Preaching Atheism

Every once in a while, atheists bring up the topic of whether atheism should be “preached” the way other religions are – whether atheists should be going to the effort of converting others to their point of view. Some object that one of the things they dislike so much about religion are the efforts its followers go into to convert others. They have such distaste for it, they hate to do this themselves.

However, a look at the claims I have been making over the past week about the wrong of teaching religion to children provides an argument in favor of promoting atheism – though it argues most strongly in favor of a type of indirect promotion.

In order to discuss the issue of teaching atheism, I need to address what it means to say that one is teaching (or promoting) atheism. Quite simply, I am going to define it as telling somebody that the proposition P, where P = “There is at least one god” is almost certainly false. (I do not hold that atheism is the lack of a belief in God. Any definition that classifies rocks and cats as being atheists is misusing the term, typically for rhetorical purposes.)

Almost Certainly

The phrase ‘almost certainly’ is important here. A great many advocates of theism accuse atheism as being another type of faith. They portray atheists as saying that it is certainly the case that no God exists, and that this cannot be known without having perfect knowledge of every fact in the universe, or on the basis of faith. Therefore, they argue, atheism is just another religion.

Those who use this argument show the same type of intellectual recklessness that I accused Michael Behe of in “Epistemic Negligence in Teaching Religion. It’s a false claim – a lie – and the type of lie that people use when they are more interested in power and glory for themselves than in truth. It is, indeed, ironic that the public advocates of atheism are accused of criticizing a straw-man version of religion, and yet we hear almost no criticism of those who repeatedly use this straw-man version of atheism. It is yet another example of the double moral standard we live under, where the ‘morality’ of theists is found in the fact that their wrongs simply are not counted.

Anyway, if it is true that the proposition ‘there is at least one god’ is almost certainly false, and if false beliefs cause people to make mistakes that interfere with the fulfillment of their desires, then it is a benefit to know that this is true. However, this benefit is proportional to the mistakes that are prevented by knowing this truth. If these harms are minor, then there is reason to focus instead on teaching beliefs that have greater importance – greater impact. However, if this proposition has the greatest impact, then teaching it should be a priority over other, less consequential, propositions.

The Value of Teaching Atheism

Ultimately, I see no particular value in teaching people that it is almost certainly the case that no God exists, period, with the existence of God being the focus of attention. Saying that no God exists does not imply anything about what does exist. Saying that there almost certainly is no God to tell you what is morally obligatory, permissible, or prohibited says nothing about what (if anything) is obligatory, permissible, or prohibited. Because so little follows from, “It is almost certainly the case that no God exists,” there are a great many propositions that are more important to teach than this one.

The proposition “at least one God possibly exists” is also a very weak claim. Any other view that one can imagine – except a view that say that it is not the case that at least one God probably exists – is compatible with this view. For example, it is compatible with the view that there was once a God who set of a ‘big bang’ which ultimately resulted in the existence of humans as a result of a set of natural laws that this creature established at the start of space/time.

A Focus on Harms Done

Because of the weakness of these propositions tells us that we have better things to do with our time – more important issues to write about. More important than the claim that a God exists are facts regarding global warming, regarding the use of drugs (including cigarettes and tobacco), regarding how to do math, regarding hurricane, tornados, tsunamis, forest fires, house fires, proper use of safety equipment, nutrition, propositions associated with one’s chosen vocation (or relevant in making an informed choice about a future vocation), pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease, or all transmitted disease for that matter, and so on.

This fact is that many who believe in God go far beyond the simple statement, “At last one God exists.” They go on to add a huge list of additional premises, and those additional premises are causing a great deal of death and suffering. With respect to these other premises – those that really do lead to harm – it is now much more reasonable to demand that they put their beliefs on a much more solid foundation or be held in contempt because of the harms they do to others in the name of (their view of) God.

For example, global warming will likely thwart a great many future desires. It is very important to get people to know and understand the propositions relevant to the significance of this threat. However, there are those who dismiss the problem of thwarting future desires because they hold that those future desires will not exist, or the effect of global warming on those future desires will be thwarted (or outweighed) by The Rapture or some other end-of-the-world scenario.

Against such person, I have no problem with somebody saying (when it is true), “Your religion has turned you into somebody who will do more harm to your fellow human than any Nazi or Soviet soldier. Global warming will do far more destruction than any of these evils, and your refusal to defend your fellow humans against this threat in the name of God is no different than refusing to stand up to Hitler or Stalin in the name of God. That makes you a truly evil person, and all of those who will come to be harmed, and all those who care about those who will be harmed, will have reason to despise you because you thought that your God told you to stand by and do nothing to help or protect them.”

The same is true of anybody who takes a position against embryonic stem cell research in the name of God. “Your religion has made you far more dangerous than the followers of Osama bin Laden or any Crusader or Inquisitor in human history. A suicide bomber can usually take out only a few people. In exceptionally rare cases, one can kill hundreds. It is possible that, some day, the losses from a single attack may be in the millions. However, you and those who think like you do will rack up a list of victims in the hundreds of millions to billions. You will rack up these victims in the name of God. If the evil in a religion is tied to its body count, yours clearly qualifies as one of the worst.”

There are also the facts, discussed earlier in my post “Religion and Bad Desires”, where children who are taught religion are often taught false beliefs and false desires that will make them a threat to themselves and others as are taught to spend their lives pursuing an end that will never be realized. They sacrifice so much (that is harmless to themselves or to others) in the name of preserving their chance for an afterlife that they will also never have – because no afterlife exists. Because their life in this world is made less than it would have otherwise been, and the promised afterlife never happens, we have religion promoting that which is bad without delivering any real-world good to compensate.

These are just some examples of the real-world harms that real-world people are being made to suffer for the sake of an entity that does not exist.

That is the main point of this argument. It is meant to shift the focus on the religious debate to the fact that, in those cases that matter the most, it is the case that, “Your religion is making you a dangerous person who has decided to devote his live to options that add death and suffering to the world.” It ranks religious beliefs according to the amount of death and suffering they contribute to, and goes most strongly after those that cause the most death and suffering.

It seems, to me, to be a more reasonable focus.

Taking Action against Religion

I am approaching the end of a series on the wrongness of teaching religion to a child and what to do about it.

I have argued that it is inaccurate to say that it is abuse (“Religion as Child Abuse”). However, it is still a bad thing to do to teach children false beliefs (“Teaching Religion”) and bad desires (“Religion and Bad Desires”) , and a great deal of this goes on in the vast majority of religious teaching. In order to combat these evils, we are morally limited to words and private actions (“The Wrongness and Freedom of Religion”). However, there has been far less use of words and private actions used against this evil than it deserves (“Condemning the Teaching of Religion”). This is particularly true when it comes to the condemnation of those who claim to be ‘experts’ and who have studied the subject matter when they use such poor arguments that a charge of epistemic negligence is justified (“Epistemic Negligence and Teaching Religion”).

In the last two days, I have spoken of the legitimacy of condemning those who teach religion to children and of speaking to the harmfulness of these actions. However, the legitimacy extends beyond words to private actions.

Private actions are those actions that a person may permissibly perform without having to explain to others why they do them. They include decisions as to where to shop, what to buy, what to watch in terms of television, movies, or plays, who to invite over to one’s house, where to donate time and money, who to vote for, and the like.

Just as there have been far too few words criticizing the teaching false beliefs and bad desires to children, there has also been far too little private action taken against teaching false beliefs and bad desires to children. One recent exception that exemplifies the type of action I am talking about was the “Rally for Reason” held at the opening of the Creation Museum. This was more than just words. This was people giving time out of their day to act.

Often, agents of change are condemned even by those who would be their allies. I remember the harsh words that Michael Newdow received for challenging the Pledge of Allegiance in court. Here is somebody who committed himself to more than words, but to actions. His actions were peaceful and totally legitimate – since his actions consisted in filing a court case to enforce the laws as written, and not in any type of violent rebellion against the status quo.

So, in addition to advocating that more words be devoted to true beliefs and good desires – to promoting organizations trying to teach true beliefs and good desires, particularly to children, and in condemning the intellectually reckless who promote false beliefs and bad desires.

We need more rallies for reason, and more public demonstrations of discontent targeting those who teach false beliefs and bad desires to children.

Separation of Church and State

In making this claim that more private action should be directed towards the teaching of true beliefs and good desires, and against the teaching of false beliefs and bad desires, I suspect that many will immediately think about contributing to the separation of church and state. However, I would argue that the campaign to separate church and state has some important weaknesses.

The most important weakness is that it is fought in the courts, and not among the people. Even when they take their case to the people, they assert that the separation of church and state is a good idea, and they assert that the founding fathers would have supported it, without explaining why it is a good idea, and why we, like the founding fathers, should support it.

Judges receive and read the arguments for saying that church ought to be separate from state, and typically the judges are convinced. However, the people seldom see those arguments (at least in a context that they can understand), so they are not convinced. The result is that every decision for separation of church and state undermines public approval of the courts, to the degree that they insist that the courts eliminate this separation of church and state.

At least in a country like the United States, a political movement cannot avoid the necessity of taking its case to the people, one way or another, if it hopes to obtain a sustained victory. So, if somebody wants to support stronger separation between church and state, I would recommend supporting organizations who take their case to the people over organizations that take their case to the courts. This will, however, ultimately strengthen those organizations that take their case to the courts by creating a public that supports those decisions.

Funding

One specific action that I have in mind is the funding of organizations that promote true beliefs and good desires – and the defunding of those that promote false beliefs and bad desires. This means, keeping track of where your money goes, and making sure to direct a little more of it to those who are making the world better than it would have otherwise been, and making sure that less of it ends up in the hands of those who are making the world a worse place.

There are those I read about who watch Fox News “for the entertainment value”. However, doing so puts money (and power) in the hands of those who are making the world a worse place. Putting eyeballs on advertisement is what Fox News does for a living, and putting one’s own eyeballs on its advertising tells it to keep doing what it is doing. It would be better, I would argue, if a person found their entertainment in something that was more useful and less destructive. In this, I am not advocating shutting one’s mind to ideas that one does not disagree with. I am advocating, instead, giving one’s attention to those who defend alternative ideas intelligently, responsibly, and knowledgably.

Today, I have a specific action that I would like to recommend. I am disturbed by the fact that the enemies of truth and good desires seem to be so well funded, compared to the defenders of truth and knowledge. So, today, I want to make a direct request to my readers to make a cash contribution to whatever organization they feel is best promoting truth over fiction, and good desires over bad desires – and, in particular, organizations that teach true beliefs and good desires to children.

I am a firm believer in leading by example. A person should never ask others to do what he is not willing to do himself, if he is able. So, I made a $250 contribution to Camp Quest this morning. Camp quest is an organization devoted to giving a summer camp experience to children of parents who wish to raise their children without religion. So, where the objective is to act so as to promote true beliefs and good desires, in contrast to those organizations promoting false beliefs and bad desires, Camp Quest certainly qualifies.

Yet, I want to make it clear that it is not the only organization that would qualify, and I would like readers to make up their own minds as to which organizations could best benefit from some additional support.

Labor Contributions

Also, this support need not take the form of a cash contribution. I have more money than time (particularly given the time that I devote to Atheist Ethicist, Atheist Ethicist Journal, The Scrapbook Wiki on Desire Utilitarianism, and other special projects. Others, I recognize, have more time than money. For them, I would recommend a commitment of time – a commitment of a weekly contribution in labor hours where one thinks that it can be useful. With today’s technology, in many cases, it need not even be a local organization. One can contribute labor over the Internet.

For this type of contribution, I would suggest allocating a regular block of time – say, three hours on a Sunday morning to working for an organization dedicated to promoting true beliefs and good desires, particularly to children. Simply write to the organization and say, “This block of time is yours. Here are my skills. What can I help you with?”

What to Do?

In an earlier post, I addressed the question, “What should I do?” I mentioned that a person with good desires gets a very pleasant answer to this question. “Do whatever you want to do?” A person with good desires wants to do things that tend to fulfill the desires of others.

This speaks to the question of whether a person is being asked to sacrifice to engage in private actions that support the teaching of true beliefs and good desires to children, and to inhibit practices that teach false beliefs and bad desires. A person with good desires wants to do good, and gets pleasure from the good that he does. There is no sacrifice. And, if it appears to be a sacrifice, one way to get over this hurdle is through practice. An activity that starts off being work can become something that a person does for its own sake, if he sticks to it long enough, and realizes the good that is being done.

More importantly, the children who are raised with true beliefs and good desires grow up to be people who may do whatever they want. Because, to the degree we are successful, what they will grow up to want to do are those things that fulfill the desires of others, and what others will grow up to want to do are those things that fulfill the desires of our children, nieces, and nephews.

Epistemic Negligence in Teaching Religion

I have been spending the week writing a series on the wrongness of teaching religion to children.

I have argued that it is inaccurate to say that it is abuse (“Religion as Child Abuse”). However, it is still a bad thing to do to teach children false beliefs (“Teaching Religion”) and bad desires (“Religion and Bad Desires”) , and a great deal of this goes on in the vast majority of religious teaching. In order to combat these evils, we are morally limited to words and private actions (“The Wrongness and Freedom of Religion”). However, there has been far less use of words and private actions used against this evil than it deserves (“Condemning the Teaching of Religion”).

Today, I am going to add another level of complexity to this analysis. The claims that I have made so far apply to the common person – the individual who is busy raising children, holding down a job, and living a normal life, with little free time to look at the relevant issues in detail.

However, there is a group of people to whom this does not apply. Somebody who wishes to proclaim that they have studied an issue and has something important to say on the issue have a moral obligation to have gone through the arguments in some depth. If such a person makes easily motivated mistakes, they have shown themselves to be morally irresponsible, and should be treated as such

In the first essay in this series, I spoke of how a mother is not to be blamed for taking thalidomide (which causes birth defects in children) even when its harmfulness is known until and unless it is reasonable for her to believe that it is harmful. However, the doctor who prescribed it for her is under a different standard. As a physician, as somebody who has decided to accept the responsibility of informing others how to care for his or her heath, the physician has an obligation to know things which an average patient may be ignorant of.

The way that this applies to the question of teaching religion is that those who defend the false beliefs and bad desires of any particular religion are more like the physicians in the thalidomide example than the average patient. The instant that somebody picks up a pen or a keyboard and starts to express an opinion on an issue, that person takes on obligations above and beyond those of the average reader. The writer or speaker is professing some level of expertise, and is reporting that he has lived up to his obligation to become informed on the subject at hand. If he has not lived up to this responsibility, he may be permissibly and soundly condemned.

What this means it that the condemnation should not be against ‘religion’ as some vague and broad generality. Instead, a critic should focus on the specific statements made by specific individuals – taking names – and let the moral condemnation fly whenever it can be shown that the individual has failed to live up to the obligations incumbent upon an expert in any particular field. “Here is Person P, who has made the world a worse place than it would have otherwise been. This is why P is guilty of these charges. If you do not wish to make the world a worse place than it would have otherwise been, do not do what P has done.”

A conveniently recent example of this is Michael Behe, who has produced a new book defending intelligent design. PZ Myers at Pharyngula mentioned a couple of reviews of his book (mention 1, mention 2) Several critics have noted that what Behe did was totally screw up the mathematics in order to get a result that matches the conclusion that he wants to defend. These critics have accurately described the flaw – and that is all.

Something else is needed. I wish to address this comment to Mr. Behe himself.”

Mr. Behe, a morally responsible person would never have let these mistakes into his book. If you are going to use probability theory to support your conclusion, then you have an obligation to study and understand probability theory. You should have at least taken a course in the subject. Better yet, you should have shown your calculations to those who are skilled in probability theory and asked them if you made any mistakes. You should have said – to yourself, if not out loud – ‘I have an obligation to make sure that the arguments I place in this book are sound. In order to help ensure this, I must do the following.’

From Behe’s behavior we have good reason to infer that he does not care for truth. So, what does motivate Behe to produce this book? Perhaps he could be motivated by the praise and gratitude of those who want propaganda that they can use to advance their own agenda (where those ‘others’ have the same lack of concern for truth that Behe has). Perhaps he’s motivated by money, knowing that people will buy a book that puts lies and distortions in language that sounds impressive.

A morally responsible person would feel ashamed that he had let such a mistake into his work. He should feel like the mechanic on an airplane who, in working on a bus, did not rebuild the breaks correctly, and put a busload full of children at risk of injury and death. The humiliation and shame should be palpable. Because, in a society where people feel this type of humility and shame, people will behave more responsibly, and we will all be better off because of it. In a society where people do not feel this type of humility and shame, there will be more shoddy work, and more ill consequences as a result.

Behe’s real motives are subject to further questioning. However, a concern for truth is clearly not among them. For this alone, we should not be content with merely pointing out that his arguments are flawed. We should condemn the lack of concern for truth and sound reasoning that he represents. We should stand before our peers and, more importantly, the young, point to him and say in no uncertain terms, “You should be ashamed to become like that man over there. Don’t do it.”

This shame and humiliation must extend beyond the person who made such a mistake. If a school bus mechanic leaves the breaks on a bus partially repaired, the moral shame and guilt are attached not only to the person who is guilty of this carelessness, but to any who would defend him in that role. It extends to the manager who would dismiss his mistake as trivial and unimportant, and would extend in particular to those who would hold him up as a role model for all mechanics to follow. The latter is telling the world not only should we be unconcerned about the fact that he left the brakes on the bus partially repaired, but that we need more mechanics who would leave the brakes on busses partially repaired. A society is simply insane to actually promote this type of irresponsibility, or to praise others who would promote it.

So it is the case with Behe, that the shame and guilt should attach not only to Behe himself, but to any who would dismiss his moral shortcomings as trivial, and in particular to any who would praise his work as a model for others to follow. The latter are not only telling the world that we should not be concerned about careless mistakes in people who profess to understand the topics they are writing about, they are saying that the world needs more people who are similarly reckless. Such a statement is its own moral crime. A society is simply insane to actually promote this type of irresponsibility, or to praise others who would promote it.

Hopefully, from this, future generations will have fewer people like Behe, and more people with such an active concern for truth that they will struggle to make sure that their arguments are sound and that elementary mistakes do not seep into their writings. That would make the future world a better place than it would otherwise have been. Our children, grandchildren, and their children, would certainly benefit from being in such a world.

This is not censorship. Censorship means using violence, even the state-sponsored violence of legal threats – against those who offer unpopular opinions. In fact, only a hypocrite could charge somebody with censorship for complaining about intellectual recklessness – because the person who is charging censorship is, himself, trying to silence (through condemnation) expressions of an opinion he does not approve of. He is saying, “It is wrong to say anything critical of the opinions of others,” while, himself, saying something critical of the opinions of others. It is a nonsense position deserving of its own moral condemnation.

The fact that people are openly making embarrassingly foolish claims without embarrassment – the fact that the propagandist and the demagogue is rewarded – is a sign of a deep moral corruption in this society. Behe should be in hiding – not out of fear for his life (for no decent person would threaten harm), but out of shame and humiliation for letting such a simple error make its way into his book. To the degree that he actually holds his head up in pride, to that degree our society has room to institute some moral improvement.

Condemning the Teaching of Religion

I have been writing a series in which I have been focusing on the wrongness of religion. So far in this series I have argued that:

1: In "Religion as Child Abuse" I argued that teaching religion to children does not automatically count as ‘abuse’, because it lacks the desire to do harm or indifference to harm done to the child.

(2) In "Teaching Religion," I rejected the idea that a prohibition on indoctrinating children even made sense. Educating a child necessarily means teaching children what to think. Even the issue of teaching children how to think is subject to disagreement. Still, even though it is not necessarily ‘abuse’ to teach children false beliefs, it is still bad insofar as false beliefs lead to mistakes – and some mistakes can be very costly.

(3) In "Religion and Bad Desires" I said that it is also bad to teach religion to children insofar as it involves teaching children bad desires – desires that thwart the child’s own desires, desires that make the child grow up to act in ways that harm others (particularly through the harmful legislation they support), and desires that waste time an energy because the individual pursues things that can never happen.

(4) Yet, in "The Wrongness and Freedom of Religion", I said that combating the badness of teaching religion to children, we must have a strong presumption against the use of violence (whether direct violence, or through coercive legislation) against beliefs and practices we do not agree with. Instead, the legitimate tools (for all but the most extreme cases) are words and private actions.

Today, I will add that even in the realm of words and private actions, far less is being done than should be done to counter the teaching of false beliefs and bad desires to children.

The Obligation to Condemn Religion

On the issue, the main message of those who have become the public advocates of atheism is correct. For far too long, people have not been raised with the inappropriate and costly attitude that they should have a social aversion to criticizing the fact that religions teach false beliefs and bad desires. In fact, it has been socially prohibited to even suggest that a religion can have these faults.

In saying this, these advocates of atheism have been blaming ‘religious moderates’ and others for this social flaw. In fact, it came mostly from academic, liberal philosophies such as cultural relativism and post modernism – philosophies that said that no world view could be called ‘better’ than another and that criticism is always, fundamentally unjustified.

It is a good thing that the social restrictions against criticizing religion are being lifted. However, they have not yet been lifted by as much as they need to be. An aversion to giving criticism, like any aversion, once learned, does not disappear instantly. It has to be unlearned. At first, giving religion the criticism it deserves for its false beliefs may be unsettling. However, it is still important.

False beliefs lead to mistakes that do real harm to the life, health, and well-being of the agent or to others. Agents with bad desires are a threat to themselves and to others, or waste their time in the pursuit of ends that can never be realized because the things the agents are working for are not real.

