Critique of pure Reasoner

Assassin's Gate

2006-10-01T20:39:00.000-06:00

I got the George Packer book today, thinking that Pinker's "Words and Rules" would almost certainly end before I have a chance to unpack my other books. Reading it is pure pain; pretty much every other page made me tear up. I can't help caring about Iraq, and the way it has been fouled up just makes me ache for the Iraqis, us, and the world.

"You Can Know For Sure 100% You Will Go To Heaven"

2006-09-29T09:04:00.000-06:00

The above-titled pamphlet for Cornerstone Baptist Church contains absolutely nothing about morality. In fact:

"God has a gift for all sinner, and it is ABSOLUTELY FREE!

Thus is the question answered:

SO HOW CAN YOU KNOW 100% SURE THAT YOU WILL GO TO HEAVEN?

First, admit you are a sinner.
Second, realize that without Christ, you are doomed to Hell.
Third, realize that God gave His Son to die in your place.

BY SIMPLE FAITH, BELIEVE AND RECEIVE GOD'S SON AS PAYMENT FOR YOUR SIN.

Evidently, faction loyalty is payment for whatever misdeeds one has committed and ever will commit.

Advert tag lines on the back page:

Bible Preaching
Family Oriented
Old Fashioned Values

That last word is the only reference to morals (besides the obligatory "we are all sinners, every one" lines) in the whole pamphlet. And, of course, this is very likely a cultural code phrase for the church's stance on issues like abortion, gay rights and so on.

And we complain about madrassas in Pakistan.

After a long haitus

2006-09-07T02:02:00.000-06:00

Just wanted to link to this story from AP. Of particular note to me:

"There are some people, and I'm one of them, that believe George Bush was placed where he is by the Lord," Tomanio said. "I don't care how he governs, I will support him. I'm a Republican through and through."

For folks like Tom, this fits very much their hypothesis for why some people still support Bush after all that has happened. As a data point, of course, this one quote is highly anecdotal.

Insurgents not getting along

2005-06-22T21:04:00.000-06:00

At my job we call unclassified media reports "OSINT" for Open Source Intelligence. Though they call their collectors "correspondents," mass media are intelligence services of sorts and frequently have information us secret-squirrel types don't. Unfortunately, after reading a few thousand reports from various sorts of sources, it can start to blur together in your head what came from where. It's apparent, though, that the story of anti-Coalition forces fighting one-another has hit OSINT in a big way, so I think I can at least talk about my perceptions in general terms.

The media occasionally bothers to devide the insurgency into a number of subgroups, the boundaries of which can be fuzzy without being arbitrarily delineated. Early on we heard a great deal about former regime elements (FREs) as well as the more general "mujahadeen" (literally "those who practice Jihad," but overuse has reduced it to meaning something like "members of the resistance"). At some point "Foreign Fighters" (FFs) became prominent in the discussions of who attacks the Multi-National Forces (MNF). The first two are (broadly) Iraqi, while the last depends on outsiders who travel to Iraq to fight the infidels (though occasionally under considerable duress).

Indigenous rebels frequently have ideological reasons for fighting, or cultural ones (it can be hard to distinguish in Iraq's tribal society), but they are also usually fighting from a sense of communal defense against marginalization of one sort or another. Alienating their own constituency or inciting the enmity of powerful neighbor tribes is a real danger of collateral damage.

Foreign fighters, on the other hand, tend to be part of global terrorist networks with recruiting operations in every country in the world with a notable population of Islamic extremists. Their "community" is essentially composed of a heirarchy of terror bosses and the media organs which carry a large percentage of their Information Operations (IO) campaign. Collateral damage certainly creates hostility in the local community, but it also compels compliance much of the time. Not many people are willing to risk the kidnapping and beheading of family members that can result from vigilante action.

But Iraqi insurgents are well-armed, at least semi-trained and organized, and have already taken measures to protect their families (or have already lost them). They are also community-based; when the MNF conduct operations to root out terrorists who have set off some huge car-bomb, killing scores of civilians in a neighborhood, they are presented with a dilemma: attack the people fighting against the group that just blew up their friends and family, or undertake the revenge prescribed by traditions of tribal honor. Even from a nationalist perspective, foreign fighters cause special aggrevation: while American presence is an unbearable insult, at least we're building up the country, whereas terrorists never do anything but blow stuff up and behead people, most of whom are Irqi Muslims. And I shouldn't forget drug trafficking and kidnapping to raise money.

It also helps that just about anyone is easier and safer to target than US troops.

So the rise of insurgent vs terrorist fighting doesn't much surprise me. Neither has the rise of anti-insurgent vigilante groups (which are not automatically pro-Coalition). People are tired of their country being the playground of armed yahoos of all types, especially now that there's an embryonic political process.

Update from Tal Afar

2005-06-17T18:14:00.000-06:00

Those slices of free time which I cut from sleep or the gym I generally use to keep in touch with my girlfriend and family rather than write about geopolitics, Iraq, or any other non-personal topic, but sometimes I have a little more leeway. When I do, I frequently check Lancelot Finn's blog to get a (generally conservative) view of Iraq from the States.

Lancelot and I, of course, disagree on a lot of things, but we're both interventionist Libertarians - something many would regard as a contradiction in terms, but it springs from a deep-seated similarity: we both believe in moral absolutes. Further, we both are of the opinion that a Western-style constitutional democracy combined with its undergirding capitalist* economic organization is a fundamentally better social system than anything on offer in the Middle East. It's not just that we're richer monetarily - and in some cases we're not, e.g. Saudi Arabia - it's that we're free to enrich our lives to suit ourselves and our ambitions in a scarier but more satisfying way.

As corny as it sounds, we believe the American Dream (qua the aspiration to material and social satisfaction as well as independence achieved through hard work) should everyone's dream. That's not to say every people's instantiation thereof should look the same, but there are main ingredients that are not optional: property rights, freedom of employment, freedom of worship, equal (and substantive) protection before the law, strong personal liberties, and legitimately democratic governance.

The whole world (publicly) respects democratic governance, excepting a few people like Zarqawi who are not well liked almost anywhere. However, not everyone respects the rest of the ingredients and some even consider them anathema. In many cases they're correct, too. The American Dream destroys as it creates: as American women approached parity in economic prospects with their male counterparts, divorce rates rose and society went through a period of turbulence as everyone tried to readjust to the fact that women's fortunes were no longer identical to that of their spouses.

In Iraq the same sort of new freedoms threaten to break down traditional structures in similar ways. As rule of law and freedom of movement grow, the need to rely on the largess and protection of tribal Sheikhs declines. As freedom of worship becomes more real, then spiritual adventurers will drift farther afield from the traditional sects to more and more varied alternatives. Social cohesion will likely suffer in the same ways it has in the United States, though for reasons unique to each individual society.

Still, there are many real reasons to fear these changes: especially the older members of society have invested their whole lives based on assumptions that will no longer hold true. Personal achievements for which they've worked their whole lives may be swept away or devalued, and things they have been taught to despise their whole lives may come to dominate. Ultimately, the greatest fear is of alienation. When the world changes so disorientingly, we often feel like our very existence is threatened by the swift corrosion of what came before; for things we have loved are the substance of our spiritual identity.

Americans marching around on the streets puts the most problematic possible face on change - we are not (generally) Arabs, or traditional allies, or Muslims, or tribesmen, or from the desert, or speak the same languages... the list goes on. Why do such a large percentage of even Sunni Arab Iraqis cheer the (mostly Shia and Kurd) Iraqi Army when they enter towns and villages, while most Iraqis have an almost comical amount of distrust of the Americans accompanying and protecting the selfsame IA soldiers? Is it just propaganda? If so, why would they believe anti-US propaganda before pro-US propaganda?

We are immensely unpopular amongst all but the Kurds - Even the Shia dislike us by at least a 2:1 margin. Yet at the end of the day, we'll get covert requests from community leaders that US soldiers accompany IA troops during house searches to prevent theft.

I predict that once we (mostly) leave and the threat is not so immediate and alien, then Americans may be remembered in a very different light by much of the populace. The toys we brought and the mistakes we did our best to make amends for and the infrastructure we built and the aid we provided will come into pespective. Once the shadow of American control - real or imagined - no longer falls over the Iraqi government, more people can relax and be excited by the opportunities presented by change rather than its dangers written in the foreign faces and on the weapons of alien occupiers.

That said, we can't be leaving just yet. Though not the paper tiger it was last year, the Iraqi Security Forces are by no means suffiently staffed, trained, equipped or disciplined to take on all stability operations by themselves. Hopefully the US will be able to scale back starting a couple months after the December elections so that by the end of next year we'll only be watching the ISF's back and providing help in a pinch rather than planning and executing the majority of the operations. We'll probably need to keep MI soldiers like myself in longer, since Iraq won't be able to mount anything comparable to our technical abilities for years, but we're very low-profile and less offensive because of that fact.

Prognosis? I think Iraq will be an independent, frequently disagreeing, excellent friend of the United States in ten years.

Unfortunately, we still have a major situation on the Korean Peninsula from which our Iraq engagement draws a great deal of logistical and intelligence resources. Let's hope that doesn't come to a head any time soon.

*I say this despite that fact that our capitalism is terribly incomplete and flawed, but "pursuit of happiness" was, after all, chosen as a sort of code-phrase for "property." Constitutional democracies are all about property rights and restrictions of government power in consciousness that private (corporate) institutions would fill all other control roles.

In Iraq

2005-04-26T17:02:00.000-06:00

So I'm in Iraq, and the popular questions seem to be "Has it changed your perspective on the war?" The psychological truth of epistemology is that people are always much more likely to find their opinions confirmed than otherwise, and it seems I am no exception. Just as I expected, it is winnable; just as I suspected, we totally screwed up unnecessarily in the beginning, and just as I suspected being in Iraq isn't so bad.

This is largely because - despite all the faults of the US's national behavior regarding Iraq - between the insurgents and ourselves, I still get to fight on the indisputably better side. How often does anyone get to do that?

Impending Deployment

2005-02-28T20:59:00.000-07:00

My girlfriend visited for a long weekend and now I'm returning to work in Colorado Springs for a few days before we deploy this weekend. Everything with which I'm not deploying is getting packed or thrown away tomorrow. Though my posting schedule has never been consistent, it's plain it will get yet more spotty.

It'll be good to finally start doing my actual job, though. As I was explaining to the owner of a left-wing bookstore in Boulder this weekend, I believe in what we're doing in Iraq even if it has been and is still being mismanaged in some ways. Now I can try to see that it's as well managed as possible in my little corner.

A very short explanation

2005-02-15T21:43:00.000-07:00

Lancelot asked me to elaborate, so I will do so briefly and without much copy-checking.

All attempts to render my current perception of the divide between the modern GOP as led by Bush* and the modern Democrats as exemplified by Dean will, of course, grossly simplify. Those politicians with whom I've agreed most strongly have always been socially liberal Republicans, but they seem badly marginalized. Meanwhile, Clinton-era Democratic pragmatism meant that I felt some genuine enthusiasm about the direction of government. For a while, the Democrats moved away somewhat from statism in economics while largely maintaining their socially liberal roots. Generally speaking I rank social freedoms well above economic ones, so if the economic freedoms are at all comparable, I almost don't care at all for comparison's sake.

Then came Bush, who seemed at least as determined to spend as his Clintonesque opposition, but was socially very conservative - more so than Dole had been. It seemed a step back in every direction. I have complained about him in length before, so details are pointless, but I became so alienated from the Republican party that I would have felt safe voting a straight Democratic ticket anywhere outside New England.

Kerry was, of course, a disappointment, largely for the same reason Dole was in '96: he seemed to abandon his best parts in order to grab his running-mate's consituency. Dole took on Kemp's stupid tax-cut plan** while Kerry took an appalling position regarding outsourcing similar to Edwards' -- where it wasn't incoherent.

If Kerry sacrificed his best economic policies, Dean never had any. Worse, his form of social liberalism is combative, anti-intellectual and insulting in all the same ways I find the far right. I might agree with his positions, but he puts such an ugly face on them that I'd rather they not be advocated at all than be stigmatized with such unsympathetic and fascist rhetorical style. Hillary Clinton, his only current rival for influence, is... ick.

For Derek Obama I hold some hope, but he's so inexperienced, his promise for national politics is still well in the future.

I'll still vote Democratic against current GOP leadership because I think they are terrifying and I'll do just about anything to maintain reproductive freedom and/or advance gay rights, but if a moderate Republican could make it past the primaries to face a Dem like Dean or post-Edwards Kerry, I'd vote for him in an instant. That I'm even dreaming of that possibility, however, is largely a sign of my increasing horror at what's become of the Dems rather than any real belief in the possibility.

* My saying this will sound odd, but compared to House Republicans and the likes of Santorum, I feel almost warm toward Bush and his administration.

** Cutting taxes qua lowering the overall tax rate does nothing to shift capital to the private sector -- only reducing government expenditures does that. Otherwise the government must borrow the exact value of the tax cut back from the economy. Real interest rates in '96 were decidedly positive, so incurring debt was definitely *not* lucrative. Since it's been negative through much of Bush's administration, it's been largely a wash, so my complaints center more on the how of the tax cut than the existence at all. I still expect real interest rates to return to large positive values, of course, and *then* I'll be more upset about the grown debt, but that's the future.

Ugh

2005-02-12T09:55:00.000-07:00

Howard Dean.

The choice between the GOP and Democrats gets ever more unpalatable.

More on freedom and secularism

2004-11-20T17:53:00.000-07:00

MaxedOutMama exercises altogether too much modesty in her eloquent and insightful latest post, though her flattery of Lancelot and myself left me preening uncontrollably. She also comments on my previous post. The most important bit:

I'd argue, I think in agreement with Lancelot Finn, that by tossing out older belief systems it becomes necessary for secularist democracies to develop and impose by legislation another belief system. The US model has been more one of prohibiting acts rather than mandating beliefs, and thereby leaving the evolution of the concept of good to private churches and secular philosophers. The tension between people's varying beliefs has created a sort of official public-policy vacuum, and freedom has existed in that no-man's land.

On one hand I'd say that secularism consists of exactly the bracketing of belief systems that she describes, but it is also incontestable that the government can and does underwrite the activities of secular philosophers while the jurisprudence considers that the constitution prohibits the government from likewise funding of churches and their official exponents. Can I wriggle out of this formulation of the issue in which the status quo is obviously unfair without being tendentious? Perhaps.

One argument I can make is that no rule, legislated or judicially decreed, prohibits, say, philosophers of religion from holding professorships in secular universities. That holders of theistic viewpoints may suffer disadvantage at the hands of the largely independent administrations of those institutions remains a matter of real concern, but of a kind beyond the scope of this post.

Another is that, though funding of churches is prohibited while secular institutions advocating counter-doctrinal views may receive state funds with impunity, government-funded organizations are enjoined from targeting any given religious group for criticism or persecution*. Lest this seem like a distinction without a difference, note that even in a perfect world the public will as implemented by the government will invariably conflict with some religious doctrine or another. In the case of rules created to protect minorities, first-order analysis of any exercise thereof will conclude it to contravene the public will itself.

Is the above sufficient to claim that religions are not disadvantaged in any unnecessary way? I think it’s at least plausible, given my caveats.

In a side note that harkens back to a much earlier post serving as my coda to an earlier debate about Christ's moral technology, I must address the side issue MaxedOutMama raises with a parenthetical caveat:

unless, of course, society at the moment has itself embarked on a destructive course

Because my particular (secular) formulation of normative truth (including personal ethics, morality, political economy, and so on) suffers all the drawbacks of heuristic searches of problem spaces, my "answers" to normative questions tend toward the messy and inelegant. Simply put, though I believe there to be only one best answer, I also believe it to be a)computationally inaccessible to finite beings and b)usually in the theoretically impure middle somewhere. Doubtless some questions have simple global answers, but I suspect none of them are very interesting.

