Hursthouse's Virtue Ethics - Part 1

I should start keeping track of the number of days until my Master's Thesis needs to be finalized. I do not think there is a hard due date, but I will set a date of May 15, 2019 - or 380 days from today.

In 1996, Rosalind Hursthouse defended the notion that:

An action is right iff it is what a virtuous agent would characteristically (i.e. acting in character) do in the circumstances.

I am going to start there.

Consequentialism, Deontology, and Virtue Ethics

The first point that Hursthouse makes is that all three types of moral theory - consequentialism, deontology, and virtue theory - can be understood as an argument consisting of three premises.

The first premise describes the nature of a right action. In the case of consequentialism, right action is action that produces the best consequences. In terms of deontology, right action is action in conformity to deontological principles. In the case of virtue theory, she argues, right action is linked to good character.

In the same way that consequentialism must then specify what counts as good consequences, and that deontology must specify what counts as the correct principles, virtue theory must then specify what counts as a virtuous agent.

What Is a Virtue?

When it comes to what counts as a virtue, Hursthouse lists the following options:

This second premise of virtue ethics might, like the second premise of some versions of deontology, be
completed simply by enumeration (‘a virtue is one of the following’, and then the list is given). Or we might, not implausibly, interpret the Hume of the second Enquiry as espousing virtue ethics. According to him, a virtue is a character trait (of human beings) that is useful or agreeable to its possessor or to others (inclusive ‘or’ both times). The standard neo-Aristotelian completion claims that a virtue is a character trait a human being needs for eudaimonia, to flourish or live well.

Of course, I am going to choose the "Hume" option. Hursthouse, in contrast, seems to prefer the Aristotelian option. Specifically, desirism says that a virtuous person is a person that has those desires and aversions that people generally have many and strong reasons to promote in people generally, and that lacks those desires and aversions that people generally have many and strong reasons to inhibit in people generally. Consequently, the overall theory that I defend will be different from Hursthouse's, but the definition of a right action as the action that a virtuous person would perform is the same.

Obligation, Prohibition, and Permission

Hursthouse adds a little detail later in her article.

The above response to the objection that fails to be action-guiding clearly amounts to a denial of the oftrepeated claim that virtue ethics does not come up with any rules (another version of the thought that it is
concerned with Being rather than Doing and needs to be supplemented with rules). We can now see that it comes up with a large number; not only does each virtue generate a prescription — act honestly, charitably, justly — but each vice a prohibition — do not act dishonestly, uncharitably, unjustly.

On this issue, desirism would have a dispute. Desirism produces an account of all three categories of action - obligatory, prohibited, and non-obligatory permission (or liberty).

• An individual has an obligation to do that which a person with good desires (and lacking bad desires) would do.

• An individual is morally prohibited from doing that which a person with good desires (and lacking bad desires) would not do.

• An individual has a moral permission to do that which a person with good desires (and lacking bad desires) may choose to do or not do depending on other interests. Examples of non-obligatory permissions include what to eat, what to wear, where to shop, who to marry (if anybody), what profession to enter into (if any), what to read, and when to go to bed.

Knowing What a Virtuous Person Would Do

Hursthouse also brings up the question of how a person who is not already virtuous know what a virtuous person would do. If an agent cannot figure this out, then the principle, "Do that which a virtuous person would do" is of no use to her.

Desirism has no problem with this requirement. Knowing what a person with good desires would do is just a branch of knowing what a person with any given desire would do. Can we predict what a person with a fear of spiders would do? Perhaps we cannot predict her behavior with perfect precision (since her behavior will also depend on her beliefs and her other desires, some of which may be unknown to us). However, we can predict a general tendency to make an effort to avoid spiders. The stronger the aversion, the stronger the tendency to avoid spiders. Similarly, we can predict the tendencies of a person with an aversion to assaulting others, taking or destroying their property without their consent, or lying. Similarly, we can at least predict the tendencies of a person who is concerned for the welfare of others and prefers to repay her debts.

Moral Education

The next objection that Hursthouse considers against the idea that virtue theory can be action guiding is the idea that what she calls "v-rules" are not a part of the moral education of children. Deontology handles the simple rules of do not lie, do not cheat, do not take what belongs to others, share, and "wait your turn". The v-rules of virtue theory - such things as "be honest" and "be kind" - are beyond the grasp of young children.

Hursthouse answers this objection in part by reminding us that children are told not only to obey certain rules but to acquire certain virtues. "Don't be mean" and "don't be selfish" are among of the moral instructions given even to young children.

I will need to look into the relevance of the instruction of older children, but I know from experience that the boy scout law is a list of virtues: trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, brave, clean, and reverent.

Desirism, however, actually gives another advantage to Hursthouse's virtue-based concept of right action. If all we do is give children rules, we leave open the question, "Why follow the rules?" From whence comes the motivation to do what the rule asks us to do? Some may argue that the type of act in question has some sort of built-in motivation that compels action. However, this account is magical and cannot be understood easily as a part of the real world.

A virtue is a rule with motivation behind it. The virtue of honesty manifests itself as a motive - a preference or desire - for truth-telling. The virtue of trustworthiness manifests itself as the rule to keep promises and repay debts that is backed by a motivational disposition to do so. Being courteous, kind, and helpful combine a rule to help others with an internal reason - a motivation - to do so.

Desirism also allows us to provide the answer to the question of the how and why of moral education. Moral education consists of using reward and punishment (including praise and condemnation), acting on the reward centers of the brain to attach motivational force to what may be considered a deontological rule. The why comes from the desires of agents that can be fulfilled if others acquire the motivations that turn these deontological rules (do not lie, keep your promises, repay debts, help those in need) into virtues (honesty, trustworthiness, and kindness).

Conclusion

Here, then, we have an outline of some of the topics that can be brought up in a discussion of the action-guidedness of virtue. Hursthouse's general defense comparing the action-guidingness of v-rules compared to utilitarianism and deontology are applicable without modification. Desirism can provide further answers to the question, "What is a virtue?" It can also address the issues of the three different types of action (obligation, prohibition, and permission) as well as the nature of moral education (reward and punishment to attach motivational force to deontological rules).

Good Character and Right Action

It seems that all I needed was to confront my concern about a thesis topic, and I got my answer.

In 1993, when I was considering the basics of what is now called desirism, I came up with the notion that a right action is that action that a person with good desires would perform.

Research reveals that in 1996 Rosalind Hursthouse defended the following thesis:

An action is right iff it is what a virtuous agent would characteristically (i.e. acting in character) do in the circumstances.

She wrote this in "Normative Virtue Ethics" from Roger Crisp, ed., How Should One Live? (Oxford University Press, 1996), 19-33.

Since then there has been a discussion of whether a virtue ethics (or a motive ethics) can be action-guiding in the sense of telling a person what to do. Basically, virtue ethics tell a person what to be - what types of motives to have. It does not tell a person what to do. In fact, it is difficult to see how a virtue ethics can even suggest a course of action. After all, it is not like a person can simply choose to acquire a particular character trait. Consequently, the fear is that a virtue ethics is useless as a guide to answer. It cannot help a person answer the one question a morally concerned person constantly confronts. "What (morally) should I do?"

Of course, one of the questions that comes up in defining right action in terms of that which a person with good desires would perform, one has to answer the question, "What counts as good desires?"

I have an answer to that question.

I also have an answer to the question of why rewards such as praise, and punishments such as condemnation, are the correct response to right and wrong actions respectively. They are the forces that mold desires and either strengthen the good desires or counter the bad desires.

Ultimately, it is a paper topic into which I can fit in a number of the key elements of desirism and see how they sit among professional philosophers. Desirism gives me potential answers to these questions that others writing in the field have not already tested.

It is also a topic that I can start working on immediately. I have my own ideas on the topic. In addition, I can start with Rosalind Hursthouse's article and make comments on it - seeing how I can write a paper around it. Discovering other comments on and references to her article will help me to identify a body of literature that I will need to show an awareness of for the thesis. I already know ways in which the subject ties into the writings of David Hume and Henry Sidgwick - two historic philosophers with a strong reputation. I suspect I may have to say a word about Aristotle's virtue theory as well - even though I do not see much in Aristotle's writings that would be relevant.

My first step will be to write a commentary on Hursthouse's article. The next step will be to review comments on the article - criticisms and support. I will be creating the paper as I go through the research, posting it as a "work in progress" on the documents page of the desirism site. Do not look for it yet - I have some initial reading to do and before I start posting notes.

According to Google Scholar, this article has been cited over 200 times. It is obviously an important subject.

In about 700 days I hope to have a masters' thesis passed on the topic of, "The right action is the action that a person with good desires would perform."

Oh, the working title for the paper: "What Would the Virtuous Person Do?" I performed a google search and could not find any reference to a publication with this title in existence.