Religion, of course, is not the sole source of false beliefs and bad desires. However, it is a source, and a legitimate target for those concerned with reducing the harms that false beliefs and bad desires bring about.

People still show far too much favor towards religion. If a person withholds medical care from a child, we condemn the parents. When the parents say that they do so for religious reasons, the habit is still to back off and say, “Then that’s alright; you shall not be condemned for following your religion.” The proper answer would be to say, “A religion that causes parents to contribute to the death and suffering of their own child is particularly vile.”

'Unconstitutional' vs 'Wrong'

Set aside the constitutional issues involved in those issues where the separation of church and state are involved. Instead, focus on the fact that religion has made the individual a threat to their own children. “Your actions weaken the child’s resistance to the false beliefs and bad desires that religions promote, making the world a worse place than it would otherwise have been. For the sake of those made to suffer and die as a result of the views you promote, we need to resist the policies that do so much harm.”

There should be no qualms in saying (insofar as it is true), “Because of your religion, you have adopted a lifestyle of promoting ignorance and misery. You have made this your legacy, that your life is devoted to standing in the way of important medical advances that can reduce or eliminate much of the world’s suffering, opposing policies that would be prevent disease and fight poverty, working to reduce the quality of life of innocent people who would otherwise be productive and cooperative members of society, and waste countless resources in pursuit of a myth that could otherwise have been spent bringing about positive real-world change. This is the type of person that you have become because of your religion. It is not something to be proud of.”

In the realm of words and private actions, there should be no quarter given to those who promote false beliefs and bad desires.

Anger

These types of statements will probably anger those who they target.

So what? Since when is it a defense against wrongdoing that the wrongdoers might react angrily to an accusation? Imagine a defense attorney in a court of law saying, against the testimony of a witness, “I object! Prosecution is eliciting responses from the witness that make my client angry,” then having the Judge sustain that objection. This is a non sequiter.

Also, imagine the absurdity of a slave, saying to the other slaves, “The best way to win our freedom is to treat the master as well as we can, to make him as comfortable as possible. If we anger him and earn his wrath, we will never win our freedom.”

No significant moral advance has come from a policy of making the wrongdoers feel as comfortable as possible in doing wrong. Moral progress is made by making wrongdoers feel uncomfortable – with using condemnation and other social tools to mold the conscience of individuals so that they will avoid the discomfort of wrongdoing.

I may object to some of the things said against religion. However, my objections are not based on a moral requirement to ‘be nice’. They are based on a moral requirement to ‘be just’ – and to make sure that those accused of a particular moral crime are actually guilty.

When they are guilty – when their attitudes are those that make the world a worse place in which to live – what justification is there for ‘being nice’? You are talking about people who are depriving others of life, health, and well-being. ‘Being nice’ to those who cost others life, health, and well-being only ensures that there will be more people more strongly devoted to costing even more life, health, and well-being.

People who promote false beliefs and bad desires are doing real-world harm to real-world people. These are not the people we should be being nice to. Being nice should be reserved, as positive reinforcement, to those who work to reduce the incidences of false belief and bad desires – and who promote true beliefs and good desires.

Conclusion

Once again, I am talking about words and private actions here, not acts of violence (even legislative violence) except in the most extreme cases. And do not let others get away with equating the two – with calling others who know and respect the need to refrain from violent responses as ‘militant’.

We have lived for too long in a bizarre society in which those who promote false beliefs and bad desires are given a special type of social protection, while those who would speak up in defense of true belief and good desires are socially condemned for being rude. It is a system that guarantees more death, suffering, and wasted life than we would otherwise have to endure.

One final point to address is the fact that a project of eliminating (false beliefs and bad desires contained within) religion is impossible. Which is certainly true. One line of reasoning says that since we cannot eliminate religion, we should not condemn it. However, I see this as no different than arguing that, since we cannot eliminate rape, that we should not condemn it. The fact is, the degree to which false beliefs and bad desires can be reduced, to that degree the world is made a better place. The impossibility of complete success is no more an argument against an investment in reducing these evils than the impossibility of becoming independently wealthy overnight is an argument against investing in the future.

I want to repeat that the real badness here is in teaching false beliefs and bad desires. The real badness is not in teaching religion. The teaching happens to be one major source of false beliefs and bad desires. However, other sources exist, and a focus on the religion source should not be taken as an argument for giving a pass on other sources of false beliefs or bad desires.

The Wrongness and Freedom of Religion

One should not teach false beliefs or bad desires to a child because, to the degree that one does so, one makes the child a threat to himself or herself and to others. To the degree that the teaching of any religion involves teaching false beliefs or bad desires, then children should not be taught to follow that religion.

This is Part Four in a series on the badness of teaching religion.

In Part 1, "Religion as Child Abuse", I argued that teaching religion to a child does not qualify as ‘abuse’ because it lacks a desire for, or an indifference towards, the harm inflicted on the student.

In Part 2, "Teaching Religion", I argued that teaching religion to a child is bad because (and insofar as) it involves teaching false beliefs, and that teaching false beliefs is bad. False beliefs cause people to make mistakes, and mistakes can often do a great deal of harm to the person who makes them, or to others.

In Part 3, "Religion and Bad Desires", I argued that teaching religion to a child is bad because (and insofar as) it involves giving the child bad desires. A bad desire will cause a child to act in ways that thwart his or her other desires, or act in ways that make the child a threat to the life, health, and well-being of others, or act so as to fulfill desires that can never be fulfilled thus wasting that person’s efforts and that person’s life.

So, teaching religion to children is a bad thing to do. So, what are we going to do to stop it?

The Fact of Conflicting Beliefs

There is nothing more obvious than the fact that every theist is going to protest that teaching religion does not involve teaching false beliefs or bad desires. In fact, the vast majority of them will likely assert that denying God involves teaching bad beliefs, that failure to teach piety is a moral crime against children, and that it is only through God that one can hope to have a meaningful life.

Even in the absence of these objections, even if nobody believed in God, we would still have a society in which different people believed different things, and where some of them believed that it is extremely important that everybody adopt their beliefs. We would likely still be at risk of war, not over conflicting religions, but still over conflicting ideologies.

We need institutions that will allow people with widely different beliefs to get along at least well enough to avoid a situation like we find in Baghdad today, or Darfur. We will need these institutions even in a world where nobody believes in God (so these are not institutions that religion makes it necessary for us to have). We need to apply these rules to all major differences in belief, including disagreements over the existence of a God.

Principles of Free Speech

On matters of belief, there shall be a strong presumption against the use of violence or threats of violence against those who hold to different beliefs. This is in spite of the fact that false beliefs and bad desires are harmful. ‘Violence’ here not only includes direct assaults against the life, body, and property of another person with an aim of causing harm. It also means ‘violence’ in the form of criminal penalties against expressing opinions that others do not like, or against rituals and practices that others do not like.

Instead, we are going to limit the set of allowable responses to other people’s beliefs to non-violent verbal responses and private actions. By ‘private actions’ I mean decisions over who to invite to a party, where to shop, what to buy, where to donate time or money, and what to watch, listen to, read, or look at.

The Limits of Freedom

I have spoken here of a strong presumption against private violence and criminal penalty. It is like the presumption used in a jury trial, where the accused is presumed innocent, and the burden of proof is on the prosecutor. If there is reasonable doubt, we should side with liberty and against violent interference. However, when there is reason to believe beyond reasonable doubt that significant harm will come from a belief or a practice, we may stand against it.

Imagine a person standing on the Mall in Washington DC with a nuclear bomb in a suitcase. He says that his God tells him to detonate the bomb. He protests that our Constitution guarantees him the free exercise of religion. The answer is that this right to the free exercise of religion is a presumption that can be overruled by clear evidence beyond a reasonable doubt that the individual is not a significant threat to others. The bomber on the mall is a threat to others, and may that threat may be eliminated.

We can also clearly argue that the right to the free exercise of religion does not include the right to offer a child (or anybody, for that matter) as a live human sacrifice to some God. And no individual shall be able to get off of the hook for the rape of a child by saying that he received a message from God to do so.

There are going to have to be limits to the free exercise of religion. The greater the harm to others (in terms of certainty and degree) the stronger the reason for saying, “These religious practices, we cannot allow.

Institutions for Peaceful Resolution of Disagreements

There are going to be disagreements even over whether a practice is a sufficient threat to warrant criminal penalties. To prevent war and physical violence, we need a commitment to institutions where we will resolve these differences short of bloodshed - such as legislators and courts. Yet, even within these bodies, we need individuals bound to the presumption of freedom - a 'bill of rights' - otherwise oppressive legislation can be the pretext for civil war. It should not be considered sufficient to convince a mere majority that something is a bad idea before it is banned. The evidence must be of such quality that the vast majority of reasonable people cannot doubt it.

Yes, there is a risk that with any standard of interference in the beliefs and expressions of others that we risk banning truth and prohibiting innocent and harmless actions. It is also true that in any court of law that we risk convicting an innocent person. This does not give us an argument for closing down the criminal justice system, nor does it give us an argument for saying ‘everything is permissible’ in terms of the expressions (religious and otherwise), or 'anything may be prohibited' on the slightest expression of discomfort on the part of the majority against it. We cannot avoid the fact that there will areas of dispute. So, we must make sure that our institutions are those that can survive in the face of a sphere of dispute.

Recognizing Rights

I think it is particularly important for atheists – particularly those atheists who are out in front of the camera – to state that they understand and respect these principles. In the words and writings of the most public atheists, I have yet to hear an argument that specifies the limits of freedom speech, freedom of religion, and the limits of violence. This, combined with the widespread public perception that atheists have no reason to recognize that there are moral limits to human action make it easy to generate fear of atheists precisely on these points that atheist spokesmen do not address.

The reason that some people use phrases such as ‘militant atheists’ or ‘atheist fundamentalist’ is because they seek to win political points by marketing in fear. These phrases are meant to convey the impression that atheists do not understand the proper limits on free expression, and are simply aching for an opportunity to turn military arms (militantism) or other forms of violence (fundamentalism) against believers. They are trying to claim that only believers understand the true limits of expression.

This is in spite of the fact that you will scarcely find a scripture that does not command and condone the wholesale slaughter of individuals whose only crime is holding beliefs contrary to one’s religion. This is in spite of the fact that almost all of the violence we see in the world today, where individuals are threatening real-world harms against those who do not share their beliefs, are cases in which the violence is done in the name of ‘defending’ some religion.

Those who are morally impaired hold that in a marketing campaign, the only thing that matters is perception. It does not matter whether it is true that atheists are militant. All that matters is the ability to generate the perception that atheists are militant. A useful lie is always to be preferred to a useless truth – and so it goes with those who speak of ‘militant’ and ‘fundamentalist’ atheists.

There are limits to what may be done to counter the teaching of religion to children. However, in recent history, the fault has fallen far on the side of doing too little than in doing too much. Tomorrow, I want to look at the other side of the coin – at the beliefs that have inspired people to do too little to counter the harms that are done, and the evils that people suffer, at the hands of those who teach religion to children.

Religion and Bad Desires

I am spending these days looking, in detail, at the idea that teaching religion to child is a form of child abuse.

In Part 1, "Religion as Child Abuse", I argued that teaching religion to a child does not qualify as ‘abuse’ because it lacks one of the necessary components of abuse – a desire for, or an indifference towards, the harm inflicted on the student.

In Part 2, "Teaching Religion", I argued that teaching religion to children is, in fact, bad in part because it teaches false beliefs. Each person acts so as to fulfill his desires given his beliefs, but seeks to act to fulfill his desires. False beliefs cause actions that aim at fulfilling desires and cause them to fail – the way that taking a drink that one thinks is clean water, but which turns out to be poison, leads to disastrous consequences for the person who only wanted to quench his thirst.

Today, I am going to argue that teaching religion to a child is bad because it teaches them bad desires. It teaches them to like things that no good person would like.

All of the caveats that I mentioned yesterday – that the bad desires taught by some religions are worse than the bad desires taught by others, and that religion is not the only source of bad desires – apply here as well.

Three Types of Bad Desires

(1) Desires that thwart other desires of the agent.

(2) Desires that thwart the desires of other people

(3) Desires that cannot be fulfilled.

Desires that thwart other desires of the agent.

In the every-day world, the paradigm example of a desire that thwarts other desires of the agent is an addiction. People act so as to fulfill their current desires, given their beliefs. Future desires are fulfilled only in so far as the agent has a current desire that future desires be fulfilled, and current desires that tend to fulfill future desires as a side effect (e.g., a desire to exercise, a taste for healthy food). A drug addiction, or even a taste for unhealthy food, is a desire that tends to thwart other desires of the agent. As such, it is a desire that the agent is better off not having.

In the religious world, nothing fits the mold of a desire that thwarts other desires more than the desire to be a martyr. The suicide bomber, or even the holy soldier whose desire to serve some god is strong enough to motivate him to risk injury or death, is somebody given a desire that thwarts other desires.

Now, many of these suicide bombers and religious warriors may well be operating from false belief, rather than bad desires. Their motivation may be to secure a place of fulfillment in heaven for their friends and family (or for themselves). These are not bad desires. Instead, these are examples like that of an agent drinking a glass of poison, thinking it is water, doing great harm to themselves for what they falsely believe will fulfill a good desire. Yet, it would be strange at best to argue that the suicide bomber, jihadist, or crusader, lacked a desire to promote their religion.

The guilt associated with something as morally innocent as masturbation, or the self-loathing that the religious inflict upon the young homosexual, severe enough to drive many of them to suicide (which, itself, is the ultimate in desire-thwarting acts) are also examples of religion teaching bad desires.

Finally, there are the resources that are spent trying to do something that cannot be done. Imagine a person who comes across a starving village, so she plants a garden, tends it through the summer, waters it, protects it from harm, then, in the fall, harvests the fruits and vegetables, and hands them to the villagers. Only, there never was a garden, there are no plants, and the baskets she hands to the villagers are empty. The whole garden and everything that came from it were figments of her imagination. The cost here is that the time and energy that she had spent tending to her imaginary garden could have been spent tending a real garden that would provide real-world nourishment to people who are suffering from real-world starvation.

Desires that tend to thwart the desires of others.

Many religions not only prevent people from fulfilling their own desires, they cause people to have desires that thwart the desires of others.

Look at the agenda for the Christian Right in this country, and with the Muslim Right in other countries. Their religion has made them into people whose primary desires are those that add to the overall misery, suffering, and death in the world. Opposition to embryonic stem-cell research, the teaching of ‘intelligent design’ (promoting an ignorance of evolution, from which we have derived tremendous breakthroughs in physical and mental health), adding misery to the lives of homosexuals, forcing real people with real interests to sacrifice their well-being for the sake of microscopic entities that have no interests, inhibiting the education of women, inhibitions on free speech and the free exchange of ideas (which only results in the dogmatic enforcement of ignorance) – all of these are examples in which religion has given people desires that thwart the desires of others.

This is not to say that these people desire the suffering of others – though, in some cases, this is clearly true. Instead, these are desires that tend to thwart the desires of others. Like the child rapist, whose desire is typically not to do harm to a child, but to do things that nonetheless cause harm to the child, many religious teachings promote desires that nonetheless result in harm to others (women, anybody who does not share the believer’s specific faith, anybody with a disease or illness, anybody who can benefit from increased knowledge and understanding of the real world, homosexuals) nonetheless.

I wrote about a prime example of this a while back where I discussed an evangelical who wanted to turn the attention of the world’s religious community to fighting global warming. Many religious leaders condemned him for diverting attention from more ‘worthy’ goals such as the fight against homosexuality and abortion. Here is a community of millions of people, refusing to contribute to something that will cause untold harm to future generations, because they are too concerned with causing untold harm to current generations.

Related postings:

“The Hitler and Stalin Cliché” discusses the idea that atheism is also responsible for great harm.

“The Good that Atheists Would Not Do” discusses the claim that religion can be defended by the good deeds it inspires.

Desires that cannot be fulfilled

People act so as to fulfill their desires, given their beliefs, and seek to act so as to fulfill their desires. A parent with a desire that his children be healthy and happy will act in ways in which he believes will bring them health and happiness. However, the only acts that have real value are those that generate true health and happiness. If an act does no good, then it has no value. If an act harms his children, even though he acted with the best intentions, the fact that his children were harmed means that this is an act he has reason to wish he had never performed.

Religion fills people with desires that simply cannot be fulfilled, no matter what the agent does. No person has ever fulfilled God’s wishes or helped to execute God’s plan on earth – because there is no God, no wishes, and no plan.

Of course, some people believe that they are serving God. These are like the parent who believes that he is helping his children, when in fact he does not even have any children.

We can compare the life of the religious person in this case with the life of somebody hooked up to an experience machine, which feeds them the illusion that they are acting in the real world. We can imagine an agent with a desire to promote the health of children being hooked up to such a machine. The machine feeds him the impression that he is going through medical school, studying to become a pediatrician. Later, the machine feeds him the illusion that he is working in some impoverished part of the world, promoting the health of children who otherwise would have gotten no medical care. Yet, all of the while, he is floating in a vat of jelly, being fed impressions from a computer.

In many cases, it would be more accurate to say that the computer is also hooked up so that, every time the individual thinks that he has saved a child’s life, the computer tortures and kills a real child. Every jolt of satisfaction the subject has for doing good, is in fact a source of evil. This is the case of many religious people who devote their lives to ‘saving’ others – particularly children – by bringing them to religion. Every jolt of satisfaction that they experience form a success, is actually an instance of doing harm to the people they think they are helping.

This is not to say that a religious person cannot do good. A real-world doctor who saves a child, who thinks he is serving God, is not serving God. However, he is saving a real-world child, and that is a real-world good thing. His life need not be nothing but an empty delusion. However, those accomplishments he has that are of real-world value are accomplishments that bear no relation to religion or God.

Summary

So, these are three ways in which teaching religion to a child is a bad thing.

It is a bad thing when it involves teaching a child desires that tend to thwart other (harmless) desires he may have.

It is a bad thing when it involves making the child into a person who will dedicate his life to causes that add to the misery and suffering of others.

It is a bad thing when it involves teaching a child to value things that simply cannot come to be in the real world.

Of course, any given religion is bad to the degree that it does these things, and religion is not the only way in which a person can acquire bad desires. It is, however, one of the most common sources of bad desires, and some religions promote far more bad desires than others. As a source of bad desires, it is something that people who are concerned with the quality of life in the real world have reason to take action against.

What types of actions may we take?

I will write about that tomorrow.

Teaching Religion

Teaching religion to children is a bad thing.

This is the second essay in a series that I have decided to write on the idea that teaching children is a form of child abuse. Yesterday, in “Religion as Child Abuse,” I argued that teaching religion to children does not count as abuse. However, this does not mean that it is not bad. Abusing children is a specific form of badness that requires some sort of maliciousness – a desire to do harm, or a disregard for the harm that would be done. All abuse is bad, but not all badness is abuse.

The argument for the thesis that teaching religion to children is bad is simple. The moral end of teaching children is to provide the children with true beliefs and good desires. Religion is full of false beliefs and bad desires. Thus, teaching religion conflicts with the moral end of teaching children.

Caveats

Before going into details, I need to present some caveats.

First, teaching religion is bad only when, and only to the degree that, in teaching that religion, one is teaching false beliefs and bad desires. In other words, I do not want to be thought of as saying that the teaching of all religion is bad because some religions contain notoriously bad beliefs (those who do not share one’s religion cannot be moral) or promote bad desires (e.g., the desire to kill anybody who does not profess the same religion). The teaching of any specific religion is bad to the degree that this specifically involves teaching false beliefs and bad desires.

Second (and this follows from the first), this implies that we can evaluate different religions according to their quality. Some religions are worse than others. The worst religions are those that teach beliefs and desires that destroy lives. A religion that introduces some mistakes around the edges of reality would be relatively benign.

Third, religion is not the only source of false beliefs. Every person holds at least one false belief, and no person has a perfect set of desires. This means that no atheist is free of false beliefs or bad desires. In fact, it is quite possible that if you take a random theist with his religiously inspired false beliefs and bad desires, and put him beside an atheist with his false beliefs and bad desires, that the atheist can be (and often is) the worse person. The real wrong here is in teaching false beliefs and bad desires, and it is something which atheists are not automatically innocent of doing merely because they are atheists.

So, my introductory statement where I explain that teaching religion is bad must be understood in the contest of these three caveats. There are degrees of badness. Different religions can be evaluated according to how bad their teachings are. Religion is not the only source of false beliefs and bad desires.

Beliefs

Tomorrow, I am going to go into the issue of teaching desires. The rest of today’s posting has to do with teaching beliefs.

I have frequently used a simple example to show the value of true beliefs. Imagine that you are thirsty, and there is a glass filled with a cool, transparent, odorless liquid on the table. If you believe that the glass contains water, you will probably drink it. If your beliefs are true, your thirst will be quenched. However, assume that your beliefs are false, and the glass contains a poison that will kill you. In trying to quench your thirst, you end up taking your own life. The way to avoid making mistakes that end up thwarting your desires rather than fulfilling them, is to have true beliefs.

Teaching What to Think

One claim that I often here is that it is wrong to ‘indoctrinate’ children. The claim is that we should teach children how to think, not what to think, and to allow children to make up their own mind when they get older.

The fact that I often hear or read this claim coming from atheists is part of my proof that an atheist can believe things that are as absurd as anything that comes out of any religion.

So, we are not going to teach children that George Washington was the first President of the United States. We are only going to teach them how to think, and let them figure this out for themselves.

We are going to quit teaching children that Helena is the capital of Montana, or that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, and that the square of the hypotenuse on a right triangle is equal to the sum of the square of the other two sides. We are simply going to teach children how to think, and let them decide for themselves if they want to accept these propositions.

