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Quotation of the day

[Conservatives] beat [liberals] in courage and in intellect, because we have nothing but the common good to sharpen our faculties or goad our will; they have no less an alternative in view than to be uncontrolled masters of mankind or to be hurled from high---

"To grinning scorn a sacrifice,
And endless infamy!"

They do not celebrate the triumphs of their enemies as their own: it is with them a more feeling disputation. They never give an inch of ground that they can keep; they keep all that they can get; they make no concessions that can redound to their own discredit; they assume all that makes for them; if they pause it is to gain time; if they offer terms it is to break them: they keep no faith with enemies: if you relax in your exertions, they persevere the more: if you make new efforts, they redouble theirs. While they give no quarter, you stand upon mere ceremony. While they are cutting your throat, or putting the gag in your mouth, you talk of nothing but liberality, freedom of inquiry, and douce humanité. Their object is to destroy you, your object is to spare them---to treat them according to your own fancied dignity. They have sense and spirit enough to take all advantages that will further their cause: you have pedantry and pusillanimity enough to undertake the defence of yours, in order to defeat it. It is the difference between the efficient and the inefficient; and this again resolves itself into the difference between a speculative proposition and a practical interest.

—William Hazlitt, On the Spirit of Partisanship, 1821
(h/t to Hullabaloo)

What right do I have?

Let's get this right out in the open. I advocate meta-ethical subjective relativism; I assert there are no objective moral truths, only truths about what people subjectively believe. So what gives me the (objective) right to make ethical judgments?

Well, nothing. Duh. "Rights" are about ethics; I assert there are no objective rights any more than there are any other kind of objective ethical truths.

What I do have are exactly the things I assert do exist: subjective opinions about ethics. And I write about them.

I'm accused of reducing ethics to the level of "taste". First of all, I didn't reduce anything: The world is the way it is, I just try to understand it. It's not like I can make truth go away just by disbelieving it, any more than one can make falsity come to be just by believing it. Perhaps I'm wrong. But getting mad at me and calling me stupid won't change the truth, won't change my mind, and won't make me stop writing. I won't change my mind on the basis of anything but sound argument.

Secondly, asserting the equivalence of subjective ethical belief to "taste" is fallacious and misleading. It's fallacious in that similarity does not entail identity. Subjective ethical belief and taste are similar: They are both subjective. But they are not identical: tastes are those subjective ethical beliefs which are relatively trivial and which we don't extend to others. Subjective ethical beliefs are those which are important and which we do extend to others. Drawing the identity asserts that all subjective beliefs are trivial and are not extended to others. I simply deny this assertion.

At the political level, one might ask: What right do I have to impose my personal subjective beliefs on the rest of the world? It's a little more difficult to answer this question because I don't personally impose my beliefs on anyone. In case it has escaped anyone's attention, I am not the dictator of the world. Neither do I blow up buildings, murder abortion doctors nor fly airplanes into buildings. I'm a civilized person and a citizen of a democracy. What subjective beliefs do get imposed on a society is a complicated process of negotiation; no one person's beliefs are ever privileged.

Another objection that has been raised is that I assert, by virtue of approving of democracy, that if a majority holds an ethical belief, then that belief is objectively true. If you think I say this, you are not paying attention. I say that nothing at all ever establishes objective truth. Majority opinion establishes only that a majority holds some opinion, and that contrary opinions are held by a minority. As it happens, if a majority of a society holds a particular ethical opinion, that opinion will usually find its way into their law, but that's a horse of a different color: It's a (rather obvious) statement of sociological science, not an ethical judgment.

I love the truth. I love the truth more than I love my wife (and I love my wife a lot, and that she loves the truth as much as I do is no small reason why I love her). If ethical objectivism were the truth, I would believe it. But, for good or ill, it's not. As I've written earlier, we have no epistemic foundation for establishing objective ethical truth. It's just not there.

If you don't like this meta-truth, tough shit. The truth is the truth, whether you like it or not. There is no God, whether you want there to be one or not. You can't flap your arms and fly to the Moon, whether you like it or not. If you get cancer, you might die, whether you like it or not. If the sun explodes, or if the apocalyptic idiots in the White House start a nuclear war, we'll all die, whether we like it or not.

