What makes altruism good?

Alonzo Fyfe asks What Makes Altruism Good?, and concludes that the atheist is stuck on the horns of a dilemma. On the one hand, Alonzo is correct, "[T]he arguments for the existence of intrinsic values are substantially identical to arguments for the existence of God."

On the other hand, the only alternative is an "absurd" subjectivist account:

One option is that the atheist will defend some sort of strict subjectivism – the type that says, "I don't like rape; therefore, rape is wrong." At which point the theist will simply respond that, "This means you can make rape perfectly legitimate simply by acquiring a fondness for raping others. Slavery, genocide, the torturing of a young child are all legitimate if the agent doesn’t feel bad about enslaving others, slaughtering people, or torturing young children."

Alonzo correctly notes that attributing ethical beliefs to evolution just pushes the problem around.

Either altruism is good because it has an inherent, intrinsic quality of goodness built into it (or it produces something that has intrinsic goodness like evolutionary fitness), or it is good because we have evolved a disposition to be altruistic.

On the one hand, where does this mysterious intrinsic quality of goodness come from? On the other, had we evolved a disposition to rape, then rape would be good.

The theist is, however, on the horns of the exact same dilemma, as Socrates argued in Euthyphro. The theist just moves the problem around without solving it by attributing ethics to God just as the evolutionary biologist moves the (philosophical) problem around. The dilemma is fundamental; it does not differentiate between theism and atheism.

But the dilemma is not really a dilemma: The subjectivist horn is typically presented incorrectly. Alonzo makes the key fallacy explicit: "I don't like rape; therefore, rape is wrong." This is a non sequitur fallacy: the conclusion cannot follow from the premise. We cannot deductively conclude an objective property from a subjective property; we are adding something in the conclusion (objectivity) that is not present in the premise (subjectivity).

We could use the scientific method: We can hypothesize that rape really is wrong and therefore we don't like rape. But this simplistic scientific hypothesis is quickly falsified by the fact that some people (i.e. rapists) actually do like rape. We must come up with some hypothesis that explains the fact that most people don't like rape but some people do, and how to tell the difference between such people.

One obvious feature of objective physical truth is that the truth is true and knowable regardless of how people feel about it. Nobody likes childhood leukemia, but it is manifestly real. Everyone — at least everyone who has tripped and taken a bad fall — would prefer that gravity be variable and subject to our will, but it keeps pulling us towards the Earth regardless of our convenience. And yet we see nothing like that in our ethical beliefs: There seem to be no ethical beliefs — at least no secular ethical beliefs — that are strongly held contrary to the desires at some level of the majority of people.

Oddly enough, it is the bizarre, seemingly arbitrary religious ethical beliefs that give the strongest support for objective religious ethics. We must, for example, execute our disobedient children by stoning regardless of how disgusting and barbaric we believe such an action to be. But Socrates' argument still stands: this view doesn't make ethics objective, it just makes ethics a subjective property of God. The theist hasn't eliminated subjectivity, he's just concentrated the subjectivity in a single agent.

The way out of the dilemma is to say, "I don't like rape." Full stop. There's no "therefore". The theist's objection falls flat: "If I liked rape, I would like rape, duh. But it's a fact that I don't like rape." If we all liked eating pie, we would eat pie; most people do in fact like eating pie, and most people do in fact actually eat pie. No problem.

We can also observe that major changes in our legal and ethical beliefs are preceded by a change in subjective attitudes. We did not eliminate slavery until after people started to subjectively find slavery to be abhorrent. (And after the economic benefits of slavery became irrelevant.) We are now in a struggle to extend basic civil rights to gay people, and this struggle is driven by the fact that people's subjective attitudes towards gay people have changed: Those people fighting for gay civil rights are just those who no longer find homosexuality abhorrent.

Eliminating the "therefore" means that our socially constructed ethics, morality and law do not fundamentally reflect an understanding of how society "should" be; they are, rather, an expression of what people actually want (and an understanding of how we can best satisfy our desires constrained by physical reality and imperfect knowledge).

