What ought a person to do?

I have a question from the studio audience.

I've only just discovered your desire utilitarianism, and it seems to have a lot of promise. How is it used, though, to make decisions in today's world?

So, you are a desire utilitarian and you have a decision to make in today’s world.

The first thing to note is that these types of questions are ‘should’ or ‘ought’ questions. They take the form, “What should I do?” or “What should somebody who is in this type of situation do?”

“Should” questions are questions about ‘reasons for action that exist’. The question, “Should I do X?” is a question that is asking, “What reasons-for-action exist in favor of, or in opposition to, my doing X?” So, we are going to make our decision about what to do in today’s world by looking at ‘reasons for action that exist in favor of, or in opposition to’ various options.

The first thing that I would recommend is clearing off of the table and getting rid of the things we can’t use. Specifically, we need to clear away all of the reasons for action that do not exist. If we were going to discuss the motion of body through space we are going to be looking at the forces that exist and that are acting on the body. Forces that do not exist are irrelevant. In the same way, reasons for action that do not exist are also irrelevant.

The set of reasons for action that do not exist are any reasons for action associated with a God. God does not exist, so reasons for action that are linked to God do not exist. Even if God did exist, He would have just one set of desires, and there would be no ‘reason for action that exists’ for giving his desires greater weight than those of any other person.

Intrinsic values or ‘fundamental moral oughts’ do not exist either. These fundamental moral oughts are basic moral entities from which all of the more complex moral duties and obligations that we see in the world come from – in the same way that fundamental physical properties explain the complexities of stars, living organisms, and universities. Postulating the existence of fundamental moral oughts that exist in a realm distinct from the physical universe but which can interact with it (at least so as to make us aware of their presence) represents a form of dualism that we should accept only if the evidence forces us to.

Subjective values also do not exist. An ‘ought’ that can spring into existence or disappear merely by thinking of it is a work of fiction. An imaginary dragon that I think lives outside of my house and will eat me if I decide to leave may be ‘true for me’ in the sense that I will act as if it exists. However, it is still an imaginary dragon – it is not a dragon that exists. Similarly, an ‘ought’ that exists only because I have thought it into existence, and that disappears the instant that I quit thinking about it . . . an ‘ought’ that is only ‘true for me’ while I believe it – is in the same state as the imaginary dragon.

We are looking for reasons for action that are real – that are actually put to work explaining and predicting real-world events. The only reasons for action that exist are desires. All other reasons for action can be cleared off of the table and thrown away – they do not exist.

When we look at real value we are going to look at the propositions that are true of a state of affairs and look at the propositions that are the objects of various desires. Whenever a proposition is true of a state of affairs that is the object of a desire, we are going to say that the state of affairs fulfills that desire. People seek to act so as to fulfill their desires – to create states of affairs in which the propositions are true. These are the type of ‘reasons for action’ that desires are. These are the types of ‘reasons for action’ that exist.

When we compare a state of affairs to reasons for action that exist (desires) we determine if people have reasons for action to bring about that state of affairs. We answer the ‘should’ question by determining the degree to which there are reasons for action that exist for realizing a state of affairs. Reasons for action exist to the degree that propositions that are true within that state of affairs are propositions that are the object of the most and strongest desires.

This is where the desire-fulfilling act-utilitarian stops. This is where act-utilitarian theories make their mistakes. Those theories say that there is nothing we can do to evaluate ends. Unlike beliefs, where our belief that a proposition is true can be compared to whether or not the proposition is true in fact, we cannot compare our desire for a state in which a proposition is true with the intrinsic value of that state. Intrinsic value does not exist.

Desire utilitarians go from this fact to the conclusion that we cannot evaluate ends. They are mistaken.

We cannot evaluate ends as ends. However, every end is also, at the same time, a means to the fulfillment of other ends. We can evaluate an end as means in the same way we can evaluate everything else, in terms of the degree to which having a desire tends to fulfill or thwart other desires.

The desire-fulfillment act-utilitarian only looks at whether an act fulfills the most and strongest desires. If it does, then the act is permissible – even obligatory. However, we can imagine an act such as rape fulfilling the more and stronger desires – the rapists desire rape more than the victim is adverse to being raped. So, in these cases, desire-fulfilling act-utilitarianism seems to justify rape.

But desire utilitarianism does not. Desire utilitarianism not only compares states of affairs to desires (to see if the state of affairs would fulfill or thwart those desires), it looks at the desires themselves to determine if people generally have reason to inhibit or promote those desires.

The desire to rape is a desire-thwarting desire. It is a desire that people generally have reason to get rid of.

We can see the problem with the desire to rape by imagining that we have control over a knob that will generally increase or decrease the intensity and spread of a desire to rape throughout a community. To the degree that we increase this desire to rape, to that degree we increase the desires that will be thwarted. Either the desires of the rapist will have to be thwarted, or the desires of the victims will have to be thwarted. The more and stronger the desire to rape, the more and stronger the desires that will be thwarted.

The best place to turn this knob is down to zero – so that there is no desire to rape. If this were the case, then no victims will have their desires thwarted through rape, and there would be no rapists who would have to go through the frustration of having a desire to rape go unfulfilled. This is a desire that people generally have reason to weaken or to eliminate.

So, we are going to condemn the rapist, and we are going to use the existence of any particular rape as evidence that we are dealing with a somebody who is not a good person – somebody who has good desires. We have reason to condemn rape, not to permit it, as a way of teaching children to acquire the aversion to rape that will keep all of us safe. It does not matter whether a given rape will fulfill more desires than it thwarts.

The mere fact that a particular rape fulfills desires is enough of a problem. We would be better off if a given rape fulfilled more desires, and we have reason to create a society where this is the case (as much as possible). Which means that we have reason to act so as to inhibit any desire to rape, which means condemning any person who has the desire as a way of discouraging its formation and growth.

So, briefly, this is how desire utilitarianism is applied to a problem in today’s world. Examine the states of affairs that would be produced by some actions (according to the best of one’s ability to predict). Determine the desires that would be fulfilled by that state. Determine whether the desires will tend to fulfill or thwart other desires. Encourage people to act to bring about states that a person with good desires would bring about, and discourage them from bringing about states that a person with good desires would avoid bringing about.

E2.0: Patricia Churchland: The Relation of Science and Morality

This is the 25th in a new series of weekend posts taken from the presentations at the Salk Institute’s “Beyond Belief: Enlightenment 2.0.”. I have placed an index of essays in this series in an introductory post, Enlightenment 2.0: Introduction.

Patricia Churchland spoke at the Beyond Belief conference last year, and began her discussion the same way that she began this one. She attempted to draw a link between morality and brain chemistry by showing that there are certain physical characteristics in the brain associated with pair bonding versus promiscuity in certain species of mice. From this, she attempted to imply that there was a relationship between brain chemistry and the morality of pair bonding versus promiscuity in mice.

I hold that it is obviously the case that different behaviors ultimate rest on different features in the brains of different agents. I have little doubt of the ability to take behavioral dispositions and trace them, at least theoretically to facts about the brain.

However, one of the things that I seriously doubt is that you can take a characteristic, discover the underlying brain functions associated with that characteristic, and in that brain function discover its morality. It is at least theoretically possible to take the brains of rapists, and the brains of homosexuals, and discover how each is related to parts of the brains having particular structures.

There are some who would want to argue that the mere fact that homosexuality can be associated with a particular brain structure, that this implies that homosexuality is not immoral. Every time a discovery is made along these lines we are told that this means that homosexuality is not a choice, and that homosexuals should be free to engage in practices consistent with their nature.

Yet, we should well expect that the disposition to rape will also be linked to particular brain structures. We would certainly not accept the argument that this implies that rape is not a matter of choice, and that rapists should therefore be free to engage in practices consistent with their nature. This argument linking brain structure to moral permissibility is completely invalid. All dispositions – obligatory, permissible, and prohibited – are (at least theoretically) associated with certain brain structures. Being associated with a brain structure, and being morally permissible, are not the same thing.

We do not find moral obligation, permission, and prohibition for a disposition in the fact that it is associated with an underlying brain structure. I have been arguing that we find the moral obligation, permission, and prohibition of a disposition by measuring its relationship to other dispositions. What makes rape morally prohibited while homosexual behavior is morally permissible is that the former is a disposition that thwarts the desires of others (thus giving others a reason to prevent it), while the latter is a disposition that does not require the thwarting of other desires.

I have also argued that morality is only relevant when we are talking about malleable desires. By this I mean that social forces, particularly the forces of praise, condemnation, reward, and punishment, can have an effect on the disposition. This means that morality is involved where these behaviors have an effect on the underlying brain structure, making brain structures that tend to thwart other desires less common, and brain structures that fulfill other desires more common.

The ways in which social forces affect brain structures, and the effect of those different brain structures on behavior, is another area where science can make meaningful contributions to morality. Science may tell us that certain brain structures are immune to social conditioning. If this is true of a brain structure associated with behavior that thwarts the desires of others, it means that we should consider that disposition an ‘illness’ rather than an ‘evil’. We call it ‘evil’ when social condemnation can make the disposition less common; we call it ‘illness’ when social condemnation can have no such effect.

So, assume that Patricia Churchland is correct when she says that oxytocin levels have an effect on promiscuity (higher oxytocin levels means less promiscuity). Let us also assume that science tells us that promiscuity tends to be desire-thwarting (in that it contributes to the spread of disease and breaks apart families to the detriment of the children within those families. Finally, let us assume that science discovers a relationship between certain social practices (the condemnation of adultery and the praise of monogamy) tends to promote oxytocin production in the brain.

