The Ethical Atheist Lobbyist and the Organization She Represents

A lobbyist walks into a legislator's office . . . .

She is carrying a folder that demonstrates beyond all reasonable doubt the merits of some proposal that she (and the organization she represents) wants the legislator to support.

After making her case, the legislator shrugs and says, "I agree with everything you said and your reasoning is sound. However, it doesn't make one bit of difference."

Holding up a copy of the most recent party surveys, the legislator says, According to this, if I adopt your proposal, I an going to lose 10,000 votes. My opponent will pick up 8000 of those votes. Furthermore, my opponent will send out a fundraising letter and collect about $500,000 in added campaign contributions, and about 1000 hours worth of additional volunteer labor. This means what you are asking me to do is to make a significant contribution to my opponent's campaign - enough, perhaps, to give him the election.

Let's say I go with your proposal. In that case, you lose. What do you get out of it? You will get somebody sitting in this chair that is not at all sympathetic to your view. He will reject it, and everything related to it. That will be the cost of your efforts. Ralph Nader ran for President on a third-party ticket. The result was to bring about eight years with a complete lack of corporate oversight and environmental disregard that, at this point, might still destroy the economy and make extreme global warming a reality. These are the costs of political stupidity. I am going to defend as much good as I can for as long as I can.

Imagine that we are defending a fortified town from barbarians. Your plan for defending the town is for me to open the gate, stand there by myself, scream at the barbarians, and challenge them to take me on. At that point, they will charge the gate and rush into the town, slaughtering me on the way past. You call this bravery. You say that it demonstrates my political courage. I call it stupidity.

Do you really want to get this proposal accepted? If you do, then don't come here asking me to make a suicidal stand at the gate of some principle.

Holding up the survey results again, he continues, If you want to make effective change, then you must change these numbers. Lower the number if votes that a legislator who supports your position will give up - or, better yet, turn support into a real political benefit. Lower the amounts that people can be inspired to contribute to campaign opposing the person who supports your proposal. Improve the number of votes or the size of the contributions that a politician can expect if he goes along with your proposal. Then, come here and talk to me.

Contact a public relations company. Don't rely on the amateur judgment and the limited contacts available to your ego-driven board of directors. That's like going to a barbor for a medical diagnosis or allowing a shipping clerk to design a bridge. Go to a company that has focused its energy for years on delivering an effective message. Find out how much they will charge you, then go to those who support your cause and get the money.

Let them design the advertisements and place them in the media where they will have the most effect. (But, please, demand that the advertisements be honest and responsible, and not politically effective lies and distortions.) Let them identify the influential people and groups that may ally with you and support your cause, make the introductions, and design the pitch. When you come back here, don't come with a list of facts and figures telling me that you are right. Come with the economic and political support that tells me that I can support you without losing my job. Better yet, come to me with proof that not supporting your proposal might cost me my job.

Of course, to the ethical atheist lobbyist, and to the ethical atheist organization she represents, being right matters. They will have a personal need to bring their reason-based thinking and best available evidence to bear on making sure they are doing the right thing. Yet, once this is determined, the practical task of doing the right thing requires acting in the real world. In the real world, presenting this set of facts and figures is seldom the next step. The next step is to rally votes and economic support behind the right thing. The third step, then, is to take this political and economic muscle one has gathered in support of the right thing and say to the politician, "We've done our job. Now, you do yours."

Any ethical atheist lobbyist worth her salt will tell you the same thing. "My effectiveness when I walk into a legislator's office is directly proportional to the weight of the votes and the economic support I have behind me. My job is to throw that political and economic weight around as efficiently as possible. Your job, as the ethical atheist organization I represent, is to find more political and economic weight for me to throw around. Our joint responsibility is to make sure that we throw this weight in the right direction - that we are using it to do good things."

(I have heard many atheists say that preaching to and trying to convert others is beneath them. They cringe at the accusation of being "fundamentalists" - an accusation they get simply because they engage in the practice of defending certain important, potentially life-saving propositions as true. This attitude merely guarantees that atheists remain socially and politically impotent - which is probably why theists love to make these types of accusations.)

One of the guiding principles for the ethical atheist lobbyist - and the ethical atheist organization she represents - should be a healthy respect for and devotion to reality-based planning and decision making. These are the facts of the political universe in which the ethical atheist lobbyist and the ethical atheist organization must work. It is irrational to ignore them.