Furthermore, there's a feedback system: Our prior social constructions influence (in complex ways) what we presently want, and what we presently want influences (in complex ways) our future social constructions. these social constructions are therefore dialectical: Everything is "bouncing around", not just unfolding in a linear, easily predictable way. Rather we see conflicts (contradictions in Marxian terminology) between social constructions, actual desires and changes in our understanding of objective physical reality. These conflicts, and their resolution, drive changes in the social constructions of ethics, morality and law.

We no longer need ask that evolutionary psychology* give us a philosophical justification for our ethics, we need only ask this science to give us a causal explanation of why we actually have some of the desires we do in fact have. Likewise, we're equally freed from drawing philosophical conclusions from our causal history: If we evolved to have certain desires, those desires will have in the past influenced our present social constructions. But if our desires have changed, if they are in conflict with our present social constructions or our understanding of physical reality, the causal history is irrelevant to the dialectic. In just the same sense because we evolved to die relatively young does not now mean that our present desire for long life is somehow immoral.

The atheist's desire for an objective morality is nothing more than a holdover from our theistic days, the desire to disclaim personal responsibility for our actions.

The "horns" of the dilemma resolve into simple truth and falsity, between an scientific understanding of psychology and sociology on the one hand and mysticism and bullshit — theistic or atheistic — on the other. We humans are beings with desires. Rationality is shared; nothing else but our idiosyncratic desires define us as individuals. And we are all stuck in a room with each other: We have no choice but to engage in negotiation and propaganda to try to live together as best we can.

Coming to Power

Phoesune speculates about The Future Civil War where a revolutionary communist government — implausibly led by yours truly — might come to power.

Who knows? Stranger things have happened.

Sunsara Taylor at U of MN on "Away With All Gods"

Sunsara Taylor at U of MN on "Away With All Gods"

On a crisp November evening at the University of Minnesota, a surprisingly large crowd gathered in a basement auditorium to hear from Sunsara Taylor, an unapologetic Revolutionary Communist and militant atheist. Hearing the views of a communist isn't as shocking as it may be in other arenas of the public; however, it isn't often that a communist will admit that they are also an atheist. Sunsara Taylor is not ashamed of either her Revolutionary Communism, or her atheism, as she presented Bob Avakian's book, "Away With All Gods, Unchaining the Mind and Radically Changing the World."

Implementing Communism

Part I: Setting the stage

This series is entirely hypothetical, to explore how one would implement communism under more-or-less realistic circumstances. I place myself as the decision maker not because I have any real ambition to hold such a position, but only to avoid the rhetorical awkwardness of placing my own ideas in the mouth of a puppet.

Let's say that after a period of profound civil unrest and violence (perhaps an actual civil war), I have at least the opportunity of greatness thrust upon me: I inexplicably find myself the head of a revolutionary government that has — at least temporarily — seized power by virtue of having the only remaining disciplined army that can effectively enforce its decisions. There is no democratically elected government for me to hand over the reins of power: I can either exercise the power I have, turn it over to another non-democratically-elected leader, or allow the country to devolve into chaos. For better or worse, I choose to exercise power.

I'm faced with the following material circumstances:

The material productive capacity of the country has been substantially reduced, but still remains in good enough condition that I'm fortunately not faced with the sort of desperate material poverty faced by the Russian and Chinese revolutionary governments.

I'm also not faced with the implacable hostility of a well-organized and prosperous capitalist-imperialist enemy. China and Europe are the only remaining powers that might form an a dedicated enemy, but both are cautiously neutral, preoccupied with their own crises. I do not have to face — as did Stalin and Mao — an imminent invasion or nuclear war. Plus, I still have access to the existing US nuclear arsenal, making the country more-or-less invasion-proof.

I therefore have considerably more latitude in my decision making. I can be reasonably confident that one bad decision won't starve millions, nor must I put everything else on the back burner and whip the population to stave off an imminent war.

Politically, I'm in a much more precarious position. Although my government does have state power, I do not have full democratic legitimacy. The only social advantage I have is the lack of a plausible alternative. I have the enthusiastic support of about a third of the population, the passive acceptance of another third, and the active hostility of a third.

