I Have No Faith in Science

I have no faith in science.

This does not mean that I reject science – nothing can be further from the truth. What it means is that the decision to go with the scientifically best results is not a matter of faith. Accusations to the contrary – accusations that going with science is a matter of faith – are nothing more than political propaganda. It is a part of a system of lies, distortions, and misrepresentations that aim to portray the decision to go with science as something other than (worse than) what it is in fact.

Scientists have to prove their claims, and is characterized by this need for proof over faith.

For example, let’s say that your 11 year old daughter is sick. You have the option of taking her to a doctor, who will then make a diagnosis and try to treat her. You also have the option to pray in the hopes that prayer alone will cure her. This is not a conflict between two different kinds of faith. This is a conflict between faith and a completely different way of examining options – the way of observation, hypothesis, experimentation, and theorizing.

Of course, this example comes from a recent case in which a Wisconsin couple spent 30 days watching their child die while they prayed for her recovery. An autopsy showed that she died from a treatable complication of diabetes.

Science works by taking similar sets of circumstances and actually studying them, and taking notes, in order to determine regularities in the events that occur within those circumstances. For example, a legitimate scientific experiment would take 300 11-year-old girls showing symptoms of a disease like diabetes, and randomly assigning them to two groups.

Group 1 will be our control group. We’re not going to do anything for them, other than normal care and feeding. We will see here what happens in the absence of care.

Group 2 children will be prayed for. We will go to a group of churches and ask them to get their members to pray as hard as they can to their God that the God will save these girls.

Group 3 children will be given medical treatment. This medical treatment will use blood tests, MRIs, descriptions of the symptoms, and other observations to make a diagnosis. From that diagnosis, they will prescribe a form of treatment that historically has the best track record at causing 11 year old girls with those symptoms to get better and live long and healthy lives. This ‘historically best track record’ has been determined by a long history of observations in which methods of treatment with higher chances of success routinely replaced methods with lower chances of success – methods like those use in Group 1 and Group 2.

We then look at which option has the better success rate. We then ask the question, “If I had an 11 year old daughter showing these symptoms, and I cared about her survival, which option gives her the best chance of survival?”

It is quite possible that some of the children in Group 1 might survive. Human bodies are complex entities, and illnesses are complex events. As such, we can expect to hear stories of people with a particular illness who seem to get better on their own, without any help. For the purposes of this story, let us say that 1% of the children show this type of spontaneous cure. Or, in this case, one child in our control group gets better without any treatment.

We can also expect that some children in the second group will get better as well. The same complex factors of human biology and the nature of different illnesses make it possible that a child who is being prayed for will get better. This is precisely why scientists use a control group. Just because a child that is being prayed for gets better, this does not prove that the child has gotten better because of the prayer. In order to determine that prayer helps, we need evidence that children who are prayed for have a higher percentage chance of survival over children not being prayed for. If we see a 1% success rate in Group 2 – if only one of the prayed-for children survive, then we have reason to chalk that one survival up to random chance.

This is one area where the advocates of Group 2 treatment fall into significant (and often fatal) error. One child survives. We can then expect – as certainly as water flows downhill – that the family of the one survivor will call this ‘a miracle’, and use this fluke accident to proclaim that their faith is superior to all other faiths, because their faith worked. They will instantly declare, without evidence or reason, that this child deserved to live and that God has decided to bless her, inferring that the 99 other children deserved to die, or that God did not care so much about them. When, in fact, we are dealing with the effects of random chance, with a child that would have gotten better even without prayer.

We can see the difference when we look at Group 3. We give Group 3 children to a group of doctors. Those doctors have learned that tests conducted on children with this particular group of symptoms show that their body produces less insulin than that of children who do not have these symptoms. They have also conducted experiments that involve measuring blood sugar on a regular basis, and giving insulin injections to children whose blood sugar gets too low.

At first (let us assume) children who were subject to this type of treatment had only a 30% chance of survival. However, through years of observation and experimentation, doctors have found similarities between those who survive and those who do not. This has caused them to alter their procedures. Now, the survival rate is 99%. For some reason, the treatment just does not work on some children, and they die in spite of the best efforts of the medical profession.

Now, a parent with a sick 11-year-old daughter has a choice. They can choose the same option as the children in Group 1, in which their daughter will have a 1% chance of survival. They can choose the same option as the children in Gorup 2, which also gives a 1% chance of survival. Or they can go with the option used in Group 3, where 99% of the children will survive.

This is not a matter of faith. This is a matter of brute fact. The people who choose Group 3 are not, in any way, expressing faith that this method will save their child. Indeed, they should enter Group 3 with the knowledge and expectation that they still have a 1% chance that their child will die. This is nothing less than the empirically verified result of using the Group 3 option. However, if they desire that their daughter live, then they have more and stronger reason to choose the Group 3 option for survival, than to choose either the Group 1 or Group 2 options.

However, here is the kicker. Let’s say that, in conducting this experiment, we get different results. Let’s say that of the Group 1 children, 1% will survive, just as before. However, we discover that of the Group 2 children, 90% of them survive. And, of the Group 3 option, only 30% of the children survive.

If this were the result, then science itself would dictate using the Group 2 option. Science itself would be saying – because the empirical facts demand that they say – that the rational option for any parents that value the survival of their children is the Group 2 option, if the results pointed in this direction. The reason that scientists in the real world pick the Group 3 option over the Group 2 option is not because they have ‘faith in science’. It is because the empirical evidence shows them that the Group 2 option does not work, and the Group 3 option does.

All parents who truly value the survival of their children should use the option that has been empirically shown to provide them with the best chance of survival. If it were the case that prayer actually improves a child’s chance of living, than scientists would be the first to shout, “Go with prayer!” However, if only 1% of those who go with prayer see their children survive, and 99% of those who go with medicine see their children survive, and if the survival of children is important, then the only sensible thing to do is to go with science.

The fact is, faith doesn’t work. The fact is, those who choose faith over science on the issue of keeping their children healthy, on the issue of keeping their nation fed, on the issue of protecting its citizens from natural disasters such as hurricanes and floods, on the issue of defending the nation from outside aggression, end up failing far more often than those who go with science.

There is a simple reason for this. Science is built on comparing the results of different options and selecting the option that has the greatest effect.

This is not a matter of having faith in science. This is a matter of measuring the success of different options, and going with the option that has the highest success rate. Deciding whether or not to use medicine instead of prayer is not a matter of randomly choosing among options in complete ignorance of the possible outcomes. It is simply a matter of knowing that 99 > 1.

Imposing on the Majority

In writing the book, A Perspective on the Pledge, I tried to cover the bulk of the arguments used in favor of having ‘under God’ in the Pledge of Allegiance. That is why it became a book – to cover arguments that I could not cover in the original story.

Some of those arguments made it into the book rather late in life, and never appeared in any blog site. One of those arguments concerned the objection that this is a democracy, and atheists (or, in the book, black people) are attempting to force their will on the majority by prohibiting the majority from pledging allegiance to ‘one nation under God’ (or, in the book, ‘one white nation’).

I gave the traditional answer to this that, in addition to majority rule there are certain minority rights where the minority does, in fact, have the right to force its will on the majority. For example, a majority that supports enslaving a minority can never make slavery legitimate. The minority who would be slaves have every right to protest and to ‘impose their will’ (that there be no slavery) on the majority.

Like I said, this is the traditional answer.

Yet, when I looked at the issue through the eyes of Shawn Henry, Shawn thought of a different answer. (I have, quite often, been surprised when, by putting an issue into the eyes of a fictional character, that the character comes up with a perspective that I never thought of.)

Ultimately, Shawn answered:

“Actually, no. I do not want to force my view on the majority. I want the majority to realize that only racist bigots would support such a proposal, and I want the majority to voluntarily decide not to be a bunch of racist bigots.”

Those of us who are identified as unpatriotic and inferior to true Americans in its Pledge and its national motto certainly are under no obligation to beg the majority to treat us as political equals. This is our right – something that we are perfectly within our rights to demand, just as slaves had the right to demand their freedom (regardless of whether they had the political strength to enforce that demand.

However, it is not actually an issue of forcing one’s will on the majority either. This characterization seems to hold the false assumption that the majority has a right to hold their particular opinion, and that there is nothing objectionable to being a part of the majority. To view the abolition of slavery as ‘the minority imposing its will on the majority’ is, in a sense, built on the false assumption that the majority have a right to hold the position that slavery is permissible. It gives the majority some sense of legitimacy as a majority, even if they may not legitimately act on their preference.

In reality, by raising a moral objection against slavery, a person is not saying that the minority has the right to impose its will on the majority. The person who is opposed to slavery is saying that the majority has every right to impose its view on the minority – and the legitimate view that the majority should be imposing on the minority is that slavery is wrong. If the majority instead holds that slavery is permissible, then that is a fault on the majority. They have no right to that position. There is absolutely no legitimacy in being a majority that accepts slavery.

Accordingly, in the case that I discuss in the book, which involves a pledge of allegiance to “one white nation”, I noticed that Shawn was not actually seeking to impose his will on the majority. Shawn was very much in favor of the idea of majority rule. Instead, what Shawn was after was for the majority to see that it was illegitimate to be imposing a pledge of allegiance to ‘one white nation’ on the country. The majority should be a group of people who see that this is wrong, and who are more than eager to impose the view that it is wrong on the minority, standing ready to condemn any person who does, in fact, pledge allegiance to ‘one white nation’.

It is not at all difficult to go from that case of pledging allegiance to ‘one white nation’ to the case of pledging allegiance to ‘one nation under God’. Both statements brand a subset of the community as inferior to their fellow citizens when the state has no legitimate authority to do so. The majority should see this and, after recognizing the injustice of pledging to view a segment of the population as inferior, be more than happy to impose their will on the minority. It’s just that their will should be that governments not have pledges or mottos that brand citizens that have every right to equal treatment before the law as inferiors.

Indeed, the classic way of viewing the objection that atheists are ‘imposing their will on the majority’ is through the assumption that the majority is always right. We can rest assured that if the Christian community know of Christians living within an atheist government, they would certainly be condemning any attempt to hold that Christians are the inferior citizens that need to be kept out of office. They would be demanding equal respect for their Christian brethren, and be ready to condemn any state that has its people pledging allegiance to ‘one nation, free of religious superstition’ or printing, ‘there is no god’ on its money.

In this, the religious majority demonstrates their hypocrisy. They recognize that, at a fundamental level, they know full well that no just and moral people would support such a pledge or a motto. They know that no fair and just people would support a motto that put them at a political disadvantage and they would see the right and the duty to protest any attempt to do so. They know that any talk about the right of the (atheist) majority to impose its will on the (theist) minority simply misses the point that the majority has such a right only insofar as its actions are fair and just. The majority has no right to impose its will on the minority when the majority has abandoned fairness and justice.

When the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals releases its decision on ‘under God’ and ‘In God We Trust’, we can expect to hear and read a great many people claiming about how this is a democracy and how the minority are trying to impose its will on the majority. We will be hearing a great many people saying that the minority, in virtue of the fact that they are the minority, should simply sit down and shut up and accept the dictates of the majority.

We can expect to hear a few people protest that majority rule needs to be weighed against minority rights. Yet, when this objection is raised against the Pledge, the defenders of ‘under God’ will portray the objection to the public in terms of atheists who are offended by the mere mention of God declaring that they have the right to prohibit others from mentioning their beliefs in public. We are trying to ‘drive God out of the public square.’

If we repeat of these tired, old arguments, like listening to an old and familiar song, we should be willing to expect the same tired, old results. The theocratic spin machine will raise a few hundred million dollars to feed a campaign to further portray atheists as un-American, just like the Pledge and the Motto say they are. They will use that money to persuade a substantial majority of the people will continue to see atheists as villains who want nothing other than to prevent Christians from mentioning god, ever, in public.

Empirically minded folks should be able to look at the results generated by the last time ‘under God’ became news, and extrapolate what will happen the next time, unless we decide to adjust a few of the input parameters.

So, writing about Shawn brought to mind a different tactic. Instead of answering the claim that we are trying to force our will on the majority, consider answering as Shawn answered.

I am not seeking to impose my will on the majority. I am seeking to get the majority to understand that a society that values fairness and justice would not have a majority that supports a pledge of allegiance that denigrates and demeans a segment of its population (blacks, in the story; those who do not believe in a god, in the real world). It would not make degrading a segment of its population on the basis of a belief about god a part of its national policy. I am not seeking to impose my will on the majority. I am trying to get the majority to impose a principle of equal respect under the law on itself.

When the defenders of ‘under God’ answer this argument, it will be easy to point out the simple fact, “‘Under God’ was not meant to promote religion in the same way that ‘with liberty and justice for all’ was not meant to promote liberty and justice for all.”

Or, “The Pledge equates Americans who are not under God with those who would support rebellion, tyranny, and injustice. What is that if not a case of the government deliberately demeaning and denigrating a segment of its population that is has no right to denigrate?”

Where, ultimately, the message is, "This is not an issue of a minority imposing its will on the majority. This is an issue of whether the majority is going to decide to do the right think and treat equal citizens with equal respect."

E2.0: V.S. Ramachandran: Bridging Humanities and Science

This is the 28th 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.

V.S. Ramachandran came to the Beyond Belief 2 conference to support the idea that studying the brain can give us insights into aspects of culture by giving us a specific example. Specifically, he wants to argue against the idea that there are two fields of study – science and humanities, and that there is a fundamental difference between them. By studying the brain, he argues, we can link science and culture.

To illustrate this point, he intends to draw a line from a subject of brain study (synesthesia) to an aspect of culture (metaphor).

Synesthesia is a phenomena where (in the form that Ramachadran talks about) the agent sees numbers as being colored. Show him a number ‘5’ and he will see it as green, for example. The number ‘2’ will appear as red.

With something strange like this, Ramachandran takes it as his first challenge to show that this is real. He does this with a simple experiment. He takes a screen and covers it with the number ‘5’, except for a few instances of the number ‘2’. He then asks the subject of the experiment to tell him the shape that the ‘2’s’ form on the screen. Most people take a fair amount of time to identify the 2’s and to make out the shape that they form. Synesthedes, on the other hand, see the shape almost immediately – almost as easily as the rest of us would if the 2’s and 5’s were of sharply different color.

Okay, the phenomenon is real. Is it a visual phenomenon, or is it associated with the higher concept of a number? To show that it is visual, researchers show the subject a Roman numeral (e.g., a V for 5). The subjects report that there is no color. Or, they show the subject a large number 5’s made up of the number ‘3’ repeated over and over. Subjects who focus on the individual 3’s see one color, but see another color when they look at the overall image of the 5.

Ramachandran reports that they have come across higher-level synesthedes who do associate colors with number concepts such as the Roman numeral 5. That will become relevant later. For this initial account of the phenomenon, we are focusing on what is called grapheme -> color synesthesia.

There are some additional observations that Ramachandran introduces in order to improve our understanding of this quirk.

For example, synesthesia runs in families. This, of course, suggests that there is a genetic component. Somewhere, there is a gene, or a set of genes, that are responsible for some form of brain change that causes people to see colors when they see numbers.

Another piece of information relevant to our understanding is that the two relevant parts of the brain – the part that is used in the visual recognition of numbers, and the part that is used in the processing of colors, are right next to each other in the brain. As such, it is possible for a signal that gets sent to the part of the brain that recognizes the shape of numbers to leak over into the part that processes colors. The visual recognition of the shape of a ‘5’, in this case, could leak over and trigger a sensation in the part of the brain that processes colors of the color ‘green’.

A third relevant fact is that the brain of an infant contains far more connections than we have. During brain development, a number of connections get pruned away, which actually explains how we learn so rapidly in the first years of our life. It is not caused by forming new connections, but by getting rid of the noise in the brain that gets in the way of our ability to think.

So, we combine these three facts and then we ask a question. What would happen if there were some gene or combination of genes that affected this pruning process – preserving links between different parts of the brain that pruning would otherwise isolate from each other? Such a characteristic would preserve links between the section of the brain that processes number shapes and the section that processes colors, causing grapheme -> color synesthesia.

Now we have a theory that links several facts. From this theory we can draw additional implications, which then can be used to generate predictions, which can be used to verify or falsify the theory.

I mentioned above that there are other types of synethedes. There are forms that link sound to color, that link number-concepts to points in three-dimensional, that link days of the week to personality types.

So, let us suggest that this ‘lack of pruning’ that takes place is more general – affecting all parts of the brain. People who have this genetic characteristic, then, not only are in the habit of associating numbers with colors, but can potentially link any concept with any other concept.

Ramachandran wants to suggest that a synesthede would be particularly good at metaphor. He specifically uses Shakespeare’s example, What light through yonder window breaks It is the East and Juliet is the sun Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon. Who is already sick and pale with grief…

Another observation that Ramachandran has encountered in his research is that sunesthesia is about eight times more common in artistic types such as authors and poets as it is in the general population. The idea here is that, if this theory is correct and synesthesia is caused by diminished pruning of connections in the brain, itself allowing sections of the brain to be connected that would have otherwise been broken, then synesthedes would be better at metaphor than the general population. They simply think in terms of associations (like the association between numbers and color) that the rest of us do not have access to.

Ramachandran would be the first to acknowledge that additional work needs to be done. This is not yet a smooth and unbroken link from genetics to an aspect of culture (artistic ability). It is, however, a hint at the types of things that brain research may reveal. It does at least hint at the possibility that we can introduce some science into the humanities.

It is easy for Ramachandran to convince me that there can be a link between brain structure and the humanities because I already buy into the bedrock concepts on which such a claim is built. I have long argued for a link between biology and ethics – though I also hold that a great many evolutionary psychologists and moral psychologists are looking at the wrong parts of biology that significantly diminishes the quality and the importance of their work.

This is illustrated in an important question about synesthedes that Ramachandran simply avoided asking. Is this ‘quirk’, as he called it, a mental defect, or is it a special gift, or is it neutral (neither good nor bad). He mentioned how it is important that at least some of us in society not be too creative. For example, he claimed that we do not want a brain surgeon working on us to suddenly get creative. However, it may be useful to have some of us be creative, and that is why we have a genetic quality that affects only some of us.

This is a question of value. To determine whether a particular part of our mental functioning is an illness, or a gift, or neither, we must measure the value of that trait. The only way to measure value, I argue, is to measure the degree to which a trait will tend to fulfill or thwart desires – and, in particular, whether they will fulfill or thwart good desires. A mental quirk is not an illness or a defect merely because it is rare. In order to be a defect, it must thwart desires.

In this study, I could not see much of a reason to consider synesthesia to be desire-thwarting. In fact, it seemed effective at desire-fulfilling. It is something we have no reason to discourage, even if we do not have a particularly strong reason to promote.

This, then, is how we can at least start to link the humanities to science.

E2.0: John Allen Paulos: Probability and Error

This is the 27th 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 main purpose of education should be to turn children into adults who are capable of making intelligent decisions. We know, through a great deal of research, that there are certain types of errors that people too commonly make that derail their attempts to make plans or evaluate policy. So, we should have a mandatory class somewhere in our education system where children learn what these common mistakes are, why they are mistakes, and how to avoid them.

The next presenter on Enlightenment 2.0, John Allen Paulos, is a mathematician who went through a number of mistakes that people generally make concerning mathematics and probability. He focused specifically on mistakes that people make in arguments for the existence of God. Yet, these are general mistakes that generally interfere in an agent’s ability to make successful plans and evaluate policy.

The Odds of Tokens and Types

For example, there is the mistake of confusing the probability that some token event will occur versus the possibility that some type of event will occur. For example, a person is dealt 13 cards from a deck of cards. Whatever set of cards he gets, the odds of getting that particular combination of cards is extremely small. Yet, he was going to get some combination of cards – every one of which has the same minuscule chance of being the combination he actually receives.

Intelligent design proponents like to use the argument that the odds of a particular combination of events happening is so remote that there must be an intelligent designer at work to make it happen. Yet, this is like arguing that receiving a particular combination of cards is so remote that an intelligent dealer must have purposefully picked out those cards.

In another example of the same type of reasoning, I would like the reader to consider the odds that he or she would actually be here, in the universe, today given the amazing set of events that had to have happened in the past. Let’s just go back 2000 years. The chance meetings, births, deaths, pregnancies (planned and unplanned), the events that determined a person’s personality that determined with whom or whether they had sex with – the odds of my being here today are vanishingly small. I cannot even imagine how small those odds were. And this is just going back 2000 years. If we go back 200 million years, the odds become even smaller.

Yet, here I am.

If I were to follow the reasoning of the intelligent design theorists, the minuscule odds of my being here implies that there must have been an intelligence at work engineering everything that happened up to the point at which I was born, just to overcome those amazingly small odds. Everything else that happened in history – the wars, the plagues, the conquests, slavery, travel, everything – were merely side effects of this master plan to bring us into existence. Otherwise, the odds being what they were, we would not be here.

