Questions from Atheist Observer

I am sooooooooooo far behind on answering questions from the studio audience. I am going to try to concentrate on that this week.

From Atheist Observer

Question 1: Do you think desire utilitarianism leads you to your moral positions, or do you think your moral positions come from your “heart” and you developed desire utilitarianism to match them?

There are two different levels to this question.

Level 1: Is desire utilitarianism itself something that I created to match my previous moral positions?

Level 2: When I use desire utilitarianism to draw a specific moral conclusion (e.g., on abortion, capital punishment, etc.), do I seek a conclusion that matches my moral positions?

I have worried about the answer to these two questions a lot. Anybody who simply observes the world around him will see how easy it is for somebody to adopt a belief and then to hold firm to it with utmost conviction even in the face of clear evidence to the contrary. I am human, with absolutely no reason to believe that I am immune to this type of problem.

I have seen this, not only among theists, but also among atheists. Ayn Rand Objectivists, in spite of that theory’s own expressed love of reason as a near perfect good, still casually brush aside fundamental problems (e.g., their inability to deal with the is-ought problem).

I think that it is far more likely that I would make a mistake such as this when answering a Level 2 question (e.g., on pornography or capital punishment) than with the Level 1 question. Desire utilitarianism itself is not a prescriptive theory. It explains what a value is (a relationship between a state of affairs and some desire) and its relationship to reasons for action (desires are the only reasons for action that exist). However, to get real-world prescription out of this theory, you actually have to have desires. Without desires, there is no value.

As I see it, the best way to find out if I am making a mistake of this type is to expose my ideas to public scrutiny and to see what objections they come up with. (For which, Atheist Observer, I want to take an opportunity to say that I am grateful for the efforts you have made in this regard, as well as those of the other readers.)

This does not eliminate the possibility that I will blind myself to clear objections, but it at least gives me an opportunity to look at them.

Ultimately, the objection that I am, in fact, guilty of blinding myself to clear objections to my theory requires that there be clear objections that I am blinding myself to. It is not a valid argument to assert, “A lot of people have adopted positions on these issues and blinded themselves to clear objections – therefore, you have blinded yourself to clear objections to your theory.”

A valid argument would be, “Here is a clear objection to your theory. However, you seem to have the traditional problem a lot of other people have had in blinding yourself to clear objections to your theory, such as this one.”

Show me the objection to my theory, and if I do not take it seriously, then you can accuse me of closed-mindedness.

Question 2: Have you had instances where you felt something is wrong, but desire utilitarianism convinced you it was morally OK?

When I first came up with the idea, I started to apply it to contemporary moral issues to see what came out of it.

My position on abortion, before coming up with this theory, was that abortion is a prima-facie wrong. It involved the killing of an innocent person. However, a greater wrong could be found in the use of one person’s body by another person without her consent. On this theory, an entity with no desires has no interests, and an entity with no interests cannot be wronged. So, an abortion carried out before the fetus has desires is not even a prima facie wrong.

My position on capital punishment is that it is not substantially different from any other punishment. It is not even a most extreme form of punishment, since (speaking personally) I would rather be executed than imprisoned for life – particularly if I was innocent. The possibility that my captors would find out about the mistake in 20 years time is of no interest to me. However, when I looked at the statistics of capital punishment through the lens of desire utilitarianism, the evidence seems to suggest that a society that teaches such an aversion to killing that they will not execute prisoners raises fewer children to be murderers. For our own safety and the safety of those we care about, we have reason to promote an aversion to killing that is strong enough to save prisoners from this fate.

Question 3: Do you think desire utilitarianism is precise enough to actually use as a prescriptive tool, that everyone attempting to apply it would come to the same moral conclusions, or that it could be interpreted in different ways, so that “what a person with good desires would do” or “the desires that fulfill other desires” are sufficiently general that a great variety of moral conclusions is possible?

Do you think that science is precise enough that no two people will come to the same conclusions? Note: I did not say “two scientists will come to the same conclusions,” I said “two people”. We seem to have people coming up with different answers all the time – about the age of the earth, about the origins of human beings.

Even within science, there is always a maximum potential level of description. We can only know answers within a certain degree of certainty. Below that, we cannot go. There is no reason to demand that a theory of ethics must give us perfect precision on all issues. All we can expect is that it give us as much precision as is possible.

If you know of a way to get more moral precision using another method (one that doesn’t simply make things up), then that theory is obviously to be preferred over the theory I defend here. Without the possibility of finding greater precision elsewhere, then this is the best we can do.

I answered this question in part in the essays on pornography. Desire utilitarianism is substantially a theory on what value is – a relationship between states of affairs and desires. We can lament about our inability to come up with precise answers to all moral questions. However, this will not change the fact about what value is. We simply have no choice but to make decisions in the face of imperfect information.

However, some wrongs are extremely easy to detect using desire utilitarianism – including some that get a pass in our current culture. One of the most significant sets of wrongs is intellectual recklessness. The wrong of drunk driving is clearly illustrated using desire utilitarianism methods (the lack of concern for the well-being of those that one might harm). That intellectual recklessness is just as wrong as drunk driving is also easily demonstrated. The lack of concern with the soundness of one’s arguments when addressing issues that affect the life, health, liberty, and well-being of others is, I would argue, the most underappreciated moral wrong in our society today.

Question 4: Another measure is does it provide something that is actually useful in making real time decisions in real life, i.e., does it provide a better guide than simpler concepts such as “be fair, be honest, and treat others as you want to be treated?”

What is fairness? How do we tell if we are being fair or not?

There are clear exceptions to the moral requirement to “be honest.” There are the famous example of lying to the Nazi soldiers who come to ask if you know about any Jews in the area and feigning loyalty to the Fuhrer while you sabotage the German war effort. There’s the white lies to your significant other so as not to hurt feelings. There are the lies used when planning a surprise party or a practical joke. How do we distinguish when to be honest and when not to be honest?

As for “treat others as you want to be treated” – what if the person you are talking about likes to be treated differently from the way you like to be treated? How about, “If I were gay, I certainly would want others to do everything in their power to save me from this sick and disgusting lifestyle; therefore, I must do whatever I can to save others from this sick and disgusting lifestyle.”

Or, “Given the great value in being a Christian, I would certainly want others to do whatever they can to convince me of the truth of Christianity, in spite of all of my protestations to the contrary. Therefore, I am obligated to do whatever I can to convert others to Christianity, ignoring all of their protests to the contrary.”

I would argue that desire utilitarianism does a far better job than any of these types of rules. “Fairness” is too vague of a concept to be useful without a theory of fairness.

“Honesty” comes with exceptions – just as we can kill an aggressor to protect an innocent victim we can clearly lie to an aggressor to kill an innocent victim. Similarly, just as a surgeon can slice into a patient for his own benefit, we can, under certain circumstances, have our aversion to lying outweighed by our desire to benefit the person we are lying to.

And a far better rule than “treat others as you would want to be treated” is “act on those desires that you would want everybody to have” or, in other words, “act as a person with desires that tend to fulfill other desires would act.” This takes into consideration the fact that others need not always like the same things that you like.

Conclusion

Like I said, I know that there is a want to find a simple set of rules that everybody can instant see are the best rules no matter what their background. It’s a fantasy. It’s not going to happen. Anybody who claims to have come up with such a set of rules is living in a fantasy universe. If morality could guarantee such easy answers, we would have found them by now.

However, the fact that some moral facts are hard to discover does not discredit those that are more easily known. Nor does it prevent the possibility of moral progress. Some scientific facts are hard to discover as well. But, some are easy, and we can make scientific progress.

It just takes work

Richard Sloan: Medicine and Religion

We are now entering the last session in the Beyond Belief 2006 conference. Our first speaker is Richard Sloan. It is particularly fitting to have Sloan speak at this moment – after reading Dennett’s letters, since Sloan seeks to address the question, “Is religion good for your health?” Sloan wishes to argue that mixing medicine and religion is bad science, bad medicine, and bad religion.

Before getting into that, Sloan makes an interesting observation about the press dealing with the issue of religion and health.

I interviewed a number of journalists and actually startled to learn something that may be obvious to you that journalists and media conduct polls in just the way that politicians do and they want to determine what the issues are that will sell their product, and the biggest issue that sells the product is religion. The second biggest one is health and so there’s a very nice confluence of stories about religion and health for market purposes only.

I would like to add that this marketing, combined with the fact that people are more likely to buy something that tells people what they want to hear, means that there is market pressure in the press to promote the idea that religion benefits health independent of the idea having any merit. We live in a society that does not recognize that there is something morally problematic with misdirecting people (interfering with their ability to make rational choices concerning their own welfare) for the sake of money.

Sloan first tackled the subject of scientific investigation that purports to show that religion has a positive relationship on health. The main conclusion that one can draw from this presentation is that a great deal of the work done in this area represents bad science – or bad reporting.

For example, Sloan reports that he and a collegu, Emilia Bagiella, read the abstracts for all 266 papers that came up in a Medline search for articles dealing with religion published in the year 2000. They found that only 17 percent (45 papers) were relevant to the question of the health benefits of religion. The claim that there are thousands of papers covering the issue of medicine and religion is true, but most of those papers are irrelevant to the question of the health benefits of religion.

Of those that are relevant?

To answer this question, Sloan read all of the documents cited in two chapters of Harold Koenig's book Handbook of Religion and Health (those chapters dealing with cardiovascular disease and hypertension, which is Sloan’s area of medicine) to see how many of them were solid enough to ground claims about the health benefits of religion.

