Hunting

Old Business: Cheney's Hunting Accident

I am still surprised at the people who are claiming that it is not Cheney's fault that he shot somebody.

Here is the rule: A hunter is NOT supposed to presume that his shot is safe unless he has reason to believe otherwise. A hunter has an obligation to presume that his shot is NOT safe unless he has reason to believe otherwise.

When Whittington stayed back to look for a bird that had been shot, Cheney should have had in his mind, "Shooting in that direction is off limits until I see Mr. Whittington again and I know where he is at." He should have mapped out in his mind those areas in which it was safe to shoot, and those in which it was not safe to shoot. If he could not identify a direction in which he should not shoot because Whittington was over there somewhere, then he should not have been shooting in any direction.

These are the rules for a responsible hunter.

The crime of shooting a fellow hunter is bad enough. Yet, Cheney's worse crime is not accepting this primary rule of responsibility. He wants to shift the blame onto others.

My concern continues to be the issue of moral responsibility. It continues to be the message given to hunters (particularly young hunters) across the country about how a responsible hunter conducts his affairs. Shooting at whatever target presents himself and blaming others if they get hit is not a good message. It is not evidence of moral responsibility.

I thought that personal moral responsibility was supposed to be a major point of strength for conservatives. Liberals are the ones who are supposed to be soft on the issue of responsibility -- blaming others (society, poor parenting, poverty) for the acts of the individual.

Here, we see that this Conservative rule of individual responsibility goes out the window the instant that a Conservative actually has to accept responsibility for wrongdoing.

Do not get me wrong -- I do not accept the 'liberal' view on this issue. These essays are very much in the tradition of individuals accepting moral responsibility for their actions. I do not care whether people who share this view call themselves 'liberal' or 'conservative' -- though I have tended to find more allies among conservatives than liberals.

If one is an advocate of individual responsibility, one has reason to be concerned that Cheney and his supporters have spent the last three days now that contradicts this concern. They are teaching people to deny responsibility for their actions, even when they are easily and clearly in the wrong.

As I have said before, the hunting accident itself is not much of a story. However, somebody with an interest in morality has reason to pay attention to the message that the Vice President and his supporters are saying about this very clear-cut case, where the person who pulls the trigger has the obligation to make sure that he does no harm to others.

New Business: The Morality of Hunting

I mentioned yesterday that I started hunting when I was 12, as any boy who grew up in mainstream Montana culture would.

When I was 14, I killed my first animal. That was the last time I went hunting.

I did not actually kill it. I shot it, and it went down. Then my uncle George and I (and one other person, I do not remember who) went looking for my victim. We found the animal pulling itself along by its front feet, dragging its useless back feet behind it. I had shot it in the middle of the back, breaking its spine. My uncle George took a knife and cut the deer's throat.

That was it for me. I would never hunt again. I also do not fish. I cannot even handle the thought of inflicting that much pain on another creature.

Morality and Personal Sentiment

However, I object to the practice of using personal sentiments to decide moral issues. I do not stewed tomatoes; I cannot stand to eat them. Yet, this gives me no basis for inferring that it is wrong to eat stewed tomatoes. The logical inference from, "I like" and "I dislike" to "is wrong" and "is not wrong" is simply not valid. People who make this logical leap are making the false assertion that others have an obligation to do that which pleases them, and an obligation to refrain from doing that which displeases them. There are no such obligations in the real world.

In addition, as I have mentioned in previous blog entries, history is filled with examples of people who felt no moral twinge whatsoever while committing the worst atrocities. From slavery to genocide to inquisitions to suicide bombings to the burning of 'witches', we can rest assured that almost all of the people who engaged in these activities measured their emotional reactions and found these activities among the actions they liked most. This alone should give us reason to reject the idea that right and wrong is associated with the likes and dislikes of the person making the judgment.

The Fate of Wild Animals

Instead, I argue that moral judgment has little to do with the agent's likes and dislikes. It has to do with the tendency of a sentiment to benefit or harm people generally, which is substantially independent of its effects on the sentiments of the person making that judgment. On this measure the person willing to embrace slavery, inquisitions, and the burning of witches is somebody with a tendency to harm others, not to help them. In the same way, individuals willing to embrace the torture and abuse of prisoners, an executive with unlimited power, and bans on homosexual marriage are also people disposed to harm others.

Applying these principles to the ritual of hunting, we can easily see the suffering done to the animals. Few shots are clean kills where the animal is instantly killed. Most shots rip through flesh, leaving the animal alive and suffering. The death of my first and last hunting victim was not the only gruesome death that I witnessed. Plus, there were the animals that were hit, wounded, but that got away.

Yet, against this I have to ask if the animals would fare better in the wild if the hunters were not there. Certainly, the natural predators that take out these animals are not going to show them any kindness. Wolves and cougars are not known for being particularly merciful. An antelope bounding across the plane breaks a leg in a gopher hole and lays there, injured, until it dies. An animal gets a cavity that abscesses. The infection enters its brain. They are subject to as many diseases as humans are, and they have nobody to go to for care.

I have sometimes wondered; when whales die, do they drown? Do they struggle to hold their breath while frantically trying to get to the surface to breathe, and sometimes fail? I think about this while remembering how it felt when classmates held me under water until I could hold my breath no more.

The short question is: If I claim that my neighbor should not go hunting, am I doing the animals any favors? If the animals generally obtain no benefit, then it is hard to argue that there exists a reason for me to prevent my fellow humans from hunting. What would that reason be?

"Natural" Does Not Mean "Right"

Anybody who would interpret this as a claim that whatever happens in nature (whatever is ‘natural’ in this sense) is intrinsically good, or that whatever animals do to one another (like predator animals hunt) humans may also permissibly do, would be mistaken. Male lions kill all the cubs the instant they take over a new pride. This can hardly be used as an argument for a honeymoon ritual in which a woman's new husband slaughters her children to make room in the house for his own children.

My argument is not, 'animals hunt; therefore it is permissible for humans to hunt.” That type of argument would be absurd.

My argument is that preventing animals from hunting (including human animals) would do the prey animals little if any good; therefore, there is little if any moral worth in preventing animals (including human animals) from hunting. If there is an argument to be made for preventing animals (including human animals) from hunting on the basis of the effect that hunting has on the prey animals, then we have as much or more of an obligation to prevent non-human prey animals from hunting compared to preventing human animals from hunting.

An Unwillingness to Do Harm

However, there is a second argument against hunting that deserves mention. It centers on the question, “Would an aversion to hunting make us any safer?”

Throughout this blog, I have defended the rules of morality by comparing them to the wisdom of putting smoke detectors in one's home. It is prudent, even for an atheist, to take those steps that would keep himself and those he cares about safe from harm. Establishing and maintaining moral institutions, like installing smoke detectors, is a useful way for a person to keep himself and those he cares about safe.

It is reasonable to believe that a community of people with a stronger aversion to harming other creatures (including animals) would be a safer community. On the other hand, a community of people who can inflict suffering on other creatures without a twinge of conscience would tend to be more dangerous. We make our communities safer for ourselves and those we care about to the degree that we create communities of people who are averse to causing harm to others.

However, we must accept the real world as it is, and not design our institutions for a world that does not exist. A community of individuals who are too reluctant to do harm to others is vulnerable. There will always be people who are not so reluctant to harm others. A community needs soldiers and police to protect it from such people. Soldiers and police cannot be so reluctant to do harm to others that they cannot defend that community.

It is a valid point that a society with people who know how to handle weapons, who have been trained to handle them responsibly, and who actually have some experience using them, gives potential aggressors something to worry about.

Summary

Ultimately, on the issue of hunting, I take the same position that I take on physician-assisted suicides. I would like to see different communities adopt different standards, so that the rest of us can get a better idea of what actually works.

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with hunting. The suffering that hunting inflicts on prey animals gives us just as much or more reason to prevent predatory animals from hunting as it gives us to prevent humans from hunting. Anybody who treats these two types of cases differently is imagining a moral difference where none exists.

Yet, perhaps a society of individuals who strongly dislike hunting would be a community of kinder individuals that are less likely to do harm to each other. Or, perhaps, they would be vulnerable to the aggression of those who do not learn these lessons and who still seek to do harm.

A Hunter's Responsibility

Okay, I feel guilty.

After 154 days of writing, I finally took a couple of days off without posting anything. I promise it will not happen often. I can't say that I have a particularly good excuse. I played computer games, spent quality time with my wife and cats, and watched mindless television.

But, I am back to work now.

I did not want to write about Cheney's hunting accident. However, the more I read about it the more I found a valuable analogy for describing the morally irresponsible elements of the political policies that Cheney defends. It provides a useful way to illustrate why the Bush Administration decision to “pull the trigger” and send the Army into Iraq was morally irresponsible.

The culture in Montana is such that every boy is expected to learn how to hunt, and to venture off into the wilderness with gun in hand. I followed tradition, taking hunters safety class when I was 12 years old, then going out that fall and participating in a ritual.

