On punishment

IOZ makes a profound point about punishment:

I propose to you that the desire to see another human being punished, even a person who has done wrong, a category to which Bradley Manning emphatically doesn't belong anyway, is the most despicable of all human desires. Even if one admits to the necessity of punishment, a necessity that I find categorically problematic to begin with, then the only decent attitude is regret. To see punishment as an affirmative good is to be on the side of the barbarians. To turn your attention to a man who is not only decent and good, but who is innocent of wrongdoing, and to conclude that because he may have violated some bureaucratic doctrine in place for the sole purpose of obscuring and obfuscating the state's criminality, venality, and violence, he must therefore be tortured until he is insane, is psychopathic.

I have to say I agree completely. All I can add is that I don't believe the necessity of punishment is "categorically problematic"; I believe that punishment per se is never necessary nor desirable at any level. It is categorically unethical to ever intend for any reason to inflict nonconsensual pain, suffering or harm to even a sentient (much less sapient, self-aware) being for its own sake.

And, by the way, you should all be reading Who is IOZ?. He's the only self-described anarchist I've ever read who is not only not completely stupid, but considerably intelligent and nuanced. And he can really fucking cook.

Slippery slopes

I’ve been participating in a comment thread at kafirgirl’s blog.* In it, commenter Nandu states that, “[B]eliefs span across a spectrum-once we start dismissing beliefs not held by us as “wrong”, we start sliding down the slippery slope of fundamentalism.” He’s half-right, i.e. wrong.

*If you read her blog on Friday, it’s imperative you swallow your coffee first.

Of course we shouldn’t judge a belief as wrong just because it differs from our own.* On the other hand, we obviously judge as wrong only beliefs we don’t actually hold. To refuse to judge a belief just because it differs from our own is to refuse to judge any belief at all, ever.

*I think many liberals mean this when they condemn “intolerance”, but the massive confusion — aided and abetted by the bullshit postmodernists — obscures the idiomatic meaning.

In the same sense, we shouldn’t judge anything as bad — a person, an action, etc. — just because it’s different, or we’re unfamiliar with it. But equally everything we judge as bad will be different in some sense.

If you judge anything you risk judging wrongly. If you speak the truth, you risk being mistaken. If you act, you risk acting wrongly. If you walk, you might fall down. That’s life. To avoid this “slippery slope” we must believe nothing, say nothing, do nothing, go nowhere. Only slaves and corpses can avoid this “slippery slope”.

We can’t avoid making judgments, about beliefs, about the truth, about right and wrong. But we can talk about how we judge. Reason, sensibility and logic itself are the only firm footing human beings have on the slippery slope of life itself, the slippery slope we cannot escape except by self-slavery and death.

When you make any judgment based on false facts about the world, you’re making a mistake. It’s a true slippery slope because you can often get a good answer for the wrong reason. If you believe that the Earth goes around the sun because your Pastor or your scripture says so, you have a true belief for the wrong reason. If you believe that you shouldn’t randomly kill people because God will send you to hell, you have a good belief — i.e. a belief you and I both approve of — for the wrong reason.

It’s because of this slippery slope that religious moderates are just as dangerous — if not more dangerous — as religious extremists and fundamentalists. Moderates justify good beliefs for the wrong reasons, and then they justify their reasons because they produce some good beliefs. But once you justify one belief by a falsehood, you accept that you can justify other beliefs by that falsehood. If you can justify not killing because God demands it, you can just as easily* justify killing because God demands it.

*More easily: the Abrahamic scriptures are full of exhortations to slaughter everyone in sight.

Indeed only the rational, secular humanists keep the religious moderates from sliding all the way down to the abhorrent behavior of the extremists. Were it not for our morality, rationally and evidentially justified*, the religious moderates would have no basis whatsoever for countering the fundamentalists. Their entire position consists of calling secular, humanistic morality the standard and then reading that standard into their scriptures.

*Justified on the foundation of subjective facts about what human beings consider to be harmful and helpful.