I could, of course, be mistaken. Maybe there is an epistemic foundation for objective ethical truth. All you have to do is prove it. But arguing against meta-ethical subjective relativism because it is not objectivist, because you just can't stand the idea of objectivism being false, is futile, stupid, and ridiculous.

Correction

It looks like I might not be able to say I told you so with quite so much vehemence.

According to TPM Horse's Mouth:

The Washington Post has now added a correction to its widely-discussed story saying Congressional Dems had "backed off" by telling the White House that they would drop withdrawal timetables from their Iraq war-funding bill. ...

[T]he premise and headline of WaPo's front-page story were essentially false. While it does seem likely that the withdrawal timetables will be gone from whatever final compromise emerges, this concession to the White House simply never happened.

Sigh. This is what I get for trusting the commercial media on even basic facts. It's nice, I suppose, to see the Democrats still have a little more cartilage than I thought.

A “small” group of 150-200 million

According to Reasons and Opinions:

Lest there is any doubt about this hypothesis, simply note that the denial of evolution is concentrated in a small group of American evangelicals. You do not see Christians around the world disdaining science in such a manner.

It's disingenuous and misleading to count Christians "around the world" in the same breath as an assertion about the relative size of American Christians who deny evolution. It's implausible to characterize more than half of the population of the third largest country in the world as a "small" group in any sense of the word "small". Furthermore, there many Muslims deny evolution, giving lie to the author's assertion about concentration.

In America:

CBS 11/04:
55% Creationist
27% "Guided" evolution
13% Scientific evolution

CBS 10/05:
51% Creationist
30% "Guided" evolution
15% Scientific evolution

Harris 7/05:
64% Creationist
10% "Guided" evolution (inferred)
12% Scientific evolution (inferred)

(h/t to INSTAPUTZ)

Ethical discourse

Meta-ethical subjective relativism is predicated on the lack of an objective (non-mind-related) ontological account of ethics that accounts for perceptual facts, in the same way that a singular, objective physical reality accounts for perceptual facts. We thus lack an evidentiary foundation for ethics. Furthermore, because of Hume's fact/value distinction, we cannot use physical reality as an axiomatic foundation for ethics.

It might be the case that there is some objective ontological account of ethics; we know it's logically possible because we do have a good physical ontology of perceptual fact. However, no such account has ever been rationally justified; all such accounts run afoul sooner or later of the perceptual facts. Notably, the content of ethical intuitions disagree, and when there is absolutely universal agreement, there is no need of further ethical discourse. The whole philosophical project of ethics is to resolve disagreements of ethical intuition; this project is dissimilar to scientific project, which is not about resolving disagreements of perceptual experience—science accepts as foundational only those perceptual experiences which are agreed upon universally prior to scientific investigation.

What we can agree on, in a shared-perceptual and scientific sense, is the existence of ethical intuitions as subjective entities, the existence of values, desires, and goals, irrespective of the objective truth of their content. Our minds demonstrably do not do nothing but draw objectively true conclusions about the physical world. We want things, we desire things, we like and dislike things, we have preferences. These preferences are important in and of themselves. Doing something just because one wants to do it is—everything else being equal—a good reason to do it.

Of course, everything else isn't always equal, and one's immediate desires are not the only reasons to do or not do something.

First, our minds are not unitary; they are multi-voiced. One part of our mind can want something, another part can want the opposite: We can be both attracted to and repelled by the exact same thing. Furthermore, our minds operate distinctly on different levels of abstraction: We can desire, for instance, good health, and can also desire specific activities which harm our health. Although the underlying objective states of affairs are rationally related, our ethical beliefs themselves are often not directly rationally related. I don't derive my preferences about ice cream from my preferences about my waistline, even though the physical effects on my waistline do derive from the physical nature of ice cream.

Second, each of us lives among others who also have wants, desires, values and preferences. Many of those preferences require limited physical resources to satisfy: The desire to be satiated requires the eating of food, and there is only so much food lying around. So the fulfillment of desire can cause conflict.

Third, given our particular biological and cultural evolution, we have wants, desires, etc. about other people's minds: We want others to want our company, to approve of us, to like us, to love us. Some of us also want others to suffer, to have their desires frustrated, to feel pain.

