Energy Policy

This week, I am devoting some time writing about some of the areas where I expect the Democratic Party, if it should be in control of the executive and legislative branches of the federal government, will likely fail.

One of the areas in which I expect Democratic failure is in the area of energy policy.

Clearly, the Democratic failures in this area will not be as bad as we can expect from the Republicans. However, it would hardly even be possible for the Democrats to invent an energy policy that is as bad as that what we get from the Republicans, but I will get to that next week. The issue is not whether the Democrats can beat the Republicans in terms of energy policy. The question is whether the Democrats can advance a good energy policy.

I do not expect them to.

The main source of failure that we can expect from the Democrats will be their tendency to try to pick winners and losers – to come up with specific objectives and to legislate those objectives. The reason that this policy will fail is because (1) legislators do not have and can never have enough information to do this well, (2) the information changes over time and legislation cannot respond quickly enough to new information, and (3) legislators need to feed their supporters.

We can see this failure in the government programs involving ethanol production. Legislators decided that we need an alternative to fossil fuels and decided that this alternative must be ethanol. Therefore, they passed legislation mandating that a certain amount of our energy production be in the form of ethanol. Furthermore, this could not be foreign ethanol (e.g., that produced with sugar cane from Brazil), but domestic ethanol produced from corn.

Let us be clear as to why the government picked ethanol as one of the ‘winners’ of an alternative energy program. It is because corn farmers have a lobby, and that lobby coordinates political support for legislators who will pick corn ethanol as a “winner” and mandate its production as a part of our alternative energy program.

But what are the consequences?

Let us assume that there is a drought or a flood that damages a significant portion of the corn crop. We have legislation in place that still demands that a certain amount of corn be used in ethanol production. But we do not have as much corn as we used to. So, something has to be cut.

So, we have no option to cut anything but food. Food prices because there is simply not as much food corn to go around. In social terms, the legislature, spurred on by the farming lobby, created a program where the rich people almost literally take food off of the table of the poor and starving people of the world in order to produce energy that is ultimately used for the sake of entertaining those who are not so poor.

Please consider the consequences of this failure – consequences being felt around the world today. People are starving. People who live off of hundreds of dollars per year are finding it more difficult to find food because that food is going to producing alternatives to gasoline for people in a country where there is a significant problem with obesity.

This policy has, as a matter of fact, turned out to be an instance where people with money have used the power of government to make themselves better off by forcefully redistributing wealth from others who can barely afford to eat.

The energy policy that the Democrats should pursue is simple. We now know that the burning of fossil fuels produces some significant threats – the spread of tropical diseases into areas that did not used to be tropical, sea-level rise threatening coastal property, more severe storms, heat stress (causing death among the sick and elderly). The simplest plan for dealing with these problems is to simply tax the use of fossil fuels to raise the price, and then to use the money raised to help those who are being harmed by fossil fuel use.

The point is that the government is not picking winners and losers. It simply makes the price of using fossil fuels more closely match the cost of using fossil energy. And it puts the cost of using fossil fuels on the shoulders of those who use them, rather than allowing a person to use fossil fuels and to impose the costs on somebody else.

The people themselves decide how they are going to respond to these price differences. If they want to respond by switching to a car that burns ethanol, or an electric car, or by driving less, or by driving the same car and driving just as much but not spending money on other things, all of these options are open to them. They can pick the option that best suits their interests (that best fulfills their desires given their beliefs).

More importantly, businesses can decide how they want to respond to the higher prices of fossil fuels. They can decide which options to invest in, and any option that they might conceive of is on the table. Any new method of conservation, any new way of producing energy that reduces the cost of wind, electric, solar, or some other form of energy, immediately begins to influence market choices.

Unfortunately, this simplicity would come with political costs. There is the cost of increasing the price of energy, which many voters would not like. We would need to add some complications to deal efficiently with these effects.

More importantly, there is the cost of a group of politicians not using their political positions to channel money directly to their friends and campaign supporters. Such a tax still leaves those poor friends and campaign supporters at the whim of market forces. They still have to find some ways to provide customers with better options to higher priced fossil fuels than the other competitors.

This last point explains why I expect that the Democrats’ are going to fail us when it comes to devising an energy plan. Again, it would be difficult for the Democrats to come up with an energy plan as bad as the Republican plan. However, this does not imply that we should expect anything good to come from the Democrats over the next four years.

School Choice

Now that Obamafest is over and the Republicans have the spotlight for a few days, I would like to spend some time going over a few areas where I think the Democrats are going to fail us in the next four years.

Please understand, I will vote for Obama in November and consider him to be the better candidate. However, there is room for improvement. Most of my readers favor the Democratic Party and speaking ill of that which cannot be questioned may be considered blasphemous. However, I think that a better world is possible and would rather speak in defense of that world than commit myself to orthodoxy in matters of politics.

Plus, I will do the same to the Republicans when the Republican convention is over – showing why, even after acknowledging some significant Democratic Party failings, they are still better than the Republicans (for now). So, you’ll have something to look forward to.

I think that the most significant area in which the Democratic Party will fail us is in the area of education. They are committed to a form of education that has seen virtually no innovation over the past 200 years, where we seem to be spending more and more money to get less and less. The way out of this trap is a policy which Democrats tend to vehemently oppose . . . the policy of ‘school choice’.

The problems that we have had in public education are very much like the problems we had with respect to a public post office. The government set up the post office as a (virtual) government monopoly. One of the consequences of this was stagnation. The Post Office never came up with a single innovation in the realm of communication. The telegraph, telephone, radio, television, email, and the internet all came from elsewhere. All of them resulted in tremendous leaps in communication technology. And through it all, what we got from the Post Office was a continual set of demands that the government put up barriers wherever possible against whatever might threaten its existence.

Certainly, the Post Office adopted a few innovations. They moved from ponies to trucks, then to airplanes. They invented the ZIP Code, and adopted OCR technology and bar scanners as a way to help sort the mail. However, these were variations on a theme. None of these were new themes.

By now, I have almost entirely opted out of the “post office” system. I do not think that I have purchased a stamp in over 5 years, and almost everything that I pull out of my mailbox (when I check my mail) goes into the garbage. It’s a waste of time, energy, and paper.

What we see in the public education system is substantially the same problem. We see an institution that has not produced a single piece of innovation over the past 200 years, which still does things in substantially the same way as our great^8 grandparents, demanding that the government take measures to ensure that nothing happens that might threaten their viability Specifically, they demand that the government do what it can to deny potential customers a choice of whether to use their service, or to opt out.

We even hear the same arguments in these two cases.

The defenders of the Post Office would protest that if people had a choice as regarding methods of communication, that private industry would take away the most profitable options, leaving the Post Office with all of the inefficient and expensive jobs to do. Specifically, a private post office would lower the price of in-city mail (where economies of scale allow for economic efficiencies), but raise the price of rural mail, creating a rural stamp that would be many times more expensive than a city stamp.

To prevent this dreadful state of affairs from coming about, it was considered essential that we lock ourselves into a form of communication that would not change over 200 years, while the rest of the world sped by with new technologies. Until, finally, email and the web came along, and the Post Office could no longer hold back the tide.

However, innovation became possible simply because the Post Office could not eliminate all possible alternatives to its service. Email snuck in through the gaps in the Post Office conceptual radar, and was far too efficient for the Post Office to contain once it got out and started being used.

Similarly, in the area of school choice, we hear the argument that if people had school choice then the ‘best students’ would go elsewhere, leaving the public schools to take care of those who were particularly hard to educate for any number of reasons, from mental and physical handicaps to poor home environment.

Again, the result is that there has been as little innovation in the way we educate our children as there has been in the way we deliver mail. We are stuck using the same old systems.

The thing is, if we could restore innovation, some of that innovation would be put to work on the very “problem cases” that those who defend the status quo claim to be worried about. In communication, the innovations of the telegraph, telephone, radio, television, and the internet have reached and have benefitted a substantial portion of the rural community. Methods of communication have been invented that can broadcast information to rural areas almost as cheaply as it can transmit information within a city.

In fact, helping those who are “problem cases” is one of the areas where we are most in need of innovation – for their sake. So, it would be ironic to use them as an excuse for policies that stifle innovation.

Similarly, there is no reason to believe why innovations in education will not include methods of innovation that we can then apply to “problem cases” – giving even them a much better education than they get from us pursuing the same methods decade after decade after decade.

The key to innovation is to give people a choice. The key is to let people take their portion of the education budget (the amount of money that would be spent to educate their child) and tell the parents, “Okay, you have the freedom to look at alternatives to the traditional brick-and-mortar method of education.”

Another concern with school choice is that some people will not choose wisely. They will choose to mis-educate their children in myths and fairy tales that have no relationship to reality. In the extreme case, we may worry about people setting up versions of the Pakistani ‘madras’ – a school where nothing is taught but holy scripture, and that is taught in a way that makes the student a threat to the well-being of others.

These are legitimate concerns, but the concern does not carry very far. In effect, this argument states, “If we give a person a choice between A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, and J, then some of them may choose J. J is a horrible choice. Therefore, we must compel everybody to choose A.”

Clearly the argument is not valid. It is possible to prohibit option J while still permitting options B through I. This type of argument is too often advanced by people who have strong reason to ban competition to option A, and they are using this piece of sophistry employing option J as a scapegoat.

Besides, among the community of non-believers, I think we are very much in need of schools where a child can go where they are not harmed by rituals that daily declare non-belief the patriotic equivalent of rebellion, tyranny, and injustice. They can benefit from a school that does not post signs that tell them, “If you do not trust in God, then we do not consider you one of us.” They can attend a biology class where the teacher is not the least bit nervous about saying, “Today, we will start discussing the theory of evolution.” A school where the history teacher is not trying to teach the literal truth of the Bible or that America is a ‘Christian Nation’. A school where the English teacher is not suspiciously keeping an eye on the atheist in the fourth row because, “We all know what kind of people those atheists are. They have no morals.” A school that teaches logic, where a Sophomore is expected to know the difference between inductive and deductive reasoning and can identify thirty informal fallacies.

There has to be a market for at least one school like this in every major city.

An argument for school choice will allow the possibility that these will be among the schools that a school choice initiative would support. If this type of school is truly a school of quality (as I expect it would be), the success of students who go to those schools would be a great inducement to others to seek the same type of education for their own children.

Anybody with a better idea should never be worried about a bit of competition.

Liars! Bigots!

I have received some criticism from a member of the studio audience of a form that a few who write on religious and political issues will be familiar with.

People would be far more receptive of what you have to say if you didn't call them liars or bigots for not agreeing with your views.

The response came to a post of mine called "The Source of Hatred", in which I argued against the thesis that scripture is the source of much of the bigotry that people display in modern society.

This objection has little to do with my posted argument. It is a more general objection used throughout the moral and political landscape, and applies only to that post because I did argue for calling certain individuals liars and bigots.

Of course, there is nowhere in my argument, there or anywhere, where I make the inference, "X disagrees with me; therefore, X is a liar and a bigot." My standards for declaring somebody to be a liar or a bigot are somewhat different than this.

Specifically, if it can be shown that an agent A has (1) asserted as if true the proposition P, and (2) believes that not-P, then it follows that A is a liar.

Or if A holds unfounded derogatory beliefs about members of a whole group, then it follows that A is a bigot.

My point here is that it is perfectly legitimate to call somebody a liar, a bigot, a sophist, a murderer, a rapist, a thief, a con-artist, or any of a long list of derogatory names is perfectly legitimate when (1) you can precisely define the qualities that identify people of that name, and (2) you can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that a person has those qualities.

[Aside: The term 'sophist' as a term of moral condemnation is one that I would love to see resurrected. It is a person who uses true premises, but strings them together using faulty logic in order to manipulate others into accepting a false conclusion. One of the most destructive examples of sophistry in recent years were the forms practiced by global warming denialists, who routinely asserted that given data supported conclusions they did not support, and which any knowledgable person would have known they did not support.]

Why not?

It is said that in civil debate one does not use terms such as these – that it is somehow inappropriate. One of the reasons that it is inappropriate is that it closes off debate. The person being called a liar, bigot, sophist, or the like will immediately quit listening, and thus is no longer open to being persuaded.

If this is such a good argument, then perhaps we should expand its use. Let us put a prohibition on accusing others of being murderers, rapists, or thieves. Because here, too, once we use these derogatory terms to describe somebody's behavior, their defenses will go up, and they will no longer listen to what the accuser has to say.

The real-world implication of pursuing this option is that murder, rape, and theft would no longer be moral crimes. If we are no longer accusing people of performing these actions – if there is nothing that we can legitimately call 'murder', 'rape', or 'theft' – then we have effectively decided that the acts that we once would have referred to using these terms are now legitimate.

A prohibition on using terms like 'liar', 'bigot', or 'sophist' has had the same effect. It has given people who lie, who promote bigotry, and who engage in sophistry a type of moral shield that they can then use to deflect blame regardless of how much they lie, or engage in bigotry or sophistry. Instead of defending their actions as legitimate, they snap back at the accuser and say, “How dare you use those terms!”

Thus, the greatest beneficiary of a prohibition on using terms such as 'liar', 'bigot', or 'sophist' are liars, bigots, and sophists. The biggest losers are their victims – the people whose lives are made worse off by those who engage in deception, bigotry, and sophistry to manipulate others and enrich themselves and their friends.

Another reason why I choose to ignore this advice is simply because it is not one of my goals to make others receptive to what I have to say. I am interested in whether certain propositions are true or false. I am content to let other people worry about how to make people receptive to that which is true or false. If it is the case that an agent has asserted P, and that he believes not-P, then it follows that he is a liar.

Now, if this is my conclusion – if this is the proposition that I am seeking to defend in my post – then how can it possibly be the case that people will be more receptive to what I have to say (e.g., "A is a liar") if I were to follow the prohibition against calling people liars. This would be like saying that I can make people more receptive to the conclusion that the sun is the center of the solar system by refusing to assert that the sun is the center of the solar system. At this point, the prescription approaches infinite absurdity.

Now, there are some moral limits on the legitimate use of terms such as 'liar', 'bigot' or 'sophist'. Specifically, the burden of proof is always on the accuser. A person is to be presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. As a result, wildly throwing accusations such as these about in order to put the accused on the defensive would be illegitimate. It is the same type of moral crime as recklessly accusing somebody of murderer, rape, thief or some other moral crime. The good person will begin with the assumption that the accused is innocent, and will demonstrate that she has been driven to the opposite conclusion only by the weight of the available evidence.

In light of this fact, there legitimate defenses against these types of accusations. One would defeat the charge of being a liar, bigot, or sophist the way one would disprove any other claim, by showing that the premises are false or that the inferences from premises to conclusion are invalid. It is sufficient in these cases to show that the accuser has not proved his point – that he has based his argument on weak evidence, even if the accuser cannot be proved to be wrong. In doing so, one shows that the accuser has violated the presumption of innocence – that the accuser is somebody who is guilty of reckless accusations.

Yet with all of this, if a person can make a sound argument beyond a reasonable doubt that another person is guilty of lying, bigotry, or sophistry, a person should be no more nervous about making these accusations then they would be about making equally well founded accusations of murder, rape, or theft.

In fact, we can accuse the person who does not report the murderer, rapist, or thief of a different type of wrongdoing – of leaving a dangerous person on the loose to victimize others. Similarly, failure to make accusations of liar, bigotry, or sophistry when those charges can be adequately supported has the effect of making the villain stronger, and leaving potential victims undefended. It is not a course of action that a person of good desires would pursue.

A person who claims that he gets his morality from the bible is, more often than not, a liar. We can know this because of the biblical commandments that he rejects. Many of these people are clearly taking a set of moral claims as being primary, and using these beliefs to judge which interpretation of biblical text they like – which are acceptable to them. Where this is the case, they are getting their morality from some other source and reading it into scripture. They are not getting their beliefs from scripture.

A person who too eagerly embraces the belief homosexuals are worthy of moral condemnation are bigots. They are not acting like people who have given others the benefit of the doubt until compelled to the opposite conclusion by available evidence. In fact, they adopt their conclusion based on faith – which is to adopt a view on the moral inferiority of others based on no evidence at all. This qualifies them as bigots.

A Senator declares that the mere fact that a person is an atheist, agnostic, free-thinker, or deist are people that good North Carolinians should be uncomfortable inviting to dinner, and that no candidate should talk to such a person, then that Senator is a bigot.

A person who embraces a Pledge of Allegiance that equates those not 'under God' with those who support rebellion, tyranny, and injustice are bigots – asserting that not being 'under God' deserves to be held in the same inferior state as these other anti-American evils.

Those who support a motto or the posting of signs that say, "If you do not trust in God, then you are not one of us," are bigots. This, asserts that members of a particular group are to be excluded – held to be inferior – where there is no evidence at all that they deserve this type of ill regard.

These accusations can be demonstrated to be true beyond a reasonable doubt. Where they can be demonstrated, there should be no apprehension of pointing out to the world the moral failings of those who fit these descriptions.

They might not like it. But, then, few people will ever actually enjoy being publicly proved guilty of a moral crime. Yet, it is absolutely absurd to argue that the fact that some people who are guilty of moral crimes do not like it when they are morally criticized for the crimes they commit counts as sufficient reason not to say they are guilty.

 

Guess Who Is not Coming to Dinner?

Guess who is not coming to dinner?

Atheists, according to North Carolina Senator Elizabeth Dole.

Campaigning for re-election, she complained in a fund raising letter to supporters recently that her opponent, Kay Hagan, has friends who, ". . . are friends most North Carolinians would not be comfortable having over for dinner."

(see Brother Richard's post, Elizabeth Dole Releases an Atheist Bigoted Press Release)

Many readers will recognize the title of this blog posting as a version of the title for a 1967 movie Guess Who Is Coming to Dinner? in which a young white woman (played by Katharine Houghton) her black fiancé (played by Sydney Poitier) over to meet her white parents.

The parents in this movie (played by Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy) were certainly not comfortable with the situation. But that was the point of the movie. Their discomfort in this case was because of a deeply rooted prejudice – a cultural history of viewing blacks as inferior creatures that good white people just did not associate with, let alone marry.

The parallels to the bigotry expressed in this movie, and the bigotry expressed by Dole's concern over people "North Carolinians would not be comfortable having over for dinner" are striking.

