Saturday, January 20, 2007

The Ethics of Workplace Romance

I kind of painted myself in a corner in The Scientific Ethicist, part I. But thanks to the magic of blogging, I can just ignore the questions I left hanging there and look at the question from a different angle.

Please bear with me and allow me some theoretical bloviation; or, if you like, you can just cut to the chase.

We saw that neither Aristotelian virtue-based ethics nor Kantian rule-based ethics give us an intuitively satisfying analysis of the issues of workplace ethics, and neither offers sufficient justification for acceptance contrary to our intuition. We need to abandon the whole idea that ethics in general is a matter of objective truth, and look at the issue in terms of subjective things like preferences, values and interests.

The first thing that jumps out is that there are actually four parties to these sorts of workplace romances: the supervisor, the subordinate, the company and the government.[1] Each party brings a set of subjective interests to the issue, both generally and in specific cases.

The supervisor and the subordinate are both individual people. As such, they generally have some competing interests in this context: On the one hand, pretty much everyone likes sex. Many people would like to find a "soul mate", a sincere, deep and fulfilling personal relationship. On the other hand, people want to perform and keep their jobs. They want to choose their sexual and romantic partners; the subordinate especially would prefer for his supervisor not to use the power of her position to coerce an unwanted sexual relationship.

These subjective interests come into conflict because on the one hand, we're at work to work, not date. On the other hand, we spend half our waking life at work, and the workplace is in fact a pretty good context for evaluating potential sexual and romantic partners; many people have begun satisfying sexual and romantic relationships from their work.

The government has interests which are far too complicated to even summarize; it's sufficient to note that the United States government has passed laws assigning civil liability to companies which tolerate supervisor-subordinate sexual harassment.

The company, on the other hand, cares not a whit for its employees sexual or romantic issues; and a company (not being a real person) doesn't have sexual or romantic interests at all; a company doesn't even have a basis for empathy in this context. Companies do, however, have a strong interest in complying with the government's laws. But again, the company has a conflicting interest in keeping its employees happy.

In a subjective analysis, none of these conflicts are contradictions. Contradictions arise only when you assign mutually exclusive properties to the same thing; it's not a contradiction to observe that there are different things with different properties (i.e. a person can have two different subjective interests).

The contradiction problem crops up all over the place in objective theories of ethics: virtues are both objectively good and objectively bad; rules are rules and non-rules; good rules promote bad virtues and vice-versa. Subjectivism is incomplete by itself, but any subjective analysis at least gets off to a good start by simply assigning these conflicting properties to different subjective interests, rather than to the same "objective" virtue or rule.

The whole exercise, then, of analyzing the ethics of workplace romances becomes a relatively straightforward exercise of game theory[2]. All the players have interests they seek to fulfill, and different moves which affect the fulfillment of those interests: enact this policy or that policy; approach or do not approach a supervisor romantically; accept or discourage a subordinate's approach, etc.

A side issue regarding the ethical nature of rules seem fairly apparent.

There are two kinds of rules: Rules which prohibit outcomes which people disapprove of directly, and rules which in effect prohibit outcomes which people don't disapprove of. Most everyone disapproves of stealing; the rule against stealing is just an extension of this disapproval. On the other hand, hardly anyone disapproves of supervisor-subordinate relationships per se.

The no supervisor-subordinate relationship rule really exists to prohibit sexual harassment, a side-effect of such relationships. In a sense it "over-legislates": Taken literally it prohibits both outcomes that people approve of as well as those people disapprove of. I think there are some good reasons for such over-legislation, but they're too complicated to get into right now.

In a subjectivist analysis, rules aren't "true" in any ethical sense. Rules are moves by both real people and abstract organizations to attempt to fulfill their own interests. In other words, we don't not steal because there's a rule against it; we create a rule against stealing to explicitly express our disapproval of stealing, usually through organizations like governments or companies. In this sense, the question, allowing exceptions--even arbitrary exceptions--isn't a contradiction (although it might be a poor strategy). A rule is just a move, which has counter-move of disobeying, which has its own counter-move of a punitive or tolerant response.

The Chase

In all the theoretical bloviation analysis above, I've very carefully not answered the practical question posed in the original thread: If a subordinate makes a romantic advance to his or her superior, should the superior accept it or reject it? In the infuriating philosophical sense, the answer is, "it depends." But I'm going to tell you precisely what it depends on.

It depends on how much you value the possible outcomes (positively or negatively), and your estimate of the probability of each outcome occurring. If you think there's a high probability of getting something you value positively, such as "true love", and a low probability of getting something you value negatively, such as getting fired, then it's in your best interest to go for it. On the other hand, if the best outcome you expect is something you don't value very highly (perhaps one episode of mediocre sex) and the worst outcome is highly probable (he's going to complain when I dump him), then it's in your best interests to refrain.