In that class, one of the things I learned is that a responsible person takes care to make sure that situations do not come up that can result in an accident. Any time a person gets killed or wounded while hunting, it is because somebody was not exercising as much caution as they could have.

By analogy, a person is not at risk of falling off of a cliff if he stays far enough away from the edge. The closer one gets, the greater the risk of going over the edge. A person who goes over the edge has violated the rule against getting too close. Some people who do not go over the edge violate the same rule, but they get lucky -- like Cheney would have been if his shot had gone off two feet further.

This is the foundation for moral rules such as a prohibition against pointing a gun at somebody, even if you are certain that it is not loaded -- because it creates a situation that is too close to the edge, where accidents get people maimed or killed.

This is the foundation for the moral requirement to lock weapons up, and to store ammunition in a separate location, because failing to do so creates a situation close to the edge, where a child (including a visiting child for the person who has no children of his own) can get hold of the gun and kill somebody.

The irresponsibility inherent in this hunting accident is fittingly symbolic of the moral irresponsibility of Cheney's policies with regard to executive power. Cheney handles the weapons of state with the same disregard for others that he used while hunting. The main difference is that when one wields the powers of government with such irresponsibility, the damage ends up being a lot more severe than a few pellets in the face.

How many innocent civilians will be picked up off of the street, hauled off to secret prisons, tortured, then released months or years later with a quickly mumbled apology when the Administration finds out that it got the wrong person?

If we look at the War in Iraq, I am willing to grant the Bush Administration the benefit of the doubt -- that they thought they had a legitimate target in their sites when they pulled the trigger and launched the invasion. However, they took no care to ensure that they were right. As a result, they scattered bombs and bullets around the country of Iraq, leading so far to the deaths of over 30,000 Iraqi citizens (and an untold number of wounded).

Also, many of the protections that are embedded in the Constitution can be viewed as rules protecting people, just like the rules that hunters are supposed to follow. The state's obligation to get an indictment before charging a person with a serious crime, or to get a warrant based on probable cause before searching a person's property or listening in on his phone calls, are no different that the hunter's responsibility to make sure that no innocent person is standing where he wants to shoot.

It is reasonable to expect that where we find people behaving irresponsibly in one area, they are likely to behave irresponsibly in others. The lawyer that Cheney shot is a good representative of innocent people that Cheney and the rest of the Bush Administration have killed, maimed, imprisoned, and tortured because they failed to adequately check their facts before taking action.

I also notice how Cheney is unwilling to accept moral responsibility for his wrongs. Rather than admit that he was wrong to pull the trigger when he did, the Bush Administration is telling us that it was his victim's fault for not announcing where he was.

I have also read the attempt to deny Cheney's moral responsibility for this accident by claiming that accidents like this are unfortunately an inherent part of hunting, bringing up statistics on the number of people killed or wounded in Texas while hunting.

Yet, this is as irresponsible as claiming that traffic accidents are an inherent part of driving, thus the person who runs a red light and smashes another car, or whose breaks fail because of poor maintenance and slaughters a herd of pedestrians, is not to be blamed for his actions.

Yet, every responsible hunter knows that the person who pulled the trigger is the one who is morally responsible for where his shot ends up. It is his responsibility to make sure that whatever leaves the barrel of his gun does not end up in somebody else's body. If the shot ends up where it was not supposed to, this is the responsibility of the person who chose to pull the trigger.

Cheney's hunting partner ended up spending some time in the hospital. He has been lucky, when we compare his fate to other innocent victims of Cheney's recklessness.

Additional Issue

There are two side issues associated with this case that deserves mention.

(1) There is the pathetic attempt to blame the victim. It is apparently not Cheney’s obligation to make sure that he has a safe shot before he pulls the trigger; it is everybody else’s responsibility that they stay out of Cheney’s way while he fires his gun in whatever direction pleases him.

Sorry, but no. It is always . . . always . . . the shooter’s responsibility to make sure that he has a safe shot and to not pull the trigger until he has that certainty. Cheney broke this moral rule.

Exactly this same moral responsibility applies to the decision to send in the U.S. Army into another country – an obligation to make sure that the person pulling the trigger understands what the real situation is. Bush, Cheney, and the rest of the administration failed that test of moral responsibility as well.

Hunters' Safety instructions across the country will be trying to teach their students, "The shooter is responsible for knowing that he has a clear shot." It would be a benefit to the potential victims of those who do not remember this rule if Cheney would admit that he was wrong and that it is an irresponsible dodge to try to pin the fault on the victim.

There was also in this an attempt to absolve Cheney of moral responsibility by saying that hunting accidents happen all the time. Running red lights also happen all the time. Yet, this does not absolve the driver who ran the red light of the responsibility to make sure that the light is NOT red when he drives into the intersection.

(2) The press seems to be most upset about the fact that they were not told promptly that Cheney accidentally shot somebody. Press secretary Scott McClellan was peppered with questions from journalists at the White House press briefing over the failure to tell the press promptly about the accident.

This is nothing but a petty turf war. It is not news. Little of significance, as far as I can tell, hinges on the White House decision to allow the rancher report the news and allow the press to pick it up from there. The White House press corps seems sore that they did not get the scoop – that it went to a small local paper in Texas and those who read the Associated Press dispatches.

To the individual members of the White House press corps this may seem significant. I see no reason to see it as anything but petty.

Good God?

This is another long post, because it again goes into theory, examining in depth the relationship between goodness and God. I start off with the standard Euthyphro argument, but ultimately my objective is to examine the thesis that Euthyphro can be answered by 'identifying' goodness with God.

DNA asked a number of questions about the relationship between goodness and God that I promised to answer some day. Today is that day.

My exchanges with DNA have taken place in the comment sections of several postings, which have been necessarily brief. Here, I am going to take a bit more room in order to go into the subject in more detail. This post will, unfortunately, be somewhat long.

Yet, the core concepts are important, for how can an atheist who does not believe in God tell the difference between that which is good and that which is bad?

In this post, I will begin by looking at two of DNA's comments on the possibility of an atheist knowing what is good.

First, he expressed his own inability to understand how it is even possible for an atheist to understand what 'better' is without a God.

Second, when I stated that Plato (through Socrates’ alleged discussion with Euthyphro) defeated the idea that goodness depends on the love of God 2500 years ago, DNA responded that it was possible to answer this objection by claiming that 'good' was somehow identified with at least some component of 'God'.

Of course, I hold that God does not exist. Yet, this will be my 154th post in this blog in which I make use of value-laden terms; pointing out how some states are better than others.

I have argued that a state with an omnipotent president is a threat to its citizens who will inevitably come to regret handing any fellow human unlimited power. I have argued that deception or "bearing false witness" is wrong and that good people would have an aversion to it.

I have responded that the only appropriate response to offensive speech, even if it is truly offensive, is speech; that good people would condemn any who responded to offensive speech with violence.

These are three of a long list of possible examples. They illustrate my position that even though I do not believe that there is any God, that the concepts of good, bad, better, worse, right, and wrong still make sense.

Good Is That Which God Loves

As I said, Socrates (according to Plato) defeated the idea that goodness is that which is loved by the Gods 2500 years ago. Only wishful thinking and a willful disregard for reason keeps the old claim alive.

To briefly paraphrase Socrates argument: Let us assume that things can only be good or bad to the degree that God loves them. This means that if God were to be the type of person who gets giddy and happy at the sight of the torturing of a child, then torturing a child would be good. I am not talking here about torturing a child because it will fulfill some great purpose (like saving society from extinction). I am talking about torturing a child simply because God enjoys the sound of a child's scream and the feel of a child's suffering.

If torturing a child can be bad, even if it were the case that God loved the sight and sound of a child being tortured, then the badness of torturing a child must be independent of what God loves. Its badness has to be found somewhere else.

DNA responded to this by claiming that the argument can be defeated by identifying God with goodness. Thus, it cannot be a part of God's character that he loves the torturing of children. Goodness is the essence of God.

Identifying Goodness with God

In my response to DNA, I pointed out that the 'identity' defense creates a biconditional, that the Euthyphro argument defeats one of the two legs of the biconditional, and that because of this the 'identity' defense cannot stand.

Allow me to go into that argument in more detail.

First, identifying goodness with God sets up a biconditional. If it is the case that A is identical to B (which, in this case, we take to be some attribute of G), then whatever is true of A is also true of B. And whatever is true of B (e.g., that it is an attribute of G) is true of A. If there is any differences between the two, then they can be no identity between them.

Formally, this is expressed as:

A <-> B implies (A -> B) and (B -> A).

Now, let us say that M = (A -> B) and N = (B -> A). This is a simple substitution. I am doing this because I do not want to write (A -> B) or (B -> A) all the time. I will simply write M and N instead.

Now, it is true of any conjunction that if one of the conjuncts is false, that the conjunction itself is also false.

So, the phrase "Phreadd is a bald man" is a conjunction of "Phreadd is bald" and "Phreadd is a man." Let us take m = "Phreadd is bald" and n = "Phreadd is a man". If we can prove that one of these two things is false, then we can prove that the conjunction is false.