The Union Station Test of Philosophical Relevance

When I think about moral philosophy, one perspective that I like to adopt is something I tend to call the Philosophy of Union Station. In downtown Denver, Union Station is a major hub for public transportation. The light rail, and a great many of the Denver busses serving not only the city but surrounding communities, meet there. It has a lot of different kinds of people. Union Station is often quite crowded.

When I think about various philosophical ideas, I like to look around at the people and ask, “What does it matter to them if this is true or not?” Another way of expressing the same question is to ask, “If I were to approach these people and tell them these ideas, would they have reason to care?” I am not asking whether they would actually have reason to stop and listen, as if I was a corner preacher telling them to repent because the end of the world is near. I am talking about them having a reason to care – even if their other reasons (to get to work, to meet with their friends, to get to the Denver International Airport to catch their flight) might make them too busy to listen.

John Rawls “Veil of Ignorance” thought experiment – whereby people choose the rules of justice by imagining themselves being ignorant of the actual station they have in society – fails this test spectacularly. Everybody in Union Station is aware of their position and their relationships to other people, and they are not choosing to ignore these facts in evaluating the merits of their actions. In fact, a great many of their actions depend on these relationships. Their duties to their employers and their families, the promises they have made, their relationships to the people they are with and those they meet, all are relevant in determining how they are going to interact with those people. A morality of union station is going to have to tell them how they can make better, more moral choices in that life and as people who are aware of those relationships.

There are two types of "reasons to care" that are relevant to answering these questions. There is the reason to care because they could put the information to use in making their own lives better. However, there is also the possibility that if I were to walk up to them and present them with a technical discussion of the results of recent research in the treatment of diabetes, they may not have any particular reason to listen to my presentation. However, they do have reasons to care - reasons that are grounded on the fact or the potential that they or somebody they care about could have diabetes. Consequently, an idea does not pass or fail the Union Station test merely because it is not something that people at Union Station can find immediately useful.

I have mentioned in my last post that I am going through the episodes of the New Books in Philosophy podcast. One of the things that strike me is the way in which many books are simply contributions to a conversation that involves, perhaps, a couple dozen people - those who are studying the specific subject that the book is about. I listen to the podcast while walking through Union Station, or standing there waiting for my own bus, and the subject matter does not pass the Union Station test. Whether true or false, is not saying anything that the people in Union Station have reason to care about - either directly or indirectly.

As I have been thinking about my return to graduate school, I have started giving thought to the question of what I will choose as a Master's thesis. One of the questions that I have been having is whether my Master's thesis will be something that can pass the Union Station test.

My counter says that I will be attending my first class in 56 days and 6 hours (as I write this).

I have come to realize that, from the first day of class until I get my MA in philosophy – if I go according to schedule – will be 1 year and 9 months. That is a longer period of time than the time from when I started my application to graduate school until the first day of class. We can make a round number out of it and call it 700 days from today. In those 700 days I need to pass 10 classes, write, and defend a Master’s thesis. Can this be done in 700 days?

I will have next summer off – working half time and taking no classes. That will be the summer of writing my Master’s Thesis. I will do my frequent editing and rewriting during the next school year.

So . . . what to choose as a topic?

A bold and reckless part of me wants to just put desirism on the table in front of my committee and say, "See what you can do to this?" My worry here is that it is too big of a topic for a Master's Thesis. I would need to pick something narrower that I can actually cover in some detail in a document the length of a master's thesis.

However, when it comes to the more narrow focus, I fear that the paper would not pass the Union Station test. I could say some things about the subjective/objective distinction, about the fact that motivating beliefs do not exist and that all value relates desires to states of affairs, that morality cannot be concerned with evolved dispositions, and that not only is free will not required for morality but that determinism is required. The people at Union Station have little reason to be concerned about these things - either directly or indirectly. These are topics of discussion within the ivory tower that have no impact on the lives being lived outside the tower.

On this matter of things that pass the Union Station test, I hope to be done with a draft of "Criticizing an Idea" this week and get that posted. This is a set of instructions regarding the distinction between the legitimate criticism of an idea on the one hand and bigotry on the other. This is something that the people in Union Station have reason to care about. I want it done and on the web site before classes start.

The Moral Syllogism

I have read Jonathan Spelman's dissertation on moral objectivity and subjectivity and wrote a commentary that I have published in the "Commentary" section of the documents page of the desirism web site.

Spelman's dissertation argued for subjectivism on moral obligation.

In my commentary, I argued for two types of subjectivism. Spelman argued quite strongly that the beliefs of the agent are important in determining an agent's obligation. The primary case involves that of a doctor with a patient who has a non-fatal skin condition. The doctor has three options - drug A, which will treat the symptoms; drug B, which will cure the illness; and drug C, which will kill the patient. The doctor knows the effect of drug A, but - in spite of her best efforts to find out - could not determine which of drugs B or C will cure the disease and which will kill the patient.

This example demonstrates that the doctor's beliefs are relevant in determining her obligation to give the patient drug A.

Spelman uses a number of cases like this to argue that the agent's beliefs are relevant to the agent's moral obligation.

In the article, I introduce the concept of a moral syllogism. A moral syllogism can be expressed as:

(1) A prescriptive premise that reports generally what agents ought to do.
(2) A descriptive premise that presents the relevant facts in a specific case.
(3) A conclusion that tells the agent what to do in that specific case.

Understood in this way, Spelman's argument shows that the agent's beliefs are relevant in (3). However, Spelman wants to draw the inference from this to the conclusion that the agent's beliefs are relevant in (1). I argue that this inference is invalid.

Specifically, what Spelman's argument shows is that the moral syllogism actually has the following form:

(a) A prescriptive premise saying an agent with belief B ought to do A.
(b) A descriptive premise that includes the fact that the agent has belief B.
(c) A conclusion that the agent ought to do A.

The conclusion in this case depends on the agent's beliefs - depends on premise (b) being true. However, one cannot infer from the fact that the truth of (c) depends on the agent's beliefs that the truth of (a) depends on the agent's beliefs.

This is good news for desirism.

Desires are expressed as dispositions to act, given an agent's beliefs. An agent seeking his keys, who believes his keys are in the bedroom, has a reason to go to the bedroom to get the keys. If, instead, he believes that they are in his coat pocket has a reason to go get his coat.

If the prescriptive premise concerns what the agent ought to desire, and the actions that an agent performs depend on an interaction between desires and beliefs, then we need to look at the agent's beliefs to determine what an agent with those desires would do. Desirism, then, explains and predicts that the prescriptive premise is relativized to the agent's beliefs.

Yet, we still have room for epistemic responsibility. It may be the case that what an agent should do given her desires is to find more information. If the medical profession has a common reference book that would tell Jill which of drugs B and C will cure the disease and which will kill the patient, Jill would have an obligation to consult that reference book. The idea that the agent's beliefs are relevant to her obligations does not imply that we have to accept whatever the agent believes, no matter what it is. Instead, the perfectly objective prescriptive premise dictates what an agent with a given set of beliefs ought to do.

I think that I will be using this moral syllogism idea quite a bit in the future.

I worked these issues out in more detail in the paper.

In other news, my top project is still getting my head into philosophy mode. In 59 days, I will be class. I have caught up on the History of Philosophy podcast, and I am now going through the New Books in Philosophy podcast. This is helping me to get a surface understanding of various issues in epistemology, philosophy of language, metaphysics, as well as different aspects of social and political philosophy. Hopefully, it will help me sound less like a novice when I get to school.

I have finished my course in basic formal logic, to refresh my memories on that topic.

I really need to do more in the area of practical moral philosophy. In particular, I think the one area that needs the most work is the nature of public debate on issues that are - literally - a matter of life and death for some people. Too many people are too comfortable with bad arguments. In the realm of politics, the art of the day is to interpret what the other party says in the worst possible light so as to present them as both extremely foolish and malevolent. It is extremely difficult, these days, to find a case where the public is discussing the relevant facts in an intellectually honest manner.

And, finally . . . it makes me nervous to think that before 2 years are out I need to write and pass a Master's Thesis. I really think that I should get started on that - even though my first day of class is still over 8 weeks away. I hate waiting until the last minute. I would really like to have my Master's Thesis written and on the shelf by next Tuesday. That way, I no longer need to worry about it.

Two Types of Subjectivism

Tomorrow, I am going to attend a PhD dissertation defense by a University of Colorado graduate student, Jonathan Spelman.

When I learned that Mr. Spelman was delivering a presentation to the summer students at the university on "In Defense of Subjectivism about Moral Obligation" I wrote to him to ask if he had a paper on the topic I could review. He wrote back to say that it was his dissertation which he would be defending the following week. I got a copy of the dissertation - and read it.

My interpretation of Spelman's dissertation was that he gave a good defense of the claim that the facts relevant to a moral evaluation include facts about the beliefs of the agent.

