The Pledge Project: Offense

When the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals releases its decision on the constitutionality of "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance and "In God We Trust" on the currency and posted in public buildings (particularly in classrooms), we will undoubtedly hear comments about 'atheists' and 'secularists' who are offended by every mention of God in the public square.

My answer:

Mentioning God in the public square does not offend me. Having the government teach children that a person who does not support 'one nation under God' is as anti-American as one who does not support 'liberty and justice for all' offends me.

Even here, I do not consider offense to be a morally relevant factor. We have to ask a further question. Is the offensive statement true or false? If it is true, then the offended party has to suck it up and live with the fact. Whereas if the offensive statement is false, then the problem with the statement is not that it is offensive, but that it is false.

Even false statements have to be divided into distinct moral categories. There is the innocent mistake – one that even a good moral character could make. There is the negligent falsehood – a falsehood acquired out of a lack of concern for the truth or the effects of a falsehood on others. Finally, there is the malicious falsehood – a falsehood adopted and spread out of a desire to do harm.

The claim that, "The American who does not favor 'one nation under God' is as bad as a person who does not favor 'liberty and justice for all'" is offensive. However, the moral problem with this statement is that it is a malicious falsehood. It was adopted out of a desire to do harm to the interests of those who do not believe in God. It does so by promoting the falsehood that atheists (e.g,, people like Pat Tillman and my father) are as bad as those who do not support liberty and justice for all.

This problem is compounded by the fact that the government has written this malicious falsehood into its Pledge of Allegiance and that the government takes such great pains to teach this malicious falsehood to very young children starting on the first day they enter public school.

Attempts to characterize objections to 'under God' in the Pledge of Allegiance as 'offense at the mere mention of God in the public square' is a bit like characterizing objections to slavery in the 1850 as 'objections to doing an honest day’s work'.

It compounds one malicious lie (the malicious lie written into the Pledge of Allegiance that an American who does not support 'one nation under God' is as bad as an American who does not support 'liberty and justice for all') with another malicious lie (that atheists are offended by any mention of God in the public square).

Both statements are also bigoted.

There are a lot of atheists in the world, and some of them hold to some pretty stupid ideas. I have no doubt that there are atheists who are offended by any mention of God in the public square and who are willing to insist that this never be permitted. However, the claim that this characterizes all atheists is a lot like saying that because some Muslims perform terrorist actions, all Muslims are terrorists. It is simple bigotry – motivated by the same malicious disregard for interests of others that got 'under God' inserted into the Pledge to start with.

This brings up another problem – the idea that theists are morally superior to atheists because theists have a foundation for their morality and an incentive to do what is right.

Yet, if this is the case, then why are so many of them doing such a poor job at determining right from wrong and doing such a good job of doing that which is wrong?

A good person would not accept a government program to promote malicious falsehoods about decent law-abiding citizens. He would say that this is wrong and, as a good person, he would refuse to participate or endorse the use of malicious falsehoods against innocent people. He certainly would object to teaching bigoted malicious falsehoods to children in a public school. He would never tolerate any attempt to elevate malicious falsehoods to the level of a national motto or a national pledge.

The fact that many Christians and other theists in this society are in favor of these practices is proof that their religion either is not helping them to understand their moral duties or not giving them much of an incentive to do what is right. Or both.

People who are driven to promote the teaching of malicious falsehoods to young children out of a desire to do harm to the interests of peaceful law-abiding neighbors by religious dogma represent that subset of religion that is motivated to do evil, rather than good, by their religious teachings.

I explicitly deny that this is true of all religion. There are, in fact, a great many religious people who realize that having the government teach malicious falsehoods to children as a way of harming the interests of peaceful citizen is wrong. The fact that there are some religious people motivated to do evil by their religious beliefs does not imply that all religious people are motivated to do evil by their beliefs.

However, it is just as true that the fact that some religious people do good that no religious person may be condemned. There are those who argue this way - using the good deeds that some religious people perform to condemn all criticism of religion.

That inference does not hold up. If it did, then it would be wrong to condemn the 9/11 hijackers or suicide bombers so long as we can find a single Muslim who has done good.

As a matter of fact, we must recognize that some religious people are good, and others are evil, and those who advocate government-sponsored malicious falsehoods against those who do not share their beliefs are closer to the second category.

We have good reason to morally condemn a religious practice that motivates its followers to do evil. We have good reason to morally condemn a religious practice that motivates agents to support a government teaching malicious falsehoods to young children, such as the malicious falsehood that a person who does not support 'one nation under God' is as bad as a person who does not support 'liberty and justice for all'.

We have good reason to morally condemn a religious practice that hides one malicious falsehood behind another as when those who defend the first practice 'bear false witness' against atheists – claiming that all atheists are (merely) offended by all mention of God in the public square.

Sometimes, religion motivates people to take political action harmful to the interest of others for no reason other than, "They do not share our religion." Sometimes it motivates people to lie and distort the objections of those they harm to the harm they do by saying that, "They are merely offended by the mention of God in public."

Sometimes, religion motivates people to do things that no good person would do.

Sometimes.

The Pledge Project: What to Do?

I have been writing in recent days about the importance of objecting to 'under God' in the Pledge of Allegiance and 'In God We Trust' as the national motto.

What are we going to do about it?

Here is what I want you to do.

I want you to go to some public forum somewhere – write a letter to the editor, post a comment to a relevant blog, enter a relevant online discussion, stand up on a soap box in a shopping mall, address your local city council or school board – and make a statement like the following:

'Under God' in the Pledge of Allegiance has never been about allowing God in the public square. It has always been about excluding non-religious people from public office and all aspects of civic life.

Perhaps adding the phrase:

And I can prove it.

I will get to that proof in a moment. I first want to make some preliminary remarks by answering the question, "Why should I do this?"

For the past 50 years, while secularists have been hiding behind judicial robes, sectarians have been out in the public concealing the real nature of these policies in a fog of rhetoric and misconceptions. They have been so successful that even secularists are having trouble seeing the real nature of these policies.

They have framed the debate in terms of allowing God on the public square, and portrayed their opponents as being enemies of freedom of speech, enemies of freedom of religious practice, and enemies of freedom of conscience.

Secularists, in the mean time, have been using legal (not the moral) principle of separation of church and state as if it is some sort of trump card. They have acted as if merely putting this card on the table will convince everybody (or at least a substantial majority) that these policies must be rejected. They have not noticed how 40 years of unanswered sectarian propaganda have turned 'separation of church and state' into something so distasteful in the eyes of the majority of Americans that it has no power anymore.

There are a lot of ways to change a law, other than by passing legislation or Constitutional amendments. One way is to simply change what the words mean. "Separation of church and state" is on its last legs in this country. People have been throwing it into battle after battle without taking even a moment to tend to the wounds it has received. When it falls, every principle of government that has been thrown onto its shoulders will fall with it.

We can see the death blow coming. I wrote about it last month in the post, A New Constitutional Test for Religious Liberty, where I reported that the Supreme Court may be near to adopting a new test for First Amendment cases. Called the Coercion Test, this test renders everything permissible except direct coercion - fines and imprisonment for failure to participate in a religious ritual.

It is time to quit hiding behind the judicial robes (because they will not be there for us to hide behind much longer) and to take the debate to the people themselves in moral terms, not just legal terms.

The moral issue is that 'under God' in the Pledge and 'In God We Trust' as the national motto posted on the money, in government buildings, and (particularly) in school classrooms are part of an attempt to use the government to promote hostility against peaceful citizens based on their religious beliefs and to put nearly insurmountable barriers between those 'infidels' and elected public offices and positions of public trust.

The Proof . . .

I can prove that 'under God' is not motivated by the simple desire to mention God in the public square or to honor the values of the founding fathers. It is actually easy to do.

When the founding fathers wrote the Constitution, they wrote an oath for public office:

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of the President of the United States and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.

There is no mention of God in this official oath. In fact, the Constitution explicitly prohibits a religious test for public office.

. . . no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.

However, they left officials free to add any religious addendum to their oath of office that they would be comfortable with. When George Washington took the oath of office for the first time it is reported that he voluntarily appended the phrase "so help me God" to the end.

An option that both honors and respects the intention of the founding fathers, and that allows for a mention of God in the public square, is one in which the Pledge itself does not mention God or make any religious reference, but one in which citizens are free to tack onto the end the phrase "so help me God" or any other phrase that suits their particular, individual, beliefs. Or to add nothing at all.

Since this both allow the mention of God in the public square and honors the founding fathers, it should be suitable to anybody who has these goals. If somebody does not find this option suitable, we may assume that she has something else in mind - some other value that 'under God' fulfills, but 'so help me God' does not.

That value can be found in the fact that 'under God' written into the pledge equates those who do not support 'one nation under God' with those who do not support 'with liberty and justice for all'. It puts a barrier between those who do not believe in God and public office by equating belief in God with patriotism and patriotism with fitness for public office. These are the values that keep 'under God' in the Pledge of Allegiance - not 'honoring the founding fathers' or 'allowing God into the public square'.

Unfortunately, we have allowed sectarians to use these smoke screens without the slightest challenge so, now, the vast majority of the population have come to think of their claims as unquestionably true. Certainly they must be true if nobody has questioned them.