If we can prove either one of these two components to be false – if we can prove that Phreadd is not a man, or that Phreadd is not bald, then we have proved that Phreadd is not a bald man.

Or, in other words, we get:

Not-m -> not (m and n)

•Not-n -> not (m and n)

DNA objected that the claim that identifying goodness with some component of God is not a conjunction of two parts. Yet, in fact, it is a conjunction of two parts. It is a conjunction of “If X is of God, then it is good” and “If X is good, then it is of God.”

Accordingly, if we can disprove “If X is of God, then it is good” or “If X is good, then it is of God”, we have disproved the claim that good can be identified with that which is of God.

In other words:

• Not-M -> not (M and N)

• Not-N -> not (M and N)

When it comes to the relationship between goodness and God, the Euthyphro argument already disproves the statement, “If X is of God, then it is good.” It does so with the example that if God got off on watching a child scream in agony, that it would still not be good. The Euthyphro argument establishes “not-M.” The Euthyphro argument already defeats attempts to identify goodness with God.

Goodness Proves God

Furthermore, the thesis that “If X is good, then X is of God” (or ‘N’) can also be proved false.

A person such as myself who does not believe in God still recognizes and perceives the negative value of that which results from sticking one’s hand in a hot fire, for example. If faced with a choice between sticking my hand in a hot fire and playing with the red-hot coals, or not doing so, I have no problem evaluating the two options and categorizing them as ‘better’ and ‘worse’. Those who think that an atheist would have trouble answering that type of question are as wrong as those who think that the misery of a young child would be good if God enjoyed it.

It does not take a concept of God to understand why putting my hand in a hot fire has less value than keeping my hand out of a hot fire. It takes an understanding of the fact that I am the offspring of those beings that evolved an aversion to pain caused by burned flesh – the offspring of beings that enjoyed the sensation of burned flesh have long since died out.

“If X is good” does not imply “X is of God”. It is quite consistent with, “We have acquired an aversion to X – an aversion that can be explained through totally natural processes.”

Diversion: The Euthyphro Argument Against Subjectivism

By the way, just as an individual can have an aversion to the sensation that results from sticking his hand in a fire, he can have an aversion to his child or spouse coming to any harm. He can have an aversion to leaving a motorist stranded on the side of the road. He can have an aversion to lying. He can have an aversion to totalitarian governments whose leaders think they can do whatever they want and that their actions are not bound by moral constraints.

Note: I am not saying that, “If I have an aversion to X, then it is wrong,” or “If I desire something than it is right.” This would run into the same sort of objection as the Euthyphro argument raises for those who identify goodness with God. It would imply that if I loved the suffering of a young child, that causing a young child to suffer would be right. So, this view – the subjectivist view of ethics – is just as objectionable as the view that identifies goodness with God.

Moral value is far more complex than this. I have described how I think it works in “Desire Utilitarianism”, and I am already out of room for going into details here. Basically, I would argue that morality concerns whether we desire things that tend to harm or help others. Having those wants that tend to help others is good, and wanting things that tend to harm others is evil.

Circular Reasoning

The tactic of identifying goodness with God has superficial appeal (it looks like a good argument to those who do not actually take it apart and sees that it does not work) because it is a circular argument.

It is a tight circle, no different from

(a) Everything I say is true.

(b) Nothing that I say is false.

If somebody challenges my claim that everything I say is true, I simply answer that it must be true because nothing I say is false. Then, if somebody were to ask me how they can trust that nothing that I say is false, I simply answer that it must be that way because everything I say is true.

Identifying goodness with God is just as tight a circle.

(a’) X is good because it is loved by God

(b’) X is loved by God because it is good.

Why is it bad to enjoy the suffering of a child? Answer: Because God does not enjoy the suffering of a child. Why doesn’t God enjoy the suffering of a child? Answer: Because the suffering of a child is bad.

A circular argument is a type of reasoning that people use when they want others to think that they are saying something profound, but they are just repeating themselves. Circular reasoning effectively says, “If I repeat the same statement twice in two different ways, that proves that it is true.”

It proves nothing.

There is no relationship between goodness and God. When humans invented the concept of God, they already knew that some things were better than others. They already had a concept of goodness. Therefore, when they invented God, they attributed goodness to this invention.

The reason that the concept of God cannot escape the Euthyphro problem is because the concept of goodness came first. The concept of goodness reigns supreme, such that even God cannot be good unless he allows himself to be governed by his concept.

Hate Mongering

Hate mongers wish to depict atheists as creatures to be hated and feared by claiming that we cannot comprehend morality. As such, they claim that we are dangerous. They tell the people that for their protection the atheist must be shunned, ostracized, and cast out of society. We must be one nation ‘under God,’ and people must be made to realize that “We” trust in God, and that those who do not trust in God must never be included in the group called “We.”

In fact, if one actually listens to what many atheists say about the relationship between goodness with God, atheists argue that goodness rules even above God. The Euthyphro argument is a complaint that goodness cannot come from God, because even God cannot violate its rules and still be good. God cannot enjoy the suffering of a child -- sit back with a bag of popcorn and enjoy the sound of a child's screams -- and still be though of as good.

Morality does not only govern what humans may or may not do. It even governs what any God, if one were to exist, may or may not do. In just the same way that the rules of logic are "above" God so that it makes no sense to say that he can create a rock so heavy that He could not list it, the rules of morality are also above God so that He cannot make the enjoyment of a child's suffering good.

God does not dictate what is good. Goodness dictates even what a God may and may not do.

Double Issue: New Spying Claims/NASA Science

Old Business:

There were two stories today relevant to the moral argument concerning the Bush Administration’s spying on Americans.

Story 1: The Administration released information today about a terrorist plan to hijack an airplane and fly it into the tallest sky scraper on the west coast, what was then Library Tower in Los Angeles. This was one of ten planned terrorist attacks that the Bush Administration is claiming to have stopped. Though no specifics were announced, we are certainly encouraged to think that some of these attacks would have occurred if not for the Administration’s suspension of the 4th Amendment to the Constitution.

Answer: Nobody is arguing that the Bush Administration should not eavesdrop on conversations between Americans and suspected terrorists. The question is whether there should be some sort of supervision to ensure that this President, or some future President, is not spying on others such as political opponents or members of the press. Though the administration claims that activities are limited to spying on terrorists, it also claimed for four years that even this form of spying required a warrant. Obviously, the administration lied. It is quite unreasonable to assume that an entity that has repeatedly been caught lying or distorting the truth has suddenly become truthful.

If Bush were to surround the nation of Pakistan, then go through the country and kill everybody there, chances are it will be able to turn over one or two bodies and be able to say, "See, it worked. We got ourselves a terrorist." It would certainly keep America safer. That does not make it right.

In fact, this Administration seems to think that not only are they above the law, but they are above morality, permissibly doing whatever it wants. With an administration like that, there is no telling what it will do that we simply do not yet know about, or who its victims may be.

Story 2: An AP-Ipsos poll (pdf) shows that the public is more supportive of the Bush Administration’s warrantless surveillance. The percentage of Americans saying that the Bush Administration that does not need a warrant has risen from 42 percent to 48 percent.

Answer: The pollsters continue to ask the wrong question. In this poll, the question asked was, “Should the Bush administration be required to get a warrant from a judge before monitoring phone and internet communications between American citizens in the United States and suspected terrorists, or should the government be allowed to monitor such communications without a warrant?”

If we know that this is a conversation between an American citizen and a suspected terrorist, then of course we want the government to be listening in on that conversation. Furthermore, the question allows the reader to assume that he is being asked whether the administration should get a warrant before it is allowed to listen. Of course we do not want the government to wait. This is why the FISA law does not require the government to get a warrant before listening, but within 72 hours after it starts.

More importantly, the poll assumes that the Administration is only listening in on conversations between American citizens and suspected terrorists. The very problem with the Executive Branch assuming this power is that, without oversight, we must trust the Administration to be honest about who it is spying on. We also must trust the Administration to have a reasonable definition of ‘suspected terrorist’. Their definition, like their definition of torture, might be so twisted that anybody who says anything bad about the President suddenly becomes a ‘suspected terrorist,’ in the same way that the Pentagon is sees anybody who speaks against the War in Iraq as a potential threat to national security.

Old Business: NASA's Bad Science

After respected NASA scientist, James E. Hansen, protested about Bush Administration censorship of his findings on global warming, and several other NASA officials reported pressure to change their results, the mess was charged to a mid-level bureaucrat, George Deutsch, who has since resigned.

As I wrote yesterday, we know that this pressure to rewrite scientific findings so that the support Administration policy extends far beyond NASA. It would be laughable to think that George Deutsch was responsible for it all and that with his resignation Bush Administration science reports will now be honest and reliable.

I strongly suspect that future generations of college professors will simply look through their students’ reports for any government science report written from 2001 through 2008 and say, "You can't use that. That's Bush science. Everybody knows that it is totally unreliable."

