Public Goods

I have spent a couple of days showing that people generally have reason to promote a general desire to contribute to public goods and/or promote an aversion to not contributing to public goods.

Today, I want to look at practical implications.

Public Goods

Public goods, recall, are goods where the benefits to not accrue to assigned individuals. That is to say, an individual can obtain a benefit without paying anybody to supply the benefit. Because of this, suppliers face less of an incentive to provide that benefit.

I used three examples of public goods two days ago:

Military. It is difficult to defend one house without defending the neighbor’s house. Besides, much of the benefits of a military is its deterrence value, which protects everybody.

Police/Courts. When a criminal is put away, the beneficiaries are whomever his or her victims would have otherwise been. We do not know who they are. Nor do we know who benefits from crimes not committed by those who do not want to go to jail.

Education. I received some objections to listing this as being (in part) a private good that I will address later.

Other examples of public goods where investments can be expected to be lacking.

Contemporary Issues

A tsunami warning system in the Indian Ocean. It is difficult to create a system that warns one person of an impending tsunami without warning others who did not contribute to the system. We can expect that such a system would be expensive. Assume that a particular hotel chain, for example, purchased such a system so that they could protect their guests. All of the other hotel chains get the benefit without paying a dime. While the conscientious hotel chain raises its rates to cover its costs, the other chains take customers. This is the a part of the punishment for contributing to a public good.

Levees around the city of New Orleans. Here, again, any system that protects one house from flooding also protects its neighbors. There is no way to charge people for flood protection, and then simply allow houses to be flooded where the owners did not pay. So, even though each dollar donated to the levee project might bring two dollars in return, since the return is divided up among hundreds of thousands of beneficiaries. The investor, then, gets very little back on his investment, but would get a substantial return if everybody else contributed.

Preventing Sea Level Rise. To the best of my knowledge, we lack the technology to allow the sea level to rise only around America, while it does not rise around those countries that actually took active steps to combat global warming. Consequently, if the United States refuses to contribute to this effort, we still stand to benefit from the contributions that everybody else makes. The Bush Administration claims that any American contribution to fighting global warming would be bad for the economy. This is the same benefit that anybody gains by refusing to contribute to a public good – a benefit that makes everybody in the world (including the United States) worse off than they could have otherwise been.

Asteroid/Comet Detection and Deflection System. The worst of all possible natural disasters is also the most preventable. However, it is particularly difficult to deal with a threat to Earth from an asteroid or commet that benefits only those that created such a system. Therefore, a lot of people are sitting around vulnerable because people do not seem to be particularly interested in funding this public good.

Environmental Goods

Many environmental goods are examples of public goods. Imagine a group of people who desire that a particular wilderness area exists. If the wilderness area exists at all, then this person benefits, regardless of whether or not this person made any contributions to its existence. In other words, wilderness benefits are not deniable or assignable.

In addition, if a society provides its citizens with clean air, everybody benefits whether they pay for that clean air or not. There is no way to clean the air and then assign it only to those who have the capacity to pay for it. We could, perhaps, bottle air in the same way we bottle water, but I suspect that the inconvenience of walking around with maks all the time, even while sleeping, would be counted as a cost.

Related to this is the fact that the rain forests, for example, provide the benefits of oxygen, carbon sequestering, and genetic diversity that are all public goods. If Brazil and Indonesia would somehow deny the benefits of their rain forests and give them only to those who would pay for them, we would not have nearly the problem with deforestation as we do today. However, since the benefits of rain forests are neither assignable or deniable, rain forests end up being destroyed.

The fight against communicable diseases is a public good. The best way to protect people from a serious pandemic is to identify it early (which requires people going out and conducting research whenever there is a hint of such an outbreak) and taking aggressive steps to contain an outbreak when it occurs. We all benefit from these programs, and there is no way to separate those who benefit and pay from those who benefit and do not pay. Consequently, we will have ‘free rider’ problems associated with disease control.

Education

Curiosis, in a comment made to the first post in this series, disputed the claim that ‘education’ is a public good.

If Bob graduates from high school, clearly Bob benefits, but the benefit to the rest of the populace seems negligible, if it could be measured at all. Once could likewise argue that we would all be better off if every graduating senior were given $10,000. This would stimulate the economy and give them all a better chance in life.However, this is wealth redistribution, plain and simple.

A public good does require benefits for others that cannot be assigned to given individuals or withheld. Education does tend to provide private goods in that a person educated to perform brain surgery or program computers (for example) has the ability to withhold the benefit from anybody who does not pay for it. However, he has an incentive to pursue an education only to the degree that, and only in the fields that, alow him to withhold benefits from those who do not pay.

As Eneasz pointed out in response to Curiousis, educated people cast more informed votes, which provides benefits that cannot be withhold from those who do not wish to pay. However, the informed voter provides not only a more informed vote. He or she provides a more informed contribution to the election process, putting not only is vote but his time and his effort into those causes. In fact, all of his charity and volunteer work promises to be better directed towards things that actually produce positive effects, rather than wasting resources where they do not do any good.

In another example: assume that you were in an automobile accident on a lonely next to nowhere. Family members are hurt, and you can’t get anywhere. Another car comes along. You clearly have reason to wish that the person in that car is more educated rather than less educated. In fact, you probably have a specific desire that the person in the car be educated in emergency first-aid. People who learn emergency first-aid do not do so for the sake of earning money, but for the sake of providing a benefit. He is not somebody who will negotiate a fee before applying aid. We all benefit from having these types of people driving around, yet we cannot assign that benefit to any given individual, nor can we deny that benefit to those who do not pay.

This brings up an important point about education as a public good. Some education is more of a public good than others. Reading, writing, math, and critical thinking skills are particularly important (making our society particularly foolish in our tendency to denigrate, rather than promote, critical thinking skills).

Moral education is another public good. On the model used in this blog, good people are those with desires that tend to fulfill the desires of others. We all obtain benefits from being surrounded by people with desires that tend to fulfill the desires of others, so we all have reason to promote morality as a public good.

In fact, these last three days have been substantially about the public benefits of promoting a desire to contribute to public goods, and an aversion to not contributing to public goods. This, in itself, is a public good.

Free Riders, Game Theory, and Morality

Yesterday, I described what economists call the Free Rider Problem in terms of one of game theory’s favorite devices, the Prisoners’ Dilemma.

When I write a post, and I refer to an earlier post, my rule has been to bring all relevant information forward so that a reader does not have to go back. However, in this case, the previous post contains a lot of relevant detail. I must refer a reader back to that post for the detail.

For those who have read yesterday’s post, I attempted to show how a ‘free rider’ situation means that people end up worse off than they could have been. This is the benefits of a public good cannot be assigned to any specific person. The payoff gets distributed among the population, with the donor getting such a small percentage of the total that it is not in his interests to donate. However, if everybody were to contribute to these public goods, everybody would benefit.

I created an example where a ‘public good’ produces a 50% return on investment that is distributed evenly among the population. Each person has an option of contributing $1000 to this public good. This will return $1500 in ‘public good’ for each person who contributes. However, because the return is distributed evenly, the person who makes the $1000 investment only gets (1/population) of the return. In my two-person case, this was one-half of the return, or $750. If everybody were to donate to this public good, in this hypothetical case, everybody would get $1500 out of the public good. However, no individual has an incentive to contribute, so everybody misses out on an opportunity to become $500 better off than they would have been.

Yesterday, I also looked at a political solution to this problem. The political solution is to force everybody to contribute $1000 by taxing them, or passing a law forcing them to prove that they have made the required contribution. Unfortunately, each ‘faction’ still has an incentive to lobby for laws in which others are required to contribute, but they obtain special immunities and exceptions.

This sets up a ‘political auction’ where everybody must pay what they bid whether they win or lose, and everybody must play. The penalty for not playing is being made the loser in the political options. Losers must contribute to public goods that benefit others, while those others do not contribute to the public goods that benefit the loser.

Morality and Free Riders

Today, I want to present a moral response to the free rider problem.

The moral response is not a solution to the free-rider problem. It is, instead, a way of avoiding the free-rider problem and all of the implications that follow from it.

The moral solution avoids this problem by altering the payoffs. Specifically, in this case we are going to introduce $300 worth of social (and, potentially, criminal) sanctions against those who do not contribute to the public good.

In the original situation, if I contribute and you do not, then your return will be $1750 (The $1000 you kept, and the $750 that is your share of the public return on my $1000 contribution). This is opposed to $1500 if you do contribute. You have an incentive not to contribute.

However, if I threaten you with $300 in sanctions, then you get $1500 if you invest and $1450 if you do not. Now, you have an incentive to invest. As a result of your investing your return goes up to $1500 and my return goes from $750 (my share of the return from my $750 investment) to $1500.

Checks and Balances

There is still a problem with this option. It assumes (1) that I have the power to impose $300 in social sanctions on you, and (2) I will not use that power to force you to pay while I refrain from paying. If either of these assumptions are violated, then the person with power can harvest the profits from failing to contribute with impunity.