Where these three items apply, we have reason to instruct society to use its forces of praise and condemnation to promote monogamy and reduce promiscuity. The effect, in this case, would be to reduce the desire for sex with people other than a pair-bonded mate, which will then reduce the spread of disease and protect children from the dangers of living in a single-parent household.

Please note that I am not assuming, nor am I arguing, that any of the three propositions in my opening paragraph are true. I am simply arguing for the implications that findings such as this might have on designing a moral system for a society.

It is often said that science cannot provide us with moral principles. Here is at least a hypothetical example in which it can. Here is a set of hypothetical examples in which people have a reason to use social forces to praise one type of behavior and to condemn another, as proved by science.

This analysis is quite different from what usually hear from biologists and evolutionists regarding the link between morality and biology. The typical link that biologists tend to draw is that if we can find a brain structure associated with the attitude that X is wrong that this proves that morality springs from biology, and somehow ‘justifies’ the attitude that X is wrong.

However, this is like saying that if the attitude ‘God exists’ can be traced to a certain brain structure (which, at least theoretically, it can be), that this proves that the attitude is justified. There is no difference between this inference and the inference that the fact that one has traced a moral attitude (homosexuality is sinful) to a mental state to the conclusion that the state is justified (that homosexuality is, indeed, sinful).

Of course an attitude is going to have a biological basis. This is true of all attitudes – attitudes that are justified, and attitudes that are not justified. It tells us nothing . . . absolutely nothing . . . about whether or not that attitude is justified. Those who find a biological basis for a moral attitude and who claim that the study stops there – that science has solved the question of morality – simply demonstrate that they do not understand what it is they are studying.

I can imagine that some people may take my opposition to the way that science studies morality to mean that I am opposed to the scientific study of morality. At the same time, they may note that I hold that moral claims are objective, and that moral statements are subject to the same standards of evidence as any other kind of scientific statement.

Let me clarify this distinction.

Science has a lot to say about morality. However, at the same time, the bulk of scientists who think they are studying morality are studying nothing of the kind. What the bulk of scientists are studying falls victim to the false inference that, “I have shown that moral attitude X has a biological basis; therefore, I have shown that moral attitude X is justified.” Scientists who make this inference are studying moral attitudes, but they are far from studying the justification of moral claims. The justification of moral claims cannot be found in this research. It has to be found elsewhere. However, the ‘elsewhere’ itself is something that can be studied scientifically.

The same is true of beliefs. A scientist would be a fool to think that because he has discovered a biological foundation for a particular belief that he has shown the belief to be justified. The justification for a belief rests somewhere other than in its biological foundation. Yet, the fact that the justification of beliefs is to be found elsewhere does not imply that the justification of beliefs is outside of the realm of science. Indeed, the scientific method itself is very much tied to the justification of beliefs. The scientific method is a system for justifying beliefs.

The point is not that science cannot provide us with information useful in making moral judgments. The point is that you do not find that information in the mere fact that an attitude has a biological underpinning. It is found, instead, in the relationships that an attitude has to other attitudes – to the degree that beliefs cohere with other beliefs, and to the degree that desires are in harmony with other desires.

Perspective on the Pledge Book Ready If Needed

Greetings Readers:

I spent the weekend working on the book A Perspective on the Pledge. I read the book out loud in order to try to catch every error that might be contained within. I rewrote a few whole sections, and read them out loud again, until everything sounded the way I wanted it to.

This has taken away from my opportunity to work on this blog for the past two days, but I think that the project is important and worth the effort.

I still have not heard from Prometheus Books - either in the form of an invitation to submit the manuscript, or in terms of a rejection letter. However, it is possible that the 0th Circuit Court of Appeals could release its opinion on 'under God' and 'In God We Trust' any day, and I simply want this to be available at that time.

So, I built a version that I could make available on a moment's notice.

Now that I have this version done, I want to address the question, "Why do you think that this project is so important?"

I have one argument for saying that it is not important. I have argued repeatedly in this blog that the propositions, "God exists" and "God does not exist" are morally irrelevant. Neither proposition tells you anything about what you should or should not do. Those moral principles all come from the things that one adds to the propositions "God exists" and "God does not exist." On both sides, those propositions are widely varied, allowing theists and non-theists alike to give their allegiance to the most noble and the most horrendous human enterprises.

So, this is not a defense of atheists, and is not a part of the atheist/theist debate. One of the features in this story is that two of the heroes in the story are white characters.

For any reader who is not familiar with the story, it concerns a black student's protest over a pledge of allegiance to 'one white nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.'

It is no more problematic for a theist to recognize the injustice of a government declaring that those who hold 'a God exists' are to be favored over those who hold 'it is not the case that a God exists', then it is for a white person to realize the injustice of a pledge of allegiance to a white nation.

Yet, it is also the case that atheists are the victims of this injustice - whether they realize it or not. (I do draw an analogy in this story between an atheist who finds no problem with a pledge of allegiance to 'one nation under God' and a black student who sees no problem with a pledge of allegiance to 'one white nation').

The harms that I believe can be attributed to this injustice include:

Psychological harm done to children who adopt atheism, many of whom are made to feel ashamed of themselves or 'anxious' about the hostility they might receive - a hostility that begins with and has the official endorsement of the U.S. Government. I hold that this is why atheists are politically impotent - because atheists, from a very young age, are caused to think of themselves as unworthy and, as a result, would rather hide than protest the injustices against them.

The Pledge and the Motto do, I argue, have the effect of turning people off to the idea that no God exists. Young children are simply made more comfortable in the 'accepting' climate of being 'under God' and in trusting in God, and so form an aversion to the possibility of not having these qualities.

The Pledge and the Motto promote the idea that atheists do not share American values - that a patriot has to be 'under God' and 'trust in God'. This is what makes it possible for one President to say that atheists are not patriots and are not really citizens, another to say that he will only appoint judges who agree that our rights come from God, for every major political candidate to declare his or her belief in God, because half of the people are taught by the government to vote against anybody who is not 'under God' or who does not trust in God.

So, we have a political system that allows a candidate to be a fan of evidence-based rationality, or to be honest, but not both.

This is not to say that every atheist would be a better candidate for public office than any theist. What it says is that if there is even one good atheist candidate - one who is a fan of evidence-based rationality and who is honest, we should not have a political system that bars her from public office. That is certainly not in our nation's interests.

Furthermore, as the story points out, 'under God' in the Pledge and 'In God We Trust' means that our national motto and our national pledge is to be a nation of bigots. This is not a state to which a great nation should aspire. In fact, it is a state that a great nation should seek to avoid.

When the story breaks that the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has once again declared 'under God' in the Pledge of Allegiance unconstitutional, we will once again hear a great hue and cry against the forces of secularism. Candidates who appeal to fundamentalists will use this as a rallying cry to raise hundreds of millions of dollars. Candidates who appeal to a more liberal crowd will need to declare their opposition to this ruling. A few dissenting voices will attempt to defend the court using traditional arguments grounded on church/state separation - arguments that nobody has listened to before, and will ignore in the future.

This book attempts to present a new argument - to give a new perspective to the Pledge debate. In the book, I am not concerned with the Constitution. The story might as well have been sat in a country that does not believe in the story's equivalence to church/state separation. It argues that, even in a country that does not have Constitutional provisions prohibiting the establishment of a religion, fair and just people would have to oppose 'under God' in the Pledge and 'In God We Trust' as the motto.

Another argument that we can expect to hear when the news once again breaks is the offense argument. I actually expect this to show up as a fundamentalist's straw-man characterization of the secular argument, than to show up as the secular argument itself. The claim will be that secularists are grounding their opposition to the law on the basis of offense. "I am offended by any mention of God in the public square, so I am going to seek to prohibit it." Of course this straw man is easy to defeat, which is why fundamentalists will offer it as the secular 'justification' for opposition to these practices.

Rather than repeating the same old arguments, which will likely have the same old results, I want to throw a new argument out there for people to consider, in the hopes of generating some new results.

It is an argument that, unlike a technical legal brief, does not require an advanced degree to understand. And it is an argument that, unlike the offense argument, actually provides justification for taking a stand against 'under God' and 'In God We Trust'.

So, these are the reasons why I am putting my effort into this project.

E2.0: Ronald de Sousa: A Passion for Science

This is the 24th in a new series of weekend posts taken from the presentations at the Salk Institute’s “Beyond Belief: Enlightenment 2.0.”. I have placed an index of essays in this series in an introductory post, Enlightenment 2.0: Introduction.

In the previous presentation, Greg Epstein argued for a culture of humanism, and ended his presentation with a song. In this presentation, Ronald d’Sousa speaks about developing a passion for science, and ends in a poem.

In listening to de Sousa’s presentation, I noticed that he blurred a distinction that I think it is important to unblur. There has been a dispute among atheist bloggers about the legitimacy of ‘framing’. In the context of this debate, ‘framing’ means paying attention to how certain facts may be perceived by the public, and presenting those facts in ways that will make them more acceptable.