Let's look at it this way:

A moral syllogism contains three parts.

(1) The prescriptive premise: A general principle governing what the ought to do.
(2) The descriptive premise: An account of the facts of the given situation
(3) The conclusion: A statement of what the agent ought to do in that situation.

An example of a moral syllogism - which comes from Spelman's paper - concerns the case of a doctor named Jill. Jill's patient Frank has a non-fatal skin condition. Jill knows that drug A will relieve the symptoms but not cure the disease. Of drugs B and C, Jill knows that one will cure the disease while the other will kill the patient. However, she does not know which is which. From this, we conclude that Jill ought to give Frank drug A. There is no sense in risking Frank's life to cure a disease where there is an effective treatment for its symptoms.

Spelman uses this as an argument for moral subjectivism over moral objectivism.

Let us assume that drug B will actually cure Frank's disease. However, Jill does not know this. There is a sense in which Jill should give Frank drug B in that this would produce the best outcome. However, given Jill's ignorance, this is not what she should do in the given situation. In the given situation - which includes the facts of Jill's ignorance - Jill should give Frank drug A as stated.

For Spelman, this supports the conclusion that beliefs are relevant to the question of what Jill should do. This is a form of subjectivism - a form of the view that something is right in virtue of the agent's beliefs, rather than in virtue of the facts of the matter.

Well, I write back with a comment.

One of those comments is that Jill's beliefs ARE facts of the matter. This is in keeping with my own position that "subjective" and "objective" are not mutually exclusive options. We have objective facts of the matter regarding mental states - such as the facts that describe what Jill believes regarding the effects of drugs A, B, and C.

I have an objection to Spelman's paper in that he does not seem to distinguish between two separate propositions.

Proposition 1: The truth of the conclusion of a moral syllogism depends on beliefs.

Proposition 2: The truth of the prescriptive premise of a moral syllogism depends on beliefs.

As I mentioned, Spelman produces several arguments that can be understood as showing that the truth of a moral conclusion depends on beliefs. In the example above, what Jill ought to do with respect to her patient depends crucially on her beliefs regarding the effects of drugs A, B, and C. Her ignorance over which of the drugs B or C will cure the patient and which will kill him are morally relevant. The conclusion that Jill should give the patient drug A depends on the fact of Jill's limited knowledge regarding the effects of drugs B and C.

However, one cannot infer from the fact that the truth of the conclusion depends on Jill's beliefs that the truth of the prescriptive premise depends on Jill's beliefs - specifically, in her belief in that premise. The prescriptive premise states that Jill ought to do that which - given her beliefs - would be best for her patient. This prescriptive premise is true independent of whether or not Jill accepts it. This identifies an actual and objective moral obligation.

Just to drag desirism into this conversation, this obligation exists in virtue of the fact that people generally have many and strong reasons to promote this sentiment using the social tools of praise and condemnation. But that does not impact the actual argument we are discussing here. There might be some other way to support the proposition that this objective moral obligation exists. What matters is that one cannot infer the proposition that the truth of the prescriptive premise depends on the agent's opinion from the fact that the truth of the moral conclusion depends on the agent's opinion. This is no more valid than inferring the fact that the truth of the descriptive premise depends on the agent's opinion from the fact that the truth of the conclusion depends on the agent's position.

The truth of the conclusion depends on the agent's opinion because the (objectively true) prescriptive premise says that it matters - and that provides the reason for including (objectively true) claims about the agent's beliefs in the descriptive premise.

This yields an objectively true conclusion that depends crucially on the agent's beliefs about the world (such as Jill's partial ignorance regarding the drugs B and C) in premise 2.

Well, I have exchanged some emails with Mr. Spelman - soon to be Dr. Spelman. He does seem to want to infer from the evidence he provides that the truth of the conclusion depends on the agent's beliefs that the truth of the prescriptive premise depends on beliefs. I think that this is a mistake. At the same time, I have to say that he has done a very good job proving that the truth of the conclusion depends on the agent's beliefs. Even if he draws an invalid implication from this fact, he has demonstrated what, within desirism, would be considered a very important fact.

Problems for Libertarianism: History of Wealth Distribution

Imagine, if you will, a community living on a large island.

A group of strong-men living on the island has been spending years accumulating wealth. Mostly, they have done this through strong-arm tactics. They have gone to property owners and commanded that they turn over property or face the consequences. They have enslaved people - forcing people to work on improving their property, planting and harvesting their crops, assembling material in their shops, collecting the benefits in ways that substantially prevented their "workers" from having the opportunity to leave. As a result, this small subset of the population - let us imagine that this top 1% owns half of the island.

NOW that they have accumulated all of this properly - mostly through violence and forces appropriation - they want to institute a new social rule. This rule says that no person can take property from another by force.

It certainly seems quite convenient for those who now own half of the property in the community that NOW they would be so concerned with prohibiting the use of force to redistribute the wealth. That is what they call it, by the way - a term that presumes their rightful ownership when that, in fact, is exactly what is in dispute.

Let's use another example. A thief pulls out a gun and tells you to step into the alley. There, he forces you to hand over your wallet, your watch, and . . . well . . . "that's a nice looking suit you are wearing." Then, after he has taken these things from you, he then announces, "New rule: No person may take property from another person by force."

The timing is quite convenient.

This idea that no person may take the property of another person by force lies at the core of libertarianism. We can see why those people who have already taken a large amount of property from others by force . . . who have, in fact, taken about as much as they can effectively take . . . would then insist that it would be wrong for others to take property by force FROM THEM.

However, would it not still be the case that the robber owes something to the robbed? The extortionist owes something to those from whom they extorted? The slave owner owe something to those he enslaved?

A lot of libertarians, it seems, wants to just blow past this issue as if it does not matter. It is no wonder that this ideology is favored among those who have already accumulated great deals of wealth, and is viewed less enthusiastically from those (and the descendants of those) from whom wealth was taken.

Problems for Libertarians: Economic Capture

As a part of my attempt to step outside of my particular intellectual bubble, I regularly listen to the podcast EconTalk hosted by Russ Roberts.

The task of stepping out of one's bubble is to read things one may not necessarily agree with. I tend to be on the liberal side of things - so the libertarian-themed EconTalk would qualify. Though, in violation of this principle, I sometimes find myself agreeing with what is said, and incorporating some libertarian thoughts into my own writing.

The fact that global trade is responsible for lifting over a billion people out of extreme poverty represents one area where free-market principles and compassion went hand-in-hand for a better world.

However, in looking at both sides of these debates, I do come up with some problems for libertarians.

A few blog posts back, I wrote a post in which I showed how the moral argument in defense of the right to freedom of speech paralleled the moral argument in defense of a right to freedom of trade - a free market. (See Freedom of Speech and Freedom of Markets)

Basically, the argument states that the right to freedom of speech is a right to freedom from violent interference based on what one says, writes, or communicates in other ways such as art or gestures. The reason we need to keep violence out of the forum is because, once it is introduced, those with power are going to determine - through violence - what people may hear or write. Inevitably, those with power are going to make this determination based on what promotes their own interests. Those with power will allow speech that promotes their interests, and condemn through violence speech that would thwart their interests.

The same argument applies to the market.

Basically, the argument states that the right to freedom of trade is a right to freedom from violent interference in the exchange of property. The reason we need to keep violence out of the market is because, once it is introduced, those with power are going to determine - through violence - what people may trade. Inevitably, those with power are going to make this determination based on what promotes their own interests. Those with power will allow trade that promotes their interests, and condemn through violence trade that would thwart their interests.

If one thinks that this is a good reason to allow freedom of speech, it seems to follow that it is also a good reason to allow freedom of trade.

This does not imply unconditional freedom in both cases. The right to freedom of speech does not include the right to lie - or even to make careless claims in some circumstances. False advertising, fraud, libel and slander, are prohibited. And freedom of trade is restricted with respect to nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, to name a few. However, it does argue for a strong presumption in defense of freedom - that freedom be permitted unless and until compelling reason can be provided in favor of violent interference.

The puzzle for libertarians is this:

We introduced violence into the market long ago. If this argument is sound, then this predicts that we should expect to find a great deal of evidence of cases where powerful people are using violence in the market place to allow trade that promotes their own interests and prohibit trade that conflicts with their interests. Yet, when one searches through the works of libertarian think-tanks such as the CATO Institute, Hoover foundation, and - indeed - listens to the podcast episodes from EconTalk - one discovers very little discussion of programs that transfer wealth upward.

This is not to say that such talk does not exist. It is simply much less common than talk about the transfers of wealth that benefit the poor. We see such organizations complaining more about minimum wages, national health care, public school, and public health care than we see them complaining about tax benefits for corporations, restraints of trade, the capture of regulatory agencies, a multi-hundred-billion dollar defense industry that is, to a large degree, a corporate welfare program, government-funded research where the wealthy take the research and sell it, and foreign wars that are fought for corporate interests.