He found that only four papers out 89 were methodologically sound.

He gave an example of one of the papers which Koenig's Handbook claimed, “Meditation subjects had lower blood pressure at follow-up.” Sloan discovered that membership in each group was self-selected (students choose whether to be members of the control or study group), and members of the study group were cloistered in a Monestary where they had no activity other than walking a mile each day to receive food.

This was not a double-blind study and the study did not correct for possibly confounding influences (e.g., the fact that the members of the study group were not doing anything). Claiming that this study supported the idea that there were health effects of religion simply misrepresents the facts of the case.

A great many of the studies that are identified by proponents as supporting the claim that religious practices are good for the health suffer from significant methodological flaws like that. The failure to control for confounders and covariants, and . . . the failure to control for multiple comparisons.

This ‘failure to control for multiple comparisons’ is also known as ‘the sharpshooter’s fallacy’ – exemplified by a person who shoots a bullet at a wall then draw a bull’s eye around the bullet hole. The specific technique is to test for a long list of relationships at the same time. Inevitably, there will be some results far enough outside the statistical norm. The researcher then takes the one item and claims that this proves a relationship.

In the discussion that followed Sloan’s presentation, one person in the audience (who I could not identify) cited an article studying the effects of prayer on patients in a critical care unit. The paper reported that when the patient and the doctor were blinded as to whether the patient was being prayed for, the patient being prayed for had better outcomes.

In fact, this study measured a long list of potential outcomes such as total mortality and number of days in the critical care unit. The one area where the researchers found a benefit among those patients prayed for was the need for diuretics. This illustrates how, if you test for enough possible outcomes, simple random variation will give you one where you can claim to have discovered a benefit.

Another important question that came up in the discussion asked how all of these bad papers with flawed methodology (80 out of 89) ended up in published journals. This comes about because there are hundreds of journals having to do with medicine, and, as Sloan said, some journals were better than others.

A great deal of the papers that are supportive of the health benefits of religious practices are published in The International Journal of Psychiatry and Medicine. That is the 71st, according to the Institute for Scientific Information, the 71st most important psychiatry journal.

Reading this from the point of view of an ethicist, I have to ask, where is the condemnation that is deserved by people who do such poor work in a field as important as medicine?

This strikes me as another example of an issue that I have complained about in the past, where we have clear examples of intellectual recklessness, we explain what is wrong with the document, and yet we give the people who did the work a moral pass on their actions.

I have repeated the argument several times that intellectual recklessness has the same moral status as physical recklessness. A drunk driver is condemned because he shows such a low level of concern for the well-being of others that he feels free to take risks with their life, health, and well-being in driving a car. This is contemptible behavior, and we respond to it in a rational way. We use moral condemnation to promote desires that would reduce this carelessness, and even threaten criminal penalties against those who refuse to take reasonable care.

It is just as rational to demand reasonable care in what people say and write, particularly when they are saying and writing things that are used to determine medical practices. Now, we have a clear argument against using penalties against mere words. The benefits of freedom of speech tell us to limit the legitimate response to words with words and private actions. However, the condemnation and private actions against those who recklessly put our health at risk is mysteriously absent.

This ties in with a similar point that I tried to make in my recent essay on the moral nature of pornography. I pointed out how the issue of pornography was morally ambiguous (though a love of liberty argues for an assumption of legitimacy unless a case beyond a reasonable doubt, appealing to reasons for action that exist, can be made against it). However, in the discussion of the moral merits of pornography, we find a great deal of behavior that is not morally ambiguous. This is the morally objectionable behavior of those who use weak reasoning when discussing the moral quality of pornography.

On the issue of pornography, people claim that it an uncertain improvement in the quality of life in our society is sufficient reason to ban this type of content. Clearly, it would significantly improve the quality of life in our society if we could clear out – not the pornography, but the sloppy reasoning that appears in the discussion of pornography. We find equally sloppy thinking and writing, even in the 71st most important journal on the subject of psychiatry. In terms of its moral quality, this type of work should rightfully be considered as worse than pornography and its authors given a level of social standing below that of pornographers.

This is where our moral wrath should find its first target. Once we deal with the demagogues and sophists, then we can start to deal with questions of pornography and the effects of religious practices on medicine intelligently. Until that happens, it is foolish to expect decent people to wade in among all that filth and still have an intelligent conversation on the relevant subject matters.fs

Daniel Dennett: Thank Goodness

Daniel Dennett was invited to give a presentation at the Beyond Belief 2006 conference, and had accepted. However, at the time of the conference he was in the hospital recovering from a near fatal heart ailment. Paul Churchland was invited to speak in his place. In addition to Churchland’s own presentation on John Rawls’ theory of justice, he read a letter that Dennett had written to the attendees at the conference.

Dennett wrote the letter to ‘thank goodness’ that he was alive. Then he went on to say that this was not just a euphemism for ‘thank God’. He truly meant ‘thank goodness’. In his stay at the hospital, he had found a model of morality – a model of virtue – a model of goodness – that he could truly thank for the fact that he was alive.

An important part of that model of goodness was the fact that hospital staff members were constantly asking themselves, “What if I am wrong?” They recognized a duty to be careful about everything that they did, to make sure that they made no mistakes. He emphasized that this did not only apply to the doctors and nurses who cared for him. It also applied to those who prepared his meals, those who wheeled him to X-ray, and everybody who worked at the hospital. They all recognized (or, they would be severely reprimanded if they neglected to recognize) a duty to ask, “What if I am wrong.”

Furthermore, nobody in the hospital was allowed to obtain any level of certainty from scripture and divine guidance. No doctor was allowed to walk into a patient’s room and begin treatment, claiming that he had received a revelation from God that this was ‘the right thing to do’. Instead, he was to gather the evidence (symptoms), conduct tests, form a theory, test the theory, and use the results of this scientific method to determine what was wrong and how best to fix it.

In Dennett’s case, the original diagnosis of his problem was mistaken. Doctors looked at his symptoms and offered an initial theory as to what the problem was. However, one doctor disagreed with that theory. He offered another theory, and he proposed a way to test it. “If I am correct, then this test would produce the following results.” They conducted the test, it produced the results he expected, and they treated him (to 9 hours of surgery during which time they stopped his heart and chilled him to 45 degrees to prevent brain damage) according to the new theory.

Here is a question that needs answering. Where did doctors learn that by chilling a body to 45 degrees they can prevent brain damage? Did they go through scripture hunting for the correct interpretation of the many pages of instructions on how to deal with illness and injury? As a matter of fact, scripture tends to be missing a great deal of knowledge about how to treat illness and injury that an all knowing God could certainly have provided – if he cared to do so. Instead, the scientists relied on their scientific method.

I had an experience much similar to Daniel Dennett, which I wrote about in much the same way. I returned home from work one night to find my wife substantially unresponsive. She would look at me, but did not answer my questions. I called 911, she spent 9 days in intensive care, and left the hospital with a brand new pacemaker.

I discussed these events in a posting called, “Atheist Materialist Scientist”. I did not turn to God to save her life – because there was no God who could do so. Her survival depended on her doctors having a competent understanding of the facts discovered through the application of ‘atheist materialist science’, that taught them how the human body works and how to fix it. That is who I thank for her survival. And, today, one can hardly tell that she had been in the hospital. The two most obvious symptoms that she has from her illness is a scar on her chest (for the pacemaker) and a tendency to take better care of herself (exercise, diet, etc.).

I returned to this subject in a subsequent essay that had become one of my most popular, an essay called, “Faith Hospital”

Dennett next took up the question of whether he ‘worships’ medical science. He says ‘no’. Quite the opposite, he advocated that every aspect of medicine continue to be held up to utmost scrutiny against an ever growing body of evidence. In thanking goodness, a part of the goodness that he thanked was the peer-reviewed science of medicine.

He thanked the editors and reviewers of those journals who upheld a moral standard that actually prohibited them from ‘respecting’ all positions (and, in particular, positions grounded on faith). Instead, they had an obligation to disrespect and to dismiss all submissions that was not well secured by available evidence.

He also commented about religious friends who had told him that they had prayed for his recovery. At first, he expressed gratitude – the person who gives a prayer for the well-being of another person does, after all, press an interest that the other person was well.

Or does he?

Upon reflection, Dennett suggested that there might be something morally problematic with praying for somebody.

If you truly wish somebody to do well, then would it not be better to take the time and resources devoted to prayer and devote them to doing something that is actually useful? There has been medical research done on the effects of prayer, with the findings showing that the prayer is utterly worthless. A person who foregoes something useful for the sake of doing something useless (or, even worse, provides only the person giving the prayer with a pleasing jolt of self-satisfaction without doing anything to help the patient) hardly qualifies as a model of moral virtue.

Dennett applies this model of moral virtue to those who would pray for him, and he invites them to ask, “What if I am wrong?” – particularly in the face of medical evidence that says that they are wrong.

If a doctor insisted on using a medical procedure that evidence showed to be ineffective, the doctor would risk censure by the medical community and possibly a loss of license (if he persisted).

I suspect that even those who pray for a friend or family member in the hospital do so only after they have provided necessary real-world assistance, or during a few minutes that their mind is free. As such, they are not taking away from the real-world help they can provide. There are exceptions – including those who insist on a witch-doctor’s remedy over that of a physician trained in the medical sciences. However, I wish to leave those aside as a special case.