The Ethical Atheist Politican and Atheist Political Impotentcy

According to the ratings, the subject of the ethical atheist politician is not a popular or interesting topic. Readership is down significantly.

This does not surprise me. I have written in the past that the type of message that children get about atheists is a type that will tend to make atheist adults timid, passive, and politically impotent. Faced with a message since childhood that not trusting in God and not supporting a nation under God makes one an unwelcome member of society, children learn to view atheism as a mark of shame to be hidden. In contrast, those who grow up to be theists learn the attitude that they have a natural superiority over atheists that will tend to make them socially and politically assertive.

These effects then produce a vicious loop where theist adults use their social and political assertiveness to further dominate socially and politically impotent atheists. They use this political imbalance to spread the message that causes it - putting anti-atheist, pro-theist messages in more and more places where children can be found. This includes putting "In God We Trust" on school walls and demanding that the Pledge of Allegiance be spoken at school events.

There is a reason why atheists have far less social and political power per capita than many much smaller but much more effective religious groups.

Yet, these general tendencies produce specific exceptions. They have a "bell curve" of effects on different children. Thus, there is some hope that those who escape these effects can become the type of social and political leaders that can help to draw others out of this trap.

One of the purposes for this series is to help those few socially and politically assertive atheists with that project.

It is important to note that this social and political impotence is not the result of a set of defective beliefs. Consequently, no well-reasoned argument will end its effects. It is, instead, a learned emotional reaction. One can have all of the facts in the world about how safe it is to fly, and still be afraid to fly. One can have all of the facts in the world about how there is no shame in being an atheist and the absurdity in believing that a good American must trust in God and support a nation under God. However, this will not remove the social and political anxiety of atheism.

The way to deal with this issue is to begin to counter the effects of the message among adults in the community, while countering the message itself among the children. Furthermore, the issue described here is more of a task to be taken on by the ethical atheist political organization than by the ethical atheist politician.

Women's rights groups faced a similar problem. Women were taught to be silent and subservient. This rendered them politically impotent - a political impotence that men then used to promote social messages and political practices that reinforced their silence and submissiveness. Women's rights groups responded to this through "assertiveness training." Of course, these programs were met with opposition. Mostly religious organizations countered that women, in asserting their own rights, were trying to enslave and dominate men. However, over time, women lost at least a large portion of their political impotence.

Gay rights organizations also faced a problem in that young homosexuals constantly received a message that good, decent human beings were not gay. Homosexuality was something to be ashamed of - and this shame kept homosexuals politically impotent. To combat this, gay rights organizations promoted a "gay pride" movement. Their message, "I am gay, and I am proud" shook off some of this learned political passivism and gave homosexuals a political voice.

Ethical atheist political organizations are beginning to serve their community with the same types of programs. Billboards go up that atheist individuals and atheist families, spreading the message that an atheist is not some hideous blemish that must remain hidden. We get the backlash that the good atheist does not boast about his atheism, that the atheist who demands political equality is as bad as the theist who demands political superiority. These backlashes all aim to preserve the status quo where the atheist remains socially and politically impotent, and theists maintain a lock on social and political power.

These messages are very much worthy of support.

Eventually, this type of campaign needs to grow beyond billboards and passive messages to active events. The atheist not only needs to read and hear that atheism is not shameful. She needs to be coaxed out into some sort of public event where she can say, "Hi, mom! I am an atheist."

On top of these, I would like to recommend that ethical atheist political organizations take on another project to counter the message that atheism is an unsightly blemish to be hidden from the public. This has to do directly with the fact that we face a government-sponsored message that a good American trusts in God, and a good American supports a nation under God. That those who do not support a nation under God are supposed to sit down and shut up and yield the floor to those who do.

This would be to have the local government pass a resolution that recognizes that, "Many citizens who do not believe in God - and thus does not trust in God or support a nation under God - are still recognized by this Council as good people and patriotic Americans."

While it may be difficult to get these messages removed from government practices and government rituals, it may be possible to counter the message, at least for a while, by getting the government to explicitly repudiate those messages and to declare atheist citizens worthy of equal respect.

My guess is that an attempt to get such a resolution passed will result in a fight. There are many people in government who believe that an atheist cannot be a good person or a good citizen. Let's drag those people out into the light where others can see them and recognize them for what they are (and replace them).

