Investments: War vs. Energy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Too expensive?

Compared to what?

A Vision of the Future: Seven Earths

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We have a whole sun.

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

What about other resources, such as iron?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It Works!

Negative ads: They really do work.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Non-Nationalism: A Vision of the Future

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

China

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

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

There is a reason for this.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is this frightening?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Morality and the Absence of Free Will

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Desire Utilitarianism vs. Egoism

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

Both questions stem from the proposition

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

I have also used the formula

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

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

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

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

Egoism is false

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other Types of Desires

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

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

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

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

Ownership of Actions

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

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

Debating Egoists

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

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

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

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

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

Desiring that Ones Desires are Fulfilled

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which is true.

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

That will be the subject of tomorrow’s posting.

Elements of a Just Trial

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

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

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

A split verdit proves that the tribunal was balanced?

Unfortuantely, he was not alone in his idiocy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On Pluto, Planets, and Goodness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As well they should.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ask any astronomer.

Perjury, Libel, and Desecration

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

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

They added:

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

Moral Authority

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

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

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

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

Free Speech

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Morality: Fact or Fiction

In my writings I continually use the slogan:

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

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

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

Mutually Exclusive Facts and Values

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

But what type of distinction is it?

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

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

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

Half Truths

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

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

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

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

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

The Insignificance of Moral Eliminativism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Recap - Desire Utilitarianism

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

So, let me address those concerns.

Jimmy_D

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not necessarily.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They are not a 'different kind of thing'.

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

Anonymous

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

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

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

Just like scientists do.

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

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

Actually, yes I can.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Desires are the only reasons for action that exist.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ways of Knowing and Justified Harm

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

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

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

A special way of knowing what?

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

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

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

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

That apostates should be put to death.

That homosexuals should be put to death.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That intelligent design is a science.

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

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

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

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

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

That stealing a cracker is the same as kidnapping.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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