tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1544954387635099672024-03-07T06:02:37.089+00:00No Double StandardsOne standard for all
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Do not sacrifice truth on the altar of comfortMartin Freedmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16952072422175870627noreply@blogger.comBlogger354120tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-154495438763509967.post-60409235032841440592017-03-09T11:16:00.000+00:002017-03-09T11:16:07.192+00:00Google pissed me off, so I am off to WordPress.This is a short post, to both explain why this blog terminated as abruptly as it did and to also announce a new one.
There were two reasons why I stopped posting here, the first was some unforeseen but interesting work commitments but the second was Google changing the way Blogger served up pages and posts. It was the latter that really angered me off hence the title of this post.<br />
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I like programming and spent quite a few very enjoyable hours hacking the script interface of this blog to make it work the way I wanted to. One thing I disliked was when searching from either a keyword, tag or time slice it returned not just the blog headline and tags but also the body. I modified the calls so that it just presented the headlines and tags, so that upon any type of canned or free form search you would get <b>all</b> the relevant posts. You can still see this if you click on any tag or perform a search. However now you do <b>not</b> get all the relevant posts.<br />
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Google without consultation and without announcement changed the Blogger platform to limit the amount of posts that were being returned from its database. Their argument was quite legitimate, they needed to limit the bandwidth loads on their servers, given how some of their users were abusing the Blogger platform. What was outrageous was the way they did it and they way the responded to complaints. I specifically had found a client-driven solution to handle exactly the same issue, albeit for a different purpose, but after a few attempts going on their support channels, including suggesting how they could do the same on the server side,I dealt with extremely ignorant and stupid google support personnel, who failed to understand what for them should been a very simple point.<br />
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Clearly there is no point in playing with the client-side Blogger interface if google is going to that and behave so badly when it does. WordPress is open sourced so even if the parent hosting free site does make annoying changes (not that I have heard of that) I could have easily dealt with such an equivalent issue there.<br />
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I have launched a new blog <a href="https://martinfreedman.wordpress.com/">Debugging Economics</a>, the focus is different to this one. Even though Google broke this blog, I will keep this up and some articles maybe re posted and/or refreshed on the new site as needed.<br />
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So for the very few of you still left listening to this rss feed, please update your feeds to the new blog, if you are interested in the <a href="https://martinfreedman.wordpress.com/2017/03/09/debuggin-economics/">new theme</a>. Martin Freedmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16952072422175870627noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-154495438763509967.post-83674377174358880682010-05-26T14:24:00.001+01:002010-05-26T14:24:36.987+01:00Is Abortion Murder?<p>Tim McGregor <a href="http://lapsedpagan.blogspot.com/2010/05/desirism-worked-example.html" target="_blank">asked me</a> the following question:</p> <blockquote> <p>“I started pondering about the issue of abortion and I thought maybe a worked example how desirism might help us make moral decisions would be greatly aid my comprehension of it.</p> <p>With that in mind, would it be possible to explain how we might decide:</p> <ul> <li>Whether to abort a foetus when the life of the mother is threatened? </li> <li>At what age it might be ethical to do so if the foetus was <i>not </i>threatening the life of the mother.?” </li> </ul> </blockquote> <h2>The Framework</h2> <p>In applying desirism, the underlying question that needs answering is “what do people generally have reasons to promote and inhibit?”. The “generally” is to emphasize the trans-cultural feature of what is in common to people, regardless of their cultural background, influences, opinions and desires. This is to consider the moral issue as an all-things-considered and all-things-being-equal question and to find the facts of the matter. </p> <p>Operating with such a framework question does not guarantee determinate let alone definitive conclusions, this is an enterprise that draws upon any relevant rational and empirical tools as for any other such empirical enterprise. Any conclusion is both provisional and defeasible and so open to challenge within such a framework.</p> <p>A desirist focuses only on reasons to act that exist (as well as states of affairs) and these are desires. If an agent lacks such a desire, they appear to them as an external reason and not one that motivates them. Now one cannot use reason to change desires, instead one uses the social forces such as praise and blame, reward and punishment to do so. Desirism provides rational and empirical grounds over what desires to promote and inhibit and shows that history has been littered with the promotion and inhibition of desires for which there are no rational and empirical justifications. That is always the danger over the mutual and reciprocal influence over desires – whether they are really justified - a danger desirism has been developed to mitigate against.</p> <p>So granted a conclusion is available for a given topic, of course individuals and groups are going to differ and disagree with this conclusion, this is because they either have desires that people generally lack, or lack desires that people generally have, the conclusion serves to show the desires that such individuals and groups <em>should</em> have. That is the whole point of the analysis. Again if no-one disagreed then there would be nothing to debate, and no-one bothers to ask such questions of universal agreement (still sometimes those are worth asking, if they can even be recognised, since we could all be wrong).</p> <h2>Murder</h2> <p>In order to answer Tim’s questions we are going to look at another question that underlies these - “is abortion murder?” -and based on the conclusion to that, answer Tim’s questions.</p> <p>It is said, even by moral relativists, that the one common feature across cultures is a prohibition against murder. However this is misleading since murder is a value-laden term, it has disvalue built into it <em>by definition</em>. Let us explicate this term, which I will only do briefly here, as this post is focused on abortion. </p> <p>Murder stereotypically means the deliberate wrongful killing of a person. Given such a meaning, it is no surprise that this is a prohibition that is likely a near universal across cultures. The real question is <em>what counts as</em> murder and this varies significantly across cultures depending on their notions of “deliberate” and “person”. All grant that for whatever is regarded as “deliberate” and “person” that it is “wrongful”  - that people have reasons to inhibit such a desire – a desire to deliberately kill a person (although they might indirectly focus on acts, rules or duties, none can be successfully affected unless the relevant desires are influenced).</p> <p>We do not need to explore the notion of “deliberate” here, as we take it as given that an abortion is “deliberate”. This leaves us to answer the question as to whether a foetus is a person.</p> <p>Prior to examining this we first need to explore two issues related to murder, self-defence and the defence of those incapable of defending themselves. </p> <h2>Defence against Murder</h2> <p>If a society coherently and consistently promotes an inhibition to deliberate kill persons, fewer members of such a society will have such a desire and so will be less likely to act upon it. However successful as society is at doing so, it is likely that some will still have such a desire and some of those will act upon it, albeit less than a society that fails in such a promotion. If there is a clear and present danger and killing the would be killer is the only option then this is not murder, it is self defence, this is not wrong, it is permissible, neither to be promoted nor inhibited. We do not need to explore the issues of the use of self-defence as a reactive response and tests to ensure whether such a claim is valid or not. However  this establishes the concept that there may be other circumstances that alter the conclusion that the deliberate killing of a person is murder - that is wrongful - such as medical complications.  We will look at that below.</p> <p>We do need to note that if a foetus is a person, it is not capable of self-defence and this leads to the next derived principle.</p> <p>Again, being brief, a moral agent is a person that can act and respond to the social forces. Now all moral agents are persons, but not all persons are moral agents. The notion of a person here (we are not exploring animal rights or psychopaths here) is is that any person is worthy of moral consideration, whether it is capable of being a moral agent or not. This certainly includes children, who lack the maturity to be moral agents, and those who are incapacitated, due to injury, illness and age. People generally have reasons to inhibit the desire not to consider such persons worthy of moral consideration, and this gives people motivations to defend those who cannot defend themselves. This does not mean or imply killing the aggressors in some form of assisted self-defence but rather that people generally have reasons to inhibit such desires, after all we all have been and will be in the position of being incapable of defending ourselves. </p> <p>So if a foetus is a person and it clearly is incapable of self-defence, on the basis that it is worthy of moral consideration, we certainly would have reasons to deem abortion murder and utilise both the social forces and legal institutions to ensure that abortions do not occur.</p> <h2>Is a foetus a person</h2> <p>So now we need to see if a foetus is a person or not. If it is not, then abortion is not murder, if it is then abortion is murder.</p> <p>Now history full of varying conceptions of persons, that is to who qualifies as a moral agent and who is worthy of moral consideration, often getting these relations inside out such as for slave and minorities being considered moral agents but not worthy of moral considerations, children often were not worthy of moral consideration and very often and till today women are worthy of only diminished moral consideration, if at all. If we seek a trans-cultural understanding of what is a person we can only have recourse to rationally secure arguments and empirically sound evidence which supports none of the above and other similar discriminations.</p> <p>At the very least a  person is a being with dispositions, desires and beliefs. One can have such desires and beliefs without language, as some higher animals do and as, indeed we often do, operating on beliefs and desires that we have never put in words (and may, if one does not fully consider one’s life, ever do). So the fact that a foetus has not yet learnt a language does not mean that it does not have beliefs and desires, however limited they may be.</p> <p>At this stage we need to refer to biological, developmental and neurological knowledge, to establish at what at age foetus could be reasonably called a person. Prior to such an age it is not a person and past that age it is. </p> <p>Some have argued that not even a new born baby is yet a person but here we will seek a reasonable minimum. I have a recent wonderful reference, which I unfortunately cannot find, that eloquently and, I believe, accurately covers these issues and which is establishes that a foetus becomes a person between 22 and 23 weeks from conception.  Further that paper argues that even as medical science improves – such as increasing the likelihood above a 4% survival rate for a 22 week old foetus -this will not alter these biological facts. </p> <p>I will take this as tentative empirical support, that a foetus less than 22 weeks old is not a person and so such an abortion is not murder. The 22 to 23 week period is therefore questionable but see below. Should my reference – if I ever find it - be invalid and revised then the relevant date would need to be updated, but this is an entirely empirical question one way or another.</p> <p>So this tallies nicely (all too nicely one might wonder) with the current UK limit of 23 weeks. Another lost reference (I checked my google history and when I have time will check my delicious bookmarks) was that the huge majority of elective abortions occur before 20 weeks and virtually all 20 -23 week abortions are due to medical complications. This makes me conjecture that those very few 22 week abortions are very unlikely to reside in the 4% that would have survived.</p> <p>So it seems that the UK has both reasonable and humane abortion rules. There is no need to add a more limited period for elective abortions versus medical emergency abortions as this is the way it already occurs.</p> <p>Now there are many other questions that could have been asked that I have not dealt with but, as far as I can see, the above is the central question that needed to be dealt with and so issues of over choice, cause of pregnancies, religious beliefs are important but separate questions to this.</p> <h2>Tim’s Answers</h2> <blockquote> <p>Whether to abort a foetus when the life of the mother is threatened? </p> </blockquote> <p>23 weeks</p> <blockquote> <p>At what age it might be ethical to do so if the foetus was <i>not </i>threatening the life of the mother.?</p> </blockquote> <p>22 weeks but this is practically what happens anyway.</p> <h2>Conclusion</h2> <p>Tim’s question was inspired by what he correctly calls a piece of idiocy <a href="http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126985072" target="_blank">Nun Excommunicated For Allowing Abortion</a>. </p> <p>There are two points here. First is that religious beliefs are motivated by when the “soul” enters the foetus. However there are two religious positions on this “immediate ensoulment – upon conception - and “delayed ensoulment” – after conception. </p> <p>Immediate ensoulment has the problem of the formation of twins <em>after</em> conception and much theistic debate has revolved around the time of delayed ensoulment. Indeed, contrary to popular conception,<em> the Catholic Church is itself has never rejected delayed ensoulment!</em> There is a fascinating free eBook on this and I do have that reference: <a href="http://www.feedbooks.com/userbook/11532%20I" target="_blank">The Pope who said Abortion is NOT Murder</a> by John McCloskey. So there is no reason why religious mystical ideas of ensoulment could not be made consistent with our empirical knowledge of human developmental physiology and neurology.</p> <p>The final concluding thought is over the Catholic Church’s gross moral hypocrisy of ex-communicating a decent Nun who saved a life versus not defrocking, let alone ex-communicating, both all those priests who abused young children in their care and all those who defended them from criminal prosecution. Since the Pope is a prime suspect in the latter we know why the Church has not and still not has done this, but all this goes to further discredit that religious considerations has any value in public debates over abortion.</p> Martin Freedmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16952072422175870627noreply@blogger.com15tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-154495438763509967.post-35899045802913015422010-04-27T13:13:00.001+01:002010-04-27T13:13:07.708+01:00Letter to a Lapsed Pagan III<p>Hi Tim</p> <p>You asked for a short description of desirism. I will give you three. The first two are aimed at school level albeit said slightly more technically and compactly than one would say to school kids. The third is a summary of the key points argued for in my previous letter. I will then finish this letter by answering your questions.</p> <h2>Desirism in in one line</h2> <p>Encourage desires that tend to fulfil other desires, discourage desires than ten to thwart other desires.</p> <h2>Desirism in a Couple of Paragraphs</h2> <p>If someone acts to thwarts one of your desires, this is undesirable to you, and this is the reason you have to discourage them from doing so. If you act to thwart one of their desires, that is undesirable to them, and that is the reason they have to discourage you from doing so. And the same goes for everyone else. Everyone uses praise and blame; and social reward and punishment to influence – to encourage and discourage - each other.  One can also use other means to influence each other, such as physical and material threats, coercion and force. However we all have reason to discourage these these other means from being used on us, and others have the same reason from those means from being used on them.</p> <p>Morality is about desires that are universally desirable to everyone, these are morally good desires and about desires that are universally undesirable to everyone, these are morally bad desires. So if we all encourage morally good desires – desires that tend to fulfil other desires, whoever has them - and discourage morally bad desires – desires that tend to thwart other desires , whoever has them - we make the world better for all of us, as we are all would better able to fulfil our own desires.</p> <h2>a Formal description of desirism</h2> <p>All value terms such as “good”, “bad”, “ought”, “ought not” are action-guiding, they are prescriptions. </p> <p>The best pragmatic definition of a prescription  is “there are reason to act of the kind to keep or bring about the state of affairs in question”. </p> <p>A prescription is a type of description. It can be true or false. We use, metonymically, the label “good” for the “keep or bring about”  relation and “bad” for the “stop or prevent “ relation. If these labels are applied to the other relation, then the prescription is false.</p> <p>The other way a prescription can be false is if they refer to reasons to act that do not exist. The only reason to act that we know exist are desires – the only brain states that motivate us to act to keep or bring about states of affairs that are the targets of those desires. </p> <p>Now we can use the label “fulfil” for the “kept or made” relation and the label “thwart” for the “stop or prevent” relation. Desires can also be directly fulfilled, or indirectly. So we can say an action “tends” to fulfil a desire, if it indirectly aids in bringing out the state of affairs that is the target of the desire.</p> <p>So we can now say that good means “such as to fulfil or tend to fulfil the desires of the kind in question” and that “bad” means “such as to thwart or tend to thwart the desires of the kind in question” . We can also shorten this using “tend” to cover both direct and indirect fulfilment so that good (bad) means “such as to tend to fulfil (thwart) desires of the kind in question”.</p> <p>Moral value terms are a specific type of prescription, they are universally prescriptive.</p> <p>A universal prescription limits what <em>kind</em> of reasons to act apply in such a prescription. is that “there are reasons to act for everyone to keep or bring about the state of affairs in question”.</p> <p>Given that the only reasons to act that exist are desires <em>and</em> that acts can only be modified by influencing desires,  this means that only desires that tend to fulfil everyone’s desires and that are socially influenceable (malleable) are the kinds of desires amenable to be universally prescribed. Similarly only malleable desires that tend to thwart everyone’s desire are the kinds of desires amenable to be universally proscribed. </p> <p>Combining this a true moral, that is universal, prescription or proscription is that there reasons to promote or demote the desire under evaluation, these reasons being whether the desire tends to fulfil or thwart everyone’s desires. If it does neither is is a morally neutral desires, not one of moral significance.</p> <h2>Your First Question</h2> <blockquote> <p>Since Desirism is sometimes called Desire Utilitarianism, does it agree that it is the outcome of an action that is important when determining its moral status and that an increase in the wellbeing, or reduction of suffering of sentient creatures, is the goal of moral actions?</p> </blockquote> <p>A desire for wellbeing is only one possible desire. People can chose to fulfil a desire that sacrifices their wellbeing. We leave such a utility undetermined, allowing for it to be non-fungible, incommensurate and plural. Unlike traditional utilitarianism, Desirism does not impose one utility on everyone.</p> <p>It is a consequentiality model, consequences do matter. The consequences being the material and physical affects on desires (more precisely on their fulfilment and thwarting). Actions are determined only indirectly, the evaluation focus is on desire and not acts and that takes better account of the results of empirical psychology.</p> <p>In right act terms one could say that the right acts are acts that are the result of desires that tend to fulfil other desires, or the act that a person with desires that tend to fulfil other desires would perform.</p> <h2>Your Second Question</h2> <blockquote> <p>Does Desirism dictate that there is a right thing to do in any given situation, regardless of the culture in which it is taken? Are there, as Sam Harris contends, "many peaks on the moral landscape", or is there one rule for all?</p> </blockquote> <p>Desirism is a means to establish what is universally desirable or not, independent of individual or group opinion. To establish matter of fact not opinion – culturally based or otherwise. </p> <p>This is not to say it guarantees this result, some analysis may just be indeterminate. Also this is an empirical approach limited as is any other empirical approach to achieving the provisionally best conclusion given the available data. Further there can be disputes over the existing data e.g. which desires are affect or who has desires (such as over foetuses) as well as whatever conclusion being revisable in the light of new data. That is this is a provisional and defensible analysis.</p> <h2>Your Third Question</h2> <blockquote> <p>Are there grades of right and wrong rather than a binary decision?</p> </blockquote> <p>Yes, one can compare two desires and it can be the case that one tends to fulfil more desire and tends to thwart less other desires, than another desire sunder evaluation. And so on.</p> <h2>Your Fourth Question</h2> <blockquote> <p>Does Desirism resolve the ought-is problem, or does it have nothing to say about this and just work from the principle that we ought to be moral and only concern itself with the "how" rather than the "why"?</p> </blockquote> <p>The is-ought problem is not ignored by desirism. As noted above prescriptions are a type of description and can be true or false. There is no is-ought, description-dualism or fact-value dualism. That is an unempirical and (fallible) metaphysical claim.</p> <p>This dualism can be shown to be false by showing that certain values or prescriptions can exist, rather than focus on others, where if they do not exist, then they are fictions. On that I assume we agreed.</p> <p>One can only argue to “ought” conclusions if there is at least one “is” premise that contains one or more reasons to act that exist, then and only then  one can draw ought conclusions. That is why desirism focused only on reasons to act that exists and so always refers to desires in arguing to ought conclusions.</p> Martin Freedmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16952072422175870627noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-154495438763509967.post-33460604311958494612010-04-27T11:01:00.001+01:002010-04-27T11:01:19.892+01:00Quote of the Day: Tolkien versus Rand<blockquote>"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs".[<a href="http://kfmonkey.blogspot.com/2009/03/ephemera-2009-7.html">Rogers</a>]</blockquote><br />
