Sacrifice and Opportunity Costs

I am still catching up on questions and comments from the studio audience. Today, I would like to address a pair of comments to a statement that I made in the post called The Bibby Survey: Kindness. There, I wrote:

We would not say that a person who likes eating chocolate ice cream is making some sort of sacrifice when he eats chocolate ice cream. He is doing what he desires to do.

Doug S. wrote in response:

I disagree. The person who eats chocolate ice cream is sacrificing the ability to do something else with the resources (time, money, stomach capacity, etc.) used to eat that ice cream. He sacrifices some desires in order to fulfill others. (An economist would call this the "opportunity cost" of eating chocolate ice cream.)

This is true. However, there is an important difference between ‘opportunity cost’ and ‘sacrifice’. Opportunity costs are bi-directional. The person who gives $1000 to combating malaria in Africa suffers the ‘opportunity cost’ of not being able to spend $1000 on a luxurious long weekend with his wife. At the same time, the person who spends a luxurious long weekend with his wife suffers the ‘opportunity cost’ of not being able to give that $1000 to his favorite cause – fighting malaria in Africa.

Though both actions have an ‘opportunity cost’, it is not the case that we generally call both actions a ‘sacrifice’. It is the concept of ‘sacrifice’ that I was getting to above. The person who truly values fighting malaria in Africa in fact is not ‘sacrificing’ a weekend get-away in order to pursue this interest – not if his fond desire is to fight malaria in Africa, and weekend get-aways are nothing but an expensive waste of money.

The reason we get asymmetry with respect to ‘sacrifice’ that we do not get with ‘opportunity costs’ is primarily because ‘sacrifice’ is a moral concept, and ‘opportunity cost’ is not. The values that we have reason to cause people to pursue we do so in part by heaping praise on those who pursue them, and condemnation on those who do not. The person who makes the ‘noble sacrifice’ is the person who performs an act that we have reason (or think we have reason) to encourage people to do. We use the term as a flag – ‘This act deserves praise’. However, it does not imply that the agent actually cared about the things that he had to give up in order to perform this ‘sacrifice’.

This relates to the rest of Doug S.’s comment:

By the way you seem to be defining "desire" and "sacrifice", no act that a person willingly chooses to perform could ever be considered a sacrifice. Would you say that, say, a firefighter who dies in the line of duty didn't make a sacrifice because he desired the chance to save other lives more than he desired avoiding risk to his own life?

My original claim was intended to point out the fact that, when it comes to eating chocolate ice cream, even though the agent must give up something in order to eat the chocolate ice cream, we (competent English speakers) do not say that this involved some sort of sacrifice. If a person who, instead, gives his money to charity is, like the person who buys a chocolate ice cream, is doing what he wants most, then what sense is to be made of calling the other a sacrifice?

It is not sufficient to hold that we do, in fact, make this distinction. I wish to know the rationale for making it – a description of the difference that actually makes sense.

One rationale that I mentioned above is the moral distinction. We use the term ‘sacrifice’ as a moral flag to identify acts that we have reason (or believe we have reason) to encourage people to make.

However, the psychological distinction between the person who wishes to prevent malaria in Africa more than he wishes to spend a luxurious weekend with his wife is no different than the psychological distinction between the person who wishes to eat chocolate ice cream more than he wishes to eat vanilla ice cream. Any claim that there is a qualitative difference is false.

There are two factors compounding the case of the firefighter mentioned above.

First, the fire-fighter’s actions are those of sacrifice in the moral sense. They are actions that people generally have reason to flag and claim to be worthy of praise. Creating a society with people such as that is a way of securing our own safety and happiness and those of other people we care about – including those that the firefighter cares about.

Second, as Doug mentions the calculation involves risk. According to standard decision theory, the value of an action that involves risk is determined by the possibility of a particular result and the value of the result. A firefighter who risks his life in a situation where there is a 1% chance of death may not be willing to do so if the chance of death is 100%. So, if he gambles and loses, he has, in fact, thwarted the most and strongest of his own desires. We are talking here about a genuine gamble, and a genuine loss.

Both of these justify a use of the word ‘sacrifice’ without refuting the point that I was trying to make in my post. A person who chooses to be a firefighter, and who even chooses to go on a suicide mission (where the chance of death is 100%) is morally, though not psychologically, acting any different than the person who chooses chocolate over vanilla ice cream.

This leads to another comment to the same post that Eneasz made:

I understand how being generous when it is a strong desire of yours that you are fulfilling is self-rewarding, and thus definitionally not a sacrifice. However, money is what our society values above almost anything else. No matter how fulfilling such acts might be, they still feel like a sacrifice to the actor regardless, due to the lost income and corresponding social status.

To the degree that a person values social status over charity then, to that degree, giving up money to fight malaria in Africa would, in fact, feel like a sacrifice, even under the system that I described. This is a person who is facing two strong but mutually conflicting desires. One of them must give way to the other. Since both desires are strong, the desire left unfulfilled (if the agent believes it has gone unfulfilled) can be expected to generate feelings of frustration and regret. That is to say, this will qualify as a sacrifice in the psychological sense.

However, it is still the case that the person who does not value influence (or some other state that is in conflict with contributing to the fight against malaria in Africa will not feel this regret. This is the person who feely chooses charity over other options and would do so regardless of the other options that become available.

We are a culture that teaches people to value social status more than the eradication of disease. For that reason, those who contribute more to the fighting of disease cannot only be said to be making a sacrifice in the moral sense. They are also more likely to also be making a sacrifice in the psychological sense – because we, as a society, make it psychologically difficult for people to pursue those types of ends.

One of the ways of promoting generosity, I would argue, is to point out that the person who learns generosity without these conflicting desires will not suffer any of this anguish over his choices. He can, in fact, choose generosity as freely and with the same immunity from conflict as the person who chooses chocolate ice cream over vanilla. That is a good position to be in.

Interpreting "The Hateful Craig Problem"

I am continuing to respond to questions from the studio audience. Of these, one set of questions comes from a reader responding to a much earlier post, The Hateful Craig Problem. That post, in turn, was concerned with an audience question from Craig who asked, “If we assume that I hate everybody, what reason is there for me to fulfill the desires of others?”

This question comes from somebody asking me to clarify my answer. The reader provides some interpretations of what I had written, then asks me to comment on whether that interpretation is correct or incorrect.

1) An atheist has no metaphysical reason to respect anyone else's desires.

Actually, my post does not make any claims about atheism. Atheists cannot even agree on the definition of the term ‘atheist’, so I would not pretend to make any claim that is true of all atheists in general. As I use the term, an atheist is any person who believes that the proposition, “At least one god exists” is almost certainly false. However, this is compatible with a lot of other beliefs, including (but not limited to) those that I defend in my post.

I have placed my views under the name ‘desire utilitarianism’. Insofar as you are asking about that particular moral theory then you are asking me about desire utilitarianism, not atheism.

Desire utilitarianism is, of course, compatible with atheism. However, it is possible for somebody to believe that a god exists and that this god created the universe and still be a desire utilitarianism. This would simply be a person that believes that god created a universe in which the propositions that make up desire utilitarianism are true.

I hold that the propositions that make up desire utilitarianism are true. I am also an atheist. However, there is no necessary connection between these two. Their relationship is the same as the relationship between the fact that I am male, and the fact that I am over 6 feet tall. A person can be more than 6 feet tall and not be male. A person can be male without being over 6 feet tall. A person can e a desire utilitarian and not be an atheist. A person can be an atheist and not be a desire utilitarian. I happen to be both.

Next, I’m afraid that I do not fully know what you want to say when you use the term ‘metaphysical’ here.

Some people use the term to mean ‘supernatural’. On this, it is true that I do not believe that there are any supernatural reasons to do anything. I believe in only natural reasons for action. However, natural reasons for action (desires) do exist. It is a mistake to say that, because a person does not believe in supernatural reasons for action that he must believe there are no reasons for action. It is as much of a mistake as claiming that because somebody believes there is no supernatural original to human beings that he denies the existence of human beings.

Some people use the term ‘metaphysics’ to refer to the study of existence, also known as ‘ontology’. On this measure, many of the reasons for action that theists point to in advising others how to live their lives lack a metaphysical basis. This is simply another way of saying that many of the reasons for action that these theists assert in recommending certain actions are reasons for action that do not exist.

God’s creators were human, as corruptible, arrogant, and prone to error as any other human. They claimed to have perfect knowledge of the difference between right and wrong. In fact, they merely had their own opinions. Unfortunately, they were able to convince far too many people to accept their ignorant, biased, and corrupt opinions under a set of conditions that prohibited people from questioning those opinions.

As such, the opinions of a group of substantially ignorant and illiterate tribesmen become carved in stone to plague humanity for millennia.

It is also worth noting that few (if any) religions actually preach a respect for the desires of others. Instead, they teach a respect for the desires of only one entity, that entity being god. Of course, this god is an invention – a human creation, endowed with the desires of those who created it. So, while the religion says, “Thou shalt consider no desires but the desires of God,” in practice this is really nothing more than, “Thou shalt consider no desires but the desires of those who created God.”

2) For atheists, then, the coercive power of the state and social approbation determine what is "right" and "wrong".

The above statement about ‘atheists’ applies here as well.

Atheism has the same relationship to morality as heliocentrism (the view that the sun is at the center of the solar system) does. Heliocentrism does not imply anything about how we should live our lives – other than to say that a sound moral argument places the sun at the center of the solar system. Atheism does not say anything about how we should live our lives. It only says that sound moral arguments do not accept the proposition that a god exists is true.

Within desire utilitarianism, coercive power of the state and social approbation do not determine right and wrong. The relationship between malleable desires and other desires determines right and wrong. The coercive power of the state and social approbation are tools that can then be used to promote that which is right and inhibit that which is wrong. However, like all tools, they can also be misused.

A right act is, on this theory, the act that a person with good desires would perform. A wrong act is an act that a person with good desires would not perform. Good desires are desires that tend to fulfill other desires. Thus, good desires are malleable desires that others have reason to promote, and the tools that they would use to promote them are praise, condemnation, reward, and punishment. We discover these relationships between desires (as well as the degree to which they are malleable) the same way we discover other natural facts – by observation, by forming theories, and by testing those theories.

3) Things like wanting "people to have...a love for the truth and a dislike for deception and for careless reasoning" are not hard-wired into us and the world, but are social goods determined by society's thought leaders.

Actually, desire utilitarianism is not only compatible with the view that some desires are hard-wired into us through evolution, I hold that some desires are, in fact, hard wired into us through evolution. Other desires can be molded through social forces, but only within a prescribed range, and only in certain ways.

The fact that these desires are hard-wired does not make them good desires. That still depends on the relationship between those desires and other desires. Instead, this distinction defines the difference between whether a person is ‘sick’ on the one hand (has bad desires outside the influence of social forces) or ‘evil’ on the other (has desires that are within the realm that can be controlled through social forces).

In other words, hard-wired desires lie outside of the realm of morality. Morality is only concerned with soft-wired desires; desires that we can mold through social forces.

Though leaders do not have the power to determine what these relationships are. They have the power to influence what people believe to be the case about these relationships. They also have the power to influence whether people believe that other types of reasons for action exist and what they are. However, in both of these cases, there is a fact of the matter that might be quite different from what the thought leader claims those facts to be.

4) In a theoretical situation where a person lives beyond the influence of the state and social pressures, like Josef Stalin, there is no reason for that person to love truth or respect the desires of others.

Here, we need to distinguish between reasons that exist, and reasons that a particular person has.

The distinction here is the same distinction between the furniture that exists, and the furniture that a particular person has. A particular person has only a small subset of all of the furniture (reasons for action) that exists. However, the fact that a person does not have a particular piece of furniture (reason for action) does not imply that it does not exist.

Stalin, in this case, may not have a reason to love truth and respect the desires of others. However, there is a whole population full of reasons that exist for him to love truth and respect the desires of others.

In fact, this gap between what Stalin had reason to do, and what there existed reason for Stalin to do, is the gap that defines Stalin as evil. A good person has desires that tend to fulfill the desires of others. In other words, a good person has reasons to do those things that there exists reason for that person to do. An evil person has reasons to do things that thwart the desires of others. In other words, he has reason to do things that people generally have reason to make it the case he not have reason to do.

That is the nature of Stalin’s evil. To call Stalin evil is to say that he had characteristics that people generally have reason to condemn. They have reason to organize their society to make it far less likely that somebody such as Stalin would even come into existence and, where such people do come into existence, that they remain impotent (preferably behind bars) rather than to have them given the reins of power. These reasons that exist do not need a god. They reside in all of the suffering and death that the victims of such a person have reason to avoid.

5) Further, should the State be run by genocidal maniacs, like Stalin's cadre, and the people thus be frightened and coerced by that State such that they are unlikely to enforce social pressures consistently, then there's little reason for any particular individual to act in a way respecting the rights of others, love truth, or be proactively compassionate.

If the state should be run by genocidal maniacs, then the fact that the people do not have the power to resist does not change the fact that they have reason to condemn such people and to organize society in such a way that they never gain power. Indeed, when such people gain power, it represents a moral failing on the part of the whole population – on the part of the leaders who get the power, and on the part of the people who did not arrange their society to prevent it from happening.

Desire utilitarianism is quite comfortable with the idea that, where a society descends into immorality, that the people suffer. I do deny that homosexual acts or allowing early-term abortion represents immorality. Instead, the type of immorality that a society is best warned not to descend into is a society that condones torture, unwarranted searches and seizures, arrest without charges, imprisonment without a trial, wars of aggression waged under false pretenses, and a unification of power in a single branch of government where a single body obtains the power to be judge, jury, and executioner of all who act contrary to his wishes.

As it turns out, the biggest supporters of this descent into immorality over the past six years – the biggest supporters of these very policies and powers that a man like Stalin would love to get his hands on, have been the religious right.

Birth Control Pills to Middle School Students

I have received two requests to discuss the issue of a middle school in Maine that has decided to make birth control pills available to students – ranging from ages 11 to 14. One of the two requests threw in the additional claim of “without parental notification”.

The Prima Facie Wrong of Withholding Information

I have written on the subject of parental notification previously in a post Parental Notification. Briefly, I hold that any activity involving a minor that contains the proposition, “Let’s not tell your parents about this. This is our little secret,” is a prima facie wrong. In order for a parent to raise a child, the parent needs information. People who act out of ignorance seldom act wisely. Withholding information from parents makes that job much more difficult.

There is a legitimate concern that the possibility of parental notification may cause a minor to refuse to seek out help when he or she needs it. Instead, they will try to deal with the issue on their own, and hope for the best. Being young, they may not make the wisest decision. Concern for the welfare of the minor, then, would speak for allowing them to seek help without parental notification – the idea being that help without parental notification is better than no help at all.

Here, I am not talking about the case where the parent finds out and then beats the minor. If there is any evidence that a parent has this disposition, then the minor should be removed from that household, not left there while we deal with her issues in secret. I am talking about the minor who is simply too embarrassed to deal with her parents on certain issues – sex naturally being one of those issues.

Experimentation

Ultimately, any policy that we consider should put the welfare of the children first. In putting the welfare of the children first, it is unwise to rely on the superstitious of a bunch of first century tribesmen. Instead, we have a useful tool that will allow us to determine intelligently and rationally which policy best promotes and protects the welfare of the children – the scientific method.

To use this method, we need to allow different regions to experiment, to some degree, with different policies. We then collect data on the effects of these policies. We use this data to form theories that explain the data that we collect from existing policies, and predict what effects we can expect from any changes to those policies. Policies that do not best protect the welfare of the minors should be thrown out.

Some argue that abstinence is the only safe form of behavior – that it has a 0 percent chance of leading to pregnancy or sexually transmitted disease. However, we need a policy that works in the real world, not in some hypothetical world that exists only in the imagination.

The real world is one in which the desire for sex is strongly ingrained. If I estimate that my family tree goes back 100 million generations – back to the time when sex became the sole method of procreation – then the number of ancestors in that family tree is 2x10^100,000,000. This is a huge number. In fact, it is so huge that there must be a great deal of overlap. Some great^nth grandparent shows up on several different branches.

However many individuals that happens to be, I can tell you exactly how many of those ancestors died a virgin. That answer is ‘zero’, because I could not be descendent from any individual who did not have sex.

Given that track record, I suspect that any demand that minors today abstain from sex is merely wishful thinking. Short of surgery, mandatory chemical castration, or some other drastic action, minors will engage in sex. It is a remedy that will work on a fantasy land where the minors are not human, and have not had the same evolutionary history our species has had.

This, however, is a hypothesis. It needs to be tested. The best way to test it is to allow people the opportunity to choose different methods to raise children, and to test those methods. If this hypothesis is correct, it predicts that abstinence programs will show themselves to be unrealistic. They will not have much of an effect in reducing teenage sexual behavior. They might, however, have a great deal of influence on whether minors who teenagers who have sex do so in a way that protects their health and well-being.

Experts

One principle that I have repeated often in this blog is the principle of trusting to experts to decide issues. A reader would be unwise to come to me and ask my opinion as to whether a particular bridge design is structurally sound. My advice would be to consult somebody whose job it is to build bridges and to ask them.

I am going to give the same advice here. I have suggested some theoretical guidelines above. However, the smart (and morally responsible) thing to do is to ask experts on the issue of childhood health – people who have had time to study the research in detail. They have a far richer opportunity than I do to examine the evidence, form theories, and learn what options best promote the future safety and happiness of the largest number of teenagers.

The American Academy of Pediatricians recommend informative sex education that includes information about birth control. The research shows that teenagers are no more likely to have sex when they have this information, but that those who do are at less risk of pregnancy and disease that puts their future (and the future of others) at risk.

According to the best available evidence, other options put more children at risk. This means that whatever might motivate people to promote other options, it is not the best interests of the children. Indeed, they are willing to sacrifice the future safety and happiness of some children in order to obtain this other value, whatever it is. This causes me to ask, “What could be so important?”

The will, of course, insist that they do care about minors. They simply dispute the science that says that the health of children is better protected in a system that teaches about birth control and disease prevention.

But why do they believe it? They certainly do not believe it because best available evidence tells them that it is true. The best available evidence tells them that this is false. They have to ignore the best available evidence in order to embrace their conclusion. Yet, somebody who truly cares about the welfare of minors will loathe to throw out the best available evidence – evidence that directly shows, “If you pursue this option, more minors will suffer harm.”

The Maine Case

The points that I have raised above do not speak specifically to making birth control available to younger teens without parental consent. I do not know of any research that addresses that issue specifically. However, that research will determine how I judge the matter. I am not inclined to pull an answer out of the air and declare that it is ‘the right answer’ when I have no way of defending it one way or the other.

Where we are ignorant, that is where we need to collect data. We collect that data by allowing each community to do what they think is best and measure the results, then go with whatever result best protects the health and well-being of minors. There is no more moral option than this.

In the absence of information, the only morally responsible conclusion to draw is, “I don’t know.” To feign certainly in the absence of evidence is arrogant and presumptuous and, worse, in this case, it shows a disregard for the potential young victims of those who pretend to a level of certainty they cannot justify.

Summary

So, a prima facie right on the part of parents says that the burden of proof is on those who wish to override this presumption. Without good evidence that minors, on the whole, are better off there is no good reason to deny parents information that is useful in guiding their children. In general, professional pediatricians seem to agree that there is sufficient evidence in favor of sex education in general. However, there is no good information on the specific program of making birth control pills available to middle school students. So the presumption in favor of parental notification remains.

If some community wishes to participate in an experiment to determine the effectiveness of such a program, they should be permitted to do so. However, the experiment should be set up according to the best scientific practices to get useful information. For example, parents agree to participate without foreknowledge as to whether they will belong to the control group or study group, and are assigned randomly. This will help to ensure that the experiment collects the best and most useful information possible.

The reason for participating in such an experiment is that the information will better enable us to design programs that do the best job humanly possible of securing the future safety and well-being of teenagers.

The Bibby Survey: Kindness

When I was asked to address Bibby’s survey that allegedly shows that people who believe in God had stronger devotion to certain key values such as generosity and kindness than theists, I saw it as an opportunity to examine a list of key values and assess just how valuable they are.

I did this with patience, which I said is an Aristotelian virtue. It is possible to have both too little (making unreasonable demands on self and others) and too much (allowing oneself to be used by others) patience.

I did this with honesty. I did not dispute the value of honesty. Instead, I asserted that we have a better way to examine how much a group of people value honesty other than by looking at how they respond to a survey. An individual acts so as to fulfill the most and strongest of his desires, given his beliefs. A person who is not acting to promote honesty cannot be said to value honesty. On this matter, the actions of theists suggest that they actually care very little about honesty. Useful dishonesty tends to draw more praise in virtue of being useful, than it draws condemnation in virtue of being dishonest.

The survey also lists a number of other virtues that I see as being so closely related, that the reasons for supporting any one of them are reasons for supporting all of them. These are the virtues of kindness (Theists 88%, Atheists: 75%), Courtesy (Theists 81%, Atheists 71%), Concern for others (Theists 82%, Atheists 63%), Politeness (Theists 77%, Atheists 65%), Friendliness (Theists 79%, Atheists 74%), and Generosity (Theists 67%, Atheists 37%).

One of the things that might be influencing this set of statistics is the fact that the category of ‘Atheists’ who are followers of the late Ayn Rand who argued that selfishness is a virtue. Though this group makes up a small percentage of the overall population, it makes up a large percentage of atheists. This would sufficiently skew the numbers. Bibby, and other agents of injustice who want to use these numbers to condemn all of atheism, are being unfair, unjust bigots to take the qualities of this one subgroup of atheists and branding the whole group in this way.

Desire utilitarian theory puts an extremely high value on all of these traits. Desire utilitarianism holds that a good desire is a desire that tends to fulfill the desires of others. All of these traits – kindness, courtesy, generosity, etc., - are things that, those who desire them, tend to fulfill the desires of others.

A truly generous person – a person who likes being generous – sacrifices nothing in being generous.

We would not say that a person who likes eating chocolate ice cream is making some sort of sacrifice when he eats chocolate ice cream. He is doing what he desires to do. The money that he spends in buying chocolate ice cream is money well spent.

Similarly, the person who values being generous is not making any sort of sacrifice when he is being generous. He is doing what he desires to do. The money that he spends is money well spent, because it buys him what he thinks is worth buying – the better well-being of others.

The time and effort that I spend on this blog is time and effort well spent. I could be doing other things in the time that I spent writing this – watching television, playing computer games, etc. – but I see those things as being such a waste. This is truly what I desire to do and, in writing this blog, I am like the chocolate-loving kid eating chocolate ice cream.

We have reason to promote this type of desire in others in our community. After all, like I said, those who are generous, kind, and courteous are not sacrificing anything, they are adding to the quality of the lives of others. When generosity and kindness are done correctly, the agent not only fulfills his desire to be generous and kind, he has also helped to fulfill the desires of those he is generous or kind to.

Cruelty as Kindness

Kindness is a virtue. However, one of the ways that cruel people get their way is by disguising their acts of cruelty as kindness.

