Kmeson's Question: Acts and Desires

I have a bit of a flu today and my mind is in somewhat of a fog.

However, I wish to try to answer Kmeson’s question about Desire Utilitarianism;

Question: Consider two agents, A and B. Each has 10 equal desires. Each currently has 5 fully satisfied desires, and 5 unsatisfied desires. You as agent C, and desire utilitarian, have the ability to fulfill 2 of agent A's desires, at a cost of 1 of agent B's desires. You may continue to trade at a two for one ratio as much as you would like. What if any is the desire utilitarian argument against minimizing agent B's expensive desires in favor of agent A's cheap ones?

First, as Martino has pointed out in answering this question in the comments, there is a difference between “desire utilitarianism” (the right act is the act that a person with good desires would perform, where good desires are those that tend to fulfill other desires), and “desire fulfillment act utilitarianism” (the right act is the act that fulfills the most desires).

To illustrate the difference between these two theories, I wish to bring forward the answer I gave to Atheist Observer’s question on the same post (with some slight modifications to fit the context here):

Desires are persistent entities - they continue to exist through a range of choices.

Assume the following set of choices with the following options:

Choice 1a vs 1b

Choice 2a vs 2b

Choice 3a vs 3b

Choice 4a vs 4b

Choice 5a vs 5b

In each case, the A option is the option that will fulfill the more and stronger desires.

There are two possible desires.

D1 will motivate an agent to do 1a, 2a, 3a 4b, and 5a.

D2 will motivate an agent to do 1b, 2b, 3b, 4a, and 5b.

When it comes to Choice 4, desire-fulfillment act utilitarianism says to do 4a. However, the only agent who can do 4a is the agent with the Desire D2. But this agent would be thwarting a whole stack of other desires, so we do not want to encourage people to acquire desire D2. We want to encourage him to have desire D1. Which means, we want to condemn the person who will do 4a (to discourage this desire) rather than praise him.

That is to say, where desire-fulfillment act utilitarianism says that 4a is the right act, desire utilitarianism itself says 4b is the right act – the act that deserves our praise, because the person who does 4b is the better person, the person with the better desires.

Another important element we are going to introduce here is that ‘ought’ implies ‘can’ – and its corollary ‘cannot’ implies ‘it is not the case that one ought’. We are concerned here only with malleable desires – desires that we can alter through social conditioning. It is not the case that a person ought to have a desire that he cannot have.

The only type of person who will always do what (he believes to be) the best act in desire-fulfillment act utilitarian terms is a person with only one desire – to fulfill other desires. This person can have no desire for sex, aversion to pain, preference for chocolate over vanilla, fear of heights, love of adventure, or any type of love for that matter. Nobody can be this type of agent, so nobody ought to be this type of agent.

So, now we go back to Kmeson’s question.

Kmeson is asking what C should do, and is putting the option in terms of an act that will fulfill more of B’s desires than A. In other words, Kmeson is raising an objection to desire-fulfillment act utilitarianism (do that act that fulfills the most desires), not desire utilitarianism itself.

Desire utilitarianism would first look at these desires that A and B have and start to ask questions about them. By assumption, A has desires that tend to thwart other desires (the only way to fulfill A’s desires is by thwarting B’s desires). So, A has bad desires. Desire utilitarianism argues that we should be raising our children in such a way that we promote desires that tend to fulfill other desires, and inhibit desires that tend to thwart other desires. We are to use our social powers of condemnation to prevent somebody like B from coming into existence.

As I said above, desire utilitarianism only applies to desires that are malleable. So, I need to add some assumptions about malleable and fixed desires, or desire utilitarianism is not even relevant. Let us assume that B’s desires are fixed (e.g., aversion to pain), where A’s desires are malleable (e.g., desire to cause pain).

We are not going to prevent the acquisition of these desire-thwarting desires by rewarding the people who have them. If C acts so as to fulfill A’s (bad; desire-thwarting) desires, he is simply encouraging the development of these bad desires in others. He’s making the situation worse.

Instead, C should be thwarting A’s bad desires as a way of discouraging others in society from adopting these desires. In fact, C should be condemning and criticizing A himself for having these desires. In this way, C has the power of weakening these bad desires in A, creating a society where we do not have these types of conflicts.

If we reverse our assumptions and make A’s desires fixed, while B’s desires are malleable, then we have reason to condemn and criticize those who become B-like agents for acquiring desires that tend to thwart other desires. In this way, we can prevent B-like agents from coming into existence, and thus avoid the problem entirely.

If all of the relevant desires are malleable, then we can bring other issues into the equation to determine which we should promote and which we should discourage. Do any of the desires tend to fulfill other desires (e.g., a desire to exercise that preserves an agent’s ability to fulfill other desires)? Which desires can be easily molded, and which require a great deal of effort? Instead of weakening or strengthening a desire, can we change its shape by adding exceptions and qualifications?

If C is a desire utilitarian, as Kmeson says, then he is not going to be looking for the act that tends to fulfill the more and stronger desires. He is going to be looking at the desires themselves, trying to reduce the incidents of desires that can only be fulfilled by thwarting the desires of others. He is going to be looking to prevent this type of situation from even coming into existence my molding the malleable desires that people have.

Lying

It is strange that, on an ethics blog, I do not spend time on the fundamentals of morality – the basic ideas of right and wrong – such as lying.

I shall define a lie as any statement or act that an agent performs with the intention of causing another person to believe a proposition that the agent knows to be false.

Of course, sign language is a clear cut example of how a person can communicate by an action – the acts of sign language are intended as ways of communicating to others. Just as sign language is a form of communication, so is ‘looking at a book as if one is reading it’ or ‘packing one’s bags as if one is getting ready for school’ (when one intends to cut school). These are lies.

I include sophistry in the category of lying. Sophistry is the use of logical fallacies that aim to cause people to believe a proposition that the premises do not support. Global warming denialists and the tobacco lobby have proven to be particularly adept at this form of lying. Indeed, many (most? all?) public relations firms) of the world are nothing less than professional liars – people who have found a way to make money by manipulating others into believing things that the speaker (the members of the company) know not to be true, even when those that the agency is trying to convince are known to have an interest in the truth.

Lying does not include silence, even where silence causes a person to believe something that is not true. If you ask me what color my car is, and I refuse to answer, you may take my non-answer as evidence that it is red. That is your mistake, that would not be a lie on my part. Even if I knew, by my silence, that you would draw the conclusion that the car was red, I would not be lying by remaining silent. (However, if I know you have a false belief, and I exploit that false belief to my benefit and your detriment, I have committed a moral crime. However, I have not committed the moral crime of lying.)

Lying is a prima-facie wrong. By this I mean that people generally – you, dear reader, and I, and nearly everybody we meet – have many and strong ‘reasons for action’ for promoting an aversion to lying. We seek to fulfill our desires, but act so as to fulfill our desires given our beliefs. False beliefs prevent us from fulfilling our desires. A person who drinks from a glass, thinking that it contains clean water, when in fact it contains poison, is an example of somebody who suffers as a result of false beliefs.

Lying exploits this gap between the goal of bringing about a state that fulfills our desires, and the reality of acting so as to fulfill our desires given our beliefs. A liar is a parasite – somebody who seeks to alter our belief so that, while we think we are acting to fulfill our desires, the parasite has used false beliefs to divert our energies to fulfill his desires instead.

The energy companies and tobacco companies practice this form of parasitism. The give money to public relations firms whose job is to infest us with false beliefs. Those false beliefs divert energies that we would have put into securing a better future for ourselves and our children, and prompt us instead to sacrifice those interests while we put money in their bank accounts of energy and tobacco company executives instead.

So, we all have reasons to point to people who lie and say, “That type of person deserves our contempt." We have many and strong reasons to promote an aversion to lying, and one of our tools for doing so is to point to those who lie – even hypothetical people in stories and parables – and say, ‘That person is a liar, and somebody who good people will view with contempt.’ We have reason to encourage the parents of other children to teach their children not to lie, so they will not lie to our children. They have reason to encourage us to teach our children not to lie, so that our children will not lie to their children.

It is not possible for any desire to be an absolute master over all others. The aversion to lying will always sit on the scale with countless other desires that we may have. Sometimes, the aversion to lying will be outweighed by other concerns. Sometimes, the aversion to lying should be outweighed by other concerns.

There are two types of qualifications on a moral principle; ‘exceptions’ and ‘outweighings’. ‘Exceptions’ are written into a desire itself, whereas ‘outweighings’ occur when another good desire should be stronger than the desire in question. The psychological difference between an ‘exception’ and an ‘outweighing’ is that an ‘exception’ leaves no residual regret or passive guilt, whereas an ‘outweighing’ does.

For example, it is permissible to lie except to defend an innocent person from a wrongful aggressor. The Nazi soldiers come to your house asking if you know anything about a Jewish family that used to live down the street. You lie and tell them you know nothing. There should be no guilt in this. If it is permissible to shoot the Nazi soldiers to protect the Jewish family, then it is also permissible to lie to the Nazi soldiers.

An example in which a moral principle will be outweighed – imagine that some criminal is holding your daughter at knife point. He tells you to lie to the neighbor who has come to your door in order to get rid of her. You lie to your neighbor. In a morally good person, this lie should come with some regret – some guilt – because of the thwarting of the aversion to lying. However, the aversion to telling a lie is outweighed by a desire to save one’s daughter from the assailant. You owe your neighbor an apology for lying to her. At the same time, your neighbor should recognize the greater moral concern you were under and forgive your dishonesty.

You do not owe the Nazi soldiers any type of apology, nor do you need to seek the Nazi soldiers’ forgiveness. They did not deserve the truth. They deserved far worse than a lie.

So, what about the little white lies? What about the surprise birthday party, or the answer to the classic question, “Does this make me look fat?”

In all of ethics, we allow for a person to perform a prima-facie wrong, and to gain permission for the (otherwise) wrongful act after the fact. If we were in a theater, and I saw a bank of lights falling right where you were standing, I may push you out of the way. This is a prima-facie wrong of assault. However, it is reasonable for me to believe that you would want me to push you out of the way, and that you would have given me permission to do so if there were time enough to ask. I may be wrong, but, in the absence of information, and the absence of time to collect more information, I will have to find out after the fact.

Many lies are like this. They are not parasitic acts that aim to divert the victim’s energies away from fulfilling his own desires and towards fulfilling the desires of the liar. They are attempts to create a situation where (one hopes) the desires of the victim will be better fulfilled. These are the ‘white lies’ – the permissible lies.

In promoting an aversion to lying, we have good and strong reason to make sure that people are careful in their use of permissible lies. People like to rationalize – to convince themselves that a wrong is permissible by putting it in a category that it does not belong. The rapist will conceive of has act as an act of justice (she deserved it) or of charity (she liked it). Liars do the same thing – conceiving of their acts as ‘deserved’ by their victims or as ‘charity’ in that the agent was just trying to help.

The wider we make the category of permissible lies, the easier we make it for people to rationalize wrongful lies. To put some sort of barrier up against these sorts of lies, we have reason to demand that the ‘permissible liars’ be particularly careful, and that any step outside those boundaries deserves the full measure of our condemnation.

We currently live in a culture where we are not giving acts of deception nearly the level of condemnation they deserve. Because of our tolerance of the various forms of deception – of sophistry and outright lies – we have whole populations parasitically diverting the resources of good people into activities that are not in their interests.

If we were a culture that gave lying the condemnation it deserves, than emails spreading lies about political candidates would die an early death. People would be too embarrassed to send on such an email out of fear of being charged with promoting a culture of lies. Representatives who dared propose something like House Resolution 888 with its litany of lies and sophistry about the relationship between church and state would fear for their jobs as much as the representative caught sending love letters to teenage pages. Evidence that a reporter had fabricated a story would end his career, not get him hired as a host of his own show on Fox News.

Condemning liars and sophists not only requires saying, “This person is a liar and I condemn him.” People need to be reminded of why lying is such a bad thing. People need to be reminded that liars are in fact parasites. They are thieves. The person who lies to you has robbed you of your labor, your money, your effort, and your emotional concern, diverting it away from accomplishing the things you care about, and tricking you into spending them on things the liar cares about instead.

These are not good people. Yet, they have done such a good job of taking over our society that they have blinded us into realizing them for what they really are.

The Sum of All Reasons

In a comment to a different post, I received a different question about desire utilitarianism. I get this question in a number of different forms, and would like to take this opportunity to address one of those forms.

…my question is: when you say, "Furthermore, it argues against individualist subjectivism that it is all desires, not just those of the agent, that must be taken into consideration," Why MUST all desires be taken into account? What is the justification for that?

Okay, let us assume that I have given you a long column of numbers. I ask you for the sum of all of those numbers. Let us say that you decide only to add up those numbers that ended in a ‘7’, or only the first 15 numbers. The answer you give is not the right answer. It is a simple matter of fact that the sum of a column of numbers considers every number in the column, not a subset of those numbers.

Similarly, if I were to ask you for the center of population of the United States, you cannot answer that question by looking only at the people who live in New York State. You can, perhaps, give a reasonable approximation if you considered only the female population of the United States, but that is still only an approximation. It is still the case that the right answer is the answer that you would get by including the relative location of every person.

And, finally, if I were to ask you to determine the actual acceleration of a body in space and time, this is equal to the vector sum of all of the forces acting on it. If you were to arbitrarily select some subset of those forces, you will not get the right answer, unless (by chance) the forces you exclude exactly cancel each other out.

Various sets of relationships between states of affairs and desires exist. There are, for example, relationships between objects of evaluation and my desires alone. When we speak of these relationships, we speak in terms of personal preferences. For example, having sex with Jenny might be the act that fulfills the more and stronger of my own desires alone.

However, much of what we understand as morality simply cannot be reduced to statements about relationships between objects of evaluation and the desires of the agent. For example, there is no valid inference from, “I want to have sex with Jenny,” or even from, “Having sex with Jenny would fulfill the more and stronger of my desires,” to “Jenny has an obligation to have sex with me.” The concept of an ‘obligation’ has a number of elements that cannot be derived from personal preferences.

There are also relationships between objects of evaluation and some subset of desires. For example, it may well have been the case that the institution of slavery before the civil war fulfilled the more and the stronger of the desires of the slave owners. However, even here it is impossible to explain how the fact that an institution fulfills the desires of the slave owners that the slaves therefore had an obligation or a duty to serve as slaves. If the inference were valid, then how does it work?

In desire utilitarianism, value statements describe relationships between states of affairs and desires. They are descriptive in that, for true value statements, those relationships truly exist. They are prescriptive in that desires are reasons for action, so a description of the relationship between an object of evaluation and certain desires is also a prescription for those people who have the desires in question. If A is such as to fulfill desire D1, then it follows axiomatically that people with desire D1 have a ‘reason for action’ to bring about A.

From this it follows that the only way to prescribe universally – the only type of universal prescription that exists – is one that considers all desires. Excluding any desires means that one prescriptions do not apply to those people whose desires are not included – it means that one’s prescriptions are not universal.

Now, I do argue that a right action is not the action that fulfills the more and stronger desires that exist. A right action is the action that a person with good desires would perform. Of course, the concept of a good desire is a concept that excludes bad desires. Does it then follow that moral prescriptions do not apply to people with bad desires?

No, it does not. A “good desire” is a desire that tends to fulfill other desires. “Good desires” are desires that people generally, as a matter of fact, have the most and strongest reasons to encourage in others, and that others have reason to encourage in the agent. It does not allow any desire to be included or excluded on the basis of intrinsic merit, because there is no such thing as intrinsic merit. It only allows desires to be evaluated in the only way that evaluations are possible – in terms of relationships between the object of evaluation (in this case, desires) and all other desires.

So, moral claims prescribe desires for everybody. They are those desires that it makes sense for people to encourage everybody to have, or desires that it makes sense for people generally to encourage nobody to have.

Now, we have these ‘desires that it makes sense for everybody to have’. They exist, and they are real.

I do not make any claims about these desires other than that which can be objectively proved. I am not saying, ‘These desires exist, plus they have some sort of intrinsic merit that makes them worthy of being pursued or promoted.” I am only saying, “These desires exist, plus, to the degree that they tend to fulfill or thwart other desires, then to that degree those with the desires being fulfilled/thwarted have reason to encourage or discourage the adoption of these desires.”

There is a tendency to assert that I need to add something more to this – a tendency to ask, “Why should I consider all other desires?” However, “should” questions in the form, “Why should I do X?” are questions that ask, “What reasons for action exist for doing X?” A person answers a “should” question by identifying the reasons for action that exist.

However, I do not see any need to add something more to this. If a desire exists that tends to fulfill the most and the strongest of desires, and desires are the only reasons that exist, then what else do I need to say to suggest that people have reason to promote this desire? If the most and the strongest desires that exist are fulfilled by this desire, then the most and the strongest reasons for action that exist prescribe promoting this desire.

“Should” questions are questions that ask for reasons for action. The question, “Why should I do X?” simply asks, “What reasons for action exist for doing X, for not doing X, and on which side of the scale do the more and the stronger reasons exist?”

If you answer a “should” question with a reason for action that does not exist, then the answer is false. For example, somebody might believe that there is intrinsic value in doing that which is natural, or that which pleases God. They may think, for example, that there is a ‘reason against action’ to engage in homosexual acts in that the unnaturalness of the act itself generates a reason not to perform it, or that God’s displeasure generates such a reason. As a result, one might be tempted to conclude that one should not engage in homosexual acts.

However, all claims that ‘reasons for action’ can be found in intrinsic merit or in what pleases or displeases God are false. When people answer a “should” statement with a statement that refers to these types of entities – or any entities other than desires – their claims are false. It is possible that reasons for action that do exist – real reasons for action – might still recommend the same act, but certainly not for the same reasons.

Since “should” questions are questions that ask us to provide reasons for action, and desires are the only reasons for action that exist, “should” questions require that we answer by describing the object of evaluation to desires. These claims are capable of being true.

It is as much of a mistake to deny a reason for action that exists, as it is to refer to a reason for action that does not exist. If an agent asks, “Should I do X?”, and there is a reason for action for doing X, but the person who answers the question ignores this reason (and thus concludes that the agent should not do X), then that person has given a wrong answer. Referring to reasons for action that do not exist, and ignoring reasons for action that do exist, both lead to wrong answers in answering “should” questions.

When people make reference to reasons for action that do not exist, they often cause people to do that which they should not do, or convince people not to do that which they should do. False beliefs about the reasons for action that exist lead to all sorts of mistakes. The greater the mistake – the more weight one gives to reasons for action that do not exist, the more we have people who are not doing what they should be doing, or doing what they should not be doing.

There simply are facts about relationships between desires, such that some desires tend to fulfill or thwart other desires. We can pay attention to those facts or not. But, do we have reason to pay attention to those facts? We have the best possible reasons – the only reasons for action that are real, and the more and stronger reasons to pay attention to the best and worst desires.

Women and the Right to Vote

In the news today I read about a case in Mexico that directly touches on one of the subjects in yesterday’s post, the degree to which we should tolerate different types of societies.

According to an article I read on MSNBC Online, Some Mexican Women Lose Right to Vote, there are places in Mexico where women are not allowed to vote, not allowed to run for or hold public office, and not even allowed to apply for government assistance without the company of a male. This situation came about because the government has constitutional protections that allow Native Americans to live by their traditional ways.

We can easily imagine this same law applying to an institution such as slavery, where a misguided respect for traditional lifestyles suggests that we permit a slave culture to continue, regardless of its effects on slaves.

There are good reasons for demanding that women have a voice in politics.

People seek to act so as to fulfill the more and the stronger of their own desires. There are three ways in which a person acting on his own desires can, at the same time, act so as to fulfill the desires of others. Where only a subset of a community is allowed to vote, they will necessarily use that power to fulfill their own desires. The desires of those not permitted to vote will be sacrificed.

We see an instance of this in our own country regarding future generations. Future generations are not allowed to vote. As a result, we see present-day politicians on a daily basis sacrificing the interests of those who cannot vote (future generations) to the interests of those who can (future generations). We see this in the global warming issue, where the effects of greenhouse gas emissions on future generations are given little consideration in policy making.

We also see it in the national debt/deficit – which is actually nothing but a substantial wealth transfer scheme, that transfers wealth from future generations to present generations, so that present generations can spend it. It works the same way as taking somebody else’s credit card and going on a spending spree – a credit card where the owner of the card will be forced to pay the balance.

Denying women the right to threatens to put women in the position of being mere things – objects to be used in whatever way fulfills the desires of those who have political power.

This does not mean that the women will necessarily be abused. We do not give pets and other animals, or children, a say in politics because they truly are incapable of casting an intelligent vote. Yet, we still (for the most part) care for our pets and for our underage children – we are not fully inclined to sacrifice their interests for our own. The same might be true of the men in these villages.

However, we can distinguish between the case of pets and children on the one hand, and women on the other, by asking, “Who is in the best position to know what the interests of the individual are and how to protect those interests?”

In the case of pets and children, the person with strongest incentive to avoid making a mistake and the knowledge and wisdom necessary to minimize mistakes is not the pet or the child. The parent or guardian (in the vast majority of the cases) truly is the person with the best information.

In the case of women, the only way that this defense of denying women the right to vote can work is if it can be shown that men have both a better understanding of what is in the interests of women and a stronger incentive to protect the interests of women than those women have. If this is not the case (and it almost certainly is not), then we already have a case where the interests of women are being sacrificed – put in the hands of decision makers that are both, at the same time, less knowledgeable and more corruptible than the women themselves at directing their own lives.

In fact, it seems quite common for men to sacrifice the interests of women for their own pleasure, and to be quite ignorant of what is in the best interests of women.

So, if we are going to evaluate attitudes by their tendency to fulfill other desires, we can see how allowing adults to have authority over the lives of children and pets will tend to fulfill the more and stronger of all desires. However, allowing men to have authority over women, who are more knowledgeable of their own interests and less corruptible than men, will tend to thwart desires. It will tend to make women worse off.

People generally have more and stronger reasons to advocate for a global aversion to the type of situation created within these Mexican villages, than they have to advocate allowing these types of systems.

Even if there is reason to condemn the political system set up in these villages (as harming the interests of women), we still have another question to ask. Is condemnation enough, or are we permitted to meet the village’s decision to subordinate the interests of women to the interests of men with violence (e.g., criminal penalties resulting in such things as fines and imprisonment)?

In the area of freedom of speech, I allow that some claims are contemptible and worthy of condemnation. However, I also argue that it is wrong to respond to people who make those statements with anything other than words and private actions. The wrongness of the speech act does not justify punishment at the hands of the law. Is it the case that the rules where these villages deny women the right to vote fits the same model?

It does not. The reason for freedom of speech is that it is far better to counter bad ideas with the force of reason rather than the force of arms. Countering them with the force of reason gives people a better understanding of what is wrong with them and gives them reason to voluntarily refuse the bad idea, whereas force of arms aims to cause people to give up bad ideas without reason.