There are many people in society who believe that an atheist cannot be a good person or a good citizen. Let's drag them out into the light so that people can see that the shame does not belong to the atheist but to these bigots.

It would help to provide a more solid social and political foundation for getting some future ethical atheist politician a seat at the political table.

The Ethical Atheist Politician - Coalition Building

The rules are made by those who show up.


Depending if the quality of those who show up, the rules typically assign benefits to those who show up, while assigning the costs to those who are locked out.

It us no mystery why politically effective theists insist on showing up, while at the same time they insist on measures that effectively keep atheists locked out of the rooms in which decisions are made. It allows them to keep harvesting the benefits and assigning the costs.

My current project is that of looking at what it takes to be, or to support, an ethical atheist politician.

The ethical atheist politician is going to need to assemble a collection of labor, capital, and cash and direct those resources to certain ends - such as the end of getting one's name on the ballot. Another end will be that of winning the election.

In this project, anybody who has labor (an hour or two a week, perhaps), capital (a computer, a car, a knowledge of web design, a list of useful contacts), or cash has something that can be put to use supporting the ethical atheist politician. It would be useful to assemble this collection of labor, capital, and cash under the directorship of people who know how to effectively use them to get candidates onto ballots and to win elections.

In order to assemble this collection of resources and to use them efficiently to achieve a goal, we need to know what the goal is.

Ultimately, the final goal is this: On election day, enough people show up at the polls to assign the ethical atheist politician a seat at legislative table and . . . this is important, and defines an area where it seems the Obama administration has failed . . . that will continue to work with the candidate after the election to achieve its ends.

In most political environments that my readers are familiar with, this typically means putting together a coalition of the best 51% to vote a candidate into office. This assumes a two-person contest in a winner-taje-all political system. In the case of a three (or more) person contest, a winning coalition might be less than 50%. In a parliamentary system, one's party might need as little as 5% (and one needs one's candidate needs to be in a position to take one of he seats that the party assigns). In the case of an uncontested seat (something ethical atheist politicians and the organizations who support them should be looking for), it takes very little.

Looking at the races where a coalition is necessary, there are some important facts that the rational supporter of the ethical atheist politician should keep in mind.

The coalition of the best 51% will not be in universal agreement on all issues. Sometimes, to keep one segment of the coalition in place, the politician will have to do something that another group will not like.

Let's say that a particular politician has put together a coalition of 53% of voters. (Not coincidentally, Obama got 53% of the the in the last election.) An issue comes up where a subset equal to 4% of the coalition says, "If you support this measure, we are leaving the coalition." Another group equal to 4% asserts, "If you fail to support this measure, we are leaving the coalition."

Congratulations, your petty bickering has just handed the reigns of political power over to the other side.

Each member of the coalition must recognize that the politician may need to do things they do not like to keep other members of the coalition in place. The idea that one can be a member of a majority coalition before an election, and not have to compromise with other members of the coalition after the election, is politically naive.

Ideally, the ethical atheist politician would have set reasonable expectations. "I will support your struggle for X and Y. However, on Z, I will not support you. I need to give up that option to keep others in the coalition. "

Unfortunately, at this point, the ethical atheist politician has a dilemma. If he tells this group the truth, there will be some fraction of that organization that will say, "No. You must give us X, Y, and Z, or we will not support you." At the same time, the ethical atheist politician has to deal with the political fact that, "If I give you X, Y, and Z I may get your support, but I cannot put together a coalition of the best 51%. The result is that the seat of power will go to the group that will not only deny and Z, but will also deny X and Y"

This is what happened in the 2000 election with Ralph Nader running on a third party ticket. Because a lot of uncompromising people were unwilling to accept X, Y, and not Z, we ended up with 8 years of a political movement that gave us not-X, not-Y, and not-Z - and were made much worse off because of it.

This is one of the points at which it may be impossible to say whether the ethical atheist politician is even a possibility. To make it possible we must come down hard against those uncompromising brutes who effectively hold positions that make it impossible for them to join a coalition of the best 51%, even though they would otherwise qualify for membership in that club.

In my blog, I argue repeatedly for repeal of "In God We Trust" and "under God". At the same time, I recognize that no candidate can come out in support of this position and win an election. So, I would not demand that any candidate support this policy. The coalition of the best 51% - currently - has no place for such a person.

Which, by the way, is one of the reasons why I would make a poor candidate. My position on some issues where, even if I am right, currently has no place in a coalition of the best 51%, are well known or easy to discover.