For example, when I was young, I was told that marrying somebody of a different race would be an act of cruelty – of child abuse, in fact. A kind person would not enter into a relationship and have a child that would then have to endure the suffering that would be imposed on having a half-breed. Some of these hate-mongering bigots were probably able to convince themselves that they were the model of human kindness because of their concern for these children. However, if they truly cared about the welfare of others, they would be devoting their time to fighting this bigotry, rather than promoting it.

Hitler packaged much of his euthanasia program as a kindness to the people he killed. This means that one of the ways that a person can get what they want is by packing

Another example concerns the burning of witches and other infidels alive at the stake during the Middle Ages. In order to give this most barbaric act a veneer of kindness, they claimed that the flames ‘purified’ the individual and gave him or her a chance to enter heaven.

The remarks that some Christians make concerning homosexual relationships are very much like the remarks I heard regarding interracial relationships. They express their hatred and bigotry in the form of a false ‘concern for others’. They like to portray themselves as trying to save homosexuals from wallowing in a degrading and self-denigrating lifestyle while, at the same time, they are the ones doing the degrading and denigrating.

Mistaken Kindness

Kindness requires true beliefs. Assume that you come across a person in the desert that is dying of thirst. You have two containers – one contains water, and the other contains a slow-acting but lethal poison. A kind person would want to give this poor lost individual a drink of water. However, in order to be kind – in order to feed him water instead of poison – the kind person has to know which is which. If he has false beliefs, then his attempts to be kind are at risk of being thwarted, and he will do harm instead.

The possibility of doing unintended harm tells kind and generous people that they need to constantly be checking their beliefs in order to make sure that the act that they are to perform is one of kindness or generosity. A truly kind person is always asking himself, “Am I really helping?” In fact, true beliefs are so important to acts of kindness and generosity that, if somebody does not seem to care whether his beliefs are true or false, we can conclude that he does not really care whether his act is an act of kindness or not.

We see this disregard for truth whenever one person tries to convince others to adopt his or her religion. This is portrayed as an act of kindness, since ‘my religion’ is thought to be the only way into heaven after death, and the only way to have a meaningful life. However, when the kind person asks, “Am I really doing the right thing?” the missionary runs into problem. There are (depending on the amount of detail one wants to go into) thousands to billions of different religious beliefs out there and no evidence at all to recommend one over the other. Even if we say that there are only thousands of different religions, the odds are still ‘thousands to one against’ the missionary converting people to the correct religious view.

Those types of odds would make a truly kind and generous person hesitate. “Maybe I am giving this person the poison, rather than the clean water? How can I tell? Why am I asserting that this container contains the clean water, if I cannot tell the difference?”

Whatever religion a person tries to convince another to adopt, we can guarantee that there are more people claiming that the adoptee is choosing hell over salvation than there are believing that he is choosing salvation over hell. If the population were divided equally among three religions, than adopting any given religion means that only one third believes the agent will be saved. The other two bring about a state in which the convert will be cursed to perpetual salvation. Yet, few missionaries ever seem to worry that they could be subjecting their subjects to perpetual suffering. This actually gives us reason to question how much kindness and concern for others these people actually possess.

Imaginary Kindness

Let’s return to our individual who finds somebody who has been lost in the desert and is severely dehydrated. Nearby, there is a well, full of water. However, our individual this time hands the desert survivor an empty glass and says, “Drink this instead.” If the survivor complains that it is empty, our ‘Good Samaritan’ protests that he simply lacks faith and that God insists that he drink from the cup, and not from the well.

This is not kindness either.

When somebody offers ‘meaning’ or ‘purpose’ to life in the form of religion, it is like offering our desert survivor an empty glass and saying, ‘drink this instead.’ The glass is empty. Even if our ‘good Samaritan’ is able to convince the desert survivor to have faith that the cup will quench his thirst, it will not. Even if he is so persuasive that he convinces the desert survivor that the survivor is no longer thirsty, the body is still dehydrated, and will deteriorate according to biological laws.

Our ‘good Samaritan’ in this case may also think that he is a kind and generous person. However, once again, false beliefs have actually thwarted his desire to help others.

Conclusion

Kindness is, concern for others, generosity, are all virtues in fact. They are qualities that we have reason to promote in others. However, we have reason to promote these virtues only to the degree that those we promote them in can tell the difference between real kindness and real generosity, and imaginary kindness and generosity. The latter can never produce any real good.

It also requires that we put some effort into making sure that people do not pass off their cruelty as kindness. In many cases, the ‘benefits’ that people attribute to their actions are not benefits at all, and a truly kind person would know better. They are merely rhetorical tricks that cruel people employ so that they can better fulfill their cruel desires.

A great many of these defects that afflict and distort the virtues of kindness and generosity come from false beliefs. The agent might have a desire to do good, but kindness and generosity also requires that the agent spend some effort trying to make sure that their actions are real goods, and not imaginary goods.

The Bibby Survey: Internal and External Validity

Today, I want to return to survey conducted by Reginald Bibby that allegedly shows that people who believe in God have better values than those who do not.

I want to begin by stressing some elements of this presentation.

Just Evaluations

I am not going to argue that, “Of course, atheists must be better people than theists. Therefore, the survey must be flawed. I only need to discover the flaws.”

Atheism is a morally neutral theory about the makeup of the universe. It is just like heliocentrism in that it has absolutely no moral implications – other than the implications that follow from the fact that the proposition, “At least one God exists” is almost certainly false. Just as heliocentrists can be good or bad, atheists can be good or bad.

Furthermore, each of us has a right to be judged according to our own behavior. Bigotry consists, in essence, in creating a ‘group’ category and condemning or praising individuals in the virtue of their membership in that group, regardless of individual contributions. Because I am a male, I am in a category that is responsible for over 90% of the crime in the United States. Yet, this gives nobody the right to accuse me of being a violent criminal. There is nothing in ‘male’ that implies ‘violent criminal’ and I have a right to be presumed innocent unless and until there is evidence (beyond a reasonable doubt) of my guilt.

I extend the same principle to others. “At least one god exists” is, itself, a morally neutral principle that does not allow us to categorize one who believes it as good or bad. That depends (in part) on what else they believe in addition to their belief that at least one God exits.

Some of those religious people prove their immorality when they use a study such as Bibby’s to denigrate all atheists. When they do this, they violate the moral principle mentioned above of judging each person on his or her own merits. They become bigots, who use broad categories to condemn whole groups of people regardless of individual characteristics. Whenever we find a theist making these types of claims, we find a theist who is immoral – one who sees God inspiring him to do things that promote injustice in the real world. We can make this claim and justify it, but we cannot justify the implication that, ‘Therefore, some other theist who we know nothing else about, must also be a bigot.”

Internal and External Validity

Another issue that I wish to discuss is the internal and external validity of Bibby’s survey. I have already mentioned that there is a significant problem with the survey in that Bibby has not given any evidence of having acquired peer review. Peer review is the process by which experts in the field judge whether the conclusions that the author asserts actually follow from the evidence provided, and whether the conclusions can be extrapolated beyond the list of subjects involved in the survey.

Upon further consideration, I find that Bibby’s study lacks both internal and external validity.

On the matter of internal validity, the press release associated with the study states:

A new examination of Canadians who believe in God and those who do not has found that believers are more likely to place high value on traits such as kindness, politeness, and generosity.

The study does not support this conclusion at all. The study supports the conclusion that theists, more than atheists, are more likely to report having certain values. However, the fact that one has reported having a particular value is not proof that one actually has it. A great many criminals protest that they are innocent. The fact that they report innocence is not proof that they are, in fact, innocent.

If the paper had been subject to peer review, this flaw would have likely been caught.

The study also contains a flaw that concerns its external validity – any claim that the findings in this study reflects the general population.

The survey reports that Bibby questioned 1600 people, of which 7% were atheists. This means that his atheist population consists of only 112 people, plus or minus three.

Statisticians know that the accuracy of a poll is determined by it the size of the sample. The smaller the sample, the more likely it is that the population is skewed and does not represent the population at large. In fact, standard proactice is for any survey to mention the error range. You may have noticed that news anchors discussing presidential campaigns will report how a survey has an accuracy of, say, “Plus or minus three percentage points”. In this example, if one candidate has 45% of the vote, the other has 42%, and the error is 3%, the race would be considered a statistical dead heat. The error does not allow a researcher to draw any meaningful conclusions.

Bibby does not provide us with any error bars. In doing so, Bibby is not even living up to the minimum of his professional standards. This gives us little reason to trust his data.

I want to stress that it is not a valid argument to say, “Bibby’s survey lacks internal and external validity; therefore, atheists are better people than this survey reports.” Reality might go the other way. Bibby might have accidentally stumbled upon the only good atheists in all of Canada, and overstated their virtue. The flaws in Bibby’s study simply allow us to know that he has not, in fact, supported the conclusions that he claims to have supported. He has told us almost nothing about atheists in the real world. Only a bigot who does not care about these matters will think that the survey provides good reason to call atheists inferior based on this study.

Of course, Bibby might have been very much aware of the fact that a substantial portion of his audience will care nothing about internal and external validity. They want a reason to denigrate and smear all atheists, and will gladly overlook any flaws in a survey that appears to give them the ammunition they so strongly desire.

I have mentioned the virtue of intellectual responsibility in my previous posts. Part of that virtue is making sure that people do not use one’s research for evil purposes. We have no basis to assume that Bibby is guilty of intentionally feeding a stereotype and promoting hatred and bigotry. However, we do have enough evidence to suggest that he was negligent in trying to prevent it – in trying to prevent his research from being misused. He should have anticipated the evil that others would have done with his work and at least included a warning that said, “These findings are not subject to large error bars, do not prove that theists actually hold these values but only that they claim to hold these values, and cannot fairly and justly be used to condemn a whole group of people.”

Failure to do so is itself a moral failing, and shows that Bibby, at least, if he is Christian, seems to be lacking some of the virtues that his survey tries to attach to Christians generally.

A member of the studio audience has asked for my comment on a decision in Maine to give birth control pills to middle-school students.

I have not commented on this story to date because I do not know what to think about it just yet. A conclusion requires having knowledge that I do not have.

However, there are some related topics that I can write about.

One of those topics is that it is extremely important to experiment with different options and to collect data on the efficacy of those options, so that we can make better plans in the future. The very reason why I am uncertain about what to say on this issue is because I do not know what the effects will be, and I find it difficult to predict. I hope, for the sake of the kids, that the experiment will have a favorable outcome. I do not pretend to the level of arrogance required to know what that outcome will be.

The 9/11 Conspiracy

One theme that I have kept in this blog is that not all bad ideas are religious (and not all religious ideas are equally bad). If we focus too much on religious bad ideas, we give other bad ideas a pass that they do not deserve.

One bad idea that is getting a pass that it does not deserve is the conspiracy theory that the Bush Administration planned and executed the 9-11 attacks. It is quite reasonable for somebody to offer this as a hypothesis that best explains the observed data. It is quite another for people to become so infatuated with the idea that they would take up heckling on a live television show.

As a hypothesis explaining the events of 9-11, the conspiracy theory fails. It requires an explanation that is so elaborate and complex that it needs to be thrown out in favor of a simpler theory – 19 Jihadists hijacked 4 airplanes, flew 2 into the World Trade Center buildings, 1 into the Pentagon, and crashed 1 into a field in Pennsylvania.

One of the pieces of evidence is that Building 7 at the World Trade Center also collapsed. Conspiracy theorists would have us believe that this was due to a controlled explosion.

Okay, I can just imagine this going on at the planning session.

Planning Officer: Then, we rig Building 7 over here with controlled explosions so that it will collapse apparently on its own without any real cause several hours after the original attack.

Andy (one of the planners): Why?

PO: To make the attack even more dramatic!

Andy: Having the two World Trade Center towers collapse is not dramatic enough?

PO: No! No! Not at all. This will be better, you see.

Andy: But, we’re already allegedly rigging the two towers to collapse using controlled explosions. The idea is to bring them straight down. Then, all of the sudden, another building, with might not even get damaged in the original attack, is supposed to collapse. Don’t you think that this might look a bit suspicious?

P.O.: Okay, obviously we have to rig the Towers to do damage to Building 7, so that we can at least have something that we can blame the collapse on. Good job, Andy. I’ll tell the demolition team now.

Andy: But, sir, why go to all this work, adding layers of complexity and significantly increasing the chance of discovery? Why not just crash the airplanes into the buildings and let the concrete fall where it may.

PO: Because that is not how we do things around here. Even though the possibility of a leak or of people discovering our plans would be catastrophic, what we really need to do is to make this as complex as possible, involve more and more people, all of which must be sworn into secrecy.

Then there is the idea that the government (1) Hijacked an airplane, (2) Took it somewhere where it would not be found, (3) Destroyed it, and (4) Launched a missile at the Pentagon.

PO: Yes, Andy?

Andy: Look. We have an airplane. We need to get rid of it anyway. Why go to all of the extra effort of moving it somewhere, making sure we can hide where it went, destroy it without any trace, kill all of the passengers, and fire a missile at the Pentagon. Why not just crash the airplane into the Pentagon, when we don’t have to worry about destroying it.

PO: Because we have to use a missle.

Andy: Why?

PO: Because that’s the way we do things! Listen, Andy, do you want to be a part of this project or not? You can be replaced. Quit questioning things!

If it was an inside job, the planners would have wanted it to look just like it was an outside job. The simplest way to simulate a bunch of terrorists hijacking 4 airplanes and crashing them into 4 buildings is to take 19 people all willing to die for the greater glory of the Republican Party, hijack 4 airplanes, and crash them into 4 buildings. Adding even one complexity would have been insanely stupid. Adding the layers and layers of complexity and involving all of the people that the conspiracy theory needs carries insane stupidity to new heights.

When Hitler wanted something to increase his power by simulating a terrorist attack, he knew the virtue of keeping things simple and keeping the number of people who knew about it to a minimum. He aimed for the simple arson of the German parliament building. When he wanted an excuse to start World War II, he took some prisoners out near a radio station, shot them, broadcast a simple message, and launched the invasion of Poland. Neither plan required the help of more than a half dozen people, none of whom had to die in the process.

That is how you simulate an attack against the country.

Having said this, I have no doubt that the Bush Administration wanted a reason to start a war in the Middle East preferably through the invasion of Iraq. Feeding this desire into the principle that people always act so as to fulfill the more and stronger of their desires, given their beliefs, it follows that this desire would have affected their decisions. However, the most likely affect would have been a virtually subconscious decision to lower the priority of defending the United States from a terrorist attack. Because they did not really want to fight terrorism, when they had to set priorities for the day, ‘fighting terrorism’ simply slipped a couple of notches on the priority index. This increased the terrorist’s chance of success.

This doesn’t require a conspiracy theory. This does not even require making a plan.

What it requires is a group of people who have a lot of work to do who need to prioritize their daily tasks. In doing so, they look at their pile of work and move to the top of the list those that ‘feel’ like they are the most important. Fighting terrorism simply does not ‘feel’ that important, particularly when compared to rewarding those who invested in the campaign with tax cuts and banning abortion and homosexual marriage. If asked, these agents would probably say that terrorism does not feel important because they do not see it as much of a threat. In practice, it doesn’t feel important because the agent is acting so as to fulfill a desire to invade Iraq.

I am not saying that this agent is lying. I am saying that this agent is basing his conclusions on what to believe on his feelings, and he is giving his feelings the interpretation that is best for his ego. He does not want to see himself as somebody who would allow the deaths of thousands of people in order to find an excuse to invade Iraq, so he denies – to himself as much as to others, that his desire for such a war is what motivates him to set aside the ‘fight terrorism’ project.

I am not even saying that they did not have good intentions. They wanted a war in the Middle East so that the could sew a crop of democracy that would spread through the area like a weed and make the whole region safe for people in their oil-industry friends. I am only saying that desires affect the ‘level of urgency’ that one feels over certain external threats, and the neo-con desires made the prospect of a terrorist attack on American soil unworthy of serious consideration. Not without hard evidence.

The real problem here is not that there are people who believe this nonsense. The real fault is that the personality traits that allow people to adopt these foolish ideas allow them to adopt other foolish ideas. The fault is a culture that does not teach people how to reason and, in neglecting this skill, must continually endure the waste of people acting on foolish ideas.

We could be a better country if the people who are wasting their time, effort, and talent on conspiracy theories would instead invest them on things that actually made sense.

Honesty

This is a second post in a series that looks at the ‘values’ that can be found in a survey conducted by Reginald Bibby at the University of Lethbridge (Alberta, Canada) that allegedly showed that atheist place less importance on a number of key values when compared to theists.

Today, I will look at the issue of honestly. Bibby’s survey reports that 95% of theists hold that honesty is very important, while only 89% of atheists hold this particular value.

The fact that 95% of theists report that they consider honesty very important simply proves how little they value honesty. One of my great frustrations in writing this blog has been in confronting the constant barrage of ‘disinformation’ that comes from theists. Now, one more piece of disinformation that I can add to the list is the disinformation that many of them give, that they actually value honesty.

Reason dictates that I cannot prove that theists do not have the level of respect for honesty reported in this survey by identifying a few instances of dishonesty. After all, I might just be drawing the examples of those who are in the 5% that do not value honesty. However, I can provide reason to dispute the claim made in this survey by showing that these ‘lovers of honesty’ certainly do not care enough about honesty to do anything about the liars and sophists that speak in defense of theism.

Bibby’s survey itself provides a case that illustrates the low regard for truth that we find among theists. I encountered news of this survey on the site Focus on the Family under the headline, Believers in God More Likely to Do Good. The report contained a link to a press release describing the survey. The press release contained the statement, “ That's not to say that God-believers always translate their values into action.”

So, Focus on the Family wrote an article in which they lied about the research they were reporting on. Yet, as I said above, evidence of a lie does not show that the whole religious culture has no respect for truth. Evidence of this further conclusion is, instead, found in the fact that the religious community on the whole does not care enough about lying to condemn or criticize those who lie. Lies are ignored, when one is lying in defense of The One True God. This takes more than a 5% that does not view honesty as ‘very important’. This requires that a substantial portion of the community views lying as unimportant or even as a positive good.

To say that a substantial portion of theists are, at best, indifferent towards honesty or actively supports dishonesty is not to say that every Christian is a liar. It is only to say that those who are honest lack the power to force honesty on their brethren, which suggests that they are too weak to actually enforce their values on others. Either it is not the case that 95% of theists value honesty, or the 5% minority is able to exercise some extraordinary powers over the alleged honest supermajority.

Another example of theistic dishonesty is found in the works of David Barton, who once filled society with a number of false claims about the words of the founding fathers. According to Barton’s quotes, the founding fathers wanted nothing more than to establish a nation ruled by a Christian version of the Taliban. Many of these quotes were later exposed to be made up or taken out of context to change their meanings.

People who actually love honesty and hate deceptionwould find this behavior contemptible. They would warn their fellow citizens of Barton’s dishonesty and condemn him for it, while at the same time condemning any co-religionist who repeats those lies. We do not see this type of behavior among theists, giving us reason to doubt that these theists have the dislike for deception that they claim to have.

Here, I want to point out that dishonesty comes in a number of stripes. Just as with other crimes, an individual can knowingly or intentionally carry out. There are also crimes that a person can carry out that represent negligence or recklessness.

If a person values not killing other people – if not killing other people is very important to him, it is not enough for the agent to show this by refusing to intentionally or even knowingly take somebody else’s life. A person also shows his love of life by making sure he does not take the life of another through accident or negligence. We can say of the reckless individual that he really does not care who gets hurt. We can say of the reckless speaker or writer that he cares as little about truth and honesty as the reckless driver.

Barton himself, and those who carelessly repeat them, are showing how little they care about honesty in the same way that a drunk driver shows that he really does not care about the lives and well-being of those he might hit. This indifference to the truth is not consistent with the claim that these people make that they truly love honesty. They only love claiming to love honestly – probably because pretending to be honest is useful.

More evidence of the way in which dishonesty permeates the theist culture can be found in their devotion to Fox News. Fox News recently won a lawsuit filed by two employees who claimed ‘wrongful termination’. According to the court records, these employees refused to insert false elements into a news segment. Fox News apparently felt that its audience was not overly concerned with whether its reports were true or not. Apparently, they were right. These people who claim that honesty is their most important value registered no objection to the Fox News decision to fight in court in the name of dishonesty.

Another example from Fox News is an incident in which Bill O’Reilly, the host of Fox News’ most highly rated show, was shown to have edited a film clip to distort the claims of Senator Joe Biden.

The report was a blatant lie. However, these lovers of honesty showed no offense at this deception. Lovers of honesty would have felt extremely betrayed by this activity, suggesting that at least those theists who are fans of Bill O’Reilly and Fox News are not, in fact, the lovers of honesty that they claim to be.

The O’Reilly event needs to be compared to Dan Rather’s report that documents showed that Bush obtained special treatment while serving in the National Guard. In this case, there was absolutely no evidence that Rather acted to distort Bush’s record. Instead, his crime was failure to verify the authenticity of the evidence provided by an outside source. For this, he issued an apology. These are the actions of somebody who holds that honesty is important or, at least, somebody who seeks to appeal to an audience that values honesty. This is not the type of audience that Bill O’Reilly speaks to, since they did not seem to care about his deception.

Also from Fox News, a survey in September 2003 showed that Fox News viewers were the least well informed of all news viewers on relevant facts concerning the attack on Iraq. If Fox News viewers were, in fact, interested in truth and honesty, this should have inspired them to switch to options that were giving people a more honest account of the invasion of Iraq. But, yet again, they showed that honesty is not one of their key concerns.

Another trait that we can expect from those who value honesty is that they would establish and support institutions whose job it is to keep people honest. The academic community has just such an institution in the form of peer-reviewed journals. In order to get published in a peer-reviewed journal, an author has to submit his article to reviewers whose job is to make sure that the author’s work is internally and externally valid. They remove not only dishonest claims, but reckless and unfounded assertions, allowing the author to claim only what the evidence actually supports.

Authors who write on subjects such as intelligent design, religious-based archaeology, and social science and medical research that aim to show the power of religion and prayer, are routinely unable to write documents that are capable of passing this type of review.

The list goes on.

A great many theists claim that inserting ‘under God’ in the Pledge of Allegiance and adopting ‘One Nation Under God’ were, in no way, motivated by a desire to establish a religion, in violation of the First Amendment. Nothing is more absurd. All this shows is that the audacity of lying is so prevalent in the theistic community that they can all mutually agree, with scarcely a voice of dissent, to swear to statement that is so blatantly false. Let somebody try to claim that a pledge to ‘one nation under no God’ or a motto of “We Trust In No God’ is not religiously motivated, and they will suddenly discover truths that appear to conveniently escape their notice today.