By reading the rational standard back into their scriptures, moderates step off the only firm foundation we have, held up only by the charity of the rational, secular humanists. And they depend on that charity while simultaneously spitting in our faces, begging us to let go of the rope. They accuse us of being “unspiritual” when the only thing we care about is the triumph of the human spirit. They accuse us of being intolerant because we refuse to tolerate human suffering, misery and death. The accuse us out of one side of their mouths of being “extremists” because we say that truth and falsity is real, not just a matter of opinion; they accuse us out of the other side of being relativists because truth and falsity is human, not divine.

The temptation to let go of the rope is strong. Why fight for humanistic values? Why fight for rationality? The mass of people don’t want it. They want to be exploited, oppressed and abused; they’d rather live in lies, misery and guilt at the center of the universe than live in happiness and comfort in an obscure, meaningless corner of the universe.

But we can’t let go, because we’re all in this together. We cannot step step away, not to an island or a secluded Colorado valley, not to space, not to the farthest galaxy. We live and die together. So we fight on.

Humanism and the Hijab

In response to The Apostate's mighty rant, a muse u offers her personal experiences regarding the hijab:

my assumptions and western conditioning were challenged when I lived in a moderate Muslim country for several months.

I had the opportunity to experience cover as a westerner passing for local on a temporary basis. ...

When I returned to the states, NYC first, I missed the cover. I missed the freedom of not being hit on constantly, not having to think about who i was turning on. ... Now, in my western way, I fend off such advances with 30lbs of fat added to my frame.

I’m not defending Veils or Hijab, nor am I pretending we are as free as many may think we are here. I simply felt the desire to share a glimpse of an experience I had that challenged my assumptions.

Very central to this experience is that it was fundamentally voluntary. Even though it was taken to conform to a culture, the commenter was visiting voluntarily and could (and did) leave whenever she pleased without harm or loss.

In most Islamic cultures, the hijab is coerced, not just by social pressure, but also by legal and extra-legal violence. Conformance to an act enforced by violence cannot be in any sense "liberating". At the very best, such conformance is a tolerable submission, the sacrifice of a smaller value for a larger. (For example, by conforming to violently enforced laws against stealing, I sacrifice the lesser value of being able to arbitrarily take property for the larger value of protecting my lawfully acquired property. It is still the case that not stealing cannot be actually "liberating"; it is still a sacrifice, albeit tolerable.)

There's no evidence, no good argument, that women in Islamic culture acquire any larger value by their act of submission in donning the hijab. Actual sexual exploitation is prevalent in Islamic culture; it merely takes different forms than in the West. Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Theo Van Gogh's film Submission dramatizes the submission of women's sexuality in toto in Islamic culture. It is clear that the stated instrumental value of the hijab — to protect women from sexual exploitation — is a hypocritical lie. It actually facilitates male sexual exploitation; we must conclude it exists in Islamic culture entirely to disempower and subordinate women, not only sexually but socially and individually.

That the commenter personally found it liberating and instrumental in avoiding sexual exploitation is due to the entirely different semiotics of the act in Western culture.

There is a deep paradox in social constructs such as the hijab. On the one hand, it seems intuitive that ideally everyone should be permitted to fully express his or her sexuality*; ideally one should not have to take any individual measures at all, much less measures that undermine one's own sexuality, to fend off unwanted advances or otherwise avoid exploitation. These measures should, in the ideal case, be entirely the responsibility of the legal system, not the individual.

*subject, of course, to the more general ethical constraints of consent and reciprocity. All further ethical assertions include this proviso.

On the other hand, people have the feelings they have — good, bad and indifferent — about sexuality; these feelings are just as much facts about a person's nature as any of their other genetically, socially or idiosyncratically constructed feelings.

Furthermore, there are a lot of people who behave in oppressive and exploitative ways, and it would be nonsense to demand for any reason that someone not protect herself against such behavior in whatever way she sees fit.

No one can fault an individual for trying to adapt and behave so as to maximize her own happiness and minimize her suffering, no matter how she happen to be, no matter how she constructs happiness and suffering. On the other hand, any time an individual appears to diminish himself to negotiate society, any person with a broader vision of human happiness than the purely individual must be concerned.