The situation is different when we are dealing with unequal political power. This is a case where the interests of those without power are being sacrificed for the interests of those with power. Those with the power have no incentive to change the system. People act so as to fulfill their own desires, given their beliefs. Those with power – those who are living in an environment where they can sacrifice the interests of others to fulfill their own interests – are not likely to easily yield to reason and private actions.

People in such a society have the right to claim that men have some sort of natural right to rule over women, or are inherently better at running the affairs of state than women. They have the right to say this, and the response should come in the form of words and private actions. However, once they are actively sacrificing the interests of others for their own personal benefit, there is reason to have enough power within the law to prohibit the act of sacrificing other people to one’s own benefit. There should be enough political power to prevent the act of sacrificing the interests of women for the benefit of men.

E2.0: Discussion: Reasons, Lies, and Types of Communities

This is the 13th in a new series of weekend posts taken from the presentations at the Salk Institute’s “Beyond Belief: Enlightenment 2.0.”. I have placed an index of essays in this series in an introductory post, Enlightenment 2.0: Introduction.

After Shermer’s presentation, there was a panel discussion. As can be expected, the discussion wandered over a number of different topics. In this post, I want to address three of them; (1) A disagreement over the influence of reason on emotions, (2) a misinterpretation of a statement by Dan Dennett that many theists are ‘lying through their teeth’, and (3) a conflict between Michael Shermer and Jonathan Haidt over the diversity of communities.

Disagreement 1: Reason and Emotions

One area of disagreement was between Haidt, who claimed that emotions controlled our reason (that we are disposed to determine if we like a conclusion first, and then hunt out evidence for our belief), and <>, who suggested that it is also possible for reason to control our emotions. <> brought up cognitive therapy – a form of therapy that shows that many psychological problems are caused by agents holding onto false beliefs – and that by changing the beliefs, the problems go away.

For example, a terminally shy individual may believe that others are going to laugh at or ridicule him no matter what he does. He might have acquired a tendency to form this assumption through childhood experiences. These beliefs make him anxious or afraid to deal with other people. However, they do not apply to the adult world. In fact, if he looks around, he finds that he is very seldom being ridiculed in the way that he feared, and that most adults consider the behavior he fears childish and immature. Once he forms new beliefs that accurately reflect how adults tend to interact, his anxiety goes away.

Haidt responded by saying that the emotion’s effect on reason is immediate and powerful, whereas cognitive therapy takes a great deal of time and effort. That is, the relationship between the two is that there is a 6-lane highway that goes from emotions to reason, but only a small trail that goes from reason to emotion.

Actually, Haidt did not make an apt comparison. The effect of reason on emotion is sometimes (often) as immediate and powerful as the effect of emotion on reason. If you got a phone call in the next minute saying that somebody very close to you was hurt in an automobile accident and is in the hospital in serious condition, the effect on your emotions will be immediate.

Yes, it is often difficult to change a belief that we have an emotional commitment to. We tend to rationalize and look for anything that will allow us to answer critics, no matter how nonsensical. However, it is also often difficult to change an emotional attachment that one is committed to believing.

Disagreement 2: Dennett’s Accusation of Lying

In the discussion, Daniel Dennett tried to give an explanation for the ‘white-knuckle reaction’ among some theists to the works of Dennett and the other ‘new atheists’

He argues that a person in power in a country that is on the verge of becoming a failed state has no incentive to admit that it is on the verge of becoming a failed state. He has reason to do whatever it takes to try to persuade people that it is not a failed state because, as soon as the people give up, the situation becomes much worse.

This is the theory he offers to explain why many of the critics of the New Atheists, “Lie through their teeth,” in criticizing the atheist writers.

Michael Shermer questioned Dennett’s claim that religious people are lying. Shermer states that religious people sincerely believe that Jesus was the son of God and was risen from the dead and all of the other fantastic fantasies of their favorite religion.

Dennett did not get a chance to answer that this interpretation. In fact, I do not think that the types of propositions that Shermer was listing off as propositions believed by theists are the same family that Dennett was talking about. Dennett was talking about people who misrepresented his book or the books of the other atheist misrepresenting what he and the others wrote.

For example, there are critics who condemned the four atheist authors for saying with certainty that no God exists. They answered that no atheist can know this, since no atheist has perfect knowledge. However, none of the four atheists state that the non-existence of a god is certain. They compare beliefs about the existence of God to beliefs about the existence of a tea kettle opening Mars. Nearly everybody believes that such a teakettle almost certainly does not exist. Nobody complains that these people deny an obvious truth. In fact, this argument shows that at least some of the new atheists are not only liars, but hypocrites as well. They condemn others for living by standards that they think are perfectly reason for themselves to adopt.

We see a long list of lies on House Resolution 888. Regardless of whether this Resolution passes or not, the 31 people who co-sponsored the resolution are lying through their teeth about some of the claims made on the resolution. By putting their names on this resolution they are saying that they are people who care nothing about truth. Their only interest is in political manipulation, and they are going to stand up as role models for those who want to grow up to adopt a life of deceiving others for personal gain.

Third, the new Ben Stein movie “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed” in which the producers and crew lied through their teeth to get statements from the like of Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers, then transfer those words to a context that was entirely different from the context in which they were made.

These are the cases that make sense of Dennett’s claim that many theists are reacting to the New Atheism by ‘lying through their teeth’.

Disagreement 3: The Diversity of Communities

Shermer is a libertarian, and argued in his presentation that the best way to promote peace would be to universally adopt a set of rules that promote free trade, which will then promote interdependence and good will, which will promote peace. Though this recipe has not always worked, there is reason to believe that much of the prosperity generated over the past 250 years in North America and Europe (and now in China and India) are the result of these types of changes.

Haidt argues for more diversity among communities – that Shermer’s type of community might be good for some people but simply not work for others. There is a wide variety of individual differences, and those individual differences suit different individuals for different types of communities. In order to promote human flourishing, we need to allow people to create the types of communities in which they are most comfortable.

Haidt does not get an opportunity to refine his proposal much further. He calls North Korea and abomination (though he does not say why). He does not address, at all, whether he would include in his set of diverse communities ones where homosexuals are killed outright, ones where women are stoned for adultery and whipped for being caught out with a male unescorted, ones where teachers who allow young children to name a teddy bear ‘Muhammad’ are executed, or ones where journalists who download information critical of Islam from the internet and those who convert away from Islam are sentenced to death. He does not say whether his tolerance for different people living under different rules argues in favor of one society enslaving all the blacks, another executing all of the Jews, or a third exterminating all of the native inhabitants of a land that they want (and that they believe God has given them the right) to occupy.

We do get some indication that Haidt would favor a system in which homosexuals may need to move out of communities unfriendly towards homosexuals (for religious reasons) into communities such as New York or San Francisco. We do not get any specific comment as to whether Haidt would allow communities to exclude (expel) Blacks, for example, or what one should do if there is no community for the expelled individual to go to. For example, many Jews tried to leave Europe before the Holocaust, only to be forced to remain by policies that did not allow their immigration into safer societies. The Native Americans also had nowhere to go as the Europeans drove them into smaller and smaller communities.

Ultimately, if we were going to get into the details of his proposal with Haidt, even if we accept his call for diversity, we do not know how that set of rules would differ from those that Shermer proposed.

E2.0: Michael Shermer: Tribalism and the Free Market

This is the 12th in a new series of weekend posts taken from the presentations at the Salk Institute’s “Beyond Belief: Enlightenment 2.0.”. I have placed an index of essays in this series in an introductory post, Enlightenment 2.0: Introduction.

Our next speaker is Michael Shermer, founding publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Skeptic magazine.

The problem that Michael Shermer is concerned with is not ‘religion’. Shermer is concerned with ‘tribalism’. He takes the position, discussed at the previous conference, that humans (like other primates) tend to form tribes. They tend to treat those within the tribe fairly well, but tend to be exceptionally brutal to those who are outside the tribe.

The ‘atheist/theist’ conflict is only one example of tribalism. Another example that Shermer mentioned were ‘the bloods vs. the crypts’ – a rivalry that has nothing to do with religion, but which (at times) is no less violent. We can support Shermer’s claims about tribalism by mentioning ‘the Hatfields vs. the McCoys’ or ‘the North vs the South’ or ‘the Ayrians vs the Jews’ or even the problem of soccer hooligans at European soccer matches a few years ago where fans of different teams got into violent brawls on a regular basis.

If we focus only on religion, and we ignore the broader problem of tribalism, then we are at risk of failing to make the world a better place, as we simply move the sight of the conflict from one set of claims to another.

Religion is certainly a source of tribalism, but it is one source among many.

Shermer is the founding editor of Skeptic magazine, which concerns itself with debunking all sorts of bizarre claims from Bigfoot to astrology to tarot card reading. He holds that, even though the circulation for Skeptic magazine is growing, there will never be a time when the bulk of the population is not captured by some form of magical thinking. Given that we will always be contaminated with widespread irrational belief, the trick is to come up with a system where people can believe what they want, without being a threat to others.

Shermer argued that this is accomplished through open trade. He builds a case for the maxim that, “Where trade crosses borders, armies do not.” In other words, where groups have learned to trade with each other, they develop a natural alliance and sense of trust, which is the best remedy to hostility.

This is the philosophy that has brought China into the World Trade Organization in spite of its history of civil rights abuses. China is becoming a powerful country. It has a population that is 4 to 5 times that of the United States. As such, its economic potential is enormous. The best way to keep China from becoming a belligerent threat to others, it is argued, is by opening up trade. As powerful economic interests in China become dependent on maintaining peace with the United States (as a partner in trade), they will put more and more pressure on the government to maintain that peace.

So the theory goes.

This is not a ‘law of nature’ that two tribes that are in a trade relationship with each other will never go to war. We can find several examples in which this is not the case. The American Civil War broke out between two tribes that had no trade barriers between them. The Shiite vs. Sunni conflict in Iraq, the Darfur conflict, the Balkans conflict, north Ireland, and World War II, all broke out among nations where there were no barriers restricting trade between the groups.

So, the claim is not that trade guarantees peace. The claim is that trade helps to promote peace. The situation in Europe, with its open borders and common currency, is now enjoying an era of peace, which is in stark contrast to nearly 2000 years of constant warfare. The United States of America, at this point in history, shows no sign of disintegrating into yet another civil war.

Insofar as we are disposed towards in-group loyalty and out-group hostility, we would be wise to pick the right in-groups and the right out-groups. Murderers, rapists, thieves, liars, and sophists make perfectly useful groups of ‘them’ for ‘us’ to target. Indeed, anybody who exhibits desires that tend to thwart the desires of others can be put into the out group. This is what should qualify a person for membership.

The moral trick is to make sure that we keep our thinking within these bounds. The fact that a particular theist is a liar does not warrant shifting the ‘out group’ from liars to theists, any more than the fact that an embezzler is Jewish justifies shifting the ‘out group’ from embezzlers to Jews. We may be biologically disposed to in-group loyalty and out-group hostility, but it would take further argument to show that we must continue to be stupid when it comes to determining the nature of our in-groups and out-groups.

Role Models

The recent issue on smoking has brought up a related issue – the idea that a person may be morally condemned for failure to be positive role model for other people’s children. Many public people – sports and entertainment celebrities, for example – face the question of whether their being a ‘bad influence’ on children is something that can and should be held against them.

Yes, it can.

When they are, in fact, a bad influence.

There are a lot of cases in which people are condemned for being a ‘bad influence’ when this is not true. And there are many cases in which people who are being a bad influence on children are not condemned because society has decided to ignore their transgressions. So, I am not saying that every instance in which a celebrity – or even a neighbor or family member – is condemned for being a bad influence is justified. I am saying that, when they are a bad influence in fact, then condemnation can be justified in fact.

So, when is it the case that a person is, in fact, a bad influence on others?

This happens when a person exhibits qualities that people generally have reason to have children not pick up, or when a person fails to exhibit qualities that people generally have reason to have children acquire. The rock superstar that trashes a hotel room shows qualities that none of us want to see in our neighbor or anybody who might visit our own property. The superstar diva who is condescending and who denigrates everybody around her exhibits traits that people generally have no reason to want to experience. The sports star whose poor sportsmanship leads to violence on and off the court. All of these people may be condemned for the powers they may have as ‘role models’ to influence a new generation.

Whereas a positive role model – a Bill Gates who resigns from his company to spend his billions of dollars helping others, or an Al Gore who devotes his energies to trying to prevent the present generation from destroying the lives of future generations – may be praised not only for the good that they do, but for being a positive role-model for others.

The standard response to this that we hear – particularly from the celebrities – are that, “It is your job to raise your children, not mine. I am here to give a concert or make a movie or play a game. I’m not here to be a role model.”

The response misses the point.

Let’s begin with the fact that there is no such thing as intrinsic value. Nobody can argue that it is intrinsically wrong to condemn such a person for failure to be a good role model, because there is no such thing as intrinsic wrongness. The only way that it can be wrong to condemn such a person is if there are no ‘good reasons for action that exist’ for condemning such a person.

As it turns out, we are surrounded by ‘good reasons for action that exist’ for condemning such people. The ‘good reasons for action that exist’ are the reasons for action that parents have to create an environment in which their children are healthy, happy, and safe. To the degree that these celebrities create in one’s children attitudes that put those children at risk, either of harming themselves or of being harmed by others – to that degree parents have ‘a reason for action that exists’ to remove that harmful influence.

The sports star who says, “My only purpose is to play the game,” makes the mistake of assuming that watching the game is the only relevant desire that the members of the audience may have. However, members of the audience have, and should have, a great many concerns other than watching the game, and they have reason to require that the players respond to all of those concerns as much as possible.

One of the problems with this, of course, is that a lot of people say that others are a ‘poor role model’ when, in fact, they are not. And there are a lot of poor role models out there who are not recognized as such.

The Boy Scouts ban homosexuals and atheists because they say that these people are poor role models for children. One standard response is to say that this is discriminatory – that the fact that these leaders think homosexuals and atheists are poor role models does not give them the right to bar such people from their organization. They should not be seeking to impose their morality, or their religion, on others.

That’s the wrong response.

People can and do have good reason to keep those who are poor role models away from positions where they may influence one’s children. They are wrong to think that homosexuals or atheists are poor role models. The bigotry for which this policy can be condemned is not the bigotry of ostracizing people who one thinks are bad. The bigotry for which the policy can be condemned is the unfounded hate-mongering behind the conclusion that homosexuals and atheists are ‘bad people’.

The reasons that people give for holding these attitudes are so poor that it is unreasonable to assert that, ‘We are driven to the conclusion that these are bad people by the available evidence.’ There is no evidence. The ‘reason’ for condemning these as bad people are no better than the reasons once given for enslaving blacks, nearly exterminating the native Americans, interning Japanese Americans during WWII, or trying to wipe out homosexuals and Jews in Europe. It is unfounded culturally-learned hate passed down from one generation to the next as a matter of tradition.

These people – the people who pass down a culture of hate from one generation to the next – are, unfortunately, the ones who are seeking to have unrestricted access to children through organizations such as the Boy Scouts. This is a case in which society has taken a group of people that there are many and strong reasons to keep away from children (because of their bad influence) and given them unrestricted and virtually unmonitored access to children in order to exert their bad influence.

The problem is not that it is wrong to keep people who are a bad influence away from children. The problem is with society’s failure to accurately judge who is, in fact, a bad influence on children – keeping children away from many who could be a good influence, and giving moral degenerates unrestricted opportunity to teach unreasoned hate to yet another generation.

This is not to say that all homosexuals or atheists would be a good influence. This is not to say that everybody else is necessarily a bad influence. It is to say that whether one is a good or bad role model for children has nothing to do with whether one is a homosexual or atheist – it depends on other factors. It depends, for example, on whether one is consumed by unreasoned hate and is likely to infect impressionable young minds with the same moral malfunction.

Here’s another example. A good role model for children is a person who is willing to ask, “What if I am wrong?” If the consequence of being wrong is that others are likely to be harmed for no good reason, the intellectually responsible person asks, “Am I wrong? How do I know that I am not wrong?” Somebody who does not ask these questions is not concerned about the harm his actions might cause others, and may well be condemned for being a poor role model for children.

We see a lot of people on the religious side of the spectrum who are ‘poor role models’ in this sense. For example, we have Danish D’Souza, who shows absolutely no intellectual responsibility as he asserts one false claim or invalid inference after another in support of his desired conclusions. He gets so many things wrong that it is absurd to suggest that he has that he exhibits the moral trait of intellectual responsibility. Children and others who look to him as an example see an example of a dishonest propagandist unconcerned with the harm that innocent people might be caused to suffer by his actions.

We also find an example in the sponsors and co-sponsors of House Resolution 888. This is a resolution that seeks to make the first week in May a week devoted to teaching their favorite American myths as facts. People who put these fictions into this resolution, and who support getting it passed, are clearly people who have no interest in truth or facts. The children and others who look up to them as an example see a model for using lies as political propaganda, not defenders of truth.

The question is not one of whether to have role models or not – of whether we have reason to demand that others be good examples for the next generation to follow. We do. This is true by definition, since ‘good examples’ or ‘positive role models’ are, by definition, examples that we have reason to encourage people to become (and to condemn those who fall short).

The question is, “Who counts as a good role model for children?”

The hate-filled, superstitious, intellectually lazy and irresponsible, lying, sophist, bigot is not qualified to care for children. He is the type of person that good parents (or anybody concerned with the moral character and education of children) will point to and say, “Do not be like him. Here, he lies. There, he uses sophistry to manipulate others into doing harm to innocent people. And there, he is being intellectually reckless, scarcely concerned about the fact that the beliefs he adopts for no good reason will bring suffering to millions of innocent people.” To whatever degree children can be taught not to follow in the footsteps of the liars, sophists, intellectually reckless bigots, to that degree future generations will have a better world than it would have otherwise been.

Cervical Cancer and HPV Immunization

I have recently learned of a teenage girl with cervical cancer.

Cervical cancer is one of those invasive, often fatal forms of cancer. Seventy percent of those cancers are caused by an HPV virus, for which there is now a vaccine. There are other ways to get cervical cancer other than through the HPV virus, and only a very small percentage of the people who get the vaccine actually get cervical cancer. However, if this girl’s guardians had given her the vaccine, there is a 70% chance that they would have saved her from a very unpleasant experience involving chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery. There is a good change that they would have saved their life.

I am wondering whether it would be legitimate to charge parents or guardians in cases like this where the child dies with negligent homicide. They were negligent in protecting their children from harm. They failed to take action that would have protected the child, and the action they failed to take is an action that somebody with good desires – such as the desire to protect the health and life children in one’s care – would have performed. They failed to act on desires that people generally have reason to encourage in others – desires that tend to fulfill other desires. People generally have reason to promote those desires, which means that people generally have reason to target those who show a deficiency in those desires with condemnation (at least) and, possibly, punishment.

The most common defense against the accusation of negligence in this case is religion. First, there is the claim that, in order to get the HPV virus in a way that causes cervical cancer, one has to have sex. Obviously, teenage girls who have sex are violating God’s law, and those who violate God’s law are subject to God’s punishment. This cancer is God’s divine wrath, and for humans to take steps to thwart God’s plan . . . for humans to take steps to ‘play God’ and make decisions that should be left in God’s hands . . . is objectionable.

Let’s start with the simple statement that there is no God and there is no plan. Humans have come into existence through several hundred million years of evolution. There is not much that I can say about my ancestors going back to the time when sex became a requirement for reproduction. However, this much I do know . . . none (or quite nearly none) of my billions of ancestors in that time period died a virgin. They have faced hundreds of millions of years of evolutionary pressure to weed out those who had no interest in sex, leaving those who had a desire for sex.

No creature in nature has sex for the sake of procreation. Creatures in nature have sex for the sake of having sex. Procreation is an unintended side-effect of sex, something that the animal having sex is not even considering. We, as humans, have the capacity to have sex for the sake of procreation. However, what we inherited from our ancestors is a desire to have sex for the sake of having sex, and procreation has nothing to do with it.

When parents act for religious reasons, and those religious reasons cause a child to die that would have otherwise lived, then their religion is no different from one that lays a child out on an altar, then takes a knife, and offers the child as a blood sacrifice to God.

The claim may be made, “You have no right to interfere with us as we practice our religion.” However, this is not always the case. The person who practices his religion by flying airplanes into sky scrapers may well be prohibited from practicing his religion. The person who practices his religion by enslaving blacks and forcing them to labor on his plantation may be prohibited from practicing his religion. The person who obeys the religious commandment not to suffer a witch to live by tying her neighbor to a stake and setting her on fire may be prohibited from practicing her religion. The person who obeys the religious commandment to destroy any and all temples to other gods may be prohibited from practicing his religion. The person who offers a child as a blood sacrifice to God may be prohibited from practicing his religion.

The right to freedom of religion is a right to engage in those practices that are a part of one’s religious culture – practices governing what to wear, what to eat, when to eat (or not eat), when to pray, how to pray, what music to listen to (or not listen to), where and with whom one may have consensual sex. There is a morality that transcends religion, that we may prohibit all religions from violating. The parental responsibility to protect one’s children from death or significant injury is one of those moral obligations that transcends all religions. The person who puts a child at risk of serious injury or harm for religious reasons may, in fact, be prohibited from practicing his religion.

One of the problems with religion in this country is that, even among those who are not particularly religious (the religiously apathetic who do not care whether a God exists) can pick up the attitudes of the religious people around her. So, where some religious people insist on putting their children in harm’s way, some religiously apathetic people simply neglect to take steps to protect their children. Negligence with respect to the welfare of a child, however, is also a moral crime.

This creates a market for arguments that support the same conclusion that the religious person wants us to accept without the divine elements that are so easily suspect. They invent arguments that make little sense, but embrace their arguments because their religion or the religion of others in their community has so infested their minds that they cannot see the error.

One of these secular arguments claims that it is a good idea to use the fear of death or significant harm from cervical cancer as a deterrent to use to prevent teenagers from having sex. They want to be able to say, “If you have sex, you might die, even if we do not catch you,” as a way to keep their daughters pure and chaste.

This is as absurd as requiring that houses be built without circuit breakers because the threat of fire will cause people to be more careful in their use of electricity. It is as absurd as passing a law that prohibits the use of life jackets on the water or bicycle helmets when riding a bike because the increased possibility of surviving an accident promotes carelessness.

If this argument actually made sense, then, if there was no such thing as cervical cancer, we could use the same reasons to support a law whereby every teenage girl who has sex puts their name in a bin, and each year a few names are removed, where those whose names are drawn are subject to months of torture, and a substantial percentage of them are actually tortured to death.