Scientists already have their own say of filtering the garbage out of science. It is the peer review process, where the people commenting on a finding are people who have actually studied and gained some credibility in the field that they are reviewing. Where the Bush Administration will give a science report to a lawyer to review it, scientists actually give their reports to other scientists to review.

Imagine that: assigning experts to the job of overseeing work being done in an area that they are experts in, rather than assigning campaign contributors and supporters to oversee areas of government that they know nothing about.

New Business: NASA's No Science

I wrote yesterday about how religious views are clouding the Administration’s judgment when it comes to evaluating science. One way that the Administration can prevent the people from learning things that the Administration does want them to learn is to censor that information. It is much easier to manipulate an ignorant population.

Another way to keep the population ignorant is to simply refuse to fund research that might produce results that the Administration wishes not to know.

Towards this end, it makes sense to learn that in NASA’s new budget projects that aim for the discovery of extraterrestrial life have been postponed.

(1) The Mars Sample Return Mission and Mars Telecommunications Orbiter have both been postponed indefinitely.

(2) The Europa exploration program has been cut. Europa, one of the moons of Jupiter, is heated by tidal forces to the degree that it seems to have liquid water below a surface of ice. It is the second most likely place in the solar system other than Mars where one might find extraterrestrial life.

(3) The Space Interferometry Mission designed to help find earth-like planets around other stars by creating a telescope of exceptional power in space has been postponed until 2015 at the earliest.

(4) The Terrestrial Planet Finder, which would have the ability to actually take pictures of Earth-like planets around other stars, has been postponed indefinitely.

Of course, if somebody believes that God created Earth and put man upon it, that we are special, then it makes no sense to waste all sorts of money trying to find life elsewhere in the universe. It is not there.

In addition, consistent with the Bush Administration’s wish not to fund research that may produce results it does not like, Earth System Science and Sun-Earth Connection science (relevant to the global warming issue) will suffer a cut of $2.4 billion over the next five years.

In place of this, NASA is to concentrate on putting man back on the moon.

Now, I am not actually arguing that people should demand that these programs be reinstated and funding provided. I am personally disappointed in these decisions. I would really very much like to live long enough to witness the discovery of (good evidence for) life outside of our solar system. However, personal disappointment does not make for a moral argument.

There is a weak moral issue to be found in the possibility that this is another example where false religious assumptions result in misdirecting government research. It is yet another item on a long list of examples where policy decisions have been placed on bad science, because religious assumptions are being used to distinguish good science from bad. Yet, of all of the examples of this, the lack of honest research on issues such as teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, environmental poisons, global warming, and stem-cell research are far worse examples of bad policy based on bad science.

Also of moral relevance: if there is any moral imperative to keep the human race from becoming extinct, the odds of survival are better if we are scattered around the solar system than all gathered on one fragile planet.

Ultimately, I think that NASA could be spending its science research and development money far more efficiently than it has been. I would like to see what would happen if the government offered prize money for the results it seeks, rather than building and testing its own robotic missions.

For example, in place of a $650 million mission to the moon to bring back samples from the South Pole region (where ice may be present), I would recommend that NASA set up a set of prizes. For example, the government could set up a set of 10 prizes, ranging from $25 million to $125 million, to whoever can bring back samples that meet NASA requirements.

Companies that compete to claim the money can also do whatever they want to gain outside income from corporate sponsors or by bringing back additional lunar material and selling it on the open market.

The project would have a number of benefits including (1) creating an incentive for entrepreneurs to search for new cost-effective ways to develop space, (2) promote the commercial development of space, (3) attract private capital which can then be mixed with government money to promote space development, and (4) allow NASA to pay only for missions that succeed and never again pay out hundreds of millions of dollars for a mission that fails.

NASA could also spur research into the best ways to discover earth-like planets elsewhere in the universe simply by announcing a prize – say, of $100 million – to the first research team to provide evidence of an earth-sized planet with an oxygen atmosphere. Maybe large orbiting telescopes such as the Space Interferometry Mission or the Terrestrial Planet Finder are not the most efficient ways to go. Perhaps astronomers, with an eye on a prize, can come up with better options.

"Good Science" and the Religious Right

I have a thought experiment.

Get a piece of paper and write upon it a set of, say, 100 random numbers.

Hand that piece of paper to an average 7th-grade student.

Tell him to get his math book out and to work the problems in each chapter until he gets the answers that you put down on that piece of paper.

Once he has done this, ask him to design a skyscraper.

My question is: Would you feel comfortable moving into the top floor of that building?

This experiment describes the status of science under the Bush Administration.

In his State of the Union address, President Bush announced an "American Competitiveness Initiative . . .to give our nation's children a firm grounding in math and science."

Given the Bush Administration's disdain for science, it seems a bit contradictory for him to claim that our children need a firm grounding in this subject.

This week's cover story in Time Magazine examines the relationship that the Bush Administration has had with the science community. It includes charges that government scientists have been pressured into providing the administration with "science" that corresponds to the administration's policies, and the degree to which scientists who do not comply fear the consequences this will have on their employment and advancement.

[I]n in the past two years, the Union of Concerned Scientists has collected the signatures of more than 8,000 scientists--including 49 Nobel laureates, 63 National Medal of Science recipients and 171 members of the National Academies--who accuse the Administration of an unprecedented level of political intrusion into their world.

It would be easy to believe that Bush's message in the State of the Union was a lie. I could suggest that he despises science, but he wanted to put something in the State of the Union that would appease those who respect science.

However, I think that there is a way of looking at the Bush Administration's attitude towards science that actually makes sense of this apparent contradiction.

By the way, I use the word "Bush Administration" deliberately. This model describes not only Bush, but a substantial portion of the Christian fundamentalist/evangelicals that make up the bulk of his political machine.

These people are intersted in promoting good science.

In other words, Bush’s science advisor, John Marburger, was stating the literal truth when he said, "The President wants us to do it right, and doesn't want us to do things that contradict the laws of nature." Only, to the Religious Right, these “laws of nature” state that the homosexuality and abortion are violations of natural law and that it is best that wives devote their lives to serving their husbands. These laws of nature state that the earth is 10,000 years old and that life wass intelligently designed. They state that there is a God who answers prayers and that "it's a miracle" is a valid scientific hypothesis that deserves equal consideration not only in science classes but in peer-reviewed scientific journals.

Those laws of nature state that God would not create a world that we humans could destroy through global warming without giving us some sort of warning – a commandment somewhere that says, “Thou shalt not increase the atmospheric concentration of CO2 above 550 parts per million by volume.” No such commandment exists. Therefore, those heretic atheist liberal scientists who suggest that we should not raise the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere above 550 ppmv are clearly working for the devil.

On this model, a good scientist practices his craft the way that a good 7th grade algebra student learns algebra. The scientist goes into the lab and he does his work, as the student goes to his room to do his homework. When the scientist or the student gets an answer, he compares it to the result printed in the “answer book.” If he gets an answer that contradicts the “answer book”, this means he did something wrong. He has to go back and redo his work until he gets the right answer.

These people object that when these arrogant scientists get answers that contradict what it says in the "answer book", they are too proud to admit that they made a mistake. They assert the blasphemy that the "answer book" is mistaken.

The answer book is wrong?

The bible is wrong!

Blasphemy!

Heresy!

There is no way that the answer book can be wrong!

The only reasonable answer would be to insist that the scientist who comes up with a wrong answer must not be a very good scientist. He needs to be disciplined, held back, put into some remedial science education program that would allow him to improve his skills. In the mean time, scientists who do get the right answers – the good scientists who get the answers that can be found in "the answer book", get the promotions and recognitions they deserve.

We can easily paraphrase Bush’s comment about the courts and judicial appointees and apply it to science boards and appointees.

“We need commonsense scientists who understand that our reality was created by God. Those are the kind of scientists I intend to put at the head of the nation's laboratories.”

Now, let’s go back to the analogy to our 7th grader with a set of 100 randomly selected "right answers."

The Bible is nothing more than a set of answers invented by primitive men who had little or no understanding of the world around them. Treating their answers as the “answer book” for scientific problems is no better than treating the sheet of random numbers as the “answer book” for a 7th grade math text.

If we give scientists this “answer book” and tell them to keep working the problem until they come up with same answers that are in "the answer book", we are not going to come up with any good science. They are going to come up with error.

If we then tell them to take what they have learned in completing this exercise and to apply it to the construction of a government policy, those policies will be as shaky as the sky scraper built by our 7th-grader.

What would happen if people actually moved into the building that this 7th grader built? In all likelihood, there will be some significant structural failure, and people are going to die.

What is going to happen as we base more and more of our social policies on the "good science" that matches the answers that we find in "the answer book?" We will see significant policy failure.

And people are going to die.

Cartoon Riots and the War on Christmas

These days, I hear a lot of Americans speaking about Muslim protestors with righteous indignation. They complain about a group of people who get all bent out of shape over a set of cartoons claiming that those cartoons are an insult to Mohammed and to all Muslims; yet those same Muslims do not get bent out of shape over those who kidnap and behead or blow up innocent men, women, and children in the name of Mohammed.