The facts that we need to establish are that "Under God" and "In God We Trust" were passed 50+ years ago to promote public hostility against atheists and to put a nearly insurmountable barrier between them and public office and positions of public trust. They were made a part of school rituals and civic life to encourage children to look down on anybody who did not favor 'one nation under God' - Soviet Communists in specific, but all atheists in practice.

These are morally objectionable practices quite independent of any legal arguments. These practices will remain immoral regardless of any changes made in the law. The law, in this case, can only be made more or less just.

It is time to remind the secular community of these facts so that, when the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals releases its decision, the secular community can take advantage of the opportunity to make the rest of the country of these facts.

The ultimate goal is that, when the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals releases its decision, there are people out there asking a new question that exposes aspects of this case that have long been buried. "What business does the government have teaching children that those who do not support 'one nation under God' are as bad as those who do not support 'liberty and justice for all', and using this to put political barriers between law-abiding citizens and public office and positions of public trust?"

The Pledge Project: Priorities

If we look at all of the issues that we could devote time and energy to – child abuse, global warming, AIDS, malaria, Iraq, illegal drugs, national deficit, medical costs, Bird Flu, stem cell research, and countless other issues – is the issue of 'under God' in the Pledge really that important?

First, I want to point out how many things we do with our time that are even less important - like watching Survivor or some sporting event, playing computer games, or going out to dinner. There are certainly some things for which this issue is more important.

Yet, compared to many of the things listed in the irst paragraph, this issue is not important – except to the atheist child who might want to grow up to become President or a legislator, become a judge, or join the military and be promoted for the quality of his service. It is not important, except for the child whose classmates are being taught by the school to look down on children who do not support 'one nation under God'.

However, this issue gains some importance because it has effects on many of the other issues that are more important. This issue has instrumental value.

Atheists as Decision Makers

When we look at these other, greater concerns, one question we should ask is, "How are we going to address those other concerns, and who gets to decide?" One of the effect of 'under God' in the pledge is that, before a person is allowed to sit among the decision makers, that person has to pass a test. He must first prove that he is willing to pledge allegiance to 'one nation under God'. Those not willing to offer such a pledge can only sit in the sidelines and, perhaps, offer suggestions to the decision makers. He will never be a decision maker himself.

I reject the proposition that atheism is a virtue. Being an atheist does not automatically make one a better person. However, this does not imply that there is no injustice in excluding atheists from the set of decision makers. There is nothing about being black that implies that blacks are better decision makers. Yet, this does not imply that there is no injustice in excluding blacks from the table of decision makers.

Even when it comes to testimony delivered from the sidelines, 'under God' and 'In God We Trust' tells people that testimony from those who pledge allegiance to 'one nation under God' deserves more weight than testimony from those who do not share this view.

Recall Illinois representatives Monica Davis' rant against atheists from her seat in the Illinois legislature.

It's dangerous to the progression of this state. And it's dangerous for our children to even know that your philosophy exists! You have no right to be here! We believe in something. You believe in destroying! You believe in destroying what this state was built upon.

Do you think that somebody like that cares at all about what any atheist tells her on any issue (so long as she knows that the person speaking is an atheist)? Let's not pretend that her attitude is in any way rare. Though some in the atheist community (and a few outside of it) expressed outrage, they were not so outraged that they forced her to apologize to the atheist community or to retract her statements.

The message that atheism is intrinsically unpatriotic - that patriotism requires a level of support for 'one nation under God' that no atheist can give - implies that atheists are not only unqualified for public office, but are unqualified to offer advice to those who hold public office.

The truth of the matter is that some atheists are able to give well informed and wise advice on some of these issues. The nation puts them in the category of unpatriotic citizens worthy only of being ignored at its peril. Banning a person from the decision-making table and ignoring her advice from the sidelines merely because she is an atheist puts everybody at a disadvantage. It costs the society the opportunity to adopt some very good solutions to some very important problems.

Defending Justice

The second way the Pledge problem relates to some of these other problems is that several of these issues have to do with questions of justice and injustice - the same question that applies to the practice of putting 'under God' in the Pledge and of adopting 'In God We Trust' as the national motto.

"Is it morally permissible for a government to adopt a national pledge that denigrates a set of peaceful and law-abiding citizens by equating them to those who oppose liberty and justice for all?" Allowing the Pledge of Allegiance to stand as it is implies saying that these types of acts are permissible - that they are not to be opposed. Saying that these types of acts are permissible implies that all other countries have the option of adopting practices that aim to promote public hostility against a peaceful and law-abiding group of its citizens. This will not make the world a better place.

America cannot honestly expect to promote a global culture in which religious minorities are treated with respect when it has risen religious bigotry to the status of a national pledge and a national motto. Around the world, conflicts between groups are made worse - not better - by the doctrine that nations can adopt injustice and bigotry as its greatest principles and highest standards.

America cannot condemn a country that demands a pledge of allegiance to Sharia law, for example, without making itself into a nation of hypocrites, if it demands allegiance to 'one nation under God'.

Lessons from History

Some argue that atheists are not treated all that badly in America today (in spite of these injustices), and so nothing needs to be done about it. However, we could also argue that women were not treated all that badly in the years before they were allowed to have a place at the table of decision makers. Perhaps, 100 years ago, we should have listened to those who said that women's rights was simply not a legitimate concern and attention should be given to other things, because women were not being treated badly enough to take women's suffrage seriously.

Japanese Americans were not being treated all that badly in the 1920s. Yet, their position quickly deteriorsted several years later. It deteriorated precisely because people were not devoted to the principles of justice as they should have been. If the people of today are not seriously committed to the principles of justice, what will they be capable of in the future?

Demanding that people live by the principles of fairness and justice today helps to protect people - including our children and grandchildren - tomorrow. Similarly, allowing individuals to get away with abuses and injustices today puts future generations at risk that these injustices will find a new target, or they might wander into an area already being targeted.

When Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of the bus, it was possible for people to complain then that her concern with walking another fifteen feet to the back of the bus was trivial and unimportant. Whats the issue of moving to the back of the bus compared with concerns like nuclear war and polio? Are we really going to make a big deal over the fact that some people have to give up seats in a bus from time to time when we have to deal with these other issue?

However, this description trivializes what was at issue with segregation. The issue was not that of moving to the back of the bus. The issue was the set of assumptions and attitudes that generated and protected the policy of requiring blacks to move to the back of the bus.

The issue with the Pledge is not about whether or not certain people have to say or refrain from saying a pair of words. It has to do with attitudes that say that the government may legitimately teach children to view people who do not believe are to be thought of the same way as those who do not support liberty and justice for all. What is at issue is a principle that, if accepted, would make it permissible for governments to have children pledge allegiance to 'one white nation' or 'one arian nation'.

No government has the right to participate in a campaign to promote hostility against peaceful law-abiding citizens based on qualities not relevant to their patriotism or moral character.

No government has the right to make it the national pledge and the national motto to put barriers between a group of peaceful law-abiding citizens and public offices within that nation or positions of public trust (such as appointed judgeships).

No nation has the right to teach children, starting on the first day of school, that those who do not support 'one nation under God' are as bad as those who do not support 'liberty and justice for all'.

No government has the right to put signs or stamps in its buildings or on its government paper (such as money) that tells its citizens, "You are not to think of a person as one of us unless he trusts in God."

Is it important to say these things?

I think it is.

The Pledge Project: The Atheist Burka

I have been thinking of the series of posts that would make up this project for months. Here it is, the second day, and I am already altering the arrangement.

Two members of the studio audience responded to yesterday's posting by saying, in effect, "I'm comfortable with 'under God' in the Pledge. The issue just does not interest me."

I know that this is a very common sentiment.

I consider this sentiment to be like that of the fundamentalist Muslim woman who has become comfortable wearing a burka each time she goes out in public. She is comfortable going outside only in the company of a male family member and is comfortable being denied an education or any activities outside the home.

I am not saying this to insult anybody. I am attempting to describe a common psychological phenomenon where the victims of one generation of social discrimination prepare the next generation to also be victims of the same discrimination - to be comfortable in their role as second-class citizens.

Not only is she comfortable in this life (because, face it, it is the only life she knows and we are certainly more comfortable with what is familiar to us than what is different), she enthusiastically begins teaching her young daughter to be comfortable in this life as well. Young minds are malleable, and can be made comfortable with a great many things. We know as a matter of fact that a young girl born in such a country can be raised to be comfortable with the limitations that the leaders of her fundamentalist religion will require of her.

In Texas recently we found another example in which children, raised in a closed community where girls are married off at puberty, also became comfortable with their situation. They could not conceive of anything else. When the camp was raided and they were taken off to foster care, they did not praise their liberators. They demanded a return to what they were comfortable with.

In America, the government begins the process of fitting children comfortably into the atheist burka on the first day of school. From that first day they are told then told to repeat the mantra that the the government does not like those who do not support 'one nation under God'. It thinks that they are just as bad - just as 'un-American' - as those who do not support 'liberty and justice for all'.

As these children come to understand what the words in the Pledge mean, they will include in their growing understanding the idea that people who support 'one nation under God' and 'liberty and justice for all' are good people, and that those who don't support 'one nation under God' or 'liberty and justice for all' are not good people – at least as far as the government and the school are concerned.