Education requires teaching children not only how to think, but what to think. If ‘indoctrination’ involves teaching children what to think, then the indoctrination of children is unavoidable. If we want to condemn indoctrination, then we have to define it as something other than teaching children what to think.

Typically, the way most people use the terms ‘education’ and ‘indoctrination’ is: ‘Education’ is what you are doing when you are teaching children something that I approve of, while ‘indoctrination’ is what you are doing when you are teaching children something that I do not approve of.

This standard, however popular, is completely useless.

Teaching How to Think

One idea is that we can avoid conflicts over teaching children what to think by focusing instead on teaching them how to think. There are two points that need to be made with respect to this option.

First, the disputes over ‘how to think’ are just as deep, if not deeper, than disputes over ‘what to think’. In fact, one significant difference in the realm of religion is that one of them believes that ‘how to think’ involves the scientific method and logic above all else, while the other relies on revelation and divine guidance. We are not going to avoid any disputes by changing the focus of the question to one of ‘how to think’. We are still going to be fighting each other, making claims and counter-claims over which method counts as ‘education’ and which method counts as ‘indoctrination’.

Second (and this follows largely because of the truth of the first point), I would like to see a show of hands for how many people actually received a quality education in ‘how to think’ in high school. By a ‘quality education,’ I mean that the school made a concentrated effort to make their students proficient in recognizing formal and informal fallacies and in using propositional logic in a way that allowed them to use those tools in their every-day life. My guess is that there are not very many, because teaching children how to think would upset too many parents.

Anyway, my point is that we are not going to be able to move the question away from the issue of ‘indoctrinating’ children by focusing on the idea of teaching children ‘how to think’. There is as much ‘indoctrination’ in teaching children how to think as there is in teaching children what to think.

Conclusion

One of the moral ends of teaching children is to give them a brain stacked full of true beliefs, so that they can avoid the costly mistakes that come from false beliefs. This means that we are going to ‘indoctrinate’ children. It is simply impossible to avoid the task of teaching children what to believe. We can shift the focus to that of teaching children how to think, but this involves just as much ‘indoctrination’. We are not going to get out of it that easy.

One of the problems with teaching religion to children is that it involves teaching false beliefs to children. Those false beliefs are going to cause those children to grow up and act in ways that they think will lead to the fulfillment of their desires. However, they will be mistaken. They will, in fact, end up thwarting their desires. They may not know it – but ignorance of a fact does not prevent it from being true.

Those who want to teach religion to children will, of course, insist that they are teaching true beliefs, and that it is the atheist who is mistaken. Whichever beliefs are false, it is the teaching of false beliefs that is bad. It is the teaching of false beliefs that we must take pains to avoid.

We will never be in full agreement over which beliefs are true and which are false. Ultimately, what we need, is a set of principles and institutions that allow people who disagree to resolve their differences and come to a decision without descending into civil war.

I will discuss these principles and institutions in a future posting. Next, I want to get to look at the question of teaching good desires.

Religion As Child Abuse

In previous posts, I have given a superficial account of the idea that religion is a form of child abuse. However, the claim continues to be made, and I want to look into it in more detail.

Abuse and Maliciousness

In “Theism as Mental Illness or Child Abuse”, I argued against the claim that religion is child abuse on the grounds that the term ‘abuse’ is an accusation of maliciousness – a lack of concern for the well-being of those abused. In the case of religion, this is often false. The people who ‘teach’ religion to children love their children as much as any parent or adult can love children. They are simply mistaken about the facts of the matter with respect to what is in the child’s interests.

I used the example of a parent who took thalidomide in the 1950s. This drug caused severe birth defects in children. This was a tragedy, but it was not an instance of abuse. It is an instance where the parents would have behaved quite differently if they had been aware of the real-world facts of the matter. It is not because of a defect in desire (maliciousness, for which moral condemnation is appropriate), but a defect in belief, that they act as they do.

Consequently, we cannot legitimately call this behavior ‘abuse’.

Emotion-Laden Words

Furthermore, I hold that that the use of this phrase, ‘religion is abuse’ represents the same moral flaw as is exhibited in using the phrase, ‘militant atheist’ or ‘atheist fundamentalist’. People do not choose these phrases because they can be proved true. People choose these phrases because they know that the person hearing them will have a particular emotional response – a response likely to generate irrational, unreasoned, and unjust hatred of the target group based on a false assumption built into the use of the term.

Religious demagogues use the term ‘militant atheist’ because they want to give the (false but useful) impression that atheists are disposed to act violently and, if they are not controlled, will come after ‘good Christians’ with guns and other forms of violence to force them to give up their religion.

‘Fundamentalist atheist’ is used to convey the (false but useful) response that these atheists have blindly attached themselves to a set of propositions that they will hold on to in the extreme and will not tolerate any view that differs from their own.

‘Religion is abuse’ is used to generate the (false but useful) impression that religious people have no interest in the welfare of children and that they harm children merely for the pleasure of doing do – or that they are too caught up in their own pleasure to consider the child’s welfare.

Anybody who complains about the terms ‘militant atheist’ or ‘fundamentalist atheist’ on the basis that those who use the term are trying to generate an emotional response based on a false association, who then uses the phrase ‘religion is abuse’, is the purist form of hypocrite.

Harm

The two points above represent the first layer of this particular onion. Now, I want to go to the second layer.

If I deny that teaching religion to children counts as ‘abuse’, does this imply that it is a perfectly legitimate action?

Absolutely not.

Look at the comparison situation. If I say that a mother who took thalidomide in 1955 is not guilty of any moral crime, am I saying that it is or was safe to take thalidomide? Absolutely not. Thalidomide was a dangerous drug that caused harm to the children of those parents who took it.

One might respond that this is an inappropriate comparison because people did not know that thalidomide caused birth defects, and this is why they were not culpable. Now that we do know of the harm, we would accuse any pregnant woman who takes thalidomide today of committing a grievous moral wrong.

This is true, but there are some important details to take into consideration with respect to ‘knowing that thalidomide is dangerous’. There period of time from ignorance to enlightenment was not instantaneous. It is not as if, at 11:53:14 am EST on March 11, 1958, everybody went from total ignorance of the dangers of thalidomide to total awareness of its dangers. There was a process involved that took time. We start off with only a small number of people knowing of the harm, who then have to convince others, who then have to convince others. A society has to achieve a certain level of overall awareness of the harms of thalidomide before taking thalidomide can be said to be morally objectionable.

Asserting that it is morally objectionable to teach religion to children requires the false assumption that knowledge of the wrongness and dangerousness of religion has reached the required degree of public acceptance.

Evidence and Epistemic Negligence

A person with prima facie good desires, but false beliefs, is not automatically free from moral condemnation. I have, in this blog, made a great deal of noise about epistemic negligence – about negligently holding onto a belief when that belief makes the individual a threat to the well-being of others.

I have compared reckless thinking to reckless driving – engaging in behavior that puts others at risk without a sufficient exercise of caution to make sure that one is not acting in a way that threatens others.

However, reckless thinking does not depend on a failure to use logic. As I have also argued, the requirement that we use reason at all times is unrealistic. Sometimes it is more rational to use quicker, though more fallible, methods for justifying our beliefs. There was sufficient evidence that thalidomide was harmful long before the average person could be held morally culpable for its use.

Even today, a mother who takes thalidomide during pregnancy can be held to be blameless if she was told by a trusted authority that thalidomide is harmless, such as a physician.

The fault, in this case, belongs to the doctor – the expert – who gave her the bad information. It does not belong to the mother who decided to trust her doctor.

Similarly, it is not the fault of the mother who decides to teach religion to her children when she is surrounded by a population that is almost entirely in agreement on the value of a religious upbringing. It is still not the case that ‘abuse’ is a legitimate charge in this case.

Conclusion

I am still going to argue that it is wrong to teach religion to children. However, the precise nature of that wrong, and what a moral person may legitimately do about it, are still open to question. I suspect that I will take at least two more posts to address these questions.

Journalism and Conflict of Interest

Coincidentally, while I was writing about the nature of different types of objective research, MSNBC released an article on journalists making contributions to political campaigns. Apparently, I am supposed to believe that a journalist who makes a contribution to a campaign is somehow a worse journalist than one who does not make contributions to campaigns. Thus, I ought to have some sort of aversion to states of affairs in which the proposition, “Journalist J has contributed to political campaigns” is true.

I do not see the argument.

Ad Hominem

First, let us recognize that referring to a journalist’s campaign contributions as an argument against the credibility of his articles is an example of an ad hominem logical fallacy. Ad hominem fallacies are arguments are arguments against the person who made an argument as a way of discrediting his argument. In other words an ad hominem argument takes the form, “Because X is true of the person who gave a particular argument, his argument is flawed.”

In fact, there are only two legitimate ways to discredit an argument. (1) Show that one or more of the premises are false (or are less likely to be true than the person claimed them to be), or (2) show that the conclusion does not follow from the premises. Both of these arguments forms of refutation can take place without knowing a single fact about the person who made the argument. Any attempt to look at the person who made the argument to discredit the argument is a distraction – a waste of attention.

If I were running a news organization, my policy would be simple. I would expect my employees to make intelligent and well-informed contributions. I think that the world would more likely be a better place as a result of their efforts.

However, in each and every article they write for my publication, I would expect that those arguments to contain only true and verified premises, and conclusions that logically follow from those premises, or some sort of explanation as to why the conclusion does not follow (that is, why the argument – which the reporter is reliably citing from some source) is reasonably believed to fail.

If the reporter can live up to these standards, then I have no reason to get rid of her. I do not care about her campaign contributions – they are none of my business. On the other hand, if I discover that a reporter is leaving out relevant facts, inserting unsupported claims, refusing to question invalid implications, or similarly producing sloppy work, then I would fire her regardless of whose campaign she was contributing to.

At this point, I wish to add a quick disclaimer. I am making these claims from the point of view of an ethicist. If I were to put my business hat on, I would have to add additional concerns.

If a large group of potential customers are prone to be persuaded by ad hominem arguments – to see them as valid – then my news organization’s revenue is in jeopardy if I should be concerned about the appearance of a conflict in interest. I may have to ban political contributions by reporters for business purposes. It has nothing to do with the prohibition on political contributions making good moral sense. It has a lot to do with the fact that a lot of business decisions must be made on standards other than good moral sense.

This does not imply that organizations may behave immorally if it is profitable to do so. It only acknowledges that there is a huge set of options that are morally permissible – neither obligatory nor prohibited – that a person can choose from using something other than moral value.

Conflict of Interest

One of the arguments says that, if a journalist makes a contribution to a political campaign that this generates a conflict of interest. Once a journalist invests in a political campaign, he has a vested interest in the outcome of that campaign, and this may be in conflict with his interests as a reporter to present an objective and accurate assessment of what is happening.

We can see ‘conflict of interest’ in the business world. If a journalist owns stock in Exxon-Mobile, for example, and his future wealth depends on the well-being of that company, how will this affect his reporting on, for example, climate change or environmental regulations? The reporter himself profits from getting people to adopt a particular point of view in this case.

Even here, we are dealing with the application of an ad hominem fallacy. In this case, it is called, “Ad hominem circumstantial.” It argues that an agent’s circumstances – particularly an agent’s ability to profit from getting people to adopt a particular view – gives that agent a ‘reason for action’ to get people to adopt a particular view.

Here, too, the ultimate test is not whether the reporter has stock in the company, but whether the agent’s reports show signs of misrepresented claims, missing counter-arguments, and invalid or weak inferences. If we see these in a reporter’s work, we can ask why that happens. Here, we may answer our question by discovering that the reporter has a financial interest in getting people to adopt a particular view. However, the discovery of stock ownership does not prove that his articles are flawed in any way. It only provides a possible explanation for flaws that are found. (At which point, the reporter can be fired.)

This, however, applies to stock or some other arrangement where the object of the reporter’s story will somehow pay a benefit to the reporter that can be influenced by what the reporter causes others to believe. In the case of campaign contributions, we are talking about a reporter who has given money to a candidate, not one in which the candidate is giving money to the reporter.

We should assume that a reporter who is willing to give $500 to a candidate has a desire to see that candidate win. Just because the reporter is no longer permitted to give $500 to a candidate, this does nothing to the reporter’s desire to see that candidate win. The only thing that this prohibition changes is our ability to find out whether that reporter desires that the candidate win.

We also have reason to be concerned that a reporter, prohibited from donating money to a candidate’s campaign, may be more (rather than less) interested in finding some other way of acting on his desire. The only reason that a company’s prohibition restrains a reporter from giving a contribution is because it puts the desire to donate money as a means to helping the candidate win up against the even stronger desire to keep his job. However, the desire still exists, and it will seek other ways to express itself – to ‘make true’ a state of affairs where the candidate wins that will not put his job at stake. It is simple foolishness to think that a ban on campaign contributions will change any of these dynamics.

Strangely enough, while people are getting bent out of shape with respect to the possibilities that a reporter might be giving money to a candidate, we pay far less attention to the many ways in which a candidate can ‘pay’ reporters for favorable press. For example, the Bush Administration has been bribing reporters to write favorable stories since it took office – paying cooperative reporters a dividend in terms of access, leaks, and other valuable prizes.

These are bribes. It is as foolish to refuse to think of these things as bribes as it is to believe that a prohibition on cash contributions inhibits a reporter’s desire to see a particular candidate win. People have wondered for years why the White House Press Corps gave the Bush Administration a pass on the months leading up to the invasion of Iraq. The answer is actually quite simple. They were seeking various types of payoffs that the Bush Administration might give to a cooperative reporter.

Judith Miller was a cooperative reporter for the New York Times, writing articles that were favorable to the Bush Administration’s agenda for war in Iraq. When the Administration had the opportunity to leak a hot story that would promote their agenda, they contacted Judith Miller – the way Scooter Libby did when he wanted to leak the fact that Paul Wilson’s wife worked for the CIA. In this case, the attempt to bribe Miller for some favorable news coverage backfired, but we can still see how the system is supposed to work.

I know that this is how the press business works. Candidates from both parties use what they have that may be of value to the press to manipulate the press into giving them what they want. However, even though this is natural, that does not make it right. It still will pay handsome dividends if we were to learn to condemn and punish, at least through our private acts if not by law, institutions where reporters are paid off for giving candidates favorable coverage.

What we have then is an attempt to cover up the mere illusion of favoritism and conflict of interest, while we protect and defend the fact of favoritism and conflict of interest.

The whole system seems a bit irrational to me.

Objectivity and a Neutral Point of View

I have mentioned that I am working on a project to create a text that would explain the problems with Intelligent Design in terms that a 12-year-old could understand. However, I have no particular talent or expertise to give to this project, so I have asked for advice on how to make the project open so that others can contribute.

One reader, borofkin suggested “Wikibooks”, but argued that my intended project would run up against Wikibooks’ “neutral point of view policy”.

Wikibooks has a strict neutral point of view (NPOV) policy, which basically states that its mission as a book collection is best served not by advancing or detracting particular points of view on any given subject, but by trying to present a fair, neutral description of the facts -- among which are the facts that various interpretations and points of view exist. (Of course, there are limits to what POVs are considered worth mentioning, which can be an area of conflict.)

I found the question of whether my intended project would or could meet this standard for a “neutral point of view” an interesting puzzle.

I have grown up under a standard that says that there are at least two sides to every story, and anybody who honestly reports on a particular conflict is under an obligation to present both sides. This means that if I intend to discuss intelligent design, I need to present the opposing viewpoint fairly and honestly. However, I hold that an honest presentation of the theory of intelligent design holds that it is a worthless waste of time. Indeed, that is one of the conclusions that I would want to demonstrate in this book. Are arguments that a particular ‘point of view’ count as worthless wastes of time consistent with, or in violation of, this neutral point of view policy?

It seems to be true by definition that a text that advances a particular point of view is not neutral. A paper that argues that Tyrannosaurus Rex was primarily a scavenger or that the Earth is 4.55 billion years old (against competing theories) is not in any sense of the imagination neutral with respect to the claims that T-Rex was a scavenger or the age of the earth.

Because these are not neutral propositions, they would be prohibited under any ‘neutral point of view’ policy. The best that a person could do is argue, “There are people who believe X and who offer these reasons for doing so.” However, this must be accompanied by text that says, “There are people who deny X and these are their reasons for doing so.” However, the “neutral point of view” cannot take sides. It is not permitted to show the coup de gras that destroys one of these two systems.

However, by making certain options impermissible, this ‘neutral point of view’ itself proves that it is not neutral. The ‘neutral point of view’ itself must take sides. It counts certain representations of reality ‘permissible’ (those that conform to the neutral point of view policy) and categorizes others as ‘prohibited’ (those that violate the neutral point of view policy).

In other words, a ‘neutral point of view’ policy is incoherent. Whenever people encounter an incoherent set of instructions, they are encouraged to adopt one interpretation that pleases them most as the right interpretation. In this case, it means, “You have written something contrary to what I believe; thus, your project violates the ‘neutral point of view’ policy. On the other hand, administrators are also free to argue, “Your project makes sense to me; therefore, it must be in compliance with our neutral point of view policy.”

In fact, a strict adherence to a neutral point of view requires that authors lie, giving alternative views more credit than the author thinks is justified. This is as much a lie as recommending that a particular plumber does a good job, when one honestly thinks that his work is substandard.

An Alternative View of Neutrality

There is another version of ‘neutrality’ that is exercised in, for example, academic peer-reviewed papers and submissions. Academic papers inevitably defend a particular conclusion. Their purpose is to argue, ‘this view is correct, and all other views are mistaken’. As such, they are not ‘neutral’.

However, academic papers are still obligated to observe a standard of objectivity. This standard does not say, “Consider all opposing theories to be as plausible as your own.” It says, “Take their objections seriously and, if you wish to claim that they give no reason to reject your conclusion, explain why this is the case.”

So, for example, I write that the generic term ‘good’ can be expressed in terms of ‘is such as to fulfill the desires in question.’ Because I take this position, I am not at all neutral with regard to either David Hume’s ‘is/ought’ distinction, or G.E. Moore’s ‘naturalistic fallacy’. I think that neither of these provide good reason to reject my thesis. However, I cannot simply ignore them in an academic paper. I must explain what these objections are in their strongest terms, and explain why they do not give us any good reason to reject the proposition that ‘good’ = ‘is such as to fulfill the desires in question.”

Pundit

These two methods, the ‘neutral point of view’ and ‘academic defense’ positions stand in contrast to a third option, which is the position of the pundit. The pundit says, “This is my microphone and I will use it to say whatever I please. If you disagree with me, then get your own microphone.” The pundit does not even pretend towards neutrality, nor does he pretend to have any regard for academic integrity. He is a propagandist, whose sole job is to convince others that a particular proposition is true, without regard to the truth or an honest consideration of objections to his thesis.

The Pundit, like the academic, presents a particular point of view. The Pundit, unlike, the academic, has no interest in taking seriously arguments and evidence that might be brought up against his position. He feels completely comfortable ignoring conflicting claims, leaving those who would express them to ‘find their own microphone’.

Morally, the pundit is on the same level as the liar and the sophist when it comes to his devotion to the truth. His interest is in ‘winning’ a political battle – which, for all practical purposes, means a willingness to inflict harm on others in order to obtain benefits for those he represents.

Conclusion

My interest is in creating a product that would fit the ‘academic’ standards. That is, I create articles that defend a particular point of view – but does so with the intention of taking objections and counter-evidence seriously, and needing to show why they are rejected. In fact, I would argue that this is the only view that has merit. The alternatives all require some measure of deception or dishonesty. The ‘neutral point of view’ gives conflicting positions more authority than they deserve; the ‘pundit’ point of view does not give them enough authority.

However, the academic standard is not ‘neutral’. It does not even pretend to neutrality. It takes sides. However, it does so with a sincere interest in honesty, fairness, and truth. This is, I hold, the best that one can ask for from others, and to deliver oneself.

Illegal Activities of the Bush Administration

According to an article in the Boston Globe, the General Accountability Office reports that “US Agencies disobey 6 laws that president challenged” through signing statements. In other words, this organization has collected evidence showing that members of the Bush Administration are violating laws that Congress has passed and the President has signed.

A ‘signing statement’ is a statement filed on the same day that a President signs a bill into law. Signing statements are not mandatory – they are not even mentioned in the Constitution. They are, instead, something that Presidents have done in as a way of making a formal statement about the legislation that he has just signed into law. Typically, a President will use a signing statement to formally recognize and thank those who have worked to get a particular law through the legislative process, and to explain what he hopes the new law will accomplish.

However, sometimes, Presidents have used signing statements to rewrite the law. President Bush has done this more than all other Presidents in history – combined. Rather than veto a law that he does not like (which the Constitution gives the President the power to do), Bush simply uses a signing statement to rewrite the law, and then signs the law he wants, rather than the law that Congress has passed.

Bush’s most infamous use of a signing statement came when Congress passed a law that outlawed the torture of prisoners. Congress passed this law by a huge margin – more than enough to sustain a Presidential veto. The Bush Administration fought against this law while Congress debated it, but failed to prevent its passage. When the bill reached his desk, rather than veto the legislation, Bush issued a signing statement that effectively said that he will obey the law only to the degree that he desires to do so.

However, a question remains, when the President says that he is going to ignore a particular law, is he really ignoring it? I can say that I am going to ignore the law against speeding. However, I do not deserve a ticket merely because I have announced an intention to violate the law. I am not guilty of a criminal act until I am actually caught speeding.