I would like liberal readers to note - all of the items that I listed above that libertarian think-tanks tend not to talk about are cases where libertarian principles support liberal political objectives. Yes, there such things do exist. One can find them if one does not spend all of one's time in one's own political tribe hating everything having to do with the other political tribe - one can find potential areas of agreement and . . . GASP! . . . even areas of potential cooperation.

But, let us put that aside for the moment.

This seems to have two possible implications: at least if we look at things as they appear from the point of view of libertarian think-tanks.

(1) The premise in which the right to freedom of speech and freedom of markets is false. It is not the case that, if violence is introduced into the forum or the market, that those with power will use violence to permit that speech/trade that benefits them and prohibit that speech/trade that is not in their interest.

(2) Those with power can not only use it to buy legislators, regulators, public-relations companies (and advertising campaigns), media, lobbyists, and lawyers with which to manipulate the powers of government to concentrate economic wealth in their hands. They can use their power (and, in particular, their money) to capture the attention of libertarian think-tanks as well.

Option 2 is not a conspiracy theory. It does not require people consciously deciding to do evil. It is simply the case of a market responding to incentives. Think-tanks need money. The wealthy and powerful have money to spend. Powerful people have reasons to fund those think-tanks that put more emphasis on criticizing programs that transfer money downward and ignore programs that transfer money upward. So, these are the types of think-tanks that survive in the market. This is an example of the market at work.

But, then, that illustrates a part of the problem with inequalities of wealth. Inequalities in wealth not only allow the wealthy to concentrate even more wealth into their hands through their control of the government but also through control of education, research, and the media. They create a culture in which academics focus their attention on issues that benefit those with money and ignore research into that which benefits those who cannot afford to pay for that benefit.

That is a problem for libertarianism.

Arab and Medieval Philosophy, Free Will, and Consciousness

In 80 days and some change, I will be attending class.

In the mean time my current activities have involved getting through the History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps podcast. The "without any gaps" component has to do with the fact that it does not skip from Aristotle to Aquinas. Instead, we have spent about 60 podcast hours on the Stoics, Neoplatonists, philosophy in the Arab world, and medieval philosophy before reaching Aquinas.

Let me fill you in on some of the things that I learned so far in this podcast.

First, there's the extensive cooperation that existed between Muslim, Christian, and Jewish scholars in Islam. Some people may be familiar with the fact that much of the scholarship of the ancient Greeks was preserved in Arab countries while Europe went through its dark age. The reason for this preservation in scholarship had to do intentional efforts to translate Greek philosophical works into Arab. For this, they worked with Jewish and Christian scholars who knew Greek and could help in the translation. Furthermore, the works of Christian and, in particular, Jewish scholars were a part of the philosophical dialogue going on at this time. These were not isolated communities - they shared a common culture.

Second, Arab intellectual culture continued past the Crusades. The way history is generally taught, when the Europeans attacked the Middle East in the Crusades and made off with their books, this sparked a resurgence in philosophy in Europe, while the Arab world went into a rapid cultural decline. It would be more accurate to say that, once the Crusaders made off with the books they captured, they quit paying attention to Arab culture. Therefore, the continuing Arab intellectual activities after the Crusades went unnoticed. However, it is not the case that what Europeans decided not to notice did not exist.

Third, a great many scholars in medieval Europe and in the Middle East during this time period "scriptualized" Aristotle. They thought that Aristotle could not be wrong. They also thought that scripture could not be wrong. Consequently, a great deal of philosophical effort went into trying to discover an understanding of Aristotle that matched their understanding of the Bible. If both were true, then they had to agree with each other. This was difficult considering that, for example, Aristotle argued that the universe was eternal and scripture argued that it was created. This was only one of the struggles that was taking place.

Fourth, a lot of excellent brain power was spent trying to prove the truths revealed in scripture. Humans may be able to come up with some tremendously imaginative ideas to argue that this is the case. In fact, many of those ingenious ideas might even have a place in the real world - for example, aiding in our understanding of the relationship between universals and particulars. However, in the end, it would be like adopting a project to show that the events in The Lord of the Rings were actual historical events. Regardless of how imaginative and innovative those solutions were, it would have been great to have had that intellectual power devoted to real problems.

I am forming the opinion that contemporary philosophers are also working on projects comparable to trying to prove how wine and bread can literally become the body and blood of Christ while showing no indication that such a transformation has taken place. These have to do with free will and consciousness.

I have never found much use for either of these two concepts. I don't think either of them exist.

Proving that something does not exist - unless it involves a straight-out contradiction - is near to impossible. I think that the proof of its nonexistence will come directly from the observation that people have quit talking about it. In the moral philosophy that I defend, I make no reference to free will. It is thought that, after years of discussion of moral theory, with no sign of free will, people may begin to wonder where free will went. In fact, it did not go anywhere. It never existed. I can leave it out of my discussion of morality because it does not do anything. Rather than being disproved, the theories will just fall into disuse. We will also find that consciousness does no good. It is unneeded and, consequently, may be cut out of your most recent efforts.

In its place, we have the physical structure of the brain motivating behavior - structures that can be molded by experience praise, reward, condemnation, and punishment. Reward and punishment have a determined effect, and are motivated by that which is a fact in the brain.

"Consciousness" is another thing that will fall into disuse until we decide that it was not being used for anything. It plays no role that requires its existence.

Well, the next part of my studies - once I catch up on the History of Philosophy - is to brush up on my logic.

I am now in regular communication with the philosophy department at the University of Colorado. As a graduate student, I have been assigned an advisor, and made arrangements to take a class in modal logic this semester. When I took propositional logic, the class was exceptionally easy. But that was two dozen years ago. Now, we get to find out just how rusty my mind is.

Trump and the Paris Agreement

I have been spreading the following moral analogy concerning President Trump's decision to have America leave the Paris Agreement:

[I]President Donald Trump has actually given us all reason to be embarrassed to be Americans.

Imagine a village where an alarm has sounded that the river going through town will flood. The villagers gather to put sandbags along the banks to keep from flooding the town.

The wealthy owner of a large house watches them work, while sitting back drinking lemonade. His house will be flooded, too, if the river breaks over the banks. But he is counting on the hard work of the other villagers to save his home, with no contribution from him.

Or, he will help, if the other villagers will pay him enough to make it worth their while.

I would be acutely embarrassed to be that person. But that person is the United States under Trump.

This analogy is missing one important element. The owner of the house sitting on the porch drinking the lemonade is CONTRIBUTING to the size of the flood. He owns a dam upstream. He has ordered the spillway opened to pour even more water into the river, making the villagers work all that much harder, or forcing them to pay him not to flood the town.

That is the type of "greatness" Trump is aiming for.

It's embarrassing.[/I]

In addition to the points raised in this post, there is a related point to consider.

Imagine that you were somebody living in this town trying to save his home from the flood, working side by side with the others. There, on that porch, sat a man drinking lemonade - refusing to help - and even suggesting that his employees at the dam feed even more water into the river.

How would you feel?

Donald Trump is promoting a great deal of hatred and contempt of the United States. One question that we have reason to ask is: How do they intend to express that anger and contempt?

One of the ways in which they may be expected to express their anger is by simply resolving to have nothing to do with the man sitting on his porch. This could range from refusing to do business with him, to failing to do anything to help protect him if some burglar, vandal, or arsonist (for example) should decide to attack his home.

We would reasonably expect the people in the village in this example to resolve to quit doing business with the man on the porch to whatever degree they are able to do so. They would resolve to take their business to the neighbor who helped them on the dikes, not the selfish man on the porch who not only refused to join them but made their job that much harder. Rather than making America great again, Trump is giving people around the world a good reason to carry out their economic activities with fellow countries who have joined in the fight against global warming and to deny their business to the country who refuses to help.

We would also reasonably expect the people in the village to be a bit less concerned about the fact that somebody in the village may form an intent to rob or vandalize that man's house. After all, they will think to himself, he is only getting what he deserves. In the world today, this means simply not caring to help to prevent a terrorist attack against the United States and not caring one bit about our security. Some of the people in the village may get sufficiently angry that they may carry out such an attack. Others, though they would not conduct such an attack themselves, certainly will not see much reason to put any effort into helping to prevent it. The result is that living in the United States becomes that much more dangerous.

These possible responses may help to explain why several states, cities, and companies resolved to continue to help in the fight against climate change, even as Trump pulls the federal government out of the Paris agreement. These human beings recognize that there is a lot to be gained by joining the others on the banks of the river to fight the rising floodwaters. There is reason to cultivate the good will of the other villagers. It is good for business, and it provides benefits in terms of mutual security. Promoting a culture of mutual cooperation requires that one agree, from time to time, to cooperate.