I made some comments like this myself, and I will stand by them.

However, I find the comments somewhat hypocritical when they come from Americans who engage in a similar form of behavior.

For example, let’s put the Cartoon Riots up against one of the top news items in this country a couple of months ago . . . the “War on Christmas.”

Instead of drawing cartoons of Mohammed, the offense in this case consisted of saying “Happy Holidays” rather than “Merry Christmas.” Somehow, it was a attack on Christianity for an individual to decide that he was not going to assume that the person he was talking to was a Christian – that he would leave his options open and use a neutral greeting to those he did not know.

For some reason, this act of free speech was an assault on the Christian God and an affront to Jesus, for which the offenders deserved the harshest condemnation.

Now, I cannot even pretend that the “War on Christmas” Christians in this country went nearly as far over the line as some Muslim critics. These Christians did not call for the execution of those who engaged in this blasphemous religious crime.

I do not recall angry Christian mobs burning down businesses that dared to say “Happy Holidays,” or leaders calling for the arrest and imprisonment of corporate event planners that organized a company holiday party.

Yet, it was also far harder to actually make a reasonable sounding case that “Seasons Greetings” is as much an anti-Christian message as a cartoon of Mohammad as endorsing terrorism is an anti-Muslim message.

At the same time that many “War on Christmas” Christians were in a range over somebody saying “Season’s Greetings,” they had nothing to say in protest of those who abused and tortured prisoners, sometimes to death. Nor were they protesting the fact that the Administration takes people off of the streets of allied countries, ships them to foreign prisons where they can be held and brutalized without a trial or court system to protect them, only to have it be discovered that the government had caught the wrong man.

These charges cannot be applied universally against all Christians or Muslims. There are Christians who are outraged over news of the abuse, torture, and sometimes murder of sometimes innocent people in U.S. custody. There are Muslims who are shamed and outraged over Muslims who suggest that it is appropriate to respond to these cartoons with acts of violence and death.

Yet, the voices of these proponents of peace and human dignity are drowned out by the shouts of anger that come from those more concerned with affronts to a God (who, we may assume, is capable of taking care of himself if he exists at all), while ignoring as insignificant the crimes committed against real people in the real world.

Both groups show a highly distorted sense of reality.

If these groups could learn to respond to terrorist bombings, and the abuse, torture, and murder of prisoners as they respond to these affronts (real and imagined) against their Gods, then the evils of suicide bombings and the abuse, torture, and murder of prisoners would be far behind us by now.

In fact, rather than bringing peace and security, these oversensitive concerns with affronts to one’s religion are exactly what is making the world less safe. We are approaching a time where, if a store clerk says “Happy Holidays” he has declared war on Christianity and can be held in contempt for his vile and disrespectful act. Yet, if he says “Merry Christmas” he has declared war on Islam and deserves to die.

There is no way to win in this type of environment. This is a recipe for conflict and, as the anger and intolerance grows, it is a recipe for war -- a war that cannot end until one of the two groups has destroyed the other.

Let’s be honest; secularists are not immune from this way of thinking. Clearly, if a cartoonist from Denmark has the right to draw a picture of Mohammed, and a store clerk has the right to say “Happy Holidays”, then a schoolgirl in France has a right to wear a cross on a necklace or a scarf without the state demanding that she remove it.

Here are the rules for peace:

No person has a right to force somebody who does not belong to their religion to act as if they do belong to that religion. Jews may not be permitted to eat pork, but they have no right to protest those who do not have the same dietary restrictions. Claiming that eating pork is anti-Semitic would be absurd. Muslims may not be allowed to draw images of Mohammed, but others drawing pictures of Mohammed is not anti-Islam. Some Christians may feel a need to wish others a, “Merry Christmas,” but “Happy Holidays” is not a declaration of war on Christianity.

The state should act as an impartial referee between conflicting religions and not take sides in the debate. The instant the state takes sides, those it favors begin to treat unjustly and immorally those who do not share the state’s favored religion. Bigotry becomes the law of the land.

People have a right to say whatever they want about other religions. Dale Reich has a right to say that atheists are sociopaths. By this I mean that the government may not punish those who make these types of statements.

However, freedom of speech includes an obligation to speak truthfully and responsibly. Violating this rule may not warrant state punishment, but it does warrant harsh condemnation from those who have an interest in promoting honest and responsible dialogue.

Similarly, if anybody from any religion calls for violence against those who say what he does not like, the person calling for violence deserves the harshest condemnation. Those who escalate a situation into violence are far more dangerous than those who can limit their disagreement to words alone.

We’ve had 7 people at least killed in protests over these cartoons, at least three buildings torched as far as I can tell, destruction of property, and whole nations of people now afraid for their lives. All because people who call themselves moral could not follow some simple little rules.

150 Days, 150 Posts

150 days; 150 posts

Note: If anybody wants to see a complete list of those 150 posts, it can be found at AlonzoFyfe.com

So, hello readers. How are things?

When I started this blog, I wanted to stop and take a breath every now and then. It is not easy trying to think of something to write about every day.

I wanted to take a day off at my 100th post to reflect on what I had already written. However, that was when the news broke of President Bush’s authorization to the NSA to spy on Americans without a warrant. That moral outrage pushed that anniversary issue away.

“Moral outrage? How can you, an atheist, ever experience moral outrage? Without belief in God, you cannot even know what morality is!”

Honestly, I am so tired of that claim. Beyond a doubt, I have devoted more time to the study of morality than I have to any other activity in my life . . . including sleep. There is really only one reason why a person embraces the “atheists cannot be moral” meme.

Bigotry.

People in Group A want to assert that they are morally superior to people in Group B, so that they can subject the people in Group B to all sorts of unfair and unjust treatment without feeling guilty about it. The idea, “We can know and understand morality; you cannot” gives these people just the excuse they need.

And if Group B ever protests their unjust and unfair treatment, Group A simply asserts, “How can you question the morality of our actions? Only we in Group A can understand the requirements of morality. Only we in Group A can determine if you are being treated unjustly. Surprisingly, when we in Group A evaluate our own actions, we find ourselves to be glowing in moral perfection. Therefore, your complaints are false.”

How convenient.

The problems associated with basing morality on religion have been known for 2,500 years, since Socrates first proved morality’s independence of religion to Euthyphro. However, when a person can clutch a straw that allows him to name himself the model of moral perfection and those he harms as deserving, he will hold onto that straw unto death.

From time to time, I have taken a day or two to describe the foundation from which I draw the moral conclusions that I do. Some of these posts include:

• Saturday, Sept. 17, 2005 Moral Progress

• Friday, Sept. 30, 2005 Moral Theory

• Thursday, Oct. 6, 2005 Ethics Without God I

• Friday, Oct. 7, 2005 Ethics Without God II

• Saturday, Nov. 12, 2005 The Meaning of Life

• Saturday, Nov. 26, 2005 Why Be Moral?

• Wednesday, Dec. 7, 2005 Morality from Religious Texts

• Thursday, Dec. 8, 2005 The Meaning of Ought

• Tuesday, Dec. 13, 2005 Reasons and Action

• Sunday, Jan. 8, 2006 Morality as Evolved Sentiments.

• Monday, Jan. 9, 2006 Morality as a Matter of Opinion

• Saturday, Jan. 14, 2006 On Moral Character

• Friday, Jan. 20, 2006 Morality and Reasons for Action

• Saturday, Jan. 28, 2006 Morality and Free Will\

• Monday, Jan. 30, 2006 Dale Reich's Caricature of Atheists

If one wants longer and more technical descriptions of what I put in these posts, they can find it at my web site, under the articles:

• Desire Utilitarianism

• Defending Moral Realism from ‘Error Theory’

• Objectivity & Subjectivity in Ethics

• Hume on Is and Ought

And, finally, the book-length manuscript I have on my web site:

• Desire Utilitarianism: An Atheist’s Quest for Moral Truth

So, with this post, the next time somebody shows up to say, “How can you, an atheist, have any opinion at all on the difference between moral right and wrong,” I now have one location I can point them to.

At least . . . so far.

Have a good evening. I’ll be back tomorrow, to start another 150 days of posts.

I hope.

Gonzales Testimony on Domestic Spying

Mr. Gonzales, if as you say, the President has the power to use all of the tools at his disposal to protect the country, and he sees a Democratic leadership to be a threat to the country, does it not follow that he has the authority to do anything in his power to prevent a Democratic leadership?"

When I was young, when I first started my quest to find out what “better” meant and how to make the world a better place, I wanted to get elected to the legislature. I felt that a person there could actually do some good.

What can I say? I was young. I thought a legislator’s job was to try to find out the best course of action and cast a vote based on his considered opinion. I did not know that they were partisan robots who got their orders from the partisan leadership. (How else can we explain so many votes being made on party lines?)

