Bill O'Reilly's Take on the Pledge

A member of the studio audience has brought my attention to a posting that tells of some statements that Bill O'Reilly made concerning the Pledge protest held at a local high school.

At Boulder High School, a number of students walked out during the pledge ceremony on Thursday (and plan to do so every Thursday) to protest the use of school time to impose a religious ceremony on the students in violation of the Constitutional prohibitions on establishing religion.

One of my most popular posts has been A Perspective on the Pledge which argues in favor of students protesting the message contained within the Pledge.

As I argued in The Moral Case against 'under God', the claim that 'under God' is not meant to establish religion and denigrate atheists is as absurd as saying that 'indivisible' was not added to the pledge to promote Union over rebellion, or that 'with liberty and justice for all' merely says is consistent with claiming 'there is nothing wrong with tyranny and injustice'.

It is a laughable absurdity whereby standing in front of a court and making the claim that 'under God' is neutral with respect to religion is as absurd as standing before a court and saying '2 + 2 = 5'. When thinking people hear individuals giving this argument in court, and see the judges nodding in agreement, it makes one gape in wonder at what humans can will themselves to believe when they want to.

The special case of Bill O'Reilly's comments is that he substantially seems to have accepted these arguments, shrugged his shoulders, and said, "That is what is so good about the Pledge?"

[The words 'under God'] were inserted in the 1950s to separate the United States, as you rightly pointed out, founded under the banner of God - God gives us our inalienable rights - from the Communist hoards in Russia and China. The United States Congress said [that] we want to have a pledge that separates our Judeo Christian tradition from our enemies, who are totalitarian atheists. Now, do you think anybody from Boulder understands that?

Well, yes, it is very easy to understand.

In a fit of religious zealotry, the United States congress passed legislation to denigrate a group of peaceful Americans by linking their belief (that the proposition 'no god exists') to totalitarianism - a link that is just as unjust and absurd as claiming that all religious people (including, for example, the Amish) are responsible for 9/11.

And O'Reilly does not think that it is at all right to protest an official government denigration of people (such as myself) who happen to have this belief, quite independent of the fact that many atheists such as myself argue quite well against totalitarianism. We still (according to O'Reilly) must be deceptively and unjustly branded as pro-totalitarian.

This is in addition to the lie that American was founded on Judeo-Christian principles. It is sad to imagine how much greater the world have been if, instead of bringing the 10 Commandments (whichever of the three biblical versions one accepts) off of the mountain, Moses would have brought a tablet that said things like:

(1) Thou shalt not permit any law to be made respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

(5) Thou shalt not hold a person to answer for a capital or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a grand jury . . . nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

(8) Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.

However, the 10 Commandments were invented by people who were as substantially ignorant about the facts of morality as they were about science - getting only a small percentage of their moral beliefs correct. It took the enlightenment, with its dedication to reason over scripture, to finally make some moral progress, and to bring forth the principles under which this country was founded.

Those principles can only be found in scripture under such pained and tortured interpretations that almost all Christians today simply ignore the immorality contained within the Bible, rather than try to make sense of it.

That itself is substantial evidence that Scripture came, not from a perfectly moral God, but from primitive, ignorant, humans.

[Note: In Doug Giles: Atheist Theft of Christian Morality, I explain where how the principles in the founding of this doctrine relate to the Judeo-Christian tradition which, actually, was the tradition of the Divine Right of Kings.]

Finally, there is the absurdity in O'Reilly's arguments that effectively says, "Our rights come from God; therefore, only those who believe in God have rights."

It has been a sad tradition in many religions to hold that members of their religion have an inherent 'God given' right to rule others, while those who do not belong to that religion lie outside of the realm of morality, and one may do whatever one pleases to them. Indeed, most scriptures speak about morality only when applied to another member of their religion, while biblical stories tell of untold horrors inflicted on any who lie outside of that religion.

This is simply a version of the argument that Christians used for 1300 years to defend "the Divine Right of Kings" - the doctrine that the Declaration of Independence argued against. This was the idea that the King obtained his right to rule from God, and any who challenged the King challenged God.

O'Reilly, and his guest radio talk show host Dan Caplis, seem to be argument that God gave special rights to the Christian majority, and that if one is not in the majority, one cannot be treated unjustly.

It is a doctrine immediately countered by recognizing the fact that the enslavement or murder of minorities would not be morally permissible regardless of the size of the majority defending it.

Nor is it morally permissible to take government money (that everybody must contribute to by force of law) and use it to promote one set of religious beliefs among others. A civic form should be a place where all peaceful individuals can come as equals to discuss how to live together in peace, not a place that Christians claim as their own where non-Christians must come to beg for indulgences.

If God gave every human rights, then it is possible (however much O'Reilly may want to deny it) for Christians to treat others unjustly, and those others have a right to protest this injustice. The Pledge of Allegiance as written unjustly denigrates a whole group of peaceful Americans by associating them with rebels, tyrants, and criminals. This is, in fact, an instance of the moral crime of 'bearing false witness'. And if this crime is indeed declared so by God, then on what grounds do people like O'Reilly defend, in the name of God, make an instance of 'bearing false witness' national policy unworthy of protest?

In closing, I want to ask the same question I asked a couple of days ago in the post, A Reason to Protest

We know full well that if any broadcaster were to go on air and state about any other group of peaceful citizens that the official policy of this country is one of denigration with the intent of eliminating them not only their own personal enemy, but America's enemy, as sanctioned by Congress, then the members of that group would scream bloody murder.

And, yet, I suspect that the atheist community - including those so-called 'militant' atheists, will remain substantially passive.

Will O’Reilly face the level of protest befitting his remarks?

Individual vs. Group Responsibility

Yesterday, I mentioned that I have formed two impressions from watching the CNN broadcast, God’s Warriors. Yesterday, I addressed the issue of how religion fuels a desire in some people to behave in ways harmful to others – and that it is probably as important to address the desire to serve God as it is to address the belief that a God exists.

Today, I wish to address a second impression – the degree to which ‘God’s warriors’ like to speak in terms of group responsibility rather than individual responsibility. When addressing some crime or transgression, often they do not seek out the individuals who are responsible, but they lay the blame on a whole group and use this to justify doing harm to any and all members of the group.

For example, a member of Group X commits some crime – say, a group of blacks rape a white woman, a Irish Catholic blows up an Irish Protestant building, a Sunni Muslim blows up a Shiite mosque, a Palestinian sets off a suicide bomb inside an Israeli bus, some Native Americans rise up and kill some White settlers, Noah finds Ham drunk and naked and condemns all of his descendents to slavery, God finds Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and responds by declaring that all humans deserve punishment for this original sin.

The basic idea is that some individual has committed some moral transgression (or something alleged to have been a moral transgression). This means that some sort of punishment (retribution) is in order. However, for some reason people get it into their head that if Person A commits the crime, and Person B is related to Person A by race, by gender, by family membership, by church affiliation, or some other way, that justice can be served by doing harm to Person B.

So, Person B is then harmed as ‘punishment’ for Person A’s actions. Unfortunately, Person B himself, or Person B’s family and friends take the harm done to Person B as somehow unjust. Since an injustice has been done against Person B, some sort of retribution is in order. So, The Friends of Person B find Person C (who is in some way related to those who did harm to Person B) and they ‘obtain justice’ by doing harm to Person C.

Unfortunately, Person C has friends and family who consider this harm to be unjust . . .

In fact, everywhere where we see conflict ruining the lives of individuals, we hear speakers talking in terms of group responsibility, rather than individual responsibility. Everywhere we see peace, we see societies who, among other things, have a strong cultural dedication to ‘finding the person who was responsible for this.’ Anybody who was not responsible for the crime can rest assured that his or her life is secure. The fact that he or she shares some quality of race, gender, religion, family relationship, or some similar quality as the accused (other than the quality of being guilty), will not be used to condemn him or her.

Of course, this is a matter of degree. I am not talking here about societies that are completely given over to the doctrine of group responsibility, versus societies that are completely given over to the doctrine of individual responsibility. We will still hear people making ‘group responsibility’ claims in an ‘individual responsibility’ culture – and weak and feeble calls for peace from people making ‘individual responsibility’ claims in a ‘group responsibility’ culture. However, to the degree that we see a society descend into barbarism, I suggest that to this degree we see a society adopting a ‘group responsibility’ as their doctrine of ‘justice’.

Even within an individual, we can find cases where that individual is speaking the language of a ‘group responsibility’ adherent, versus speaking as an advocate of ‘individual responsibility’. Somebody who uses the doctrine of ‘individual responsibility’ will give specific names when speaking about transgressions, or speak in terms of those who actually commit transgressions (rapists, thieves, murderers, liars, sophists, bigots, people who shout into their cell phones while riding a public bus as if everybody else wants to be a part of her conversation). People who embrace the doctrine of ‘group responsibility’ use generic terms that are not conceptually linked to any transgression (atheist, liberal, conservative, sunni, black, white, gay, Muslim, Christian, secular, religious).

The series God’s Warriors presented interviews with Jews who became terrorists – one of which attempted to kill a number of Palestinian children at a girl’s school. Their plot failed, though they had gone as far as to plant the bomb near the school and to drive off. The moral doctrine behind this behavior was that it is permissible to seek ‘justice’ by doing harm (killing, maiming) people who had nothing at all to do with the transgressions against them.

We also see Israel adopting policies that do harm to all Palestinians equally. It does not seem to matter to them whether the Palestinian being harmed by their policies has anything to do with any transgressions within Israel. As long as one is a Palestinian, one may be legitimately harmed on this doctrine of ‘group responsibility’.

I am not going to even try to pretend that this is a ‘religious’ problem and that those who do not believe in God will not be tempted to adopt the doctrine of ‘group responsibility’. In fact, many of my previous posts have been very tightly focused on cases where I have discovered atheists speaking in terms of ‘group responsibility’ – condemning any and all people who believe in God as if they are all guilty (and can thus be punished) for the moral transgressions of the more fundamentalist theists.

I have had to remind atheist readers on a number of occasions that, “The proposition ‘at least one god exists’ is (almost certainly) true’, by itself has exactly the same moral implications as, “The proposition ‘at least one God exists’ is (almost certainly) false’. That is to say, none at all. In both cases, one needs to add a number of additional propositions – propositions about the nature of this god or these gods and their relationship to goodness in the first sense, propositions about the real-world facts about reasons for action in the second sense – before one can draw conclusions about morality.

Yet, at the same time, religion – particularly fundamentalist religion – seems to do a particularly poor job of teaching its follows to adopt a doctrine of ‘individual responsibility’ over ‘group responsibility’.

In recent years, we have heard a number of critics of the ‘new atheism’ refer to the writers in this genre as ‘atheist fundamentalists’. If we take the term ‘fundamentalist’ as ‘somebody who believes that some doctrine is beyond question and all who do not live their lives by strict interpretation of its doctrines are evil,’ then we can expect ‘atheist fundamentalists’ to be as common in the real world as ‘round squares’.

However, if we take the idea that ‘fundamentalism’ is somehow liked to ‘those who adopt an attitude of group responsibility – group credit for any who belong to their group, and group condemnation for all who do not belong,’ then this type of ‘atheist fundamentalist’ is certainly possible. This will be somebody who begins with a strong presumption that an agent is good merely because he is atheist and his action is just based solely on the fact that it targets theists. This can be held in contrast to somebody who begins with a strong presumption that an agent who mentions ‘Jesus’ favorably while speaking is a good person and that any policy that targets non-Christians is automatically just.

So, I worry that if the ‘new Atheism’ does not adopt a firm commitment to ‘individual responsibility’ over ‘group responsibility’ – of blaming and praising people by name or in terms conceptually linked to some wrongdoing – that, in the long run, they may not be any better than the people they condemn.

This is, in fact, one of my greatest worries about this ‘new Atheism’.

The Passion of Religion

My schedule has not allowed me time to watch CNN’s special, God’s Warriors until recently. In watching it, there are two things that I have noticed.

Before I describe those two things, I want to give a caveat. All of us are prone to filter whatever we see through a lens of existing beliefs. Our habit is to see things that confirm our beliefs and mark them as significant, and to see things that conflict with our beliefs and mark them as aberrations or exceptions. My filter has been through the lens of desire utilitarianism, and this may well have distorted what I saw.

The two things that I noticed in this presentation are (1) that between ‘a belief in God’, and ‘a desire to serve God’, the latter has the greater influence and is the greatest threat, and (2) God’s warriors tend to speak in terms of group responsibility rather than individual responsibility.

Today, I wish to deal with the first of these issues.

Belief vs. Desire

Many people who challenge religion spend a great deal of time speaking about belief in God. They speak about the absurdities of holding that the proposition, “God exists,” to be true given the total lack of evidence, the contradictions, the fact that so many people have faith in so many different views about God that almost all of them have to be wrong, and that they offer no criteria for determining which beliefs are mistaken and which are not.

All of these are, indeed, serious problems when it comes to belief in God.

However, this brings up an important question – why are so many people blind to these considerations?

In watching God’s Warriors my mind turned repeatedly to the passion of those who believe in God – who believe in different gods. People of different religions speak about their devotion to different Gods and different scriptures, stating, “Anybody who is not living their life according to this book is wasting their life – their life has no meaning, and no purpose.” Yet, they refer to different books.

This should invite people to consider the following: “Well, if they say that no life can have meaning without devotion to their book, and I say that no life can have meaning without devotion to my book, then one of us is wrong. One of us must be living under the mere illusion of a meaningful life.”

To the degree that people consider this question, they almost universally come to the conclusion, “Their life is a life that only has the illusion of meaning and purpose. My life obviously does have meaning and purpose.”

How can they reach that conclusion?

It is because they can feel the meaning and purpose in their own life. And it is because they feel the emptiness of living a life without those elements in it. These feelings are extremely strong – overpowering.

These feelings have a narcotic like property of overriding rational thought, making total absurdities appear reasonable. The idea of living in a universe that does not have the qualities that one desires in it is so painful, so depressing, so agonizing, that one must come to believe that those properties are present in order to avoid this pain, depression, and agony. Any argument . . . any argument at all (including the claim that one does not need arguments but can accept a conclusion based on faith alone) is accepted, because of the tremendous emotional pain that comes from not accepting it.

Good and Bad Passion

The next question to ask is, “Is this passion a bad thing?”

Well, it depends. Does it cause a person to suffer such a break with reality that they cannot function as well as they otherwise could in the real world? Does it cause people to refuse life-saving medical procedures? Does it cause them to stand in the way of medical and scientific advances that have the promise to save lives – thus causing them to sacrifice the lives and health of others to their own good feelings? Does it cause them to want to kill or otherwise harm anybody who threatens their distorted view of reality? Does it cause them to devote their lives to pursuing legislation and other social parties harmful to others because doing so is the only way of avoiding the pain and agony associated with realizing that the world is not put together the way one wants it to be put together?

To the degree that one is passionate about such things, then that passion is not such a good thing. In fact, it is evil. It is harmful and destructive not only to those who suffer from it, but it makes those people a threat to others, and that is not a good thing.

One point that I want to stress here is that passion feeds the beliefs. Any attempt to deal with the beliefs that does not deal with the passion is doomed to fail. Accepting your arguments, no matter how rational or how well supported, is simply too painful for such people. They will become persuaded by reason and argument only to the degree that their passions will allow them to do so.

This suggests that atheists will be well advised to spend a little less time discussing the arguments for or against the existence of God or contradictions in scripture or the evidence against the truth of some interpretation of some holy book, and more time dealing directly with the passions that block people’s acceptance to reason.

This means tackling the “meaning of life” and “no morality without God” issues.

The Issue of Meaning

On the meaning of life issue, I have argued that living a religious life is like being hooked up to an experience machine – or living a life in a Star Trek style holodeck, where one is fed images of a life that one does not actually have. The person hooked up to such a machine may be made to believe that she is living in Africa devoting her life to fighting disease and saving the people who live there. Only, the people she is saving are merely ‘toons’ in an elaborate computer simulation. They are not accomplishing anything real. They are merely wasting away, accomplishing nothing.

Or, worse, they are actually doing harm while the experience machine feeds them lies about doing good. I described this scenario earlier, about being hooked up to an experience machine where, each time the person thinks he has helped others, the machine causes others great pain and suffering. Those who are advocating legislation harmful to the interests of others live in an experience machine that is feeding them the delusion that they are doing great things, when in fact they are causing unjustified harm and suffering to others with each ‘good thing’ that they accomplish.