I could, under some circumstances, be arrested and charged with conspiracy to break a law. This happens when there is evidence that I am actually making plans to break a law, before I actually break it. For example, the police do not have to wait for me to actually kill my business rival before they step in and charge me with a crime. It is enough that they caught me, for example, trying to negotiate with somebody I thought was a hit-man in order to arrange the murder. Conspiracy requires that I show enough intent to make it reasonable to believe that I would have gone ahead with an act.

Signing statements alone do not violate the law, nor do they show enough intent to support a charge of conspiracy.

However, what the General Accountability Office did was pick 19 laws that the Bush Administration changed through his signing statements. They then asked those members of the Administration that the law applies to and asked if they have obeyed the law that Congress has passed, or the President’s rewritten law.

Of the nineteen examples of laws rewritten through the use of signing statements, investigators found 3 cases where they could not determine if the law would be enforced as written. The law required executive action when triggered by specific circumstances, and those specific circumstances have not yet come about. Ten of those laws were being enforced as written. However, in the case of 6 of those laws, the Administration is violating the expressed will of Congress. In other words, the administer is ignoring the law that Congress passed and is following the President’s law instead.

The OMB included in their report the fact that they did not test whether the agency violated the law because of the signing statement. They simply asked the agency what the agency had done to conform to the law as written, and found 6 instances in which the agency obeyed the President’s law but ignored Congress. These agencies may have decided to violate the law for other reasons, or simply acted in ignorance of what the law said.

Still, President Bush has issued over 1000 signing statements in his career, and the OMB only studied 19 of those laws. We have more than enough reason to suspect that if Congress were to investigate the remaining signing statements, they would find additional cases where the President and his administration is acting in total disregard for the law. From there, it would be possible to launch an investigation, to collect emails an dother documents, and to determine whether the nature of those illegal activities – determine who is responsible, and who needs to resign.

The question now is whether Congress will take action.

There is a principle in law that states that silence implies consent. If you are given an opportunity to speak up and express an opinion on a subject, and you do not do so, others have a reason to assume that you consent to the proposal. If Congress remains silent and inactive in the face of a President who overrides and disregards its will, then they give their consent for this and all future Presidents to continue the practice.

This is nearly identical to allowing the President to dissolve the legislature (or, at least, divest it of power and turn it into a body of Presidential advisors rather than legislators) and to declare himself the sole author of all laws.

In Al Gore's book, "The Assault on Reason," he tells us that this is, effectively, the situation that Julius Caesar created in ancient Rome when that republic died. Caesar did not disband the Senate. He kept it intact, to give the people some false sense of control. The idea that a tyranny does not exist as long as there is a semblance of a body of elected officials in government is naive. The question is not whether there is a body of individuals elected by the people, but whether that body has power to determine the laws of the land, or if that power rests instead with an executive who writes his own law.

And it was the people of Rome who gave their voice and support, not to the Senate, but to Caesar.

So, what will become of people that the General Accountability Office have found to be acting in violation of the law?

Belief and Evidence

I have just read a story in which the author claimed that a parable, popular among atheists, is not actually true.

The story concerns a meeting between Napoleon Bonaparte and a French astronomer Laplace.

Some background information is useful for understanding this story. In the 1600s, Isaac Newton had published his laws of motion in which, among other things, he explained the orbits of the planets. However, on Newton’s accounts, these orbits were unstable. Each planet exerts a small influence on the others so that, over time, the solar system would fall apart. To solve this problem, Newton said that God intervened to make minor changes in the orbits of planets to keep the solar system stable.

Laplace came along with some new mathematical formulae that showed that the orbits of the planets were stable after all.

The story popular among atheists is that, after Laplace explained his new discoveries to Napoleon, Napoleon asked why God was not mentioned. Laplace’s popular response was, “Sire, I had no need of that hypothesis.”

Daniel Johnson reports in an article titled, “The Hypothetical Atheist” that this exchange probably never took place. Instead, Johnson presented the case that a historian E.T. Bell made up the story, presenting it in his book Men in Mathematics in 1937. Those atheists who are fond of this story have merely accepted on faith that the story was true.

Johnson's so-called scholarship on the issue is questionable. It took me just a few minutes to trace the quote at least to Augustus De Morgan's A Budget of Paradoxes published posthumously from a collection of essays De Morgan wrote. De Morgan died in 1871, suggesting that the quote can be traced significantly further back than Johnson claimed.

The easy availability of this information suggested that Johnson did very little to research this subject, or that he knew the truth of the matter and decided to lie for political purposes. Either way, Johnson shows that he has a caracteristic disregard for truth and is more than happy to promote fictions to obtain political and social ends.

However, for purposes of this post, it does not matter that Johnson's claim is incorrect. My guess is that few (if any) atheists reading Johnson’s article would have been immediately able to refute it, as I was not. This is because few atheists who have come to accept this story as being true actually acquired that belief on the basis of good evidence. Instead, they came to believe the story because they heard it from a position of authority and it was a story that they wanted to believe to be true.

This supports two conclusions that I have been defending regarding the ethics of belief.

The first conclusion I want to support says that a moral obligation to use nothing but reason in the formation of our beliefs is not only unreasonable but hypocritical. None of us have the time and resources to hold all of our beliefs up to rational scrutiny. Instead, we have to rely on quick but fallible ‘rules of thumb’ for our beliefs – such as the rule to trust people in authority, and to accept as true those propositions that fit into an overall world view. Even the proponents of pure reason, we will discover, need to use quick and fallible rules of thumb from time to time.

The second conclusion that I want to draw comes from the observation that most atheists, I suspect, who believed this story will react to this report much as I did. Once exposed to the idea that the original story was false, they will immediately suspend belief and wait for confirmation. I doubt that any atheists are going to start clamoring for the head of those who dare question the literal truth of the Laplace story or accuse those who spread the story as blasphemy. Nor are they going to campaign that the story much be taught in its original version, and taught as if true, because doing otherwise will weaken the population’s moral commitment to science and reason.

In other words, though there is no prohibition in using quick rules of thumb in forming our beliefs, evidence still matters where it can be found. Precisely because we tend to form our beliefs on the fly, we have no good reason to hold firmly onto them when conflicting evidence comes to light.

Even here, I am going to assert, many rationalists will continue to hold on to a belief far longer than the strict adherence to reason would allow, even when reason comes into play. Once an individual becomes psychologically tied to a proposition so that he identifies with it, then that proposition becomes more difficult to surrender, even in the face conflicting evidence. This is not a problem that is unique to the religious, it is a human weakness. It helps to make religion possible, but religion is not the only bundle of false propositions that a person can embrace on the basis of insufficient evidence.

I will put my own belief in desire utilitarianism in this category. Now that I have come to identify with this set of propositions, I worry that it will take more than the standard set of evidence to the contrary to dissuade me as to the theory’s truth. This is not because I have decided to embrace the theory in complete disregard for any and all evidence that might be brought against it. Rather, it is because this psychological investment will block my ability to see evidence against it as evidence. I am more inclined to dismiss as unsound that which is logically sound, and to embrace that which is logically unsound, if it proves consistent with desire utilitarianism.

Now, there is one last moral principle that I want to apply to this discussion. Even though it is natural for an individual to cling to a belief that they have come to identify with, this does not make it right. The naturalness of a desire is not a measure of its merit. Its merit depends entirely on its tendency to fulfill or thwart other desires. The habit of holding onto beliefs far longer than the evidence would allow is a habit that tends to thwart desires. This, combined by the fact that condemnation can weaken this natural desire-thwarting tendency, makes it a fit target for moral condemnation.

My confession that I may hold onto desire utilitarianism longer than reason would allow is not an argument that it is permissible to do so. It is an argument that I may suffer from a moral failing. If I were the one holding onto this belief while it is no longer reasonable to do so, then I could be legitimately condemned for my stubbornness.

This, of course, assumes that I am holding onto desire utilitarianism longer than reason would permit, which (as far as I can tell) has yet to be demonstrated.

So, here are three moral conclusions that I hope the LaFavore story sheds some light on.

(1) There is no moral crime in using quick rules of thumb to forming beliefs – we must do so in order to function efficiently.

(2) Beliefs that come from these rules of thumb should be dropped whenever an exposure to reason suggests that they are false. Rules of thumb are notoriously fallible.

(3) We also have a tendency to hold onto beliefs longer than a strict view of reason will allow. The naturalness of this tendency does not make it right.

A Project on Intelligent Design

I have decided to start a new project, and I would like to ask for advice on how best to proceed. We need a simple book, suitable for Jr. High School students, that explains the issues surrounding intelligent design.

The standard response to the challenge of intelligent design on the secular side of this dispute has been to simply argue that we should not talk about it. Schools should simply ignore the subject and not talk about it. The problem with this strategy is that it leaves the whole population substantially ignorant of the problems with intelligent design, and that this substantially ignorant population is left defenseless to the well-funded propaganda of those elements of society selling this particular brand of snake oil.

What we need to do is to explain the problems with intelligent design, and to do so in a way that students can understand this issues while they are taking science classes in school.

The Moral Dimension

The moral dimension of this particular posting is that we are being entirely irrational in insisting that schools not discuss the issue of intelligent design. The purpose of the school system is to educate children, and this is clearly an area where children are being poorly educated. More importantly, this is an area where people seem to insist that children not be educated, even though widespread public ignorance on this issue is proving to be extremely costly.

First, we must look at the amount of time, money, and other resources that go into promoting intelligent design. These are resources that are devoted to promoting fiction, effectively making a substantial portion of the population stupider than it would have otherwise been.

Second, an uninformed population is less capable of making intelligent decisions on national policies that depend on that particular field of knowledge. In this case, the policy decisions made by a population that is substantially more ignorant of the biological facts than they would have otherwise been are less capable of making intelligent policy decisions in fields of health, the environment, and even criminal law. After all, a better understanding of evolution gives us, among other things, a better understanding of criminal (and non-criminal) behavior.

There is little doubt that we, as a society, are worse off than we would have otherwise been – particularly worse off in terms of health care, environmental care, and criminal law, than we would have otherwise been. The result is a lower quality of health, a more noxious environment, and a lessened ability to deal with crimes (with its subsequent costs) than we would have otherwise had.

This is not to say that proponents of intelligent design are solely responsible for the fact that we do not live un a utiopia. Our problems have a wide number of sources, and this is just one of them. However, even a slight improvement in our understanding in any of these areas implies improvements in the quality of life (and even the survival) of millions of people.

So, if the public school system is politically incapable of educating the children in our society of the facts concerning intelligent design, then those concerned with the quality of life in this world have reason to take up the challenge themselves. For that, they need high-quality tools, and in particular need tools that they can use in the education of young children.

Qualifications

I have no particular talent for writing text books for seventh graders, so I cannot claim to be the best qualified to execute this particular project. However, I also hold that it is better to do something than to sit back and wait for others to act. Of course, this policy should come with a recognition of one’s own competencies, and to leave room for more knowledgable people to provide input. In this way, we can avoid situations like the Iraq War, where incompetent people decide to do something with full disregard of their own incompetence.

So, I would like this to be an online project. However, I would like the project to have the aim of producing a book, which can then be funded and distributed to students in the age range of 12 to 14.

There will, of course, be questions of credit and authorship. On these matters, I am thnking of something that would work much like “open source” works in programming or a Wikipedia works. Some site will be set up that will allow different individuals to contribute. However, in this case, all contributions will be judged by whether young teenagers can understand what was written. This will not be a “talk-origins” like project which is likely to be filled with complex details written in a manner appropriate for a PhD dissertation.

Ultimately, there will be a question of publication and distribution. I would like to see some non-profit science organization ultimately take the project and use it to produce a book. The organization will seek funding (contributions) for the purpose of printing and distributing the book to people in the Jr. High School age range, perhaps through organizations such as Camp Quest or science and secular web sites. Whatever organization takes up the project of printing and distributing the content will be allowed to keep whatever income it can generate from this product.

First Step: Existing Efforts

In a project such as this, the first thing to do is to determine that it has not already been done, or is not already being done. I have done my own online searches for something like this, and I have asked others to point me to something that meets these criteria. I have been informed of some useful resources, but nothing like what I would like to see made available – a relatively complete discussion of the issue of intelligent design suitable for 12-year-old children.

If I am wrong in this, I would like to know now. I would like to encourage any reader to let me know of anything that meets this objective. I would further like to ask any reader to ask others who might know of anything that meets this objective. I certainly have no interest in wasting effort on something that has already been done.

If something like this already exists, I would be more than happy to spread the word here on this site, and encourage others to do the same.

Second Step: Set Up a Project

The second step, then, would be to set something up where people can start building the text. I am not an expert in the resources that are available. I have recently learned of Wiki scratchpad, which has a great deal of functionality that can be hijacked for such a project. I am wondering if there is a service like this available for more conventional writing projects – for example, to be used by people wanting to collaborate on a book or manuscript.

If anybody has any advice to offer in this regards, please, let me know. I would hate for such a project to get off on the wrong foot.

Third Step: Solicit for Expert Assistance

Of course, I would like to draw people to this project that have particularly strong skills in understanding the issue of intelligent design and communicating those issues in language that 12 to 14 year olds can understand. Once the project is set up, I would like to encourage readers to point it out to those who could make meaningful contributions in the hopes that they will see the project as worth at least a little of their time.

Auxiliary Step

I would also like to hear any advice one might have regarding the ownership and rights for such a project. I would like contributors to understand that they will have no rights to the content. The rights to the content will go to whatever organization seeks to use the content to create and distribute a book. This will be a voluntary effort – a freely given contribution to the greater well-being of society.

Predictions

Actually, if I were to make predictions on how such a project would turn out, I would predict that there will be some serious disagreements about how to write such a book. These political disputes will express themselves in the form of factions. Eventually, each faction will get fed up with the incompetence expressed by competing ideas, they will break off, and they will develop independent projects.

In particular, I expect that one faction will form around the desire to present the issue in terms of NOMA – the idea that science and religion represent two Non-Overlapping Majestrata, where neither has anything to say about the other. They would find themselves at odds with a faction that wants to present the issue in terms of The God Hypothesis – the idea that the existence of a God is a scientific claim that describes events in the real world.

I would not be surprised to see these factions splitting into separate projects, if this project should ever get that far.

On this issue, I’m afraid that I would find myself favoring the camp seeking to represent religion in terms of a God Hypothesis, a hypothesis that absolutely fails any and all scientific testing.

However, I would not object to advocates of NOMA producing their own version of the project. It will likely reach people that will simply dismiss The God Hypothesis. Even though I hold that this view is mistaken, it is less mistaken than the alternative, and a lesser mistake is at least some measure of improvement.

Addendum

I have started my project. I will be slowly writing and editing the project at a place on my web site.

Democracy in the Middle East

Crooks and Liars had a video clip from The Cafferty Files in which Jack Cafferty chided President Bush for the failed attempts to turn the Middle East into a bastion of democracy.

Cafferty: When there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, President Bush immediately seized on the idea of bringing freedom and democracy. How’s that working out for you, Mr. President? The United States also pressured the Palestinians to hold elections. They elected Hamas, a terrorist organization. How’s that working out for you, Mr. President? Hamas has now seized Gaza. The Abbas government has been dismantled and Hamas militants have been on a rampage, pillaging government institutions. It’s very unlikely they’ll be dipping their fingers in ink wells there, any time soon.

My first question is: Is instituting something like a democratic, open society in the Middle East such a bad idea? I mean . . . are we going to argue that theocratic dictatorship is the preferred option, and that the last thing we should ever consider is replacing theocratic dictatorship with secular democracy?

On this particular issue, I believe it is very important to clearly distinguish between means and ends.

When Bush started his campaign to turn Iraq into a democracy, I expressed the attitude that the objective was certainly sound. However, I was against the policy. The reasons that I offered at the time were that Bush was incompetent and would almost certainly screw things up, doing more harm than good. It is not that the objective was a bad idea, but that Bush and his team in the White House could not possibly pick the best means towards that particular end.

So, the news items today tell us the following:

The Taliban in Afghanistan are starting to use the same tactics used in the Iraqi insurgency, punctuated today by a headline that says, “At least 35 killed in Afghan bus explosion.”

Among the Palestinians, we have to deal with the fact that Hamas has a great deal of popular support, enough to support an uprising in Gaza.

And the situation in Iraq does not seem to be getting any better.

The main problem centers around the fact that the people in these regions do not have the moral foundation for a democracy, which requires, among other things, a decision not to use violence to obtain political ends, and to fight all battles on the airwaves.

The Bush Administration thought that all they needed to do was to remove the dictator, and the people will instantly create a thriving democratic state in its midst. It did not recognize that democracies can only be built on a particular moral foundation, and the moral foundation for a democracy did not exist. There were too many people in Iraq willing to use force of arms to execute their political will, and had too weak of an aversion to killing.

I have suggested throughout this blog that the tools to be used in promoting useful desires and aversions are praise and condemnation.

Here is where the secular, liberal political establishment has failed for the past several decades.

Sam Harris like to blame ‘religious moderates’ for the idea that one may not criticize other cultures and traditions. However, that particular fault can be more accurately assigned to progressive liberals. For decades, they promoted the idea that all value is subjective and that it makes no sense to criticize another culture. Moral and cultural institutions were like differences in diet and clothing styles. A person in one culture might be able to say, “I would not like that for myself,” but that is the worst form of criticism that a person can give.

In fact, the idea that all cultures are the same, that nobody is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ in matters of value, is quite at odds with most religious teachings. Those teachings say that certain acts are right and wrong. Where other cultures have different teachings, our tolerance of them is more of a matter of tolerating other people’s mistakes in order to keep the peace, than in a genuine assertion that their truth is just as good as our truth.

As such, it was the secular liberals, not religious moderates, who gave would-be dictators and theocrats moral permission to set up their oppressive regimes.

It is way past time for secular liberals to become critical, to face people who do stupid and evil things, and to call them stupid and evil – to condemn them for what they do wrong, and to praise them for what they do right.

One of the common responses that others will give to this type of behavior is to say, “You are trying to destroy our way of life. You are engaging in intolerant, militant, and even fundamentalist behavior against this target group.”

“No, in fact, what I am trying to do is to convince you that some of the things that you believe are in error.” Imagine that you have a friend or family member that you are trying to get off of alcohol, drugs, or tobacco. While you argue about the health effects of their activity, somebody comes up to you and says, “You are simply trying to destroy their way of life. You are engaging in intolerant, militant, and fundamentalist behavior against this target group.”

These charges are entirely out of line. The ‘militant’ charge, in particular, is completely slanderous in the absence of evidence that the person it is being used against has actually threatened to take up arms against their target group. If the only weapons being used are words and private actions, then there is no militancy. There is no militancy without violence. The accusation of militancy is an accusation that the accused is at least on the verge of using military force (violence) to impose his views on others. In most cases, those accusations are themselves nothing but lies intending to promote fear.

The charges of ‘intolerance’ and ‘fundamentalism’ are themselves out of line, unless attempts to convince people to give up smoking or drug use are examples of intolerance and fundamentalism against an alternative lifestyle.

Even here, the problems with smoking and other forms of drug use is that these behaviors primarily harm only the person who engages in them. They harm others to the degree that others care about the person who is destroying her own life, or insofar as they cause the person to act irresponsibility (e.g., drunk driving or to steal for drugs).

This is not the case for those who suffer from an insufficiently strong aversion to killing others to obtain a political end. Imagine condemning somebody with an insufficiently strong aversion to killing others to obtain a political end, and hearing in response, “You are an intolerant bigot who merely wants to destroy our way of life.”

“Well, since your way of life includes killing others to obtain a political end, then, yes, actually, I am intolerant of that life style and I wish to see it destroyed. Sorry, I do not see how we have a lot of options in this matter. I would be perfectly willing to tolerate your lifestyle, if not for the fact that you are killing people to obtain a political end.”

Contrary to the secular/political ideologies of the last part of the 20th Century, criticism is quite appropriate. In many cases, the absence of criticism is what we need to condemn. Praise and condemnation are important tools that need to be put into place in order to develop a set of desires and aversions where democracy can grow.

Without it, we will continue to be less effective than we could otherwise be at replacing theocratic dictatorships with democratic institutions.

Mill's Utilitarianism: Part II

As I wrote last week, I am starting a project where I want to explain some of the roots of desire utilitarianism. Last week I wrote a post in which I quoted John Stuart Mill’s “Utilitarianism”, where he said some things that are consistent with desire utilitarianism. However, the true heart of Mill’s theory is found in Chapter 4 of his book, where he presents, “Of what sort of Proof the Principle of Utility is Susceptible.”

From the time of Aristotle, philosophers in the Greek tradition have distinguished between two types of values. Something can have value as a means or as a tool for bringing about other things of value, and something can have value as an end or an ultimate objective which has value “for its own sake.” For example, a person does not purchase a pound of nails because he has an urge to own nails. He wants the nails for a purpose – to build a house. At the same time, a person does not seek to avoid pain or obtain sex not because it is useful. People will avoid pain and obtain sex even when it is not useful. Pain and sex have value “for their own sake” (negative value, in the case of pain) – independent of what might come from them.

In the philosophy of value, one of the enduring questions has been to characterize ‘ends’.

The classic way characterizing this distinction is to speak in terms of the value of means as ‘instrumental value’ or the value that something can have as an instrument or tool, useful for doing something else. This is contrasted with ‘intrinsic value’, or the value that something has for its own sake, and not for the sake of what can be done with it.

However, this begs an important question. It assumes (incorrectly, I argue) that the value something can have as an end is an intrinsic property. “Valued for its own sake” is not the same thing as “valued for its own sake in virtue of its intrinsic properties.” It is dangerous to make these assumptions.

