Honoring the Dead: Iraq

Yesterday, in speaking about the engineers who were killed and injured at Scaled Composites, I wrote that you cannot honor the dead by destroying that which they thought it was worth risking their lives to build. Instead, you honor the dead by completing the projects that they risked their lives to complete.

This sounds suspiciously like an argument that the Bush Administration is using to support “staying the course” in Iraq. They argue that to leave Iraq is to dishonor the sacrifice of those who have already been killed and injured there – to cause them to have sacrificed in vein.

I have seen presidential candidates and pundits struggle with this conflict – trying to figure out how to say that the war was a foolish mistake that we should end, while at the same time preserving the honor of the American forces who fought there.

Yet, if one understands the argument – if one understands the concept of honoring the dead - this is not that difficult.

Hill 514

Imagine, if you will, a military scene where a regimental commander, Captain Herb Shrub, has decided to capture Hill 514. He has convinced himself that taking Hill 514 is key to winning the war. However, being an incompetent commander, he has failed to perform proper reconnaissance.

In fact, he has looked at the intelligence reports that have come in, dismissed those he does not like, and selected only those that confirm his own belief that he can take Hill 514. So, he sets his junior officers to the task – dismissing those who question his assertions about how easy it will be to take Hill 514.

If Captain Shrub lacked the authority to dismiss or reassign his critics, then he publicly called them traitors and enemy sympathizers – people who obviously wanted the enemy to continue to occupy Hill 514 and to prevent our side from winning the war. When, in fact, those critics were just as interested in winning the war as Captain Shrub. Their only crime was in disagreeing with Captain Shrub on the feasibility of taking Hill 514.

Then, Captain Shrub sends his soldiers to take the hill.

Only (substantially due to Shrub’s intelligence failures) the battle for Hill 514 goes worse than expected. The enemy holding Hill 514 use defensive tactics that Captain Shrub did not imagine. Even though Shrub’s units were able to plant the regimental flag on the summit of the hill, the battle continued, with Shrub’s forces taking significant losses. To hold the hill, Captain Shrub needs to keep pouring men into the battle.

Now, let us put the Bush Administration’s argument for staying the course in Iraq into this context. In justifying his actions, we see Captain Shrub telling his superiors that if those who do not support his efforts to take Hill 514 are saying that all of the soldiers serving under him died and suffered in vein. He tells us that the only way to honor and respect those who have already sacrificed is to continue the attack and to take Hill 514.

Here, we see just how easy it is to answer such a nonsense argument. There is not a single soldier, living or dead, who had committed his life to taking Hill 514. That is to say, if you had asked any soldier on the day of his induction why he had joined the military, it is laughable to assume that any of them answered, “So that I can take Hill 514 from the enemy, sir!”

Instead, their best answers would have been to protect the people that they loved back home and the rest of their fellow citizens. This would mean not only protecting the lives of those people, but protecting the institutions that contributed to the quality of their lives – their freedom from oppression and other forms of dogma and tyranny. Many active military personnel will say that they fight for the sake of the person standing next to them, that the idea of abandoning their fellow soldier on the field of the battle is unthinkable.

So, how do we honor the dead and the injured in this case?

We do not honor them by taking Hill 514. Hill 514 is not important – at least, not in its own right. We honor them by accomplishing the goals that they thought was worth their lives and well-being. We honor them by keeping their loved ones safe and by protecting and defending the institutions that contribute to the quality of their lives. We honor them by taking care of the soldiers that they would have been standing next to in the field of battle, if they had still lived.

We do not honor them by taking actions that threaten the security of their loved ones and fellow citizens back home, or by destroying the institutions that have, for so many years, contributed to the quality of their lives – their freedom from oppression, dogma, and tyranny. We do not honor them by putting their buddies in harm’s way in ways that do not protect these people and institutions. In fact, we do the opposite. We do not honor them by taking Hill 514. We honor them by winning the war. If taking Hill 514 helps win the war, then we take the hill. If not, then the best way to respect the sacrifice of those who died there is to do that which will win the war.

In particular, we have to worry about Captain Shrub’s insistence in devoting more and more resources to the capture of Hill 514, while the enemy is allowed to regroup and reorganize in a village not far away. If the way we honor those who have sacrificed their lives by securing those things that they felt were important enough to risk their lives, then perhaps we cannot honor them by pouring more effort into Hill 514.

A Scaled Composites Analogy

I can illustrate this same objection to the Bush Administration’s way of arguing for staying the course in Iraq by applying their form of reasoning to the tragedy at Scaled Composites. If Burt Rutan at Scaled Composites were to take up the Bush Administration’s way of thinking, we can soon expect to hear Rutan saying that, now that three engineers have died and three who were injured testing a particular engine, that Scaled Composites will dishonor what those men were trying to accomplish if they should choose some other engine for their rocket. We would hear him say, “To honor the sacrifice of these six engineers, our rocket must use the very type of engine they were testing when this tragedy struck. To use any other type of engine would be to dishonor their sacrifice.”

Yet, nobody expects him to say anything so foolish.

Actually what the Bush Administration seems to be doing is worse than this. The Bush Administration is shamelessly exploiting the deaths of these soldiers. Bush is taking these deaths and cutting them away from the things that those soldiers thought was worth dying for, and attaching their deaths to Bush’s own pet project. This is precisely what the Hill 514 story illustrates. There, Captain Shrub takes his fallen soldiers and discards what was important to those soldiers (winning the war), and replaces their goals with his own (taking Hill 514).

A better analogy on the Scaled Composites version of the argument would have the company that provided the engine telling Scaled Composites, “Now you must use our engine, or you dishonor the sacrifice that your six engineers made.” This is what the Bush Administration is trying to pull when they tell us, “Now you must support my plan, or you dishonor the sacrifice that 30,000 dead and injured soldiers have already made.”

[And why do we only talk about the sacrifices of those who were killed and wounded. What about the sacrifice of those who put their lives on hold, or who lose the opportunity to watch their children grow and to participate in their development? These harms deserve no less consideration, and no less respect, than the harms of injuries and death. Ignoring these harms does such a disservice to the measure of the sacrifice that these people make.]

The Candidate’s Stand

So, the next time a candidate gets asked a question that relates withdrawing from Iraq with honoring the troops, I would recommend an answer like the following:

We honor our troops, and the sacrifices that they make, by better securing the things that they fought to protect. We honor them by doing what we can to secure their loved ones at home, the institutions that protect the quality of their lives, and the buddies who they would still be standing beside in the field of battle if they were here to stand. We do not honor those troops by putting their loved ones at greater risk, destroying the institutions that protect us from tyranny and injustice, and allowing their buddies to be shamelessly exploited and used. The question we need to be asking is, “Are we doing what we need to be doing to secure the things that these soldiers thought was worth dying for?” Because if we are not, then we are dishonoring their sacrifice.

The Death of Space Pioneers

I have spent the weekend mourning over the explosion, deaths, and injuries that occurred at Scaled Composites last Friday.

As reported at Space.com:

Scaled Composites workers Todd Ivens, 33, Eric Blackwell, 38, and Glen May, 45, were killed in the explosion, which occurred as they and other coworkers were conducting a routine cold-flow test of the oxidizer system for SpaceShipTwo.

I knew what I wanted to say in response to that incident, but it took a while for me to be able to write it – and, in the mean time, little else seemed sufficiently important.

I think that the people at Scaled Composites and elsewhere are doing something that is vital to the future of the human race. The future of the human race may well depend on our ability to build a sufficiently large infrastructure in space to keep the human race going, even if Earth should become uninhabitable.

I have had some contact with this particular company. I once (a few years ago) was given a tour of Scaled Composites. It was a tour that first required that I sign a non-disclosure agreement; a tour that lasted for hours (including lunch). As long as it lasted, it was far too short. I left feeling that I had been given the honor of seeing history being made.

These are people who deserve the title of ‘heroes’ – people who are willing to put their lives on the line to bring some goodness into the world. They are like police officers, fire fighters, and soldiers, who think that something is important enough to warrant the risk involved in taking on the job.

Clearly, these six people were aware of the fact that they were in the vicinity of something that could kill them. They were at a testing pad, built quite some distance away from any other structure or installation that could be hurt in an accident. They were there because they knew that this was the type of work that required being at such a place.

These are people who knew that death would happen. They knew that people would die, and that they could be the ones who died. Yet, their greatest fear as they talked about such things was not so much that they would die, but that their death would be such a blow to the work that was so important to them.

[Note: I know these things, because I discussed these issues with people in the industry. My contributions were covered in Chapter 17 of the 2003 publication, Making Space Happen by Bernstein Research.]

These people did not hesitate to talk about the fact that some would die. When they had this conversation, in addition to the standard worries of those who faced the possibility of death, they worried a great deal about what that death would do to the work they were doing. Near the top of their list of fears was the fear that after they died that those who survived their death would use the incident to tear down what these people risked their lives to build.

As a matter of fact, in participating in these conversations, and knowing the day will come in which people will die in this pursuit, I have given a lot of thought to what I would do when that day came. I felt it my duty to make what contribution I could to make sure that, in burying the victims of such an accident, they did not bury the dreams of those who died.

The very reason why my blog has been silent for these past two days is because I knew the time had come to do that which I had so often thought about – and I simply did not want this day to ever come.

I should also add that I cannot speak for the six people who were in that explosion. I did not know any of them personally. The only thing I can speak to are the attitudes of those who I knew when I participated in that industry.

It is impossible to calculate how much we owe to those who were willing to take the first steps into a new frontier. We know that they have not always fared well against the unknown, yet they went nonetheless. The rest of us wait, timidly, for them to signal back, “Okay, it’s safe.”

These people, the pioneers, have given us the world. Someday, they will give us other worlds – including worlds that we have designed and built ourselves, to our own specifications.

We cannot honor these people by destroying the things they lived for. What a tragic mistake that would be. We would then be like children who, knowing that our parents sacrificed so much for our benefit, sought to destroy our own lives. Such a child makes their parent’s sacrifice less than worthless.

[Note: This argument calls to mind some of the claims that the Bush Administration has made in defense of ‘staying the course’ in Iraq. I do not want to sully this post with a digression into Bush’s policies. Tomorrow, I will explain why Bush’s version of this argument fails, and fails so spectacularly. But, not today.]

The universe is as indifferent to our survival as a species as it is to the survival of any individual person. Whether we live or die as a species depends on the work we are willing to do as individuals to help secure our survival. Some of that work is dangerous. However, the dangers we face as individuals is miniscule to the dangers we face as a species if individuals do nothing.

How do we respect their work? How do we honor what them? We will show them our respect and honor what they were trying to do for us by building the future world that they dreamed about. We will honor them as humans stand among the stars and look back in greater and greater numbers. To do anything else . . . in particular, to kill what they have worked to accomplish or to strangle it in so much red tape that it has no room to move or to grow, would be to show contempt for what many people think of as being so important, so valuable, that they willingly put their lives on the line.

In closing, Scaled Composites have set up a support fund for the families of those killed and injured last week.

Please send your donation for those involved in the accident on July 26, 2007, to:

Scaled Family Support Fund c/o Scaled Composites, 1624 Flight Line, Mojave, CA. 93501

Blaming Religion: Hasty Generalizations and False Attributions

I would like to use a recent post by Michael in Moderate Christians - Take some responsibility, stop blaming Dawkins to clarify my position on the criticism of religion.

I agree with a vast majority of the claims that Michael makes, and with the tone in which many of them are made. However, there are a few areas in which I think the essay went astray. One involves a logical inference – a leap from the specific to the general that qualifies as an example of the fallacy ‘hasty generalization’. The other is a false attribution – an accusation that a group of people are guilty of something that they are not guilty of.

Hasty Generalization

The hasty generalization comes from making the case that something is true of a particular individual or small set of individuals, then asserting that the claim is true of a larger set, when the second claim is clearly false. It is a case of talking about, “this marble, which is red,” or even “these marbles, which are red,” to talking about marbles as if redness was intrinsic to all marbles.

In this case, it involves complaints about a group of people who write in protest of Dawkins and Harris’ tone, as if these were extremely important transgressions worthy of strong condemnation, yet refusing to condemn those who do worse – religious fundamentalists who are responsible for so much death, misery, and ignorance in the world. Indeed, one of the essential tools for riding the world of this suffering is to raise a more united voice against those who are responsible for this suffering. Yet, those who would deny women an education, or stand in the way of stem-cell research, or demand that Israel be restored to its biblical borders, are given a free pass, while those who raise a voice against those who are contributing to these ills are slapped down for their ‘tone’.

Another aspect of this point is to note that these people tend to condemn the critics of religion for their tone, without even addressing the issues of life, health, and well-being lost due to policies grounded on religious beliefs. It is as if to say these harms have no significance.

I agree with all of this.

However, Michael switches from talking about individuals who he claims are guilty of this charge, to using generic ‘group’ labels to make accusations of a whole set of people. As such, a set of statements that I would argue could be defended as demonstrably true, yield a set of conclusions that are demonstrably false or, at best, do not follow from the premises provided.

His argument would have worked much better if he had kept his focus on the specific wrongdoers he mentioned. Michael could have constructed a strong argument that says, “This is the wrong that I accuse these people of. This is my evidence that they are guilty. These are my reasons for believing that they are wrong.”

Any moral claim, “X is wrong,” contains an inherent assumption of universalizability – “Anybody who does anything relevantly similar to X is also guilty.” Specifically, in Michael’s case the argument would be, “These people are condemning the ‘tone’ of people like Dawkins and Harris, yet they are not condemning the greater wrongs – the life-taking, suffering-producing, ignorance-promoting wrongs of religious fundamentalists. It would seem that their priorities are a little screwed up, because we clearly need to take care of the very significant harms that religious fundamentalists are inflicting on others.”

In making this argument against a specific person for specific wrongs and all others who are like him or her, it is quite permissible to be as harsh as the circumstances deserve. Those who can be held accountable for the loss of life and health can legitimately be made the object of very harsh condemnation. This is not a plea for, “Be nice to these people or they will not like you.” It is a plea for “Be harsh, but at those who actually deserve it.”

If we are concerned with reducing the evil done in the world – the harms inflicted on real people – we should note that many of those harms are inflicted because of a human tendency to join tribes, where they view “us” as inherently superior to “them”. One of the most common tools used in this type of dynamic is to take individuals that one had put in the category of “them” and apply their errors to the whole group. It helps to explain why all Montages should hate all Capulets, why all Hatfields must hate all McCoys.

One of the ways to fight the effects if this type of tribalism is to condemn individuals for their wrongdoing and to use the moral implication of universalization to infer that the same can be said of all who perform relevantly similar actions in relevantly similar circumstances. This involves insisting that arguments take the form, “Here is an example of an individual who has done wrong, here is why it is wrong, and here is my evidence for believing these people are guilty.” It’s main characteristic is that it uses proper names and specific evidence, while it avoids gross overgeneralizations made against whole groups.

This method works even if it happens to be the case that everybody in a group is guilty of a particular wrongdoing. Because a moral argument implies, “All who do similar things in similar circumstances are similarly guilty,” if everybody in a particular group actually does similar things under similar circumstances, this argument paints them all guilty. However, the arguer does not have to make the dubious (and usually false) claim that this is the case.

False Attribution

I have spent a fair number of years defending moral realism – the idea that moral claims are capable of being objectively, knowably true. (There is another type of moral realism that says that moral claims were to mind-independent properties. I disagree with that form of realism, but I hold that statements about mental states and statements about relationships between mental states and states of affairs are capable of being objectively, knowably true.)

In all of those debates over the years, I have found that my allies in defense of moral realism have been conservatives, and substantially religious individuals. They have long held that there are moral facts and that it is perfectly appropriate to condemn those who get the moral facts wrong.

On the other hand, I have found myself arguing against people who have tended to be secular liberals. They are the ones who have advocated, “Thou shalt not speak ill of the beliefs of others,” because no point of view can be honestly said to be ‘better’ than any other. For decades they have advocated the doctrines of cultural relativism and post modernism, against a substantially religious crowd that condemned this view and nonsense.

I am pleased to see that the notion that criticism is permissible is now coming back into favor. I am somewhat dismayed to discover that the accusers are letting their allies who have been the most vocal opponents of condemnation off the hook, and making accusations against those who tried substantially to keep the practice of condemnation.

This is another example of the tribalism that I spoke about earlier. Because people in the ‘in-tribe’ are so eager to condemn those who belong to the out-tribe, they look for every minor transgression to pick on. However, people who do worse, but who happen to be fellow members of the in-tribe are let off the hook – even praised. Accusations are made, not on the basis of guilt, but on the basis of tribal membership.

Paying Out from an Externalities Tax

As your pseudo-candidate for the House of Representatives, I am more than happy to respond to the concerns of my constituents, particularly those living outside of the United States.

For example, Psychols has asked how I plan to get the money raised through a pigovian tax on fossil fuel consumption to the victims of fossil fuel consumption – those who will suffer the loss of life, health, and property as a result of American actions.

If I understand you correctly, the pigovian tax on emissions will increase the price of the energy and products we consume.

Yes, but it does not increase the cost of energy or the products we consume. Instead, it helps to ensure that those who consume the products pay those costs, rather than force those costs onto others.

How can those pigovian tax funds realistically be directed to everyone who was and will be impoverished by the emissions generated in the production and use of the energy and products?

I want to start by making the point that we are not going to create a perfect system. While we strive to eliminate unfairness, there comes a point at which one might be forded to say, “This is the limits of our ability to be fair. We can’t do any more.” A system that precisely matches compensation to harms done is beyond the realm of possibility. However, this is not an argument against going as far as we realistically can go to addressing some of these wrongs.

Income Effects and Market Failure

There is also no moral crime in addressing two different concerns at the same time, if it can be conveniently done. One of the examples of true free-market failure – a case where free markets themselves fail to provide for the social good – has to do with the income effect on consumption. One way that free markets fail is that the wealthy are able to bid resources away from poor people who would have put them to a more highly valued use, but who could not participate in the bidding due to a lack of funds.

In an earlier discussion I used the example of a rich person wishing to shampoo her dog bidding a bottle of water away from a woman who wanted to give it to her sick and dehydrated child.

I applied this to ethanol, where we have the case of rich people bidding corn that they will then use to fuel their vehicles away from poor people who would have used the corn for food. There has already been a measurable affect on corn prices due to ethanol production, and it is expected to get worse.

So, in light of these facts, I have no qualms for using the revenue from the pigovian tax not only to compensate the poor for harms done through fossil fuel production, but to correct for the income effects on welfare. I would use the money to fund an organization that will use it to purchase food for distribution to third-world nations, particularly those that will be hit the hardest by the effects of fossil fuel consumption.

I want to stress that this is not charity. This is compensation for harms done (or risk of harms done). Any protests against ‘foreign aid’ to third-world countries do not apply.

Energy Assistance

This section is a slight aside. Of course, an increase in energy prices is going to harm the poor people in this country, and steps should be taken to alleviate that suffering. Technically, this money should not come from proceeds of the pigovian tax – that money should go to the victims of consumption itself. Money to help the poor should come from a general tax on the wealthy – something that respects the fact that the wealthy can bid resources away from the poor, who have a more valuable use for it.

As your pseudo-legislator, I do not see much wisdom in making this support take the form of subsidies for the use of fossil fuels. The types of assistance that I would support include increasing available public transportation and lowering prices, particularly for the poor. They also include providing renewable energy options such as solar and wind power to augment traditional fuel sources in rural climates.

Efficient Mitigation

Another principle that I would apply to answering this question is to look for programs that will provide the greatest benefit to the greatest number of victims of fossil fuel consumption at the least cost. As I see it, one of the greatest concentrations of people who will need some sort of mitigation or compensation of harms done are those who live in the delta regions of major rivers and island nations threatened with sea-level rise.

As a part of my energy package, I would include funding for studies on how best to help people of these regions – whether this involves creating barriers against sea-level rise, relocating these people to higher land, rebuilding the towns themselves so that its people can literally live on a shallow ocean, making cash contributions for property destroyed, or providing for education benefits so that their children will have options that do not require living on the same plot of land.

Specifically, I would use the revenue to fund studies into how best to help the people who live in the deltas for the Nile River. I will leave it up to these experts to make specific policy recommendations and study carefully their suggestions.

Malaria

I would argue for using the revenue from the pigovian tax to fund an international program that would fight malaria around the globe.

First, many of the people adversely affected by malaria are also those who would be adversely affected by global warming. Reducing the malaria problem may well be an important compensation to forcing people to live with other greenhouse-gas induced problems.

It is also the case that one of the externalities of fossil fuel consumption is to expose people to a risk of diseases that they had little or no risk of being exposed to before. Warmer temperatures will allow the mosquitoes that carry malaria to live in parts of the world that they are now currently incapable of living in. Mitigating against the effects of this and other tropical diseases would be an important form of compensation for the harms done by global warming.

One of the potential threats due to global warming are those who will suffer the added risk of diseases that they have not had to deal with before.

Conclusion

These illustrate some of the policies that I would support in terms of using the pigovian tax to compensate and mitigate the harm. They do not do a perfect job of getting the assistance to those who deserve it. However, the question to be asking is not, “Are these options perfect?” The question we need to be asking is, “Are these options better than the alternative. The alternative, in this case, is the injustice of robbing the poor of trillions of dollars worth of life, health, well-being, and property from the poor, and transforming it into a few tens of billions of dollars in profits for the rich. On this measure, I would suggests that these options would make an improvement

Improvement is a good thing.

Emissions Trading

Today, your pseudo candidate for the House of Representatives is going to continue to look at energy policy. One of the policies that would be put before me, if I were elected, would be ‘emissions trading’.

What Came Before

So far, if elected as your pseudo Representative, I have said that I will not support renewable energy subsidies. Nor will I support renewable portfolio standards. I am not going to support a policy of providing customers with price relief - keeping the price of fossil fuel consumption artifically low - since this will only encourage consumption and increase the negative effects of consumption.

I will, on the other hand, support a pigovian tax on fossil fuels that brings the price of fossil fuels consumption up to its true social cost. I would make sure that this tax covered the additional costs imposed on the people of the world by the energy company’s actions in deceiving and manipulating the public on the harms that result from the use of their products.

However, I will not support any policy that protects the customers from the costs of those increases. After all, it is the behavior of those customers (consumption levels) that we most need to influence. We want the consumer to quit consuming at the point that the net social benefit of his consumption is less than the net social costs, and that does not happen if we shield the customer forom he net social costs.

Finally, as a legislator, I hold that a legislator’s duty is not to vote only for ideal options, but to vote for the best politically possible option. I would violate these rules and vote for renewable energy subsidies and renewable portfolio standards if these are the best politically viable options. However, these are only the best political options only to the degree that energy companies have a legal license to kill and maim others for profit.

[Let’s see. Have I alienated ALL potential voters yet?]

