Bush's Defense of Torture

The Bush Administration is making America a vile and despicable country. To make matters worse, it has now embarked on a campaign that, it seems to me, has the specific purpose of corrupting the American moral character and to seduce the American people into embracing pure, uncontaminated evil.

These are the thoughts that came to my mind as I read the MSNBC article, "White House pushes water boarding rationale." The article tells of an administration that has made a conscious decision to use the powers of the President to engage in an orchestrated mass-marketing campaign whose ultimate object is to get the American people to become co-conspirators in its own moral atrocity.

The tactic is the same that Michael Devlin used in the kidnapping of a second boy for his own sexual pleasure. A boy he had kidnapped a few years earlier was protesting Devlin's plans to kidnap another (younger) child. In order to gain the first boy's cooperation, he made the first boy a co-conspirator, involving him in the execution of the kidnapping. The idea is that, once the first boy is involved in supporting the crime, he will 'rationalize' the act in his own mind so as to justify it to himself, in order to protect his own ego.

So, now, the Bush Administration wants to involve the American people in its war crimes, to get us to embrace its own evil.

So, what is this plan?

Bush has ordered six people suspected in some involvement in the 9/11 terrorist attacks to be tried, with the intention of seeking the death penalty. If these people had been captured and given fair trials, then there would be little grounds for objection. I probably would not have thought the issue worth writing about.

However, these people were tortured.

Of course, the Administration does not torture (Bush has told us this himself). Of course, in order to say this with a straight face, they have literally defined torture as acts of barbaric cruelty inflicted on people other than the Bush Administration. Imagine a rapist who comes to us with the claim, “I do not rape,” defending his claim by saying, “Rape is an act of forcing sex on somebody who is unwilling by somebody other than me.”

We’re talking about somebody who is evil to the core.

Now, it is also the case that every rapist will be able to tell us a story that ‘justifies’ his actions in his own mind. He will tell us that the victim deserved to be raped. “She is nothing but a tease who enjoys frustrating men and she deserved what I gave her.” Or he will defend it as an act of charity. “Women secretly enjoy being raped. It allows them to have the pleasure of sex without the responsibility.”

Gang members will explain how they are only protecting their own turn. The thief who robs the convenience store will tell us that they are robbing the people with their high prices and his theft was only a matter of getting back what the store has wrongfully taken. Even Hitler could give us a story about how the Holocaust was for the greater good, as could every slave owner, crusader, or terrorist who helped to hijack an airplane and fly it into a sky scraper.

Every one of them has a story to tell us about what we can perceive to be justified when we put our minds to it. Every one of them is, in fact, a warning about the type of world we make for ourselves when we accept these types of rationalizations. We are looking at a world in which nothing is evil, in which there is no such thing as an ‘atrocity’, except that which is committed by ‘the other guy’, which can then be used to justify us doing the very thing we have condemned in others.

So, why is torture immoral? Why is it something that no good person can accept?

Because the statement, “Torture is permissible” means anybody can engage in torture. President Bush is giving permission to every tyrant and despot, present and future, with prisoners that he wants to interrogate, to torture them. If America embraces torture, one of the certain effects of our action will be that a lot more people around the world will be tortured. By lowering (or eliminating) the moral barriers against torture, we embrace a world in which torture is more common.

One could argue that the difference between American torture and the torture done by these petty tyrants and dictators is that we have good reasons to torture and they do not. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Scalia brings up the often-used ticking bomb example. “You know that a bomb is going to go off that will kill a thousand innocent children. You can save those children by torturing this one prisoner. Certainly, in this case, it is morally justified to torture this prisoner.”

To somebody who understands morality, the ‘ticking bomb’ example is a moral cake-walk. I have compared it to the case of a father, out fishing with his son, when the son has an allergic reaction to a bee sting, and the only car available belongs to somebody else who has left his keys to the ignition. Does the father take the car?

Yes, the father takes the car and uses it to save his son’s life. But the father still admits that taking the car is wrong. He goes to the person who owns the car and begs forgiveness. “I’m very sorry for taking your car. I know it was wrong. Please forgive me. My son was dying and I couldn’t see any other way to get him to the hospital. If I had any other option I would have used it. I know it was wrong. I’ll make it up to you.”

This type of regret is the sign of a moral wrong outweighed by a legitimate greater concern. We do not meet these types of situations by making car theft legal on the off chance that somebody might actually have a good reason to take somebody’s car. We leave it the case that car theft is illegal and, in the rare circumstances in which somebody needs to take somebody else’s car, we leave it to them to throw themselves on our mercy. And if they can convince us that a greater value was truly at stake, and that the agent made a good-faith effort to realize those values without doing evil to another person, then, and only then, do we forgive him.

Has anybody heard the Bush Administration beg for forgiveness for the evil that it has done? Has anybody heard the Bush Administration admit that their actions were ‘wrong but necessary’. Quite the opposite. They continue to insist that their actions were right. They’re acting like somebody who (claims to) have taken the car to save their sick child, without providing any evidence that the child was, indeed, sick, and who then insists that they now have the right to keep the car.

I want to stress this point, because it is important. I fear that some readers might skim over the above paragraph as pure rhetoric. The behavior of the Bush Administration is like that of the person who takes a car, when asked why he took it he claims that he had a sick child to deliver to the hospital (without providing evidence) and who insists that he may now keep the car.

This is the moral character of the Bush Administration. The contempt and condemnation that we would give the father in this type of case is what any good, moral person would give to the Bush Administration – only more so, given the greater magnitude of the evils that the Bush Administration is embracing and the fact that this evil is its preferred world-wide moral standard.

So, what do we do in this case? As I said, we condemn the Bush Administration. We should insist on a formal condemnation but, failing that, at least to the degree that we are able, we spread the informal condemnation as far and as wide as possible – among all people who do not wish to see casual torture the new moral standard. And we condemn all who do not join us in condemning this administration.

That condemnation need not be because the Administration engaged in torture – just like the condemnation in the above case need not be because the father took the car to get his sick child to the hospital. The condemnation is because the Bush Administration fails to recognize the wrongness of torture and, even where it is necessary, it is something for which a good person would still beg for forgiveness as a way of acknowledging that wrong.

Even more so, the Bush Administration deserves condemnation for this new tactic, of putting the weight of the Administration behind corrupting the moral character of America. Rather than admit the evil that it has done and ask for forgiveness, the Bush Administration now wants to seduce the American people into embracing evil as its new moral standard.

For that crime, there can be no forgiveness.

Any person who sides with the Bush Administration on this, sides with evil. They are evil , too. They are the 21st century equivalent of the “good Nazi.”

One of the goals of this blog is to convince readers that it is necessary to pick up the tools of praise and condemnation and to wield them, at times with unrestrained force, at those who exhibit characteristics that we have reason to promote or inhibit respectively. It is a summons to express contempt at those who are contemptible, and to heap praise upon those who deserve praise. That these are vital tools to making the world a better place.

When you write, and you can demonstrate that the person you are writing about exhibited traits that people generally have reason to inhibit, then make sure that you make it clear that the subject of your writing deserves contempt and condemnation. To say that they deserve contempt and condemnation is nothing but saying that people generally have reason to inhibit the formation of those character traits, that having those traits makes one a person that others generally have reason to condemn.

The Ultimatum Game

Last night I listened to the most recent episode of TED while I was on my exercise bike.

TED is one of my favorite web sites to visit. It contains video of presentations given at an annual conference in California where, at least according to their own promotions, 1000 of the best and brightest minds get together to discuss issues of technology, entertainment, and design. If anybody wants an example of “hope” without a religious context, this is the place to go – to see what real people are doing to make the world a better place.

This current episode had to do with issues of cooperation. Specifically, Howard Reingold argues that the internet is making possible a whole new culture of cooperation, which we can see exhibited in phenomena such as “open source” coding, Wikipedia, and other open, cooperative efforts.

On the issue of cooperation, Reingold brings up a couple of famous problems in game theory – problems that are supposed to highlight some paradoxes of rationality, where people who perform the ‘selfish’ act in a contrived situation ends up creating a situation in which he (and everybody else) is worse off.

He discussed the famous Prisoner’s Dilemma, of course, which I have discussed in the past.

He also discussed another game, an ultimatum game, which deserves our attention.

Before I describe the game, I would like to note that I listen to these types of cases through the filter of desire utilitarianism. A lot of these types of ‘puzzles’, I argue, only appear to be puzzles because people look primarily at actions themselves, and with that narrow perspective they cannot understand why the situation works out the way it does. If one looks at the issue from the perspective of desires, rather than actions, what appears to be a puzzle, actually makes sense.

The ultimatum game works like this: You take two people who do not know each other and you put them in separate rooms. You then go to one person and say, “I have a hundred dollars. I am going to give it to you, but you have to split it with the guy in the other room. I want you to tell me how much of this $100 you are willing to offer that other person. If he accepts the offer, then he will get what you offer and you get the rest. If he refuses, then neither of you get any money.”

According to standard assumptions of rationality, the first person should only need to offer $1 to the person in the second room. The person in the second room has a simple decision, whether to take $1 or to refuse it and get $0. Rationality seems to dictate that he take the $1.

However, in laboratory experiments, people who learn that the first person decided to make a split of $99 to $1, they often refuse the $1. They seek to ‘punish’ the first person by depriving that person of $99, even at a cost of $1 to themselves.

Furthermore, according to <>, people seem to know this, because the people in the first room often offer something closer to a 50-50 split, rather than thinking, “The person in the other room is rational, and will clearly choose to have $1 over having $0.”

