Corporate Feudalism

Recently, in a post on the flaws of socialism, I pointed

out that socialism responds too closely to changes in information.

See: The Three Flaws of Socialism

A member of the studio audience challenged me with the following:

Is that why trans-fats had been banned in several countries of the world long before US America would even admit they could be problem? Is that why the various bans on cigarette advertising and smoking in stipulated places was slow to occur in the US?

Part of the answer to this is that a portion of the American economy and its culture is neither capitalist nor socialist. It follows another set of terms that I identify with the label “corporate feudalism”.

I call it this because it is an ideology that divides the population into two groups – those who own businesses, and everybody else. It then grants to the former all sorts of legal rights (not moral rights) and privileges that neither capitalism nor socialism would permit.

Capitalism does not grant any person the moral right to kill or maim or poison others, or to destroy their property, merely because the person doing the killing, maiming, poisoning, or destroying considers it profitable to do so. According to capitalist principles, these would be considered violations of the rights of the person being killed, maimed, poisoned, or whose property is being destroyed.

The American system of government, on the other hand, is one in which the argument is often made that businesses must be given such rights because it is good for the economy – because to prohibit businesses from doing such things is bad for business.

So, for example, we have the issue of global warming. The reason the Bush Administration offered for not taking steps against this problem is that it would harm the American economy to do so. Yet, what he was permitting, according to the best scientific evidence, was the rights of business to engage in actions that scientist told us would take tens of millions to hundreds of millions of lives, and destroy a great deal of coastal property.

I have yet to hear of a Republican candidate, in spite of claiming to be a defender of capitalism, bring up this argument against business practices that kill, maim, or poison others or destroy their property. Instead, Republican candidates seem to exist to do the opposite – to defend the practices – which is inconsistent with capitalism.

Now, we are familiar with those businesses branding their practice of killing, maiming, and poisoning others and destroying their property as “capitalism”. This is because lying is another “right” that the corporate feudalists have. We must remember that these businesses are masters of marketing – at least those that survive tend to be.

In a country like America, businesses that refrain from engaging in the practice of killing, maiming, and poisoning others an destroying their property finds themselves at an economic disadvantage – unable to compete against companies that do kill, maim, poison, and destroy the property of others for profit. Those businesses close their doors, leaving only those willing to inflict such harms to rule the marketplace.

It would actually be an act of instituting capitalism to condemn businesses that engage in these practices. However, any attempt to make the country more capitalistic by prohibiting businesses from inflicting these harms – creating these externalities – is met with political stonewalling from a group of politicians who tend to call themselves capitalists.

It is quite ironic, if you think about it.

Well, actually, it is just another component of this package of deception.

This is not a flaw either with socialism or with capitalism. It is a deviation from an area in which both of these systems speak with a common voice. They both prohibit people with capital from treating people without capital as mere tools of production - or as "statistics" who may be made to suffer externalities without a trace of a moral qualm. Yet, this is exactly what the American system of government permits in far too many cases.

The Fatal Flaw of Protectionism

The Democrats in House of Representatives have put something particularly stupid in the national recovery legislation they have just passed. It is a requirement that none of the infrastructure projects purchase steel from any country other than the United States.

The stimulus bill passed by the House last night contains a controversial provision that would mostly bar foreign steel and iron from the infrastructure projects laid out by the $819 billion economic package.

A Senate version, yet to be acted upon, goes further, requiring, with few exceptions, that all stimulus-funded projects use only American-made equipment and goods.

See: Washington Post, 'Buy American' Rider Sparks Trade Debate

It is widely accepted that one of the things that made the Great Depression far worse than it would have otherwise been, and that made the war that followed much more likely, was the protectionist legislation that sprang up as the world economies crashed. Countries cut economic ties with other countries, demanding that more and more purchases be done locally.

One of the effects of cutting international trade was to promote international job loss and economic decline.

Another effect comes from the fact that as economic relationships between countries weaken, the possibilities for armed conflict tend to increase.

To see the truth of the first of these effects, simply imagine that you are living alone. You are stranded on an island where you must gather food and water buy yourself, create your own clothes, build your own shelter, build your own tools for farming, tailoring, and construction, provide for your own health care, predict the weather, determine which natural foods are poisonous, and the like.

This is not a life with a particularly high standard of living.

Introduce just one more person, and both of you are better off. That one person can focus on growing and preserving food for two people. This makes him much more efficient at his job. Furthermore, it gives him an opportunity to learn how to do his job better. He need not be distracted by other jobs such as building a house or making clothes – you are doing those things. And, as with your partner, you become better and more efficient at the tasks you specialize in.

Add a third person, and a fourth. Every additional person creates more opportunity for specialization and trade.

Add enough people, and soon you have people specifically devoted to the study of health, to predicting the weather so as to better determine when to plant and when to harvest, the study of engineering, and construction itself allowing the community to build aqueducts and to harvest power from the flowing streams.

It no more matters that some of your trading partners live across the ocean than that some of them once lived on the other side of the stream or a mountain. Distance increases the cost of trade (more so for physical goods and services, and less so for information) but is not relevant to the fundamental benefit of trade.

Any time anybody stands up and demands that we cut off trade with some group of people, that we make the economic community smaller rather than larger, then this person is promoting a system that will make all of us worse off. It makes us worse off by blocking our trade with others, and makes those others worse off by blocking their trade with us.

If it makes sense to say that smaller communities can be more prosperous than larger communities, then it makes sense to say that none of us should be engaged in trade with any other person, and we should all live a life where we each grow our own food, manufacture our own clothes, construct our own shelter, and tend to our own doctoring.

Perhaps more important is the fact that isolated tribes are the type who are more likely to go to war with each other. If two tribes have economic links – if the wealth and well-being of one tribe is tied to the wealth and well-being of the other – then there are all sorts of incentives to preserve the peace. But, if there economic borders are closed, then the only way to get something that the other tribe has is to take it by force of arms.

It is quite reasonable to suspect that, without the protectionist policies of the 1930s and its adverse effects not only on the global economy but the severing of incentives to maintain peace between nations, came to be followed by the largest global military conflict in human history.

What the United States does in this economic crisis sets an example for the rest of the world. We have many and good reasons to set an example of keeping economic relationships between different countries open – to foster trade rather than sever economic ties. We have many and strong reasons to demand that, this time, the world works together to get through this economic crisis, rather than split off into isolated tribes.

Because it typically is not long after countries quit trading bread and butter across their national boundaries, that the find they are soon trading bullets.

The Certainty of Error

A few posts ago I mentioned that there was an interview of me up at Common Sense Atheism: CPBD 003: Alonzo Fyfe - Morality without God.

The interviewer wrote:

For today's episode of Conversations from the Pale Blue Dot, I interview Alonzo Fyfe, who completely changed the way I think about morality with this very interview.

I hope it was changed for the better. Comments like this always cause a bit of moral anxiety.

What if I am wrong?

A morally responsible person is always asking that question when he is making claims which, if adopted, would interfere with the lives of others. He recognizes the duty to continually sifting through the reasons for his belief, looking for a sign that he might have been a mistake.

Similarly, any institution that teaches its people that they need not do this – that they can accept propositions leading to harm to others on the basis of faith alone, and never need to question their legitimacy – teaches moral irresponsibility.

In this area, the institution that teaches intellectual recklessness is less moral than the institution that teaches care and prudence with respect to beliefs, in the same way that the drunk driver is less moral than the sober and careful driver.

So, whenever I get praise for what I write it always makes me nervous. It always causes me to ask, once again, "What if I am wrong?" And to invite others to consider critically anything I may write.

This is . . . or should be the standard throughout. Any person who leads an organization that tells people that their support for policies harmful to others can be grounded on groundless beliefs, he is teaching them to behave recklessly. This is no different than telling a person that he may drink as much as he wants and go ahead and drive home.

In fact, the person who is counseling others to engage in drunk driving would be by far the lesser of these two evils, compared to the proponent of reckless thinking. The drunk driver will, at worst, wipe out a school bus or a family on vacation. The reckless thinker, on the other hand, have wiped out whole civilizations or aided in the death and suffering of millions.

"We are the most moral people in the world, and you are to trust that what I tell you is the right thing to do, even though others may be harmed, and the worst thing you can do is question me or what I say because what I tell you is necessarily true and true without question."

The person who makes any claim like this is uttering a flat contradiction. The person who preaches this type of intellectual recklessness is preaching immorality, not morality.

So, in contrast with their teachings, I have said often and I will say again . . .

It is certain that at least one thing that I have written is false, though I do not know what it is (or, more accurately, what they are).

The morally responsible person takes this attitude towards everything they hear and read. The person who does not question is by that very fact loses all right to claim to being or even knowing the measure of virtue.

Three Faults with Capitalism

Well, yesterday I looked at three flaws with socialist solutions to a nation's problems.

(1) Decisions are made by people other than those who are the best informed.

(2) Decision makers are motivated by a number of concerns other than the public good.

(3) Political systems respond slowly (way too slowly) to changes circumstances.

So, let's look at three significant problems with capitalist solutions to social problems.

(1) The wealth effect. In a capitalist system, those with money have the power to bid resources away from the more valuable uses to which the poor people would put them.

Capitalists often boast that its system allows for the most efficient allocation of resources because, if you want something more than somebody else, you simply pay more. Resources always go to the person who will pay more, so resources always are given to the person who values them more.

This is false.

Differences in wealth mean that those people who have wealth can outbid those who have significantly less wealth, even if the wealthy person has a trivial interest in those resources.

I have illustrated this in previous posts with the case of a woman with $20 in a drought-infested land wanting to buy water for her sick child, while another woman with $20 million wanting that water to shampoo her poodle. If the two people had equal wealth, the woman with the sick child would certainly outbid the woman with the poodle for that water. Unfortunately, because of differences in wealth, the water is allocated to its socially least valuable use.

The world is filled with wealthy people bidding resources away from poorer people who, nonetheless, would put those resources to more highly valued use.

It takes about nine pounds of grain to produce a pound of meat. If poor people had the means, they would buy that grain to feed themselves and their families. Instead, wealthier people literally bid the grain off of their table and demand that it be used for what merely amounts to an increase in flavor.

The same thing is now happening with ethanol production. Wealthier people are bidding the food away from poorer people to produce energy that they can then continue to use for purposes, many of which are substantially trivial.

(2) Capitalism is a regulatory system.

Capitalists often market the distinction between them and their competitor as a conflict between "regulation" and "no regulagion".

The fact of the matter is that this is a conflict between two different types of regulatory systems.

What is the difference between an action that imposes a legitimate cost on other people, and one that violates their rights? I lower prices in my store, taking your customers, lowering the value of your business. Did I violate your rights? What is the difference between that and letting my property deteriorate, when you live next to me, lowering the value of your property?

What if I build a dam on my property that breaks, causing a rush of water that destroys your house and kills your wife and daughter? Is this a violation of your rights?

How do we define what risks you voluntarily adopt, and what risks I wrongfully impose upon you?

Even in a purely capitalist system, it would take a mountain of legislators, judges, and lawyers to sift through the minutia of what capitalists call “voluntary exchange”. It is no different then the effort that we must also go through with respect to any other type of regulatory system that we choose to set up.

Capitalism is not regulation free. It is, itself, a system for regulating the ownership and transfer of property.

(3) Capitalism is expensive.

I originally entitled this section, "Externalities and the Free Rider Problem." However, externalities are not a problem with capitalism. Externalities occur where capitalism does not exist. Externalities are costs or benefits that are imposed on other people that are not imposed on the people who cause them.

In order for resources to be perfectly allocated, a person who produces benefits for others needs to be compensated for every single benefit provided – and a person who imposes costs on others has to be made to pay those costs.

If he produces benefits where he does not capture any rents, then others are “taking from him” that which is rightfully his. In the economic realm, it means that people are not going to put as much effort into those activities as they would if those benefits could be properly captured.

If he produces costs that others are forced to pay, this is the equivalent of buying things on somebody else’s credit card without their consent. Activities where people can force others to pay the bill are activities that people are likely to perform even when the social benefit of their actions is negative.

Imagine what it would cost to have a system where every single benefit that one produces for others is captured in terms of rents or payments, and one is forced to pay for every single cost that one imposes on others.

At some point, we have to say that the marginal cost of additional capitalism simply is not worth the marginal benefits. At that point, we say, "We're just going to stop capitalism right here and allow the "thefts" in capitalist terms beyond this point to stand without worrying about them."

Ultimately, we are forced into a choice - to not use capitalism when it does not pay to do so, or to institute some very expensive systems of property rights that cover absolutely every externality produced both positive and negative.

Conclusion

So, capitalism has its problems. It allows for the gross misallocation of resources, it is a regulatory framework that is subject to all of the abuses of any regulatory abuses, and it can be fully extended and applied only at very great expense.

Socialism has its problems.

The question of whether to adopt capitalist or socialist solutions to our problems is not an either or question. It is a question that requires taking seriously the benefits and the problems that exist in each system and then trying to choose which tool is best for a given job.

Sometimes, that is not going to be an easy question to answer. Sometimes, morally reprehensible people are going to get in and muddy the waters as much as they can because they see an opportunity to gain personal benefit by generating confusion and manipulating us into choosing poorly.

These are facts that we simply have to include in our decision making.

Desire Utilitarianism and Political Libertarianism

One this issue of the relative merits of socialism and capitalism, one question that I have gotten from the studio audience is:

do you find it possible for me to consider myself a libertarian (free market anarchist/voluntaryist) as my legal framework position and a desire utilitarian as my moral position, or do you consider that would be an absurd/totally inconsistent thing to be?

Desire utilitarianism does not contradict libertarianism in one sense.

There are, actually, two types of libertarians. There are natural rights libertarians (such as Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard) who argued that libertarianism represented a system of natural rights discoverable in nature. These natural rights, they argued, were revealed by reason alone and were grounded on one is true of “man qua man”.

This theory is not at all compatible with desire utilitarianism. This form of libertarianism is guilty of the is-ought fallacy. First of all, this entity that lies at the root of this type of libertarianism, this entity known as “man qua man”, is as fictitious as any God. So, libertarianism (in this form) is grounded on a false premise.

Second, even if there were such a thing as “man qua man”, the libertarian would need to explain how he can make the leap from certain factual or “is” statements about such an entity to conclusions about what ought or ought not to be done.

At both of these steps, the natural-rights libertarian fails miserably. There morality is grounded on entities as fictitious as those of any religion and their reasoning about those entities is no more sound.

On the other hand, there is another group of libertarians who are utilitarian libertarians. They hold that capitalism has merit precisely because it fulfills the requirement of bringing the greatest good to the greatest number,

However, utilitarian libertarianism holds that if it were to be shown that libertarianism did not bring the greatest good to the greatest number – if it were to be shown that some aspect of socialism did a better job, the utilitarian libertarian would give up on libertarianism (in those cases) and go with the alternative.

Whereas a natural rights libertarian would hold that any socialist scheme would be a violation of those natural rights such that, even though some alternative will bring a greater good to more people, it should be rejected in favor of the intrinsically obligatory obedience to natural moral law.

In fact, some libertarians that I know when I was young said that, even where a violation of the moral law were necessary to save the whole Earth from destruction (one had to forcefully take a plain granite rock from its rightful owner to prevent aliens from destroying the Earth and everybody on it), it would be better that the earth be destroyed than that a single item of property be taken without consent.

Of these two options, natural rights libertarianism is not at all compatible with desire utilitarianism. It asserts that intrinsic value properties exist and can be found in certain families of actions. Intrinsic value properties do not exist.

It also asserts that people can be made to suffer where necessary so as to help to preserve and promote these imaginary entities. This is different than the religious practice of calling for the sacrifice of individuals so that God will show us favor and protect us from natural disasters and foreign aggression. In this, too, it is little different from religion.

In contrast, utilitarian libertarianism can be compatible with desire utilitarianism. A desire utilitarian holds that there are certain desires that people generally have reason to promote or inhibit. It may be that the desires that people generally have reason to promote are those of a capitalist system. They may have reason the libertarian non-aggression policy for the specific reason that if everybody had such an aversion to aggression that the more and stronger of all of our desires will be better realized.

Ultimately, I think that utilitarian capitalism fails as well. I will mention a few of its problems in my next post. However, its problem is not some fundamental conflict with the basics of desire utilitarianism. Its problem is that there are areas in which it fails the utilitarian test of making good people better off.

Three Flaws with Socialism

Announcement. I have been interviewed. A podcast of an interview I performed recently is up at "Common Sense Atheism" titled, CPBD 003: Alonzo Fyfe - Morality without God..

Elsewhere, some members of the studio audience, in the comment section of this blog, have expressed an affection recently with socialism. They believe that, in the battle between socialism and capitalism, that capitalism has proven itself a failure, and socialism wins.

I disagree with that assessment.

For the record, my view on the Capitalism vs Socialism debate is that it is much like a debate that might occur among construction workers.

One worker proclaims all of the work that a hammer can do better than a saw – from pounding in nails to breaking rocks – and declares, “All construction work can and should be done with a hammer.”

The other worker lists all of the things that a saw can do more efficiently than a hammer, such as cut planks to length, and declares that all construction work should be done with a saw, and none with a hammer.

I look at the two participants in this debate as both being wrong. Capitalism and socialism (the free market and the state) are both tools. Each has their strengths and weaknesses, and it is foolish to limit ourselves to just one of these two tools.

Since the pendulum is swinging more toward socialism in recent weeks, I think it would be useful to remind ourselves of its weaknesses.

Here are three.

(1) Socialism puts decision-making power in the hands of people who are substantially ignorant as to many of the relevant facts for making a decision.

Each person seeks the fulfillment of the most and strongest of his desires. Now, when it comes to the fulfillment of Person A’s desires, we can give that authority to one of two people. We can give that authority to Person A himself (the individual), or we can give it to Person B (the state).

