The Anti-Atheist Bigotry of Congressman Diaz-Balart (R-

In my previous post I presented ten examples of anti-atheist bigotry in 2008

(See: Anti-Atheist Bigotry in 2008)

It is not too early to start the list for 2009.

From Friendly Atheist Congressman Lincoln Diaz-Balart Bashes Atheism:

Lincoln Diaz-Balart, a Congressperson from Florida, saw the “Divine Performing Arts” show the other night and couldn’t stop raving about it.

“I was very moved by the song that talked about the damage that atheism has caused and is causing. It was very moving, but all of the performances were moving, uplifting; they teach us about the eternal nature of mankind and of how we have to be humble.

My discussion this week has been in the context of doing moral work. I have been presenting the idea that morality involves picking up the tools of praise, condemnation, reward, and punishment and applying them to promoting good desires and inhibiting bad desires.

I have argued that, while reason tells us how to use these tools and whether they are being used to good ends, reason alone cannot do any moral work. The moral work gets done by those who pick up these tools of praise and condemnation and apply them to specific cases.

It means making public statements, since their objective is to mold the desires of any who hear the praise and condemnation - particularly children.

Diaz-Balart is doing moral work with his statement. It is a statement of very high praise for that which takes a stand against atheism - that which condemns atheism for all of the trouble atheists are causing in the world. It says that of all of the values that were captured in this concert, the highest value of all - the one most worthy of being promoted - was the value of anti-atheist bigotry.

Diaz-Balart has picked up the moral tools of praise and condemnation and applied them to promote an aversion to atheists.

My question now is whether there are any people willing to pick up the same moral tools and apply them to actually making the world a better place, rather than applying them to promote unjustified hatred and bigotry.

Congressman Lincoln Diaz-Balart is a Republican representative of Florida's 21st District. He can be contacted through his congressional office web site. This district is a suburb of Miami and, thus, its members can be best reached by letters and comments to media that serve the Miama market.

A list of Miami media can be found at ABYZ News Links for Miami and includes, among other media, The Miami Herald

One also has the option of contacting any organization that one belongs to that has reason to stand in opposition to bigtroy (not limited to atheist or humanist organizations) and getting them to offer official condemnation. The more condemnation that one can muster, the more moral work that gets done.

Anti-Atheist Bigotry in 2008

I have written a few posts recently concerning the work of morality. In those posts I have argued that doing the work of morality requires employing the tools of praise, condemnation, reward, and punishment. These tools are to be used to promote desires people generally have reason to promote (that tend to fulfill other desires), and inhibit desires people generally have reason to inhibit (that tend to thwart other desires).

Reason tells us how best to use those tools. However, reason does not actually do any moral work. Expecting reason alone to do moral work is like expecting the instructions for assembling a bicycle to assemble the bicycle. Somebody has to pick up the tools and apply them.

Recently, I saw a list of 10 events in 2008 that allegedly illustrate the persecution that Christians suffer in the United States. The list included events such as PZ Myers' alleged desecration of a Eucharist and Bill Mahar's movie Religulous. (Of course, we must realize that we are dealing with people who think that anything other than total agreement with and subservience to their will counts as 'persecution').

As an "atheist ethicist" I have been particularly concerned with the issue of anti-atheist bigotry. So, allow me to present my list of events in 2008 that illustrate the magnitude of anti-atheist bigotry in America.

(1) Science Debate 2008

Nearly 30 debates took place among Presidential candidates in 2008. Yet, it proved impossible to get the candidates to participate in an event called Science Debate 2008, devoted specifically to scientific issues. Science is what is has warned us about global warming and will provide us with the tools to respond to this crisis. Science is the tool that will give us weapons to fight off a potential Bird Flu pandemic. Science is what warns us of oncoming hurricanes and other natural disasters, creates the early warning system, and tells us how to construct our society to mitigate the harms done by these events. Yet, the candidates would not go on air and talk about science. (See: Science Has No Place in Politics)

Yet, they participated in a number of events dealing with faith, including an agreement to be interviewed by pastor Rick Warren on their religious views.

The reason, of course, is because science is seen as atheistic, and no candidate can tolerate being associated with or participating in anything that might be cast as being in conflict with issues of faith. So, that which has the potential to save us is ignored.

(2) Kieffe and Sons Auto Dealership Advertisement

In February, a San Diego Ford dealership ran an advertisement in which they boast of "offending" potential customers who so not endorse government expressions of anti-atheist bigotry. They tell any potential customers who might disagree with such policies to "sit down and shut up" merely because they are in the minority.

This is in spite of the fact that the idea that majorities may treat minorities however they like, and minorities have an obligation to "sit down and shut up" and endure that treatment, did not work out very well for other groups as diverse as Native Americans, Blacks, Irish, and Japanese-Americans, Jews in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, and countless other examples. In fact, one of the greatest moral advances of the last 250 years is the recognition that minorities do not have an obligation to sit down and shut up.

Complaints to Ford Motor Company ultimately brought pressure to bear on Kieffe and Sons to retract the ad (which had run its course anyway) and to apologize. However, immediately after the apology the owner of the company said in an interview that he really did not mean it and he stood behind the message in the advertisement.

Furthermore, the individual who put together the advertisement saw fit to defend the message he set forth in that advertisement, without any economic consequences that I am aware of to himself or the company he works for.

(3) Ben Stein's Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed

Though this movie was billed as exposing some sort of conspiracy to prevent the teaching of "intelligent design" (a.k.a. Creationism) in public schools, it had all of the elements of an anti-atheist propaganda film.

How do you manufacture hatred against a group of people? One very common way is to associate the group that you want people to hate with something that they already hate (and, better yet, with something that they hate for good reason). It is an application of the technique that marketers use, attempting to associate a product with desirable ends such as sex and public approval and acclaim. The tactic is to invite the audience to transfer its sentiments towards the one thing to the "product" that the marketer is trying to sell – whether it is anti-atheist bigotry, or a car.

Ben Stein filled his movie with images of Hitler, Stalin, mushroom clouds, and gas chambers, in order to evoke harsh sentiments in his audience. His film then invited the audience to transfer this fear and hatred to his target group – atheists and 'evolutionists' who he claimed were ultimately the group responsible for these horrors. He, and those who backed the film, then toured the country to present this hate-mongering to audiences that were particularly susceptible to the message, as well as to legislators and school children.

(4) Monique Davis' Rant in the Illinois Legislature

Representative Monique Davis shouted at an atheist giving testimony to an atheist Rob Sherman giving testimony before her committee

This is the Land of Lincoln where people believe in God, where people believe in protecting their children.… What you have to spew and spread is extremely dangerous, it's dangerous . . . for our children to even know that your philosophy exists! . . . I am fed up! Get out of that seat! You have no right to be here! We believe in something. You believe in destroying!

Ultimately, she apologized to Sherman (though not to any other atheist). However, she did not apologize for what she said. She apologized for raising her voice. Her "apology" effectively was a claim that, even though she believed and stood by the content of her rant, the volume of her voice as she spoke should have been 15 decibels less than it was.

Furthermore, she made these statements during a session of the Illinois legislator, while sitting in a legislative chamber, and while acting as a member of that legislature. However, the Illinois legislature did not take a single step to reprimand or discipline her for her outburst.

Another dimension of this insult was the fact that she blamed her outburst on the fact that she had just heard about a school shooting. This gives rise to the question about the connections that might exist between hearing news of a school shooting and the claim, "It is dangerous for children to even know that your philosophy exists!" It is not uncommon for people anti-atheist bigots to blame atheists for every act of violence that takes place in a school, and this connection falls dangerously close to expressing that bigotry.

(5) Mitt Romney: Atheists Unfit to Lead

Republican Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney gave a campaign speech where he was accosted by a member of the audience who condemned Romney for being a Mormon. Romney answered

Let me -- let me offer just a thought, and that is, one of the great things about this great land is we have people of different faiths and different persuasions. And I'm convinced that the nation -- that the nation does need -- the nation does need to have people of different faiths, but we need to have a person of faith lead the country.

And he got a standing ovation for this.

His strategy was easy to understand. "Hey, c'mon man, we should not be fighting among ourselves. Instead of fighting each other, you and I should come together so that we can make a joint stand against them - where them are people who are not people of faith." He got a standing ovation for his expression of bigotry and hate-mongering.

(6) Mitt Romney "Freedom requires religion."

A couple of months after his first expression of anti-atheist hate mongering, Mitt Romney was getting enough grief on the fact that he was a Mormon that he decided he needed to give a major speech on the role of religion and politics. The heart of his speech was captured in the statement, "Freedom requires religion."

Apparently, he thinks that atheists can neither maintain nor even contribute to the maintenance of a free society. Where we find atheism, we find tyranny, and where we find freedom, we must find a religious people establishing and maintaining that freedom.