A person is not required to spend all of his time doing something useful. We have some moral permission spending our time relaxing – watching television, listening to music, attending and/or participating in some sort of performance (e.g., a religious performance at a church). So, the accusation that somebody who prays is not doing something useful is a weak objection, equally applicable to somebody who still takes time to watch his favorite TV show while his friend is in the hospital.

I admit, while my wife was in the hospital, I wasted some time playing computer games and watching television, and I feel no guilt over it.

The story changes for somebody who engages in activities that are actually harmful to the institution that is providing this life-preserving aid. There is, in fact, a moral and intellectual standard required in hospital care – a standard that demands evidence-based thinking and constant questioning of one’s beliefs.

Activities that weaken those standards – that preach against evidence-based thinking or that block access to medical care for religious reasons – are not harmless activities. They are cases where a person’s religion drives him to do harm to others, uncomfortably similar in effect to that of a person who straps on a vest of explosives and detonates it in God’s name.

The standards and practices of medical science that Dennett writes about do, indeed, embrace a moral standard, a ‘goodness’, that Dennett (and I) both have reason to thank. Thank goodness we have an institution that puts these standards to work. They provide us with extremely important life-saving goods, and we have many and good ‘reasons for action’ to see these standards encouraged, rather than denigrated and degraded in ways that we find in some religious traditions.

Pornography II

Yesterday and today I have been trying to illustrate how desire utilitarianism works by applying it to a real-world concern of pornography.

In our Previous Episode

What we are looking at reasons for action that exist for and against a prohibition on pornography. Yesterday, I ruled out reasons for action that do not exist. Intrinsic value and divine rights are reasons for action that some people bring into this debate. However, these reasons for action do not exist. Desires are the only reason for action that exist.

I also ruled out desires that cannot be fulfilled. A “desire that P” (for some proposition P) is a reason for action for bringing about a state of affairs in which P is true. If P can never be true, then the desire that P cannot be fulfilled in any state of affairs, and does not serve as a reason for any action. Even if P can be true in some states of affairs, but action A will not help bring about that state of affairs, the desire that P is not a reason for action A.

I used this to throw out desires to do God’s will and desires to realize something of intrinsic value (since these desires cannot be fulfilled under any real-world states of affairs).

I then started to look at some of the reasons for action that do exist both for viewing and for banning pornography. For example, given that everybody acts to fulfill the more and stronger of their desires, given their beliefs, that many people use pornography, and that there is no evidence that those viewing pornography suffer a defect of belief, we have reason to conclude that the viewing of pornography fulfills desires. A prohibition on pornography would, then, thwart those desires. That would be bad.

However, on the other side, we have a potential for an aversion to pornography that is like an aversion to certain smells. To prevent thwarting those desires, one might argue for confining pornography to certain regions were those who would be offended by the ‘stink’ of pornography would not have to experience it, and to warn people of its presence.

Finally, I looked at desires that certain states of affairs exist and not exist, and argued that these desires are as legitimate as any other. The desire that a state in which a person is viewing pornography not exist (even where the agent will not experience it) is at some level the same that the desire that a certain wilderness state does exist (even though the agent will not experience it).

The next relevant question to answer is to look at the quality of the reasons for action relevant to the viewing or banning of pornography. Are these ‘reasons for action that exist’ good reasons or bad reasons? A good reason is a desire that tends to fulfill other desires. A bad reason is a desire that tends to thwart other desires.

At first glance, the desire that a state in which a person is viewing pornography not exist looks like a bad desire. It is a desire that tends to thwart other desires. However, the desire that a state in which a wilderness exists would also count as a bad desire at first look, because it thwarts the desires that would be fulfilled by the use of those resources.

We need to look at bit deeper than this.

Love of Liberty

One desire that we have reason to strengthen and promote is a love of freedom. As John Stuart Mill argued in ‘on Liberty’, if we wish to bring about the most desire fulfillment, then we want to trust the fulfillment of desires to the person who has the best information on what those desires are, and are least corruptible. The agent who is best informed and least corruptible when it comes to fulfilling a particular person’s desires is that person himself or herself. So, we have reason to promote a love of liberty – an aversion to interfering with a person’s ability to fulfill his own desires.

However, that love of liberty is not an absolute. It is not the case that a person who loves liberty can love nothing else – that he cannot, for example, have an aversion to pain or be indifferent to the health of his child. The love of liberty offers for a presumption in favor of liberty – a desire that can be thwarted in extreme circumstances when other desires are at play; just as a desire for chocolate can be overruled by a desire for health and long life.

In this way, a concern for the well-being of others can outweigh a love of liberty, denying liberty to those who wish to act in ways harmful to others. We have reason not to grant liberty to those whose actions would spring from desires that tend to thwart other desires – desires to rape, desires to take from others. It also applies to actions that evidence a lack of good desires – an indifference to the well-being of others that would cause a person to knowingly, negligently, or recklessly do harm to others. The love of liberty does not argue for absolute freedom. It argues for a presumption in favor of freedom – a presumption that can be outweighed.

This presumption of liberty works like the presumption of innocence in a criminal case. In a criminal case, the presumption is that an individual is not to be harmed unless the prosecution can show, beyond a reasonable doubt, in a fair hearing, that the accused is one who deserves to be harmed. This is how a person with an aversion to doing harm – though an aversion that can be overridden by other concerns – would act. “I don’t want to harm you. We need to work something out here,” he would plead. But, backed into a corner by sound reason, he will do harm.

Applying the presumption of liberty to the current case, we get a presumption against a prohibition on pornography. The individual who seeks to ban pornography is saying that the harm to others is justified. It is not the duty of those he would harm to prove that it they should be left alone. A good person would begin with the assumption that others are to be left alone. It is the duty of those who would do harm to assemble the evidence and show, beyond a reasonable doubt, that a person with good desires (that tend to fulfill other desires) would have other, compelling reasons to act against liberty.

Desires that Thwart Other Desires

Clearly, it is a good working hypothesis that some of the desires that are fulfilled in using certain types of pornography are desires that we have reason to inhibit. These are desires that clearly could be fulfilled only in a state that thwarts the desires of others. These include desires for rape and other forms of sexual violence.

If it can be shown that exposure to (certain types of) pornography will strengthen desires that we have reason to inhibit – will cause people to acquire desires that make them a threat to the well-being of others – then our reasons for action for inhibiting those desires translates into reasons for preventing those exposures to (certain types of) pornography.

Arguments Against Harmfulness

I want to give some space to the moral character of those who use poor arguments when it comes to making this type of case. On one side, we have people who will make claims like, “I have used pornography and I have not suffered any ill effects,” or “I know of people exposed to pornography and they are all decent human beings.”

This is not the only place we see this type of argument used. On the question of violent video games or rock lyrics, we can expect to hear people proclaim, “I played those games and I turned out okay,” or “My friends and I played those games all the time and we did not get the urge to walk down the hallways killing our classmates.”

However, imagine somebody trying to protest laws against drunk driving by saying, “I drove last night while I was drunk and I made it home without killing anybody,” or “I know lots of people who have driven while drunk without getting into an accident.” These arguments are pathetically poor. The question is not whether this person or those people happen to have undergone the experience without harming others. The question is whether the experience tends to promote harm to others.

If you remove all of the hearts out of a deck of cards, it is foolish to argue that every diamond you draw is proof that the odds of drawing a black card has not been changed.

Arguments For Harmfulness

I also want to address the moral character of those who too willingly accept evidence that a limitation on liberty is good. These are people who ‘cherry pick’ the data on an issue such as pornography. They wish to see the ban, so they eagerly embrace any and every claim of harm as proof that their position is correct. At the same time, any evidence against your position is immediately branded ‘bad science’ or attributed to some conspiracy among ‘liberals’.

These people have the same moral character as somebody who is so intent on seeing his neighbor suffer that he frames his neighbor for a crime, doing whatever is in its power to rig his neighbor’s conviction. A person who truly loves liberty and justice will be adverse to doing unjustified harm. This aversion to doing unjustified harm means drawing conclusions based on the evidence, not using a desired outcome to cherry-pick the evidence.

It is one thing to proclaim an accused person guilty on the basis of little evidence when one is reading about a trial in a newspaper or on television – when one is not a part of the jury. However, once one becomes a part of the jury that those responsibilities change. Making a snap judgment based on partial evidence is no longer permissible. One has a duty – to justice, to the accused, to society – to listen to the evidence and to base one’s judgment on a sound consideration of that evidence.

When it comes to matters of public policy, we are all members of the jury, because we all get to vote. Some of us may decide to abstain. The decision to abstain gives us permission to remain ignorant. However, the permission to remain ignorant does not imply a permission to pretend to knowledge we do not have. Everybody else – those who choose to take a position on the issue – has an obligation to cast an informed and responsible vote. It is not a vote cast by a person who shouts, “Guilty! Now, let’s take a look at the evidence. Remember, if the evidence supports guilt, it is good evidence. If it does not support guilt, then it is obviously flawed.”

Addiction

There is a second way in which pornography may promote bad desires. Above, I talked about promoting desires that tend to thwart the desires of other people – desires for rape and sexual violence. Another type of desire-thwarting desire is an addiction.

A person acts so as to fulfill his current desires, given his beliefs. Future desires have no power of backwards causation. Present actions fulfill future desires either through a present desire that future desires be fulfilled, or present desires that fulfill future desires as a side effect. A fondness for exercise would be an example of a present desire that has a side effect of fulfilling future desires.