We should, as our default position, give authority in making particular decisions to the people who are the most well informed of the facts relevant to those decisions. So, when it comes to directing the course of Person A’s life, we should give the decision-making capability to Person A – unless Person A is known to be mentally incompetent (e.g., Person A is a child.)

In other words, we are better off giving people the power to make their own decisions governing their own lives in a free market of voluntary trade among individuals, then we are handing those decisions over to somebody else, such as the state. The state simply lacks the information it needs to make wise decisions in many cases. So, it will make poor decisions, even if all of its members were saints.

Which is another problem with socialism. It puts massive amounts of power in the hands of people who often are not saints.

(2) Each individual is the least corruptible guardian of his own interests.

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

One of the things we can count on with respect to this government spending program to try to jump start the economy, is that every single Senator and Representative will cast a vote that best fulfills his or her own desires, given his or her beliefs.

And what are those desires?

No leader is motivated solely by the public interests. They all have friends, and are going to be tempted to act so as to make their friends better off.

They like money – because the more money they have the greater ability they will have to spend it to fulfill the more and stronger of their desires – so this will motivate their votes in some instances.

Some of them may want sex, or simply be in love (even if it is an unrequited love without sex), and will seek to pleasure of the person who is the object of his or her affection. And who knows what that person wants?

Some are motivated by a desire for power, and will see merit in various plans (even to the point of deluding themselves that certain claims are true or arguments are valid that lack any support) that promises to deliver more power into their hands or do harm to rivals.

Consider giving full control of your money over to somebody who knows you and cares about you. You will no longer direct the spending of your own income, but you will give it over to your best friend. That friend will have instructions not to come to you for advice on how to spend it, but can only consult outside experts (each acting so as to fulfill the most and strongest of their desires).

Do you seriously think that the money will be spent as wisely in the fulfillment of your desires as it would be if you were given the authority to spend the money yourself?

(3) Socialist systems respond too slowly to information and not always in the best possible way.

Imagine a large community gets hit by a sudden petulance that wipes out the bulk of its food crop.

This community needs to immediately start treating food as a scarce commodity. It needs to quit using food for things (e.g., decorations and art, glue, dyes) where it is not being consumed for calories and to switch to other substitutes. It needs to immediately set to work discovering new sources of food that it can add to its stores. And, as new discoveries are made (e.g., new food is discovered or there is a fire that destroys some of the remaining food), it needs to respond as quickly as possible to this new information.

Socialist systems are very slow to react to news. It is slow even to recognize that a significant event has taken place and that a change of policy is in order. The government must be assembled. It must weigh the various benefits and costs (this process being hampered by the two problems already described – decision makers who have limited information and who are going to act so as to fulfill the most and strongest of their own desires). It must make a decision. Then, it must implement decision.

In a capitalist system, the response to new information is instantaneous. The instant – the very second – that news hits a market that some product in high demand will become scarce, the price goes up. The higher price signals people that they need to start looking for substitutes to use in place of the scarce commodity. It inspires people to go out and find substitutes, and to put extra effort into increasing the supply of the product that has suddenly become scarce.

It does not need to call a meeting into order. It does not need to engage in endless debate. It instantly puts society to work mitigating the damage that the change in the news implies.

Conclusion

These, then, are three unavoidable problems that will plague this multi-hundred-billion dollar economic recovery bill. The final results of the bill will be put together by people who lack sufficient information to do a good job, by people who are easily persuaded to act in ways not necessarily in the public interest, and who will institute a system that will respond very poorly to changes in information.

Capitalism has its own problems. This is not a claim that socialist tools should be abandoned entirely and only capitalist tools should be permitted. It is an invitation to consider seriously that the socialist tool is not perfect – it has its flaws – and we must give an honest consideration of the implications of those flaws.

Morality and Law

I have some questions from a member of the studio audience to address.

One concerns a topic related to several recent posts – the relationship between law and morality.

I am used to thinking about it like this: "every law/everything that is legal should me moral, but not everything that is moral should be legal obligation" or if you prefer "everything that is illegal is immoral, but not everything that is immoral should be illegal"

I believe that this is true with respect to the criminal law. A person ought not to be punished unless he has done something worthy of punishment. If a person has not done anything wrong, then it is a mistake to say that he should be punished.

In other words, legislating morality is not only a legitimate function of the law, it is the primary function of the law. The thesis that it is objectionable to legislate morality substantially boils down to the thesis that there should be no relationship between punishment and the question of whether or not the person being punished actually did something wrong.

The specific difference between criminal law and morality is this:

Morality is concerned with altering a person's desires – so that they will do or forebear from certain actions even when nobody is looking over their shoulder. When society uses social forces to give people a moral aversion to taking the property of others, then those people will leave the property of others alone even when they have an opportunity to take that property.

Law, on the other hand, is concerned with getting people to perform or to abstain from certain actions by threatening to thwart the desires that already exist. "If we catch you performing action A, then we will create a state of affairs that will thwart many of your other desires – a state that you certainly have reason to avoid. You can avoid the realization of such a state simply by not doing A."

The problem with legal penalties is that the motivation only applies when the agent believes that he is at sufficiently high risk of being caught. If the threat of being caught is sufficiently reduced, then to that degree performing action A will not lead to the bad results that the agent has reason to avoid.

On the other hand, the law is a heavy, blunt weapon. To put the rule of law to work in all instances of wrongdoing (e.g., making it a crime for a child to lie to her parents) would be impractical at best.

Another class of immoral actions that should not be made illegal are those pertaining to certain rights such as the right to freedom of speech. No good person would stand before an audience and promote racial segregation, for example. However, the right to freedom of speech means that a person may go ahead and make statements that no good person would make, and the only legitimate responses are words and private actions.

Yet, there is also a class of legislation – other than criminal legislation – that is not concerned with immorality. This has to do with regulation – and, in particular, with standardization.

It is economically and socially beneficial for the country as a whole to adopt certain common common ways of doing things. For example, it is useful if everybody in a country drive on the same side of the road, and for pipes and bolts to have a common number of threads per inch. It is useful for reports to count like incidents as alike so that aggregators can focus on comparing apples to apples.

So, the state can designate a particular street to be a one-way street without appealing to a natural moral law that dictates an obligation to drive only one way on a particular street. It can demand that bolts contain one of two values for the number of threads per inch without proving that all other possibilities represent moral crimes.

We can still make something of a moral case for regulations and standardizations in general. People have a reason to promote conformity in some instances – such as conformity in which side of the road to drive on and conformity in the construction of certain types of tools.

It does not matter what standard everybody adopts, as long as everybody adopts a common standard. So, people generally have many and good reasons to promote a desire to conform to certain common standards, and an aversion to violating those standards.

Sometimes this moral case springs a bit, and we demand conformity even where conformity does no good – even where we would benefit by diversity rather than conformity. We end up demanding conformity in clothing, hair styles, hobbies, viewing and listening habits, and food preferences where there is no reason to argue for conformity at all.

However, the fact that a tool might be misapplied is no argument for throwing away the tool. The possibility that somebody might use a hammer to drive a screw is no argument for ridding the world of hammers or screws.

This, then, is a brief rundown of the relationships that I see between law and morality. Nothing should be made criminal unless it is immoral. Yet, it is not the case that all things that are immoral should be made criminal.

The law is far too unwieldy a tool to be used in cases of minor wrongdoing. Standards and regulations may be imposed even though they do not reflect a specific moral fact. However, we still have many and strong reasons to promote conformity to some standards – reasons to promote a desire to conform and an aversion to violating some standards. Yet, this is not an argument for universal conformity on all things.

The Existence of Rights

A member of the studio audience, Janus, had an objection to a recent post of mine in which I wrote that there were two conceptions of rights.

The two that I offered were:

(1) Rights exist as entities that can be discovered in the real world. Rights exist prior to law in such a way that they allow us to judge certain laws to be just or unjust.

(2) Rights exist as state-created facts. As such, there is no such thing as a just or unjust law because a person has no right unless it the law grants him such a right.

Janus wanted me to consider a third option.

(3) That there are no moral rights. There are no entities discoverable in nature that allow us to evaluate laws and institutions as just or unjust. And states do not create and destroy rights on a whim. There simply is no such thing.

Actually, I believe that Janus is correct. (3) is a true statement. Rights do not exist. Arguments for their existence tend to be as bad (or worse) than arguments for the existence of God.

At the same time, (1) is also true. Rights exist as discoverable entities against which we can evaluate laws as just and unjust.

And (2) is true as well. States have the power to create and destroy rights on a whim. A person has whatever rights the state says she has - no more, and no less.

Is this a contradiction?

Consider the following two claims:

(1) Atoms exist

(2) Atoms do not exist.

Is this a contradiction?

It is only a contadiction if we mean the same thing by the term 'atom' in both sentences.

However, the original definition of 'atom' is that it is the smallest possible unit of an element and that it has no parts. "A-tom" literally meant (to the Greeks who invented the term) "without - parts".

Yet, we know that the individual units of an element do have parts - electrons, neutrons, and protons.

So, atoms (the smallest units of an element that, themselves, are made up of electrons, neutrons, and protons) certainly exist. At the same time atoms (the smallest unit of an element which, itself, has no parts) do not exist.

There is no contradition here.

In exactly the same sense, I hold that rights most certainly exist. That is to say, there are certain maleable desires (such as an aversion to cruel punishment, a desire to have guilt proved before somebody is punishment, an aversion to sex without consent, an aversion to responding to mere words with violence) that people generally have many and strong reasons to promote.

At the same time, governments clearly have the power to create and destroy rights. If a government gives a company a permit to cut trees in a national forest it has created a right to do so. If the government revokes that permit than it has taken away that right.

And, as Janus has pointed out, rights, understood as intrinsic value properties that can be found inherent in certain families of actions, do not exist. No action or family of actions contains within it an intrinsic property of "ought to be doneness" or "ought not to be doneness". Any assertion that such an entity exists is false.

Now, we take these three propositions, and we add a fourth.

(4) We must choose one of the first three propositions as being true, and reject the other two as false.

Now, we have set the stage for an endless and utterly pointless debate. Now, we have ushered in a colossal waste of time, energy, and brain power as each proposition gathers a camp of faithful defenders around it – and nobody can actually be proved wrong.

Yet, the culprit in this case is not (1) or (2) or (3). The proposition that we must reject is (4). Once we get rid of (4), then we can put all of that wasted time and energy that goes into deciding which of the first three options to reject back into productive use.

Only Desires Have Moral Value?

A member of the studio audience has asked me whether, in, desire utilitarianism – the moral theory that sits at the foundation of this blog – it is the case that "only desires have moral value."

I am not comfortable with this characterization. It sounds like an intrinsic value claim – a claim that there is this entity or essence called “moral value” and, if you break open desires, you can find this essence within. Since desire utilitarianism holds that there is no such thing as intrinsic value, this characterization would be a mistake.

Let me look at the issue by looking at value in general.

Anything can have value. Movies, pictures, television sets, hammers, knives, sex, reports, schools, laws, and presidents all have value.

In order for something (S) to have direct value it must be the case that there is a desire that P, and P is true of S. S has indirect value if S has a tendency to bring about T, there is a desire that P, and P is true of T.

All desire utilitarianism does is take the two ways in which something can have value – direct value in terms of being such as to fulfill a desire, and indirect value in terms of being such as to bring about a state that fulfills a desire – and applies this method to desires themselves. Desires also have value in virtue of the degree to which they are desired, or the degree to which they are likely to bring about states that are desired.

Moral values can also apply to actions, laws, institutions, and even movies and books.

Moral value applies to actions insofar as they are the actions that a person with good desires would perform. It applies to laws insofar as they are the laws that a person with good desires would support. It applies to a movie insofar as it is a movie that somebody with good desires would want to watch – and to books insofar as the book is one that a person with good desires would want to read.

It makes no sense to apply moral concepts to fixed desires because fixed desires are desires that cannot be changed. It makes no sense for anybody to ask what an agent’s fixed desires should be – any more than it makes sense to ask what the mass of the Earth should be. It makes sense to ask what something should be only insofar as it is within our power to affect that thing.

Actually, I argue that morality is primarily concerned with reasons for action. It turns out to be the case that desires are the only reasons for action that exist. As a result, true value claims have to be claims that refer ultimately to desires. Any value claim that refers to a reason for action other than desires is a value claim that refers to reasons for action that do not exist. If it is a claim that says, "There are reasons for action that calls for bringing about X," and the reasons for action it refers to are imaginary or mythical, then the statement is false.

So, why can’t moral value be assigned to other things like apple pie?

This is like asking why the term "monkey" cannot refer to an elephant. Obviously, we can use it to refer to anything we want. Language is an invention, and there is no law of nature dictating what things are called. In saying that moral values refer primarily to desires I am merely saying that, if we look at the way that moral terms are used, the claim that they refer primarily to desires makes the most sense of that use.

We can apply moral concepts to anything. However, in doing so we have no power to create reasons for action out of thin are, or to dismiss reasons for action that are real.

We can use moral terms to refer to happiness and claim that morality requires that we act so as to produce the greatest happiness for the greatest number. However, this claim can never invent reasons for action for promoting happiness. Those reasons for action either exist or they do not exist, and are not at all dependent on what we call things.

Yet, we are free to change our language however we would like.

Yet, in doing so, we are not free to change what is objectively true of what we name. We can use the term "monkey" to refer to an elephant if we wish to re-define our terms. However, what is objectively true of elephants does not change.

We can choose not to apply moral value to malleable desires. Yet, it will still be true that we have malleable desires, that we have reasons-for-action for promoting and inhibiting malleable desires using social forces such as praise and condemnation, that we have reasons for action to promote desires that tend to fill other desires and to inhibit desires that tend to thwart other desires.

These claims remain facts regardless of how we decide to define the term "morality".

Limbaugh, and Hoping America Fails

In my previous post I wrote about the legitimacy of criticizing the President. I wrote that, if somebody thinks that a President's policies would do harm to the country or are immoral, they have a duty to speak up. Nobody should be condemned merely because they criticize the President – though they may be condemned if their criticism is grounded on false statements and intellectually reckless reasoning.

However, a couple of people have made comments about the Obama administration that truly do count as un-American . . . even anti-American. Rush Limbaugh has said that he hopes that Obama fails.

So I shamelessly say, no, I want him to fail, if his agenda is a far- left collectivism, some people say socialism, as a conservative heartfelt, deeply, why would I want socialism to succeed?

See: Fox News Rush Limbaugh's Shocking Words for President Obama

I have said that it is perfectly legitimate to criticize the President’s policies where one has good reason to believe they will do harm to the country. However, I want you to pay close attention to the difference between the following two statements.

(1) I hope that the engines in the airplane will fail and that the plane will crash.

(2) I fear that the engines of the airplane will fail and the plane will crash.

When a person says that they fear the possibility of a particular outcome, they are saying that they view the outcome as something that there are many and good reasons to avoid. They are saying that they do not want that outcome to be realized and, because of this, they are willing to work to prevent those outcomes.

On the other hand, when a person says that they hope that a particular outcome will be realized, they are saying that the outcome is one that they desire. They are saying that they are willing to work to help realize that outcome and are unwilling to take any action that might prevent that outcome from being realized.

Rush Limbaugh did not say that he fears that Obama's policies will fail. They explicitly said that he hopes that those policies will fail - that they want those policies to fail.

Which means that Limbaugh is resporting that he is willing to help bring about that failure. He is saying that the he would view any news of failure as a good thing, as something that he hopes to see, like somebody might hope to see smoke coming from a jet engine that he hopes will fail in flight.

He hopes that you lose your job.

He hopes that your business goes under.

He hopes that your retirement dwindles away into nothing and you are forced to live your final years in abject policy.

He hopes that America itself is forced to declare bankruptcy.

He (unlike the rest of us) does not fear that these things might happen. He hopes that these things will happen.

It is not propaganda – it is a matter of logical necessity – that a person who hopes that such things will come about are anti-American.

Why would Hannity and Limbaugh want such a thing? A reasonable hypothesis is that their egoes are of such a size that, if given a choice between promoting America and promoting themselves, they would give anything for an opportunity to promote themselves. Rather than a willingness to take a hit for the sake of the country, they would prefer it if the country takes a hit that would benefit them.

In short, they are too much pro Hannity and pro Limbaugh to have any room left for being pro America.

Note: This is not the same as saying that Hannity and Limbaugh "hate America". This no more implies that they "hate America" than a cook making an omlett "hates eggs". They see the breaking of the eggs (the breaking of America) as a mere means to an end. They do not hate that which serves as a means - they simply do not care about its welfare.

As I said in my previous post, criticism itself is no vice. A person who fears that a policy will do harm to America has a duty to speak up and to (peacefully) act to prevent such a policy from being enacted. The person who fears that Obama will fail (and has intellectually responsible reasons for doing so) is not worthy of criticism.

However, the person who hopes that Obama fails is somebody who hopes that America fails.

I am not the one saying that Limbaugh is hoping for America's failure. Those words came straight from them.

Criticism of the President

At Crooks and Liars, I saw a clip from Jon Stewart's "The Daily Show" about right-wing criticism of Obama's decisions at the start of his Presidency.

(See: Crooks and Liars: The Daily Show: The Fox News Fears Imbalance)

It also presented clips in which those same commenters such as Bill O'Reilly saying, when Bush was President, that people who do not rally around and support the President and his policies are anti-American. Their principle seemed then to have been that, once the election is over and we have a winner, everybody should support the winner.

Now, we see that their real principle is that everybody should support the winner only when the winner is a Republican, and that dissent and criticism is perfectly legitimate now that the President is a Democrat.

This is simply hypocrisy. This is a case of people who have adopted one set of standards for themselves, and a different set of standards for others. Republicans are patriots when they criticize the administration, Democrats are traitors.

They are pure tribalists. They appear to be completely submerged in an "us" versus "them" mentality where morality applies only to "us" and never to "them".

