The utilitarianism of ridicule

I think it's good to ridicule religion.

Ridicule is complicated from a utilitarian perspective. By design, ridicule is immediately harmful: it makes its target feel bad. So, in a consequentialist utilitarian framework, we can justify ridicule only by concluding first that we can know, directly or indirectly, that the overall effects of ridicule promote more happiness and less suffering in the long run to offset the immediate suffering. Second, we have to know that there is no alternative means that is less immediately harmful.

The idea of doing something bad in the short run for a good in the long run is incredibly problematic. We have a lot more knowledge about the short run than we do about the long run. That's the whole point of ethical principles: ethical principles encapsulate our social knowledge (as well as social prejudice, confusion, ignorance, and delusion) about the expected long run effects of short run actions. I strongly suspect that, for instance, people don't like flipping the switch in the Trolley Problem* precisely because we are socially conditioned that uncertainty** about the indirect and long term effects prohibit actively killing a person. We also must consider the meta-problem: when we justify doing a short-run harm for a long-run good, we have to also ask: who will be making those decisions, under what constraints, and to fulfill which ends? But saying that causing immediate, local harm now for a long-run, global good is problematic is not to say that it cannot possibly be justified.


*See also Can Bad Men Make Good Brains do Bad Things?

**The assumption of certainty made in the presentation of the problem just doesn't help: our intuition about the world is both unconscious and deeply conditioned (usually) about how the world actually is; it's difficult or impossible for us to consciously adjust our intuition to conform to alternative physics. It's hard enough to adjust our intuition to true but non-obvious physics.

The justification for ridicule, then, must address what the long-run effects of ridicule will be, how we know what those effects are, whether they outweigh the short-run harm, whether less harmful methods exist, and how we socially decide whom to ridicule and when. I think we can justify ridiculing religion on these grounds.

The expected long-term effects of ridicule are change of behavior. When we ridicule some people, or actions, or ideas, we are saying that these people, or people who do or think these things should change. Hence, ridiculing people for unchangeable characteristics — race, sex, gender, sexual orientation, height, and, to some extent weight — cannot effect any long-term change in behavior; therefore, the immediate harm cannot be outweighed by the impossible to achieve long-term effects. If you ridicule someone for being Black, you're just being mean.

Second, since individuals are the best judge of what is harmful, it doesn't make sense to ridicule people only for harming themselves. Even if fat people could change their weight (and there's a lot of science that shows that losing weight is incredibly difficult, and often impossible), they harm no one but themselves. Presumably, they are rational people, and have decided that even if losing weight were possible for them, the short-term pain outweighs the long-term benefits, and they, not I, are the experts on their own utility functions.

However, we can reasonably expect long-term positive effects of ridiculing religion. We want people to stop using religion to hurt other people. We know how religion harms people: people use religion to justify and perpetuate sexism, misogyny, racism, homophobia, national chauvinism, and a host of other obvious ills. We know that people use religion to perpetuate subordination, exploitation, and in some cases outright victimization. And we know that the underlying justification — some people know what God wants, and what God wants overrides anything that mere human beings might want — is utterly without merit.

(I want to take a brief sidebar and address the argument: I'm (this or that religion), and I don't think that God wants us to be sexist, racist, exploitative, etc. The fundamental problem with religion is not content but methodology. You don't know any better than the sexists, racists, etc. about what God does or does not want. You have to appeal either to personal revelation or to scripture. If you appeal to revelation, then the charisma and rhetorical skill of those who claim revelation becomes more ethically persuasive than the content of the revelation. If you appeal to scripture, then, well, scripture is equivocal enough that it's certainly possible to read most anything into it, but you're still relying on the charisma and rhetoric of the interpreter, rather than the content of the interpretation, for ethical persuasion. If you want to argue on the basis of content, then you don't need God in the first place: we can just look at the content directly.)

We won't stop all sexism, misogyny, racism, etc. ad nauseam by convincing people to stop being religious (or just stop being such assholes about their religion), but I think we could put a real dent in these social ills. And whatever positive effects religion might have, if we can tell that that effects are positive without appeal to religion, then we can find non-religious ways of gaining the effects.

We also have to look at the potential negative effects. First, ridicule might be ineffective. Ridicule often enough is effective, but it's not always effective. But the immediate short-run effects are relatively small: some people have their feelings hurt. Just having a small negative effect is not a justification by itself — a small harm is still a harm — but it does say that the risk of ineffectuality is relatively low.

More importantly, when individuals of a particular religion are generally subjugated in some context, ridicule can perpetuate and justify that subjugation. For example, one argument against Charlie Hebdo is that because Muslims are generally subjugated in France, ridiculing Islam perpetuates and justifies that subjugation. This argument has some merit but I think there are some good counter-arguments.

First, Muslims in France are not subjugated because they are Muslims (much less because Charlie Hebdo ridiculed them). I'm no expert in French sociology, but as a communist, I tend to see the underlying cause of subjugation and exploitation as capitalism, not religion. If Muslims really are subjugated in France, it's because capitalism requires that somebody be subjugated, and the Muslims (perhaps among others) just got the shitty end of the stick: if it weren't the Muslims, then it would be someone else. I obviously don't think that people should be subjugated because of their religion (or race, or gender, or any other ineluctable characteristic), but I also don't think that we should distribute subjugation "fairly": we shouldn't subjugate anyone.

