a danger to others – justifies a lethal act of self-defense.

Intellectual Immorality

Harris’ quote, taken out of this context, is an extremely useful tool for those whose business is the manufacture and untaxed sale of hatred (since contributions to religious institutions are not taxed) against atheists. As such, it is reasonable to expect that some would find this business hard to resist. Moral prohibitions against bearing false witness against others, lying, sophistry (engineering false beliefs) and intellectual recklessness are of no concern to such people – only the profitability (in terms of cash and power) of their product.

This is the point that I want to make in this posting. It is not that there are people who have taken Harris’ statement out of context in order to manufacture hate. It is not the fact that what they have done is morally contemptible. A morally responsible person would have checked the quote to determine if it was accurate, and refused to use it if it was not.

No, the real issue is that these people are part of a vast and powerful culture that have absolutely no respect for the intellectual virtues. Intellectual recklessness, bearing false witness, sophistry (manufacturing false beliefs), and deliberate deception – they shrug off these moral crimes with a lack of guilt that would make them the envy of any sociopath.

As I work on this blog, I have often thought of what might happen if my writings somehow became noticed by the members of this culture. I suspect that they would immediately cast me as somebody who says that people may do whatever they desire because fulfilling desire is the root of all value.

Yes, I say that all value consists of relationships between states of affairs and desires. However, these people would likely choose to ignore (because they care nothing about truth) that this implies that the value of certain desires rests in their tendency to fulfill other desires. Thus, it is not the case that all desires are equal – some are clearly better than others. Some desires (those that tend to fulfill the desires of others), we have reason to promote and encourage. Other desires (desires that do harm to or otherwise thwart the desires of others) we have reason to inhibit.

However, once this propaganda machine gets up to speed, there is little that I, with my little corner blog and the need to spend a good portion of my day working for a living, could do anything to stop it. Those who read the words of people who would bear false witness against me equally will accept the accusations as true. This is because they share in this culture of intellectual irresponsibility – it is a part of their culture. Reading the words of others through a lens of moral responsibility is simply out of the question.

There are, then, three responses to an incident such as this wrong committed against Harris. The first response is to simply point out that the author made a mistake. The second response is to condemn the author, because a morally responsible agent would not have made a mistake. The third response is to condemn the culture to which that agent belongs – a culture that cares nothing about intellectual integrity, and a great deal about doing harm to others through careless and deliberate falsehoods.

Culture of Intellectual Recklessness

Who are the members of this culture of intellectual recklessness? To find out, all we need to do is to trace the thread of this misquote through the internet. Everywhere it stops and obtains an implicit endorsement is another person who is part of this intellectually reckless culture.

It is not surprising to find a link between intellectual recklessness and religious fundamentalism either. Fundamentalism teaches intellectual recklessness. It is, in fact, a primary requirement for membership. This is not to say that all intellectually reckless people are fundamentalists. Nor is it to say that all religious people are intellectually reckless (because not all religious people are fundamentalists). It is only to say that religious fundamentalism is intellectually reckless.

Do we wish to see how far this intellectually reckless attitude – this fundamental disregard for truth – goes? Our current day and age gives us a handy tool to do so. All we need to do is search the Intranet, and we can track intellectual recklessness through the strands of the world wide web.

Note that I am not talking about tracking religious fundamentalism through the web and using that as a marker for intellectual recklessness and a fundamental disregard for the truth. I am talking about tracking something where the intellectual recklessness can be more easily noted. In this case, it is in the many examples of bearing false witness – either recklessly or through deliberate and malicious deception – against Sam Harris.

That these people show the same moral failing if intellectual irresponsibility on matters of religious belief as they show here is simply another piece of evidence in what criminal lawyers would call “establishing a pattern of behavior” which, with enough examples, is sufficient to prove moral culpability.

Promoting Intellectual Responsibility

One lesson that I wish to draw from this is that it is possible to criticize and to condemn religious fundamentalists without once bringing God or religion into the picture at all. People suffering from the vice of intellectual irresponsibility are bound to use it even in areas outside of religion – areas that have real effects on real people (e.g., global warming, weapons of mass destruction in Iraq) costing real lives and real suffering. When these types of opportunities come up, blaming the cult of intellectual irresponsibility for the harms done – for the lives lost, the injuries, the suffering – will have a real-world significance that will pay dividends against other instances of intellectual recklessness.

The point is to say more than, “You are mistaken,” but to go further and say, “Your mistake is either reckless or deliberately malicious and, in either case, is morally reprehensible,” to the final charge (where bad reasoning can be shown to have been picked up and spread around by others), “You are a part of a morally irresponsible culture that appears to embrace intellectual recklessness, bearing false witness, engineering false beliefs, and even deliberate deception, with all of the evils that such people bring to the world.”

Note that my accusation in this case applies to those whose moral irresponsibility applies to misquoting Sam Harris - an easily demonstrable example of, at best, moral recklessness and, at worse, deliberate and malicious deception. Yet, its targets are also those who are morally irresponsibile in other ways.

To the degree that intellectual irresponsibility in all of its harmful forms can be reduced, to that degree we will all live longer, healthier, and happier lives, and to that degree even harmless unreasonable beliefs will fade away.

The Genetic Morality Delusion

One of the things that tempers my dislike for theists and their sometimes absurd beliefs about right and wrong is the fact that many atheists also have some rather foolish beliefs about right and wrong. They hold onto these beliefs with religious tenacity, cherry-picking the available evidence to support their cherished views.

One recent example of this is an article I read this morning; Blumner: Biology, not faith, is the source of human morality by Robyn Blumner. In this article, Blumner attempts to defend the idea that morality has a genetic explanation, rather than an explanation through scripture.

Before I start my criticism, I want to make it clear that I believe that moral facts can, at least in part, be reduced to biological facts. The system of morality that I defend in this blog holds that value exists in the form of relationships between states of affairs and desires. Moral value is found in the relationship between malleable desires and other desires. Desires are brain states. Brains are biological organs that came about through hundreds of millions of years of evolution. The study of desires is the study of brains – of the way that genes interact with environment to create gray matter of a particular structure.

The dispute is over which biological facts best explain moral properties.

Universal Intuitions

In this particular defense of genetic morality, Blumner wrote:

[Marc] Hauser [a Harvard professor of psychology, organismic and evolutionary biology and biological anthropology] gives the example of five people who are in need of organ transplants and a healthy man walks into the hospital. Nearly everyone, asked if it is morally acceptable to kill the healthy man to provide life-saving organs to the five others, answers no. But in another example, where a trolley is racing down a track and about to kill five people, most people agree that it is permissible to flip a switch and reroute the trolley so that it will kill only one person.

The outcomes are the same, one person sacrificed to save five others, yet people of all types of backgrounds come up with the same contrasting judgments for the two examples and they often can't explain why they have drawn a distinction.

Humans have an inherent sense of fair play and the idea that hurting someone intentionally, such as strapping them down and harvesting their organs, is worse than doing so as collateral damage to a larger rescue (hence the use of that phrase by modern warmongers).

So, tell me, am I supposed to believe that my biological ancestors, way back before they could read and write, were continually running into situations regarding trolley cars and organ transplants? Should I believe that these encounters were common enough and important enough that evolution had an opportunity to select for a ‘do not kill and distribute organs’ gene, and a ‘throw the trolley car switch’ gene?

That seems unlikely.

Even though this conclusion is not the intended implication of the view that moral facts are reducible to genetic facts, it is in fact what such a theory implies. The absurdity of this conclusion tells us about the absurdity of the premises that give rise to it.

