Taxation is Theft?

From the moment I started writing on the moral concept of theft (as applied to consecrated communion wafers), I was waiting for somebody to respond as Jimmy_D responded on July 28th,

And now let's apply this to taxes.

Because, clearly, if theft is the taking of property from another through deception (fraud), stealth (burglary), or force (robbery), then taxation is theft. We pay our taxes – we hand over our property to the government – because we are threatened with harm if we do not.

First point: There is no such thing as intrinsic value. Value exists in the form of relationships between states of affairs and desires, and moral value exists in the form of relationships between malleable desires (desires that can be molded through social forces) and other desires.

Desire utilitarianism recommends an aversion to acquiring property through deception, stealth, and force. We should all feel very uneasy about taking property from other people without their consent. Because, to the degree that we are uncomfortable with (have an aversion to) this type of activity – to that degree all of our property is more secure, we can make better plans, and we are less likely to go to war with each other.

This, by the way, is what I consider important about the case of the communion cracker. It is not the value of the cracker itself, but it is the value of the aversion to taking property through deception that I sought to defend. That moral principle has implications far beyond communion crackers. It affects all of us in the security of our own possessions. The idea that it is a minimal crime for others to walk off with our property whenever they disagree with our reasons for wanting to hold onto it leaves all of us less secure.

Anyway, looking at the issue through desire utilitarian terms, there are two areas (at least) in which the strict principle described above will thwart desires rather than fulfill them. As a result, the desire that best tends to fulfill other desires is a bit more complex than a simple aversion to the use of deception, stealth, or force to acquire the property of another.

Public Goods

One of the area where a strict application of this principle will thwart desires is in the area of public goods. Public goods are goods where we cannot limit the benefits of a particular good only to those who pay for them.

The problem with public goods is that, if people can obtain the benefit without paying for them, then the goods tend to be under-funded and under-developed. We lose a great deal of desire fulfillment because people are sitting around on their hands hoping to be ‘free riders’ – to obtain the benefits of somebody else’s contribution, without making a contribution of their own.

Example of public goods are national defense (it is difficult to defend 514 Pearl Street without also defending 516 Pearl Street), police and court system (we are all better off when a rapist is taken off the streets, not just those who paid for the police and court system that captured and imprisoned him), education (we all benefit from having a well-educated population), clean air (it is difficult to give one person clean air but not his neighbor), and the prevention of human extinction (to the degree that people value human survival).

If we left these goods up to entirely private funding, we would suffer a free-rider problem that will give us less of each of these goods than will actually fulfill our desires. Of course, the only way to get people to make contributions to these goods (in many cases) is to use force against them. It is to tax them, and to threaten to put in jail those who do not pay their taxes.

So, we have reason to promote a modified moral concept of theft. We want people to be uneasy about taking the property of another through deception, stealth, or force – except when the money is used to provide (desire-fulfilling) public goods, in which case there should be less aversion to taking the money through force.

There should still be some aversion, or the practice of taking money for public goods gets out of hand. People will have an unfortunate tendency to see ‘public goods’ where none exist - when doing so allows them to then use force (through taxes) to get money from others.

In fact, it is possible to argue that we are better off foregoing the benefits of public goods then we are establishing a system of taxation to provide public goods. The latter will inevitably be corrupted, with the corruption thwarting more desires than the public goods would fulfill. However, this is an empirical question. Furthermore, it does not refute the principle that where providing public goods does more good than harm, then taxation for the purpose of providing public goods is morally legitimate.

The Wealth Effect

In a community where people have different levels of wealth, those with a great deal of wealth have the power to bid resources away from those who have little wealth – even though the person with little wealth would have fulfilled more and stronger desires with those resources.

I have used an example in previous posts, following Hurricane Katrina, where water is scarce. One person with a great deal of money wants to use some of the limited water to shampoo her dog, and does not care about the price. So, she bids up the price of water. As she does so, she bids it up above the price that another woman, who has a sick and dehydrated child, can afford to pay.

Many conservatives argue that, in a free market, property goes to its most highly valued use because it goes to the person willing to pay more. This isn’t true – because $20 to somebody who has $20 million is worth a lot less than $10 to somebody who has $100. In order to find who whether the person who wants to shampoo her dog or the person who wants water for her sick child values the water more, we have to ask who would bid the more for the water if they had equal wealth. That is to say, if the value of the money was the same for both agents.

We see a world today where those with a great deal of money bid significant amounts of resources away from those who are barely able to survive. We see people bidding up the price of food so that they can use it to produce energy, much of which goes to entertainment, making others significantly worse off (thwarting extremely strong and stable desires) along the way.

In a recent discussion that I heard, one of the participants suggested that price should be used to allocate who gets immunizations in the case of a global epidemic. Yet, this is nothing but a recipe for a situation where the wealthy (and those who are favored by the wealthy) survive and the poor die. When a rich person lives instead of a poor person, we have absolutely no reason to believe that his life is more valuable than that of the poor person who died. We have no reason to believe that rich people have more or stronger desires than poor people and, realize more value through living than poor people do. So, there is no reason to believe that rich people realize more value in living than poor people do – all else being equal.

In desire utilitarian terms, there is nothing to recommend this method of distribution.

Here, too, we have reason to worry about the possibility of people using this power of the government to do harm instead of to do good. Seeing the government hand out money, they decide to use government force to take (tax) money from others and direct it into their own pockets. They merely pretend to be interested in making sure people with little wealth are able to acquire higher-valued resources. They lobby and lie to promote a program that they falsely claim to have legitimate ends, when it does not have those ends.

Here, too, we might be better off abolishing the practice, because the good we forego by preventing the rich from bidding more highly valued resources away from the poor is less than the harm done by a culture that invests huge amounts of money taking from the poor and middle-class and giving it to people who already have enough money to manipulate the system.

Institutions

Desire utilitarianism says that a person with good desires would probably have no aversion to the taking of money by force (taxation) for the purpose of promoting public goods such as national defense, courts, and education. She would also probably have no aversion to taxation for the purpose of preventing people with a great deal of wealth from bidding resources away from people who have little money but a more highly valued use for those resources.

Still, the person with good desires still has reason to look for institutions that make sure that the money is taxed for the purpose of public goods and most highly valued uses, and to prevent people from exploiting the system to divert funds to less valued uses. The test of whether a person with good desires would support taxation is the test of whether the program actually does promote a public good that would have otherwise gone underfunded or corrects the problem of wealthy people bidding resources away from more highly valued uses.

Attack Ads

It is the political season, and we are starting to see a lot of political advertisements.

There is one particular type of advertisement that I am interested today – one that shows that the person who sponsored (or "approves of") this message is somebody of dubious moral character. It is a type of advertisement where a candidate speaks about what the other candidate has voted on or wants to do.

"My opponent voted to abolish social security," or "My opponent said that he has no interest in protecting the lives and freedoms of Americans," or similar statement.

These types of advertisements are often called, "attack ads." However, that term is far too broad. It is often used to refer to any advertisement that says anything negative about an opponent. Yet, taken to its extreme, a prohibition on "attack ads" or “negative advertising” would also be a prohibition on saying many true things about others. The problem with these advertisements is not that they "attack" or that they are 'negative'. The problem is that they are dishonest.

These types of advertisements fall into a type of political strategy where the goal for the candidate is to "define" her opponent. He "defines" her as being soft on crime, or weak on national defense, or as heartless, or as unpatriotic. He does so by taking votes and statements out of their original context and presenting them to the public in such a way that the public is invited to give a negative view of that opponent.

"My opponent voted against armor for American troops in Iraq."

That’s doubtful. I doubt that any Senator or Representative said, "I think it is better to have American soldiers blown to bits than to protect them from bombs and bullets." Chances are that there was something else going on here. Chances are that the advertisement, in failing to look at the context in which the vote was cast, is imply not being honest about what "my opponent" did.

This illustrates what is wrong with these types of advertisements. They are almost always lies. I think that a strong case can be made that every advertisement where one candidate talks about what his or her opponent did or said is a lie – because none of those advertisements have enough time to include enough context to give the reader or listener an accurate understanding of the event. They can only lift the vote or statement out of context. But lifting a vote or statement out of context results in changing its meaning. Presenting this changed meaning as the meaning of the actual vote or statement is a lie – an untruth.

I have defined a lie as any action that communicates to others a proposition that is not true. A person lies when he believes that X, he wants somebody else to believe not-X, and communicates with that somebody else in some way that intends to promote in that person a belief that not-X.

That is exactly what these advertisements do – promote attitudes that are not true. That is exactly what these advertisements must do. There is no way to design an advertisement like this that is 30 to 60 seconds long that is not deceptive. Or, if there is a way, then it happens very, very rarely.

This is because these advertisements function by taking somebody else's vote, or somebody else's statement, out of its context. As such, they report that the opponent said something that he did not say, or that he cast a vote that he did not cast.

The only way to be honest about what the opponent said or did would be to put the vote or the statement back in its original context, and to look at the reasons for and against that action. However, putting the action back in its original context takes a great many more words – which is why a 30 second advertisement of the form, "My opponent voted to do this," or "My opponent said that," cannot possibly tell the truth. It is because the people making the advertisement cannot put the vote or statement in its correct context in 30 seconds.

There is a second problem with this type of political advertisement. Defining oneself or others takes money. The idea is that, if you repeat a lie often enough, people start to believe it. So, this tactic throws the election to whomever can throw the most lies in front of the average voter. The person who can lie the most often and the loudest is the one with the most money. The opponent, unless he also has money, cannot prevent herself from being defined in this way, and will almost certainly lose the race.

Consequently, because we are a culture that allows this type of deception and because we respond to it by believing these distortions rather than condemning the liar, we live in a society where the dishonest candidate is the most likely winner and the dishonest candidate who sells himself for the most money can defeat the dishonest candidate who attracts less money.

The remedy for this problem is to condemn the candidate who lies to earn public office – who produces an advertisement that falsely claims that they can accurately present what their opponent has done or believes in 30 seconds or less. The instant that one of these types of advertisements comes on the air, you should know that the candidate supporting the advertisement is fundamentally dishonest.

And that, more than the misleading context in the message, is what should determine your vote. The country would be better off if we were to make it a cultural priority to keep these types of people out of public office.

Programmable Morality

Today, a member of the studio audience left a comment in which Colin identified himself or herself as "a physicist who programs BDI agents."

This called to mind a project that I have been thinking about for a long time.

I want to have somebody try to program morality into a set of BDI agents.

How would this work?

Well, if we have a community of BDI agents, then we have a community of entities that have beliefs and desires.

Its beliefs take the form of data stored in a database that describe the world around the agent. Though, of course, those beliefs may be false. The agent uses various ways to collect evidence, but it might end up with 'false beliefs' – data in its database that does not accurately describe the world. Still, the agent will act as if its beliefs are true.

Its desires take the form of goals – or objectives – that the agent is trying to achieve. Specifically, while the beliefs identify what the machine thinks is true about the world, its desires determine what the machine will try to make true. If the machine’s goal is to keep the room it is in at 25 degrees C, then this is its desire.

For the sake of this project, we will need to have a community of BDI agents. They do not need to all have the same desires (the same values). They simply need to have desires. The morality will come about in part through an interplay of different desires.

These are the things that we get automatically from a community of BDI agents. However, in order to create morality, we need a few more things.

(1) The desires have to be malleable. There has to be a way for environmental factors to alter the agent’s desires. Perhaps, if it sees something red, it will change its goal from keeping the room at 25 degrees to keeping the room at 30 degrees. If its power supply drops at too fast a rate, then it grows averse to activities that consume power.

(2) Agents need to be able to 'theorize' about what the desires of other agents are, and how those desires impact its own desires. For example, a machine with a desire to keep the room at 25 degrees will need to know what the different behaviors of the other agents will have on the temperature. It will also need to know how to promote desires in others that will keep the temperature at 25 degrees, and to inhibit desires that will tend to move the temperature below 25 degrees. At the same time, other agents will need to know how to change this agent into one that tries to keep the temperature at 28 degrees or 30 degrees, and how that will affect their own goals.

Contemporary morality uses a system of rewards and punishments.

Note: I typically use the phrase, "praise, condemnation, reward, and punishment." However, praise and condemnation are simply verbal forms of reward and punishment. We could program the robots to see certain signals as praise. In other words, "If another robot shows a flashing red light, then the desires you were seeking to fulfill become weaker. If it shows a flashing green light, then the desires you were acting on become stronger." Of course, machines are also programmed to give off a blinking red-light signal if its desires are being thwarted, and a blinking green-light signal if its desires are being fulfilled.

Green lights represent praise, while red lights represent condemnation.

Now, we have the makings for a moral system among our BDI agents. We turn them loose, and watch how they struggle to promote desires that tend to fulfill other desires, and inhibit desires that tend to thwart other desires. Desires that fulfill other desires trigger green lights which then strengthen those desires, while desires that thwart other desires trigger red lights that then inhibit those desires.

Hopefully, the community, over time, will grow to have more and more flashing green lights and fewer and fewer flashing red lights.

This would be a rudimentary moral system – machines using actions as signs of the desires that other agents have, drawing inferences as to what the impact of those desires will be on its fulfillment of its own desires, and modifying those desires through blinking red (blame) and green (praise) lights that inhibit desire-thwarting desires and promoting desire-fulfilling desires.

To this system, we then add another layer of capacity. At this level, agents are capable of studying the behavior of other agents to learn what their desires are. Once agents acquire beliefs about the desires of other agents, they can engage in rudimentary bargaining and threats.

For example, Agent A (with a desire that P) forms the belief that Agent B has a desire that Q. So, Agent A communicates to Agent B, "If you help me to realize P, then I will help you to realize Q." In this way, our agents are programmed to bargain. Of course, bargains create a risk that an agent will perform its part of the bargain only to see the other agent defect. But, agents have reason to flash red on instances of defection and green on instances of completion – to give other agents an aversion to breaking a contract and a desire to live up to its terms.

Or, Agent A might offer a different deal to Agent B. "If you prevent me from realizing P, then I will do my best to prevent you from realizing Q." In this way, our agents are programmed to make threats – including the threat to punish those who do not perform desire-fulfilling actions. Of course, agents have reason to give others an aversion to making threats, unless those threats in turn tend to promote behavior that fulfills desires. It has reason to flash red at the sign of unjustified threats (unjust laws), and green at the sign of justified threats (just laws).

Next, in addition to the ability to alter the desires of other agents, we must give agents the ability to alter the beliefs of other agents – to engage in communication. Agent A, in this model, will give out certain signals that will cause all who hear to form a belief that P. Of course, since Agent A is ultimately only concerned with the fulfillment of its own desires, it will discover that one of the ways it might fulfill those desires from time to time is to lie – is to communicate false beliefs to other agents so those agents will act so as to fulfill Agent A’s desires.

Except, Agent A will also realize that it has reason to build in others an aversion to lying and other types of manipulation. So, it will flash red when it detects a lie, and flash green when it detects other agents being truthful – so as to promote an aversion to lying and a desire for honesty.

These features, then, will give us elementary bargaining and threats.

In this way, we build up a moral system in computer language. There is nothing in this that gives us any reason to doubt our capacity, ultimately, to create machines that have morals.

The next thing you know, robots will have rights.

Some day.

Holding and Acting On Beliefs

In the recent debate on the concept of theft, Ron in Houston made a couple of common claims about the relationship between belief and intention on the one hand, and morality on the other.

There is a vast difference between holding a belief and acting upon that belief. Honestly, who has the right to tell people what they must believe? Sounds like a 1984 style mind control to me.

In this post, I want to take a closer look at the relationships between belief, desire, intention, action, and morality.

In this blog, I follow the theory of intentional action known as “BDI Theory” – Belief, Desire, Intention theory. It says that all intentional actions can be explained using the following formula:

(Belief + Desire) -> Intention -> Intentional Action

Why did the chicken cross the road? Whatever answer you give to this question will be a hypothesis about what beliefs and desires the chicken had.

Desires select the ends of intentional action – they select our goals. Beliefs select the means of intentional action – they tell us how to get to our goals and whether our goals have actually been met. Intentions are how beliefs and desires are translated into actions – the movement of muscles – or, in some cases, into inaction.

Now, let us look at an action A, where A = going 90kph through a school zone. We make this action illegal. In doing so, we make it illegal for agents to have whatever combinations of beliefs and desires that would then result in the intentional action of going 90kph through a school zone.

Does a person who is going 90kph through a school zone have a right to believe that he was only going 30kph? The law has hereby demanded that people have true beliefs as to how fast they are going, and will arrest and imprison people who happen to do a poor job of acquiring true beliefs about how the fast they are going.

We can imagine somebody saying, “You clocked me at 90kph, but I believe that I was only going 30kph. I have a right to believe whatever I want to believe. You cannot arrest me for going 90kph when I believe that I was only going 30kph because that does not respect my beliefs.”

Or, imagine somebody saying, “I believe that there is no law against traveling 90kph – and I have a right to that belief.”

Every criminal law ever written is a prohibition on having certain (sets of) beliefs. Every time we make a particular intentional action illegal, we have said, “Here is a group of belief-desire sets that you are not permitted to have. If we discover that you have them (because you have performed this illegal act), then you will be arrested and punished.”

A belief is a disposition to act. The idea that you can have a belief without acting on it is as absurd as the idea that an object can be under the influence of a force of nature without being affected by it.

Return to the formula above governing intentional action. That formula is governed by the principle that an agent acts to fulfill the most and strongest of his desires, given his beliefs. If you wish to alter the intentional actions that an agent will perform, then you do so by altering his beliefs and desires.

Think of these beliefs and desires to be like the forces on a body going through space. If you want to alter the course of a body going through space, then you must alter the forces acting on it – adding a new force, or changing the magnitude and/or direction of the forces that are already present. At the same time, it is not causally possible to add a new force that does not alter the motion of the object through space (unless you add two new forces that completely cancel each other out).

