Sean Tevis

Running for Office: It's Like A Flamewar with a Forum Troll, but with an Eventual Winner. [h/t to Disgusted Beyond Belief]

It's the overreaction, stupid

One aspect of the cracker controversy that seems to have escaped some critics is the fundamental motivation of critics such as PZ Myers (and myself) and what specifically we're reacting to.

This controversy did not arise because atheists don't like religion.

This controversy did not arise because atheists think communion and transubstantiation are ridiculous.

Many of us (myself included) don't like religion, and many of us think communion and transubstantiation are ridiculous. But that's not what this whole issue is about.

Nobody ever said, "I can't stand Catholics because they have a dumb religion, let's go desecrate their wafers." Nobody ever said, "Let's show the world how ridiculous Catholic communion is."

This controversy arose because of Catholics' insane overreaction to what was at worst a harmless, albeit juvenile, prank and at best nothing more than simple curiosity.

This overreaction is many orders of magnitude more serious than even the most uncharitable interpretation of the original offense. Regardless of how one feels about desecrating communion wafers, civilized, rational human beings cannot permit such an overreaction to an action that caused no actual harm to anyone. Even worse, many many Catholics — including official and prestigious advocates — are defending the overreaction by virtue of the fervency and the religious character of their beliefs. Again, civilized, rational human beings cannot allow this sort of justification to stand.

If the original prank were not about specifically religious belief, those overreacting would be universally condemned. If someone were receiving death threats and feared physical violence because he "desecrated" an apple pie, there would be no controversy at all. Everyone would consider those issuing the death threats to be complete lunatics. It's retarded to permit Catholics an exception to this standard because their beliefs are irrational and their fervency extreme.

We can and should apply normal legal consequences to those who break the law by harming, assaulting and threatening people. But more is required.

We cannot apply legal punishment (much as we might like to) to stupidity and assholiness, so the best way to counter the Catholics' ridiculous overreaction is with widespread public ridicule and humiliation. Any activity, any response that harms no one, threatens no one with actual harm, but highlights the stupidity of making death threats and threats of violence over "harm" to a cracker is not only permissible, but almost obligatory to anyone with an interest in maintaining standards of rational civility.

On Speciesism

Stephen Law writes about Speciesism, Potential and Normality, investigating the ethics of eating animals. Unfortunately, he takes an ass-backward approach to the analysis, which merely confuses, rather than clarifies the issue.

The fundamental issue is the attempt "to justify our discriminating between pigs on the one hand and equally dim humans on the other by appealing to the notions of potential and normality."

The argument that some elaborate justification is even necessary is fallacious: if we have the right to eat pigs because they are unintelligent, then we have the right to eat equally unintelligent human beings. However, this argument works only if we add "only" to the justification: if we have the right to eat pigs only because they are unintelligent, then we have the right to eat equally unintelligent human beings. From a purely logical standpoint, we can account for our moral intuitions with a complex principle: we have the right to eat pigs because they are unintelligent and not human beings.

Obviously, this complex justification relies on raw speciesism: We should not eat members of our own species just because they are members of our own species. Law is not at all stupid, and he attempts to undermine this complex justification by comparing speciesism to racism and sexism. The justification is, if race and sex are inadequate basis for ethical discrimination, then speciesism requires a separate, principled justification. In Law's own words,

The challenge facing those of us who believe it is morally acceptable to kill and eat, experiment upon, etc. other species but not our own is, in effect, to point out the difference between us and them that morally justifies this marked difference in treatment. Unless we can point up some such difference, it seems that we, too, are guilty of a form of bigotry: the form for which Richard Ryder coined the term speciesism.

But why should we require any deep principled justification? We can certainly point out that pigs and humans are indeed different species. Law therefore endorses Ryder's assertion that we should point out a difference other than species.

Ryder's argument is also subject to a subtle form of infinite regress. Suppose we could find some difference X between pigs and humans. It would then be just as arbitrary to make an ethical discrimination on the basis of X as it would be to make an ethical discrimination on the basis of species. A clever philosopher would just say that The challenge facing those of us who believe it is morally acceptable to kill and eat, experiment upon, etc. beings with X but not beings without X is, in effect, to point out the difference between beings with X and beings without X that morally justifies this marked difference in treatment. Unless we can point up some such difference, it seems that we, too, are guilty of a form of bigotry: the form for which I might coin the term Xism.