In the political world, this type of practice is known as ‘spin.’ Politicians do this in order to give their policies an appearance that might not be totally accurate, but will make it easier to get past the people. Thus, a bill that allows companies to poison their neighbors by removing mandatory restrictions on air pollution and replacing them with voluntary restrictions can be known as the ‘clean air act’. A bill that effectively repeals the 4th, 5th, 6th, and 8th Amendments to the Constitution can be called ‘The Patriot Act’.

For the most part, framing is lying, and nothing that a person who values the truth can endorse. In fact, a great deal of the difficulties we have in creating sound policies in this country is due to the fact that we, as a culture, have little or no respect for truth. Lying (or ‘framing’ has become mainstream, to the degree that many people have lost the ability to tell the difference between fact and fiction.

In making this presentation, de Sousa uses the term ‘framing’ and speaks about framing as a good thing. However, what he ends up talking about is different, and the difference is important.

Framing has to do with the manipulation of belief. De Sousa does not actually talk about manipulating our beliefs (coating them in ways that make them easier to swallow). He actually talks about manipulating our desires. He talks about the passion for science – creating a love for knowledge, and a wonder and awe in the aspects of nature.

To illustrate his point, he suggests a parable. In this story, a man finds a stone that looks like a human face. It is not a perfect likeness – there are distortions and flaws in the image. However, he still takes it home and marvels about how millions of years of erosion from wind and water has created such a stone. Then a friend comes over, sees the rock, and identifies it as a reject from a local sculpture. Its features (with its flaws and distortion) were not the product of natural phenomena, but the flawed efforts of a designer. Suddenly, the stone loses its value. It becomes just another worthless rock.

This, according to de Sousa, is how atheists and humanists should paint the world. They should be generating a passion of awe and wonder for a universe that, through billions of years, can bring a collection of molecules together to form us. We can expect that such a process will have a few flaws and distortions. In contrast, to think of the universe, with its flaws and distortions, as the output of a designer means that it is not so awesome and marvelous. It means that the universe is rather ordinary – as awesome as laptop that sometimes locks up and loses one’s documents, or a car that does not always start.

As a desire utilitarian, I can fully endorse this project, while condemning the practice of ‘framing’ mentioned earlier. We have many and strong reasons to promote a love of truth – even unpleasant truth – because those truths are not going to go away simply because we do not like them.

I have agreed that, given our limited resources, it is often better to understand an approximation of a truth than to get every detail right. In most of our everyday experience, Newtonian physics gives us answers that are close enough to the truth for all practical purposes. The complexities of Einstein’s equations do not give us answers that are useful, even if they are more accurate.

However, recognizing these types of limitations is not what people typically talk about when they talk about framing. All we need to do for our statements to be true is simply to admit to some measure of uncertainty. The person using Newtonian calculations who says that the car should reach 60 miles per hour in 4.4 seconds simply needs to be understood as saying, “The car should reach close-enough-to-60 miles per hour in close-enough-to-4.4 seconds.’ Understood in this way, the statement is true, and no ‘framing’ is involved.

All of this is consistent with a love for truth.

Indeed, it is important here to note that I am speaking of a love for truth – a passion that says that a true statement is not only more useful than a false statement, but where an agent values truth for its own sake independent of its usefulness, and condemn even harmless fiction. A difference between a love of truth and the practical utility of truth is that, when an agent encounters a useful fiction, the lover of truth will hate it for being fiction, where the person who sees truth as being merely practical will reject it for being impractical.

The same is true of a person who has a love of knowledge.

I recall incidents in graduate school, when I was totally engrossed in reading a good book, suddenly thinking, “I’ve got to put this away. I’ve good schoolwork I need to do for tomorrow.” An instant later I realized that the book I was reading was my schoolwork. I enjoyed graduate school, and would clearly have done the same job even outside of school.

That’s easy enough to prove. After all, that’s what I’m doing in this blog – all of the things that I did in graduate school, without a single shred of college credit.

Each morning I log onto the Astronomy Picture of the Day to learn what surprise they have in store for me. They always have a short paragraph describing the science behind whatever image they are showing – explaining how the colors of a nebulae are due to its reflecting light from a nearby star or glowing with the energy of a nearby star. In all of these cases, the scientific facts about the hydrogen atoms, the distance in light years, the size of the cloud, all add to how amazing the picture is.

And every valentine’s day, I send my wife a rose.

This is not ‘framing’ science the way the term is typically understood. This is not misrepresenting scientific findings – promoting false beliefs and misunderstandings – in order to win a political or social contest that cares nothing about facts. This has to do with promoting passions, in the hope that people will come to find value in science even where it is not useful – value in science and truth and knowledge for its own sake.

D’Souza did not only speak about science. He spoke about living life as an atheist. There is the fact that no divine intervention will save us. When we pull together and accomplish some end – whether it is landing on the moon or ending small pox or building a nation that is substantially free of violence – these are things that we can be proud of. These are things that add value to a life, and can make a life worth living.

Reflections on Rejected Moral Theories

Hello, readers.

How’s life?

Personally, I’ve been doing a little soul searching, trying to see how my life so far measures up with what I wanted my life to be. Of course, I found no soul. But that does not affect the measure of my life so far.

This blog . . . as long-time readers already know . . . represents my attempt to make good on an oath that I gave to myself when I was 16 years old to leave the world a better place than it would have otherwise been if I had not lived. Of course, I needed to know what ‘better’ was if I was going to actually fulfill this goal. I took the attitude, when I was 16 years old, that I honestly did not know. I was hearing different people making different claims, all of them perfectly certain that they were right and everybody who disagreed with them was wrong, and I absolutely did not know which to pick.

When I thought of the certainty that others expressed I thought that this was the greatest hypocrisy. “How could you be so certain of being right – certain to the degree that you are willing to impose huge costs on others – when there are people out there who are as smart as you are saying that you are wrong?”

In fact, it did not take me long to realize that one way to make the world a better place than it would have otherwise been would be to do something against this arrogance.

I learned that one of the things that people do to get themselves into this mindset was to trust their feelings. They did not look at the arguments – at the reasons for adopting one view over another. Instead, they would hold a proposition in their mind and judge how it caused them to feel. If they liked the feel of an idea, then they asserted that it was true, and so absolutely true that it justified whatever harms might be inflicted on others as a result of promoting that belief.

I never trusted my feelings. I always thought that feelings were the prejudices and bigotries that I was raised with, and were never to be given any weight unless I could put a solid foundation of reason underneath them.

It was easy to see why a person should not trust their feelings. Every atrocity committed in human history was committed by people who made themselves comfortable with their crimes. I have no doubt that the vast majority of the slave owners in the American south felt perfectly comfortable with the idea of owning slaves. The inquisitors and crusaders of Europe were of a mindset that they had trouble not sleeping if they were to spare the life of an infidel or a Muslim. The every-day crimes that I see around me, from the person who abuses a child to those who view homosexuality as the biggest threat America faces, are all perfectly comfortable with the ‘feel’ of their thoughts and actions.

I see this as reason to distrust feelings, not because these things that others accept ‘feel’ wrong to me. I distrust feelings because I am surrounded by people whose feelings differ, who cannot all be right. The evidence makes it abundantly clear that feelings are not to be trusted.

So, as I sat there in my American History class thinking about making the world a better place, I knew that I could not trust my feelings to tell me what that was. I knew that I could not just grab on to some sort of cause that I liked and start working on promoting it – because I would likely be making a mistake. I decided that I needed to learn a lot more than I already knew before I could make sure that I was actually making the world better.

And still I was surrounded by people who, out of arrogance, presumed that they only need measure how they felt about things to determine that they were fighting on the right side, and that it was safe to ignore everybody who felt that they were wrong.

So the fighting continued.

It seemed that one thing that a person could do in order to make the world a better place was just to deflate some of the arrogance out there – to invite people to ask themselves, “Am I right? Am I so certain that I am right that I am willing to inflict harm on others in the name of my own moral perfection?”

Anyway, while so many people were arrogantly presuming their own moral perfection, I went off to college to study value theory – to try to find out what the reality of ‘better’ actually is.

I learned a lot of 12 years of college. I gave the issues that haunted me a lot of thought to finding out what ‘better’ was, and I ruled out a lot of theories.

I ruled out divine command systems at the start because God does not exist. And even if God did exist, how could we answer the question that what God commanded us to do was better than what God prohibited us from doing?

I ruled out libertarian theories because ‘man qua man’ does not exist, and the theory makes an entirely invalid leap from ‘is’ to ‘ought’.

I ruled out natural rights based theories because advocates of these theories could not tell me what a right is, or how I can find one in nature.

I ruled out non-natural theories because, if value cannot be reduced to something natural (something in the universe that ‘is’) then it makes more sense to say that value does not exist then it does to postulate non-natural entities.

I ruled out act-utilitarian theories because the only way a human can always perform that act that maximizes utility is if a human has only one desire – the desire to maximize utility.

I ruled out rule-utilitarian theories because they collapse into act-utilitarian theories.

I ruled out happiness theories because whenever happiness and truth when different routes, value followed truth, not happiness.

I ruled out subjectivist theories because, if everything is a matter of opinion – if A is just as valid as not-A – then there is no reason to adopt A or not-A and adopting either would be a mistake.

I ruled out emotivist theories because moral statements behave in all instances like propositions.

I ruled out theories that ground morality on genetics because the advocate of genetic morality cannot answer the question, “Is X moral because it is loved by our genes, or is X loved by our genes because it is moral?” If the former, then the most atrocious acts can be moral. And if it is the later, then morality is something outside of our genes.