But not everyone believes that capitalism is the underlying problem, or that capitalism requires subjugation, or that subjugation is necessarily bad. I would disagree with the position overall, but I do think the argument has at least some merit that the subjugation of Muslims in French society is at least in part due to their resistance to assimilation. Just being religious, just going to the Mosque on Friday instead of Church on Sunday (or no Church at all), is no barrier to assimilation, but insisting on private standards of justice, such as the permission of the subjugation of women, or restrictions on others' free speech, can be barriers to assimilation.

The position of Muslim immigrants to France is very different from the position of Black people in the United States: Black Americans were forcibly brought to the United States and forced into literal chattel slavery (along with genocide and wars of aggression, one of the Unforgivable Curses). Their presence in the United States is 100% the result of and the responsibility of White Americans. Black Americans have zero duty to "assimilate" to a culture that forced their inclusion; White Americans have at the very least (and we have a lot more duties) a duty to simply take Black Americans as they are, and change ourselves to include them fully in American society. In contrast, Muslim immigrants to France came there, presumably, because they thought French society was better than their original society. And French colonialism was not slavery; decolonization is obviously justified, but non-assimilative immigration seems more difficult to justify.

Assimilation and acculturation are obviously complicated issues: immigrants, by virtue of acceptance into a culture, are entitled to participate in the social construction and evolution of that culture. But, frankly, ridicule (on both sides) is a part of the process of social construction. Even native-born members of a culture have a duty of enculturation; as a native-born White American, I cannot simply say that I am who I am, and everyone else has to unconditionally adjust around me. And if were I try to say that, I would subject myself to ridicule.

The point is: Unlike Black Americans, French Muslims did not start out as completely powerless. They chose to came (and the French chose to accept them), so they are part of the process. Immigrants have the right to argue, by any appropriate and effective means, for whatever cultural change they want; unlike White Americans, the French also have the right to argue back. They should avoid perpetuating subjugation, but unless Muslims were almost completely powerless, just because they are exploited to some extent in France does not mean they are immune to criticism. And if ridicule is legitimately part of that argument back, that criticism, then so be it.

(In contrast, the only "argument" White Americans have is, "I'm sorry. What happened to you and what is happening now is completely inexcusable. I can't change the past, but I will do today whatever you think is reasonable or moderate to fix the problem.")

We next have to ask: is there a better alternative to ridicule? Obviously, rational persuasion is always better. But rational persuasion is singularly ineffective when it comes to changing most people's religious beliefs. (Rational persuasion does work on some individuals, and in general having a rational basis for any position is valuable.) When rational persuasion fails to correct harmful behavior, we must resort to stronger measures. I am not a lets-hold-hands-and-sing-Kumbaya mushy liberal; I will not give up just because a harm requires stronger methods to correct. I think ridicule is a stronger method than rational persuasion, but it is milder than outright coercion. The most puerile, immature, scatalogical, and even misguided ridicule might sting, but I'll take it any day over the policeman's baton or the soldier's bayonet. Furthermore, a lot of religious people are just as offended, have their feelings just as hurt, just by people saying they disagree with them, much less offering rational criticism. So I think that the harm done by ridicule is often no worse than rational criticism, and substantially less worse than outright violent coercion. And ridicule is very different from, and less bad than, threats, harassment, or near-incitement.

Finally, we socialize ridicule by letting anyone do it. Ridiculing other people is a right, not a privilege. It's not even a privilege of the rich; it doesn't take that much wealth to print a magazine, and almost no wealth to ridicule people on the internet. No one, I think, can legitimately argue that unlike, for example, the Koch brothers, Charlie Hebdo used their immense wealth to magnify the impact of their speech; before the attacks, the magazine had been flying six inches from the ground for years, with a circulation in the tens of thousands (compared to the ~64 million just in Metropolitan France). I'm not saying that White (or non-Muslim) privilege is non-existent, but it's hard to tie any kind of privilege to Charlie Hebdo. (If France had actually tried to shut down any satirical publications because they were Islamic, that might be different, but I've seen no evidence of that. Even then, the response would not be to condemn Charlie Hebdo for using its privilege, but to condemn the French for creating the privilege.)

We can always argue that some instance of ridicule is misguided, mistaken, unwarranted, or otherwise defective. But we can always argue that any position, expressed in any form, from a scientific paper to a casual remark, is somehow defective. It is never wrong to criticize any speech for its content. But if we disapprove of ridicule itself just because it hurts people's feelings, then to be consistent, I think we have to disapprove of a lot of things, like criticism and simple disagreement, that also hurt people's feelings. If we want to disapprove of specific kinds of ridicule, then we have to justify why those specific kinds of ridicule are wrong, but not others.

I have not yet seen a compelling argument that the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists did anything more wrong than does anyone else who expresses strong opinions about socially important issues. They made some mistakes — as does everyone — and may have missed their intended targets — as does everyone — but I think they both intended to and actually were making the world a better place. Their deaths are not just an offense against the general prohibition against killing, but a real loss for the world.

Two principles and Charlie Hebdo

When we protect or permit an activity, we are usually talking about two distinct principles. The first principle is that the activity we're protecting itself has positive value.* Second, even if, in specific instances, the activity itself has negative value, the cost of prohibiting or restricting the activity is worse than the activity itself. For example, it might be difficult to actually agree on what instances of the activity are good or bad: if we restrict instances that I think are bad, I might have to permit others to restrict instances I think are good. Or, if we allow specific people to restrict an activity, they might restrict only instances that harm themselves, regardless of the common evaluation of various instances.

*e.g. in the consequentialist, utilitarian sense, the activity generally has a positive effect on aggregate well-being; this analysis, however, works regardless of how one individually constructs positive and negative value.

