Summary Conclusion on Moral Instinct

Since I have spent the week on this ‘moral instinct’ theory, I thought I would finish it up by stating my core objection to ‘moral instinct’ or ‘moral sense’ theories or any form of moral intuitionism.

I see it as being simply a replacement for religion.

One of the reasons that people have invented gods is to give legitimacy to their immoral impulses. Do you want to take over some piece of land that somebody else occupies? Claim that God has given you title until the end of time, and that this gives you the right to kick anybody and everybody else off of it, regardless of harm done.

Are there people in your own community who are not like you – who like things that you do not like? Then tell the world that God commands the death of such people, and you can then feel justified in rounding them up and killing them, or at least driving them into the closet.

Do you want to assert that you and your people have a right to rule and that all others have a duty to obey, then assert that God has personally selected you to be the person who rules, so that anybody who disobeys you disobeys God, and all of society will suffer his wrath if this is allowed to continue.

‘Moral instinct’, ‘moral sense’, and all other forms of intuitionist moral theories play the same role. We simply get rid of the idea of a God writing moral truths on our soul, and replace it with the idea of genes writing moral truths into our brain structure.

All a person in ante-bellum South needed to do was to recognize that the thought of owning slaves did nothing to tickle his conscience – that he actually found it somewhat pleasing to be ‘master’ to somebody else’s ‘slave’ without a twinge of guilt. If he senses no wrongness in owning slaves, then there must not be any wrongness in owning slaves for him to sense.

The person who wants to rape a woman appeals to his moral sense. He then listens as his moral sense tells him that women actually enjoy rape (because it allows them to have sex without feeling guilty), or that they deserve to be raped. The act of rape, in this latter case, becomes an act of imposing justice – something his ‘moral sense’ tells him ought to be done.

Ultimately, intuitionist moral theories are the ultimate expression of the idea, “If it feels good, it must be right.” Since moral claims are intimately linked to punishment or other forms of harm to others, they actually take the form, “If it feels right to do this harm to others, then it is right to do this harm to others.”

I grew up among people who knew that interracial relationships were wrong. They knew this because they relied on their moral sense to tell them this. If they saw an interracial couple engaged in public displays of affection, then their moral sense went off to tell them, immediately, that they were in the presence of wrongness and something should be done to prevent this.

They were not faking or lying about their feelings of disgust. Those feelings were genuine. The problem is that they did not reflect any ‘moral sense’ or ‘moral intuition’. What they reflected was the agent’s own learned aversion to these types of relationships.

What difference would it make to discover that this aversion was universal, or that it might have had some evolutionary explanation? Evolution could very well have made us into people who tend to favor those who ‘look like us’ and to have an adverse reaction to those who ‘look different’. This could have been an effective way of determining whether the ‘other’ has similar genes (and should be favored), or different genes (and should be disfavored).

In fact, when a set of mutations came along that made a significant contribution to what we are as human, it may well have included this type of favoritism. Since others with these new humanity-making genes would ‘look like us’, then such a trait may well have been responsible for our genetic success – the fact that our biological ancestors were busy helping those who ‘looked like them’ at the expense of members of other tribes where this mutation did not appear and whose members did not ‘look like us’.

We can even imagine an evolutionary case in which these sentiments became universal. With a slight adjustment to our evolutionary history, we may have become a race that ‘felt’ perfectly justified in enslaving others who did not look like us and forcing them to work (without compensation) for those who did ‘look like us’. People who claim that their study of our moral intuitions is a study of morality cannot rule out the possibility that they are assigning ‘justification’ to just this type of phenomenon. The claim that the universal nature of the desire to enslave those who do not look like us gives it legitimacy is absurd.

An innate disposition towards a racist morality that imposes slavery on those who do not look like us, no matter how well backed up by an evolutionary story, and no matter how universal, does not imply that slavery is, in fact, morally legitimate. It might explain racism and slavery, but in doing so it would be explaining a tendency to do evil. It would not be explaining the moral legitimacy of slavery.

All of this suggests that there is a moral goodness that is independent of our moral instinct – that to determine the difference between right and wrong we must appeal to something other than a ‘moral intuition’ or whether something ‘feels right’.

Once we have made that appeal, once we know the real difference between right and wrong, then we can look at our intuitions and determine whether they are calibrated correctly. However, we cannot calibrate an instrument without having a standard that is independent of the instrument being calibrated. We cannot calibrate our moral sense without having a moral standard that exists independent of our moral sense. That is where we must go to discover the true difference between right and wrong.

In saying all of this, I recognize that there is a complication drawn from the fact that intrinsic value does not exist. The only reasons for action that exist are desires, and desires are mental states. We must investigate desires to investigate reasons for action. However, we must be careful never to give a mere desire the status of a ‘moral intuition’ no matter how it may feel to us. The inclination to enslave those who do not ‘look like us’ is a mere desire, not a moral intuition, regardless of how it feels. It is merely one of many desires.

And it is a bad desire at that, given that it is a desire that tends to thwart other desires. To the degree that this desire exists, then some desires must be thwarted. Either the desires of the slave owner are thwarted by a prohibition on slavery, or the desires of the slave are thwarted by allowing slavery. On the other hand, if this desire did not exist, then there would be nobody with a desire to own slaves, and no slaves whose desires are being thwarted.

Ancient civilization took these bad desires and assigned them to a God to give them legitimacy. They claim that God wrote these moral truths into their sole. So, when they talk about these attitudes they hold that they are not talking about mere desires. They are talking about something that is greater than a desire – something that justifies whatever violence may be necessary to fulfill those interests.

More ‘enlightened’ thinkers invent special legitimacy for those desires to act in ways harmful to others by inventing things like a ‘moral instinct’, ‘moral intuitions’, or a ‘moral sense.’ However, this is just another way of saying, “Moral truths written onto the human sole by .” In fact, these entities do have one thing in common with God – none of them are real. They are just convenient entities that one can point to in order to excuse desires to do harm to others.

If there is no independent justification to measure our moral instinct against, then our moral instinct is simply an urge to do unjustified harm to others without feeling guilty about it. If there is an independent justification to measure our moral instinct against, then we do not need a moral instinct – we can just go with the independent justification.

Moral Instinct and the Analogy of Nutrition

I have been spending the last few days looking at an article that appeared in The New York Times proposing that we have “A Moral Instinct.” I have raised some objections to the ideas presented in that essay.

Steven Pinker, the author of the article, obeys his intellectual responsibilities and considers some objections to his position at the end of his article (a habit that I wish some faith-based hate-mongers would pick up). I would like to take a look at those considered objections.

One of the objections that Pinker considers is the implication of putting our evolved ‘moral sense’ in front of morality.

Now, if the distinction between right and wrong is . . . a product of brain wiring, why should we believe it is any more real than the distinction between red and green? And if it is just a collective hallucination, how could we argue that evils like genocide and slavery are wrong for everyone, rather than just distasteful to us?

Pinker considers an alternative – putting God in charge of our morality rather than our mental wiring.

Putting God in charge of morality is one way to solve the problem, of course, but Plato made short work of it 2,400 years ago. Does God have a good reason for designating certain acts as moral and others as immoral? If not — if his dictates are divine whims — why should we take them seriously? Suppose that God commanded us to torture a child. Would that make it all right, or would some other standard give us reasons to resist? And if, on the other hand, God was forced by moral reasons to issue some dictates and not others — if a command to torture a child was never an option — then why not appeal to those reasons directly?

If Plato has made short work of a divine command theory of morality, then he has also made short work of any genetic ‘moral instinct’ theory of morality. Is X good because it is loved by our genes, or is X loved by our genes because it is good?

If we go with the first option, then anything loved by our genes would be good. Male lions, when they take over a pride, kill all of the children. If humans had evolved a disposition to kill their step-children, would this imply that the killing of step-children could be morally permissible? Even obligatory? Genetic moralists often provides us with stories about how altruism could have evolved. However, predators and parasites are also products of evolution.

If we go the other way, if we say ‘X is loved by our genes because it is good’, then (1) we need a theory of good that is independent of our genes or ‘moral instinct,’ and (2) we need a theory that will explain how our ‘moral instinct’ actually came to line up reliably with that moral goodness. In other words, the ‘moral instinct’ theorist who takes this route has already conceded that what is right or wrong in fact is independent of our ‘moral instincts.’ This argument says that there is something else, something quite independent of our moral instinct, that defines right and wrong and, at best, our ‘moral instinct’ reliably points out what the answer is.

We can’t even address the second option until we know what morality is, because we cannot tell if our moral instinct is accurate until we can see the target. Without a theory of morality separate from our sentiments, we can only guess at the relationships between our moral sentiments and what is truly moral.

One way to illustrate these problems is by making an analogy to food.

There is a difference between the foods that we like and the foods that are good for us. Now, evolutionary theory will tell us that we will tend to like those foods that kept our ancestors alive long enough to genetically reproduce in the types of environments they encountered. So, we have a taste for high-calorie food. However, our environment has changed. We are surrounded by high-calorie food, and we eat far more than we need to.

The ‘moral sense’ theorists are doing the equivalent of feeding people different types of foods and measuring which types of food are universally liked and which seem to be local or individual preferences. They are feeding people these foods while they are hooked up to MRI’s and other brain imaging devices in order to determine which foods light up different parts of the brain. They are taking note of the fact that evolution has disposed us to like those foods that kept our genetic ancestors alive long enough to reproduce.