“Do you want to live in the real world, helping real people with real problems, or do you want to live in a fantasy world where you are merely presented with the illusion of doing good while you actually do great harm?” This is an important question to ask to those people who think that their life can only have meaning within the context of one of these religious myths.

Addressing the Desire to Believe

Of course, this question will not likely penetrate the thoughts of those who are so locked into the experience machine of religion that they cannot be safely disconnected from it. Anybody who has watched much science fiction is familiar with this scenario. Some character or other has been hooked up to some machine to such an extent, “If we remove him, he will die.” In the case of religion, the heartbreak of being disconnected from the machine and discovering the real world may cause him to wish he were dead.

The question will likely be more meaningful for people who have not been hooked up to the machine for so long that they can no longer tolerate being without it, or who have not been hooked up to it but could serve to be warned of its dangers.

There is one chance for a meaningful life, and that is to spend it in the real world dealing with real-world issues, not in an imaginary playground filled with mythical heroes and monsters.

I would like those who read this blog and who have a habit of arguing that the proposition, “God does not exist” is not true, or pointing out the moral failings of some who do not believe in God, to spend some effort pointing out how a religious life is wasted. Ultimately, this may be the most effective starting point for addressing these other two concerns.

The Role of Feelings

Much of my recent writings have seemed to focus on promoting the value of reason and denigrating the value of feelings in moral judgments. I want to take some time to clarify the relationship between reason and ‘feelings’ here.

I hold to a theory of value that says that reason alone can never tell us what is good and what is bad. Value exists as a real-world property. However, value exists as a relationship between states of affairs and desires such that, if no desires existed, then no value would exist either.

In saying this, the most common conclusion that readers will jump to is to think that I have just said, “Relationships between states of affairs and desires have intrinsic value.” They will then challenge me to prove this proposition and boast that I have been defeated if I do not do so.

So, I will quickly add, “The proposition, ‘Relationships between states of affairs and desires have intrinsic value’ is false.” I do not intend to defend it. In fact, I would challenge anybody to defend it. It is not what I said. I said that value consists of relationships between states of affairs and desires in that, if an A has a desire that P, and P is true in S, then A has a ‘reason for action’ to bring about or preserve S. That is to say, one of A’s goals or ends is any state of affairs in which P is true.

That’s it.

This means that desires cannot be evaluated, right? “If it feels good, do it.” If I desire to slaughter all of the Jews, then a state of affairs in which Jews are being slaughtered is one that has value to me, and nobody can criticize it on the basis of its being ‘intrinsically wrong’, right? Or, as some philosophers have maintained, we cannot reason about ends because reason alone cannot tell us which ends are ‘appropriate’ or ‘inappropriate’. We can only reason about means. Anybody who stands up and criticizes certain ends is guilty of arguing from false assumptions.

Right?

Well, yes and no. We cannot reason about ends as ends. If a person has a desire that P, we cannot apply reason to P alone and determine whether it is something that, because of its intrinsic qualities, deserves to be desired.

However, every end is also, at the same time, a means to the fulfillment of other ends. I have a desire for chocolate. A state of affairs in which I am eating chocolate is something I value as an end. However, my desire to eat chocolate is also, at the same time, a means that thwarts other ends – my end of living a long and healthy life, of maintaining my weight, of living without a constant struggle to thwart my desire for chocolate so that I can obtain these other ends. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with eating chocolate that reason alone can discover. However, reason is perfectly able to discover that the desire for chocolate thwarts other desires, and that I would be better off to be rid of it.

This, then, ties in to my criticism of ‘feelings’ as a form of moral argument. Feelings tell us what we like and do not like. Feelings do not tell us what we should like or should not like. In order to determine what we should or should not like we need to apply reason to those feelings and determine their value. This does not mean determining whether the object of our feelings has some type of intrinsic merit where they inherently ‘deserve’ certain attitudes towards them. This means determining whether the feeling we are talking about tends to thwart or to fulfill other desires – whether it is a good or bad means towards the fulfillment of those desires.

So, whenever somebody says that they get their morality from their ‘feelings’ I cough, sputter, and generally warn all who can hear to run away in fear. It should be quite obvious that a large majority of suicide bombers, crusaders, jihadists, inquisitors, Nazi guards, slave owner, child abuser, and the like trusted their feelings. When it comes to the quest for a reliable source of moral truth, ‘feelings’ are no more reliable than ‘scripture’, and people who decide to trust their feelings are just as dangerous as those who would trust scripture.

In order to get to morality, the right question to ask is not, “How do I feel about X?” The question we should be asking is, “How should people generally feel about X?” In answering that question, it would be a mistake to think that we can somehow divine or derive the intrinsic merit of X – whether X ‘deserves’ certain feelings entirely because of its own independent nature. The only option we have – because the only value that exists in the real world is in the form of relationships between states of affairs and desires – is to ask whether a particular ‘feeling’ will tend to fulfill or thwart other desires.

Recall, if A has a desire that P, and P is true in S, then A has a ‘reason for action’ to bring about S. It is also the case that if R will bring about or preserve S that A also has reason to bring about or promote R, in order to obtain S. This ‘reason to bring about R’ has to do with instrumental value, or the value that R can have as a means to bring about S.

One possible member in the set R can well be that ‘people have a desire that Q’, for some Q. The most obvious example of this is a ‘desire to help others’. I have a desire that P. If you have a desire to help others then you have a desire to bring about a state of affairs in which the proposition, ‘I am helping others’ is true. That proposition would be true in any state of affairs in which you are helping me realize a state of affairs in which P is true.

Of course, if P itself is something that is helpful to others, your desire to help others will pay extra dividends if you choose to help me. Whereas if my desire does harm to others, your desire to help others might even lead you to conclude that you can do more to help others by actually hindering me.

This is a rather clear case. Other cases are not so clear. A desire to tell the truth is generally something that people have reason to promote. However, there are exceptions – such as telling the truth to Nazi SS soldiers about Jews hiding in the attic, or telling the truth to your sister about her surprise birthday party, or simply telling an entertaining story which is, essentially, a bunch of claims about things that did not happen.

The crux of the matter is that no person can tell what is right from what is wrong by measuring how he feels about things. His feelings will tell him what he likes and does not like, but not what he should like or should not like. The practice of determining moral value by searching one’s own feelings is as flaws as attempting to discover whether some claim is true or false by measuring whether or not one believes it. The inference, “I feel good about X; therefore, X must be moral,” is as flawed as, “I believe X; therefore, X must be true.” A person can feel good about something (the way a jihadist can feel good about killing infidels or a Christian in America can feel good about coercing children into praying to her God in public schools), without these being things that a person should feel good about. The person who uses his or her own feelings as a judge of right and wrong is, in essence making a fundamentally arrogant and presumptuous claim that, “In matters of ethics, I cannot be wrong; and if anybody disagrees with me, they must necessarily be wrong.”

The real question to be asking is not, “Do I feel good about doing X?” but “Should I feel good about doing X?” To answer this question, you have to ask, “What would our society be like if everybody felt good about doing X?” You cannot answer this question by searching your own feelings.

You can only answer this question by looking out at the world – at the real world relationships that exist quite independent of how you perceive them, and ask, “What are the effects of everybody feeling good about doing X?” If the effects are not so great, then it is quite possible that one is feeling good about something that one should not feel good about. Or you might not feel good about something that, if you were smart, you would realize that you have reason to cause everybody to feel good about.

So, then, this is the relationship between ‘feelings’, reason, and value. Desires determine what has value. Whether or not something has value requires an exercise of reason, but reason itself can answer this question only by discovering how an object of evaluation relates to certain desires.

However, this same capacity to use reason to answer questions about value can be used to answer questions about the value of having certain feelings. These questions – about whether it is a good or bad idea to be promoting certain feelings – are at heart of morality. People who use their own feelings to answer moral questions are making a mistake, just like those who use their own beliefs to determine what is true. Determining the effects of states in which certain feelings are more or less common and more or less powerful is not something that we can learn from merely thinking about a problem. It requires making empirical observations of the world around us. It requires the same techniques used in science, applied to real-world relationships between desires and other desires.

So, the morals of this story are: Feelings (desires) are essential for value. Desires determine the ends (goals) of our actions. We have no way to evaluate ends as ends. However, each and every end is also a means, and we do have ways of evaluating the rationality of ends as means. Morality is concerned primarily with evaluating ends as means and distinguishing good ends from bad ends. This requires reason. This also allows that how a person feels about something, and how he should feel about it, are not necessarily the same thing.

A Reason to Protest

A member of the studio audience has brought an incident to my attention that was described as follows:

Ironic note on the poster of Atheist Symbols for the Atheist Alliance International convention: I went to have it made today, at a local shop which specializes in posters, worked happily with the designer – and then several hours later got a call to come back and pick my stuff up, no poster. They are Christians and cannot do it. Went to another place, same thing. It was simply a poster with symbols to vote on – but it was for atheists. And they are Christians. One person helpfully explained that they turned down the KKK too. So sorry. But they’re Christians.

Somebody wanting to point out the bigotry behind this behavior would likely ask the question of what the sentiment would be if a shop owner had refused service to a Jewish organization on these grounds.

However, there is a second part to this same question that is also particularly telling.

What would the reaction been of a Jewish organization who was given this type of treatment?

Atheists are talking about the need for less intolerance and discrimination against them. This is precisely the type of action that calls for some sort of visible protest. As a matter of fact, the above organization would immediately have launched a campaign of protest, calling up reporters and politically connected friends and associates to protest the behavior. They would organize some sort of action to the degree that, currently, no business would dare to refuse such service because of the publicity that would be generated.

The response that I have seen so far suggests that the Atheist reaction is expected to be the mumbling of a few complaints among themselves . . . nothing more.

When we think of atheists who are protesting that religious moderates are too tolerant of fundamentalism and are unwilling to take a stand against it, to let this type of behavior pass without protest is, at best, hypocritical. This makes it sound like ‘passionate atheists’ are willing to complain about others standing up to fundamentalism in ways that they are not willing to do so themselves.

Why not? Perhaps because it is too inconvenient to do so?

In organizing a proper protest, it would seem that the following steps would be required.

Of course, the first thing to do would be to contact the local police department and find out the terms and conditions required for holding a protest against the two businesses, then immediately begin whatever tasks are necessary to conform to those requirements.

The next thing to do would be to start to design a protest that would conform to those requirements but would still be effective. Perhaps a day gathered in front of each store in protest would be best.

The concept of ‘effectiveness’ requires some sort of goal or purpose. It will be important to select a goal that the group can actually meet, and that can best be reached through this type of protest.

For example, it would not be worthwhile to organize a protest with the expectation that you would be costing the business money or otherwise forcing some hardship on them. They may even receive more than enough donations from other fundamentalists to cover any financial damage. Nor would it be worthwhile to organize a protest for the purpose of forcing an apology from the owners.

On the other hand, a reasonable protest would be To make people aware of the discrimination that atheists are subject to in this community.

This objective would suggest, to whatever degree it is possible to do so, arranging a protest so that atheists who are capable of drawing the press would participate.

The Civil Rights sit-ins against discrimination did not seek to drive the discriminating business out of business or to force an apology. The objective was to call attention to a basic unfairness – to force the public to confront an issue that they had so far been far too willing to ignore. The same should be the case if people were to organize a protest of these businesses.

Another lesson from the civil rights movement is that this should not be made an atheist-only event. Any Jew, Wiccan, Buddhist, or anybody who recognizes the injustice and bigotry represented by this type of behavior should be permitted to express their support for the moral principles involved.

It would also be a good idea to have a prepared statement in advance. That prepared statement should be written in two parts. The first part would be a totally honest and accurate description of the event. The second part would be an account of the moral case against the owner – an argument explaining why a moral person would not have done such a thing, and would not support such a thing.

In making the moral case, I would include something the following:

Any person of good moral character would easily agree that this behavior is immoral.

If a Jew were to enter this business, and if the owner were to refuse to give service to the Jew because we are Christians, we know that they would be soundly condemned for this, and rightfully so. If a Christian were to walk into a business where the staff refused to seat them or to wait on them because they were Christians, the air waves would be filled with the sound of protest.

This is because people know that treating others this way, when those others are peaceful and law-abiding citizens, is entirely unfair, unjust, and immoral. We are simply saying what everybody knows, that this type of unprovoked and unjust hostility towards peaceful members of the community is the very essence of bigotry, and it is something that no person interested in forming a moral community can condone.

As for comparing us to the Ku Klux Klan or any similar organization, they offered this as some type of balm, as if it is somehow quite acceptable to be like the KKK. It is hard to imagine a greater insult. It’s about like being shot and having the shooter say, ‘Don’t feel bad, I would have done the same to Hitler.’ Of course you would have done the same to Hitler. So would we.

Do you know what a bigot is? A bigot is somebody who looks for excuses to hate other people – to denigrate them – to treat them as something less than what they are. Comparing us to the KKK is about as denigrating, demeaning, and bigoted a statement that a person can make.

I would suspect that such an issue would bring up the question of whether a company has a right to refuse service to organizations such as the KKK or the Nazi Party. On this issue, I would say,

The right to do something does not imply an immunity from criticism. It implies an immunity from violence. The right to publish Mein Kampf does not imply that nobody should criticize or condemn the author of such filth. It only implies that it is wrong to react with violence. I will say, here and now, that – unlike some Christians and a lot of Muslims – I condemn anybody who commits or even threatens to commit violence against these people. Whether it be by phoning in death threats, or vandalism against their property, or any type of physical harm to person or property, the only legitimate way to respond to an insult like this is with words and peaceful protest.

If people should plan such a protest, they should also be ready to respond to the remark, “What are a bunch of atheists doing talking about morality. Where do they get their morality from?”

That criticism should be met head on. “Rational people know the value of peace, justice, security, and freedom. Those who say otherwise are too often people who seek to profit from manufacturing fear and hatred of others, selling a boogyman image of atheists to frighten people into contributing to their ministries of hate.”

This might be a bit frightening – a bit scary. However, there are scarier things in the world. Consider the situation that Specialist Jeremy Hall put himself in. An example of Christians showing their ‘moral superiority’ by responding to speech with threats of violence. And listen to the silence from Christian leaders when it comes to condemning those acts.

In the Year 1787

It has been four years since the French had helped the Americans defeat King George III. Since then, living conditions in America have changed considerably.

For one thing, the French have taken the best parts of New York and Charleston harbors and turned them into French military ports for their ships.

They have also taken the best part of Philadelphia and turned it into a walled up French compound called (for some strange reason) “The Green Zone.” Within its walls, they have a construction project going on that makes the palace at Versailles look like a hunting lodge. It’s an area that includes Independence Hall and, in fact, the new American government is almost entirely housed within French fortifications. It’s for their protection – from the ‘Tories’ who have threatened to disrupt the new government.

The French military has gone to great lengths to round up these Tories. They regularly send patrols out to villages that they suspect as having Tory sympathies. When they do so, they will typically round up everybody in the village and haul them off to French prisons for interrogation. Those who come out again tell of stories of torture and abuse.

Over time, the French have taken to use the word ‘Tory’ to refer to more than just the original supporters of King George, but anybody who is opposed to what some Americans call ‘The French Occupation’. The French say that they are not here to occupy the land and claim it as their own – that they will leave if the American government asks them to. Yet, it is difficult to imagine that they would actually leave the military installations they have created or the “Green Zone”. The French seem to be putting an awful lot of effort to make sure that they are never actually quite asked to leave, at least by the government that they recognize, which (as it turns out) is made up of people who are ‘easily persuaded’ into not extending that particular invitation.

Many of these ‘Tories’, as the French call them, were actually opposed to King George. They endorsed a list of grievances against him, such as his habit of sending soldiers door to door in massive sweeps to search people’s homes and arrest anybody they suspect as having anti-government sympathies, holding the accused indefinitely without charges filed against them, inflicting cruel and unusual punishment on those individuals while they were held in these prisons, and hauling them off to distant prisons to be tried according to ‘secret’ evidence, far from home and far from any evidence that can be collected in their favor.

Now, we have the French sending troops door to door in massive sweeps to search people’s homes and arrest anybody they suspect of having anti-French sympathies, holding the accused indefinitely without charges filed against them, inflicting cruel and unusual punishment on these people who were held in these prisons, and hauling them off to distant prisons to be tried according to ‘secret’ evidence, far from home and far from any evidence that can be collected in their favor.