Some people like to speak about phenomena such as this in terms of 'memes' – mental analogues to genes that get passed from one generation to another. We should not be surprised that natural selection will favor the meme that will give its host a sense of comfort and will suppress resistance against passing that meme on to the next generation. Ideas fed into the brains of young children are just the type that generate the type of comfort. So, the six-year-olds of today will teach the six-year-olds of tomorrow to wear the atheist burka comfortably and not to complain.

Many of us have applied these concepts to other groups. We have spoken of the way that religious fundamentalists pass religious fundamentalism on to the next generation in ways where the child cannot grow up to question them. We have not realized that we are a party to passing down a set of myths to our own children as well.

We have not been so eager to apply these concepts to ourselves. We have been fed the meme since we were six that not favoring 'one nation under God' is shameful and as un-American as not favoring liberty and justice for all. The government requires that signs be posted where the youngest Americans cannot escape them that tell children, "If you want to be one of us, then you will trust in God – and if you do not trust in God we will not think of you as one of us."

The question of how religions hand down their myths from one generation to the next can be found in how 'comfortable' we are with the way atheists are treated in this country. We can look at ourselves to study how these memes work. They have certainly infected us, given the lack of interest many of us have in rejecting the denigration and abuse of atheists even by their own government.

In some of his writings and his speeches Richard Dawkins has talked about 'consciousness raising'. Here is one area where the concept of 'consciousness raising' applies.

"I am 'comfortable' with the myth that a person who does not support 'one nation under God' is like a person who does not support 'liberty and justice for all'. "

Really?

You're comfortable with that?

And you're going to stand aside while the government teaches the next generation to be comfortable with the idea that those who do not favor 'one nation under God' are as bad as those who do not favor 'liberty and justice for all'? You are comfortable with our children growing up to be 'comfortable with' a barrier that keeps them out of public office and positions of public trust? You are comfortable with society handing out atheist burkas to their children and demanding that your children wear them, and then pass those burkas on to their children?

'Consciousness raising' was introduced to deal with the problems found in other groups who were made 'comfortable with' various forms of discrimination against other groups. They were 'comfortable with' treating women as property whose sole duty was to to obey their fathers and their husbands, and with being treated as property. 'Consciousness raising' applied to the practice of teaching women exactly what it is they had become comfortable with, so that they could see it for what it is.

Atheists need to be made aware that they have been made 'comfortable with' barriers that keep them out of public office and positions of public trust. They have been made 'comfortable with' civic ceremonies where the people unanimously declare, "A person who does not support 'one nation under God' cannot possibly be a patriot." They have been made 'comfortable with' signs in civic hall and on the money that say, "Only somebody who trusts in God is to be considered one of us."

Atheists have been made 'comfortable with' a President who states, "We need common-sense judges who realize that our rights come from God, and that is the type of judge I intend to nominate." Even though they and their neighbors have young children who have just heard the President say, "If you do not believe that our rights come from God then you are not qualified to be a judge," they are 'comfortable with' this situation and simply go about their business.

The atheist burka means atheists not being judges in the United States.

They hear of an Illinois representative tell an Atheist witness before a government committee that, "Yours is a philosophy of destruction," and "You have no right to sit in that chair." The atheist burka means shrugging and doing nothing.

Ultimately, my point is that I do not care how comfortable you have come to be in the atheist burka. It is time to take it off.

More importantly . . . much more important than you taking off the atheist burka yourself . . . you should not allow the government to put the atheist burka on the next generation of children.

The Pledge Project: Acting Against Anti-Atheist Bigotry

Note: I was wrong on the date in what follows, but the rest of the post stands and remains relevant for whenever this decision is released.

I was going to wait on this project . . . but, I think it would be foolish to wait.

The project . . .

Sometime in the next 50 days, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals will release its decisions on whether 'under God' in the Pledge of Allegiance and 'In God We Trust' on the money and in government buildings violates the First Amendment's prohibition on establishing religion.

I consider 'under God' in the pledge, and the national motto of "In God We Trust" to be the most significant cause of the deteriorating political situation that atheists in specific and secularists in general are facing in the United States, and I want to see these practices ended.

When the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals releases its decision, this will create a political uproar that could have a significant impact on the federal election and several local elections. It will have a significant impact on the electability of atheist candidates (or any candidate who would not pledge allegiance to 'one nation under God') and the status of atheists in America for the foreseeable future.

To get a hint of the type of problems I am talking about, vjack was coincidentally kind enough to post on the topic just this evening. See America the Intolerant: Attitudes towards Atheists Revealing.

If we continue to debate this issue as we have debated it in the past we should only expect the results of those debates to be a continually growing barrier between atheist candidates and public office and positions of public trust, and a growing deterioration of the view of atheists among most Americans.

If you think that being a rationalist should not disqualify a person for a position in public life as an executive, legislator, judge, or appointed leader, then you have reason to reject 'under God' and 'In God We Trust' because, as long as they exist, positions of high public office are not available to rationalist candidates.

I do not think that there is any virtue in being an atheist. I can think of many pairings in which I would choose the religious candidate over the atheist alternative. However, I can also think of many pairings where I would choose the atheist over the religious alternative. Where those pairings might occur in the political process the atheist candidate ought not to be disqualified merely because he is an atheist.

I do not need to believe that there is a particular virtue in being black, or that blacks are inherently superior to whites, to know that a government-endorsed program to keep blacks from public office is a vice, and nothing that a good person could support. I do not even need to be black to have strong and serious objections to any such project.

Similarly, I do not need to believe that there is a particular virtue in being an atheist, or that atheists are inherently superior to theists, to know that a government-endorsed program to keep atheists from public office is a vice, and nothing that a good person could support. I do not even need to be an atheist to have strong and serious objections to such a project.

Let's be honest – these policies were adopted, and they continue to be enthusiastically supported – because they serve as a way of keeping political power out of the hands of any person who will not pledge allegiance to 'one nation under God'. They are loved (by those who love them the most) because they endorse a religious barrier to public office that only allows those who are willing to express a belief in God to pass through.

From the very first day that a child can read the words on the money or on the school room wall that say, "In God We Trust", the government is teaching that child that if she wants to be counted as 'one of us', she will trust in God, and she will not accept any who do not trust in God as one of 'us'.

From the very first day that a child enters public school the child is taught that, at least in the eyes of the government, any person who does not support 'one nation under God' is like a person who does not support 'liberty and justice for all'. These are things that all good Americans support, and those who do not support them are not to be thought of as good Americans.

The reason that those who support these policies the loudest want these lessons taught in the public schools – the reason why they are so emphatic on protecting these policies – is precisely because it helps them to eliminate competition from 'secularists' and 'atheists' for positions of public power and public trust. Through these policies they can keep political power in their own hands. By keeping political power in their own hands they can protect these policies.

Attempting to interpret this as some wild conspiracy theory involving millions of people whispering a secret that is never released to the public would be a mistake.

We find the same type of 'conspiracy' in 'under God' and 'In God We Trust' today that we found in 'separate but equal' in the years between the Civil War and Civil Rights. No sane person could look at the way that blacks were treated before 1960 and say that it followed the constitutional guarantee that blacks be treated as equals. However, a deep-seated prejudice (not a conspiracy) kept the majority who loved their privileged status from admitting what no sane and honest person could deny - that these 'separate' institutions and facilities were not 'equal' (and could never be).

Today, this same type of deep-seated prejudice causes people to ignore what no sane and honest person could deny about 'under God' and 'In God We Trust' – that these, like 'separate but equal', are government-supported policies that aim primarily at promoting hostility towards a group of peaceful and law-abiding citizens based on (in this case) nothing more than their beliefs about God. These policies exist to keep political power in the hands of those who are willing to pledge allegiance to 'one nation under God' by making it nearly impossible for those not willing to make such a pledge from gaining public office.

The mere fact that there are so few atheists in public office (and none who have run for public office while denying that we ever were, are, or will be 'one nation under God' since there is no God) is testimony to the effect of these policies.

An important exchange between Chief Justice Rehnquist and Michael Newdow the last time the Pledge of Allegiance came before the Supreme Court is telling on this matter.

As reported on MSNBC:

Newdow had argued that the words "under God" were divisive and damaging to national unity, by pitting atheist against believers.

"What was the vote in Congress" when it decided in 1954 to add the words "under God" to the pledge, asked Rehnquist.

Newdow replied that it was "apparently unanimous," prompting Rehnquist to question how divisive the pledge really was.

"That's because no atheists can get elected to Congress," Newdow insisted, prompting a sudden round of applause in the audience.

Newdow touched almost accidentally on what is a key concern in this dispute – a matter that the audience recognized instantly and responded to. One way to express that concern is as follows:

If an all-white Congress unanimously passed a pledge of allegiance to 'one white nation', only a bigot would deny that they did this to divide the nation between those who were white and those who were black in an attempt to keep political power in the hands of those who were white.

This Pledge Project is about creating a nation where rationalists can have a chance of winning public office and positions of public trust.