The relationship between current action and future desires is the same as the relationship between current action and the desires of other persons. An individual will not act so as to fulfill the desires of other persons unless he has a current desire that the desires of other people be fulfilled, or current desires that fulfill other desires as a side effect. Someone who dances because of a love of dance may also have a desire that fulfills the desires of those who may become a member of his audience.

An addiction is a particularly strong present desire that tends to thwart future desires. It serves to diminish a person’s ability to fulfill other desires by taking away his health, and distracts him away from activities that would secure those future desires. For the sake of fulfilling future desires, it is advisable that one avoids addiction.

If a certain experience tends to cause addiction, we have reasons for action (in terms of those desires that would then be thwarted) to make sure that the experience does not take place. Our ‘reasons for action’ for reducing the incidents of addiction are ‘reasons for action’ for prohibiting experiences that tend to bring about addiction.

A person might want to remark that, “Other people’s problems with the possibility of addiction are not my concern.” However, this would be a cold and callous individual who clearly does not have desires that tend to fulfill the desires of others. We have reason for action to condemn such attitudes, so as to make them weaker and less common than they would otherwise be.

Final Verdict

As I approach the end of this posting, a reader may be expecting me to pass judgment on the moral legitimacy of a prohibition on pornography. That is not going to happen. In the argument above, I have presented two instances where empirical data is needed – in determining whether experiencing pornography promotes desires that tend to cause harm to others, and whether pornography can become addictive.

It is no more possible to determine the morality of a prohibition on pornography by sitting back and contemplating the idea of pornography, than it is to understand nuclear fusion by contemplating the idea of the sun. Real research must be done – and it must be enough research to be able to comprehend, if not contribute, to the peer-reviewed literature on the subject at hand. I have not done that research, so I cannot render a verdict. Anybody who does pretend to be able to render a verdict without doing the research is arrogant, presumptuous, and irresponsible.

My next step, if I were to pursue this further, is to look for some appropriately trained body of professional scientists who have investigated the issue and accept their educated opinion on these matters. If they are confident beyond a reasonable doubt that pornography contributes to harmful desires and addiction, then I would support a prohibition (though I would also have to consider the costs of prohibition in creating a criminal black market). If they are uncertain, or they believe there is no evidence of harm, then the presumption in favor of liberty shall stand.

If I had a position of political authority, I would convene a panel of experts to look into the issue and produce a report. These experts would be psychiatrists and economists. Religion is no expertise in these matters. Nobody would be appointed merely because he thinks he has a direct line to God. We are dealing with a real-world issue, and we need real-world answers.

However, though the moral quality of pornography itself is hard to determine, the moral quality of the vast majority of things written about pornography is extremely easy to determine. The author displays a level of intellectual recklessness that is absolutely shameful. They show in what they write that they have no real concern over who may be unjustly harmed or helped. They accept arguments, in defense of actions harmful to others, on the weakest and most unreasonable evidence they can find, as long as that evidence supports the harm they wish to see done.

A person who uses weak arguments in favor of a prohibition has proved that he has no love of liberty, and is at best apathetic about the harm he may potentially do to others. Those who use weak arguments against a prohibition show that they lack a proper measure of concern for harms that might be prevented.

There is also the arrogance of the person who has not studied the scientific literature thinking that he can nonetheless give an informed opinion as to which option would fulfill the most desires and prevent the least suffering.

Those who produce this demagoguery are the true producers of 'pornography' (in the derogatory sense). We would be much better off if they could learn to take responsibility for the moral quality of what they produce and release to the public.

Pornography Part I

I regret that I am getting way behind in answering questions from the studio audience, and I promise to make a concentrated effort to remedy that lapse.

Fortunately, I think that I have a chance to address several questions at once – though it will take me two posts to do so.

In an email, DC said:

[T]here are some elements of your exposition that could use shoring up. The most important . . . is a clearer exposition of that paragon, the Person Of Good Desires. . . . I keep hearing the voice of a troubled person saying, "I just don't know what to DO," and the wise ethicist replying, "Just do what the POGD would do." "But--what would that be?" the troubled person asks.

Atheist Observer asked in a comment:

Do you think desire utilitarianism is precise enough to actually use as a prescriptive tool, that everyone attempting to apply it would come to the same moral conclusions, or that it could be interpreted in different ways, so that “what a person with good desires would do” or “the desires that fulfill other desires” are sufficiently general that a great variety of moral conclusions is possible?

And Eneasz asked in a comment:

These sorts of problems are fascinating, but it almost goes without saying that the 1000 Sadists are always morally wrong. Seeing how a particular theory explains this (or fails to) can be very informative, but it's fairly irrelevant on a practical scale. I'm interested in how a more contemporary issue would be tackled. For example, pornography (of the legal variety).

So, let’s apply this system to the issue of pornography, and see what we get.

Ease of Use

Before getting in to actual application, I need to present an important meta-principle. The philosophy of science says that, all else being equal, the simplest theory is the best theory. However, this does not imply that the best theory is necessarily simple. It only implies that the best theory is simpler than all of the other theories that can handle the same set of observations.

In morality, the same principle applies. The best moral theory will be the simplest moral theory. However, it is not a sufficient reason to reject a theory that it does not give easy answers to all moral questions – that it takes some effort. There are many theories that can give a simpler account than the one I will give here. Yet, all of them will fail one crucial test – they will postulate ‘reasons for action’ that do not exist, or they will deny ‘reasons for action’ that do exist. These theories will always fail when held up against a theory that gets the issue of reasons for action that exist right.

We would hardly accept, in science, that Newtonian physics wins out over Einsteinian physics merely because it is simpler. If the two were equally potent in handling physics, then the simpler explanation would win. But the more complex defeats the simpler where it better handles the subject matter.

’Should’ questions are questions about reasons for action that exist.

Any question about what we ‘should’ do is a question about what reasons for action exist for doing or for forbearing from some course of action. In this post, we are going to look at ‘reasons for action’ for the manufacture, distribution, consumption, and criminalization of pornography. The main focus of my attention will be, “What reasons for action exist for a criminal prohibition on the manufacture, distribution, and consumption of pornography?”

Desires are the only reasons for action that exist.

Desires are the only reasons for action that exist. Therefore, answering the question of, “What reasons for action exist for and against a criminal prohibition on pornography?” means answering the question, “What desires would be fulfilled or thwarted by a criminal prohibition on pornography?”

Some people will try to bring other ‘reasons for action’ to bear on this debate. For example, some will assert that God has commanded them to round up all pornographers (manufacturers and consumers) and imprison them. This ‘reason for action’ has much in common with the claim some people make that God commanded them to walk into a restaurant and blow themselves up. In fact, the suicide bomber does far less harm – because the blast radius from a suicide bomb is far smaller than the blast radius of a criminal statute, and does not last as long.

At the same time, there are also crucial differences. It takes far more effort and cooperation to construct a statute than it does to construct a bomb. We have a far greater opportunity to disrupt the plans of those who think that God commands them to do harm to their neighbors through statute than we do to disrupt the plans of those who think that God commands them to do harm to their neighbors with bombs.

Also, I must insert the principle at this point (though its defense will come later) that the only legitimate response to words are words and private actions, and the only legitimate response to a campaign in an open society is a counter-campaign. Nothing in what I write justifies a violent response when people in an open society attempt, and even succeed, in doing harm to their neighbors in the name of God through statute.

Note that ‘intrinsic value’ claims do not need to depend on God. An atheist can also claim that the manufacture or sale of pornography is intrinsically bad, stating that this intrinsic badness is an emergent property (like consciousness). Or, he might claim that pornography is intrinsically good – or that a right to liberty is intrinsically good, and that these argue against such a prohibition. ‘Intrinsic values’ do not exist. Therefore, when we look at ‘reasons for action that exist’ for and against a prohibition on morality, we can dismiss intrinsic value claims on both sides of the debate. They are making reference to ‘reasons for action’ that do not exist.

People Seek to Fulfill their Desires

People act so as to fulfill the more and stronger of their desires, given their beliefs. When a person views pornography, it is because this fulfills the more and stronger of their desires, given their beliefs. In the absence of evidence that a person is acting on false or incomplete beliefs, then we may conclude that viewing pornography fulfills the more and stronger of a person’s desires. A prohibition on pornography is a prohibition on people fulfilling the more and stronger of their desires.

People also act so as to ban pornography because this fulfills the more an stronger of their desires, given their beliefs. In the absence of evidence that a person is acting on false or incomplete beliefs, we may conclude that viewing pornography fulfills the more and stronger of that person’s desires.

As it turns out, we can already dismiss many claims in favor of a prohibition on pornography on the basis that the agent for prohibition is acting on false or incomplete beliefs. A person may think that banning pornography fulfills his desire to do God’s will or to realize a state that has intrinsic value. However, the fact of the matter is that this is not the case. A desire to do God’s will cannot be fulfilled except in a state of affairs in which the proposition, “I am fulfilling God’s will” is true. A desire to realize something of intrinsic value cannot be fulfilled unless the proposition “I am realizing something of intrinsic value” can be made or kept true. Neither proposition can be made or kept true. Neither desire can be fulfilled.

However, there may also be people who simply hate the idea of others viewing and distributing pornography. His reaction to pornography may be like a reaction to a bad smell – it is simply in his nature to have an aversion to such a state. He does not have any false beliefs about that state – it just stinks. In this case, the person who acts so as to ban pornography will be acting so as to fulfill the more and stronger of his desires, given his beliefs.