Of course, the French propagandists only see two options. “Either you are with us, or you are against us. Either you are for the French, or you are for its enemy (the British).” Their propagandists cannot see – or, at least, cannot allow others to see that that somebody might simply be anti-arbitrary arrest, indefinite confinement, cruel and unusual punishment, or rigged trials based on secret evidence. Those people do not care who practices these wrongs – British or French. Whoever does so is evil.

The French have another problem in America. Besides the Americans who see the French Occupation as an affront to their liberty and have taken it upon themselves to kill French soldiers, the French are having to deal with the aftermath of the war in the South. That part of the Revolutionary War was substantially a civil war – Americans versus Americans. It was also a particularly bloody and cruel war, with a long list of the most heinous acts of barbarism one can find in war. This generated a great deal of hard feelings. Members of each group insist that they are entitled to ‘justice’ against the members Actually, what they want is revenge. They have adopted an ethic that if Person A in a town committed a crime against some member of their group, that ‘justice’ can be extracted from anybody in that town, regardless of their connection to the original act.

So, the French are not only dealing with Americans who want to kill the French. They are dealing with Americans who want to kill other Americans.

Much of this is a battle among different groups that want to control the government. There are the ‘federalists’ who want to establish a strong central government and who seem to have acquired the support of the French. And there are the ‘Democrats’ – made up mostly of Virginia plantation owners, who insist on a weaker form of government. In the chaos of French occupation (since the French were more interested in building secure bases for themselves than in figuring out how to deal with the Americans), this dispute also grew increasingly violent.

Of course, the English are not sitting back quietly watching all of this happen without comment and, wherever they think they can get away with it, without trying to find some way to do harm to the French. They have found ways to funnel money and supplies to the anti-French ‘Tories’. Even though some of those Americans were vehemently anti-British when the British ruled the country, they are not above taking money and supplies from whomever will provide them. Particularly since the only alternative would be to surrender and allow the French occupation, with all of the injustice that the French have so far exhibited in their country.

Now, I want you to imagine that you are in this land. You are living in Tranton, New Jersey. You have seen the French enter your town and take away whomever they thought might be anti-French. You have talked to some who have returned with horror stories about what the French did to them in prison. Some people never return. They are simply called, ‘the Disappeared’. The French seem skilled at making people ‘disappear’ when convenient. Other neighbors who have been captured and hauled away were taken off to Europe to face trial in secret courts where secret evidence will be presented against them.

Let’s assume that you have had a fleeting thought that there might be some merit to joining the people in the hills who are fighting the French occupation with British money and British supplies. If you should hint at these new sympathies to the wrong person, you could end up on one of those French prisons. But, heck, you could end up in one of those French prisons anyway, since the French are not arresting people based on anything more than the most casual evidence. All it would take is for one of the people that the French hauled away to give his captors your name in exchange for some water or a good night’s sleep – which they may well consider a small price to pay, since you are the one who would be paying it.

In the mean time, roaming bands of Virginia Democrats are hunting down any Federalist they can get their hands on, Virginia is not that far away. At the same time, New England Federalists are seeking revenge against Virgina Democrats. At any moment you could be identified with one group or the other and be killed (or worse), not by the French, but by another American.

This is your life, now. And yet the French are congratulating themselves for having rescued you from the British, as if they have done you some great favor.

This is the new America.

In the year 1787.

Baiting

Imagine reading in the paper one morning that the police had come up with a new method for capturing ‘bad guys’. They would put a wallet on a park bench and, if anybody should pick up and walk away with the wallet, they would shoot him. Dead.

The paper this morning reported of a technique being used in Iraq, called Baiting where the American military would set up snipers, plant something that had a military use within line of sight of the snipers, and kill anybody who tried to walk away with it – assuming that the victim was somebody who would use the equipment against the Americans.

I do not know the details of this program. The report said that much of it is classified. Therefore, I am not going to jump up and shout that the military is certainly doing something wrong here. However, I am going to say that there are elements here that somebody should be looking into.

If it were me, I may not be able to tell the difference between something that was militarily useful and something that was not. If I saw a spool of primer cord laying on the side of the road – again, assuming a land as chaotic as Iraq is right now where there is a humanitarian crisis (no food, no water, no jobs, no security) of unimaginable proportions, I would probably take the cord home to use it for a clothes line, or to tie the door of my house back onto its frame, or to sell to my neighbors so they can do the same.

If I were able to recognize an object as having a military use . . . well, if I can find it, then my neighbors’ children can find it, or the insurgents can find it. Again, I would likely take it home and bury it in the back yard.

I would likely have not returned it to the Americans. After all, the Americans are an occupying army. Assume that, after the Revolutionary War, the French had decided to stay in large numbers, build military bases on American soil, and insist in having a roll in writing our Constitution and in the government that resulted, arresting (or killing) Americans at will that they thought were anti-French, imagine how far they would be able to get with the claim, “But we helped you get rid of the British. You owe us.”

Anyway, the point is, there are a lot of good reasons for good people to walk away with that military equipment. However, this article suggests that there are American military teams who are set up to assume that there are no good Iraqis, and that anybody who would pick up that equipment deserves death.

Just like the police, in the sting operation that I mentioned above, are assuming that no good person would pick up and walk away with a wallet he discovers on a park bench, assumes that the individual is guilty, holds a secret trial, renders a verdict in that trial, and then executes that verdict on the man walking away with the wallet.

It is hardly justice.

Military ‘Justice’

Then again, there can be no justice in a war zone. Imagine asking a soldier, before he shoots somebody, to read an enemy soldier his rights before firing his weapon. It is an absurdity, and no sane person could hope to defend such a policy.

One of the ways in which military procedures are separate from civilian justice is that the military has fewer safeguards for protecting the innocent. This is why military situations tend to result in a lot more civilian casualties. It is the nature of the beast. Yet, sooner or later we need to restore civilian institutions. Otherwise, the senseless slaughter of innocent people will never end.

The practice mentioned above came to light because soldiers, who are defending themselves from charges of murder, are referring to it in their defense. These soldiers have been accused of killing Iraqi civilians with insufficient provocation. In some cases, according to the testimony, evidence was then planted on the victim, where the soldier then claims that he was following the procedures described above. The soldier had killed a person who was attempting to walk away with militarily useful equipment.

The report tells of one instance in which an apparently unarmed civilian was approaching a site where American snipers were hidden. Now, a ‘hide’ is selected precisely because it is a place that the Americans judge would not cause others to think Americans are hiding there. The soldier shot the intruder, then planted a weapon on the body in order to give the case more legitimacy. In this case, the soldier had been given permission to fire anyway, so planting the weapon was unnecessary.

I am not going to say that this story is accurate. It doesn’t matter. For the purposes of this posting, we can easily imagine something like this happening and look at the implications.

Apparently, in Iraq, it is a capital offense to approach a place that was specifically selected for its ability to appear to be something that nobody should worry about approaching.

We can relate this story or another hypothetical story in which an Iraqi carrying a weapon approaches an American ‘hide’. In this context, we must remember that Iraqi is a lawless place. If one is a Sunni then, at any moment, a band of Shiites might show up to kill you. If one is a Shiite, then one’s life is also in danger. When anarchy is the order of the day, a lot of innocent people take to carrying weapons. I suspect that I would.

This can be compared to yet another type of situation. An American soldier goes out, simply to bag some Iraqis. All he wants to do is kill somebody. He has come to view all Iraqi as the enemy and thinks nothing more than that, the fewer Iraqis there are, the safer he will be. He simply sees this program of ‘baiting’ as a simple way to execute his plan without facing any sort of punishment.

It’s a messy situation . . . and that is precisely the problem with it. It results in a lot of innocent death. Worse, it does so in a substantially bigoted culture that believes in revenge. It is a culture that thinks that there is nothing wrong with the idea that, if somebody with trait X harms my family, then everybody with trait X deserves to suffer for it.

Establishing Peace

Ultimately, there is only one way to put an end to this type of random violence, which is to establish a principle of ‘presumed innocent until proven guilty’. It is a principle that says, ‘We are going to assume that your reasons for carrying out these actions are perfectly legitimate, unless and until we have sufficient evidence to believe otherwise. Only then, will we act.”

This presumption of innocence and presumption against harm unless wrongdoing can be proved requires devotion to a few other principles. One of these is the right of Habeas Corpus. This is literally nothing less than the right of a person to be free unless those who would do him harm can prove that the harm is justified. It is nothing less than the embodiment of that which separates civilian from military action – the presumption against doing harm.

It also requires a system where the objective is to capture wrongdoers and put them on trial, rather than to convict and execute (presumed) wrongdoers on the field. Even in the obvious case of entrapment captured in the example where a wallet is taken, the only justified response on the part of civil authorities is to apprehend the individual, arrest him, and give him his day in court. This outcome also requires a respect for law and for peaceful over violent (militaristic) solutions to disagreements among individuals. On this issue, President Bush served as a very poor role model. He went to great lengths to tell the world, “Civil institutions are impotent and are not to be used when a military solution is available,” by circumventing all of the civilian institutions that stood between him and violence. What we have seen in Iraq is what happens when the values that embody this administration – the love of violent solutions over political solutions – grips a whole nation, rather than just a small part of a nation. In our case, it is unfortunate that this small part that loves violence over politics gained the power to command the military.

Joint Blame

I fully blame Iraqis for the problems in Iraq. They choose this particular reaction to events. Each bomb that goes off in a public place killing innocent civilians was planted there by somebody who could have done something else. When Bush and Blair are blamed for the violence in Iraq, it shifts the blame away from the individuals that actually planted the bomb. Those people deserve the full measure of our condemnation.

However, the fact that the people of Iraq are fully responsible for the violence there, does not change the fact that Bush and Blair were guilty of the grossest negligence in launching the war. If I discover that a neighbor of mine is a serial killer, and I send my wife there to deliver a message, the serial killer is fully responsible for murdering my wife. Yet, this does not change the fact that I am also morally contemptible for putting my wife in a situation where she could probably get murdered.

The people of Iraq are the wrongdoer fully responsible for the denigration of their society. Yet, this does not change the fact that Bush and Blair are also fully responsible for giving these people the opportunity to commit the moral crimes that they routinely commit in Iraq. They have no excuse.

It would be nice if one thing that the Iraqis (and the rest of the world) could learn from us - though they are not going to learn it from this administration. That would be a traditional respect for the time-honored principles of justice. Instead, this administration seems most interested in providing the world with different examples of injustice.

Religion and Education

Two days ago in Morality and Religious Culture I argued for a distinction between ‘morality’ (prescriptions that can be forced on everybody), and ‘religious culture’ (prescriptions peculiar to a religion that may not be legitimately forced on anybody).

Yesterday in Intolerable Religions, I used these concepts to define ‘intolerable religions’ – religions that do not warrant respect because they violate morality. That is, they call upon their followers to murder, rape, enslave, or otherwise do harm to others. I applied this distinction to the First Amendment and showed how the moral principle behind the Amendment says, “Congress shall pass no law respecting the establishment of religious culture or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Congress, of course, has every right to respect the establishment of morality – that is, to prohibit murder, rape, theft, slavery, lying, abuse, negligence, recklessness, and other actions where people may do harm to others.

Today, I would like to apply this distinction to the area where I first came up with this distinction about a week ago. I was reading the article, Same-sex talk in diversity video divides town” about a dispute over teaching diversity to children. That article contained the following:

“I think it’s the parents’ decision to decide to teach their children morality,” local parent Mike Quinn told NBC.

Imposing Morality in School

My immediate response was ‘nonsense’. It makes absolutely no sense for teachers to leave the schools to leave the teaching of morality to the parents. Schools need to impose certain standards of behavior on children in school or they would never be able to have a school.

If it is optional, if it is something that the parent can teach at home (or not), then it is not morality. It is something else. Let’s call it, ‘religious culture’.

Do not disrupt the class. Do not hit other students (or staff). Do not take what does not belong to you. Keep your promises. Do not lie. Wait your turn. These are all moral principles. These are principles describing what students ought and ought not to do. They define punishment for misbehavior and uses the concepts that punishment, where legitimate, must be deserved and just. The rules are supposed to apply toe everybody equally so that, if anybody gets special treatment, this is wrong and it, too, should be prohibited.

This is morality, and no school can run without it. Here, as I have been saying for the past two days, ‘morality’ is that which can be imposed on everybody regardless of what their religious beliefs are. No student can hit others or take what does not belong to them and claim, ‘religious discrimination’ if anybody tries to stop them. Legitimate religious practices do not include immoral practices such as these.

What schools do not have a right to impose students – what should be left up to the parents – is not ‘morality’ but ‘religious culture’. If there is a possibility of opting out of any rule, then we have quit talking about ‘morality’ and we started talking about ‘religious culture’ instead.

Some religions prohibit the eating of pork. Those students go to public school, where the school cafeteria serves pork, and other children eat it (as they are permitted to do). Parents who wish to teach a particular religious culture to their students have no right to demand that the school prohibit anything that is not a part of their culture. They need to figure out how to deal with the fact that they live among others who do not share their culture, and what to teach their children about those other cultures.

What the school needs to be teaching is that people have a moral obligation to live in peace with people of other cultures. The fact that the child next to you eats pork gives you no justification to try to do harm to him. The fact that the child next to you works on the Sabbath gives you no reason to interfere with his actions. Just because the child next to you lives with two parents who are both of the same gender gives you no reason to call for doing them harm.

All of these are actually quite equivalent on this model.

‘Immorality’ In the School

One popular area of protest is comes from parents who send their children to school, where they encounter others who do not share the same condemnation of homosexual acts, and some even have parents who are in homosexual relationships (or are in homosexual relationships themselves). Some religious parents find this intolerable, and insist that the school not say or do anything that can be taken as condoning homosexual relationships.

However, consider the parents who send their children to school, where they encounter others who do not share their views on the wrongness of eating pork, and some of them even eat pork. They talk openly about eating pork and speak as if there is nothing wrong with it. In fact, the school itself will sometimes serve pork in the school lunch. Imagine the parent protesting that this is ‘intolerable’ and who insists that the school not say or do anything that can be taken as condoning the eating of pork.

The proper response to such a parent is easy to see. “You, parents, have to decide how you are going to handle the fact that you live in a society where others do not share your religious prohibition on homosexual acts/eating pork. One of the places that your children are going to encounter people who do not share your religious culture is in the public school system. You are not going to turn the school into an instrument for enforcing your particular religious culture on others by making the school an instrument for condemning that which your religious culture condemns. That is not our job. Some people in this culture condone homosexual acts/the eating of pork. Live with it.”

A teacher or student should no more have to hide his or her homosexuality in school than they should be required to hide their hamburger from a Hindu, or female students should be required to hide their faces and bodies from Muslim students.

Teaching Religious Tolerance

One important implication of this is that children in public schools will learn a very important lesson. “These things over here are ‘morality’ – things that it makes sense to force on everybody, like prohibitions on murder, rape, and theft. Those things over there are ‘religious culture’ – things that are optional. And, more importantly, things that are not to be forced on everybody, because doing so is immoral.”

I suspect that a lot of religious parents would find this objectionable. This is because they have been raised in a tradition that takes their ‘religious culture’ to be morality and, as such, something that it is perfectly acceptable to force on others. Though we can listen to them scream when other people take a different ‘religious culture’ as ‘morality’ and tries to force it on them.

In fact, this is the very reason why people a couple of centuries ago decided to adopt rules against forcing religious culture on others or forcing others to give up their own religious culture. Because when two different religions take their ‘religious culture’ to be ‘morality’, and that which they can legitimately force on others, we end up with violent conflict – pretty much like we have today, and which we seem to be getting more and more of with each passing year.

We seem to have forgotten some of those lessons, and this lapse in memory is turning costly. We can teach that morality and religious culture are one and continue this endless conflict of people forcing their religious cultures on each other, or we can divorce religious culture from morality and allow people of different religious cultures to live side by side in peace.

From Where Comes Moral Rules?

A question may come up in a child’s mind, “How can we have moral rules that transcend moral culture?”

Is that really such a difficult question to answer? It does not take much to imagine what a school would be like without the rules properly called ‘morality’ rules that may be imposed on everybody regardless of their religion. It would not be hard to imagine a school without prohibitions on assaulting other students, lying, cheating, theft, and the like. Even an atheist would not want to go (or want their child to go) to such a school.