If you want to alter the movement of an intentional action – another human being – through life, then you do so by altering the beliefs and desires that are forming his intentions. It is as impossible to alter the intentional actions of an individual without altering his beliefs and desires as it is to alter the movement of an object through space without altering the forces acting upon it.

Similarly, it is impossible to add a belief to an agent’s set of beliefs and desires without affecting his intentional actions – as it is to add a force to an object without altering its movement through space (unless one also introduces another force that is precisely the opposite of the first).

In other words, there is no difference between holding a belief and acting on it. Beliefs will be acted on in the same way that forces of nature will influence objects.

How does this relate to “1984 style mind control?”

It is easy to understand the fear. “If people believe that it is permissible to regulate thoughts, then this is going to open up all sorts of room for abuse. People will be fighting with each other over what we are and are not permitted to think. This will lead to tyranny.”

But, the same argument applies to all law. “If people believe that it is permissible to regulate action, then this is going to open up all sorts of room for abuse. People will be fighting with each other over what actions we are and are not permitted to perform. This will lead to tyranny.”

In fact, it’s the same argument, given that every regulation we have ever passed on intentional actions is a regulation passed against belief-desire sets.

Think about any trial. A person is on trial for murder. Did he believe that the gun was loaded? Did he believe that firing a bullet at the victim might kill him? Did he believe that the victim was an immediate threat to somebody else?

The jury at any trial is going to be asked to judge not only what the accused did, but what the accused believed. In fact, there is an intimate connection between what the accused did and what the accused believed, since his actions are defined by what he believed. Did he believe that the gun was not loaded? If he did, then he could not possibly have performed the act of intentional homicide.

The statement that we may regulate thought is not a statement that says we may start to do something new – something that people have thought in the past was prohibited. It is a statement that says that we should be honest about what we have been doing all along – what we have done since the day that the first law was passed.

A Call for Bill Donahue's Resignation

I am posting two items back to back; this posting here on Bill Donahue, and a related posting as well on PZ Myers.

William Donahue

I write today to call for the resignation of William Donahue as the President of the Catholic League and, if he is not willing to do the right thing in this matter, call for his removal from that position by whatever mechanisms the Catholic League has for such an action.

The reason is because William Donahue has been using an organization that claims to exist for the purpose of promoting civil rights to advance an agenda that is quite the opposite of this intended goal, and to serve as a mechanism for promoting bigotry and prejudice towards others.

One of the defining characteristics of bigotry resides when somebody takes the wrongs (real or imagined) of an individual or group of individuals and uses that to promote hostility towards a whole group. We find examples of this in several of Donahue's press releases.

For example, in responding to PZ Myers' threat to desecrate a Eucharist, Donahue made a comment in MYERS TO DESECRATE EUCHARIST AND KORAN that:

Much has been written about the moral vacuity that marks the Darwinian vision of society that Myers embraces. He now has a grand opportunity to rebut those critics. Or sustain the perception.

His statement here has the same moral quality as the statement, Much has been written about the greed that marks the kike vision of society, of which my opponent is a member. He now has a grand opportunity to rebut those critics. Or sustain the perception.

Donahue's statement is morally equivalent to the anti-Semitic rant in the above paragraph on two points.

First, it is equivalent in the sense that 'Darwinism' is a derogatory term that theists have invented and toss among themselves to refer to those who believe in evolution and in no God in a derogatory and profane manner. You will scarcely see this word in writing or hear it spoken except in an attitude similar to that with which people also use terms like 'nigger', 'kike', 'wetback', and the like.

Second, it is equivalent in the sense that it asserts that all members of the bigot's target group share the common flaw of being morally inferior to the speaker's group. It makes this accusation in total disregard to the individual characteristics of those who make up the group.

It makes no difference whether Myers is actually guilty of a wrong. It is as irrelevant as the answer to the question of whether the Jew, in the above example, was being inappropriately greedy. What matters is that the speaker decided to use the fault of a specific individual (real or imagined) to promote prejudice towards a whole group.

With this bigoted slur, Donahue is inviting and encouraging his readers to prejudge a group of people as 'morally vacuous' – to promote prejudice in such a pure form that it could stand in as a paradigm example of that particular moral crime. It is particularly ironic that it comes from the leader of an organization that claims to not only have a proper understanding of, but is on a mission to promote, religious freedom rights and the free speech rights.

This is not the only expression of bigotry to come from Donahue.

In MYERS STILL WANTS TO ABUSE EUCHARIST; SHOWS DEFERENCE TO ISLAM, Donahue writes:

So now the Planet-of-the-Apes biologist has divined himself an expert on the artistic value of cartoons.

In HYSTERIA MARKS MYERS AND HIS ILK Donahue writes

Myers, who claims expertise in studying zebrafish, has quite a following among the King Kong Theory of Creation gang.

So we have a pattern whereby Donahue uses the pulpit of an organization allegedly created to support religious freedom and civil rights to promote bigotry and prejudice against those who do not share Donahue's religion.

Some will be tempted to compare this call for Donahue's removal with his call for the firing of PZ Myers for making claims that are hostile to Catholics. However, there are clear and relevant differences.

Chief among these is the fact that Myers is a biologist, while Donahue is the President of an organization that claims to exist for the purpose of promoting religious liberty and civil rights. If Myers were as incompetent in the biological sciences as Donahue has proven himself to be in the field of religious liberty and civil rights, then it may well be appropriate to find some way to remove Myers from his position.

Furthermore, Myers is not speaking for the organization for which he works. He is not releasing press releases as if they were official university statements. He is not posting his statements on a university web site as if his words were those of the university.

Donahue, on the other hand, is doing all of these things. He has made his bigotry the official doctrine of the Catholic League, spoken in their name, using their money, and using their web site, as a medium for promoting bigotry and prejudice.

For both of these reasons, if the Catholic League were a moral and just institution, they would not have Donahue as their mouthpiece and would end his use of their resources in promoting prejudice.

As it stands, Donahue's incompetence in his selected field is unmatched.

If Donahue does not resign, then the Catholic League should consider removing him and replacing him with somebody who has the competence to first understand what religious liberty and civil rights are. Donahue is an embarrassment to anybody and everybody who holds that the defense of religious liberty and civil rights is truly something worth defending. He has made himself an agent of the very types of behavior he claims to be fighting against, and has made the Catholic League an accessory to and an agent of bigotry and prejudice.

If the Catholic League does not take steps to remove him, then we have reason to question whether the Catholic League itself has not decided to embrace bigotry and prejudice.

Contributions to a Stereotype

I am posting two items back to back. This item here on PZ Myers, and nother posting on Bill Donahue.

PZ Myers

"Contributions to a stereotype are not tax deductable."

I do not know why this particular quote, from a popular television series several decades ago called Barney_Miller, has stuck with me all of these years. The episode in question involved one in which the precinct arrested a black man for assault. The person he was accused of assaulting was a voodoo priestess that he believed had cursed him.

The quote above was uttered by Detective Harris (played by Ron Glass), who was also black.

It applies today to the stereotype that atheists lack any connection to morality or, in the absence of a belief in God, are capable of committing horrendous deeds that a person with a belief in God would not commit. These claims are used to promote an attitude of fear and hostility towards atheists.

The question of "contributing to a stereotype" in this case means acting in a way that contributes to the belief that atheists lack a fundamental understanding of morality.

When PZ Myers called for the 'scoring' of a consecrated communion wafer, Myers not only became guilty of the crime of promoting fraud or stealth as a way of acquiring the property of others, he also became guilty of contributing to a stereotype. He provided others with a tool that they can use to argue that atheists have no connection to morality and see themselves free to do evil (to engage in fraud or burglary) whenever it suits them to do so.

This contribution to a stereotype is an additional moral crime – even though it is grounded on the wrongful acts of others. In this case, in order for Myers' act to promote bigotry, others have to be guilty of making a hasty generalization from the specific (Myers' endorsement of the use of fraud or stealth to acquire property from Catholics) to the general (atheist disregard for morality). This is as bigoted as drawing an inference from a black person's robbery of a convenience store to the conclusion that blacks are criminals.

However, in an environment in which one is aware of the fact that others will behave immorally, that is a fact that the moral person would consider, and which we can morally blame a person for failing to consider.

Suppose I discover that a co-worker of mine is a serial killer with a preference for young long-haired brunettes. I have a neighbor who is a young long-haired brunette who regularly keeps me awake with loud parties, fights with various boyfriends, and a dog that never stops barking. As a way of dealing with this issue, I invite my co-worker home and introduce him to my neighbor.

In this case, I would be guilty of her murder. The fact that the murder was committed by somebody else – without a word of encouragement from me – does not change the fact that if I have reason to suspect that a particular outcome would result from my actions, then I am morally responsible for that outcome.

Similarly, even though it takes an act of bigotry to apply an individual atheist's detachment from morality to all atheists, and bigotry is itself a moral crime, it is a moral crime that we are all aware of. As such, there is an additional level of moral condemnation that is appropriate whenever any atheist demonstrates a detachment from moral requirements – particularly when their detachment from moral requirements is as public as Myers' has recently become.

This criticism does not only apply to Myers, it applies to all who decided to blind themselves to the moral prohibition against acquiring property through fraud or stealth – those who acquired consecrated communion wafers through fraud or stealth, and those who cheered them on.

When responding to the 9/11 attacks, I have often made the comment that it is illegitimate to blame anybody for those attacks who did not participate in them or who did not celebrate them. To celebrate a wrong done to others is to endorse that wrong, and is itself a moral crime.

So, in the Case of the Communion Cracker, moral condemnation for promoting fraud or stealth as a way of acquiring the property of a Catholic Church applies not only to PZ Myers, but to those who actually performed those actions, and to those who endorsed it

[For those who deny that Myers promoted fraud or stealth as a way of taking the property of others, I ask you – how else was somebody going to score a consecrated communion wafer other than fraud (pretending to participate in the ritual of communion) or stealth (grabbing one when nobody was looking and sneaking it out of the church)?

I have also dealt with the claim that the stealing of a cracker is a minimal crime that deserves only mild condemnation. Yet, the damage done from such an act is not the loss of a cracker. The principle that it is a trivial concern to take the property of another whenever one does not agree with the reasons the owner has for valuing that property puts all of our property at risk. We are made worse off whenever people think they can enter somebody else's property and walk off with anything that the other person (in the opinion of the thief) does not properly value.]

It is also the case that moral condemnation for contributing to the stereotype that atheists are detached from morality, and will abandon moral restraints when it suits their purpose to do so, belongs not only to Myers and those who acquired consecrated communion wafers through fraud or stealth, but those who embraced those acts.

The entire atheist community has been made worse off by this demonstration of the eagerness of atheists to ignore moral the moral prohibitions on fraud and stealth when acquiring the property of the Catholic Church. Because, by this action, those atheists have reinforced the stereotype that a lack of belief in God is associated with a lack of conviction to obey moral restraints. They have done us harm.

Note: I am not condemning the desecration of the consecrated communion wafer. I have also said that, if Myers had acquired rightful possession of such a cracker, he would then be free to do with it what he choose, including the use of it in a demonstration like the one he performed. However, the need to have a particular prop for a demonstration does not give one the right to acquire that prop through fraud or stealth. Nor does it give legitimacy to asking others to score such a prop when one knows (or should have known) that the only way to score one is through fraud or stealth.

The best thing for Myers and those who supported using fraud or stealth to acquire the property of a Catholic church to do now is to admit that moral transgression, to apologize for it, to disavow the legitimacy of using fraud or stealth to acquire property from another, and to disavow the principle that a person may take property from another whenever he disagrees with the reason the owner has for valuing that property.

This, then, would repair some of the damage done by those who contributed to the stereotype that atheists are incapable of comprehending or of being motivated to live within moral constraints.

Dohanue on Swastikas and Burning Crosses

Today’s already written post will have to wait, given the response from Bill Donahue, the President of the Catholic League, to the desecration of a Eucharist by PZ Myers.

Donahue’s statement, in calling for the University of Minnesota to fire Myers, from MYERS DESECRATES THE EUCHARIST

“It is important for Catholics to know that the University of Minnesota will not tolerate the deliberate destruction of the Eucharist by one of its faculty. Just as African Americans would not tolerate the burning of a cross, and Jews would not tolerate the display of swastikas, Catholics will not tolerate the desecration of the Eucharist.”

The important point to note here is that the Swastika and the burning cross (and the Confederate flag, for that matter), are symbols of actual violence committed against Jews and blacks. These are symbols of organizations that not only advocate, but who have actually committed, physical and violent crimes against the people involved.

Nothing in what Myers has done consists of a real or threatened act of violence against a human being.

So, what Donahue is doing in making this analogy to say that the act of putting a nail through a cracker is equivalent to the slaughter of 6 million Jews, the lynching and segregation of blacks, and a century of slavery.

To make such a statement, of course, is to denigrate - to utterly trivialize - the Holocaust, segregation, and slavery.

"Put a nail through a cracker, kill 6 million Jews, enslave blacks for nearly two centuries and continue to treat them as subhuman for another 100 years after that, it's all the same to me." This is, in effect, what Bill Donahue is saying.

His act of appropriating these symbols of real violence for his own purposes is an ultimate act of exploitation. He is, in fact, harvesting the suffering and harm that these people endured for his own political ends. As such, he is adding a new injustice against the injustices that these others have suffered. He is declaring that their deaths and their suffering is simply another resource that he can appropriate for himself and use at his will.

Furthermore, if Donahue's standard of morality were to be universalized, then we would reach the absurd state in which no action can be performed, because you cannot name an act that violates some religious precept somewhere in the world.

Is the act of eating bacon going to be made a hate crime? If we follow Donahue's line of reasoning, this would follow. For a person whose religion forbids the eating of pork, knowledge that somebody else is eating pork can be interpreted as "a statement that my religious beliefs are simply idle prejudices, of no real value". He can clearly argue that, "To show respect for my religion, you must refrain from eating pork. If you violate this prohibition, if you eat pork anyway, we may take this as a sign of hatred and hostility towards those who view the eating of pork to be prohibited."

The desecration of a Eucharist cracker is quite like the eating of pork, or the wearing of a bikini at the beach, or of working on the Sabbath, or of taking the Lord's name in vain. These are the types of acts that those who follow a religion that condemns these acts must nonetheless tolerate in others, because they have no right to impose their purely religious requirements or restrictions on others.

If we follow Donahue even further, we would be viewing the wearing of a bikini on the beach to be the same as burning a cross, or working on the Sabbath to be the same as hanging a swastika in one's cubical.

This is the absurdity of his moral position.

The Ethics of Protest

Today, I am going to do something a bit strange and respond to the comments to somebody else's blog posting. These comments contain a list of common excuses against engaging in any type of atheist activism, and I would like to address those excuses.

These comments were made in response to a posting at Atheist Revolution in which vjack asked if atheists should be involved in picketing churches whose leaders express extreme religious views.

I am not going to write on the specific merits of vjack's proposal. The specific case does not matter. His proposal drew a number of general comments that are brought up any time somebody suggests some form of atheist activism – comments that do not depend on the specific type of activism being suggested. Those are the comments that I am interested in.

From CJ:

One thing I have always despised about most religious people is the fact that they feel the need to force their views on me. Why then should I want to be a part of something that is trying to force my non religious views on someone else?

There are two points that can be made against this type of statement.

The first has to do with this claim about 'force'. The forms of atheist activism that I am talking about do not involve 'force' in any meaningful way. It does not involve holding a gun to people's head and saying, "Renounce your God or die." Atheist activism falls perfectly within the realm of free speech. The right to freedom of speech includes the right to respond to the claims of others with words of criticism and condemnation and private (peaceful) actions.

Some atheists are annoyed by theist proselytizing. They don't like it when people come up to them and push belief in God. "My goal is to change your beliefs. Please give me some of your time so that I may do so." The response is, "No, get out of here." Proselytizing falls in the same category as telemarketing. "Leave me alone, I just want to get on with my life."

This is a valid point. However, what happens when the beliefs of others contribute to real-world harms suffered by real-world people? For example, we are all familiar with religious practices that do harm to the interests of those who (1) would potentially benefit from the medical treatments made possible by stem-cell research, (2) effective programs for family planning and against the spread of sexually transmitted disease, (3) the ability to run for office without facing an politically fatal level of religious bigotry because one does not trust in or pledge allegiance to God, (4) seek an early-term abortion, (5) wish to marry somebody of the same gender.

These are just a few examples.

There are certain views that it is perfectly legitimate to 'force' on others. Imagine taking the position, "I dislike it when people force their views on me, so I will not force my views on others," and apply it to issues such as rape, ethnic cleansing, segregation, slavery, and the right to vote. Are we going to morally prohibit the forcing of these views on others?

Refusing to protest religiously based policies that do harm to others is, in effect, permitting the harm done to others. The individual is saying, "It is better that the religious person maintain the freedom to do harm to others, than that his victims obtain freedom from those harms."

That is not a morally defensible position to take.

This does limit the scope of atheist activism to the protest of religiously-based activities that have victims. Yet, as the list I gave above indicates, these are not at all difficult to find. There are a great many things out there that are worthy of protest. Of all of the absurd beliefs that people can hold, there is good reason to concentrate first on those that do the greatest harm, and to work one’s way down the list.

Historically, this is the trend that we have seen. From the dark ages, where the slaughter of people holding different religious views to the norm, to increasing degrees of religious tolerance, to the abolition of slavery, to political equality for women, to the present it has been the worst of religious doctrine that has fallen first.

This is the historic trend, but the conflict is far from over. There are a great many prejudices still to pull down.

