The Stupid! It Burns! (billboards and bumper stickers edition)

A double dose of stupid today.

Atheists Rail About "Vitriol, Threats and Hate Speech" On A Hateful Billboard Directed At Christians Yes, Ms Cellaneous is talking about the billboard above. The author quotes Fox News: "Amanda Knief, managing director of American Atheists, said a report from Fox News on Wednesday about the billboards led to a national outpouring of 'vitriol, threats and hate speech against our staff, volunteers and Adams Outdoor Advertising.'"

The author then comments on the issue:

”vitriol, threats and hate speech against…” …. and what does she consider that Billboard to be? A love hug?

Stupid is, as stupid does. Not that all atheists are “stupid”, but their lack of true knowledge is as immense as is their lack of consideration for those who have faith in God. People who believe in a Creator God far out number [sic] those who do not.

These atheists have made a decision to close their minds, their spirits and any rationale toward God. But how anyone can look at the beauty of nature or a living creature, and not see God’s design, seems rather remarkable. The intricacy’s of the human body can’t be created in a laboratory, nor have all monkeys ‘evolved’ into humans. . . .

However,

[T]hose who believe in God don’t try to force non- believers into participating in their beliefs (radical Islam excluded).

Michael Frissore opens "Atheists Are So Much Smarter Than Christians." - an atheist, with his dislike of the above Darwin Fish.

You're that much of a smug prick you put a bumper sticker on your car mocking the Jesus fish. Whatever. Go with...whoever the hell you go with. . . .

When an atheist argues with a Christian, they're playing with house money. They can't lose, particularly in their own mind, because the final argument is always, "Show me proof." They want you to prove to them that God exists. The punchline, of course, is that no human being can prove a higher being exists. If a god, any god, were to show up here, we'd probably all go blind or die from the mere sight.

As usual, lots more self-parodying stupid in the originals.

Separation of church and state

In his essay, Don't tear down that wall!, Roger Ebert argues against legislating religious morality on First Amendment grounds. Ebert draws an analogy between "the eagerness of states to permit the teaching of Creationism . . . in public schools" and "the attempt to legislate birth control, abortion and other matters pertaining to birth." Because issues of birth, pregnancy, and sexuality are dictated by religious belief, attempting to legislate these matters is tantamount to imposing religious belief by law. Instead of passing laws, Ebert argues that to increase social adherence to their moral beliefs, sincere religious believers should try to convert others to their religion. Although I agree with Ebert's politics, and I'm a strong supporter of the Separation of Church and State, his analysis is flawed because he implicitly leaves no mechanism for deciding moral values in a democracy.

It would be convenient if we could use objective, secular scientific reasoning to determine the correct moral values. However, the world does not appear to work that way. As I explore in more depth in my series on Meta-Ethical Subjective Relativism, science cannot establish moral laws in the same way it establishes physical laws. A physical law is, by definition, a statement that despite careful and focused and careful effort, we cannot observe any exception. If we do observe an exception to what we thought was a physical law, we do not conclude that a "miracle" happened; we must readjust our construction of physical law to permit the observation. However, the only interesting moral "laws" are those we do observe contraventions of; a moral law prohibiting killing (under specified circumstances) is useful only to the extent that people do actually kill. Since we cannot (or it is not useful to) "falsify" a moral law by observing an exception, we simply cannot apply the scientific method to determine moral law.

There have been other philosophical approaches to determining moral law, but, lacking scientific foundation, all of them suffer from the Universal Philosophical Refutation. Science can "privilege" hypotheses only because the universe itself appears to refuse to contradict the hypothesis, but when the universe does not speak to the conclusions, any premise can, with a little ingenuity, be abandoned or replaced by its opposite without contradiction. There is no objective way you can say, that it is morally wrong to kill a person (under specific circumstances). There is no objective way you can say, we ought to (somehow) maximize the "well-being" of society. There is no objective way you can say that we should do only what everyone always ought to do. I can simply deny it's wrong to kill a person, maximize utility, or be compelled by the categorical imperative, and although we might not like or respect each other, neither of us can find a contradiction in the other's reasoning.