Still, I like to imagine what it would be like to be a legislator who was not bound to a party.

Please allow me to indulge that fantasy for a moment. Tomorrow, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales will testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee concerning the defense of the Bush Administration's secret order to spy on Americans. So, what would I say to him?

SENATOR FYFE: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. Gonzales, my time is limited and there is a lot that I want to cover.

Let’s start with the 4th Amendment. It states, "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."

I repeat, ...the right … shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but on probable cause...

When you state that President Bush has the authority to allow wiretaps, you are stating that Article II of the Constitution naming the President the Commander in Chief of the Military, and Senate authorization to use force against those responsible for 9/11, imply that this right shall be violated, and that no warrants are needed at all, let alone those that depend on probable cause.

As I read it, the 4th Amendment to the Constitution is not ambiguous. The Constitution says, The right shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue but on probable cause. You say that the right shall be violated and warrants are not even required.

Mr. Gonzales, I ask for your patience here. I actually have a three-part question, but I want to make sure that you understand what I am asking. So, please, let me finish before you start to answer.

Question 1

The first part of the question is this. You obviously believe that Article II of the Constitution and Congress’s authorization for use of force has the legal power to suspend the 4th Amendment to the Constitution. If you are right, then it seems to follow from your own argument that this gives the President the authority to suspend, say, the 2nd Amendment of the Constitution as well.

The 2nd Amendment states, A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed. So, it appears that you are saying that, in the name of national security, the Government has the right to ban private ownership of weapons and confiscate all guns.

Again, all I am asking Mr. Gonzales is that if the government has the right to suspend the 4th Amendment, then it has the right to suspend the 2nd Amendment as well.

Plus, it would have the right to suspend the 1st Amendment. That is to say, if President Bush feels that newspaper articles criticizing his position on the war were harmful to national security – say, because they comfort the enemy – that the President has the power to nationalize the press and to dictate what is printed.

And, it would seem to follow that the President, on your argument Mr. Gonzales, also has the power to suspend the 5th Amendment, and to arrest American citizens without a warrant, and hold them in prison indefinitely without a trial. Furthermore, with the 8th Amendment being suspended as well, those Americans can be tortured or even killed at the sole discretion of the President. No trial. No warrant. The President simply gives some government agency a name. They go out, pick the person up, put a bullet in his head, and report back that the job is done.

Mr. Gonzales, if your argument makes any sense at all, it says that this is a perfectly legitimate expression of Presidential powers.

So, Mr. Gonzales, the first part of my question is this: Is the 4th Amendment and the Bill of Rights still in effect, or is it not? Are the Bill of Rights still in effect, or has the President suspended the Bill of Rights?

Question 2

Now, before you answer that, I want to make you aware of the second part of my question.

Article I gives the legislature -- that's us, Mr. Gonzales -- the right to make laws, and it gives the Judiciary the responsibility to adjudicate laws.

In fact, Mr. Gonzales, I want to note that your party has a long history of protesting about the branches of government overstepping their authority. They have made a great deal of noise about the crime of legislating from the bench, where judges step outside of their authority and actually create law, where they should limit themselves to interpreting the law that exists.

Anyway, Mr. Gonzales, you appear to be arguing that the Executive Branch has the authority to legislate from the oval office -- rewriting laws to suit its own interest -- and to adjudicate from the oval office. Plus you have claimed that the Executive Branch has the authority to adjudicate those laws. With respect to this wiretapping, you have argued that the Executive Branch alone gets to decide if it is breaking the law or not – that you have no duty to present your acts to an outside tribunal, such as a court.

Signing statements, which this administration has used in ways that previous Presidents have attempted only rarely, are nothing less than the President asserting the power to legislate from the Oval Office. They allow the President to rewrite a law as he signs it by changing its meaning, rather than looking to the intent of the legislature. The very instant that this legislature passed legislation banning torture, President Bush issued a signing statement that repealed the law the instant he signed the bill.

So, it appears that the President has not only suspended the Bill of Rights, he has suspended Article I and Article III of the Constitution – the parts that established a legislature and a judiciary.

In fact, he seems to have suspended Article II as well – at least that part that places limits on executive power. Nowhere in that Article does it say that the President has the authority to rewrite laws as he signs them, name himself the sole judge of last appeal, or to suspend the Bill of Rights. Yet, your argument suggests that he has these powers.

This leads ultimately to the second part of my question, Mr. Gonzales. Under your interpretation, is there any part of the Constitution that is still in force? Does the Constitution have any force at all? Or is it just a set of polite suggestions that the President can accept or reject as he may accept the advice of, say, some friend offering suggestions over dinner?

Question 3

Finally, Mr. Gonzales, let me present you with the third part of my question, then you can go ahead and answer.

You say that you are only monitoring calls between Americans and foreign terrorist suspects.

How do we know that is the case? How do we know that President Bush has not authorized the NSA to tap, for example, my phone call? How do we know that he is not listening in on the conversations of his political opponents, collecting strategic information that he then uses to form his party’s political strategy for the next election?

Are we supposed to take your word for this? I remind you, Mr. Gonzales, that for four years the Executive Branch has been giving the American People its word that it takes a warrant to spy on the American people. During the election he repeatedly said that the Constitution does not allow him to spy on Americans without a warrant. Now, we discover that this is a lie. Not only did he think that he had the authority to spy on Americans without a warrant, he was exercising that authority. He WAS spying on Americans without a warrant.

So, if you were to give me your word today that you are only listening in on conversations between Americans and suspected foreign terrorists, I ask you again, Mr. Gonzales, why should I believe you?

You have claimed that the President has this authority in the name of national security. We already know that the President views a Democratic leadership to be a threat to national security. This claim will hold center stage in the Republican 2006 strategy -- that if the Democrats get into power then the people will not be safe. So, if the President has the power to use all of the tools at his disposal to protect the country, and he sees a Democratic leadership to be a threat to the country, does it not follow that he has the authority to do anything in his power to prevent a Democratic leadership?"

More importantly, Mr. Gonzales, you seem certainly to be claiming to have the authority to spy on any Americans for any reason that the President, at his sole discretion, feels is important. Perhaps you are not yet spying on other conversations, but clearly you claim the right to do so.

Perhaps you are not yet sending out squads to pick Americans up off of the streets and locking them up in secret detention centers. Then again, maybe President Bush has already signed a secret executive order allowing the creation of death squads, where the President gives the name of a citizen to a special hit squad, who then goes out and kills him, conveniently disposing of the body. Maybe no such group exists, yet. However, Mr. Gonzales, you seem to be arguing that the President has the authority to set up such a group.

The standard method that people use, when they fear that somebody may abuse their power, is to assign somebody else to look over their shoulder. This is why we want the President to let somebody outside of the Presidential office know who he is spying on, who he is imprisoning, who he is torturing, and why. We want somebody to make sure that he is not spying on, imprisoning, and torturing political opponents.

You seem to have left us no way of knowing how far over the line this President has stepped. We are supposed to take his word for it. This President has already lied to us, saying that he has not stepped this far over the line when, as he now admits, he has been standing miles further beyond the line than he said he was. Perhaps he is actually standing miles further, doing more than we are yet aware of.

This is my third question, Mr. Gonzales. How are we supposed to know whether this, or some future President is not using the power to eavesdrop for political purposes, spying on political opponents or spying on the business competitors of his biggest campaign contributors, if we are not allowed to have somebody look over his shoulder?

Wrap up

Mr. Gonzales, by your argument, you have left the American people, the legislature, and the judiciary defenseless against an omnipotent President. If this President is not abusing those powers to the detriment of the American people, the next President might not show that restraint.

You say that you are doing this to protect our national security, Mr. Gonzales. Americans have long known that it is foolish to trust their security to a benevolent dictator. The Constitution itself is the best defense of those rights. However, Mr. Gonzales, what I find in your argument is a claim that the Constitution has been suspended, except for those parts that an omnipotent President with dictatorial powers decides that he is willing to keep around – for the time being.

There is no security in the form of government you are advocating.

Now, I see I have run out of time. I’m sorry. It appears that there is not enough time left for you to answer. Yet, Mr. Gonzales, at your earliest opportunity, I would like to hear what you have to say in answer to these questions.

I thank you, Mr. Chairman, and I yield back the remainder of my time.

Individual Responsibility and the Culture of Corruption

My recent posts have centered on the moral wrong of making over generalized statements meant to promote hatred and distrust of people, based not on whether that person has done anything wrong, but based on whether that individual is a member of the target group.

Another example of this form of persuasion is coming from the Democratic Party. Their strategy for the 2006 midterm elections is to promote the idea that Republicans are mired in a "Culture of Corruption." Even the Republican who faces no allegations, who has taken pains to stay on the right side of the law, is to be portrayed as guilty by association.

The Essence of Bigotry

Headlines from around the world show us clearly how poorly we are served by the idea that whole groups can be blamed for the wrong actions of a few.

No homosexual or priest's rape of a child should be used to make the charge that all homosexuals or priests are guilty of a crime.