That’s absurd. Given the way things were 2000 years ago, it was certain that somebody would exist today, just as the bridge player was going to receive some combination of cards. The fact that I am one of those people – or that the hand in question was one of those hands – is not all that remarkable.

Conjunction Bias

Which option is more likely? Is it more likely that A will happen, or that A and B will happen? For example, if you were rolling a die, which is more likely? (1) that the first roll will be a ‘6’, or (B) that the first roll will be a ‘6’ and the second row will be a ‘6’? The first has to be more likely than the second. That much is obvious.

However, there is a set of experiments that show that if a story is told a particular way, a substantial portion of the people will say that ‘A and B’ is more likely than A alone. These experiments involve a story about a person (e.g., Linda). After hearing the story, the listener is asked, “Which is more common? (A) Linda became a college professor, or (B) Linda became a college professor and a political activist? Under certain telling of the story, people (mistakenly) choose B.

But option B is absurd. B can, at best, be equal to A.

Confirmation Bias

Paulos mentioned confirmation bias quickly, because it is a widely understood and recognized bias. However, in his brief mention he linked confirmation bias to the Gulf War – the bias that allowed an administration to see evidence it wanted to see and dismiss evidence suggesting conclusions it did not like.

This bias has cost the United States 4,000 lives, will ultimately cost over a trillion dollars, has killed hundreds of thousands of people in Iraq and maimed countless more, did huge damage to the country in terms of a generation of children who will see no school or training to do any sophisticated work other than the manufacture of bombs.

All of this could have been avoided, perhaps, if our education system had decided to devote a few resources to classes that taught the American population about the traps that people get into and how to avoid them. The people would have had a better understanding of the types of pitfalls that might get us into an unnecessary expense of lives and money. The Bush Administration itself might have had a few more people who understood how to read evidence and to protect it from the chance that they were misreading it. Or (what is more likely) the Bush Administration would have continued to push its favorite interpretation on the American people who would have been better equipped at detecting their deception.

If the school system is supposed to be providing us with information that would help us make sound decisions, and information on the type of epistemic mistakes we are likely to make will help protect us from harm, then it follows that these premises that we should be giving our children knowledge about the types of mistakes we are likely to make.

So, there certainly must be room in the educational system for a class on cognitive errors. We can pay for it out of the future lives and monies saved by not going along with the next avoidable bloody war.

Being Mean and Cruel vs. Being Honest

Continuing a theme from the last couple of days, today I want to argue for the importance of using moral language.

A fun thing happened yesterday. NewsLi took the press release sent out by those promoting the movie “Expelled” about the PZ Myers incident and made a story out of it. By the time I found it, three other people familiar with the facts of the case had remarked on some of the errors in the story. One had provided links.

I added my two cents worth from the point of view of an ethicist, pointing out that the author had abdicated his professional responsibility and taken a piece of fiction that he found in his email and, without putting the least amount of effort into verifying the claims being made, reported the story as news. I pointed out how easy it would have been to have checked the basic facts of the story. I concluded that saying that this breech in professional ethics would not only require a correction, but a level of shame and embarrassment that would require an apology and a promise to do better in the future.

A short time after I had posted that comment, the link to the page with the original story came back “Not Found, Error 404”. A link to the story could still be found on Google News, but it went to a site that says, “The page you are looking for no longer exists.”

Note: It appears that the press release had absolutely no traction. So, according to Friendly Atheist, the people behind the movie are now organizing a teleconference press conference. I can only assume that it is for the same purpose - for trying promote their fiction - a way of talking to the press without people like us around to correct their 'mistakes'. I wonder if any informed reporters will show up to ask the embarrassing questions that should be asked.

Today, PZ Myers pointed to an AlterNet article in which the author advocated that Democrats need to get mean when they deal with Republicans. The article actually comes across as pro-violence, glorifying the killing that has been done (in the Revolutionary War and Civil War) in the defense of liberal principles. I am no advocate of violence – and wars, where they must occur, are a necessary evil, not a positive good.

I am also not so keen on the partisan element in the original article. I happen to think that some Democrats are as divorced from reality as some Republicans, and some Republican ideas have serious merit. In fact, I see both parties as consisting of a loose alliance between sane individuals struggling to attract just enough nut jobs to make a 51% majority.

Within these caveats, I hold that we do, indeed, need to promote the use of moral language – the language of praise and condemnation – in the defense of liberal causes. There is far too much of a tendency to speak only of the non-moral facts in criticizing the actions of others, ignoring the moral facts.

For example, in the press release that I mentioned above, the authors spoke of PZ Myers’ displeasure over having been expelled from the movie “Expelled.” This was a lie. This makes the authors of the press release (and any person or organization who endorses the press release) liars.

Liars are parasites. Liars are people who wish to hijack a person’s will – the time and energy that a person would spend fulfilling his or her own desires – and divert them into fulfilling the desires of the parasite/liar instead. He does so by filling the head of the agent with false beliefs. Those false beliefs divert the agent from doing what the agent would have been doing if he knew the facts, and cause him to do something he would consider unworthy of his time if not for the fictions he has been fed.

When applying the label ‘Liars for Jesus’ to some individual or group, I would suggest taking the time to point out the fact that this means that they are parasites who see nothing wrong with “using deception to get you to do things that you might well not have done if they had told you the truth . They are people who rob you of your right to make your own informed decisions.”

The people who are backing the move “Expelled” have proven themselves to be liars and manipulators from the start. From getting Myers, Richard Dawkins, and others to agree to interviews under false pretenses, to the lies written directly into the movie, to the lies put into the press release about the PZ Myers incident, the people behind this movie have proved that they have absolutely no qualms about using lies to manipulate others.

Somehow, these agents reached mature adulthood without the slightest moral qualm – the slightest emotional recognition – that lying, deception, and similar forms of manipulation are things that no good person would do – things that all good people have reason to condemn.

The appropriate response is not only to point out the logical and factual errors in their statements. The appropriate response should include a willingness to back those reports of the factual errors with the call for society to condemn people such as this.

“They are not making your life any better. In fact, to the degree that they are allowed to succeed in these activities, to that degree we are teaching people in society generally that it is permissible to manipulate others through lies and deception. To the degree that these people are allowed to succeed, to that degree we are telling our neighbors that they, too, should feel free to employ lies and deception in the pursuit of their ends.”

The best way to fight the prevalence of lies and deception in our society is by condemning those who are caught practicing them, and to make sure that they do not succeed.

To do this, moral condemnation should not just be limited to the guilty party. Moral condemnation should be extended to those who protect and defend the guilty party – those who contribute to the success of the guilty party.

Given that the people backing this movie have proved themselves to be eager to manipulate others through lies and deception, there is absolutely no reason for any good person to pay to see this movie. It is not as if one has any hope of learning something. The behavior of the people backing the movie have given intellectually responsible people reason enough to question the claims within the movie. Even to the degree that the movie might contain some truths, it will take an independent understanding of the issues to sort the truth from the fiction. In this case, the outside understanding of the issue should be good enough, and there would be no need to go to the movie.

There is one excellent reason for a person who cares about truth and honesty not to go to the movie – because buying a ticket contributes to the success of a pack of liars. It would be better to spend that money promoting truth by purchasing something produced by an individual with intellectual integrity. Let us contribute to the success of the people who care about the quality and the truth of the statements that they make, rather than contribute to the success of deceiving manipulators.

The society that we live in is the society that we build. Every dollar we spend sends a message to the community that, “I want the community I live in to have more of this.” When those dollars are spent in the support of those who seek to manipulate others through lies and deception, then one is sending a message through the community that says, “I vote in favor of a community that contains more of this practice of manipulating others through lies and deception.”

Is that really something that good people would think to be worthy of a contribution?

For these reasons, the language of moral condemnation applies not only to the people who made this movie, but to those who would contribute to the success of this movie. They are, in fact, even more morally responsible for the fact that we must live in a society where we are surrounded by manipulated deceivers. They are the ones who are feeding and caring for these pets. They are the ones who are nurturing this culture of manipulative deception.

These are moral claims. These are claims that go beyond statements of what the facts of the matter are, to statements about what good people should do when confronted with those facts. These are claims that go beyond merely telling the facts to the author of an article written from a piece of fiction in the form of a press release and condemns the author as somebody who did something that no morally responsible person would have done.

It is time to reclaim the use of moral language, and to get rid of this absurdity where the least moral among us are those who most eagerly identify themselves as ‘moral’.

The idea is not to be mean or cruel. The idea is to tell the truth. The truth that is to be told sometimes is the fact that the person one is talking about (or to) is a liar, hypocrite, hate-mongering bigot, manipulative, deceitful, intellectually reckless, abusive, ignorant, or just plain evil.

Implication vs. Association

Today, I want to stress a component of yesterday’s posting where I claimed that the movie “Expelled” should be evaluated, not as a documentary, but as propaganda.

The part I want to focus on is the distinction between ‘implication’ (the process of deriving conclusions from premises) and ‘association’ (the process of linking, not by implication or any type of inference, a concept with an emotion).

I want to apply this distinction to the relationship between evolution and Nazi Germany.

On the implication side of this relationship, we have people who claim (correctly) that problems associated with deriving an ‘ought’ statement from an ‘is’ statement prevents any reasonable thinker from deriving the ‘ought’ statements of Nazi-style racism from the ‘is’ statements of evolutionary theory.

This is not to say that people will not go ahead and make this mistake. People who have fallen in love with a particular view of how the world ‘ought’ to be have shown themselves quite adept at deriving those ‘ought’ statements from any number of nonsense conclusions. Some derive their favorite bigotries and prejudices from mistaken inferences out of Darwin. Others assign their favorite bigotries and prejudices to a God and say, ‘It is not me who wishes these people to be condemned as immoral, it is God. I am but a humble servant.’ Only, the ‘humble servant’ is the one who picked his or her god’s make-believe prejudices.

The fact that people engage in these types of sloppy inferences in defense of their favorite prejudices is not an argument against the truth of those premises, or even an argument against accepting those premises.

For all practical purposes, the argument is, “A does not imply B. B is a horrendous thing to have people believe, and there are people out there who want to believe B who think that they can derive it from A. They are mistaken, of course, However, in order to combat the prevalence of those who believe B, we must deny A, so as to block people from making this false inference from A to B.”

Specifically, evolutionary theory does not imply Nazi-style racism. However, Nazi-style racists are prone to make this inference anyway. Because Nazi-style racism is so horrendous, we must deny Nazi-style racists from the opportunity to rationalize their horrendous beliefs by appeal to evolution. We do this by denying that the claims of evolution are true.”

If the claim that the opposition is making is that Nazi-style racism actually can be derived from evolution, then they are simply mistaken. Actually, this is worse than simply being mistaken. This is the type of mistake that qualifies a person as a hate-mongering bigot. It is the type of mistake that a person embraces because they want to believe that the inference is valid. Their desire to believe is, itself, a desire to hate and a need to embrace something . . . anything . . . that gives their hate an illusion of validity.

Of course, the first obvious response is that this does not imply evolution is false. It’s like arguing, “If you tell Jim that the person who killed his daughter was black, it will reinforce his racism against blacks. We do not want to reinforce his racism against blacks, so do not tell him that his daughter’s murder was black.” This does not imply that the daughter’s murderer was not black. Trying to go from this type of argument to, “Therefore, the daughter’s murderer was not black,” is entirely invalid.

With all of the available evidence showing that the claims of evolution are true, this line of reasoning puts the denial of evolution (to the degree that it holds up) into the category of a “Noble Lie”. The proponents of this argument are claiming that we need to lie to the people – for their own good, of course – because the people cannot handle the truth.

There is a substantial stack of arguments that can be brought against any assertion that we must preach a ‘Noble Lie’. The first is that we need an accurate understanding of how the world works in order to explain and predict what happens in the real world. We need to be able to explain and predict real-world events in order to pursue good states of affairs and avoid harmful states of affairs. The person who is ignorant of the fact that a particular common mushroom is poisonous is more likely to eat it and suffer the ill effects.

Evolutionary theory is necessary to understanding and predicting events in medicine and health, the environment, and even human behavior. It allows us to prevent and cure disease, grow food, determine our nutritional needs, protect the environment that keeps us alive. We are far better off telling people the truth about evolution and to teach them that it is a mistake to try to derive Nazi-style racist ‘ought’ statements from the ‘is’ statements of evolution than to deny the truth of evolution.

We are talking about an invalid inference here, and invalid inferences can come from anywhere. As many American writings before the civil war tell us, and even many of the claims made in America in the 100 years after the civil war, people can derive their favorite prejudices from religion as well. In fact, since gods are fictional beings, and they get their morals from the people who invent them, it is far easier for a person to find his prejudices in the claims of a god he creates in his own image than in a scientific theory he does not invent.

Besides, Nazi-style racists are not the only people who derive their favorite ‘ought’ statement prejudices from ‘is’ statements. This is a very common mistake that Scottish philosopher David Hume called the root of all ‘vulgar’ systems of morality. So, if we want people to grow up to be able to engage in sound moral reasoning, we need to teach them the error of deriving ‘ought’ from ‘is’. Which means that we should not be ignoring the problem by hiding the truth of evolution. We should be embracing the truth and focus instead on the mistake of deriving Nazi-style ‘ought’ conclusions from strong scientific ‘is’ premises.

All of this is sound criticism of those who want to condemn evolution on the basis that Nazi-style racists might use invalid inferences from it to give their hatred an illusion of legitimacy.

However, we need to distinguish this from another form of reasoning that has nothing to do with inference. It is the reasoning of association.

Using this method, the speaker talks about ‘intelligent design’ while showing the audience positive and reassuring images, then talks about ‘atheism’ and ‘evolution’ while showing images of Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, and other frightening images. The purpose here is not to get the audience to infer Nazi-style racism from evolution, but to associate the emotions tied to these images to mention of the concepts of ‘atheism’ and ‘evolution’.

The idea here is that any audience member who is successfully infected with this association, when he hears a speaker talk about ‘atheists’ or ‘evolution’, will have an emotional reaction akin to the reaction that can be expected of somebody talking about ‘Nazi-style racism’ or ‘Soviet tyranny’. This emotional reaction immediately shuts down any hope for debate or reason. The listener will view any attempt to convince him that these views are correct as akin to convincing him to accept Nazi-style racism or Soviet tyranny. That reaction alone will close his mind to any type of reasoned argument.

What I wrote yesterday, and what I want to make more explicit today, is that it is a mistake to evaluate Ben Stein’s “Exposed” as a movie that attempts to defend the ‘inference’ from evolution to Nazi-style racism, or to argue that the possibility that Nazi-style racists might benefit from invalid inferences from Evolution. It is meant to generate an emotional reaction to the concepts of ‘atheism’ and ‘evolution’ that will cause viewers (students, voters, audience members) to react to these concepts as they would react to somebody defending Hitler or Stalin.

The association is not grounded on reason. Consequently, all of that stuff that I wrote above on ‘is’ and ‘ought’ and ‘valid inferences’ are all irrelevant. If you give those types of arguments to somebody conditioned to respond to the concept of ‘atheist’ and ‘evolution’ in the way described here, he will see your arguments as merely an attempt to seduce him into becoming the moral equivalent of a Nazi-style racist or Stalinist. If your arguments sound reasonable, then it is merely because the devil is a clever speaker who easily seduces the listener who listens with his brain and not with his heart.

These types of associations require a different type of response – not a response grounded on reason, but a response grounded on ethics. This is where the ethicist steps in, condemning attempts to manufacture this association as examples of promoting unreasoned hatred and bigotry, and leveling the charge of intellectual recklessness (at best) and malicious error (at worst) against the perpetrators of these moral crimes.

The rationalist at this point will only find himself frustrated at his inability to ‘get through to’ the listener with arguments that, to him, make perfectly good sense.

In order to deal with the problem of association, this film, and similar practices that are commonly employed against reason and science, need to be attacked on from a moral perspective. It is not sufficient to say that the reasoning sucks. It is necessary to add the fact that a morally responsible person would not make such a mistake, and how those types of arguments demonstrate an urge to promote hatred and injustice.

Please note that I am not declaring that this is an ‘either/or’ situation here. It is not the case that we ‘either’ attack the movie for its poor use of logic ‘or’ we condemn the movie as a display of hate-mongering. Rather, we must use the fact that the movie contains poor reasoning to infer, among other things, that it is really hate-mongering propaganda. Do not stop and feel content that you have succeeded when you have torn apart the arguments. From there, go on and condemn the people who made those arguments. Condemn them, not for their stupidity, but for an eagerness to promote hatred that blinded them to reason.

Where we are talking about the crime of invalid inference, we can apply reason to demonstrate the error. However, where we are talking about the crime of malicious association, the answer is not (just to) point out where reason has failed, but to point out how a morally responsible person would not have made such a mistake.

The Atheists' Problem with Morality

Note: I will be at the First Freedom First Simulcast at the Denver Pavilions 15 in downtown Denver on Wednesday night, March 26.

I am beginning to see a number of articles floating about professing that atheists have a problem with morality. We have Dinesh D'Souza's book, What’s So Great About Christianity. The movie “Expelled” is also asserting that atheists have a problem with morality – associating atheists with Hitler and Stalin as if to say, “Stalin was an atheist; therefore, all atheists are evil.”

In the Collegiate Times, Allison Aldrich, wrote “Defending morality in an atheist's culture is challenging,” and in the Calgary Harold, Mark Milke recently wrote, “New breed of atheist treads too much on glib ground.”

The natural response to these types of assertions would be to demonstrate how I can make and defend moral claims without appeal to supernatural entities. However, I have already drummed that particular song. I have 900 posts on this blog, four books – two online (“Desire Utilitarianism” and “The Cult of Justice and Will”), and two for sale (“A Better Place” and “A Perspective on the Pledge”) which demonstrate my competence to make and defend moral claims, and a few other essays and articles floating around.

Today, I am not in a mood for repeating any of those arguments.

Today, I want to point out how the people who are making these arguments, while asserting their moral superiority, demonstrate how utterly blind they are to their own moral faults.

I want to start with the principle that no person should assume their moral superiority over others – or the moral inferiority of others. Equal respect for other people as people requires that one begin with the assumption that they are our moral equals. It is only after evidence is provided to the contrary – that we have evidence beyond a reasonable doubt – that a person lacks certain moral qualities that we are then justified in condemning them.

For example, since I can show that these authors presume the moral inferiority of others, I have the evidence I need to morally condemn them for their arrogance and bigotry. I have no right to assume their arrogance and bigotry. I have an obligation to assume that they are my moral eequals. It is only because they provide evidence of their arrogance and bigotry that I have justification for making these accusations.

Not only do these authors presume the moral inferiority of others, they do so on the basis of faith. This must be one of the most convenient aspects of faith – what everybody who claims to have faith ultimately asserts to have faith in is their own infallibility. The person who defends his beliefs on the basis of faith say, for all practical purposes, “There is no way that I could possibly be wrong in what I believe. If there is any conflict in what I believe and what others claim, the fault must be theirs. Because of faith, I do not have to listen to any evidence or any objection to my own views. I can simply assert that they are true.”

‘Faith’ ultimately is another word for ‘arrogance’ wrapped up in a pretty white ribbon.

It is particularly convenient for a ‘person of faith’ to be able to proclaim his superiority over others in matters of ethics. What the four authors above are actually asserting is that, “In virtue of my religion – a matter in which I could not be in error – I have drawn certain moral principles – a matter of which I also could not be in error. Since my ‘faith’ gives me perfect moral knowledge and access to absolute moral truth, it follows by necessity that any who might disagree with me must be in error. It follows by necessity that I am morally superior to them, and they are morally inferior to me.”

This is the function ‘faith’ plays in these disputes.

For the person who has intellectual integrity and a decent respect for other persons, it is not enough to merely assume that others are his moral equals (unless he finds evidence to the contrary). He cannot be too eager to find that evidence. When a person grasps onto weak evidence of fault in others too quickly, he proves that he is motivated more by a desire to see others as inferior than by a true concern with justice. Justice holds the evidence at arm’s length until it becomes too powerful to be resisted. Bigotry embraces the first hint of an argument that others are morally inferior, because it has the benefit of giving one’s hatred a warm and comfortable home.

For 2500 years there has been a well known problem with any attempt to derive morality from religion. Plato wrote about it in Euthyphro, where he had his main character Socrates ask, “Is something good because it is loved by the gods, or is it loved by the gods because it is good?”

If it is good because it is loved by the goods, then any atrocity can be made good, simply by having God love it. If God were to love the slow roasting of young children on an open fire, the proponent of this method would have to say that this is good.