This problem disappears as soon as we add one more player. Now, if Player 1 wishes to impose sanctions on Player 2, he has Player to back him up. On the other hand, if Player 1 wishes not to contribute, then Player 3 can work with Player 2 to impose sanctions on him. If Player 3 decide not to contribute, Players 1 and 2 have the power to impose sanctions on him. As long as we have at least a three-ways system of checks and balances, and nobody has more power than the other two combined, we have a method of forcing cooperation and imposing sanctions on refusing to contribute.

Anonymous Defection

Another problem with this solution rests with the possibility of anonymous defection. Game theory often works under the assumption that all defections are public knowledge, so that everybody knows who contributed and who did not. In reality, there are any number of ways to refuse to contribute without this being known. They can hide their money, cook the books, lie, or steal back what they contributed, just to name some examples. The $300 in cultural and legal sanctions will not do any good if we do not know who to punish.

We can find an answer to this problem by looking at the nature of these payoffs. I have been measuring the payoffs in terms of dollars. However, dollars (for the most part) have value because of what you can do with them. People use dollars to fulfill their desires, given their beliefs. This could well include desires to help others – so we do not need to assume that everybody is totally selfish. A person who wants to give to charity cannot give what he does not have.

So, let us assume that I have the power to give you a desire to contribute to public goods that is stronger than any other desire that you could fulfill for $300. In other words, when choosing between contributing to a public good, and choosing to have $300, you could go either way. However, the $250 benefit that you would receive from not contributing to the public good in this example just isn’t enough money. Here, contributing and having $1500 is worth $1800 to you, while refusing to contribute and having $750 is only worth $1750.

Please note that, on this model, acting to serve the public good is not an act of self-sacrifice. To the person who desires to eat chocolate ice-cream, the act of eating chocolate ice-cream is not an act of self-sacrifice. Similarly, to the person who desires to contribute to the public good, contributing to the public good is not an act of self-sacrifice. To such a person, contributing to the public good becomes his ice-cream. In fact, it could become better than ice-cream.

Using Moral Sentiments

There is, then, a reason for each person to give others either a desire to contribute or an aversion to refraining from contributing (selfishness). The question remains whether there is a way to accomplish this end.

The methods of ‘rewards’ and ‘sanctions’ certainly does exist. So, we each have reason to support an institution of rewards (praise, honors, prizes) to those who contribute and sanctions (condemnation, ostracism, boycotts) against those who refrain from contributing.

We know that interaction with the environment alters brain structure. We see this in terms of beliefs, where different interactions with the environment cause different agents to acquire different beliefs. We also see this in desires – particularly in the way different societies have different desires, but people within a given society come to have common desires. This pretty much proves the proposition that social forces can influence desires.

To whatever degree social forces can influence desires, people generally have reason to promote those desires that fulfill other desires, and inhibit those desires that thwart other desires. In this posting, I have shown how people generally have reason to use social forces to promote a desire to contribute to the public good, and to promote an aversion to refraining from contributing to the public good.

We have reason to praise and honor those who contribute to the public good as a way of promoting this desire not only in those we praise and honor, but those who are a witness to praise and honor. We even have reason to provide people with hypothetical examples of those who would deserve praise and honor as a way of encouraging others to become that type of person.

All of this applies as well to those we condemn and punish.

Free Ridership and Game Theory

My nighttime reading this week has been devoted to game theories –theories that looks how rational people make rational choices and the consequences that result.

One of the more interesting game theory situations is called the ‘prisoner’s dilemma’. This dilemma comes in many forms – one of which gives the dilemma its name. For my purposes, the form that is the most useful is one that captures the concept of what economists call ‘free ridership’.

In this post, which will be the first in a series, I will simply set up the free-rider problem, look at the standard (political) solution to that problem, and explain how the political solution can make things worse.

Constructing the Dilemma

To put the problem of free ridership in terms of a prisoner’s dilemma, let us assume that there is some project that people can invest in. However, there is no way to restrict the payoffs of this investment only to those who invest. The payoffs must be distributed evenly. For the sake of this argument, we will assume that the rate of return is 50%. That is to say, for every $1.00 that society invests in this project, they will get $1.50 rate of return.

Now, we have two citizens, each with $1000 in investment capital.

To start off with, we have a voluntary situation. People are free to donate, or not donate, as they wish.

Citizen One is trying to decide whether to donate.

First, assume that Citizen Two donates $1000.

Now, should I keep my $1,000, or should I donate $1000 as well.

If I also donate $1,000, then there will be $2,000 in the public treasury. This will produce $3,000 in social good, which we will distribute evenly. That is to say, I will get $1,500.

On the other hand, if I keep my $1,000, then there will still be $1000 in the public treasury. This will produce $1,500 in social good, which will be divided evenly. The $1,000 that I kept plus $750 worth of social good means I get $1,750.

Since $1,750 is more than $1,500, then the best thing for me to do is to donate nothing.

Second, assume that Citizen Two donates nothing.

If I donate $1,000, this will produce $1,500 in social good, which will be divided up evenly between us. That is to say, we each get $750.

If I donate nothing and keep my $1000, then there will be nothing in the social pot, so I will get nothing. However, I get to keep my $1000.

Since $1000 is more than nothing, if I assume that Citizen Two will donate nothing, the best thing for me to do is to donate nothing as well.

In fact, no matter what Citizen Two does, I am better off donating nothing. So, I am going to donate nothing.

Of course, Citizen Two goes through the same line of reasoning concluding that he, too, should donate nothing. They end up each with the $1000 they started with. Whereas, if both of them would have contributed their $1,000 and taken their share of the social wealth that resulted, they would have each had $1,500. They each lost a chance for $500 they could have very easily had.

Examples

This is a real-world problem because there are a number of institutions that provide benefits for the whole population, where it is not possible to provide the benefits for some people but not others.

Military protection, for example, is something that defends everybody. There is no way for the military to protect one house but not the one next to it. So, the benefits that the military provides to the population are spread equally. There is no way to provide benefits only to those who donate.

The police and court system has the same effect. When a potential rapist is locked away, all potential victims, and all people who care about those potential victims – obtain a benefit. We don’t even know who they would be, so we cannot charge only those who actually benefit.

The same is true for education. An individual can keep some of the benefits of his education private and offer it only to those who will pay for it. However, some of the benefits will leak out and get distributed to everybody. An educated population provides some benefits to everybody.

All of these are cases where an investment made by any given individual gets distributed to the whole population. As such, all of these are cases where, if we depended on voluntary contributions, each individual has an incentive to contribute nothing, and “free ride” off of those who do contribute.

The Political Solution

One way to deal with these types of situations is through a political solution. That is to say, the government taxes everybody $1,000. It puts the money into a pot. It invests the money. In doing this, it provides everybody with $1,500 of value instead of the $1000 in value each person would have had.

Notice that each citizen has reason to support this type of ‘tax and spend’ policy with respect to those goods that have distributed benefits. Each person faces a situation where, “If the government were to take this money and invest it in these public goods, I will end up better off than if we relied on private contributions.”

However, please note that each citizen has an even stronger incentive for a different type of political action.

Citizen One thinks, “On the other hand, what if I can get the government to force Citizen Two to pay, but to give me an exemption. If I can pull this off, then I will get my $1,750 in social benefit, which is more than I would get from a system that taxed everybody equally. Even if I have to invest $100 to get a candidate elected who will exempt me from this tax, I still end up $150 in the black.”

Meanwhile, Citizen Two is going through the same type of process, looking for a candidate that will support a tax on Citizen One while providing his constituent with exceptions and exemptions. In the mean time, society continues to suffer a loss of social welfare that would have otherwise been available.

However, at this point we run into another ‘game theory’ problem – the political auction.

What we need to do now is to determine the costs of winning or losing the election.

Citizen One needs to determine how much money to invest in the election. Now that there are competing candidates (each advocating that the other pays for these social goods while their constituent does not pay), Citizen One is faced with two options. If his candidate wins, he gets $1750. If his opponent wins, then the Citizen One gets $750.

Let us assume that Citizen One has already spent $1000 to get his candidate elected. So has Citizen Two – and Citizen Two’s candidate is ahead in the polls. Citizen One still faces two options: $1750 minus $1000 in political costs for $750 if his candidate wins, or $750 minus $1000 in political costs for a net loss of $250 if his candidate loses. If, by spending another $250, he can bring about a win, then he will end up with $500 (as opposed to minus $250 if he does nothing).

Of course, Citizen Two is thinking the same thing when his candidate is behind, seeing just as much reason to throw more and more money into these campaigns.

Eventually, both Citizen One and Citizen Two end up being worse off than they would have been if they simply refused to try to obtain a political solution. By trying for a political solution, they went from a situation where each had $1000, to one in which they each had significantly less, because of the resources drained away in political fighting.

Summary

So, free rider problems create situations where the a population has an opportunity to realize some significant benefit, but cannot get people to contribute to that benefit. They have no reason to voluntarily contribute, because ‘free riders’ who live off of the benefits that others provide end up being better off than those who provide the benefit.