Now, one aspect of the ‘bad smell’ analogy is that if a bad smell can be confined to a place where the agent it offends cannot smell it, than no harm is done. We can respect the interests of those who have a ‘bad smell’ reaction to pornography by simply confining pornography to certain locations and situations, and clearly identify them as places where those who have a bad smell reaction to pornography should stay away from.

Desires For and Against Existence

Recall that a desire that P (for any proposition P) is fulfilled in any state of affairs where P is true. A parent can have a desire that his child is happy. That desire is fulfilled by any state of affairs in which the proposition ‘my child is happy’ is true. The parent does not have to experience that happiness. The parent might even believe that the proposition is false. However, what ‘really matters’ to the concerned agent is that the proposition is true. Everything else is a separate and distinct concern.

Consequently, it is possible that an agent can simply have a desire that graphic depictions of sexual acts not exist – or that a state in which somebody is viewing such a depiction not exist. This is not the same as a desire not to experience such a state. The agent might also have an aversion to such a state. However, like the mother who desires a state in which her child is happy, the anti-pornography agent mist simply desire that no pornography exist.

I have a suspicion that, because I am talking about pornography, some liberals will immediately dismiss these ‘desires that a state not exist’ as irrelevant. They would probably assert that there is something intrinsically wrong with considering such desires. However, liberals have very similar concerns. The nature of the desire does not change; only the object of the desire changes.

For example, many liberals have a desire that certain wilderness areas exist. They know that they will never experience those wilderness areas. They do not wish that the area exists as wilderness because they wish to experience that area. They know that this will never happen. (Think: Antarctica, or the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge). Yet, it is sufficient to motivate their activism that they desire that such a state exists.

At a very important level, there is no difference between these two cases. In one case, the agent seeks to prohibit people from obtaining the fulfillment of desires that pornography provides because he has an aversion to the mere existence of such a state. In the other case, the agent seeks to prohibit people from obtaining the fulfillment of desires that would come from using the resources in a particular area because he has a desire for the mere existence of a state of wilderness. An argument that desires that a particular state exist or not exist are automatically irrelevant would apply to both cases.

More importantly, such an argument requires postulating the existence of intrinsic values. Either that, or they need to provide us a ‘reason for action that exists’ for excluding these desires. Since desires are the only reasons for action that exist, the appeal to a desire not to include an particular desire as justification for not including it is somewhat lame.

This will then lead us to a discussion of the value of different desires. I will discuss these considerations tomorrow.

The Good that Atheists Would Not Do

My wife always tells me, “Don’t post angry. You’ll say things you regret.”

But, some days, something touches a little bit of ire.

Once again (in a clip on Crooks and Liars in a post "Hitchens vs. Hannity on Religion and God,") I have heard some theist offer the argument, “Look at the good that religion has done!” Hitchens was given little time for a reply, but the reply he gave was far from what Hannity deserved.

Hannity: Religion also has provided food and water and medicine and supplies and housing and there has been in the name of religion much good that has been done both in this country and around the world.

Hitchens: But if you reduce religion to social work then so does USAID do all that at, actually a secular organization, actually rather more convincingly. Most of the great philanthropists in the United States have been atheists. That does not prove that atheism is correct.

Technically, this answer is correct. However, it completely ignores the stench at the core of Hannity’s remark.

I have offered a response to this claim in a couple of posts, but I want to bring it front-and-center and shine a spotlight on it.

[Note: No interviewer would sit still and allow you to recite everything I have written below. So, think of the first paragraph as the actual response. The paragraphs that follow are talking points that can be added to any follow-up comments.]

Do you realize how amazingly bigoted that remark is? When you say, ‘Look at the good that religion does,’ as an argument for religion, you are saying, ‘look at the good that atheists would not do,’ which is the same as saying that atheists are inherently selfish and lack compassion.

Think about this: Would you dare sit there and tell a Jewish guest that Christian charity is proof that Jesus is the son of God – because of all the good done in the name of Jesus? If you even tried that, you would be out of a job by the end of the week. You know this. You are so instantly aware of the bigotry inherent in such a claim that the words would not leave your lips. Claiming that Christian charity is proof that Jews are mistaken about Christ would imply that Jews are not charitable. The roar that would result from such blatant bigotry would be deafening and end only in your resignation or termination.

But you say such things against atheists – even though you do not have a shred of evidence to back it up – without the slightest hint that you appreciate the appalling bigotry in your assumptions.

You probably won’t be fired for this – and will probably be rewarded – for the same reason that Don Imus would have perhaps been rewarded if he had delivered the same remark against blacks in the 1920s. Anti-atheist bigotry is so pervasive in this society that you can’t even notice it. It’s a stench that you have gotten used to because you spend your life in it. It is just as easy to today to divide the country between a 'we' who 'trust in God' and a 'they' who do not as it once was to divide restaurants and restroms among ‘white’ and ‘colored’.

You see nothing wrong in the sickening stereotype of atheists as cowards unwilling to risk their lives for others with the cliché “There are no atheists in foxholes” when there are atheist soldiers, police officers, firemen, and other heroes buried from one end of this country to another and in several foreign countries as well.

You do not see the bigotry inherent in having the government tell its school age children every day, ‘Good Americans are 'under God'. If you are not under God, then you are no different than those who are against a nation that is with liberty and justice for all.’

I say that it is not religion that causes people to do good deeds, but innate human kindness. Some of that human kindness finds its expression through church. However, it will find expression through whatever institutions are available.

I know many atheists who show their charity through a church because helping those in need is far more important than petty disputes about the existence of God. The only qualms that atheists have about making contributions through a church is they want to be sure that the money goes to food, clothing, and medicine, on building hospitals and promoting sanitation, on things that have real-world value, and not wasted on churches and Bibles.

Do you want to know why there are no atheist hospitals or charities? It’s because atheists do not drool over other people’s suffering as an opportunity to coerce them into joining one’s club. We are not going to force starving people to attend Darwin lectures in exchange for a bowl of soup. Nor are we going to require that they profess unbelief before we inoculate them against disease. Nor are we going to use their natural gratitude to coerce them into joining our meetings and buying membership into our clubs because they owe us.

We don’t paint religious symbols on our good deeds when we hand them out. We simply hand them out. Because our good deeds bear no mark, because they are unconditional, bigots like you think that you can ignore them – pretend they do not exist – and smugly tell your viewers/listeners, ‘Look at the good deeds that atheists would not do.’ You will not recognize the good that we do because you do not know what charity without strings looks like.

The fact is, the vast majority of atheists are too busy bringing good to the world to worry about who believes in God and who does not. You are alive today, almost certainly, because of the good that atheists do. Atheist scientists provide most of the medical breakthroughs that keep you alive – much of it using this theory of evolution that you love to denigrate. Atheist earth scientists have discovered ways to warn you of tornadoes, hurricanes, tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions. They have also taught you how to build structures that can withstand earthquakes, predict your weather. Atheist science, using this curse you love to spit at called ‘evolution’, make sure that you have enough food – clean, healthy food - to eat, clean water to drink, and clean air to breathe.

If all of the religious people were to disappear out of the scientific community, science would barely notice the loss. But if the atheist scientists were to suddenly disappear – as you seem to want them to do – most people in this world would quickly end up dead, and the prospects for future generations would look no better.

‘Look at the good that religion does; look at the good that atheists would not do,’ you say.

Find some good that atheists would not do, and I will be pleased to examine it with you. However, I assert that the good that atheists would not do – this denigrating bigotry you express towards atheists – exists only in your very narrow mind.

The point of this being – I express again – to make clear the fact that, “Look at the good that religion does,” stated in this kind of context means nothing other than, “Look at the good that atheists would not do.” It is a denigrating, mean-spirited, bigoted statement that would never cross the lips of any fair and just human being.

The 1000 Sadists Problem

There are two Big Questions that people trying to understand desire utilitarianism will eventually ask. Atheist Observer asked one of them two days ago.

This question asks me to imagine a world with 1000 people who seek do to harm of one form or another (child rapists, Nazis, slave owners) and 1 person whom they desire to harm (a child, a Jew, a slave). The question then is, “Doesn’t your theory say that the harmful acts in this type of situation are obligatory, since they fulfill the most desires?

[Note: For the sake of completeness, Big Question #1 is, “Why should I care whether the desires of others are fulfilled or not?” I have addressed that question in the post, “The Hateful Craig Problem.”]

My answer is that the theory still condemns the harmful act.

We must distinguish between two theories:

Desire fulfilling act utilitarianism: That act is right that fulfills the most desires.

Desire utilitarianism: Desires (like everything else in the universe) are good or bad according to whether they tend to fulfill or thwart (other) desires. Acts are right or wrong according to whether or not a person with good desires would perform that act.

Desire Fulfilling Act Utilitarianism would say to harm the child in these imaginary circumstances.

Desire Utilitarianism says that we need to look at the desire to see if it tends to fulfill or thwart other desires.

So, take the desire to rape children, for example. In any society, the more prevalent and the stronger this desire becomes, the more other desires are thwarted. As we turn the desire up, making it stronger and more common, either more children (and those who truly care for children) are having their desires thwarted, or those with this desire to rape children are having their desires thwarted.

Either way, ‘up’ in strength and prevalence means more desires being thwarted. ‘Down’ on the other hand means fewer desires being thwarted. If we can dial this desire all the way down to zero, then children would be safe at least from this type of harm, and nobody in society would be suffering the frustration of not acting on such a desire.

So, this desire counts as a bad desire.