The nation that would pass such a law is not civilized. These are barbarians. Yet, failure to protect one’s children from the ravages of cervical cancer is no different than putting the child’s name in a lottery bin to be tortured in killed for disobedience – disobedience driven by hundreds of millions of years of evolution promoting a desire to have sex.

If you know of somebody who has not yet had their child vaccinated against the HPV virus, I would like to strongly encourage you to summon the courage to do something to change that fact. It could make the world a better place – or, at least, prevent the world from becoming a worse place than it could otherwise be, at least for some young girl somewhere.

Smoking

Smoking is bad.

Of course, the most immediate thought that comes into people’s minds about the badness of smoking is the health effects. Health effects are a legitimate concern, and it is worthwhile to spend a few minutes discussing that aspect. However, for this post, I am interested in two moral objections to smoking – ways in which a smoker should understand that they are not only being impractical, but they are contributing to harm to others.

Tobacco companies make their product to take advantage of some facts easily understood in the context of desire utilitarianism. It takes advantage of the fact that future desires cannot influence present-day action. An agent acts so as to fulfill the more and stronger of his current desires, given his beliefs. The only way a future desire can influence a current action is if the agent has a current desire that future desires are fulfilled.

Even with such a desire, the current desire that future desires are fulfilled are in conflict with other desires. A desire for sex. A desire for high-calorie food. An aversion to pain.

A desire to smoke.

So, this desire that future desires are fulfilled can easily be outweighed by other current desires. When that happens, the agent who obtains the fulfillment of the more and stronger current desires, ends up with future desires being thwarted.

Tobacco companies have invested huge amounts of money making sure that their product creates a current desire that can outweigh any desire that future desires are fulfilled. This is precisely how they are able to bring about the slow and agonizing deaths of countless people for a profit. The desire that future desires be fulfilled is the champion of preventing those future slow and agonizing deaths, and they are up against a laboratory-engineered desire for a nicotine high (or, more precisely, a current aversion to nicotine withdraw).

We are looking at an industry full of people who, quite literally, imposes a slow and agonizing death on millions of people every year, for money. And not a lot of money either – at least not once it gets split up each person takes their share. Even the people at the top are inflicting slow and agonizing deaths on millions of people for just a few million dollars. An estimate, admittedly drawn off the top of my head, is that the leaders of these organizations bring about one agonizing death per dollar.

This is where the moral dimension comes in.

A person who buys a pack of cigarettes is somebody who is so selfish that he is willing to contribute to this organization that slowly kills millions of people each year for profit, just to avoid a nicotine fit. “Yes, my avoiding this nicotine fit is so important to me, that I do not care about the fact that I am supporting such an industry. The slow and agonizing deaths of others that I help to bring about is nothing compared to my avoiding this nicotine fit.”

These are not the desires of a good person. The are not desires that tend to fulfill the desires of others – these are desires that, very much so, tend to thwart the desires of others, and to make the world a worse place than they would have otherwise been.

These are desires that people generally have a lot of very good reasons to respond to with condemnation and punishment.

Now, the issue of punishment has to be weighed against the harms done by creating a black-market industry. It may well be the case that a prohibition on tobacco will do more harm than good by turning a huge section of the population into criminals. These factors may outweigh the positive value of punishing people who contribute to the desire to smoke. But they do not negate that value.

The other moral argument against smoking is that those who smoke lead others into the same habit. The best way to teach good behavior to children is to teach by example. The example that a smoker sets for children is an example that leads children into smoking. To the degree that a child is surrounded by people who condemn smoking, then to that degree a child will be less likely to take up smoking herself. To the degree that a child is surrounded by smokers, to that degree the child is less likely to learn an aversion to smoking.

So, this is a second way in which smokers contribute to making the world a worse place than it would otherwise be.

And let’s not deny the fact that the smoking industry thrives on getting children hooked on smoking. The trick is to get to a child whose ‘desire that future desires be fulfilled’ is weaker and far less developed, to build within their brain a desire to smoke that can more easily outweigh the desire to fulfill future desires. Hopefully (at least from the tobacco industry’s point of view), the child’s desire to smoke (caused by repeated nicotine hits on her young brain) will grow faster than her desire that future desires be fulfilled.

When the child reaches adulthood, she will be more than willing to pay out one or two hundred dollars each month to support an industry that inflicts agonizing deaths on others for profit. She will be more than willing to be yet another living example that will help the tobacco industry infect another set of young minds that see these people as examples.

Many smokers complain that they object to being treated like second-class citizens. They complain that others (non-smokers) look down on them and see them as somehow lesser beings.

Yet, my point is that they are worthy of this moral condemnation. If cigarettes did not exist, then people will live longer and healthier lives and many who are now suffering – including non-smokers who are suffering through the slow and agonizing death of a loved one – would be better off. It may not be practical to destroy the smoking industry through legislation, but it is certainly possible to reduce its effect by using the tools of social condemnation. To the degree that these tools work to prevent the desire-thwarting caused by tobacco smoking, to that degree people have reason to use these tools.

The person that objects that smoking itself fulfills desires misses an important part of desire utilitarianism. Desire utilitarianism does not evaluate actions according to whether they fulfill desires. Desire utilitarianism evaluates desires according to their tendency to fulfill or thwart other desires. The desire to smoke is a desire that tends to thwart other desires – the future desires of the smoker, the desires of those who are concerned with the smoker, the desires of those whose children may take up smoking and suffer its effects.

Desire utilitarianism calls for using social forces to promote good desires and inhibit bad desires. Given the fact that the desire to smoke is such a bad desire, it is clearly a desire that society has reason to bring social forces against.

The tobacco industry will spend huge amounts of money saying something different – in the same way that the energy industry spends huge amounts of money spreading lies about the effect of carbon emission on global climate. They will hire expert marketers to create messages that are far more persuasive than a posting on a philosophy blog. They are an industry filled with people who think that one more dollar in their pocket is worth one more slow and agonizing death in the world, so it is only to be expected that they would do these things. But the scientifically engineered persuasiveness of their sophistry does not guarantee the truth of their conclusions.

Value from the Point of View of the Universe

Black Sun Journal has posted an article that points readers to a Wired article on Why Science Sucks.

According to the article:

the real reason science sucks is that it makes us look bad. It makes us bit players in the Big Story of the universe, and it exposes some key limitations of the human brain.

I have a question . . . bit players from what point of view?.

I have defended the proposition that all value consists of relationships between states of affairs and desires. The value of a role depends on its relationship to certain desires. Yes, it is true that, since the universe has no desires, there is no possibility of a relationship between a life and the desires of the universe.

But . . . so what?

The tree in my yard does not have any desires. Nobody’s life has any value in terms of having a relationship between their life and the desires of the tree in my yard. Yet, I sincerely doubt that there are people staying awake because of that fact. Nor is it the case that science’s inability to find value in a person’s life from the point of view of the tree in my yard is a reason to think that “science sucks.”

The problem is that people care whether or not their life has value from the point of view of the universe. They have acquired a desire that their lives have value from the point of view of the universe.

Where did this come from?

It is difficult to argue that it has some type of genetic or evolutionary purpose. Procreation and other forms of genetic replication are hardly served by the development of such a desire – as opposed to a desires for sex, high-calorie food, aversion to pain, and the like.

Chances are this desire that a life have value from the point of view of the universe is something that is learned – something that we teach our children. However, if this is the case, then we have to ask why we are teaching our children to desire something that they can never have. Then, why are we blaming science for showing that we can never have such a thing, rather than blaming our culture for teaching us to desire something that we can never have.

There are other perspectives from which we can measure a life.

For example, it is clearly the case that my wife’s life does not have any value from the point of view of the universe. The universe, with its absence of desires, would yawn apathetically if my wife should leave the play that is my life.

However, from my point of view, her life is of crucial importance in this play. Her role is not as important as that of the main actor. If that lead actor (me) leaves the play, then the play shuts down and they quit selling tickets. And even though it is the case that the play that is my life will continue to run even if my wife were to leave the stage, the play will be significantly diminished. She is not, in any sense of the imagination, a ‘bit player’.

Ah, but the value of her life from my perspective does not matter, the critic may claim. The value of a life from the universe’s perspective is what has real value. And if there is no value of a life from the universe’s perspective, then somehow this is ‘a sad state of affairs.’

Let’s say that things from the universe’s point of view is what really matters. To know the true value of something, we need to know its value from the point of view of the universe. However, the universe does not care about anything (or anybody). This means that nothing (and nobody) has value.

However, the universe also does not care about whether or not things matter to the universe. If we are looking to the universe to determine the true value of things, then ‘looking to the universe to determine the true value of things’ is one of the things that the universe does not care about. So, it is at best a contradiction to put so much emphasis on what the universe thinks about the value of things, but to put no emphasis at all in the fact that the universe does not care one iota about what the universe thinks.

If we look at things from the same point of view that we use to determine, “The value of things from the point of the universe matters,” we will discover a long list of other things that matter as well. Aversion to pain, loving relationships with a significant other, learning, helping others, and the like, all matter – and they matter in the same way that ‘things from the point of view of the universe’ matters.

Voter ID and the Right to Vote

The lead story in “The Nation” magazine this week concerns the issue of voter ID laws.

Voter ID laws are allegedly designed to fight voter fraud – non-citizens registering to vote and voting in elections, thus determining our leaders for us. Those who are opposed to Voter ID law state that its supporters are not really interested in preventing non-Americans from voting, but to prevent Americans from voting. The argument here is that Voter ID laws are used to increase the cost of voting, with the knowledge that as you increase the cost of a product, you decrease the numbers of people willing to pay those costs.

The reason that voter ID laws are a partisan issue is because the Democrats are at least thought to have a lower marginal cost of voting than Republicans. That is, if you can decrease the number of voters by 1,000 by increasing the cost of voting, Democratic candidates will lose more votes than Republican candidates.

For example, an election in which the Democratic candidate would have won by 50 votes without a voter identification law, can become an election where the Republican candidate wins by 50 votes with the law, because the law kept 550 who would have voted Democrat, and 450 who would have voted Republican, away from the polls.

The article would have greatly benefitted from some empirical backing. It did point out that the Illinois state government, the state with the most restrictive law, could not point out a single case of ‘voter impersonation’ to prevent. Laws like this do impose a cost on the voters, and a cost on the state to enforce the law. If there is a benefit to be obtained from this law, it hardly seems worth the cost.

Unless, the benefit is what the Democrats say it is – getting Republicans into office. And the cost does not bother the Republicans because they are not paying the cost. They have shifted the cost onto the taxpayer. Capitalist economic principles fully recognize that when a person can obtain a benefit, and use somebody else’s bank account to pay for it, they are likely to obtain benefits that they would not seek if they had to pay the true costs.

According to the article, the Republicans are trying a different argument.

Lacking evidence, the Republicans have shifted their argument. Now it runs: “legitimate voters” will lose confidence in elections if they think there’s voter fraud, so the government must clamp down even without evidence.

This is an absurd argument. If the problem is with ‘legitimate elections,’ then the question becomes the legitimacy of elections where legitimate voters are kept away from the polls by driving poorer voters out by increasing the costs. If the reason that Republican candidate won the election is because Democratic voters were discouraged from voting, then we need to ask how this would promote the appearance of legitimacy.

Of course, perception counts. If one were to run an advertising campaign, spending a few million dollars convincing people that there is a problem with voter fraud that this law is fighting, then the law may give them a stronger sense of legitimacy. However, given that there is no evidence of voter fraud – that this proposition even serves as a premise for the argument – then this would be a case of convincing the people of a lie.

On the other hand, a campaign that tells people the truth of the matter, that elections become less legitimate as higher costs of voting keep legitimate voters from casting legitimate votes – an honest campaign – would result in less confidence in the legitimacy of elections, not more.

It is a bit strange, of course, to argue that a law is needed and important because the people have been caused to believe a lie. It would seem that a better remedy for the fact that the people believe a falsehood would be to tell them the truth. A remedy that says, “Because the people believe a myth, we must do harm to innocent people that we would not have to do if they believe the truth,” seems a poorer solution than one that says, “Tell people the truth.”

It may sound like the Democrats, in this case, are the more noble cause. However, both sides are interested in the same thing – creating laws that will give their candidates more votes than the other candidates. I suspect that if the situation were reversed, the Democrats would favor voter ID laws and the Republicans would be opposed. If either side happens to have the more virtuous position, it is because prudence and accident have put them on that side, not because they selected it.

One of the assumptions built into this argument is that there is an obligation to get as many votes from as many people as possible. However, many of the people who do not vote are people who do not care to go through the effort of casting an informed vote. They simply choose to remain ignorant of who the candidates are and what they believe in. Whereas an individual who decides to go to the effort of finding out more about candidates and their positions on the issues are people who will be less likely to be deterred from voting.

And if it is the case that one party, more than the other, benefits from the casting of ill-conceived votes from un-informed voters, this hardly justifies a policy of promoting the practice of aiding or even forcing people who do not want to vote to cast uninformed and apathetic votes.

This is not the case of people who wanted to vote but who are being prevented from voting. These are cases of people who choose not to go through the effort of voting. In these cases, it is reasonable to assume (though there will certainly be exceptions) that they do not much care to make a contribution, which means that they probably do not care enough to engage the issues well enough to cast in an informed vote. If they truly did want to vote, then, even with a voter ID law, they are able to do so.

It may sound like the Democrats, in this case, are the more noble cause. However, both sides are interested in the same thing – creating laws that will give their candidates more votes than the other candidates. I suspect that if the situation were reversed, the Democrats would favor voter ID laws and the Republicans would be opposed. If either side happens to have the more virtuous position, it is because prudence and accident have put them on that side, not because they selected it.

They both want to manipulate the system for the sake of obtaining political power more easily. Neither are showing any genuine interest in promoting the best political system. If they did, then they would throw out the weak arguments and rationalizations and engage in a serious discussion of which policies produce the best governments.

Of course, that is not a question that politicians are generally in the best position to answer. To a politician, the ‘best’ political system is the one that gives them the most power and gives others the least desire to or ability to reject their dictates. These questions are best discussed outside of conflicts between political parties.

E2.0: Jonathan Haidt: Five Foundations of Morality

This is the eleventh in a new series of weekend posts taken from the presentations at the Salk Institute’s “Beyond Belief: Enlightenment 2.0.”. I have placed an index of essays in this series in an introductory post, Enlightenment 2.0: Introduction.

This posting is the second posting on the presentation made by Jonathan Haidt, an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia. Earlier, I discussed his defense of intuitionism and raised objections to it. In addition to defending intuitionism, Haidt presented a number of propositions distinguishing between conservative and liberal morality.

Basically, his claims were these:

Liberal morality can be understood as being grounded on two fundamental sets of principles – each of which can be related to some biological (evolutionary) trait. These are a prohibition on harm (founded on the evolutionary quality of kin selection), and the other is fairness or justice (founded on the evolutionary quality of reciprocal altruism). These values are premised on the idea that societies are made up of distinct individuals and the individual is the fundamental entity that makes up communities.

However, if we look at morality around the world, we find three more fundamental sets of values that liberals tend to ignore. These additional three foundations come from recognition that groups, not just individuals, have moral importance. In order to have a functioning group, we need more than principles concerning harm and justice. We need principles concerning loyalty, respect, and purity or sanctity.

Haidt also charged the liberal community with being opposed to diversity (or, at best, as lacking diversity). He pointed out that there was almost universal agreement in the room about certain (liberal) moral values, and that this has been obtained effectively by driving anybody who would hold a conflicting view out of the community. He pointed out how, at psychology conventions, the attendees make jokes about conservatives and create an atmosphere where somebody holding conservative values would feel very uncomfortable – would feel unwelcome.

Ultimately, people do not like ‘liberal’ policies grounded merely on a foundation of harm and fairness because it undermines what he calls ‘moral communal capital’, which he defines as follows:

Moral-Communal capital: Social capital, plus institutions, traditions, and norms that guarantee that contributions and hard work will be rewarded, and that free-riders, exploiters, and criminals will be punished.

Earlier in the presentation, Haidt made the claim that we tend to do a poor job of moral reasoning – that we tend to think of our conclusions first and to look for arguments to defend it. This happens easiest in a homogenous society – a society that has silenced dissent – the way the liberal academic society has done. In order to make moral progress – in order to do morality right – liberals have to recognize that there is a place, or at least to give serious consideration to the possibility of a place, for some conservative values.

In order to briefly critique this theory, I want to look at it through the lens of desire utilitarianism. Desire utilitarianism holds that the value of a desire is determined by its tendency to fulfill (or thwart) other desires. So, the value of a desire to avoid harm or to promote fairness, as well as the desires that strengthen and better organize a society so that it actually gets things done, are determined by their tendency to fulfill other desires.

So, there is nothing in desire utilitarianism that limits our moral foundation to principles of harm and fairness or rules out the other concerns that Haidt proposes.

There is also nothing in desire utilitarianism that gives support to something called 'five pillars of morality'. This type of taxonomy of values tends to have more in common with intrinsic value theories (theories trying to identify some fundamental entities that have intrinsic worth from which all other values can be derived). Since desire utilitarianism denies the existence of intrinsic values, it denies that intrinsic value can be found in any 'five pillars' of morality.

However, it does suggest some questions for the specifics of Haidt’s account of morality.

For one thing, what is ‘harm’ and ‘fairness’? Both of these are value-laden terms. Nothing counts as a harm unless it is bad in the same way that no person is a bachelor unless he is unmarried. As for ‘fairness’, a great deal of ink has been spilled (and electrons have been charged) over what counts as being ‘fair’.

Haidt, for example, explains the virtue of ‘moral communal capital’ in that it allows us to leave our doors unlocked and our laptops out because we can trust others. However, the moral condemnation of taking a laptop can easily come from principles of harm and fairness – this is hardly a case that shows the need for ‘something more’ in the sense of community values.

I borrow my use of the term ‘harm’ from Joel Feinberg’s book, Harm to Others: The Moral Limits of the Criminal Law, which describes a harm as the thwarting of a strong and stable desire. Any thwarting of weak or fleeting desire counts as ‘hurting’ another, but not ‘harming’ in the morally relevant sense. If the value of a community is in its ability to fulfill desires, and harm is the thwarting of the desires, then Haidt’s concept of ‘community’ is actually captured within the ‘liberal’ concept of ‘harm’. The real question in this case is whether certain activities that purport to be destructive of the community will actually do so, or are the advocates of particular laws merely making up false claims about the ‘dangers’ of, for example, pornography or homosexual marriage?

Perhaps the differences that Haidt sees in the conservative disposition to value such things as community and authority rests in beliefs that our desires will tend to be thwarted in a society that does not have these things. Certainly, their desires to have these values instituted within a society will be thwarted, but the moral question is not whether a society will fulfill their desires for community and authority, but whether the desires for community and authority are good desires.

We can see a case for the value of community and authority in the workings of the military. A unit is brought together and trains together in the hopes of forming a community. This community establishes a set of community values and expectations that all members are expected to live up to. It includes a chain of command – those who give the orders, and those who obey them. This is, to the best of our knowledge, the best way to create a cohesive military unit capable of accomplishing important tasks in extremely unpleasant and dangerous situations. Remove the values of community and authority from a military unit, and it falls apart.

Even ‘liberals’ can recognize these values and the benefits that come from them.

So can desire utilitarians, who hold that we should promote these values to the degree that doing so fulfills other desires, but stop at that point where strengthening these desires do more harm than good.

One of the powers of community values is that they are better at uniting ‘us’ into a common force – a cohesive whole. However, is it even possible to unite ‘us’ into a cohesive whole without a ‘them’ to unite us against? It would seem, in most cases where communities become tight-knit, that they perceive themselves to be the persecuted enemy of some ‘them’ group that must somehow be defeated. Remove the external threat, and community values tend to weaken. Atheists, homosexuals (the so-called ‘homosexual agenda’), communists, Islamic jihadists, secularists, evolutionists, Darwinists, are all names attached to ‘them’ that ‘we’ must unite against.

It would be hard to argue that a sense of community actually does have moral value if it requires an enemy – a group of people who must be harassed, harmed, and brought to submission – in order to be effective. And even if ‘we’ are effective in forcing ‘them’ into submission, then we are going to need to invent another ‘them’ to replace those ‘we’ have defeated.

Similarly, authority values bring up the question, “Who watches the watchers?” The value of authority is brought to question by the fact that those with authority tend to sacrifice those without authority to their own interests. Slave cultures and tyrannies are prime examples of cultures that put a great deal of value on authority.

I want to remind the reader that Haidt’s account of the liberal values of harm and fairness are not without their own problems. In these cases, Haidt uses vague terms that could apply to anything that thwarts (strong and stable) desires. I am not here defending the liberal two-foundation system against a conservative five-foundation system. I am saying that Haidt’s ‘liberal’ foundations of harm and fairness are too vague to be useful, and his conservative values of ‘community’, ‘authority’, and ‘purity’ can be evaluated within a structure that properly defines the concepts of ‘harm’ and ‘fairness’.

One of the claims that Haidt makes is that religion does a particularly good job at promoting community values – creating his ‘moral communal capital’. Yet, it at least seems to be the case that religions do this precisely because they are able to generate an atmosphere of hostility towards others – outsiders that the group must unite against. It uses fear to cause people to huddled together as a huddled mass easily exploited by those who then take control of the group and use them to further the ends of the leaders.

Nobody reading this blog posting should come to the conclusion that I have defeated Haidt’s position. I have, at best, raised questions that require some further thought and consideration. It simply does not follow that because Haidt can show that certain people follow certain patterns of behavior that they have reason to do so. Nor does it necessarily justify any harm that they may be doing to an excluded group of 'them' that the group has decided to use as an enemy, or to the lower members of the group who make the sacrifices that benefit those higher up the ladder of authority.

E2.0: Jonathan Haidt: Moral Intuitionism

This is the tenth in a new series of weekend posts taken from the presentations at the Salk Institute’s “Beyond Belief: Enlightenment 2.0.”. I have placed an index of essays in this series in an introductory post, Enlightenment 2.0: Introduction.

This posting concerns a presentation made by Jonathan Haidt, Jonathan Haidt, an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia. When I first listened to Haidt’s presentation I found a lot there that I wanted to comment on – too much to fit into the format for this series. Fortunately, many ideas Haidt presented also showed up in a New York Times article this week, “The Moral Instinct,” giving me an opportunity outside of the conference to report on those elements.

Particularly, Haidt gave three propositions about morality that he more-or-less asserted were beyond dispute:

(1) Morality is a natural phenomenon that can and should be studied by the methods of science.

(2) Much of morality is innate (“structured in advance of experience”)

(3) Much of that structured by kin selection (the ethic of care) and reciprocal justice (the ethic of justice/fairness).