Emissions Trading

Emissions trading, in one simple form, involves putting a cap on emissions. For the sake of illustration, let us simply say that Congress has set an emissions cap of 1,000,000 of, say, 1,000,000 units. It then sells permits for emissions. If Company C emits 10,000 units per year, then it would have to purchase permits to emit 10,000 units. It would find itself in competition with others who would want to emit the same substance, which would bid up the price. If this company wants to save money, or to get itself out from under these restrictions, then it could do so by installing technology that would reduce its emissions, to the degree that it is cost effective to do so.

Emissions trading has a lot to recommend it. For one thing, politicians do not decide where to cut emissions. The market makes this decision. The system employs man of the market’s advantages of blending information and incentives. The system captures the relative value to the public of the different reasons to emit the substance, driving the least valued uses out of business, while allowing the most valued uses the ability to collect the money that would allow them to purchase licenses. The very instant that a new technology is invented, the price of emissions permits will drop, making emissions available to industries that otherwise could not have afforded them. All of this gets done without an ounce of legislative interference, once emissions trading is established.

The objective for a cap and trade policy would be to establish a trading system where the purchaser’s price of emissions permits reflects the social costs of emissions. This includes the price of the emissions trading system itself. Furthermore, the revenue should go to those who will be made to suffer the effects of those emissions. Otherwise, our system is still producing negative externalities and free riders – where the free riders, in this case, would include those who are actually obtaining the funds that should go to the victims of the activity.

Externalities, Subsidies, and Taxes

I want to tie this in with a comment that ADHR made to my earlier post on subsidizing renewable energy.

One might want to claim reduced emissions are the lack of a negative externality, but given that emissions (and associated penalties) are continuing to rise, reducing emissions clearly generates a benefit relative to other possible outcomes. I don't see any in principle reason, though, for denying that someone can free-ride on a reduced negative externality just as easily as on a positive externality.

I have argued so far that it is best to deal with positive externalities by subsidizing the activities that produce them, and negative externalities with a pigovian tax – a tax that drives the price of an activity up to the point where it covers social cost, and where the revenue can then be used to mitigate or compensate for the harms done.

ADHR is correct to note that a reduction in externalities is certainly a good (or, at least, a ‘better than’). However, when it comes to giving companies an incentive to reduce emissions, it is a ‘better than’ best brought about through a pigovian tax. Subsidizing a competing industry still leaves the price of those activities below the social costs, and thus still encourages people to engage in those activities even where the activities do more harm than good.

However, the argument that a rise in negative externalities justifies subsidizing industries that produce fewer negative externalities is something like saying that since rape-murder is on the rise we should subsidize mere rapes. After all, if we can induce people into mere rapes, we prevent murder, which is a good thing.

Subsidized renewable energy may produce fewer negative externalities, but it still produces externalities. It may cause impose less injustice, but it still imposes injustice. This is inevitably the result of lowering the price that a consumer pays for a product below its social cost. Others still suffer those social costs. The only time when a subsidy is legitimate is when one wants to raise the benefits to a provider up to the level where the provider can realize a reward for the benefit he provides for society. A benefit to society is not ‘doing less harm and injustice than the next person’.

Cap and Trade

Now, assume that you run a company that puts 10,000 units of emissions into the atmosphere. Licenses cost $100 per unit. However, Company D, at a cost of only $10 per unit, can engage in an activity that sucks 10,000 units of emissions out of the atmosphere. Why should the company be forced to pay $1 million for emissions licenses? Why not allow it, instead, to pay $100,000 to Company D to suck 10,000 units out of the atmosphere, and save $100,000?

Note that this will not work if the adverse effects of the emissions are local. For example, if an emission produces health effects for those those who live downwind, then it does no ogood to have people on the other side of the world suck an equal amount of the emissions out of the atmosphere – those who live downwind from the plant will still suffer. However, the system does work if the problem is more widely distributed. Greenhouse gas emissions affect the planet, and the effects of 10,000 units of emissions on one part of the gloe can be mitigated by 10,000 units drawn into a sink on the other side of the globe.

Ultimately, the difference reflects the different activities between the price of an activity and its true social costs or benefits.

The way this works is that the sink industry is allowed to ‘manufacture’ emissions permits. The sink company engages in an activity that sucks 10,000 units of emissions out of the atmosphere. The company has then ‘manufactured’ permits for 10,000 units of emissions that it can then sell on the market. Companies then bid for these emissions permits. The higher the bidding goes, the more profitable the sink industry becomes, the more money that goes into growing the sink industry.

Disadvantages

A emissions cap and trading system still has a disadvantage in that the legislature needs to decide what the proper cap should be. Ideally, the cap should be where the marginal social cost of an additional unit of emissions exceeds the marginal social benefit. Those legislators will be expected to try to figure this out while being lobbied by special interest groups where many have no moral qualms against legislation allowing them to bring about the death and suffering of others when it profits them to do so.

However, the question is not whether this is an ideal solution. The question is whether this is among the best of all available real-world solutions. Emissions cap and trading is clearly not ideal, but it is better than many of the alternatives.

Renewable Portfolio Standards

Your pseudo-candidate for the House of Representatives is back to discuss energy policy. I have already pointed out that I would oppose subsidies for renewable energy, but support a carbon tax. The proceeds of that carbon tax would be used to provide mitigation or compensation to the likely victims of fossil fuel consumption.

I should add that, earlier, I expressed my opposition to price controls (they further force innocent people to suffer the costs of other people’s consumption and reduce the incentive to switch to alternatives that do less harm to others).

I also objected to a windfall profits tax. We have good reason to tax a large number of activities, but ‘making a profit’ is not one of them. I would, however, make sure that the carbon tax covered all additional harms that will result from the energy companies marketing lies to slow our response to the threat of global warming. However, the activity being targeted here is not ‘making a profit’ but ‘doing harm, and covering it up’.

The next plank in my energy platform will be opposition to ‘renewable energy portfolio structure’ (RPS). An RPS is a law that requires energy providers in a state to meet energy demand through a portfolio of energy supplies that includes a certain percentage of renewable energy. One of the most popular RPS objectives is “20% renewable energy by 2020”. This means that, by the year 2020, the region affected by the law should be getting 20% of its energy from renewable sources.

I do not think that politicians (including myself, if I should be elected as pseudo representative) have the information that they need to know the optimum level of renewable energy production. Technically, the level of renewable energy production we should have is that level at which 1 additional unit of renewable energy costs more than the benefit it provides.

Energy suffers from the law of diminishing returns. If somebody has 1 unit of energy available (and is rational), he is going to buy the least expensive unit of energy and put it to the most valued use. The next unit of energy will be the second least expensive and go to the second most valued use. Each additional unit will be more expensive and go to a less valued use. Eventually, the cost of a unit of energy will exceed the value of its use. At that point, the agenet should stop purchasing energy and forego all remaining uses.

“Least expensive” here actually means overall social cost. We are assuming that the agent is covering the externalities imposed on others by his or her actions. Otherwise, all of the problems with externalities occur. Also, by ‘benefits’ we are also counting potential free-riders; people who can obtain benefits without paying for them. I discussed this issue in more detail yesterday in “Subsidizing Renewable Energy.”

These principles are as applicable within types of energy as it is to energy in general. So, for example, the agent purchases his first unit of energy. That unit comes from Source X. Naturally, he will use the cheapest Source X available. His next unit of energy will be the next cheapest unit from Source X – until the price of Source X has grown so high that Source Y is now cheaper. At that point, he will add energy from Source X and Source Y according to which provides the next least expensive energy.

What is the ideal ratio of Source X to Source Y that this agent should purchase? Should it be 80% X and 20% Y? Maybe it should be 50/50? Maybe, we have not yet reached a point where Source Y is a viable alternative, and Source X consumption still has a lower social cost than Source Y consumption.

We have one good way to find out. Make sure that the price of Source X energy and Source Y energy reflects the true social costs, then let people buy energy as they see fit. They will migrate towards the optimal ratio of Source X and Source Y.

However, to obscure the true social costs behind subsidies, tax breaks, and other complications destroys the information that people need to make intelligent decisions – and drives them into making stupid decisions that harm themselves and others (or, at best, fail to realize benefits that are otherwise available).

Somebody might be tempted to argue that we do not need the information and incentives that markets provide because legislatures are so brilliant and pure of heart that they can make better decisions than the market. It’s not like they are going to sell their votes to the highest bidder – bidders who are more than willing to promote policies that promote social harm, as long as those harmed are ‘others’ and those who profit are themselves.

I suggest that this view of the power and virtue of legislators is somewhat optimistic.

Another failure that legislatures will experience is their slow response to changing situations. What new discoveries are waiting for us in the next, say, 13 years? What new problems are we going to discover?

There is, for example, the problem that food-based ethanol is an inexpensive way to meet a renewable portfolio requirement. However, this involves diverting food production from providing 2 billion people with something to eat, to instead providing 800 million people with fuel for their car. Yet, the 20% RPS does not pay attention to the cost of providing this energy – it has set an absolute goal. Once the 20% limit has been set, the market is not going to pay attention to the fact that the policy is bidding the price of corn above what a couple of billion people can afford. It has statutory requirements to meet.

One way for the legislature to get around this is to write these concerns into the law. This is where the legislators lack sufficient information to make these types of decisions, or to respond appropriately. They cannot anticipate all of the changes in understanding and discoveries that would affect this law and, once they learn the new information, it will take months to get the updated data into the law.

All of this assumes that there are not special interest groups out to make a profit any way they can – without regard to the fate of the average person. As pseudo congressman working in a pseudo lecture, I can ignore all of the special interest groups However, any serving member of congress is aware of the fact that if he says something this group will not like, he can count on directing that group’s money and labor into his opponent’s camp.

Here, I want to add a comment about belief. Many people view the effects of campaign contributions is on the agent who, without using so many words, simply announce, “I hereby offer my vote to the highest bidder.” However, the effects of cash on belief is often more subtle. Many people base their beliefs on feelings – a proposition is true if it feels right. Knowledge that a particular belief will affect campaign contributions and future job prospects will alter the feeling of a particular belief. These feelings will determine whether the agent actually believes the proposition.

So, we are not dealing with a corruption that convinces legislators to support projects they do not believe in because it is profitable to do so. We have a corruption that convinces legislators to believe in projects that have no merit, though are profitable to the people who then pay professional lobbyists and public relations staff members to manufacture particular beliefs.

The option that I would support, as your pseudo representative, is to simply do the best job we can to make sure that the cost to the consumer of using various types of fuel reflected the social cost, and let the market with its blending of information and incentive work out the details.

Once again, I need to close with a comment about political reality. The reality is that the lobbyists, public relations campaigns, the lies, and the deception of the oil companies will still be there, lobbying for the right to destroy the lives, health, well-being, and property of others to the degree that it is profitable for them to do so. Against this, it may not be possible to get the social cost of burning fossil fuels built into the price. That is exactly what these people will be campaigning against.

In light of this possibility, one may have little option but to vote for renewable portfolio standards. These, at least, may have some effect on the amount of death and suffering the energy companies are capable of inflicting in the name of harvesting profits. It may be the lesser evil. However, this does not make it good.

Subsidizing Renewable Energy

As a pseudo candidate for the U.S. Hosue of Representatives, I am here today to announce my policy regarding renewable energy.

Before going into policy details, however, I want to set the context for this presentation.

First, as a pseudo candidate, I am blessed with the liberty that I do not have to announce a policy that will actually muster a majority of the votes in the House and Senate and be passed into law. Rather, I get to propose a policy that should earn a majority of the votes and be passed into law. The objection that my proposal could not pass because certain special interest groups would block it, in this context, implies only that those special interest groups are engaging in immoral practices – imposing suffering on others for their own benefit.

For similar reasons, it is not an objection against this policy that, if I was actually running for Congress, that this policy could not get me elected. I’m not going to be elected anyway. However, this is not an objection to the conclusion that this is the type of policy that moral and rational voters should support.

So, now, let me get into the details of my policy.

(1) I shall not support any subsidies for renewable energy – solar, wind, hydroelectric, geothermal, wave, biodiesel, ethanol, any of them.

This stand is not based on believing in some sort of pure capitalism ideal where subsidies are never permissible. Instead, there are particular types of situations that call for the use of a subsidy, and certain types of situations that do not. Renewable energy is one instance where subsidies do more harm than good.

The type of situation where we should use subsidies is a situation that generates economic free riders and there is no other cost-effect method for dealing with the free-rider problem.

A ‘free rider’ is a person who obtains a benefit from some activity without paying for it.

Standard examples of where activities generate free ridership include national defense. If national defense depended on voluntary contributions, we can expect that somebody living in the middle of Kansas to conclude that his home will be protected if any of the homes near his will be protected. He does not have to pay anything; he can obtain the benefits of protection as a free rider. Even if he does decide to contribute, his contribution will not make a significant difference.

The courts and legal system also produce free riders. The benefits of apprehending and confining a serial rapists are to be had by anybody who would become a future victim of that individual, or anybody who cares for somebody who would become a future victim. In this case, we cannot even identify who the greatest beneficiaries are, let alone ask them for payment.

The education system generates free riders that warrant government subsidies. Yes, it is true, that a person with a higher level of education can expect greater income. However, the benefits to society of being surrounded by educated people – particularly educated people who vote – far exceeds what the individual will obtain in terms of increased salary. Those who obtain these secondary benefits of having an educated population without paying for those benefits are ‘free riders’.

The idea in all of these cases is to have the free riders pay something, which can then be used to support the institution (military, courts, education) that they benefit from but otherwise would not contribute to.

Renewable energy does not fit this criterion. Renewable energy has no free riders.

The response here may be to say that everybody benefits from a cleaner environment, and there would be a whole lot of ‘free riders’ who would benefit by our attempts to avoid global warming.

However, these environmental and climatological effects are not ‘positive externalities’ generated from the use of renewable energy. They identify the negative externalities of using fossil fuels. The proper response to this type of situation is not to subsidize renewable energy, but to institute a pigelian tax against those activities that contribute to environmental damage and climate change.

Let us look at what happens when we use a subsidy rather than a pigelian tax.

We have an industry where those who consume a product pay, in our example, $3.00 per unit to consume that product. In doing so, the product generates another $2.00 per unit in costs on others – costs borne by those who suffer the effects of pollution used in creating or consuming that product. However, those victims of negative externalities are forced to pay this cost out of their own pockets. The person paying the $3.00 per unit only has to cover the costs the manufacturer passes on to the purchaser. It does not cover the costs that are not passed on, that are borne instead by the victims of these negative externalities.

If the consumers were required to pay the full cost, then they would be paying $5.00 per unit.

Let us assume that there is a use for the product that is worth $4.00 per unit to an individual. He would not use the product in this way if he had to pay $5.00. Because of the negative externalities, he is using the product in a way that realizes $4.00 worth of social benefit, but which inflicts $5.00 worth of social costs. Society would be better off if he did not use the product in these circumstances. However, he uses the product anyway because he only pays $3.00, and using the product provides him with $1.00 worth of benefit.

Now, we introduce a product that has a $4.50 social cost, but all of those costs are passed on to the consumer. So, now the consumer has a choice between paying $3.00 for a product that produces $5.00 in social costs - $2,00 of which are borne by the victims of negative externalities. Or he can pay $4.50 worth of costs for a product that produces $4.50 in social costs, but no negative externalities.

We have two policy proposals before us.

One is to impose a $2.00 pigovian tax on the first product – forcing the consumer to cover the entire social costs of his purchase.

The second option is to subsidize the second option. Here, the government says, “You cover $3.00 worth of costs for this new product, and we will cover the additional $1.50.”

Now, again, look at the optional use that produces $4.00 worth of social benefit. Because we have used a subsidy, the consumer has a choice between paying $3.00 for either the product with the $2.00 in externalities, or pay $3.00 where the government will cover the remaining $1.50 in tax revenue. In this case, we still have consumers engaging in activities that produce more social cost than benefit.

On the other hand, if we use the piqovian tax, the consumer has the option of paying $4.50 for a unit of the unsubsidized Product B, or the full $5.00 social cost of Product A. Since he obtains only $4.00 worth of benefit, he does not engage in the activity at all.

Now, at this point a bunch of Republican politicians will likely stand up and shout that, because we have prevented $4.00 worth of activity, that this is bad for the economy.

That is false. Not only is it false, but it is one of those maliciously deceptive pieces of propaganda used by people who want to get away with harming others for their own benefit. What is ‘bad for the economy’ is having people pay $3.00 to obtain $4.00 worth of benefit from an activity that inflicts $4.50 or $5.00 worth of costs on others. The social cost is still greater than the social benefit. Overall, the activity makes people worse off. Overall, the claim that cutting off this activity is bad for the economy is at best an intellectually reckless claim, and is probably most commonly an outright lie.

Now, having said all of this, even though subsidizing renewable energy is not a good option, it is also not the worst. As your pseudo representative in Washington I would try first for a carbon tax so that the price of using fossil fuels more accurately reflects their true costs. Failing that, there is some merit for moving society from an activity that generates $2.00 worth of externalities on the poorest people in the world, to an activity that generates $1.50 worth of additional costs born substantially by the American taxpayers (who, we may assume, can afford the cost far better than the African desert-dweller or the poor family living in the river deltas in South East Asia whose land will be consumed by sea-level rise).

Now, obviously, there is some risk involved. We do not know what the actual costs would be. Again, it makes no sense to argue, “We do not know what the full costs will be; therefore, the victims have to suffer those costs.” This would be as absurd as arguing that we do not know how much damage you will inflict on others from your next automobile accident, so the victim of that accident will be required to suffer the cost. Or, worse yet, we do not know how much money you will take in your next armed robbery, so armed robbery should not be illegal. The fact that we do not know what the costs will be does not argue that the victims are responsible for coving those costs. It is still the duty of those who do harm to compensate the victims for the harm done.

So, as your phantom representative I could be coerced into supporting a subsidy. If it appears that the fossil fuel companies are capable of preserving its ‘right’ to impose death, disease, destruction of property, and other costs on others for the sake of profits, I may be forced to support subsidies for renewable energy as a way of reducing those costs and shifting them to those more able to pay. However, I will not pretend that it is a good thing. I will not stand before an audience and tell them that this is a great plan. I will only tell them that this is not the worst plan. The worst plan is what we would get if I did not vote for these subsidies.

Unsound Moral Reasoning: 4 Examples

As should be obvious to anybody who has followed this blog for any extended period of time, I am somebody who believes that there are true and false moral statements. There is a fact of the matter concerning the rightness or wrongness of particular acts, and we can discover these facts like we can discover the chemical composition of a substance or the facts about an ecosystem that existed hundreds of millions of years ago.

A more important (though, certainly, related) question is not whether moral statements can be true or false, but whether moral arguments can be sound rather than unsound, or at least strong rather than weak.

What follows is largely a summary post, meant to put a number of different issues I have written about into a larger context.

Logicians have their own particular vocabulary for talking about arguments. A sound argument is an argument where the conclusion logically follows from the premises (the ‘reasons for believing’ the conclusion), and all of the premises are true. A strong argument is one in which the premises render the conclusion to be almost certainly true, but does not guarantee that truth.

For example, the major problem with religious arguments is not that their conclusions are false. The problem is that their arguments are unsound, because many of the premises are false.

One of the important facts about logic is that, even though an argument is unsound, its conclusion can still be true. For example, I could wake up in the morning, see a bright red sunrise, and conclude that an airplane crashed last night. My argument would not be sound. It would not even be a strong argument. Yet, this does not prove that no airplane crashed last night. It only proves that no rational person, presented solely with evidence that the sunrise is red, would have any reason to conclude that a plane crashed last night.

So, take the moral prohibition against bearing false witness against others – a prohibition that I have defended as being more important than a prohibition on lying. It is a prohibition that, of course, covers lying (lying is one way to bear false witness against others). Yet, a prohibition against bearing false witness also prohibits rumor-mongering and making intellectually reckless accusations and associations – because of the risk of bearing false witness.

Divine Command

If a person bases a conclusion of the form, “It is wrong to bear false witness,” on premises that say there is a God and that this God frowns upon bearing false witness, then that argument is unsound. The premises are false. It is like basing a belief that an airplane crashed during the night on a red sunrise in the morning, when the morning was, in fact, covered with a thick fog.

However, once again, claiming that the argument is unsound is not the same as saying that the conclusion is false. This is where some theists make a significant mistake. They assert that, “Because you criticize my premises, you must be arguing that it is not wrong to bear false witness against others. It certainly is true that it is wrong to bear false witness against others, so my premises that there exists a God and this God disapproves of such things must be true.”

Of course, this defense fails. This would be like having a person argue, on a gray and foggy morning, “There must have been a bright red sunlight this morning because the news reported that a plane crashed last night.” It is a clearly flawed and question-begging form of argument.

Even though false premises do not guarantee a false conclusion, they certainly do not guarantee a true conclusion. Many theists are convinced through religious argument to do things that are actually wrong. They were not believed to be wrong by the tribesmen who created the holy scripture – but those were largely ignorant people with a limited understanding of the real world. Their moral science, as it turns out, was little better than their physical science.

Intrinsic Value

Another form of argument commonly used rests their moral conclusions on fundamental, basic ‘ought’ statements that cannot be further reduced to anything in the real world. Here, I am also going to argue that these propositions do not exist. All premises of the form, “There is a basic, irreducible ‘ought’ that says ‘people ought to do X’ are false.

One of the most common arguments in favor of the existence of these fundamental, irreducible ‘oughts’ is that one cannot derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’. Here is where I insert my view that there is no distinction between ‘is’ and ‘ought’. There is only a distinction between ‘is’ and ‘is not’ – and if ‘ought’ cannot fit in with what ‘is’, then the only place left for it is in the realm of what ‘is not’.

Surprisingly, it does not matter which category a person chooses. Regardless of whether ‘ought’ is put into the category of ‘is’ or ‘is not’, desires still exist. Relationships between states of affairs and desires are still real, and desires continue to provide agents with reasons for action in the real world. We may have to come up with a different name for these aspects of nature, but we have no basis on which to question their existence or the reasons for action embedded within them.

Common Subjectivism

Another form of argument that is very popular, and also entirely unsound, is the argument from personal preference. It is an argument that states, “I desire that everybody do X; therefore, everybody has an obligation to do X.” In other words, a person makes a statement such as, “People should not bear false witness against others.” Then, when asked to defend it, the speaker merely asserts, “I have come to adopt the attitude towards bearing false witness that it is something that should not be done. If I had been raised differently then I would not now be a person who holds that this is something that ought not to be done. Similarly, somebody who was raised differently might not hold the attitude that this should not be done. Nonetheless, I have come to hold the attitude that it should not be done; therefore, it should not be done.”

This is much like adopting the attitude that God exists; then, when asked to defend this claim, asserting something like, “I have come to adopt the attitude towards God that He exists. If I had been raised differently, then I would not now be a person who holds that God exists. Similarly, somebody who was raised differently might not hold the attitude that God exists. Nonetheless, I have come to hold the attitude that God exists; therefore, God exists.”