Furthermore, there are substantive differences between racism and sexism on the one hand, and speciesism on the other. First, racism and sexism have typically been used to deny ordinary rights, whereas speciesism in this context is used to assert extra rights, only for a small minority of human beings without ordinary human intelligence. Granting extra privilege on non-principled grounds is a much easier sell than denying ordinary rights. I have an ethical obligation to provide medical treatment to my pet cat, but no corresponding obligation to provide the same treatment to every stray cat, even though there is no principled difference between my pet cat and the neighborhood strays. I assume the obligation -- and when I coughed up $1,200 to treat my cat, you can be sure the concept of ethical obligation was strong in my mind -- just because I happen to care more about one particular cat than another.

Secondly, there are sapient, intelligent beings who can and do object to being denied their own ordinary rights on the basis of race and sex. However, all beings capable of objecting to speciesism are those privileged by the principle; the beings denied this privilege, i.e. animals, are not capable of objecting. On the ethical basis of conflict resolution, there is no conflict whatsoever between human beings and those actually denied some privileges.

The attempt is futile and misguided to reduce ethical obligations to absolute universal principles, especially simple principles without conjunctions.

On a purely evidentiary basis, all we can do is attempt to explain human moral intuitions. Such an endeavor is worthwhile, but it's not philosophy: It's purely descriptive individual and social psychology.

On a deductivist basis, we're stuck with deductivism's foundational problems: how do we justify our axioms? "Sapientism" -- the idea that it's permissible to eat non-sapient beings and impermissible to eat sapient beings -- is just as arbitrary and unjustified as speciesism. We might just as well say that without some principled justification for sapientism, it is just as bigoted as speciesism -- or even racism and sexism. And even if we did fine some principled justification for sapientism, we could attack that principle on the same grounds.

Satire is impossible

Yes, it's satire... or at least an attempt at satire. I'm not offended or outraged.

There is a substantial fraction of the American people who believe everything depicted in this picture is literally, factually true. And there is a substantial fraction of the commercial media (cough Faux News) who would (and will) actually say everything depicted in that picture as the literal, factual truth.

Even I, a reasonably intelligent person with a good sense of humor had to do a double-take — thinking "what the fuck" for a moment — before I realized it was an attempt at satire.

The image tries for satire, but fails; it falls short. That's to be expected. Our society has become so ridiculous, so absurd, that it's impossible for mere human imagination to keep up with reality, much less exaggerate it sufficiently for successful satire.

I'm not offended or outraged, but I am depressed and pessimistic.

Smith and Rall on Obama and the Democrats

Fighting Words

Ted Rall, More Ted Rall; Still more Ted Rall

Should he do it?

PZ Myers wants to desecrate a communion wafer. Joe Foley asks, "Should he do it??" [h/t to Hemant Mehta]

Wrong question.

Myers has no obligations to anyone else in this matter. Regardless of the effects of his actions, Myers need not please anyone but himself. Both "Yes, he should," and, "No he shouldn't," are inappropriate answers. It's nobody's business but his own — none of Joe Foley's business, or Hemant Mehta's business, or your business or my business — what Myers does with a cracker.

It is, indeed, just a frackin' cracker. It is not the body of Christ. You can say all the magic words you please but the cracker will remain a cracker, nothing more. To even call a cracker "the body of Christ" is to make obeisance to an irrational superstition, an amazingly retarded superstition at that.

Unless we want to completely overhaul all our moral intuitions, crackers — as well as biscuits, cookies, brownies; indeed baked goods of any variety — do not have any moral status, no matter how anyone feels about the cracker, or what magic words were said in its vicinity. It is just as stupid to even bring up the subject of what Myers should or should not do with his cracker as it is to bring up the subject of whether I should or should not put butter on my beans.

Joe Foley is, of course, free to voice his personal opinion about Myers actions. And I am, of course, free to voice my personal opinion of Foley's opinion. And — in my opinion, of course — Foley's opinion is both sanctimonious and stupid.