This is about creating a nation where the government is not teaching its citizens from the youngest age that their government looks on people who do not support 'one nation under God' the same way it looks on people who do not support 'liberty and justice for all'.

It is about creating a nation where the government does not put up signs in every government building and child's classroom that state, "Only a person who trusts in God can be one of us. And if you want to be one of us yourself, then you must also trust in God."

After the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals releases its decision, the case will almost certainly go to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court will hear the case late in 2009 or early 2010. This gives us a year and a half to make the case that 'under God' is not about mentioning God in the public square. It is about keeping atheists out of public office.

In fact, any campaign to give atheists a chance to win public office must begin with defeating these practices. There can be no (honest) atheist in high public office against the backdrop of a nation whose government teaches children from the youngest age to pledge allegiance to 'one nation under God' and where political advertisements adorn every public office that say, "Only one who trusts in God can be one of us."

Do you think that rational candidates who base conclusions on the evidence and who understand and can apply the rules of logic should have a chance to honestly win public office?

This issue is where that campaign begins.

The Waste of a Life

A couple of the leaders of the atheist blogsphere got into a dispute recently over the death of pastor Paul Jones.

It started with PZ Myers posting the blog entry, How Sad in which he wrote:

Paul Jones has died. I didn't know him, or even know about him, until his obituary was sent to me, but it's an utterly tragic life story. He was an ordained Baptist minister — there's a waste of a life right there — and his death was ironic and futile.

Hemant Mehta (a.k.a. Friendly Atheist) did not approve. In a post titled, How Sad, Indeed. He wrote:

Believing in God is not as bad as using God's name to advance your own political agenda. That doesn't mean belief in God is correct. But it doesn't imply a complete waste of time. We could all name plenty of religious people (current and historical) who have done wonderful things in the name of their God. It's petty to dismiss those good works because they were done in the name of a God we don’t believe in.

Fortunately, I have a theory of value that is perfectly applicable to these types of questions from which I can derive who (and to what degree) each writer is correct.

In fact, both writers are correct in their own way.

Imagine that there is a nurse who has decided to care for the health and well-being of an isolated community. However, she has come to believe (by whatever mechanisms allow people to believe in absurdities) that arsenic is a cure-all. She arrives with a lifetime supply of arsenic pills. Whenever somebody in the village expresses some discomfort or shows signs of any illness, she provides them with a little arsenic. Those who get better (as some of them certainly will – arsenic in small doses is not fatal but its effects are cumulative) then praise the nurse and the power of her medicine.

However, at the age of 52, this nurse has a tragic accident that takes her life.

This nurse has wasted her life. She has actually done worse than wasted her life. Let’s assume that there is an afterlife in which she learns the truth – that she really was poisoning the villagers and making them slowly sicker over time. If she truly cared about the welfare of the villagers, then this would be a tragic and heartbreaking discovery. She herself would come to the conclusion that, for the sake of those she cared about and, in her ignorance, were suffering harm at her hands, it would have been better for her to have died sooner – or to never have lived at all.

It does not matter that the villagers honored her and praised her, that they remembered her as a compassionate person always willing to come to the aid of those who were sick. It does not matter that she herself thought that she was doing something good. What matters is the fact that she was, in fact, doing harm.

This is the measure of a life.

We can argue that prayer, unlike arsenic, is not poisonous. It does no harm. Yet, ‘having no effect’ is not the same as 'doing no harm.' It matters whether the person is left better or worse off than she would have otherwise been.

We can imagine the villagers being given sugar pills instead of arsenic, generating a genuine placebo effect and giving them the (false) sense that they are actually being cared for. Willing to give the sugar pills a try, they put off seeking real medical care, allowing diseases to develop longer than they would have if this nurse had not given them false beliefs about its effectiveness. A few faithful might even watch their children die of diseases that could have been easily treated. In this case, even without poisoning the villagers, our nurse still made them worse off than they would have otherwise been.

She still would have reason to weep if, after death, she discovers the truth of her actions.

The obituary for Jones also said that he:

always found a way to provide for churches and charities as well as individuals in need.

Does this provide a way saving his life from having been a life without meaning?

Well, it depends in part on what type of charities he gave his aid to and the type of help he gave to people in need.

If he had limited his help to prayer then we are still left with a case like that of the nurse giving away arsenic pills (or placebos, as the case may be). It is the case of a person who produced no real-world good and may have done real-world harm.

However, even if he contributed to genuine charities – charities that did real-world good, we have two questions that we need to ask about the nature of these contributions to measure the value of his life.

First, what motivated these donations to charities?

The relevant test here would involve determining the answer to the question, "Would Jones have contributed to these charities if he did not believe that a God existed?"

If Jones was truly interested in the welfare of others then he would have cared about their welfare even in the absence of a God. He would not have been willing to abandon them to their own fates, watching them suffer with indifference, simply because no God existed to pat him on the head for his good deeds or threaten him with hell for his evil deeds. A person who responds only to these types of rewards and punishes cares nothing about other people – he cares only about his own welfare, and his concern for others only comes as a pretense.

However, if he would have been touched by the suffering of others even in the belief that no God existed – if he had genuine concern for their welfare of a form that did not depend on heavenly rewards or punishments – then he would have spent his life producing real-world good for real-world people in service to real-world people, not in service to am imaginary deity.

However, if the belief that no God exists would have turned him away from charitable work, we may assume that he real motivation was to please God or to buy a ticket to heaven, but that he cared nothing about the people around him. A person must be utterly lacking in compassion to stand around and do nothing while others suffer in a universe where no God exists.

This person, who spent his life serving God or avoiding hell, but who actually cared nothing about the people around him, has, indeed, wasted his life. The good he has provided was, at best, a fortunate side-effect of his actions – but was not a part of his intention or among his goals. He is like the person who, tripping over a shovel as he walks down the sidewalk, happens to crash into a child and knock him out of the way of an oncoming train. He deserves no credit for his actions – no praise – precisely because he did not desire the good that came from his actions. Not if, in the absence of the shovel, he would have watched the child get run over by the train with complete indifference.

Second, what were the opportunity costs of this devotion to charity?

Let us assume that, through a person's charitable activities, he raises $50 for religious efforts that do no real-world good (e.g., missionaries, churches, putting up billboards that say, "Why do atheists hate America?"), funding legislation to ban abortion or constitutional amendments to exclude homosexual unions from the definition of marriage), and $50 to charities that do real-world good (feed the hungry, treat the sick, provide shelter for the homeless, conduct research into any of a number of diseases, clean up the environment).

However, in the absence of his efforts, people would have otherwise contributed $75 to the latter set of charities.

In this case, the true effect of this person's efforts is to drain worthwhile charities of $25 that they would have otherwise gotten. This is not a person to be praised for the $50 that he gave to worthwhile charities that do real-world good, or the $100 in charitable donations that he actually made possible. This is a person who made the world worse off than it would have otherwise been, by costing charities that do real-world good $25 that they would have otherwise had.

In this case, we are talking about a life that was actually spent preventing good from being done more than it was a life spent doing good.

Finally, let us look at a more favorable case – one in which charities that do real-world good would have normally received $25. However, because of Jones’ hard efforts they received $50 instead. We would still have to weigh this gain against contributions that do real-world harm.

Many of the examples that I gave above are not contributions to waste-of-effort but harmless activities. They are contributions to activities that do real-world harm. If he spent effort promoting prayer or the teaching of creationism in the nation's schools, blocking homosexual marriage, fighting to outlaw early term abortions, and supporting the destructive policies of President George Bush because of these beliefs, these harms must be weighed against any good that might have come from the effect is efforts may have had in getting more money to charities producing real-world benefits.

It is true that the obituary does not actually give us enough information to decide which category Jones actually belongs in. The most important part of his life might well have been in giving real-world care to his friends and family. In fact, I would be willing to bet good money that Jones genuinely cared for his friends and his family and even strangers in ways that he would have continued to care for them even if no God existed. He would have still sought after their welfare. He might not have been all that political, and his contribution to the evils of religion we have seen over the past eight years in particular might have been minimal.

If this is the case, his life was not at all wasted. If this is the case, then he took care of the people he cared about and did little harm to outweigh the direct good that came from his actions. We may even call him a good man.

Or he may have been like our nurse, handing out poison and preventing the people he thought he was helping from getting real-world help that would have mitigated their real-world problems.

We simply do not know.

Human Dignity

My recent postings on the selling of organs for transplant touched on the concept of human dignity. There are some who argue that a person who sells his organs (e.g., a kidney) for money is somehow sacrificing human dignity. It is somehow undignified for a person to be reduced to a state in which he must sell off body parts for cash. It makes him little more than a commodity – an 'organ market' rather than a full human being.

G-man commented:

I would venture to guess that people who trade their organs don't find the process to be a violation of human dignity.

I am not willing to grant that venture without more argument. It could very well be the case that those who sell their organs for money do find it a violation of human dignity. It may be the case that those who sell their organs simply find themselves in a position where there is something more important to them than preserving their dignity. Perhaps they have gambling debts to pay off, or they dream of going to college, or they have this plan to start a business that will make him and his family rich. So, he sacrifices his dignity for a greater good.