h/t <a href="http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2010/04/goddess-of-market.html">The Barefoot Bum</a>Martin Freedmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16952072422175870627noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-154495438763509967.post-58720136131698180302010-04-23T08:00:00.001+01:002010-04-26T10:33:02.790+01:00Letter to a Lapsed Pagan II<i>[See <a href="http://impartialism.blogspot.com/2010/04/letters-to-lapsed-pagan-index.html">Letters to a Lapsed Pagan - Index</a> for full list of our correspondence]</i><br />
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Hi Tim<br />
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I think a better way to move forward is for me, in this second letter to you, is to directly answer your "WTF is desirism?" question from your first letter.<br />
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Given your second letter, although you did not intend it as a second letter as such, I do not think it right to give you homework or require you to look up unfamiliar terms (within reason). Apart from anything else, I hope our correspondence can be a standalone reference to these ideas.<br />
So lets proceed.<br />
<h2>Moral Language</h2>First I want to add a point omitted from my first letter and one that nicely dovetails into the following explanation.<br />
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One of my concerns, as a sceptic, was the misuse and abuse of moral language, specifically and most often by those who presumed best qualified to use it, religious leaders. <br />
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I must emphasize that I am not only concerned with them, as the issue is broader than religions and not all religious leaders (and followers) are culpable. This is an important point but I will not repeat it. Please take it as read.<br />
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The issue is that all too often moral language is used to support immoral actions, such as prejudice, bigotry and violence. However too many critics seem to be disabled from using the same type of language, due to their interpretations of what they Moral Inquiry actually is, that, at the very least, they consider Morality not to be objective. They concede much by doing this and this has concerned me for quite a while. Such critics, if nothing else, still concede to religious claims taht thiersis the only basis for moral objectivity, even as any sensible person knows and argues that such theistic-based moral claims are,with respect to objectivity, at least false (or in my view, incoherent, and not even false). <br />
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For a while my approach took to pointing out the many incoherencies and ignorance that no intellectually responsible person would endorse, let alone promote. To use their own supposed morality against them. The classic being “bearing false witness” which many of the theists I was concerned over committed, when they repeatedly misrepresented atheists as communists and immoral and so on. However, those and similar arguments. were either wilfully misunderstood or consistent with their view that we are not their neighbours!<br />
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Then I undertook a study of ethics, all of the classics through to much of the work of the present day. Here I was very surprised, as far from there being little to support objective approaches to morality, there were many and from different bases and assumptions. Indeed this is, as I often repeat, where all the action ethics seems to be nowadays. Part of the surprise was I did not get this from many scientific and other critics, who were more concerned to base their views on their own take of morality, including negative or nihilistic ones. Whilst quite a few are quite objective in their approach (as Sam Harris is), there are far too many who are not and either way, none communicated how much is really going on in ethics. The last few years has seen dramatic changes in public awareness but there is still much that has not been covered.<br />
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Anyway I sought to find the most empirically adequate explanation of the phenomenon of morality, one that explained more with less, had fewer errors and mistakes than competitors and this is where I discovered and challenged Desire Utilitarianism. Part of testing became for me to, reluctantly I must say, to become an advocate of this theory. <br />
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My experience has been that there are about 5 or 6 common criticisms (some from theists, the others from subjectivists and non-cognitivists) and it is clear to me, however often they are repeated that desirism can deal with them. There are many other criticisms and I too still have some but I am not going to second guess you. Lets see what you come up with.<br />
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Anyway the underlying goal was is to rehabilitate moral language, so none of us has any qualms about using it, as and where required, particularly and most often, to those who misuse and abuse such language.<br />
In order to do this we need to get behind the language and see what it means. To see if there are empirically adequate referents for these terms,to reduce such terms to their references and analyse the implications of these references without recourse to moral language. <br />
<h2>Prescriptions</h2>So what do “ought”, “ought not”, “should”, “should not”, “good”, “bad”, “right” and “wrong” mean? <br />
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If one says “you ought not to X” and you ask “why?”, they might reply “because doing X is wrong” or “because X is bad”, These do not really answer the question. In fact these are three different ways of saying the same thing, that is expressing the same proposition. This proposition is a recommendation, it is action-guiding, or, to use the parlance, it is a prescription. This is the real answer to any of the three above responses.<br />
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Note at this stage we are not looking at just “moral” usage but in general. For example the same knife might be “good” in one context “sharp enough”, bad in another “dangerous to children” and “bad” in a different way in another context “too blunt to use”. The use of “good” and the two different “bad”s are all prescribing the usage of a knife, such that there are reasons to use it in situations when it is “good”, and reasons not to use it in situations when it is “bad”. And, note, the prescription is often implicit or tacit and inferred from the situation. Regardless of how implicit or explicit it is stated, there is a prescription being expressed. <br />
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So what are prescriptions? As hinted above, a prescription is a description of objects under evaluation, the reasons to act and the relation between them – as to whether the reasons to act are to realise or prevent the state of affairs that is the object of the evaluation. <br />
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Clearly many descriptions are not prescriptions, since if they do not describe objects of evaluation, reasons to act and the relations between them, they have necessarily failed to provide the components of a prescription. However descriptions that do contain these three components are prescriptions.<br />
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Like descriptions in general, prescriptions can be true or false (or cognitive), whether they are, or not, depends on the propositions stated by the prescription. So the description of an object of evaluation, the reasons to act and the relations between them can be false, if either the reasons to act do not exist, or the relations between the reasons to act and the objects of evaluations are incorrect. If a prescription describes both reasons to act that exist and correct relations between these and the object of evaluations, then it is true.<br />
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If “good” does not express such a prescription then it is not a prescription and in contrary to general, common and typical usage, that is redefining good not to be a prescription does too much violence to any pragmatic meaning of the term.<br />
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Now if instead, one defines generic good to be about reasons for action to stop or prevent a state of affairs, one has inverted the meaning of good (and bad) and again has done too much violence to any pragmatic meaning of the term. <br />
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Given this, saying that a prescription that has reasons not to act (or refrain from acting) or reasons to prevent a state of affairs is good is a false prescription, since one has inverted the relation between reasons to act and the state of affairs for which those reason to act are about.<br />
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In short, a prescription is a way of describing value. So this gives us a robust, general, consistent but pragmatic definition of value or generic good to mean “there are reasons to act of the kind to keep or bring a state of affairs in question” and disvalue or generic bad “that there are reasons to act of the kind to stop or prevent a state of affairs in question”. These definitions are pragmatic in that this describes how the terms are used, as opposed to what they users think they mean.<br />
<h2>Desires as reasons to act</h2>The other way for a prescription to be false is if it refers to reasons to act that do not exist. That is in order for a prescription to be true it is necessary to refer to reasons to act that exist. <br />
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The only reasons to act that exist, as far as we know with our current state of knowledge, are desires. Desires are a type of brain state and the only brain states that motivate the agent to keep or bring about the state of affairs that is the object of the desire. <br />
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Desires themselves are neither true or false (cognitive) rather they are fulfilled or thwarted (or neither) depending upon whether the state of affairs that is the object of the desires is made or kept true; stopped or prevented from occurring, respectively. By contrast the only other equivalent brain state beliefs are cognitive, they are capable of being true or false (or undecided)<br />
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If a prescription contains any other reasons to act, these reasons to act do not exist and the prescription is false. If someone proposes a reason to act that is not a desire, it is up to them to show that it exists, if they cannot, then any prescription based on it is false.<br />
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Based on desires being the only reasons to act that exist, we can add a derivative definition of value to mean “such as to fulfil the desires of the kind in question” and disvalue to mean “such as to thwart the desires of the kind in question”.<br />
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Note in either form, that value is not intrinsic to any objective feature of the world, nor is intrinsic to any subjective feature of the world (such as a desire). It is extrinsic to both,that is value is relational not subjective nor objective. Nothing here stops us performing an objective examination of these relations as in any other empirical endeavour which can be mostly considered as finding and describing relations between different features of reality. It is this objective examination that I will pursue here.<br />
<h2>Agent Reasons</h2>Now <em>my</em> desires are <em>my</em> reasons to act. <em>Your</em> desires are <em>your</em> reasons to act. If I desire a state of affairs and you act, knowingly or inadvertently, directly or indirectly, to prevent or stop that state of affairs, the thwarting of my desire gives me a reason to dissuade you from so acting. And vice versa, if my actions thwart your desire. And so on for everyone else. <br />
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Indeed knowledge of others’s beliefs and desires are very useful as they enable us to predict how others are going to respond to our actions. That is, these prescriptions, whether one to one, one to many, many to one, or many to many, are all predictions.<br />
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For example, if you tell me that Alice will not like it if I phi, you are giving me a prediction as a prescription, one based on your (accurate or not) understanding of Alice’s beliefs and desires (their reasons to act) as to how they are likely to respond if I phi. More explicitly you would be saying “Alice has a reason to dissuade me from doing X, those reasons being that me phi’ing thwarts (what you believe are) one or more of Alice’s desires.”<br />
<h2>Social Forces</h2>So how does one go about dissuading someone from an action that thwarts your desires? <br />
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What we are trying to do is change actions, but the only actions we can change are voluntary or intentional actions and these are the result of intentions. An intention is, at a minimum, a combination of a belief and a desire, but it is only desires that motivate, so in order to influence actions, one has to influence desire.<br />
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Still when people act to fulfil their desires, they do so given their beliefs and, if they have false beliefs, then one could address those false beliefs, using reason and argument. As we know this may or may not work (even if you are correct, and it sometimes works even if you are not!) mostly because their desire to believe overwhelms their desire for truth. Whether you succeed or not in addressing their beliefs, you cannot use reason to alter their desires. <br />
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However we can directly influence each others desires using rhetoric - emotive language - through social tools employing commendations and condemnations, praise and blame, honours and demerits, reward, penalties and punishments and behind these are physical tools such as of power, threats and violence, economic tools such as financial rewards and penalties, the legal tools such as (including threats of) civil actions and so on. Everyone, to various degrees, employs some of these and similar tools in their day to day and longer interactions amongst friends, families, colleagues, peers, businesses, strangers and so on. These all serve to change the social environment within which we seek to fulfil our desires, such that our desires are mutually and reciprocally moulding each other.<br />
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Now one can only mould desires that are malleable, those that can be modified by the environment. If they are not malleable, then they are unaffected by changes in the environment. So social forces can only be used to influence malleable desires. <br />
<h2>Universal Prescriptions</h2>As noted in my previous letter, morality is specifically to do with the employment of the social forces such as praise and blame, reward and punishment in institutions of morality. What makes moral prescriptions different to prudential, familial, team, work and other prescriptions is, that regardless of how anyone does or does not define moral terms, they are universally prescriptive, they are universally applicable to everyone.<br />
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If these were not universally prescriptive, then one could imagine anti-abortionists saying, “we think abortion is murder and so will not have abortions, you do not think it is murder, so go ahead if you want to”. Similarly we do not say “We think bigotry is wrong, you do not, so go ahead and be a bigot” . Clearly this is absurd. It is inherent in usage that moral terms are universally prescriptive.<br />
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So given our definitions of value in general and that moral value is to do with universal prescriptions, what are moral values in this same framework?<br />
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Since the issue is universal applicability, we are looking at the value of a desire with respect to everyone. That is a universally good (bad) desire is universally good (bad) to the degree that it tends to fulfil the desires of everyone’s desires. Remembering that prescriptions are also predictions, one could say that a universally good desire is one that, all things being equal, generally people have reason to encourage, (these reasons being their desires that this desire tends to fulfil). And a universally bad desire is one that, all things being equal, generally people have reasons to discourage, (these reasons being their desires that this desire tends to thwart). The means of encouragement and discouragement being the social forces, as employed by people generally. If such a prescription is true, it would be an accurate prediction of how people would in fact react.<br />
<h2>All things being equal</h2>Of course, in the real world, to various degrees, the distribution of desires in a population and the acceptable and unacceptable usages of the social forces, show that often things are not equal, that many institutions of morality are no operating on a level playing field.<br />
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However we both agree on one naturalistic fallacy (there are at least four others), that what is the case does not mean it ought to be the case. So there is no reason to justify things based on the way they are. So how can we evaluate them?<br />
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Well we can evaluate any and all distributions of desires and variable usages of the social forces by comparing this to the all things being equal general situation. So we can say, that in comparison to that scenario, what the individual or group ought and ought not do – whether they listen to us or not (that is up to the effectiveness of the social forces, which we can discuss in a future letter, maybe). <br />
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We now have a means of evaluating any individual or group independent of matter of opinion, employing only matter of facts based, of course, only on still provisional and defeasible prescriptions as accurate enough predictions of what people want, all things being equal.<br />
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One last point, in this already long letter, is over whether there an implicit “should “ in comparing any scenario to an all things being equal (or level plain field) scenario. <br />
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Actually there are two opposite questions here: one is “why should there be a level playing field?”(even if such universal prescriptions are accurate of it), the opposite question is “why should there not be a level playing field?” . On purely rational and objective grounds, there is no prior basis to prefer one unlevel playing field over another, so the level playing field is the natural default or null hypothesis to engage in such comparisons. <br />
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This is not to say that some apparently unlevel playing fields can be rationally and empirically justified, but such justifications must presume a level playing in order to make such successful argument. What I have found is that all the justifications for unlevel playing fields rely upon additional and unsound assumptions and/or formal and informal fallacious reasoning. That is I have only seen unsound, invalid and poor arguments to justify unlevel playing fields, in other words they are not rationally and empirically justified.<br />