If we aim for a political solution that forces each person to make a contribution, we are at risk of setting off a political battle. In this battle, each candidate proposes an option that is less than optimal (their constituents benefit while the other candidate’s constituents pay). The resources that then get drained by this political fighting actually leaves people worse off than they would have been if they had not sought a political solution.

Tomorrow, I would like to look at the moral solution.

Private Censorship

One of the issues touched on in the Kathy Griffin incident was the issue of private censorship. This aspect has gone largely unmentioned, but it is an important part of the ethics of this particular event.

Let us assume that I host a party. You are invited, with a number of other people. You know what criteria I used to select the guests, you have a good idea of who will show up, and you know what usually goes on at these types of events.

This party is meant to be a celebration of sorts.

Let us assume that this is my wedding reception. It is a secular affair, and I have asked my guests to stand up and say a few words. You know that many of the guests make statements that are grounded on their religious beliefs. You will hear party goers speaking about their faith and the good that religion has done for them. This is to be expected.

At this party, it would seem perfectly acceptable to say, "Since I do not believe in any God or diety, I cannot call upon them to watch over you. For this marriage to work you will need a little luck, a lot of hard work, and some help from your friends from time to time. With luck, this friend will always be there for you."

This would be on a par with what the other guests have been saying.

However, let us say that instead of this you prepare a speech that includes vulgar statements precisely because you know that these vulgarities will rile the people that you want to rile. You use them precisely because you know they will make certain other guests uncomfortable.

One issue is the appropriateness of this type of conduct. I want to be clear once again that I am not objecting to what Kathy Griffin said but to the conditions under which she said it – as an invited guest to somebody else’s party.

However, let us set this issue aside for a moment. Now the time has come for me to edit the tape that I have made at my party. I will be showing this type to family, friends, and even as a public broadcast (since this is a high-profile wedding). In making my tape, I have decided not to include your speech.

For this, I am being accused of censorship. Allegedly there is some moral principle at play that states that when you appear at my party and make some vulgar statement intending to make my other guests feel uncomfortable, that I am obligated to refrain from editing that out of my record of my event.

Ultimately, this is going to be a short post. I have argued with respect to morality that here, too, people are to be assumed innocent until proven guilty. It is the job of those who condemn a person for some action to prove that the condemnation is justified - it is never the job of the person being condemned to prove that he is innocent.

In fact, about the only defense a person can offer for condemnation is to challenge the accuser to justify his actions. If I am to be condemned for going to the grocery store this afternoon, I can say nothing in defense of that action other than that there is no reason to condemn it. So, if somebody wishes to condemn it, they must identify the reason.

I can see no argument for condemnation that applies to the act of editing one's own video of one's own event - even if one intends that event to be distributed for public viewing. Somebody making a documentary, writing a novel, creating a blog posting, can put in whatever, to them, fits his or her intentions regarding that product.

How can the charge of 'censorship' be justified when we are talking about an organization's private record of their own private event?

Moon 2.0

Yesterday, Google announced the creation of a new prize dedicated to the development of space, The Google X-Prize (a.k.a. "Moon 2.0"). This is $30 million to be awarded to whomever can put a lander on the moon, travel 500 meters, broadcast about 1 gigabyte of images back to Earth, and accomplish some other feats.

The prize is $25 million to the first who can fulfill the primary objectives as long as they do so before the end of the year 2012; $15 million if it takes them until $2014. There is a $5 million second place prize and a $5 million set aside for other accomplishments.

I consider the prize to be substantially a sham.

The reason is because of the expiration date.

Any business man knows that the value of any potential income is to be discounted by the amount of risk involved. If I have a 50% chance of making $100 – then that is only ‘worth’ $50 in current value. I would be wise to collect a guaranteed $51 now over making this gamble.

This due date substantially increases the risks involved for any team that decides to go for the prize, thus significantly decreasing its value. This is not a $20 million prize. It is significantly less than that.

Robert Bigalow performed the same stunt with his “America’s Prize”. This is a $50 million prize to the first private organization that can put a person in orbit. It has an expiration date of 2010. As far as I know, this prize has almost no effect on the space development industry, simply because the ‘risk’ of failing to meet the deadline is so high that the prize itself is virtually worthless.

I suspect that what Google is really after is about 5 years worth of free publicity from people reporting on the prize. Reporters will come to them to talk about the prize, or invite its members to speak at their organizations, or put up banners, or simply look up information on the prize because they are interested. Google’s name will be all over these displays, of course. Yet, ultimately, Google will be able to put the $30 million back in the bank, because nothing will happen to it.

It is simply difficult to square the decision to put on an expiration date with the idea that these individuals are truly interested in space development. Is it the case that, if we do not have lunar landers by the end of 2012, that it is no longer important (or less important) that we have lunar landers at all? People who are truly interested in the development of space would want to find ways to increase the incentive to develop space, not decrease it.

There is an important similarity here. The factors that make this prize much less valuable to those who would consider trying to earn it are the same factors that argue that Google is not making the contribution to space development they may want us to think that they are making.

From a business point of view, it all makes perfectly good sense. From a space development point of view, it’s a lot of noise for nothing.

I am a serious supporter of prizes for promoting space development. I think that the system is orders of magnitude better than our current system – where NASA spends billions of dollars on its own projects.

Imagine that you have two proposals in front of you. Proposal 1 (the George Bush plan) is for NASA to spend an average of $7 billion per year for the next 14 years to land astronauts on the South Pole. Of course, this is supposed to be the first step in an ongoing government lunar base, but that will require billions more every year. Besides, I strongly suspect that those plans will go the same way as Apollo 18, 19, and 20 – particularly as the government’s burden from war, deficit spending, and social security obligations picks up.

Compare this to a second plan, where the government will spend $3 billion per year on space prizes.

The X-Prize, that resulted in several private companies competing to develop the capacity to put 3 people onto the edge of space twice in two weeks, cost $10 million in prize money. They result is a new space industry that is already attracting around $1 billion per year in non-taxpayer-funded space development.

So, let’s say that the government were banking $3 billion per year and simply adding the money to a list of space prizes. First team to land an astronaut on the moon and return him safely to Earth. First team to land an astronaut on the moon and have him live there through 1 month. First team to bring back and process 1 tonne of material from an asteroid. First team to manufacture 100 kg of oxygen from lunar material.

The reason that this is a justifiable use of government money is because space development provides some extremely valuable goods that suffer from ‘free rider’ complications. The benefits that we get from space development (e.g., the use of a huge supply of natural resources from energy to iron, harvesting those resources without doing environmental damage to Earth, the potential survival of the human race in the event of a global catastrophe) are mostly benefits that everybody gets whether they pay or not.

This means that a lot of people will sit back and attempt to be ‘free riders’ – attempting to obtain the benefits without paying. However, somebody has to pay or we will never obtain the benefits. The smart way to proceed is to have the government collect the money so that everybody pays.

However, the government should use this money in the most efficient way possible. $100 billion government space projects do not fit that criterion. Government funded prizes for those who accomplish certain significant goals does fit that criterion.

However, the government will not use this system, because the $100 billion is a pork-barrel project that goes to people who contribute to political campaigns. NASA’s job is not to explore and develop space for the development of humanity. NASA’s job is to transfer money from people who pay taxes to corporations that collect government handouts. This $100 billion project is a poorly designed project for carrying out NASA’s alleged objective, but it is very well designed for carrying out NASA’s real objective.

The problem with government space prizes is that the politicians lose the ability to channel the money to their favorite campaign contributors. The money will go to the people who complete the task first. That might very well be people who contribute money to their opponents. That is simply not an acceptable outcome.

In fact, the government had a ‘prize’ system established for a couple of years – the Centennial Challenges. It was very modestly funded – only a few million dollars. However, it has since been killed. There are a few prizes still available, and we can see some of them competing in New Mexico next month. However, the program is all but dead.

Private organizations can take up some of this slack. We see what the Astari X-Prize accomplished. However, what we are starting to see on the private size of space prize industry are stunts like Google’s X-Prize – an attempt to offer a prize and to gather publicity under conditions where the prize merely appears valuable to those who neglect the relevance of risk and the effect of expiration dates on risk.

What would I like to see?

(1) I would like to see Bigelow and Google commit to the development of space by removing their time limits, substantially increasing the net present value of their prizes by decreasing the risks involved in collecting them. Space missions are risky enough already.

(2) I would like to see the government in the business of offering space prizes, shifting hundreds of millions of dollars currently used on government-run missions. This implies restoring the Centennial Challenge and significantly increasing its funding and the list of activities that people can perform to earn prizes.

(3) I would like to see the creation of an international organization (such as the United Nations) to sell property in space to private individuals and use the money to fund projects on Earth that would be particularly useful to underdeveloped countries. I would nominate using the money to educate orphaned children from these countries. Once people get their hands on deeds they can trust saying that they own a piece of the moon or an asteroid, we can trust that they will have a stronger interest in seeing that land put to good use.