Assumptions such as this are constantly written into our language. The ancient Greeks came up with the idea that the world was made of ‘atoms’. But what is an atom? To the Greeks, it had to be a substance without parts. Indeed, the term ‘atom’ means ‘without parts’.

Another example is the term ‘malaria’, meaning ‘bad air’, invented under the assumption that the disease was caused by bad air.

‘Intrinsic value’, used to refer to the case in which something is valued for its own sake, is another mistaken assumption. Yet, as in the other two examples, it is useful to continue using the term, even where we must clarify how we are using it.

Anyway, so, ancient value theorists distinguished between instrumental value and ‘intrinsic value’. Mill, however, wanted to make use of another type of value – one that can be called ‘inclusive value’.

Mill starts Chapter 4 with the classical relationship between these, that there are ‘means’ and ‘ends’, that happiness is the sole ‘end’, and that everything else has value as a means toward that end.

Questions about ends are, in other words, questions what things are desirable. The utilitarian doctrine is, that happiness is desirable, and the only thing desirable, as an end; all other things being only desirable as means to that end. What ought to be required of this doctrine- what conditions is it requisite that the doctrine should fulfil- to make good its claim to be believed?

Yet, just a few paragraphs later, Mill allows that many people value virtue, and that they do so not as a means, but as something valued as ‘a good in itself, without looking to any end beyond it’.

Okay, Mill. Virtue is not the same as happiness. Either virtue has value only as a means to happiness, or there is something other than happiness that can have value as an end. How do you resolve this?

Ultimately, as follows:

The person who desires virtue as an end desires it as a part of happiness. Think of a painting that you like, or a song that you find particularly beautiful. Then, think of an individual note within that song. That note does not have value as a means to the value of the song. Nor does it have value independent of its position in the song. It has value as a part of the song. Similarly, virtue has value as a part of a happy life.

The principle of utility does not mean that any given pleasure, as music, for instance, or any given exemption from pain, as for example health, is to be looked upon as means to a collective something termed happiness, and to be desired on that account. They are desired and desirable in and for themselves; besides being means, they are a part of the end.

This is ‘inclusive value’ coming to the rescue.

However, one of the things we can ask about ‘inclusive value’ is whether it is really necessary. For example, in physics, the sum of the forces acting on an object produce a result that is the vector sum of all of the other forces. Each force has a type of ‘inclusive value’ that affects the final result. However, we do not need to postulate any new force, a ‘final end’ force, that is the vector sum of its component parts. All we need is the component parts.

The real problem with happiness theory as a final end is that it fails the experience machine test. ‘Happiness’ does not mean ‘the vector some of the value-forces (desires) influencing individual action’. It refers to something specific. Most importantly, it refers to something that a person can acquire from an experience machine. However, many people express an absolute aversion to entering an experience machine, which shows that happiness is one end among many, and one that can be outweighed by other concerns.

Recognizing this fact, we can then defend Mill’s claim, which I wrote about last week, that it is better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied. It is better to be unhappy outside of an experience machine than happy within an experience machine – precisely because (and this is a solution Mill dismisses) that happiness is one end among many.

In describing the idea that what we desire ‘for its own sake’ is a part of happiness, Mill describes how we acquire new desires.

Referring to money as an example:

There is nothing originally more desirable about money than about any heap of glittering pebbles. Its worth is solely that of the things which it will buy; the desires for other things than itself, which it is a means of gratifying. Yet the love of money is not only one of the strongest moving forces of human life, but money is, in many cases, desired in and for itself; the desire to possess it is often stronger than the desire to use it . . .

In fact, few things work better as a proof of the fact that desires are malleable than the example of money, which simply does not exist in a state of nature, and cannot come to be naturally valued for its own sake the way that sex and freedom from pain are naturally desired for their own sake. This desire is learned. Because money is useful in the fulfillment of other desires, it begins as something desired as a means. However, for some people, it clearly becomes something desired for its own sake – valued beyond its usefulness.

Virtue, according to the utilitarian conception, is a good of this description. There was no original desire of it, or motive to it, save its conduciveness to pleasure, and especially to protection from pain. But through the association thus formed, it may be felt a good in itself, and desired as such with as great intensity as any other good; and with this difference between it and the love of money, of power, or of fame, that all of these may, and often do, render the individual noxious to the other members of the society to which he belongs, whereas there is nothing which makes him so much a blessing to them as the cultivation of the disinterested love of virtue. And consequently, the utilitarian standard, while it tolerates and approves those other acquired desires, up to the point beyond which they would be more injurious to the general happiness than promotive of it, enjoins and requires the cultivation of the love of virtue up to the greatest strength possible, as being above all things important to the general happiness.

Here we have the heart of desire utilitarianism, where a desire that is useful because of its tendency to fulfill other desires, gives people a reason to cultivate this desire in others and in themselves. The method by which they cultivate this desire is by associating it with the fulfillment of other desires – with a system of reward and punishment, and praise and condemnation, all engineered to make more common those desires that tend to make an individual ‘a blessing to [members of society’.

Everything that Mill says about the love of virtue applies to other desires as well. Mill wrote about the love of money, power, and fame, which makes an individual ‘noxious to the other members of the society to which he belongs’, which then become desires that people have reason to discourage. However, they are hard to discourage, since they inherently fulfill the desires of the individual.

Any other desire that renders an individual ‘noxious to to the other members of the society to which he belongs’ is a desire those others have reason to inhibit, while any other desire that renders an individual ‘a blessing to them’ is a desire that people generally have reason to cultivate. When cultivated, these desires define objects that are valued for their own sake, and not simply because of their usefulness.

The only real change that one has to make to Mill’s theory at this point is to give up the idea of desires as being ‘a part of happiness’ and to simply acknowledge that happiness is one of the things desired for its own sake. In terms of how the theory works, this change is quite benign.

Camp Quest and Religious Bigotry

I came across an online article in The Hook concerning teachers who are refusing to hand out literature on Camp Quest for children to take home.

“Atheist camp: Teachers buck School Board policy.”

The story behind this article is that a Christian parent protested the fact that the school would not allow her to distribute a flier for a Bible school.

after a local parent was refused permission to send home a flier for vacation Bible school, the parent contacted the Christian Liberty Counsel, which reminded the Albemarle school district that the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals had ruled that if a school permits fliers about after-school events, it can't discriminate against religious fliers.

Then, Camp Quest decided to hand out fliers. Camp Quest is an organization that runs summer camps with a secular, atheist, agnostic theme. Some teachers were refusing to hand out this material. The same lawyers informed them that the same rules prohibiting discrimination in what the school handed out based on religion required them to hand out the fliers for Camp Quest.

Now, the school is revisiting the policy. They want to exclude any further use of the school backpack mail program to advertise Camp Quest by limiting the distribution to “local events.”

The intention of the law is quite clear. Some teachers and parents want to discriminate against atheist groups. However, the law does not permit them to do so. Therefore, they want to Gerrymander a set of rules that use non-religious criteria that will, nonetheless, serve the same political purpose – to institute a policy of discrimination against atheists.

For example, if the school were to adopt a rule prohibiting fliers for any organization with the word “Camp Quest” in the title, this would be a non-religious distinction that would serve the purpose of discriminating against Camp Quest, while leaving religious organizations free to use the backpack mail program.

However, this rule would appear arbitrary. Its discriminatory nature will be so blatant and obvious that the Courts could not help but recognize it for what it is, and disallow it. What the school needs is to gerrymander a boundary between what is permitted and what is not that could possibly get past the courts because it seems like a legitimate rule. It’s possible for a community to be overcome by tribalism and decide to exclude all non-local vendors. Who is the Court to say that this is not the case?

The fact of the matter is, this is not the case. The rules did not come up for review because an “outside organization” decided to advertise using the backpack mail program. If a religious camp had decided to advertise in this way, there is little doubt that the school would have accepted the advertisements without a second thought. No, the real reason why these people are revisiting the rules is because an atheist organization decided to use it – and the school wants to ban atheists.

One question that this issue brings up is an issue of what the law will and will not allow. Is the law set up to defend bigotry, or to defend the victims of bigotry. As I have said several times, this is not a “law” blog, this is an “ethics” blog. I am not concerned with what the law does or does not say, I am concerned with what people should and should not do.

Regardless of what the law says, these people have already exhibited a moral failing that they cannot hide. The courts cannot change the fact that these people are motivated by unreasoned hatred and bigotry to commit an act of injustice against their neighbors. This is now an established and unavoidable fact.

A preacher might stand before these people and say, “You might be able to fool your neighbor into thinking that you are motivated by love and kindness to your neighbor. You might be able to fool the courts into thinking that you are motivated by love and kindness to your neighbor. But you cannot fool God. God knows what is in your hearts, and he knows that it is not love. He knows that it is not kindness. He knows that he sees hate. He knows that he sees injustice. You can try to hide your shame behind a fig leaf of rhetoric, but He knows.”

Of course, in secular terms, this is simply another way of saying that the terms ‘hate’ and ‘injustice’ capture the truth of the matter, and anybody who says otherwise is lying. But, if a person is already stepped into the quagmire of immorality up to the point of hate and injustice, why not add some good old-fashioned lying to top it off.

We constantly hear about how God gives these people an inside track on ‘the right thing to do’. We constantly hear that it is because they cannot hide from God, and they cannot escape judgment in the afterlife, that they are more highly driven to do good than their secular/atheist neighbors – people such as myself.

Yet, the physical evidence seems to suggest otherwise. The evidence suggests that they know that there is no afterlife, that there is no final judgment. All of these claims come with a wink and a nudge among the knowing, that this is just a story that they made up so that they could get away acting immorally, and then blaming it all on God. “I’m not the one who made up these rules. I’m just obeying God. Can I help it if GOD wants you to hate these people and treat them unjustly? I’m just the messenger.”

No, he is not just a messenger. He is a hate-mongering bigot who needs to say something other than, “Because I don’t like it,” to get others to adopt the hatred and bigotry he preaches.

A good person really doesn’t need a God to get him to do the right thing. He does the right thing because he wants to. He does not need to be told, “God can see into your heart and he knows what you are truly after.” This is because he can see into his own heart. He knows what he is after.

If he is after justice, then it is simply going to leave a taste in his mouth too foul for him to swallow if he should treat others unjustly. He will so hate the taste that this is simply something he will not do. If he does treat others unjustly, this can mean nothing other than the fact that it has not left much of a foul taste in his mouth after all.

This is how secular morality works. Or, at least, it is how desire utilitarianism works. Desire utilitarianism seeks to use social institutions to make it the case that people so dislike injustice that they will avoid it, even when they can get away with it. Unlike certain religious people in Albermarle, the very idea of manipulating the legal system to execute a campaign of hatred and bigotry does not appeal to them. This is not because they don’t think they can get away with it. It is not because God can see what is truly in their hearts even if the Judge cannot. It is because, in being raised to be good, moral individuals, they simply do not like to treat others unjustly.

It is said that, without God – without religion – people can do whatever they please. In fact, everybody always does whatever they please. Even the religious person does not serve God unless it pleases him to do so, and does not treat others justly unless it pleases him to do so. The difference between good and evil is not a difference between doing what one pleases or not. The difference lies in being pleased by an opportunity to act fairly and justly towards others, versus being pleased by an opportunity to treat others to unjustly.

Religion clearly has done nothing to give certain people in Albemarle a distaste for injustice. Indeed, we are invited to wonder whether their religion has helped them learn to treat others unjustly – actually causing them to adopt the immoral attitudes we see witnessed in this particular campaign. Injustice – particularly the unjust treatment of those who do not share their beliefs – is a recommended dish in most moral menus based on scripture. Injustice is a dish that too many people are trying too hard to serve up as often as they can, and to force down the throats of others.

In the name of God.

Amen.

Religion, Education, and Harry Potter

Michael, at Atheist Perspective, writes a series of rhetorical questions in condemnation of a teacher who was disciplined for refusing to listen to a student read Harry Potter. The teaching assistant believed that the books promoted witchcraft and objected to the book on religious grounds.

The teacher later resigned and is suing the school on the basis of religious discrimination.

Against this, Michael asked:

Isn’t teaching about what’s best for the child and not what’s best for the teacher? What right does a teacher have to supersede the wishes of the parent in what they wish for their child to believe? If your faith is such that you believe Harry Potter to be the work of the devil then you have no place in education. A teacher’s beliefs are secondary to a child’s development. As a teacher your job is to educate the child as the school wishes.

There is every reason to believe that this teacher thinks that these actions are in the best interests of the student, and that resigning is an act of self-sacrifice of a person who puts the (alleged) welfare of the student first. So, these accusations are out of line.

Furthermore, the counter-claim to this is that the state is forcing the teacher to do that which the teacher holds to be immoral. Would a Jewish teach be required to listen to a student read Mein Kampf? What about a black teacher listening while a kid reads some fiction that his racist father gives him where the "hero" of the story is out to rid society of "niggers"?

It is perfectly acceptable for a teacher to declare that these attitudes are wrong. Any offense given to Nazi or White Supremacist parents by a teacher's refusal to present this material in class is irrelevant.

We can't get by with saying that a teacher must listen and promote in class every viewpoint that some parent or other might embrace. Some picking and choosing is necessary.

Clearly, I do not hold that Harry Potter is in the same category as Mein Kampf and white supremacist literature. However, this teaching assistant did believe this - and believed it because her religion told her so.

The Essentials of Education

Speaking bluntly, the purpose of an education system is to fill a child’s brain with true beliefs and good moral values (to build good moral character).

For any who claim that values should not be a part of education – that values should be left up to the parents – I would like to mention the values. Don’t cheat; Don’t lie; Wait your turn; No fighting; Don’t interrupt; Be to class on time; Don’t disrupt the class; Don’t rape your classmates; Don’t destroy school property; Don’t take that which belongs to the school or to other students.

A school that did not teach virtue along with truth would not be a school anybody would choose to go to. In fact, it is logically impossible for a school not to teach values, because even a school that says “it is wrong to teach values in public schools” involves teaching the children a particular attitude towards the teaching of values in public schools.

There is simply no getting around the fact that the public school system is to devote the bulk of its efforts to teaching children which propositions are true, which propositions are false, which desires are virtuous, an which are vicious.

Inevitably, we are going to disagree over which propositions are true or false, and which desires are virtues and vices. In order to live in peace, we must consent to a set of institutions which we will use to resolve these differences – those institutions involving legislatures, courts, school boards, and teachers. We agree to go along peacefully with whatever these institutions decide, while at the same time struggling to make those institutions better.

History tells us that religious disagreements are all too likely to promote bloodshed and civil war. In order to get the people to peacefully agree to what will be taught in public schools, we have reason to support a set of institutions whereby the most important religious propositions are simply going to be ignored. We are only going to teach those propositions where there is a sufficiently broad agreement, and leave violently divisive propositions off of the curriculum.

This is not only true when it comes to teaching the truth or falsity of the propositions within a religion, but also a religion’s most important values – teaching children what to desire.

In order to keep the peace, we must mutually agree to respond to decisions made over what is to be taught, in terms of propositions believed or desired, with campaigns to change the system, rather than through force of arms.

Final Analysis

Given these propositions, I would need to know some additional information before knowing how to react to the case of this particular teacher. The most important part of this case as I see it is the teacher’s claim that, “I cannot listen to the expression of views that I do not agree with.”

We are not talking about a case in which a teacher was being required to engage in a religious ritual or practice that she disagreed with. Nobody was drawing pentagrams on the floor and asking the teacher to repeat the words in some ritual or other. All she was being required to do is to listen to and evaluate the report of some student.

“Exposing me to points of view other than my own while at work is religious discrimination and shall not be permitted.” This is the principle that this teacher’s assistant wants to introduce into our system. However, if we were to adopt this principle, then our school system itself will come to a dead stop. The same rule that demands that she not be exposed to the views of others also requires that others not be exposed to her views – which effectively implies that no person shall be permitted to say anything.

A civilized society requires that each individual at least be able to be exposed to views that are not their own. There are simply some principles that a civilized society needs that transcend ‘freedom of religion’. A prohibition on killing others simply because they do not believe the same religion is one. An willingness to be exposed to others who do not share the same beliefs is another.

An atheist teacher who requires that students talk about their favorite book must be ready to sit and listen to the student who talks about the Bible. Similarly, Christian students in the class would be obligated to sit and listen while somebody brings in the Koran.

In fact, it should be a part of the mission of any school to give children an opportunity to learn about other people with whom they are going to have to live. A huge number of possible professions that the child might want to enter as an adult will require knowing something about systems of belief other than his or her own. If he wants to be a police officer or a physician, he will need to understand how others live. If she wants to be a legislator, she will need to understand the various ways in which the people she represents live. Writers, speakers, advocates, lawyers, even good neighbors need to understand different ways of life.

Those who prevent a school from doing this, prevent the school from giving a child a quality education.

Considerations on Condemnation

In comments to yesterday’s blog, one commenter, ADHR, gave a particularly sophisticated set of responses to my position. I want to take advantage of this opportunity to address these concerns.

Yesterday, ADHR pointed out that a statement that I made, When people act so as to make the lives of others worse off than they would have otherwise been, and uses poor reasoning to defend their action, it is perfectly legitimate to condemn them for it. could not be taken as literally true. There are countless cases, rising from ignorance to a lack of options, where people act in ways that make the lives of others worse off without doing anything worthy of condemnation.

I made this statement in the context of a discussion as to whether somebody who owns a pharmacy should be permitted to refuse to sell birth control for religious reasons. I argued that such a decision deserves private condemnation but not violence (whether in the form of private violence or criminal penalties).

The objection is entirely accurate. As written, my statement above fit into a theory of morality that evaluated actions according to their intrinsic merit – that making another worse off is not only intrinsically wrong but deserving of condemnation. It is not a theory that I hold to.

I wrote too quickly.

It would have been more precise for me to say that the desires of others (the desire to have more ready access to prescription drugs they want) gives them reason to evaluate the attitudes of those who could easily fulfill those desires, but who refuse to do so. These thwarted (legitimate) desires gives them reasons-for-action for condemning, so as to inhibit, the owners.

This justification for condemnation comes from the fact that a person of good moral character would have presumed in favor of providing his or her neighbors with what they want, and would have accepted the need to thwart those desires only after receiving proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Because the owners are using religious arguments, no proof beyond a reasonable doubt is being offered.

When it comes to doing harm to others, “Because I have faith that my God would be pleased by the harm that I do to you,” does not qualify as proof beyond a reasonable doubt that the harm is necessary.

However, I argue that these reasons-for-action for condemning this owners’ attitude do not justify physical violence in the form of criminal penalties. I argue that, for the sake of keeping the peace, there should be a strong presumption in favor of liberty that is only outweighed by evidence beyond reasonable doubt of significant harm to others.

ADHR’s first example does demonstrate that the original expression, taken literally, does fail. Indeed, all moral theories that base morality on the intrinsic value of actions will fail, because intrinsic value does not exist, and actions are caused by desire.

ADHR goes on to raise objections against introducing desires to solve this problem. And, I have to see if I get this right, because it is a sophisticated set of objections.

If a good desire is defined in terms of fulfilling the desires of others, what is it that defines the desires others have?

I cannot tell if ADHR is familiar with other posts that I have written that addressed this question. I regret that, as this post gets longer, I tend to write as if my readers are familiar with everything else that I have written, which is certainly a false assumption.

Either way, a ‘desire that P’ is a propositional attitude such that the agent with the desire is moved to make or keep P true to a degree determined by the strength of the desire. We explain and predict intentional action by postulating a set of beliefs (attitudes that a particular proposition is true or false) and desires (attitudes that a particular proposition is to be made or kept true or false) assigning different strengths to desires until we have the best explanation and can make the best predictions about an agent’s intentional actions.

Desires are the only reasons for intentional action that exist.

Desires are the only reasons that exist for or against condemning a particular (type of) person. Condemnation makes sense as a tool for inhibiting desire-thwarting desires.

An agent acts to fulfill the more and stronger of his desires, given his beliefs – and seeks to act so as to fulfill the more and stronger of his desires.

Since the bad desire only causes actions that generally prevent the fulfillment of the desires of others, and the good desire only causes actions that generally fulfill the desires of others, it follows that the good desire can cause an action that, in a particular case, prevents the fulfillment of the desires of others (and vice versa for a bad desire causing a beneficial action).

Yes, it is true that on this theory a person will sometimes act in ways that thwart the desires of others. This happens when the desires that will cause an agent to behave differently in the current situation would tend to cause agents to fulfill more and stronger desires in other actual situations. If it is the case that condemnation followed actually acting so as to make the lives of others worse off, then under these conditions condemnation would be appropriate.

Yes, I know that this is what I said in the quote above.

I miswrote. I was trying to come up with a statement that was close enough to the truth to work in a post without getting too technical.

So, ultimately, we are looking for what people generally have the more and the stronger reason to condemn. They have the more and the stronger reason to condemn where condemnation will inhibit attitudes (desires) that tend to thwart the desires of others. In the case of the pharmacy owners who choose not to fulfill prescriptions to birth control, this clearly thwarts the desires of others. This gives others a reason to condemn the attitudes responsible for this choice, so as to reduce the incidence of these desire-thwarting attitudes.

Note that in desire utilitarianism a desire is fulfilled if the proposition that is the object of a desire is made or kept true, and thwarted if the proposition that is the object of a desire is made or kept false. Desires that have as their object a proposition that cannot be true (e.g., “I serve God’s will) cannot be fulfilled. Therefore, nothing in the real world can be judged negatively by saying that they interfere with the fulfillment of such a desire. If the owners of the pharmacy are desiring to fulfill God’s will, nobody can interfere with that result, because no person can, in fact, ever fulfill the will of a God that does not exist.