Then, an act is right according to whether or not a person with good desires would perform that act. A person with good desires would have no desire to rape a child (and several reasons not to). So, a person with good desires would not perform that action. Which means that the action falls in the category of “morally prohibited” in desire utilitarian terms.

The key difference, again, is the difference between evaluating actions according to whether or not they fulfill the most desires, and evaluating desires according to whether they tend to fulfill or thwart other desires.

Intrinsic Value vs Relational Value

This distinction actually has at its roots another distinction – a distinction between the idea that value is an intrinsic property (found, in this case, in states of affairs where desires are being fulfilled), versus the idea that value is a relational property (a relationship between states of affairs and desires).

I can illustrate this difference by asking you to imagine two possible universes. In Universe 1there is a single person, Agent A, with a desire that P (for some proposition P) and a state of affairs in which P is true. In Universe 2 there is no such agent A. The question is: Which universe is better?

The theory that says that desire fulfillment has intrinsic value would argue that Universe 1 is better than Universe 2. This is because Universe 1 contains this intrinsically valuable state of desire fulfillment, while Universe 2 does not.

The theory that says that value is a relationship between states of affairs and desires says that both universes have equal value. Within Universe 1, states of affairs in which P is true has value to Agent A. That is to say, Agent A has ‘reasons for action’ to create or preserve states of affairs in which P is true. However, the fact that A exists and P is true has no value unless there is somebody with a desire that can be fulfilled by a state of affairs in which A exists and P is true.

Many readers would likely choose Universe 1 over Universe 2, saying that Universe 1 is better. However, this is because you, my reader, have desires. If you had to choose between Universe 1 existing and Universe 2 existing, you would likely choose Universe 1, because this would fulfill the more and stronger of your own desires.

However, imagine how a creature with no desires would choose in this case? By definition, this person would not care one way or the other. He has no reason to choose Universe 1 over Universe 2 if he has no desires that can be fulfilled by Universe 1 but not Universe 2.

Argument Against Intrinsic Value

The section above is not an argument that aims to show that desire utilitarianism is correct. It simply exists to illustrate the difference between theories that state that desire fulfillment has intrinsic value (which would support desire-fulfillment act utilitarianism), and that value exists as a relationship between states of affairs and desires (which supports desire utilitarianism).

The argument against the intrinsic value theory is simply an application of J.L. Mackie’s “Argument from Queerness”. We can quite adequately explain all relevant observations in the real world by postulating desires (as motivational propositional attitudes – a desire that P motivates the agent who has it to bring about or preserve states of affairs in which P is true). We do not need any other type of entity. By the powers vested in me by Occam’s Razor, intrinsic values do not exist. Only relationships between states of affairs and desires exist.

If somebody wants to claim that desire fulfillment has intrinsic value, I am going to ask, “What is this intrinsic value? Do states with intrinsic value somehow emit some form of ‘goodon radiation’ that we have evolved a faculty to detect? Why would evolution have given us such a faculty? Evolution is going to give us a tendency to like that which promotes our genetic replication, not that which radiates goodons, unless there is some reason to believe that these are the same thing. You have no way of making sense of this ‘value as an intrinsic property’ theory. So, I am going to stick with my ‘value as a relational property’ theory.

By the way, relational properties exist. They are as much a part of the real world as the objects or states they relate. So, the theory that value is a relational property is still a theory that says that values are real, they can be known, and that they are things about which people can be (objectively) mistaken. So, this is still, very much, a realist theory of value.

It is a theory that says that the value of desires themselves rests in the relationships that they have to other desires – that claims about the value of a desire are objectively true or false.

Acts and Desires

The next question is: Why is the evaluation of actions tied to desires? Why not evaluate actions directly by their consequences?

The answer to this question is because there ain’t no such thing as a free will.

A lot of moral philosophy is wasted on the idea that we can evaluate actions on their own intrinsic value. However, if this is the case, then we must somehow be able to perform an action based on its intrinsic value. That is to say, the property of the intrinsic value of an action must somehow be causally linked to the muscle contractions that cause the action.

The fact is, there is no such power. Intentional actions are the product of beliefs and desires. Whenever we say that an agent “ought to have done X” we must infer that the agent “ought to have had those desires that would have caused him to do X.” Since desires are persistent entities that will influence a number of actions over time, in saying that an agent “ought to have done X” we have to ask what those desires would then cause the agent to do under other, common, every-day circumstances.

If that desire would produce a good result in this highly unusual circumstance, but bad results in more common circumstance, then it is NOT the case that we have reason to promote that desire. That is to say, it is not the case that the agent ought to have done X.

For quite some time moral philosophers have been trying to argue that morality requires some form of free will. This conclusion came from the fact that moral philosophers were busy trying to evaluate actions independent of the desires that caused them. The fact that this practice requires such an absurd metaphysics is reason enough to discard it, and replace it with the idea that actions are evaluated according to whether or not they would fulfill good desires, where good desires are desires that people generally have reasons to promote or inhibit through social forces.

Do people generally have more and stronger reasons to turn the dial on a desire up – making the desire stronger through social forces? Or do they instead have more and stronger reasons to turn the dial on a desire down, making it weaker and less common? Which option will lead to more overall desire fulfillment, and less desire thwarting?

What will be the effect, in terms of desire fulfillment, of turning the dial for the desire to rape children up, or down? Down is the only option that reduces the thwarting of somebody’s desires. This tells us that there is more and stronger reason to bring the weapons of social influence to bear on inhibiting such a desire.

A Chat on Social Activism

Greetings:

I am having one of those days in which I would rather chat than write about any subject in details.

The item which has my attention now is a clip on Bill Moyers’ Journal “Keeping the Faith” about the graduates at Regent University. This is Pat Robertson’s university, whose objective is to create a cadre of lawyers who are particularly devoted to Christianity.

Cherry Picking and the Sources of Morality

I have written recently on the “cherry picking” that religious people do with respect to biblical moral principles. I find it difficult to think that we could ever revert back to a form of barbarity that would come from true biblical fundamentalism. That is to say, I see very little real-world possibility that we will become a country that executes those who work on the Sabbath or children who talk back to their parents.

These people do not, strictly speaking, get their morality from biblical sources. They get their morality from something else, using religion as a cover when it is useful to do so, and otherwise simply ignoring or rewriting scripture that they do not like.

One question to ask is, "What is this 'something else'?" Where do these people actually get their morality?

Bluntly, the “something else” is the political whim of the leaders of a group. The leaders decide what they like and dislike, and the group blindly follows. All the leaders need to do is find a boogey man and point.

Now, I am not talking about a conspiracy, headed by people who are fully aware that the claims they make are nonsense and whose only goal is personal power. The mind is more subtle than that. The leaders, too, think they are doing good. However, they do not get their ideas of goodness from scripture (which we know for the reasons given above). They get their measure of good and evil from their own 'hearts'. This means that they get their sense of good and evil from their own likes and dislikes.

They think that their ‘hearts’ tell them the word of God. What their ‘hearts’ really tell them is what they have learned (through their culture) to like and dislike. They dislike homosexuality, so they brand it as evil, and use scripture for cover when it is available. They do not dislike people working on the day of the Sabbath, and they particularly do not dislike the business of banking or the charging of interest, so they ignore scripture in these cases. The differences here is not a difference between what scripture says and does not say. The difference is what the preacher likes and does not like.

Another part of the dynamic, for getting the sheep to huddle together into a single mass, is to identify some threat - some group of them that are the source of all of our problems. In this case, them are homosexuals, feminists, atheists, and liberals.

At this point, I think that it is important to note that atheists are capable of the same type of thinking. There is no law of nature that prevents atheists from getting involved in the same type of social dynamics, where a small numbers decide what is good and bad by listening to their own hearts (only, they may call this an evolved sense of right and wrong), and uniting their followers behind them by pointing out some group of them as the enemy. When this sort of dynamic takes over, no atrocity will seem undeserved or unjustified against them who are the source of all of our problems.

And, yes, this does concern me from time to time. Atheists are human. (Or, at least, all of them that I know are.) As such, the psychological facts that make these the dynamics I warned about above possible are facts about humans. A serious study of the forces that lead to these types of attrocities should show that a belief in God is only one way that they can manifest themselves. Those who put too much attention on the idea that religion is the root of this evil, rather than a convenient scape goat for some manifestations of it, may not recognize in themselves their own potential for the same type of attrocities. To avoid these attrocities, harms, it is important to recognize and respond to the psycho-social facts that make these types of acts possible in any group.

Anyway, that concern is for a future time. Today, my concern is with the fact that we have this flock of graduates heading out in the world dedicated to doing things that they (wrongfully) think as good, who will in fact be living their lives delivering endles harm to others. They will do so in the name of God and for the greater glory of their not-quite mortal leaders.

How do we deal with these threats? How do we protect people from the harms that these people will inflict?

I see a lot of electrons being spilled on the questions of how to organize atheists or whether atheists should form alliances with others.

Which reminds me . . .

Richard Dawkins: The Roosevelt and Churchill Analogy

I read (or, rather, heard, since I do much of my reading over the head phones as I exercise) Dawkins discussing arguments about whether to form alliances with other groups. Dawkins addressed the argument that Roosevelt and Churchill, during World War II, saw fit to ally with Stalin to defeat Hitler. It was a wise move.

Dawkins’ response was to say that the situation he is concerned with is different. His enemy is religion itself. It makes no sense to form an alliance with those who say that science is compatible with religion if what one wants to do away with is religion.