While it would be irrational for me to demand that any candidate currently support my position, I can continue to argue to the coalition of the best 51% that the fact that such a candidate supports my position would not be a reason to leave the coalition. If I can do that, then I create a political climate in which some future politician can endorse my position without fear.

However, the burden is not on the candidate to push my position. The burden is on the candidate to keep the coalition of the best 51% together, while the burden is on me to continue to work on making it possible for some future candidate to support my position without destroying the coalition of the best 51%.

These, then, are some of the principles of coalition building. For effective coalition building, we really must come down hard on those people who demand too much from the ethical atheist politician - or any politician for that matter. Reason dictates that we demand from our politicians whatever it takes to keep the coalition of the best 51% together.

At the same time, we should constantly be working on improving the quality of the positions that the ethical atheist politician cand defend and still keep the coalition together. Where the coalition is wrong, our task is to correct the other members of the coalition. Our task is NOT to demand that the politician take a position that would tear the coalition apart.

Here is a hint: A coalition of the best 51% will currently consist of a majority of members who believe in God.

It is okay to go ahead and continue to work on changing the minds of other members of the best 51% - to show them that it would be wrong for them to leave the coalition if the candidate decided to support and Z. In fact, this is to be encouraged. If one believes in and Z then one might have an obligation to convince other members of the coalition that it would be wrong for them to leave if the politican were to endorse and Z.

In making this case, the defenders of this position are working to create a political climate in which a future candidate might even be able to promise X, Y, and Z, while respecting the real-world fact that the present candidate can make no such promise and live. A decent respect for reality might demand that the candidate not promise and Z just yet.

The Ethical Atheist Politician - Building a Political Foundation

The Ethical Atheist Politician - Establishing a Foundation


My fifth project this year is to look at the life of an ethical atheist politician.

I know that very few (if any) readers intend to actually become ethical atheist politicians. (I would hope that it is the last these three elements that is missing, that there is an interest in the first element, and that the middle element will at least be considered.)

However, we all have an interest in quality leadership. Eight years of Bush Jr. has shown us the high cost of poor leadership - in terms of lives and limbs lost (American and foreign), wealth squandered, and families thrown out of their jobs and homes.

On this regard, please note that there is nothing about being an atheist that uniquely qualifies a person for public office. However, there is nothing about being an atheist that disqualifies that person either - though many people think there is. The focus on the atheist politician in this series simply acknowledges the need to challenge the practice of denying atheists a seat at the table where the rules are being made or decided upon. If there shall be an ethical atheist sitting at the table, what would that ethical atheist look like? And how can we make that happen?

In yesterday's post I covered the first objective for the ethical atheist politician - getting one's name on the ballot. This requires that there be an infrastructure in place that has the resources necessary to reach that objective.

I also pointed out, for the sake of those who want to put effort into promoting better leadership, that one can create the organization and put it to work without actually having a candidate to support. One of the tasks to be taken up by the group that sets up this infrastructure would be to look for qualified candidates to receive that aid.

Any atheist or secular club can take up this project. It involves assigning some portion of the club to an elections committee. That committee, then, takes on the task of:

(1) Researching ballot-access legislation for the area, assembling it, and making it easily available to members of the organization.

(2) Establishing a list of potential contributors - not only of dollars, but of labor.

(3) Raise money to support the work of the committee.

(4) Create a database of important contacts - community leaders who are known by members of the committee so that the committee can serve as a point of contact between a potential candidate and those leaders.

(5) Search the community for potential ethical atheist politicians.

Included in this last task would be the job of determining if any existing politicians qualify as deserving the support that the committee has to offer. This might include a project of creating a survey and giving it to candidates who have already qualified for the ballot to determine their views on atheists in this country.

The survey would include such things as asking whether the candidate agrees or disagrees with the following statements: "There are no atheists in foxholes," "A person who does not believe in God cannot inspire those under him or her to bravery," "We need to have a person of faith lead the country." (Mitt Romney, 2007)" or "Freedom requires religion." (Mitt Romney, 2008)".

Such a survey might ask, "If you discover that an otherwise well qualified potential nominee for a judgeship was an atheist, how would this affect your willingness to support that nominee?"