Anyway, condemnation may inhibit attitudes that thwart the desires of others even where those attitudes, in some rare circumstance, actually fulfill desires.

Birth Control and Business Choices

Where I am spending some time visiting my mother, there is a controversy about a nearby drug store which is refusing to fill prescriptions having to do with birth control. The store in question is the nearest store to where my mother lives, and the only pharmacy in the neighborhood. It has recently been purchased by a couple who are Catholic and who announced that they would use this policy in their store. The local newspaper picked up the announcement and the story has generated a fair amount of debate.

The debate concerns a conflict between the rights of a store owner to sell what they please, versus the rights of individuals to obtain whatever legal medical care is available without being required to pass a religious test.

On the side of store owners being able to sell what they please, we must consider the case of a grocery store that makes a choice not to sell meat. Most people would not get too upset about the option. We do not require a grocery store to sell every type of legal food available. Indeed, we permit some grocery stores to sell only a limited set of foods. We do not call this an act of discrimination or bigotry against customers who do not like the food that the store serves. We simply say something like, “This is a vegetarian grocery store,” and we move on.

Similarly, we do not hold that a Catholic church is guilty of discrimination for holding only Catholic religious ceremonies. They are not engaging in discrimination against Jews and Muslims because they do not host religious ceremonies outside of their own tradition.

An example that is more directly relevant to this is the case of medical care. A hospital is not required to make all possible forms of medical care available to its patients. It can decide not to purchase particularly expensive equipment or to have particular types of skills represented among its doctors. This is its right.

Yet, there is an important difference in the case of people seeking birth control and other forms of medication when compared to people seeking a good steak or a place to pray. In the case of buying meat and prayer, the inconveniences are small, and we have less reason to condemn private beliefs for these costs. In the case of birth control and similar medical options, the price is significantly larger. In other words, this is a case in which the world would have been a better place if people did not have attitudes such as these, so people have much stronger reason to condemn those who have these attitudes.

Religion, Harm, and Causation

I would like to use this opportunity to briefly discuss the relationship between religion and harm. A few days ago I criticized Christopher Hitchens for making claims about similar situations that the only reason these wrongs get done is because of religion. In spite of my protests to the contrary, I worry about some people taking my argument to mean that I think that religion is impotent, and that we can ignore religion as a cause of harm.

I would like to use a quick analogy to explain my position.

Imagine that somebody in Colorado hops into a 1967 pickup and heads off to San Francisco. In a case like this, we would have to acknowledge that the 1967 pickup is not impotent – it has the ability to take a person from Colorado to San Francisco. However, the fact that it is not impotent does not imply that it is uniquely potent.

If we rid the world of 1967 pickups, we can rest assured that nobody will ever go from Colorado to San Francisco in a 1967 pickup. However, it is still the case that there are substitutes – that people in Colorado can still travel to San Francisco in something other than a 1967 Pickup.

My view on the relationship between religion and harm follows this model. Clearly, religion is not impotent – it can and is used to get people to adopt attitudes that adversely affect the well-being of others, as in the case of the couple that purchased the nearby pharmacy.

However, acknowledging that religion has the power to cause people to adopt attitudes that diminish the well-being of others does not imply that religion is the only entity with this power. Acknowledging that a 1967 pickup can get a person from Colorado to San Francisco is not the same as acknowledging that it is the only vehicle one can use to get to San Francisco from Colorado.

Consequently, I can condemn a particular set of religious beliefs, in this case, for creating a situation that will make the lives of some of my wife’s neighbors worse off than they otherwise would have been. I can say that they are being made worse off for no good reason. In saying this, I am not saying that non-religious options cannot generate the same (or worse) results. This can still be true, even if this time religion, and not some other entity, fills this role.

Condemnation

When people act so as to make the lives of others worse off than they would have otherwise been, and uses poor reasoning to defend their action, it is perfectly legitimate to condemn them for it. Condemning a person for saying or doing something contemptible is not the same as violating their rights.

This couple can quite honestly say that they have the right to choose what to sell in their store. However, I have argued that a ‘right’ to do something only means that a person should be free to do that thing without somebody responding directly with violence and harm. The right of the American Nazi Party to hold a march through some Jewish neighborhood means that they have a right against violent interference with their actions. It is not a right to be free from condemnation. Nor is it a right to be free from whatever private actions (e.g., boycotts) in response to their adopting this policy.

It is a matter of empirical fact that these people will be making the lives of many of those in the neighborhood worse than those lives would otherwise have been. I also assert that they have no good reason to do so. The desire on the part of others that this attitude is thwarting gives them reason to inhibit this attitude through condemnation and private actions. An interest in preserving the peace denies others the right to inhibit this attitude through formal sanctions or violence.

In fact, I would argue that it is a bit counter-productive to focus on the question of whether the state should require these owners to sell a product they do not wish to sell. Instead, I would propose using this as an example of people who are acting in ways that lower the quality of life of others. Claiming that people have a right to practice their religion seems quite benign, until one points out that what their religion commands them to act in ways that are harmful to others.

Summary

This is also a case in which people are using religious arguments to defend actions that make the quality of life worse for others. Those arguments are highly questionable. Those who are to be made worse off by the actions of others have a right to condemn others who use such poor reasons for doing harm.

All of this is quite consistent with the claim that religion is not the only medium one can use to ‘justify’ doing harm to others, and that where no religion exists we can still expect people to form ‘tribes’ that treat outsiders unjustly an even brutally. Animals – particularly primates – form groups like this without any belief in a God to guide them.

It is the medium being used in this case, and those who do so are deserving of some measure of condemnation for it.

Colin Powell: Defending the Iraq Invasion

Tim Russert interviewed former Secretary of State Colin Powell on Meet the Press today, where Powell said something that I find particularly interesting.

I cannot tell you why in the intelligence community, the people who put out burn notices – meaning, “Don’t trust this source,” – those burn notices never rose to the right level. One of the things that I am most irate about is that I have reason to believe that in the CIA on the nights we were out there until midnight every night putting this presentation together and trying to make it air tight there were people in the room who knew that burn notices had gone out on some of these sources and that was not raised to me or to [former CIA director] Mr. Tenet.

Let’s be clear about this. Colin Powell was preparing for a key speech to justify an American act of aggression against Iraq. Powell was giving this speech because, unlike Bush, Cheney, and others in the Administration, people trusted that Powell would not say anything he did not believe to be true. If Powell was sitting before the United Nations saying that we had reliable intelligence that Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, then we can rest assured that the United States had reliable information.

True to his role in this (at least, according to Powell’s own testimony) he went over the information carefully and picked only conclusions that had multiple reliable sources. He said, for example, regarding the testimony that Iraq had mobile chemical weapons laboratories, that he had been assured that there were four independent sources confirming this conclusion.

The reason Powell was able to sit before the United Nations and give this false data is because people in the room decided – on their own or under orders from a higher source – not to tell Powell and Tenet that “burn orders” (warnings of a lack of reliability) had gone out on some of these sources.

When Russert asked Powell why he thought that this was the case, Powell answered:

I can’t answer that question. This is for others . . . I am not the investigator of the intelligence community. But if I was, we would be having very long meetings about this.

Indeed, this appears to be something about which there should be very long meetings.

There has been some sense of outrage over the fact that faulty intelligence made its way into the State of the Union speech. Bush said that there was intelligence indicating that Iraq was trying to buy raw material for nuclear weapons from Niger when intelligence experts had determined that the documents providing this evidence were forged. Even here, some people have asked why the Bush Administration does not seem to be at all embarrassed by this revelation. They certainly are not doing anything to ferret out who was responsible for putting bad data into the State of the Union speech. It is as if the Bush Administration does not see anything wrong with allowing the President to build the case for war based on faulty intelligence.

Indeed, Bush Administration members are behaving very much as if they have no antipathy at all to the idea of faulty information appearing in the President’s State of the Union Message. A person who misses an appointment, even if done for good reason, recognizes that at least a prima facie wrong had been done. He uses the words, “I’m sorry,” to show that he was aware of his expectations and intended to meet those expectations. Failure to use these words on the part of the Bush Administration suggests that they do not, in fact, sense any type of moral requirement to be honest to the American people and to refrain from ‘intelligence’ that is known to be faulty.

The case of getting false data into Colin Powell’s speech before the United Nations – an instance of the same type of moral crime – a crime of omission when it came to mentioning that certain sources of information were not reliable – is just as worthy of our concern.

Again, we see no concern coming from President Bush, Vice President Cheney, or other members of the Bush Administration. Again, this type of behavior indicates that they have no aversion (no sense of shame or embarrassment) in putting out false information before the public If they were the slightest bit embarrassed by what happened, they would seek to find out who was responsible for this embarrassment, and make sure that the culprit got the punishment he deserved.

Powell’s reaction demonstrates that he has a proper appreciation for the moral weight of this situation. The reaction from the rest of the Bush Administration shows that, at the very least, they suffer from a certain moral blindness that prevents them from seeing that a serious moral crime has been committed. They refuse to be embarrassed about something for which any morally decent human being would be greatly embarrassed.

The fault here rests as well with the American people. The best way to promote embarrassment, where embarrassment is appropriate, is to condemn those who would cause this embarrassment, and condemn those who let the culprits get away with this moral crime. If the Bush Administration is not guilty of committing the moral crime itself, it is at least guilty of giving the culprits a free pass, thus encouraging more of the same type of behavior in future generations.

This latter point ties in with another claim that Powell made during this interview. Powell said that if he were in charge he would close down Guantanamo Bay immediately, bring its prisoners into the United States, and put them into the Federal judicial system.

[I]f it was up to me, I would close Guantanamo, not tomorrow, this afternoon. I’d close it. And I’d not let any of those people go. I would simply move them to the United States and put them into our federal legal system. The concern was well, then they’ll have access to lawyers, then they’ll have access to writs of habeas corpus. . . America, unfortunately, has too million people in jail, all of whom had lawyers and access to writs of habeas corpus. And so we can handle bad people in our system . . . because every morning I pick up a paper and some authoritarian figure, some person somewhere, is using Guantanamo to hide their own misdeeds.

I have argued before that the Bush Administration suffers from a fundamental moral blindness – an inability to reason through whether it is a morally good idea to follow a particular policy. Every action that the Bush Administration performs, it tells the world – including the dictators, warlords, and other tyrants of the world, that this is a permissible thing to do. When Bush imprisons people indefinitely, it tells the world that indefinite imprisonment is a permissible option. When Bush has prisoners tortured it tells the world that the torture of prisoners is permissible.

When the Bush Administration allows faulty data to get into the State of the Union Speech and Powell’s speech before the United Nations, without showing any embarrassment over the fact or any attempt to ferret out those responsible for this situation, they tell the world that this type of behavior is permissible, and that we ought to see more of it.

This is one way that a morally astute person can judge the morality of his actions. He can ask whether he has reasons to promote a society in which everybody had those desires that would motivate people to perform the types of actions that he endorses. Do we have reason to want to live in a society where people do not care whether the vital statements of key state leaders knowingly contain false and misleading information?

I suggest that we do not. Instead, we have reason to promote a strong sense of embarrassment among those who are caught making false statements to the public, and for this acute sense of embarrassment to motivate them to take steps to prevent anything like this happening again. Leaders who do not take these steps are blind to the low moral quality of these types of actions.

J.S. Mill: Socrates Dissatisfied vs. Pig Satisfied

Introduction

With the Beyond Belief 2006 series having come to a close, I am in need of something new to write about on the weekends. I have decided in favor of a series of posts describing the philosophical roots of desire utilitarianism. The first historical philosopher that I want to discuss in this context is John Stuart Mill.

In his book, Utilitarianism, J.S. Mill gives a length defense of the idea that:

It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question. The other party to the comparison knows both sides.

This has long been taken to be a problem with Mill's philosophy because it seems to directly contradict utilitarianism. If somebody holds that pleasure is the only good, and pain is the only evil, then in what sense can Socrates dissatisfied be better than a pig satisfied? The latter seems to clearly have more pleasure than the former. Claiming that the former has more value requires the assumption that value can be found in something other than pleasure. Yet, if value can be found in something other than pleasure, than there must be value in something other than utility, and utilitarianism itself is contradicted.

Directly Evaluating Desires

If we look at Mill's claim, we can find that a part of his defense rests with claims that a desire utilitarian would certainly want to make.

Specifically, when Mill talks about the difference between a Socrates satisfied and a pig dissatisfied, he asks us to consider both types of pleasure, and then asks us to consider which is the most desirable. As mentioned above, one is to consider one value beside the other and to judge which of the two options the evaluator wishes more.

Now it is an unquestionable fact that those who are equally acquainted with, and equally capable of appreciating and enjoying, both, do give a most marked preference to the manner of existence which employs their higher faculties. Few human creatures would consent to be changed into any of the lower animals, for a promise of the fullest allowance of a beast's pleasures; no intelligent human being would consent to be a fool, no instructed person would be an ignoramus, no person of feeling and conscience would be selfish and base, even though they should be persuaded that the fool, the dunce, or the rascal is better satisfied with his lot than they are with theirs.

Mill states that it is an "unquestionable fact" that anybody acquainted with the two "pleasures" would prefer one over the other. His argument appears to suggest that this universal agreement proves that there is quality of value that is higher in the pleasure of the former over the pleasure of the latter. Mill can be questioned on both of these grounds; that not everybody would give the assent he claims, and even if they did this would only prove an inter-subjective preference not a difference in intrinsic worth.

Still, Mill gives us a way of evaluating different desires – such as the desires of the pig versus the desires of Socrates. We can evaluate desires by determining whether the desires themselves are the objects of second order desires - desires to have (or to not have) particular desries. In a desire-utilitarian system, desires themselves have value according to how well they fulfill other desires. This applies not only to the value that a desire has as a means to fulfilling other desires (as a tool, or an instrument, useful in fulfilling other desires), but the degree to which desires themselves (or states of affairs in which one has particular desires) are desired.

Not withstanding that some do not have a preference to be Socrates dissatisfied over a pig satisfied, and that even if they did this would only prove that people have a common preference, insofar as people do have a preference for Socrates dissatisfied over a pig satisfied, they have reason-for-action for bringing about a state of Socrates dissatisfied rather than a state of pig satisfied (if they must choose).

Indirectly Evaluating Desires

Another way of evaluating a desire (in addition to whether or not it is desired) is by whether or not it tends to lead indirectly to the fulfillment of other desires. In other words, we can recommend certain desires and aversions because of their usefulness.

I want to start looking at this option by noting that Mill does not require that people always and only act from a principle of utility. Other motives can direct a person’s actions.

The great majority of good actions are intended not for the benefit of the world, but for that of individuals, of which the good of the world is made up; and the thoughts of the most virtuous man need not on these occasions travel beyond the particular persons concerned, except so far as is necessary to assure himself that in benefiting them he is not violating the rights, that is, the legitimate and authorised expectations, of any one else.

An agent can act simply to realize something that he desires (other than general utility). Yet, we can still evaluate that desire by its usefulness - by its tendency to fulfill other desires.

In the case of abstinences indeed - of things which people forbear to do from moral considerations, though the consequences in the particular case might be beneficial - it would be unworthy of an intelligent agent not to be consciously aware that the action is of a class which, if practised generally, would be generally injurious, and that this is the ground of the obligation to abstain from it.

If Mill thought that we are to promote utility in all instances, then the above passage of foregoing instances that maximize utility would be frowned upon. Yet, Mill clearly states that a person should forego an instance of maximizing utility if the general practice "would be generally injurious". This would apply in cases where the desire for something is a desire that tends to thwart other desires.

Promoting Good Desires; Inhibiting Bad Desires

Finally, it is the purpose of law and social institutions to promote interests (desires) that are in harmony with the desires of others.

laws and social arrangements should place the happiness, or (as speaking practically it may be called) the interest, of every individual, as nearly as possible in harmony with the interest of the whole . . . so that not only he may be unable to conceive the possibility of happiness to himself, consistently with conduct opposed to the general good, but also that a direct impulse to promote the general good may be in every individual one of the habitual motives of action, and the sentiments connected therewith may fill a large and prominent place in every human being's sentient existence.

Mill's arguments for this position are the source of later interpretations that Mill was a rule utilitarian

It is a strange notion that the acknowledgment of a first principle is inconsistent with the admission of secondary ones. To inform a traveller respecting the place of his ultimate destination, is not to forbid the use of landmarks and direction-posts on the way. The proposition that happiness is the end and aim of morality, does not mean that no road ought to be laid down to that goal, or that persons going thither should not be advised to take one direction rather than another.

These landmarks or guideposts, according to Mill, are necessary because we cannot be expected to calculate utility entirely from scratch at the moment of every action. Indeed, it would be irrational for us to do so.

Nobody argues that the art of navigation is not founded on astronomy, because sailors cannot wait to calculate the Nautical Almanack. Being rational creatures, they go to sea with it ready calculated . . .

And so it is with morality, that we enter into our moral universe with certain guideposts and landmarks already calculated. The rational person does not refer to the principle of utility itself in deciding each individual question, but refers instead to guideposts that have been calculated, debated, and promoted through thousands of years of civilization. He uses rules that, as a matter of experience, tend to produce far better results than the time-consuming task of evaluating every option from scratch

Desire utilitarianism makes the further claim that these rules are written into the brain in the form of culturally acquired 'sense' of right and wrong – in fact, a culturally acquired desire for or aversion to particular actions. The person who appeals to his or her 'conscience' in making decisions appeals to these desires and aversions as guideposts and landmarks.

However – and this is important – those guideposts are capable of being flawed, miscalculated. A person who appeals to his conscience can still perform wrong actions. More specifically, actions are not right or wrong in virtue of the testimony of conscience, and anybody who appeals to conscience as the final resting place of moral argument are mistaken. The 'guideposts' of conscience themselves need to be justified – shown good or bad – by their tendency to promote or inhibit overall utility.

Conclusion

Once again; under Mill's rule utilitarianism, a person can and should appeal to their conscience in making moral decisions. However, conscience is not the end of moral argument. We can also ask whether a state in which people generally have a particular conscience would tend to promote or inhibit the universal good.

The traditional interpretation of Mill is that these guideposts take the form of rules.

This interpretation leads Mill to a problem. Why should we follow the rule even when we know that it will not maximize utility? This would be as absurd as saying that the navigator has an obligation to continue to follow his rules of thumb even after he has determined that they are pointing him in the wrong direction. This would be madness.

However, another possible interpretation is that these guideposts take the form of learned sentiments of approval or disapproval – desires for and aversions to – certain types of actions. If these guideposts are desires, rather than rules, then the problem disappears. As desires, the 'landmarks' themselves become not only a means for getting to some final destination, but a destination in their own rights. If your goal is to get to New York from Kansas, then you have no reason to take a side street in Ohio that you know takes you out of your way. However, if you have a desire to get to New York from Kansas by going through Ohio, then the side trip to Ohio is no longer a distraction.

As described, Mill makes it much of the way to desire utilitarianism. He has rules functioning as landmarks for maximizing utility. These landmarks are to be taken to be the guideposts of utility. These landmarks are, among other things, the dictates of conscience. However, conscience is not the end of moral questioning. We must still ask whether it is conducive to utility to have individuals generally with a particular conscience. These sentiments, including the moral sentiments, are not only to be evaluated according to their usefulness. They are also to be evaluated according to whether they fulfill desires more directly – such as the stronger desire to be Socrates unsatisfied than a pig satisfied.

We only need to add a few drops of desire utilitarianism to Mill's theory of utilitarianism to create a theory that can handle many of the objections raised against it.

Christopher Hitchens on the Evils of Religion

I think that I am getting too many readers, so it is time for me to get rid of a few. It is quite predictable that when I write against some atheist hero, a fair number of readers decide that my blog is no longer worth reading. Today, I will accomplish this pruning by criticizing the arguments of Christopher Hitchens.

Hitchens does not speak for me. He makes narrow-minded, bigoted statements that 10 minutes of rational consideration can refute. Yet, he makes them, because they are easy to make. Also, I suspect that it weighs on his mind, subconsciously if not consciously, that a more careful and accurate description of the matter would not draw nearly as large an audience.

For example, Townhall.com contains a transcript of a debate involving Christopher Hitchens and Mark Robins, moderated by Hugh Hewitt. In it, Hitchens says,

There’s a great deal of wickedness that’s attributable purely to religious belief. Morally normal people wouldn’t do these things if they didn’t think God was desiring them to do so.

The claim that we can attribute so much wrongdoing to religious belief is simply false. Furthermore, the argument against Hitchens can be drawn from claims that Hitchen himself makes and defends.

Atheism and Evil

When discussing the good that religion does, Hitchens offers the following challenge:

You have to name a moral action taken, or a moral statement uttered by a person of faith that could not be taken or uttered by a non-believer.

This is a legitimate challenge, which I gave in an earlier post on, “The Good that Atheists Would Not Do.” Here, I disagree with Hitchens on another small matter. Hitchens says that the assumption built into the claim that religion does good – the assumption that this is a good that atheists would not do – is “a slightly insulting one”. In fact, it is deeply insulting and should be considered one of the worst forms of bigotry.

However, this touches on my objection to Hitchens. Because, just as claims that religion does good in the world are claims that these are goods that no atheist would perform, the claim that religion does evil in the world are claims that these are evils that no atheist would perform.

I can repeat Hitchens’ objection. Hitchens has to name an immoral action taken, or an immoral statement uttered by a person of faith that could not be taken or uttered by a non-believer.