(7) North Carolina Senate Campaign

Late in the North Carolina Senate campaign, incumbent Elizabeth Dole accused her opponent, Kate Hagen, of associating with atheists and with, perhaps, being an atheist. Hagen had attended a fundraising dinner in Massachusetts among prominent figures in that state (including Ted Kennedy).. One of the attendees was Woody Kaplan -- who is an advisor to the Godless Americans Political Action Committee. Kaplan was not there representing any organization and made no contribution in the name of any group. Yet, his presence was considered sufficient case to brand Hagan with the political crime of being friendly to atheists.

Hagen responded to these accusations by bringing out her religious bona-fides. She further made the counter-accusation that there was probably nothing a political candidate could do than to accuse her opponent of being an atheist. In fact, Dole’s accusation was considered so horrendous that it was considered worthy of a lawsuit. Of all of the claims that one candidate made against another in the course of the 2008 elections, the one claim that is considered worthy of a lawsuit was the accusation of being friendly towards, or perhaps being, an atheist.

(8) Obama's Inter-Faith Gathering

Obama opened his convention with an interfaith gathering – a gathering of people from a number of religions and faith-based ideologies. It was an event built on the premise that "Democrats are people of faith" (suggesting, of course, that if one is not a person of faith one should consider this an invitation not to speak of oneself as a Democrat and to "honor the diverse faith tradition within the Democratic Party."

The real problem is not that such an event took place. The real problem is that, throughout the entire campaign, and even into the transition, in spite of significant efforts to reach out to people of faith, Obama has said and done practically nothing to acknowledge that people without faith even exist. He has not met with any atheist leaders, nor has he held an event in which atheists were invited to sit at the table with "people of faith" when matters of religion were discussed.

There is a question as to whether this is a matter of personal belief or political expedience. However, both options are compatible with putting this on the list of examples of anti-atheist bigotry in 2008.

(9) In God We Trust

There is scarcely a better example of bigotry in the world than a drive to put up signs in schools and public buildings that say, "We officially declare that any who belong to that group should not consider themselves one of us." In this case, the signs say, "In God We Trust" (or "If you do not trust in God, you are not one of us."). In 2008, the drive to post as widely as possible – and particularly where children gather and where government business is conducted that "we denounce anybody who does not trust in God" continued.

In particular, this year, the organization "In God We Trust – America" devoted a considerable amount of effort to have city governments and school rooms prominently display this message of exclusion and ostracism.

(10) The pledge of allegiance

The number one example of anti-atheist bigotry in the United States is the widespread use of the assertion that any who do not support a nation under God are the patriotic and moral equivalent of those who would support rebellion, tyranny, and injustice for all. A constant struggle exists to demand that all Americans – and, in particular, those who hold public office, show respect for the idea that there are four great evils that no good America could ever find acceptable - atheism, rebellion, tyranny, and injustice for all.

Conclusion

Here, then, are ten events that took place in 2008 exhibiting anti-atheist bigotry in America. They represent 10 events in which we should have seen orders of magnitude more “moral work” being done than we saw in fact.

The reason for demanding this moral work is not for the sake of atheists themselves. The moral demand comes from any love of justice – of the principle that law-abiding citizens of any government deserve the equal respect of that government and of their fellow citizens.

Promoting Virtue

The work of morality is not done in the realm of reason.

The work of morality is not done through dispassionate lectures, or blog postings that emotionlessly follow a path from a set of true premises through the length of a valid argument to a moral conclusion. It is not done in friendly debate or discussion.

The work of morality requires picking up the tools of morality – praise, condemnation, reward, and punishment – and applying the tools to task at hand to modify desires insofar as they can be modified. It requires actually going to the effort of promoting those desires that tend to fulfill other desires, and inhibiting those desires that tend to thwart other desires.

Reason has a role to play in telling us what those desires are, the degree to which they can be molded, and in how to most effectively use the tools of morality to mold those desires. However, reason alone does not do the work. In the same way, reason can tell you how to change a tire. However, you need to pick up the tools and actually apply them to the job if you want to get the tires changed.

A protest – people with signs marching and shouting – is one of the places where moral work actually gets done. Protests are acts of condemnation. It does not matter that the slogans that show up on the signs or the chants that the marchers use are not logically sound syllogisms leading to necessarily true conclusions. It matters that the signs and chants express praise on the one hand for what the marchers seek to promote, and condemnation on the other hand for what the marchers seek to inhibit.

Reason tells us if the protesters are working to promote that which there are many and strong reasons to promote – or if they are working to inhibit that which there are many and strong reasons to inhibit. However, reason does not do the work of promoting or inhibiting. That is the work that the protestors have taken up.

My ideal example of doing moral work can be found in the national motto and the national pledge. The national motto is an act of praise for those who trust in God (and an act of condemnation for those who do not), attached to something that is essential in every person’s life.

The Pledge of Allegiance is an act of praise for those who support a nation under God (and an act of condemnation for those who do not), aimed primarily at an audience whose minds are the most malleable, creating an emotional bond in the brain of the child for a state of affairs in which the nation is under God, and an aversion to anything that threatens the realization of such a state.

There are no arguments or syllogisms in these examples. No "reasons to believe" are provided. Rather, these acts of praise and condemnation work directly on the desires – particularly those of children.

The effect of this moral work is to create a state in which a person must trust in God and support a nation under God to enter public office. It is to promote a state where a supermajority of citizens would not want their child to marry an atheist, that views atheists as inherent anti-American, and who will withdraw support for any policy or program from the teaching of evolution to enforcing the First Amendment to the Constitution, that can be presented as a threat to trust in God or a nation under God.

It does so in a way that makes attempts to reason people out of these convictions a waste of effort, for the most part. Their attitudes are not grounded in reason, they are grounded in desires and aversions planted in their brains as children. Desires and aversions are a realm that reason typically cannot touch. They are a realm that we reach through praise, condemnation, reward, and punishment.

I want to point out that the qualifiers in the previous paragraph are meant to respect the fact that not all children learn the same moral lessons. An attempt to promote certain attitudes may make those attitudes more common, but it is difficult to make any set of attitudes truly universal.

There will be those who escape this attempt to plant desires for trust in God and a nation under God, and to plant aversion to anything that threaten such a state, and it will meet with certain degrees of success in others. None of that defeats the argument I am making here.

Again, the fact that people pick up a tool (such as praise and condemnation) and wield it does not prove that they are wielding it for a good end. That the praise that our government and its institutions heap upon those who trust in God and support a nation under God is effective and a perfect example of doing moral work is not proof that it is right.

In fact, in this case, the tools are not being used for a good end. This does not change the fact that the tools are being used efficiency - with great skill and precision. An expert soldier can be an expert soldier in the service of good or evil. How well he uses his tools, and the quality of the ends he serves with them, are two different questions.

Reason tells us the quality of the ends, and how best to use the tools in service to those ends.

However, the people who actually wield the tools of praise and condemnation are the ones doing the real work.

Here, I want to repeat my standard disclaimer. In an open society, the only legitimate response to words are words and private actions – not violence. The only legitimate response to a political campaign is a counter-campaign focused on persuading people that one’s position is correct, not on threats of violence commanding expressions of acceptance.

Moral Work

I am responding to a flurry of questions I have received on the moral principles that underlie this blog. In my previous post, I wrote about the difference between desires-as-ends and desires-as-means. Desires-as-ends provide the only reasons for action that exist. Even with respect to desires-as-means, the desire for the end that the "means" will help the agent achieve provide the "reasons for action that exist" to realize those means.

This has important implications for the "teaching" of morality.

If desires-as-ends are not dependent on beliefs, and morality is concerned with promoting good desires-as-ends and inhibiting bad desires-as-ends – this suggests that we do not teach morality by altering a person’s beliefs. It is quite possible for a person to hear a logical syllogism that tells him, "X is wrong", know that the premises are true and that the argument is valid, accept the conclusion as true, and simply shrug his shoulders at the conclusion and do X anyway.

The problem is not that he does not believe that X is wrong. The problem is that he does not care. And caring is in the realm of desires, not beliefs.

This goes against a common claim that "a person who knows the good will do the good." All you have to do is to prove to somebody, through calm reason, that X is the right thing to do, and he will do X.

That common claim is true, to some degree, for people who actually have a desire to do the right thing. If somebody has that desire, and a belief that "X is the right thing to do", then he has a motivating reason to do X. Still, the belief without the desire is insufficient.

Each agent only does what fulfills the most and strongest of his own desires given his beliefs. If he does not have a desire to do the right thing, or some set of desires that he can be convinced will be fulfilled if he does X, then he has no motivating reason to do X, regardless of the moral argument.

This does not imply that there is no role for reason in morality. Reason is what tells us what needs to be done, but it does not actually do the work.