Surveys such as this are not only used to determine the opinions of a candidate, but to educate the candidate on issues the candidate might not otherwise have encountered. For example, "The Pledge of Allegiance says that a loyal American supports a nation under God, while the motto says that a loyal American supports, 'In God We Trust'. Do you think that an atheist can be a loyal American?"

This should be done with the help of a professional surveyer. Atheist and secular organizations tend to have strong ties to academic institutions, which should allow the organization to draw on those resources apply their knowledge to the task at hand.

These and similar efforts would help to establish a foundation for the ethical atheist candidate, as soon as one comes along. While the fact that there is an organization in place that is willing to provide this type of assistance, and who has laid the foundation locally to support such a candidate, should increase the chances that such a candidate will come along to support.

The Ethical Atheist Politician - Introduction

What would an ethical atheist politician be like?

At the start, it seems like some sort of Chimera - a creature made up of parts of three different animals that do not fit together very well.

Many commonly joke about the incongruity of joining "ethical" with "politician". A clear majority would have similar problems mixing "ethical" with "atheist". At least in the United States, it is perhaps even more implausible to mix the concepts of "atheist" and "politician".

I have often entertained the thought of running for public office. When I return to reality I realize that I am not fit for such a role - being far too shy to go around rallying a group of people to see me elected into public office. However, I have still given the idea a lot of thought to the issues that I would face in my attempt to be an ethical atheist politician, and how I would face them.

With this being an election year, and with atheists taking a stronger interest in politics, I thought it might be entertaining and useful to present those thoughts - just in case somebody in the studio audience has an interest in doing more than thinking about taking such a path.

I will present those ideas in the form of a pseudo-campaign for public office. For my pseudo campaign, I think I will choose to run for a seat in the House of Representatives. I will do this in part to keep my comments broadly useful. I suspect that few people would consider a detailed discussion of Colorado politics interesting.

In this campaign, I will get to discussing specific issues. However, the first thing the ethical atheist politician will have to do is to build an infrastructure for running for public office. You have to build the soap box (or find one) before you can stand on it.

First, I will need to choose a party.

I would recommend to the reader who is thinking about running for public office that you choose whatever party dominates the region that you are running in - if possible. It makes no sense to join a political party that recent gerrymandering and other political manipulations has locked out of public office. Even within the dominant party, there is a bell-curve of beliefs and interests, some better than others. Promoting the better over the worst among those who have a chance at power has its merits.

If you cannot join the political party that dominates the region in which you live, then I would recommend moving to a place where your preferred party dominates - for the same reason.

There are a lot of things that people who agree that here is no god an still disagree on. There is absolutely no sense to the idea that, if we were all atheists, we would all be in unanimous agreement on all political and social issues. Recall, Karl Marx and Ayn Rand were both atheists. I see no reason to assume that an ethical atheist politician must be a Democrat or a Republican.

In my own case, my views are such that I could join either party. This will become clear in the campaign that follows - when I get to discussing issues.

However, in this pseudo-campaign, I will be running as a pseudo-independent. It is, after all, a pseudo-campaign. One more nail in the coffin is not going to hurt.

Now that I have decided on a party, the next task is to get my name on the ballot.

In my state, to get on the ballot as an Independent, I would have to get 800 signatures from registered voters in my district over a specific two-month period (from about 7 months to about 5 months before the general election). That will be my first campaign objective.

I would do this by organizing, well in advance, a series of signing parties that would take place during that time period. This would mean going to friends and acquaintances and getting them to arrange these parties. At these parties, I would go and speak and mingle with the guests. There would be a petition sitting at a table near the front door which qualified participants could sign, and other copies available that guests can take home with them. Owing to the possibility of errors and disqualified signatures, the aim would be to collect significantly more than 800 signatures.

In seeing what is needed to get a name on the ballot, we can see one reason why somebody who attends a church will have an advantage over the average atheist. The church provides a set of people who meet regularly that the candidate could talk to in order to organize these parties. Without any type of official endorsement from the pulpit, the church provides excellent opportunities to meet people, shake hands, announce one's intention to run for public office, and ask for help on a one-on-one basis with like-minded people who share a sense of community.

This means starting early. In fact, today would not be too late for starting a campaign for the 2014 elections.

This also provides an important piece of information for those who think that electing an ethical atheist politician into office is important and is looking for a way to help. One of the things that you could do is to join (or create) an organization that such a candidate can go to in order to get help. This organization would learn the ballot access requirements in its region, find volunteers who share the same interests and concerns, create contacts with the heads of various organizations that the candidate would want to reach, figure out the logistics for organizing meetings, and be ready to make these resources available to the ethical atheist politican.