We can create quite a complicated discourse without ever saying a single thing about the ontological nature of the content of these desires, without ever objectively breaking the symmetry between physically or socially competing desires. We can't objectively break the symmetry. Since we can't do so, a desire to actually do so is doomed to frustration; the best we can do to satisfy the desire to have objectively true ethical beliefs is to descend into delusion about physical reality.

So what can we do? Specifically, what are we physically able to do?

First, we can propagandize: We can attempt to directly influence others' desires. Propaganda does not entail lying, though. Martin Luther King offers us one of the greatest and most uplifting pieces of propaganda. Watch his speech carefully. I don't know all the reasons why he's persuasive, but I know he doesn't make anything like an argument: Not a scientific argument, not a philosophical argument, not a mathematical argument. Just exhortations, assertions, and a couple of veiled threats. You simply cannot account for the persuasiveness of his speech or the 1960s Civil Rights Movement from a position of philosophical rigor or objective truth-seeking. Racial equality is not truthful in the sense that mathematical or scientific equality is truthful. It just—to many but not all—feels good... especially spoken with King's magnificent oratory.

We can negotiate. If you and I have competing desires, maybe we can share. Maybe we can take turns. Maybe you can give me this and I'll give you something you want. We can pressure. We can praise. We can blame.

We can even coerce. We can lock our front doors, each forcing everyone else to stay out of her house. We can strike back if struck. And, if we are are so moved, we can and do simply imprison or kill those whose desires arouse our greatest antipathy.

If everyone's desires were absolutely different, if there were no commonality, we would have chaos or pure individualistic competition, the law of the jungle. But we don't have chaos, therefore it follows that we actually do have commonality. Not should have, but do in fact have. And thus we have societies. But don't be fooled: The best scientific explanation for this commonality is that they are a product of the accidents of our unique biological and cultural evolution. We might have ended up completely different, and then we would be constructing our social ethics on a different subjective factual basis.

How can we best propagandize, negotiate, pressure and coerce? First of all, in the most abstract sense the question makes no sense without actual people with minds and existing values. We can't even talk about "best" in a neutral, objective sense: We must always construct "best" in the context of one or more existing mind. Secondly, even given some particular collection of people and their values, there is no "optimization" because each person has his or her own values and preferences: There is no single standard against which to call a solution optimal. Even a utilitarian, statistical evaluation entails making subjective value distinctions: Should we optimize total wealth? Some particular pattern of distribution? Which pattern? The only "optimal" solution would be for everyone to be perfectly happy, which does not seem achievable even in principle, much less in practice.

The best we can do is what we're doing: Each person propagandizes, negotiates, pressures, praises, blames, and coerces according to the dictates of her own conscience and her best rational evaluation of the consequences of her actions, and society is what emerges from every person doing so.

Philosophical sloppiness

Almost all the philosophical blogs—theist and atheist, smart and dumb—I read with any regularity have a tendency to philosophical and intellectual sloppiness, and this tendency drives me up the wall.

I'm not talking about trivial mistakes of spelling, grammar or punctuation. I'm talking about the tendency to assume the truth of one's basic premises without argument or substantiation, to make broad, unsubstantiated generalizations about intellectual topics, and glossing over controversial enthymemes.

Scientists can get away with this kind of sloppiness, because there's an enormous canon of uncontroversial and widely-accepted work. Scientists don't have to re-argue or even mention first principles for every argument or discussion because their first principles are well-defined and univocal.

Philosophers lack this sort of canonical basis. Absolutely nothing is uncontroversially accepted as a first principle. Indeed, philosophy is in no small part devoted to the study of first principles. Even when not devoted to first principles, whatever basis is being assumed needs always to explicitly mentioned. If you're evaluating some ethical question on a Kantian basis, then you need to say that you're referencing Kant.

I have worked most of my life as a profession engineer. Precision, clarity, and an explicit recognition of underlying assumptions is a professional requirement. Computers simply do not recognize even the tiniest bit of imprecision or ambiguity. Maybe it's just me, but I find vagueness, imprecision, ambiguity and hidden assumptions in philosophy just as outrageous as I do in engineering or science.

To a certain extent, professional academic philosophy is devoted to topics that I really don't care about, among them argument for argument's sake and a detailed examination of various works that form the academic philosophical canon. Because I'm not interested in these topics as topics, I just don't comment on them. Say what you will about Kant; I've not made a sufficiently detailed study of his work to make any sort of meaningful comment about what he really says or means. I have my opinions about these writers (chiefly that they—unlike scientists writing about quantum mechanics—are not sufficiently clear to take at face value) but I freely admit my opinions are relatively uninformed. So be it. But I do know that the philosophical canon is a multi-voiced literary canon, not a univocal scientific canon.