So, on the one hand, I don't fault at all any individual woman who wears the hijab, nor do I fault any individual woman for putting on 30 lbs. of unwanted fat to avoid unwanted attention. On the other hand, I definitely fault the social and cultural constructs that push women into making these choices which, to my mind, make them choose between how to diminish themselves and take away the choices which would augment themselves.

... to segue to more abstract theoretics...

It is entirely possible to have an entirely different judgment of an act at the individual level and at the social and cultural level. I have to presume that every individual's choices are taken to maximize her own happiness and minimize her own suffering; I can judge an individual's actions only on the direct and foreseeable effect of those actions on other people. But on a social level, I have to judge socially constructed actions on their effects on an idealized individual, on my opinion about how a person should be.

Without this standard, I cannot judge at all; I cannot make any comparisons at all. I cannot judge Nazi Germany, I cannot judge Stalinist Russia, I cannot judge the dystopian society of 1984. I cannot even judge the elements in my own society that lead to the commenter's own suffering: I can no more condemn the men who make unwanted advances than I can condemn her response. Without appeal to the ideal individual, I cannot say anything but observe that each person "legitimately" tries to maximize his own happiness and minimize his own suffering. I cannot even apply the provisos of consent and reciprocity.

All ethical judgments must reference some conception of the ideal individual, and that idealization is a matter of individual opinion, not truth. There is no other basis on which one can judge. All other bases reduce to this opinion. There is only more or less honesty in admitting and being explicit about this basis.

The difference between modernism and "good" (or coherent) postmodernism is the postmodernist admission that the basis of ethical judgment is individual. Good postmodernism differs from bullshit postmodernism in that the good postmodernist has the "existential courage" to actually make judgments on the authority of her opinion; the bullshit postmodernist just wraps his judgments in a flavor of bullshit different from modernism.

Because I am a human being, I make and express judgments. Because I am myself, I make the particular judgments I make. Because I recognize that my judgment reduces to my opinion (my opinion, moreover, about something, the ideal individual, that does not actually exist) I express my judgments in words rather than going around hitting people on the head when they do not agree with me.

Because I do judge, I judge Islam to be odious, which seems to piss off a lot of people who call themselves liberal. I'm very explicit: my ideal individual has nothing to do with being white, or Christian (ha!), or doing any of the cultural things I enjoy as an American. My ideal individual is happy, avoids physical suffering, and, most importantly chooses as she herself pleases. Full stop. It is against that standard and only that standard that I judge.

On the other hand, because I know my opinion is in fact an opinion, I don't support making war or violently repressing a culture I consider odious, which seems to piss off a lot of people who call themselves conservative.

Happily, I'm used to pissing most everyone off and it doesn't bother me in the least.

Imprecatory Prayer

Recently the subject of Imprecatory Prayer has come up, as called for by Southern Baptist Minister Wiley Drake. My cohort James F. Elliott is doing a stellar job debating Rhology on this topic in the Religious Idiots and Fringe and Mainstream threads; I'm busy and James obviously needs no help from me anyway.

But I wanted to write briefly about Imprecatory Prayer itself. An imprecatory prayer is essentially a curse, a prayer for suffering, calamity and death to befall the victim of the prayer.

Even someone indifferent to Christian theology as myself knows Christians don't believe they can command Jehovah to curse someone, but there is ample evidence in their scripture to "justify" the belief that he can be persuaded. At least in terms of intent and state of mind, an imprecatory prayer is a threat. The only reason it isn't considered criminal assault under secular law is the recognition that such prayer is ineffective, at least supernaturally.

Furthermore, it shows a general indifference to human life and well-being in general. The implication seems to be that the believer does not directly value the life of others; he values it only because God has happened to not have commanded him—at least not yet—to take it. This does not seem a good way to establish mutual trust: "Good night, Wesley, I'll most likely kill you in the morning."

Imprecatory prayer offends my humanist sensibilities. At the very least, it indicates that the believer desires and would be pleased by the suffering and death of another human being. I find such an attitude very offensive. Even worse, it indicates an intent (however ineffectual) to actually cause (by persuasion) the suffering and death of another. It is, in legal terms, a declaration of mens rea, i.e. criminal intent; again, only the preposterous ineffectuality of the means shields the believer from prosecution.