And, as it turns out, while I agree with the first one, I entirely disagree with the second, and substantially disagree with the third. I hold that the idea of an innate morality is a contradiction – like round squares. Our innate dispositions can either be justified by some outside standard (in which case morality rests entirely with the outside justification, not with the innate disposition), or it cannot be justified by appeal to an outside standard (meaning that our innate position is nothing more than a desire to do things that harm others for no good reason and to feel good about it – in other words, it is not morality).

In presenting his case for intuitionism, Haidt quotes David Hume

We speak not strictly and philosophically when we talk of the combat of passion and of reason. Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.” (David Hume, 1739)

I happen to agree with this statement. I have said many times that we cannot reason about ends, we can only reason about means. However, every passion (or desire) not only identifies an end, but it is a means to the fulfillment (or to thwarting) other desires. So, we are not prohibited from applying reason to ‘the passions’ to determine which conflict with other passions and which are in harmony with them. Those other passions give us reason to promote some passions and inhibit others.

This leads to a conclusion that Hume himself endorsed, that the quality of a virtue is determined by the degree to which it is pleasing or useful to self or others. Or, in other words, a desire is good to the degree that it tends to fulfill the desires – either directly (pleasing) or indirectly (useful) – of self or others.

This does not at all lead to Haidt’s intuitionism.

Heidt wants to replace ‘passions’ with ‘intuitions’. Whereas I replace ‘passions’ with ‘desires’. The difference between a ‘desire’ and an ‘intuition’ is that an ‘intuition’ imbeds a proposition that has a truth value. A desire imbeds a proposition that the agent wishes to make true. A moral intuition that killing the people in the next village and taking their property implies support for the proposition that it is morally permissible to kill the people in the next village and take their property. A desire to kill the people in the next village and take their property does not support any moral conclusion.

How does Haidt defend his intuition? He does so by noting all sorts of situations in which he can demonstrate that what people are in fact doing is ‘justifying their intuitions’ – cases in which the moral judgment comes first, and the reasons for adopting them come afterwards as ‘rationalizations’ for the moral position.

I do not see why we cannot come up with a system of religious intuitionism the same way. You take a religious statement that somebody accepts, you demonstrate that there is absolutely no justification for that belief, you force the person into a position where they say, “I cannot disagree with you rationally; yet, I know that God exists and that is all there is to it.” Now, all we need is for Haidt to come along and state that these fundamental religious propositions that cannot be defended by reason are our ‘religious intuitions’ – a knowledge of God that is written directly into the mind (presumably by God himself).

Consider your response to be if some theist were to defend those fundamental propositions of theism that he cannot demonstrate to be true – propositions that command him to do harm to others – on the basis of some ‘religious intuition’ by which he can simply know that those religious propositions are true without proof . . . without evidence . . . without justification, claiming that ‘justifications’ when they occur are merely ad hoc.

This gives us a reduction ad absurdum of the form of reasoning that Haidt is trying to use in defense of moral intuitionism. The type of evidence that Haidt is providing does not justify believing in the types of entities that his theory postulates – moral intuitions (in the first case), or religious intuitions (in the second).

In addition, a researcher may be able to find example after example of cases where subjects are inclined to (for example) use the logical fallacy of ‘affirming the consequent’. He may be able to take brain scans of people committing the fallacy of affirming the consequent and see just what parts of the brain are involved. It may be the case that a theory that includes affirming the consequent is the best theory for explaining and predicting the behavior of test subjects. Yet, with all of this, ‘affirming the consequent’ is still a fallacy. It remains a fallacy no matter how often it is used or how well researchers do in predicting its use.

Haidt’s research, which he claims shows that people reliably engage in a pattern where moral intuition leads to judgment which leads to ‘reasoning’ (or coming up with fallacious claims based on false premises in support of the judgment), can never support the conclusion that passion or sentiment alone can actually justify a moral judgment (a conclusion that others may be legitimately harmed).

In fact, this is a problem with a great deal of moral reasoning. Agents tend to jump far too quickly from a desire to inflict certain types of harm to the conclusion that they are morally justified in doing so. They ‘justify’ this leap by stating that God wrote those moral rules directly into their brain. But God, in this sense, is just an invention that allows one to act on one’s desires without guilt. Moral intuitionism works the same way. By calling an impulse to act in ways harmful to others a ‘moral intuition’ rather than a ‘desire’, one can pretend that the actions that the desire motivates the agent to perform are justified.

Summary Conclusion on Moral Instinct

Since I have spent the week on this ‘moral instinct’ theory, I thought I would finish it up by stating my core objection to ‘moral instinct’ or ‘moral sense’ theories or any form of moral intuitionism.

I see it as being simply a replacement for religion.

One of the reasons that people have invented gods is to give legitimacy to their immoral impulses. Do you want to take over some piece of land that somebody else occupies? Claim that God has given you title until the end of time, and that this gives you the right to kick anybody and everybody else off of it, regardless of harm done.

Are there people in your own community who are not like you – who like things that you do not like? Then tell the world that God commands the death of such people, and you can then feel justified in rounding them up and killing them, or at least driving them into the closet.

Do you want to assert that you and your people have a right to rule and that all others have a duty to obey, then assert that God has personally selected you to be the person who rules, so that anybody who disobeys you disobeys God, and all of society will suffer his wrath if this is allowed to continue.

‘Moral instinct’, ‘moral sense’, and all other forms of intuitionist moral theories play the same role. We simply get rid of the idea of a God writing moral truths on our soul, and replace it with the idea of genes writing moral truths into our brain structure.

All a person in ante-bellum South needed to do was to recognize that the thought of owning slaves did nothing to tickle his conscience – that he actually found it somewhat pleasing to be ‘master’ to somebody else’s ‘slave’ without a twinge of guilt. If he senses no wrongness in owning slaves, then there must not be any wrongness in owning slaves for him to sense.

The person who wants to rape a woman appeals to his moral sense. He then listens as his moral sense tells him that women actually enjoy rape (because it allows them to have sex without feeling guilty), or that they deserve to be raped. The act of rape, in this latter case, becomes an act of imposing justice – something his ‘moral sense’ tells him ought to be done.

Ultimately, intuitionist moral theories are the ultimate expression of the idea, “If it feels good, it must be right.” Since moral claims are intimately linked to punishment or other forms of harm to others, they actually take the form, “If it feels right to do this harm to others, then it is right to do this harm to others.”

I grew up among people who knew that interracial relationships were wrong. They knew this because they relied on their moral sense to tell them this. If they saw an interracial couple engaged in public displays of affection, then their moral sense went off to tell them, immediately, that they were in the presence of wrongness and something should be done to prevent this.

They were not faking or lying about their feelings of disgust. Those feelings were genuine. The problem is that they did not reflect any ‘moral sense’ or ‘moral intuition’. What they reflected was the agent’s own learned aversion to these types of relationships.

What difference would it make to discover that this aversion was universal, or that it might have had some evolutionary explanation? Evolution could very well have made us into people who tend to favor those who ‘look like us’ and to have an adverse reaction to those who ‘look different’. This could have been an effective way of determining whether the ‘other’ has similar genes (and should be favored), or different genes (and should be disfavored).

In fact, when a set of mutations came along that made a significant contribution to what we are as human, it may well have included this type of favoritism. Since others with these new humanity-making genes would ‘look like us’, then such a trait may well have been responsible for our genetic success – the fact that our biological ancestors were busy helping those who ‘looked like them’ at the expense of members of other tribes where this mutation did not appear and whose members did not ‘look like us’.

We can even imagine an evolutionary case in which these sentiments became universal. With a slight adjustment to our evolutionary history, we may have become a race that ‘felt’ perfectly justified in enslaving others who did not look like us and forcing them to work (without compensation) for those who did ‘look like us’. People who claim that their study of our moral intuitions is a study of morality cannot rule out the possibility that they are assigning ‘justification’ to just this type of phenomenon. The claim that the universal nature of the desire to enslave those who do not look like us gives it legitimacy is absurd.

An innate disposition towards a racist morality that imposes slavery on those who do not look like us, no matter how well backed up by an evolutionary story, and no matter how universal, does not imply that slavery is, in fact, morally legitimate. It might explain racism and slavery, but in doing so it would be explaining a tendency to do evil. It would not be explaining the moral legitimacy of slavery.

All of this suggests that there is a moral goodness that is independent of our moral instinct – that to determine the difference between right and wrong we must appeal to something other than a ‘moral intuition’ or whether something ‘feels right’.

Once we have made that appeal, once we know the real difference between right and wrong, then we can look at our intuitions and determine whether they are calibrated correctly. However, we cannot calibrate an instrument without having a standard that is independent of the instrument being calibrated. We cannot calibrate our moral sense without having a moral standard that exists independent of our moral sense. That is where we must go to discover the true difference between right and wrong.

In saying all of this, I recognize that there is a complication drawn from the fact that intrinsic value does not exist. The only reasons for action that exist are desires, and desires are mental states. We must investigate desires to investigate reasons for action. However, we must be careful never to give a mere desire the status of a ‘moral intuition’ no matter how it may feel to us. The inclination to enslave those who do not ‘look like us’ is a mere desire, not a moral intuition, regardless of how it feels. It is merely one of many desires.

And it is a bad desire at that, given that it is a desire that tends to thwart other desires. To the degree that this desire exists, then some desires must be thwarted. Either the desires of the slave owner are thwarted by a prohibition on slavery, or the desires of the slave are thwarted by allowing slavery. On the other hand, if this desire did not exist, then there would be nobody with a desire to own slaves, and no slaves whose desires are being thwarted.

Ancient civilization took these bad desires and assigned them to a God to give them legitimacy. They claim that God wrote these moral truths into their sole. So, when they talk about these attitudes they hold that they are not talking about mere desires. They are talking about something that is greater than a desire – something that justifies whatever violence may be necessary to fulfill those interests.

More ‘enlightened’ thinkers invent special legitimacy for those desires to act in ways harmful to others by inventing things like a ‘moral instinct’, ‘moral intuitions’, or a ‘moral sense.’ However, this is just another way of saying, “Moral truths written onto the human sole by .” In fact, these entities do have one thing in common with God – none of them are real. They are just convenient entities that one can point to in order to excuse desires to do harm to others.

If there is no independent justification to measure our moral instinct against, then our moral instinct is simply an urge to do unjustified harm to others without feeling guilty about it. If there is an independent justification to measure our moral instinct against, then we do not need a moral instinct – we can just go with the independent justification.

Moral Instinct and the Analogy of Nutrition

I have been spending the last few days looking at an article that appeared in The New York Times proposing that we have “A Moral Instinct.” I have raised some objections to the ideas presented in that essay.

Steven Pinker, the author of the article, obeys his intellectual responsibilities and considers some objections to his position at the end of his article (a habit that I wish some faith-based hate-mongers would pick up). I would like to take a look at those considered objections.

One of the objections that Pinker considers is the implication of putting our evolved ‘moral sense’ in front of morality.

Now, if the distinction between right and wrong is . . . a product of brain wiring, why should we believe it is any more real than the distinction between red and green? And if it is just a collective hallucination, how could we argue that evils like genocide and slavery are wrong for everyone, rather than just distasteful to us?

Pinker considers an alternative – putting God in charge of our morality rather than our mental wiring.

Putting God in charge of morality is one way to solve the problem, of course, but Plato made short work of it 2,400 years ago. Does God have a good reason for designating certain acts as moral and others as immoral? If not — if his dictates are divine whims — why should we take them seriously? Suppose that God commanded us to torture a child. Would that make it all right, or would some other standard give us reasons to resist? And if, on the other hand, God was forced by moral reasons to issue some dictates and not others — if a command to torture a child was never an option — then why not appeal to those reasons directly?

If Plato has made short work of a divine command theory of morality, then he has also made short work of any genetic ‘moral instinct’ theory of morality. Is X good because it is loved by our genes, or is X loved by our genes because it is good?

If we go with the first option, then anything loved by our genes would be good. Male lions, when they take over a pride, kill all of the children. If humans had evolved a disposition to kill their step-children, would this imply that the killing of step-children could be morally permissible? Even obligatory? Genetic moralists often provides us with stories about how altruism could have evolved. However, predators and parasites are also products of evolution.

If we go the other way, if we say ‘X is loved by our genes because it is good’, then (1) we need a theory of good that is independent of our genes or ‘moral instinct,’ and (2) we need a theory that will explain how our ‘moral instinct’ actually came to line up reliably with that moral goodness. In other words, the ‘moral instinct’ theorist who takes this route has already conceded that what is right or wrong in fact is independent of our ‘moral instincts.’ This argument says that there is something else, something quite independent of our moral instinct, that defines right and wrong and, at best, our ‘moral instinct’ reliably points out what the answer is.

We can’t even address the second option until we know what morality is, because we cannot tell if our moral instinct is accurate until we can see the target. Without a theory of morality separate from our sentiments, we can only guess at the relationships between our moral sentiments and what is truly moral.

One way to illustrate these problems is by making an analogy to food.

There is a difference between the foods that we like and the foods that are good for us. Now, evolutionary theory will tell us that we will tend to like those foods that kept our ancestors alive long enough to genetically reproduce in the types of environments they encountered. So, we have a taste for high-calorie food. However, our environment has changed. We are surrounded by high-calorie food, and we eat far more than we need to.

The ‘moral sense’ theorists are doing the equivalent of feeding people different types of foods and measuring which types of food are universally liked and which seem to be local or individual preferences. They are feeding people these foods while they are hooked up to MRI’s and other brain imaging devices in order to determine which foods light up different parts of the brain. They are taking note of the fact that evolution has disposed us to like those foods that kept our genetic ancestors alive long enough to reproduce.

They are then taking all of this data and publishing it in peer-reviewed journals under titles where they claim that they are involved in the study of nutrition – the study of what foods are good for us in fact.

Now, the study of nutrition has nothing to do with the study of what foods we like and dislike. In fact, it is quite possible to have a science of nutrition that never even looks at our tastes in food. The study of food preferences is irrelevant. The data may be useful – it may provide some insights on where to look. However, the study of nutrition can get along just fine without the scientists in their lab coats running MRIs on agents given different flavors of ice cream.

Similarly, when scientists measure the attitudes that people have to certain moral situations, they are studying our tastes and preferences. They are correctly noting that evolution disposed us to prefer the taste of those things that allowed our ancestors to reproduce correctly. However, when they claim that they are involved in the study of morality, this is no more true than the taste-scientist’s claim that he is involved in the study of nutrition.

We can say that the study of nutrition is the study of foods that it is good for us to like – a study of foods we should grow a fondness for or an aversion to eating (to the degree that our food tastes are malleable). To the degree that we are successful, then to that degree our tastes will motivate us to eat that which is also (independently) good for us.

Similarly, morality is also the study of what it is good for us to like – a study of qualities that we should grow a fondness for or an aversion to bringing about (to the degree that our desires are malleable). To the degree that we are successful, then to that degree we will like to bring about that which is also (independently) good for us.

But the study of morality is no more closely linked to the study of personal moral tastes than the study of nutrition is to the study of tastes in food.

While I’m on the subject, I suppose I should address the issue of how Desire Utilitarianism handles Plato’s argument. After all, if ‘good’ = ‘is such as to fulfill the desires in question’, let’s ask, “Is X good because we desire it? Or do we desire it because it is good?” If the former, then if we desire the torturing of young children, then torturing young children would be good. If it is the latter, then (1) what is this ‘goodness’ that is independent of our desires, and (2) how is it that our desires (influenced, as they are, by evolutionary pressures) happen to reliably pick out that which is good?

It turns out that neither of the horns of this dilemma can be satisfied. It is neither the case that things are morally good because we desire them, nor is it the case that we desire them because they are morally good. It is quite possible for what is morally good to be substantially independent of what we desire in fact.

Returning to the food analogy, it turns out that it is neither the case that, strictly speaking, we like things because they are nutritious (meaning that our likeness is directly and inerrantly fixed on their nutritional value). Nor is it the case that things are nutritious because we like them. Rather what is nutritious is something independent of what we like and dislike, though we have evolved a disposition to favor things that kept us alive.

Moral goodness = that which it is good for us to desire, the way nutrition = that which it would be good for us to like (in terms of food).

This goodness is not fully independent of our desires. A ‘good desire’ is a desire that tends to fulfill other desires. However, this theory breaks any direct connection between our desires and moral goodness. We can’t get from ‘I want to torture a young child,’ to ‘torturing a young child is morally good’. We have to take the desire to torture a young child and compare that to other desires. We need to determine if people generally have reason to promote that desire, or to discourage it. If nobody desired to torture young children, no desires would be thwarted. Whereas, if everybody desired to torture young children, desire-thwartings would be rampant in that either the desires of those who want to torture, or the desires of those who would be tortured, have to be thwarted. These desire thwarting give people generally reason to prefer that no desire to torture children exists.

So, we have our answer to the question of what is ‘good’ that is independent of our desires. Or, at least, a good that is not directly dependent on our desires. It is consistent with the view that desires are the only reasons for action that exist, but respects the fact that our desires – our ‘reasons for action’ – are reasons to act so as to promote some desires and inhibit others.

At this point, a slightly different example may be worthwhile. Just as nutritionists have been able to do a fine job of studying the science of nutrition without studying brain scans of people as they chew and swallow food, logicians have been able to do a fine job of studying logic, and mathematicians have been able to do a fine job of studying math, without studying brain scans of people as they chew on and swallow logical or mathematical propositions. Similarly, the ethicist can make a perfectly valid study of ethics without studying brain scans of people chewing on and swallowing moral claims.

The study of brain scans is simply not the same area of study as the study of nutrition, logic, math, or ethics.

The Moral Instinct: Genetics and Brain Damage

For the last couple of days I have been writing about the information presented in a New York Times article, “The Moral Instinct”.

One of the claims made in that article is this:

Though no one has identified genes for morality, there is circumstantial evidence they exist. The character traits called “conscientiousness” and “agreeableness” are far more correlated in identical twins separated at birth (who share their genes but not their environment) than in adoptive siblings raised together (who share their environment but not their genes).

However, an essential part of morality is that it concerns cases in which people are worthy of praise or condemnation – when they are deserving of punishment or reward. If we link morality with genetic dispositions, then we are saying that people with one set of genes deserves to be harmed and those with another set deserve to be rewarded. Yet, how can it possibly make sense to say that a person deserves reward or punishment based on their genetic makeup?

Any time a ‘moral sense’ theorist starts talking about a genetic basis of morality, ask him what his morality says about locking people up in prison for the crime of having the wrong genetic sequence.

In fact, morality is concerned with things that we have the capacity to choose. Since we do not have the capacity to choose our genetic makeup, questions of genetic makeup lie outside of the realm where moral concepts apply. We are as capable of finding “genes for morality” as we are of finding “round squares” or “married bachelors”.

I am not denying that there are any genetic influences governing our conscientiousness, agreeableness, or altruism. However, no matter how much agreeableness we get through genetics, we still have some important questions that we need to ask and answer.

Is this the right amount of agreeableness? Could we use more agreeableness, or less? Could we use more agreeableness in these circumstances, and less agreeableness in those?

If our genetic dispositions were good enough – if they left us with no characteristic that we have reason to change – then we simply would not have a need for moral institutions. Morality exists because we have reasons to add to or subtract from our genetic dispositions, or to alter the objects of those dispositions.

Other parts of the article discussed the sections of the brain used when people consider moral problems, and the effects of brain damage on the conclusions people come to when faced with moral questions. Psychopathy, the article states, may have genetic dispositions. Damage to the frontal lobes makes one more utilitarian.

Of course moral reasoning is a brain function. That’s not the question. The question is whether a particular instance of moral reasoning is good or bad – is it helping people reach accurate conclusions, or are their conclusions mistaken?

Assume that researchers discover that most people when they engage in moral reasoning activate area A of their brain. Damage to Area A leads to a different set of moral conclusions. Are those conclusions better than, or worse than, those of an average person.

It may well be that area A is doing nothing but adding a bunch of noise to our moral decision-making, clouding our judgment. Area A, for example, might be responsible for rationalization – the ability to see arguments when they support our desired position that we are blind to when they oppose our desired position. It may be the ‘hypocrisy center’ of the brain that blocks the proper universalization of moral principles. In these cases, those with brain damage would be better moral reasoners than those without.

There is no way that a researcher can determine whether a particular form of reasoning is better or worse than another without an independent standard of good or bad moral reasoning. You cannot get ‘better’ and ‘worse’ reasoning from a brain scan. All the brain scan will tell you is ‘different’.

More importantly, the relevance of brain damage to behavior lies in the distinction between morality and illness. Blaming or praising people in virtue of whether they have received a blow to the head is as nonsensical as blaming or praising people for their genetic makeup. The distinction we are talking about here is the distinction between ‘mental illness’ and ‘immorality’. In order for behavior to be immoral, it has to be something that we can talk about in the context of praise and blame. Brain damage is not in that area.

Even if a person suffers brain damage that disposes him to behave less morally than he would have otherwise behaved, moral concepts can still apply. This is the same issue we faced when discussing the amount of agreeableness or altruism one gets as a result of genetics. We can still ask whether the levels obtained as a result of a brain injury are too high or too low, or if they pick out the right objects. Even for a brain-damaged person, it may be possible for social factors (moral institutions) to improve upon the dispositions that they acquire from the brain injury, making a person less likely to do harm and more likely to help, then the brain damage alone would have accounted for.

So, I am not denying the validity of any of the empirical research. I am also not denying the importance of the empirical research. I am, however, pointing out the fact that the researcher who reports that he has discovered round squares (for example) is doing his field a disservice. People who link morality (or immorality) to genetics or brain structure are like researchers who discover round circles. Since the things that they claim to have discovered are logically impossible, these researchers clearly do not understand what they are studying.

This, of course, leads to the thorny issue of ‘choice’ in morality. If morality has to do with choice, and choice itself does not exist (in a determined or random world), then morality does not and never has had anything to do with the real world.

I do not have space to go into that issue in detail here. However, I can still provide an outline of a response.

Morality has to do with determined choice. A chess playing computer engages in determined choice. It considers every possible move as if it can actually make that move. It measures the value of each option. Then, it takes the option with the highest value. A person with perfect knowledge of the computer’s program can reliably predict the computer’s choice. However, the computer still makes a choice. The computer still weighs competing alternatives and selects the alternative with the greatest value.

Moral institutions seek to influence the values that we give to different outcomes as a way of influencing our determined choices. Praise and reward are used to encourage people to assign higher value to some sets of moves. Condemnation and punishment are used to encourage people to assign lower value to other moves – or even negative value (to acquire aversions to) other moves. In doing so, we can influence how others behave. We can get them to behave in ways that tend to better fulfill our desires (values). At the same time, others have reasn to use the same tools to get us to adopt particular values, thus influencing how we behave.

Praise and reward, condemnation and punishment, have no effect on our genetic makeup or on the strictly determined results of a brain injury. It is only relevant where our innate dispositions, whatever they happen to be, can be molded by social forces. This is why we can never have a moral genes or immorality grounded on brain damage. It is because it does not make sense to praise or condemn people on the basis of their genetic makeup or aspects of our brain states that are immune from social influence.