None of these historic prejudices have fallen as a result of people cleverly sitting home and doing nothing to protest against it. All of them have fallen because people have had the courage and commitment to stand up and put their foot down. Every time they had their say the defenders of the status quo were there to condemn them for being 'annoying', 'brazen', and even 'militant' (even when the protesters were emphatically non-violent). Yet, they would not have won if they had listened to these objections and decided that, instead of protesting, they should give up their fight and say nothing.

There is a choice to be made between two possible worlds. One world puts the sentiments of those who hold absurd beliefs above the life, health, and well-being of those whose interests are adversely affected by those beliefs. The other world puts the life, health, and well-being of real-world people above the sentiments of those who hold absurd beliefs. To do nothing is to say that the life, health, and well-being of the victims of absurd beliefs are not important – that they are not worth protecting or standing up for.

Keeping in mind that the type of 'force' we are talking about here is verbally assaulting absurd beliefs that are the basis of policy decisions harmful to the interests of innocent people, the harm that one seeks to prevent provides the right, and even the duty, to 'force' others to abandon absurdities.

[Note: I will know that I have reached the big time when people start quoting only the last half of the previous paragraph in order to depict me as some type of moral monster ready and willing to start the next Stalin-like purge.]

Desire Utilitarianism vs. Social Contract Theory

M. Tully has given me an excuse to write about social contract theory by mentioning it in a comment to an earlier post.

I have to agree with Alonzo and Ron. But, I base it on social contract theory (I'm still not sure there are many conflicts between that and DU).

So, let me account for some of the differences between social contract theory and desire utilitarianism.

Objection 1: There is no social contract. Any moral argument built on a false premise is unsound by definition. The premises for an argument must be true, and the inferences drawn from them must be valid, for the argument to count as sound. Basing any moral conclusions on the myth of the social contract, like basing moral conclusions on the myth of a benevolent God or an impartial observer, is just doomed to failure from the start.

Response 1: Social contract theorists would respond to this by saying something like, "Of course there is no real social contract. The social contract is a metaphor – like when your science teacher in Jr. High School asked you to think of electrons in an atom as having orbits, like planets around the sun, with each orbit representing an energy level."

Answer 1: A metaphor for what? We can't judge a metaphor to be accurate or inaccurate until we know what it is we are metaphoring. If the 'social contract' is just a pedagogical tool – something we can use to help people grasp more complex concepts – then what are those more complex concepts being captured by the metaphor? Whatever they are, that is our moral theory. Then we can ask to what degree the metaphor of the social contract actually captures this truth.

Response 2: The term 'social contract' refers to a hypothetical entity. Assume you can get everybody in the world into a room to agree to a contract. Everybody must sign. The ‘social contract’ is the term that refers to the hypothetical compromise social contract that you can get everybody to sign.

Answer 2a: First, the assumption that there is a compromise contract that everybody will have reason to sign is false. Every contract will have some group who has more and stronger reason to bow out than to sign on. Altering the contract to give them reason to sign on, will give somebody else reason to bow out. We need some evidence that there is a contract that everybody would have reason to sign, even hypothetically.

Answer 2b: Even assuming that there is a contract for everybody to sign, as I sit here ready to act, what reason do I have to consider the terms of such a hypothetical contract? My interaction is with real people in the real world having real beliefs and desires. Even though they might have reason to sign this hypothetical contract, they are not likely to actually be thinking in terms of such a contract. Why must I go outside of this set of real-world facts in order to make my decision?

Objection 2: Social contract theory ignores the vital concern with how to motivate people to abide by the terms of the contract. The social contract is, ultimately, a set of rules telling agents what they may or may not do. However, people have no capacity to simply pick a rule and act on it. People always act so as to fulfill the most and strongest of their desires (given their beliefs). If an act that conforms to a social contract rule also happens to fulfill the most and strongest of the agent's desires given her beliefs, then he will obey the contract. If the two diverge, then the agent will violate the contract. This means that the contract, in order to be effective, has to define what fulfills the most and strongest desires of all agents.

I do not think that social contract theory has an answer to this objection. You simply cannot come up with a set of policies that has the property of being such as to fulfill the most and strongest of all peoples’ desires. So, it is not possible to devise a contract that is actually effective.

Desire utilitarianism actually has a great deal in common with social contract theory. It captures, I think, much of what seems to be promising in social contract theory – without the contract, and without the disconnect from agents' motivations.

For example, social contract theory defines a right act as the act that conforms to the terms of a social contract that everybody would sign.

Desire utilitarianism defines the right act as the act that a person with good desires would perform – where good desires are those desires that people generally have reason to promote.

Imagine people in a social contract setting, only they are not trying to pick out a set of rules that go into a contract, but desires that everybody will adopt (or will avoid). It looks at the love of truth and determines that there is a reason for everybody to acquire a love of truth. It looks at a desire to rape and correctly determines that this is a desire to be inhibited.

'Right acts', in this case, are simply those acts that people with good desires would perform. There is no problem with motivating agents with good desires into doing the right acts – they will already have the desires that would be fulfilled by those actions.

As for the question of how we motivate agents into acquiring good desires – we use praise, condemnation, reward, and punishment. More generally, we use the tools of social pressure to promote those desires we have the most and strongest reason to promote, and to inhibit those desires that we have the most and strongest reason to inhibit.

The motivation to promote good desires and inhibit bad desires, in turn, comes from the desires that good desires will help to fulfill, and the desires that bad desires would thwart.

There is no actual contract – not even a hypothetical contract. There are, instead, 'terms' that take the form of desires that people generally have reason to promote or inhibit.

There is no problem with linking right acts to motivation, because the right act is the act that a person with good desires would perform.

Why does a person acquire good desires? It is because others use social tools such as praise, condemnation, reward, and punishment to promote those desires (and to inhibit bad desires).

What reason do we have to use social tools to promote good desires and inhibit bad desires? Since good desires are desires that tend to fulfill other desires, and bad desires are desires that tend to thwart other desires, this gives us our reason for using social tools to promote good desires and inhibit bad desires.

No social contract is necessary – yet, the theory results in some elements that we find in social contract theory. It is still the case, in a sense, that moral principles are those that people generally have reason to support – that people generally would agree to put into a social contract, if there were one. The major difference is that desire utilitarianism also evaluates the reasons for supporting various rules (the quality of the desires that go into supporting or rejecting rules), and explains the link between the rules and motives of agents.

More Bigotry from Catholic League President Bill Donahue

Catholic League President Bill Donahue has once again proved that he either has no understanding of the moral crime of bigotry - though he professes to be the leader of an organization for "religious and civil rights" - or, while understanding this moral crime, has decided to profess bigotry.

In a new press release against PZ Myers, Myers to Desecrate Eucharist and Koran, Donahue said:

Much has been written about the moral vacuity that marks the Darwinian vision of society that Myers embraces.

A person engages in the moral crime of bigotry when he attempts to promote a general hostility against a whole group of people, either by making up some unfounded accusations against them or by extrapolating an offense by some subset of the group to cover the whole group.

This is clearly Donahue's intention with the statement quoted above, asserting a "moral vacuity that marks the Darwinian vision" as if all people who believe in evolution while denying the existence of God suffer from a lack of morality.

In other words, he is instructing his readers to "prejudge" all people who are not Catholics and, in doing so, to judge all of them to be morally inferior.

It is the very essence of bigotry and prejudice.

I discussed some other comments from Bill Donahue that showed these same moral failings in Donahue, Censorship, and Hate Speech

Reasonable Person Test

Ron from Houston, in a number of comments, has been bringing up a test for moral acceptability that he calls "The Reasonable Person Test."

I keep bringing up the reasonable man standard because I think it applies in these situations. Grilling hamburgers at my local park is something a reasonable man would do and is therefore acceptable. Grilling hamburgers outside a Hindu temple is not something a reasonable man would do and therefore violates boundaries.

I have objections to the 'reasonable person' test. Namely, if we are going to try to determine what the reasonable person would or would not do, what we need to do is to look at the reasons. We then evaluate the reasons for soundness (or, at least, plausibility), and judge from that.

However, if we are making our evaluations on the plausibility of reasons, we do not need a reasonable person test. We simply need a 'good reason' test. The 'person' part becomes superficial. We need to look at whether the reasons for or against an action have merit, or not.

There are two types of reasons – beliefs and desires. Desires identify the ends (or goals) of human action, while beliefs pick out the means (or the methods of establishing or maintaining those goals). To look at whether an agent passes a “good reason” test, we must look at the reasons and see if they are any good.

Beliefs are judged to be good or bad based on their justification. Abelief is a mental state – having a belief that P means being in a state where one treats the proposition P as being true. (Even though the belief might be false.) Believing that there is a dragon outside of one’s door that will eat the agent as soon as he leaves the house means behaving as if the proposition were true.

Desires are judged good or bad according to their tendency to fulfill or thwart other desires. We have reason to promote beliefs that tend to fulfill other desires because we have other desires that need to be fulfilled.

So, what reasons are there for cooking hamburgers in a park as opposed to cooking hamburgers in front of a Hindu temple? What can we say about the quality of those reasons?

We do not need a "Reasonable Person Test" to judge an act like PZ Myers' alleged plan to desecrate a consecrated communion wafer. We need to look at Myers' reasons themselves, and to judge whether those reasons have any merit.

I hold that the proposition that the crackers were not obtained by theft is an unreasonable belief. Property acquired through fraud or stealth is still the property of the person who was defrauded. We can be quite certain that, if Myers has a consecrated communion wafer, then it was taken from the church through fraud (by falsely presenting oneself as a Catholic participating in the ritual of communion), or by stealth (sneaking out with a wafer).

We can argue that Myers also presents another bad reason for action (or demonstrates the absence of a good reason, which also counts on this model). He does not show any compassion for the feelings of Catholics who are offended and bothered by his action. Sympathy is a good desire – one we have reason to promote and to promote. To the degree that Myers does not exhibit sympathy, we have reason to condemn him.

However, the ‘sympathy’ ply is cluttered by the fact that the Church promotes policies and laws detrimental to the well-being of others. As such, we have to measure sympathy for the members of the Catholic church against sympathy for the well-being of those who are made to suffer and, in some cases, die as a result of Catholic church doctrine.

I am not going back to the Inquisition, Crusades, and 30-Years War to make this point. I am talking about current policies that block research into stem cell medicine, early-term abortions, family planning (through the use of birth control), and homosexual marriage. We need to measure compassion for people who hold an absurdly false set of beliefs, with compassion for the people that those who uphold an absurdly false set of beliefs harm.

Given that real value requires real relationships between states of affairs and desires, we have good reason not to respect false beliefs. What this means is that a state of affairs S has value to the degree that there is a desire that P and P is true in S. No consecrated cracker has ever been the actual body of Christ. So, much of the value that people see in a consecrated value is not real. Whereas the interests harmed by public policies that the Catholic Church defends are real.

Real goods trump imaginary goods.

In the case of the Hindu temple, this applies. If the Hindu position regarding the eating of beef resulted in widespread starvation – where tens to hundreds of millions of people starve to death – it may well be time to open up a barbecue in front of the nearest Hindu temple. Once again, it makes no sense to give preference to invented harms over real harms.

One objection that may be raised against this is the assumption that starvation, survival through medical breakthroughs involving stem-cell research, and freedom from sexually transmitted disease, are all real goods while the sacredness of cows and the value of the consecrated communion wafers are imaginary goods. In making these claims, I may be accused of begging the question against religious beliefs.

However, the possibility of error is captured in the principles surrounding freedom of speech. I am not advocating violence against those who hold these absurd beliefs – in fact, I have argued against the use of violence. I have only argued in favor of debate, which means allowing the critics of these views to speak their mind in whatever way they think best communicates their ideas.

The desecration of the consecrated communion wafer is meant to communicate that the consecrated wafer is still just a cracker. The barbecue outside of a Hindu temple at a time of starvation communicates the fact that e can use cows to feed people. No violence is being offered against the church (at least on the principles I am defending here). That is as far as respect for other beliefs requires us to go.

Desire utilitarianism does have something like a 'reasonable person' test. It is a 'person with good desires’ test. A right act is the act that a person with good desires would perform. A wrong act is the act that a person with good desires would not perform. And a permissible act is an act that a person with good desires may or may not perform, depending on other interests.

A right act is not necessarily done for good reasons – sometimes they are done for notorious reasons. A person might turn in his brother, the child rapist, so that he can be sole heir to the family fortune. Yet, he still performed the act that a person with good desires would have performed.

However, 'good desires' is rather precisely defined – as is 'justified beliefs'.

One of the problems of imagining a 'reasonable person' test without fixed definitions is that people are going to imagine the 'reasonable person' doing exactly what the agent wants to do. It is an invitation to examine one’s own prejudices and then project those prejudices onto the world. One person may claim that a reasonable person can simply see that homosexuality is unnatural and that we must promote religion in order to promote morality.

What standard does he use to determine if these views are correct?

I would argue that the only standards that make sense in the light of this model is to test the beliefs and desires themselves for reasonableness – beliefs in terms of whether or not they are justified, and desires according to whether or not they tend to fulfill other desires.

Theft, Autonomy, and Keeping the Peace

For the last few days, across a number of posts, I have been engaged in a very interesting discussion with Ron in Houston on the nature of theft. It has been quite useful since, through the course of that discussion, I have been forced to reflect on and actually refine some of my beliefs on the nature of this moral crime.

These concerns came from the Case of the Communion Cracker, but the topic has become the more general (and interesting) question of the nature of theft in general.

I do not believe that anybody in these parts is questioning the fact that the taking of a communion cracker is theft. The question has become the magnitude of the theft. It has been compared, in various comments, with the taking of a sugar packet at a restaurant, of a toothpick, or of a napkin. It is a theft that is of little concern because, after all, the communion cracker “is just a cracker”.

I am still objecting to these characterizations. The issue with respect to the sugar packet, toothpick, and napkin has to do with the fact that, for these items, the owner does not really care. We all have good reason to believe that people are not much concerned with the theft of these items. We all have good reason to believe that the Catholic church is very much concerned with the taking of a consecrated communion cracker.

But this is the rub. The Church’s concern with the communion cracker is irrational – built, as it is, on absurdly false premises. Whereas the Catholic Church has no more reason to be concerned about the consecrated communion wafer as it does about the average Ritz cracker, it is argued that we should consider the theft of a consecrated communion wafer to be no worse than the theft of a common cracker.

My objection to that view is that, with it, whenever I invite somebody into my home, I now have to worry whether or not he considers my attachment to certain pieces of my property to be rational or not. If he thinks that my attachment to anything that I might own is irrational, or grounded on false premises, then he should consider it a minimal offense (similar to taking a sugar packet from a restaurant) to walk off with that particular piece of property.

Whereas, on the view I am defending here, the reasons that I have for my various attachments and values are irrelevant. What is relevant is the fact that the property is mine. As such, what matters is my wishes regarding the disposition of that property.

If I make it clear that a dust bunny under my living room couch is my most prized possession and I tell my guests that they must absolutely leave it alone then, so far as they are guests in my home, that is their obligation. They have no right to determine that the dust bunny is of little value (because it is, after all, just a dust bunny) and to destroy it.

This may be taken as an obligation to respect the beliefs of other people – no matter how absurd – which is a principle that the atheist community in general is starting to stand up against. The atheist community, in general, is starting to say, “We have every right to challenge absurd beliefs. We have no duty to sit back and give polite respect for nonsense beliefs such as the belief that those who name a teddy bear Mohammed deserve to die, or those who take a cracker out of a church are guilty of kidnapping.”

I share this view. This is not about respect for stupid beliefs. This is about respect for autonomy. This is about respecting the express wishes of the owner of a piece of property over how that property is to be treated.

Part of the reason we can see this is because the owner need not give any reason for his decision – his reasons do not matter. Only the decision matters. If you wish to borrow my rake for an hour, and promise to return it, my reasons for refusing to allow you to use it do not matter. It may be because I have a use for the rake. It may be because I do not trust you. That lack of trust may be founded on the flimsiest of reasons.

Yet, the principle at play here is not that you get to evaluate the merit of my reasons and, if you find that my reasons for denying you the use of my rake have no merit, that you can take the rake anyway. The principle at play here is that the rake is my property, and my reasons for denying you permission to use it are not relevant. The fact that I have denied you permission is what matters.

Now, let’s back up a step and look at this dispute in desire-utilitarian terms.

There is no such thing as intrinsic value. Instead, value exists as relationships between states of affairs and desires. A state of affairs S has value (to A) only in the virtue that A desires that P and P is true in S. We cannot talk about the intrinsic value of any piece of property because no property has intrinsic value.

The part of this that says “P is true in S” is highly relevant here. Consecrated communion wafers believe that consecrated communion wafers has a certain type of value because they become the body of Jesus. However, no cracker ever becomes the body of Jesus. “P”, in this case, is never true, so the value that Catholics believe exists in the consecrated communion wafer does not exist in fact.

We are not going to depend that crazy ideas deserve any respect.

However, to look at the nature of theft, we have to look at it in desire-utilitarian terms as well. Theft is not intrinsically wrong. Theft is wrong in the sense that people generally have real reasons to promote an aversion to theft (and to promote that aversion through social forces such as praise and condemnation).

The value of an aversion to taking the property of others is that it keeps the peace. To the degree that we are secure in our possessions, to that degree we are able to make plans on what we are going to do with those possessions. To the degree that we are insecure in our ownership, time and effort that we would otherwise have available for fulfilling our desires has to go to security – often in the form of violent security – for those possessions.

Peace is not secured by a principle that says, “If you judge the reasons that I may have for giving or withholding consent on the use of my property to be unsound, then you may ignore them.” This is just an invitation for people to judge the reasons for others to be unsound, and for wholesale disregard for the rights of others. None of us are secure in our possessions if others can categorize the theft of our property as trivial merely by conceiving of our reasons as unsound.