They are then taking all of this data and publishing it in peer-reviewed journals under titles where they claim that they are involved in the study of nutrition – the study of what foods are good for us in fact.

Now, the study of nutrition has nothing to do with the study of what foods we like and dislike. In fact, it is quite possible to have a science of nutrition that never even looks at our tastes in food. The study of food preferences is irrelevant. The data may be useful – it may provide some insights on where to look. However, the study of nutrition can get along just fine without the scientists in their lab coats running MRIs on agents given different flavors of ice cream.

Similarly, when scientists measure the attitudes that people have to certain moral situations, they are studying our tastes and preferences. They are correctly noting that evolution disposed us to prefer the taste of those things that allowed our ancestors to reproduce correctly. However, when they claim that they are involved in the study of morality, this is no more true than the taste-scientist’s claim that he is involved in the study of nutrition.

We can say that the study of nutrition is the study of foods that it is good for us to like – a study of foods we should grow a fondness for or an aversion to eating (to the degree that our food tastes are malleable). To the degree that we are successful, then to that degree our tastes will motivate us to eat that which is also (independently) good for us.

Similarly, morality is also the study of what it is good for us to like – a study of qualities that we should grow a fondness for or an aversion to bringing about (to the degree that our desires are malleable). To the degree that we are successful, then to that degree we will like to bring about that which is also (independently) good for us.

But the study of morality is no more closely linked to the study of personal moral tastes than the study of nutrition is to the study of tastes in food.

While I’m on the subject, I suppose I should address the issue of how Desire Utilitarianism handles Plato’s argument. After all, if ‘good’ = ‘is such as to fulfill the desires in question’, let’s ask, “Is X good because we desire it? Or do we desire it because it is good?” If the former, then if we desire the torturing of young children, then torturing young children would be good. If it is the latter, then (1) what is this ‘goodness’ that is independent of our desires, and (2) how is it that our desires (influenced, as they are, by evolutionary pressures) happen to reliably pick out that which is good?

It turns out that neither of the horns of this dilemma can be satisfied. It is neither the case that things are morally good because we desire them, nor is it the case that we desire them because they are morally good. It is quite possible for what is morally good to be substantially independent of what we desire in fact.

Returning to the food analogy, it turns out that it is neither the case that, strictly speaking, we like things because they are nutritious (meaning that our likeness is directly and inerrantly fixed on their nutritional value). Nor is it the case that things are nutritious because we like them. Rather what is nutritious is something independent of what we like and dislike, though we have evolved a disposition to favor things that kept us alive.

Moral goodness = that which it is good for us to desire, the way nutrition = that which it would be good for us to like (in terms of food).

This goodness is not fully independent of our desires. A ‘good desire’ is a desire that tends to fulfill other desires. However, this theory breaks any direct connection between our desires and moral goodness. We can’t get from ‘I want to torture a young child,’ to ‘torturing a young child is morally good’. We have to take the desire to torture a young child and compare that to other desires. We need to determine if people generally have reason to promote that desire, or to discourage it. If nobody desired to torture young children, no desires would be thwarted. Whereas, if everybody desired to torture young children, desire-thwartings would be rampant in that either the desires of those who want to torture, or the desires of those who would be tortured, have to be thwarted. These desire thwarting give people generally reason to prefer that no desire to torture children exists.

So, we have our answer to the question of what is ‘good’ that is independent of our desires. Or, at least, a good that is not directly dependent on our desires. It is consistent with the view that desires are the only reasons for action that exist, but respects the fact that our desires – our ‘reasons for action’ – are reasons to act so as to promote some desires and inhibit others.

At this point, a slightly different example may be worthwhile. Just as nutritionists have been able to do a fine job of studying the science of nutrition without studying brain scans of people as they chew and swallow food, logicians have been able to do a fine job of studying logic, and mathematicians have been able to do a fine job of studying math, without studying brain scans of people as they chew on and swallow logical or mathematical propositions. Similarly, the ethicist can make a perfectly valid study of ethics without studying brain scans of people chewing on and swallowing moral claims.

The study of brain scans is simply not the same area of study as the study of nutrition, logic, math, or ethics.

The Moral Instinct: Genetics and Brain Damage

For the last couple of days I have been writing about the information presented in a New York Times article, “The Moral Instinct”.

One of the claims made in that article is this:

Though no one has identified genes for morality, there is circumstantial evidence they exist. The character traits called “conscientiousness” and “agreeableness” are far more correlated in identical twins separated at birth (who share their genes but not their environment) than in adoptive siblings raised together (who share their environment but not their genes).

However, an essential part of morality is that it concerns cases in which people are worthy of praise or condemnation – when they are deserving of punishment or reward. If we link morality with genetic dispositions, then we are saying that people with one set of genes deserves to be harmed and those with another set deserve to be rewarded. Yet, how can it possibly make sense to say that a person deserves reward or punishment based on their genetic makeup?

Any time a ‘moral sense’ theorist starts talking about a genetic basis of morality, ask him what his morality says about locking people up in prison for the crime of having the wrong genetic sequence.

In fact, morality is concerned with things that we have the capacity to choose. Since we do not have the capacity to choose our genetic makeup, questions of genetic makeup lie outside of the realm where moral concepts apply. We are as capable of finding “genes for morality” as we are of finding “round squares” or “married bachelors”.

I am not denying that there are any genetic influences governing our conscientiousness, agreeableness, or altruism. However, no matter how much agreeableness we get through genetics, we still have some important questions that we need to ask and answer.

Is this the right amount of agreeableness? Could we use more agreeableness, or less? Could we use more agreeableness in these circumstances, and less agreeableness in those?

If our genetic dispositions were good enough – if they left us with no characteristic that we have reason to change – then we simply would not have a need for moral institutions. Morality exists because we have reasons to add to or subtract from our genetic dispositions, or to alter the objects of those dispositions.

Other parts of the article discussed the sections of the brain used when people consider moral problems, and the effects of brain damage on the conclusions people come to when faced with moral questions. Psychopathy, the article states, may have genetic dispositions. Damage to the frontal lobes makes one more utilitarian.

Of course moral reasoning is a brain function. That’s not the question. The question is whether a particular instance of moral reasoning is good or bad – is it helping people reach accurate conclusions, or are their conclusions mistaken?

Assume that researchers discover that most people when they engage in moral reasoning activate area A of their brain. Damage to Area A leads to a different set of moral conclusions. Are those conclusions better than, or worse than, those of an average person.

It may well be that area A is doing nothing but adding a bunch of noise to our moral decision-making, clouding our judgment. Area A, for example, might be responsible for rationalization – the ability to see arguments when they support our desired position that we are blind to when they oppose our desired position. It may be the ‘hypocrisy center’ of the brain that blocks the proper universalization of moral principles. In these cases, those with brain damage would be better moral reasoners than those without.

There is no way that a researcher can determine whether a particular form of reasoning is better or worse than another without an independent standard of good or bad moral reasoning. You cannot get ‘better’ and ‘worse’ reasoning from a brain scan. All the brain scan will tell you is ‘different’.

More importantly, the relevance of brain damage to behavior lies in the distinction between morality and illness. Blaming or praising people in virtue of whether they have received a blow to the head is as nonsensical as blaming or praising people for their genetic makeup. The distinction we are talking about here is the distinction between ‘mental illness’ and ‘immorality’. In order for behavior to be immoral, it has to be something that we can talk about in the context of praise and blame. Brain damage is not in that area.

Even if a person suffers brain damage that disposes him to behave less morally than he would have otherwise behaved, moral concepts can still apply. This is the same issue we faced when discussing the amount of agreeableness or altruism one gets as a result of genetics. We can still ask whether the levels obtained as a result of a brain injury are too high or too low, or if they pick out the right objects. Even for a brain-damaged person, it may be possible for social factors (moral institutions) to improve upon the dispositions that they acquire from the brain injury, making a person less likely to do harm and more likely to help, then the brain damage alone would have accounted for.

So, I am not denying the validity of any of the empirical research. I am also not denying the importance of the empirical research. I am, however, pointing out the fact that the researcher who reports that he has discovered round squares (for example) is doing his field a disservice. People who link morality (or immorality) to genetics or brain structure are like researchers who discover round circles. Since the things that they claim to have discovered are logically impossible, these researchers clearly do not understand what they are studying.

This, of course, leads to the thorny issue of ‘choice’ in morality. If morality has to do with choice, and choice itself does not exist (in a determined or random world), then morality does not and never has had anything to do with the real world.

I do not have space to go into that issue in detail here. However, I can still provide an outline of a response.

Morality has to do with determined choice. A chess playing computer engages in determined choice. It considers every possible move as if it can actually make that move. It measures the value of each option. Then, it takes the option with the highest value. A person with perfect knowledge of the computer’s program can reliably predict the computer’s choice. However, the computer still makes a choice. The computer still weighs competing alternatives and selects the alternative with the greatest value.

Moral institutions seek to influence the values that we give to different outcomes as a way of influencing our determined choices. Praise and reward are used to encourage people to assign higher value to some sets of moves. Condemnation and punishment are used to encourage people to assign lower value to other moves – or even negative value (to acquire aversions to) other moves. In doing so, we can influence how others behave. We can get them to behave in ways that tend to better fulfill our desires (values). At the same time, others have reasn to use the same tools to get us to adopt particular values, thus influencing how we behave.