(4) I would like to see the establishment of a system where people, governments, and business can contribute to a pot that will grow increasingly large over time, with the money going to whomever can fulfill the objectives to the prize. The money on deposit would simply continue to grow until it was collected.

Yes, I consider these things to be very important. They are among a very small list of things where the fate of the human race might actually hang in the balance.

Kathy Griffin and The Comic Defense

The Comic Defense

Two commenters responded to yesterday’s blog with what I call “The Comic Defense” – a claim that if one is a ‘comic’, or one is trying to be ‘comical’, then one is immune to certain sorts of criticism that would otherwise be legitimate.

Griffin herself used this defense when she rhetorically asked, “Am I the only Catholic left with a sense of humor?”

Interestingly, this is not the only place that I encountered the comic defense yesterday.

Al Lewis wrote an article, which was put under the headline, “There aren’t any atheists in a Front Range real estate foxhole.” Several atheists wrote to condemn him for using a version of the bigoted cliché, “There are no atheists in foxholes”. He responded to them in a follow-up article under the headline, “Letters from Atheists”: http://blogs.denverpost.com/lewis/2007/09/12/e-mails-from-atheists/

To be fair, the original criticism of Lewis was misdirected. People who write articles do not choose headlines. Somebody at the newspaper chose the headline – and the criticism should be aimed at the newspaper.

However, in his follow-up article, Lewis defended the headline and condemned those who objected to it. This now makes Lewis himself a legitimate target of moral criticism.

As a part of that defense, he wrote:

Obviously, God did not give them a sense of humor. Maybe I should start praying for them.

Both speakers used substantially the same defense. “I was just having some fun. Quit being such a tightwad. Loosen up.”

The first thing I want to do is to demonstrate how the Comic Defense can be abused and what it looks like when it is abused.

Imagine a group of people burning a cross in a black family’s yard, or painting a swastika on a Jewish person’s door. When they are caught, they respond, “We were just having some fun. Lighten up, will you? Where’s your sense of humor?”

In this case, we would be hard pressed to agree with these agents that the moral fault lies with those who condemn them for “having a little fun.” The moral fault lies with those who think that this type of behavior is “fun”. There are limits to what counts as “fun” (or “humor”), and I want to see if I can say something useful about where those limits can be found.

Please do not get distracted by the fact that the examples that I used are also property crimes. The agents in this case are not only guilty of malicious “fun”, but of trespassing and vandalism. However, they are not being judged solely because of their crimes against property. Somebody who paints some random lines on a door or who sets fire to somebody’s pile of leaves in the yard has committed the same property crime, but has not committed all of the same transgressions as our imaginary Nazi or KKK member. The “communication elements” in these particular acts are morally relevant and morally contemptible in their own right.

Also, some people seem inclined to argue that “freedom of speech” means that we may not morally condemn others for what they say. Lewis also wrote:

The line about atheists in foxholes is a common expression. Atheists ought to be FOR freedom of expression — not against it.

However, the view that condemnation is a violation of somebody’s right to freedom of speech is nonsense. Condemnation itself is speech, so to say, “It is wrong to condemn others for what they say,” would – if applied consistency – also imply that it is wrong to condemn those who condemn others. This claim that the freedom of speech implies an immunity from criticism is simply a rhetorical trick.

The right to freedom of speech is not a shield against criticism, it is a shield against violence - whether privately enforced, or enforced through legal censorship. Since nobody (so far as I can tell) is threatening Griffin or Lewis with violence in this case, the claim that ‘freedom of expression’ is being violated is simply not true. People making this claim are attempting an illegitimate defense of what may well be indefensible.

This point relates to something else Lewis wrote in defense of the headline.

If atheists are really offended by such an innocuous line, how are they any different than Jerry Farwell, who was offended by Tinky Winky, the allegedly gay Teletubbie? Or Muslims who didn’t like cartoons?

There are, in fact, two differences:

The first is that the atheists offended by these remarks did not (to the best of my ability) threaten to kill anybody. I hold that this is a morally significant difference.

The second is that there is a difference between legitimate and illegitimate offense. The Nazi and the KKK member might be offended by my examples above. However, this is simply too bad – because the Nazi and the KKK member deserve to be offended. Whereas the Jews and the blacks who are “offended” by their symbols do not deserve to be offended or intimidated. To defend the phrase denying atheists in foxholes by saying that atheists in military service have no right to condemn being ridiculed and belittled is to claim that atheists in the military belong in the same category as the Nazi or the KKK members. It says that the speaker things they are members of a group that deserve denigration and condemnation.

With these two distractions out of the way, I want to return the original question: When is it legitimate to use “The Comic Defense” to ward off criticism of something that one has said?

Comics can, in fact, make outlandish claims and be immune from criticism. However, in order for this to be the case, the comments have to be made in a context where (1) the comic did not really mean to denigrate others, and (2) the comic has clearly indicated this fact in the context of his communication.

Archie Bunker in the TV Series “All in the Family” was famous for denigrating others. One could scarcely find a common prejudice that he would not repeat. Yet, Carrol O’Connor, the actor who played Archie Bunker, deserved no condemnation for these remarks. This is because his remarks were made in accordance with the two principles that I stated above. Everybody knew that O’Connor did not personally mean these things, and this was made clear in context.

There was also no moral crime involved in finding O’Connor’s remarks to be funny. This is because the audience knew (or should have known) that the character was being used to ridicule bigots, not to ridicule those groups where were commonly victimized by their bigotry.

So, who was Karren Griffin and Al Lewis making fun of in these cases? Who were they laughing at? Were they actually ridiculing those who would condemn religion, or those who would denigrate atheists in foxholes? Or were they speaking in support of those attitudes? The “humor” dfense would require the former.

One way to find out is to look at how people can reasonably be expected to have interpreted their remarks. Griffin received a great deal of praise from atheists who largely expressed approval at her comments. They did not interpret her remarks as a parody of those who would condemn religion. They interpreted her remarks as a slap against those who believe in God, and cheered her words for their content.

The phrase, “There are no atheists in foxholes” itself is commonly used to report as if it is a fact that no atheist is sincere enough in his beliefs that he can resist turning to God in a moment of stress.

If it is the case that one person can sensibly praise a remark because of its comment, then it must be the case that somebody else can condemn a remark based on that same content. In other words, if we are going to say that the critic has failed to realize an important fact – that the remark was made in jest, then the supporter has missed this same fact. It would be like a bigot writing to Carroll O’Connor and saying, “Yes! Thank you! Somebody finally had the courage to say the things about niggers that I have been saying for years!.”

Anybody who made these types of remarks in response to O’Connor’s comments in the character of Archie Bunker simply did not get it.

Praise and condemnation play equivalent roles in this case. Either both are legitimate, or both are illegitimate.

Griffin’s comments, as well as those who use the phrase, “There are no atheists in foxholes,” did not fit these criteria. In fact, much of the praise that Griffin received for her comments were from people who praised the comments for their content. This would be like praising Carroll O’Connor for Archie Bunker’s bigoted remarks, saying, “It’s about time somebody had the courage to say such things. You are my hero.” Anybody who would make this type of claim about Carroll O’Connor clearly “doesn’t get it.”

This, then, is one test for The Comic Defense. If the people praising a remark for its content make sense doing so, then The Comic Defense is not a legitimate response to critics. If The Comic Defense is a legitimate defense of criticisms, then those who are praising that remark for its content similarly don’t get the joke. In fact, they don’t realize that they are the joke.

Another test is this:

Imagine somebody such as Mel Gibson receiving an award and saying, “Some people think that there is no God. Suck it, atheists. There is a God.”

Imagine what you would think or say or write on the day after an outburst like that, and compare it to what you thought or said or wrote about Kathy Griffin. Would you find it funny? Would your response sound different than your response to Griffin’s comments?

If I have done my job right then, at least in my own writings, there would be no difference.

Finally, I want to point out that it was not Kathy Griffin's content specifically that was at fault here. It was the content in that context. As I wrote yesterday, guests at award shows are asked and expected to refrain from using the awards ceremony as a political forum. The same remarks, made back stage, would not suffer from the same objections

The Kathy Griffin Incident

Many atheist readers will already be familiar with this story. Kathy Griffin received a Creative Arts Emmy for Outstanding Reality Program. In her acceptance speech she said:

A lot of people come up here and thank Jesus for this award. I want you to know that no one had less to do with this award than Jesus. Suck it, Jesus, this award is my god now!

For this, she has received praise from many atheist bloggers, the condemnation of many religious leaders such as Catholic League president Bill Donohue, and a promise from the TV Academy to edit her remarks in a rebroadcast of the award ceremony on E! on Saturday night.

I am not going to be one of the bloggers who will praise her for what she said. I consider the remarks inappropriate.

Let us assume that there was a comedy or a musical team, Jim and Bob, that had been famous for a couple of decades. However, they had a recent falling out. Each has gone their own way and one of them, Jim, was being quite successful in his solo career. Jim gets an Emmy and, when he gets up to give his speech, said, “I want you to know that no one had less to do with this award than Bob. Suck it, Bob. This award is mine.”