A counter to this may be that, “It is not the fact that I conceive of your reasons as unsound that matter. It is whether your reasons are unsound in fact.”

Yet, in practice (and no moral theory is worth its salt except in the sense of how it plays out in practice) we can never get beyond the realm of whether reasons are, in fact, sound or unsound. In practice, we cannot get any further than considerations of whether the (would be) thief judges the reasons of the property owner to be sound or unsound.

It is this latter fact that will determine how secure we are in our property.

This still leaves room for view that taking sugar packets or toothpicks are trivial offenses – whenever it is reasonable to determine that the owner does not much care whether they are taken. Though a restaurant owner has reason to care if somebody regularly comes to a restaurant and routinely takes every sugar packet from every table, slipping a few packets from one’s own table into one’s pocket to be used later is a minimal theft. It hardly threatens the peace.

Yet, the theft of a consecrated wafer falls on an entirely different level. The person who is willing to steal a communion wafer is showing a willingness to violate the autonomy of the church to a much greater degree than the person who takes a sugar packet from a restaurant. Whereas we have reason to believe that the restaurant owner does not care about the loss of a few sugar packets, we also have reason to believe that the Catholic Church cares very much about the theft of a consecrated communion wafer.

As I said, the quality of the church’s reasons does not matter. What matters is each person’s autonomy over the disposition of their own property – and the degree to which that autonomy is being violated that matters.

That's how we keep the peace - by respecting each person's boundaries.

Culpable Ignorance

Yesterday, I wrote about the fact that we are forced to live our lives with a merely superficial knowledge of a great many things. I wrote that the physical laws of nature give us only enough time to superficially skim the top of many issues going on around us. This is just a part of the real world in which we live in and we are better off acknowledging this fact than ignoring it.

I also warned against manipulative individuals who take advantage of our necessity to 'skim' issues to manipulate us into actions that are harmful to us and useful to them – the way the Bush Administration has exploited the skimming of knowledge of energy in order to impoverish the American people (and, particularly, their children and grandchildren) for the sake of profiting a few friends.

This fact of necessary ignorance has two additional moral implications that are worth mentioning.

Arrogance

Given the fact that we are all so incredibly ignorant about so much, we can consider it a moral failing when people pretend to be smarter and wiser than any human being can possibly be. Yet, it is extremely common for people who are substantially ignorant of the relevant facts to claim to know with utter certainty – with so much certainty that they are willing to risk other peoples’ lives – things they cannot possibly know.

I have mentioned one example of culpable arrogance in a number of posts. These are people who get their understanding of the situation in Iraq from some broadcast news segments and a little internet research. They then proclaim, "I know exactly what strategy we should use with respect to Iraq, and my vote in the November elections will be given only to those who agree to embrace my plan."

Often, that plan does not even come from the snippets of news and research they perform. Rather, they form their opinion in advance, and they filter their interpretation of the available information according to what best fits their pre-determined conclusions. It's the same technique that the Bush Administration used in evaluating the intelligence on Saddam Hussein’s alleged ‘weapons of mass destruction’. And these people complain about how the Bush Administration blinded itself to an objective interpretation of that intelligence. They do so while they engage in the exactly the same practice.

Such is the nature of culpable arrogance.

On the domestic front, many Americans report that the number one issue on their minds today is the high price of gasoline. They are willing to sell their vote to whomever they trust to bring down the price of gasoline. Plus, they know exactly what the problem is and what we need to do to fix it.

The problem is either that we are not consuming domestic supplies fast enough, or the big oil companies are in a secret agreement to jack up prices and rob us of our hard earned wealth.

This demonstrates culpable arrogance in two ways. The first is with the assumption that the price of gasoline is their most important concern. To which I reply, "Honestly? You're telling me that the one item that can most affect the rest of your life, for better or worse, is the high price of gasoline?" It takes a certain amount of arrogance to even make such a statement.

It takes less arrogance to say that we have a variety of important issues – from the future collapse of social security, to global warming, to a struggling economy, to poor education, and to simply add, "I don’t know which one is the most important, which is why I want somebody with sufficient breadth of knowledge to deal with all of them."

Wasted Intelligence

The other moral issue relevant to the fact of wide-spread ignorance is that of wasted intelligence.

Given that we are so ignorant of so many things, why do so many people waste time and effort becoming knowledgeable about things that are not important, using intelligence-resources that could have been spent learning something useful.

I can identify three huge realms of wasted intelligence.

(1) Knowledge of the events on American Idol, or Dances with the Stars, or Gilligan’s Island, or any of hundreds of other television shows and movies. People have a great deal of knowledge of these things that they acquire by examining primary materials on these events (that is to say, by watching them on television). But, it is useless knowledge. Exchange 1 person-hour of American Idol with 1 hour reading an article in National Geographic magazine, and we are all better off.

(2) Knowledge of sports facts. A great many people have a great deal of knowledge about those who are particularly skilled at throwing a ball through a metal ring or hitting a ball and running around in circles.

(3) Knowledge of religious claims. Religions don't even make good history. We can gain some knowledge about people, their values, and how they behave from stories. However, we can get these stories from any piece of fiction (and even better from any peace of history). It is still far better for us when we study what it is to be human in a work that we know to be fiction than one that is fiction but mistakenly taken to be fact.

When I get on the bus and see passengers using the time to read their bibles (as many do), I wonder how much better the world would be if they were sitting there reading a book on international economics, or contemporary society in China or India, or the science of global warming, or matters relevant to energy policy, or cosmic threats to the existence of human civilization.

One of the significant costs of television, and sports, and religion, is the resources that people are putting into them that they are not putting into understanding science, economics, geography, and the like.

We have good reason to believe that these preferences are malleable to some extent. We have some reason to believe that, through social forces, we can promote an aversion to wasting time on mindless television, sports, and religion. At the same time, we can use those same forces to promote a desire to understand things like science, economics, and geography.

It is a matter of the judicious use of praise and condemnation (particularly directed towards children) we can promote a love of learning and an aversion to being an ignorant fool. In particular, we can promote a love of learning and the wonder and awe of the real world, and a simple aversion to wasting one’s day.

Myers and "This 'theft' nonsense"

I have decided that it is unpleasant being ignored.

The Catholic News Agency has an article titled, Professor who threatened desecration claims to have consecrated Host.

It contains the following:

"I'm not taking the crackers from any church. I'm not interested in attending church, nor would I misrepresent myself as a Catholic to receive it.

"It is freely handed out to people taking communion in the church. The people who are sending me crackers have received it openly," he wrote.

Myers also could not see how others could consider taking a consecrated Host to be theft. "No. This 'theft' nonsense is a rationalization people are making up to justify hysteria."

Me?

Making up rationalizations to justify hysteria?

That’s a bit harsh.

It is also, as far as arguments go, question-begging, since calling an objection 'hysteria' presumes the very irrationality on the part of a response that one actually needs to demonstrate.

I haven't actually seen an argument against the thesis that property acquired through deception is fraud, which is a type of theft - and 'deception' means any act that intends to communicate some conclusion that is not true (e.g., an intention to fully participate in the ritual of communion).

I can understand that Myers is unlikely to be reading my blog, so I sent him two emails outlining my arguments. These were not the long 1,700 word essays that I post here. These were much smaller, focusing on the main point – that an object is not 'freely given' if the person receiving it practices deception to get it.

Well, he could have missed those as well. No doubt he has obtained a great many emails in the past weeks and, per chance, he is in the habit of skimming over them looking for triggers that one might contain something worthy of a more detailed reading and, finding none, moves on to the next.

And nobody else, apparently, has made the same arguments in any way in which he has noticed.

Or, maybe, he is not listening. He has made up his mind what he wants to believe and, at this point, he has made himself immune to reason. No matter what argument one puts up, he will conceive of a reason to dismiss it – even if it means ignoring it – based on the assumption that "there can be no rational argument against my position; so, anybody who claims to be presenting one, must be wrong."

Now, I do not want what I have written to be interpreted as being hostile to Mr. Myers. I think he is making a mistake. The tendency people have to be blinded by emotion into rationalizing away the moral arguments against what one sincerely wants to do is very strong and very common. Yet, a strong human disposition to dismiss the soundness of a moral argument does not prevent it from being sound.

Is there, perhaps, an obvious whole in my reasoning that I have not blocked?

The Failure of the New Yorker Cartoon

Why did the cartoon recently published on the cover of New Yorker magazine fail so spectacularly.

The cover depicts Barak and Michelle Obama in the Oval Office of the White House. Barak is dressed as a Muslim imam, while Michelle is decked out as a terrorist, while the couple is surrounded by anti-American and pro-Terrorist images.

The intent of the cartoon was to satirize the view that some ultra-conservatives are embracing that Barak Obama and his ife as anti-American and pro-Terrorist. However much money the McCain administration and the Republican Party has spent on the political campaign, nothing has been nearly as effective in damaging Obama than these lies spread through e-mail with a push now and then by Fox News.

However, many people did not see the cartoon as satire. The reaction, even Obama and many of his supporters had a hostile reaction. (See, Los Angeles Times, Barack Obama calls New Yorker cartoon an 'insult against Muslim Americans') Why is that? Has America lost its collective sense of humor?

Actually, no. Americans know, somewhat instinctively, about how communication works. People do not have time to stop and think about every piece of information that they come across. They only have time to give it a cursory glance. They form a quick opinion (based more on emotion and pre-conceived ideas than on the content of what they see), then they move on.

The vast majority of the people who will see the cover of the New Yorker magazine will not think too deeply about it. They will glance at the cartoon, which will generate an instant emotional reaction. They will then attach that emotion to Barak Obama and, over the next four months, interpret further information through the lens that this cartoon generated.

This instant, unreflective, shallow interpretation of the cartoon for a lot of people will be the idea that the Michelle and Barak Obama hold pro-terrorist/anti-American sympathies who are trying to gain control of the White House. The cartoon ends up reinforcing the very ideas that the author intended to ridicule.

Even people who know better will have a gut reaction that will suggest, "It's probably nothing, but why take chances?"

Some people will see this tendency to glance at a cartoon and derive instant conclusions that are at odds with the facts to be a moral failing. There is something wrong with people who do not take the time to understand what they see and who form snap decisions instead.

However, they would be mistaken. We do not have a choice but to form snap judgments.

Look at the huge amount of information that exists in the world. Before you can even start to understand it, you need to decide which parts of it you are going to spend time understanding, and which you will largely ignore. This means taking a glance at a huge quantity of information and forming quick opinions. From this initial scan, some elements will catch your eye. Those are the parts that you will look at in more detail. It will be a very small percentage of the total amount of information available. For the vast majority of the items we come across in an average day, we glance at the head lines, make our snap judgments, and we move on, looking for the item that strikes enough interest to generate a more thorough examination.

There is no way out of this. This is a part of the real world in which we must live, and it does us no good to pretend that things are or can be any different.

Whatever you write, whatever you say, whatever you post on your blog, you can trust that most people who encounter it will skim across the surface, then move on. A small percentage are going to be willing to spend the time to look at the issue in detail. Because, every moment that somebody spends looking at your article in detail is a moment they cannot spend doing something else that interests them more.

Instead of lamenting reality and wishing we lived in an alternative universe where different natural laws apply, we should accept reality and plan to act accordingly. We should recognize that people must skim the surface of most information they encounter, and ask ourselves, "What am I communicating to the average skimmer?"

In my own blog, the message that I seek to give the average skimmer is, "If you don’t have time to give this subject some serious consideration, then please move along. This material is not meant for skimmers."

But that's just me. This does not imply that there is anything wrong with writing for skimmers. Somebody has to do it. Hopefully, morally responsible people will accept the challenge of providing skimmers with a useful understanding of important issues.

Do not make the mistake of thinking that I am dividing the world into 'skimmers' and 'deep readers' (implying that the latter are morally superior to the former). There are a lot of subjects in the world. Deciding to become well informed on one of them requires deciding to skim many others that would otherwise take too much time to study. The brightest people in the world in one area of knowledge are, at best, skimmers of all other subjects that she does not study.

In over 1000 blog postings, I have yet to write on the subject of illegal drug abuse, because this is an area where I have only skimmed an understanding. I haven't had time for anything else.

The list of things that each of us only skims the surface of is humongous.

The New Yorker magazine failed to take this into consideration, and created a cover that communicated the opposite of what they wanted to communicate.

Others see the need for the bulk of the population to skim most subjects as an excellent opportunity to exploit them for political or social gain.

For example, President Bush announced that he will sign an executive order to allow more offshore drilling. At the same time, he blamed the Democrats for the energy shortage. The story is that the Democrats were blocking access to oil, thus keeping the price high, and causing the people to suffer.

In doing this, the Bush Administration decided to use the necessity of skimming to once again manipulate the American people to act against their own interests. Off-shore drilling will not have any effect on gasoline prices for years, will have a small effect even then, and uses up oil reserves that ultimately makes us even more dependent on other countries (by destroying our options). Off shore drilling is not a solution to the problem of gas prices. It is a way in which the executives of oil companies can make billions of dollars while the people are deluded into thinking they are made beter off.

The Bush Administration is counting on the necesity of skimming to make sure that only a few people see the true implications of their actions.

We certainly have reason to promote an aversion to using the necessity of skimming as an opportunity to deceive people, just as we have reason to avoid the harms of being deceived.

The lies of the Bush Administration will encourage people to vote for Republicans who have no good answer to the problem of the high price of energy. Smart Republicans know that offshore oil drilling will do nothing to help the average consumer. What it will do is help wealthy oil company executives make a ton of money selling oil, while distracting the people from options that actually do have a chance to help.

It would be a mistake to lay the blame on the fact that people simply skim the news – we do not have time for anything else. The blame rests on those who take advantage of this fact in ways that are beneficial to them but harmful to others. This is where the moral fault lies, and this is where the tool of moral condemnation should be applied.

Fraud and the Extent of Communication

There is an element of the concept of fraud that some people seem to be tripping on in recent days that I want to explain. The problem can be found in PZ Myers’ recent comments in the Minnesota Independent.

"Myers: There's a subtle difference there -- maybe an important difference. I don't favor the idea of going to somebody's home or to something they own and possess and consider very important, like a graveyard . . . and desecrating that. Because what you're doing is doing harm to something unique and something that is rightfully part of somebody else -- it's somebody else's ownership. The cracker is completely different. This is something that's freely handed out."

It is false to say that the cracker is freely handed out. It is conditionally handed out – in the sense that, “I will give you this cracker, but you must promise to use it in a way prescribed by this ritual.” The fraud element comes from the fact that the person who enters into the ritual is making the false claim that he is there to participate in the ritual, and will perform all of the elements in the ritual. In the types of cases we are concerned with here, this is a lie being used to trick the priest into handing over a wafer. This makes the act of acquiring the wafer theft.

The issue that I want to focus on here is the claim that, in stepping up to receive mass, the agent is, in effect, binding himself to go through with the ritual and eat the wafer. “If the priest wants to take the fact that I am kneeling down before him to take a wafer as a promise to eat the wafer then and there, that is his problem. I’m making no such promise.”

But actually, you are.

Every speech act can be reduced to a set of movements that, in themselves, completely lack any meaning or significance. We could deny that kneeling to receive communion is a speech act that communicates a promise to complete the ritual. We could, at the same time, reduce the signing of a contract to a simple act of doodling on the bottom of the page of a document.

Some speech acts involve moving the parts of one’s mouth while activating the vocal cords. Some involve scribbling characters on a piece of paper. Some involve using sign language. In just the same way that delivering a promise in sign language counts as communication, stepping up to receive communion also counts as a statement delivered in sign language. Everybody present knows exactly what it means – that the agent has agreed to participate in the ritual of communion. If you make that statement under conditions hen it is not true, you are guilty of acquiring property through deception.

You can see an example of this principle at work at the all-you-can-eat buffet. In exactly the same way that we can say the priest is “freely handing out crackers”, we can also say that the server at the all-you-can-eat buffet line. You can take the food, and you can eat it, but you may not walk out of the restaurant with it. Walking out the door with food handed to you in an all-you-can-eat buffet is theft. It violates the terms and conditions that one agrees to once one buys a ticket to the buffet.

Communication takes place whenever you say or do anything that transmits ideas within a particular language culture. Spoken and written words are just a part of our language culture. Sign language has meaning within a language culture. Red lights, signs with images of men and women, a flashing arrow, are also a part of a language culture. Traditions and rituals, such as catholic mass or a military salute, can become a part of the language culture.

These are all parts of communication. So, when we look at whether a person has committed fraud or not – look at whether a person has lied or not – we need to look at the whole of a language culture to determine what was being communicated.

Step up to receive communion and, within that language culture, you have engaged in communication. Take the wafer and leave, and you have lied – and you have acquired possession of another person’s property through deception.

This trick of artificially limiting the scope of communication – of talking about ‘literal truth’ and ‘explicit claims,’ is a trick that people use when they try to convince themselves that something they want is not really wrong. They artificially and unjustifiably limit the concept of ‘communication’ so that they can convince themselves (or others), “I am not telling a lie.” By denying the communication that takes place, one can deny that an act of deception has taken place.

However, what a person believes, and what is true in fact, are not necessarily the same thing. Communication takes place whenever one says or does something in a language culture that transmit particular ideas to others. If those ideas being communicated are not true, the agent needs to make it clear to others, “I am not taking part in the language culture right now, so don’t make any inferences from what I say or do as if I am participating in that culture.”

While I am here, I would like to speak a bit about another trick that people use to convince themselves that something they want to do is not really wrong – it is the trick of minimizing.

The rapist convinces himself that his victims like to be raped. The person guilty of insurance fraud convinces himself that the insurance companies have enough money and has been ripping him off for years with their high rates. The bully insults others and covers it up by saying, “I was just kidding. Sheesh, can’t anybody take a joke any more?”