I ruled out intuitionism because it made more sense to view our intuitions in terms of the prejudices and bigotries we were raised with than some type of supernatural connection to some mysterious moral truth.

Yet, in spite of these flaws, each of these theories have people who latch onto it as tightly as any religion, and who refuse to entertain any objection.

When people latch on to a flawed idea with the tenacity of a religion, and think that their attitudes are so well grounded that it is perfectly legitimate to use that system to advocate harming others in some way, we have (or potentially have) a very serious problem.

So, perhaps, one way to make the world a better place than it would have otherwise been would be to simply point out to people the errors in following any of these flawed systems. I do not really need to advance a separate system that I thought was true. It would be enough to simply clear away some of the brush – the garbage ideas that litter the moral landscape – to make some room for ideas that made sense.

Morality and Being Human

“Human” is not a morally relevant category. By this I mean that nothing of moral consequence necessarily hinges on whether or not a person is or is not human.

Recently, I have seen it mentioned in a few places that the fact that an entity is ‘human’ has profound moral consequences. For example, in Lee Silver’s presentation at Beyond Belief 2, he quoted a source that said that science had proved that abortion was wrong because science had proved that a human life starts at conception.

Richard, in a comment to yesterday’s blog, asked me to clarify whether my claim, the moral quality of an action does not depend on the agent’s reasons for performing it by asking, Do you mean a *human* action, or any action?

Plus there is a line in the Star Trek movie, “The Undiscovered Country,” where Chekov says, “Everybody is entitled to basic human rights,” and a Klingon responds, “Human rights. The very name is racist.”

In fact, the fact that ‘human’ is not a moral category can be most easily demonstrated by appeal to science fiction, where humans encounter a wide variety of non-human life forms, all of which have moral worth. The statement in Star Trek IV was, in fact, racist. There is no such thing as human rights. There are only rights.

So, in my answer to Richard’s question, I do not mean *human* action in the sense that the fact that an action was performed by a human has special moral significance. The actions that I am speaking about are intentional actions – actions motivated by beliefs and, more importantly, (malleable) desires, regardless of the species of the agent that performed them.

Wherever desires are malleable we have reason to lend our support to a project of promoting desires that tend to fulfill the desires of others, and inhibiting desires that tend to thwart the desires of others. It does not matter whether we find those desires in a human, a Vulcan, a pet (the phrase ‘bad dog’ is, in fact, a moral statement), or a god.

Value consists in relationships between states of affairs and desires. Moral value consists in relationships between malleable desires and other desires. It has to do with desires that people generally have reason to promote (because they tend to fulfill other desires) and desires that people generally have reason to inhibit (because they tend to thwart other desires). The genetic composition of the agent is not a part of the formula. Does the agent have desires (reasons for action)? Does the agent have the capacity to figure out that certain malleable desires in others will tend to either promote or inhibit the fulfillment of his own desires). If so, we have all we need for moralit – without once mentioning the biological family of the agent.

If a being has no desires, then it has no reasons for action. It has no reason to promote certain desires in others or to inhibit other desires. It has no reason to do anything. That which has no desires cannot be harmed in any morally relevant way by the actions of another. Abortion does not harm the interests of a fetus that does not yet have desires.

In the vast majority of cases, it does not thwart the desires of those who are opposed to abortion either. Those who are opposed to abortion have this position because they think that something of intrinsic merit is being destroyed. Yet, this belief that something of intrinsic merit is being destroyed is false. The desire on the part of those who oppose abortion to preserve something of intrinsic merit cannot be fulfilled. Even if abortion were made illegal, a desire to protect a state of intrinsic merit can never be fulfilled, because no ‘state of intrinsic merit’ exists. Only a false belief in a state of intrinsic merit exists. False beliefs are poor justification for real-world laws.

It may thwart the desires of other people who have an aversion to abortion. However, The issue also goes the other way. The fact that an individual is a ‘human’ does not automatically grant it moral rights. In order to have rights, an individual has to have interests. In order to have interests, an individual has to have desires – has to have the capacity to wish that something were the case, before those interests can be violated, and the individual can be wronged.

So, the concept of ‘human’ is both too broad and too narrow to encompass the realm of moral concerns. It is too narrow in that non-human things with desires also have interests, and desires to fulfill or thwart other interests will necessarily imply desires that fulfill or thwart the interests of non-human entities. It is too broad in that there are humans without desires, and thus humans without interests, and thus humans that cannot be wronged.

Teaching Intelligent Design

Today, I want to defend the proposition that we should be teaching intelligent design in science classes.

Recent events (and not-so-recent events) have shown us that there is a serious deficiency in our education system. There are a lot of people in this country who think that intelligent design counts as a scientific theory. The numbers of people who believe this tells us that our education system has let us down. It has failed in its mission to help students to understand what a scientific theory is. Armed with that knowledge, they should find it much easier to see through the smoke and mirrors and legislative bullying of those who advocate creationism in its various forms.

It is a travesty of our educational system that so many young students can go through science classes in this country and graduate with such a poor understanding of what science is. The mere fact that we have such an ignorant population should be a cause of embarrassment in its own right. When America shows up at the bottom (or near the bottom) of countries when it comes to an understanding of scientific facts, our politicians should hang their head in shame for their failure, and the people themselves should take this as a reason to resolve to elect better politicians in the future.

Even worse than the pure shame of this national ignorance is the cost. Americans are spending huge quantities of money trying to get myth and superstition taught as science, and huge quantities of money fighting it. These conflicts are tying up the courts and diverting huge amounts of labor-hours into a worthless struggle that could be devoted to more productive concerns. In other words, we are losing money. What is the public education system for but to give Americans knowledge that will help our economy thrive and prosper? What is the public education system for, then, if not to teach people the ignorance and the waste associated with advancing the doctrine that intelligent design is science.

When I say that intelligent design should be taught in science classes, I am not saying that it should be alluded to. I am saying that science teachers should dedicate at least a class period to looking at intelligent design as a paradigm case of ‘not science’. When the lecture is done, the students should be tested on these facts. Those who fail – those who cannot explain why intelligent design fails to be a scientific theory. One of the measures by which we judge the quality of education in a school should be in terms of the percentage of students who can explain why intelligent design is not science, with schools (and students) counted down appropriately to the degree that neither can meet these simple requirements.

This way, when a student gets to college, the college biology teachers do not need to waste their time teaching students things that the students should have learned in high school. Students should enter their first college science classes knowing that the way that a theory gets contested is by putting it up against another theory, drawing implications from each theory as to what would happen under different circumstances, creating a set of predictions that can then be tested by observation. Whereas intelligent design theory cannot provide an instance where it makes a more reliable and accurate prediction than evolution.

Advocates of intelligent design do sometimes claim to have experiments that disprove evolution. For example, they claim that we should be able to put some creature in a given environment, come back in a few thousand years, and see if a new species springs up. However, since evolutionary theory does not predict that the results of such an experiment will be a new species, it is simply not the case that this experiment would be a test as to whether evolutionary theory can withstand empirical verification. A proper experiment must look at outcomes that a scientific theory actually exists.

Of course, this too is symptomatic of the overwhelming ignorance of science in this country. It is not surprising to note that those people who are so uneducated on the nature of science that they classify intelligent design as science are also too ignorant to construct a proper scientific experiment.

It does not matter that there are a few people who call themselves scientists who go along with this nonsense. In every field there will always be a bottom ten percent. The trick – and the purpose of science education – is to try to keep the levels of ignorance exhibited by the thesis that intelligent design is science. It is a bizarre form of education to allow students to point to a student in the corner that got the wrong answer on a test and claim that the ignorance of a few justifies the ignorance of the many.

In fact, one of the absurd implications of this type of policy – one of the absurd implications of saying that, “If one person in a field holds a position than everybody in the field is justified in holding that position,” is to generate a system of education where every form of insanity and ignorance can result in a passing grade. The field of science education should recognize that there are standards for determining that an answer is good or bad other than, “Pete likes it,” and it is by those standards that we judge whether an answer demonstrates competence in that field.

“Pete likes it” is not a demonstration of competence.

This, too, becomes an element of what we should be teaching in science. I have no objection to presenting Ben Stein’s movie Expelled in a science class. Because, then, a teacher can use that to further point out how the case for intelligent design has nothing to do with science.

“Okay, class, please notice that in this entire film on teaching intelligent design in a science class that the authors did not use one argument that would count as a scientific argument. In fact, what you see in this movie is a propaganda that is intended to rouse the rabble. By the form and structure of the type of claims that are made in this movie, we see that it was made by people who want to make mob action – the twenty-first century version of torches and pitchforks – a part of the scientific process. Nowhere today, in the peer reviewed literature, is an author’s ability to assemble a mob considered valid evidence in support of a scientific claim.”

Hopefully, if this plan were adopted, we could quickly come to a time in this country, through proper education, we can lift much of the ignorance that has people living under the delusion that intelligent design is a scientific theory. Democratic governments, where power resides in the people, requires that the people be educated to the degree that they can make intelligent decisions and cast intelligent votes. It is the goal of the education system to give the people the education they need to fulfill this role. Science is going to play a significant role in that future – from medicine to agriculture to energy production to climate change. It would seem that crucial to that enterprise that, at the very least, future generations be taught how to recognize the difference between science and not-science.