If, instead, we say that God could never love the slow roasting of a child over an open fire, then we must say that goodness does not depend on what God loves. Goodness is something that is independent of God – something that even God must appeal to in order to determine if he should enjoy the roasting of a young child or not. Whatever external standard God appeals to, we can appeal to as well, without God.

There are, of course, a group of pathetic responses to this. One says, “God appeals to a standard of good, but that standard of good is his own nature.” Okay, fine, then if God’s nature were to love the slow roasting of children, then it would be good.

There is a long and colorful history of this debate. However, none of these four authors give serious consideration to these problems. They follow the pattern of grasping the first argument they can find that gives their hatred a warm and comfortable home – regardless of its flaws. In their eagerness to assert their moral superiority over others, they show themselves to be hate-mongering bigots too eager to condemn without sound evidence to actually deserve to be called ‘moral’.

Another area in which these people show their moral failings is in their use of hasty generalizations. Their argument follows the pattern, “Some atheists have done bad things; therefore, all atheists are evil.” This is the paradigm example of bigotry. It follows the same pattern as, “Some Muslims perform terrorist acts so all Muslims are terrorists,” or “Some black people were caught using drugs so all black people are drug addicts,” or “Suzie, who is blond, did something dumb, so all blonde people are dumb.”

It also follows the pattern of, “Some religious people brought down the World Trade Center in a terrorist attack, so all religious people are evil.” I never said that the four authors above, or theists in general, were the only people actually capable of bigotry. However, the fact that some atheists are guilty of the same crime does not prove that the theists mentioned above are innocent.

This is how bigotry is defined – by an eagerness to expand the group of people guilty of some wrongdoing far beyond the circle of those who are actually guilty. It is motivated by hatred for all members of the group and a desire to see them as inferior or deserving of harm that blinds the person to the fallacy of ‘hasty generalization.’

The morally responsible way to respond to an alternative point of view is to keep one’s accusations focused on those who are actually guilty. For example, it would be perfectly legitimate to argue against ‘new atheist’ writer Sam Harris that he is an act-utilitarian who believes that ‘utility’ is measured in terms of happiness and absence of suffering is the measure of all moral value. One can then argue that act-utilitarian theories fail (because they do not properly respect the fact that actions are caused by desires), and that where happiness and truth diverge, value follows truth.

However, from here, it is the essence of bigotry to assert that because Sam Harris’s moral arguments fail that all atheists have a problem with morality. From here, any attempt to make that leap of logic proves that the person making it is a bigot who cares more about selling hate than he does about justice. Because somewhere out there, per chance, there may well be an atheist who rejects act-utilitarian moral theories and happiness/suffering theories of value.

Similarly, it is perfectly legitimate to condemn the four authors mentioned above for demonstrating the qualities of hate-mongering bigots. However, it would be entirely unfair to then generalize from this to say that all theists are hate-mongering bigots. The accusation can only properly be applied to that subset of theists who think that it is perfectly acceptable to presume their moral superiority over others, to do so on the basis of faith, to grasp whatever arguments they can find however weak that appear gives this hate a warm home, and to over-generalize from the failings of some members of a group to the whole group.

Consequently, I – the atheist who apparently has a ‘problem with morality’ – will not be guilty of that particular wrong. My accusations apply specifically to D’Souza, the people backing the movie ‘Expelled’, Aldrich, and Milke, and any who should perform the same wrongs. Any theist who does not follow this particular path does not deserve to be subject to the same condemnation, merely because they share the trait with these guilty parties of having a belief in God. It is only those who share the traits of groundless arrogance, hate, and bigotry who deserve to share the same condemnation.

Yet, it is fair to say that the culture that these four belong to – insofar as the culture does not see fit to condemn them for their wrongdoing, but instead applauds them for their demonstrations of hate and bigotry – deserves to be condemned as well. This does not imply that everybody within the culture deserves condemnation. However, it does imply that those who do not deserve condemnation appear too few in numbers and too weak to have much of an effect on that society.

Seeing Ben Stein's "Expelled" as Propaganda

Note: I will be at the First Freedom First Simulcast at the Denver Pavilions 15 in downtown Denver on Wednesday night, March 26.

I, like several others, have been entertained by the fiasco whereby the people responsible for the movie Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed had PZ Myers evicted from a ‘private screening’ of the movie while letting Richard Dawkins and others in to see it.

There are, however, some elements in these accounts that I would like to comment upon.

Documentary vs. Propaganda

The more I read about this movie the more it seems that the point of the movie is to sell hatred of atheists and evolutionists by associating the terms with images of concentration camps, gas chambers, Hitler, Stalin, and anything else threatening.

Richard Dawkins reviewed the movie as a documentary , and found it to be a very poor documentary. However, this is a lot like picking it up a saw, trying to use it as a hammer, and then writing a critique that the tool is a very poor hammer.

Of course it is a poor hammer – it is a saw. And of course “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed” is a poor documentary. It is a propaganda film.

From what I have read of descriptions of the movie, its purpose is to create an association in the minds of viewers (or at least those who are susceptible, which explains the marketing strategy) between ‘atheism’ and ‘evolution’ on the one hand, and ‘Nazi’ and ‘Stalin’ images on the other. They are seeking to plant in society a tendency, whenever one hears or reads the concept ‘atheist’ or ‘evolution’, the listener or reader immediately calls to image gas chambers and concentration camps.

Imagine the effect that this will have on American politics and American culture to have a significant portion of the population react in this way to anybody seeking to present atheism or evolution in a positive light.

It does not matter that the audience member is bored while the movie is planting this association in his head. Indeed, it may well be easier to plant the idea into the brain of an otherwise bored audience member. Their resistance may well be lowered while their brain is disengaged. What matters is the effect that the presentation will have on those who leave the theater.

In addition to providing the viewer with this association of concepts and images, the presenters make sure that they provide their viewings to a receptive audience, so that the audience members can reinforce this association in their fellow members. The Q&A after the presentation performs the same function.

Here, Richard Dawkins in his posting “Lying for Jesus” does a spectacular job of missing the point.

Now, to the film itself. What a shoddy, second-rate piece of work. A favourite joke among the film-making community is the 'Lord Privy Seal'. Amateurs and novices in the making of documentaries can't resist illustrating every significant word in the commentary by cutting to a picture of it. The Lord Privy Seal is an antiquated title in Britain's heraldic tradition. The joke imagines a low-grade film directory who illustrates it by cutting to a picture of a Lord, then a privy, then a seal. Mathis' film is positively barking with Lord Privy Seals. We get otherwise pointless cut to Nikita Khrushchev hammering the table (to illustrate something like 'emotional outburst'). There is similarly clunking and artless cuts to a guillotine, fist fights, and above all to the Berlin wall and Nazi gas chambers and concentration camps.

Claiming that the film is full of Lord Privy Seals misses the point. The images described are not Lord Privy Seals. They are deliberate attempts to associate ‘atheism’ and ‘evolution’ with ‘gas chambers’ and ‘concentration camps’ or anything else that looks dangerous and evil.

This practice of associating the terms 'evolution' and 'atheist' with images of gas chambers and concentration camps is not pointless. It’s the whole point. Its purpose is to create a society in which mentioning evolution or atheism in a political speech, television show, classroom, or casual conversation brings up images of gas chambers and concentration camps in a sufficiently large portion of the population that people substantially give up using these terms.

We already have an environment in this country where high school teachers do not teach evolution because they do not want to deal with the hostility. After April 18th (and beyond) they will have to deal with students brought to associate any talk of evolution with images and ideas of gas chambers and concentration camps.

I am not saying that this is all a part of some conscious plan or, God forbid, some intelligent design. It may well be that the promoters went with a plan that ‘felt right’ to them and that seemed to provide them with the feedback they wanted. Through experimentation and observation they hit on a program that turns the audience into the type of people they want the audience to become.

Intentional or not, this is the how the movie should be evaluated. It is a poor documentary in the same sense that a hammer is a poor saw or sandstone makes poor wires.

Public Relations

Another claim that I have seen made about this event is that it was a public relations nightmare for those who are promoting the film.

Where does that conclusion come from?

This is an empirical claim. The individual is making a claim about the world. Is this claim justified? On the basis of what evidence is this claim made?

I find it particularly interesting that people who claim to think that it is particularly important that people draw their conclusions from the available evidence. Where is the evidence that this is a public relations fiasco for the organizers of this movie?

Look around you on the bus, or in a restaurant, or at the movies, or any place where there is a crowd of rather ordinary people. Ask yourselves (or, better yet, take a poll) on the numbers who are familiar with the Dawkins/Myers version of the story. Then ask how many of them have heard the Discovery Institute version of the story. Finally, ask how many of them even know that the event took place.

But they will know about the movie soon enough. They will learn about the movie, and watch the movie, and tell their friends about the movie, all without ever hearing about this event.

Yes, the story was heavily covered in the atheist blogs. Combined, how many unique readers do you think we all have? Combined, how many people can fundamentalist and other theist organizations reach with their version of the story?

In evaluating the effect of these types of incidents, one has to pay attention to a numbers. Simply because a person runs around in a universe where blog-reading atheists are a majority does not mean that one can extrapolate findings within this group to the whole population. That is a fairly fundamental statistical error. We, of all people, should not be making it, and should not be encouraging others to make it.

Update: 11:18 MDT. The backers of 'Expelled' have just sent out a press release to help to ensure that, when the general public does hear of this event, it will be their version that the people hear of. Will this truly be a public relations debacle for the movie? These are professional spin-doctors. Do not expect them to just lie down on the job.

Conclusion

One of the things that I dislike about many religious claims is that false beliefs cause people to act in ways that are, to put it bluntly, irrational. They think that they are accomplishing something of value, but the value they have been told to believe in does not exist. In the mean time, real-world values that do exist are sacrificed to the imaginary values of religion.

However, I find the same problem with false beliefs generating irrational action in the claims made above. People who do not recognize the actual function of the movie, or come to irrational conclusions about the movie being hopelessly mishandled, are not likely to take the types of actions that an accurately informed person will take.

The purpose of the movie is not to fight for free speech. It is to create in the minds of as many people as possible a relationship between ‘evolution’ and ‘atheist’ on the one hand, and ‘gas chambers’ and ‘concentration camps’ on the other. And it will probably succeed. After the movie is aired, we will probably be dealing with a significant increase in public sentiment that says that anything that supports evolution or secularism or church/state separation supports the next wave of gas chambers and concentration camps.

We cannot start too soon to deal with that issue. The way to start is to inoculate as many minds as possible against the hate-mongering that is written into this movie by informing as many people as possible of the fact that the movie is designed to sell unreasoned, unfounded hatred.

It’s not (as far as I can tell) a documentary. It is a propaganda film built to sell hate.

Instead of complaining that the hammer is a very poor saw, we should try evaluating the hammer in terms of how well it functions as a hammer.

Addendum: Goons

The accounts I have read have mentioned the actions of some guards or police officers or some sort of uniformed security person. The accounts that I have read suggest that this individual did not do anything improper. He did his job and he did not do anything that he did not have a right to do.

However, when I read accounts of this event, I have been treated to descriptions of this person as a ‘goon’, ‘guerilla’, and similar statements that almost invite me as the reader to imagine a goose-stepping Nazi SS officer threatening the masses. I do not know anything about this person (or these people). For all I know they are off-duty police officers trying to make a little extra money to cover health insurance or buy a few extra things for the home. Or they may have been on-duty police officers. Or they could have been employees of the theater.

Whatever the fact of the matter is, if somebody wants to resort to name-calling and making other derogatory comments about these people, please provide me with some evidence that they actually did something wrong. Otherwise, this baseless name-calling is completely inappropriate.

On this matter, I would like to pause to in praise of several people who had placed comments in these reports, who have noticed the same issue that I am raising. In many cultures, name-calling is such an accepted practice that nobody within the community will concern themselves with defending the victims of this type of speech. At least among the atheist community there is generally (though not universally) accepted principle that accusations such as these should not be made without just cause.

A Perspective on the Pledge: Book Available

Greetings:

Given that the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals may release its opinion on “Under God” and “In God We Trust” at any time in the next 3 months, and given worries that I have on what the aftermath to that decision may be, I have decided to make this book available now.

A Perspective on the Pledge

I have a link to a blog posting that became an earlier version of Chapter 1

And I spent a lot of time on this making it ready.

I am expecting that the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals will again declare ‘under God’ unconstitutional – and perhaps the motto ‘In God We Trust’ as well. Without some effort on our part, the results will be the same – politicians falling all over themselves to protect and defend the Pledge from ‘secularists’.

The traditional argument simply have no weight. People who would defend the 9th Circuit’s opinion would likely appeal to Separation of Church and State, as if this is some fundamental principle on which everybody agrees. In fact, in discussing the Constitutional issue, that is what they have to do.

If people do not like the law, there is an easy way to change it. That is to ignore it. People can then complain all they want about how the law is being ignored. However, the people want to ignore a provision in the law, and they insist on only electing politicians who appoint judges that will ignore it, then that part of the law will be ignored. That is a fact.

In this case, the 9th Circuit opinion, if they declare 'under God' unconstitutional, will be one of those provisions in the Constitution that people can and will change - not through the Amendment process, but by electing politicians who will appoint judges who will give the law the interpretation they want.

The decision would be a fundraising boon for the Republican Party and in particular for the most theocratic branch of the Republican Party. They will put that money to work telling people in every venue open to them – from the pulpit, from their radio shows, from their ‘news’ stations, from their newsletters – that the Constitution is not meant to protect people from religion.

Anybody who has faith that the people will see through the obvious errors in their argument and adopt a position of truth and reason simply has not been paying attention. If the people had such a power to see through nonsense, then we would not be facing so many of the absurdities that we hear today. Remember, half of Americans still believe that the Earth is less than 10,000 years old. This hardly sounds like a group that has much of a capacity to see through illogical arguments.

Given that we no longer live in a country that views the separation of church and state as a foundational principle, it should no longer be considered sufficient to argue from this principle to any conclusion. Rather, we must assume that the population is hostile to this principle, and to offer its defense. It is necessary to argue the proposition, “If a separation of church and state never existed, why would a fair, just, and wise population find it necessary to invent it?”

If the next debate is held on the same terms as the last debate, we can expect the same result. We can expect that the marketing and the money of the religious right will help to ensure in this election, and the next, and the election after that, that no candidate can be elected who not only professes a belief in God, but who professes the superiority of those who believe in God over those who do not.

However, the story is not just about ‘under God’.

The story is about a government that funds, supports, and bars institutions that get public money from excluding an organization that says that you are morally suspect – morally inferior to other citizens based on a characteristic that has nothing to do with morality. It is a story about a country in which people routinely fill the air waves and print media with statements about your moral inferiority without anybody challenging the pure bigotry of such a claim.

It is a story about living in a country where the government makes it its pledge and motto to treat those in your group of incapable of patriotism.

It is a story about a country where people can put up signs that say, “Why does your group hate this country,” when members of your group have fought and died for that country.

It’s about being faced with all of these different forms of bigotry all wrapped together.

When the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals announces its decision, I hope to hear a new set of arguments added to those that already exist.

I am hoping that the debate can go a little further with some new lines of reasoning becoming a part of the public discourse.

“You talk about it being wrong to keep God out of the public square, when ‘under God’ was added to the pledge and ‘In God We Trust’ was made the national motto for the purpose of keeping atheists out of public office. You cheer candidates who say that atheists are not fit to serve in public office.”

“’Under God’ was not meant to promote religion in the same way that ‘liberty and justice for all’ was not meant to promote liberty and justice for all.”

“’In God We Trust’ isn’t a way of telling Americans to trust in God in the same way that the Marine motto, Semper Fi is not a way of telling Marines to be faithful to their comrades in arms.”

“You have no right to declare that you are morally superior to others, and then to have the gall to say that the only evidence you have for this is your faith in your own moral superiority.”

It is my hope that the debate, when the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals announces its decision, will not be a repeat of the things that were said when the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals announced their last decision. I hope to see the arguments made on a new level.

I hope that this book can make a contribution to that end.

E2.0: Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: Atheism from the Inside Out

This is the 26th 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.

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein did not give a presentation to the Beyond Belief 2. She gave a reading from a work in progress called 33 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction. The reading was from the first chapter of this work, a story about a professor in the psychology of religion who had just become world famous for a book that examines 33 arguments for the existence of god, and then refutes them.

It is, as I said, a work of fiction. In this story, our hero, Cass Seltzer is standing on at 4:00 am in Boston on a cold February day reflecting on his sudden fame – a fame that can be compared to that of Sam Harris or, perhaps, Daniel Dennett who obtained popular standing because of something written critical of religion that happened to become very popular.

The story provides a homage, of a sort, in favor of certain arguments in favor of the existence of God. Though it denies that they have any intellectual weight, they have a certain amount of emotional weight. Those arguments, at least in this reading, concern the marvelous fact of our own existence. I am here. I am participating in the world, writing my blog, interacting with others in a way that I hope will have some positive impact on current and future events. Within the story, Seltzer cannot help but feel an immense sense of gratitude for all that he has. All of this gives emotional weight to a set of rather loose and informal arguments that, somewhere out there, there is a God.

does not use this as an argument for the existence of God. She does not say that this immense sense of gratitude that manifests itself in a desire to thank something for the gift of life and to think that there must therefore be something capable of receiving his gratitude. She puts these emotions in their proper place. To the degree that they generate a sense that there is something out there to be grateful to then these are cognitive illusions. Like optical illusions, they look real, and they are even replicatable, but there is a fact of the matter and the fact is that what we see (or sense) is not real.

Yet, still, the illusion persists.

I certainly hold that there are some ideas that a person can communicate better in a work of fiction than in a scholarly treatise. I have written my own Perspective on the Pledge both in the form of a formal argument and in the form of a short story about a student who is grappling with a very similar prejudice in an alternative universe. In fact, the book that I am writing has both of these approaches. While it discusses the ‘under God’ issue in the form of a short story, it presents the ‘In God We Trust’ issue in the appendix on the form of objective argument.

The point is that when we make the transition from ‘outside and above’ the phenomena that we are studying to ‘inside’ that phenomena, there is information to be gained. Think of a house. Think of having all sorts of information that describes what the house looks like from ‘outside and above’ the house. We may even have pictures. Yet, there is a great deal of information that we do not have. We do not know what the inside of the house looks like. We do not know what it feels like to be inside of the house. We cannot know this until we add something to our ‘external’ description of the house and say something about what it is like to be inside that house.

This is what provides us in her presentation. We have had a number of presentations that look at atheism from the outside – objectively, rationally. We have had little that describes what atheism is like on the inside.

One of the biggest problems that a lot of people have with atheism has to do precisely with what it is like to be an atheist on the inside.

People imagine the atheist life, and they imagine a person in a cold, dark, and lonely place with no possibility of joy and no sense of purpose or meaning in his existence. Those of us who live this life know that it is not true. Well, it is not necessarily true. There are probably some atheists living cold, dark, and lonely lives just as there are probably many theists living similar lives. However, many of us, most of us, are not like this. Our lives are filled with warmth, light, social interaction, joy, and purpose.

Whenever somebody protests that our lives must be cold, lonely, dark, miserable, and empty, the common response is to deny it. Yet, this denial itself comes from the ‘above and outside’ perspective. We claim that our lives have value. However, can we describe that value from the inside? Can we communicate with others what it is like to live within an atheist house? Or within an atheist mind?

Of course, in addition to fiction - in addition to describing what something is like in the form of a story with a character who is living that life - there is the option of explaining the same thing through the living of an actual life.

I would have to say that the best account of atheism from the inside out that is available today in the non-fiction category is Possommama, a.k.a. Atheist in a Minivan. This blog is not dedicated to looking at the most recent follies of creationists or the crimes committed by priests or an examination of contradictions in the Bible or the different arguments for or against the existence of God. It is a look at an atheist life from the inside. There; are more than enough blogs that describe atheism from outside and above, looking down on the atheist life. We could, perhaps, use a bit more work done on the atheist life as seen from the inside looking out.

There is a need for more atheism from the inside out.

Justice

I have another question from the studio audience today.

[F]rom a desire utilitarian perspective, what is justice? As a theory of value, it seems pretty clear that desire utilitarianism has an answer to that question. I'm just not sure how to approach the question of what, for example, a judge would do in order to make a just decision, or how policy-makers would begin to structure a just law. Are these questions that make sense from a desire utilitarian perspective?

The Value of Justice

The questioner has agreed that desire utilitarianism provides an adequate theory of value. If this is true, then this means that for justice to be good, it has to be something that fulfills good desires (something a person with good desires would promote). Furthermore, the fulfillment of desires is the only type of value that exists.