Just because you know a lot about Kant or Hume or Aquinas doesn't necessarily mean that you know anything at all about philosophy. Most do, but many do not. And even a PhD in philosophy and a tenured professorship does not exempt you from showing your philosophical argument all the way down to the "bare metal"; as opposed to way that a scientific PhD does provide such an exemption by virtue of a univocal canon.

I've seen this tendency all too many times. A professor will make some dodgy philosophical argument, I'll criticize it, and I'll be slapped down for lack of credentials. It's infuriating. I'll take it from a scientist (or a philosophy professor talking about the canon), because I know they know quite a lot that I know I don't know. But I won't take it from a philosopher talking about philosophy. I'm not impressed by philosophical credentials: It's just not that hard to think logically and sensibly; one does not need the better part of a decade's worth of academic study to understand a syllogism.

Not every PhD and philosophy professor does this, and I'm not drawing any broad conclusions. I'm just discussing something that some people do that pisses me off.

Naturalistic ethics

Underneath the Deacon's pose of why-can't-we-all-just-get-along meekness lies an ideologue just as uncompromising as any atheist. And good for him: It's nice to see him take an actual position. He's wrong, of course, but it's nice to see him at least definite enough to be wrong.

The Deacon makes a few obvious errors in his post. He says without substantiation, "[A]theists believe that... the absence of God releases humans from metaphysical bondage and opens wide the gates of possibility." This is an over-generalization. Atheists—apart from not believing in God—don't all believe anything, any more than Christians all believe anything. It's not even the case that atheists mostly believe that the lack of a God "open[s] the gates of possibility". It is an actual fact that most atheists have very prosaic and respectable ethical beliefs.

The Deacon, in his usual intellectually lazy manner, speaks as if it were obviously the case that everything good comes from God: He does not even bother to grace us with any sort of an argument or substantiation, just a series of bare assertions and assumptions. His argument is technically kind of correct: If there were none of the things that he enumerates, our ethical beliefs would be minimal indeed. He's incorrect, though: Not even the jackboot and the straitjacket would then be entailed, just pure law-of-the-jungle individualism. (Unsurprisingly, we see exactly law-of-the-jungle individualism in non-human animals, more-or-less thinking creatures without much capacity for abstract or self-referential thought.)

But take a look at the things he throws in the middle of his list conflating them with disbelief in God: "no unveiling beauty in creation that reveals ever deeper layers of meaning; no darkly brilliant mystery to existence that defies our mind but illumines our spirit; no moral intuition through which to name the good and condemn evil". These are, of course, things that exist in fact. People do have a sense of beauty we do find layers of meaning. We do apprehend mysteries which excite the mind. (We atheists do tend to want to solve mysteries, and we reject the spiritual benefits of ignorance.) Most importantly, we do have ethical intuition. These are ordinary human feelings. It's typical of the Deacon's arrogance and unjustified self-righteousness that he truly believes that someone who doesn't make a fetish of ignorance and superstition can have actual human feelings or believe them to be important.

The Deacon makes both a scientific and a philosophical mistake as well (he's packing a lot of error into a short post). Philosophically, he's deriving an "ought" from an objective (not a mind or a property of a mind) "is": If the physical universe is not fundamentally ethical, then we ought not to have ethical beliefs. This position was adequately rebutted by Hume[1]. The scientific mistake is, of course, that we're "governed by chance." Even speaking rhetorically, this is a howler: We are, of course, governed by physics, which has no small few non-chance-like components.

Most rational people—including the Deacon himself—reject scriptural literalism (of any scripture) as a complete axiomatic ethical foundation. It is only the scripturalists (whether that scripture is the Bible, the Koran, or the works of Marx, Rand or even Kant) who are in "metaphysical bondage". The Deacon adequately proves in other comments that this task is at least partially possible to theists; Communists and Randians prove that even atheism by itself is not sufficient to release one from metaphysical bondage. It is not disbelief in God that releases humans from this bondage, it is disbelief in the fundamental ethical authority and veracity of scripture—any scripture.