I want to use this instance to make clear what does and does not count as bigotry in this case.

It is not bigotry for Dole to complain about her opponent dealing with people who are pursuing policies that she is against. If one person is in favor of capital punishment, and her opponent is against capital punishment, it is not bigotry for the former to point out that the latter is collecting money from a group that opposes capital punishment.

Nor is it an attack on a person to say that their views on a specific issue are mistaken. As a matter of fact, there is not one person on the planet that I do not disagree with on at least one issue. Anybody who cannot get along with somebody they disagree with – even love and respect people who are 'wrong' on at least one thing – is going to have a sorry and lonely life.

However, in this press release, Dole does not protest any of the policies that the people Hagan is visiting are pursuing. She does not even mention what those policies are. It is sufficient for her purposes to mention that Hagan is visiting the leaders of, "the national lobby for atheists, humanists, freethinkers and other nontheistic Americans with the unique mission of protecting their civil rights." These people are to be judged solely on the criteria that the average North Carolinian would not be comfortable having them over for dinner.

I am an atheist. I would wager that Elizabeth Dole does not know the slightest thing about me. Yet, she has decided to pre-judge me. She has decided by the simple fact of my beliefs that I am somebody that she would be uncomfortable having over for dinner. She has decided that I am somebody that any North Carolinian should be uncomfortable having over for dinner.

On this matter, it is important to note that Dole is not merely describing a sociological fact that happens to be true of North Carolinians. It may be true that most North Carolinians are uncomfortable having an atheist over for dinner – just as they might be uncomfortable having a black man over for dinner. She is not just describing this as a fact. She is endorsing it. She is saying, in effect, "Vote for me, because I am not somebody who would not hang out with these sorts of undesirables." She is teaching . . . promoting . . . encouraging . . . selling . . . bigotry to anybody who reads her letter.

She is saying the same type of thing that somebody from North Carolina might have said 50 years ago when that candidate wanted his constituents to, "Vote for me, because I am not the type of person who hangs around with blacks or people who support their civil rights."

It is also interesting to note that in her letter she describes the people that Hagan will meet as "anti-religion activists". This is a rhetorical trick, much like calling those people who fought for black civil rights in the 1950s and 1960s "anti-white activists." It is a trick that bigots are fond of using in order to stir up fear, hatred, and prejudice and to ride this wave of bigotry into political office.

It may work. It may be effective – just as it was effective 50 years ago for candidates to ride the wave of anti-black bigotry into office time and time again. But this blog is not concerned with what works or does not work politically. It is concerned with what is right and what is wrong. What Elizabeth Dole is doing with this letter and the language she puts in it is as wrong as similar bigotries used 50 years ago, and it puts her in the same moral category as the hate peddlers of the last century.

Of course, I feel compelled to point out that Dole is merely acting in accordance with the national motto, "If you do not trust in God, then we do not consider you one of us."

This should be brought to the attention to the people of North Carolina. If there is anybody from North Carolina in the studio audience, I would like to recommend that you put some effort into delivering this message to people of your state.

Addendum: Apologies revisited.

I am going to repeat something that I wrote about just a few days ago, because many opponents of anti-Atheist bigotry get this wrong.

IF Dole were to apologize for this statement of bigotry, I would give good money that the apology will take the form, "I am sorry that atheists failed to understand the true intent of my message." Which isn't an apology. It constitutes blaming the atheists. It says, "I am sorry that you are all idiots."

Atheists and their allies have a bad habit of responding positively to these types of insults.

Look for the four elements of an apology in any response before you accept it.

(1) A statement of the form "I did x and it was wrong of me to do so."

(2) An explanation that demonstrates that the person understands why x is wrong.

(3) A plan to make sure that similar lapses do not occur in the future.

(4) An offer to provide some sort of compensation for the wrongs done.

If any of these elements are missing, then the 'apology' is not an apology.

Democratic Forum on Morals and the Common Good

The Democratic Party’s assumption that a non-believer has nothing to contribute to a forum on morality and the common good is, so far, one of the three greatest examples of anti-atheist bigotry of the year so far.

I want to address the issue today by writing what I would say if I were given the honor of participating in such a forum.

I will begin with a simple fact.

We live in a universe that is entirely indifferent as to whether or not we survive as individuals, or as a species.

Insofar as we do survive, the universe does not care one iota whether we live in comfort or in agony or at any point in between.

On the individual level, we see evidence of this all around us. Tsunamis, earthquakes, fire, lightning, cancer, heart attacks, AIDS, SARS, malaria, strokes, all threaten us. A simple, momentary lapse in judgment where one reaches a little too far while on the top of a ladder should not be the type of crime that warrants a death sentence. But people die. They choke to death, bleed to death, drown, and impale themselves.

At any moment either we ourselves or somebody we love can be taken. And even if they are not taken, be caused to suffer great harm, by a universe that cares nothing about how we feel.

Nature’s indifference to our survival or quality of life not only applies to each of us as individuals, but all of us as a species. Nature has driven to extinction over 99 percent of the species that have come into existence on this planet. Our species can easily find itself on that list. Even in our own lifetime as a species – even within the last 2000 years – countless species have gone extinct. Nature did not care enough to save them.

If we want to survive, and we want to live well, as individuals and as a species, it is up to us. We need to provide for our own welfare and for our own survival.

Let us assume, for a moment, that those of us in this room are on a ship. We encounter a fierce storm. Perhaps we should imagine a storm that shreds time and space itself. When it is over, we find ourselves shipwrecked on an island. We have good reason to believe that nobody is going to come to rescue us. For all we know, we are alone.

What are our first priorities?

Should we immediately go to work debating the issue of whether a god exists, and do nothing else until we have unanimous agreement on all matters of religion?

If that is our goal, then that day will come on the day that all of us have died except one person. On that day, and not one day sooner, there will be no more disputes about what different people believe. With that option, we would be sentencing ourselves to a quick death as individuals and as a species.

Depending on the environment we find ourselves in, our first priority would be to find shelter. If, on the other hand, we assume a fairly comfortable environment, our first priority would be to care for the sick and injured – those who will die within moments without our help.

After that, our priorities are water, food, and security from whatever forces would do us harm – from disease, predators, accident, natural disaster, and each other.

We may discover that we have come aground on an island that simply does not have enough shelter or water or food for everybody. As I said, we live in a universe that is indifferent to our survival. It is under no obligation to provide us with enough clean water and nourishing food for everybody. It is under no obligation to provide us with food or water at all.

If our island happens to have enough food and water for everybody, then we are lucky. If not, then we will need to make decisions about who will live and who will die.

Here we are. There are over six billion of us, crash-landed on an island called Earth, surrounded by a vast and lifeless sea called ‘space’. We have been listening for signs of rescue for decades now, but we have not heard anything yet, and probably will hear nothing for the foreseeable future. We are on our own.

We clearly do not have enough clean water to go around. We need to organize ways to get more, and ways to ration what we have.

We have enough food (for now), but it is poorly distributed. Many of us are going hungry because we do not have an efficient system for getting the food from where it is harvested to those who need it to survive. Perhaps more precisely, we have a way of distributing it, but people keep getting in the way. For all practical purposes, this amounts to the same thing.

We are not yet safe from disease or injury. Every day of every year our community of survivors is attacked by diseases and injured through natural disasters. We need to take care of those afflicted while, at the same time, we learn what we can to prevent even more people from being afflicted.

We need to put resources to work to fight malaria, and to do a better job of learning how to track hurricanes and predict earthquakes.

We have a lot of work that needs doing.

Sitting around debating the existence of God is something that can be saved for the spare time that all of us need once in a while, when we gather with friends and family and relax for a bit. Then, we have the luxury of spending a few minutes debating whose religion is better than whose. Yet, when the discussion is over, we should be putting our attention once again into finding drinking water, better distributing food, and securing ourselves from diseases and natural disasters.

How do we do this? What tool do we have with a proven track record for providing us with water, food, immunizations and treatments for disease, hurricane tracking systems, and designing buildings that stand up to other natural disasters.

It’s science.

It’s the practice of taking measurements – of putting processes side by side in order to determine which does the better job of providing clean water, growing more food, preventing or curing more disease, more accurately predicting the courses of hurricanes, and proving how well or how poorly a building design will hold up against natural disasters.

Science will tell us what threats exist that could wipe out the human race, and science will tell us how to protect ourselves from them, provided that we do our homework. It will protect our children, and give them a way to protect their children, as long as we teach them to use its methods.

It doesn’t matter what God you believe in. If 90% of the people who get disease D and do nothing die within a month, and if 90% of the people who get disease D and undergo treatment T survive and suffer no adverse side effects, then this is a fact that transcends all religion.

It’s a fact – and it is a fact we can use to keep 80 out of 100 people alive who would have otherwise died.

We have work to do.

We have people to feed, diseases to cure, natural disasters to avoid. We have evidence-driven ways to determine which ways to grow food, cure disease, and predict natural disasters are better than others.

We can worry about this God stuff in our spare time – when people are not dying and otherwise suffering from the want of our attention.

Responding to Bigotry

I received a comment from an anonymous member of the studio audience this morning that I think expresses a common set of sentiments, so I want to address them.

Look, I am an outspoken atheist activist. I agree with what you say, but this is one of those years when we simply (I hate to say it) need to bite our tongues and understand that the Dems are damned if they do, and damned if they don't.

The conclusion, in this case, does not follow from the premises.

We live in an anti-atheist culture where a majority of the population have anti-atheist sentiments. A majority of the culture admits to being hostile to atheists and, we can expect, this a non-trivial number who like to view themselves as fair and open-minded while, in fact (in their actions) they are still prejudice.

This is true of racism where many people who claim not to be racist – people who are quite vocal in their opposition to racism – will still make assumptions consistent with racial stereotypes when their guard is down.

Given these facts, it would practically be impossible for the Atheist community to do any harm to the Democratic Party by expressing its opinion. In fact, it would probably help the Democratic Party since the majority of the people want a President that shares their anti-atheist bigotry. There is perhaps no better way to tell the bulk of the people, “This is somebody you want in the White House than for the atheist community to raise its voice n protest against that candidate.

I think that it’s an arrogant conceit, or a significant break from reality, to think that atheists have any power to shame the Democratic Party into making any kind of concessions – to the point of costing itself elections.

And if we want even the CHANCE of equal treatment, the Dems MUST win the election.

This is also inconsistent. If we want even a chance of equal treatment, we must change society itself so that no candidate can get elected who does not give atheists equal treatment. As long as we live in a society where the only way to get elected is to denigrate, insult, and alienate the atheists in the population, then any rational atheist should expect only to be denigrated, insulted, and alienated.

Equal treatment requires equal respect.

Look, Obama had atheist parents. Even if he really is a believing Christian, he doesn't hate atheists (and I'd bet that McCain is the same, but he will be forever beholden to the RRR for his victory if he wins).

What Obama hates or not is not relevant. Political campaigns involve taking polls and telling the people what the people want to hear. If the people want to hear anti-atheist rhetoric, then anybody seeking public office must make a choice. “Either I give the people the anti-atheist rhetoric they desire, or I am wasting my time running for public office.” In this type of society, the candidates that will win are those who will give the people the anti-atheist rhetoric they desire.

Given this choice, it does not matter (much) what Obama likes or dislikes. He knows the value of giving the people the anti-atheist rhetoric they desire, and he has proven his willingness to do so.

There is an interesting psychological aspect to all of this. People do not like to think of themselves as liars. So, what they tend to do in these types of situations, is to actually embrace and internalize the ‘convenient fiction’. So, Obama becomes the type of person the people want him to be. He makes anti-atheist claims. He is applauded for it. He likes the feel of the applause. He makes more claims (even more hostile to the last). He hears louder applause. All the while he tells himself, “This is what I really believe.” Without actually seeing where he is going.

Now, AFTER the election is a different story, if Obama wins. If we are NOT given a fully equal place at the table, we need to go absolutely BALLISTIC, even to the extent of creating a third party---a voting block of 8 to 14% of the electorate.

How is this going to happen? If Obama wins the election and gets into office on the back of body of anti-atheist bigotry (like this assumption that atheists have nothing of value to contribute to a discussion of morality and the public good), then this is the power base that he must appeal to in order to preserve his leadership. If he immediately starts to alienate those people, he weakens his own ability to make effective change. His supporters start to abandon him.

Besides, once he gets elected, his first job is to start running for the next election. Which means he must immediately start doing the things that got him elected in this election. There is, as a matter of fact, no such thing as “after the election.” We are always in a position of being “before the (next) election.”

I wish we were currently more politically powerful and could make all sorts of demands of these candidates, but, until we organize as a voting block, with a respectable and credible spokesperson, we are not.

I do not believe in the power of wishes. I believe in the power of plans. “Wait until next year” is a plan that never gets anywhere. Because, next year, there will be yet another reason to wait until the year after that, and then it is all too easy to wait until the year after that.

At this point, I want to stress a key point here.

My position is not ‘pro-atheist’. I see no reason to care whether a person believes that the proposition ‘at least one god exists’ is either true or false. Neither option has any moral significance.

What I am arguing for is taking a position against bigotry – a position that a person can (and should) take regardless of their views about the existence of God.

I write a lot about anti-atheist bigotry because (1) as an atheist, it affects me more than other types of bigotry so I have more of a personal interest in the issue, and (2) it is among the most widely accepted and practiced forms of bigotry in the United States today (so one of the forms most in need of people to stand up against it.)

However, my opposition does not come from the fact that these statements are anti-atheist. My opposition comes from the fact that it is bigotry, and bigotry is not something to be tolerated.

I have had both private emails and public comments from Christians and other religious people who say that they agree with me. They affirm their belief in God, then add that people who do not share their beliefs still have a right to equal respect and equal consideration from their government. They oppose anti-atheist bigotry for the same reason that many white people oppose segregation and other forms of racism, and for the same reason that many males oppose sexism, and for the reason that many Christians oppose bigotry against Jews and Muslims.

There is nothing that I write that a fair and just Christian, Jew, Muslim, or whatever cannot agree with. Or, at least, that is what I am for. Because what I write about is fairness and justice, not about religious (or non-religious) doctrines.

There is no reason why an anti-bigot must keep his mouth shut. An anti-bigot should feel free to raise his voice against examples of bigotry whenever and wherever he finds it. Failure to do so means handing power to the bigot.

And when bigots get power, it is absurd to think that somehow they are going to kindly hand any portion of that power over to those they are bigoted against. It is even more absurd to think that kindness and submission among those the population is bigoted against will somehow convince them to give up that power.

A Hypothetical Democratic Apology

So far this year atheists – or, more precisely, those opposed to anti-atheist bigotry (which would count people from any religion who has a respect for justice) – have show an embarrassing tendency to accept second-order insults and insincere remarks as apologies.

As a result, in the light of the Democratic Party's statement that there is no place at the table when Democrats gather to discuss morality and/or the common good (since only 'people of faith' were invited to these discussions), I want to state now what would count as a legitimate apology.

A legitimate party is an admission of wrongdoing that states that one understand what one did that was wrong, that at least admits to owing some sort of restitution to those who were wronged, and makes a sincere promise not to engage in the same behavior in the future.

In this case, the Democratic Party apology would look something like this:

When we organized forums on morality and the common good, and invited only people of faith to these discussions, we engaged in a form of bigotry that we really need to put an end to in this country. We fell into a trap of thinking that if a person does not have a religion, then he does not have any morals or any concern for the public good. The non-religious community was rightly outraged by these insults. We have to admit that the claim that these people have nothing useful to contribute to a discussion on morals and the public good is an insult worthy of condemnation.

We realize, and we want to make it clear, that any discussion of morals and the public good must include the voice of the non-religious community. In the future, we will make sure that they have a place at the table. We swear ourselves to standing in opposition to any policy that will seek to segregate our community between people of faith and non-believers. We will never again hang a sign on any party door that says, 'People of faith only beyond this point; people of no faith are not allowed in'.

A just society cannot tolerate any attempt to segregate its community between a ‘we’ who have faith, and ‘they’ who do not – to set up public institutions in which one group may freely enter and enjoy the freedoms within, while others are required to stay out. We ask your forgiveness, and we are asking members of the non-religious community how we can make up for the wrong we have inflicted on them.

This is what is due.

People can debate whether the Democratic Party will or will not ever do such a thing. However, that is out of the question. The fact remains – and it is a fact from which the Democratic Party cannot escape – that if they refuse to do so then they are agents of injustice. If they favor justice, they can do nothing less.

This is the only morally legitimate response for what they have done.

My argument is an argument about what is right and what is wrong. Arguments about what is or is not politically expedient belong elsewhere.

What does not count as an apology?

I am sorry that these people were insulted by our actions.

Or

I am sorry for my actions. Now, here is my explanation as to why they were perfectly legitimate and why I have nothing to be sorry about.

These are, arguably, the two most common types of non-apologies that we tend to hear. If there is any type of apology offered to the non-religious community for being excluded from discussions of morality and the common good, as if we have nothing useful to contribute, my guess is that it will take one of these two forms.

It would be (and has been) embarrassingly absurd for the non-religious community to take these comments and respond by saying, "That's okay. You're forgiven."

To the first type of non-apology, the proper response is, "The fact that I was insulted is not the problem here. The problem is your insinuation that non-religious people have nothing to contribute to a forum on morality and the public good. If you’re not apologizing for claiming that non-religious Americans are amoral and unconcerned with the general welfare, then you haven’t yet apologized."

To the second type of non-apology, the proper response is, "You haven't apologized yet. You gave us an argument claiming that it is perfectly legitimate to call non-religious Americans amoral and unconcerned with the general welfare because (inset reasons the speaker used here). You're not apologizing for calling non-religious Americans amoral. You're trying to justify it. But there is no justification for that kind of bigotry. (Insert counter-arguments to the speaker's attempt at justification here)."

These are some of the things to look at in determining whether somebody has given an honest and legitimate apology. Simply because a sentence contains the word 'sorry', this does not make their claim an apology. One has to look for an admission of wrongdoing, an explanation of why the act was wrong, a willingness to compensate those wronged for the harms done, and a sincere promise not to do the same thing in the future. Without these four elements, no apology has taken place. Instead, a mere pseudo-apology has been offered, and no just person can find merit in a mere pseudo-apology.