Let them wallow in their lack of moral principles, but let us not join them there. While they switch allegiance from "dissent is un-American" to "dissent is the only true sign of patriotism", let's apply a consistent set of moral principles across all boundaries.

Criticism of the President is a perfectly legitimate activity. If somebody has reason to believe that the President's policies will do harm to the country, or that they are simply immoral, they not only have a right, they have a duty, to speak their mind.

They have a duty even to act to (peacefully) act so as to prevent the enactment of those policies that they believe will do more harm than good. This is not a duty to break the law, but a duty to engage in legitimate political activity that best promotes those policies that they think will serve the country well, and prevent those policies that will do the country harm.

This means that no criticism should be condemned for no reason other than the fact that it is criticism, and the President may never be criticized.. It means that when people do criticize the President, one must respond to the actual substance of that criticism - to show that the criticism is unwarranted and invalid.

Nobody has a duty to get in line behind the President if the President is going to do us harm. Nobody had a duty to get in line behind Bush, and nobody has a duty to get in line behind Obama. Obama, and those who wish to defend his policies, in turn have a duty to argue for those policies and to make the case that they are necessary for the common good.

This public debate is the essence of an open democracy.

On this ground, criticism of the President can still be condemned. Criticism can be condemned if it is deceptive, or if it aims to promote the interests of some special-interest group at a cost to the nation as a whole. Criticism can be condemned if it is fallacious rhetoric or if it assumes as true that which has been proved false. Critics themselves can be condemned for lying, or for intellectual recklessness if they did not act responsibly in determining the truth of their premises or the quality of their reasoning.

There are a great many things that a critic can do to be worthy of condemnation.

However, the mere fact that somebody is criticizing the President is not in itself a justification for condemnation, even if that person had previously made the false claim that it was justified. Such a person can be charged with hypocrisy, but not with being anti-American.

BB3: Sally Satel: Individual Flourishing and the Mental Health Industry

This is the 13th in a series of posts on presentations given at Beyond Belief 3: Candles in the Dark"

You can find a list of all Atheist Ethicist blog postings covering Beyond Belief 3 at the Introduction post

And I would like to encourage you to give a contribution to the Science Network, who makes these presentations available for free.

Sally Satel rose to speak about the relationship of the mental health professional to human flourishing.

She started off her talk by looking at the reasons people seek mental health professionals, linking those reasons to the pursuit of human flourishing.

She included such things as:

• Symptom relief - depression and anxiety "because those limit human potential significant."

• Change behavior.

• Obtain insight and self-understanding.

• Because they know that they are sabotaging themselves.

She also spoke about her own role as a part-time worker in a methadone clinic. She looked at the question of whether there is any sort of incompatibility between human flourishing and the use of medication in order to obtain such a state - such as the use of methadone by opium addicts.

She admitted that the drugs were a crutch. However, she denied that there is any relationship between the use of a drug to obtain flourishing and flourishing itself.

Her claims were made against the belief that a person who used some drug (e.g., Prozac) to influence the brain could not obtain the flourishing of somebody who did not use such a drug. She compared the state that a patient may be in with medication with the state that the patient would be in without the medication and gave the argument, "It is better than the alternative."

Yet, better than the alternative need not be good. A financial setback where an individual loses half of his wealth might be "better than the alternative" of losing everything. However, it is still not as good as losing nothing.

So, the question still comes up whether a person who obtains a state of "human flourishing" through the use of some sort of medication can have as good a life as a person who uses no medication.

There is absolutely no reason to think that the use of medication is, in itself, a detraction from the quality of a person's life.

When we eat or drink, we ingest chemicals because those chemicals are useful to maintaining particular body functions. We put iodine in salt to prevent some physical problems, vitamin-fortify breakfast cerials, take vitamins. Even breathing is an ingestion of a chemical that helps the body to function better than it would have functioned without oxygen.

There is nothing about the ingesting of chemicals that is, per se, something incompatible with flourishing.

The only argument that can be given against medication is that it involves the ingestion of chemicals that people generally do not use. It is an argument that only makes sense under the assumption that "natural" has some sort of intrinsic value. However, intrinsic values do not exist. Any claim that what is "natural" is (intrinsically) better than what is "unnatural" or "not natural" is false. There is no useful measure of value to be found in this area.

Satel then went on to look at the impact that the mental health industry itself might have on helping - or, actually, on hindering people from obtaining human flourishing. She argued that, with respect to some problems such as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, the reaction of the mental health industry might have a strong negative influence on the patient.

She illustrated her point with the story of an Iraq War soldier who applied for and obtained the status of 100 percent disabled as a result of injuries he suffered during the war. According to Satel, this was a disservice to the individual soldier because it confirmed the view that he would no longer be a functioning member of society. The award of total disability becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The patient can say, "See, this proves that I am now incapable of doing anything productive with my life - the military said I am totally disabled."

The general concern about this specific story is for mental health professionals to learn to recognize when they are contributing to a problem, rather than dealing with a problem. Where people come to the health professionals to improve "human flourishing" (whatever that is), the health professionals need to be concerned with the possibility that they are locking in states that will get in the way of flourishing.

Moral Rights and the Issue of Torture

In my last post I compared two conceptions of rights.

One conception holds that rights represent moral facts of some sort and are independent of the whim of the state. On this conception, states can violate rights, which means that states can be identified as morally just or unjust.

The other conception holds that rights are contrivances of the state. A person has only those rights that the state gives them, so the state cannot actually violate anybody’s rights. If the state sanctions the slaughter of a whole group of people then those people simply do not have a right not to be slaughtered.

I showed that Representative Young of Florida defends the second conception of rights, while both Desire Utilitarianism (the theory I use in this blog) and America’s founding documents – the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights are consistent with the first conception.

I made these claims in the context of the debate over the rights of the Guantanamo Bay prisoners. The question is whether those prisoners have moral rights and can thus be treated unjustly, or if their rights are mere government contrivances making unjust treatment impossible.

I suggested that a right, in desire utilitarian terms, is something towards which people generally have many and strong reasons to promote an aversion. Rights to freedom of the speech and the press exist insofar as people generally have many and strong reasons to promote an overall aversion to responding to words with violence.

The claim that the only legitimate response to words are words and private actions is the claim that a good person (the person with desires that people generally have reason to promote) would be averse to responding to words with violence.

People generally have many and strong reasons to promote an aversion to torture as well, and to secret trials, and to lengthy imprisonments without a trial, and various other evils that the Bush Administration visited on people (making this one of the most morally bankrupt administrations in American history).

The problem with allowing torture – with being a country that condones or even praises the use of torture – is that it weakens the aversion to torture. In weakening the aversion to torture, the attitude creates a social climate in which torture will be more common.

I am not speaking just about state torture but private torture – including private crimes in which a guardian tortures a child or a citizen acts in a particularly cruel way towards another citizen.

One way to reduce the incidents of these types of situations is to promote a general aversion to these types of situations – to seed the moral conscience of all people with a distaste for such activities that is so strong that it overrules other desires that people might have.

We do this, in turn, by condemning any and all instances of torture. The stronger our interest in reducing the incidents of cruelty of one person towards another, the stronger should be our condemnation of torture.

The Bush Administration pats itself on the back for saying that, because of its practice of torture, it has kept us safe. However, even to the degree that torture helped rather than harmed that goal, it still put innocent people around the world at risk of being tortured.

Bush gave would-be dictators and tyrants around the world moral permission to apprehend anybody that they conceived of as a threat to the state, arrest them, and torture them for information. Where some mob of people are trying to gain power, Bush gave them moral permission to capture and torture as well.

Bush did not make people around the world generally safe from torture. He did the opposite. He destroyed decades of work in securing innocent people from such a fate by promoting and encouraging what people generally have many and strong reasons to discourage.

President Obama, in reversing Bush’s policies, is creating a world in which innocent people around the world are less likely to be subject to torture and other forms of abuse.

By taking a stand against torture, he is setting a moral example for others to follow. He makes it easier to condemn the dictator or tyrant or warlord or tribal leader who practices torture. He makes it harder for those who practice torture to find friends and allies, and thus weakens those who would engage in such acts.

There is, then, a moral right not to be tortured – because there are many and strong reasons to promote an aversion to torture regardless of what any given state allows or prohibits.

Obama’s orders respect those rights, thus making America a morally better country than it was under the Bush Administration. Recognizing that a state has no power to create or destroy rights – only to respect or abridge rights – he has turned the country away from the practice of abridging certain rights, and towards respecting those rights.

At least in this one instance.

Representative Bill Young's Wrong View of Rights

Representative Bill Young (R - FL) objected to Obama's decision to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility because:

[O]nce they become present in the United States, what is their legal status? What is their constitutional status? I worry about that, because I don't want to have the same constitutional rights that you and I have. They're our enemy.

Now, there are two ways in which to view Constitutional rights.

First option: They are moral rights. A right to freedom of speech, fredom of the press, a trial, against cruel and unusual punishment is something that a person has as a matter moral fact. They are, in other words, 'inalienable' rights.

On this model, governments may decide to respect those rights or to violate them, but governments are not the creators of moral rights, nor does government have the the power to destroy moral rights. A government that exists within the bounds of morality is a just government, a government that violates moral rights is evil.

Second option: Rights are a contrivance of the state. They are human inventions that governments can create or destroy at will. On this model, there is no such thing as "good government" or "bad government" because the government itself determines what is good or bad.

On this model, if the government wishes to round up a section of its population and slaughter them, no moral crime has taken place. No right has been violated, precisely because the government does not recognize that the victims of such a slaughter have a right not to be slaughtered.

In other words, this second model does not recognize the possibility of an unjust law. One cannot say that a law is unjust - that it treats people unjustly - if justice itself is determined by what the law says.

It is clear that the founding fathers believed in the first model. The whole of the Declaration of Independence is a statement of this model - that rights are inalienable, that governments are established to secure these rights - that whenever any government becomes evil and systematically violates these rights it is the right of the people to alter or destroy that government and to put a new government in its place.

We also find this philosophy in the way that the Bill of Rights were written. The Fourth Amendment, for example, states

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

This is not a statement that the government creates such a right. This is a statement that the right exists in nature, and the government is morally bound not to violate that right. It states that one of the ways we can distinguish moral government from immoral government is the degree to which it obeys or violates this right.

Representative Bill Young apparently holds to the second view of rights. His view, apparently, is that no moral rights exist at all so that. If one does not get his rights from government, one has no rights.

One can only wonder whether his philosophy that rights are created by government and governments can do no evil applies to his moral obligation to uphold his oath to uphold, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.

I need to add something for the benefit of long-term readers that explains how these two theories of rights relate to the desire utilitarian theory that sits as the moral foundation for these posts.

Desire utilitarianism holds that a "right" is "that which people generally have many and strong reasons to promote an aversion to violating." So, the right to freedom of the press implies that people generally have reason to promote an aversion to abridging the freedom of the press. A right against cruel and unusual punishment is a claim that people generally have many and strong reasons to promote an aversion to cruel and unusual punishment.

Desire utilitarianism, on this model, is consistent with the first option for a theory of rights given above. Governments have no power to decide by legislative fiat what people generally have many and strong reason to promote desires for or aversions to. These relationships exist as natural facts to be discovered.

Consequently, desire utilitarianism holds that there is a difference between good government and bad government - between just laws and unjust laws.

It is quite a different view of rights from that which Representative Bill Young believes in - and significantly more consistent with the view that this country was founded on.

President Obama and a Non-Believer's Values

I want you to send a letter to President Barack Obama. The letter should go something like this:

Dear Mr. President

Several times now you have had gatherings where people of faith have been brought together to present their visions of America both in the form of informal discussions and through services. You have given them an opportunity discuss their views and their values, and to give sermons and offer prayers regarding your administration and the future of the country.

In each of these cases, you have sought fit not to make room for anybody to present a non-theistic view.

It is as if you hold a common prejudice that, when it comes to questions of value and to how best to guide the country forward, that an atheist has nothing to say on these matters. Only people of faith have values – which easily translates into the view that only people of faith have value. All others – non-believers – are fit only to be ruled by their religious 'betters' who will serve as guides, but unfit to offer guidance on the direction that the country should go or the values that the nation should promote.

Perhaps you think that non-believers do not have a place at such a gathering because they have plenty of other opportunities to present their view to the President. Yet, there are two problems with this line of reasoning.

The first is that it assumes that, when not in a faith-based gathering, you prohibit those who believe in God from speaking and listen only to the atheist. Yet, I sincerely doubt that you exercise this type of control over who is allowed to give advice when not at such a gathering.

The second problem is that such a doctrine would still falls into the morally murky ground of "separate but equal". It is a Segregationist’s approach to values.

Of course, one could make the claim, "Why would an unbeliever want to attend a faith-based conference anyway?"

Which is a bit like asking, "Why would a black person want to be a member to a whites only club anyway?"

The question I am asking is about the appropriateness of a whites only club – a club in which white people (and white people only) are allowed to assemble and present their views to the President, and a faith-based only club where only people of faith are invited to come together and share their views with the President.

Perhaps a better option would be to have a values gathering. It would be a gathering where people of faith, certainly, can come together to express their views and provide a vision for the future of the country. However, it would be a gathering from which those whose values are not grounded on scripture can also have their say and express their vision.

Every time you have one of these gatherings – and you do not make a place for somebody who believes that there is no God – you are promoting and fostering the idea that, when it comes to guiding the country, non-believers have nothing of value to say. They are not worth listening to. Somebody must be a person of faith to have a vision for the future of the country that is worth considering. Those without faith have no values and, as such, they have no value.

That makes you an agent of prejudice.

I write to ask you to put an end to that particular practice.

Sincerely,

Alonzo Fyfe

Promoting the Value of Transparency

President Obama seems to be taking a substantial risk for our benefit.

So far, he has made significant efforts to make the workings of government more transparent than before. He has told agencies to be default to giving people information they request through the Freedom of Information Act, rather than hunting for reasons to keep the information secret, and has taken steps to put government information on the web where government activities can be monitored by private citizens.

However, transparency comes with risks. It leaves the Obama Administration open to embarrassing disclosures that previous administrations would have been able to cover up. There is little use that Obama’s political adversaries will be ready to use these freedoms to attack Obama himself, and to try to clear room for an opportunity to reach their own ambitions.

Whether future Presidents will choose openness over secrecy will depend substantially on whether Obama's experiment turns into a success or a failure. They will be able to make an easy contrast between the Bush’s administration’s success in avoiding any serious consequences for its actions (even winning a second term), and whatever fate Obama faces as a result of his openness.

We have the capacity to influence how future generations will run their affairs in a government devoted to transparency or a government of secrecy substantially by influencing whether the government produces more openness or more secrets. We do this by taking action to see if the author of an open government gets our praise for their actions, or our wrath and condemnation.

The problem is that the challenges to the doctrine of transparency will not come directly. The lessons will be learned indirectly. When some piece of information made freely available to others allows those others to raise objections, the dispute will be over whatever matter the information pertains to. Yet, the effect may make Obama regret, and future Presidents decide to avoid, any attempt at transparency.

If we wish to preserve this doctrine of transparency for future generations, then we need to help ensure that it works.

We do this by being ready to condemn any person who exploits the doctrine for personal gain.

The response, to have ready at all times, should always be:

Okay, you don't like X. However, I remind you that the very reason the President makes this information freely available is so that we the People have an opportunity to comment on it – to express our approval or disapproval and make suggestions to improve it. Obama could, as other Presidents have done, keep all of this information hidden, then he would have been free of your criticism. But we would also not have a government of the people.

This does not mean that a doctrine of transparency implies that the leader is now immune from criticism. If the Bush Administration had made public all of the things it did in private, the proper response would not have been to make the administration immune from criticism because of the transparency. The criticism in this case would have been rightfully deserved. The Bush Administration needed secrecy in order to get away with much of what it got away with.

Yet, ironically, it also spent the last seven years telling us, "If you have nothing to hide, then you have no reason to be worried about the fact that we are reading your emails and listening in on your telephone calls."

The point is to focus attention on the specific policies that are worthy of criticism and why they are worthy of criticism, while protecting and preserving the doctrine of transparency.

It requires a delicate balance. Which is precisely why I start practicing that balance as soon as possible.

Afghanistan and the Issue of Religious Tolerance

With the start of a new administration, we have an opportunity to start to look at existing issues in a new light. Since I am not a holder of or a candidate for public office, I have the luxury of speaking plainly.

I want to start with President Obama’s Inaugural Address and, more specifically, about the war in Afghanistan. The Address contained a couple of passages relevant to that conflict.

To the Muslim world, we seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect.

. . . for those who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents, we say to you now that our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken; you cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you.

There are some who will argue that this is a contradiction. They hold that Islam is a religion that promotes the use of terror and the slaughtering of innocents, and are able to quote multiple passages in the Koran to support this interpretation.

Though there are other passages that can be interpreted as prohibiting the slaughter of innocents, when God commands people to do X in one instance, and prohibits people from doing X in another, it is left up to the reader to decide whether or not to do X. Whatever he decides, he can claim that he is doing God’s will.

I deny that there is a “Muslim World” per se. Instead, there are hundreds or thousands of Muslim cultures that share in some characteristics and differ in others. Among these hundreds of Islams there is one that is the most peaceful, and one that is the most violent, and a range of Islams in between.

I would be hard pressed to argue that there is any one thing that all of these Islams have in common. There is probably even an atheist Islam, just as there are atheist Jews and – cultural Islams in the same mold that Richard Dawkins talks about when he calls himself a cultural Christian.

In light of these facts, and in light of the quest for peace, there is an inescapable conclusion that people are seemingly extremely reluctant to admit out loud.

The quest for peace will necessarily involve a decision on the part of this administration and every other government in the world to promote some religions and to inhibit others. The war against terror is, at one level, a war against some Islams.

