Gasoline Prices

According to an article on MSNBC Online, the most important issue on America’s mind this election (at least at the moment) is high gasoline prices. People want the government to do something to lower the price of gasoline. And candidates are responding with plans to lower prices – mostly by lowering or suspending the government’s tax on gasoline during the summer.

The problem with this scheme is that, if the government eliminates the tax, then demand will increase. Increased demand (without an increase in supply) means that the price will go up to where demand equals supply – which is about where the price is today. Meaning, the result of this move is that the money that would otherwise go to the government, will go to the oil companies instead.

Ultimately, however, the moral problem here is that the actual cost of gasoline is much higher than people seem willing to pay. Those who argue for gas prices to be lower are advocates of a system that tax the poor and tax future generations - making them worse off - so that they can drive their vehicles. The people who are forced to suffer the costs are those who do not have a political voice. They are starving in another country where they cannot afford food, or they are members of a future generation too young to vote or not yet born.

Fossil fuel consumption is the leading contributor to global warming. Global warming is a subsidy – a 'wealth transfer scheme' - that transfers wealth away from those who will suffer its ill effects (future generations) to those who are causing the problem. Future generations will pay that cost in terms of the destruction of coastal properties, higher death rates due to extreme weather, disease, and and heat-related deaths, loss of property, and even the destruction of whole (low-lying) countries. If we were to pay for the gasoline we used ourselves – pay an amount that would compensate future generations for the harms we will otherwise force them to endure, we would be paying far more than we do now.

The best way to force people off of gasoline (and fossil fuels in general), and onto alternatives such as walking, riding a bike, using public transportation, buying locally-produced goods that do not need to be shipped half-way around the world, is to raise the price. There is no better incentive for getting people to reduce the amount of an activity than by making it more expensive to do so.

Unfortunately, this solution comes with another problem. It is problem that I discussed even in the first days of this blog. The very wealthy (the ‘aristocracy’) has the power to bid essential goods and services away from the poor.

I illustrated this problem in the days after Hurricane Katrina hit in discussing 'price gounging' accusations against people charging as much as $20 for a bottle of water. John Stossel argued that ‘price gouging’ was a good thing – that high prices helped to ensure that water was going to its most highly valued uses and not to lesser-valued uses (uses for which people were not willing to pay $20 per bottle).

I told a story about two women bidding on a bottle of water. A poor woman wanted the water in order to give it to her sick child. A rich woman wanted the water to use it to shampoo her pet poodle. In the free market, $20 to the rich woman has a significantly lower 'opportunity cost' than $20 for the poor woman. The rich woman has stacks upon stacks of $20 that she can spend on other things – the loss of one $20 bill is insignificant. The poor woman has very few $20 – the loss of one is extremely significant.

To accurately measure which use has the higher value, we have to imagine who would bid the higher price if $20 had the same value to both people – who would pay the most if both people had the same amount of wealth. If the poor woman would have out-bid the wealthy woman if their levels of wealth were equal, then hers is the higher-valued use. In this type of case, 'free markets' take goods and services away from their more highly valued use, and give them to their less highly valued use.

Gasoline (and fossil fuel consumption in general) is a product where the rich can bid the resources away from the poor, who would put it to a more highly valued use. Filling up an SUV several times a week does not have much of an opportunity cost for those who have stacks of $20 bills to spend. For such a person, gasoline is still 'next to free'. It is only the poor who are suffering from the higher price of gasoline – people for whom the loss of $20 means less money to buy food, clothing, or pay the rent.

Now, we also see the aristocracy bidding food itself off of the tables of the poor. The case I started with of the two women bidding for water explains the current situation. Rich people are buying up food to use in ethanol production. Food prices are going up. This is morally identical to the case of the rich person bidding water way from a person who would give it to a sick child, so that she could use it to shampoo her poodle. The difference – the rich are bidding food away from the starving, rather than water away from the thirsty.

So, this must imply that I am in favor of abandoning the market because of these flaws, and go with government solutions, right?

Let’s not lose track of the one thing that markets are really good at. Prices store a great deal of information, and they instantly connect that information to behavior. You have a village operating under market conditions. The food crop fails. Instantly, the price of food goes up – telling people that (1) they need to start using less food immediately, (2) they need to look for substitutes for food where food is being used for things other than eating, and (3) they need to go out and find more food. It provides instant incentives for people to start acting in ways that will mitigate the harm of the crop failure.

If the government, instead, struggles to keep the price (artificially) low, we will suppress the instant incentive for reducing consumption, searching for substitutes, and searching for additional sources that the market gives us. Governments are notoriously slow at responding to new information – and their response is corrupted by the noise of special interest groups.

This is my fear with respect to the claim that the most important concern in America is with the high price of gasoline. Government action to keep the price (artificially) low would serve to keep the consumption of fossil fuels (artificially) high. It gives people less of an incentive to cut back on their consumption, to look for substitutes, and to look for new sources. It makes the problem much worse.

More importantly, this type of government interference simply increases the tax on the poor or on future generations who do not have a vote in today’s elections – further taxes the poor to enefit the rich.

(Yes, in the world economy, the average American is considered 'rich'.)

Government subsidies for ethanol production and legislative requirements that a particular percentage of one's energy portfolio be made up of ethanol are examples of taxing the poor and the unborn – almost literally taxing the food off their tables – to subsidize the entertainment of the aristocracy. The legislation demands that a certain amount of food production go to ethanol, which makes it unavailable to those who are starting, and is a substantial contributor to rising food costs around the world.

Not only is it morally wrong to tax the food from the poor to pay for the entertainment of the wealthy, it is also immoral to do nothing about it in a democratic political system where one has the power to act.

Yet, the claim that 'the price of gasoline' is America's number one concern suggests that Americans are not morally concerned with taxing the poor and the unborn to entertain the wealthy. In fact, their number one concern is that the government must inflict even higher taxes on the poor to entertain the wealthy. It suggests that they want to see more food taken off of the tables of the poor around the world and converted into energy for the rich, and they want to lower the price of gas so that we can continue our high rates of fossil fuel consumption that taxes future generations with the cost of global warming.

Actually, what we need is to eliminate the subsidies for ethanol – eliminate all subsidies for the production and consumption of fossil fuels, and impose a tax where those who use fossil fuels will pay the costs of their own consumption, rather than pass those costs onto the poor and the unborn. This will then promote the development of energy resources that do not tax the poor and the unborn for the entertainment of the rich.

In fact, we might even provide the poor and the unborn with a significant benefit. The worldwide development of energy resources that do not tax the poor and the unborn mwy not only liberate them from these taxes. Economies of scale and technological advances might even provide them with cheep energy that they can use to improve the quality of their lives without doing harm to others.

Even the rich might benefit. Replacing a source of energy that taxes the poor and the unborn will, over time, leave the poor and the unborn better off, which can generate positive benefits throughout the economy. Those benefits will ripple through an economy that has been made not only more prosperous, but more just at the same time.

But it starts with those who consume gasoline insisting that they will not demand the taxation of the poor and the unborn for their own benefit. It starts with their willingness to pay the full cost for the gasoline they use, rather than hand the bill to others- an act as unjust and immoral as taking money out of their wallets and using it as one’s own.

What's Important about Rights

Today, I wish to explain what rights are and to show that rights are real. Or, more precisely, that a particular conception of ‘rights’ refers to something that is real.

Emu Sam wrote in a comment last week:

I think I don't understand your definition of a "right." . . . I think . . . that you are saying a right will be inextricably bound up with morality. There exist rights, and these rights can be discovered by seeing what people generally have a reason to promote. Now that sounds like you're saying something exists - that there are "right particles" which can be violated or upheld. Obviously, this is not what you intended to say.

There are no 'right particles' in nature. Nor is there some sort of 'natural right' that takes the form of 'ought radiation' emitting from certain types of acts that somehow have the metaphysical implication of making it wrong to perform acts that are counter to this 'ought radition'. Any theory of rights that suggests such things can be dismissed as nonsense.

Yet, rights exist. They simply do not exist in any of these forms.

Rights exist in the sense that there are certain families of action that we have reason to cause others to have an aversion to performing. One way of saying, "People generally have many and strong reasons for causing others to have an aversion to actions that would deprive others of X" is to say, "Others have a right to X."

This conception of rights is not a 'noble lie' theory. I am not claiming that the false belief that rights exist is useful; therefore, if we are smart, we will promulgate this false belief that rights exist. I saying that rights do exist. A 'right to X' is precisely equal to 'people generally have many and strong reasons for causing in others an aversion to violating X'. There is no lie in this. This statement can be (and sometimes is) quite literally true.

Furthermore, it is a fact that we can discover – and it is a fact that we have discovered. When the founding fathers said that we have rights to life, liberty, property, a trial b jury, religious liberty, speak (or write) freely, freedom from unwarranted searches and seizures, not to be subject to cruel and unusual punishment, and the like they were saying that people have many and strong reasons to set up aversions (and other barriers) to performing these actions. The many and strong reasons are the reasons that they appealed to when they said that such a right existed.

I want to approach this issue of whether rights exist by looking at what people are afraid of when they should think that rights to not exist.

What people fear is that to deny that a right exists means that others must be at liberty to do as they please. So, if I say that you have no right to freedom of speech, it means that nobody can do any wrong in attempting to silence you. If I say that you have no right to liberty, then people may act to enslave you without doing you any wrong. And if I say that you have no right to life, then others are under no obligation to refrain from killing you, if it should serve their interests to do so.

Whereas we all have reason to fear the suppression of truth, as well as being enslaved or killed (or having those we care about enslaved or killed), we have reason to worry what implications people may draw from the claim that 'there are no rights'.

In logic, if a person claims, "A implies B", and yet we can show that B is false, this means one of two things. Either it means that A also is false (since, by assumption, if A were true then B would be true). Or it means that A does not, in fact, imply B.

So, if the claim that 'no rights exist' implies that 'people can do no wrong by suppressing speech or enslaving or murdering others', then a proof that shows ‘it is the case that those who suppress speech or who enslave or kill others do wrong’ implies either that rights do exist, or the denial of rights does not carry the implication that people fear.

Yesterday, I argued that we have many and strong reason to promote in others an aversion to killing. Given the tremendous instrumental value of a life, we have reason to protect our own life and the lives of those we care about. One way to do this is to promote in others an aversion to killing the innocent. The reason we want an aversion to killing the innocent (as opposed to simply a rule or a law) is that an aversion will motivate an agent not to kill the innocent even when it would otherwise be profitable to do so and even when he would not get caught. The agent will refrain from killing because one of his strongest reasons for action is 'to not be a killer of innocent people'. If this is what the agent desires, then there is no way that killing an innocent (even when he would not get caught) can fulfill such a desire.

The same argument can be given for creating an aversion to restraining speech by violence, or enslaving others.

This statement that people generally have many and strong reasons to promote in others aversion to silencing speech through violence, aversions to slavery, and aversions to killing the innocent, can be said much more economically by saying, “It is wrong to restrain speech, to enslave others, or to kill the innocent.”

Where, "There is no right to life" implies "There is no wrong in killing the innocent," a demonstration that it is wrong to kill the innocent implies that there is, in fact, a right to life. Or it implies that the absence of a right to life is not the same as saying that it is morally permissible to kill the innocent. Which is it?

Here, I am going to borrow a page from a Chemistry handbook. The term 'atom' originally meant 'without parts' – a particle that could not be divided. When chemists became accustomed to speaking about oxygen, hydrogen, and carbon atoms they confronted a theory that said that these 'atoms' did, indeed, have parts.

Chemists were left with a dilemma. They could continue to say that 'atoms' had no parts, and that these minute particles of oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, and the like were not 'atoms'. Or they could continue to call them 'atoms' but allow that atoms could have parts.

I want the reader to recognize that the distinction here was fully arbitrary. It did not depend in any way on any experiment or observation of nature. It was simply a decision on how to use a term. Chemists choose to continue to speak of oxygen, carbon, and hydrogen atoms but allowed that atoms could have parts.

And so it is with rights. I could hold that 'rights' are supernatural entities that make it wrong to suppress speech or enslave or kill others. Or I could allow that 'rights' are 'whatever it is that makes it wrong to suppress speech or enslave or kill others'. The first option denies the implication that 'no rights' implies 'it is not wrong to suppress speech or enslave or kill others'. The second option implies that 'it is wrong to suppress speech, enslave or kill others' implies 'there are, indeed, rights to freedom of the press, to liberty, and to life'.

I want the reader to realize how the chemists’ choice in no way threatens the objectivity of chemistry. It remains a hard science, even though the choice as to how to use the term 'atom' was purely subjective. Similarly, it is no threat to the objectivity of ethics that there is a similar choice to make on how we are to use the word 'right'. If we wish to insist that the absence of a right to life implies the moral permissibility of killing, then rights do, in fact, exist. They do not exist as strange supernatural entities, of course, but they exist. They exist in the fact that people have many and strong reasons to promote an aversion to killing the innocent.

Similarly, the term 'malaria' meant, literally, 'bad air' (mal aeria) – and referred to a disease that people once falsely thought was caused by bad air. Incense swung around a room (as during some Catholic rituals) and perfumed cloth held over the nose and mouth were thought to ward off the disease because it sweetened the air.

Similarly, the American Astronomical Association recently changed the definition of a planet, and changed the truth value of the statement, "Pluto is a planet" from 'true' to 'false' by taking a vote. Yet, this did not in the least bit put the objectivity of astronomy into doubt.

The move that I make above with respect to 'rights' does nothing to call the objectivity of ethics into question – any more than chemists playing with the definition of 'atom' physicians playing with the definition of 'malaria', or astronomers playing with the definition of 'planet' were threats to the objectivity of chemistry, astronomy, or medicine.

Given that we have a strong tradition of using the term 'right' to refer to things that we have reason to give people an aversion to doing, we should continue to use the term 'right' to that which we have many and strong reasons to give people an aversion to doing. There really are things (such as theft, rape, and killing the innocent) that we have reason to cause others to have an aversion to doing – and aversions that they have reason to cause in us. So something that is as fit to call a 'right' as the smallest particle of an element can be called an ‘atom’ or a we can sensibly call ‘rights’ actually does exist.

Life as The Ultimate Value

Last week, a post I made called Evanescent on the Meaning of Life left me with two related tasks for this week.

I need to answer emu sam question about how we can have rights without suggesting some sort of 'rights particle' or some other strange ontological invention. At the same time, I need to demonstrate to Evanescent that the proposition, "Life is the ultimate value," is false.

I am going to start with refuting Evanescent's thesis.

Life is necessarily the ultimate value, because IF it wasn't, you would act with death as your objective! IF that was the case, you should up and die as soon as possible, in which case you wouldn't need a guide to how to live your life, because you wouldn't have life as your goal!

This is a classic example of a false dichotomy. There are many things in the universe other than life and death. The 'ultimate value' (if there is such a thing) could be a third thing, such as happiness or the absence of pain. In these cases, life would be useful insofar as life is conducive to happiness, or death would be useful insofar as death provides the only way to obtain the absence of pain.

Elsewhere, evanescent seems to acknowledge the possibility of a ‘third thing’ as an ultimate value when he challenges me to:

Name a value higher than life.

Okay, I will. Or, rather, I claim that we have a set of ultimate values (which are sometimes in conflict with each other). I am going to do so by bringing forth the classic distinction between "value as a means" and "value as an end". I am going to equate "value as an end" with "ultimate value", and show that we have a number of these ends.

A hammer has value. However, the value that a hammer has is merely its value as a tool. A hammer can be used to build a house. A house has value because it separates the outside environment from the inside environment. We have the ability to regulate the inside environment and to keep it (for example) at a more comfortable temperature than the outside environment.

Why does a comfortable temperature have value?

It might have some value as a tool. However, ultimately, a 'comfortable temperature' has value independent of its usefulness. In addition to any value it may have as a means to something else of value, it is an end – a goal that agents reach for its own sake, and not (solely) for the sake of something else.

"I like it." That’s all that needs to be said.

Nature has given us a number of 'values as ends' (or 'ultimate values') – not just life. Our 'values as ends' include happiness, pleasure, the absence of pain, eating, sex, and a few others.

Now, I want to look at the value of something as an end and 'side effects'.

Nature did not give us an 'ultimate end' of procreation. That would have been far too difficult. Instead, nature gave us a natural ‘ultimate value’ of having sex. Procreation is an unintended (and often, even, undesired) side-effect of a desire for sex. We can see this in the fact that people seek sex even in the absence of procreation – even while actively taking steps to prevent procreation. If procreation were the 'ultimate end' of sex, then we would never see people having sex except as a means (a chore) useful for bringing about procreation.

The same is true of eating. Eating is an 'ultimate value'. Nature has made us so that we tend to prefer those foods that keep us alive (at least long enough to procreate). However, survival is not the 'ultimate end' of eating. If it were, then we would only eat those foods that were good for us, and only in th quantity that maximized survival. Eating would be a chore – a job to do that had no value for us other than as something useful in reaching the 'end' of survival.

I capture these elements in a phrase that is almost a cliché in this blog: The antelope does not run from the lion because he is afraid of being killed and eaten. The antelope runs from the lion because he is afraid of lions. This aversion to the presence of lions has the effect of preventing the antelope from being killed and eaten, which then helped the genetic predispositions for lion-aversion to spread throughout the antelope population. But, for the antelope, lion-avoidance has value for its own sake. It also has some evolutionarily useful side effects.

As I said, nature has given us a number of natural ends (eating, drinking, sex, absence of pain, various forms of comfort). Nature has also given us a malleable brain, which then causes us to acquire new ultimate ends through experience. One of the most basic ways of learning new desires is through conditioning. Associate an action with a 'natural end' so that the agent is rewarded, and that action goes from being a means to that end to something that is valued for its own sake. It becomes something the agent will pursue even when the agent is fully aware of the fact that it has been disconnected from its former end.

Thus, a child learns to tell the truth and not to take things that belong to others as a way of fulfilling a natural aversion to parental wrath. Eventually, however, these become desired for their own sake – such that the child will come to see dishonesty and theft as something to be avoided for its own sake, and not just as a means for avoiding parental wrath.

Evanescent mentions this distinction between means and ends in his own defense of life as an 'ultimate value':

In order to even ask whether life is the ultimate value or not, you are in effect asking “how do you know that life is the standard for right or wrong?” – but what you have missed is that UNLESS YOU WERE ALIVE, and unless you were a rational being with needs and desires, and things that were objectively positive or negative for your existence, you couldn't even ask the question! The words "good" and "bad" would be meaningless. What ever else could they relate to, if NOT your own life??

However, please note that in offering this defense of life as an ‘ultimate value’, Evanescent is really only defending the value of life as a means. Life is valuable, in this sense, only insofar as life is a useful tool – useful for bringing about other things that have value. However, if this is the type of value that life has, then life is a means, and the things that one can do with a life are the true ends – the true ultimate values. Because, if there was nothing that one could do with a life, if a life was not useful, it would have no value.

These points are not inconsistent with the possibility that life also has value is one of our 'ultimate values'. It is possible for something to have value both as a means and as an end. However, its value as an end (as an 'ultimate value') is distinct from its value as a means, and cannot be defended by pointing out its value as a means. It has to be demonstrated that it is something (like the absence of pain) that we pursue for its own sake – independent of its usefulness in realizing other ends.

However, this fact that life is a very useful means (or tool) for the fulfillment of other desires suggests that people have many and strong reason to promote an aversion to killing in others. This relationship is straight forward. To the degree that others have an aversion to killing, then to that degree that have an aversion to depriving us of this very useful tool for the fulfillment of our desires. Our desires are our reasons for action, so they are reasons to establish this aversion to killing in others. And their desires are their reasons for action for instilling an aversion to killing in us.

The reason to promote an aversion to killing is that this makes 'not killing' itself one of the agent's reasons for action – one of the ends that the agent is acting to fulfill at all instances. An individual with a sufficiently strong aversion to killing will not kill others even when it would otherwise be profitable to do so and even when he could get away with it. This is true in the same sense that a person with an aversion to pain will not stick his hand into a bed of hot coals even when it would otherwise be profitable to do so (e.g., "I will pay you $100") and he could get away with it.

More precisely, we have reason to set up an aversion to killing an innocent person. We have much less of a reason to establish an aversion to killing an aggressor – so that we may kill in self defense, and others (e.g., police, neighbors) may kill in our defense. This, however, is still justified in virtue of the fact that an aversion to killing others except aggressors better secures a very useful tool (means, not end) for the fulfillment of our desires – our lives.

E2.0: Daniel Smail: The Historian's "Creationist" Contamination

This is the 34th 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.

Daniel Smail, professor of history at Harvard University, speaks next. In his presentation, he tells us that history (or, more precisely, the history of history) suffers from a doctrine of ‘intelligent design’ much like biology does, and that this has had a contaminating effect on our study of history.

Specifically, if we go back in time, the discipline of teaching history used to begin with the book of genesis. At a time when people believed that the Bible was literally true and without error, it is only natural that one would begin a study of human history with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden (around 4000 BC), and then go from there. Eventually, after a lot of time had passed, you end up with Egyptians along the Nile River building pyramids and the other cultures of the world. However, behind them, there was Noah and the flood.

In the 1800s, this way of understanding history started to run into a serious problem. Archaeologists were digging up a lot of evidence that did not actually square with the biblical story of the origins of the human race. Archaeology was telling a different story.

To the “creationist” historian, who wanted to preserve biblical text, this created a problem – a crisis, as it were. According to Smail, the way historians dealt with this problem was to simply declare the discoveries of archaeology irrelevant to history. In order for something to count as history, they said, there must be writing – documents, giving first-hand accounts of the events in question. This invention of writing is how we distinguish history (everything that comes after) from pre-history (or prehistoric) events that come before the invention of writing.

This allowed historians to present history as, everything that happened in the world after the great flood. The flood was over. The arc came to rest. The people and the animals left the arc and spread around the world. Over time, we get the four cradles of civilization – China, India, Mesopotamia, and Egypt.

This division between history and pre-history is completely artificial. We can see this in Heinrich Schliemann’s discovery of the city of Troy using references from the Greek bible, the writings of Homer. Schliemann demonstrated the ability to use archaeology to confirm (or falsify) the claims within an ancient text. History does not start with the invention of writing. Rather, the invention of writing itself occurs as a historical event that has a context, and it gets that context from the years before writing was invented.

This corruption of history – this selective use of the facts in order to get history to line up with certain religious views of humanity, meant that, through the years, history has not been done very well. History has not been done very scientifically. Yet, Smail pointed how how important history was to many of the presentations that people actually gave. We can see it in the economic histories of Michael Shermer and Gregory Clark. Patricia Churchland made a statement that fit within the subject of history when she spoke about inter-group rivalries. Sam Harris, in his presentation, made historic claims (claims about the history) of the effects of faith.

Even when the speakers at Beyond Belief 2 used history, their references were causal and careless. They made assertions, really, to an audience that they hoped would accept it. Poor history, of course, needs to be contrasted with the presentations that gave a rigorous defense of some aspect of history, such as David Clark’s research into wills to suggest that the Enlightenment ‘evolved’ because middle-class Englishmen proved to be more evolutionarily fit than poor Englishmen.