Moral Instinct: A Case Study

Yesterday's posting concerned a New York Times article called, "The Moral Instinct". In it, I argued that an inference assumed in the article - that a sense that an instinct to make the judgment P is wrong implies P is wrong - is an invalid inference.

Today, I would like to look at one of the specific examples used in the article and demonstrate this fallacy.

The article reports on some experiments that were performed.

Julie is traveling in France on summer vacation from college with her brother Mark. One night they decide that it would be interesting and fun if they tried making love. Julie was already taking birth-control pills, but Mark uses a condom, too, just to be safe. They both enjoy the sex but decide not to do it again. They keep the night as a special secret, which makes them feel closer to each other. What do you think about that — was it O.K. for them to make love?

When presenting this case to people, the researchers point out the fact that they can block any argument that the test subjects give for saying that it is wrong. They can drive their subjects into a situation where the subject says, "I can't argue against anythng that you say. But, I know it's wrong, and nothing you can say will convince me otherwise."

The fact is, I have met people who would say exactly the same thing about interracial relationships - or homosexual relationships for that matter. This is a descriptive fact about how a lot of people think - about how they reach moral conclusions.

However, it leaves an important set of questions unanswered. Is this form of sibling incest, or homosexuality, or interracial relationship, wrong in fact? What does it take for homosexuality (for example) to be wrong in fact?

Is it the case that - if there are people who can be driven to the conclusion, "I cannot argue against anything you say, but I know that homosexuality is wrong and that it is permissible to take actions that harm the interests of homosexuals, and there is nothing you can say to change my mind," then in fact homosexuality is wrong and these people really are justified in harming the interests of homosexuals?

Just because you can find a lot of examples of people doing something, this does not mean that they are justified in doing it. No matter how many instances we find of people committing the fallacy of 'ad hominem' - this does not make 'ad hominem' a valid form of reasoning. No matter how many instances we find of people firmly anchoring their claims that they are justified in doing harm to others on a particular set of personal likes and dislikes, this does not mean that the particular set of likes and dislikes actually justifies those harms.

I think that I can offer an account of what is going on in the case of incest. This research starts off entirely on the wrong foot. It is making the false assumption that morality is primarily concerned with evaluating actions. So, it is trying to get people to evaluate an act of incest. When, in fact, morality is primarily concerned with evaluating desires, and what agents are evaluating in fact is a universal aversion to incest.

They then force their perspective on the subjects - forcing the subject to come up with a justification in terms of acts being the primary object of evaluation. Which the subjects cannot do - because the assumption is false.

Here is how the argument would go if we take desires to be the primary object of moral behavior.

What I am looking at in evaluating this act is whether there are desires or aversions inherent in the situation that people generally have reason to promote throughout a population.

People generally have reason to promote an aversion to incest. Even though there may be a few cases in which incest does not thwart desires, by and large incestuous relationships are ultimately desire-thwarting; they cause a great deal of harm. If everybody has an aversion to incest, then for the most part we would be preventing a great deal of harm, and if everybody has an aversion to incest we would not be thwarting any desires (there would not be a desire to engage in incest for us to thwart).

A universal aversion to incest implies a universal aversion to the type of behavior described in this case.

If I were to say that their behavior were justified, then I would be saying that nobody should have this aversion to incest. However, a culture in which nobody has this aversion to incest would be a culture in which abusive incest would be far more common. We certainly have no reason to create a culture in which abusive incest is far more common. Therefore, we certainly have no reason to say that nobody should have an aversion to this type of situation.

The case clearly states that the couple keep their act a secret, so that it has no affect on society.

However, I am not talking about the act itself. I am talking about the judgment of the act. When you ask me to judge the act as morally permissible or impermissible you are asking me to judge whether everybody should or should not have an aversion to that type of situation. Even if, in this rare case, no harm was done, people generally still have many good reasons to promote an a culture in which people are averse to these types of relationships. People generally still have reason to judge the absence of an aversion to incest negatively.

The researchers who write about these types of cases point out that their subjects generally cannot articulate a defense that the researchers cannot counter. Therefore, they say that all moral justifications are 'rationalizations'. However, that conclusion requires something stronger than saying, "We have been able to counter every response." It requires saying, "There can be no response that we cannot counter."

That, I argue, simply is not true. Try the above response on for size.

If this response fails, then there is still the possibility that there is another response not yet thought of.

If it is the case that all responses fail, then the conclusion is not to say that the prohibition on incest is justified in virtue of some 'moral instinct'. The correct conclusion to draw is that humans have an inherent impulse to do unjustified harm to others in these types of cases. If incest is not wrong in fact, then a moral instinct to treat incest as wrong is, itself, wrong - a sickness driving people to do harm to those that it has no real reason to harm, and to merely imagine that the harms they inflict are justified.

One of the things that I must note is that subjects often cannot give a conscious defense of their moral conclusions. However, this does not require any sort of ‘moral instinct’. A lot of our reasoning is subconscious. Nature does not have a particularly compelling need to make it the case that all reasoning is conscious. Nature is well served by coming to the correct conclusion. Making the method of reasoning conscious is, sometimes, a waste of energy and a waste of time. One of the things about morality is that it must often weigh in on our actions the instant we decide to act. We do not have time to consciously deliberate the morality of every action.

Morality, on this account, is still an object of reason, though some of it is subconscious. When moral reason is done poorly, it yields moral conclusions that are wrong. There is no ‘moral instinct’ or ‘innate morality’ – it is simply a fallacy to argue from the fact that we have certain innate desires to do harm and feel justified in doing so that we are, as a matter of fact, justified in doing so. In order to be justified in doing harm there has to be a fact of the matter – a way in which ‘we are morally justified in doing harm’ can be true as a matter of fact.

Either there is a justification for the harms that we inflict on others under the heading ‘morality’, or the harms that we inflict on others under the heading ‘morality’ are unjustified.

NYT: The Moral Instinct

The New York Times has an article called, “The Moral Instinct”.

I hold that there is no such thing as a “moral instinct”.

In fact, “moral instinct” serves the same role in morality as “God”. People invented God because they wanted to assign their prejudices to an entity that gave them more legitimacy than they had in real world. The inference, “I want you dead; therefore, you deserve to die,” is transparently an invalid inference. So, people introduced a God element into the equation: “God wants you dead; therefore, you deserve to die.”

For those who do not believe in God this transference no longer works. The next move is to invent a God substitute. This is ‘innate morality’, ‘moral instinct’, or ‘genetic morality’ – take your pick. They all function the same way. “My innate morality wants you dead; therefore, you deserve to die.”

Death is just one element of morality that this form of reasoning applies to. We can make the same case for:

“I want you to suffer; therefore, you deserve to suffer.”

“I want you as my slave; therefore, you deserve to be my slave.”

In the case of women in most culture, “I want you to obey; therefore, you have a duty to obey.”

Or, “I want your land and your property as my own; therefore, I have a right to take your land and your property as my own.”

Primitive people attributed these to God. “God says that those who do X should suffer; therefore, I may make you suffer.” Of course, this was merely the agent’s own desire to see others suffer assigned to a God that he invented. Modern scientifically-minded people attribute this to ‘innate morality”. “My innate morality says that those who do X should suffer.; therefore, I may make you suffer.”

It may well be the case that evolutionary forces have influenced our desire – causing us to want to kill, make suffer, enslave, or oppress others under certain circumstances. Evolutionary forces certainly gave these desires a certain desire or subjective sensation.

But where did we get the idea that, “If I have a subjective sensation S associated with my desire to do harm to others, then those people deserve to be harmed?”

According to the article:

Moral intuitions are being drawn out of people in the lab, on Web sites and in brain scanners, and are being explained with tools from game theory, neuroscience and evolutionary biology.

However, what none of these studies seem to address if the fact that you can draw moral intuitions out of an Islamic jihadist, an ante-bellum Southern slave holder, a crusader, a Japanese Kamikaze pilot, a child rapist, a drunk driver . . . you can draw moral intuitions out of anybody. But how do you justify the inference; “These people have a moral intuition that P is wrong; therefore P is wrong?”

What does “P is wrong” mean within the context of these experiments?

The first hallmark of moralization is that the rules it invokes are felt to be universal. Prohibitions of rape and murder, for example, are felt not to be matters of local custom but to be universally and objectively warranted. One can easily say, “I don’t like brussels sprouts, but I don’t care if you eat them,” but no one would say, “I don’t like killing, but I don’t care if you murder someone.

I have absolutely no trouble handling this observation without any type of reference to a ‘moral instinct’. There are certain desires that people generally have reason to promote in everybody; and there are certain desires that people generally have reason to promote to everybody. Morality is just the term that we use to refer to these questions. The fact that morality is ‘universal’ is no more of a mystery than the fact that circles are ‘round’. We recognize that there are desires and aversions that would benefit us if universally held, and we call those ‘morality’ in the same sense in which we recognize that some shapes are round and we call them ‘circles’.

There is no ‘felt’ element to this at all. If we ‘felt’ that there should be a universal prohibition on eating with one’s left hand, for example, would this make it the case that eating with the left hand is, in fact, wrong? That those who do so should be punished? Or is it the case that our felt judgments are mistaken – because we are calling for something to be universally prohibited that we have no reason to call to be universally prohibited?

The other hallmark is that people feel that those who commit immoral acts deserve to be punished. Not only is it allowable to inflict pain on a person who has broken a moral rule; it is wrong not to, to “let them get away with it.” People are thus untroubled in inviting divine retribution or the power of the state to harm other people they deem immoral.

The tools that we have had for molding desires are praise, condemnation, reward, and punishment. If we have reason to make a particular aversion universal, and the tools for making it universal are condemnation and punishment, then we have reason to use condemnation and punishment. If we have reason to make a particular desire universal, and the tools for doing so are praise and reward, then we have reason to use praise and reward.

There is no deep dark mystery here.

What about homosexual acts? According to this ‘innate morality’ theory, the wrongness of homosexual acts is to be determined by whether or not people have an innate disposition to do harm to homosexuals. If they do, then homosexuals deserve to be harmed. Whatever we do, we cannot judge homosexual acts by the qualities of the acts themselves – whether those acts thwart desires or cause harm to others. We must look at the people who want to harm homosexuals. If they have a ‘moral instinct’ to do harm to homosexuals, then the homosexuals are just out of luck. They deserve to be harmed an no good and just person would stand in the way of those wanting to do (moral) harm.

The logic behind this avenue of moral investigation is absolutely bizarre.

But it is not difficult to explain. It is “religion without God”.

It is taking the function of religion – to provide an excuse for doing harm to others by assigning the legitimacy of that harm to some supernatural entity – and coming up with a substitute.

Because, where we have these desires to do harm – where we want to inflict suffering on others – the last thing we want to consider is that there is no justification for doing harm and the entities we summon to try to give them legitimacy exist only in the realm of make-believe.

The Times article itself is filled with data that contradicts the concept of a ‘moral instinct’ It lists a number of things once thought to be immoral which are now ‘amoralized’ (e.g., divorce, illegitimacy, being a working mother). While new ‘immoralities’ are being argued for (e.g., disposable diapers, I.Q. tests, poultry farms, Barbie dolls.)

So, what happened? Our moral instincts changed?

Are there any reasons for these changes, or are they just haphazard fads that come and go like clothing styles?

In fact, when we debate what should and should not be on the moralized list, people are expected to provide reasons for considering something moral or immoral. One of the things that is not considered a legitimate reason for a moral claim is “because I feel like it.” Some subjectivists have tried to reduce morality to feelings, but they have never been able to make it past this hurdle. How can a feeling justify the conclusion that another person deserves to be harmed? It can’t. In order to justify doing harm to others we need reasons, not just feelings.

The real problem with ‘moral instinct’ or ‘innate morality’ theories is that, even though they may come up with causal reasons for doing harm to others, they have a hard time coming up with justification for doing harm. In fact, the very instant one of these moral researchers put on their lab coats, they seem to forget that morality has to do with justification. They do all sorts of research on causation, but how do you look at a brain scan or the results of a questionnaire and assert, “Because these people engaged in this type of behavior, those people over there that these people would harm deserves to be harmed?

Please explain how you can get deserves to be harmed out of a lab experiment that looks only at the fact that the person doing harm really wants to and thinks that he would be right to do so.

E2.0: David Sloan Wilson: New Atheism a Stealth Religion

This is the ninth in a new series of weekend posts taken from the presentations at the Salk Institute’s “Beyond Belief: Enlightenment 2.0.”. I have placed an index of essays in this series in an introductory post, Enlightenment 2.0: Introduction.

In David Sloan Wilson’s presentation at Beyond Belief 2, he made the argument that the “new atheism” is a stealth religion. It is a stealth religion because, like all religions, its major proponents and its followers buy into a set of propositions that they hold, not on the basis of evidence, but on the basis of . . . well, something less solid than ‘good science’. Yet, they are not willing to concede the fact that they lack good evidence for their beliefs.

Once we take the concept of stealth religions seriously then we can entertain the prospect that there are belief systems that have nothing to do with God . . . not that particular departure from reality . . . but that depart from reality in other ways.

He selected an example of a ‘religious’ form of atheism in Ayn Rand’s Objectivism. Wilson does not go into details as to how Objectivism departs from reality. However, this is a subject that I have covered in the past, such as Why I Am Not A Libertarian.

Briefly, Objectivists ignore logical gaps between ‘is’ and ‘ought’, equivocate between the concepts of value as a means and value as an end, and invent metaphysical entities such as ‘man qua man’ that do not exist in the real world, all in a tenacious attempt to defend their conclusions that, in spite of protests to the contrary, they could not possibly have reached through a judicious application of reason.

Wilson’s claim now is that the New Atheism, like Objectivism, is another ‘stealth religion’.

More specifically, he is concerned with four propositions that (partially) define the New Atheism.

(1) Is there any scientific evidence for the existence of supernatural agents?

(2) If not, then how can we explain the phenomenon of religion in naturalistic terms?

(3) Are the impacts of religion good or bad on human welfare?

(4) How can we use our understanding of religion to ameliorate its negative effects?

On these issues, what he says about the new atheism is, “

My complaint about the New Atheism is that, in the first place, for all of us the answer to question 1 is a no-brainer, so we don’t need to go on and on about it, and that they just get the answer wrong to the other three questions.

I have one immediate complaint about Wilson’s complaint. The ‘New Atheists’ did not write their books for those of us who view the answer to Question 1 as a ‘no brainer’. They wrote their books for people who have not settled on an answer to Question 1, and even for people who insist that the answer to Question 1 is a no-brainer in terms of thinking that supernatural agents definitely exist.

The complaint that, “The problem with your book is that I am not your target audience” is an absurd complaint. It also suggests that the complainer might have other problems understanding the book, because many of the things we say acquire their meaning in context. If Wilson does not understand the intent of the book, then he does not have the right context for understanding its content.

However, Wilson’s more serious objection is that the “New Atheists” give the wrong answer to the other three questions – that they answers that the New Atheists present are not ‘good science’.

I agree with the proposition that the “New Atheists” make false claims and employ leaps of logic that are indefensible. I have raised objections there in the past as well.

However, a lot of people make claims that I hold to be mistakes. In fact, since there is not one single person on the planet who agrees with me on everything, I would have to conclude that everybody holds at least one false belief or makes at least one unjustified leap of logic in defending those beliefs – including me. I have no idea where my false beliefs are to be found, or which of my brilliant logical inferences are, in fact, fallacious, but I know that some do exist.

If the fact that people make mistakes is enough to assert that they are guilty of holding on to a ‘stealth religion’, then the concept of ‘stealth religion’ is so broad that it is a useless term. It does not exclude anything or anybody. In fact, it can only exclude an all-knowing, perfectly logical entity.

It does not even exclude Wilson himself. Wilson says in his speech that he agrees with Dennett that we have a realm of facts on the one hand and a realm of values that is completely distinct and separate from fact. This ‘metaphysical dualism’ – this idea that values represent a ‘different type of entity’ that we cannot study scientifically but that nonetheless has an impact on the real world – I would argue would quality Wilson’s own belief system as a ‘stealth religion’ on his own terms.

I am also puzzled by Wilson’s decision to speak of the New Atheism in terms of a ‘stealth religion’ at all. Here, it would seem that Wilson is intentionally choosing to use an emotionally laden label – one that is almost certainly guaranteed to shut down, rather than support, reasoned debate. It was adopted, it would seem, as much out of a desire to be provocative and insulting as it was out of a desire to educate and enlighten. It would have been wiser to pick a term that would be less likely to cause listeners to respond by going to red alert and raising all shields.

Another issue that puzzles me is that Wilson describes the New Atheism as a ‘stealth religion’, that he seems to be using this in a derogatory way as if this alone is enough to condemn it, and yet at the same time he argues that religion is not necessarily bad.

Here, I found something in Wilson’s presentation that was extremely interesting – the idea that a practical truth is better than a factual truth.

I’m going to try to explain the concept in my own terms, and hope that I get at what Wilson was trying to defend.

Let us accept as a fact that none of us know everything – that there are facts about the universe that each of us are unaware, and that this condition will persist into the indefinite future. This means that the best that any of us can ever have is an approximation of the real world – a model, as it were, constructed to serve practical goals but far from complete.

Think of a computer model that is set up to predict climate change. There is no way that you are going to be able to input the exact location and state of every molecule in the atmosphere and its interaction with every force and particle in space and on Earth to come up with a completely accurate model. The best you are going to be able to create is an approximation of the real world. In coming up with that approximation, one of the things that you might introduce into your model are factors that merely approximate certain aspects of the real climate – certain fudge factors that do not conform to reality but which generate far more accurate predictions with less effort.

In our brains, we have a computer model of the real world – one that is informed through perception but which is not totally and completely accurate. It has been molded through evolution to generate output in real time fast enough to keep the agent evolutionarily fit. In order for this simulation to do its job, it may well use ‘fudge factors’ – variables that refer to things that are not real but which approximate things that are real.

Beliefs and desires may well be two entities of this type. It may well be that beliefs and desires do not refer to anything real. Neuroscientists could well discover systems that better explain and predict human behavior, and the classical concepts of ‘belief’ and ‘desire’ simply are not reducible to these findings in neuroscience. However, these neuroscience concepts are simply not the type that can be programmed into a brain in such a way that they can generate basically reliable output in real time. Though beliefs and desires do not exist, they may well provide a practical value long into the future.

Religion itself might be this type of system. It is a set of propositions that do not reduce to anything real that still have practical value.

In Wilson’s terms:

Basically what we are talking about here are cultural systems as like species in a multiple niche environment. That's the ecological and evolutionary paradigm is to be thinking of cultural systems not as viral-like bits but as systems that are like species and adapted to multiple niches in an economy.

In order to discuss Wilson’s view of religion, we must note that there may be things other than speed and accuracy that are important to include in a simulator meant to generate real-time decision-making data. There are good practical reasons to give up accuracy in exchange for speed. There may also be good practical reasons to give up accuracy in exchange for some other good.

Like, according to Wilson, evolutionary fitness.

Wilson focuses specifically on group selection as an evolutionary force. He talks about colonies of ants, and of how a trait that is bad from the point of view of individual selection can nonetheless be adopted because the colonies where members have those traits out compete colonies that do not have such members. For example, the existence of worker ants (who do not reproduce) may be easier to explain as a product of group selection than kin selection. In fact, Wilson argues, an organism (such as a human body) can be explained in terms of the principles of “group selection” governing the collection of cells that make up human bodies.

Ultimately, Wilson’s argument is that cultural systems (such as religion) may – even though the beliefs deviate from reality – bring about a system of unification and cooperation among individuals that the ‘religion’ itself becomes an organism, where the powers of group selection dominate the powers of individual selection among its members. In a sense, religions help to form colonies – and colonies, in turn, can out-compete individuals.

Wilson seeks to put his group-selection theory of religion up against the ‘parasitic meme’ theory that the ‘New Atheists’ seem to have adopted. Dennett himself, in his presentation the day before, compared religion to a parasite that causes infected ants to climb to the top of a blade of grass. There, the ant can be eaten by a sheep, and the parasite can then infect the sheep. Religion, Dennett argues, is a parasitic meme that infects its host, causing its host to engage in self-destructive behavior, but in doing so perpetuates the reproduction of the meme (by converting new followers into the religion).

In putting these theories up against each other, Wilson accuses the parasitic-meme theorists (the ‘New Atheists’) of ‘bad science’. The New Atheists, he asserts, have done nothing to actually defend their theory – nothing but offer loose anecdotal evidence comparable to the types of evidence that religions offer in defense of their beliefs.

They have not even proved, in a scientifically viable way, that religion is always bad, that it is something that must be done away with.

E2.0: Daniel Dennett: Teach the Children

This is the eighth in a new series of weekend posts taken from the presentations at the Salk Institute’s “Beyond Belief: Enlightenment 2.0.”. I have placed an index of essays in this series in an introductory post, Enlightenment 2.0: Introduction.

This essay is the second of two essays concerning Daniel Dennett’s presentation at Beyond Belief 2: Enlightenment 2.0.

In our previous episode, Dennett presented the proposition:

With all due respect, sir, have you considered the possibility that you have blighted your whole life with a fantasy and are polluting the minds of defenseless children with dangerous nonsense?

He argued that there is no polite way to say this so our options are either to be impolite or to remain silent. The arguments for remaining silent are (1) religion is good, or (2) even though religion is not useful the statement above is (a) cruel or (b) dangerous.

I applied Dennett’s argument to a statement that reflects more my own interests.

You are engaged in a pattern of behave or that deprives others of life, health, and well-being and you are using scripture and religious tradition to wrap your harmful behavior in an illusion of legitimacy.

And I applied Dennett’s response, “But what if it’s true?”

If it is true, then it is quite difficult to imagine that such an attitude could actually be defended as being good, and what is ‘cruel’ and ‘dangerous’ is standing aside while people engage in these types of behavior.

But, how do we get people to stop engaging in this type of behavior? How do we reduce the numbers of victims that this way of thinking generates?

Dennett’s proposal is to make religious studies a required part of the school curriculum. Public schools, private schools, even home schools will be required to teach children the basic facts about all major religions – and children will be tested on it. So, even the home-schooled fundamentalist creationist with limited contact with the outside world will have to study Islam, Hindu, Buddhism, and the like.

Ultimately, Dennett defends his program with an analogy to a situation in which you have water flooding the house. The first thing you do is turn the water off, so that you are not adding more water. Then, you can deal with the water you have. Given enough time, it will drain away on its own, and you can then clean up the mess.

Dennett hope is that, when children are presented with the variety of religions and the fact that each has a set of adherents who say that theirs is true and all others is false, that they will realize there is nothing ‘special’ about any one religion. There is no reason to pick one and say, “This contains the absolute truth,” because “that religion over there” is being defended in exactly the same way.