Foley states,

[Myers proposed desecration] would bring a lot of attention to one religion's rather extreme reverence for a small foodlike object, but only at the direct expense of the adherents' emotional distress.

First, Foley frames the issue... uncharitably. Myers intention is not to bring attention to Catholics' ridiculous reverence for crackers; his obvious motivation is to bring attention to Catholics' hysterical overreaction to what is at the very worst Webster Cook's somewhat juvenile prank.

Second, emotional distress is not by itself harm or expense. Gay sex causes just as much (or more) emotional distress to Catholics. That an action causes someone else emotional distress is not a sufficient reason to condemn the action.

Others' distress is not just outweighed by the positive value of gay sex, but completely, totally, utterly irrelevant. My proper response to, "I feel bad when he does that," is, "So what?" Your emotional health is fundamentally your problem, not mine.

(Causing emotional distress is a harm only when there's a preexisting, mutually acknowledged obligation to maintain others' emotional health, such as when people are forced together with no reasonable opportunity to ignore each other.)

Foley belabors the point for a few more sentences:

But to at least one of the parties involved, dishonoring the stolen Eucharist would be more than just an act of free speech: they believe, as they're free to do, that the cracker is a transubstantiation of their Savior's actual Body, and Myers would be corporally abusing It/Him. [Who cares?] Eating it is one of the most important parts of their religion, perhaps the most important – "excommunication" literally refers to being denied the Holy Communion. Most importantly, the only reason this proposal is interesting is because it would make a lot of people very upset. But it's beyond just "offense;" the members of the Florida church prayed for their own pardon because they were responsible for losing the anointed wafer. [So what?] As far as they're concerned, he'd be causing them tangible spiritual harm ["spiritual harm" is an oxymoron], and as far as he's concerned, that's precisely why it's exciting.

No, Joe, another reason Myers proposal is interesting and exciting is that it highlights the complete stupidity of getting all worked up over a cracker.

Under meta-ethical subjective relativism, emotional distress is a necessary condition for finding some action or state of affairs unethical. In this sense, no one will consider an action unethical when it causes no one any emotional distress.

But emotional distress is not a sufficient condition, especially regarding socially constructed ethics. To socially construct an ethical position, it's necessary the action cause empathic distress, i.e. relate the distress the sufferer feels with how you would feel under similar circumstances. And there's simply no way an intelligent, rational human being can empathically relate to the distress about the "desecration" of a cracker. It's completely ridiculous.

Foley asks, "What do you think?"

I think you're a sanctimonious doofus, Joe.

Carnival of the Godless #95

The 95th Carnival of the Godless is up at The Atheist Blogger.

Relativism and truth

I'm continuing my commentary on Stephen Law's essay, Religion and philosophy in schools.

The meat of this essay concerns "relativism". Law notes that a popular objection to the teaching of critical thinking is that critical thinking promotes "relativism". Law quotes several sources who condemn relativism. Melanie Phillips complains specifically about cultural relativism; Marianne Talbot and Allan Bloom condemn truth relativism; Pope Benedict condemns a notion of relativism that entails that one's own ego and desires are the highest goal. The Ministry of Defense complains that moral relativism causes rigid belief systems.

Law is not as vigorous as I would like about directly confronting the vagueness, imprecision and outright contradiction in the critics' condemnation of relativism.

As I've written before, just using the word "relativism" without more specific qualification is vacuous. Everything is relative in some sense. Even a statement of how the universe is under the most rigid notions of metaphysical realism is relative: the truth of the statement is relative to how the world actually is.

Law states blithely that

Some truths are indeed relative. Consider wichitti grubs – those huge larvae eaten live by some aboriginal Australians. Most Westerners find them revolting (certainly, the model Jordan did when she was recently required to eat one on I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here). But at least some native Australians consider them delicious.

So what is the truth about wichitti grubs? Are they delicious, or aren’t they? The truth, it seems, is that, unlike the truth about whether wichitti grubs are carbon-based life forms or whether they are found in Australia, there is no objective, mind-independent truth. The truth about the deliciousness of wichitti grubs is relative. For Jordan, that wichitti grubs are delicious is false. For others, it’s true. When it comes to deliciousness, what’s true and false ultimately boils down to subjective opinion or taste.

