On the radio yesterday a House Republican explained that though he didn't expect his party to do well in the next election he expected that sooner or later "the pendulum would swing back the other way" allowing his party to come back to power. This metaphor is a common one but I think it's the hides more than it reveals. A pendulum implies that the various political parties/philosophies stand still while the voting public swings about. The reality is that the political parties and their ideologies are the changing too.
Of course they're changing! We're learning more and more everyday. From how to best administer health care to how regulatory capture can warp well-intentioned plans; voters are going to form different opinions based on new information and experiences. Moreover, the actual problems facing society are changing all the time. Many of them won't require government intervention but some of them will. Any political party that puts ideological fealty over pragmatically grappling with relevant issues is going to be toast electorally.
An Example: When facts on the ground show that "preemptive" war and unilateralism don't work, that creates an opportunity for either party. On the left that meant passing over those who supported the war to nominate a candidate who opposed it from the beginning. On the right it's lead to a renewed interest in isolationists (or "non-interventionists") like Ron Paul. One can only imagine this interest increasing if the right meets more electoral defeats. Either way the parties are changing every bit as much as the populace is.
At first glance the history of American politics might look like a fickle populace swing back and forth between two parties. But the party labels disguise the constantly changing ideologies underneath.
So in conclusion let me offer a new metaphor for democratic politics. Voters are like a laser-pointer spot moving randomly around the room and the parties are like two cats trying to catch it.
Showing posts with label philosophy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label philosophy. Show all posts
Saturday, August 09, 2008
Monday, July 07, 2008
Incoherence vs "unrecognized subtlety"
This whole discussion about libertarianism and liberalism is so facinating I'm sad I missed a lot of it due to a super-long awesome wedding party. Reading the comments however I think I have bit more to add.
Though it's generally never a good idea I'd like to draw a distinction between my own views and Paul's when he writes:
Allow me to be the first to plead guilty to being mistaken about my own beliefs. In rereading my previous post on liberalism I realize that it does a poor job of explaining what I believe. In fact, it seems that I defined liberalism so broadly that it could probably include most of conservatism. I guess this shouldn't be surprising. Both liberals and conservatives agree that the government should be used to make people's lives better - they just differ as to the best way. Liberals want to use government to create a high-speed rail system. Conservatives want to use it to stop people from drinking too much.
The only thing my definition does manage to do is distinguish my philosophy with the rights-based constricted ones like Communism and Libertarianism where rights based arguments - not efficiency ones - are used much more more often to define the role of the state in the economy.
But back to my crappy definition of liberalism. I first recognized this shortcoming when I started trying use the "more better options" business to explain why I support the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA). It turns out it's pretty difficult. The "more, better options" doesn't include any concept of fairness which is pretty important. I think I ought to think about exactly how that figures in and if that can be used to distinguish conservatism from liberalism.
Though it's generally never a good idea I'd like to draw a distinction between my own views and Paul's when he writes:
...The point is that when you put pressure on thinking that is ostensibly "libertarian", you tend to find a hodge-podge of other philosophies being applied in selective ways. Sometimes it's strict constructionism, sometimes it's about negative liberty, sometimes it's about the inefficiency of government. That makes the arguments difficult to engage with and, I think, suggests that the philosophy itself is somewhat incoherent.Paul writes that since many libertarians don't seem to be applying their claimed precepts in a regular way that those individuals probably have an incoherent philosophy. I disagree. In the same way that a native English speaker can form coherent sentences without having to memorize thousands of grammatical rules, so to can people subscribe to and practice a coherent political philosophy without being consciously aware of which values they are applying and how. Indeed, I suspect that most politically aware people have very regular system of rules and values for making political decisions that they follow even if they are mistaken about the nature of their own political philosophy.
Allow me to be the first to plead guilty to being mistaken about my own beliefs. In rereading my previous post on liberalism I realize that it does a poor job of explaining what I believe. In fact, it seems that I defined liberalism so broadly that it could probably include most of conservatism. I guess this shouldn't be surprising. Both liberals and conservatives agree that the government should be used to make people's lives better - they just differ as to the best way. Liberals want to use government to create a high-speed rail system. Conservatives want to use it to stop people from drinking too much.
The only thing my definition does manage to do is distinguish my philosophy with the rights-based constricted ones like Communism and Libertarianism where rights based arguments - not efficiency ones - are used much more more often to define the role of the state in the economy.
But back to my crappy definition of liberalism. I first recognized this shortcoming when I started trying use the "more better options" business to explain why I support the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA). It turns out it's pretty difficult. The "more, better options" doesn't include any concept of fairness which is pretty important. I think I ought to think about exactly how that figures in and if that can be used to distinguish conservatism from liberalism.
Thursday, May 10, 2007
Blood, Water, Etc.