*With the usual exception of those sects whose central doctrines require their members to substantially break important laws. I don’t think anyone worries about the government’s persecution of the Manson "Family".

Boiling some more blood

2004-11-13T15:11:00.000-07:00

My last post didn't play very well to Lancelot's eyes:

His post makes my blood boil, but it's not his fault really: he's just voicing the condescendion towards religion that characterizes broad swaths of the general culure.

After restating his belief that tolerance in Christian countries is due to Christian arguments*, he moves on to my 'condescension':

And of course, failing to control the message the children of the faithful receive is rightly perceived as a threat. Lancelot Finn, for example, worries that merely "conveying a vague sense that the whole world can be explained without reference to God" is sufficient to "turn my son into an atheist".

Failing to control the message? Earth to Nato: no one is proposing to pull scientific books off the shelves, to prohibit atheists from speaking on the radio and television, or even to bar atheists from teaching in the schools. It is not Christians who feel the need for message control here. But we need the resources-- children's time, facilities, personnel, and so on-- to positively instill the message. Christianity may be faith in part but it also involves a tremendous amount of learning.

At this point, I'm wondering if he thinks atheists are attempting to prohibit theists from speaking on the radio, teaching in schools and etc. But moving on, he continues:

"we are afraid that the vast amount of tax dollars and of our children's time that is devoted to constructing this rival, secularist synthesis will leave us without the space to instill a knowledge of what the Christian faith is in our children."

Now I wonder about what secularist synthesis are we talking. A carefully crafted "vague sense that the whole world can be explained without reference to God" that somehow takes up hours and hours and bajillions of dollars? Are we talking about the theory of evolution, the majority of which is accepted even by the likes of Behe? If you cut out only those portions that Behe rejects, you don't save much time or money. Or do we need to cut out more from the secular curriculum? Maybe a little less math, science, history and English? Surely not.

It seems very much that it's the rival "secularist synthesis" itself that's threatening, and the "vast amount of tax dollars and of our children's time" is merely an excuse. Which is fair enough - atheists are operating under the same logic when they complain government funding of religous schooling. The loss of one cent out of our personal budget that ends up funding the opposing message is not the issue so much as we can use the constitutional argument to complain about how the other guys have an advantage and to make it harder for them. I mean, if some atheist parent sends her child to a school and it "makes" her child a theist, then perhaps the child found the school's case for theism more convincing than the parent's case against it. The marketplace of ideas doesn't always spread the truth, but it's the best mechanism we've got.

Really, atheists have a sort of unfair advantage that the founders never really foresaw. By requiring the government to take no positive position, they essentially made the government atheist in the same way private citizens are. Since the government never advises children about God, a child might get the idea that there's no God about which to be advised: the classic null case. Advertisers vie to market their brand of ceareal, but the government must stay out of it, so it avoids showing children eating breakfast. Result: the cereal industry declines altogether and non-breakfast eaters win by default.

Lancelot also links to an article in which the "secularization hypothesis" is "discredited." Unfortunately, it seems to start from the highly tendentious assumption that "human beings are unalterably religious." Well, if that is the given from which the argument starts, then yeah, it's going to be pretty tough to maintain that secularity is growing.

Finally he ends up with what is largely a mirror image of my own discussion in which I claimed that the backlash against fundamentalist resurgence might well prove to be the event that vitalizes the secularist minority. I called one of his posts "preposterous and insulting" and thereafter wrote a post expressing "condescension" that made his blood boil. We have now both predicted eventual victory for our own side. If only both of us could claim God was on our side, it'd be perfectly classic parity.

*One wonders whence comes tolerance in non-Christian countries. Also, one wonders, if Christianity is so good at tolerance, why Europe wasn't more tolerant back when Christianity had much greater relative power.

Atheism and the authoritarian state

2004-11-12T14:54:00.000-07:00

Authoritarian states repress. That's what makes them authoritarian. The degree to which a state represses is therefor the degree to which it is authoritarian. Further, one can say that a state that represses religion must be an authoritarian state. For a state to declare itself explicitly atheistic (more than merely secular) is to repress religion at least somewhat, so it's pretty much logically impossible for an atheist state to not be authoritarian.

So, saying that atheist states have a history of authoritarianism is something of a tautology, and applies to any state expressing any positive position on religion. As with most such pat chains of reasoning, of course, it elides some important distinctions. Norway is nominally Lutheran, for example, but it's difficult to really call it authoritarian, as the state works hard to avoid enabling Lutheran domination. Meanwhile the repression of any ideology that might conflict with "communism" in Poland was both brutal and onerous. The degree of interference with civil rights makes a big difference. In the very history of explicitly atheist states, of course, there are few examples of Norway equivalents and many Polands.

Is this because atheists naturally gravitate toward authoritarian states? Considering that most of the atheistic states in question were clients of the Soviet Union, it's hardly surprising that they were all avowed socialist/communist states, which cannot operate except on an authoritarian basis. There's really no example of an atheist state coming about without demagogue-orchestrated communist populism borrowing directly from Marx and his heirs. Lenin's elitist stamp on all of 20th century communism certainly didn't help.

So the closest thing we have to naturally occurring atheist states are countries like Japan and perhaps the Netherlands. Since abandoning the ambulatory phase of Shinto/Buddhism that gave rise to early 20th century nationalism, they've not been particularly authoritarian, especially compared to far more religious neighbors like Taiwan and South Korea. The Netherlands is only incrementally more atheist (55% describe themselves as Secular Humanists as opposed to 25-40% in the rest of Western Europe) than its neighbors, but it's also incrementally more libertarian than its continental neighbors - especially socially, but also economically. The UK's economy is considerably more economically libertarian, of course, but England's entire industrial-age experience has been radically different from the rest of Europe's.

Two counties are at best anecdotes and I don't really see any reason to believe (naturally) atheistic countries would be any more libertarian than theistic ones, but the reason I see for the obverse doesn't really pay organized theism any compliments.

Essentially, powerful churches see the addition of powerful non-sectarian states like the addition of a second tiger to a hill (and vice-versa in the former communist countries). Churches (and other reified religious structures) are by their nature methods of centralizing authority (except in cases like the Quakers). One need only read the newsletters of old-line churches bemoaning the rise of "interfaith" churches to see desire to monopolize their control on their congregations. Another excellent example is Orthodox accusations against the Vatican of "poaching" their congregations. These are not people interested in competing openly in the marketplace of ideas, and libertarianism is a way to prevent state competition therein.

And of course, failing to control the message the children of the faithful receive is rightly perceived as a threat. Lancelot Finn, for example, worries that merely "conveying a vague sense that the whole world can be explained without reference to God" is sufficient to "turn my son into an atheist". Well, he's right. My grandfather, who is a very religious man as well as a chemist, accidentally triggered my "conversion" to atheism simply by explaining to me Occam's Razor. As time has passed, the percentage of atheists in the world has grown despite the much lower birth rates among the secular, showing that despite the lack of any missionary apparatus, atheism has been easily the most successful religious stance in the world as measured by conversion.

Now, many want to explain this in terms of the government acting as a missionary proxy for secular humanism, but it seems religious belief has actually fared worse in industrialized states with official religions. Really it seems to be most closely related to the degree of higher education in the general populace, whether religious or otherwise. Likely this has something to do with the much greater pedagogical weight the atheistic elite wield in academia. If one wants to find examples of secularists intimidating theists, that's certainly the place to look. Even granted that such intimidation is widespread and overwhelming (which I only do for the purposes of this essay) I very much doubt that intimidation-based conversion lasts very long after one leaves the intimidating environment, if one's earlier upbringing was notably religious. As the Jesuits (or Loyola) were once reputed to say "give me the first six years of a child's life and you can have the rest."

I think the persecution complex evinced by so many Christians is really an excuse explaining away the long-term decline of their faith. Ditto the Islamic fantasy that the entire Western world is arrayed against them.

Of course, with traditionalist Christianity in the ascendancy in the US, the fundamentalists risk radicalizing formerly-moderate secularists that have so far taken for granted that whatever aggravating things religious conservatives might say, their fundamental rights were not in real jeopardy. Believe it or not, I think criticism of the religious right has so far been relatively muted. Witness Andrew Sullivan's about-face as a public example of what I hear expressed more and more by my personal friends. My brother was once disgusted by the Log Cabin Republicans because he felt they were too liberal, but has become a committed enemy of the GOP because it's no longer possible to deny how much control the religious right has over it and how ambitious their goals are. Another libertarian friend of mine who used to weight economic freedoms much more heavily than social ones has also changed her mind and is now voting a straight Dem ticket. All in all, the percentage of "soft secularists" will still be much smaller than the evangelical legions, but look for it to become a more organized, outspoken and important force as former moderates begin to speak up and drown out the lunatic fringe of the left that has always been our embarrassment.

And then what happens? Will the US mirror Europe's religious decline? It depends on how authoritarian the US becomes about legislating religious morality on the nonreligious. Personally, I'd rather that *not* be the path, as the intervening time will be painful for everyone. I'd much rather traditional religion decline slowly with everyone's freedoms intact than be discredited by destructive interference in government.

None of which is amenable to the viewpoint of the traditionally religious, but it's how I see things. Now, for the nontraditionally religious, it need not be very scary, as most of them are quite happy to let people arrive at their various beliefs about the metaphysical universe independently.

My friend Sarah is an excellent example. She's quite religious in her way, but she combines a wide variety of different traditions together after trying them out and seeing how they fit her life. She certainly believes in a higher power of some sort, but neither would does the prospect of a secular education at all worry her. After all, it didn't turn her into an atheist automaton. Meanwhile, I went to a Protestant preschool, said grace before every family meal and so on, yet my theism died before I was ten. Now, had I continued to a sectarian primary school, the story might have gone differently, but speculation doesn't count as evidence.

All of which leads one to the suggestion that secularists are somewhat overafraid of the rise of religious schools. Sarah didn't become an atheist automaton and neither do parochial school students necessarily become theist clones. Stifling the marketplace of ideas typically only slows improvement; it doesn't easily stop or reverse it in the long term. We are not headed toward Margaret Atwood's theocratic dystopia.

That doesn't mean I look forward to the slowing of progress or the painful continuing conflict between champions of tradition and progress. I also hope to make some use of the advocacy by the religious of libertarian principles to counterbalance the socialist tendencies in my own set. Perhaps in some far future, atheism will hold the kind of demographic dominance that religious belief has enjoyed for most of human history, but mostly I just wish for the dismantling of all sorts of authoritarianism. If everyone became like Sarah, that would work just as well.

Taking off the 'irate atheist' hat

2004-11-11T10:22:00.000-07:00

Or at least shrinking it to a less obtrustive yamaka-type thing.

Lancelot Finn, always a good sport and, I think, quite willing to stretch his thesis in order to provoke a good exchange, has responded to my rather hotly-worded commentary.

Nathanael points out that Christianity has within it messages of tolerance meant to counteract the impulse to squash differing opinions, contra atheism, for which I supply no equivalent. This is, of course, absolutely true. There's nothing about atheism qua atheism that requires it to tolerate anyone. There's nothing in atheism that indicts mass murder, torture, rape, pillage, sophistry, or poor government, for the very simple reason that atheism is not an integrated world view, but rather consists entirely of the lack of any theistic belief. It prohibits nothing morally, and only obliquely indicts theistic belief on epistemic grounds.

Of course this is not really new information, but sometimes one must be reminded that atheism doesn't equate to secular humanism, which which it is usually associated. Of course, sometimes it's associated with communism, or Naziism, or Mormonism, but I generally regard those as mistakes. I lost faith in technocracy and other top-down management ideologies somewhat before I became an actual atheist.

Does secular humanism have within it an explicit antidote to the totalizing impulse? A quick quote for context:

Why should you tolerate a belief system you think is absurd, and which will lead people to do things that you feel endanger the Republic, like vote for George Bush/John Kerry? What if you really hate it that people think that way, and you just know that they're wrong? Maybe you can't actually force them to change their beliefs, but can't you make them shut up about it and keep them to themselves? Christians have an answer to this: it violates the Christian religion to impose one's beliefs on anyone. That's not to say that many Christians haven't violated their religion in this way (and in many other ways) over the years, but the antidote to Christian intolerance is contained in the Christian faith itself.

In the Council for Secular Humanism's Statement of Principles, #4 is:

We believe in an open and pluralistic society and that democracy is the best guarantee of protecting human rights from authoritarian elites and repressive majorities.

and #6

We cultivate the arts of negotiation and compromise as a means of resolving differences and achieving mutual understanding.

The Council for Secular Humanism by no means represents all secular humanists - not even me, though I stole their little logo for my orginal livejournal. However, they are a fairly typical example of organized secular humanist belief, and they have dictates of tolerance in their short list of principles. It's true that, since this list was not composed by Ultimate Authority, it is always subject to revision, but there was a time when the New Testament didn't exist as well. Both before it was written at all and before the Council of Nicea. And if you're a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints, then there were times before the Pearl of Great Price and the Book of Mormon, both of which, if they contradict the Old and New Testament, are regarded by the LDS as more authoritative. The LDS, for the record, consider themselves Christians, though plenty of other Christians disagree.

On to another item:

Is it an "anecdote" that millions of religious parents are taxed in order to have their children compulsorily sent to schools where the curriculum contradicts their beliefs?

Actually, they can send their children to religious schools if they have the cash. The issue is that they nevertheless get taxed to pay for public education in which curriculum is decided by the state, which is explicitly secular. Not explicitly atheist, but explicitly secular. Of course, since atheism is a negative position and so is secularism, there's a lot of similarity, but the secularlism consists in bracketing religious belief while atheist is a rejection of them.

One can argue about the concept of education being funded by income taxes instead of user fees, but complaining that the curriculum contradicts one's beliefs is not in any way unique to religious questions. In science where the best-supported theories are usually in at least a little controversy, the practice of giving the majority opinion of scientists is merely a best guess method of choosing what to teach.

I mean, I had to sit through classes in my public high school in which it was taught that fiscal policy is an effective way of regulating the economy despite that I thought that only monetary policy had a non-illusory affect*. Does it follow that monetarists who also have to pay for those classes are being oppressed by Keynsians? Or anyone?

Moving on to Lancelot's ideas about Europe... well, I tend to agree. Though I still think the EU should at least put Turkey's admission up for review.

*I'm no longer the Austrian-school purist I was at the time, but I think the argument still carries.

Up on my high horse

2004-11-09T21:37:00.000-07:00

Preposterous and insulting.

What do you mean, Atheists don't have an answer to "Why let a belief system you think is absurd continue to exist..."? It seems clear that one need not be a theist to support the right to have differing opinions. As for "secularized culture," the very term implies something forced and invasive - something that can only happen under authoritarian regimes. Secular states, on the other hand, are very much associated with democratic freedom. The US Constitution does not and never has mentioned the word "God," so I don't see how the failure to include the word in the European Constitution somehow qualifies as some sort of awful anti-Christian discrimination. Contra the "secular elites are oppressing the Christian masses" meme sit facts like the addition (owing largely to the lobbying of the Knights of Columbus) of the word "God" to both the Pledge of Allegiance and the official US motto in the 1950s as a blow against "communism" - despite the fact that the large scientific corps frantically maintaining US miliary parity failed to believe in God at least half the time.

As for the "people" of Europe overturning an elite-imposed cultural secularism, one should note that the level of belief in Europe is much lower at the same time as many states there maintain official churches. As general belief has declined rapidly in the last 3-4 decades, the religious sinecures and offices have come under attack by a populace that no longer believes they are relevant. I'm admittedly not sure I'm comfortable with Parris' treatment of Mr Buttiglione, but neither am I sure it was inappropriate. I'm just not familiar enough with the post to have a solid opinion. I will say, however, that western European popular opinion is assuredly closer to Mr Parris' side than Mr Buttiglione's.