In other words, there are some Muslim worlds against which the United States cannot and will not “seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect.”

There are some who read the First Amendment to the Constitution – the one that says that Congress shall pass no law respecting the establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof – to mean that the government cannot get into the business of promoting some religions and inhibiting others.

This is nonsense.

The government has every right – it has a duty – to inhibit some religions. It has a duty to inhibit those religions that tell their people that God wants them to strap on bombs and kill innocent people.

The only way that this duty can be made compatible with a prohibition on laws prohibiting the free exercise of religion is if we define religion in such a way that nothing that commands such an act is defined as a religion. Yet, if we take this route, we can easily get to a conclusion where the First Amendment tolerates even so much as a national church. All we need to do is re-define religion so that only a given faith (e.g., Catholocism) counts as a religion, and all competitors are thus defined as “non-religious” (meaning “non-Catholic”).

The first Amendment then becomes a law that merely prohibits the government from passing laws against the free exercise of Catholicism, while permitting any restrictions one can imagine against other “non-religious” practices.

The point here is that these types of maneuvers are just playing with words. In the absence of these types of word games, we should be honest with is involved in this war on terror. It is a war against both religious and non-religious philosophies that practice certain forms of violence against innocents. It is, in part, a promise to pass laws and to use weapons to prohibit – to outlaw and to arrest those who promote and practice – certain varieties of Islam, Christianity, Judaism . . . and, yes, certain species of atheism.

There are some religions that simply do not deserve – and can never be granted – our respect.

I do not need to take the position of somebody like Sam Harris that this should be a war against Islam in all of its manifestations. In fact, I do not agree with Harris' position. Harris argument involves an unwarranted leap from what is true of "a religion" (the specific religion he uses as an example), and what is true of "religion", making his arguments invalid.

However, we do not need to make this leap to reach a similar conclusion. Even if our complaint is against "an Islam" and we refuse to make the hasty generalizations that Harris makes, it is still the case that there is just cause for a war against some Islams. Congress can and will pass laws prohibiting the free exercise of some religioius practices - such as the practices of flying airplanes into sky scrapers and blowing up busses and trains.

A Better President

Today the world became a better place. Many anxieties lurking in the back of my brain have vanished as power has now been transferred to somebody who I think has the capacity to look at issues intelligently and come up with evidence-based solutions. The merit that I see in an Obama administration is not that I will agree with all of his policies, but that I trust that decisions will be made by somebody with an open and inquisitive mind who bases his conclusions on the evidence.

As Bush leaves office, I see his one greatest moral failing, and the biggest contributor to the mess we find ourselves in today, was that Bush was sophist. By that I mean that Bush was somebody who decided what to believe first (as a matter of faith or convenience or personal desire), who then looked at the evidence afterward.

Not only was he a sophist himself, he was an advocate of sophistry. He held his sophistry up as a virtue, declaring that gut feelings were better than evidence-based reasoning when it came to making "the tough choices".

We saw this attitude at work in his claim that Saddam Hussein aided Al Quida in attacking the United States, and that it had weapons of mass destruction. He did not base these beliefs on the evidence. He grabbed onto them as useful fictions (refusing to admit even to himself that they were fictions). He then used them as the measure for all evidence that came his way.

If a piece of data suggested that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, he saw this as proof that he was right. If some contrary evidence showed up, he saw this as proof that he was right and that somebody out to sabotage his plans or too incompetent to see the truth was feeding him false information.

In fact, the Bush Administration's attitude towards warrants and trials reflects the same moral failing of sophistry.

The reason to take a case before a judge and obtain a warrant is to make sure that the warrant is based on the available evidence, and not because of some preconceived (but unfounded) whim of the investigators. The reason for a trial is to determine if the evidence supports the belief that the accused is guilty and to avoid the prejudices of the prosecutor.

The idea that we do not need warrants or trials is the idea that the investigators and prosecutors need not base their conclusions on evidence. It is consistent with the idea that evidence-based thinking is to be shunned in favor of sophistry. Investigators and prosecutors are free to determine in advance who is guilty and who is innocent, and then look for the evidence that supports that belief.

A third area in which we saw Bush's sophistry was in the area of climate change (global warming). Instead of basing its policies on the best scientific evidence available, the Bush Administration thought that that they had the power to alter the laws of nature (by rewriting scientific reports) to conform to its policy.

Imagine the leader of a team in charge of inspecting airplanes taking the reports of the people who inspected the plane and rewriting them to give the results that he wanted. It is obviously better if the airplane was sound rather than unsound, so he altered the inspection reports to introduce uncertainties where none existed, and introduce unwarranted assumptions.

He does so in the sincere belief that altering the reports actually makes them more accurate – because he is evaluating the reports based on his (prior) belief that the plane is sound, rather than basing his judgment on the soundness of the plane from his reports.

Ultimately, we cannot ignore the fact that the Bush Administration was fully submerged in a culture that embraced sophistry. They belonged to a religious tradition that told people that virtue consisted in adopting a particular set of religious beliefs "on faith" and looking at that evidence through those beliefs. Observations that supported the Bible are to be considered as proof that everything in the Bible is correct and true. While anything that contradicts the Bible is to be considered weakly understood or dismissed as an aberration.

This is where Bush and millions like him learned to ignore the real world.

The real world insists on having things its way. The only hope we have in order to plan effectively is to recognize the fact that the real world is indifferent to our welfare and will follow its own rules independent of where we put our wants or our faith

If there is one benefit to come out of the last eight years, I hope that Bush provides a lesson throughout the rest of recorded history of the foolishness of having a President who thinks he can decide what reality is first (and reality will conform to his wishes and his faith), and look at the evidence second.

Today, the world took a turn for the better. It gave power to somebody who is curious enough to know that he must understand the world around him if he is going to make wise decisions. That is a major step in the right direction.

Bush's Conscience

Today, we come to the end of the Bush Administration.

We would have been better off if it had happened four years earlier. We would have been better off if this Bush Administration had never existed.

Bush has made the world a worse place than it would have been if he had not existed. He will never be able to admit this to himself. (Neither will his co-horts such as Cheney.) However, what these people can admit to themselves and what is fact are not the same thing. In this case, they are quite different.

The best that Bush could say for himself was that I have followed my conscience and done what I thought was right. You may not agree with some tough decisions I have made, but I hope you can agree that I was willing to make the tough decisions. .

The fact is, everybody can say that they followed their conscience.

Hitler almost certainly followed his conscience, as did Stalin and every other dictator. Certainly, the 9-11 hijackers followed their conscience. The vast majority of slave owners before the 1860 followed their conscience.

People follow their conscience because their conscience is nothing more than a set of their own desires and aversions. They are sets of what the agent has learned to like or dislike.

The question is never whether a person has followed their conscience. The question is always whether a person had a conscience worth following. It is on this latter test that Bush failed.

He did not fail as spectacularly as some - as spectacularly as Hitler and Stalin, for example. However, he did fail. His conscience had more in common with theirs than this country needed or deserved.

In fact, it is an act of supreme arrogance for somebody to "follow their conscience". This is the act of somebody who thinks so highly of themselves that they (unlike everybody else in the world who holds different standards) cannot possibly make a mistake. A person has to consider their conscience to be incapable of error to make it the standard for all their actions.

The person who admits to the possibility of error would have reason to examine his conscience.

But not Bush.

Bush was far too arrogant for that type of self-evaluation.

Fortunately, from this day forward, he gets to follow his conscience as a private citizen, without dragging the rest of the country with him.

Malleable vs. Fixed Desires

A couple of people asked in comments about my claim that, where a malleable desire comes into conflict with a fixed desire, that the malleable desire should give way. The claimed that there is nothing in the nature of either value that declares that the fixed desire has a natural right to rule in such a conflict, and the malleable desire has a natural duty to yield.

So, let’s assume that we are dealing with a run-away train. It is out of control. There is no way to stop it or to switch it to a different track. Ahead of the train there is a second train heading the opposite direction. This train, however, is under control. We have the option of moving this train onto a side track, so that the first train speeds harmlessly past.

As we are getting ready to switch the second train onto a side track, somebody chimes up, "Why should the second train yield the right of way to the first train? We have two trains heading towards each other who are about to collide.

There is absolutely no argument from nature – no intrinsic value – that declares that the first train has a natural right of way over the second train. Except for the fact that one train can be moved to a side rail and the other cannot, there is nothing that distinguishes these two trains – nothing that makes one train inherently better than the other.”

All of these claims about the intrinsic merits of the two trains are perfectly true. Yet, we can still ask what relevance these facts have to the question of whether or not to move the second train to a side track given the fact that moving the first train to a side track is not an option.

We are facing two option – moving the second train onto a side track, or a head-on collision. Moving the first train onto a side track and giving the second train the right-of-way is ex hypthesi not an option.

There is a principle in morality that says that 'ought' implies 'can'. It makes no sense to say that somebody 'ought' to do something that it is not possible to do.

It makes no sense to condemn a person for failing to teleport a child out of a burning building unless and until teleporting a child outside of a burning building is something he could have done. In that case, we can ask him why he did not do so and condemn him if his reasons-for-action are not good enough. Without that power, we can assume that even a person with the best reasons available would have failed to teleport the child out of the building.

Many people take this principle of 'ought' implies 'can’ to mean that morality requires some sort of counter-causal free will. However, I don’t see it that way. I see the principle of "ought" implies "can" to mean that we are going to focus social forces where they can have an effect, and ignore cases where they cannot have an effect. It is the moral equivalent of saying, "If you have two trains that are going to collide, one of which cannot be steered, you avoid the conclusion by steering the train you can."

If we were facing a different situation – if the first train could be switched to a side track, and the second train were this out-of-control train whose speed and direction we could not influence – then prudence suggests switching the first train, not the second.

Desire Fulfillment Rule Utilitarianism

A Set of Questions

I have been spending much of these first two weeks of 2009 addressing questions to the moral propositions that provide the foundation for this blog – with a couple of digressions into applications and real-world implications.

I have more questions that I wish to address.

[I] is your theory basically "desire fulfillment rule utilitarianism," where the rule is that the good act is the act a person with good desires would perform, and good desires are desires that tend to fulfill more and greater desires than they thwart?

Not really.

First, because the name suggests that rules are the primary object of moral evaluation, while I hold that it is maleable desires. The name should properly identify the object of evaluation.

Second, because the term would seem to suggest that the end of evaluation is being evaluated by its ability to maximize the entity called "desire fulfillment." This would suggest that "desire fulfillment" is an entity with intrinsic value that we need to create as much of as we can. I deny that this is the case.

Desire fulfillment is not an end having intrinsic value that needs to be maximized. Instead, desire utilitarianism is a pluralistic moral theory. It states that each desire creates its own end – that a “desire that P” creates an end of realizing a state of affairs in which P is true. If an agent has a desire that P and P is true, I say that the desire has been fulfilled. However, this is just a name for a particular combination of states.

To illustrate the difference, imagine a choice between two possible worlds. World A is one where there is a creature with a desire that P, and P is true. World B is one in which P is true, but there is no creature.

The term "desire fulfillment rule utilitarianism" seems to suggest that we should pick World A (or that we should adopt a rule where the rule is better to the degree that it tends to recommend World A over World B), because World A contains desire fulfillment, and World B does not.

However, neither world has more value than the other.

The state in which P is true has value to the creature in World A. However, even the creature in World A does not have any reason to prefer World A over World B. It has a desire that P, P is equally true in both worlds, so he has no “reason for action” for choosing one world over the other.

In order to get the creature to choose World A we need to give him a second desire – a desire that Q, where Q is true in A but not in B. For example, if we added a desire to be alive to the desire that P, given that "I am alive" is only true in A and not in B, he now has a reason to choose A over B. But only because he has a desire that is fulfilled in A but not in B – not because A contains more "desire fulfillment" than B.

The same is true if we look at both worlds from the point of view of an impartial observer. Impartial observer theories make up a large branch of moral philosophy. However, if an impartial observer were truly impartial (he has no desires), then he has no reason for choosing one world over the other. He would be indifferent.

If we start to give our impartial observer desires, then he ceases to be an impartial observer. He becomes partial – depending on the desires we give him. As we give the observer desires, we give him reasons for action for choosing the world in which the most and strongest of those desires are fulfilled.

If we give our observer an aversion to desire fulfillment, he has reason to select World B, rather than World A. He has no reason to pick a world merely because it has the most desire fulfillment. He only has reason to pick the world in which the propositions that are the objects of his own desires are true.

If we look at our own sentiments, I suspect almost all of us will see a preference for World A rather than World B. We would rather it be the case that a world with a creature with a desire exists than that a lifeless world exists.

Here, we are simply appealing to our own desires. We are not perceiving some type of intrinsic merit in one world over the other, only that the propositions that are the objects of own desires are true in one world, and not the other.

So, in conclusion, any formulation that says that World A has more value than World B, merely because World A has desire fulfillment and World B does not, is making a false claim that intrinsic value exists. The goal is not to maximize the amount of desire fulfillment (to realize a world in which desire fulfillment exists). The goal is to realize states of affairs in which the propositions that are the objects of our desires are true.

If those propositions are true in a world where desire fulfillment does not exist, then so be it.

Responding to Congressman Diaz-Balart's Bigotry

I want to say a few words about how to respond to the Congressman Diaz-Balart incident (and any similar future incident).

As I mentioned in my last post, after attending the "Divine Performing Arts" show, Diaz-Balart said:

“I was very moved by the song that talked about the damage that atheism has caused and is causing. It was very moving, but all of the performances were moving, uplifting; they teach us about the eternal nature of mankind and of how we have to be humble.

In that post I provided a link to media in Miami, the media center closest to Diaz-Balart’s district.

So, Step 1, create a radio advertisement and some money, and purchase time for the advertisement on Miami radio stations.

Let’s start the advertisement with something that would catch peoples’ attention.

Voice 1: "I was very moved by the song that talked about the damage that the Jews have caused and is causing."

Voice 2: If a politician were to make this type of statement, we would recognize immediately that he was unfit to hold any public office. Public office is not the proper place for such blatant bigotry. It is the duty of all morally decent people to keep the power to make laws away from bigots such as this.

This is no less true when a politician targets some other group with unfounded, general hatred, as Representative Diaz-Balart did after attending a performance of the Divine Performing Arts.

Afterward, he said, "I was very moved by the song that talked about the damage that atheism has caused and is causing."

Many decent, law-abiding patriotic Americans happen to be atheists. They have a right to the equal respect and consideration of their political leaders. Religious bigots have no place in public office.

This is just a suggestion. In general, I argue for consulting with marketing experts in such a project. However, you do what you can with the resources you have available.

At the same time, send out a fundraiser to collect money for the advertising campaign. Contact the head of any atheist or free-thought organization. Have them communicate with their members.

Also, include organizations that are not specifically geared towards atheism, but have taken a position against bigotry in all forms – religious, racial, gender, and the like. As long as you allow bigotry to go unchallenged, you leave people the option of asking themselves, "Why can't I do to your group what you allow people to do to atheists?"

At the same time, somebody should create a short YouTube video reporting this incident and start circulating it as widely as possible. Because this statement was made by a Republican, see if one can get the video written about and linked to in media such as Crooks and Liars and Democratic Underground.

Contact other bloggers . . . regardless of the size of their audience . . . and see if they will include mention of the incident and embed the video.

The advertising campaign should come with some publicity. The advertising campaign buys a small advertisement somewhere deep inside the paper. However, the article about the advertisement shows up in the front page of the Politics section of the newspaper, on television, and in other media.

Look at the way the London bus campaign has reached an audience that is several orders of magnitude larger than those who actually see busses on the London street through media coverage of the advertisement.

Use this incident to create a fund for the next campaign – to use to target the next politician or business who decides to express this type of advertisement. Use this incident to establish the network, so that the next time the campaign moves farther, faster, and more efficiently.

When politicians and businesses can expect an immediate and harsh response to such statements of bigotry, they should learn to think twice about using hate to market their product or themselves.

That would be a step in the right direction.

The Anti-Atheist Bigotry of Congressman Diaz-Balart (R-

In my previous post I presented ten examples of anti-atheist bigotry in 2008

(See: Anti-Atheist Bigotry in 2008)

It is not too early to start the list for 2009.

From Friendly Atheist Congressman Lincoln Diaz-Balart Bashes Atheism:

Lincoln Diaz-Balart, a Congressperson from Florida, saw the “Divine Performing Arts” show the other night and couldn’t stop raving about it.

“I was very moved by the song that talked about the damage that atheism has caused and is causing. It was very moving, but all of the performances were moving, uplifting; they teach us about the eternal nature of mankind and of how we have to be humble.

My discussion this week has been in the context of doing moral work. I have been presenting the idea that morality involves picking up the tools of praise, condemnation, reward, and punishment and applying them to promoting good desires and inhibiting bad desires.

I have argued that, while reason tells us how to use these tools and whether they are being used to good ends, reason alone cannot do any moral work. The moral work gets done by those who pick up these tools of praise and condemnation and apply them to specific cases.

It means making public statements, since their objective is to mold the desires of any who hear the praise and condemnation - particularly children.

Diaz-Balart is doing moral work with his statement. It is a statement of very high praise for that which takes a stand against atheism - that which condemns atheism for all of the trouble atheists are causing in the world. It says that of all of the values that were captured in this concert, the highest value of all - the one most worthy of being promoted - was the value of anti-atheist bigotry.

Diaz-Balart has picked up the moral tools of praise and condemnation and applied them to promote an aversion to atheists.

My question now is whether there are any people willing to pick up the same moral tools and apply them to actually making the world a better place, rather than applying them to promote unjustified hatred and bigotry.

Congressman Lincoln Diaz-Balart is a Republican representative of Florida's 21st District. He can be contacted through his congressional office web site. This district is a suburb of Miami and, thus, its members can be best reached by letters and comments to media that serve the Miama market.