Mark Kleiman makes an argument against free trade that's a lot like an argument I made when applying to an undergraduate political philosophy seminar at Cal:
I agree that it seems very plausible to say that we have special, or additional, moral obligations to "those with whom [we] cooperate more", like relatives, co-workers, teammates, etc. Lumping all of those groups together, though, obscures the fact that even if that's true (and let's just assume it is), the degree of additional obligation is measured on a sliding scale. For example, however much extra weight my parents deserve in my moral calculations, odds are that the woman who lives in the apartment below mine deserves rather less, and that the clerk who checked my ID at Albertsons this evening should get less still. And the further removed an individual is from my day-to-day life, the harder it becomes to discern which features of our relationship warrant this sort of special moral attention. By the time we're talking about call center operators in Virginia, our actual relationship is pretty vague indeed and it seems to me that we've slid pretty far down that sliding scale. How much further down, really, is the Mexican factory worker?
What's more, even if interpersonal relationships create additional moral considerations, so do other factors. Most notably - as Kleiman himself mentions - we're way richer than the other people we're considering trading with. If liberalizing trade would benefit the citizens of other countries at some expense to American citizens, then surely it matters how much poorer than our own those other citizens are. Nobody thinks the rule is to promote your family's well-being at any cost to others.
Now, I think that Kleiman feels like he's accommodating that egalitarian concern by endorsing the idea that "a big, rich country like the U.S. ought to be a generous contributor both to world-scale public goods and to the needs of the global poor." But if it's OK to tax our relatively rich compatriots to help out relatively poor foreigners, why is it not OK to allow certain jobs to move across the border, instead of cash? Free trade, on this account, is just de facto foreign aid, with the additional likely benefit (in many cases) of bringing more, cheaper goods to American consumers.
P.S. - Of course, Brad DeLong's response to all of this is going to be much simpler. My understanding is that he's a pretty strict utilitarian, and so would reject from the start the suggestion that, say, family members "deserve" any special moral consideration at all. Sure, maybe as a rule of thumb it's good to make the well-being of one's family a higher priority than the well-being of strangers, because this will probably tend to create the greatest happiness overall. But it's not like your aunt, qua your aunt, is somehow more special than other peoples' aunts. After all, it's hard to imagine something more random than the fact of you being related to your aunt. As they say, you don't pick your family.
Economic exchange is an important means of facilitating cooperation, but it is not the only means. Kinship, norms enforced by reputational effects, and state action also organize cooperation. It is neither irrational nor morally wrong for me to be more eager to benefit, and more reluctant to harm, those with whom I cooperate more, because they are my relatives, because they are my neighbors or my co-workers or my fellow-members of other groups that embody collective social capital, or because they are my fellow-citizens.The thing is, for my application I also had to make an opposing argument.
The sovereign state has the capacity to pay for public goods by compulsory taxation, thus avoiding the free-rider problem. Wages or profits earned by people or firms that pay U.S. taxes are more important to me than wages or profits earned by those who pay taxes elsewhere, because I get a share of those wages or profits in the form of greater expenditure on public goods or reduced taxation. But even putting that aside, the feeling of community among Americans or Mexicans or Germans or Thais has all sorts of beneficial results (along, of course, with some quite horrible ones).
Does that mean that nations should be entirely selfish? No, any more than the fact that parents care more about their own children than they do about other children means that families should be entirely selfish. In particular, a big, rich country like the U.S. ought to be a generous contributor both to world-scale public goods and to the needs of the global poor.
I agree that it seems very plausible to say that we have special, or additional, moral obligations to "those with whom [we] cooperate more", like relatives, co-workers, teammates, etc. Lumping all of those groups together, though, obscures the fact that even if that's true (and let's just assume it is), the degree of additional obligation is measured on a sliding scale. For example, however much extra weight my parents deserve in my moral calculations, odds are that the woman who lives in the apartment below mine deserves rather less, and that the clerk who checked my ID at Albertsons this evening should get less still. And the further removed an individual is from my day-to-day life, the harder it becomes to discern which features of our relationship warrant this sort of special moral attention. By the time we're talking about call center operators in Virginia, our actual relationship is pretty vague indeed and it seems to me that we've slid pretty far down that sliding scale. How much further down, really, is the Mexican factory worker?
What's more, even if interpersonal relationships create additional moral considerations, so do other factors. Most notably - as Kleiman himself mentions - we're way richer than the other people we're considering trading with. If liberalizing trade would benefit the citizens of other countries at some expense to American citizens, then surely it matters how much poorer than our own those other citizens are. Nobody thinks the rule is to promote your family's well-being at any cost to others.
Now, I think that Kleiman feels like he's accommodating that egalitarian concern by endorsing the idea that "a big, rich country like the U.S. ought to be a generous contributor both to world-scale public goods and to the needs of the global poor." But if it's OK to tax our relatively rich compatriots to help out relatively poor foreigners, why is it not OK to allow certain jobs to move across the border, instead of cash? Free trade, on this account, is just de facto foreign aid, with the additional likely benefit (in many cases) of bringing more, cheaper goods to American consumers.