I don't think Law is sufficiently precise here. I think it's misleading and inaccurate to say, "The truth about the deliciousness of wichitti grubs is relative." It's more precise to say that there is no truth at all about the deliciousness of wichitti grubs; deliciousness is not a property that wichitti grubs can have or lack. Deliciousness describes a relation between wichitti grubs and individual human beings. Deliciousness is relative, not truth.

The statement, "Jordan finds wichitti grubs revolting," is mind-dependent on one level (it's a statement that depends in part on the specific characteristics of Jordan's mind), but it is mind-independent at the truth level: It's true, for everyone, everywhere. If someone believes that Jordan find wichitti grubs delicious, that person is definitely mistaken.

It's often the case that ordinary people make imprecise statements in colloquial, idiomatic speech. If I say, "Wichitti grubs are revolting," everybody knows that I'm expressing my relation to wichitti grubs; I'm not talking about a property of wichitti grubs that is independent of my mind. Likewise, one can interpret Law's statement charitably as, "Some truths describe relations, not properties," in precisely the same sense that truths about the velocity of an object always express a relation to some specific frame of reference. But I object to imprecise, idiomatic usage in formal expository writing such as Law's essay. The reader should not have to employ any charity at all to discover Law's central point.

The claim of "moral relativism", more specifically meta-ethical subjective relativism, is that to be even truth-apt, a moral statement must implicitly or explicitly state a relationship between one or more individuals and some action or other state of affairs. A statement expressing a moral judgment about a state of affairs without relating that state of affairs to some individual(s) is not even false.

Given this framework, it's easy to distinguish between Law's two examples of relativism:

The relativist about morality insists that the truth of moral claims is similarly relative. There’s no objective truth about whether female circumcision, stealing from supermarkets, or even killing an innocent human being, is morally wrong. Rightness and wrongness ultimately also boil down to subjective preference or taste. What’s true for one person or culture may be false for another.

The relativist about religious truth similarly insists that the truth about whether or not Jesus is God is relative. That Jesus is God is true-for-Christians but false-for Muslims. The “truth” about religion is simply whatever the faithful take it to be.

In the first case, it's imprecise to say, "What’s true for one person or culture may be false for another." It would be more precise to say that true statements about morality discuss individuals' opinions and preferences about female circumcision, stealing from supermarkets, or even killing an innocent human being; true moral statements express relations.

In the second case, however, it's simply impossible, even bending over backwards with the utmost charity, to interpret the claim "Jesus is God" (or, more importantly, "The Bible expresses God's moral commandments") as a statement of a relation without completely changing the meaning of the statement.

Consider two statements about John, an orthodox Christian:

S1: John believes that wichitti grubs are disgusting

S2: John believes that Jesus is God

Both statements as a whole -- at the level of describing John's beliefs -- are unobjectionably true. John really does believe that wichitti grubs are disgusting, and John really does believe that Jesus is God.

But both statements contain an embedded predicate:

S1: John believes that wichitti grubs are disgusting

S2: John believes that Jesus is God

In the first case, the embedded predicate, "wichitti grubs are disgusting" is neither true nor false, it is not truth-apt. In the second case, however, the embedded predicate, "Jesus is God" is truth-apt. Jesus either is or is not God. (He's not. Jesus is a fictional character in a book, a character who might or might not be based on one or more real-life people.)

In the first case, it is not possible for John to be mistaken, since the embedded predicate is not truth-apt. In the second case, however, because the embedded predicate is truth-apt, it is possible for John to be mistaken (and indeed he is).

When discussing "relativism" in a social, moral and ethical sense, I think the payoff of speaking very accurately and literally about precisely what we mean and what we mean to defend is very important, and strengthens the argument. It is not truth that is relative, it is that some statements -- notably moral statements -- can be truthful only to the extent that they express or rely on relations.

Reasons and causes of belief

Steven Law has an excellent (and long) post on Religion and philosophy in schools. He mentions a few topics that I'm moved to comment on.

Law gives a good account of the difference between reasons and causes for belief.