I suspect that he is right, but it is a matter for empirical research, not for suspicions.

However, there is a perfectly secular argument for this type of education as well. We have to live with (share the planet) with these people in an increasingly global economy. The better we are at understanding others the better we will be at explaining and predicting their behavior, at working with them, at avoiding conflict, at making deals. Some familiarity with religious studies would go a long way to training the child to be a better business or political leader. We need educated people in leadership positions, and this is one element of education that would be useful.

The argument does not only reveal the value of having educated political leaders, but an educated public capable of making intelligent decisions about how to vote. Besides, a lot of these people are our potential neighbors, co-workers, and customers. The only reasonable vaccine against misunderstanding is understanding – and the best source of understanding is through education.

However, in presenting his idea, Dennett makes one significant mistake.

He wants the class to only deal with the facts of a particular religion – its history, its rituals, its moral prescriptions. He does not want any value judgments to enter into the classroom at all.

Yet, as any intelligent news reporter will tell you, value judgments are an inherent part of reporting facts. At the very least, you have to determine which facts you are going to tell. This requires a judgment as to which facts are worth telling and which are not important enough to reveal. This is a value judgment.

In fact, the whole class is premised on a value judgment. Whether we require religious studies as a way of helping children to realize that a lot of people hold a lot of different views on ‘faith’ and there is no good reason to think that any of them are right, or whether we see religious studies as an important body of knowledge for people to have, we must judge which facts are worth knowing, and which are not worth knowing.

This is where the political dispute will come in. In this class, do we teach the students that the Bible commands that disobedient children be brought before the village to be stoned, and that those who work on the day of the Sabbath shall be put to death? Do we teach them the sophisticated rationalizations that people have come up with to try to resolve religious contradictions, or do we only tell them about the contradictions?

Of course, the defenders of any particular view are going to insist that their religion be put in a favorable light. The political battles could be endless and, in the end, quite violent. The best solution with respect to keeping the peace may well be to simply not allow the schools to say anything on this subject. If the schools are silent, then we can all continue to get along without breaking into religious factions and reaching for the weapons of war.

Also, I have an argument against elaborate and complex plans to accomplish some end. The chances of any grand plan ever getting implemented is practically zero, which means that the energy that is devoted to a grand plan is typically wasted. Perhaps I am just being cynical, but I simply do not see much of a hope for a national campaign to make religious studies a required subject.

I am a favor of proposing smaller, personal projects that people can do at home. If the public school system is not willing to establish a class on religious studies, there is nothing to prevent individuals from doing so. There is nothing to prevent a group of concerned parents in setting up a regular weekly or monthly get-together where, at each session, the representative of some religious faction explains their religion to the audience.

At the same time, Dennett’s proposal provides reason to engage in private action to condemn the ‘enforced ignorance’ that religious groups rely on in their efforts to indoctrinate children. Those efforts include an insistence that children not be exposed to ideas other than those they are being indoctrinated into until the indoctrination has had a chance to set. Once set in the brain, a child’s indoctrination is almost impossible to dislodge. Only then is it safe to allow the child to be exposed to other peoples’ ideas.

The Catholic campaign against The Golden Compass, and the decision in Canada to remove the books from libraries that children have access to, is just the most recent example of how religious institutions seek to indoctrinate through enforced ignorance of alternative views. Home schooling, for many parents, is another example of enforced ignorance. It is a way to preserve the child’s ignorance of views the parent does not want the child to be aware of until the child’s mind has been sufficiently set into the parents’ beliefs.

Dennett proposes a massive change in the national school curriculum – and that might be a good idea if it can be pulled off. However, in the mean time, those same arguments can be used to justify campaigns that are more local. There was not, in my mind, nearly as much protest against the boycott of The Golden Compass as their should have been. There was not nearly enough effort to point out how religious institutions seek to indoctrinate children, not through education, but through enforced ignorance of alternative views. Indeed, when it comes to alternatives to a particular religion’s beliefs, religious institutions have a long and violent history of preferring enforced ignorance over education.

That was an excellent time to point this out. Yet, the few articles I read from people who defended the movie largely said, “Don’t worry. Your child can go to see The Golden Compass and still remain ignorant of alternatives to the Christian religion.” The idea that it is wrong for religious institutions to demand that children remain ignorant of alternatives to that religion was not really questioned.

It should have been.

Democrats and Foreign Policy

I have received what may be thought of as an exceptionally long question from a member of the studio audience. That member bought me a subscription to “The Nation” magazine, and asked my opinion about the contents of this news magazine. The first issue (January 2, 2008) just recently landed in my mailbox.

The story that caught my attention first was, “The Democratic Foreign Policy Wars.” By Ari Berman. The first part of the article looks at Senator Clinton’s foreign policy advisors and identifies Richard Holbrooke as a likely candidate for Secretary of State under a Clinton administration.

“No More War” democrats would likely see this as bad news. Holbrooke, it seems, is not adverse to the use of American military power overseas. He favored American military action in the Balkans under the Clinton administration, favored the removal of Saddam Hussein, and advises that we must keep an eye on Iran. In other words, he is not likely to advocate breaking significantly with Bush’s foreign policy.

One of the things that the article does not do is examine the reasons for believing that “No More War” democrats are right and that Holbrooke’s positions are mistaken. It does not at all look at the reasons behind holding competing views and judging whether those reasons are good reasons or bad. They are, in fact, writing for the converted, and saying, “Now that we all agree on X, what should we do about it?”

One of the things that I dislike most about Presidential politics in general and presidential elections in specific is that we have a number of substantially ignorant people, who get their information in 2-minute News segments or reading the headlines on newspapers, who think that they have the perfect solution to every problem. When they listen to a Presidential candidate speak, they go with the attitude that, “This person had better tell me that I am right and that I have perfect wisdom on this matter, or I am not voting for him or her.”

Whereas I hold that the most morally responsible position is to walk in with the attitude, “I do not have time to become an expert on this issue. I’m too busy making a living, raising my children, taking care of my elderly parents, taking care of the yard, keeping my job, and the like to become an expert. So, is this somebody who seems to have become the expert that I do not have time to become, and does he have the moral character that would drive him to do the right thing with the information at hand?”

Fad Beliefs

I have a great deal of sympathy for any political candidate who has to deal with this type of situation. Imagine that you are a Senator. Acting responsibly, you devote a great deal of your time studying an issue, trying to come up with the best solution. However, while you study the issue, some significant subset of your constituency adopts a “fad belief” that the conclusion other than the one you reached through reasoned deliberation is mistaken.

By a “fad belief” I refer to the fact that virtually nobody who holds this popular position has nearly enough information to make an intelligent decision. They have adopted their position, not based on knowledge and reason, but based on a desire to be a part of a fad that has latched onto this political position the way they might all adopt a new hair style.

So now you have a choice. If you look at your evidence and base your decision on a considered evaluation of the reasons for and against each side, you run the risk of coming into conflict with individuals who have done far less work, yet consider their opinions superior to yours. If, instead of applying reason to evidence, you look at the opinion polls, you can keep the people happy, but you find yourself often doing the wrong thing, and doing the right thing only by chance instead of by intention.

One of the issues that Clinton is being pressured on is to pull U.S. troops out of Iraq as quickly as possible. I hold that people with this position are morally irresponsible – as morally irresponsible as Bush was when he sent the troops in to begin with. These advocates of troop withdraw cannot possibly have a sufficiently detailed understanding of the situation in Iraq to be making policy decisions. It is not that I think they are wrong. It is that I think that they are ignorant – and so am I

Bush’s Stupidity

If somebody were to ask me, “When should we pull our troops out of Iraq?” my answer would be, “How the heck do I know? Give me a top-secret security clearance and 5 years to study the issue and I might be able to give you an answer. Until then, I have no choice but to trust people who have had top-secret security clearance and 5 years to study the issue.”

Even though I do not have enough information to draw a conclusion on what to do in Iraq, I often do have enough information to judge whether the person telling me his plans is intelligent enough and moral enough to come up with a good plan. When President Bush made the decision to attack Iraq it was clear, at least to me, that he was significantly deficient in both of these qualities. It did not matter whether I thought that invading Iraq was a good idea or not, it was a very bad idea for Bush to be in charge of the operation. In fact, we have seen the consequences.

If, in 2003, Congress would have budgeted $1 trillion, 4000 American lives, and 30,000 American military personnel injured to dealing with problems in the middle east. I have little doubt that we could have done much more than Bush was able to accomplish with this allotment.

I continue to wonder what would have happened if we had spent that $1 trillion on reducing American dependence on foreign oil – invested it in wind farms, solar power stations, and conservation instead of in Blackwater-style mercenaries and military hardware. What would we have been able to do today if we were now able to approach Middle-Eastern countries from a position of independence and strength, rather than from about the same position as a drug addict to his supplier.

And we could have saved the 4000 American lives, and 30,000 American military personnel would not have been injured.

Using History

One of the ways to determine the answer to the question of what a candidate will do as President is to ask them their opinion about past events. In this regard, there is no need to limit our discussion to the invasion of Iraq. What about Bosnia? What about the first Gulf war?

I supported Papa Bush’s decision to liberate Kuwait. Hussein was the aggressor, and needed to be pushed back. This response would serve as a deterrence to other aggressor nations that the days of conquering other countries with impunity are over. It would be a useful program to adopt for promoting peace. However, we somewhat shoot ourselves in the foot when we become the nation that is doing the conquering. This, then, makes us hypocrites.

I supported the attack on Bosnia. People are people. I reject the idea that a Bosnian life (or an Iraqi life) is worth less than an American life. Death is the ultimate loss for those who die. The campaign in Bosnia saved innocent lives, and did so without a hint that it was done for anything other than humanitarian principles.

So, I would like to ask the candidates whether they would have supported (or did support) these actions and why. If not, I would count this against the quality of their character.

Do they care enough about innocent life to save it? Do they care enough about bringing an end to tyranny that they will devote efforts to bringing an end to tyranny? If not, they do not have the moral character necessary to be good people, let alone good Presidents.

Do they have the intelligence enough to do so without utterly destroying one country and doing significant harm to their own? If not, than even if their heart is in the right place, it would be better to trust the job to somebody competent enough to do it correctly.

Which of the current candidates has the competence and concern to do the best job at saving innocent lives regardless (even if they are not American citizens) and promoting freedom? I'm looking for the author who can help to answer that question for me.

A Prohibition on Teaching Religion

An article in the National Post raises an important question about the goals of the ‘new Atheism’. It focuses specifically on the fact that Dawkins claims that teaching certain religious beliefs to children amount to ‘child abuse’. With this in mind, the author asks:

Why Dawkins refuses to take this idea to its logical conclusion -- to say that raising a child in a religious tradition, like other forms of child abuse, should be considered a crime punishable by the state -- is a mystery, for it follows directly from the character of his atheism.

I actually do not know how Dawkins (or the other ‘new athists’) would answer this question. Their rhetoric at times seems to advocate a policy of banning any mention of a god in the presence of a child until that child reaches a sufficiently mature age. Nor am I particularly concerned with what their answer is. I am more concerned with what the answer to this question should be.

I need to begin by reminding the reader that I reject the proposition that teaching religion to a child is ‘child abuse’. In order for actions towards a child to count as abuse, the agent must have malicious intent or at least a disregard for the well-being of the child. The person who cares for the child’s well-being, but nonetheless does harm, has made a tragic mistake, but has not committed any form of abuse.

Having said that, teaching religion to a child is certainly harmful in two major ways.

The first is that it deprives the child of the opportunity to obtain things of real value. Religious claims are false, and the values that they hold up are as imaginary as the gods they worship. A life of real meaning and realizing states of real value simply is not possible for an agent who is trapped in the pursuit of fictional meaning and imaginary value.

The second is that, while we seek to fulfill the more and stronger of our desires, we choose those actions that would fulfill the more and stronger of our desires given our beliefs. False beliefs cause people to fail to realize states in which the things that they desire are realized. We can see this in the person who wants to be healthy, but who believes that illness is caused by a rejection of God. He decides to fight off an infection with prayer rather than antibiotics, and he dies. False beliefs, in this case, not only prevented this agent from living a good life. It prevented the agent from living at all.

So, giving children false beliefs harms them in two ways. It gives children imaginary values that can never be realized, so it causes the child to grow up wasting his life. Even to the degree that the child has values that he can realize he may fail to do so because false religious beliefs prevent him from recognizing the best means to those ends.

This harm done to children does not, however, does not come from a malicious intent or disregard for the welfare of the child. Those parents and teachers are often very much interested in the welfare of the child. Only, they suffer from one of the two flaws of religion mentioned above – because of their beliefs, they fail to help the child adopt real-world values and deprives the child of the tools that would help to realize the real-world values he does have.

Given that this behavior is harmful to children, should we use the force of law to punish people who engage in this sort of behavior?

Absolutely not.

The principle that I have defended throughout this blog is that the only legitimate response to words are words and private actions, and the only legitimate response to a political campaign is a counter-campaign. False beliefs should never be met with violence. They should be met with a determined effort to demonstrate to others that those beliefs are false.

The argument for this traces its roots back to the heart of the enlightenment. Thomas Jefferson, for example, wrote that to impose beliefs on others through force of arms “makes half of the world hypocrites and the other half fools.” The fools are those who think that they can change beliefs through force of arms. The hypocrites are those who claim to believe what they are being told to believe in order to avoid the violence that the fools would otherwise visit upon them.

John Stuart Mill argued for the opposite of using force of arms to impose beliefs on others. Mill argued that if there were ever a belief held with such a certainty in a society that nobody would ever dispute it, that we should appoint people to defend the indefensible. Otherwise, the idea becomes stagnate. We lose our full understanding and appreciation of a truth if we are not constantly engaged in a struggle to explain how it is true against challengers.

The point of both of these positions is that the best way to defeat a set of false beliefs is not through force of arms (or force of law), but through a vigorous effort to explain why those beliefs are false – to convince others that no lover of truth would embrace such beliefs.

Even when it comes to preventing parents from doing harm to children by teaching those children false beliefs and imaginary values, the correct response is never to use the force of law, but to use the force of reason instead.

We do recognize that one form of child abuse is to neglect to provide the child with an education. A child who grows up unable to read, write, do basic math, or understand the fundamental facts of the world in which we live, will not have the tools he needs to run his own life, and is also not of much use to others. Particularly in a democracy, where the people choose their leaders, we must be concerned that the people are well enough educated that they can do a good job of choosing those leaders.

Now, we get to the question of education.

A major purpose of the school system is to provide children with true (and useful) beliefs and good desires. In fact, children need true beliefs in order to live a quality life, as I argued above. They also need good desires so as not to be a threat to others, and need others to have good desires so that they are not a threat to him.

At the same time, we will never have universal agreement on what counts as true beliefs or good desires. So, the question of what to teach children is always going to be a political issue – something that we must work out through public debate and compromise. We must go with a common consensus on what counts as true belief or good desire. This is not because the majority is always right (they very often are not). It is because there is no better option.

In some cases, we have found it necessary to adopt the position that the government will not teach particular propositions to children – even if they are true – because the proposition concerns a subject over which people tend to get violent. The ‘separation of church and state’ is only required because of a long and dark history of violence when church and state do not remain separate. If people with religious differences of opinion could learn to settle their differences by peaceful means – through institutions like those that scientists use, for example – there would be no need to separate church from state, any more than there is a need to separate science from state.

So, we have reached a political compromise that says, “Thou shalt not use public schools and public dollars to try to convert my child to your religion.”

This principle, by the way, is completely ignored when it comes to atheists in this country. Adding ‘under God’ to the pledge and changing the national motto to ‘In God We Trust’ were done precisely in violation of this principle – done precisely to promote a belief in God over other beliefs, and to make children feel uncomfortable with considering other options. Fortunately, atheists have had a tendency to prefer reasoned discussion to force of arms when they are threatened, so this particular violation has not lead (and, with continued strong moral commitments on the part of atheists, will not lead) to violent confrontations.

The idea that these atheists who are protesting these violations to the limits on government power are ‘militant’ is just another piece of evidence that the dominant Christian culture in this country is a culture of lies, sophistry, and bearing false witness for political purposes. The fact of the matter is that, in spite of the fact that the Christian culture continually violates the peace treaty between religions, the atheist culture has refused to break the peace.

I urge that they continue to do so, even though this incentivizes the Christian culture into greater and greater breaches of the terms of that agreement.

There is, then, no call for laws declaring the teaching of religious beliefs to children to be a type of abuse punishable by law. It simply is not permissible to respond to words with violence. The best way to respond to harms done to children in the form of false beliefs and bad desires is to counter those harms with a campaign to promote truth and good desires – and to promote them in ways that children can understand.

Because teaching religion to children does harm, the degree to which individuals are concerned with preventing harm to children will be measured by the degree to which they are willing to contribute to a campaign to present children with true beliefs and good desires in ways the child can understand and accept. It is blatantly inconsistent to complain that it is bad to teach religion to children, and yet not be willing to take action to prevent this harm in morally permissible ways.

The religious community will not like this. As they have demonstrated with the movie, “The Golden Compass” they recognize that the best defense that they have when it comes to teaching their attitudes to children is to enforce a child’s ignorance of alternative views. So, instead of meeting the movie The Golden Compass with arguments explaining the problems with the ideas presented, they organize a boycott. They run at full speed away from a policy of debate and discussion and directly into a policy of enforced ignorance.

The original question concerns whether we should make the teaching of religion to children punishable by law, in virtue of the fact that it is harmful to children. We should not. Even if the children adopt atheism under such a system, they will not understand it. They will not know why it is better than competing ideas unless and until they have been presented with those competing ideas and come to understand why they are inferior. This cannot be done by making the teaching of competing ideas illegal. This can only be done in an environment where people are free to offer those competing ideas, so that they can just as freely be refuted.

In other words, this doctrine of making it illegal to teach religion to children is exactly the type of ‘enforced ignorance’ that many religious figures feel they have reason to fear, because it is a policy that where, as illustrated with their reaction to The Golden Compass, they are eager to embrace. Whereas, the morally better way would be to allow children to be exposed to competing ideas, and then to help the children to understand what is wrong with those ideas.

This is not at all an unreasonable strategy. We can expect that a great many theists have a stronger love for their children (who exist) than for their God (who does not). Insofar as they care for their children, they have reason to take seriously the claim that they are doing harm, and to stop. This is the strategy to use - one in which they choose to comply, and to do so because they understand the harm that is otherwise done, and they care to prevent it.

More Happiness and Desire Fulfillment

Some current discussion among members of the studio audience invites me to take a closer look at the concepts of ‘happiness’ and ‘desire fulfillment’.

One of the questions that I need to look at is whether they are the same thing, or if they are importantly different.

If the two concepts are the same, then their truth-conditions should co-vary. Specifically, if happiness and desire fulfillment are the same, then when a proposition about happiness goes from being true to false, a corresponding proposition about desire fulfillment should also go from being true to false. If they do not, then there is a difference between them. When we encounter a difference, we can see which option value tracks.

So, let’s take the case of Mary. Mary is sitting at her computer, reading an email she has received from her daughter-in-law, Susan. Susan and her husband (Mary’s son) Brad are with their children enjoying a vacation in Australia. At this point, Mary is happy.

At the very instant that Mary is reading the letter, a drunk driver hits the car that her son was driving. Her son and one of her grandchildren are killed. Her daughter in law is paralyzed, and her other grandchild suffers severe and irreversible brain damage. At the moment of the accident, the proposition, “Mary is happy” remains true. There is no sense in which it is reasonable to say that Mary’s happiness changed from one moment to the next. No observer, watching Mary’s behavior as she reads the letter, or measuring her vital signs, would notice any difference.

However, at the moment of the accident, the proposition, “Mary’s desire that her son and his family enjoy their vacation in Australia is being fulfilled,” goes instantly from being true, to being false. Mary’s desire that P is fulfilled only in a state where P is true. Because of the automobile accident, P is no longer true, so Mary’s desire is no longer fulfilled.

So, we see here that happiness and desire fulfillment are not the same thing. In this one circumstance (and there are is an infinite number of comparable examples) the truth conditions diverge – a happiness proposition remains true while a desire fulfillment proposition changes from true to false.

Is this an important difference?

The reason that this difference exists is because ‘happiness’ is a mental state, while ‘desire fulfillment’ is a relationship between a mental state and a state of affairs in the real world.

Because happiness is a mental state alone we can isolate happiness from the external world. Let us take Mary’s brain state as she reads the letter – a state in which Mary is happy – and preserve it. Let’s put the brain in an infinite loop. In this state, Mary thinks that she is going to her computer, turning it on, happily reading the email, finishing the email, going to the kitchen, pouring herself a cup of coffee, going into the computer room (without any memory of the earlier event), finding and reading the email, and so forth.

Once Mary is in this infinite loop, we can do anything we want in the external world and it cannot affect her happiness.

If it is true that value tracks happiness, than the world in which Mary’s children and grand children get in the wreck is no more or less valuable to her than the world in which they do not get in a wreck. One of the things that happiness theory implies is, “What you do not know cannot hurt you.” Mary is not made unhappy by the accident. Mary is made unhappy by learning about the accident. The accident does not affect her brain states. The discovery that the accident took place is what harms her. So, by promoting ignorance (of things people do not want to hear) we can prevent harm.

The discussion in the studio audience on this issue brings up the possibility that happiness is still the only thing that matters. The accident, after all, cost the family in Australia the loss of a great deal of happiness.

But let’s remove this variable. Let’s take the family in Australia and put their brains in the same loop. Before the accident, they were enjoying the day snorkeling at the Great Barrier Reef. So, we take their brains at the time when they were the happiest and we lock them in a loop.

In fact, let us take everybody’s brain and lock it in a loop when that person was the happiest. We will set up machines to monitor these brain states – machines that we will assume have no chance of breaking down.

Under the happiness theory of value, this would be utopia. Nothing could be better than to have all these brains experiencing nothing but their best state of happiness in perpetuity.

That is, if the happiness theory of value were correct.

Yet, some people look upon this description and shudder. They do not see this as the best of all possible worlds. They see this as a horrendously meaningless existence. In terms of happiness, nothing can be better. If something is better than this, than that something must be a state in happiness is sacrificed in favor of something else of value.

Happiness is, indeed, one of the things that we value. But there are others, such that people are willing to pay a little less happiness in order to purchase this “something else”. They are willing to endure a little suffering, if it brings them more of this “something else”.

Desire fulfillment theory explains why events external to our brain states matter. A ‘desire that P’ is a mental state that motivates an agent into realizing a state in which P is true. A state in which P is not true (even if the agent falsely believes that it is true) has no value – at least as it relates to that desire.