A democracy fundamentally rejects the idea of objective moral law. Instead of "searching for the truth," about morality, we search for ways we can all live together. Some of those ways involve prohibiting or compelling behavior. Democracy is not a simple matter of always doing what the majority says; because we are not completely stupid, we can look at issues at varying levels of abstraction and generality. A majority of us can, for example, strongly disapprove of specific, concrete speech, such as racist or sexist speech, but still strongly approve generally and abstractly of freedom of speech, and we can decide to implement the general and abstract into law. Furthermore, we have learned to institutionalize certain democratic principles, such as the First Amendment, and making the process of changing those principles complicated and difficult. But at the end of the day everything in a democracy is up to the arbitrary preferences, specific and concrete or general and abstract, of the people. The people are sovereign; because the universe constrains only how we can act, not how we ought to act, there is no higher authority on how we ought to act than the preferences of the people.

Because democracy is based on implementing arbitrary preferences, there is no good way to distinguish arbitrary preferences from arbitrary religious preferences. This is precisely the distinction Ebert tries to draw. Religions have not become popular because they completely ignore our natural preferences. Religions forbid murder and theft not because wow! who'd'a thunk it until God said so, but because a religion that excused or required wanton murder and theft would not gain many adherents. Even so, people usually attach all their moral beliefs to God; just as they believe homosexuality is wrong because God says so, they also believe that murder is wrong because God says so. They are mistaken, of course, no God exists to say anything, but they are mistaken about the justification, not the preference. A secularist is simply more direct. As a secularist, I am tolerant of homosexuality simply because I don't have any preference about what people do with their genitals*; I am intolerant of murder because I strongly prefer that people don't go around killing each other (and I don't give a tinker's damn that I'm infringing on the liberty of people who do want to kill others). The difference is not in the kind of preference, only the justification (or lack thereof); because all preferences are arbitrary, it is incoherent to talk about correct or mistaken preferences; preferences are just brute facts. Thus, it does not make sense to distinguish between different kinds of preferences; all preferences have equal standing.

Rather than placing limitations on motives, since motives are essential preferential, the First Amendment places limitations on the purposes and effects of laws. Rather than making the government either supportive or hostile to religion, the establishment and free exercise clauses, the First Amendment makes the government indifferent to religion. Thus, any law that has a primary or exclusive purpose or effect of establishing or suppressing religion is illegitimate. Although it's not consistently applied, the Lemon Test expresses this doctrine. Even if some law might have a "religious" motivation, it is legitimate so long as its primary purpose and effect are secular. Thus, even if the prohibition of murder were religiously motivated, it has a secular purpose and effect of suppressing the killing of human beings. It is sufficient to limit the purpose and effect of laws without addressing their motivations.

I myself am, of course, a strong proponent of absolute reproductive rights of women. However, I think the "religious motivation" argument against laws that would infringe on women's reproductive rights is fundamentally flawed. Laws limiting reproductive rights have a clear secular purpose: laws restricting abortion and contraception aim to and would have the effect of promoting the creation of and protecting human zygotes and blastocysts. Whether these are good secular purposes is a matter of preference (or many preferences, at different levels of generality and abstraction), but they are clearly secular: they address physical, concrete things about which we can have scientific knowledge. The secular/religious distinction does not by itself address reproductive rights.