Of course, we cannot leave out the detail that many people in the audience are extremely good friends with Bob. At the end of each speech, the tradition is to applaud the person who received it. However, Jim would have put all of those people in the uncomfortable position of applauding the person who has just insulted their friend Bob in front of a national audience.

For putting the members of the audience in this position, Jim deserves some measure of moral condemnation.

In addition, those who sponsor most awards ceremonies request (demand) that speakers refrain from using their time at the podium to advocate any political or social agenda, other than whatever agenda might be ‘on topic’ given what they are receiving the award for. A person receiving an award for a documentary on global warming is permitted to say something about global warming. The reason is simple – they do not want these awards ceremonies to degenerate into brawls – verbal or otherwise.

One possible response to this objection to these remarks is to say that it is a part of Griffin’s public persona to do or say things that are objectionable. However, it does not follow from the fact that a person has adopted a persona of behaving inappropriately that it is wrong to condemn her. We would not, for example, argue that the fact that a person has adopted the role of a burglar implies that it would be wrong for us to condemn his acts of theft.

I suspect that at least one person will assume that I am basing my criticism of Griffin on an assumption that we have an obligation to be particularly nice or tolerant of those who believe in God. That would not be correct.

There are legitimate criticisms to be made against those who claim that religion deserves a special sort of politeness or tolerance that we should not grant to other forms of belief. For example, in almost all parts of life, if somebody says something absurd or ridiculous we are permitted to say (if it is our honest opinion), “That is absurd” or “That is ridiculous.” We are not permitted to say this under every circumstance, but certainly under some circumstance, Yet, saying that the belief that there is a God is absurd or ridiculous is culturally prohibited. This amounts to a special protection for religious beliefs. That special protection is unwarranted, and should be eliminated.

However, my criticism about Griffin is not because she refused to show special sensitivity towards religious beliefs. My example above is meant to illustrate that there is a wide range of remarks that are not appropriate in these circumstances, many of which have nothing to do with religion. Arguing that her comments against religion are acceptable in these circumstances is like saying that religion deserves a place of special condemnation – that it is legitimate to condemn religion in circumstances where other forms of criticism would be considered inappropriate.

In fact, since it is considered appropriate for a speaker to thank Jesus or some other supernatural entity when accepting an award, the following should be viewed as acceptable:

To all of the people who made this possible, you did this. This is for your hard work and your talent, and I’m not going to give the credit you deserve to some supernatural deity.

If it is appropriate to thank Jesus at an award ceremony, then it should be appropriate to tell those that one is thanking that they deserve full credit for their contribution.

In fact, it would be hard to criticize this type of acceptance speech. Anybody who does so will have to say, or at least infer, that the people that the recipient thanked do not actually deserve full credit.

The way that this story is developing, we now have to say a few things about the reactions to Griffin’s remarks.

For example, the Catholic League has condemned Griffin’s remarks for being “obscene and blasphemous.”

Obscene . . . yes, in part. Blasphemous? Well, I’m willing to grant that, but I find it hard for a Catholic to make this claim without being guilty of hypocrisy. After all, thanking Jesus is blasphemous, in a sense, from the point of view of an atheist. Blasphemy is denying the existence of a God (which atheists certainly do). Denying the non-existence of a God is simply the same situation in reverse. Arguing that one should be permitted while the other should be condemned is a textbook example of hypocrisy.

Also, in response to criticisms of Griffin, the TV Academy has said that they will edit her remarks.

I would consider it perfectly legitimate for the TV Academy to censor obscenity – as long as it does so on a regular standard. This is going to be hard to do, given that the show itself put on a presentation of MTV’s song, “Dick in a box.” To censor Griffin for obscenity in this context . . . the stench of hypocrisy will be overpowering.

But, to censor blasphemy? Since it permits people to thank Jesus, censoring blasphemy would be an instance of allowing certain religions special protection. It grants the church protections that the rest of us do not have – not unless it is also willing to censor any statement thanking a deity.

Griffin has been accused of bigotry. Yet, no clearer example of bigotry can be found than that of an organization that allows the double standard found in allowing people to assert a belief in Jesus but not allow somebody to assert a belief in the skills and talents of real people.

Now, the Saturday version of the Emmy Awards has not yet aired. I do not know what will be cut and what will not be cut. There is nothing yet to say about whether the TV Academy will apply a consistent standard or not to this broadcast. (I think it would be quite amusing if they edited out Griffin’s comments and also every comment making reference to any deity.)

So, I cannot say that what the TV Academy did was wrong. They haven’t done it yet. It will be interesting to find out. But, from what I have seen so far, and the choices they have made, they have painted themselves into a moral corner. The next question will be whether, if things turn out as expected, a sufficient number of people will be willing to condemn them for it.

The Irrelevance of Moral Sentiments

When some people hear that somebody is going to discuss ‘morality’, they jump to the conclusion that the discussion must be about ‘the moral sentiments’. They then jump to a set of conclusions about what is obviously true about ‘morality’ – that different people have different moral sentiments, that cultural factors play a heavy role in determining a person’s moral sentiments, that genetics also plays a role in the moral sentiments we have and how we acquire them, and that the sentiments are internal to the agent – not an intrinsic part of that which is being evaluated.

From this they assert some form of moral subjectivism and that any claim that morality can be objective as utter nonsense.

Given this definition of ‘morality’, I would have to agree with them. However, ‘morality’ as these people define it is not what I write about in this blog. I am writing about a different subject – also called ‘morality’, but substantially and importantly different from the study of moral sentiments.

Thinking of morality as the study of moral sentiments is a mistake – very much like thinking that ‘astronomy’ is the study of beliefs about things above the atmosphere.

Imagine somebody claiming to be an astronomer. However, his research involves doing brain scans on people while he asks them to consider certain aspects about things in space. The bulk of his research involves publishing the results of experiments where he describes the differences between people’s brain function and their beliefs about things in the cosmos. For example, he publishes articles where he compares and contrasts the brain functions of those who believe that the Earth is less than 10,000 years old to those who believe that the earth is 4.55 billion years old. When he talks about his research he proudly boasts that he is involved in the study of theories of planetary formation.

Given the way this researcher is defining ‘astronomy’, he too would discover that different people have different astronomical beliefs, that cultural factors play a role in the beliefs that people have, that genetics probably plays some role in how people acquire and change their beliefs, and that these beliefs are internal to the agent.

However, if he were to then conclude that any claim that astronomy can be objective is utter nonsense. However, this result comes from the fact that he has defined ‘astronomy’ as the study of brain functions and beliefs about what is in space. Most astronomers are not, in fact, people who study beliefs about things in space – they study things in space. As such, they are involved in something quite different from what this researcher has decided to call ‘astronomy’.

Language is an invention, and there is nothing inherently wrong with having more than on definition osf ‘morality’ any more than there is something wrong with having more than one definition of ‘star’ (e.g., the hydrogen type versus the Hollywood type). However, we encounter practical problems when two different definitions are so close together that people cannot tell when they are using one definition or the other. This invites people to equivocate between the two meanings, taking claims that are true about morality-1, and asserting that they are also true about morality-2, when they are not true.

I am writing this particular post to bring this confusion to the forefront so that we can recognize it and do a better job of avoiding it. Whenever I write about ‘morality’ I am not the least bit concerned with what a person would find if he studied our moral sentiments, any more than the astronomer is concerned with what would be revealed by a study of our beliefs about things in space. I am not concerned about ‘sentiments’ of right and wrong, but with right and wrong itself, just as the astronomer is not concerned with beliefs about stars and planets, but with stars and planets themselves.

You do not study stars and planets by looking at brain scans and studying the beliefs of different people in different cultures at different times.

You do not study morality by looking at brain scans and studying the sentiments of different people in different cultures at different times.

In the realm of morality, I will certainly admit that these sentiments will affect what a person will claim to be the case regarding right and wrong. However, in the realm of astronomy, it is also true that these cultural elements will affect what a person will claim is true about stars and planets, We can hardly expect that a person who grew up in ancient Greece would be able to present us with a theory of dark matter. Furthermore, people 2500 years from now (if there are people 2500 years from now) will be talking about theories that we cannot imagine. These factors do no more to prove that we cannot have a science of morality than they prove that we cannot have a science of astronomy.

The sociologist will point out that no astronomer can ever build his theories out of whole cloth. Astronomers borrow from their culture, reading what others believed and picking up cultural norms governing the ways in which astronomical beliefs are considered to have been proven. The astronomer who thinks that he can fully separate his own beliefs from these cultural and individual influences is wholly mistaken. The astronomer will answer, “So what? Please explain to me how these facts indicate that I should do my astronomical research by looking at brain scans and surveys of people’s claims about things in space. How do you justfy those conclusions from the premises you provide?”

Similarly, when somebody claims that we draw our moral beliefs from our culture and none of us can construct morality from whole cloth, I answer that this does not prove that morality is nothing more than the study of brain scans and that we must take all moral sentiments at face value. It is still a different field of study.