Moral Luck

The quote above gives a classic attempt to defend one theory over another by showing its superior ability to account for a particular observation – the answers that people give to these two cases. Traditional moral theory, it says, cannot account for this difference because “The outcomes are the same, one person sacrificed to save five others.”

Yet, if the outcomes are the same, then it is just as difficult to appeal to evolution to explain the difference. In order for evolution to play a role, the different outcomes must have a difference that plays out in terms of genetic survival. Otherwise, nature would have nothing to use in selecting one or the other. Either that, or the difference is merely an accident of nature – a genetic trait that happened to become universal even though it serves no evolutionary function, and which could have easily been different.

So, what makes organ harvesters evil and deserving of the wrath reserved for murderers, while the switch throwers are forgiven? It is merely an accident of nature. With a different flip of the genetic coin, it could have been otherwise.

However, that is not the most important problem.

Moral Disputes

Blumner says that “nearly everybody agrees” that it is not permissible to harvest organs in the one case, and “most people agree” that it is permissible to throw the switch.

But not everybody.

Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that 97% of the population has a “do not harvest organs” gene, and 3% of the people have a “save as many lives as possible” gene. What does this tell us about the morality of harvesting organs?

Are we to conclude that harvesting organs is wrong for 97% of the population, but permissible, even obligatory, for the other 3%? If so, this would go against one of the basic elements of what people generally know about morality – that moral principles are supposed to be universal. To say that raping a child is wrong is to say that no person may rape a child. It does not mean that those with a “rape child” gene may rape children, while those with an “aversion to the rape of children gene” may not do so.

So, at what point does harvesting organs becomes universally wrong. What if the “do not harvest organs” gene was present in only 70% of the population? 60%? 50.01%?

What does “wrong” even mean under this theory?

The theory of genetic morality ultimately says that ‘X is wrong’ means (or can be reduced to ‘the most powerful elements in society are disposed to do harm to those who do X’. That is it.

If the most powerful elements in a society were disposed to do harm to those who ate with their left hand, then eating with one’s left hand would be ‘wrong’.

‘X is wrong’ also means ‘those who do X deserve condemnation and punishment.’ It is not just a descriptive phrase that those who do X will be harmed. It is a prescriptive phrase that says that those who do X should be harmed, that they deserve to be harmed, that they are at fault, and that punishment is appropriate in such circumstances.

How do we get from, ‘the most powerful people in society are disposed to do harm to those who do X’, to ‘those who do X deserve to be harmed’?

David Hume would argue that those who would draw such an implication owe us an explanation as to how we derive such an ought from the ‘is’ premises that give rise to it.

(Note: I believe that one can derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’, but only from a specialized set of ‘is’ statements, some of which involve the malleability of desires by social forces, which are ‘is’ statements not available to the genetic moralist.)

Is homosexuality moral or immoral? Well, what we need to do is determine if people have a genetic disposition to do harm to those who engage in homosexual acts. If people have such a disposition to harm homosexuals, then homosexuals deserve to be harmed – harming them is a good thing.

The Euthyphro Argument

Ultimately, all I am doing here is using Plato’s ‘Euthyphro’ argument against the genetic moralist. However, I am rephrasing the question somewhat.

“Is X morally good because it is loved by the genes? Or is X loved by the genes because it is morally good?”

For a point of clarification, my view is that neither are true. There is no necessary connection between what is loved by the genes and what is morally good. It is quite possible for something to be loved by the genes that is down right evil.

If the genetic moralist takes the first horn of this dilemma, she falls into a trap of saying that the most horrendous acts can be good. A genetic disposition to kill everybody in an ‘out’ group, take their property and their land, and use it for one’s own tribe would make ethnic cleansing a moral commandment. All these many decades we have been bemoaning that ethic cleansing was immoral when all along it was morally commanded by our genes.

If the genetic moralist takes the second option, then we are still missing an account of what ‘wrong’ is. On this option, morality does not come from our genes. Morality comes from ‘something else’ – and whatever that ‘something else’ is, that is where our genes direct us. Here, the genetic moralist has an additional problem that the divine command theorist could avoid. The genetic moralist also has to explain how evolution managed to pick up this good and selected for it, when genetic survival is going to have a far stronger effect on evolution than this hypothetical, independent ‘good’.

The genetic moralist might want to answer, “Well, if we had this disposition to wipe out another race, then we would be justified in doing so and they would deserve to be wiped out merely because we had this disposition.”

He could say that, but he should be careful what he says the next time he hears a theist say, “If God commands us to torture young children for pleasure, then it would be a good thing for us to do so.

"Afflicted by a demonic power"

Ii am back from my anniversary.

Unfortunately, I do not have much time to write this evening. Just as unfortunately, I read something in the news today that does not require many words.

According to a story on MSNBC.com, Hyang In Cho, the mother of the Virginia Tech shootist Seung Hui Cho, knew that her son was in trouble and sought help for him.

The help she sought was from a Presbyterian pastor Rev. Dong Cheol Lee, who diagnosed the son as being afflicted by a ’demonic power’.

"His problem needed to be solved by spiritual power," said Lee, whose church members met with Cho and his mother. "That's why she came to our church -- because we were helping several people like him." Those churchgoers told Hyang In Cho that her son was afflicted by demonic power and needed deliverance, Lee said.

If you want to keep people from killing other people, try seeking out real-world cures and treatments. In this case, religious belief did real-world harm by looking for magical and, to be honest, insanely stupid solutions to a real-world problem that ended up costing 32 lives.

One is supposed to respect the religious views of others. But, what respect is due to views that put innocent lives at risk?

The obligation to respect somebody else’s stupid views ends where those stupid views puts the life, health, and well-being of innocent people at risk.

Melvin Konner: Hope, Benefit, and Prohibiting Religion

Melvin Konner (Professor of Anthropology, Neuroscience, and Behavioral Biology) spoke third in the 9th Session of Beyond Belief 2006, ending a trio of presentations meant to start a dialogue about the value of religion. The first two participants were Sam Harris and Jim Woodward.

I think that the overall impression is that Woodward and Konner formed one side of the debate, and Sam Harris formed the other side. (Later, in the discussion that I will cover next week, Richard Dawkins joined Harris.)

Though I think that Woodward made some important points, Konner contributed virtually nothing of merit to the discussion at all. Indeed, Konner’s presentation appeared to me to be nothing more than an attempt to score rhetorical points against a with little if any concern for what actually makes sense or was relevant to the debate.

The Scientist Physican

Konner drew his first lesson from his training as a physician. He asserted the moral position that “it is not the job of the physician to take away the patient’s hope.” He explained this with an example of a patient who does not accept that he has terminal cancer.

Yes, you tell the truth. ‘I’m sorry, sir, but you have terminal cancer and you might die next year or the year after, I’m not sure.’ No, doc, I think I’m going to be okay; it is going to be fine. When you have that exchange three times, you stop, because it is not the job of the physician to take away the patient’s hope. Truth is fine, but you don’t have to batter somebody with it.

I was happy to hear that Richard Dawkins agreed with me. He said that he would not tell somebody his views if they were on their death bed. I find that quite inconsistent, actually, as many people have pointed out during the meeting, we are all on our death beds as soon as we attain consciousness. . . .

And I would suggest to you that all of us who speak to the public about science are physicians, in a way, and that it is not the job of the physician to take away the patient’s hope.