Ebert does, however, imply a useful moral distinction. Rather than the distinction between religious and secular morality, we can draw a distinction between social and individual morality. Social morality concerns behavior that has a direct effect on others: killing people, hitting them on the head, taking their stuff, polluting their air and water, denying them employment, housing, or economic activity, etc. Even though people might have preferences as strong as they have concerning social morality, individual morality concerns behavior that does not have a direct effect on others: consensual sexual activity*, masturbation, diet, health care choices, assisted suicide/euthanasia of the terminally ill**, and similar activities. Religion, one's preferences about what to believe about God, is perhaps the most obvious form of private morality; as Jefferson says, religion (or lack thereof) "neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg." By itself, religion has a purely individual effect.I t it tempting, therefore, to locate what are essentially privacy rights in the First Amendment. But that approach ignores most of Supreme Court jurisprudence. Privacy is a right, and therefore any act that affects no one but those who consent is usually considered private. But privacy rights have been located by the Supreme Court, not in the establishment and free exercise clauses of the First Amendment, but in the concept of substantive due process, a consequence of the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

*that does not have a direct, substantial impact on the transmission of infectious disease.
**with appropriate protection for the poor and mentally ill.

The issue over contraception and abortion rights is important, but the argument from the establishment clause is a bad argument. It is impossible in principle and actively contrary to democracy to try to distinguish between certain kinds of arbitrary preferences. Because they involve tangible, material entities and activities, not immaterial, invisible entities such as gods and souls, contraception and abortion are, whether we like it or not, secular matters. The best constitutional arguments, indeed the ones actually made by the Supreme Court in Griswald, Roe and others, are found in substantive due process. We must, in a democracy, let people argue (and vote) for any legitimate law, regardless of their individual motivation. If we do not, then we subvert democracy by making some process sovereign over the will of the people, and, more dangerously, unacceptably privilege those individuals who implement that process.

The finances of the Catholic church

I'm sure it will come as a great shock, but The Economics reports that the Catholic church is not handling its money well.

[T]he finances of the Catholic church in America are an unholy mess. The sins involved in its book-keeping are not as vivid or grotesque as those on display in the various sexual-abuse cases that have cost the American church more than $3 billion so far; but the financial mismanagement and questionable business practices would have seen widespread resignations at the top of any other public institution.

According to Buce, who claims to be a former bankruptcy judge,

[O]ver and over again, the bishops engage in--and get away with-- stuff that would send them to the stony lonesome if they did them in the private sector, or at the very least, strip them of their employment or at least of their bankruptcy discharge. Commingling assets, shell-game moving of assets, misuse of trust fund taxes--this is stuff that causes real trouble to real people even in the highly forgiving realm of private-sector corporate America but not, it seems, for those who are so securely wrapped in the cloth of sanctity.

The Stupid! It Burns! (help! help! I'm being oppressed edition)

Atheists Threaten District Over Religious Chorus Songs

It is being reported over on the CBN News website that the FFRF (Freedom from Religion Foundation) is threatening to sue a New York school district over songs taught in music class that include the words "God" and "Lord." [all emphasis and links original]

Why is this important? Easy, because it's a group of non-believers who are trying to silence Christians and this is where "soft" Christian persecution can eventually lead to more "hard" Christian persecution, which is what we cover most of the time.

The role of evidence in science

In Another Question For Atheists, John Barron asks

For the sake of argument let’s grant that the quantity and quality of evidence, according to your standard, brought the probability of whether God exists to 50%. In other words, it was as equally probable that God exists as doesn’t according to your own criteria. Presuming agnosticism is not an option, ould you choose theism or atheism?, and equally as important, why?

Barron does not understand the role of evidence in the scientific method. The scientific method does not consist of using the evidence to assign probabilities to all the competing hypotheses, and then "believing" the most likely.

The second component, "believing" the most likely hypothesis, is easier to address. A probabilistic statement cannot be reduced to a statement of truth or falsity: it is always a fallacy to say, "the probability that X is true is p; therefore, X is true," for any value of p, even 99.999999999%. The best you can ever say is, "The probability that X is true is p." Even this statement is oversimplified; generally even the simplest probabilistic statement has at least two dimensions: "The probability that X is between a and b is p." The fallacy of equivocation between probability and truth is at the heart of the lottery "paradox".