P.S. - Of course, Brad DeLong's response to all of this is going to be much simpler. My understanding is that he's a pretty strict utilitarian, and so would reject from the start the suggestion that, say, family members "deserve" any special moral consideration at all. Sure, maybe as a rule of thumb it's good to make the well-being of one's family a higher priority than the well-being of strangers, because this will probably tend to create the greatest happiness overall. But it's not like your aunt, qua your aunt, is somehow more special than other peoples' aunts. After all, it's hard to imagine something more random than the fact of you being related to your aunt. As they say, you don't pick your family.
Saturday, May 05, 2007
The Below-Minimum Wages Of Religion
Ezra would "happily bargain away whatever satisfaction I supposedly derive from my bold freethinking for a sense of serenity, a perceived connection to a more permanent and grounding plane, and a steadying faith in the continuation of my consciousness." I say, none of those supposed benefits are actually of any utilitarian value unless you've actually bargained away not just your atheism, but also your faculties for critical thinking. (There's nothing about permanence or impermanence that would actually make life any more or less meaningless, for instance.) But if you've given up those critical capacities, not only is your own life likely to suffer on balance, but you're also much more likely to be a significant drag on the overall happiness of the world. So I can see the appeal of ignorant bliss from the blissfully ignorant point of view, but I don't see the sense of the trade from point of view you have to occupy to consider it in the first place.
I suppose we could stipulate that the only stuff you'd have to stop thinking critically about would be the metaphysics and the existentialism, but as long as we're tailoring our hypothetical trade-offs to suit our preferences, I'd rather just be blissfully happy in the employment of my critical thinking abilities.
I suppose we could stipulate that the only stuff you'd have to stop thinking critically about would be the metaphysics and the existentialism, but as long as we're tailoring our hypothetical trade-offs to suit our preferences, I'd rather just be blissfully happy in the employment of my critical thinking abilities.
Monday, April 23, 2007
On Liberty & Utilitarianism
Radley Balko marvels at the fact that Barney Frank can be both a fan of John Stuart Mill and "a big government socialist on most economic issues". The implication - or assumption - is supposed to be that Frank is being inconsistent, presumably because he hasn't thought through his beliefs very carefully.
Except that, as it turns out, John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism is one of the most influential books in the history of...egalitarian liberalism! Mill was a big fan of freedom, definitely. At the same time, though, he thought that the organizing principle of society - and life generally - should be the "greatest happiness principle", which "holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness." That is the fundamental ethical principle of Mill's philosophy. Note that it says not a single word about liberty.
Once you factor in the law of diminishing marginal utility, Mill's ethics offer a powerful argument that will frequently justify redistributing significant quantities of wealth from the rich to the poor - i.e., big government socialism, as defined by our right-wing friends at Reason.
And not to hassle Balko with needless details, but Mill was also an advocate, in many cases, of government intervention, provided that it was to the benefit of society's aggregate happiness. In later years he was essentially a socialist himself, but even earlier on he advocated free markets primarily because he thought they were an effective way of promoting happiness, not because they were ends in themselves. And that really gets at the central flaw of libertarian thinking, doesn't it?
Except that, as it turns out, John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism is one of the most influential books in the history of...egalitarian liberalism! Mill was a big fan of freedom, definitely. At the same time, though, he thought that the organizing principle of society - and life generally - should be the "greatest happiness principle", which "holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness." That is the fundamental ethical principle of Mill's philosophy. Note that it says not a single word about liberty.
Once you factor in the law of diminishing marginal utility, Mill's ethics offer a powerful argument that will frequently justify redistributing significant quantities of wealth from the rich to the poor - i.e., big government socialism, as defined by our right-wing friends at Reason.
And not to hassle Balko with needless details, but Mill was also an advocate, in many cases, of government intervention, provided that it was to the benefit of society's aggregate happiness. In later years he was essentially a socialist himself, but even earlier on he advocated free markets primarily because he thought they were an effective way of promoting happiness, not because they were ends in themselves. And that really gets at the central flaw of libertarian thinking, doesn't it?
Tuesday, April 17, 2007
Evolution Debate Post-Mortem
Out of a dangerous combination of curiosity and boredom, I got myself into an evolution/creationism debate here. It seems to have winded down, so for my own benefit I decided to go through and try to discern from where the disagreement between the parties was originating. I think I've identified the following misconceptions, each of which may or may not be held by creationists/religious sorts generally. I list them in the order they came up or became clear to me.
Also interesting, but maybe less satisfying to examine, is the peculiar combination of smugness and defensiveness on the part of my interlocutor. On the one hand, I'm told that as an atheist I get a "free ride" from my Christian countrymen and it's suggested that I must not truly understand theistic arguments. At the same time, I'm told I'm "insulting" his intelligence by suggesting that his reasoning is flawed and I'm "hectoring" him when I request examples or arguments in support of his assertions.
Then there's the troubling bigotry of not only the assertion that atheists are doomed to moral inferiority (because we must be relativists!), but also the implication that specifically Judeo-Christian theism is required for sound moral infrastructure. Besides being a (surprise!) reductive view of the history of Western civilization, it also gives short shrift to the two-thirds of the world's population that doesn't share the peculiar religious beliefs of my opponent.