The place to start with respect to dignity is that it is a value-laden term. It is a term that has value written into its very meaning. It is no mere coincidence that something that results in a violation of dignity is bad – just as it is no mere coincidence that bachelors are unmarried. An evaluation is written directly into the meaning of a term. We cannot actually tell whether something is a violation of human dignity until we have a theory of value that we can use to evaluate that something. If our theory of value suggests that something is not bad, then it cannot be 'undignified'.

If it is true (as the desire utilitarian maintains) that desires are the only reasons for action that exist, and that nothing is good or bad except insofar as it is such as to fulfill or thwart desires, then nothing conforms to or violates human dignity except insofar as it is such as to fulfill or thwart desires. We must have a reason to dislike that which is undignified, and if no reason to dislike it (in the form of a desire) exists, then the claim that it violates human dignity is false.

Elements of human dignity are often taken to be elements that contain intrinsic value. There is something intrinsically wrong with treating people in certain ways. However, intrinsic values do not exist. No state of affairs contains within itself a 'reason for action' dictating that those who perceive it properly must approve or disapprove of it. The person claiming that things are intrinsically undignified is taking his own (probably learned) aversions and mistaking them for perceptions of something external.

G-Man states:

I think the argument has to do with perception. In other words, there may be no intrinsic human dignity, but the way people perceive others influences the way they treat them. So, it seems normal to "sell" your brain and muscles, and nobody perceives that as violating human dignity.

The issue here is one of cause and effect. If others should come to perceive you as merely a tool for their gratification, then they can be expected to treat you as a (mere) tool. The thing about tools is that we can destroy them in the pursuit of our ends, and their destruction does not matter much (except we lose the use of the tool at a later time). There are some tools (e.g., explosives) that are meant to be destroyed when we use them.

Certainly, we have little reason to promote the idea that people are mere tools. For one thing, it risks becoming victim to the idea that we and those we care about are mere tools. Instead, we have reason to preserve the sense that people are something more than tools and, as such, there are certain ways in which they are not to be used. I am not just an organ farm for your convenience. I am a person, and my status as a person requires that I be treated with a certain amount of dignity.

However, if the exchange of a kidney for money is purely voluntary, then this would defeat any claim that I am being treated merely as a tool if I should volunteer to sell my kidney for money. My ends – my goals – are being respected by the fact that I am being provided with the means to pursue my own goals – a wad of money. In fact, it is quite reasonably the case that a wad of money is more useful to me in the pursuit of my goals than a backup kidney. I can't think of any way that my second kidney can help me to retire more quickly so I can work full time on moral philosophy except insofar as it is something that I can use to get extra money.

But selling organs seems like it violates human dignity. And since it seems to do so, it actually does.

This is an important insight.

Take what G-Man wrote above about dignity and apply it to language. There is nothing in the word 'lion' that intrinsically means 'a member of the cat family that lives in prides'. However, because we have assigned this meaning to the word 'lion', it actually does mean that.

We assign meanings to acts in just the same way we assign meanings to words. A salute in the military means something. There is nothing in a salute that intrinsically indicates that the one saluting owes obedience to the one being saluted. This is a meaning that we have assigned to this act. Yet, because we have assigned this meaning, it actually does have the signification we assigned to it.

A culture may designate that it is an insult to fail to present a business associate at a meeting with a business card. Because the act (or, in this case, the non-act) of failing to provide another with a business card has been deemed insulting, it actually is insulting.

Similarly, if we assign to the act of selling an organ the meaning that, "I am something less than a human – a mere organ farm for use by others, then, the person who sells an organ, like the person who salutes a superior officer, is communicating something that we do not want people to be communicating. Effectively, the objection is, "You shouldn't say such things."

But meanings like this are arbitrarily assigned and can be just as arbitrarily unassigned. If it were to turn out that one of these arbitrarily assigned meanings interferes with life-saving activities, this alone is good enough reason to reconsider the arbitrarily assigned meaning we have given to that action. We simply need to decide, "It doesn't mean that at all."

In the case of a military salute, this would be easy. The military would simply hand down new rules. In the case of a cultural norm where no person or group has the authority to dictate meanings, it may take a lot of hard work in order to change public attitudes. Organizations devoted to making sure that people who need organs get the organs they need may need to invest some of their money in a PR campaign that compares the selling of an organ to, for example, the selling of a house or a few hours of one's labor.

We see these types of campaigns all the time, where groups try to take something that has been perceived as good or indifferent and promotes a public attitude of hostility. One example is the way that Mothers Against Drunk Driving changed the image of the drunk driver as the comic nuisance to the irresponsible deadly menace. Another is the way religious groups have promoted the image of atheists as being un-American by writing this idea into the national pledge and national motto.

Where people have a habit of taking their feelings as perceptions of intrinsic value, and where they have learned aversions to the thoughts of people selling organs, the best way to proceed might first require a campaign to change those feelings. Organizations interested in making sure that organs are available to those who need them may need to invest some money in a campaign along these lines.

The question to ask before starting this campaign, however, is, "What will be the effects of weakening this aversion generally?" Will it, in fact, promote the availability of organs to those who need them? Or will it lead to the sense that poor people exist merely for those who have money to use for their own convenience regardless of the cost?

Selling Transplant Organs Part II: Options

Yesterday, I started looking at the issue of buying and selling organs for transplant (e.g., kidneys). I looked at three considerations.

(1) The feeling of yuckiness at having a market in organs. However, we have to ask if the ‘yuckiness’ that people feel at the thought of a market in human organs is, perhaps, like the ‘yuckness’ people once felt (and some people still feel) towards interracial relationships. We have to ask whether this aversion to a market in organs is an aversion that people generally have many and strong reasons to promote, or whether it is an aversion that people have many and strong reasons to inhibit.

(2) Voluntary exchange among competent adults tends to fulfill the most and strongest desires of both participants. If it did not, then they would not engage in the trade. Realizing the desire-fulfillment consequences of trade we have reason to be averse to interfering in the voluntary exchanges of competent adults, including the exchange of cash for kidneys.

(3) However, markets, combined with large differences in income, create a situation where rich people can bid resources away from more highly valued uses (in terms of desire fulfillment) and into less highly valued uses. During a drought, unregulated markets allow rich people to bid water away from those who are dying of thirst to use in swimming pools, fountains, and watering their golf courses.

So, a market in organs such as kidneys would allow rich people to redistribute human organs away from the more highly valued uses (or, at least, equally valued uses) that poor people have for their kidney and towards the less highly valued uses (or, at best, equally valued uses) of the wealthy.

For example, if kidneys were bought and sold on a market, would a rich person with kidney failure be permitted to purchase two functioning kidneys? An unregulated market would allow this. To prohibit it would be to regulate the market.

Would wealthy people be permitted to purchase kidneys to keep them in storage just in case they might be needed at a later date – throwing them away once they have reached their expiration date? Allowing this would be an example of redistributing kidneys from poor people who have a more highly valued use for them, to rich people who values the kidney only as an insurance against possible future harm.

Assigning kidneys by lottery, rather than by willingness to pay, seems to respect the assumption that the poor people value their kidneys as much as rich people do, and that “willingness to pay” (or, more precisely, “ability to pay”) should not be used as a method for moving rich people to the front of the line (and poor people to the back).

However, rationing creates its own problems – it generates shortages.

How many hours would you work each week if the government prohibited people from paying workers? Let us say that the contribution of time to a company had to be completely voluntary, like the contribution of a kidney must be completely voluntary. I suspect that such a program would lead to an economic disaster. Nothing (or very little) would actually get done, and people would limit the work they did to that which would benefit themselves and their immediate family and friends.

We see this in the kidney market, where a prohibition on exchange leads to a severe shortage of kidneys, which has nearly 100,000 people in the United States alone suffering (and dying at the rate of 18 per day) for the want of a (market in) kidneys. It is not the case that, by allocating kidneys in the absence of price, the right and poor equally get to live. Rather, the current rationing system is one in which rich and poor equally get to suffer and (for some of them) die.

And let’s not kid ourselves. Even where the buying and selling of organs is prohibited, rich people have options that poor people do not have – from the luxury of being able to spend 30 hours per week on dialysis to the means to pay for it.

Our options are not limited to “completely unregulated market” or “outright prohibition on the selling of organs”. There is a wide range of options in between.

From a desire utilitarian perspective, there are moral facts. However, they are not always easy to discover. One of the things we may need to do to determine the moral facts is to allow a certain amount of experimentation. In this case, the experiments would involve allowing different states to try different methods for redistributing organs. One of the things that a desire utilitarian can all for is more data, which can then be used to help answer the question.

For example, allow a state to set up a system where the government pays money to the estate of a person who (1) signed up as an organ donor, (2) who died in a state in which her organs could be harvested, and (3) died of natural causes.

Such a law would almost certainly increase the number of organs available for transplant by increasing the number of people who sign up as organ donors. Taxpayers have many and strong reasons to support such a plan since it helps to ensure that an organ is available if the taxpayer (or somebody the taxpayer cares about) should ever need one.

People also have reason to support such a policy to the degree that they have reason to be concerned with the size of their estate and what can be done with the money. This is a gift that they can leave their spouse or children (or parents) in the case of an untimely death – like life insurance without the monthly premiums.