Democrats, Faith, Morals, and the Common Good

With the Democratic National Convention going on just blocks from where I work, it is perhaps unavoidable that I would turn my attention to the events going on there.

The first of those events that deserve consideration is the decision to start the convention with an inter-faith gathering; a gathering of religious leaders. The purpose of this gathering is to show that Democrats accept people of faith.

Indeed, according to Leah Daughtry, CEO of the Democratic National Committee,

"Democrats have been, are and will continue to be people of faith - and this interfaith gathering is proof of that."

Note that there is a distinction between saying "some Democrats are people of faith" and "Democrats are people of faith." The former clearly asserts that those who are not people of faith are not invited to be Democrats, while the latter is still consistent with "some Democrats are not people of faith."

Consistent with this, the leadership of the Democratic Party has not merely extended an invitation to people of faith to attend its convention and participate in these sessions. It has explicitly excluded atheists. As with any party, we can tell a lot about the values and opinions of those in charge by looking not only at those who have received invitations to the party, but also by looking at the list of those who were not invited.

Atheists were not invited.

This should be expected. Given the fact that so many voters are adverse to anything having to do with atheism, the Democratic Party had to choose between ostracizing atheists to win public office, or accepting atheists and exclude themselves from public office (as atheists themselves are excluded from public office). One of the core principles of marketing is to link that which you want to sell with something that potential customers' desire, and to link what the competitor is selling to something that potential customers hate. For years the Republican Party has sold itself by linking itself to religion and the Democratic Party to hated atheism. The rational response for the Democratic Party to take is to reject the atheists as well.

In following this path, the Democratic Party is simply trying to show that it is faithful to American values. One of those values, as expressed in the National Motto, is, "If you do not trust in God, then we do not want to think of you as being one of us." There is no better way for the Democratic Party to show its support for this principle than to say as loudly and as publicly as possible to atheists, "If you do not trust in God, then you are not invited to be one of us."

Given the lies spread earlier in the year – the lie that Obama does not say the Pledge of Allegiance, we can bet that there will be one or more conspicuous moments where Obama leads the Convention itself in the Pledge of Allegiance – probably when he gives his acceptance speech. If the cameras should catch sight of any portion of the audience itself remaining seated or refusing to participate, this will simply be taken as proof that the Democrats do not share American values. You can bet that there will be a lot of pressure and manipulation used to guarantee that Democrats show their proper respect to 'one nation under God', and their contempt for any who would reject this objective.

Whenever the Pledge of Allegiance is spoken in this country, participants are given two options. They can either stand and voice their support to 'one nation under God', or they can remain seated and show their contempt for 'liberty and justice for all'. There is no third option. If you doubt this, you need only look at any discussion on the topic of whether people should be required to stand for the Pledge, and these are the options people talk about. Even when people talk about the (free speech) right to remain seated, it is presented as a right show contempt for 'liberty and justice for all'.

Some atheists are preparing to protest these proceedings. I will be among them. However, in doing this, I think it is important to face up to some facts about what is going on.

I will bet good money that the leaders of the Democratic Party want this protest. In fact, I expect that those leaders will go out of their way to get the press to cover these protests, because that coverage will simply help to advertise the message that the Democratic Party wants to give the American people. It wants the people to know that it shares their distaste for atheists, and are not willing to consider atheists as "one of us." They think it will win them votes. The best way to do this is to ensure that the news covers this protest.

Consider the protests against segregation in the 1950s. Consider the sit-ins at segregated restaurants, where blacks would enter and sit in the white-only section until the police removed them. These protesters were not trying to embarrass businesses by exposing the fact that they were segregationists. Segregating customers was a badge of honor, and charges of segregation was good advertising at the time.

Instead, those protests were about telling people that segregation deserves contempt. Its purpose was to show contempt for the practice of dividing the nation between ‘white’ and ‘colored’.

In exactly the same way, the Democratic Party is not going to be embarrassed by the fact that they have decided to divide the country between a ‘we’ who ‘trust in God’ and ‘they’ who do not. They are going to wear this as a badge of honor, and consider news to that effect good advertising. Because of this, the objective of protest should not be to reveal this hidden truth of religious segregation. The purpose of protest should be to state loudly and clearly that religious segregation is worthy of contempt.

The Democratic Party deserves contempt not only for its act of religious segregation – for having its 'people of faith' meetings from which 'the faithless' are excluded. It deserves an extra measure of contempt for the content of those meetings.

PZ Myers at Pharyngula posted an announcement he received that states this content.

On Tuesday, August 26, the Faith Caucus will hold two panel discussions – "Common Ground on Common Good," an opportunity to discuss finding common ground on moral issues of the day . . . . On Thursday, August 28, the Caucus will convene for "Moral Values Issues Abroad," a panel on how the faith community can work together to address pressing moral issues around the world . . .

So, the Democratic Party has decided to embrace the prejudice that if morality is the topic of discussion, then atheists have nothing to say.

The paradigm example of bigotry is to morally denigrate the target group, to spread the message that, "If you belong to the target group (atheists) you are morally inferior and, as such, not worthy of respect or of being listened to when we (the faithful) discuss moral matters. On moral matters, you have nothing valuable to contribute."

Here I am, devoting hours of every day of unpaid time to moral issues, and the Democratic Party decides to tell the world that, on moral issues, atheists have nothing to contribute. There truly is no greater or purer insult in the land of bigotry than to make an accusation of moral worthlessness such as this.

Obviously, the Democratic Party has no interest in finding 'common ground' with the atheist. Nor are atheists to be included in the 'common good'. The 'common good’ to be sought is whatever 'common good' can be found between Jews, Christians, Muslims, and Buddhists (the four groups actually invited to participate in these forums). And no atheist, sitting at a table in which "moral values issues abroad" is being discussed, could possibly say something – could possibly provide a perspective or an argument – that the Democratic Party should hear and consider. Only a person of faith can provide moral guidance to the party.

An atheist ethicist . . . well, that’s just a contradiction in terms.

Paternalism and the Argument for Callous Disregard

In my recent post on paternalism, some members of the studio audience objected that I used some poor examples of paternalistic laws (mandatory motorcycle helmets and mandatory seat belts). These laws were defended, not on the basis of benefit to others, but for the sake of preventing people from becoming wards of the state (and becoming a burden on the rest of the community).

There is a common response to this type of claim that I did not give because I think it is a poor argument. However, it is a very popular argument, so I want to discuss why (in the context of desire utilitarianism) it should be rejected.

Using laws that make motorcycle helmets mandatory as an example, the argument progresses like this:

“We, the legislature, are going to force you to wear motorcycle helmets because those motorcycle riders who do not risks having head injuries that would then be a drain on state resources used to care for those who are disabled. Because their actions adversely affect others and society as a whole, we are going to prohibit them.”

The response on the part of motorcycle riders is, “We are not forcing you to take care of us. We are willing to take the risk – we value taking the risk – and we are willing to accept the consequences. If we end up with massive brain damage, then don’t take are of us.”

A desire utilitarian has a response to this argument. Desire utilitarianism holds that we should promote desires that tend to fulfill other desires, and inhibit desires that tend to thwart other desires.

Compassion represents a desire that we generally have reason to promote. It tends to fulfill other desires. The person who has a desire for compassion fulfills his own desire when he helps others, and he helps to fulfill the desires of others. So, compassion tends to be desire-fulfilling. Whereas callous disregard for the well-being of others (the type of callous disregard that the motorcycle rider above would seek to promote) puts all of us at risk that our desires will be thwarted by others who simply lack concern for our welfare.

Sp. We have many and good reasons to reject the motorcycle rider’s proposal that we promote callous disregard for the suffering of others.

The motorcycle rider may then complain that our compassion is leading to the thwarting of his desire to ride his motorcycle with the wind blowing through his hair.

However, there is a reason why desire utilitarianism focuses itself on the fact that a desire will tend to fulfill other desires. It is perfectly consistent with this view that there will be rare instances in which a good desire will lead to behavior that thwarts other desires. The question is not whether a desire results in behavior that will always fulfill other desires. The question is whether a desire will tend to fulfill other desires – this is what determines whether (and to what degree) we have reason to promote or inhibit that desire.

So, do not ask us to promote an attitude of callous disregard for the interests of others. Do not ask us to promote in our neighbors the ability to stand there with complete indifference to the suffering of somebody who cannot take care of himself. We have no reason to adopt that suggestion – and many reasons not to.

Now, we also have reason to promote a love of freedom. We should realize that, when it comes to fulfilling their own desires, the agent himself (with some notable exceptions such as young children and the mentally disabled) are the best at determining which options will best fulfill her current desires. She is the most knowledgeable agent as to what those desires are, and she is the least likely to be corrupted by other concerns. These are good reasons for granting freedom wherever possible.

One of the integral parts of desire utilitarian theory (as opposed to most other theories) is that it allows for cases in which there is moral tension – conflicts between competing moral claims that need to be weighed against each other. A legitimate moral concern for freedom of the press (for example) sometimes comes into conflict with and needs to be weighed against legitimate moral concerns for a right to privacy or to national security. In this case, a legitimate moral concern for promoting compassion conflicts with a legitimate moral concern for liberty, and we must weigh the two against each other.

So, we may allow individuals to engage in sky diving, mountain climbing, automobile racing, cross country competitions, bull riding, and other events that put individuals at significant injury. The worry that they may become wards of the state is a worry that we accept. We will care for these people, we will accept the burden, because it is more important that we accept the burden of our compassion in this case than that we restrict the liberty of those who value these types of activities.

What’s the difference between these cases and motorcycle helmets?

It’s the fact that not wearing a motorcycle helmet is not seen as an example of risk-taking (in most cases), it is seen as an example of foolish laziness. While there may be individuals who do not wear helmets because of a desire to take risks (which they should be free to take), they do not make up a majority of the people who end up being harmed in motorcycle helmets. Most of those people (it is judged) are foolish idiots who will pay for a life time for a momentary lapse in judgment.

In these cases, a person with good desires – a person with desires that tend to fulfill (or prevent the thwarting of) the desires of others – will have an aversion to allowing people to take foolish risks that tend to thwart future desires. The people who value risk-taking will have reason to object to these attitudes. However, the future person who may be saved from a state where significant desires are being thwarted has no such objection.

We have many and strong reasons to reject the anti-paternalist call that we learn and teach callous disregard for the suffering of others.

Foreign Aid

Members of the federal government are now talking about providing the government of Georgia with about $1 billion in foreign aid to help that nation rebuild following the recent Russian incursion.

In general, I have a number of problems with government funded foreign aid,. It carries with it a number of hazards that may well make it the case that it may do more harm than good. In other words, the more money the federal government spends on foreign aid, the worse off the rest of the world (particularly its poorer parts) become.

The Hazard of Corporate Welfare

Let us start with the fact that a great deal of foreign aid is not foreign aid at all. Much of it is corporate welfare. The money does not go from the taxpayers to the people of another country. It goes from the taxpayer to American businesses who will allegedly provide the foreign government with something of value. In reality, what they provide is often more valuable to the company that provides it than to the people who receive it.

We can look at the war in Iraq as an example of this. It would not be a stretch to view the invasion as a huge foreign aid package – one that was at least allegedly created to provide the people of Iraq with a benefit – political freedom. In fact, however, a great deal of the money spent on this foreign aid package was money that went from the American taxpayer to American corporations – a wealth redistribution scheme that funneled money from the poor and the middle class to the rich.

The federal government did not only take money from the pockets of the poor and the middle class. It also taxed them out of their liberty (calling them up into military service), their well-being (from the sacrifies made in order to serve to the injuries they received as a result of that serve), and in some cases their lives. All of this so that the government could give the gift of hundreds of billions of dollars of aid to American corporations.

Measuring Help and Harm

It is still reasonable to ask in this case about the degree to which the people of Iraq obtained a benefit from this ‘foreign aid’. Remember that on the question of provided a benefit, we should not compare an action to the option of doing nothing and decide if the beneficiary is better off. We need to ask whether the aid offered was better than the next best alternative.

For example, let’s assume that I was to force you to invest $1000 in a projet that pays a 5% annual dividend. At the end of the year, you end up with $1050. It does not follow that I provided you with a $50 benefit. Let us add the assumption that you had the option to invest $1000 in a project that pays 10% interest. If I had not forced you into this option, you would have had $1100. Instead, I forced you into an option that left you with $1050. As a matter of fact, my action did not provide you with $50 in benefit. Instead, it cost you $50.

Was there an alternative available to the Iraqi people the world and to the Iraqi people that would have left them better off at the end of 5.5 years than they are today? If there was, then our foreign aid provided no benefit. Our foreign aid imposed a cost – one that denied the people of Iraq the benefits of this alternative.

Here’s an example. What would have been the result of paying Saddam Hussein $5 billion to call for free elections to create a congress, and then to leave the country, plus another $100 billion to the new government to help it get established?

I do not know what the answer to this question is. However, if the answer is that, at the end of 5.5 years, Iraq would have suffered less of a loss of infrastructure, life, and well-being than it did under the invasion plan, then the invasion plan provided no net benefit. Instead, it provided a net cost – the cost being the difference (to Iraq) between the invasion option and the bribery option.

The Hazard of Political Welfare

Much of foreign aid is not only corporate welfare, it is political welfare. It is not only used as a mechanism for transferring money (and other forms of well-being) from the middle and lower classes to the rich, it is a way of transferring money from the average American to those who belong to organizations politically aligned with the President’s party.

We can put much of the government expenditures to fight AIDS in Africa in this category. This is a transfer of wealth from the average American to organizations that share the President’s views on abortion, family planning, and sex education. Specifically, it was a way for the Bush Administration to funnel money to religious people who were politically aligned with the Republican Party. Given the harm that is done to the people of Africa by following these policies, this was not an aid package to Africa at all. It was a sacrifice of the people of Africa – an exploitation of their plight – for the purpose of making a political payoff in the United States.

The Hazard of Aiding Tyranny

A third hazard to foreign aid is that the money goes to the government of the recipient country. That government, with an additional lump of money to spend, will also be working to make sure that the money gets funneled to people and projects that will keep them in power. They will funnel the money to their political allies – underlings whose support and loyalty are valuable to the political leaders, and who expect to be well paid for their services.

If we are providing foreign aid to a country, then perhaps we are keeping people in power who are not particularly interested in helping the poor people in their country as much as they are interested in preserving power for themselves and their friends. In fact, many of the countries that are in need of our foreign aid are in that situation because they are doing a poor job of handling their own affairs, and this is usually because of a political system that does more harm than good.

Concluding Remarks

Many of these points tie in with the issues that I have raised for the past couple of days regarding rational ignorance. The reason that foreign aid can be used as a tool for generating corporate welfare, or political welfare, or supporting tyranny, is because the politician knows that the average voter does not have the time or the inclination to audit the line-item details of each government expenditure. The government puts the money down as ‘foreign aid’, and the people think in terms of convoys of trucks bringing food and medicine to an impoverished community.

Indeed, some of that happens – enough to put these images on the screen from time to time and to manipulate the people through a judicious application of selection bias into thinking that this is the norm. In fact, there is a great deal of room available for foreign aid to be diverted to any of these other objectives without anybody caring enough to protest.

It is not worth it to protest. The average taxpayer, considering a $1 billion contribution, can expect to pay only a few tens of dollars, if he pays anything at all. And even those who will pay nothing will have a vote.

For this reason, there are very few people who know the details of even one foreign aid package, let alone have a working understanding of America’s entire foreign aid policy. This level of necessary ignorance is what makes it possible for legislators to sneak corporate welfare into a foreign aid bill.

A common rhetorical trick is to take the value of a particular project and to divide the amount by the total number of taxpayers. This yields a price per taxpayer that has the ability to scare any taxpayer. Yet, as a matter of fact, more than half of the cost will be borne by a small percentage of the taxpayers, and many taxpayers will pay nothing. The average taxpayer – the number that makes up the majority – will pay significantly less than the average amount for any given project. We do not gain any political insight by pretending that all tax payers will pay the average amount. Any conclusions drawn from this assumption will be drawn from a false premise.

So, given the significantly-less-than-average-dollar-value of the contributions made by a majority of the voters, the cost of determining the merits of any given foreign aid proposal far outstrips the benefits of having that information.

This, of course, is what the political manipulators count on in order to manipulate the system in favor of their constituents – the fact that it will not be worthwhile for the majority of voters to care about what is going on. However, it is definitely worthwhile for the few beneficiaries to share the haul that these types of programs bring in. Given the amount of money to be gained, it certainly pays the political manipulator to find some way to get the majority of the population to support their pet project.

This is not to say that foreign aid is necessarily a bad idea. This is simply to say that there are some traps that we need to watch out for. That if we do not watch out for them, then our foreign aid can do more harm than good – not only to the people of another country, but to the average American as well. If we do not care to avoid these traps because the playoff is too low, we should are to avoid these traps because we actually want to help the beneficiaries of foreign aid, not make them worse off in a scheme that ultimately aims to profit people who do not need it.

Paternalism

Paternalism refers to a set of laws where a person’s liberty is denied to them for their own benefit. In other words, people are prohibited from doing things that are harmful to themselves, or required to do things that benefit themselves. Examples of this include wearing motorcycle helmets or seatbelts, wearing flotation device when out on a boat.

Desire utilitarianism has some implications about this sort of legislation that is not typically found in public debate.

Desire utilitarianism is built on a theory of behavior that says that a person always acts to fulfill the most and strongest of their own desires, given their beliefs. More specifically, a person always acts on the most and strongest of their current desires. Future desires have no effect on current behavior.

There are three ways in which a person’s future desires can be fulfilled by current desires. The individual can have a desire that future desire to fulfill future desires. She can have a desire that future desires be fulfilled. Or she can have desires that tend to fulfill other desires as an unintended consequence or side effect.

This is how addictions are possible. Addictions are particularly strong current desires that tend to thwart future desires. Because future desires have no direct effect on current behavior, it is quite possible for an agent to be fully aware of the fact that the addiction will thwart future desires, and still not be able to keep from giving in to the addiction. To beat an addiction, the agent must somehow muster current desires that outweigh the force of the addiction or weaken the addiction below the level of other current desires.