Smail does not give us any suggestions for doing history right. He merely suggests that history – how it is done, what is being studied – has been contaminated by a strong religious motivation not to discuss what came before history – of ignoring the prehistoric factors that may be relevant as to how history started off the way it did.

E2.0: Sam Harris: The End of Religion

This is the 33rd 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 in this series was Sam Harris, the ‘New Atheist’ author of “The End of Faith.”

I believe that I have come to see something of Harris’ claims in a different light, and it came from how Harris answered a particular question from the studio audience.

There has always been a certain tension in Harris’ writings. In some places, he explicitly recognizes that some religions are worse than others. He compares the Djin to radical Islam to show that it is possible for a person to have a religion that does not make them a threat to others. At the same time, he write about the end of faith – the end of religion – as if all religion is bad. As I read him, this takes the form of the bigot’s fallacy: “Some members of group X are evil; therefore, all members of X are to be condemned.”

However, after giving his speech, a member of the studio audience once again pointed out that it is not the case that all religions are bad. In response to this, Harris said, “That’s why I don’t like the word ‘religion’.”

When Harris says that all religion is bad, he doesn’t like the word ‘religion’, because when he uses the word people take him to be saying something that he is not saying. They then criticize what they think he is saying (which is certainly supported by the title of his book, The End of Faith), and . . . apparently . . . miss what he is actually saying.

So, if Harris is not actually interested in the end of religion, what is it that he wants to end? How does this actual goal relate to the ‘religion’ that makes ‘religion’ seem close to the right term?

Here is one thing that Harris clearly wants to see end. He wants an end to the social taboo against criticizing beliefs that are grounded on nothing but faith. On Harris’s view, some religious beliefs cause those who have them to behave in ways harmful to others (suicide bombings, a community established to institute the rape of pubescent girls, campaigns to block embryonic stem-cell research and prohibit homosexual marriage), When religion causes people to behave in ways harmful to others, Harris thinks we should be free to condemn that religion.

Currently, religion is taken to be a safe haven for those who seek to ‘justify’ behavior harmful to others. If an attack on the well-being of others springs from a set of religious beliefs, we are not allowed to attack their alleged ‘justification’ for their harmful behavior. Their ‘justification’ (which is typically asserted as being a matter of ‘faith’) is not to be challenged. This implies that we have a lot of behavior that is harmful to others that is not being challenged the way that it should be. And we have a lot of suffering as a result.

At this point, we have a conclusion that says that, “Religions may be challenged to the degree that they are used to defend behavior that is harmful to others.” This is fully consistent with the idea that not all religions are equally bad. Those that do not motivate behavior harmful to others can be set aside, while we focus on those that do motivate behavior that is harmful to others.

Notice that the argument above also says that we are focusing on a particular set of justifications that we are not socially permitted to condemn. There is one and only one set of beliefs that we are not socially permitted to condemn – religious beliefs. If a person tries to justify behavior harmful to others on any other standard, we are free to have it him and point out how that standard leads to harm to others. However, if the agent retreats into saying that he holds his standard as a matter of religious faith, this is considered a trump card, and the critic is then expected to back off – even to apologize – for daring to criticize somebody else’s religion.

The proposition, “Religion is not to be considered a sacred ground immune from criticism” is not the same as saying that “All of religion is to be criticized.” The former proposition is fully compatible with saying, “Some religions deserve more criticism than others; and some are so mild that they scarcely deserve our attention (because those who adhere to them are not a threat to others).”

“The end of faith” on this interpretation becomes “the end of a safe area from which behavior that is harmful to others can spring without being criticized – and, in particular, criticized for the harm that it causes people to do to others.”

I see this as being a perfectly reasonable position to take – and the position that I take in this blog. I do not defend atheism in this blog. I condemn behavior harmful to others, and I do not permit ‘this is a matter of faith’ to be used as a shield to criticism for behavior that is harmful to others. At the same time, I do not waste my effort criticizing beliefs that do not lead to behavior harmful to others.

When Harris speaks, this is taken as an attack on all religion. This is because Harris uses the term ‘religion’ to refer to this zone of beliefs that we are socially prohibited from criticizing. However, we can remove the special immunity from criticism from religious beliefs and still have religious beliefs. What remains qualifies as a second definition of religion – the beliefs themselves. We can have zero beliefs that have a special immunity from criticism, and still have religious beliefs, so the set ‘religious beliefs’ and ‘beliefs that have a special immunity from criticism’ are not identical.

Harris switches back and forth between these two concepts without clearly indicating when he using one term and when he is using another. He might not even be clear on the distinction in his own mind – constantly equivocating between the two definitions. Or, he might have the two concepts distinct in his own mind and simply fail to communicate them to his audience.

It is not impossible for a set of religious beliefs to withstand criticism. It is possible that some set of religious beliefs are true. I do not believe that any of them are true, but I could be wrong. Some beliefs withstand criticism better than others.

There is the claim that Harris and other “New Atheists” have made that even moderate religion is to be blamed for shielding the fanatics from criticism. This can be taken as simply another aspect of the claim that all religion (in the broad second sense) is bad. However, once we bring this new, narrower definition into play, this means something else. It means that the religious moderate’s insistence that some beliefs are not to be question is an attitude that shields the religious fanatic. “As long as you keep saying that your beliefs are never to be questioned, you side with the fanatics when they protest the questioning of their beliefs.”

It’s not the end of religion that we are aiming for. It’s the end of faith as an accepted defense of behavior harmful to others. This might result in the end of religion – and some people certainly think that this is the case. Yet, this ‘might’ is consistent with ‘might not’. The question remains as to whether ‘moderate’ religions can find a way to defend their beliefs without giving sanctuary to the fanatics who use the same tools to defend despicably harmful actions.

Since the focus here is on groundless defense of behavior harmful to others, neutral and beneficial religions that at least try for a more substantive defense might get by for quite some time without attracting attention. Rational critics will focus their attention first on the failures of those religions whose beliefs inspire the most harmful actions – leaving the rest alone. The goal is to prevent harm, not to destroy religion; and only to destroy religions to the degree that a particular religion inspires its followers to do harm to others.

I might be reading a lot into a simple answer to a simple question. Yet, there is a principle in charity that in selecting the correct interpretation of a document one must give the author the benefits of all doubt. Harris’ response to this question, that he does not like the word ‘religion’ because it is overly general, gives me reason to doubt that Harris actually committed the bigot’s fallacy, “Some religious people did a bad thing; therefore, all religion is bad.”

Perhaps what he really meant to say is, “The practice of causing harm to others and then ducking criticism by saying, ‘God told me to do it,’ has to come an end. Religions are free to try to defend themselves by more rational means; that’s not the issue. Religions are not free to engage in behavior harmful to others without having a defense that sits on a more solid foundation than ‘faith’. Those whom the practitioners of that religion do harm to have a right to demand better from those who do them harm.

The 'end of faith' is not necessarily the same as 'the end of religion', and criticism of Harris as calling for 'the end of religion' (rather than the narrower 'end to claiming that behavior harmful to others can be defended by appealing to faith') need not actually defeat the proposal to end the special status of religious belief that Harris was principally attacking.

A New Constitutional Test for Religious Liberty

According to an article in America Magazine, "America at the Crossroads" the conservative faction on the Supreme Court is looking for an opportunity to institute a new way of interpreting the First Amendment with respect to religious liberty.

The current test that the Supreme Court uses in examining church/state legislation is the Lemon Test, named for case Lemon v. Kurtzman in which the test was first enumerated. To pass the Lemon Test a church/state law must (1) have a secular legislative purpose, (2) must not have the primary effect of either advancing or inhibiting religion, and (3) must not result in an "excessive government entanglement" with religion.

The new test being considered would be the Coercion Test. Using this test, the Supreme Court would look at whether the law coerces citizens into participating in or supporting a religious exercise.

What counts as coercion?

Well, the Supreme Court ruled this year that being taxed for the purpose of supporting a religious activity does not give a person any standing to challenge that activity. In order to have standing, a person must suffer actual harm. So, if the government is taking your money from you and giving it to a church, it is not violating the separation of church and state under the Coercion doctrine – at least, not in any way that allows you to go for a court and seek a remedy.

Justice Anthony Scalia also argues that speech is not a form of coercion because "the listener can do as he pleases." Consequently, a legislator's decision to put the 10 Commandments in a government building, or to put up a Nativity scene during Christmas, or to put "In God We Trust" on the money and in every classroom in every school, or to start school functions such as an assembly or graduation ceremony or sporting event with a prayer, or teaching intelligent design in a science class, are not "coercive" on this test. Certainly, a citizen may be "coerced" into listening or viewing these displays, but since they are at liberty to dismiss or disregard what they hear or see, they are not suffering 'coercion' in a sense that would violate this test.

The article suggests that there may be some dispute over whether young children, coerced into attending public schools, have the same capacity to ignore what is being said that a competent adult has. According to the article, Justice Stevens might consider prayer in school, for example, to be an impermissible form of coercion given the child's limited ability to question the information that the government is giving it.

In one sense, I think that it might be a good thing to replace the Lemon test with the Coercion test in constitutional law. I fear that, for too long, secularists have been hiding behind the robes of judges and utterly failing to engage the public in a discussion of these matters. As a result, while the secularists have been winning court cases, the sectarians have been talking to the public and generating public hostility towards the secularists. In a democracy, public opinion will eventually trump legal precedent. The strategy of hiding behind judicial robes was doomed eventually to fail, and that day may well be here.

However, this is not a blog in Constitutional law or in political strategy. This is a blog on ethics. Regardless of the constitutional issues involved in the debate over the Lemon Test versus the Coercion Test, there is a separate question as to which standard does the best job of determining what counts as just law.

The Coercion Test, as a standard of just law (rather than Constitutional law), is a very poor standard. Within the confines of the Coercion Test, the government may pass a resolution, for example, declaring that the Jewish faith is incompatible with the American way of life, and that no Jew is fit to hold public office. A bill that prohibits Jews from holding public office would not be permitted. However, it would not be an act of coercion for the government to declare, through a resolution or an executive order, that it officially disapproves of the election or appointment of a Jew to any office or position of public trust. A resolution is mere speech, and as such "the listener can do with it as he likes."

Furthermore, the government would be permitted under the Coercion test to fund a campaign to promote public hostility towards Jews. It would not be able to require that Jews wear a yellow Star of David on their clothing or identify their shops as Jewish, but it would be able to launch a campaign to encourage Christians to put a white cross on their clothing or to identify their businesses as a Christian businesses, and to encourage the population in general to shop at Christian businesses. Again, there is no coercion involved in such an act. As such, it would not be seen as violating the government’s prohibition on establishing a religion using the Coercion test.

The government could pass a law authorizing the display of plaques or other messages that declare that all true Americans are Christians – that they believe that Jesus was the Messiah and that no person who doubts such a claim can be considered a good American. It can have students pledge allegiance to "one Christian nation", and put a slogan on the money and in the classroom for every Christian and Jewish people to see that says, "We Trust in Jesus."

With all of this, under the Coercion test, no constitutional violation has yet taken place.

I have expressed these possibilities in terms of the attitude that the government may express towards its Jewish citizens under this principle, because the government already does most of these things to its atheist citizens without protest. These examples are not wild imaginings of what the government might do if some concepts get stretched far beyond their regular use. These examples represent a set of actions that the government is already engaged in. The Coercion Test is being considered precisely because it will provide those who want to continue acts of this type to give a sense that they are defensible.

Many people have recognized that there is a lot of tension between these actions taken against atheist citizens and the Lemon Test. Instead of resolving this tension by ending the government promotion of hostility towards atheists, they seek to relieve the tension by removing the Constitutional prohibition on the government marketing hostility towards a religious minority. The paragraphs above simply point out that if the government allows public hostility towards one religious minority, it can easily be used against other religious minorities.

As I said above, this blog is not concerned with what is and is not constitutional. However, it is possible to argue that there is a particular concept of morality written into the Constitution (and certainly in the Declaration of Independence) that makes moral arguments such as these relevant to Constitutional questions. This is the idea that moral rights exist as entities independent of government decree and the minds of men gathered in a legislative session. Governments do not create rights, they either respect or they violate rights that exist in the absence of government.

Clearly, this is the concept of rights that the Declaration of Independence was built on. It declares that rights are 'unalienable', and that governments can be 'destructive' of these rights. This simply is not possible if rights were entities invented by government.

We also see this in the Bill of Rights added to the Constitution. Look at the words.

Amendment 1: Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble. . . .

Amendment 2: . . . the right of the People to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Amendment 4: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated . . .

These are three examples in which the Bill of Rights is best interpreted as saying, "There exists a right independent of government, and we command the government to respect this right." Against this interpretation, any appeal to what the founding fathers thought the rights were is irrelevant. The founding fathers told us to defend the rights that exist as a matter of fact - not the rights that they thought existed.

When people try to interpret the Bill of Rights by looking at what the founding fathers thought, they are treating those rights as human inventions. This is what you would do if you were asking, "What did the founding fathers try to invent, in terms of rights?" The right to freedom of speech becomes whatever the founding fathers thought it was, and the prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment is a prohibition on what the founding fathers thought was cruel and unusual.

When people take the Bill of Rights as a list of rights that exist 'in nature' that the government is not to abridge, then interpreting the Constitution is not a matter of getting inside the founder's heads. It is a matter of asking, "What 'right' to freedom of the press, or freedom of the people to assemble and petition their government, or freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures, exists in nature?" This natural right is the right that the founding fathers were trying to protect.

The degree to which the thoughts of the founding fathers are relevant in interpreting the law extends only to the conclusion that the founding fathers thought that there were natural rights found, independent of what any government or legislative body says they are, and that the job of government is to protect those rights.

One of those rights is a right of members of a religous minority not to be the victim of a government-orchistrated campaign of hostility based on nothing more substantial than the hate that some religions renerate against those who do not share their ideas. There may well be reasons for a government to orchestrate a campaign of hostility against a religion that abuses children or seeks to make the nation subject to a foreign (religious) power like the Pope. However, it has no right to orchestrate a campaign of hate against a minority for no reason other than the majority follows an intolerant religion that preaches hatred towards that minroity.

The Coercion Test, however, frees the government to orchestrate campaigns of hostility against religious minorities. It does not allow the government to actually punish a person who belongs to that minority, but the government can officially recommend that members of that minority be barred from public office, and even encourage its people to view the members of that minority with suspicion and contempt for no reason other than their religious opinions.

This is exactly what the proponents of the Coercion Test want to protect – an existing government-run campaign to generate public hostility against a religious minority. It is needed to protect a campaign of teaching citizens (particularly young children) to have the same hostility towards those who do not favor 'one nation under God' that they should have for those who do not favor 'liberty and justice for all'. It is needed to protect a campaign to teach the people, particularly children, not to think of those who do not trust in God as 'one of us'. Instead, the government lesson is that an American who does not trust in God is like a Marine who is not faithful to his fellow soldier – somebody hardly worthy of the name 'Marine' (or, in the government's case, somebody hardly worthy of the name 'American'.

The Constitutional question is whether the First Amendment protects this type of government-run campaign against a religious minority, or prohibits it? The Coercion Test is clearly the test of choice for those who favor such a campaign, and it is one Supreme Court vote away from becoming the law of the land.

Heartless Atheists

A standard response, when somebody asserts, “Those people in that group that you dislike are better than the people in the group that you are a member of at accomplishing X,” is to get defensive and say, “No they’re not.” The knee-jerk reaction is to assume that there is something wrong with the data, and to immediately accept as true anything that hints at a problem with the research, simply because one does not like the conclusion.

Knowing this, I try to respond to research that shows conclusions that I do not like with a prejudice towards accepting it, giving it some bonus points in terms of credibility that must be overcome, and to see what it implies.

The specific research that I am referring to here is research that shows that theists are more charitable (give significantly more time and money) than unbelievers. See, for example, Religious Faith and Social Giving. This research suggests that the degree to which we have reason to promote charitable desires in others, we have a reason to promote religion in America. Correspondingly, to the degree that we challenge religion, to that degree we are responsible for the reduction in charitable contributions that would result from the secularization of the country.

The human response for most of my readers, if they were to go to the study and read it, would be to go hunting for flaws, ready to find any and all flaws that exist, real or imagined. Actually, I came up with a few dozen possibilities off of the top of my head, all of which I was willing to assume must be true unless and until the article provided me with overwhelming evidence that the issue had been dealt with.

Ultimately, however, I compare this approach to that of assuming that the Bible must be literally true and taking any hint of a flaw in the evidence to the contrary as a disproof, or the assumption that Saddam Hussein must have weapons of mass destruction and that evidence to the contrary must be flawed in some way.

Let’s take the conclusion at face value – religious Americans contribute far more than secular Americans to charity (in terms of both time and money).

By the way, the researchers excluded specifically religious contributions. Religious Americans, for example, are far more likely to give blood than secular Americans.

I would then argue that I should not encourage others to do things that I am not willing to do myself. It would be hypocritical of me to say, “Hey, you, give more to charity,” if I am not willing to do the same thing myself.

Here, I encounter a problem. Using the concepts that were used in this study, I am not a very charitable person. I do not give much money to traditional charities, nor do I contribute much of my available time. So, within the terms used in the study, I am bringing down the average for secular Americans.

On the other hand, I decided at the age of 16 to leave the world a better place than it would have otherwise been. This motivated me to spend 12 years in college studying different theories and ideas as to what the “best thing” might be. My decision to go to graduate school meant turning down a very lucrative job offer. After leaving college, I have spent a great deal of time and effort trying to communicate the things that I have learned to a general audience. This costs me in terms of my job because, if I were more devoted to my job I would certainly be getting more money and recognition than I get as a result of working on this blog. Yet, the blog is what gives my life meaning.

I do not even own a car, relying solely on public transportation to get around, I spend extra money on my energy bill to purchase wind power.

For all of this, in the terms of the survey that shows that religious people are more charitable than unbelievers, the survey would have put me down as somebody who scarcely contributes anything to charity at all.

Actually, I am not only dragging down the atheist average for charity, I am encouraging others to do the same. When a member of the studio audience asked me to present atheist charities, I answered by suggesting that traditional charity might not be the most efficient use of one’s resources. Particularly when we are working against contributions of the magnitude made by (atheists) Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett. They not only have the means for making substantial contributions, but also have the resources to make sure that the money is spent where it promises to provide the greatest return.

At this point, I want to make clear that nothing in what I have just written refutes the findings of the studies in question. It may be the case that, even in this type of giving, theists are more willing to contribute to promoting well-being than (other) atheists. Or it may be that this blog is merely an excuse that I use for not engaging in other types of charity – that it is not charitable at all. Let’s not make the mistake of thinking that these concerns have disproved the original proposition.

Yet, it does identify a potential problem.

Those years studying theories of value taught me a distinction between desires to fulfill the desires of others, and desires that fulfill the desires of others.

Traditional charity would fit in the first category. A person with a desire to fulfill the desires of others makes a contribution to a traditional charity precisely because it results in directly contributing to fulfilling the desires of others. A person with a desire that fulfills the desires of others might not have the fulfillment of other desires in mind, but his actions fulfill the desires of others nonetheless.

I bring this up because of the way that scientific investigation might be reflected in research that shows that atheists may be less charitable than theists. For example, do we count the work done by the researcher trying to discover new cures for disease, to understand (and predict) hurricanes, or to discover drought-resistant crops as “charitable contributions.” These agents might be motivated in part by a desire to fulfill the desires of others. However, they may well be motivated by a love of the subject matter itself, where the fulfillment of the desires of others is an unintended side-effect.

It is still the case that those ‘others’ whose desires are fulfilled by these types of concerns have reason to promote those concerns. It is still the case that, to the degree that our desires are fulfilled by these interests that benefit others as a side effect, we have reason to promote these desires through (moral) praise. These are still good people, and they are good people precisely because they have desires we have reason to promote.

The scientist who is truly passionate in his work, as I am in my studies of moral philosophy, if he has a few extra hours to spend, will not likely donate it to a traditional charity. He would likely spend it doing a few more hours of research in his favorite field of study. It is good that he do so, since this passion is what enables him to be so good at what he does, and makes it more likely that he will make discoveries that would then be useful to others.

At the same time, the contemporary complaint against religion is not that religious individuals lack charity. It’s that they engage in actions that cause more people to need charity – actions that tend to thwart the desires of others.

A letter last year written by several religious leaders protested any focus on global warming because it distracted from the religious goals of blocking homosexual marriage and forcing mothers to complete unwanted pregnancies. They are struggling to teach mythology in science classes and viciously protect the practice of denigrating those who do not support ‘one nation under God’ or who do not trust in God. They block stem-cell research that has the potential to treat countless injuries and illnesses. They promote habits of intellectual recklessness that conceal the truth under a heavy cloak of lies and deception (like the lies associated with Presidential Candidate Obama’s ‘refusal’ to say the Pledge of Allegiance).

The same intellectual habits that block recognition of the errors in scripture are also put to good use by people who sought to block acceptance of the hazards of tobacco, greenhouse gas emissions, and to promote false beliefs about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. All of these have had consequences that significantly subtract from the benefits that one might find from religiously motivated charity.

Finally, we should consider the fact that a great many religious statements are simply false. Following the formula that we seek to fulfill our desires, but act to fulfill our desires given our beliefs, false beliefs threaten to thwart our capacity to fulfill our desires. They cause us to act in ways that will fail to make true the propositions that are the objects of our desires. To the degree that promoting religion involves promoting false beliefs, we obtain the better fulfillment of some desires by weakening our ability to fulfill others.

So, does this distinction between desires to fulfill (thwart) the desires of others and desires that fulfill (thwart) the desires of others defeat the original proposition?

No. Absolutely not.

I have not demonstrated that secularists are better at “desires that tend to fulfill the desires of others” than theists. Theists may be better in this area as well. Their tendency to embrace false beliefs and faulty reasoning would certainly handicap them in this area. However, just because a person does not believe in God, this does not imply that he is immune to fictions that are as costly as those of any religion.

More importantly, I have not provided any argument that says that we cannot have both a flourishing of desires that fulfill the desires of others, and desires to fulfill the desires of others. To the degree that we have reason to promote those desires that result in charitable actions, to that degree we may have something to learn from the theists – something we may have reason to copy.

Using the theist’s greater tendency to be charitable as a reason to promote theism (in one form or another) suggests that we have to make a tradeoff. It says that we can have truth without charity, or charity without truth, but we cannot have both truth and charity.

At this moment, I have not seen any evidence that this is the case. Even the research cited above does not tell us that we must choose “truth or charity.” It simply says that we have some work to do if we are to get both. The best time and place to start doing that work is here and now.

Evanescent on the Meaning of Life

I finally get to fit a post in that I have been trying to fit in for a month – a response to Evanescent’s post, The Meaning of Life: It’s Right Here.

A response is appropriate because one of the things that Evanescent claims is:

the only reasonable worthwhile thing to do is live for others; give up what you have; sacrifice for the good of others; create a legacy, make the world a better place; disown yourself.

And here I am, having decided at the age of 16 to "leave the world a better place than it would have otherwise been," having spent 12 years in college studying moral philosophy, and spending extraordinary amounts of time each day writing this blog. Apparently, I have "disowned myself."