The Unsupported Fundamental 'Ought'

Today’s posting takes off from my responses to a couple of that people have recently left to a couple of recent postings. They concern the fundamentals of the desire-utilitarian theory I use as a foundation for all of my writings.

When I speak or write about desire utilitarianism, a lot of readers make an assumption about what I am talking about that simply is not true. They assume that desire utilitarianism means, “Do that act that will fulfill the most desires.”

That is not desire utilitarianism as I defend it. That is a closely related theory that I call desire-fulfilling act utilitarianism. It is an act utilitarian theory in that it is focused on evaluating actions, and does so according to their consequences.

Desire utilitarianism is not an act-utilitarian theory. It does not primarily evaluate actions. It primarily evaluates desires. It evaluates actions only in a secondary or a derived sense. A ‘right act’ is that act that a person with good desires would perform. But we cannot know what a right act is until after we know what good desires are.

It is common, ever since Hume presented his ‘is/ought’ argument. Hume is typically understood to have said that we cannot derive ‘ought’ statements from ‘is’ statements. This meant that all moral arguments (all arguments that ended in an ‘ought’ conclusion) had to contain at least one fundamental ‘ought’ statement that could not be reduced to anything in the ‘is’ universe. These fundamental ‘ought’ entities are basic. They cannot be proved or disproved. We can really do little more than assert their existence.

I deny the existence of such entities. I deny Hume’s entire is/ought distinction. The universe is made up of only one kind of relationship – and that is ‘is’ relationships. ‘Ought’ relationships either must be reduced to a subset of ‘is’ relationships or ‘ought’ statements refer to something that does not exist. Either option is fine with me as it turns out. If a reader does not want to reduce ‘ought’ to an ‘is’ statement, we can eliminate ‘ought’ entirely, and I can still capture all of the parts of ‘ought’ in the ‘is’ universe of relationships between states of affairs and desires.

We can compare moral theories the same way that we compare scientific theories. One of the ways we can do so is by asking whether the theory requires any strange entities, or whether it can explain and predict a wide range of relevant moral facts.

In saying this, I am not speaking of moral facts of the form ‘abortion is permissible’ and ‘homosexuality is a sin’. I am speaking about the following types of moral facts:

(1) ‘Ought’ implies ‘can’ and ‘cannot’ implies ‘it is not the case that one ought.

(2) Actions fall into three moral categories; obligation, permission, and prohibition.

(3) The moral quality of an action does not depend on the reasons that the agent had for performing it.

(4) ‘Negligence’ is a type of moral wrongdoing.

(5) Moral judgment requires that the agent, in some sense or another, have some type of ‘free will’ in that an agent does not deserve praise or condemnation unless there is some possibility that the agent could have done otherwise.

(6) Intrinsic value properties (or true fundamental ‘ought’ properties) do not exist. Any moral argument that appeals to a fundamental ‘ought’ as a reason for action has is grounding morality on a fiction.

Desire utilitarianism handles moral facts like this without the difficulty that other theories have.

In my earlier post, I compared desire utilitarianism to Ayn Rand style Objectivism and to happiness theory. Ayn Rand Objectivism theory fails because it postulates entities that are as fictitious as God – an entity called ‘man qua man’ from which all value can be derived. First, there is no such thing as ‘man qua man’ other than the completely arbitrary decision to use the term ‘man’ to refer to beings with certain qualities. No normative statements follow from this. The fact that we have a term that refers to a set of qualities does not imply any type of normative or prescriptive force. If we were to use the term ‘reddles’ to refer to red marbles, this does not imply anything about any moral obligation to realize ‘reddles qua reddles’.

A theory that postulates desires, states of affairs in the real world, and relationships between them where a desire that P motivates an agent to realize any state of affairs in which P is true, has a distinct advantage over a theory that postulates strange entities such as ‘god’ or ‘am qua man’.

I reject happiness theory precisely because it fails to explain and predict real-world phenomena. Specifically, it fails to explain and predict why it is the case that when happiness is separated from truth, people tend to prefer truth over happiness. Happiness theory implies that under conditions C, where the agent must choose between happiness and truth, many (most) agents choose happiness.

Desire utilitarianism, as I argued, does not allow us to separate value from truth. A state of affairs has value only to the degree to which propositions that are the object of agent’s desires are true in that state of affairs. If those propositions are not true, then the state of affairs loses its value.

So, desire utilitarianism explains and predicts real-world events better than happiness theory. Desire utilitarianism, unlike Ayn Rand Objectivism, does not postulate strange entities such as ‘man qua man’. There is nothing in it that is not ordinary – ordinary desires, ordinary states of affairs, and ordinary relationships where a proposition that is an object of a desire is true within a state of affairs.

These are ordinary ways of criticizing theories. The fact that I am writing about ethics does not justify, nor does it require, a different kind of thinking when it comes to comparing one theory to another to determine which is best. A theory can be rejected for postulating entities that are as mysterious (or more mysterious) then they thing they are being used to explain. And a theory can be rejected because it makes explanations and predictions that simply fail to correspond to observation.

The idea that morality requires an unsupported foundational ‘ought’ that is distinct and separate from ‘is’ is so widely accepted that few people think to question it. The instant that somebody starts writing about a moral theory, the mind starts searching for the author’s unsupported foundational ‘ought’. Typically, the searcher then declares that “Your unsupported foundational ‘ought’ is just as unsupported and just as foundational as everybody else’s unsupported foundational ‘ought’”.

In fact, this objection has weight. All unsupported foundational ‘oughts’ are equally suspect. Actually, all unsupported foundational ‘oughts’ are alike in being nonsense.

We scarcely hear anybody say that there is no such thing as an unsupported foundational ‘ought’. Yet, why not?

The idea of an unsupported foundational ‘ought’ is, really, just a religious concept – a ‘god of the gaps’ for secular ethics (or for religious ethics, for those who say that the unsupported foundational ‘ought’ comes from God). It is distinct and separate from the world of ‘is’, yet can somehow interact with it. We can say nothing about its structure or composition. We know nothing more than that it exists (at least, this is what the advocates of an unsupported foundational ‘ought’ claims to know) and that it is the source of all value in the universe.

It doesn’t exist.

Desire utilitarianism does not have unsupported foundational ‘oughts’. It has desires (propositional attitudes written into the brain – attitudes that a particular proposition is to be made or kept true – that are encoded into the mental computer), states of affairs, and relationships whereby the propositions that are the objects of those desires are true or false in any given state of affairs.

That’s it.

There is not an unsupported foundational is-independent ‘ought’ to be seen.

Or heard.

Or felt.

Dealing with Disagreement

Once again we see evidence of two different cultures pursuing two different options with respect to how to handle conflicting view.

Culture 1, when it encounters somebody presenting an alternative idea, says, “Go ahead. Present your case. We will then explain why you are wrong.”

Culture 2, when it encounters somebody presenting an alternative idea, says, “We must silence this competing view before others hear of it.”

Part of the reason that Culture 2 has adopted this particular methodology is precisely because there is nothing that they can offer in the sense of a reason to reject the alternative idea. Culture 2 defends their positions by appeal to face. At best, they completely lack evidence for their view and, more often than not, the available evidence completely contradicts their view (as where the scientific data shows that the Earth is 4.5 billion years old).

Where people cannot offer reason in defense of their position, they can only offer force. So, their culture says to bring force (at least economic force) against any who would provide an outlet for this contrary view.

Earlier, I discussed this dynamic in the context of two movies; “The Chronicles of Narnia” and “The Golden Compass”. In the case of The Chronicles of Narnia, the members of Culture 1 said, “Present your view, and then we will present our criticism.” In the case of “The Golden Compass”, the members of Culture 2 said, “We must have a boycott. We must cause so much economic harm to any who would threaten to present an idea contrary to our own so as to make sure that nobody again will threaten to do such a thing. We must not allow these alternatives views to appear in public.”

Now, it is showing up in the case of billboard wars.

I do not recall ever hearing a demand that a theist billboard be removed. (An exception to this is where signs are put up at taxpayer expense, in which case the issue is not that of silencing a competing view, but that of being forced to pay for some church’s advertising.)

Yet, atheists either cannot get a billboard put up or, once up, it is immediately removed under the weight of protests from the members of Culture 2 – from the members of the culture that demands the silencing, rather than the considered rejection of, a contrary view.

One story along these lines concerns an attempt from the Freedom From Religion Foundation to pay for billboards that say, “Beware of Dogma”. CBS Outdoor Advertising in Grand Rapids simply refuses to accept their business, and offers as their reason the fact that Culture 2 will launch a vocal protest for the purpose of getting the signs removed. This, of course, is in keeping with Culture 2’s values of prohibiting the presentation of any view contrary to their own.

In the second story, as described in Hateful Response to ‘Imagine No Religion’, the Freedom From Religion Foundation put up a “Beware of Dogma” billboard in Chambersberg, PA. Shortly thereafter, the company from which FFRF had leased the sign, Kegerreis Outdoor Advertising, put up its own sign that said, “In God We Trust: The previous sign posted at this location does not reflect the values or morals of our company"!

At the same time, another group, “In God We Trust” answered the FFRF sign by putting up billboards of its own that say, “Why Do Atheists Hate America”.

Apparently, the second sign is in keeping with the morals of Kegerreis Outdoor Advertising. Apparently, their morals do not contain a provision against malicious hate-mongering.