In the past, I have compared the practice of morality to the task of changing a tire. You can reason all you want with the flat tire while you sit on the side of the road. That will not get the tire changed. You have to do the work of getting the jack and the tire-iron out and physically changing the tire.

However, reason still has a role to play. Reason tells you why you should change the tire (in terms of the desires-as-means for changing the tire), and how to do so. However, reason alone will not do the work.

The same is true of morality. I argue that morality is concerned with using social forces such as praise, condemnation, reward, and punishment to promote malleable desires that people generally have reason (desires-as-ends) to promote, and inhibit malleable desires that people have reason (desires-as-ends) to inhibit.

Reason alone does not do the work. You have to have people out there praising, condemning, rewarding, and punishing people in the way that reason recommends to do the moral work.

In the absence of moral work being done in the form of praise, condemnation, reward, and punishment, nothing changes. Nothing gets done. That is the arena in which moral work gets done. If people are not in that arena, then they are not doing the moral work. They are leaving that job to others.

In my next post, I will look at what the moral work consists of, particularly on issues relevant to secularists and atheists.

Desires, Ends, and Means

I am still getting a swarm of questions about the morality that sits at the foundation of this blog. Some of those questions come as comments to previous blog postings. Many more are coming through direct contact.

I want to answer one of the questions that I got as a comment, because it has important implications for the question of how morality is taught – with what one should do with moral facts. I answered the question in the comments section when it came in, but I want to give a more thorough answer.

The question:

Wait - so does your theory differentiate between desires based on true beliefs and desires based on false beliefs.

The answer: Desires are not based on beliefs. (Or, more precisely, desires-as-ends, which ultimately are the only reasons for action that exist, are not based on beliefs.)

Take, for example, the aversion to pain. The discomfort that one feels on having one’s hand in a bed of red-hot coals (at least so long as the flesh survives) is not grounded on any beliefs one might have about fire. It simply hurts.

Desires and beliefs are both propositional attitudes – line of computer code written into the brain. Beliefs are attitudes about how the world is. Desires are attitudes about how one wants the world to be.

We tend to want to avoid the sensation one gets when one's hand is badly burned. Beliefs help us to do so, but our aversion to those sensations are independent of our beliefs.

To confuse things, we do use the term 'desire' or 'want' loosely. We use it to refer to things that we desire as an end (aversion to pain) for no reason other than the fact we like or do not like it. We also use the term to refer to that which we desire as a means or as a tool for bringing about what we do not want. We want a smoke detector installed in our house to avoid being burned in a fire.

What we desire as a means is belief-dependent. We want smoke detectors because we believe that they can save us from a fire. However, every "desire-as-a-means" that we have is really just a bundle of beliefs and "desires-as-an-end". It is still the case that all of the motivation – all of the reasons for action – come from the "desires-as-ends" that are incorporated into this bundle.

One of the questions that I was asked concerns how we know whether we are dealing with a desire-as-means versus a desires-as-ends. One of the ways we can do this is by looking at the role of beliefs.

Somebody says that he favors capital punishment because it is a deterrence against crime. He is provided with evidence that disproves this belief. However, he dismisses the evidence without good reason (he "grasps at straws" for anything that appears to give the deterrence claim legitimacy regardless of how little sense it makes), or he accepts the evidence but still favors capital punishment.

Either of these reactions suggests that he does not value capital punishment as a means to reducing the killing of innocent people.

After all, if reducing the murders of innocent people were his goal, he would be seeking out the most efficient way to realize that goal. It would be important to him to have good evidence for what works (and what doesn't work) and to go with the option that has the best chance of working. The fact that he is willing to lie to himself about the effectiveness of capital punishment, or to disregard evidence, suggests that he values capital punishment for its own sake, and not just as a means for reducing the number of murders.

Whenever we see people grasping clearly flawed arguments, we have good reason to believe that the "desires-as-means" that he claims are the reasons for his action are not his real reasons. His real reasons are some desires-as-ends that we have reason to condemn or to criticize. To avoid this condemnation or criticism, he gives is whatever desires-as-means reasons that shows the slightest hope of tying his actions to a more legitimate end.

He denies that he has an aversion to homosexual relationships themselves and claims that opposition to homosexual marriage is necessary to promote morality and the traditional family, because societies that ignore morality and the traditional family collapse into a heap. "So, see, my end is not opposition to homosexual marriage. My end is to prevent the collapse of society. This is a perfectly good end."

Except, there is no evidence that society is actually put at stake by allowing homosexual marriage. There is only a desire to believe that society will collapse.

Now we can ask, "What desires are motivating you to WANT to believe such nonsense?"

 

BB3: Peter Turchin: A Science of History

This is the 13th in a series of posts on presentations given at Beyond Belief 3: Candles in the Dark"

You can find a list of all Atheist Ethicist blog postings covering Beyond Belief 3 at the Introduction post

And I would like to encourage you to give a contribution to the Science Network, who makes these presentations available for free.

Peter Turchin came to talk about the possibility of and the importance of "social science."

Let's look at the importance of social science first.

One of the statistics that Turchin brought to his talk was the claim that, in recent years, ten times as many people have died in intranational conflict than international conflict.

Political instability is a source of massive human misery. How do we solve this problem?

It would seem, Turchin argues, that the same reasons we have for valuing medicine and the health of individuals, we have reasons for valuing social sciences and the health of societies. When societies become unhealthy, people die. To prevent death, we look at what makes societies sick, and we find ways to treat or cure those social diseases.

Solving problems such as this is why we need a science of history. Turchin laments the fact that the study of history is a study in which people propose a lot of theories (e.g., theories for the decline of the Roman Empire), but no theory ever gets rejected. There is no method for falsifying a theory in history, so history fails to provide us with data that is useful for avoiding the problems of political instability.

Then, to illustrate what he is talking about, Turchin discussed what he considers to be an actual theory to an actual historical problem. He showed a chart that looked at the size of the largest empire at any given year, He noticed that the size of the largest empire seemed to have an upper boundary until somewhere between 800 and 200 BC.

Then, the maximum size for societies suddenly grew by an orderof magnitude. From this point on, empires could be 10 times larger than empires under used to be able to get.

What happened between in that time that made larger societies possible?

Turchin credits religion and religious-like belief systems with making large societies possible. This increase in the maximum possible size of societies took place at the same time that monotheism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Stoicism came into existence.

These "unifying ideologies" play an important role in creating stable societies - according to Turchin. Their role was important enough that it would be unwise to be rid of them.

A strong and just state is possible only on the basis of a well-integrated society.

Turchin does not go into this issue in detail (given the 15-minute limitation on his speech). However, a question that I came up with at this point is the disposition that religions have to be intolerant of dissent. If a common social glue is important, then does this need for a common social glue justify being intolerant of other views?

Ultimately, Turchin does not say that the social glue is religion. He states that the social glue is cooperation.

Cooperation is the social glue. What mechanisms cause it to wax versus wane?

This says something about the atheist movement in the United States. There is very little cooperation among atheist groups in the United States. So, it may be said that atheism does not generate cooperation. As such, it cannot provide a society with the integration that it needs.

I want to stress that Turchin did not draw these implications. I am simply looking at the possibility here.

However, somebody who attempts to make this argument would have to explain how those explanations square with the fact that there are northern-European countries that are substantially secular, and very health.

Robert Nozick's Utility Monster

Mail from the studio audience is coming in at a fairly fast rate right now. Which is a good thing. I am trying to answer as many questions as I can.

One piece of correspondence came with a question that I really should have answered long ago.

I was curious if you would be willing to or already have (and would be willing to provide me a link) addressed the concept of the utility monster and how it relates (or doesn’t) to desire utilitarianism.

The “utility monster” was one of philosopher Robert Nozick’s objections to utilitarian theory.

Nozick postulated a creature who received 100 units of utility (pleasure, happiness) per unit of resource consumption, in a universe where everybody else received 1 unit of utility per unit of resource consumption. In this type of universe, Nozick argued, utilitarian would require that all of the people who got lesser utility be sacrificed (give up any and all resources) to the utility monster. This moral demand for sacrifice, however, is absurd. Therefore, basic utilitarianism is defeated by means of a reduction to absurdity.

How does desire utilitarianism handle the utility monster?

I will begin by asserting that morality is a tool used for the fulfillment of real-world desires. If I were to build a hammer, somebody might raise the objection, “How would that hammer work in a world where nails were all built of clay?” The answer is, it wouldn’t. However, this is still a perfectly good hammer for the real world, where nails are made of steel.

Having said that, as a desire utilitarian, I would also note that the utility monster, in this case, has desires that tend to thwart other desires. Desire utilitarianism focuses on the evaluation of desires - counting as good those desires that tend to fulfill other desires and bad (evil) those desires that tend to thwart other desires.