In fact, the "myself" that Evanescent claims that I have disowned does not exist. The "myself" that Evanescent would have me serve, in place of this project of leaving the world a better place than it would have otherwise been, is as mythical an entity as God – and service done to a mythical entity is a waste of time and effort.

Instead, "myself" is a person who decided at the age of 16 to leave the world a better place than it would have otherwise been. Giving up that would be "disowning myself"

Evanescent was inspired to make this observation in answering the despondent musings of some friends in a pub asking, "Is this all there is to life?" In speaking of his friend, Eanescent wrote:

His point was basically along the lines of: if I die, and I've contributed nothing, and left nothing, does it really make a difference whether I was alive or not?

In answering this question, Evanescent claims to have entered into the realm of 'morality'.

Morality is a branch of philosophy that attempts to deal with the questions: "how should I live my life? What is good for my life and what is harmful?"

This is certainly not how I use the word 'morality' – and I do not think that this is how most native speakers of English use the word 'morality'. Rather, morality is concerned with how one ought to treat other people; It makes no sense to talk about 'morality' when you are talking about a person who is completely isolated from others – even though it still makes sense to ask the question, "How should I live my life?"

[S]ociety in general . . . holds one thing as its standard. What I mean is, the measure by which an action is considered virtuous and noble. That standard is: sacrifice. It is the belief that the more an action is directed towards others, and the less it is directly for personal selfish benefit, the more moral it is.

"Sacrifice" is not my standard. My standard is that value exists as a relationship between states of affairs and desires. A state of affairs is good to the degree that it fulfills desires, and bad to the degree that it thwarts desires. On this standard, the value of a desire is determined by the degree to which it fulfills or thwarts other desires. A desire is good to the degree that it tends to fulfill other desires, and bad to the degree that it thwarts other desires.

If a person desires to eat chocolate ice cream, then a state of affairs in which he eats chocolate ice cream has value to him. When he picks up a chocolate ice cream and eats it, he is not engaged in any type of "sacrifice". He is acting to as to fulfill the most and strongest of his desires.

The person who desires to leave the world a better place stands in the exactly the same relationship to acts of leaving the world a better place. He, too, is acting so as to fulfill the most and the strongest of his desires. The only difference is that, instead of a having a desire to eat chocolate ice cream, he has a desire to leave the world a better place.

There is no difference between the two that warrants calling one a 'sacrifice' and the other not. In both cases, agents are doing what they desire. They simply do not desire the same thing.

Evanescent apparently wants to argue that an act that provides a benefit to the self is ultimately better than an act that provides a benefit to others. He is willing to allow some amount of charity to enter into an agent's action, as long as the primary focus of the agent's actions is self-benefit.

I'm not saying ignore others, and don't better the world, and don’t help people, and don't be kind and generous – the difference is this: one morality tells you to act with OTHERS as the primary beneficiaries of your life. The other tells you to act with YOURSELF as the primary beneficiary of your life, your actions, your choices. (Emphasis in original.)

There is no way to make a direct endorsement of the second option over the first – or to make a direct endorsement of the first option over the second – except to claim that some sort of 'intrinsic value' property exists. It requires a claim that there is some force or primary particle – 'goodons' and 'badons' – that adhere to one option but not the other. These types of statements are false. Intrinsic values do not exist. On this measure, both options have equal value. On this measure, both options have no value.

Value exists. Value is real. Put your hand in a bed of red hot coals and tell me that you do not recognize the badness of that experience. The badness has an effect in the real world. It alters the movement of physical particles through space, namely by keeping people from putting their hands into red hot burning coals. Value is real. It simply does not exist in the form of intrinsic properties. It exists in the form of relationships between states of affairs and desires. It exists in the relationship between a charred hand and a set of (very real) signals in the brain.

The value of different desires depends on the relationships that exist between those desires and other desires. Desires that tend to fulfill other desires are desires that we have reason to promote. Desires that tend to thwart other desires are desires that we have reason to inhibit. As an agent, if I act so as to fulfill my desires given my beliefs, and I know that other agents will act to fulfill their desires given their beliefs, then I have reason to cause others to have desires that will fulfill my desires. And they have reason to cause me to have desires that will fulfill their desires.

Evanescent's mistake is in identifying these desires that tend to fulfill the desires of others as 'sacrifice'. An agent who acts so as to fulfill his desire to make the world a better place is no more engaged in 'sacrifice' than the agent who acts so as to fulfill his desire for chocolate ice cream. For such a person, 'leaving the world a better place' is simply his particular flavor of ice cream.

Evanescent closes his post with the following statement.

If you live, pursue happiness. It's your right. In fact, there is no other purpose in life.

And what of the person who pursues happiness by making the world a better place? What of the physician who finds happiness in bringing health to a sick child, or the teacher who enjoys teaching a new generation, or the dancer who enjoys giving the audience something that they value?

And what of the person who finds happiness raping children, or dominating and abusing slaves, or demonstrating his absolute tyranny over others through random and senseless slaughter just to show that he has power of life and death?

Certainly, of the different things that might make a person happy, we can recognize that it is better that people find happiness in some things rather than others. From this, it is a small step to recognize that the difference between 'sources of happiness' that we have reason to encourage, and 'sources of happiness' we have reason to discourage is the effect that those 'sources of happiness' have on others. It clearly makes sense to encourage others to adopt 'sources of happiness' that bring happiness to others, and to discourage 'sources of happiness' that bring pain to others.

Of course, I deny the happiness theory of value. I have shown repeatedly how, where happiness and truth take two different routes, value follows truth rather than happiness. I speak in terms of 'sources of happiness' above only to maintain focus on a key point. 'Sources of happiness' theory itself has additional problems. Those problems, in turn, can be corrected by switching to 'fulfillment of desires' theory. But we do not need to add that complicaiton at this time.

Lockhart, Hitchens, Atheism, and Morality

Christopher Hitchens, the author of "God is Not Great", commonly challenges theists to name a moral statement or a moral action that an atheist cannot also make. He offers this challenge as an answer to the proposition that atheists have a problem with morality.

On the charge that atheists have a problem with morality, I have a different response that I would like to propose.

One of the tactics that defines bigotry is the tactic of claiming that members of their target group have a problem with morality - which they assert without the slightest bit of evidence to back it up. They do this in order to dehumanize and to promote fear of the target group. The claim that atheists have a problem with morality is not a claim that people are driven to by the evidence. It is a claim that people are driven to by a want to hate others, and of inflating their own self-image by attacking others.

In other words, it is not my duty as an atheist to prove that I am innocent of this accusation of immorality. It is their duty to prove that I am guilty. To assume my guilt – to prejudge me without evidence – is a paradigm case of prejudice and shows that the accuser, not the accused, is the one who has a problem with morality.

However, since Hitchens has offered his challenge, others have tried to answer it. One answer that I have encountered recently is a pair of articles by Brian Lockhart: Responding to Hitchen's Ethical Challenge and Responding to Hitchens: Morality can, but need not, come from religion.

Lockhart starts off by saying that Hitchens is asking the wrong question. Lockhart then asks a different question. This is a very common way for a demagogue to cheat. "I cannot answer your question so let me ask myself a different question that I can answer."

The question that Lockhart seeks to answer is, "Does religion cause people to behave more morally than they would have otherwise behaved." He then goes on to answer this question by providing anecdotal evidence of three people who began to behave more morally once they "found God".

He tells the story of a soccer player, Tom Skinner, who, at one time, would have responded to an assault from a racist bigot with violence. After finding God, when assulted, he would instantly forgive his assailant and walk away.

Lockhart wrote about C.S. Lewis' transformation from a bitter person who avoided relationships to an open Christian sharing his life with others. And Lockhart wrote about the improvements in the quality of his own relationships once he found God.

I grew up in a church, but I distinctly remember the first time the Christian doctrine of grace actually made sense to me the summer after my sophomore year of college. I used to be a very bitter person. Since then, because of the recognition of God's grace, I have experienced an improved ability to forgive. Consequently, every relationship I have is different. My junior year, others said I literally changed before their eyes as they watched me become a better friend, son, brother, etc.

Problem #1: Lockhart's examples are anecdotal.

Lockhart's examples are like the claim that prayer cures illness because "I knew somebody who was sick whom the doctors had given up any hope on, who prayed daily, and was miraculously cured." Yes, and the obituary pages are filled with the names of people who prayed just as hard and just as devoutly who nonetheless died; and the front pages with the names of children who could have been saved if the parents had tried medicine instead of prayer.

Lockhart asserts:

I am saying that I need to recognize God's grace to better forgive. One cannot argue with testimony. To claim that another worldview would have the same effect on me is unfounded arrogance.

No, it is unfounded arrogance to trust anecdotal evidence and 'testimony' – to assume that one knows what the right answer is and to allow no objections to be raised against it. Research is filled with examples that show testimony to be extremely unreliable. From optical illusions, to studies where researchers stage a crime and then ask eye witnesses what they witnessed, to confabulation, to planted memories, to experiments involving choice under controlled conditions where the researcher can determine the agent's reasons for action better than the agent can.

Evolutionary theorists can explain why testimony is so unreliable. In the wild, if we do not perceive that we are on the top of the cliff, or how far that branch is from this branch, or the predator stalking us from the bush, we die. The advantage goes to those who can most accurately perceive threats and mates in the outside world. But it gives us no advantage to know our own mental processes.

The antelope needs to be able to perceive lion-sign in the brush and to run away when lion sign reliably suggests the presence of a lion. The antelope gains nothing from a better understanding of its own beliefs about lion-sign or his desire to run.

So, we have a theory that explains how unreliable testimony is, and empirical research to back up the theory. It is not 'unfounded arrogance' to go with empirical observation backed by theory. It is 'unfounded arrogance' to go against empirical observation backed by theory and to rely instead on anecdotal evidence cherry-picked and interpreted to give the illusion of supporting one's favorite hypothesis.

Problem #2: Real meaning requires real value.

Lockhart also wrote:

I concluded that Hitchens misses the point of religion. The purpose of adhering to religious beliefs is not to be better than nonbelievers, it is to improve oneself and find meaning for moral actions that were otherwise absent.

A person cannot find meaning where there is no meaning to be found.

In saying this, I am not saying that life (or the things we can do in our life) has no meaning or no value. That is false. I am saying that real meaning requires real value. Since God almost certainly does not exist, the meaning or value that one finds in serving God almost certainly does not exist.

In order for a life to have real meaning, it must be attached to real-world value.

Lockhart allows that an atheist can find meaning without God.

I stated that God is necessary for morality to have meaning. This was way off base and, quite frankly, arrogant. I now recognize that people find meaning in places that I do not, and I cannot argue with where people find their own meaning.

But this leads to an important difference between the two world views. Person A finds meaning in bringing health to a sick child, but does so only on the condition that a loving God exists. In the absence of a God, he is indifferent to bringing health to a sick child - it has no value. Person B, on the other hand, values bringing health to a sick child for its own sake. Regardless of whether or not a God exists, a child has been brought to health. The child suffers less and knows more happiness and comfort. To Person B, that has value for its own sake.

Let us combine this with Lockhart's statement, "God can be neither proved nor disproved." If this is true, then the meaning that Person A is trying to find cannot be proved or disproved. He can only reach the conclusion that his act of bringing health to a sick child has meaning as a matter of faith, not fact. Furthermore, even if a God exists, we need further evidence of what God values to know anything of the value of brining health to a sick child. What if God enjoys the suffering of a child, and created a world in which there were so many ways for children to suffer in order to satisfy this need? Then, what does this do to the value of bringing health to a sick child?

However, the value that Person B finds in bringing health to a sick child is not at all contingent on the existence or the interests of a God.

Unlike the type of theist that Lockhart writes about, where value depends on the existence of a God, there are few (if any) atheists where value depends on the non-existence of a God. This type of theist says, "If there were no God, these things are meaningless." The atheist says, "Even if their is a God, these things would still have value. No God who fails to respect the value if bringing health to a sick child is worthy of my respect." When the atheist fixes value in something that even the theist knows to be real - the health of a child - the atheist's value becomes much more solid, and much less a matter of faith, than the theist's value.

There is a separate argument to be made that the person who values the health of a child for its own sake – without regard to whether or not a God exists – is more noble than the person who would be indifferent to the health of a child if no God exists. The first person will see reason to continue to treat sick children regardless of his beliefs about God. To him, bringing health to children is what has value and meaning, not serving God. Whereas the second person, if he were to come to believe that no God exists, would throw up his hands and say that none of this has any value or meaning, and judge the fact that children sicken and die as insignificant.

As a matter of fact, I do not think that there are very many Christians who are as vicious as they often paint themselves to be. People who claim that the health of a child would have no value to them without God, I suspect, would still value the health of a child in the absence of a God. They simply like to claim that the health of a child would have no meaning, as a way of giving their religion a significance it does not have. They are as unlikely to become indifferent to the suffering of a child in the absence of a god as they are unlikely to become indifferent to their own physical pain.

The Meaning of Friendship

This brings us back to the first question, the question of testimony. Lockhart said that the quality of his relationships improved once he acquired a certain interest in God. However, now that he has acquired these relationships, would he abandon them if he should now come to doubt God's existence? If he would, what would that say about the quality of those relationships, compared to the quality of the atheist's relationships?

Could Lockhart seriously go up to the most important person in his life today and say, "If not for the existence of God, your welfare means nothing to me. You could be screaming in the worst agony, and I could rescue you with the touch of a button, but I would find no value in doing so, unless I also believed that a God exists."

For me, a person who could say such a think does not really value me as a friend. If he valued me as a friend, he would care about my suffering even if no God existed. As I care about the welfare of my friends, even though I believe that no God exists. Who is the better friend? The person whose concern for your welfare is contingent on the belief in a God, or the person whose concern for your welfare does not come with conditions?

Hitchens asked the question of whether there is a moral act or statement that a theist can make that an atheist cannot make. The types of examples that Lockhart brought up do not answer the challenge. To the degree that belief in a God contributes to the quality of a person's life and, in particular, improves the way he treats others, Lockhart has to argue that atheists are incapable of realizing those same values. Either that, or he must argue that relationships that are conditional on a belief that a God exists are somehow 'better than' relationships that do not have these types of conditions placed on them.

Washington Post Supports Anti-Atheist Bigotry

The King of Saudi Arabia wants to bring about peace in the Middle East by uniting the three Abrahamic religions – Christianity, Islam, and Judaism – against atheists.

According to the Times of London:

"If God wills it, we will then meet with our brothers from other religions, including those of the Torah and the Gospel to come up with ways to safeguard humanity," he added. The king, who is the guardian of the holy sites of Mecca and Medina, said the major faiths shared a desire to combat "the disintegration of the family and the rise of atheism in the world". . . . King Abdullah said "I have noticed that the family system has weakened and that atheism has increased. That is an unacceptable behavior to all religions, to the Koran, the Torah and the Bible.”

Source: The Carpet Bagger Report: Saudi king seeks new crusade against atheists.

Okay, what can we expect from a moral monster such as the King of Saudi Arabia. He needs a diversion. He needs to point the global finger at somebody else and say, “Look! Over there!” while he preserves his misogynistic monarchy.

But . . . that’s not the news that caught my attention.

The Washington Post agrees. In an editorial called, “A Hint of Tolerance” , the Washington Post wrote:

Last week, Saudi King Abdullah delivered a little-noticed but potentially momentous statement calling for an interfaith dialogue among Saudi Muslims, Christians and Jews. Saying he had the support of the official Saudi clergy, King Abdullah said "the idea is to ask representatives of all monotheistic religions to sit together with their brothers in faith and sincerity to all religions as we all believe in the same god."

The Washington Post added:

The king didn't offer details . . .

Um . . . Mr. Post . . . the King certainly did offer details. He wants to start a joint Jihad/Crusade against atheists.

What the Washington Post editorial staff did was ignore the details, telling their readers that those details did not exist because . . . well, apparently, the safety and well-being of atheists around the world is not of much concern to the Washington Post editorial staff.

Still, the implicit recognition of other religions and the message of tolerance was a radical and welcome break from the message of Sheik Barak.

As Morbo points out in the Carpetbagger Report:

Imagine if Abdullah has singled out just about any other class of people. Pretend he had said Hinduism is increasing, and this is unacceptable. Substitute Buddhists, Sikhs, followers of Confucius or whatever. Can you imagine the uproar? Would any Christian or Jewish religious leader endorse such talks?

My question: Would the Washington Post have written an editorial calling this joint conference for the purpose of attacking Buddhists or Hindus “A Hint of Tolerance?”

Atheists, however, are a legitimate target – or at least a group whose targeting is of no concern - not only in Saudi Arabia, but on the editorial board of the Washington Post.

What is worse even than this is that, as I understand it, the Washington Post is a fairly well read newspaper. Furthermore, its readership consists of at least a few people who knew about what the Saudi King was proposing in this meeting of the representatives of the monotheistic religions – even thought the Washington Post decided not to mention it in their editorial.

And, yet, even those readers gave the endorsement of a joint Crusade/Jihad against atheists a pass. At least . . . it took me two weeks to find out about it.

You can contact the Washington Post at: ombudsman@washpost.com

E2.0: Robert Winter: The Nature of (Musical) Genius

This is the 32nd 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.

Robert Winter came to the Enlightenment 2.0 conference to discuss Beethoven. Or, more precisely, he came to discuss Beethoven’s genius. He came to make some comments as to what Beethoven’s genius was and what it was not and to direct the neuroscientists into the audience in what to study.

He looks at three popular myths that have become a part of the understanding of most people we think of as ‘genius’.

One of these theories that Winter dismissed out of hand is that Beethoven was simply ‘taking dictation from God’. God fed the ideas into Beethoven’s brain and Beethoven simply needed to write down the notes. This theory is disputed, in part, because we have Beethoven’s rough drafts – and rough drafts are hardly necessary if one is ‘taking dictation from God’

Another popular way of thinking about Beethoven’s genius is to day that he was crazy in some way. According to Winter, we like to think of geniuses as crazy. However, as a ‘theory of genius’ it does not do us much good. Winter did not speak precisely as to Beethoven’s state of mental health, though his tone did suggest some dislike for the idea. One of the things that can be said against this hypothesis is that ‘crazy’ is not much of an explanation. It does not give us any insight into how Beethoven was able to create the works that he did.

A third theory that Winter looked at was what he called the ‘People Magazine’ account of Beethoven – the idea that he was trying to work out certain aspects of relationships that he had with his father and with an ‘immortal beloved’ that Beethoven never identified by name. Winter dismissed the idea that Beethoven was working out his relationship with his father through his music by simply asserting that Beethoven had no respect for or interest in his father and did not give enough thought to him to have anything to work out.

Besides, as it turns out, we have a great many notes from Beethoven talking about his own works. Beethoven lost his hearing and, as a result, communicated with many people by writing. These ‘conversation notebooks’ contain records of a lot of Beethoven’s conversations. We do not have to guess as to what he was thinking. (Well, we have to guess a little, because Anton Schindler doctored many of the records in order to promote a particular perception of Beethoven.)

Plus, as I mentioned above, we have his drafts.

Winter wants the neuroscientists to look at three qualities that he thinks made Beethoven a genius. One of these three things comes from the drafts of Beethoven’s works – the fact that Beethoven engaged in trial and error.

Winter played some of Beethoven’s drafts, and they truly were horrible. They were laughably bad. But, then, these were the options that Beethoven did not use – the ones we do not hear today because they ended up on the cutting room floor. Beethoven engaged in trial and error. He experimented.

And he kept on experimenting. According to Winter, there are dozens to hundreds of drafts before Beethoven finally settled on a final version. In understanding Beethoven’s genius Winter wants the neuroscientists to take a look at tenacity and find out how it works. Tenacity, and curiosity, which Winter says are, “the two most important components of genius.”

The idea is for neuroscientists to rid the discussion of genius from a bunch of myths and folk-theories that are not making any meaningful contribution. The idea is for neuroscientists to get at what is really going on in a composer’s head while he is composing music. Then, from this, to see if we can discover something scientifically substantive and useful about what it takes to be a musical (or other kind of) genius.

E2.0: David Brin: The Great Silence and the Enlightenment

This is the 31st 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.

Welcome back to the weekend series on the Beyond Belief conference, “Enlightenment 2.0”. Our next speaker is David Brin, astronomer and science fiction author.

Brin is concerned about the great silence – about the fact that this huge universe exists, and yet there is no evidence of any other occupants within it. The hypothesis that explains this observations is that something (or some combination of things) prevents civilizations from reaching a point where they actually become space-faring (or at least space-communicating) civilizations. Given how far we have come in just 10,000 years, and the fact that we already are a space-communicating civilization and expect to become more so very rapidly, we have to ask . . .

Where is everybody?

What’s getting in the way of everybody else, and what should we be on the lookout for?

Brin’s suggestion is that the problem is feudalism, and the solution to this problem is the enlightenment.

The problem is that, the instant that people started to make tools that they can use to harvest the crops, they have turned those tools into weapons for attacking their neighbors – taking their women and their wheat. This situation, which he loosely calls ‘feudalism’ is the natural state of mankind.

There is another state, called ‘enlightenment’, that allows for tremendous progress. However, it is a very unstable state. There are always people trying to cheat – trying to get advantage over others through violence and other forms of cheating. They seek to recreate a feudal state – of course, one in which they are the feudal masters.

He complained against the libertarians that the great enemy of markets is not government bureaucracy. The great enemy of markets is the aristocracy, or would-be aristocracy. These people sit at the heads of their empires and want to secure their position. The way they do so is by using the power that they have as the heads of their empires to secure their position, to create feudal policies where they may maintain their position and pass it on intact to their children.

From Brin’s description, we can see how the aristocracy would be opposed to income taxes (which shrink the size of their kingdom) and an inheritance tax (which gets in the way of their handing their empires down to their children).

In order to explain how to counter these feudalistic tendencies he draws upon the writings of John Locke. What we need is a set of institutions that helps to promote our better natures, while it suppresses our baser natures. (This sounds very much like the description that I have given to morality – an institution for promoting desires that tend to fulfill other desires, and to inhibit desires that tend to thwart other desires.)

The tools that Brin wants us to use to promote our better natures and inhibit our baser natures are the four great “accountability arenas” – Markets, Democracy, Science, and Law Courts. In each of these arenas, competing ideas come in to do battle, but do so within a system of rules that “keeps the bloodshed to a minimum.”

This stands in contrast to the feudal system mostly in terms of the lack of concern over the amount of blood that has been shed in the feudal system. Feudalism is the violent confrontation of one system that cares little about the amount of bloodshed – turning farm tools into weapons and robbing one’s neighbor of its food and kidnapping its women. Often, the aristocrats themselves enjoy charging into the fray.

If we lose the enlightenment, and if we let the aristocrats win (by allowing the aristocrats to take control of government and to establish a feudal government with each business conglomerate being the modern version of an ancient feudal holding, with workers as serfs working in the feudal holdings, then, according to Brin, it will be 10,000 years before we will have another chance to rise from that feudal society.

The difference, Brin suggests, between the human race becoming another one of those civilizations in the world that nobody ever hears about, and our becoming the civilization that moves out among the stars and, perhaps, adopts the task of helping other civilizations, is whether or not we can hold on to the enlightenment.