So, what are the differences between the study of morality-1 (brain states; moral sentiments), and the study of morality-2? What is morality-2 anyway?

I have written much of this blog discussing a theory of morality – the fact that people have desires-as-ends reasons to promote certain desires in others and inhibit certain other desires. Against this theory, anybody who points out that moral sentiments are subjective simply is not engaged in the same discussion. I can easily agree with everything that such a person may say about moral sentiments – other than the inference, “We have a moral sentiment that P; therefore, we should have a moral sentiment that P,” and still hold that such a person has not yet said a word about morality.

At this point, I typically encounter the claim that we have ways of resolving differences of opinion regarding astronomy. However, we have no such method for resolving differences in morality. Your view of right and wrong is different from mine and there is no way to prove that either of ours is correct.

Well, I have two responses to say to this.

First, if there is no way to demonstrate that A is a better answer than not-A, when what business does anybody have for choosing A? If both options are truly equal, with no reason available for accepting one over the other, then this (I would argue) suggests that anybody who then chooses one over the other is making a mistake.

Second, the response begs the question. It is effectively stating that morality cannot be about anything other than moral sentiments because our moral sentiments are subjective. The fact that moral sentiments have this problem of being unjustifiable does not prove that morality is unjustifiable unless one assumes that which is under dispute, that ‘morality’ is concerned with moral sentiments.

Ultimately, the point of this post is to clarify why I hold that facts about moral sentiments are not relevant to morality. If somebody comes to me with all sorts of information about our moral sentiments – particularly the fact that they are subjective, culturally influenced, and are different for different people in different cultures – I am going to answer that all of this is fine, but it simply is not about the same thing that I am writing about. “You might as well be talking about the molecular composition of an orange for all of its relevance to morality – to the question of what we should and should not approve of or disapprove of.

Moral Weakness or Hypocrisy

Several Republican politicians and supporters who have been vocal advocates of ‘family values’ with its condemnation of homosexuality have recently been found to engage in homosexual acts. For this, they have been charged with hypocrisy.

Time Magazine had an article, " The Psychology of Hypocrisy" this morning explaining why ‘hypocrisy’ might not be the appropriate charge to make in this case This article argued that it would be more accurate to accuse these people with ‘moral weakness’.

The difference is that hypocrisy itself is a moral crime – something to be condemned. Moral weakness, on the other hand, is something that all of us suffer from to some extent. If we were to condemn the morally weak the way we condemn the hypocritical, then we would all have to condemn ourselves. So, we tend to forgive the morally weak. They, at least, understand the wrongness of their actions, even though they have a hard time living up to their ideals.

This does not imply that moral condemnation is not warranted in case of moral weakness. The difference is that moral weakness is not a separate moral crime. The person who lies when placed in an uncomfortable situation, or who pockets the money he finds in a lost wallet, is not condemned once for the lie and once for the moral weakness. However, the person who excuses his own lies while condemning the lies of others under similar circumstances deserves not only condemnation for the lie, but separate condemnation for the hypocrisy with which he lies.

The idea that everybody is morally weak to some extent is not the claim that none of us deserve condemnation as a result, but a claim that all of us will deserve some moral condemnation throughout our lives. Some will deserve significantly more than others.

Of course, in the case of these Republicans, we introduce another complication, homosexual acts are not necessarily immoral. They can be – just the way that driving a car can be immoral when one drives recklessly or with an intent to do harm. However, there is nothing in their nature that makes them necessarily acts that a person with good desires would not perform.

In this case, the agents believed (wrongly) that homosexual acts are immoral. When speaking, they stated their beliefs. However, this belief that homosexuality is wrong did not change their desires, and their desires still motivated them to engage in homosexual acts.

Desire utilitarianism allows for an easy accounting of moral weakness. A right act is an act that a person with good desires will perform. However, the act that any given agent would perform at any instant is that act that would best fulfill his desires, given his beliefs. Unless the agent actually has good desires, and has each desire at its best strength, we are going to find difference between the way an agent acts and the way an agent should act. I think it is safe to say that no person will have all of the right desires in all of the right strengths, so we are all going to morally fail to some extent. Only, some will fail more than others.

Many drunk drivers, drug addicts, child abusers, thieves, shoplifters, and the like are people who know that their actions are wrong – that a good person would not do these things. They need not (in fact, they almost certainly have not) expressed that wrongness in desire utilitarian terms. Yet, they still know that the actions are wrong. Yet, they perform the action anyway, because their desire not to do that which is wrong is weaker than whatever desire is motivating the action they know to be wrong.

The drunk driver who campaigns against drunk driving may well be somebody who knows that drunk driving is wrong and know that it is important for society to take steps to condemn it. In fact, as he campaigns for tougher laws against drunk driving, he may well think, “I must make the laws strong enough so that they will cause even me to think twice about violating them, so that I can end this destructive and contemptible behavior I engage in.” This is not a hypocrite. This is someone who finds himself with desires that motivate him to perform actions that he knows a good person would not perform.

I have often used the charge of ‘hypocrisy’ against others. However, I have not used the term to mean merely that a person performs an act that he condemns. Rather, I have used the term to refer to those who hold a double standard. A hypocrite not only does things he condemns, but he hold an act to be acceptable when he does it that he condemns when he catches somebody else doing it.

One of my best examples of hypocrisy these days comes from liberals who insist that America withdraw from Iraq. Many of them condemn Bush for intellectual recklessness in supporting the war in Iraq. Some call him an outright liar, but others are willing to assert that he told the truth, but recklessly determined what to believe. At the very least, they recklessly believed that the Iraq invasion would be over quickly and have a very low cost.

These anti-war liberals think that the policy of withdrawing troops from Iraq will also have a very low cost. They speak about withdraw as if it could not possibly have any adverse affects. There is one affect that I am relatively certain it will have. It will allow al-Queida recruiters to claim, “God is with us. We have defeated the infidels,” which will substantially increase their recruiting and funding efforts. The most important factor in any conflict has never been the size of the army, or the sophistication of their equipment, but the morale of the soldiers. Military leaders will tell you that to win a war you do not need to destroy the enemy, you simply need to destroy their will to fight.

Anti-war liberals are conveniently ignoring these facts because it does not support their policy. They are engaging in the same type of intellectual recklessness that the Bush Administration engaged in at the start of the war. These people assert that the Bush Administration is morally culpable for not checking its assumptions, while these people express no moral objection to check their own assumptions.

This would be hypocrisy.

Why is this distinction important?

Well, if a machine is broken, and you have false beliefs about what is wrong with it, chances are this will make it more difficult (if not impossible) to fix the machine. On the other hand, if you know what is wrong with it, you will be more likely to find a solution that addresses the actual problem.

Condemning these incidents as hypocrisy simply means that agents should put more effort into making sure that their behavior conforms to their own moral standards. As I suggested above, one of the things some of these agents might have been trying to do is to strengthen society’s condemnation of homosexuality so that it might have a stronger affect on their own behavior, and they would commit fewer sins – simply because the opportunity to do so would be lessened.

This does not actually fix the problem. In fact, since homosexual acts are not wrong in themselves, this makes the problem worse.

On the other hand, if we get the moral diagnosis correct, we will say that to these Republicans that they have been twice harmed. First, because of the deception that was fed to them when they were children and too young to think for themselves, they have grown up to be people devoted to activities that are harmful to others. Their chance to be good people who have made a positive contribution to society is greatly diminished. Second, because the list of people whose lives are being turned upside down by these false moral claims are their own.

You are not a bad person just because you want to have sex with somebody of the same gender. You are a bad person because you want to do things that are harmful to others. Now, take a good look at your life. Of all of the things that you have done with your life, where were you and what were you doing when you were making the lives of others worse than those lives could have been?

Those people who have been dead for 2000 years were as much in the dark about the moral universe as they were about the scientific universe, and holding them up as the model of moral perfection is not only insane, it is harmful – it turns otherwise good people such as yourself into people who harm not only others, but people who harm even themselves.

So, quit devoting your energies to policies that harm people who you know are not hurting anybody, and start going after the people who are doing real harm. If you do that, you might actually accomplish the good that you want to accomplish.

I do not epect this type of claim to convince the person it is aimed at. That person will probably continue along his or her chosen path out of inertia alone. However, if this is said loud enough and often enough, somebody would hear it who will actually ask himself, "Do I really have good reason to make others merable by supporting this type of legislation? Is this, perhaps, really another ancient moral mistake?"

As the cultural attitude shifts, then perhaps fewer politicians will feel the need to pursue these types of policies, or think that they are electable when their campaign promise is to do harm to others in the name of God.

Happy (2nd) Blogbirthday To Me

Hello, reader.

I'm back from vacation, and I am ready to start another brand new year of Atheist Ethicist.

As it turns out, this is the second anniversary of my first post in this blog.

As it turns out, I am also sleep writing. Having just gotten back from vacation, I am very much in need of a good night's sleep. My wife and I travelled home last night (leaving at 4:00 yesterday, getting home at 6:00 this morning), and I have an annoying problem of not being able to sleep during daylight. So my brain is not fully functional.