The narrative in which Christians are somehow being put at a disadvantage (outside of anecdotes) in the modern America by secular elites is so absurd from my perspective that it beggars the mind. For example, 37% of Americans would refuse to vote for a gay president, but 48% would be unwilling to support an atheist. All sorts of well-meaning people feel free to tell me that since I’m an atheist, I have no morals. That I was allowed to join the military frequently astonishes those around me. When I was filling out the forms for my military ID tags, I was told I could not have “none” or “atheist” printed in the customary religion slot - I would only be “no-rel-pref.” I am by no means the only enlisted atheist I know who has encountered that particular circumstance. I was not allowed into the Boy Scouts because I was an atheist. I could go on and on with the statistics and anecdotes, but I think I’ve made my point.

That’s not to say that I feel particularly disadvantaged by my atheism. I mean, I’m an educated, employed heterosexual caucasian male from a wealthy family who doesn’t drink, doesn’t smoke, doesn’t do any other drugs and is more or less celibate. I personally have little to fear from even the most arch-conservative Christian society. Well, I wouldn’t have been born if my mother hadn’t been able to abort a baby that would have become my brother’s sibling instead of me, but that’s water well under the bridge. However, my brother would like to adopt children with his partner some day, I hope to have children free of preconceived notions about how they must be to fit their gender, I’d like my friends to be able to conduct their sexual lives in safe ways they see fit, and I’d like to be able to honor my grandfather’s fervent and long-standing demand that should he ever become mentally incapacitated that we not keep him alive artificially. None of these actions require anything of Christians, yet it seems a great number of said Christians (as well as Muslims, etc) feel the need to impose laws against them. Frustrating the desire to impose theistic moral dictates on non-theists does not strike me as “oppressing” the theist. Taking “God” back out of the Pledge of Allegiance doesn’t seem like elitist domination.

Usama bin Laden's Intentions

2004-10-30T17:48:00.000-06:00

Lancelot Finn makes a post about the intent of UBL's newly released video. I posted the following as a comment:

***
Capturing and imprisoning Usama would be the fastest way to abrade his currency, as executing him would just make him a martyr. Second to that is him being killed in a factional battle that muddies the meaning of his death. Last would be for him to die naturally of something like sudden heart failure or falling off a rock. Here's to any of those possibilities.

I've also been thinking about the importance of the identity of the PotUS in UBL's mind, and I tend to wonder if he has any sort of real grasp of American politics at all. He seems to have taken the wrong lessons from Somalia because he didn't realize that the US resolve to aid those who shoot at us is highly limited. Note the swift-declining popularity of the Iraq war now that it's clear it presented no real threat to the US - a huge percentage of people just dont' care much for the humanitarian dimensions of the war, or don't understand them. We left Somalia in a hurry because no one wanted to spend American lives helping people who didn't appreciate it*.

UBL, on the other hand, thought that the US was cowed by the public casualties. He doesn’t understand the pride of a people like ours, who count ourselves worth more because we’re well aware of the fact that when there’s aid or an attempt to help, it’s always from us to others, not the reverse. Strike at us, of course, and you find out that our instinct is to, as a Marine friend of mine says, “Rip sh*t up.” That we merely retract our troops is generally a measure of restraint rather than retreat.

Our response in Afghanistan, I think, surprised him a great deal. I, on the other hand, being the liberal interventionist that I am, had wanted an excuse for us to invade that abandoned and forgotten country since 1996 and saw it as an inevitable beneficial result of the 9/11 attacks. Essentially, by attacking us on our own soil without (what is internationally accepted as sufficient) provocation, he achieved the worst setback for his movement he possibly could have effected. Not only did he make us very, very angry, he convinced the world (for a while) to lend legitimacy to whatever we did. We crushed his Afghan operations almost without backlash**. If we had stopped there, I think UBL would have been marginalized for many years, or perhaps permanently.

Iraq, of course, has been another thing entirely, but even now, UBL does not seem particularly involved there except as a symbol. Zarqawi is, while not quite apostate, regarded as somewhat outside the Al Qaeda hierarchy because of his (even more) indiscriminate tactics. Since Iraq has to some extent supplanted Palestine as the beacon of jihad, Zarqawi’s star is rising over UBL’s somewhat tattered flag.

So what does the US election mean to UBL? Does he need Bush’s crusader fervor as a foil to lend him meaning and importance as many on the left like to say? Perhaps, but I don’t know if UBL can navigate the shades of difference between Kerry and Bush that seem like gaping chasms to people raised within American culture and traditions. If Bush is a Christian crusader, at least he is a Man of the Book who believes in the primacy of faith in public life. Kerry’s secular humanist positions constitute an even greater anathema to the Islamic fundamentalist, worthy of outright execution. Meanwhile, Bush is the incumbent and the election of Kerry might look attractively like the populace capitulating. There’s no real way of telling how someone like Usama would view them.

However, it’s easy to see what threat of schism and loss of hegemony Zarqawi’s ascendance presents to UBL. By releasing a video right now to focus the eye of the world back on himself might serve his personal goals within the community of terrorists much more directly and reliably.

P.S. You’d probably prefer to transliterate is as “Al Quds” because “holy” in Arabic begins with a voiceless uvular stop as opposed to the velar stop for which the Latin letter “k” is usually used.

*The fact that most people there *did* appreciate it was largely lost on the electorate.

**Afghanistan was always an embarrassment to Islamic nations, and it seemed to me in conversations with Muslims from around the world that they were mostly upset that it took US intervention to clear that huge skeleton out of the Islamic closet.

North Korea ad nauseum

2004-10-01T08:28:00.000-06:00

Ohay, I still haven't offered a 'solution' to the North Korea thing, but Nathanael has responded to my own commentary, saying "It seems that Nato was thinking of “hitting” North Korea, or at any rate, of being able to."

About which he is fully correct. Being able to cast doubt on North Korea's ability to deliver its nukes gives a great deal more leverage in negotiations, and of course, gives us some in hope of preventing unthinkable in case negotiations fail catastrophically. It still leaves them with a lot of leverage, but you do the best you can with what you have.

Something else he said is also important to note:

Nato suggests that Kim Jong Il would “respond” with his “gigantic army.” Why? If we did take out his nukes, North Korea would be in no better position to invade South Korea than at any time in the past fifty years. And why punish South Korea, or even Japan, for what the US did?

North Korea is a good bit more desperate than they've ever been before. Millions of people are starving, their electrical infrastructure is breaking down, and so on. South Korea has food, resources, and offers a distraction from internal dissent. Meanwhile, by striking North Korea we are, technically, committing an act of war. South Korea is our close ally. While I doubt much of the world would be on North Korea's side, I don't think the rest of the world would admit that our moral position is exactly flawless. And in Kim Jong Il's mind, that might well be enough.

North Korea part III

2004-09-29T08:50:00.000-06:00

Nathanael also asked what to do about North Korea now. Watch this space on that topic.

North Korea, redux

2004-09-29T07:49:00.000-06:00

Nathanael replies to my comments about "hitting" North Korea:

It's not in North Korea's interests to compromise. It's in North Korea's interests to get nuclear weapons and blackmail us. Yes, there are more ways to deal with a country than to "hit" it. But if we can't hit it, we're in a bad position to negotiate.

Nathanael has very concisely made my point for me. Right now with the imbroglio in Iraq, it is very hard for us to present a credible threat to North Korea - our ground forces are publicly overcommitted to the point where we're attriting our peninsular presence.

Granted, the Navy and Air Force are the forces likely to be able to damage North Korea's nuclear facilities, but the subsequent response by Kim Jong Il and his gigantic army is strategically curtailed by significant presence of US ground forces - essentially if he engages our troops in a major way, it commits the US to flattening him. If he can avoid engaging our troops as much as possible, however, then he may feel he can avoid the US's full-scale involvement. That's the doctrinal reason for the presence of US ground forces near the DMZ.

Maybe we can get by with half as many troops there - perhaps it'll still be seen the same way - but at less than 40k troops it was already in danger of being a clearly token force. Inter alia, the intelligence resouces of those troops are moving as well, with all their focused understanding of the Korean situation. Bad idea? I would say so, if we didn't really need those troops in Iraq-which-is-not-a-quagmire.

Meanwhile, that's ony half the kind of pressure we can exert. The Chinese, on whom the North Koreans depend heavily, have a great deal of traction with them. In multi-lateral talks, there's a great deal we can bring to bear on China to in turn bring to bear on North Korea. It has worked before, and it could well have worked again, if we hadn't already used (squandered, really) most of our leverage with China on Iraq. So, while we've been screwing around with the oppressor who wouldn't be able to obtain nuclear weapons for several years yet, who we thought had chemical weapons that he might have been able to deliver to targets outside Iraq, and who was not widely assessed to be willing to sell such munitions to terrorists, we've missed the boat with the oppressor who had nuclear weapons and said he was making more and does have the capability to deliver the nukes to US targets (or whomever else) and is assessed to be willing to sell anything to anyone.

And now the North Koreans have made a bunch more nukes. When it was one or two, we would likely have been able to deal with them through airstrikes. Now we're screwed. And yes, paying the blackmail might work better - by now - than apologizing to the South Koreans and the relatives of those who used to live in Seattle. Great job, Bush!

North Korea

2004-09-24T22:34:00.000-06:00

Nathanael addresses my brief commentary about North Korea (even more) briefly, saying:

North Korea’s bad. But we can’t hit them because they would nuke Seoul, or Tokyo, and kill millions. Right?

Such a laconic statement couldn't possibly state anything like a comprehensive option (nor, I think, does Nathanael intend it as such), but it's a good starting place for discussion to address the implications of this central fact. Having just gotten back from a rough time in the feild, however, I'm not feeling like dropping the analysis bomb. Instead, I'll just treat his statement as if it really represented the totality of Nathanael's thought on the topic.

The fact that Korea has the current and confirmed ability to cause true catastrophe at any moment for any reason is the opposite of a reason to commit all of the the slack in our resources to an unpopular, aggressive action against a regime we have placed in the same rhetorical category. We make them nervous while reducing our ability to counter their actions.

And I never suggested we "hit" North Korea. That this apparently springs immediately to Nathanael's mind as the first choice consequence of focusing on the problem would signal a seriously limited imagination, if he really meant it that way.

I also admit

2004-09-20T19:18:00.000-06:00

My feelings about Bush prior to the war made me much less likely to support the war in the first place. I think this goes for most of the rest of the world that he offended from his first days in office. Now, just because the world's offended doesn't mean it's right - we don't get to vote on the truth, after all - but it does mean that Bush was always going to have to work harder to convince than someone else would have. He seemed to work moderately hard to bully, but not so hard to convince.

People seem to have forgotten

2004-09-20T18:56:00.000-06:00

Does anyone remember that during the US rush to invade Iraq, a variety third-party nations floated compromise plans delaying just months or even weeks on the US plan? The Canadian plan in specific was very favorable to us, terminating on March 28 of 2003. Under such a plan, we might have been able to obtain at least a majority in the Security Council to lend legitimacy to our side. Other plans in which we waited longer might have even overcome the French veto threat. This not to mention the possibility of securing transport through Turkey, increasing coalition partnership and participation, maintaining the political stability of allied leadership, and so on.

Plenty of US intelligence analyses even today give high probability of severe sectional strife and possible civil war next year. Over and over again before the war, foreign policy specialists wrung their hands over whether Iraq without Saddam would disintegrate into two or three pieces, resulting in long term chaos and destruction familiar to Afghanis. I do think that with enough focus on the matter we'll keep that from happening, but it's worth noting that it's a year and a half later and we haven't gotten out of crisis yet. Saying that the violence is (currently) only regional is misleading if it continues to gut Iraqis confidence in central governance. And since our use of the UN essentially amounted to "here's what we're gonna do, take it or leave it," and we showed absolutely no willingness to compromise with anyone to gain their support, we do not have nearly the resources (diplomatic, financial, moral, and military) we would have had otherwise.

Considering that the threats from North Korea that were intensifying then and remain today still unresolved, this does appear to be a collossal misallocation of resources. Unconscionable, in my eyes.

Finally, a return to something relevant

2004-09-13T13:26:00.000-06:00

AP reports that Kerry's made the very good point that Bush spent political, diplomatic and military capital that should have been spent on the much more serious crisis on the Korean peninsula. A not so good point is his claim that we should have settled for bilateral talks - I agree with the analysis that insists no real progress can be made without all major regional parties represented. A good point not made directly - or a least not quoted in the article - is the point that North Korea has been and continues to be quite willing to sell arms to anybody and everybody -including terrorists - to obtain foreign scrip.

Nitpick

2004-09-07T05:58:00.000-06:00

Jesus ... invited only freely given belief and love.

It would seem the Christian "deal" runs something like: "You have the free choice between believing in Jesus and going to heaven or not believing, and spending eternity in torment. Choose any old way you want, and no pressure."

Now, I understand that it's not docrinaire to put it that way, but it certainly seems to amount to that often. I would feel the choice was more "free" if there was no mention of reward or punishment in the Bible, and the soul presumably found out about their happy reward (or terrible punishment) at death. It's suspicious, no?

More elegantly stated...

2004-08-27T18:49:00.000-06:00

Consciousness is made of the same substance as dance.

A even shorter note

2004-08-26T18:22:00.000-06:00

Since I'm packing for Austin tonight, I likely won't be able to elaborate my response to Nathanael's commentary. As a short point of clarification, however, I can poitn out that minds are immaterial in that they are information. Physical things can map information, but they are not themselves information*. Nevertheless, one need not depart from monism to allow that information is real and important.

*Well, perhaps physical things are also information or something, but that metaphysical quandry is irrelevant.

A quick note on thoughts

2004-08-26T00:31:00.000-06:00

I expect I'll write something more comprehensive later, but I wanted to sketch a general reply to Nathanael's discussion of thoughts.

It's true thoughts are immaterial - they are constitutionally informational, and the physical component of thought only matters in that the causal properties of the medium instantiate the information processing topology. Minds are always and essentially logical entities.

It still means physical processes execute our thoughts. We don't experience our thoughts as physical processes, of course, but why would we think our thoughts would seem physically intantiated to us? One can define "thought" in an essentialist manner so as to rule out any 'reductionist' account, but what's the motivation?

While I'm waiting

2004-08-24T23:15:00.000-06:00

Though I remain posted, I wanted to throw out a couple concerns with Nathanael's latest bit of commentary to make sure we're on the same page as far as the two of us go. I'll let Tom take care of his own end.

First, I want to mention that I think Nathanael meant “Foundationalism” instead of “fundamentalism.” I am also surprised that he declines to mention Reliabilism, though perhaps he considers it a subcategory of Foundationalism. That he doesn’t mention Contextualism surprises me less.

Second, I wanted to address an ambiguity:

I want to admit that, as Nato guessed, I have "not read any of the many answers that scientists have advanced, the models that have grown dramatically in power and fidelity in the last twenty years since the overly-reductive red herring of hard computationalism finally fell by the wayside for good." And I was no doubt too bold in stating categorically that modern ethical philosophers "have been refuted." Frankly, I suspect I could "refute" the recent philosophical efforts if I read them (at least inasmuch as they offer a materialist basis for morality) but I haven't, and I probably won't, which perhaps puts me in an awkward position here, so how can I justify myself?

Nathanael goes on to give a good example of an arena in which one can feel justified in dismissing a whole field of inquiry/theory based on previous experience. He uses computational biblical interpretation as his example where I would probably use perpetual motion, but both apply pretty well. Right off the bat, I can dismiss anything purporting to be a perpetual motion machine as well as anything that purports to predict the future with nonrandom accuracy based on an irrelevant data set. Physics disproves one*, information theory disproves the other. Since I have a great deal of confidence in both, I can dismiss their claim to do things that would disprove either. Anyway, if I didn’t accept this mvoe, how could I remain an atheist in a world with so many different theistic claims that I couldn’t possibly examine them all?