There are two freedoms that are at issue in the Charlie Hebdo killings. The first is freedom of speech. The second is freedom to live. As far as I tell, no one (serious) says that the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists should not have have freedom of speech and life. The question is, under which principle do we uphold their freedom of speech and life: did their speech and their lives have intrinsic positive value? Or did their speech and lives have intrinsic negative value, and did we let them speak and live (and condemn their killing) only because the cost of suppression exceeds the cost of permission?

I think most speech, even speech I disagree with, has positive value. For example, I think the socialist magazine, Monthly Review, has positive value. I also think the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal has positive value, even though I strongly disagree with what they say, and even though I think they are often... misleading. Given that these opinions published in the WSJ actually exist in the world, I think it's intrinsically positive that their advocates openly publish them without fear of coercive repression. This positive good does not mean they are immune from criticism; the whole point of allowing them to publish is to make their opinions freely available for criticism. So these publications have freedom of speech on the first principle: protect the positive.

On the other hand, I think a publication like Stormfront is just reprehensible. I think even given that the opinions there actually exist, publishing them has a hugely negative value. However, I believe that the cost of trying to repress Stormfront would be higher than the cost of allowing them to publish. This publication, and others like it, have freedom of speech on the second principle: we permit the negative because of the cost of suppression.

I'm not particularly sentimental about human life. I think almost all human life has intrinsic positive value, but there are some people whose lives I think have intrinsic negative value. I think Jerry "if we gave him an enema, we could bury him in a matchbox" Falwell's life, for example, had intrinsic negative value. We don't kill the first kind of person under the first principle; we don't kill the second kind of person under the second principle: it's more costly to kill them than to let them live.

Although the effect is the same, at least at the level of legal coercion, I think the decision to categorize and protect some publications and some people under the second principle is momentous. And I think the two freedoms are presently strongly coupled for the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists and staff, given that a dozen of them were just killed because of what they said.* To say right now that their freedom of speech was protected on only the second principle is also to say that their lives were protected only on the second principle, that even though we condemn their killers (on the second principle), their lives themselves had negative value and the world is better off with them dead.

*There are a lot of causes of the killings; it is perhaps more precise to say that they specifically were chosen as targets because of what they said. The killers were not trying to kill only random civilians.

And when people say, "It's wrong that they were killed, but..." I think that's exactly what they were saying: the cost of killing them was higher than the cost of letting them live, but their lives were a cost to society, not a benefit. I think that's a coherent position, but I think it's pretty momentous. We are saying something important about their work and their lives.

(As a side note, when a lot of people justify the murders of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Gardner, etc. ad nauseam, that's the language they use: "It's wrong that Martin/Brown/Gardner was killed, but...")

I think affording protection of speech under the second principle is momentous because although the legal consequences are the same, the social consequences are very different. When I disagree with someone, I need say only that while I think their opinions are wrong, but I'm happy they offered them so we can talk about it. Their speech, while wrong, is still valuable. However, when I protect someone only under the second principle, I'm saying not only that their opinions are wrong, but that this is something we should not even be talking about in the first place. I will not tell the first person to shut up, but I will tell the second, "I won't make you shut up, but seriously, just shut the fuck up and crawl back under your rock; your opinions are not fit for civilized* society." There are a lot of sub-legal ways of coercing people, and the farther you are from the line between protection under the first and second principles, the more sub-legal coercion becomes socially permissible. For example, I would never fire someone (except as a scientist, politician, or relevant civil servant) for denying evolution or global warming. I would not refuse service to someone of most any religion. But I would, for example, fire someone for posting racist or sexist comments or "empty" threats on their Facebook page. I would in fact refuse service to anyone who says "n—" in my store.

*As "civilized" as we are, which isn't very.

Affording protection of life under the second principle is also momentous. If society thinks someone's life has positive value, we actively try not to kill them. But if we think their life has negative value, we'll kill them as soon as we have a legal excuse. Again, the whole point of the recent killing of Black men is just that: their lives have negative value, and the second we have an excuse, we will rid our society of these harmful lives. It's not terribly difficult to create a legal excuse to kill someone: that's exactly what Zimmer did, and that's almost certainly what Darren Wilson did. Just provoke someone until fear and anger causes them to do something suspicious, and then kill them in "self defense." If the victim's life had intrinsic positive value, we would look more deeply into the circumstances. If, for example, Trayvon Martin had killed George Zimmer in "self-defense," we would have looked very deeply into the circumstance; indeed, we would probably have found some sort of fault with Martin's excuse, and convicted him of manslaughter. When the victim's life has intrinsic negative value, why bother to look deeply? They needed killing, you had a enough excuse that we're not worried about people just randomly shooting others: you're cool, go home.

So... looking at Charlie Hebdo...

Again, I think it's hard to talk about Charlie Hebdo without linking freedom of speech and freedom to live. We have to ask, did what they say make their lives themselves of negative value? Do we condemn their killing only because killing even bad people is worse than letting them live? I think if say, "The killings were wrong but...", you are taking the second position, and I think it's important to justify that position, because it really is momentous. So what's the justification?

The first justification is that they published at least two cartoons that I think were gratuitously offensive. The first is the depiction of "French Justice Minister Christiane Taubira, a black woman, drawn as a monkey." The second is this cartoon, which uses the word "negres" to refer to Black people. Even with context (the first cartoon is satirizing others' racism; the second really isn't directed towards Black people or people of color), and even given my low taste in humor, I think these cartoons are unacceptably racist and should not have been published, for a lot of reasons that should be obvious. But does that mean the publication as a whole has negative value? Does that mean the lives of the cartoonists have negative value? That they are protected only because it's more costly to shut them down and kill them than let them live and publish? If you say answer in the affirmative, how generally are you willing to apply the methodology? Only to people who disagree with you? Only to middle-class white male French cartoonists? If your uncle said something anti-Semitic, how hard would you sanction him? If he were in trouble, would you stand with him nonetheless? Or would you say, "Fuck that anti-semitic bastard. If he's in trouble, he's on his own."