Apparently, this is a puzzle.

However, I do not see the puzzle.

Let us take the principle that people act so as to fulfill their desires given their beliefs. Let us also propose that people have reason to promote in others those desires that tend to fulfill other desires, and to inhibit desires that tend to thwart other desires. A third proposition that I want to throw into this is that these cases cannot, in fact, be separated from the outside world. The subjects come into the experiment with desires molded in the outside world, and they will carry those same desires back into the outside world.

So, I’m the second person in this contest. Would it make sense for me to refuse the $1?

Of course it would. I have reason to promote those desires that tend to fulfill the desires of others, and inhibit those desires that tend to thwart the desires of others. One of the ways that I do so is through social conditioning. If I reward somebody who makes such an uneven split of money, he will take the story of this encounter into the outside world. He will teach people the benefits of this form of selfishness, and this will generate a culture in which there is even more selfishness – where I am even more likely to suffer at the hands of people willing to take more for themselves than they are willing to give to others.

Whereas, if I refuse this $1, then the other subject is going to take that story into the outside world. He is going to be a living example of a lesson that, “If you want something for yourself, you had better be ready to share it with others.” This will promote an aversion to selfishness and a desire for sharing, which will better fulfill my desires in the outside world.

In fact, other people in the world have reason to condemn me for taking the dollar, because in doing so I have promoted selfishness and inhibited sharing in the real world. The adverse affects of my action give them good reason to say to me that my relationships with them are at risk, because I did not have the good sense to promote sharing and inhibit selfishness.

There is no rationality in accepting the $1.

Okay, what if we can guarantee that everybody forgets about the event once the game is over, so that there is no story to take into the outside world. Thus, none of these adverse consequences will result. That cancels out this reason for refusing to generate $1.

I still have a reason to refuse to take the $1 . . . because I simply do not like the fact that the other person is offering such an unfair deal. In being subject to social conditioning, I should have been caused to have an aversion to unfairness such that, even though I value $1, I value a fair exchange even more. I simply do not want an unfair exchange, and am willing to pay $1 for the sake of avoiding a result in which another person benefits from selfishness.

This is true in the same way that, if somebody were to offer me $1, and say that if I accept the money I would have to endure a series of painful electric shocks, that I would have reason to refuse the $1. If they offer me $1, and require that I eat food that I do not like, I have reason to say, “Keep the money.” If they offer me $1, and offer me the opportunity to reward selfishness, it is not irrational for me to say, “I hate unfair deals even more than I hate that food that you offered me last time. You can still keep the money.”

It does not matter where my hatred of unfair deals comes from. Once I have that desire, then it becomes a part of who I am and one of my reasons for action. It doesn’t matter where my hatred for a certain type of food comes from, once I have that distaste for that food, that is enough to give me a reason to avoid eating it. I do not have to make up a story about how it might thwart my future desires to have news of my eating that food reach the outside world. I don’t like it – and that’s all I need to say on the matter.

The value of creating an actual aversion to unfair trade is that it will affect a person’s behavior even when they can act in secret. It prevents people from engaging in unfair trade, even when they can away with it – even when nobody knows about it.

The same applies to creating aversions to killing innocent people, rape, theft, violent destruction of property. If people have aversions to these things, then they have a reason not to perform these types of acts, even under situations where they could get away with it, and no story of their misdeed will ever reach the outside world.

The rationalist is puzzled by the fact that somebody will not take money even when he can get away with it – when he is absolutely certain that nobody is looking over his shoulder. Yet, for some reason the rationalist is not puzzled by the fact that an agent will not eat food that he doesn’t like, even when he can snitch some of that food without being caught. If he has a distaste for that type of food, it is not irrational to refuse to eat it. If he has a distaste for taking property that does not belong to him, then it is not irrational for him to refuse to take it.

When we add an examination of desires to our view of these particular ‘puzzles’, a lot of the puzzle just vanishes. Looking at these puzzles without including the perspective of desires is like examining planet Earth but ignoring the sun, and then asking, “Where does all of the energy for all of this activity come from? The only possible source of energy we can see (given our artificially narrow perspective) is the Earth’s core, but it is hardly enough to explain all of this activity.”

Indeed, it is not. We need to look away from the Earth and towards the sun to understand where all of this energy comes from. In the subject of morality and rationality, we need to look away from actions and towards desires – and, in particular, at the rationality of promoting and inhibiting certain desires – to understand where much of this behavior is coming from.

This subject of evaluating desires, determining which to promote and which to inhibit, is what desire utilitarianism is all about.

Perspective on the Pledge 6: Hating Ameryca

This installment of the Perspective on the Pledge series was inspired by news of a billboard that went up in Pennsylvania, showing a sign much like the one described in this story. Quite coincidentally, the story provides an excellent way of illustrating the moral quality (or lack of it) of those who would post such a sign.

Previous installments can be found in yesterday's post

Part 6

Principal Hadley had given Shawn the night to choose between submitting to a pledge of allegiance to white power without protest, or being expelled from school. Shawn did not need even a minute to consider his options. He imagined himself sitting there while Ms. Johnson insulted his dad, claiming that a patriot must support white power, and he could not even imagine himself bearing the insult in silence. The only thing he could imagine was Ms. Johnson simply refusing to support the insult, refusing to give class time to the idea that all good Americans pledge allegiance to one white nation.

He told his mother that in the evening. He had everything all worked out, assuring her that he would study and get his degree, even if he was not allowed to attend a public school, but that he would fight any attempt the school made to dismiss him. “I’m doing this for dad,” he told his mother. “I’m doing this because he was a patriot, even if he didn’t have any allegiance to one white nation.”

Eventually, his mother had given in. “When your father went off to war, I didn’t want him to go. I wanted him to stay here with us, safe. Let somebody else do the dirty work. But, if everybody thought that way, nobody would ever do the dirty work. And none of us would ever be safe. I was scared, but I was so proud of him for agreeing to do the dirty work. Shawn, don’t do anything stupid.”

“I’ll do it just like Ghandi did, mom. I won’t raise a hand against anybody, no matter what they do to me. But I won’t give in either.”

The next day, when he got to the school, he found a group of students gathered around the front door. When they saw Shawn, they parted, leaving him a path to a sign that somebody had taped to the door. The sign showed a white kid standing before the flag, his hand over his heart, and a caption below the flag that said, “Why does Shawn Henry hate America?”

Shawn clawed the sign off of the door and looked around. He counted four teachers standing within line of sight of the door, yet none of them had thought to even ask what was going on. Crumpling the paper in his hand, he marched in the direction of the administrative center.

Jenny intercepted him. She handed him another version of the sign. This one said, “Why do blacks hate Ameryca?”

“I can tell you why?” Jenny said and she matched Shawn’s stride. “Because Ameryca is a white nation. If you’re not in favor of a white nation, then you have to hate Ameryca, because Ameryca is a white nation.”

“If Ameryca is a white nation and if loyal citizens have to pledge allegiance to white power, then it deserves to be hated,” Shawn grunted.

“Say that a little louder, Shawn,” Jenny said. “Then you won’t have to worry about detention any more, not until you’re released from the hospital, if you live that long.”

Shawn stopped. He found a chair sitting against the wall of the hallway and climbed on top. “Ameryca is either a great nation that values liberty and justice for all. Or it is a bigoted nation that values white power. It’s one or the other. Take your pick,” he shouted.

Two teachers were already working their way through the crowd to call him down, but Shawn did not give them time. He stepped down and continued toward the administrative center.

Side by side, they entered the administration center, where Principle Hadley and Ms. Johnson stood waiting.

Principle Hadley greeted them with a smile. “Jenny, let’s start with you. Show Shawn your good sense. I trust that your parents had a long and serious talk with you about the importance of staying in school.”

“Yes, Mr. Hadley,” Jenny said with a wide smile. “They taught me the importance of an education. They also taught me the importance of doing what’s right. Ms. Johnson, I live by that motto I gave in your class on the first day. A person does not show her moral character by doing the right thing when it is easy. She shows her moral character by doing the right thing when it is hard. I’ll accept my punishment, but I will not support a pledge of allegiance to white power.”

Hadley reached forward, took hold of Jenny’s arm, and dragged her away. “Jenny, this isn’t some noble cause. Shawn is just a troubled kid trying to find some attention. It’s the Pledge of Allegiance, not the abolition of slavery.”

“It’s a pledge to white power, Mr. Hadley. Of course, I have nothing against white power, if whites actually make the best leaders. But they aren’t the best leaders because of the color of their skin. They’re the best leaders because of their intelligence and moral character. I know it is said that blacks lack the moral sense of white people – that they have trouble being moral. But, from what I see, Shawn’s got a lot better moral sense than a lot of the white people around here.”

“Jenny!”

“There are a lot of private schools that my dad can get me into, Mr. Hadley. But you’re going to have to expel me. In the mean time, I know my way to the detention hall.” Jenny gave a polite bow, and headed down the hall towards the library.

“Look at what you’ve done,” Hadley said. “I suppose that expecting you to apologize and put an end to this is out of the question.”

“Yes, sir,” said Shawn. He held up the sign that Jenny had given him. “I suppose that expecting you to put an end to this is out of the question.”

“Guard, get him out of my sight,” Hadley said. He turned and went into his office while the school guard took Shawn to the detention center.

Perspective on the Pledge 5: Friend or Foe

I have two more parts to my Perspective on the Pledge series.