Who said that!

Who said that my brain has never been fully functional!

I heard that!

Anyway, if we can put aside the heckling from the studio audience, I want to say that I have found the work that I have done here extremely valuable, at least to me.

Over the break, I wrote a book, Good Lives and Good People, about how atheists can live good a good life and be a good person. Now, I hate to give away the ending . . . okay, I actually answer this question in the first chapter, but a good life is a life that contains those elements that would fulfill good desires.

Recall, one of the claims made within desire utilitarianism is that all value exists in the form of relationships between states of affairs and desires. This means that if we are going to evaluate lives, the only type of value that exists for a life is in terms of a life's relationship between that which is true of a life and a set of desires. A good life is going to be a life that we have reasons to recommend pursuing. The only "relationship between the properties of life an desires" that we have reason to promote is a life that would fulfill good desires.

Some might complain that this is not good enough for a good life. A good life must have something else - some special quality independent of desire.

Not good enough?

This is the only good that is real. An individual may, of course, come to want some other type of good - intrinsic good, transcendental good, divine good. However, the world will always thwart such a desire - those types of goodness do not exist. Because these are desires that cannot be fulfilled, they are desires that should be avoided.

Anyway, this blog would certainly count as part of a'good life'. Assuming, of course, that I am actually doing some good with it.

I have actually given up quite a bit to be in this place where I can write this blog. I gave up a lucrative job offer to go to graduate school - and to study in a field that does not produce job offers. The philosphy department sent a written warning to those they accepted into graduate school saying that there was little chance to find work in that particular field. I went anyway. My application to graduate school said why. I needed to learn these things. I was not going to study moral philosophy to get a job. I was not even going to get a degree. I was going to get an education. That is what I received.

Even today, I would likely be a much better computer programmer if, like other programmers, I were to focus all of my attention on that job, writing programs both on and off the job. However, I have something else that I do when I am off the job, so I am not as good a programmer as I could be.

When I think about giving it up, those thoughts last about 1.7 seconds. (Though, I will state explicitly, because I have much to gain and nothing to lose, that if anybody should know of a way that I could quit doing this blog part time . . . and write and research these issues full time . . . I would be pleased to listen to the proposition.)

Spending a week with my nieces and nephews, wondering what type of future they may have, I really could not live with myself if I decided to hang this up and do nothing. I could not do that to them. Though my writings do not have much of a chance of making any significant contribution to their future, ceasing to write will guarantee no useful contribution at all.

While I was on vacation, I read a National Geographic article mostly on religion in Pakistan. It was largely a story of so many lives ruined, and the teaching and spreading of idiotic claims - like the claims that Pakistan's earthquake was caused by the will of Allah. These types of claims are not only false, they are morally negligent. Only through understanding earthquakes can we avoid future catastrophies. Those who obsecure the scientific facts for these phenomena are setting people up for death and injury. They are people who leave a trail of maimed and broken bodies in their wake, killed by ignorance.

As those forces of ignorance gain power, they provide an ever increasing threat to my neices' and nephews' future - and their children. Am I to sit back and do nothing?

For all practical purposes, my life ends when I can no longer make some sort of useful contribution to the subjects that I write about. I may stay alive, but that life becomes insignificant at that point. My wife knows this. Those are my criteria for when she is supposed to pull the plug on my existence. When there is no reasonable expectation that I could write another post that made a real contribution to some subject under dispute.

The critic may say that I have already passed the point where I could make any real contributions. Or that I never reached it, and never will. Perhaps that is correct. This theory does allow it to be the case that a person can believe his life has significance when it does not. Many who have served a church and spent their lives promoting a religion fall into this category. The ends they pursued did not exist, and they ended up promoting myth and superstition, which in turn lead to death, disease, and injury.

Those things happen. However, all a person can do is try.

Tomorrow, I try again.

What I Did On My Summer Vacation

While I was away on my summer vacation, I worked on a new book. I had planned to work on a new book when I left. However, it turns out that the book I planned to work on, and the book I came back with, are not the same book.

And this was not a casual effort. My goal was to be substantially done with the book when I returned, so I worked on it almost constantly in order to get it done, minus some time to read a book on the civil war and to watch some episodes I missed of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.

The book I ended up with is called, "Good Lives and Good People".

The way that I came up with this book is that I started to cut and paste postings from my blog site (which I had downloaded before leaving on vactaion) into the book that I intended to write, and discovered that I had a section that seemed to stand quite well on its own.

This is not just a collection of postings from my web site. That is what I started out to do, but the stand-alone section that I ended up with needed some substantial work to get it to hold together. I edited it extensively.

People who know me know how I edit.

The way that I describe my editing process - which is only a slight exaggeration - is by saying, "I ended up replacing everything except a comma on Page 44, and I moved that comma to Page 66."

That's actually what took so much effort - rewriting everything.

Here's what I ended up with:

About 170 pages that look at how to evaluate lives and people, to show that an atheist (or, at least, this atheist) can determine if a life is a good life or a person is a good person.

I did not go heavily into theory. I had already written that book, and did not want to simply write it again. This book is more of an application of the conclusions reached in that other book to a practical problem of trying to determine what counts as a good life and a good person.

And I wrote it with a heavy focus on atheism.

This is what concerned me in writing it. You've got all of these people who claim that atheists cannot come up with a way of talking about a life that has meaning and value, or talking about morality, without borrowing from Christian concepts. Some even argue that the mere fact that atheists use moral concepts is proof that they have some concept of a God.

Against that view, I wanted to make sure that this book approached those issues while paying attention to the debate between atheists and theists on the possibility of living a good life or being a good person.

After a few chapters on good lives and good people, I go on to discuss why it is the case that theism presents obstacles to living a good life or being a good person that atheism avoids.

I then address some issues in the general arena of 'militant atheists' and the attitudes that atheists should take towards religion.

Anyway, at this point, I would like to ask if there are people in the studio audience who would be willing to volunteer to read this manuscript and to tell me all of the really stupid things I said in it. I'm not just talking about the creative ways in which I spell words and the way I might, on occasion, write sentences without verbs, nouns, or punctuation. I'm talking about scribbling notes like, "This is the most absurd claim I have ever heard any human being make. Go find <> by <>, and you can see just how stupid this is."

If you want me to give you a PDF of the manuscript, just send me an email and let me know. Click on that 'contact' thingy in the top right section of this blog.

Except, you have to promise to have your comments in to me by October 1st. I'm not handing out free copies to whoever wants them. I really want this manuscript cleaned up, and I want to hear from somebody who is willing to help me do it.

Thank you.

Alonzo Fyfe

Vacation

I will be going away on vacation for 10 days. The next time you will hear from me should be the night of September 9th.

The traffic reports for this blog tell me that many readers are college students. I would like to welcome those students back to the blog.

While I am away, if you are looking for something interesting to read, I had an interesting discussion with a few members of the studio audience over the relationship between beliefs, desires, and value. That exchange started on August 8th with Potential versus Actual Desires and ended on August 21st.

The comments in this case are particularly worth reading.

Also, last year, I was writing a series of posts on the weekends covering the Beyond Belief 2006 conference. This conference was attended by a number of excellent thinkers such as Paul and Patricia Churchland, Richard Dawkins, and Neil deGrasse Tyson. I wrote a posting about every presentation given at the conference.

The June 6th post, Beyond Belief 2006: Summary contains a link to each of the posts tied to that series.

In the mean time, please feel free to help yourself to some chocolate and Diet Dr. Pepper. You're free to talk among yourselves in the comments section. I have over 700 posts for you to browse through, or you can use the search feature to find subjects that interest you.

I will see you when I get back.

Alonzo Fyfe

Morality and the Possibility of Harm

As I understand it, the driver who rear-ended the bus my wife was involved in, got out of his vehicle, stepped onto the bus, and asked, “Is anybody hurt?” He then said, “I’m going to go move my vehicle.”

He then got into his vehicle and drove off.

I am not going to say that this story is accurate. For the purposes of this essay, it does not matter whether it is accurate. The mere possibility is enough to illustrate the points that I want to write about today.

When I was in high school, I became distracted by some fire engines and police cars at a nearby house. When I turned my attention back to the road, I found that I had drifted, and was near to rear-ending a parked car. I hit the breaks, and stopped before doing any damage.

I can well imagine the driver of that truck suffering the same lapse in judgment. And because of that momentary lapse, he hit a bus during rush hour.

According to what my wife told me, he then got out of his truck and came up to the back door of the bus. He asked, “Is anybody hurt?” He then said, “I’m going to move my truck. I’ll be right back.” Only he took off.

Again, I can well imagine an individual in that situation, seeing how much harm was done, suffering an overwhelming panic. I can imagine myself in that situation – with all of the things that I wanted to do in my life, and all of the things that I have tried to do – undone, with a short lapse in judgment.

“It’s not fair. I don’t deserve this.”

Of course, neither did the people on the bus – and the only thing they did was seek a ride home on public transportation. This is hardly an act worthy of being tossed around inside of a bus.