Change the example just slightly. Have this cancer patient refuse potentially life-saving treatment because, ‘I think I’m going to be okay.’ Or, make the person a diabetic alcoholic who refuses to give up drinking, or have her be a patient who tests positive for HIV and refuses to accept the fact that through unprotected sex (and even protected sex) she puts others at risk.

In at least the first two of these cases, it may be wise to follow the rule to present the truth to the patient three times and then stop. The doctor does not stop “because it is not the job of the physician to take away the patient’s hope (that he will survive without treatment or will not suffer harm from drinking).” The physician stops because the patient is almost certainly in denial and is not going to listen.

Yet, the third case – the case of the HIV patient - represents a situation where the physician may not stop even after the third iteration of the conversation. Innocent lives are now at stake and, even if the patient refuses to care for herself, there is reason to take action to prevent her from being a threat to the well-being of others.

The type of case that Konner used in his example, and the type of case that Dawkins agreed to, is one where the patient in fact has no hope and one in which it is nearly certain that no harm will come to others.

Yet, Dawkins and Harris, in making their case against faith, assert that faith is something that stands in the way of hope (a delusion that there is nothing wrong rather than finding real-world solutions to real-world problems) and in some cases makes the ‘patient’ a threat to the well-being of others. In these cases, it is, indeed, the duty of the doctor to try to remove the patient’s delusions.

I have some disagreements with Dawkins and Harris over the strength of these arguments in all of the cases where they apply them. However, Konner has decided to build and attack a straw man, building an argument filled with assumptions that beg the question and misrepresents what his opponents are trying to say.

The Costs and Benefits of Religion

In a related argument, Konner accused the critics of religion of attempting to perform a benefits-cost analysis of religion while considering only the costs of religion itself. In fact, he describes two ways in which Dawkins and Harris flubbed the cost-benefit analysis; by not including any of the benefits of religion, and by not considering the costs of abolishing religion.

Assigning Benefits

On the benefits side of the equation, Konner accuses Dawkins and Harris of neglecting the good that religion does. To illustrate the type of argument that he is constructing, Konner pointed out that a paper on water that only discussed, hurricanes, tsunamis, and the fact that 97% of the water on earth is poisonous, one could conclude that water is bad. However, that conclusion only follows because one has ignored the benefits.

The form of Konner’s counter argument is sound. An evaluation of the overall value of something is measured by its overall costs and its overall benefits requires that we get the costs and benefits right.

However, Konner assumes that religion provides a number of benefits. It does, in a sense. However, by the methods used in standard accounting, these are technically not benefits of religion. For a benefit to qualify as a benefit of religion it must be a benefit that would not exist if not for religion.

For example, let us assume that religious institutions perform $500 billion worth of charity. This counts as a ‘benefit of religion’ only if it is the case that, in the absence of religion, people would not have performed $500 billion worth of charity. It is not enough to argue that they would not have performed this charity in the name of God - if they would have performed this charity for some other reason. It is necessary to argue that, without belief in God, there is no charity.

I made this point in detail in an earlier post, “A Special Way of Knowing” . The only benefits that can honestly and accurately be attributed to religion are those benefits that would not be obtained in the absence of religion.

To see the form of my argument, assume that you were testing a drug against a placebo. Thirty percent of the patients who took the drug ended up being cured. However, thirty percent of the patients taking the placebo were cured as well. In addition, the drug causes some obnoxious side effects such as vomiting and convulsions. The recommendation comes down not to use the drug.

The company manufacturing Drug 1 then shouts back, “You are ignoring all of the good that Drug 1 does. It cures diabetes.”

Well, no, it doesn’t. Yes, there is a thirty percent cure rate for those who took the drug. But the benefit of the drug is not to be measured by the number of people cured, but the number of additional people cured than would have otherwise been cured.

Similarly, the benefit of religion is not the amount of charitable work done. It can only be measured in terms of the amount of charitable work done that would not have otherwise been done, if any.

I want to stress this, because it is easy to overlook the implications of this. The phrase, “Look at the good that religion has done,” is to the phrase, “Look at how selfish and uncharitable nonreligious people are.” It is a bigoted remark – a statement filled with bigoted and denigrating assumptions. It is not just wrong. It employs a denigrating and insulting assumption that atheists are uncharitable.

Prohibition

Konner’s second attempt to make his case demonstrates that in his eagerness to attack Dawkins and Harris is grossly irresponsible and insulting.

Ethanol demonstrably causes great harm. We also know now that it cause some good, but the balance is clearly in favor of harm with ethanol. Why was Prohibition repealed? It was not repealed because people had a wrong idea about that balance. It was repealed because it was discovered that the attempt to abolish ethanol and the use of ethanol for consciousness alteration was more costly than the harm done by alcohol. That’s the conclusion that was come to.

And I urge on you the analogy of that with religion, because not only do Sam’s and Richard’s books not take up the balance between the good done by religion and the harm done by religion. They do not even consider the harm that could be done by attempting to abolish religion that they both advocate strongly.

Neither Harris nor Dawkins has outlined a program of religious prohibition like alcohol prohibition during the early 1920s. Neither of them have advocated outlawing religion. The most either of them have argued for is public condemnation of those who engage in faith-based thinking in order to get people to voluntarily (in the sense of not coerced by law) give it up in favor of a better form of life. Because they do not even suggest such a prohibition, they have no need to consider its harms.

Making such a claim about Harris and Dawkins is simply irresponsible.

Needs

Konner also devotes some time discussing how religion fulfills certain needs. Konner is an anthropologist, and used as his example the Kung Trance Dance through which tribal members enter a trance in which they (believe they) talk to their ancestors. In explaining this ceremony, Konner said, “Looking at a system like that shows you how religion fills very basic human needs.”

Candy fulfills certain needs. It provides people with calories and, of course, no body would survive without calories. However, this is not enough to say that candy is good, or even 'good for you'. There are other things that fulfill this same need, but which also provides other benefits (such as essential vitamins and minerals). So, relatively speaking, we can still say that candy is bad for you, even though it fulfills certain bodily needs.

So, to make a meaningful statement that religion fulfills certain needs is to say that, for those who are nonreligious, these needs are unfulfilled - that there is no alternative (not having the same harmful side effects) for getting these same needs fulfilled. "Religion fulfills basic needs" either assumes that atheists do not have these basic human needs (they are not fully human), or that atheists have these needs and they are not being fulfilled. Neither of these conclusions are defensible. Therefore, we can reject the assumption that religion fulfills otherwise unfulfilled needs.

Here, again, is a statement that is fundamentally insulting, denigrating, and demeaning towards atheists - that they are somehow incapable of taking care of basic human needs, when there is absolutely no evidence supporting that position, and no non-bigoted reason to assume it.

Conclusion

When Richard Dawkins gave his presentation (which I commented on in “Richard Dawkins Part I: Consciousness Raising.”) I gave some criticisms about where Dawkins wanted consciousness to be raised. However, here is an important place where moral consciousness needs to be raised. Even many atheists take seriously the claim “Look at the good that religion does,” without recognizing that the person who uttered it had just slapped him with an insult, “Look at the good that the nonreligious would not do.”

The argument, “Look at the good that religion has done” or "look at the needs that religion fulfills" begs the question, in that it requires the assumption that people will not do good or find ways to fulfill needs without religion. It assumes that atheiss are selfish individuals with basic human needs unfulfilled.

If as much good would have been done (but for different reasons) without religion, then religion has done no good – at least not any that gives us any reason to prefer religion over the comparable alternative. If more good would have been done by the alternative, then the claim, “Look at the good that religion has done” becomes “look at the harm that religion has done” in preventing us from moving to this more powerful reason to give to charity.