All of these are mental tricks that people pull when they want to do something wrong to get it to appear more legitimate.

In this case, “It is just a cracker” is used to minimize the nature of the offense and make the theft seem insignificant.

This doesn’t work. The offense is not written in terms of the value of the object stolen. It is written in terms of the wrong of taking illicit possession of somebody.

If I was invited into your house for any reason, it would not be legitimate for me to start looking around for things that I can interpret as having low value that I can try to walk away with. The fact that I can describe something in low-value terms does not imply that it has low value to the owner of the house.

More importantly, theft itself is wrong – something which we have strong reason to cause people to form an aversion. Otherwise, none of us will be able to keep our property safe.

One of the problems with Myers’ call is that it creates a legitimate concern among Catholics, “How are we going to prevent people from walking away with our property?” Forget about the fact that they think that this property is the body of Christ. That is not important. Keeping our property safe means creating (and enforcing) an aversion to people walking in and using fraud or deception to take that property from us.

We have those institutions – we promote those attitudes – to keep our property safe. If we threaten those institutions, we have to fear for our property, just as we make others fear for theirs.

We secure our property by enforcing the prohibitions on the three major types of theft – fraud (theft by deception), burglary (theft by stealth), and robbery (theft by force). We need these institutions if we are to keep the peace. So, we should make sure to respect these institutions, and not to give license to those who would violate them.

1000 Posts and a Birthday

Somewhere in the midst of discussing the Case of the Communion Cracker I wrote my 1000th essay.

It’s also my birthday.

As a result, I have decided to relax a little, sit back, and enjoy myself.

So . . .

Hello readers.

I want to thank all of you for showing up. Some of you have been here a while, and you still show up. I am honored.

Some people might be surprised that, after all of this time and effort writing blog posts, that I still do everything wrong. My posts are way too long. They are boring. They are poorly proofed and edited. It is, in short a surprise that people show up at all.

Nobody comes here so that they can breeze through the atheist news of the day. Or, if they do, they quickly leave again and swear never to return. Coming here takes a certain amount of commitment to whatever the subject of the day is going to be.

I’m sorry about the editing problems. I just run out of time. You see, when I go to edit a post, I usually end up rewriting it. I remove all of the old mistakes (because I simply block off whole sections of text and delete them) but introduce new mistakes in their wake. At the end of the day, when I am finishing up my post, my head is typically bouncing off the desk as I fall asleep at the keyboard. That has something of an adverse effect on quality. I’m sorry about that.

Yet, I’m still up at 4:30 the next morning to start my research for the next post.

Tell you what. If somebody out there will give me $1.7 million, I’ll quit my job and work on these essays full time. That will include editing. C’mon. What do you say? It’s my birthday, after all. Clearly, I deserve $1.7 million.

Oh well. Until the $1.7 million or something similar shows up, I will continue to do what I can.

I’ll be back tomorrow to continue working on the second 1000 posts.

Alonzo Fyfe

Donahue, Censorship, and Hate Speech

There are two statements that the head of the Catholic League has made with respect to the Case of the Communion Cracker that deserve special mention, because they bring up special moral considerations.

[Note: Previous posts covering other aspects of this issue can be found in the Case of the Communion Wafer Part I: Theft, Part II: PZ Myers, and Part III: Bill Donahue]

Censorship

In the first press release that the Catholic League sent out on this issue, , Minnesota Prof Pledges to Desecrate Eucharist Bill Donahue said:

Because the university is a state institution, we are also contacting the Minnesota legislature.

In what follows it is necessary to remember that this blog is concerned with morality, not matters of law. If one wants to know what the law does or does not allow, consult a lawyer. This blog is concerned with ethics.

On the matter of free speech, one principle that I have defended a number of times is that the right to freedom of speech does not imply a right to immunity from criticism. In fact, it implies no immunity from criticism. Criticism is a form of speech, so naturally if there is a right to freedom of speech it must include the right to a freedom to criticize.

PZ Myers has a right to freedom of speech. This includes a right to communicate the proposition that the consecrated communion cracker is still just “a frackin’ cracker”. This includes the right to treat any cracker that comes into his rightful possession as a cracker, and to do with that cracker whatever he may rightfully do with any other cracker.

This right to freedom of speech does not grant Myers a right to immunity from criticism. It is still perfectly legitimate to use words and private actions in order to condemn Mr. Myers if he should perform such an act. In fact, the right to freedom of speech implies that it would be wrong to prohibit others from criticizing Myers for those actions, since criticism is speech.

The question of whether people have a right to criticize Myers through words and private action is a different question from the question of whether he would deserve criticism if he were to perform such actions.

However, the primary distinguishing characteristic of the state is its monopoly on violence. The right to freedom of speech implies a right to immunity from violence. Bringing the threat of government violence against people is one way of reacting to another person’s words with violence. Whenever anybody summons ‘the state’ to stand on their side they are summoning the ultimate instrument of violence.

Summoning the state to stand on one’s side is the very definition of censorship.

The charge of ‘censorship’ tends to be used too liberally. People often use the accusation as a way of deflecting blame and silencing criticism. For example, if a person makes a racist remark and becomes the subject of a stream of condemnation and adverse private actions as a result, he is likely to scream ‘censorship’ at those critics and assert his right to freedom of speech. However, as I said above, the right to freedom of speech is not immunity from criticism or private actions. Using the concept of ‘censorship’ in this way counts as an abuse of the term – a rhetorical ploy used to try to trick critics into silence.

However, the charge of ‘censorship’ is used legitimately whenever it is used against people who try to summon the power of the state to silence an opinion. Here, the word does apply.

Since Donahue has threatened to summon the state to his side to silence those he disagrees with, the accusation of ‘censorship’ would be perfectly legitimate in this case.

Hate Speech

I have written a couple of posts about hate speech. Hate speech, I have said, involves making unfounded moral accusations against a group of people as an expression of one’s own unjustified hatred and/or as a way of promoting hatred in others.

This leads to the second statement that Donahue made that I would like to look at. This occurred in the second press release, “Hysteria Marks Myers and His Ilk”

It contains the following statement:

As a result of the hysteria that Myers’ ilk have promoted, at least one public official is taking it seriously. Thomas E. Foley is chairman of Virginia’s First Congressional District Republican Committee, a delegate to the Republican National Convention and one of two Republican at large nominees for Virginia’s Electoral College. His concern is for the safety of Catholics attending this year’s Republican National Convention in Minneapolis, Myers’ backyard. Accordingly, Foley has asked the top GOP brass to provide additional security while in the Twin Cities so that Catholics can worship without fear of violence. Given the vitriol we have experienced for simply exercising our First Amendment right to freedom of speech, we support Foley’s request.

Earlier, I said that “hate speech” was speech that makes unfounded moral accusations against a group of people either as an expression of the hate of the speaker or to rouse sentiments of hate in the audience.

Donahue’s statements clearly qualify.

There is absolutely no evidence that Myers and his ‘ilk’ are interested in any sort of violence. At the very least, Donahue did not provide any.

In fact, in the very same press release, Donahue himself testifies to the lack of evidence of any threat of violence.

But he’d better be careful what he says, because if I get any death threats, it won’t be hard to connect the dots.

Apparently, Donahue had not gotten any death threats. Yet, in spite of this absence of evidence of a threat to violence, Donahue acted to paint Myers and ‘his ilk’ as people prone to violence – as people to be hated and feared because of a tendency to do harm that requires Donahue and his allies to seek additional security.

The hate-monger wants people to believe that the targets of their hate are a threat because the hate-monger feeds off of fear and hate. Donahue either believes this nonsense – which makes him a bigot in that he presumes the moral inferiority of whole groups. Or he does not believe this nonsense but is willing to use fear and hate to manipulate others for his own benefit.

Either way, it does not speak favorably to the matter of his own moral character.

If Donahue were a moral and just person, there are a couple of things that he would have done differently.

I find it interesting to note that Donahue runs an organization that he claims to be concerned with civil rights. Yet, Donahue shows absolutely no understanding about what civil rights are about. One of the things it is about is not using hatred and fear as a weapon to score political points.

Another thing that a person concerned with civil rights does not do is make gross overgeneralizations about whole groups.

In my own case, I will criticize a person only when I have evidence that the person has done something wrong. I will never make an accusation against Donahue and ‘his ilk’. This is because I am aware of the fact that Donahue’s ‘ilk’, just like Myers’ ‘ilk’, make up a diverse set of people who do not all share the same beliefs and moral failings. I condemn Donahue for Donahue’s words and actions, and worry about the ‘ilk’ only when I have evidence on which to make a judgment.

Donahue does not need evidence. Donahue is more than willing to make a pre-judgment of Myers’ ‘ilk’ – to judge them without evidence by making unfounded generalizations. This pre-judgment is the very essence of bigotry, and it is something that Donahue seems to have no problem with.

Conclusion

Donahue’s problem is that he does not have any type of moral theory that tells him what counts as a violation of a civil right and what does not. All he has are his own feelings. Since those feelings include Donahue’s hatreds, bigotries, and prejudices, we can easily see those sentiments coming out in his moral claims.

This is not a blanket charge. This is something that can be demonstrated.

We see Donahue’s call for censorship in his threat to appeal to the legislature to silence those who make claims he does not like.

We see Donahue’s disposition towards hate-mongering in branding Myers’ ‘ilk’ as prone to violence without any evidence but Donahue’s own desire to believe the worst in (certain) others.

We see Donahue’s prejudice in his disposition to pre-judge Myers’ ‘ilk’ – making gross generalizations that allows him to judge a whole group of individuals without any consideration of individual differences.

This from a person who heads an organization that is allegedly concerned with civil rights.

They should be acutely embarrassed.

The Case of the Communion Cracker III - Bill Donahue

The Case of the Communion Cracker Part 2: Bill Donahue

So far, I have given a moral evaluation of the theft of a communion cracker.

In brief, there are three types of theft, distinguished from each other by the method used to illicitly get possession of property that belongs to somebody else. Property illicitly acquired through the use of force is robbery. Property illicitly acquired through the use of stealth is burglary. Property illicitly acquired through the use of deception is fraud.

Regardless of the method used to take somebody else's property, the object remains the property of the person it was stolen from. If one discovers that one has acquired stolen property, he or she should return it to its rightful owner is as good a condition as circumstances allow.

I have given a moral evaluation of PZ Myers' reaction to this event.

It was wrong for him to incite people to commit theft.

However, nothing that he wrote constitutes 'hate speech'. Hate speech involves making false moral claims about a group of people in order to promote hatred against them. The types of speech that classify has hate speech includes:

(1) The Connecticut Valley Atheist's Christmas sign that shows the world trade center and the text, "Imagine No Religion" - thus falsely casting moral blame for the 9/11 attacks on all people who subscribe to any religion.

(2) Ben Stein's "Expelled" that tried to link all atheists and all those who believe in evolution to the Nazi Holocaust.

(3) Any claim that tries to blame all Catholics for the sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests.

(4) Any claim similar to (3) above that tries to assert that all homosexual men are child abusers.

What all of these statements have in common is that they make over-general moral claims for the purpose of promoting hatred of whole groups of people regardless of the innocence of individual members of that group.

If it were possible to honestly acquire ownership of a communion cracker, in that case I would be tempted to join Myers in designing some way to forcefully communicate to people the fact that this is just a cracker.

Donahue said:

It is hard to think of anything more vile than to intentionally desecrate the Body of Christ. We look to those who have oversight responsibility to act quickly and decisively.

Nobody is going to desecrate the Body of Christ. That body turned to dust a long time ago (if it ever existed at all). The fact that some delusional people think that this cracker is the body of Christ does not make it true, any more than the fact that a person thinks that they have a bank account with one million dollars in it does not make it true.

In fact, that would be the point of the demonstration - to state clearly that this is just a cracker. I can agree that it would be wrong to desecrate the body of Christ (as I think it is wrong to desecrate anybody), but that has nothing at all to do with this cracker.

Do I need to respect the fact that some people believe that a communion cracker is the body of Christ?

Well . . . do they have an obligation to respect my view that it is not the body of Christ? By what moral rule am I required to treat a cracker as if it is the body of Christ (against all reasonableness to the contrary), but others are not obligated to treat the cracker as if it is just a cracker?

Whenever moral claims are asymmetric like this, you have injustice. You have people imposing rules on others that they are not willing to apply to themselves. You have people who are 'doing unto others' that which they are not willing to allow others to do unto them.

The symmetric rule - the rule that is imposed on others and self alike - is, "It's your cracker, do what you want with it as long as you do not harm others. If you want to pray to it, then pray to it. If you want to cover it with a cheese spread and ham and serve it as an appetizer, then do so."

If PZ Myers legitimately acquired a set of communion crackers, then he would be within his rights to serve them with a cheese spread and ham, or to do anything else to them that he may do to any other cracker that he might happen to come into possession of.

If the crackers were truly his.

I know that these acts would upset a lot of people. What is the moral status of that?

Well, imagine a mentally handicapped adult who thinks that a doll that he sees (it is not his) is his sister Jane. He takes the doll and screams at anybody who tries to take it back. If we take the doll from him, this will induce suffering. To what degree does this suffering have moral relevance?

Well, up until the point that the person with delusional thinking becomes a threat to others. If he is an otherwise harmless individual, his suffering gives us reason to say, "Let him have the doll. Go ahead and humor him. He's not hurting anybody."

However, when his delusional beliefs are a part of a pattern of behavior that involves doing harm to others, then there is reason to quit playing nice when it comes to humoring that person.

In this particular case, we are talking about death threats and other threats of violence made against the student who stole the cracker. These are threats of violence grounded on the delusional belief that this cracker is the Body of Christ. When a delusional belief is inspiring people to threats of violence, with a possibility of actual violence, it becomes morally legitimate to confront them with the fact that this is just a cracker.

If it were possible to honestly get a communion cracker, then there would be good reason to communicate to those who have made threats of violence based on the delusion that it is the body of Christ that a key premise that they are using to try to justify their actions are absurdly false. As such, the actions that they claim to be justified are not justified in fact.

It is not hate speech to say, “The premise that you are grounding your call to do violence to another person on is deeply flawed.” Particularly when the premise that the person is grounding his call to do violence to another person on is deeply flawed.

Now, let us look at this from Donahue’s position. Donahue wants to ban people from saying that, “The premises that some of my people are using to justify violence to others is deeply flawed.”

What type of claim is this? By what authority does anybody have the right to say, “Nobody may question the reasons that these people give for threatening harm to others?” The very act of threatening harm to others opens up every reason one might give to defend that harm to scrutiny and criticism. If you do not want a belief of yours to be questioned, then resolve never to use it to try to justify doing harm to others. Because, the instant you use it to try to justify doing harm to others, others (particularly those who would be harmed) have a right to question it.

This does not only apply to death threats against a student who stole a communion cracker.

It also has to do with the fact that these beliefs are being used to justify political actions. They are used to justify denying people the benefits of stem-cell medical research, to prevent the distribution of condoms to prevent the spread of disease, to prevent women from having early-term abortions, and to prevent homosexuals from having the benefit of marriage.

As soon as a belief is used to justify actions harmful to the interests of others, others have a right to question those beliefs. If you want your religious beliefs to be immune from questioning and criticism, then do not use them to justify policies that are contrary to the interests of others. The instant that a belief is used to justify harming others, that belief is on the table and it can be challenged, particularly by those whose interests are to be harmed.

For the very reason that these Catholic beliefs are being used to justify policies that are harmful to the interests of others, those beliefs are on the table, and may be legitimately challenged. It is not hate speech. It is, instead, the right of any person whose interests are to be sacrificed to challenge the reasons that others give for having those interests sacrificed.

The Case of the Communion Cracker II - PZ Myers

As I mentioned, a member of the studio audience asked me to render moral judgment on the Case of the Communion Cracker.

In my first post I discussed the original theft, attempts to use force to prevent the theft, and the series of death threats that actually followed the theft.

Now, I would like to look at PZ Myers’ response to this news story, posted in the blog entry, It's a Frackin' Cracker.

Myers is clearly responding to the absurd reaction generated by what amounts to the theft of a cracker. He is clearly and accurately describing this reaction as an absurdity, and the fact that if one starts off with crazy premises (e.g., that the cracker has been changed into the body of Christ), one gets some equally crazy conclusions (the death threats and hysteria following upon the theft of a cracker).

So, what to do. I have an idea. Can anyone out there score me some consecrated communion wafers? There's no way I can personally get them — my local churches have stakes prepared for me, I'm sure — but if any of you would be willing to do what it takes to get me some, or even one, and mail it to me, I'll show you sacrilege . . .

There is a problem here in that Myers statement here calls upon others to perform immoral acts.

The morally acceptable way for a person to acquire the property of another is to ask the person for the use of their property. If one has reason to believe that there are strings attached, and the person wanting the property fully intends to violate those conditions, then the person asking for the property must state that fact. If it means that one does not acquire the property - so be it.

Now, I am not, in any way, going to treat seriously the proposition that this cracker is, was, or ever will become the body of Christ. It is just a cracker.

However, the cracker is somebody's property, and there are limits in what a person may and may not do to acquire the property of another person.

Myers asked his readers to acquire communion crackers and send them to him. There is no morally legitimate way for anybody to acquire a communion cracker. (Or, at least, it would be extremely difficult.) So, Myers has asked his readers to act immorally - to engage in deception and theft.

That's not right.

Any communion crackers acquired through deception still morally belongs to the Catholic Church and, as such, ought to be returned to its rightful owner.

If anybody happens to acquire a communion cracker honestly, then that is a different matter. But, like I said, I do not think that this is going to happen. Anybody acquiring a communion cracker has acted dishonestly (immorally) in acquiring it.