Yet, Dawkins ignored (or did not allow himself to see) the obvious counter-reply. Roosevelt and Churchill could have said, “Our enemy is against tyranny itself. Therefore, it is more important to us that we sever our alliances with China and Russia and drive them into the hands of the enemy, so that we end up fighting them, too.”

Yes, it would have been a good plan . . . to refuse to give any help whatsoever to Russia and China, because they, too, were ‘the enemy’. It would have been a perfect plan, assuming that Roosevelt and Churchill wanted to loose the war and to help Hitler and the Japanese Empire take control of the bulk of the world. Assuming that it was important to actually stop Hitler and Imperial Japan, allying with China and Russia was not an entirely a foolish idea.

Organizing Atheism

I have argued in the past that I see no particularly great value in organizing atheists, because atheism does not entail any particular moral view. A more important goal is to tackle the actual issues facing the country and the world today. In doing so, I would argue that it is important (vital and necessary) to point out where religious thinking is the cause of great harms. Yet, the goal remains, not to end religious thinking, but to end great harms.

If an atheist were to join a gay rights group, and speak forcefully about the stupidity of drawing anti-homosexual bigotry out of the Bible, one would probably find a lot of people receptive to that message. If one were to join an environmental group, and ridicule and attack the argument that the impending rapture means that we can ignore environmental concerns and go ahead and destroy our planet one would likely find people willing to listen.

Go to the environmentalist organizations, join them, and form and strengthen a subgroup there whose main argument is how this same millennial thinking is putting every species on the planet (including humans) at risk of great harm.

Join a group that is fighting Parkinson’s disease, or Alzheimer’s, or diabetes, and let them know how religious thinking is killing the people they love.

Join an anti-war group and complain about how the backwards thinking of the Bush Administration – its religious disposition to take certain facts as given and accept or reject evidence based solely on whether it supports a pre-drawn conclusion – has gotten so many Americans killed or wounded and cost us hundreds of billions of dollars.

In all of these cases, one would be fighting religion where religion is doing some significant real-world harms, and talking to people who have a real stake, in terms of life, health, and quality of life, in listening to the message.

Atheism does not entail any particular position on any of these issues. I draw my moral conclusions, not from atheism but from desire utilitarianism. However, atheists in all camps have a unique position for fighting arguments that effecitively boil down to, “The harm that comes from our policies is harm that we inflict in the name of God, so it is justified.”

It is, I think, quite important to try to say something that will let people like those graduating from Regent University see the magnitude of the gap between the type of person they want to be, and the type of person they have been trained to become. They could be somebody who does good in the (real) world. Instead, they are being trained to be people who will live their lives delivering harms to others, blind to the harms that they do. I think it is important to speak, not strictly (or even mainly) to the existence of God, but to the existence of great harm.

Paul Churchland: Rawls' Theory of Justice

Paul Churchland, professor of philosophy at University of California, San Diego, rose to address the Beyond Belief 2006 conference to present the moral/political theory of John Rawls.

Churchland began his presentation by reporting that he was asked to speak about the moral and political philosophy of John Rawls probably because the conference organizers wanted to show the audience a system of morality that did not rely in any way on scripture. Rawls’ theory of justice certainly met that objective.

Rawls: A Theory of Justice

Briefly, Rawls suggested that we can best intuit justice by asking what a rational person would choose for a political system if he were placed behind a ‘veil of ignorance’. This veil left the agent ignorant of any of the particular facts of his life – his intelligence or access to education, his economic standing, who his friends were, his physical appearance, his race, etc.

According to Rawls, the position that a rational person would choose is one that provided the highest standard of living for those who were the bottom of the social and economic ladder. Such a system, for example, would allow for great inequalities of wealth if the system that produced that wealth left the least-well-off people better than they would have been in a system without such inequalities.

The idea was that the option which raised the position of the least well off was a uniquely rational best option.

Churchland’s Criticism

Churchland then threatened pulled the rug out from under the conference organizers by claiming that this theory of justice does not work. Of course, what good does it do to assert that we can have a system of ethics that makes no use of God if there is no system of ethics that works.

Churchland’s objection was that Rawls’ theory of justice employed the same type of reasoning that Rene Descartes used to defend particular facts of nature, including the existence of God.

Descartes argued that if he can form a clear and distinct idea of a natural principle than this demonstrated that the principle was a natural law. This meant that all that scientists needed to do was to sit around and measure the clearness and distinctness of their ideas in order to understand nature. Descartes also asserted that one of these clear and distinct ideas was the idea of God; therefore, God exists.

Rawls is using his veil of ignorance to form “clear and distinct ideas” of moral principles. It promises to be no more useful in helping us come to a theory of justice than Descartes plan.

As a matter of fact, science has not made the progress we have seen by testing ideas for clearness and distinctness. It would, in fact, be quite nice if all a scientist has to do is sit back in his office, put his feet up on his desk, and test his ideas for clearness and distinctness.

Yet, science requires a lot of hard work. The scientist has to get up off of his desk, go to the lab (which often is a very uncomfortable place such as a hot desert where he looks for dinosaur fossils, a damp and sweltering jungle, or an arctic research station where he is picking up ice cores). He has to carefully and meticulously take and record precise measurements. Then he needs to fit his favorite theory to those measurements or – GASP! – discover that his theory does not fit.

Churchland’s argument is that morality and justice require the same type of experimentation. He described human history substantially as a social science experiment, with an emphasis on science. We set up a society. We observe the results. From our observations we evaluate whether the assumptions on which our society are validated or falsified. We make adjustments. We then establish a new society, or modify the existing society, to take into consideration what we have learned. We make a new set of observations. And so on.

Churchland used Prohibition as an example of a social experiment. People devised a theory, they set up an experiment, they drew some observations that suggested that prohibition was a bad idea. They tossed out prohibition. I suppose we are to think of inquisitions, slavery, monarchy, Nazi Germany, and Soviet Russia as failed experiments.

This may be a salient point against Rawls’ methods for arriving at moral truth, but it is strangely hollow. Imagine somebody responding to a theory of planetary formation by saying that current theories are only the most recent component of millennia of scientific study and hard work that can be traced back to the first civilizations. This may be true, but it does not help us to decide which theory of planetary formation is correct. It suggests that certain methods should not be used to judge theories of planetary formation, but it says nothing about the methods that should be used.

I have encountered a similar issue with respect to the desire utilitarianism that I have defended here. One of the more frequent objections that I receive says that desire utilitarianism must be rejected because, if desire utilitarianism were true, some moral questions would be difficult to answer. The objector makes the completely unfounded assumption that a moral theory would make all moral questions easy to answer, and that desire utilitarianism must be rejected for its failure to do so.

I would argue for rejecting any theory that distributes answers to moral questions like answers to scientific questions. Some of them are easy to answer. Some are difficult. Some may even remain outside of our ability to answer forcing us to live in a universe with some measure of moral uncertainty. Yet, over time, we have the ability to make moral progress as we make scientific progress, never quite arriving at perfect moral knowledge (just as we will always lack perfect scientific knowledge), but getting closer over time – as long as religion doesn’t muck things up by insisting on teaching moral (scientific) myth.

Other Objections to Rawls

I would like to take this opportunity to throw in a few additional objections to Rawls’ theory of justice.

(1) Implications of the Veil of Ignorance

Rawls asks us to imagine the choices that one will make from behind a veil of ignorance. He then says that these conclusions apply to the real world in which we live. But why would implications drawn from obviously false premises have any relevance in the real world?

Imagine, as you read this, that a fire breaks out nearby filling the room with smoke. What would you do? No doubt, you can come up with a plan. You can pick an escape route and imagine yourself using it. However, it does not follow from the fact that you would perform a particular set of acts in an imaginary world in which there is a nearby fire, that you should – in the real world where there is no fire – perform the same actions.

Similarly, the mere fact that you would choose a particular political system when behind a veil of ignorance certainly does not imply that you should choose that same political system in the real world where you suffer from no such ignorance.

(2) The Extent of Ignorance

Another problem arises from the question, “How ignorant am I supposed to be?” Are we supposed to be ignorant of our beliefs?

For example, am I to assume that I do not know from behind a veil of ignorance whether I am a Christian Scientist? It would seem that I must be ignorant of this if I am going to vote for a system that treats Christian Scientists justly. However, am I also supposed to be ignorant as to the cause of diseases? If I am not to be ignorant of disease, then I would likely support a system that helped Christian Scientists realize their error and would force doctors (rather than priests) to attend to my illness.

Consider the choices that a person who believes in an arrogant and megalomaniacal God who condemns to eternal damnation any who do not believe in him. What would this person choose behind a veil of ignorance?

Or the person who believes that homosexuality is fundamentally wrong? To such a person would likely vote for a society where homosexuals are compelled to seek some sort of treatment that he would want even for himself.

In short, if people are not allowed to take behind the veil of ignorance their beliefs about the nature of the world – the causes of disease, the existence of a God, the intrinsic value of various states of affairs – then we will be too ignorant to make rational decisions. On the other hand, if we can carry our beliefs about such things behind the veil of ignorance, people will end up promoting substantially the same principles behind the veil of ignorance that they promoted in front of the veil.

Conclusion

In short, Rawls’ theory of justice is a secular theory, but it does not work. As such, it is a poor candidate for proving that it is possible to have a system of morality that does not depend on God. This job must be given over to theories that actually work.