Of course, one of the manifestations of this culture of cooperation is that members of the community will sometimes choose cooperation for its own sake - merely because it is the right thing to do. Sitting on the porch refusing to contribute, and even taking action that forces the others to work that much harder, can be expected to have some significant costs.

Nobody in the village is going to think that the man sitting on the porch while they work to save the village from the flood is 'great' in any sense of the word. They are going to think that he is a . . . well, honestly . . . that he is an asshole. Because that, in the proper understanding of the term, is exactly what he is proving himself to be. His attitude and his actions will leave him without friends and without help when he needs it most.

The Value of a Life of Reason

I am starting my next paper. This one seeks to promote the virtue of seeking true and relevant beliefs in deciding on courses of action that impact the lives of others.

This is how the paper starts:

The Value of the Life of Reason (20170523)
Alonzo Fyfe

I write this document primarily to try to get you, the reader, to adopt – a bit more strongly than you have – a devotion to truth and reason, and to promote that interest across the community as a whole.

Your life may depend on it.

Its importance seems obvious beyond question. We can illustrate it in countless examples.

For an illustrative example, imagine that you are a prisoner presented with two glasses, each with a clear odorless liquid. One contains a poison that causes excruciating pain, while the other is good clean water.

It seems beyond question that you would want a way to determine which glass contains poison and which contains water. Towards that end, you discover that the poison is an oil that floats on water. You only need to take a drop from one glass and put it in the other. If that drop floats on the surface, then you should skim that drop off of the surface and drink the contents of that glass. If the drop sinks, then you should drink from the glass from which that drop came.

Having true and relevant beliefs can save you a lot of pain.

Now, let’s introduce a number of prisoners. Each prisoner is presented with a glass of water and a glass of poison, and asked to choose which glass to give some other prisoner. In this community, you have reason to promote not only an aversion to causing others pain, but also reason to promote an interest in true and relevant beliefs so that prisoners in general are choosing the glass with water rather than the glass with poison.

We live in a society where people are drinking a great deal of poison. This is happening because people are being careless about the truth and relevance of their beliefs. They are acquiring beliefs through unreliable sources, and failing to inquire into whether even the truth beliefs they have are relevant to their decisions regarding the glass from which others will be forced to drink.

This metaphor of drinking from a glass of poison stands for suffering from the results of carelessness with respect to the truth and relevance of beliefs. Those who will suffer the ill effects of greenhouse gas emissions, vaccinations (or the lack of vaccinations), a higher minimum wage, homeopathy and other forms of crack medicine, or lured into smoking, are examples of people who have been made to drink from a glass of poison – often by people who are careless in determining the truth and relevance of those beliefs causing them to choose the glass containing the poison.

This is a moral failing worthy of condemnation. Those who are put at risk of drinking poison – let alone those who are forced to drink the poison that others choose – have good reason to condemn, in harsh terms, those who made that choice carelessly.

One of the reasons we are drinking a great deal of poison these days is due to a common misunderstanding of the claim, “everybody has a right to their beliefs.” The popular misunderstanding is that it is wrong to condemn people for a careless belief that the glass they choose for others to drink from contains water. If it ends up containing poison, rather than to condemn the person who made the choice for carelessness, we are told, “everybody has a right to their belief” – and we may not legitimately condemn the person who carelessly acquired the belief that the glass contained water.

We are also drinking a lot of poison because of beliefs grounded on faith. Some of the prisoners are making their decisions based on a passage in religious scripture that says, “Always choose the glass on the right.” In fact, the glass on the right, as often as not, contains poison. The people who wrote those scriptures long ago knew nothing about the “poison floats on water test.” Now that it is known, people with a slaving devotion to scripture are still choosing the glass on the right, and thus serving their fellow prisoners poison. If your scripture tells you to always choose the glass on the right then, as long as you are choosing for yourself, that’s fine. But, when you are choosing for others, you may be obligated to use a different standard.

Scripture is only one source of potential error. There are those who choose what glass others will drink from based on horoscopes or other signs, or think that they can choose the right glass based on intuition or some other special faculty whereby, if they close their eyes and point, they will point to the glass of water rather than poison. Repeated failures in these tests do not dissuade them. There are those who carelessly believe that they can tell the poison from the water because the poison has a slight reddish color that they can see, but which exists only in their imagination. Yet, they confidently assert that they are incapable of error, and that their methods for determining truth are flawless.

We also need to consider the poison vendors – those who manufacture and sell the poison being used in the test. They obtain a profit when they can convince prisoners to choose poison instead of water. Consequently, they have reason to flood the prison with misinformation – telling them such things as that water floats on oil or, at least, that the “oil floating on water hypothesis” is “just a theory” and there are a great many reasons to doubt it. Because of these campaigns, they bank billions of dollars, and many more prisoners end up in agony.
Finally, we must consider the prison employees – often paid off by the poison vendors, or under the influence of scripture – who encourage prisoners to select poison over water.

As a result of these customs, people are drinking a lot of metaphorical poison.

People will make mistakes – that goes without saying. However, much of the poison being served is not due to the innocent mistakes of people who are, nonetheless, doing the best they can. Much of this is due to carelessness, and some of it is due to malevolence.

The solution is to say that truth and reason matter – and to hold in deserving contempt those who carelessly or malevolently come to believe, or to choose, to have their fellow prisoners drink poison instead of water.

Criticizing an Idea (Again)

With the terrorist attack in Manchester, the debate between "the legitimate criticism of Islam" and "Islamophobia" once again emerges.

On this topic, my first question is: Can you tell the difference?

In 1879, several Europeans, tired of being condemned for being anti-Jew, answered that they were not against the Jew. They were against the Jewish philosophy, "Semitism". They were engaged in the legitimate criticism of an idea - or "anti-Semitism". However, what they called anti-Semitism, and which they said was the legitimate criticism of an idea, was still bigotry under a new name. This bigotry under a new name lead to the Holocaust 60 years later.

Can you tell the difference?

I am constantly engaged in the criticism of ideas. Utilitarianism, moral relativism, hard determinism, Objectivism, Kantianism, theism, and the like. There are rules to criticizing an idea.

One of those rules is that criticism does not count as criticizing an idea unless it is criticism of a defining characteristic of that idea.

For example, I am not criticizing act-utilitarianism unless I am criticizing the idea that the right act is the act that produces the most utility.

If Jeremy, who calls himself an act-utilitarian, were to blow up a building, saying that he believed that this act would produce the most utility, in order to make this a criticism of act-utilitarianism it would not be sufficient for me to show that Jeremy called himself an act-utilitarianism, that act-utilarianism says to do the act that produces the most utility, and that Joe believed that his act produced the most utility.

I would also need to show that Jeremy made no mistake in believing that his act produced the most utility.

Plus, I would need to demonstrate not only that Jeremy made no mistake in believing that his act produced the most utility, but also that the act was nonetheless wrong.

When somebody falls short of these requirements, we have reason to believe that they are "criticizing an idea" is, in fact, false. What they are doing is using Jeremy's action - and the emotional response to it - to promote hatred of a people (those who self-identify as act-utilitarians), many of whom would not have ever endorsed Jeremy's actions.

Applying these standards to the case of using a terrorist attack to criticize Islam, one would need to demonstrate that the terrorist was a Muslim, that he justified his actions on the basis of Islam, that his understanding of Islam is correct, and that there is a more accurate account of morality that would have condemned the action.

It's this requirement of showing that "his understanding of Islam is correct" that is the hard part - and the part that critics often leave out. This is comparable to saying, "no Muslim deserving of the name would have disagreed with Jeremy," or "Everybody who disagrees with Jeremy is not actually a Muslim."

If the critic says, "Yes, there are Muslims worthy of the name who would have disagreed with Jeremy," then this is as good as admitting that his claim that he is criticizing an idea called Islam is false. He is not actually criticizing an idea. A likely explanation of what he is doing in fact is promoting hatred of a people who call themsleves Muslim.

He is merely calling his hate-montering the "criticizing an idea" to give it the appearance of legitimacy.

Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Markets

Recently, I have been trying to get participants in discussions at the Party of Reason and Progress to respect conservative ideas.

This is not because I think that intellectual diversity has any type of intrinsic value, or because I believe that everything is just a matter of opinion and one opinion is as good as any other, or because I think that beliefs should be evaluated on any standard other than (or addition to) whether they are true. It is because I hold that some beliefs attributed to conservatives and Republicans are true, and some beliefs attributed to liberals and Democrats are false.

If the Party of Reason and Progress and its members adopt the idea that one major party is a fountain of all wisdom and virtue, and the other is a cesspool of ignorance and malevolence, then it will not be operating on the principles of reason. It will, in fact, be embracing a great many fictions precisely because they are the beliefs that one must have to obtain membership in a particular political tribe.