The previous parts of this series can be found here:

Perspective on the Pledge

Detention did not end when the school day ended. Detention ended at 4:30, when the last of the teachers were getting ready to go home. So, when Shawn and Jenny were finally released and allowed to talk to each other, the school was nearly empty.

“So, what happened?” Shawn asked.

“I waited until everybody else had said the Pledge of Allegiance, then I stood up and gave my version. I didn’t say ‘black nation.’ I hope you don’t mind. I just couldn’t bring myself to say it.”

“What did Ms. Johnson say?”

“She didn’t say anything. The rest of the class started to boo me, and she told them to sit down and be quiet. She let me finish. Then she sent me to the Principal’s office and here to detention.”

“What about Mr. Hadley?” Shawn asked.

“He gave me a lecture about you being a bad influence on me. He said how he hates to see me go down this path, and I have all of this potential and he would like to see me make better choices”

“Speak of the devil,” Shawn said. Mr. Hadley had just entered the library with a middle-aged couple close behind.

Jenny gasped, “Those are my parents!”

Jenny’s parents seemed quite well off. Her father was dressed in a well tailored suit and tie, and her mom was dressed as if she, too, could step into a board meeting without a second glance in a pants suit with a laptop bag over her shoulder.

Mr. Hadley simply opened the door to the detention room and let the couple enter.

“This is the young man?” Jenny’s mom asked, looking at Shawn.

“Yes, Ms. Bradford.”

“Young man, I ask that you find better things to do with your time than to corrupt my daughter.” She then held her hand out towards Jenny and added, “Come along, dear.”

Jenny went with her mom, leaving her dad and Principal Hadley behind. Mr. Bradford waited until the women were out of earshot and added, “I realize that you people have difficulty determining right from wrong, so I will put this in terms that you can understand. If I catch you hanging around with my daughter again, you will suffer the consequences, and that is a promise.”

He did not wait around for Shawn’s rebuttal. He spun on his heel and was out the door at a quick pace, catching up with the women.

“What am I going to do with you, Shawn?” Principal Hadley said. “I can’t let this continue. You are disruption to the school. Either you need to start living by our rules, or I will have no choice but to convene a hearing to have you expelled.”

“Living by the rules. That means pledging allegiance to white power.”

“You have the option, according to state law, of sitting quietly during the Pledge of Allegiance.”

“While everybody goes through this ceremony that says that in order to be a patriot one has to pledge allegiance to white power.”

“You have the option to sit quietly while the rest of the class says the Pledge of Allegiance. That is your only option. I will let you have the night to think about it. Tomorrow morning, you will either tell me that you will live within the rules, or you will come here to detention while I convene a board of expulsion. I have nothing more to say this evening.”

“And Jenny, will you expel her, too?”

“If I have to. Hopefully, with her parent’s guidance, we can get through this phase she is going through without doing permanent harm to her future. She really does have a promising future ahead of her. You’re dismissed. Sleep on it, Shawn. Make the right choice.”

Shawn picked up his books and his backpack and headed down the nearly deserted halls of the school.

He was just off of school property when he heard somebody shout his name. He turned and saw three black students approaching him from behind. He recognized the one in the middle, an athletic kid by the name of Paul who was in his physical education class. Shawn stopped for them, though they did not hurry.

“What do you want?” Shawn asked as they approached. None of the three answered. They looked angry. Shawn let his backpack drop from his shoulder and into his hand.

The middle of the three boys stepped straight up to Shawn and shoved him backwards. As Shawn’s arms went out to keep from falling, he dropped his backpack onto the sidewalk.

“What are you doing?” Paul asked. “Everything was fine here until you come along. Now all the white students are looking at us as if we’re all potential terrorists. Everybody got along. Black people haven’t had it nearly as bad as a lot of other groups did. We’re not getting beaten up and killed like black people in some other schools. Then you come here and start stirring up trouble.”

“All you have to do is pledge allegiance to white power?”

“What does it matter, man? Nobody pays attention anyway. It’s not like people take the Pledge seriously. We just mouth the words anyway. You act like it’s such a big deal.”

“If it’s no big deal, when why is there so much resistance to changing it? One of the ways in which I discover if something is a big deal or not is by looking at whether it dies of neglect. I do not see the Pledge dying of neglect, here. In fact, I see people willing to lynch anybody who suggests that we have a Pledge of Allegiance that is anything other than a pledge to white power.”

“You’re not changing anybody’s mind, Shawn. You’re just getting them mad, and all of us are going to pay the price.”

“Right,” said the student who stood at Paul’s side. “Haven’t you ever heard that you can attract more flies with honey than with vinegar?”

“You call this honey?” Shawn asked. “Your honey has a really bitter aftertaste.”

“You’re not listening, man,” Paul said, stepping up close. “You’re just making them mad. You’re not going to get anybody to change their mind by ridiculing and belittling them.”

“Do you expect that I can get them to change their mind by telling them that there is nothing wrong? You can’t get somebody to change their mind without first saying, ‘You’re wrong and here’s why you’re wrong.’ They’re wrong to have a school ritual of pledging allegiance to white power. And there’s no better way to show them why they’re wrong than by exposing them to a pledge of allegiance to black power.”

“Pledge to black power, and they’ll just see you as a threat. They’ll see all of us as a threat.”

“No,” Shawn said. “All you’re saying is that we’re supposed to act like nice, peaceful little slaves in order to keep the master happy. That way, he won’t beat us as badly. Maybe that’s true. Maybe telling the master that slavery is evil is a good way to get beaten. But slavery is wrong.”

“Leave it alone,” Paul repeated. “If you were the only one to get beaten, I would tell you to go enjoy yourself. But you’re not. All of us are going to suffer as well, and our suffering will be on your hands.”

“No, again,” Shawn said. “That’s like saying that the cop who dies trying to arrest a criminal is the fault of the judge who signed the warrant. No. The wrong being done here is being done by those who insist on a pledge of allegiance to white power. If any evil comes of that, it’s the responsibility of those who support such a pledge, not those who oppose it.”

“You remember that when you read about one of us in the hospital, Shawn.” Paul signaled to his friends that it was time to leave. As he walked away, he turned for a parting word. “I warned you, Shawn. I’m not going to suffer because you can’t keep your mouth shut.”

E2.0: Deirdre McCloskey: The Morality of Capitalism

This is the 15th in a new series of weekend posts taken from the presentations at the Salk Institute’s “Beyond Belief: Enlightenment 2.0.”. I have placed an index of essays in this series in an introductory post, Enlightenment 2.0: Introduction.

The speaker for this presentation is Deirdre McCloskey from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her topic is to defend a moral component of capitalism.

The problem that McCloskey is concerned with is the tendency of capitalist economists to simply ignore any discussion of morality. The only thing that matters is prudent. Capitalism is good because capitalism gives us ‘more’. The only form of rationality is the rationality of means – prudence. There is no rationality of ends. Capitalism provides us with a way of determining the best means for maximizing our ends whatever they may be.

McCloskey wants to insert into this view of capitalism some discussion of the value of ends. Specifically, she argues that capitalism relies upon and draws out seven main virtues; courage, temperance, justice, prudence, hope, faith, and love.

I have a serious problem with this from the start, because it uses a set of assumptions that are so common that few people ever think to question them, and yet they very much need to be questioned. One particular assumption is key to McCloskey’s enterprise. It is a false assumption, but widely assumed to be true. This false assumption cannot be easily squared with a number of issues and concerns in economics and morality. In fact, I would argue that it cannot be squared at all. Yet, people like McCloskey continue to try.

It is much like the Christian attempt to try to square the claim that there is only one God, that Jesus and God were both divine, and yet they were two separate entities. The fact is, this is a contradiction and the set of religious assumptions are to be thrown out. Still, people who do not want to throw out these assumptions want to continue to treat this like a serious problem.

The false assumption that McCloskey and economists like her are making is that there is this hard distinction between the evaluation of means and the evaluation of ends. They have figured out the rationality of means – that is what the study of economics is all about. Yet, they hold that there is absolutely no sense to be made of the idea of evaluating ends. Any claims that ends have different values are claims that intrinsic value properties exist. But, none exist, so there is no such thing as a value of ends. Ends are simply those states that our minds have, by evolution or culture, locked onto as ends.

My answer to this is to point out that every end is also a means. Our desires pick out our ends. A desire that P picks out states of affairs in which ‘P’ is true as an end – and then starts hunting for the means to bring about that end. However, one of the ways in which an agent can bring about a particular end is by altering the desires of other people. His desire that P gives him reason to promote desires in others that will tend to fulfill his desire that P, and to inhibit desires in others that will tend to thwart his desire that P.

That is to say, his desire that P gives him a perspective from which he can evaluate the values as means of the ends that people might adopt, to identify some ends as worthy of promoting, and others as worthy of inhibiting.

With this simple step we can preserve the fact that there is no rationality other than the rationality of means with the ability to determine the value of ends. We have the capacity to determine the value of ends as means and to act on those facts.

Without this, we are left with a quandary. There are no intrinsic values. There is only a rationality of means. Yet, there seems to be a sense (and, indeed, all of morality seems to depend upon the possibility) in which we can evaluate ends. How do you square the fact that all rationality is prudence with the moral requirement that we evaluate ends? The answer is that we recognize that all ends are also, at the same time, means, and that it makes sense to evaluate the means-rationality of ends.

In addition to this concern, McCloskey is interested in explaining the sudden rise in wealth starting in the late 1700s, and she does not think that Gregory Clark’s evolution explanation works. By the way, neither does Margaret Jacob, who points out that the industrial revolution took place mostly in northwestern England, and not all of England, where Clark has collected his data.