The second justification is that the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists were "Islamophobic." Islamophobia is defined variously as

• "Intense dislike or fear of Islam, esp. as a political force; hostility or prejudice towards Muslims" (Oxford English Dictionary)
• "[S]ocially reproduced prejudices and aversion to Islam and Muslims, as well as actions and practices that attack, exclude or discriminate against persons on the basis that they are or perceived to be Muslim and be associated with Islam" (Gardell)
• "[A]n outlook or world-view involving an unfounded dread and dislike of Muslims, which results in practices of exclusion and discrimination" (Runnymede Trust)

I want to compare and contrast Islamophobia with sexism, anti-Black racism and anti-Semitism. We know that women, Black people and Jewish people are entirely ordinary; as a class, there is nothing at all* special about them. Thus, attributing any special quality, positive or negative, to women, Black and Jewish people as a class is known to be false. Because it's known to be false, any such attribution is by definition unfounded, and we can actually remove the qualifier from the (third) definition were it employed to define sexism, racism, and anti-Semitism.

*except the obvious and usually irrelevant reproductive differences between men and women.

I do not, however, believe that we know that Islam is entirely ordinary; thus, we need the "unfounded" in the definition of Islamophobia. I have not yet been convinced that there is no foundation for any finding that Islam is special or substantively different in any socially relevant way. Of course, there are some findings of specialness that lack foundation, such as that "Islam has no values in common with other cultures, [or] that it is inferior to Western cultures" (Runnymede Trust). Similarly, the idea that all Muslims have exactly the same views, is provably false; that all Muslims are collectively blameworthy for the actions of extremists is trivially stupid. But Islam is not a race; it is, as are all religions, a political and social ideology, i.e. a collection of socially relevant values (well, many collections with substantive similarities). To the extent that people choose, Unlike race, Islam, like every religion, is a choice, both in its adoption and its content.

I have often seen it asserted that Charlie Hebdo is in fact Islamophobic.* There are two bases for making this charge. First, have they promulgated unfounded assertions about Islam or Muslims? If so, I have not seen the analysis. Second, criticism of Islam and Muslims is unfounded a priori: It is wrong per se to mock certain values. If so, I have not seen a convincing argument for consistently deciding which values are excluded from mockery. I think pretentiousness, pomposity, and arrogance, not to mention outright racism, sexism, and anti-Semitism, all of which are values, may certainly be mocked, as savagely as one wishes, and as humorously as one is able. So what values are exempt? What values may not be mocked, regardless of their content?

*JFGI

As far as I can tell,

And even if someone mocks a value I hold, well, I still think their mockery is valuable, even if wrong, for exactly the same reason that I think speech I disagree with is still valuable. Good: it's out in the open that you think this or that value I hold is ridiculous. Let's talk about it. I want to see it. I won't tell you to STFU and GBTW just because I disagree with you about what is or is not ridiculous. The only mockery that I think is impermissible is mockery that is based on falsehoods so well established as false and socially harmful that their expression can be nothing but perversity. It is only the latter that I would say has truly negative value, and is protected only under the second principle.

I have not done a thorough analysis of Charlie Hebdo's cartoons. So I don't know with any degree of confidence that they are not Islamophobic. But if you want to put them in the same category as the KKK and the American Nazi Party, I think it is incumbent on you to make that case.

The Physiology of the Employee

balzac’s physiology of the employee:

In the war against the specific sufferings induced by office life, Herman Melville’s Bartleby is revered as saint and martyr. In the sacred literature of the office genre, his death is the office worker’s call to arms. But it’s a mistake to think that before his sacrifice, the literary universe wasn’t waging such a war against office ennui. Bartleby’s sacrifice is still honored and “I would prefer not to” remains our great rallying cry, but the more his followers understand the history of their war, even if it means recognizing how little ground has been gained, the more allies they find, the better suited they are to continue the fight. Honoré de Balzac’s The Physiology of the Employee (1841) is a guidebook, and it is not outdated. In its relevancy yet seeming strangeness, it fits with the rest of Wakefield Press’s catalog. His description of the climate in which he wrote sounds little different from the economic recession of recent years, and the lack of change since: “Personal expenses were examined with a fine-tooth comb. Benefits were chipped away at.” In its careful organization and laying out of office principles, The Physiology of the Employee serves as a work that grounds the spirit of Bartleby.

Charlie Hebdo

A couple of interesting responses to the Charlie Hebdo shooting. I don't agree with all of what they say, but they're worth reading, if only as an anodyne to the sanctimonious hand-wringing.

An open letter to 99.99% of American editorial cartoonists:

What is not justified, or rather, what is not earned, is how many of you are comparing yourselves to the slain cartoonists based, it seems, on nothing more than the fact that you are in the same line of work as them.

On Charlie Hebdo:

[T]here is already an enormous pressure, in this context, to defend Charlie Hebdo as a forceful exponent of “Western values,” or in some cases even as a brilliantly radical bastion of left-wing anti-clericalism. . . .

[But] irrespective of whatever else it does, and whatever valid comment it makes — the way in which that publication represents Islam is racist. . . .