These relationships that I described between a person’s current desires and his future desires are exactly the same as the relationships that exist between a person’s current desires and the desires of other people. Specifically, there are three ways in which the desires of other people can be fulfilled by an agent’s current desires. The individual can have a desire to fulfill the desires of others. She can have a desire that the desires of others are fulfilled. Or she can have desires that tend to fulfill other desires as an unintended consequence or side effect.

When it comes to this relationship between a person’s desires and the desires of others, we typically demand that a person consider the desires of others, and we are willing to condemn or punish him if this is not the case.

This is no less true when a person acts so as to thwart the future desires of other people. In this case, an individual’s relationship to other desires are twice removed. First, they are desires of other people. Second, they are future desires. Yet, here, too, we have no qualms against morally condemning and legally prohibiting a person from acting in ways that thwart those other desires.

So, why object to morally condemning and legally prohibiting a person from thwarting his own future desires?

One of the implications of these principles is that the future person – the person an agent will become – is entirely incapable of defending his own interests. There is absolutely nothing he can do to bribe or coerce his earlier self into doing the right thing. Again, in the realm of morality and of law, we tend to be strictest in our impositions on people when they are dealing with those who cannot defend themselves. If the potential victim is a child or otherwise disabled, we are more inclined to impose limits on what others may do, not less.

In spite of these considerations, there is still an argument to be made against paternalistic morals and laws. Again, it comes from the fact that people act to fulfill the most and the strongest of their own desires, given their beliefs. If you ever give somebody else control over your life, you can count on the fact that he will continue to act so as to fulfill the most and strongest of his desires.

If his desires are desires that tend to fulfill the desires of others, then this might not be a problem. However, even those desires will have to go up against the other desires the agent may have – desires for sex, desires that can be fulfilled through money, aversion to pain. Those other concerns will inevitably drive the agent to act in ways that sacrifice your interests for their own.

This is less of a problem when the person being sacrificed and the person obtaining the benefit of that sacrifice are the same person. In these cases, we may argue that the good and the bad balance each other out. And even if they do not, the same person gets both the shorter and the longer end of the stick. This is more of a problem when the person who benefits (the person given decision-making power), and the person whose life he has the power to direct are not the same person.

So, this essay is not an essay that gives a clean bill of health to paternalistic morals and legislation. This essay merely hopes to introduce some considerations that those who are opposed to paternalistic morals and legislation tend to ignore.

Those opponents tend to treat all of an agent’s desires as having weight in the present. They say that the agent obviously values the feel of the wind through his hair more than the possible loss of health and well-being that would result from getting in a motorcycle accident, and we should not impose our values on him. However, it may be more accurate to say that the agent is yielding to a weaker current desire because, even though the future desires being thwarted are more and stronger, they cannot reach back in time to influence current behavior. So, the agent is fulfilling a weaker current desire at the expense of more and stronger future desires. It is not always the case that an agent does what is in his own best long-term interest.

Interests in International Affairs

One of the members of the studio audience, Anticant, wrote something in a comment yesterday that deserves some special emphasis and development.

The problem we suffer from in democracies is that while all of us quite rightly believe our own personal lives, careers. and interests are more important than politics, except in times of crisis – i.e. that we are entitled to the pursuit of happiness - a majority of the population who are qualified to vote take no interest whatsoever in what is going on in their own country and the world, and this culpable indifference enables the power-hungry politicians, the super-rich, the bigoted religious loudmouths, and the downright crooks, to wield much more power than they are rightly entitled to.

In a sense, all of this is correct. However, this is one of those instances in which I think that it is important to look at some of the details, and to recognize that there are structural problems here for which individuals are not fully culpable.

These details have to do with the degree to which people devote time and energy to their lives, careers, and interests, as opposed to studying what is going on in our country and in the world.

The fact is, it is rational for a person to study those issues where (1) the consequences of their decision will have the largest impact on their lives, and (2) their decision will have a real-world impact on the outcome of events. It is simply not rational for people to come up with a detailed understanding of what is going on in their country and world events because, even though the impact is huge, the probability that they can have any control on that impact is virtually zero.

I can relate a personal story to illustrate this point.

I am very well of the fact that if I were to devote as much time and energy to studying computers that I spend on studying moral and political issues, that I would be far better off financially than I am today. In fact, I have been told as much – that my career is stalled because I do not eat, drink, and sleep computer programming.

There are people out there who have jobs in which they work on computers, who leave their jobs and go home, where they work on computers in the pursuit of their individual interests, who then take what they learned at home and apply it to their work. These types of people become the best computer programmers, they become recognized as such, and their employment status benefits as a result.

The same is true for the person who studies medicine, law, engineering, or who teaches in a university on any subject. They are experts at what they do because they are so interested in the subject at hand that this is where their brain is at 24 hours each day. They even dream about the subject that they study and where their interests lie.

For those who have a family – for those who have children – they have something else in their lives that demands a great deal of attention. It takes a great deal of time to actually study and be aware of the things that are intimately connected to a child’s life – to not only keep the child safe, but to help the child to become an adult who can thrive in modern society.

My interest happens to be in political and social issues. However, I cannot complain about those who have interests that are different than mine.

Of course, it is not the case that people are devoting time and energy only to their careers and their families. People do waste a great deal of time and money. One of the greatest wastes of time concerns the time they spend watching television – watching intellectually vacuous shows such as American Idol or Survivor. One of the greatest wastes of time, money, and resources is sports – a $300 billion per year industry that accomplishes almost nothing. If we are going to have sporting events, can we not at least have events where competing teams actually try to accomplish something useful?

We can rightfully complain about the person who can name a hundred different athletes, but who cannot name their own representatives to Congress. We can rightfully complain about the person who spends $100 and a full day going to the ball game rather than spending the day learning about the economics of foreign trade.

Yet, even if we got rid of mindless television, sports, and similar wastes of time, it would still be the case that people would be smarter to devote that time and energy to their careers and their families than to devote them to national or international politics. The time and energy they devote to national or international politics will still have almost no impact on how the world the world turns out. That requires the cooperation of a huge number of people who have very little incentive to cooperate. Whereas the time and money they spent on their career and family would have an immediate impact on their well-being and the well-being of those around them.

Where things get truly sinister is where there are people who recognize these facts about private incentives, who then exploit these facts to personal advantage. Special interest groups are great filling people’s heads with useful fictions – fictions that are useful to the people who promulgate them, but not to the people who are ultimately convinced.

What these organizations do is spend millions of dollars getting useful fictions placed where people have their attention. They hire marketing companies to wrap their useful fictions into packages that largely disinterested people can easily digest, then they pay millions of dollars to put that information where disinterested people tend to focus their attention. They can afford to pay millions of dollars because, once they convince enough people of this useful fiction, they will harvest hundreds of billions to billions of dollars as a result.

They promote celebrities whose main claim to fame is their ability to make useful fictions entertaining – talk show radio hosts and Fox News broadcasters who will get these useful fictions in front of the general population.

I am not saying that these broadcasters sell their message to the highest bidder. Rather, the people with the useful fictions to sell know that they can gain a lot of mileage selling their message to these opinion leaders. In addition to spending millions of dollars to put advertising up where the disinterested public will see it, they make sure to get the message into those areas where the substantially ignorant broadcast entertainers who are more interested in ratings than in truth would see it.

In short, there is a problem here that Anticant describes quite accurately. The important part that is missing is the fact that it actually makes no sense for the average person – the career and family minded individual – to do anything different. The career and family minded individual will always be able to find something more profitable (to himself and to his family) to spend his time on than learning the details of the conflict in Georgia, or studying the fine print of the North American Free Trade Agreement and the social and political implications of those provisions. Even if he were to become an expert on any of those things, there is nothing that his expertise would allow him to do about the situation. All he would basically acquire as a result of his efforts is a better understanding of just how screwed up things have become.

Unless he is going to make his career in the state department, this information is about as useless to him as baseball statistics or the standings in this season’s most popular reality shows.

So, is there anything that can be done about this, or all we all doomed?

Well, I think that if there are any solutions to be found, we can do a better job of finding them if we accurately understand the problem. A part of the problem is that we are demanding that people spend time and effort on things that do not interest them and are not useful in achieving things that do interest them.

Desire utilitarianism has another way of describing this problem. The problem is that we are demanding that people devote time and attention to things that do not fulfill their desires directly (interest them) or indirectly (useful). The remedy to this would be to devote time and energy into changing their desires, using social forces such as praise and condemnation.

One of the things that we can do is be less sparing in our praise of people who exhibit traits that we have reason to promote, and less sparing in our criticism of people who exhibit traits that we have reason to inhibit. It is particularly important that we express this praise and condemnation in the presence of children who will carry those values into the next generation.

If anybody here were interested in why I am so contemptible of a national motto and a national pledge that puts atheists (those not ‘under God’) in the same company as those who support rebellion, tyranny, and injustice for all, they can find their answer in the way that the national motto and the national pledge use praise and condemnation to imbed attitudes in young minds that do far more harm than good.

Bigotry Deserves No Allegiance

Schools are starting up again across the country. One of the things that this means is that the government is once again going to start to indoctrinate millions of children into the attitude that, in order to be a good American, one must endorse 'one nation under God'.

Many children will go to school to see the message prominently displayed on the classroom wall, "If you do not trust in God, then we do not think of you as being one of us."

It is not enough that the government declares this to be the official state attitude towards atheists. Many of the teachers – and many of the classmates – that the atheist (or would-be atheist) students will interact with daily believe this. To think that this does not color interactions between atheists and the rest of their school is naïve.

It is here, at a very young age, under the direction of the State and the active encouragement of teachers and fellow students, that young atheists and would-be atheists learn to hide what they believe. They learn to be timid and fearful – attitudes that they will carry with them throughout their adult lives, much to the delight of the theocrats and others who favor having an sectarian state.

If I have not been plain enough in the past, let me be clear now, I think it is right and necessary to explicitly protest this policy.

It's not sufficient to simply sit down and shut up while others say the Pledge of Allegiance. In this country, those actions simply reinforce the message that atheists are un-American. In our cultural language, sitting down and saying nothing is interpreted as a sign of disrespect for liberty and justice for all, disrespect for the government, and, in particular, disrespect for those people who have fought and died to protect our liberty.

Which is exactly the message that the theocrats want to give.

So, we are given a choice to make one of two statements whenever the Pledge of Allegiance is given. We can either stand up and show respect for the idea that a person who does not support 'one nation under God' is the same as a person who does not support 'one nation . . . indivisible, with liberty and justice for all'.

Or we can remain seated and silent, and tell the community that our attitude is that people who fight and die for our freedoms are not worthy of our respect or consideration.

These are the two legally and culturally permitted statements that one can make whenever the Pledge is offered. No other message is permissible.

Both of them are messages that cast atheists in an unfavorable light.

Worse, it casts atheists in an unfavorable light in the minds of children . . . six, seven, eight years old . . . who are not old enough to question. It casts these ideas into the minds of children who will unthinkingly attach emotions and sentiments to these ideas. They will associate being 'under God' and trusting in God with a sense of belonging and acceptance that will make it very difficult – impossible for some – to be at all comfortable with the idea that some citizens do not believe in God. They will associate not being 'under God' or not trusting in God with the sense of being outcast and isolated, unworthy of the equal respect and consideration not only of one's government, but of other people.

At this point it is all too common for some individuals to stand up and say, "That is not what happened to me."

However, imagine somebody writing about the dangers of falling from a great height – how this breaks bones and causes death. Then, those few people who have fallen from a great height without being harmed, stand up and say, "That is not what happened to me."

We would be fools to think of their few exceptions give us good reason to reject the idea that falling from a great height is dangerous. We would be foolish to look at the exceptions and say, "This must be the norm." We should only look at the norm to discover what the norm is.

And the norm, when it comes to the public's attitude towards atheists, is that atheists are un-American, are unfit to hold public office and positions of public trust, is the last person most parents would want their child to marry, is immoral, and is politically disposed to support a Holocaust or Stalinist purge.

I would like those atheists who think that they, too, have not been affected by this social attitude to actually look at your lives. You're not worried about what anybody would think if they were to discover that you do not believe in God? Proclaiming your atheism to somebody that you might want to date – or their family – or your family – does not cause you an ounce of concern? You think you can run for public office stating explicitly that you believe that no God exists and that this would do absolutely no harm to your campaign?

A slave can be comfortable as a slave if he learns to accept this as his role in society, and conforms his own attitudes and expectations to the position that society has assigned them to. Slaves continued to willingly serve their masters throughout the Civil War - even taking up arms against the Union army.

However, the fact that some blacks had internalized the slave culture and found themselves comfortable within it, is not an argument for saying that no injustice is done under the institution of slavery. The fact that some atheists are comfortable in a culture hostile towards atheists is no proof that no injustice is done with the current Pledge, the current motto, and the current culture that they support.

Speifically, what I am endorsing is going to the school and asking or demanding (because, on an issue such as this, it is within one's rights to demand – at least in the sense of saying, 'You are an accessory to bigotry if you do not agree to this') the right to deliver a message to the school other than the two government approved messages.

What I am endorsing is demanding the right to say that students (or anybody else for that matter) should not be forced into a situation where they must communicate to others either, "I support 'one nation under God'" or "I have absolutely no respect for any who fight and die for liberty and justice for all." I support demanding the right to say – and even to demand that the school itself say – that bigotry deserves no allegiance.

National Generalizations

Some of my postings recently have elicited a set of comments that can probably be accurately described as ‘America-bashing’, and the typical defensive claims that are often made in these types of situations.

It reminded me a great deal of my childhood.

See, I grew up on the U.S./Canadian border. I did not grow up near the border. Quite literally, if I was playing ball in my back yard, and the ball left my back yard heading north, it landed in Canada.

Officially, I was told, I was not permitted to go other there and pick it up again. I was not allowed to go to Canada unless I went down the street to the customs station and cleared customs. Then, I could retrieve my ball and come back.

In fact, I never did so. I dashed over into Canada, grabbed my ball, and dashed back again before anybody saw me.

There were people living on the other side of the border. I lived in a town called Sweetgrass, Montana. On the other side of the border, there was a Canadian town. In spite of the fact that I grew up inches away from this town, I cannot name a single person who lived, there, or tell you the location of any important buildings . . . except the school . . . which was right across the border from our house.

Schools tend to attract children, and children tend to get involved in childish games, such as “My country is better than your country.” So me and my friends would line up on our side of the border, and the Canadian school children would line up on their side of the border, and we would shout insults at each other. We would dare the people on the other side to “come over here and say that.” They would dare us to do the same thing.

These were childish insults. They certainly did not display any depth of awareness of social, cultural, or political norms. I actually remember being confused as to whether Canada was a country or not. In a sense, it had its own government. In another sense, it still showed some allegiance to England. We had a revolutionary war over here. We kicked the British out. The Canadians never did.

I remember that I could stand on the border and look east and west, and I could literally see the line that divided the United States from Canada. There were farms on both sides of the border, and all of the fields ended right on that line.

My attitude now is that there is a problem with these kinds of disputes. They are, in a sense, quite bigoted. They make derogatory claims about whole groups of people as if they are all alike – all Americans or all Canadians. When, in fact, each country is made up of a wide variety of people. The mix is almost certainly different, but the variety is there nonetheless.

So, I no longer (or I try not to) write about “Canadians” or “Russians” or “Chinese” or “French” as if they are all alike. Or, I try not to. It is such a part of our culture to speak and write in this fashion that I will not be too surprised if somebody can find violations in the 1,500,000 words that make up this blog, or the 1,000,000 words that make up my other writings. If I have violated this rule, I offer my apologies.

Instead, what I try to do, and what I argue should be done, is to focus one’s comments specifically on the subgroup of any population who actually hold the attitudes that one is criticizing or praising. I do not wish to blame the Afghans, or the Iranians, or the Saudis, or the Chinese, or the Russians, or the French, or the Canadians. Rather, if a nation pursues a policy that I approve of, I will reserve my criticism for the policy and those who support it, not for a whole nation.

In fact, I fear that this habit of treating whole nations as if they are alike may contribute to some of the worst aspects of human conflict. By blaming “the Germans” or “the Japanese” for the atrocities of World War II, we made it that much easier to carpet-bomb whole cities.

This is not the first context in which I have made this objection. In protesting against religion, I have spoken against making claims about ‘Christians’ or ‘Muslims’ or ‘theists’ or any group as if they share traits that they do not, in fact, share. A person should always address their criticism to the specific view that one is seeking to criticize, and to those who hold that specific view, without casting blame around indiscriminately.

I will use the term ‘theocrat’ from time to time. However, that term refers specifically to anybody who believes that government should be grounded on a particular theology or religion. A pledge of allegiance to ‘one nation under God’ is a pledge of allegiance to theocracy, specifically because it states that civil law should be under religious doctrine.

Of course, since there is no God, there is no possibility that the nation can ever be ‘under God’. What these people are striving for as a matter of fact is ‘one nation under those people who claim to speak for God, but who in fact are seeking power only for themselves.’ But that would make an awkward Pledge.

A person can speak about atheists generally, but only insofar as an atheist is somebody who believes that the proposition, “at least one God exists” is certainly or almost certainly false. To make any generalization about atheists outside of those boundaries is to bear false witness against others. Effectively, it contains a lie, and is not something that a person with good desires would have an aversion to.

I think that something also needs to be said about the fact that America is still a very young country. Let us look, instead, at Greece. Do we hold the Greeks of today responsible for the atrocities of their own past?

Every year, Sparta would declare war on its own slaves, conquering them all over again. It was one of the most brutal slave cultures that ever existed.

Yet, it makes no sense today to speak about the Greeks – the modern Greeks – as being the perpetrators of this injustice. To go into a bout of Greek bashing because of the activities of the ancient Spartans seems absurd. It is, in fact, absurd. There is no sense in looking at what happened in a past that the current generation now repudiates.

We do, of course, have a right to demand that the current generation actually repudiate the immoral activities of their ancestors. When a country offers a formal apology for slavery, for segregation, for Japanese internment, for the slaughter of the native Americans. This is a way of stating that we condemn any group of people who would commit such an atrocity, even our own ancestors. In this way, we can be trusted not to do the same to others.