Lacking the authority of scripture, talk about ethics must cast about for a new epistemic authority for this talk to be about something. And that epistemic authority is, of course, ethical intuition. (Keep in mind the difference between authority and veracity; authority entails only that the whole statement ("I believe that 'torturing babies is wrong'") is true by definition; veracity entails that the content of the statement ("I believe that 'torturing babies is wrong'") is true.)

If ethical intuition is our epistemic authority, then any ethical belief system must therefore account for our ethical intuitions; It is irrational to adopt any ethical belief which contradicts the authority of our ethical intuition. If your ethical system entails that you do not believe that 'torturing babies is wrong' and you actually believe that, then your ethical system is false-to-fact and irrational. Secondly, Occam's razor entails that the veracity—in some sense—of our ethical intuitions is the simplest hypothesis, and should be abandoned only if accepting the prima facie veracity entails a contradiction or over-elaboration.

There are a lot of different ways of discussing what it means for an ethical intuition to have "veracity", but these ways are side issues. Just looking at ethical intuition as an epistemic foundation shows the fallacy of the Deacon's argument. For his argument depends on contradicting moral intuition. There's nothing false-to-fact about jackboot and the straitjacket; the Deacon is not making a physically evidentiary argument. He's trading on the actual fact that the jackboot and the straitjacket offend our ethical intuition. But if ethical intuition is any sort of epistemic basis, then the fact that some ethical system would severely contradict our intuition is itself a sufficient argument against that ethical system.

I think the Deacon has a fundamentally misguided view about atheism and naturalism. This post reveals the Deacon's own metaphysical bias of ontological priority: We make certain presuppositions about how the world is, and then reason from those presuppositions to what we know and what we approve of. But that's simply not the case. Metaphysical naturalism has a bias of epistemic priority. We make presuppositions about what we know directly, and then construct a view of the world which explains that direct knowledge. We know perceptual experiences as experiences directly; the physical sciences are a set of ontological theories which account for those perceptual experiences. We know our ethical intuitions as intuitions directly; naturalistic ethics are a set of theories which account for those intuitions.

Update: (20 May 07) The Deacon has deleted the contents of his blog; the post I criticize here is no longer available.


[1] The short version of the argument is that ethical choices, in the way that humans uncontroversially talk about ethics, always choose between physically possible alternatives. Both alternatives of an ethical choice reference—in a loose sense—that which is. Therefore, we cannot derive an ought from an is in this sense.

Terrorism!

Vatican calls verbal attack on Pope ‘terrorism':

L'Osservatore Romano said a presenter of a televised May Day rock concert, which is sponsored by Italy's labour unions, had launched “vile attacks” on Pope Benedict in front of an “excitable crowd”.

“This, too, is terrorism. It's terrorism to launch attacks on the Church,” it said. “It's terrorism to stoke blind and irrational rage against someone who always speaks in the name of love, love for life and love for man.”

This is exactly what we atheists are talking about when we talk about "anti-accommodationism". It's not that religious thought should be excluded from the free marketplace of ideas. We refuse to accommodate claim that religious thought should be exempted from the political and rational criticism it so richly deserves.

The Pope is an evil man, who has promoted religious doctrines that have lead to the misery, suffering and death of hundreds of millions of people. Go ahead, call me a terrorist.

Myers’ polite request

PZ Myers aims to misbehave: He quotes Susan B. Anthony

Cautious, careful people, always casting about to preserve their reputation and social standing, never can bring about a reform. Those who are really in earnest must be willing to be anything or nothing in the world's estimation, and publicly and privately, in season and out, avow their sympathy with despised and persecuted ideas and their advocates, and bear the consequences.

He observes that

Atheists are calm and mild-mannered, even leaders of the New Atheists like Dawkins and Harris and Dennett — no doubt because our oppression is minor compared to that of women, racial minorities, and labor — but we're still getting these ridiculous claims that we're too "rude".

and makes a polite request to atheist accomodationists:

They won't stop until we're completely silent, and there's no point in compromise, so these faint-hearted enablers of superstition are going to have to excuse us if we ever so politely request that they go fuck themselves, beg pardon, and please, use a rolled-up copy of the Republican party platform to do it, if you don't mind, thank you in advance.

(h/t to Butterflies and Wheels)