This is clearly a very poor defense. Yet, it is extremely common among those who are trying to defend a moral conclusion. It effectively states, “If I have come to a completely unsupported and indefensible attitude that something is the case, then I am completely justified in asserting that something is the case, even though somebody else who acquires the attitude that something is not the case would be justified in asserting that something is not the case. In fact, if I were to acquire the attitude that something is not the case, then I would be totally justified in asserting that.

It is a nonsense position – and one of my main exhibits in defending my claim that religion is not the only source of absurdity in the world, and eliminating religion is no guarantee against eliminating absurdity.

Genetic/Biological Morality

I have discussed this option repeatedly over the past week. I add it here only to fit it into context. This is the view, “It is wrong to bear false witness because I have been programmed by evolution to adopt the attitude that it is wrong to bear false witness.”

So, what of the person who has not evolved a disposition to view bearing false witness as wrong. Or, what of the person who views the establishment of ‘in group’ loyalty and ‘out group’ hostility, manifesting an urge to attack out-groups and destroy them, taking their resources from them? What of the person who evolved a disposition to rape? If we (or to the degree that we) did not evolve altruistic dispositions, then is it the case that to that degree we are not good? Or does that imply that altruism is not good?

If we look at nature, we do not find an environment filled with cooperation and love. We see an environment that is a blend of cooperation and competition – with forms of cruelty by one creature against others that many people simply hope to ignore. Those people who argue that morality comes from evolution would have to have some place in the horrendous brutality and cruelty we also find in nature, and explain how, if morality comes from nature, that nature (and thus morality) does not and cannot command horrendous brutality.

Summary

None of these arguments actually have much merit. Yet, people appeal to them time and time again. They do so in defending conclusions that are as serious as deciding who to kill and who to let live, who to harm to who to help. There is a lot of talk given recently about how religion, with its false premises and invalid arguments, is used to ‘justify’ support for policies that bring death and suffering to millions. Yet, religion is not the only argument that can work this way. Religious people are not the only people who base moral conclusions on some very shaky arguments.

Here are three examples that fit beside religious-based ethics in terms of shakiness. Some of them are very popular, even among those who are the first to ridicule those who base moral conclusions on shaky premises.

Why Worry about Morality?

I was thinking about taking the day off, when olvlzl provided me with this comment:

One thing I am absolutely certain of, if someone lives in a situation, a country, region, etc. where their basic rights are violated up to and including the right to life all of this analysis would not only not be necessary, it would be rejected as absurd…. Reality is real.

It is a comment that precisely fit my mood at the time.

It is also true that a corpse has no need of the science of medicine. All of this effort that goes into keeping people alive is of no value to one who had already died. Yet, it does not follow from this that medicine is of no value. Similarly, all of the work done in the realm of fire prevention – building codes, materials research, smoke detectors, and fire departments – are irrelevant to the person walking through the ashes of what was once her home. Yet, this does not imply that these studies are worthless.

We can think of morality as a type of ‘wrongdoing prevention’, in the same way that much of medicine deals with ‘disease prevention’ and building codes, materials research, smoke detectors, and fire departments as elements of ‘fire prevention’. It is quite true that these institutions have failed whenever we find evil, disease, or fires. Yet, it is still the case that evil prevention, disease prevention, and fire prevention are good ideas.

Evil prevention takes the form of using social tools to promote desires that tend to fulfill other desires, and inhibit desires that tend to thwart other desires. To the degree that we are successful, then to that degree we have created a society in which actions are motivated by a desire for things that tend to benefit others and an aversion to that which causes harm to others.

If you raise a group of people with an aversion to responding to words with violence – even the violence of law – then you will not need to live in fear of what will happen if you should state an opinion that is unpopular. You can, for example, write a blog in which you are heavily critical of the President of the United States and his administration, knowing that the society-wide aversion to responding to words with violence will keep you safe.

If you are raised among a group of people who have an aversion to slavery – who are repulsed by the idea of slavery in the same way that one might be repulsed by the idea of drinking urine, then you can rest assured that you can live your life without becoming a slave.

This is where all of this analysis acquires its necessity.

If we raise a generation with an attitude of indifference towards the violence that one person may do to another when that violence is justified by appeal to a religion, then we create a society where people need to worry about becoming victims of religious violence. If we want our children or grand children to be free of those particular fears, we do so by teaching an aversion to violence even when the agent appeals to religion to justify it.

On this subject, I hasten to remind my readers that the religious fundamentalist who flies a passenger jet into a sky scraper is an impotent little gnat compared to the religious fundamentalist who flies legislation into people’s life. Those who pass legislation against stem-cell research, early abortion, homosexuality, who promote ignorance in our school system and raise children on a diet of distinguishing “we – patriotic Americans” from “they – un-American” on the basis of ‘trust in God’ or being ‘under God’ – do far more violence to their neighbors than suicide bombers.

All of this analysis tells us that if we want our children and grandchildren to grow up surrounded by less religion-based violence than we do, then we must replace the current attitude of ‘acceptance’ of violence (including the violence of legislation) when backed by religious beliefs, to an active ‘aversion’ to those who appeal to religion to justify harms done to their neighbors.

A significant failures of the current generation towards those that will follow us come from the large numbers of us who are teaching our children an indifference towards warrantless government spying, extraordinary rendition, arbitrary arrest and imprisonment, habeas corpus, cruel and unusual treatment of prisoners, wars of aggression, government secrecy and deceptive manipulation, destroying the system of checks and balances in the federal government. We have had a chance to teach an aversion to these things to the next generation. Yet, with our own indifference, we teach then to shrug off these concerns and go back to whatever form of entertainment is on their ipod.

As a result, we can expect a future in which governments will be far more likely to inflict these pains on citizens and non-citizens alike. We are creating a future society in which our children and their children will more likely be victims of these ills, since we are creating a generation that passively accepts those who inflict these ills on others.

I am not talking merely within national borders when I make this statement. Bush’s support of such things as arbitrary arrest and imprisonment, abuse of prisoners, repeal of habeas corpus, warrantless wiretaps, and unchecked executive power will serve as precedent around the world. Bush has effectively given every political leader around the world permission to do all of the things he has been caught doing. They will maintain that permission unless or until we take steps to deny that permission.

However, I do not see those steps being taken. Even the Democratic leadership in the House and Senate is not taking action against these abuses. I worry that it is because the Democratic political leaders are wringing their hands thinking to themselves, “Imagine what I can do when I become president with all of these powers at my disposal.”

Refusing to inoculate future societies from these diseases is like refusing to inoculate one’s children from disease. It is equally irresponsible, because sick societies have done as much if not more harm to people than bacteria and viruses.

At this point, I will quickly add the principle that I have defended before. That unless we want society to descend into a chaos like we find today in Baghdad, that one of the principles we need to promote is the principle that the only legitimate response to words are words and private actions, and the only legitimate response to a political campaign is a counter-campaign, and that good people have and promote an aversion to responding to these things with violence.

It means getting angry, letting that anger be known, letting those who contribute to these problems know what type of people they are, and always asking oneself who and what one will support with their words and private actions.

As a weapon of evil prevention, these points are far from unnecessary and absurd.

Defining 'Rights'

I have another question from the studio audience that I would like to take on.

I wonder if you'd agree with me that defining human rights is ultimately an act of social agreement (with input from culture and, hopefully, design principles)? Or do you think a set of objective and well-defined inalienable rights can be reached through reason? (Or as certain theists might phrase it, are human rights as absolute as 2+2=4?)

This is a very popular question. Unfortunately, I think that the question itself contains some mistakes. It is an example of what logicians call a ‘complex question’ – a question of the form “Do you still beat your wife?” The question itself assumes that two things are true that are, in fact, not true. Consequently, the question cannot be answered without first identifying and eliminating those mistakes.

Definitions

One of the problems with this question can be illustrated by asking a similar question. “Do you think that (the word) ‘dinosaur’ was invented in the 1800s? Or did dinosaurs die out about 65 million years ago?”

Before answering this question, one has to ask, “Are we talking about the word ‘dinosaur’, or are we talking about dinosaurs?” Because, these are not the same thing. The word ‘dinosaur’ did not exist until the 1800s. Dinosaurs lived over 65 million years ago. The word ‘dinosaur’ was made by combining the Greek words ‘deino’ (terrible, fearfully great) and ‘sauros’ (lizard). Dinosaurs were made of cells.

When a person asks a question about definitions, they are asking a question about the word. The danger here comes from saying something true about the word that is not true about things in the real world. It is like saying, ‘The word ‘dinosaur’ did not exist before 1840; therefore, there were no dinosaurs in existence before 1840.”

So, now, let us look at the statement, “Defining ‘human rights’ is ultimately an act of social agreement.”

This is true.

It is also true that defining ‘dinosaur’ is an act of social agreement. Defining ‘planet’ is an act of social agreement. Defining ‘atom’, ‘malaria’, ‘argument’, ‘hypotenuse’, ‘blog’, and every word ever conceived in every field of study from physics to entertainment are all acts of social agreement.

The fact that defining ‘dinosaur’ is an act of social agreement tells us nothing about dinosaurs. In particular, it does not give us any reason to argue that dinosaurs themselves existed merely as a consequence of social agreement. The fact that defining ‘human rights’ is a matter of social agreement tells us little about human rights as defining ‘dinosaur’ by social agreement tells us about dinosaurs.

Make Believe

So, the question is, “Are human rights a matter of social agreement?”

Here, I am going to engage in a reduction ad absurdum argument – I am going to reduce the belief that rights are a matter of social agreement to an absurdity. Because, if human rights are a matter of social agreement, then the institutions and practices where human rights are used are a game of ‘make believe’ or ‘let’s pretend’.

Let’s pretend that people have a right to life. The way we play this game is that we say that everybody has this ‘right to life,’ which means that anybody who takes the life of another (in a certain way) deserves to die, so the rest of us get together and kill him. Killing him doesn’t violate his right to life because we are going to pretend that this ‘right to life’ disappears – it evaporates, sort of – whenever a person kills another in a particular way.

But is there really a right to life?

Well, no. Don’t be silly. There’s not really a right to life. Everybody knows that. We’re just pretending.

But, if you are just pretending that there is a right to life, then are you just pretending to kill people who violate that right?

We have the power of changing the definitions of words simply by agreeing to a new definition (as astronomers did with the word ‘planet’). But changing our definitions has zero effect on things in the real world. Pluto did not change, simply because we changed our definition of ‘planet’.

Yet, those who hold that human rights are a matter of convention, hold that we can change things in the real world simply by changing the way we talk about them. Call something a right and it acquires new properties – new powers – that it did not have when we did not call it a right.

The only things that we can change simply by agreeing to change them are things in the realm of ‘make believe’ or ‘let’s pretend’. If we all decide to agree that Santa has a ninth reindeer named Rudolph, then Santa has a ninth reindeer named Rudolph.

This ties in with what has become a slogan in my writing:

I do not accept that there is a distinction between ‘is’ and ‘ought’. I accept that there is only a distinction between ‘is’ and ‘is not’. We must either place ‘ought’ squarely in the realm of what ‘is’, or we must relegate it to the realm of what ‘is not’. To claim that there is a third option – a third essence or realm reserved for ‘ought’, that is distinct and separate from ‘is’, but which must not put in the realm of what ‘is not’ is an extraordinary claim – the type of claim that we have no reason to accept, except through extraordinary proof.

The False Dichotomy of Ethics

Now, we enter the realm of the second false assumption written into one of the most commonly asked questions in ethics – the false dichotomy. I am either required to say that morality is a game of make-believe as described above, or I must defend the thesis that the universe is filled with a particular type of value-entity – a type of ‘goodon’ and ‘badon’ radiation emitted by certain states of affairs that we have the capacity to detect.

This is why discussions in ethics so often go around in circles. One person says, “The idea that morality is a game of make-believe filled with imaginary rights and duties is so absurd that goodons and badons must exist.” His opponent then counters, “The idea that the universe is filled with goodons and badons is so absurd that morality must be a game of make-believe involving such let’s-pretend entities as rights and duties.”

The question of which view is correct can never be answered, because both views are mistaken.

Desires exist. They are not make-believe, they are real. They are as real as we are.

Desires are propositional attitudes that provide reasons for action. A ‘desire that P’ for some proposition P is a reason for that agent to act to bring about or preserve a state of affairs in which P is true.

Some of the states of affairs that people have reason to bring about is to promote the existence of desires that tend to fulfill other desires, and to inhibit the existence of desires that tend to thwart other desires.

Everything I have mentioned is still real. Yet, I have not, nor will I ever, need to bring in any mysterious entities such as ‘goodons’ and ‘badons’.

Some of the desires that there are many and strong reasons to promote is an aversion to taking the life of others, aversion to action without consent, and an aversion to responding to mere words with violence.

Another way of saying the same thing is to advocate a right to life, to liberty, and to freedom of speech (to give just three examples).

The proposition that there are many strong reasons for action for people generally to promote these aversions is as true as propositions about height, weight, distance, numbers, or locations of things in the universe. There is nothing make-believe in any of this. There are no intrinsic values involved.

Conclusion

So, my conclusion is to say that I am not talking about defining ‘human rights’. Our definition of ‘human rights’ is as unimportant to the study of the reasons that exist for and against an aversion to killing, as our definition of ‘planet’ is to our study of Pluto.

I am talking about relationships between desires and states of affairs – between the different things that can exist and the reasons-for-action that exist for preserving or bringing about those states. In this, all objectively true statements fall within the realm of what ‘is’, and all else false within the realm of ‘is not’ – with some wiggle room created by fuzzy logic and similar concepts that still apply equally to all sciences.

I think that there are objectively true and false relationships between desires and states of affairs. In the realm of value theory, this is all I need.

Egoism

I have received another question from the studio audience.

What does DU say about the egoist? Rather, what reason does anyone have to accept the DU definitions of "good" and "bad"? to be more precise: What does DU say about egoism? What arguments can be used against it?

Reasons for Accepting DU Definitions

As far as anybody accepting my definitions of 'good' or 'bad', I answered this question most recently just a couple of days ago.

Ask an astronomer, "What reason does anybody have to accept your definition of a 'planet'?"

The answer is "None, really. But, if you think that something of significance hangs on that fact, you are mistaken."

Pluto's properties do not in any way depend on whether or not we call it a planet. Similarly, the relationships that exist between states of affairs and desires do not depend on what we call them.

So, call them what you will - as long as your terms do not make assertions about those relationships that are not true.

See:

The Meaning of 'Morality' Is Subjective

Choosing a Moral Theory

Egoism

When it comes to confronting egoism, there are two versions of egoism that are relevant here.

Psychological Egoism. This is a descriptive theory that states that all human action can best be explained in terms of seeking that which benefits the agent. It holds that, as a matter of descriptive fact, no agent ever acts in any way other than according to what he beliefs benefits himself. No person ever acts so as to benefit another except as a means to securing a benefit to himself. One version of psychological egoism holds that a person only acts to maximize his own pleasure and minimize his own pain. Another version holds that a person only acts to maximize his own happiness and minimize his own unhappiness.

Ethical Egoism. Ethical egoism holds that, as a prescriptive theory, no person should act in any way other than to obtain benefits for himself. On this ethical theory, even if we have the capacity to make sacrifices for others, it is always wrong to do so.

Defeating Psychological Egoism

Psychological egoism needs to be treated like any other scientific theory. We use it to make predictions. We then make observations. If those observations fit the theory, then the theory is confirmed. If not, then the theory is falsified. Falsified theories end up in the scrap heap as soon as a better theory comes along that can handle the observations that the scrapped theory cannot handle.

One set of observations that psychological egoism cannot handle concern ‘experience machines’ or ‘The Matrix’ options. If we can hook you up to a machine that gives you perfect pleasure and no pain, or that we can guarantee will stimulate your brain in ways that produce the greatest happiness and the least unhappiness, would you enter that machine?

Psychological egoism implies that people will crawl all over each other for a chance to get hooked up to that machine. Yet, when we ask real people what they would choose, they often express a strong dislike for the experience machine – it is not their example of an ideal life. They would rather suffer the pains and unhappiness of the real world, than spend their lives hooked up to such a machine.

A theory that better handles these observations says that we act so as to fulfill the more and the stronger of our desires, given our beliefs. A desire is a propositional attitude – a mental state that motivates an agent to make or keep a particular proposition true. Thus, a person with a desire to see her son graduate from college is motivated to choose options that will, some day, make the proposition, “My son has graduated from college,” true.

Experience machines simply cannot make these propositions true. They can make a person believe that they are true. But desires motivate people to make these propositions true in fact, and a false belief that these propositions are true simply are not good enough.

So, desire fulfillment theory beats out psychological egoism as the best explanation of intentional behavior.

Confusing Psychological Egoism and Desire Fulfillment Theory

It is easy to confuse desire fulfillment theory with a form of psychological egoism. After all, desire utilitarian theory says that a person acts so as to fulfill the most and the strongest of his own desires. That is psychological egoism, right?

Not really.

The claim that a person acts so as to fulfill the more and stronger of his own desires simply states that, if you trace the muscle contractions associated with any intentional action back to its source, it originates in the brain of the actor. In fact, if you were to trace a particular set of muscle contractions in my body to somebody else’s brain (say, through a system of remote control), then those actions would not even be my actions. If, for example, they caused somebody’s death, I would not be guilty of murder. Those actions would belong to the person whose desires spawned them. That is to say, the person with the remote control device would be the one guilty of murder.

Desire fulfillment theory’s ability to account for assignments of responsibility is yet another mark in its favor. My intentional actions are those that spring from my intentional mental states (beliefs and desires) and define the limits of my responsibility. Your intentional actions are the consequence of your intentional mental states and define the limits of your responsibility.

Egoism does not stop at saying that my actions are those that spring from my mental states. It limits the content of those mental states. Egoism says that I cannot genuinely want somebody else to be happy. I can only want my own happiness. The happiness of other people can only have instrumental value – can only be important to the degree that the happiness of other people is a useful to me.

Desire fulfillment theory, on the other hand, does not place any limit on the content of an agent’s desires. Just as an agent can believe just about anything (any proposition can be the object of a belief that ‘P’), a person can desire just about anything. For example, there is nothing to prohibit an agent having a desire that P where P = “no child goes to bed hungry”, or P = “humanity or its descendents will survive as long as the universe has energy capable of supporting life” or, on the cruel side, P = “people who do not believe in God are made to suffer an excruciating pain worse than death but cannot die.”

People can desire these things because they are useful. However, people can also desire these things as ends in themselves – for the sake of no further reason at all, not even for the sake of their own happiness.

A person can have a desire that P says that I can have a genuine desire that somebody else be happy, in which case I will be motivated to make the proposition “somebody else is happy” true, for no reason other than the fact that I value another person’s happiness.

This easy confusion between psychological egoism and desire fulfillment theory is part of what gives psychological egoism some of its intuitive plausibility. However, the theory of psychological egoism is like the theory of a flat earth or a geocentric solar system. It has a superficial appearance of being true, but is easily proved false once we start looking at the details.

Defeating Ethical Egoism

Once we have defeated psychological egoism and put desire fulfillment theory in its place, the defeat of ethical egoism is easy.

Ethical egoism says that we can measure the moral value of a desire by some internal or intrinsic property – that ‘desires for the benefit of the desirer’ are somehow intrinsically superior to all of the other desires an individual might have. Since intrinsic values do not exist, all claims that one set of desires are intrinsically better than other desires are false.

Here, some people make the mistake of claiming that because no desire has intrinsic merit that makes it the case that no desire is better than another, that all desires have equal value. The desire to torture young children would have to be declared equal to the desire that no child go to sleep hungry.

This is a mistake. Desires still have value. However, the value of a desire is like the value of everything else in the universe – it depends on the desire’s tendency to fulfill or thwart other desires. People have reasons to reduce or eliminate the desire to inflict pain on others in people generally the same way that they have reasons to reduce or eliminate the chance that they will be burned alive in a fire. Saying that some desires are bad simply means that the desires tend to thwart other desires.

Statements to the effect that desires tend to fulfill or thwart other desires are true statements. When they are true, those whose desires will be thwarted have real-world reasons to reduce or eliminate those desires. They have the capacity to do so using tools such as condemnation and punishment. There is absolutely no sense to be made of the idea that it is somehow a mistake to report these facts. These facts are all one needs to be able to evaluate desires and label them, “desires that people generally have reason to promote” and “desires that people generally have reason to inhibit.”

However, this idea that desires have the same type of value that everything else has – value in accordance to its ability to fulfill other desires, is clearly at odds with ethical egoism. Ethical egoism does not have a metaphysical leg to stand on. Desire utilitarianism, on the other hand, requires only the existence of malleable desires and reasons to promote and inhibit those desires – all of which are very real.

This is how I would answer the egoist.

Political Equality Without Faith

Friendly Atheist has posted a challenge he received from a theist to account for moral equality without any reference to a deity – to explain it purely in scientific terms. ("Can We Have Government Without Faith?") This theist suggests that it cannot be done, which leaves the atheist with a problem. The atheist must either abandon the idea of moral quality, or allow that he holds onto a belief (a belief in the rightness of moral equality) in the absence of information – on faith alone.

Using that definition, it seems the belief in equal worth, equal treatment, and autonomy are more faith based than science. So given that we want these principles in government, is it not necessary to have faith inside government? For people reading this who identify themselves as atheist yet believe in these principles, how is that not faith?

I read the many attempts to answer this challenge with interest, and thought I would offer some comments on the issue.

It does not make any sense to try to account for something such as the moral principle of political equality unless we first know what it is. Try looking for an ukalarn some day, without first answering the question, “What is a ukalarn?”

So, what is this moral principle of political equality that we need to account for?

Equality as the Absence of Divine Right

It turns out that it is not anything at all. It is the absence of something. Specifically, it is the absence of a natural right to rule on the part of one group of people, and a natural duty to obey on the part of some other group.

We can see this clearly when we look at the context in which this moral principle was discovered. It was in the 1600s. For 1200 years Europe had been governed by the unquestioned principle of the divine right of kings. Everybody believed that God picked the rulers for a country by manipulating political events in a way that put His chosen leader on the throne. At least, every leader in Europe had a vested interest in making the people think that they ruled in God’s name.

As God’s chosen leader, every king or emperor had a right to rule, and every subject in his kingdom (and it was almost always a ‘his’ – God seemed to have an aversion to selecting female leaders and putting them on the throne, though He did make an occasional exception) had a duty to obey.

I want to point out that this arrangement of God-given rulers and subjects used to be one of those moral absolutes that religious people like to talk about as proof that there is a God. Certainly, there can be no such thing as a divine right of Kings without something divine to give that right. To question the existence of God is to question the King’s divine right to rule. That was a threat to both church and state, so it was an idea that both had a particularly strong interest in suppressing.

Anyway, in the 1600s, people started to get the idea that they could look at nature, make observations, apply reason to those observations, come up with ‘laws’, and use those ‘laws’ to try to predict and explain what goes on around them. They kept those ‘laws’ that made the best predictions, and threw away those ‘laws’ that could be falsified. They started talking about such things as proof and reason – ideas that came about when they discovered the writings of some ancient pagan named Aristotle.