I can understand if Nathanael perceives the position of materialist morality to be analogous. I don’t agree, of course, but I can by no means call the claim out of bounds. Now, if he intends this also to apply to modern theories of mind, then I suggest he’s simply mistaken. His original expression of skepticism:

This whole complex of thoughts, abstract ideas, right and wrong and free will, materialists must somehow explain with reference only to electrical signals bouncing around among neurons. Have they accomplished this? Of course not, not even close. To the question, "If the world is strictly material, then how do we think, and how are our thoughts linked to things in the physical world that we're thinking of, and how can we think abstract thoughts that are not equivalent to anything in real life, and how can ideas be communicated, such that the 'same idea' can exist in two different heads, and if we can make choices, as we seem to be able to do, how can we do that?" the answer is "Somehow." (Perhaps more fancily worded.)

If he has not read modern cognitive neuroscience and cognitive philosophy while dismissing it as handwaving, he is simply engaging in the sort of a priori reasoning that has repeatedly embarrassed philosophers of the past who confidently proclaimed various things impossible until science did them. For good reason has modern analytical philosophy become wary of advancing “self-evidently obvious” empirical claims.

On the other hand, if Nathanael was bracketing the cognition subject and didn’t mean for his crticism to apply to that, never mind.

Nathanael might be leveling the charge that introspection trumps hetereophenomenalism, which might say different things about your cognitive processes than what it seems to you is happening. This makes sense from the perspective that nothing could have a shorter chain of justification that one’s own direct perceptions, but I’ve addressed that mistake before in an old discussion of Chalmers. Dennett’s criticism of Chalmers also addresses the issue.

Finally, on freewill, Nathanael says:

If I am "coerced" to shoot myself, that might mean, 1) you fold your fingers around mine and push them to pull the trigger, or 2) you threaten me with much worse tortures, and persuade me to go the easy way. In the first case, coercion has overcome free will, but it's hard to say then whether I shot myself at all: a better description might be "you shot me, using my own fingers." In the second case, coercion certainly narrowed my options, but I still had free will. Even in the first case I still had free will: my thoughts, my decision to push back, and so on, were still under my control. Free will still exists in a case of coercion, just as it is possible to play baseball without mitts and bases, though each circumstances makes judging the outcome harder. But just as you can never win a baseball game except by scoring the most runs, no matter how many mitts and bases there are, you don't have free will if deterministic molecular interactions predetermine your every move, no matter how absent coercive circumstances are.

Nathanael can define freewill as he likes, saying that it must have a causal force independent of the deterministic stream of cause an effect, but he should explain why he wants that definition rather than the one I propose. To sketch the very broad reason I think one should prefer freewill of my (vaguely described here) definition, when one asks if someone did something of their own free will, they want to know about that person's character. If Mr Convenient Evil Guy threatened Mr Conundrum with the murder of the entire Conundrum family if Mr Conundrum did not shoot himself in the head, then one would draw a different conclusion about Mr Conundrum than if he had shot himself in the head without that threat. Many Christians (for example) might view him as an irresponsible depressive if he shot himself because he was sad, but might view him as heroic to sacrifice his life to save his family. People, Christians and otherwise, are not in the least bit interested in knowing if his decision was microphysically determined or not, and so freewill of my definition participates in a distinction that people care about.

*It’s worth noting that we may eventually find new approaches to “perpetual motion” that achieve that is a totally different way, much like one cannot move faster than the speed of light, but one can fold space so that one travels between two locations before light reaches that place via the conventional route. It seems likely unadorned Utilitarianism and Kantianism are permanently flawed without changing a few basic problems in their framework of assumption, so on those scores I can’t much fault you. However, I do think heuristic morality folds the logical space of the moral problem nicely.

Real World Moral Progress

2004-08-24T12:57:00.000-06:00

I think we can make progress morally. I think we’ve made an incredible amount of progress already in both moral thought and practice, though I don’t propose we’re in much danger of exhausting room for improvement. In another sense I deny the attainability of perfect moral theory and practice for finite beings with robust forms of personal utility. This should not be interpreted as a denial of a fully determined ‘best’ morality - an objective “absolute morality.” The denial instead grows from the belief that advance can proceed only asymptotically, and not perfectly so. Better approximations enable still better and so on, in an indefinite loop lasting the span of human history without ever achieving perfection.

Part of the difficulty with morality, however, is its “special” status amongst academic pursuits. Few philosophers of morality and ethics seem willing to take seriously the relevance of rich real-world subjects like game theory, economics, cognitive neuroscience, and information theory on their age-old deliberations. I suppose it is at least somewhat plausible that those theological moral systems founded on the will of a logically neat infinite being need accede no recourse to such untidy studies of dynamic systems. So far as I can tell, however, that set’s avoidance of the usual difficulties predicates on their constitutional incoherence. This by no means disqualifies all theistic moral systems; that broad criticism only applies to morality defined and exhausted by the will of an infinite anthropomorphic entity. I don’t know if the tradition of such hopeful-but-confused attempts to distill all moral considerations remains the proximate cause of philosophers’ distracting quest for a computationally tractable final answer, but I do think it creates frequently disastrous social expectations of parsimonious advice.

Despite our experience with the horrible religious insanities that have occasionally seized control of human history, the repeated rise and fall of fashionable isms, the easy answers the ambitious have offered the masses, we have not yet lost our taste for moral guidance in 25 words or less. The ratio remains large of those aligning themselves with bold new ideas to those who invest substantial personal effort in evaluation of the idea’s justifications and those of its best critics. This gives demagogues and opportunists inordinate leverage and thereby our control of our spiritual destiny, singly and collectively, is attenuated.

Daniel Dennett tells the story of a man who walked a thousand miles barefoot and climbed a tall mountain to seek the guru’s wisdom.

“Oh guru,” he asked, “Will you tell me the meaning of life?”
“Certainly,” the guru replied kindly, “but to understand the answer you must first master mathematical logic and recursive function theory.”
This took the man aback after his arduous journey. “Really?” he asked in dismay.
“Oh yes,” the guru replied.
The man looked downcast. “Never mind, then.”
“Suit yourself.”

This little fable evokes humanity’s tendency to be willing to embark on only that sort of personal journey and exert only that sort of personal effort to which we have already committed ourselves. I think our history has prepared us to participate in sit-ins and protests standing up for our convictions far more than it has taught us that legitimate moral certitude carries a price other than an obligation to act in accordance therewith. The September 11th terrorists were so confident of their morality and so righteously motivated that they were willing to devote years of work and their very lives to the cause. Some might wish to object to this example on the grounds that the terrorists’ belief in the quid-pro-quo of divine reward annuls the selflessness of their sacrifice, but this is irrelevant - surely they thought the reward due because of the goodness of the action, not vice-versa. Furthermore, plenty of examples exist of people sacrificing their lives to godless communism. Surely atheists can’t be easily accused of anticipating material advantage in oblivion. Not even the most copious dousing by willingly-shed blood of its faithful proves any creed or guarantees its salubrious effect on humanity.

The foregoing thesis has the single-sided insight of an aphorism; ‘Think before you act,’ I could summarize, and so appear to preserve the gist of the conclusion while demolishing whatever analytical value it may have offered a reader. Almost certainly some better essayist could render the same analysis more concisely without loss of fidelity, but I very much doubt the ability of the best writer to communicate the substantial logic in a moderately-long chapter heading, much less a headline. We pointy-headed intellectuals have been decrying the layperson’s unwillingness to engage the no-doubt sublime truths of our elegantly-argued positions since the invention of writing and before, I’m sure. It’s not that most people have lost the taste for discursive rigor - they’ve never had it in the first place. Otherwise, how is there an “us-them” dichotomy in the first place?

Ask any person how informed they are regarding subjects highly relevant to their lives and how well-reasoned are their beliefs about them, and they’re likely to score themselves above-average. Further, most will assert that they know ‘enough’ to be sure of themselves. Whether implicitly or explicitly, people make judgements regarding the marginal value of further intellectual work. The costs/benefit equation for those of us who enjoy debate and rigor enough to spend our free time on them diverges wildly from those who’d like to get on with the many other genuinely pressing practical problems they face on a daily basis. It would seem more than a little unfair to expect the single mother of three holding down two jobs to keep up with the ongoing quibbling in the uncounted fields of human mental endeavor. Does it really matter to her life whether Nietzsche was misunderstood, sloppy, or just hopelessly confused? Can she expect a raise for being able to explain Pinker’s critique of the Standard Social Science Model? Even more plausibly relevant analysis of the long-term incentive effects of state-funded health care seems a poor candidate distract her from her worries about little Timmy’s undiagnosed thyroid condition.

Is this apology for public disinterest condescension? I suppose it could be if one accepts the ambient perception of intellectual inquiry as high-minded and inaccessible to lesser beings. The truth is rather than people’s decision to leave the issues to others of appropriate inclination and ability is fully rational, if not necessarily fully-considered. The breadth of science long ago exceeded the ability of any human to grasp the whole of it in any great detail even if they spent every waking moment reading peer-reviewed journals. It that realm at least we’ve all had to become more or less comfortable with allowing specialists to do our thinking for us. I haven’t suffered noticeably from my lack of knowledge of how exactly my old VCR worked. I’ve even learned to live with the idea that I will probably never become much more familiar with Nietzsche than I am now, contingently trusting to my current impressions of the worth of his ideas.

But a problem remains: people widely value scientific analysis performed in their stead by others - they do like to have VCRs (or DVD players, these days) to use, after all - but they see less utility in the erudite squabbling of moral philosophers. There’s justice in this, of course. Those who chose to purchase a DVD player get the functionality they want without having to know almost anything about the machine’s articulation. Not so for moral philosophy. Even Christ’s words seem to need exegesis, judging by the number of clergies devoted to that pursuit, and Bentham’s hope that the masses could use his limericks as a tool to craft an expedient first-order approximation of moral rectitude in any situation was simply fantasy.

Another point of difference is the relative amounts of consensus. Scientists sweat details all the time and entire theoretical paradigms every now and again, but generally one can enough agreement on the big issues to satisfy moderate curiosity. Not so moral philosophy. It’s been said that while bad science advances the field less than good science, poor philosophy doesn’t yield any progress at all. Perhaps that explains why millennia and seemingly inexhaustible verbiage has not built many theoretical houses in which most philosophers are willing to live.

I am a little more optimistic, personally. Some areas of inquiry are just not very accessible without supporting understandings that may take a great deal of time coming. Before the identification of deoxyribonucleic acid, all attempts at a comprehensive account of heredity were hopelessly hamstrung. Not to say breeders and the like hadn’t achieved a level of true knowledge, but all explanatory depth was confined to the shallows. The subjects I mention above as examples of fields of which philosophers often fail to take account have all come of age only recently and I look forward to ethical philosophers expanding their intellectual toolkit so that they can make real headway into the deep issues.

At the same time, even if we do take leaps forward in moral theory, I doubt it will translate into a pushbutton moral certitude machine. I expect moral decision making will always be hard, uncertain work - not an answer people like to hear - but I do hope for a time when people can count on substantial and comprehensible help from philosophy in their quest to improve themselves and do the right thing.

Materialist morality and more

2004-08-21T08:49:00.000-06:00

I have encountered positions like Nathanael’s many times. Though I have developed something of a psychological callus on the subject by now, it never ceases to dismay me when I hear it issuing from someone thoughtful. But it’s such a fundamental subject, the foundation of everything that matters, and it cuts directly at the heart of every morally engaged human - when I pronounce Christ’s morality lacking or flawed, I can only expect we’re about to talk about the primordial truths, the convictions that drive our inspirations, give us place, fortify confidence in our own values, and guide us to lasting happiness.

To start at the beginning I have to start at the end of Nathanael’s essay, in which he seems to misunderstand Popper’s principle of disconfirmability as the undergirding of empiricism. We’ve discussed this before, in which Nathanael opined that science’s assumption of naturalism amounted to faith. I offered up Popper as an antidote to that, with his description of how what philosophers once described as “induction” is actually the result of deduction in an asymmetrical propositional environment. Nathanael and others (appear to) have interpreted this to mean that scientific method is no more or less arbitrary in its precepts than any other system of investigation, but it’s really intended to show that one need make no arbitrary assumptions to choose the kinds of hypotheses that are deductively tractable and thereby worth making - naturalistic ones. Now, perhaps Popper is wrong, but the key is that one must respond to Popper (and others) in that context if one wants to continue to insist that scientific empiricism is just another faith. One can’t stop with, for example, Hume’s refutation of the forms of inductive principle that existed in his time.

Moving on backwards through Nathanael’s essay, I come to his claim that scientists and philosophers have no credible account of how humans think:

This whole complex of thoughts, abstract ideas, right and wrong and free will, materialists must somehow explain with reference only to electrical signals bouncing around among neurons. Have they accomplished this? Of course not, not even close. To the question, "If the world is strictly material, then how do we think, and how are our thoughts linked to things in the physical world that we're thinking of, and how can we think abstract thoughts that are not equivalent to anything in real life, and how can ideas be communicated, such that the 'same idea' can exist in two different heads, and if we can make choices, as we seem to be able to do, how can we do that?" the answer is "Somehow." (Perhaps more fancily worded.) Materialism demands a colossal leap of blind faith.

I get the feeling that Nathanael has not read any of the many answers that scientists have advanced, the models that have grown dramatically in power and fidelity in the last twenty years since the overly-reductive red herring of hard computationalism finally fell by the wayside for good. It’s gotten to the point where Jeffrey Chalmers is acting as a sort of Horatio on the Bridge of Dualism, his “The Conscious Mind” remarkable almost as much for how much it concedes as what it preserves of dualism. He concedes that all functional cognitive processes can be and are achieved in a traditional mechanistic manner and only invokes “naturalistic dualism” as the final province of ineffable phenomenal experience. Even this predicates on his claim that philosophers have not (yet) given an account that describes phenomenal experiences as constituent to functional description.

However, such accounts have been given, and Chalmers is flat mistaken on that point. There are a number of accounts in the marketplace, no one of which is likely to be the complete right answer, but these various models of how to constitute semantic processing in syntactic terms while taking the introspectively familiar non-semantic depths to cogitation seriously (including those aspects historically called ‘phenomenal’) have grown through theoretical critique and input from clinical neurology until they are plausible and occasionally even persuasive. An incredible amount of work remains to match the models to minds, but we’re not nowhere any more. One reason for confidence on this score is the huge strides we’ve taken in understanding perception beyond the “homunculus watching the screen” non-model. For a rapidly aging but nonetheless accessible and eye-opening account, read the late Francis Crick’s “Astonishing Hypothesis,” in which he present the then state-of-the-art understanding of the human visual perception system. Even then we were well beyond handwaving about how it is that we package and process visual concepts, even down to a surprisingly fine grain. Only a decade previously, rampant skepticism that we would ever understand anything as close to semantic processing as human perception held a great deal of currency. By the early 90s when Crick published his book, the situation reversed entirely, with some assuming we’d understand everything about the brain/mind soon. Crick himself remained far more cautious, seeing from a lab’s-eye view the huge job left to do in working out how a gaggle of moderately well-described perceptual subsystems could add up to the flexible, apparently infinite semantic flexibility we observe in the human mind.

In many ways Patricia Smith Churchland’s “Neurophilosophy” heralded the modern, more neurophysically-grounded era of cognitive philosophy. Dennett’s presumptuously-named “Consciousness Explained” redefined the discussion by showing how to obviate a number of apparently insoluble explanatory conundrums through a more clever framing of hypothesis. His heterophenomenological method, growing out of the arguments in his influential book “The Intentional Stance” and applied comprehensively in “Consciousness Explained” helps avoid unnecessary assumptions that grow out of inappropriately applied “folk psychology,” as Paul Churchland calls the common models of mind we use to predict peoples’ thoughts and feelings on a day-to-day basis. In the intervening 13 years, Kathleen Akins, Bo Dahlbom, V M Ramachandran, the Churchlands, and countless others have carried forward in both science and philosophy, the articles and books becoming more and more focused as the ratio of hypothesis to evidence rapidly improved. In 2004, materialism might require a lot of hard work and research, but it does not require “a colossal leap of blind faith.”