I have internal organizational issues as well: While I have the enthusiastic support of my own organization, it has ipso facto the characteristics necessary to seize state power. Some of these characteristics (including too much enthusiastic support) are not conducive to actually running a government.

The remainder of this series will explore my ideas and conjectures for what I would specifically do organizationally, politically, economically and socially in such a hypothetical situation.

Materialism and Empirio-criticism

I'm currently reading Lenin's Materialism and Empirio-criticism.

I'm about a third of the way through the book. Lenin has devoted this portion of the book to demonstrating that the "empirio-critical" school of philosophy — which criticizes late 19th and early 20th century materialism — is at best nothing more than an elaborate restatement of Berkeley's subjective idealism; at worst it's hypocritical and sometimes mendacious. Lenin's scholarship is meticulous and his analysis is incisive, direct and bullshit-free. It remains to be seen if he offers good positive arguments for materialism.

The fundamental issue hinges on existence, and what precisely we mean by this word.

The subjective idealists have a good point, a point that deserves careful consideration. It is uncontroversial that all of our knowledge fundamentally rests on a foundation of subjective experience, and nothing but subjective experience. Therefore, any concept of an objective, material reality must posit something extra, something we cannot derive from the subjective foundation of our knowledge. The materialist must "bite the bullet" and admit that yes, we are indeed adding something extra to our subjective foundation.

But the subjective idealist must bite his own bullet: he must account for our overpowering and unshakable intuition of naive realism. This intuition might have as little veracity as our intuitions about the existence of God, but naive realism cannot simply be ignored and dismissed as irrelevant.

The subjective idealist, from Berkeley to Mach, says that our "epistemic project" is to organize and predict our subjective experiences, that all "scientific" theories discuss nothing but our subjective experiences. All well and good; even a materialist such as myself will agree to thus restrict our epistemic project.

However, the way in which we organize and predict our experience becomes relevant. If subjective idealism is to be different from materialism, the components of our underlying understanding of experience cannot have certain properties: notably properties that are stable and consistent independent of our subjective experience. Subjective idealism as an ontology must call all properties properties of the mind.

And not just the mind in general, but the individual's own conscious mind: subjective idealism entails solipsism. Pushing any properties to the "subconscious" mind, or the mind of God, or the absolute ideal — anything other than the individual's own conscious mind — adds something extra to our conscious experience. Furthermore, whatever "extra" we add must have the exact same properties as the materialist's objective reality: the materialist intentionally attributes to objective reality the minimum necessary to account for our subjective experience. Any move away from solipsism, and either the materialist and the faux subjective idealist are talking about exactly the same thing and the controversy is merely a choice of label, or it is the subjective idealist who is adding even more than the materialist to individual subjective experience, demolishing his fundamental argument from parsimony.

So the difference between the subjective idealist and the materialist is not epistemic: both must admit the subjective foundation of our knowledge. The controversy is ontological: about what kinds of properties to attribute to the components of our organization of our experience.

Subjective idealism says that the components of our subjective organization of the world, our mental objects, are "bundles of sense impressions" and nothing more. This characterization works well enough as a metaphor; one must charitably assume that the subjective idealist is well aware that our mental processes are more complicated than simple "bundling". And, of course, given that the materialist must admit to the subjective foundation of our knowledge (if not our ontology), she must approve of the idea that our mental objects have a lot to do with our sense impressions. But it's all too easy to take a metaphor literally.

There are some aspects of my experience that I am never surprised about. When something appears red, I never think, "Wait! that's not how red appears!" When I remember something, I never think, "Wait! That's not how I remember it." I just see the color red; I just remember what I remember. If I don't see something as red, I just see it as green or blue or fuchsia; I don't see it as the "wrong" kind of red.

There are, however, other aspects of my experience that I'm regularly surprised about: As I move through the world, I have sense impressions I've never had before: The position of other cars as I drive, the specific locations, colors, smells, textures of trees and bushes when I walk in the woods and so forth. I'm constantly being — in some sense — surpised by the my experiences. I have sense impressions I've never had before: my mental objects as "bundles of sense impressions" do not actually include those new sense impressions. And yet these surprising sense impressions "fit" in various different ways with my pre-existing mental object. They are both surprising in one sense and (usually) unsurprising in another sense.