In this respect, recently, I noticed an interesting parallel between the arguments for freedom of speech and the arguments for freedom in the marketplace.

In a nutshell, the main argument for a right to freedom of speech goes as follows:

A right to freedom of speech is a right to an immunity from violence or threats of violence for what one says and does. We wish to prohibit the introduction of violence into the forum. The reason for this is, primarily, because introducing violence will start us down a road where those with power will ultimately decide what is said and written in the public forum. If they have the power to say what is said and written, they will inevitably allow those things that serve their interests, and prohibit that which goes against their interests. We do not need to even imagine a malevolent conspiracy on their part. This will come about simply because of the common arrogance people have to exaggerate the benefits to themselves, to imagine benefits to others in that which benefits themselves, to minimize harm to others, and to imagine harms to others in that which harms them. In other words, we do not need malevolence. We only need self-deception. And we have plenty of that. Though, clearly, this will also tempt the malevolent.

We can write the freedom of exchange in almost exactly the same terms.

A right to freedom of speech is a right to an immunity from violence or threats of violence in exchange. We wish to prohibit the introduction of violence into the market. The reason for this is, primarily, because introducing violence will start us down a road where those with power will ultimately decide what is traded and for what price. If they have the power to say what is traded, they will inevitably allow those trades that serve their interests, and prohibit that which goes against their interests. We do not need to even imagine a malevolent conspiracy on their part. This will come about simply because of the common arrogance people have to exaggerate the benefits to themselves, to imagine benefits to others in that which benefits themselves, to minimize harm to others, and to imagine harms to others in that which harms them. In other words, we do not need malevolence. We only need self-deception. And we have plenty of that. Though, clearly, this will also tempt the malevolent.

Employing this argument, I suspect many liberals will have little trouble imagining a society a few decades after we introduce violence into the forum - and the wealthy and powerful have gained increasing power to dictate what is said and written. Those who oppose the people in power are arrested and imprisoned - their property compensation - and otherwise forced into silence. The defender of freedom of speech would then tell these people, "I told you this would happen. You didn't listen. Now you have a forum where speech only benefits those in power."

Today, a few decades since violence was introduced into the marketplace, conservatives are saying the same thing. They see many liberals complaining that activities benefit to those with power more than any other group. They see economic activity going to increase their power. Indeed, the force of government is used quite extensively to take wealth from those who lack power and give it to those who have power - which tend to be those who can afford lawyers, lobbyists, and public relations firms that specialize in manipulating the public. Against this, the defender of freedom of markets would then tell these people, "I told you this would happen. You didn't listen. Now, you have markets where trade only benefits those in power."

I favor the affordable care act.

However, I condemn the attitude common among liberals that conservative who oppose the act get off on the idea of taking medical insurance away from tens of millions of people and watching them suffer and die. However, the liberal attitude in this case is like that of a person viewing a person perceiving a defender of freedom of speech as a defender of all sorts of malevolent and harmful beliefs that are sometimes found in an unregulated forum. Interpreting a defender of freedom of speech as a defender of lies, and interpreting a defender of freedom of market as a defender of suffering and death, are comparable malevolent and dishonest distortions of an opposing view.

If I may quickly summarize a sketch of an opposing view, it goes as follows:

People are resourceful and imaginative. The best way to deal with the health-care problem is to put that resourcefulness and imagination to work to come up with solutions that have the lowest cost and maximum benefit. When we "kick tens of millions of people" off of government-funded health insurance, we do not expect them to suffer and die. We expect them to find new and better ways to prevent suffering and death.

The liberal plan is one of violence and arrogance. It is violent in that people are forced to participate in their plan; those who do so face people with guns, and those people with guns have a legal permission to kill any who resist. This is not an exaggeration - this is a description of how the state works. The government passes a law. People with guns who have a permission to kill those who resist enforce the law. The liberal plan is arrogant because it assumes that a government employee can come up with a brilliant plan to solve the problems - a plan that is so certain that he can be justified in sending people with guns to threaten to kill any who do not obey his dictates.

Instead, the conservatives expect these tens of millions of people - so long as they have the freedom to do so - to come up with some number of non-violent answers to the problem and to implement them. Since the costs come from their own pockets, and since they harvest the benefits directly, they will inevitably seek the solutions that produce the greatest benefits at the least cost. To the conservative, "We are not the ones condemning people to suffering and death. You are. You are the ones relying on arrogant bureaucrats with guns. You are the ones who are blocking the invention of dozens of non-violent solutions that will ultimately provide far more help to far more people at a much lower cost."

In my posts, I argue extensively for the freedom of speech using precisely the argument I outlined above. As such, I have to admit that the same argument applied to a freedom of market has some merit.

I note, however, that the right to freedom of speech is not absolute. It does not give a person a right to lie. Perjury, fraud, libel, slander, false advertising, are all prohibited. At the very least, the right to freedom of speech applies only to those who believe what they are saying. In many cases, they must also believe on the basis of good reason. Negligent speech is also prohibited.

Consequently, we can argue, even where these arguments are parallel, that there are some market activities that can also be considered harmful to the public good and, thereby, regulated. In this respect, I would argue that the very poor actually lack market freedom. Their economic situation means that they are often acting under duress, as in, "Do what I say or your children starve and your spouse will not get needed medical care." A right to freedom in the market no more applies to these types of trades than a right to freedom of speech applies to lies and negligent acts of libel and slander.

But the more important point is that this is a type of conclusion that one can reach if one takes the arguments of critics seriously - rather than manufacturing straw men that allow one to charge the critics with stupidity or malevolence. Sometimes the critic has a grasp of a truth. Presuming that they are malevolent or foolish merely blinds oneself to a truth that could, ultimately, produce great benefit or prevent great harm.

100 Days

In 100 days plus 20 hours I will be sitting in my first class.

So, what news is there of the past 11 days since I was here last?

Item 1: I got an email from the Philosophy department of the University of Colorado asking if I will be coming. I said yes. So, now, "I'll make sure I add you to our grad student email list in June, so that you can keep track of things as we approach the coming semester."

At least I know they are expecting me.

The email was sent to three people - so there are apparently three of us entering the program this year.

Using the email address of the other two as a guide, I was able to identify one of them - a lad name of Elliot Lloyd Spears, who attended the University of Colorado as an undergraduate. He wrote a senior project under Dr. Heathwood called Value, Duty, and the Divine which I have downloaded for reading. I am wondering how Mr. Spears is going to react to having the author of the "atheist ethicist" as a classmate.

In addition, I have been working on putting some of my own work into html. I have created a page for Morality from the Ground Up. If you want to provide a link to a site explaining the basics of desirism, you can do this now.

I will be doing this next to my paper on objections to Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign. With another election coming up, and with a group of people seemingly following Bernie's example a bit too closely, I think that this page might have relevance in the next election. So far, the most common reaction I get from Sanders' folks is that this misrepresents his views. Still, if they want to prove that they do have consideration for the global poor, shun scapegoating as a political strategy, and have respect for scientific findings, that is fine with me.

In the realm of seeking political influence, I have been posting to the Party of Reason and Progress forums in Facebook regarding various issues. Since the site seems to be filled with tribal liberal types, I have put most of my efforts recently into arguing that conservatives do have arguments and evidence in support of their positions. Though I dislike defending views I do not share, I am - more to the point - defending the position that people have an obligation to present opposing views fairly.

Also, oddly, at the Party for Reason and Progress forums, in a discussion of abortion, I pointed out that some arguments being used in defense of a right to abortion were bad arguments. I got criticized by people who clearly did not understand the difference between questioning the truth of a conclusion and questioning the validity of an argument in defense of that conclusion. I am wondering what it would take to have a group devoted to reason and progress made up of members who actually thought it to be important to understand basic logic.

I also intend to post the paper I submitted to the graduate school as my writing sample up on the Desirism site. It concerns J.L. Mackie's error theory. Upon getting the email from the university, I went back and read it - and it is one of the few things I wrote that I am not tempted to entirely rewrite the moment I encounter it. Consequently - I will post it.

Prinz on Moral Relativism

I am back from vacation and ready to work on making the world a better place.

In the "Documents" section of the new desirism blog site I have posted a new paper on Moral Judgment.

This is the paper I have been working on responding to the claims that Jesse Prinz, Distinguished Professor of philosophy and director of the Committee for Interdisciplinary Science Studies at the City University of New York, Graduate Center, on moral relativism.

Prinz argued that morality is the expression of our moral sentiments. As I understood and interpreted Prinz' thesis, it can be expressed as follows:

To believe that something is morally wrong (right) is to have a disposition to have an attitude of disapprobation (approbation) towards it under conditions of full factual knowledge and reflection and freedom from emotional biases that I myself would deem unrelated to the matter at hand.