Let us assume that we had a choice between a utility monster who received 100 units of utility per unit of resource consumption, and one that received 100 units of utility for each act of kindness he performs. We certainly have more and stronger reason to prefer the second type of utility monster to the first. That is to say, we have more and stronger reason to use our social tools to promote the formation of the second type of utility monster and to inhibit the second type. That is to say, we have many and strong reason to call the latter 'good' and the former 'evil'.

It is better, in other words, for the utility monster to get its 100 units of utility from states of affairs in which the desires of others are fulfilled, than from states of affairs where the desires of others are thwarted through the loss of resources.

This, I would wager, is where the emotional reaction to Nozick’s hypothetical come from. We read the description and immediately note that we have an aversion to that type of situation – the desires we have that will be thwarted by the greedy consumption of all the resources by this monster.

Those desires are "reasons for action that exist" for each of us to act so as to prevent the realization of such a state – to avoid a state in which there is a utility monster commanding the consumption of all the resources. They give us reasons to promote a aversions to overconsumption, waste, and greed, so that more desires are fulfilled through the use of fewer resources.

This is, in fact, what we see in the real world – the use of social forces (praise and condemnation) to promote aversions to the over-use of resources. It is because of the desire-thwarting qualities of "utility monsters" that people act to inhibit the creation of a world in which people find utility in the over-consumption of resources.

Individuals will seek to act so as to fulfill the more and stronger of their own desires. As a result, if we assert that the utility monster is a creature that acts in ways that thwart the desires of others, it follows that others have little or no reason to feed the utility monster. Advocating that people do that which, by hypothesis, we are told that they have more and stronger reason to refrain from doing, is nonsense. It’s a contradiction built straight into the example.

Let us say, instead, that we are dealing with a non-malleable desire. The utility monster has extremely strong desires (obsessions, perhaps) that require the consumption of vast amounts of resources. Other people have non-malleable desires to use those resources to fulfill weaker desires.

In this case, desire utilitarianism says that we have stepped out of the realm of morality. We have a universe in which these two sets of beings are in an unavoidable conflict. As a matter of fact, each faction will continue to act so as to fulfill the most and strongest of its own desires, given its belief. The fighting will continue until one group or the other has been wiped out or conquered.

Moral concepts only apply when we have a faction that has malleable desires. Then (and only then) it makes sense to ask how social forces should be brought to bear to mold those desires. Which is the same as asking about the desires that the most and strongest people have reason to promote or inhibit - asking about what to call good and what to call evil.

The utility monster's resource-consuming desires are not desires that people generally have reason to promote.

The Aversion to Homosexual Marriage

[W]ould a Christian's desire to live in a world without homosexual marriage be morally equivalent to the desire to enter a homosexual marriage? It would seem that fulfillment of either desire thwarts the other.

This is one of two questions that I received from a member of the studio audience. I answered the first question, on whether an embryo has morally relevant interests, yesterday.

Again, I am going to get pedantic and add some precision to this question.

The fact that a particular desire is a Christian’s desire does not give it any more weight . . . or any less weight . . . then the same desire held by a non-Christian. The question here is really how we should weigh an aversion to homosexual marriage and a desire on the part of some to enter into homosexual marriage. Is this an irreconcilable conflict?

In answering this question we need to look at a few additional factors.

The first is that morality is concerned with applying social forces such as praise and condemnation to malleable desires. Where two sets of desires come into conflict, one of the questions we need to ask ourselves in determining how to resolve that conflict is to ask which of the desires can be more easily changed.

Evidence suggests that the aversion to homosexual marriage is learned. Homosexual desire itself, on the other hand, is often the result of biochemical reactions that occur during fetal development that influence the properties of the body and brain.

The only thing we really need to do to end (or significantly reduce) this aversion to homosexual relationships is to quit teaching children to acquire and aversion to homosexual relationships. Whereas we are not going to get rid of homosexuality itself – at least until fetuses are developed inside of artificially and carefully regulated wombs.

The second factor to examine is to ask whether we are actually dealing with an aversion to homosexual marriage. In many cases, we are not dealing with an aversion to homosexual marriage per se, but with an aversion to that which offends God, and a belief that homosexual marriage offends God. Or, similarly, we could be dealing with an aversion to that which is intrinsically bad and a belief that homosexual marriage is intrinsically bad (or ‘unnatural’).

In these cases, homosexual marriage is not actually thwarting any desires. Instead, some people have merely acquired a false belief that it thwarts certain desires. The objections to homosexual marriage in this case would be similar to an objection raised by a neighbor because you intend to till your garden. Your neighbor comes over and says, “Do not till your garden because it will harm all of the faeries that live in the garden.”

Your neighbor, in this case, has an aversion to having harm done to faeries and a false belief that tilling your garden will harm faeries. However, here aversion to having harm done to faeries will not actually be thwarted by you tilling your garden. Because tilling the garden does not actually thwart any real desires, there is no real world “reason for action” to prevent you from weeding the garden.

Homosexual marriage is in the same situation. Homosexual marriage does not actually offend God because there is no God to be offended. Nor is homosexual marriage intrinsically bad because intrinsic badness does not exist. So, with respect to these concerns, homosexual marriage is not actually thwarting real desires. Consequently, these concerns do not provide any real-world reason to oppose homosexual marriage. They provide imaginary reasons.

If we imagine that the neighbor shoots the gardener to prevent harm being done to the faeries in the garden (or forces him, through law, to starve when he could have been well fed), we do not have a story of a hero doing great deeds. We have a tragedy born of ignorance and superstition.

The Moral Status of an Embryo

I have received another communication from somebody with questions about the implications of my moral philosophy. This one has two questions.

The second of these two questions draws from the claims that I have been using for the last two days – that for an entity to have interests that are morally relevant, it must have desires. An entity without desires cannot be harmed in any morally relevant way.

So, I have been asked:

Also, using desire utilitarianism, is it correct that an embryo would lack moral standing since it lacks the facility for conscious desire?

I wish to be pedantic for a moment and make this question a bit more precise before answering it.

There is a distinction between having “the facility for conscious desire” and having desires.

A person can have a “facility” for something without having the thing itself. I can, for example, have a facility for storing two hundred tons of cotton, without actually having two hundred tons of cotton. Having the “facility” for desires is not relevant here. Value consists of a relationship between states of affairs and actual desires. If the facility is empty, then no value (and no interests) yet exists.

Also, the claim that value exists in the form of relationships between states of affairs and desires does not distinguish between conscious and unconscious desires. Unconscious desires generate value just as conscious desires do. So, there is no moral permission to ignore unconscious desires – to go ahead and thwart them at will because they have no moral weight.

Please note that a sleeping (or unconscious) individual still has desires. He may not be able to act on them, but the desires exist nonetheless. There is no call for saying that the desires disappear – or they lose their moral relevance – in virtue of the fact that the person with the desires has lost consciousness.

So, I would rephrase the question to ask:

Also, using desire utilitarianism, is it correct that an embryo would lack moral standing since it lacks desires?

That is correct.

No morally relevant harm can be done to an entity that does not have any interests. Removing an embryo is much the same as removing an appendix. However, once the fetus has desires (even so much as an aversion to pain), it has morally relevant interests.

What If There Were a God? Implications on Morality

I have been writing a series of posts answering a series of questions on my basic moral philosophy. This post does not come from any question. However, it does come from some of the things I wrote in the last post on the value of communities.

In my last post I wrote that it is unlikely that communities have any interests because communities do not have any desires. Individuals within a community have desires, but not communities themselves.

However, what if communities had interests (desires) emerging from their complexity that were independent of those of the people within that community?

Even if this were true, this would be one set of interests among many. There is no reason to give the interests of this entity any greater weight than the interests of any other entity within the community. The community itself would still count as one entity – one “person”.

The same type of answer applies to the question, “What if there was a God?”

Let us assume that there is a God, and that God has a set of beliefs and desires. What implications would this have for morality?

Not much.

This would imply that there are a set of values in the sense that there is a set of relationships between states of affairs and God’s desires – just as there exists a set of relationships between states of affairs and my neighbor’s desires. God would still be entitled to the moral weight of one entity in all moral calculations.

There is no justification for the claim that an individual must make his interests (desires) subservient to those of God, any more than there is justification for the claim that God must make his interests subservient to those of any human.

In the realm of morality, God and humans are equals.

Instead of having intrinsic value, the value of God’s desires would still be determined by the value of all other desires. God’s desires are good to the degree that God has desires that tend to fulfill other desires.

Similarly, God is evil to the degree that God has desires that tend to thwart other desires. If God has a desire that tends to thwart other desires – a desire to cause pain, or a desire that leads to a great deal of thwarting of desires, then this does not make suffering good. This makes God evil.