For me, the point of all of this was getting more of a sense of how a great many people think about these things. I've spent the last seven years or so in the Bay Area, and four of those years I spent studying science. It's easy for me to forget that a great many people haven't had the same good fortune.
- Evolution by natural selection amounts to "time plus chance plus a protein molecule" - This is, of course, a wildly reductive way of describing the relevant theories, and you can't really create this sort of caricature without misrepresenting the ideas being discussed. Certainly, the atheistic view is that evolution by natural selection proceeds without conscious control, which makes it, in some sense, a "random" process. But it also happens as the result of predictable natural processes, a feature that loose firings of the word "random" don't really seem to capture.
- "Faith" is required to believe in naturalistic explanations - This is a confusion. It's true that science, by and large, does not consist in a priori reasoning, so its conclusions can't be known with complete certainty. However, it does not follow from the fact that we cannot know X with certainty that believing X requires "faith". Rather, appropriate scientific beliefs are held with relative certainty - as they are viewed as more probable than competing alternatives - and are subject to falsification by evidence. To the extent that a belief admits of the possibility of falsification by evidence, it cannot be described as requiring "faith" in the sense that the word is typically used. Articles of religious faith are not fundamentally probabilistic in the same way scientific beliefs are. Personally, I like to think of scientific beliefs, or a posteriori beliefs generally, as operating assumptions. (Later in the thread, I had to explain that science does most of its work through induction not deduction, so the fundamental problem seems to be a failure to distinguish different types of reasoning.)
- We have lots of reasons to think that the Bible is a reliable historical record - Given the extent to which the Bible is internally inconsistent, it seems odd to put a lot of stock in its consistency with external reality.
- Various complex biological phenomena are irreducibly complex, in the sense that they couldn't have evolved gradually over time according to prevailing theories - Creationists don't seem to realize that arguments appealing to supposed irreducible complexity are 1) incredibly ambitious and 2) ridiculously arrogant. Ambitious because you have to rule out every possible progression of evolution as incompatible with theories of natural selection, and arrogant because you have to assume that just because you can't think of a way something could have evolved, it must not have been possible by natural means. As I said in the comments, the poverty of a given individual's imagination says nothing about the potential of evolution by natural selection. And all of this completely puts aside the fact that, so far as I know, every single example put forward by creationists as an instance of irreducible complexity has been rebutted with a possible mechanism of evolution in which each individual step is either selectively advantageous or selectively neutral.
- There's nothing improbable about the theory that God created everything - However improbable our scientific theories are, surely the theory that God exists and also provides all of our scientific evidence is more improbable still. The bottom line is that if you want to theorize God's existence and agency, that theory either demands explanation and justification, or it does not. If it does, then you should provide it. If it does not, then theistic theories are being held to a much lower standard than scientific theories. This is related to another misconception:
- Supernatural theories have significant explanatory power - As I said over the course of the argument: First, why assume that a supernatural force must be involved rather than wait and see if a natural explanation can be uncovered? Second, if the force in question has all sorts of physical, material, natural influences and effects, in what sense is it supernatural at all? Why don't we just describe it as a natural force? What work is the "supernatural" part doing except letting us wave away the aspects of the question we don't understand?
- Evolution by natural selection violates the 2nd law of thermodynamics - I didn't realize people still believed this, so it's helpful to see that the misconception persists. Anyway, the 2nd law pertains closed systems; organisms are not closed systems, so the 2nd law doesn't apply.
Also interesting, but maybe less satisfying to examine, is the peculiar combination of smugness and defensiveness on the part of my interlocutor. On the one hand, I'm told that as an atheist I get a "free ride" from my Christian countrymen and it's suggested that I must not truly understand theistic arguments. At the same time, I'm told I'm "insulting" his intelligence by suggesting that his reasoning is flawed and I'm "hectoring" him when I request examples or arguments in support of his assertions.
Then there's the troubling bigotry of not only the assertion that atheists are doomed to moral inferiority (because we must be relativists!), but also the implication that specifically Judeo-Christian theism is required for sound moral infrastructure. Besides being a (surprise!) reductive view of the history of Western civilization, it also gives short shrift to the two-thirds of the world's population that doesn't share the peculiar religious beliefs of my opponent.
For me, the point of all of this was getting more of a sense of how a great many people think about these things. I've spent the last seven years or so in the Bay Area, and four of those years I spent studying science. It's easy for me to forget that a great many people haven't had the same good fortune.
Monday, March 12, 2007
Let them have Fox News
How do people come about their political positions and how does this affect the evolution of political movements? My personal belief is that the politically involved tend to pick a political world-view around ages 20-25 and stick with it for life. This view is entirely based on personal experience.