Jim Woodward: Empirical Study of Religion and Harm

In this weekend’s discussion of the Beyond Belief 2006 presentations, we will be looking at a presentation from Jim Woodward, Professor of Humanities at the California Institute of Technology. The organizers at the conference set up the morning of the third day for a discussion on the relation between morality and religion. This started with Sam Harris' presentation (which I discussed last week) and goes through Woodword and Melvin Konner (to be discussed tomorrow).

Once all three presentations are done, we will have a general discussion of the relationship between religion and morality (next weekend). Finally, we will move into closing remarks, then end the conference.

So, the end is in sight.

For the moment, however, we will be looking at Woodward’s contribution to the relationship between religion and morality.

Woodward begins with a disclaimer that his research interests are more in the realm of philosophy of science than in moral philosophy. However, in that light, he begins by chastising others for making empirical (scientific) claims without backing them up with scientific evidence.

Two of these empirical claims are:

2) Belief in God (or religious faith or particular religious doctrines) is responsible for bad outcomes like suicide bombing, interference w. scientific research like stem cell research, science education.

3) It is a good, practical strategy to try to ameliorate those bad outcomes by converting the world to secular humanism.

These, Woodward said, are empirical claims that require investigation in accordance with “ordinary scientific standards of evidence and assessment that would be insisted on in other context.”

Belief in God Is responsible for Bad Outcomes

Woodward brings up the problem that suicide bombing is a variable phenomena, while the content of the Koran is a fixed phenomena, and, scientifically, “You can’t explain a variable with a constant.” That is to say, you can’t explain the variability in dispositions for suicide bombing across time and in different locations by appealing to something that they all have in common – the content of the Koran. You need to find something that is co-variable with what you want to explain.

I have another example independent of Woodward. Both Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins said that religious people cherry pick the moral conclusions that they draw from religious text. For example, very few American Christians advocate the stoning of a rebellious child, the killing of somebody who would try to convert another to a non-Christian religion, or the execution of those who work on the day of the Sabbath. Many people claim to get their opposition to homosexuality, early-term abortion, and stem-cell research from scripture. However, if this is true, then why do they not have other attitudes that scripture also commands?

By Woodward's argument, it makes no sense to blame scripture for the condemnation of homosexuality - even though those who condemn homosexuality often quote scripture. Because, if scripture were the true cause of the condemnation, these people would also be advocating the death of those who work on the Sabbath. The evidence suggests that trying to use scripture to explain attitudes towards homosexuality fails to qualify according to “the ordinary standards of evidence and assessment that would be insisted on in other context.” This opposition towards homosexuality comes from some other source. Biblical references are then thrown up as a smoke screen, as a legitimate-sounding reason that hides the real reason. The real reason, in turn, explains why these same people do not advocate killing those who work on the day of the Sabbath.

By the way, the same is true of attempts to blame atheism for Hitler and Stalin. Many athiests have standards that are completely opposed to those of Hitler and Stalin. Explaining these tyrannies by reference to atheism also falls victim to the problem of explaining a variable in terms of a constant.

In fighting prejudice against homosexuality, there is certainly some value in showing the smoke-screen of scripture for what it is. However, this is a different project than the project of arguing that scripture really is to blame for people’s attitudes towards homosexuality. It cannot be both, at the same time, a rationalization for attitudes that come from another source, and the source of those attitudes.

Note: For some people scripture may be the actual source of their condemnation of homosexuality, but that set is as large as the set of people who advocate stoning of disobedient children.

In other words, ‘scripture’ cannot explain the fact that, when theists cherry-pick their moral principles, they do not leave the condemnation of homosexuality behind as a bad cherry, along with endorsement of slavery and killing those who work on the day of the Sabbath.

Harris and Dawkins need to do better science.

Conversion to Secular Humanism Will Prevent Bad Outcomes

The claim that putting an end to faith, or an end to the God delusion, will make the world a better place is also an empirical question that needs the same standards of evidence used in science generally.

At this point, Woodword blurts out a straw man - one that others at the conference have also used without anybody questioning it. Woodword states that the project of converting the world to secular humanism, even if it would be a good thing, is simply impossible. He responded to the idea by saying simply, “Good luck with that.”

The straw man is that nobody is talking about “converting the world to secular humanism.” Woodward treats this as an all or nothing proposition, and insists that the “all” option is impossible. He is right in this. However, it is, as it turns out, equally impossible to convert the whole world into believing that rape is wrong. Yet, the impossibility of complete success does not argue that no action should be taken to reduce the numbers of people who see no wrong in rape.

The real position that Woodword needs to argue against is that, “To whatever degree we are successful in converting people into believing that rape is wrong, to that degree we are safer.” Against this, Woodwords comment of "Good luck with thta" is impotent.

However, Woodword's next response is quite potent. This real position is still an empirical statement, and as such needs to be proved by the standards of evidence used in science. In what sense is it true that converting people to atheism in itself will make them more virtuous.

This is an empirical claim. It is a claim that, given the fact that there are horrendously immoral atheists, we have at least some prima-facie reason to believe is false.

It is unreasonable and unjust to reference people such as Hitler or Stalin to show that atheism itself is evil, as I showed above. However, it is perfectly reasonable to point to these examples (or, at least, the latter) as a counter-example to any assertion that atheism entails virtue.

There is some contention these days that Karl Rove, Bush’s advisor and perhaps the man most responsible for the last six years of an ever-growing tyranny in America, actually has no belief in God. If true, this would not affect me or my writings in the least. He would just be another example to point to as proof that atheism does not entail virtue.

I deny that atheism itself is a virtue, or that atheists are inherently more virtuous than theists. I hold this mostly on the basis of theory. Since morality is concerned with the evaluation of malleable desires (virtues and vices), and no belief entails a desire, the belief that there is no God entails no virtue or no vice. Since I am more interested in virtue than in belief in God, I do not waste space in this blog trying to convert people to atheism – I leave that task to others.

Even though atheism is not a virtue, bigotry towards atheists is certainly a vice. Unfair, unjust, and unfounded generalities used to promote the hatred or fear of a group of people independent of their individual differences is something that no good person would do. So, I condemn bigotry against atheists in spite of the fact that atheism is not a virtue, in the same way that I would condemn bigotry against blacks even though being black is not a virtue.

Since I am an atheist, and since I am a victim of this bigotry – my life options have been unfairly and unjustly limited because of this bigotry – I do give it a particular degree of attention.

At the same time, since atheism is not a virtue, and being an atheist does not entail being virtuous, I think that it is important to examine what type of person an atheist should become. Unjust atheism, which can also be called 'vicious atheism' in the sense that it is unvirtuous atheism, can and does exist today. It would not be wise to think that it is impossible, or that atheists are so possessed of virtue that no atheist can be unjust, and no moral condemnation can ever be warranted.

At this point, some may ask if I consider Dawkins and Harris to be ‘vicious atheists’ as I use the term here. In answering this, it is important to be clear how I am using the term. The term 'vicious atheist' may call to mind some type of snarling, rabid dog, and think that the term almost certainly applies to Dawkins and Harris. Yet, I am using the term in its classic sense that means, "the opposite of virtuous; having moral flaws." I think that Dawkins and Harris are vicious atheists to some degree, but not because of their tone. It is because of their content.