There is, however, an even more sinister implication to the call for imprecatory prayer: A coded incitement to perform an actual criminal act. Again, even the most cursory examination of Christian scripture shows that Jehovah often delegates his dirty work to mortals through an intermediary religious authority, sometimes contrary to civil, secular law. Jesus himself was executed by the legitimate governmental authorities for sedition and subversion.

It is not too much of a stretch to believe that some believer might feel himself commanded by God to perform this act, and not consider it murder or mayhem (note that assault and battery is not condemned in either version of the Ten Commandments). Since any action has—to the believer's mind—been both commanded by God and sanctioned by a religious authority, he might well rationalize the act as ethically permissible.

This is not idle or paranoid suspicion. One has only to look at Paul Jennings Hill, Timothy McVeigh, Christian militias and hate groups, as well as the growing Dominionist movement.

My ethics

For those of you new to the blog, let me briefly sum up my meta-ethical and ethical positions.

I hold meta-ethical subjective relativism: ethical properties (i.e. good and bad, right and wrong) are not objective properties, i.e. properties of objects or other actions, conditions, or states of affairs outside the mind. They are purely subjective properties, properties of minds, and are properties describing the relationship between minds and these states of affairs.

Things are not good or bad; There is only that which we approve of or disapprove of, i.e. that which we value.

My personal set of values can be summed up accurately enough as libertarian humanism: I value human life, liberty and happiness highly, especially my own, and I disapprove of human suffering and death. I therefore also approve of people who have more or less the same values as me, and disapprove of those who hold contrary values.

I do not "hate" anyone, in the sense of wishing them death or suffering. There are people I hold in contempt, even disgust, but I do not hate them. If my contempt or disgust causes you suffering, then you have merely (!) to change your values to regain my good graces. If you don't care about my contempt, then it causes you no suffering, and I feel no guilt.

There are subtleties to this position, especially when one person's happiness depends on another's suffering, but most of the time one can apply simple libertarian humanism to correctly predict my values.

Christian Domestic Discipline

Infidelis Maximus and A Whore in the Temple of Reason have written recently on Christian Domestic Discipline (CDD). The topic touches on a number of important ethical and meta-ethical principles.

On the one hand, I think I have to disagree (just a little) with the Slut: In the broadest sense of "consent"—the sort of consent we apply specifically to criminalization—any activity that a participant actively and directly agrees to for whatever reason short of threat of immediate violence must be viewed as consensual.

There are some extreme lifestyles such as Gorean sex slavery within the BDSM community. Most ordinary people might well see such lifestyles as disagreeable and morally objectionable. But the key consideration is that these lifestyles emerge to satisfy the full inner subjective nature of the participants. In the non-Christian BDSM community we typically see that the ideology is constructed to conform to the participants' inner nature: People construct, adopt and elaborate a "Gorean" ideology to match their subjective nature; they do not typically engage in Gorean slavery because they are convinced of its objective truth.

Another ethical standard that is seen throughout the BDSM community is that the greater the power exchange within a game, the stronger the requirement to negotiate the limitations outside the game, in an environment and context structured to strongly establish and reinforce the equality of the participants.

We don't see either of these ethical principles within CDD. Reading the blogs of some of the submissive victims (and I use the word "victim" intentionally), it seems very clear that they do not participate in their lifestyle purely because it fulfills their full inner subjective nature. Rather, a strong component derives from the delusional conviction that the (suitably cherry-picked) prescriptions of the Christian Bible are literally true. They are convinced that this lifestyle is true and normative without regard to their full inner nature. While there is no immediate, temporal coercion, there certainly seems to be a degree of "supernatural" coercion.

Furthermore, the negotiation of the limitations of this lifestyle never appears to occur in a purely egalitarian context: Even "outside" the game, the husband negotiates from a position of power and authority conferred from the Bible.

While we must view CDD as consensual in the broadest sense, it is clearly not rationally informed consent.