These methods, applied to physical observations, were yielding truly stupendous results. Galileo and the astronomers were showing that the Earth was not at the center of the solar system. Newton was revealing his laws of planetary motion. Electricity, weather, magnetism, light, were all being put under a microscope – which, by the way, was one of the new inventions of the age.

Some people got the bright idea of doing the same thing to morality. They said, “Let us look at man in a state of nature – without governments or social structure of any kind. What type of society would it make sense for them to adopt?”

Thomas Hobbes argued that life in a state of nature would be perpetual war of all against all where individuals could anticipate an existence that was nasty, brutish, cruel, and short. Rational people would give their authority to a dictator – a leviathan – with asolute power to crush anybody who opposed him. The monarch’s interest in preserving his power would motivate him to prevent conflict among his subjects.

However, John Locke had a different idea. Locke noted that, in a state of nature, we could find no natural right to rule or duty to obey. This ‘moral absolute’ of the divine right of kings that Church and State had been pushing for 1200 years under Christianity, and perpetually before that, turned out to be absolutely wrong.

Of course, neither Church nor State liked the idea that there was no divine right to rule and divine duty to obey. So, ultimately, dethroning the idea that such divine right existed ultimately required a revolution – in England, in America, and elsewhere. This rebellion was a rebellion against a “moral absolute” that God picked our monarchs who ruled in His name.

For purposes of this posting what is important here is the observation that the concept of political equality was the concept that there was no divine right to rule and no divine rule to obey. These are claims that any atheist would have no trouble accepting. It certainly makes no sense to argue, “There is no divine right to rule and no divine duty to obey; therefore, God exists.”

Theists Restore Divine Right

It is worth noting that, with the controversial Presidential election of 2000, how many theists were eager to restore the doctrine of the divine right of kings. Some (including Bush himself) asserted that God selected Bush to be President and, to accomplish this end, interfered in the election to prevent Al Gore from winning the election. The implication we were invited to take from this is that, since God picked Bush to be President of the United States, anybody who opposed Bush or his policies opposed God.

The religious right proved to be all too willing to set the clock back 500 years, back to the philosophy that denied political equality and asserted the medieval idea of the divine rights of rulers and divine duties of subjects.

Which Religious Morals are Absolute?

It is also strange, at best, to argue that religion gives us moral absolutes when religious people change their minds so much over time. First there was the divine right of kings, then there was democracy, then the divine right of kings again. First there was slavery, then slavery became a bad thing. First it was wrong to charge interest when lending money to fellow citizens, then charging interest became the foundation of a free-market economy. It makes one pause to ask, “If religion brings us moral absolutes, what are they?”

Note that “thou shalt not murder”, “thou shalt not steel”, and “honor thy mother and thy father,” are not moral absolutes because they are utterly question-begging. Murder, for example, is wrongful killing, so the claim ‘thou shalt not murder’ really says that it is wrong to engage in wrongful killing. The same can be said about the wrong of stealing, since stealing is the wrongful taking the property of another. If there are, indeed, moral absolutes that come from God, then why is it that the religious community has changed and return to an era where God picked our leaders, and disobeying the leader was the same as disobeying God.

Theists certainly do not preach the value of political equality when it comes between humans and God. Let us assume that some interstellar race were to come upon our little planet. Let us assume that they are vastly more intelligent than we are, and significantly more powerful. This combination of intelligence and power still would not give them a right to rule. It does not give us a duty to obey. We are still, by right, political equals, since neither has an intrinsic right to rule the other.

God’s Right to Rule

The same principle applies to God, as it turns out. Let us assume that there was a God, and that this creature created us and populated the planet with us. We may be grateful to such a being and buy him a present on his birthday. However, even this generosity does not give God a right to rule, nor does it give us a duty to obey. If somebody were to save my life, I would be grateful, but I would have no obligation to become his slave and obey his every wish, putting his will above mine in all things. I have a right of refusal.

Denying this is to deny the principle of political equality, while at the same time telling us that a right to political equality is a moral absolute.

Atheism simply has no problem with the concept of political equality. On the other hand, atheists would have a great deal of difficulty denying the principle of political equality. The atheist would somehow have to come up with a theory to explain where a natural right to rule and a natural duty to obey comes from. A theist will find it easy to deny political equality – and did so for thousands of years. The theist says that the right to rule and the duty to obey comes from God. The atheist does not have that option. So, many atheists find that they are stuck. They have no choice but to assert political equality. There is no evidence that something exists that would break this tie.

Sex, Desire, Goodness, and Duty

An anonymous member of the studio audience has declared, “I thought I understood desire utilitarianism up to now.”

If there is confusion, I wish to deconfusify the situation.

This specific situation began with a claim of mine that I can find no “desire for sex” that that is morally good (virtuous). By that I mean that there is no desire for sex that people generally have reason to promote in others. Rather, some desires for sex are morally neutral (there is no reason to object to the fact that people have such a desire), while others are morally bad (vicious), in that people generally do have reason to inhibit the formation of those desires.

Anonymous is questioning my claim that his desire to have sex with his wife is not virtuous. I make this claim because it is not the case that people generally do not have a reason to promote an overall desire for everybody to have sex with his wife. That his wife may have an interest in promoting such a desire, but what one person has an interest in promoting does not qualify what is being promoted as a virtue.

Anonymous writes:

I understand the distinction that says a morally good desire is one that tends to fulfill desires generally - so you seem to be saying that if the fulfillment is too specific and limited, this is no longer a moral question. It is hard to see why.

To explain limited value is no longer moral value, I have the good fortune to be able to refer to a recent controversy in astronomy over the definition of a planet. The International Astronomical Union faced the question of whether Pluto was a planet. This is analogous to the question of whether specific and limited relationships between states of affairs and desires are moral values.

The International Astronomical Union settled the question with a vote. Whether Pluto is a planet or not was substantially an arbitrary decision about how we were going to define terms. However, nothing of substance depends on the language that we choose to express it.

An individual can say, “I understand the distinction that a planet is something that orbits a star, is massive enough to be made spherical by its own gravity, and that has substantially cleared its orbit of other bodies, and that something that has not cleared out its orbit of other bodies is not a planet,. It is hard to see why.”

If one is looking for an experiment or some sort of experimental evidence to support the claim that a planet must clear out its orbit, there is nothing. Yet – and this is important – nothing of consequence depends on how this vote turned out. Pluto’s properties – it’s size, mass, orbital dimensions – are unaffected by whether we classify it as a planet or not.

The same is true in morality. The definition of value-laden terms are just as arbitrary as the definition of ‘planet’. However, nothing of consequence depends on how we define these terms.

It is a very common mistake in ethics (though every other field of study I know does not make this mistake) to think that the arbitrariness of terms has some sort of significant theoretical or metaphysical implications. No set of definitions will change the desires that exist, or the relationships between states of affairs and desires, or the relationships between desires and other desires. In the same way that facts about ‘Pluto’ are independent of our definition of ‘planet’, what is true or false about the relationships between states of affairs and desires are independent of the language we use to talk about them.

For these reasons, I have often said (when confronted with somebody who asserts that the arbitrariness of moral terms is in some way significant) that I will use whatever set of terms somebody may want me to use. Changing definitions will not affect the substance of the theory one iota. It will only change the language used to express that theory.

Having said all of this – having said that it is fruitless to look for some piece of data that compels the use of one term over another, there are still reasons for using a term like ‘moral’ one way or another. One of those reasons is that a particular use best fits the way people have been using the term, so it generates the least confusion to use a term in a particular way. There is no law of nature that prohibits me from using the term ‘oxygen’ when talking about atoms with 6-protons, but most people who read the term will expect me to be talking about atoms with 8 protons.

Moral terms are used to refer to universal principles – principles that apply to everybody. If a person says, “It is wrong for A to do X,” he is understood to mean, “It is wrong for anybody who is in a situation like A’s to do anything like X.” Somebody who says that lying is wrong is saying that nobody should lie. Somebody who says that capital punishment is murder is understood to mean that no person should engage in capital punishment.

In fact, this is how we distinguish ‘morality’ from ‘culture’. If people in a society who say that people should do X hold that there is nothing particularly wrong with not doing X, but we simply have a tradition of doing X, then doing X is considered an aspect of culture. However, if those who hold that doing X is something that everybody should do – that there is something wrong with anybody not doing X – then that is taken to be a moral prescription.

Even if Anonymous desires sex with his wife, we can imagine a couple where neither one has a desire to have sex with the other. Imagine a couple where the man received a war wound that castrated him (thus significantly reducing his desire for sex) while the woman simply never acquired much of an interest in the activity. This couple can still be very much in love – concerned for each other’s welfare and dedicated to a life together – without sexual desire.

The fact that we can imagine such a case, and that there is nothing wrong with such an arrangement – that it is simply an alternative lifestyle – suggests that it is more appropriate to put the desire for sex is permissible – neither good nor bad in the moral sense, but not a moral virtue. The couple in the example above is not vicious (lacking virtue), they are just different.

Please note: this is not a test for whether something is, in fact, right or wrong or whether a trait is virtuous or vicious. We cannot reliably measure the moral quality of an act or trait through these types of intuitive tests. What these intuitions measure if the fact that we are in the habit of using the term ‘moral’ when applying it to universal traits, and withholding its use when violations are not ‘wrong’, but only ‘different’.

Anonymous also comments:

If I asked instead whether a general desire to love one's wife was a good desire, it surely would be - it would tend to fulfill the desires of most wives. Hurrah for people who love their spouses and boo to people who neglect them! So why does it stop being a good desire in a specific instance?

First, I need to distinguish between ‘to love one’s wife’ with ‘to have a desire for sex with one’s wife’. Many people love others that they have no desire to have sex with, and have desires to have sex with others they do not love. To avoid confusion, we must keep these two attitudes distinct. I wish to continue to focus on the desire to have sex. There is a distinction between the statement, “Hurrah for people who love their spouses,” and “Hurrah for people who desire sex with their spouses.”

Consider, for example, the difference between the statements, “Hurrah for the parent who loves his child,” and “Hurrah for the parent who desires sex with his child.” Clearly, the statements are not equivalent.

Certainly, it makes sense to say, “Hurrah for the couple who love each other,” but even here, for this to be a moral requirement, we would have to say that there is something vicious (not just different, but evil) in those who simply have no interest in being a couple. Some people may view the life of the confirmed bachelor or spinster to be missing something and have pity on them (a pity, I hold, is misplaced if the individual never had desires left unfulfilled in the absence of such a relationship), but this is not the same as calling such a person evil.

Finally, I want to discuss Anonymous’ claim, But celibacy would be less good by this standard..

Celibacy is certainly something we have little reason to promote as a national standard. This merely means that celibacy is not a virtue. It does not imply that celibacy is a vice. We can certainly get along quite well if some people are celibate. In fact, with the growing population problem, celibacy may well become a growing virtue as time goes by – something we have more and more reason to promote. Unless we have a reason to prohibit all sex, celibacy will not be a moral virtue. However, it could be supererogatory – something we have reason to promote through praise in the sense of saying that those who refrain from sex are acting above and beyond the call of duty.

Desire utilitarianism states that morality is substantially concerned with the malleable desires that we have reason to promote or inhibit universally – desires such as an aversion to lying and a worry over doing harm to others that keeps us vigilant against potential harm. There are lots of different relationships between desires and states of affairs in the world. We speak of some of them using terms like ‘rights’, ‘duty’, ‘obligation’. ‘virtue’, ‘prohibition’. ‘responsibility’, and the like.

However we have other terms that we tend to use when referring to other relationships between states of affairs and desires. ‘Useful’, ‘pretty’, ‘dangerous’, ‘disease’, ‘broken’. Some of these terms are used to refer to things that are good, without claiming that they are a moral virtue or an obligation where those who do not share the characteristic may be condemned.

We have divided the value universe up into different types of goods, just as we have divided the solar system up into planets, asteroids, moons, comets, and the like. The distinctions are arbitrary, but the study of the things that we apply these terms to are not.

Suicide

I have a request from the studio audience to address the moral issue of suicide.

Many "relativists" argue that suicide should be morally acceptable because (to overly simplify their position) you're not harming anyone but yourself and relate to smoking or any other self-destructive liberty. They also argue from the standpoint that condemning suicide promotes the extension of the torture of enduring life itself when suicide is desired. Finally, they argue against the ability for external forces to properly discern between euthanasia and suicide.

One way to interpret this is as a question about the morality of a specific act of suicide. The only possible answer to this question is, “It depends.” Even the act of torturing a child can be made permissible, even obligatory, if we put enough at stake on the other side of the equation. Have some alien race threaten to permanently torture every human on Earth unless you torture one child for one hour, and it becomes permissible. Now, a good person would have such an aversion to torturing a child that this act will likely leave permanent psychological scars (nightmares or even some sort of psychotic break), but this is not an argument against the permissibility of the act.

Condemning Suicide

If we are going to talk about suicide in general terms, then desire utilitarianism suggests that we look at the question of whether people generally have reason to use the tools of social condemnation to promote an aversion to taking one’s own life.

Here, some critics might sarcastically ask, “How are you going to condemn the person who wrongfully takes his own life? Are you going to send him to his room? Are you going to have him whipped?”

In earlier times, this was a common reaction to suicide, and it was a perfectly rational response. The purpose of condemnation is not so much to change the behavior of the person being condemned, but to change the behavior of everybody else. Banishment of the body from the community cemetery is unlikely to build remorse in the heart of the person who has already taken his own life. However, it is likely to build an aversion to suicide in those who are still alive, causing them to think, “I do not want to be thought of in that way, even after I die.”

Prima Facie Argument from Freedom

We can start this analysis from the fundamental argument for freedom. Earlier, I defended freedom on the grounds that each agent is the most knowledgeable and least corruptible individual to put in charge of directing each individual life. Where we are looking for desires that tend to fulfill other desires, a desire for individual liberty puts the most knowledgeable and least corruptible agent in charge of each life, so it would be a desire that tends to fulfill other desires.

This argues that the burden of proof is on those who would condemn suicide. This burden would not be easy to overcome. The person making the claim needs to overcome the presumption that each person is the most knowledgeable and least corruptible agent to put in charge of his own life (or death).

However, we are not completely lacking in arguments that claim to be able to do exactly this.

A Desire to Protect and Preserve Life

Life is an almost universal means to fulfillment of one’s desires. With few exceptions, any desire that an agent may happen to have can be more easily fulfilled by an agent who is alive than an agent who is dead. I am certain that I would suffer a significant decrease in productivity when it comes to writing essays for this blog if I were to suffer an unexpected (or even an expected) loss of life.

One of the ways that we can better secure our lives from being terminated is to promote a general aversion to the taking of a life. We have a great many string reasons for praising those who act so as to protect and preserve life, while condemning those who take life. One potential problem with capital punishment that I have mentioned earlier is that, as children hear adults cheer and applaud any range of killings, they may grow up to have a weekend aversion to killing, thus find it easier to become killers.

It certainly seems to be the case that societies whose citizens are so averse to killing that they even have an aversion to capital punishment may raise fewer murders. Similarly, a society that teaches its children to be so averse to killing that even self-killing is made loathsome might also raise fewer murderers.

In the absence of hard empirical evidence on this issue, we must make do with anecdotal and other less reliable evidence, keeping in mind that controlled scientific research could bring all of this into question.

Anyway, we have at least some anecdotal evidence that societies that are more lenient on suicide and euthanasia still have lower murder rates. People, it seems, have the ability to distinguish between the wrongness of killing others, and the permissibility of killing self.

We see further evidence of this in the fact that we do not seem to need a more general prohibition on putting a person at risk of harm. People seem quite capable of morally distinguishing between putting oneself at risk of harm (which is permissible) and putting others at risk of harm (which is generally prohibited)..

So, we do not yet have good reason to override the presumption in favor of liberty.

Bad Desires and False Beliefs

Still, we may have another reason to promote an aversion to killing self – because those who do so tend to do so for poor reasons.

For example, there is a genetic disorder that causes those afflicted with it to gnaw their own flesh, biting off their own lips and fingers. We may assume that the biting off of one’s own body parts is a desire that tends to thwart other desires. We certainly have reason to condemn those who have this desire, if we had reason to think that condemnation would do any good. Failing that, we have reason to call this affliction an illness, and take steps to prevent these people from doing that which they desire to do. For example, parents of children with this disorder may seek to have the child’s teeth removed.

Some percentage of suicides are due to depression or some other irrational desire. Other suicides are due to miscalculation over what the future will be like. Some suicides are based on false beliefs (e.g., that one will appear in a spaceship riding in the tail of a comet or that the cult one belongs to is under attack and all will be taken away and seduced into an evil life. Some suicides are done as a form of attack, by people think, “I’ll show you. I’ll make you suffer for what you did to me.”

Where rational suicides are the exception, and suicides grounded on mistakes are the rule, and there is enough evidence of this to override a presumption that each individual is the best informed and least corruptible agent of his own actions, we have reason to institute an aversion to suicide. This suicide will prevent people from doing that which, if they were fully informed with good desires, they would clearly not do.

The claim that a person who is considering suicide is mentally ill by definition - that no rational person would ever consider taking his or her own life – is patently false. There are clearly desires that can sometimes be better fulfilled by death than by life. One such desire is an aversion to pain. In situations where there is no way for a conscious brain to block out some pain, death may be a better way to fulfill a desire to be free of pain than conscious life, and unconscious life or life under so many drugs that one cannot function may justifiably be claimed to be as bad as death, at least when it comes to the agent’s ability to fulfill other desires.

However, the fact that there may be instances in which suicide is a rational option does not imply that society lacks good reason to condemn suicide. I once read a case of a person with obsessive/compulsive disorder being shot in the head. The injury did not kill him. In fact, it seemed to have cured his obsessive-compulsive disorder. The fact that there is an instance where being shot in the head produced good results does not change the fact that society has reason to promote an overall aversion to shooting people in the head.

The Old and the Young

As it turns out, instances in which a person can best fulfill the more and the stronger of his or her desires by dying are not that rare – particularly as people near the ends of their lives and who are in extreme pain. It also applies to people who have lost the ability to act so as to fulfill their desires – where there an empty shell – still ‘living’ in a technical sense, but with possibility of beliefs and desires motivating actions that aim to make true a valued state of affairs.

At the same time, we may expect that those who take their own lives for foolish reasons are those who are younger. Indeed, we tend to put greater restrictions on those who are younger precisely because they have a greater tendency to do things that they will regret, and will not be able to undo.

This suggests that there is a curious split in the effects of our attitudes towards suicide. There is reason to condemn suicide in the young if this prevents young people from performing actions that will tend to thwart their own desires and the desires of others, while permitting suicide in the old who can get relief from suffering through death, or who have already died in all but an overly technical sense of the word.

Furthermore, this is not a hard distinction, since there are young people who can be in extreme misery, and older people enjoying life and still capable of acting so as to fulfill their own desires.

An Ideal Position

Ideally, I hold that society should treat suicide as a medical condition. People who think that they may be better able to fulfill the more and stronger of their desires through death rather than life should be free to go to a doctor. A doctor can check their assumptions, run physical tests, and check to see if depression or some misunderstanding of the relevant facts is present. If it is not present, then the physician can administer the treatment that best fulfills the desires of the patient.

This will, unfortunately, require making some judgment call on the merit of the desires that would be fulfilled by death. The patient who comes in seeking an end to his life because he wishes to escape death, or he wishes to make his former lover feel bad, would not be permitted to fulfill those particular desires – at least, not with a doctor’s aid. Doctors shall not be made accomplices in a patient’s wish to do harm to others.

This brings up a principle in medicine that says to do no harm. However, when it can be demonstrated that a patient’s desires are better fulfilled in death than in life, then forcing the patient to continue living is not in that patient’s interests. In this case, life is an imposition that harms the patient. Death is a harm when death prevents a person from fulfilling her desires, and life is a harm when life prevents a patient from fulfilling her desires.

If such a system existed, then we can reasonably condemn anybody who seeks what we might call a ‘freelance’ suicide. These people (in most cases) may be considered foolish or evil – failing to show the proper appreciation for a careful analysis of the facts that we have reason to demand that all people seek.

However, in a society where the work is left up to amateurs, and where no professional option is available, we should not be surprised to find a society where amateurs are constantly mucking up the operation – committing suicide when they need not, and doing so (or attempting to do so) in sloppy ways that simply compound the misery and suffering involved.

Having said this much, there are a couple of additional concerns, that I discussed in the posting on Physician Assisted Suicide.

This, ultimately, is how I would address the issue of suicide.

Externalities and Space Development

It’s my birthday, so, today, I am going to take a detour into issues of personal interest.

Today’s posting will fit into the general themes of the past couple of days, but will apply them to the issue of space development, which continues to be the focus of at least of cluster of brain cells when I have spare time.

Externalities

One of the issues of the past few days has been the issue of externalities – people performing actions that threaten the life, health, and well-being of others without having to compensate those people for the costs. An industry that produces externalities allows the people involved in that industry to profit from the destruction of the things that are of value to other people. In some cases, it takes their lives.

One aspect of space development is that it is one area of industrial development that it can easily be designed to produce few externalities.

Energy Production

In space, we can expect energy to come primarily from two sources; photovoltaic (the use of solar cells to convert sunlight directly into energy), and solar concentration (the use of mirrors to focus solar energy on a reservoir that turns liquid into steam which turns a turbine. Both of these forms of energy production in space has significant advantages over similar systems on Earth. There are no clouds. There is no night. There is no atmosphere blocking the full force of the sun’s energy.

There are no CO2 emissions to contribute to global warming, no spent nuclear fuel rods that need to be disposed of, no windmills to clutter the landscape and chop up migrating birds, none of the problems with being able to produce energy only when the wind is blowing or the sky is clear, no building of huge reservoirs behind dams, or any of those effects.

There is a problem with getting the energy to those who use it. Some systems advocate beaming the energy down to Earth using microwaves. This would generate some potential externalities. Yet, I tend to think in terms of using the energy where it is harvested.

Space Mining and Manufacturing

A mining and manufacturing ship pulls up to an asteroid. A great many asteroids in space appear to be gravel piles held together by their own gravity. They are a loose collection of dust and rocks waiting to be turned into something useful.

A space manufacturing center would pull up to the asteroid, take these chunks of rock, feed them into a grinder to pulverize them, send them through a (solar powered) processing plant to extract the useful materials (oxygen, water, methane, ammonia, aluminum, iron), and spit the mine tailings out the other end.

However, in space, there is no such thing as a ‘waste product’. One of the things that we need in space is radiation shielding. Radiation shielding consists of think walls of anything you have available which can absorb the high energy particles that otherwise contaminate space. Two aluminum sheets with this space debris sandwiched in between would make useful radiation shielding.

So, everything has a use.

As far as providing for the needs of earth, one way to do so is not to beam energy down to the Earth’s surface, but to drop refined mining material onto the surface – huge chunk of iron or aluminum that has already been mined and refined without contaminating one iota of Earth’s delicate environment.