No terrorist act by any Muslim justifies the conclusion that all Muslims are terrorists.

No African American guilty of a violent crime justifies the conclusion that all African Americans are violent.

No white male serial killer justifies us in claiming that all white men should be treated as serial killers.

No dumb blond justifies the conclusion that all blonds are dumb.

No Republican's corruption should be used in a campaign that implies that all Republicans are corrupt.

Those who participate in this campaign will be doing nothing less than giving their approval to a way of thinking that sits at the heart of all bigotry and prejudice. They will be engaging in a campaign that says, fundamentally, “There is nothing wrong with blaming all members of a group for the crimes of a few who belong to that group.”

After all, the only difference between the form of the argument that the Democratic leadership is promoting and these other forms of bigotry is the identity of target group to be vilified. The Value of Individual Responsibility

Why is the concept of individual responsibility important?

Because if people are judged by the actions of others -- actions over which they have no control -- then they have little a reason to be concerned with the quality of their own actions. It is extremely easy to go from this to, "If I am going to be blamed even if I am innocent, then I might as well be guilty."

At heart, we understand the fundamental injustice of blaming a person for a crime he did not commit. We recognize that an individual should be presumed innocent, and that he is not to be punished unless he is actually guilty. We recognize that this is vital because it provides the key incentive for individuals to remain innocent. In adopting these rules we are telling people, “If you are virtuous and good, then you will be safe – it is only those who become vicious and evil who need to worry.”

Yet, this doctrine of blaming all members of a group for the actions of a few undermines this. It says that remaining innocent is of no use, because he will be blamed anyway if somebody like him – somebody from the same country, religion, or whatever -- is thought to be guilty.

Now, the Democrat leadership is getting into the act, planning to devote a great part of its energy for the next nine months promoting the idea that it is okay to blame whole groups for the crimes of a few individuals. It will spend tens to hundreds of millions of dollars and produce countless editorials, articles, speeches, and papers telling the American people to embrace the idea of hating whole groups for the crimes of a few.

When it is over, the moral principle of individual responsibility and accountability will be that much weaker, and we will be worse off because of it.

Public Participation

Of course, one of the reasons that the Democratic Party is pursuing this strategy is because its pollsters and public relations groups are telling them that it will work.

They are telling them that it will work because it does work.

It works because people are too happy and willing to hate whole groups for the actions of a few.

We can look at the news headlines today and see how this way of thinking promotes hate and violence, how it makes the world much less secure than it would otherwise have been, how each and every one of us must hide out of fear that we will be punished for somebody else’s crimes.

And, yet, the public relationships companies know that this form of argument works against us, and they will continue to advise their clients to spend money embracing this form of reasoning -- because we will almost certainly allow it to work.

Liberals Accepting Responsibility for Killers

My wife received an email yesterday at work from a co-worker who thought it was "too good not to pass along".

The email is a fake letter from the White House to an unnamed liberal who had been complaining about the Bush Administration’s treatment of prisoners. The email describes a hypothetical response whereby the liberal was enlisted in the LARK program.

LARK stands for “Liberals Accept Responsibility for Killers.”

The program is described as one that places terrorists in the homes of liberals concerned with their treatment. In this case, the complainer was matched with Ahmed, a “sociopathic and extremely violent” individual trained to kill with a pencil, nail clipper, or common household products. His tendency to react violently to women who are not appropriately dressed result in a recommendation that the liberals wear bhurkas.

“Just remind them that it is all part of respecting his beliefs,” the letter says.

Who is the Sociopath?

What is the function of this article? It exists as a tool for creating an emotional reaction that will generate hatred, and the behavior associated with hatred, against anybody who would dare protest the brutal treatment of prisoners.

This much is fine. I am a strong advocate of using stories to illustrate a point. I have done so in postings such as The Meaning of Life and The Cult of Justice and Will

The problem here is that the story depends on lies, bigotry, and a desire to do harm – traits that good people have no reason to want to encourage.

It is at least a mark of consistency that the person who would have such fantasies of the brutal treatment of a liberal family is not going to mind the brutal treatment of a Muslim. Consequently, he is not going to be inclined to find anything objectionable with the brutal treatment of prisoners.

However, this consistency is exactly what is wrong with this type of interest. The person who finds the brutal of treatment of prisoners to be to his liking may easily find the brutal treatment of anybody he does not like to be to his liking. He is not likely to be the type of person who will contribute to making the world a safer place for people to live.

On the other hand, somebody who is inclined to protest the brutal treatment of prisoners is also somebody who is not very likely to brutalize us if he is given a chance. Instead, he is as likely, if not more likely, to protest our own brutalization. He is likely to be a protector and defender.

Presumed Guilt

Another moral failing exhibited in this email is that of presuming guilt. The letter tells us to accept the brutal treatment of Ahmed because of the type of person he is. It also tells us to accept the brutal of all prisoners. This only follows if we accept the conclusion that what is true of Ahmed is true of all prisoners.

The email assumes, "If Bush says that you are a terrorist, than you are a terrorist." This assumption is as reasonable as believing "If Bush says that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction, than Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction" or "If Bush says that he will not spy on Americans without a warrant, than he will not spy on Americans without a warrant."

We already know that President Bush and his administration have a low regard for the truth, and a poor record when it comes to determining who is guilty and who is not.

The assumption that those who embrace the message of this letter must accept is an assumption so far removed from the truth that only those blinded by the most hateful bigotry could accept it as reasonable.

Bigotry

The bigotry is magnified by the fact that the letter does stop at saying that all prisoners are sociopaths and extremely violent. It condemns the liberal who would show respect for Muslims and their culture. We are being told not only to fear the prisoners, but to fear Muslims.

It is this point that my wife reacted to most strongly when she saw the letter – the statement, “Just remind them that this is a part of respecting his beliefs,” as if showing respect for a religious view one does not share is a contemptible act.

The Quality of a Person

In short, we can reasonably infer that those who embrace the tone of this letter are those who hate, who have no respect for truth, and who find pleasure in the suffering of others.

On the other hand, I would suggest that the person who has a love of truth, a concern for the well-being of others to the degree that he cannot enjoy their suffering, a willingness to see people judged as individuals, an attitude of respect for others even if they do not share the same religious beliefs, a dislike for allowing a single individual with demonstrably poor reasoning ability to determine who is a terrorist and who is not, and a distaste for subjecting people to brutal treatment without some measure of proof that it is necessary . . . that type of person would have a problem with this message.

And that when it comes to trying to decide with whom it is best to trust the welfare of ourselves and those we care about, the second type of person is a far better person – a more moral person – than the first.

Joke

Of course, I expect the rebuttal to my comments were made, "This was not meant to be taken seriously. It was a joke.

Yet, this type of response fits in the same moral category as the person who says, "I was not stealing the car, I was only borrowing it," or "We are not torturing prisoners, we are just asking them a few questions," while standing over a bloody and broken prisoner.

No, it is not a joke, and it is wrong to try to call it something other than what it is.

Faith and Human Sacrifice

A recent article in Newsweek told of efforts in evangelical schools to win college debate competitions. To these schools, debate is more than just another school sport. It is a part of their mission -- to convert people to their view, and to score points for their cause. They take this sport seriously.

According to the article, many of these participants are preparing to become politicians and lawyers. They want to enter fields in which they can set social policy. In the words of one freshman debater, "I think I can make an impact in the field of law on abortion and gay rights, to get back to Americans' godly heritage."

When I read that quote, my mind formed an image of an Aztec priest-in-training learning the rituals of human sacrifice. I imagined a young man eager to give his life meaning and significance by cutting the beating hearts out of his sacrificial victims in an effort to inspire his God to smile upon his community.

Before I go to deeply in this analogy, I want to say that I recognize that there are some complications in applying this analogy to the issue of abortion. However, if my arguments in “Abortion (and Infanticide)” Part I and Part II are sound, then the analogy is valid.

It also applies to the sacrifice of the victims of injury and illness when the young priests devote their lives to interfering with the medical research that would benefit these people.

There are no qualifications possible in applying this analogy to sacrificing the interests of homosexuals on religious altars in an effort to please some God.

My imagination did not create an image of a vicious and angry young man out to do harm. Rather, it was of a young man, as I said, seeking meaning and purpose for his life, and finding it in rituals of human sacrifice.

I noticed that the student quoted in the article did not express an interest in using his skill to coax others into giving more food and medicine to the poor. He wanted to focus instead on making sure that those he targeted would be undergo the sacrifice that he thought that his God demanded. He wanted to do a good job arguing for laws that did harm to his fellow humans, just as the Aztec priest did harm to his victims -- in the name of God.

Granted, contemporary evangelicals are not actually cutting the beating hearts out of their victims. However, there is more than one way to harm a person.

Take a child from almost any parent and torture or kill the child. The child is not the only one harmed by this action. It also harms the parent. We can see this in the fact that most parents would choose to have their heart ripped out of their own chest to having their children tortured or killed. Their choice tells us that they having their children tortured or killed is a greater harm than having their hearts cut from them in a religious sacrifice.