Praise and reward, condemnation and punishment, have no effect on our genetic makeup or on the strictly determined results of a brain injury. It is only relevant where our innate dispositions, whatever they happen to be, can be molded by social forces. This is why we can never have a moral genes or immorality grounded on brain damage. It is because it does not make sense to praise or condemn people on the basis of their genetic makeup or aspects of our brain states that are immune from social influence.

Moral Instinct: A Case Study

Yesterday's posting concerned a New York Times article called, "The Moral Instinct". In it, I argued that an inference assumed in the article - that a sense that an instinct to make the judgment P is wrong implies P is wrong - is an invalid inference.

Today, I would like to look at one of the specific examples used in the article and demonstrate this fallacy.

The article reports on some experiments that were performed.

Julie is traveling in France on summer vacation from college with her brother Mark. One night they decide that it would be interesting and fun if they tried making love. Julie was already taking birth-control pills, but Mark uses a condom, too, just to be safe. They both enjoy the sex but decide not to do it again. They keep the night as a special secret, which makes them feel closer to each other. What do you think about that — was it O.K. for them to make love?

When presenting this case to people, the researchers point out the fact that they can block any argument that the test subjects give for saying that it is wrong. They can drive their subjects into a situation where the subject says, "I can't argue against anythng that you say. But, I know it's wrong, and nothing you can say will convince me otherwise."

The fact is, I have met people who would say exactly the same thing about interracial relationships - or homosexual relationships for that matter. This is a descriptive fact about how a lot of people think - about how they reach moral conclusions.

However, it leaves an important set of questions unanswered. Is this form of sibling incest, or homosexuality, or interracial relationship, wrong in fact? What does it take for homosexuality (for example) to be wrong in fact?

Is it the case that - if there are people who can be driven to the conclusion, "I cannot argue against anything you say, but I know that homosexuality is wrong and that it is permissible to take actions that harm the interests of homosexuals, and there is nothing you can say to change my mind," then in fact homosexuality is wrong and these people really are justified in harming the interests of homosexuals?

Just because you can find a lot of examples of people doing something, this does not mean that they are justified in doing it. No matter how many instances we find of people committing the fallacy of 'ad hominem' - this does not make 'ad hominem' a valid form of reasoning. No matter how many instances we find of people firmly anchoring their claims that they are justified in doing harm to others on a particular set of personal likes and dislikes, this does not mean that the particular set of likes and dislikes actually justifies those harms.

I think that I can offer an account of what is going on in the case of incest. This research starts off entirely on the wrong foot. It is making the false assumption that morality is primarily concerned with evaluating actions. So, it is trying to get people to evaluate an act of incest. When, in fact, morality is primarily concerned with evaluating desires, and what agents are evaluating in fact is a universal aversion to incest.

They then force their perspective on the subjects - forcing the subject to come up with a justification in terms of acts being the primary object of evaluation. Which the subjects cannot do - because the assumption is false.

Here is how the argument would go if we take desires to be the primary object of moral behavior.

What I am looking at in evaluating this act is whether there are desires or aversions inherent in the situation that people generally have reason to promote throughout a population.

People generally have reason to promote an aversion to incest. Even though there may be a few cases in which incest does not thwart desires, by and large incestuous relationships are ultimately desire-thwarting; they cause a great deal of harm. If everybody has an aversion to incest, then for the most part we would be preventing a great deal of harm, and if everybody has an aversion to incest we would not be thwarting any desires (there would not be a desire to engage in incest for us to thwart).

A universal aversion to incest implies a universal aversion to the type of behavior described in this case.

If I were to say that their behavior were justified, then I would be saying that nobody should have this aversion to incest. However, a culture in which nobody has this aversion to incest would be a culture in which abusive incest would be far more common. We certainly have no reason to create a culture in which abusive incest is far more common. Therefore, we certainly have no reason to say that nobody should have an aversion to this type of situation.

The case clearly states that the couple keep their act a secret, so that it has no affect on society.

However, I am not talking about the act itself. I am talking about the judgment of the act. When you ask me to judge the act as morally permissible or impermissible you are asking me to judge whether everybody should or should not have an aversion to that type of situation. Even if, in this rare case, no harm was done, people generally still have many good reasons to promote an a culture in which people are averse to these types of relationships. People generally still have reason to judge the absence of an aversion to incest negatively.

The researchers who write about these types of cases point out that their subjects generally cannot articulate a defense that the researchers cannot counter. Therefore, they say that all moral justifications are 'rationalizations'. However, that conclusion requires something stronger than saying, "We have been able to counter every response." It requires saying, "There can be no response that we cannot counter."

That, I argue, simply is not true. Try the above response on for size.

If this response fails, then there is still the possibility that there is another response not yet thought of.

If it is the case that all responses fail, then the conclusion is not to say that the prohibition on incest is justified in virtue of some 'moral instinct'. The correct conclusion to draw is that humans have an inherent impulse to do unjustified harm to others in these types of cases. If incest is not wrong in fact, then a moral instinct to treat incest as wrong is, itself, wrong - a sickness driving people to do harm to those that it has no real reason to harm, and to merely imagine that the harms they inflict are justified.

One of the things that I must note is that subjects often cannot give a conscious defense of their moral conclusions. However, this does not require any sort of ‘moral instinct’. A lot of our reasoning is subconscious. Nature does not have a particularly compelling need to make it the case that all reasoning is conscious. Nature is well served by coming to the correct conclusion. Making the method of reasoning conscious is, sometimes, a waste of energy and a waste of time. One of the things about morality is that it must often weigh in on our actions the instant we decide to act. We do not have time to consciously deliberate the morality of every action.

Morality, on this account, is still an object of reason, though some of it is subconscious. When moral reason is done poorly, it yields moral conclusions that are wrong. There is no ‘moral instinct’ or ‘innate morality’ – it is simply a fallacy to argue from the fact that we have certain innate desires to do harm and feel justified in doing so that we are, as a matter of fact, justified in doing so. In order to be justified in doing harm there has to be a fact of the matter – a way in which ‘we are morally justified in doing harm’ can be true as a matter of fact.

Either there is a justification for the harms that we inflict on others under the heading ‘morality’, or the harms that we inflict on others under the heading ‘morality’ are unjustified.

NYT: The Moral Instinct

The New York Times has an article called, “The Moral Instinct”.

I hold that there is no such thing as a “moral instinct”.

In fact, “moral instinct” serves the same role in morality as “God”. People invented God because they wanted to assign their prejudices to an entity that gave them more legitimacy than they had in real world. The inference, “I want you dead; therefore, you deserve to die,” is transparently an invalid inference. So, people introduced a God element into the equation: “God wants you dead; therefore, you deserve to die.”

For those who do not believe in God this transference no longer works. The next move is to invent a God substitute. This is ‘innate morality’, ‘moral instinct’, or ‘genetic morality’ – take your pick. They all function the same way. “My innate morality wants you dead; therefore, you deserve to die.”

Death is just one element of morality that this form of reasoning applies to. We can make the same case for:

“I want you to suffer; therefore, you deserve to suffer.”

“I want you as my slave; therefore, you deserve to be my slave.”

In the case of women in most culture, “I want you to obey; therefore, you have a duty to obey.”

Or, “I want your land and your property as my own; therefore, I have a right to take your land and your property as my own.”

Primitive people attributed these to God. “God says that those who do X should suffer; therefore, I may make you suffer.” Of course, this was merely the agent’s own desire to see others suffer assigned to a God that he invented. Modern scientifically-minded people attribute this to ‘innate morality”. “My innate morality says that those who do X should suffer.; therefore, I may make you suffer.”

It may well be the case that evolutionary forces have influenced our desire – causing us to want to kill, make suffer, enslave, or oppress others under certain circumstances. Evolutionary forces certainly gave these desires a certain desire or subjective sensation.

But where did we get the idea that, “If I have a subjective sensation S associated with my desire to do harm to others, then those people deserve to be harmed?”

According to the article:

Moral intuitions are being drawn out of people in the lab, on Web sites and in brain scanners, and are being explained with tools from game theory, neuroscience and evolutionary biology.

However, what none of these studies seem to address if the fact that you can draw moral intuitions out of an Islamic jihadist, an ante-bellum Southern slave holder, a crusader, a Japanese Kamikaze pilot, a child rapist, a drunk driver . . . you can draw moral intuitions out of anybody. But how do you justify the inference; “These people have a moral intuition that P is wrong; therefore P is wrong?”

What does “P is wrong” mean within the context of these experiments?

The first hallmark of moralization is that the rules it invokes are felt to be universal. Prohibitions of rape and murder, for example, are felt not to be matters of local custom but to be universally and objectively warranted. One can easily say, “I don’t like brussels sprouts, but I don’t care if you eat them,” but no one would say, “I don’t like killing, but I don’t care if you murder someone.

I have absolutely no trouble handling this observation without any type of reference to a ‘moral instinct’. There are certain desires that people generally have reason to promote in everybody; and there are certain desires that people generally have reason to promote to everybody. Morality is just the term that we use to refer to these questions. The fact that morality is ‘universal’ is no more of a mystery than the fact that circles are ‘round’. We recognize that there are desires and aversions that would benefit us if universally held, and we call those ‘morality’ in the same sense in which we recognize that some shapes are round and we call them ‘circles’.

There is no ‘felt’ element to this at all. If we ‘felt’ that there should be a universal prohibition on eating with one’s left hand, for example, would this make it the case that eating with the left hand is, in fact, wrong? That those who do so should be punished? Or is it the case that our felt judgments are mistaken – because we are calling for something to be universally prohibited that we have no reason to call to be universally prohibited?