McCloskey also objects to the idea that we can find some sort of regularity to explain this event. When it comes to finding a scientific explanation, we are looking for a regularity – a reason as to why something changed in circumstances A, B, and C, but not in circumstances X, Y, and Z. To provide a scientific account of the cause of enlightenment, we need a number of circumstances in which an enlightenment occurred, a number of circumstances in which it did not, and a theory that reliably explains (and predicts) when enlightenments will spring up. However, the enlightenment is a unique event, so a theory that will explain and predict enlightenments (a scientific account of the enlightenment) is out of the question.

McCloskey’s theory for the sudden increase in wealth in the late 1700s is that it is due to a cultural change – an innovation, something that is likely to happen only once. That change was a change in ethics. For millennia, mutually beneficial exchange was seen as either impossible or unethical. If one person gained, then somebody else must have lost.

The 1700s saw the rise of the concept of mutually beneficial trade. Merchants – traders – went from being a dishonorable profession, to an honorable profession. People talked differently about trade and those who engaged in trade.

This was an innovation – like inventing the steam engine was an innovation. All of the pieces were there to be put together, and had been laying there to be put together, for hundreds to thousands of years. Millions of people had an incentive to figure out that putting these pieces together would have value. Yet, nobody thought of it. Then, suddenly, somebody had this burst of inspiration, and the industrial revolution took off.

What England actually needed was a new way of thinking that makes innovation possible – that encourages people to bring ideas together in ways that they have not been brought together before. What England needed was a system that praised and rewarded those who brought ideas together in new and unique ways, and condemned or punished (or at least failed to reward) those who did not innovate.

This cultural shift, too, was an innovation. All of the ingredients had been laying around for people to use, but nobody thought to pick them up. Suddenly, somebody in England (or Holland, actually) came up with the innovation of praising innovation and trade, and with that we get the enlightenment, and the vast accumulation of wealth of the industrial revolution.

E2.0: Gregory Clark: The Evolution of Capitalism

This is the 14th in a new series of weekend posts taken from the presentations at the Salk Institute’s “Beyond Belief: Enlightenment 2.0.”. I have placed an index of essays in this series in an introductory post, Enlightenment 2.0: Introduction.

Our next speaker is economic historian Gregory Clark, the head of the Department of Economics at the University of California, Davis. Clark is seeking to explain the sudden rise in material wealth that occurred in Europe and America, starting about 200 years ago.

Contradicting Shermer, Clark argues that there was no real increase in the standard of living in England (the target of his study) until about 1800. If we look only at the aristocracy, we see something that might be thought of as progress over time. However, if we look at the standard of living for the average Englishman – the vast majority of the population – they did not live any better in 1700 AD then they did in 1700 BC. In fact, their lives may be said to be worse. They had to work longer and harder hours under dirtier conditions surrounded by more disease and suffering than hunter gatherers did for the same amount of food.

The challenge is to explain what changed to bring about this sudden burst in productivity.

Many people (and I have been one of them) attribute this sudden change to the enlightenment. There was a philosophical shift in England and Europe at that time, a shift that threw off superstitious nonsense and replaced it with a disposition to study and understand the real world. It was a shift away from explaining things in terms of gods and other supernatural forces, and towards explaining them in terms of natural forces that we can understand as natural laws and use to our advantage.

Clark suggests that this may not be the case. In terms of economic and social customers, England had nothing under the enlightenment that had not been replicated elsewhere without producing the great boom in productivity we saw in England. Against the idea that ‘enlightenment’ implies ‘skyrocketing growth’, Clark offers a number of examples of ‘enlightenment and no skyrocketing economic growth’

He offers an alternative theory. He looked at wills filed in Europe in the years before this tremendous economic boom and noticed a trend in England whereby unsuccessful Englishmen (the economically disadvantaged) were becoming extinct and replaced by the descendents of more successful Englishmen.

Specifically, these wills show that upper middle class Englishmen had an average of four surviving offspring, whereas significantly poorer Englishermen had an average of less than two (less than the replacement rate). The upper middle class Englishmen were passing the biological determinants of economic success down to their offspring. Many of those offspring themselves tumbled down into the lower class. So, while the old lower class was dying off, a new lower class was coming into existence who were the descendents of these successful upper middle-class Englishmen.

Some of the results of this, over time, is that the lower class became more literate. Clark asserts that in Roman times, for example, very few people even knew their own ages, or knew how to read or write. By the 1700s, almost all Englishmen knew how to read a calendar, and could record the actual date and time they were born, and how old they were.

According to Clark, this shift might well have had a biological component. Lower-class people with lower-class values were dying off, being replaced by a new lower-class form of life, with a new lower class form of values.

In short, Clark asserts, we evolved into a capitalist society. As a result of this biological phenomena, the basic preferences of Europeans changed over time – the fundamental biological underpinning of our values changed. An earlier enlightenment would not have helped an earlier species of Europeans because those Europeans were not biologically fit for an enlightenment environment. They did not have the psychological dispositions that would allow them to thrive in such an environment. After a few centuries lower-class die-off and replacement by the genetic descendents of middle-class culture, the population changed. The new population was, in fact, capable of thriving in a capitalist environment.

Among these middle-class values, there was a very low preference for giving anything to the poor. In examining these wills, Clark noted that the wealthier individuals left less than 0.5% of their income to the poor. They left the rest to their children. They did not even leave money to their wives (who were at risk of taking the money and using it to raise somebody else’s children) – or did so only under the condition that the wife not remarry and that the wealth gets passed on to the man’s own biological children.

These agents also practiced a rigid for of kin selection. If a man had no children of his own, he did not leave the money to strangers. He did not even leave the money to servants. He left the money to nieces, nephews, and other blood relatives. Again, this helped to ensure the survival of those who carried the genetic determinants of success into future generations, and withheld benefits from those who lacked the genetic disposition to thrive in a capitalist society.

There are a lot of things about this theory that could easily cause a person to feel uncomfortable. Primarily, it speaks of social Darwinism. We can easily imagine somebody like Hitler saying that, “My people are genetically superior to these others. It is only fitting that we eliminate these others, replace them, and thereby create a country of super-men who can then enjoy a thousand years of peace and prosperity.”

The Englishmen did not consciously adopt a program of replacing a biologically inferior form of Englishman with a biologically superior form of Englishman. However, can we make a moral argument against doing anything like this consciously?

Clark is careful not to make these types of value judgments. He does not state that the wealthy Englishmen were genetically superior to the (original) species of poor Englishman. He is simply describing a historical fact – he is not attaching any value to them whatsoever. Because his conclusions are value-free, they cannot be used to recommend for or against any particular economic policy.

However, his theory does contain an element that says not only that our values – our preferences – have the same historical and biological component, but that our fundamental values underwent a shift in the previous 200 years. He does not have anything to say against making the value judgment that certain forms of human are biologically superior to others. His neutrality implies saying nothing against the legitimacy of replacing biologically inferior (unfit) individuals in a society – namely, the economically disadvantaged – with the biologically/evolutionarily fit descendents of the upper-middle class.

One thing to say about these conclusions is that the mere fact that people do not like a particular conclusion, this does not imply that it is false. It is scarcely a good argument to claim, “If human values underwent an evolutionary change before the enlightenment, this might support racist doctrines that some people are inherently superior to others. Supporting racist doctrines that some people are inherently superior to others is morally repulsive. Therefore, the theory must be false.”

This would be like arguing, “The holocaust was morally repulsive; therefore, the holocaust did not happen,”

Or, “If carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, then we might be forced to reduce carbon emissions. It would be a pain to reduce carbon emissions. Therefore, it must not be the case that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas.”

These types of arguments do not work. We cannot reject conclusions on the basis of the fact that we do not like where the argument is leading.

As it turns out, in this case, we can reject the idea that this line of reasoning actually supports these types of racist conclusions. To begin with, there is no such thing as intrinsic or no inherent value, so no justification for claiming that one segment of the population is intrinsically or inherently better than another. The only type of value that exists depends on relationships between objects of evaluation and reasons for action, and desires are the only reasons for action that exist. So, the type of person that is ‘better’ than any other – the type that is morally superior – is the type that tends to fulfill other desires. A person who lacks an aversion to wiping out a segment of the population would not easily qualify as a person with desires that tend to fulfill other desires. He would scarcely qualify as a good person.

Preparing for Court of Appeals Decision on the Pledge

Sometime between now and June, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals will put out a decision as to whether "under God" in the Pledge, and "In God We Trust" on the currency, are constitutional.

This is an election year. Beyond any doubt, the Democratic candidates for President and for the Senate and House will be required to declare that these are Constitutional and they must promise to do whatever they can to fight those who would remove these phrases.

Those candidates will have a choice - either agree with the Christian majority, or give their political seats to those who do.

It's got to be up to us to have an answer - a way of challenging what will no doubt be either a very vocal cry in protest of the decision, or a vocal cry in defense of that decision.

Obama and Clinton will once again be found on the Capital steps shouting, 'UNDER GOD!" when the Senate shows its support for, or opposition to, the 9th Circuit Court opinion.

Regardless of how the decision goes, the mere fact of the decision will be good for tens to hundreds of millions of dollars flowing into the coffers of theocratic candidates, amid promises that only those who believe that our rights come from God are qualified to serve as judges in the United States.

Our job is to make the task of defending these phrases as difficult as possible, by being prepared to make as much noise in defense of removing these relics of religiosity as possible, using the best arguments.