From an purely objective standpoint, of course, every activity—even outright violent coercion—happens according to the totality of the inner nature of the participants. If I give my wallet to an armed robber, it is because I value my life more than my money; the robber values my money more than my life. To an purely ethically neutral observer, these are just facts from which one can construct scientific theories that accurately predict future behavior.

But, of course, none of us are Vulcans* or computers. We are not ethically neutral, we are not purely objective. We value certain states of others' minds over their alternatives. One important state of mind to which I attach tremendous value is belief in the truth: I actively condemn others' desire to be deluded, and I'll equally deprecate any choice which follows from that desire.

*It's arguable that even Vulcans have arbitrary values, their lip service to purely logical analysis notwithstanding.

Because I also value personal autonomy, however, I won't support legal coercive measures to correct a situation—even a situation I will verbally condemn—unless the participant actively and directly desires the intervention of society. By contrast, the victim of an armed robbery does in fact desire assistance, and since I disapprove of the perpetrator's value system, I'm happy to help. As much as I condemn and deprecate CDD, unless the wife actively wants out of the relationship, and unless the husband physically forces her to stay, I feel helpless to intervene directly.

One reason I condemn religious moderates is that they necessarily and fundamentally undermine the strongest philosophical argument against something like CDD: They fail to condemn the delusion itself which differentiates between CDD and rationally informed BDSM. They condemn CDD, of course, (and good for them, I guess) but why? They cannot condemn CDD because it is based in delusion; it is based, after all, on the same sort of delusional thinking that they themselves explicitly endorse. They must, I suppose, condemn it only because they condemn dominant/submissive lifestyles in general (or because it is based on the "wrong" arbitrary assignment of metaphor to scripture).

But by condemning all dominant/submissive lifestyles, they must condemn rationally informed consensual BDSM as well, which entails two troubling consequences: They must deny the primacy of rationally informed consent, and they must deny the primacy of a full expression of one's inner nature*. Without condemning the delusion itself, the religious moderate must, to condemn CDD, condemn small-ell libertarianism and humanism itself, in favor of authoritarianism and the value of conformity. The religious moderate is letting into the tent the nose of a particularly odious camel.

*That does not, of course, in any way compromise the expression of anyone else's inner nature.

To condemn CDD without condemning BDSM under rationally informed consent, someone such as myself must condemn the whole edifice of delusional brainwashing which constitutes modern religion, which necessarily condemns the religious moderates in the same breath. Happily, I'm willing to do so.

On the one hand, I'm pleased that religious moderates approve and disapprove of most of the same things I do—they've retrojected on their God most of the same sort of humanist values that I hold directly. Most, but not all, however: By definition, they cannot retroject on the authority of their God most important meta-values of humanism: anti-authoritarian libertarianism and the universal condemnation of human suffering.

On Abortion

The essential properties of a person are sentience, the capacity to feel pain and pleasure, sapience, the capacity for self-awareness, and individual personality.

Biological independence, the ability to function as a independent entity or "organism", and human genetics are the essential characteristic of a human organism: Brain-dead but still breathing bodies, for instance, are human organisms, although lacking sentience, sapience and personality they are not persons.

An embryo has only one of these essential characteristics and none of the essential properties of a person.

Morality is built on empathy: We do not wish another being to experience that which we would not wish to experience. Since we ourselves do not (typically) wish to experience pain and suffering, we do not wish another being to experience pain and suffering, hence we object to, for instance, cruelty even to animals.

There is simply no point of similarity on which we can feel empathy for an embryo: It cannot experience even pain and suffering, much less the awareness of mortality which is entailed by sapience. I cannot feel empathy for something that itself cannot feel, cannot think, cannot be in a mental sense. I have no more rational justification for empathy for an embryo than I would for an amputated finger.

No empathy, no moral status.

I have empathy for all sapient beings, human and non-human, and I disapprove of anyone who does not have empathy for all sapient beings, I strongly disapprove of anyone who does not have empathy for all sapient humans and I violently (to the extent of supporting coercion through lawful means, i.e. police, courts and prisons) of those who would cause suffering to any sapient being, that is pain against his, her or its will.