The plan would also side-step the problem of markets redistributing resources away from poor people who have a higher valued use for the product but who cannot afford to outbid the rich person. We may assume that, after death, an individual will have no further use for these organs – that the only options left to the person who died would be low-valued uses.

One major reason not to adopt this policy is a feeling of ‘yuckiness’ associated with the selling of organs. However, there are enough people who report not having this sensation that we have reason to conclude that this is a learned reaction. We can choose whether to promote or inhibit this feeling of yuckiness. Since the feeling is one that tends to thwart other desires (or so it seems) it is a feeling that we have more and stronger reason to inhibit than to nurture.

Some readers brought up some interesting ideas concerning the ‘human dignity’ argument that I would like to address. However, given space limitations, I would like to make that the focus of tomorrow’s post.

I would like to see some state legislature experiment with this option and see if it does not improve the quality (and even the quantity) of life for some of its citizens.

This is just one idea. It is a mistake to think of this issue to be one in which only two options are available - a completely unregulated market and a complete prohibition on exchanging organs for other things of value. When we look at the issue and find problems with a particular solution, it does not automatically follow that, "We have aproblem here. We must completely prohibit a market in transplant organs." Another option is usually available - to design the law in such a way so as to avoid the problem without blocking the availability of transplant organs to recipients.

The main point being that when we step into a realm of moral uncertainty, we have reason to collect data by allowing different states to experiment with different methods to determine which actually helps to promote the life, health, and well-being of its people.

Selling Organs for Transplant

I have recently gotten an urge to take an important moral issue where I really do not know what the right answer is and look at it from a desire utilitarian perspective. I want to look at a set of steps that desire utilitarianism suggests and to use it as a kind of a road map for looking at other issues.

The issue that I want to write about is that of selling organs such as kidneys.

I discussed this issue two years ago in a post called "Buying and Selling Organs" . There, I looked at a number of arguments against selling organs and dismissed each one rather quickly. The only argument that I gave in favor of organ selling is that it would save lives. Though that, to me, sounds like a particularly good argument.

Like I said, this time I want to look at the issue in more detail and tie the specific arguments directly into desire utilitarian theory.

The first and strongest argument that we will likely encounter against selling organs is that it feels yucky. The opponent simply thinks of the idea of a person being paid a sum of money to give up a perfectly good kidney – an offer that he then takes. This just feels wrong. Going on feelings alone, these people side with any politician who would oppose such a system.

In response to this feeling of wrongness, the opponent might drum up all sorts of rationalizations to give this feeling legitimacy. They might argue that it is "playing God" – though, in fact, God gets his morality directly from us. We are the ones who decide what God likes and dislikes and then assign our preferences to Him. God is a human invention, and so is His ethics.

Other catch phrases that are used is that violates human dignity to reduce a human body to a product to be bought and sold on the market place. But what is this 'dignity' and how is it violated by the buying and selling of organs? After all, I sell my brain to the highest bidder for 40 hours each day, as well as the use of my muscles. People also sell blood, eggs, and sperm. These do not seem to have harmed human dignity in any way.

Ultimately, these claims about 'playing God' and 'human dignity' are ultimately just different ways of saying, 'It feels yucky'. Only, we don't want to say 'It feels yucky' because this hardly seems like a good enough reason to bring people to an early death that could have been prevented. We need a better, nobler, grander idea so we pretend that our feelings are associated in some way with a divine entity or some mysterious entity called 'human dignity'.

Within desire utilitarianism, the fact that something 'feels yucky' is a legitimate concern. At the point of action, we all act so as to fulfill the most and strongest of our desires, given our beliefs. If those desires include a particularly strong aversion to the buying and selling of organs, then that is going to impact our behavior. It is just like the aversion that people have to, say, the feeling generated by a third degree burn. If a state of affairs that involves buying and selling organs causes so much discomfort, that alone is a good reason not to do it.

Yet, for a desire utilitarian, we have to go one step further. In addition to noting that we have an aversion to the buying and selling of organs, we have to ask (1) is this aversion malleable, and (2) if it is malleable then how should we mold it to make it compatible with the fulfillment of the most and the strongest of other desires?

Consider, for example, the aversion that some people have towards interracial relationships. They have a primary aversion to these relationship such that the mere thought of a white person and a black person having children. They, like the person who is averse to the buying and selling of organs, are likely to take their sentiment as the final word on the issue. They neglect the desire utilitarian question, "Okay, we know that we have these sentiments. Is it a good idea that we have these sentiments, or should we train the next generation to be free of these prejudices so that they can have longer, healthier, and happier lives than we allowed ourselves?"

Do we have reason to promote this aversion to the buying and selling of organs, or do we have more and stronger reason to inhibit this aversion?

The prima facie argument on the other side argues for inhibiting the aversion to buying and selling organs.

First, there is the fact that voluntary exchange between two individuals tends to fulfill the desires of both individuals. At least, it tends to fulfill the more and stronger desires given the beliefs of the agent.

Now, no agent does a perfect job of knowing his own interests. Agents are fallible. Still, for the sake of efficiency, we have many and strong reasons to establish institutions where each person's decisions are made by the most knowledgeable and least corruptible agent imaginable. Except in cases of young children and severely mentally handicapped, the most knowledgeable and least corruptible individual for advancing an agent’s interests (fulfilling his desires) is the agent himself.

If person A is put in charge of decisions affecting A's life, then A is going to make choices based on what best fulfills the most and strongest of A's desires, given A’s beliefs, at any given time. On the other hand, if person B is put in charge of decisions affecting A's life, then B is still going to perform those actions that tend to fulfill the most and strongest of B's desires. Hopefully, B has a desire to advance A's interests and enough knowledge of A to know what those interests are. Yet, even in the best of circumstances, B's desire to advance A's interests will necessarily be a subset of B's interests. B will still have other desires, and will still act so as to fulfill the most and strongest of B's desires given B's beliefs.

In a voluntary exchange – kidney for money – we may assume that both agents are fulfilling the most and strongest of their own desires by agreeing to the exchange. Interfering with the exchange thwarts the desires of both participants – leaving them in a situation that the most knowledgeable and least corruptible agent tells us will thwart many and strong desires of both agents. We also have a love of liberty telling us that this aversion to the buying and selling of organs is something that we ought to be inhibiting. This love of liberty that desire utilitarianism recommends shows itself in terms of an aversion to interfering with voluntary exchange. We should find the idea of people interfering with voluntary exchange (without special justification) to be objectionable in itself, regardless of its consequences.

However, at this point I would like to bring in a particular form of market failure that I have written about several times. Markets, when combined with wide differences in income, allow people with a lot of money to bid resources away from people with little money, even though the people with little money would use those resources to fulfill more and stronger desire.

My standard example of this is that of a rich person bidding up the price of bottled water after a disaster such as Katrina so she can give her dog a shampoo, or rich people bidding up the price of gasoline in order to fulfill their SUVs while poor people cannot afford to heat their house in the winter.

The application in this case is that rich people in this case would bid up the price of kidneys to where they can get a kidney whenever they want one, while poor people could not afford them.

It is not unreasonable to assume that, on average, the poor person values the rest of his life as much as the rich person. However, the poor person cannot pay as much to protect and preserve the rest of his life as the rich person. So, when the rich person bids a kidney away from a poor person, this is almost certainly an example in which the rich person's ability to pay more is in no way tied to the fact that his life has greater value.

As for those who keep their kidneys (who do not give them up for transplant) the same principle applies. The rich people get to keep both kidneys and turn down any money that might be offered for them (in a sense, very much like bidding up the price of a kidney), whereas the poor person cannot afford to give up that same amount of money as easily as the rich person. Even when he values his kidney as much (or more) than the rich person, the rich person still has the ability to 'bid' kidneys away from their higher valued uses.

It simply seems unfair that rich people (in virtue of their wealth) should be given the power to bid kidneys away from poor people for whom the kidney likely has an equal and may have a higher valued use. At least, not from a desire-utilitarian perspective. The system of buying and selling kidneys would not necessarily be one in which the most and strongest desires are fulfilled. It could very easily be one in which the fewer and weaker desires of those with money get fulfilled by bidding resources away from those who have more and stronger desires but less ability to pay.

This analysis is not done, and I am not yet ready to conclude that the buying and selling of organs is wrong. I have so far only looked at three arguments. The first is a 'gut feeling' response to the thought of selling organs which, like interracial marriage (for some) may well be a gut feeling that we are better off changing. Arguments for liberty and the benefits of voluntary trade for both participants argues for allowing organ sales. However, the capacity of the rich to bid resources away from the more highly valued uses to which the poor might put those same resources.

I want to continue to look at some of the other considerations that surround this issue tomorrow.

E2.0: PZ Myers: Should I call myself an atheist?

This is the 36th in a new series of weekend posts taken from the presentations at the Salk Institute’s "Beyond Belief: Enlightenment 2.0.". I have placed an index of essays in this series in an introductory post, Enlightenment 2.0: Introduction.

The last three presentations at Beyond Belief 2.0 had to do with whether people should call themselves atheists. It started with Sam Harris’ presentation where he discussed an earlier speech to the Atheist Alliance International, where he suggested doing away with that ‘A’ word. It continued through Jeff Hawins' presentation on selling atheism through atheist entrepreneurship – and the ‘atheist’ brand name simply carries too much negative baggage to be useful.