I have a problem with Brin’s presentation in that he has this grand theory, but he has nothing to back it up. I have, in my life, heard a lot of people offer a grand “Theory of Everything” that explains a wide variety of phenomena. In Brin’s case, he seeks to explain everything from the rise of civilization to the great silence (the absence of extraterrestrial civilizations willing to talk to us). I simply find it difficult to put much stock in those types of claims.

I have argued in this blog that truth certainly has value. We aim to fulfill our desires, but we act so as to fulfill our desires given our beliefs. False beliefs tends to get in the way of us acting so as to fulfill our desires. It is easy to imagine the things that we would have done differently, and the things we would do differently today, if we only had true beliefs.

The four institutions that Brin mentions – markets, democracy, science, and courts of law – are designed to provide people with information. The relationship between science and a well constructed court system and the truth is obvious. The power of markets comes precisely from the fact that price carries a tremendous amount of information and ties that information to reasons for action.

I have trouble seeing democracy as a tool for truth. It does provide a set of rules for avoiding bloodshed – the decision that we will all bind ourselves to the expressed will of the majority. However, what the majority believes is not necessarily true, and embracing the beliefs of the majority is not the same thing as embracing truth.

In place of ‘democracy’ I would put ‘liberty’ in this category. Liberty has value in that we are better off to the degree that the person who makes decisions for an individual should be the person who is the most knowledgeable and the least corruptible agent possible. Giving the job to somebody who is less knowledgeable or more corruptible means that value that the first agent would have acquired will likely be missed. In other words, the individual will be worse off.

I’m not going to tie this to the absence of other voices from space, however. When it comes to explaining why we have not heard from other civilizations, I am at a loss. I look at our civilization, and to what we could accomplish in the next few thousand years. We already know how to build beacons that can communicate across half the universe. A society in the Milky Way that had beaten us to this level of civilization even by a mere hundred thousand years should be noticeable to us.

So, where are they?

And . . . it suggests that there might be something wrong with the basic assumptions that I make about the universe, if those assumptions predict that there would be voices out there to talk to us, and there are no voices. This suggests that something about those assumptions may be mistaken. Or, our corner of the universe has suffered an unusually large quantity of bad luck.

I do not need to make grand statements on how a lack of concern for truth explains the great silence. Truth has value enough for us, regardless of what the reasons for the great silence actually turn out to be. Truth (information) is the means by which acting so as to fulfill our desires given our beliefs actually results in fulfilling our desires.

That’s really all that I need.

Why I Care About Anti-Atheist Bigotry

I have spent a fair amount of effort these last few days asserting, strongly, that atheists need to do a better job of defending themselves. I even postponed my weekend series on the Beyond Belief 2 conference to stay on topic.

I obviously think that this is important.

At the same time, I deny that there is anything particularly virtuous in being an atheist. I consider atheism itself to be morally neutral, since neither the proposition "God exists" nor the proposition, "God does not exist" gives us any hint as to how we should behave. We have to look elsewhere for that information. When it comes to looking elsewhere, atheists have shown just as much skill at embracing foolish ideas as theists.

So, if atheism is not a virtue, then why is anti-atheist bigotry a vice?

There is one easy answer to this question.

You don't have to argue that blacks are better than whites to argue that they deserve equal treatment. And you do not need proof that women are better than men to argue that people should see men and women as political and social equals. Similarly, I do not need to argue that atheists are better than theists to argue that government practices that denigrate atheists are unfair and unjust.

Insofar as an injustice is being committed against atheists, a love of justice alone is sufficient motivation to condemn it – just as it is sufficient motivation to protest the unjust treatment of blacks and women (among others).

In addition, the attitudes that the public hold, and that the government promotes, against atheists constitute doing malicious harm to good people.

Look again at the types of statements that I am referring to.

President Bush declaring that no atheist is fit to sit as a judge in the United States, because to be a qualified judge one has to believe that our rights come from God.

A Pledge of Allegiance repeated daily in schools and at the start of civic events that say, "A person who does not favor 'one nation under God' is like a person who does not favor 'liberty and justice for all'."

A national motto that people are driven to put up in more and more places that says, "Only those who trust in God are to think of themselves as one of us."

A sign on a freeway that says, "(Why do) atheists hate America."

The message, after every act of school violence and every time that the topic of prayer in school is brought up, that, "Atheists are going to come to school and kill your children and the only way to prevent this is to fight the atheist murderers with prayer in school."

A legislator who declares, "You believe in destroying. It is dangerous for children to even know that your philosophy exists."

A movie, opening across the country today, that will tell its audience that atheists are proto-Nazis who will bring about another holocaust if they are not held in check.

A message, that you can almost certainly find repeated somewhere every single day, that a person who does not believe in God has a problem with morality is a mortal threat to everybody's safety and happiness.

In many of these cases, the message that atheists are inherently evil comes to your children in the form of a paid 'patriotic' announcement brought to you by your very own government.

And the question is, "Why do I care?"

Other than the fact that I am one of these people who could never qualify to be a judge, is like a person who is opposed to liberty and justice for all, who is not to think of myself as being 'one of us', hates America, is responsible for every school shooting that occurs, believes in destroying, is somebody that children should not even know exists, am working to bring about the next holocaust, and has a serious problem with morality.

Why do I care?

I think about the college atheist pursuing a degree in pre-law, with an acute interest in Constitutional issues, not because he has already decided what view he wants to impose on others from the bench, but with an eye to looking at what makes one decision truly better than another, hearing that no atheist is qualified to be judge and certainly cannot expect to be appointed.

I think about the nine or ten year old student who does not really understand the world around him just yet but who knows that the government and his teacher is telling him to favor 'one nation under God,' and what this means about those other people who say that there is no God.

I think about this student's atheist classmate who hears the government telling him that the fact that this 'god' stuff doesn't make sense to him. It makes him a bad person – as bad as somebody who does not support liberty and justice for all.

I think about the atheist 100% disabled American veteran who gave so much to this country attending a ceremony to honor veterans, when somebody read a statement over the loud speaker that concluded with:

. . . once you are done complaining, whining, and griping about our flag, our pledge, our national motto, or our way of life, I highly encourage you to take advantage of one other great American freedoms, the right to leave.

[Note: That is what happened to my father, who described his service in the military as an atheist in this letter to me.]

I think about the high school student who wants to spend his life doing good deeds and is thinking about a lifetime of public service discovering that no atheist can be elected to the legislature.

However, even this ignores another serious problem. This form of bigotry is symptomatic of another, more general problem that victimizes not only those who do not believe in God.

The bigot's way of thinking is to take their hatred for a group and to use that to evaluate the 'evidence' he might come across. It teaches people to think in terms of, "I hate these people. If these people are guilty of X then this would be a good reason to hate them. Therefore, these people must be guilty of X."

This general way of thinking not only victimizes atheists today, but has been the general way of thinking that has been responsible for the greatest atrocities in history. Slavery, the Holocaust, the near-genocide of the Native Americans, religious wars, anti-homosexual legislation in the United States, and the like follow this same pattern.

"I want to hate these people. To hate these people I need an excuse. I can use X as an excuse. Therefore, I accept X."

This general tendency, this 'bigot's way of thinking' is what I actually care about.

It is a specific instance of what got us into a needless war in Iraq – a war that destroyed resources and lives that would have otherwise been available to do something constructive about the world's problems.

"I need to believe that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction. If these are chemical weapons vehicles then Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction. Therefore, these must be chemical weapons vehicles."

"I need to believe that Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9/11. If an aide to Saddam Hussein met with one of the hijackers in Europe than Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9/11. Therefore, one of Saddam Hussein’s aids met with one of the hijackers in Europe."

Or, "It would be bad for business if carbon dioxide contributed to global warming. If the sun was responsible for global warming then we do not need to worry about carbon dioxide. Therefore, the sun is responsible for global warming."

Or, "I have to believe that God is responsible for human life. If these components of life were irreducibly complex then we would have to make room for God in the creation of human life. Therefore, these components of life are irreducibly complex."

We see this way of thinking all around us, and it is so incredibly destructive. It costs so many lives and brings about so much suffering that a person concerned with saving lives and preventing suffering cannot help but care whenever he sees evidence of this kind of thinking.

I do not think that there is anything particularly virtuous about being an atheist. However, it is quite clear that there is something particularly vicious about being somebody whose hatred drives him to accept malicious falsehoods about other people and who then lobbies the government into teaching these malicious falsehoods to the next generation. There is something particularly vicious about being a person who is so consumed by hatred that the one thing he finds most intolerable is the idea that the government might stop delivering this message of hate to young children, and that the next generation might not grow up with the hatred that the bigot wants that generation to have.

I can imagine a generation of children growing up without learning this particular bigotry. I think about a generation that gets a different lesson – that it is wrong to begin with an attitude of hate and then grab onto whatever beliefs one can find that gives one's hate the mere illusion of legitimacy.

I think about such a world and I can't help but think that it would be a better place.

I was quite angry last week at the tame (and lame) response to Davis' comments. It simply reinforced all of the other negative messages that people hear about atheists. It simply aggrivated all of the other situations that I described above. She should have lost her job over that. We should have sent a message to the people of this country - to the children of this country - how wrong it is to be a bigot like Ms. Davis. Instead, they learned that the view that atheists "believe in destroying" isn't a horrible message at all. Which, at least, is consistent with all of the other messages that children hear on this subject.

It really is time to demand that the country change the message. The next generation will have reason to thank us if we do.

Michael Medved: No Atheist President

Michael Medved wrote an article recently in townhall.com in which he declared that Americans are right to resist an atheist as President. It has brought a lot of attention to this blog, particularly from people who think that my post, “More Perspective on the Pledge” (and the book that came out of it, "A Perspective on the Pledge") provides an effective counter to Medved's claim.

Medved used as a part of his argument that America is right to reject an atheist President because the Pledge of Allegiance contains the word "under God".

Then there's the significant matter of the Pledge of Allegiance. Would President Atheist pronounce the controversial words "under God"? If he did, he’d stand accused (rightly) of rank hypocrisy. And if he didn't, he'd pointedly excuse himself from a daily ritual that overwhelming majorities of his fellow citizens consider meaningful.

In other words, he is arguing that the Pledge of Allegiance, as written, is a de facto religious test for public office in that only a person who can sincerely say the Pledge of Allegiance as written is fit to be President. Or, to put it another way, the purpose that 'under God' serves in the Pledge of Allegiance is to help keep atheists out of public office.

The story, More Perspective on the Pledge, aimed to show the bigotry in the Pledge of Allegiance by examining the effect of a similar pledge – a pledge to “one white nation” in a country called 'Ameryca' – on the life of a black high school student named Shawn Henry. Shawn argues in the book that the word 'white' was added to the Pledge of Allegiance primarily as a way of putting black candidates at a political disadvantage and, thus, to make sure that government power remains in the hands of white Amerycans - the same way that 'under God' was inserted to keep political power out of the hands of atheists and in the hands of religious Amerycans. This is one of several arguments that Shawn uses in the course of the book to reject the Pledge.

Using the arguments in that book, it would be a simple matter to create a parody of Medved's argument by introducing a character into the book that argues why Ameryca is right to resist a black President.

This Amerycan version of Medved would start off with arguments that Ameryca is right to resist a black President because of "Hollowness and Hypocrisy at State Occasions." I would only need to introduce a number of popular rituals, such as a Pledge of Allegiance to 'one white nation', designed by white Amerycans declaring the great value to be found in being a white Amerycan.

Then, my Amerycan Medved could sensibly write:

[B]ut truly overwhelming majorities cherish such traditions. The notion of dropping or altering all references to the superiority of the white race on public occasions to avoid discomfort for a single individual amounts to a formula for a disastrously unpopular presidency.

Well, yes, we may assume that a black Presidency in such a heavily racist society would be 'unpopular'. Yet, we must remember that Medved is attempting to argue that it is right for Ameryca to resist a black President. The fact that a black President would not be a popular leader is hardly an argument for saying that keeping blacks out of public office is the right thing to do. It may well be the case that the right thing to do would be to start fighting the prejudice (including the state rituals that maintain the prejudice) that keep blacks out of public office.

The Amerycan version of Medved would continue his argument by claiming that a black President would simply not be able to relate to Ameryca's white citizens. He would write about how it must be the case that, if the President were black, white Amerycans would only be able to take this as a put-down – as, itself, a denigrating statement – about white Amerycans.

To break the analogy for a moment, Medved argues that we could have a Jewish President, but not an atheist President. For some reason, "A leader who touts his non-belief will, even with the best of intentions, give the impression that he looks down on the people who elected him."

But, then, isn't the Jewish religion a form of non-belief? Isn't it an expression of a non-belief in the divinity of Jesus? If so, then why is it not the case that touting this non-belief (in the divinity of Jesus) will ‘give the impression that he looks down on the people who elected him'?

The difference is that Medved is using the existence of a prejudice to justify prejudice. "Because we are anti-atheist bigots, we have a moral right to resist an atheist President. The reason we do not have the same right to resist a Jewish President is because we are not anti-Jewish bigots." Medved blinds himself to the fact that, by his own argument, if Americans saw the denial of the divinity of Jesus as a sign that the Jew 'looks down on' the Christian, then Americans would also be right to resist a Jewish President.

Now, back to the analogy. The Amerycan version of Medved would then close his argument by noting that Ameryca is surrounded by countries that have an even stronger dislike for blacks than Ameryca. The reason Ameryca should not elect a black President, according to this argument, is that a black President would be unable to negotiate with those countries where – well, to be honest, they simply do not tolerate blacks in those countries.

Being surrounded by such a prejudice would in fact, be an important practical consideration. It has practical value in the same way that if our United States were surrounded by cultures that refused to deal with women as political equals, then we would have reason to resist having a female President.

However, there is a distinction here between a practical consideration and a moral consideration. Immoral people, when they put a gun to our head or threaten to harm the people we care about (or even strangers we don’t know but who do not deserve to be harmed) can sometimes force us to do things that are otherwise wrong.

Bigoted foreign powers might force us to reject an otherwise well qualified President. However, this would be an example of performing an immoral act while under an external threat that has power over us. It would not be an example of performing a moral act. It would be an argument for getting out from under that external threat – to weaken it, so that it no longer has the ability to threaten those whom we love in order to get us to do things that are wrong.

Conclusions

There are three main points that are relevant to this posting.

(1) Michael Medved is a hate-mongerng bigot, as are any readers who read through his trash and nod in agreement.

And the world is a worse place because of him. People are worse off than they would have otherwise been if Medved had decided to be a fair and just individual, rather than a hate-mongering bigot.

A fair and just person would begin with the assumption that there should be no discrimination against an atheist candidate. He would look with suspicion on any argument that claims otherwise as a sign that the person making it is embracing the argument to rationalize his own bigotry. He would be forced into the conclusion – recognize the need to yield to discriminatory practices – only when the weight of the arguments forced him into it.

Medved was so eager to embrace arguments of such stunning weakness, that we may conclude that he did not approach this issue the way a fair and just person would have done so. He approached it with the mind of a bigot, looking for any excuse that would give his bigotry even an illusion of legitimacy. He was not driven to his conclusions by the weight of the evidence. Rather, his fondness for the conclusion drove him to accept evidence that a fair and just person would have recognized as seriously flawed rationalizations.

(2) Medved has a very low opinion of what Christians are morally capable of doing.

Medved’s argument depends on a description of a Christian as somebody who cannot accept the idea of an atheist as a political equal. On Medved's account of what a 'Christian' is, it would be impossible for a Christian to have an atheist as a friend or a peer (a co-worker or a team member), or to love an atheist child or sibling or parent. Medved's 'Christian' must view the mere existence of an atheist as an insult to his religious beliefs. (But not, for some reason, the Jew.)

Contrary to Medved’s view of Christians, I suggest that there are a lot of Christians who are on friendly terms with atheists and able to give atheists the same respect they give Jews and Muslims. Every one of these instances belies Medved’s description of a Christian as somebody who must necessarily find atheism unacceptable.

In fact, Medved's account goes beyond claiming that Christians are incapable of seeing atheists as political ppers. He says that it is 'right' to resist an atheist President. This suggests that, if one has to choose between being a Christian who accepts atheists as fellow citizens and being a Christian who cannot do so, the 'right' option is to choose to be the intolerant Christian. By which we can infer that, according to Medved, it would be 'wrong' to choose to be the tolerant Christian.

(3) 'Under God' and 'In God We Trust' are de facto religious tests for public office. Their purpose is to put atheists at a political disadvantage – to make it harder for voters to support atheist candidates. And they are very effective in that regard. "If you can't say the Pledge of Allegiance at your own political rallies, then you cannot get my vote."

Now, it is widely known that while the Constitution prohibits a religious test for public office, it is not illegal for citizens to use a religious test. However, 'Under God' and 'In God We Trust' are both government-supported religious tests for public office. Their practical (and intended) effect is to put such a heavy disadvantage on any candidate who does not support ‘one nation under God’ or who does not 'trust in God' that their practical effect is to disqualify those candidates from public office.

Between now and the end of June, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals will render a decision on 'under God' and 'In God We Trust'. When that happens, remaining silent on whether these practices should continue implies giving consent to a principal that no atheist is fit to hold public office – that to be a qualified public servant one must support 'one nation under God' and be a member of the group 'we' mentioned in 'In God We Trust'.

I wrote the story, "More Perspective on the Pledge", to highlight the bigotry inherent in these practices, and I wrote the book, "A Perspective on the Pledge", to gather the arguments surrounding this issue in one convenient location.

I think it would be a good idea to give the matter some attention, and to be ready with a course of action when the 9th Circuit Court of Opinion’s decision hits the news. I think it would be a good idea to prepare to be very loud in one's protest that practices aiming to keep atheists out of public office are both immoral and unconstitutional. So that, some day, we can have a country that does not resist an atheist President.

Respect for Religious (and Other) Beliefs

In a continuing discussion of atheists standing up for their beliefs, I would like to address another obstacle to discussion and debate - a false dichotomy.

“Either you are an ally in our fight to rid the world of faith, or you share responsibility for all of the religiously motivated terrorism and violence that we see in the world today.”

“Either you are for us, or you are for the terrorists.”

It is a simple-minded way of looking at the world suitable for people who cannot handle more complex realities.

Where do I stand on the issue of tolerance for religion?

Well, imagine that you are with a group of people who have crash-landed on an island. Let us assume a rather mild climate. What is your first order of business: (a) resolve the issue of whether or not a god exists, or (b) find a source of clean drinking water?

I would vote for (b).

The first option can wait. It’s not important.

Now, let’s look to the question of finding water. Let’s say we have two people in the group. One is a geologist. He looks at the rock formations and points to a place where he thinks there is a good chance of finding water. Another member of the group says that he has a magical method of finding water, or a method whereby if he prays hard enough then God will plant knowledge on where to find water in his head.

Now, I ask the geologist, “When you point to a place to find water, how often to people actually find water?” The answer (as determined by a history of empirical observation) is “Fifty percent.”

I ask the magician and the theist, “When you point to a place to find water, how often to people actually find water?” Based from a long history of empirical observation, let’s assume that the odds are no more than chance, about five percent.

On this matter, all I need to know is that 50% is better than 5%. We need water. We go with the option that gives us the best chance of finding water. That’s all that matters.

Now, let’s say that the magician and the theist say that I am not giving their beliefs sufficient respect. In order to show respect for their beliefs, I should give their methods equal consideration along side the methods of the geologists.

If I do not pretend that their method is as good as the geologist's, then I am being told that I am worthy of condemnation. After all, they say, there is nothing special about the scientific method. It is just another way of doing things.

In other words, respecting their belief means pretending that 5% = 50%.

Sorry, but that is not going to happen.

If the advocates of magic and prayer can find a method of success that exceeds or at least equals that of the geologiest in finding water, then they will be given a level of respect that exceeds or at least equals that of the scientist. Without a proven record of success, pretending that they are successful is foolish. It puts the lives, health, and well-being of those of us who are living on this island at risk.

Now, planet earth is an island in space. About 6.5 billion of us are crash-landed on this island. Today, we do not have enough clean water to go around. This is only one threat we have to the life, health, and well-being of the people who are living here. We need real-world solutions to real-world problems. As I see it, we can discuss the existence of God at another time. In the mean time, we need to pay attention to methods of dealing with real-world problems that have a demonstrable real-world effect.

It’s simply a matter of respecting the numbers, and respecting anything that shows a disposition to improving those numbers. Numbers do not lie, and they do not have any tolerance for human prejudice. Reality itself has no respect for our different beliefs. Reality does not care if you believe that a certain magical spell will cure a disease, or if you believe that a prayer can alter the course of a hurricane. If we want to protect ourselves from diseases and hurricanes we need to look at what has real-world effects on how they behave. If magic and prayer have a real-world effect, it will show up in the numbers. If it doesn't show up in the numbers, then they are of no use. Saving lives means paying attention to what does show up in the numbers.

I believe that the proposition that a god exists is almost certainly false. Even if a god exists, it is extremely unlikely that we know anything about what that god wants that would be useful. We have no good reason to assume that what we may think it wants is a reliable indication of what it wants as a matter of fact. The huge numbers of different stories that people have believed, and even the huge varieties of the stories that people believe today, means that for any particular story is almost certainly false.

What I do know is that when people started to actually compare different ways of doing things – comparing their chances of success – the methods that have actually shown constantly improving success rates have not needed to make any mention of a god. There is no god element in their formulas, and adding a god element does not do any good.

It would be quite nice if we could compare religions the way we compare drugs and new forms of crops. “When people pray to god X, we see a 35% chance of survival, but when they pray to god Y, we see a 50% chance of survival, so this suggests that we are better off praying to god X than god Y. This goes in support of the followers of god Y.”

But we see nothing like this. We have absolutely no empirical evidence showing us that, “Employing prayer type P1 to god G increases the chance that rain will fall by an inexplicable 5%” or “By passing law L outlawing sin S reduces hurricane frequencies by 20%.”

There have been plenty of opportunities to discover that prayer or some sort of religious observance prevents drought, helps needy people win at games of chance, cures disease, prevents accidents, alters the course of hurricanes, reduces the frequencies of hurricanes, and the like. So far . . . nothing.

Do you want me to respect your beliefs? Show me that you have a more reliable method of finding clean drinking water, curing disease, preventing the destruction of hurricanes, curing cancer, treating diabetes, determining the consequences of putting particular chemicals in our food, air, and water, and you have shown me that I have a reason to listen to what you have to say. Other than that . . . I go with what actually does provide benefits in these areas.

One area in which people make claims about the benefit of religion is that it reduces crime rates. Religion, it is said, has an effect on the possibility that you will be murdered, raped, robbed, or suffer some other form of violence that we have real-world reasons to want to avoid.

Really?

Show me the empirical evidence for this. And show me the different effects of different beliefs so that I can see which beliefs we really need to promote if we are going to see the greatest benefit in our crime rates.

One study that I know of compares the rates of various social ills with religiosity of the population suggests that people have lower chances of suffering these ill effects in a secular non-religious society. Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies.

This study looked at homicides, suicides (15 to 24 year olds), early childhood deaths (under five years old), life expectancy, gonorrhea infections (all ages and 15-19 year olds), syphilis infections (all ages and 15-19 year olds), abortions, and teen pregnancies (15 – 17 year olds), and found that the more highly religious America actually scored worse than more secular countries.