I'm a politically involved person. So is everyone who writes for this site and so are you, probably. My personal world view consists of things like:
I fully admit to not being as open-minded as I would like to be. In high school, I was pro-life and vaguely anti-gay and even flirted with opposing contraception (it's an easy position for a Catholic who had never kissed a girl). All of these beliefs were reconsidered during the late 90'. Then I kind of stopped dramatically changing my positions on things. I tell myself that the facts on the ground don't warrant changing my position on X or Y, but that's just what I would think, isn't it? Now that I've identified with one side (liberal wonkosphere) there's a whole set of primal group dynamics encouraging me to stick with the others who've made the same decision.
So let's say that people form their opinions early in adulthood, group up, and then stick with those groups even if the case for those political ideas weakens. What you'd expect to see over the lifetime of a political movement is something like this:
Kevin says conservatives would do well to ignore Fox News because it makes them complacent. I ask: Is Fox News making conservatives complacent and closed-minded or is conservative closed-mindedness and complacency making them seek out things like Fox news? Shouldn't we expect that a movement built in the 60's and 70's and which applied it's polices throughout the 80's and 90s would find it's world-view no longer appealing in the 00's? And do we really expect Republicans will change their world-view if only they stopped watching Fox News?
Granted, political movements as vast as conservatism should have some flexibility to adopt new understandings, but I suspect that those new world-views come from new recruits, not grizzled veterans. Basically, if you're the type of person who want to cocoon him/herself with Fox News, getting rid of Fox News isn't going to help you.
*The answer: earth, 1972
I'm a politically involved person. So is everyone who writes for this site and so are you, probably. My personal world view consists of things like:
- The Christian right is crazier than anything on the left.
- America has the power to invade a country and drive out a specific bad leader and stop specific atrocities, but we don't have the power to bring democracy or stability if the country is inhospitable to it.
- Quote: "about zero percent of the electorate is primarily motivated by a principled opposition to state coercion"
- Liberals should not be afraid to stand up for what they believe in.
I fully admit to not being as open-minded as I would like to be. In high school, I was pro-life and vaguely anti-gay and even flirted with opposing contraception (it's an easy position for a Catholic who had never kissed a girl). All of these beliefs were reconsidered during the late 90'. Then I kind of stopped dramatically changing my positions on things. I tell myself that the facts on the ground don't warrant changing my position on X or Y, but that's just what I would think, isn't it? Now that I've identified with one side (liberal wonkosphere) there's a whole set of primal group dynamics encouraging me to stick with the others who've made the same decision.
So let's say that people form their opinions early in adulthood, group up, and then stick with those groups even if the case for those political ideas weakens. What you'd expect to see over the lifetime of a political movement is something like this:
- A set of problems mold the world-view of people with certain values. They group up and recommend certain policies.
- If they come to power, those policies gets enacted.
- The reality changes and the world-view is no longer accurate (either because the problem is solved or because their polices have proven ineffective).
- The group stops taking on new members as fewer people adopt the world-view.
- The groups fades away as members die out or find themselves unable to form political coalitions with other groups.
Kevin says conservatives would do well to ignore Fox News because it makes them complacent. I ask: Is Fox News making conservatives complacent and closed-minded or is conservative closed-mindedness and complacency making them seek out things like Fox news? Shouldn't we expect that a movement built in the 60's and 70's and which applied it's polices throughout the 80's and 90s would find it's world-view no longer appealing in the 00's? And do we really expect Republicans will change their world-view if only they stopped watching Fox News?
Granted, political movements as vast as conservatism should have some flexibility to adopt new understandings, but I suspect that those new world-views come from new recruits, not grizzled veterans. Basically, if you're the type of person who want to cocoon him/herself with Fox News, getting rid of Fox News isn't going to help you.
*The answer: earth, 1972
Sunday, January 21, 2007
More on Consciousness
I'd blogged a little bit about the metaphysics of the mind last week, and now I see that Time has dedicated its most recent issue to the brain.
Steven Pinker gives gives an overview of "a bracing new field, the science of consciousness." Pinker mentions the philosophical controversy around the relationship between the mind and the body, but Daniel Dennett spends a few hundred words suggesting that there's not really anything very mysterious about consciousness in the first place; it's probably just a novel physical phenomenon we'll figure out in due time. Colin McGinn agrees about the metaphysics but is less sanguine about the epistemology.
I'd just add that cognitive science is one of those fields that has depended pretty heavily on analytic philosophy for its advancement. Metaphysics going at least as far back as Descartes has done a lot of the work of directing scientists to the right sorts of questions to ask and the right places to look for answers. Ditto for Einstein and special relativity. Of course, once a branch of philosophy becomes incorporated into a branch of the hard sciences, everybody stops thinking about it as philosophy. Philosophy itself is therefore doomed to always appear irrelevant and frivolous to most people. A pity.
Steven Pinker gives gives an overview of "a bracing new field, the science of consciousness." Pinker mentions the philosophical controversy around the relationship between the mind and the body, but Daniel Dennett spends a few hundred words suggesting that there's not really anything very mysterious about consciousness in the first place; it's probably just a novel physical phenomenon we'll figure out in due time. Colin McGinn agrees about the metaphysics but is less sanguine about the epistemology.