No, the offices of Charlie Hebdo should not be raided by gun-wielding murderers. No, journalists are not legitimate targets for killing. But no, we also shouldn’t line up with the inevitable statist backlash against Muslims, or the ideological charge to defend a fetishized, racialized “secularism,” or concede to the blackmail which forces us into solidarity with a racist institution.

In the forward (?) to his book Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut compares writing an anti-war book to writing an anti-glacier book. The comparison is apt: people have been slaughtering each other in retail, wholesale, and industrial quantities since the beginning of recorded history. And it's always at best just "regrettable" or "unfortunate" when people are dishing out the hurt, but everyone gets seriously bent out of shape when they're on the receiving end. We've been dishing out the hurt in the Middle East and South Asia; now we're all shocked that we're getting some back. I suppose that's just how people are. C'est la vie.

I think it's almost always a mistake to assign blame. Whom do we blame, the provocation or the disproportionate response? My training in business and engineering was, "Fix the problem, not the blame." When, for example, someone shoots his or her spouse, I think it's a mistake to blame the shooter; I ask why we have a society where people let resentment build up to murderous intensity rather than just separate. And with Charlie Hebdo, I ask, why do we have a society and international relations such that people think killing cartoonists is a Good Idea?

Almost all social problems are structural. Either they're just people acting economically efficiently, e.g. a social structure where thousands of drug murders really is economically efficient, or they're a structural failure to provide humane medical treatment for people with mental illness. I mean seriously: we can fly thousands of enormous, complicated aircraft five miles up in the sky for a trillion passenger miles for years without killing a single person. Our political problems are not technical.

This is the society that we want, that we ourselves have built. We built it the way we did because we want power more than peace. If we don't like it, only we can fix it.

Origins of the police

Origins of the police:

In England and the United States, the police were invented within the space of just a few decades—roughly from 1825 to 1855.

The new institution was not a response to an increase in crime, and it really didn’t lead to new methods for dealing with crime. . . . The authorities created the police in response to large, defiant crowds. That’s [strikes, riots, and slave insurrections]. So the police are a response to crowds, not to crime.

Mark Ames does not like Andrew Sullivan

If Andrew Sullivan Is The Future of Journalism Then Journalism Is Fucked: "Why would subscribers pay to support one of the most colossal serial-failures in American journalism of the past two decades?"

Equivocation

John Quiggen has an interesting article up at Crooked Timber: Consequentialist arguments for deontological claims. The comment thread is way too long to read, but a couple of interesting comments caught my attention. (I have to paraphrase from memory, because for some weird technical reason, I can't access CT from my primary computer, where I'm writing this.)

One commenter (J Thomas, I think) argues that the idea that "only consequences [morally] matter" is a deontological belief. (Similarly, he argues that atheism is a religious belief.) I don't think he's a troll (as others there believe he is), but I think he's arguing by definition, which is not the most productive way for people to argue about philosophers. As I've said many times before, philosophers are not lexicographers: lexicographers catalog definitions; philosophers criticize, adjust, and create definitions.

JT further argues that moral rules are inherently deontological; "only consequences matter" is a rule, therefore, "only consequences matter" is deontological. But that is not the same definition that Quiggen appears to be using in the post, and not how I typically use the definition. In our (mine and presumably Quiggen's) definition, deontologicalism is the rule, "The intrinsic properties of an action morally matter." (Add "only" for strong deontologicalism.) Consequentialism is the rule, "The consequences of an action morally matter." (Again, add "only" for the strong version.)

There's certainly nothing intrinsically wrong with JT's definition. We could, if we wanted to, distinguish between rule-based and non-rule-based moral systems of belief, and we could, if we wanted to, use deontolgical and consequential to label the distinction. But to argue that consequentialism contains a rule, therefore consequentialism is deontological, therefore consequentialism holds that the intrinsic properties of actions are morally relevant, would be to commit a fallacy of equivocation. (I don't know if JT makes that argument.)

In a similar sense what "atheism is a religious belief" means just depends on what you specifically mean by "religious belief." If you mean "any belief about god(s), the divine, or the supernatural," and if you hold it is coherent to have beliefs about what does not exist* (which complicates logic considerably), then atheism is, in that sense, "religious belief." If so, so what? Atheism can be "religious belief" in that sense, but it is still not "religious belief" in the sense of "belief that god(s), the divine, or the supernatural actually exists," which is the sense that most atheists mean. Again, I suspect proponents of "atheism is a religious belief" have a (perhaps subconscious) motive to create a fallacy of equivocation.

*Hence atheism is often defined as the lack of belief about god, assuming that one can coherently have beliefs only about what actually exists: the statement, "I believe that God does not exist," does not make sense under these assumptions, in pretty much the same way that "I believe no four-sided triangles exist" does not make sense because "four-sided triangle" is meaningless.

Coercively harming a minority

miller (a.k.a. trivialknot) asks the question (regarding Christmas music): "[I]f [some social] gain requires coercively harming a minority, is it truly worthwhile?"

"Harm" and "coercion" are subjective terms: we cannot talk about "harm" without talking about how a person feels about something; we cannot talk about coercion without talking about will and consent, so their will can be coercively violated without their consent. These terms are also morally loaded. "Harm" is morally unacceptable negativity; coercion is morally unacceptable force. So the question as its stands is trivial or circular: unacceptable actions are unacceptable. In a morally neutral sense, a person is harmed if and only if they subjectively feel that they have been harmed, and they are coerced if and only if they subjectively feel that they have been coerced. The only way to detect harm and coercion is to ask people. (We also need to discover whether or not the objectively determinable actions they claim to have been harmful or coercive actually occurred.)