Still, when the mass of vicious atheism is held up to the mass of vicious theism, the latter so far outshadows the former as to make the former inconsipicuous, except for those who who are actively looking for it. Vicious theism is rampant, in claims like "there are no atheists in foxholes" and "there is no morality without God" and "the reason we have shootings in schools is because we have removed God from the classroom" and "look at the good that religion has done" (a statement that makes no sense unless one assumes that people would not do as much good if they lacked religion). This does not yet add in religious violence in other parts of the world. Vicious theism so permeates our culture that, like a foul smell one can never avoid, after a while, few of us even notice it.

Conclusion

Woodword had two important points to make. The view that religion is the root of all evil depends on a number of empirical assumptions, many of which have not yet been subjected to the standards of science.

Exactly how scripture molds beliefs (as opposed to having beliefs one acquires elsewhere molding one's interpretations of scripture) is unknown. The effects of converting people to secular humanism are unknown. (The argument that athiesm entails no virtue because beliefs entail no desire is my argument, not Woodword's.)

At least some attempt should be made to study the phonemena, form theories, make predictions, and verify or falsify those theories, before we put too much weight on them. Otherwise, we are acting on faith, and not on reason.

Kennedy Square

Note: I am out enjoying a 20th Anniversary celebration with my wife. (Perhaps the person I really should be celebrating with under these circumstances.) As such, I am not focusing on writing. I was able to write the weekend’s Beyond Belief postings in advance, and hope to quickly post them at their regular time.

For today, I pulled out a file that has been sitting on my desktop for a while. Once upon a time I was interested in writing a blog novel – a piece of fiction in which I would illustrate some of my ideas about value. Here’s the first entry. Enjoy.

12:00 AM, January 1, 2020.

The first hour of the first day of a new decade seems like a perfect day to start a new blog. Particularly this blog.

Midnight struck just a few minutes ago. I could see the fireworks going off around the Washington Monument from my office window across the Potomac. However, the night is still young from where I sit. I'm one of the bidders in the Kennedy Square auction. That auction ends at midnight in the last time zone on Earth; seven hours from now.

I know that most of you are familiar with the Kennedy Square auction. However, just in case somebody stumbles onto this site who has been asleep for the past three years, I'll give you a summary.

On July 15, 2018, the United Nations General assembly approved a plan to use space for the common benefit of humanity. The plan was to auction off objects in space and to use the money to fund a global education project. Education, certainly, is something that benefits all of humanity. In the mean time, objects in space are transferred to private land holders for the sake of private development.

The Kennedy Square auction is the first auction. Kennedy Square is 100 kilometers wide and 100 kilometers long, with the Apollo 11 landing site right in the middle of it. This was divided up into 1 million plots of land, each a square 1 hectare in size.

The middle four square kilometers around the Apollo 11 landing site itself was donated to the Smithsonian Institution. The 12 square kilometers that surrounded that was donated to the University of Earth, the benefactor of this auction. This left 984,000 plots of land up for public auction.

Some people might consider me a nut, but I was going to spend $25,000 so that I could own my piece of the moon. There were some limitations on who could bid. Only individuals could bid. Countries, corporations, nonprofit organizations, were all locked out. These rules were permanent. No person was permitted to transfer title to any government, corporation, or organization other than the University of Earth. All titles will be required to be in the name of a specific individual owner who had sole discretion over what happened to the property.

I assumed that, just like on Earth, most people would go for the flat land on the lunar sea. Because I wanted cheep land, I selected a string of craters - or a string of connected sinkholes, I really do not know which - called Word Rille. This shouldn't be worth much. Right?

Well, as the auction progressed, I discovered I was wrong. What people wanted something that they could identify from Earth. They wanted to point to something and say, "That's mine." Crater Moltke was actually fetching some of the higher prices in the region. The only place more expensive was Cat's Paw; a set of craters just west of the Apollo 11 landing site. From the rim around the craters it would be possible to see the Apollo 11 landing site itself. That is if anybody was ever actually going to live there.

I want to see the Kennedy Square become an actual community. That was my real motive to become a part of this. That's what this blog is all about. Hopefully, it will be the history of a new community - a community that comes into existence in a little more than 6 hours.

3:42 AM EST

We're getting close to the deadline, and prices are starting to rise. Europe is awake now; it's nearly 9:00 AM in London. It is mid day in India, and late evening in China.

A part of the bidding program allows a user to find the plot of land with the lowest current price. People are using that to put bids on the cheapest land so quickly that one can barely read it. It will pause for a while on a round number. It stopped for a couple of hours at $500, then started going up from there.

A couple of weeks ago, Worm Rille prices passed $1000 per hectare. I am not a gambler. I am not one of those who ends up trapped, bidding more and more because I just cannot stand to lose a bid. When I lost the bid for a couple of hectares, I took the money and applied it to hectares I had not yet lost. I had promised not to go above $25,000, and I was going to keep that promise. The only question was: how much land could I afford for that price?

Now, prices for Worm Rille land was approaching $2000 per hectare. I have bids on 11 hectares, and I find that being threatened.

Looking at the data, there are large open areas where the price of land is still going for less than $700 per hectare. So, I could take the money that I am now using to bid on 1 hectare at Worm Rille and use it to bid on as many as 7 hectares elsewhere.

The number of hectares one owns is important. After the bidding ends, winners will immediately become members of the Kennedy Square Landowner Association. They will have one vote on the association for each hectare that they own. Twenty-five hectares means 25 votes on the association.

Another map that bidding software shows is one that color-codes the price of the land. One of the cheapest sections was a featureless piece of land about 10 kilometers west of Worm Rille. As soon as somebody outbids me for a hectare of Worm Rille land, I'm bidding $1000 each for some of this featureless land.

5:11 AM

Less than 2 hours of bidding to go. I still have the high bid on 6 hectares on Worm Rille, and 10 hectares on a patch that I have been calling in my head, "The Nothings." Yet, now, even prices at The Nothings are going up. The lowest bids right now are sitting at $815.32, and still rising. Even the cheapest land may be selling for more than $1000 when this is over.

The University of Earth will be pleased. The total of the winning bids is now $1.7 billion. That is a respectable endowment for a brand new university. This does not include the fact that there will be an additional bid each year for more of the solar system's resources. If the United Nations auctioned off the amount of land equal to Kennedy Square every year, it would take over 3,000 years to sell off the moon alone. Selling off Mars and the other planets, asteroids, comets, and the moons of the outer planets would take forever to sell. Estimates are that there are over 1 trillion chunks of rock the size of a city block or larger circling the sun - most in the Oort cloud, quite some distance out.

Then there are also questions of selling off land on other solar systems. Scientists now know of 1,314 planets orbiting other stars. Some of them are earth-sized. Some of them are in a habitable zone. Some of them are earth-sized and in the habitable zone of their respective stars. However, none of them so far have been shown to have an earth-like atmosphere.

However, it doesn’t matter. We have proved that we have the ability to live at any star that has rocks orbiting it, and every star has rocks orbiting it. We can simply turn the carbon, iron, water, methane, and ammonia in those rocks into orbiting space stations filled with life.

There are people already talking about how we would create an earth colony on Proxima Centauri. It's a small, cool star. This only means that stations would orbit closer to its surface than they would to a star like our own sun. Proxima Centauri, because it burns much more slowly, will probably outlast our sun.

I'm sorry. I'm dreaming. None of that is for my lifetime. That's for a distant future.

5:30 AM

I've got a small window of opportunity to tell you about myself. My name is Samuel Lewister. I am a 26 year old associate at the Space Properties Title Company. The founders created this company specifically to deal with the United Nations auctions. Our only business is in registering titles to land not on Earth. Right now, we do not have a single customer. In a little under 1.5 hours, that will start to change. As soon as we confirm payment, we will register the high bidders of each hectare as the rightful owner subjects to the terms and conditions specified by the United Nations.