<h2>Finally</h2>Ok this letter is longer than planned and reflects some issues that I have been debating elsewhere. I could have provided a short paragraph description of desirism as I have done elsewhere and might do again if you request. Still there is enough meat here for you to get your teeth into and examine sceptically. Please fire away!Martin Freedmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16952072422175870627noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-154495438763509967.post-30666937117831388582010-04-22T08:00:00.000+01:002010-04-22T08:00:04.891+01:00The Abuse of Social Forces<p>A common and entirely misleading misunderstanding over desirism is over the desire to torture and similar desires. We will use the desire to torture as an exemplar here.</p> <p>The desire to torture is a <em>necessarily</em> as well as directly desire thwarting desire, since it <em>requires the thwarting</em> of the victim’s aversion to pain.  Without such thwarting of the victim’s aversion to pain <em>it is not torture</em>.</p> <p>Consider the torturer who, considerately, gives a pain killer to the victim, so that the victim’s aversion to pain is not thwarted, then surely this defeats the object of the torturer's desires (whether for fun, information, control, fear or otherwise), since the state of affairs that is the target of the desire is not fulfilled, as the state of affairs requires that the victim’s aversion to pain is thwarted. (Other desires of the victim are also directly thwarted, as whilst they are being tortured they are not able to pursue the fulfilment of their other desires, however that can also achieved by imprisonment alone, no torture required, however it is the desire to torture we are considering here)</p> <p>The main confusion is over the distribution of this desire in a population.  If the desire to torture is present, then either the torturer’s desires is thwarted or the victim’s is. When it is absent, neither types of agent’s desires are thwarted. So it makes no difference how many or how few have this desire, it is still a necessary and directly desire-thwarting desire. </p> <p>Note this is not always the case, for some desires its presence tends to fulfil other desires, whereas its absence does neither, or worse, tends to thwart other desires. For example a desire for charity or a desire not to harm others.</p> <p>Another mistake we need to clear up is that the torturer and those who support or are even entertained by this act often have other desires, for which the desire to torture <em>is a means to fulfil</em> those other desires. In such case, <em>those</em> desires can and must be <em>independently evaluated</em> to see if they tend to thwart or fulfil other desires (or neither). If the only means to fulfil those other desires is through promoting or not inhibiting (making it permissible) the desire to torture, then the conclusion is that those are desires that tend to thwart other desires, that is generally people have reason to inhibit <em>such other desires too</em>.</p> <p>However there is another confusion, over the employment of the social forces. We will investigate that here.</p> <p>This is usually a response of the form of using the social forces to promote a desire to be tortured, usually in some sub-set of the population. There are a number of issues with this.</p> <p>First an aversion to pain is not malleable. Whether one provides pharmaceutical (such as pain killers) or genetic modifications, these both defeat the desire to torture itself. What is required is for people to have desire to have their aversion to pain thwarted. Such a desire is a desire thwarting desire with one notable exception. And note this exception does not apply to other similar desires, making this not the best exemplar of its class. However an extension of it servers to make useful point.</p> <p>There are some circumstances where some people  get “sexually turned on” by having pain inflicted upon them “masochists” and others enjoy inflicting <em>such</em> pain “sadists”. As I understand it, there are limits as to what pain is inflicted and is acceptable. This still looks on the surface like torture but has a significant difference to the general desire we are discussing, namely that it is done by <em>consenting </em>adults and with specific limits. As odd or even disgusting their sexual pursuits might appear to the rest of us, they only seek for it to be permissible and morally neutral, neither to be promoted or inhibited. Indeed there is no reason generally for people to either promote or inhibit such acts between consenting adults.</p> <p>We can extend this idea. Let us suppose we are a different species where the only way to conceive is through the infliction of pain on each other in the act of sex. Sex without the pain does not lead to conception but is enjoyable. Leaving evolutionary considerations aside, it would be the case the members of that species generally have reason to promote torture and the desire to be tortured in that circumstance. Given this, there would be no need for contraception in that species. Still scientists could have a role here, to discover a way to conceive without inflicting pain on one another. Should there be such a discovery, then then would be no reason to promote torture and the desire to be tortured anymore, and plenty of reasons to promote this discovery. No doubt, there might be some traditionalists, but that would be their choice. The point is that for no desire, even one that is necessarily directly desire thwarting, does it necessarily follow that generally people have reasons to inhibit it. Anyway we are not that species.</p> <p>This exception aside what is at issue here is affecting people <em>without their consent</em>, especially when a desire to torture is considered as an exemplar for other desires, up to and including a desire for genocide, is that still <em>generally people</em> do not have reasons to promote such a desire. </p> <p>Still people can use and <em>abuse</em> the social forces. </p> <p>One could imagine a society where a sub-set of the (human) population are given the choice to be tortured or be killed. In that case they do have reasons to promote a desire to be tortured given the alternatives. But there are obvious moral issues over such alternatives. Unfortunately I find it impossible to imagine any benign alternative that would lead to such people choosing to promote a desire to be tortured against their consent. But let us imagine there is such a benign alternative and it can be promoted by the social forces such that a desire to be tortured is installed in this sub-set of the population,<em> including by the sub-set themselves.</em></p> <p>So does this now change the original desire to torture (not this new desire to be tortured) from being a necessarily and directly desire thwarting desire into a desire fulfilling desire, in virtue of this successful application of the social forces?</p> <p>No. What we are now evaluating is the application of the social forces themselves. We are asking whether generally people <em>should</em> use the social forces this way. That is are the social forces being used as a means to promote a desire that tends to fulfil other desires or a desire that tends to thwart other desires? In this case, the use of the social forces to promote a desire to be tortured is a means to fulfil a desire to torture, which is a desire that generally people have reasons to inhibit.  So in this case, the use of the social forces this way is to be condemned, generally people have many reasons to inhibit the use of the social forces this way.</p> <p>When seeking to establish whether a desire is to be promoted or inhibited <em>generally</em>, it is not only the current  distribution and strength of the population (or an ad hoc selecting of a population to support a pre-ordained conclusion) that needs to be discounted as confounds, but also how the use of the social forces could be possibly abused. The establishment of what generally people have reason to promote and inhibit is <em>independent</em> of both of any distribution of desires  <em>and</em> any application of the social forces. To repeat the old adage “two wrongs do not make a right”.</p> <p>Indeed in the past and in many cases in the present, the social forces have and are being abused by the differential power and authority of one sub-set of the population over the rest, often by successfully convincing the rest that this is in their interest. So, when evaluating a population, we are often evaluating <em>their</em> use of the social forces (actual or imagined, as in the above example), by comparing what <em>their social forces</em> are promoting and inhibiting versus what generally people have reason to promote and inhibit.</p> <p>Remember, the establishment of what desires generally people have reasons to promote and inhibit is a description and <em>prediction</em> of how people will respond to the fulfilment of the desires under consideration. It is in virtue of a desire tending to thwart other desires that the thwarting of these other desires are the reasons the people have to inhibit the desire, it is in virtue of a desire tending  to fulfil other desires that the fulfilling of these other desires are the reasons that people have to promote the desire. This remains the same regardless of how the social forces have been abused and serves to identify whether the social forces are being abused.</p> <p>So one cannot change a desire that generally people have reasons to inhibit into a desire that generally people have reasons to promote, by the use of the social forces. One can promote a desire that generally people have reasons to inhibit by the use of the social forces, but then generally people have reasons to condemn such use of the social forces.  </p> Martin Freedmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16952072422175870627noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-154495438763509967.post-6735663736141732502010-04-21T08:47:00.000+01:002010-04-21T08:48:09.096+01:00Motivational Externalism and Reasons Internalism<p>In a debate in the comments of a previous post, Richard Wein thinks my position is inconsistent over internalism and externalism. This post is an answer to Richard Wein to explain why it is consistent. </p> <p>One might ask how it is possible to be a motivational externalist and a reasons internalist? Can one consistently take both positions? </p> <p>This looks puzzling unless one realises this is possibly why philosophers went to the bother of making the distinction between these two types of internalism and externalism in the first place. That is the conclusion of inconsistency is based is based on thinking that the reasons internalism/ externalism distinction is same distinction as motivational internalism/externalism. They are not, at least as I understand them, as I intend to show here. </p> <p>I will state these philosophical positions in the terms that I use which will make it obvious why I have these philosophical positions and why they are consistent.</p> <h2>Motivational Internalism and Externalism</h2> <p><em>Motivational </em>internalism says that if an agent has knowledge of reasons to act that exist then this entails that they have the accompanying reasons to act - that, is they already have reason to act in accordance with such reasons to act. This is clearly false,  the fact that there are reasons to act that exist does not imply that the agent to whom this knowledge is being given has those reasons to act. </p> <p>The contrary and correct view is that of <em>motivational </em>externalism. This allows that an agent can be aware of reasons to act that exists but these may not be <em>their </em>reasons to act and so they are not motivated to act on them. </p> <h2>Reasons internalism and externalism</h2> <p><em>Reasons</em> internalism says that only reasons to act that are internal to the agent can motivate the agent. A <em>reasons</em> externalist says reasons to act that exist that are not reasons of the agent can motivate the agent.</p> <p>Since any agent seeks to fulfil the more and stronger of the desires <em>they have</em>, if they do not have such desires – reasons to act- then those reasons are not internal to them and they will not be motivated to fulfil them.</p> <p>So I am a reasons internalist.</p> <h2>Consistency</h2> <p>Motivational externalism says that there are prescriptions that agents can be aware of that do not motivate. True when considering the descriptive (cognitive) meaning of a prescription. </p> <p>Reasons internalism says that unless reasons to act are, in one way or another, internalised, that is made part of the agent’s internal reasons to act, then they will not have any reason to act. True when considering the motivating (non-cognitive) meaning of a prescription.  The process of internalisation being the social forces of praise and blame, reward and punishment.</p> <p>So both positions are correct and consistent, that is that motivational externalism is true and reasons internalism is true.</p> Martin Freedmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16952072422175870627noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-154495438763509967.post-82124616406168307302010-04-20T08:00:00.002+01:002010-04-20T08:00:08.601+01:00WTF is Morality?<p>This is my first Letter to Tim McGregor and is in reply to his first letter to me <a href="http://lapsedpagan.blogspot.com/2010/04/wtf-is-desirism.html" target="_blank">WTF is desirism?</a> I am keeping an updated index of our letters in <a href="http://impartialism.blogspot.com/2010/04/letters-to-lapsed-pagan-index.html">Letters to a Lapsed Pagan – Index</a>. I suggest you read his letter first so that I do not need to repeat what he has already said.</p> <p>Hi Tim</p> <p>You asked “WTF is desirism?” and how it compares to your tentative understanding of morality has led you to a form of utilitarianism. </p> <p>First, there is no reference to desirism (actually it was over the entry “Desire Utilitarianism” – I had not baptised it with the new name then) in Wikipedia due to their policy on what can be regarded as entries in that encyclopaedia. </p> <p>Still Desirism aka Desire Utilitarianism is a well known theory in online atheist circles. </p> <p>Much of it was tested in the most popular rational and free thought forum of the recent past, the internet infidels forums. <a href="http://alonzofyfe.com/" target="_blank">Alonzo Fyfe</a>, the originator of this theory, then launched his own blog the <a href="atheistethicist.blogspot.com" target="_blank">Atheist Ethicist</a>. This blog has been in and out of the top 20 atheists blogs over the last few years. </p> <p>Luke at <a href="http://commonsenseatheism.com/" target="_blank">CommonsenseAtheism</a>, a new entry into the top 20 atheist blogs, has also become an advocate of this theory. </p> <p>And I have been writing about it the last two years, although have never consistently pushed this blog for high readerships (and if I had I doubt I would have reached the heights of either Alonzo’s or Luke’s blogs, not just because I don’t have time).</p> <p>Many other bloggers and commenters have at one time or another endorsed this theory but only us three have been consistent advocates of it. In spite of its general awareness and references to it in online atheist circles this is not regarded as sufficient for a Wikipedia entry.</p> <p>Now whilst there is considerable overlap in the online atheist and sceptical communities, there are quite significant differences too, so I am not surprised that you had not come across it before. And this leads into how I want to engage with you in these letters, as one sceptic to another.</p> <p>As we both well know, the sceptical movement developed to fill a gap in two popular areas of human interest – paranormal phenomena and alternative medicine. There was no need to have a sceptical movement in other domains since it was already part and parcel of them, but in these areas it was absent (although, as we all know too well, it is also mostly absent in more areas than we realised, such as finance).</p> <p>In these two areas, relevant past knowledge and discoveries and their implications were completely ignored, that is the rational and empirical standards that existed elsewhere, however provisional, progressive, dynamic and defeasible - let us call them for short “epistemic norms” - were absent. These epistemic norms were being ignored and broken in spite of the main and strong grounds to justify them and sceptics stepped in point this out.</p> <p>There were three aspects to this. </p> <p>The first was to reassert the epistemic norms that exist elsewhere and which, far more often that not, showed that the knowledge claims in these two areas were false. Some were satisfied merely to point out the intellectual negligence, recklessness and  irresponsibility that were required to believe in alternative medicine and the paranormal. </p> <p>Others sought or answered the charge of “so what, what’s the harm?” by showing the harm, both direct and indirect, that could be caused by denigrating such hard won epistemic norms in other areas. They showed the dangers to physical, financial, emotional and mental health of the ill, the disturbed and the bereaved caused by Big Placebo and New Ageism.</p> <p>Finally some seek to show how, in spite of there being not a jot of evidence for many of these claims, many still happily promote the bogus claims and other happily want them to be promoted. Why do people want to believe in the bogus, both producers and consumers, why and how are they willing to sacrifice truth on the altar of comfort? Why are rhetoric and sophistry promoted as virtues not vices? They showed all the ways that cognitive and affective biases and distortions of reality are taken advantage of, very often in an entirely self-deluded way, by the gullible.</p> <p>For a long time sceptics did “not do god”. That was a long known bankrupt path to knowledge, discredited by philosophers and scientists over many centuries, popular only amongst the ignorant. Indeed the grandfather of modern scepticism, certainly of the sceptical movement, Martin Gardner, is a theist, specifically a fideist, which is quite compatible with being the great sceptic and debunker that he is. Still, I am sure he would agree, that over real-world claims, “we have no need of that hypothesis”. </p> <p>Now other theisms have had much in common with the alternative medical practitioners and their patients, the psychic readers and their clients, but to the degree that those theists made empirical and disconfirmable claims, this was already covered by the sceptics movements in these aforesaid areas.</p> <p>This all changed after September 11th 2001. This led, amongst other things, to the birth of the “New Atheists”, although there is nothing new in terms of content that I have read from them.  What is new is that now they are both atheists and sceptics and that sceptics now “do do god”. That the sceptical and atheist “movements” are far more aligned and have far more common cause than prior to the 21st century. </p> <p>In particular, certain theists make many other claims that are not covered by the traditional areas of scepticism, particularly in the area of morality. Many sceptics take the more than reasonable approach that you do and I did, that if god does not exist – and the evidence for that is overwhelming - then any conclusions based on such a false belief fails because it is unsound. </p> <p>Still some theists disregard such obvious truth and proceed as if god exists and their interpretation of what their god is can and should be imposed on the rest of us. They can make all sort of regressive moral claims than can and does have deleterious affects on our society. This brings up the second and third themes of the traditional sceptics movement. Over the harm these beliefs can cause and why people believe what they do.</p> <p>Why do I not dismiss theistic-based morality as you do? Well actually I do but I also hold that this is not sufficient to deal with the issues at hand. This has led to another related problem, in that supposed  backwater of philosophy, ethics. This is well aware of the problems of the latter two just mentioned strands of scepticism in this area. You cannot answer the question of the harm that some moralities do, by coming up with a definition of harm which is not question begging. You cannot answer the question of why some believe what they do without seeing what the consequences of such beliefs are, but, again, one needs to determine those consequences without circular reasoning.</p> <p>The issue is that there is a naivety that infects the New Atheists and 21st century sceptics, not remotely by any means fatally, but that the ethical issues are rarely well considered and very often quite out of date. </p> <p>The problem is that many have an ill considered view of morality, thinking it is either subjective, relative, non-cognitive or evolved (or even all four) but these positions have been both defended and demolished just as effectively as any traditional moral objectivism, not just divine command theory which as ethicists well know, is actually a species of ethical subjectivism - despite the numerous, incoherent and plaintiff claims of theists to the contrary. And still many people falsely believe that without god there is morality, including many scientists! (Who obviously and mostly conclude that such morality does not exist).</p> <p>For example, it was a mystery to me why there has been such stimulation as well as controversy over Sam Harris TED talk on science and morality. This is not to say he is correct in his approach, I do not think he is, neither are the Brights.</p> <p>This is because in ethics all the action in the last 30 odd years, is in moral realism of many varieties, both reductive and non-reductive naturalisms, both desire-based and non-desire-based theories. Pretty much all the leading writers in this field are making arguments within this area not against it. Of course there are a  few subjectivists and non-cognitivists but even they end up arguing for a pragmatic moral realism, whether it is Mackie, who calls his approach Moral Subjectivism (with quite a number of reservations) and that right and wrong are invented or Hare who are argues that moral terms are not truth-apt but universal prescriptions. From multiple meta-ethical positions (where only rational and empirical inquiry are allowed on discussing what morality is) their approach and others all tend to towards a preference satisfaction type of utilitarianism. (In this sense, Tim, you are definitely in the right space).</p> <p>This can also be seen in the largest ever survey of philosophers, where if you exclude philosophers of religion, there is still a majority of atheists philosophers who support moral realism.</p> <p>The fact that Sam Harris’s talk has stirred such responses is indicative of how out of alignment and out of date many sceptics and scientists are as to where ethics now is and why it is now there. I suspect that many harbour a suspicion of science based morality dictating to everyone what is right and wrong. However, I will only assert for now, that anyone with a humanistic sensibility has nothing to fear from such results. </p> <p>In future letters I will directly develop and defend desirism but for now I would say it can be considered a variant of preference satisfaction (note that desirism is only a consequentialist but not utilitarian theory, unlike both naive economic and sophisticated philosophical preference satisfaction) and within moral realism – that prescriptions are truth-apt and some are true.</p> <p>However I want to finish this latter by answering the question I juxtaposed against your question. WTF is morality?