Discussion: Faith as a Vice

In my continuing weekend series discussing the presentations at Beyond Belief 2006, we are at the end of the second-to-last episode. We have heard presentations from Sam Harris, Jim Woodward, and Melvin Konner on the nature of morality and religion. At the conference itself, this seemed to be an alliance of Konner and Wooodward against Harris. (Soon, Richard Dawkins would take the stage as Harris’ ally.)

I hold that Woodward made the strongest case, while Konner presented the worst case. In fact, I would nominate Konner for giving the most intellectually bankrupt presentation at the conference. I discussed many of his mistakes and misinterpretations in my discussion of his presentation. The discussion that followed brings to bear another of his mistakes.

Konner’s Response to Harris

At one point in his presentation, Konner pointed out the difficulty in convincing religious people to give up their religion. He said that they know all of the arguments – arguments about God’s evil character, the contradictions that can be found in scripture, the scientific evidence that overwhelmingly supports theories that the believer rejects. Dawkins and Harris are not saying anything new. It would be foolish for them to expect that their efforts would have any effect.

After giving an inventory of these arguments that fail to impact religious belief, Konner gives Harris’ definition of faith as something that closes down discourse. It closes the mind to evidence, allowing the faithful to hold on to their belief no matter what. In response to this, Konner simply said, “Yes, that’s what it is. Get over it.”

Taking these objections [to religion] we need to recognize that none of them is new. All of them have been heard or independently thought of by most intelligent people, and most important none has posed or is likely to pose a serious obstacle to belief in the minds of the vast majority of believers. . . . [M]ost religious people don’t care about proofs. It is not news to them that religion has caused great harm, or that their sacred texts are flawed, or that science explains most things. They have been meeting these objections with aplomb for centuries. Most don’t care, they will proudly tell you, about argument. They don’t care about evidence. They don’t even care that they can’t clearly define ‘God’. Most think that all these conversations are silly.

So what do they care about? Faith, defined in Letter to the Hebrews as ‘…the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.’ Sam [Harris’] definition is or one of his basic statements is, ‘Religious faith . . . forms a kind of perverse, cultural singularity – a vanishing point beyond which rational discourse proves impossible.’

Yes, that’s what it is, Sam.

Get over it.

Now, I would like you to imagine a person giving a presentation in which he pointed out all of the various ways in which rapists rationalize their actions – giving them a cloak of legitimacy, ignoring any evidence about the harmfulness of rape and the incoherence of their own attempts to rationalize it. He also makes claims about the high recidivism rate for sex offenders and how hard it is to convince people not to commit rape. After all of this, the speaker says, “Smith defines rape as sexual penetration without consent. Yes, that’s what it is, Smith. Get over it.”

Get over it?

A short digression. A religious fundamentalist or anybody else with more interest in scoring rhetorical points than intellectual honest debate would say, “How dare you compare faith to rape!” As a matter of fact, I said nothing to compare faith to rape. What I did was compare an statement about faith to a statement about rape to show that the statement of faith contained certain question-begging assumptions that will become clear shortly.

Faith as a Vice

Harris is not presenting the case against faith as a matter of competing beliefs. Harris is presenting faith as a moral problem – as a pattern of behavior which is extremely dangerous and the cause of significant harm to others. The command to “get over it” is a command to stand by with one’s hands in one’s pockets while innocent people around the world are being made to suffer and die horrible deaths, without lifting even a finger to help protect those innocent lives. For a morally concerned individual, that is not an option.

Konner’s response, “Get over it,” assumes either that there is nothing morally culpable in an act of faith. Konner accepts many of Harris’ points in favor of thinking of faith as an a vice. Yet, ultimately, he says, “Yes, we have all of these reasons to condemn faith. But you should simply accept it.”

One possible reason to accept faith, in spite of its social costs, is because we cannot eliminate it. There will always be people who will engage in faith-based thinking. The idea that we can turn everybody into perfect reason-based thinkers is simply wishful thinking.

However, this same argument can be applied to any moral objective – and it fails against all of them. There is no way in which we can convince everybody to be perfectly honest, yet this is not an argument against raising moral objections against those who lie, bear false witness, or engineer false beliefs. We will never be able to completely eliminate theft, yet we still have many good reasons to condemn theft. And there will certainly be rapes far into the foreseeable future, but this does not imply that we must accept and tolerate rape.

Nor is the fact that there will always be faith-based thinkers imply that we must passively accept faith-based thinking; particularly when it is responsible for far more death and suffering than lies, theft, and rape.

That is how Harris’ argument goes, and Konner’s response does not even begin to touch it.

Intellectual Recklessness as Vice

At this point, I want to make another careful distinction. It is a distinction between, “Harris’ argument is that faith is a vice,” and “Faith is a vice.” I can present Harris’ argument here, and point out that Konner fails to address it, without agreeing with Harris on the claim that faith is a vice. In fact, I do not agree with Harris on this matter.

Intellectual recklessness is a vice. However, the wrong of intellectual recklessness is like the wrong of drunk driving. Drunk driving is wrong when it puts the well-being of others at risk. However, if the drunk driver confines himself to his own 10,000 acre ranch, on which nobody else is permitted to trespass, he threatens nobody, and he does no wrong.

Similarly, reckless thinking is a vice when it is done in areas that put others at risk of harm, but not when it is confined to beliefs that only affect the thinker. A person who believes that a God exists, that he will survive death, and that God will allow him into heaven if he is good to others, and who is not reckless about what constitutes good for others, is not somebody we need to worry about. Yes, he is a reckless thinker, but he is reckless only in the privacy of his own life.

Harris speaks as somebody who would condemn even reckless driving on one’s own property on the grounds that allowing even a little bit of reckless driving would tear down the walls that would otherwise keep people from reckless driving in public. In fact, Harris’ argument would actually be more like saying that all drinking is to be condemned because, if we allow drinking, we will inevitably suffer the effects of those who choose to drink and drive. By refusing to condemn all drinking, Harris’ argument would say, we give license to those who would drink and drive.

Regular readers will remember that I had harsh words last week for Konner when he said that Harris and Dawkins were arguing for a religious version of Prohibition. They argued for no such thing. My argument here does not accuse Harris of arguing for religious prohibition. There is no inconsistency in condemning something while, at the same time, saying that it is foolish to pass a law against it. A person can argue for abolition while saying that the only legitimate force for abolition is moral persuasion.

I (and many atheists) apply these same principles to the greatest absurdities of religion. Though we hold that those who speak these absurdities deserve ridicule and scorn, and condemnation where they prey on others who are vulnerable, we would object to any legal prohibitions against these speech acts. Moral persuasion and the force of reason are the only legitimate tools to use in these cases. The force of law is off-limits.

So, here I compare Harris’ condemnation of all faith as a response to harmful acts based on faith to the condemnation of all drinking as a response to drunk driving. I, on the other hand, argue that faith becomes worthy of condemnation only when it becomes a risk to others, in the same way that drinking becomes worthy of condemnation when it becomes a risk to others.

If somebody were to come to me with a belief in God and the afterlife, with a belief that God will save those who promote goodness in the real world, that scripture is clearly a poor moral guide, and that reason provides a better tool for determining the difference between what is good and what is bad, I would rather have him as my neighbor than many of the atheists that I have come across. Here is somebody who confines his reckless thinking to areas which do not cause him to be a threat to others. While many atheists, who get the right answer with respect to God’s existence, can still be extremely reckless thinkers when it comes to what causes harm to others.

Harsh Language

This consideration of faith as a vice also explains and, if the premises are correct, wold justify the harsh language that Harris uses.

There are two ways to get a person to change their attitude towards something. Belief is an attitude that a proposition is true or false. The way that one affects beliefs is through reason – by showing evidence against the proposition, thus proving to the listener that the proposition is false. Desire, on the other hand, is a mental force that motivates an agent to make or keep a proposition true. We affect desire through praise and blame, reward (for those good, clear, rational thinkers) and punishment (e.g., in cases such as medical malpractice where intellectual recklessness can be directly linked to harm to others).

It is simply absurd to treat a love of faith as a matter for reason. If faith is a vice then, like all vices, we have good and strong reason to inhibit its influence by morally condemning those who engage in faith-based thinking. The goal is to make them feel embarrassed and ashamed, so that these emotions will inhibit them from continuing to engage in behavior that is a threat to others.

Once again, I believe that Harris’ objection to faith itself is much too broad. Therefore, I would argue that harsh language directed at all the targets that Harris would commend directing it is not always just. However, to the degree that Harris is correct in his claim that faith is a vice, to that degree it does follow that harsh language against those who engage in the practice of faith is appropriate.

Limits of Condemnation

At the same time, it is important not to go overboard in this condemnation of alternative ways of thinking. Too often, those who assert that others are being reckless and who call for punishment tend to be the poorer thinkers themselves. We do require a certain amount of humility, where we give others the benefit of the doubt. We shall presume another person’s thinking to be within moral bounds.

It shall not be a crime to disagree with another person, even when a person’s argument is pathetically poor. However, when poor belief causes a person to pick up a weapon (or conspire to wield a weapon) to kill or maim others, then it is time to step in and physically restrain the reckless thinker.

These are the standards that I have used throughout this blog. The only legitimate response to words are counter-words. The only legitimate response to a political campaign in an open society is a counter-campaign. Only when one side picks up weapons is it permissible to take up arms in self-defense.

Failure to abide by these rules – and even failure to use praise and reward to promote them, while using condemnation and punishment to inhibit violations – risks moving us towards, if not actually to, a state much like that of Baghdad.