The first component is a little harder to address. In science, we do not just create any old hypotheses and try to assign probabilities to them. Rather, we create two very special kind of hypotheses. The first is the null hypothesis, which hypothesizes that two variables are "related" only by chance; they are independent of each other. The second is the alternative hypothesis, that the two variables are correlated in reality; they are not "related" only by chance.

If, for example, we want to investigate the relationship between the amount of food eaten and the amount of weight gained, we formulate two hypotheses:

• H₀: The amount of food eaten and the amount of weight gained are related only by chance.
• H_a: The amount of food eaten and the amount of weight gained are correlated in reality.

We do an experiment, measuring the amount of food eaten and the amount of weight gained, and we do magic statistics to calculate a p-value. It is extremely important to understand what the p-value means. The p-value does not represent the probability that either the null or alternate hypothesis are true. Instead, The p-value means if the null hypotheses were true, what is the probability that we would observe the measured values by chance.. And the farther the p-value is from 0.50, the greater the likelihood of rejecting the null hypothesis; both very low (near 0) and very high (near 1) p-values represent the unlikely "tails" of the underlying distribution. If the null hypothesis is true, we should almost always get p-values near 0.5.

There are a lot of different ways you have to set up the analysis of any experiment or observation to get meaningful p-values, and of course the above analysis applies only to hypotheses that can be expressed quantitatively. The underlying philosophy, however, can be applied to qualitative hypotheses. First, the statement must be reducible to a null hypothesis and a mutually exclusive and exhaustive alternative hypothesis. Second, there must be some potential observation that is in some sense "unlikely" were the null hypothesis true. If we actually observe the unlikely potential observation, we have grounds for rejecting the null hypothesis in favor of the alternative hypothesis. If you cannot even qualitatively or abstractly represent an idea in this manner, it is not, in this view, a meaningful statement about the world.

Thus, saying "the probability that God exists is 50%" is not the sort of probability that's meaningful to deciding the question of whether God exists. Instead, I would want to see probabilities like "If God did not exist, the probability of observing X is less than 0.5%; Since we do observe X, we have grounds for rejecting the null hypothesis and accept that God exists."

Keep in mind, however, that testing the null hypothesis like this is only half of the criteria. The null-hypothesis methodology underdetermines the mechanisms of correlation, even when applied piecemeal to the intermediate steps between two variables. Therefore, we also apply Occam's Razor: the alternate hypothesis must also be the simplest way of negating the null hypothesis.

The Fine-Tuning Argument for the existence of God is a good example of a hypothesis that is well-formed by the null/alternate hypothesis criteria, but fails Occam's Razor.

• H₀: The physical constants of the universe are a product of chance.
• H_a: The physical constants of the universe were "fine-tuned" to allow life to exist.

There is no controversy that as best we presently understand physics, the p-value for the observation that the physical constants of the universe allow life to exist is very low. Precisely how low is a matter of controversy, but there is no controversy but we can assume for the sake of argument [see below] that it is "statistically significant" to at least the 99.9% confidence level, which would be accepted as sufficient evidence to reject the null hypothesis in even the most rigorous study.

However, the alternate hypothesis is not exhaustive (alternate hypotheses are never exhaustive). For example, a low probability, no matter how low, does not entail the impossibility of that event. The "alternate" hypothesis that we just "got lucky" is simpler than another alternate that requires equal or greater luck. And indeed the probability that by chance we got a god who wanted this particular universe is actually lower than the probability that by chance we got this particular universe, because the population of all possible gods exceeds the population of all possible universes governed by physical law.

There are other reasons to reject the Fine Tuning argument, but it is at least meaningfully formed according to the null/alternate hypothesis method.