When I consider these types of sentimentalist theories, I am reminded of people that I know who are strongly racist or strongly anti-gay. These people have an attitude of disapprobation towards, among other things, interracial or same-gender relationships. It is true that these people claim that such things are wrong, and they are basing their judgments on their sentiments. The question to be asked and answered, however, is whether their sentiments can be mistaken.

Actually, Prinz allows for the possibility of moral error. In the case of racism, Prinz allows us to question whether the racist has incorrect views regarding the race - e.g., that one race is intellectually inferior to another or more prone to violence, laziness, or some other negative quality. In the case of homosexuality, Prinz would allow us to question those who condemn these relationships on their factual assertion that a god exists and that this god condemns these activities. On matters such as this, we can say that another person's moral attitudes are mistaken.

However, if one simply has an attitude of disapprobation towards interracial or same-gender relationships, and holds no mistaken beliefs about those relationships, then those relationships are "wrong for me" (as spoken by the person who is judging them. A person cannot be any more mistaken about what is "wrong for me" as one can be about what is "delicious for me" when judged by the direct experience of that which is judged to be wrong or delicious.

I argue that some of Prinz's own evidence contradicts this thesis.

Specifically, Prinz talks about moral instruction and the fact that parents use a variety of emotional conditioning techniques to condition the sentiments of their children.

I try to point out that when a parent tells a child, for example, that hitting her little brother is wrong, from the point of view of the child, it is difficult to interpret this claim as an invitation to the child to use her own sentiments to judge the action.

By analogy, if the parents tell the child that stewed tomatoes are delicious, the child can challenge this claim by tasting stewed tomatoes and coming to the conclusion that she does not like them. For the child, stewed tomatoes are not "delicious for me". If she were to say so, she would not be challenged on this fact.

However, woe to the child who responds to the claim that hitting her little brother is wrong who responds by saying, "I feel no attitude of disapprobation when it comes to hitting my little brother. Therefore, it is not 'wrong for me' to hit him."

Unlike "delicious", the term "wrong" contains no invitation on the part of those who make a moral claim for the people they condemn to check their own sentiments and use those sentiments to dismiss the claim of wrongness. If one's sentiments do not correspond to the wrongness of hitting one's little brother, the proper conclusion is not to say, "There is nothing wrong with hitting my little brother." The proper conclusion to draw is, "There is something wrong with my sentiments."

I argue that these techniques of emotional conditioning are tools. Given these tools, prudence suggests that the person use them to create in others those sentiments that are useful to the agent. I gave examples of using these tools to cause a predatory animal to have an aversion to entering the territory in which one lives, or to cause a large herbivore to pull a plow or a wagon without protest. In the company of other intentional agents, the person given these tools would be wise to use them to promote in others an aversion to lying, breaking promises, theft, vandalism, assault, and the like.

Ultimately, Prinz's thesis concerning moral judgments is mistaken. A better view of moral judgments says:

To believe that something is morally wrong (right) is to believe that people generally have many and strong reasons to promote universally an attitude of disapprobation (approbation) towards acts like the act judged to be wrong (right).

The evidence that Prinz brings to bear in defense of his own thesis does not actually support that thesis. It better supports this alternative thesis instead.

The School of Fact and Reason

Even though, in the last two posts, I have provided some objections to creating a private set of atheist schools - a "school of fact and reason" - I am ultimately sympathetic to the project. I think that it would be a good idea for atheists to set up a private school of fact and reason and to get legislators to support a voucher system that would allow parents to send their children to such a school.

The first benefit is that such a school will turn out students educated in fact and reason.

Some people may complain that such a system leaves out the most important element - values. However, such a reader needs to read more of this blog. I hold that values are a species of fact. Specifically, values, generally speaking, concern relationships between states of affairs and desires. Moral values concern relationships between malleable desires and other desires. The School of Fact and Reason should certainly teach about these relationships - which will include facts about the sentiments that people generally have many and strong reasons to promote universally by employing the tools of reward (e.g., praise) and punishment (e.g., condemnation). This would include using these tools to promote these values.

A voucher system actually helps to combat one of the problems with private schools in that it would provide a way for lower-income parents to send their children to the School of Fact and Reason. When such a school enrolls a student from a low-income household, it collects the state voucher money for that student. Without a voucher system, only the wealthy can afford to (1) pay taxes that go to education, and (2) have enough money left over to send their own children to private schools. Consequently, without vouchers, schools are wise to package and sell a product that appeals to the wealthy. However, a voucher system would allow the parents of poorer students to enter the market. This provides a market incentive to develop a package that poorer parents would want to buy.

Furthermore, the board of directors for the School of Fact and Reason can solicit donations that it can use to help poorer families enter the system. This depends on there being a board of directors who recognize that the purpose of an education is to teach facts and reason - and not to serve the interests of the very wealthy who are capable of making contributions. However, such an attitude is also necessary if we are to condemn public schools and to promote a private alternative in their place that reflects these values. In other words, the values must exist for them to have an influence on education policy regardless of whether that policy is public, private, or a mixture. If these values do not exist, public education is not a benefit. If they do exist, then they can exist in the private setting as well as the public system.

As for the tribal problem - the idea that such a School of Fact and Reason would promote an atheist tribe the way that many religious schools promote religious tribalism - with all of the potentially harmful consequences of tribalism. And I want to repeat that these harmful consequences of tribalism are difficult to underestimate. In the past they have resulted in utterly horrendous atrocities ranging from genocide (e.g., the native Americans, the Holocaust) to ethnic cleansing to race-based slavery and the subjugation of women. It would include The Terror in France, the near-depopulation of Europe during the 30 Years' War, and countless incidents in which one group rounded up and slaughtered all of the men, women, and children in certain battles of conquest.

If the School of Fact and Reason served to create an Atheist tribe capable of these types of atrocities - capable, for example, of subjecting Theists to something similar to Jim Crow laws or simply rounding them up and exterminating those who believed that at least one god existed - then this would be reason enough to condemn the practice. However, a School of Fact and Reason should include in its teachings facts about tribal psychology, the types of atrocities they can contribute to, and the reasons why the school should avoid becoming a tool for tribal atheism. Furthermore, such a school - and the political campaign that backed the use of vouchers to pay for such a system. It would be fully consistent for the School of Fact and Reason to adopt procedures and practices aimed explicitly against its being used to promote tribal atheism, and object to the use of vouchers to allow parents to send their children to schools that promote tribal theism (or tribal racism, for that matter).

The reasons that these problems fail to imply that we ought not to have private schools that parents can send their children to private schools are the same reasons why the fact that laws against assault and rape will tend to unfairly target the poor and marginalized races fails to provide reasons to object to laws against assault and rape. The way to deal with these types of problems is to deal with discrimination against the poor and marginalized races directly, not with by eliminating the institutions where these issues might manifest themselves. After all, they manifest themselves in all sorts of practices that we cannot sensibly eliminate.

So, ultimately, I would like to see a set of private Schools of Fact and Reason (aka "So Far") established. Such a school should acknowledge the problems listed above and seek to address them, rather than deny the possibility of teaching a number of students at a school devoted to facts and sound/strong reasoning.

Thoughts on Atheist Private Schools (and private schools generally)

An accurate title for this blog posting would not easily fit in the title screen. It continues the discussion of atheists setting up a string of private schools that focus on teaching real-world facts and sound reasoning that I started yesterday. However, it is also a blog posting that discusses two problems with private schools - and, actually, two problems with free market solutions. In other words, it is a posting on a narrow subject matter that has some vary broad applications.

This is a continuation of a discussion I started in the previous posting that at least examines the option of setting up atheist schools that can take advantage of school voucher systems to get children into schools that focus on teaching then the facts of the natural world and sound reasoning. If these voucher systems are going to exist, then reason suggests offering parents the best possible education option - for parents who are interested in their child's education. I did suggest in that posting that most parents prefer to pay for indoctrination rather than education.

I argued in that previous post that setting up a set of atheist private schools has a problem that comes from the fact that such schools tend to promote tribalism. These schools tend to focus on promoting the idea that "us" - the group that hosts the school - is intrinsically better than "them" - the outgroup that that does not learn the same things that the ingroup consider to be true and important. History shows us that there seems no limit to the atrocities that tribalism can inspire, all of the way up to mass torture, slavery, and genocide. The French Revolution provides evidence that an atheist tribal movement can become just as deadly as any religious tribal movement.

This does not deny that there can be a benefit to private education. If atheists were to set up a group of private schools, I have little doubt that they could successfully market this particular product. "We are not going to teach your child myth and superstition. Your child will know what the best scientific minds think is true of the universe we live in. Furthermore,we will teach them critical learning skills. Those other (religious) schools have to dull your child's wisdom and intelligence to keep them from questioning religious doctrine. We won't do that."

This, however, highlights the problem between establishing a set of private schools and promoting tribal hostility. The claim that "Our school is better than any competing school" translates without effort into "Our people are superior to other people."