We could, of course, define harm and coercion objectively. However, such an objective definition would include and exclude actions as harmful and coercive only according to our a priori moral beliefs about actions. The best we can do with objective definitions is to talk about consistency, not correctness. Thus, miller's question would be, "Is ubiquitous Christmas music substantively similar to other things we consider coercively harmful (morally unacceptable), and substantively different from things we do not consider coercively harmful (morally acceptable)." Ubiquitous Christmas music cannot intrinsically be coercively harmful; in a morally neutral sense, it is coercively harmful if and only if people subjectively feel like they are being coercively harmed. In other words, we cannot examine the objective characteristics of ubiquitous Christmas music, ignoring how people feel about it, and come to a moral determination.

(You may disagree with the above paragraph. Most philosophers who advocate deontic and objective moral philosophy would disagree. I would welcome any argument that's less circular than "subjective moral philosophy is not objective," or, "subjective moral philosophy is contradictory when interpreted objectively.")

There are also the subjectively reflective definitions of "coercion" and "harm": I believe you have been coerced or harmed if you subjectively feel you have been coerced or harmed, and I subjectively feel you have been coerced or harmed, and both of us believe so in an objectively consistent way (i.e. I believe that all objectively similar actions are also coercive or harmful). Again, we can still have a morally neutral reflective definition: the reflective definitions just distinguish between actions that a some people consider coercive or harmful, and actions that almost everyone considers coercive or harmful. For example, a lot of people believe that affording secular (non-religious) marriage to gay people is neither coercive nor harmful, even if a lot of religious people feel coerced or harmed by secular gay marriage. There's an argument that people who feel coerced or harmed by secular gay marriage do not feel like they are coercing or harming Muslims, for example, by eating pork. However, this objective inconsistency can be eliminated by admitting that in a morally neutral sense, eating pork does coercively harm Muslims, and so what?

Again, if we define coercive harm in a morally neutral sense, then by definition saying that some action requires coercive harm (in the subjectively reflective sense) is not saying that it is therefore, and for that reason only, morally unacceptable. We would have to add the statement as a premise, not a conclusion. However, adding the premise entails unresolvable contradictions in our present physical circumstances.

It is not (perhaps not yet) the case that everyone can have and do everything they want, and people who don't get or do what they want have a tendency to feel coercively harmed, especially when they don't get what they want because other people with superior power (either numbers, privilege, or violence) do get or do what they want. So we have to make trade-offs entailing morally neutral coercive harm: trade-offs are a physical necessity. Of course, if we can choose between harming no one and harming someone, most people (besides sadists) would agree the former is preferable. But a lot of social choices, including not only whether to play Christmas music ubiquitously for a month or two but also most criminal and property law, requires trading off coercive harm against some people to benefit others.

Let's consider a trade-off with, to most 21st century Americans, a subjectively obvious answer: chattel slavery of black people. The existence of chattel slavery requires unambiguous subjectively reflective coercive harm to slaves. The slaves themselves feel coercively harmed, and if free white people were in the same situation, they would feel coerced and harmed, so at some level they agree that slavery is coercively harmful. On the other hand, the abolition of chattel slavery requires unambiguous subjectively reflective coercive harm: the owners of slaves feel are harmed by the coercive deprivation of their property, and most 21st century Americans consider deprivation of property by force to be coercively harmful. (One could argue that people cannot be property, but "property" is just as subjective as "harm" and "coercion"; by deciding that people cannot be property, one embeds the moral judgment in the definition a priori. As a subjectivist, I think that embedding moral judgments in language is perfectly fine, so long as we're honest and upfront about it and do not pretend to be objective.) If we have the moral premise that if X entails coercively harming someone, then X is wrong, then both the preservation and abolition of chattel slavery is wrong. We could, of course, have the moral premise that if X is wrong, then its imposition is coercively harmful, and its abolition is not coercively harmful. But that renders the first premise vacuous: wrong things are wrong. Or we could say that when we have two choices that are coercively harmful, we have to just decide between them on some other basis.

And that is precisely what we did with chattel slavery, and what we do with Christmas music. Both alternatives are, in a morally neutral, subjectively reflective sense, coercively harmful (and the imposition of music can be a form of torture, arguably worse than the imposition of pain). We simply have to choose between them. How we do so is a matter for scientific inquiry; how we should do so is a matter of philosophical and political theoretical inquiry.

The cops are pissed off

The cartoon:


The response:



(via a good cartoon)

Atheism and neoconservatism

I don't want to directly address the main point of Luke Savage's article, New Atheism, Old Empire:a few prominent New Atheists — Savage names Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens — have views on Islam that explicitly or implicitly support American Imperialism and neoconservatism. First, I think this part of his critique is mostly correct. I know of Hitchens' and Harris's views, and I definitely disagree with them. I'm not as familiar with Dawkins' present views; I liked Dawkins' book, The God Delusion, but his project as a popularizer of atheism is very different from my own, so I don't follow him closely. Dawkins is also a sexist pig, which reduces my interest in following his thoughts to zero. Regardless, I don't find it extremely counterintuitive that he might not just find the Islamic religion terrible (it is), but that he might be bigoted against Islamic people. More importantly, it's just not particularly important whether or not this or that New Atheist is or is not aiding and abetting the neoconservative cause. To the extent that some are, they deserve criticism and correction, but New Atheism (and atheism) is not a left-wing project, and that some New Atheists are not on the left is not by itself problematic. What is more problematic is Savage's implication that the atheist critique of religion itself is nothing but neoconservative propaganda.