The immediate comeback would likely to be to name some evil and to claim that it was done in the name of God. It is certainly true that no non-believer can honestly claim to be doing evil in the name of God. However, this is not a relevant difference. The same can be said on behalf of the good that people do. No atheist can honestly claim to be doing good in the name of God. However, he can honestly claim to be doing the same good. Similarly, no atheist can honestly claim to be doing evil in the name of God. However, he can still do the same evil.

Is there any evil that a theist could do that an atheist could not do (for some reason other than belief in God)?

There is none.

Consequently, just as claims asserting the good that religion does contain the bigoted assumption that these are goods that no atheist would do, asserting the evil that religion does contains a bigoted assumption that these are evils that no atheist would do.

Just as this is no slight insult against atheists to claim that these are goods that atheists would not do, it is no slight insult against theists to claim that these are evils that no atheist would do.

Cherry Picking

Another example of this bigotry at work starts with the well-observed fact that theists ‘cherry pick’ their religious beliefs. When some atheists, such as Hitchens, attempt to explain why certain evils are done in the world, they say “because of scripture.” When they make this claim they are offering what is, in fact, a scientific explanation for a set of observations. The observations are certain evils allegedly done in the name of some God. The explanation is, “because of scripture.”

As a rational explanation for this set of observations, it utterly fails.

Imagine watching a group of workers as they pick cherries. You seek an explanation for what they are doing. As a worker plucks a cherry from the tree, you ask, “Why did you do that?” He answers, “Because it is a cherry.”

Immediately, you know that this is not inadequate. The hypothesis that the reason for his action is to pick cherries is falsified by the fact that there are a lot of cherries on the tree that he will not pick. He will only pick a certain subset of all the cherries. This tells you that, “Because it is a cherry,” is, at best, an incomplete answer.

The same is true of those who cherry-pick scripture for their moral system. Somebody comes along and asks, “Why did you pick that particular moral prescription?” The answer comes back, “Because it is scripture.” However, a great deal of scripture is ignored. This is enough to prove that the answer, “Because it is scripture,” is, at best, inadequate.

Somewhere there must be a standard that they are using to determine which scripture they pick and which they leave behind. Where does this standard come from? This standard that they use to determine which scripture to pick and which to leave is the true source of morality. Whatever this source is, it is NOT scripture.

This problem is compounded by the fact that our cherry pickers are not picking cherries. In the case of religious ethics, religious people do not only pick scripture that fits their ethics (leaving the rest behind), they pick moral principles that are not to be found in scripture. They accept the abolition of slavery and certain principles fundamental to democracy even where there is nothing in scripture that advocates a democratic form of government.

Where do theists get these principles?

“Scripture” utterly fails to explain the phenomena in question. Yet “scripture” is what certain atheists such as Hitchens say is the source of great evil. That evil does not come from scripture, it comes from whatever source people use to determine which parts of scripture to accept, which to reject, and which to add to scripture.

History

There is one last problem with the idea that evil comes from scripture. This is the historical fact that, whatever made it into scripture is something that people thought of and accepted well before they wrote it into scripture.

Scriptures were not handed down by God. It seems strange to have to say this to an audience that is made up substantially of atheists. However, the proposition, “Scripture is responsible for this evil,” can come only if we forget, momentarily, where scripture itself came from. It came from a set of ideas that humans adopted without any divine intervention at all – ideas that a pre-scripture people still came to think of as good ideas.

This directly contradicts Hitchens’ claim that, “Morally normal people wouldn’t do these things if they didn’t think God was desiring them to do so.” Morally normal people were the ones who decided (and are still deciding) that a God wants them to do these things. The reason they claim that God desires these things is because they want God to desire these things, and they want God to desire these things because they want these things. Or, at least, they wanted these things at the time they were inventing and defining God.

Everything in scripture is evidence of what humans are capable of dreaming up and finding acceptable in the absence of scripture, because this was where scripture came from.

Conclusion

Every evil that has found its way into scripture is an evil that humans are capable of accepting in the absence of scripture. If this were not true, then these evils would not have found their way into scripture to begin with.

Every evil that people cherry-pick out of scripture is an evil that humans are capable of accepting in the absence of scripture. If this were not true, then people would not see these evils as ripe for the picking. They would ignore these evils, as they ignore all passages that report things that they reject.

Religion is not the source of these evils.

One of the sources of evil is a human tendency to divide the world up into groups of ‘us’ and ‘them’ – and to embrace easily refutable claims that ‘us’ – the master race, the chosen people – are immune to the evils that afflict ‘them’ – the lesser beings. It is found in the ease with which people embrace and cheer those who say, “If we can only rid the world of ‘them’, the world would be a better place.”

The idea that religion is the root of all evil is one of those easily refutable claims. It takes only a few minutes of reflection to hold that the evils that we find in religion are evils that have a source outside of religion, and that atheists have no magical immunity from the true source of evil.

It is an issue of which theory best explains and predicts a set of observations. Either religion is the root of all evil (in which case we are left wondering how that evil got into scripture in the first place), or people have an inherent affinity for philosophies that divide the world into ‘us’ and ‘them’ that tend to blind them to poor arguments used in defense of these divisions. This explains both the ‘us’ versus ‘them’ of scripture, and why many atheist fail to see the flaws in their own ‘us’ versus ‘them’ philosophies.

This alternative hypothesis predicts that if religions were to disappear, and atheists ruled the world, that atheists would find other (equally unreasonable) reasons to divide the world into groups of ‘us’ and ‘them’, and the violence would not diminish. We cannot end the violence by ending religion. We can only end the violence by fighting the root causes of evil that afflict the religious and non-religious alike.

As long as atheists divide the world into ‘us’ and ‘them’ on religious grounds, they leave themselves vulnerable to the causes of evil that can be found in our nature. If religion is the root of all evil, we can ignore the tendency to embrace unreasonable claims that ‘we’ are inherently superior to ‘them’ and must rid the world of ‘them’ if we are to know peace. We can simply refuse to ask, “Is this claim that ‘they’ are responsible for all evil – and it is not to be found elsewhere – truly reasonable?”

I know, in order to boost readership I am supposed to join those defend this claim. Humans have a basic affinity for these types of assertions and to embrace those who make them. However, having a fundamental desire to accept certain types of beliefs does not make them true, or make the willingness to embrace them moral. In fact, reason suggests that the opposite is true. So this is what I write, instead.

Pardoning Libby

Announcement:

In my new efforts to add a bit more work rather than just writing these long essays, I have created a second blog called Atheist Ethicist Journal to deal with a number of smaller projects. My introductory message mentions Wikipedia and Borofkin’s decision to create a mini wiki on desire utilitarianism, and some effort that those who have wanted to volunteer could contribute.

The second blog will allow me to make minor follow-up comments on the news of the day relevant to my longer essays here, illustrate progress in my various tasks, and communicate in a less rigid and formal way with those who have expressed some interest in my work.

Essay: Pardoning Libby

This post is on the prospects of pardoning I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby. However, it is not an argument for why it should not be done. It is written in condemnation of some of the arguments given for saying it should be done.

It also raises concerns about those who would use a particular argument against a pardon.

According to the Washington Post,

. . . aides worry about the political consequences of stepping into a case that stems from the origins of the Iraq war and renewing questions about the truthfulness of the Bush administration.

This would be like a staff member for some congressman saying that he is concerned about the congressman having sex with underage pages because of the "political consequences" of such an act.

"Political consequences" is a second line of defense - one that is only used when the first line of defense, "because it is wrong," has already been breached.

When both psychological barriers against wrongdoing have been breached - the ‘because it is wrong’ barrier and ‘because of the political consequences’ barrier – we get Vice President Cheney, and others who actually favor a pardon.

Libby was convicted of interfering with an investigation into who was responsible for outing an undercover CIA operative. We have a conviction here, so the “presumption of innocence” that I argued for in earlier postings on the subject no longer apply. We are now free to presume guilt.

We are now free to presume that Libby intentionally misdirected investigators who were seeking to determine if somebody compromised our national security and, if so, to identify and punish that person (or those persons).

What should we do with people who intentionally interfere with attempts to discover those who compromise national security? We are not talking about somebody who exercises known Constitutional rights, like appealing to the 5th Amendment. We are talking about somebody who performed acts that are illegal and that have no Constitutional protections.

Assume that your child is missing. The police are interrogating people trying to discover where your child is at. One person intentionally lies to investigators and conceals information that the investigators have a legal right to acquire. Your child is still missing, and we know that this person intentionally misdirected or obstructed legitimate Police attempts to find her. He has been tried and found guilty in a court of law, so this is not mere idle speculation.

Would you argue that this person should be pardoned?

We have as much or more reason to react to somebody who obstructs an investigation into a potential breech of national security as we would react to somebody who obstructed an investigation into your child’s disappearance.

Now, imagine how you would react to people who said that this person who obstructed an investigation into your child’s disappearance should be pardoned because the police (obstructed, as they were, in their investigation by this person) never found out what happened to your child.

The National Review

According to the Washington Post:

[The conservative National Review] magazine contended that Libby had been "found guilty of process crimes," even though the special prosecutor never brought charges relating to the leak of CIA officer Valerie Plame's name: "He is a dedicated public servant caught in a crazy political fight that should have never happened, convicted of lying about a crime that the prosecutor can't even prove was committed.

We can see the moral principles that the editors of the National Review want us to live under by applying their morality to the case of your child’s disappearance.

Anybody who successfully obstructs an investigation into a child’s disappearance, where the police fail to discover what happened, shall be considered innocent of all wrong doing and, if convicted of a crime, shall be pardoned. The reason they shall be pardoned is precisely because the police failed to discover what happened to the child.

This is in spite of the fact that this individual has been convicted of deliberately misleading the investigation, making it harder for the police to actually discover what happened to your child. This conviction, according to the moral principles endorsed by the editors of the National Review, counts for nothing if your child remains lost.

The Weekly Standard

The Washington Post reports that:

The Weekly Standard followed with a cutting article accusing Bush of abandoning Libby: "So much for loyalty, or decency, or courage. For President Bush, loyalty is apparently a one-way street; decency is something he's for as long as he doesn't have to ake any risks on its behalf; and courage - well, that's nowhere to be seen. Many of us used to respect President Bush. Can one respect him still?"

Frankly, what passes for morality in the Weekly Standard is the type of behavior we would expect from an organized crime family. Whether an act is legal or illegal is does not matter. All that matters is whether the accused is a member of the family. Members of the family can violate laws and harm others with impunity. Only those who are not members of the family need to worry about consequences.

This is nothing but an invitation to lawlessness and obstruction in the Executive branch. The Weekly Standard is effectively saying that, “All key advisors who materially contribute to a failed investigation into matters that might embarrass the Administration should be rewarded for their efforts with a Presidential pardon.”

According to the Washington Post:

Former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney said that they would seriously consider pardoning Libby. . . . Sen. Sam Brownback (Kan.) and Rep. Tom Tancredo (Colo.) said flatly that they would pardon Libby. . . . Former Tennessee senator Fred D. Thompson, a presumed candidate who did not take part in the debate, is a member of Libby's legal defense fund and has called for a pardon.

Giuliani, Romney, Brownback, Tancredo, and Fred Thompson, all need to face a follow-up question. “Are you not saying that a member of your staff who is convicted of perjury an obstructing an investigation that may prove embarrassing to your administration can expect a Presidential pardon as a reward for his efforts?”

The Post reports that Giuliani added, “What the judge did today argues more in favor of a pardon because this is excessive punishment."

If Giuliani wants to set up a commission to investigate all sentences and offer pardons to anybody who his commission judges to have been given excessive punishment, this would be an option. However, for him to single out a member of the Administration for special treatment, while all others who suffer from excessive punishment languish in prison, is unfair favoritism. In effect, this states that the President should feel free to interfere with the criminal courts whenever his or her friends are involved.

The same response applies to Romney’s claim that, “[T]he prosecutor ‘clearly abused prosecutorial discretion.’” The courts have a built-in appeal process for dealing with these types of issues. If they do not determine that such an abuse took place, there is no justification for a pardon. If they determine that such an abuse did take place, then there will be no need for a pardon. Either way, the President has no moral justification for getting involved.

Five Republican candidates for President, including the front-runners, have announced that their staff should feel entitled to Presidential interference in criminal processes on their behalf. If they are caught and convicted of interfering with an investigation that may prove embarrassing to the President, then they should expect to be rewarded for their efforts with a Presidential pardon.

Giuliani might limit his interference to cases of “excessive punishment”, and Romney might limit his to “clearly abused procedural discretion,” but we have reason to wonder what would count as “excessive punishment” or “abused discretion” in these cases. We have reason to wonder how worried their staff members will be when it comes to interfering with investigations of their administrations.

Collaborators

In this political season, I would like to have the term ‘collaborator’ restored to widespread use, and for people seeking a career in politics to loathe the idea of suffering this particular brand.

A collaborator in this context is a person who assists any political faction who evidences a serious intent to destroy the principles of government written into the Constitution, other than through the accepted method of Constitutional amendment.

Two recent events bring this thought to the surface of my mind. The first comes from the recent Democratic and Republican political debates – both of them. The topic of discussion seems to be whether Bush is a competent commander in chief – whether he obtained his desired objectives skillfully. There is far too little discussion of what it is that he seemed to want to accomplish. With respect to some of the goals in the Bush Administration, really, one thing we do not need is a President and an administration that could accomplish those goals competently.

The goals that I am referring to are his attempts to dismantle the Constitution. The Bush Administration has worked systematically to create a form of government where the Constitution is nothing but a figurehead. Its role in American politics would be reduced to something comparable to that of the Queen of England. Its only purpose is ceremonial. People bring it out every now and then so that the public can cheer in its general direction, while he government largely continues in total disregard to what is written there.

In these debates, I have heard almost nothing said about such things as signing statements, warrantless searches and seizures, indefinite arbitrary imprisonment, cruel and unusual treatment of prisoners (I would call it ‘punishment’ – but punishment assumes at least a conviction of wrongdoing, which does not exist in the vast majority of these cases), the duty of the government to provide evidence that a person is guilty and deserving of harm as a condition of depriving somebody of life, liberty, or property.

I have not heard anything on whether any candidate believes that the President has the right to circumvent the legislative and judiciary branches, making these institutions as well the quaint relics of a bygone era – a type of “Colonial Williamsburg” where people dress up and pretend to fill roles once filled by real people with important jobs to do.

The second impetus to this request concerns a question of what we are going to teach our children about government and civic responsibility. Most children who were 12 years old on September 11, 2001 will be graduating from high school this year. They have spent the bulk of their formative years watching us, learning our values, learning what we can reasonably expect from a citizen of this great country.

What have we taught them?

Mostly, they have learned that, if any political faction should work to remove the Constitutional protections that I described above, the most important thing that they are to do with their lives is to wonder about the significance of things like Tom Cruise dancing on Oprah Winfrey’s couch exclaiming his love of Katie Holmes, or the identity of the father of Anne Nichole Smith’s baby. This is what a good citizen does with his day.

Having absorbed these lessons, we can only wonder what this generation will do when, 30 or 40 years from now, some would-be tyrant decides that he wants to be dictator of the United States. When that leader comes to power, what will that generation do to protect those same Constitutional freedoms. (Will there be any Constitutional freedoms for them to protect?)

There is a second, more important concern. How many of them are going to look back on the Bush Administration and the public reaction to their behavior and say, “How hard will it be to establish a more dictatorial government with us in control of everything? Look at the Bush Administration and how far he actually went dismantling the Constitution. And Bush was an idiot. If we avoid his mistakes, we might actually be able to succeed where he failed.”

We are, in effect, making it far more likely that our children or grand children will lose their freedom, because we have created a culture that is indifferent to the losses of those freedoms, while encouraging people to take seriously the possibilities that Bush has opened up for future presidents.

The Bush Administration has made the job much easier for some future tyrant in another way. They will be able to use Bush’s actions as President. Any action that Bush performed, that was not officially rejected by the American people, is an action that is open to some future President. From this moment on, all future Presidents can argue, “The people, Congress, and Courts did nothing to stop Bush from warrantless wiretaps; why are you getting all upset about it now?”

If anybody should answer, “But in 2006, we were at war,” the next President will be able to answer, “That can be arranged.” Because, another one of the powers that Bush has argued for that has not yet been challenged, is the right to attack any country he wants any time he wants by simply uttering the words, ‘national interests’.

The remedy against these possibilities is to teach a children a new and different moral lesson, that those who collaborate in the dismantling of these important freedoms are regarded – as they ought to be rewarded – as the scum of the earth. They are the type of people who deserve nothing better than to be verbally spat upon for the wrongs that they have done, and the wrongs that they have encouraged others to do.

Now, I want to make it clear that I am not talking about forcing a Democrat vs. Republican schism here.

First, the leaders in the Democratic Party have given these issues as little attention as the Republicans. Democrats in control of the House and Senate have taken no action to challenge and dismantle these abuses. I suspect that the front-runners in the Democratic Party, and those who fund them (particularly those who fund them), are looking forward to what they can accomplish with warrantless searches and seizures, arbitrary arrest and imprisonment, and signing statements.

Second, the Republican Party itself has had a long tradition of supporting Constitutional principles, particularly the value of a limited government and maximum freedom. I do not know where those Republicans have been hiding for the past six years, but it is time for them to come out and assert themselves

The Election Primaries is an excellent opportunity for each party to remove the collaborators from power, and to replace them with people who are more strongly devoted to Constitutional provisions of checks and balances. Party members are not compelled to choose leaders who are opposed to the Constitution. It is a choice – and a choice they must be held responsible for.

When the younger generation sees that collaboration comes with a cost in terms of contempt and political capital, they will have reason to think twice before they endorse similar methods in some future administration. If they see the futility of rendering the Constitution a powerless figurehead of a tyrannical state, they will not be tempted to pursue that option themselves.

For these reasons I argue that it is time to make the term ‘collaborator’ a part of our political vocabulary once again, and to make every politician afraid to wear that label. It is time to teach our children what it is like to stand up and defend those principles, so that they will have had some experience with such things, in case it will become required again in their lifetime.

Bush Admin. Degrading Climate Research

I am going to appoint myself energy and climate czar for the day.

I have known for a while that the Bush Administration has been constantly cutting back on the government’s efforts to collect data on climate change.

I also know that companies that market in fossil fuels have been engaged in a disinformation campaign. Effectively, they are in the business of selling snake-oil – tonics that are deadly – to people who do not know any better, and paying for public relations campaigns that cover up the truth. One of the most notorious groups in this syndicate is Exxon Mobile.

This disinformation campaign aims to give people the false impression that we do not know as much as we know about the effects of carbon dioxide on the future of the planet. They do this by filling the airwaves – television, mostly, because people spend a huge amount of their time watching television, and television broadcasts (unlike scientific journals) are not peer-reviewed – with false claims about the uncertainty of climate change science.

At best, these people are so unconcerned about who they might kill or whose lives they might destroy to put money in their pockets that they are willing to allow our children, nieces, and nephews to suffer the consequences of inaction, so that they can afford another yacht.

Of course, it feeds right into this strategy to make sure that scientists do not have data. So, it fits perfectly into this strategy for the Bush Administration to divert money from climate change research into other, less useful projects, or to simply cut the money out of the budget entirely. This will allow the energy companies to continue their campaign of uncertainty, and for our children, nieces, and nephews to suffer even more harm so that these people can afford another yacht.

Finally, I know that this disinformation campaign has been effective. For an investment of tens of millions of dollars in lies and manipulation, the oil companies are receiving tens of billions of dollars in additional profits.

Today, one of my assistants, John Heilprin from the Associated Press, has informed me, “U.S. Cuts Back Climate Checks from Space.”

Because of technology glitches and a near-doubling in the original $6.5 billion cost, the Defense Department has decided to downsize and launch four satellites paired into two orbits, instead of six satellites and three orbits.

The satellites were intended to gather weather and climate data, replacing existing satellites as they come to the end of their useful lifetimes beginning in the next couple of years.

The reduced system of four satellites will now focus on weather forecasting. Most of the climate instruments needed to collect more precise data over long periods are being eliminated.

The American Association for the Advancement of Science and the National Academy of Sciences have both cautioned that downsizing the satellite program will result in major gaps in the continuity and quality of the data gathered about the Earth from space . . .

[S]even other separate climate sensors are still being eliminated or substantially downgraded by lower-quality equipment to save money, according to the report to the White House. Most of the satellites, which were scheduled to launch starting next year, have been delayed to between 2013 and 2026.

As Energy and Climate Czar, I am going to demand the following:

First, I want to know the reasons for these cost overruns. What, exactly, are these ‘technology glitches’? Could they have been avoided or anticipated? If so, then I want to know who failed to avoid or anticipate them and I want them on the unemployment line.

Second, I ask you this question: If we know that an organization out there fully intends to do trillions of dollars worth of damage to buildings and infrastructure to the American people and their property in the lifetime of our children, nieces, and nephews, would we consider it worth $6.5 billion to collect intelligence that will protect us from that threat?

I also want to note that we can collect this information without violating any privacy rights. We will not be listening on any telephone calls or opening anybody’s mail. In short, there is nothing in the way we collect this information that involves “protecting people from external threats” that makes them vulnerable to internal threats.

So, it makes sense to come up with the money to collect this intelligence that will help to protect our children and our allies from harm, right?

Third, people who engage in a disinformation campaign that puts others at risk of death and suffering should not be rewarded for their efforts. Those who filled the airwaves with these lies and disinformation should be the ones to pay to find the facts. So, as energy czar, I suggest that we pay for this research with a tax on coal and oil purchased by refineries. Let the energy companies decide if they want to pay for these costs out of their profits, or pass the costs on to the consumer.