</p> <p>I am a sceptic about the whole enterprise we could call Moral Inquiry, as a distinct enterprise from Rational and Empirical Inquiry. As a sceptic I have found the idea of such a distinct domain with its own entities, rules of inference, special logic, grammars and psychologies all fail. There is no such thing as Moral Inquiry and even as many  are correctly sceptical of some of the claims of Moral Inquiry, they are not sceptical enough and retain unsound assumptions as they, say, reject (correctly) classical  moral realism, but (incorrectly) accept moral subjectivism, relativism or non-cognitivism. There are indeed truths in all these positions, and valid criticisms of the others, but they all fail due to the fallacy of hasty generalisation. They all fail because they think they are trying to explain something that does not exist, Moral Inquiry. The challenge in talking to anyone on this topic is over what hidden assumptions they presume is required. </p> <p>The best way to approach this is to assume that there is only Rational and Empirical Inquiry and nothing else. This applies not just to meta-ethics but also descriptive, normative and applied ethics. Having just dismissed Moral Inquiry, what remains?</p> <p>There is no domain called Morality with a capital “M”, but there is still topic of study called morality, amenable to rational and empirical inquiry. What is this morality with a lower case “m”, if you will?  </p> <p>This is a common and near-universal feature of social reality – the institution of morality – an institution in the same sense that language, money, marriage and football are social institutions. This institution employs the social forces of praise and blame, reward and punishment, in promoting what is praiseworthy and inhibiting what is blameworthy. We can look to see how internally efficient (in the application of such forces) and externally effective (in the consequences of such forces) any such institution is. We can look to see how what is praiseworthy and blameworthy are determined and explained in such institutions and as to whether all or any are empirically adequately explained, and as to whether that makes any differences.</p> <p>This is the topic that desirism provides, in my view, the most empirically adequate explanation for. Desirism is a theory based on the least controversial existing theories in related domains, specifically social, cognitive and philosophical psychologies and quite consistent with what we know from biology and society. Desirism is a provisional and defeasible explanation of morality with a lower case “m”, whilst also explaining why people are mistaken in thinking there is something called Moral Inquiry, distinct from rational and empirical inquiry. It better deals with all three features that any good sceptic would cover, over epistemic norms, over harm and over psychologically distorting  motivations than any other theory I have seen.</p> <p>So, how do we proceed from here? Unfortunately Blogger has broken my indexing and search and there is no sign they are going to fix it. (That is the topic for another post,  for now, if one is starting a blog, <strong>do not use blogger</strong>). Instead here is Luke’s <a href="http://commonsenseatheism.com/?s=faithlessgod&x=10&y=10&paged=2" target="_blank">index</a> into some of my writings relevant here. I have a post  <a href="http://impartialism.blogspot.com/2009/03/desire-utilitarianism-online-resources.html" target="_blank">Desire Utilitarianism Online Resources</a>, (for which I need to add Luke’s index into my own posts!).</p> <p>If you really want some guidance (and bearing in mind some these links might have content that has been revised in the light of criticism), then I suggest what really seeks to get a morality with a small “m” are my posts <a href="http://impartialism.blogspot.com/2008/05/evolutionary-basis-of-desire-and.html">The Evolutionary Basis of Desire and Beliefs</a>, <a href="http://impartialism.blogspot.com/2008/05/cultural-basis-of-desires-and-beliefs.html">The Cultural basis of Desires and Beliefs</a> and <a href="http://impartialism.blogspot.com/2008/05/unified-basis-of-desires-and-beliefs.html">The Unified Basis of Desires and Beliefs</a>. (Note I called desirism then desire consequentialism). Interesting, Alonzo has just written a great and more compact single post that says very much the same <a href="http://atheistethicist.blogspot.com/2010/04/emergence-of-morality.html">The Emergence of Morality</a>.</p> <p>Finally there is more you say in your first post than I have addressed here. Specifically over the strengths and weaknesses of your utilitarianism but I see you are aware of the main issues. Whether these letters should be written in parallel or be responses to each other we can decide later. Either you can examine the posts I suggest and respond or I can directly address your utilitarianism in your first letter or give a direct answer as to what desirism is in the second letter. Either way, I hope this will be an interesting and fruitful discussion.</p> Martin Freedmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16952072422175870627noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-154495438763509967.post-20137986339879758902010-04-19T12:51:00.003+01:002010-04-26T10:26:21.250+01:00Letters to a Lapsed Pagan - IndexFellow Brighton based sceptics Tim McGregor - founder of the Brighton branch of Skeptics in the Pub (why did they use the USA spelling for a UK originated idea?) - and myself, have agreed to discuss desirism and morality in an exchange of letters posted on our blogs. This post will contain the index of our letters and will be updated after letters are published.<br /><h2>Round 1</h2>Tim has his first post up <a href="http://lapsedpagan.blogspot.com/2010/04/wtf-is-desirism.html" target="_blank">WTF is Desirism?</a><br />My reply is <a href="http://impartialism.blogspot.com/2010/04/wtf-is-morality.html" target="_blank">WTF is Morality?</a><br /><h2>Round 2</h2>Tim has a reply, although he did not consider it this way, also called <a href="http://lapsedpagan.blogspot.com/2010/04/wtf-is-morality.html" target="_blank">WTF is Morality?</a> On the basis of this I pre-empting a fuller reply from Tim and saving him unnecessary homework (see my comment to his post).<br />I replied with a full description of desirism in <a href="http://impartialism.blogspot.com/2010/04/letter-to-lapsed-pagan-ii.html">Letter to a Lapsed Pagan II</a><br /><h2>Round 3</h2>Tim has replied with a list of questions in <a href="http://lapsedpagan.blogspot.com/2010/04/desirism-ii.html">Desirism II</a>Martin Freedmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16952072422175870627noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-154495438763509967.post-19258290323656421012010-04-16T08:00:00.000+01:002010-04-16T08:45:10.492+01:00Rational and Irrational Justifications<p>This is the third and final reply to Kip’s <a href="http://impartialism.blogspot.com/2010/04/why-consider-all-desires-that-exist.html?showComment=1270773036910#c2303923747629424821" target="_blank">response</a> to my original post to him <a href="http://impartialism.blogspot.com/2010/04/why-consider-all-desires-that-exist.html" target="_blank">Why Consider all Desires that exist?</a> (My first reply was <a href="http://impartialism.blogspot.com/2010/04/why-consider-others-when-you-dont-need.html" target="_blank">Why Consider others when you don’t need to?</a> and my second reply was <a href="http://impartialism.blogspot.com/2010/04/all-desires-versus-affected-desires.html">All desires versus affected desires</a>)</p> <p>Kip complains that</p> <blockquote>Apart from your list of reasons why a group might not consider the desires of another group, you just assert [them].</blockquote> As I said <br /> <blockquote>The many answers bulleted above all fail as rational and empirical justifications for Group A’s practises. </blockquote> <p>Now I was implying that items on this bulleted list were based on fallacious reasoning. It is true I just asserted that in my original post, so here I will answer Kip’s challenge now.</p> <p>The bullets I wrote are re-listed here, with an immediate off the cuff example of the type of fallacies I had in mind when I wrote this list:</p> <ul> <li>we do not need to consider their desires </li> </ul> <em>Double Standards/selective reasoning</em> <br /> <ul> <li>their desires cannot influence us, so we do not need to concern ourselves of those desires </li> </ul> <em>Appeal to Strength</em> <br /> <ul> <li>that is the way we always do (did) it </li> </ul> <em>Appeal to Tradition</em> <br /> <ul> <li>we are stronger and can get a way with it </li> </ul> <em>Appeal to Strength </em> <br /> <ul> <li>we are more and can get away with it </li> </ul> <em>Appeal to Popularity</em> <br /> <ul> <li>we have the law on our side </li> </ul> <em>Appeal to Law</em> <br /> <ul> <li>we have God on our side </li> </ul> <em>Appeal to Authority</em> <br /> <ul> <li>their desires are not worthy of moral consideration </li> </ul> <p><em>Begging the Question</em></p> <em></em> <p>Now the above is just a set of illustrative responses to Kip’s reasonable question. It is not mean to be exhaustive or accurate, just indicative of why I stated the bulleted list in the first place.</p> <p>Further I am not denying that there can be some legitimate justifications, and already provided one in the original post, over the asbestos example. That was over a lack of present day knowledge that no reasonable person who took due care and precautions could, at that time, have known about. (Indeed, to criticise past decisions and moralities on this basis is another fallacy - hindsight bias). If and when there are such “moral” arguments, we can check to see if they are legitimate or not. Most, in my experience, are not.</p> <p>Kip continues</p> <blockquote>Group A may have very many prudential reasons for ignoring the desires of Group B -- or perhaps they just don't have any prudential reasons to consider the desires of Group B. In other words, none of their desires will be fulfilled by considering the desires of Group B. Or, perhaps even, more of their desires will be thwarted by considering the desires of Group B.</blockquote> <p>When it comes to prudence, all the above listed bullets, with the examples of the type of fallacies they exhibit, come into play. Prudentially there is no reason not to use such rhetoric and sophistry to defend ones positions, especially to one’s peers who are looking for justification, any justification, in keeping the status quo.</p> <p>This happens all the time and not just in issues of morality. Regardless, however <em>prudentially </em>rational it is to make those justifications, they are still <em>theoretically </em>irrational justifications.</p> <p>Further whether the prudential defenders of such fallacies, (in cases only where it is clear they are fallacies, if you wish) accept these rational criticisms or not, that would be insufficient to make them change <em>their desires</em>. You cannot use reason to change desires only beliefs, and, only then, provided their desire to believe does not overwhelm  desires for truth and reason, which these all too often do.  </p> <p>That, of course, is why we have the social forces of commendation and condemnation, honours and disgrace, rewards and penalties and so on, we have these to operate on modifying malleable desires (not just desires with moral implications but any and all). And Desirism serves as a check to ensure that what is promoted and inhibited is theoretically rationally grounded. </p> <p>By having such rationally and empirically justified social forces coherently and consistently applied, these serve to change the desires people have, so there is no prudential sacrifice required, indeed the idea of sacrifice and making a decision between prudential and  moral concerns would be meaningless.  That is, in such an environment there would be no substantive difference between their prudential and moral values. This is an ideal and may never be fully achievable but it is a feasible target to aim at and is far better than what we have now.</p> Martin Freedmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16952072422175870627noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-154495438763509967.post-46969519175324590002010-04-15T08:00:00.000+01:002010-04-15T08:00:06.689+01:00The Manhattan versus the Westminster Declarations<p>The UK based <a href="http://impartialism.blogspot.com/2010/04/fisking-westminster-declaration.html">Westminster Declaration</a> was unlikely created in a vacuum, and it would not be saying much to presume that the USA based <a href="http://www.manhattandeclaration.org/read.aspx" target="_blank">Manhattan Declaration</a> is more than likely the inspiration for it.</p> <p>Now there are differences between these two apart from just length (the Manhattan one is considerably longer) as noted in <a href="http://impartialism.blogspot.com/2010/04/press-on-westminster-declaration.html" target="_blank">my post</a> on the press’s take on the Westminster Declaration.</p> <p>Prior to the launch of this declaration I did not consider the USA version (as we can now say) relevant. Regardless I did read some critiques on it from Alonzo Fyfe, and his arguments  might well be the inspiration for my arguments from human sacrifice and religious tyranny that I certainly read from the Westminster Declaration.</p> <p>I am not sure whether it is worth making a side by side comparison of the differences between the two declarations but given Fyfe’s likely inspiration for some of my insights, some readers might find it of interest to look at the analysis from both Christians and non-Christians for the Manhattan Declaration. </p> <p>Alonzo Fyfe – the atheist ethicist – is one of the top atheist bloggers and a summary of his analysis can be found at <a href="http://atheistethicist.blogspot.com/2009/12/manhattan-declaration-part-x-summary.html" target="_blank">The Manhattan Declaration X: Summary</a>. There is no post of his listing all 10 of these posts but this <a href="http://atheistethicist.blogspot.com/search?q=The+Manhattan+Declaration" target="_blank">search link</a> provides all 10 (start reading from the bottom post for the whole analysis). His summary alone is superbly and boldly stated, with far more originality than my critique of the UK version, and certainly with no holding back of any punches. He finishes it with:</p> <blockquote> <p>In short, the authors of the Manhattan Declaration have given us a manifesto in which they reserve for themselves the liberty to impose any demands they see fit on others, while also preserving for themselves the liberty to refuse any demands that others may see fit to impose on them. It is a manifesto of arrogance and bigotry in which the authors deny moral responsibility for their own ideas by shifting that responsibility [to] a god that they invent in their own image. [This] god they invented is not only an arrogant and bigoted god, but a god demanding massive human sacrifice in the form of premature death and suffering. The authors, of course, do not wish to admit that they are the authors of this demand for death and suffering. Here, too, they wish to shift the responsibility to a god that they have created in their own image.</p> </blockquote> <p>Unfortunately for  the USA versions, I have not been able to find any decent analysis, rather just bloggers saying they are proud to sign these declarations. If anyone finds any critical analysis from theists, Christians and non-Christians – pro or con these declarations – could you please post a link in the comments?</p> <p>However with regards to the UK version I have found an excellent critique by self-professed Christian <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_A._Foster" target="_blank">Charles Foster</a> writing on the Practical Ethics blog, entitled <a href="http://www.practicalethicsnews.com/practicalethics/2010/04/the-christian-right-is-wrong.html" target="_blank">The Christian Right is Wrong</a>.</p> <p>I find it interesting to compare my <a href="http://impartialism.blogspot.com/2010/04/fisking-westminster-declaration.html" target="_blank">fisking</a> – written from the perspective of someone for whom Christianity has always been an alien and alienating, antiquated, archaic and absurd worldview – and that of someone who presumably grew up in it and still endorses it as someone who teaches ethics and medical law at Oxford.</p> <p>His scathing review actually makes me wonder if this declaration will actually turn out to be a benefit to a secular UK as he argues that “[i]t will reduce significantly the ability of Christians to make a contribution to public life”!</p> <p>He provides a very interesting take on the theological gobbledegook - that I am eminently unqualified to criticise (why else would I call it gobbledegook?) - which prefaces the declaration, when he says: </p> <blockquote> <p>The parallels with the foundational creeds of Christianity are unmistakable, and we’re meant to see them. The clear message is: If you call yourself a Christian, you’ll agree with what’s in this Declaration. And the corollary is deafening, threatening, and equally unmissable: If you don’t agree with what’s in this Declaration, you’re not Christian at all: you’re beyond the pale, and ought to watch your eternal back. This is sheep and goats stuff.</p> </blockquote> <p>As for the body of the declaration he provides many juicy thoughts, of which I will only quote one more:</p> <blockquote> <p>Speaking purely as a citizen, I’m worried. If one accepts the Declaration’s reasoning, there can be no possible objection to the rule of Britain’s Muslim communities by Shari’ a law. Perhaps that should happen, but it is not as blindingly obvious that it should happen as the Declaration suggests. There’s something to discuss,  and this Declaration is saying that there isn’t - that it’s simple.</p> </blockquote> <p>Thoroughly recommended reading. My faith in religious moderation is restored.</p> <p>It is early days for the Westminster Declaration but it is interesting to note that the Manhattan Declaration has, to date, obtained 437,000 signatures since its launch on November 20, 2009. Now still in the first month of its launch the Westminster Declaration has so far gained over 22,000 signatures. </p> <p>Plausibly assuming there are no substantive difference in internet access and inclinations to sign pledges across the Atlantic (that is that whatever sub-set of those who endorse the sentiments expressed in the Manhattan Declaration and signed that, would be equivalent to the sub-set of those who endorse the Westminster Declaration and sign this one), we can use the level of signatures to indicate the threat that this specific religious extremism poses here, compared to the USA. In the USA there are approximately 300 million people whilst in the UK there are approximately 60 million. On this basis we would expect that around 87,000 signatures (1/5 of the USA equivalent) would indicate an equivalent religious sentiment in the UK.</p> <p>Of course we do not have data on the velocity and acceleration of signatures and it is likely that it is higher in the UK – albeit starting from a lower point - and lower in the USA (since many of those who would have signed do know about it and have already signed). So we can review this relationship in a few months, once both have had sufficient time to be known and responded to the relevant parties. I predict that overall number here will be lower than the 1:5 ratio rather than higher, I hope I am not wrong.</p> Martin Freedmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16952072422175870627noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-154495438763509967.post-10096799924002536182010-04-14T08:00:00.001+01:002010-04-14T08:26:14.456+01:00All desires versus affected desiresThis a further response to Kip’s <a href="http://impartialism.blogspot.com/2010/04/why-consider-all-desires-that-exist.html?showComment=1270773036910#c2303923747629424821" target="_blank">reply</a> to my original <a href="http://impartialism.blogspot.com/2010/04/why-consider-all-desires-that-exist.html" target="_blank">post</a>, this is in addition to my other reply <a href="http://impartialism.blogspot.com/2010/04/why-consider-others-when-you-dont-need.html" target="_blank">Why consider other when you don’t need to?</a><br />Kip says<br /><blockquote>Your answer, in part, states that it <b>is</b> just a subset of the desires that exist to which a moral-ought is relative:</blockquote>This is correct. It makes no sense to consider the desires that are not affected. However it is also important to consider desires that could be affected and not to arbitrarily exclude them prior to the analysis. <div><br />Now desires can be directly and indirectly affected. A desire has conditions of fulfilment such that these conditions are met when the proposition(s) that the desire contains are true in some states of the affairs. Some desires might have different conditions of fulfilment that are either fulfilled or thwarted in those same states of affairs. Those are the directly affected desires. </div><div><br />By contrast, other desires are only indirectly affected by such states of affairs. That is the state of affairs and hence the desire that brought it about, are only means or intermediate to <em>other</em> states of affairs that are the targets of those <em>other</em> desires. They are affected, as such states of affairs brought about by the desire under evaluation can help or hinder the realisation of their states of affairs, such helping or hindering being indirect.</div><div><br />Much of the internal critique within desirism is as to what the directly and indirectly affected desires are, particularly indirect desires. That is, accepting the desirist framework, there can still be dispute as to what the affected desires are. The phrase “all desires that exist” serves to ensure that none are excluded on a priori unsound and invalid grounds.<br /><blockquote>Clearly, then, this is not "all desires that exist". A moral-ought is relative to a subset of all desires that (possibly) exist given your qualifications above. I think this is fine, though. I think the theory still stands. But this "all desires that exist" terminology needs to be clarified to include the qualifications you've pointed out here.</blockquote>I also highlighted in the original post the other internal/external usages of “all desires that exist”. The fact the only some desires are internal to the agent(s) under evaluations does not mean other desires external to them must be excluded. The primary purpose of morality is to help install and promote some desires that the agent lacks, and remove and discourage some other desires that the agents have.</div><div><br />Bearing this caveat over internal/external desires in mind, one could talk about “all affected desires that exist” where appropriate? </div><div><br />I will deal with the other qualification hinted at in the above quotes when I reply to Kip’s final point – over irrational and rational justifications in a future post.