I'd just add that cognitive science is one of those fields that has depended pretty heavily on analytic philosophy for its advancement. Metaphysics going at least as far back as Descartes has done a lot of the work of directing scientists to the right sorts of questions to ask and the right places to look for answers. Ditto for Einstein and special relativity. Of course, once a branch of philosophy becomes incorporated into a branch of the hard sciences, everybody stops thinking about it as philosophy. Philosophy itself is therefore doomed to always appear irrelevant and frivolous to most people. A pity.
Monday, January 15, 2007
Dawkins, Nagel, and The God Delusion
I just finished reading Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion, and I liked it very much. It's a book trying to popularize certain biological and philosophical ideas, and having studied both biology and philosophy in college, there was much I found unoriginal and a little that I felt was poorly treated. Nonetheless, on the whole the book is very interesting, not least for it's hard-line stance against religion. The central project of the book is well captured by the title of the fourth chapter: "Why There Almost Certainly Is No God". And Dawkins makes a point of being as blunt as possible about his anti-theism. Raising the young to be religious is child abuse, he thinks, and he fails to see why theology ought to be viewed as a field of study at all.
As my acquaintances may guess, I am broadly sympathetic to these sorts of ideas. I'll come right out and say that I think the world would be a better place, on balance, without religion, and I too resent the privileged status granted to religious beliefs such that they are considered to be above criticism. Believing something to be true in the absence of supporting evidence is, to put it mildly, silly, and when the evidence is in opposition to your belief, well, then, you're just being willfully stupid.
When it comes to matters of faith, though, a great many people are willfully stupid, and a great many of the criticisms of The God Delusion are predictably unintelligent. There is the fair charge that the book is poorly edited and contemptuous, but none of that speaks to the merits of its argumentation. I'd like to have read a clearer, more disciplined book, but that sort of quibble is a distraction. It's also true that Dawkins could have been more polite in his delivery but, again, the most this gets you as a criticism is that the book is likely to offend people it could otherwise persuade.
To date, I've read only one insightful criticism of this book, and it comes from Thomas Nagel. I'd known that Nagel had written a review , but prior to reading the book I didn't see why I should particularly care what he had to say about it since it wasn't obviously his field. Dawkins, though, makes some dismissive comments about moral absolutism and ontological dualism. After reading the book, I can see why Nagel would be interested, since Nagel is among the world's foremost advocates of both moral absolutism and ontological dualism. And besides, Nagel's a genuinely brilliant guy - a fact I can testify to not just as a result of reading his work but also from personal experience - so, I signed up for a trial subscription to the otherwise-lame New Republic just to read what he had to say.
Nagel's objection boils down to this:
Now, I think Nagel is right that Dawkins is too dismissive of dualism in general, probably because his exposure to philosophy is limited. You can file a similar complaint against Dawkins's contempt of moral absolutism, best captured by this bit from pg. 232:
One is forced to conclude that Dawkins isn't actually very familiar with the ins-and-outs of contemporary philosophy, since he seems oblivious to the widely-respected arguments for both ontological dualism and ethical absolutism. In both cases he just assumes - without any evident reason - that the position he disfavors is necessarily bound up with religion, and must therefore be summarily tossed out.
Plainly put, Dawkins is wrong to reject dualism and absolutism on the basis of the arguments he offers. At the same time, those technical philosophical criticisms have almost no practical impact on the arguments of the book. One need not reject ontological dualism to point out that religious people ascribe all sorts of ridiculous characteristics to the non-physical world and tend to assume that if non-physical phenomena exist, they must be the sort of phenomena that are described in, for instance, the Bible. Similarly, one need not reject moral absolutism to acknowledge that religious groups tend to come up with really lousy moral absolutes.
In other words, Dawkins assumes in multiple instances that when the content of religious beliefs is absurd, the underlying ethics or metaphysics must be equally absurd. That's a baby-with-the-bathwater mistake, and Dawkins of all people probably has friends who could have helped him clarify his thinking. Instead, he gets the philosophy wrong even though it's got no significance to his central thesis: namely, that we'd do well to get rid of religion altogether.
Update: Because Tom asked, and because I felt like this post wasn't quite long enough, I thought I'd expand on my thoughts on dualism a little bit.
I personally don't know that I subscribe to dualism. But I don't think I'm really committed to monism, either. My issue with Dawkins is that he just acts like dualism is obviously wrong, but in fact that is one of the central and most contentious questions in contemporary metaphysics.
I think dualism's got problems - most notably, a dualist has got to give some account of how it is that an essentially non-physical thing can interact causally with a physical thing (without running into conservation of energy problems, no less!) But dualism also has some very powerful arguments going for it.
The gist of the problem was formulated with force by Nagel, in that "Bat" article I linked to.