I want to first object to the idea of using New Atheist or New Atheism as any kind of meaningful collective noun, even a noun that refers (as does the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy's article, The New Atheists). People who write books (other than textbooks) are not representative, contra Savage's assertion, of anyone or anything. Writing a book is an intensely personal, not a collective, effort. The God Delusion represents Dawkins' views; God Is Not Great represents Hitchens' views, etc. And reading a book is just as personal; each reader brings their own unique point of view to every book they read and takes from that book their own individual value. Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens — and Stenger, Eller, Myers, Coyne, Carrier, and every other author who has written on atheism — are all sui generis. We can judge them, but We must judge them individually, by name.

If "New Atheist" is not appropriate to label actually published authors, it is even less apt to label — except in the broadest, most general terms — any actual group of people who are not published authors. The term "New Atheist" is originally a pejorative label established by critics of atheists. The use of the term goes back (at least) as far as David Haxton Carswell Read's 1966 book, Whose God is Dead: The Challenge of the New Atheism. The term is still used pejoratively to collect a disparate group of people whom some critic disagrees with, as if they constituted some cohesive collective. While there are, of course, many cohesive atheist groups, such as American Atheists, the Freedom from Religion Foundation, etc., there is no overall cohesive atheist group at all, let alone any cohesive group of New Atheists. It would be an exercise in vacuity for Savage to define (or adopt the implicit definition) New Atheists as "neoconservative atheist writers" and then "prove" that New Atheists are neoconservatives.

Savage seems to want to talk about what is at least a real intellectual thread, a particular kind of critique of religion, and connect that critique to neoconservatism. According to Savage, "New Atheism’s intellectual foundations are also exceptionally weak." Savage claims that there is an intellectual thread that seeks to expose the "inherent 'irrationality' of all religions [emphasis added]" by "scrutiniz[ing] religious myths without attention to, or even awareness of, the multiplicity of social and theological debates they have provoked, the manifold ideological guises their interpreters have assumed, or the secular belief systems they have helped to influence." But this criticism is misguided. Most atheist writers are not anthropologists, and simply assume that the the dominant religious (especially the most problematic religious ideas) in their own culture is what religion is in all cultures. This view is obviously incorrect. If atheist critiques of religion were intended to address the full diversity of religious expression, including the culture of the Walpuri, Yanomamo, Jain, etc., then this ethnocentrism would be extremely problematic. But atheists tend to focus not on deep sociological, anthropological, or philosophical issues, but on political and cultural issues in their own polities and culture. When an atheist criticizes, for example, the religious causes of evolution or climate change denial in American culture, it is irrelevant that the Walpuri have a completely different conception of religion than do American Christians. In no other field does the charge make sense that thought and opinion in that field must necessarily be absolutely universal to be meaningful. Political scientists, for example can criticize Republicans (and Democrats) even though the American two-party democratic republic is hardly universal; economists can criticize or support the PPACA even though the American health care system is not even prevalent in most capitalist countries. The idea that some criticism of some particular idea invalid because it is not universal to all ideas in the same (very general) category is simply nonsensical.

Savage segues almost imperceptibly from the true but trivial claim that atheist critique of certain brands of American Christianity (and perhaps Islam) do not apply to all religions to the idea that our critique does not apply to any religious expression. For example, Savage reproduces Terry Eagleton's objection to God Is Not Great:

Hitchens argues earnestly that the Book of Genesis doesn’t mention marsupials; that the Old Testament Jews couldn't have wandered for forty years in the desert; that the capture of the huge bedstead of the giant Og, King of Bashan, might never have happened at all, and so on. This is rather like someone vehemently trying to convince you, with fastidious attention to architectural and zoological detail, that King Kong could not possibly have scaled the Empire State Building because it would have collapsed under his weight.

Not even Hitchens, much less atheists in general, use this "factual" approach exclusively; God Is Not Great engages religion on a number of fronts. But Savage uses Eagleton here to imply that no religious person ever (or only an insignificant, marginal, minority) ever holds factual beliefs about their religious texts, in the same sense that no one believes that King Kong is a documentary. Savage's position might be correct, but it would require an empirical argument, and engagement with the empirical arguments of atheist thinkers. Simply quoting the opinion of a literary critic is insufficient, especially without presenting any opposing argument.

Savage goes on to quote Richard Seymour's book, Unhitched: The Trial of Christopher Hitchens to "define" religion:

Religion is a labour of interpretation, of symbolic and ideological production from which agents derive meanings adequate to their life circumstances. Apart from anything else, the sheer indeterminacy of religious texts would make it impossible for there to be a literal, consistent meaning present in the texts: interpretation is indispensible [sic].

But this definition is obviously nonsense. What does Seymour mean by the "sheer indeterminacy of religious texts"? If there is no "literal, consistent meaning present," what precisely is it that religious people are interpreting? In what sense is a passage such as Leviticus 20:13 —"If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them." — at all indeterminate? We might or might not like what it says, but it seems crystal clear that it says something very specific and definite*; the need for "interpretation" does not come from a lack of literal meaning, but from us not liking the literal meaning. Would Savage claim that no Christians today justify their opposition to homosexuality just because the Bible literally says so? If so, let him prove that thesis.

*Context and translation are of little help to indeterminists here.