</div>Martin Freedmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16952072422175870627noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-154495438763509967.post-37693921870446525342010-04-13T08:00:00.002+01:002010-04-14T07:41:38.256+01:00The Press on the Westminster DeclarationThe Sunday Telegraph has published an article on the <a href="http://www.westminster2010.org.uk/" target="_blank">Westminster Declaration</a> that I recently <a href="http://impartialism.blogspot.com/2010/04/fisking-westminster-declaration.html" target="_blank">fisked</a>: <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/religion/7550241/Christians-launch-pre-election-declaration-of-conscience-on-values.html" target="_blank">Christians launch pre-election 'declaration of conscience' on values</a>. The sub-title of the article was<br /><blockquote>A bid to place Christian values at the heart of the general election campaign has been launched with a 'declaration of conscience' endorsed by senior figures from the Church of England, the Catholic Church and other denominations</blockquote>That is a reasonable characterisation of the surface intent of this declaration. It then rather more worryingly says:<br /><blockquote>The <strong><a href="http://www.westminster2010.org.uk./">Westminster 2010 Declaration</a> </strong>sets out a broad range of policies that unite British churches, including support for traditional marriage and opposition to assisted suicide and euthanasia.</blockquote>When I analysed the declaration it looked far more like the agenda that religious extremists would support and certainly not religious moderates. Indeed, I would hope that moderates are against and would condemn this Declaration. However if the Telegraph, which is more sympathetic to Christianity as part for the political discourse than other UK Broadsheets, is correct, then this extremism crosses sectarian lines in British Churches, so where, I wonder, are the moderates?<br /><blockquote>[The organisation behind it] has a website database that aims to reveal the ethical position of more than 2,600 election candidates on issues such as abortion and stem-cell research.</blockquote>This makes quite clear the political agenda behind the Declaration. (Dare I suggest that the <a href="http://skeptical-voter.org/" target="_blank">Skeptical Voter</a> scrapes this data to enhance their database?)<br /><blockquote>It could prove as controversial as its American counterpart, which allows for "civil disobedience" for Christians whose faith clashes with the law.</blockquote>I certainly agree there. However there is no critical analysis of the declaration rather it only quotes some Christian views that augments the intent behind the Declaration such as<br /><blockquote>Dr Peter Saunders, chief executive of the Christian Medical Fellowship and another signatory to the declaration, said: "There has been a feeling of growing hostility to the Christian faith and that Christians are being marginalised from the public square.</blockquote>That should be expected in a more secular – that is religiously neutral state. Special privileges are unjustified in such a state. So it is not surprising that<br /><blockquote>Cardinal Vincent Nichols, head of the Catholic Church in England and Wales, has told a BBC documentary that Labour's laws on equality are part of a secular "doctrine" that "can be as forceful and it can be as narrow minded as the worst of a doctrinaire Christian position".</blockquote>The failure to see removal of a double standard by a single standard but, instead, as still a double standard only with different preferences and biases is a common and fallacious argument (unless the double standard is not being removed, which is not the case over the equality laws, except for certain Christians who are doing their best to keep their double standards!).<div><br />Overall it offered no real criticism of the declaration, really just reporting on its existence and, I suspect, giving it the publicity it needed to gain the many signatures it now has (it had only 2,600 when the article was published and now 8 days later it has about 17,500).</div><div><br />The Christian media think tank Ekklesia responds to this article in <a href="http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/node/11694" target="_blank">Conservative church leaders launch anti-war declaration for general election</a>. Here they alleviate my main concern highlighted by the Telegraph article, when they disagree with its asserted broad appeal of this declaration, by noting<br /><blockquote>1. <strong>It isn't broad</strong>, but seems predominantly focused on abortion, euthanasia, marriage and the ongoing 'Christian discrimination' obsession (although paying passing lip service to some 'justice' issues)<br />2. <strong>It isn't a set of policies</strong>, but rather a set of values that relates to a small set of policy issues<br />3. <strong>It doesn't unite churches</strong>. The church leaders who signed it are overwhelmingly conservative in their theology, and the section on marriage alone would split the Church of England, and alienate groups like the Quakers</blockquote>Looks like I have found the moderates that the Telegraph tried to define into non-existence.</div><div><br />They then, rather humorously note that the pledge implies an anti-war stance<br /><blockquote>Clearly this is aimed at abortion/ euthanasia. But the pledge does seem pretty unequivocal if taken to its logical conclusion. It is hard to see how protecting "the life of every human being" and opposing "any other act that involves intentionally taking innocent human life" could for example square with any support for the invasions of Iraq or Afghanistan, or for that matter the replacement of Trident.</blockquote>This is a good point which I missed and might take some of the sting out of my concern over “civil disobedience” – they would not endorse, presumably the killing of abortion doctors either?</div><div><br /></div><div>On the other hand, what Ekklesia missed, is implication of the “innocent” qualifier, a common trick used by many religions which means they say nothing about the guilty and leave it open as to who is to decide who is guilty and what to do about them.</div><div><br />The other point, also missed by Ekklesia, is the implicit homophobia in the declaration, which one has to great efforts to miss. Still I do like their overall conclusion:<br /><blockquote>What it does show is the extent to which those putting the Westminster Declaration together are dualistic in their thinking, selective in their focus, and ignore some of the most central aspects of their faith that have something to say to the world around them - despite their claim to be 'representing' Christianity.</blockquote><blockquote>In their zeal to combat the 'marginalisation' of Christianity, they are actually doing a great deal to marginalise the faith themselves.</blockquote>Meanwhile, in the Guardian, both pro and anti points of view have been presented. Andrew Brown is critical in <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2010/apr/05/religion-christianity-andrew-brown" target="_blank">The Multicultural Christian Right</a> and Jonathan Chaplin responds in <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2010/apr/07/religion-christianity" target="_blank">The Westminster Declaration Defended</a>. Now I agree with Andrew Brown’s summary<br /><blockquote>The launch of a Christian programme for the general election and beyond is a significant political development, not a good one</blockquote>However I am not sure over some of his arguments. He supplies some background to the<br /><blockquote>fairly coherent rightwing bloc in British <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/christianity">Christianity</a>. It is nationalist, socially conservative, suspicious of markets, critical of <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/islam">Islam</a>, authoritarian … but what distinguishes it from Ukip, or even the BNP, is that it has a large and powerful black membership. The figureheads of the movement are two retired Anglican bishops, Lord Carey, who used to be archbishop of Canterbury and still carries on as if he ought to be, and Dr Michael Nazir-Ali, who resigned last year as bishop of Rochester.<br />Along with Cardinal Keith O'Brien, the head of the Roman Catholic church in Scotland, they are the most prominent signatories to the<a href="http://bit.ly/bIEUmI">"Westminster Declaration"</a> which was publicised on Sunday. But when you look down the list of 30 or so signatories, almost all of them representing groups you have never heard of, the most significant fact is that a quarter of them are black or representing black-led churches, and almost all would agree that the most dynamic Christianity in the world today is African.</blockquote>Now this may all be correct or not. What matters is what the Declaration is and whom it attracts. The simplest answer is only religious Christian extremists. He is certainly confirms Ekklesia’s view that this is not of broad appeal to British Churches.</div><div><br />Brown insinuates an anti-Islam bent to the Declaration but it actually assumes a position of religious not just Christian liberty. Maybe they would have it otherwise but this certainly deflates any anti-Islamic reading of the declaration, if not the motivation of those behind it.<br />Unlike the Telegraph and Ekklesia he recognises the implicit homophobia and makes an interesting contrast to the US equivalent when he notes<br /><blockquote>But there is also a great deal that would never pass the filter of US Republican anti-political correctness</blockquote>Let us be thankful for small mercies?</div><div><br /></div><div>By contrast to my reading this declaration as a call for religious tyranny, he reads it as a call to martyrdom (which leads probably to tyranny?). He cements and, at the same time, ameliorates his martyrdom argument with<br /><blockquote>It's not clear what any of this posturing actually means in practice. But emotionally, it's quite clear. Christians in Britain are to behave as a persecuted minority, avid for injustice, watching the papers eagerly for signs that some other group is getting special treatment.</blockquote>This is most certainly and troublingly true already.<br /><blockquote>What we're seeing here is the growth of Christianity as a player in multicultural politics, competing as a tribal identity for group privileges. It's ironic that the most prominent signatories of the declaration would regard "multiculturalism" as a thoroughly bad thing. I suspect that in the next few years, they will be showing us its bad side in ways that no one has up till now suspected.</blockquote>An interesting and ironical twist on the issue and possibly support for why I think the claim for “religious liberty” is quite jarring in this Declaration. Still this might be a clever journalistic twist and insight but is it really important in the scheme of things?</div><div><br />Jonathan Chaplin in the self-same Guardian <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2010/apr/07/religion-christianity" target="_blank">replies</a> to Andrew Brown with<br /><blockquote>Liberals should not sneer at the Westminster declaration. It is a sign of democratic vitality, not sinister nor right wing</blockquote>Instead of addressing the issues of the declaration itself he just tries to refute Andrew Brown’s take on it. In response to Brown’s, rather irrelevant in my view, “multicultural” jibe he writes<br /><blockquote>The "<a href="http://www.westminster2010.org.uk/declaration/">Westminster Declaration of Christian Conscience</a>" is not evidence of <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/christianity">Christianity</a> as a "player in multicultural politics" but rather a response to the growing experience among Christians with theologically orthodox and socially conservative leanings of being unacceptably constrained or marginalized in key areas of public life. <em>For the most part such Christians are not demanding special treatment but only a level playing field with other religions and with secular humanists</em>. Yet matters of great importance to them – and, they are convinced, to society at large – are routinely derided as symptoms of a victim mentality.[My Emphasis]</blockquote>It seems by responding that element of Brown’s critique Chaplin hopes to avoid dealing with the real issues of substance here. Brown has given Chaplin an excuse to avoid such issues. So Chaplin just restates some purported motivations behind the declaration, or of those likely to sign it. As for claims for not demanding special treatment, this is quite contrary to my reading of the declaration. One can look in vain for any argument from Chaplin to support this claim, there is none.</div><div><br />Rather than defend his rhetorical reading of the declaration, Chaplin picks up on other irrelevant issues promoted by Brown, such as his “alarmist stereotyping” of the ethnicity of the groups involved. Indeed Brown has given Chaplin too many reasons for Chaplin to avoid really responding to the underlying issues in the Declaration. This enables him to say “But there's nothing in the declaration to suggest that it is nationalist, authoritarian, or anti-Islamic” – well at least the later is a valid criticism of Brown, the former less so but by bringing up Brown’s “anti-Islamic” point Chaplin is hoping to collectively avoid all those issues. He fails.</div><div><br />The only really substantive point Chaplin engages with is over Brown’s point on homophobia, which Brown due to his focus on other issues made all too briefly. This enables Chaplin to say<br /><blockquote>Finally, to hold that heterosexual marriage is "the only context for sexual intercourse", as the declaration bluntly puts it, doesn't make you "homophobic".</blockquote>Well I argue that anyone reading the declaration in a critical and unbiased fashion would have to agree with Brown (and me) and against Chaplin. However Chaplin has been given too much material by Brown to successfully avoiding having to face such issues.</div><div><br />Chaplin finishes with<br /><blockquote>Whether or not secular or Christian readers agree with the objectives of the declaration, discerning readers should respond by asking what interventions like this disclose about the continuing tendency of the British political system to silence or neutralise dissenting minorities. Over the last century or so it succeeded for long periods in gagging trade unionists, feminists, blacks, and gays and lesbians, and it currently silences the disabled, the elderly and religious conservatives, among others. No representative system can or should equally accommodate the demands of every single minority group, but a confident and strong democracy will seek to make space for as many of them as possible. Andrew Brown sees the declaration as a "dangerous development". On the contrary, it may be a sign of democratic vitality.</blockquote>Chaplin ends with a false dichotomy. It is both a dangerous development and a sign of democratic vitality. </div><div><br />Now as long as Brown, myself and others are free and feel free to criticise such declarations, without fear of threats or actual violent reprisals, then both their and our democratic freedoms are protected. It is also dangerous because by taking it to its logical conclusion, by acting upon rather than talking through these points, the declaration could a significant step along the road to removing such democratic vitality from this country.</div><div><br />So it is up to everyone to participate in the vital democratic process of freedom of speech, including the freedom to criticise and condemn this declaration and any of those who support and sign it.</div>Martin Freedmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16952072422175870627noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-154495438763509967.post-35590017336819060862010-04-12T10:46:00.001+01:002010-04-12T10:46:53.604+01:00Why consider others when you don’t need to?<p>Kip has replied to my post <a href="http://impartialism.blogspot.com/2010/04/why-consider-all-desires-that-exist.html" target="_blank">Why consider all desires that exist?</a>  which was a response to some emailed questions from him. There are three parts to his <a href="http://impartialism.blogspot.com/2010/04/why-consider-all-desires-that-exist.html?showComment=1270773036910#c2303923747629424821" target="_blank">reply</a> and I will only address the last part in this post, which is the most important issue.</p> <p>Kip says:</p> <blockquote> <p>Group A may have very many prudential reasons for ignoring the desires of Group B -- or perhaps they just don't have any prudential reasons to consider the desires of Group B. In other words, none of their desires will be fulfilled by considering the desires of Group B. Or, perhaps even, more of their desires will be thwarted by considering the desires of Group B.</p> <p>So, without begging the question, <b>why</b> should Group A consider the desires of Group B, if 1) more of their desires will be fulfilled by not considering them, and 2) Group B has no way of influencing the desires of Group A (though force or social tools).</p> </blockquote> <p>The impression is that Kip considers this an objection to (at least some aspect of) Desirism but this is no objection at all. </p> <p>Consider, that for the above situation, anyone and everyone who has any moral theory in the world agrees with the desirist analysis (whether they are aware of it or not).</p> <p>That is moral realists, desire-based or otherwise, reductive and non-reductive naturalists and non-natural intuitionists all agree. Normatively consequentialists, utilitarian and non-utilitarian, deontologists (duty-based ethics) and aretists (virtue-based ethicists) all agree to the same conclusion too.  Similarly subjectivists, including divine command theorists might agree. And non-cognitivists too, whether of the emotive, expressive or universally prescriptive variety also agree.</p> <p>The issue of inter-theoretical disagreement, that one group’s reasoning to the right conclusion in this situation is no guarantee that their (claimed) fallacious reasoning might work in others is not relevant. Nor too is any dispute over whether there are objective grounds or not to come to this conclusion. Subjectivists agree regardless.</p> <p>Now Group A in defence – if they ever hear or allow such criticisms of their position – might answer as moral nihilists – hence any such criticism have no force. Or they they might take the position of normative relativists – this is the way we do things here and no-one else has any grounds to judge them otherwise. Or, more likely they prevent – suppress, censor and hide -such criticism and basically ignore them. </p> <p>What then? The whole world agrees that Group A’s practices are “wrong”, their values are “bad”, they “should not” continue as they are. </p> <p>The world can try and use the social forces of condemnation – published and vocal criticism of Group A in the media and the internet - and social punishment such as refusing to buy from them or through more formal trade sanctions... and still Group A can  belligerently carry on and choose to isolate themselves from the rest of the world.</p> <p>At this point the issue is beyond morality <em>per se </em>and to do with international law (if that can even be said to exist), just war and so on. Now there are ethical issues underlying these but <em>they are different now to the original challenge posed by Kip</em>. </p> <p>One can all too easily think of international examples that do conform to the above – although people might very well disagree over the examples e.g. The first Iraq War had a large amount of cross-cultural agreement, the latest Afghanistan far less so and that second Iraq War it was virtually non-existent. But feel free to disagree such a characterisation as just presented.</p> <p>The point is what action is to be taken or actions to refrain from taking are beyond the type of moral considerations here. Yes there are different moral issues over further actions but that is a different issue to the question that Kip asked and I answered.</p> <p>So this is not an objection to desirism, rather it is an objection that could be raised against any and all ethical analysis of the relation between Group A and Group B. That is the issue is nothing specific to Desirism<em> per se</em>. <em>It is part and parcel of the inherent limitations of any institution of morality</em>. </p> <p>One of the challenges of the institutions of morality is to create a world where Group A/Group B situations do not occur, where they are inhibited and discouraged from occurring in the first place, where such scenarios <em>are prevented</em>. That is an ongoing effort and one of the reasons why searching for the provisionally best ethical models is worthwhile and important, to help make the world a better place for everyone.</p> Martin Freedmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16952072422175870627noreply@blogger.com71tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-154495438763509967.post-87092783252846191132010-04-08T22:34:00.001+01:002010-04-19T12:32:36.176+01:00Fisking the Westminster DeclarationThe <a href="http://www.westminster2010.org.uk/declaration/" target="_blank">Westminster Declaration</a> is written by 20 UK based Christians of various influence and renown. This includes Lord Carey, the Former Archbishop of Canterbury; Cardinal O'Brien of the Catholic Church in Scotland; and  Michael Nazir-Ali,<strong> </strong> the former Bishop of Rochester. Since its launch at Easter weekend it has gained over 12,000 signatures and counting.The declaration comprises an overview, then a statement of beliefs and values followed by the three areas they aim to speak out and act in defence of: human life, marriage and freedom of conscience. I will start with the statement of beliefs and values.  <h2>Their Beliefs and Values</h2> <blockquote> <p>As Christians we reaffirm historic belief in God the Father (who created us and gave us the blueprint for our lives together); in God the Son Jesus Christ our Saviour (accepting his incarnation, teaching, claims, miracles, death, resurrection and return in judgment); and in God the Holy Spirit (who lives within us, guides us and gives us strength)….</p> </blockquote> <p>In a modern liberal democracy anyone and everyone should be free to believe whatever gobbledegook they want to. Presumably the above nonsense makes sense to Christians, so no issue there. However the first problem is in the final sentence of this first paragraph:</p> <blockquote> <p>….We commit ourselves to worship, honour and <em>obey </em>God.