The claim that God created humans would be morally irrelevant. If a being creates another being with desires, then that being creates a moral equal. If a man and a woman act so as to bring a baby into the world, this does not make the baby a slave to her parents, obligated to putting their interests above her own. The baby comes to the world as somebody of equal moral weight, whose interests are on a par with the interests of her parents.

Just as the infant is the moral equal of her parents (even though the parents have far greater strength, intelligence, and wisdom), people would be the moral equivalent of Gods.

The only reason that parents have authority over a child is because the parents, we assume, can make decisions that more reliably fulfill the present and future desires of the child than the child can. The child’s duty to obey her parents, insofar as such a duty exists, comes from the fact that it is generally in her interests to do so.

As soon as the parents begin to command things that are not in the child’s interests (particularly if they command that the child act in ways that fulfill the desires of the parent while sacrificing her own interests), the duty to obey disappears.

The same would be true if there were a God.

If that God commanded things that were truly in our interests (that would help to better realize states of affairs that fulfill our desires), it would be prudent for us to do what that God told us to do.

However, at the first sign that this God is commanding that we act in ways where we are not fulfilling our own desires, but instead sacrificing our interests for his pleasure, our duty to obey goes to the same place as that of the child of a parent who would abuse her for his own pleasure.

As it is, there is no God. There are the beliefs of a bunch of pre-literate tribesmen scribbled into books and stories when they finally learned to write. People who obey the bible are not fulfilling the desires of any deity. They are following the instructions of substantially ignorant human beings who have been dead for hundreds of years.

When those beings died, their desires died with them. When those desires ceased to exist, so did the value grounded on those desires. So, people who act so as to please a group of pre-literate tribesmen are not realizing any value at all, unless (by chance) those actions also tend to fulfill current, real, and good desires.

Yet, even if I were wrong on this matter . . . even if there were a God . . . the moral implications would be nothing more than to note that the moral universe is larger by one person – a person who has no more rights than any other person – a person who counts as one person in all moral calculations – a person that is good to the degree that he has desires that tend to fulfill other desires, and evil to the degree that he has desires that tend to thwart other desires.

The Individual vs The Community

I am writing a series of posts on my basic moral foundations, in response to a series of questions that I received from an interested reader. That list of questions included the following:

Richard Chappell, referring to you, says the perspective of moral values is the “us” - This strikes me as collectivism, so, how can it not be? . . . Maybe you feel that individualism and collectivism can be merged or compatibilized, like with what you did to the objective/subjective dichotomy?

One of the concerns that some people have is over the question of whether (and to what degree) an individual may be sacrificed for the good of the community. It concerns a line of thinking that says that the community is some type of “superperson”, more important than any individual and worthy of the individual’s sacrifice.

An important counter to this is that we are all individuals. The sacrifice of an individual for the sake of “the community” is really just the sacrifice of an individual for the sake of other individuals.

I have argued that value exists in the form of relationships between states of affairs and desires. As far as we know so far, only individuals have desires. Communities do not have desires independent of the desires of any individual.

So, this model would conform to the view that the sacrifice of the individual for the sake of the community is accurately described as the thwarting of one person’s desires for the sake of fulfilling the desires of other people. Perhaps it is to fulfill particularly strong desires for a lot of other people, but it is a of one person for the benefit of other people nonetheless.

It is, at least, conceivable that a community can have beliefs and desires that are independent of those of any person within that community.

A bunch of atoms can be organized into a form called a brain, where the brain has beliefs and desires that are independent of the beliefs and desires of any atom that makes up the brain. So, it may be possible that a group of people can be organized into a form of society where the society has beliefs and desires that are independent of any person within that society.

If such an entity were to come into existence, then certain values would also come into existence. Those values would take the form of relationships between states of affairs in the world and the entity’s desires.

However, there is no reason to believe that the desires of this entity are any more or less important than the desires of any individual who made up that entity. This entity would still only be one “person”, whose interests are to be weighed against the interests of the hundreds of millions or billions of people who made up this entity.

We can sacrifice an appendix for the sake of the person who needs it removed because the appendix has no beliefs or desires of its own. As an entity without desires, it is an entity without interests, which means that it cannot be harmed in any morally relevant sense.

However, sacrificing a clump of people for the sake of the community does involve the sacrifice of beings with interests. If we consider the community to be an entity with desires independent of those of the individuals who make it up, then sacrificing a group of people in that society for the sake of the society still counts as sacrificing the interests of a lot of entities for the sake of the interests of one entity.

Furthermore, if a community is an entity with desires independent of the desires of the individuals within it, then it is still the case that we can evaluate the desires of that entity. That entity has good desires to the degree that it has desires that tend to fulfill other desires (the desires of the people who make up that community). That entity has bad desires to the degree that it has desires that tend to thwart the desires of others (the desires of the people who make up that community).

The idea that the community represents some sort of super-entity with its own desires is highly speculative at best. A person can reasonably hold that even if such an entity were possible, no such entity exists at this time.

Yet, even if it did exist . . . even if communities formed entities with their own beliefs and desires . . . it is still one entity among many. Any claim that this entity’s interests have value above and beyond the interests of the people who make up this entity is a claim that some sort of desire-independent reason exists. That’s a false claim.

This does not imply that it is always wrong to sacrifice the interests of some individuals for the sake of other people. In fact, we do it all the time. We have a prison and court system that every honest person knows does harm to the interests of a lot of innocent people.

However, we know that it would be foolish for us to abolish it, and to accept only a prison and court system that guarantees without the possibility of error that no innocent person will be punished. We know that we are doing harm to innocent people for the sake of the community, but we do so anyway.

We sacrifice the interests of rapists for the sake of the community, and we do not offer them a smidgen of compensation for their loss. Why should we? The rapist has bad desires – desires that we have reason to inhibit – because the community will be better off if no member of the community had a desire to rape.

Ultimately, this is an example of sacrificing the interests of one group of people to protect the interests of others. However, we are sacrificing the interests of those who have interests they should not have, and that we have reason to discourage rather than promote.

So, while it is sometimes legitimate to sacrifice the interests of some subset of people for the sake of the community, it is not legitimate in the sense that the community represents a super-community with its own super-interests that outweigh those of any individual.

Even if it did exist, it would be one entity among many, and its interests would be the equal of those of any one person within the community. It would not be an entity with interests inherently worth the sacrifice of millions (or even tens) of people.

For the moment, so far as we can tell, only individuals have desires. Consequently, all real-world value exists in the form of relationships between states of affairs and the desires of individuals.

Individualist vs Collectivist Systems

I am writing a series answering some basic questions about the philosophy that serves as the foundation for this blog. So far I have presented the idea that there are moral facts. Moral facts concern relationships between malleable desires and other desires (not some sort of intrinsic moral property). This implies that moral facts can change over time as relationships between real-world objects change over time. However, you cannot change a moral fact merely by changing your mind, any more than you can change your height by merely believing you are taller.

These posts came from a set of questions sent to me by somebody who included the following.

I come from Objectivism (the philosophy of Ayn Rand). I consider myself an individualistic anarchist, (free market anarchist). Does Objective Moral Relativism equate to a collectivist worldview or is it proper for an individualist (take someone who comes from Randian premises)?

I came from an Objectivist camp as well – and stayed there through most of high school and until the early years of college. I gave it up when I realized that my Objectivist friends, even though they claimed to have a great deal of respect for reason and reality, held a system that asserted the existence of things that do not exist, and defended them with twists of logic that rival those of any religion.

When we are talking about value, only one type of value has been shown to exist - has been shown to be real. This is the value that exists as relationships between states of affairs and desires. Different types of value reflect different types of relationships.

So, for example, the term "useful" is applied to things in virtue of their ability to bring about other things in which desires are fulfilled.

The term "healthy" is a desire-laden term that applies to physical and mental functioning. It states whether the object of evaluation is functioning in a way that tends to fulfill the desires of the agent.

The term "beautiful" refers to things seen and heard and concerns wither the speaker has a desire to look at or to listen to that object of evaluation.

Whether a system that is "individualist" has more value than something that is "collective" (or visa versa) depends on the relationship that individualist systems have in fulfilling good desires, compared to the relationship that a collectivist system has. If individualistic systems tend to fulfill good desires better than collective systems, then people have more and stronger reason to promote individualistic systems than they do for promoting collective systems. Or visa versa, depending on the relevant moral facts.

Good desires are relevant here because good desires are those that tend to fulfill other desires, so are desires that people have reason to promote. Bad desires tend to thwart other desires, and are desires people have reason to inhibit. A system that fulfills desires that tend to fulfill other desires is one that people have reason to prefer over one that fulfills desires that tend to thwart the desires of others. We do not just look at whether each system fulfills desires, but at the quality of the desires they fulfill.