But what about the rule? The rule doesn't have any ethical value per se. The company did not enact the rule because it's "ethically right"; it enacted the rule to protect its own interests, primarily its interests in making money and not being sued. The company's intent was not to protect the superior's interests, nor even the subordinate's interests; the intent was to protect its own interests.

(One can, however, apply the same sort of analysis to what sort of rules a company should create, and how it should enforce them: What are the values of the different outcomes? What is the probability they would occur? "Spending time and money creating and enforcing rules," is one of these outcomes; considerations of efficiency come into play.)

The rule is thus an indication of how the company will act and under what circumstances. You have to look at your own company's rules and policies to try and anticipate how they'll act under different circumstances. Some companies will invoke the rule only if there's a formal complaint; other companies will invoke the rule if there's even the slightest evidence of a relationship. The rule (and other rules and characteristic behavior) affects the analysis not by establishing (or even recognizing) any kind of ethical truth, but by determining the probability of different outcomes.

The advantage of the paradigm (meta-ethical subjective relativism) is that it captures quite a lot with game theory about how we actually behave in ways we tend to categorize as "ethical". Furthermore, it makes falsifiable predictions. Subjective relativist systems of government, such as democracy--which just allows people to negotiate how values are fulfilled, without making many a priori judgments about values per se--should prove more stable than either authoritarianism or some sort of process modeled on scientific institutions. Furthermore, we should be able to infer people's and organizations' interests from a game theoretical analysis of their behavior, and those values should match the values we infer from talking to them; if the values don't match, we should be able to directly attribute that mismatch to a substantial strategic value of lying.

Of course, the huge question that meta-ethical subjective relativism doesn't answer--at least not directly--is why we persist in what can be called under this paradigm the delusions of ethical objectivism. The jury is still out, but this question may well be answered by scientific psychology.

Aside from ignoring a whole class of meta-ethical intuitions, meta-ethical subjective relativism is on pretty solid philosophical ground. It depends only on the premises that people have subjective interests, they act to fulfill them, and that the fulfillment of different interests (between different interests within one person's mind, and between different people) can come into conflict; all of these premises have good scientific justification. The paradigm has good explanatory power, and the theories and hypotheses which comprise it are falsifiable. It matches many of our intuitions about specific ethical situations, and gives us good reasons for abandoning those intuitions which conflict.



[1] The reification of abstract, conceptual entities such as companies and governments and the fictional attribution of subjective values to these entities is benign in this case. We can reduce an abstract company or government to a collection of real people with real values. And since real people create these abstractions precisely for the purpose of explicitly privileging some set of values in a particular context, we have an authoritative reference for what values we ascribe to the abstractions. So we can discuss abstractions like companies and governments using the same sort of language we use to discuss real concrete people with real subjective values.

[2] Technically, probabilistic game theory; the outcome of many of the moves can't be definitely known in advance. One cannot know in advance if accepting a subordinate's approach would result in "true love", but people can and do estimate the probability of such an outcome.

Wednesday, January 17, 2007

Potshots from the Peanut Gallery

Sam Harris is debating Andrew Sullivan on religious moderation. Unsurprisingly Sullivan wriggles on a logical skewer which only his impressive rhetorical talent makes even a little bit non-obvious.

First, let me briefly note Sullivan's argument from Pascal's authority: One can disagree with Pascal without denying his brilliance; his false dichotomy: Harris's argument does not depend on finding no solid distinctions within faith, just on finding a substantive similarity; and Sullivan's confusion about science: It is not because faith is "true" that science cannot disprove it; it's because faith doesn't actually say anything; there is nothing there to disprove.

That being said, let's move on to the "money quote:"

The reason I find fundamentalism so troubling - whether it is Christian, Jewish or Muslim - is not just its willingness to use violence (in the Islamist manifestation). It is its inability to integrate doubt into faith, its resistance to human reason, its tendency to pride and exclusion, and its inability to accept mystery as the core reality of any religious life.

First, intellectual writers try to keep contradictory points, if not in separate paragraphs, at least in separate sentences. It's simply beyond me how Sullivan can condemn fundamentalism for its "resistance to human reason" on the one hand and its "inability to accept mystery" on the other.

More importantly, precisely how does one "integrate doubt into faith"? How do you "doubt"--in any kind of meaningful, intellectual, reasonable way--a "mystery" which "may be beyond our human understanding" (and, presumably actually is beyond our present understanding), a mystery for which Sullivan is willing to abandon reason for the sake of his faith?

These are rhetorical questions, of course. You can't integrate doubt with faith. Faith is belief without knowledge[1]; there's nothing there to doubt; you either have faith or you don't.

How can Sullivan possibly know, in any kind of reasonable sense that "both [reason and faith] are reconciled by a Truth that may yet be beyond our understanding"? Sullivan can, I suppose, have faith that reason and faith are reconciled, but he certainly doesn't have any reasonable justification for doing so.