[My emphasis here and in all quotes below]</p> </blockquote> <p>When I first read this, my first thought was that anyone is free to worship or honour whatever they want, however, when it comes to <em>obeying - there are limits</em>. This fear was immediately confirmed in the second paragraph of this section:</p> <blockquote> <p>As UK citizens we affirm our Christian commitment both to exercise social responsibility in working for the common good and also to be subject to all governing authorities and obey them <em>except when they require us to act unjustly.</em></p> </blockquote> <p>One would like to think, that as a UK citizen, if such a Christian were to lose their faith, their “commitment to exercise social responsibility in working for the common good” would remain unaltered. Certainly Christianity  is not necessary for such a commitment, however is it even sufficient when they wish to exclude acting unjustly? </p> <p>This depends on how injustice is determined. Given the previous emphasis over obeying God, the implication is that injustice is determined by such Christians, that sign or support this declaration, as being relative to God’s commands and if governing authorities conflict with their subjective opinion, they do not have to act as required.</p> <p>Unfortunately history is littered with “obeying God” being used as a justification for many past injustices and worse - slavery, misogyny, homophobia, apartheid, ethnic cleansing and genocide. It is true that Christians have sometimes been on both sides, using the argument of “obeying God” to fight those injustices rather than support and promote them. However, given this, it is surely impossible not to conclude that “obeying God” is a wholly indeterminate and hence arbitrary basis for determining injustices. It is a standard of injustice that is woefully and dangerously inadequate in the 21st Century anywhere. </p> <p>Whilst I agree we should all act to make our government more rather than less just, we need a far better basis than what has been so far implied. Their underlying value here allows promoting injustice in the name of “justice” - it can and has all too easily inverted the meaning of justice in the past – especially when invoking God in support. Let us hope that this analysis will not show that this is the case and that other terms are also not inverted. </p> <p>George Santayana famously said “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Lets us remember and learn from the past and move forward, rather than forget and move backwards. We need better not worse standards for identifying and fighting injustice. Lowering standards is not an improvement in defence of justice.</p> <p>Maybe I am jumping the gun, let us see how these values are explicated in their three areas of concern?</p> <h2>Human Life</h2> <blockquote> <p>We believe that being made in the image of God, <em>all human life</em> has intrinsic and equal dignity and worth and that it is the duty of the state to protect the vulnerable. </p> </blockquote> <p>Sometimes, in such a declaration, what is not said is as relevant as what is said, and one implication of the first line is that they have zero regard for any non human life. So they do not care about obscene and unnecessary maltreatments of animal nor extinction of any species – except where environmental change discomforts humans? </p> <p>Again they can believe whatever they want to believe with respect to “image of God”, one does not need such a belief to consider any individual of equal worth or dignity.  Again, I hope that if any of these signees or supporters of the declaration lose their faith, they still recognise that all individuals are worthy of equal consideration. Of course, such an “image of God” argument has failed to prevent injustices in the past and often actively encouraged them, the signees have provided, as yet, zero indication that things would be different now.</p> <p>This makes me wonder do they mean what everyone else means by “vulnerable”? Can I or anyone assume any of the terms they use mean what everyone else in polite society thinks they mean? Lets see what they mean by vulnerable then:</p> <blockquote> <p>We will support, protect, and be advocates for <em>such people</em> – including children born and <em>unborn</em>, and all those who are sick, disabled, addicted, elderly, in single parent families, poor, exploited, trafficked, <em>appropriately</em> seeking asylum, threatened by environmental change, or exploited by unjust trade, aid or debt policies. </p> </blockquote> <p>Interesting that those subject to religious discrimination and persecution are not listed among the vulnerable.</p> <p>Now note my emphasis and how the three lines (above, here and the one below) of this paragraph switches from “human life” through “people” to “human being”. These are three distinct although related concepts, they are most certainly not synonyms, at least here. </p> <p>In particular, an unborn foetus (most certainly first trimester) is not yet a person nor a human being.  When conceived it is most certainly not a person or a human being, what is there to protect? Clearly “vulnerable” here does not include the future pregnant mother, however vulnerable they actually are…</p> <p>What on earth does the “appropriately” mean  in “<em>appropriately</em> seeking asylum”? To charitably interpret it as if said by a non-Christian is as likely to mislead as anything. Given the intent of the rest of the declaration, who decides what is appropriate? God? Christians? These are not the grounds that any citizen who wishes to keep living in a modern liberal democracy would endorse.</p> <blockquote> <p>We pledge to work to protect the life of every <em>human being</em> from <em>conception</em> to its <em>natural</em> end and we refuse to comply with any directive that compels us to participate in or facilitate abortion, embryo-destructive research, assisted suicide, euthanasia, or any other act that involves intentionally taking <em>innocent</em> human life.</p> </blockquote> <p>Why the selection of “natural” in “<em>natural</em> end”? When someone who has led a good and fulfilling life, is now <em>naturally</em> suffering in unending pain with no hope of reprieve, they are to be denied their own dignity and worth in choosing to end their own life because it is <em>unnatural</em>? When a terminally ill child is born, with no hope of surviving a few days or weeks, they would rather the child <em>naturally</em> dies in suffering and agony by withholding medical care rather than provide a painless means to end their avoidable suffering? </p> <p>It appears the signees seem happy to impose additional suffering on the child’s parents and on the members of a terminally ill patient’s family as these all watch as their loved ones suffer unnecessarily and viciously, all due to Christian conscience, which only goes to show that the signees have a warped concept of worth and dignity - then again they did not use “suffering” here, did they?</p> <p>The pledge here insists that they do not facilitate or participate in “embryo-destructive research” (so embryo-constructive research is ok?). </p> <p>An interesting story, that just happened in Israel, can cast light on one issue here. It has just introduced a novel solution to the problem of free-riders in organ transplants. The religious do not donate organs but all too willingly accept them, creating a short fall in available organs. The solution is to prioritise those who sign consent to be organ donors. The ones who do not consent go to the bottom of the organ recipient list. </p> <p>Maybe the same principle should apply here? Anyone who signs this declaration goes to the bottom of the list for gaining any of the benefits of embryo research? I am sure none of the signees would want to be a free rider nor benefit from such research as that, by implication, means participating in it.</p> <p>The signees are also asking us to sacrifice human beings and cause suffering to many others in the name of their God! All those who lives could be saved and relieved of suffering due to the benefits of embryological research are to be sacrificed because of what they think their God commands! <em>The signees demand human sacrifice of innocents all in the name of preserving the dignity and worth of innocents!</em></p> <p>This leads to the final issue in this sentence - who gets to decide who is innocent or not? Is it these Christian’s subjective interpretation of God? Or are they just saying that the guilty can be killed by the state? Do we want to regress to having state sanctioned official killings in the UK?</p> <blockquote> <p>We will support those who take the same stand.</p> </blockquote> <p>In the USA there have been the murders of gynaecologists who carry out abortions. According to this declaration those doctors are not innocent – they are the “murderers” of “unborn” children taking “human life” of “persons” “unnaturally” – these doctors are “guilty”.  The signees do not say that that there is a prohibition of taking the lives of the “guilty”. Maybe they would not act to take the lives of those “guilty” doctors, and as far as<em> </em>I<em> </em>know it has not happened in the UK yet<em> </em>but the above makes clear they would support those who do – after all they take the same stand as the signees.</p> <p>It should be quite clear that the fuzziness of human life, person, human being, dignity and worth is indicative they do not really mean what they are claiming and often mean the opposite! </p> <h2>Marriage</h2> <blockquote> <p>We pledge to support marriage – the lifelong covenantal union of one man and one woman as husband and wife. </p> </blockquote> <p>So they do not recognise divorcees? They will not allow divorcees to re-marry? </p> <blockquote> <p>We believe it is divinely ordained, the only context for sexual intercourse, and the most important unit for sustaining the health, education, and welfare of all. </p> </blockquote> <p>You can have as many beliefs as you want but how does this match up to reality? If it does not so much the worse for your beliefs. Why is it that Christians get divorced as often as non-Christians? Divine ordination of Christian marriages has not helped reduced their divorce rate. </p> <p>Certainly I would agree that caring environment is better for the welfare of our children than not. Sadly many marriages are not the basis of such a caring environment, as the data on incest and domestic violence shows. Rather than divorce as one means to secure a better and more sustaining environment, the signees would want these disastrous marriages to carry on, creating the opposite. To blithely ignore these facts is not to give equal consideration to the worth and dignity to everyone. Not if you are focused on sustaining the health, education and welfare of all.</p> <p>As for “the only context for sexual intercourse”, Christians need to account for the higher prevalence of teenage pregnancies, venereal disease and the consumption of pornography (oh they did not mention that, may be that is ok?) in areas with higher levels of Christian adherence, in many countries around the world. </p> <p>Now this is highly correlated with, in many of these areas, the promotion of abstinence over condoms, the lack of sexual education, the deliberate and immoral mis-education about sex such as that condoms cause AIDS, the unavailability of safe alternatives for sex inside and outside of marriage and so on. </p> <p>Interestingly many of these policies are due to explicit Christian interference in state policies, interference of the type that the signees are implying here in general. One way to protect the vulnerable is not promote situations which makes people vulnerable but that is what all these polices do.</p> <p>The more you look at this declaration the more incoherent it becomes. Part of this incoherence might be to cover up the elephant in the room – only man and woman can be married and only married couples can have sex. In other words homosexual intercourse would be impossible under such views – does this make these innocents “guilty”? Would not such a Christian society makes such people vulnerable? However they are not “innocent” and so not worthy of protection? </p> <blockquote> <p>We call on government to honour, promote and protect marriage and we refuse to submit to any edict forcing us to equate any other form of sexual partnership with marriage. </p> </blockquote> <p>We can all see the elephant now. So they want to preserve their prejudice and bigotry against homosexuals and this declaration says they will regardless of any government edict otherwise. Coupled with the above list of the vulnerable omitting those subject to religious prejudice, what else can any unbiased observer conclude that any signee is endorsing bigotry, specifically homophobia? I doubt they would sign this unwittingly, but you never know, certainly many signees must be well aware of what they are pledging to promote.</p> <blockquote> <p>We commit ourselves to continue affirming what we believe as Christians about sexual morality, marriage, and the family.</p> </blockquote> <p>You can commit all you want in the privacy of your own home with consenting adults but outside that, when these commitments conflicts with a modern civilised democracy, hiding behind the claim that “I am only following orders” - by obeying God - should carry no weight in the public sphere. It is becoming clear that anyone who signs this declaration is against the modern civilised democracy that many have suffered and died to bequeath to us. </p> <p>Maybe the conscience section will alleviate all my concerns so far, or maybe not. Lets see.</p> <h2>Conscience</h2> <blockquote> <p>We count it a <em>special privilege</em> to live in a democratic society where all citizens have the right to participate in the political process. </p> </blockquote> <p>It should be the norm and it should be an <em>equal</em> right. </p> <p>We know that in many places today and thought history this “special privilege” of equal citizenship has been denied. Whilst there are many reasons for this, any signee of this declaration needs to be aware that such specifically Christian ideals as expressed, here has been one of those reasons why we do consider it a “special privilege” and not just a norm today, those ideals making it special because in times past <em>when such ideals dominated societies, this “special privilege” did not exist</em>! </p> <p>We were <em>subjects</em> of divinely appointed monarchs working hand in hand with Christian institutions, we were <em>slaves</em>, <em>serfs</em> and <em>servants </em>of God and not allowed equal dignity and worth. We were not <em>citizens</em>.</p> <p>Those days are past in the UK, lets not bring them back. If you want to preserve this “special privilege” that is a good reason not to sign this declaration and to condemn those who do. That would be the act of a good Samaritan.</p> <blockquote> <p>We pledge to do what we can to ensure our laws are just and fair, particularly in protecting vulnerable people. </p> </blockquote> <p>Given everything else in this declaration this is just empty rhetoric to distract the unwary. This might make you feel warm inside but you need to do a reality check.</p> <blockquote> <p>We will seek to ensure that <em>religious liberty</em> and freedom of conscience are unequivocally protected against interference by the state and other threats, not only to individuals but also to institutions including families, charities, schools and religious communities.</p> </blockquote> <p>So the signees wish to preserve their right to take state funds and provide services…not to all, certainly not to homosexual couples willing to adopt children who could benefit from a caring environment, to discriminate against non Christians in employing people in supplying these services, to gain tax exemptions for “charities” that only support their own institutions and buildings and do no real charitable work, to teach this discrimination and proving misleading and failed sex education at schools, this list could go one but this post is already long lets stop there. </p> <p>Methinks they have a different notion of “special privileges” to what they were implying above. The signees wish to have and preserve special privileges <em>not available to the non-Christian</em>. Maybe it was not a mistake that they omitted “equal” in the first line of this section?</p> <p>As for “other threats” what does this mean? The signees have not spoken about freedom of speech and expression which would protect anyone from discrimination in pursing their beliefs and conscience whatever they were, provided it did not harm others. Is freedom of speech one of these “other threats”? Is showing the inconsistencies, incoherencies and immorality in this declaration such a threat? We need to be told.</p> <p>However this line does not only apply to Christians, does it? Here is another problem, we already have an elephant, so I suppose now we are letting the cat out the bag. Everything so far has focused on Christian liberty but they could not say that here without being overtly prejudiced. So “religious liberty” was used instead. </p> <p>If this is what is now being argued for, on the pain of consistency, whatever basis the Christian signee can use to claim dispensation for requirements to act unjustly, is also available to a member of any other religion. </p> <p>One could say, as has happened, that extremist Muslims have exercised their religious liberty in blowing up London buses and trains and attempted to blow up Glasgow Airport. They were within their rights and expressing their conscience in doing so. This is the type of society which signees wish to live in.  Anyone can claim dispensation to act against the laws of this country because their religion regards them as unjust. And we must protect their right to religious liberty even as we are being killed. An excellent means to preserve a “just and fair” society.</p> <p>The arguments just here for religious liberty are no such thing. Let us call a spade a spade, <em>signees of this declaration are arguing for religious tyranny</em>! And anyone, not of any religion, does not have the same “special privilege” to so act, we have to turn back the clock, return to the dark ages, be subjugated to the discrimination and prejudices of the Christians, purely in virtue of them being Christians. And this is meant by “what we can to [do] ensure our laws are just and fair”. Hmmm.</p> <blockquote> <p>We will not be intimidated by any cultural or political power into silence or acquiescence and we will reject measures that seek to over-rule our Christian consciences or to restrict our freedoms to express Christian beliefs, or to worship and obey God.</p> </blockquote> <p>Now the declaration is quite blatantly belligerent and showing everyone what it really stands for. Far from supporting the worth and dignity of everyone and protecting the vulnerable, this declaration is an argument to promote discrimination, bigotry and tyranny.</p> <h2>Commitment</h2> <blockquote> <p>We call upon all those in UK positions of leadership, responsibility and influence to pledge to respect, uphold and protect the right of Christians to hold these beliefs and to act according to Christian conscience.</p> </blockquote> <p>No, anyone in such positions of leadership, responsibility and influence needs to condemn such threats to equality, fairness, liberty and civilisation. Christian and non-Christian alike, if you want to promote and improve the values of our country, we should all be united in exercising our freedom of speech to criticise and condemn anyone who signs this declaration.</p> <h2>Updates</h2> <p>See also <a href="http://impartialism.blogspot.com/2010/04/press-on-westminster-declaration.html">The Press On The Westminster Declaration</a> and <a href="http://impartialism.blogspot.com/2010/04/manhattan-versus-westminster.html">The Manhattan Versus The Westminste Declaration. </a></p> Martin Freedmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16952072422175870627noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-154495438763509967.post-39887722399823465222010-04-08T15:16:00.001+01:002010-04-08T15:16:55.221+01:00The Westminster Manifesto<p> </p> <p><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRgJZTtk1dsO8vWajh0ACeQgJjSTj5L9z_Tgv-zNgnpC4CVKfiHfPphRAvvLVlB9n2ZYOrSMc-uRJ7xFGDH0D-sxDtbyJu6L61TsRmoBMogsHOpard1TB00WuRQ1_YTRjM6H1Hjyfrqwk/s1600-h/WestminsterManifestoImage%5B4%5D.jpg"><img style="border-right-width: 0px; width: 508px; display: inline; border-top-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px" title="WestminsterManifestoImage" border="0" alt="WestminsterManifestoImage" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivnysvWzqBID3BLBOl5HC43882-TDdfAQfiSMHNlxy6nwAZKprKRErNn1NGUJ4MV-Knm3J6SSzYxjtWG8WxmYmrrbTgEWNydvEro3yHhu3iSgaAhXHVfW7JGUevBoAXvGeMBorbSEVYto/?imgmax=800" width="508" height="253" /></a></p> <p>A UK equivalent to the <a href="http://www.manhattandeclaration.org/" target="_blank">Manhattan Declaration</a> has recently been created. This is the <a href="http://www.westminster2010.org.uk/declaration/" target="_blank">Westminster Declaration</a>.  I will analyse this declaration and its political and social implications in future posts. </p> <p>I must note I am not impressed - although not surprised - by the signatories to date :-)</p> Martin Freedmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16952072422175870627noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-154495438763509967.post-70520115171837798322010-04-07T15:56:00.001+01:002010-04-16T09:01:43.968+01:00Why consider all desires that exist?<p></p> <p>In the ethical framework I support called desirism is the requirement that one considers “all desires that exist”. Now Kip, who has commented on this blog and other blogs that advocate desirism and is largely also an advocate of desirism, and is well able to identify and argue against the all too common poor, unsound and invalid objections against desirism, still has an issue over this requirement. In his own words:</p> <blockquote> <p>You know I am very fond of Desirism... but can't help thinking that the idea that we should consider "all desires that exist" into the moral calculus is just plain wrong.  I mean, you can do that, but then you aren't talking about the same system of morality that I think the theory was trying to capture -- the system that is being used by people.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Desirism states:  a practical-ought is relative to "the desires in question"; a moral-ought is relative to "all the desires that exist".  Why "all the desires that exist", and not just a subset of them?</p> <p>My objection is that this claim is just an assertion -- that there is no reason or evidence to support it.</p> <p>…</p> <p>There are no moral laws of the universe that tell us to consider all desires that exist. That is just Alonzo's assertion.