I routinely hear from them the lie that atheists assert an absolute certain knowledge that no God exists and, in refuting this statement, claim to have refuted atheism. This lie comes in the face of the fact that atheists routinely use arguments that make reference to Bertrand Russell’s orbiting teakettle, the flying spaghetti monster, fairies in garden, the invisible pink unicorn, the Easter Bunny, and any of the tens of thousands of gods that even the Christian does not believe in. The argument is simple. “When you understand why you do not believe in these things, you will understand why we do not believe in your God.” None of these examples require absolute certainty. Yet, we continually hear the lie that ‘atheists assert with absolute certainty that there is no God.’

Recently, the more heavily religious side of the political spectrum treated us to the swift-boating of 10-year-old Graeme Frost and his family. When Graeme Frost appeared in a video criticizing Bush’s stand on a bill providing health insurance for children, a group of misleadingly dishonest claims about the family spread like wildfire among bloggers and pundits whose audience consists primarily of the type of people who claimed in Bibby’s survey to have such a love of honesty.

During the 2004 Presidential campaign, Bush constantly told his audiences that the Constitution forbids the President from spying on Americans without a warrant. He said this while the ink was not even dry on executive orders he signed authorizing the spying on Americans without a warrant.

Finally, I want to make it clear that these points cannot be answered by claiming that there are atheists guilty of the same offense. It is certainly true, and I have criticized some of them in this blog. Yet, if one has captured a thief in the commission of a crime, he cannot legitimately defend himself by saying that there are other thieves. And no rapist or murderer deserves to be let off the hook because they can honestly claim that they are not the only ones who have ever committed rape or murder. Regardless of how many atheist liars there might be, the evidence still proves that theists are not the lovers of honesty they claim to be.

In fact, if I could have one wish granted for the well-being of humanity, it would be worth it to wish that people generally had a greater respect for and love of truth than we currently find in our society. Nothing makes the job of trying to make the world a better place more difficult than dealing with the deafening noise of people who either recklessly or intentionally fill the air with false claims.

All it takes is for people to realize that there is, in fact, a great deal of value to be found in simply pausing for a second at the end of each sentence one writes or just before each sentence one intends to speak and ask, ‘Can I really defend that as being true?’

Intellectual Responsibility and Patience

One of the questions that I received from the studio audience asked me to comment on a survey conducted by Reginald Bibby at the University of Lethbridge (Alberta, Canada) that allegedly showed that atheist place less importance on a number of key values when compared to theists. For example, according to this survey, 95% view as very important; whereas 89% of atheists view honesty as very important.

Standards of Evaluation

One of the things that I am not going to do in response to this survey is to assert that it is flawed merely because it draws conclusions that I do not like. This is the Bush Administration method of analyzing intelligence, where intelligence that does not support the Administration’s position on attacking Iraq is, by that fact alone, assumed to be bad intelligence. It is a system where scientific studies that show that humans are contributing to global warming is considered bad science because his its financial backers do not want to be held accountable for the harms that will result, and where any evidence that can be interpreted as a problem for evolution is instantly accepted because it, too, supports a favored position.

I am quite willing to examine this survey using the same standards of evidence that are applied to scientific surveys generally. To the degree that the survey is internally and externally valid, to that degree its findings should be incorporated into our understanding of the world.

Internal validity, by the way, has to do with the way in which the survey’s conclusions are supported by the data within the survey. For example, if the survey asks an individual whether they are pleased or displeased with Bush’s job in office, and concludes from a 71% disapproval rating that this percentage of respondents were liberals, this would be internally invalid. It is quite easy for a conservative to disapprove of Bush’s job in office.

Professional researchers know many ways to get research to appear to say what the author wants it to say. For example, if one wants to show a 'positive' answer rather than a 'negative' answer, a survey simply needs to provide more positive options than negative options. Professional researchers who submit their research to peer review have a difficult time getting their tricks past professionals who are aware of, and whose job it is to catch and reject, papers that have these types of flaws.

External validity has to do with the degree to which a survey can be extrapolated across the country at large. If a survey on Bush’s popularity was taken at a pro-Bush rally, even though it may be true that “88% of respondents approve of how Bush is handling his job in office,” this finding could not be extrapolated to say that the nation as a whole approves of Bush’s job in office.

Since I do not have time to examine every study that people might take, and I do not have time to keep up on every field that an individual might write on, I use proxy standards to determine whether a report is trustworthy or not. Specifically, I look for what whether individuals who are experts in the field and who have studied issues such as internal and external validity.

This is what the peer-review process in science is about.

A few months ago, a study came out that showed that less religious societies in Europe had fewer incidents of teenage pregnancy, suicide, drug use, murder, and similar socially destructive states than America did. This study obtained credibility by being subject to a peer-review process that required that the author restate certain conclusions so that they were consistent with the data. For example, the study did not show that high religiosity caused these harms – it only showed a correspondence between high religiosity and these harms among developed countries (Europe, North America, and Japan). That is what the paper ultimately claimed.

However, I have not found any evidence that this study has undergone any type of peer-review process. I could not find mention of the study being included in any peer-reviewed publication, or of any independent assessment of its methodology and conclusions. Until such a report has been issued, it is sensible to view the study with some measure of suspicion.

Of course, in the absence of peer review, it is just as much of mistake to assume that this study is flawed as it is to assume that the study is sound. In addition, the survey provides an excellent opportunity for an ethics writer to examine the values that were a part of the survey.

One open question that reports of the survey left untouched was a question of the degree to which people should hold a particular value as important.

A good example of this is ‘patience’. It is easy to see how a group of people who have been waiting for 2000 years for their savior to return, and who will likely have to wait for a few billion more years (or until the end of human civilization whenever that may come) will find patience to be a virtue. The same is true of people who are waiting for prayers to be answered when there is no being to answer them. The church, in this case, has good reason to preach that patience is a virtue because, without patience, most of their political and economic support would pack up and walk away.

However, a more rational view of patience would categorize it as an Aristotelian virtue. Aristotle argued that virtue rests in finding an appropriate level of moderation between two extremes. Courage, for example, lies somewhere between the extremes of cowardice and foolhardiness. Temperance rests between abstinence and gluttony.

It is possible for a person to be over-demanding, insisting that things be delivered immediately that should not always be delivered immediately. A President who is impatient to receive an intelligence report on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq may rush the report and get a far lower quality product as a result.

At the same time, too much patience is also imprudent. For example, if information does not arrive in a timely manner, then it becomes useless. Also, a person who is trapped in a burning building should recognize the fact that he cannot afford to wait around all day, and insist on some measure of speed on the part of his would-be rescuers.

Too much patience has the unfortunate side effect of encouraging people to take advantage of others – namely, the infinitely patient. If there is no condemnation or negative consequences to making others wait, then individuals will have less of an opportunity to form aversion to making others wait. These people will tend to steal time from others and use it for their own projects. The remedy for this type of exploitation is to be a little less than totally patient, to be willing to say to such people, “You have taken enough of my time, now act, or get out of the way.”

Imagine two people, each with $10,000 in their bank accounts. One of them knows that this is the case – that he has $10,000, and when it is gone there will be no more. The other has $10,000, a debit card, and a false belief that he has an account without limit.

In most cases, we can expect the person with the false belief that he has an endless supply of money to squander what he has, wasting it on things that are of little value, and foregoing things that have real value in the false belief that he can get those things later. At the same time, the individual who understands exactly how much money he has will have a more accurate understanding of the true cost of things, and will be more willing to change his behavior when the cost gets too high.

The same can be expected when it comes to theists and atheists spending the ‘time’ accounts that they have available. Both of them only have this one life to live. However, the person who falsely believes that he is immortal and that the time he has available is endless can be expected to squander that time. He uses it to acquire things today that have little value, falsely believing that he can pick other things up at a later date. When somebody seeks to squander his time, he has no reason to protest – there is more where that came from (or so he thinks).

Asserting that atheists have a poorer sense of value because they place a greater value on time than the theist begs some very important questions. This is simply a case where the atheist appreciates how scarce a particular resource is, which allows him to realize how valuable it is, which will tend to make him upset with those who would insist that he waste it. This is not an example of greater Christian virtue. This is an example of greater Christian irrationality.

Over the course of the next couple of weeks I will be addressing some of the other values that showed up in that survey, and looking at what the differences in the findings say about the individuals who hold those values.

Teaching Sorcery

In this recent surge of questions from the studio audience I received a new type of question. This one asks for advice – “This happened to me, and I do not know how I should feel about it.”

The situation:

ET is an English teacher who has come up with a vocabulary exercise in which students were given a list of latin ‘word parts’ that they could use to construct ‘spells’ – like those that Rowling used in the Harry Potter series. They then used these spells in a ‘mock’ duel. However, a parent apparently complained to the school that ET was teaching witchcraft to the students.

In this context, ET wrote:

Now, I write to you about this situation because, while I am upset, I'm not quite certain to what degree I have the *right* to be upset. Nor am I sure about where my indignation should be directed.

Okay, ET, if you have read much of my blog you know that I forego short and oversimplified answers in favor of detailed answers. So, I am going to start with a couple of distinctions.

The first is a distinction between matters of practical decision making, matters of law, and matters of morality.

If someone were to describe a situation in which they had been hauled into an alley by somebody with a gun and demanding his money, I would of course write that the robber was behaving immorally. However, that should not be confused with practical advice that the victim should not turn over the money. The teacher threatened with the loss of a job can find himself in a situation like that of the person hauled into the alley by the robber, coerced into doing something that, morally, he ought not to be coerced into doing.

Also, I do not even pretend to offer legal advice. There is often a significant difference between what the law is and what the law ought to be. The question of obeying or disobeying an unjust law is sometimes a difficult question to answer. When the Nazi soldiers show up asking if you know of the location of any Jews, the decision to disobey the law and refuse to report the Jews hiding in a neighbor’s attic is not an easy decision to make.

I am also going to add a third caveat, simply because it is a point that a concerned reader or writer must consider. These types of questions are necessarily one-sided. They are like the prosecutor offering evidence to a grand jury – who has absolutely no opportunity to hear the other side. No fair and just verdict can be rendered under these circumstances. However, the case can be used to discuss the principles under which a fair and just (moral) verdict can be rendered by those who have more information.

With these caveats in mind, the direct answer to this question is that there is a reason to be upset over these events. Let us be honest about what has happened here.

A teacher has discovered a way to communicate certain ideas to students that would help those students in the art of communication. The understanding of Latin prefixes and suffixes makes it easier to determine the meanings of words and phrases that they have never heard before, by understanding the meanings of these parts. The very art of understanding the meanings of terms by understanding its parts is what this lesson aims to teach.

However, because of the foolish beliefs of some parents of some students, no student is permitted to obtain the benefit of this plan. There is no such thing as a magic spell, no consorting with demons, no way for the utterance of words to affect the world by altering the laws of physics. Words are powerful tools. However, their powers work according to the laws of physics allow one person to alter the physiological structure (usually brain structure) of another by promoting certain beliefs on the part of the listener or reader. None of this involves the use of supernatural powers.

Pandering to these types of idiotic beliefs directly violates the function of a school (and the objectives of a teacher) in two ways. The first is because it prevents the teacher using tools that effectively teach the relevant concepts to students. The second is that it panders to superstition – telling the students in effect that unfounded superstitious myth such as belief in magic spells is something that one has to take seriously. In both cases, students end up dumber than they would have otherwise been. This, as I said, runs contrary to the primary function of the teacher and the school in which he teaches, which is to make students smarter than they would have otherwise been.

In counter to this, it is sometimes argued that we need to respect other people’s beliefs. However, the idea that we should respect other beliefs also runs counter to the primary function of the school. Every time a teacher marks an answer as incorrect, and degrades (lowers the grade) of the student who gave that answer, he is showing a lack of respect for those who might hold that the answer is correct. Those who put down the answer marked wrong are, in some sense, of a lower grade than those who put down the correct answer.

If we take the idea of ‘respecting’ other answers too seriously, we have teachers giving ‘respect’ to the students who believe that 12 * 12 = 140 and who think that the sum of the angles in a triangle equals 212 degrees.

There have to be some wrong answers in an education system (or there is no need for or purpose to education) – and those answers must remain wrong even if there is a parent out there who thinks that it is correct. Parents who think that these answers are correct must recognize that there is a distinction between believing something and holding it to be something that should be integrated into a school’s task of educating children.

I hold that desire utilitarianism provides a better account of morality than any other theory. Yet, my believing this is not sufficient to demand that it be a part of the school curriculum. Making it a part of the school system requires that it adopt enough ‘street credibility’ that there is sufficient public backing to make it a part of the school system.

Until then, teachers are free to teach theories other than desire utilitarianism, giving each theory whatever measure of respect it has in the intellectual community.

In this, our government was written to make an exception for whatever is classified as ‘religion’. Our government is prohibited from passing laws that seek to promote the idea that a specific set of religious beliefs are ‘true’ and others are ‘false’.

Side note: Some individuals, proving themselves to be amazingly skilled at deception – including self deception – hold that a national Pledge to ‘one nation under God’ and a motto of ‘In God We Trust’ – does not violate this restriction. Yet, both presume that the proposition ‘God exists’ is true. So, both involve teaching children that the official government position is that the proposition ‘God exists’ is true.

Anyway, at least with the blatant exception of atheism which the government may coerce its citizens – including (as especially children) into pledging to reject – the government is not permitted to adopt policies that promote any religion over any other. The reason for this is because religious beliefs can neither be defended nor attacked through the force of reason. They can only be defended and attacked through the force of arms. To the degree that the government takes it upon itself to promote one religion over another, it puts itself at risk of creating a conflict of arms that, as our founding fathers knew particularly well (given the Catholic/Protestant wars of Europe for the last two hundred years) is detrimental to the well-being of any nation.

I can think of no clearer violation of this peace treaty among the different religions than for members of one religion to say, “You must send your children to our church, to say there 6+ hours per week, where they will be told that our religion is correct and yours is mistaken.” This is not a relationship among equals. These are the terms under which masters impose their will on subjects.

This agreement states that the parent who believes in a real Satan that one can negotiate with through magical powers that are triggered through the use of Latin prefixes and suffixes on words shall not be required to send their children to an institution that tells her children, “Your religious beliefs are a bunch of nonsense.”

So, yes, the terms of this peace treaty say that the proper ends of a school system (education) must be frustrated in some cases for the purpose of keeping the peace among religious factions. This means that education, in some areas, must be prohibited in government funded schools.

This does not imply that there is no reason to be frustrated or upset. It means that we need more out-of-school activities to make up for the forms of education that public schools are not permitted to give.

We need organizations outside of schools – a ‘private supplemental education system’ that will fill the education gap that this peace treaty among religions requires that we exclude from school curriculums. It is an outside system where a teacher such as this can volunteer some time to teach students without worrying about public-school restrictions on religion.

In the mean time, to the degree that religions that believe in witchcraft become less common, to that degree public schools and public school teachers can better do their job of educating students. However, the defeat of these religions must come outside of school, by the private confrontation of those who hold such absurd beliefs using peaceful methods of private words and private actions, until a sufficiently large number of people have abandoned this absurdity that it is no longer a threat.

Kant's Refutation of Atheism (per D'Souza)

A member of the studio audience has asked that I comment on an article in The Christian Science Monitor, in which Dinesh D'Souza attempted to use Kant to refute Dawkins' (and other empiricist) arguments against the existence of God. (What Atheists Kant Refute

Before doing this, I have a couple of caveats to expose.

First, this is a blog about ethics, not a blog about the existence of God. The proposition, "At least one god exists" and the proposition "It is not the case that at least one god exists" are both morally neutral. Neither has anything to say about how we should live our lives. We have to add other propositions to these in order to draw morally relevant conclusions. So, I feel that it is safe to ignore these propositions, and focus on the other propositions that have real moral implications.

Having said that, bigotry and prejudice against atheists is a moral issue, and one which is appropriate for this blog to address.

I also consider it to be important since many (though not all) of the false beliefs that cause good people to do real-world harm to real-world people are false beliefs supported by religious institutions. Preventing these harms means correcting the false beliefs that those agents are acting on.

Second, D'Sousa has repeatedly proved himself to be an epistemic hack who substantially makes things up as he goes along. I have learned long ago that he selects propositions to go into his articles without any consideration to whether they are true or false, but by considering only their utility. In this article, anything he says about Kant, I immediately conclude to be probably false. If it is true, it is only accidentally true, since the intersection between D'Sousa's writing and truth is, at best, entirely accidental.

This means that I have a couple of questions regarding this request. What am I actually being asked to do? Am I being asked to address whether Kant actually does have a response to Dawkins on the existence of God as D'Sousa claims? Or am I being asked to assess D'Sousa's arguments against Dawkins. allowing for the fact that any relationship to Kant's actual views would be purely coincidental?

In order to address the first question, I would have to be a Kant scholar. I am not. Of course, I took college courses on Kant and, as a moral philosopher, I spent a fair amount of time studying his, Metaphysics of morals. However, neither of these make me an expert on his Critique of Pure Reason.

So, I am going to have to pass on answering the question of whether Kant has an argument that effectively refutes Dawkins on the issue of God's existence.

However, my experience with D'Sousa suggests that if he had an ounce of integrity and a love of truth not completely overshadowed by a love of rhetoric, sophistry, and demagoguery, he probably should have passed as well.

I have my own reasons for my atheism - reasons that came to me at such a young age that I have never gone through any kind of 'deconversion'. History shows us that primitive cultures had a habit of adopting almost universal belief in a myth involving superbeings (gods), mystical monsters, sorcerers, and heroes. I see absolutely nothing that justifies distinguishing the myths of the ancient Greeks, Roman, Chinese, Japanese, Norwegians, Native Americans, and others from contemporary Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, or any other religion. If any think that it is no longer possible to persuade whole populations to adopt a myth, the success of the Mormons and the Scientologists (among others) testify against that.

For this reason, I place all religious scripture on the same shelf. The Iliad and the Odyssey share the shelf with the Torah and the Koran. L. Ron Hubbard's Dyanetics belongs in the same genre as his nobel Battlefield Earth. The Book of Mormon sits on the same shelf as the stories of Paul Bunyon and Pecos Bill.

This is not to say that one cannot draw some useful moral lessons from literature. I believe that Mark Twain did an excellent job in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn describing the way that a culture can cause a person to actuall feel that helping a slave to escape to freedom is wrong. Huckleberry Finn tried several times to do the right thing and return Jim to his rightful owner, but could not bring himself to do it, finally deciding that he must resign himself to the fact that he is a bad person. Yet, the usefulness of this story in describing the corrupting influence of culture does not incline me, in any way, to profess that every sentence that Mark Twain wrote is literally true. The story - and even the name of the author - is a work of fiction.

Okay, this is a lot of space to spend on caveats, but I thought that some perspective is in order.

So, let me spend at least some time answering the question I was asked.

D’Sousa’s claim basically boils down to this:

Reason and science, they contend, are the only proper foundations for forming opinions and understanding the universe. Those who believe in God, they insist, are falling for silly superstitions. This atheist attack is based on a fallacy – the Fallacy of the Enlightenment. It was pointed out by the great Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant. Kant erected a sturdy intellectual bulwark against atheism that hasn't been breached since.

There are two claims here. One is that the atheist attack is based on the premise that reason and science are the only proper foundations for understanding the universe. The second is that this premise is false.

As I said, I am not a Kant scholar, and I will not attempt to report what Kant would really say against this. However, I do know of an important refutation of this premise. This refutation is that, “Reason and science cannot prove that reason and science are the only proper foundation for understanding the universe.” If we appeal only to reason and science to establish this foundation, our arguments are viciously circular. If we go outside of reason and science, our premise is false.

However, there is a difference between saying that reason and science are not omnipotent, and that there are things that can refute the claims of reason and science. For example, reason tells us that the sum of the angles inside of a triangle equals 180 degrees. If somebody wants to claim that he has a special way of knowing, that’s fine. However, if he claims that his special way of knowing tells him that the sum of the angles inside of a triangle is equal to 150 degrees, then the reasonable conclusion to draw is that his special way of knowing is deeply flawed.

So, a ‘way of knowing’ that says that the Earth is less than 10,000 years old, when all of the evidence available to reason and science suggests 4.5 billion, suggests that this ‘special way of knowing’ is critically flawed. A ‘special way of knowing’ that says, ‘the contents of this conclusion are literally true’ – when this ‘special way of knowing’ has supported such a wide variety of mutually conflicting and contradictory myths, suggests that this ‘special way of knowing’ is not all that reliable. Far too many people who have relied upon it have gotten far too many different conclusions for anybody to sensibly claim that it works.

This special way of knowing becomes particularly problematic when one wants to use to justify behavior that does harm to or even takes the life of others. It is one thing to be put to death because of crimes that one was proved guilty of performing in a court of law. It is quite another to be executed because, “I simply have a special way of knowing that you are guilty.”

This is the type of thinking that D’Sousa is defending – a way that says it is permissible to kill others on the basis of a special way of knowing they should die.

In fact, this ‘special way of knowing that religious people like to appeal to have given us a huge array of contradictory beliefs, from Ares to Xochopilli, from Amman-Ra to Zeus. This gives us reason to believe that this ‘special way of knowing’ is not latched on to any read knowledge at all, but to the imaginations of those who invent the theories.”

This is where my objection to religious claims come from – in the fact that so many people are actually claiming that their ‘special way of knowing’ justifies behaving in ways that cause real-world harm to real-world people. In most cases, this ‘special way of knowing’ is simply their own culturally derived prejudices that work the same way that Huckleberry Finn’s ‘special way of knowing’ told him that he should return Jim to his rightful owner.

A Summary: A Perspective on Religion

As tends to be the case with random distributions, questions from the studio audience come in clumps. So, I have a few such questions to address at the moment. I hope to get to all of them.

The first set of questions that I would like to take the opportunity to address are those from Deep Thought, who commented on a couple of recent posts. One set of questions gives me an opportunity to summarize my views, which I think some new readers might find useful.

To start with, Deep Thought asked:

How *do* you form moral judgments?

I actually have a number of sources that I can use to answer that question.

There is, for example, the book, A Better Place: Selected Essays in Desire Utilitarianism, a self-published book that collects the most central aspects of the moral theory that I use in this blog.

A reader can search this blog for the phrase “desire utilitarianism” and come up with several posts that address that issue. Some of these compare desire utilitarianism to other theories such as act utilitarianism, egoism, moral subjectivism, and evolutionary ethical theories.

There is also my web site, AlonzoFyfe.com.

And, finally, there are a few podcasts such as This One in which I explain my answer to this question:

I deal with two common objections to this theory - the possibility of a large number of people who desire to do harm to a small number, and the question of why be moral, in my posts The 1000 Sadists Problem and The Hateful Craig Problem.

On a different issue, Deep Thought write:

I think you need to be more clear when you discuss the rather vague term 'faith-based harms'. This is, in my opinion, cadgey language. For example, I have neighbors who openly support Dawkins' statement that raising a child Catholic is a form of abuse - is this the sort of 'harm' you are discussing?

First, I object to the claim that raising a child according to a dominant religion for a particular society counts as ‘child abuse’ (see Religion as Child Abuse). The phrase ‘child abuse’ denotes malicious intent (a desire to harm to a child) or, at least, a malignant indifference to the welfare of a child. The claim that these qualities define all people who teach the dominant religion to their children is simply false.