Where possible, these things can even be molded into their final form in space – into I beams and sheet metal or whatever other materials those living on the surface of the future earth may have a use for.

Externalities in Space

Space itself will have some externalities. The externalities we need to worry about include orbiting debris – bullets and cannonballs travelling at 17,500 miles per hour that are the remnants of spacecraft that have disintegrated, either accidentally or intentionally. Those countries who produce this rubble are forcing others to endure a cost – either the cost of shielding their people and materials, the cost of losing their people and materials, or the cost of not utilizing these resources. These are externalities where those who engage in debris-producing activities expect others to pay for the harm that these people do.

Launch and entry back into the atmosphere will have some effects on the atmosphere, owever, , but it would take a great many launches and entries to compare to the damage done by earth-based energy production, mining, and manufacturing. One of the most useful rocket fuels is a combination of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen – which produces water – which is hardly a dangerous chemical to be putting into the air.

I do not know the effects of bring materials back down from space. Over 100 tons of meteors hit the earth’s atmosphere every day, and that seems to produce no ill effects. It will take a while for people to be dropping 100 tons per day down to earth, yet everybody who is interested in space development hopes for the day that this benchmark is passed.

A third externality to be concerned with is obstructing the view. Currently, we can see satellites orbiting the earth. If you look out after sunset or before dawn, while the sky is dark, you can see the occasional satellite drifting across the sky, like an airplane. Now, we do not hear a great deal of concern about airplanes polluting the view of space at night (or of the sky in daylight), and no reason to hold that the sight of a satellite is in any way worse than the site of a plane in the sky.

In these cases, of the externalities we already know to expect, only one of them is a serious threat, that being the creation of orbital debris. Those externalities affect people who put things in space, but have no effect on the earth, other than creating a barrier that prevents people from exploiting space as a way of putting less stress on the Earth.

Timeline

None of this should be considered a suggestion on what humans should try to accomplish in the near future. If that is the objection, then it misses the mark. I fully recognize that it would take a long time for space to reach this level of development. However, in that time, our need for space development might actually be higher than it is now. Over time, we are going to cut deeper and deeper scars into the living earth, unless we are pursuing alternatives that will allow us to leave the earth alone, to some extent.

However, like any investment, the sooner you start, the sooner you will see a return on your investment (if there is a return to be had). The sooner we invest in space-based energy production, mining, and manufacturing, the sooner we will have alternatives to cutting ever larger scars into the living earth.

As my birthday present, I would like to see the appropriate steps made in pursuing these options.

I am not asking for too much, am I?

Capitalism vs. Socialism

Blacksun, in commenting on yesterday’s post, said that:

I have to part company . . . when you insist that the severity of a person’s need should determine their ability to buy something. This to me is drifting dangerously close to flat-out socialism.

I do not recall saying that the severity of a person’s need should determine their ability to buy something.

I did say that free markets contain a serious problem in that it gives wealthy people an ability to bid resources away from more highly-valued uses to which the poor could put those resources.

At the same, I have argued that one of the significant benefits of a free market is that, where property rights (including each person’s property right in their own life and their own physical body) are properly protected, free markets do an excellent job of tying information on what is in the public interest with an incentive to act in the public interest.

I have covered some of the problems with interfering with markets in an article I wrote called Price Gouging, and used it to describe how Democrats will make our energy and global environment situation worse in a posting on Energy Policy. There are also relevant points to be found in my essay, The Value of Freedom.

Flat-out socialism utterly fails to provide enough information to decision makers while at the same time incentivizing them to act in the public interest. Flat-out capitalism is far more efficient at linking incentives to act with the public interest when that system is set up so as to recognize the rights of all individuals – including the rights of the poor to their own life, body, liberty, and property. However, even ‘perfect’ capitalism does not do a perfect job of incentivizing people to act in the public interest. This ideal outcome is distorted by the ability of the rich to bid resources away from the more highly valued uses to which the poor would put those same resources.

Perhaps this inefficiency is unavoidable, but it is an inefficiency nonetheless – a case where the ‘invisible hand’ of the market does real harm, even in its purist and most ideal form.

Economic Systems and Intrinsic Values

Intrinsic values do not exist. Many arguments that people give, arguing for one economic system over another, do so by suggesting that certain actions or states of affairs are intrinsically better than others. Every argument of this type is grounded on a false premise – as false as any argument that grounds a defense of one system over another based on God’s will (another entity that does not exist).

This ties in with a point that I have repeatedly tried to make – that there are more myths and superstitions in the world than those that postulate the existence of gods. Consequently, the abolition of religion is not the same thing as the abolition of belief in mythical entities that affect the value of things. There are some myths – beliefs in things that are not real – that can be found even among atheists.

The only values that exist are not intrinsic values, but relationships between states of affairs and desires. You will find no other form of value in the real world. Yet, these relationships are real, and they are intimately tied to reasons for action in a way that something must be for the term ‘value’ to make sense.

Since relationships between states of affairs and desires are the only values that are real, then the real-world value of an economic system can only be found in that system’s relationships to desires.

Note that, in desire utilitarian terms, it is not the case that most moral economic system is not the one that fulfills the most and the strongest desires. Instead, the most moral economic system is the system that a person with good desires (a person whose desires are those that tend to fulfill other desires) can support.

This is because no person can act in any way but to best fulfill the most and strongest of his own desires, given his beliefs – and will seek to act so as to fulfill the most and strongest of his own desires. Expecting a person to judge an economic system based on only one criterion is the same as expecting a person to act on only one desire, such as a desire for the maximum fulfillment of all desires. This is an absurd demand, and an absurd standard for an economic system.

This is why, instead of focusing on one standard, we must evaluate an economic system according to the weight it gives to the objects of a number of good desires. These desires include such things as liberty, privacy, equality, truth, knowledge, freedom from pain, freedom from disease, and happiness. These things must we weighed against each other, according to the desires that good people would have towards each.

The precise mix is something about which intelligent people are going to be debating for a long time to come, assuming that the human race continues to exist for a long time to come.

Common Ground

However, there is one set of policies that the capitalist idealist and the socialist idealist should agree on. It should also appeal to everybody standing on every point in between that advocates a mixture of these two systems. This would be opposition to the externalities that the wealthy are permitted to inflict on the poor – an opposition to wealth transfer system where the life, health, and property of the poor are sacrificed without compensation so as to increase the wealth of the wealthiest people.

Externalities and Pro-Rich Regulations

Global warming is the largest recent example of just such a wealth transfer scheme. The actions of the rich, in this case, will cost the poor their land, their health, and in some cases their lives, simply so that the wealthier people on the planet can enjoy an even better standard of living.

Yet, global warming is not the only example of this. A great many environmental issues are issues where the wealthy are given special credits to kill, maim, or otherwise harm the poor with impunity – with impure drinking water, poisoned air, and the destruction of their land (to the degree that poor people are permitted to own land).

A great many regulations are restrictions on where people can go to find work, and on the types of work that they can have. This means that employers do not need to provide workers with a level of compensation that would keep them from voluntarily leaving for better alternatives elsewhere – not if there are legal barriers preventing those workers from moving.

In addition to the restrictions that prevent people from seeking better jobs, there are restrictions on jobs seeking the workers that need them. One of the first things a company has an incentive to do when they move into a new area and begin using the labor force there is to corrupt the government into keeping other competitors for that labor out.

Warlords and Tyrants

Earlier, I mentioned the warlords who dominate an area, who prevent food from getting to the poor because they take the food for themselves, or they demand some sort of payment from those who would distribute it. These are people that the world would be better off without. Capitalists and communists alike should be unified in seeking their removal. Tyrants and dictators present the same problem on a larger scale.

I have mentioned that I was in favor of removing Saddam Hussein from power. I was opposed to Bush’s invasion from the beginning, but I did not have any objection based on moral principle. My view is that different nations should treat each other the same way different families treat each other. To a substantial degree, parents should be permitted to raise their children as they see fit, and nations should be allowed to organize themselves as they see fit. However, then there is clear evidence of abuse, society has a duty to step in and free the subjects from that abuse.

By this standard, Saddam Hussein was somebody that the international community needed to remove from power.

However, I opposed the invasion of Iraq, even before it started, because it was obvious that President Bush was incompetent, and even though he was doing the right thing, he would almost certainly mess it up so badly that it was better to do nothing, and to wait for a competent leader to tackle the job.

I have heard liberals complain that if these arguments for removing Saddam Hussein from power are valid, then this implies that there are other world leaders we should be seeking to remove from power as well. It is absurd to claim that we should take action against so many leaders; therefore, we should have left Saddam Hussein alone.

Actually, I have no objection to removing tyrants from power wherever they can be found, though it should be done competently, by people who know how to make the situation better, but not worse.

I am particularly disturbed by those who argue that there will always be tyrants, and that therefore we should do nothing. This is like saying that there will always be parents who abuse their children, so we should take no action against those parents we catch doing so.

There are also those who argue that if we allow even a little bit of interference in the internal affairs of one country that we open the floodgates for interference in every country. Yet, this too is as absurd as arguing that if we protect the children from abuse in even one household, that we open the floodgates for interference in how all parents raise their children. Just as we have been able to strike a reasonable balance in the latter case, I think we can strike a reasonable balance in the former case.

A Common Theme

The one common theme regarding all of these issues is the idea that capitalists and communists alike should be able to find common ground in opposing those who redistribute wealth from the poor to the rich. We are surrounded by them. Do this, and we have made the present and future lives of the poor much better than they would have otherwise been. Unite on these issues, and we can deal with the issues that divide us later.

The True Cost of Ethanol

Shortly after Hurricane Katrina hit, when people were charging huge amounts of money for bottled water, John Stossel wrote an article that defended so-called “price gouging.” (John Stossel: Price Gouging)

He used a standard claim that one of the virtues of a free market is that it guarantees that resources go to those who value it the most. If one person is only willing to pay $20 for something, and another is willing to pay $21, then this implies that the second person values the water (or what she can do with the water) more than the first. We should praise the system that makes sure that resources go to their most highly valued use.

Or so the argument goes.

However, this claimed benefit of free markets is quite simply false. Free markets do not distribute those who most need the product. It distributes goods to those who can most afford the product. Often, those who need the product are not those who can afford it.

This is, quite simply, one area where free markets utterly fail to fulfill desires.

In my earlier post I illustrated this point by suggesting a scenario where a person with a dehydrated child goes up to somebody selling water for $20 per bottle. But, what if she does not have $20? She doesn’t get the water. However, somebody else going up to the same water seller, who wants to use a bottle of water to shampoo her poodle, will get the water.

Clearly, the water did not go to those who most needed it. It went to those who could most afford it, even if what they want it for is something that has trivial value.

If the poor woman with the sick child had the same size bundle of cash as the rich woman, she would have certainly outbid the rich person for the water. What kept her from bidding more was not that she did not value the health of her child as much as the other valued a shampoo for her poodle. What kept her from bidding more was the fact that she did not have the ability to express her values in market terms because of a lack of money.

The situation regarding the use of some (though not all) forms of ethanol is exactly the same. Most ethanol is made from food – or from resources that could have otherwise been used for growing food. What we have is a situation where billions of poor people want to buy food for themselves and their children. However, wealthier people are willing to bid more for those resources to feed their demand for fuel – much of which goes for recreational or other non-essential uses.

It is the same situation of rich people bidding essential resources away from poor people who have a higher-valued use for those resources, but who lack the ability to express their preferences in market terms.

Compounding the Problem through Regulation

This analogy is not perfect, of course.

We confront one of those limits when we recognize that, in the case of ethanol, we are talking about a subsidy that will increase the demand for the materials that go into the production of food, and food itself, in the face of a population that is not able to afford the higher prices.

It is as if, in the case of a water shortage, the government introduced a low that required people to replace the practice of heating food over a fire with boiling it. Not only will poor, in this case, need to deal with the wealthy bidding away the last bottles of water to shampoo their poodles, they will also have to struggle against the demand for water created by this new requirement for boiling food. This will make their situation that much more desperate.

The analogy is found between requirements to consume water in boiling food in the analogous case, and consuming food as automobile fuel in the ethanol case.

Imaginary Benefits; Real World Harms

I find it particularly tragic when an individual goes to bed, wrapping himself in a warm glow of pride, thinking that he has done great deeds and made the world a better place, when, in reality, he has made the situation worse. I compare it to a person hooked up to a machine that feeds experiences directly into his brain. In this case, the machine makes him think he is a surgeon saving children’s lives. He is proud of his work, and there is nothing that he would rather be doing. Only for every fictitious life he saves, a real child is tortured and killed. If he were merely to give up the practice of saving children, the real-world children who face torture and death because of him will be spared.

The advocates of ethanol are much like this hypothetical doctor, thinking that they have done good deeds while real-world children are made to starve because of their actions.

There is an important difference between the ethanol case and the experience machine. Ethanol advocates face a world where, if they look, they can see the arguments against their position.

Then I imagine the person in the experience machine being woken from her fantasy. She is told that, while she is hooked up to her machine, every fantasy child she saves results in the torture and death of a real-world child. Yet, she still protests that she be placed back into the machine. “There, I was somebody important. I was a doctor. I was saving children. I demand that you return me to the machine.”

Answer: “No, you were not saving children. You were torturing children – or bringing about their torture, even if you were not doing so intentionally.”

We see this type of denial and continued harm in the Bush Administration. They did not want to believe that invading Iraq would lead to problems. They wanted to believe that attacking Iraq was a good idea, so he simply ignored any evidence or arguments that were brought up against it. It is something they had a great deal of practice in. One of the traits that their religion promoted was the ability to ignore evidence and to stick with an idea on the basis of faith alone. “Invading Iraq is a good idea. This evidence, or these arguments, suggest that it is not a good idea. Therefore, this evidence, or these arguments, must be flawed.”

Again, in the case of ethanol subsidies and requirements, the argument has the same form. “The use of ethanol is a good idea. This evidence, or these arguments, suggest that it is not a good idea. Therefore, this evidence, or these arguments, must be flawed.”

Demand and Supply

There is one more complication that deserves our attention. As a matter of fact, we are not talking about a world in which there is a limited resource. We have the ability to grow more food-stuffs, either for consumption as food or consumption as fuel. We are assuming that the additional demand will increase price. That extra price, in turn, provides an incentive to increase supply. At least some of that extra supply of food-stuffs can be made available to those who are starving.

However, this whole mechanism requires the incentive of higher prices, which is exactly what keeps food out of the mouths of those who have a higher-valued use for this product but no way to make their preferences known on the free market. We are still creating a situation where rich people are bidding food away from poor people so that rich people can have fuel for their vehicles. The slope may be less steep than I described it in the sections before this, but it still exists.

Conclusion

Given the particularly high value of food to those who are starving, there is no justification for subsidizing the use of food stuffs for anything other than this high-valued use until all of the starving people are being fed. If there are any subsidies to be had, they need to go first and foremost to the use of foodstuffs for their most valued use – feeding the hungry (particularly hungry children).

Any food stuffs above and beyond that are surplus can be made available for other uses, such as ethanol. Any food stuffs below this limit of adequately feeding the population means bidding food away from the starving in favor of the least-valued uses that we may find for ethanol.

Of course, the issue of providing food to the poor is more complicated than I made it here. Too often, the food is available, but political or social barriers get in the way - such as tribal warlords and national leaders holding whole populations hostage demanding payment before they would let the food through. These issues do not affect the principles outlined in this posting. It does, however, argue for the moral merit of eliminating these barriers.

We can imagine the case of the two women bidding for a bottle of water and ask ourselves what we think of the woman who bids $21, keeping the water out of the hands of the mother with a sick child who only has $20. What type of person would do that?

It’s the same type of person who would bid up the price of food stuffs so that it could be used in recreation, taking it away from the mothers who need it to feed their starving children. We are that type of person, if we advocate and support such a policy.

The True Price of Gas

I have been devoting much of my free time recently to looking into energy policy – particularly on alternatives to fossil fuels. In general, I have to say that I am not impressed with many of the ideas for promoting alternatives to fossil fuels. However, I fear that if I launch immediately into a criticism of those policies, people might mistake me for an apologist for the oil industry. So, let me block that assumption right away.

If I was named energy czar, I would seek to implement a simple energy policy that would take the decision making out of the hands of the legislature and put it into the hands of the free market.

[I can hear the confused reader gasp, “What? I thought you were going to block the assumption that you are an apologist for the energy industry!”]

One of the principles of a free market is that you have to pay for what you use. Obtaining goods, while forcing other people to pay the bill, is generally known as a subsidy. Subsidies distort the market.

The value of a free market is that it carries a tremendous amount of information and it ties incentives for behavior to that information. We want people to refrain from activities that have a high cost on others, and to engage in more activities that provide benefits to others. A free market carries that information because it internalizes the cost. If my activity imposes a cost on you, then I need to compensate you for those costs. If my activity provides a benefit to you, then, in a free market, I can deny you the benefit of that activity until you pay me for it. In general, this combination of information and incentive, properly applied, promotes actions that fulfill the desires of others and inhibits actions that thwart the desires of others.

Desire utilitarianism and capitalism are very compatible systems.

When people are able to engage in activities that impose a cost on others, without paying for those costs, then this is a subsidy. It is also a form of theft. These types of distortions in the market reduce the incentive to avoid behavior that does harm to others. In fact, given the size of the incentive, it might even encourage people to do things harmful to others.

Many big businesses, while they use the terms ‘capitalism’ and ‘free market’ for public relations purposes, invest huge amounts of money in policies that distort the market, allowing them to engage in behavior harmful to others without paying a penalty, effectively obtaining a ‘subsidy’ from the victims harmed by their actions.

In fact, much of the inequality in wealth and power in the world today is not the result of ‘market forces’. It is a result of people with a great deal of money investing it in legislation (and legislators) that permit them to engage in behavior harmful to others without paying the cost – and sometimes even getting the government to pay them to engage in behavior that is harmful to others. The ‘others’ being harmed, of course, are those who cannot afford to buy a legislator of their own.

Some of them, of course, pass their subsidies on to their customers. When Exxon-Mobile obtains a multi-trillion dollar subsidy to the price of gasoline (allowing it to obtain oil without paying the true cost of oil), it passes much of that on to the driver buying gasoline for his SUV.

We would have to imagine something slightly different, if we were to imagine people paying the true cost of fossil fuels.

Imagine

For example, imagine a driver, having filled up his SUV, walking into the convenience store to pay for it. He hands the clerk a credit card, who rings up the gasoline at about $3.00 per gallon. The clerk then says to the customer, “I’m sorry, sir, you are out of credits. I can take $3.00 from your credit card, but you’re going to have to come up with something to cover the additional costs.”

The customer then fumbles through his wallet, looking through a stack of coupons. He picks a coupon – one that shows a family standing in front of their house. The house has been in their family for a couple of generations now. “Take the house; that should cover my additional costs. And, while you’re at it, take the grandfather as well. Put the credit on my account.”

He has other coupons in his wallet.

Some of the coupons simply allow the clerk to take the costs out of the bank accounts of other people. Those other people will have to pay for his gasoline through higher taxes, which will go to provide the services, that get the gasoline to the pump.

One shows a soldier in uniform. The coupon allows the taking of one arm and one leg in a conflict meant to secure some other country’s oil supply for American use. Another coupon also shows a soldier, but offers the soldier’s life in exchange for gasoline credits. Typically, drivers do not pay these costs. A third coupon shows a village in Africa, its crops ruined by drought, its people starving and dying of thirst. By using these coupons, the individual shift the costs off his or her actions onto others and expect those others to pay the cost, allowing them to take only $3.00 per gallon out of their own bank accounts.

Vault Loads of Coupons

The SUV owner has only a few of these coupons. Exxon-Mobile and other companies have vaults full of them. Whenever they need a few billion dollars, they cash in coupons for the destruction of whole counts and even some nations. They are permitted to go to their bank, coupon in hand, and exchange a whole hospital full of patients for a few tens of millions of dollars.

Of course, they give away a few of these coupons to the SUV owners. This is a bribe for the SUV owner to vote to protect the oil company. “If you vote to end this trade, then you will no longer be able to pay for part of your gas by destroying the life, health, and property of others. If you lose this political battle, you will have to pay the whole price of gasoline yourself.”

There are some who argue that forcing people to pay for the true price of gasoline would be bad for the economy.

It is as if they are saying that the destruction of homes, limbs, and lives is somehow good for the economy. The types of subsidies that I am talking about are the type where somebody is going to have to pay the cost. The question is, who will do so?

The propaganda machine from the large companies that hold these vaults full of coupons, and the politicians who mimic these myths in exchange for political contributions, want to make us think that we are faced with a question of paying these costs or not paying them. The only way of not paying them is to end the activity that is causing the harm. Short of that, the question is not one of whether to pay these costs, but who pays the cost.

Are we going to have the person purchasing the gas pay the price at the pump? Or are we going to give them coupons that they can use to pass the cost on to others, in the form of property destroyed, health sacrificed, and lives lost?

Domestic Profits/Foreign Losses

There is one way in which we can argue that such policies would be “bad for the economy.” This situation applies to cases where the people who hold the bulk of these coupons are Americans, and the people who are on the coupons – the people that the coupon holder decides to sacrifice – are foreigners. In this case, using the coupons makes Americans wealthier by sacrificing the lives, limbs, health, and property of citizens of other countries.

This is exactly the situation that we see with respect to global warming, where Americans hold most of coupons, and the poor people in other countries will suffer most of the ill effects. If we give up this multi-billion-dollar business of destroying other countries for profit, then we will be economically worse off – and other countries will be economically better off. However, at some point, a person needs to ask whether he wants to be somebody who profits from killing, maiming, and destroying the property of others.

Arguing in favor of this system is to say that the SUV owner is perfectly within his moral rights to be using these coupons to pay for his gas – sacrificing the life, health, and property of other people to cover costs that do not come from his bank account, as long as the people he decides to sacrifice do not live in America.

Of course, we must ask how we feel about people in other countries who think that it is permissible for them to kill anybody in any country other than their own. What type of person would think this way?

Benefits

There are, of course, some benefits associated with global warming. Some property in northern Canada and Siberia will become more valuable, and we may get a “Northwest Passage” across an Arctic Ocean that thaws in the summer. However, even these benefits can be understood in terms of benefits obtain by forcing others to pay for them. We can imagine the board of directors of Exxon-Mobile mailing out packets of coupons, allowing those land owners who receive them to pay for improvements to their property with the life, health, and well-being of others.

If it is truly a benefit to the people of Canada and Siberia to obtain these benefits, then perhaps they could see fit to compensate those who will suffer the costs, the way that a person who benefits from a gallon of gas pays the gas station owner for that benefit.

This analysis might sound somewhat harsh to some people. I cannot imagine anybody with any conscience paying for their gasoline with coupons that allow the store clerk to take the price by destroying the life, health, or well-being of others. However, it is no objection to a particular point of view that one does not like it. I hold that this does capture the moral dimension of these subsidies.