</p> </blockquote> <p>Well is it just Alonzo’s assertion and if not, why not?</p> <p>Kip provides a number of related objections in making his argument.  I have labelled these:</p> <ul> <li>The Multiverse Objection </li> <li>The Omniscience Objection </li> <li>The Universal Objection </li> <li>The Influencing Objection </li> </ul> <h2>The Multiverse Objection</h2> <blockquote> <p>[in] saying that when people say "you should not rape", that the desires in question for this statement include every desire that exists in the entire multi/universe.</p> </blockquote> <p></p> <p>In the two recent Doctor Who Series finales, the enemies of the Doctor were trying to destroy not just this universe but all universes – the multiverse – with the means to survive such destruction! How they how they could have destroyed the multiverse, let alone survived such destruction, is a question for science fiction. Here such desires can surely be seen as the ultimate desire-thwarting desires, can anyone imagine any desire more desire-thwarting than the destruction of the multiverse? </p> <p>Now in such a science fiction scenario, the desire-desire cause-effect relations are such that the desire to destroy the multiverse is a causal desire and all desires that exist in the multiverse are necessarily affected. However, luckily, we do not as far as we know live in such a multiverse. As far as we know  the maximum causal scope of a desire is the world we live on now and no farther.  Whilst that might change in the far future the underlying principles would not, namely what are the cause-effect relations.</p> <p>I do not know if Kip intended this as a <em>reductio ad absurdum</em> over  what “all desires that exist” means but, regardless, once one recognises that out of “all desires that exist” it is only the ones that are <em>affected </em>that are an issue, then surely this multiverse objection fails.    </p> <p>I could dwell on global desire-thwarting issues such as Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) but that would be diversionary to the theme of this post. Still it is relevant to note two points on this.</p> <p>The first is that AGW and other global issues illustrate, whether one agrees with their arguments or not, that there can be a global scope to the effect of certain desires. At this stage in our evolution the scope is only global, not stellar, let alone galactic, universal (in the cosmological sense) or multiversal.</p> <p>The second is that many of the disputes over  AGW and so on, revolve over what is knowable now, certainly compared to the past and this leads to Kip’s next objection: </p> <h2>The Omniscience Objection</h2> <blockquote> <p>And, couldn't be the case as people are not omniscient.  At the most, people would mean "considering all the desires that we are aware of".  </p> </blockquote> <p>With regard to Kip’s issue over omniscience not only does desirism not demand it but it already incorporates this cognitive limitation. </p> <p>It provides substance to the reasonable person test in the establishment of Mens Rea “Guilty Mind” in criminal and civil judgements. If an actor caused a prima facie legal wrong they can be excused if it can be shown that no reasonable person could have done better in that situation, that is they were not acting in a negligent, reckless or knowing manner.   </p> <p>Consider Asbestos. When it was developed it was regarded as having positive economic-value and use-value due to providing energy saving insulation. It was also regarded as having zero or neutral health-value.  </p> <p>At some stage it was discovered – by one of the few great successes of epidemiology as it happens – that it has negative health-value (other means could have established this but it happened this way). </p> <p>From that stage forward to promote the economic usefulness of asbestos by disregarding, ignoring, denying  or otherwise avoiding the negative health-value of asbestos made one morally and (eventually) legally culpable. One could only proceed to do so by being negligent, reckless or ignoring what was foreseeable.</p> <p>Still prior to this, no-one could be held responsible, one could not demand an impossible omniscience.  </p> <p>Partly as a result of story of Asbestos (and Thalidomide and so on) there is much issue made over trying to determine the currently unknown and maybe non-existent dangers of new technologies such as genetically modified foods and so on. Whatever the specifics over such controversies (and if they really are controversies) it is still the case that if one has made best efforts to ensure the safety and health issues, one could not be held responsible for not being omniscient.</p> <p>Many new facts and discoveries emerge that can require revision of the health and other values of existing technologies (revised both positively as well as negatively) but desirism employs these same provisional principles, the ones that are shared by the best means to knowledge such as science. All ethical knowledge can ever be is provisional, the only challenge to seek the best provisional conclusion available, rather than lower such standards to permit less than best conclusions to be allowed. </p> <h2>The Influencing Objection</h2> <blockquote> <p>I actually think people mean "considering all the desires that we include in our "moral sphere", those that are capable of influencing us"</p> </blockquote> <p>How does this connect to the cause-effect relations that desires have upon other desires? </p> <p>If Group A discriminates (or worse) against Group B and Group B has no power to <em>influence</em> group A, it is still the case that Group B is <em>affected</em> by Group A. Further Group B has no ability to <em>affect</em> Group A – whether due to natural or social constraints and limitations - that it is why it has no influence over Group A.  </p> <p>It seems that much of the history of moral progress is over this distinction between influence and affect and the institutionalised imbalance of the ability to affect one other. Whether this was and is apartheid both past (South Africa) and present (Sharia Law states) or slavery or misogynistic societies (ahem…Sharia law states again and so on) and so on, these can all be characterised this way.  This leads to the final version of Kip’s argument:</p> <h2>The Universal Objection</h2> <blockquote> <p>I guess it's that "universal" word that I'm now disagreeing with.  That doesn't reflect the actual usage of our moral institutions and practices, and it doesn't even make prudential sense to try to make it that way -- it's impossible.</p> <p>…</p> <p>I think a group of moral agents should (prudential reason for action) only consider the desires that are able to influence their desires (either through moral tools or force).  The agents using the social tools should (prudentially) consider any and all desires that need to be harmonized.  They should not (prudentially) consider desires that do not need to be harmonized, and they could not consider all desires that existed even if they wanted to (since they are not omniscient).</p> <p>…</p> <p>Further, if ought implies can, then it would be wrong to say that they moral-should consider all desires that exist, since they cannot do that.</p> </blockquote> <p>If there is no multiversal scope or omniscient requirement it is not impossible. </p> <p>Still the question to ask is why <em>should</em> Group A care about Group B? However just asking the questions <em>presupposes</em> the consideration of all desire that exist – the ones that can be reasonably be determined to be affected. Whatever answer a representative of Group A gives such as:-</p> <ul> <li>we do not consider their desires </li> <li>we do not need to consider their desires </li> <li>their desires cannot influence us, so we do not need to concern ourselves of those desires </li> <li>that is the way we always do (did) it </li> <li>we are stronger and can get a way with it </li> <li>we are more and can get away with it </li> <li>we have the law on our side </li> <li>we have God on our side </li> <li>their desires are not worthy of moral consideration </li> </ul> <p>and many other possible defences all presuppose that, <em>in this case</em>, the question over “all desires that exist” means the desires of Group B. This presupposition is both intelligible and feasible and neither impossible nor beyond cognitive capacities.</p> <p>In asking the question to Group A “why do you ignore the desire of Group B?” one is seeking a rational and empirical justification, the above does not assume that none is possible. Indeed the above does shows that there can be one such justification, based on the fact that we are not omniscient but this only applies where there is new knowledge that a reasonable (or good) person could not now ignore. The many answers bulleted above all fail as rational and empirical justifications for Group A’s practises. </p> <h2>Desire that exist</h2> <p>There is another meaning over the term “all desires that exist” - the whole basis of asking such questions of Group A (and Group B as well for that matter) is that it is not over the desires they (internally) do have but over the desires that they could have – desire that exist. This is externalism, the institution of morality being the way to internalise such external desires. </p> <h2>Evaluating Moral Institutions</h2> <p>The last bulleted pseudo-justification is particularly telling as many claim morality on their side to “justify” their desires and actions. This too, is to be expected within a desirist analysis. It makes no difference whether they defend their position using “morality” and moral-speak or not, it is still a fact that their practices are desire-thwarting.</p> <p>Like science that can recursively apply its own standards to the the methods by which it achieves provisional scientific knowledge, any such institution (of morality) can <em>themselves</em> be evaluated for how effective they are, in the Group A/Group B scenarios they are not.</p> <h2>Conclusion</h2> <p>I hope this addresses Kip’s concerns who I have otherwise found to be an able exponent of desirism. I regard the fact that Kip still asks such questions is a positive sign as I would never want anyone to accept such arguments without robust challenges. This and any other successful ethical theory should be well able to handle such objections and at least Kip presents decent challenges to desirism, still ones that desirism can refute. </p> <p>In short that is no demand for omniscience and such cognitive limitations are incorporated into any desirist analysis of any situation.  To ask the question about what desires to consider is to presuppose all desires that could exist in order to find the desires that are actually affected and that anyone reasonably asking that question could know about. There is no reason to suppose today that there are any such affected desires that reach beyond this planet. Any defence is open to a critical evaluation which again presupposes in an intelligible and reasonable fashion what are the relevant desires. A “moral defence” and other defences that excludes - prior to argument - certain desires from consideration, is an illegitimate defence since if one wishes to argue for the exclusion of some desire that has be done in the argument and not before. </p> <p>Neither Alonzo, myself nor anyone else is making an arbitrary or subjective assertion to consider all desires that exist, it is inherent in the objective approach of this framework that these are all to be considered unless and until some reasonable rational and empirical argument can show otherwise. </p> <h2>Update</h2> <p>I have provided three replies to Kip’s questions in the comments here. These are:</p> <a href="http://impartialism.blogspot.com/2010/04/why-consider-others-when-you-dont-need.html"> <ol> <li></li> <a href="http://impartialism.blogspot.com/2010/04/why-consider-others-when-you-dont-need.html">Why Consider Others When You Don’t Need To</a></ol> <li><a href="http://impartialism.blogspot.com/2010/04/all-desires-versus-affected-desires.html">All Desires Versus Affected Desires</a></li> <li><a href="http://impartialism.blogspot.com/2010/04/rational-and-irrational-justifications.html">Rational And Irrational Justifications</a></li> </a> <p>In addition, Alonzo Fyfe has replied again to Kip’s issues on CommonsenseAtheism blog in the post <a href="http://commonsenseatheism.com/?p=7927" target="_blank">All Desires that Exist</a>. </p> <p>This also addresses some points raised in posts 1 and 2 above. Both Alonzo’s reply and mine are quite consistent, although I realize now that it is still possible to misread some of my analysis in the way that Alonzo argues against. So it is useful to read my posts in conjunction with Alonzo’s, to avoid any such misreading.</p> <p>In short, the reason one analyses all desires that exist, and so finding and not omitting all the affected desires, is so that one can identify and predict those who have reasons to promote or inhibit the desire under evaluation. It would be misreading this analysis to think that there is any overall ethical principal or commandment such as “Thou Shalt consider all desires” in addition to such requirements.</p> Martin Freedmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16952072422175870627noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-154495438763509967.post-3743165667039622302010-03-09T10:24:00.002+00:002010-03-09T10:24:54.405+00:00Pope PetitionsThere are three petitions on the UK Government's petition site. I have signed all three but you decide which you want to sign. I also recommend all atheist and secular bloggers promote these three petitions in their blogs, even if you are not a UK citizen and even if you disagree with some of them - you might have UK readers and you should let them decide (by all means, if you disagree, produce arguments against them - it is still up to the reader to decide the merits of your argument).<br /><br /><blockquote>We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to ask the Catholic Church to pay for the proposed visit of the Pope to the UK and relieve the taxpayer of the estimated £20 million cost.</blockquote><a href="http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/selfpaypope/">http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/selfpaypope/</a><br /><blockquote>We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to disassociate the British government from the Pope's intolerant views ahead of the Papal visit to Britain in September 2010. We urge the Prime Minister to make it clear that his government disagrees with the Pope's opposition to women's reproductive rights, gay equality, embryonic stem cell research and the use of condoms to prevent the spread of HIV. We ask the Prime Minister to express his disagreement with the Pope’s role in the cover-up of child sex abuse by Catholic clergy, his rehabilitation of the Holocaust-denying bishop Richard Williamson, and his decree paving the way for the beatification and sainthood of the war-time Pope, Pius XII, who stands accused of failing to speak out against the Holocaust. We also request the Prime Minister to assure us that the Pope’s visit will not be financed by the British taxpayer.</blockquote><a href="http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/ProtestthePope/">http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/ProtestthePope/</a><br /><div><blockquote>We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to Revoke the formal state visit given to the Pope Benedict XVI. </blockquote><a href="http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/Pope2010/">http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/Pope2010/</a><br /><br /><br /></div>Martin Freedmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16952072422175870627noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-154495438763509967.post-81157401247811386322010-03-04T10:51:00.002+00:002010-03-09T09:51:58.200+00:00Why can't theists do this?A short while ago I noticed on biologist and philosopher Massimo Pigliucci's <a href="http://rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com/">Rationally Speaking blog</a> in his <a href="http://rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com/2010/03/massimos-picks.html">Massimo's Picks post</a> the following link, prefaced with "You knew this, right? <span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium;">" <a href="http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/02/100224132655.htm">Liberals and Atheists Smarter? Intelligent People Have Values Novel in Human Evolutionary History, Study Finds</a>. This was a press release claiming that </span></span><br />
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More intelligent people are statistically significantly more likely to exhibit social values and religious and political preferences that are novel to the human species in evolutionary history. Specifically, liberalism and atheism, and for men (but not women), preference for sexual exclusivity correlate with higher intelligence, a new study finds.</blockquote>
As interesting as this was, I wondered if it:-<br />
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(a) was actually as statically significant as it claimed since<br />
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Young adults who subjectively identify themselves as "very liberal" have an average IQ of 106 during adolescence while those who identify themselves as "very conservative" have an average IQ of 95 during adolescence.</blockquote>
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Such a small difference requires a high sample size to have a p value of at least 0.05 (anything less is unacceptable and p=0.01 would be far better) and neither the error bars, sample size not p values were provided.</div>
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(b) Is IQ a suitable surrogate measure for "intelligence" to capture this difference?</div>
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(c) Were the question design in the opinion survey sufficiently well balanced to avoid bias?</div>
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Well I had not time to ponder those questions or google for answers but considered this, as presumably did Massimo, sufficiently amusing and provocative to post in my micro-blog (my <a href="http://twitter.com/faithlessgod">faithlessgod twitter feed</a>), I most certainly thought it was of interest to the followers of my feed.</div>
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Well my twitter feed automatically posts to my personal facebook status and I received a comment from Tim McGregor the founder of <a href="http://brighton.skepticsinthepub.org/">Skeptics in the Pub Brighton</a> (a group I had wanted to form last year but had no time, so well done to Tim for actually making this happen). </div>
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He pointed to a post by P.Z Meyer's <a href="http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula">Pharyngula blog</a> entitled <a href="http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/02/stop_patting_yourselves_on_the.php">Stop patting yourselves on the back over this study</a> in which he was both scathing of bloggers who had just jumped on the bandwagon by uncritically assuming it was good science and he was also scathing of the study itself, including such gems as:</div>
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And then to claim that these differences are not only heritable, but evolutionarily significant…jebus, people, you can just glance at it and see that it is complete crap.</blockquote>
Now I think both Tim pointing this article out to me and PZ's article itself responding in this way is excellent and what I expect of an honest and ethical approach to any evidential claims, in even if, and especially if, it appears to be in one's favour. Articles in one's favour are no excuse to drop one's standards.<br />
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Hence the question which is the title of this post. I repeatedly see theists make empirical claims about how religion benefits society when there is a wealth of empirical evidence, certainly of a correlative nature that contradicts these claims. It seems they can find no contrary equivalent evidence in their favour and so in response, if they just do not just happily ignore this evidence, promote a variety of dubious opinion survey based social psychology studies, which whenever investigated (at least the ones I have seen) are of poor methodological design such as low statistical significance, small sample size and/or with unbalanced questions formats which fails to control for biases.<br />
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Now I am, of course, <i>only addressing this to those theists who do just jump on the bandwagon and uncritically promote these studies or uncritically agree with them</i>. Where are the theists who say "hang on a second, as much as we like the conclusions, the study being celebrated is highly questionable?" (Or "crap" possibly). I had undertaken to follow a few Christian apologist blogs for a while. All the ones I followed all too uncritically accept any argument in their favour, however dubious. I no longer follow such blogs as they are too tedious, predictable and boring, as well as being disturbingly immoral - particularly promoting and defending bigotry - to boot.<br />
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So the question is are there any committed theistic bloggers out who do critically challenge evidence in their own favour, as PZ admirably did to this study? Such bloggers I would be interested in reading. Does anyone know of any? Are there any takers?<br />
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POSTSCRIPT: Since I have submitted this to some blog carnivals I thought it only fair to take out specific references to one theist blogger, since it was outside the main thrust of this argument to just highlight one such blogger. (I also typo checked it and slightly changed the emphasis of some points at the same time).<br />