(I admit also to a degree of speciesism--all other things being equal, I have different empathic attitudes towards non sapient members of species typically sapient, especially my own species, then towards members of non-sapient species. Since this speciesism enhances moral status, I don't see it as problematic.)

Most importantly, I have empathy for a woman--a fully human, fully sapient being--who is pregnant against her will. If she does not wish to be pregnant, then pregnancy will by definition cause her suffering. When I balance that suffering against the physical impossibility of an embryo suffering, I can come to only one conclusion: I must not only permit abortion, but I have an active duty to ensure that any woman who wishes an abortion is able to receive one.

On Suffering

In On Humanism I laid out the foundation of humanism: the promotion of happiness and the diminishing of "suffering". Both terms require more investigation; since "suffering" is easier, I'll start with that.

Suffering is not pain per se, although one can suffer from pain. However, it's possible that one might not suffer at all: The athlete "feeling the burn" is feeling pain, but enjoying it. There are those who receive sexual gratification from pain; one cannot justly say they are suffering.

Suffering is likewise not disappointment per se. When I lose a game of Go to my sensei, I am disappointed in a sense, but I was also after my pleasure in being beaten well, and learning in the process.

Suffering is bound up strongly, I think, with will: Suffering is, in the main, the forceful contravening of the will. I want to speak my mind, and I want to move about freely; if I were threatened with imprisonment for my views, my will would thereby be contravened and I would suffer. I want my loved ones to be with me perpetually; when they die, I suffer.

Because of this strong bound with will, suffering is strongly subjectively constructed. You cannot tell me what constitutes suffering for me (nor I for you), because of all the things I know, I know my own conscious will the best.

Context and level of abstraction are also important. One can be said to be suffering in one sense and not suffering in another: A person such as Eugene Debs, imprisoned for opposing WW-I, was suffering in the sense that ideally he wanted to be free, but he was acting in accordance with his will to speak out against WW-I, and thus on that level was not suffering. I might choose to live in relative poverty to save money and later become wealthy, and thus am acting in one sense according to my will, but I would prefer to be wealthy without the concomitant poverty.

The differing levels of abstraction come into play especially when discussing the Problem of Evil. What might be a choice given the constraint of this possible world becomes an imposition against the will when constrained only to the universe of all logically possible worlds.

On Humanism

A discussion on Humanism has broken out at Mere Comments, so I thought it might be useful to briefly describe my own ethical opinions.

My ethical opinions are best described as empathic libertarian humanism. There are certain experiences that I enjoy: joy, happiness, pleasure, and the like. There are other experiences that I do not enjoy: pain, grief, sorrow and the like. I wish to maximize the former and minimize the latter.

Because I am libertarian, I alone can construct what these experiences mean to me, and what objective circumstances cause these feelings; in general, each person constructs for herself what she considers happiness and suffering.

I am empathic in the sense that other people's happiness usually makes me happy, and other peoples suffering makes me suffer. My empathy is not, however, exact: I am indifferent, for instance, to the happiness of rapists, and I am indifferent to the suffering of the intolerant.

If some sort of experience causes me or others happiness, and doesn't cause me or others to suffer, then I will approve of that experience. Contrawise, if some sort of experience causes suffering and no happiness, I will disapprove.

Because my specific ethical opinions about what causes me happiness and suffering are indeed opinions and not matters of fact, there is no issue with having specific opinions about abstract experiences at varying levels of abstraction. For instance, although I'm straight man, and therefore gay sexual activities don't cause me any particular happiness, I have a positive opinion about the abstract notion of having rewarding consensual sexual experiences in general.

The big issue with this sort of humanist ethics is forming opinions about specific activities which cause some people happiness and others suffering. There are no rigorous, logical, objective answers to these sorts of issues: I must, rather, consult my feelings, discover how I feel about the various consequences and how I feel directly about the various actions available, and come to some conclusion.

Because I am a philosopher, I've examined my feelings in some detail. Although I've done some work in making my feelings consistent, on the whole my ethical beliefs are a matter of discovery rather than construction.