This way, when the ethical atheist politician actually shows up, the organization can say, "You have come to the right place. Here, let me explain what I can do for you."

All of this work and the campaign has not even started yet.

There will be more work to do tomorrow.

Environmentalists Versus Developers

A member of the studio audience has provided me with a long question that I think can be summarized as a request to a particular species of social controversy - the conflict between environmental concerns and development concerns.

It is about conflicts like that between the defenders of the spotted owl and the lumberjacks, or between the defenders of the snail darter and the dam builders.

Before I get into the specifics of this debate, I want to note that desirism does not come with a set of commandments. It does not belong in the same genus as libertarianism, communism, objectivism, humanism, or most (if not all) theisms, each of which provides its members with a list of thou shalts and thou shalt nots. It is, instead, a theory of how to evaluate commandments - a theory that says that there is a fact of the matter, but it does not dictate any particular fact.

This is like the relationship between the scientific method and any particular scientific claim. Using the scientific method, we learn that the earth is 4.5 billion years old. However, the scientific method itself does not dictate this conclusion. The earth might have turned out (and still might turn out) to be of some other age. Yet, the way that this will be determined is through the application of the scientific method.

So, desirism does not dictate an answer in the environment vs. development debate. I may argue for one or the other - employing desirism in making my moral arguments. However, it will always be possible for somebody else to come along and say, "Though desirism is true, your application of desirism to this specific case is flawed."

Desirism tells us to focus on desires.

In the environmentalism versus development debate, a relevant desire may be a desire that the snail darter or the spotted owl continue to exist. This is the desire motivating one group of people to preserve the snail darter or the spotted owl and, in doing so, stop development.

Is this a good desire, or a bad desire?

Another relevant set of desires focus on earning a paycheck by cutting down trees or building a dam - or that center around using the lumber or the power that results from those activities. The desire for a paycheck is typically a means-desire. The paycheck is not a goal in itself - it is a means for acquiring food, shelter, medical care, and the like. The desire for power and for flood control in the case of the dam is also substantially an interest in their usefulness.

Of course, as a means, we may ask whether there are other means that are just as effective. Are there not other forests to cut down? Are there not other ways to get the power or to control flooding?

The availability of substitutes becomes an important part of the debate on this model. It tells us how much the fulfillment of desires actually depend on this particular activity.

The desire that the snail darter continue to exist may be defended as a manifestation of a more general desire for environmental preservation.

A general desire for environmental preservation can be defended as a way of preventing something like the Easter Island scenario from happening on a global scale.

A group of Polynesians landed on and colonized Easter Island about 1000 years ago or more. Research tells us that, at the time, the island was heavily forested and rich in plant and animal life. These new settlers started to harvest the trees. The resulting deforestation changed the local climate. Easter Island lost not only its forests, but also its ability to support most food crops. The population of the island dropped by 80% within a century. Starvation and famine kept the population down.

Clearly, people generally have many and strong reasons to avoid this fate on a global scale. Doing so may require promoting - through praise and other social tools - a general desire for environmental preservation.

We might hear the developers say that the loss of this one species just isn't that important. It will not make that much of a difference in the overall scheme of things. After all, species come and go all the time.

Against this, an environmentalist can respond that the people on Easter Island could have fallen victim to the same way of thinking. "Clearly, the loss of this one tree is not that important. It is just one tree. Trees die all the time." However, that is exactly the attitude that brought them into the position they found themselves in at the end. It is the attitude that this one tree does not matter that got them into that situation, it is the attitude that this one species does not matter that will do the same for us, or so the argument goes. Thus, it is this attitude that we must condemn.

Recall that desirism is all about the evaluation of attitudes (desires), not actions.

However, the argument condemning the attitude that this one species does not matter depends on whether the claimed relationships between the attitude and consequences like those on Easter Island are true. Desirism cannot help us answer that question - it is an empirical question that depends on scientific research. Desirism brands the form of reasoning used above as valid, but it says nothing about the truth of the premises.

On the other hand, an environmentalist might argue that each species has intrinsic value. The disappearance of a species is intrinsically bad and is to be avoided regardless of the consequences. This avoids the problem of having to demonstrate that the relationships described above are true. When using the intrinsic value argument, those relationships are not relevant, so the environmentalist can avoid the need to defend them. This is what makes intrinsic-value arguments tempting.