ETA: Thinking about the issue more carefully, it's actually difficult to draw any solid statistical inferences about physical constants, even if we assume they are in some sense, perhaps metaphysical, randomly distributed. The problem is that we have a sample of size one. The least restrictive assumptions are that each physical constant is randomly distributed, and the physical constants are all mutually independent. Even on those assumptions, the best estimate of the mean, median, and mode of each constant is the value we actually observe. Furthermore, we have no way of estimating what kind of random distribution the (possibly metaphysical) population of each constant follows: the normal distribution is only one kind of random distribution. And even if we assume a normal distribution, a sample size of one gives us no way at all of estimating the variance of the population: the estimate of the variance from one sample divides by zero. So talking about the probability of this particular universe in the population of all possible universes requires assumptions that can be neither theoretically nor empirically justified.

The best we can say is that given there are 20 independent, normally distributed physical constants, the probability is 0.95²⁰ = 0.358 that all the constants we observe in this actual universe are within about two (unknown) standard deviations of the population mean, which is insufficient evidence at even the loosest confidence level to reject the null hypothesis that this universe is unusual. (There would have to be 77 normally distributed physical constants for more than 80% of all possible universes to have even one constant outside of about two standard deviations of the mean.)

However, under all possible assumptions where the same assumptions govern the population of all (perhaps metaphysical) universes and all (perhaps metaphysical) gods, the probability that this particular universe occurred by chance is always higher than the probability that a god who created this possible universe occurred by chance.

I wish my mother had aborted me

I wish my mother had aborted me, by Lynn Beisner.

[N]o one should have to make such a Herculean struggle [as the author's] for simple normalcy. Even given the happiness and success I now enjoy, if I could go back in time and make the choice for my mother, it would be abortion. . . .

It is not easy to say, "I wish my mother had aborted me." The right would have us see abortion as women acting out of cowardice, selfishness, or convenience. But for many women, like my mother, abortion would be an inconvenient act of courage and selflessness. I am sad for both of us that she could not find the courage and selflessness.

Let me add that the idea that the world would have been worse had I or any other individual never been born seems incredibly narcissistic. At least an order of magnitude more potential human beings have never been born than have actually existed, and abortion counts only for a fraction of those never-existing potential people. We have enough trouble maintaining the people we actually have; there's simply no way to manage the rights for all the people we might have had.

(via HumanistLife)

Physics, politics, and religion

In his thoughtful and interesting post, An apology to Atheists, John C. Wright frames the conflict between atheism and theism in a novel way. Wright makes a distinction between "policy" and "political" conflicts. In policy conflicts, where there is some common ground, either in the ends sought or in some process to reconcile conflicting ends, the parties can use the common ground to come to peaceful agreement. In political conflicts, "the two parties differ on the ultimate ends sought," and presumably in contrast to policy conflicts, there is no common agreement "about how to work out a compromise." To the extent that atheists see the conflict between atheism and theism a policy conflict, in a similar sense to how scientists see conflicts over scientific truth as essentially a policy conflict, atheists can avoid Wright's previous charge of the "irresistible temptation to pride and vainglory." Although I commend Wright for his sincere charity, I don't think he has quite grasped how many atheists, especially the New Atheists, actually see the conflict between atheism and theism.

Wright first over-generalizes aspects of some atheists to all atheists. Atheists are people who, for whatever reason or cause, good or bad, do not believe that any God exists. There really isn't any consistent way to generalize much of anything else to all atheists; a lack of one single belief does not entail much else, because it's extremely difficult, probably impossible, to prove that any derived belief can derive from only one particular premise. It's not a big point, because Wright addresses one important variety of atheism, scientific naturalism, but over-generalization can lead to some severe errors.

Although he calls it "atheism," Wright attempts to describe what looks like scientific naturalism.

Atheism is a theological stance. It is a theory of theology, or, rather, of metaphysics which holds first, the that universe is explicable without recourse to any theory of god or gods; and holds, second, that human knowledge proffers no clear evidence of the nature of divine things, whether god is one or many, whether life ends in oblivion, reincarnation, or last judgment; and holds, third, the human conscience and human prudence is sufficient, without recourse to divine spokesmen, to instruct the conscience and human decency sufficient to motivate the will to follow the conscience; and holds, fourth, that no account is logically coherent of an omnipotent god powerless to remove evil from the world nor a benevolent god unwilling to do so; and atheism concludes from this and other reasons that there is no god, and that even if there were, we would owe him no love nor loyalty nor obedience.