But one need not get so deeply into the nuts and bolts of modern analytical philosophy in conjunction with its new partner experimental science to present a simplified counterpoint to Nathanael’s ideas about the incorporeal nature of thought:

...to me materialism flies in the face of the most basic experiences. I have thoughts. I do not see any thoughts in the world around me. Thoughts are within me, and do not have the characteristics of material objects, such as size or shape. They have a certain connection to material objects, as we say "I'm thinking of a mountain." It's almost as if the mountain was in our heads, and we might even say that "I have the most beautiful scene in my head." But of course, the mountain isn't physically in our heads: it wouldn't fit. Another example: I can conceive of abstract things, such as 2+2=4, which, though they may be instantiated in the physical world, cannot exist in the physical world per se. Yet I can most certainly think them.

It can be rhetorically dangerous to compare human cognition to computer processing of the sort familiar at this point in history. The human mind is (to the connectionist theorists who now dominate the field) certainly the result of something expressible as an Von Neumann machine and thus at least potentially portable to some future computer with sufficient memory and processing speed. Nonetheless, the informational topology of computer programs that exist today and that of the vastly more advanced human brain are not similar and human minds are not just more advanced elaborations on Microsoft Windows. All that said, computers can instantiate abstract processing, if not int eh contextually-rich manner human brains do.

When a computer moves electrons around to calculate 2+2=4, there’s no Platonic “two” or “four” made physical in the computer; all that has occurred is the modeling of logical relationships using physical processes. Nonetheless, the calculation got done, and the logic of 2+2=4 has been successfully reflected in the material world. When huge neural associations cooperatively reflect the same logic, the mind of which these calculations are a part has “thought” of this immaterial mathematical relationship. The results of such neural processing gets sent around to other subsystems that process the result in their own idiosyncratic way, evoking, for example, memories related to this much-used logical statement, its implications, and even how it “feels” to us. Thousands of ganglia undertaking their division of labor call up a bewildering variety of descriptors concerning mountains (appearance and spatial characteristics form the visual system, relevant words from the linguistic, smells from the olfactory, and so on) to present to the relevant adjacent ganglia for further processing, it all adding up to conscious consideration. A subset of these present their findings to the generative portions of our linguistic system to shape the linguistic thoughts we think to ourselves (or type into our blogs), another subset’s findings shape the visualizations we visualize to ourselves (or attempt to draw), and so on.

Though this description is necessarily short of detail, it sketches a view of how thoughts get thought through physical reflection of logical relationships. Logical relationships are and will always be immaterial in nature, but minds are immaterial too; they are the network of logical relationships reflected by electrochemical signals of the physical brain, and someday (I believe) by the movement of electrons in futuristic computer hardware.

Next we have this paragraph in which Nathanael correctly notes that any system that denies freewill cannot justify any morality:

And yet, it just seems obvious a priori that there can be no morality for a materialist. Morality implies free will and choice, but for materialists those are illusions, we are all just particles bouncing around. If I stab someone with a knife, I am held guilty, and the knife is not, because the knife is just a material object with no volition of its own. But for the materialist, I too am just a material object with no volition of my own. Can I be guilty? Morality implies right and wrong, good and evil. But how can those metaphysical entities exist in a strictly material world? What could they mean? Not that these questions-- free will and choice, or good and evil-- are easy to answer in the framework of other metaphysical positions (e.g. body/spirit dualism) either; they are still quite difficult. But a materialist cuts himself off from all possible avenues of answering them from square one

Nathanael’s objections about materialist freewill result from a badly-chosen conceptualization or definition of freewill that needs an answer in much greater length and detail than I can offer here, but I can strip the compatiblist position of all its argument and just state that freewill is properly the opposite of coercion and determinism is the opposite of indeterminism. The idea that naturalistic determinism threatens freewill is almost backwards - only indeterminism could threaten freewill by potentially removing causation from moral decisions.* Insisting on choice as the uncaused cause is just a terrible idea, rendering all accounts of responsibility incoherent.

Religious positions may appear at first glance to escape this by making the immaterial soul guide moral decision-making, but this simply moves explanation into the realm of handwaving or brackets it entirely. As soon as I ask why a soul comes to make the choices it does, the prospect of pointless infinite regression looms. Perhaps someone can offer mechanisms for how the soul arrives at moral decisions, but then we’re back to a determined, mechanistic explanation, even if it’s a different substance instantiating the mechanism.

Compatibilism, on the other hand, seems to me to be the only way to save freewill (at least, a form of freewill worth wanting) and thus allow a non question-begging moral system. Since materialist compatibilism is simpler than dualist compatibilism, Occam’s much-invoked Razor invites me to chose the former.

With that, I move further backwards to Nathanael’s offer of quarter to an undefeated enemy:

It's hard to justify any morality in a materialist framework. In fact, I'm inclined to say it's impossible, which is what a lot of people have assuemd[my gratitude to Nathanael for offering a typo to make me feel a bit better about my far more numerous editing failures], and what is argued perennially in the pages of magazines like First Things-- and yet it seems like poor sportsmanship, somehow, to say that. That debate reminds me somehow of a parent is playing chess with a child, and no matter how many times the child is beaten he keeps saying bravely, "I challenge you to another match!" but the parent meanly refuses ever to let the child win.

It tends to be very difficult (sometimes impossible?) to prove that anything is impossible in a way that ends argument, but it’s certainly reasonable to assume something impossible if no one can come up with a plausible account of its possibility. It is incumbent on those advancing an argument to support an idea’s possibility/probability since you can’t prove a negative. Disproving a claim involves disassembling the offered support thereof, like demolishing a building involves destroying its structure. A building doesn’t count as standing just because the plot hasn’t been rendered permanently unusable and some other structure may yet be built there.

On the other hand, being convinced one has flattened a highrise doesn’t suffice to make it so. “First Things” is hardly an unbiased journal of analytical philosophy. While I do not peruse it on anything approaching a regular basis, I have read a handful of articles therefrom over the years and haven’t found myself particularly moved by the admittedly sophisticated apologetics advanced. Neither am I unbiased, so those articles’ failure to persuade me hardly amounts to a searing indictment of the consensus amongst contributors to First Things, but it does raise the prospect that a competing consensus or two might be found elsewhere. The hordes (ha ha!) of materialist analytical ethical philosophers (who, yes, still exist despite the attempts of post-modernist “philosophers” to squeeze them out of the humanities departments) who argue about their latest refinements and corrections to systems of materialist morality certainly believe they have a pretty good shot at arriving at ever-better justifications for human values without reference to anything supernatural. I tend to think theologians are in a poor position to declare victory over materialist ethics. At least one philosopher of science, Michael Martin, chose that field because he felt that the theological positions had been so thoroughly crushed in the academic arena that there was no interesting work left to do and the only people left talking about it were a cabal of professional theologians whose jobs depended on the pretense that rational theology was still viable. It’s a sort of mirror image to Nathanael’s position. Of course, the theologians declined to give up and continued to refine Kierkegaard, Lewis, and etc, so said philosopher returned to “refute” these newer refinements with his book "Atheism: A Philosophical Justification." Did he do so? I think so, but I don’t even claim omniscience and no one’s invented a refutometer to measure that objectively. It’s up to us humans to arrive at our own decisions. Notably those theologians still haven’t retired in embarrassed disrepute.

My ongoing retrograde progression through Nathanael’s essay skips several paragraphs at this point to his claims of events in human history discrediting the enlightenment moral philosophies:

When Enlightenment morality began to reach the masses in the late 19th century, the flaws and incompleteness that an intelligent person can rapidly recognize in reading Bentham or Kant were translated into social catastrophes. In the Soviet state, meddling in every detail of life and liquidating all opposition for the sake of the communist utopia in which the greatest happiness of the greatest number would come to pass, we see Bentham's errors writ large. In the Nazi soldier, braving death and suppressing all kind feeling for the sake of Fatherland and Fuehrer, never mind the consequences, we see Kant's categorical imperative discredited through being realized.

The most parsimonious return volley here is to ask how often actions taken in the name of and ostensibly directed by Christian teachings have turned out to be awful moral catastrophes. The Crusades are a much-ballyhooed member of that vast set (and frequently overstated), but I would also like to point out that people have attempted to justify monarchy, slavery, female thralldom, numerous wars, and even, yes, Naziism in Christian terms. At least frequently these involved distorted simplifications of Christian theology and biblical reasoning, but nonetheless, the people doing the arguing presumably considered themselves to be faithful to Christian truth.

I put my intended opposition to Nathanael’s conclusion more plainly: Soviet socialism is at best a misapplication of utilitarian principles and I reject the claim Immanuel Kant has more connection with Naziism than does Jesus Christ. Nathanael does, however, demonstrate how demagogues can repackage and repurpose originally subtle positions to serve their own ends. Surely a tolerably literate Christian will notice the wide divide between the rousing but sophistic speeches usually offered to the parishioners in the hinterlands and the intricate, carefully crafted arguments gracing the pages of academic theological journals.

In the preceding paragraph Nathanael equates the highlights of Enlightenment moral philosophy with Christian teachings:

...most of what is best in [Enlightenment moral philosophy] draws on Christian themes. Nato identifies Kant and Bentham as initiating the two chief traditions in modern moral philosophy. Bentham exhorts us to seek "the greatest happiness for the greatest number," a translation of Christian charity. Kant, who claims that we should treat people as ends not means, is translating the Golden Rule. Neither Kant nor Bentham have good arguments for their respective theses, and were persuasive mainly because Christian Europe was already conditioned to believe things quite similar to these.

To construe “the greatest happiness for the greatest number” as a mere translation of Christian charity is to help oneself to an astonishing amount. How is Christian charity any more equivalent to that than Muslim charity, or Buddhist charity, or the charity encouraged by Native American beliefs, or the charity urged by myriad other native traditions, ancient philosophers, and so on? Charity seems to be a widespread value in general human culture. Further, I don’t see how “the greatest happiness for the greatest number,” much less the rest of Bentham’s utilitarianism, is equivalent to the idea of charity at all. Utilitarian reasoning in the form of that statement can militate for or against charity in a given analysis of a particular situation, and of course the far subtler modifications of/diversions from the tradition that Bentham started take more words to express than exist in the whole of the Bible.

I hardly know what to say about Kant supposedly translating the golden rule. I suppose one could regard the golden rule as consonant with Kant’s philosophy, but “treat others as you would wish to be treated” is mostly an elegantly-phrased exhortation to be nice with many snappily-put analogues from a plethora of cultures. I can’t figure out any way to meaningfully reduce Kant’s ethical philosophy to an argument for being nice.

Now, it’s true that it helped Enlightenment philosophy that its various ethical systems didn’t demand dramatic departures from European moral intuition, informed as it was by its Christian tradition, but the works of those philosophers and their modern counterparts are not exactly unread and unfollowed in, say, Japan, which has no Christian tradition to speak of.

Finally we arrive at the substantive beginning of Nathanael’s essay:

A lot of modern philosophers "offer theoretical backing to the moral practice that Nathanael grants has been improving" in some sense, but those theories are incomplete and flawed. To be more precise, their arguments have been refuted, by Alasdair MacIntyre and Bertrand Russell, for example. It's not in the interests of professional philosophers to admit this, and moreover, professional philosophers may be a self-selecting group, since, for example, those who see immediately that Kant's arguments fail are unlikely to become Kant scholars. The general public, however, might be said to demonstrate its unpersuaded-ness by having lost interest in moral philosophy, though not in religion.

The first sentence of that quote is an allusion to my statement:

...modern ethical philosophers have some excellent offerings on how to get from raw self-interest all the way to pursuing common goods at (at least superficially) personal disadvantage. Baier, Moore and Hare are examples of this from different schools, but of course there are a great many more. None of them are really complete and flawless by any means...

I am highly skeptical of the ability of finite humans to achieve a complete and flawless moral system, my belief in the ongoing (fitful) improvement of both theoretical and practical morality notwithstanding. Nathanael’s casual assertion that modern moral philosophers’ arguments have been “refuted”, however, may just possibly require more support than his bald asseveration. MacIntyre’s “After Virtue”, presumably the modern source of Nathanael’s belief that ethical philosophy has proven hopeless (and which also focused inordinately on Nietzsche as the father of modern ethics), is certainly a powerful, clever book but not only is MacIntyre’s position highly contentious (and does not address Dennett’s position, to which I subscribe), I think Nathanael has gone a bit beyond even MacIntyre. Certainly I welcome more discussion of the flaws and virtues of particular ethical theories to explore our respective beliefs.

As for Nathanael’s hypothesis regarding the reasons professional philosophers continue to publicly hold Kant and general ethical philosophy in good regard, one could easily turn the same logic against theologians, a tack I have mentioned but dismissed as unfair in previous essays. I doubt Nathanael intends to offer such an ad-hominem type argument seriously anyway.

Finally, I must respond to the public’s supposed “unpersuaded-ness.” If we measure the public’s interest in moral philosophy by its references to Christ versus Kant or Mill, the existence of a large, well-funded, 2000-year-old Christian church (in its various incarnations) gives Christ a distinctive advantage. Philosophy departments do have their own pedagogical heft, but they hardly outweigh seminary schools nor do very many recipients of degrees in philosophy go on establish large weekly social groups devoted to advocating their favored school of thought. A handful do go on to earn doctorates and a proportion of those end up teaching philosophy, but this represents a vanishingly small cadre compared to their theological competition. Given such a large demagogic lead, it would actually seem like the relative pervasiveness of explicit invocation of Enlightenment moral philosophy requires explanation. I can offer a number of hypotheses that don’t require the philosophies in question be any more attractive or persuasive than religious alternatives, but I think that’s sufficient to cast doubt on the ascription of Christianity’s powerful share in the marketplace of ideas to its more persuasive content.

I could also argue that many Enlightenment moral ideas have won so completely that they are now the status-quo, obscuring the link between modern intuitions about moral calculus and these theories that are no longer novel. Advancing that position, however, would require a lot of careful study and analysis that I’m ill-equipped to undertake. Likely the idea has been suggested, defined, criticized and defended already by trained professionals, but as I’ve not encountered such a dialog, I hold only a very weak preliminary opinion on its sustainability.

And so at the end of a little shy of 4000 words I arrive at my conclusion that Nathanael’s perception of what is “obvious” about the weakness of materialism and the prospects of materialist ethics is at least as dubious as my ill-chosen claim that tradition “OBVIOUSLY cuts ZERO ice.” At this point I want to leave attempts at objective analysis aside for a moment and turn to a poem I wrote a while back that expresses my feelings about evangelism of secular, materialist morality. I’m not much of a poet, but perhaps sometimes the spiritual side of one’s deep convictions is best evoked by poetical language.

I have nothing to offer you
No easy answers
No freedom from toil
No way to set your conscience to rest
In three easy steps

If you buy my product I can guarantee you
Only hard work
Only uncertainty
Only a long hard fight to give people what they already own
But don't want

I can't offer you the stars or the moon
Everything I give you will be the sweat of your own brow
I have nothing to offer you

Except freedom

*For a popular but confused attempt by an eminent theoretical physicist to make room for his “uncaused” conception of freewill via quantum calculations, see Roger Penrose’s “The Emperor’s New Mind.” Though quite brilliant, Penrose’s approach to consciousness suffers fatally from a lack of appreciation of heuristic algorithms - not particularly surprising in a physicist but nonetheless crippling in someone addressing cognitive science.

Materialism and freewill

2004-08-20T19:39:00.000-06:00

As Nathanaelpoints out, the concept of agency is vital to any moral system. If materialism is incompatible with freewill, than there can be no materialist morals. Fortunately, this is very far from the case. Compatibilism, the position that freewill and determinism are not in opposition, is age-old and well respected, though not universally accepted. I actually stumbled onto a primitive version of it myself in the course of writing a paper evaluating William James' pragmatism.