Here, the desirist says, "Whoa. There is no intrinsic value. What you are doing here is exactly like the behavior of the person who hates homosexual marriage. Knowing that his desire alone gives him no right to harm others he invents a god, assigns his own desire to that god, and says, "God is offended." He has invented a myth to give an illusion of legitimacy to acts that fufill his own desires in ways that cause harm to others. Your myth about the intrinsic badness of extinction follows the same pattern. You want something that harms the intersts of others. In order to see yourself as a good person while you harm others, you give your harmful behavior an illusion of legitimacy by wrapping it in the fiction of realizing intrinsic values."

This illustrates the way in which desirism tells us which arguments are valid and which are invalid in this tpe of debate. It gives us some useful insight into sound moral reasoning. However, it does not dictate any particular conclusion. Moral conclusions depend on a combination of valid moral arguments and true premises. To discover the truth of premises, we must use empirical research. This type of truth cannot be provided a priori (which is exactly what most - if not all - competing theories try to do).

Torture - A Summary

Torture - A Summary



In the last two weeks, I took a discussion on torture and turned it into a discussion on comparative moral theory.

It is not the most interesting subject on the planet for many, but I think it has some unappreciated significance.

One of the most common objections atheists have against religion is that it is provides such a poor foundation for morality. It takes the prejudices, superstitions, and ignorance of a bunch of primitive tribesmen and claims that it is the perfect wisdom of an all-knowing and perfectly moral god. I assure you, the people who invented scripture were neither all-knowing, nor were they perfectly benevolent.

The flaw in this, as I pointed out, is even worse than taking the work of Hippocrates and declaring it the work of an all-knowing physician, never to be contradicted by any future findings in the science of medicine. The results in terms of community health would be catastrophic.

The problem with directing one's life by a poor moral theory is that a lot if evil is called good and a lot of good is called evil. - the same way that directing one's life by an ancient set of medical beliefs would result in treatable diseases going untreated or mistreated. You end up with a group of people slapping themselves in the back and sleeping quite fitfully while they, at best, fail to prevent misery and death that could have been prevented and, at worse, contribute to that misery and suffering.

However, the problem I am writing about is not religion. The problem us 'having a poor moral theory' - being unable to determine the difference between right and wrong as a matter of fact.

Religion represents a subset of bad moral theories. It does not exhaust the list.

Sam Harris has a bad moral theory - act-consequentialism. His application of that theory embraces torture. A consequence of widespread acceptance of tht theory would be a lot of people being tortured or suffering other forms of abuse who, under a better theory, would have been spared that agony.

Why would it have these consequences?

Because Harris' mistakes weaken an aversion to the types of cruelty that would make it impossible for people to engage in torture, and weakens the kindness that people in desperate need depend upon.

I suspect that the world would not benefit from more cruelty and less kindness.

Harris' argument implies telling our neighbors (which is anybody we and those we care about might meet) to be the type of person who can be comfortable with or even celebrate acts of torture. We are telling them not to be moved by even the imagined the screams of agony that one might hear from the victims of torture - to be the type of person who can shrug their shoulders in indifference at the thought and the reality of these agonies.

Is this the type of person we have reason to want as our neighbors?

One response to this is to say that we only want people to be indifferent or to celebrate the agony of a terrorist with information to share. However, this raises two questions: (1) Can our desires actually be categorized this finely? And (2) Even if such fine tuning is possible, can it be reliably and efficiently taught?

Our desires and aversions clearly have some measure of persistence. The desires we have in one situation carry through to another. It would seem difficult at best - and probably impossible - to teach everybody to love chocolate during ever even-numbered hours in the day and loathe it during odd-numbered hours. A person cannot turn on and off her fear of flying or fear of spiders, or her love for her child or her spouse, like flipping a switch. A desire, once it exists, will remain for a long time through any number of circumstances.

Clearly we can, in fact, modify the scope of some desires. A desire for sex can be accompanied by an aversion to non-consentual sex. An aversion to lying can be overridden when one is lying to the slave catchers about the run-away slaves hiding in the barn. However, there are clear limits to this capacity as well. A moral theory to be used in the real world must respect these real-world limitations.