I've been adding to my story, "Perspective on the Pledge" recently. I have another section to add today.

The complete story to date (all four parts) - with even some of the earlier parts edited and cleaned up, can be found at:

Perspective on the Pledge.

The fourth part - the recently added part - is below:

---------

“You promised,” Shelby Johnson said. She had come to the detention center under the pretext of bringing Shawn’s homework to him. But she really wanted to talk to him about the fact that he had broken his promise to her. “Last night, you looked me straight in the eye and promised that you would not disrupt my class. I actually thought you meant it.”

“I did mean it,” Shawn said. “But, later, I realized that what I promised to do was to sit quietly while you taught another class full of students that people like my dad do not deserve your respect. I have an obligation to my dad, too. I have an obligation not to let the country he died to protect say that he wasn’t a patriot, simply because he had no allegiance to a white nation. I either had to disappoint you, Ms. Johnson, or disrespect my dad. I’m sorry, you lost.”

“It’s not like that, Shawn. You’re the only one who thinks that the Pledge of Allegiance disrespects those who don’t favor a white nation.”

“Then why did I get the reaction I did when I pledged allegiance to one black nation, Ms. Johnson. Some of the white kids in that class were ready to lynch me. They know that pledging allegiance to a black nation means saying that nobody who would support white leaders is patriotic. That’s why they were angry. They know that pledging allegiance to a white nation means saying that nobody who would support a black leader is patriotic. That’s why they want to keep it in the Pledge.”

“People have been saying the Pledge for sixty years, Shawn. You’re saying that you were the first person to figure out this secret meaning?”

“No, Ms. Johnson. You’re not listening. They added ‘white’ to the pledge sixty years ago when black people took over the Soviet Union. They did it because they did not want black leaders in this country. They know what it means. The only thing I did was to actually say out loud what everybody for sixty years has agreed never to say out loud. The words ‘with liberty and justice for all’ are in the Pledge in order to get children to support liberty and justice. The word ‘indivisible’ is in the Pledge to get children to support the union. The word ‘white’ was added to the pledge to get children to support white power. Of course white people love the idea of getting children to pledge allegiance to white power. They’ve been indoctrinating children this way for fifty years. That’s why you won’t find anybody but white people in public office.”

“Shawn, they’re not going to let you back into class unless you promise to behave yourself. They’re just not going to permit it.”

“Ms. Johnson, just don’t tell the class that being a patriot means pledging allegiance to white power. Don’t expect me to sit there while you tell everybody that people like my dad who did not support white power are as unpatriotic as anybody who would support rebellion, tyranny, and injustice. You’re talking about my dad, Ms. Johnson.”

“It’s the law, Shawn.”

“Yes. The law passed by white law makers telling you to teach other people’s kids that they’re not good Amerycans unless they pledge allegiance to white power.”

“Don’t do this, Shawn.”

“It’s your call, Ms. Johnson.”

Shelby left Shawn’s books on his desk and left the room.

A while later, Shawn received a summons to report to the Principal’s office. When he entered the Administration Center, he saw his mother through the glass windows in the Principal’s office. He felt his stomach suddenly tie in knots, and it took all of his effort to quit standing.

When he entered the office, Principal Hadley said, “I’ll leave you two alone for a while.” He left, closing the door behind him.

Shawn looked around nervously for a hidden microphone, realizing that there could be hundreds in the room and he would never see them.

“Honey, this is a new school. You said you wouldn’t get into trouble, here.”

“This is different, mom,” Shawn said. “I’m not fighting. I’m not doing anything like that.”

“They say that you’re causing trouble in the class, that you won’t let the teacher do her job. What are you doing, son?”

“It’s the Pledge, mom. I actually thought about what we’re saying when we pledge allegiance to one white nation. We’re saying that people like dad aren’t patriots – because patriots have to support white power. Dad was more of a patriot than anybody here. None of them died for this country.”

“You’re father was a good man, Shawn. But I bet some of these people fought for their country, too. Just because they didn’t die, that doesn’t mean they didn’t fight.”

“Okay. Still, it’s wrong, mom. It’s wrong what they’re doing.”

“Maybe it is, son. But your dad wanted you to finish school. He wanted you to make something of yourself. He fought to give you a good life, son. Don’t throw it away.”

“He fought to give me a good life by fighting those who would do us harm. That’s what I’m doing, mom. Because the government is having everybody pledge allegiance to white power, people like dad – and people like me – can’t do some of the things we would be good at doing, because it would violate the idea of white power. There are no black people holding political office in this country. Politicians have said, over and over again, that they will only appoint white judges who recognize that our rights came from white men. I’m fighting for a better life, too, mom. A life where being a patriot does not mean supporting white power.”

The room fell into a long, silent pause.

“Mom, it’s like Ghandi. I’ve sworn that I’ll never raise my hand in anger. I will do what I think is right. If the school decides to punish me, I will take my punishment like a man. If they quit saying that my dad wasn’t a patriot, I’ll shut up. If they keep saying that my dad wasn’t a patriot, I’ll speak my mind. But I won’t hurt anybody, I promise. I’m standing up for what’s right, mom. Just like dad did.”

Ms. Peachtree shrugged. “When you go back to detention, I want you to write down everything that happened. I want to know everything. We’ll discuss it when you get home.”

She picked up her gloves and her purse and headed for the door. Hadley saw her through the window and intercepted her.

“He’s all yours, Principal Hadley,” Ms. Peachtree said.

“Did you talk to him?” Hadley asked.

“We talked. We’ll talk some more tonight,” she answered. She said nothing else as she left.

* “I’m not going to do anything stupid, mom,” Shawn said. “I promise, mom, no fighting. A student could be pummeling me with a bat in the parking lot and I promise I won’t hit him. All I’m doing is saying that this isn’t right. If they decide to

The next day, Shawn went straight to the principal’s office as soon as he got in. Ms. Johnson and Principal Hadley were there waiting for him. Hadley spoke formally and deliberately. “Shawn, before I can allow you to return to Ms. Johnson’s class, I need you to apologize to Ms. Johnson about your behavior yesterday, admit that it was wrong, and promise never to do it again.”

“I have to ask Ms. Shelby a question first,” Shawn answered.

“What question?” Hadley asked.

Shawn turned to Shelby. “Are you going to be leading the class in the Pledge?”

“That’s the law,” Hadley answered for her. “You don’t have to participate, but the state legislature requires that she begin first period with the Pledge of allegiance.”

Shelby answered with a shrug, gesturing towards Principle Hadley as if to say, “That’s my position. There’s nothing I can do about it.”

“If Ms. Johnson refuses to lead the class in a Pledge of allegiance to white power, I will have nothing to protest. If she tells the class that my dad was not a patriot because he did not fight and die for one white nation, I will answer that insult.”

“Fine. Back to detention,” Hadley said. He summoned the school guard over and Shawn quietly followed him out of the room.

Shawn actually did not mind detention. The school held detention in a room just off of the library, and students were not permitted to do anything but study for the classes they were enrolled in. Shawn was getting well ahead of his reading and other homework, and liked it that way.

He was in the middle of his math homework when he was interrupted by the school guard opening the detention room door. He looked up and saw Jenny entering the room.

“I didn’t know we were allowed visitors?” Shawn said.

“You aren’t,” the guard answered. “Jennifer is a guest.”

“I seem to have gotten myself into a bit of trouble with the establishment,” Jenny said with a mischievous smile.”

“No talking,” the guard announced. “You don’t want to get into any more trouble than you already are.”

Quietly, Jenny took a seat opposite the table from Shawn and got out her books. Through it all, a smile never left her lips.

Protesting the Pledge

Since the start of this blog, I have written a series of posts in the form of a story that describe a high school dealing with a system that encourages its students to pledge allegiance to “one white nation, indivisible.”

A PDF file if the first part of this story can be found on my web site:

A Perspective on the Pledge

It’s time for the next chapter.

“All I want to do is teach,” Shelby Johnson told herself while she watched the students file into her classroom. She was watching for Shawn to enter, hoping that he might decide not to come to school today. She was disappointed. He came through the door. Almost bumping into another student at the doorway, he stepped back to give the classmate room to enter, then entered himself, taking a seat in the back corner, near the door.

He looked up at her, then closed his eyes and laid his head down on his desk.

The sound of the bell announcing the start of the class startled her. Shelby put herself on auto pilot. “All stand for the Pledge of Allegiance.”

Shawn, of course, did not stand. He kept his head on his desk as if he was asleep. Jenny remained seated as well, glancing at Shawn. The boy sitting in the row next to Jenny leaned over and whispered something to her. Jenny’s expression showed her anger, but she did not respond.

As was her duty, Shelby lead the class in the Pledge of Allegiance. Again, she was startled when the class again shouted, “one WHITE nation.” That wasn’t helping, and she resolved that she would put her foot down against that kind provocation.

She did not get a chance. When the Pledge ended, and the students took their seats, Shawn suddenly stood. Standing at attention, his hand on his heart, and in a loud and clear voice he started, “I pledge allegiance to the United States of Ameryca . . .,”

“No! Shawn, sit down!” Shelby shouted immediately.

He ignored her and continued. “. . . and for the republic for which it stands . . . “

Her mind raced to consider her options. Should she let him finish?

“. . . one BLACK nation, indivisible . . .”

“That’s enough!” Shelby shouted. Others in the class erupted in anger as well. One of the larger white boys stood up and started to charge Shawn, but another student between them interfered. “Sit down! Everybody sit down!”