It is precisely because Sullivan is not as nutty as the fundamentalists (or, politically, the wingnut conservatives) that I find his position perhaps even more reprehensible. At least we can tell just by looking that the nutjobs are indeed insane; Sullivan distracts us with his calm, reasonable tone while he dispenses bullshit with a front-end loader, a mountain of bullshit that fundamentalists use as a platform to spew their lunatic hatred and violence on the world at large.


[1] technically, truth-belief without sufficient epistemic justification

Propaganda and Negotiation

(Updated)

Sorry, but you'll have to wait another day for part II of the Scientific Ethicist.

Blame SteveG for making yet another thought-provoking post from Philosopher's Playground: The Charlie Brown-ization of Political Ethics (17 Jan 2007). Steve correctly identifies an important issue, but I think his evaluation and proposed cure are somewhat naive.

Steve identifies several rhetorical tactics in political discourse and focuses on two: framing and caging.

Framing is the description of some specific issue using words which have ethical or value connotations advantageous to your own position. The classic example is the the framing of abortion rights by proponents in terms of choice and by opponents in terms of life.

Caging is focusing attention on one particular instance out of many in a class, an instance where your own side's position is strong (or one you can most easily frame advantageously) and suppressing attention on the instances which are less advantageous. Steve offers the example of caging the general issue of [racial] civil rights by focusing on affirmative action in hiring. It's also helpful, he concludes, that caging be intentionally pursued uncivilly and with extreme passion to make one's opponents look weak, pathetic and vulnerable if they attempt to simply ignore the focus.

Steve's analysis of these tactics is spot on. But his evaluation of what these tactics mean is naive. Caging especially, he asserts, "undermine[s] ethical conversation." He proposes reasoned discourse as a cure, a "measured, careful discussion; one that treats all concerns open-mindedly and which allows for careful, creative alternatives to be considered." An admirable attitude, to be sure, but naive and dependent on a faulty premise.

The faulty premise is that ethics (in the particular) can be objectively true, allowing reasoned discussion to find that truth. But the problem is that particular ethical statements can't be objectively true in the same sense that particular statements about reality can be objectively truth, or even in the same sense that scientific theories can be objectively true. Seeking a truth that simply does not exist is, of course, an exercise in futility.

Any specific ethical theory fundamentally depends on the actual values which real people hold subjectively as mental states. Thus there are only two effective ways of talking about ethics in the particular: propaganda, the attempt to inculcate particular values in the audience, and negotiation, the process by which two parties with differing values agree on actions which will maximize the mutual satisfaction of their values. Reasoned discourse is at best a peripheral technique and at worst completely irrelevant.[1]

The conservative movement has achieved notable success precisely because they have grasped this fundamental meta-ethical truth. Although people sincerely holding core conservative values are a relatively small minority, the conservative movement relentlessly propagandizes derivative values to engender support for their core values and uses the success of this propaganda as a powerful negotiating tool.

Conservatives use framing and caging effectively. Few outside the core conservative movement favor outright racial discrimination. Rather than ineffectually try to propagandize this underlying value, the conservative movement propagandizes the derivative value of "equal" employment opportunity framed in a way that supports the core value. No one is for outright sexual enslavement of women (i.e. "barefoot and pregnant"), so they propagandize respect for life also framed in a way that supports the core value.[2]. And the framing device of "personal responsibility" has been tremendously effective.[3]

Since there is no particular ethical objective truth to be found, calm, reasoned discourse cannot be a panacea (although it can be effective as propaganda or negotiation). Rather, progressives and liberals have to bite the bullet and explicitly and unashamedly use propaganda and negotiation. We have to sell our values, and negotiate with those who aren't buying.

Resorting to propaganda doesn't mean that liberals and progressives have to sink to the level of conservatives in ethical discourse. Propaganda is a word loaded with negative connotations; worse yet it has no good synonyms. Ethical objectivists have shot themselves in the foot by framing "propaganda" so negatively; by trying conscientiously to avoid propaganda in favor of "rational discourse", intelligent liberal people deprive themselves of a fundamental tool of ethical discourse.

But propaganda does not have to be bad, it does not have to be dishonest, it does not have to be slimy in any way. Look at King's "I Have a Dream" speech: It's pure propaganda, inculcating the values of human dignity and racial equality in his listeners. He's not making any sort of logical argument from true premises, but there's nothing slimy, dishonest, or covert about it. He's right up front about the values that he wants his audience to embrace. Indeed the whole Civil Rights movement in the 60's was as effective as it was precisely because King was both a master propagandist as well as a tough negotiator.[4]

Propaganda per se is not undermining political and ethical discourse; it's a necessary part of ethical discourse. Not even dishonest propaganda is undermining discourse: Sincere, honest propaganda will beat disingenuous and dishonest propaganda every time (even Hitler and Goebbels were right up front about the whole "kill all the Jews and take over the world" thing).