I say that Wright describes scientific naturalism because all of the theological or metaphysical premises he ascribes to atheism are conclusions of scientific naturalism. But it is important to note that these are conclusions, not metaphysical premises.

The actual premises of scientific naturalism are simply that we can obtain reliable knowledge about the world using logic and the evidence of our senses according to a specific method, the Scientific Method. Another way of stating this definition is that scientific naturalism metaphysically privileges the Scientific Method and calls its outcome "knowledge." The ontology of scientific naturalism is, therefore, the simplest description of how the world could be to explain and account for the evidence of our senses. Under scientific naturalism, the question of how the world actually is independent of our knowledge of the world is not a meaningful question. Underlying this view are two other metaphysical principles:* that specify the job that any candidate system of knowledge must perform. First a candidate epistemic system must be preference-independent; there must be a rigorous method to resolve any differences of opinion about what we know. Second, it must produce, as far as possible, a specific ontology, a description of the world compatible with only the actual evidence of our senses, not one compatible with a range of evidence. Because the Scientific Method does these jobs, it is a successful epistemic method.

*There are other metaphysical principles about what a candidate system of knowledge ought to do, but they are not immediately relevant.

It is important to understand the meaning of "supernatural" in the context of scientific naturalism. A "supernatural" proposition is not a proposition that specifies an entity or property "outside" the physical world. Instead, A supernatural proposition is a superficially truth-apt statement whose truth or falsity cannot be known. It's not even a proposition that cannot be known by the Scientific Method; it's a proposition that cannot be known by any system of knowledge that meets the meta-epistemic conditions specified by scientific naturalism. Scientific naturalism a priori excludes the "supernatural" only to the extent that we deny that we can have knowledge of a proposition that by definition cannot be known, which seems harmlessly tautological. Scientific naturalism does not automatically exclude any and all theories of knowledge alternative to the Scientific Method. It does exclude a priori those methods which fail to do the meta-epistemic job.

To the extent that the existence of a god can be known, that existence is, in Wright's terminology, a "policy" matter. Scientific naturalism is neutral on the actual existence on such a god: either we know that it exists or we know it does not exist; either way, we must adjust our ontology to fit our knowledge. But of course, according to the Scientific Method, no god exists. (Technically, there is insufficient evidence to reject the null hypothesis that no god exists.) To the extent that theists attempt to privilege alternative epistemic systems, none do the job specified by the meta-epistemology of scientific naturalism. To the extent that theists specify a god that cannot be known, it is incoherent to assert the existence or non-existence of "god"; the proposition "an unknowable god exists" is not even wrong; it's incoherent. How it fails depends on the particular definition, but as yet scientific naturalism fails to justify — and failure to justify is grounds for denial* — the existence of any non-trivial definition of god. All the premises Wright assigns to atheism, as is atheism itself, are conclusions of scientific naturalism.

*Keep in mind that under scientific naturalism, acceptance or rejection of any epistemic or ontological proposition is always provisional. We may reject a proposition one day, and, on additional evidence or more comprehensive theory, accept it the next day.

To the extent that theists frame the existence of a god in purely metaphysical terms, the issue can approach a "political" conflict. Much depends on how much common ground theistic metaphysics retains with the metaphysics of scientific naturalism. Most importantly, is there meta-epistemic common ground? If we disagree not just on a particular epistemic method, but on the job a method must do to be a legitimate epistemic method, then we cannot agree on what we know. It's a much more difficult job to budge scientific naturalism on meta-epistemology than on some particular epistemic method; denying the meta-epistemic criteria will place the denier in what seems to be an irreconcilable conflict with scientific naturalism. We're not, however, going to feel any shame or guilt that other people have irreconcilable conflicts with our metaphysical system.