I look forward to the day (though it will probably not be in my lifetime) that there will be a formal government apology for a pledge and a motto designed to culturally exclude and promote hostility against to those citizens who do not believe in God. The apology will come, not from those who are guilty, of course, but from those who want to state that they are better than their ancestors and recognize injustice where that their ancestors chose to remain blind to.

It will be a statement against those doctrines and the people who defended them, not a statement against all Americans.

That’s the part about justice that we still need to learn – the part that tells us to be careful of our generalizations, since they often accuse people of things they have not done, and make other claims about people that simply are not true.

Investments: War vs. Energy

Yesterday I referenced a Defense Department report that said that wars in the 21st Century are going to be fought largely over oil and water.

(See: Space‐Based Solar Power As an Opportunity for Strategic Security (PDF: 75pp))

It made this claim in the context of a report that suggested that America begin a project that aims at not only freeing the United States from diminishing amounts of oil, but freeing the whole world. It will not do the United States any good to be energy independent if the rest of the world is still getting into wars where we might need to get involved. We’re better off in a community of nations that can get along peacefully with each other than in a community in conflict.

The project is a solar power satellite system capable, at least in this iteration, of producing around 1 million terawatt hours of energy per year – or about 7 times the current world consumption of energy.

I am not going to defend this specific solution, but I would like to say a few things about the argument for something like this.

Of course, the first objection that will be raised against a project such as this is that it is too expensive. However, we have to weigh the expense of such a system to the expense of whatever wars we would have to fight – and that we might be able to avoid.

Current history gives us an excellent lesson to draw from. Five and a half years ago Americans had a choice between investing in war to secure oil, or investing in the development of renewable energy that would free us (and the world) from dependence on oil. The United States decided to invest in war – and invaded the nation of Iraq.

The cost of that investment has been nearly $1 trillion in direct government expenditure, 4000 American lives, and tens of thousands of Americans wounded.

Technically, if we are going to talk about which investment would have been the most expensive, we will have to add on the costs that other countries have borne as a result of our policy decisions. This includes the loss of lives and resources in Iraq. Many Americans like to think of only American lives and American bank accounts as being important, so the costs borne by non-Americans simply do not count. However, ethicists and economists tend to argue that these costs do count. They are morally and economically relevant factors.

Furthermore, the costs we are looking at so far include only the direct monetary costs borne by the government and the costs in terms of lives and health borne by the soldiers. Technically, we need to include the costs borne by the soldiers and their families as well. A soldier serving in Iraq is losing opportunities in America. Some of them bought their own military equipment – costs of war that are not figured into the government’s actual budget. In addition, many suffered other financial losses back home as a result of their service in Iraq. They had to close up businesses, forego education, and simply put aside many of the investments that they were making in their own lives and careers.

They did this for us, by the way, and we denigrate their sacrifice when we refuse to include them in the overall cost of the war, as if they are of no significance.

Now, think about where we would be today if, in 2003, the government would have announced a commitment to investing as much in a project to make America and the world independent of oil.

It seems to me quite insane that people will look at a billions of dollars invested in a war and shrug their shoulders, saying, “Well, wars are expensive. We just have to recognize that fact.” And they care so little about the loss of thousands of lives.

However, at the same time, when asked to make a similar investment in something constructive, they scream that it is too expensive – and when seven people are killed in the pursuit of those dreams they shut the whole project down for 3 years while they study the reasons why people died and make adjustments.

By the way, during the same time in which Americans invested nearly $1.00 trillion and 4000 lives in war, it invested $0.08 trillion and 7 lives in space.

We also, strangely, devote far more time and attention to honoring 7 dead astronauts than we do honoring 4,000 dead soldiers. Imagine if the anniversaries of each attack in which 7 (or more) soldiers died in Iraq was given the same air time and attention as the anniversaries of the Challenger and Columbia disasters. Even using the word ‘disaster’ when applied to the loss of a space shuttle and its crew reveals an unfounded difference in attitude to the way we speak about the loss of a military helicopter and its crew and passengers.

Let’s look at the situation between Russia and Georgia. How much of the world’s lives and property are being destroyed in this conflict?

Let’s not kid ourselves. This conflict is largely motivated by a desire to control the flow of oil. This is another case in which the countries of the world (specifically, Russia) have made a decision to invest in war in order to secure an advantage in a world of diminishing oil supplies, instead of investing in something constructive. It is another place where American concern and American involvement is driven substantially, not by our interest in peace and justice, but in our interest in oil.

Russia has also shown its willingness to pursue conflict for the sake of oil in the Arctic Ocean. With the Arctic ice cap disappearing (due, ironically, to global warming – from the burning of oil), oil fields under the Arctic Ocean are becoming available. Russia is taking steps to claim that oil for itself.

All things considered, it appears that Russia’s energy policy involves a conscious decision to invest in war, to capture as much of this precious resource as it can for its own use, without much regard for moral limits, willing even to see innocent lives lost for the sake of getting control of more oil.

So far in the 21st Century, the American government has followed the same route. It, too, has spent the last 5.5 years investing in war as a way of securing its access to oil. Please understand, I am not talking here about the standard military budget. I am talking about the extra money that the government spends specifically because of the war in Iraq.

In this contest, there is one question that the American people ought to be asking themselves.

Let us assume that we continue to invest in war for the next 50 years to better secure our access to oil. Where will we be at the end of 50 years? At the end of this long and potentially very costly struggle, will the struggle be over and we will have the energy security we need?

The answer, of course, is, “No.” We will gain nothing from participating in this conflict.

Then ask ourselves, where will we be in 50 years if we invest, instead, in the construction of alternative energy resources that will provide not only the United States but the rest of the world with energy other than oil. Where will we be at the end of 50 years? At the end of this long and potentially very costly struggle, will the struggle be over and we will have the energy security we need?

Well, if we work hard enough the answer is potentially, “Yes.”

We have already lost 5.5 years and hundreds of billions of dollars of potential investment towards that end. We lost it at the same time we lost 4,000 American lives, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives, tens of thousands of American wounded, and huge economic costs inflicted on many of those who have survived.

The alternative that involves a program of constructive investment is too expensive, we are told.

Too expensive?

Compared to what?

A Vision of the Future: Seven Earths

In a recent comment, one of the members of the studio audience, anton, wrote:

I would like to "enter" a widely accepted statistic into the discussion. It would take more than 7 planet earths to sustain a US American life style for all of our planets people.

In attempting to respond to this statistic, I tried to find out more precisely what it meant. My search of the internet found that it was, indeed, widely accepted. However, I could not find anybody who used this statistic to cite a source or to offer an explanation.

Clearly, it does not mean that we need seven times as much surface area. It’s not the case that 6/7 of the people are sitting in a holding area somewhere waiting for us to find some place to put them. In fact, people in the wealthier parts of the world use up less surface area per person than poorer people. That is to say, population densities are higher in Europe and Japan than in Africa and, yes, even China.

We also have enough food for everybody. In fact, people in the wealthier parts of the world could probably improve their standard of living by eating less food than by consuming more. Our problem here is not with the amount of food we have available, but its distribution. We are also starting to have a problem with people in the developed parts of the world removing food from the tables of the starving in order to create energy that then gets consumed in activities that are far less valuable than eating.

Water is a problem. Or, more precisely, clean water is a problem. The Defense Department predicts that future wars will be fought substantially over two things: water, and energy.

As it turns out, the problem that we have with respect to clean water is, ultimately, an energy problem. The sun is already involved in created buckets full of clean water every second. There is a very well understood process for making clean water involving evaporation and condensation. We just need to make more of it in the right places – and/or allow people to move to where it is easier to provide them with clean water.

It turns out, then, that the water problem is actually another manifestation of the energy problem.

Yet, in the area of energy, we have "seven earths" of energy available to us.

Wikipedia reports that our current energy consumption is about 140,000 terawatt hours.

The Defense Department is looking into a solar power satellite system that would produce about 950,000 terawatt hours of energy per year – coincidentally, about seven times as much energy as we are currently using. (See: Space‐Based Solar Power As an Opportunity for Strategic Security (PDF: 75pp))

The idea is that, if we can provide the world with a sufficient amount of energy, then we can avoid future wars (and the future threats to national security that wars provide). Of course, the Defense Department also recognizes that there would be certain secondary benefits if this energy were owned and operated by the United States, and for the United States to have the infrastructure built into its economy for manufacturing and maintaining such a system. But those are co-incidental concerns.

The fact remains, we have seven earths of energy available – and more. Trust me, this solar power project that the Defense Department is studying is not using up all of the solar power available. Not by a long shot. Ultimately, when we talk about the amount of energy we have available, we have countless orders of magnitude of energy available that we are not even starting to use.

We have a whole sun.

It would take a great deal of effort to harvest this energy, that's true. But, then, when I argued for a future in which the rest of the world has been raised to the standard of living of the United States, I did not expect that to happen by next Tuesday.

What about other resources, such as iron?

The asteroid belt contains several different types of asteroids. One type of asteroid that we know about are iron asteroids. These asteroids were once part of a body that was large enough to undergo separation, where the iron sank into the center of a molten core and rocky materials floated to the surface. When this body was pulverized in a collision of astronomical proportions, the core formed a set of asteroids that are made up almost entirely of pure iron.

One of those asteroids is 16Psyche. Astronomical studies of this asteroid suggest that it is a huge gravel heap of iron ore – much more pure than the iron that miners harvest from the surface of the Earth. It is not a solid body. It is a gaggle of rocks and sand held together by its own gravity, making it relatively easy to grab chunks and fly away with them.

Some of its rocks can be expected to contain higher concentrations of other heavy metals – gold, platinum, and uranium.

If we mine this asteroid at the same rate at which we mined iron ore on Earth in 2004, it would take millions of years to deplete this one source of iron. It would be a foolish waste of resources to take this ore and bring it down to Earth to be refined. It would be far more efficient to put it into a furnace in space, refine it there, and even do some preliminary shaping and molding. It turns out that metals refined in space are actually much better than metals refined in a gravity environment – since gravity causes separation of heavier elements from lighter elements that we can avoid in space. Where we do want to separate elements (as a way of removing impurities), we just give the molten bucket a spin and use centrifugal force for that purpose.

All of this mining and refining would be done in space, with zero impact on any living ecosystem. A multi-million year supply of iron, mined and refined with zero environmental impact on living ecosystems, even at seven times our current rate of production.

If we do start to worry about surface area, I would like to point out that a planet is an extremely inefficient way of creating living space. The earth contains a volume of 2000 cubic kilometers of materials for each square kilometer of surface living space.

However, if we take that same amount of material and re-engineer it for greater efficiency we can get a great deal more living space out of it. We do this by creating cylinders in space and setting them to spin in order to create artificial gravity (again, using centrifugal force). We trap the atmosphere inside, and we power the whole thing using solar power from a sun that never sets and is never hidden by clouds, whose full force shines on the solar power station that creates its power.

Most of the building material need not be anything special. The largest material need on such a station would be for shielding from cosmic rays. The only requirement that this shielding must meet is that it has mass. The slag from the mining and the refining process would work well in this role, so there would be no waste product.

Using this model, we will need only about 0.002 cubic kilometers of material to create each square kilometer of living area.

With the material in the asteroid belt we can create the surface area equivalent of 50,000 earths.

Another recent study tells us that, in the outer solar system, there are perhaps a quadrillion objects orbiting the sun outside of the orbit of Neptune. (See Space.com: Discovery Hints at a Quadrillion Space Rocks Beyond Neptune.) This works out about 150,000 space rocks for every person on Earth today.

The idea that we should think in terms of planets at all is a prejudice that we need to seriously reconsider. Planets are an extremely inefficient way to support life – particularly human life. The idea that we might need seven extremely inefficient systems to support everybody at a particular standard of living carries with it a lot of assumptions that we actually should discard. Eliminating the planetary assumption, we can see that we actually have the resources of tens of thousands of earths without stepping foot out of the inner solar system – and millions of earths beyond that.

In my vision for the future, we will eventually put these resources to work.

It Works!

Negative ads: They really do work.

This is what a former political advisor to Hillery Clinton tells us in an editorial in Political titled, "Negative ads: They really do work."

However, there is an important fact that we need to keep in mind any time we hear somebody claim that "It works" (for any given 'it'). This is the fact that the phrase assumes a set of goals or objectives. If you change the background assumptions regarding the goals and objectives, the phrase changes from being true to being false (or vica versa).

For example, a hammer 'works' if your goal if you have a sack of nails to put in a board. Less so if you have a pack of screws. A wrecking ball 'works' if your objective is to bring down a building. Less so if your objective is to remove somebody's appendix.

To say that something works is to say that it is useful in bringing about some assumed goals. This type of phrase is only concerned with a descriptive cause and effect. However, when we go further and endorse the use of the tool that ‘works’, we are also going further and endorsing those ends.

It is one thing to say that potassium cyanide will work as a way of silencing an obnoxious neighbor’s noisy pet. This statement is true – a descriptive fact about the world.

It is quite another to endorse the use of poison to silence a neighbor’s noisy pet. This statement endorses being a certain type of person – a person willing to do such a thing.

When somebody uses the phrase "It works" to endorse a practice, this tells us something about his values – what his goals and concerns are. This tells us what type of person we are dealing with – his moral character.

Mark Penn represents one of the most vile and destructive forces in America today – a group of people for whom "it works" exists in an almost complete moral void.

The tactic meets with media and pundit disapproval and spawns accusations of negativity, but the reality is that a clever negative ad can be devastatingly effective.

Penn does not seem to realize that he is talking about two different things there. There is no contradiction in disapproving of something that also happens to be "devastatingly effective". Shooting somebody with a shotgun multiple times is "devastatingly effective" when it comes to killing him. This does not say that it is anything wrong with expressing disapproval over those who use such a system.

Of course, voters publicly condemn negative advertising and suggest they would never be swayed by it.

The fact is, if negative advertising were not effective, there would be little reason to condemn it. We do not waste our energy condemning the person who thinks that he can teleport money out of the bank vault and into the shoebox under his bed. His insanity proves that he is not really a threat. We will save our energy for those who rob banks using guns or by hacking computers.

It is because negative advertising is effective, and because it exhibits a set of values that are so destructive to the country and the political process that it deserves our condemnation.

Later in the article, Penn states that negative advertising can be unfair. However, he argues, positive advertising can be unfair as well. He brought up the example of John Edward's claim that he would deny Congress its legislative package unless it passed health care reform for everybody else. A President has no power to do such things.

However, these claims about morally faulty positive advertisements are completely irrelevant. They are like trying to defend the act of robbing people with a gun by saying, "Well, you can rob a person with a knife as well." In order to have a relevant argument, you have to have an implication such as, "Since robbing people with a knife is legitimate, robbing people with a gun is legitimate as well." Yet, once we admit that lying in a positive advertisement is also immoral, it is also irrelevant.

An argument can be made that we should pay attention to the fairness or unfairness of an advertisement, not whether it is positive or negative. Penn's last statement suggests that fairness is a moral constraint on both positive and negative advertisements.

This year, you can expect a tough political season and plenty of negative ads. Done fairly, they serve a legitimate role.

However, it would have been instructive if Penn had said something about how to distinguish fair from unfair arguments. As it stands, the article that Penn authored does not contain a single example of an argument that he would not support. It never gave a single standard for distinguishing legitimate from illegitimate political advertisements except for an undefined reference to what is 'fair'.

Apparently, Penn thinks that it would have been ‘fair’ to release an advertisement that cast Obama as being ‘foreign’. Penn proposed an advertisement that pointed out that Obama was the child of a Muslim from Kenya who later became an atheist, and that his mother was an atheist. The ad would have included the fact that Obama spent much of his childhood in Hawaii and Indonesia. All of this was meant to support our claim that we should not have a candidate that was foreign to American values in this time of war.

To mention that such an advertisement would have been effective is to describe the world, and perhaps to describe it accurately. However, to endorse the use of the advertisement is to endorse the values expressed by having such an advertisement.

The advertisement endorses and promotes the idea that somebody who comes from Muslim parents or atheist parents is unfit to rule the United States. The advertisement does not stop at merely stating these claims about Obama and his family. The advertisement goes on to endorse as if to recommend the attitude that it is inappropriate to vote for somebody who has Muslim or Atheist parents. It promotes the bigotry that such people are unfit for public office.

"Don't vote for him. He's the descendent of Muslims and Atheists" is substantially the same as "Don't vote for him. He's black." It is an invitation to use an irrelevant criteria as a standard for determining who may or may not hold public office.

Penn apparently thinks that this type of behavior is 'fair' – that it is legitimate – and that it is permissible to encourage these types of attitudes among the population in general.

Penn not only sought to endorse and promote attitudes of bigotry against others, he also embraced and promoted the trait of being willing to promote bigotry. Penn's moral flaw is not only the fact that he stood ready to promote an attitude of bigotry towards Muslims and atheists. He also supported the act of promoting bigotry in order to win political elections. He promoted the attitude that, "A good person will employ techniques that promote bigotry and injustice as a method of winning public office."

So, his moral failure carries through on two levels. He promotes an attitude of bigotry against Muslims and atheists, and he promotes the attitude that it is legitimate to promote bigotry as a means of winning public office.

In both of these cases, Penn is guilty of an egregious moral failure.

Yet, when it comes to answering the charge that this type of behavior is wrong and worthy of our condemnation, the defense that Penn offers is to say that "It works."

So, we are apparently to believe that whatever works is morally legitimate.

"Hey, it worked, so it can't be wrong."

Non-Nationalism: A Vision of the Future

I have a vision of the future in which a person l move us closer to this state are to be preferred to those policies that move us away from this state.

We are told that we must fear people from other countries – that we must hate them and lock them out of this country because, if they are allowed in, they will destroy everything that we value.

I am of the opinion that a human being is a human being, regardless of what part of the planet he or she lives on. Yesterday, I wrote about the success of China (and of the possible consequences of China growing into an economy that is five times more powerful than the American economy).

This is not a matter of watching the United States crumble and decay until it falls to China’s level. It is a matter of watching China succeed and grow until it reaches America’s level. I am happy that more and more people in China are able to enjoy things that Americans have enjoyed for quite a while. I am happy to see China grow out of a system where 20 million people can starve to death in a year because of a failed government policy.

I would like to see the African, the Arab, the Central American, and the Pacific Islander enjoy those things as well. It is hardly fair, and it is hardly moral, to cheer policies and programs that have the effect of making Americans $100 better off, if its price is to destroy the lives of 1 billion people elsewhere in the world.