If somebody wants to argue that individualistic systems are intrinsically more valuable than collective systems, they are going to provide me with some sort of evidence that this intrinsic value exists. As I see it, "intrinsic value" is at least as mysterious as God, and I have never seen a shred of evidence of its existence. Accordingly, I see that a person who worships at the altar of "intrinsic value" to be little different than a person who worships a God. They are both devoting time and energy to the service of something that does not exist.

So, desire utilitarianism is not inherently individualist or collectivist. Desire utilitarianism calls for looking at each system and judging which best fulfills good desires. Capitalists have arguments that free-market systems do a better job of fulfilling desires. Communists disagree.

Keep in mind, this requires more than saying, "I like individualistic systems more than collective systems." Like does not matter much. A person may taste the contents of two glasses that are sitting in front of him on the table. He may discover that he likes the taste of glass A more than that of glass B. Yet, it may still be the case that glass A contains a poison that will cause the person who drinks it a slow and agonizing death. We cannot trust to our likes and dislikes alone to tell us what has value.

There are facts of the matter here, regarding whether individualist or collectivist systems help or poison those who use them. There are questions here that cannot be answered by appeal to personal preference or taste. There are questions that are as much a matter of what is real and what is not as any question that scientists seek to answer.

Desire Utilitarianism vs. "Common Utilitarianism"

I am starting the year with a series of blog postings about my basic moral philosophy, in answer to a set of questions that I have recently received.

I started by explaining desire utilitarianism - the idea that malleable desires are the fundamental object of moral evaluation. We have reason to use those social forces to promote malleable desires that tend to fulfill other desires, and inhibit desires that tend to thwart other desires.

I also explained objective moral relativism – the thesis that moral claims are not claims about intrinsic moral properties, but claims about relationships that exist in the real world. These relationships are real and can be studied as scientifically as any relationship in nature.

The next question is:

3 - How is your position distinct from common Utilitarianism, like the one Bentham invented, with the whole "greatest amount of pleasure for the greater number of people" and "hedonic calculus" which could lead to someone killing an innocent person to save 2 of his better-liked fellows, or robbing my food to feed more people, etc..

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I have partially answered this question in the first posting on desire utilitarian theory.

Desire utilitarianism is a theory that holds that desires are the fundamental object of moral evaluation, and that desires are to be evaluated according to the utility they produce. The rightness or wrongness of an action does not depend on maximizing utility. The rightness or wrongness of an action depends on whether it is the type of action that a person with good desires would perform.

I have answered this question in more detail in a posting that I called The 1000Sadists Problem. What if the televised torture of a young child will fulfill the desires of 1,000 sadists? Does desire utilitarianism say we should torture the child?

No, it does not.

The first thing we must do is to evaluate the sadistic desire itself. Let us assume that nobody has a sadistic desire. In this case, no desires are being thwarted. No victims are being tortured to fulfill the desires of the sadist, and no sadists are having their desire to witness torture thwarted by the fact that nobody is being tortured.

However, the instant we introduce a person with a sadistic desire, then somebody’s desires are going to be thwarted. Either the sadist is going to suffer the thwarting of his desire for sadistic torture, or the sadist’s victim is going to suffer the thwarting of desires that is a part of being tortured. The desire for sadistic torture is a desire that people generally have reason to inhibit – it is a bad desire.

Note that it is not a bad desire because it is intrinsically bad. It is a bad desire because of the relationship it has to other desires – the desires that other people have to avoid pain and for the well-being of their loved ones. Intrinsic value does not exist. Only relationships between objects of evaluation (sadistic desire) and (other) desires exist.

This does not imply that a desire utilitarian would be opposed to a redistribution of wealth through such methods as taxation. The fact of the matter is that if there are 10 hungry people, one would fulfill more desires by distributing the food among all 10 people than by giving the food to one person (who may have no interest in sharing it with others). We have many and strong reasons to promote in people a desire to share that which they have with those who have less, or even to force him to hand over the food if he does not want to.

This is an issue that I have discussed in several postings, using the example of an airplane that has crashed in a desert, far from any help, but near to an isolated mansion where the wealthy owner is running millions of gallons of water through his fountains, with no possibility for help to come for days or weeks.

Desire utilitarianism holds that the person who would selfishly refuse to share his water in this case has desires that people generally have reason to inhibit. That is to say, he is a bad person. A good person, on the other hand, would seek to redistribute the water wealth, allowing the passengers to survive. People generally have many and strong reasons to promote desires to help those in need and aversions to those who selfishly stand by while others suffer and die.

Though it is not guaranteed, it is at least plausible that the good person, in this type of case, will forcefully redistribute the water wealth from those who have more water than they need to those who need water to survive.

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with redistributing the wealth. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with anything - intrinsic values do not exist. However, objective values exist. It may well be a matter of objective fact that the desires that the good person would have are desires that would see to the redistribution of the water wealth.

I will have more to say on this topic in my next post.

Desire Utilitarianism and Objective Moral Relativism - Part II

Objective Moral Relativism

I am going over a set of questions that I have been sent regarding my basic moral philosophy. Currently, I am addressing the question of whether one position I defend - Objective Moral Relativism - is the same as another view that I defend - Desire Utilitarianism. In my previous post I described desire utilitarianism. So, in this post, I will look at objective moral relativism.

The short answer is that objective moral relativism is not the same as desire utilitarianism. However, the two claims do not conflict, so they both are true.

Objective moral relativism is a term that I use to confront the popular (and hugely mistaken) assumption that for moral values to be objective they must be some sort of property that is intrinsic to actions or states of affairs that somehow signal to us that the action ought (or ought not) to be done or the state ought (or ought not) to be realized.

Consequently, a moral objectivist must assert the existence of such entities. Those who deny their existence are moral relativists, who hold that morality is nothing more than the unfounded whim of the person making the moral claim.

The idea that one must choose between intrinsic properties or subjective properties is simply false. Science claims are considered objective. However, there are very few if any scientific claims that refer to intrinsic properties. Most scientific claims describe relationships between things. Yet, this fact does not, in any way, threaten the objectivity of science.

My paradigm example of objective relativism is location. I challenge you, the reader, to describe the location of anything in absolute terms. All location claims describe relationships. They point out where one thing is by describing its relationship to another thing. The keys are on the table. Denver is in Colorado. I am at home.

Yet, scientific research papers are filled with location claims.

Surprisingly, nobody ever thinks to assert that scientific research isn’t real science if it contains a location claim.

Another fact about location claims is that the decision as to what to describe an object’s location relative to is a matter of whim. We give the location of many things on Earth relative to an imaginary line drawn between the north and south pole through Greenwich, England. But why Greenwich England? Can any researcher, anywhere in the world, provide me with a scientific argument proving that Greenwich, England is the one and only correct place to use for zero degrees longitude? Or is it the case that this reflects a substantially arbitrary choice by a bunch of men who simply agreed to use this line?

Yet, even with this arbitrary, unfounded decision to use Greenwich, England as the point for zero degrees longitude, we still do not have an objection to the claim that a statement in a scientific paper giving the location of an object in terms of latitude and longitude is an objective scientific claim.

My claim is that moral statements, like location statements, represent a type of objective relativism. Moral statements, like location statements, describe relationships between real things in the universe. Specifically, moral statements describe relationships between malleable desires (those desires that can be molded through social forces such as praise and condemnation) and other desires. They are not statements about mysterious properties that are somehow intrinsic to objects of evaluation that tell us whether or not the object of evaluation should be realized or not.

Furthermore, these relationships are perfectly fit subjects for scientific study – as fit as relationships between objects in space and time. They exist as a part of the real world. Nobody has the power to alter these relationships simply by changing their mind about them, any more than they have the power to move a star trillions of miles through space simply by changing their mind on where the star is at, or to move their keys to their coat pocket simply by believing, "My keys are in my coat pocket."

The next objection usually to come up asks on what basis I am justified in calling these particular relationships 'morality'. My answer is: Call them what you want, it does not matter in the end. In just the same way that choosing Greenwich, England as the starting point for latitude and longitude has no relevance to the objective location of things on the Earth what we choose to call morality has no relevance what is and is not true about relationships between desires and states of affairs.

If X is a desire that people generally have reason to promote or to inhibit through social forces such as praise and condemnation, then X remains a desire that people generally have reason to promote or to inhibit, regardless of what we call it. Just as the longitudinal distance from Greenwich, England to Denver, Colorado, remains the same regardless of what location one arbitrarily decides to call "zero degrees longitude".

So, in short, Objective Moral Relativism says that moral statements do not refer to intrinsic moral properties. Instead, they refer to relationships that exist in the real world that allow moral claims to be objectively true or false. Desire utilitarianism holds that the specific relationships in question are those between maleable desires (desires that can be molded through social forces) and other desires.

Desire Utilitarianism and Objective Moral Relativism - Part I

I have received a communication with a set of four questions about my basic moral view. Since this is the start of a new year, and since I suspect that there is some turnover in my readership, I think that this is a good time to explain the moral foundation of this blog in the light of these questions.