Mises on Rand

You have the courage to tell the masses what no politician told them: you are inferior and all the improvements in your conditions which you simply take for granted you owe to the effort of men who are better than you.

— Ludwig von Mises, praising Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged

(via Corey Robin)

Libertarianism and democracy

In Equality vs. Freedom, Allen Small paraphrases a speech by Prof. Jan Narveson, Chairman of the Institute for Liberal Studies*. In his paraphrase, Small points to a tension between democracy and morality. Small has some gaps in his paraphrase; I'll do my best to fill in the blanks as charitably as I can. Imagine if it were "decided in a democratic vote (51 to 49) that you should be boiled in oil." You would, Small seems to imply, object to such a vote as immoral. Democracy can therefore, at least in theory, lead to immoral results. Even putting aside the obvious oversimplification (no one has ever proposed any kind of democracy where citizens vote at this level of detail, unmediated by institutions), this argument has a severe logical flaw.

*I didn't hear the speech, and I didn't look for a transcript, so I don't know if Small's paraphrase is accurate. The point, however, is to examine a specific argument, not to try to discredit any individual for making it. I just want to show that I'm not making up the argument out of thin air.

The argument is actually form of a common religious argument: without God, you have no reason to be "moral", therefore you should believe in God so you have a reason to be moral. The argument fails because if you are not already "moral", you need no reason to be so, and the argument is unpersuasive; if you are already moral but don't believe God exists, then, if you are rational, you already have a reason to be moral, and the premise is trivially false. (If you're irrational, rational argument will be unpersuasive.)

The implied argument against democracy above similarly fails. If the majority of the people believe it is acceptable in general to vote on whether individuals should be boiled in oil, then the argument that democracy might lead to individuals being boiled in oil is entirely unpersuasive. On the other hand, if the majority of the people believe it is unacceptable in general to vote on boiling individuals in oil, then they know they would never vote to actually do son, and the premise is false.

This argument is in a critical family of democracy; the argument is that democracy does not find the objective truth. But this criticism makes two controversial presuppositions. The first is that democracy purports to be a method of finding the truth; the second, is that there actually is objective fundamental ethical truth to be found. Longtime readers know that I deny the second presupposition: I argue there is no such thing as objective fundamental ethical truth. On this view, democracy is a process for reconciling competing interests. There is no objective truth about what interests an individual ought to have or not have; there is only the fact of individuals' sometimes competing and sometimes harmonious interests. Democracy is simply one process among many that work to make social decisions based on these diverse interests.

It's also important to note that no one, myself included, advocates democracy divorced from any cultural or institutional framework. Democracy does not entail that every possible decision is simply put to a vote. Rather, we apply democracy at various levels of abstraction, and decisions at higher levels of abstraction are usually implemented through institutions. So, for example, although a majority of people might well vote to suppress some individual with particularly odious views, we can make a democratic decision at a higher level of abstraction to generally preserve freedom of speech, and implement that decision through the institutional framework of constitutions and courts. That we do not decide individual cases by a simple vote is not undemocratic, so long as we have democratically decided on an abstract procedure to decide individual cases.

Finally, some people do need to be "boiled in oil." Not literally, of course, but some people do need to be coerced. I've never seen any anarchist or libertarian say that all coercion needs to be unconditionally eliminated. We need to have some method of determining who gets coerced, under what circumstances, and how far they're pushed. In the end, our only choices are to make these determinations by a majority or a minority. I think I have a better chance with the majority.

What good is Mars?

Honji is skeptical about the Mars Curiosity mission. It probably won't bring us any information or science we plebes can use in our daily lives. Even if it did, we would probably put that information to reprehensible uses. And the money spent could be put to better uses. But Honji's analysis is too narrow, and his economic reasoning misses the point.