In addition, I also argue that when a person makes a mistake – particularly a mistake that can be easily shown to be a mistake, we get to ask, “What caused him to make that mistake and not some other? What theory best explains this observation of the real world? (See: Bigotry and the Ethics of Belief)

When it comes to adopting unsupported beliefs, the typical answer to this question is that the unfounded belief somehow fulfills the agent’s desires, either directly or indirectly (or both). He has adopted a particular attitude, in spite of the evidence, because he finds the attitude pleasing or useful, regardless of its truth (or lack of it).

In this case, the motivation behind the ‘abuse’ claim is probably, in many cases, a desire to generate an emotional reaction on the part of the listener or reader. The listener or reader is being invited to take the natural hatred he or she feels towards ‘abusers of children’ and attach that hatred to those who teach their children to adopt a dominant religion. That hatred is, of course, premised on the fact that ‘abusers of children’ are people who, at worst, desire to do harm or, at best, are indifferent to the possibility of harm coming to children – exactly the quality that cannot be honestly attached to all people who teach the dominant religion to their children.

This is classic hate-mongering; promoting a falsehood because it is useful in promoting hatred of a target group.

I do not have one language of condemnation for theists who promote hatred of others and another softer, less accusatory language for atheists who do the same thing. I apply the same language to both. I lose a lot of readers because of this. However, that will not cause me to refute an argument that, as far as I can tell, are perfectly sound.

Having said this, I do hold that teaching religion to a child does count as doing harm to a child. This falls under the general heading of teaching false beliefs to a child. I argue that a good life requires a connection to the real world. (See: The Meaning of LIfe and Sam Harris: Morality and Religion). When a person lives a lie, that person is like a person who lives inside experience machine. This machine feeds the victim the false impressions of a meaningful life, while the agent actually does nothing but lay down and decay in a pod of goo.

I actually do not expect many theists to deny this claim – that a life lived according to false beliefs deprives a life of meaning. Where they would disagree is on which beliefs are false. There is some disagreement on this issue.

On the subject of this disagreement, I also hold to the principle that 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. This is necessary for a number of reasons. First, it helps to preserve the peace to limit the number of cases when people may respond to another through violence. Second, it is because if a society does not know and understand why a particular set of beliefs are false, forcing them to live as if those beliefs are false is somewhat empty.

So, while I agree that teaching religion to children is harmful, I assert that there is no right to use anything but words and private (peaceful) actions to persuade religious people to quit inflicting this harm on their children. (See: On Cartoons and Violence). This should not be forced on people through the law. What we have the right to demand of ‘the law’ is that it keeps its nose out of our disagreement, and let us settle it among ourselves. The law should not take sides. (See: Religious Liberty and Religious Culture).

DeepThought then asked:

Are you attempting to condense the rather complicated moral issues of embryonic stem cell research into the nebulous term 'harm'?

Actually, my criticism of religious interference in the science of medicine goes beyond stem-cell research. At the time of my writing I was thinking primarily of religious objections to ‘safe sex’ programs – in particular, the use of condoms – in Africa to reduce the spread of AIDS. I was also thinking of religion’s historical objections to the use of autopsies and dissection of cadavers as a way of learning about the human body and to immunizing children against disease since this was considered ‘playing God’.

These same policies promote overpopulation, which in turn put straings on the water and food supplies and the ability to provide sanitation. Contaminated water, poor food, and poor sanitation also, in turn, contribute to the spread of disease.

I was also thinking of contemporary resistance to medical practices such as the Christian Scientist reliance on prayer over all medicine, the Jehovah’s Witness refusal to accept blood transfusions, and the Scientologist’s objections to the science of psychiatry. (See Faith Hospital)

We can add to this the reliance on faith healers and other quack medical practices – spiritual surgery and new-age healing, which provide no medicinal benefit.

In all of these cases, not only are people persuaded against obtaining reasonable treatment for their own disease. Worse, they prevent children from obtaining the best cures and treatments for their injuries and illnesses.

Religious objections to stem-cell research certainly does fit in as one of the many areas in which religious institutions have come down on the side of sickness over health. On this issue, I deny that this moral issue is all that complicated. Zygotes do not have desires; thus, they cannot be wronged. (See Abortion and Infanticide Part I and Part II.) The fact that a lot of people do not like a particular issue does not imply that the issue is complicated. The label ‘complicated’ is simply a label that those who do not like the conclusion use to give themselves permission not to like it.

Ultimately, the issue of embryonic stem cell research is no more complicated than the issue of small-pox vaccines was 200 years ago. It is not complicated at all. It only appears complicated to those who have yet to reconcile the facts of medical science with their primitive religious beliefs.

Finally:

are you attempting to claim that moral concepts have a 'shelf-life' after which they are harmful? Are you attempting to claim that a particular person's ignorance of, for example, quantum theory means that their concepts of civic governance or human rights are inherently flawed? If not, what *do* you mean?

I would not infer that ignorance of quantum theory implied ignorance of moral facts unless somebody could demonstrate that quantum theory had moral implications – that it provided information on how we should or should not behave.

However, I am a moral realist. (See: Who Gets to Decide) I hold that moral facts are a subset of scientific facts. It is a subset that primitive human cultures did not understand very well.

Another set of scientific facts that primitive cultures did not understand very well was the science of agriculture. However, this does not imply that they were unable, on the whole, to grow enough food to survive. Obviously, some of them were able to pull off this much with their primitive understanding or we would not be here. Similarly, they knew enough about organizing societies to have survived, though history tells us that they did not survive very well. In the realm of morality, as in the realm of agriculture, we can do better than they did, because we know more.

Correspondingly, turning the clock back on morality so that we return to the primitive standards that existed 2000 years ago would have disastrous effects similar to turning our understanding of agriculture back 2000 years. Such a move would kill most of us and leave most of the survivors wishing they were dead. It is as grave of a mistake for a person to hold up a book of ancient moral truths and say, “This is how we should live our lives,” as it would be to hold up a book on ancient farming practices and say, “We may not engage in the practice of farming in any way that deviates with the lessons given in this book.”

The concept of ‘human rights” that you are talking about did not even exist until the 1600s. Before that time, the idea of a ‘right’ did not exist. It certainly cannot be found in any scripture. I consider the discovery of ‘rights’ in the 1600s to be comparable to Newton’s discovery of the principles of motion in the same age. It is not a coincidence that they were discovered the same way – by people who believed that they could discover truth without appeal to scripture. This is not to deny that both Newton and Locke were very religious people – but their methods of investigation made no use of scripture or religion.

I am sorry, but as an outsider looking in this piece smacks a little bit of 'others = bad' and I would like some clarity, please.

Your comment is somewhat ambiguous. It is a necessary truth that if an agent believes that X is true, then he also believes that all people who believe that X is false are mistaken. A person who believes X and rejects not-X, while at the same time holding that believing not-X and rejecting X is just as plausible, is suffering from some type of epistemic dual personality disorder.

So, yes, when I assert that X is true, I also assert that everybody who believes not-X is mistaken. This is part of what it means to say X is true.

This does not mean that I refuse to accept the possibility of my own error. Of course, I cannot coherently believe that I am mistaken. If I believed that, I would have no choice but to change my mind. At the same time, I have often said, “In these writings, I have certainly made at least one mistake. I do not know where it is (because if I knew, I would change it), but I do not know what it is. I leave it up to my readers to discover what that mistake is (what those mistakes are).

On Secular and Sectarian Societies

One of the recurring themes in this blog has been the relationship between meaning and marketing. I wrote about it most recently in discussing Sam Harris’ proposal to do away with the term ‘atheist’. I argued against it because, as it stands now, the term ‘atheist’ – burden as it is with strong public disapproval – is a useful marketing tool. Marketers know that if they want to enhance public disapproval of some policy or program, all they need to do is tie whatever it is they do not like to ‘atheism’, and they can ratchet up the public disapproval.

One case study illustrating this policy has to do with the term ‘secular’. People who do not like the idea of a secular society have come to realize that if they make enough noise linking the term ‘secular’ to ‘atheist’ in the public mind, they can ratchet up public disapproval for ‘secular’ policies, leading people to the only logical alternative to such a society, which is a ‘sectarian’ society (a.k.a. ‘theocracy’).

Not long ago even an extremely religious person could be ‘secular’. This simply meant that, whatever his religious beliefs happen to be, when it comes to government actions, those actions had to be grounded on real-world evidence. They could not be grounded on scripture. In other words, one option that was strictly prohibited was for the members of any religion to use the government to make it illegal for somebody to break commandments that had a strictly religious foundation, without a corresponding secular argument in its defense.

In this way of thinking, the government can pass laws against murder, rape, theft, fraud, counterfeiting, and the like because these laws had a secular justification. We may assume that even atheists would want protection from being murdered, raped, robbed, defrauded, and the like. However, the state could not be used to tell the people when to pray, where to pray, what to say during prayer, when to fast or whether to fast, what to eat, what to wear, and the like, because these had a strictly religious foundation.

The most devout Protestant could use the principle of a secular society to condemn any use of the government to force allegiance to the Catholic Pope. Similarly, even a strong Catholic could appeal to these principles of secularism to protest any attempt to inflict additional taxes or burdens on Catholics, or prohibiting their rituals.

There was no conflict between being religious and being secular. In fact, many of the most secular individuals in society were religious, simply because they were worried about the state imposing restrictions on their practice of religion.

However, for somebody who wants to create a theocracy – to institute Sharia law or the Christian equivalent or orthodox Jewish equivalent – secularism is a major obstacle. Before this can happen, people have to be made to hate secularism – to reject it – to deny any person who appeals to the concept of a ‘secular’ government any place of political or social influence.

We know that atheists are the least trusted group in America. They are the group that people identify the most as ‘people who do not share our values’. Somebody with a talent for marketing can easily draw the connection that if they can link the concept of ‘secular’ with the concept of ‘atheist’, that ‘secularism’ itself will become something that people dislike – something that is seen as being at odds with American values.

What it takes to make a language change like this is a willingness to spend enough time and enough money making sure that enough people hear the term in this new context enough times that they adopt the new usage.

This is why I find Harris’ claim that we should rid the language of the term ‘atheist’ to be so naïve – because the people that Harris was talking to are not in the habit of making substantial contributions for the purpose of selling his idea to all English speakers. The people who are willing to spend the most money to talk to the most people and to speak the loudest are those who will dictate how a term be used. It is not within the power of the weak and timid to change the language.

On the other hand, the religious right have the power of conservative talk-shows and other evangelical organizations which will be immediately receptive to this new usage.

Ultimately, this does not require anything like a huge, secret conspiracy theory where people whisper behind closed doors, “Here is a part of our grand plan to defeat secularism.” There are a number of ‘invisible hand’ forces at play supporting such a strategy. Once the idea appears in the policy of any one group, others can immediately see the power of it, and pick it up themselves. All it takes is a sufficient number of people who can see a way to increase their own power and influence (by denigrating and degrading alternatives) by adopting the new way of speaking.

Some evolutionists would explain its growth in terms of ‘meme’ theory, requiring little conscious direction or intelligent design. We look only at whether the environment is one in which a particular meme has what it needs to replicate and spread and, in a highly religious society united against a common and widely despised enemy (atheism), this type of environment exists.

Now, I even read passages in which atheists equate ‘secular’ with ‘atheist’. In all likelihood, they have seen the equation so many times in their young lives that they could not imagine it having a different meaning. They are simply adopting the convention that those who are willing to spend the time and money in control of the media are encouraging them to adopt.

There are still some places in which the term ‘secular’ retains its original meaning. Specifically, whenever Christians talk about keeping a government free of Muslim influence among a population that is heavily Muslim, they will use the term ‘secular’ in its traditional sense. So, the fact that Turkey has a ‘secular’ government, and attempts to establish a ‘secular’ government in Iraq and Afghanistan, are (weakly) praised. To a Christian, it can easily be understood as the lesser of two evils. Of course, a sectarian-Christian society is best. However, if the option is between a secular society and a sectarian-Muslim society, it is better to argue for sectarian society. At least in such a society the Christians will be free to grow their religion without imposition from the state.

Yet, it is quite reasonable to expect that if those Christians should become the new majority, that ‘sectarianism’ will become the new enemy, with sectarian-Christian (theocracy) becoming the preferred form of government. That is when ‘sectarian’ will change its meaning from, ‘A form of government where religious minorities are not oppressed’ to ‘An atheist form of government that tries to rid the state of all reference to God.”

So, what is the moral of this story? What should good people do to defend against this strategy for bringing about the shift from a secular America to a sectarian America?

It will require making noise. It will require people who care enough about the theocratization of America that they are willing to devote resources – time and money – to reach people who do not visit atheist web sites and blogs. It will require funding organizations that oppose the theocratization of America at least as well as the megachurches and forces advocating theocratization are funded.

People may lament the degree to which marketing and campaigning influences people’s opinion, but the world has a lamentable way of being indifferent to what we want the world to be. The answer is to make sure that the people know when an abuse of language is taking place, the type of people who would abuse language in this way, and that such people deserve condemnation because they are nothing more than people obtaining their own benefit (political, social, and economic power) by convincing others to act in ways harmful to themselves.

The Armenian Genocide

Congress is seeking to pass a non-binding resolution that identifies events in the former Ottoman Empire (now Turkey) in 1915-1917 a ‘genocide’. In those three years, the Ottoman Empire forcefully relocated the Armenians. In the process, somewhere between several hundred thousand and 1.5 million Armenians (out of an estimated 2 million) died.

The Turkish government is upset about this resolution and has promised to punish the United States if the resolution should pass. The most likely form of punishment would be to prohibit the United States from supplying its forces in Iraq through Turkey – mostly by flying through Turkish air space.

One of the things that the Turkish government does not like is the idea of calling this a ‘genocide’. Yet, the one quality that all of the victims of this massacre shared – the quality that was used to single them out for this special treatment – is the quality of being members of a particular group of people. So, ‘genocide’ seems to be a quite appropriate term.

President Bush and his administration are opposing this resolution. Once again, they are demonstrating to the world their Christian morality by saying, “If you have something of value that you can offer us, then we can certainly ignore the slaughter of up to 1.5 million people. What’s the slaughter of large numbers of innocent people among friends?

The Turkish government itself is behaving in a contemptible manner in opposing this resolution. One of the things that their action tells us is that they are not willing to condemn those who committed these crimes. If they do not think that these crimes are worthy of condemnation, then we must worry that they might do something like this again in the future. At the very least, they cannot effectively join the rest of the international community in condemning others who might engage in similar actions.

If the United States sides with the Turkish government on this dispute, then it too will lose the authority to condemn similar slaughters elsewhere. The rest of the world will see that the difference between being condemned and not being condemned has little to do with the wrongness of one’s actions, but with the degree to which one can make oneself useful to the United States.

I need to clear up one issue regarding these types of measures – the issue of apologizing for past generations. I hold that the only person whose actions I am responsible for are my own. I am no more obligated to apologize for acts that a family member committed a hundred years ago, than for the acts of a stranger that lives 100 miles down the road. If somebody wants me to apologize, they will need to provide evidence that I did something that warrants an apology.

However, even though I will not apologize for the acts of other people, I do think that it is important to acknowledge when they have done something wrong. If I refuse to classify their actions as wrong, then I am saying that their actions are permissible (or obligatory). If I am saying that their acts are permissible, then I am putting people at risk of others who would perform similar actions. Indeed, I am saying that I would consider it permissible to perform such actions myself. Others in society have every reason to view those who will not condemn such actions as a threat – as somebody they have reason to condemn, in order to promote a hatred of the types of acts I refuse to condemn.

So it is the case that, if some government were to consider a resolution considering the actions against the Native Americans a genocide, or condemning slavery, I would condemn any American who stood in the way – who did not, in fact, join in the condemnation of those policies. It is necessary to convey the message, “Those actions will wrong. In condemning them I give warning that I will also condemn any contemporary who would perform similar crimes.”

One particular crime that I think that Americans have an obligation to own up to has to do with the Revolutionary War. One of the events that we tend to gloss over is the controversy over the Line of Demarcation in 1763. This was one of the reasons for going to war with the English crown, and is included in the Declaration of Independence.

This controversy concerned England’s decision that all land west of the Appalachian Mountains belonged to the Indians (Native Americans), and prohibited the American colonists from settling the land there. The Americans rejected this idea. They saw vast tracts of land ripe for the taking, and did not at all approve of the Parliament’s enforcement of the moral prohibitions on murder and theft.

On this matter, the founding fathers were the moral monsters. Any morally decent American would condemn the founding fathers for this (as well as the stand that they took on the issue of slavery).

This does not diminish the fact that they were right on a number of other issues. In fact, one of their greatest moral failings was their utter hypocrisy. They did an excellent job of expressing a set of moral principles that should govern relationships between people and their government – if only they had the moral fortitude to actually live according to those principles.

(This, by the way, is the biggest problem with the type of ‘originalism’ practiced by Supreme Court Justice Scalia. Scalia’s method of interpreting the Constitution is to apply the principle ‘Do as I do, not as I say.’ As a result, every example of hypocrisy committed by the founding fathers is taken by Scalia to negate the principles that they wrote into the Constitution.)

A moral person need not apologize for the criminal acts of their ancestors, but they do have an obligation to admit that those were criminal acts. Failure to do so means failure to contribute to setting up a culture that will help to prevent similar crimes from acting in the future. Failure to do so tells the world, “You, too, can slaughter a million people, as long as you have something that you can then sell to those who would condemn you for it.”

That is not a very good message to be spreading throughout the world.

In saying this, there is some room for practicality when somebody is doing something immoral. If a thief pulls a gun on you in a dark alley and demands your money, it may be the case that he deserves condemnation, and refusal to condemn him simply makes the world a more dangerous place. However, at that particular place and time, it may well be best to remain silent, or even show some sympathy for the man with the gun. At the same time, you can be taking a description of your assailant in order to provide a better description of him to the authorities, and better condemn him later.

It is quite possible that the Bush Administration is negotiating with Turkey as I write this, with Turkey making real threats about what may happen if its demands are not met.

If the threat is to deny American airplanes the use of Turkish airspace, this threat is not good enough. We are weighing the cost of diverting flights against the principle that it is wrong to kill hundreds of thousands (over a million) innocent people. The United States should have the moral fortitude to be willing to pay such a small price for defense of such an important principle.

Or, Turkey may be threatening to attack the Kurds in northern Iraq and, in so doing, take even more innocent lives. This, then, could count as a hostage situation, with the hostage taker threatening to take lives unless his demands are not met. This bargain should go a considerable distance to proving that Turkey remains the same morally contemptible place that it was when it brought about the death of those Armenians. The fact that they have not improved their moral character in nearly a century provides a hint of what happens when others do not take a stand for moral decency.

Sincerely, it is difficult to find a threat that is significant enough, for somebody who is truly interested in promoting good and fighting evil, to warrant claiming that mass murder on this scale is acceptable. I am not snot saying that it can’thappen, but only that it would be morally difficult for a good person to turn his back and ignore up to 1.5 million deaths.

Except, the Bush Administration seems quite comfortable with turning its back on 1.5 million deaths.

Contributing to the Conversation

I have spent the past week discussing some of the ideas that Sam Harris raised in his controversial speech before the Atheist Alliance International. These have included:

(1) The thesis that atheists should surrender the term ‘atheist’ to the theist. (Opposed.)

(2) The thesis that atheists should recognize that not all religious beliefs are equally bad and should respond by taking on the worst of those beliefs first. (Defended, and augmented by the proposition that some of the worst beliefs and attitudes are not religious.)

(3) That atheists should simply give up on trying to counter such things as the Hitler and Stalin cliché – the tendency to hold all atheists in contempt because Hitler and Stalin were atheists (Opposed, with the response that atheists should respond to moral outrage that also applies to the national motto and pledge of allegiance).

I have one last topic from that discussion that I want to discuss – the fact that theists have very effectively changed the subject – away from the subject of whether their faith-based harms are justified, and onto the subject of the ‘tone’ of the atheist writers and the foundation of atheist beliefs.

They have been able to do these things because theists control the microphone in this country. They have been able to do these things because they are willing to shout louder and longer than their opponents, and drown their opponents out. The volume of their writings, the fact that they have a ready audience, and the fact that people who want to sell products realize that there are more Christian customers in the market place than atheist customers, all substantially leads to the silencing of the atheist voice when compared to the Christian voice.

In the public mind, it is not the case that the claim made with the strongest defense will be claim that the public accepts. People, instead, are more inclined to accept (blindly) the claim that they hear the most often, and which is spoken with the greatest authority, regardless of the quality of the evidence for that statement. This hypothesis is easily confirmed by observation – by the wide array of nonsense that people believe where no evidence can be found for believing it.

Even when it comes to the contents of Dawkins’ and Harris’ books – few people will read them. Most people will believe that the books say what those who speak with the loudest voice and greatest authority report. If that report is a vicious misrepresentation of the contents, then for the bulk of the population this vicious misrepresentation of the contents will become the de facto belief about the contents of those books.

All of this hinges on a willingness to speak up – on a willingness to spend time and money increasing the volume of one’s own voice in the public media. It depends on the willingness to spend money, time, and effort saying the things that one thinks it is important for people to hear.

As I have written above, since the proposition, “At least one god exists,” contains no moral implications in itself, I do not see it as being particularly worthwhile to refute this statement. I am more keen to advocate opposing those statements that do the greatest harm. We cannot base 21st century society on the scientific and moral ignorance of people dead for thousands of years without inflicting great harm on a great number of people. So, the idea that all scripture is to be treated literally is one of those ideas that does contribute to harm, and one that I would be keen to hear refuted.

Another dangerous idea is the idea that faith can justify harm to others. If people want to accept foolish, harmless beliefs on the basis of faith, then they are only harming themselves by doing so. The problem is when one decides to advocate doing harm to others (particularly harm to people who do not belong to their church) and doing so on the basis of faith. When it comes to the proposition, “Those people should be made to suffer,” the speaker needs more than faith to justify his statement. He needs evidence. Those being harmed have the right to demand evidence.

These (types of) messages – that scripture is consists of the prejudices of people as ignorant of morality as they were of science, and that faith cannot justify doing harm to others – are messages that will be drowned out unless and until people are willing to invest time and money and effort into making them heard.

The virtue of this activity is that this is time and money that is actually devoted to protecting people from harms they would otherwise suffer. There is no difference between making contributions that will protect people from disease and treat their injuries, and contributions that will protect people from harms inflicted by those who would base modern society on a primitive moral foundation. Contributing to a cause of fighting the false beliefs that stand in the way of preventing and curing disease is no different than fighting the disease itself.

It does not count as a contribution to fighting these types of dangerous false beliefs to talk only among ourselves. These activities are classic examples of ‘preaching to the choir’. The real task is to get these messages out among those who most need to hear it. This means contributing enough money to fund a marketing campaign, to create advertisements (billboards, radio and television commercials, and the like) that get the message out to people who do not browse atheist blogs and discussion groups.