At this point I need to clarify an issue. In an earlier posting called “Connecticut Valley Atheists: Imagine” , I protested against the use of a sign in Connecticut which the phrase, “Imagine No Religion” was used on a picture of the World Trade Center. In that case I protested that the sign was designed to manufacture hatred against theists by making the maliciously false claim that any and all religion is equally responsible for the 9/11 attacks. I said that maliciously false claims such as this are bigoted hate-mongering and, thus, not the type of sign that a person with good desires could endorse.

The FFRF sign, however, does not make the malicious attempt to link all religion to 9/11. The backdrop for its message is neutral – it shows the letters in an image that has the appearance of a stain-glass window. As such, it does not contain any maliciously false interpretations and, as such, it is not subject to the same criticism that I gave to the Connecticut sign last December.

However, the “Why Do Atheists Hate America” sign contains exactly the elements that I condemned the Connecticut sign for. Once again we have an example of malicious hate-mongering.

The organization that paid for the “Atheists Hate America” sign, ingodwetrustusa.org, tried to defend their actions by claiming that the sign really says, “Why do atheists act as if they hate America.” However, first, that is not what the sign says. If somebody were to ask, “Why is the sky blue?” this question is the same as saying, “The sky is blue. Why?” Similarly, if a person were to ask, “Why do atheists hate America,” this is the same as saying, “Atheists hate America. Why?” The organization is making a maliciously false claim about all atheists that atheists hate America, qualifying their statement as hate-mongering.

However, even if they were to put a sign up that says, “Why do atheists act like they hate America,” they are still making a maliciously false statement that every atheist acts like they hate America. They are making a bigoted assertion about all members of a group by attributing to all of them a trait that only some of them share. It is not the case that all atheists are responsible for the “Imagine No Religion” sign – only a subset of them are. However, ingodwetrustusa.org, in its lust to promote unreasoned and unfounded hatred of others, has decided not to worry about such minor issues as fairness and justice.

They also tried to defend their claims by saying that the FFRF sign made the same sort of statement. They asserted that "Imagine No Religion" has to imply, "Imagine No Christians." It does so in the same way that the American Cancer Society wants us to imagine a world without cancer victims. It does so in exactly the same way that Christians want us to imagine a world without Muslims, and Muslims want us to imagine a world without Christians. It is an end that is to be accomplished, not by force of arms, but simply by convincing people to give up false beliefs.

Of course, since these people are agents of hatred and bigotry, they much prefer to give a hate-mongering, bigoted interpretation of what was said.

In other words, it is still the case that malicious hate-mongering bigotry apparently does reflect the values and the morals of Kegerreis Outdoor Advertising – because they are not showing any signs of protesting this campaign.

In fact, we should take Kegerreis Outdoor Advertising and ingodwetrust.org at their word. Hate-mongering bigotry is, in fact, in keeping with the morals of both of these organizations. These are the values. When we are told how religion gives these people special access to moral truth and a special incentive to be moral, we can see this at work in their enthusiastic embrace of type of unjust, unfounded, hate-mongering bigotry depicted in these signs.

In fact, this is in keeping with the values of these organizations that, instead of allowing different people to express their views and explain what is wrong with them, they adopt a policy of silencing competing views and threatening those who express them.

That's the difference we see between Culture 1 and Culture 2

E2.0: Greg Epstein: Humanism - The Heart of Atheism

This is the 23rd in a new series of weekend posts taken from the presentations at the Salk Institute’s “Beyond Belief: Enlightenment 2.0.”. I have placed an index of essays in this series in an introductory post, Enlightenment 2.0: Introduction.

The next speaker at the conference was Greg Epstein, Humanist Chaplain of Harvard University. Epstein used his time before the conference to support humanism and to claim that atheists needed to build a movement that was broader

Humanism a progressive life stance . . . that, without supernaturalism, affirms our ability and our responsibility to lead ethical lives of personal fulfillment aspiring to the greater good of humanity.

He started his presentation with a claim that science can build hospitals (by this, I think he means that science can provide the intellectual foundation that serves as the foundation of the practice of medicine), but that science will not visit you in the hospital. That is to say, science does not have any heart. Humanism, according to Epstein, is the ‘heart’ of atheism.

I agree with Epstein on this matter. Atheism (taken to mean the belief that the proposition ‘god exists’ is certainly or almost certainly false) implies no moral conclusion. It says nothing about what we ought or ought not to do.

Theism also implies no moral conclusion. You can take the proposition, ‘god exists’ and tie it to any moral claim imaginable. Perhaps God created homosexuality as a way to keep the population from growing too quickly and wants us to celebrate this option as one tool for keeping population growth in check. Only, the ‘religionists’ listened to the wrong people and have spent the last several thousand years teaching the wrong lesson.

Like I said, neither atheism nor theism gets us anywhere in terms of moral conclusions. It’s the stuff that we add to atheism or theism that yields these types of results. It’s the stuff we add to atheism or theism that the ethicist (such as myself) has reason to be concerned with.

Life is difficult, Epstein says, and atheism tells us nothing about how to deal with this difficulty. Humanism goes beyond atheism to provide ways of dealing with life – with the happiness and sorrows of living, in the real world.

In order to do this, according to Epstein

We need a movement that is a little more diverse. We need a movement that is a little more inclusive. And we need a movement that is a little more actively inspiring.

On the issue of diversity, Epstein has a simple way to illustrate his point. He simply invites the audience to look around the room at the various attendees where the descriptions ‘white’ and ‘male’ apply to almost every speaker. (Note: I must confess that I have always had difficulty categorizing people as ‘white’ or ‘nonwhite’ except where it is extremely obvious, and I prefer it that way. There are several speakers that I would not know how to classify in terms of diversity. So, in a sense, I am somewhat at a handicap when it comes to noting the degree to which Epstein may be correct or incorrect.)

Epstein also points out that the conference does not display a lot of cultural diversity. In this area, Epstein describes himself as a ‘humanistic Jew’ (a Jewish atheist) as a term that links culture with humanism. Richard Dawkins has described himself as a ‘cultural Christian’, which describes a cultural or ethic tie that goes outside of simply atheism. Recognizing these types of ties is not tribalism, but does recognize that different people have different cultural ties – ties in terms of heritage, race, and age.

For another example of cultural atheism Epstein brought up Nobel Prize winning economists Amartya Sen, a “proud Indian humanist”, who is very strongly connected to his Indian heritage.

He is very much through and through a humanist, but a humanist who sees life through the lens of . . . somebody who was born in India and feels very much connected to his Indian cultural roots.

Epstein also speaks of Confucian humanism; “thousands of years of poetry, of music, of art, of philosophy.” He speaks of novelist Salman Rushdie’s “Muslim humanism” – a person who is aware of his relationship to a group that, among other things, preserved the writings of the ancient Greek philosophers while the Europeans were going through the dark ages and losing their knowledge.

Epstein distinguishes his call for diversity – particularly diversity in the sense of allowing for a diverse set of cultural humanisms – from being inclusive. The people that Epstein wants to include in this wider group includes people who believe in some supernatural entities. He speaks about being accepting of and working with some theists.

In saying this, he stressed that he was not advocating an attitude that Epstein attributed to Dennett in terms of being ‘faith in faith heads’. The term refers to atheists who are happy that some people are theists – who see theism as a good thing and who are happy that some people have faith. Against this, Epstein speaks more in terms of ‘polite disagreement’. He points out that there is as much disagreement within a particular religion as there are between religions, yet people within a religion are still able to form some sort of a family. People with different religions should be able to do the same thing.

I think we can find the type of model of what Epstein is talking about in science. Scientists in a discipline can find themselves in disagreement over some fact within that field of study. Some can believe that the Tyrannosaurus Rex was primarily a scavenger, while others believe it was a hunter. Yet, these people still belong to the same family. Members in neither group are willing to claim that the other is right or even that it is a ‘good thing’ that some people have this alternative view of the T-Rex. They state that their opponents are wrong. Yet, they still share membership in the same group.

So, humanists can become members in a wider circle of people who are interested in dealing with the joys and sorrows of human existence – celebrating or dealing with marriages, births, deaths, friendships, relationships, sickness, natural disasters, relationships, dreams, and the like – who do not agree with us entirely on matters of God’s existence.

Of course, I want to add (though Epstein did not mention this fact) that there are others that we have little reason to welcome into such a family – people whose religion drives them to take actions that actually cause (or fail to prevent) the harms mentioned above either directly (through violence) or indirectly (blocking the scientific advances that can cure disease and prevent disasters).

A final ‘improvement’ that Epstein would like to introduce into atheism is expressed in his question, “What can we do in the future to sing and to build.” He reported that atheists do two things very well – spoken and debated. He wants to add to this some of the cultural elements that we find in religious groups; architecture (the building of cathedrals) and singing. These, of course, are merely examples of what is actually request for a more inspiring humanist culture.

On this issue, I think that humanists do quite well. We simply do not recognize it. The reason we do not recognize it is because we do not attach a humanist label to our creations. Much of the art and dance that we create these days have nothing to do with religion. Yet, they are still inspiring. I went to see Stomp the other day. It was an extremely impressive performance (as I knew it would be). It does not promote humanism. It does not wear any conspicuous humanist tags. Yet, it is, in a very real sense, a celebration of what humans can accomplish here, in the real world.

It has exactly the type of ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusion’ that Epstein spoke of in the first two parts of his presentation. We are able to draw a circle around the group that values such a performance that includes more than just humanists. We may disagree with their interpretation of their events, but we can still agree to its value.