I would like to see them try to pass the costs onto the consumer, and then whine that “It is the government’s fault for doing this – they imposed the tax,” while the energy companies continue to enjoy record profits. “Do not tell me that you could not afford to cover the tax out of your own profits, given the prices you already charge?”

Fourth, I want to get NASA and NOAA out of the business of directly funding research projects. Instead, I want to get them into the business of paying for data provided by private contractors. Instead of proposing a $6.5 billion research project, I want NASA to announce that it will pay $6.5 billion for whomever provides it with the data that the project would provide. Let private enterprise, with its entrepreneurial skills, discover how to collect the information. If somebody’s plan to collect the data runs into cost overruns, then those overruns come out of the investor’s pocket, not the taxpayer. Taxpayers, on this model, pay only for success.

I trust that, using this method, people will do a far better job of anticipating and avoiding cost overruns. I will suffer far few interruptions in my day as Energy and Climate Czar from people like Heilprin telling me that some project is over-budget. This, by the way, will explain why private interests will use their political power – their money – to resist such a system. A system that allows a company to run up billions of dollars of cost overruns at taxpayer expense is far more inviting than a system that will have those same companies paying for their misjudgment out of their own pockets.

The delays were caused in part because of problems with an infrared sensor that officials either didn't monitor closely enough or didn't bring to the attention of their managers, the Commerce Department's inspector general reported last year. That report also said a contractor on the project was receiving excessive fees.

I know that a lot of military intelligence cannot be financed this way. Where it would be foolish for the government to announce the types of information it is trying to collect and how it is collecting that information, I would strongly advise against being foolish. However, these objections do not apply to the scientific research on climate change.

Of course, I am not the energy and climate czar – not that I would actually want the job. However:

Rep. Bart Gordon, D-Tenn., who chairs the House Committee on Science and Technology, called for a hearing later this week on the satellite program. Gordon believes Lautenbacher should resign, the panel's spokeswoman said.

About this Blog

Today is not a good day to write.

I have been thinking about making some changes, and I do not know how to say them. So, after a day of frustration to no good effect, let me just say what I want to say.

This blog has been more successful than I had expected it to be. However, I would like to do more. Too little is being done. “Doing more” is not easy for me, because I have a tendency towards paralyzing uncertainty. “What if I am wrong?” One of the things that I need to accept that doing nothing is a choice, and one which also requires that I ask the question, “What if I am wrong?”

I have long felt that the best way to avoid being wrong is to share the blame – to work with others in the hopes that a group of people will be more likely to see problems that any individual would miss.

This leads to the first change that I would like to make. Well, it leads to the first substantive change after some preliminary work gets done.

Task 1: I am going to be cleaning up my personal web site and moving it to a host that allows me more options for what I may do with it. I actually started this part of the project over the weekend. I’m still working on getting the site working at its new host location. When I finish, I wish to use it as more of a collaborative site where I can work with others on projects that will be to our mutual benefit.

Task 2: I have written in the past that I think that one of the most important projects a person can work on is to teach critical thinking skills to young people. By teaching critical thinking skills, I do not need to worry about whether I am right or wrong on any specific subject such as desire utilitarianism. Young people will grow to be individuals better able to discern what makes sense from what does not.

In fact, an improvement in critical thinking skills is a useful prerequisite for just about every project a rational person wants to pursue. Do you want to fight global warming? Then give young people better critical thinking skills. Do you want to find a cure for cancer? Then give young people better critical thinking skills. So, once I get my personal web site cleaned up, I will start devoting at least a part of my time to this project.

Task 3: I am going to quit being a loner and ask for more help – and be willing to accept more help from people who volunteer. There were a number of people who stepped forward on their own to try to get an entry in Desire Utilitarianism included on Wikipedia. This was a noble and humbling effort. Regardless of the success of that specific effort, there is work like that to be done.

Combining Task 2 with Task 3, I believe I would like to invest some money into the coordination of stories, games, and lesson plans for teaching critical thinking skills to young people. This means (1) asking for money, (2) using the money to pay people to provide the materials, and (3) making those materials available to people who might want to use them.

We’ll see what I can accomplish along these lines.

In the mean time, I fully intend to give my first priority to writing the essays for this blog.

I also want to expand my presentation options to make these ideas available to a wider audience. This means writing papers that I hope to submit to more mainstream publications, and looking for opportunities to present these ideas in debates, webcasts, and the like. In this regard, I would like to further ask for help from the studio audience. If there is somebody that you have contact with, or somebody that you think I should contact, the assistance would be appreciated.

Well, this means that I have a lot of work to do.

Becoming a Better Person

Today's posting comes via another question from the studio audience.

A person with good desires has it made. When she asks the question, “What should I do?” the answer comes back, “Whatever you want to do.” The person with good desires is somebody who wants to find a cure for diabetes, or wants to prevent the suffering caused by malaria, or wants to teach children about the real world. This is their passion. In pursuing their passion, they also tend to fulfill the desires of others.

The person with good desires can still experience certain frustrations in attempting to make particular propositions true. A person who desires to bring peace to the Middle East may be as successful in fulfilling that desire as the person who desires to accumulate more wealth than any other person. Yet, still, insofar as the good person is doing what she wants, she is also doing what she should.

It’s the rest of us who have to worry, to greater and lesser extents, about the gap between what we want to do and what we should do.

In writing about desire utilitarianism, I tend to focus on one person’s ability to mold the desires of other people through praise and condemnation. This seems to suggest that my own moral character is dependent on what others have done to me, and not something that I could be accountable for.

To a certain extent, this is true. It is true in the same sense that I did not choose my native language – it is the language taught to me when I was growing up. I am not responsible for my initial beliefs, these are the beliefs that I acquired while I was still too young to acquire beliefs. Similarly, my initial learned desires (to be distinguished from genetic desires such as hunger, thirst, aversion to pain, and sex) were acquired by experience and, in part, by what I was condemned/praised for as a child.

Yet, we have the ability to learn new languages. We eventually acquire the ability to re-evaluate our beliefs. And we acquire the ability to choose, to some extent, our own desires.

An easy example of choosing one’s desire is the choice not to engage in activities that are potentially addictive. The decision not to smoke or to use other drugs known to be addictive is, at least some times (as in my own case), a decision not to acquire particular desires.

As I have said before, people act so as to fulfill their current desires, given their beliefs. Their future desires are fulfilled only insofar as they have a present desire that future desires be fulfilled, or present desires that tend to fulfill future desires as a side effect. An addiction is a desire that thwarts the fulfillment of future desires – that is what makes an addiction bad. A present desire that future desires be fulfilled, therefore, translates into a present aversion to acting in ways that could lead to addiction.

Another way that a person can mold their current desires is by acquiring a habit. For example, it is easier to maintain one’s health if one likes to exercise. One way to acquire a desire to exercise is to simply force oneself to exercise on a regular basis. At first, the motivation to exercise might come from a desire that future desires be fulfilled. However, over time, exercise will often become something desired for its own sake. Eventually, the agent will prefer exercise to other things she could be doing.

This, by the way, is also relevant to raising children. You do your child a great favor if you can give your child desires that tend to fulfill other desires, and if you help your child avoid acquiring desires that tend to thwart other desires. One way to do this is to help your child acquire good habits – eating habits, exercise habits, saving habits, and learning habits. What a person does as a child (in order to please one’s parents) is far more likely to be something that a person does as an adult (because she now has acquired a desire to do these things for their own sake).

The same tools that one uses to acquire desires that will tend to fulfill future desires are also available for acquiring desires that tend to fulfill the desires of other people. The same goes for avoiding desires that tend to thwart one’s own future desires – they are useful in avoiding desires that tend to thwart the desires of other people.

In many cases, these will be the same. A person with desires that will tend to thwart his future desires will also often thwart the desires of other people who care about him. It will also often make him less able to fulfill the desires of others he cares about.

At the same time, the person who has desires that tend to thwart the desires of others is at risk of having his future desires thwarted by others. Clearly, this is not a inviolable moral law. It is a tendency, made more or less true in part by whether the society one exists is more or less just.

Guilt, Shame, and Pride

I have written about using the tools of praise and condemnation of others as a way of molding their desires. We can, in fact, use these tools on ourselves. Guilt, shame, and pride are emotions that can be put to good use inhibiting some desires and promoting others.

Now, I am not saying that guilt and shame are intrinsically good things – something that we should desire for its own sake. There seem to be some moral traditions that take this position, that one is not a ‘good person’ unless one is wallowing in guilt and shame. I am saying that guilt, shame, and pride can be made into useful tools that serve productive purposes.

We seek to avoid guilt and shame. One of the ways we do so is to engage in rationalization – we tell ourselves that the wrongs we commit are not that bad and, as such, are not worthy of guilt. Sometimes, if we look at the issue more honestly, we can see that we are lying to ourselves. Admitting the wrong – admitting the guilt-worthiness of a particular pattern of behavior – can have the effect of weakening the desires that promote that behavior. In the same way, admitting, when it is reasonable to do so, “Yeah, I did good,” is a way of reinforcing the desires that caused the praiseworthy behavior.

Guilt and shame, properly applied, will motivate us to make amends. We apologize and see if we can do something to 'make it up' to those we have wronged. These are also forms of self-punishment, that inhibit bad desires in ourselves. We do not want to go through that again.

Acting Virtuously

Even if a person discovers that he has desires that a good person would not have, he can still act like a good person. The key word here is ‘acting'.

I could, for example, act as if I sprained my ankle, even though I have not done so. I would do so by simulating the behavior indicative of a person with a sprained ankle – an unwillingness to walk, a tendency to rub and care for my ankle, and a tendency to limp when I do walk. I do not even have to lie. I can honestly report that my ankle does not hurt when asked, while still simulating the behavior.

Similarly, a person with some bad desires can use other desires (e.g., a desire to do the right thing) to motivate acting like a person with good desires. For example, he may have no inclination towards charity – no concern for the suffering of others. Yet, he can know that a person with good desires would be charitable.

I want to repeat that this is not an example of a good person. This is an example of somebody acting like a good person for one reason or another. This is the case of a rich person who builds a hospital because he wants public approval, rather than the rich person who builds a hospital because he wants to improve the health of a community. This is the case of an actress who associates herself with feeding the poor because her publicist said it would be good for her career, as opposed to the actress who feeds the poor because she has an aversion to others being hungry. It is the case of a person passing up an opportunity to murder because he fears God’s punishment, as opposed to the person who refuses to murder because he has such a revulsion to the idea of taking an innocent life.

This is acting like a person of virtue. It is not true virtue.

However, for some neighbors who lack true virtue, a willingness to act like somebody of true virtue may be the best we can hope for. It is certainly better than dealing with a person who cannot even act as if he is virtuous.

Professional Help

Finally, if one wishes to acquire good desires and get rid of bad desires, one tool that a person to use is to obtain professional help. The more and stronger the desires that tend to thwart other desires (your own future desires or the desires of others), and the more and stronger the desires they tend to thwart, the more and stronger is my recommendation to obtain professional help in dealing with those issues.

Of course, an agent will accept this advice only if he believes it will fulfill the more and stronger of his current desires. The more evil a person has become, the less likely that this is to be true. However, there is an important difference between desiring that P, and desiring that one desires that P. A person can easily have a desire to get high or drunk or to smoke a cigarette, while also having an aversion to having a desire to get high or drunk or to smoke (or rape, or mutilate, or kill). This second-order desire can be drawn upon to motivate an agent to take action against a first-order desire.

It is said that before a person can change he has to want to change, and desire utilitarianism is consistent with that observation.

Conclusion

We are not stuck with the desires that we have. It is not impossible, nor is it nonsensical, to take steps to improve the quality of one’s desires. It is possible to become a better person. People do it all the time. It might take some work, but it can be done.

Beyond Belief 2006: Summary

Every weekend for 4 months I have been commenting on the presentations at the Beyond Belief 2006 conference. I have now covered every presentation.

The main reason why I selected this project is because I was concerned with what I might have missed in the years since I left graduate school. Though I have tried to keep up on the subjects that interested me, this is simply far harder to do than it was when I did not have to divert so many hours to a job outside of my field of interest.

Beyond Belief 2006 brought together many of the best minds in or near the American academic tradition to discuss just the topics that interested me – morality (and, in particular, morality without God), meaning, and value. If I had been missing something important in my attempts to keep up in these fields, these sessions should have revealed that lapse.

My question was whether a person who watched the sessions and reads my commentary would be better off than the person who merely watched the sessions. Could I contribute something of value?

Ultimately, I am not going to answer whether I succeeded or failed. I’ll leave that up to the reader.

(1) Steven Weinberg Faith: A Defect of Desire

(2) Lawrence Krauss: Selling Science

(3) Sam Harris: The Tone of Political Discourse

(4) Michael Shermer: The Art of Political Compromise

Note: Michael Shermer wrote in eskeptic magazine:

I recently found this blog summary of my lecture at the Beyond Belief conference at the Salk Institute November 5–7, 2006. I wanted to call it to your attention because this is the only account I have seen thus far that understood what I was saying about the necessity for compromise between science and religion if we have goals beyond the scope of the realm of these two enterprises (which I do). All of the press accounts of the conference simply quoted the most extremist positions in short sound-bites, missing out entirely on much of the subtle discussions that went on. —Michael Shermer

(5) Neil deGrasse Tyson: Intelligent Design

(6) Discussion: Public Relations"

(7) Joan Roughgarden: Evolution and The Bible

(8) Richard Dawkins: Missing Religion

(9) Discussion: Desire, Value, and Meaning

(10) Carolyn Porco: Awe and Wonder

(11) Stuart Hameroff: Rational Ignorance and Platonic Moral Forms

(12) V. S. Ramachandran: Brain States

(12) Paul Davies: Levitating Superturtles

(13) Stephen Nadler: Spinoza

(14) Patricia Churchland: The Biology of Morality

(15) Susan Neiman: Religion and Science

(16) Discussion: Susan Neiman's Science and Morality

(17) Loyal Rue: The Nature of Religion

(18) Elizabeth Loftus: False Memories

(19) Mahzarin Banaji: Bugs of the Mind

(20) Richard Dawkins Part I: Consciousness Raising

(21) Richard Dawkins Part II: Morality and the Selfish Gene

(22) Scott Atran: Is Religion to Blame?

(23) Sir Harold Kroto: Communicating Science

(24) Charles Harper: Scientism

(25) Ann Druyan: Popular Science

(26) Sam Harris: Morality and Religion

(27) Jim Woodward: Empirical Study of Religion and Harm

(28) Melvin Konner: Hope, Benefit, and Prohibiting Religion

(29) Discussion: Faith as a Vice

(30) Paul Churchland: Rawls' Theory of Justice

(31) Daniel Dennett: Thank Goodness

(32) Richard Sloan: Medicine and Religion

(33) V. S. Ramachandran: Cognitive Illusions

(34) Neil deGrasse Tyson: Meaning

(35) Terrence Sejnowski: The Miracle of Science

I sincerely hope that you find this useful. I certainly found it an educational enterprise. And, as I said at the start of the series, I immensely enjoy listening to intelligent people having a discussion. It is, for me, one of my more basic pleasures.

Beyond Belief II is scheduled for November of this year. I will likely try to do the same thing. In the mean time, I guess I need to find something else to do with my weekends for a while.

Terrence Sejnowski: The Miracle of Science

Old Business: Wikipedia

For those fighting to keep the wikipedia entry on desire utilitarianism, I am honored - more so by the fact that I only know one of you and none of you seem to know each other.

If it would be of service, I would like to note that I have thrice been given a "thinking blogger" award.

Brian Berkey. Berkey is a PhD student in Philosophy at Univeristy of California, Berkeley.

Philaletheia

Import Mind.Reason

New Business: The Miracle of Science

We have now reached the end of the Beyond Belief 2006 conference, with this being our last presentation. In the closing minutes of the last session, Terrence Sejnowski, who is Francis Crick Professor and Director of the Crick-Jacobs Center for Theoretical and Computational Biology at the Salk Institute stood up to give a summary and to start the closing credits.

Becoming Known

Sejnowski’s summary started where Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s presentation left off, talking about the joy of scientific discovery. Sejnowski spoke of a rock on the moon that had been sitting there for billions of years – just another rock – until humans picked it up and studied it. When that happened, something that had remained unknown for all those billions of years suddenly became known.

Every day, in science, something becomes known for the first time. Scientists recently completed sequencing the human genome. Even fifty years ago, sequencing the human genome seemed impossible. However, increases in computational power gave us the ability to take things that less than a human lifetime ago seemed impossible and made them possible. Last week, I spoke of the ‘impossibility’ of seeing what the center of the Milky Way looked like. Earlier this year, I saw exactly what I thought I would never be able to see.

These impossible things will simply keep coming. Sejnowski spoke of scientific quest to sequence the DNA of Neanderthals. This will give us information on how their branch of the evolutionary tree attaches to ours and where they diverge. It will also give us information to help us determine more precisely how we and chimpanzees evolved. Is a particular gene found in chimps but not humans something that chimps acquired as a part of their evolution after humans broke off? Or is it something our common ancestor had but that humans eventually lost?

Of all of the things that we are on the verge of knowing, there are some that are of particular importance. These are facts that will help us discover how to quit killing each other, and similarly doing harm to one another.

The Uselessness of Religious Sacrifice

As regular readers are aware, my standard position is that whether a person believes in God or not is irrelevant. Problems emerge when people adopt false beliefs that make them a threat to the life, health, and well-being of others.

I would agree with Sejnowski that science gives us a great deal of power. Of this, the most important power that we get from science is the ability to save life, cure disease, heal injury, predict and avoid the effects of natural disasters, and feed the hungry.

For thousands of years, people have turned to priests to provide these things. The priests offered ceremonies and demanded sacrifices to the gods. These sacrifices, by definition, made people worse off than they would have otherwise been. That which does not leave the person worse off cannot properly be called a sacrifice. The greater the want, the greater the sacrifice that the gods demanded, or so the priests said.

Unfortunately, the ceremonies produced no effect outside what the laws of nature had already determined would be the case. The killing and suffering was for nothing.

Faith and prayer has never cured an illness or brought about the end of a disease. All of the prayers and religious pleadings of the 1300s did nothing to slow the Black Death, or end an small pox epidemic, or save a child from polio, except in ways where the religious component was purely incidental (e.g., by remaining isolated from the carriers of disease). Science, quite independent of prayer, gave us our answers to the Plaque, small pox, and polio.

Faith and prayer have never increased crop yields or prevented a village from suffering a famine. All of the rituals and ceremonies ever done had no necessary affect on crop yields. Again, it was science who gave us a reliable food supply, such that people in America have never had to face wide-spread famine, and will likely never have to do so.

No act of religious faith has ever warned anybody of an oncoming hurricane or tsunami, or warned people to evacuate an area in the face of a volcanic eruption, or taught people how to build buildings that can withstand an earthquake. Science has given us the power to do all of these things.

Some may be tempted to argue against this by saying, “How do you know? You have not been able to study every event in history to know that there has never been even one miracle. You are simply making a guess – issuing an article of faith.”

Okay, then, there proper statement is that there is no hard evidence for such an event.

However, look at how weak this response is. Imagine somebody claiming that science has never cured a disease, promoted crop yields, or warned us of an upcoming natural disaster. Scientists certainly do not need to resort to a response like, “How do you know for certain? Maybe science did accomplish one of these things some time in the past and you just don’t know about it.”

No, science accomplishes things like this every hour of every day, and is so conspicuous about it that it is obvious. If only religion was so obviously useful, then science is the best defender from disease, famine, and natural disaster in the future.

It will take moral limits as well to do the right thing in response to these threats. True beliefs does not give an individual a motivating reason to do good. If the person already has bad desires, then true beliefs will only allow him to behave badly with ore efficiency. So, we need good moral character and true beliefs. Yet, many religions put a lot of work leading its followers into dangerously wrong beliefs – turning those individuals into people who are threat to the life, health, and well-being of others.

Harm to Self

Those who complain about religion will often mention the evils that one person does to another in the name of God. Yet, it is just as reasonable to add to the ledger the evils that people do to themselves in the name of God. I have mentioned in the past how a false belief that a glass containing poison actually contains clean water can cause a person to act against his or her own interests (by drinking the water). Religion can sometimes have the same affect – when a person drinks poison for religious reasons, thinking that it will bring divine blessing or ‘spiritual’ health.

The people who die because they do not get medical treatment that would have saved their lives, or who refuse food at times of famine and starvation because it is a food prohibited by God, are doing so because they believe that these behaviors produce some type of benefit. In fact, they are inflicting harm on themselves for no good reason.

This is not to say that they should be compelled by force to give up these practices. There are many and strong reasons to prohibit the use of violence to those cases when a person is a threat to others.

We must note that a person who does violence to others will, necessarily, act so as to fulfill his own desires, given his beliefs. These desires might well include desires for the well-being of others. However, this will be one desire among many, with many of the other desires being for things that the victim of violence has no reason to be interested in.

In other words, violence against others is too easily corrupted into an instance of sacrificing the victim for the sake of those who do the violence. So, an aversion to violence except against those who do harm to others is in order.

The fact that we are morally compelled to stand aside while people do great harm to themselves does not change the fact that their faith is driving them to do great harm to a living being – and doing so in the name of some God.

Conclusion

This is just a reminder – anybody can have false beliefs that make them a threat to the life, health, and well-being of others. Certain religious beliefs are simply a subset of these. The true problem is not religion. The true problem is beliefs that make one a threat to the well-being of others; religious and non-religious alike.

However, when it comes to saving lives, promoting good health, and improving well-being, scientific investigation has in the past shown itself to be far more useful than prayer and faith. Any person truly interested in promoting life, health, and well-being will have good reason to go with what works.