I have said that this is a vision for the future. One of the types of objections that I often read to these types of suggestions reads, “If we were to adopt these policies today, the results would be chaos. There would be pandemonium, mass hysteria, a disaster of biblical proportions as the Anti-Christ is summoned to try for world domination!.

The argument, “If we were to adopt your policy today without changing anything else, the consequences would be disasterous,” is a phony objection. There is no possible way that such a policy could be adopted tomorrow without changing anything else. The policy is one to be worked for over generations in the hopes that, some day, it would be implemented. But it would be a ‘some day’ in which other things have changed as well in order to accommodate these changes.

Desires overall will be better fulfilled because people will have more options available for fulfilling those desires. Every time we build a wall or create a barrier, we block people from the fulfillment of their desires. Their desires tell them to ‘do X’. However, they find that X is blocked due to political boundaries. So, they must select a next-best alternative; one that fulfills fewer or weaker desires. So, we have a prima-facie argument against walls and political barriers, just as we have a prima-facie argument against declaring a person guilty in a court of law. The burden of proof rests on those who would argue for the necessity of the wall, not those who would argue against it.

This is not to say that such a burden of proof cannot be met – that barriers are not necessary in some cases. To carry the analogy further, the fact that the burden of proof is on those who would argue that the accused is guilty does not mean that this burden cannot be met and nobody can be declared guilty of a crime.

So, it is no objection to this posting to assert, “I can think of an instance in which a wall should be required.” Indeed you can, and so can I. Think of my property line as a boundary that you may cross only with my permission (except that you have implied permission to cross the boundary long enough to ask for my permission). These walls are useful, because they give each person a realm of security and privacy where they can work towards the fulfillment of their desires without interference. There are some barriers that we simply have to learn to live with.

However, in the long run, barriers between nations make no more sense than barriers between states. The weaker these barriers become – the more freely we can pass between them – the better off we are, provided that certain conditions are met. The better the job we do at creating the circumstances where barriers are unnecessary, the more freedom we all have, and the better off we are as a result.

One of the conditions that we should meet is to reject the idea that we must fear the person from Mexico or from China or from India – that we must fear the possibility that they could take our jobs and ruin our livelihoods. To be honest, I am more likely to lose my job to somebody from California or New York, then to somebody from Chile or New Guinea.

However, I am not impoverished by the fact that they can come here and take my job without barriers between us – because I can go there and take their job as well. The free flow of people across state borders gives all of us more options – both within our own states, and in other states.

It’s also the case that the open borders mean that any employer in Colorado is free to pick up and move out to some other state – some place where wages or taxes are low. Yet, I do not seem to be suffering as a result. Instead, just as some industries can leave if they want, others are free to move in.

The result has not been the ‘race to the bottom’ that we have been taught to fear. It is not the case that the poorest states have pulled the rest of the states down to their level. Instead, we have all benefitted. Our standard of living can only be explained in terms of open borders wealthier states pulling the poorer states up to their level. The result has been a country where the standard of living (at the state level) is quite uniform across the country.

This is what good people have reason to hope for on an international level – wealthier countries pulling the poorer countries up to their level, and prospering together as the American states have done.

This is, as I said, a vision of the future. It will not suddenly spring into existence tomorrow – entirely or in part. So, objections to the thesis that these changes ought to be adopted immediately are moot. ‘Ought’ implies ‘can’, and the only thing that can be done in this case is to work towards such a goal, one step at a time.

And the first step is simply to realize that we go a lot further when we try to help each other and value each other’s success, then we go when we are struggling to find new and creative ways to get in each other’s way and dragging each other down.

I will not live to see the day. Still, hope that some future generation will enjoy the freedom to move among countries and to freely find a home for herself wherever she is most likely to find happiness. If such a future should come to pass, then I regret the fact that I must miss it.

China

I watched the opening ceremony to the Olympics over the weekend, and I have been favorably impressed.

I have actually been quite interested in events in China for a while now, and have followed their progress over the last few years more closely than that of any country other than the United States.

There is a reason for this.

Assume that China’s economy continues to grow to the point that its per-capita wealth (its standard of living – according to one measure) is equal to that of the United States. Currently, China has between 4 and 5 times the population of the United States. This means that China would then have 4 or 5 times the economic power of the United States.

What would it be like to live in a country that, on the world stage, would be a bit player – a country that had so little economic power that it could be conveniently ignored?

If China were to become that powerful, then it would effectively control the world economy. Businesses would learn to focus their attention on satisfying the Chinsese cutomers – because that is where the money is. Americans would have to buy whatever the Chinese bought – because the Chinese would determine what is available to sell.

There are a couple of areas in which we can see this type of dynamic at work. One of which is in the manufacture of text books for public schools.

California and Texas have a policy of purchasing a common textbook across the whole state. The size of their purchase gives them economic power, which gives them the ability to dictate terms to potential suppliers. If they do not like the deal that a particular customer is offering, then they take their business elsewhere. It makes good economic sense for the state of Texas to do this. They can negotiate a far better price for text books than they could as several small and independent districts.

In Texas, some factions have realized that this economic power also comes with a power to indoctrinate. They want to dictate what children are taught in the public schools – particularly in the field of biology (creationism), but also in other classes such as history, civics, and social science. They aim to win seats in government where they judge books, in part, on whether they have the ‘right content’.

The result is that these factions ultimately end up having the power to determine what text books are available across the whole country. Manufacturers who are aiming to capture the Texas market write their text book so as to win favor in the face of their political and economic biases. When the people of Massachusetts and Oregon go to buy textbooks, they find that the books available have been written to meet the Texas standards.

Currently, in the world economy, America plays the role of Texas. However, if things continue going the way they have been, we can expect a day when China plays the role of Texas in the world economy, and the United States plays the role of New York or Pennsylvania . . . powerful, but not dominant.

Another area where we see this effect is in retail and manufacturing. Manufacturers today know that if they want to sell product, they need to get that product onto the shelves at Wal-Mart. In many cases, if Wal-Mart shuts them out, then they have an option of either accepting their small stature as a local company, or go out of business entirely.

Wal-Mart knows this, too. So, Wal-Mart goes to potential suppliers and dictates what the company must do in order to get their product on Wal-Mart shelves. Everything that a manufacturer does – from the size and shape of the package to how it handles employee relationships – is dictated by Wal-Mart, to the degree that Wal-Mart chooses to do so.

When Wal-Mart talks about how it is rolling back prices, sometimes what they are talking about is their success at getting some manufacturer to lay-off or cut benefits to employees so that they can supply the same product to Wal-Mart at a lower price.

Every other company that the manufacturer sells to, then, has no option but to purchase the product that has been designed to meet the Wal-Mart standards. Once the manufacturer has tooled its manufacturing center to meet Wal-Mart’s standards, there is often little reason to build a second system that meets different standards.

So, we can expect that as the Chinese economy grows – assuming that its society does not implode, that we might find ourselves where the world economy is geared to meet Chinese tastes. Even our own businesses, in such a world, would be geared to please the Chinese market, because American businesses will recognize that there is far more money to be had manufacturing things for sale in China, then there would be in manufacturing things for sale in the United States.

Is this frightening?

It should not be. For decades now, the world has lived in the shadow of the United States. If it is so horrible to live in a world where one is not in the country that is at the center of the economic universe, then 96 percent of the people are living a horrible existence – including people in countries like Belgium and New Zealand – countries whose economies are far too weak to dictate anything on the universal economic stage.

Ultimately, we might find ourselves in a world where the United States controls about 4% of the world economy, uses 4% of the world’s energy, and has 4% of the world’s military power under its control. All of this corresponding to the fact that we have 4% of the world’s population.

If (when) that day comes, how would we want the economic (and military) powerhouses of the world to treat us? What rules and principles are we going to want them to adopt towards smaller and economically and militarily weaker countries?

Whatever the answer to that question is, that is how we should start treating other countries today. Those are the standards that we should adopt now so that, if (when) we are no longer the most economically and militarily powerful country on the planet, we are living with economic and military powerhouses that have internalized the principles that we have helped to teach.

This is, in fact, the most frightening prospect. It is that other countries will pass us in economic and political power, and use that power in pretty much the same way we have used it – particularly in the last 8 years.

It may be wise for America to pay attention to setting a standard for how larger overall economies treat smaller overall economies. It will not be that America is impoverished, with lower standards of living than China. It is only that China, even with half of the standard of living as the United States, will still have over twice the overall economic (and military) power as America.

Morality and the Absence of Free Will

As I mentioned in my last post, I am writing about the relationship between Desire Utilitarianism on the one hand, and egoism and free will on the other.

In my last post, I explained how desire fulfillment theory is not compatible with egoism. Desire fulfillment theory allows us to have a variety of different types of desires. This includes caring about the welfare of other people, and wanting to see them better off – or having an aversion to the suffering of others.

Still, the idea that each person acts to fulfill the most and strongest of his or her own desires leaves little room for free will. Our actions are determined, on this model, by the combination of an agent’s beliefs and desires.

It’s true – there ain’t no such thing as a free will.

Desire utilitarianism is not only compatible with determinism, it requires determinism. It requires the assumption that our actions are caused by our beliefs and desires, and the assumption that are desires can be molded, at least in part, by the environment. The parts of the environment that are particularly relevant are social forces – praise, condemnation, reward, and punishment.

If something like contra-causal free will actually exists, I would not know what to do with it. This force that allows a person to violate the laws of cause and effect simply by ‘willing’ something to happen – it is so bizarre that I do not even know how to make sense of it, let alone work it into a theory of ethics.

As one of the anonymous member of the audience put it:

How is a moral system not useless in determinism? If I can't make a choice between alternatives then how can I be held responsible for my actions?

You can be held responsible for your actions simply because you are responsible for those actions – or, more precisely, your desires are responsible for those actions.

I have often heard the claim that the only way praise or condemnation can make sense is if the person praised or condemned has free will. Without free will, praise or condemnation would not be legitimate.

However, one of the questions that I have had for quite some time is this: How is it the case that the existence of free will makes condemnation and punishment the appropriate response to wrong action, and makes praise and reward the appropriate response to virtuous action? Why is it not the case that the appropriate reaction to wrong action is to run around in a circle clockwise, and the appropriate response to right action is to run around in a circle counter-clockwise?

Desire utilitarianism has an answer to these questions. Praise and condemnation have the effect of molding desires. A wrong action indicates that a person has bad desires – desires that people generally have reason to inhibit. Condemnation is a tool for inhibiting bad desires. So, the appropriate response to a sign that a person has bad desires is condemnation.

However, the claim is that free will is necessary before we can legitimately ‘blame’ somebody and impose condemnation or punishment.

Why is this? What is the relationship between free will and condemnation?

There is a sense, when we blame somebody, that it must have been the case that he ‘could have done otherwise’. In fact, whenever we condemn somebody for doing the wrong thing we can identify a right thing that the agent ‘should have done’ instead.

However, desire utilitarianism has a place for this kind of language. In order for condemnation to be legitimate, it must be the case that the agent ‘could have done otherwise’ in the sense that, if he had a different set of desires, he would have done otherwise. The condemnation is intended to help the agent get the correct desires.

More importantly, condemnation is meant to help others acquire the right desires. We do not have to be punished ourselves for wrongdoing in order to acquire an aversion. We only need to experience the hostility that people have for those who would commit murder. In this way, many of us acquired an aversion to the groundless killing of other people without ever having been condemned for killing, or praised for deciding not to kill. We learn these rules vicariously, through the experiences of others.

Those ‘others’ do not even have to be real. They can be characters in a story. Or they can be expressions of wrongdoing leveled at purely hypothetical wrongdoers – expressions of the level of condemnation that a person would receive if he were ever to be caught doing such a thing.

Let’s look at another part of Anonymous’ response.

Even if we accept your ideas on controlling desires through praise, condemnation, and punishment isn't it thus useless to even discuss the subject since it will occur regardless in a determined world?

Computers have shown us how choice can be relevant even in a determined system.

A chess-playing computer goes thorough a set of possible moves, measuring the outcome of each option, and then deciding on the outcome with the highest value. It evaluates the different moves available to it as if each move were a genuine possibility. It evaluates KP2-KP4 vs QP2-QP4 as if it really does have the power to move either piece – as if the move it ends up making actually does depend on the calculations it makes weighing different options.

As the computer goes through its calculations, both options are available to it. The move that results is not determined independent of the weighing of options on the part of the machine. It is an outcome of the completely determined act of weighing consequences and going with the option that has the highest value.

It makes no sense to say that the computer need not go through these calculations – those in which it seems to ‘assume’ that all legal options are actually available to it, since its final outcome is determined. It is determined by the process of going through and evaluating options.

Since humans also go through and evaluate options, and select the option that has the highest value (fulfills the most and strongest of the agent’s desires given his beliefs), we can influence the decisions that a human makes by influencing the process it goes through in making those decisions. We can alter the value that humans give to different outcomes, by strengthening the desires for some outcomes, and programming them with aversions to other outcomes.

Yet, in all of this, the fact that humans go through a decision-making process, and it decides on its actions by processes that can be influenced through social conditioning is vital.

Morality is not only possible in the absence of free will. In fact, morality requires the absence of free will.

Desire Utilitarianism vs. Egoism

From a wide variety of independent sources in the past few weeks I have been questioned on whether I am an egoist, and of the role of free will in desire utilitarianism.

Both questions stem from the proposition

Each person always acts so as to fulfill the most and strongest of his desires, given his beliefs.

I have also used the formula

(Beliefs + Desires) -> Intention -> Intentional action

Many people interpret this as being an affirmation of egoism, "Each person is only out for himself. It is only 'my desires' that matter and genuine altruism is not possible."

It also suggests that behavior is determined. The statement does not give any role to free will; it is not listed as one of the causes of intentional action.

The short answer is: Egoism is false, and there is no free will.

Egoism is false

Desires are propositional attitudes. They are expressed in the form, "Agent desires that P" where P is any proposition. P might be, "I am having sex with Sam" or "I am eating a chocolate cup cake" or "my child is happy" or "nobody on the planet is in pain" or "I have served God." Any proposition, true or false, can become the object of a desire.

Selfishness (or self-interest) and altruism, are two sets of desires. Both of them are possible. The difference between them is that, for selfish desires, the proposition P meets two criteria.

(1) P refers back to the speaker – or, in other words, it contains the word ‘I’ or ‘me’.

(2) P identifies a state in which the desires of the object of reference (‘I’ or ‘me’) are fulfilled.

The proposition P, when we are talking about altruistic or other-regarding desires, differs from self-interested desires in that the self is not the object of the desire. For self-interested desires, the proposition P:

(1) P refers to somebody other than the speaker (e.g., you, Jim, children, God).

(2) P identifies a state in which the desires of the object of reference (e.g., you, Jim, children, God) are being fulfilled.

Other Types of Desires

There are mixed desires – desires that take others as an object, but others that have a certain relationship to the self. These can be desires for the well-being of 'my child' or 'my spouse' or 'my pet snake, Reggie'.

Yes, it is possible for the 'other' in an altruistic desire to be an animal.

This system also leaves room for self-destructive desires. These are desires that take the self as an object, but seeks to thwart the desires of the object.

It also allows for the possibility of hate and sadism – desires that take others as an object, but they are desires that the desires of the other are being thwarted.

Ownership of Actions

The statement that everybody acts so as to fulfill his or her desires is not egoism. It is a statement about what is required in order to call an action ‘my action’. If an intentional action does not spring from my beliefs and my desires, then it is not my action. It belongs to the person whose beliefs and desires give rise to it.

Assume that Max the Mad Scientist invents a gadget for controlling my body. He sits back in his remote control and directs my body into a bank where it pulls a gun, robs the bank, and runs off with the loot. Those were not my actions. I am not the person who robbed the bank. Max robbed the bank, using my body as a tool. An action belongs to the person whose beliefs and desires were the proximate cause of the action. My actions are caused by my desires, and your actions are caused by your desires.

Debating Egoists

When you debate an egoist, that debate will quite often go as follows.

(1) The egoism will assert that everybody is selfish.

(2) Upon being challenged, the egoist will retreat to the desire fulfillment theory that I gave above, arguing that each person acts so as to fulfill his desires.

(3) When the egoist’s opponent has exhausted himself against the walls of these fortress and leaves, the egoists then asserts that he has successfully defended egoism.

This standard practice comes from the power of equivocating between egoism (everybody desires only his or her own benefit) from desire fulfillment theory (everybody acts on his or her desires).

Desiring that Ones Desires are Fulfilled

Part of the confusion that leads people to think that desire fulfillment theory is egoistic is that they inject something into the theory that the theory does not say.

Assume that an agent desires that P, where P = "my child is healthy and happy." The egoist interpretation of this actually asserts that the agent has two desires. He has a desire that his child is healthy and happy, plus he has a desire that his desire that his child is healthy and happy is fulfilled. It is this second desire – the desire that the first desire is fulfilled – that is supposed to motivate the agent’s action.

If this were true, then it would be the case that everybody is selfish in the egoist sense of the term. However, we co not need this second desire.

Asserting that this second desire exists is like saying that the motion of objects on the surface of a planet is governed by two forces. There is the force of gravity that attracts objects towards the center of the planet. Plus there is the force of meta-gravity that says that the force of gravity must be obeyed. Furthermore, the force of gravity is inert, and it is the force of meta-gravity that actually causes things to fall.

The theory does not demand that there is a 'desire that the most and strongest of our desires are fulfilled' Each desire that P1, desire that P2, desire that P3, etc., provides its own motivation for the agent to realize a state of affairs in which P1, P2, and P3 are true. Sometimes these desires conflict – you can fulfill desire P1, or P2, but not both. In these cases, the strongest desire will win. Or, perhaps, even though the desire for P1 is stronger than the desire for P2, there is a second desire that P3 where the fulfillment of P2 and P3 is stronger than the desire for the fulfillment of P1.

All of this, again, suggests that we are not acting according to any type of free will. Our actions are determined by the most and strongest of our desires, given our beliefs.

Which is true.

But if it is true, then how can we blame people for actions that they have taken when these forces of nature left them with no other option?

That will be the subject of tomorrow’s posting.