Setting that issue aside, there are charges of intolerance and 'hate speech' going on here.

If it is 'hate speech' to deny that a cracker becomes the body of Christ in the face of a religious doctrine that says that it does.

Then, clearly, it is 'hate speech' to say that a cracker does become the body of Christ in the face of a-religious doctrine that says that it does not.

Why is the denial of the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation 'hate speech', but the denial of the atheist doctrine of non-transubstantiation not 'hate speech'? What gives the Catholic Church the right to demand that their beliefs not be questioned, but denies the atheist the right to make the same claim about their beliefs?

In fact, I think it would be useful for atheists to begin to show people the absurd way in which people hide behind the accusation of 'hate speech' by using the term the way it is used against us - here every statement that asserts that an atheist has a false belief is branded 'hate speech' and is accompanied by demands that it be removed.

As long as those communications were done with tongue firmly planted in one's cheek - because the intent is to show the absurdity with which people use the charge of 'hate speech' against atheists.

If somebody denies the theory of evolution, accuse them of engaging in 'hate speech' against those who believe that evolution has taken place and, in doing so, infer that anybody who makes such a statement in the face of those who believe it is true should be morally condemned for not respecting the beliefs of others.

The claim, "It is just a cracker," is not 'hate speech'. Just as the claim, "It is not just a cracker," is not hate speech.

Now, the claim that evolution is responsible for the Holocaust - that is hate speech. Here, we are talking about an absurd implication that a person uses to promote unjustified and unfounded hatred of others. The only reason somebody would make such a claim - the only reason that a person would believe it - is because they hate the people that they are claiming to be responsible for the Holocaust, wish to promote that hatred in others, and do not care what lies they utter in order to accomplish that end.

The claim that all Catholic priests sexually abuse children would be hate speech, because it is not true, and those who assert that it is true are doing so to promote hatred and fear of people who are innocent of the accusations made against them.

Atheists have engaged in hate speech against theists. I have condemned some instances in the course of this blog. See, for example, Connecticut Valley Atheists: Imagine. I classified that as hate speech because it took an act that some religious beliefs are responsible for and used it to condemn all religious beliefs - an attempt to use false claims to promote hatred of others.

"It's just a cracker," is not hate speech - no matter how forcefully it is made.

The Case of the Communion Cracker

A member of the studio audience has written to me and asked that I pass moral judgment on The Case of the Communion Cracker.

In fact, there are several different moral issues now related to this event. We have the original event in which a student took a communion cracker from a church, the actions taken to stop the student from taking the cracker, the threats against the student, and PZ Myers’ response to those threats.

Let’s start at the beginning.

‘Body of Christ’ snatched from church, held hostage by UCF student

Student who took religious icon getting death threats

‘Body of Christ’ returned to church after student receives email threats

The facts of the case, as laid before me are that name walked into a church, went through the communion service, had a communion wafer placed on his tongue. He removed it, and he attempted to leave the church with it.

This is theft, plain and simple.

The communion cracker is the property of the church. It is given to parishioners under an implied contract where the person receiving the property agrees to certain terms and conditions – these being that the cracker will be eaten on the spot. The student, in this case, indicated his agreement to these terms and conditions by opening his mouth and allowing the cracker to be placed inside. That he had no intention of consuming the cracker demonstrates that he engaged in an act of deception (he lied) to acquire property that would not have otherwise been given to him. After obtaining illicit possession of the property, he attempted to (and succeeded in) removing it from the premises. This constitutes theft.

Having said this, we are talking about the theft of a cracker here. This is not a kidnapping, or anything on that order. Nor is it a hostage situation. It is theft. The cracker was the property of the church, and it was stolen.

The next issue before me is that people who noticed that the student was stealing church property attempted to use force to stop the theft. The student, in this case, claimed that the use of force was wrong.

The student, in this case, was mistaken.

If I noticed somebody had entered my home and was leaving with my property, I would be within my rights to use violence in order to prevent the theft. Some people would argue that I would be within my rights to shoot the thief. I would not go that far. However, grabbing the thief as he left my property and demanding by force or threat of force that he leave the stolen property behind would be within my rights – I would not be expected to be condemned for it.

Then there was the reaction of the Catholics after the student had successfully stolen church property – including death threats and alleged planned attempts to storm the student’s room to ‘rescue the hostage’.

These types of actions in insanely disproportionate to the crime that was committed.

In fact, it borders on criminal insanity.

Let’s say I have a favorite pet rock, Herbert. The neighbor kid stole it. To get the rock back, I break into my neighbor’s house, kill the kid, and take my rock.

It is my rock.

Then, the police start asking me questions. They find out that I believe that this rock is a real person – that if Herbert did not get his ‘medicine’ then he would suffer horrible agony, and it is to prevent this agony that I broke into the house, killed the kid, and brought back my rock.

That story that I told would be considered justification for locking me up as a danger to society.

There is nothing wrong with me having a special affection for my pet rock Herbert. However, when a person’s pet beliefs make them a threat to the well-being of others – when it makes them consider acts of extreme violence – then it is time for civilized people to recognize that the person who holds these beliefs are a danger to others, and to treat them accordingly.

The fact that there might be a large number of them may be relevant to their political power – which has important practical implications. However, it is not an argument against the fact of the matter, that these people are suffering from false beliefs that make them a threat to others.

Demagogues will take what I wrote above and twist it into saying that I think Catholics should be rounded up and hauled off into concentration camps for our own protection. These are people who are so fond of bearing false witness against others that they cannot resist the opportunity to find absurd interpretations of what other write.

A very small percentage of the Catholic population responded to these claims with death threats. A large percentage of the Catholic population would view the death threats as inappropriate and would condemn anybody who ever acted violently. So, a vast majority of Catholics show no signs whatsoever that their religious beliefs make them a threat to others – at least in this sense.

The blame among the Catholics belongs only to those who make the threats or who commit acts of violence, not to the whole Catholic population. Just as the blame for the theft of this communion cracker belongs to the person who stole it and not to the whole of whatever group he may belong to.

Of course, a few, who feed off of the fear and the hate that they grow in others, will ignore this set of facts and promote a gross misinterpretation of what was said – in order to grow the fear and hatred that they life off of.

Moral Rights vs. Legal Rights

A number of topics of public discussion in recent weeks – rights of Guantanamo Bay detainees, treatment of citizens in foreign lands, the current FISA Amendments - have touched on a significant inconsistency in the way Americans think of the relationship between legal and moral rights.

It is a consistency that is particularly blatant among the religious right, though it is not limited to them.

It is an inconsistency that makes its greatest expression in light of claims made to defend religious references in the Declaration of Independence, ‘under God’ in the Pledge of Allegiance, ‘In God We Trust’ as the national motto, and the claim that atheists cannot be moral (because morality requires God).

The importance of claiming that our rights come from God – for those who insist on this theory – is to say that our rights have a source that is outside of human contrivance. If our rights do not come from God, then they come from man – and what man gives, man can take away. If, instead, our rights come from God, then no man can take them away. Putting America ‘under God’ in this sense means putting the country under this set of external moral constraints that do not allow mere mortals to dictate the difference between right and wrong.

[Note: I argue, of course, that this is a false dichotomy. Our moral rights exist in the form of discoverable relationships between malleable desires – desires we have the power to influence through social forces – and other desires. Those relationships exist in nature. Man has no more power to ‘decide’ on a different set of relationships than he has to ‘decide’ to alter the gravitational constant or the speed of light in a vacuum. It is, furthermore, inappropriate for the government to declare that those who hold the ‘god theory’ of rights are inherently more patriotic than those desire utilitarians, but that is a matter for another post.]

Let’s take this claim seriously – that our rights come from God or some other external source, and that they are human rights. They do not come from man.

Now, let’s look at how these same people treat the rights specified in the Constitution. According to the dominant vie these rights only apply to American citizens. If a person is not an American citizen, then he has no Constitutional rights.

This Constitutional theory requires the assumption that our rights come from man, and what man can give to people, man can give away. Because man has assigned these rights only to a particular subset of people, only that particular subset of people has these rights. What man gives (in terms of rights), man can take away.

This applies to the FISA bill because of the assumption that, while the warrantless searches and seizures of American citizens is ‘wrong’ in some sense, it is not wrong’ to conduct warrantless searches and seizures of people from other countries. While rounding up Americans, torturing them, holding them indefinitely without formal charges or a trial, is considered ‘wrong’ in a sense, it is not considered wrong to inflict these harms on foreign nationals.

Please note I have noted an inconsistency. There are always two ways to resolve this inconsistency.

If it is morally permissible for a government to conduct warrantless searches and seizures of foreign nationals on foreign soil, then this suggests that the ‘right’ against warrantless searches is merely a political contrivance, and there would be nothing morally wrong with opening up warrantless searches of American citizens on American soil. That which it is morally permissible to do to others, it is morally permissible to do to Americans, and it is only made illegal as a matter of (arbitrary) legal contrivance.

On other hand, if it is morally impermissible to conduct warrantless searches and seizures against Americans – if this is no mere legal contrivance but represents some form of natural right to privacy – then it is equally immoral to conduct warrantless searches and seizures of foreign nationals. After all, they are human beings as well, and as such they have the same God-given (or external) rights that Americans have. Denying that they have the same rights is the same as denying that those rights come from God (or denying that they are something other than mere human contrivances as well).

It is surprising to note that those who allegedly view rights as coming from God (or some other external source) and as being applicable to all men (to use the Declaration of Independence's wording) tend to be the most vocal at insisting that those rights only be granted to some men while enthusiastically violating the same rights of others.

At the same time, those who allegedly view rights as mere human contrivances tend to be the most vocal when it comes to insisting that if something is a moral right – a human right – that it truly must govern our behavior towards all men.

Let me repeat, I consider this to be a false dichotomy. There is a third option. It is possible to hold that rights have no divine origin, but that they exist in nature (in the form of relationships between malleable desires and other desires). As moral rights, that which (the government claims) it may permissibly do to foreign nationals, it is saying it may permissibly do to Americans. That which we say the government may not rightfully do to an American (not as a matter of political contrivance, but as a matter of moral right), it has no moral right to do to a foreign national.

Please note, in this posting at least I have not defined what it is morally permissible for the Government to do to American citizens or to foreign nationals. I want to make it clear that this post is not concerned with supporting any particular conclusion about what is permissible and what is not. This post is concerned only with pointing out the demands of consistency – that whatever the government is morally permitted to do to foreign nationals it is permitted to do to citizens, and whatever the government is morally prohibited from doing to citizens it is prohibited from doing to foreign nationals – whatever that may be.

Only a hypocrite will argue that it is permissible to do to foreigners that which morality prohibits doing to an American citizen – that which is a moral right. Moral consistency does not allow any other option.

Political Reality

With respect to any piece of legislation that comes before a legislator, there are two sets of questions to be answered. The first set concerns the quality of each item in the legislation. For each item, one may ask, "Is this item worthy of my support?" The other question, of course, is, "Should I vote for this legislation?"

Every legislator will almost certainly have to vote at some time to institute a practice that is unjust, or approve a law that does harm to (those he thinks are) innocent people, or causes unnecessary suffering. Because, in spite of the fact that the bill contains something bad, it contains more good than bad, and the legislator must vote for or against the whole bill.

The same is true of executives (governors and presidents) who sign the bill into law.

A moral objection to a provision of the bill does not necessarily imply that a good person would vote against that bill.

These issues come to mind with respect to the current FISA bill – the bill that will be used to govern the future of wiretapping for security purposes. Many people on the political left are opposed to this bill. Democratic Presidential candidate Barak Obama also opposed this bill, until recently, when he announced that he will vote for it.

I have read a number of objections against Obama’s change in position.

I have spent the day trying to learn enough details about the bill in order to discover what position I would take on it. To be honest, I could not find enough clear information on which to make a decision. However, my research took me through a great deal of criticism of Obama's shift in position. A lot of that criticism was missing some very important elements.

It appears to me that criticism of a bill (as distinct from criticism of a specific element of a bill) requires more than simply an announcement that there are reasons to reject provisions within the bill. It requires some discussion of what alternatives are available, and what the consequences are of a particular action.

For example, one of the criticisms made against Obama was that he was concerned with winning the election, and seems willing to abandon principle when there are votes at stake. However, I have never found this to be a sensible criticism. It is the same as saying to a candidate, "I believe that you are the best person for the job. However, I demand that you act in such a way that you give up any chance of winning the election, and actually hand the seat over to somebody who, in that position, will spell disaster for the country."

I do not approve of lying. I do not approve of a candidate saying that he favors a position he does not favor in order to attract votes. At the same time, I see no sensible reason to object to a candidate who says, "I am voting for this legislation, even though it contains elements that I do not like, because I do not see a better alternative available. I am not saying that this legislation is perfect. To insist that I only vote for perfect legislation is to insist that I never vote in favor of any legislation."

Again, I am not talking about lying. I am talking about making the honest claim that, “This is the best option that I think is politically viable at this time. If you do not like this option, then change political reality so that we can get a better version of this law passed. Sitting around and griping – expecting political reality to change magically rather than by hard work, while demanding that candidates act as if they are not running for office in the real world, is irrational nonsense.”

People who have read this blog know that I am adamantly opposed to having 'under God' in the Pledge of Allegiance, and 'In God We Trust' as the national motto. However, when the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals releases its decision on these matters, I fully expect Obama to denounce the decision and to speak in defense of these practices. His defense will make no logical sense, and I will take great pains to show its flaws.

However, I also realize that I live in the real world. I expect – I even hope – that Obama will denounce the 9th Circuit Court opinion (if it comes out against 'under God') for the simple fact that, if he does what is right, it could cost him the election. Given the consequences of his renouncing the 9th Circuit Court decision, and the consequences of McCain becoming President, I choose the former over the latter.

When Obama states his position, I expect to rip it to shreds in this blog – and I will encourage others to do the same. However, I will do so with full understanding of why he stated that position. I will do so knowing full well that before any politician can dare to support the position that I support, I need to put the work into making it politically viable for him (or her) to do so. That’s my job as a citizen.

For similar reasons, people who are opposed to certain elements of the FISA Amendments need to do the same thing. They can certainly know and understand that some of its positions are morally objectionable. However, they have to recognize that it is senseless to demand that a politician take a position on that issue that will guarantee that he will lose the election to a worse candidate. They have to recognize that their first duty must be to contribute to changing the political landscape to one in which a politician can take the correct position on the issue, and still win an election.

It is a politician's duty in this winner-take-all political system to pull together the best 51% of the country against the worst 49% (or the best 60% against the worst 40%). If he makes it his goal to pull the best 49% together against the worst 51%, then he is handing the reigns of government over to the worst 51%.

When I read about people saying of a candidate, "I refuse to support him because he refuses to act in a way that will cost him the election and give power to the worst 51%," this type of attitude strikes me as irrational to the point of insanity. I can make no sense of it. Yet, I see it all the time.

If the alliance of the best 51% is not willing to support the 4th Amendment, then it becomes my job – our job – to get them to see the value of the 4th Amendment. If we fail, this does not change the fact that the candidate's job is to pull together an alliance of the best 51%. The only thing that changes is that the best 51% happens to be a group of people who simply refuse to support the 4th Amendment – and the 4th Amendment is as good as repealed.

Perhaps an alliance of the best 51% will support the 4th Amendment. If this is the case, then Obama should defend it as well. It is open for somebody to make that case. Yet, many of the critics that I see do not make the case – or they assert it without offering any reason to believe it other than, “Of course the majority realize that my position is correct.”

To the degree that somebody can make this case, to that degree they have a case for condemning the politician who does not defend the 4th Amendment – for saying that the politician is making a mistake. Where they cannot make such a case, their protest amounts to insisting that the candidate unite the best 49% against the worst 51% - that is to say, they are insisting that the candidate be irrational and foolish in a way that does irreparable harm to the country.

Mutiny

I seem to be in a state of dispute with a couple of my most loyal readers – or, at least, a couple of my most loyal readers who post comments – on matters of foreign policy. Therefore, I would like to take the opportunity to refine my position.

So, let’s start at the heart of the issue. Sheldon asked:

At what point are they justified to pick and choose? I would think that as soon as they could discern the unjustness of the order.

My quick answer is:

At the point at which they are justified in declaring that the Constitution is null and void, and the military no longer has a duty to answer to its civilian commanders.

Because that is what we are talking about. The decision that the military can act independent of its instructions from the government is a decision that the Constitution is no longer in effect.

We might well come to a point in which this is the case. But let’s not pretend that this is an easy decision to make, or a decision without consequences.

The first charge that I think will be leveled against me in saying this is that I am exaggerating – that the type of issue under consideration is not as serious as I am making it out to be. In fact, in every conflict, you will find countless instances in which people disobey bad orders and do so without challenging the legitimacy of the Constitution.

I am assuming that we are not talking about the type of every-day moral concerns that are a part of life even for those of us not in the military. I am talking about the refusal to follow orders – in effect, acts of mutiny. At that level of transgression, we are talking about cases in which a soldier has determined that he is not answerable to a superior officer – and ultimately not answerable to the Commander in Chief of the military.

Sheldon provides a couple of examples.

Would we tolerate the destruction of a crime ridden area of a U.S. city, like we tolerated the destruction of Fallujah? Would we tolerate no-knock mid-night raids on families' homes based on faulty intelligence? (Not to mention lack of search warrants).

My answer here is that we should not have tolerated these actions in Iraq. Or, more precisely, we should not have tolerated our government giving these types of orders to soldiers in Iraq. As soldiers, they must give up a certain amount of moral autonomy (since this is required of an effective military). In exchange, we have an added obligation to make sure that they only receive good orders.

They have done their job.

We have, so far, utterly failed to do ours.