The other hallmark is that people feel that those who commit immoral acts deserve to be punished. Not only is it allowable to inflict pain on a person who has broken a moral rule; it is wrong not to, to “let them get away with it.” People are thus untroubled in inviting divine retribution or the power of the state to harm other people they deem immoral.

The tools that we have had for molding desires are praise, condemnation, reward, and punishment. If we have reason to make a particular aversion universal, and the tools for making it universal are condemnation and punishment, then we have reason to use condemnation and punishment. If we have reason to make a particular desire universal, and the tools for doing so are praise and reward, then we have reason to use praise and reward.

There is no deep dark mystery here.

What about homosexual acts? According to this ‘innate morality’ theory, the wrongness of homosexual acts is to be determined by whether or not people have an innate disposition to do harm to homosexuals. If they do, then homosexuals deserve to be harmed. Whatever we do, we cannot judge homosexual acts by the qualities of the acts themselves – whether those acts thwart desires or cause harm to others. We must look at the people who want to harm homosexuals. If they have a ‘moral instinct’ to do harm to homosexuals, then the homosexuals are just out of luck. They deserve to be harmed an no good and just person would stand in the way of those wanting to do (moral) harm.

The logic behind this avenue of moral investigation is absolutely bizarre.

But it is not difficult to explain. It is “religion without God”.

It is taking the function of religion – to provide an excuse for doing harm to others by assigning the legitimacy of that harm to some supernatural entity – and coming up with a substitute.

Because, where we have these desires to do harm – where we want to inflict suffering on others – the last thing we want to consider is that there is no justification for doing harm and the entities we summon to try to give them legitimacy exist only in the realm of make-believe.

The Times article itself is filled with data that contradicts the concept of a ‘moral instinct’ It lists a number of things once thought to be immoral which are now ‘amoralized’ (e.g., divorce, illegitimacy, being a working mother). While new ‘immoralities’ are being argued for (e.g., disposable diapers, I.Q. tests, poultry farms, Barbie dolls.)

So, what happened? Our moral instincts changed?

Are there any reasons for these changes, or are they just haphazard fads that come and go like clothing styles?

In fact, when we debate what should and should not be on the moralized list, people are expected to provide reasons for considering something moral or immoral. One of the things that is not considered a legitimate reason for a moral claim is “because I feel like it.” Some subjectivists have tried to reduce morality to feelings, but they have never been able to make it past this hurdle. How can a feeling justify the conclusion that another person deserves to be harmed? It can’t. In order to justify doing harm to others we need reasons, not just feelings.

The real problem with ‘moral instinct’ or ‘innate morality’ theories is that, even though they may come up with causal reasons for doing harm to others, they have a hard time coming up with justification for doing harm. In fact, the very instant one of these moral researchers put on their lab coats, they seem to forget that morality has to do with justification. They do all sorts of research on causation, but how do you look at a brain scan or the results of a questionnaire and assert, “Because these people engaged in this type of behavior, those people over there that these people would harm deserves to be harmed?

Please explain how you can get deserves to be harmed out of a lab experiment that looks only at the fact that the person doing harm really wants to and thinks that he would be right to do so.

E2.0: David Sloan Wilson: New Atheism a Stealth Religion

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

In David Sloan Wilson’s presentation at Beyond Belief 2, he made the argument that the “new atheism” is a stealth religion. It is a stealth religion because, like all religions, its major proponents and its followers buy into a set of propositions that they hold, not on the basis of evidence, but on the basis of . . . well, something less solid than ‘good science’. Yet, they are not willing to concede the fact that they lack good evidence for their beliefs.

Once we take the concept of stealth religions seriously then we can entertain the prospect that there are belief systems that have nothing to do with God . . . not that particular departure from reality . . . but that depart from reality in other ways.

He selected an example of a ‘religious’ form of atheism in Ayn Rand’s Objectivism. Wilson does not go into details as to how Objectivism departs from reality. However, this is a subject that I have covered in the past, such as Why I Am Not A Libertarian.

Briefly, Objectivists ignore logical gaps between ‘is’ and ‘ought’, equivocate between the concepts of value as a means and value as an end, and invent metaphysical entities such as ‘man qua man’ that do not exist in the real world, all in a tenacious attempt to defend their conclusions that, in spite of protests to the contrary, they could not possibly have reached through a judicious application of reason.

Wilson’s claim now is that the New Atheism, like Objectivism, is another ‘stealth religion’.

More specifically, he is concerned with four propositions that (partially) define the New Atheism.

(1) Is there any scientific evidence for the existence of supernatural agents?

(2) If not, then how can we explain the phenomenon of religion in naturalistic terms?

(3) Are the impacts of religion good or bad on human welfare?

(4) How can we use our understanding of religion to ameliorate its negative effects?

On these issues, what he says about the new atheism is, “

My complaint about the New Atheism is that, in the first place, for all of us the answer to question 1 is a no-brainer, so we don’t need to go on and on about it, and that they just get the answer wrong to the other three questions.

I have one immediate complaint about Wilson’s complaint. The ‘New Atheists’ did not write their books for those of us who view the answer to Question 1 as a ‘no brainer’. They wrote their books for people who have not settled on an answer to Question 1, and even for people who insist that the answer to Question 1 is a no-brainer in terms of thinking that supernatural agents definitely exist.

The complaint that, “The problem with your book is that I am not your target audience” is an absurd complaint. It also suggests that the complainer might have other problems understanding the book, because many of the things we say acquire their meaning in context. If Wilson does not understand the intent of the book, then he does not have the right context for understanding its content.

However, Wilson’s more serious objection is that the “New Atheists” give the wrong answer to the other three questions – that they answers that the New Atheists present are not ‘good science’.

I agree with the proposition that the “New Atheists” make false claims and employ leaps of logic that are indefensible. I have raised objections there in the past as well.

However, a lot of people make claims that I hold to be mistakes. In fact, since there is not one single person on the planet who agrees with me on everything, I would have to conclude that everybody holds at least one false belief or makes at least one unjustified leap of logic in defending those beliefs – including me. I have no idea where my false beliefs are to be found, or which of my brilliant logical inferences are, in fact, fallacious, but I know that some do exist.

If the fact that people make mistakes is enough to assert that they are guilty of holding on to a ‘stealth religion’, then the concept of ‘stealth religion’ is so broad that it is a useless term. It does not exclude anything or anybody. In fact, it can only exclude an all-knowing, perfectly logical entity.

It does not even exclude Wilson himself. Wilson says in his speech that he agrees with Dennett that we have a realm of facts on the one hand and a realm of values that is completely distinct and separate from fact. This ‘metaphysical dualism’ – this idea that values represent a ‘different type of entity’ that we cannot study scientifically but that nonetheless has an impact on the real world – I would argue would quality Wilson’s own belief system as a ‘stealth religion’ on his own terms.

I am also puzzled by Wilson’s decision to speak of the New Atheism in terms of a ‘stealth religion’ at all. Here, it would seem that Wilson is intentionally choosing to use an emotionally laden label – one that is almost certainly guaranteed to shut down, rather than support, reasoned debate. It was adopted, it would seem, as much out of a desire to be provocative and insulting as it was out of a desire to educate and enlighten. It would have been wiser to pick a term that would be less likely to cause listeners to respond by going to red alert and raising all shields.

Another issue that puzzles me is that Wilson describes the New Atheism as a ‘stealth religion’, that he seems to be using this in a derogatory way as if this alone is enough to condemn it, and yet at the same time he argues that religion is not necessarily bad.

Here, I found something in Wilson’s presentation that was extremely interesting – the idea that a practical truth is better than a factual truth.

I’m going to try to explain the concept in my own terms, and hope that I get at what Wilson was trying to defend.

Let us accept as a fact that none of us know everything – that there are facts about the universe that each of us are unaware, and that this condition will persist into the indefinite future. This means that the best that any of us can ever have is an approximation of the real world – a model, as it were, constructed to serve practical goals but far from complete.

Think of a computer model that is set up to predict climate change. There is no way that you are going to be able to input the exact location and state of every molecule in the atmosphere and its interaction with every force and particle in space and on Earth to come up with a completely accurate model. The best you are going to be able to create is an approximation of the real world. In coming up with that approximation, one of the things that you might introduce into your model are factors that merely approximate certain aspects of the real climate – certain fudge factors that do not conform to reality but which generate far more accurate predictions with less effort.

In our brains, we have a computer model of the real world – one that is informed through perception but which is not totally and completely accurate. It has been molded through evolution to generate output in real time fast enough to keep the agent evolutionarily fit. In order for this simulation to do its job, it may well use ‘fudge factors’ – variables that refer to things that are not real but which approximate things that are real.

Beliefs and desires may well be two entities of this type. It may well be that beliefs and desires do not refer to anything real. Neuroscientists could well discover systems that better explain and predict human behavior, and the classical concepts of ‘belief’ and ‘desire’ simply are not reducible to these findings in neuroscience. However, these neuroscience concepts are simply not the type that can be programmed into a brain in such a way that they can generate basically reliable output in real time. Though beliefs and desires do not exist, they may well provide a practical value long into the future.

Religion itself might be this type of system. It is a set of propositions that do not reduce to anything real that still have practical value.

In Wilson’s terms:

Basically what we are talking about here are cultural systems as like species in a multiple niche environment. That's the ecological and evolutionary paradigm is to be thinking of cultural systems not as viral-like bits but as systems that are like species and adapted to multiple niches in an economy.