The space program in general is pretty easy to justify. First, the space program has more than paid for itself; it's brought us so much value — from communications satellites to GPS to Tang — that if NASA were a private company they would have earned enough money to spend a few billion dollars painting the NASA logo on the Moon. And, if you'll excuse the terrible pun, curiosity is its own reward; the day we stop being curious about the world around us, over and above what we need to find our next meal, our next safe place to sleep, and our next fuck, is the day we lose an important part of what makes us human. But a thousand other skeptics and science geeks could address the proximate value of Curiosity better than I could. Instead of extolling the virtues of Curiosity, I want to look at the project as an economist.

Honji complains that Curiosity will cost "two and half billion dollars" (which I can't help but hear in Dr. Evil's voice)*. That sounds like a lot, but for an economy the size of the United States, it's chump change. Our GDP is about $14 trillion dollars, that's $14 thousand billion dollars. Assuming all Curiosity, therefore, cost 2.6/14000, i.e. a little less than 0.02% of our national economy. In comparison, 0.02% of the 2010 median household income of $45800\mathit{i}\mathit{s}$9.7, about the cost of a movie ticket. It's also almost exactly what I earn in an hour. If Honji is concerned about the cost, I'll be happy to contribute an extra hour's pay to cover his cost, and I'll generously let him use GPS without calling him a hypocrite. Indeed, I'll contribute ten hours' pay to cover me and nine other chintzy bastards.

*According to Thom Patterson at CNN.com, the cost is $2.6 billion.

More importantly, Honji claims the money could be better spent elsewhere, such as universal healthcare and housing the homeless. In this sense, Honji is thinking about the economy exactly as the capitalist ruling class would like him to think. The truth is that, never mind the triviality of NASA's entire $17+ billion budget, not even the outright waste of substantial labor and natural resources (e.g. the Iraq war, almost two hundred military bases around the world, and all the other costs of maintaining our Imperial prestige) prevents us from having universal health care and decent housing. The reason we do not have universal health care is not that it "too expensive" in any meaningful economic sense. The reason we do not have universal health care is that we as a society have decided that poor people do not deserve health care. We have homeless people because we as a society have decided that extremely poor people, including many people with severe mental illness, do not deserve to have a place to live. We have more than 8% unemployment because we as a society have decided that millions of people do not deserve to contribute their labor to society, and it is only squeamishness that prevents us from just turning them into Soylent Green. Our social ills are not in any sense economic; they are entirely moral and political. We have the society we choose, not the society that the natural world forces on us.

We cannot be limited by money itself. Money itself is a pure abstraction, a pure social construction. Money is not itself physical; at best, money represents something physical. It represents the constraints on our economic activity: we can't do everything, so we use money in a complex system to decide what we want to do. In theory, we are limited by only three things: the amount of various kinds of physical stuff (iron, germanium, carbon, water, etc.) that has been stored by nature in the Earth and in the Solar System; the amount of physical energy available to us; and the amount of human labor available. In practice, however, none of those things actually limit us. Excluding oil, we have enough stuff stored in just the Earth to last us centuries, and there are orders of magnitude more stuff waiting for us in the Solar System. We don't need oil for energy; we have again orders of magnitude more free energy falling on the Earth every year as sunlight than all the oil, coal, and natural gas in the ground. And we have not come anywhere near to harnessing the labor available from the people who currently inhabit the Earth.

In practice, the only limitations that money represents are the limits imposed by our will and imagination. We can have globally universal health care, globally universal decent housing, globally universal food security, globally universal education, and, if we were to choose to do so, we could have them in less than a decade, the time it would take to sort out the details. We do not do so not because we cannot, but because we choose not.

Fundamentally, Honji shows the attitude of the capitalist ruling class. The capitalist ruling class would like us to believe that scraps are all there is, and the best the mass of humanity can do is fight over them. This is a lie. Like Honji, the capitalist ruling class believes that the mass of humanity does not deserve greatness; indeed we do not deserve even dignity or security, and it would be a crime against justice to provide it to us.