Years later I read Daniel Dennett's elegant (if initially unappreciated because it was in certain ways too far ahead of its time) book "Elbow Room: Varieties of Freewill Worth Wanting." Until then I had been tolerably rpoud of my stance avec James, but Dennett's discussion... well, I've bought that book four times now, because I have been overcome now and again with the burning desire to read portions of it again, especially the chapter "Could Have Done Otherwise." It remains the most beautiful bit of philosophy I've ever read.

"The Intentional Stance" might be a necessary companion book to address technical concerns that tend to occur to analytical philosophers, but it's not necessary and it's very much Dennett's dryest and most difficult book. On the other hand, the Intentional Stance was considered quite formidable and has had huge influence.

In any case, though, there's nothing I can say that "Elbow Room" doesn't say better. And I still have one spare, if Nathanael wants it.

Christ's moral modernity

2004-08-19T15:42:00.000-06:00

In my last meandering post on tradition and gay marriage (far from my best organized essay ever) I both defended and moderated my criticism of appeals to tradition. Nathanael seems more or less satisfied with it en total, (even the editing mistakes which I throw in, um, as an interpolation exercise for the reader) but in response to my claim that the Bible is “not exactly state-of-the-art ethical reasoning these days” Nathanael asks:

What in moral philosophy over the past 2000 years has surpassed the words of Jesus Christ? Alasdair MacIntyre and Bertrand Russell both see post-Enlightenment moral philosophy as finding its logical culmination in Nietzsche, whose mercilessly "heroic" doctrines underlay Nazism. I know some people look for moral systems in Rawls, Kant, Nozick, or even Marx, but does anyone really have the bravado nowadays to see these as "state-of-the-art," and Christianity as somehow passe?

After I finish wincing at the very idea of Nietzsche as the pinnacle of moral philosophy, I open my eyes and notice, yes, Nietzsche is incontrovertibly an influential example of almost-modern moral reasoning, if not at all the foot I’d want to put forward.

As Nathanael points out immediately prior to the above passage, the Bible has some unsavory parts and makes some moral progress of its own from beginning to end - answering my statement that the Bible “has its wise and less-wise parts” - but he does not, nor does modern Christian theology, identify these unsavory parts as the culmination of Christian or Biblical moral reasoning. Christ’s words specifically are the archetype here. This, filtered through the most erudite and advanced exegesis offered by modern Christian theology, is Christianity’s ‘best foot,’ to which I must offer a counterpart if I am to make my claims credible.

One issue at the outset is that I view all words through the lense of assumption that the inspiration of their human authors came from non-supernatural sources. Instead of trying to tease the sublime from a few sentences based on the idea that the person speaking has an extraordinary conduit to transcendent truth, I interpret using the same principles of literary analysis I apply to everything else. In the case of Jesus Christ, this can be problematic, because his recorded statements are sparse relative to the length of the bible and a good amount of what he says holds only implicit moral reasoning. As soon as we’re attempting to deduce the reasoning, we’re thrown on our understanding of context, intended audience, the narrative traditions of the day, and so on. It leaves us lots of room for disagreement.

Theologians, of course, have already done a great deal of work on these subjects, but while I’ve read some C S Lewis and others, I can by no means lay claim to mastery of the modern understandings. I’m also not sure if these count in our comparisons, since while they take the Bible as their primary text, they by no means restrict themselves to the contents thereof to achieve their more explicit moral systems. I suppose if I wanted to escape this whole essay cheaply, I could just say that the two sources of moral reasoning (Christ’s words and modern philosophy) are incomparable. Alternately I could dismiss theology as necessarily tendentious, since it has no work to do without the divinity of its subject. Neither of these is fair, so I’ll carry on in the consciousness that I’m inevitably going to elide the separation between modern Christian thought and the original content of Christ’s words.

So, then, we come to modern philosophy, of which I do not have an encyclopedic knowledge so much as a working familiarity. I am not a ninja even of ethical philosophy, but I do have my bearings and a position. The major schools of personal ethics that still hold sway in ethical philosophy all sprang from Mill (or Bentham) and Kant, and just about every ethical philosopher tends to get classified as some form of Utilitarian good-maximizer or Kantian rule-follower*. I first encountered my favorite “third way” of ethical reasoning in Dennettm who advocates “heuristic” ethical analysis, but I doubt his idea is completely novel and I bet it gets categorized as a sort of update to Kantian ethics using some Utilitarian reasoning. Nietzsche has his influence, but as Dennett has implied in his own writings, Nietzsche’s position is too confused to engender any single coherent school.

In political philosophy the major modern voices are Rawls and Nozick, with updates from their peers. Both leave a great deal to be desired in my eyes, but they certainly crush the classic analyses of Hobbes through Marx in terms of rigor and rooting in fundamentals. Since Justice as Fairness and Anarchy, State and Utopia plenty of philosophers and others have built on - and improved - those foundations so that we now have a relatively robust set of answers that compare very favorably to those of the early and late Enlightenment scholars.

The modern understanding of Christ’s words seem to center around the ideas of love and avoidance of hypocrisy. We can derive from just those two principles many great things. If we endeavor to love consistently and thoughtfully, so that we do not reduce our love to a thin facsimile of itself, we indeed lead to many excellent insights. However, Christ offers little justification to the materialist for his directives. “Why?” we ask, and we receive back an answer that references God’s will - not a convincing tactic for those who fail to believe in God in the first place. Also, there are problems with making God’s will the source of moral value rather than a guide thereto. In any case, the promise of an afterlife or presumably positive “closeness to God” do offer efficient reasons for the described moral behavior in terms of personal benefit, but I’m not sure how to respond to such a supernatural quid pro quo. Fortunately, I don’t believe in God or an afterlife anyway, so I escape that particular quandary.

But let us say for instance that we’re actually only talking about actual (practical) moral directives rather than their justification. We should also throw out Christ’s directives concerning God if we expect to discuss answers relevant to the many people whose metaphysical positions lack a deity. Christ has a good amount of personal instruction to give, though he has little to offer on political ethics except to render unto Ceasar what is Ceasar’s. One might regard this as a major weakness since the real-world state very much needs ethical direction to guide lawmaking and enforcement, but it’s also been mentioned that if we were all angels government wouldn’t be necessary. Ditto if the world was going to end pretty soon, as Christ seemed to be saying in Mark 13:30-33 (as well as in other places). Since it didn’t work out that way, I don’t know if that amounts to poor moral advice or not.

Anyway, Christ’s morality is pretty sparse by word count, which reminds me of how Bentham’s rhymes and formulations attempt to package a complex moral system into a small set of adages that evoke rather than describe moral solutions. Both, I think, are open to similar pedagogical criticisms, though in Bentham’s case there exists the rest of his writing in which he attempts to flesh out a comprehensive moral structure to back up the simplifications. Unfortunately for Bentham, his attempts are pretty inadequate; Mill well-earned his standing in the Utilitarian tradition with his more robust reworking thereof. Am I comparing Christ to Bentham now? Not exactly - no one now has seen what comprehensive system of argument lurked behind his words, so we must either bracket that consideration or try to read between lines. Since bracketing the logical substance of Christ’s moral thought makes attempts to compare Christ’s morality with modern morality, I suppose we must choose the latter.

Since to do this convincingly would require much closer and more comprehensive reading of the Bible than I have ever brought myself to perform, I’ll have to give my impressions with the caveat that I don’t regard them as particularly reliable. When I said in my previous essay that there are more and less wise portions of the Bible, I was thinking of the (somewhat Hellenist) New Testament as broadly wiser and the (somewhat tribalist) Old Testament as broadly less wise, not intending to take a strong stance on Christ specifically. Since we’re already on the same page about moral progress in the Bible, this is quasi-tangential to my thesis at the time.

Christ seems to stick to the idea that obedience is a cardinal virtue and that authority justifies his command to love. Also, the form of ‘love’ he recommends seems a little different that what I would hope. I think of Matt 21:18-21 when Christ withers a fig tree because it didn’t have fruit when he wanted something to eat. Now, this is by no means a human and I don’t think of trees as having moral rights, but in conjunction with Christ bearing a sword, and his episodes with cursing villages that were insufficiently impressed with his miracles, I get this idea that his love is a bit erratic. Perhaps it has to do with so much of his love being pointed toward deity or something, but I find it a little less person-positive than I would hope. He sometimes seems to support the idea of all people having the same value and sometimes he seems to be less willing to take his message to gentiles. I have heard a lot of apologetics regarding Jesus’ seemingly less-than-perfectly-loving actions, but stripped of the theology which I find empty and unpersuasive, they fail to convince me that his actions are anything like a guade to perfect living.

Now, some Christian theologians drop a lot of the details and synopsize Christ’s innovation as the elevation of love over mechanistic, heartless law. Some of the more liberal brand even manage to do this without distorting the definition of the word “love” into something I don’t want in the process. The problem I find with this is that all of these theologians are heavily influenced by the Enlightenment. Humanist currents within the Catholic Church sparked that to some extent in conjunction with contact with the much more learned Muslim lands. To a large extent this marked a turning away from the focus on heavenly concerns that, to me, is very much a divergence from Christ’s own apprehension of priorities. A search for God, infinitude and Truth ensued that was perhaps inspired by Christ’s message of love but seems to have traveled very far beyond it, eventually forming naturalistic science, secular ethics, and so on. It just doesn’t seem that even the best modern Christian moralists find Christ’s teaching sufficient - he’s perhaps a muse or stands in for an idealization of human potential.

Meanwhile, modern ethical philosophers have some excellent offerings on how to get from raw self-interest all the way to pursuing common goods at (at least superficially) personal disadvantage. Baier, Moore and Hare are examples of this from different schools, but of course there are a great many more. None of them are really complete and flawless by any means, but they certainly do offer theoretical backing to the moral practice that Nathanael grants has been improving. My personal favorite philosopher, Daniel Dennett, is not a straight ahead ethical philosopher, but I think his ideas about incremental improvements in moral heuristics, which takes realistic account of limited information and ability to calculate (predict), offers a way of reifying our substantial progress without requiring any particular theory be the final answer.

Ultimately, there may be no fair way to compare the parsimoniously preserved words of an ancient prophet to a modern thinker who can not only draw on that prophet’s words (and other forerunners) but write quite a few more of her own to craft a truly deep moral position. Nonetheless, I think it’s also difficult to describe Christ’s words as constituting especially advanced morality.

* Of course utilitarianism is a sort of expansion on consequentialism and within utilitarianism there’s a bunch of finer gradations, such as Moore’s ideal utilitarianism and Hare’s preference utilitarianism. I simplify egregiously.

Tradition and gay marriage

2004-08-18T05:32:00.000-06:00

Nathanael stepped up to challenge my (rather dramatic) statement “tradition should OBVIOUSLY cut ZERO ice” with his 0752 17AUG04 post, more or less pointing out that thousands of years of human thought have crafted tradition and one is foolish to discard such collective wisdom.

Of course, he has a point. Once upon a time I went to Kingdom Hall with Jehovah’s Witnesses because I figured that a sect that had lasted so long, kept so tight and had so many followers probably had something wise to say. It did, but of course not so wise I felt it was ultimately other than pernicious. The Christian Bible has its wise and less-wise portions (and its wise and less-wise followers) and is incontrovertibly a prominent distillation of a millennium and more of Mesopotamian thought, but of course it’s not exactly state-of-the-art ethical reasoning these days. Aristotle was quite the philosophical ninja in his day but by now he’s mostly a historical reference point and an obligatory part of introductions to the history of philosophy.

Nonetheless, to break from everything said in the Bible or by Aristotle simply because they are old is foolish. Progress happens by building on and improving existing ideas more than demolishing them, because people who went before us committed the ideas they considered best to the ages, and one might expect that these would beat a sampling of randomly generated ideas in any worthwhile test of veracity.

Then again, some ideas recur because they tend to serve the purposes of those having the power to disburse them. Though Europe forbore to call the station of their underclass “slave,” serfs weren’t exactly free, either. Not to mention that if one was not a noble or a cleric, one was almost always a serf, which doesn’t leave much room for freedom at large. Nathanael refers to slavery as an “innovation for the Portuguese when they re-introduced it to European culture in the 1400s,” but one might suppose that it was really a return to tradition in which making a slave of one’s own tribe remained verboten but outsiders were fair game, allowing for more complete domination without the credible fear of insurrection. Slavery is not a unique to any cultural tradition and though some of its variations and alternates (such as “untouchables” which have analogues in the ‘eta’ of feudal Japan) are less common.

Furthermore, Nathanael quotes but does not address the other two clearly unacceptable examples of tradition - racial discrimination and disenfranchisement of women - that I offered. That there is plenty of evil embedded in tradition remains undisputed. Rather, Nathanael attempts to show that lack of “respect for tradition” leads to many of the worst kinds of revolutionary brutality and regression. Even the sins of many calling themselves traditionalists he ascribes to this lack:

Self-conscious "traditionalists" are always innovators, who have to dumb tradition down in order to render it into something that can be deliberately "obeyed" or "followed." What narrow-minded "traditionalists" lack is adequate respect for tradition. Students of contemporary Islam, such as Bernard Lewis, are keenly aware of this.

So far as I can see, however, his case against this ‘lack of respect’ has more to do with ideological purges executed by totalizing political revolutionaries. Such revolutions necessarily have to be packaged and sold to a power base, rhetorically streamlined, and so on. I’m sure Nathanael can easily find places where sudden, internally-generated social departures have also caused chaos, but these are less dramatic and easier to set in contrast with their not-particularly-attractive traditional bretheren.

Before I go on, however, I should enter a caveat: historical social agreements evolved in response to pressures of their day, with each party negotiating the best it could expect to get under the circumstances. In an era dominated by the right of might, one can expect those whose physical traits were statistically less suited to martial pursuits (women) would be not only disadvantages, but would likely support systems in which they trade “freedom” of dubious value for the literal patronage of even an unequal system of marriage alliance in which one attaches one’s fate to a another who would presumably fight for one’s interests for love or at least offspring. Likewise did peasants attach themselves to their lord, who may not have been kind or particularly just but at least had reason to prevent his people’s housing from being razed and farmland from being salted. Many people view these arrangements purely as examples of tyranny without seeing the benefits they offered the disadvantaged in comparison to the alternatives conceivable at the time. And the fact remained that even a lord had an interest in keeping his peasantry minimally happy, as a husband had an interest in treating his wife minimally well - those with nothing to lose could still revolt and damage one’s interests even if they can’t advance their own.

Furthermore, Daniel Dennett’s defense of tradition as engineering is quite valid to my mind. Traditions have intrinsic design value as intricate solutions to a set of problems and constraints that are both novel and frequently beautiful. The loss of heritage is an acute pain, as Dennett points out, that only humans feel. It can be sad to watch the ‘ambulatory phase’ of meme-sets disintegrate, as we do tend to cherish our history in its own right and don’t wish it to end even after the death of everyone who still holds them. I suppose it’s because we hope for our traditions to be an enduring patrimony. Nonetheless, maintenance has costs, and we must ask ourselves if a tradition that requires us to, say, ‘circumcise’ our daughters is worth preserving.

In any case, it’s the modern world now, and I think we have the technology, both social and technical, to eliminate most forms of unfreedom. I would further say that freedom as a value trumps the value of preservation of traditions, so Dennett’s defense doesn’t really hold sway here when they come in conflict. Nozick would even argue that freedom is a primary value that allows the pursuit of all others. In that view, the value of tradition is irrelevant.

So we’re back to talking about the functional value of tradition to determining the best ways of doing business. It’s a rock of wisdom that’s nonetheless shot through with flaws. Can we justify effectual things with appeals to tradition? Not directly. I suppose we can say that we have no idea how something works and thus we must do it as we always have, but this only persuades people who share the conviction of our own ignorance.