People’s beliefs can be shaped in two very different ways, as illustrated by the two different ways we might answer the question “Why does Jane believe what she does?”
First, we might offer Jane’s reasons and justifications – the grounds of her belief. Why does Jane believe our CO2 gas emissions are causing global warming? Well, she has seen the figures on how much CO2 we are putting into the atmosphere, and she has seen the graphs based on Antarctic ice cores showing how global temperatures have closely tracked CO2 levels over the last 600,000 years. So, concludes Jane on the basis of this evidence, the rising temperatures are very probably a result of our CO2 emissions. ...

So we can explain beliefs by giving people’s reasons. But this is not the only way in which beliefs can be explained. Suppose John believes he is a teapot. Why? Because John attended a hypnotist’s stage-show last night. John was pulled out of the audience and hypnotized into believing he is a teapot. The hypnotist forgot to un-hypnotize him, and so John is still stuck with that belief. ...

So we can explain beliefs by giving a person’s reasons, grounds and justifications, and we can explain beliefs by giving purely causal explanations (I say purely causal, as reasons can be causes too [see for example Davidson, 1963]).
Purely causal explanations range from, say, being hypnotized or brainwashed to caving in to peer pressure or wishful thinking. These mechanisms may even include, say, being genetically predisposed to having certain sorts of belief (it has been suggested by Daniel Dennett (2006) and others that we are, for example, genetically predisposed to religious belief).

As good as Law's explanation is, I think it can be improved upon.

We can make a rigorous distinction between reasons and "purely causal" underpinnings of belief. I wrote earlier on consensus, truth and reality, and I can expand on this idea. We can create a causal story of belief as well as a logical story. A causal story says that some truth q entails (directly or indirectly) that some person or people believe that p. A logical story says that some truth q entails that p. When the causal story and the logical story coincide, we can say that the belief in p is justified, and q is a reason to believe that p. When they do not coincide, when q entails that someone believes that p but q does not entail that p, then q is a purely causal underpinning for p.

For example, that a tree actually exists in my front yard is the basis for a causal explanation for my belief that a tree actually exists in my front yard. The causal story is that because the tree exists, it reflects light, some of which causes changes in my retina, which sends nerve impulses to my brain, etc. which causes me to believe that a tree exists in my front yard. It is also the case that any proposition entails itself, so that a tree exists entails that a tree exists, so the existence of the tree is both the reason and the cause of my belief.

Just matching some causal account to a logical account does not, however, get us out of the woods. There are always an infinite number of potential causal accounts. Since we directly experience only the tail end of these causal accounts, we cannot directly verify which causal account is correct. Our causal accounts always contain a lot of physics, some of which may be opaque. We do not know, for example, precisely how the changes in my retina physically causes my belief that I'm seeing a tree.

We might also say that Jesus rose from the dead caused some people's belief that Jesus rose from the dead (i.e. people saw him do so, wrote about the experience, etc.). The causal account matches the logical account, so that Jesus actually did rise from the dead is a reason to believe he did so.

We have a method for distinguishing between competing causal accounts: We can evaluate and compare different accounts on simplicity, i.e. Occam's razor. We can choose the simplest causal account for our beliefs as the best causal explanation, and then match the logical explanation to the simplest causal explanation.

That Jesus actually rose from the dead is not the simplest causal explanation for our beliefs. That it would have been physically possible for him to have done so conflicts with an enormous quantity of experiences that people generally stay dead when they die. These inconsistencies can be "fixed up", but only at the cost of introducing an equally enormous quantity of additional premises. At worst we have to assume that the regularity and consistency of our experiences is not caused by the regularity and consistency of the universe, that the consistency of our experiences is an illusion. This may be true, but when we have a perfectly good explanation that does not conflict with our day-to-day observations; an explanation that with many fewer assumptions gives us a rock-solid causal explanation for our experiences, the much more complicated causal account is easily dismissed.

Intense Debates Comments

On the advice of db0 (I agree that Blogger comments are kind of sucky), I've installed Intense Debates comments. Let me know what y'all think. There may be some problems as I work out any unexpected bugs.

The new system is enabled only on posts with no preexisting comments. Posts with existing comments will still use the Blogger system.