This shows the lie behind the common (bigoted, hate-mongering) claim that atheists have nothing to base morality on. They can base it on their own desire not to be (and not to have those they care about be) murdered, raped, robbed, lied to, cheated against, or otherwise harmed. The say some theists talk, one would think that a person who denies the existence of God becomes suddenly passively indifferent to having a knife shoved between his ribs or his checking account cleaned out.

Conclusion

So, then, when it comes to teaching morality in schools, we cannot have schools at all if we do not allow them to teach morality. There are limits to behavior that schools must impose on everyone (and everyone equally) for the school to run, and for the school to run well. One of those rules must include a prohibition on forcing ‘religious culture’ on others, and a condemnation of those who try.

To have peace in society, children need to learn that the student sitting next to them can have a different religious culture from theirs, and that is okay. Students taught to think that they have a right to call their religious culture ‘morality’ and force it on the students sitting next to them are going to grow up to be very poor neighbors and citizens.

Intolerable Religion

Yesterday, in "Morality and Religious Culture", I wrote about a distinction between ‘morality’ (prescriptions that which may be imposed on others regardless of what religion they belong to), and ‘religious culture’ (prescriptions that are inherent to a particular religion and which may not be imposed on others). I also wrote about how people’s safety and well-being is dependent on recognizing this distinction and opposing the common practice of elevating ‘religious culture’ into ‘morality’. Those who do so inevitably come to the conclusion that they may (or must) impose their ‘religious culture’ upon others.

This distinction leads to the concept of ‘intolerable religion’.

Religious tolerance is, itself, considered an important component of a peaceful society. Yet, clearly, there are limits to how far religious tolerance can go. It is not at all difficult to imagine religions that cross the line – that become religions that we do not, in fact, have any reason to tolerate.

Let us assume, for example, that there is a community in the mountains of Colorado that believes that their God commands them to go out into the community of non-believers (meaning, in this case, those who do not believe in their God), find a 10 year old boy, and offer him up as a human sacrifice. In doing this the faithful show their devotion to God, and God is then supposed to reward them with protection from terrorist attacks and natural disasters.

IF we were to discover such a community, they may try to defend their claim on the basis that “Congress shall pass no law . . . prohibiting the free exercise [of religion].” We would instead say, “Your religion does not count,” and we would not need a Constitutional Amendment to do so. This counts as an intolerable religion.

Or, let us assume that, in the mountains of Montana, there is a community that holds that Ghod gave the whole of the Earth to the Aryans to rule, and where Ghod populated the earth with other peoples, He made them so that they may serve as slaves to the Aryans, and to cultivate the lands and work the factories in their service. Let us assume that this community has captured and enslaved a number of Native Americans, the descendents of the original inhabitants of that land, as their religion tells them they may do.

Again, any First Amendment appeal that the government may not prohibit them from practicing this religion would (and should) go nowhere. This, too, counts as an intolerable religion.

This argument is actually meant for anybody who might think, superficially, that just because something is a religion, that is good enough reason to hold that it is something that we must tolerate. Such a person, if he thinks below the surface of this idea, should be forced to conclude, “As much as I do not like the idea, the fact is, there are some religions that qualify as ‘intolerable’.”

Once we recognize that some religions are intolerable, the next question is, “How do we distinguish those religions that can be tolerated, from those that cannot be tolerated?”

Intolerable Religions and Trans-Religion Morality

The distinction between tolerable and intolerable religions follows precisely the distinction between trans-religion morality (morality that can be forced on all people regardless of their religion or lack of religion) and religious culture. Where religious culture violates morality, we have an intolerable religion. Where religious culture remains on the near side of morality, we have a tolerable religion.

Yesterday, I defined ‘morality’ as rules that can be justifiably enforced on others regardless of their religion, such as prohibitions on murder, rape, theft, slavery, assault, and negligence. I defined ‘religious culture’ as rules that are unique to a religion and need not be enforced on everybody, such as what to eat, when to eat, where to worship, how to worship, where to live (‘homeland’ issues), and what to wear. An intolerable religion on this standard is one that declares that its members may violate these moral prescriptions, or who try to impose its religious culture as if they were moral prescriptions.

The First Amendment

The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution prohibits the government from establishing a religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. Before I go further, I want to remind the reader that this is not a legal blog. I am not here to interpret the law. However, I do hold that there are certain moral principles underlying the Bill of Rights. It is within the scope of this blog to examine those underlying moral principles. Whether those moral principles are captured within the law is a separate question.

When the First Amendment says that congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, this clearly does not prohibit the government from passing laws respecting the establishment of certain moral principles. Indeed, one of the most fundamental (if not the most fundamental) role of government is to impose ‘morality’ on its people – to prohibit murder and other forms of violence, theft, deception, recklessness, and the like, and to punish those who transgress these moral principles.

Morality, understood as ‘principles that may be forced on others regardless their religion,’ are the basis of the vast majority of our criminal laws. We even have the capacity to measure criminal laws as being ‘just’ or ‘unjust’ in accordance with whether those criminal laws are consistent with, or violate, morality itself.

The best way to understand the government’s moral prohibition on the establishment of a religion is in terms of a prohibition against the establishment of a particular ‘religious culture’. Religious cultures are those rules that cannot be legitimately enforced on others; not morality. At the same time, a government prohibition on the free practice of religion can best be understood as a government prohibition on the elements of any particular ‘religious culture’ except when those elements transcend morality. Elements of a ‘religious culture’ that involves the murder of children or enslavement of Native Americans can be banned because they transgress moral boundaries. However, individuals should be left free to follow whatever ‘religious culture’ they like that stays on this side of morality.

Again, the only sensible interpretation of the moral prohibition on Congress against the establishment of a religion and protecting the free exercise of religion depends on a recognition of the distinction between morality (that which governments may legitimately impose on its citizens), and ‘religious culture’ (that which governments can neither establish nor prohibit)..

Unlinking Morality and Religion

In what I have written so far, I have spoken about a trans-religious morality; a morality that crosses religious boundaries and even the boundary between the religious and non-religious. Is it possible to make sense of such a morality? Doesn’t such a morality require the existence of a God? Can a person sensibly assert that such a morality exists (independent of any scientific evidence for its existence), but dispute the legitimacy of having faith in a God?

Much of this blog, and that book mentioned in the top right side of this page called, A Better Place . . ., contain some detailed arguments against the idea that there is anything supernatural or mysterious about a morality that transcends all religion. All it takes is a recognition that some desires are malleable, and that people reason to promote desires that tend to fulfill other desires and to inhibit desires that tend to thwart other desires.

A theist and an atheist may argue about how a particular tree came to be standing in a particular place, whether the tree came about through evolution or natural selection. However, neither should doubt the existence of the tree. Nor should the two have any difficulty coming to an agreement about its height, age, shape, or other features.

Similarly, a theist and an atheist may argue about how malleable desires that tend to fulfill or thwart other desires came into existence, whether they are a part of God’s design or they arose through evolutionary processes. However, these relationships between malleable desires and other desires certainly do exist, and it is a matter of fact that people have reason to promote some malleable desires and inhibit others.

That is to say, people generally have many and good reasons to inhibit desires that may lead to murder, rape, theft, assault, deception, neglect, and the like. These are aversions that people generally have reason to impose upon others and, for their own safety and the safety of those they care about, they may impose these on others through use of government law. They may impose these on others without regard to the religion that those others might adopt. Nobody has the right to claim that, in virtue of their religion, they may ignore these moral boundaries. Where their religion comes into conflict with morality, morality plays the trump card.

Yet, let’s not pretend that we cannot tell the difference between prescriptions that actually count as morality, and those that count as ‘religious culture’. The fact that morality consists of rules that can be imposed on others gives no religion the right to call its ‘religious culture’ a ‘morality’, and thereby impose it on others. The religion that cannot recognize this distinction and that violates its mandates makes itself an intolerable religion. It is a religion of people whose faith makes them a threat to others, and a religion that those threatened have a right to respond to accordingly.

I will, of course, leave this discussion with my standard disclaimer. The only legitimate response to words are words and private actions, and the only legitimate response to a political campaign in an open society is a counter-campaign. In such a society, private violence is never appropriate – not unless one wants to create a society the likes of Baghdad or Lebanon, where a culture of private violence has become dominant.

Morality and Religious Culture

In this post I want to discuss the relationship between religion, morality, and culture. Specifically, I want to present a way of conceiving of this relationship that will make explicit the source of a great deal of conflict and ways to avoid that conflict.

The view that I will present will divide religious prescriptions into two classes. One class is properly and correctly linked to ‘morality’. This is a class that transcends different religions and even non-religious belief. This is the class of prescriptions that can legitimately be forced upon others. The second class consists of those prescriptions that belong only to a particular religion. I am going to call this class ‘religious culture’. These are prescriptions that cannot be legitimately forced upon others.

We can begin to figure out how to classify the beliefs in a particular religion by asking about a person who is leaving that religion and going to some other religion, or giving up religion entirely. Our imaginary person can go down the list of prescriptions in that religion and ask, “Which of these am I obligated to take with me if I am going to be a productive member of society, and which of these can I leave behind?”

We can easily classify the prescriptions against murder, rape, child abuse, slavery, assault, theft, lying, ‘bearing false witness’, breaking promises or contracts, recklessness, negligence, and similar kinds of actions as prescriptions that the agent will have to take with him as he goes into society. People generally (atheists included) have no reason to excuse any fellow citizen who commits these types of actions, regardless of any religious affiliation. These are the prescriptions that properly fall under ‘morality’. These are also the prescriptions that people generally have reason to impose on its members.

We can just as easily identify a set of prescriptions that an agent can leave behind – where the fact that one religion may require these types of actions while another does not is of little social consequence. These prescriptions include what to eat or drink, when to eat or drink, where to live (the concept of ‘homeland’), when to pray, how to pray, to whom one is to pray, which scripture to read, when to work (or not work), what to wear. These are the prescriptions that I will put in the category of ‘religious culture’. These are prescriptions that the members of a religion may not impose on others.

A great deal of the conflict we see in the world today comes from a failure to make this distinction – to collapse both of these categories into one, even though they really are quite distinct.

One way to collapse these distinctions is to say that there is no such thing as ‘religious culture’ – that everything that a religion prescribes falls into the realm of morality. However, ‘morality’ is still taken to mean ‘that which may legitimately be forced upon others’. As a result, people who make this distinction devote a great deal of effort forcing elements of what are, in fact, religious culture upon others. Where different religions have different religious cultures, each claiming the right to force their culture on others, we have conflict – sometimes erupting into outright violence.

The other way to try to collapse these two is to take ‘morality’ and to try to collapse it into ‘religious culture’. As a part of ‘religious culture’, these prescriptions are then assumed to be things that one people may not impose on others. Taken to its logical conclusion, this theory would hold that there is no way to condemn murder, theft, rape, or slavery – that these can be nothing more than ‘religious culture’ and cannot be forced on a ‘religious culture’ that rejects them. Somebody who holds this view may well condemn the woman who resists rape on the grounds that she is forcing her non-rape views on her attacker, who obviously has different view of this issue. In fact, people who accept this view often do stand aside while ‘religious cultures’ commit any number of murders, abuses, assaults, deceptions, and injustices.

One may think that this second way of collapsing ‘morality’ into ‘religious culture’ avoids conflict. However, it does not do that at all. In fact, it allows a ‘religious culture’ that thrives and promotes conflict to continue to wage warfare against everybody else. They cannot be criticized because battling everybody else is merely a part of their religious culture. Interfering with this religion’s attempts to subdue other cultures is immediately branded as ‘attacking religion X’.

Both attempts to collapse these distinctions are not only flawed, they are tragically flawed. They contribute to a large surplus of death, injury, illness, and other forms of harm that we see in the world today.

The route to avoid these harms is to recognize and embrace this distinction – to recognize that there is a difference between the prescriptions that somebody leaving a religion must bring with him, and the prescriptions that somebody leaving a religion may permissibly leave behind.

In fact, the prescriptions that fall into the category of ‘morality’ that I described above are prescriptions that a religion must incorporate into its teachings – somehow – for the followers of that religion to be an acceptable part of society. People generally have no reason to tolerate a religion that tells its members that they must kill anybody they meet who do not belong to that religion, or that the rape of a woman is a holy rite, or that they may freely lie or break contracts to others who are not of their faith. The idea that we must be tolerant of all religions is nonsense where those religions teach its members to do harm to others. There is a line that distinguishes ‘religions that we can be tolerant of’ and ‘religions that we must not tolerate’. That line is found in the category called ‘morality’ above, and whether that religion teaches its members to obey (can be tolerated) or violate (cannot be tolerated) those prescriptions.

This is not a new distinction. It has been addressed in earlier generations as the difference between ‘public’ and ‘private’ morality. ‘Public morality’ represented the morality that can be legitimately forced on others, while ‘private morality’ represented the morality that cannot be legitimately enforced on others. The problem is that ‘private morality’ is a contradiction in terms. If something is truly ‘immoral’ than it is wrong for everybody to do – not just those who belong to a particular religion. Accordingly, if it is okay for somebody who belongs to a different religion to refuse to behave in a particular way, then it is nonsense to say that it is immoral. There is no such thing as a ‘private morality’. There is, instead, ‘religious culture.

One of the ways to promote recognition of this distinction is to protest anybody who uses the term ‘morality’ then they mean ‘religious culture’ whenever they are talking outside of the context of their religion. Whenever a person belonging these religions enters a public forum (as opposed to preaching to its own members from its own pulpit), and uses the term ‘morality’ to refer to prescriptions that are, in fact, ‘religious culture’, it is necessary to call them on it.

No, sir. What you are talking about is not morality at all. It is religious culture. Morality concerns those items that we must require of everybody, regardless of what religion they belong do. We can require that they not murder, rape, steel, lie, break promises, or negligently or recklessly put others at risk – no matter what religion they believe in. Religious culture – what you are talking about – are those things that can be left behind and that you have no right to force on others. It belongs in the same category as what to eat, what to wear, when to pray, and when to work. There is a difference, and refusing to recognize that difference as you have done here today has been a great source of much of the world’s conflict.

When confronted with this type of claim, I expect that many theists will reject the idea of demoting some of their prescriptions to the level of ‘mere religious culture’. They will insist that all of these prescriptions represent morality, clear and simple.

The answer to this is as follows:

Look, you have two options. Either you are claiming that you have the right to force others to accept your religious practices, or you are not. To claim that ‘religious culture’ actually represents morality is to say that you have the right to force others into your religion. This follows directly from the fact that ‘morality’ is ‘that which can be legitimately forced on others’. If you are denying that you have the right to force others into your religion, then you can’t sensibly at the same time say that these prescriptions represent any type of ‘morality’. Prescriptions that cannot be legitimately forced on others are not moral prescriptions, they are merely cultural prescriptions. Which do you claim? Do you claim the right to force others into your religion, or don’t you?

This distinction goes directly to the core of how religion leads to conflict. It is precisely because religions take matters of religious culture and assign them the status of morality. This means they acquire the status of ‘that which may be legitimately imposed on others’, which then invites the followers of that religion to enter into conflict with those who do not belong to that religion. If, instead, a particular religion were to recognize that some of their practices are merely religious culture, then they should not feel such a need to impose those prescriptions on others.

I do not expect that this approach will actually answer any of the genuine moral debates. People will still debate whether abortion is murder – where murder is clearly immoral even under the distinction given above. They would debate whether capital punishment is justice. On the other hand, it would be hard to argue that prohibitions on homosexual relationships are anything other than religious culture, and prayers in schools and at civic ceremonies are clearly examples of religious culture, rather than morality.

What it will do is put the actual source of many of the problems that spring from debate over religion squarely on the table so that everybody can see it and everybody can recognize it for what it is. It will weaken the habit that we have lived under for too long of hiding this particular truth behind an unwillingness to upset people who believe that scripture gives them the right to call all of their prescriptions ‘morality’, and thus claim the right to impose those prescriptions on everybody else.

All it takes is a willingness to take a theist’s talk of morality and saying, “No. Morality concerns things like murder, rape, and theft. What you’re talking about isn’t morality. It is religious culture. Culture means that it is okay to be different. Morality means that it is not okay to be different. That’s the part that you are not understanding.”