There seems, then, to be some tension between Epstein’s three criteria for a better humanism. He wants it to be more diverse and more inclusive. Yet, in the area of ‘inspiration’ – in its architecture, art, and music – he seems to be calling for something that is a little less inclusive. He seems to be speaking about cultural elements that have a humanist focus, to the exclusion of other interpretations. Because, if he speaks about a more diverse and inclusive form of art, we already have that.

This might be a good idea to have a distinctly (and exclusively) humanist art. The idea is worth some thought. Yet, it would benefit us to know exactly what it is we are thinking (and talking) about in discussing this subject.

E2.0: Lee Silver: Religion Without God

This is the 22nd in a new series of weekend posts taken from the presentations at the Salk Institute’s “Beyond Belief: Enlightenment 2.0.”. I have placed an index of essays in this series in an introductory post, Enlightenment 2.0: Introduction.

Lee Silver, Professor of Molecular Biology and Public Policy at Princeton University, addressed the Beyond Belief 2 conference largely to speak about a religion that has no God – at least not a God in the traditional sense of a person sitting on a throne passing judgment on others.

An idea that we get from listening to some atheists is that there are only two options – belief in a personal God and a devotion to reason and science. Of course, any atheist who thinks about this for more than a moment will realize that this is not the case. These just happen to be the two options that he has focused the greatest amount of his attention on. Yet, at times, he does slip, and he reacts to news around the world as if anybody who is not a Christian, Muslim, or Jew is fully committed to the tools of reason and science.

For example, I commonly hear atheists celebrating the relative atheism in Europe, as if Europe has discovered the light and is years or decades ahead of America in that regard. Yet, it is just as plausible to argue that Europe, instead of discovering the light, has discovered an alternative form of darkness. It is because of this that, in spite of their abandonment of the Christian religion and aversion to Muslim religion, they fail to actually take off as a society.

The religion that Silver spoke about is the religion of naturalism – the idea that whatever is natural is good.

One of the forms that this nature worship takes in Europe can be found in their devotion to homeopathic medicine. Homeopathy, according to Silver, relies on the idea that sickness in the body is caused by ‘negative spirits’ and that the road to health is to replace these forces with ‘positive spirits’. The doctrine does not mention a God. An individual can be an ‘atheist’ in the traditional sense and still accept homoeopathy. Yet, these people still base their decisions on false beliefs about entities that do not exist and values that are not real. Whenever people do this, they risk making poor decisions that do more real-world harm than real-world good.

This irrational nature worship has manifested itself in Europe in the form of a strong public opposition to the use of genetically modified foods. Just as religion in America has lead to opposition to stem cell research (a form of scientific advance that promises to significantly reduce death and suffering), Europeans are strongly opposed to the use of genetically modified crops.

The creation of genetically modified foods is another technology that promises to reduce death and suffering by providing us with more efficient ways to feed a growing world population. To shun the technology of genetically modified foods is as irrational as to shun the technology of stem cell research. It does not matter that the prohibition does not come from scripture. It still comes from a belief in things that do not exist – a worship of things that have no divine spirit.

I suspect that many readers can understand the position better when we start to talk about genetically modified children. The idea that a parent may be able to genetically modify a child – selecting traits – often leads to a strong preference for ‘natural’ children. These are children whose DNA is determined, not by the parents, but by the unguided laws of nature. Readers may sense a strong preference for the latter and an aversion to the former that motivates them to seriously consider laws against such actions.

Unfortunately, those laws would also prevent a parent from noting that a newly fertilized egg has cystic fibrosis and purposely choosing to have that strand of DNA altered so as to remove the disease.

Defending these types of positions requires claiming that there are some ‘reasons for action that exist’ that call for preferring ‘natural’ over ‘unnatural’ states of affairs. It seems to require that what is ‘natural’ has some sort of intrinsic value and it is something that people should like in spite of its relationship to desires is false. Preserving the environment for its own sake – as an endeavor that realizes something of intrinsic worth – is as much a waste as pursuing an end because it pleases God. There is no God to please, so any claim that an act is justified because its result pleases God is false. There is no intrinsic value in nature so to say that an act is justified because it preserves that which has intrinsic value in nature is false.

Silver does not speak about the value of nature in terms of ‘intrinsic value’. He speaks of it in terms of worshipping a goddess mother Earth. However, in terms of practical effects, there is no difference. Both views still have agents bypassing important scientific breakthroughs and scientific research on a subject that promises to be extremely useful for the sake of realizing ‘sacred’ values that do not exist. Both views involve appeals to reasons for action that do not exist.

Desire utilitarianism says that, insofar as we are interested in our moral obligations to the environment (or anything else for that matter), the only type of value that exists is in the form of relationships between states of affairs and good desires (desires that tend to fulfill other desires). This means that the only value that a state of affairs in nature has is in terms of its relationship to good desires.

We can make an argument that a desire for that which is natural is a good desire, and an insufficiently strong aversion to ‘playing God’ is a bad desire, in virtue of the desire-thwarting possibilities. That is to say, if these technologies get out of control, the consequences could be disastrous (and tremendously desire-thwarting). In order to avoid potential disasters we have good reason to promote an aversion to these types of activities. It is often called ‘playing God’, but it is in fact playing with technologies that have the potential to produce disastrous consequences.

In these cases, we still have to ask about the nature of these disastrous effects. Are they real desire-thwarting effects? Or do they consist in the widespread destruction of ‘intrinsic values’ that do not exist anyway? If the latter, we can ignore them, the concerns raised are not real.

We may have a certain natural affinity for certain types of environmental states. In just the same way that we do not want the air to be too warm or too cold, we do not want to be bothered by obnoxious smells, and we do not want to be bothered by obnoxious noises all the time, we may have evolved a natural desire to find value in certain environments. These may well be environments that are like those that our ancestors found to be easy to live in. In this case, there may be a natural desire to preserve certain environments, and these desires give us a reason for action.

However, this does not give the natural environment any type of sacred value. It has value in the same way that a comfortable room or a quiet place to sleep has value. It has the same value of a good tasting steak or a good looking picture.

As it turns out, I can give an argument for promoting a certain type of value in nature – an argument for a certain type of environmentalism. It rests on the fact that nature, tens of millions of years, has given us an environment in which humans could survive, even where humans were too stupid to take much responsibility for their own survival. So, to the degree that we have an interest in surviving as a species, to that degree we have reason to preserve an environment that even our primitive ancestors could have lived in. We have reason to argue for using caution when we make changes – particularly when we make global changes such as destroying the ozone layer or filling the atmosphere with extra carbon dioxide and methane.

This does not argue for a blind worship of nature, any more than an IT department’s decision to proceed cautiously with a server upgrade argues for a blind worship of the existing computer network. It is simply a call for practical restraint – let’s make sure that we are not going to do anything significantly harmful before we do it.

In many cases, the ‘reasons for action’ that people give for standing in the way of actions that are called ‘playing God’ are reference to ‘reasons for action’ that simply do not exist. Nature has no intrinsic merit. The only value to be found in any state of affairs – including any state of affairs in nature – is determined by that state’s capacity to fulfill good desires. These include desires for food, clothing, and shelter as well as health. If the value of a state of affairs in nature cannot be expressed in these terms, then the values that people are speaking about are as imaginary as those of any religion.

Sectarian Harrassment and Support

I encountered a depressing story this morning of two families in Delaware who challenged the Indian River School District’s practice of promoting Christianity in its public schools (Prayer Suit Settled Little for Families). The Indian River School District’s staff members would lead explicitly Christian prayers at school functions, leading to a pro-Christian anti-Semitic attitude that resulted in the harassment of Jewish children. Parents of two of the children filed a lawsuit. After 3 years of harassment, one of them has decided that this type of activism just isn’t worth it, regrets having done it, and would never do the same thing again.

It was similar to a story reported on Atheist Revolution in “Complaining about God in School Can Have Dire Consequences”

The most depressing part of this story is the recognition that there is no support structure for people like this. We are all well aware that those who challenge theocratic practices such as this can pay a heavy cost. Yet, as far as I know, there are no agencies or institutions set up to collect contributions that will then go to helping support people in this type of position.

That support could take several forms.

(1) Providing the individuals with people that they can talk to and provide moral support

(2) Providing assistance that would help to avoid the harassment such as an alternative cell phone

(3) Helping the victims avoid public exposure by providing people who could do yard work or go on errands for the family.

(4) Providing the family with a greater sense of security by providing them with somebody who can accompany them when they go out in public.

(5) Providing moving expenses and people who can help move if the harassment drives the family to making that type of choice.

(6) Organizing a public information campaign that condemns any community that condones this type of harassment, and condemns civic and religious leaders who do not take a stand against it.

These people are actually doing the community a service. They are helping to protect and promote important values. There is some obligation to regard them the same way that we would regard a soldier who has gone off to war. They deserve our honor and respect. We show them this honor and respect by showing that we are willing to endure part of the burden that they have accepted.

What makes these practitioners of harassment particularly despicable is their willingness to target children. What these people want is to use the public school system as a tool for promoting their own church – their own religion – by using it as an opportunity to preach to (brainwash) an audience that is not only captive but vulnerable.

When people protest, these practitioners victimize children another way. For all practical purposes, they hold the children of any who would protest hostage, and proclaim as loudly as possible, “One false move out of you and we will make sure that your children suffer.”