It means, when one is in a public forum with any of these people, simply refusing them to change the subject. The subject is, “You have become a group of people who do harm to others and base your harm on ‘faith.’ You provide no evidence that the harms you would inflict are well grounded, yet you insist on a right to ground them, and claim that those who protest the harm are attacking your religion. How does blind faith justify harm, and how do you prevent blind faith from justifying any harm that an individual might want to inflict?”

“I would assert that your religion’s prohibition on homosexual acts is like your prohibition on eating shellfish. You have no more right to use your religion to ban homosexual acts than you do to ban the eating of shellfish or the executing of a citizen that works on the Sabbath. They are all equally cases of harm inflicted on the basis of faith alone and, as such, unjustified harm. It is an example of faith making you a threat to the well-being of others.”

Most importantly, it means making contributions to organizations capable of producing advertisements that then make it out to the general public - to people who would not visit an atheist site such as this one on their own. It would be an organization that is involved in making an delivering a message that shows up in shows that the general population watches. This is an expensive project that requires the contributions of a lot of people. However, without it, few people will ever actually get to hear what the atheists are trying to say. They will only hear the interpretations that the theists provide through the media that they control and are more than happy to use.

Moral Outrage II: In God We Trust

I have recently written about how moral outrage is the appropriate response to what I have called The Hitler and Stalin Cliche. This involves associating Hitler and Stalin with atheism in order to market fear and hatred of atheists. This is done by people who would certainly recognize the absurdity of claiming that believers in a round earth are dangerous because Hitler and Stalin both believed in a round earth. But, as I wrote in that earlier post, making sense does not matter to these people. They want to manufacture and sell hate for profit, and making sense just gets in the way.

Another set of circumstances that deserves a level of moral outrage that it is not receiving are incidents like Chad Vegas' push to put "In God We Trust" in all school classrooms.

In the news articles that I have read about this, I have found the standard objections of 'separation of church and state' and 'unconstitutionality' of the proposal. However, both of these arguments fall on a lot of deaf ears. Recall, we are talking about people who want to set up a theocracy and, thereby, have no think that separation of church and state is a moral sin responsible for terrorist attacks and hurricanes. In addition, they are particularly adept (from centuries of experience) in making texts say whatever they want those texts to say.

However, my objection to these arguments is not that they do not work. My objection is that those who use these arguments are missing an important step. We would be better off if those who appealed to 'separation of church and state' would not only explain that this is a violation, but also explain why a good government separates church and state - and why bad governments (and bad people) threaten that separation.

It's easy to do. Simply point to Iran, Afghanistan, and the Dark Ages as examples when nobody would dream of even questioning the separation of church and state - where it was a crime (punishable by death) to question religion.

More importantly, however, is that this is another instance where I see a more appropriate response of moral outrage to be missing.

In the articles that I have read on this case (or any case of posting 'In God We Trust' in public buildings - or on the money), I have not heard the argument that this proposal deserves moral outrage.

You have two options. Either that statement is meant to marginalize and exclude those who do not share your religious beliefs, or it is a lie. It has to be one of the two. If it includes those American citizens who do not share your religious beliefs, it is a lie, because it is not the case that we - if 'we' means all good Americans - trust in God. If it is not a lie, than it marginalizes and excludes those Americans who do not believe in God.

I do not think that those who approved this motto in Congress or those who are fighting for it here are liars. What they are, instead, is religious bigots, and they have made religious bigotry the national motto.

No citizen . . . no good, honest citizen should have to tolerate signs anywhwere, let alone in a government building, that say that they do not belong. No good, honest citizen should ever walk into a building a see a sign on the wall that says, 'You do not count. You are not one of us.

And, far worse than this, far worse by far, is to have laws that require that parents send their children to school, and to see, every day, a sign on the wall that denigrates them and their family.

You - representatives of a government of the people - and not just Christian people, but all people who are citizens of this country - have no right to subject good American citizens to a message of exclusion.

In an article on KGET.COM, National motto posters debated at KNZR form, reports:

We're not trying to establish the nation's motto, we're not trying to make the nation's motto 'In God We Trust' ... The nation's motto is, in fact, 'In God We Trust' ... Period," Vegas said.

Was there anybody in the audience who said, "If the motto was, "We trust in no God," what would you say to somebody who used your argument as a reason for posting that sign in the classrooms?"

Mister Vegas, if you are not using the same arguments that you would use if the motto said, 'We Trust In No God,' then you are being a moral hypocrite. You are proving that you care nothing about treating others as you would wish to be treated by them. If you are using arguments that you would claim constitute injustice if others applied them to you, then you must admit that they constitute the same injustice when you use those arguments against them.

You would literally scream at the injustice if somebody were to do to you what you seem happy to do to others. So, I have to ask you, is this what your Christian morality tells you to do – to treat others in ways that you would call unjust if they were done to you?

Mister Vegas, you know that if the roles were reversed, and you were out here, and somebody was sitting up there insisting that a national motto that said 'We Trust In No God' be posted in all the schools, you would know that he was doing it in order to force his religious views on you and your children. For that very reason, we know that the reason you support this proposal is because you want to force parents who do not share your religious beliefs to encounter this message of exclusion every time they sit in a classroom.

Another claim often made in this context is the claim that proposals such as these are necessary to improve the moral character of our students – that since the ‘liberals’ took God out of the schools everything in this country has gone downhill.

No, sir. No, you have no right to say that. You have no right to sit there in that chair and denigrate the moral character of a lot of very fine people who have made significant contributions to this country. You have no right to use your position to announce to the world that we are your moral inferiors – that we are lesser people and lesser citizens because we do not share your religious beliefs.

How dare you sit there and insult me, and say that I am a lesser person than you? How dare you sit there and say that I am your moral inferior? How dare you not treat me with the dignity and respect that every human being deserves unless and until he has been proved to have committed some crime against the people of this community? I stand before you as an equal member of this community . . . an equal member by right, and you cannot call yourself a moral person if you cannot acknowledge and respect that fact.

As I have been saying through most of this week, this is the types of response that these types of cases demand.

And while I am here, I wish to add that the same thing applies any time anybody recites the current pledge of allegiance.

How dare you stand there and say that I am as bad as those who would oppose union, liberty, and justice. You have no right to stand there and say that those who are not ‘under God’ are like those who would support rebellion, tyranny, and injustice. You particularly have no right to force my child to sit through a daily ritual where you tell his or her peers, ‘those who are not ‘under God’ are inferior to those who are.’ No decent person would support such a policy.

If you do not think that these situations deserve moral outrage, then I would argue that you do not understand what the people who advocate these proposals are truly saying.

Censoring Hate Speech

Yesterday’s posting on the appropriateness of moral outrage as a response to the Hitler and Stalin Cliché brought up the question of censorship. Specifically, is it the case that expressing moral outrage at those who use the Hitler and Stalin Cliché an act that deserves condemnation in the name of opposing censorship?

Briefly, the Hitler and Stalin Cliché is an argument used to condemn atheists by claiming that the atheist regimes of Hitler and Stalin have killed several times as many people as Christianity. The argument is provably invalid; we would not argue that those who believe in a flat earth are morally superior to a round earth on the basis that the latter have killed are more people than the former. The difference between using this argument against atheists, but not against round-earth believers, is because there are social factions who seek to promote hatred of atheists, but not against round-earth believers. In other words, the Hitler and Stalin cliché is a hate crime.

However, if one goes around condemning the Hitler and Stalin Cliché as a hate crime, then is this not censorship, and is this not then worthy of condemnation?

No, it is not. Furthermore, the fact that there is no ‘censorship’ worthy of condemnation in calling the use of cliché a hate crime that the cry of ‘censorship’ can easily be shown to be just another tool in the hate-mongers’ toolbag.

If it is censorship to condemn those who use the Hitler and Stalin Cliché, then it would also be censorship to condemn those who condemn the Hitler and Stalin Cliché. After all, condemning the Hitler and Stalin Cliché counts as speech. Therefore, condemning those who condemn the Hitler and Stalin Cliché counts as condemning speech.

Effectively, the person who uses this censorship argument is saying, “Because censorship is bad, we must prohibit people from saying that the use of the Hitler and Stalin cliché is motivated primarily by a love of hate, even if they can demonstrate this is the case.” In other words, we are going to censor speech in the name of preventing the censorship of speech.

This is nonsense. Yet, this type of idiocy is business-as-usual for those who have decided to make their living manufacturing and selling hatred.

Two Types of Prohibition

In order to more easily understand the moral case, we must distinguish between two levels of moral prohibition in these types of cases. Level 1 Prohibition: Your act is morally contemptible, meaning that it is appropriate to respond to the act with condemnation and private acts such as boycotts, but it is not the type of act that deserves a violent response in the form of fines, imprisonment, or worse.

Level 2 Prohibition: Your act falls in the same moral category as murder, rape, theft, and fraud in that is deserves a violent response in the form of criminal penalties.

What these hate-mongers do, when it is convenient for them to do so, is to ignore these two levels of moral condemnation and to pretend that the only choice that one can make is a choice between complete moral permission on the one end (no punishment, no penalty, no condemnation, no harsh words at all used against the speaker), and a Level 2 Prohibition (a violent response in the form of criminal penalties). They condemn all Level 1 responses to their speech-act as ‘censorship’ as worthy of condemnation as acts of individual or state violence against the speeker.

Of course, the reason that they do this is to silence their critics – to get them to shut up, so that they can continue to utter their contemptible hate-speech without anybody actually saying, “Yours is contemptible hate-speech.”

However, the statement that “yours is contemptible hate-speech” is, itself, speech. If it is always wrong to condemn the words of another, then it is wrong to condemn those who say, “Your words are worthy of condemnation.” Like I said above, this position is inherently self-defeating.

The fact of the matter is that the claim of ‘censorship’ is invalid when people use it against those who employ Level 1 condemnation. The right to freedom of speech is not a right to be immune from condemnation when one says something contemptible. It is a right against the use of state or private violence – against “Level 2 condemnation” – of what one says; not a right against the use of Level 1 condemnation.

There are attempts being made in some parts of the world to say that some biblical passages – particularly those that call for the execution of homosexuals – are hate speech. They want to make the reciting of these biblical passages a crime. In effect, this means outlawing those religions that hold that these anti-homosexual passages are God’s word and literally true.

The distinction above says that these laws are immoral. Those laws would count as a Level 2 response to speech acts, where only Level 1 responses are legitimate. They count as doing harm to those who commit the crime of saying things that one does not like. However, if it is permissible to pass legislation against those who say things that one does not like, then those who advocate these laws should also have the opportunity to seek the arrest of those who condemn them. After all, they too would merely be passing laws against those who say things they do not like.

We avoid this vicious cycle of violence by stating that, even though some speech is wrong and certainly deserves the harshest moral condemnation, that we will not permit people to respond to words with violence. This means that the person advocating laws criminalizing homosexual acts, and the person condemning those who advocate such laws, are both free to have their say, and to try to convince society to adopt their view.

Yes, it means that these people get to keep quoting their Bible versus.

But it also means that we get to keep pointing out how primative, vicious, and harmful these particular religious beliefs are and how they will tend to be favored by primitive, vicious, and harmful people. One group has a desire to have sex with others of the same gender. Others have a desire to do harm. It is not difficult to argue which, in fact, are the better people, so long as we are permitted to say such things.

Moral Outrage

I regret that this posting is turning up on a Saturday, since Saturdays tend to be light traffic days. This is a post that I particularly strongly hope will have an impact among readers, but it is also a post that fits into the current context of this blog at this point.

I am continuing to discuss Sam Harris’ speech before the Atheist Alliance International – the speech in which he said that we should abandon the term ‘atheist’ and that we should be focusing on more than simply whether and to what degree others accept the proposition, “At least one god exists.”

One of the reasons Harris gave in favor of abandoning the fight for atheism per se is the futility of giving arguments that nobody listens to.

So too with the "greatest crimes of the 20th century" argument. How many times are we going to have to counter the charge that Stalin, Hitler, and Pol Pot represent the endgame of atheism? I've got news for you, this meme is not going away. I argued against it in The End of Faith, and it was immediately thrown back at me in reviews of the book as though I had never mentioned it. So I tackled it again in the afterword to the paperback edition of The End of Faith; but this had no effect whatsoever; so at the risk of boring everyone, I brought it up again in Letter to a Christian Nation; and Richard did the same in The God Delusion; and Christopher took a mighty swing at it in God is Not Great. I can assure you that this bogus argument will be with us for as long as people label themselves "atheists." And it really convinces religious people. It convinces moderates and liberals. It even convinces the occasional atheist.

Why should we fall into this trap? Why should we stand obediently in the space provided, in the space carved out by the conceptual scheme of theistic religion? It's as though, before the debate even begins, our opponents draw the chalk-outline of a dead man on the sidewalk, and we just walk up and lie down in it.

This sounds frustrating. This is frustrating. I have discussed this argument before, under the title, "The Hitler and Stalin Cliche" and I am familiar with the frustration. However, it is frustrating because the way that Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchins (and I, in the context of this blog) respond to this is not the appropriate response for the general audience.

Why do people continue to use this argument, even though it is a fallacious argument (one might as well argue that heliocentrists – those who believe that the sun is at the center of the solar system – are more evil than geocentrists because heliocentrists have killed more people), and how do we get them to stop?

They use this argument because they love to use it. It gives them pleasure. These are people who have grown so fond of blind, bigoted hate that they are not going to let a reasonable argument preclude them from getting their next fix. The problem, here, is not a problem with their beliefs . . . well, it is a problem with their beliefs. However, the problem has its root in their desires – their addiction to hate.

Harris wants to respond to this addiction to hate by hiding. I deny that this is a good strategy – the addict will continue to find some way of fulfilling this desire.

The rational way to respond is to recognize the actual root of the problem and respond in a way that addresses that problem. The correct response in this case is not calm logical discourse, but moral outrage.

That person who used the Hitler and Stalin Cliché has effectively called you a violent, dangerous, murderer. You want to sit there and say, “Excuse me, sir. I hope you don’t mind if I point out that your argument contains something of a fallacy.” They are going to take one look at that response, note that nobody is listening, and go ahead and repeat their argument because their love of hate and all of the things that hate brings them – political and economic power, among others – is stronger than any desire for truth.

Nothing is going to work until you decide to respond to this love of hate and hatred of truth. And the way to do that is to express the moral outrage that these types of claims deserve.

Moral outrage does not need to be void of reason. In fact, moral outrage should be backed up by reason. An expression of moral outrage should not only convey outrage – in tone and body language in addition to choice of words. It should contain an argument that demonstrates that outrage is an appropriate response to this type of claim.

Is this your example of your superior morality – lying hate-mongering bigotry? First, Hitler was raised a Catholic, learned his values from the Catholic church, and certainly did not have any trouble convincing a nation of Lutherans to go along with him. Second, you might as well say that everybody who denies that the Earth is flat is a potential Stalin because I can assure you that almost every tyrant that’s ruled the planet has believed the world to be round. You won’t accept that argument because you know it’s doesn’t make any sense. You SHOULD know that the same argument used against the belief that no God exists doesn’t work either. You would know it, if you had any sense of morality and decency. Unfortunately, you do not seem to have found more love of unreasoned hate in your Bible than respect for truth..

Or, if you want a version fit for the evening news and morning paper, “Why aren’t they going after people who believe the earth is round? Round-earthers have killed countless more than flat earthers. It’s because they don’t care about making sense. They love to hate, and will grab onto any piece of nonsense that feeds that desire.”

This type of statement should be uttered, not in a calm voice, but through clenched teeth and clench fists, with anger and indignation behind it, because this is the type of response that the Hitler and Stalin cliché deserves. This is the appropriate way of dealing with the love of hate and the disrespect for truth and justice that a person who uses this cliché proves himself to possess.

There are some things that cannot be communicated through words alone. The tone in which they are expressed – the context in terms of body language and force of voice in which they are embedded – become a part of their meaning. If the idea that one needs to communicate is that, “Your behavior is morally outrageous,” then the only honest way to communicate one’s belief of this fact is through an expression of moral outrage.

An objection may be raised that an emotional response, backed by a calm and unimpassioned argument, is fake – that this involves acting. However, we routinely expect reason to show that somebody else’s anger is unjustified and, once these reasons are provided, we expect these people to rid themselves of their anger. An employee who is angry that an award went to somebody else, when told that the other person’s actions saved a whole division in Louisiana and kept 100 people employed, is expected not to be angry any more. We do hold that there is such a thing as illegitimate anger. Yet, this goes along with the idea that there is something to the concept of legitimate anger. The anger that a person feels – when he is presented with an argument that shows that he should be angry is not (or should not be) fake.

The person who is not outraged over the use of the Hitler and Stalin cliché is like the person who is not outraged at the student who gives a Jewish classmate a Nazi salute as they pass in the hall, or the person who is not outraged at the person who hung a noose on the doorknob of a black college professor. The Hitler and Stalin Cliché is used to communicate hate. There is no reason backing it up, only a pure desire to hate and to encourage others to hate. It will continue to be acceptable until it is met with the same type of moral outrage as its kinfolk, the Nazi salute and the racist’s noose.

There should be an organized campaign to track and log the use of the Hitler and Stalin Cliché, and to brand its use as a hate crime (because it is a hate crime).

There should be a central repository that explains why it is a hate crime, and that lists the hate-mongers that make use of it.

Every atheist blogger (or any blogger of any persuasion who is opposed to expressions of hate such as these) should then dedicate at least one posting to pointing readers to this resource and explaining the idea behind it.

Those who have influence in non-atheist political sites should put what pressure they can on those sites to acknowledge that the Hitler and Stalin Cliché is a hate crime and to endorse the message at this site.

People should work to make sure that this campaign is sufficiently well funded to include an advertising campaign that will bring the message to every American, regardless of whether they have a habit of visiting atheist or politically liberal web sites.

Those who have access to the press should quit responding to the cliché as if it is a claim that makes deserves to be met by reason, and start responding to it as a Jew would respond to a Nazi salute.

Of course, somebody is inevitably going to scream 'censorship'. It is an easy accusation to answer.

So, because censorship is wrong, we are not permitted to say that the Hitler and Stalin cliche counts as hate speech. Even though it is quite obvious that those who use this cliche are motivated more by a desire to promote hate than by reason, we are not permitted to say so, because saying so counts as censorship."

In addition, I will add my standard caveat. The only legitimate response to words are words and private actions - and that is all that I am advocating here. The right to freedom of speech includes the right to condemn those who say things that are contemptible. It includes a right to moral outrage expressed through words and private actions. I advocate nothing here that is inconsistent with those principles.

When people like Harris and Dawkins and whomever has the microphone at the moment quits arguing against the Hitler and Stalin Cliché, and condemning those who practice it, and when we systematically target this idea with the type of moral outrage it deserves, then, and only then, will we be making an effective response.

A Range of Bad Beliefs

Two days ago I criticized an aspect of Sam Harris’ speech before the Atheist Alliance International conference as being naïve – the idea that atheists can decide how society will refer to us. However, Harris made another set of claims that are not only defensible but important.

Much of Harris’ speech was directed against the idea that all religious claims are equally bad and equally deserving of our attention. As a matter of fact, some religious beliefs are worse than others and that a person who favors reason should see that it is more prudent to spend the greatest effort going after the worse of those beliefs.

Harris gave two main reasons for acknowledging the differences in religious beliefs. One was the fact that pointing this out brought to the surface the fact that religious beliefs are contingent and arbitrary. The second, however, is the focus of this post.

The second reason to be attentive to the differences among the world's religions is that these differences are actually a matter of life and death. There are very few of us who lie awake at night worrying about the Amish. This is not an accident. While I have no doubt that the Amish are mistreating their children, by not educating them adequately, they are not likely to hijack aircraft and fly them into buildings.

In short, some religious beliefs are worse than other.

I have argued in this blog that belief in the proposition, “At least one god exists,” is a harmless proposition because it does not carry with it any moral implications. It has no implications at all about how one should act. Those implications come from the other false beliefs that some people add to the belief, “At least one god exists.”

For example, you cannot get directly from, “At least one god exists” to “homosexual acts shall be punishable by death.” You can’t get here without adding additional claims – claims that some people who believe, “At least one god exists” can consistently and coherently deny.

On the other hand, the belief that people who lived 2,000 years ago lived in a system of perfect moral and scientific knowledge, and that everything in modern society can be evaluated by what those primitive and ignorant tribesmen would say about it is not only wrong, it is gets innocent people killed and destroys the quality of life for countless others. We are wallowing in misery and raising one generation after another who are devoting their energies to doing real-world harm to real-world people because of these particular false beliefs.

As a matter of fact, we have limited resources. As a matter of prudence, when you have limited resources, you should devote your energies to those activities that promise to produce the greatest effect with the least effort. This means devoting more energies to those beliefs that do the greatest harm (belief in the perfect knowledge of primitive and ignorant tribesmen), and less energy to those beliefs that are harmless (at least one God exists).

One objection to this is that it advocates tolerance and acceptance of those beliefs that one does not challenge. This nonsense – and a particularly obnoxious and brutal piece of nonsense.

Imagine that you are a police officer. You are about to pull over somebody that you suspect of driving drunk. Then, a call comes over the radio that somebody is going down the hall of a nearby school shooting everybody he sees. You decide that devoting time and energy to the shooter is more important than stopping this drunk driver. You call in the suspected drunk driver, while you turn around and rush to the school.

Then some nut comes along and says that, by your actions, you have effectively claimed that drunk driving is not and ought not to be a crime, that drunk driving should be tolerated and drunk drivers should not be prosecuted for their actions. You are condemned as somebody who is ‘soft’ on drunk driving and ignoring the real-world harm that drunk drivers are doing to people.

As I said, this line of reasoning is not only fallacious, it is maliciously false. The decision to devote one’s energy the most serious problems is not a statement that the less serious problems are not important. It is a statement that the less serious problems are, in fact, less serious problems – likely to inflict much less real-world harm on real-world people than the problems that one has decided to tackle.

Does this imply that no person should spend time refuting the proposition that at least one God exists – at least until the more serious problems are taken care of?

Of course not. One should recognize that refuting this proposition in itself is not the most productive use of one’s time. However, it is hard to defend the proposition that we should spend every waking moment in the most productive use of one’s time. Refuting the existence of a god might well be something that somebody does for entertainment value. As such, it is certainly a better use of time than watching sports or sitcoms on television or playing computer games. Yet, it is not wrong to spend at least some of one’s time watching sports or sitcoms on television or playing computer games - in addition to spending some time dealing with situations that are getting innocent people maimed and killed.

You can refute the claim that scripture is literally true without refuting the proposition that at least one god exists. In fact, if you take any given scripture, only a small fraction of the population believes that the scripture in question is literally true and even they cannot agree on what it says. It takes very little effort to take somebody who believes that scripture is literally true and start quoting scripture at him, asking at each breaking point, “That is literally true?” The person who finally breaks and says, “No,” does not need to draw the conclusion that no god exists (though, ultimately, it would be better if he would do so).