This example shows us that it is possible to do worse harms to a person than the Aztec priest causes his victims without even touching that person. All we need to do is to sacrifice the objects of his affection.

We can do even more damage, inflict even greater harm, and force an even sacrifice with a law than we can with a dagger.

I have no doubt that the Aztec priest had great pride in his work and carried out his actions without a hint of doubt that he was doing the right thing. If he imagined himself doing something else -- if he imagined a life in which he was not a priest, and in which he did not lead these rituals -- he imagined his life being meaningless. Through these rituals, he was bring his community into closer harmony with God; nothing could possibly be more important.

If God required that he sacrifice other humans, well, he certainly was in no position to argue. He likely believed that arguing and doubt were, themselves, evil.

Besides, he no doubt told himself that he was protecting his people from hurricanes, volcanoes, earthquakes, fire, tornadoes, plague, and other natural disasters. Or he was enticing God into provide a bountiful harvest and to turn aside the evil hand of his nation's enemies.

He thinks of himself as a good person doing what must be done.

Nor do I imagine that today's advocates of human sacrifice hunger for an opportunity to do harm. They see themselves as saving New Orleans and Florida from another hurricane or San Francisco from an earthquake. Or they think that they are enticing God to provide the country with a prosperous economy and to defend it against its enemies. They are good people.

They think of themselves as good people doing what must be done.

Though the Aztec priest sought to do good deeds, his ignorance and superstition caused him to harm others. When his work was done, he had a stack of victims that he had sacrificed, and nothing good came of it. Volcanoes erupted and plaques struck as they would have struck. People suffered and died as they would have died. However, in addition to all of the damage that nature inflicted, some people also suffered the harms that the priests inflicted.

The human tragedy, then, applies not only to the victims of religious sacrifice, but also to the priest. He wanted to do good deeds. He wanted a life of meaning and significance. He ended up with a life in which he added one more source of misery and death to all of the causes of misery and death found in nature. He wanted to help his people -- to protect them from hurricanes and enemy attack. He ended up being just one more threat to their lives and well-being.

If not for the fact that the priest had been misled into a tragic error, he would have probably done good deeds. If he had devoted himself to bringing food to the hungry and medicine to the poor, and to allowing his neighbors to live in peace with those that they actually loved, he would have reached his goal of being a source of benefit rather than a source of harm.

Of course, if a person growing up in a society sees that there are two groups of people -- those who stand at the top of the pyramid with daggers in hand (whether they be daggers of steel or daggers of law), and those who the man with the dagger will sacrifice -- it makes sense for him to strive to be the person holding the dagger. Those options make his choice understandable. It cannot make that choice right.

This ritual of human sacrifice is still just one more source of misery and death. It’s time to put those daggers away.

I know. I hear the claims every time something bad happens. God visits this evil upon us because he demands that we sacrifice our neighbors, and we are not doing what God demands. As a result, God forces us to suffer from plague, hurricanes, tsunamis, and earthquakes. When our enemies attack he turns away, claiming that since we abandon Him, He will protect us. We show our devotion to God by our willingness to sacrifice our neighbors. When we put our neighbors above God, we should expect His wrath. Or so we are told.

I want to suggest that we give it a shot.

If somebody wants to pray for rain, or for another person's health after doing everything he physically can to help another, then there is no reason to complain. If he wants to perform a human sacrifice to purchase God's good will . . . well . . . let’s try to put those rituals behind us.

Besides, it is never the job of those who would be sacrificed to prove that they have a right not to be. It is the duty of those who would sacrifice them to prove that it is necessary. When it comes to sacrificing humans to God, faith alone is simply not a good enough reason.

Intellectual Integrity

I am afraid that I do not have much of a posting today.

I had this beautiful post written, filled with all sorts of language that sounded quite powerful, as far as I can tell. Then, as I always do, when I got home from work I went online to double-check my facts.

This time, I discovered that I got some of those facts wrong.

It is quite common, when I double-check my facts, that I discover that I have gotten some details wrong. I make the corrections and then go through the article and make sure that my arguments are still sound.

There have been frustrating evenings when I KNOW that I had read something that I had included in the article. Yet, when it came to actually verifying my vital and important claim, I could not find what I needed. Instead of keeping the claims in the article, I delete that which I cannot support, no matter how wonderful it sounded.

Actually, the only job I was ever asked to leave was one in which I refused to write into an article some things that I could not cite as being true.

Also, I do not consider it sufficient to simply find somebody else who said the same thing. If the only source that I could find for a claim is a statement by Joe Blogger somewhere, who himself provides no citation or reference, then that is not good enough. I need a reliable source that is a little more reliable.

This evening, the damage done to my post as a result of fact-checking was fatal to my post. So, it goes into the scrap bin.

It would be wrong to do anything.

This type of concern might not bother some people. If they want to generate some reason to hate or condemn others, then it does not matter if the story is true or false. They will go with it, and let the truth lay battered and bleeding in the gutter. In fact, it is far too common.

However, I cannot do that. It is my contention that a substantial portion of the problems we face today would go away, if only writers would take a few minutes to double-check their claims, and delete those they cannot support. The more truth -- and the less fiction -- that there is circulating around out there, the easier it will be for us to make informed decisions.

On Cartoons and Violence

Muslims around the world have expressed outrage over 12 cartoons printed in a Danish newspaper last September. Saudi Arabia recalled its ambassador. Muslim groups have called for boycotts of Danish goods and stores in the Arab world pulled Danish products off of their shelves. Some groups such as the Mujahedeen Army called for attacking Danish interests wherever possible and placed a bounty on the cartoonists who created the drawings.

Last night, the newspaper apologized saying that “offending anybody on the grounds of their religious beliefs is unthinkable to us.”

Really?

Let us assume that a group of Nazis get the idea that Hitler was a prophet and that Mein Kampf was the Newest Testament. Clearly, it would continue to be appropriate to denigrate Hitler, to count him evil, and to condemn those who idolize him.

We have every right to distinguish a religion that demands its followers do harm to others from one that demands that its followers live in peace with others. It is absurd to say that, if a religion demands that its followers do harm to others, that those others have an obligation to suffer harm, rather than condemn that religion and those who embrace it as a threat. Just as we have a right to distinguish different religions based on whether they embrace doing harm or bringing peace, we have a right to distinguish between sects within a religion. Claiming that all followers of a religion are alike when simple observation shows that this is false is simple bigotry. We must recognize distinctions where they exist.

This was where the Danish cartoons have problems. They lumped all Muslims together, failing to distinguish Muslims who stresses peace and tolerance from those who embrace violence.

However, the sects that preach peace and tolerance were not the ones calling for the destruction of all things Danish, or threatening the lives and limbs of Danish citizens. Only a Muslim who belongs to a cult of hate and violence would embrace these options. These are the Muslims as deserving of contempt and condemnation as the Hitler cult mentioned above.

A Muslim truly interested in peace and tolerance should recognize that Muslims who preach hate and violence are more of a threat than those who print cartoons in a newspaper. If a given Muslim sect finds that it is heartened by the violence that other Muslims preach, then they are also to be considered a family of the cult of violence, not a sect of peace.

Civilized people recognize that appropriate response to speech is with counter-speech that points out the malicious and bigoted nature of the original claims.

Yesterday, I responded to an online article that equated atheists who "get [atheism] right") with sociopaths. Specifically, he wrote of the atheist who “gets it right” that, “Some people already do that. We call them sociopaths.” There is no difference between this and a cartoon that equates Muslims with terrorists.

I responded as a civilized person should respond, with a letter posted on my blog and sent to the offending parties indicating the moral depravity in that original article.

According to the principles of some Muslim sects, I should have called my fellow atheists to attack, whenever or wherever possible, anybody having anything to do with the state of Wisconsin. We would place a bounty on Mr. Reich. Yet, clearly such a response is so morally depraved to be worthy of any serious consideration.

If any atheist had gone beyond speech and proposed violence -- particularly if they had proposed violence against people for no reason other than that they come from the same state as the bigot who produced the original article, I swear I would have had a post on my site within the day condemning them.

Furthermore, I would have expected to be trampled by the stampede of electrons from other atheist writers who would have also been quick to condemn the atheist who made such a call for violence. I would have been sorely disappointed if this was not the case.

Yet, I know of no such atheists to condemn. They are so rare, at least around here, that I can only talk about the hypothetical atheist making such a call to do violence. The reason they are rare is probably due in no small measure to the fact that they know how few allies they would have.

This does not mitigate against the original wrong. Publishing an article that equates atheists with sociopaths, or Muslims with terrorists, is an act that deserves the harsh condemnation. I am not inclined to take back a single word that I had written in response to that article.

However, civilized people agree to moral limits to the responses they give to offensive speech. When any group goes beyond those limits, then the target of that outrage should shift. The wrong of the offensive speech is orders of magnitude less than the wrong of making calls to violence.

Civilized people can understand the difference.