In order to discuss Wilson’s view of religion, we must note that there may be things other than speed and accuracy that are important to include in a simulator meant to generate real-time decision-making data. There are good practical reasons to give up accuracy in exchange for speed. There may also be good practical reasons to give up accuracy in exchange for some other good.

Like, according to Wilson, evolutionary fitness.

Wilson focuses specifically on group selection as an evolutionary force. He talks about colonies of ants, and of how a trait that is bad from the point of view of individual selection can nonetheless be adopted because the colonies where members have those traits out compete colonies that do not have such members. For example, the existence of worker ants (who do not reproduce) may be easier to explain as a product of group selection than kin selection. In fact, Wilson argues, an organism (such as a human body) can be explained in terms of the principles of “group selection” governing the collection of cells that make up human bodies.

Ultimately, Wilson’s argument is that cultural systems (such as religion) may – even though the beliefs deviate from reality – bring about a system of unification and cooperation among individuals that the ‘religion’ itself becomes an organism, where the powers of group selection dominate the powers of individual selection among its members. In a sense, religions help to form colonies – and colonies, in turn, can out-compete individuals.

Wilson seeks to put his group-selection theory of religion up against the ‘parasitic meme’ theory that the ‘New Atheists’ seem to have adopted. Dennett himself, in his presentation the day before, compared religion to a parasite that causes infected ants to climb to the top of a blade of grass. There, the ant can be eaten by a sheep, and the parasite can then infect the sheep. Religion, Dennett argues, is a parasitic meme that infects its host, causing its host to engage in self-destructive behavior, but in doing so perpetuates the reproduction of the meme (by converting new followers into the religion).

In putting these theories up against each other, Wilson accuses the parasitic-meme theorists (the ‘New Atheists’) of ‘bad science’. The New Atheists, he asserts, have done nothing to actually defend their theory – nothing but offer loose anecdotal evidence comparable to the types of evidence that religions offer in defense of their beliefs.

They have not even proved, in a scientifically viable way, that religion is always bad, that it is something that must be done away with.

E2.0: Daniel Dennett: Teach the Children

This is the eighth 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.

This essay is the second of two essays concerning Daniel Dennett’s presentation at Beyond Belief 2: Enlightenment 2.0.

In our previous episode, Dennett presented the proposition:

With all due respect, sir, have you considered the possibility that you have blighted your whole life with a fantasy and are polluting the minds of defenseless children with dangerous nonsense?

He argued that there is no polite way to say this so our options are either to be impolite or to remain silent. The arguments for remaining silent are (1) religion is good, or (2) even though religion is not useful the statement above is (a) cruel or (b) dangerous.

I applied Dennett’s argument to a statement that reflects more my own interests.

You are engaged in a pattern of behave or that deprives others of life, health, and well-being and you are using scripture and religious tradition to wrap your harmful behavior in an illusion of legitimacy.

And I applied Dennett’s response, “But what if it’s true?”

If it is true, then it is quite difficult to imagine that such an attitude could actually be defended as being good, and what is ‘cruel’ and ‘dangerous’ is standing aside while people engage in these types of behavior.

But, how do we get people to stop engaging in this type of behavior? How do we reduce the numbers of victims that this way of thinking generates?

Dennett’s proposal is to make religious studies a required part of the school curriculum. Public schools, private schools, even home schools will be required to teach children the basic facts about all major religions – and children will be tested on it. So, even the home-schooled fundamentalist creationist with limited contact with the outside world will have to study Islam, Hindu, Buddhism, and the like.

Ultimately, Dennett defends his program with an analogy to a situation in which you have water flooding the house. The first thing you do is turn the water off, so that you are not adding more water. Then, you can deal with the water you have. Given enough time, it will drain away on its own, and you can then clean up the mess.

Dennett hope is that, when children are presented with the variety of religions and the fact that each has a set of adherents who say that theirs is true and all others is false, that they will realize there is nothing ‘special’ about any one religion. There is no reason to pick one and say, “This contains the absolute truth,” because “that religion over there” is being defended in exactly the same way.

I suspect that he is right, but it is a matter for empirical research, not for suspicions.

However, there is a perfectly secular argument for this type of education as well. We have to live with (share the planet) with these people in an increasingly global economy. The better we are at understanding others the better we will be at explaining and predicting their behavior, at working with them, at avoiding conflict, at making deals. Some familiarity with religious studies would go a long way to training the child to be a better business or political leader. We need educated people in leadership positions, and this is one element of education that would be useful.

The argument does not only reveal the value of having educated political leaders, but an educated public capable of making intelligent decisions about how to vote. Besides, a lot of these people are our potential neighbors, co-workers, and customers. The only reasonable vaccine against misunderstanding is understanding – and the best source of understanding is through education.

However, in presenting his idea, Dennett makes one significant mistake.

He wants the class to only deal with the facts of a particular religion – its history, its rituals, its moral prescriptions. He does not want any value judgments to enter into the classroom at all.

Yet, as any intelligent news reporter will tell you, value judgments are an inherent part of reporting facts. At the very least, you have to determine which facts you are going to tell. This requires a judgment as to which facts are worth telling and which are not important enough to reveal. This is a value judgment.

In fact, the whole class is premised on a value judgment. Whether we require religious studies as a way of helping children to realize that a lot of people hold a lot of different views on ‘faith’ and there is no good reason to think that any of them are right, or whether we see religious studies as an important body of knowledge for people to have, we must judge which facts are worth knowing, and which are not worth knowing.

This is where the political dispute will come in. In this class, do we teach the students that the Bible commands that disobedient children be brought before the village to be stoned, and that those who work on the day of the Sabbath shall be put to death? Do we teach them the sophisticated rationalizations that people have come up with to try to resolve religious contradictions, or do we only tell them about the contradictions?

Of course, the defenders of any particular view are going to insist that their religion be put in a favorable light. The political battles could be endless and, in the end, quite violent. The best solution with respect to keeping the peace may well be to simply not allow the schools to say anything on this subject. If the schools are silent, then we can all continue to get along without breaking into religious factions and reaching for the weapons of war.

Also, I have an argument against elaborate and complex plans to accomplish some end. The chances of any grand plan ever getting implemented is practically zero, which means that the energy that is devoted to a grand plan is typically wasted. Perhaps I am just being cynical, but I simply do not see much of a hope for a national campaign to make religious studies a required subject.

I am a favor of proposing smaller, personal projects that people can do at home. If the public school system is not willing to establish a class on religious studies, there is nothing to prevent individuals from doing so. There is nothing to prevent a group of concerned parents in setting up a regular weekly or monthly get-together where, at each session, the representative of some religious faction explains their religion to the audience.

At the same time, Dennett’s proposal provides reason to engage in private action to condemn the ‘enforced ignorance’ that religious groups rely on in their efforts to indoctrinate children. Those efforts include an insistence that children not be exposed to ideas other than those they are being indoctrinated into until the indoctrination has had a chance to set. Once set in the brain, a child’s indoctrination is almost impossible to dislodge. Only then is it safe to allow the child to be exposed to other peoples’ ideas.

The Catholic campaign against The Golden Compass, and the decision in Canada to remove the books from libraries that children have access to, is just the most recent example of how religious institutions seek to indoctrinate through enforced ignorance of alternative views. Home schooling, for many parents, is another example of enforced ignorance. It is a way to preserve the child’s ignorance of views the parent does not want the child to be aware of until the child’s mind has been sufficiently set into the parents’ beliefs.

Dennett proposes a massive change in the national school curriculum – and that might be a good idea if it can be pulled off. However, in the mean time, those same arguments can be used to justify campaigns that are more local. There was not, in my mind, nearly as much protest against the boycott of The Golden Compass as their should have been. There was not nearly enough effort to point out how religious institutions seek to indoctrinate children, not through education, but through enforced ignorance of alternative views. Indeed, when it comes to alternatives to a particular religion’s beliefs, religious institutions have a long and violent history of preferring enforced ignorance over education.

That was an excellent time to point this out. Yet, the few articles I read from people who defended the movie largely said, “Don’t worry. Your child can go to see The Golden Compass and still remain ignorant of alternatives to the Christian religion.” The idea that it is wrong for religious institutions to demand that children remain ignorant of alternatives to that religion was not really questioned.

It should have been.

Democrats and Foreign Policy

I have received what may be thought of as an exceptionally long question from a member of the studio audience. That member bought me a subscription to “The Nation” magazine, and asked my opinion about the contents of this news magazine. The first issue (January 2, 2008) just recently landed in my mailbox.

The story that caught my attention first was, “The Democratic Foreign Policy Wars.” By Ari Berman. The first part of the article looks at Senator Clinton’s foreign policy advisors and identifies Richard Holbrooke as a likely candidate for Secretary of State under a Clinton administration.

“No More War” democrats would likely see this as bad news. Holbrooke, it seems, is not adverse to the use of American military power overseas. He favored American military action in the Balkans under the Clinton administration, favored the removal of Saddam Hussein, and advises that we must keep an eye on Iran. In other words, he is not likely to advocate breaking significantly with Bush’s foreign policy.

One of the things that the article does not do is examine the reasons for believing that “No More War” democrats are right and that Holbrooke’s positions are mistaken. It does not at all look at the reasons behind holding competing views and judging whether those reasons are good reasons or bad. They are, in fact, writing for the converted, and saying, “Now that we all agree on X, what should we do about it?”