Please recall, two days ago I objected to Harris’ claim that we should do this while ‘under the radar’ – that is, while we hide our atheism. Instead, I wrote a post much earlier where I advocated that we should go after the range of wrongs (grounded on false beliefs) in the world while, at the same time, very obviously wearing our atheism, as I do in writing this blog. We should tell those suffering of spinal cord injuries, Parkinson’s disease, and Alzheimer’s disease (and their family members) that they suffer as a result of religiously-grounded ignorance. We should tell homosexuals that religious myth is responsible for their suffering. We should point to charts and graphs that reveal the spread of disease – the death and the suffering – and not be at all afraid to point out (where it is true) that those deaths and those suffering are attributable at least in part to those religious beliefs, and condemn the beliefs as a way of preventing death and suffering.

Contrary to Harris, I argue that atheists should state loudly, “There is no god. We live in a universe that is indifferent to our well-being and even our survival, so we must take care of these issues ourselves. Furthermore, we must deal with them rationally and intelligently. Solutions grounded on myth and superstition are not only likely to make things worse rather than better – they have historically done so.”

There is a corollary to this idea that not all religious beliefs are equally bad, and that is the proposition that not all bad beliefs are religious. Harris alluded to this in the statement, “Religion has its share of bad ideas.” Religion’s “share of bad ideas” does not imply a monopoly. One possible area of concern is the problem of fixation where, while our attention is fixed on religion as a source of evil, we are outflanked and overrun by non-religious evils.

Please keep in mind that two of the deadliest and most destructive campaigns in America did not come from religious institutions – they came from business. Industries spending money to promote false beliefs about the safety of tobacco and to get people addicted to this product, and a campaign of misinformation on global warming, have already killed more people and destroyed more property than terrorists, and they were religious campaigns. As much of a threat as fundamentalist religion is to the quality of human life, it may not be the most significant threat by a long shot.

These are the principles that I have written this blog under for over two years. Though I include the name ‘atheist’ in the title, I have devoted only one posting to the question of God’s existence. This is not the first time that I have pointed out that the proposition, “There exists a god,” has absolutely no moral implications or implications on how to behave, so it is not worth time discussing in a blog that is concerned with ethics )or ‘what should be done’) The target of concern is not whether a proposition is religious or not, but whether a proposition makes an individual a threat to the life, health, and well-being of hisneighbors, and that a dangerous non-religious belief is more of a concern than a harmless religious belief.

The goal is to protect the quality of human life, and even human survival (individually and collectively. The goal is to combat the bad ideas that threaten these things. Some of these bad ideas are religious, others are not. Among religious ideas, some are worst than others, and some are more deserving of our attention than others. These are all real-world facts. If anything, atheists should have a particularly keen respect for the importance of real-world facts

Defending the Constitution

The Constitution of the United States cannot defend itself. It exists only so long as there are enough people to stand up for it.

I wonder how many people that would be.

I would like to find out how many people are willing to raise a voice in protest of such actions as torture, arbitrary arrest and imprisonment, unchecked executive power, cruel and unusual punishment. I would like to ask for a “Resist Tyranny Day” in which bloggers devote the day to discussing a common topic – a statement of protest against the arbitrary and capricious rule that has come to govern this country.

November 6, 2007 – the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November – I would like to see how many blog writers, discussion-group posters, and others who use this new medium of communication called the Internet, are willing to write with two demands.

(1) A serious investigation in the House of Representative on the possibility of impeaching Vice President Cheney - the person who has done more to destroy the Constitution than any other man in history.

(2) The establishment of a court system with powers that the Executive Branch cannot hide from.

Two articles are relevant to day's post.

I found one at Think Progress, a posting titled Charlie Savage: Cheney Plotted Bush's Imperial Presidency 'Thirty Years Ago'. This posting contains a clip of a CSPAN interview where Charlie Savage presented a case that Vice President Cheney came up with a blue print for a monarchical Presidency 30 years ago.

The second, as reported in a New York Times article, Supreme Court Refuses to Hear Torture Appeal, the US Supreme Court decision not to hear the case of man who alleges to have been kidnapped, hauled off to a prison in Afghanistan, and tortured, and then released four months later when his captors (the United States) realized they had the wrong person.

As the New York Times article points out, the Executive Branch has blocked judicial review of this policy by claiming that such a trial will expose important state secrets.

Before Cheney came into power, the “state secrets’ defense had been used only six times. In one case, it was used to block a lawsuit from the spouses of military officials who died in an Air Force air plane crash. The government claimed that the plane was on a secret mission and the trial would reveal state secrets. The government, apparently, lied – the mission became declassified recently and there was no ‘secret mission’ – only a failure on the part of the Air Force to sufficiently maintain its airplanes. That was the ‘state secret’ that the government could not let be revealed in trial.

Cheney’s administration (and, yes, it is more Cheney's administration than Bush's) has used the State Secrets act 36 times so far, as a part of a campaign to create a Presidency that is more like a monarchy than a Constitutional Republic. It has used this as one of several weapons to destroy the system of checks and balances established in the Constitution, by severing the power of the courts to check and balance the power of the executive.

Charlie Savage presented a case that Cheney began this process of destroying the Constitution the instant the Bush Administration took over power. On the first meeting of the White House Legal Team following the Inauguration, Cheney gave the team their marching orders – that whenever any opportunity presented itself to destroy the system of checks and balances that the founding fathers had established, that they (his team) were to cease the opportunity to do so.

Of course, Cheney would not phrase it in exactly these terms. He claims that the Constitution itself was written to create an unchecked executive branch – an elected monarchy. Of course, interpreting the Constitution as establishing an elected monarchy makes as much sense as interpreting the Declaration of Independence was a letter of apology to King George for the rude and obnoxious behavior of the American colonists.

At the same time, we do not see any movement on the part of the Democrats to resist tyranny. I wonder if there is not a reason for that. I wonder how many Democratic Senators, running for President, are salivating at the thought of what they can do with unchecked executive power – the newfound ability to ignore the legislative and judicial branches of government and to do whatever they please to whomever they please.

One of the biggest threats of the next administration is the threat that we will endure a Democratic president and a Democratic Congress. History has shown that whenever both branches of government are under the control of the same party, that their top priority will be to cooperate to give themselves to grab more power for themselves. A Democratic Congress will almost certainly fail to provide the level of oversight and control over a Democratic president as a Republican Congress did for Cheney. This means another 4 years (or, at best, another 2 years) to further entrench the idea that the Executive Branch is a true monarchy, whose occupant can do whatever she pleases to whomever she pleases.

However, we still have a democracy. We still live in a state where we have the right and the power to dictate to those who serve in Government how they will behave, and to take peaceful, political action to affect change. It would be far better to do so while we still have the power to do so, then to discover that we have created a situation where we no longer have that option.

Please be aware that the greatest threat to your child’s or grandchild’s future is not some Al-Queida agent with a bomb. The biggest threat is a Hitleresque President with unchecked authority, using the power to act without judicial or legislative oversight to do whatever he pleases to whomever he pleases, invading countries at will and creating a state of national emergency that is simply too unstable for national elections.

If we have a government where the Executive Branch has unlimited powers in times of war, “Well, I guess we’re just going to have a war, won’t we?”

So, it is time to say that we will not tolerate a form of government that is such a threat to our future safety and happiness. It is time to say that we will not tolerate people in public office who make it a top priority to destroy the system of checks and balances that has kept us free for over 200 years.

In any institution, there are rules that people obey, not because they are formally written into the bylaws, but because they have a sense of right and wrong that prevent them from abuse. However, sooner or later somebody comes along and abuses those rules, and then everybody has to suffer the consequences.

One of the unwritten rules that Cheney has decided to abuse is the ‘state secrets’ exemption. And so it is now necessary to provide some way of better securing lives and liberty from this abuse. Otherwise, we risk laying the foundation for a tyrannical executive that is far more of a threat than the revelation of any state secrets – particularly the ‘state secret’ that those who occupy the White House are seeking to establish tyranny.

There is, of course, a legitimate concern against having state secrets revealed in a public court room where it is possible to do so. In this case, those reasons for action suggest the establishment of a court of judges capable of seeing those secrets, empowered to determine whether the government is actually protecting state secrets or merely lying to defend criminal conduct or an unconstitutional abuse of power. Where state secrets are in play, even this does not preclude the possibility of the government being found guilty of wrongdoing and providing the victims with some measure of compensation.

Otherwise, we live in a country where any one of us can be snatched up, hauled off to a foreign prison, tortured for months, without any opportunity to protest these violations. None of us can truly be free as long as we must live in the fear that the government has this type of power over us.

Let us not forget, tyrants do not maintain power by doing harm to the people. They maintain power by exercising the threat to do harm. That threat is properly defeated only where one lives in a society that is willing to remove from any potential tyrant the power to exercise such a threat.

So, I am wondering if there are people left in America who are willing to state that we are not willing to tolerate the likes of Dick Cheney in government, that we exercise our right to remove from power those who abuse their station, and that any future leader who should try any similar stunts should expect the same result. Or is it the case that Americans are people who really do not care what type of government they live under, where all of the boasting to the contrary turns out to be nothing more than so much hot air.

On Calling Oneself 'Atheist'

Though apparently not the most warmly received talk at the Atheist Alliance conference, Sam Harris’ speech suggesting that we do away with the term ‘atheist’ is almost certainly the most talked about. I find the proposal to be extremely naive. To explain why, I want to silently sneak into a conservative/fundamentalist political strategy session.

In this session, a group of religious fundamentalists are seeking to promote a policy P. P could be a law, a nomination to the Supreme Court, a slate of political candidates, a change in television programming, the shutting down of an abortion clinic, opposition to including a gay-pride float in a city parade. Whatever it is, they want to get the public to support P, and to oppose not-P.

One of the things that they know is that two-thirds of the population associate ‘atheism’ with ‘bad’. (The do this, I contend, substantially because they are taught in school that those who are not ‘under God’ are ‘un-American’, and those who do not trust in God belong in the excluded group of ‘they’ or ‘them’ as opposed to the included group of ‘we’ or ‘us’.) So, anybody with even the slightest marketing sense will note, “If we can associate not-P with atheism, then we can turn a majority of the people against not-P.”

So, how are we going to associate atheism with not-P?

Well, we need to get the word out. We talk to our preachers about giving sermons associating atheism with not-P. We are friends with all sorts of columnists and religious writers – we get them to write a piece associating not-P with atheism. We present the idea to radio talk-show hosts, we talk the people over at Fox News and any other member of the media who we can trust to present our view, we buy advertising, and we saturate the region with the message that not-P is associated with atheism. If we do this, then our pollsters tell us that we can promote public approval of P (public disapproval of not-P) by (for example) 6 percentage points. Which just might carry the day.

Now, in order to augment our attack, we need to make sure that we preserve or, if possible, bolster the idea in the public mind that atheism is bad. So, in addition to making these claims that associate not-P with atheism, we need to make sure that we use this media to bolster the association of atheism with badness. So, we need to continue to present the idea that atheists are opposed to religious freedom. We must at all costs continue to fight to keep the pledge of allegiance in our schools and ‘In God We Trust” on our money, we must hold on to every success we have won that associates atheism with badness in the public mind, and to find new associations where we can.

Here’s an idea. Almost nobody in our audience will actually read Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris. They will read us, as they always do. So, they will almost certainly believe us regardless of what we say about Dawkins and Harris. It is not at all difficult to associate Dawkins and Harris with atheism – they have done this ourselves. Now, all we need to do is associate Dawkins and Harris with badness (even if we have to invent this association). Then, presto, we have made another association between atheism and badness in the minds of the bulk of the population.

The one crucial fact to take away from this strategy session is . . . and, please, listen carefully . . . they are not asking for our permission. The people who get to decide how the term ‘atheist’ is used are the people who decide to invest the most time and money in using it that way – the people who can get their use into the press and into the public mind the most often.

What rational people need to do is to recognize that this is one of the facts about the natural world – about how things in the real world work – and figure out what to do in the real world given these facts. Harris wants to get rid of the word ‘atheist’. Sorry, that will not happen – not so long as opinion polls show that the term ‘atheism’ can be used in an effective marketing campaign, it will continue to be used in those ways in which it is most effective.

What needs to be done is to change the fact that the term ‘atheism’ can be used in this type of campaign – to change the fact that when the religious right associates not-P with atheism, that they can generate an additional 6 points of public disapproval of not-P (or approval of P).

This can only be done by making a huge – and I mean substantial – investment in countering the association between atheism and badness that the religious right has cultivated in this country.

The very reason that I chose the term ‘Atheist Ethicist’ as the title for this blog is because, one of the ways the religious right associates atheism with badness, is by associating atheism with immorality. It would be useful, I felt, to help counter this by writing something that associates atheism with morality. With a significant amount of education in moral philosophy behind me, this is an association that I felt qualified to make. And I make a significant contribution to drawing that connection every day through this blog.

It is essential, I would argue, to get ‘under God’ out of the Pledge and ‘In God We Trust’ removed as the national motto – not because of some abstract principle of ‘separation of church and state’ – but precisely because these acts were passed and approved as a part of a program to denigrate those who do not believe in God, and it is unjust for the government to adopt the position that those who do not believe in God are not true Americans. When people make the claim that these acts are not intended to denigrate atheists, the response should be a very angry and terse, “Yeah, right. The pledge was not altered to denigrate non-believers in the same way that Auschwitz was not altered to murder Jews.”

Now, imagine a professional boxer who has decided to adopt a strategy that, in the ring, he will always defend and never attack. He will spend one hundred percent of his efforts tryong to block the blows that other opponent tries to land, and never spend a moment trying to land a blow of his own. The best that such a boxer can hope for is a draw, and he has to be absolutely perfect in his defense to do that well.

So it is in the ‘marketing’ of atheism, it is not sufficient to simply defend atheism from the attacks landed against it. It is necessary to land some blows against religion as well.

One point of moral fact that needs to be mentioned – the purpose is not to deliver blows against religion for the sake of scoring some otherwise pointless victory. The point is to address the very real harms that some religious beliefs bring to the lives of very real people. The proposition, “A god exists,” contains no moral implications and is irrelevant to any policy question under debate today. The proposition, “Primative, superstitious people who died thousands of years ago had perfect scientific and moral knowledge and we should follow their dictates without question,” is an absurdity that makes people do things that seriously impair not only their own quality of life but the lives of their neighbors. The target, then, should be on delivering blows that aim to prevent the damage that such people do.

Blows like, “People say that religion gives their life meaning. There is no way that a myth can give a life meaning. The only thing that a myth can do is to give a life the illusion of meaning. That meaning may appear real, but it is as imaginary as the God from whose that meaning springs. The only way that a life can have real meaning is if it is engaged in the real world. There are, in fact, real-world diseases, real-world poverty, real-world ignorance, and real-world conflict, all of which need our real-world attention. If we want to do something about these things, then it is time for us to get real.”

Blows like, “The morality that we get from scripture is the morality of a bunch of primitive tribesmen who knew as little about the moral world as they did about the scientific world. Sure, they got some of the more obvious facts right, but they were wrong on almost everything that was not obvious. Running societies as if Scripture contains perfect moral truth is as foolish as running our hospitals as if the works of Hypocrates were the last word in medicine. Any time moral fictions – or science fictions – make their way into policy through scripture real people are going to suffer real harms as a result.”

Scripture does, in fact, contain as many moral fictions as science fictions – and anybody who actually looks at the moral claims made in scripture can see this.

These deal with two of the wrongly believed ‘advantages’ of religion – that it provides a life with meaning and that it provides us with morality. It’s ‘meaning’ is no more real than the God they worship, and its ‘morality’ are the blind prejudices and superstitions of people long dead.

Ultimately, it will not be possible to retire the term ‘atheist’ until it can no longer be used by those who seek a political weapon. This means that it will not be possible to abandon the term ‘atheist’ until it no longer matters whether one is called an ‘atheist’ or not. As long as the term ‘atheist’ contains all of the negative baggage that it does in our society, people will try to exploit that negative baggage to promote their agenda, and they will not be asking anybody’s permission to do so. The choice is not ours to make. The question then is, how are we going to deal with this real-world fact. How relevant is it to the choices we can make?

The Virtue of Modest Conclusions

Bruce Taylor wrote an article titled, “Anti-Theists Avoid Morality Question” that contains the old argument that an atheist (like me) cannot find a reasonable way of grounding moral claims (like I attempt to do in this blog). [I was made aware of this through An Atheist's Answer to the Morality Question at Letters from Le Vrai.]

In this posting I do not want to waste time repeating the standard responses to this tired claim. Instead, I find something interesting in the form of argument that Taylor uses to defend his claim. It bears a strong relation to the style of argument that these “anti-Theists” that Taylor mentions are accused to have been making. So, ultimately, I want to say something about that form of argument.

The way that Taylor attempts to establish his objection to the anti-Theists is to argue that they have failed to come up with a decent foundation for morality. From this he seeks to draw the conclusion that God exists. As it turns out, I agree that the claims about morality that these anti-theists make have significant problems. Yet, I do not come to the conclusion that God exists. There is a significant weakness in Taylor’s argument that allows his premises to be true, but his conclusion to be false. If Taylor’s argument is, in fact, the same type of argument as that which the anti-theists used, then those anti-theists have the same problem as Taylor.

For example, Taylor substantially repeats the arguments that I have made against a genetic source of ethics – even using the same counter-example that I have used.

The claim being refuted here is that morality is somehow determined by our genetic makeup – our history. It has somehow tuned the brain to certain moral attitudes. The claim is that we have an evolved disposition to behave altruistically; therefore, we have an evolved disposition to behave morally.

There are two ways to interpret this inference. One way is to interpret it as claiming that altruism is moral because we have evolved a disposition to view altruism as moral. If we accept this interpretation, then it follows that if we had evolved a disposition to be cruel, then being cruel will be moral.

Taylor uses the example of rape, which is an example that I have used in the past. If morality depends on our evolved dispositions then, if we have acquired an evolved disposition to commit rape, then rape would be moral. If we have an evolved disposition to favor those who look like us and to distrust or even harm those who look different, than racism would be moral. These absurdities tell us that we should reject the idea that morality depends on what we are genetically disposed to perceive as moral.

Taylor does not mention that divine command theory suffers from the same problem – a problem that Plato identified 2500 years ago. The position invites us to ask, “Is X moral because it is loved by God (our genes), or is it loved by God (our genes) because it is moral?” If we go with the former, then anything – even the greatest cruelties – can become ‘moral’ by being loved by God (our genes). If we go with the latter, then morality must be something distinct and separate from that which is loved by God (our genes).

However, Dawkins ultimately seems to hold the position that altruism is moral whether we are disposed to approve of altruism or not. To the degree that humans evolved a disposition to behave altruistically, to that degree we have evolved a disposition to behave morally. And to the degree that we have evolved dispositions to act cruelly, to that degree we have evolved dispositions to behave immorally.

However, against this option, Taylor asks for somebody to answer the question of why altruism, or community service, or helping others is moral and cruelty is immoral. What is there, in the atheist-materialist universe, to prevent cruelty from being moral and altruism from being immoral. Or, actually, what is there that can assign moral value to either altruism or cruelty?

He claims that Hitchens’ bases his morality on the claim that we are all in this together, and that we are all better off if we cooperate than if we fight each other. Taylor points out that this is insufficient. The fact that it may be useful to be moral still leaves it upen for us to behave immorally the instant we perceive it is useful to do that. On what basis can we condemn a person who can perform an immoral act without getting caught or suffering any negative consequences? Why is it the case that he ought not to take advantage of such a situation, if one should arise?

I have not read Hitchens’ book, so I cannot judge whether Taylor presented Hitchens’ view correctly. Yet, for the sake of this posting, it does not matter. Taylor is effectively claiming that because Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris have all failed to prvide a foundation for mority, that this leaves the way clear for theism to provide the missing foundation. Yet, even if Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris all fail, this does not give the decision to theism. Not unless one can make the further claim that Dawkins, Hutchins, and Harris exhaust all possibilities for religious ethics.

Harris, by the way, appears to run a strict act-utilitarian argument. The problem with act-utilitarianism is that it seems capable of justifying a great deal of injustice. For example, if one truly feels that religion is a scourge, and that future generations can benefit from its elimination, then it might just be permissible to simply bring about the execution of those who assert that a God exists.

While most moral philosophers consider these types of conclusions to reduce act utilitarianism to an absurdity, Harris seems to embrace these types of conclusions. In his book The End of Faith Harris gives an act-utilitarian argument in favor of torture – even the torture of an innocent person – when the suffering of the one person being tortured provides a sufficient benefit for everybody else.

I agree with all of these objections. However, I do not accept Taylor’s solution that I am left with no other option but to believe in God. Dawkins, Hutchens, and Harris all do not have any significant training in moral philosophy. To take their view of morality as the best that atheists have to offer is to argue against straw men. In order to truly take on atheist morality, Taylor will need to provide arguments against the likes of Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Rousseau, Locke, Hume, Bentham, Mill, Sidgwick, Hare, and a large collection of contemporary moral philosophers who have all made significant contributions to this problem.

At this point, a person who was familiar with the common responses given to Dawkins and Harris will recognize this argument. Many of those people also claim that, by taking on the particular targets that Dawkins and Harris have selected, they are actually tackling straw men. Defeating these weak (but popular) positions is no proof against theism. There are other theists who make many of the same arguments, yet they still come to the conclusion that a God can and probably does exist.

The problem that I am pointing out in my response to Taylor, and others have pointed out with respect to Dawkins and Harris among others, is that the author’s conclusions have overstepped their premises. Taylor has identified problems with the moral views of Dawkins and Hitchens, but this does not give him the authority to claim that he has defeated atheism. Dawkins and Hitchens have defeated many common religious beliefs, but this does not justify the claim that they have defeated theism.

The moral of the story to this point is to keep one’s conclusions modest – within the scope of available evidence. If one has an argument against Dawkins’ view of morality, then one is justified in presenting it as an argument against Dawkins’ view of morality. It does not justify a broad conclusion against atheism. If one has an argument against a 6,000 year old earth, then it can be presented as an argument against a 6,000 year old earth. It is not an argument against the existence of God.

So far, so good. However, there is another step that we need to take here.

One of the claims that we seem to be getting from those who criticize the atheist authors seems to be, “Since these authors suggested conclusions that overstepped their evidence, we can ignore everything that they said against religion. All religious beliefs can be defended merely by showing that there is some obscure and sophisticated set of religious beliefs they have not confronted.

This would be like me arguing that since Taylor failed to refute all possible defenses of an atheist morality, he is not justified in claiming that Dawkins and Hutchins were still wrong.

That rhetorical trick is absurd. Dawkins and Hutchins are still wrong (about morality) – the existence of some obscure ethics that answers Taylor’s objections cannot save them. Similarly, the more popular and widespread (and harmful and deadly) beliefs that Dawkins, Harris, and Hutchins object to are still evil – the existence of some obscure religious beliefs they did not touch cannot save those they did touch.