Shawn finished the pledge before sitting, but that did not take much longer.

“Shawn, get out! I will see you at the Principal’s office. Take your stuff and get out of my class!”

Others in the class started to heckle Shawn while he picked up his bag.

“Shut up!” Shelby said. “The next person to speak will go with him.”

The class remained silent while Shawn approached the back door. As he left, Shawn turned to Shelby and said, “I am very sorry I couldn’t keep my promise,” then left.

After Shawn had closed the door behind him, Shelby addressed the rest of the class. “Anybody who shouts ‘white nation’ while saying the pledge ever again, you’re going to the Principal’s office. That’s a deliberate act of provocation and I will not stand for it in my clsssroom.”

One of her students answered, “But that’s what the Senate did, Ms. Johnson. When the appeals court said that the pledge was unconstitutional, they all went onto the steps of the capital and said the pledge, and they shouted, ‘one WHITE nation'.”

“You get yourself elected to the senate, and you too can act like an ass. Not in my classroom. Now, I have to go to the Principal’s office. Jim, go across the hall and ask Ms. Benson to keep an eye on my class while I’m gone. You will remain silent, and you will read the first chapter in your books while I am gone.”

"I already read it," protested one student.

"Then read it again. It won't kill you," Shelby answered.

As she started to leave, she noticed the student next to Jenny take another anticipatory glance in her direction. It seemed a poor idea to leave Jenny here alone, since she had also remained seated. “Jenny, come with me.”

Several in the class taunted her by saying, “You’re in trouble now.” They seemed content with that interpretation, and Shelby let it stand.

When Shelby got to the administrative center, Shawn was standing before the reception desk, and Principal Hadley was just coming out of his office. “What’s going on here?” Hadley asked. He recognized Shawn and asked further, “What type of trouble have you caused now?”

After telling Jenny to sit down, Shelby approached the Principal, “We’re having a bit of a misunderstanding regarding the Pledge. I just need to talk to Shawn for a bit.”

“What kind of trouble?” Hadley asked.

“I think I can take care of it, Mr. Hadley,” Shelby said.

Speaking slowly and deliberately, Hadley said, “I want to know what happened.”

“It was nothing,” Shelby said. “Shawn remained seated during the pledge, as did Jenny. But, when the pledge was over, Shawn stood to give his own version of the Pledge. He pledged allegiance to 'one black nation'?”

“Black nation?” Hadley asked, turning to Shawn with a look of utter contempt.

“I’m certain he was just trying to make a point.”

“Ms. Johnson, come into my office.”

Shelby and Mr. Hadley disappeared behind the closed door. Shawn was certain he knew what they were talking about. Hadley did not want to fight in front of the student, and was telling Shelby to get in line.

“Shawn,” Jenny whispered, looking furtively around to see if anybody was paying attention.

“Shawn,” Jenny repeated.

Shawn turned from the glass window into the Principal’s office to face Jenny.

“Why did you say ‘black nation’?” she asked.

“Because I wanted them to see how wrong it was to say ‘white nation’. The way they felt when they heard me pledge allegiance to one black nation . . . well . . . that’s the way I feel when I hear them pledge allegiance to one white nation. It’s a pledge to treat those people who aren’t being included as lesser beings. Besides, I also wanted them to see that the choice is not between saying ‘white nation’ or not saying it. I wanted them to see that the choice was between saying ‘white nation’ or ‘black nation’, and it’s because both of them are wrong that the right thing to do is to say neither.”

“Well, it didn’t work,” Jenny whispered. “Now everybody thinks you’re some sort of militant who wants to wipe out white people.”

“Militant? That makes as much sense as calling Ghandi ‘militant’. I never so much as raised a finger against anybody. I did nothing but pledge allegiance to the flag. That’s militant? What is it, then, when they pledge allegiance to the flag?”

At that moment the Principal’s door opened and Hadley and Shelby stepped outside. Hadley stepped up quickly and shouted to Shawn, “You stay away from her young man. You have done enough damage as it is.” He literally pulled Shawn away from Jenny and stood him up against the wall.

While they stood, face to face, Ms. Johnson kept walking, looking nervously over her shoulder. She entered the hallway and turned towards her classroom.

Hadley continued. “Our classrooms are for learning, young man. Keep your political protests off of school property.”

“For learning to denigrate good men like my father,” Shawn said. “He died for this country. He died for one nation with liberty and justice for all. He did not die – he would not die – for one white nation. You’re trying to ‘educate’ me into believing that my dad could not be a patriot because he would not and could not devote himself to ‘one white nation’.”

“Your dad has nothing to do with this,” Hadley said. “Get this through your thick black skull. Nobody, I don’t care what your race, has a right to disrupt the classes in this school.”

“So how come it’s not a disruption when I sit quietly while everybody else pledges an allegiance to one white nation, but too much to ask others to sit quietly while I pledge allegiance to one black nation?”

“Shawn, this country was founded by white men. If you paid attention in your history classes you would know this. This is a white nation. You would have us deny our heritage? If you have something to say, we have channels. Take it up you’re your congressman if you want to, but do not come here and disrupt my classes.”

“My white congressman?” Shawn asked. “Did my father go to Afghanistan to ask Al-Quida to respect our rights?”

“How dare you compare us to Al-Queida!”

“How dare you accuse me of comparing you to Al-Queida. When my dad went to Afghanistan he was armed. He had to be. Here, I would condemn violence because I respect that most people will do the right thing once they learn what the right thing is. Only the most hate-filled bigots will insist that I do nothing while the school I attend spits on my dad’s grave by saying that patriotism requires allegiance to a white nation. My dad deserves better than that.”

“I don’t care what your cause is, you will not disrupt this school. You are confined to detention for the rest of the day; I’ll have your teachers deliver your homework. If you insist on continuing this demonstration, you will be expelled, and where will that get you?”

Hadley turned around and told the school guard, “Take this boy to in-school suspension.”

He then saw Jenny, still sitting on the couch. “What are you here for?” Hadley asked.

“I don’t know,” said Jenny. “Ms. Johnson asked me to follow her.”

“Get back to your class,” Hadley commanded. He returned to his office, slamming his door behind him.

On Scouts and Lies

Contributions to a stereotype are not tax deductible.

Yesterday, I read an article by Terry Sanderson, "Scouting Without God," requesting that the Scout Association make its religious oath optional. The line above came when I read some of the comments to this article – comments that effectively said, “There’s no reason for we atheists to request that this oath be made optional. We should just teach our children to lie. It’s the same thing we do with respect to faith schools here in England. We don’t need to change the rules. It is far better to embrace lies and deception as a way around them.”

I need to make it clear that the article and the comments concerned scouting in England, where parents do lie to get their children into government-funded religious schools and the scouts themselves receive public money.

One of the reasons why atheists were not permitted to testify in court, or to hold public office, and one of the major complaints we get today against atheists, is that they have no moral code. Unlike Christians (so the myth goes), atheists have no incentive to tell the truth when lies are more convenient. They have no fear of hell or damnation afterwards, so you can’t trust them.

In these comments, I found one example after another of people contributing to this stereotype.

As it happens my lad is a Cub, my oldest girl a Brownie, my middle girl a Rainbow - they have each made the promise, and none is religious, my son in particular has expressed pretty solid doubt about the god propaganda they get at school, but he's happy enough to go along with the pretence because he wants to be in Cubs.

Another commenter wrote:

Besides which, atheists and secularists can always lie when they take the oath. I believe that's how people get their kids into religious schools these days and if it's good enough for your kids' education then it's good enough for the Scouts too.

A third commenter wrote:

If you're an atheist and you really want your kid to become a Scout then just let them take the oath without meaning it. It worked for me.

So, go ahead, lie to get what you want. While we’re at it, we might as well also be teaching them to lie to get the job they want, lie to get elected into the positions they want, lie to others to get sex or to get them to contribute money. And while we are teaching our children to lie, we are teaching people everywhere to lie to our children, creating an environment for them in which they will need to deal with the deceptive manipulation of others.

I can easily imagine the Christian who thinks that no atheist can be trusted to tell the truth, that no atheist is moral (or is only accidentally moral because he has a false belief that there is a foundation for morality other than God) reading this and saying, “See! See! Truth, honesty, these things mean nothing to atheists. As soon as they see an advantage to lying, they are all over themselves defending the permissibility of lies.”

No, the proper defense is to condemn the culture that forces atheist parents into a dilemma where whatever they do is wrong. Parents have a moral obligation to their children – to their children’s welfare. Children need a good education and character-building experiences.

When the government establishes a set of rules whereby those who believe in God have easy access to these things, but those who do not have to undergo huge expense to get the same quality of education and experiences for their children, atheist parents are forced to either abandon their obligations to their children or abandon their obligations to the truth. This is a true moral dilemma.

It is a dilemma that is caused by unfair and discriminatory government rules.

Once again, I want to remind the reader here that I am writing about the situation in England, where religious schools and scouts receive public money. The atheist parents who are forced to undergo huge expense to get as good for their children are parents who are made poorer by the fact that they are also paying tax money to provide the children of religious parents with these opportunities.

A moral system either has everybody paying his own way, or nobody.

A moral system is not one that begins with a system of injustice, then seeks to alleviate its symptoms with a bout of lying. Defenders of the ‘injustice plus deception’ proposal are not only morally wrong, but they are announcing to the world that, in addition to their lack of belief in God, they have a lack of commitment to morality to go along with it.