Of course, there are some important caveats that are necessary to prevent misinterpreting the data. The findings need to be replicated and one must rule out coincidence. However, at the very least, these data tell us that we have no good reason to suspect that religion is necessary to protect us from social ills. Those people who believe otherwise are not driven to that belief by the data. They have no data. They are driven to their conclusions by another force, by a desire to hate, that causes them to feel a special attraction to ideas that give their hate a confortable home. Throughout history, one of the most common comforts for the bigot is the unfounded idea that those they hate are simply incapable of acting morally for one make-belief reason or another. That is how many religious people treat secular philosophies - with maliciously false accusations of horrible consequences.

So, ultimately, I am interested in priorities. There are certain necessities that all of us should be able to agree that we need. We need to find clean water, enough food to eat, and shelter. We need security from diseases and natural disasters. Deciding that we need to resolve questions about whether a god exists before we put our efforts into solving common problems is absurd. However, in solving these problems, it is absurd not to put our efforts into projects that have a demonstrable record of success. And we need to get people out of the habit of inventing make-believe failures so that their hatred of some group or another can find a comfortable home.

That is how I would propose we make the real world a better place.

Appealing to “Moderate” Christians

I have seen a trend in the comments to my recent blog postings of interpreting my recent postings as suggesting that atheists should get together and organize protests against religion. Assuming that I am advocating something along the lines of Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, that religion is the great evil that must be eliminated, they have sought to argue against me by arguing against this position.

I have also picked up a substantial number of new readers in recent weeks who have not read prior posts in which I discussed these issues, so I should not be assuming that readers automatically know my position on these things.

So, let me briefly state some of these basic propositions.

(1) “At least one god certainly or almost certainly exists”, and “At least one god certainly or almost certainly does not exist,” are morally neutral statements. They tell us nothing about how we should behave. Even if a god exists, that god might be a malicious god who designed the earth and created human nature the way he did because he loves conflict. Every day he sits in his recliner with a can of beer and a bowl of chips watching a new episode of “Survivor Earth.” It’s not the existence or the non-existence of god that gives us moral guidance. We get that from the additional claims added to this claim about the existence or non-existence of God. When those additinal claims are junk, then we have problems.

(2) When it comes to tacking junk onto claims about the existence or non-existence of God, atheists are as good at making things up (that happen to be dead wrong) as theists. Branding all theists with the crimes of Stalin is bigotry, but Stalin does provide a counter-example to the idea that you can make somebody a better person just by getting them to believe that no God exists.

(3) There is nobody on the planet that agrees with you about everything. If you can’t get along with people who disagree with you, you are doomed to have a very lonely life

(4) Given that we have no choice but to accept and get along with people who disagree with us, our goal should be to distinguish between disagreements that are tolerable and those that are not (and how we are going to handle each). There is a clear difference between the person who says, “I believe that there is a loving god that commands me to feed the hungry and care for the sick,” and “I believe in a vengeful god that commands me to kill anybody who does not worship him as I do.” One is a false belief that we can comfortably ignore. The other is not.

(5) Rather than making both of these types of people our enemies, if we were rational, we would welcome the former as allies against the latter.

Anybody who has taken any of my last week’s postings as a protest against religion or faith have been reading things into my postings that are simply not there. In fact, you have read things into my postings that I have explicitly and repeatedly argued against.

I have only one posting in this entire blog that discusses the issue of whether God exists. This is precisely because I consider the issue to be unimportant. The important issues are those that put life, health, and well-being at risk. A belief in God does not necessarily do this. Many of the things that some people associate with belief in God do this, but there are a great many things advocated by people who do not believe in God that put life, health, and well-being at risk as well.

I have complained against atheists who have made bigoted statements when I have found them. For example, I objected when the Connecticut Valley Atheists put up a sign that said, “Imagine, no religion” that showed the World Trade Center, I protested that the group was making the unjust (and totally bigoted inference) that all religious people share blame for 9/11.

See, Connecticut Valley Atheists: Imagine and A Speech Proposal”

I have also protested against the claim that teaching religion to a child amounts to child abuse because child abuse requires malicious intent or reckless disregard for the child. This is simply not true in most cases. Some, true - such as this cult in Texas and parents who pray for the health of their child when she has an easily treatable disease - are guilty of reckless disregard for the child. But not all. (See Religion as Child Abuse).

My complaint is not against Christianity in specific, or belief in God in general.

My objection is that the statement, “No atheist is qualified to be judge,” is prejudicial and discriminatory – and that anybody, regardless of their religion, should be able to see that it is simply wrong for a President to hold this attitude.

My objection is that a pledge of allegiance that states that aims to teach children to view the person who does not favor ‘one nation under God’ the way he views one who does not favor ‘liberty and justice for all’ is an exercise in teaching bigotry is not a statement against Christianity. It is a statement against teaching bigotry - particularly to very young children. I trust that most Christians would see this type of bigotry as wrong if they ever got a chance to hear or read the argument.

My objection to Davis’ statement is that she uttered a derogatory falsehood that prejudices her and anybody who shares her views against the words and deeds of those who do not believe in God – a prejudice that makes her unfit to be a legislator. Any good Christian should be able to see this as well.

I am simply not talking about a protest in defense of atheism and against Christianity. I am talking about a protest by those in defense of equal respect in the eyes of the law and against government declarations of hatred and bigotry.

For atheists to sit and do nothing while waiting patiently for others to do the work would be like the blacks in the 1950s sitting in their homes waiting for white people to change the voting access laws and to eliminate “separate but equal”.

The blacks in the 1950s and 1960s needed to take the lead – to be at the head of the march for civil rights. And there was, indeed, an attempt at the time to cast their activities in terms of “black” versus “white”. However, what those who marched for civil rights - those who engaged in the 'sit ins' and the voter registration drives - were demanding were things that no just and fair white person could deny. There was nothing inconsistent in white people joining the marches and the rallies and fighting for the same cause – because the cause they were fighting for was not ‘blacks’. The cause they were fighting for was ‘justice’.

When it comes to responding to the bigotry and injustice that I have been talking about this week, I am talking about things for which atheists must take the lead. However, there is nothing in what I have written that should give a good Christian pause. It is not anti-Christian. It is anti-injustice. Just as no Christian would tolerate being on a witness stand and being told by a sitting legislator to ‘get out of that seat because you are a Christian and Christians have no right to be here, no fair and just Christian should tolerate a legislator telling an Atheist to ‘get out of that seat because Atheists have no right to be here.’

In asking the question, “Why don’t atheists defend themselves?” it seems that I must be asking a related question, “Where did we get the idea that atheists defending themselves is anti-Christian? Is it the case that blacks defending their rights is anti-White? Is it the case that women defending themselves is anti-Male?”

There will certainly be people who will want to distort the message and turn it into an “atheist’ versus “Christian” message. The will seek to promote the idea that Christians are being persecuted because Christians are being forced to treat atheists as political equals to be given equal respect under the law. However, the existence of people who will distort the message in order to promote hostility and manipulate the public does not imply that proponents of justice should give up. Of course the unjust are going to fight back. But this implies 'fight harder', not 'give up'.

Atheists, Protests, and Responses to Comments

Note: The contents of these recent posts are closely related to an earlier post I had written on The Culpability of the Moderates, which examines Martin Luther King's protest of the moderates of his age who also thought that inaction was better than action.

Do you want to know what is really wrong with The God Delusion and The End of Faith and those other new atheist works?

The problem is that they are books. You see, Christians use books. They fill their books with all sorts of myths and superstitions – and in some cases outright lies. We certainly do not want it to appear that we are like Christians. So, clearly, it is objectionable for atheists to present their ideas using this medium known as ‘books’. It would be unseemly. We want people to think of us as being above books.

Absurd, right?

Books are tools used in communication. Books themselves are not to be judged by whether or not there are people who have filled them with lies and propaganda, with sloppy thinking, or with hate-motivated bigotry. Each book is to be judged on its own merits – on what ideas the author was trying to communicate, and on how well they were communicated.

I bring this up because some people have written in protest of atheists protesting the abuses that they have been subject to in this country. By this I refer to abuses such as a Pledge that says that those who do not support ‘one nation under God’ are, in the eyes of this government, equivalent to those who do not support a nation ‘with liberty and justice for all’. I am speaking about a President stating that no atheist is qualified to be President, and a sitting legislator asserting that atheism is a philosophy of destruction and ‘it is dangerous for children to even know that your philosophy exists’. I am talking about signs on the money and going up in public buildings and classrooms across the country that say, “If you do not trust in God, then do not think of yourself as one of us.”

I have suggested that atheists have not only a right but a duty to protest these abuses, because failure to do so means giving consent to teaching the next generation that atheism is something to be ashamed of – that atheists are not and cannot be good people. To give our consent to the teaching of this bigotry (and silence does imply consent) is itself a contemptible act.

In response, some have protested that atheists should not engage in protests because this is what the Christians do.

The solution isn't to get whiny. That's the tool of our enemies.

We shouldn’t write books. Books are the tool of our enemies.

Well, there is a distinction between ‘get whiny’ and ‘write books’ in that ‘get whiny’ is a derogatory and demeaning term whereas ‘write books’ is morally neutral. Certainly, one cannot find a quote in my blog posting where I advocated ‘get whiny’. I would not advocate such a thing.

So, how about responding to what I did, in fact, advocate, which was to state – in a loud and confident voice – that a President has no moral right to exclude atheists from the post of judgeship because he does not believe that our rights come from God. What I advocated was to emphatically deny that schools have any right to teach children – children who are atheists, children who will become atheists, children who are the classmates of atheists, and children who will become co-workers, neighbors, bosses, and voters, that an atheist is no better than a person who opposes liberty and justice for all, and that a person who fails to trust in God is not good enough to be counted one of us.

If you fight fire with fire, you end up with a bigger fire. We shouldn't fight ignorant shouters with shouts, we should fight them with quiet words.

We should not fight lying or superstitious books with books. We should used whispered words instead. No?

A protest, like a book, is a tool for communication. The content of a protest, like the content of a book, is not to be judged simply by the fact that it is a protest (or a book). It is to be judged by its actual content – by the truth of what the speakers actually say. What distinguishes the type of shouting that I have in mind from ‘ignorant shouting’ is the fact that what I advocate shouting is not ignorant.

No President has the right to exclude atheists from the job of federal judge. If this is shouted, clearly, from the courthouse steps, it is not an ignorant shout. It is a true claim.

Words alone are not the only parts of communication that carry meaning. We also communicate meaning through tone, inflection, and body language. Smile, as your spouse walks through the door, and, handing her a flower, smile and say, “You are late.” Compare this to, for example, standing there with fists clenched and shouting, “You are late!” Identical words, in these cases, have entirely different meanings, because we do not use words alone to communicate meaning.

In fact, if you were furious at your spouse for being late, yet you greeted your spouse with a smile and a gift while playfully saying, 'You are late', you would be guilty of lying - because you are communicating something that is manifestly untrue

Similarly, the silence we hear when a President says that no atheist is fit to be a judge, or when a seated legislature says that atheism is a philosophy of destruction and "it is dangerous for children to even know that your philosophy exists" is a lie. Because the moral truth of the matter requires outrage.

Telling a person, “What you are doing is wrong,” while engaged in light-hearted banter carries a different meaning than shouting, “What you are doing is wrong!” from a megaphone on a court-house steps. And it is the latter meaning, in the types of cases that I have described, is closer to the truth. Telling people that they ought not to shout their objections to this behavior is the same as saying that there are certain truths that should not be spoken. The truth that should not be spoken is the truth that you find in, “What you are doing is wrong!” shouted forcefully from the courthouse steps.

We *can't* be the extremists. We have to be the normal, rational, calm, sensible ones.

We should not portray ourselves as extremists. We should portray ourselves as the moderates we are. The people looking out for *everyone*.

Any claim that I have anywhere advocated “portraying ourselves as extremists” is an outright lie. Nowhere have I advocated extremism, and to interpret my remarks as a defense of extremism is a form of lying – of ‘bearing false witness’ against what I said in fact. It is, unfortunately, a very common tactic – if you can’t refute what a person says, then accuse them of saying something that you can refute.

What is ‘extreme’ in saying that an atheist can be perfectly well qualified to be a judge and in condemning a President (or a party) that insists that no atheist is qualified to fill that role? Indeed, there are those who would like to see this as an extremist position – but those are the very people who want to limit the people who can be judges to those who believe that our rights come from God.

Because the point is this: the existence of *one* normal, nice, ethical atheist destroys the basis of *every* religion, makes *all* priests and witch doctors liars.

Sure. In the same way that the existence of *one* normal, nice, ethical Jew can prevent the Holocaust from happening, and the existence of *one* normal, nice, ethical African makes slavery impossible, and the existence of *one* intelligent, ethical woman guarantees that women everywhere and everywhen will always have the right to vote.

Try to get the Christian majority to grant us "equal rights" and we would accept their eternal power to give and take such rights.

Certainly, in the same way that women insisting on a right to vote helped men to maintain a monopoly on political power so that women were forever subject to their political rights on the whim of men, and the way that the civil rights movement actually made blacks more subservient to and dependent on the good grace of whites.

Rather than shout at Davis, atheists need to get better at cataloguing and blogging these sort of things. It's more than a full time job.

In a sense, this is what I advocate. My argument for removing Davis from her position was never an argument that it was necessary in order to teach her to change her mind. My argument that this is necessary to teach the country that the view that atheism is a ‘philosophy of destruction’ and ‘it is dangerous for children to even know that your philosophy even exists’ is a view held by contemptible people who deserve our condemnation, not our praise. It was because of a concern about what will happen when other politicians learn that Davis is actually more secure in her position, not less secure. It had to do with what children hear when they hear that Davis said this, and they heard that it came with no adverse consequences (as if it must be a perfectly legitimate thing for a person to say).

We can catalogue and blog about these things and talk about them amongst each other all we want – that will do no good. What we need to do is to present them to people who do not look at our catalogues or read our blogs – we must get these claims out where people can actually hear them. Otherwise, when a President says that no atheist is qualified to be judge, and nobody even hints that this might be a bad idea (except the group mumbling to itself in the corner – and they are the most hated group in America anyway) – then we should not be surprised to discover that more and more people have come to actually think that no atheist is qualified to be a judge.

And for those who think that reason will always triumph over truth and that people are not prone to accept false statements that saturate the community in which they live . . .

. . . look around you. Just look at the numbers of people who accept absurdities even when they do hear from those who disagree, and explain how it is sufficient to respond to absurdities by mumbling among ourselves about how absurd they are.

Why Won't Atheists Defend Themselves?

Why won’t atheists defend themselves?

And how do you get them to start?

Seriously, this is perhaps one of the most baffling situations that I encounter here on this blog – a complete indifference of atheists to their own victimization.

In the past six years alone, atheists have been subjected to a string of insults and slanders which, if they had been directed against any other group, would have caused riots. Literally. I mean, smoke rising above the city from the burning buildings and tear gas.

Look at the list.

(1) A sitting president said that atheists are not fit to be judges – and the statement can still be found on the White House’s own web site.”[W]e need common-sense judges who understand that our rights were derived from God. And those are the kind of judges I intend to put on the bench.”

(2) We have atheists who stand and feign support for a Pledge of Allegiance that says, “As far as this government is concerned, atheists (those not ‘under god’) are the moral equivalent of those who would commit themselves to rebellion, tyranny, and injustice for all.”

(3) We have a national motto on our money and going up in more and more places in this country that says, “If you do not trust in God, you are not one of us.”

(4) Atheists are routinely blamed for everything from terrorist attacks to school shootings to hurricanes to the Holocaust.

(5) On this latter point, there is a movie that will officially debut around the country on April 18th that is making a blatant attempt to link atheism to the Holocaust.

(6) A sitting legislator tells an atheist witness that atheism is a philosophy of destruction and that he has no right to be there – and apologizes only for raising her voice.

Any one of these things should have sparked massive protests – not only from atheists, but from anybody who accepts the principle that law-abiding citizens deserve the equal respect and consideration of their government. And until they make atheism illegal, atheists count as law-abiding citizens.

So, why don’t atheists defend themselves? Why don’t they get angry?

I really want to hear your ideas on this, reader.

I have my own hypothesis – but it’s only a hypothesis.

It’s because even if you do not believe intellectually that atheism is something to be ashamed of, you’re ashamed of it nonetheless. You’re ashamed on a gut level – an emotional level – that reason cannot reach.

And by 'you' I do not just mean 'you' atheists. I mean anybody who favors a fair and just society. You don't have to be a wiccan or a Jew or a Muslim to defend their rights. You don't have to be an atheist to know that the actions that I described above are wrong.

You are ashamed of it because you have been taught to be ashamed of it since you were too young to question what you were being taught. You are ashamed of it because you look at the money, and the national motto on the money tells you to feel ashamed. It tells you to feel like an outsider – like somebody who does not deserve to be counted as “one of us” if you do not trust in God.

You are ashamed of it because, every day when you were in school, you pledged allegiance to the idea that people not “under God” are no better than people who would support rebellion, tyranny, and injustice for all. You were taught to be ashamed to sit out the Pledge of Allegiance. You were taught that you had to at least stand and show respect for the idea that good Americans favor “one nation under God” and anybody who does not favor “one nation under God” cannot be a good American.

You are ashamed of it because, ever since you were old enough to understand the words coming through your television set and over the radio, you have heard the lesson repeated over and over again that atheists are responsible for every child that gets shot in a school, every natural disaster that befalls the country, and would lead the nation into ruin if they ever got any real power.

You do not stand up to people like Ms. Davis because, on a gut level, you think she is right.

I know that you do not believe she is right. You string the propositions together from beginning to end and calculate all of the disjunctive syllogisms and constructive dilemmas and you know the conclusion, “Atheists are bad people,” cannot be supported.

And perhaps you can handle your atheism on an unemotional, intellectual level. You can debate the Bible with the best of them and even wear your t-shirts with the big letter A on them. But these are harmless. These are things that allow a person to think that they are doing something without actually doing something.

If you could attach some real-world accomplishments to this symbol, that would be different. If this were the case, then the symbol would be the symbol for “those of us who accomplished this thing.” In the absence of accomplishment, it is just so much red pigment on cloth (or red photons emitting from a web page).

And if I am wrong, then you tell me why Ms. Davis’ next committee hearing is not packed with a standing-room only crowd with signs that say, “We have a right to be here!” and slogans like, “Get out of that chair, Ms. Davis. Bigots like you have no right to be here.”

If I am wrong, then you tell me why atheists parents are letting their schools teach their children that those who do not favor “one nation under God” are as bad as those who do not favor “liberty and justice for all?”

But if I am right . . . .

If I am right, than we are guilty of letting that same message of shame get passed on to the next generation, and they will act the same way we do. They, too, will learn to do nothing while they are declared unfit to be judges, as bad as those who do not favor ‘liberty and justice for all’, not fit to be counted as ‘one of us’ if they do not trust in God, guilty of every terrorist attack, hurricane, and school shooting that strikes the country, guilty of the worst atrocities of the 20th century, and advocates of a philosophy of destruction that ‘have no right’ to address legislatures in this country.

Some of those atheist children (or children who later become atheists) might actually want to be judges, or representatives, or President. Some might even be good at it. But we close down these options when we let the next generation to learn the same lessons that we learned – that being an atheist is something to be ashamed of.

Sooner or later, hopefully, a generation will come along that says, “No. It stops here. You will not teach my child that those who do not favor ‘one nation under God’ are as bad as those who do not favor ‘liberty and justice for all’. You will pay with your job if you should declare that atheists are not qualified to be judges or have no right to offer testimony before a state legislature. If you produce a movie that tries to blame atheists for the holocaust you will be met with a cry that will ensure that everybody in the country hears how bigoted your claims are. And if you ever again try to blame us for a school shooting, hurricane, terrorist attack, or anything similar you will be met with a storm of protest that will bury your career.

These are the morally appropriate responses to these types of insults. Failure to respond in this way is not a morally permissible option. Failure to respond in this way says that we are going to allow the next generation to suffer the same insults and degradations that we suffer.

Until, sooner or later, one generation decides that they will do something different.

I would like it to be this generation.

Dear Ms. Davis

Dear Representative Davis:

First, I want to congratulate you for that back-handed apology to Rob Sherman – the one where you linked Sherman’s atheism with a school shooting. You got Mr. Sherman to say “Thank you,” and “I forgive you,” and to announce this on his web site, while the rest of the atheist community wonders where those finger marks on their cheek came from. That was a political masterpiece. I wonder, did you think of that yourself, or did some PR firm recommend it to you?

What’s particularly impressive about it is that the bulk of the country doesn’t even know you apologized. MSNBC, like all news organizations, condemned you in ways that were transmitted all over the web, but the apology was scarcely mentioned and certainly not repeated outside of the group you most needed to silence.

To the rest of the world, you stood up to the atheists, you insisted that they had no right to even be represented in Congress, you called their beliefs ‘dangerous’ saying that children should not even know that their philosophy exists. And then . . . silence.

I have no doubt that your actions will serve as a valuable lesson to the rest of the country – that they can stand up to atheists, put them in their place, and nothing will come of it.

By now, their initial blog postings would have scrolled off of their front pages and into the archives. Their attention will move on to some other issue, and you will still be here.

We have often said that our rights are in poor hands if trust them to atheists. This, certainly, is proof. Atheists will not even defend their own rights – so we certainly cannot trust them to defend the rights of others. And, of course, nobody else will stand up for the atheists. Why? It’s like a soldier bravely defending an able-bodied adult who, nonetheless, lies cowering and sniveling in the corner. Why do for atheists what atheists are not willing to do for themselves?

They say that they do not believe in a God. Yet, they certainly act as if they are waiting for some kind of divine being to descend from heaven and smite their enemies. As atheists, you would expect them to think and act as if they believe that nothing gets done on this planet except through their hard efforts. You would think that they would shun the idea of doing nothing and waiting for things to happen for them. Yet, they do nothing, and wait for some mysterious actor to act on their behalf.

These people pride themselves on their rationality, and yet they write letters to you, Ms. Davis – a person who has already said that you consider theirs a ‘philosophy of destruction’ and something that children should not even know about. What type of person do they think you are that a letter from a person who only believes in destroying might persuade you to do what they want?

In fact, what are these letters but proof of their determination to destroy everything good in the state? Certainly, your representation – and in particular your willingness to stand up for God against the heathens and infidels – is one of the good things in this state. Of course they would want to destroy it. Of course they would want to see you resign.

I hope that writing these letters made them feel better, because that’s all the good they are ever going to get out of them.

As far as I am concerned, the best thing to come from this – the best thing to come from their pathetic and ineffective response to your outburst – is that this might help other legislators across the state and across the country find the nerve to put atheists in their place like you did. We know that there are a lot of them out there. Now, thanks to you, they know that standing up to atheists comes with no adverse political consequences.

Like I already said, the rest of the country knows that you stood up to Sherman. They know what you said, and, as far as they know that was the end of it. Except, you have become the darling of people who have wanted to tell atheists off for decades now. You are now their hero. One nice thing about heroes is that they breed more people like them.