One of the things that I dislike most about Presidential politics in general and presidential elections in specific is that we have a number of substantially ignorant people, who get their information in 2-minute News segments or reading the headlines on newspapers, who think that they have the perfect solution to every problem. When they listen to a Presidential candidate speak, they go with the attitude that, “This person had better tell me that I am right and that I have perfect wisdom on this matter, or I am not voting for him or her.”

Whereas I hold that the most morally responsible position is to walk in with the attitude, “I do not have time to become an expert on this issue. I’m too busy making a living, raising my children, taking care of my elderly parents, taking care of the yard, keeping my job, and the like to become an expert. So, is this somebody who seems to have become the expert that I do not have time to become, and does he have the moral character that would drive him to do the right thing with the information at hand?”

Fad Beliefs

I have a great deal of sympathy for any political candidate who has to deal with this type of situation. Imagine that you are a Senator. Acting responsibly, you devote a great deal of your time studying an issue, trying to come up with the best solution. However, while you study the issue, some significant subset of your constituency adopts a “fad belief” that the conclusion other than the one you reached through reasoned deliberation is mistaken.

By a “fad belief” I refer to the fact that virtually nobody who holds this popular position has nearly enough information to make an intelligent decision. They have adopted their position, not based on knowledge and reason, but based on a desire to be a part of a fad that has latched onto this political position the way they might all adopt a new hair style.

So now you have a choice. If you look at your evidence and base your decision on a considered evaluation of the reasons for and against each side, you run the risk of coming into conflict with individuals who have done far less work, yet consider their opinions superior to yours. If, instead of applying reason to evidence, you look at the opinion polls, you can keep the people happy, but you find yourself often doing the wrong thing, and doing the right thing only by chance instead of by intention.

One of the issues that Clinton is being pressured on is to pull U.S. troops out of Iraq as quickly as possible. I hold that people with this position are morally irresponsible – as morally irresponsible as Bush was when he sent the troops in to begin with. These advocates of troop withdraw cannot possibly have a sufficiently detailed understanding of the situation in Iraq to be making policy decisions. It is not that I think they are wrong. It is that I think that they are ignorant – and so am I

Bush’s Stupidity

If somebody were to ask me, “When should we pull our troops out of Iraq?” my answer would be, “How the heck do I know? Give me a top-secret security clearance and 5 years to study the issue and I might be able to give you an answer. Until then, I have no choice but to trust people who have had top-secret security clearance and 5 years to study the issue.”

Even though I do not have enough information to draw a conclusion on what to do in Iraq, I often do have enough information to judge whether the person telling me his plans is intelligent enough and moral enough to come up with a good plan. When President Bush made the decision to attack Iraq it was clear, at least to me, that he was significantly deficient in both of these qualities. It did not matter whether I thought that invading Iraq was a good idea or not, it was a very bad idea for Bush to be in charge of the operation. In fact, we have seen the consequences.

If, in 2003, Congress would have budgeted $1 trillion, 4000 American lives, and 30,000 American military personnel injured to dealing with problems in the middle east. I have little doubt that we could have done much more than Bush was able to accomplish with this allotment.

I continue to wonder what would have happened if we had spent that $1 trillion on reducing American dependence on foreign oil – invested it in wind farms, solar power stations, and conservation instead of in Blackwater-style mercenaries and military hardware. What would we have been able to do today if we were now able to approach Middle-Eastern countries from a position of independence and strength, rather than from about the same position as a drug addict to his supplier.

And we could have saved the 4000 American lives, and 30,000 American military personnel would not have been injured.

Using History

One of the ways to determine the answer to the question of what a candidate will do as President is to ask them their opinion about past events. In this regard, there is no need to limit our discussion to the invasion of Iraq. What about Bosnia? What about the first Gulf war?

I supported Papa Bush’s decision to liberate Kuwait. Hussein was the aggressor, and needed to be pushed back. This response would serve as a deterrence to other aggressor nations that the days of conquering other countries with impunity are over. It would be a useful program to adopt for promoting peace. However, we somewhat shoot ourselves in the foot when we become the nation that is doing the conquering. This, then, makes us hypocrites.

I supported the attack on Bosnia. People are people. I reject the idea that a Bosnian life (or an Iraqi life) is worth less than an American life. Death is the ultimate loss for those who die. The campaign in Bosnia saved innocent lives, and did so without a hint that it was done for anything other than humanitarian principles.

So, I would like to ask the candidates whether they would have supported (or did support) these actions and why. If not, I would count this against the quality of their character.

Do they care enough about innocent life to save it? Do they care enough about bringing an end to tyranny that they will devote efforts to bringing an end to tyranny? If not, they do not have the moral character necessary to be good people, let alone good Presidents.

Do they have the intelligence enough to do so without utterly destroying one country and doing significant harm to their own? If not, than even if their heart is in the right place, it would be better to trust the job to somebody competent enough to do it correctly.

Which of the current candidates has the competence and concern to do the best job at saving innocent lives regardless (even if they are not American citizens) and promoting freedom? I'm looking for the author who can help to answer that question for me.

A Prohibition on Teaching Religion

An article in the National Post raises an important question about the goals of the ‘new Atheism’. It focuses specifically on the fact that Dawkins claims that teaching certain religious beliefs to children amount to ‘child abuse’. With this in mind, the author asks:

Why Dawkins refuses to take this idea to its logical conclusion -- to say that raising a child in a religious tradition, like other forms of child abuse, should be considered a crime punishable by the state -- is a mystery, for it follows directly from the character of his atheism.

I actually do not know how Dawkins (or the other ‘new athists’) would answer this question. Their rhetoric at times seems to advocate a policy of banning any mention of a god in the presence of a child until that child reaches a sufficiently mature age. Nor am I particularly concerned with what their answer is. I am more concerned with what the answer to this question should be.

I need to begin by reminding the reader that I reject the proposition that teaching religion to a child is ‘child abuse’. In order for actions towards a child to count as abuse, the agent must have malicious intent or at least a disregard for the well-being of the child. The person who cares for the child’s well-being, but nonetheless does harm, has made a tragic mistake, but has not committed any form of abuse.

Having said that, teaching religion to a child is certainly harmful in two major ways.

The first is that it deprives the child of the opportunity to obtain things of real value. Religious claims are false, and the values that they hold up are as imaginary as the gods they worship. A life of real meaning and realizing states of real value simply is not possible for an agent who is trapped in the pursuit of fictional meaning and imaginary value.

The second is that, while we seek to fulfill the more and stronger of our desires, we choose those actions that would fulfill the more and stronger of our desires given our beliefs. False beliefs cause people to fail to realize states in which the things that they desire are realized. We can see this in the person who wants to be healthy, but who believes that illness is caused by a rejection of God. He decides to fight off an infection with prayer rather than antibiotics, and he dies. False beliefs, in this case, not only prevented this agent from living a good life. It prevented the agent from living at all.

So, giving children false beliefs harms them in two ways. It gives children imaginary values that can never be realized, so it causes the child to grow up wasting his life. Even to the degree that the child has values that he can realize he may fail to do so because false religious beliefs prevent him from recognizing the best means to those ends.

This harm done to children does not, however, does not come from a malicious intent or disregard for the welfare of the child. Those parents and teachers are often very much interested in the welfare of the child. Only, they suffer from one of the two flaws of religion mentioned above – because of their beliefs, they fail to help the child adopt real-world values and deprives the child of the tools that would help to realize the real-world values he does have.

Given that this behavior is harmful to children, should we use the force of law to punish people who engage in this sort of behavior?

Absolutely not.

The principle that I have defended throughout this blog is that the only legitimate response to words are words and private actions, and the only legitimate response to a political campaign is a counter-campaign. False beliefs should never be met with violence. They should be met with a determined effort to demonstrate to others that those beliefs are false.

The argument for this traces its roots back to the heart of the enlightenment. Thomas Jefferson, for example, wrote that to impose beliefs on others through force of arms “makes half of the world hypocrites and the other half fools.” The fools are those who think that they can change beliefs through force of arms. The hypocrites are those who claim to believe what they are being told to believe in order to avoid the violence that the fools would otherwise visit upon them.

John Stuart Mill argued for the opposite of using force of arms to impose beliefs on others. Mill argued that if there were ever a belief held with such a certainty in a society that nobody would ever dispute it, that we should appoint people to defend the indefensible. Otherwise, the idea becomes stagnate. We lose our full understanding and appreciation of a truth if we are not constantly engaged in a struggle to explain how it is true against challengers.

The point of both of these positions is that the best way to defeat a set of false beliefs is not through force of arms (or force of law), but through a vigorous effort to explain why those beliefs are false – to convince others that no lover of truth would embrace such beliefs.

Even when it comes to preventing parents from doing harm to children by teaching those children false beliefs and imaginary values, the correct response is never to use the force of law, but to use the force of reason instead.

We do recognize that one form of child abuse is to neglect to provide the child with an education. A child who grows up unable to read, write, do basic math, or understand the fundamental facts of the world in which we live, will not have the tools he needs to run his own life, and is also not of much use to others. Particularly in a democracy, where the people choose their leaders, we must be concerned that the people are well enough educated that they can do a good job of choosing those leaders.

Now, we get to the question of education.

A major purpose of the school system is to provide children with true (and useful) beliefs and good desires. In fact, children need true beliefs in order to live a quality life, as I argued above. They also need good desires so as not to be a threat to others, and need others to have good desires so that they are not a threat to him.