I, for one, see plenty of reasons for the institution of marriage as well as the advantages for any (set of) individual(s) wishing to avail themselves of it. Governments have an interest in recognizing them both because households are to a large extent the basic granules of the economy and because they incubate future adult citizens. Individuals have an interest in legal recognition of marriage because of the legal and (occasionally) financial benefits provided by the government. Human psychology sustains the actual tradition of the interpersonal contract for reasons related to both sociobiological programming and the clear advantages of resource-pooling with a committed partner. Marriage between animals and humans don’t have any of these features to a significant extent.

Nathanael says regarding marriage:

Another way to look at this is an ad absurdum argument. If two men can marry, why can't a man marry an animal, or his car, or two women, or himself, or his mother? There may be good reasons, but they are incompatible with the simplistic nondiscrimination rule Nato proposes. To decide if a rule is being applied in a nondiscriminatory way, we have to first define the rule, and if we are to define that rule as (for example) "only two human beings may marry," then there is no logical reason not to restrict the rule further, and say "only one man and one woman may marry."

“This”, Nathanael says, “is enough to refute Nato’s argument,” but I think that claim is at best premature. There are reasons to define the rule a certain way. As he quoted me:

if one wishes to curtail freedom of any kind, it is incumbent on one to explain why. If one wants to curtain[sic] freedom in a discriminatory way, one must explain not just why the freedom should ever be abridged, but why it is valid to abridge in a special case.

The legal recognition of marriage is for something. It has a function. If it was entirely arbitrary as well as functionally neutral, then it would certainly not be accessible to reasonable critique and so the preservation of tradition would be the only value in town. But it does confer advantage (as well as disadvantage, but presumably those who desire it judge the advantages to weigh more in their case) and it does have a purpose, so we must show why it should be available to some and not to others with reference to that purpose. Nathanael appears aware of this when he continues:

it is not a case against gay marriage. It simply makes it clear that the task is to explain why a man should have a right to bind his future to another man, as (for some reason) he is considered to have a right to do with a woman, but as he is not considered to be allowed to do with an animal, an inanimate object, a place, a member of his immediate family, etc.

The only problem is that he seems to think that this is some sort of unanswerable rhetorical question, or he would not be able to claim that he “refuted” anything. Perhaps he thought I had no answer to that question and admitted none, which would certainly have made my argument incoherent.

On the other hand, the legal recognition of marriage for anyone can be called into question, and I admit that’s a contentious issue. I still tend toward the recognition of marriage but I think reasonable people can disagree. Besides, that is not the matter in dispute.

In the end, though, I’m forced to moderate a bit - it may not be obvious that appeals to tradition cut no ice. If the ice is very thin and there’s no reason available to apply, then one can, I suppose, appeal to it directly. Further, tradition has within it all sorts or reason that is not necessarily visible to the naked eye, so one should seriously address oneself to understanding how it functions and why. It is valid to demand justification someone who opposes tradition. In the heat of my personal outrage on this issue (of which I have a great deal) I slightly overstepped.

Still, marriage is legally recognized and confers advantages. If they are going to be offered to anyone, then it must be explained why they are not offered to everyone. Saying that they are offered in the way they are because of tradition is unimpressive. One can throw up one’s hands and say “well, if you won’t accept tradition, we’re all in a muddle,” but that can only hold while there’s no non-arbitrary reason for marriage and thereby implicitly militates for removing legal recognition thereof. The position assassinates itself.

If some broad-minded traditionalist can give me a reason for marriage that doesn't rely directly on tradition and also excludes gay marriage, then we'll have something to talk about.

Nathanael on Tom on morality

2004-08-15T15:25:00.000-06:00

Nathanael said in response to Tom's discussion of morality: "Tom's conclusion leaves me less satisfied" then quotes the admittedly ambiguous end of Tom's essay:

Now we're at the end, the end of man. The end of man is to act within his nature, just like everything else. It is natural for man to ask questions, seek answers, and create answers, even in the absence of rational justification. It is natural for man to act in his own self-interests, and to determine what those interests are, even those that may require a personal sacrifice. Above all, it is natural for man to propagate, both physically and intellectually. That is the sum of it. All of human morality can be derived from these ends. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to discover how.

Not surprisingly, Nathanael took Tom's "conclusion" in precisely the unfortunate direction I predicted some would in the comments I posted on Tom's essay, though of course, in a more thoughtful way than some might. From Nathanael's post:

Above all, it is natural for man to propagate, both physically and intellectually." The "physically" seems to recommend an African moral universe, where the chief is polygamous and measures his success in the quantity of his offspring relative to his rivals: not, I feel, a good ethical ideal. The "intellectually" (slurred together with "physically" by a clever sleight of hand, luring the reader into a strange and unwarranted feeling that man's propensity to discussing, believe and philosophize is somehow an extension of the physical process of reproduction) I can sympathize with-- that's what blogging is all about!-- but what does it mean, after all, to "propagate intellectually?" If I convince others to believe what I believe, have I propagated intellectually? Is that my end? If so, do I fail to achieve my end when I become convinced that I was wrong and someone else was right? I think, on the contrary, that I benefit more by abandoning my own false belief and adopting someone else's true one, than by persuading someone else to adopt my false belief, or even my true belief. "Intellectual propagation" is not the end, but truth, to which "intellectual propagation" is a means when and only when I have (or think I have) truth that others lack.

Immediately preceding this Nathanael notes: "Tom leaves an unresolved tension between "self-interest" and "personal sacrifice"-- maybe a good thing, since what looks at first glance like self-contradiction is often a recognition of complexity." Thereby he sort of touches on the reason I refer to the last paragraph of Tom's essay as the 'end' rather than the "conclusion" - it intentionally leaves us in ambiguity, with work to do. Like many of the best philosophical positions, it merely sets the stage for doing work rather than doing it, its virtue being in avoiding doing the wrong work. It may be very interesting to analyze a game that's very much like chess but, say, the king can move two spaces in any direction and the queen can also move like a knight. Unfortunately at the end of the day, the hard-won truths toward which the analysis has worked applies to no game anyone plays. Theories of moral calculus can be the same way.

Nathanael takes strongest issue with "the end of man is to act within his nature, just like everything else", not realizing that Tom mentions this as a tautological antidote to idea that the purpose of anything is defined by the intentions of its creator. It's the sort of sloppy phrase that one frequently lets slip when one has gotten too used to talking to other people of like mind. I am far from innocent in that, for sure. The use of the word "propagate" is also misleading, not least because it has a number of meanings. Of course, that sort of smeary semantics can be quite intentional if one wants to bracket the exact form of the answer or if one wants to answer on more than one level at a time, but of course that opens one up to unfortunate interpretations, such as that one's purpose is to have as many children as possible and to convince people of as many of one's own opinions as possible. Propagation occurs in the sense of transmission in time and/or space of patterns, whether genetic code in children or thought processes in brains. The exact form of propagation we choose is not specified, but it's justified by our own existence. Therefore morality is determined in human terms, not the terms of God's (empirically inaccessible) love, Gaia's diversity, or Gouda's... um... odor.

But of course, the difficult task still lies ahead of us humans to work on that determination.

The speed of reform

2004-08-15T13:24:00.000-06:00

I love cities. They provide so much humanity, convenience and culture in a cauldron of interaction that makes each a living entity of its own, every one unique and increasingly rich as time passes.

As they build up, of course, they start to get crowded. Rent prices in the better areas climb higher and higher as competition for limited space intensifies, which leads many well-meaning city councils to impose rent controls. Sometimes the reasoning is specifically socialist in nature, informed by a conviction that rents greater than X are exorbitant extortion. Other times the motives are somewhat more sophisticated - the city council may value neighborhood consistency and want to defend families from sudden inclines in rents caused by the positive externalities of surrounding development such as a major new park or completed cultural building. Still more thoughtful analysis will reveal large inefficiencies in an environment that forces frequent wholesale transplanting of the economically displaced.

The fact of the matter is, of course, that rent controls as they have usually been imposed quite simply discourage new building. Once imposed there becomes a more-or-less fixed amount of living space available in more-or-less fixed parcels. This increases the attractiveness of the living space relative to its price, inducing a predictable shortage. Now those who have found apartments hold on to them because they know they may not be able to find a new one and those without apartments either find a leaseholder to move in with or, more frequently, move to the suburbs. Flight to the suburbs in turn reduces the economy of scale for city services, increases transportation problems and destroys either farmland typically amongst the most productive or wilderness that once raised the value of city lands. Suburbanization also tends to reduce aggregate health, resource efficiencies and cultural engagement.

Even when rent controls don’t exist there still tends to be a lag between building and demand as well as a number of pressures encouraging suburban growth (cultural expectations chief amongst them), but they exacerbate those tendencies and as time goes on make things worse. The obvious solution to the damage caused by rent controls is to get rid of them.

Many cities do exactly that. The problem is, the sudden repeal of those measures does not imply a commensurate sudden growth in living space. Buildings take time to build - especially if city codes and similar legal barriers complicate the implementation of development plans. The bigger the building, the more time it’ll take (and typically, the more codes and oversight apply), and in an urban area the buildings tend to be pretty big. Years could go by before a building boom can catch up to the suddenly unleashed supply-demand equilibrium point, especially considering possible limitations credit agencies may want to place on lending to the construction sector in a localized area. Meanwhile, current owners of buildings can charge hugely inflated rents in the intervening period of constricted supply. Renters end up paying owners of dilapidated or even squalid properties the large premium supplied by the convenience of city infrastructure or have to pick up and leave. The character of districts, cultural nuclei, and the pattern of use of city services abruptly change as families move out of or into school districts, as they are replaced by single professionals, as restaurants and entertainment centers close down or relocate, and so on. Agents that had arranged a network of economic choices for greatest efficiency find their whole web disarranged and destroyed before they have time to adapt, leaving them, and much of the city, to start over.

Frequently this turns into a backlash and the repeals are rolled back, exchanging one the new set of problems for the old one, but with a great deal already destroyed. Sometimes political will survives and a city eventually recovers. The problem is, there’s no good reason to endure these destructive shocks, as a thoughtful process of gradual change can obviate the most severe pain.

To offer a single, lightly researched proposal, a city council could announce the impending end of price controls several -let’s say five - years in advance and institute measures to make the change difficult to renege upon so that developers feel confident enough to take on the risk of new construction. Furthermore, after the first year, the percentage of annual increase allowed on existing leases will be relaxed somewhat to offer property owners the possibility of a return on investments in renovations as well as to allow them to signal to current tenants what to expect in the future while still leaving them time to adjust. Finally, the city should invest some of its own reserves in beefing up its infrastructure as well as those offices that handle development oversight so as to expedite the approvals process for new construction.

Even once a city has banished price controls in general, it still does have a legitimate interest in some price regulation, because the tight integration of a city creates many externality effects. Sudden spikes in demand for residency or office space ina certain area do occur, and a property owner is only intelligent to charge what the market can bear. However, since that property owner’s choice effects a large number of uninvolved parties, the most interests of the city, even in mere dollar terms and bracketing cultural/social goals, may diverge dramatically from those of the owner. Leaving aside the hardcore libertarian objections against state interference on property rights grounds, it would behoove the city to try to find a balanced way to mitigating the suddenness of changes without doing too much damage to the market’s ability to find equilibrium through price signals. Perhaps modest caps on rent increases - say 10% annually - would help. Exemptions from price increase caps for renovation are offered by many cities. I don’t know of any cities that cap the rents on new buildings, but the promise of being able to adjust rents easily to market conditions would eliminate most of the worst fears of potential property owners.

I’m sure better, more refined proposals crafted and debated by true experts would far outshine my invention, but I think it already shows a highly desirable middle ground between jarringly sudden reform and the status quo. It’s a specific member of the large set of long-standing imbalances that afflict our global situation, all of which should be rectified as quickly as we can. Or, if you will, as quickly as would be prudent.

Immigration , exchange rates, agricultural subsidies, NTBs, outsourcing, and a variety of other socio-economic issues all cry out for liberalization, but the ideological elegance of a world without them does not imply that sudden, full liberalization on those issues wouldn’t be worse than the status quo, at least for a good long while. Not only is the extended period of chaos and hardship in the offing unnecessary, it frequently engenders political regression that rolls back the liberalization well before it starts to pay off. Purism may be personally gratifying, but it’s not the way to approach policy change.

That’s why I register Libertarian every year but would not actually want a fully Libertarian government to take over suddenly. As the party currently exists, it tends to consist mainly of ideological extremists who rarely even pay lip service to the idea of graceful transition or that end states should be anything other than identical to the theoretical optimum of utopia. The real world has a variety of odd corners and awkward situations to which we cannot apply a one-size-fits-all solution without regard to the details.

And the oddest situation of all is the current accidental status-quo that is undesigned but nonetheless the result of a huge number of actors negotiating the best spot they can find in the bewildering network of interactions. Change must be applied informed by intelligence, detailed knowledge, and flexibility in addition to the theoretical elegance that attracts so many to libertarian principles. Above all, of course, we must have patience.

We don't get to vote on what the truth is

2004-07-25T19:23:00.000-06:00

From Nathan Smith's response to my post of 22 July regarding the virtues of technocracy versus democracy:

I do not think it's a good thing that "scientific truths that most laymen do not accept are taught in schools." Even if evolution is true (and I think the theory is full of holes) to override the popular will on this issue is not a price worth paying: millions of people whom the elite considers barbarians and ignores are marginalized and alienated by such undemocratic norms. (If the Founders were alive today, they would be more distrustful of state-run public education than they ever were of standing armies.)

I don't know what Nathan means by "full of holes," (Is chemistry 'full of holes'? Certainly it is not completely understood nor are all its parts agreed upon) but the truth or falsity of evolution is apparently not at issue. Nathan says that to override the popular will on an issue of scientific fact is 'not worth it'. Could we apply this to geography? If we vote that, say, the continent of Asia is imaginary, should it be taught in schools? How about if only one school district votes to teach that, in an area where a sect predominates whose holy text says there is no continent but North America? What if perhaps a majority of people would rather there be no mention of the Civil War in their histry books, considering it to be an apocryphal event? Sure, a bunch of hoity-toity melonhead history professors might come along and lecture people about how their beliefs are contradicted by a mountain of rigorously-attested documentary evidence, but they're just a bunch of elitists!

Only teaching TRUE, relevant knowledge is education, all else is misinformation. One can argue that a cabal of so-called 'experts' is wrong and hiding that fact, but you can't dismiss the evidence because people refuse to believe it. Attempting to teach biology without evolution - the central organizing idea thereof - is a terrible failure of education. Unless all those scientists are wrong.

As for state-run public education versus any other kind in which public treasure is spent, the outcome is irrelevant. Public education money should only be spent teaching things that, to the best of its ability, the government has determined to be true. The way to do that is to ask a council of (hopefully disinterested) subject-matter experts, not to have a referendum. If one worries about abuse of state power, one can insist the expert-choosing process be more transparent. All government activities are ultimately answerable to elected officials.

Even the Supreme Court, in the long run.

Dividend tax cuts

2004-07-25T09:22:00.000-06:00

This article of which the following is criticism came to my attention via Nathan Smith's 23 July 2004 post on his blog.

All of Daniel Clifton’s arguments in favor of dividend tax cuts predicate on the idea that dividend income is somehow better than capital gains income or on the completely fatuous accusation that dividend taxes are somehow "double taxes." Let me examine the latter claim first, as it’s easier to dismiss.