Yet, at the same time, many of the steps taken to use renewable energy are just as bad. Politicians are getting their hands into the fine details of the business. This is not because they want to promote energy efficiency. It is because they want to take the resources that go into energy efficiency and pass them out to their favorite campaign contributors. Unfortunately, when the government works in these ways, they are, in effect, taking resources that should be going to make the situation better, and diverting them to second-rate solutions.

In other words, they are not helping.

The Desire for Sex

Today, as promised, I am going to write about sex.

Specifically, I am responding to a comment that G-man made to an earlier post:

Consider . . . the fact that our current values are by no means the values we *should* have. Does that mean, then, that if our values can be adjusted (say, for instance, the desire for sex or the desire for personal freedom), would there be anything wrong with that state of affairs? I can't think of any reason why it would. Of course, I have a personal aversion to losing my desire for freedom and for sex - but it's still worth a thought, I guess.

Yesterday, I wrote about the desire for freedom. I presented an argument that the love of freedom is something that we have many and strong reasons to promote regardless of whatever else we may happen to desire – because freedom gives the authority to make decisions on what action to perform to the most knowledgeable and least corruptible agent – the actor himself.

Today, I want to talk about the desire for sex.

As it turns out, we do have ways to alter the desire for sex, at least in certain parts of population. We may not have effective methods for altering the object of sexual desire (though this may simply be a matter of further research), but we certainly have ways of altering the strength of sexual desire among males.

The two options available are (1) castration, and (2) regular injections of methoxyprogesterone. Methoxyprogesterone fits into the brain receptors for testosterone in the brain, blocking the testosterone, thus weakening or eliminating the desire for sex.

Given that these options is available, the question, “Should I act so as to weaken my sexual desire?” is a legitimate question.

A desire for sex is a desire that a particular state of affairs in which the propositions that are the objects of one’s sexual desire are true. It is clearly the case that the term ‘sexual desire’ does not describe just one sexual desire. It involves a wide range of desires where the object of desire fits under the general heading of a ‘sexual situation’. It includes not only intercourse, but desires that one’s sex partner have particular physical and mental properties, particular actions, and particular surroundings.

Yet, if this is truly a sexual desire, then castration or injections of methoxyprogesterone will influce the strength of that desire.

Another fact to note about a sexual desire is that it is an appetite. Appetites are desires that dissipate when fulfilled, only to grow in intensity at a later time. Hunger is an appetite – a desire to eat that goes away when it is fulfilled, then returns a few hours later. Thirst and sleep are also appetites. These are contrasted with, for example, the aversion to pain or the desire for the well-being of one’s children which persists even when it is fulfilled.

However, what G-man wrote about is not the desire for sex, but the desire for the desire for sex. He reports not only a desire for sex, but a desire for a desire for sex.

Because these are distinct and separate desires, it is not impossible that a person can have a desire for (a particular type of) sex, and, at the same time, have an aversion to having that desire. This is true in the same way that a person can have a desire to be drunk or high and have an aversion to having that particular desire. I, for example, have a desire for high-calorie foods (cholesterol being one of the best-tasting substances ever discovered), while at the same time wishing that I did not have this desire.

Is it possible to defend a “desire for a desire for sex” as a good thing?

This depends a lot on the nature of the sex that one desires. Is the desire for sex itself of a form that tends to fulfill or thwart other desires?

If a person’s desire for sex is a desire that tends to thwart the desires of self or others, then there are reasons not to promote a desire for that particular type of sex. Indeed, there is a reason to promote an aversion to that particular type of sex, and to motivate those who have such a desire to take action that will either change the object of that desire (to something less harmful) or change the strength of that desire.

On the other hand, sexual desires that tend to fulfill the desires of others are desires that we have reason to promote or encourage.

I cannot think of any clear examples of this second type of sexual desire – a desire that fulfills the desires of others. Most sexual desire, it seems, falls in the third moral category – neither bad (promoting acts that tend to thwart other desires) or good (promoting acts that tend to fulfill other desires), but neutral (promoting acts that neither fulfill or thwart other desires).

All sexual desire is either neutral (something people generally have no reason to promote or prohibit) or bad (something that people generally have reason to inhibit). There is no such thing as a good sexual desire.

This does not imply that there is anything wrong with a given individual having a desire for (morally neutral) sex, or a desire that he have a desire for (morally neutral) sex. Just as the desire for sex is morally neutral, the desire for the desire for sex is morally neutral.

Some Implications

In the realm of sexual morality, I often hear the claim that people do not choose their sexual desires. This is supposed to have some sort of moral significance, as if, “I did not choose a desire that P; therefore, bring about state of affairs P should be considered morally permissible.”

We typically see this argument with respect to homosexual acts. However, the argument is clearly invalid. We can clearly see this if we replace P with a desire to rape and torture young children, a desire to burn down buildings, a desire to take things that belong to others, or a desire to drive extremely fast through residential and school neighborhoods.

This argument gives the impression that somehow people are supposed to have an opportunity to sit down, weigh the plusses and minuses of having a particular desire, and deciding, “I choose a desire that P.”

Nobody ever does this for any of their desires – even their desires to burn down buildings or to rape and torture small children.

I suspect the next response would be, “How dare you compare a desire for homosexual acts with desires to burn down buildings or to rape and torture small children? These desires are totally different. The homosexual does not desire anything that implies harming others.”

My answer to this is, “That’s exactly my point! Choice is not the issue. The question is whether or not people generally have a reason to promote or inhibit the desire in question. People have no reason to inhibit homosexual desires precisely because they are not desires that tend to motivate people to threaten others. People do have reasons to inhibit the desire to burn down buildings or to rape and torture small children. These facts sit as the foundation of the moral difference between these desires, not ‘choice’.

The fact that there is such a huge variety of sexual desires strongly argues that this is not based entirely on genes. Any who want to argue that social conditioning does no good against homosexual desire needs to explain how it could possibly make sense to explain all of this variety through genetic factors alone. If social factors have any affect at all on sexual desire, then people generally have reason to ask for the most efficient way of inhibiting desires they have reason to inhibit. If social factors have no affect on sexual desire, then how is it that people can acquire so many different sexual desires, and why is it that the factors responsible for this variety are all outside of human control?

Conclusion

I want to add with this: If one has a sexual desire that tends to thwart the desires of self or others, I would like to make it known that the strength of that desire is a matter of choice. It might be difficult to change the object of that desire (I am no expert in this area), but reducing the strength of a sexual desire is clearly on the “can do” list. It would be a service to others and to oneself to free oneself of such a desire that thwarts the desires of self and others.

See a doctor. Get the condition taken care of. It is the right thing to do.

The Value of Freedom

In the comments to a recent post, “G-man” wrote:

Consider . . . the fact that our current values are by no means the values we *should* have. Does that mean, then, that if our values can be adjusted (say, for instance, the desire for sex or the desire for personal freedom), would there be anything wrong with that state of affairs? I can't think of any reason why it would. Of course, I have a personal aversion to losing my desire for freedom and for sex - but it's still worth a thought, I guess.

There are things to be said on both of these issues – the desire for sex, and the desire for freedom. Today, I will give my comments on the desire for freedom. Tomorrow, I will talk about sex.

The Loss of Freedom

Freedom has some unique properties whereby a loss of freedom is bad even for the person who does not value freedom per se.

To start with, I would like you to consider a law that outlaws swimming in the methane lakes of Titan for the next 10 years, or imposes a fine on altering the gravitational constant by more than 1 order of magnitude. In some overly technical sense, this may be considered a loss of freedom. However, in a more day-to-day sense, no freedom has been lost at all. These prohibitions do not prevent people from doing anything that they would otherwise have done.

A more meaningful loss of freedom prohibits people from performing actions that they might have otherwise performed. Imagine an individual facing a choice between two options; Option A and Option B. People choose those actions that fulfill the more and the stronger of their desires, given their beliefs. Our individual, in a state of freedom, would choose Option A. However, if Option A is prohibited – if the individual is denied his freedom – then that individual has been denied the opportunity to fulfill his desires, given his beliefs.

This might not be a bad thing where agents have false beliefs. A person might desire to take arsenic, thinking that it cures the hiccups. A prohibition on taking arsenic would prevent these people from doing something that they would not have chosen if their beliefs were true. Each individual seeks to act so as to fulfill his desires, so such a law would give people what they want, even if it denies them what they would choose.

The Value of Liberty

The ultimate case for freedom comes from the 19th century English philosopher John Stuart Mill, in the essay “On Liberty,” which I discussed in the third part in a series on the value of truth, “True Beliefs III: Liberty of Beliefs.” He gave two principle reasons why we would want the person who directs an individual’s life to be that individual.

I’m going to give his arguments a slight desire-utilitarian twist. (It is just a slight twist because the only difference between desire utilitarianism and rule utilitarianism is that desires are particular types of rules written into the brain.)

Value exists in the form of relationships between states of affairs and desires. Specifically, each agent seeks to create states of affairs in which their desires are fulfilled. If we are going to try to maximize value, then we need to assign the job of running each person’s life to an individual or group who (1) has the best information on what those desires are, (2) has the best information on which states of affairs will fulfill those desires, and (3) is the least corruptible agent when it comes to fulfilling those desires.

In other words, the person who is best qualified to run any given individual’s life in a way that fulfills the most and strongest desires is that person. There are, of course, known exceptions such as young children and the mentally incompetent. However, among competent adults, this is generally true.

The Love of Liberty

This argues that liberty is useful. However, in this post I am interested in showing that the love of liberty is useful.

Imagine that you are a loving parent with a vulnerable child. You have a choice between moving into two neighborhoods. In one neighborhood, people value the well being of children to the degree that they can be convinced that it is useful to do so. We convince them by telling them that those children could grow up to be doctors, lawyers, architects, landscapers, and, in other ways, skilled and useful adults.

In the other neighborhood, people value the well-being of children for its own sake. They have come to desire that children are safe and well cared for independent of its usefulness. It’s like eating chocolate – something that some people may pursue even when it is not useful for them to do so – even when it conflicts with other interests – simply because they like it. The people living in this neighborhood like a neighborhood where children are safe.

To the degree that you are interested in your child’s safety, I would recommend the second neighborhood over the first.

For another example, consider the case of exercise. Exercise is useful in that it promotes health which an individual can reasonably expect will promote the agent’s ability to fulfill future desires. However, exercise is hard work. You are given a choice. You can be made into a person who does not like exercise and exercises only when (and to the degree) that it is useful to do so, or you can be made into somebody who values exercise for its own sake. The second type of person will exercise even when she cannot calculate any use for it, because she likes to exercise, and she insists on doing what she likes.

Again, an argument can be made that it is better to be the second type of person – the person who exercises for the fun of it. This person does not need to be reminded that it is time to job or run. She will exercise (rather than watch television) precisely because exercising is something that she values more than watching television.

Similarly, when it comes to securing liberty (and I have already established that each of us have reason to secure liberty – because no other person is going to do a better job of directing the course of each of our lives than that person), our liberty is better secured in a neighborhood that loves liberty, than in a neighborhood where liberty is valued only for its usefulness (and easily discarded the instant it ceases to become useful).

One of the conclusions that we can draw from the Bush Administration is that they have no love of liberty. If they care about liberty at all it is only insofar as they find it to be useful. They will toss it aside the instant that it ceases to be useful. This is why convincing them to abandon torture and arbitrary imprisonment, or to restore the right of habeas corpus, seems to require an argument as to the usefulness of doing so.

You do not need to convince somebody who loves chocolate to eat chocolate because of its usefulness. In most cases, you do not need to present a person with a case for the usefulness of sex to get him to have sex. These are things that people value for their own sake. You can know this because of the fact that they pursue these ends without regard for their usefulness, simply because they are desired.

So, we know that the Bush Administration has no love of liberty. Because we have placed our liberty in the hands of those who do not love liberty, but who value it only insofar as it is useful to them, our liberty is now far less secure.

Now, please note that I have not premised this argument for the value of the love of liberty on anything other than the fact that each individual is best qualified (most knowledgeable, leas corruptible) person to direct that person’s life. It does not depend on what a person likes, he can almost always do a better job of directing his life towards that end. It is one of the qualities of liberty that it is useful (among such individuals) regardless of what other desires a person has.

Restrictions on Liberty

The love of liberty argues for a presumption in favor of liberty – but a presumption that can be outweighed. In a trial by jury, it argues for a presumption of innocence on the part of the accused – but a presumption that can be overridden by proof of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. In law it argues for a presumption in favor of personal freedom and against government interference – but a presumption that can be overridden by evidence beyond a reasonable doubt.

If a person desires to set off a nuclear weapon in a city, then we will prevent him from fulfilling the more and stronger of his desires, given his beliefs. However, we know (quite reliably) that the desires that would motivate a person to set off such a bomb in the middle of a city are desires that tend to thwart other desires. People (whose desires would be thwarted) have reason to inhibit the formation of desires that tend to thwart other desires. They have reason to interfere with the actions that such a person might perform.

So, yes, laws do thwart liberty.

However, in desire-utilitarian terms, they only restrict the liberty of bad people. A good person (a person whose desires tend to fulfill the desires of others) would have such an aversion to detonating nuclear weapons in a city, rape, theft, murder, robbery, and the like, that, to them, committing one of these actions is not within the realm of possibilities for a good person. "I could never do something like that," is a real-world truth when it comes to real-world good people performing such an action.

The love of liberty means that a person is going to need 'proof beyond a reasonable doubt' that the restriction of a particular liberty is necessary. In terms of laws against detonating nuclear weapons in cities, killing and maiming others, rape, theft, and other forms of violence, we have our proof beyond a reasonable doubt. However, the person who advocates restrictions in liberty without proof - based on a 'preponderance of evidence' or 'it seems like a good idea' is like the person who will vote 'guilty' on a trial because the accused, 'just seems guilty to me.'

Belief Without Evidence or Faith

I am growing concerned with presidential candidates drawing their positions from what the core party members believe, when those core party members have no reason for that belief and are quite possibly wrong.

Typically, we see this as a fault of the Republican Party, where evidence-based thinking is publicly ridiculed in favor of faith-based thinking. However, we can also find it in the Democratic Party, where beliefs become popular because of a political fad, rather than from an understanding of the available evidence.

These ‘fads’ themselves are often spread by special-interest groups paying money to public relations firms in order to plant a seed in a particular political faction, nurture it, and watch it grow, until the party faithful culturally accept or reject others in the group by whether they accept this particular view.

Lacking Evidence for War; Lacking Evidence for Withdrawal

I have written about one version of this problem previously, the call for a complete withdraw from Iraq. A huge block of Democratic voters have adopted the attitude that the only acceptable Democratic Party candidate is one who insists that we will withdraw all troops from Iraq. They cannot possibly be basing this opinion on an honest evaluation of the available evidence, because the available evidence is substantially classified. Even if it was not, there is so much information that one would have to digest in order to draw an informed opinion that there are very few who have this luxury.

Yet, tens of millions of Democratic Party faithful believe that they are capable – between job, family vacations, and episodes of American Idol and weekend sports – to determine the best policy, and to insist that agreeing with them on this one issue is the most reliable mark of a quality candidate.

There is just as much arrogant certainty of unquestionable truths in the Democratic Party as there is in the Republican Party. The only difference is that faith-based thinking in the Republican Party is more likely to involve beliefs about God.

As far as I have been able to determine, those experts who have the capacity to draw an informed opinion about what Americans should do with respect to Iraq are not advocates of a complete American withdraw. They are in favor of reducing the American presence, but believe that a substantial investment is still required for a couple of reasons. The primary objection is that a withdraw will give the impression that Allah is on the side of the fundamentalists and that this will enable them to attract even more support – in terms of volunteers, financial help, contacts, safe havens, and assistance in communication among members.

Evidence and the Importance of Ethanol

Another example in which the Party faithful seems to be pushing ideas that lack evidence-based support is in the realm of corn-based ethanol. The Iowa Caucus is one of the first formal political contests in the Presidential race. As such, all major candidates are focusing their attentions on this state. Iowa grows corn, and corn growers certainly have reason to want to believe that corn ethanol is a viable alternative energy source.

However, much of what I read suggests that this is not the case. Ethanol contains less energy than gasoline, so cars that burn ethanol will get fewer miles per gallon. A 10% reduction in price is only a part of the story if it means a 20% increase in the volume one has to purchase to cover the same territory. Sugar cane, for example, is a better source of ethanol, but sugar cane does not grow in Iowa.

What somebody who specializes in rhetoric and other forms of mass deception will tell you is that the way to promote a good is to make the most useful comparison. You do not want to choose a comparison that will give people the most accurate understanding of the situation. You want to select a comparison that will engineer a conclusion that is the most useful – even if, on some fundamental level, it is mistaken.

To sell corn-ethanol, the comparison that the master of rhetoric would advise would be to compare it to gasoline. Gasoline is what everybody uses, so it easily comes to mind, and facts can be cherry-picked so as to make corn-ethanol look like a good, clean energy source compared to gasoline.

However, if somebody is actually interested in renewable energy, then corn-ethanol should not be compared to gasoline. It should be compared to cane-ethanol.

When governments subsidize a lower quality product in order to help it to compete against higher-quality products, this actually makes the world a worse place in which to live. Subsidizing the corn-ethanol industry means taking business, profits, and investment capital away from the cane-ethanol industry. It means having more of a lesser quality replacement to gasoline, and less of a higher quality replacement.

One could argue that there is more than enough of a need for ethanol to justify the use of both cane-ethanol and corn-ethanol; that these products do not compete against each other. This is a mistake. As the cane-ethanol industry grows, it would be expected to suffer from diminishing marginal returns. Corn-ethanol kicks in when the marginal benefit of cane-ethanol equals the marginal benefit of corn-ethanol. At that point, corn ethanol becomes a reasonable substitute for cane-ethanol.

What these subsidies do is to distort the marginal benefit of corn ethanol, making it appear to be higher than it is in fact. This is how subsidies work to promote the industry being subsidized. If subsidies had no effect, if they did not have the power to manipulate market forces, then there would be no sense in using them. When the marginal benefit of corn-ethanol has been raised by subsidies, then resources get transferred from cane-ethanol to corn-ethanol sooner than it would have done so in the free market. The result, as I said, is more inferior ethanol production, at the expense of superior ethanol production.

In the name of protecting the environment and making the world a better place for our children, we make the environment worse than it would have otherwise been and our children’s world worse, rather than better.

Yet, the top Democratic Party presidential contenders ignore these facts. They advocate policies that go right ahead and make the environment worse than it would have otherwise been, because the Party Faithful demand it. Because the Party Faithful base their conclusions, not on a consideration of the evidence, but on a fad, where accepting a particular belief (regardless of its merit) is the ticket one needs in order to be considered a part of the ‘in’ group.

Those who think that religions have a lock on unreasoned belief – that all we need to do is get rid of religion and a world of reason and enlightenment will flourish before us – need to take a closer look at the real world.

Ethanol and Greenhouse Gasses

At the same time, I am aware of the fact that political factions are almost certainly at work to attack the issue with fictions from the other direction. Exxon-Mobile, among others, will contribute significant amounts of money to “engineer false beliefs” in the American public about options that may cut into their profits. They are willing to promote false beliefs about global warming, thereby putting at risk the life, health, and property of billions of people. Such people cannot be expected to have a twinge of conscience arise from promoting fictions regarding ethanol or other potential competition to their industry – regardless of who suffers from these myths.

For example, one of the arguments that I have routinely seen used against ethanol is that it produces just as much greenhouse gas as gasoline.

So?

Ethanol (unlike gasoline) must first pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere in order to create the fuel that, then, returns carbon dioxide to the atmosphere when it is burned. Gasoline, on the other hand, is using carbon that was pulled out of the atmosphere many millions of years ago. Over the course of 1 year, the direct net effect carbon effect of ethanol is zero – it pulls as much carbon out of the atmosphere as it puts back in.

This deceptive little half-truth is much like the deceptive half-truths Exxon-Mobile and similar companies and organizations have been telling about global warming, in order to engineer false beliefs. Those false beliefs, in turn, are designed to cause people to put money in the pockets of Exxon-Mobile executives by people who are unknowingly making the world a far worse place for their children and grand-children.

And all of this deception and misinformation takes place without anybody even mentioning God or faith – though it remains as blind to reason as anything any priest might suggest.

So, do I have a position on the issue of promoting ethanol as a substitute for fossil fuels? Not really. It will take a lot more information than I have available to me at the moment. However, I do have a position on the use of bad arguments. People do this when they do not care who is made to suffer so that they can make themselves better off. Yet, others do suffer. Mostly, our children and grandchildren, nieces, nephews, and the children of our friends and neighbors, who will be the victims of this rhetoric.

A Summary on Faith

I am curious how this is going to play out . . .

Carnival of the Godless #70 is out on Friendly Atheist.

In it is an article from Jacob at Winter’s Haven, that Friendly Atheist linked to under the phrase, “faith is not a virtue.” Friendly Atheist also said that this is a response to something I had written (which he also links to).

(So, it looks as if I have an article in this edition of Carnival of the Godless – indirectly.)

One of the things that I pay attention to as a writer is how people read.

My philosophy of writing (at least, for the type of writing that I engage in here) is that writing is theory driven. A concerned writer is always trying to predict what ideas will appear in the mind of the reader when encountering the combination of squiggles and lines that the writer has put on a page. A morally concerned writer wants to make sure that his squiggles (or sounds in the case of podcasts, or images and sounds in the case of video) generates true beliefs and good desires in the brains of those who encounter it.

This, by the way, informs my theory of lying or sophistry. A person lies, not by uttering a proposition that he knows is false, but by uttering a proposition that he knows the reader or listener will interpret in a way that is false. When President Clinton said, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman,” this was a lie. Clinton seems to have sought to defend himself by saying, “By ‘sex’ I mean sexual intercourse, which does not include oral sex.” What makes this a lie is that Clinton certainly knew that the proposition would be interpreted to include a denial of oral sex in the minds of the listeners.

Sophistry or “engineering false beliefs” is the use of true propositions to generate false beliefs in the brains of the listener. In Sophistry: Engineering False Beliefs, I used examples from Representative Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA, 48th District) to show how a sophist tries to get people to believe things that are false without directly lying. The intent is the same – the intent, in this case, is to get people to choose actions that are extremely harmful to themselves and their values my engineering false beliefs. The wrong done here ties directly into the writer’s or speaker’s obligation to judge his honesty by his ability to provide the reader or listener with true beliefs.

This is not to say that the listener or reader’s beliefs are entirely the speaker’s or writer’s responsibility. Readers and writers have some responsibilities as well. Communication is a team effort.

The relevance of these factors to this posting by Friendly Atheist is that I expect some readers will read this part of the posting and draw the following conclusions:

Jacob at Winter’s Haven has written an article saying that faith is not a virtue. He was responding to a post by Atheist Ethicist. Therefore, Atheist Ethicist must believe that faith is a virtue.

The problem is that Friendly Atheist normally has a much larger audience than I do, that the Carnival itself will draw a larger crowd, so there is a risk that the cultural assumption may well become the assumption that Atheist Ethicist believes that faith is a virtue.