Reducing the mind down to physical facts about the body isn't like, say, reducing proteins down to individual amino acids, he thinks, because mental phenomena are necessarily subjective, while the physicalist project is aimed at moving toward ever-increasing objectivity. I can imagine, at best, what it would be like for me to be a bat, but no amount of physical knowledge could possibly let me know what it's like for the bat. This isn't a problem about being able to reproduce neurological states; it's a problem about being able to actually occupy a point of view that's not your own.
I think Nagel identifies a very real problem here, but Frank Jackson probably did it more clearly in "What Mary Didn't Know", the central argument of which is this:
Mary is a girl who is locked up in a black and white room without windows, where she is taught every physical fact about the world (using, of course, only black and white materials.) If it is actually possible to explain everything in the world in terms of physical facts, Mary knows everything there is to know.
Presumably, though, if Mary is then let out of the room, she will learn something new: namely, what it is like to see, for instance, red.
The underlying concern in both cases is that mental phenomena seem to have these subjective properties - "qualia", in the jargon - that you just can't get at with any quantity of physical knowledge. It's difficult to see how any set of physical facts could possibly lead to knowledge about what a mental phenomenon is like.
Of course, the way that philosophy works is that a lot of very smart people - Dawkins's buddy Daniel Dennett, for instance - have come up with really brilliant reasons why we shouldn't think that Mary learns anything new at all when she leaves her room. But it's not like the case has been closed, and my only real problem was with Dawkins acting like it was.
For my own part, I have physicalist sympathies, and I get the impression that monism generally is on the rise these days. But I am by no means confident that I could ever know what being a bat is like for a bat, and I think that's a real dilemma.
As my acquaintances may guess, I am broadly sympathetic to these sorts of ideas. I'll come right out and say that I think the world would be a better place, on balance, without religion, and I too resent the privileged status granted to religious beliefs such that they are considered to be above criticism. Believing something to be true in the absence of supporting evidence is, to put it mildly, silly, and when the evidence is in opposition to your belief, well, then, you're just being willfully stupid.
When it comes to matters of faith, though, a great many people are willfully stupid, and a great many of the criticisms of The God Delusion are predictably unintelligent. There is the fair charge that the book is poorly edited and contemptuous, but none of that speaks to the merits of its argumentation. I'd like to have read a clearer, more disciplined book, but that sort of quibble is a distraction. It's also true that Dawkins could have been more polite in his delivery but, again, the most this gets you as a criticism is that the book is likely to offend people it could otherwise persuade.
To date, I've read only one insightful criticism of this book, and it comes from Thomas Nagel. I'd known that Nagel had written a review , but prior to reading the book I didn't see why I should particularly care what he had to say about it since it wasn't obviously his field. Dawkins, though, makes some dismissive comments about moral absolutism and ontological dualism. After reading the book, I can see why Nagel would be interested, since Nagel is among the world's foremost advocates of both moral absolutism and ontological dualism. And besides, Nagel's a genuinely brilliant guy - a fact I can testify to not just as a result of reading his work but also from personal experience - so, I signed up for a trial subscription to the otherwise-lame New Republic just to read what he had to say.
Nagel's objection boils down to this:
The fear of religion leads too many scientifically minded atheists to cling to a defensive, world-flattening reductionism. Dawkins, like many of his contemporaries, is hobbled by the assumption that the only alternative to religion is to insist that the ultimate explanation of everything must lie in particle physics, string theory, or whatever purely extensional laws govern the elements of which the material world is composed.In other words, Dawkins has succumbed to the temptation to think that everything that exists has to be explained exclusively and ultimately in physical terms. Initially, Nagel dismissively refers to this as "amateur philosophy". Eventually he concedes in an off-hand way that there are actually a lot of questions left unanswered by "[a]ny anti-reductionist view", but the gist of the complaint seems to be that if Dawkins had just read "What is it Like to be a Bat?", his book would be very different (and, presumably, better.)
This reductionist dream is nourished by the extraordinary success of the physical sciences in our time, not least in their recent application to the understanding of life through molecular biology. It is natural to try to take any successful intellectual method as far as it will go. Yet the impulse to find an explanation of everything in physics has over the last fifty years gotten out of control. The concepts of physical science provide a very special, and partial, description of the world that experience reveals to us. It is the world with all subjective consciousness, sensory appearances, thought, value, purpose, and will left out. What remains is the mathematically describable order of things and events in space and time.
Now, I think Nagel is right that Dawkins is too dismissive of dualism in general, probably because his exposure to philosophy is limited. You can file a similar complaint against Dawkins's contempt of moral absolutism, best captured by this bit from pg. 232:
Moral philosophers are the professionals when it comes to thinking about right and wrong. As Robert Hinde succinctly put it, they agree that 'moral precepts, while not necessarily constructed by reason, should be defensible by reason'. They classify themselves in many ways, but in modern terminology the major divide is between 'deontologists' (such as Kant) and 'consequentialists' (including 'utilitarians' such as Jeremy Bentham, 1748-1832). Deontology is a fancy name for the belief that morality consists in the obeying of rules. It is literally the science of duty, from the Greek for 'that which is binding'. Deontology is not quite the same thing as moral absolutism, but for most purposes in a book about religion there is no need to dwell on the distinction. Absolutists believe there are absolutes of right and wrong, imperatives whose rightness makes no reference to their consequences. Consequentialists more pragmatically hold that the morality of an action should be judged by its consequences.Since Dawkins himself had pointed out only a few pages earlier that there are very plausible arguments that Kant was himself an atheist, it's not clear why he now dismisses deontologists out of hand as religious nuts. Certainly today there are no shortage of non-religious deontologists among the ranks of those moral philosophers who "are the professionals when it comes to thinking about right and wrong." (Nagel is one, as a matter of fact.)