What's undermining political and ethical discourse is the shame towards which the progressives and liberals approach the idea of propaganda. Any attempt to sell our values is seen as unseemly and embarrassing. Leaving the propaganda field wide open to conservatives and authoritarians allows them get away with using dishonest propaganda.

Our liberal, progressive values are rational and true, are they not? Sadly no, not any more than conservative values are "rational" and "true". Values are not truths, they are facts, facts about human minds. And they are contingent facts, facts which can be changed in the same sense that a fact about the position of an object can be changed by moving it.

There is no magic bullet--not even reasonability--for ethical discourse. Ethical discourse is a project and a conflict; there are battles lost and won, progress made and losses suffered. Liberals and progressives should, of course, be ashamed to use dishonest propaganda. But we should not be ashamed to use propaganda, to sell our values honestly, sincerely and, most of all effectively.

Update
Of course, Tom Tomorrow makes a similar point a thousand times more succinctly than I do.



[1] I don't want to sound like I'm putting down reasoned discourse universally. If you want to discuss scientific truth, logical analysis, mathematical theorems, or the best way to get to Minneapolis, there's just no substitute. But it is precisely the same features of reasoned discourse which make it suitable for discussions about objective reality that render it unsuitable (in many senses) for discussions about subjective values.

[2] I don't think the conservative movement has anything "personal" against black people and women (nor homosexuals, laborers, the middle class, atheists, heretics, Jews, etc.). But oppressing and exploiting such people are "traditional" values which people self-described as "conservative" might logically be expected to conserve.

[3] See Andrew Sullivan, for instance: "[R]ational thought, not revelation, is all that is required to arrive at the fundamental conservative principles of personal responsibility and the rule of law." (Vive La Resistance, 15 Jan 2007)

This statement is not only wrong, it's trivially stupid: Outside of completely uncontroversial interpretations, both "personal responsibility" and "rule of law" are
vacuous in their literal sense, mutually contradictory and so metaphorically flexible that together they can be used to "justify" anything from anarcho-communism to totalitarian fascism.

Also see George Scialabba's excellent essay The Work Cut Out for Us for an example of how conservatives use "personal responsibility" as a framing device.

[4] i.e. Even if you don't buy into this whole "human dignity" business, you'd better reach some sort of accommodation with those who do or you're going to have thousands of uppity (but well-dressed) Negroes[5] marching in your streets, boycotting your buses and taking over your lunch counters.

[5] Kindly untwist your knickers; I'm using the term as a sarcastic jibe towards racists.

Tuesday, January 16, 2007

Terrorism in a Nutshell

The Western methods of waging war--planes, bombs, tanks, infantry, etc.--may have regrettable consequences, but it's not so bad because we wage war for good ends.

The terrorists' method of waging war is bad because they wage war for bad ends.

We know that our ends are good because we don't use bad means; we know the terrorists ends are bad because they do use bad means.

See, it's all very simple.

Andrew Sullivan in a Nutshell

"[T]he fundamental conservative principles [are] personal responsibility and the rule of law." (Vive La Resistance, 15 Jan 2007).

In other words, "I've got mine, Jack, so sit down, shut up, and do as you're told."

The Scientific Ethicist, part I

SteveG at Philosopher's Playground addresses the question of workplace romances (Love Conquers All -- Even Ethics?, January 16, 2007).

There is (in modern society) a general ethical rule against a supervisor and his or her subordinate having a sexual relationship. Can there be exceptions to this rule? Steve quotes a FoaF, "Don't do it unless you are sure it is for real. It's ok, if and only if she is, in fact, the one," and asks, "It's only morally right, if she is Miss Right. Is this right? Does 'happily ever after' trump 'do unto others?'"

How should we consider these exceptions philosophically? Steve offers us two analyses: We should give "finding a soul-mate" a privileged moral status in the model of Aristotelian virtue. The most charitable interpretation ("Who needs Kant[1] when you can just read Cosmo," doesn't seem like much of an argument) I can extract of the alternative is that the rule asserts a deontic imperative which doesn't admit exceptions.

The presentation of both sides of the issue depend on fundamentally unsupported premises: The Aristotelian: "True love is our highest aspiration," thus "giving it a privileged moral standing," versus the Kantian: "You accepted the position of manager and that contractually binds you to certain obligations and one is not to pick up the employees."

The Aristotelian story of virtue suffers from a vicious circularity. How are we to determine what human virtues should be by examining how humans are? If we want to draw any nontrivial conclusions about how people should be distinct from how they actually are, we have to bring in something other than how people are; the alternative is the trivial "people should be how they are". Kantian ethics[2] are even worse from a deductivist perspective: They depend (based on how you read Kant) on the arbitrary adoption of completely unsupported ethical or meta-ethical premises.