The challenge for private schools would be to create a product that can handle these types of problems.

Here, we expose two problems.

One is a problem with unfettered capitalism. Capitalism states that competition for dollars will inspire entrepreneurs to create products that provide people with what they value. In talking about private education, we assume that what people value - what they are seeking to purchase - is the education of the child. Thus, competition in the private education market would produce the best and most efficient education. Those businesses that produce the most education at the least cost would become the market champions, and the world would be a better place.

However, this assumes that what people value - what they want to purchase - is knowledge and understanding of the facts of the world. If this is true, private education would produce the best institutions for teaching the facts of the world.

However, what many people really want to purchase - what they value far more than they value truth - is cultural dominance. They value seeing "us" in power as masters and "them" being made to serve. To the degree that this is the case, the value that private schools have to offer - that which will help them dominate the market - that on which they will innovate - is in indoctrinating the child into the tribe. The most profitable and successful private schools - the market leaders - will be those that can sell tribal dominance to the tribe that already has the most wealth and political power.

The general problem is that the free market is great at innovation and creating the things that people want to buy, but there are some things that those with power and money want to buy where there are many and strong reasons to object to having those goods in the market to be purchased. Tribal cohesion and dominance over others would qualify.

The second problem is that capitalism does not innovate to benefit those who have no money. One of the effects of having half of the global wealth in the hands of 1% of the population is that, if you are an entrepreneur and you want somebody to pay you for your good or service, them you had better provide a good or service that this 1% wants to buy. They have enough food, clean water, and access to medical care. Therefore, innovation in the area of growing more and more nourishing food, providing clean water, or providing basic medical care will not be high on your list. Providing luxury goods - vacation opportunities, entertainment, art and other forms of conspicuous consumption, gadgets, and the like - would be high on the list.

The atheist private school system could produce the best education on the planet in terms of factual knowledge and sound reasoning, but only for those who had the means to pay.

The problem facing those at the bottom of the economic system is not only that they have less money, but the money they do have needs to go first to food, water, security, and health care. Nobody is going to get wealthy innovating education goods to sell to the global poor. Nobody is even going to get wealthy innovating in the distribution of food, clean water, and health care. Here, too, the global poor does not have the means to compensate the entrepreneur for these investments.

None of this contradicts the actual benefits that would come from creating an atheist school that proved superior in teaching factual knowledge and sound reasoning. Simply imagine a school where the teachers can teach the facts of science where science teachers did not have to worry about offending religious sensibilities. Imagine history classes that did not have to tip-toe around the conflicts between archaeology and biblical literalism. Imagine a school where students in the 9th and 10th grade can discuss the cosmological arguments for the existence of god and the argument from evil. One can imagine that the children could come out of a system like that much better off than children whose teachers are trying not to offend religious sensibilities - or, worse yet, a system where religious myths lacking evidence are taught as fact and faith is taught to be superior to evidence and reason.

That is - if those children can leave such a school without thinking that their duty to humanity is to lead the atheist tribe in a purge of all things religious.

One can attempt to design a set of atheist private schools that answers the first problem simply by resolving to teach the importance of accepting different group. Teaching the facts of the world should include teaching about tribalism and its dangers. However, the problem here concerns the question of whether this school can actually be successful. Recent research reveals that atheists are human beings - that the facts of human psychology are applicable to them. This suggests that if two atheist private school systems came into existence - one dedicated to teaching the dangers of tribalism and another devoted to promoting and championing the atheist tribe as superior to all others, that the latter would dominate the market.

As for the second problem, there is simply no way for the market to correct for the fact that private schools will serve the interests of those who have the money to pay for them, and fail to innovate to serve the interests of those who have no money to spend. Some sort of redistribution is going to be required - some way to get those with money to finance the education of those who do not have money. We can try to rely on private contributions - charity - but, here too, the rich will tend to demand that their charity go to providing an education that favors the class that is paying the money. They will be more likely to fund beliefs and values that preserve their status and position over those that challenge their status and position.

The challenge of providing a quality education to all lends itself to no easy solution. At least, there is no easy solution that I can think of.

Atheism and School Vouchers

In less than 118 days, I will be attending my first class at the University of Colorado.

I have been away for a while attending to my 30th wedding anniversary. Technically, I am still away - and will remain so until the end of the week. However, even as I attend to my anniversary, I try to continue my learning.

I have been listening to a podcast called EconTalk. It is a show that promotes conservative (libertarian) economics. In a way, I like to listen to it to get me out of the liberal intellectual bubble that I am likely to find myself in. In that regard, I should also add that I think that free market economics reveals some legitimate and serious concerns that many liberals deny - because those ideas do not fit their liberal ideology. They embrace the economic ideas and evidence that supports their world view, and dismiss those who disagree with a casual flip of the hand and a, "Well, they must be mistaken."

Yet, sometimes they Russ Roberts and his guests let their own biases leek through resulting in claims that go contrary to reason.

I recently listened to an episode broadcast on December 2, 2013 with Lant Pritchett on education. Pritchett, as would be typical of the economically conservative bent of the show, argued for private schools and the use of school vouchers. In his defense, he made the following claim:

[S]ocialization is not third-party contractible. What do I mean by that? Why I mean by that is you don't--if you want your kid to grow up religious . . . [y]ou actually take him to the denomination of your choice and put him in a Sunday School run by people who believe in that denomination. Because there's always the risk that if I give you a voucher, let's say I'm a government that believes in secularism and I give you a voucher to go off and educate your kid, you can easily take the voucher, get your kid educated with all the demonstrable skills of reading and writing but at the same time socialize him in some religious views that the secular government may not want children to have. . . and government really can't have it both ways. It really can't just give people vouchers or let them have choice over how they education their kids and not have them educate their kids how they want their kids to be educated. Which will include that they want their kids to be socialized in ways that governments often disagree with.

This quote is actually filled with a number of tribal conservative dog whistles. We can begin with the contrast between the wishes of a secular government and religious parents. There is the strong implication that the purpose of a (secular) public school system is as a part of a secular liberal war against religion - an attempt to prevent parents from teaching their children their own religious values.

I would like to see a survey done among liberals to determine if they are a bunch of atheists trying to prevent parents from teaching religion to their children. I suspect that the goal is something different from what Pritchett describes here.

This ties in with another set of thoughts that I have and that I often think about making to the atheist community.

That idea is for atheists to put some resources into creating private schools that teach children what the atheists think that children should be learning. It teaches that the earth is roughly spherical and that it has been around for about 4.5 billion years. It teaches that life evolved on this planet. It teaches the origins of Christianity, Islam, and other religions as the historical phenomenon that they are. It teaches logic and (secular) moral philosophies. These children will receive a proper education and understanding of how the world actually works, how to test a hypothesis, and the psychological traps such as wishful thinking and confirmation bias that cloud human thinking. Because of the quality of the education that these atheists schools provide - because the school is not filling the child's head, I would suspect that there would be a high demand for the services that such a school would provide.

I am often tempted to start pushing this idea within the atheist community. The idea latches on to the merits of the voucher system and school choice. It provides people with a way to create better schools for students - to demonstrate that they are better - and to profit and succeed a a result.

However, there is a problem with this idea, and that problem is found in the concept of "socialization".

It would be very easy for one of these secular schools to teach its students to have a hatred of religion and a hatred for anybody who would "be so stupid" as to adopt a religious beliefs. The best way for atheist children to learn to be tolerant of religious people and their beliefs. The best way to teach children to be tolerant is to actually have the child interact with people of different systems of belief and to see that they really are ordinary people with ordinary problems. They are not demons with pitchforks hot tar. Some of them can even be friends.

This cannot happen with the type of voucher system that Pritchett advertises - where people only send their children to the school that will indoctrinate the children into those tribal beliefs. We have seen the consequence of this tribal segregation. It gave us Jim Crow laws and the KKK. It gave us Japanese internment camps. In other parts of the world, it has given us religious civil war - whether between the protest and the Catholics, between Sunni and Shiite Muslims. It gave us tribal conflicts that is ultimately extremely destructive.

This is what many liberals are actually trying to prevent through this practice of "socialization". And it requires NOT sending children off into schools that will teach them nothing but the moral superiority of their own tribe and the moral inferiority of all opposing tribes - the type of degeneration of others that historically has lead to bigotry, injustice, and - in far too many cases to count, tribal violence of the worst kind. History has shown us that we cannot wave our hands dismissively at the threat of genocide, slavery, or civil war along tribal fault lines where different tribal plates run up against each other.

This is the problem that at least some liberals are trying to solve. It is, at the very least, a problem that this writer sees as a serious problem that argues against the establishment of atheist private schools that aim to teach children what we think is true of the world in which they live. It has nothing to do with a war against religion. It has everything to do with a war against tribal bigotry.