I am considering what someone in reference to you called Objective Moral Relativism. After doing some research, I found out you have a book where you use the term Desire Utilitarianism, and maybe it's the same thing. Is that still the ethical position you hold?

(1) Yes, I still hold that Objective Moral Relativism is true. I also hold that Desire Utilitarianism is true.

(2) Desire utilitarianism and Objective Moral Relativism are not the same thing. However, they do not conflict with each other either – which is how both can be true.

So, let me explain. I will start with desire utilitarianism

Utilitarian theories hold that moral values are tied up with the 'utility' of the object of evaluation. One alternative is morally better than another in virtue of the fact it creates the most utility.

We have two different ways that we can distinguish among different utilitarian theory.

One method is by distinguishing between that which is to be maximized – that which counts as 'utility'. In this schema we have utilitarian theories that say we should maximize pleasure and minimize pain, theories that say we should maximize happiness and minimize unhappiness, theories that say we should maximize preference satisfaction, and so forth.

The other method is by distinguishing between primary objects of evaluation. Act utilitarianism says that the primary object of moral evaluation is the act (the right act is the act that maximizes utility). Rule utilitarianism says that the primary object of moral evaluation is the rule (the best rule set is the set that maximizes utility), and that the right action is the action recommended by the best rules.

Desire utilitarianism is a utilitarian theory in the second sense. It holds that desires (or, more specifically, desires that can be molded through social forces such as praise and condemnation) are the primary objects of moral evaluation. The best desires are those that tend to maximize utility in the sense that they tend to lead to the fulfillment of other desires. The right action is the action that a person with good desires would perform.

So, what is it that we should maximize? What counts as "utility" in a desire utilitarianism framework?

On this metric, desire utilitarianism is a pluralistic theory. There is no single thing that all people should maximize. Instead, each desire identifies a state of affairs that the agent has a reason to bring about. If the agent desires pleasure, then he has reason to bring about pleasure. If he desires happiness, he has reason to bring about happiness. If he desires the welfare of his children, then he has reason to bring about the welfare of his children.

I speak about desire fulfillment in this theory. However, desire fulfillment is not a thing to be maximized. Desire fulfillment is simply a term that I use to refer to a state in which an agent has a desire that P (for some proposition P), and P is true.

Different desires have different strengths. We can use the strengths of different desires to choose among different options available. So, a person who has an aversion to pain and a desire that his children are healthy and happy can weigh the value (to him) of a state in which he is free of pain from a state in which his children are healthy and happy, and to act according to the strongest of the two desires. Yet, it is not "desire fulfillment" that has value for this agent. It is "freedom of pain" that has value, or "my children are healthy and happy" that has value.

The biggest mistake people make when they encounter the term "desire utilitarianism" is that they assume that it is an act-utilitarian theory that calls for maximizing desire fulfillment – the way that other utilitarian theories call for maximizing pleasure, happiness, or preference satisfaction. term refers to a theory that I call desire-fulfillment act utilitarianism. They then bring the standard objections to act-utilitarian theory to bear against this theory.

Yet, desire utilitarianism does not say, "Perform that act that maximizes utility.” It says, "Perform that act that a person with good desires would perform," along with, "Promote those desires that tend to fulfill other desires and inhibit those desires that tend to thwart other desires."

This is the difference between an act-utilitarian theory, and a desire-utilitarian theory.

Animals and Morality

Yesterday, in The Predator Problem Revisited, I argued that animal rights concerns does not necessarily imply vegetarianism or the view that it is wrong to kill animals.

However, as Chris pointed out in a comment to that posting, animal rights concern is broader than this. Therefore, let me take a few moments to state some broad morally relevant facts about animals.

First, animals operate on a system of beliefs and desires. The best way to explain a wide range of animal behavior is in terms of statements about what the animal wants (sex, food, avoidance of pain, comfort) and what the animal believes to be true about the world. Somebody who owns a pet makes perfectly good sense when he says that the pet wants to go outside, or that the pet "thinks that I still have his toy."

Desires are reasons for action. This is no less true in non-human animals as it is in humans.

Animals' desires are reasons-for-action for realizing a state in which humans have particular desires and aversion. That is to say, animals have reasons-for-action for causing humans to have desires that fulfill the desires of animals, and for inhibiting in humans those desires that thwart the desires of animals.

What animals lack, and humans have, is an advanced capacity to realize complex relationships between states of affairs and desires and, thus, the ability to make complex plans that will help to fulfill those desires. Consequently, animals cannot think to promote desires in humans that they have reason to promote, or to inhibit desires in humans that they have reasons to inhibit.

Those reasons for action still exist, even if animals lack the capacity to act on them in particular ways.

However, humans (and animals) seek to act so as to fulfill their own desires, and act so as to fulfill their desires given their beliefs. So, humans are going to act to realize states that promote their own desires, which means that humans are going to act so as to promote in others to desires that fulfill and/or prevent the thwarting of their own desires.

Yet, humans do have a reason to promote in others an aversion to thwarting the desires of those who cannot act on their own behalf. This is true because each of us, at times, cannot act on our own behalf (while unconscious or otherwise disabled) or care about somebody who cannot act on their own behalf (infants, pets, friends who might fall unconscious or are similarly disabled).

These "reasons for action that exist" for promoting those desires in others are "reasons for action that exist" for promoting desires that fulfill the desires of animals, and inhibiting in others those desires that thwart the desires of others. What another human cannot do to an animal that is incapable of defending its own interests is something he or she cannot do a human that is incapable of defending its own interests, and leaves all of us more secure.

These, then, represent a body of morally relevant facts concerning the status of animals. What follows from these facts gets complex. However, this at least provides a foundation from which further conversations can be launched.

The Predator Problem Revisited

I have an email question from a member ofthe studio audience.

I have been reading you blog for over a year now but and maybe I have missed it. But do you have any writings about vegetarianism and the moral implications of both or either side?

One thing that I have written is an article called The Predator Problem.

It concerns a question that animal rights advocates need to answer about the legitimacy of a predator - such as a lion - killing and eating a prey animal. If it is wrong for a human to kill another animal, then it is also wrong for one animal to kill another animal - and for humans to sit back and do nothing while this wrong is committed.

The standard animal rights response to this objection is to say that predators such as lions are not moral agents. As such, they cannot be blamed for what they do. They lack the capacity to know or to act based on their knowledge of right and wrong.

However, this response does not work.

First, the fact that the predator is not a moral agent does not imply that we should do nothing if an animal should try to kill and eat a human being. Our moral obligations still compell us to go to the rescue of any human being attacked by an animal.

If we add to this obligation the proposition that animals have rights, then we have the same duty to prevent an attack on another animal as we do to prevent an attack on another human being. The assertion that the attacker is not a moral agent turns out to be irrelevant. The assertion that the attacker is not a moral agent does not imply that we should do nothing while non-moral agents inflict pain and suffering on others.

Second, I am not talking about the morality of the animal's actions. I am talking about the morality of our actions insofar as we act to prevent or to allw the predatory acts of predatory animals. I am writing about our acts, as moral agents, to interfere or to permit this behavior on the part of non-moral arguments. The question does not concern the moral legitimacy of the animal's actions as non-moral agents. The question concrs the moral legitimacy of our behavior with respect to allowing or or preventing predator attacks on other animals, particularly in light of the death and suffering that prey animal.

So, we could take the predators of the universe and kill them all to keep them from killing the prey. However, this fundamentally goes against the proposition that animals have a basic right to stay alive. We could keep the predators alive, but the killing of the prey animals contradicts the proposition that animals have a right to stay alive as well.

The article mentioned above goes into more detail. Ultimately, I argue that animals do not have an aversion to death (a being can have an aversion only to those things one can comprehend), and that animals do not have the capacity to comprehend death. Therefore, the can have no aversion to death.

They can (and do) have an aversion to pain, but not to death.

So, killing them cannot (at least directly) thwart the desires of an animal by killing it. The desire utilitarian needs to come up with a different reason not to kill animals - if there is another reason to be had.

BB3: Panel Discussion: Be Kind to Religion

This is the 12th in a series of posts on presentations given at Beyond Belief 3: Candles in the Dark"

You can find a list of all Atheist Ethicist blog postings covering Beyond Belief 3 at the Introduction post

And I would like to encourage you to give a contribution to the Science Network, who makes these presentations available for free.

In the panel discussion on politics and science, This Is Your Brain on Politics Sam Harris responded to some of the comments that Chris Mooney made regarding the policy of being concilatory towards evangelicals.

Harris sought to point out some of the costs of being conciliatory towards religion. He drew an analogy towards witchcraft and, in Africa, we have a "pandemic" of children being accused of witchcraft and being killed or otherwise made to suffer. Religion, according to Harris, is as bad or worse than witchcraft and, being conciliatory towards religion, is being conciliatory towards something that causes great harm.