I have written a number of posts, much like the questions that Sheldon asked above, concerning the moral quality of the orders that have been sent to soldiers in Iraq by our government. These include:

A Different Kind of War

Baiting

The Capture and Internment of Former President Bush

In the Year 1781

As I see it, the fact that soldiers in Iraq are getting these types of orders is our moral responsibility. We are not soldiers. We have not given up our moral autonomy. In fact, quite the opposite – we have taken the moral responsibility of making sure that those who have given up moral autonomy are not used by others for personal or political gain, but instead relied upon when the principles and values they are worthy of being defended are at risk.

On this point, I want to add the fact that soldiers do not give up their right to be citizens. They are citizens who have a special knowledge relevant to the moral quality of the actions they have been receiving. Thus, they have a special obligation to inform the rest of us when the military is being abused for personal and political gain. The soldier who protests immoral orders is in the same position as the citizen who protests.

At what point are soldiers justified in picking and choosing?

Whatever point that is, before we get to that point, we reach a point where those of us who have not given up moral autonomy have an obligation to act. If the members of the military are getting morally outrageous orders, then we should be protesting on their behalf, because we have in fact broken our contract with the soldiers.

But this reflexive admiration of war heroes is a short-cut around the critical examination of what soldiers are ordered to do in a broader context. It is an intentional propagandizing distraction, to "Support the Troops" on their mission, and to just "trust the institutions".

I agree that the command to “support the troops” is often abused. Political leaders use this as a red herring – as if, somehow, refusing to support the leader of the troops is the same as refusing to support the troops.

I have argued against this line of reasoning as well. Imagine that you have a company of soldiers. How do you “support the troops”?

Well, one of the requirements for supporting the troops is to make sure that they have high-quality leaders who will not expend their lives needlessly. I can imagine the leader of a company who is incompetent complaining that anybody who objects to the quality of his leadership is insulting the soldiers under his command. In the name of respecting and honoring the troops, we are told not to question the competence of their leader.

Yet, these two acts are qualitatively different. To support the troops, you replace incompetent leaders who are not willing or able to secure the best advantage for his troops, and replace that leader with somebody competent to do the job. President Bush is an incompetent and immoral leader. We owe it to the troops to replace him with somebody who is competent and moral – somebody who will not order the troops to do anything that an honorable person would not do.

However, recognizing this distraction (and condemning it) still does not threaten the assumption that the soldiers themselves are to be respected. In fact, my argument for condemning this distraction is still grounded on the assumption that soldiers are to be respected – and the type of respect that they are due is inconsistent to allowing this type of abusive propaganda. Indeed, the respect that they are due is consistent with condemning this type of propaganda that people use to exploit the soldier for personal or political gain.

Actually, I do not think that I find myself in disagreement with Sheldon. The points that he has brought up are valid and important. I simply happen to think that there is a way of answering them that is consistent with the policy of respect for the troops. Indeed, there are ways of answering those objections that are built on the very assumption of respect for the troops.

We have failed the soldiers. We have allowed the development of a set of institutions whereby soldiers can be used to launch wars of aggression for the political and financial gain of the Executive Branch of government and their friends. We need to correct these institutions. We should not be asking or expecting soldiers to take a course of action that is illegal and unconstitutional until we have first pursued the option of removing the offending parties from public office in ways that are fully constitutional.

Quite by coincidence, there was a news story today that will give us the opportunity to improve our institution with an eye to helping to ensure that the military gets quality orders. A bipartisan panel has released a report suggesting changes in the War Powers Act. I am not writing here to endorse its findings, but rathter to susggest that it is an important starting point for reform to eliminate the problems we have seen through the last seven years. See Los Angeles Times, New Law Is Urged on War Powers

Flip Floppery

Democratic Presidential Nominee Barak Obama has announced recently that he will visit several countries in Europe and the Middle East and that, in doing so, he may ‘refine’ his policy with respect to Iraq.

Some people are upset that he is leaving the option open for a change in policy – that he may decide to continue the war in Iraq rather than end it. There are people on the left who fear that they might not have the anti-war candidate they wanted. And there are people on the right who are anxious to find reasons to accuse Obama of the political crime of flip-floppery.

Obama, for his part, is in damage-control mode. He is arguing that he has said nothing to indicate a shift in position – that working out the details in how he is going to carry out his stated objectives is not the same as changing those objectives. Deciding how to get the ball through the goal posts is not the same as moving the goal posts.

For my part, I think that Obama should be free to move the goal posts. He should be free to act on whatever new information he acquires and to choose the best course of action based on available information. This would include the option of another Iraqi ‘surge’ or the option of attacking Iran if the evidence suggests that these are legitimate options.

Having said this, I argue that there are important moral limits on the legitimacy of attacking another country. The presumption should be against launching an attack. It is only with the accumulation of evidence beyond a reasonable doubt that attacking is necessary that it becomes legitimate to attack. Because people have a tendency to see what they want to see and to manipulate the public accordingly, that presentation of evidence should be made to an impartial third party. I do not believe that these moral requirements for an attack on Iran are near to being met. Yet, this is different from saying that they cannot be met.

It is, I think, a moral failing on the part of the political left that they think they have enough information to determine the right strategy and to confine Presidents to what they think is the best option. It is a sign of extreme arrogance – a foolish arrogance that says that important decisions can be made by people who know almost nothing about the facts of the matter.

I would hope that, if any of these anti-war advocates on the political left were to visit with European leaders and visit the middle east, that they, too, might have the courage to 'revise' their plans in the light of better evidence. It would be a moral crime to insist, “We will pursue this policy that I have decided upon regardless of what the evidence tells us.”

That type of thinking – the thinking that attacking Iraq is a good idea regardless of what the evidence actually said – is what got us into this mess.

I am not saying that these people on the political left are mistaken. I am saying that I do not know if they are right or wrong – and neither do they. Yet, they act as if they do and, what is worse, insist that no amount of evidence or closer understanding of the issues, no amount of personal contact with the people involved, no amount of top-secret military intelligence – can contain anything that could convince Obama that they are mistaken. Whatever evidence and understanding Obama may acquire, he must not revise his plan so as to continue the war or attack Iraq.

What I am looking for in a Presidential candidate is not somebody who will pander to the demands of the ignorant. I want somebody who states that he understands the principles involved and has the intelligence and moral character to actually act in accordance with those principles.

Most importantly, what I am looking for in a fellow citizen is somebody who recognizes the limitations of his own knowledge, and who does not pretend to greater wisdom and intelligence than he actually has.

What I am looking for in a fellow citizen is a realization that evidence matters, and that any belief, no matter how firmly held, can be shaken and brought down with sufficient evidence.

What I am looking for in a fellow citizen is an admission that somebody who has looked at an issue up close and actually had long conversations with the people involved might actually have an informed opinion that is better grounded than that of the liberal who knows only what he has read on the internet and seen on the evening news.

Generally speaking, flipflopping should not be considered a moral or political wrong.

Having said this, I want to add that I am not so naïve that I do not recognize the flipping of flops to be the sign of a moral and political wrong. When a candidate changes his position on a political issue – particularly when the candidate changes from an unpopular to a popular position – we have reason to ask whether the change was motivated by a consideration of the evidence, or whether it was grounded on political expedience.

It is certainly legitimate to use the changing of an opinion as a sign that the candidate is being dishonest, just as it is legitimate to use the look in a person’s eye as a sign that he is trying to be deceptive. However, we must distinguish between the signification and the thing signified. The crime is not to be found in the way that a person looks around, but in the fact that he is lying. Similarly, in politics, the crime should not be the fact that a candidate has shifted his position, but his reasons for doing so.

To the degree that we make the flipping of flops a political crime, to that degree our elected offices will become the property of people who never change their opinions. This type of standard makes stubbornness in the face of evidence a political virtue – and that is precisely the opposite of the type of person we have reason to want to see in public office. It is decidedly not in our mutual interest to promote such a standard.

What we should be promoting is a standard where we ask and expect candidates to provide us with reasons for their change of opinion, and to evaluate those reasons according to whether they make sense or, instead, suggest that the candidate is allowing himself to be persuaded by political convenience.

We should also be leaving it open for a candidate to say, "Hey, I'm trying to be your representative in government. I do not agree with you on this issue. However, I recognize your right to demand that your representative actually represent you in Congress. So, while I disagree with you on this issue, I will represent your wishes in Congress." This way, candidates will not have to lie to be elected, and we can start to grow a more honest crop of politicians.

As far as I am concerned, I like Obama's recent statements on Iraq. I like the idea that a candidate will make decisions based on evidence, and that the evidence might cause him to change his mind. I find that comforting.

Enforcing Laws and Obeying Orders

In a comment to a recent post, one of my regular commenters, Shaldon, brought up the issue of the degree to which a soldier can be morally praised or blamed for the quality of the actions he is ordered to perform.

McCain was shot down after about 20bombing missions over North Vietnam. Seems to me that a legitimate question would be what were the effects of those bombing missions to people on the ground? Did that aerial bombardment terrorize the people below? What is the likelihood that more than a few innocents were killed or maimed from the bombs McCain and others dropped?

Sheldon also says:

I am pretty tired of this admiration for so-called "war heroes". The real war heroes are those with the moral courage to speak of the truth about what they have seen, done and experienced.

I first want to stress that the principles that I apply here do not just apply to “war heroes”. They apply to first responders in general – police, fire department, paramedics, coast guard. They apply to anybody who puts his or her life on the line for others.

In this sense, the same types of questions that a soldier can ask, a police officer can ask as well. "What are the purposes of the laws that I am enforcing? What are the effects? What are the chances, if I follow the law in this case – if I wait to get a warrant or I release this person I suspect of a crime but against whom I have no evidence – that innocent people will die?"

And, yet, we still have reason to demand that anybody who joins the police force (or the district attorney's office, or becomes a judge) to enforce the law regardless of whether he or she agrees or disagrees with the law. We expect the police and the judge to enforce the law even when they think it is an immoral law meant to use government force to take advantage of others, or puts innocent lives at risk.

Similarly, we have reason to expect that anybody who joins the military will carry out his or her orders. Soldiers have no more discretion with respect to carrying out orders than a police officer does enforcing the law. (There is, in fact, a fair amount of discretion in both of these jobs, but not enough to threaten the point of this argument.)

At the same time, this duty to enforce the law, and the duty to obey orders, has its limits. Beyond a certain point, society becomes so corrupt that a person of good conscience cannot agree to go along with the actions.

There are two conflicting forces at play here.

One is the chain of command, which a functioning military requires. Higher-rank soldiers give their commands to the lower-rank soldiers who are then expected to carry them out. People with lower military rank give up a certain amount of their autonomy, and agree to follow orders. In return, those giving the orders acquire the responsibility of giving those under them orders that a respectable moral agent would carry out.

However, people higher in rank are not perfect, and some of them command others to do things that no moral person would do. The Nuremberg Trials established the principle that "I was just following orders" is not a legitimate defense against moral crimes committed during wartime. Lower-rank officers have a moral obligation to question the moral legitimacy of the orders they are given and, where those orders are found morally wanting, have a moral duty to refuse to obey.

Refusing to obey a direct order, like civil disobedience, puts the agent at risk of punishment. However, the individual is expected to have sufficient moral integrity that he is willing to accept punishment over committing a moral crime.

Yet, the distinction between what is and what is not a moral crime does not come to us in black and white. It comes to us in shades of gray, with no bright lines by which we can mark a particular option clearly morally permissible or clearly impermissible.

So, there are going to be areas where soldiers and law-enforcement agents are going to have questions – where reasonable people can disagree. We are even going to disagree over whether the realm of items we can permissibly disagree about. In the face of these types of questions, the benefit of the doubt goes to enforcing the law as written, and obeying the order s that are handed down.

Clearly, we cannot sensibly advocate a principle that nobody should become a police officer or a soldier until the institutions that give rise to their orders are perfect, and no police officer or soldier has a chance of getting a bum or immoral order. This would be the same as saying that we should have no police force or military.

Since abolishing the military and police force until we literally make perfect the system whereby agents obtain only perfect orders is out of the question, we are stuck with moral principles that sometimes command soldiers and police officers to do immoral things with small penalties.

Everything that I have written above is consistent with a right – even a duty – to question the morality of what one is asked to do. The obligation to enforce the law as written or to obey an order has its limits. At some point, police have a right – even a duty – to ignore unjust laws. At some point, even a member of the military has the right – even the duty – to consider whether the institutions that he is protecting deserve his protection.

This is a duty we all share. Since police officers and military personnel are limited in the degree to which they can question their orders, we have an obligation to set up institutions that make it more likely than not that soldiers will get good orders.

So, I agree with Sheldon's statement that people who speak the truth about war crimes and atrocities are also heroes, and deserve to be treated as such. People who leaked the Pentagon Papers in the 1970s and met with newspaper reporters in secret to reveal corruption to the highest levels of the Nixon administration deserve our praise and gratitude.

These are admirable actions.

Sheldon also says:

Another question relevant to McCain's qualifications is whether he is more likely to order similar attacks on Iran, and recklessly expand a regional war, and cause even more bloodshed and human suffering.

Sheldon is right - these are important questions. It is also permissible to use the intentional actions that McCain has performed as a pilot, as a prisoner, and as a Senator, to try to predict how he will behave once he enters White House. This is why getting shot down and being imprisoned are not signs of one’s ability to be President. Since these were involuntary actions, they tell us nothing about the types of intentional actions McCain would perform as President – and that is the question in need of answering.

Soldiers and police officers have a right and a duty to ask about the moral quality of the orders that they receive or the laws they are told to enforce. Yet, they also have a duty – as do the rest of us - to trust the institutions to provide them with good orders and just laws. They have no liberty to pick and choose – at least not until the orders become so heinous or the laws become so unjust that it is unreasonable to expect that the institutions that provide them are worthy of continuing, let alone be protected and upheld.

The Pledge Project: Patrotism and Respect

I am going to break protocol with this blog and spend a posting discussing strategy, regarding the status of 'under God' in the Pledge and 'In God We Trust' as the national motto.

The people who want to keep these references are going to market their position by branding opposition of these terms under the word 'offense'. The position that they are going to sell is that atheists react to the word 'God' the way that vampires react to the sight of a cross. It causes us to cringe and hiss and to fly away in fear. That is why we want the word 'God' removed from all public buildings and public ceremonies.

Of course, under that term those who want the word 'God' inserted into these civic ceremonies have as little reason to do so as one would have to put away a cross in the presence of a vampire. Doing so is very dangerous. Furthermore, it is obvious that vampires (or atheists) do not deserve such consideration. After all, we have to remember what kind of people we are dealing with here – people who have rejected God and given themselves over to dark forces.

Two other key terms that are association with the Pledge and the Motto are "Patriotism" and "Respect". Saying the Pledge and displaying the national motto are ways in which a person shows respect for the country and for all of those who have fought to protect it.

We must recite the Pledge in schools to teach patriotism and respect. We must start civic ceremonies with the Pledge to teach patriotism and respect.

We must post "In God We Trust" in our civic buildings to show patriotism and respect. It is, after all, our national motto, so refusing to display it is the same as being ashamed of one's country. It is the opposite of patriotism and respect.

Or so the sayings go.

These three terms – 'offense' on the other hand, versus 'patriotism' and 'respect' – are what shapes most peoples' understanding of 'under God' and 'In God We Trust'. Given these associations, the vast majority of the people favor keeping 'under God' and 'In God We Trust'.

There is this issue of 'separation of church and state'. However, this is just some slogan that the vampire-atheist has invented to try to get good Christians to remove the offensive word 'God' from the public square. For the past 40 years, fundamentalists and evangelicals have been hard at work convincing the people that no such "separation of church and state" exists. So, it does not provide a good reason to concede to the requests of the vampire-atheists 'offended' by the mention of God in public.

Now, I want to suggest a new strategy.

This strategy begins by taking "patriotism" and "respect" as given values. These are good things.

Of course, these are not absolute goods. The Nazi soldier was hyper-patriotic and full of respect for his country and its leader. The patriot cannot be somebody who will support his country without any regard to the moral quality of its actions. A patriot should be somebody who is proud of his country, including the moral quality of its actions, and strive to make a country worthy of pride and respect. These must be considered patriotic acts. A patriot will not only defend his country, but he will work to make his country constantly worthy of that sacrifice.

Taking these two values as a given, in questioning the use of the Pledge of Allegiance at a civic ceremony or in school, the question to ask is this:

Why do you insist on starting this ceremony with a message of contempt for some of the soldiers who are fighting and defending the freedoms you take for granted? Is this your idea of patriotism – declaring that soldiers who are, at this moment, putting themselves at risk for us are to be virtually spat upon by putting them in the company of our nation's greatest enemies? The Pledge, with the phrase 'under God', says that many of those soldiers are no better than those who would support rebellion, tyranny, and injustice. What about showing a little respect here? Do you deny that the soldiers fighting for our freedom deserve respect?"

Of course, where respect is a value, the only response available to this claim is to deny that 'under God' shows a lack of respect towards any soldier.

But that is just not true.

To say that the words 'under God' respects the soldier who does not believe in God is the same as saying that the word 'indivisible' respects rebellion and that the words 'with liberty and justice for all' respects tyranny and injustice.

There is no escape from this objection – because the statements above are all true.

The same form of objection applies to those who would post the motto 'In God We Trust'.

You insist on posting a sign here that says to the soldier who has returned from fighting to defend this country, 'If you do not trust in God, then we do not consider you to be one of us.' I believe that these soldiers deserve our respect for what they have done, not to be insulted. I think we need a sign that speaks well of all soldiers who have fought honorably for our defense. But that doesn't seem to be the case with people like you. You think that insulting people who have fought for our freedom by saying, 'We do not consider you to be one of us,' is a perfectly legitimate act. Apparently, you do not value respect.