I don't want to say that Aristotle and Kant have nothing to say about ethics; they have a lot to say, much of it profound. But neither manages to prove anything at all about ethics; indeed the criticism has been leveled that both philosophers merely rationalized the prejudices of their respective societies and cultures.

Just as neither alternative has a good foundation, neither alternative completely appeals to our intuition. One the one hand, I think most people see the "true love" exception to have real merit. On the other hand, the rule itself has intuitive value, and there's really no way to know if the exception applies until after you've broken the rule. And a rule which admits to arbitrary exceptions is no rule at all.

These unsatisfactory alternatives do not appear only in the particular case of workplace romance; start picking at this thread with a skeptical view and, one way or another, you'll simply unravels three thousand years of ethical philosophy.

No set of laws, ethical rules or social mores has ever come even close to capturing its own members' ethical intuitions. Worse yet, moral intuition is itself a moving target; people's moral intuitions change dramatically over time, and it's hard, perhaps impossible, to rule out the bias towards our own ethical intuitions when examining those of our predecessors and neighbors. Furthermore, any deductive foundation for an ethical system is going to founder on the same criticism which has undermined deductive foundationalism in epistemology: How precisely do you establish the truth of those premises which are not themselves deduced from true premises?

When two alternative answers to a question are neither decisively justifiable nor uncontroversially intuitively appealing, the obvious response is pick a side and hope to shout down your opponents. Just kidding! The obvious response to try and ask a better question.

For three millennia the question in ethical philosophy has been: What true premises should guide our choices? Find the true premises, and we can deduce all of ethics. Stated so bluntly, though, we can see the self-reference: "What true premises should guide our choices?" "Should" is an ethics word; the whole point of trying to find these premises is to use them to determine what we should do. Self-reference is a huge clue that we need to ask a better question. (At least until logicians find a way to apply the same kind of rigor to self-referential formal systems as they can to ordinary hierarchical systems.)

One way to avoid self-reference is to ask the fundamental question epistemically: How do we know things about "true" ethical systems? And, as it happens, we have a brand-spankin' shiny new epistemological system at hand: Science.

To apply science to the issue of ethics, we have to start by talking about the facts, statements uncontroversially accepted as true (usually on the basis of perception). Once we have a some of facts, we try to construct various falsifiable explanations for those facts, and begin the whole tedious (to philosophers) business of self-correcting scientific examination.

So what sorts of things might qualify as facts--i.e. uncontroversially true statements--in the ethical sense? What sort of theories, in general, might we construct to explain those facts? If we apply science, do we get anywhere near our intuitions about how an ethical system should be? And if not, which should give way: Our meta-ethical intuitions or scientific epistemology?

Stay tuned for tomorrow's episode of The Scientific Ethicist! [cue credits]


[1]"Who needs Kant?" by itself is a good question; the correct answer is not immediately obvious.

[2]Or at least how I've usually seen Kantian ethics presented. Since I don't speak German, I'll have to take my friend Ernie Lundquist's word for it: "It's not enough to not understand Kant in English translation. You have to learn German so you can not understand him in the original."

Sunday, January 14, 2007

Recommended Articles

The Height Gap by Burkhard Bilger in The New Yorker (March 29 2004)

John Komlos is the "pope" of a new field of "anthropometric historians", drawing conclusions from historical correlations of physical human measurements, especially of height, with their societies' socioeconomic and political characteristics. His data and conclusions are surprising: He observes that while average height in European societies continues to grow in proportion to their GDP, the average height in the United States has been flat for many years.


Betrayal at The Mahablog by Barbara O'Brien (January 13 2007)

Barbara O'Brian answers Rod Dreher's rhetorical questions (audio link).

"Hadn’t the hippies tried to tell my generation... [to] never, ever take Presidents and Generals at their word?"

"Yes," answers O'Brien.

"Why had we scorned them so blithely?"

"Because you were brainwashed."

Following the links leads us to O'Brien's own How the Democrats Lost Their Spines and Kevin Baker's Stabbed in the Back! (Harpers, June 2006).

Wednesday, January 10, 2007

Po' Little Patty Heaton

I have to disagree somewhat with Ken Levine's defense of conservative actress Patty Heaton. Heaton is apparently getting some heat in the media and her personal life for her political and religious views, heat that appears to exceed mere intellectual criticism.

Levine knows Heaton personally and considers her to be both a top-notch professional and a very nice person. This is a relevant point, and if he'd stopped there, I would have considered it an appropriate and reasonable defense. But he takes one more step (although a baby step, to be sure) which prompts me to comment.

Levine seems to imply that it is unreasonable to be outraged over someone's political views in the first place, that we should show tolerance to such views. The "outrage" (and, according to Levine, "people are outraged over everything these days") is "way out of whack". He asks, "Why the hate?" He wishes "the people who disagree so vehemently with her views could see past them to the lovely caring person she is." I object this unconditioned tolerance, unconditioned at least by anything more substantive than her personality and professionalism.