However, people who want to preserve their self-respect while they devote their lives to actions harmful to others are going to clutch at straws that protect their self-image. If the invalid inference, “They did not defeat some obscure view that has certain elements in common with mine; therefore, I, whose views were soundly trounced by these writers, am still a good person.”

No, not really. This argument will not work to save Dawkins’ and Harris’ views of morality. It will not work to save common Christianity or Islam (or the common version of any religion).

In fact, it does not justify that conclusion at all.

Why Are Desires So Important?

Eenauk has presented me with another question.

Why are desires so important? On one level they are important by definition: we do, after all desire them. But on another level, there are certainly other important things in our moral lives. Kant also came up with a "closed" ethical theory that was however based on "reason alone". Why are desires more important than reason? Why reduce homo moralis to desires alone?

Before I go too far, I need to offer an apology. No, it's not what you think. See, when I write, I sometimes hear somebody else's voice in my head, and I have an annoying habit to write in that voice. My wife and I spent the weekend catching up on last year's Stargate Atlantis series and, as a result, I have Rodney McKay's voice stuck in my head. Rodney is an obnoxious know-it-all. As much as I try to get rid of it, it is stuck there, like a song one hates but cannot quit thinking about. I want to apologize if Rodney's tone leaks into this post.

The Value of Desires

Anyway, I want to devote a posting to answering this question from Eenauk because the answer is central to the moral foundation of these posts.

That answer is:

I do not need to answer why desires are important because desires are not important.

The objects of desires are important to those who have those desires. However, the desires themselves have no value.

Except . . .

Well, like I said, the objects of desires are important to those who have the desires. If the object of a desire is itself a desire, then that desire is important to those who have the desire as an object.

In addition, things can have value because of their instrumental value. A trip to the value might not be desired, but it is a useful way of avoiding things (like pain) that one desires to avoid. The trip to the dentist, in this case, has instrumental value.

Desires themselves can have instrumental value. A desire, like a trip to the dentist, can be useful in fulfilling other desires. To the degree that a desire has such a quality, then the desire is useful, like a trip to the dentist is useful. An agent can have reason to promote such a desire, just as he can have a reason to go to the dentist.

These are the two ways in which a desire can be important. The desire itself might be the object of a desire, or the desire can be a useful tool for the fulfillment of other desires. These are the only two types of value a desire can have. These are the only two types of value that anything can have.

So, why do desires play such a central role in this theory. Why can't something else play the central role - either by itself or along side desires.

The answer . . .

Because desires are the only reasons for action that exist. Desires are the only entities we have so far discovered that motivate agents to make or keep true some set of propositions.

Belief-Desire-Intention

Of course, this claim depends on the assumption that the belief-desire-intention model of intentional action actually holds up. To the degree that BDI theory breaks down - to the degree that there are reasons for action other than desires - then, to that degree, morality can be based on things other than desires. However, so long as desires are the only reasons for action that exist, then any answer to the question, "What reasons for action are there for doing X?" has to either make reference to desires, or it is false.

This is consistent with one of the things that eenauk claims; "[T]here are certainly other important things in our moral lives."

There certainly are. Every separate desire identifies something of importance. That is what desires do . . . they identify that which has importance and they motivate the agent to bring about or preserve states of affairs that realize the objects of those desires.

Beliefs do not do this. Beliefs and desires are mirror images of each other. If an agent believes that P, and P is false, then the agent needs to modify his beliefs. Beliefs - or, at least, true beliefs - map to the outside world. On the other hand, if the agent desires that P, and P is false, then the agent has a reason to act so as to create a state of affairs that realizes P.

Reason does not do this. Reason maps means to ends, but has nothing to say about the choice of ends.

Well, almost nothing.

Evaluating Ends as Means

A desire that P identifies P as an end or goal for any person who has that desire. Insofar as we are talking about P as an end, reason has nothing to say on the issue. Desires are the only reasons for action that exist, and reason cannot provide us a reason to bring about or to avoid P other than those provided by desires.

However, every desire that P, at the same time that it identifies P as an end serves as a tool for (or in opposition to) the fulfillment of other desires. So, even though reason gives us nothing to grab on to when it comes to evaluating P as an end, reason can give us something to grab on to when evaluating the desire that P as a means.

So, we can do something like what Kant argues for. Kant says that the right act is the act that one can will to be a universal law. Desire utilitarianism says that the right act is the act that would be motivated by a desire that one can consistently will to be a universal desire. However, the process of evaluating a desire has nothing to do with a Kantian ‘categorical imperative’. In order to evaluate a desire we look at simple, traditional means-ends rationality or, in Kantian terms, ‘hypothetical’ imperatives. There is no such thing as an intrinsic value, and there is no such thing as a categorical imperative.

We have no way to assign importance to desires other than insofar as they are objects of (other) desires or useful (as a means – or a tool) for the fulfillment of other desires.

How To Refute This Theory

In order to refute this – in order to put something else into the position at the root of morality, they will need to come up with a theory of action. That theory of action needs to demonstrate that it can predict and explain intentional action better (more accurately, more simply) than the belief-desire theory that I have relied on in this blog. Once somebody has demonstrated that reasons for action other than desires exist, then one can begin to sensibly refer to those reasons for action to answer questions about what we have reasons for action for doing or for refraining from doing.

I am not even going to say that it can’t be done. In fact, I will assert the opposite. I will confidently predict that, someday in the future (if the human race lives that long) scientists will replace belief-desire theory with something better at explaining and predicting human actions. Science will make new discoveries. The science of the mind is in its infancy, with some large-scale changes in our understanding to be expected. So, I am simply not going to say that no better theory can be invented. I will only say that I am dealing with (I hope) the best we have available today.

When a new theory of the mind does come forward, those people will need to look at the reasons for action in that theory. When they ask the question, “What reasons for action exist for supporting or opposing some policy P?” the answer – at least among all rational people – will be to turn to the reasons for action that exist. Reasons for action that do not exist simply are not relevant.

Summary

So, nothing is important in the real world except insofar as it is the object of a desire, or it is useful for bringing about the realization of a state that is the object of a desire. Desires themselves are not important in the real world except insofar as they are the objects of desires or useful for bringing about the realization of other desires. The reason why everything gets evaluated in relation to desire is because desires are the only reasons for action that exist. Desires are the only real-world entities that identify possible ends and motivate the agent to realize those ends. In order to turn to something else in answering questions about how to act, we have to show that this ‘something else’ is a reason for action that exists in the real world.

A Harmony of Desires

A member of the studio audience, eenauk, made a comment recently on a subject that I was surprised to discover I had not yet talked about in this blog. I was surprised because it is a core part of the moral theory I use in writing this blog, and I have defended it often. Apparently, just not here.

Eenauk said:

Where things get difficult is when we try to decide which desires are desirable. Of course, you will probably introduce a "coherence theory of desires" to solve the problem; but you can only justify it by referring to a desire to be coherent. It might seem obvious that we _should_ desire that our desires be coherent, but that is nonetheless an obvious _moral_ truth and no longer a matter of fact. Let me know if I'm wrong.

This is a particularly precise comment. If it is the case that I have build this theory entirely on facts, then I need to come up with a way of accounting for the fact that ‘we ought to have this desire rather than that one.’. Otherwise, I am smuggling desire-independent morality distinct from fact in the back door, which would create a significant problem for my theory.

Eenauk is also correct to point out that the answer depends on some sort of ‘coherence’ – some way of evaluating desires by evaluating their agreement with each other. This is the only way to evaluate desires without bringing in some external fact – some sort of desire-independent value. The question then is, “Why should our desires be coherent?” Can I answer this question while remaining true to the other claims that I have made about this theory?

In order to show how this is done, I ask you to imagine a universe with one being. I call this being “Firs”. Firs has only one desire – a desire to gather stones together. Now, it is important to note that this is not a desire that the stones be gathered. I am not saying that he has a desire to see all of the stones in a nice big pile, and that the work he does gathering stones is ‘work’ – in the sense of being labor that is only valuable as a means of bringing about the end goal of a stack of stones. Rather, the gathering of stones is the end. Once all of the stones are gathered, this entity must then scatter the stones again before he can continue his desired activity of gathering stones.

Now, let us change Firs’s universe slightly. We are going to give Firs a partner; let’s call him ‘Sec’. We will also give Firs two pills to give to Sec. The yellow pill will cause Sec to have a desire like Firs’s desire – a desire to gather stones. The blue pill will cause Sec to have a desire to scatter stones.

Now, let us look at the reasons for action that exist – which, for the moment, is simply Fris’s desire to gather stones. There is only one reason for action in this universe, and it is a reason for action for giving Sec the blue pill.

If Fris gives Sec the yellow pill, then both Sec and Fris will have a desire to gather stones. They would be in competition for the stones that exist. Furthermore, once all the stones are gathered, either Fris or Sec or both will have to do work (undesired labor performed as a means of realizing a state that one desires) of scattering stones so that they can be gathered again.

However, if Fris gives Sec the blue pill, the Sec will immediately go to work scattering stones. Meanwhile, Fris can go back to gathering stones. Assuming that both Fris and Sec work at the same speed, Fris will be able to spend all of his time gathering stones without ever having to pause and do the work of scattering stones. The scattering is being done for him. The same is true of Sec, who will be able to spend all of his time scattering stones, as Fris provides stacks of stones for Sec to scatter.

Another way of saying the same thing is to say that Sec’s desire to scatter stones is a desire that tends to fulfill other desires (in this case, helping Fris to spend more time fulfilling his desire to gather stones).

When I speak of this state where there are different desires that work well together, I say that the desires are in ‘harmony’. It is like the coherence theory of belief. However, desires fit together differently than beliefs. A desire to gather stones fits harmoniously with another’s desire to gather stones together. Whereas a belief that gathering stones has intrinsic merit while scattering stones is a waste of life does not fit coherently with another’s belief that scattering stones has intrinsic merit and gathering stones is a waste of life.

This is one of the problems with ‘intrinsic value’ theories of value. It gets in the way of establishing harmonious desires. It says, “Either (1) you must value (desire) what I value, (2) you are evil for intentionally bringing about that which is intrinsically bad, or (3) you are sick in the sense that your desires are perverse and realize things that have no intrinsic merit.” Rejecting intrinsic values means that we have an opportunity to set up harmonious desires where different people desire different things – things that tend to fulfill the desires of others – without being denigrated for their differences.

Eenauk’s objection is that in order to recommend that Fris give Sec the blue pill, I need to introduce a (moral) principle of ‘should create a state of harmony among the desires’. This moral principle is what recommends to Fris that he give Sec the blue pill. Without this moral principle, Fris would not know what to do.

I hold that this principle is entirely unnecessary. Fris wants to gather stones. If he gives Sec the blue pill, he will be able to spend all of his time gathering stones. If, on the other hand, he gives Sec the yellow pill he will continue to be able to spend only half of his time gathering stones. He has more and stronger reasons to give Sec the blue pill than the yellow pill. A state of harmonious desires is what results from this decision. However, I do not need a moral principle of ‘thou shalt bring about a state of harmonious desires’ to bring this about.

All I need is the reasons for action that exist.

Let us imagine that this society has grown. There are now some large number of people with a desire to gather stones, and a large number of people with a desire to scatter stones. Now, we introduce yet another person in this society and we give the community the option of feeding this new person a yellow pill or a blue pill. How difficult would it be for this community with countless desires to decide which pill to feed this person?

It would not be difficult at all. All we would need to do is to look at the community and ask, “Is there more work being done gathering stones, or scattering stones?” Assume that, in this community, most of the stones are gathered together and, as soon as a stone gets scattered, there is a fight to see who can gather it. This suggests that the community needs more stone-scatterers, which means giving the newcomer the blue pill. If, instead, almost all of the stones are scattered and as soon as two stones are gathered together there is a fight to see who scatters it, then this suggests that the community needs more stone gatherers.

In the former case, the community has more and stronger reasons to give the newcomer a desire to scatter stones (feed him the blue pill). In the latter case, the community has more and stronger reasons to give the newcomer a desire to gather stones (feed him the yellow pill).

I still do not need a moral principle that says, ‘thou shalt bring about a state of harmonious desires in the community’. The members of this community do not even need to have a concept of harmony to know that there are more and stronger reasons to give the newcomer the blue pill (in the first instance) or the yellow pill (in the second). This concept of ‘harmony’ is simply some word that somebody eventually invents when he wants to talk about a state where the desires to gather stones are in balance with the strengths of the desires to scatter stones – when stones are gathered and scattered at nearly equal rates.

In fact, this system can even be applied to a group of animals. A new pup is born into this community. Assume that this pup is born into a community with more stone gatherers than stone scatterers. As the pup attempts to gather stones, he is hissed at and snarled at by others who are competing for the few rocks that there are to gather. On the other hand, when he scatters stones he gets none of this negative feedback. In fact, the stone gatherers reward and encourage him. This community is, in effect, feeding the young pup the blue pill.

Yet, this community does not even have a concept of ‘thou shalt’ – let alone the capacity to let it influence their actions.

When the question comes up, “Can there be a moral system among animals,” I answer that there can be. All it takes is a system of ‘rewarding’ those who fulfill the desires (with grooming, sex, the sharing of food, play) and the ‘condemning’ of those who thwart the desires of others (through snarls, hisses, a swipe across the nose, and other threats). Animals can very well ‘promote desires that tend to fulfill other desires, and inhibit desires that tend to thwart other desires’ in this way without having even a concept of good and evil.

In fact, I would suggest that this is where morality came from. I would suggest that humans had a concept of morality long before they were able to even dream up the concept of God because, even as animals, they were using praise and condemnation to promote desires that tended to fulfill other desires and inhibit desires that tended to thwart other desires. They converted this practice into language by adding the concepts of ‘good’ and ‘evil’. Then, much later, they added the concept of ‘god’ and mucked the whole thing up.

However the historical concept works out, it’s still the case that I do not need “a desire to be [harmonious]” or a moral principle, “thou shalt create a harmony of desires.” I only need the reasons for action that exist. Those reasons for action themselves are enough to motivate acts that tend to their fulfillment, which means that they are sufficient to generate acts that establish a harmony of desires.

Church and State

I wonder, sometimes, if any reader has noticed a curious absence in the posts that I have submitted to this blog. Though I speak frequently about the relationship between religion and morality, I have not yet written, nor have I even used the argument, that something is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ in virtue of the principle of separation of church and state.

The closest argument that I have given relating to this separation is a counter to the claim that, “If you do not mention God (e.g., in biology class, in the context of evolution), then this is the same as promoting atheism.” This inference, of course, is absurd. It is the same as saying that, “If I do not tell you what color my car is, then this is the same as saying that my car is transparent.” In other words, if I ask you what color your car is, and you refuse to answer, this is not the same as saying that your car has no color.

But this is a far cry from arguing for separation of church and state.

When I argue against “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance, my argument is only loosely connected to the separation of church and state. My argument is that “under God” has been placed in the Pledge in such a way that it denigrates and insults all who are not “under God” by equating them with rebels (not indivisible), tyrants (not with liberty), and moral criminals (not with justice for all).

My argument against including “In God We Trust” is that this motto says, This motto states that the most important principle that a country can stand for – that a person can fight and die for – is the principle that the nation’s population should be divided between an included and accepted ‘we’ who trust in God, and a group of ‘they’ or ‘those who do not truly belong here’ who do not. Not only is this principle not the most important principle to live and die for, it happens to be a principle that no fair and just person could embrace at all.

Recently, at the atheist ethicist journal, I argued against inserting religious messages into graduation ceremonies and the like, not because of ‘separation between church and state’, but because ‘people who come to these ceremonies do so to celebrate their child’s graduation, not to be preached at by somebody who has beliefs that they do not share.” I used a standard, “Do unto others” argument to illustrate that no Christian would tolerate having an atheist preach to them about the futility of believing in a “sky daddy” – and that they are hypocritical to demand and even celebrate that which they would condemn if done by others.

In an earlier post, “Intolerable religion,” I distinguished between morality (that which is not optional and, thus, may be forced on everybody) from religious culture (that which is optional and should not be forced on anybody). I argued for an interpretation of the moral principle behind the First Amendment as stating that the government shall not impose religious culture on others nor should it interfere with the free exercise of religious culture - unless that religious culture is immoral (it is a religion that calls upon its subjects to do harm to others). Immoral religious culture may be – must be – restricted, or we give a religion the legal right (never a moral right) to harm others with impunity.

I would not argue against a practice of imposing religious culture through force of law because it violates the First Amendment. I would argue against it on the basis that it violates the moral principle that the government shall neither require nor prohibit practices that which are neither morally obligatory nor morally prohibited respectively – such as telling people when to eat, when to pray, what church to go to, or whether to go to church at all.

This is not, strictly speaking, an argument for the separation of church and state. It is an argument for the separation of religious culture and state based on a moral distinction between that which is obligatory, permissible, and prohibited. ‘Religious culture’ here is simply defined as ‘that which does not fall in the category of obligatory or prohibited but which, instead, properly fits the moral category of ‘permissible’.’

The reason that I have not argued in defense of a strict separation between church and state is because I have never been able to make sense of this separation – let alone argue for it.

Imagine a person who truly believes that if this country does not condemn homosexuals or abortion, that God will inflict terrible punishment upon us, killing countless people and harming others. This person sits in the legislature, and is being asked to vote on legislation that will make homosexual acts and abortion illegal, punishable (each) by death. Asking this person to vote against these laws is like asking him to condemn countless people to death and suffering. Telling this person not to act on his religious beliefs is, simply, pure nonsense.

In short, I have not seen an account of ‘the separation of church and state’ that does not ultimately turn out to be ‘a separation of belief and action’. Saying that an individual should act contrary to what he believes to be the best act is simply demanding a little too much.

Along these lines, I think that if a politician believes that atheists are fools, and he says this, that the fault is not actually that he said it, but that he believes it. The person who would say such a thing is a person who has been turned by his religion into an arrogant bigot who has just shown that is arrogance is entirely unfounded. When others speak up to condemn his statement, the objection should not be, “It is okay to believe such a thing – as long as you do not say it out loud” The problem (at least for a political candidate) is that no person stupid and bigoted enough to believe such a thing is qualified to hold public office.

This type of person simply should not be made a part of any real-world legislature. He is another example of a person who has been made a threat to the well-being of others because he has been trained to believe something that is not true and to hate those who do not deserve hate. His is like a person who has come to believe that arsenic in the drinking water is an important health measure. The remedy is not to say that he should not act on this belief. The remedy is to make sure that nobody who has this belief ends up serving in the legislature, where is superstition or (other form of) stupidity will put the health and well-being of good people at risk.

For these same reasons, I do not object to any teacher telling his or her students his or her religious beliefs. If a teacher says, “I am a Muslim,” there is no fault in the fact that she has informed her students of what is actually a fact about the real world. If she is a Muslim, and the children learn that the proposition, “The teacher is a Muslim” is true, then the students have learned another fact about the real world and are better informed because of it. The same is true of a teacher who says, “I believe that Jesus is our savior and that nobody gets to heaven but through Him,” or “I believe that there is no God and an indifferent universe is just as willing to kill us all as let us live – unless we take care of ourselves and each other.”

However, I am not saying that a teacher has a right to teach nonsense to a child. The problem with a teacher trying to convince students that evolution has flaws it does not have, or that the Earth can be no more than 6,000 years old, or that all homosexuals and adulterers shall be put to death, is that this person is not teaching. Her students are not becoming smarter, nor are they becoming better people. Instead, she is making them a threat to others both by making them too stupid to make intelligent decisions and to filled by hate to lead a good life.

Of course, people will disagree over what counts as ‘truth’ or what counts as an education. However, these are not issues that should be swept under the rug with a promise not to talk about them. They are issues that should be debated in the open. It might even do the children some good to realize that there is a debate and that there are sides to take.

I oppose placing the 10 Commandments in public buildings, not because it violates the separation of church and state, but because its principles are objectionable. The Commandments, when taken in context, invites citizens to kill those who worship other Gods , violate the Sabbath, or take the Lord’s name in vain. Putting these documents in public buildings is an invitation to go to the Bible and find out their context. Going to the Bible and finding their context means promoting a view where violators shall be executed. If you do not support the execution of people who worship other gods, work on the Sabbath, or take the Lord’s name in vain, then you cannot in good conscience support others putting teaching children to accept this view.

In other words, the problem with the 10 Commandments is not that they are religious. The problem is that the principles they advocate are principles no good person can accept. They are the products of a primitive and ill-informed culture that had as poor an understanding of the difference between right and wrong as they did of science. These displays are appropriate in a display of the history of morality – the way that an ancient anatomy text is appropriate in a display on the history of medicine. But it is as insane to to argue that we, today, should follow those practices as it is to say that modern medicine should follow the practices in that ancient text – ignoring everything we have learned since then.

I fear that constantly objecting to these policies on the basis of ‘separation of church and state’ will serve only to promote a general hatred of the idea that church and state are to be kept separate, and an endorsement of the idea that church and state were not meant to be separate. We must remember, we are dealing with people who can sweep aside the mounds of evidence against a young earth and in favor of evolution – they are certainly not going to have any trouble sweeping aside evidence of a secular Constitution.

I would argue in favor of focusing on what is really wrong with these proposals – and it is not the fact that they violate the principle of separation of church and state. It is that they are primitive ideas of both science and morality that belong back in the dark ages if not before.

At least, in this blog, I have already stated that I am not interested in political strategies. I am interested in what is right and wrong in fact. I do not find what is right or wrong in fact in terms of violating a principle of separation of church and state. I find a what is right and wrong in fact by looking to see of the laws are founded on true beliefs and good desires. Those that fail this test should be discarded regardless of which side of the church/state wall they fall upon.

The Insignificance of 'Morality'

Today, I want to give some emphasis to something that I added to yesterday’s post, and which played a role in a response that I gave to Atheist Observer to days ago.

Typically, somebody who writes about morality is anxious to assert that their theory can be the only true account of morality, and that no other use of the term ‘morality’ is legitimate. In contrast, I hold that language is an invention, what is true of things in the world does not depend on what we call them, so I do not care if somebody decides to use the term ‘morality’ in some way other than the way that I use it.

Let’s look at the propositions that provide the foundation for desire utilitarianism.

(1) Desires exist.

(2) Desires are the only reasons for action that exist.

(3) Desires are propositional attitudes.

(4) People seek to realize states of affairs in which the propositions that are the objects of their desires are true.

(5) People act to realize states of affairs in which the propositions that are the object of their desires are true, given their beliefs – meaning that false or incomplete beliefs may thwart their desires.

(6) Some desires are malleable.

(7) Desires can, to different degrees, tend to fulfill or thwart other desires. That is, they can contribute to realizing the propositions that are the objects of other desires true, or contribute to preventing the realization of those propositions.

(8) To the degree that a malleable desire tends to fulfill other desires, to that degree people generally have reason to promote or encourage the formation and strength of that desire. To the degree that a malleable desire tends to thwart other desires, to that degree people generally have reason to inhibit or discourage the formation and strength of that desire.