That is one reason why you must stay in office, Ms. Davis. That is one reason why you must weather this storm. You must do so to give strength and to give voice to legislators across this country when it comes to standing up to those atheists. With your leadership, with your example, others will begin to realize that they, too, can take the position that you have taken with regard to these atheists, and that no harm will come of it. Indeed, their positions will become more secure – because the atheists will do nothing, and the theocrats will rally to your cause, and the atheists by their unwillingness to act will make sure that the theocrats will win.

And they will win, Ms. Davis.

We live in a country where a sitting President of the United States twice said that no atheist is qualified to be a judge. He said that “we need common-sense judges who realize that our rights come from God, and that is the type of judge I intend to appoint.” He said it once during a Presidential debate. What is that if not a statement that no atheist is qualified to be a judge? What is this if not a statement by the President of the United States to any atheist who comes in to be interviewed for a post as a Federal judge to, “Get out of that chair! You have no right to be here!”?

Bush not only survived making such statements. Nobody challenged him. Nobody said a word against him. Clearly, that sent a message across the political community that denying atheists any role at all in government is politically viable. We can see how Bush’s ability to explicitly deny atheists a role in government without any political consequences has affected even the Democratic candidates in this election.

I enjoy the way that atheists moan and cry about how if you had said the same thing about some other minority – if you had told some Jewish witness that this was a Christian nation, that theirs was a philosophy of destruction, and that it was dangerous for children to even know that Jews exist – that you would be out of a job.

Of course you would be out of a job. This is because every civil rights organization across the country would be making telephone calls and sending representatives out here demanding to see the governor and the House and Senate leadership, and the Democratic Party leadership, and every news reporter in the country demanding your head on a platter. They would have no choice but to deliver it.

Then there is the trick of turning public attention against the atheists by taking a quote from Sherman out of context to make it look as if he is the bigot. Thanks to that brilliant move, the atheists are now on the defensive. On the context of talking about Martin Luther King, Sherman used the word 'Negroes', and suddenly he is the bigot - irrespective of the fact that King used the word 'Negroes' 15 times in the 'I Have a Dream' speech alone.

Since people have such a deep-seated hostility towards atheists, they are naturally going to accept our interpretation of Sherman's words. They are not going to give it a favorable interpretation or see our actions as manipulative, because they want to see the atheists as the bad guys and us as the good guys. We must never forget that we have this advantage over them, or lose any opportunity to use the negative perception of atheists to our advantage.

You would think that these self-professed masters of reasoning who call themselves atheists would figure out that there is a direct relationship between a government’s tendency to stomp on a group of citizens and their tendency to let it happen. They’ll blame some non-descript ‘other’ for the way they are treated but take no responsibility for the contribution they make to this situation.

The Jews, for example, would know full well that a similar string of statements made against them are not a Jewish issue. This is not just a matter of Jews defending themselves from people who claim that “children ought not to even know that Jews exist.” They would make sure that the world knew that a threat against the Jews is a threat against any minority that might find itself the object of political hostility. They would have every organization that sees reason to fear a government that gets away with saying – “you have no right to be here” contacting representatives and friends of representatives demanding your resignation. And the noise will not end until they got it.

These things do not happen to other minorities because those minorities defend themselves, while atheists run and hide. The atheists might as well simply tattoo a sign on their bare back that says, “Kick me (again).”

Those atheists, if they really were as rational as they claim to be, would not be sending you emails or calling your office. They would be sending letters or calling the offices of American Atheists, Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, The Secular Coalition, and they would be asking, “What are you going to do about this?” And if the answer is “Nothing”, they would shout – literally SHOUT - “Well you had better fracking get a plan and get it quick or my membership will go to the one who does! What the frack is wrong with you people!”

Those atheists, if they were rational, would be convening meetings within their own states asking, “What can we do to keep anything like that from happening here?” They would be organizing a campaign to talk to their own legislators and saying, “See what happened in Illinois? I demand (and ‘demand’ is the right word) a statement from you condemning her words and saying that if any colleague of yours in this state were to do the same thing you would demand their resignation.”

If they were rational, they would be contacting their county Democratic and Republican party headquarters and saying, “I demand a resolution from you stating that you recognize that the statement that ‘atheists are responsible for all of the school shootings’ to be morally equivalent to ‘Jews are responsible for all of the wars’ – an expression of blanket hate-mongering bigotry that has no legitimate place in this state.” And then when that party refuses, make sure that the public knows the bigotry that the party represents. They would make sure to inoculate their own state from the effects of your success here.

If they were rational, they would not be blind to the fact that a leading Democratic Presidential candidate is an Illinois legislator, and they would not shy from any opportunity to embarrass him until he disowns you and your remarks as he was forced to disown the remarks of his own preacher.

However, as I have already said, the scientific method itself confirms the fact that it is foolish to expect atheists to defend anybody’s rights to equal respect in the eyes of their own government, even their own. This is not an insult, this is just an empirical fact.

Mark my words, Ms. Davis. Nothing is going to happen to you. I’m going to check back here next Monday, and I bet the whole issue will have been forgotten, your position in this legislature will actually be stronger (because of the support of those who want to stick it to the atheists the way you did), and you will be an important role model for politicians across the whole country during this election.

Mark my words, Ms. Davis. Nothing will come of this.

It never does.

Representative Davis' Non-Apology

Actually, there was no apology. Ms. Davis apologized to Rob Sherman for yelling at him. However, she did not apologize for what she said, and she did not apologize to the people she slighted.

Let’s compare this to another bigoted rant. On July 26, 2006, Mel Gibson was arrested for drunk driving. Information was leaked that, at the time of his arrest, Gibson made some anti-Semitic remarks, such as, “Jews are responsible for all of the wars in the world.”

This is a classic element of bigotry – a desire to charge the objects of one’s hatred with any crime imaginable in order to give the bigot’s hatred a comfortable home.

“I hate these people. If they were guilty of this crime, then they deserve to be hated. Therefore, they must be guilty of this crime.”

This is bigotry. This is how the bigot thinks. And this is how Monique Davis thinks.

Davis said that she was reacting to news that there had been another fatal school shooting. She hears about a school shooting, and she immediate takes it out on the first atheist she comes into contact with. She says, “You believe in destroying” and “It is dangerous for children to even know that your philosophy exists.”

Obviously, she is a victim of the prejudice that says that atheists and evolutionists have been responsible for every act of school violence since Columbine.

This was no apology.

This was actually nothing more than Davis admitting her bigotry, and slapping Sherman and all atheists again with the accusation that atheism was responsible for this student’s death.

This bigotry . . . this common rant that atheists and evolutionists are responsible for all school violence . . . this is morally no different than Gibson’s claim that Jews are responsible for all the wars of the world.

There is no evidence behind it. People do not get this idea because they are driven to it by any sort of valid argument. Why do they believe it?

People believe that atheists are responsible for all school violence for the same reason that anti-Semites believe that Jews are responsible for all of the wars of the world. It is because their hatred has driven them to seek a reason to hate, and these types of beliefs fill the bigot’s need.

In Gibson’s case, the very next day – the day after his arrest, Gibson released a statement. It included:

I acted like a person completely out of control when I was arrested, and said things that I do not believe to be true and which are despicable. I am deeply ashamed of everything I said and I apologize to anyone who I have offended.

Three days later, Gibson released another statement to the Jewish community.

There is no excuse, nor should there be any tolerance, for anyone who thinks or expresses any kind of anti-Semitic remark. . . . I am a public person, and when I say something either articulated and thought out, or blurted out in a moment of insanity, my words carry weight in the public arena. As a result, I must assume personal responsibility for my words and apologize directly to those who have been hurt and offended by those words. . . . I am not just asking for forgiveness, I would like to . . . meet with the leaders in the Jewish community, with whom I can have a one-on-one discussion to discern the appropriate path for healing.

We can speculate whether or not Gibson actually meant these words. However, he recognized that it was important to say them. He recognized that his words and deeds required more than a phone call to the police officer that arrested him and saying, “I’m sorry.”

And even if he had done that, and even if the police officer had said, “I forgive you,” this still would not have gotten him off of the hook for all of the other people he had insulted. He had to do more, and he knew it.

And he did it.

Ms. Davis is more than a ‘public person’. She is a duly elected representative, sworn to uphold and defend rights that she public denied even existed. She did not speak as a drunk being arrested at 2:00 in the morning. Ms. Davis spoke while she was acting in the capacity of a legislator in a legislative session, when she was perfectly sober, when she was listening to the testimony of a witness in a case before the legislative body in which she is a member.

Davis acted under conditions where her behavior is the least worthy of any type of forgiveness.

As I said above, Davis’ behavior is not only as bad as Gibson’s. It is much, much worse.

Gibson tried to deny the charge of being anti-Semitic. He went to great lengths to prove that this is the case. Yet, in spite of this fact, he was still accused of saying what was in his heart at the night of the arrest. If he did not have anti-Semitic thoughts, the accusers said, then why is it that he immediately went into an anti-Semitic rant when he was arrested? Obviously, anti-Semitic thoughts were not the furthest thing from his mind.

So far, Davis hasn’t taken a single step to deny her hatred of atheists. She apologized to Sherman, but I have seen or heard nothing comparable to her saying, “There is no excuse, nor should there be any tolerance, for anyone who thinks or expresses this type of hatred – particularly for a legislator whose duty is to protect and defend the rights of the people.”

There has been nothing like that.

Why?

Because Davis almost certainly does believe that atheists are responsible for every act of school violence, in the same way that an anti-Semite really does believe that Jews are responsible for all of the wars of the world.

If she does not believe it, then let her deny it?

Let’s hear her say that it is unfair and unjust to blame atheists for school violence. Let her deny that she attacked Sherman the way she did because she saw him as a symbol for those who she thinks are the true culprits guilty of the killing of that student she had heard about earlier in the day. Let her tell us how she believes that there should be no tolerance for anybody whose attitudes towards their fellow humans is that which is expressed by this type of unfounded, unjustified, hate-motivated accusation.

Hers is exactly the same form of bigotry we see in Ben Stein’s movie, "Expelled.” In just the same way that Davis wants to ‘justify’ her love of hating atheists in a veneer of legitimacy by imaging atheists responsible for all school shootings, Stein wants to ‘justify’ his love of hating atheists by blaming atheists for the holocaust. With Ben Stein, it is not ‘Jews are responsible for all of the world’s wars,’ but ‘Atheists are responsible for all of the world’s wars’.”

Except, when Gibson made his unfounded accusation against the Jews, the world was aghast. If Gibson had made a movie in which the main theme was, “Jews are responsible for all of the wars of the world,” in just the same way that Stein has made a movie that says, “Atheists and evolutionists are responsible for all the wars of the world” . . . well, there would have been no saving him.

Just as their should be no way to save Stein from his accusation, or to save Davis' job.

The one final question that I want to ask is, are atheists going to do anything about it? Are they going to move on to other things, or are they finally going to take a stand and say, “A person who claims that atheists are responsible for these atrocities will get no better treatment than the anti-Semite who wants to blame the Jews for all of the wars in the world?”

It is time for another round of emails - and not just to Ms. Davis. It is time for a round of emails and calls to her peers and to the press - to anybody who will put pressure on her to answer the question, "Ms. Davis, several atheists are accusing you of claiming that we can blame all school shootings on atheists in the same way that Mel Gibson once claimed that we can blame all the wars on the world as Jews. Do you hold atheists responsible for all school violence? And, if so, how does this differ from Gibson's remark that the Jews were responsible for all the world's wars?"

Get her to answer that question. Then we will see the degree for which she is sorry for the hate that motivated her outburst.

Representative Davis' Apology

So, Ms. Davis has apologized and said that she had a bad day because she had just learned of another school shooting.

And she decided to take it out on the atheist.

Why?

Could it be, perhaps, that she shares the theocratic bigotry that all school violence is somehow associated with atheism, and that if we had no atheists then we would have no school shootings?

Is that what she meant when she said that "it is dangerous for children to even know that your philosophy exists" - that children who become atheists shoot other children?

Is that what she meant when she said that atheism is a philosophy of destruction - because it must have been this student's atheism that caused the student to destroy the life of another student?

This apology, in fact, is just another slap in the face of all atheists. It is just another expression of her bigotry. Because, certainly, if she had been talking to a Christian witness, she would not have reacted in the same way.

Why not?

You've got more questions to answer, Ms. Davis.

The Moral Argument for Davis' Resignation in Detail

I’m going to have to put off my posting on the meaning of life for another day. I want to say more about the moral issues relevant to calling for the resignation of Representative Davis of Illinois. I want to address some of the concerns that people have about this and explain some of the moral implications of the options available.

By way of background, I commented on Davis’ arguments twice, in “Name of First Posting” and “Name of Second Posting”. Basically, Davis said that atheists had a philosophy of destruction and demanded that the atheist offering testimony leave because atheists had no right to offer testimony in a nation dedicated to God.

Before going further, I want to repeat a distinction that I have made in the past between political strategy and ethics. If this were a post on political strategy we would be concerned with what is or is not expedience, with little regard for what is right. However, as an ethics blog, my concern with what is right, regardless with what is expedient.

There is good reason for a person who is concerned with the right and wrong of an action not to offer compromise and to accept less than morality demands.

In the case of Monique Davis, the right thing to do is for her to resign. When she made her comments she demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt that she is not fit to be a legislator. A legislator is a representative of the people, yet there is a law-abiding segment of the population that she has substantially said she will not represent because they have no right to representation. She will not consider their interests in future legislation. Furthermore, she cannot be expected to protect and defend the rights of this segment of the population when she denies that they have any rights.

She has even denied that they have a right to exist (or, if they do exist, they may exist only in a way that others do not know about it).

All of this renders her unfit to be a legislator in a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.

However, we live in a country where the denigration of atheists is perfectly acceptable in most quarters. Because it is acceptable, it is quite possible that Ms. Davis will get away with her expressions of bigotry. She may have the same odds of being called on it as a candidate in the 1850s who said that blacks are the moral and intellectual inferior to whites and had no right to serve on juries and no role to play in government.

Regardless of how safe her comments may be, they are still wrong, and the proportional response to the magnitude of her disregard for the principles of representative government is to see her resign or otherwise (peacefully) removed from office.

The fact that she may not be held as accountable for her wrongs as she should be is no argument against the severity of those wrongs or the appropriateness of calling for her resignation. In this blog, I routinely argue for moral marks that I can reasonably expect will not be met.

In December, I criticized the Connecticut Valley Atheists for a sign that linked all of religion to the destruction of the World Trade Center. I called this bigotry, because I held that it is a gross overgeneralization, blaming people for something that they were not the least bit responsible for and never would have condoned because they share a characteristic that the speaker/writer wants everybody else to hate.

I knew at the time that it was unlikely that my moral demands would be met. However, I still hold that I made the right call, and the failure of others to live up to that standard was their fault, not a fault of the standard.

There is no sense in weakening a moral standard simply because the accused will not meet it. Imagine telling a jurist that he has an obligation to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth; however, if he is bent on lying, then we will weaken the standard so that he is permitted to lie to some extent. That is, if we really do not expect him to tell the truth, we tell him that it is okay to tell the truth, and that the obligation to tell the truth simply does not apply to somebody who is bent on lying.

Or imagine telling a doctor that she has an obligation to provide her patients with competent medical advice. However, insofar as we deem that she is unwilling to do so (because she does not care enough about the welfare of her patients to go through the effort), that we will weaken the standard in her case. Instead, we will only demand medical care that is as competent as that which she is willing to provide.

In general, this says that we should move the moral marker to the point that indicates what we can reasonably expect a person to do, without regard to what we have a right to demand of the accused. That is not a moral standard at all. It is a moral license to do as one pleases.

A second and related problem brings in the moral principle of universalization. A moral principle is supposed to be universal. As a result, if A says that B may do X to C, then A is also taken to be saying that C may do X to B under similar circumstances.

So, if we say that there is nothing about holding the attitude that a group of law-abiding citizens has no right to representation that is morally objectionable, then we are effectively saying that the following is also morally permissible:

Imagine a Christian representative saying of a Jewish witness:

“We are a Christian nation. Our nation serves Jesus Christ. Your people are agents of destruction. Your philosophy should not even be allowed to exist. Get out of that seat. You have no right to be here.”

We hear these types of objections raised against those who make claims against atheists all the time. But we usually see these as arguments that display hypocrisy. We tend not to look at their further meaning.

The further meaning is that if we, as atheists, say that the only appropriate response to this type of claim is to politely criticize the individual, then we are at the same time telling the Jews that they should also respond to these types of comments with a mild rebuke. We are telling the Muslims and Wiccans and Buddhists that, wherever they suffer the same sort of treatment at the hands of a Christian legislator, that they should be like us and passively request better treatment in the future. And we are telling our fellow Christian citizens that if anybody should make similar claims against them, that they are to restrain themselves from offering anything more than a mild rebuke.

This is the moral standard we establish – this is the moral principle we advocate – when we say that we should not do anything more than rebuke Ms. Davis for her remarks.

Or, conversely, if we hold that the Jew, the Muslim, the Wiccan, the Buddhist, and the Christian all have the right to demand the resignation of a legislator that insists that they have no right to offer testimony to a government off the people, then, it follows that we, too, have that right.

And the Christian who claims that if she were spoken to in a similar manner by an atheist legislator would see this as just cause to demand and expect the resignation of that legislator, must also demand and expect the resignation of a Christian legislator making those comments about atheists.

When we demand the resignation of somebody like Monique Davis, we offer the Jew, the Muslim, the Hindu, the Wiccan, and even the Christian the moral right to do the same thing, if they should ever find themselves in the same situation. We create a moral standard whereby the legislator that denies the critic’s right to speak will be removed and replaced with somebody with a better sense of her own duties as a representative of all the people.

Perhaps it is true that we cannot expect the Illinois legislature to do what it should in this case. Perhaps we can expect that the people of Illinois will fall short of their obligation to uphold and defend government of, for, and by the people. However, if we take this as a reason to move the moral goal post, then we are making it easy for them to fall short of that goal as well.

If we demand resignation, it may be the case that Davis is merely censured. But, if we demand censure, we should not be surprised to discover that she was only rebuked. If we demand that she be rebuked, we can expect those who fall short of this moral goal to simply ignore her remarks, And if we allow people to get away with ignoring her remarks then we can expect that they will fall short of that goal by actively praising and supporting her.

The right thing to do is to demand Davis’ resignation. Even if the odds of people doing the right thing are low, if we move the moral flag, then we reduce the odds of them doing the right thing from a probability to a certainty. If we move the moral flag, then we are in effect granting moral permission to legislatures across the whole country to say that some group of law-abiding citizens ought to be silenced and ought not to exist.

That is a permission that we have no right to grant.

Less Talking and More Doing

Less Talking and More Doing

I had this wonderful philosophical blog posting on the meaning of life written this morning, and I ended up getting overrun by current events. Both events played into a change that I have wanted to see for a while – a change from 'Talking' into 'Doing'.

Truth Tickets

I have mentioned before how searches for Ben Stein's "Expelled" movie has been generating a substantial number of hits to my blog – directed at my post, “Ben Stein Expelled”. Recently, the number of hits took a significant leap, presumably as the movie draws close to opening. I had been thinking about the amount of money that they would make on this movie, and the harm that they would do with it.

And I came up with my idea to ask readers to by "Truth Tickets" to offset this investment in stupidity.

Well, the "Truth Tickets" idea took off.

Today, I got more hits from searches for Ben Stein's "Expelled" than even yesterday’s record-setting number of hits. However, they were swamped by hits from those interested in the "Truth Tickets" idea.

This was a very welcome development because, what I would really love to see is for the movie "Expelled" itself swamped by the investment people are willing to make in offsetting this stupidity.

The idea got picked up first (as far as I can tell) by Jim Lippard

And, from there to Panda’s Thumb.

Then to Pharyngula

I also received comments from people who took the idea and bought their own sets of "Truth Tickets" – usually more than one (though even one would be a help).

I can't tell what the overall result has been so far, but I do know that it will take a great deal of effort to counter the professional marketing efforts of the backers of "Expelled". I would like more to be done.

I would like the idea to spread to organizations who have a serious stake in making sure that we maintain a firm commitment to sound science in the fields of medicine, agriculture, and environmental sciences.

So, I thank everybody for the contributions they have made so far, in whatever form they took. And, please, keep up the good work.

And if you want to report your efforts, please come here and let the other readers know what you have accomplished. I hope to be hearing from you.

Forcing the Resignation of Representative Davis

The other issue that came up today concerns the appropriate reaction to comments made against atheists.

Today, a Superdelegate for Barak Obama called about a bunch of kids playing in a tree “monkeys”, and then resigned. We have had an election full of incidents where a candidate has said something derogatory (or in some cases merely taken to be derogatory) of one group or another being forced to pay some sort of cost for their remarks. Davis' comments about atheists – explicitly stating that they do not have a right to testify before Congress and that children should not even be allowed to know that their philosophy exists is orders of magnitude more bigoted than comments that have ended the careers of other politicians.

Listen to what she said.. There is no way that a person with such views is fit to be a Representative of a free people.

Whereas she almost certainly wishes to keep her job, pressure can be put on her co-workers to put pressure on her and do the right thing – leave her seat available for somebody who knows a Representatives duties.

The right to petition the government – the right of a citizen to express his opinion to the government – is not only a Constitutional right but a moral right. It is the very essence of a democracy that the free and law-abiding people can come before the government and express their views on any issue. But, to Davis, that right does not extend to atheists. She would not only deny us the right to speak to the government, she would deny us the right to speak to our fellow citizens.

[I]t's dangerous for our children to even know that your philosophy exists.

Seriously, no atheist should have to go to the government and look up at her on the other end of the room. You are here to express your opinion to the people who are supposed to be working for the people, and she is sitting there not only tuning out what you say, but asserting that it is wrong for you to be sitting there giving an opinion at all.

And this is not something for which an apology is at all sufficient. We have every reason to believe that this was a statement of her true views – released in an unguarded moment, perhaps, but her true views nonetheless. Any statement to the effect of, "I really didn’t mean it," would be a lie, and we would be foolish to accept it.

Why is all of this slander against atheists possible?

Because when a person slanders atheists the way Davis has done, the response has been to send a polite letter saying, "Please, sir, would you mind terribly if we asked you not to say such things?"

Come, now. The only morally legitimate option is for her to leave office. If something less than that happens, it is a moral failure on the part of those who accepted that option. One thing we do not need to be saying is that this lesser option is somehow the morally legitimate option. It is not. It is, instead, a moral failure, and we should be calling it what it is.

This has got to stop. If we live in a society where this type of slander is politically rewarded, rather than politically punished, we can only expect it to grow. When we make this a society where this type of slander is politically punished as it should be, that is the only way it will ever diminish.

A commenter to my earlier post on this wrote:

I'm not against the idea of her resigning, I just greatly doubt it's going to happen. . . . A more modest endeavor would have a greater likelihood of getting her to recognize her mistake and think more carefully in the future.

If she is not forced out of office, then the thing to do is to make THIS the story. Make THIS the claim that American society itself has failed. Make THIS the shame of the legislature and even the people of the state that they will not live by the principles they claim to value. Raise the cognitive dissidence up to such a level that people can taste it.