A list of Miami media can be found at ABYZ News Links for Miami and includes, among other media, The Miami Herald

One also has the option of contacting any organization that one belongs to that has reason to stand in opposition to bigtroy (not limited to atheist or humanist organizations) and getting them to offer official condemnation. The more condemnation that one can muster, the more moral work that gets done.

Anti-Atheist Bigotry in 2008

I have written a few posts recently concerning the work of morality. In those posts I have argued that doing the work of morality requires employing the tools of praise, condemnation, reward, and punishment. These tools are to be used to promote desires people generally have reason to promote (that tend to fulfill other desires), and inhibit desires people generally have reason to inhibit (that tend to thwart other desires).

Reason tells us how best to use those tools. However, reason does not actually do any moral work. Expecting reason alone to do moral work is like expecting the instructions for assembling a bicycle to assemble the bicycle. Somebody has to pick up the tools and apply them.

Recently, I saw a list of 10 events in 2008 that allegedly illustrate the persecution that Christians suffer in the United States. The list included events such as PZ Myers' alleged desecration of a Eucharist and Bill Mahar's movie Religulous. (Of course, we must realize that we are dealing with people who think that anything other than total agreement with and subservience to their will counts as 'persecution').

As an "atheist ethicist" I have been particularly concerned with the issue of anti-atheist bigotry. So, allow me to present my list of events in 2008 that illustrate the magnitude of anti-atheist bigotry in America.

(1) Science Debate 2008

Nearly 30 debates took place among Presidential candidates in 2008. Yet, it proved impossible to get the candidates to participate in an event called Science Debate 2008, devoted specifically to scientific issues. Science is what is has warned us about global warming and will provide us with the tools to respond to this crisis. Science is the tool that will give us weapons to fight off a potential Bird Flu pandemic. Science is what warns us of oncoming hurricanes and other natural disasters, creates the early warning system, and tells us how to construct our society to mitigate the harms done by these events. Yet, the candidates would not go on air and talk about science. (See: Science Has No Place in Politics)

Yet, they participated in a number of events dealing with faith, including an agreement to be interviewed by pastor Rick Warren on their religious views.

The reason, of course, is because science is seen as atheistic, and no candidate can tolerate being associated with or participating in anything that might be cast as being in conflict with issues of faith. So, that which has the potential to save us is ignored.

(2) Kieffe and Sons Auto Dealership Advertisement

In February, a San Diego Ford dealership ran an advertisement in which they boast of "offending" potential customers who so not endorse government expressions of anti-atheist bigotry. They tell any potential customers who might disagree with such policies to "sit down and shut up" merely because they are in the minority.

This is in spite of the fact that the idea that majorities may treat minorities however they like, and minorities have an obligation to "sit down and shut up" and endure that treatment, did not work out very well for other groups as diverse as Native Americans, Blacks, Irish, and Japanese-Americans, Jews in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, and countless other examples. In fact, one of the greatest moral advances of the last 250 years is the recognition that minorities do not have an obligation to sit down and shut up.

Complaints to Ford Motor Company ultimately brought pressure to bear on Kieffe and Sons to retract the ad (which had run its course anyway) and to apologize. However, immediately after the apology the owner of the company said in an interview that he really did not mean it and he stood behind the message in the advertisement.

Furthermore, the individual who put together the advertisement saw fit to defend the message he set forth in that advertisement, without any economic consequences that I am aware of to himself or the company he works for.

(3) Ben Stein's Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed

Though this movie was billed as exposing some sort of conspiracy to prevent the teaching of "intelligent design" (a.k.a. Creationism) in public schools, it had all of the elements of an anti-atheist propaganda film.

How do you manufacture hatred against a group of people? One very common way is to associate the group that you want people to hate with something that they already hate (and, better yet, with something that they hate for good reason). It is an application of the technique that marketers use, attempting to associate a product with desirable ends such as sex and public approval and acclaim. The tactic is to invite the audience to transfer its sentiments towards the one thing to the "product" that the marketer is trying to sell – whether it is anti-atheist bigotry, or a car.

Ben Stein filled his movie with images of Hitler, Stalin, mushroom clouds, and gas chambers, in order to evoke harsh sentiments in his audience. His film then invited the audience to transfer this fear and hatred to his target group – atheists and 'evolutionists' who he claimed were ultimately the group responsible for these horrors. He, and those who backed the film, then toured the country to present this hate-mongering to audiences that were particularly susceptible to the message, as well as to legislators and school children.

(4) Monique Davis' Rant in the Illinois Legislature

Representative Monique Davis shouted at an atheist giving testimony to an atheist Rob Sherman giving testimony before her committee

This is the Land of Lincoln where people believe in God, where people believe in protecting their children.… What you have to spew and spread is extremely dangerous, it's dangerous . . . for our children to even know that your philosophy exists! . . . I am fed up! Get out of that seat! You have no right to be here! We believe in something. You believe in destroying!

Ultimately, she apologized to Sherman (though not to any other atheist). However, she did not apologize for what she said. She apologized for raising her voice. Her "apology" effectively was a claim that, even though she believed and stood by the content of her rant, the volume of her voice as she spoke should have been 15 decibels less than it was.

Furthermore, she made these statements during a session of the Illinois legislator, while sitting in a legislative chamber, and while acting as a member of that legislature. However, the Illinois legislature did not take a single step to reprimand or discipline her for her outburst.

Another dimension of this insult was the fact that she blamed her outburst on the fact that she had just heard about a school shooting. This gives rise to the question about the connections that might exist between hearing news of a school shooting and the claim, "It is dangerous for children to even know that your philosophy exists!" It is not uncommon for people anti-atheist bigots to blame atheists for every act of violence that takes place in a school, and this connection falls dangerously close to expressing that bigotry.

(5) Mitt Romney: Atheists Unfit to Lead

Republican Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney gave a campaign speech where he was accosted by a member of the audience who condemned Romney for being a Mormon. Romney answered

Let me -- let me offer just a thought, and that is, one of the great things about this great land is we have people of different faiths and different persuasions. And I'm convinced that the nation -- that the nation does need -- the nation does need to have people of different faiths, but we need to have a person of faith lead the country.

And he got a standing ovation for this.

His strategy was easy to understand. "Hey, c'mon man, we should not be fighting among ourselves. Instead of fighting each other, you and I should come together so that we can make a joint stand against them - where them are people who are not people of faith." He got a standing ovation for his expression of bigotry and hate-mongering.

(6) Mitt Romney "Freedom requires religion."

A couple of months after his first expression of anti-atheist hate mongering, Mitt Romney was getting enough grief on the fact that he was a Mormon that he decided he needed to give a major speech on the role of religion and politics. The heart of his speech was captured in the statement, "Freedom requires religion."

Apparently, he thinks that atheists can neither maintain nor even contribute to the maintenance of a free society. Where we find atheism, we find tyranny, and where we find freedom, we must find a religious people establishing and maintaining that freedom.

(7) North Carolina Senate Campaign

Late in the North Carolina Senate campaign, incumbent Elizabeth Dole accused her opponent, Kate Hagen, of associating with atheists and with, perhaps, being an atheist. Hagen had attended a fundraising dinner in Massachusetts among prominent figures in that state (including Ted Kennedy).. One of the attendees was Woody Kaplan -- who is an advisor to the Godless Americans Political Action Committee. Kaplan was not there representing any organization and made no contribution in the name of any group. Yet, his presence was considered sufficient case to brand Hagan with the political crime of being friendly to atheists.

Hagen responded to these accusations by bringing out her religious bona-fides. She further made the counter-accusation that there was probably nothing a political candidate could do than to accuse her opponent of being an atheist. In fact, Dole’s accusation was considered so horrendous that it was considered worthy of a lawsuit. Of all of the claims that one candidate made against another in the course of the 2008 elections, the one claim that is considered worthy of a lawsuit was the accusation of being friendly towards, or perhaps being, an atheist.

(8) Obama's Inter-Faith Gathering

Obama opened his convention with an interfaith gathering – a gathering of people from a number of religions and faith-based ideologies. It was an event built on the premise that "Democrats are people of faith" (suggesting, of course, that if one is not a person of faith one should consider this an invitation not to speak of oneself as a Democrat and to "honor the diverse faith tradition within the Democratic Party."

The real problem is not that such an event took place. The real problem is that, throughout the entire campaign, and even into the transition, in spite of significant efforts to reach out to people of faith, Obama has said and done practically nothing to acknowledge that people without faith even exist. He has not met with any atheist leaders, nor has he held an event in which atheists were invited to sit at the table with "people of faith" when matters of religion were discussed.

There is a question as to whether this is a matter of personal belief or political expedience. However, both options are compatible with putting this on the list of examples of anti-atheist bigotry in 2008.

(9) In God We Trust

There is scarcely a better example of bigotry in the world than a drive to put up signs in schools and public buildings that say, "We officially declare that any who belong to that group should not consider themselves one of us." In this case, the signs say, "In God We Trust" (or "If you do not trust in God, you are not one of us."). In 2008, the drive to post as widely as possible – and particularly where children gather and where government business is conducted that "we denounce anybody who does not trust in God" continued.

In particular, this year, the organization "In God We Trust – America" devoted a considerable amount of effort to have city governments and school rooms prominently display this message of exclusion and ostracism.

(10) The pledge of allegiance

The number one example of anti-atheist bigotry in the United States is the widespread use of the assertion that any who do not support a nation under God are the patriotic and moral equivalent of those who would support rebellion, tyranny, and injustice for all. A constant struggle exists to demand that all Americans – and, in particular, those who hold public office, show respect for the idea that there are four great evils that no good America could ever find acceptable - atheism, rebellion, tyranny, and injustice for all.

Conclusion

Here, then, are ten events that took place in 2008 exhibiting anti-atheist bigotry in America. They represent 10 events in which we should have seen orders of magnitude more “moral work” being done than we saw in fact.

The reason for demanding this moral work is not for the sake of atheists themselves. The moral demand comes from any love of justice – of the principle that law-abiding citizens of any government deserve the equal respect of that government and of their fellow citizens.

Promoting Virtue

The work of morality is not done in the realm of reason.

The work of morality is not done through dispassionate lectures, or blog postings that emotionlessly follow a path from a set of true premises through the length of a valid argument to a moral conclusion. It is not done in friendly debate or discussion.

The work of morality requires picking up the tools of morality – praise, condemnation, reward, and punishment – and applying the tools to task at hand to modify desires insofar as they can be modified. It requires actually going to the effort of promoting those desires that tend to fulfill other desires, and inhibiting those desires that tend to thwart other desires.

Reason has a role to play in telling us what those desires are, the degree to which they can be molded, and in how to most effectively use the tools of morality to mold those desires. However, reason alone does not do the work. In the same way, reason can tell you how to change a tire. However, you need to pick up the tools and actually apply them to the job if you want to get the tires changed.

A protest – people with signs marching and shouting – is one of the places where moral work actually gets done. Protests are acts of condemnation. It does not matter that the slogans that show up on the signs or the chants that the marchers use are not logically sound syllogisms leading to necessarily true conclusions. It matters that the signs and chants express praise on the one hand for what the marchers seek to promote, and condemnation on the other hand for what the marchers seek to inhibit.

Reason tells us if the protesters are working to promote that which there are many and strong reasons to promote – or if they are working to inhibit that which there are many and strong reasons to inhibit. However, reason does not do the work of promoting or inhibiting. That is the work that the protestors have taken up.

My ideal example of doing moral work can be found in the national motto and the national pledge. The national motto is an act of praise for those who trust in God (and an act of condemnation for those who do not), attached to something that is essential in every person’s life.

The Pledge of Allegiance is an act of praise for those who support a nation under God (and an act of condemnation for those who do not), aimed primarily at an audience whose minds are the most malleable, creating an emotional bond in the brain of the child for a state of affairs in which the nation is under God, and an aversion to anything that threatens the realization of such a state.

There are no arguments or syllogisms in these examples. No "reasons to believe" are provided. Rather, these acts of praise and condemnation work directly on the desires – particularly those of children.

The effect of this moral work is to create a state in which a person must trust in God and support a nation under God to enter public office. It is to promote a state where a supermajority of citizens would not want their child to marry an atheist, that views atheists as inherent anti-American, and who will withdraw support for any policy or program from the teaching of evolution to enforcing the First Amendment to the Constitution, that can be presented as a threat to trust in God or a nation under God.

It does so in a way that makes attempts to reason people out of these convictions a waste of effort, for the most part. Their attitudes are not grounded in reason, they are grounded in desires and aversions planted in their brains as children. Desires and aversions are a realm that reason typically cannot touch. They are a realm that we reach through praise, condemnation, reward, and punishment.

I want to point out that the qualifiers in the previous paragraph are meant to respect the fact that not all children learn the same moral lessons. An attempt to promote certain attitudes may make those attitudes more common, but it is difficult to make any set of attitudes truly universal.

There will be those who escape this attempt to plant desires for trust in God and a nation under God, and to plant aversion to anything that threaten such a state, and it will meet with certain degrees of success in others. None of that defeats the argument I am making here.

Again, the fact that people pick up a tool (such as praise and condemnation) and wield it does not prove that they are wielding it for a good end. That the praise that our government and its institutions heap upon those who trust in God and support a nation under God is effective and a perfect example of doing moral work is not proof that it is right.

In fact, in this case, the tools are not being used for a good end. This does not change the fact that the tools are being used efficiency - with great skill and precision. An expert soldier can be an expert soldier in the service of good or evil. How well he uses his tools, and the quality of the ends he serves with them, are two different questions.

Reason tells us the quality of the ends, and how best to use the tools in service to those ends.

However, the people who actually wield the tools of praise and condemnation are the ones doing the real work.

Here, I want to repeat my standard disclaimer. In an open society, the only legitimate response to words are words and private actions – not violence. The only legitimate response to a political campaign is a counter-campaign focused on persuading people that one’s position is correct, not on threats of violence commanding expressions of acceptance.

Moral Work

I am responding to a flurry of questions I have received on the moral principles that underlie this blog. In my previous post, I wrote about the difference between desires-as-ends and desires-as-means. Desires-as-ends provide the only reasons for action that exist. Even with respect to desires-as-means, the desire for the end that the "means" will help the agent achieve provide the "reasons for action that exist" to realize those means.

This has important implications for the "teaching" of morality.

If desires-as-ends are not dependent on beliefs, and morality is concerned with promoting good desires-as-ends and inhibiting bad desires-as-ends – this suggests that we do not teach morality by altering a person’s beliefs. It is quite possible for a person to hear a logical syllogism that tells him, "X is wrong", know that the premises are true and that the argument is valid, accept the conclusion as true, and simply shrug his shoulders at the conclusion and do X anyway.

The problem is not that he does not believe that X is wrong. The problem is that he does not care. And caring is in the realm of desires, not beliefs.

This goes against a common claim that "a person who knows the good will do the good." All you have to do is to prove to somebody, through calm reason, that X is the right thing to do, and he will do X.

That common claim is true, to some degree, for people who actually have a desire to do the right thing. If somebody has that desire, and a belief that "X is the right thing to do", then he has a motivating reason to do X. Still, the belief without the desire is insufficient.

Each agent only does what fulfills the most and strongest of his own desires given his beliefs. If he does not have a desire to do the right thing, or some set of desires that he can be convinced will be fulfilled if he does X, then he has no motivating reason to do X, regardless of the moral argument.

This does not imply that there is no role for reason in morality. Reason is what tells us what needs to be done, but it does not actually do the work.

In the past, I have compared the practice of morality to the task of changing a tire. You can reason all you want with the flat tire while you sit on the side of the road. That will not get the tire changed. You have to do the work of getting the jack and the tire-iron out and physically changing the tire.

However, reason still has a role to play. Reason tells you why you should change the tire (in terms of the desires-as-means for changing the tire), and how to do so. However, reason alone will not do the work.

The same is true of morality. I argue that morality is concerned with using social forces such as praise, condemnation, reward, and punishment to promote malleable desires that people generally have reason (desires-as-ends) to promote, and inhibit malleable desires that people have reason (desires-as-ends) to inhibit.

Reason alone does not do the work. You have to have people out there praising, condemning, rewarding, and punishing people in the way that reason recommends to do the moral work.

In the absence of moral work being done in the form of praise, condemnation, reward, and punishment, nothing changes. Nothing gets done. That is the arena in which moral work gets done. If people are not in that arena, then they are not doing the moral work. They are leaving that job to others.

In my next post, I will look at what the moral work consists of, particularly on issues relevant to secularists and atheists.

Desires, Ends, and Means

I am still getting a swarm of questions about the morality that sits at the foundation of this blog. Some of those questions come as comments to previous blog postings. Many more are coming through direct contact.

I want to answer one of the questions that I got as a comment, because it has important implications for the question of how morality is taught – with what one should do with moral facts. I answered the question in the comments section when it came in, but I want to give a more thorough answer.

The question:

Wait - so does your theory differentiate between desires based on true beliefs and desires based on false beliefs.

The answer: Desires are not based on beliefs. (Or, more precisely, desires-as-ends, which ultimately are the only reasons for action that exist, are not based on beliefs.)

Take, for example, the aversion to pain. The discomfort that one feels on having one’s hand in a bed of red-hot coals (at least so long as the flesh survives) is not grounded on any beliefs one might have about fire. It simply hurts.

Desires and beliefs are both propositional attitudes – line of computer code written into the brain. Beliefs are attitudes about how the world is. Desires are attitudes about how one wants the world to be.

We tend to want to avoid the sensation one gets when one's hand is badly burned. Beliefs help us to do so, but our aversion to those sensations are independent of our beliefs.

To confuse things, we do use the term 'desire' or 'want' loosely. We use it to refer to things that we desire as an end (aversion to pain) for no reason other than the fact we like or do not like it. We also use the term to refer to that which we desire as a means or as a tool for bringing about what we do not want. We want a smoke detector installed in our house to avoid being burned in a fire.