Furthermore, justice is something that fulfills good desires by definition, the way that ‘useful’ refers to something that fulfills at least some desires by definition. If a set of institutions fails to fulfill the relevant desires, this does not imply that justice is bad. It implies that a particular situation is not just.

Types of Justice

Another set of facts that I want to throw into this analysis is that there are two major families of ‘justice’; retributive justice, and distributive justice.

Retributive justice is concerned with determining and inflicting the appropriate levels of punishment for legitimate crimes. If an individual is punished for something that is not a legitimate crime, is punished too harshly or not harshly enough, or has had his guilt or innocence determined by illegitimate means, then he may rightfully claim to have been treated unjustly.

Distributive justice has to do with the distribution of wealth in a community. Distributive justice can either concern itself with the final distribution of goods and services (who has what)? Or it can concern itself with the rules for acquiring, holding, and transferring property (including labor) from one person to another without regard to the final outcome, as long as the rules are followed.

For one essay, I do not have time to speak to both types of justice, so I will speak to the type alluded to in the question from the studio audience – distributive justice.

History of Justice

In the case of justice, I think that it is useful to understand what justice is by going back to its roots. Besides, I must admit that I like this story because of what it says about putting religious symbols on government property.

Justitas was an ancient Roman goddess, typically depicted as a woman holding a set of scales in her left hand, a sword in her right, and blind folded. Not all ancient depictions take this form. This is actually an image of Justitas that has evolved over time. However, the way it has evolved and what it has evolved into tells us something of the institutions she represents.

The scales mean that we are going to consider all evidence – evidence for and evidence against a proposition. We are not going to make a decision by listening to only one side of the debate. Thus, we realize justice in a court of law where the prosecutor presents her evidence, but the defense has an opportunity to examine and respond to all of it.

President Bush’s military tribunals are inherently unjust because they allow prosecutors to present secret evidence. This is evidence that the defendant is not permitted to see or to respond to. As such, it is the equivalent to putting a weight on one side of the scale, without allowing even the opportunity of considering what weight might be put on the scales against it.

Another feature captured with the scales is the idea that the decision – on which side the greater weight rests – is not determined by the whim of the judge. It is determined by an outside source, something that does not care which side ends up having the greater weight. We capture this element in a system of justice by having the decision be made by an impartial judge and a jury of one’s peers. The judge, being an employee of the state, is not even considered sufficiently unbiased in many cases to make a just decision. The decision is handed over instead to a group of citizens.

The other symbolic representation that we find associated with the statue of Justitas is the blind fold. This represents recognition of the fact that there are certain things that will tend to sway our opinion, but we must work hard to establish institutions that help us to avoid that weakness. We need to make sure that justice is blind to irrelevant facts that might otherwise arouse the passions – facts about race, gender, personal characteristics that are not relevant to an individual’s guilt or innocence (e.g., homosexuality, where homosexuality is not relevant to whether an individual held up a convenience store or not).

It may seem unfair to have a trial where the jury is simply not permitted to see certain pieces of information. It would seem that all information is relevant to a case. However, we know that there are many types of information that may prejudice a jury, causing jurists to reach conclusions that are not justified by the evidence. Before bringing evidence into the court the judge has the power to rule on relevance. There is simply no need to waste time on data that is not relevant, or to risk that it might prejudice the opinion of a juror who mistakenly sees relevance where none exists.

These are some elements in what we find to be a standard system of retributive justice. How is it that these things come to have value? More specifically, how is it that they come to have moral value?

They come to have moral value in the way that all things have moral value; they are things that a person with good desires would love, where good desires are desires that tend to fulfill other desires. A good person values a fair trial – a trial in which the defendant has the opportunity to tell his side of the story, where the verdict is rendered by an impartial jury, and with a procedure that makes sure to confine the case to relevant evidence. A good person would insist on a trial like this because such a trial is most likely to fulfill the more and the stronger of all desires.

Here, I want to bring into the discussion the difference between rule and desire utilitarianism. The rule utilitarian would have us take these principles of justice as a set of rules that, if followed, would tend to maximize utility. The rules have no value in their own right. They do not identify principles of intrinsic worth. They are rules that we adopt merely because they are useful

They are rules that we can throw out the instant they cease to be useful. The instant a political leader deems it useful to throw out the concepts of a fair trial, he may do so. The rules, after all, exist only to serve the public good, and can be tossed as soon as one believes that tossing them will serve the public good.

However, to the desire utilitarian, these are not just rules. When a principle of justice becomes the object of a desire – of a passion – then it is no longer merely a means to some end. The rules become ends in themselves. They become an object of passion such that, when we measure the utility of a mere rule, its utility is measured by its ability to bring about trials in which the accused is able to confront the evidence against him, the trial is heard by an impartial jury, the accused is presumed innocent, and the burden of proof is on those who would inflict harm rather than on those who would be harmed.

Correspondingly, when the principles of justice have become objects of desire, then the agent will view those things that threaten these principles as he would those things that would cause him personal pain or do harm to a person that he loves. In fact, there is an important similarity between the love that the agent may have for his child and the love he might have for one of these principles. In both cases, he protects the principle or the child not merely because the principle or child is useful, but because the principle or child is something he wants to protect and defend.

Desire utilitarians do not ask whether the principle itself is useful in this or that instance. The desire utilitarian asks about the usefulness of the love for the principle. ‘Justice’ itself are those principles, to be used in determining guilt or innocence and the appropriate levels of punishment, that people generally have reason to encourage their neighbors, not only to follow, but to love, and to protect, and to nurture.

These are the questions that make sense from a desire utilitarian perspective.

Retrospective: Iraq

On this, the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, I am fortunate to be one of the people who does not have to apologize for the position that I took on the war 5 years ago. I hold the same position now that I held back then. That position was:

(1) The international community had not only a right, but a duty, to remove Saddam Hussein from power and deserved condemnation for its unwillingness to execute that duty.

My model for involvement in the affairs of individual countries by the international community is the same as that for involvement in the affairs of an individual family by a town. For the most part, we have an obligation to let other parents raise their children as they see fit. Even if we disagree with their methods, we ought not to interfere. However, there is a line – an admittedly fuzzy line, but a line nonetheless – beyond which the parent’s behavior becomes abusive. When that happens, the others in community not only have a right, they have a duty, to forcefully interfere with that family and to remove those parents from their position of power.

Saddam Hussein’s reign was obviously a tyranny. For the international community to stand back and do nothing is like the neighbor who shuts his window and turns up his television to drown out the bloody screams of a neighbor beating his children. It was a contemptible dereliction of duty.

(2) President George Bush was an incompetent leader who would almost certainly make things worse.

Before 9-11, when President Bush had unilaterally broken off any and all negotiations with North Korea, unilaterally stepped away from Kyoto, and unilaterally ended American involvement in the anti-ballistic missile treaty, I was saying that Bush’s foreign policy was immensely stupid. I wrote, before 9-11, that there may well come a time in which America will need the help and cooperation of the rest of the world in some enterprise, but Bush would have left us without friends – alone and isolated in a hostile world.

Even though I felt that the international community had a right and a duty to act to remove Saddam Hussein from power, we needed to wait for a more competent President before we could actually act. We needed a President like Bush’s father, Papa Bush, who lacked Bush’s arrogance and who actually listened to the advice of people who knew more than he did.

What is it about idiots (like baby Bush) in that they insist on compounding their idiocy by insisting that they know everything?

(3) The duty to remove Saddam Hussein from power does not necessarily include, nor does it exclude, the possibility of war.

Using the family model above, in order to remove an abusive parent from a position of power in a household, it is sometimes necessary to enter the house with guns drawn to arrest – or to kill, if the accused violently resists capture – the responsible parent. So, it is legitimate to enter a country and forcefully remove from power a politically abusive leader in a foreign country. Yet, that is not always the most useful way with dealing with a family in crisis. Sometimes, the situation calls for a less militant response. It requires intervention and coercion – perhaps with a threat of force just outside the door – or the children in that household.

So, in saying that the international community had an obligation to remove Saddam Hussein from power, I am not saying that they necessarily had an obligation to use violence to do so. My claim is that knowledgeable experts should have been put in charge of coming up with a plan. Unlike President Bush, I do not assume that I have the knowledge necessary to come up with a perfect plan myself, and I would insist on consulting experts. Since the possibility exists that those experts would decide against invasion, it would be wrong for me to prematurely assume that invasion is the best option. However, since the experts might also come up with a recommendation to invade,, then that option should not be assumed to be closed either.

(4) The Bush Administration had an obligation to present its evidence to an impartial third party before acting on it.

Obviously, the Bush Administration was not going to come to my home and show me every piece of evidence it had on Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction. I could not pretend to know enough to be able to determine whether he had enough evidence of an imminent threat to justify attacking. Bush thought he had the evidence, but for an idiot like Bush to claim to know that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction is like an idiot like Bush claiming to have evidence that the Earth is only 6,000 years old.

We invented the institution of a trial by jury precisely because we wanted to avoid the problem of unnecessary and disproportionate violence against individuals who happen to be innocent. We maintain peace within a community by promoting an aversion to doing harm to others. This is an overridable presumption. When we have evidence beyond a reasonable doubt that somebody did something that we have reason to punish, we may harm that individual. However, we are to presume innocence and prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt to an impartial jury, before we have any right to think that the harms we would inflict on an individual are justified.

For President Bush, it would have been sufficient for him to have presented evidence to NATO or some group of trusted allies to determine whether the evidence was sound. If they agreed that the evidence was good enough, then I would consider the invasion to be legitimate. However, when an impartial jury remains unconvinced, it is a violation of the basic principles of justice that keep the peace in a community. In this case, those principles should be put to use to preserve the peace in the international community. The risk of not applying those principles of justice that we might get involved in a costly and unnecessary war fully justifies the application of the principles of justice in international disputes.

(5) What would you do with a half billion dollars and 4,000 lives?

Of course, before the war started, a rational person would have looked at the opportunity costs of war. He would have said, “Assume that I had $X and $Y lives that I could spend to make the world a better place?” The invasion of Iraq should have been carried out only if there was not some better use for those same resources.

For example, what would have happened if we had invested the money we spent on the war to better develop alternative energy options in this country? What would we have had if we had invested $100 billion per year in developing wind, wave, solar, and geothermal power? With that money, we could have launched solar power satellites and collected energy that way. We could have lost 3,000 construction workers and laborers in this project, and still come out ahead.

One argument I have seen people use (and that I may have used myself in the past) is that, in purchasing foreign oil, we are funding the terrorists. However, there is another line of thought that says that countries that trade with each other are less likely to war with each other. What would the situation be if we made oil obsolete and drove the economies of the Middle East into a deep poverty? Would this make them less likely to attack the United State, or more likely? I do not know, and I do not have an education in the relevant areas to speculate.

Conclusion

The Bush Administration abandoned every principle of morality and justice in its route to war. In doing so, they have provided us with an important lesson as to why it is important to follow, rather than to discard, those principles of morality and justice. They exist because they prevent us from making some very costly mistakes. They exist as a barrier to unjustified and very costly acts of violence – protecting us both from being the victim of that type of violence, and to protect us from victimizing others.

With luck, we can elect a new batch of decent, moral leaders to replace those that we have had for the past seven years. And we can start to repair some of the damage that this Administration has done.

What ought a person to do?

I have a question from the studio audience.

I've only just discovered your desire utilitarianism, and it seems to have a lot of promise. How is it used, though, to make decisions in today's world?

So, you are a desire utilitarian and you have a decision to make in today’s world.

The first thing to note is that these types of questions are ‘should’ or ‘ought’ questions. They take the form, “What should I do?” or “What should somebody who is in this type of situation do?”

“Should” questions are questions about ‘reasons for action that exist’. The question, “Should I do X?” is a question that is asking, “What reasons-for-action exist in favor of, or in opposition to, my doing X?” So, we are going to make our decision about what to do in today’s world by looking at ‘reasons for action that exist in favor of, or in opposition to’ various options.

The first thing that I would recommend is clearing off of the table and getting rid of the things we can’t use. Specifically, we need to clear away all of the reasons for action that do not exist. If we were going to discuss the motion of body through space we are going to be looking at the forces that exist and that are acting on the body. Forces that do not exist are irrelevant. In the same way, reasons for action that do not exist are also irrelevant.

The set of reasons for action that do not exist are any reasons for action associated with a God. God does not exist, so reasons for action that are linked to God do not exist. Even if God did exist, He would have just one set of desires, and there would be no ‘reason for action that exists’ for giving his desires greater weight than those of any other person.

Intrinsic values or ‘fundamental moral oughts’ do not exist either. These fundamental moral oughts are basic moral entities from which all of the more complex moral duties and obligations that we see in the world come from – in the same way that fundamental physical properties explain the complexities of stars, living organisms, and universities. Postulating the existence of fundamental moral oughts that exist in a realm distinct from the physical universe but which can interact with it (at least so as to make us aware of their presence) represents a form of dualism that we should accept only if the evidence forces us to.

Subjective values also do not exist. An ‘ought’ that can spring into existence or disappear merely by thinking of it is a work of fiction. An imaginary dragon that I think lives outside of my house and will eat me if I decide to leave may be ‘true for me’ in the sense that I will act as if it exists. However, it is still an imaginary dragon – it is not a dragon that exists. Similarly, an ‘ought’ that exists only because I have thought it into existence, and that disappears the instant that I quit thinking about it . . . an ‘ought’ that is only ‘true for me’ while I believe it – is in the same state as the imaginary dragon.

We are looking for reasons for action that are real – that are actually put to work explaining and predicting real-world events. The only reasons for action that exist are desires. All other reasons for action can be cleared off of the table and thrown away – they do not exist.

When we look at real value we are going to look at the propositions that are true of a state of affairs and look at the propositions that are the objects of various desires. Whenever a proposition is true of a state of affairs that is the object of a desire, we are going to say that the state of affairs fulfills that desire. People seek to act so as to fulfill their desires – to create states of affairs in which the propositions are true. These are the type of ‘reasons for action’ that desires are. These are the types of ‘reasons for action’ that exist.

When we compare a state of affairs to reasons for action that exist (desires) we determine if people have reasons for action to bring about that state of affairs. We answer the ‘should’ question by determining the degree to which there are reasons for action that exist for realizing a state of affairs. Reasons for action exist to the degree that propositions that are true within that state of affairs are propositions that are the object of the most and strongest desires.

This is where the desire-fulfilling act-utilitarian stops. This is where act-utilitarian theories make their mistakes. Those theories say that there is nothing we can do to evaluate ends. Unlike beliefs, where our belief that a proposition is true can be compared to whether or not the proposition is true in fact, we cannot compare our desire for a state in which a proposition is true with the intrinsic value of that state. Intrinsic value does not exist.

Desire utilitarians go from this fact to the conclusion that we cannot evaluate ends. They are mistaken.

We cannot evaluate ends as ends. However, every end is also, at the same time, a means to the fulfillment of other ends. We can evaluate an end as means in the same way we can evaluate everything else, in terms of the degree to which having a desire tends to fulfill or thwart other desires.

The desire-fulfillment act-utilitarian only looks at whether an act fulfills the most and strongest desires. If it does, then the act is permissible – even obligatory. However, we can imagine an act such as rape fulfilling the more and stronger desires – the rapists desire rape more than the victim is adverse to being raped. So, in these cases, desire-fulfilling act-utilitarianism seems to justify rape.

But desire utilitarianism does not. Desire utilitarianism not only compares states of affairs to desires (to see if the state of affairs would fulfill or thwart those desires), it looks at the desires themselves to determine if people generally have reason to inhibit or promote those desires.

The desire to rape is a desire-thwarting desire. It is a desire that people generally have reason to get rid of.

We can see the problem with the desire to rape by imagining that we have control over a knob that will generally increase or decrease the intensity and spread of a desire to rape throughout a community. To the degree that we increase this desire to rape, to that degree we increase the desires that will be thwarted. Either the desires of the rapist will have to be thwarted, or the desires of the victims will have to be thwarted. The more and stronger the desire to rape, the more and stronger the desires that will be thwarted.

The best place to turn this knob is down to zero – so that there is no desire to rape. If this were the case, then no victims will have their desires thwarted through rape, and there would be no rapists who would have to go through the frustration of having a desire to rape go unfulfilled. This is a desire that people generally have reason to weaken or to eliminate.

So, we are going to condemn the rapist, and we are going to use the existence of any particular rape as evidence that we are dealing with a somebody who is not a good person – somebody who has good desires. We have reason to condemn rape, not to permit it, as a way of teaching children to acquire the aversion to rape that will keep all of us safe. It does not matter whether a given rape will fulfill more desires than it thwarts.

The mere fact that a particular rape fulfills desires is enough of a problem. We would be better off if a given rape fulfilled more desires, and we have reason to create a society where this is the case (as much as possible). Which means that we have reason to act so as to inhibit any desire to rape, which means condemning any person who has the desire as a way of discouraging its formation and growth.

So, briefly, this is how desire utilitarianism is applied to a problem in today’s world. Examine the states of affairs that would be produced by some actions (according to the best of one’s ability to predict). Determine the desires that would be fulfilled by that state. Determine whether the desires will tend to fulfill or thwart other desires. Encourage people to act to bring about states that a person with good desires would bring about, and discourage them from bringing about states that a person with good desires would avoid bringing about.

E2.0: Patricia Churchland: The Relation of Science and Morality

This is the 25th 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.

Patricia Churchland spoke at the Beyond Belief conference last year, and began her discussion the same way that she began this one. She attempted to draw a link between morality and brain chemistry by showing that there are certain physical characteristics in the brain associated with pair bonding versus promiscuity in certain species of mice. From this, she attempted to imply that there was a relationship between brain chemistry and the morality of pair bonding versus promiscuity in mice.

I hold that it is obviously the case that different behaviors ultimate rest on different features in the brains of different agents. I have little doubt of the ability to take behavioral dispositions and trace them, at least theoretically to facts about the brain.

However, one of the things that I seriously doubt is that you can take a characteristic, discover the underlying brain functions associated with that characteristic, and in that brain function discover its morality. It is at least theoretically possible to take the brains of rapists, and the brains of homosexuals, and discover how each is related to parts of the brains having particular structures.

There are some who would want to argue that the mere fact that homosexuality can be associated with a particular brain structure, that this implies that homosexuality is not immoral. Every time a discovery is made along these lines we are told that this means that homosexuality is not a choice, and that homosexuals should be free to engage in practices consistent with their nature.

Yet, we should well expect that the disposition to rape will also be linked to particular brain structures. We would certainly not accept the argument that this implies that rape is not a matter of choice, and that rapists should therefore be free to engage in practices consistent with their nature. This argument linking brain structure to moral permissibility is completely invalid. All dispositions – obligatory, permissible, and prohibited – are (at least theoretically) associated with certain brain structures. Being associated with a brain structure, and being morally permissible, are not the same thing.

We do not find moral obligation, permission, and prohibition for a disposition in the fact that it is associated with an underlying brain structure. I have been arguing that we find the moral obligation, permission, and prohibition of a disposition by measuring its relationship to other dispositions. What makes rape morally prohibited while homosexual behavior is morally permissible is that the former is a disposition that thwarts the desires of others (thus giving others a reason to prevent it), while the latter is a disposition that does not require the thwarting of other desires.

I have also argued that morality is only relevant when we are talking about malleable desires. By this I mean that social forces, particularly the forces of praise, condemnation, reward, and punishment, can have an effect on the disposition. This means that morality is involved where these behaviors have an effect on the underlying brain structure, making brain structures that tend to thwart other desires less common, and brain structures that fulfill other desires more common.

The ways in which social forces affect brain structures, and the effect of those different brain structures on behavior, is another area where science can make meaningful contributions to morality. Science may tell us that certain brain structures are immune to social conditioning. If this is true of a brain structure associated with behavior that thwarts the desires of others, it means that we should consider that disposition an ‘illness’ rather than an ‘evil’. We call it ‘evil’ when social condemnation can make the disposition less common; we call it ‘illness’ when social condemnation can have no such effect.

So, assume that Patricia Churchland is correct when she says that oxytocin levels have an effect on promiscuity (higher oxytocin levels means less promiscuity). Let us also assume that science tells us that promiscuity tends to be desire-thwarting (in that it contributes to the spread of disease and breaks apart families to the detriment of the children within those families. Finally, let us assume that science discovers a relationship between certain social practices (the condemnation of adultery and the praise of monogamy) tends to promote oxytocin production in the brain.

Where these three items apply, we have reason to instruct society to use its forces of praise and condemnation to promote monogamy and reduce promiscuity. The effect, in this case, would be to reduce the desire for sex with people other than a pair-bonded mate, which will then reduce the spread of disease and protect children from the dangers of living in a single-parent household.