The real universe is indifferent to our survival, or to the quality of our lives. It simply does not care if a momentary lapse of judgment causes so much harm. It does not care if its laws create tsunamis and plagues that wipe out hundreds of thousands to millions of people who have done nothing wrong. The universe does not care, so it is up to us to care.

As much as I can understand what this imaginary driver (I do not know if any of these statements are true of the real incident), it is still important to assign moral responsibility for these momentary lapses in judgment.

There is an important difference between that imaginary driver and me. When I suffered through these near accidents while I was a teenager, I learned a lesson. Driving was a dangerous activity. I asked myself whether driving was so important that it was worth not only the price of a car and the gasoline that fueled it, but the potential for hitting a bus full of passengers. I can easily imagine driving down a street, seeing a kid on a bike as he rides out in front of my car, the crunch, and the mangled body laying on the pavement.

Those types of thoughts convinced me that I did not want to drive. When my first driver’s license expired, I did not renew it.

My wife does not drive either, by the way – because medical problems prohibit her from driving. So, our household does not have a vehicle of any type (unless you count bicycles),. We make our way on public transportation.

I saw another story that is similar to the case of the hapless driver. This story was about an individual who picked up a rock and tossed it over the edge of a cliff, then leaned over, just in time to see the rock strike a comber coming up the hill. The climber was killed instantly.

Luke Rodolph, who threw the rock, did not run. He did not try to claim that this was an accident. He confessed.

Again, I could imagine the horror of somebody who was basically a responsible person, suddenly discovering that he had done something horribly wrong. I can well imagine it because, as a young teenager, I once threw a rock over a cliff into a fog bank below. The fog cleared after that, and I saw that there was a road below me. There was nobody on the road at the time. I learned a valuable lesson. However, people could have died, and I would have been responsible.

The universe does not care about the size of the price tag that it attaches to the lessons it teaches.

It take the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocent people caught in the middle of an ill-planned war, or vacationing and living on the shores of the Indian Ocean, or a whole planet full of people wiped out by a celestial impact that some foresight and planning could have prevented.

It is sometimes argued that if a particular type of mistake is common – if anybody can do it – that it is wrong to hold people morally responsible for those mistakes. However, if a type of mistake puts a lot of people at risk of great harm, then we need stronger barriers – internal and external – against making those types of mistakes, not weaker. We have reason to make those mistakes less common by putting up stronger psychological barriers to committing those mistakes, not more common by telling people “It’s alright. It doesn’t matter.”

I argue that this is a significant problem for much of what passes for moral philosophy these days. Philosophers test their moral intuitions against highly contrived and almost-never-going-to-happen-in-the-real-world situations. Morality is not a discovery of properties inherent in nature and nothing for a special faculty of ‘moral intuition’ to pick out. It is an institution that aims to manipulate the desires of individuals to prevent them from creating real-world harms to real-world people in real-world possible circumstances.

I suspect that there is a far greater chance that my life, health, and well-being will is more at risk from some driver’s momentary lapse in judgment than from some doctor needing to take five organs to save five patients. As a result, I have far stronger reason to inhibit others from suffering these momentary lapses in judgment, than from refraining to kill me to harvest my organs, or to need to kill somebody else to save me from death. (The ‘need to kill’ part is important here. If doctors have sufficient organs coming in from voluntary sources this diminishes the magnitude of the significant. Furthermore, I will have the ability to reduce the risk further by promoting the voluntary contribution of one’s organs.

We have reason to be paying far more moral attention to those who are guilty of momentary lapses of judgment in every-day circumstances that could get people killed, then those whose sentiments might cause them to behave in appropriately under circumstances that will almost certainly never arise.

Physics vs. Prayer

I have always been quite surprised at how kind and considerate emergency response personnel (police, fire fighters, paramedics) can be. I do not think I have ever met one who struck me as an individual who was just doing his job and collecting a paycheck. They have always provided a level of kindness and concern that could never be motivated by “just collecting a paycheck.”

Yesterday evening, the bus that my wife was riding home stopped at the stop before hers, when a fairly large vehicle hit the back of the bus at full force. This was at the stop before that which my wife Lesley typically gets off at. She called me from the bus (cell phones are a wonderful invention) and I walked over to meet her. Seven or eight people were going to the hospital. Lesley’s injuries were minor. We spent about 4 hours in the hospital, then walked home.

The driver of the other vehicle left the scene, but was arrested a short while later. Or, at least, a person was arrested who was alleged to have been the same person who left the scene of the accident.

The laws of physics being what they are, the impact imparted energy into the bus, causing the bus to suddenly accelerate forward. However, the impact did not impart the same energy onto the passengers of the bus (inertial dampeners not yet being standard equipment for RTD busses). So, the passengers, being at rest, tended to stay at rest until acted upon by another force. That force was typically some other part of the bus.

The laws of physics being what they are . . .

This is one of the nice things about having people understand the laws of physics. The laws of physics being what they are, it is possible to make reasonable predictions about what would happen to the bodies on a bus, when the bus is struck from behind by a fairly massive vehicle going appreciably faster than the bus (relatively speaking).

Knowing these things, it becomes possible to determine explain and predict what will likely happen to a bus under such circumstances, and to make design changes to reduce the amount of damage that people are likely to suffer.

Using these tools, it is possible to preserve and protect human life.

In fact, I would go so far as to suggest that a better understanding of physics and an application of those principles to events such as rear-ending a bus will do far more to prevent injury and death to humans than ‘praying for a safe trip’ ever will. Even if society’s investment in ‘praying for a safe trip’ (in terms of the hours that people spend and the institutions established that cater to the practice of praying for a safe trip) were a million times that invested in understanding the laws of physics and applying that understanding to the design of busses, the physics option will still save more lives and prevent more injury than the prayer option.

In fact, I hold that the prayer option does not save any lives or prevent any injury – that the only practical tool we have for this end is the application of physics to the problem of bodies in a bus when rear-ended by trucks.

Another aspect of the case that I mentioned above is that the driver of the vehicle that hit the bus left the scene of the accident. The police apprehended a person whom they believe was driving the vehicle that hit the bus. I understand that they have strong reason for believing this – that they caught the person in the vehicle as he was leaving the scene.

The laws of physics being what they are, it seems most reasonable to believe that the person who was apprehended was the same person who was driving the vehicle that struck the bus and who left the scene of the accident.

The point that I want to stress here is that the decision that the person arrested and the person who fled the scene of the accident are the same person is a conclusion that we tend to insist be based on evidence. If we were to discover that the person was arrested because some detective, used an Ouija Board that spelled out the name of the accused, this would not be considered good enough to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

What if the detective, instead of using an Ouija Board, reported that he prayed and asked God to identify the culprit? If there is a God, then He should know who the person is, right? So, it seems, we would have to consider this to be a very reliable source. If God said that the accused is guilty, then the accused is guilty. He might as well confess.

Of course, we do not accept this type of evidence in a court of law either. In fact, we consider it highly suspect. Though, I am curious as to why those people who will not accept religious testimonial in a court of law where the fate of a single person is at stake, have no problems hearing that President Bush used the same type of evidence to determine matters of national policy – that he prays for guidance, and does whatever he thinks God tells him to do. We will not send an accused criminal to jail on the basis of this type of evidence, but we will condemn millions of people to war (as soldiers, or as potential ‘collateral damage’) based on this type of evidence.

I am not saying that legislation requires the same standards of proof that is required in criminal courts – proof beyond a reasonable doubt.

[Okay, sometimes I argue that legislation requires this type of evidence. A right means that there is a presumption in favor of a particular view, and that this presumption must be outweighed by the evidence against it. A right to freedom of speech means that freedom of speech is the default position. However, freedom of speech is not an absolute right – people cannot say whatever they want to say whenever they want to say it. The proverbial case of (falsely) yelling, “Fire!” in a crowded theater is an example. However, the right to freedom of speech means that the judges should start with a presumption in favor of the speaker, and side with those who would silence him only upon proof beyond a reasonable doubt. However, this does not apply to all legislation, only to legislation that is stood up against a right.]

What I am saying is that the same types of evidence permissible in a trial are the only types of evidence that are legitimate to deciding how to vote on legislation.

Along these lines, there is another question that I would like to make a standard part of the political process. I will add this to the list of questions that I want to see become a standard part of the political process. “Candidate A, this question is for you. In deciding on how to vote for a policy, will you base your decision only on the types of evidence that would be acceptable in a court of law? Or will you go outside that list to include evidence considered sufficiently unreliable to justify sending even one person to jail – evidence such as divine revelation, astrological calculations, or favors for those who contribute to your campaign?”

We are accustomed to hearing of the big ticket items where religion has been a source of harm. Yet, we can find our examples even in something more mundane, like a traffic accident. Here is an excellent opportunity to take the time to ask which option would save the most lives and prevent the most injury; prayer, or physics? If we add up all of the small gains that we could make in human well-being with a population that devoted a fraction of the time they now spend studying scripture to studying science, it may reduce the big-ticket items to insignificance.