There are only three choices:

1. These regularities are already part of my conscious mind and my conscious mind is imposing the regularities on my sense impressions
2. My conscious mind is randomly creating regularities and imposing them on my sense impressions
3. These regularities are independent of my conscious mind, and I'm consciously discovering them.

We can exclude the first: If these regularities were already part of my conscious mind, I would be aware of them before I had any sense impressions at all: I could never be surprised by a sense impression. We can exclude the second: There are too many higher-level regularities to the regularities for them to be random. Which leaves only the third option: These regularities must be independent of my conscious mind. The label is irrelevant: whether I label these regularities as "subconscious", the mind of God, the absolute ideal, objective reality, a Cartesian demon, I'm committed to some sort of externalism: my mental objects have properties independent of my conscious mind. And once I'm committed to externalism I might as well be committed to materialism, since materialism is defined to be the minimal externalism necessary to account for the independent properties of my mental objects.

Once we view the debate between subjective idealism and materialism as a debate about the kind of ontology we mentally construct, evidence starts pouring in to support materialism.

My mind constructs elaborate causal histories for my experiences, causal histories that extend billions of years — the same sorts of years that I directly experience — before my earliest memories. I simply cannot appeal to randomness or pre-existing conscious thought to account for the construction of these elaborate causal histories.

My experiences do not automatically conform to my convenience or pleasure; indeed they rarely do so, and never do so without performing what — are from a position of subjective realism — elaborate and pointless rituals. I wish the subjective experience of tasting coffee, I have to experience filling the coffee pot with water, getting the can of coffee down from the shelf, etc. Worse yet, to have the experience of having a coffee pot, I have to go to work, earn money, take that money to a store, etc. Again, I can't appeal to randomness to account for these elaborate rituals.

We are constantly flooded with experiential evidence of externalism and thus materialism. There is simply no way to construct an ontology without giving my mental objects the properties of independence, of the capability to surprise.

Atheism in a nutshell

The position of strong atheists — myself included — is that we know that no God exists as confidently as we know any moderately complicated but well-established scientific theory, such as evolution or quantum mechanics.

If one objects to strong atheism it is either just because we are confident, or because we assert a degree of confidence that is not warranted by the actual facts. To object to confidence per se entails epistemic nihilism. If one objects that the confidence is not warranted by the facts, then only the substance of the argument is relevant.

The whole argument is complicated (again, much like a moderately complicated but well-established scientific theory) but it can be briefly summarized.

There are two classes of definitions of god: empirically falsifiable and metaphysical. I adopt Popper's general stance that there's nothing inherently disreputable about metaphysics per se (although there can be bad metaphysics just like there can be bad scientific theories).

The falsifiable definitions of God are actually false: they either make predictions that are definitely falsified by experience (e.g. the Problem of Evil) or they are over-elaborated and overcomplicated restatements of ordinary natural science and fall victim to Occam's razor.

The metaphysical definitions of God either require presuppositions at least as controversial (if not more controversial) than simply assuming the existence of God (e.g. the Ontological argument) or are (again) over-elaborated and overcomplicated restatements of metaphysical naturalism and again fall victim to Occam's razor.

The analysis is somewhat complicated by the sheer number of patently invalid arguments for the existence of God. Invalid arguments demonstrate nothing per se (nb. the fallacy fallacy). However, valid arguments ought to drive out invalid arguments; when one position is riddled with invalid arguments, that's strong evidence that there are no valid arguments to drive out the invalid.

Political respectability

Pretty much every idea*, however stupid, false or abhorrent, deserves political (i.e. legal) respectability. No one ought to be punished in a strictly political sense for saying just about anything. Political respectability, at least in a free society, deserves to be taken for granted. The assumption of political respectability goes not only to the expression of ideas, but the criticism of others' ideas: just because I criticize an idea does not mean I advocate withdrawing political respectability from that idea. This position stands in contrast with the ethical criticism of actions: to criticize an action entails advocating withdrawing political respectability for that action and making it illegal.