Please note that I am not assuming, nor am I arguing, that any of the three propositions in my opening paragraph are true. I am simply arguing for the implications that findings such as this might have on designing a moral system for a society.

It is often said that science cannot provide us with moral principles. Here is at least a hypothetical example in which it can. Here is a set of hypothetical examples in which people have a reason to use social forces to praise one type of behavior and to condemn another, as proved by science.

This analysis is quite different from what usually hear from biologists and evolutionists regarding the link between morality and biology. The typical link that biologists tend to draw is that if we can find a brain structure associated with the attitude that X is wrong that this proves that morality springs from biology, and somehow ‘justifies’ the attitude that X is wrong.

However, this is like saying that if the attitude ‘God exists’ can be traced to a certain brain structure (which, at least theoretically, it can be), that this proves that the attitude is justified. There is no difference between this inference and the inference that the fact that one has traced a moral attitude (homosexuality is sinful) to a mental state to the conclusion that the state is justified (that homosexuality is, indeed, sinful).

Of course an attitude is going to have a biological basis. This is true of all attitudes – attitudes that are justified, and attitudes that are not justified. It tells us nothing . . . absolutely nothing . . . about whether or not that attitude is justified. Those who find a biological basis for a moral attitude and who claim that the study stops there – that science has solved the question of morality – simply demonstrate that they do not understand what it is they are studying.

I can imagine that some people may take my opposition to the way that science studies morality to mean that I am opposed to the scientific study of morality. At the same time, they may note that I hold that moral claims are objective, and that moral statements are subject to the same standards of evidence as any other kind of scientific statement.

Let me clarify this distinction.

Science has a lot to say about morality. However, at the same time, the bulk of scientists who think they are studying morality are studying nothing of the kind. What the bulk of scientists are studying falls victim to the false inference that, “I have shown that moral attitude X has a biological basis; therefore, I have shown that moral attitude X is justified.” Scientists who make this inference are studying moral attitudes, but they are far from studying the justification of moral claims. The justification of moral claims cannot be found in this research. It has to be found elsewhere. However, the ‘elsewhere’ itself is something that can be studied scientifically.

The same is true of beliefs. A scientist would be a fool to think that because he has discovered a biological foundation for a particular belief that he has shown the belief to be justified. The justification for a belief rests somewhere other than in its biological foundation. Yet, the fact that the justification of beliefs is to be found elsewhere does not imply that the justification of beliefs is outside of the realm of science. Indeed, the scientific method itself is very much tied to the justification of beliefs. The scientific method is a system for justifying beliefs.

The point is not that science cannot provide us with information useful in making moral judgments. The point is that you do not find that information in the mere fact that an attitude has a biological underpinning. It is found, instead, in the relationships that an attitude has to other attitudes – to the degree that beliefs cohere with other beliefs, and to the degree that desires are in harmony with other desires.

Perspective on the Pledge Book Ready If Needed

Greetings Readers:

I spent the weekend working on the book A Perspective on the Pledge. I read the book out loud in order to try to catch every error that might be contained within. I rewrote a few whole sections, and read them out loud again, until everything sounded the way I wanted it to.

This has taken away from my opportunity to work on this blog for the past two days, but I think that the project is important and worth the effort.

I still have not heard from Prometheus Books - either in the form of an invitation to submit the manuscript, or in terms of a rejection letter. However, it is possible that the 0th Circuit Court of Appeals could release its opinion on 'under God' and 'In God We Trust' any day, and I simply want this to be available at that time.

So, I built a version that I could make available on a moment's notice.

Now that I have this version done, I want to address the question, "Why do you think that this project is so important?"

I have one argument for saying that it is not important. I have argued repeatedly in this blog that the propositions, "God exists" and "God does not exist" are morally irrelevant. Neither proposition tells you anything about what you should or should not do. Those moral principles all come from the things that one adds to the propositions "God exists" and "God does not exist." On both sides, those propositions are widely varied, allowing theists and non-theists alike to give their allegiance to the most noble and the most horrendous human enterprises.

So, this is not a defense of atheists, and is not a part of the atheist/theist debate. One of the features in this story is that two of the heroes in the story are white characters.

For any reader who is not familiar with the story, it concerns a black student's protest over a pledge of allegiance to 'one white nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.'

It is no more problematic for a theist to recognize the injustice of a government declaring that those who hold 'a God exists' are to be favored over those who hold 'it is not the case that a God exists', then it is for a white person to realize the injustice of a pledge of allegiance to a white nation.

Yet, it is also the case that atheists are the victims of this injustice - whether they realize it or not. (I do draw an analogy in this story between an atheist who finds no problem with a pledge of allegiance to 'one nation under God' and a black student who sees no problem with a pledge of allegiance to 'one white nation').

The harms that I believe can be attributed to this injustice include:

Psychological harm done to children who adopt atheism, many of whom are made to feel ashamed of themselves or 'anxious' about the hostility they might receive - a hostility that begins with and has the official endorsement of the U.S. Government. I hold that this is why atheists are politically impotent - because atheists, from a very young age, are caused to think of themselves as unworthy and, as a result, would rather hide than protest the injustices against them.

The Pledge and the Motto do, I argue, have the effect of turning people off to the idea that no God exists. Young children are simply made more comfortable in the 'accepting' climate of being 'under God' and in trusting in God, and so form an aversion to the possibility of not having these qualities.

The Pledge and the Motto promote the idea that atheists do not share American values - that a patriot has to be 'under God' and 'trust in God'. This is what makes it possible for one President to say that atheists are not patriots and are not really citizens, another to say that he will only appoint judges who agree that our rights come from God, for every major political candidate to declare his or her belief in God, because half of the people are taught by the government to vote against anybody who is not 'under God' or who does not trust in God.

So, we have a political system that allows a candidate to be a fan of evidence-based rationality, or to be honest, but not both.

This is not to say that every atheist would be a better candidate for public office than any theist. What it says is that if there is even one good atheist candidate - one who is a fan of evidence-based rationality and who is honest, we should not have a political system that bars her from public office. That is certainly not in our nation's interests.

Furthermore, as the story points out, 'under God' in the Pledge and 'In God We Trust' means that our national motto and our national pledge is to be a nation of bigots. This is not a state to which a great nation should aspire. In fact, it is a state that a great nation should seek to avoid.

When the story breaks that the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has once again declared 'under God' in the Pledge of Allegiance unconstitutional, we will once again hear a great hue and cry against the forces of secularism. Candidates who appeal to fundamentalists will use this as a rallying cry to raise hundreds of millions of dollars. Candidates who appeal to a more liberal crowd will need to declare their opposition to this ruling. A few dissenting voices will attempt to defend the court using traditional arguments grounded on church/state separation - arguments that nobody has listened to before, and will ignore in the future.

This book attempts to present a new argument - to give a new perspective to the Pledge debate. In the book, I am not concerned with the Constitution. The story might as well have been sat in a country that does not believe in the story's equivalence to church/state separation. It argues that, even in a country that does not have Constitutional provisions prohibiting the establishment of a religion, fair and just people would have to oppose 'under God' in the Pledge and 'In God We Trust' as the motto.

Another argument that we can expect to hear when the news once again breaks is the offense argument. I actually expect this to show up as a fundamentalist's straw-man characterization of the secular argument, than to show up as the secular argument itself. The claim will be that secularists are grounding their opposition to the law on the basis of offense. "I am offended by any mention of God in the public square, so I am going to seek to prohibit it." Of course this straw man is easy to defeat, which is why fundamentalists will offer it as the secular 'justification' for opposition to these practices.

Rather than repeating the same old arguments, which will likely have the same old results, I want to throw a new argument out there for people to consider, in the hopes of generating some new results.

It is an argument that, unlike a technical legal brief, does not require an advanced degree to understand. And it is an argument that, unlike the offense argument, actually provides justification for taking a stand against 'under God' and 'In God We Trust'.

So, these are the reasons why I am putting my effort into this project.

E2.0: Ronald de Sousa: A Passion for Science

This is the 24th 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 the previous presentation, Greg Epstein argued for a culture of humanism, and ended his presentation with a song. In this presentation, Ronald d’Sousa speaks about developing a passion for science, and ends in a poem.

In listening to de Sousa’s presentation, I noticed that he blurred a distinction that I think it is important to unblur. There has been a dispute among atheist bloggers about the legitimacy of ‘framing’. In the context of this debate, ‘framing’ means paying attention to how certain facts may be perceived by the public, and presenting those facts in ways that will make them more acceptable.

In the political world, this type of practice is known as ‘spin.’ Politicians do this in order to give their policies an appearance that might not be totally accurate, but will make it easier to get past the people. Thus, a bill that allows companies to poison their neighbors by removing mandatory restrictions on air pollution and replacing them with voluntary restrictions can be known as the ‘clean air act’. A bill that effectively repeals the 4th, 5th, 6th, and 8th Amendments to the Constitution can be called ‘The Patriot Act’.

For the most part, framing is lying, and nothing that a person who values the truth can endorse. In fact, a great deal of the difficulties we have in creating sound policies in this country is due to the fact that we, as a culture, have little or no respect for truth. Lying (or ‘framing’ has become mainstream, to the degree that many people have lost the ability to tell the difference between fact and fiction.

In making this presentation, de Sousa uses the term ‘framing’ and speaks about framing as a good thing. However, what he ends up talking about is different, and the difference is important.

Framing has to do with the manipulation of belief. De Sousa does not actually talk about manipulating our beliefs (coating them in ways that make them easier to swallow). He actually talks about manipulating our desires. He talks about the passion for science – creating a love for knowledge, and a wonder and awe in the aspects of nature.

To illustrate his point, he suggests a parable. In this story, a man finds a stone that looks like a human face. It is not a perfect likeness – there are distortions and flaws in the image. However, he still takes it home and marvels about how millions of years of erosion from wind and water has created such a stone. Then a friend comes over, sees the rock, and identifies it as a reject from a local sculpture. Its features (with its flaws and distortion) were not the product of natural phenomena, but the flawed efforts of a designer. Suddenly, the stone loses its value. It becomes just another worthless rock.

This, according to de Sousa, is how atheists and humanists should paint the world. They should be generating a passion of awe and wonder for a universe that, through billions of years, can bring a collection of molecules together to form us. We can expect that such a process will have a few flaws and distortions. In contrast, to think of the universe, with its flaws and distortions, as the output of a designer means that it is not so awesome and marvelous. It means that the universe is rather ordinary – as awesome as laptop that sometimes locks up and loses one’s documents, or a car that does not always start.

As a desire utilitarian, I can fully endorse this project, while condemning the practice of ‘framing’ mentioned earlier. We have many and strong reasons to promote a love of truth – even unpleasant truth – because those truths are not going to go away simply because we do not like them.

I have agreed that, given our limited resources, it is often better to understand an approximation of a truth than to get every detail right. In most of our everyday experience, Newtonian physics gives us answers that are close enough to the truth for all practical purposes. The complexities of Einstein’s equations do not give us answers that are useful, even if they are more accurate.

However, recognizing these types of limitations is not what people typically talk about when they talk about framing. All we need to do for our statements to be true is simply to admit to some measure of uncertainty. The person using Newtonian calculations who says that the car should reach 60 miles per hour in 4.4 seconds simply needs to be understood as saying, “The car should reach close-enough-to-60 miles per hour in close-enough-to-4.4 seconds.’ Understood in this way, the statement is true, and no ‘framing’ is involved.

All of this is consistent with a love for truth.

Indeed, it is important here to note that I am speaking of a love for truth – a passion that says that a true statement is not only more useful than a false statement, but where an agent values truth for its own sake independent of its usefulness, and condemn even harmless fiction. A difference between a love of truth and the practical utility of truth is that, when an agent encounters a useful fiction, the lover of truth will hate it for being fiction, where the person who sees truth as being merely practical will reject it for being impractical.

The same is true of a person who has a love of knowledge.

I recall incidents in graduate school, when I was totally engrossed in reading a good book, suddenly thinking, “I’ve got to put this away. I’ve good schoolwork I need to do for tomorrow.” An instant later I realized that the book I was reading was my schoolwork. I enjoyed graduate school, and would clearly have done the same job even outside of school.

That’s easy enough to prove. After all, that’s what I’m doing in this blog – all of the things that I did in graduate school, without a single shred of college credit.

Each morning I log onto the Astronomy Picture of the Day to learn what surprise they have in store for me. They always have a short paragraph describing the science behind whatever image they are showing – explaining how the colors of a nebulae are due to its reflecting light from a nearby star or glowing with the energy of a nearby star. In all of these cases, the scientific facts about the hydrogen atoms, the distance in light years, the size of the cloud, all add to how amazing the picture is.

And every valentine’s day, I send my wife a rose.

This is not ‘framing’ science the way the term is typically understood. This is not misrepresenting scientific findings – promoting false beliefs and misunderstandings – in order to win a political or social contest that cares nothing about facts. This has to do with promoting passions, in the hope that people will come to find value in science even where it is not useful – value in science and truth and knowledge for its own sake.

D’Souza did not only speak about science. He spoke about living life as an atheist. There is the fact that no divine intervention will save us. When we pull together and accomplish some end – whether it is landing on the moon or ending small pox or building a nation that is substantially free of violence – these are things that we can be proud of. These are things that add value to a life, and can make a life worth living.

Reflections on Rejected Moral Theories

Hello, readers.

How’s life?

Personally, I’ve been doing a little soul searching, trying to see how my life so far measures up with what I wanted my life to be. Of course, I found no soul. But that does not affect the measure of my life so far.

This blog . . . as long-time readers already know . . . represents my attempt to make good on an oath that I gave to myself when I was 16 years old to leave the world a better place than it would have otherwise been if I had not lived. Of course, I needed to know what ‘better’ was if I was going to actually fulfill this goal. I took the attitude, when I was 16 years old, that I honestly did not know. I was hearing different people making different claims, all of them perfectly certain that they were right and everybody who disagreed with them was wrong, and I absolutely did not know which to pick.

When I thought of the certainty that others expressed I thought that this was the greatest hypocrisy. “How could you be so certain of being right – certain to the degree that you are willing to impose huge costs on others – when there are people out there who are as smart as you are saying that you are wrong?”

In fact, it did not take me long to realize that one way to make the world a better place than it would have otherwise been would be to do something against this arrogance.

I learned that one of the things that people do to get themselves into this mindset was to trust their feelings. They did not look at the arguments – at the reasons for adopting one view over another. Instead, they would hold a proposition in their mind and judge how it caused them to feel. If they liked the feel of an idea, then they asserted that it was true, and so absolutely true that it justified whatever harms might be inflicted on others as a result of promoting that belief.

I never trusted my feelings. I always thought that feelings were the prejudices and bigotries that I was raised with, and were never to be given any weight unless I could put a solid foundation of reason underneath them.

It was easy to see why a person should not trust their feelings. Every atrocity committed in human history was committed by people who made themselves comfortable with their crimes. I have no doubt that the vast majority of the slave owners in the American south felt perfectly comfortable with the idea of owning slaves. The inquisitors and crusaders of Europe were of a mindset that they had trouble not sleeping if they were to spare the life of an infidel or a Muslim. The every-day crimes that I see around me, from the person who abuses a child to those who view homosexuality as the biggest threat America faces, are all perfectly comfortable with the ‘feel’ of their thoughts and actions.

I see this as reason to distrust feelings, not because these things that others accept ‘feel’ wrong to me. I distrust feelings because I am surrounded by people whose feelings differ, who cannot all be right. The evidence makes it abundantly clear that feelings are not to be trusted.

So, as I sat there in my American History class thinking about making the world a better place, I knew that I could not trust my feelings to tell me what that was. I knew that I could not just grab on to some sort of cause that I liked and start working on promoting it – because I would likely be making a mistake. I decided that I needed to learn a lot more than I already knew before I could make sure that I was actually making the world better.

And still I was surrounded by people who, out of arrogance, presumed that they only need measure how they felt about things to determine that they were fighting on the right side, and that it was safe to ignore everybody who felt that they were wrong.

So the fighting continued.

It seemed that one thing that a person could do in order to make the world a better place was just to deflate some of the arrogance out there – to invite people to ask themselves, “Am I right? Am I so certain that I am right that I am willing to inflict harm on others in the name of my own moral perfection?”

Anyway, while so many people were arrogantly presuming their own moral perfection, I went off to college to study value theory – to try to find out what the reality of ‘better’ actually is.

I learned a lot of 12 years of college. I gave the issues that haunted me a lot of thought to finding out what ‘better’ was, and I ruled out a lot of theories.

I ruled out divine command systems at the start because God does not exist. And even if God did exist, how could we answer the question that what God commanded us to do was better than what God prohibited us from doing?

I ruled out libertarian theories because ‘man qua man’ does not exist, and the theory makes an entirely invalid leap from ‘is’ to ‘ought’.

I ruled out natural rights based theories because advocates of these theories could not tell me what a right is, or how I can find one in nature.

I ruled out non-natural theories because, if value cannot be reduced to something natural (something in the universe that ‘is’) then it makes more sense to say that value does not exist then it does to postulate non-natural entities.

I ruled out act-utilitarian theories because the only way a human can always perform that act that maximizes utility is if a human has only one desire – the desire to maximize utility.

I ruled out rule-utilitarian theories because they collapse into act-utilitarian theories.

I ruled out happiness theories because whenever happiness and truth when different routes, value followed truth, not happiness.

I ruled out subjectivist theories because, if everything is a matter of opinion – if A is just as valid as not-A – then there is no reason to adopt A or not-A and adopting either would be a mistake.

I ruled out emotivist theories because moral statements behave in all instances like propositions.

I ruled out theories that ground morality on genetics because the advocate of genetic morality cannot answer the question, “Is X moral because it is loved by our genes, or is X loved by our genes because it is moral?” If the former, then the most atrocious acts can be moral. And if it is the later, then morality is something outside of our genes.

I ruled out intuitionism because it made more sense to view our intuitions in terms of the prejudices and bigotries we were raised with than some type of supernatural connection to some mysterious moral truth.

Yet, in spite of these flaws, each of these theories have people who latch onto it as tightly as any religion, and who refuse to entertain any objection.

When people latch on to a flawed idea with the tenacity of a religion, and think that their attitudes are so well grounded that it is perfectly legitimate to use that system to advocate harming others in some way, we have (or potentially have) a very serious problem.

So, perhaps, one way to make the world a better place than it would have otherwise been would be to simply point out to people the errors in following any of these flawed systems. I do not really need to advance a separate system that I thought was true. It would be enough to simply clear away some of the brush – the garbage ideas that litter the moral landscape – to make some room for ideas that made sense.

Morality and Being Human

“Human” is not a morally relevant category. By this I mean that nothing of moral consequence necessarily hinges on whether or not a person is or is not human.

Recently, I have seen it mentioned in a few places that the fact that an entity is ‘human’ has profound moral consequences. For example, in Lee Silver’s presentation at Beyond Belief 2, he quoted a source that said that science had proved that abortion was wrong because science had proved that a human life starts at conception.

Richard, in a comment to yesterday’s blog, asked me to clarify whether my claim, the moral quality of an action does not depend on the agent’s reasons for performing it by asking, Do you mean a *human* action, or any action?

Plus there is a line in the Star Trek movie, “The Undiscovered Country,” where Chekov says, “Everybody is entitled to basic human rights,” and a Klingon responds, “Human rights. The very name is racist.”

In fact, the fact that ‘human’ is not a moral category can be most easily demonstrated by appeal to science fiction, where humans encounter a wide variety of non-human life forms, all of which have moral worth. The statement in Star Trek IV was, in fact, racist. There is no such thing as human rights. There are only rights.

So, in my answer to Richard’s question, I do not mean *human* action in the sense that the fact that an action was performed by a human has special moral significance. The actions that I am speaking about are intentional actions – actions motivated by beliefs and, more importantly, (malleable) desires, regardless of the species of the agent that performed them.

Wherever desires are malleable we have reason to lend our support to a project of promoting desires that tend to fulfill the desires of others, and inhibiting desires that tend to thwart the desires of others. It does not matter whether we find those desires in a human, a Vulcan, a pet (the phrase ‘bad dog’ is, in fact, a moral statement), or a god.

Value consists in relationships between states of affairs and desires. Moral value consists in relationships between malleable desires and other desires. It has to do with desires that people generally have reason to promote (because they tend to fulfill other desires) and desires that people generally have reason to inhibit (because they tend to thwart other desires). The genetic composition of the agent is not a part of the formula. Does the agent have desires (reasons for action)? Does the agent have the capacity to figure out that certain malleable desires in others will tend to either promote or inhibit the fulfillment of his own desires). If so, we have all we need for moralit – without once mentioning the biological family of the agent.