When they say that the national motto respects those who do not believe in God, then they can be asked:

If somebody were to suggest that you put up a sign that says, 'If you are not white, then we do not consider you to be one of us,' that this would be taken as showing respect for those who are not white?

So, whenever you encounter somebody defending the Pledge and the Motto using the terms 'patriotism' and 'respect', throw the terms right back at them.

Yes, you believe that it is important to show our respect for people who have fought for your freedoms by insulting them and excluding them. You declare that they are the moral equivalent of rebels and tyrants, and declare that they are not fit to be considered one of us. And you have the gall to say that this is necessary to show respect. I am the one who favors respect here. I insist that we show respect for all soldiers who have served honorably.

The ultimate power behind this argument is that the claim being made is true. The question that I have in my mind is why people have, for so long, ignored what is an obvious fact, and thus allowed the theocrats to obtain a monopoly over the concepts of 'patriotism' and 'respect'.

The 'strategy' that I am talking about here is simply one of putting people face to face with the truth. 'Under God' was added to the Pledge and 'In God We Trust' was made the national motto precisely to teach the American people not to respect those who held particular religious views. They were passed into law for the purpose of branding particular religious views 'unpatriotic' – and, thus, to brand those who hold these vies as 'unpatriotic'. This is in spite of the fact that some of the citizens who hold those views still fight and die for the sake of defending the government that insults them.

As long as the theocrats are able to hold a monopoly on the concepts of 'patriotism' and 'respect', they will always be able to brand atheism and secularism as 'un-American' and 'disrespectful'. The way to deny them this monopoly on the concepts of 'patriotism' and 'respect' is to make it clear how these policies disrespect some of the people who most deserve our respect – those who fought to defend our rights and freedoms even though they did not believe in God.

Appeals to Emotion

Over the course of this blog, I have had a few people make the comment that an appeal to emotion is somehow illegitimate. We must appeal to reason only, or so it is said. In some circles, this is virtually de dicta - one of those fundamental truths that is too obvious to question.

A recent example comes from a comment by a member of the studio audience. Heisenberg wrote:

You are right that we, the addressees of political campaigns, should not let ourselves be manipulated by lies and appeals to emotion. Alas, I fear that a comparison to such a heinous crime as child abuse is itself such an appeal to emotion.

Truths considered too obvious to question should always be near to the top of our list of things to question.

Desire utilitarianism holds that all value exists in the form of relationships between states of affairs and desires (and moral value exists as relationships between malleable desires – desires that can be molded through social forces – and other desires). It follows axiomatically from this that it is not possible to talk about the value of something without making a reference to desire.

I use the term ‘desire’ in a technical sense. It refers to all likes and dislikes and, as such, it refers to those things to which an agent may have an emotional attachment. The love that a person may have for his wife, for example, is expressible in terms of a set of desires for her company and well-being. So, as it turns out, ‘appeals to emotion’ are simply a subset of the broader category of ‘appeal to desire’ or ‘appeal to likes and dislikes’.

Since every true value claim (and moral claims are a subset of value claims) must describe a relationship between states of affairs and desires, every true value claim must include an appeal to desires.

Inappropriate Appeals to Emotions

There is one form of appeal to emotion (desire) that is clearly illegitimate. This happens when a person attempts to defend a belief (or defend the claim that a proposition is true) based on the emotional appeal of the proposition being true.

For example, “There is a heaven and a life after death. After all, you do not want to think that your poor wife is simply dead – that she exists no more. It is far better to think that she is in a happier place, looking down on us and smiling.”

The fact that one would be happier if a proposition is true is no evidence at all the proposition is true in fact. This method of argument is very popular, but the form of reasoning is very much invalid.

This is the type of scenario where an objection of an ‘appeal to emotion’ makes sense.

Appropriate Appeals to Emotions

When an appeal to emotion is legitimate is not when you are trying to defend a particular proposition as being true (defend a belief), but when you are trying to recommend a course of action.

In order to recommend an action, one must tie the action to a set of reasons for action, and desires are the only reasons for action that exist. As a result, not only is it appropriate to make an appeal to desires (including emotions) when proposing a course of action. It is actually necessary to do so. One must argue that the action is such as to fulfill some set of desires – typically by arguing that the action will make true the propositions that are the objects of good desires, where good desires are desires that will tend to fulfill other desires, such as those of the agent you are trying to convince.

Technical Account

I beg your indulgence for a few paragraphs of technical babbling.

Philosophers recognize that there is a difference between ‘is’ (or ‘descriptive’) statements and ‘ought’ or ‘should’ (or prescriptive) statements. You can never defend a descriptive statement by an appeal to desires. However, you can never defend a prescriptive statement without an appeal to desires.

It turns out that there is an important area of overlap between these two types of claims. Many people treat the distinction between ‘prescriptive’ and ‘descriptive’ statements as identifying mutually exclusive categories. A statement can belong to one group or the other, but not both.

However, I argue that prescriptive statements are a peculiar subset of descriptive statements. The prescriptive statement, “The agent should do X” has a truth value – just like descriptive statements. The statement “The agent should do X” is true if the reasons-for-action for doing X outweigh the reasons-for-action for not doing X. That is to say, doing X will make true the propositions of more and stronger desires than any alternative action.

As a belief, the belief that “the agent should do X” should not be defended by an appeal to the desires that “the belief that the agent should do X” will fulfill. This would be an example of the illegitimate grounding of a belief on desires that I described above. The belief that “the agent should do X” should be defended by an appeal to the desires that “the act of doing X” will fulfill. This would be an example of a legitimate appeal to desires (emotions) to defend a conclusion.

Back to the Main Point

I write an ethics blog – and I do so under the assumption that desire utilitarianism best describes the phenomena of value. As such, every one of my conclusions is tied to a set of desires, and every one of those desires is then evaluated according to its tendency to fulfill or thwart other desires. I look for the “reasons for action that exist” for bringing about or avoiding some state of affairs, where desires are the only reasons for action that exist. Those reasons for action that exist are the core of every true value claim.

It is not at all inappropriate to use the term ‘child abuse’ when discussing the actions of the California Teachers’ Association as I did in The Art of Political Manipulation. In fact, it would be wrong to. This claim is not an illegitimate appeal to emotion. It is a claim that the very same ‘reasons for action that exist’ that justify our condemnation of those who abuse children applies to the behavior of the California Teachers’ Association in the way that it handled the issue of teacher tenure.

My arguments appear in the earlier article, and I will not repeat them here.

Now, I may be mistaken. It may be the case that when I relate the conduct of the Association to reasons for action that exist and claim that they are the same reasons for action relevant in child abuse, that I am making a false claim. A person can argue against my conclusion by showing that the reasons for action that I alluded to do not apply to the behavior of the Association.

However, my fault in this case would not be that I made an appeal to desires (or an appeal to emotion). My fault would be that I said that there were relationships between states of affairs and desires that do not exist as a matter of fact.

In other words, it is not the appeal to emotions that would be wrong. An appeal to emotions is not wrong in itself. In fact, it is necessary.

Qualifications for President

It appears that the American people are determined to remove all substance from political contests in this country and to fill them with junk.

The top news story in the Presidential race for the past two days has been retired general Wesley Clark's statement that, "I don't think that being shot down and being a prisoner of war is a qualification to be President," on Face the Nation

This is a worthless statement to spend time on. However, since the nation is spending time on it, I want to pull something substantive out of it. I want to look at the qualities that a President should have, and the qualities of being a hero. Over the course of this presentation I will argue that Clark's statement is true. However, I will go further and look at the criteria that is relevant to making these types of judgments.

The thesis that there is nothing in being shot down and being a prisoner of war that makes one more qualified to be President springs from the fact that being shot down and being held at the Hanoi Hilton was not an intentional action. It was not something that McCain choose to do. Therefore, it tells us nothing about his character or about the quality of the choices that he will make as President.

In general, we apply the principle that a person acts so as to fulfill the most and strongest of his desires, given his beliefs. With this principle, we look at the intentional actions of an individual and, from this, we create a theory of beliefs and desires. We look for the set of beliefs and desires that best explains past actions. That theory can then be used to best preduct future actions.

We are constantly employing this technique. For each of us, a lot depends on doing this well. We use this to predict the behavior of our bosses and our spouses, to run our businesses, to negotiate with our neighbors, and to run political campaigns. From the first instant we lay eyes on somebody we look at their clothes and appearance. We see the way they have decided to dress and groom themselves as intentional actions that instantly lead to conclusions about what that agent believes and desires. From those theories, we begin to draw predictions of how that person will act in various circumstances (whether to trust them, or whether to run away).

Being shot down and being a prisoner of war is not an intentional action. It does not allow us to infer anything about the beliefs and desires of the agent. Therefore, it does not allow us to infer anything about how that agent will behave as President of the United States.

By the way, as an aside, the same analysis applies to those who died in the World Trade Center on 9/11 – at least for those who worked there. I constantly hear these people referred to as heroes. They were not heroes, they were victims. They made no intentional choice to put themselves in danger. Instead, danger came to them – unknowingly. If they had known what was going to happen, we can trust that few of them would have gone there. They were not heroes.

There were heroes at 9/11. Those were the first responders who entered the World Trade Center after it had been hit. These people performed intentional actions that put them in danger. This allows us to say something about the beliefs and desires of those people – and we find in them desires worthy of our admiration and respect – desires that tend to fulfill the desires of others.

Also, there were people who became heroes after the airplanes crashed into the World Trade Center. These were people who responded to the attack with action – actions that considered the well-being of others.

In fact, it diminishes the claim that these first-responders are heroes to give the term as well to those who made no intentional choice to face danger. When we give an honor to those who do not deserve it, we insult all of those given the same honor but who did deserve it.

The passengers who died bringing down Flight 93 are heroes. They performed an intentional action – an action that proved to be a benefit to others. We may cynically assert that they acted only to save their own lives. Yet, history has told us of great numbers of people who refused to act even when they were being killed off (or enslaved) in huge numbers. We have every reason to believe that in addition to any desire for self-preservation, these agents knew that if they did not act their plane would be used as a weapon against innocent people. The passengers of Flight 93 qualify as heroes.

Those who died at the Pentagon also belong in a different category from those who died in the World Trade Center. Military buildings are military targets. People who join the military are people who are willing to put themselves at risk for the well-being of others. The Pentagon is a military target, occupied by people who voluntarily accept risks to life and limb in the defense of this country. They get credit for that intentional action.

In this sense, the same is true of John McCain. For choosing to put himself in a situation where he might be shot down and held as a prisoner of war, he deserves our admiration and respect. However, he shares this right to our admiration and respect with every other fighter pilot who flew combat missions during Vietnam without being shot down. His intentional action was the same as theirs, and so the respect and admiration that is his due is the same as theirs.

The same applies, in fact, for anybody who joins the police force, fire department, search and rescue, coast guard, or the military. This act of joining is an intentional act that tells us something about the character of the individual – something positive – something we generally have reason to praise.

When a person puts himself at risk for the sake of others, and suffers a huge cost because of it, we owe him a debt of gratitude. If a person takes a risk for my benefit, and suffers as a consequence, then I owe him some form of compensation for what he lost. It would be selfish and cruel of me to simply say, "Thank you," and to walk off.

So, we do owe McCain a greater debt of gratitude than we owe to the fighter pilot who did not get shot down and tortured. However, this is not the type of debt that gives McCain any claim to the keys to the White House. It gives him a claim that we make his life more comfortable – a decent set of veterans' benefits that properly convey to these people that, "We are grateful for what you gave up and we are more than eager to share the burden." McCain has no right to point to the White House and say, "You owe me."

Yes, Mr. McCain, we owe you, but the White House is not on the list of things that you may ask from us. We owe that office to the person who will do the best job promoting the well-being of the American people on the whole, and in particular promoting certain values on which that well-being depends.

 

The Art of Political Manipulation

A recent set of articles in the Washington Post focused on a political phenomenon that I consider to be the moral equivalent of the gang-rape of a group of children. These involved the use of focus groups to design political commercials and, through them, to influence the American voters.

(See: Washington Post, Hearts, Not Minds and How Focus Groups Reshaped the 1988 Campaign)

In one example, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger proposed a series of educational reforms in California. These included a proposition that would make it easier to get rid of bad teachers.

Research has shown that the most important factor under a school’s control regarding education is the quality of the teacher. This quality is not determined by years of experience or even the amount of training that one has received (though a teacher does have to know what he teaches). It is an as-of-yet undefined quality to pass information on to children. Some people can do this well. Others cannot.

Schwarzenegger’s proposals included provisions for getting rid of teachers who could not teach well.

The California Teacher’s Association, who considers it to be its job to protect the employment of teachers, ran a set of focus groups to determine how to defeat the proposal. They discovered that the people had a particularly strong emotional reaction to the claim that Schwarzenegger had broken his promise to improve the schools. They used this information to create a series of advertisements. And, with this, they defeated the proposal.

I could be wrong about provisions governing the quality of teachers. This would not change my argument. My argument remains grounded on the fact that those who ran these focus groups and who designed their commercials accordingly did not express any interest in the welfare of the children. If they were right on the issue – they were accidentally right – through no fault (or no credit) of their own.

To the degree that the California Teachers’ Association has anything to say about the education of children, to that degree the people of California have entrusted their children to a group of moral monsters. People truly interested in the welfare of children would have looked at the scientific evidence governing the quality of education and based their conclusions on that – and promoted the understanding of the facts of quality education among the population. They would not have engaged in these types of games that ignored the quality of children’s education for personal gain.

Is this perhaps too harsh? After all, it would be difficult to imagine a group of teachers that did not care something about the welfare of their students. Clearly, these people believed that they were doing the right thing.

However, on what is this belief that these people doing the best they can for the children founded? Is it founded on research and scientific evidence? Or is it founded on a desire for a particular state of affairs along with an unfounded desire to believe that no harm is done.

Most (virtually all) people who abuse children do so under the sincere belief that they love those children and would not do anything to harm them. They simply refuse to see their own behavior as harmful. So, the practice of engaging in harmful behavior while convincing oneself that the behavior is not harmful is far from rare. The will to believe that what fulfills the desires of the adult is not harmful to the child is far too common – and scarcely provides us with a difference between the California Teachers’ Association in this case and those who abuse children.

The very act by which the California Teachers’ Association would demonstrate that they actually care about the well-being of the children would be for them to be concerned with serious, empirical research showing what is in the best interests of the child. This is exactly the method that they abandoned when they replaced fact with focus groups and emotion that advanced an entirely question-begging line of reasoning.

What the California Teachers’ Association said in this case was that Governor Schwarzenegger broke his promise to improve the schools. This is not an examination of the proposals under consideration based on the facts. This was an entirely question-begging claim that assumed what was under dispute – that the proposals would not improve the schools.

Another fault that we can find with the California Teachers’ Association in this case is that it provided a poor role model for children. It set a poor moral example. One of the things that the Association should have been teaching its students is that a morally responsible person considers the facts and bases his conclusions on what the evidence suggests would be best for everybody concerned. That the Association actually taught its students is that they condone burying the truth under emotions and demagoguery that does not give any consideration for the welfare of others and aims only at winning.

Another case of the use of focus groups to in a political campaign free from moral constraints concerned the 1988 Presidential election. By using focus groups, the Republicans found that they could score points against the Democratic candidate, Michael Dukakis, based on the latter’s veto of a bill mandating the Pledge of Allegiance.

Requiring people to participate in the Pledge of Allegiance is unconstitutional – the Supreme Court had already decided this issue. So, the legislature had put a bill on Dukakis’ desk that violated the Constitution of the United States of America. However, Republicans, with their focus groups, discovered that there was a substantial portion of the population that seems to have no interest in the Constitution. Those voters stood ready to reject a candidate regardless of the Constitutional considerations.

In order to run this campaign, the Republicans who were involved in it had to be the type of people who cared nothing about protecting and defending the Constitution. The campaign itself would require teaching the American people through a series of advertisements to vilify somebody whose crime was obeying the Constitution. The campaign required promoting the assumption that the Constitution is just words to be cast aside when one wants to do so.

Of course, these were the people who were trying to become President. This is an office here the person who takes it is supposed to be somebody dedicated to preserving and protecting the Constitution of the United States. Yet, he was a part of a campaign that tossed the Constitution aside at the first sign of political advantage.

A morally responsible group of people would have sought an opportunity to defend the Constitution – to explain what it is the Constitution demanded in this case. They would have thought it important to teach a vital lesson in freedom and democracy. What they demonstrated instead was affection for deception and manipulation without regard for the damage they would do to the public understanding of the Constitution.

So, we have one group who used focus groups for the purpose of convincing people to sacrifice their children for their benefit. We have another who used a focus group to convince the people to sacrifice the Constitution for their benefit. The real problem is not with either of these groups. The real problem is with a culture that lets these people get away with these types of moral crimes.

As I see it, the news that the California Teachers’ Association had engaged in these practices should be viewed in the same way as news that they had been secretly protecting a group of child abusers. The news that the Republican Party had decided to sacrifice the Constitution for political office should be viewed the same way as the discovery that they had given military secrets to enemy powers. These are not minor transgressions.

When people quit reacting to these as minor transgressions and treat those who engage in them with the contempt they deserve, then these types of people will become much less common and we will have better quality campaigns.

Though I have compared the California Teachers’ Association with child abusers and Republicans with traitors, the real blame rests with the people who allow these practices to continue and even reward those who engage in them. The reason why focus groups are so popular is because we allow ourselves to be manipulated by the findings. We allow these tools to be used against us. In doing so, we lose much of our moral right to criticize those who use the tools that we make possible.

The burden should be on us to demand more from candidates – to demand facts and figures that have been supported by evidence and verified by other research. We should be demanding facts and evidence. As long as we reward political advisors who engineer our deception, we would be foolish not to expect more and more people getting into the business.