This leads up to the issue of whether an organization that receives public money should be allowed to discriminate based on religious belief. The principle at play here is simple. An organization that receives government money is morally permitted to exclude those who provide that money (particularly insofar as they provide it while looking down the barrel of a gun) for reasons of merit or of compelling state interest.

Those who defend this system must either argue that atheists, insofar as they are atheists, do not merit a quality education or the types of character-building experiences that scouting provides. Or they must argue that some compelling state interest is served by denying atheists equal access to these education resources and character-building experiences.

Neither case can be made. In fact, only the worst form of bigot would think that there is any plausibility behind such a situation.

Another potential solution would be to allow secular parents to create a secular version of the scouts to provide character-building experiences. However, this means that the government must adopt some sort of principle of “separate but equal”. We tried that in America for nearly a century, where we segregated everything from our schools to seats on a bus, claiming that it is possible to give blacks and whites ‘separate but equal’ facilities.

Inevitably, prejudice destroys any possibility of separate but equal. Bigots inevitably demonstrate their ability to give advantages to their favored group and disadvantages to their unfavored group, while blinding themselves to this equality. There is no way that a sane person would look at the different facilities provided to blacks and whites in the days of segregation and think that this conformed to the principle ‘separate but equal’. They paid lip service to the principle while knowing full well that they were ignoring it, and that they wanted it that way.

We should expect the same thing if England should embrace ‘separate but equal’ scouting organizations (or schools, for that matter). Inequalities will creep in, and they will be ignored. The best way to prevent these inequalities from creeping in is to deny the practice of keeping these groups separate. Allow the atheist to go to the theist school, and the theist to go to the atheist school, and people will (at least to some degree) use this freedom to bring about more equality than we can hope to find in a system of enforced segregatin.

The other option, of course, is for these schools and organizations to refuse any further government money. Refusing government money the moral principle that no taxpayer may be excluded for any reason other than merit or a compelling state interest no longer applies – people can discriminate at will.

It would still be immoral for such a group to discriminate, by the way. It would simply be wrong to respond to this discrimination through violence. The issue here is the same as we deal with on issues of free speech. The right to freedom of the press does not imply that people may not be criticized or condemned for what they write – only that it is wrong to respond to them with violence. The right to freedom of assembly does not imply a freedom from condemnation for forming hate-groups. It only implies a freedom from violence for doing so.

And no person shall be required to pay tax money to support an organization that targets it with unprincipled and unfounded hate. Whereas the scouts (or religious schools) preach unreasoned hatred of certain groups, and those groups are groups that pay taxes, the government is acting immorally when it taxes the victims of bigotry and uses it to fund the bigotry that victimizes him. To the degree that faith-based schools and faith-based children’s organizations preach that atheist taxpayers are inherently immoral and not to be trusted, to that degree society itself is unjust and immoral to force the atheist to fund that message with its tax dollars.

In the mean time, let’s not be advocating that lying under oath is a perfectly legitimate atheist alternative to these types of situations.

Contributions to a stereotype are not tax deductible.

And for my American readers who think that going through the motions of saying the Pledge of Allegiance while mumbling the words ‘under God’ or substituting something else or leaving them out entirely, please note that this is actually rather juvenile nonsense. Imagine a jurist being sworn in to a jury with the other 11 members, mumbling or leaving out some words that he does not to follow, violating that oath, then claiming, “I actually left that part out, your honor. So, I’m not bound by that part of the oath.” Sorry, but if you go through the motions, you could be mumbling the lyrics to your favorite drinking song, going through the motions without protest binds you to the oath that was given.

Without an outright and public refusal, if you go through the motions, you are in fact pledging allegiance to one nation under God. If that is not, in fact, where your allegiance lies then your obligation is to make that refusal explicit and unambiguous.

Anything else is lying under oath. Lying under oath is not something that good people have reason to encourage or embrace.

McCain: The Accidental Republican Nominee

Assuming that today is February 5th, today nearly half of the country votes (or has an opportunity to vote) in state primaries or caucuses to select the next President of the United States.

Today, I want to rant a bit about the political process. I have no arguments to make. I just want to point out some things about it that I do not like – that it would be within our interests to change to whatever degree we actually make those changes.

On the Republican side, the nominee will probably be John McCain. McCain is almost certainly the best of the Republican candidates. (Some people might have said the same about Ron Paul, until discovering that he is a theocratic creationist little different from Romney, Huckabee, and Brownbeck.) Unfortunately, McCain does not represent the Republican party. McCain’s successful nomination comes from the religious-right contingent splitting their vote between Huckabee and Romney. If either one of these two had dropped out early, the other would have likely been the nominee.

This would have made for an interesting election, because the number one topic under debate would have been the proper relationship between religion and government. The Democratic nominee would almost certainly have tried to secure the Presidency by out-doing the Republican nominee in apparent religiousness. However, I think a substantial portion of the population is uncomfortable with such a blend of religion and politics, and they would have been asking questions.

In this sense, I wish that the religious right would have agreed on a candidate for President and had picked the Republican nominee. If they had done so, then we could have had nine months seriously focusing on the issue of the role of religion in government.

This would not have been a debate between the Republican and Democratic candidates – I have little doubt that the Democratic candidate would certainly try to pander to those with religious sentiments to some extent. This would have been a debate between the Republican candidate and the American people, because I think a significant portion of the American population has serious misgivings about the wisdom of theocracy. This debate would have given them the ability to express those misgivings in a way that the population at large would have had difficulty trying to ignore.

Really, we should have seen the folly of theocracy in the last eight years under the Bush administration. The greatest problem of this administration was its fundamental inability to draw conclusions based on evidence. From global warming to the question of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq to dangers represented in a memo saying that Bin Laden is intent on striking within the United States to sitting in children’s class after being told America was under attack, Bush (and his supporters) represented an incredible incompetence when it came to drawing substantive conclusions from available evidence.

Against that background, it should have been easy to argue against more of the same – particularly with a candidate like Huckabee at the head of the Republican ticket, who brags about his unwillingness to draw substantive conclusions from the available evidence.

The Huckabee/Romney faction is going to have to sit through the 2008 election knowing that the type of person that they want to see in government is not on the ballot. They will have to settle for a ‘second best’. This will dampen their enthusiasm, and increase their resolve in making sure that the same thing does not happen in the next election. They will (or they should, if they were wise) use this to remind themselves of the need to settle on a specific candidate early, to provide him with maximum support, and make sure that no other evangelical candidate becomes a serious threat.

This is just a guess. I could be wrong.

Only Atheists Can Be Moral?

Here’s a headline that attracted my attention.

“Only Atheists can Act Morally”

I disagree, of course.

The reason given for saying that only atheists can be moral is:

In most, If not all religions, There is a reward/punishment system at it's very core. Religion comes along, lays down some rules and convinces you that should you break any of these rules you will be subject to torturous punishment, pain and suffering for eternity. For eternity!

In light of that, How can any action performed by a religious person be considered moral? How can it even be a result of free will? If you are told to do something and threatened with eternal suffering should you not comply or promised a reward should you abide how can your action be considered good?

First (and this is admittedly pedantic) actions are right or wrong, people are good or evil. This is true in the same way that propositions are true or false, while arguments are valid or invalid. A more precise use of terms is helpful. Like I said, nothing really depends on this. It is just how I learned to write in studying moral philosophy, and what follows will make more sense if people are aware of these conventions.

Second, a right act is an act that a person with good desires would perform. A right act is not necessarily done from good desires. I borrow $15 from you and promise to pay you back on Monday. Monday comes, and I owe you $15. I do not owe you $15 paid from a particular motive. I simply owe you $15.

Or, assume that you are serving as a witness in a trial, and you are asked a question. Your motivation for telling the truth does not matter. You may tell the truth because you hate the defendant. You may tell the truth because you stand to gain a lot of money. The lawyers will certainly bring up these facts (as a way of determining if you have an incentive to lie), but they do not affect the fact that telling the truth is the right action. You still have an obligation to tell the truth, even if your motives are bad.

So, even if a person does the right act in order to avoid punishment or to obtain a reward, he is still performing the right action. It is not the case that only atheists can perform right actions. It is not the case that an act performed for the sake of obtaining a reward or avoiding punishment cannot be a right action.

So, what about the question that only an atheist can be a good person? A person is a person with good desires. A theist, apparently, only acts on a desire to obtain a reward or to avoid punishment in the afterlife.

This is almost certainly false. To begin with, if we talk about evolved desires, the theist’s (evolved) desire to care for their offspring (for example) is just as real as an atheist’s evolved desire to care for his offspring. No amount of religion changes the fact that theists are evolved creatures with the full range of evolved desires.

I have denied that evolved desires have anything to do with morality. Morality has to do only with learned desires. However, these learned desires involve, in part, strengthening or weakening those evolved desires. Evolution may have given us a sense of altruism. However, it has also given us the ability to strengthen or weaken that sense of altruism through social forces. Do we use those social forces to strengthen altruism, or to weaken it? These are the questions for morality to answer.

The relevant point here is that theists have these desires as well, and the capacity to have these desires strengthened or weakened, and ‘reasons for action’ for strengthening or weakening these desires. Not believing in evolution does not change the fact that one evolved any more than not believing in gravity changes one's weight.

People often do not know why they do things. One of my favorite examples has to do with riding a bike. Many bike riders cannot accurately describe how they keep themselves balanced on a bike. They claim to do this by shifting their weight, but the truth of the matter is that they keep their balance by turning the front wheel and using their momentum to carry their center of balance back and forth across the line from the front tire to the back tire.