Value is not a brain state. Value is a relationship between a brain state and a state of affairs in the world. Alter the state of affairs and value can instantly vanish. We do not have to wait for the agent to find out about it.

Desire and Motivation

From Atheist Observer:

you have desires that are not happiness or satisfaction related. Fine. Why do you have them? Where did they come from and how were they acquired?

Consider the fact that these are the two options. (1) Nature molded us to be concerned with one thing and one thing only, and that is whether our brain is in a particular state – a state of ‘being happy’. (2) Nature molded us to have a number of concerns to create states in the real world – states, for example, that result in our genetic replication, the survival of our children to the point and in a condition in which they can have children of their own.

Why would nature mold us to have one and only one concern, that being the concern that our brain is in a particular state? How did that happen?

Assume that you were building a robot that you would wish to see survive a hostile environment. Your robot can be damaged by excessive heat. So, you program your robot so that it can measure temperature differences and so that it moves away from unusually hot locations. In other words, you provide your argument with primitive versions of ‘beliefs’ about the temperature and a primitive form of an ‘aversion’ to high temperatures.

Also, a fall might harm your robot. Therefore, you program your robot with a way of sensing how far it would fall under different circumstances. You also program it with a primitive aversion to states of affairs in which there is a significant risk of falling far enough to cause harm.

Of course, circumstances arise in which the robot must make a choice between entering an area with higher temperatures or risking a fall. So, you give these desires a rank – and built it so that it performs the action that fulfills the stronger of its two desires.

Finally, you fine-tune your robot a little. You make the strength of an aversion proportional to the measure of the state to which one is averse. So, the robot has a stronger aversion to entering a higher-temperature region than to entering a lower-temperature region. It has a higher aversion to falling a longer distance than to falling a shorter distance.

In comparing these desires, the robot, if faced with a choice between entering a region with moderately high temperature or falling a great distance, will choose the moderately high temperature. If faced with a choice between a region with very high temperature or falling a moderate distance, it will choose to fall a moderate distance. It takes that action that fulfills the more and stronger of its desires (or, in this case, that avoids the more and stronger of its aversions).

The point to note here is that there is no need for happiness. Your robot is not programmed to realize a state of happiness. Your robot is programmed to avoid a state of high temperature or a risk of falling a great distance.

I can illustrate this same point by looking at a simple example. My cat walks into the kitchen for some food. One explanation for my cat’s behavior is that my cat wants to eat something and knows that there is food in the kitchen. Another explanation for my cat’s behavior is that my cat wants to be happy, believes that eating food will make it happy, and believes that there is food in the kitchen.

The first explanation is the simplest. We have every reason to stick with the first unless and until we have compelling reason to complicate our description by adding complexities.

I assert that I am not much different from the cat. When I wander into the kitchen it is not because I have a desire for happiness and suspect that something in the kitchen might provide me with happiness. I just want something to eat – that’s all. Happiness, if it comes, is a side-effect; icing on the cake, as it were.

Ben Stein's "Expelled" Revisited

One of the problems with the "new atheism" is that it is confronted with people who seem to be significantly lacking in certain moral virtues; in particular, the moral virtues of honesty and intellectual integrity.

One manifestation of this is the degree to which they critics of the “new atheism” lie, distort, and otherwise misrepresent the claims of those they criticize ('bearing false witness' against others to their readers and listeners) in order to present a view that they can easily refute. In doing so, they ignore the claims that those they criticize actually make.

An instance of this springs from my post concerning Ben Stein's movie, due out next month, "Expelled: No Intelligence in the Classroom." The movie aims to argue that the ‘Darwinists’ that dominate America’s institutions of higher learning are engaged in an unjust campaign to silence critics this persecution is not being carried out because intelligent design is not science (the reason that, for example, astrologers are not welcome in the community of astronomers), but because 'Darwinists' have a religious intolerance of all things religious.

Seth Elliott, writing for the organization “In His Name,” wrote recently that he wants to use my earlier criticism of Ben Stein’s movie as a starting point for addressing certain concerns that atheists might have with Christians.

Well, from the Atheist Ethicist’s internet blogging, we can begin to understand the fear that for an increasingly large number of people comes from Christians. I intend to use one of this blogger’s main points to begin a series of articles to re-articulate the Christian faith and to reduce the irrational fears that misinformation has produced about those of us who seek to follow Christ and His teachings.

What is "one of this blogger's main points?" According to Elliott it is:

He honestly fears that the refutation of evolution might mean an onslaught of religious fervor that would seek to replace things like MRI’s with crystal balls and neuroscience with phrenology. He, and others, imagine a world where everyone abandons boats and starts drowning while trying to walk on water. They see censorship, hysteria, and catastrophe when religious fools start throwing themselves off of cliffs to see if angels will catch them. I am heartbroken about where this dude went to church and the kind of Christians he knows.

The question to ask is: Are these empirically true facts about me? Or is this an example of 'bearing false witness' - an example of the morally questionable practice of telling others things about a person that are not true.

Of course, it is the latter.

Attacking Christians

The most personally disturbing fiction that Elliott witnesses to is his assertion that my writing is directed against Christians. I have devoted a great deal of my blog to promoting and practicing the principle that blame must be narrowly assigned to those who are actually guilty. I am as critical of atheists who violate this principle as I am of theists, as illustrated by my recent series of postings criticizing the act of putting an, “Imagine: No Religion” sign in a park in Connecticut as a part of a holiday display.

The fact is, it would be wrong for me to blame Christians for this attack on science. Many Christians (and, officially, the Catholic Church) accept evolution, and some make significant contributions to the biological sciences. Though we might argue that evolution is inconsistent with a literal interpretation of the Bible, some do not interpret the Bible literally.

So, the claim that I have written against Christians commits the moral crime of bearing false witness against me. It is a malignant distortion of my views that will give Elliott’s readers false impressions of what I actually believe and say;

My point here is not just that Elliott's claims are false, but that they represent a moral failing on his part. He wrote a series of statements about me without showing even the slightest interest in determining whether they were accurate. He bore witness against me without concern over whether the witness he bore was accurate or false.

Evolution and Past Medical Breakthroughs

Elliott bears witness that "[Alonzo] honestly fears that the refutation of evolution might mean an onslaught of religious fervor that would seek to replace things like MRI’s with crystal balls and neuroscience with phrenology."

I find the insertion of the word 'honestly' in this statement to be particularly ironic.

Actually, this is not 'honestly' the case at all. I have no doubt that Christians will continue to make use of current medical breakthroughs. I am well aware of the fact that, while Creationists are busy undercutting the foundation on which medical breakthroughs are built, they have no objection to taking advantage of those breakthroughs anyway. The clear benefit of those breakthroughs will virtually guarantee that they will continue to be used.

My concern is not with abandoning current medical breakthroughs, but with delaying future medical breakthroughs. Those breakthroughs come from people who take phenomena not yet explained, offer theories about possible explanations, and then test those theories through experimentation. The person who shuts down his mind and says, "There can be no understanding of how this happens; God did it and it defies human understanding." discovers nothing, and helps nobody.

These are the people who I was referring to in my original post when I wrote that a consequence of 'Expelled' in promoting public hostility to the scientific quest of finding real-world answers to these questions will be the suffering and early death of countless people who otherwise could have been saved or benefited from advances in science.

The Consequences of Refuting Evolution

I would be ecstatic to learn that evolution had been refuted and replaced with a better scientific theory. A better theory, in science, means a better way to explain and predict real-world events. In the area of biology, a breakthrough theory that replaces evolution should generate countless medical breakthroughs and a significant improvement in environmental policy (derived from our better understanding of the environment). In fact, these outcomes are how the new theory would prove it deserves to hold the seat that evolution currently holds.

Intelligent design is not science precisely because it does not offer the breakthroughs in medicine and environmental policy that an improved scientific theory would give us. There are zero medical research proposals waiting for intelligent design theory to be verified or falsified, and there are zero medical research proposals that employ intelligent design rather than evolution as a basis for that research. If intelligent design theorists actually started producing breakthrough medical research and breakthrough understanding of the environment, then those benefits alone would guarantee that they get a hearing.

It is precisely because there is no scientific evidence supporting intelligent design that, instead of offering research results that defend their claim, they are forced to use propaganda such as the movie Expelled, legislation, and public pressure to get their views presented as science.

The Policy Implications of Belief Without Evidence

According to Elliott, I and others “imagine a world where everyone abandons boats and starts drowning while trying to walk on water.”

Actually, I do not recall ever imagining such a world. Taken as a literal statement of what I imagine, the statement is false.

However, it is possible to take this statement metaphorically, in which case it might hold some truth.

We do, in fact, have events like this in the real world. We have people who insist that we can alter the course of hurricanes and prevent tsunamis, for example, by passing laws against homosexual acts and abortion. They are people who think that the absence of school prayer has a material effect on whether federal agents will notice whether a group of terrorists are going to try to hijack airplanes and fly them into sky scrapers. We have people who, in countless individual cases every day, choose an irrational solution based on star charts or what they think is a sign from God. These are, in fact, 21st century equivalents of ‘abandoning boats and trying to walk on water,’ with the same types of tragic consequences.

There is reason to believe that we have nearly 4000 Americans killed and over 20,000 injured in Iraq by a President who ignored evidence and went with ‘signs from God’ in deciding to attack Iraq – another example of the metaphor of abandoning boats and walking on water, where this is taken as a metaphor for abandoning evidence and acting on faith.

More importantly, we have legions of individuals devoting vast quantities of time and effort to actions and policies that deprive others of life, health, and well-being based on beliefs without evidence. Metaphorically, these are not just people who abandon boats and try to walk on water, but who force others out to stand on the water. When their victims sink, they blame the victim for not having enough faith while they shove the next group out onto the water.

Regardless of the accuracy of Elliott’s statement as metaphor, I do see how it would be on topic to relate these effects to Ben Stein’s movie Expelled. In my original article, I have written about how the belief that we can use laws against homosexuality and abortion to influence the frequency of earthquakes and direction of hurricanes has not been scientifically verified. However, that is not the same issue.

Conclusion

Theists who engage in these types of acts are rewarded by the fact that benefit from the fact that more people will read their claims about what these writers said than read what the writers actually wrote. Their willingness to devote so much energy to repeating these false claims, combined with their readers’ and listeners’ tendency to accept claims made on authority without questioning the reliability of the source, promotes a false impression of our views. We must, then, live with the fact that others have made and promoted false claims against us – exactly the type of injustice that makes this type of behavior immoral.

In my original post, I took effort to confine my criticism to “those who were responsible for” the movie. I made sure to declare that I might be mistaken about what the movie claimed (because I had not seen it) and that I was responding to reports about the movie that may be mistaken. I made an effort to make sure that I did not bear false witness against anybody, and that my writing conformed to the moral responsibilities incumbent on all writers.

An Atheist's 10 Commandments: Items 3 and 4

A few weeks ago I discussed a video that a member of the studio audience made me aware of that showed An Atheist's 10 Commandments. The audience member directed me to it and asked, "Did you have something to do with writing this? It sounds so much like you."

I decided at the time to explain why the video does not sound so much like me.

At the time, I only had room to discuss two of the ten commandments. Here, I want to discuss a couple more.

Treat the environment and all life with reverence ensuring its improvement by virtue of preventing loss, injury, or any other harmful change.

The first thing that I do not like about this principle is its circular reference. The terms 'improvement', 'loss', 'injury', and 'harmful' are all value-laden terms. So, in effect, this principle tells us, "Do not do bad things." It tells us nothing about what those bad things are.

It is like the biblical commandment, "Thou shalt not murder." (Some translate this as 'thou shalt not kill' but that cannot be a reasonable translation, particularly since the bible commands the killing of any who break the commandments.

'Murder,' however, means 'wrongful killing'.

So the commandment in question says, "That shalt not engage in the types of killings that thou shalt not engage in."

Well . . . yeah . . . thanks for the advice, I will keep that in mind.

In order to call a change an 'improvement' you have to have a way of measuring value - since an 'improvement' by definition replaces something of lesser value with something of greater value. 'Harms' and 'injuries' are not contingently bad. They are necessarily bad. They have bad written into the very meaning of the terms. So, the real value question is never, "Is harm or injury bad?" It is always, "Is X a harm or an injury." And if X is not bad then the answer must be "No."

So, this commandment is worthless until somebody tells us what an 'improvement', 'loss', 'injury' and 'harm' are.

Desire utilitarianism holds that all true value claims relate objects of evaluation to desires. Something is an 'improvement' if it substitues something that fulfills fewer and weaker desires with something that fulfills more and stronger desires.

It holds that an 'injury' is a change in functioning that thwarts the desires of that which is injured, and 'harming' an entity consists in actually thwarting the strong and stable desires of an entity - where thwarting weaker and fleeting desires counts as 'hurting' the entity.

The environment itself has no desires. Therefore, it is not possible to harm or injure the environment.

Sure, we sometimes talk about harming or injuring the environment. We also sometimes talk about offending God. The fact that we sometimes talk about something does not imply that we are talking about something real.

We can (and do) speak metaphorically about harming 'the environment'. In this sense, to harm the environment is to harm the interests of those whose desires are fulfilled by the environment. When we poison the air and the water we make fill those entities with substances that tend to thwart desires. Those whose desires are being thwarted are those who are actually being harmed. This is true in the same sense that talk about poisoning the air or water supply does not actually poison the air or water supply. It poisons those who use that air and water supply.

Some people have a desire to preserve the environment as is, and perhaps more people should. One thing that we can say about the environment as it has been is that it could keep us alive. We have reason to be concerned about whether a changed environment will have the same capacity as the environment that was. We have reason to want to preserve the environment.

Yet, even here, the desire to preserve the environment gets its value by its tendency to fulfill other desires (to the degree that it has this tendency). It is still not the environment getting harmed, but the people whose desires are thwarted by a change in the environment who are being harmed.

Determine what is moral in your own mind, not what others dictate morality should be.

I'm sorry, but there is no polite way to go about discussing this one. Right in the middle of "an atheist's 10 commandments" that have the function of telling people what morality to adopt, it says, "Do not listen to those who tell you what morality to adopt."

It's like a list of 10 commandments with a "Just Kidding" stamp placed across them.

This principle is actually a false dichotomy, and neither option is to be recommended.

Tell a person to determine what is moral in his own mind, and he may well find racism, bigotry, the rape of a child, the murder of all 'outsiders', to be moral. Tell a person to determine what others dictate morality should be and he may well listen to somebody who holds that racism, bigotry, the rape of a child, or the murder of all outsiders to be moral.

Morality is not "whatever you decide to do" any more than science is "whatever you decide to believe". Morality is not "whatever others tell you to do" any more than science is "whatever others tell you to believe."

Moral value is a species of value, and value is the relationship between objects of evaluation and reasons for action that exist. One needs to discover which reasons for action we have reason to promote and which reasons for action we have reason to inhibit. When people 'determine' what these answers are, they could very well be wrong.

E2.0: Daniel Dennett: "But What If It's True?"

This is the seventh in a new series of weekend posts taken from the presentations at the Salk Institute’s “Beyond Belief: Enlightenment 2.0.”. I have placed an index of essays in this series in an introductory post, Enlightenment 2.0: Introduction.

Because Daniel Dennett discussed two topics, both of which are worth our full attention, I am going to be discussing his presentation in two posts. One of those two topics was the thesis that there is something morally objectionable in the tone of atheist writings – independent of their content. The other topic (which I will discuss next week) was the thesis that we should require that the school system teach children about all of the major religion – that there be a ‘religious studies’ requirement in our schools, so that a child graduates knowing the basics of Christianity, Islam, and the rest.

Actually, Dennett discusses a third topic that I want to cover – but that third topic is a criticism of the views of David Sloan Wilson, who will speak after Dennett. I will discuss Dennett’s criticism of Wilson’s view at that time.

The Tone of the Anti-Theist Writers

From the time that the very first of the anti-theist books hit the bookshelves, Sam Harris’ The End of Faith, people have been complaining about the tone. That complaint carried through to the other books that came out on the same subject – Dawkins’ The God Delusion, Dennett’s Breaking the Spell, Hutchins’ God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, and back to Harris’ Letter to a Christian Nation.

I have covered this topic a number of times in my blog. See, for example, Polite Atheists, Defending Real World Harms for Imaginary Reasons, and Moral Outrage.

In those essays, I made substantially the same point that Dennett made in his presentation.

There is no polite way to say, ‘With all due respect, sir, have you considered the possibility that you have blighted your whole life with a fantasy and are polluting the minds of defenseless children with dangerous nonsense?’

In my writing, I focus on the ‘dangerous’ component. I have argued that the proposition, “At least one God exists,” is morally neutral in that believing this proposition tells a person absolutely nothing about how he should treat others. My problem is with the propositions found in religion that guide a person into acting in ways harmful to the interests, and even to the lives, of others.

In this, I have also argued that the most dangerous weapon of mass destruction is legislation. Religious beliefs have inspired whole armies of people in the United States and elsewhere to set of legislative ‘weapons of mass destruction’ that do significant damage to the life, health, and well-being of others.

In fact, in the United States, religious propositions are used to justify the expenditure of whole fortunes and whole lives to projects devoted to doing harm to others.

I have denied that religion is the cause of this harm. People do not adopt the positions they hold because of scripture – there are too many inconsistencies between scripture and people’s moral beliefs for this. They are not killing people who violate the Sabbath or who charge interest on loans. The process actually works the other way. The individual first adopts an interest in policies harmful to others. He then reads those policies into scripture – giving scripture an interpretation that can shield him from the guilt that he should feel for behavior that subjects others to unjustified and undeserved harm.

However, all of this is consistent with the fact that scripture and religious institutions are heavily used in this country and elsewhere to shield behavior harmful to others. To the degree that there is reason to cause that behavior to stop (and everywhere there is harm, there is reason to cause the harmful behavior to stop), to that degree we have reason to tear down the defenses that those who engage in harmful behavior use to ‘rationalize’ those harms.

Quite possibly, those people who are intent to do harm, if the prospect of using scripture and religious tradition to defend that harm comes to be condemned as it should, will retreat to some secular justification. In fact, they can be expected to grasp at whatever straw they can find to give their harmful behavior the illusion of legitimacy (and there is no more tempting source of legitimacy than to say, ‘God told me to do it’). Those defenses will have to be stripped away as well, in turn.

Dennett’s point is that there is no polite way to say, “You are engaged in a pattern of behavior that deprives others of life, health, and well-being and you are using scripture and religious tradition to wrap your harmful behavior in an illusion of legitimacy.”

If there is no polite way to say this then the only way to be polite is to not say this.

Here, Dennett responds:

But what if it’s true?

Well, it is true. Or, more precisely, there is substantial reason to believe that it is true.

However, even if it is not certain, even if it is a mere possibility, it is morally irresponsible not to investigate that possibility. It is morally irresponsible for a person to turn his back when the question comes up, “Would you please consider the possibility that you are doing harm?”

We cannot say such things politely. So, the next option to consider is that we should not say such things at all.

Dennett looks at three arguments in support of the claim, “We should not tell people that they are engaged in these patterns of behavior harmful to others founded on false beliefs.”

Reason 1: Because religion is a good and irreplaceable thing. It’s fragile. It’s valuable. Don’t be a vandal.

Reason 2: Because although religion is not so good, pointing this out is too cruel.

Reason 3: Because although religion is not so good, pointing this out is . . . too dangerous.

The ‘Religion is Good’ Argument

I would like to pause a moment and note that Dennett shows the true virtue of a philosophical thinker here. Before he criticizes a position, he does his best to present it in its strongest form. To show the ‘good’ of religion, Dennett postulates a war between a gold army and a silver army.

The gold soldiers believe that God is on their side, that God will answer their prayers, that if they die they will go to heaven and be rewarded by God. The silver soldiers are well-informed and highly trained economists. They are taking out insurance policies, laying out side bets, they’re doing . . . very well informed cost-benefit analysis, they’ve got exit strategies both personal and by group.

Dennett suggests that the Gold army would probably be the better army to have in such a battle – that they would likely defeat the silver army. This, I take it, is an analogy for saying that religious groups can accomplish more than non-religious groups.

There may be evidence for this in recent history. The success of religious groups in taking over the government and influencing policy may, perhaps, be explained by the fact that they represent a ‘gold’ political army, confronting a ‘silver’ secular army with their side bets, exit strategies, who, to put it bluntly, refuse to accept the risks associated with standing up to the ‘gold’ army.

Dennett says that trying to preserve this ‘gold’ army comes with a cost. A part of that cost is dishonesty. This is an answer that I have already discussed in the post “Does Religion Make One a Better Ruler?” The fact is, we need true beliefs in order to accurately explain and predict what happens in the world, and a lack of respect for true beliefs is a great source of trouble in the world.

Our political and social debate in this country is contaminated to the core with deception, sophistry, and hypocrisy. We are all far worse off because of it. The only way to reverse this trend is to restore some respect to truth and reason. We cannot do this by advocating myth and superstition, or by claiming that the advocates of myth and superstition have a special right not to be challenged.

Cruelty and Dangerousness

The claim that it is “too cruel” or “too dangerous” to tell people that they are using scripture to give an illusion of legitimacy to behavior harmful to others is the easiest to answer.

It is even more cruel to the victims of this behavior – those made to suffer the loss of life, health, and liberty – to allow this type of behavior to go unchallenged. The innocent people who are killed in religious wars, the minorities who are made to suffer everywhere where religion dominates public policy, the loss of medical breakthroughs and prohibition on social practices that could cure or treat disease and keep people alive – these things are cruel.

It is even more dangerous to allow the practice of engaging in behavior harmful to others and giving it an illusion of legitimacy by appeal to scripture to continue.

The challenges leveled against behavior harmful to others given an illusion of legitimacy by appeal to scripture is precisely the opposite of ‘cruel’ and ‘dangerous’.

Conclusion

There is, in fact, no polite way to tell people, “You are engaged in behavior harmful to others and using scripture and religious tradition to give your harmful behavior an illusion of legitimacy.” Either we must be impolite, or we must decide that we are not going to challenge this type of behavior.

The decision to be polite is, in fact, even more cruel and dangerous. It ignores the victims of behavior harmful to others, and legitimizes the practice of defending behavior harmful to others by appeal to myth and superstition. We are not made better off by refusing to challenge these practices. We are made worse off. We end up being surrounded by even more behavior harmful to others, and a culture that promotes the use of deception, sophistry, and hypocrisy in defense of doing harm to others.

When confronted with the claim that one's statements are impolite, let's not respond by getting into a discussion of the merits and demerits of politeness. Just, stop the person and ask, "Am I wrong? I'm saying that these people are harming others and giving their behavior an illusion of legitimacy by using scripture. You say I am being impolite. I ask you, 'Am I wrong?'"