If a being has no desires, then it has no reasons for action. It has no reason to promote certain desires in others or to inhibit other desires. It has no reason to do anything. That which has no desires cannot be harmed in any morally relevant way by the actions of another. Abortion does not harm the interests of a fetus that does not yet have desires.

In the vast majority of cases, it does not thwart the desires of those who are opposed to abortion either. Those who are opposed to abortion have this position because they think that something of intrinsic merit is being destroyed. Yet, this belief that something of intrinsic merit is being destroyed is false. The desire on the part of those who oppose abortion to preserve something of intrinsic merit cannot be fulfilled. Even if abortion were made illegal, a desire to protect a state of intrinsic merit can never be fulfilled, because no ‘state of intrinsic merit’ exists. Only a false belief in a state of intrinsic merit exists. False beliefs are poor justification for real-world laws.

It may thwart the desires of other people who have an aversion to abortion. However, The issue also goes the other way. The fact that an individual is a ‘human’ does not automatically grant it moral rights. In order to have rights, an individual has to have interests. In order to have interests, an individual has to have desires – has to have the capacity to wish that something were the case, before those interests can be violated, and the individual can be wronged.

So, the concept of ‘human’ is both too broad and too narrow to encompass the realm of moral concerns. It is too narrow in that non-human things with desires also have interests, and desires to fulfill or thwart other interests will necessarily imply desires that fulfill or thwart the interests of non-human entities. It is too broad in that there are humans without desires, and thus humans without interests, and thus humans that cannot be wronged.

Teaching Intelligent Design

Today, I want to defend the proposition that we should be teaching intelligent design in science classes.

Recent events (and not-so-recent events) have shown us that there is a serious deficiency in our education system. There are a lot of people in this country who think that intelligent design counts as a scientific theory. The numbers of people who believe this tells us that our education system has let us down. It has failed in its mission to help students to understand what a scientific theory is. Armed with that knowledge, they should find it much easier to see through the smoke and mirrors and legislative bullying of those who advocate creationism in its various forms.

It is a travesty of our educational system that so many young students can go through science classes in this country and graduate with such a poor understanding of what science is. The mere fact that we have such an ignorant population should be a cause of embarrassment in its own right. When America shows up at the bottom (or near the bottom) of countries when it comes to an understanding of scientific facts, our politicians should hang their head in shame for their failure, and the people themselves should take this as a reason to resolve to elect better politicians in the future.

Even worse than the pure shame of this national ignorance is the cost. Americans are spending huge quantities of money trying to get myth and superstition taught as science, and huge quantities of money fighting it. These conflicts are tying up the courts and diverting huge amounts of labor-hours into a worthless struggle that could be devoted to more productive concerns. In other words, we are losing money. What is the public education system for but to give Americans knowledge that will help our economy thrive and prosper? What is the public education system for, then, if not to teach people the ignorance and the waste associated with advancing the doctrine that intelligent design is science.

When I say that intelligent design should be taught in science classes, I am not saying that it should be alluded to. I am saying that science teachers should dedicate at least a class period to looking at intelligent design as a paradigm case of ‘not science’. When the lecture is done, the students should be tested on these facts. Those who fail – those who cannot explain why intelligent design fails to be a scientific theory. One of the measures by which we judge the quality of education in a school should be in terms of the percentage of students who can explain why intelligent design is not science, with schools (and students) counted down appropriately to the degree that neither can meet these simple requirements.

This way, when a student gets to college, the college biology teachers do not need to waste their time teaching students things that the students should have learned in high school. Students should enter their first college science classes knowing that the way that a theory gets contested is by putting it up against another theory, drawing implications from each theory as to what would happen under different circumstances, creating a set of predictions that can then be tested by observation. Whereas intelligent design theory cannot provide an instance where it makes a more reliable and accurate prediction than evolution.

Advocates of intelligent design do sometimes claim to have experiments that disprove evolution. For example, they claim that we should be able to put some creature in a given environment, come back in a few thousand years, and see if a new species springs up. However, since evolutionary theory does not predict that the results of such an experiment will be a new species, it is simply not the case that this experiment would be a test as to whether evolutionary theory can withstand empirical verification. A proper experiment must look at outcomes that a scientific theory actually exists.

Of course, this too is symptomatic of the overwhelming ignorance of science in this country. It is not surprising to note that those people who are so uneducated on the nature of science that they classify intelligent design as science are also too ignorant to construct a proper scientific experiment.

It does not matter that there are a few people who call themselves scientists who go along with this nonsense. In every field there will always be a bottom ten percent. The trick – and the purpose of science education – is to try to keep the levels of ignorance exhibited by the thesis that intelligent design is science. It is a bizarre form of education to allow students to point to a student in the corner that got the wrong answer on a test and claim that the ignorance of a few justifies the ignorance of the many.

In fact, one of the absurd implications of this type of policy – one of the absurd implications of saying that, “If one person in a field holds a position than everybody in the field is justified in holding that position,” is to generate a system of education where every form of insanity and ignorance can result in a passing grade. The field of science education should recognize that there are standards for determining that an answer is good or bad other than, “Pete likes it,” and it is by those standards that we judge whether an answer demonstrates competence in that field.

“Pete likes it” is not a demonstration of competence.

This, too, becomes an element of what we should be teaching in science. I have no objection to presenting Ben Stein’s movie Expelled in a science class. Because, then, a teacher can use that to further point out how the case for intelligent design has nothing to do with science.

“Okay, class, please notice that in this entire film on teaching intelligent design in a science class that the authors did not use one argument that would count as a scientific argument. In fact, what you see in this movie is a propaganda that is intended to rouse the rabble. By the form and structure of the type of claims that are made in this movie, we see that it was made by people who want to make mob action – the twenty-first century version of torches and pitchforks – a part of the scientific process. Nowhere today, in the peer reviewed literature, is an author’s ability to assemble a mob considered valid evidence in support of a scientific claim.”

Hopefully, if this plan were adopted, we could quickly come to a time in this country, through proper education, we can lift much of the ignorance that has people living under the delusion that intelligent design is a scientific theory. Democratic governments, where power resides in the people, requires that the people be educated to the degree that they can make intelligent decisions and cast intelligent votes. It is the goal of the education system to give the people the education they need to fulfill this role. Science is going to play a significant role in that future – from medicine to agriculture to energy production to climate change. It would seem that crucial to that enterprise that, at the very least, future generations be taught how to recognize the difference between science and not-science.

The Unsupported Fundamental 'Ought'

Today’s posting takes off from my responses to a couple of that people have recently left to a couple of recent postings. They concern the fundamentals of the desire-utilitarian theory I use as a foundation for all of my writings.

When I speak or write about desire utilitarianism, a lot of readers make an assumption about what I am talking about that simply is not true. They assume that desire utilitarianism means, “Do that act that will fulfill the most desires.”

That is not desire utilitarianism as I defend it. That is a closely related theory that I call desire-fulfilling act utilitarianism. It is an act utilitarian theory in that it is focused on evaluating actions, and does so according to their consequences.

Desire utilitarianism is not an act-utilitarian theory. It does not primarily evaluate actions. It primarily evaluates desires. It evaluates actions only in a secondary or a derived sense. A ‘right act’ is that act that a person with good desires would perform. But we cannot know what a right act is until after we know what good desires are.

It is common, ever since Hume presented his ‘is/ought’ argument. Hume is typically understood to have said that we cannot derive ‘ought’ statements from ‘is’ statements. This meant that all moral arguments (all arguments that ended in an ‘ought’ conclusion) had to contain at least one fundamental ‘ought’ statement that could not be reduced to anything in the ‘is’ universe. These fundamental ‘ought’ entities are basic. They cannot be proved or disproved. We can really do little more than assert their existence.

I deny the existence of such entities. I deny Hume’s entire is/ought distinction. The universe is made up of only one kind of relationship – and that is ‘is’ relationships. ‘Ought’ relationships either must be reduced to a subset of ‘is’ relationships or ‘ought’ statements refer to something that does not exist. Either option is fine with me as it turns out. If a reader does not want to reduce ‘ought’ to an ‘is’ statement, we can eliminate ‘ought’ entirely, and I can still capture all of the parts of ‘ought’ in the ‘is’ universe of relationships between states of affairs and desires.

We can compare moral theories the same way that we compare scientific theories. One of the ways we can do so is by asking whether the theory requires any strange entities, or whether it can explain and predict a wide range of relevant moral facts.

In saying this, I am not speaking of moral facts of the form ‘abortion is permissible’ and ‘homosexuality is a sin’. I am speaking about the following types of moral facts:

(1) ‘Ought’ implies ‘can’ and ‘cannot’ implies ‘it is not the case that one ought.

(2) Actions fall into three moral categories; obligation, permission, and prohibition.

(3) The moral quality of an action does not depend on the reasons that the agent had for performing it.

(4) ‘Negligence’ is a type of moral wrongdoing.

(5) Moral judgment requires that the agent, in some sense or another, have some type of ‘free will’ in that an agent does not deserve praise or condemnation unless there is some possibility that the agent could have done otherwise.

(6) Intrinsic value properties (or true fundamental ‘ought’ properties) do not exist. Any moral argument that appeals to a fundamental ‘ought’ as a reason for action has is grounding morality on a fiction.

Desire utilitarianism handles moral facts like this without the difficulty that other theories have.

In my earlier post, I compared desire utilitarianism to Ayn Rand style Objectivism and to happiness theory. Ayn Rand Objectivism theory fails because it postulates entities that are as fictitious as God – an entity called ‘man qua man’ from which all value can be derived. First, there is no such thing as ‘man qua man’ other than the completely arbitrary decision to use the term ‘man’ to refer to beings with certain qualities. No normative statements follow from this. The fact that we have a term that refers to a set of qualities does not imply any type of normative or prescriptive force. If we were to use the term ‘reddles’ to refer to red marbles, this does not imply anything about any moral obligation to realize ‘reddles qua reddles’.

A theory that postulates desires, states of affairs in the real world, and relationships between them where a desire that P motivates an agent to realize any state of affairs in which P is true, has a distinct advantage over a theory that postulates strange entities such as ‘god’ or ‘am qua man’.

I reject happiness theory precisely because it fails to explain and predict real-world phenomena. Specifically, it fails to explain and predict why it is the case that when happiness is separated from truth, people tend to prefer truth over happiness. Happiness theory implies that under conditions C, where the agent must choose between happiness and truth, many (most) agents choose happiness.

Desire utilitarianism, as I argued, does not allow us to separate value from truth. A state of affairs has value only to the degree to which propositions that are the object of agent’s desires are true in that state of affairs. If those propositions are not true, then the state of affairs loses its value.

So, desire utilitarianism explains and predicts real-world events better than happiness theory. Desire utilitarianism, unlike Ayn Rand Objectivism, does not postulate strange entities such as ‘man qua man’. There is nothing in it that is not ordinary – ordinary desires, ordinary states of affairs, and ordinary relationships where a proposition that is an object of a desire is true within a state of affairs.

These are ordinary ways of criticizing theories. The fact that I am writing about ethics does not justify, nor does it require, a different kind of thinking when it comes to comparing one theory to another to determine which is best. A theory can be rejected for postulating entities that are as mysterious (or more mysterious) then they thing they are being used to explain. And a theory can be rejected because it makes explanations and predictions that simply fail to correspond to observation.

The idea that morality requires an unsupported foundational ‘ought’ that is distinct and separate from ‘is’ is so widely accepted that few people think to question it. The instant that somebody starts writing about a moral theory, the mind starts searching for the author’s unsupported foundational ‘ought’. Typically, the searcher then declares that “Your unsupported foundational ‘ought’ is just as unsupported and just as foundational as everybody else’s unsupported foundational ‘ought’”.

In fact, this objection has weight. All unsupported foundational ‘oughts’ are equally suspect. Actually, all unsupported foundational ‘oughts’ are alike in being nonsense.

We scarcely hear anybody say that there is no such thing as an unsupported foundational ‘ought’. Yet, why not?

The idea of an unsupported foundational ‘ought’ is, really, just a religious concept – a ‘god of the gaps’ for secular ethics (or for religious ethics, for those who say that the unsupported foundational ‘ought’ comes from God). It is distinct and separate from the world of ‘is’, yet can somehow interact with it. We can say nothing about its structure or composition. We know nothing more than that it exists (at least, this is what the advocates of an unsupported foundational ‘ought’ claims to know) and that it is the source of all value in the universe.

It doesn’t exist.

Desire utilitarianism does not have unsupported foundational ‘oughts’. It has desires (propositional attitudes written into the brain – attitudes that a particular proposition is to be made or kept true – that are encoded into the mental computer), states of affairs, and relationships whereby the propositions that are the objects of those desires are true or false in any given state of affairs.

That’s it.

There is not an unsupported foundational is-independent ‘ought’ to be seen.

Or heard.

Or felt.

Dealing with Disagreement

Once again we see evidence of two different cultures pursuing two different options with respect to how to handle conflicting view.

Culture 1, when it encounters somebody presenting an alternative idea, says, “Go ahead. Present your case. We will then explain why you are wrong.”

Culture 2, when it encounters somebody presenting an alternative idea, says, “We must silence this competing view before others hear of it.”

Part of the reason that Culture 2 has adopted this particular methodology is precisely because there is nothing that they can offer in the sense of a reason to reject the alternative idea. Culture 2 defends their positions by appeal to face. At best, they completely lack evidence for their view and, more often than not, the available evidence completely contradicts their view (as where the scientific data shows that the Earth is 4.5 billion years old).

Where people cannot offer reason in defense of their position, they can only offer force. So, their culture says to bring force (at least economic force) against any who would provide an outlet for this contrary view.

Earlier, I discussed this dynamic in the context of two movies; “The Chronicles of Narnia” and “The Golden Compass”. In the case of The Chronicles of Narnia, the members of Culture 1 said, “Present your view, and then we will present our criticism.” In the case of “The Golden Compass”, the members of Culture 2 said, “We must have a boycott. We must cause so much economic harm to any who would threaten to present an idea contrary to our own so as to make sure that nobody again will threaten to do such a thing. We must not allow these alternatives views to appear in public.”

Now, it is showing up in the case of billboard wars.

I do not recall ever hearing a demand that a theist billboard be removed. (An exception to this is where signs are put up at taxpayer expense, in which case the issue is not that of silencing a competing view, but that of being forced to pay for some church’s advertising.)

Yet, atheists either cannot get a billboard put up or, once up, it is immediately removed under the weight of protests from the members of Culture 2 – from the members of the culture that demands the silencing, rather than the considered rejection of, a contrary view.

One story along these lines concerns an attempt from the Freedom From Religion Foundation to pay for billboards that say, “Beware of Dogma”. CBS Outdoor Advertising in Grand Rapids simply refuses to accept their business, and offers as their reason the fact that Culture 2 will launch a vocal protest for the purpose of getting the signs removed. This, of course, is in keeping with Culture 2’s values of prohibiting the presentation of any view contrary to their own.

In the second story, as described in Hateful Response to ‘Imagine No Religion’, the Freedom From Religion Foundation put up a “Beware of Dogma” billboard in Chambersberg, PA. Shortly thereafter, the company from which FFRF had leased the sign, Kegerreis Outdoor Advertising, put up its own sign that said, “In God We Trust: The previous sign posted at this location does not reflect the values or morals of our company"!

At the same time, another group, “In God We Trust” answered the FFRF sign by putting up billboards of its own that say, “Why Do Atheists Hate America”.

Apparently, the second sign is in keeping with the morals of Kegerreis Outdoor Advertising. Apparently, their morals do not contain a provision against malicious hate-mongering.

At this point I need to clarify an issue. In an earlier posting called “Connecticut Valley Atheists: Imagine” , I protested against the use of a sign in Connecticut which the phrase, “Imagine No Religion” was used on a picture of the World Trade Center. In that case I protested that the sign was designed to manufacture hatred against theists by making the maliciously false claim that any and all religion is equally responsible for the 9/11 attacks. I said that maliciously false claims such as this are bigoted hate-mongering and, thus, not the type of sign that a person with good desires could endorse.

The FFRF sign, however, does not make the malicious attempt to link all religion to 9/11. The backdrop for its message is neutral – it shows the letters in an image that has the appearance of a stain-glass window. As such, it does not contain any maliciously false interpretations and, as such, it is not subject to the same criticism that I gave to the Connecticut sign last December.

However, the “Why Do Atheists Hate America” sign contains exactly the elements that I condemned the Connecticut sign for. Once again we have an example of malicious hate-mongering.

The organization that paid for the “Atheists Hate America” sign, ingodwetrustusa.org, tried to defend their actions by claiming that the sign really says, “Why do atheists act as if they hate America.” However, first, that is not what the sign says. If somebody were to ask, “Why is the sky blue?” this question is the same as saying, “The sky is blue. Why?” Similarly, if a person were to ask, “Why do atheists hate America,” this is the same as saying, “Atheists hate America. Why?” The organization is making a maliciously false claim about all atheists that atheists hate America, qualifying their statement as hate-mongering.

However, even if they were to put a sign up that says, “Why do atheists act like they hate America,” they are still making a maliciously false statement that every atheist acts like they hate America. They are making a bigoted assertion about all members of a group by attributing to all of them a trait that only some of them share. It is not the case that all atheists are responsible for the “Imagine No Religion” sign – only a subset of them are. However, ingodwetrustusa.org, in its lust to promote unreasoned and unfounded hatred of others, has decided not to worry about such minor issues as fairness and justice.

They also tried to defend their claims by saying that the FFRF sign made the same sort of statement. They asserted that "Imagine No Religion" has to imply, "Imagine No Christians." It does so in the same way that the American Cancer Society wants us to imagine a world without cancer victims. It does so in exactly the same way that Christians want us to imagine a world without Muslims, and Muslims want us to imagine a world without Christians. It is an end that is to be accomplished, not by force of arms, but simply by convincing people to give up false beliefs.

Of course, since these people are agents of hatred and bigotry, they much prefer to give a hate-mongering, bigoted interpretation of what was said.

In other words, it is still the case that malicious hate-mongering bigotry apparently does reflect the values and the morals of Kegerreis Outdoor Advertising – because they are not showing any signs of protesting this campaign.

In fact, we should take Kegerreis Outdoor Advertising and ingodwetrust.org at their word. Hate-mongering bigotry is, in fact, in keeping with the morals of both of these organizations. These are the values. When we are told how religion gives these people special access to moral truth and a special incentive to be moral, we can see this at work in their enthusiastic embrace of type of unjust, unfounded, hate-mongering bigotry depicted in these signs.

In fact, this is in keeping with the values of these organizations that, instead of allowing different people to express their views and explain what is wrong with them, they adopt a policy of silencing competing views and threatening those who express them.

That's the difference we see between Culture 1 and Culture 2

E2.0: Greg Epstein: Humanism - The Heart of Atheism

This is the 23rd 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 next speaker at the conference was Greg Epstein, Humanist Chaplain of Harvard University. Epstein used his time before the conference to support humanism and to claim that atheists needed to build a movement that was broader

Humanism a progressive life stance . . . that, without supernaturalism, affirms our ability and our responsibility to lead ethical lives of personal fulfillment aspiring to the greater good of humanity.

He started his presentation with a claim that science can build hospitals (by this, I think he means that science can provide the intellectual foundation that serves as the foundation of the practice of medicine), but that science will not visit you in the hospital. That is to say, science does not have any heart. Humanism, according to Epstein, is the ‘heart’ of atheism.

I agree with Epstein on this matter. Atheism (taken to mean the belief that the proposition ‘god exists’ is certainly or almost certainly false) implies no moral conclusion. It says nothing about what we ought or ought not to do.

Theism also implies no moral conclusion. You can take the proposition, ‘god exists’ and tie it to any moral claim imaginable. Perhaps God created homosexuality as a way to keep the population from growing too quickly and wants us to celebrate this option as one tool for keeping population growth in check. Only, the ‘religionists’ listened to the wrong people and have spent the last several thousand years teaching the wrong lesson.

Like I said, neither atheism nor theism gets us anywhere in terms of moral conclusions. It’s the stuff that we add to atheism or theism that yields these types of results. It’s the stuff we add to atheism or theism that the ethicist (such as myself) has reason to be concerned with.

Life is difficult, Epstein says, and atheism tells us nothing about how to deal with this difficulty. Humanism goes beyond atheism to provide ways of dealing with life – with the happiness and sorrows of living, in the real world.

In order to do this, according to Epstein

We need a movement that is a little more diverse. We need a movement that is a little more inclusive. And we need a movement that is a little more actively inspiring.