Avoiding Free Ridership

In the last three days I have:

(1) Described the issue of free ridership in game-theory terms to show what the problem is and why it leaves us worse off than we would otherwise be.

(2) Discussed a political solution to the free rider problem and why it fails.

(3) Discussed a moral solution in technical game-theory terms and explained why it works.

(4) Listed a number of current political/social issues where the free rider problem exists and the stakes that are involved.

Today, I would like to explain the moral solution I presented in (3) in non-technical; non-game-theory terms for readers who might have gotten a headache as a result of the earlier discussion.

The conclusion that I defended is that people generally (meaning you and me) have reason to promote a desire to contributing to public goods (such as the items listed in yesterday’s post) and an aversion to not contributing. We also have reason to establish a system of rewards for those who contribute to the public good (praise, plaques, honors, and social status), and a system of sanctions for those who do not contribute (condemnation, ostracism, criminal penalties).

These policies will allow us as a society to harvest the value of “public goods” in ways that purely voluntary systems would not allow.

Go to the first post in this series for an explanation of why this is the case.

Game theorists have a tradition of calling a state where one person contributes to a public good when others do not to be the ‘sucker’ option. It is important for what they are focusing on to use a denigrating and derogatory term for those who would donate to the public good, because they need to preserve the problem that they are discussing. In fact, by using a denigrating term to refer to those who would contribute to the public good they make the option of contributing to the public good even less attractive – lowering the incentive to do so. This drives choices even more strongly towards the point where the public good goes unfunded and everybody loses the benefits that they could have otherwise obtained.

However, we, the people living in the real world who are talking about real-world harms and benefits, have no reason to drive choice towards the game theorist’s equilibrium point. Instead, we have reason to drive choices in exactly the opposite direction – to promote contributions to the public good so that we can harvest the benefits of those public goods.

In the example I used in Part 1 in this series, the outcome that the game theorist is trying to preserve is one where each of us in the community has $1000. The outcome that we are creating for ourselves in that example is one in which each of us has $1500. We certainly do not have any reason to adopt the game-theorist’s decision to apply denigrating terms to those who drive the outcome towards the “everybody has $1500” option.

Instead, we face the opposite motivation – to speak about those who do not contribute to the public good in terms of denigration and condemnation, and to speak about those who do contribute to the public good in terms of praise and commendation. The person who makes such a contribution shows civic virtue and deserves honors for what he has done. The person who hoards money and refuses to make a contribution deserves scorn and ridicule.

In doing this, what we are really trying to do is avoid the type of situation that makes free ridership possible. We want to do this by saying that those who contribute to the public good not only get his cut of the total social return, but he also gets to fulfill a desire to contribute to the public good. We are seeking to increase the value of contributing, while decreasing the value of refusing to contribute, in order to promote contributions and inhibit selfish restraint from making contributions.

Everybody has reason to contribute to these institutions, because everybody has reason to prefer the society where everybody has $1500 over the society where everybody has $1000. Please note, I am using money in these examples. However, the money is just a place holder for ‘getting what one wants.’ This is really a choice between a situation where everybody has a score of 1500 ‘getting what one wants’ versus a score of 1000 ‘getting what one wants’, Between these two options, the 1500 score is better (more of what one wants) by definition.

For example, there is a tendency of giving people who have served in the military some preference when it comes to electing community leaders. This makes sense. Somebody who has served in the military – particularly somebody who volunteers in times of war when the potential costs are particularly high and the payoffs certainly disbursed – has given us reason to believe that he has a desire to contribute to the public good.

Whereas, at the same time, if an agent shunned military service, and even took pains to avoid military service while others were serving (e.g., President Bush, Vice President Cheney), then we have reason to question whether the agent actually has much of a concern for the public good. Such an agent may be more interested in his or her own good, and may be quite willing to see the public good sacrificed for his or her benefit.

Of course, this is not an inviolable law. Somebody may fail to enter the military and yet still have a strong interest in making contributions to promote the public good. Similarly, somebody may see the military as merely another employment opportunity (particularly in times of peace) or as a way of making people think he or she cares about the public good. That is to say, they may see it as a stepping stone to public office.

The general principle is to be on the lookout for evidence that an individual sees value in contributing to the public good, and to hold those people up as role models for the next generation, while also finding examples of those who seem to care nothing for public goods and saying, “No good person will grow up to behave like that.”

Please note that I have been talking about two different ways in which the moral system avoids free-rider problems when it comes to public goods. One way is by providing an individual who contributes to public goods with praise and honors, and those who do not contribute with condemnation and dishonor. Praise and honor have positive value for most people, while condemnation and dishonor have negative value. Therefore, they increase the payoff of contributing to the public good, and decrease the payoff of not contributing. If these payoffs are sufficiently high, they eliminate the free rider problem.

In extreme cases, actual reward and punishment are possible, where ‘rewards’ of course are things that an individual desires that increase the value of contributing to the public good, while ‘punishment’ is something to which the agent is averse or has a reason to avoid, decreasing the value of not cooperating.

In addition, these types of institutions promote a desire to contribute to public goods and an aversion to not contributing to public goods that give these contributions a value independent of any rewards or honors that a person may receive. In this sense, “virtue is its own reward” in the sense that a person who has the virtue of a desires to contribute to the public good and who is contributing to the public good is in the same position as a person who desires to eat chocolate and who is eating chocolate.

Combined, these factors can do a significant amount of work in helping societies obtain the value of public goods by helping them to avoid the problem of free ridership.

Public Goods

I have spent a couple of days showing that people generally have reason to promote a general desire to contribute to public goods and/or promote an aversion to not contributing to public goods.

Today, I want to look at practical implications.

Public Goods

Public goods, recall, are goods where the benefits to not accrue to assigned individuals. That is to say, an individual can obtain a benefit without paying anybody to supply the benefit. Because of this, suppliers face less of an incentive to provide that benefit.

I used three examples of public goods two days ago:

Military. It is difficult to defend one house without defending the neighbor’s house. Besides, much of the benefits of a military is its deterrence value, which protects everybody.

Police/Courts. When a criminal is put away, the beneficiaries are whomever his or her victims would have otherwise been. We do not know who they are. Nor do we know who benefits from crimes not committed by those who do not want to go to jail.

Education. I received some objections to listing this as being (in part) a private good that I will address later.

Other examples of public goods where investments can be expected to be lacking.

Contemporary Issues

A tsunami warning system in the Indian Ocean. It is difficult to create a system that warns one person of an impending tsunami without warning others who did not contribute to the system. We can expect that such a system would be expensive. Assume that a particular hotel chain, for example, purchased such a system so that they could protect their guests. All of the other hotel chains get the benefit without paying a dime. While the conscientious hotel chain raises its rates to cover its costs, the other chains take customers. This is the a part of the punishment for contributing to a public good.

Levees around the city of New Orleans. Here, again, any system that protects one house from flooding also protects its neighbors. There is no way to charge people for flood protection, and then simply allow houses to be flooded where the owners did not pay. So, even though each dollar donated to the levee project might bring two dollars in return, since the return is divided up among hundreds of thousands of beneficiaries. The investor, then, gets very little back on his investment, but would get a substantial return if everybody else contributed.

Preventing Sea Level Rise. To the best of my knowledge, we lack the technology to allow the sea level to rise only around America, while it does not rise around those countries that actually took active steps to combat global warming. Consequently, if the United States refuses to contribute to this effort, we still stand to benefit from the contributions that everybody else makes. The Bush Administration claims that any American contribution to fighting global warming would be bad for the economy. This is the same benefit that anybody gains by refusing to contribute to a public good – a benefit that makes everybody in the world (including the United States) worse off than they could have otherwise been.

Asteroid/Comet Detection and Deflection System. The worst of all possible natural disasters is also the most preventable. However, it is particularly difficult to deal with a threat to Earth from an asteroid or commet that benefits only those that created such a system. Therefore, a lot of people are sitting around vulnerable because people do not seem to be particularly interested in funding this public good.

Environmental Goods

Many environmental goods are examples of public goods. Imagine a group of people who desire that a particular wilderness area exists. If the wilderness area exists at all, then this person benefits, regardless of whether or not this person made any contributions to its existence. In other words, wilderness benefits are not deniable or assignable.

In addition, if a society provides its citizens with clean air, everybody benefits whether they pay for that clean air or not. There is no way to clean the air and then assign it only to those who have the capacity to pay for it. We could, perhaps, bottle air in the same way we bottle water, but I suspect that the inconvenience of walking around with maks all the time, even while sleeping, would be counted as a cost.

Related to this is the fact that the rain forests, for example, provide the benefits of oxygen, carbon sequestering, and genetic diversity that are all public goods. If Brazil and Indonesia would somehow deny the benefits of their rain forests and give them only to those who would pay for them, we would not have nearly the problem with deforestation as we do today. However, since the benefits of rain forests are neither assignable or deniable, rain forests end up being destroyed.

The fight against communicable diseases is a public good. The best way to protect people from a serious pandemic is to identify it early (which requires people going out and conducting research whenever there is a hint of such an outbreak) and taking aggressive steps to contain an outbreak when it occurs. We all benefit from these programs, and there is no way to separate those who benefit and pay from those who benefit and do not pay. Consequently, we will have ‘free rider’ problems associated with disease control.

Education

Curiosis, in a comment made to the first post in this series, disputed the claim that ‘education’ is a public good.

If Bob graduates from high school, clearly Bob benefits, but the benefit to the rest of the populace seems negligible, if it could be measured at all. Once could likewise argue that we would all be better off if every graduating senior were given $10,000. This would stimulate the economy and give them all a better chance in life.However, this is wealth redistribution, plain and simple.

A public good does require benefits for others that cannot be assigned to given individuals or withheld. Education does tend to provide private goods in that a person educated to perform brain surgery or program computers (for example) has the ability to withhold the benefit from anybody who does not pay for it. However, he has an incentive to pursue an education only to the degree that, and only in the fields that, alow him to withhold benefits from those who do not pay.

As Eneasz pointed out in response to Curiousis, educated people cast more informed votes, which provides benefits that cannot be withhold from those who do not wish to pay. However, the informed voter provides not only a more informed vote. He or she provides a more informed contribution to the election process, putting not only is vote but his time and his effort into those causes. In fact, all of his charity and volunteer work promises to be better directed towards things that actually produce positive effects, rather than wasting resources where they do not do any good.

In another example: assume that you were in an automobile accident on a lonely next to nowhere. Family members are hurt, and you can’t get anywhere. Another car comes along. You clearly have reason to wish that the person in that car is more educated rather than less educated. In fact, you probably have a specific desire that the person in the car be educated in emergency first-aid. People who learn emergency first-aid do not do so for the sake of earning money, but for the sake of providing a benefit. He is not somebody who will negotiate a fee before applying aid. We all benefit from having these types of people driving around, yet we cannot assign that benefit to any given individual, nor can we deny that benefit to those who do not pay.

This brings up an important point about education as a public good. Some education is more of a public good than others. Reading, writing, math, and critical thinking skills are particularly important (making our society particularly foolish in our tendency to denigrate, rather than promote, critical thinking skills).

Moral education is another public good. On the model used in this blog, good people are those with desires that tend to fulfill the desires of others. We all obtain benefits from being surrounded by people with desires that tend to fulfill the desires of others, so we all have reason to promote morality as a public good.

In fact, these last three days have been substantially about the public benefits of promoting a desire to contribute to public goods, and an aversion to not contributing to public goods. This, in itself, is a public good.

Free Riders, Game Theory, and Morality

Yesterday, I described what economists call the Free Rider Problem in terms of one of game theory’s favorite devices, the Prisoners’ Dilemma.

When I write a post, and I refer to an earlier post, my rule has been to bring all relevant information forward so that a reader does not have to go back. However, in this case, the previous post contains a lot of relevant detail. I must refer a reader back to that post for the detail.

For those who have read yesterday’s post, I attempted to show how a ‘free rider’ situation means that people end up worse off than they could have been. This is the benefits of a public good cannot be assigned to any specific person. The payoff gets distributed among the population, with the donor getting such a small percentage of the total that it is not in his interests to donate. However, if everybody were to contribute to these public goods, everybody would benefit.

I created an example where a ‘public good’ produces a 50% return on investment that is distributed evenly among the population. Each person has an option of contributing $1000 to this public good. This will return $1500 in ‘public good’ for each person who contributes. However, because the return is distributed evenly, the person who makes the $1000 investment only gets (1/population) of the return. In my two-person case, this was one-half of the return, or $750. If everybody were to donate to this public good, in this hypothetical case, everybody would get $1500 out of the public good. However, no individual has an incentive to contribute, so everybody misses out on an opportunity to become $500 better off than they would have been.

Yesterday, I also looked at a political solution to this problem. The political solution is to force everybody to contribute $1000 by taxing them, or passing a law forcing them to prove that they have made the required contribution. Unfortunately, each ‘faction’ still has an incentive to lobby for laws in which others are required to contribute, but they obtain special immunities and exceptions.

This sets up a ‘political auction’ where everybody must pay what they bid whether they win or lose, and everybody must play. The penalty for not playing is being made the loser in the political options. Losers must contribute to public goods that benefit others, while those others do not contribute to the public goods that benefit the loser.

Morality and Free Riders

Today, I want to present a moral response to the free rider problem.

The moral response is not a solution to the free-rider problem. It is, instead, a way of avoiding the free-rider problem and all of the implications that follow from it.

The moral solution avoids this problem by altering the payoffs. Specifically, in this case we are going to introduce $300 worth of social (and, potentially, criminal) sanctions against those who do not contribute to the public good.

In the original situation, if I contribute and you do not, then your return will be $1750 (The $1000 you kept, and the $750 that is your share of the public return on my $1000 contribution). This is opposed to $1500 if you do contribute. You have an incentive not to contribute.

However, if I threaten you with $300 in sanctions, then you get $1500 if you invest and $1450 if you do not. Now, you have an incentive to invest. As a result of your investing your return goes up to $1500 and my return goes from $750 (my share of the return from my $750 investment) to $1500.

Checks and Balances

There is still a problem with this option. It assumes (1) that I have the power to impose $300 in social sanctions on you, and (2) I will not use that power to force you to pay while I refrain from paying. If either of these assumptions are violated, then the person with power can harvest the profits from failing to contribute with impunity.

This problem disappears as soon as we add one more player. Now, if Player 1 wishes to impose sanctions on Player 2, he has Player to back him up. On the other hand, if Player 1 wishes not to contribute, then Player 3 can work with Player 2 to impose sanctions on him. If Player 3 decide not to contribute, Players 1 and 2 have the power to impose sanctions on him. As long as we have at least a three-ways system of checks and balances, and nobody has more power than the other two combined, we have a method of forcing cooperation and imposing sanctions on refusing to contribute.

Anonymous Defection

Another problem with this solution rests with the possibility of anonymous defection. Game theory often works under the assumption that all defections are public knowledge, so that everybody knows who contributed and who did not. In reality, there are any number of ways to refuse to contribute without this being known. They can hide their money, cook the books, lie, or steal back what they contributed, just to name some examples. The $300 in cultural and legal sanctions will not do any good if we do not know who to punish.

We can find an answer to this problem by looking at the nature of these payoffs. I have been measuring the payoffs in terms of dollars. However, dollars (for the most part) have value because of what you can do with them. People use dollars to fulfill their desires, given their beliefs. This could well include desires to help others – so we do not need to assume that everybody is totally selfish. A person who wants to give to charity cannot give what he does not have.

So, let us assume that I have the power to give you a desire to contribute to public goods that is stronger than any other desire that you could fulfill for $300. In other words, when choosing between contributing to a public good, and choosing to have $300, you could go either way. However, the $250 benefit that you would receive from not contributing to the public good in this example just isn’t enough money. Here, contributing and having $1500 is worth $1800 to you, while refusing to contribute and having $750 is only worth $1750.

Please note that, on this model, acting to serve the public good is not an act of self-sacrifice. To the person who desires to eat chocolate ice-cream, the act of eating chocolate ice-cream is not an act of self-sacrifice. Similarly, to the person who desires to contribute to the public good, contributing to the public good is not an act of self-sacrifice. To such a person, contributing to the public good becomes his ice-cream. In fact, it could become better than ice-cream.

Using Moral Sentiments

There is, then, a reason for each person to give others either a desire to contribute or an aversion to refraining from contributing (selfishness). The question remains whether there is a way to accomplish this end.