The owner of the winning bid will have until February 1 to pay for and claim title to their land. Lands not claimed by that date will revert to the Kennedy Square Land Owners' Association, to be sold at auction under the terms and conditions established in the original auction. The Association will auction off all unclaimed lands at the start of each month, subtracting an amount appropriate to cover the costs of the auction, and submit the remainder to the University of Earth.

I know, it's all boring stuff. In my business, I specialize in boring. Dry, sleep-inducing language that is designed, as much as possible, to strip away all of the ambiguities of language.

Anyway, I have been a space enthusiast since I can remember. My dad has a huge collection of all of the film footage ever shot and all of the books and reports written from the Apollo era. I would pour over them for hours as a kid. I turned my bed into my own space capsule. When I was 11, I stayed in bed for over a week while I played the Apollo 11 transcripts over my computer - except when I had to go to the bathroom. My mom insisted that I come to the table or go outside to play, but I dad always sided with me. He let me play out my mission. My mom forced me to take a bath the instant I 'splashed down', as it were.

6:00 AM

Less than an hour to go. A quick update. I need to build in a safety margin in some of my areas. The high bid is getting close to my cap both at Worm Rille and The Nothings. At the Rille somebody beat my bid for one of the 6 hectares I was still winning on. I let him take control of the property. Instead, I distributed the $2,250 that I had bid and distributed the money among my other properties - to buy me a little time.

There's a huge bidding war going on at Cat's Paw. From what I can tell from the map - I can color-code it for author with the highest bid - there are a lot of people trying to their 25 hectares in a reasonable close proximity - overlapping with others who want their 25 hectares in close proximity. This leads to some major bidding wars. Property at Cat's Paw was now selling at over $20,000 per hectare.

6:42 AM

Lost another hectare at Worm Rille. Redistributed the money. Put in high bid for a couple more acres at The Nothings.

6:50 AM

Another one gone. Bottom prices are now over $1100 - which is not much less than what I am bidding at The Nothings. I have this worry of somebody coming in and sweeping the whole lot out from under me with a last-minute bid. I broke my rule. I busted into my piggy bank and added a could hundred to each bid in the nothings, just to be safe.

7:00 AM

DAMN! I had a nice section of land in The Nothings; 4 hectares wide and 3 hectares long. At the last minute, somebody put a bid on one of the middle two hectares. I don't know what he bid, but I tried to get it back, and failed. I didn't have time to move my bids, or I would have shifted the whole plot to a couple of hectares. The bidding ended before I had a chance.

Anyway, I ended up with 4 hectares at Worm Rille, and 11 hectares at The Nothings. That will be 15 votes in the Land Owners' Association.

I've got some stuff that I need to take care of for now. Give me a couple of hours. I'll be back.

9:30 AM

Okay, I've taken care of the paperwork. I sent in my payment for the 15 hectares and got my titles. As a registered landowner, I received a login and password for going to the Kennedy Square Landowner Association Extranet Site. There, I filed as a candidate for the Board of Directors and filled in my profile.

I really would like to win a position on the board. I think that space development is the most interesting thing happening in the world today. It is the future. Millions of years from now, people will look back on the events of this era - the start of the 3rd Millenium CE - as the time when humans left Earth.

If you will pardon me, I have some campaigning to do.

11:00 am

It's been 30 hours now since I slept last. Please pardon me if my writing becomes a bit unfocused.

I've been logged onto the Kennedy Square extranet site looking through the database. I thought you might be interested in knowing some facts about this community we are building.

If you have been paying attention to the news, you will know that we raised over $1.7 billion for the University of Earth charter. This money will go to constructing a set of schools to educate children from some of the poorest countries of the world. Research shows that education - particularly the education of women - is the best way to fight poverty and overpopulation.

So, who paid the money?

Remember, only individuals can own land - not countries, companies, or organizations. However, we know the native countries of those involved. You can look it up on the web site. But, those who do not want to go through the effort, let me list the top seven.

United States, 273,893; China, 201,783; European Union: 173,290; Japan: 95,933; India: 77,190; Russia: 51,679; Saudi Arabia: 50,036

These numbers are subject to change. People have until February 1 to claim their title. Any land not claimed by February 1 will go back to the University of Earth, and will be auctioned off on March 1st. Also, if any property owner falls 6 months behind in the payment of his homeowner's association fees, then that land will be considered abandoned. The University of Earth will regain title to that land as well, to be auctioned off at the following month.

Of course, one of the services that Landowner's Association offers is the option of setting up trust accounts from which monthly dues will be withdrawn.

3:00 pm

I'm getting really tired. I have been looking over the other candidates for office, and talking to some of the other land owners. I'm going to need some sleep soon, but there is just so much to be done.

Before I go to sleep, I want to tell you something about how I plan to serve if I get elected to the Landowners' Association.

Each landowner will pay a monthly landowner association fee of $10 per month. Like I said earlier, if anybody falls 6 months behind in his fee, the Landowner Association will consider his plot to be abandoned and the University of Earth will auction it off to a new owner. If possible, the money gained from the auction will cover past fees.

This means that the Association will have an annual budget of nearly $10 million per month ($120 million per year) from LOA fees alone.

One of the things that I think that most of you are going to want (speaking to those readers who are fellow land owners) is for the Association to do things that will improve the value of your land. I think that one of the first things we need to do to accomplish this is to take a survey of the territory.

I want to propose that the Association solicit bids for somebody to send the best camera we can afford to the moon to fly over Kennedy Square as low as possible while still staying in orbit to get the best pictures possible of what we have purchased.

Now, I've been talking to the University of Earth. The Board of Regents for the University is interested in making a school project out of just an adventure. It will involve all of the departments in the entire school. Science and engineering departments, of course, would run the mission. However, even its business, economics, marketing, law, political science, languages, and most other departments would have something to contribute. By relying on the contributions of these college students, we should be able to run a fairly large mission.

I mentioned that the marketing and business schools at the University would get involved. They will be looking at other business opportunities - at ways of making even more money to have an even larger mission.

Anyway, I want the Landowner's Association to be at the heart of this mission. We will provide the core funding and be the decision-makers for the mission. It is, after all, our land that they will be looking at.

7:00 pm

I need to do some campaigning before I go to sleep. So, let me tell you why you should vote for me as a member of the Kennedy Square Land Owners' Association. Let me tell you something about what I believe.

However, first, I want to make sure that, if you're a member of the association, that you understand the rules.

There are 15 seats on the Board of Directors for the Landowner' Association. There will be one election. Each person will be able to cast a number of votes equal to the number of hectares he or she owns (e.g., I will be able to cast 15 votes).

The top 15 candidates will have a seat on the Board. Each candidate will have a number of votes on the board equal to the number of votes cast. So, if the 15th place candidate gets 5,316 votes, then he will be on the board, and can cast 5,316 votes for or against any measure put before the Board.

After the first election, where the winning 15 candidates are selected, there will be a second election for those who voted for candidates that did not win a seat on the board. These people will then get to decide which of the winning candidates will represent them.

Everybody gets represented on the Board. That's the rule.

So, I want to explain to you why I should be your representative on the board.

First, I believe in compromise. There are purists out there who want to insist that everything be done according to their specific model of how things should be done. They have a simple two-step process to developing space. Step 1: Convince everybody that I am right and they are wrong. Step 2: Develop space the way I think it should be done. Just between you and me, I think that Step 1 is going to take longer than I am willing to wait.