It is a very effective technique.

It is the embodiment of evil, but it is also effective.

That’s one of the messages that needs to be made clear in this type of situation, and the message that I have in mind in the sixth item on the list above. It involves using the incident to point out that the local community has evolved a culture that condones the exploitation and abuse of children in order to obtain their religious objectives. They exploit access to children in the public school system for their own objectives, and then they promote not only the abuse of children who do not conform to their program, but the abuse of the children of any who would protest this exploitation.

This is the moral culture that the community has adopted, but it is not a culture that any community has a right to be proud of. It is a culture that shows that the moral leaders in that community – the preachers and political leaders – are themselves morally bankrupt. Yet, they insist on exploiting the school system to pass this lesson in immorality (exploitation and abuse) on to the next generation.

I want to stress that I think the habit of debating these issues in terms of ‘separation of church and state’ should be put aside. This is, of course, the proper role for the lawyers to take when arguing the case in court. However, it is not the role that people should adopt in debating the issue in public. The public debate should not only explain that there is a separation of church and state, but also that there should be a separation of church and state in the sense that where it is violated we tend to find a culture of exploitation, intimidation, and abuse.

In these types of cases, the two often go hand in hand.

In too many places across the country, they are successful. In too many places around the country today we do have children learning the moral lessons of exploitation, intimidation, and abuse from the moral leaders in that community – through the public school system. This is the lesson that those schools are teaching. It is a lesson that they will continue to teach unless and until somebody stands up to put an end to it.

Yet, we have so far left those who would dare to stand up against this culture of exploitation, intimidation, and abuse to fend for themselves. The ACLU may provide legal support, but where does the family go for moral support? Where do they go when they become the actual targets of the very culture of exploitation, intimidation, and abuse that they have decided to challenge?

So, this posting is a challenge to those who are involved in fighting the culture of exploitation, intimidation, and abuse to find ways of supporting its soldiers in the field – the people who are on the front lines and in the court room. It is a bit unfair, I think, to expect them to go into battle alone, with us in the background, collecting the benefits of their actions, but not willing to share the burden.

Atheist Proselytizing

I have seen a few posts about the atheist blogosphere concerning atheist proselytizing. “What should our goals be?” people are asking.

It’s a question that I asked in creating this blog. It is a question that I ask when I decide what to write each day. “What are my goals? What post could I create today that would best further those goals?”

My answer: Atheist proselytizing should focus on those things that make the world a better place than it would have otherwise been.

For example, a couple of days ago I wrote a post about the Copenhagen Consensus, which argued that the most cost-effective way to make the world a better place is to fight the spread of AIDS. (Or, at least it was 4 years ago; we will see what the 2008 conference says). One of the ways to prevent the spread of AIDS is by promoting the use of condoms. Simple, cost effective, having massive positive benefits – and also a number of positive side effects. It also prevents unwanted pregnancies, reduces population growth, and prevents the spread of other sexually transmitted diseases.

However, the Catholic Church and other religious organizations are against this. They campaign against it. They do so based on myth and superstition.

This, then, is one of a multitude of examples in which superstition kills people and destroys lives. It is one of a multitude of instances in which it is possible to say, “Because people grasp onto these absurd ideas, we have more death and suffering in the world than there would otherwise be. To avoid death and suffering, we have reason to promote an aversion to the adoption of these absurd beliefs.”

As the head of a group of atheist proselytizers, I would create a subgroup within the organization dedicated specifically to the prevention of AIDS. It would be a group that collected money for the purpose of buying condoms and shipping them to countries where the HIV/AIDS epidemic is at its worst. Atheist proselytizers would go from village to village giving out scientifically vetted information on AIDS, promoting the use of condoms, and spreading the word that the agents of myth and superstition who argue against this practice are also the agents of death and suffering.

That’s the form that I think atheist proselytizing should take.

I would also form a group dedicated to opposing creationism. It would oppose not only the teaching of creationism as science in American classrooms, it would oppose creationism itself. It would not attempt to make the case that evolution is compatible with religion. It would not make the case in terms of separation of church and state. It would make the case that science saves lives, and anti-science puts lives at risk.

The most popular posting that I have written to date – still drawing 10% to 15% of the traffic to this blog 7 months after I first posted it, is “Ben Stein’s ‘Expelled’”. It is a critique of the movie grounded entirely on the principle of harm done. We can save lives to the degree that we can explain and predict the universe around us. The best method for doing this is science – which continually produces amazing predictions that no religious prophets could ever be able to match. “Intelligent design” is anti-science that simply does not produce the types of predictions that are required of a scientific theory. It’s failure to produce predictions translates directly into a failure to preserve and protect lives.

One of the harmful effects of the Intelligent Design dogma is that it will seduce children away from studying or even understanding science (that is to say, studying or even understanding how to save and preserve lives in a universe of natural laws) and into worthless and ineffective superstitions.

I would also set up a group for opposing ‘under God’ in the Pledge of Allegiance and a national motto of ‘In God We Trust’. Both of these movements aim to teach children that it is better to be ‘under God’ or to be somebody who trusts in God than it is to be an atheist. It denigrates atheism as a matter of national policy, even though atheists are by far disproportionately responsible for the scientific discoveries in this country and save more lives and prevent more destruction than religion. With these actions, the government is telling children not to become the types of people who produce more good for their fellow humans in outcomes such as medical breakthroughs, protection from natural disasters, food production, and energy production and efficiency, than any other group in the country.

That is how I would proselytize atheism.

In saying this, we must note that atheists are not immune from unreasoned dogma. Religion is not the only place where one can go to find doctrines that promote death and human suffering.

Europe, though being more ‘atheist’ than America, also suffers from the influence of atheist dogmas that are as anti-science as any religion. The list of popular philosophies in Europe include post-modernism and cultural relativism, both of which condemn the idea that we can have actual knowledge of the real world. These dogmas have been as effective at holding the European culture back scientifically and economically as creationism has been in America. Focusing on religious dogmas and their harmful effects is just a part of the problem.

In fact, the philosophies of post-modernism and cultural relativism point to an important case of atheist scapegoating. Many ‘new atheists’ have accused religious moderates of shielding religious extremists by preventing criticism against the harshest forms of their religion. However, they did not mention the fact that these non-religious philosophies are an even greater obstacle to criticizing fundamentalist religions. It’s from these philosophies, not from religious moderates, that we get the idea that no culture may criticize another. Religious moderates, in contrast, still held to the possibility of moral and objective truths.

We see how atheists can be attracted to pleasant-sounding but useful fictions with as much zealousness as a religious devotee in Objectivism, in the thesis that ‘atheist’ means ‘the absence of a belief in God’, and in the happiness cult. All three of these dogmas have clear problems, yet people latch onto them with little regard for the rational arguments against them.

Objectivism even has its own mythical entities – this thing called ‘man qua man’ that is a rational animal that tells us that reason is the defining characteristic of man. It makes unwarranted leaps from ‘is’ premises (man is a rational animal) to ‘ought’ conclusions (man ought to always promote reason above all else). It confuses the distinction between ‘means’ and ‘ends’ (e.g., life is the near-universal means to the fulfillment of other desires; therefore, it is the universal end). Yet, it attracts a group of atheist followers like any other cult.

The ‘meaning of atheism’ issue is a small affair, yet it illustrates how an atheist can latch onto an idea that just a moment’s reflection will expose to be false – merely because the idea serves a political purpose. The claim is that ‘atheism’ means ‘the lack of a belief in God’ – and because of this we can dismiss the claim that atheism is a religion and atheists actually believe something. However, it does this by introducing a definition of ‘atheism’ that has nothing at all to do with how competent English speakers use the term. ‘Atheism’, as the word is used by competent English speakers, means, “A person who believes that the proposition ‘God exists’ is certainly or almost certainly false. It involves an actual belief that is in need of support. Atheists need to accept this fact and deal with it appropriately.

Indeed, there are some strange implications in talking about ‘atheist proselytizing’ in a context in which an atheist is somebody who has no belief in God. It says that atheist proselytizing can be successful by killing a person (since a dead person has no belief in a God) or by inflicting sufficient head trauma that a person can no longer hold a proposition ‘God exists’. Whereas ‘atheist proselytizing’ in a context where an atheist believes that the proposition ‘God exists’ is almost certainly or certainly false requires a bit more work.

The Cult of Happiness holds that happiness is the sole value. This is proved false by the fact that when happiness is divorced from truth, then happiness loses its luster. Induce happiness by taking the brain of a person in a state of happiness and put it in a jar where it relives its last state of happiness over and over again, or put a person in an experience machine that feeds the agent false beliefs that induce happiness, or find an way of stimulating the brain with an electrode in a way that produces happiness, and then inquire as to the value of this state.

Desire fulfillment, on the other hand, cannot be divorced from truth. Desires are propositional attitudes (attitudes that particular propositions are to be made or kept true). A desire is fulfilled if and only if a state of affairs exists in which the proposition that is the object of a desire is true. Desire fulfillment theory accounts for the essential connection between value and truth. Happiness theory ignores it. Yet, the cult of happiness still dominates atheist conversations about value.

So, let us not think that in ‘atheist proselytizing’ begins and ends with promoting the belief that the proposition ‘God exists’ is very nearly or certainly false. The proposition ‘God exists’ is only one of a number of propositions that people can hold without good reason, and many of them have nothing to do with religion.