The methods of ‘rewards’ and ‘sanctions’ certainly does exist. So, we each have reason to support an institution of rewards (praise, honors, prizes) to those who contribute and sanctions (condemnation, ostracism, boycotts) against those who refrain from contributing.

We know that interaction with the environment alters brain structure. We see this in terms of beliefs, where different interactions with the environment cause different agents to acquire different beliefs. We also see this in desires – particularly in the way different societies have different desires, but people within a given society come to have common desires. This pretty much proves the proposition that social forces can influence desires.

To whatever degree social forces can influence desires, people generally have reason to promote those desires that fulfill other desires, and inhibit those desires that thwart other desires. In this posting, I have shown how people generally have reason to use social forces to promote a desire to contribute to the public good, and to promote an aversion to refraining from contributing to the public good.

We have reason to praise and honor those who contribute to the public good as a way of promoting this desire not only in those we praise and honor, but those who are a witness to praise and honor. We even have reason to provide people with hypothetical examples of those who would deserve praise and honor as a way of encouraging others to become that type of person.

All of this applies as well to those we condemn and punish.

Free Ridership and Game Theory

My nighttime reading this week has been devoted to game theories –theories that looks how rational people make rational choices and the consequences that result.

One of the more interesting game theory situations is called the ‘prisoner’s dilemma’. This dilemma comes in many forms – one of which gives the dilemma its name. For my purposes, the form that is the most useful is one that captures the concept of what economists call ‘free ridership’.

In this post, which will be the first in a series, I will simply set up the free-rider problem, look at the standard (political) solution to that problem, and explain how the political solution can make things worse.

Constructing the Dilemma

To put the problem of free ridership in terms of a prisoner’s dilemma, let us assume that there is some project that people can invest in. However, there is no way to restrict the payoffs of this investment only to those who invest. The payoffs must be distributed evenly. For the sake of this argument, we will assume that the rate of return is 50%. That is to say, for every $1.00 that society invests in this project, they will get $1.50 rate of return.

Now, we have two citizens, each with $1000 in investment capital.

To start off with, we have a voluntary situation. People are free to donate, or not donate, as they wish.

Citizen One is trying to decide whether to donate.

First, assume that Citizen Two donates $1000.

Now, should I keep my $1,000, or should I donate $1000 as well.

If I also donate $1,000, then there will be $2,000 in the public treasury. This will produce $3,000 in social good, which we will distribute evenly. That is to say, I will get $1,500.

On the other hand, if I keep my $1,000, then there will still be $1000 in the public treasury. This will produce $1,500 in social good, which will be divided evenly. The $1,000 that I kept plus $750 worth of social good means I get $1,750.

Since $1,750 is more than $1,500, then the best thing for me to do is to donate nothing.

Second, assume that Citizen Two donates nothing.

If I donate $1,000, this will produce $1,500 in social good, which will be divided up evenly between us. That is to say, we each get $750.

If I donate nothing and keep my $1000, then there will be nothing in the social pot, so I will get nothing. However, I get to keep my $1000.

Since $1000 is more than nothing, if I assume that Citizen Two will donate nothing, the best thing for me to do is to donate nothing as well.

In fact, no matter what Citizen Two does, I am better off donating nothing. So, I am going to donate nothing.

Of course, Citizen Two goes through the same line of reasoning concluding that he, too, should donate nothing. They end up each with the $1000 they started with. Whereas, if both of them would have contributed their $1,000 and taken their share of the social wealth that resulted, they would have each had $1,500. They each lost a chance for $500 they could have very easily had.

Examples

This is a real-world problem because there are a number of institutions that provide benefits for the whole population, where it is not possible to provide the benefits for some people but not others.

Military protection, for example, is something that defends everybody. There is no way for the military to protect one house but not the one next to it. So, the benefits that the military provides to the population are spread equally. There is no way to provide benefits only to those who donate.

The police and court system has the same effect. When a potential rapist is locked away, all potential victims, and all people who care about those potential victims – obtain a benefit. We don’t even know who they would be, so we cannot charge only those who actually benefit.

The same is true for education. An individual can keep some of the benefits of his education private and offer it only to those who will pay for it. However, some of the benefits will leak out and get distributed to everybody. An educated population provides some benefits to everybody.

All of these are cases where an investment made by any given individual gets distributed to the whole population. As such, all of these are cases where, if we depended on voluntary contributions, each individual has an incentive to contribute nothing, and “free ride” off of those who do contribute.

The Political Solution

One way to deal with these types of situations is through a political solution. That is to say, the government taxes everybody $1,000. It puts the money into a pot. It invests the money. In doing this, it provides everybody with $1,500 of value instead of the $1000 in value each person would have had.

Notice that each citizen has reason to support this type of ‘tax and spend’ policy with respect to those goods that have distributed benefits. Each person faces a situation where, “If the government were to take this money and invest it in these public goods, I will end up better off than if we relied on private contributions.”

However, please note that each citizen has an even stronger incentive for a different type of political action.

Citizen One thinks, “On the other hand, what if I can get the government to force Citizen Two to pay, but to give me an exemption. If I can pull this off, then I will get my $1,750 in social benefit, which is more than I would get from a system that taxed everybody equally. Even if I have to invest $100 to get a candidate elected who will exempt me from this tax, I still end up $150 in the black.”

Meanwhile, Citizen Two is going through the same type of process, looking for a candidate that will support a tax on Citizen One while providing his constituent with exceptions and exemptions. In the mean time, society continues to suffer a loss of social welfare that would have otherwise been available.

However, at this point we run into another ‘game theory’ problem – the political auction.

What we need to do now is to determine the costs of winning or losing the election.

Citizen One needs to determine how much money to invest in the election. Now that there are competing candidates (each advocating that the other pays for these social goods while their constituent does not pay), Citizen One is faced with two options. If his candidate wins, he gets $1750. If his opponent wins, then the Citizen One gets $750.

Let us assume that Citizen One has already spent $1000 to get his candidate elected. So has Citizen Two – and Citizen Two’s candidate is ahead in the polls. Citizen One still faces two options: $1750 minus $1000 in political costs for $750 if his candidate wins, or $750 minus $1000 in political costs for a net loss of $250 if his candidate loses. If, by spending another $250, he can bring about a win, then he will end up with $500 (as opposed to minus $250 if he does nothing).

Of course, Citizen Two is thinking the same thing when his candidate is behind, seeing just as much reason to throw more and more money into these campaigns.

Eventually, both Citizen One and Citizen Two end up being worse off than they would have been if they simply refused to try to obtain a political solution. By trying for a political solution, they went from a situation where each had $1000, to one in which they each had significantly less, because of the resources drained away in political fighting.

Summary

So, free rider problems create situations where the a population has an opportunity to realize some significant benefit, but cannot get people to contribute to that benefit. They have no reason to voluntarily contribute, because ‘free riders’ who live off of the benefits that others provide end up being better off than those who provide the benefit.

If we aim for a political solution that forces each person to make a contribution, we are at risk of setting off a political battle. In this battle, each candidate proposes an option that is less than optimal (their constituents benefit while the other candidate’s constituents pay). The resources that then get drained by this political fighting actually leaves people worse off than they would have been if they had not sought a political solution.

Tomorrow, I would like to look at the moral solution.

Private Censorship

One of the issues touched on in the Kathy Griffin incident was the issue of private censorship. This aspect has gone largely unmentioned, but it is an important part of the ethics of this particular event.

Let us assume that I host a party. You are invited, with a number of other people. You know what criteria I used to select the guests, you have a good idea of who will show up, and you know what usually goes on at these types of events.

This party is meant to be a celebration of sorts.

Let us assume that this is my wedding reception. It is a secular affair, and I have asked my guests to stand up and say a few words. You know that many of the guests make statements that are grounded on their religious beliefs. You will hear party goers speaking about their faith and the good that religion has done for them. This is to be expected.

At this party, it would seem perfectly acceptable to say, "Since I do not believe in any God or diety, I cannot call upon them to watch over you. For this marriage to work you will need a little luck, a lot of hard work, and some help from your friends from time to time. With luck, this friend will always be there for you."

This would be on a par with what the other guests have been saying.

However, let us say that instead of this you prepare a speech that includes vulgar statements precisely because you know that these vulgarities will rile the people that you want to rile. You use them precisely because you know they will make certain other guests uncomfortable.

One issue is the appropriateness of this type of conduct. I want to be clear once again that I am not objecting to what Kathy Griffin said but to the conditions under which she said it – as an invited guest to somebody else’s party.

However, let us set this issue aside for a moment. Now the time has come for me to edit the tape that I have made at my party. I will be showing this type to family, friends, and even as a public broadcast (since this is a high-profile wedding). In making my tape, I have decided not to include your speech.

For this, I am being accused of censorship. Allegedly there is some moral principle at play that states that when you appear at my party and make some vulgar statement intending to make my other guests feel uncomfortable, that I am obligated to refrain from editing that out of my record of my event.

Ultimately, this is going to be a short post. I have argued with respect to morality that here, too, people are to be assumed innocent until proven guilty. It is the job of those who condemn a person for some action to prove that the condemnation is justified - it is never the job of the person being condemned to prove that he is innocent.

In fact, about the only defense a person can offer for condemnation is to challenge the accuser to justify his actions. If I am to be condemned for going to the grocery store this afternoon, I can say nothing in defense of that action other than that there is no reason to condemn it. So, if somebody wishes to condemn it, they must identify the reason.

I can see no argument for condemnation that applies to the act of editing one's own video of one's own event - even if one intends that event to be distributed for public viewing. Somebody making a documentary, writing a novel, creating a blog posting, can put in whatever, to them, fits his or her intentions regarding that product.

How can the charge of 'censorship' be justified when we are talking about an organization's private record of their own private event?

Moon 2.0

Yesterday, Google announced the creation of a new prize dedicated to the development of space, The Google X-Prize (a.k.a. "Moon 2.0"). This is $30 million to be awarded to whomever can put a lander on the moon, travel 500 meters, broadcast about 1 gigabyte of images back to Earth, and accomplish some other feats.

The prize is $25 million to the first who can fulfill the primary objectives as long as they do so before the end of the year 2012; $15 million if it takes them until $2014. There is a $5 million second place prize and a $5 million set aside for other accomplishments.

I consider the prize to be substantially a sham.

The reason is because of the expiration date.

Any business man knows that the value of any potential income is to be discounted by the amount of risk involved. If I have a 50% chance of making $100 – then that is only ‘worth’ $50 in current value. I would be wise to collect a guaranteed $51 now over making this gamble.

This due date substantially increases the risks involved for any team that decides to go for the prize, thus significantly decreasing its value. This is not a $20 million prize. It is significantly less than that.

Robert Bigalow performed the same stunt with his “America’s Prize”. This is a $50 million prize to the first private organization that can put a person in orbit. It has an expiration date of 2010. As far as I know, this prize has almost no effect on the space development industry, simply because the ‘risk’ of failing to meet the deadline is so high that the prize itself is virtually worthless.

I suspect that what Google is really after is about 5 years worth of free publicity from people reporting on the prize. Reporters will come to them to talk about the prize, or invite its members to speak at their organizations, or put up banners, or simply look up information on the prize because they are interested. Google’s name will be all over these displays, of course. Yet, ultimately, Google will be able to put the $30 million back in the bank, because nothing will happen to it.

It is simply difficult to square the decision to put on an expiration date with the idea that these individuals are truly interested in space development. Is it the case that, if we do not have lunar landers by the end of 2012, that it is no longer important (or less important) that we have lunar landers at all? People who are truly interested in the development of space would want to find ways to increase the incentive to develop space, not decrease it.

There is an important similarity here. The factors that make this prize much less valuable to those who would consider trying to earn it are the same factors that argue that Google is not making the contribution to space development they may want us to think that they are making.

From a business point of view, it all makes perfectly good sense. From a space development point of view, it’s a lot of noise for nothing.

I am a serious supporter of prizes for promoting space development. I think that the system is orders of magnitude better than our current system – where NASA spends billions of dollars on its own projects.

Imagine that you have two proposals in front of you. Proposal 1 (the George Bush plan) is for NASA to spend an average of $7 billion per year for the next 14 years to land astronauts on the South Pole. Of course, this is supposed to be the first step in an ongoing government lunar base, but that will require billions more every year. Besides, I strongly suspect that those plans will go the same way as Apollo 18, 19, and 20 – particularly as the government’s burden from war, deficit spending, and social security obligations picks up.

Compare this to a second plan, where the government will spend $3 billion per year on space prizes.

The X-Prize, that resulted in several private companies competing to develop the capacity to put 3 people onto the edge of space twice in two weeks, cost $10 million in prize money. They result is a new space industry that is already attracting around $1 billion per year in non-taxpayer-funded space development.

So, let’s say that the government were banking $3 billion per year and simply adding the money to a list of space prizes. First team to land an astronaut on the moon and return him safely to Earth. First team to land an astronaut on the moon and have him live there through 1 month. First team to bring back and process 1 tonne of material from an asteroid. First team to manufacture 100 kg of oxygen from lunar material.

The reason that this is a justifiable use of government money is because space development provides some extremely valuable goods that suffer from ‘free rider’ complications. The benefits that we get from space development (e.g., the use of a huge supply of natural resources from energy to iron, harvesting those resources without doing environmental damage to Earth, the potential survival of the human race in the event of a global catastrophe) are mostly benefits that everybody gets whether they pay or not.

This means that a lot of people will sit back and attempt to be ‘free riders’ – attempting to obtain the benefits without paying. However, somebody has to pay or we will never obtain the benefits. The smart way to proceed is to have the government collect the money so that everybody pays.

However, the government should use this money in the most efficient way possible. $100 billion government space projects do not fit that criterion. Government funded prizes for those who accomplish certain significant goals does fit that criterion.

However, the government will not use this system, because the $100 billion is a pork-barrel project that goes to people who contribute to political campaigns. NASA’s job is not to explore and develop space for the development of humanity. NASA’s job is to transfer money from people who pay taxes to corporations that collect government handouts. This $100 billion project is a poorly designed project for carrying out NASA’s alleged objective, but it is very well designed for carrying out NASA’s real objective.

The problem with government space prizes is that the politicians lose the ability to channel the money to their favorite campaign contributors. The money will go to the people who complete the task first. That might very well be people who contribute money to their opponents. That is simply not an acceptable outcome.

In fact, the government had a ‘prize’ system established for a couple of years – the Centennial Challenges. It was very modestly funded – only a few million dollars. However, it has since been killed. There are a few prizes still available, and we can see some of them competing in New Mexico next month. However, the program is all but dead.

Private organizations can take up some of this slack. We see what the Astari X-Prize accomplished. However, what we are starting to see on the private size of space prize industry are stunts like Google’s X-Prize – an attempt to offer a prize and to gather publicity under conditions where the prize merely appears valuable to those who neglect the relevance of risk and the effect of expiration dates on risk.

What would I like to see?

(1) I would like to see Bigelow and Google commit to the development of space by removing their time limits, substantially increasing the net present value of their prizes by decreasing the risks involved in collecting them. Space missions are risky enough already.

(2) I would like to see the government in the business of offering space prizes, shifting hundreds of millions of dollars currently used on government-run missions. This implies restoring the Centennial Challenge and significantly increasing its funding and the list of activities that people can perform to earn prizes.

(3) I would like to see the creation of an international organization (such as the United Nations) to sell property in space to private individuals and use the money to fund projects on Earth that would be particularly useful to underdeveloped countries. I would nominate using the money to educate orphaned children from these countries. Once people get their hands on deeds they can trust saying that they own a piece of the moon or an asteroid, we can trust that they will have a stronger interest in seeing that land put to good use.

(4) I would like to see the establishment of a system where people, governments, and business can contribute to a pot that will grow increasingly large over time, with the money going to whomever can fulfill the objectives to the prize. The money on deposit would simply continue to grow until it was collected.

Yes, I consider these things to be very important. They are among a very small list of things where the fate of the human race might actually hang in the balance.

Kathy Griffin and The Comic Defense

The Comic Defense

Two commenters responded to yesterday’s blog with what I call “The Comic Defense” – a claim that if one is a ‘comic’, or one is trying to be ‘comical’, then one is immune to certain sorts of criticism that would otherwise be legitimate.