Elements of a Just Trial

Yesterday, a military court convicted Salim Ahmed Hamdan of supporting terrorism. Hamdan was allegedly Osama bin Laden’s driver and bodyguard. Of course, it takes more than being a driver and body guard to be guilty of supporting terrorism. The individual has to know something about the fact that the passenger and person guarded is associated with terrorism. Which, in this case, is probably true.

However, Republican Presidential Candidate John McCain’s comment about the verdict is patently absurd.

Sen. John McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, said the split verdict proved that the tribunal was balanced.

A split verdit proves that the tribunal was balanced?

Unfortuantely, he was not alone in his idiocy.

Army Col. Lawrence Morris, the chief prosecutor, said that he was "wholly satisfied" with the verdict and that it "validated in its essence" the fairness and openness of the tribunal. "Hamdan's conviction on some but not all counts should dispel any speculation that this was a kangaroo court," said Jeff Addicott, director of the Center for Terrorism Law at St. Mary's University in San Antonio.

These are the words of people who have become psychologically invested in this process and who have lost all concern for reliable evidence as to whether they are doing a good or bad job. They are looking for excuses to pass something they support off as just, rather than looking to answer the question of whether justice is or is not served as a matter of fact.

And, what? If Hamdan had been found guilty of 7 counts and innocent of 3, that this would have proved that the tribunal was slightly imbalanced? On this logic, what would a verdict of 0 out of 10, or 10 out of 10, have told us about the degree of balance in the system?

The percentage of guilty verdicts to innocent verdicts has absolutely nothing to tell us about how fair the system is. The only relevant ratio that we should be looking it is the ratio between convictions and actual guilt. Better systems give us a higher ratio of convictions to guilt, while lower quality systems suffer the problem of declaring innocent people guilty – and of declaring guilty people innocent.

Yes, even the verdict of ‘innocent’ can be a sign of problems for any system of justice – if it is unable to convict people who are actually guilty of a crime.

All judicial systems will fail this measure of quality to some extent. A perfect judicial system is an ideal – a goal that we will never reach, but which we can always struggle to get closer to. On this standard, the American judicial system clearly needs some work – because it has an annoying habit of condemning innocent people to imprisonment and death, and an annoying habit of allowing innocent people to go free.

Throughout the debate over Guantanamo Bay, enemy combatants, and military tribunals, I have heard the exclamation, “These people are terrorists. It is absurd for you to argue for giving rights to terrorists.”

However, the reason to argue for a fair trial is not to argue for giving rights to terrorists. The right to a fair trial is perfectly compatible with the claim that terrorists have no rights. The problem is that we need to separate the terrorists who have no rights from innocent people who do have rights. For that purpose, we have a trial. At the trial, we present the evidence, and we reach a verdict, and divide the people who come to trial between ‘guilty’ who have no rights, and ‘innocent’ who do have rights.

Okay, technically, even those who are convicted have certain rights. However, those other rights that even guilty people retain are not the rights we are concerned about here. For the purposes of this essay, we are talking about the rights that people have not to be treated as if they are guilty of a crime. The purpose of the trial is to separate the innocent, who still have rights not to be treated as if they are guilty, from the guilty (who have no such rights).

After the trial, we can say to the guilty, “You are terrorists. You have no rights.” However, to make that claim before the trial is to make an assumption which, all too often, is not true.

The purpose of a trial is not to protect the guilty. Its purpose is to protect you and me . . . to protect the innocent . . . to protect those of us who are not terrorists by saying, “Do not lump me in with those who have no rights unless and until you can provide proof that I am a member of that group.”

All of us have good reason to demand that our accusers provide evidence of our guilt – and to demand that they live by the principle, “In the absence of evidence, you are to assume that we are innocent. It is your job to prove my guilt. It is not my job to prove that I am innocent.”

This is the standards by which the elements of a trial are to be evaluated. What effect will those elements have in the degree to which the system will accurately separate out the guilty from the innocent.

For example, how often, in your life, has somebody taken something that you did and misinterpreted it – accusing you of doing something wrong when, in fact, there was a perfectly good explanation for what you did? Convicting people on secret evidence increases the chance that the innocent will be declared guilty because it deprives the innocent of the ability to give a reasonable explanation for what looks like evidence of guilt.

For another example, it is well known that prisoners put under duress will tell their captors whatever those captors want to hear. Their goal is not truth. Their goal is to end the torture. If truth will do the job, then what they say will not be true. However, it is very seldom the case that the people who are torturing a prisoner will be persuaded by the truth if the truth is “I am innocent.” If they were willing to accept such a claim, the accused would not have been tortured to start with. If the statement “I am innocent” did not prevent the torture, it certainly is not going to stop the torture, even if it is true.

Even where the torturers demand that the prisoner provide evidence that can be proved, we still have a problem with the way that the evidence is interpreted. The revolutionary writings and web surfings of the accused may have more to do with research being done for a paper on terrorism than with actual sympathy for their cause, and even statements of endorsement could have more to do with earning trust than offering support.

Any of us could ‘prove’ ourselves guilty of a hundred different crimes, given enough incentive.

We can trust that these procedures will do nothing to help us to sort the innocent from the guilty. Since a system of justice exists to sort the innocent from the guilty, these items have no place in a system of justice. In fact, the fact that they create obstacles to the task of sorting innocent from guilty are why they deserve to be classified as unjust – as contrary to justice.

McCain does not seem to understand this. However, the most serious problem ith McCain’s remark is that his evidence is entirely divorced from his conclusion. It is like having somebody say, “It’s Tuesday; therefore, it must be the case that plants produce energy by a process that involves taking in carbon dioxide and releasing oxygen.”

This guy wants to be President, and he cannot tell that the ratio of guilty verdicts to innocent verdicts have nothing to do with whether a court system is fair? How can he be expected to promote justice if he does not know what justice is? Or he knows but pretends ignorance when he sees a chance that injustice might help him get elected.

On Pluto, Planets, and Goodness

It seems that astronomers are still debating the definition of a planet.

I love this debate because it illustrates a point that I have been trying to make in the field of ethics for years.

One argument that I have confronted is the claim that since ethicists disagree on the definition of ‘good’, and there seems to be no experiment that one can perform to determine which definition is correct, that this implies that all of ethics is subjective and that there are no objectively right answers.

Now, we have astronomers who disagree on the definition of ‘planet’, and there seems to be no experiment that one can perform to determine which definition is correct. However, this does not imply that all of astronomy is subjective and that there are no right answers. In fact, this dispute does not threaten the objectivity of astronomy at all.

Once you can understand how astronomers can disagree on the definition of ‘planet’ without threatening the objectivity of astronomy, you can understand how ethicists can disagree over the definition of ‘good’ without threatening the objectivity of ethics.

The reason that this is possible is because what we call Pluto (for example) has no bearing on its mass, its shape, its surface features, its temperature its chemical composition, its orbital properties, and the like. What we call something has no relevance to the question of what its properties are.

It is also the case that what we call ‘good’ has no bearing on its properties and relationships. You can call something ‘good’ if you want to, but it does not cause reasons-for-action to bring about that thing to suddenly spring into existence. And taking away the term ‘good’ does not cause reasons for action to suddenly evaporate. Those reasons for action either exist or they do not exist – quite independent of what we claim to be true about their existence.

Astronomy is objective in spite of the subjective definition of ‘planet’ because Pluto’s properties do not depend on what we call it. Ethics is objective in spite of the subjective definition of ‘good’ because the relationships between states of affairs and reasons for action that exist do not depend on what we call them.

I am entertained by some of the ‘arguments’ that astronomers are using in this dispute over the definition of ‘planet’.

Many planet scientists were disgruntled over the 2006 IAU decision, which they said involved a vote of just 424 astronomers out of some 10,000 professional astronomers around the globe. The most recent decision, to categorize Pluto and such as plutoids, further ticked off many astronomers, who felt the term was developed behind closed doors.

In science, certainly, you do not have worries about whether the Theory of Relativity was decided on by a vote of 424 out of 10,000 physicists, or object to the Theory of Evolution on the grounds that it was developed ‘behind closed doors’. These types of claims simply are not relevant to the truth of scientific theories. These are the marks of people having to deal with subjective definitions.

Yet, the people involved in this debate can leave their office, go back to their telescopes and rock samples, and continue to engage in the wholly objective study of planets.

As well they should.

"We're going to do something that the IAU did not, which is discuss what we know about planetary bodies in the solar system and around other stars, and discuss the value of different ways of defining objects as planets and what that means," said Mark V. Sykes, director of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Ariz. When the dust settles, those involved hope a consensus will stand, a classification scheme for all objects orbiting a star.

And what fact about planetary bodies are we going to look at to determine whether a planet substantially clears its orbit of other objects or not? Where, in the spectral analysis of a heavenly body do we read off the proof that being round due to one’s own gravity and orbiting a star is sufficient reason to call something a planet? Where are they going to find the proof that one definition is correct, and the other is not?

They are not going to find their proof in the same types of evidence that they use to find proof as to the body’s size, or surface features, or temperature. They’re going to discover that they are locked in a debate whose ultimately answer is not going to be dug out of their piles of data. Their ultimate answer depends on the sentiments and preferences of individual astronomers. Their ultimate answer is wholly subjective.

Yet, the objectivity of astronomy survives all of this. And the objectivity survives the subjective definition of ‘good’ just as easily.

What is really happening when a person assigns the term ‘good’ to some state of affairs is that he is trying to get people to create or preserve that state of affairs. He wants them to believe that there are reasons for action for bringing about such a state. However, his ambition to give others this belief does not make the belief true.

We have no parallel in the realm of planets. The types of motives that astronomers might have for pushing a particular definition of ‘planet’ would have to do with sentimental value, or with the possibility that one can get more funding (and prestige) studying something called a planet than by studying something of less significance. However, the definition of ‘planet’ cannot be used to manipulate others the way that a definition of ‘good’ can, so we get a lot less of this from astronomers (or non-astronomers).

The assignment of ‘good’ for these reasons can actually be true or false. If we define S as a state that there exists reasons to bring about or preserve, we should not allow ourselves to be fooled into thinking that we cannot question the claim. We should be wary of the fact that you cannot define reasons for action into existence any more than you can define God or angels or a Pluto that is 8000 km in diameter into existence.

If somebody tries to define reasons for action into existence, we have no obligation to take his definition of ‘good’ at face value. We are perfectly free to say to him, “Either admit that you are attempting to use ‘good’ in a way that has nothing to do with reasons for action, or admit that your use of the term ‘good’ in this instance is flawed since it claims the existence of reasons for action that do not, in fact, exist.”

If ever you should find yourself in a debate with somebody over the objectivity of value, and he claims, “You can’t prove that your definition of ‘good’ is any better than any others,” remind them of Pluto and the definition of a planet. It’s true, when it comes to definitions, that we cannot prove that one definition is intrinsically correct and that all others are inherently wrong. But that is just a fact about the subjectivity of language. It has nothing to do with the objectivity of ethics. The subjectivity of definitions is perfectly compatible with the objectivity of the subject that the words are used in.

Ask any astronomer.

Perjury, Libel, and Desecration

It is old news now that the Confraternity of Catholic Clergy has condemned PZ Myers’ act of desecrating a Eucharist, declaring:

Attacking the most sacred elements of a religion is not free speech anymore than would be perjury in a court or libel in a newspaper.

They added:

Lies and hate speech which incite contempt or violence are not protected under the law. Hence, inscribing Swastikas on Jewish synagogues or publicly burning copies of the Christian Bible or the Muslim Koran, especially by a faculty member of a public university, are just as heinous and just as unconstitutional. Individual freedoms are limited by the boundaries created by the inalienable rights of others. The freedom of religion means that no one has the right to attack, malign or grossly offend a faith tradition they personally do not have membership or ascribe allegiance.

Moral Authority

The Catholic Church considers itself to be qualified to determine the correct answer to all questions of morality for all people regardless of their religious beliefs. Their argument is that morality cannot be a matter of opinion. There is a single moral truth, and that single moral truth must be the truth of the Catholic faith. Anybody who disagrees with Catholic morality must be mistaken.

I also hold that there are moral facts. However, just as with scientific facts, any one of us can be mistaken. When I present a moral argument I present it in the sense that, "I hold that the evidence supports M. However, I may be wrong. M is not to be taken as a matter of faith, and certainly not based on decree. Where evidence supports a contrary view, please, go with the evidence."

The belief that there are moral facts does not justify the arrogance of claiming that the speaker is the indisputable master of those facts.

The statement above gives us strong reason to question the degree to which the Confraternity of Catholic Clergy has a grasp of the moral facts.

Free Speech

Let’s start with the concept of 'free speech'. Free speech is not a right to immunity from criticism. It is quite the opposite. The very idea of the right to freedom of speech is a right to criticize – the right to say, "You are wrong," without fear of being imprisoned or killed as a result. It tells people that they must endure the criticism of others and respond with, at worst, condemnation and private actions, but never with violence.

PZ Myers sought to communicate the idea that the consecrated Eucharist was "just a cracker." This he did by getting a consecrated Eucharist and treating it like one would treat a common cracker. This communicates the idea he wanted to communicate far better than mere words could have done. We see proof of this in the reaction that people had to his actions. If the words had the same meaning or significance as the act, then the words alone would have generated the same response. The fact that the act generated a stronger response proves that the act had meaning or significance that words alone lacked. Banning the act means banning Myers from communicating what he sought to communicate.

As regular readers know, I have raised objections to the act of stealing a consecrated communion wafer. However, the issue of theft is quite distinct from the issue of desecration. I have not disputed the claim that if Myers were to acquire a consecrated Eucharist legitimately (without fraud or stealth or force), that this would then become his cracker, and he may do with it as he pleases. He would then be within his rights to do to it what he could legitimately do to any cracker, including use it to communicate the absurdity of believing that the cracker is the body of Christ.

Nowhere in Myers' act or his words did he advocate that violence be used against Catholics. There is a clear difference between saying, "Your beliefs are laughably absurd" and "You should be the victim of violence." Even on the issue of theft, the argument has not been that Catholics deserve to have their property stolen. The argument has been that the act of acquiring a Eucharist is not theft since the Church is simply giving them away anyway.

However, the Confraternity is asserting that the use of violence against its critics is perfectly legitimate.

This part is important. The Confraternity is claiming that, just as it is legitimate to use violence against those who commit perjury or libel, the state has the right – indeed the duty, they argue – to use violence against those who would dare assert through actions like those of Myers that the communion cracker is just a cracker. Myers makes no call for the use of violence. The Confraternity responds with a call to bring violence to bear.

Most of those who have written on this topic have ignored or underplayed this fact. They have written about abstract rights to freedom of religion and freedom of speech without mentioning what is involved in denying those rights.

However, this needs emphasis because it is crucial to understanding the (im)moral stand that the Confraternity has taken. They are calling upon the government to bring violence to bear against its critics. Specifically, they argue that the government is not protecting freedom of religion unless the government is making threats to respond with violence against any who would challenge the Church’s most sacred beliefs.

It is true that the state may threaten violence against any who they catch committing perjury or libel. Perjury is an act of deliberately making a false statement under oath – a statement that the agent knew at the time was false. Libel involves either knowingly or recklessly making false statements about an individual or group that does them material harm. An individual can defend himself from either one of these accusations by showing that the statement was true or that the agent had good reason to believe what they said.

Now, when it comes to people making negligently or deliberately false statements that cast whole groups of individuals in a negative light – harming their interests, subjecting them to state-run violence, and putting them at risk of private harms – the Catholic Church has a very poor track record. Even today, it is involved in campaigns that are harmful to the interests of homosexuals, women in the early portion of their pregnancy, atheists and agnostics, and others. And they do so on the bases of absurd and entirely unfounded beliefs.

Yet, even here . . . even where we can identify specific groups of individuals suffering real-world harms as a result of the carelessly formed beliefs of others . . . we have many and strong reasons to stop short of calling for the use of violence those who promote these prejudices. When people come to reject these ideas, it is far better that they come to reject these ideas by a judicious application of reason than that they be reject them as a result of coercion. The former allows the individuals to understand why the ideas deserve to be rejected, allowing them to apply the same principles to other ideas that also deserve to be rejected. The latter leaves individuals wallowing in ignorance, perhaps embracing the truth, but void of understanding.

So, even though the Catholic Church promotes bigotry that does real-world harm to real-world people, it is still best that they be granted the freedom of speech, and that the reaction to their bigotry be limited to words and private (peaceful) action. However, this is only possible as long as the critics of Catholic bigotries are permitted to respond to Catholic beliefs with words and private action. When those are prohibited, few options remain.

Unfortunately, the Catholic Church has a long and disgraceful history of calling upon the state to violence to its critics. This long and colorful history is why wise people a few hundred years ago argued that this must end – that the Church shall be prohibited from using the violence of the state to secure its ends and silence its critics, through a mechanism that we know as the First Amendment. Those who passed this Amendment wisely sought to tell the religious institutions of this country, “From now on you are limited to your means of persuasion to words and private actions. You are hereby barred from using the violence of the state.”

Yet, as the Confraternity of Catholic Clergy has now informed us, the Church finds old habits very hard to break.

The Catholic Church tells us that it is the top authority when it comes to all things moral. It would do a better job of making its case if its members could actually tell the difference between right and wrong. When it summons up traditional practices of the Church calling upon the state to violence against its critics, it tells us that it does not have the understanding of moral facts that it claims to have. Indeed, its understanding of its moral limits is really quite poor.

Morality: Fact or Fiction

In my writings I continually use the slogan:

There is no fact/value distinction. There is only a fact/fiction distinction. Value (including moral value) either belongs to the realm of fact or it belongs to the realm of fiction.

Like all slogans of this type, it is an oversimplification. It oversimplifies some things to the point that it can even be said to be wrong. So, I want to state the truth contained in this slogan a bit more precisely. In doing so, I will also make clear that for desire utilitarianism, it does not matter which option you pick. Desire utilitarianism survives even if we were to conclude that morality itself belongs to the realm of fiction.

So, let’s start to clarify the slogan above.

Mutually Exclusive Facts and Values

First, there certainly is a fact/value distinction. The proposition “The car is red” declares a fact about the car. However, it does not express any value. It does not say whether the fact that the car is red is good or bad. If you can have facts without values, then there must be a distinction between facts and values.