The Linkage

Both of these issues are very closely linked, as it turns out.

Ben Stein’s "Expelled", as I explained in previous posts, is a propaganda piece that aims to promote hatred of atheists by linking their mention with images of Hitler, Stalin, and everything else despised. It's purpose is to create legislators like Ms. Davis, and to give them strength.

In fact, one of the things that the backers of Ben Stein's move have talked about is their efforts to influence legislators by showing their movie to legislators. The influence that "Expelled" is seeking to have on the legislature is nothing less than to sell legislators on the type of hatred that Davis has expressed, by training legislators to view the atheists among them the same way that they would view Nazis and anybody else who would defend the death camps of Germany.

Responding to these attacks with polite letters of, "Please do not say such mean things about atheists. We really aren't all that bad, you know. We hope you will find it in your heart to give us some minimum measure of respect," it itself morally deficient.

The legitimate response is to say, "Your slanderous attempt to link atheists and evolutionists to the Nazi atrocities – your declarations that anybody who does not believe in God shall not testify before a legislature of, by and for the people – are far removed from the legitimate attitudes of a fair and just people."

These two projects are very much worth doing, and very much worth seeing to a successful end. Failure to respond to these attacks – failure to respond to attempts to like atheists to Nazi atrocities and failure to remove from office legislatures who insist that atheists not be allowed to (let alone agree to listen to) their testimony will simply give license to increase the attacks against them.

Against us.

Demand Monique Davis' Resignation

We interrupt this regular daily blogcast (almost) for this special announcement.

Daylight Atheism contains a posting that covers the remarks made by Illinois State Representative Monique Davis against Atheist Rob Sherman.

it's dangerous for our children to even know that your philosophy exists! Now you will go to court to fight kids to have the opportunity to be quiet for a minute. But damn if you'll go to [court] to fight for them to keep guns out of their hands. I am fed up! Get out of that seat!

The post concludes with the recommendation:

If you have the time, please call or mail her - politely, but firmly - and let her know that you do not appreciate an elected official showing such hate and bigotry toward one of her own constituents. It's not out of the question that we can enlighten her to the ugliness of her own actions and shame her into treating American atheists with more respect in the future.

No!

Stop!

This is the type of case where the right thing to do would be to contact her and the Democratic Party and any and all news organizations within the state and . . .

Demand her immediate resignation!

She has proved herself unfit to be a legislator in these United States.

She does not deserve our polite and respectful disagreement.

She deserves to be replaced by somebody who will do the job of Representative the way it is supposed to be done.

She deserves to be fired.

Nothing less.

What Is 'Self Interest'?

I still have a hard time listening to economists talk about anything because they always seem to start with an assumption that, to me, makes absolutely no sense.

They say that we are all ‘self-interested’ (or ‘selfish’, in a sense). And that all of economics is built on the behavior of individuals who are assumed to be self-interested. Somehow, these self-interested individuals, in the right economic and political candidate, can find incentive to act in self-interested ways that also benefit others. This is the economic ‘invisible hand’ of Adam Smith. The truth of this assumption is borne out by the success of economics – by the way that economists are able to explain and predict behavior.

My objection is not that the assumption that humans are ‘self-interested’ is false. It’s that the assumption is ambiguous and confused. Economists who use this assumption are saying a bunch of contradictory things, and they pick out the parts of the contradiction that serves their purpose at the moment. When their purpose changes, so does their concept of ‘self-interest’.

In an earlier post I distinguished between two types of self-interest; interest of the self, and interest in the self. All of my desires are mine. They are ‘interests of the self’ because my desires belong to me. They are encoded into my brain which is the only brain (given current technology) directly connected to my muscles. Of course I always act on my ‘interests of the self’ – because my ‘interests of the self’ are the only interests connected to my muscles in the right way.

When we talk about interests of the south, we have no difficulty explaining how a person might be altruistic or concerned with the welfare of others. An agent can simply have an interest in a state in which other people are better off, or an interest in avoiding a state in which other people are worse off. These are still ‘interests of the self’ in the sense that they are interests of the agent. However, they are not ‘interests in the self’. Instead, they are interests in the well-being of others.

When economists speak about self-interests, and claim that it creates some special problem for altruism, they need to be talking about ‘interests in the self’. These are a special subset of potential ‘interests of the self’ – they are ‘interests of the self’ that also take the self as an object. More specifically, they are ‘interests of the self’ in providing the self with a benefit of some sort.

If it were the case that all human interests are ‘interests in the self’, then this would be a problem for altruism, and we may need to do some fancy theorizing to explain how, if all human interests are ‘interests in the self’, we could possibly drive people to behave in ways that benefit others. However, we have no reason to accept this assumption that all human interests are ‘interests in the self’ is true. So, we have no particular reason to think that there is a problem here in need of solving, let alone reason to examine whether various theories have solved it.

Evolution has a number of reasons to favor ‘interests of the self’ over ‘interests in the self’. The latter simply require a lot more work to program into a living system. My favorite example concerns the relationship between antelope and lions. The antelope does not run from the lion because he is afraid of being killed and eaten. It runs from the lians because he is afraid of lions. It is just so much easier to program into an antelope brain, ‘if you see a lion, or anything that might be a lion, run’ than it is to program ‘if you see something that might eat you, run’.

Indeed, if we were going to program a robot to survive in a hostile climate, the vast majority of that programming will have nothing to do with ‘self-interest’. The robot will be programmed to avoid going off of a cliff without spending an iota of processing capability calculating the effects of falling off the cliff. The latter would require the use of resources that the agent can better allocate to other items.

The agent is going to eat the plants that taste good to it, without regard as to why some plants taste better than others. The agent is going to engage in sex, not because it has a desire to procreate and some complex set of beliefs that link sex to the fact of procreation. The agent is going to avoid the fire because the fire makes it feel uncomfortable, not because it has made some complex calculation saying that the source of pain might also produce some other harmful side effects that are best avoided.

This is not to say that we do not contain any interests in the self. There are certainly interests of the self that take the self as an object. The desire to avoid pain is most strongly realized as a desire to avoid my pain. Hunger, thirst, and the desire for sex are realized in the form of a desire ‘that I eat’ or ‘that I drink’ or ‘that I have sex’

Even ‘interests of the self’ that take the well-being of others as their object can be selfish in some important way. For example, the desire for the well-being of one’s children is often realized as a partially selfish desire for the well-being of one’s own children; or, more precisely, a desire that my children are healthy and happy.

Still, we are dealing with a set of ‘desires of the self’ that includes desires for the well-being of other people. Within the context of desires of the self there altruism is not a problem. Altruism consists of desires of the self in the well-being of others. Just as we have some desires of the self that are desires in the well-being of ourselves, we can have desires of the self that are desires in the well-being of others.

We have reason to promote these desires. We not only have desires-in-the-self reason to promote desires in others to do no harm to self and to provide benefit to self, we also have desires-of-the-self-in-the-well-being-of-others reason to promote desires in others do no harm to the people we care about and to provide benefits to them when they are in need.

That is to say, to the degree that desires are malleable, we have reason to promote desires-of-the-self in the well-being of others, since we (and those we care about) are the ‘others’ who benefit when we promote ‘desires-of-the-self’ in the well-being of others.

One special problem with the idea of desires-in-the-self has to do with what counts as a benefit. What does it really mean to be selfish?

This problem comes about because the only form of value that actually exists in the real world is that of relationships between states of affairs and desires. “The self” can be made better off only to the degree that “the self” can be put in a state that better fulfills the most and strongest desires of the agent.

This invites us to ask, “What are the most and strongest desires of the agent?”

Let’s assume that an agent wants to be somebody who takes care of sick children. He invests a great deal of time and effort into making himself somebody who is better able to take care of sick children. To the degree that he does so, he is making himself into a person that best fulfills the more and stronger of that agent’s desires. This desire ‘that I be the best pediatrician available’ is not only a desire of the self, it is a desire in the self. Yet, even this type of ‘interest in the self’ desire is fully compatible with altruism.

So, where do we get this idea that humans are confined to a set of interests that are incompatible with altruism . . . so much so that economists (and others) think that there is a huge problem with respect to altruism that we need to solve?

Just as it is not necessarily the case that all interests in the self are bad, it is also not the case that all interests of the self in others are good. A person who has a desire to kill others, or a desire to see them suffer, also has an interest of the self in other people. It just happens to be an interest in thwarting the desires of others, rather than an interest in fulfilling the desires of others.

So, the problem goes both ways. We try to distinguish between good and evil in terms of ‘desires of the self in the self’ and ‘desires of the self in others’. But there are a lot of desires of the self in the self that can be good, and desires of the self in others that can be bad. This is just not a good distinction to use when trying to distinguish between what is good (what we have reason to promote) and what is bad (what we have reason to inhibit).

It is true that humans do not have the strength of ‘desire that the desires of others are fulfilled’ or even ‘desires that tend to fulfill the desires of others’ that we have reason to cause them to have. It is true that we have reason to promote more and stronger desires that tend to fulfill the desires of others. However, the problem is not one that can be reduced to a type of ‘self interest’ that is incompatible with altruism. The problem, instead, is one that can be reduced to the fact that people have desires that tend to thwart other desires – self-regarding interests and other-regarding interests that we have reason that do harm.

Expelled and "Truth Tickets"

I would like challenge each of my readers to buy a "Truth Ticket" related to the movie "Expelled"

A "Truth Ticket" is a donation, equal to the value of a movie ticket (let's just assume $10 as a nice round number), sent to the National Center for Science Education.

Link to NCSE Donations Page

You can make a donation only, without joining, by selecting the "Donation Only" option at the bottom of the membership/donations page.

Everybody who actually buys a ticket to the movie is contributing to the funding of ignorance in America, and to the suffering that results from people making plans based on ignorance and superstition. So, I think that it is important that, for every person who contributes to dumbing down America by buying a ticket to this movie, it is important that somebody, somewhere, purchase an offset "Truth Ticket", and send it to the National Center for Science Education, which is involved in countering the malicious and pernicious effects of those behind the movie "Expelled".

Personally, I have decided to purchase 10 tickets. I am buying a ticket for every person in my family (including my cat, who clearly has a vested interest in science-based veterinary medicine), and for a few friends and associates. Those friends and associates are people who would benefit from hearing the truth about the movie Expelled and about Intelligent Design or Evolution.

I do trust that most readers are aware of the importance of this event. Evolutionary theory sits at the root of our best advances in medicine, agriculture, and environmental studies. People live and die based on our ability to protect advances already made and to make new advances. Ignorant people make foolish choices, and foolish choices in the realm of medicine, agriculture, and environmental sciences can cost lives.

We have to think of young minds turned off to science - or who just do not get it. Not only the young minds corrupted by this influence, but their classmates who accept evolution but who do not want to get involved in a controversy.

We also need to think about the science teachers at all levels facing an increasingly hostile audience - made hostile by people who have equated any mention of evolution with the defense of Hitler.

These are not the same thing, by the way. I have mentioned before that there are people who think that the movie "Expelled" is about intelligent design and who try to respond to the movie and criticize the movie from that perspective. Those criticisms fall flat. This is because the movie is a propaganda piece, meant not to promote 'intelligent design' per say, but to promote hatred of people who do not share the religious views of those who are backing this movie. It does so by visually linking atheists and those who accept evolution with Nazis, Stalinist Russia, and anything else bad that the makers of the movie could find images of to put on the screen.

In style and structure, it has more in common with a Nazi film promoting hatred of the Jews than with a discussion of academic freedom.

Ben Stein wants to blame evolution for the Holocaust. In fact, the Holocaust was made possible by people who thought that the type of hate-mongering found in Expelled was a perfectly legitimate activity.

In telling the truth about the movie, this is a part of the truth that should be told. People should not only be told why intelligent design is not science. In the context of this movie, they should be told that the people behind the movie are fundamentally dishonest by reporting on the strings of lies that they have so far told about this movie. And they should be told that this is not a movie about the difference in intelligent design and evolution (neither of which, apparently, are defined in the movie), but an attempt to link atheists and those who believe in evolution with all things hated specifically for the purpose of promoting hatred of atheists and those who believe in evolution.

If you are a member of a club or organization that has reason to promote sound science then, for the sake of efficiency, I would like to recommend passing the hat among members of that organization and purchasing these "Truth Tickets" in bulk in the name of the organization. For example, of you are a member of a campus Free-Thought organization, I would like to propose that you start your next meeting by selling as many truth tickets as your members may want to buy, and then sending the money raised to the National Center for Science Education.

Do not forget to invite your members to purchase "Truth Tickets" for their family, friends, significant others, and whomever else they may be willing to take to such a movie, if there were such a movie to take them to.

What I would truly like to see – and what would give real hope for the future of the human race – is if we can "sell" more "Truth Tickets" to benefit the National Center for Science Education than “Expelled” sells in real tickets.

But that would take your help.

E2.0: Jonathan Gottschall: Literary Science

This is the 30th 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.

We are on a general theme of linking science and the humanities which has taken a number of different forms. The next speaker at the Beyond Belief 2 conference, Jonathan Gottschall of Washington and Jefferson College, is interested in literary studies.

Gottschall thinks that the discipline of literary studies is in trouble. The main problem is that it does not produce anything of lasting value. More specifically, literary scholars are not building up a body of knowledge, the way that scientists are. Darwin’s theory of evolution gets linked to genetics which gets linked to the study of various health issues and possible treatments. Literary theorists throw everything out with each generation and build anew. There is enough ‘evidence’ in the available literature to confirm just about any theory that anybody wants to propose, and enough evidence to refute it.

Gottschall wants to change this and introduce something like science into literary studies.

One of his examples is the hypothesis that the difference between the way women are presented in stories, and the way men are presented, is a part of our patriarchal culture. Gottschall mentions a study that aims to either confirm or falsify this theory. If it is a cultural phenomenon, then we can expect to see differences across different cultures, or across the same culture over time as the culture changes. If, on the other hand, there is some deep-seated reason built into human nature, then we can expect to see less variation across culture and across time.

So, these researchers got busy looking at stories produced in a number of different cultures, and counted the references to female appearance as opposed to male appearance. What they discovered is that all cultures universally paid much more attention to female beauty than male beauty – mentioning the former over the latter at a 6:1 ratio.

So, now we have some empirical evidence that counters the feminist theory that the differences in the way women are treated in literature when compared to men is cultural in nature. It appears to be more basically biological. This can then be incorporated into a body of literary studies that, like any science, has the capacity to grow over time.

From an ethical perspective, there is something that I would like to add to this description – something that might provide suggestions for future research. The fact that we have a particular tendency does not imply that it is a good thing that we have a particular tendency. In fact, if a tendency is one that tends to significantly thwart the desires of half of the population, this suggests that we might want to do something to counter that tendency – to weaken it, so that more people can enjoy a better life.

In other words, the fact that research shows that literature everywhere and everywhen shows such a strong emphasis on female beauty does not imply that literature should show such an emphasis, or that it is permissible or good to treat women as mere objects of beauty and not as persons with interests of their own to include in the social calculus.

So, is it possible to impose certain changes in literature – to use moral standards to promote certain types of literature away from our natural inclinations. And is there good reason to do so?

Remember, there is no such thing as intrinsic value. The only type of value exists is relationships between states of affairs and desires. Literature is good insofar as it either appeals directly to good (or neutral) desires, or indirectly helps to bring about states that tend to fulfill good (or neutral) desires. So, if our new discipline of literary science is going to tell us the value of literature, it is going to have to tell us about the relationships between that literature and various desires. No other type of value exists.

This brings us dangerously close to another area of concern where Gottschall thinks that contemporary literary studies has failed. Literary theory is plagued by an attempt on the part of many of its participants to advance certain political goals. Science, in contrast, is more objective (or at least tries harder to be more objective) and uses procedures that aim – imperfectly, but not without some success – to remove these biases. The example that I gave above seems to be in conflict with Gottschall’s goals.

Though not entirely.

There are two ways in which values infect the study of science which in no way interferes with the objectivity of science (or the greater objectivity of science when compared to other disciplines).

One of these two ways is that scientists study what scientists are interested in. A scientist does not choose his area of expertise as a result of an experiment that yields a determined result given the best theory available. The scientist chooses his profession according to what will fulfill the more and stronger of the scientist’s desires, given her beliefs. If she likes whales, she studies whales. If he finds some measure of success and public praise due to his work on stellar physics, then he may focus more of his energies on stellar physics. If she gets a bright idea in the field of fetal development, than she may pursue the studies of fetal development.

These are perfectly legitimate ways in which values may influence scientific study. They are also perfectly legitimate ways in which values may influence literary studies, even where literary studies are trying to become more science-like. It is still the case that people are free to study those specific areas that interest them most, or best fulfills their desires, whatever those desires may be.

Another way in which values influence scientific research is in terms of usefulness. What gets funded? The focus on medicine, agriculture, climate change, and those aspects of geology relevant to finding and extracting natural resources, are all driven to a large degree by the fact that there is money to be made, or harms to be avoided, by work in these specific fields of study. It’s a little easier to get funding if one shows that some good can come out of it – and easier still if one can show that the results will give the user information that is useful.

There may also be some concern over the phrase that I used earlier with respect to ‘imposing certain changes’ on literature for moral reasons. Is this somehow objectionable?

Actually, what I am talking about in terms of literature is much like what already happens in other parts of our lives. We put iodine in salt to prevent rickets, put vitamins and pre-packaged cereal in order to promote kid’s health, put floride in toothpaste to promote dental health, and put disinfectant in soap to inhibit the spread of disease.

If we can identify certain aspects of literature that help to make our culture better than it would otherwise be – that affect the likelihood that people will engage in violence or make stupid decisions because they ‘learned’ something from literature that simply is not true – then there is good reason to promote those features in literature. (Or, in the case of features that do harm, inhibit the promulgation of literature with those features.)

I am not talking about censorship here. I am not talking about outlawing literature when some government “books and broadcast board” determines that it does not meet the board’s standards. I am talking about literary scholars taking it upon themselves to do the scientific research to determine the effects of different properties within literature and to make their recommendations based, in part, on that research. I am talking about literary scholars identifying literature as good or bad and backing their claims up with empirical research that provides proof as to what the effects of those qualities are.

In this area, like in several others, there are people who seek to distort and twist the empirical research to promote a particular agenda. In just the same way that creationists distort the theories of biology in order to try to drive their religious myths into the gap, people with political agendas have long been distorting the empirical research on the effects of various forms of literature. We have had commissions on pornography discover evidence of harms that is just as imaginary as Bush’s evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Yet, the fact that people engage in dishonest manipulation of the facts for political purposes is not an argument against the claim that the field of study is legitimate and the information it provides is important. It is simply a fact that good people must keep in mind at all times and be ready to trounce on these abuses. We need to do that in biology. We need to do that in medicine. The fact that we will also need to do that in a scientific version of literary studies is no solid objection against the practice.

E2.0: Adam Kolber: Brain Studies and the Law

This is the 29th 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.

There are tough moral questions. If somebody is looking for a moral theory where they can simply plug in a group of variables and instantly get out a proposition about what is right and wrong without doing any significant work, one is in for a tremendous disappointment. The only moral system that can accomplish this end is one where the individual simply makes up the answer. Unfortunately, their ‘morality’ is a make-believe morality that has no real-world application.

Adam Kolber visiting fellow at Princeton University's Center for Human Values, came to the Beyond Belief conference to discuss some of the implications that advances in biotechnology has on the field of law. Since his topic was not about its implications for what the law is, but its implications for what the law ought to be, he was actually talking about the moral implications of these advances in our knowledge. Some of these qualify as tough moral questions.

Extrapolating from Kolber’s presentation, imagine the following scenario.

A woman comes into the emergency room after having been severely brutalized in an attack. Research in brain science has revealed a treatment that can cause a person to forget the events of the past few hours. Research shows that those whose memories have been erased have an easier time dealing with the trauma because they only know about it in the third person. They are not constantly reliving the memories of the event. However, if this woman gets this treatment, then she will not be able to identify the person who attacked her, or recall anything about the crime that might help investigators.

So, what is a person’s obligation to endure life-altering trauma for the sake of helping to catch a perpetrator?

Also, if it is possible for people to use this technology to avoid some of the more harmful aspects of a crime, then to what degree should we hold perpetrators responsible for harm that the victim could have avoided? For example, there may be a drug that dampens the emotional impact of recent memories such that, if a woman is raped, and receives the drug shortly after being raped, she tends not to mind so much (not to be so heavily traumatized) by the rape. So, can this be used to argue that rape is now a less serious crime, because (at least for those who take the drug) it does less harm? Is the rapist, or is the victim, responsible for the harms done if the victim refuses this treatment?

From a desire utilitarian perspective, I can examine these types of questions and state, with all possible certainty, that I do not know how to answer these problems. Desire utilitarianism admit that there are a lot of factors that must be weighed, and it is not easy to weigh them. For the most part, it would be useful if different communities adopted different standards so that we can see the effects, and then make future decisions based on that data.

One of the contributions that I can make to this discussion as an ethicist is to say that certain concerns that some might bring to the table just do not matter. They postulate values that do not exist, or they postulate attempts to mischaracterize what are nothing more than desires so as to give them more weight in moral calculations than they should have.

For example, Kolber mentioned some work that the President’s Commission on bio-Ethics recently did on the question of enhancement – for example, using chemicals to improve strength or memory. Many of the members of the panel who contributed to the Commission’s findings obviously held that there was something intrinsically valuable in that which is 'natural' – that 'enhancements' are immoral because they are unnatural.

Well, there is no such thing as intrinsic value. What we are dealing here is not with something that has intrinsic merit. Instead, a certain group of people either (1) acquired desire for that which has intrinsic merit and a false belief that what is natural has intrinsic merit, or (2) simply acquired a desire to preserve that which is natural that they wish to give more weight, so they misrepresent their desire as a perception of intrinsic merit – as something more important than a mere desire.

Sorry, no. There is no such entity as intrinsic merit. 'Natural' only has value to the extent that what is true in a state where things are natural is that which tends to fulfill good desires. A desire for that which is natural is good only to the degree that the desire is something that tends to fulfill other desires. In order to make a moral case for that which is natural, we have to defend the desire for that which is natural as a desire that tends to fulfill other desires. It does not identify anything of intrinsic merit.

This makes the question a little easier to answer because we were able to remove some of the clutter. Or, to the degree that we allow people to bring this clutter into the discussion, to that degree we risk reaching conclusions (based on false premises) that simply are not true. We would, in other words, be writing moral fictions into the law – which means that people will be suffering the thwarting of desires that are not being thwarted for any good reason.

Of course, religious reasons for various moral conclusions can also be thrown out. The desire to please God or to serve God never provides a legitimate reason-for-action. They are fictions that lead us away from the correct real-world moral option. They are fictions that, if used, will result in the thwarting of desires that could have otherwise been fulfilled, or that will bring about states of affairs that people have real-world reasons to prevent bringing about.

Another issue that will be raised by advances in the science of the mind is the issue of mind-reading. We are already able to make determinations of what parts of the brain are used in different experiences. As we get more and more precise information about these phenomena, we will be able to determine more and more of what a person is actually thinking – the actual brain processes – behind particular behavior.