Now of course I take it for granted that Levine does have a moral line somewhere: I doubt he would defend Dr. Mengele even if the guy were funnier than Charlie Chaplin. Woody Allen has had his share of well-deserved negative scrutiny for his personal behavior and beliefs. The question isn't whether we should have a line; it's whether one's political views are or are not over that line, the line where morality ought to start affecting our personal relationships.

If I'd read the same implication even in the Reagan years, I would have unhesitatingly agreed with Levine. Then I would have agreed that--McCarthyism behind us--even people with whom I profoundly disagree deserve social and professional tolerance and respect. And if it were just a matter of disagreement I would still agree. But the conflict between liberals and conservatives has long ago gone past mere disagreement.

For the last ten years I've heard an increasingly vitriolic line from the conservatives about how liberals are not only wrong (hardly surprising), not only stupid (insulting, but I can handle that), not only ridiculous (which starts to push the line of civil discourse), but also treasonous, evil, terrorist sympathizers eagerly awaiting the overthrow of Western Civilization*. And not just by a few wingnuts on the fringe, but by prominent media personalities, elected politicians, religious leaders, and one of the most popular news networks on the air. And any time a liberal complains about such treatment, it is we who are accused of being uncivil.

Any time a liberal actor opens his or her mouth, the conservatives are on the attack. Barbara Streisand, Robert Redford, the Dixie Chicks, the list goes on. Sean Penn is, according to Sean Hannity, apparently an "Enemy of the State". Outspoken liberals "should be rounded up and put in a detention camp."

Even in my personal life, I'm not going to let anyone who's a conservative duck away from owning this kind of rhetoric, no matter how nice they are, no matter how good they are at their jobs. I know that not all conservatives approve of this sort of rhetoric, but they're part of a movement being led by the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, Pat Robertson, and Jerry Falwell, not to mention George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. And Malkin. And Reynolds. You get the point. If these guys embarrass you, kick them out, marginalize them or leave the movement.

I'm entirely unsympathetic to Heaton's plight. So she's a nice person and a good actress; good for her. But we liberals need to stand up for ourselves: There have to be consequences, not for disagreement, but for associating oneself with hatred and vitriol. If she's losing the esteem of her liberal peers who are daily being subjected to the most vile rhetortic we've seen since we repudiated McCarthy, coming from a movement Heaton self-identifies with, well boohoo.

Cry me a river, conservative.


*Do I really need to Google the links for you?

Sunday, January 07, 2007

Theism, Atheism and Knowledge

I read with interest the debate over legitimate lines of argumentation regarding the existence of God in a Philosophers' Playground comments thread.

One interesting point that Kerry brought up in the thread is the objection to "the assumption that faith is properly thought of in exclusively epistemic terms." While I agree that faith should not be thought of exclusively in terms of how theists say they know things, I'm unpersuaded of the implication that faith should not be thought of at all in terms of knowledge; I think that it is not a "straw man" to consider "faith" in terms of knowledge.

When debating atheists, theists often say, "Atheists have just as much faith as theists," (or variations on this theme). I've been debating theists for many years both on Internet Infidels as well as on no small few religious message boards, and I've seen this theme used by theists a score of times. That theists themselves often raise this theme makes it reasonable to consider the issue of knowledge as relevant to the difference between theism and atheism. I'm also unpersuaded to move the discussion to, as Kerry insists, a more "metaphysical" basis, to consider faith "in terms of life-attitude, interpretive worldview lens, primal relationship with reality, ultimate concern, basic paradigm and so on." What could be more central to one's life-attitude, etc. than one's approach to knowledge? Rather than changing the picture, I think this approach merely buries the issue in jargon.

Is there really a difference between theists' and atheists' beliefs about knowledge? What do atheists actually believe about knowledge? How about theists?

Scientifically-minded atheists believe only what they know; they know only what they directly experience or what is somehow logically and falsifiably justified by what they experience (I use justified by advisably, in a broader sense than derived from); and they have confidence in their knowledge only to the degree that they have carefully justified that knowledge. Even the knowledge that scientists are generally trustworthy is justified by the experience of scientists' statements being experienced as accurate; the experience in this case is the experience of reading or hearing words.

Theists also use the related theme that atheists say they know things about which they are not certain*. This observation is accurate: An Atheist cannot be certain about anything beyond his or her own immediate subjective experience; anything else can be known only provisionally, and is all potentially subject to revision. This stance is intentional and principled: Uncertain knowledge that we can actually have is better than certainty we cannot ever have.

(Of course no atheist actually achieves perfection in this regard; we are human, after all, and susceptible to the same cognitive biases as anyone else. However, we at least think that everything we think we know is justified, and we would consider it an error to be immediately corrected if we found some belief that didn't measure up.)