We have been practicing morality for a long time - since before religion came into existence. Even animals, I argue, are capable of using social forces (praise, condemnation, reward, and punishment) to promote desires that tend to fulfill other desires and inhibit desires that tend to thwart other desires. It does not take a lot of intelligence (certainly not as much as inventing the concept of ‘god’) to reward pleasing behavior and condemn displeasing behavior in others. Intelligence still has a role to play in morality - it allows us to create a better morality in the same way it allows us to create better tools generally. Great intelligence is simply not necessary.,/p>

Morality came before religion. Religion did not invent morality. Religion hijacked a moral system that was already in existence.

And what type of situation do these people count as a ‘reward’ in heaven? One of the most common aspects that I hear about is a reunion with family members and other loved ones – for those loved ones to come to heaven with them. What this means is that, yes, these people seek a reward in heaven. However, the reward they hope for is the perpetual safety and happiness of their loved ones in heaven with them.

In fact, this is precisely why many of these people hate atheism so much. Given their religious beliefs, atheists are a threat to the possibility that their children will live in perpetual safety and happiness in heaven. Instead, they will live in perpetual torment. This would not be an easy situation for any loving parent to accept. Is it the case that a parent is a ‘bad person’ because they seek a ‘reward’ of their children joining them in heaven as opposed to the ‘punishment’ of knowing that their child will endure perpetual torture?

Having said this, it is correct to say that that religion provides many religious people with a significant moral handicap. To imagine the handicap that a religious moralist is under, imagine the handicap that a physician would be under if he decided that all medical truths were written in the works of Hippocrates and that anything that deviates from his teachings is false? He would not be a very good physician.

For the same reasons, a moralist who works under the false assumptions that a group of substantially ignorant tribesmen came up with perfect moral knowledge and that anything that deviates from their teaching is a mistake will be working under the same type of handicap.

Anybody who goes to the Bible for moral guidance is going to an extremely unreliable source.

There are some in the Christian tradition who have found a way around this. They have gotten into the habit of rewriting (or reinterpreting) their religious texts, putting into them the most recent advances in secular morality. When secular philosophers discover a new moral truth (e.g., that slavery is wrong), these Christians write these new moral truths into their interpretation of scripture, interpreting scripture as a document that condemns slavery.

They do this, even when secular philosophers make moral mistakes. While Marx was an atheist and his views are often used to condemn all atheists, a great many priests and preachers embraced his philosophy - claiming that Marx described an economic system that Jesus would have embraced.

I challenge anybody to find where it says in scripture that abortion is immoral – that it is murder. People who make this claim are not getting this view from scripture. They are getting it from something else, from their culture, and reading this into scripture. They do this in the same way that they have read the abolition of slavery and democracy into scripture (when, for 1800 years, scripture stood for slavery and the divine right of kings).

Many Christians ignore the biblical prohibitions on the charging of interest and working on the Sabbath, but refuse to ignore the biblical prohibitions on homosexuality. This is not something they get out of the Bible. There is nothing in the Bible that says, ‘ignore this passage; give that one extra emphasis’. They get these prejudices from sources outside of scripture.

Let's go back to our doctor who thinks that all medical truth comes from Hippocrates. Imagine that this doctor keeps up on the most recent medical journals, accepts their findings, then 'interprets' the works of Hippocrates as containing those truths. To the degree that a physician does this, he is still practicing the best medicine available. He just has an odd way of relating to those medical facts.

The ‘moral handicap’ of religion only applies to those who refuse to engage in this practice, and who stick with an interpretation of scripture in the face of modern advances. A lot of religious people do think this way, and we are made worse off because of it. Yet, this fact falls far short of saying that only atheists can be good people.

An atheist can, in fact, be far worse a person than a theist. Because, while thinking that scripture is a good moral guide may be a mistake, it is not the only mistake that a person can make. Nor is it necessarily the worst.

Kmeson's 2nd Question: Exotic Choices

I still am suffering from a flu, so my timing is somewhat off in writing this blog.

So, I’m going to take on a question that is easy for me, since it is in an area where my mind spends a lot of time. It comes from Kmeson’s follow-up question to yesterday’s post:

If I am in a position where I cannot influence the desires of a set of Agents, but can only turn a knob which greatly satisfies the desires of one at the expense of lesser desires of the other then how should I act?

In "desire utilitarianism" you have said that A has bad desires since they tend to thwart B's desires, but if I understand correctly then in my scenario B's desires are twice as bad since they require the thwarting of more of A's desires. I'm still left with the question of what to do with my knob.

First, the only type of person who will turn the knob, based entirely and solely on which option fulfills the most desires, is the agent that has only one desire – a desire to fulfill other desires. Any more complex agent – any human agent is going to be driven to turn the knob by a number of desires. In this example, you will, as a matter of necessity, turn the knob to that point that will fulfill the more and stronger of your own desires. That is the only thing that you can do.

Even though this is a highly abstract and contrived situation, you are human, and you have acquired your desires in the real world. Those desires have been molded – not to fit wildly exotic and contrived situations like the one you describe here. They have been molded to cause you to act in the real world, where people do not, in fact, have the desires of your two hypothetical agent.

So, you have acquired (I may assume) a desire for some sort of equal treatment among the agents. In the real world, we have to deal with laws of diminishing returns, for example. The law of diminishing returns says that the more you have of something, the less each unit is worth. One common example is money. We may assume that, if somebody were to hand you $100, you would spend it on that which you want most for $100. The next $100 would go to your second (and weaker) preference. When you get enough $100 bills, each additional bill may be so worthless to you that you simply roll it up and light it on fire.

The law of diminishing returns argues against giving one person ‘too much’ while another has ‘too little’. It says that the further we get away from equality, the more likely it is that the person who gets more is not gaining as much more as the person who gets less is losing.

This may not be true in your hypothetical case, but it is true in the real world. In that real world, we have reason to use social forces to pressure you into somebody who values some measure of equality. We want you to feel uncomfortable about a situation where one person gains everything and another loses everything. You have reason to want us to feel the same way.

No matter what we do to create a hypothetical moral story such as yours, we cannot eliminate the corruption that is inherent in the fact that the evaluators – you and I – have emotions that people in the real world have reason to want us to have. Those emotions will give us an emotional reaction to these hypothetical worlds that are relevant to this world, not to the hypothetical world we are evaluating.

So, what should you do with the knob? You should turn it to a point where there is some measure of equality between the two agents. We have reason to want you to be somebody who will turn the knob to a location with some measure of equality. That desire – that emotion – might not maximize utility in the exotic and contrived case that you described. However, that type of person will tend to fulfill the more and stronger of our very real world desires. That, ultimately, is what matters.

Now, as a person living in the real world, you should see the value of inhibiting a desire to inflict pain on others. If you were to discover that one of A’s desires is a desire to inflict pain, your reaction should be to say, “That desire does not count. I do not want to fulfill this desire to inflict pain.” You would be right to do so, and we have good reason to encourage you to do so.

Within the hypothetical example, this desire to inflict pain on others has very little consequence. It will only thwart one of B’s desires. However, in the real world, the desire to inflict pain has great consequence, and is a desire we have reason to inhibit to a great degree. So, we have reason to use social pressure to make you reluctant to turn the knob in favor of a desire to inflict pain. We have reason to want you to be the type of person who, when confronted with A’s desire to inflict pain, sees this as a reason to turn the knob against A, for that fact alone. Because somebody with such a desire, in the real world, is somebody that it is safer for us to have as our neighbor.

Once again, you can’t get away from the fact that people generally have reason to tune your desires to what is true of the real world. Once you have these real-world moral sentiments, they will affect your judgments even in highly contrived cases. What should you (want to) do in these highly contrived cases? You should (want to) do that act that a person whose desires tend to fulfill other real-world desires would do.

So, when opponents to utilitarian theories bring up the case of a doctor who has a chance to kill one healthy patient to save five sick patients, and point out that simple utility argues in favor of the murder, and that this is a problem for utilitarian theories, I have an answer.

We, the people who are applying our intuitions to this case, have very real reason to want the very real people we are asking to evaluate this case to be people who are averse to killing this person.

Why?

The answer is the same as the answer I gave in the sibling incest case. If I were to judge the act of killing this healthy patient to be permissible, this would imply that no person should have an aversion to killing this healthy patient. This means a weaker aversion to killing whenever the agent believes that more good can come of killing than harm. This weaker aversion to killing means more killing. A lot of that killing will not, in fact, be incases that produce the most good. A lot of that killing will only be in cases where people have convinced themselves (often wrongly) that more good can come from killing.

In order to better secure our live, health, and wellbeing, we are better off simply promoting an aversion to killing. We want our neighbors to be people who do not want to kill the healthy patient even to kill five. Yes, this means that in some highly contrived case that will almost never certainly happen in real life we will die where we might otherwise have lived, in a great many real-world cases we have a much greater chance of living where we otherwise would have been killed.

I want to repeat this point once more for the sake of any who may have missed it.

The desires that we should have – the desires that we apply even to highly contrived hypothetical cases – are those desires that tend to fulfill other real-world desires. We can speak hypothetically about the desires that people might have reason to promote in some hypothetical world. However, the question of whether or not we like that answer – whether we are comfortable with it or uncomfortable with it – depends essentially on the desires that work in the real world. If an aversion to torturing a child a good real-world desire, that desire is going to sit within us, even as we evaluate highly contrived and imaginary examples in which torturing a child produces the best consequences. We still have reason to demand that nobody want to torture that child.