I earned a dollar upon which I paid income taxes. I spent that dollar on a soft drink, paying sales tax. The store that sold it pays taxes on the profit it earns from the drink, then Coca Cola pays taxes on the profit it earned from the drink. Then Coca-Cola decides to send that dollar to its shareholder, me, and I pay taxes on it again. Where is the double-tax there? The only clear example is that of me paying both sales tax and income tax on the dollar in the first leg. Now, people try to argue "well, the piece of the corporation that’s ‘paying’ you is really your own property so it’s a tax on what you pay yourself, and that’s not fair." This might be true except that ownership of stock is not like regular ownership - the legal fiction of the corporate person protects one from liability. The entire amount on the line is the price of the stock. If a corporation gets sued for a bajillion dollars, amounting to ten thousand dollars per stock, it doesn’t matter - you are not liable. Since you and the corporations are legally separate, you have to pay taxes on funds transferred from one to the other. There’s nothing "double" about it.

On the other hand, it may be that the large bias in favor of internal investment is a bad thing. That is the premise of Clifton’s primary argument.

His best claim under that rubric is that dividend tax rates in line with capital gains taxes will encourage corporate leadership to pay out funds to shareholders if there’s not an overwhelmingly attractive investment opportunity available. In other words, it discourages investment. Is that good for economic growth? Well, sometimes it is - sometimes it works best to increase consumer spending, sometimes it works best to increase investment. Essentially, the lower capital gains rate encourages saving/investment on the part of corporations and Clifton seems to think this is a bad thing.

Perhaps it is a bad thing - I am biased by the belief that meddling in peoples’ economic choices frequently has unintended and counterproductive side-effects. If that was the case, then perhaps there’s no reason to give people a break on that portion of their income that comes from capital gains from stocks. In this case, however, I think I will break from my regular position. Right now, only established, low-growth companies generally pay dividends, meaning that only those companies who feel relatively certain they’ve encompassed about as much economic activity as they can reasonably expect are going to go ahead and pay out dividends. Everyone else just builds up their corporate assets or buys back stocks until such time as they have the cash for the next ambitious step or have to spend it to weather an economic storm. I also like this because it actually makes companies more accountable as well as more growth-oriented. What if Microsoft accidentally destroyed Lake Washington? Well, they have about $50billion in assets with which to pay for cleaning it - they have the resources to be held accountable. If they had already paid it out, then there would be no way to get that income back from all those liability-protected stockholders who didn’t put enough pressure on their company for accountability.

Clifton’s much weaker claim is that dividends require more honest accounting since the funds have to be paid out to everyone. He opposes this to stock buyback, however, which seems odd to me. With what does he mean to imply companies pay for the stocks? Corporate bonds? Those can pay for dividends just as easily. There are ways to trade holdings with institutional investors, but it’s not like those investors don’t have a strong interest in checking the books, plus resources to do it that individual stockholders can rarely match.

Clifton also says the dividend tax cut is good for stockholders. Brilliant observation. Perhaps the US government should lower taxes further, or even give people credits for buying stocks, plus a shiny medal with a blue ribbon. Or perhaps the interests of the United States encompass all its citizens, not just stockholders. And it’s just perhaps possible the executive director of the American Shareholder’s Association isn’t as concerned with the overall effects of tax policy as he is with the balance sheets of his group.

I find it very curious how much time he spends assuring the reader that dividend tax cuts do in fact encourage issuing dividends compared to how much justification he offers as to why this is a good thing. Overall, I think he’s done very little preaching to anyone but the choir, since he leaves all the most interesting pillars of the argument invoked rather than elaborated.

In conclusion I think it’s likely the capital gains tax advantage is too steep, but I like its existence somewhat. Therefore, I don’t think we need to remove it by treating it like all other income. Now, if one wants to cut income tax rates to spur the economy, then that's a different issue unaddressed by this article.

Pro-choice morality

2004-07-24T08:15:00.000-06:00

Yes, the most morally coherent pro-choice position is that fetuses are not people and that abortion has nothing to do with murder, but there is space for the problematic position that fetuses are semi-people so abortion is bad, but not bad like murdering a full-person. Pro-choice people seem to tend toward this latter view but don't usually articulate it very well, and those who take my position - that fetuses have very little to do with what we care about when we say "person" - tend to sound too harsh for public rhetoric. It's a life, but it's not a *human* life, we say, and then peoplelook at their ultrasounds and saw "awww, but look at the little fingers". Alternately, perhaps they listen to their pastor who tells them about brain functioning and hearts beating and the like.

When does the clearly non-human blastocyst become undeniably human? Well, there's no fact of the matter, since humans develop into their humanity. If one believed in a soul, one might say "the moment at which the soul cleaves to the body," but it's notoriously difficult to measure the supernatural. I think a rational place might be the point at which the baby acquires a personality - for which we might establish statistically significant number of days out of the womb. Jews once named babies eight days after they were born, which made a lot of cultural sense in a time when infant mortality was huge. Of course, I think birth itself is a better choice. Whether a baby is premature or full-term, being out in the world entails a period of rapid neurological change that is a necessary precursor to recognizable personhood. The foundation of all this is the idea that what we care about with humans is personhood capable of the basics: love, friendship, joy, anger, and so on. Newborn babies aren't capable of these things, granted, but very swiftly they shade into that territory, so swiftly I think it's best to draw the line at birth. Dogs aren't (and will never be) fully capable of these things so we give them second-tier rights. If we ever had a super-dog,however, capable of fully-articulated love and friendship, it seems obvious that it would be incumbent on us to extend to that dog the rights and protections we offer genetic humans - because the dog's humanity is in its mind and soul (in the non-supernatural sense). Judging humanity by genetics is an insult to human love, in my opinion.

Keep in mind your cuticles and hair were once living human cells. Do we really want to equate them with human life?

Technocrats and Democrats

2004-07-22T18:26:00.000-06:00

Commentary from Nathan Smith (whose opinions are germane to this blog as he is a friend of Tom's):

"I think the Kyoto process highlights the disturbing implications for democratic politics of environmentalism, particularly in the case of global warming, which inevitably sets a trend towards global technocracy. The trouble is: can we trust the technocrats? Why should we dethrone kings and emperors and then trust enviro-technocrats?"

This is a specific example of a broader difficulty regarding democratic decision-making. It has often been noted that consensus of belief does not dictate physical fact. A majority of Americans believe the humanity has been visited by extraterrestrials, but I think most would not regard this in itself as evidence that flying saucers are zipping about. Likewise do most seem to believe the Bible is literally true - though according to the statistics, a large portion of them would also somehow have to believe in evolution, with which biblical literalism is not readily compatible.

How is it that scientific truths that most laymen do not accept get taught in schools? It's because we live in the original democratic technocracy - the republic. Almost all our laws are made by lawmakers. That's pretty much the entire job - making laws. Now, most of them are politicians (as opposed to statesmen) as well, but it's a de facto not de jure requirement.

Why don't we just vote on things ourselves? Well, the truth, is, we're not very informed. I consider myself very well informed compared to the average person, but you can guarantee that lawmakers know lawmaking a whole lot better than I ever will. I might be able to bend a certain portion of my free time to studying the crafting, arguing, and negotiation of laws, but it's their whole profession (at least ostensibly).

Likewise I'm not an environmental scientist or a professional economist or a tenured professor of philosophy. I have interests and a propensity for research that put me in the Nth percentile of knowledge for the pertinent fields, but all of that 'expertise' essentially qualifies me to make a good guess at which experts to trust. Likewise in the early days of the USA people elected people to office with reputations such that they could reasonably be trusted to make good decisions for constituents who were too busy growing food or hammering iron to examine the minutia.

Trust that I want Greenspan setting the interest rates rather than for the population at large to vote on them.

But technocracy didn't work at all well for even the best communist state, and even elsewhere it has a spotty history. France's nuclear industry is a technocratic triumph of efficiency, but one need not search far for failures - such as the particular form of the Kyoto protocols.

So technocracy is not a panacea, but neither should the word carry a pejorative ring

Bush and Afghanistan

2004-07-14T04:16:00.000-06:00

I won't consider the 'sniper' issue, since I can't research it for details and veracity.

As far as the use of warlord allies goes - I actually think it was likely the best choice of a constellation of poor ones. It worked, anyway, and with minimal military intervention on our part.

Part three - the distraction from sustaining the new Afghan government and the hunt for Afghan al-Qaeda and Taliban elements - is a powerful one in my eyes. While the administration seemed willing to continue to devote US forces to fighting pockets of holdouts, they definitely did not seem willing to commit a sufficient number of peacekeepers nor expend a great deal of US treasure or reputation to secure strong international investment in the rebuilding of Afghanistan. The United States and the world have not lived up to our promises to Afghanistan, and that is why the country is still a mess. A country that the international community has left weak, divided, and alienated is going to be a base for international terrorism.

Tom also notes that almost anyone would have intervened militarily in Afghanistan. I think this is true, though how well or quickly is up for grabs. Overall, I want to give Bush some points on Afghanistan in the initial days because as a military campaign, it seems pretty well executed overall. His diplomacy during that stage wasn't even as crappy as it has been at other times, despite his tendancy to choose his words for a friendly domestic audience without sufficient regard for how those words would be heard overseas, especially in Muslim countries suspicious of US intentions. Foreigners can't vote in US elections, but they can fight US policy. Overall, I give the administration's choice and methods for dealing with Afghanistan a B for the first two months declining steadily to a D or F by the time we were invading Iraq.

Iraq is a different issue that would take more time to address than I have right now, so I'll come back to it

Essences and selves

2004-07-02T05:23:00.000-06:00

A river drains a certain mountain valley, over time etching its way sinuously this way and that, not occupying quite the same cartographic location from year to year, and certainly not carrying the same water, yet we would call it the same name. Are we deluding ourselves in thinking it's the same river?

Of course, we're all aware that the river changes from year to year. Last year there was a copse of trees on the side of the river and now it's a farm, and we might remark on how the river has changed. But it's the same river that has changed.

What if there's a powerful earthquake that causes some mountain landslides, changing the course of water flow dramatically? Is it still the same river? It still drains approximately the same area. I think we usually would, especially considering that human engineering projects have generated some of the same sort of catastrophic changes without us changing the name of the river(s) involved.

What if we go back to the ice ages? It'll be pretty hard to identify which rivers we see are the younger (ancestral? analogous? terminology here depends on you favored answer) form of our rivers of today. Should we give them the same names? What about if we go all the way back to Pangaea?

One could argue all day long about this, but it's clear it's an issue of efficiency and preference because there's no fact of the matter, only nomenclature. We need not announce that rivers are nothing more than comforting illusions because there's no river essence to which our names firmly attach. Rivers are real and persistent in ways we care about. Only if one insists on weird forms of river essentialism does any of this become a worry.

Is a man the 'same' man after a severe stroke? An earthquake has happened in his head, dramatically diverting his 'self' all at once. It's more tempting to call him a different purpose with a nice sharp division like that, but I think we'll consider him 'same enough' to carry his old name for similar types of reasons that we'd continue to call the earthquake-diverted river by the same name. Which way is the best way is a matter for moral and social analysis, but there's no fact of the matter to discover out in the physical world.

We are accustomed to vague ideas of the soul that include some sort of essence that carries the core of our being that we care about. When people criticise the hypothesis of the soul or its essentialist analogs, people often feel like the critic is trying to say there's nothing we care about, or what we care about is only a comfortable illusion. Well, one way to make sure the baby's thrown out with the bathwater is to conflate them. SO let's not. Let's agree our individualism exists, our selves exist, there are plenty of good reasons we carry our names from day to day, and none of it requires an "essence" of us.

That said, the above leaves open the possibility of discontinuities that might challenge our judgement in fringe cases. They are moral quandries with no clear right answer, which is uncomfortable. However, it's our duty to try and find the best answer we can instead of holding out for a essence to decide the question.

NPOs vs the government

2004-06-29T04:53:00.000-06:00

Many people view NPOs as the government's competitor, and the government, like an NPO, does not pay taxes - it only collects them. The difference between the two is that one can vote not to pay the government for any particular activity, but whether you do or not is not your personal decision. With NPOs, the funders decide exactly what they think it's worth. That actually makes them, weighted by total income, more responsive than the government. It's also true that many smaller or younger NPOs are incredibly wasteful and essentially do very little good for the dollar, counting on the relative ignorance of their contributing audience and their obscurity to shield them from scrutiny.

As a contributor, writing off that portion of your money you gave to this alternate government is not usually profitable. If one pays 50% of one's income in taxes, then one effectively gets refunded 50% of one's contributions (assuming one itemizes). That only softens the loss. A person must believe in what (they think)the organization is doing.

Of course, it's still taking diverting income from the government, which has well established and controls responsive to democratic ideals despite its unwieldy size and lack of fair competition. What can this money be used to do when used by NPOs? Anything not specifically illegal. If you want to make an NPO for the manufacturing of fingernail clippers (but not for profit) then you're good to go. Of course, then at least you're producing something. What does a television evangelist produce except broken promises and loyalty to a figment and a demagogue?

NPOs have many of the virtues and weaknesses of a direct democracy versus a representative one. NPOs must court their funders directly, but they can do this as often by misleading them because those funders are not professional funders, they are merely people who have wider lives to live. Of course, in the case of religious organizations, it's even worse...

Epistemic disconnect

2004-06-27T18:46:00.000-06:00

I've been asked before if I would consider dating a religious person, and in every instance the uncomfortable truth beneath my equivocation has been "no, I would not." Now, Catholics and Jews and people of all sorts of religious backgrounds regularly (though certainly not universally) avoid partner relationships with those not of the same 'faith,' but we secular humanists like to think we are so much more tolerant and accepting of every person's beauty. Is my position not a denial of that; am I not evincing a sort of atheist bigotry?

Well, it traces back to 'epistemic disconnect,' my jargon-term relating to my belief that fundamental differences in how two people arrive at truth will be a permanent stumbling block in finding stable common ground. My 'bigotry' actually relates more specifically to my perception of the sources of religious faith rather than to any specific (distal) characteristics of their metaphysical opinion. I cannot have a life partner who holds 'faith' to be a permissible path to truth. I can hardly have a cogent discussion with one who sees faith or revelation as superior to reason.

Before I proceed I should throw in some caveats - the equivocation I mention above does not spring entirely from aversion to revealing my narrow-sounding position to my interlocutor(s). As with most things, the truth is in the middle somewhere - many 'religious' people aren't particularly divorced from reason at all, and certainly there exist a variety of religious beliefs that fall closer to the secular humanist's end of the spectrum than the fundamentalist hardcase's. I tend to be well-disposed toward Wiccans and liberal Christians, for example, though even they make me squeamish if we're talking about dating. They would still work better for me than an atheist who believed in hard gender roles or racial superiority. The point of difference is what my prospective partner sees as counting as evidence or justification - and no one who believes in old-school religion is going to be on the same page with me there.

What about intuition vs reason? What if someone believes in the superiority of (not-explicitly-supernatural) intuition over reason? From a certain perspective, this is true. Axioms and the rules of logic are our intuitions codified. If base intuition is absolutely unreliable then reason has no traction, and Descarte's demon has won: we will never believe anything about the world that could be counted as true knowledge.

The real virtue of reason and the logical system it implies is that it directs us to pare our intuitions hierarchically. If logic brings it to our attention that some later-acquired belief or intuition conflicts with a primal one like "A thing can not be 'A' and 'not A' at the same time and in the same respect," then our deeper intuitive belief directs us to discard or correct the shallower one. Religions, however, frequently direct us to change our system of logic to place the beliefs that constitute religious doctrine in a special category labeled "faith" to which we must not fairly apply our paring shears of intuitive consistency.

And that bolloxes it all up.

Some people want to paint faith as a virtue because morals and comforting beliefs can be put in the invincible box, but the reality is that anything can be placed in that box without answering to reason. In fact, I would argue the persistent existence of the box and its vestiges are the primary stumbling blocks to making the most we can of human nature. We can't get rid of our lack of omnipotence, omniscience and omnibenevolence, but we can at least do our best to see things clearly. There's enough temptation for us to believe things convenient to us without creating a social construct that privileges unreason.

And on a more personal note, what sort of dialog can I have with a person who will believe in a square circle if a book tells her to?