Coincidentally, this subject ties directly into the topic that Jacob and I wrote on – which was the ethics of adopting a belief that is a part of the public culture – of assuming something simply because one grows up in a culture where nobody thinks to question it. I argued that it may be wrong, but it is not culpable, to fail to question something that nobody – or a very small segment of society – thinks to be questionable.

Friendly Atheist responsibly linked the reader directly to Jacob’s article, and to mine, giving readers an opportunity to view primary sources. Still, following the model of predicting what ideas will emerge in the minds of the readers, this will reduce, but not eliminate, the risk of people adopting the false belief that Atheist Ethicist (that’s me) argues that faith is a virtue.

So, I’m going to state my position, for the record.

On the concepts of virtue and vice in general, these are not jointly exhaustive categories. There are three moral categories – not two (a feature of morality that trips up many act-based consequentialist theories); the categories of ‘obligation’, ‘permission’ and ‘prohibition’. In the realm of character traits, this points to ‘virtue’ (good desires). ‘vice’ (bad desires), and ‘personal preference’ (desires that are neither good nor bad).

As a result, the proposition, “Faith is not a virtue” does not imply “Faith is a vice”. This proposition allows for the possibility that faith is a personal preference.

Faith is poor justification for a belief – a position that I recently defended in more detail in Faith, Evidence, and Convictions.

It is not a moral failing to adopt a view that is widely accepted in the society in which one lives. In fact, it is reasonable to assume (as a rule of thumb) that a widespread belief is true. In other words, adopting a false belief because it is widely accepted is an example of a non-culpable error.

The above proposition is supported by the fact that we simply do not have the resources – time, ability – to hold each and every one of our beliefs up to the light of reason. We must use quicker, though more fallible, rules of thumb if we are going to have any beliefs at all.

This same lack of resources for holding all of our beliefs up to the light of reason, and the fact that we cannot stop time until we have resolved our differences, argue for a type of ‘belief triage’. Our ‘rules of thumb’ need to be held up to a harm principle, where some extreme cases are categorized as “too much effort required for too little gain”, and others are categorized as “can wait until more urgent issues are taken care of”. The middle category, “urgent matters where immediate action can do the most good” is the category that warrants the greatest focus of attention.

In these areas – global warming, rejection of homosexuals (with its corresponding effect on suicides), opposition to embryonic stem-cell research, opposition to the use of condoms and family planning, opposition to early-term abortions, ‘rapture’ theology’s impact on neglecting policies geared toward long-term human survival, ‘revelations’ theology’s impact on promoting mid-east violence. I have not even mentioned examples where people kill directly, just because (they believe) God wants them to.

Of all of the weapons that a person of faith can use to kill or otherwise harm others, biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons are insignificant in their impotence compared the power the weapon of law. This particular weapon is one which religious zealots even in this country use with reckless abandon, doing countless harm to millions of people every year.

There are naturally going to be some disagreement over what those categories are. For example, I argue that eliminating “under God” and “In God We Trust” is extremely important because they promote in-group favoritism and out-group hostility that prejudices people against those in the best position to offer real-world solutions to real-world problems.

The level of culpability goes up to the degree that an individual professes to be an expert on the subject. Indeed, experts are assumed to have gone outside the fallible ‘rules of thumb’ that people are commonly forced to use because of a lack of time and resources, and grounded their conclusions on something more solid. This allows the common person to say, ‘I do not know or understand the foundation for this commonly accepted belief, but I trust that the experts who speak on this subject have worked those things out.”

It is an abuse of the public trust for people to identify themselves as ‘experts’ when their work is morally and intellectually negligent. They can be – and should be – publicly condemned and shamed not only on intellectual grounds, but on the moral culpability of identifying themselves as experts when they clearly do such a poor job.

So, this is my actual view on the matter.

Where, per chance, somebody seems to have gotten the idea that I argue faith is a virtue, I would not mind it if you would take the opportunity to express the fact that this interpretation is not entirely accurate.

The Value of Value

I came across an article recently, on a study relating biology to behavior, (Economist: “Money Isn’t Everything”) that was conveniently set up to allow me to explain some of the key elements of desire utilitarianism.

The behavior part of the study goes like this:

The researcher gives Person A $40.

The researcher then gives Person A two options.

Option 1: Offer Person B $5 (and keep $35)

Option 2: Offer Person B $25 (and keep $15).

However, if Person B does not accept the offer, then you have to give back the $40.

Often, this experiment is performed as a type of repeated game. In a repeated game, it makes sense for Person B to refuse the $5 offer because it tells Person A “You had better be offering me $25 if you want to keep any of the money for yourself.”

However, this experiment was different. This will only happen once, so there is nothing to be gained (in terms of influencing future iterations) by refusing the $5.

Still, in this study, there were many people who still refused the $5.

Here is where the biology part comes in. The researchers took swabs of saliva from the subjects and discovered that those who refused the $5 had higher significantly higher levels of testosterone than those who accepted the $5.

One quick conclusion that one can draw from this – which many people might have asserted without the experiment – that high levels of testosterone turns the brain into mush and people into idiots. It is irrational, on this view, to refuse the $5.

However, the researchers point out that this conclusion is much too quick – because it is wrong. Testosterone does not cause these people to be irrational. Instead, it gives them a different set of ‘values’ to be rational about. The testosterone causes an aversion to differences in status. We may assume that the individual values having $5. However, his aversion to the other person getting $35 is stronger than his desire for $5. In other words, he will pay (lose) $5, to obtain the value of depriving the other person of $35.

At this point, “biology of value” people would say that this is the end of the story. We now know that people with high levels of testosterone has these particular values. We can write that down in our book of findings and move on. It confirms the hypothesis that values are grounded in biology, which is what the “biology of value” people are interested in, so the work is done.

Desire utilitarianism suggests asking a few more questions.

A desire utilitarian can take everything that was reported in this study at face value. Assuming that there are no flaws in the study, a desire utilitarian can say, “Ahhh, data. I love data. Now, let’s see what we can do with it.”

What is the value of having people in society who would pay $5 to deprive others of $35?

We know that there are people like this. We know how it happens (or, at least, we know one of its causal influences). However, we have another question to answer: Is it good that things are this way, or do we have reasons to prefer something different?

An evil person, within desire utilitarianism, is a person for whom it is rational to do harm to others. An evil person is a person with desires that tend to result in thwarting the desires of others or, at least, lack desires that tend to fulfill the desires of others. An evil person acts so as to fulfill his desires given his beliefs (just like everybody else), and seeks to act to fulfill his desires (just like everybody else). The difference is that the desires that the evil person seeks to fulfill are desires that thwart the desires of others, so the rational evil person does harm to others.

One implication of this is that, if you feed an evil person more information and a better capacity to reason, then what you get from this is the ‘evil genius’ – the person whose evil is executed with greater efficiency (like a Karl Rove or a Dick Cheney). You cannot reason somebody into goodness. You need to change their desires, and desires are not changed through reason. They are changed through social tools such as praise, condemnation, reward, and punishment.

Here, for example, are two stories that might describe the value of this particular value – the goodness of this particular desire.

A researcher can never fully remove a subject from the social circumstances of his actions. It may be useful, as a general social rule, to promote a general love of fairness within a society. There may not be a second iteration of the game in the context of the experiment where it pays Person B to teach Person A to make a more fair offer. However, refusing the $5 option in the context of the game may have the effect of promoting a stronger love of fairness in Person A that will carry through outside of the research environment. It may be a part of a general (and useful) plan to promote fairness in all context, in order to create a more fair society.

Or, it could be that testosterone turns people into assholes who actually come to value depriving others of gain. We can see how this would work in competition, where a person ‘sacrifices’ five points in a game to prevent an opponent from scoring 35 points, or in a battle where a company commander sacrifices 5 men to set up a trap that kills 35 enemy soldiers. If life were a competition measured in ‘points’ like this, then this type of attitude might make sense. However, what we are talking about is units of well-being. These individuals are destroying 40 units of social well-being because, by destroying 5 units of their own well-being, they can destroy 35 units of well-being for others.

If the first story best describes the situation, then we have a case in which this desire may be a good thing, and one that should be encouraged. Whereas, if the second story is the most accurate, then this desire may be a bad thing, and seek to discourage it.

The desire utilitarian can fully accept that we have a base desire which is heavily influenced by biological factors. However, the desire utilitarian needs would ask additional questions to determine whether and how social factors can influence these options.

For example, it may be the case that people with high levels of testosterone causes people to refuse the $5 offer because, in a particular social environment, people with high levels of testosterone acquire that disposition. However, in a different social environment, people with high levels of testosterone could be raised to adopt a different disposition. For example, it may be the case that one social environment causes people with high leels of testosterone to adopt the ‘competitive value’ described above; whereas, in a different social environment, they would adopt the ‘fairness value’. Or, in a third social environment, they will come to see that allowing 40 units of social utility (even if he gets only 5 of those 40 units) will score him a certain number of moral points, thus giving him a moral victory.

All of these options have one thing in common. They are examples of taking a particular value (a particular desire) and asking, “What is the value of that particular value? Is it something that people generally have reason to promote, or to discourage?”

When it comes to looking at moral questions, the desire utilitarianism does not ask, “What is the value of torture?” He asks, “What is the value of an aversion to torture?” He does not ask, “What is the value of homosexual relationships?” He asks, “What is the value of a desire for, or an aversion to, homosexual relationships?” In the latter case, the desire utilitarian will distinguish between the value of, “I have an aversion to engaging in homosexual acts,” to “I have an aversion to having anybody who engages in homosexual acts.” Recognizing that these are two different desires, they can have two different values. A person can have an aversion to eating spinach, without having an aversion to the fact that there are people who like and eat spinach.

So, now that researchers have linked high levels of testosterone to a particular set of values, the desire utilitarian can take the data and ask, “What is the value of having people around to having these particular values? What are the limits of social forces in molding these values? And, finally, which option, within these limits, does society have the most and strongest reasons to promote?”

Here is an example of the general desire utilitarian framework applied to a specific finding on the relationship between biology and value.

General Comments on the Use of Fallacies

Some of my recent postings have been specific instances of a more general moral principle that the use of informal fallacies in public discourse is morally contemptible. It is a sign of intellectual recklessness.

Typically, I have compared the use of fallacies in arguments to be equivalent to drunk driving. Like the drunk driver, those who use fallacies show a disregard for the effects that their actions may have on others. They care more about ‘winning’ than ‘being right’, in an arena where the winner must either be right or countless individuals may suffer for it.

I can be more specific.

Drivers come with a wide variety of skills. Some are better than others. We do not expect – it would not even be reasonable to expect – that all drivers be perfect drivers. If we did, then nobody would be permitted to drive. Instead , we demand a minimum level of competence, and suspend the licenses of those who show such a routine lack of carelessness (or one example of extremely gross negligence).

The same is true in writing. It would be foolish to demand the perfect use of freedom in all written words, and allow only those who meet this standard to write (or express his views in any other medium). To do so would be to outlaw communication. However, we have reason to demand that anybody who gets behind a keyboard or a megaphone or a microphone and starts writing to show sufficient concern for those who might be harmed to be aware of the possible pitfalls and to avoid them.

Now, unlike reckless driving, we have good reason not to make reckless writing into a criminal offense. History has shown us that governments that have the power to regulate what is said and spoken will judge something as illegitimate, not because it shows some obvious fallacy, but because it does not serve the interests of the Administrations or the Administration’s friends – whether that Administration be an elected President or a self-appointed monarch.

Because legal penalties for reckless writing (rhetoric, demagoguery, and sophistry) are necessarily light, there is all the more reason for public, non-violent moral condemnation for those who use these tricks. When it becomes too dangerous to use one barrier to wrongdoing, prudence suggests making the second barrier that much longer.

Morally, we have reason to set the standards at different levels for the different roles that people play. In the realm of driving, anybody who wishes to drive others (in a bus, or a taxi service), or anybody who wishes to transport hazardous chemicals, and the like can be morally required to abide by standards of care that the average driver need not worry about. Similarly, in the realm of writing or speech, we have far more reason to e contemptible of the use of fallacies among those who wish to transport dangerous ideas that put the lives, health, and well-being of others at risk.

It does not matter all that much that the legal secretary of Wal-Mart greeter does not have the logic skills of a professional philosopher. Anybody who gets advice from their hair stylist or convenience store clerk should immediately recognize the need to discount that advice – to ‘consider the source’ in considering the quality of the input. However, anybody who takes it upon himself to stand on a soapbox in a public forum is like the bus driver or the driver who transports hazardous chemicals. He takes on additional moral responsibilities, and may rightfully be held to a higher standard.

One group of people who fit this standard are news anchors and reporters. It should be considered a minimum standard of competence for any reporter that they can demonstrate capacity to recognize informal fallacies by name, and to identify them whenever the reporter encounters them in the wild – whether in his or her own writing, the writings of other reporters, or the remarks of the people they interview for a story.

Each fallacy invites a particular type of retort. A good reporter should have a sufficient understanding of the informal fallacies that, in identifying a piece of sophistry, immediately identify the retort that points out the sophistry. For example, a standard remark to somebody accused of wrongdoing who says, “X committed equivalent atrocities,” is to say, “If you had a murderer before you who claims that he is innocent because there are other people who have committed murder, would you accept that as a sound argument?”

A good legislator, President, or Governor should also be somebody who can recognize the informal fallacies by name and call those who use these fallacies, particularly when testifying before a legislative committees. Indeed, I would like to see a standard test that all candidates take on the subject, with their scores becoming one of the criteria in determining who to vote for. (Though, it cannot be the only criterion. Recall, I have argued that if you feed true beliefs and sound reasoning to an evil person, you merely get somebody who can be much more efficiently evil.)

Right now, people throw fallacies around with reckless abandon. Once upon a time, drunk driving was, for the most part, an accepted activity. This was until enough people got fed up with the harm done by those who engage in this activity that they decided to ‘raise the consciousness’ of society to those harms. I do think that we are long past due for a concentrated effort on the part of individuals to insist that people recognize the harms that result, and the moral problems associated with using, these fallacies.

Faith, Evidence, and Convictions

In a comment to yesterday’s post, “Mike” suggested that Frank Walton could defend himself from the accusations that I had made against him by declaring that I had accused him of violating the principles of logic (specifically, of committing the “No True Scotsman” fallacy). However, Mike suggests that Walton could deny that the rules of logic are applicable, and that Walton could appeal to faith as a legitimate defense.

I would like to look at the merits of such a defense.

Assume that you are on a jury trial. The accused, in this case, has been accused of driving with a blood alcohol level above the legal limit and reckless endangerment. They pulled the accused over, gave a breathalyzer test, had him try to walk a straight line, and all of this was recorded on the squad car camera.

Then, during opening arguments, the defense attorney approaches the bench. He says, The only thing that the prosecution will show you in this case is evidence. But what justifies all of this faith in evidence? They will show you a breathalyzer test that indicates that my client had a blood alcohol level of .38. From this, they will ask you to infer that my client actually had a blood alcohol level of 0.38. However, this is an inference based on data collected from a machine – an inference based on evidence.

I will argue that, in spite of what the evidence says, that my client had a blood alcohol level that was below 0.08. This will not be proved on the basis of evidence. Instead, my argument will be grounded on faith. I will present three witnesses who will tell you that they prayed with the accused before leaving the bar. The accused prayed to God to see that he got home safely. We could, perhaps, infer from this that God answered this prayer by allowing my client to drive with a blood alcohol level of .38 without putting others at risk. However, that would not have allowed my client to get home safely. Getting home safely means not being guilty of violating the state’s law against driving with a blood alcohol level above 0.08. So, we infer that my client must have had a blood alcohol level below 0.08, not on the basis of evidence, but on the basis of faith.

Besides, what is this evidence-based thinking anyway but just another form of faith. The prosecution in this case has faith that God did not lower my client’s lood alcohol content. They have faith in the reliability of their experiments and tests. This is really nothing but a contest between two different systems of faith. If you cannot prove that the prosecution’s faith in evidence is better than the defendant’s faith in God, then you are obligated to vote not-guilty. After all, the accused is to be presumed innocent unless proved guilty beyond a benefit of the doubt. It is not my client’s responsibility to prove that his faith-in-God system is better than the prosecution’s faith-in-evidence system. The prosecution must prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that their faith-in-evidence system is better than my client’s faith-in-God system.

In my previous post, the one where Mark argued that Walton could use the “faith defense”, I was, in fact, making an accusation. I did not claim to be able to prove wrongdoing, but I did seek to describe the relevant facts that were not yet known. I argued that Walton either (1) lacked the mental competence to understand the ‘No True Scotsman’ fallacy, or (2) he could understand it and was not aware of it, or (3) he could understand it and was aware of it but had a morally culpable disinterest in avoiding fallacious reasoning. In addition, when considering the second option, I argued that Walton had an obligation as a writer to make himself aware of possible objections. His failure to do so in this case either represented negligence on his part, or was an innocent mistake. If the latter, we still have reason to expect some sort of acknowledgement that he allowed a mistake to enter his writing that he should not have allowed – something that can be communicated through a sincere apology and an active attempt to prevent repeating that mistake.

This description is complex, but it is still quite similar to making accusations against a drunk driver. The alleged drunk driver was either not guilty by reason of insanity, was not aware of the fact that he was drunk (either culpably not aware or perhaps non-culpably unaware because he had no way of knowing that a particular drink had been spiked with alcohol), or was aware but indifferent towards the wrongness of his actions.

The ‘faith defense’ clearly is not an acceptable defense in the case of drunk driving. Anybody who claimed this defense would still be convicted of drunk driving based on the available evidence. Similarly, the ‘faith defense’ fails in the case of intellectual recklessness in using the No True Scotsman fallacy. If we have sufficient evidence of wrongdoing, we have everything we need for a conviction.

In fact, if we look at the cases where ‘faith’ is used to argue against evidence, these are cases where the person making the argument would instantly abandon his own standards, if he were ever in jury – or would be considered incompetent to be on a jury.

Using the same language, we have more than sufficient physical evidence to discover that ‘the body’ (that is, the earth) in a particular cosmological investigation, is about 4.55 billion years old, that the onset of living organisms occurred shortly thereafter, that it was infested by dinosaurs up until 65 million years ago, when blunt-force trauma caused the extinction of the dinosaurs and brought the age of mammals. Somebody who looks at the evidence, and concludes that the case has not been proved, must have a standard of evidence that would not allow him to convict any person of any crime in any real-world situation. Quite often, the evidence is not nearly as good as it is for a 4.55 billion year old earth.

We also have more than enough evidence for a verdict of ‘guilty beyond a reasonable doubt’ against the charge that ransom genetic mutation with natural selection is responsible for the presence of intelligent life on Earth. Again, anybody who would doubt this argument is somebody who would either have to abandon his standards of proof if he ever got on a jury, or would have to vote for the acquittal of any defendant based on the evidence, because the evidence would never be as strong in a court as the scientific evidence for evolution.

All of these examples, from our hypothetical case of drunk driving to our real-world examples of intellectual recklessness, the age of the Earth, and evolution, are examples where the evidence in favor of a conviction are overwhelming. Using ‘faith’ in any of the latter three cases is as absurd, as foolish, and even more life-threatening than allowing people to use ‘faith’ as a defense in the drunk driving case.

So, yes, Frank Walton may want to use the claim that faith-based thinking is better than evidence-based thinking to defend himself from my accusations. Yet, I strongly suspect that, if he were sitting on a jury, he would not allow the accused to get off by using the same type of argument you recommend he use here.

Now, I need to make it clear, Walton did not actually use this defense, and it would be neither honest nor just to accuse him of using a defense he did not in fact use. What we are talking about is a hypothetical defense that Mike suggested for Walton to use. It is a defense similar to that which many people do use when they defend their favorite views regarding such things as the age of the earth and evolution. It is a flawed defense that even those who use it find objectionable in cases other than those where they find it convenient. Yet, it is not a defense that Walton, himself, actually decided to use. Its consideration here was purely hypothetical.

However, even a hypothetical case of the faith defense can help to illustrate the fact that, where faith is allowed as a defense, absolutely nothing, no matter how horrendous, that becomes indefensible.

Language, Fallacies, and Moral Responsibility

Today, I would like to have a little more fun with words.

One of the comments to a recent post came from Frank Walton.

Walton was responding to a comment I made on my other blog, Atheist Ethicist Journal on the idea that there is no discrimination against atheists. Some have made the claim that atheists suffer from a public relations problem, with certain people giving the public a poor image of atheists, which then somehow justifies the harsh attitude that society takes towards us.

I countered this, in part, by pointing out that we can see this discrimination at work in the fact that the writings of Dawkins, Harris, and Hutchens create an “image problem” for atheists. Yet, Christians who blow up abortion clinics and Muslim suicide bombers are met with cries that we must take care not to judge all members of one of these groups by the actions of a few. That is, of course, if one can even make sense of the claim that Dawkins, Harris, and Hutchens have done something morally objectionable. Any wrongs they may have committed are not nearly as objectionable as the actions of certain Christians and Muslims (among others).

In response to this, Walton wrote:

If you are blowing up abortion clinics, or killing doctors you are clearly not a Christian. I don't know what's so hard for people to understand. I hear "Hitler was a theist" all the time well, he obviously wasn't a Christian or he wouldn't have killed 60 million Jews. No "real" Christians in all of history have ever advocated or used violence. Except during war that's different. You sound like an intellectual idiot. I'm even going to go as far as tell you you suck.

Now, anybody who has been introduced to even a little logic will recognize this as what is called the ‘no true Scotsman fallacy’.

The “No True Scotsman” fallacy is a piece of political sophistry that is often used specifically to try to shield a group from condemnation for wrongdoing. Some Republicans are trying to disassociate themselves and the party from the evils of the Bush Administration by denying that these are Republicans. “No true Republican” would commit the acts that Bush committed; therefore, the Republican Party is not responsible for the decisions and policies of this Administration.

A Christian is, quite simply, anybody who believes that Jesus had divine powers and that his words and deeds had divine significance. Different groups ‘cherry pick’ different passages depending on their personal likes and dislikes, so the term ‘Christians’ actually identifies a group of individuals with widely diverging views. It is quite difficult to say that ‘all Christians believe X’ or ‘all true Christians believe Y’.

One way that we can illustrate the problem with Walton’s remarks is simply to ask what gives Frank Henry the authority to define what a ‘true Christian’ is – given that so many people disagree with them, and all of them claim to be able to find support for their views in the same scripture.

In the spirit of adding to, subtracting from, or remodeling language that I spoke about yesterday, we could describe Walton’s effort here as an effort to add a new, narrower definition of Christianity. We have several terms in our language that have multiple meanings – in some cases, a broad meaning and a narrow meaning. For example, the term ‘cat’ is used to refer to any feline including lions, tigers, panthers, and lynxes. At the same time, the term also has a narrow definition, where it refers only to domestic cats.