But what type of distinction is it?

The slogan above denies a particular type of distinction – the type that says that ‘facts’ and ‘values’ are mutually exclusive categories. It says that if something is a “fact” then it cannot be a “value”, and if something expresses a “value” then it cannot express a “fact”.

So, a more precise version of the slogan above would say, “There is no mutually exclusive fact/value distinction.”

Instead, the distinction between facts and values is like the distinction between rocks and granite. There are a lot of rocks that are not granite (there are a lot of facts that are not values), but granite is a rock (values are facts). There is no rock/granite distinction that puts the realm of granite outside of the realm of rocks. There is no fact/value distinction that puts values outside of the realm of facts.

Half Truths

Second, the idea that statements can be pigeon holed precisely either as fact or as fiction is false. Many statements are a little bit of both.

For example, let’s say that somebody asks you what time it is. You look at your watch. It says 7:58. So, you look at the person who make the request and answer, “It is 8:00.” The answer is wrong – the statement is false. Yet, in fact, the answer right. We cannot give the precise time when we tell people what time it is. That level of precision is impossible. Therefore, cultural tradition says to give people the approximate time. The person who asks, “What time is it?” typically wants to know the approximate time. Answering that it is 8:00 does, in fact, answer the question asked. It is a true statement.

Unless, of course, we know that the person asking the question has a special reason to worry about hether it is precisely 8:00. In this case, the truthful answer to the question would be, “It’s 7:58.” Or, “You have a couple of minutes left.”

The claim that a moral statement either falls in the realm of fact, or it falls in the realm of fiction, is consistent with the fact that some moral statements might fall part way in between. They are close enough to the truth for all practical purposes, even if they are not precisely true. This is like the slogan that starts this posting – a slogan that is not strictly true, but hich is close enough is includes moral statements.

What the slogan at the start of this posting means to say is that there is no third way of being. Though some things might fit between the realm of fact and fiction, nothing falls outside of the continuum between fact and fiction. Value statements must fall somewhere on the line between facts and values. Value claims do not fall in a third distinct realm, independent of the continuum between fact and value.

The Insignificance of Moral Eliminativism

People are then free to argue whether moral claims belong closer to the side of fact, o closer to the realm of fiction. As far as desire utilitarianism is concerned, it doesn’t matter.

How can it not matter? Doesn’t desire utilitarianism say that there are moral facts?

It does, and it reduces moral facts to natural facts (relationships between states of affairs and desires).

However, let us say that we want to reserve the term ‘morality’ to refer to intrinsic goodness, or divine commands, or subjective truths. In these cases, the conclusion will be that morality does not exist (because none of these entities exist). So, in these cases, morality would be a fiction – a myth.

Yet, this would have no impact on desire utilitarian theory. The claims made within desire utilitarianism would still be true.

Beliefs and desires will continue to exist. We will continue to use them to explain observed phenomena in the real world – the intentional actions of intentional agents.

Beliefs and desires will still be propositional attitudes, where a ‘belief that P’ is an attitude that P is true in the world, whereby a ‘desire that P’ will still be a reason for action where making or keeping the proposition ‘P’ true.

People will still act so as to fulfill the most and strongest of their desires, given their beliefs. They will still seek to act to fulfill the most and strongest of their desires, where false beliefs will be a barrier to success.

Some of those desires will continue to be malleable. The agent seeking to fulfill the most and strongest of his own desires will generally continue to have reason to promote in others those desires that tend to fulfill other desires, and inhibit in others those desires that tend to thwart other desires.

There will continue to be desires that people generally will have many and strong reasons to promote or to inhibit.

They will still have reason to promote a desire for truth and an aversion to deception in others, since agents can expect to have more success fulfilling his own desires given his beliefs if he is surrounded by honest agents than if he is surrounded by dishonest agents. He will also be more likely to have a love of truth himself, since others have as much reason to give a love of honesty as he has for giving them a love of honestly.

He will still have reason to promote a desire on the part of others to obtain consent from those who will be affected by their actions, an aversion to taking property that belongs to others, an aversion to killing or inflicting pain on others (with some exceptions), an aversion to rape and the like.

The tools for promoting or inhibiting desires will continue to be positive and negative reinforcement, such as praise, condemnation, reward, and punishment. Reward and punishment will also continue to be ways of controlling people’s actions directly by adding on the fulfillment or the thwarting of desires.

We will still have room for a concept of negligence – of acting without a level of concern for the well-being of others or with a level of concern that was insufficiently strong to prevent the negligent action.

We will still have room for the concept of ‘mens rea’ – a reason to focus on the mental qualities that of the agent to determine if the agent had desires we have reason to promote or had desires we have reason to inhibit (and still have reason to promote or inhibit accordingly).

We will still have room for the moral concept of an excuse, which is a claim that allegedly breaks the inference from what appears to be an immoral act to the psychological states of the agent.

We will still have reason to promote in others an aversion to responding to words with violence (freedom of the speech and of the press). We will continue to have reasons to be averse to a government that can arbitrarily pick us up off the street and imprison us indefinitely – giving us reason instead to impose limits on this type of behavior.

All of these claims would still be true, even if morality did not exist.

Recap - Desire Utilitarianism

A couple of members of the studio audience made some comments recently that give me an opportunity to recap some of the central claims of desire utilitarianism. Since I put a lot of weight on that theory, I should take the time to explain it, from time to time, to new readers.

So, let me address those concerns.

Jimmy_D

That's an incoherent answer. A moral question is not one of fact. It's like asking "what color should we paint the car", instead.

First, the answer is obviously coherent, since you understood it. If it were truly inherent, you could not say that it was wrong. "2 + 2 = 5" is a perfectly coherent statement. It is because its meaning is so clear that we can be so certain that it is false.

Second, I disagree with your statement that a moral question is not one of fact.

Third, if moral statements are not matters of fact, then we should abandon them. There are two possible realms. There is the realm of fact, and there is the realm of fiction. If moral statements are not a part of the realm of facts, then they are a part of the realm of fiction and e should treat them as such. The idea that there is some 'third thing' - a realm other than fact and fiction - is false.

You claim to disbelieve in inherit value but your arguments rely on moral judgments being objective.

Moral statements are objective, but not intrinsic. They are relational properties.

Take the property of being '50 years old'. The statement that something is 50 years old is a scientifically objective statement. Yet, it does not describe an intrinsic property. It describes a relational property (a relationship between the age of the object and the number of times the Earth goes around the sun). Moral properties are objective relational properties.

Value statements relate states of affairs to desires. An object is good to the degree that it is such as to fulfill the desires in question. Moral properties are a species of value properties that relate desires to other desires. A malleable desire is good to the degree that it tends to fulfill other desires; bad to the degree that it tends to thwart other desires.

You asked whether I was a subjectivist, and I answered that this depended on what you meant by 'subjectivist'. I am a subjectivist in the sense that value depends on mental states (they are relationships between states of affairs and desires). However, I am an objectivist in the sense that beliefs and desires are real. And relationships between states of affairs and desires are real-world properties that we can discuss just like we can discuss the age of a rock or the distance between stars.

Moral properties exist only in regards to personal perspective, thus subjective.

You are merely making an assertion here. It is an assertion that has a great many problems. One of the worst problems is that is morality is something that we can make up as we go along, then that puts morality in the realm of fiction, and all statements in the realm of fiction are false.

Except that you consistently say desires that fulfill the desires of others are superior to other desires. So you are claiming that altruism is a higher moral value.

Not necessarily.

There is a difference between a desire that tends to fulfill other desires, and a desire that aims to fulfill other desires (altruism).

It may well be that the hard-core capitalists are right. It may be that greed or 'rational self-interest' in a system that protects property rights is a system that makes everybody better off (fulfills the most and strongest desires). In which case, this system would be good. It would be the system that people generally had the most and strongest reasons to promote (whether they knew it or not).

Now, when I call a state of affairs 'good' I simply mean that people have reason to bring that state of affairs about. The only reasons for action that exist are desires. (But desires do, in fact, exist.) A 'desire that P' is a reason to bring about a state of affairs in which 'P' is true. These relationships between states of affairs and desires exist in the real world. I do not make them up.

You cannot demonstrate moral principles or oughts the same way you can properties of nature. They are fundamentally dissimilar and none of your semantic tricks change this.

Again, this is a mere assertion. I have over 1000 blog postings where I do exactly what you say cannot be done. Now, some of my statements may be false. In fact, I often assert that these blog postings are guaranteed to contain at least one false statement. But the possibility of error does not prove that something is not objectively knowable. In fact, it assumes objectivity.

Fire is hot is an objective fact that can be determined regardless of beliefs or mental states.

Here, you are equivocating. I fully agree that moral values depend on mental states. But mental states are real. A person's mental states are as real as his blood pressure, his age, his height, his body temperature. All of these are scientifically knowable properties. His beliefs and desires are also scientifically knowable properties. Relationships between states of affairs and desires are scientifically knowable properties.

They are not a 'different kind of thing'.

Since we can study these relationships, claims that we make about them are objectively true or false. We should treat them as such.

Anonymous

You cannot claim that your ideas are as objective as scientific conclusions until you can show us the property of good and the property of bad under a microscope.

Well, I assume that 'under a microscope' is metaphorical. You can't get the property of being 50 years old under a microscope, but it is still an objective property.

But, yes, we can get moral properties 'under a microscope' as you say. Beliefs and desires exist as real-world. They are a part of the explanation of the movement of real-world objects through space (intentional actions, such as writing a post). We can study these entities like we study any entity we cannot see directly, by looking at their effects, and from the effects discovering facts about the things that bring about those effects (people's beliefs and desires).

Just like scientists do.

Just as we can study beliefs and desires, we can study relationships between other states of affairs to beliefs and desires. Those relationships, too, reflect scientifically objective claims about the real world. They are things about which we can be right, or we can be wrong.

You have found a system of moral appraisal but cannot use objective methods to compare it to other systems of moral appraisal.

Actually, yes I can.

I can compare them to religious systems because religious systems postulate entities that do not exist. Therefore, all religious systems can be thrown out.

I can compare them to systems that postulate some sort of intrinsic value, because intrinsic values do not exist. They can be thrown out.

I can compare them to dualist theories - theories that say that there are are two types of reality. These theories postulate separate and distinct realms of 'is' and 'ought' that are completely different from each other, but can somehow interact. I call this metaphysical nonsense. There is the realm of 'is', and whatever is not in the realm of 'is' belongs in ther realm of 'is not'.

'Should' and 'ought' have to do with reasons for action. Desires are the only reasons for action that exist (or, at least, the only ones we have discovered to date). So, a 'should' or 'ought' statement has to either relate the object of evaluation to real-world reasons for action (in which case they are objectively true), or they do not draw such a relationship (in which case they are objectively false).

This is especially true since you not only go beyond a non-cognitivist subjectivism (desires shaped by beliefs) to state a moral truth that desires which fulfill others are superior to other desires. Superior how? Show me how you come to this conclusion without using your own system's semantics as a basis.

Well, your demand that I cannot use my own system's semantics to explain the theory is something that no scientist could meet.

Try explaining evolution without speaking about genes, mutation, or natural selection?

Try explaining the heliocentric theory of the solar system without talking about stars and planets.

I will defend my theory using the same standards and procedures that scientists generally use to defend their theories. That does not include a prohibition on 'using your own system's semantics'.

Now, if you are going to recommend states of affairs, then you are going to have to talk about reasons for action that exist for realizing those states of affairs. It scarcely makes sense to recommend a state of affairs based on reasons for action that do not exist.

Desires are the only reasons for action that exist.

So, if you describe relationships between the objects of evaluation and desires you can make objectively true statements. Otherwise, your statements are objectively false.

Your idea of ethics begs too many questions and ignores too many meta-ethical problems. Too many holes to be taken seriously I'm afraid.

This is an amusing statement. I can tell how much time and effort you have put into studying my ideas, and yet you claim the expertise to claim to know what I have and have not ignored. You could not even put my ideas into your own words before criticizing them.

There's a book listed up there to the right, "A Better Place: Selected Essays in Desire Utilitarianism" that will tell you what I believe. And, if you do not want to buy the book, you can search for the phrase "desire utilitarianism" in this blog and find all sorts of postings that give the details to the theory.

The 'holes' that you have found are the holes you see in a straw man that is of your own construction. If you were to take your attention away from your straw man for a moment and look at the actual theory, I think you would not discover so many holes.

Though, I am more than happy to be proved wrong.

Ways of Knowing and Justified Harm

In an opinion piece in Salon, Karl Giberson wrote about What's Wrong with Science as Religion.. He spoke about ways of knowing that are outside of science.

When Salon interviewed me about my new book, "Saving Darwin," I suggested that science doesn't know everything, that there might be a reality beyond science, and that religion might be about God and not merely about the human quest for a nonexistent God.

Whenever I read a claim that there are special ways of knowing, I have a question that always comes crashing into the front of my consciousness.

A special way of knowing what?

Just take a look at the things that people claim to have a special way of knowing.

That it would be wrong for us to harvest the medical advances that could come from embryonic stem cell research.

That women must be covered from head to toe if they should ever go outside, can never travel without an escort (so they spend most of their life imprisoned in their home or under guard), are to be denied an education, and are to be subjected to rules that make decent medical care impossible.

That magical monkeys built a land bridge from India to Ceylon and, as a result, cutting a channel through this thin strip of land (to make trade more efficient) is prohibited.

That apostates should be put to death.

That homosexuals should be put to death.

That people who name a teddy bear Mohammed should be put to death.

That people who criticize religious beliefs should be put to death.

That atheists cannot be moral (or can be moral only insofar as they live under Christian domination) and that they are unfit for public office or positions of public trust.

That the last person you would want your child to marry was an atheist.

That we don’t have to worry about anything catastrophic happening to the whole Earth, because God would not allow it.

That we do not need to worry about the long-term consequences of our actions (such as a huge national debt, global warming, or overpopulation) because God is going to end the world in a few years anyway.

That you may kill or rape or otherwise do whatever harm pleases you, as long as you accept Jesus as your savior before death – while the atheist ho spent his life in service to others is doomed to everlasting damnation.

That children with simple diseases such as juvenile diabetes are to be prayed over rather than given medical treatment because what they are really suffering from is alienation from God.

That it is better to die than to have a blood transfusion.

That it is better that your child dies than that your child has a blood transfusion.

That intelligent design is a science.

That atheists and others not ‘under God’ are to be thought of as belonging to the same un-American, anti-patriotic family as those who do not support an indivisible nation, or those who do not support liberty and justice for all.

That it is permissible to put a sign on the money and in public buildings that tell the people of a nation, “If you do not trust in God, then you are not one of us.”

That the course of hurricanes and the success of terrorist attacks can be influenced by the number of times school children are compelled to pray in public schools.

That billions of dollars donated to a televangelist counts as charity.

That God gave the land of Israel to the Jews and it is perfectly within their rights – that it is indeed their duty – to restore their country to their biblical boundaries by whatever means necessary, including war.

That stealing a cracker is the same as kidnapping.

That it is necessary to discourage the use of condoms or other forms of birth control which, in turn, aids in the spread of disease, poverty, and death.

Giberson says that, "I worry about dogmatism and the kind of zealotry that motivates the faithful to blow themselves up, shoot abortion doctors and persecute homosexuals." However, if there is this special way of knowing out there, then on what grounds does he question others claims to have a special way of knowing that these are permissible - even obligatory - actions?

In making this list, I focused on the false beliefs that are still in play today, and which are currently causing people to act in ways that are harmful to their own interests or the interests of others.

I have ignored past religious beliefs such as the appropriateness of slavery, the divine right of kings, the economic backwardness of not charging interest, the subjugation of women, the need to free the holy lands from infidels, and the need to have only one religion in Europe and to do violence to all heretics.

I have also ignored absurd beliefs that people hold today that do not inspire people to behave in ways harmful to others. Even if we accept the premise that religion does some good and inspires people to act in ways that benefit others – it is still far better to have a religion that inspires people to produce these benefits without the harms than it is to have a religion that inspires benefits with harms.

I am also not going to deny that some atheists have absurd beliefs as well. In some cases, they are beliefs that also inspire them to act in ways harmful to the interests of others. However, it is not the case that the faults of some atheist imply that theists have the moral right to hold beliefs that inspire them to harm others. Instead, morality and reason tell us to hold the atheist with beliefs that render them a threat to others the same way that we should regard theists who have beliefs that make them a threat to others.

When it comes to beliefs that make a person a threat to the interests of others, those ‘others’ have the right to demand that people who would do them harm defend their reasons for doing so. The claim that the attacker has a “special way of knowing” that the harm he does is good and right and proper simply is not good enough.

Somebody comes at you and says that he is going to beat you to a bloody pulp with his club. When you demand that he justify his actions – that he explain why he is going to do this to you, he answers, “I have no reason that I can explain to you. I was out in nature and it just struck me, with a certainty that I cannot explain, that you are to be beaten to a bloody pulp. Do not ask me to explain it. This comes from a special way of knowing that transcends all reason.”

If the things that a person believes as a result of this ‘special way of knowing’ are harmless, then there is reason to leave the poor deluded individual alone. There are more important things to spend our time on. In fact, if the choice were to spend time in opposition to the harmless falsehoods of some theist, or the harmful falsehoods that have come to grip some group of atheists, then dealing with the atheists is far more important than dealing with the harmless theists.

There is no rule in nature that says, “Hey, by a wonderful coincidence, the things that we can know by a special way of knowing are things that do not make us a threat to others. While, things that would make us a threat to others are things that can be known by reason – things where we can meet the moral demand of those we would harm that we provide reasons.”

It is morality that says that we can afford the luxury of letting people hold beliefs without reason when those beliefs are harmless (or, perhaps, beneficial) to others. But it is also morality that demands, when one person wishes to engage in behavior that is harmful to the interests of others, that he provide us with a reason. “I have a special way of knowing that others should e harmed” is not good enough.

In the realm of epistemology (the study of knowledge) we have no reason to believe that the support for claims that put one at risk of acting in ways harmful to others are subject to a different set of rules as harmless or beneficial beliefs. We have good reason to expect people to provide reasons for those types of beliefs as well. We just have less of a reason to push the issue in those cases.