At the same time, we will never have universal agreement on what counts as true beliefs or good desires. So, the question of what to teach children is always going to be a political issue – something that we must work out through public debate and compromise. We must go with a common consensus on what counts as true belief or good desire. This is not because the majority is always right (they very often are not). It is because there is no better option.

In some cases, we have found it necessary to adopt the position that the government will not teach particular propositions to children – even if they are true – because the proposition concerns a subject over which people tend to get violent. The ‘separation of church and state’ is only required because of a long and dark history of violence when church and state do not remain separate. If people with religious differences of opinion could learn to settle their differences by peaceful means – through institutions like those that scientists use, for example – there would be no need to separate church from state, any more than there is a need to separate science from state.

So, we have reached a political compromise that says, “Thou shalt not use public schools and public dollars to try to convert my child to your religion.”

This principle, by the way, is completely ignored when it comes to atheists in this country. Adding ‘under God’ to the pledge and changing the national motto to ‘In God We Trust’ were done precisely in violation of this principle – done precisely to promote a belief in God over other beliefs, and to make children feel uncomfortable with considering other options. Fortunately, atheists have had a tendency to prefer reasoned discussion to force of arms when they are threatened, so this particular violation has not lead (and, with continued strong moral commitments on the part of atheists, will not lead) to violent confrontations.

The idea that these atheists who are protesting these violations to the limits on government power are ‘militant’ is just another piece of evidence that the dominant Christian culture in this country is a culture of lies, sophistry, and bearing false witness for political purposes. The fact of the matter is that, in spite of the fact that the Christian culture continually violates the peace treaty between religions, the atheist culture has refused to break the peace.

I urge that they continue to do so, even though this incentivizes the Christian culture into greater and greater breaches of the terms of that agreement.

There is, then, no call for laws declaring the teaching of religious beliefs to children to be a type of abuse punishable by law. It simply is not permissible to respond to words with violence. The best way to respond to harms done to children in the form of false beliefs and bad desires is to counter those harms with a campaign to promote truth and good desires – and to promote them in ways that children can understand.

Because teaching religion to children does harm, the degree to which individuals are concerned with preventing harm to children will be measured by the degree to which they are willing to contribute to a campaign to present children with true beliefs and good desires in ways the child can understand and accept. It is blatantly inconsistent to complain that it is bad to teach religion to children, and yet not be willing to take action to prevent this harm in morally permissible ways.

The religious community will not like this. As they have demonstrated with the movie, “The Golden Compass” they recognize that the best defense that they have when it comes to teaching their attitudes to children is to enforce a child’s ignorance of alternative views. So, instead of meeting the movie The Golden Compass with arguments explaining the problems with the ideas presented, they organize a boycott. They run at full speed away from a policy of debate and discussion and directly into a policy of enforced ignorance.

The original question concerns whether we should make the teaching of religion to children punishable by law, in virtue of the fact that it is harmful to children. We should not. Even if the children adopt atheism under such a system, they will not understand it. They will not know why it is better than competing ideas unless and until they have been presented with those competing ideas and come to understand why they are inferior. This cannot be done by making the teaching of competing ideas illegal. This can only be done in an environment where people are free to offer those competing ideas, so that they can just as freely be refuted.

In other words, this doctrine of making it illegal to teach religion to children is exactly the type of ‘enforced ignorance’ that many religious figures feel they have reason to fear, because it is a policy that where, as illustrated with their reaction to The Golden Compass, they are eager to embrace. Whereas, the morally better way would be to allow children to be exposed to competing ideas, and then to help the children to understand what is wrong with those ideas.

This is not at all an unreasonable strategy. We can expect that a great many theists have a stronger love for their children (who exist) than for their God (who does not). Insofar as they care for their children, they have reason to take seriously the claim that they are doing harm, and to stop. This is the strategy to use - one in which they choose to comply, and to do so because they understand the harm that is otherwise done, and they care to prevent it.

More Happiness and Desire Fulfillment

Some current discussion among members of the studio audience invites me to take a closer look at the concepts of ‘happiness’ and ‘desire fulfillment’.

One of the questions that I need to look at is whether they are the same thing, or if they are importantly different.

If the two concepts are the same, then their truth-conditions should co-vary. Specifically, if happiness and desire fulfillment are the same, then when a proposition about happiness goes from being true to false, a corresponding proposition about desire fulfillment should also go from being true to false. If they do not, then there is a difference between them. When we encounter a difference, we can see which option value tracks.

So, let’s take the case of Mary. Mary is sitting at her computer, reading an email she has received from her daughter-in-law, Susan. Susan and her husband (Mary’s son) Brad are with their children enjoying a vacation in Australia. At this point, Mary is happy.

At the very instant that Mary is reading the letter, a drunk driver hits the car that her son was driving. Her son and one of her grandchildren are killed. Her daughter in law is paralyzed, and her other grandchild suffers severe and irreversible brain damage. At the moment of the accident, the proposition, “Mary is happy” remains true. There is no sense in which it is reasonable to say that Mary’s happiness changed from one moment to the next. No observer, watching Mary’s behavior as she reads the letter, or measuring her vital signs, would notice any difference.

However, at the moment of the accident, the proposition, “Mary’s desire that her son and his family enjoy their vacation in Australia is being fulfilled,” goes instantly from being true, to being false. Mary’s desire that P is fulfilled only in a state where P is true. Because of the automobile accident, P is no longer true, so Mary’s desire is no longer fulfilled.

So, we see here that happiness and desire fulfillment are not the same thing. In this one circumstance (and there are is an infinite number of comparable examples) the truth conditions diverge – a happiness proposition remains true while a desire fulfillment proposition changes from true to false.

Is this an important difference?

The reason that this difference exists is because ‘happiness’ is a mental state, while ‘desire fulfillment’ is a relationship between a mental state and a state of affairs in the real world.

Because happiness is a mental state alone we can isolate happiness from the external world. Let us take Mary’s brain state as she reads the letter – a state in which Mary is happy – and preserve it. Let’s put the brain in an infinite loop. In this state, Mary thinks that she is going to her computer, turning it on, happily reading the email, finishing the email, going to the kitchen, pouring herself a cup of coffee, going into the computer room (without any memory of the earlier event), finding and reading the email, and so forth.

Once Mary is in this infinite loop, we can do anything we want in the external world and it cannot affect her happiness.

If it is true that value tracks happiness, than the world in which Mary’s children and grand children get in the wreck is no more or less valuable to her than the world in which they do not get in a wreck. One of the things that happiness theory implies is, “What you do not know cannot hurt you.” Mary is not made unhappy by the accident. Mary is made unhappy by learning about the accident. The accident does not affect her brain states. The discovery that the accident took place is what harms her. So, by promoting ignorance (of things people do not want to hear) we can prevent harm.

The discussion in the studio audience on this issue brings up the possibility that happiness is still the only thing that matters. The accident, after all, cost the family in Australia the loss of a great deal of happiness.

But let’s remove this variable. Let’s take the family in Australia and put their brains in the same loop. Before the accident, they were enjoying the day snorkeling at the Great Barrier Reef. So, we take their brains at the time when they were the happiest and we lock them in a loop.

In fact, let us take everybody’s brain and lock it in a loop when that person was the happiest. We will set up machines to monitor these brain states – machines that we will assume have no chance of breaking down.

Under the happiness theory of value, this would be utopia. Nothing could be better than to have all these brains experiencing nothing but their best state of happiness in perpetuity.

That is, if the happiness theory of value were correct.

Yet, some people look upon this description and shudder. They do not see this as the best of all possible worlds. They see this as a horrendously meaningless existence. In terms of happiness, nothing can be better. If something is better than this, than that something must be a state in happiness is sacrificed in favor of something else of value.

Happiness is, indeed, one of the things that we value. But there are others, such that people are willing to pay a little less happiness in order to purchase this “something else”. They are willing to endure a little suffering, if it brings them more of this “something else”.

Desire fulfillment theory explains why events external to our brain states matter. A ‘desire that P’ is a mental state that motivates an agent into realizing a state in which P is true. A state in which P is not true (even if the agent falsely believes that it is true) has no value – at least as it relates to that desire.

Value is not a brain state. Value is a relationship between a brain state and a state of affairs in the world. Alter the state of affairs and value can instantly vanish. We do not have to wait for the agent to find out about it.

Desire and Motivation

From Atheist Observer:

you have desires that are not happiness or satisfaction related. Fine. Why do you have them? Where did they come from and how were they acquired?

Consider the fact that these are the two options. (1) Nature molded us to be concerned with one thing and one thing only, and that is whether our brain is in a particular state – a state of ‘being happy’. (2) Nature molded us to have a number of concerns to create states in the real world – states, for example, that result in our genetic replication, the survival of our children to the point and in a condition in which they can have children of their own.

Why would nature mold us to have one and only one concern, that being the concern that our brain is in a particular state? How did that happen?

Assume that you were building a robot that you would wish to see survive a hostile environment. Your robot can be damaged by excessive heat. So, you program your robot so that it can measure temperature differences and so that it moves away from unusually hot locations. In other words, you provide your argument with primitive versions of ‘beliefs’ about the temperature and a primitive form of an ‘aversion’ to high temperatures.

Also, a fall might harm your robot. Therefore, you program your robot with a way of sensing how far it would fall under different circumstances. You also program it with a primitive aversion to states of affairs in which there is a significant risk of falling far enough to cause harm.

Of course, circumstances arise in which the robot must make a choice between entering an area with higher temperatures or risking a fall. So, you give these desires a rank – and built it so that it performs the action that fulfills the stronger of its two desires.