So, at the end of the conference, Beyond Belief 2.0 host Roger Bingham called upon Atheist blogger PZ Myers in the audience for some comments on what it is like being an open, uncloseted atheist.

On the off chance that a reader might not know Myers, he is the author of one of the more popular atheist blogs Pharyngula. In his (very conservative) home town he is known as the village atheists, but reports that he is not treated with any hostility. In fact, people complement him on his civility.

They think that I am one of the most courteous savages they ever met.

He went on to say that atheists should go ahead and label themselves as atheists.

I kinda reject the notion that we should not label ourselves as atheists. What we need to do is label ourselves as atheists and stand up in a civil manner in front of these people and have a conversation.

I pointedly reject this point of view.

I also reject the view that atheists should ‘change their name’ or treat the label of being an ‘atheist’ as something to be ashamed of – something that we should run from. I do not see this as a dilemma between abandoning the term ‘atheism’ or accepting the term under Myers’ terms. Rather, I support a third alternative, that I will get to later.

I have a question for Mr. Myers. If all we need to do is to stand up in a civil manner in front of these people and all of our problems will disappear, doesn’t this assume that for the past 150 years we have not been civil?

We have two options. Either atheists have been civil (or at least displaying the normal distribution of civility that we would find in the rest of the population), or atheists have for some reason spent the last 150 years being far less civil than non-atheists.

If atheists have displayed the normal range of civility over the past 150 years, yet people still have this negative view of atheist, then this suggests that the hostility towards atheists is not at all linked to our civility. If we display the normal human range of civility and others still hate us, then is it our obligation to be more civil than non-atheists just to be regarded as equal?

This is neither fair nor just.

The other result, of course, is that atheists have engaged in behavior that has been far worse, on average, than that of non-atheists and, as such, we have brought this hostility down upon ourselves. Yet, I want to see some evidence that this is the case. I want to see some proof that the negative view of atheists that has over half of the population refusing to vote for an atheist candidate is somehow the atheists’ fault.

In fact, Myers himself is expressing anti-atheist bigotry with these remarks. Myers himself is making judgments based on the false assumptions that atheists, overall, are a worse class of people compared to non-atheists, and if atheists would just improve their behavior and act like everybody else, we could be accepted in the community.

It doesn’t matter that Myers is an atheist himself. There is a great deal of evidence that shows how the victims of prejudice can adopt the attitudes of the bigots that dominate their society. In a racist community, the way in which the culture teaches white people to look down on blacks can also have the effect of causing black people to look down on (other) blacks. Cultural norms that see women incapable of holding positions of leadership can infect women to the degree that they, too, will only support a male leader.

And atheists, who see nothing wrong with atheism, can still harbor deep (and unconscious) sentiments that atheists tend to be people of low moral character and it is this low moral character that is responsible for their poor standing in the community.

Like I said, unless and until somebody provides me with hard evidence suggesting that atheists are of a lower moral character than non-atheists, and that hostility towards atheists are directly linked to this low moral character, I am going to assume – as all fair and just people should assume – that atheists are no different from non-atheists in these matters. I am going to follow the moral dictum of assuming that people are innocent unless proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.

Under this assumption, recommending that atheists can solve their image problem by becoming more civil is not only unfounded, it is a sign of bigotry. It is an even more pathetic form of bigotry when it is spoken by an atheist against other atheists.

I want to stress, I do not think that Myers intended to insult other atheists. What I am suggesting is that he has unconsciously adopted some anti-atheist bigotry that has worked its way into his subconscious and comes out (unintentionally) in the attitudes he adopts towards his fellow atheists. He has absorbed out of his community shades of the idea that atheists are responsible for their own poor social standing. He has adopted these attitudes without thinking about them – the way many of us adopt attitudes towards others.

We can imagine a member of the Jewish community in Germany in 1930s telling his fellow Jews, “What we need to do is label ourselves as atheists and stand up in a civil manner in front of these people and have a conversation. If we do this, then the Nazi menace will disappear.”

No, it will not.

Nor should we think that walking around with a scarlet ‘A’ on our clothes will end this bigotry. In Nazi Germany, the government required Jews to wear a yellow Star of David on their clothes. This had no effect on diminishing the anti-Semitism in Germany. Instead, the Nazis simply made their victims more visible targets. If America’s government were to require that atheists in America wear a scarlet A the way that German Jews were required to wear a yellow Star of David, this would seem to represent a major success for the ‘Out’ campaign that promotes this type of symbolism. Yet, in this comparison, we see that the symbol counts for nothing.

Nor can we abandon the name ‘Atheist’. Using the term (or not) is not even our choice.

Following the example above, we can imagine a Jew suggesting in 1930, “Perhaps we should abandon the term ‘Jew’. It has such negative connotations. Perhaps, in order to help us become more widely accepted in the German community, we should call ourselves something else – something like ‘Pre-Christians’ perhaps.

Do you really think that this would have done any good? The community targeting them would have continued to call them ‘Jews’ and would have continued to use them as a scapegoat for everything that was wrong with the community. If the community had decided to adopt the label ‘pre-Christians’ they would have done so only by sticking the same negative connotations on the new term that the old term carried.

Atheists do need to continue to use the term ‘atheist’. We need to identify ourselves as atheists and stand up and act in a civil manner. However, in addition to this, the one other thing that atheists must do if the rest is to have any effect is that atheists must get indignant over the insults and attitudes that people harbor towards atheists.

The anti-atheist bigot does not deserve our civility. The anti-atheist bigot deserves our condemnation and contempt. When the Christian writer says that there can be no morality without God and that without belief in an afterlife the atheist is at risk of raping, robbing, and murdering others with wild abandon, it is entirely inappropriate to give a civil response. The moral person does not answer, “I beg to differ with my most esteemed colleague on these matters. The evidence does not in fact support the conclusion that an atheist, who is not bound by religious morality, is at risk of performing these evils.”

The moral person says, “Mr. Smith, in declaring that his religion gives him special knowledge of and motivation to abide by moral truth, has just shown us that his religion instead has made him a hate-mongering bigot. He has just shown himself to be content to promote hatred and hostility towards others based on no evidence whatsoever, but based on the ‘faith’ that his religion alone glorifies the individual who condemns others who do not share his beliefs without any just cause to do so.”

When news anchors, bloggers, newspaper columnists, and politicians learn this lesson, then we may see a change in the attitudes towards atheists. History gives us more than enough examples of people who were, in all things, no less ‘human’ than their neighbor in civility and courtesy, still being subjected to the harshest bigotry and hatred. History gives us more than enough reason to scoff at the individual who says that all we need to do is to “stand up in a civil manner in front of these people and have a conversation.”

Welfare Goods and Desire Utilitarian Rights

In a comment made to yesterday's post "Quality vs. Quantity of Life", Steelman wrote:

It seems to me that "life" isn't an ultimate value (speaking everyday English here) so much as it's a basic value. A necessary value.

In the book, Harm to Others: The Moral Limits of the Criminal Law, Joel Feinberg called this type of value 'welfare value'. Welfare values are particularly important in desire utilitarian theory.

'Welfare values' are those things that are useful for almost anything else a person may desire as an end. They are, in a sense, nearly universal means. They include life (without which it is often quite difficult to fulfill one's desires). They also include health, true belief (or education), liberty, money, property, and help from others.

One of the standard objections against desire utilitarianism is that it is nearly impossible to determine what has value. According to this objection, there are simply too many things to consider to be able to draw a conclusion that something is actually good or bad.

This is a borrowed objection from act utilitarian theory. Act utilitarianism says that we are to perform the act that has the best consequences. Yet, who can determine all of the consequences of an act? A simple act that looks good from the surface – saving a child from a deadly disease – might have dire consequences. This child might grow up to be the next Hitler. So, according to act utilitarianism, the act of saving this child was the wrong thing to do – it was not the act that has the best consequences.

Desire utilitarianism is not concerned with actions except in a derived sense (the right at is the act that a person with good desires would perform). Desire utilitarianism is concerned with good desires – desires that tend to fulfill other desires.

Welfare goods identify a list of objects that are almost universally useful in fulfilling other desires. Desires to protect and preserve welfare values, then, would be desires that would tend to fulfill other desires. Desires to protect life, liberty would qualify.

In a desire utilitarian theory, a 'right to X’ exists where 'people generally have many and strong reason to promote a desire to provide people with X or, at least an aversion to depriving people of X'. 'Welfare goods' provide a good list of things to put in for 'X' in this concept of rights. Thus, we have a 'right' in this case to life, liberty, a minimal standard of living, an education, health care, and the respect of one’s neighbors.

'Rights' in this sense, are not absolute. There are a number of instances in which one right can come into conflict with another, or where a right might run up against the laws of nature. Events could come up where a good person might need to take the life of an innocent person. I have used an example in the past of a child making a purchase from a vending machine that will set off a nuclear weapon in a distant city. The 'right to life' says that the good person would have an aversion to killing the child. However, this aversion may reasonably be outweighed by the good person's desire to prevent the deaths of millions of people in a distant city.