The questions then become: Do theists believe to be true about God only that which they know? If so, do they know things by insisting on a logical, falsifiable connection to experience? And what's their attitude towards certainty? Note that I'm not going to go into whether atheists' approach to knowledge is better or worse than theists'; I want only to show that they are indeed different.

In my discussions with theists, I've found that there are five main classes of beliefs about God:

  1. They do not believe they can say anything about God which is actually true; they use the word "God" as a metaphor for their opinions and preferences.

  2. They believe particular statements about God to be true, but they do not claim to "know" that such statements are true.

  3. They actually do say that they know things to be true about God, but they say their knowledge is not logically and falsifiably justified by experience.

  4. They claim that their worldview is so far beyond the atheistic and scientific worldview that honest, meaningful communication is impossible.

  5. They know things about God, they believe this knowledge to be logically and falsifiably connected to experience, but on close examination this turns out not to be the case.



Those in the first class are, as I mentioned before, indistinguishable from atheists. If you press such people, though, you'll often find that they will indeed say that some statements about God are true, such as, "God is good," or, "There is a design or purpose to the universe." Which puts them in the second or third classes.

Those in the second and third stance are obviously distinguishable from atheists: Atheists believe to be true only what they know, and they know things based only on experience or connection to experience. If you explicitly deny these qualifications, you've established a difference.

There's just no talking to those in the fourth class, metaphysical relativists, presuppositionalists and the like. Without some form of basic agreement, honest communication is impossible. I'll say only that, in my experience, I've seen only three basic kinds of metaphysics: science, making stuff up, and not thinking at all; the only difference is how many layers of jargon the "making stuff up" is buried under.

The last class is more subtle. The "crux of the biscuit" here is falsifiability. It's not enough that that one's knowledge is just "somehow" connected to experience, it has to be falsifiably connected to experience to qualify as knowledge in the scientific sense. The existence of God, for example, is not falsifiably connected to beautiful sunsets: If they did not experience beautiful sunsets, theists would not then conclude the nonexistence of God. (Theists do not, after all, conclude the nonexistence of God from the complete lack of beautiful, soul-inspiring smallpox pustules.) Again, it's not my intention to justify and argue for falsifiability; regardless of whether falsifiability holds water, scientists use it and theists do not: It is a difference.

No matter how you slice it, self-described theists either don't actually believe in God, or they have an objectively determinable difference in their approaches to knowledge.


*This objection is sort of silly; "How can you know that God does not exist if you haven't looked everywhere," is trivially answered by, "How can you know that God does exist if you haven't actually seen him where you have looked?" The fundamental charge of hypocrisy--that atheists claim to know something they don't know--is at least relevant, even if it's easily refuted by the fact that atheists don't claim certainty for knowledge.

Monday, January 01, 2007

Ideological Focus/Ideological Rigidity

David Sirota makes a terrific point about the lack of progressives' and liberals' ideological focus in his review of America's Right Turn. I agree completely with Sirota: There is a lack of ideological focus on the left, and it has crippled our ability to implement humanistic, liberal principles in actual real-world politics. It's not my intention to contradict Sirota, but he gives us only one side of the story, and I want to talk about both sides.

While a lack of focus is definitely crippling, too much focus--or focus on the wrong things--can be just as debilitating. The most obvious example is in today's politics: The conservative movement's rigidity and fixation on its ideological principles has handed the Democratic party a majority in Congress in spite of the party's almost complete lack of any consistent, coherent ideology. One can also look at Soviet and Chinese Communism and just about any major or minor religion; certainly no one can accuse them of ideological spinelessness.

The defining feature of this sort of bad ideological rigidity is its disconnection from reality. The Republican party lost Congress not because the war in Iraq was unjust or immoral (which it was), but because they allowed their ideological principles to override their grasp of reality, botched the job, and have lost the war. The war was probably winnable (although at a moral cost which would have sickened any liberal humanist), but they didn't win it. Contrawise, the war was also entirely avoidable on even conservative principles, had the ideology not substituted for a rational assessment of reality.

I think we definitely must have greater ideological focus and discipline in the progressive, liberal movement; it is not enough to stand for only standing for nothing. Before one can compromise, one must have some definite stance from which to negotiate. On the other hand, we must also ensure (or at least stave off for as long possible) that focus and discipline does not degenerate into rigidity and delusion.

It is not possible to rigorously define how well an ideology maps to reality. It is entirely possible to make a good, rational case for the realism of any ideology right up until the moment that some catastrophe highlights the delusions and brings the movement to its knees. On the other hand I believe there are some ideological and procedural measures that can keep any movement from straying too far from reality.

The most important step is to break the "ought-is" connection. Just because something is good does not mean it is true. It was good (according to conservative ideology) that we should invade Iraq, therefore it was true that we could successfully do so. A moral stance never implies anything at all about reality. To be successful, any movement must take into account both its moral position as well as an objective, scientific view of the reality which cares nothing at all about our moral judgments.