Finally, you fine-tune your robot a little. You make the strength of an aversion proportional to the measure of the state to which one is averse. So, the robot has a stronger aversion to entering a higher-temperature region than to entering a lower-temperature region. It has a higher aversion to falling a longer distance than to falling a shorter distance.

In comparing these desires, the robot, if faced with a choice between entering a region with moderately high temperature or falling a great distance, will choose the moderately high temperature. If faced with a choice between a region with very high temperature or falling a moderate distance, it will choose to fall a moderate distance. It takes that action that fulfills the more and stronger of its desires (or, in this case, that avoids the more and stronger of its aversions).

The point to note here is that there is no need for happiness. Your robot is not programmed to realize a state of happiness. Your robot is programmed to avoid a state of high temperature or a risk of falling a great distance.

I can illustrate this same point by looking at a simple example. My cat walks into the kitchen for some food. One explanation for my cat’s behavior is that my cat wants to eat something and knows that there is food in the kitchen. Another explanation for my cat’s behavior is that my cat wants to be happy, believes that eating food will make it happy, and believes that there is food in the kitchen.

The first explanation is the simplest. We have every reason to stick with the first unless and until we have compelling reason to complicate our description by adding complexities.

I assert that I am not much different from the cat. When I wander into the kitchen it is not because I have a desire for happiness and suspect that something in the kitchen might provide me with happiness. I just want something to eat – that’s all. Happiness, if it comes, is a side-effect; icing on the cake, as it were.

Ben Stein's "Expelled" Revisited

One of the problems with the "new atheism" is that it is confronted with people who seem to be significantly lacking in certain moral virtues; in particular, the moral virtues of honesty and intellectual integrity.

One manifestation of this is the degree to which they critics of the “new atheism” lie, distort, and otherwise misrepresent the claims of those they criticize ('bearing false witness' against others to their readers and listeners) in order to present a view that they can easily refute. In doing so, they ignore the claims that those they criticize actually make.

An instance of this springs from my post concerning Ben Stein's movie, due out next month, "Expelled: No Intelligence in the Classroom." The movie aims to argue that the ‘Darwinists’ that dominate America’s institutions of higher learning are engaged in an unjust campaign to silence critics this persecution is not being carried out because intelligent design is not science (the reason that, for example, astrologers are not welcome in the community of astronomers), but because 'Darwinists' have a religious intolerance of all things religious.

Seth Elliott, writing for the organization “In His Name,” wrote recently that he wants to use my earlier criticism of Ben Stein’s movie as a starting point for addressing certain concerns that atheists might have with Christians.

Well, from the Atheist Ethicist’s internet blogging, we can begin to understand the fear that for an increasingly large number of people comes from Christians. I intend to use one of this blogger’s main points to begin a series of articles to re-articulate the Christian faith and to reduce the irrational fears that misinformation has produced about those of us who seek to follow Christ and His teachings.

What is "one of this blogger's main points?" According to Elliott it is:

He honestly fears that the refutation of evolution might mean an onslaught of religious fervor that would seek to replace things like MRI’s with crystal balls and neuroscience with phrenology. He, and others, imagine a world where everyone abandons boats and starts drowning while trying to walk on water. They see censorship, hysteria, and catastrophe when religious fools start throwing themselves off of cliffs to see if angels will catch them. I am heartbroken about where this dude went to church and the kind of Christians he knows.

The question to ask is: Are these empirically true facts about me? Or is this an example of 'bearing false witness' - an example of the morally questionable practice of telling others things about a person that are not true.

Of course, it is the latter.

Attacking Christians

The most personally disturbing fiction that Elliott witnesses to is his assertion that my writing is directed against Christians. I have devoted a great deal of my blog to promoting and practicing the principle that blame must be narrowly assigned to those who are actually guilty. I am as critical of atheists who violate this principle as I am of theists, as illustrated by my recent series of postings criticizing the act of putting an, “Imagine: No Religion” sign in a park in Connecticut as a part of a holiday display.

The fact is, it would be wrong for me to blame Christians for this attack on science. Many Christians (and, officially, the Catholic Church) accept evolution, and some make significant contributions to the biological sciences. Though we might argue that evolution is inconsistent with a literal interpretation of the Bible, some do not interpret the Bible literally.

So, the claim that I have written against Christians commits the moral crime of bearing false witness against me. It is a malignant distortion of my views that will give Elliott’s readers false impressions of what I actually believe and say;

My point here is not just that Elliott's claims are false, but that they represent a moral failing on his part. He wrote a series of statements about me without showing even the slightest interest in determining whether they were accurate. He bore witness against me without concern over whether the witness he bore was accurate or false.

Evolution and Past Medical Breakthroughs

Elliott bears witness that "[Alonzo] honestly fears that the refutation of evolution might mean an onslaught of religious fervor that would seek to replace things like MRI’s with crystal balls and neuroscience with phrenology."

I find the insertion of the word 'honestly' in this statement to be particularly ironic.

Actually, this is not 'honestly' the case at all. I have no doubt that Christians will continue to make use of current medical breakthroughs. I am well aware of the fact that, while Creationists are busy undercutting the foundation on which medical breakthroughs are built, they have no objection to taking advantage of those breakthroughs anyway. The clear benefit of those breakthroughs will virtually guarantee that they will continue to be used.

My concern is not with abandoning current medical breakthroughs, but with delaying future medical breakthroughs. Those breakthroughs come from people who take phenomena not yet explained, offer theories about possible explanations, and then test those theories through experimentation. The person who shuts down his mind and says, "There can be no understanding of how this happens; God did it and it defies human understanding." discovers nothing, and helps nobody.

These are the people who I was referring to in my original post when I wrote that a consequence of 'Expelled' in promoting public hostility to the scientific quest of finding real-world answers to these questions will be the suffering and early death of countless people who otherwise could have been saved or benefited from advances in science.

The Consequences of Refuting Evolution

I would be ecstatic to learn that evolution had been refuted and replaced with a better scientific theory. A better theory, in science, means a better way to explain and predict real-world events. In the area of biology, a breakthrough theory that replaces evolution should generate countless medical breakthroughs and a significant improvement in environmental policy (derived from our better understanding of the environment). In fact, these outcomes are how the new theory would prove it deserves to hold the seat that evolution currently holds.

Intelligent design is not science precisely because it does not offer the breakthroughs in medicine and environmental policy that an improved scientific theory would give us. There are zero medical research proposals waiting for intelligent design theory to be verified or falsified, and there are zero medical research proposals that employ intelligent design rather than evolution as a basis for that research. If intelligent design theorists actually started producing breakthrough medical research and breakthrough understanding of the environment, then those benefits alone would guarantee that they get a hearing.

It is precisely because there is no scientific evidence supporting intelligent design that, instead of offering research results that defend their claim, they are forced to use propaganda such as the movie Expelled, legislation, and public pressure to get their views presented as science.

The Policy Implications of Belief Without Evidence

According to Elliott, I and others “imagine a world where everyone abandons boats and starts drowning while trying to walk on water.”

Actually, I do not recall ever imagining such a world. Taken as a literal statement of what I imagine, the statement is false.

However, it is possible to take this statement metaphorically, in which case it might hold some truth.

We do, in fact, have events like this in the real world. We have people who insist that we can alter the course of hurricanes and prevent tsunamis, for example, by passing laws against homosexual acts and abortion. They are people who think that the absence of school prayer has a material effect on whether federal agents will notice whether a group of terrorists are going to try to hijack airplanes and fly them into sky scrapers. We have people who, in countless individual cases every day, choose an irrational solution based on star charts or what they think is a sign from God. These are, in fact, 21st century equivalents of ‘abandoning boats and trying to walk on water,’ with the same types of tragic consequences.

There is reason to believe that we have nearly 4000 Americans killed and over 20,000 injured in Iraq by a President who ignored evidence and went with ‘signs from God’ in deciding to attack Iraq – another example of the metaphor of abandoning boats and walking on water, where this is taken as a metaphor for abandoning evidence and acting on faith.

More importantly, we have legions of individuals devoting vast quantities of time and effort to actions and policies that deprive others of life, health, and well-being based on beliefs without evidence. Metaphorically, these are not just people who abandon boats and try to walk on water, but who force others out to stand on the water. When their victims sink, they blame the victim for not having enough faith while they shove the next group out onto the water.

Regardless of the accuracy of Elliott’s statement as metaphor, I do see how it would be on topic to relate these effects to Ben Stein’s movie Expelled. In my original article, I have written about how the belief that we can use laws against homosexuality and abortion to influence the frequency of earthquakes and direction of hurricanes has not been scientifically verified. However, that is not the same issue.

Conclusion

Theists who engage in these types of acts are rewarded by the fact that benefit from the fact that more people will read their claims about what these writers said than read what the writers actually wrote. Their willingness to devote so much energy to repeating these false claims, combined with their readers’ and listeners’ tendency to accept claims made on authority without questioning the reliability of the source, promotes a false impression of our views. We must, then, live with the fact that others have made and promoted false claims against us – exactly the type of injustice that makes this type of behavior immoral.

In my original post, I took effort to confine my criticism to “those who were responsible for” the movie. I made sure to declare that I might be mistaken about what the movie claimed (because I had not seen it) and that I was responding to reports about the movie that may be mistaken. I made an effort to make sure that I did not bear false witness against anybody, and that my writing conformed to the moral responsibilities incumbent on all writers.