The fact is, purists have set themselves up to vote 'no' on every single plan to develop space - because no plan will ever meet their standards. They are no better than those who would always vote 'no' because they are flat opposed to space development. They have different reasons, but they have the same results.

I will certainly not agree with everything I vote for, but I will make sure that we make progress.

Second, because I am realistic. Are we going to have a big tourist hotel at Cat's Paw in 10 years that anybody on Earth can visit for a few hundred dollars per night? Of course not. I do not know what the future will bring, but that does not argue against starting out. Lewis and Clark did not know what they would find on their journey. But, they just put one foot in front of the other and, after a lot of hard work, they reached their destination.

I am going to fit the projects that I vote for to our available budget. There will be no unrealistic grand schemes. There will, instead, be steady and affordable progress.

Third, because I believe in market systems. There are those who want to develop space as if it is a big commune - no private property, no private development. This is a recipe for doing nothing. Nobody is going to invest the types of resources in developing space unless they can expect something in return. We need to set up rules so that they can profit from taking risks. Then, they will take risks.

Fourth, because I know people in the industry. I am associate for Space Properties Title Company. We set up the auction and we are handling all of your transactions. I know the rules and I have corresponded with people around the world about their hopes and dreams. For somebody who will be a part of the first space property land owners' association, I have as much experience as one can possibly have.

Okay, it's time for bed. I'll be back tomorrow.

Happy new year, everybody.

Important? Useful?

I looked back on some of my posts for the last couple of weeks and came up with a couple of questions that I would like to answer. “Is any of this useful? Is it important?”

For example: What does it matter whether morality is altruism (so that the study of altruism can be claimed to be the same thing as the study of morality)? What does it matter that happiness theory fails the experience machine test and cannot account for the commensurability of values?

Do these issues have real significance?

They certainly do for some people.

Genetic Altruism

For example, one of my objections was that the study of altruism does not even begin to handle moral concepts such as excuse, negligence, ‘ought’ implies ‘can’, or even ‘ought’. Yet, every day, countless people live or die by these moral concepts that the concept of ‘altruism’ simply does not have anything to say about.

In fact, it would not be far from the truth to say that my objection to claims that link morality with altruism is that it is altruism – particularly genetic altruism – that is not important. If we have genetic altruism, then we will behave altruistically, as our genes dictate.

If we lack genetic altruism, then . . . well, then what? Then we need some way to promote non-genetic or learned altruism. This, I argue, is what morality is all about. It has nothing at all to do with genetic altruism (which we either do or do not have), and everything to do with learned altruism that we can promote through social forces.

The study of genetic altruism – and, in particular, the tendency on the part of some to confuse genetic altruism with morality, diverts attention from a set of very important moral questions. This is, “How can we get people to behave better than they would otherwise behave?”

Happiness Theory

In order to question happiness theory, I used a thought experiment focused on a hypothetical scientific invention – a Matrix, or a permanent Holodeck (from Star Trek), or an Experience Machine, to generate false beliefs that a person had acquired a desired end. However, is it at all important that a theory cannot account for choices that we might make in a science-fiction universe? How does that impact the choices we make in the real universe?

The basic answer is this: If you want to help people get what they want, and if you wish to stay out of their way, it would be useful for you to know what they really want. What a person really wants, when he has a desire that ‘P’, is for a state of affairs to exist where ‘P’ is true.

The real-world counterpart of the experience machine is the lie. Experience machines are the ultimate lie generators. Hypothetically, they manufacture perfectly convincing lies that the agent is in a state that she desires. However, the lie has no value. It is only the genuine state of affairs – a state of affairs in which ‘P’ is true (for anybody with a desire that ‘P’) that has value. Anybody who thinks that they are generating value with a lie is simply mistaken.

Imagine the case of a person who is happy thinking that her (dead) child is now with God who will look after her. This is a lie. Offering a person this lie is simply like telling a person, “I have a computer program here that will feed you impressions that your child is still alive. Enter the experience machine, and you will never know that your child has died.”

Some people might accept such an offer. However, what type of people are they?

They are people whose real concern is with their own happiness or pleasure. It cannot be “a desire that my child is still alive” that causes her to enter the machine – because the machine cannot make that proposition true. It can only be “a desire that I experience pleasure and avoid pain” that motivates such a choice – an essentially selfish desire.

The same is true of the parent who seeks to believe that their child is in heaven. It cannot be “a desire that my child is conscious and happy” that motivates accepting such a claim. It is only “a desire that I experience pleasure and avoid pain” that motivates a person to believe the story of an afterlife.

Indeed, the heaven story caters to selfish desires (personal comfort) and inhibits altruistic desires (saving lives) by trivializing actions that save lives (you are only keeping good people out of heaven and evil people from just punishment) for the sake of maintaining a myth that provides personal comfort.

Yes, much religion is selfish, in the same way that entering the experience machine is selfish, because they both allow a person to obtain personal pleasure by pretending to help others. They simply are not going to be seen as attractive options by people who care less about their own personal pleasure and more about actually helping people.

These accusations are not true of all religion. The term ‘religion’ encompasses a wide variety of beliefs, some of which cannot be easily compared to the concept of an experience machine. Yet, the fact that some religions cannot be compared in this way is no defense of those that can be.

Unwitting Participation

So far, I have talked about a person who is given a choice to enter an experience machine. Such a person has to have a desire for personal pleasure or happiness, but no genuine concern for the welfare of others. He may be somebody who likes to see himself as somebody who helps others, but not as somebody who actually likes to help others. The experience machine can fulfill the first desire by filling the agent’s brain with false beliefs about his own charity. It cannot fulfill the second desire.

The person who is honestly selling seats in an experience machine will only attract customers that are selfish. However, it is also possible for the person selling positions in the experience machine to attract people with a genuine concern for others. All they have to do is lie (or, at least, make claims that are not true). They can attract these customers by making claims like, “Enter the experience machine. We will hook it up. However, rest assured, the benefits you will create are real.” The agent then enters the experience machine, where she is then fed all sorts of programmed computer images of people in trouble. Only, there are no people.

This result is even more tragic. The agent believes that she is doing something important – helping others. Only, she is doing nothing. The agent is told that she has a daughter who she is raising to become a self-sufficient adult who is a productive member of society, only the child does not exist. While the agent thinks she is doing great deeds, her body atrophies in a bath of warm glop that is keeping her alive.

Harming Others

We can add an additional change to compound the tragedy here. Let us hook up the experience machine so that, every time the agent thinks she has done good, and she walks away with a smile on her face and her heart full of pride, the machine inflicts suffering and, in some cases, death on others. Every time the machine feeds the sensations of having fed a village full of children having their first meal in days or their own source of drinking water, it actually tortures and poisons that number of children.

In this example, we have an agent who wants to do good – who finds meaning and purpose in being an agent of positive change. She proudly believes that she does good things. However, the machine tricks her, giving her beliefs that are false, while it turns her into an agent producing great harm, suffering, and death. By the time she dies of old age, the universe would have been a much better place, if only she had not existed.

This describes the situation for many who have entered into a religion that follows the model of the experience machine. The experience machine feeds them false beliefs that they do well. While, in opposing homosexual marriage, early-term abortions, embryonic stem-cell research, the education of women, planning for a distant future the religion says will not exist, denying women the right to vote, or in encouraging its members to become suicide bombers, or help the Bush Administration establish a system where the President can round up, arrest, and indefinitely hold people virtually at will.