In other circumstances, the good person's aversion to depriving people of liberty might well run up against the need to draft people into military to fight a particularly ruthless enemy, or draft them into service during an emergency. We have reason to promote an aversion to answering mere words with violence (freedom of speech), but we still have reason to condemn the person who would yell "fire" in a crowded theater and to threaten to punish such individuals.

It is also relevant in this case whether socialized medicine or free markets work better in providing people with food, education, and health care. If socialized medicine does not work – if it robs people of health care that they would have had in a free market system, then the 'right' to health care does not translate into a ‘right’ to government-provided health care, or welfare, or education. These consequences depend on the facts of the matter as to which system actually provides people with these welfare goods.

One of the implications of this is that much of the debate that people engage in when it comes to social policy actually makes sense. The debate as to whether markets or government-run systems best provide people with welfare goods is an important debate to have.

Desire utilitarianism disallows either side from claiming that, for example, government systems shall not be used because "They are just wrong." This is because nothing is 'just wrong' in this sense. Something is 'wrong' only in the sense that a person with good desires would not perform the action, and desires are evaluated on their tendency to fulfill other desires. 'Just wrong', in contrast, is an intrinsic-value claim. It is an appeal to an entity that does not exist. No moral argument grounded on a false premise (a premise that “just wrongness” is real and is found in a particular family of actions) is a sound argument.

Yet, it is relevant that a person just 'does not like' depriving others of their freedom of speech (for example). Of course, he needs to go a step further and argue that it is a good thing that people 'does not like' depriving others of their freedom of speech. This, he can do by arguing that an aversion to depriving others of freedom of speech will generally fulfill other desires, since restrictions on freedom of speech are typically abused by people who block the flow of information so that they can thwart the desires of others.

Quality vs Quantity of Life

A debate over the value of life that I participated in with a couple of posts is continuing in the comments section of Evanescent's posting Ultimate Value and Morality and db0's posting on A Division by Zer0, Yet More Hypocrisy from Objectivists.

In this debate over the ultimate value of life, an important distinction is getting blurred between the quantity vs. the quality of life.

If life is the ultimate value the it would seem to follow that the longer a life is (the more life a person has had), the more value has been acquired.

Lets take two people – identical twins, separated by birth when people who traffic in sex slaves kidnaps one of the twins shortly after birth. The kidnapped twin, whom we shall call Longella, is sold on the black market to a criminal organization that engages is child prostitution, and the child grows up being abused (while her education is neglected). She is discarded on the streets of some third-world country shortly after reaching puberty, where she continues to live as a prostitute (since this is the only thing she knows) – being arrested several times and repeatedly raped. When she is no longer appealing to potential customers, she lives a hand-to-mouth existence as a homeless person on the streets until she dies at the age of 59.

Longella’s twin went to Harvard business school, where she was nicknamed ‘Shorty’ by her friends. She went on to form her own company, which was later bought out by Microsoft at a sum that put $5.7 billion into her own pocket. With that money she decided to pursue space travel. She founded a new business that established a hotel in space. Later, in a fully privately financed space venture, she became the first person to set foot on the moon since the Apollo missions. Unfortunately, during her second trip to the moon, a tragic accident resulted in her death. She was 58.

Furthermore, Shorty cultivated her love of space travel from a realization that the development of space is the best insurance against human extinction. Whereas she first came to see space travel as a mere tool – a means to human survival – it became an ‘end in itself’ for her, something that she valued for its own sake.

Now, if life was the only thing that has value, then it would seem that Longella has realized more value than Shorty, because Longella had 59 years of life while Shorty died at the age of 58. If life is the only thing that has value, and Longella lived longer than Shorty, then Longella realized more value than Shorty. If we had the capacity to choose which life to live, and life itself is the sole ultimate value, we should choose Longella's life. We would be irrational to choose Shorty's life – the life that realized less of what has ultimate value.

This, of course, is a patently absurd conclusion. Somehow, the "life is the ultimate value" theorist needs to provide us with an account whereby the Shorty’s life is better than Longella’s life.

The way to do this, of course, is to change the definition of 'life'. It requires saying something like, "When I say that a being is alive, I mean more than that its heart is beating and its brain is functioning. I being is not alive in the sense that I am talking about unless the following is also true . . ." followed by an account of what is allegedly required for "life is the ultimate value" to be true.

This has two implications.

First, it requires abandoning one of the primary arguments used to try to prove that life is the ultimate value. This is the argument that, "Life is essential for value to exist; therefore, life is the ultimate value." This argument uses the term 'life' in its traditional English-speaking sense of being alive. When Shorty died, value for her ceased to exist. However, Longella continued to value for another year. Longella acquired more of that which is necessary for value to exist than Shorty did so, on this argument, Longella’s had more 'ultimate value' then Shorty.

Of course, we already had a reason to abandon this argument. It says that life is essential for value to exist. It also says that life is the ultimate value. So, the argument states that life is essential for life to exist. This is true. However, it is also true that my toaster is essential for my toaster to exist. If my toaster ceased to exist, then it would no longer be the case that my toaster exists. The advocate of 'life is the ultimate value' who uses this argument needs to show how 'life is necessary for life to exist' demonstrates that life is the ultimate value, but "my toaster is necessary for my toaster to exist" does not demonstrate that my toaster is the ultimate value.

Second, the strategy of changing the definition of 'life' leaves us with no account of what it is exactly that makes one life better than another. We are now being told that Shorty's life is better than Longella's life because Shorty's life contained more life than Longella's, even though Longella lived longer.

One important conclusion that I want to draw from this example is to deny that all human activity either does nor should direct itself towards maximizing the number of seconds that one is alive. In evaluating different options, it is quite reasonable to sacrifice "number of seconds alive" in one case in order to realize something else of value. We do it all the time, and a great deal of argument will be required to show that we should not to so.

What can 'life' possibly mean in a context that would allow us to conclude 58 > 59?

Until we are given a definition of 'life' in this context, we have not been given a theory of value. We have only changed the words being used to discuss value. In effect, the “life is the ultimate value” theorist has merely changed the spelling of the word 'value' to 'l-i-f-e' without telling us a thing about what it is.

All he does is tell us, "Of course life is the ultimate value. 'Life' means 'ultimate value' and anybody who denies that the ultimate value is the ultimate value is just an idiot unworthy of our time and attention.”

Which is about as meaningful as telling us, "Of course God exists. 'God' means 'the greatest thing that exists' and anybody who denies that the greatest thing that exists actually does exist is just an idiot worthy of our time and attention." This argument certainly proves that God (under this new definition) does exist. It tells us nothing about what God’s properties are. And it gives us absolutely no reason to believe that 'God' as originally described (as an entity that created the universe, knows everything, and cares about us) actually exists. Using this to assert that it proves the existence of 'God' in the traditional sense is simply invalid reasoning.

The same is true with an argument that says that 'life' means 'ultimate value'.

If 'life' in Objectivist-speak means the same thing as 'life' in English, we are lead to the absurd conclusion that the rational person would choose Longella's life over Shorty's life. So, 'life' in Objectivist speech much mean something different from what 'life' means in English. This means that, until the Objectivist has given us the English equivalent of whatever 'life' means in Objectivist-speak, he has not given us a theory of value. He might as well be telling us that 'woweiu' is the ultimate value. Unless and until he tells us the English equivalent of 'woweiu', he is not telling us anything at all.

'Life' as the term is understood in English is not 'the ultimate value'. This would imply that every decision we make should be evaluated according to its impact on the number of seconds we are alive. What should I have for breakfast this morning? Taste does not matter. Only 'effect on the number of seconds we are likely to live' matters. Who should I marry? Love does not matter, only 'who will contribute to my greater longevity' matters.

The Objectivist, of course, will tell us that, according to Ayn Rand, taste and love does matter. But this only goes to the conclusion that when objectivists talk about 'life' they are using Objectivist-speak and not English. They are using a term that looks like a common English word, and in fact they invite us to draw the conclusion that they are, in fact, using the common English word. Yet, this option – that 'life' in the English language sense is the only thing that matters, would then contradict their assertion that taste and love matter. The only way that 'taste and love matters' can be made compatible with the claim that 'life is the only thing that matters' is to be using 'life' in some non-traditional (and yet undefined) way.

The fact is, Ayn Rand contradicted herself. Attempting to make sense of her claims that 'life is the only thing that matters' and 'taste and love also matter' is like trying to make sense of the claim that 'Jesus, God, and the Holy Spirit are three distinct entities' and 'There is only one God'.

Rand herself said, "If your argument leads to a contradiction, then check your premises. At least one of them must be mistaken." And, indeed, one of her own premises is mistaken.

The proposition that 'life' (in the English language sense) is the only thing that matters’ is false. As the comparison between Longella and Shorty above suggests, we are willing to sacrifice life in order to obtain other goods. This only makes sense to the degree that there are 'other goods' that are more valuable than life.

The proposition that 'life' (in Objectivist-speak) is the only thing that matters is empty. It is like saying 'woweiu is the only thing that matters'. Unless and until the Objectivist has given us an English-language equivalent to 'life' in Objectivist-speak, or taken some other action to define the term, it is meaningless, and statements using the term are empty.