Harris did agree with the "energy war" that others had talked about. However, he said that the enemy on the other side is not just the pump, but Islamic despotisms who have no need to invest in the economic capital of its people because of the economic capital of its oil.

Chris Mooney resonded to Harris' remarks by saying:

It is interesting that you bring up the energy issue at the end because what we have on that is we have evangelicals mobilizing to create concern among their own members about global climate change, and that is actually an important trend in the evangelical community, and they are defining the mission to deal with protecting the environment in the context of biblical stewardship, which is a message that resonates for them. And, this is the question for me, Do you really want to alienate those kind of views when the planet is at stake? No. Not in the context of American politics, no.

So, here’s my question. What is involved in this project of not alienating the evangelical community?

Are we seeking to make a bargain whereby atheists and secularists concede that they are unfit to hold political office and positions of public trust in order to buy evangelical support on climate change?

"Okay, for those evangelicals who have decided to become the good guys on the issue of climate change, we will no longer publicly challenge your claim to moral superiority – that only a person of faith can have morals, that only a person of faith is fit to lead the country, that only a person of faith should be considered a true American."

And does our bargain involve conceding the issue of creationism being taught in public schools as fact. "Okay, in order not to offend you so that you do not turn away from promoting an effective response for climate change, we will grant your wish that science classes teach that the earth is less than 10,000 years old, that evolution is a lie, and that God created everybody as the only scientific theory that actually works."

Does our bargain include refusing to challenge evangelicals on issues such as gay marriage? Are we being asked to throw not only ourselves, but homosexuals, under the evangelical bus? Is this part of what is involved in the decision not to alienate the evangelical community?

Do we buy their political support with faith-based initiatives where the government once again levies a tithe on American income and gives the money directly to the church?

Do we purchase their cooperation by putting the American military under the authority of the church, filling its officer corps with people who think that the purpose of the military is to fight for God and who cannot distinguish between fighting to defend the United States and fighting the perceived enemies of the evangelical religion?

As an ethicist, I have defended the proposition that the enemy is not "religion" per se. The proposition "God (almost certainly) exists" carries absolutely no moral implications about what we should or should not do – in exactly the same way that "God (almost certainly) does not exist" says nothing about what we should or should not do. It is all the stuff one adds to "God exists" or "God does not exists" that carries the moral weight. We can debate moral facts without mentioning God in the same way that we can debate ways of growing food or designing bridges without mentioning God.

However, Mooney is not talking about "religion" as a generic and abstract belief that a God exists. Mooney is specifically saying that we should not alienate evangelicals. That is to say, we should purchase political cooperation from evangelicals on the issue of climate change. However, that requires giving them something in return. Mooney does not mention which harms we should close our eyes to – which portions of the population we should turn our back on – in order to purchase evangelical support for a global warming initiative.

Mooney went on to say that we must close our eyes and turn our back on some of the victims of evangelical falsehoods is because the planet is at stake. Clearly, what good is it to get gay marriage legalized in this country if it comes at the cost destroying the planet. “Yes, the human race will be extinct in 100 years because we could not get evangelicals to work with us on climate change. However, at least for those 100 years gays will be allowed to freely marry. That is our victory.”

It would be a hollow victory indeed.

However, if this is an accurate description of our current situation, then the current situation is one in which evangelicals are willing to hold human survival hostage to its political ambitions – willing to tell the rest of us, "Concede to our demands or we will end the human race."

If this is the demand that they are making on us, perhaps we do have to give in to their demands. Perhaps Mooney is right and we must silence our criticism of the harms done by evangelical errors and prejudice in order to save the planet.

However, this does not say anything positive about the ethics of the evangelical community. We may be forced to say that they are good people in order to get their political cooperation in saving the planet. However, this is like being forced to say (and to teach the next generation) that the Earth is less than 10,000 years old.

The fact that we are forced to say it does not make it true.

In fact, in this case, if we are forced to say it, then it is because we are dealing with people of which it is not true.

Finally, I must point out before I go . . . the evangelical community is just now starting to motivate its people to do something about climate change. The scientific community had motivated its people 30 years ago. Should we really praise a group that held up action on this vital issue for 30 years because it conflicted with their political and social ambitions?

BB3: Panel Discussion The Energy War

This is the eleventh in a series of posts on presentations given at Beyond Belief 3: Candles in the Dark"

You can find a list of all Atheist Ethicist blog postings covering Beyond Belief 3 at the Introduction post

And I would like to encourage you to give a contribution to the Science Network, who makes these presentations available for free.

My first prediction of 2009. President Elect Barak ObamJonata is going to announce a project, similar to the Apollo project of the 1960s, to dramatically alter the energy landscape in America and the world. It will be a multi-hundred-billion dollar project to switch the country from fossil fuels to other forms of energy – solar, wind, ethanol.

The purpose of this project will be:

(1) To free the United States from dependence on foreign oil – most of which we get from hostile countries. It will be Obama’s way of dealing with a number of foreign threats, from Muslim extremists to Chavez in Venezuela.

(2) To deal with the problem of global warming. The project will save future generations trillions of dollars in costs that would result from climate changes that would result if we did not do this – in particular, with sea-level change and the migration of tropical diseases into regions that are currently not tropical.

(3) To stimulate the economy. The project will provide jobs in the short term, while giving America a technological advantage that will provide economic benefits far into the future.

The prospect of an energy war came up at the Beyond Belief conference, in the panel discussion at the end of three presentations on politics, This Is Your Brain on Politics. In fact, its an idea that has been circulated since 9/11 – as the option that Bush should have spent $1 trillion on instead of spending the money on invading Iraq. It is an option that would not have cost over 4,000 American killed and 30,000 injured, would not have killed and maimed perhaps over 1,000,000 Iraqi citizens, and would not have left America economically vulnerable to our chief rivals in the Middle East and China.

Mooney, as well as other attendees at the conference, advocated support for the Energy Project because of its relationship to science and technology. Like the Apollo project, this energy project is one in which scientists and engineers are going to make the largest contribution.

Promoting the energy project goes hand-in-hand with promoting math and science education. A national project in which scientists are the front-line soldiers could, potentially, promote the prestige of science and scientists much the way that Apollo did in the 1960s.

That is the dream.

Against this, Jonathan Haidt had a dire warning. Haydt suggested that such a project needs a personified enemy in order to be effective. America has had its "war on poverty" and its "war on drugs" – neither of which accomplished nearly as much as its advocates wanted them to accomplish. The nation ultimately failed to rally around these causes. They did not seem to care.

The Manhattan Project and the Apollo Project, on the other hand, both succeeded because America faced an external threat in the form of persons with which it was at war. The Manhattan Project took place in the context of a war against Germany and Japan. The Apollo Project was, in effect, a proxy war against the Soviet Union. Instead of seeing who can kill enemy soldiers and destroy enemy cities the fastest, the combatants signed on to a proxy war where the winner would be the one who sent a man to the moon and brought him safely back to Earth.

The war on drugs was, in a sense, a war against persons. It was a war against the drug cartels who were running the business of crating drugs and shipping them to the United States. However, at the root, it was not a war against people. The drug cartels made their money feeding a demand, and that demand came from America itself.

The war on drugs was, in effect, a civil war, with Americans contributing billions of dollars to people on both sides. Where did these cartels get their money? They were financed by people in the United States that bought their drugs.

The war on poverty had no personal enemy, and it went nowhere.

The energy war may well be marketed more like the war on drugs. The role of the drug cartels will be played by violent Islamic extremists and he foreign governments and regions they control. However, also like the war on drugs, Americans would be funding both sides in this war. The enemy will be getting its money to counter America’s moves from Americans buying gasoline at the pump.

In fact, there are multi-billion-dollar American companies who profit from being on the "other side" of such a war. Exxon-Mobile has already proved its lack of moral conscience in putting whole American cities at risk of destruction for the sake of securing more profits for itself.

People who care so little about the blood that stains the dollars they put in their pocket are not likely to show much patriotism when it comes to waging the energy war. (Obama will be smart to design his energy war package in such a way that these companies are bought off somehow – given that they are lead by people who care more about money than morality.

It is a shame, if it is true, that one cannot rally the people to a cause unless it is a cause that involves doing harm to some enemy – some people capable of being killed and tortured. However, the fact that it would be a shame if something were true does not imply that it is not true.

This is where morality comes in. Morality is concerned with molding our desires, to whatever degree that they can be molded, from those that it is a shame that we have, to those we have reason to have. So, perhaps it is time to put some effort into casting shame on those who cannot get behind a plan unless it involves declaring war on some other group of people. Perhaps it is time to start praising the ability to become enthusiastic about a plan whose purpose is to help everybody, as opposed to simply helping "my clan".