Some of these people certainly are self-centered individuals who lack a desire to do good, but only have a desire to see themselves as people who do good. Yet, there are almost certainly countless others who desire to do good, but who the experience machine itself has made the unwitting agents of great evil.

However, if you will pardon one more observation . . . those good people who get seduced into hooking themselves into an experience machine who harms others . . . if they truly wanted to make sure that they were providing real (real-world) benefits and not doing harm . . . they would have an interest in double-checking the claims of those who claim that they can do good from inside the experience machine. That is, if they really cared.

Conclusion

Are the ideas that I have been defending in these recent posts on Dawkins, Harris, and evaluating moral theories important? Are they useful?

I think that there is some merit in reminding people that we can make the world a better place by promoting desires that tend to fulfill other desires, and inhibiting desires that tend to thwart other desires, where we can. The study of genetic altruism might be interesting to some, but it is not all that useful.

They yield some important conclusions that are useful in determining whether a life has value, meaning, and importance. Only a self-centered person can intentionally choose a life of self-deception and false beliefs. It has to be somebody who prefers the illusion of being helpful to others and who cares little about the fact of the matter.

A person with a genuine interest in helping others could not possibly choose a life inside an experience machine, because the person inside the experience machine generates no real benefit for others. He only generates pleasure and happiness for himself.

Worse, many people who live in the experience machine of religion are not only failing to benefit others; they do genuine harm. The experience machine makes them think that they are doing good deeds. Yet, in fact, many of the “good deeds” that they perform end up being the cause of great quantities of harm, suffering, and death that the machine does not let them see.

In fact, 'happiness' theory says that says that there is no reason to refuse to enter an experience machine, also says that there is no reason to remove somebody. After all, they are happy. However, desire utilitarianism says that there are reasons to remove people from an experience machine. A person who has a desire to help others, for example, can only pretend to help others (and might be harming others) from within the machine. The only way he can actually help others is here in the real world.

These, I would argue, are important and useful findings.

The Incommensurability of Value

I want to do further damage to the idea that value can be reduced to happiness. In fact, I want to present a couple of arguments against the idea that value can be reduced to any single thing – happiness, pleasure, well-being, preference satisfaction.

In recent posts, I have argued that moral theories should be judged by their ability to account morality (“Evaluating Moral Theories”). It needs to account for such things as mens rea, excuse, supererogatory actions, moral dilemmas, moral argument, and the like.

I further argued that Richard Dawkins fails to do this (“Richard Dawkins: Morality and the Selfish Gene”). He has some important insights into the possibility of altruism, but doesn’t say much of anything about elements like those listed above.

I also argued that Sam Harris’ reduction to ‘happiness’ and ‘freedom from suffering’ fails to account for reports of unwillingness to live in an experience chamber (“Sam Harris: Morality and Religion”).

The Experience Machine argument applies to any attempt to reduce issues of value to the intrinsic value of some psychological state such as happiness. Today, I wish to add another argument against the idea that value can be reduced to a single commodity.

The Incommensurability of Value

That objection comes from the inability that single or small-number value theories have in accounting for the incommensurability of different values. If there is only one value, then there can be no incommensurability of value. There cannot be two incompatible things if there is only one thing.

Commensurable values are substitutable. To understand commensurable value, imagine an investor with a number of investment options. Assume that one option pays 6 percent, and another pays 5 percent. The term of the investment (e.g., 1 year) and risk (insured by the FDIC) are the same.

When the investor chooses the 6% option there is no sense of regret for having not selected the 5% option. He took the best option available, and the options not chosen are simply dismissed as irrelevant – as not good enough.

Incommensurable values, then, are values that cannot serve as a substitute for each other. Consider the case of a Montana kid who got accepted to Harvard University. He could go to Harvard and get his degree, opening up a number of future career opportunities. However, if he goes to Harvard, he will have to leave his girl friend behind. He also wants to be with her. He wants never to be parted from her.

If these were commensurable goods, then, even if both options had equal value to the agent, it would be like choosing one container holding $50,000 and another container also holding $50,000. He can only pick one container. He would just shrug his shoulders and grab one. It does not matter which. There is no loss or sacrifice here that comes from the fact that grabbing both is not an option.

However, in the choice between college and staying with his girlfriend, there are regrets. There is a loss. These are incommensurable goods. College is not a substitute for staying with his girlfriend, and staying with his girlfriend is not a substitute for going to college. Even if both options have equal value, he cannot look on the choice as one of casual indifference. “Six of one, half dozen of the other, it doesn’t really matter.”

Any attempt to reduce value to a single entity – pleasure, happiness, freedom from suffering – has a problem with the incommensurability of value. “I will get 50,000 units of happiness if I go to Harvard. I will get 50,000 units of happiness if I stay with my girlfriend. One is as good as the other. It really doesn’t matter which I choose.”

However, this is not what happens when a person makes a choice like this. His competing desires pull him in both directions at once. If he chooses one, it is not like picking one of the suitcases full of money. No matter what the agent chooses, something is lost – something is given up – some sacrifice has to be made.

Every example such as this is further evidence that humans act on more than one value.

Desire Utilitarianism and the Incommensurability of Values

Desire fulfillment theory handles the incommensurability of value because each desire generates its own value.

Here is a mistake that a lot of people make when I talk about desire fulfillment. They think that I say that where a person desires that P (for some proposition P), where there is a state of affairs S, and P is true in S, a special property emerges that is called ‘desire fulfillment”, and it is this special property that holds all of the value intrinsic to that state of affairs.

There is no ‘special property’ that holds the value in these states of affairs. There is nothing in this state other than the desires, the state of affairs, and the relationship between them.

If I were to claim that desire fulfillment were emergent property that holds all of the value of a given state of affairs, then desire utilitarianism would fall into the same pit with all of the other forms of utilitarianism I mentioned above. Here, we would have to describe the agent as making a choice between 50,000 units of desire fulfillment vs. 50,000 units of desire fulfillment. There would be no incommensurability problem because there would be only one type of value.

Desire utilitarianism does not face the problem of incommensurable values because it holds that each “desire that P” generates its own value in states of affairs in which P is true. Whatever may fulfill a desire that P does not necessarily fulfill a desire that Q. So, a person who acts so as to realize P may well have to sacrifice or give up on Q. He would certainly want to create a state of affairs in which both P and Q are true. Failing that, he must give up one of his values in order to pursue the other one. This is a real sacrifice – quite unlike giving up $50,000 to get $50,000.

The Force Metaphor

To explain how desires work I sometimes draw on a metaphor that uses the way that forces act on a physical body flying through space.

Whenever a body is acted on two or more forces, the total effect on the body is determined by the vector sum of the forces. If one force pushes to the right at 5 ft/s^2, and another pushes to the left at 4 ft/s^2, the object will move to the right at 1 ft/s^2.

Similarly, if the desire to go to Harvard is stronger than the desire to stay with his girlfriend, then he will go to Harvard. If the desires are nearly equal, and both desires are strong, he will go with the stronger desire, but he will do so with regret. The desire that he cannot fulfill is still there pushing with all of its strength.

Conclusion

There is one more consideration that is relevant when we consider that value is grounded on desire, which is a propositional attitude like belief. As I wrote in a comment to one of the earlier discussions, there is no more reason to insist on reducing all desires to a single desire, than there is to insist on reducing all beliefs to a single belief. Just as we can each believe a wide array of propositions, we can each desire a broad array of propositions as well.

The only difference is that, whenever a belief does not conform to the real world, this is a reason to change one’s belief. Whenever a desire does not conform to the real world, this is a reason to change the world.