Standard disclaimer: I do object to some of the things that the anti-theists say. However, it is not because those claims are 'impolite'. It is because those claims are false. The permission to be impolite that I discuss in this post applies only to a permission to make true accusations. Also, please keep in mind that the only legitimate response to words are words and private actions, and the only legitimate response to a political campaign is a counter-campaign in a free society.

E2.0: Discussion 2: Happiness and Absence of Suffering

This is the sixth in a new series of weekend posts taken from the presentations at the Salk Institute’s “Beyond Belief: Enlightenment 2.0.”. I have placed an index of essays in this series in an introductory post, Enlightenment 2.0: Introduction.

The second discussion in the Enlightenment 2.0 series elicited a number of opinions on the importance of happiness to a secular ethics.

In the discussion that followed Dan Rutherford’s talk, we had a couple of people in the audience speak in favor of happiness (and the absence of suffering) being core moral values.

Sam Harris, the author of “The End of Faith” and “Letter to a Christian Nation”, said

The only thing you need to be a moral realist without having to appeal to transcendental values and other postulates is to: (1) believe that morality is about questions of suffering and happiness and the difference there in conscious systems not just humans, and (2) to believe that there are right and wrong answers to those questions.

Greg Epstein, from Harvard University, agrees.

I would not have predicted that Sam would take the words right out of my mouth but I think that the question of suffering and happiness is really important because I think that it’s the sort of simple beginning that we humanists, non-theists, whatever you want to call us, that we are coming from, this question that our ethics start with a real simple proposition, that we are against human suffering and we are for human happiness.

Unfortunately, Harris’ item (1) is false. Since (1) is false, then the fact that there are right and wrong answers to questions of how to maximize human happiness is irrelevant to questions of morality, since morality is not founded on human happiness (and suffering).

There is solid evidence against this proposal. Give a person an option of living inside of an experience machine which will feed her false information about her life. In the machine, she will be made to believe that she is loved by everybody, accomplishes great things in science or art or whatever field interests her, has a perfect spouse and perfect children with a perfect house. She is, in short, as happy as a clam.

However, her happiness is all fake.

Give a person a choice between this happiness and absence of suffering, and a less pleasant life having real-world experiences (even though some of them cause suffering and unhappiness), and a great many people will gladly trade happiness for truth. Truth matters.

In other words, Greg is simply mistaken. We may, in a sense, be against suffering and in favor of happiness when all else is equal, but we will seek suffering and sacrifice happiness if, in doing so, we can buy a little bit of truth.

How is it the case that truth matters?

Desire fulfillment theory answers this question. A desire is a propositional attitude that can be expressed in the form “desires that P”, and agents act so as to realize states of affairs in which P is true.

The problem with the experience machine – the reason why people do not value its illusions, is that it does not realize a state of affairs in which P is true. It realizes a state of affairs in which the agent believes that P is true (which generates happiness), but not one in which P is true in fact.

Now, there are people who do, in fact, value happiness and the absence of suffering above all other things. Somebody like this can value life inside of the experience machine. However, he has a desire that P, where P = “That I am happy,” and P is, in fact, true in a state of affairs where the agent is inside of an experience machine.

However, for people such as myself who have different desires, the experience machine is not even a temptation. Give me a choice between an experience machine with its perfect happiness and freedom from suffering and death, and I would choose death. It is better to not live at all than to live a lie.

Desire utilitarianism allows us to salvage much of what Harris says. The relationships between states of affairs and desires are real-world relationships that we can investigate scientifically. Whether an agent has a desire that P, and whether P is true in state of affairs S, are factual statements subject to empirical investigation. So, we still have moral realism. However, moral realism is grounded on relationships between states of affairs and desires (and between desires and other desires), not happiness and suffering.

One critic at the conference, Deirdre McCloskey, recognized that there was something wrong with the happiness and suffering thesis.

We are meaning-seeking animals. I don’t think that we can get away from that. We’re not cats. Cats avoid pain and sit on the sill in the sunlight and enjoy themselves. As a famous theologian said, man does seek a triple perfection, and its that third thing that science can’t provide us.

There are things that we value other than an absence of pain and the presence of happiness – that these are not enough.

However, McCloskey was wrong (or, at least, her statement is without foundation) to say that this is not something that science can talk about. Far too many people make an unwarranted leap of faith from the fact that some thesis of human value is incomplete to the conclusion that the rest will not be found inside the realms of science. This is, in fact, a “god of the gaps” argument where what we do not know is not “that which science has not yet revealed” but “that which science cannot reveal.”

A different (unidentified) commenter said,

I would like to suggest that the jury is still out there, or maybe we have indications that we don’t need these metaphysical entities, that they will get pushed back also with increasing understanding.

Where I would like to further add that this improved account that drives back the need to postulate these strange entities describes value, not in terms of happiness and absence of suffering, but in terms of relationships between states of affairs and desires.

And that if this proves also be lacking, before we start postulating strange metaphysical entities that we make up to justify doing harm to people, that perhaps a few more refinements will get us closer without those entities.

Let us not be so quick to summon the secular version of the value ‘god of the gaps’ type entities to explain that which we do not yet know how to explain.

Ron Paul's "Inappropriate Question"

A couple of weeks ago, several atheist and scientist blogs covered Ron Paul’s answer to a question of whether he believes in evolution. Paul’s answer was that evolution was just a theory – demonstrating a complete lack of understanding not only of the science of biology, but the nature of science itself.

However, there was another part of Paul’s answer that deserves our attention. The very first words out of his mouth when asked about a previous event in which Presidential candidates were asked whether they believe in evolution was, “That was an inappropriate question.”

Bullpukky.

Americans not only have a right to ask, they have a need to demand that their political leaders have a basic understanding of science. Science builds its reputation on its ability to explain and predict real-world events. A President who cannot understand current events or predict future events is a President whose policies will succeed, if they succeed at all, merely by chance.

When these Presidential candidates make their campaign stops and ask for questions from the audience, I want to fill that audience with people who will demand that their Presidents have at least a high-school graduate understanding of science. A President does not need to know the name of every bone in the human body. However, he does need to know what a double-blind experiment is and why this is the best way to determine the effectiveness of a medical procedure.

The problem with Huckabee’s campaign for the Presidency is that he has already said that if scientists tell him one thing, and scripture tells him another, that he will go with scripture. I can only interpret this to mean that, if scientists came to Huckabee and said, “This idea has been tested. The tests have been replicated. The conclusions have passed muster in the peer review process. If you do not do X, a billion people will die,” Huckabee will still have to consult a priest and get a sign from God before he will do X.

It is all too easy for a priest to answer (as many priests often do), “God will deliver us a miracle that will prevent these people from dying; and, if he does not, then their deaths are God’s will and it is for the greater good that they suffer. We may not see it that way, but the Lord works in mysterious ways and we mere mortals lack the ability to understand His great wisdom.” And in doing so to allow a billion people to die who could otherwise have been saved.

Science is in the job of creating prophecies, just as religion does. Only, science is constantly testing and modifying its principles according to the accuracy of the prophecies it creates. Religion does not. As a result, scientific prophecies are getting more and more accurate over time. Wherever the prophecies of science come into conflict with the prophecies of religion, the prophecies of science inevitably and necessarily win. The reason is because if science should ever lose such a contest – if its prophecies do not turn out to be accurate – then science changes to become more accurate. Religion never does.

[Actually, that last part is not strictly true. There are large segments of the Christian population that reinterpret whole sections of scripture in light of new science, effectively rewriting scripture when it conflicts with science. However, scripture, in this case, follows the scientist’s lead. It can never be in conflict with science because it uses any sign of conflict as necessitating a re-interpretation of scripture.]

Science – particularly the science of evolution – creates massive numbers of prophecies relevant to political decision making. Our understanding of how different parts of the human body function – and how they fail – is enhanced by understanding the evolutionary process by which those organs came about, and of how genetic factors influence how those organs function.

Evolutionary theory not only helps us to treat sick, injured, and dying humans. It allows us to treat sick, injured, and dying animals as well. It allows us to better understand plants, which tells us how to grow more crops on less land in order to feed a growing population. It allows us to understand how ecosystems work and how to keep them healthy. It helps to determine how best to maintain the Earth itself because, if the Earth shall ever fail (if we should ever push the Earth past some environmental tipping point that we currently cannot see), the consequences will be disastrous.

Anything having to do with living systems – and human bodies are living systems – is best understood through the filter of evolution. Though this theory, a President can better understand how living systems operate, predict what will happen as a result of different policies, and thereby select good policies.

It is not mere bad luck that makes President Bush do such a poor job managing living systems. It is the expected result of his stupidity, on his outright dismissal of the best evidence available for explaining and predicting how living systems work.

Scientists make the best prophets. If a President wants to bring a prophet into the oval Office to perform some sort of augury – a ritual that will predict the future and guide him in determining which course of action is best – he is well advised to bring a scientist, not a priest.

While the priest cuts open the chicken and examines his entrails, or prays for God to plant the answer directly into his brain (as Bush has often claimed to do), the scientist practices his rituals. That ritual involves the creation of different hypotheses, determining the predictions that each hypothesis would make, constructing experiments to determine which predictions are accurate, and keeps only the theories that pass the tests and prove as a matter of fact that it can produce the most accurate prophecies.

Compare the prophecies of science to the prophecies of somebody like Pat Robertson. Which are the most accurate?

Here is a scientific prophesy. On Friday, April 13th, 2029, an asteroid will narrowly miss the Earth at a range of about 20,000 miles. This is within the orbit of geosynchronous satellites. Anybody seeking to put anything into space between now and then will be advised to consider this fact in their plans because it is virtually certain to occur.

This scientific prophesy gives us a nearly exact date and time for an event, and tells us what the event will be.

I challenge the reader to name one event that will occur between now and 2029, reliably predicted by any religious prophesy – any event that has the near certainty of the asteroid near miss that I mentioned above.

The fact is, none exists. The fact is, when scientists come into the Oval Office and say that their rituals and methods give them the power to predict the future, and they make a prediction that is securely founded on the rituals of science, the President then ignores those scientists at the peril to the company.

The fact that Americans have a right to expect some minimum level of scientific competence on the part of their political leaders is precisely the fact that Americans have a right not to be put in peril by a leader who ignores the prophesies of science.

I want a cadre of science-literate voters to dog these candidates and measure the level of their respect for science.

“Do you accept that scientists have virtually proved the theory of evolution?”

“In five words or less, how old is the Earth?”

“Is it possible to alter the course of hurricanes by passing laws against homosexuality and abortion?”

“If faced with a policy option that violates the laws of physics, will you rule this option out, or will you still consider it ‘on the table’ since some divine power might decide to grant us a miracle and suspend the laws of physics just this once?”

“Will part of your decision-making process involve the use of astrology charts, tarot cards, chicken entrails, or any similar reliance on supernatural forces?” These are not inappropriate questions. These are questions that will help us to determine whether this person who wants to be our President is capable of making sound decisions based on the best available evidence that have the best chance for success.

It is past time to be asking these types of questions.

Studying Morality through Brain Scans

I have a question from the studio audience regarding the relevance of scientific brain research on morality. Specifically, when scientists do brain research, such as when they put people into MRIs and ask them questions or to make choices in order to determine how the brain functions in these circumstances, what does this say about morality?

Actually, it says absolutely nothing.

Imagine putting an astronomer into a cat scan and asking him all sorts of questions about black holes or quasars. You get an image that tells you what parts of the brain were active at the time and the sequence of neural findings.

However, when you do this, you learn absolutely nothing about black holes.

It is quite bizarre for somebody to be conducting these types of experiments – doing brain studies of astronomers while they think about astronomical concepts, and for the researcher to be claiming that he, too, is an astronomer. Measuring brain states of astronomers thinking about astronomical concepts is not, itself, astronomy.

In particular, while the brain researcher can get a clue as to how the astronomer thinks about black holes, he cannot infer from his brain scans which of those propositions are actually correct. He can get an image of Stephen Hawking’s brain while Hawkins thinks about evaporating black holes. However, he cannot use his brain scans as proof that black holes do, in fact, evaporate.

Measuring brain states of people while they think about moral concepts is not, itself, ethics (or moral philosophy). The scientist is measuring what is going on in the brain. In doing so, he can get an image of what happens when an agent concludes that homosexuals should be killed. However, he cannot use his brain scans as proof that homosexuals, in fact, should be killed.

So, how do you ‘test’ desire utilitarianism. How do you prove that desire utilitarianism is true and some other theory is not true?

Desire utilitarianism makes a claim about reasons for action that exist. It says that true value statements are statements about relationships between objects of evaluation and reasons for action that exist, that desires are the only reasons for action that exist, that desires are propositional attitudes – mental states that can be expressed in the form of ‘agent desires that P’ for some proposition P, and that agents act so as to realize states of affairs in which the propositions that are the objects of their desires are true.

Furthermore, because desires are the only reasons for action that exist, the only reasons for action that exist for promoting or inhibiting certain malleable desires exists in virtue of their relationships to other desires. No other reason or action exists for promoting or inhibiting malleable desires.

These propositions are used to explain and predict intentional behavior. If some other theory comes along that does a better job of giving us explanations and predictions of intentional behavior, and that theory postulates reasons for action other than desires, then desire utilitarianism should be rejected in favor of that other theory.

The fact is, whether a person is good or evil, you can get a brain scan of that person’s mental behavior. The idea that you can study ethics by studying brain scans implies that you can look at a brain scan and, from that data alone, make moral judgments.

Take a bunch of brain scans of homosexuals looking at homosexual pornography. Of course there is something going on in their brain when they do this. However, the idea of using scientific research to study ethics suggests that you can look at this data and, knowing nothing else, determine whether homosexuality is moral or immoral.

I would like to know how what part of the brain scan one is supposed to look at in order to determine this morality. What are we going to see in the brain scan of a homosexual looking at homosexual pornography if it is moral that we will not see if it is immoral?

Nothing?

That’s my hypothesis. You can collect all of the brain-scan data you can imagine, and you will still not have any evidence relevant to its moral permissibility or impermissibility.

Take a bunch of brain scans of KKK members while they contemplate the appropriate behavior that whites should have towards blacks. After collecting this stack of brain scans, tell me which part of the brain scan proves the wrongness of racism? What would it take – how would the brain scans of racists be different – if it were the case that racism is permissible.

What about slavery? What difference would we (theoretically) find in the brain scan of slave owners to prove that slavery is wrong? If slavery were not wrong – if those who said that slavery is permissible were correct – how would brain scans of people contemplating slavery be different so as to prove that slavery is morally permissible?

These should be taken as nonsense questions. Indeed, they are. They are nonsense precisely because you cannot study brain scans to get at moral facts any more than you can study brain scans to get at astronomical facts.

Let me use one more example to illustrate a crucial part of this argument.

Imagine a study where research subjects are given a complex mathematical equation to work out in their head. Because of its complexity, people come up with different answers. We take brain scans of all of these people. We even discover that those who get the right answer have different brain processes than those who get the wrong answer, so the researchers can sort the brain scans into two piles – those with feature X, and those without feature X. Let us assume that having feature X corresponds to getting the right answer.

How do we know that this is the right answer?

In order to use this experiment, we have to know what the right answer is before we conduct the experiment. Somebody has to take this complex mathematical equation and actually solve it, using the rules and principles of mathematics, before we can say, “These people got the answer right; those people did not.”

Again, the same applies to morality. We can take brain scans of people who get to the conclusion that homosexuality is immoral. We can take brain scans of people who believe that homosexuality is not immoral. However, before we can determine which if these two groups has the right answer, we first have to do something (comparable to working out the math problem) that tells us what the right answer is.

What are the rules for getting ‘right answers’ to moral questions?

Is there even such a thing as a right answer to moral questions?

Even somebody who says that there are no right answers – that all there is for us to study are the brain scans themselves – is still trapped by the need to prove (separately from the brain scans) that there are no right answers to moral questions. We cannot get that conclusion by looking at the fact that different people undergo slightly different mental processes when they contemplate a moral issue. Certainly, we can take brain scans of people reaching different moral conclusions. However, to decide that neither of them can be right, like deciding that one of them is right and the other wrong, requires looking at something other than the brain scans.

This is also not to say that morality lies outside of the realm of science. The fact that an astronomer cannot study black holes by looking at brain scans of astronomers thinking about black holes does not prove that the study of black holes is subjective. Nor does it prove that the study of the brain scans is not a science. It proves that the study of black holes is not the study of brain scans – that black holes are not to be found in brain scans.

Similarly, the fact that an ethicist cannot study right and wrong by looking at brain scans of people contemplating moral questions does not prove that the study of morality is subjective. Nor does it prove that the study of brain scans is not a science. It proves that the study of morality is not the study of brain scans – that morality is not something to be found in brain scans.

The astronomer needs to actually study (the effects of) these real objects of material so dense that no light can escape them.

The ethicist needs to study actual relationships between states of affairs and reasons for action that exist.

Good Resolutions and How to Keep Them

I am a major fan of New Year's resolutions. Though, of course, it depends on whether the individual is resolving to do something that has real significance. An individual who binds himself to a set of resolutions admits that there is more that he can do to make the world a better place for himself and for others. People who actually do more to make the world a better place for themselves and others are the types of people that I certainly want to be surrounded with.

A resolution is a decision to behave differently. However, behavior exists in the world of cause and effect. We cannot simply ‘wish’ to behave differently and then do so, any more than we can ‘wish’ for a lead statue to be gold and have it turn into gold. In order to behave differently, one has to understand the causes of behavior, and go to work altering the actual real-world causes.

A resolution, at least in desire utilitarian terms, has to do with the realization that some of our current desires are bad for us – that we would be better off if they did not exist, that they were weaker than they are, or that they were more frequently outweighed by greater (and healthier) concerns.

Two ways in which we can recognize that an action is bad (that it thwarts desires) and yet still act on it, involve actions that threaten to thwart future desires and actions that tend to thwart the desires of others.

Future desires have no effect on present actions. The only way in which a future desire can influence an agent’s current action is if the agent has a current desire that future desires be fulfilled. That desire that future desires be fulfilled ends up being weighed against the agent’s other desires, such as a desire to smoke or a desire to eat. The desire that future desires be fulfilled may be significantly weaker than the future desires themselves. When this happens, an agent can knowingly sacrifice greater future desire fulfillment for the sake of significantly less current desire fulfillment

It is also the case that the desires of other agents have no direct affect on our current behavior. We act so as to fulfill the desires of others only to the degree that we have a current desire to fulfill the desires of others, a current desire that the desires of others be fulfilled, and current desires that fulfill the desires of others as a side effect.

Resolutions are (or should be) meant to strengthen those desires to fulfill our future desires and the desires of others, desires that our future desires and the desires of others be fulfilled, and desires that tend to fulfill our future desires and the desires of others.

Resolutions are hard to keep. Why is that?

It is because people act so as to fulfill the more and stronger of their desires, given their beliefs. Neither their beliefs nor their desires undergo a miraculous transformation at midnight on December 31. The wiring in the brain is not substantially different. Therefore, the behavior is not going to be substantially different.

The idea of "will power" as it is commonly spoken of is a magical concept. It is like "the force" in the Star Wars universe - a power to simply wish that the laws of nature would shift, and they do. Will power is the power to merely wish that a person's desires were to change (so that he will do things he has not done in the past, or not do things he has done in the past), and to have them change so that the new behavior emerges.

One of the major problems with ‘will power’ theories of behavior is that they distract people from finding solutions that actually work – solutions that fully respect the fact that behavior exists in the real world of cause and effect.

Magic does not exist. A person will have as much success drawing upon "will power" to affect a change in the real world as he will have drawing upon "the force". People who live in the real world will realize that this change will take place only when something in the real world is made to change.

One of the ways in which resolutions can work is by bringing new desires into play on the scale that weighs existing desires. A person, for example, might make a resolution to lose weight or quit smoking. At present, the desire to smoke outweighs all other desires.

Remember, future desires have no direct affect on present behavior. The only way that a future desire can affect present behavior is through an intermediary mental state. For example, the agent may have a present desire that his future desires be fulfilled, a present desire to live to see his grand children graduate from high school, or a present desire to avoid future pain.

So, when it comes to overeating or smoking or any of a dozen additional bad habits, the future aversion to cancer is not even on the scales. Only the current aversion to have cancer in the future is on the scales - and this desire might not be strong enough to outweigh the desire to smoke or eat.

So, one of the things a person can do is to add another desire to the scale on the side of not smoking or eating. For example, he can add a desire to keep promises - and promise somebody that he will quit smoking.

The trick associated with adding the desire to keep promises is that the act of making a promise does not thwart the desire to smoke. In fact, a person can make the promise to quit smoking at a later date while he is smoking. Therefore, the desire to smoke does not weigh against the act of making a promise.

After the promise is made, when the promise comes due, the weight of the desire to keep promises will be added to the desire to live to see one's grandchildren graduate from college and other desires that smoking would thwart will be put up against the desire to smoke. Then, we get to see which group of desires has the greater weight - we will see whether smoking best fulfills the more and stronger of the agent's desires given his beliefs.

We are all familiar with other tricks that people use to make it easier to keep a resolution. Keep the fattening food out of the house, get rid of the cigarettes, and avoid situations where overeating or smoking becomes more likely.

Here, too, we take advantage of the fact that putting the sources of temptation out of reach does not directly thwart the desire in question. A person can be smoking his last cigarette while he destroys every other cigarette in the house. A person can take his fill of the last chocolate cake he will eat while he goes through the house throwing out the last of the unhealthy food. The desire that future desires be fulfilled, or the desire to keep a promise, or the desire to see one’s grand children graduate from high school motivates the removal of temptation, and the desires that generate the temptation have no weight against those specific acts.

We are familiar with other tricks to make it easier to keep resolutions. We remove fattening food from the house, and throw away the cigarettes. These put other desires in conflict with the desire to smoke or overeat by requiring additional effort. Effort comes with a cost - lost opportunity to fulfill other desires. Those other desires are then put on the scales against the desires that one has resolved not to fulfill.

Here, too, we are talking about things other than magic. We are talking about taking advantage of what we know about the relationships between beliefs, desires, and states of affairs in order to more successfully bring about that which we wish to bring about.

No magic.

No wishful thinking.

No countra-causal free will.

No praying to imaginary beings for intervention that will never come.

Now that I have said a few things about resolutions, I have one resolution that I would like to suggest.

This resolution is to take an activity that is substantially a waste of time - like watching sitcoms or sports on television, or playing computer games - and replacing that activity with one that will have more of an effect fulfilling future desires and the desires of others. An example of the latter is to become more involved in activities that condemn and counter those who do harm to others using poor reasons - reasons based on myth and superstition. Not only will you be preventing others from suffering harm for no good reason, you may well be protecting yourself from suffering harm for no good reason, or obtaining benefits that will otherwise be blocked.

Come on. A couple hours of week switched form an activity of the first time to an activity of the second time. The world will be a better place as a result.

That's what I'm doing this year.