On the issue of diversity, Epstein has a simple way to illustrate his point. He simply invites the audience to look around the room at the various attendees where the descriptions ‘white’ and ‘male’ apply to almost every speaker. (Note: I must confess that I have always had difficulty categorizing people as ‘white’ or ‘nonwhite’ except where it is extremely obvious, and I prefer it that way. There are several speakers that I would not know how to classify in terms of diversity. So, in a sense, I am somewhat at a handicap when it comes to noting the degree to which Epstein may be correct or incorrect.)

Epstein also points out that the conference does not display a lot of cultural diversity. In this area, Epstein describes himself as a ‘humanistic Jew’ (a Jewish atheist) as a term that links culture with humanism. Richard Dawkins has described himself as a ‘cultural Christian’, which describes a cultural or ethic tie that goes outside of simply atheism. Recognizing these types of ties is not tribalism, but does recognize that different people have different cultural ties – ties in terms of heritage, race, and age.

For another example of cultural atheism Epstein brought up Nobel Prize winning economists Amartya Sen, a “proud Indian humanist”, who is very strongly connected to his Indian heritage.

He is very much through and through a humanist, but a humanist who sees life through the lens of . . . somebody who was born in India and feels very much connected to his Indian cultural roots.

Epstein also speaks of Confucian humanism; “thousands of years of poetry, of music, of art, of philosophy.” He speaks of novelist Salman Rushdie’s “Muslim humanism” – a person who is aware of his relationship to a group that, among other things, preserved the writings of the ancient Greek philosophers while the Europeans were going through the dark ages and losing their knowledge.

Epstein distinguishes his call for diversity – particularly diversity in the sense of allowing for a diverse set of cultural humanisms – from being inclusive. The people that Epstein wants to include in this wider group includes people who believe in some supernatural entities. He speaks about being accepting of and working with some theists.

In saying this, he stressed that he was not advocating an attitude that Epstein attributed to Dennett in terms of being ‘faith in faith heads’. The term refers to atheists who are happy that some people are theists – who see theism as a good thing and who are happy that some people have faith. Against this, Epstein speaks more in terms of ‘polite disagreement’. He points out that there is as much disagreement within a particular religion as there are between religions, yet people within a religion are still able to form some sort of a family. People with different religions should be able to do the same thing.

I think we can find the type of model of what Epstein is talking about in science. Scientists in a discipline can find themselves in disagreement over some fact within that field of study. Some can believe that the Tyrannosaurus Rex was primarily a scavenger, while others believe it was a hunter. Yet, these people still belong to the same family. Members in neither group are willing to claim that the other is right or even that it is a ‘good thing’ that some people have this alternative view of the T-Rex. They state that their opponents are wrong. Yet, they still share membership in the same group.

So, humanists can become members in a wider circle of people who are interested in dealing with the joys and sorrows of human existence – celebrating or dealing with marriages, births, deaths, friendships, relationships, sickness, natural disasters, relationships, dreams, and the like – who do not agree with us entirely on matters of God’s existence.

Of course, I want to add (though Epstein did not mention this fact) that there are others that we have little reason to welcome into such a family – people whose religion drives them to take actions that actually cause (or fail to prevent) the harms mentioned above either directly (through violence) or indirectly (blocking the scientific advances that can cure disease and prevent disasters).

A final ‘improvement’ that Epstein would like to introduce into atheism is expressed in his question, “What can we do in the future to sing and to build.” He reported that atheists do two things very well – spoken and debated. He wants to add to this some of the cultural elements that we find in religious groups; architecture (the building of cathedrals) and singing. These, of course, are merely examples of what is actually request for a more inspiring humanist culture.

On this issue, I think that humanists do quite well. We simply do not recognize it. The reason we do not recognize it is because we do not attach a humanist label to our creations. Much of the art and dance that we create these days have nothing to do with religion. Yet, they are still inspiring. I went to see Stomp the other day. It was an extremely impressive performance (as I knew it would be). It does not promote humanism. It does not wear any conspicuous humanist tags. Yet, it is, in a very real sense, a celebration of what humans can accomplish here, in the real world.

It has exactly the type of ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusion’ that Epstein spoke of in the first two parts of his presentation. We are able to draw a circle around the group that values such a performance that includes more than just humanists. We may disagree with their interpretation of their events, but we can still agree to its value.

There seems, then, to be some tension between Epstein’s three criteria for a better humanism. He wants it to be more diverse and more inclusive. Yet, in the area of ‘inspiration’ – in its architecture, art, and music – he seems to be calling for something that is a little less inclusive. He seems to be speaking about cultural elements that have a humanist focus, to the exclusion of other interpretations. Because, if he speaks about a more diverse and inclusive form of art, we already have that.

This might be a good idea to have a distinctly (and exclusively) humanist art. The idea is worth some thought. Yet, it would benefit us to know exactly what it is we are thinking (and talking) about in discussing this subject.

E2.0: Lee Silver: Religion Without God

This is the 22nd 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.

Lee Silver, Professor of Molecular Biology and Public Policy at Princeton University, addressed the Beyond Belief 2 conference largely to speak about a religion that has no God – at least not a God in the traditional sense of a person sitting on a throne passing judgment on others.

An idea that we get from listening to some atheists is that there are only two options – belief in a personal God and a devotion to reason and science. Of course, any atheist who thinks about this for more than a moment will realize that this is not the case. These just happen to be the two options that he has focused the greatest amount of his attention on. Yet, at times, he does slip, and he reacts to news around the world as if anybody who is not a Christian, Muslim, or Jew is fully committed to the tools of reason and science.

For example, I commonly hear atheists celebrating the relative atheism in Europe, as if Europe has discovered the light and is years or decades ahead of America in that regard. Yet, it is just as plausible to argue that Europe, instead of discovering the light, has discovered an alternative form of darkness. It is because of this that, in spite of their abandonment of the Christian religion and aversion to Muslim religion, they fail to actually take off as a society.

The religion that Silver spoke about is the religion of naturalism – the idea that whatever is natural is good.

One of the forms that this nature worship takes in Europe can be found in their devotion to homeopathic medicine. Homeopathy, according to Silver, relies on the idea that sickness in the body is caused by ‘negative spirits’ and that the road to health is to replace these forces with ‘positive spirits’. The doctrine does not mention a God. An individual can be an ‘atheist’ in the traditional sense and still accept homoeopathy. Yet, these people still base their decisions on false beliefs about entities that do not exist and values that are not real. Whenever people do this, they risk making poor decisions that do more real-world harm than real-world good.

This irrational nature worship has manifested itself in Europe in the form of a strong public opposition to the use of genetically modified foods. Just as religion in America has lead to opposition to stem cell research (a form of scientific advance that promises to significantly reduce death and suffering), Europeans are strongly opposed to the use of genetically modified crops.

The creation of genetically modified foods is another technology that promises to reduce death and suffering by providing us with more efficient ways to feed a growing world population. To shun the technology of genetically modified foods is as irrational as to shun the technology of stem cell research. It does not matter that the prohibition does not come from scripture. It still comes from a belief in things that do not exist – a worship of things that have no divine spirit.

I suspect that many readers can understand the position better when we start to talk about genetically modified children. The idea that a parent may be able to genetically modify a child – selecting traits – often leads to a strong preference for ‘natural’ children. These are children whose DNA is determined, not by the parents, but by the unguided laws of nature. Readers may sense a strong preference for the latter and an aversion to the former that motivates them to seriously consider laws against such actions.

Unfortunately, those laws would also prevent a parent from noting that a newly fertilized egg has cystic fibrosis and purposely choosing to have that strand of DNA altered so as to remove the disease.

Defending these types of positions requires claiming that there are some ‘reasons for action that exist’ that call for preferring ‘natural’ over ‘unnatural’ states of affairs. It seems to require that what is ‘natural’ has some sort of intrinsic value and it is something that people should like in spite of its relationship to desires is false. Preserving the environment for its own sake – as an endeavor that realizes something of intrinsic worth – is as much a waste as pursuing an end because it pleases God. There is no God to please, so any claim that an act is justified because its result pleases God is false. There is no intrinsic value in nature so to say that an act is justified because it preserves that which has intrinsic value in nature is false.

Silver does not speak about the value of nature in terms of ‘intrinsic value’. He speaks of it in terms of worshipping a goddess mother Earth. However, in terms of practical effects, there is no difference. Both views still have agents bypassing important scientific breakthroughs and scientific research on a subject that promises to be extremely useful for the sake of realizing ‘sacred’ values that do not exist. Both views involve appeals to reasons for action that do not exist.

Desire utilitarianism says that, insofar as we are interested in our moral obligations to the environment (or anything else for that matter), the only type of value that exists is in the form of relationships between states of affairs and good desires (desires that tend to fulfill other desires). This means that the only value that a state of affairs in nature has is in terms of its relationship to good desires.

We can make an argument that a desire for that which is natural is a good desire, and an insufficiently strong aversion to ‘playing God’ is a bad desire, in virtue of the desire-thwarting possibilities. That is to say, if these technologies get out of control, the consequences could be disastrous (and tremendously desire-thwarting). In order to avoid potential disasters we have good reason to promote an aversion to these types of activities. It is often called ‘playing God’, but it is in fact playing with technologies that have the potential to produce disastrous consequences.

In these cases, we still have to ask about the nature of these disastrous effects. Are they real desire-thwarting effects? Or do they consist in the widespread destruction of ‘intrinsic values’ that do not exist anyway? If the latter, we can ignore them, the concerns raised are not real.

We may have a certain natural affinity for certain types of environmental states. In just the same way that we do not want the air to be too warm or too cold, we do not want to be bothered by obnoxious smells, and we do not want to be bothered by obnoxious noises all the time, we may have evolved a natural desire to find value in certain environments. These may well be environments that are like those that our ancestors found to be easy to live in. In this case, there may be a natural desire to preserve certain environments, and these desires give us a reason for action.

However, this does not give the natural environment any type of sacred value. It has value in the same way that a comfortable room or a quiet place to sleep has value. It has the same value of a good tasting steak or a good looking picture.

As it turns out, I can give an argument for promoting a certain type of value in nature – an argument for a certain type of environmentalism. It rests on the fact that nature, tens of millions of years, has given us an environment in which humans could survive, even where humans were too stupid to take much responsibility for their own survival. So, to the degree that we have an interest in surviving as a species, to that degree we have reason to preserve an environment that even our primitive ancestors could have lived in. We have reason to argue for using caution when we make changes – particularly when we make global changes such as destroying the ozone layer or filling the atmosphere with extra carbon dioxide and methane.

This does not argue for a blind worship of nature, any more than an IT department’s decision to proceed cautiously with a server upgrade argues for a blind worship of the existing computer network. It is simply a call for practical restraint – let’s make sure that we are not going to do anything significantly harmful before we do it.

In many cases, the ‘reasons for action’ that people give for standing in the way of actions that are called ‘playing God’ are reference to ‘reasons for action’ that simply do not exist. Nature has no intrinsic merit. The only value to be found in any state of affairs – including any state of affairs in nature – is determined by that state’s capacity to fulfill good desires. These include desires for food, clothing, and shelter as well as health. If the value of a state of affairs in nature cannot be expressed in these terms, then the values that people are speaking about are as imaginary as those of any religion.

Sectarian Harrassment and Support

I encountered a depressing story this morning of two families in Delaware who challenged the Indian River School District’s practice of promoting Christianity in its public schools (Prayer Suit Settled Little for Families). The Indian River School District’s staff members would lead explicitly Christian prayers at school functions, leading to a pro-Christian anti-Semitic attitude that resulted in the harassment of Jewish children. Parents of two of the children filed a lawsuit. After 3 years of harassment, one of them has decided that this type of activism just isn’t worth it, regrets having done it, and would never do the same thing again.

It was similar to a story reported on Atheist Revolution in “Complaining about God in School Can Have Dire Consequences”

The most depressing part of this story is the recognition that there is no support structure for people like this. We are all well aware that those who challenge theocratic practices such as this can pay a heavy cost. Yet, as far as I know, there are no agencies or institutions set up to collect contributions that will then go to helping support people in this type of position.

That support could take several forms.

(1) Providing the individuals with people that they can talk to and provide moral support

(2) Providing assistance that would help to avoid the harassment such as an alternative cell phone

(3) Helping the victims avoid public exposure by providing people who could do yard work or go on errands for the family.

(4) Providing the family with a greater sense of security by providing them with somebody who can accompany them when they go out in public.

(5) Providing moving expenses and people who can help move if the harassment drives the family to making that type of choice.

(6) Organizing a public information campaign that condemns any community that condones this type of harassment, and condemns civic and religious leaders who do not take a stand against it.

These people are actually doing the community a service. They are helping to protect and promote important values. There is some obligation to regard them the same way that we would regard a soldier who has gone off to war. They deserve our honor and respect. We show them this honor and respect by showing that we are willing to endure part of the burden that they have accepted.

What makes these practitioners of harassment particularly despicable is their willingness to target children. What these people want is to use the public school system as a tool for promoting their own church – their own religion – by using it as an opportunity to preach to (brainwash) an audience that is not only captive but vulnerable.

When people protest, these practitioners victimize children another way. For all practical purposes, they hold the children of any who would protest hostage, and proclaim as loudly as possible, “One false move out of you and we will make sure that your children suffer.”

It is a very effective technique.

It is the embodiment of evil, but it is also effective.

That’s one of the messages that needs to be made clear in this type of situation, and the message that I have in mind in the sixth item on the list above. It involves using the incident to point out that the local community has evolved a culture that condones the exploitation and abuse of children in order to obtain their religious objectives. They exploit access to children in the public school system for their own objectives, and then they promote not only the abuse of children who do not conform to their program, but the abuse of the children of any who would protest this exploitation.

This is the moral culture that the community has adopted, but it is not a culture that any community has a right to be proud of. It is a culture that shows that the moral leaders in that community – the preachers and political leaders – are themselves morally bankrupt. Yet, they insist on exploiting the school system to pass this lesson in immorality (exploitation and abuse) on to the next generation.

I want to stress that I think the habit of debating these issues in terms of ‘separation of church and state’ should be put aside. This is, of course, the proper role for the lawyers to take when arguing the case in court. However, it is not the role that people should adopt in debating the issue in public. The public debate should not only explain that there is a separation of church and state, but also that there should be a separation of church and state in the sense that where it is violated we tend to find a culture of exploitation, intimidation, and abuse.

In these types of cases, the two often go hand in hand.

In too many places across the country, they are successful. In too many places around the country today we do have children learning the moral lessons of exploitation, intimidation, and abuse from the moral leaders in that community – through the public school system. This is the lesson that those schools are teaching. It is a lesson that they will continue to teach unless and until somebody stands up to put an end to it.

Yet, we have so far left those who would dare to stand up against this culture of exploitation, intimidation, and abuse to fend for themselves. The ACLU may provide legal support, but where does the family go for moral support? Where do they go when they become the actual targets of the very culture of exploitation, intimidation, and abuse that they have decided to challenge?

So, this posting is a challenge to those who are involved in fighting the culture of exploitation, intimidation, and abuse to find ways of supporting its soldiers in the field – the people who are on the front lines and in the court room. It is a bit unfair, I think, to expect them to go into battle alone, with us in the background, collecting the benefits of their actions, but not willing to share the burden.

Atheist Proselytizing

I have seen a few posts about the atheist blogosphere concerning atheist proselytizing. “What should our goals be?” people are asking.

It’s a question that I asked in creating this blog. It is a question that I ask when I decide what to write each day. “What are my goals? What post could I create today that would best further those goals?”

My answer: Atheist proselytizing should focus on those things that make the world a better place than it would have otherwise been.

For example, a couple of days ago I wrote a post about the Copenhagen Consensus, which argued that the most cost-effective way to make the world a better place is to fight the spread of AIDS. (Or, at least it was 4 years ago; we will see what the 2008 conference says). One of the ways to prevent the spread of AIDS is by promoting the use of condoms. Simple, cost effective, having massive positive benefits – and also a number of positive side effects. It also prevents unwanted pregnancies, reduces population growth, and prevents the spread of other sexually transmitted diseases.

However, the Catholic Church and other religious organizations are against this. They campaign against it. They do so based on myth and superstition.

This, then, is one of a multitude of examples in which superstition kills people and destroys lives. It is one of a multitude of instances in which it is possible to say, “Because people grasp onto these absurd ideas, we have more death and suffering in the world than there would otherwise be. To avoid death and suffering, we have reason to promote an aversion to the adoption of these absurd beliefs.”

As the head of a group of atheist proselytizers, I would create a subgroup within the organization dedicated specifically to the prevention of AIDS. It would be a group that collected money for the purpose of buying condoms and shipping them to countries where the HIV/AIDS epidemic is at its worst. Atheist proselytizers would go from village to village giving out scientifically vetted information on AIDS, promoting the use of condoms, and spreading the word that the agents of myth and superstition who argue against this practice are also the agents of death and suffering.

That’s the form that I think atheist proselytizing should take.

I would also form a group dedicated to opposing creationism. It would oppose not only the teaching of creationism as science in American classrooms, it would oppose creationism itself. It would not attempt to make the case that evolution is compatible with religion. It would not make the case in terms of separation of church and state. It would make the case that science saves lives, and anti-science puts lives at risk.

The most popular posting that I have written to date – still drawing 10% to 15% of the traffic to this blog 7 months after I first posted it, is “Ben Stein’s ‘Expelled’”. It is a critique of the movie grounded entirely on the principle of harm done. We can save lives to the degree that we can explain and predict the universe around us. The best method for doing this is science – which continually produces amazing predictions that no religious prophets could ever be able to match. “Intelligent design” is anti-science that simply does not produce the types of predictions that are required of a scientific theory. It’s failure to produce predictions translates directly into a failure to preserve and protect lives.

One of the harmful effects of the Intelligent Design dogma is that it will seduce children away from studying or even understanding science (that is to say, studying or even understanding how to save and preserve lives in a universe of natural laws) and into worthless and ineffective superstitions.

I would also set up a group for opposing ‘under God’ in the Pledge of Allegiance and a national motto of ‘In God We Trust’. Both of these movements aim to teach children that it is better to be ‘under God’ or to be somebody who trusts in God than it is to be an atheist. It denigrates atheism as a matter of national policy, even though atheists are by far disproportionately responsible for the scientific discoveries in this country and save more lives and prevent more destruction than religion. With these actions, the government is telling children not to become the types of people who produce more good for their fellow humans in outcomes such as medical breakthroughs, protection from natural disasters, food production, and energy production and efficiency, than any other group in the country.

That is how I would proselytize atheism.

In saying this, we must note that atheists are not immune from unreasoned dogma. Religion is not the only place where one can go to find doctrines that promote death and human suffering.

Europe, though being more ‘atheist’ than America, also suffers from the influence of atheist dogmas that are as anti-science as any religion. The list of popular philosophies in Europe include post-modernism and cultural relativism, both of which condemn the idea that we can have actual knowledge of the real world. These dogmas have been as effective at holding the European culture back scientifically and economically as creationism has been in America. Focusing on religious dogmas and their harmful effects is just a part of the problem.

In fact, the philosophies of post-modernism and cultural relativism point to an important case of atheist scapegoating. Many ‘new atheists’ have accused religious moderates of shielding religious extremists by preventing criticism against the harshest forms of their religion. However, they did not mention the fact that these non-religious philosophies are an even greater obstacle to criticizing fundamentalist religions. It’s from these philosophies, not from religious moderates, that we get the idea that no culture may criticize another. Religious moderates, in contrast, still held to the possibility of moral and objective truths.

We see how atheists can be attracted to pleasant-sounding but useful fictions with as much zealousness as a religious devotee in Objectivism, in the thesis that ‘atheist’ means ‘the absence of a belief in God’, and in the happiness cult. All three of these dogmas have clear problems, yet people latch onto them with little regard for the rational arguments against them.

Objectivism even has its own mythical entities – this thing called ‘man qua man’ that is a rational animal that tells us that reason is the defining characteristic of man. It makes unwarranted leaps from ‘is’ premises (man is a rational animal) to ‘ought’ conclusions (man ought to always promote reason above all else). It confuses the distinction between ‘means’ and ‘ends’ (e.g., life is the near-universal means to the fulfillment of other desires; therefore, it is the universal end). Yet, it attracts a group of atheist followers like any other cult.

The ‘meaning of atheism’ issue is a small affair, yet it illustrates how an atheist can latch onto an idea that just a moment’s reflection will expose to be false – merely because the idea serves a political purpose. The claim is that ‘atheism’ means ‘the lack of a belief in God’ – and because of this we can dismiss the claim that atheism is a religion and atheists actually believe something. However, it does this by introducing a definition of ‘atheism’ that has nothing at all to do with how competent English speakers use the term. ‘Atheism’, as the word is used by competent English speakers, means, “A person who believes that the proposition ‘God exists’ is certainly or almost certainly false. It involves an actual belief that is in need of support. Atheists need to accept this fact and deal with it appropriately.