Savage then asserts that the atheist critique of Islam is flawed because it "assumes that fundamentalism is the product of bad ideas rather than particular social and material conditions . . . [and] attribute [violence] to some monolithic orthodoxy." First, atheists do not really hold that "fundamentalism" (whatever that means) is the product of bad ideas; we argue that fundamentalism is a bad idea, regardless of its genesis. Second, to be fair, most atheists are not Marxists, and do not give as much importance as Marxists to social and material conditions. But Savage is being at best inconsistent and at worst hypocritical: if Islam is "the product of particular social and material conditions", and not "the product of bad ideas," so too is atheism. Indeed, on the narrowest interpretation of Marx, consciousness is purely epiphenomenal; criticizing ideas of any sort — religion, atheism, capitalism, communism, science, law, etc. — is sterile and useless. Savage wants to have his critical cake and eat it too: religion is exempt from criticism because religious ideas are just the result of social and material conditions; atheist ideas are fair game and create the social and material conditions of imperialism and neoconservatism.

Finally, "monolithic orthodoxy" is unacceptably vague. If Savage means to imply that atheists believe that every religious person (or every Muslim, Christian, Hindu, etc.) ever, past and present, believes exactly the same thing about everything, and, more importantly, that the atheist critique of religion fails if this absolute agreement is even trivially compromised, he would clearly be demolishing a ridiculous straw man. More importantly, his critique depends just as much on attributing an equally ridiculous monolithic orthodoxy to the atheist critique of religion. Atheism is hardly monolithic; not even capitalism is a monolithic orthodoxy. But if Savage does not mean to imply an absolute agreement, what does he mean? Does he mean to imply the idea that most members of religious groups do not agree within their own group about a substantial collection of ideas, and their agreement rests on authoritative interpretations of authoritative texts? That every religious person's beliefs are sui generis, and that almost every religious group encourages unrestricted individual ideas about god and the divine? Such an interpretation could perhaps be argued, but to present this interpretation as obviously, unquestionably true seems as ridiculous as the straw man of perfect agreement.

Even if Savage's specific criticism of Hitchens, Dawkins, and Harris were completely correct, Savage clearly has made no effort to engage with the larger atheist critique of religion as it actually exists. So why go farther? I suspect there is an underlying reason: it is tempting, and false, to believe that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, and my friend's enemies are my own. Clearly, the Islamic world is engaged in a struggle against western imperialism, in its sharpest, most directly military form. As opponents of western imperialism, it is tempting to see the victim of imperialism as our friends, and shield them from criticism. But just that the Islamic world is the target of western imperialism does not make them friends of the western Left, the working class, of the struggle for freedom and justice. I don't think that the Islamic world really is on "our" side; they are, at the very least, on their own side. Savage appears to argue that any criticism of any victim of oppression justifies that oppression. We must be careful, of course; blaming victims for their own oppression is never correct. But criticism need not be blame. We should not claim that we should never criticize, for example, Islamic misogyny because that justifies imperialism to "correct" that misogyny, we should realize that even if the Islamic world were a thousand times more misogynist that it actually is, such misogyny cannot justify imperialism; indeed, no "faults" can ever justify conquest, subordination, and oppression. Criticism can be used as a partisan tool, but it is not intrinsically a partisan tool. We should, like Marx, seek to be ruthless critics of everything existing, and Marx himself offered some of his most ruthless criticism for opponents of capitalism.

In truth, while errors in atheist thought should never be shielded from criticism, atheists and the modern atheist critique of religion should be seen not as enemies of the left, but as potential allies. Throughout history, religious thinking, however broadly and diversely defined, has served most often not to undermine but to reproduce relations of domination and subordination. More importantly, all relations of domination and subordination require the kind of thinking that religion must necessarily employ: asserting some privilege, whether textual, interpretive, or traditional that is immune to ration criticism by its very nature — as Eller defines religion, where "the nonhuman and ‘supernatural' are seen as profoundly human and social," i.e. as fetishized non-human expressions of human relations. Domination and subordination must employ some sort of epistemic and moral privilege. Without such privilege, the "right" of one group to subordinate another cannot stand. Epistemic and moral privilege need not be strictly "religious"; it is arguable, however, that any assertion that cannot be established by common natural reason and observation, whether it be a monotheistic deity, an unseen spirit, or a universal moral principle, is ipso facto supernatural and therefore, in the broadest sense (that Savage seems to advocate), "religious."

The problem is not that religion, and religious thinking, can be used only for evil, for reproducing relations of dominance; the problem is that religious thinking can be used for anything; I have no way of independently evaluating the claims that "God loves homosexuals" and "God hates homosexuals (or homosexuality)." It doesn't matter whether these statements stem from a reading, literal or "interpretive," of some text, or from personal revelation, or from theological debate; I have no way of knowing what God wants, good or bad. I know what I want, and I can get a good idea, using reason and observation, of what other human beings want, but I have no idea of what God wants. And I'm not just going to project my own desires on a mythical God and pretend I'm talking about more than what I want. To claim that "God loves homosexuals" is not just to endorse equal rights for homosexuals (yay), but to endorse the idea that equal rights is about what God wants, not what we want. And, since I don't actually know what God wants, for all I know, God really does hate homosexuals. Our social norms become a conversation only among those who claim privilege, with the rest of us as passive spectators.

We on the left must, I think, share the true core narrative of atheism: there is no privilege. There is no religious privilege. There is no capitalist privilege. And there is no socialist privilege. We should be socialists and communists because we have good reasons to believe that, at some level, people want socialism and communism. To oppose the fundamental project of atheist criticism of religion (and not legitimately criticize its errors and inconsistencies) is to endorse privilege. And I would no more endorse so-called socialist or communist privilege than I would capitalist or fascist privilege.