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<br />Martin Freedmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16952072422175870627noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-154495438763509967.post-22853848207544024982010-02-28T18:04:00.000+00:002010-02-28T18:18:50.971+00:00The Atheist Argument from MoralityLuke of <a href="http://commonsenseatheism.com/">Commonsense Atheism</a> has finally woken me up from my blogging slumber for much the same reason as he had (similar to the debate that triggered his post), Luke's <a href="http://commonsenseatheism.com/?p=7374">post</a> in turn gives me reason to write a post I have been wanting to write for a long time. His post was inspired by a <a href="http://www.conversantlife.com/morality/upcoming-debate-on-god-and-morality">debate</a> between Christian apologist <a href="http://www.seanmcdowell.org/" style="text-decoration: none;">Sean McDowell</a> and humanist and atheist history teacher James Corbett on the question: <a href="http://apologetics315.blogspot.com/2010/02/sean-mcdowell-vs-james-corbett-debate.html">Is God the Best Explanation for Moral Values?</a><br /><br /><b><u>Background</u></b><br /><br />I listened to the opening argument (provided in the previous link) by Sean McDowell and am responding only to this. I have not listened to the rest of the talk and have no opinion as to how well James Corbett dealt with McDowell's argument but assume from Luke's post that Corbett failed to address the central points in McDowell's argument.<br /><br />Luke has given his own response to McDowell, basing his reply on <a href="http://impartialism.blogspot.com/2009/08/desirism.html">desirism</a>, which is the same ethical framework that I have been promoting in this blog. However I am here giving a quite different response which will also indicate why I do not think his is the right approach to McDowell's challenge, although there is nothing in his reply which is incorrect. Reading the comments to Luke's post indicates the problem, it can be made diversionary and allows defenders of theistic-based morality to avoid dealing with the many failings of their own theory. This is not to say that Luke did not also highlight such failings, he did and quite correctly too, however the way his post was presented allows these issues to be side stepped and as much as it is a problem in a blog post I conjecture it would have been worse in a live debate.<br /><br />Well I might be wrong about this and this can be resolved so by writing this post so that interested readers (as well as Luke) can compare and contrast our responses for the specific issues at hand.<br /><br /><b><u>McDowell's Argument</u></b><br /><br />In McDowell's opening argument he makes two central claims:<br /><ol><li>If God does not exist, we do not have a solid foundation for [objective] moral values. </li><li>If God does exist, we do have a solid foundation for [objective] moral values. </li></ol>In support of this McDowell provides “three criteria that any adequate moral system must be able to account for”:<br /><ol><li>Any adequate moral system must have a transcendent standard beyond human nature.</li><li>Any adequate moral system must account for free will.</li><li>Any adequate moral system must account for what makes humans special.</li></ol>This is all used to support William Lane Craig's <a href="http://www.leaderu.com/offices/billcraig/docs/meta-eth.html">Argument from Morality</a>:<br /><ol><li>If God does not exist then objective moral values do not exist.</li><li>Objective moral values do exist.</li><li>Therefore, God exists.</li></ol>Finally he asserts that the only alternative to his central claims are in terms of subjective preferences and that if anyone is to argue for a better explanation for (objective) moral values than god, then they need to provide a better alternative, as subjective preferences fails. This is what he requests of Corbett (and I do not know what Corbett's reply is but , according to Luke, he fails) and to which Luke responds with desirism.<br /><br />Now behind all this he makes a number of fallacious informal rhetorical arguments, such as appeals to consequences, fear and comfort, primarily to convince his audience if they needed convincing) of the necessity of objective moral values, referring to the Nuremberg trials and a horrendous date rape amongst others. I note this only to show later there is a more implicit rhetorical device and problem with his argument (see "A Secondary Point" below).<br /><br /><b><u>Response</u></b><br /><br /><b>A Valid Candidate?</b><br />There is a presumption behind his argument which is a false dichotomy, that his is the only foundation for objective moral values or there are no objective moral values. That the only alternative to a theistic-based morality is subjective preferences - which clearly denies objective moral values. He tries make the only viable response to this argument beholden on the responder to come with a third alternative for which he is presumably prepared to dissect, whatever it is. However to provide an alternative - well defended or not - is to grant too much to McDowell, as this implies that his is a viable explanation of moral values with the dispute then revolving around whom has the better explanation.<br /><br />I make no such grant, I instead dispute not that god is the best explanation for objective moral values but whether such an explanation <i>is even</i> a candidate explanation. Until McDowell can establish this could be a type of explanation of objective moral values, there is no need and it is diversionary to propose another alternative.<br /><br />We know that many great minds have considered this question thought the ages and there are quite a few theories that argue for objective moral values and are largely united in rejecting theistic-based morality, of the kind that McDowell espouses, as a viable alternative. This applies to theistic thinkers not just atheistic and proto-atheistic thinkers. For example, the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilitarianism">utilitarian</a> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Sidgwick">Henry Sidgwick</a> tried to argue the god was a utilitarian, which is a radically different thesis from McDowell. Another example is the deontologist <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immanuel_Kant">Immanuel Kant</a>, who argued for God as a synthetic a priori whilst at the same time establishing morality, quite independently of God, on the basis of his <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorical_imperative">categorical imperative</a>. There are many others.<br /><br />Furthermore the <a href="http://philpapers.org/surveys/">largest ever survey of professional philosophers</a> has shown that the majority of them believe in moral realism and the majority of those are atheists. Note that just because one is a philosopher does not give one special authority to espouse on moral matters and many of them do not specialise in ethics. However we do know that most, if not all philosophers, are better equipped, due to training, to be familiar with the key concepts and issues involved with the tips, tricks and traps of reasoning in this domain and still this is the majority position. How could this be possible if McDowell's above noted dichotomy were true?<br /><br />Indeed in ethics, which can happily grant the existence of a god, the question as to whether god could be basis for an objective morality is generally regarded as a long failed project being labelled as a species of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethical_subjectivism">ethical subjectivism</a>. The fact that the popular conception of these issues is widely divergent to the view within ethics and without such a divergence the subject of this topic would have been unlikely to be debated by McDowell and Corbett is incidental and of no real substance. What is of substance is as to whether McDowell does have a viable argument to explain objective moral values and we cannot just presume and allow that this is so. This needs to be answered first and only if McDowell can show that this is a viable candidate can we then contemplate comparing his argument with others as to which is the "best".<br /><br /><b>A Side Issue?</b><br />Now we have another issue to deal with before we get to the substance of the matter. Although McDowell has presented an argument for his god - "the moral argument" - this is not the primary question in this debate. That is what is the best explanation for moral value.<br /><br />Now as a moral realist, I can happily grant, along with the majority of professional and atheist philosophers, amongst others, McDowell's second premise in this argument that objective moral values exist. (And I did not need any rhetorical devices such as the date rape example to reach this conclusion).<br /><br />We only need discuss why anyone does hold objective moral values once we have resolved in McDowell's first premise claims in his favour, which I dispute can be done. So even though this argument is a secondary issue here, it does revolve around the acceptance or not of his first premise, which pertains to the central theme of this debate.<br /><br />It is beholden on everyone, regardless of their view on his moral argument for god, who wishes to come to an honest unbiased conclusion over the central topic, to s<i>uspend judgement</i> as to whether such a god exists (me included with a negative view). If one cannot then one disqualifies oneself from being a fair and impartial judge in this debate.<br /><br />McDowell's presentation of this argument is a somewhat dubious rhetorical device. Debates in ethics are not usually about arguments for the existence of god. Whether intentional or not, McDowell, by introducing this argument, is "loading the dice". Given this I have no choice but to "unload the dice" and so will respond to this argument in particular even though you may not like or be uncomfortable with my conclusion, such discomfort, for the believers of McDowell's God amongst my readers, are unsound grounds to decide the primary argument.<br /><br /><b>McDowell's First Criterion</b><br />This is:<br /><blockquote>Any adequate moral system must have a transcendent standard beyond human nature.</blockquote>Really why is this qualified with "<i>human</i> nature"? What is this mysterious "transcendent standard"? Since we are talking about objective moral values what do ethicists consider the underlying issue? Well I take a stricter criterion for objective moral values, namely moral realism (anyone who argues for moral realism has to to be endorsing some form of objective moral values). This states that ethical propositions are true independent of subjective opinion. I cannot see McDowell disputing this he has said almost as much himself in criticising subjective preferences.<br /><br />Further McDowell needs to make an argument that this is <i>only</i> beyond human "nature" rather than <i>any</i> sentient being's nature. This appears to be a double standard. If McDowell is arguing for a morality which is conditional on what type of sentient being is under question, this is no different from the Nazis operating under different laws to the allies that he discussed. This is not the basis for objective moral values. Whether we are talking about aliens or god we are still talking about sentient beings, it appears quite arbitrary to include one and exclude the others. The fact that there may or may not be aliens is as moot as whether there may or may not be gods or God. If either exist they cannot be excluded from the consideration of their subjective opinions as denying objective moral values. Calling this "nature" makes no difference. If it is ones nature to have certain opinion unalterable by any circumstance it is still an opinion, whoever one is.<br /><br />As for a mysterious "transcendent standard" I can only read this as transcending any individual or group that there is a standard beyond them and this is usually called "nature" (intended clearly quite differently to McDowell's use of the term in his criterion). It is the same standard as that of any other empirical discipline, nature is the way it is regardless of however much we want it otherwise, regardless of the strength or certainty of our opinions. (I note that this is not an argument for evolutionary based morality in this context "it is gene's nature" is just as problematic as "it is in god's nature").<br /><br />There no need for a "higher law" as McDowell implied in his rhetoric over the judicial resolution to the Nazis claims to be only following order according to their legal framework. Ethics and law are related but not the same and one can consider the ethics of any law in any jurisdiction. Law alone cannot make morality - unless one is arguing for a relativism which McDowell is opposed to.<br /><br />Connecting these themes together, of course law in the natural world is descriptive not prescriptive and it would be equivocation to argue otherwise.<br /><br /><b>McDowell's Second Criterion</b><br />This is<br /><blockquote>Any adequate moral system must account for free will.</blockquote>Well this criterion bundles in a whole set of issues that would require a separate debate, so I can only be brief here. There are two issues here. The first is as to whether God is necessary for us to have free will of the kind McDowell endorses more explicitly this is libertarian, contra-causal or supernatural free will. Secondly the issue is not free will but moral responsibility and there relations. That is what any adequate moral system must account for.<br /><br />With respect to the first issue this is an un-argued for assertion by McDowell.Plenty of religious people deny such a god as McDowell's yet assert there is such a free will as McDowell believes in. Consider many variants of Buddhism, Taoism, Adviata Vedanta and other religions. However it would be diversionary to pursue McDowell's error further as the second point is far more fatal to McDowell's implications here.<br /><br />What McDowell is, presumably, concerned about is that without his type of free will there can be no moral responsibility. Now note the danger of an a<i>ppeal to consequences</i>, it may have in fact been the case that there is no moral responsibility, merely wanting that this not be the case is not a justification or argument for McDowell's type of free will.<br /><br />As it happens we do not need to worry, moral responsibility more than adequately works under determinism (and a compatibilist concept of free will, if you like). Indeed when one considers the issue in detail a McDowell type of free will appears incompatible with moral responsibility. With such a free will, no amount moral praise or blame, reward or punishment can affect such a will, it will do what it do quite regardless of the affects of these social forces and anything else. If it were always affected by these social forces then it would not be the type of free will McDowell assumes. By contrast numerous empirical studies in cognitive, moral and social psychology support a natural basis of responsibility. Indeed one could take something similar McDowell's moral argument and present it with the opposite conclusion<br /><blockquote>P1. If moral responsibility exists, then McDowell's (god-given) free will does not exist<br />P2. Moral Responsibility exists<br />C1. McDowell free will does not exist.</blockquote>Whatever else might be said this is an incredibly weak criterion that looks more like trying to deflect a significant weakness in McDowell's case by assuming the opposite of where the evidence and philosophy goes and invoking a fear of consequences to hide this move.<br /><br /><b>McDowell's Third Criterion</b><br />This is:<blockquote>Any adequate moral system must account for what makes humans special.</blockquote>What does special mean and why just human? I have already dealt with the second point in McDowell''s first criterion. It is difficult to know what McDowell means by "special" here the most charitable one I can come up with is that humans (and other higher sentient agents) are special in that they are capable of responding to verbal social forces - commendation and condemnation and so on - and that they are capable of reasoning about these issue. Animals (on this planet at least) are mostly not capable of either, especially the second. This is does not seem to be a hugely significant criterion as the issues are fairly obvious to anyone as far as I can see.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">The status of McDowell's three criteria</span><br />The first criterion seems to be a semantic manipulation what is meant by objective to permit what is otherwise the subjective opinion of an deity to appear to be objective. This is denied<br /><br />The second makes an assertion of the importance of god for free will hence responsibility, yet the slightest consideration reveals deep problems in this un-argued for assertion and it was sufficient to expose it for the rhetorical device that it was, even if there is not enough time to investigate it properly - which would be outsider the topic of this debate anyway. It certainly fails to establish any necessity for god through the back- door of free will.<br /><br />The third criterion does not seem to be saying much of anything being in support of his first criterion irrational separation of human nature from other sentient beings.<br /><br /><b>The Status of his Central Claims</b><br />So where does this leave his central claims? First we need to introduce an idea that was tacitly indicated at the beginning of my response. Why do most ethicists and other philosophers not consider McDowell's god a contender for an explanation of objective moral values? (Note this also applies to many ethicists and philosophers who do deny objective moral values, the following argument works regardless of their independent reasons to support or deny objective moral values)<br /><br />Well there are two reasons. The first is based on Plato dialogue concerning Socrates' dilemma to Euthyphro. I <a href="http://impartialism.blogspot.com/2009/04/socrates-versus-euthyphro.html">have</a> <a href="http://impartialism.blogspot.com/2009/04/god-and-euthyphro.html">written</a> <a href="http://impartialism.blogspot.com/2009/04/christianity-and-euthyphro.html">about</a> <a href="http://impartialism.blogspot.com/2009/04/debate-with-tom-gilson-on-euthyphro-and.html">this</a> <a href="http://impartialism.blogspot.com/2009/04/with-god-anything-is-possible.html">exhaustively</a> <a href="http://impartialism.blogspot.com/2009/04/gods-answer-to-euthyphro-dilemma.html">elsewhere</a> and so will not repeat myself here. To summarise, assuming since McDowell uses Craig's argument from morality that he also agrees with Craig's definition of theistic moral value, with the failed Thomist solution, the dilemma is "is it moral good because it is in God's eternal nature or is it in god's eternal nature because it is good"? If one takes the first horn, as everything in McDowell's argument indicates that he does, then he has chosen the subjective horn.<br /><br />The second reason goes to point that McDowell raises at the beginning of his argument and only half correctly notes that it is not substantive to the central topic, namely that "believers can do bad things, and do them <i>in the name of</i> God." Now merely to provide a list of examples that agree with this is, as McDowell notes, not a substantive point in this debate. However he is only half correct since the issue is not that this has occurred, which he grants, but that there is <i>no objective basis</i> to determine who is correct. Whatever reasons and evidences McDowell proposes to support his view, equivalent are and have been proposed to claims at best contradictory and at worst contrary to his. There are no objective means to distinguish such claims., only subjective and relative ones, which McDowell implies elsewhere are no basis at to determining objective moral values.<br /><br />The Euthyphro point is over ontological subjectivity whereas this second point is over epistemological subjectivity, a question of how or anyone can know what objective moral values are. As much as he would like to know what is <i>really</i> right and wrong his conception of theistic-based morality can provide neither ontological grounds nor epistemological knowledge, so far from god providing the best grounds for (objective) moral value, it provides no grounds nor knowledge of such values.<br /><br />To update McDowells' two central claims:<br /><br /><ol><li>If a McDowell type God does not exist, we could have a solid foundation for [objective] moral values. </li><li>If a McDowell type God does exist, there cannot be a solid foundation for [objective] moral values. </li></ol><br />Here claim 1 is straightforward we must look elsewhere for such a foundation. Claim 2 is far stronger and I might have made too strong, however it does seem to follow logically from everything discussed so far. So I will finish by expanding on my revision of McDowell's second claim.<br /><br /><b>An Atheist Argument from Morality</b><br />I think this is sufficient to establish this McDowell's explanation is a failed candidate, but I would like to go further and show that it is not even wrong as an explanation. Given that he has already utilised Craig's purported Argument from Morality we can revisit this and re-examine the above stated problematic first premise.<br /><br /><blockquote>P1. If a McDowell type God does not exist then objective moral values do not exist.<br />P2. Objective moral values do exist.<br />C1.Therefore, a McDowell type God exists.</blockquote><br />As stated far above I grant Premise 2 but my response shows many problems with P1 and would replace it with P3.<br /><blockquote>P3. If objective moral values exist then a McDowell type God does not exist</blockquote><br />This leads, with P2, to a new conclusion<br /><blockquote>C2. Therefore, a McDowell type God does not exist.</blockquote><br />Note that I qualified this notion of god, this is a specific argument at a very specific conception of god, many theists do not have such a conception of god, and for them such an argument holds no merit but then they would also agree that god is not the best basis for objective moral values! This argument is not aimed at such theists.<br /><br />A final point is that you non-theistic non-moral realist readers do not have to agree with P2 , you can deny it if you wish. The issue is that McDowell (and Craig etc.) do not, and their position leads to a performative contradiction. If they insist that objective moral values exist they cannot also assert that moral values are based upon god's eternal nature, they are, as far as I can see, logically incompatible, indeed to maintain such a position is actually incoherent.<br /><br />As for wishing to consider who has the best explanation of moral values, their candidate is a complete non-starter since it is <i>not even wrong </i>and <i>no amount</i> of debate, dispute and dissection of any other moral theory that, however poor or well, does endeavour to explain objective moral value<i>s can ever make it a candidate let alone the best explanation. </i><br /><br />Indeed all the argument indicates that the only honest and true conclusion to make it that if one does believe there are objective moral values, then this is a good reason to dis-believe in the existence of such a god.Martin Freedmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16952072422175870627noreply@blogger.com9