*With the usual exceptions of libel, slander, conspiracy and shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theater.

Because of this principle I tend to find criticism of how someone says something to be tedious and irritating. If someone says something, they said what they wanted to say the way they wanted to say it. If you want to say something different in a different way, just say what you have to say in the way you want to say it. The whole framing debate fills me with aggravation and nausea; people such as Nisbet and Mooney simply do not understand freedom of speech in any deep, philosophical way.

Ethics and law

As a general rule, ethics should be translated into law. If you believe something is ethically compelled, then why not force people to do it? If you're not willing to force people to do something, then in what sense are you saying it's ethically wrong as opposed to merely not to your taste?

Let's take rape and the oppression of women in Islamic countries, for example. I'm completely uninterested in people who fiddle around with the Koran and try to prove that Islam is not misogynist. I really don't give a shit one way or the other what Muslims think their imaginary friend thinks. I will be convinced that Islam supports the rights of women when they make and vigorously enforce laws against sexual and physical assault against women. Until then any talk about the rights of women in Islam is at best just so much bullshit and at worst contemptible hypocrisy.

Contrawise, if you think abortion is wrong, you should try to make it illegal. Period. End of story. If you don't want to make abortion illegal, then why talk about how abortion is some sort "tragedy" or social loss? If it's just that abortion is not to your taste, then just shut the fuck up (metaphorically speaking) and don't have one; it's none of your goddamn business whether a woman has an abortion. (Actually, talking about how abortion is a tragedy is an end-run around the law mechanisms, attempting to use force in the form of social ostracism to replace the courts and formal legal mechanisms.)

This pretty much goes for all our ethical intuitions. The best we can do with our law is make it match our ethical intuitions; and the only thing that separates our ethical intuitions from our tastes and preferences is our willingness to use force. I don't intend a superficial translation of ethics to law: there are various levels of abstraction and complicated considerations necessary to most effectively map our ethical intuitions to law. But at the end of the day, law must follow and reflect our ethical intuitions, and some belief is an ethical intuition if and only if one desires it be mapped into law.

There's one glaring exception, though: freedom of speech. Even though our ethical intuition may hold that certain kinds of speech are really abhorrent and ethically objectionable, we have to permit all speech. And this principle goes beyond merely the tolerance of other people's abhorrent speech to permit our own abhorrent speech. If you want to speak merely for the pleasure of hearing your own voice, you can talk in private.

Law and law enforcement is the socialization of the individual, unilateral use of force. In order to socialize the use of force, though, there has to be a non-coercive mechanism at some level to actually perform the socialization. We cannot decide as a society how well our law matches our ethical intuitions unless we can communicate those ethical intuitions to each other, especially when those intuitions contradict present law. Without near-absolute freedom of speech, the law cannot change. What becomes illegal would become unspeakable.

So the way to manage speech is "upside down" compared with how we use speech to manage actions. When managing speech, we must have the freedom to say whatever we please, and criticize what anyone else says without implying we wish to make that speech illegal. Ethical criticism of an action however, always entails that the speaker, explicitly or covertly, advocates making that action illegal.

Revolution, food riots in America by 2012

Revolution, food riots in America by 2012:

Gerald Celente, the CEO of Trends Research Institute... says that by 2012 America will become an undeveloped nation, that there will be a revolution marked by food riots, squatter rebellions, tax revolts and job marches, and that holidays will be more about obtaining food, not gifts. ...

"There will be a revolution in this country," he said. "It's not going to come yet, but it's going to come down the line and we're going to see a third party and this was the catalyst for it: the takeover of Washington, D. C., in broad daylight by Wall Street in this bloodless coup. And it will happen as conditions continue to worsen."

[h/t to BJ and kevin]

Light bulb joke

How many computer programmers does it take to change a light bulb?

Three: one to change it, one to ask, "How many computer programmers does it take to change a light bulb?" and one to answer, "Three: one to change it..."