It is not unreasonable to expect that promoting a culture of indifference to the agony of terrorist prisoners will "leak out". We might find it making itself present in the treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and other detention facilities. It will likely affect some soldiers in the field rounding up suspencts who convince themselves that a villager is guilty, and thus the aversion to cruelty no longer applies. It will likely affect the racist soldier (and it is absurd to assume that there will be no racists in the military) who holds that "all Arabs are terrorists" and the aversion to cruelty never applies.

We gave some of these prisoners over to countries that were practiced in the art of torture. Who were they practicing on? And why? And how might our use of their skills have affected their disposition to continue those practices, or to end them?

On the questions of whether we can teach a particular fine-tuned aversion reliably, we need to look at the possibility of failure in some instances. People will learn different lessons from this message that they should be confortable with - and even celebrate - torture.

I ask a similar question in the case of capital punishment. We might very well be able to teach people generally that the celebration of killing specifically applies to a celebration of killing convicted murderers. However, let us assume (for the sake of illustration) that our methods for teaching people this aversion is merely 99.9% successful. Instead of learning indifference to killing murderers, the other 0.01% of the population learns a more general indifference to killing. In the United States, this would mean creating 300,000 potential murders.

Even if our techniques for teaching the celebration of torturing known terrorists are 99.9% successful, we end up teaching 0.1% of the population to embrace a more general love of cruelty.

Can we assure ourselves that nobody watching the series "24", with its depictions of cruelty, learned to enjoy cruelty itself a little bit more? Can we assure ourselves that it did not effect the way they treated other other students at school, co-workers, or others they might encounter?

In fact, people are going to mix their lessons on the permissibility of torture with their other beliefs. No doubt, world dictators from North Korea to Libya, as well as warlords and their soldiers and organized crime members took the Bush Administration's defense of torture to heart.

At the same time, humans have a very strong disposition to see themselves as heros - even when they are not. Hitler thought he was a great man - doing great things. Hitler and the SS thought that torture was justified because those that they tortured had important information about criminal and terrorist organizations operating in their countries that were getting in the way of their great and noble plans.

In these ways, even a 99.9% success rate at teaching people that torture is only legitimate against criminals and terrorists is going to manifest itself in ways that are harmful to a great many innocent people. These facts may not be relevant to evaluating a specific act of torture (the way an act-consequentialist such as Harris would evaluate it). However, it is very much relevant on the question of teaching the types of affections that make torture possible and to see it as tolerable.

Harris compares torture with dropping bombs on people. We freely drop bombs on people, causing them all sorts of agony to bring about a good effect. Why not torture them when it brings about a good effect?

Please notice, first, the act-consequentialist nature of this argument. The acts produce similar consequences; therefore, they should share the same moral evaluation.

This comparison has some merits. However, insofar as the comparison has merit, I would like to ask whether this is an argument for more torture, or for less bomb-dropping. I think that a case can be made that we are all two willing to maim and kill people - even innocent people - and a stronger aversion would likely do us some good. However, this is a different subject.

Harris' argument makes sense IF we accept the premise that morality is primarily concerned with comparing an act of torture with an act of bomb-dropping. However, if we reject this assumption and focus our evaluations elsewhere, we get a different result - and one that is more applicable in the real world.

We can see an important difference between the two cases by asking whether the consequences of an announcement to the effect that we will never drop another bomb or shoot another bullet in defense of this country, and we compare that to the announcement that we will never again use torture. If it were the case that bomb dropping and bullet shooting were morally comparable to torture, then we should expect the same consequence from both of these announcements. Yet, almost certainly, each announcement has quite different conseqeunces. Those differences give us reason to oppose the announcement against the use of bombs and bullets to defend the country that are not applicable to the announcement against the use of torture.

We must - reluctantly - accept that a weakened aversion to the use of bombs and bullets in defense of the country is necessary.

Harris' act-consequentialism is a bad moral theory. As a result, embracing it causes people to see bad things as good, and good things as bad.

It is not the worst moral theory out there. Many religious theories are deplorable (and some are more deplorable than others). At the same time, there are also several secular theories that are also much worse. Ayn Rand's Objectivism, Marxism, common moral subjectivism, and evolutionary theories are, I would argue, as flawed as many religious theories.

I have to admit that the theory that I defend - desirism - might also be seriously flawed. However, if it is, then this would still support these conclusions. A person does not have to believe in a god to have a bad moral theory. The claim that religion is the problem, as opposed to having a bad moral theory, defines the problem far too narrowly.