What we desire as a means is belief-dependent. We want smoke detectors because we believe that they can save us from a fire. However, every "desire-as-a-means" that we have is really just a bundle of beliefs and "desires-as-an-end". It is still the case that all of the motivation – all of the reasons for action – come from the "desires-as-ends" that are incorporated into this bundle.

One of the questions that I was asked concerns how we know whether we are dealing with a desire-as-means versus a desires-as-ends. One of the ways we can do this is by looking at the role of beliefs.

Somebody says that he favors capital punishment because it is a deterrence against crime. He is provided with evidence that disproves this belief. However, he dismisses the evidence without good reason (he "grasps at straws" for anything that appears to give the deterrence claim legitimacy regardless of how little sense it makes), or he accepts the evidence but still favors capital punishment.

Either of these reactions suggests that he does not value capital punishment as a means to reducing the killing of innocent people.

After all, if reducing the murders of innocent people were his goal, he would be seeking out the most efficient way to realize that goal. It would be important to him to have good evidence for what works (and what doesn't work) and to go with the option that has the best chance of working. The fact that he is willing to lie to himself about the effectiveness of capital punishment, or to disregard evidence, suggests that he values capital punishment for its own sake, and not just as a means for reducing the number of murders.

Whenever we see people grasping clearly flawed arguments, we have good reason to believe that the "desires-as-means" that he claims are the reasons for his action are not his real reasons. His real reasons are some desires-as-ends that we have reason to condemn or to criticize. To avoid this condemnation or criticism, he gives is whatever desires-as-means reasons that shows the slightest hope of tying his actions to a more legitimate end.

He denies that he has an aversion to homosexual relationships themselves and claims that opposition to homosexual marriage is necessary to promote morality and the traditional family, because societies that ignore morality and the traditional family collapse into a heap. "So, see, my end is not opposition to homosexual marriage. My end is to prevent the collapse of society. This is a perfectly good end."

Except, there is no evidence that society is actually put at stake by allowing homosexual marriage. There is only a desire to believe that society will collapse.

Now we can ask, "What desires are motivating you to WANT to believe such nonsense?"

 

BB3: Peter Turchin: A Science of History

This is the 13th in a series of posts on presentations given at Beyond Belief 3: Candles in the Dark"

You can find a list of all Atheist Ethicist blog postings covering Beyond Belief 3 at the Introduction post

And I would like to encourage you to give a contribution to the Science Network, who makes these presentations available for free.

Peter Turchin came to talk about the possibility of and the importance of "social science."

Let's look at the importance of social science first.

One of the statistics that Turchin brought to his talk was the claim that, in recent years, ten times as many people have died in intranational conflict than international conflict.

Political instability is a source of massive human misery. How do we solve this problem?

It would seem, Turchin argues, that the same reasons we have for valuing medicine and the health of individuals, we have reasons for valuing social sciences and the health of societies. When societies become unhealthy, people die. To prevent death, we look at what makes societies sick, and we find ways to treat or cure those social diseases.

Solving problems such as this is why we need a science of history. Turchin laments the fact that the study of history is a study in which people propose a lot of theories (e.g., theories for the decline of the Roman Empire), but no theory ever gets rejected. There is no method for falsifying a theory in history, so history fails to provide us with data that is useful for avoiding the problems of political instability.

Then, to illustrate what he is talking about, Turchin discussed what he considers to be an actual theory to an actual historical problem. He showed a chart that looked at the size of the largest empire at any given year, He noticed that the size of the largest empire seemed to have an upper boundary until somewhere between 800 and 200 BC.

Then, the maximum size for societies suddenly grew by an orderof magnitude. From this point on, empires could be 10 times larger than empires under used to be able to get.

What happened between in that time that made larger societies possible?

Turchin credits religion and religious-like belief systems with making large societies possible. This increase in the maximum possible size of societies took place at the same time that monotheism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Stoicism came into existence.

These "unifying ideologies" play an important role in creating stable societies - according to Turchin. Their role was important enough that it would be unwise to be rid of them.

A strong and just state is possible only on the basis of a well-integrated society.

Turchin does not go into this issue in detail (given the 15-minute limitation on his speech). However, a question that I came up with at this point is the disposition that religions have to be intolerant of dissent. If a common social glue is important, then does this need for a common social glue justify being intolerant of other views?

Ultimately, Turchin does not say that the social glue is religion. He states that the social glue is cooperation.

Cooperation is the social glue. What mechanisms cause it to wax versus wane?

This says something about the atheist movement in the United States. There is very little cooperation among atheist groups in the United States. So, it may be said that atheism does not generate cooperation. As such, it cannot provide a society with the integration that it needs.

I want to stress that Turchin did not draw these implications. I am simply looking at the possibility here.

However, somebody who attempts to make this argument would have to explain how those explanations square with the fact that there are northern-European countries that are substantially secular, and very health.

Robert Nozick's Utility Monster

Mail from the studio audience is coming in at a fairly fast rate right now. Which is a good thing. I am trying to answer as many questions as I can.

One piece of correspondence came with a question that I really should have answered long ago.

I was curious if you would be willing to or already have (and would be willing to provide me a link) addressed the concept of the utility monster and how it relates (or doesn’t) to desire utilitarianism.

The “utility monster” was one of philosopher Robert Nozick’s objections to utilitarian theory.

Nozick postulated a creature who received 100 units of utility (pleasure, happiness) per unit of resource consumption, in a universe where everybody else received 1 unit of utility per unit of resource consumption. In this type of universe, Nozick argued, utilitarian would require that all of the people who got lesser utility be sacrificed (give up any and all resources) to the utility monster. This moral demand for sacrifice, however, is absurd. Therefore, basic utilitarianism is defeated by means of a reduction to absurdity.

How does desire utilitarianism handle the utility monster?

I will begin by asserting that morality is a tool used for the fulfillment of real-world desires. If I were to build a hammer, somebody might raise the objection, “How would that hammer work in a world where nails were all built of clay?” The answer is, it wouldn’t. However, this is still a perfectly good hammer for the real world, where nails are made of steel.

Having said that, as I desire utilitarian, I would also note that the utility monster, in this case, has desires that tend to thwart the desires of others. As such, others have many and strong reason to inhibit this desire through social forces such as praise and condemnation. They have many and strong reasons to raise in their place desires that tend to fulfill other desires.

It is better, all things considered, for the utility monster to get its 100 units of utility from states of affairs in which the desires of others are fulfilled, than from states of affairs where the desires of others are thwarted through the loss of resources.

This, I would wager, is where the emotional reaction to Nozick’s hypothetical come from. We read the description and immediately note that we have an aversion to that type of situation – the desires we have that will be thwarted by the greedy consumption of all the resources by this monster.

Those desires are "reasons for action that exist" for each of us to act so as to prevent the realization of such a state – to avoid a state in which there is a utility monster commanding the consumption of all the resources. They give us reasons to promote a aversions to overconsumption, waste, and greed, so that more desires are fulfilled through the use of fewer resources.

This is, in fact, what we see in the real world – the use of social forces (praise and condemnation) to promote aversions to the over-use of resources. It is because of the desire-thwarting qualities of "utility monsters" that people act to inhibit the creation of a world in which people find utility in the over-consumption of resources.

Individuals will seek to act so as to fulfill the more and stronger of their own desires. As a result, if we assert that the utility monster is a creature that acts in ways that thwart the desires of others, it follows that others have little or no reason to feed the utility monster. Advocating that people do that which, by hypothesis, we are told that they have more and stronger reason to refrain from doing, is nonsense. It’s a contradiction built straight into the example.

Let us say, instead, that we are dealing with a non-malleable desires. The utility monster has extremely strong desires (obsessions, perhaps) that require the consumption of fast amounts of resources. Other people have non-malleable desires to use those resources to fulfill weaker desires.

In this case, desire utilitarianism says that we have stepped out of the realm of morality. We have a universe in which these two sets of beings are in an unavoidable conflict. As a matter of fact, each faction will continue to act so as to fulfill the most and strongest of its own desires, given its belief. The fighting will continue until one group or the other has been wiped out.

We can only bring morality into the equation when one faction or the other has malleable desires. Then (and only then) it makes sense to ask how social forces can mold those desires. Which is the same as asking about the desires that the most and strongest people have reason to promote or inhibit.

The utility monster's resource-consuming desires are not desires that people generally have reason to promote.

 

The Aversion to Homosexual Marriage

[W]ould a Christian's desire to live in a world without homosexual marriage be morally equivalent to the desire to enter a homosexual marriage? It would seem that fulfillment of either desire thwarts the other.

This is one of two questions that I received from a member of the studio audience. I answered the first question, on whether an embryo has morally relevant interests, yesterday.

Again, I am going to get pedantic and add some precision to this question.

The fact that a particular desire is a Christian’s desire does not give it any more weight . . . or any less weight . . . then the same desire held by a non-Christian. The question here is really how we should weigh an aversion to homosexual marriage and a desire on the part of some to enter into homosexual marriage. Is this an irreconcilable conflict?

In answering this question we need to look at a few additional factors.

The first is that morality is concerned with applying social forces such as praise and condemnation to malleable desires. Where two sets of desires come into conflict, one of the questions we need to ask ourselves in determining how to resolve that conflict is to ask which of the desires can be more easily changed.

Evidence suggests that the aversion to homosexual marriage is learned. Homosexual desire itself, on the other hand, is often the result of biochemical reactions that occur during fetal development that influence the properties of the body and brain.

The only thing we really need to do to end (or significantly reduce) this aversion to homosexual relationships is to quit teaching children to acquire and aversion to homosexual relationships. Whereas we are not going to get rid of homosexuality itself – at least until fetuses are developed inside of artificially and carefully regulated wombs.

The second factor to examine is to ask whether we are actually dealing with an aversion to homosexual marriage. In many cases, we are not dealing with an aversion to homosexual marriage per se, but with an aversion to that which offends God, and a belief that homosexual marriage offends God. Or, similarly, we could be dealing with an aversion to that which is intrinsically bad and a belief that homosexual marriage is intrinsically bad (or ‘unnatural’).

In these cases, homosexual marriage is not actually thwarting any desires. Instead, some people have merely acquired a false belief that it thwarts certain desires. The objections to homosexual marriage in this case would be similar to an objection raised by a neighbor because you intend to till your garden. Your neighbor comes over and says, “Do not till your garden because it will harm all of the faeries that live in the garden.”

Your neighbor, in this case, has an aversion to having harm done to faeries and a false belief that tilling your garden will harm faeries. However, here aversion to having harm done to faeries will not actually be thwarted by you tilling your garden. Because tilling the garden does not actually thwart any real desires, there is no real world “reason for action” to prevent you from weeding the garden.

Homosexual marriage is in the same situation. Homosexual marriage does not actually offend God because there is no God to be offended. Nor is homosexual marriage intrinsically bad because intrinsic badness does not exist. So, with respect to these concerns, homosexual marriage is not actually thwarting real desires. Consequently, these concerns do not provide any real-world reason to oppose homosexual marriage. They provide imaginary reasons.

If we imagine that the neighbor shoots the gardener to prevent harm being done to the faeries in the garden (or forces him, through law, to starve when he could have been well fed), we do not have a story of a hero doing great deeds. We have a tragedy born of ignorance and superstition.

The Moral Status of an Embryo

I have received another communication from somebody with questions about the implications of my moral philosophy. This one has two questions.

The second of these two questions draws from the claims that I have been using for the last two days – that for an entity to have interests that are morally relevant, it must have desires. An entity without desires cannot be harmed in any morally relevant way.

So, I have been asked:

Also, using desire utilitarianism, is it correct that an embryo would lack moral standing since it lacks the facility for conscious desire?

I wish to be pedantic for a moment and make this question a bit more precise before answering it.

There is a distinction between having “the facility for conscious desire” and having desires.

A person can have a “facility” for something without having the thing itself. I can, for example, have a facility for storing two hundred tons of cotton, without actually having two hundred tons of cotton. Having the “facility” for desires is not relevant here. Value consists of a relationship between states of affairs and actual desires. If the facility is empty, then no value (and no interests) yet exists.

Also, the claim that value exists in the form of relationships between states of affairs and desires does not distinguish between conscious and unconscious desires. Unconscious desires generate value just as conscious desires do. So, there is no moral permission to ignore unconscious desires – to go ahead and thwart them at will because they have no moral weight.

Please note that a sleeping (or unconscious) individual still has desires. He may not be able to act on them, but the desires exist nonetheless. There is no call for saying that the desires disappear – or they lose their moral relevance – in virtue of the fact that the person with the desires has lost consciousness.

So, I would rephrase the question to ask:

Also, using desire utilitarianism, is it correct that an embryo would lack moral standing since it lacks desires?

That is correct.

No morally relevant harm can be done to an entity that does not have any interests. Removing an embryo is much the same as removing an appendix. However, once the fetus has desires (even so much as an aversion to pain), it has morally relevant interests.

What If There Were a God? Implications on Morality

I have been writing a series of posts answering a series of questions on my basic moral philosophy. This post does not come from any question. However, it does come from some of the things I wrote in the last post on the value of communities.

In my last post I wrote that it is unlikely that communities have any interests because communities do not have any desires. Individuals within a community have desires, but not communities themselves.

However, what if communities had interests (desires) emerging from their complexity that were independent of those of the people within that community?

Even if this were true, this would be one set of interests among many. There is no reason to give the interests of this entity any greater weight than the interests of any other entity within the community. The community itself would still count as one entity – one “person”.

The same type of answer applies to the question, “What if there was a God?”

Let us assume that there is a God, and that God has a set of beliefs and desires. What implications would this have for morality?

Not much.

This would imply that there are a set of values in the sense that there is a set of relationships between states of affairs and God’s desires – just as there exists a set of relationships between states of affairs and my neighbor’s desires. God would still be entitled to the moral weight of one entity in all moral calculations.

There is no justification for the claim that an individual must make his interests (desires) subservient to those of God, any more than there is justification for the claim that God must make his interests subservient to those of any human.

In the realm of morality, God and humans are equals.

Instead of having intrinsic value, the value of God’s desires would still be determined by the value of all other desires. God’s desires are good to the degree that God has desires that tend to fulfill other desires.

Similarly, God is evil to the degree that God has desires that tend to thwart other desires. If God has a desire that tends to thwart other desires – a desire to cause pain, or a desire that leads to a great deal of thwarting of desires, then this does not make suffering good. This makes God evil.

The claim that God created humans would be morally irrelevant. If a being creates another being with desires, then that being creates a moral equal. If a man and a woman act so as to bring a baby into the world, this does not make the baby a slave to her parents, obligated to putting their interests above her own. The baby comes to the world as somebody of equal moral weight, whose interests are on a par with the interests of her parents.

Just as the infant is the moral equal of her parents (even though the parents have far greater strength, intelligence, and wisdom), people would be the moral equivalent of Gods.

The only reason that parents have authority over a child is because the parents, we assume, can make decisions that more reliably fulfill the present and future desires of the child than the child can. The child’s duty to obey her parents, insofar as such a duty exists, comes from the fact that it is generally in her interests to do so.

As soon as the parents begin to command things that are not in the child’s interests (particularly if they command that the child act in ways that fulfill the desires of the parent while sacrificing her own interests), the duty to obey disappears.

The same would be true if there were a God.

If that God commanded things that were truly in our interests (that would help to better realize states of affairs that fulfill our desires), it would be prudent for us to do what that God told us to do.

However, at the first sign that this God is commanding that we act in ways where we are not fulfilling our own desires, but instead sacrificing our interests for his pleasure, our duty to obey goes to the same place as that of the child of a parent who would abuse her for his own pleasure.

As it is, there is no God. There are the beliefs of a bunch of pre-literate tribesmen scribbled into books and stories when they finally learned to write. People who obey the bible are not fulfilling the desires of any deity. They are following the instructions of substantially ignorant human beings who have been dead for hundreds of years.

When those beings died, their desires died with them. When those desires ceased to exist, so did the value grounded on those desires. So, people who act so as to please a group of pre-literate tribesmen are not realizing any value at all, unless (by chance) those actions also tend to fulfill current, real, and good desires.

Yet, even if I were wrong on this matter . . . even if there were a God . . . the moral implications would be nothing more than to note that the moral universe is larger by one person – a person who has no more rights than any other person – a person who counts as one person in all moral calculations – a person that is good to the degree that he has desires that tend to fulfill other desires, and evil to the degree that he has desires that tend to thwart other desires.

The Individual vs The Community

I am writing a series of posts on my basic moral foundations, in response to a series of questions that I received from an interested reader. That list of questions included the following:

Richard Chappell, referring to you, says the perspective of moral values is the “us” - This strikes me as collectivism, so, how can it not be? . . . Maybe you feel that individualism and collectivism can be merged or compatibilized, like with what you did to the objective/subjective dichotomy?

One of the concerns that some people have is over the question of whether (and to what degree) an individual may be sacrificed for the good of the community. It concerns a line of thinking that says that the community is some type of “superperson”, more important than any individual and worthy of the individual’s sacrifice.

An important counter to this is that we are all individuals. The sacrifice of an individual for the sake of “the community” is really just the sacrifice of an individual for the sake of other individuals.

I have argued that value exists in the form of relationships between states of affairs and desires. As far as we know so far, only individuals have desires. Communities do not have desires independent of the desires of any individual.

So, this model would conform to the view that the sacrifice of the individual for the sake of the community is accurately described as the thwarting of one person’s desires for the sake of fulfilling the desires of other people. Perhaps it is to fulfill particularly strong desires for a lot of other people, but it is a of one person for the benefit of other people nonetheless.

It is, at least, conceivable that a community can have beliefs and desires that are independent of those of any person within that community.