Kolber mentions that a substantial proportion of the payouts that are given out in tort cases have to do with pain. The plaintiff in these cases report being in a certain amount of pain and that being forced to endure this pain should involve a particular cost on the part of the defendant.

In economic terms, it is said that the defendants owe compensation to the degree that puts the defendant on the same point of an indifference curve. That is to say, the defendant is indifferent to the option of choosing the pain with the money, and giving up both the pain and the money. Anything below this indifference curve and the plaintiff is suffering uncompensated harm. Anything above this indifference curve and the defendant is being forced to provide compensation for harms that are not real.

What if brain scans can help to determine how much pain a person is in? In fact, what if brain scans can help to determine if the accused is lying about his or her pain? In this type of example, let us assume that research shows that one part of the brain lights up when an agent is creating a story about being in pain or acting like a person in pain, and another part lights up when the agent is in pain as a matter of fact.

So, can plaintiffs be forced to undergo exams to determine the amount of pain they are in? Would this type of examination involve an invasion of privacy? Would they violate the prohibition on self-incrimination?

<> does not answer much of an answer for the issues that he brought up. Instead, he merely focuses on pointing out that the information that we are acquiring, and the possibilities that we are creating with this knowledge, will have legal implications. It will have implications for fundamental legal concepts of moral and legal culpability, for the degrees and types of harm, for ways of avoiding harm, and for the degree to which agents will be permitted to alter their own minds/brains.

A lot of the possibilities that one could write about are still within the realm of science fiction. However, some of them will eventually go from fiction to fact. More importantly, researchers may well open up possibilities that science fiction authors never imagined

This intersection between brain science and morality/law promises to be a very interesting area for future research.

Principles of Charity

I have had an interesting request from a member of the studio audience, to

Write a list of worthy causes that rich readers like me (ha, ha) could contribute to that you think are doing good work.

This reader provided his own lists of likely candidates that I will include at the end of this post. Ultimately, he said that the main objective for such a post:

. . . would be to spark a discussion in the comments section of the post, and to create a de facto permanent list of charities where like-minded desire utilitarianists can go when they want to do some good.

When it comes to charity, there are some initial observations that I think are useful.

We are working in the shadow of some massive charitable organizations, such as the Bill and Melinda Gates run their charity like a business. Do you want some money? You need to submit a proposal showing that your activity will produce a reasonably high return on investment. Return in not measured in the amount of money that will flow back into the charity (like a for-profit business), but that you can do the most good with the least amount of money. They not only have a huge stash of resources that they can use, but they know how to use it efficiently. There is no way that I can do the same thing with the money that I have.

Warren Buffett gave his money to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation precisely because the organization was already well set up to determine where to put charitable investments to have the greatest effect.

I could, of course, watch where they placed their money and contribute to the same causes. However, there is an economic law of diminishing returns. To the degree that the Foundation is doing an efficient job, then it donates to a particular cause to the point at which an additional dollar produces less benefit than having that dollar going someplace else.

No matter where I put my money, in the shadow of an organization that has so much and has solid ways of determining where their money is most needed. My own charitable donations are going to suffer from ‘diminished marginal returns’. Not only can I not do as much as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, I cannot even do as much with each dollar as they can, because I lack the resources to determine where each dollar could best be spent.

In light of this, there are still things we can do. Here is my recommendation.

(1) Invest in Yourself

The first place for anybody to invest their money is in themselves. Make yourself into a better, more valuable resource first. Then, as a more valuable resource, you will have more to offer to whatever charity can use your services.

Back when I was sitting in that American History class, making my decision to leave the world a better place than it would have otherwise been, the very first place that I decided to invest my time and effort was in understanding what a ‘better’ world would be like.

I found myself surrounded by people who were asserting different and conflicting opinions on the matter. One thing that I did know is that, in these areas of conflict, at least one of the two people was making a mistake – defending a position that actually would make the world a worse place. Yet, he was defending it with absolute certainty that he was right. I did not want to spend my life defending something that turned out to be a mistake. Even if I was absolutely convinced that I was right, even though I was happy fighting what I thought was the good fight, my life would be a worse than a waste unless I was fighting the good fight as a matter of fact.

So, I invested in myself. I invested in 12 years of college studying value theory.

This was an extremely expensive investment. After I graduated from college, before going to graduate school, I took a year off. At the end of that year my boss made me a very lucrative job offer if I would stay and work for him. If I would have accepted that offer, I would almost certainly have had a lot more money and influence than I do today. However, I would have missed out on an education that would help to answer the question of what I should be doing with that money and influence. Is it better to have more money and influence but not know what to do with it, or to have less power and money but to have a better understanding of what ‘better’ was?

I choose the latter.

(2) Specialize

It would be foolish for all of us to invest in exactly the same thing. We can do far more if each of us picks a separate part of whatever jobs need to be done, and learns to do that job particularly well.

At one point in my study of moral philosophy, I encountered the related field of philosophy of psychology. My views on ethics make heavy use of the concepts of belief and desire and the differences between them. I became aware of people – very intelligent people – studying beliefs, desires, and alternative theories of mind. I knew at the time that I did not have the resources to develop to understand that field of study completely and still maintain my focus on ethics. So, I made a choice to listen to what the people in philosophy of psychology were saying, but to maintain my focus on theories of value.

In fact, I make heavy use of experts in other fields that I do not have time to become experts in myself – experts in medicine, engineering, psychology, sociology, history, chemistry, economics, astronomy, and the like.

I also make use of the skills and resources that others have in web design, graphic arts, book manufacturing, even the driving of busses, the manufacturing and shipping of laptops, and the growing of food.

There are a great many way to contribute, and each of us has our own interests. So, my next piece of advice regarding where to put one’s resources in order to do the more good, is to find a way to contribute that suits one’s own skills and interests.

For me, it is the studying of moral philosophy (ethics) and writing. For you, maybe its construction work and you can help build homes for Habitat for Humanity, or maybe it is web programming and you can build a web application that teaches logic to children, or maybe it is writing stories with good characters that teach readers something about the world.

(3) Use Your Comparative Advantage

In economics, there is a law that is known as 'the law of comparative advantage'. It is built on the fact that we all have limited resources and different skills. Even if one person has an absolute advantage over another in all areas, it is still beneficial to have the person with the lesser advantage doing what he is best at so the person with the greater advantage can focus more energy on her greatest skills.

When Warren Buffett gave the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation (which already had a $30 billion endowment) a promise of another $30 billion, I asked myself what good I could possibly do with the few thousand dollars that I could contribute to charity. For every dollar that I could donate, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation could donate $1 million out of the interest alone from their money.

So, others have a 1 million to 1 advantage over me in terms of cash. However, when it comes to free time, their advantage is only 10 to 1 – assuming that they do not have to work for a living, and I do. So, it would seem that my time is more valuable than my money.

When it comes to votes, the advantage is even more favorable. We have a 1 to 1 ratio in terms of votes. So, an argument could be made that how I use my vote is more valuable than how I use my money or my time.

Finally, in my case, I have an absolute advantage over Bill and Melinda Gates when it comes to an understanding of value theory. Indeed, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation cannot even do its job efficiently unless it can accurately determine the value of its different options. A better understanding of value theory would do them some good. Since my greatest comparative advantage is in value theory, the best expenditure that I can make is in making improvements in people’s understanding of value. That better understanding of value will help them to make better choices on how to utilize the resources they have.

(4) Fulfill Your Own Good Desires

You are going to find it easier to do more work, and do a better job, if you are doing something in an area where you have a personal interests. If you have family members suffering from diabetes or Alzheimer's and, as a result, you have studied the subject and know it well, then this would be an excellent place to invest your efforts.

If you love computer programming – if you go home from a job in which you program computers and find yourself programming computers in your spare time as well – then this is a valuable service that you could offer to any organization that interests you.

If you like business management, then perhaps you should look into an organization that looks to invest in businesses in developing countries.

If you like automobile mechanics then perhaps you can offer your services fixing up vehicles that an organization can then put to use driving senior citizens to their doctor’s appointments or delivering meals to the needy.

Whatever you do in fulfilling your own (good) interests, you will likely need to spend some money to do it well.

(5) Personal Choices

Having said that, here is where I have put my resources for the last couple of years.

(a) Several hours worth of time have gone into writing and publishing 900 essays on ethics, along with two books finished and one in the works.

(b) I have sent money to The Science Network for providing, free of charge, some highly educational content.

(c) I have given money to Camp Quest because in order to solve future problems, future citizens are going to have to be able to think and reason through those problems – preferably better than our generation.

(d) I have already set aside money to offer as prizes for short stories directed at children in which the main characters are unapologetic reason-based atheists and good role models to boot.

(e) My next investment will likely be to pay to have copies of my book, "A Perspective on the Pledge" distributed where I think they may be able to do some good.

The Ethics of the Google Bomb

There seems to be something of a dispute on the ethics of the 'Google bomb'. In this case, the term refers to the act of creating blog posting that are intended to influence the search results that one gets from conducting a search through an internet search engine such as (and in particular) Google. In this case, the goal is to promote the web site "Expelled Exposed" for those who search for Ben Stein's movie "Expelled".

I wish to start with a disclaimer, that I have some vested interest in this topic. Somehow, my critique of the movie 'Expelled', Ben Stein's 'Expelled' is the second or third hit on Google when people search for “Ben Stein Expelled” or any similar search term. I am getting 1/3 of my visitors each day from those searches. So, for me, one of the corollaries to this issue is whether I have reason to feel that I have been wronged in some way by this attempt to promote the web site 'Expelled Exposed’ to the top of the Google search results - given the fact that I will lose traffic as a result.

I believe that it is easy to show that there is at least a sense of a prima facie wrong in creating these Google bombs, and that those who are creating them are aware, but have decided to suppress, this wrongness. We can see this by imagining that the Discovery Institute (for example) had created a site called "Pharyngula Exposed". After which, a group of creationists spread a meme to create "Google bombs" to elevate this site any time that people searched for "Pharyngula" or ""PZ Myers" or similar terms.

I have no doubt that many of the supporters of PZ Myers, including those who have created 'Google bombs' for ‘Expelled Exposed’ would protest these underhanded, desperate, and ultimately dishonest tactics of the religious fundamentalists for what would be seen as behavior so obviously unethical that only a fundamentalist would be blind to it. They would present this as a case of unfairly exploiting a situation to create an advantage for themselves, and taken as yet another sign of their general lack of ethics in the pursuit of their goals.

That would make many of those who created Google bombs for "Expelled Exposed", and those who defend these tactics, hypocrites. They are advocates of a double standard where, "We may engage in activities that we would condemn if they were used by others against us."

This type of test is only a prima-facie test for moral wrong. It does not tell us how to resolve the conflict. We can restore consistency by either condemning (in the same tone) those who created Google bombs in favor of "Expelled Exposed", or by admitting that no criticism would be justified if the Discovery Institute would have pursued similar tactics against, for example, PZ Myers.

To answer this question we would have to ask whether a person with good desires (which includes an aversion to hypocrisy) would condemn both, or allow both cases to pass uncondemned.

There is an additional complication here, because this is a free speech issue. Free speech issues are those where we must recognize an important distinction between two classes of condemnation. At one level, there is the form of condemnation that takes the form of words and private action alone, but where actual prohibitions are not legitimate. It may be the case that a Google bomb is an action to be condemned at the level of words and private action, but not at the level of prohibition.

A common form of rhetoric that we are seeing with increasing frequency these days is that the 'right to freedom of speech' means more than a right to be free from prohibitions, but a right to be free from criticism. This is not the case. Criticism is also a form of speech and needs to be as free as the speech being criticized. Establishing that people have a free-speech right to create Google bombs only implies that they have the same rights as the KKK member who advocates sending all blacks back to Africa. It is not legitimate to prohibit his statement, but it is certainly legitimate to condemn it.

With this caveat in place, we can take an initial look at the ethics of the Google bomb.

I have described a liar as a type of parasite. Individuals seek to fulfill their desires, but act so as to fulfill their desires given their beliefs. What the liar does is infect his victim with a false belief so that, while the victim thinks his actions are those that will fulfill his own desires, they are in fact actions that fulfill the liar’s desires. The liar parasitically draws upon the time, resources, and will of the victim for his own ends.

The person who creates a “Google bomb” engages in the same type of behavior. Google created its search engines to fulfill a particular end – to provide a particular service to its customers. The person who creates a ‘Google bomb’ infects this entity that Google created with data that aims to manipulate it away from serving Google’s purpose, and towards serving the purpose of the person who created the bomb. The person who creates a Google bomb is a parasite, much like a liar is a parasite.

We can further see this by recognizing the fact that Google has not only a reason to but a right to thwart these attempts. In order to keep its search engine functioning the way that Google wants it to, they have reason to devote resources to identifying and blocking these types of attempts. In a very real sense, the person who creates a “Google bomb” is like a programmer who creates a virus – forcing potential victims to spend their resources on anti-virus software that will block his illegitimate activities. Just as writing and distributing viruses is wrong, the creating and distributing of a “Google bomb’ is also wrong.

Now, there is an additional complication. I have established that the 'Google bomb' is a prima-facie wrong. We are better off if people generally had an aversion to engaging in these types of activities. However, a prima-facie wrong can become justified if the action is taken as retribution against somebody who himself has done wrong.

It is a prima facie wrong to take a person by force and lock him in a place where he does not consent to be. But this prima-facie wrong becomes legitimate when we take this action against somebody who has been proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law of performing a serious crime. We can throw such people in prison.

It is well established that the people responsible for the movie "Expelled" are deceitful and manipulative, and have engaged in a number of wrongful actions in the creation and development of this movie. Furthermore, they have engaged in this unethical activity in pursuit of an end that threatens to do great harm. It is an attempt to introduce mob rule as an element of scientific criticism, which is hazardous to the scientific enterprise itself. It is an attempt to promote ignorance and inhibit understanding of the real world.

Consequently, it may be possible to defend a Google bomb as an attempt to help protect innocent people from the wrongs committed by those who are responsible for the move ‘Expelled’. After all, they have shown themselves to be quite willing to engage in the deceptive manipulation of their victims to serve their own ends. Somebody should take action to protect the victims from this wrongful action.

One of the problems with the Google bomb though is that it involves doing harm to an innocent third party – not just to the perpetrator. This is not like doing harm to the potential rapist who is dragging a woman into a dark alley, but doing harm to somebody who happens to have with Google, to be exact. In preventing a wrong, we can do a lot more to the perpetrator than we can do to an innocent third party.

To what degree does the perpetrator of a Google Bomb have a right to fiddle with Google’s search engine without Google’s consent?

This depends on the magnitude of the wrong being committed against the victim. Clearly, to prevent a rape, I would have moral permission to pick up a bat leaning against wall of an innocent third party and club the rapist with it. To save my neighbor’s house from burning, I have a right to go to his neighbor’s yard and to take a hose, to use it on the fire, without waiting to ask permission.

Yet, in performing these types of actions, we can only do to an innocent third party that which a good person would have given consent to if asked. We can use the hose of the neighbor because a good person would have given our consent if asked. Furthermore, we have a right to do this to an innocent third party only when there is no opportunity to ask for permission. If an opportunity exists to ask permission, then an obligation exists to ask for consent, and to obey the wishes of the individual who refuses to give consent.

There is plenty of time to ask Google for permission to Google bomb the perpetrators of the “Expelled” deception. Google also has very good reason to deny permission. One major reason that Google has for denying permission is that its customers have reason to expect a certain degree of hands-off treatment that assumes that Google will not grant permission to others who wish to “Google Bomb” their site. Google has an implicit (at least) contract with its customers to refuse consent to those who would use these tactics.

So, in this case, even the fact that the perpetrators of the “Expelled” myth are wrong-doers who will victimize others through deception and misinformation fails to justify doing harm to an innocent third party without their consent. Google bombers have no right to parasitically hijack Google’s resources for their own purposes.

A moral person would look for other, more legitimate methods to obtain their ends.

Desire Utilitarianism and Moral Calculus

I wrote a post a couple of weeks ago that drew a number of interesting comments that I think deserve my attention.

The post provided a desire-utilitarian account of retributive justice. In it, I defended the value of the presumption of innocence, impartial juries, and the need for the accused to confront the evidence against him, among other principles as not only useful rules but principles that we should make the object of our affections. Rule utilitarian theories say that we should follow these rules so long as they are useful and discard them the instant they do not maximize utility. Desire utilitarianism says that if we cultivate a love of justice then we do not abandon it the instant it is no longer useful. This is true in the same way that a parent who truly loves his child does not abandon the child as soon as she quits being useful. It means protecting and defending the object of one’s affections even when it is not useful.

Having said that, one of the objections raised against desire utilitarianism is that it requires an impractical calculus to determine what the right action is, and that as such it is of no use in telling us what to do. A corollary to that is that the complexity of desire utilitarianism is such that it is particularly useless when an agent has a short period of time available in determining what to do in a specific case.

The calculus is not all that difficult. It is certainly impossible if it is determined that we need an infinite amount of precision in determining the answer to a moral question. However, the less precision we need, the less effort we need to put into making the calculation.

For example, how difficult would it be to determine the population of the United States? If we need to know the exact number at any instant, this would be an insurmountable task. We would have to keep track of every birth and death and be able to adjust the final total with any change in these two factors. That would take a tremendous amount of resources.

However, with significantly less resources at our disposal, I can tell you that the population is slightly over 300 million. I know this because we reached 300 million according to official estimates a few months ago, and the odds are that our population is going up, not down. Making an estimate takes very little effort.

Without a complex moral calculus, we can make a reasonable estimate of the value of certain types of desires. For example, we seek to act so as to fulfill our desires. For any desire that P, the desire is fulfilled in any state of affairs in which P is true. We seek to create states of affairs in which the more and stronger of our desires are fulfilled, but we act so as to fulfill the more and stronger of our desires given our beliefs. For this reason, we can know that true beliefs are generally useful. This gives us reason to argue that truth has value. A love of truth, intellectual responsibility (the use of methods that tend to give true results), and curiosity (the quest to discover the truth) are traits we generally have reason to promote.

It does not take many resources at all to know that we have reason to praise those who are honest and trustworthy and to condemn deceitful manipulators. We can defend this conclusion easily enough.

The same is true of many of the moral principles that we value. The right to freedom of the press, for example, can be translated into an aversion to responding to what people say with violence. Only criticism that takes the form a verbal response – providing reasons for rejecting the original claim – are legitimate. This keeps the peace and protects us from the harms that people have habitually suffered in ideological wars.

We may be wrong in some of our calculations. In fact, I will guarantee that we are wrong with respect to some of the things we believe. However, the possibility of being wrong does not prove that we are helpless and cannot make any decisions. We can still use the knowledge at our disposal to reach answers that are more likely to be right than wrong.

We can know that we have reason to condemn rape, that we have reason to condemn wanton killing, that we have reason to inhibit the tendency to respond to words with violence rather than counter-words, we have reason to promote an aversion to breaking promises, we have a reason to promote an aversion to taking property that belongs to others even when the agent can get away with it, and the like. These do not take any sort of complex utilitarian calculation.

More importantly, if we look at it, this is exactly how moral principles are defended. When people have debates over whether or not to allow capital punishment, whether homosexuals should be allowed to marry, whether to pass laws against drunk driving – people generally bring forth evidence that is relevant to debating the value of particular desires. We debate capital punishment by asking whether a person who cares about the innocent people who might be saved has more reason to be worried about the innocent accused who might be executed or the innocent victims of those who were not executed.

There are other arguments as well – such as appeals to God’s will or the intrinsic merit of ‘justice,’ but these entities do not exist. The reason to reject these claims made in defense of a moral position is not because, “They do not fit our model.” It is because “they do not make reference to entities that are real.”

Some questions are difficult to answer. Sometimes the answers really will be difficult, and intelligent people can disagree. This, too, is a fact of life. It is a benefit, not an objection, to desire utilitarianism that it can explain and predict the fact of moral disagreement.

Of course, if our choice is between two theories that explain and predict a set of phenomena equally well, we should go with the simpler theory. If there were a moral theory that allowed us to get moral answers more quickly and easily than desire utilitarianism – a theory that did not simply make answers up out of thin air – then we should go with that theory. My suggestion here is that there is no such theory. It may, in a sense, be regrettable that desire utilitarianism predicts that some moral questions will be hard to answer and that we will be locked in moral debate on some issues for a long time, but without a simpler theory, that is just a fact about the universe we are going to have to learn to live with.

It is important to note that my objections to other theories are substantially based on their claims about what exists. I hold that desires are the only reasons for action that exist. All other theories invent other types of reasons for action. They fail because they postulate reasons for action that do not exist. A reason for action that does not exist cannot possibly be a reason for action for performing or refraining from any real-world action. Objections to desire utilitarianism have to start with showing that these other reason for action do exist.

Otherwise, you are building your morality on a fantasy. You might as well be building your morality on a God as to build it on any other type of reason for action that is just as mythical.

This, by the way, is one of the merits of desire utilitarianism. Even though it does not guarantee that moral calculations will be easy, it does make moral calculations easier by throwing out a huge stack of clutter. This clutter consists of reasons for action that do not exist. Divine commands, categorical imperatives, intrinsic (non-relational) values, desire-independent values of all types do not exist, and can be thrown out of any moral debate as irrelevant.

Desires exist. Some desires are malleable. Desires that exist give us reason to mold those malleable desires, promoting desires that tend to fulfill other desires and inhibiting desires that tend to thwart other desires. In some cases it will be easy to determine which desires we have the most and strongest reasons to promote (e.g., honesty) or inhibit (rape). In some cases it will be difficult.

Morality becomes even more difficult because advancing technology and a changing world keeps changing our options, which keeps changing the possible effects of different malleable desires, which means that the answers to moral questions will change. As I will discuss this weekend, we once never had to worry about the morality of altering or eliminating one’s memories of a recent event, but that is changing. Soon, we will need to be discussing the ethics of, for example, a treatment for rape that might allow the victim to forget the rape itself, but which would also cause her to forget what her attacker looked like.

Finally, there is the question about how desire utilitarianism might guide a person to act in a circumstance in which he does not have a great deal of time in which to make a decision. Desire utilitarianism holds that, at the moment of action, we will act so as to fulfill the most and strongest of our desires, given our beliefs. At the moment of action, we do not appeal to moral principles. We do what we want to do.

If the institution of morality has done its job correctly, then the most and the strongest desires that the agent has at the moment of action will be desires that tend to fulfill the desires of others. He will have an aversion to taking property that belongs to others, an aversion to causing pain and suffering, a desire to keep promises and to tell the truth, and so forth. At the moment of action, he will act so as to fulfill these desires – just like he always does.

He will act in partial ignorance of the consequences of his actions, without fully knowing which action will actually fulfill the more and stronger of his desires. Just like he always does. He may make a mistake and perform an action that fails to fulfill his desires – one that will create a state that makes false propositions that the agent wishes were made true, or make true propositions that the agent wishes were made false. But his heart will be in the right place, and for that reason we have no legitimate reason-for-action to condemn such a person. We only have reason to condemn a person to the degree that we find evidence that his heart is not in the right place – as a way of nudging hearts in general into a better place, a place that tends to fulfill more and stronger desires generally.

This, then, is how desire utilitarianism handles the problem of moral calculus.