Griffin herself used this defense when she rhetorically asked, “Am I the only Catholic left with a sense of humor?”

Interestingly, this is not the only place that I encountered the comic defense yesterday.

Al Lewis wrote an article, which was put under the headline, “There aren’t any atheists in a Front Range real estate foxhole.” Several atheists wrote to condemn him for using a version of the bigoted cliché, “There are no atheists in foxholes”. He responded to them in a follow-up article under the headline, “Letters from Atheists”: http://blogs.denverpost.com/lewis/2007/09/12/e-mails-from-atheists/

To be fair, the original criticism of Lewis was misdirected. People who write articles do not choose headlines. Somebody at the newspaper chose the headline – and the criticism should be aimed at the newspaper.

However, in his follow-up article, Lewis defended the headline and condemned those who objected to it. This now makes Lewis himself a legitimate target of moral criticism.

As a part of that defense, he wrote:

Obviously, God did not give them a sense of humor. Maybe I should start praying for them.

Both speakers used substantially the same defense. “I was just having some fun. Quit being such a tightwad. Loosen up.”

The first thing I want to do is to demonstrate how the Comic Defense can be abused and what it looks like when it is abused.

Imagine a group of people burning a cross in a black family’s yard, or painting a swastika on a Jewish person’s door. When they are caught, they respond, “We were just having some fun. Lighten up, will you? Where’s your sense of humor?”

In this case, we would be hard pressed to agree with these agents that the moral fault lies with those who condemn them for “having a little fun.” The moral fault lies with those who think that this type of behavior is “fun”. There are limits to what counts as “fun” (or “humor”), and I want to see if I can say something useful about where those limits can be found.

Please do not get distracted by the fact that the examples that I used are also property crimes. The agents in this case are not only guilty of malicious “fun”, but of trespassing and vandalism. However, they are not being judged solely because of their crimes against property. Somebody who paints some random lines on a door or who sets fire to somebody’s pile of leaves in the yard has committed the same property crime, but has not committed all of the same transgressions as our imaginary Nazi or KKK member. The “communication elements” in these particular acts are morally relevant and morally contemptible in their own right.

Also, some people seem inclined to argue that “freedom of speech” means that we may not morally condemn others for what they say. Lewis also wrote:

The line about atheists in foxholes is a common expression. Atheists ought to be FOR freedom of expression — not against it.

However, the view that condemnation is a violation of somebody’s right to freedom of speech is nonsense. Condemnation itself is speech, so to say, “It is wrong to condemn others for what they say,” would – if applied consistency – also imply that it is wrong to condemn those who condemn others. This claim that the freedom of speech implies an immunity from criticism is simply a rhetorical trick.

The right to freedom of speech is not a shield against criticism, it is a shield against violence - whether privately enforced, or enforced through legal censorship. Since nobody (so far as I can tell) is threatening Griffin or Lewis with violence in this case, the claim that ‘freedom of expression’ is being violated is simply not true. People making this claim are attempting an illegitimate defense of what may well be indefensible.

This point relates to something else Lewis wrote in defense of the headline.

If atheists are really offended by such an innocuous line, how are they any different than Jerry Farwell, who was offended by Tinky Winky, the allegedly gay Teletubbie? Or Muslims who didn’t like cartoons?

There are, in fact, two differences:

The first is that the atheists offended by these remarks did not (to the best of my ability) threaten to kill anybody. I hold that this is a morally significant difference.

The second is that there is a difference between legitimate and illegitimate offense. The Nazi and the KKK member might be offended by my examples above. However, this is simply too bad – because the Nazi and the KKK member deserve to be offended. Whereas the Jews and the blacks who are “offended” by their symbols do not deserve to be offended or intimidated. To defend the phrase denying atheists in foxholes by saying that atheists in military service have no right to condemn being ridiculed and belittled is to claim that atheists in the military belong in the same category as the Nazi or the KKK members. It says that the speaker things they are members of a group that deserve denigration and condemnation.

With these two distractions out of the way, I want to return the original question: When is it legitimate to use “The Comic Defense” to ward off criticism of something that one has said?

Comics can, in fact, make outlandish claims and be immune from criticism. However, in order for this to be the case, the comments have to be made in a context where (1) the comic did not really mean to denigrate others, and (2) the comic has clearly indicated this fact in the context of his communication.

Archie Bunker in the TV Series “All in the Family” was famous for denigrating others. One could scarcely find a common prejudice that he would not repeat. Yet, Carrol O’Connor, the actor who played Archie Bunker, deserved no condemnation for these remarks. This is because his remarks were made in accordance with the two principles that I stated above. Everybody knew that O’Connor did not personally mean these things, and this was made clear in context.

There was also no moral crime involved in finding O’Connor’s remarks to be funny. This is because the audience knew (or should have known) that the character was being used to ridicule bigots, not to ridicule those groups where were commonly victimized by their bigotry.

So, who was Karren Griffin and Al Lewis making fun of in these cases? Who were they laughing at? Were they actually ridiculing those who would condemn religion, or those who would denigrate atheists in foxholes? Or were they speaking in support of those attitudes? The “humor” dfense would require the former.

One way to find out is to look at how people can reasonably be expected to have interpreted their remarks. Griffin received a great deal of praise from atheists who largely expressed approval at her comments. They did not interpret her remarks as a parody of those who would condemn religion. They interpreted her remarks as a slap against those who believe in God, and cheered her words for their content.

The phrase, “There are no atheists in foxholes” itself is commonly used to report as if it is a fact that no atheist is sincere enough in his beliefs that he can resist turning to God in a moment of stress.

If it is the case that one person can sensibly praise a remark because of its comment, then it must be the case that somebody else can condemn a remark based on that same content. In other words, if we are going to say that the critic has failed to realize an important fact – that the remark was made in jest, then the supporter has missed this same fact. It would be like a bigot writing to Carroll O’Connor and saying, “Yes! Thank you! Somebody finally had the courage to say the things about niggers that I have been saying for years!.”

Anybody who made these types of remarks in response to O’Connor’s comments in the character of Archie Bunker simply did not get it.

Praise and condemnation play equivalent roles in this case. Either both are legitimate, or both are illegitimate.

Griffin’s comments, as well as those who use the phrase, “There are no atheists in foxholes,” did not fit these criteria. In fact, much of the praise that Griffin received for her comments were from people who praised the comments for their content. This would be like praising Carroll O’Connor for Archie Bunker’s bigoted remarks, saying, “It’s about time somebody had the courage to say such things. You are my hero.” Anybody who would make this type of claim about Carroll O’Connor clearly “doesn’t get it.”

This, then, is one test for The Comic Defense. If the people praising a remark for its content make sense doing so, then The Comic Defense is not a legitimate response to critics. If The Comic Defense is a legitimate defense of criticisms, then those who are praising that remark for its content similarly don’t get the joke. In fact, they don’t realize that they are the joke.

Another test is this:

Imagine somebody such as Mel Gibson receiving an award and saying, “Some people think that there is no God. Suck it, atheists. There is a God.”

Imagine what you would think or say or write on the day after an outburst like that, and compare it to what you thought or said or wrote about Kathy Griffin. Would you find it funny? Would your response sound different than your response to Griffin’s comments?

If I have done my job right then, at least in my own writings, there would be no difference.

Finally, I want to point out that it was not Kathy Griffin's content specifically that was at fault here. It was the content in that context. As I wrote yesterday, guests at award shows are asked and expected to refrain from using the awards ceremony as a political forum. The same remarks, made back stage, would not suffer from the same objections

The Kathy Griffin Incident

Many atheist readers will already be familiar with this story. Kathy Griffin received a Creative Arts Emmy for Outstanding Reality Program. In her acceptance speech she said:

A lot of people come up here and thank Jesus for this award. I want you to know that no one had less to do with this award than Jesus. Suck it, Jesus, this award is my god now!

For this, she has received praise from many atheist bloggers, the condemnation of many religious leaders such as Catholic League president Bill Donohue, and a promise from the TV Academy to edit her remarks in a rebroadcast of the award ceremony on E! on Saturday night.

I am not going to be one of the bloggers who will praise her for what she said. I consider the remarks inappropriate.

Let us assume that there was a comedy or a musical team, Jim and Bob, that had been famous for a couple of decades. However, they had a recent falling out. Each has gone their own way and one of them, Jim, was being quite successful in his solo career. Jim gets an Emmy and, when he gets up to give his speech, said, “I want you to know that no one had less to do with this award than Bob. Suck it, Bob. This award is mine.”

Of course, we cannot leave out the detail that many people in the audience are extremely good friends with Bob. At the end of each speech, the tradition is to applaud the person who received it. However, Jim would have put all of those people in the uncomfortable position of applauding the person who has just insulted their friend Bob in front of a national audience.

For putting the members of the audience in this position, Jim deserves some measure of moral condemnation.

In addition, those who sponsor most awards ceremonies request (demand) that speakers refrain from using their time at the podium to advocate any political or social agenda, other than whatever agenda might be ‘on topic’ given what they are receiving the award for. A person receiving an award for a documentary on global warming is permitted to say something about global warming. The reason is simple – they do not want these awards ceremonies to degenerate into brawls – verbal or otherwise.

One possible response to this objection to these remarks is to say that it is a part of Griffin’s public persona to do or say things that are objectionable. However, it does not follow from the fact that a person has adopted a persona of behaving inappropriately that it is wrong to condemn her. We would not, for example, argue that the fact that a person has adopted the role of a burglar implies that it would be wrong for us to condemn his acts of theft.

I suspect that at least one person will assume that I am basing my criticism of Griffin on an assumption that we have an obligation to be particularly nice or tolerant of those who believe in God. That would not be correct.

There are legitimate criticisms to be made against those who claim that religion deserves a special sort of politeness or tolerance that we should not grant to other forms of belief. For example, in almost all parts of life, if somebody says something absurd or ridiculous we are permitted to say (if it is our honest opinion), “That is absurd” or “That is ridiculous.” We are not permitted to say this under every circumstance, but certainly under some circumstance, Yet, saying that the belief that there is a God is absurd or ridiculous is culturally prohibited. This amounts to a special protection for religious beliefs. That special protection is unwarranted, and should be eliminated.

However, my criticism about Griffin is not because she refused to show special sensitivity towards religious beliefs. My example above is meant to illustrate that there is a wide range of remarks that are not appropriate in these circumstances, many of which have nothing to do with religion. Arguing that her comments against religion are acceptable in these circumstances is like saying that religion deserves a place of special condemnation – that it is legitimate to condemn religion in circumstances where other forms of criticism would be considered inappropriate.

In fact, since it is considered appropriate for a speaker to thank Jesus or some other supernatural entity when accepting an award, the following should be viewed as acceptable:

To all of the people who made this possible, you did this. This is for your hard work and your talent, and I’m not going to give the credit you deserve to some supernatural deity.

If it is appropriate to thank Jesus at an award ceremony, then it should be appropriate to tell those that one is thanking that they deserve full credit for their contribution.

In fact, it would be hard to criticize this type of acceptance speech. Anybody who does so will have to say, or at least infer, that the people that the recipient thanked do not actually deserve full credit.

The way that this story is developing, we now have to say a few things about the reactions to Griffin’s remarks.

For example, the Catholic League has condemned Griffin’s remarks for being “obscene and blasphemous.”

Obscene . . . yes, in part. Blasphemous? Well, I’m willing to grant that, but I find it hard for a Catholic to make this claim without being guilty of hypocrisy. After all, thanking Jesus is blasphemous, in a sense, from the point of view of an atheist. Blasphemy is denying the existence of a God (which atheists certainly do). Denying the non-existence of a God is simply the same situation in reverse. Arguing that one should be permitted while the other should be condemned is a textbook example of hypocrisy.

Also, in response to criticisms of Griffin, the TV Academy has said that they will edit her remarks.

I would consider it perfectly legitimate for the TV Academy to censor obscenity – as long as it does so on a regular standard. This is going to be hard to do, given that the show itself put on a presentation of MTV’s song, “Dick in a box.” To censor Griffin for obscenity in this context . . . the stench of hypocrisy will be overpowering.

But, to censor blasphemy? Since it permits people to thank Jesus, censoring blasphemy would be an instance of allowing certain religions special protection. It grants the church protections that the rest of us do not have – not unless it is also willing to censor any statement thanking a deity.

Griffin has been accused of bigotry. Yet, no clearer example of bigotry can be found than that of an organization that allows the double standard found in allowing people to assert a belief in Jesus but not allow somebody to assert a belief in the skills and talents of real people.

Now, the Saturday version of the Emmy Awards has not yet aired. I do not know what will be cut and what will not be cut. There is nothing yet to say about whether the TV Academy will apply a consistent standard or not to this broadcast. (I think it would be quite amusing if they edited out Griffin’s comments and also every comment making reference to any deity.)

So, I cannot say that what the TV Academy did was wrong. They haven’t done it yet. It will be interesting to find out. But, from what I have seen so far, and the choices they have made, they have painted themselves into a moral corner. The next question will be whether, if things turn out as expected, a sufficient number of people will be willing to condemn them for it.

The Irrelevance of Moral Sentiments

When some people hear that somebody is going to discuss ‘morality’, they jump to the conclusion that the discussion must be about ‘the moral sentiments’. They then jump to a set of conclusions about what is obviously true about ‘morality’ – that different people have different moral sentiments, that cultural factors play a heavy role in determining a person’s moral sentiments, that genetics also plays a role in the moral sentiments we have and how we acquire them, and that the sentiments are internal to the agent – not an intrinsic part of that which is being evaluated.

From this they assert some form of moral subjectivism and that any claim that morality can be objective as utter nonsense.

Given this definition of ‘morality’, I would have to agree with them. However, ‘morality’ as these people define it is not what I write about in this blog. I am writing about a different subject – also called ‘morality’, but substantially and importantly different from the study of moral sentiments.

Thinking of morality as the study of moral sentiments is a mistake – very much like thinking that ‘astronomy’ is the study of beliefs about things above the atmosphere.

Imagine somebody claiming to be an astronomer. However, his research involves doing brain scans on people while he asks them to consider certain aspects about things in space. The bulk of his research involves publishing the results of experiments where he describes the differences between people’s brain function and their beliefs about things in the cosmos. For example, he publishes articles where he compares and contrasts the brain functions of those who believe that the Earth is less than 10,000 years old to those who believe that the earth is 4.55 billion years old. When he talks about his research he proudly boasts that he is involved in the study of theories of planetary formation.

Given the way this researcher is defining ‘astronomy’, he too would discover that different people have different astronomical beliefs, that cultural factors play a role in the beliefs that people have, that genetics probably plays some role in how people acquire and change their beliefs, and that these beliefs are internal to the agent.

However, if he were to then conclude that any claim that astronomy can be objective is utter nonsense. However, this result comes from the fact that he has defined ‘astronomy’ as the study of brain functions and beliefs about what is in space. Most astronomers are not, in fact, people who study beliefs about things in space – they study things in space. As such, they are involved in something quite different from what this researcher has decided to call ‘astronomy’.

Language is an invention, and there is nothing inherently wrong with having more than on definition osf ‘morality’ any more than there is something wrong with having more than one definition of ‘star’ (e.g., the hydrogen type versus the Hollywood type). However, we encounter practical problems when two different definitions are so close together that people cannot tell when they are using one definition or the other. This invites people to equivocate between the two meanings, taking claims that are true about morality-1, and asserting that they are also true about morality-2, when they are not true.

I am writing this particular post to bring this confusion to the forefront so that we can recognize it and do a better job of avoiding it. Whenever I write about ‘morality’ I am not the least bit concerned with what a person would find if he studied our moral sentiments, any more than the astronomer is concerned with what would be revealed by a study of our beliefs about things in space. I am not concerned about ‘sentiments’ of right and wrong, but with right and wrong itself, just as the astronomer is not concerned with beliefs about stars and planets, but with stars and planets themselves.

You do not study stars and planets by looking at brain scans and studying the beliefs of different people in different cultures at different times.

You do not study morality by looking at brain scans and studying the sentiments of different people in different cultures at different times.

In the realm of morality, I will certainly admit that these sentiments will affect what a person will claim to be the case regarding right and wrong. However, in the realm of astronomy, it is also true that these cultural elements will affect what a person will claim is true about stars and planets, We can hardly expect that a person who grew up in ancient Greece would be able to present us with a theory of dark matter. Furthermore, people 2500 years from now (if there are people 2500 years from now) will be talking about theories that we cannot imagine. These factors do no more to prove that we cannot have a science of morality than they prove that we cannot have a science of astronomy.