A bunch of atoms can be organized into a form called a brain, where the brain has beliefs and desires that are independent of the beliefs and desires of any atom that makes up the brain. So, it may be possible that a group of people can be organized into a form of society where the society has beliefs and desires that are independent of any person within that society.

If such an entity were to come into existence, then certain values would also come into existence. Those values would take the form of relationships between states of affairs in the world and the entity’s desires.

However, there is no reason to believe that the desires of this entity are any more or less important than the desires of any individual who made up that entity. This entity would still only be one “person”, whose interests are to be weighed against the interests of the hundreds of millions or billions of people who made up this entity.

We can sacrifice an appendix for the sake of the person who needs it removed because the appendix has no beliefs or desires of its own. As an entity without desires, it is an entity without interests, which means that it cannot be harmed in any morally relevant sense.

However, sacrificing a clump of people for the sake of the community does involve the sacrifice of beings with interests. If we consider the community to be an entity with desires independent of those of the individuals who make it up, then sacrificing a group of people in that society for the sake of the society still counts as sacrificing the interests of a lot of entities for the sake of the interests of one entity.

Furthermore, if a community is an entity with desires independent of the desires of the individuals within it, then it is still the case that we can evaluate the desires of that entity. That entity has good desires to the degree that it has desires that tend to fulfill other desires (the desires of the people who make up that community). That entity has bad desires to the degree that it has desires that tend to thwart the desires of others (the desires of the people who make up that community).

The idea that the community represents some sort of super-entity with its own desires is highly speculative at best. A person can reasonably hold that even if such an entity were possible, no such entity exists at this time.

Yet, even if it did exist . . . even if communities formed entities with their own beliefs and desires . . . it is still one entity among many. Any claim that this entity’s interests have value above and beyond the interests of the people who make up this entity is a claim that some sort of desire-independent reason exists. That’s a false claim.

This does not imply that it is always wrong to sacrifice the interests of some individuals for the sake of other people. In fact, we do it all the time. We have a prison and court system that every honest person knows does harm to the interests of a lot of innocent people.

However, we know that it would be foolish for us to abolish it, and to accept only a prison and court system that guarantees without the possibility of error that no innocent person will be punished. We know that we are doing harm to innocent people for the sake of the community, but we do so anyway.

We sacrifice the interests of rapists for the sake of the community, and we do not offer them a smidgen of compensation for their loss. Why should we? The rapist has bad desires – desires that we have reason to inhibit – because the community will be better off if no member of the community had a desire to rape.

Ultimately, this is an example of sacrificing the interests of one group of people to protect the interests of others. However, we are sacrificing the interests of those who have interests they should not have, and that we have reason to discourage rather than promote.

So, while it is sometimes legitimate to sacrifice the interests of some subset of people for the sake of the community, it is not legitimate in the sense that the community represents a super-community with its own super-interests that outweigh those of any individual.

Even if it did exist, it would be one entity among many, and its interests would be the equal of those of any one person within the community. It would not be an entity with interests inherently worth the sacrifice of millions (or even tens) of people.

For the moment, so far as we can tell, only individuals have desires. Consequently, all real-world value exists in the form of relationships between states of affairs and the desires of individuals.

Individualist vs Collectivist Systems

I am writing a series answering some basic questions about the philosophy that serves as the foundation for this blog. So far I have presented the idea that there are moral facts. Moral facts concern relationships between malleable desires and other desires (not some sort of intrinsic moral property). This implies that moral facts can change over time as relationships between real-world objects change over time. However, you cannot change a moral fact merely by changing your mind, any more than you can change your height by merely believing you are taller.

These posts came from a set of questions sent to me by somebody who included the following.

I come from Objectivism (the philosophy of Ayn Rand). I consider myself an individualistic anarchist, (free market anarchist). Does Objective Moral Relativism equate to a collectivist worldview or is it proper for an individualist (take someone who comes from Randian premises)?

I came from an Objectivist camp as well – and stayed there through most of high school and until the early years of college. I gave it up when I realized that my Objectivist friends, even though they claimed to have a great deal of respect for reason and reality, held a system that asserted the existence of things that do not exist, and defended them with twists of logic that rival those of any religion.

When we are talking about value, only one type of value has been shown to exist - has been shown to be real. This is the value that exists as relationships between states of affairs and desires. Different types of value reflect different types of relationships.

So, for example, the term "useful" is applied to things in virtue of their ability to bring about other things in which desires are fulfilled.

The term "healthy" is a desire-laden term that applies to physical and mental functioning. It states whether the object of evaluation is functioning in a way that tends to fulfill the desires of the agent.

The term "beautiful" refers to things seen and heard and concerns wither the speaker has a desire to look at or to listen to that object of evaluation.

Whether a system that is "individualist" has more value than something that is "collective" (or visa versa) depends on the relationship that individualist systems have in fulfilling good desires, compared to the relationship that a collectivist system has. If individualistic systems tend to fulfill good desires better than collective systems, then people have more and stronger reason to promote individualistic systems than they do for promoting collective systems. Or visa versa, depending on the relevant moral facts.

Good desires are relevant here because good desires are those that tend to fulfill other desires, so are desires that people have reason to promote. Bad desires tend to thwart other desires, and are desires people have reason to inhibit. A system that fulfills desires that tend to fulfill other desires is one that people have reason to prefer over one that fulfills desires that tend to thwart the desires of others. We do not just look at whether each system fulfills desires, but at the quality of the desires they fulfill.

If somebody wants to argue that individualistic systems are intrinsically more valuable than collective systems, they are going to provide me with some sort of evidence that this intrinsic value exists. As I see it, "intrinsic value" is at least as mysterious as God, and I have never seen a shred of evidence of its existence. Accordingly, I see that a person who worships at the altar of "intrinsic value" to be little different than a person who worships a God. They are both devoting time and energy to the service of something that does not exist.

So, desire utilitarianism is not inherently individualist or collectivist. Desire utilitarianism calls for looking at each system and judging which best fulfills good desires. Capitalists have arguments that free-market systems do a better job of fulfilling desires. Communists disagree.

Keep in mind, this requires more than saying, "I like individualistic systems more than collective systems." Like does not matter much. A person may taste the contents of two glasses that are sitting in front of him on the table. He may discover that he likes the taste of glass A more than that of glass B. Yet, it may still be the case that glass A contains a poison that will cause the person who drinks it a slow and agonizing death. We cannot trust to our likes and dislikes alone to tell us what has value.

There are facts of the matter here, regarding whether individualist or collectivist systems help or poison those who use them. There are questions here that cannot be answered by appeal to personal preference or taste. There are questions that are as much a matter of what is real and what is not as any question that scientists seek to answer.

Desire Utilitarianism vs. "Common Utilitarianism"

I am starting the year with a series of blog postings about my basic moral philosophy, in answer to a set of questions that I have recently received.

I started by explaining desire utilitarianism - the idea that malleable desires are the fundamental object of moral evaluation. We have reason to use those social forces to promote malleable desires that tend to fulfill other desires, and inhibit desires that tend to thwart other desires.

I also explained objective moral relativism – the thesis that moral claims are not claims about intrinsic moral properties, but claims about relationships that exist in the real world. These relationships are real and can be studied as scientifically as any relationship in nature.

The next question is:

3 - How is your position distinct from common Utilitarianism, like the one Bentham invented, with the whole "greatest amount of pleasure for the greater number of people" and "hedonic calculus" which could lead to someone killing an innocent person to save 2 of his better-liked fellows, or robbing my food to feed more people, etc..

.

I have partially answered this question in the first posting on desire utilitarian theory.

Desire utilitarianism is a theory that holds that desires are the fundamental object of moral evaluation, and that desires are to be evaluated according to the utility they produce. The rightness or wrongness of an action does not depend on maximizing utility. The rightness or wrongness of an action depends on whether it is the type of action that a person with good desires would perform.

I have answered this question in more detail in a posting that I called The 1000Sadists Problem. What if the televised torture of a young child will fulfill the desires of 1,000 sadists? Does desire utilitarianism say we should torture the child?

No, it does not.

The first thing we must do is to evaluate the sadistic desire itself. Let us assume that nobody has a sadistic desire. In this case, no desires are being thwarted. No victims are being tortured to fulfill the desires of the sadist, and no sadists are having their desire to witness torture thwarted by the fact that nobody is being tortured.

However, the instant we introduce a person with a sadistic desire, then somebody’s desires are going to be thwarted. Either the sadist is going to suffer the thwarting of his desire for sadistic torture, or the sadist’s victim is going to suffer the thwarting of desires that is a part of being tortured. The desire for sadistic torture is a desire that people generally have reason to inhibit – it is a bad desire.

Note that it is not a bad desire because it is intrinsically bad. It is a bad desire because of the relationship it has to other desires – the desires that other people have to avoid pain and for the well-being of their loved ones. Intrinsic value does not exist. Only relationships between objects of evaluation (sadistic desire) and (other) desires exist.

This does not imply that a desire utilitarian would be opposed to a redistribution of wealth through such methods as taxation. The fact of the matter is that if there are 10 hungry people, one would fulfill more desires by distributing the food among all 10 people than by giving the food to one person (who may have no interest in sharing it with others). We have many and strong reasons to promote in people a desire to share that which they have with those who have less, or even to force him to hand over the food if he does not want to.

This is an issue that I have discussed in several postings, using the example of an airplane that has crashed in a desert, far from any help, but near to an isolated mansion where the wealthy owner is running millions of gallons of water through his fountains, with no possibility for help to come for days or weeks.

Desire utilitarianism holds that the person who would selfishly refuse to share his water in this case has desires that people generally have reason to inhibit. That is to say, he is a bad person. A good person, on the other hand, would seek to redistribute the water wealth, allowing the passengers to survive. People generally have many and strong reasons to promote desires to help those in need and aversions to those who selfishly stand by while others suffer and die.

Though it is not guaranteed, it is at least plausible that the good person, in this type of case, will forcefully redistribute the water wealth from those who have more water than they need to those who need water to survive.

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with redistributing the wealth. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with anything - intrinsic values do not exist. However, objective values exist. It may well be a matter of objective fact that the desires that the good person would have are desires that would see to the redistribution of the water wealth.

I will have more to say on this topic in my next post.

Desire Utilitarianism and Objective Moral Relativism - Part II

Objective Moral Relativism

I am going over a set of questions that I have been sent regarding my basic moral philosophy. Currently, I am addressing the question of whether one position I defend - Objective Moral Relativism - is the same as another view that I defend - Desire Utilitarianism. In my previous post I described desire utilitarianism. So, in this post, I will look at objective moral relativism.

The short answer is that objective moral relativism is not the same as desire utilitarianism. However, the two claims do not conflict, so they both are true.

Objective moral relativism is a term that I use to confront the popular (and hugely mistaken) assumption that for moral values to be objective they must be some sort of property that is intrinsic to actions or states of affairs that somehow signal to us that the action ought (or ought not) to be done or the state ought (or ought not) to be realized.

Consequently, a moral objectivist must assert the existence of such entities. Those who deny their existence are moral relativists, who hold that morality is nothing more than the unfounded whim of the person making the moral claim.

The idea that one must choose between intrinsic properties or subjective properties is simply false. Science claims are considered objective. However, there are very few if any scientific claims that refer to intrinsic properties. Most scientific claims describe relationships between things. Yet, this fact does not, in any way, threaten the objectivity of science.

My paradigm example of objective relativism is location. I challenge you, the reader, to describe the location of anything in absolute terms. All location claims describe relationships. They point out where one thing is by describing its relationship to another thing. The keys are on the table. Denver is in Colorado. I am at home.

Yet, scientific research papers are filled with location claims.

Surprisingly, nobody ever thinks to assert that scientific research isn’t real science if it contains a location claim.

Another fact about location claims is that the decision as to what to describe an object’s location relative to is a matter of whim. We give the location of many things on Earth relative to an imaginary line drawn between the north and south pole through Greenwich, England. But why Greenwich England? Can any researcher, anywhere in the world, provide me with a scientific argument proving that Greenwich, England is the one and only correct place to use for zero degrees longitude? Or is it the case that this reflects a substantially arbitrary choice by a bunch of men who simply agreed to use this line?

Yet, even with this arbitrary, unfounded decision to use Greenwich, England as the point for zero degrees longitude, we still do not have an objection to the claim that a statement in a scientific paper giving the location of an object in terms of latitude and longitude is an objective scientific claim.

My claim is that moral statements, like location statements, represent a type of objective relativism. Moral statements, like location statements, describe relationships between real things in the universe. Specifically, moral statements describe relationships between malleable desires (those desires that can be molded through social forces such as praise and condemnation) and other desires. They are not statements about mysterious properties that are somehow intrinsic to objects of evaluation that tell us whether or not the object of evaluation should be realized or not.

Furthermore, these relationships are perfectly fit subjects for scientific study – as fit as relationships between objects in space and time. They exist as a part of the real world. Nobody has the power to alter these relationships simply by changing their mind about them, any more than they have the power to move a star trillions of miles through space simply by changing their mind on where the star is at, or to move their keys to their coat pocket simply by believing, "My keys are in my coat pocket."

The next objection usually to come up asks on what basis I am justified in calling these particular relationships 'morality'. My answer is: Call them what you want, it does not matter in the end. In just the same way that choosing Greenwich, England as the starting point for latitude and longitude has no relevance to the objective location of things on the Earth what we choose to call morality has no relevance what is and is not true about relationships between desires and states of affairs.

If X is a desire that people generally have reason to promote or to inhibit through social forces such as praise and condemnation, then X remains a desire that people generally have reason to promote or to inhibit, regardless of what we call it. Just as the longitudinal distance from Greenwich, England to Denver, Colorado, remains the same regardless of what location one arbitrarily decides to call "zero degrees longitude".

So, in short, Objective Moral Relativism says that moral statements do not refer to intrinsic moral properties. Instead, they refer to relationships that exist in the real world that allow moral claims to be objectively true or false. Desire utilitarianism holds that the specific relationships in question are those between maleable desires (desires that can be molded through social forces) and other desires.

Desire Utilitarianism and Objective Moral Relativism - Part I

I have received a communication with a set of four questions about my basic moral view. Since this is the start of a new year, and since I suspect that there is some turnover in my readership, I think that this is a good time to explain the moral foundation of this blog in the light of these questions.

I am considering what someone in reference to you called Objective Moral Relativism. After doing some research, I found out you have a book where you use the term Desire Utilitarianism, and maybe it's the same thing. Is that still the ethical position you hold?

(1) Yes, I still hold that Objective Moral Relativism is true. I also hold that Desire Utilitarianism is true.

(2) Desire utilitarianism and Objective Moral Relativism are not the same thing. However, they do not conflict with each other either – which is how both can be true.

So, let me explain. I will start with desire utilitarianism

Utilitarian theories hold that moral values are tied up with the 'utility' of the object of evaluation. One alternative is morally better than another in virtue of the fact it creates the most utility.

We have two different ways that we can distinguish among different utilitarian theory.

One method is by distinguishing between that which is to be maximized – that which counts as 'utility'. In this schema we have utilitarian theories that say we should maximize pleasure and minimize pain, theories that say we should maximize happiness and minimize unhappiness, theories that say we should maximize preference satisfaction, and so forth.

The other method is by distinguishing between primary objects of evaluation. Act utilitarianism says that the primary object of moral evaluation is the act (the right act is the act that maximizes utility). Rule utilitarianism says that the primary object of moral evaluation is the rule (the best rule set is the set that maximizes utility), and that the right action is the action recommended by the best rules.

Desire utilitarianism is a utilitarian theory in the second sense. It holds that desires (or, more specifically, desires that can be molded through social forces such as praise and condemnation) are the primary objects of moral evaluation. The best desires are those that tend to maximize utility in the sense that they tend to lead to the fulfillment of other desires. The right action is the action that a person with good desires would perform.

So, what is it that we should maximize? What counts as "utility" in a desire utilitarianism framework?

On this metric, desire utilitarianism is a pluralistic theory. There is no single thing that all people should maximize. Instead, each desire identifies a state of affairs that the agent has a reason to bring about. If the agent desires pleasure, then he has reason to bring about pleasure. If he desires happiness, he has reason to bring about happiness. If he desires the welfare of his children, then he has reason to bring about the welfare of his children.

I speak about desire fulfillment in this theory. However, desire fulfillment is not a thing to be maximized. Desire fulfillment is simply a term that I use to refer to a state in which an agent has a desire that P (for some proposition P), and P is true.

Different desires have different strengths. We can use the strengths of different desires to choose among different options available. So, a person who has an aversion to pain and a desire that his children are healthy and happy can weigh the value (to him) of a state in which he is free of pain from a state in which his children are healthy and happy, and to act according to the strongest of the two desires. Yet, it is not "desire fulfillment" that has value for this agent. It is "freedom of pain" that has value, or "my children are healthy and happy" that has value.

The biggest mistake people make when they encounter the term "desire utilitarianism" is that they assume that it is an act-utilitarian theory that calls for maximizing desire fulfillment – the way that other utilitarian theories call for maximizing pleasure, happiness, or preference satisfaction. term refers to a theory that I call desire-fulfillment act utilitarianism. They then bring the standard objections to act-utilitarian theory to bear against this theory.

Yet, desire utilitarianism does not say, "Perform that act that maximizes utility.” It says, "Perform that act that a person with good desires would perform," along with, "Promote those desires that tend to fulfill other desires and inhibit those desires that tend to thwart other desires."

This is the difference between an act-utilitarian theory, and a desire-utilitarian theory.

Animals and Morality

Yesterday, in The Predator Problem Revisited, I argued that animal rights concerns does not necessarily imply vegetarianism or the view that it is wrong to kill animals.

However, as Chris pointed out in a comment to that posting, animal rights concern is broader than this. Therefore, let me take a few moments to state some broad morally relevant facts about animals.