Indeed, there are some strange implications in talking about ‘atheist proselytizing’ in a context in which an atheist is somebody who has no belief in God. It says that atheist proselytizing can be successful by killing a person (since a dead person has no belief in a God) or by inflicting sufficient head trauma that a person can no longer hold a proposition ‘God exists’. Whereas ‘atheist proselytizing’ in a context where an atheist believes that the proposition ‘God exists’ is almost certainly or certainly false requires a bit more work.

The Cult of Happiness holds that happiness is the sole value. This is proved false by the fact that when happiness is divorced from truth, then happiness loses its luster. Induce happiness by taking the brain of a person in a state of happiness and put it in a jar where it relives its last state of happiness over and over again, or put a person in an experience machine that feeds the agent false beliefs that induce happiness, or find an way of stimulating the brain with an electrode in a way that produces happiness, and then inquire as to the value of this state.

Desire fulfillment, on the other hand, cannot be divorced from truth. Desires are propositional attitudes (attitudes that particular propositions are to be made or kept true). A desire is fulfilled if and only if a state of affairs exists in which the proposition that is the object of a desire is true. Desire fulfillment theory accounts for the essential connection between value and truth. Happiness theory ignores it. Yet, the cult of happiness still dominates atheist conversations about value.

So, let us not think that in ‘atheist proselytizing’ begins and ends with promoting the belief that the proposition ‘God exists’ is very nearly or certainly false. The proposition ‘God exists’ is only one of a number of propositions that people can hold without good reason, and many of them have nothing to do with religion.

Progress Report on Persective on the Pledge

I have been putting my efforts recently in completing a short book version of Perspective on the Pledge. I have a draft version of the whole book ready, at Perspective on the Pledge.

If anybody wants to read a copy and send me back a list of corrections, I would appreciate it.

The book now contains a new argument against, "In God We Trust", which I have cut and pasted below.

But there is another important component of a motto that this version would not capture, and it is a component that sorely needs to be mentioned. Mottos are not merely descriptive. They are prescriptive. They do not tell you want the members of the group are. They tell you what the members of the group should be.

The Marine motto, ‘Semper Fidelis’ (or its spoken counterpart ‘Semper Fi’) is not just a description of what marines are. It is a statement of what a marine should be – what all should strive to be. Any marine that does not live up to the motto – any marine that is not faithful to his comrades in arms – is looked upon as a disgrace, as something unworthy of the name ‘Marine’.

The same is true of the Boy Scout motto, ‘Be Prepared’. Nobody thinks that all Boy Scouts actually are prepared at all times. This is an ideal to be strived for, even if it is never obtained. Boy scouts who are not prepared fall short of this ideal. They are the types of scouts that, according to this motto, should feel shame at their shortcomings, and that they should strive to correct in the future.

So, when the United States adopts as its motto, ‘In God We Trust’ they are fully aware of the fact that not all of us trust in God. However, the government is telling its people that it is the official government position that an American who does not trust in God is like a Marine who is not faithful, or a boy scout who is not prepared. He is somebody who falls short of the ideal, something that is actually unworthy of being in the group that uses the motto the name ‘American’. In the case of ‘In God We Trust’ we are being told that those who do not trust God are not worthy of being Americans – and that this is the government’s official position.

This, of course, is something that the government has no right to say.

This is not only false. It is malicious hate-mongering. Adopting this national motto does nothing less than adopt the position that the first and most important quality that an American has is that of a bigot eager to ignore and to violate the principles of justice and equality before the law. The government has absolutely no right, and absolutely no just cause, to adopt the official position that a person who does not trust in God simply fails to live up to the standards of being a good Amerycan.

Then, the proponents of such a law say that it has passed into the realm of ‘ceremonial deism’ which has lost its religious meaning. As I illustrate in the story, this is proved false by the vocal reaction that people have to removing this phrase. That motivation is a lie – another falsehood as blatant as claiming that 2. + 2 = 5.

Furthermore, I would dare any person who states that the Pledge or motto has lost its meaning due to use to stand before a Marine and state that because this motto is so widely used and referred to in Marine culture, that ‘Semper Fidelis’ to a Marine is now nothing more than ceremonia, void of any normative strength at all.

George Carlin on the Absence of Rights

George Carlin has a new comedy routine. It has recently appeared on HBO and is quite popular among the atheist blogsphere because of Carlin's explicit atheism. In this particular program, Carlin also took a swipe at the existence of rights.

Carlin is no philosopher, and to examine his work is not the same as examining a philosophical argument in defense of a position. Unfortunately, the pop philosophy of somebody like Carlin will reach more people and have more of an impact than anything having to do with a reasoned defense of a proposition.

If a comedien is going to defend a particular proposition, it would be better if they would defend a proposition that is true, and ridicule those who hold it to be false. When a commedien defends a proposition that is false, and ridicules those who believe it is true, it is counter-productive.

We know this. When Carlin says that no God exists, and ridicules those who believe in a God, we consider this to be a good thing.

I doubt that a commedien can convince somebody of a new proposition, but it probably does have the effect of reinforcing a proposition that a person already holds. It gives that attitude positive reinforcement, and positive reinforcement of a belief, though it is not a 'reason' for holding a belief, still has an effect.

So, while Carlin is reinforcing the attitude that no rights exist in an activity that does nothing in the sense of providing reasons, it may be worthwhile to offer some reasons on the other side of the scale.

Carlin's first question is, "Where do they come from?" He dismisses the God option (rights come from God) easily enough. "The God excuse - the last refuge of a man with no answers and no argument."

When I speak about rights, I certainly do not speak about anything that comes from God.

I hold that all forms of value exist as relationships between states of affairs and desires. Moral values concern relationships between malleable desires and other desires, and focus on questions of what malleable desires we have reason to promote or to inhibit. "Rights" fit into this account as states of affairs that we have reason to promote a desire for or an aversion to.

To say that there is a right to freedom of the press, on this account, is to say that it would be a good idea for us to promote an overall aversion to responding to words or other ways of conveying ideas with violence. We may, of course, respond with criticism and even condemnation, but not with violence.

Similarly, the right to a trial by jury on this account states that we have reason to promote an aversion to certain types of kangaroo justice - that we have reason to be averse to doing harm to a person unless that person has been proved to be deserving of harm in an arena where he has been allowed to defend himself and confront the evidence against him, and where the evidence is heard by a body that has no personal stake in the outcome (the 'jury').

These rights, I would argue, certainly do exist. These 'states of affairs to which there are many and strong reasons to argue for a desire or aversion' exist. They do not come from God. They are simply descriptive facts about how particular desires relate to each other.

The types of rights that Carlin says we made up are the rights that are found in documents - such as the Constitution of the United States. He notes that different governments around the world enumerate different rights. The fact that different cultures enumerate different rights is supposed to be evidence that they are simply made up.

Yet, if the account of rights that I use is true, their enumeration in any document is irrelevant. The question, concerning the existence of any right, is whether or not it is true (or false) that people generally have reason to promote any particular desire. A right to life exists regardless of whether it is enumerated in a Constitution, so long as people generally have reason to promote an overall aversion to killing.

In fact, this is how rights are spoken of in the various documents that Carlin referred to. The right to freedom of speech in the First Amendment, for example, is not something that did not exist until the First Amendment was ratified. Rather, it existed before the First Amendment was passed. The Amendment is nothing more than a limitation on the government from abridging a right that already exists.

Similarly, the 4th Amendment did not invent a right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures. It is a prohibition on the government from violating a right that already exists.

Different people in different countries do not have different numbers of different rights. Instead, there are different theories describing states to which people generally should have desires or aversions, and there are different enumerations of those things to which people should have desires or aversions.

Another argument that Carlin uses to argue that rights exist is to say that rights cannot be taken away. He uses the fact that Japanese Americans were interred during World War II.

In 1942 there were 110,000 Japanese American citizens in good standing; law abiding people who were thrown into internment camps simply because their parents were born in the wrong country. . . . They had no right to a lawyer, no right to a fair trial, no right to a jury of their piers, no right to due process of any kind.

In fact, they did have a right to a lawyer and a right to a trial. These rights were violated. In fact, the very claim that the actions taken against them were wrong is the claim that their rights were violated.

If, indeed, a person has no right to a lawyer and no right to due process, then it would be false to claim that those who denied them a lawyer or due process did anything wrong. We would have no reason to apologize to the Japanese Americans about the way we treated them if it were true that they had no rights. It is precisely because they had rights that the U.S. Government ignored that we classify the act as 'wrong', 'immoral', or 'unjust'.

Nobody who seriously defends the concept of a right claims that a right is something that cannot be violated. In fact, they would claim that it is nonsense to speak of a right as a thing that cannot be violated. The violation of a right is not proof that the right does not exist. Instead, it is the fact that a violation of a right is a moral wrong - a contemptible act - is evidence that a right exists even when it is being violated.

So, Carlin's argument here is a straw man. The absurdity he is arguing against is more 'made up' than the rights that he claims to be talking about.

Coppenhagen Consensus

What is the best way to solve the world’s problems?

In a presentation given at TED called, “Our priorities for saving the world,” Bjorn Lomberg, a Danish political scientist, made a number of very interesting points and drew a number of interesting conclusions on this subject.

First, he said, if you want to know the best option to take among a number of competing options, you do not ask a physician or a climatologist or any sort of scientist. Scientists are great at providing information within their field, but are not particularly adept at handling information outside of their field. As such, they are not the most highly trained experts in comparing – say – the value of fighting AIDS in Africa vs. the value of preventing climate change.

Instead, the best people to ask when one wants to know, “How do I get the best bang for my buck – the best output per unit of input?” are economists.

This makes sense.

Second, he said, these economists are not going to investigate problems, they are going to investigate solutions. The real question that we need to answer is not, “What is going to do the most harm in the next few years,” but “Of all the actions available to us, which has the potential to prevent the greatest harm (or to provide the greatest benefit).”

This also makes sense.

So, Lomberg called a group of the world’s leading economists to a conference called The Copenhagen Consensus to discuss a number of proposed solutions and to pick those that had the greatest potential – those most worthy of our attention.

The original conference was in 2004, so some of its recommendations are outdated. In addition, the 2004 panel had only eight economists involved. A new conference is being planned for May, 2008 where 55 economists will be involved - including 4 Nobel Prize winners. I have always been a fan of trusting the experts. I think that the chance that a person sitting at his laptop and writing a blog can do a good job of determining the world’s priorities is pretty low. The best thing that a person sitting at his laptop writing a blog can do is point readers to experts who are using reliable peer-reviewed methods to get things done.

Yet, this doesn’t mean that somebody who has studied social and political philosophy might not have some input into the moral value of some of these projects – independent of their economic value.

For example, the panel decided that the best option to pursue was to combat the spread of HIV/AIDS.

The panel assigned the highest priority to new measures to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS. Spending assigned to this purpose would yield extraordinarily high benefits, averting nearly 30m new infections by 2010. Costs are substantial, estimated at $27 billion. Even so, these costs are small in relation to what stands to be gained. Moreover, the scale and urgency of the problem—especially in Africa, where AIDS threatens the collapse of entire societies—are extreme.

This was back in 2004.

Unfortunately, this analysis seems to have overlooked a significant cost to any program that aims to reduce the incidence of a sexually transmitted disease – and that is the cost of overcoming primitive superstitious beliefs about sex, particularly those that are held by the world’s major religions.

For example, one of the most cost-effective ways of combating HIV/AIDS according to the study is through increased use of condoms. However, we have religious groups that are violently opposed to pursuing this policy because it violates a superstitious belief that sex without a condom has sacred value. Getting a program adopted which promotes this option will require some cost in battling this primitive superstition.

An accurate assessment of the costs of any program must include the costs of getting it adopted. Assume that we had two options before us – a $10 billion dollar option that will produce an estimated $500 billion in benefits, and a $10 billion dollar option that will produce an estimated $400 billion in benefits. The first option produces $50 in return for each dollar invested. The second produces only $40. If we had only $10 billion to spend, we should spend it on the first option.

However, let us now add the fact that the first option will then spark religious protests. Religious pundits will denounce the program and start their own campaign to defeat it. Countering these religious claims will require an education campaign that will cost another $10 billion. Now, the first option produces only $25 in return for each dollar invested, and the second option (which has no religious opposition) still produces $40.

To be fair, opposition does not need to come from religion. It could come from political ideologies as well. For example, one of the other methods of reducing the incidents of HIV/AIDS is to promote a reduction in the number of sexual partners. Promoting ‘family values’ where the adult partners are faithful to each other and condemning those who ‘sleep around’ are ways of encouraging people to select lifestyles involving fewer sexual partners. However, many people who do not draw their sexual values from any religious principles hold that we should not negatively judge those who seek multiple sexual partners.

To a degree that a malleable desire tends to fulfill other desires, we have reason to promote it. And to the degree that a malleable desire tends to thwart other desires, we have reason to use social forces to inhibit the formation of that desire. People who have an aversion to ‘cheating’ in their partners have a desire that will tend to keep their partners safe from sexually transmitted diseases such as HIV/AIDS. People who have no aversion to having sex with people other than their primary partner have a set of desires that creates desire-thwarting risk. Those who create risks for others are not good people. Those who risk the lives of others are worse.

The idea that sexual attitudes are morally neutral – that having fewer sexual partners is not a virtue and that having more sexual partners is not a vice – is as dangerous and false as the idea that sex without a condom is sacred and sex without a condom violates some natural moral law.

This is an illustration of the claim I have made earlier that religion is not the root of all evil – false beliefs are. And whereas religion is filled with false beliefs, there are false beliefs as well that fall outside of the realm of religion that can do just as much harm.

There is a distinction between arguing that a certain form of behavior is morally bad and arguing that it should be made illegal. The instrument of the state is a heavy and awkward instrument to wield and has a number of unavoidable side effects. In some instances, using the law to enforce moral principles may be like wearing boxing gloves when doing brain surgery. Whereas no act should be made criminal unless those who engage in it are also guilty of doing something immoral, not every immoral act should be made criminal.

In addition, particularly when it comes to sex, we must pay close attention to the issue of malleable desires. Each of us has a family tree – parents, grandparents, great grandparents – that goes back hundreds of millions of years and through hundreds of millions of generations to the point where sex became required for procreation. None of us can say very much about every individual in that family tree. Yet, there is one thing we can say – none of them died a virgin. Evolution almost certainly worked to fix a desire for sex as a basic fundamental human desire. Even where sexual desire is malleable, the ways and degrees to which sexual desires may be molded may be quite rigid.

The best way to get at answers to these types of questions is through more scientific research into the nature of sexual desire, the effects of certain types of social activities on molding sexual desire, and the costs as well as the side-effects of those social activities. This is not an area where armchair psychologists can be expected to provide sound conclusions as well as rigid scientific research.

It is also not an area where it is at all reasonable to believe that substantially ignorant tribesmen living 2000 years ago without the benefit of any form of science at all ‘got it right’ as it were. This is definitely an area where my previous analogy comparing the use of scripture as a guide to ultimate moral truth, to the use of the works of Hippocrates as the guide to ultimate medical truth, applies.

The most important point of similarity between these two examples are that those who use the Bible as the ultimate source of moral truth, like those who would use Hippocrates as the ultimate source of medical truth, would reach conclusions that will do a great deal of harm to a great many people. They would be the bringers of death and suffering on an massive scale. They are people who those who wish to solve the world’s problems and prevent death and suffering have good reason to condemn in very harsh terms.

E2.0: Scott Atran: The Causes of Terrorism

This is the 21st 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.

Scott Atran begins with a very provocative comment.

My interest here is to give you a reality check about what terrorism is about. So far I’ve heard mostly ignorance and nonsense. You guys have no idea what terrorism is about.

I would like to begin by saying that my interest here is not to determine what terrorism is about. My interest is in true beliefs and good desires. Yet, it is the case that if religion is the cause of things that tend to thwart desires, and we have reason to promote an aversion to things insofar as the aversion will tend to prevent the thwarting of desires, then we have reason to promote an aversion to religion.

On this matter, Atran says:

I think that religion is basically a neutral vessel. It has done everything you can imagine, and its contrary. And there is nothing intrinsic about religion, for the good or the bad.

This sounds like something I have said. I have argued that the proposition ‘God exists’ is morally neutral. It does not tell you anything about what to do or what not to do. Those implications come from the things that people add to religion. The things that people add to religion are the things that evolved creatures invented and put there for whatever purposes they have for doing so. If religion did not exist to hold the things we put there, nothing prevents these evolved creatures from putting those same elements in something else, a philosophy that does not have a God, such as communism or the type of corporate feudalism that sprang from Objectivism. Post modernism and subjectivism promise to give free reign to our darker nature with philosophies that are as antithetical to science and reason as any religion.

I often read of many atheists celebrating the atheism of Europe. They do not even ask what form this atheism takes, or how wide spread the different sects of atheism may be. One of the dominant atheist philosophies in Europe is post-modernism, a philosophy that denies science and that says that all moral codes (including the most radical and extreme religious codes) are equal.

We condemn the ‘religious moderate’ for giving sanction to fundamentalist religion. We should condemn the atheist post-modernist as well. However, like all good politicians, when fellow atheists make a contribution to evil we ignore their contribution, and focus only on the flaws that we can find in the other party.

The rest of the presentation looks at terrorism itself and explains its causes and its scope. This is one presentation that is well worth listening to. Atran draws his information from a serious scientific study of terrorists, collecting data from literally tens of thousands of would-be terrorists and their supporters. His is not the idle speculating of the arm-chair philosopher or blog writer. His claims are supported by empirical evidence.

According to Atran, that evidence supports the following conclusion:

We have this idea of a terrorist organization that goes out and looks for recruits. It hires people who look like they might be worthy prospects for engaging in a suicide attack. They are hired, trained, sent out as operatives to pull some job. The next thing we know there are trains or busses or buildings blown up and bodies all over the place.

That’s not the model that Atran gives us.

Atran tells us of a group of people from 18 to 30 who have formed a social unit – a group of ‘friends’ who hang out together the way that young adult males everywhere tend to do. He says that the biggest predictor that one is going to become a member of one of these groups is not mosque membership or religious training or the work of Madrassas in Pakistan, but whether one is a ‘soccer buddy’ to another would-be terrorist. So, a group of young adults get together, they become soccer buddies, then one of the soccer buddies decides that they want to do something violent, and he brings the rest of the group along.

This self-made terrorist cell, then, goes looking for Al-Queida (usually on the internet, according to Atran).

What is their motivation?

Atran describes two sources of motivation. One of them is Al-Jazeera news network.

Commenting about the neighborhood where the Madrid bombers came from, Atran said,

There are two cafes here. One . . . that belongs to the Madrid club. One that belongs to the Barsa club. Al-Jazeera is on all the time, and the kids sit there and the brothers sit there and they comment on the News. I don’t know how many of you have watched Al-Jazeera. You get 15 minutes of Iraq with people running through the streets with their kid’s brains falling out. You get 10 minutes of Palestine which isn’t as bad but its pretty gruesome. And you get 1 minute for the rest of the world. . . . [P]eople watch this and, let me tell you, you would want to join the Jihad. They say, ‘How can they do that? How can people let these people kill children like this?’ We’ve got to do something.

Anyway, the motivation behind these terrorist attacks is moral outrage – it is Americans killing Iraqi children and Israeli killing Palestinian children and a desire to strike back. The most significant source of this moral outrage is the American activity in Iraq – reported on Al-Jazeera, as mentioned above.

Atran adds that religious education is a negative indicator of terrorism. The people who form these terrorist cliques are people whose understanding of Islam is fairly basic. Consequently, one of the points that Atran makes is that you do not fight terrorism by studying the Koran and going after religious fundamentalism – the teachings of the Mosque or the Madrassa. You fight terrorism by not killing Muslim children, but instead involving and including those children in social groups that teach positive values independent of whether or not those children continue to visit a Mosque or study the Koran.

Another statistic that Atran said was relevant to fighting terrorism had to do with the fact that in America, the Muslim population has ‘bought into the American dream’ and their economic standing matches that of the general population. Per capita, Muslims are underrepresented in the prison population in this country. In Europe, on the other hand, Muslims make up an impoverished minority. As such, they make up 60% or more of the prison population in European nations. If Europe could learn to incorporate Muslims into the general population, than, according to Atran’s arguments, Europe would have less to worry about with respect to Muslim terrorism.

This is just a small portion of the interesting findings that come from Atran’s presentation. As I said, it is one of the presentations that a reader is well advised to take a look at. His information is extremely useful in understanding current world events and world policy, and contains a set of ideas that are very much worth spreading.