The sociologist will point out that no astronomer can ever build his theories out of whole cloth. Astronomers borrow from their culture, reading what others believed and picking up cultural norms governing the ways in which astronomical beliefs are considered to have been proven. The astronomer who thinks that he can fully separate his own beliefs from these cultural and individual influences is wholly mistaken. The astronomer will answer, “So what? Please explain to me how these facts indicate that I should do my astronomical research by looking at brain scans and surveys of people’s claims about things in space. How do you justfy those conclusions from the premises you provide?”

Similarly, when somebody claims that we draw our moral beliefs from our culture and none of us can construct morality from whole cloth, I answer that this does not prove that morality is nothing more than the study of brain scans and that we must take all moral sentiments at face value. It is still a different field of study.

So, what are the differences between the study of morality-1 (brain states; moral sentiments), and the study of morality-2? What is morality-2 anyway?

I have written much of this blog discussing a theory of morality – the fact that people have desires-as-ends reasons to promote certain desires in others and inhibit certain other desires. Against this theory, anybody who points out that moral sentiments are subjective simply is not engaged in the same discussion. I can easily agree with everything that such a person may say about moral sentiments – other than the inference, “We have a moral sentiment that P; therefore, we should have a moral sentiment that P,” and still hold that such a person has not yet said a word about morality.

At this point, I typically encounter the claim that we have ways of resolving differences of opinion regarding astronomy. However, we have no such method for resolving differences in morality. Your view of right and wrong is different from mine and there is no way to prove that either of ours is correct.

Well, I have two responses to say to this.

First, if there is no way to demonstrate that A is a better answer than not-A, when what business does anybody have for choosing A? If both options are truly equal, with no reason available for accepting one over the other, then this (I would argue) suggests that anybody who then chooses one over the other is making a mistake.

Second, the response begs the question. It is effectively stating that morality cannot be about anything other than moral sentiments because our moral sentiments are subjective. The fact that moral sentiments have this problem of being unjustifiable does not prove that morality is unjustifiable unless one assumes that which is under dispute, that ‘morality’ is concerned with moral sentiments.

Ultimately, the point of this post is to clarify why I hold that facts about moral sentiments are not relevant to morality. If somebody comes to me with all sorts of information about our moral sentiments – particularly the fact that they are subjective, culturally influenced, and are different for different people in different cultures – I am going to answer that all of this is fine, but it simply is not about the same thing that I am writing about. “You might as well be talking about the molecular composition of an orange for all of its relevance to morality – to the question of what we should and should not approve of or disapprove of.

Moral Weakness or Hypocrisy

Several Republican politicians and supporters who have been vocal advocates of ‘family values’ with its condemnation of homosexuality have recently been found to engage in homosexual acts. For this, they have been charged with hypocrisy.

Time Magazine had an article, " The Psychology of Hypocrisy" this morning explaining why ‘hypocrisy’ might not be the appropriate charge to make in this case This article argued that it would be more accurate to accuse these people with ‘moral weakness’.

The difference is that hypocrisy itself is a moral crime – something to be condemned. Moral weakness, on the other hand, is something that all of us suffer from to some extent. If we were to condemn the morally weak the way we condemn the hypocritical, then we would all have to condemn ourselves. So, we tend to forgive the morally weak. They, at least, understand the wrongness of their actions, even though they have a hard time living up to their ideals.

This does not imply that moral condemnation is not warranted in case of moral weakness. The difference is that moral weakness is not a separate moral crime. The person who lies when placed in an uncomfortable situation, or who pockets the money he finds in a lost wallet, is not condemned once for the lie and once for the moral weakness. However, the person who excuses his own lies while condemning the lies of others under similar circumstances deserves not only condemnation for the lie, but separate condemnation for the hypocrisy with which he lies.

The idea that everybody is morally weak to some extent is not the claim that none of us deserve condemnation as a result, but a claim that all of us will deserve some moral condemnation throughout our lives. Some will deserve significantly more than others.

Of course, in the case of these Republicans, we introduce another complication, homosexual acts are not necessarily immoral. They can be – just the way that driving a car can be immoral when one drives recklessly or with an intent to do harm. However, there is nothing in their nature that makes them necessarily acts that a person with good desires would not perform.

In this case, the agents believed (wrongly) that homosexual acts are immoral. When speaking, they stated their beliefs. However, this belief that homosexuality is wrong did not change their desires, and their desires still motivated them to engage in homosexual acts.

Desire utilitarianism allows for an easy accounting of moral weakness. A right act is an act that a person with good desires will perform. However, the act that any given agent would perform at any instant is that act that would best fulfill his desires, given his beliefs. Unless the agent actually has good desires, and has each desire at its best strength, we are going to find difference between the way an agent acts and the way an agent should act. I think it is safe to say that no person will have all of the right desires in all of the right strengths, so we are all going to morally fail to some extent. Only, some will fail more than others.

Many drunk drivers, drug addicts, child abusers, thieves, shoplifters, and the like are people who know that their actions are wrong – that a good person would not do these things. They need not (in fact, they almost certainly have not) expressed that wrongness in desire utilitarian terms. Yet, they still know that the actions are wrong. Yet, they perform the action anyway, because their desire not to do that which is wrong is weaker than whatever desire is motivating the action they know to be wrong.

The drunk driver who campaigns against drunk driving may well be somebody who knows that drunk driving is wrong and know that it is important for society to take steps to condemn it. In fact, as he campaigns for tougher laws against drunk driving, he may well think, “I must make the laws strong enough so that they will cause even me to think twice about violating them, so that I can end this destructive and contemptible behavior I engage in.” This is not a hypocrite. This is someone who finds himself with desires that motivate him to perform actions that he knows a good person would not perform.

I have often used the charge of ‘hypocrisy’ against others. However, I have not used the term to mean merely that a person performs an act that he condemns. Rather, I have used the term to refer to those who hold a double standard. A hypocrite not only does things he condemns, but he hold an act to be acceptable when he does it that he condemns when he catches somebody else doing it.

One of my best examples of hypocrisy these days comes from liberals who insist that America withdraw from Iraq. Many of them condemn Bush for intellectual recklessness in supporting the war in Iraq. Some call him an outright liar, but others are willing to assert that he told the truth, but recklessly determined what to believe. At the very least, they recklessly believed that the Iraq invasion would be over quickly and have a very low cost.

These anti-war liberals think that the policy of withdrawing troops from Iraq will also have a very low cost. They speak about withdraw as if it could not possibly have any adverse affects. There is one affect that I am relatively certain it will have. It will allow al-Queida recruiters to claim, “God is with us. We have defeated the infidels,” which will substantially increase their recruiting and funding efforts. The most important factor in any conflict has never been the size of the army, or the sophistication of their equipment, but the morale of the soldiers. Military leaders will tell you that to win a war you do not need to destroy the enemy, you simply need to destroy their will to fight.

Anti-war liberals are conveniently ignoring these facts because it does not support their policy. They are engaging in the same type of intellectual recklessness that the Bush Administration engaged in at the start of the war. These people assert that the Bush Administration is morally culpable for not checking its assumptions, while these people express no moral objection to check their own assumptions.

This would be hypocrisy.

Why is this distinction important?

Well, if a machine is broken, and you have false beliefs about what is wrong with it, chances are this will make it more difficult (if not impossible) to fix the machine. On the other hand, if you know what is wrong with it, you will be more likely to find a solution that addresses the actual problem.

Condemning these incidents as hypocrisy simply means that agents should put more effort into making sure that their behavior conforms to their own moral standards. As I suggested above, one of the things some of these agents might have been trying to do is to strengthen society’s condemnation of homosexuality so that it might have a stronger affect on their own behavior, and they would commit fewer sins – simply because the opportunity to do so would be lessened.

This does not actually fix the problem. In fact, since homosexual acts are not wrong in themselves, this makes the problem worse.

On the other hand, if we get the moral diagnosis correct, we will say that to these Republicans that they have been twice harmed. First, because of the deception that was fed to them when they were children and too young to think for themselves, they have grown up to be people devoted to activities that are harmful to others. Their chance to be good people who have made a positive contribution to society is greatly diminished. Second, because the list of people whose lives are being turned upside down by these false moral claims are their own.

You are not a bad person just because you want to have sex with somebody of the same gender. You are a bad person because you want to do things that are harmful to others. Now, take a good look at your life. Of all of the things that you have done with your life, where were you and what were you doing when you were making the lives of others worse than those lives could have been?

Those people who have been dead for 2000 years were as much in the dark about the moral universe as they were about the scientific universe, and holding them up as the model of moral perfection is not only insane, it is harmful – it turns otherwise good people such as yourself into people who harm not only others, but people who harm even themselves.

So, quit devoting your energies to policies that harm people who you know are not hurting anybody, and start going after the people who are doing real harm. If you do that, you might actually accomplish the good that you want to accomplish.

I do not epect this type of claim to convince the person it is aimed at. That person will probably continue along his or her chosen path out of inertia alone. However, if this is said loud enough and often enough, somebody would hear it who will actually ask himself, "Do I really have good reason to make others merable by supporting this type of legislation? Is this, perhaps, really another ancient moral mistake?"

As the cultural attitude shifts, then perhaps fewer politicians will feel the need to pursue these types of policies, or think that they are electable when their campaign promise is to do harm to others in the name of God.

Happy (2nd) Blogbirthday To Me

Hello, reader.

I'm back from vacation, and I am ready to start another brand new year of Atheist Ethicist.

As it turns out, this is the second anniversary of my first post in this blog.

As it turns out, I am also sleep writing. Having just gotten back from vacation, I am very much in need of a good night's sleep. My wife and I travelled home last night (leaving at 4:00 yesterday, getting home at 6:00 this morning), and I have an annoying problem of not being able to sleep during daylight. So my brain is not fully functional.

Who said that!

Who said that my brain has never been fully functional!

I heard that!

Anyway, if we can put aside the heckling from the studio audience, I want to say that I have found the work that I have done here extremely valuable, at least to me.

Over the break, I wrote a book, Good Lives and Good People, about how atheists can live good a good life and be a good person. Now, I hate to give away the ending . . . okay, I actually answer this question in the first chapter, but a good life is a life that contains those elements that would fulfill good desires.

Recall, one of the claims made within desire utilitarianism is that all value exists in the form of relationships between states of affairs and desires. This means that if we are going to evaluate lives, the only type of value that exists for a life is in terms of a life's relationship between that which is true of a life and a set of desires. A good life is going to be a life that we have reasons to recommend pursuing. The only "relationship between the properties of life an desires" that we have reason to promote is a life that would fulfill good desires.

Some might complain that this is not good enough for a good life. A good life must have something else - some special quality independent of desire.

Not good enough?

This is the only good that is real. An individual may, of course, come to want some other type of good - intrinsic good, transcendental good, divine good. However, the world will always thwart such a desire - those types of goodness do not exist. Because these are desires that cannot be fulfilled, they are desires that should be avoided.

Anyway, this blog would certainly count as part of a'good life'. Assuming, of course, that I am actually doing some good with it.

I have actually given up quite a bit to be in this place where I can write this blog. I gave up a lucrative job offer to go to graduate school - and to study in a field that does not produce job offers. The philosphy department sent a written warning to those they accepted into graduate school saying that there was little chance to find work in that particular field. I went anyway. My application to graduate school said why. I needed to learn these things. I was not going to study moral philosophy to get a job. I was not even going to get a degree. I was going to get an education. That is what I received.

Even today, I would likely be a much better computer programmer if, like other programmers, I were to focus all of my attention on that job, writing programs both on and off the job. However, I have something else that I do when I am off the job, so I am not as good a programmer as I could be.

When I think about giving it up, those thoughts last about 1.7 seconds. (Though, I will state explicitly, because I have much to gain and nothing to lose, that if anybody should know of a way that I could quit doing this blog part time . . . and write and research these issues full time . . . I would be pleased to listen to the proposition.)

Spending a week with my nieces and nephews, wondering what type of future they may have, I really could not live with myself if I decided to hang this up and do nothing. I could not do that to them. Though my writings do not have much of a chance of making any significant contribution to their future, ceasing to write will guarantee no useful contribution at all.

While I was on vacation, I read a National Geographic article mostly on religion in Pakistan. It was largely a story of so many lives ruined, and the teaching and spreading of idiotic claims - like the claims that Pakistan's earthquake was caused by the will of Allah. These types of claims are not only false, they are morally negligent. Only through understanding earthquakes can we avoid future catastrophies. Those who obsecure the scientific facts for these phenomena are setting people up for death and injury. They are people who leave a trail of maimed and broken bodies in their wake, killed by ignorance.

As those forces of ignorance gain power, they provide an ever increasing threat to my neices' and nephews' future - and their children. Am I to sit back and do nothing?

For all practical purposes, my life ends when I can no longer make some sort of useful contribution to the subjects that I write about. I may stay alive, but that life becomes insignificant at that point. My wife knows this. Those are my criteria for when she is supposed to pull the plug on my existence. When there is no reasonable expectation that I could write another post that made a real contribution to some subject under dispute.

The critic may say that I have already passed the point where I could make any real contributions. Or that I never reached it, and never will. Perhaps that is correct. This theory does allow it to be the case that a person can believe his life has significance when it does not. Many who have served a church and spent their lives promoting a religion fall into this category. The ends they pursued did not exist, and they ended up promoting myth and superstition, which in turn lead to death, disease, and injury.

Those things happen. However, all a person can do is try.

Tomorrow, I try again.

What I Did On My Summer Vacation

While I was away on my summer vacation, I worked on a new book. I had planned to work on a new book when I left. However, it turns out that the book I planned to work on, and the book I came back with, are not the same book.

And this was not a casual effort. My goal was to be substantially done with the book when I returned, so I worked on it almost constantly in order to get it done, minus some time to read a book on the civil war and to watch some episodes I missed of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.

The book I ended up with is called, "Good Lives and Good People".

The way that I came up with this book is that I started to cut and paste postings from my blog site (which I had downloaded before leaving on vactaion) into the book that I intended to write, and discovered that I had a section that seemed to stand quite well on its own.

This is not just a collection of postings from my web site. That is what I started out to do, but the stand-alone section that I ended up with needed some substantial work to get it to hold together. I edited it extensively.

People who know me know how I edit.

The way that I describe my editing process - which is only a slight exaggeration - is by saying, "I ended up replacing everything except a comma on Page 44, and I moved that comma to Page 66."

That's actually what took so much effort - rewriting everything.

Here's what I ended up with:

About 170 pages that look at how to evaluate lives and people, to show that an atheist (or, at least, this atheist) can determine if a life is a good life or a person is a good person.

I did not go heavily into theory. I had already written that book, and did not want to simply write it again. This book is more of an application of the conclusions reached in that other book to a practical problem of trying to determine what counts as a good life and a good person.

And I wrote it with a heavy focus on atheism.

This is what concerned me in writing it. You've got all of these people who claim that atheists cannot come up with a way of talking about a life that has meaning and value, or talking about morality, without borrowing from Christian concepts. Some even argue that the mere fact that atheists use moral concepts is proof that they have some concept of a God.

Against that view, I wanted to make sure that this book approached those issues while paying attention to the debate between atheists and theists on the possibility of living a good life or being a good person.

After a few chapters on good lives and good people, I go on to discuss why it is the case that theism presents obstacles to living a good life or being a good person that atheism avoids.

I then address some issues in the general arena of 'militant atheists' and the attitudes that atheists should take towards religion.

Anyway, at this point, I would like to ask if there are people in the studio audience who would be willing to volunteer to read this manuscript and to tell me all of the really stupid things I said in it. I'm not just talking about the creative ways in which I spell words and the way I might, on occasion, write sentences without verbs, nouns, or punctuation. I'm talking about scribbling notes like, "This is the most absurd claim I have ever heard any human being make. Go find <> by <>, and you can see just how stupid this is."

If you want me to give you a PDF of the manuscript, just send me an email and let me know. Click on that 'contact' thingy in the top right section of this blog.

Except, you have to promise to have your comments in to me by October 1st. I'm not handing out free copies to whoever wants them. I really want this manuscript cleaned up, and I want to hear from somebody who is willing to help me do it.

Thank you.

Alonzo Fyfe