First, animals operate on a system of beliefs and desires. The best way to explain a wide range of animal behavior is in terms of statements about what the animal wants (sex, food, avoidance of pain, comfort) and what the animal believes to be true about the world. Somebody who owns a pet makes perfectly good sense when he says that the pet wants to go outside, or that the pet "thinks that I still have his toy."

Desires are reasons for action. This is no less true in non-human animals as it is in humans.

Animals' desires are reasons-for-action for realizing a state in which humans have particular desires and aversion. That is to say, animals have reasons-for-action for causing humans to have desires that fulfill the desires of animals, and for inhibiting in humans those desires that thwart the desires of animals.

What animals lack, and humans have, is an advanced capacity to realize complex relationships between states of affairs and desires and, thus, the ability to make complex plans that will help to fulfill those desires. Consequently, animals cannot think to promote desires in humans that they have reason to promote, or to inhibit desires in humans that they have reasons to inhibit.

Those reasons for action still exist, even if animals lack the capacity to act on them in particular ways.

However, humans (and animals) seek to act so as to fulfill their own desires, and act so as to fulfill their desires given their beliefs. So, humans are going to act to realize states that promote their own desires, which means that humans are going to act so as to promote in others to desires that fulfill and/or prevent the thwarting of their own desires.

Yet, humans do have a reason to promote in others an aversion to thwarting the desires of those who cannot act on their own behalf. This is true because each of us, at times, cannot act on our own behalf (while unconscious or otherwise disabled) or care about somebody who cannot act on their own behalf (infants, pets, friends who might fall unconscious or are similarly disabled).

These "reasons for action that exist" for promoting those desires in others are "reasons for action that exist" for promoting desires that fulfill the desires of animals, and inhibiting in others those desires that thwart the desires of others. What another human cannot do to an animal that is incapable of defending its own interests is something he or she cannot do a human that is incapable of defending its own interests, and leaves all of us more secure.

These, then, represent a body of morally relevant facts concerning the status of animals. What follows from these facts gets complex. However, this at least provides a foundation from which further conversations can be launched.

The Predator Problem Revisited

I have an email question from a member ofthe studio audience.

I have been reading you blog for over a year now but and maybe I have missed it. But do you have any writings about vegetarianism and the moral implications of both or either side?

One thing that I have written is an article called The Predator Problem.

It concerns a question that animal rights advocates need to answer about the legitimacy of a predator - such as a lion - killing and eating a prey animal. If it is wrong for a human to kill another animal, then it is also wrong for one animal to kill another animal - and for humans to sit back and do nothing while this wrong is committed.

The standard animal rights response to this objection is to say that predators such as lions are not moral agents. As such, they cannot be blamed for what they do. They lack the capacity to know or to act based on their knowledge of right and wrong.

However, this response does not work.

First, the fact that the predator is not a moral agent does not imply that we should do nothing if an animal should try to kill and eat a human being. Our moral obligations still compell us to go to the rescue of any human being attacked by an animal.

If we add to this obligation the proposition that animals have rights, then we have the same duty to prevent an attack on another animal as we do to prevent an attack on another human being. The assertion that the attacker is not a moral agent turns out to be irrelevant. The assertion that the attacker is not a moral agent does not imply that we should do nothing while non-moral agents inflict pain and suffering on others.

Second, I am not talking about the morality of the animal's actions. I am talking about the morality of our actions insofar as we act to prevent or to allw the predatory acts of predatory animals. I am writing about our acts, as moral agents, to interfere or to permit this behavior on the part of non-moral arguments. The question does not concern the moral legitimacy of the animal's actions as non-moral agents. The question concrs the moral legitimacy of our behavior with respect to allowing or or preventing predator attacks on other animals, particularly in light of the death and suffering that prey animal.

So, we could take the predators of the universe and kill them all to keep them from killing the prey. However, this fundamentally goes against the proposition that animals have a basic right to stay alive. We could keep the predators alive, but the killing of the prey animals contradicts the proposition that animals have a right to stay alive as well.

The article mentioned above goes into more detail. Ultimately, I argue that animals do not have an aversion to death (a being can have an aversion only to those things one can comprehend), and that animals do not have the capacity to comprehend death. Therefore, the can have no aversion to death.

They can (and do) have an aversion to pain, but not to death.

So, killing them cannot (at least directly) thwart the desires of an animal by killing it. The desire utilitarian needs to come up with a different reason not to kill animals - if there is another reason to be had.

BB3: Panel Discussion: Be Kind to Religion

This is the 12th in a series of posts on presentations given at Beyond Belief 3: Candles in the Dark"

You can find a list of all Atheist Ethicist blog postings covering Beyond Belief 3 at the Introduction post

And I would like to encourage you to give a contribution to the Science Network, who makes these presentations available for free.

In the panel discussion on politics and science, This Is Your Brain on Politics Sam Harris responded to some of the comments that Chris Mooney made regarding the policy of being concilatory towards evangelicals.

Harris sought to point out some of the costs of being conciliatory towards religion. He drew an analogy towards witchcraft and, in Africa, we have a "pandemic" of children being accused of witchcraft and being killed or otherwise made to suffer. Religion, according to Harris, is as bad or worse than witchcraft and, being conciliatory towards religion, is being conciliatory towards something that causes great harm.

Harris did agree with the "energy war" that others had talked about. However, he said that the enemy on the other side is not just the pump, but Islamic despotisms who have no need to invest in the economic capital of its people because of the economic capital of its oil.

Chris Mooney resonded to Harris' remarks by saying:

It is interesting that you bring up the energy issue at the end because what we have on that is we have evangelicals mobilizing to create concern among their own members about global climate change, and that is actually an important trend in the evangelical community, and they are defining the mission to deal with protecting the environment in the context of biblical stewardship, which is a message that resonates for them. And, this is the question for me, Do you really want to alienate those kind of views when the planet is at stake? No. Not in the context of American politics, no.

So, here’s my question. What is involved in this project of not alienating the evangelical community?

Are we seeking to make a bargain whereby atheists and secularists concede that they are unfit to hold political office and positions of public trust in order to buy evangelical support on climate change?

"Okay, for those evangelicals who have decided to become the good guys on the issue of climate change, we will no longer publicly challenge your claim to moral superiority – that only a person of faith can have morals, that only a person of faith is fit to lead the country, that only a person of faith should be considered a true American."

And does our bargain involve conceding the issue of creationism being taught in public schools as fact. "Okay, in order not to offend you so that you do not turn away from promoting an effective response for climate change, we will grant your wish that science classes teach that the earth is less than 10,000 years old, that evolution is a lie, and that God created everybody as the only scientific theory that actually works."

Does our bargain include refusing to challenge evangelicals on issues such as gay marriage? Are we being asked to throw not only ourselves, but homosexuals, under the evangelical bus? Is this part of what is involved in the decision not to alienate the evangelical community?

Do we buy their political support with faith-based initiatives where the government once again levies a tithe on American income and gives the money directly to the church?

Do we purchase their cooperation by putting the American military under the authority of the church, filling its officer corps with people who think that the purpose of the military is to fight for God and who cannot distinguish between fighting to defend the United States and fighting the perceived enemies of the evangelical religion?

As an ethicist, I have defended the proposition that the enemy is not "religion" per se. The proposition "God (almost certainly) exists" carries absolutely no moral implications about what we should or should not do – in exactly the same way that "God (almost certainly) does not exist" says nothing about what we should or should not do. It is all the stuff one adds to "God exists" or "God does not exists" that carries the moral weight. We can debate moral facts without mentioning God in the same way that we can debate ways of growing food or designing bridges without mentioning God.

However, Mooney is not talking about "religion" as a generic and abstract belief that a God exists. Mooney is specifically saying that we should not alienate evangelicals. That is to say, we should purchase political cooperation from evangelicals on the issue of climate change. However, that requires giving them something in return. Mooney does not mention which harms we should close our eyes to – which portions of the population we should turn our back on – in order to purchase evangelical support for a global warming initiative.

Mooney went on to say that we must close our eyes and turn our back on some of the victims of evangelical falsehoods is because the planet is at stake. Clearly, what good is it to get gay marriage legalized in this country if it comes at the cost destroying the planet. “Yes, the human race will be extinct in 100 years because we could not get evangelicals to work with us on climate change. However, at least for those 100 years gays will be allowed to freely marry. That is our victory.”

It would be a hollow victory indeed.

However, if this is an accurate description of our current situation, then the current situation is one in which evangelicals are willing to hold human survival hostage to its political ambitions – willing to tell the rest of us, "Concede to our demands or we will end the human race."

If this is the demand that they are making on us, perhaps we do have to give in to their demands. Perhaps Mooney is right and we must silence our criticism of the harms done by evangelical errors and prejudice in order to save the planet.

However, this does not say anything positive about the ethics of the evangelical community. We may be forced to say that they are good people in order to get their political cooperation in saving the planet. However, this is like being forced to say (and to teach the next generation) that the Earth is less than 10,000 years old.

The fact that we are forced to say it does not make it true.

In fact, in this case, if we are forced to say it, then it is because we are dealing with people of which it is not true.

Finally, I must point out before I go . . . the evangelical community is just now starting to motivate its people to do something about climate change. The scientific community had motivated its people 30 years ago. Should we really praise a group that held up action on this vital issue for 30 years because it conflicted with their political and social ambitions?

BB3: Panel Discussion The Energy War

This is the eleventh in a series of posts on presentations given at Beyond Belief 3: Candles in the Dark"

You can find a list of all Atheist Ethicist blog postings covering Beyond Belief 3 at the Introduction post

And I would like to encourage you to give a contribution to the Science Network, who makes these presentations available for free.

My first prediction of 2009. President Elect Barak ObamJonata is going to announce a project, similar to the Apollo project of the 1960s, to dramatically alter the energy landscape in America and the world. It will be a multi-hundred-billion dollar project to switch the country from fossil fuels to other forms of energy – solar, wind, ethanol.

The purpose of this project will be:

(1) To free the United States from dependence on foreign oil – most of which we get from hostile countries. It will be Obama’s way of dealing with a number of foreign threats, from Muslim extremists to Chavez in Venezuela.

(2) To deal with the problem of global warming. The project will save future generations trillions of dollars in costs that would result from climate changes that would result if we did not do this – in particular, with sea-level change and the migration of tropical diseases into regions that are currently not tropical.

(3) To stimulate the economy. The project will provide jobs in the short term, while giving America a technological advantage that will provide economic benefits far into the future.

The prospect of an energy war came up at the Beyond Belief conference, in the panel discussion at the end of three presentations on politics, This Is Your Brain on Politics. In fact, its an idea that has been circulated since 9/11 – as the option that Bush should have spent $1 trillion on instead of spending the money on invading Iraq. It is an option that would not have cost over 4,000 American killed and 30,000 injured, would not have killed and maimed perhaps over 1,000,000 Iraqi citizens, and would not have left America economically vulnerable to our chief rivals in the Middle East and China.

Mooney, as well as other attendees at the conference, advocated support for the Energy Project because of its relationship to science and technology. Like the Apollo project, this energy project is one in which scientists and engineers are going to make the largest contribution.

Promoting the energy project goes hand-in-hand with promoting math and science education. A national project in which scientists are the front-line soldiers could, potentially, promote the prestige of science and scientists much the way that Apollo did in the 1960s.

That is the dream.

Against this, Jonathan Haidt had a dire warning. Haydt suggested that such a project needs a personified enemy in order to be effective. America has had its "war on poverty" and its "war on drugs" – neither of which accomplished nearly as much as its advocates wanted them to accomplish. The nation ultimately failed to rally around these causes. They did not seem to care.

The Manhattan Project and the Apollo Project, on the other hand, both succeeded because America faced an external threat in the form of persons with which it was at war. The Manhattan Project took place in the context of a war against Germany and Japan. The Apollo Project was, in effect, a proxy war against the Soviet Union. Instead of seeing who can kill enemy soldiers and destroy enemy cities the fastest, the combatants signed on to a proxy war where the winner would be the one who sent a man to the moon and brought him safely back to Earth.

The war on drugs was, in a sense, a war against persons. It was a war against the drug cartels who were running the business of crating drugs and shipping them to the United States. However, at the root, it was not a war against people. The drug cartels made their money feeding a demand, and that demand came from America itself.

The war on drugs was, in effect, a civil war, with Americans contributing billions of dollars to people on both sides. Where did these cartels get their money? They were financed by people in the United States that bought their drugs.

The war on poverty had no personal enemy, and it went nowhere.

The energy war may well be marketed more like the war on drugs. The role of the drug cartels will be played by violent Islamic extremists and he foreign governments and regions they control. However, also like the war on drugs, Americans would be funding both sides in this war. The enemy will be getting its money to counter America’s moves from Americans buying gasoline at the pump.

In fact, there are multi-billion-dollar American companies who profit from being on the "other side" of such a war. Exxon-Mobile has already proved its lack of moral conscience in putting whole American cities at risk of destruction for the sake of securing more profits for itself.

People who care so little about the blood that stains the dollars they put in their pocket are not likely to show much patriotism when it comes to waging the energy war. (Obama will be smart to design his energy war package in such a way that these companies are bought off somehow – given that they are lead by people who care more about money than morality.

It is a shame, if it is true, that one cannot rally the people to a cause unless it is a cause that involves doing harm to some enemy – some people capable of being killed and tortured. However, the fact that it would be a shame if something were true does not imply that it is not true.

This is where morality comes in. Morality is concerned with molding our desires, to whatever degree that they can be molded, from those that it is a shame that we have, to those we have reason to have. So, perhaps it is time to put some effort into casting shame on those who cannot get behind a plan unless it involves declaring war on some other group of people. Perhaps it is time to start praising the ability to become enthusiastic about a plan whose purpose is to help everybody, as opposed to simply helping "my clan".

BB3: Tony Haymet: Non-Human Threats

This is the tenth in a series of posts on presentations given at Beyond Belief 3: Candles in the Dark"

You can find a list of all Atheist Ethicist blog postings covering Beyond Belief 3 at the Introduction post

And I would like to encourage you to give a contribution to the Science Network, who makes these presentations available for free.

The next speaker up at the Beyond Belief conference was Tony Haymet, director of Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego.

Haymet, in his presentation, discussed two areas of human impact on the environment that, he argued, we should find the money to accurately monitor, the way we monitor atmospheric CO2 levels.

One of those areas is the acidity of the oceans. According to Haymet, the sea level of the oceans has remained at a pH of 8.2 for over 40 million years. However, one of the effects of humans putting CO2 into the atmosphere is that this CO2 gets absorbed into the oceans. When it gets absorbed into the oceans it forms carbonic acid. As a result, the pH of the oceans has changed from 8.2 to 8.1, and is continuing to decrease.

The further effects of ocean acidity is that it dissolves the shells of seafish such as snails, that depend on snails, clams, coral, and the like.

In other words, we are killing our oceans.

This links to another fact that Haymet presented in his talk. As a result of human activity, we have removed about 90% of the biomass of the oceans.

In saying this, we have to keep in mind that a single whale represents a great deal of biomass. So does a tuna fish. We are able to reduce the biomass in the oceans by such an amount by focusing on removing the largest creatures in the ocean by huge amounts.

Similarly, over 97% of the animal biomass on land is made up of humans, domesticated animals, and pets. This is because the creatures that have managed to stay wild are those of low mass - mice, birds, insects, and the like.

The main point of Haymet's speech comes when he talks about funding the monitoring of these types of changes that people are having on the earth.

The bailout was passed. Seven-hundred and sixty billion dollars. Well, here's my little community, craving a few million dollars to make an ocean acidity network that really is going to save the planet or at least document its destruction, and yet we are fumbling around. We don't seem to be able to do it.

It would seem reasonable and rational that, where the government were to spend hundreds of billions of dollars, that the money go first to understanding and dealing with significant threats to then well being of its people. We seem perfectly capable of understanding threats that come from other people. We have whole agencies with budgets in the hundreds of billions of dollars collecting "intelligence" on foreign threats and dealing with them.

However, when confronted with a threat that is non-human, that cannot be cast as an "other" worthy of our condemnation and hostility, the threat gets ignored. We can scarcely afford to spend even tens of millions of dollars in gathering intelligence on that threat and responding to it – threats against our food supply, biological threats against the health of the American people, threats that could potentially completely destroy a number of American cities, but threats made by nature, not by humans.

In fact, it is one of the more obvious trends of the Bush administration that, while he significantly expanded the government's ability to collect intelligence on human threats to the people of this country, it cared nothing about gathering intelligence on non-human threats. He allowed the climate-monitoring network to fall apart, refusing to replace key elements as they reached the end of their life expectancy. If the threat was not coming from a person that can be killed or captured and tortured, as far as the Bush administration was concerned, it did not exist.

Yet, Haymet ultimately expressed optimism that we will deal with these threats – that the situation will change. He noted that, in Australia, the people threw out a government of global-warming denialists and elected a group who actually had some understanding of and respect for the scientific findings.

At the same time, he noted another problem. He noted that, in Australia, while scientists and those who respected their findings were trying to get the government to pay attention, that when the government actually did start to pay attention, that they did not have a plan. They had not worked out an answer to the question, "What should we do?" as long as the government was one that said, "Do nothing."

He is advocating that, with respect to these other threats – to the acidification of the oceans and the removal of biomass – that the scientists actually get to work on creating plans of action so as to be ready for the time when the politicians say, "Lets take these threats seriously."

In historic context, we should note that this conference took place before the election. As such, its participants only knew of the possibility that Barak Obama was going to win the election. Now that Obama has won the election, we can be assured that we will have a government that will be more willing to listen when scientists suggest that the nation is being threatened, not by people (who can be tortured and killed), but by nature itself. We will have a government that thinks that it is important to collect intelligence on non-human threats, and not allow our intelligence-gathering infrastructure to fall apart.

His ultimate optimism might have been well placed. We shall see.