(9) The tools for promoting or inhibiting desires include praise, condemnation, reward, and punishment.

I have given these propositions without once using the term ‘morality’ or even the term ‘value’. Ultimately, it does not matter whether people actually do take this set of propositions, wrap them up in a package, and call them ‘morality’ or give them some other name. None of that affects the question of whether these propositions are true or false. It simply does not matter, ultimately, how a person wants to use the term ‘morality’ because it does not affect whether the things that I say above are true or false, or the implications of what follows from these propositions if they are true.

I would further assert that value-laden terms including moral terms carry with them assumptions about reasons for action. To say that a state of affairs is ‘good’ means that there exists some reason for action to realize such a state, and to call it ‘bad’ is to say that there are reasons for action for avoiding such a state.

People assert the existence of reasons for action other than desires – such as ‘God’s will’ or ‘intrinsic merit’. However, these ‘reasons for action’ do not exist. Because they do not exist, all statements that assert a reason for action grounded on God’s will or intrinsic value or some other form of desire-independent reason for action are false. They are not a matter of opinion.

Claims about desire-independent reasons for action are not ‘subjectively true’. Either these desire-independent reasons for action exist, or they do not. If they exist, then a theory that makes use of them should be able to do a better job of explaining and predicting intentional action. If a theory that makes use of them fails to do a better job of explaining and predicting intentional action, then by virtue of Occam’s Razor, we can eliminate them from our ontology.

It is true that a person can claim that some action X serves God’s will, and then act to realize X. However, we can adequately explain this type of behavior by asserting that the agent has a desire to serve God, and a belief that doing X serves God. However, in this case, the agent can never fulfill his desire, because he can never realize a state in which the proposition, “I am serving God” is true. He can only realize a state that he falsely believes is a state in which “I am serving God” is true. This means that such an agent cannot actually fulfill a desire – cannot actually realize something that has value. He can only falsely believe that he has realized a state that has value.

This account is still fully consistent with the claim that desires are the only reasons for action that actually exist. What motivates the agent’s action, in this case, is a desire to serve God and a false belief that doing X will serve God. The desire to serve God is a genuine reason for action that exists. However, it does not recommend any real-world action because no real-world action can actually realize a state where ‘I am serving God” is true.

If somebody wishes to assert that ‘morality’ attaches to something else, I will respond by asking, “In calling that moral, are you saying that there are reasons for action for realizing that which you call ‘moral’ or preventing the realization of that which ou call ‘immoral’? If you are, then I am going to ask you to demonstrate that the reasons for action that you are talking about actually do exist. If they do not exist, then your claim that there are reasons for action for realizing what you call ‘moral’ or for avoiding the realization of what you call ‘immoral’ is, quite simply, false. If they do exist . . . well, I would like to see an argument for the existence of reasons for action other than desires.

If you are claiming that in calling something ‘moral’ or ‘immoral’ you are not saying anything about what we should realize or prevent from being realized, then I am going to accuse you, at best, of inventing a new language and, at worse, of uttering nonsense. I could take you at your word – and say that because no ‘reasons for action exist’ for bringing about what you call ‘moral’ then the fact that something is ‘moral’ is unimportant. You cannot coherently insist that I bring about that where there exists no reason for me to bring about.

If, on the other hand, in calling something ‘moral’ you are saying that there are reasons for action for bringing it about, and in calling something ‘immoral’ you are saying that there are reasons for action to prevent its realization, I am going to ask you to demonstrate that those reasons for action are, themselves, real.

If you can’t meet this challenge and show that your reasons for action are real, then I am going to assert that your claim that there are reasons for action for bringing about that which you call ‘moral’ are false. If you can demonstrate that there are reasons for action that are real . . . well, I’m going to assert that you must be referring to desires, since desires are the only reasons for action that exist. If you are talking about malleable desires, then I get to ask questions about whether there are reasons for action for promoting or inhibiting those desires.

Desires that tend to fulfill other desires matter because reasons for action exist for promoting the occurrence and strength of desires that tend to fulfill other desires. Desires that tend to thwart other desires matter because reasons for action exist for inhibiting the occurrence and strength of desires that tend to thwart other desires. These ‘reasons for action’ are the desires fulfilled or thwarted. So, I do not face a problem at least in theory, when it comes to answering the challenge, “Do reasons for action exist for promoting that which you call ‘moral’ or inhibiting that which you call ‘immoral’?” I don’t need to use the word ‘moral’ for any of this.

Where those reasons for action exist, they exist whether we use the term ‘moral’ or not. Whether to attach the term ‘moral’ is not relevant to the whether the proposition is true or false. What matters is whether ‘reasons for action exist’ for realizing that which the speaker says should be realized, or for avoiding the realization of that which we are being told to avoid realizing. What doesn’t matter is what terms are used to refer to these facts.

Who Gets to Decide?

Who gets to decide?

I often encounter this question in moral debate, typically from somebody who claims that the difficulty in answering this question provides some sort of benefit to his position. Who gets to decide whether a particular speech counts as hate speech? Who gets to decide whether a religion is good or bad? Who gets to decide whether a group is responsible for some moral crime?

In logic terms, “Who gets to decide?” questions almost always commit the fallacy of complex question – like, “Do you still beat your wife?” The question itself contains a number of assumptions. Those assumptions generally turn out to be false.

To bring those assumptions into the light, imagine somebody asking the question, “Who gets to decide the chemical composition of a water molecule? Who gets to decide the age of the earth? Who gets to decide whether humans evolved or were designed? Who gets to decide whether God exists? Who gets to decide God’s powers?”

The answer to these questions is, “Nobody does. There is a fact of the matter, and either we get that fact right, or we get the fact wrong.”

I am a moral realist. Nobody gets to ‘decide’ what the moral facts are. There is a fact of the matter, and either we get those facts right, or we get them wrong.

Now . . . stop right there!

Somewhere out in the studio audience somebody is thinking, “Here we go again. Some self-important writer thinks that he has the capacity to prove the existence of intrinsic moral values. Sorry, but intrinsic moral values do not exist, and arguments for their existence always turn out to be as twisted and convoluted as arguments for the existence of God. Go ahead. Give it a shot. You’re going to fail.”

Well, I would like to thank this person for being so open minded. But, in spite of the fact that this individual has already made up his mind, here goes:

Intrinsic moral values do not exist. Arguments for the existence of intrinsic moral values always turn out to be as convoluted and twisted as arguments for the existence of God. I have no argument for the existence of intrinsic moral values – and I do not think that any exist.

The aforementioned member of the studio audience would probably respond to this by saying, “Wait a minute. You said you were a moral realist.”

I am.

I deny that moral realism requires intrinsic-value realism. There are a lot of things in the universe that are real. Only a very small subset of them are ‘intrinsic properties’. My viw on the nature of value is:

(1) Value is a relational property.

(2) Relational properties are real.

Take, for example, the property “1 meter away from”. This is not an intrinsic property. You cannot study A in isolation – independent of everything else in the universe, and determine whether (or what) it is 1 meter away from. You can only do this by looking at A, in relationship to B.

Yet, scientific papers and reports are filled with claims about the distance of things. Angstroms, meters, kilometers, light years, are all units of measurement that are fully accepted in peer-reviewed scientific journals. Yet, none of these terms refer to an intrinsic property.

Value is a relational property. Value statements are statements that relate A to B.

Furthermore, one of the entities that value claims relate are mental states. Specifically, they relate objects of evaluation to desires – at least when they are true. Actually, value claims relate objects of evaluation to reasons for action, but desires are the only reasons for action that exist. Therefore, only value claims that relate objects of evaluation to desires are true. All other value claims are false – because the reasons for action they refer to do not exist.

This is consistent with the claim that, “If there were no people, then nothing would have any value.” This proposition is often offered as proof that value is not a real property – that value is ’subjective’.

However, if there were no people, then the number of people in the world will be zero. This certainly does not prove that people are not real. People are real. All of the real-world properties of people are real. The fact that these facts would be different in a universe without people does not imply that, in a world with people, they are not facts – that they are not real.

So, desires are real. Objects of evaluation are real. The relationships between desires and objects of evaluation are real. They can be studied. We can make true and false claims about them. We can study them scientifically. This means that we can study value scientifically.

I am a value realist. However, I am not an intrinsic value realist. I am hold that value exists in the form of relationships between states of affairs and desires. However, these relationships between states of affairs and desires are real. Nobody gets to ‘decide’ what those relationships are. We get to discover them, the same way we discover the distance between different objects.

I have so far spoken about value in general. Moral value is a species of the genus ‘value’. As a member of the genus ‘value’, morality shares the quality of being concerned with states of affairs and reasons for action – of which desires are the only reasons for action that exist. However, as a species within that genus, it is concerned with a subset of those relationships.

My argument has been that morality is concerned with the subset that consists of (1) states of affairs in which certain malleable desires are made more or less common and/or more or less powerful, and (2) other desires. In other words, morality is concerned with ‘reasons for action’ for promoting or inhibiting malleable desires, promoting those malleable desires that we have reasons-for-action to promote, and inhibiting those malleable desires that we have reasons-for-action to inhibit.

On making this claim, a standard follow-up question tends to be, “Who gets to decide whether morality is concerned with these relationships between malleable desires and other desires or something else?”

The answer to this question is, “It doesn’t matter what you decide. Deciding what to call things does not affect what they are.”

Desires exist. Desires are the only reasons for action that exist. Some desires are malleable. There are real-world ‘reasons for action’ that promoting some desires and inhibiting others. These are all real-world facts. Call these facts whatever you want, this changes nothing. The answer to the question, “What malleable desires are there reasons-for-action to promote and inhibit?” does not change.

Who gets to decide whether people generally have reasons to promote or inhibit certain malleable desires?

Nobody.

From here, I tend to get two further questions. I have already answered them elsewhere, so I would like to simply refer to reader to those answers.

First question: Are you saying that if somebody desires to harm other people, that this means that it is good to harm other people?. Answer: The question of whether a desire to do something that harms others is good or bad is a question about whether the desire tends to fulfill or thwart other desires. Desires to do things that harm others are desires that thwart other desires – so they are not good. For more, see “The 1,000 Sadists Problem.”

Second Question: What if I don’t care about fulfilling the desires of others? Why should I want to do so? The answer here is that this is a poorly formed question. To see why, please go to, “The Hateful Craig Problem.”

More on Group Responsibility

A member of the studio audience, Sheldon, has encouraged me twice in recent weeks to reconsider a part of my position on ‘group responsibility’. In order to add force to his remarks, Sheldon has pointed out where I have spoken in terms of ‘group responsibility’. Another member of the studio audience, Atheist Observer, also is keen to point out my occasional lapses in this regard. Martino also has questions about this distinction.

My position, by the way, has been that when it comes to moral sanctions (condemnation and punishment) that those sanctions can only legitimately be assigned to individuals based on individual conduct. Condemning or punishing ‘groups’ means punishing the innocent with the guilty, which is unjust. The only exception I allow is when a group is defined in terms of a particular wrong – groups like ‘liars’, ‘murderers’, ‘rapists’, ‘sophists’.

Sheldon responds:

[I]t seems to be an unavoidable fact that people act collectively, as groups at various scales from the micro to the macro. There does seem to be cases where at some level there is group responsibility. Where it gets fuzzy and difficult is toward the macro end that includes ethnic groups and societies.

I dealt with one possible interpretation of this argument yesterday where I argued against the inference, “X is a part of our nature that we will never be completely rid of; therefore, we ought not to take a moral stand against X.” I used the examples of rape and racism as things we will probably never be rid of, but which we still have reason to condemn.

However, Sheldon seems to be making a different point – that ‘groups’ behave differently than individuals (or individuals behave differently in groups than they do on their own), and that it would be a mistake for society to fail to apply moral concepts to the actions of groups.

To illustrate his point he calls forth one of my own claims. The people of Iraq are the wrongdoers fully responsible for the denigration of their society. The context of this statement is my argument against blaming Bush for the violence in Iraq. Bush may well be responsible for not anticipating the violence, but the decision to engage in violence was made by individuals in Iraq. The could have chosen to respond differently, but they did not. Bush is guilty of intellectual recklessness. The people in Iraq who choose to engage in and support this violence are guilty of far worse.

Sheldon accepts that my statement should not be interpreted as assigning ‘deserves condemnation or punishment’ to every person in Iraq. Rather, the statement should be interpreted as saying that, even though some Iraqi may be innocent (particularly the young children), a lot of Iraqi are guilty, and I have no capacity to name them. So, I identify the guilty by description. ‘Iraqi who choose to engage in and support this violence.’

Yet, I do not only blame individuals for this. I attribute this love of violence to a cause – to a culture of ‘group responsibility’ and ‘revenge’. The culprit rests with those people who helped to create and support this culture. Iraqi culture itself must change from one of ‘group responsibility’ and ‘revenge’ to ‘individual responsibility’ and ‘justice’ if there is to be peace. Every individual in Iraq has a moral obligation to support this end.

Assigning moral obligations to a group is hardly unwarranted. Indeed, one of the hallmarks of a moral principle is that it must be universal – it must apply to everybody. Therefore, moral obligations are inherently applied to groups. There are no exceptions based on personal identity to the prohibitions on rape, murder, theft, and the like. There may be exceptional circumstances (e.g., lying to the Nazi soldier about the hidden Jews), but those circumstances apply to any individual who might be in those circumstances.

Only, I cannot honestly say that this is the correct interpretation of the quote that Sheldon provided. I said that all Iraqi people were wrongdoers. In doing so, actually, I made a mistake – the statement is not accurate as written. It would be more accurate to say that the people of Iraq share a moral responsibility to build a culture of individual responsibility and justice. It is a responsibility that a few Iraqi people might actually be taken seriously (though they are too few in number and too weak to be noticed), but which many (and, in particular, many with access to weapons) are openly disregarding.

Martino wants to add a consideration for political parties.

I could also add to Sheldon's comments what about political parties which are designed to have some form of collective or group responsibility? In most electoral systems you are voting for the party even if you are actually voting for a specific individual.

I am going to have to agree with Martino that there is an exception here. The exception applies to groups with voluntary membership who have some sort of policy or statement of purpose.

On this count, Sheldon could probably find instances in which I held ‘Exxon Mobile’ morally responsible for a campaign of disinformation with respect to global warming. Given the amount of destruction that will likely result of this campaign (the United States alone will – according to scientists – inevitably now lose the land area equivalent to the state of West Virginia), that this campaign of deception is morally comparable to the Holocaust and Stalin’s Purges – done simply for the sake of profit. Any person who remained in voluntary association with Exxon Mobile while it pursued these policies is morally responsible for that outcome. They could have broken that voluntary association at any time, and did not.

The same is true with political parties, Al Queida, or any other voluntary organization. In these cases, it would be entirely appropriate to condemn the organization by condemning the positions that it officially endorses, and by condemning any and all individuals who support the organization in the pursuit of those ends. It does not matter that there are people who call themselves ‘Republicans’ who are in favor of gay rights. It is still the case that the official Republican position is opposition to gay rights, and those who support the Republican Party support this campaign of opposition.

Being black or white, male or female, American or European, are not voluntary-membership organizations. The fact that it is possible to change one’s gender or move to another country introduces some measure of volunteerism to gender and nationality. However, the cost here is so high that, for all practical purposes, extremely few people have a choice in the matter.

On the question of sexual orientation, it may well be the case that membership in the group, “People with a desire to have sex with others of the same gender,” is not voluntary. However, membership in the group, “People who intentionally engage in homosexual acts” is voluntary – so long as the act of having sex is an intentional act.

Membership in a religion (or, perhaps more appropriately, a church) is usually voluntary. Consequently, individuals within a particular church can be held accountable for church doctrine. If they do not like it, then they can leave. I say, “usually voluntary” because in some cultures and some countries choosing membership in a different church (or no church at all) carries costs at least as high as that of changing gender or nationality. In these cases, it is not fair to condemn those who were coerced into a religion for that religion’s practices.

Even where membership in a religion is voluntary, and members can be held accountable for the policies and practices of the church they choose to belong to, it would still be unjust to hold the individuals in one church responsible for the misdeeds of members of some other church. It is unfair and unjust to walk up to an Amish farmer, point to a picture of 9/11, and shout, “See what you did! You should be ashamed of yourself!”. On the other hand, anybody who remains associated with a religious organization that participated in or praised 9/11 deserves condemnation on those grounds.

However, nobody deserves condemnation on the grounds of joining a group that has something else in common with groups supporting the 9/11 attack that does not directly imply supporting the 9/11 attack. This means expanding the list of those who are guilty for the attacks to ‘all those who believe in a god’. That would be another example, applied to groups, of blaming the innocent.

Religion and the Possibility of Change

In an article that I read today, Should Science Speak to Faith in Scientific American, Richard Dawkins and Laurence Kraus discussed how scientists should approach the issue of faith. Kraus wrote about the value of reaching out to people of faith to get them interested in science, while Dawkins saw faith and science to be substantially incompatible and contradictory.

One view that Kraus defended was that religious belief is inevitable, so that we must learn to live with it.

Rejecting the Inevitable

I want to get rid of the notion that simply because something is an inevitable part of our society does not mean that we need to put it in the category of ‘morally permissible’. I sincerely doubt that we are going to get rid of rape or racism. Barring any type of extremely intrusive intervention that currently exists only in the realm of science fiction, there will be people who will rape others; and there will be people who will denigrate others on account of race.

However, nobody would take seriously the claim that since rape and racial bigotry will always be a part of our society that, therefore, we must learn to tolerate rape and racial bigotry. No argument that it is ‘within our nature’ to rape and to judge others on the basis of race will make it morally permissible to do so.

By the way, desire utilitarianism takes account of this. The purpose of morality is to use the tools of praise and condemnation to create or promote good desires and to weaken and eliminate bad desires. The question to be asked in desire utilitarian terms is not whether rape or bigotry is a part of our nature. The question to ask is whether we can, and whether we have reason to, weaken this part of our nature or cover it up through social forces such as praise, condemnation, reward, and punishment. It appears quite reasonable to believe that the desires that lead to rape and bigotry will be stronger and more widely spread in a culture that tolerates these attitudes, compared to a society that condemns them.

In short, some 'false belief' may be inevitable, but that does not mean that we lack the ability to influence its degree, even if we cannot eliminate it entirely.

Possible Objection

I suspect that somebody might object to the section above by claiming, “How dare you compare religion to rape and bigotry!”

As a matter of fact, I did compare religion to rape and bigotry. What I did was reduce the argument, “X is something that we can never be rid of; therefore, we should learn to live with X and tolerate those who engage in X,” to an absurdity. I introduced the two obvious cases of X that meet the criterion of being something that we cannot be rid of in order to show that it does not follow that we should accept and learn to live with those who do X.

The question still remains as to whether religious belief falls into the same category as these other items. That is the issue that I turn to next.

Intellectual Integrity and Responsibility

Before addressing Kraus’ specific claim, I want to look at the more general moral obligation to intellectual integrity and responsibility.

There is a duty that is particularly strong where the well-being of others is at stake for a person to accept a certain measure of responsibility for his beliefs. Particularly when his beliefs drive him to do actions that are harmful to others, a moral appreciation for the fact that one is considering doing harm means that a person of good moral character will take that harm seriously and avoid it unless the facts leave him no other choice. He will not hold beliefs that would drive him to do harm to others recklessly.

The whole branch of morality known as ‘due process’ is built on this foundation. The obligation to do no harm unless the need for harm has been demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt, for the accused to have the opportunity to argue in his own defense and to present witnesses that he is not, in fact, deserving of this harm. Those who do not accept these principles are people who are too casual about the harms they inflict for civil society. Those who accept an argument for doing harm to others too casually are, by this fact, showing that they are evil. They lack qualities that we have reason to promote in others.

This obligation is built upon a premise that good people would be averse to causing harm to others. This aversion will cause a good person to stop, to think twice, and to say at times, “I do not know, and the benefit of the doubt rests with those that I would have otherwise harmed.”

One unquestionable fact is that we will always have to deal with false beliefs. As long as humans are alive, at least one will believe that a proposition is true. False beliefs would fit Kraus’s category of something that will always exist.

However, in spite of this fact, we have reason to reduce the overall incidence of false belief. People seek to create states of affairs that fulfill their desires. However, they act so as to create states of affairs given their beliefs. If all of their beliefs were true and complete, all of their actions would be successful. However, ignorance gets in the way of success, preventing people from realizing states that they desire to realize, and often hurting others in the process.

So, rational people have reason to set up institutions that promote morally responsible behavior when it comes to examining beliefs and that encourage people to reject beliefs that lead to harm to others unless the evidence in favor is overwhelming. Those who refuse to do so remain a threat to others, promoting false belief and intellectual irresponsibility that leads to harm.

So, we can accept this modified version of Kraus’s statement – false beliefs will always be among us, with accepting his conclusion that we must accept false beliefs and deny that there is any moral transgression involved in forming false beliefs.

The Criteria of Harm and Efficiency

At this point, it is important to note that I have built this argument on a concept of harm. Moral responsibility requires that agents review those beliefs that would make the agent a threat to the well-being of others if they were to be adopted. It is extremely difficult to make a similar argument when the false beliefs are relatively harmless. If a belief is a belief that poses no threat to others, then what reason to others have for being concerned with whether or not the agent adopts that belief?

This, then, argues in favor of a sort of belief-triage. Reason (rationality, ‘the wise thing to do’) suggests looking at the range of false beliefs that people have and tackling those that (1) do a great deal of harm, and (2) can be efficiently battled. Focusing on these beliefs means preventing the most harm with the least amount of input (saving input to be applied against other evils. This means ignoring those false beliefs that are too strongly seated to be removed, and ignoring those false beliefs that are trivial in that those who hold them are in no way a threat to others. It means dealing with these beliefs as a side effect of dealing with the easily changed roots of the most harmful actions.

Ultimately, this was the position Kraus was arguing for - focusing on the worst of religion the most effective way possible, and dealing with the rest of it later to the degree necessary to secure our future safety and happiness.

Disagreement in Detail

Of course, people will disagree about which patients can be saved (which false beliefs can be easily eliminated) and how much effort it will take to save them (by eliminating those false beliefs). There will be instances where one triage expert will count a patient as ‘beyond savoing’ that another will think can be easily saved.

Yet, this argument does give us a set of criteria for looking at those disputes, and a checklist for looking at which arguments and which data are relevant. What we are looking for in these cases is evidence for and against the propositions, (1) belief X causes people to behave in ways that make them a threat to others, and (2) belief X can be relatively easily changed at least to the point of making measurable progress against this harm.

Please note that these are empirical claims. People may have to rely on their feelings to determine if these propositions are true or false in a particular case, as long as nothing else comes along, but there are data to be sought after for people involved in such a dispute.

It would be quite interesting, I think, if the scientific-minded people in this dispute were to actually call forth their expertise to look for the evidence for and against their various positions and examine that evidence critically, just as they would do so for a paper written in their chosen professions.