We can view Walton’s objection here in terms of an attempt to introduce a narrow definition of the term ‘Christian’. We have the broad definition (anybody who claims to follow the teachings of Jesus), and the narrow definition (anybody who claims to follow the teachings of Jesus and who agrees with Frank Walton over exactly what those teachings are).

One of the things that the term ‘Christian’ (broadly defined) has in common with ‘atheist’ is that both terms refer to people who hold a wide variety of different views. There are atheist communists, atheist libertarians, atheist desire utilitarians, atheist moral subjectivists, atheist moral non-cognitivists, and many more. There are Christians (broadly defined) who think it is permissible (or even obligatory) to blow up abortion clinics or kill all who do not follow Jesus and Christians who believe that their religion commands them to feed the poor, and cure the sick, Catholics, Evangelicals, Baptists, Adventists, Mormons, and others.

It is certainly true that a Christian (broadly defined) is not necessarily a Christian (narrowly defined). However, this will turn out to make no difference.

The accusation, from which the conclusion that there is bigotry against atheists is proved, is the fact that people like Dawkins and Harris are said to be given all of atheists a bad name, in spite of the fact that ‘atheist’ refers to a large group of people with a wide variety of beliefs. We scarcely hear anybody say that, in virtue of the fact that there is such a wide variety of different types of atheists, it would be wrong to take the actions of one group and apply them to all others – that this would be unjust. Yet, this is one of the first things one hears whenever a Muslim (broadly defined) or a Christian (broadly defined) commits a crime allegedly in the name of God.

The fact that no Christian (as defined by Frank Walton) would do such a thing is completely beside the point. Some ‘Christians’ (broadly defined) do perform these types of acts, and the term ‘Christian’ (broadly defined) is sufficient for this demonstration of bigotry.

The fact that Walton’s argument does not work, and his argument clearly doesn’t work, leads to another issue.

Yesterday, I wrote about the difference between a simple mistake and a morally culpable error. Sinbad complained about how some atheists brand some theists either mentally or morally incompetent based on the claims that the theist makes.

I would argue that any use of the No True Scotsman fallacy in an argument attacking atheists demonstrates either that the agent lacks the capacity to understand this simple logical fallacy, or can understand it but, due to a lack of moral integrity, decides that he wants to use it anyway. In other words, here is an example where it is legitimate to charge a theist with either being an stupid or evil.

A morally responsible writer is always asking himself, “Are my claims true? Are there any reasons to reject them?” The greater the possibility that one is putting others in harms way or making accusations against them, the greater the obligation to determine that the harm is truly necessary or that the accusations are truthfully made. An intellectually responsible person, once he encounters the charge of using a logical fallacy, immediately worries, “Have I made a mistake?”

Walton, in his remarks, indicates that he is either unaware of the No True Scotsman fallacy, or is aware of it but is too intellectually reckless (to unconcerned about truth or about the harms that false beliefs will inflict on others) to concern himself with something as inconvenient as truth.

There is a slight chance that Walton never heard of the ‘No True Scotsman’ fallacy before, in which case he can be somewhat forgiven for failure to answer a challenge from this direction. However, when Walton decided to write on this subject, he took upon himself a moral obligation not to harm people by leading them astray. This means doing his best to discover and avoid logical fallacies.

It may be that Walton has never heard of the ‘No True Scotsman’ fallacy, and that it is an honest mistake. Still, we can tell if a person is truly morally responsible when, even when they make an honest mistake, they acknowledge that they have made a mistake, they apologize for it, and we see in their actions a genuine concern to make sure that they do not repeat that mistake. This is how a morally responsible person behaves. Failure to do this earns one the label of being morally irresponsible.

Bump into somebody in a hallway, even accidentally, one the correct response is to say, “I’m sorry. I didn’t see you.” This tells the world (or those within earshot) that you recognize and acknowledge that this is a type of situation that one ought to take pains to avoid, even if (quite by accident) it was not avoided in this instance. Similarly, the use of logical fallacies is a situation to be avoided, even though all of us make mistakes from time to time.

In the absence of such a response, we have reason to infer that the agent is negligent, reckless, or simply indifferent towards the wrongs that he does and for which others may be made to suffer. Or, at best, that one may need to claim in his defense that he simply lacks the mental capacity to act in a morally responsible manner.

The Ethics of Inventing Words

Sinbad, from Someone Say Grace wrote to object to my characterization of how the term ‘atheist fundamentalists’ is used and to point to a blog posting, “Ignominiously Defining Fundamentalism”, which offered a definition whereby ‘atheist fundamentalist’ actually makes sense and where some people are guilty of the moral charge that the phrase is designed to describe.

Of course, every word ever invented was, in fact, invented. Some people write as if there is a natural law of meaning – that words have a natural meaning that can be discovered by reason alone. In fact, words have whatever meanings that people agree to give them, and nothing more. If existing language does not suit our needs, then we redesign language to make it more useful – the way we may add an addition to a house or remodel a kitchen.

I have long had an interest in the moral principles governing the use of language since I started studying ethics. I have held, in some cases, that the use of equivocation fallacies and other fallacies of meaning are morally culpable mistakes that an intellectually responsible person would not have made in a particular circumstance. As it turns out, Sinbad’s attempt to define a new term, ‘fundamatheist’, provides an excellent opportunity to look at how an intellectually responsible person would approach the definition of a new term.

Inventing Language

In my own writings, I had concluded that human actions are geared to creating states of affairs in which the propositions that are the objects of one’s desires are true. However, I did not want to be constantly writing the phrase, “There exists a desire that P, for some proposition P, and a state of affairs S, where P is true in S.” So, I decided to remodel an old English Language term, ‘fulfilled’. I stipulated that, in place of that long, drawn out phrase, I will simply use the term ‘fulfilled’ in that role, which would reduce the word count on my writings significantly.

Note: I would swear that I actually borrowed this new usage from somebody else. However, I have never been able to identify the ‘somebody else’ who first defined ‘fulfillment’ in this way.

So, there is thing wrong – let alone morally wrong – in inventing new terms or remodeling old terms. There are problems when somebody uses these in rhetorical tricks – verbal ‘slight of hand’ used for the purpose of confusing others and scoring rhetorical points.

Fundamatheism

Sinbad wants to add an addition to our language – the term ‘fundamatheism’, which is a shortened version of ‘atheist fundamentalism’.

Christian fundamentalism is based upon the idea that the Bible + common sense = readily ascertainable truth. Fundamatheism is a similarly narrow epistemology whereby science + reason = readily ascertainable truth. In each case, the emphasis is on the readily ascertainable part, with the Truth so obvious that those who disagree aren't just in error, they're evil or damned or irrational or delusional or mentally ill or or or. Both fundamentalist and fundamatheist have a base-level arrogance. The fundy mindset isn't at all humble and rejects the idea that being wrong is even a remote possibility. Moreover and most (a-hem) fundamentally, those who disagree are inferior -- and that idea is incredibly dangerous and not terribly constructive, as history makes ever so clear.

Clearly, he holds that there is something wrong with being a fundamatheist – that this is a state to avoid. That is to say, reasons for action exist that will reduce the numbers of fundamatheists and/or the strength of their fundamatheist attitudes.

Here, I run into a bit of confusion over how Sinbad wants to use the term.

Interpretation 1

In one case he talks about refusing to deny the possibility of being wrong. In other words, the fundamatheist will not entertain the possibility that the proposition, ‘I am wrong’ has any chance whatsoever of bring true.

I think that Sinbad would have trouble defending this statement, at least among the most public atheist advocates. This is purely anecdotal evidence, but I seem to hear a lot of atheists using Bertrand Russel’s ‘orbiting teapot’ comparison to the God hypothesis. This is not an argument that says, “I have no chance of being wrong.” It is an argument that states, “As a matter of fact, if there is no evidence supporting a hypothesis, there is no reason to adopt it.” There is less evidence for the existence of a God than there is for an orbiting teapot.

In fact, in this area, we are far more likely to see intellectual responsibility on the theist side. Far too many theists argue, “There is at least the slightest small smidgen of a possibility that a god exists; therefore, a god almost certainly exists.” That is an invalid inference. When it is used by somebody who should have known better, it is an example of morally culpable intellectual recklessness.

Interpretation 2

Elsewhere, Sinbad defines a fundamatheist as one who takes the proposition, “You are wrong,” and infers from it, “You are evil, damned, irrational, delusional, mentally ill, or in some way inferior to me.” Let’s be clear – it is not just the case that the fundamatheist views those with different views as being inferior, but as morally inferior – as being worthy of contempt.

Yet, there has to be more to it than this. Sinbad himself is saying that fundamatheists are worthy of contempt. So, it must sometimes be acceptable to hold others in contempt for their beliefs, the way Sinbad holds fundamatheists in contempt for their beliefs. There must be a standard for distinguishing permissible from impermissible cases of holding others in contempt for their beliefs. By this standard, Sinbad’s attitude towards fundamatheits would be permissible, but fundamatheists’ attitudes towards theists are impermissible.

Here’s another example. I hold that the sun is a big ball made up of mostly hydrogen that converts matter into energy that is released in the form of protons. I am not strongly disposed to take seriously the claim that the sun represents the wheel of a chariot being driven by Apollo across the sky. Furthermore, I do hold that any, today, who accept the Apollo version would have some sort of mental or moral defect whereby they are either incapable or unwilling to accept the facts of the matter. Am I a ‘fundamatheist’ with respect to Apollo? Do I have an attitude towards Apollo that makes me worthy of condemnation?

If this does not qualify me as a fundamatheist, then why is it that I cannot adopt the same attitude towards those who believe that the Earth is less than 10,000 years old?

It would seem that Sinbad either needs to further redefine his terms so that an Apollo-denier is not a fundamatheist, or so that fundamatheists are not necessarily worthy of condemnation. Or he needs to defend the claim that those who deny any plausibility to the story that the Sun is a chariot being driven across the sky is worthy of condemnation.

Without this, we have reason to reject his proposed addition to the English language.

Additional Considerations

I think that it is possible to refine Sinbad’s term, make it more precise that allows for the possible existence of ‘fundamatheists’ which is substantially along the lines originally described. That is, it is a term that refers to atheists who unjustly condemns others for not recognizing that the proposition, “‘At least one god exist’ is almost certainly false.”

Now, there is a matter of being simply wrong, and there is a matter of being culpably wrong. A person cannot be held morally responsible and condemned for every false belief he has. All of us have false beliefs. Moral culpability can only be assigned to a particular type of false belief. It is a false belief that puts others at threat of harm and which a morally and intellectually responsible person could have been expected to see as a false belief.

Sinbad seeks to use ‘fundamatheist’ as a term of condemnation. This means that a ‘fundamatheist’ cannot merely be wrong in saying that others are guilty of a culpable error. The ‘fundamatheist’ must be guilty of a culpable error himself – a belief that threatens harm to others and which an intellectually responsible person could be expected to see as false.

A ‘fundamatheist’ then could be defined as an atheist who classifies another person as mentally or morally deficient for holding a false (religious) belief where we have reason to expect a competent and responsible person to reject that belief. Furthermore, consistent with the intention to use the term as a term of condemnation, the ‘fundamatheist’ would have to be culpably wrong in holding that the theists are guilty of intellectual irresponsibility.

Now, we have a term that we can use, and we can appeal to real-world evidence to determine whether or not it applies. That is to say, we can prove whether or not an individual truly is a ‘fundamatheist’.

The question then becomes, can this case actually be made against any of the leading atheist spokesmen. Or is the charge that these ‘fundamatheists’ are making a morally culpable error itself an example of unjust, unfounded accusations?

Assumptions

Last week, I wrote a series on the wrongness of teaching religion to children where I assumed without argument that religions teach false beliefs and bad desires. I am aware that many theists would not accept this assumption – assuming, instead, that their religions teach true beliefs and good desires.

Yet, even they must concede one point – that insofar as other religions teach things that are different from theirs, that other religions (meaning, the vast majority of religious teaching going on in the world) teaches false beliefs and bad desires.

I did not feel any compelling need to argue that ‘one or more gods exist’ is almost certainly false, just as I would not have felt compelled to argue that 2 _ 2 = 4 or ‘water’ = H2O, if it should become relevant. Others have already proved this case, and I do not need to repeat the arguments here. (I would not have space to do so even if I wanted to.)

Some people might not be convinced of these arguments, but that is no objection to their merit.

Another relevant fact is there are more important things to be doing with one’s life than arguing about the existence of a God. I imagine a case in which the Titanic is sinking and the officers in charge of the boat having a debate over what implications this has for the idea that there is a divine protector. People are dying every day – from war, from malaria, from AIDS, from malnutrition. Future generations are at risk from staggering debt, global warming, insufficient energy, political tyrants with no respect for individual rights, drugs, natural and man-made disasters of all types imaginable.

My argument is: Let’s get everybody into the lifeboats. Then, when we are safe, we can afford the luxury of idle philosophical debates.

If there are people on the boat who believe that a benevolent God will protect them and they don’t need any lifeboats, then I would answer, “Leave them. That leaves more room for the rest of us.”

The problem comes from another faction that believes that God has commanded them from allowing anybody on the lifeboats – that argues that even deploying the lifeboats shows a lack of faith in God’s good will that God will become angry. As a result, they seek to prohibit others from using the lifeboats. Now we have a problem. Now we have a group of people who believe in God putting the lives of others at risk.

“I am not going to require that you occupy the lifeboats if you think your God will be happier with you if you do not leave. But do not dare to stand in the way of our getting on those lifeboats.”

Of course, the religious zealots tell us that if we occupy the lifeboats that we are interfering with their religious practices. They have a right to exercise their religious beliefs and, as it turns out, their religious beliefs compel then to prohibit the rest of us from occupying the life boats. Their religious beliefs tell them to require that we show unquestioned faith that God will prevent the boat from sinking, if only we believed strongly enough.

If the boat continues to sink, it is because some amongst us are not believing strongly enough. They would need to be ferreted out and eliminated. It is because of those non-believers that God has not yet stopped the boat from sinking.

And if anybody should protest, then, “You are not showing proper respect for my religion.”

It is as if the woman, accused of witchcraft, takes advantage of an opportunity to escape so that she would not be burned at the stake. The next thing you know, she is being condemned ‘for not showing proper respect for the religious views of others in your community, who, after all, have a right to practice their religion, even if their religion includes the practice of burning you at the stake.’

Or, even if their religion commands them to prevent people from using the lifeboats.

Or, even if their religion compels them to prevent people from obtaining the benefits of medical advances gained through embryonic stem cell research, or to use methods for preventing pregnancy other than not having sex, or to obtain the benefits and stability of entering into a government recognized contract of marriage, or of protecting the planet from the long range (post-rapture) harms from global warming or other disaster.

In this case, there are still reasons to think that it is somewhat irrational to focus on a debate over whether or not those god or gods actually exist. When the religious people line up to prevent access to the lifeboats, the better response is to simply say, “Get the frack out of the way!” Or, to adopt and enforce a rule that says, “Your free exercise of your religion ends where it interferes with my harmless exercise of liberty,” which includes the liberty of entering into the lifeboats.

“If you want to prevent people from entering the lifeboats, you need to come up with something stronger than, ‘Because my God said so!” You need an argument that has its foundation on evidence-based thinking, something that does not depend on faith, that you can show to others.”

“Do not use the benefits of embryonic stem cell research, do not have abortions, do not use condoms or other methods of preventing pregnancy and disease while having sex, do not have sex with members of the same gender, refuse blood transfusions and ignore all findings regarding the science of the brain, pray in schools (contrary to hate-mongering myth this has never been outlawed), pray whenever or wherever you want, but do not prevent those who base their decisions on evidence from pursuing the options that evidence-based thinking recommends.”

Prudence also suggests that if we are going to have a conflict between those who want to man the lifeboats, and those who want to block access to the lifeboats and force everybody to show their faith that God will keep the ship afloat, that we are going to want as many people on our side as we can get. This suggests that it is not particularly wise to turn to somebody who is initially on our side, who wants to man the lifeboats, and say, “You also believe in God. Get over there an help them stop us from getting to the lifeboats.” This is the, “If you are not for us, you are against us,” philosophy that some people have seen to adopt, where they want to force anybody with any sympathy for the idea of a God to join the opposition – we certainly cannot allow them to associate with us.

Demanding that fellow travelers join the “prevent use of the lifeboat” faction, when they are more than happy to agree to the use of the lifeboats, is simply a symptom of making belief in God the focus of the debate, rather than the saving of lives. Because saving as many people as possible is made subordinate to the belief in God argument, allies in the ‘save as many people as possible’ cause have been turned into enemies in the ‘belief in God’ conflict. It is a distraction.

This does not imply that it is wrong to present and defend the hypothesis, “The proposition that one or more gods exist is almost certainly false.” Certainly, an individual should be permitted to defend that proposition just as he may defend the proposition, “The proposition that Tyrannosaurus Rex was predominantly a scavenger is probably false.” The idea that this might offend and upset those who believe that T-Rex was a hunter is irrelevant – no morally virtuous person would be offended by such a claim. It’s just useful to remember that when the life, health, and well-being of people are at stake, these types of disagreements would not prevent good people from working together to protect life, health, and well-being.

Suffering for our Sins

Nullifidian has informed me that, according to an article in The Telegraph ("Floods are judgment on society, say bishops"), the floods in the United States are due to the moral failings of the people.

Many atheists will instantly condemn such a statement, mostly because of its source (and its content). However, in fact, there is an element of truth about it.

The victims of this flooding do suffer because of our sins.

One of the greatest sins for which these people suffer is the moral crime of listening to bishops tell us with each natural disaster that we can avoid these types of situations if we would only cultivate more hate against our neighbors in the name of God. It's our 'godless' or 'god-defying' neighbors who are the cause of the problem, they say, and if we will only more boldy turn against them and blame them for our problems, God will love us and stop the rains and the flooding.

Human Sacrifice

Specifically, the Anglican Bishops proclaimed that "pro-gay legislation" is responsible for the floods.

"The sexual orientation regulations [which give greater rights to gays] are part of a general scene of permissiveness. We are in a situation where we are liable for God's judgment, which is intended to call us to repentance."

In other words, to prevent future floods, we need to withdraw or repeal this pro-gay legislation. These Bishops are telling people that the best way to prepare for a natural disaster is by doing harm to their neighbor.

I assure you, legislation has nothing to do with flooding. The Anglican Bishops are doing the equivalent of asking for a human sacrifice. There is no moral difference between cutting the hearts out of 100,000 living human sacrifices to end a solar eclipse, and passing legislation that harms millions of homosexual citizens in order to prevent a future flood.

Seriously, this sick and archaic way of looking at the world should have never left the middle ages. It is morally and socially outrageous that this attitude can still be used today.

What these Anglican Bishops are really advocating is that we add a level of man-made misery and suffering to that which nature has delivered. As if nature does cause enough human misery, the Anglican Bishops feel compelled to engineer society to add even more.

Working Together

Another way in which we can blame the magnitude of this disaster on our moral failings is that too many people have wasted too much energy hating their neighbors and generating political conflicts, when that time and energy could have been spent learning to work together to better respond to natural disasters.

Ironically, if there ever is a natural (or terrorist-made) disaster, the people we need to depend on most are our neighbors - the people that the Anglican Bishops want you to harm.

Think of yourself being swept away by a flood. You reach out your hand with one chance of somebody pulling you to safety (or pulling you out of a burning building, or performing life-saving surgery, or getting you and your family out of the pile of rubble that some earthquake may have made out of your home). The person in the best position to save your life may well be the gay person that the Anglican Bishop wants you to harm.

Also, consider the importance of preparing for a natural disaster as an important part of saving lives and preventing injury. The Anglican Bishops would prefer wasting time and energy on a political fight. All of that time and effort that goes into hating homosexuals and blaming them for floods, could otherwise go into understanding nature, building disaster plans, and training people to work together to protect each other.

It is no exaggeration to say that these Anglican Bishops are seeking to generate animosity and conflict among people who really would benefit if they learned to work together for the common good.

Supporting the Church

What is really going on here is that the Church is exploiting a natural disaster – with all of the human misery and suffering that comes with it – to make itself more powerful. It is committing a form of blackmail. “Either you support the Church, give us political power, and obey our dictates, or our God will make sure that you suffer the consequences.” If it works as it should, then the Church leaders become the masters, and the rest of us humbly obey (so that we do not suffer the consequence of floods, hurricanes, tsunamis, fires, plague, and the like).

I am not saying that the Church is run by a group of people who know that no God exists and who, instead, have worked out this elaborate conspiracy to trick the people. I am willing to allow that the Church leaders believe what they say. However, the reason they believe it is because they want to believe it. They are human. They like power. The sight of millions of people bowing to them and giving them homage can easily turn a person’s head.

These people look at this line of argument and, perhaps even subconsciously (rather than consciously), note that it will result in people bowing down to them, giving them social and political power and control. This triggers the pleasure centers of the brain. This, in turn, tells the person that they ‘like’ this idea. Because they like it, it must be true. In fact, religion makes this a lot easier because when the religious leader ‘likes’ something, he does not have to hold it up to the light of reason. He does not have to question it in any way. In fact, he can tell himself that it would be wrong to question it because what he likes obviously comes from God.

It is all so very convenient.

Understanding Cause and Effect

In this flooding, we are, indeed, paying for our sins. One of those sins is listening to people who denigrate science and who profess magic solutions that prevent people from taking real-world action to protect themselves from real-world risk.

One of the things that scientists have been telling us for the last few decades is that global warming will mean greater flooding. Warmer temperatures are going to cause oceans, lakes, rivers, and puddles to evaporate more quickly than before. Plants make their living by pulling moisture out of the ground and using depositing it in the atmosphere – and plants can do much more of this with higher temperatures. More moisture in the air means that more moisture is going to come out of the air when we have precipitation events. We can reasonably expect flooding to be worse in the future than it has been in the past.

Science has warned us. However, the theistic branch of society keeps telling us to ignore science. Forget about all of those findings and research, all we need to do is to pray to God, hate our neighbors, and support the Church and we will have nothing to worry about.

Because of our sins, we do not understand the real world nearly as well as we could have understood it – and we do not put as much effort into preparing for these types of events because we think that our good luck charms and God’s love will protect us. As a result, we suffer far greater harm than we would have if we simply accepted the fact that we live in a universe that really does not care whether we live or die, or how well we live, or how painfully and long it takes us to die.

Conclusion

The Church of England bishops are correct. We are suffering for our sins. We are suffering for the sin that too many people have, for too long, listened to people like the Church of England bishops. The Church has distracted people from obtaining an accurate understanding of how nature works, and has devoted far too much of its effort to sewing conflict among its people rather than helping them to work together to prepare for natural disasters and to help each other out in times of needs. It wants to teach people to hate their homosexual neighbors, rather than sit down with their homosexual neighbors and ask, “What can we do to prepare for the next flood?”

There is a form of cosmic justice in the world. This cosmic justice says that people who do stupid things, who fail to understand and anticipate the real world in which they live, are likely to suffer the consequences of their stupidity. A nation that spends too many centuries listening to bishops rather than scientists well illustrates this principle.