For a movement to be disciplined and focused entails that it restrict some forms of internal criticism; to maintain flexibility and a connection to reality, however, entails that it must allow some other forms of internal criticism. I don't think it's possible to draw this line with razor-sharp precision, but I think some guidelines can help. Rationality demands we must break the ought-is connection, which suggests where to at least roughly draw the line: What is good and bad is an essential feature of an ideology; if you do not subscribe to the moral dimension of the ideology, you are simply not entitled to criticize it internally (one can, of course, externally criticize the moral dimension of any ideology). On the other hand, criticism of the ideology's connection to reality must always be internally permitted.

(The gray area, of course, lies in that it is not always possible to determine whether some internal criticism is really a criticism of the morality or of its implementation.)

Any moral ideology must be meaningful in reality: If an ideology defines something as good, we also need a way of objectively telling whether that good is or is not actually appearing in reality. Any ideology which does not have an objective way of measuring its own implementation is nothing more than metaphysical mumbo-jumbo. An internal critical process is necessary, but the practical failure of of Marxism, which elevates vacuous dialectic to a religious principle, shows that just any old kind of internal criticism is not sufficient.

An internal critical process must be based upon some connection to reality. The scientific community is the most successful institution ever devised, and its success is due to its monomaniacal focus on reality-based internal criticism, the insistence (in principle at least) that internal criticism be exclusively based on experiments rather than consistency with some revealed authority or based simply on how loudly one can shout.

Probably the most important pitfall for any movement to avoid is to "root for the shirts". Again, the present difficulties of the conservative movement can be traced in no small part to the reliance on the Republican party by the conservative movement. Despite the early separation between conservatism and the Republican party, years of successful cooperation appears to have led to a degree of complacency. Conservatives stopped voting for Republicans because they were conservative and started voting for them because they were Republicans. In response, Republicans stopped actually implementing conservative principles and simply degenerated into the worst kind of self-serving corruption.

The preceding is all very abstract, so let me provide a more concrete example in my own view of progressive liberalism.

The moral dimension of liberalism is Humanism: what is good is individuals' human happiness; what is bad is individuals' human suffering. This moral view stands in contrast to the conservative (and especially Libertarian) view that society should be a particular way (e.g. laissez-faire capitalism, Christian sex-negativity and hierarchal authoritarianism), that certain societal mores are intrinsically good. If these mores result in human happiness, that's a bonus, of course, but if they result in suffering, that's just too bad.

While happiness and suffering are the epitome of subjectivity, it is trivially easy to objectively determine whether someone is happy or suffering: You simply ask him. It is therefore possible (at least in principle) to measure whether some practical agenda is has a humanistic, liberal effect in reality: Ask the people. Of course, it is decidedly not trivial to determine in advance whether some proposed policy will or will not have a humanistic effect. Nor is it trivial to determine how precisely to measure happiness or suffering on a statistical scale, or which particular measures we should concentrate on optimizing.

The moral dimension of liberal humanism is not internally questionable. Either you agree, and you're a humanist, or you disagree and you're not a humanist. It's certainly possible to externally criticize the moral dimension of humanism, but the fact that one merely brings up a moral criticism makes it an external criticism. Contrawise, pointing out that someone doesn't hold to the moral dimension, the essential moral vision, is always legitimate internal criticism.

On the other hand, there is debate about how to actually promote human happiness, how to prevent human suffering; in general about how it is most effective to implement humanist moral values in society. Such debate, such questioning is always legitimate as internal criticism, no matter who offers the question and no matter whom is questioned.

The Democratic party appears, at least at this point, to be the best means to implement a liberal, humanistic moral vision in society. But we must not worship the party itself over and above our moral vision. Democratic politicians are, first of all, politicians: It is their job to do whatever it takes to be elected. They will actually act according to a moral vision if and only if that moral vision is necessary to be elected, if and only if each individual citizen votes for any politician, Democratic or Republican, only if the politician subscribes to the citizen's moral vision and is accountable for how well its been implemented.

It's not enough for the Democratic party to be not as bad as the Republicans. It's not enough that they are not as corrupt, not as stupid, not as indifferent to happiness and suffering. If a Democrat is not as bad as her Republican opponent, I might cast my vote in her column, but I'm voting against, not for. And I might well simply vote for a marginal candidate who actively subscribes to my own moral vision (as I did in 2000*) and too bad if the worst candidate wins.

If progressives have and can enunciate a clear moral vision, maintain internal focus and discipline adhering to that moral vision, maintain a reality-based internal debate about the effectiveness in implementing that moral vision, and avoid conflating the movement with the party or its leaders, we can not only steal a page from the Republican play book, but do them one better and actually get things done in reality.



*I like Al Gore, I like him a lot. But he ran (ideologically) in 2000 not as a progressive or a liberal but rather as a moderate conservative (basically Clinton without the charm). And I'll be damned if I ever vote for Lieberman even for dog catcher.