..
Not all absolutism is derived from religion. Nevertheless, it is pretty hard to defend absolutist morals on grounds other than religious ones.
One is forced to conclude that Dawkins isn't actually very familiar with the ins-and-outs of contemporary philosophy, since he seems oblivious to the widely-respected arguments for both ontological dualism and ethical absolutism. In both cases he just assumes - without any evident reason - that the position he disfavors is necessarily bound up with religion, and must therefore be summarily tossed out.
Plainly put, Dawkins is wrong to reject dualism and absolutism on the basis of the arguments he offers. At the same time, those technical philosophical criticisms have almost no practical impact on the arguments of the book. One need not reject ontological dualism to point out that religious people ascribe all sorts of ridiculous characteristics to the non-physical world and tend to assume that if non-physical phenomena exist, they must be the sort of phenomena that are described in, for instance, the Bible. Similarly, one need not reject moral absolutism to acknowledge that religious groups tend to come up with really lousy moral absolutes.
In other words, Dawkins assumes in multiple instances that when the content of religious beliefs is absurd, the underlying ethics or metaphysics must be equally absurd. That's a baby-with-the-bathwater mistake, and Dawkins of all people probably has friends who could have helped him clarify his thinking. Instead, he gets the philosophy wrong even though it's got no significance to his central thesis: namely, that we'd do well to get rid of religion altogether.
Update: Because Tom asked, and because I felt like this post wasn't quite long enough, I thought I'd expand on my thoughts on dualism a little bit.
I personally don't know that I subscribe to dualism. But I don't think I'm really committed to monism, either. My issue with Dawkins is that he just acts like dualism is obviously wrong, but in fact that is one of the central and most contentious questions in contemporary metaphysics.
I think dualism's got problems - most notably, a dualist has got to give some account of how it is that an essentially non-physical thing can interact causally with a physical thing (without running into conservation of energy problems, no less!) But dualism also has some very powerful arguments going for it.
The gist of the problem was formulated with force by Nagel, in that "Bat" article I linked to.
I have said that the essence of the belief that bats have experience is that there is something that it is like to be a bat. Now we know that most bats (the microchiroptera, to be precise) perceive the external world primarily by sonar, or echolocation, detecting the reflections, from objects within range, of their own rapid, subtly modulated, high-frequency shrieks. Their brains are designed to correlate the outgoing impulses with the subsequent echoes, and the information thus acquired enables bats to make precise discriminations of distance, size, shape, motion, and texture comparable to those we make by vision. But bat sonar, though clearly a form of perception, is not similar in its operation to any sense that we possess, and there is no reason to suppose that it is subjectively like anything we can experience or imagine. This appears to create difficulties for the notion of what it is like to be a bat. We must consider whether any method will permit us to extrapolate to the inner life of the bat from our own case, and if not, what alternative methods there may be for understanding the notion.
Our own experience provides the basic material for our imagination, whose range is therefore limited. It will not help to try to imagine that one has webbing on one's arms, which enables one to fly around at dusk and dawn catching insects in one's mouth; that one has very poor vision, and perceives the surrounding world by a system of reflected high-frequency sound signals; and that one spends the day hanging upside down by one's feet in an attic. In so far as I can imagine this (which is not very far), it tells me only what it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves. But that is not the question. I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat. Yet if I try to imagine this, I am restricted to the resources of my own mind, and those resources are inadequate to the task. I cannot perform it either by imagining additions to my present experience, or by imagining segments gradually subtracted from it, or by imagining some combination of additions, subtractions, and modifications.
...
It is difficult to understand what could be meant by the objective character of an experience, apart from the particular point of view from which its subject apprehends it. After all, what would be left of what it was like to be a bat if one removed the viewpoint of the bat?
Reducing the mind down to physical facts about the body isn't like, say, reducing proteins down to individual amino acids, he thinks, because mental phenomena are necessarily subjective, while the physicalist project is aimed at moving toward ever-increasing objectivity. I can imagine, at best, what it would be like for me to be a bat, but no amount of physical knowledge could possibly let me know what it's like for the bat. This isn't a problem about being able to reproduce neurological states; it's a problem about being able to actually occupy a point of view that's not your own.
I think Nagel identifies a very real problem here, but Frank Jackson probably did it more clearly in "What Mary Didn't Know", the central argument of which is this:
Mary is a girl who is locked up in a black and white room without windows, where she is taught every physical fact about the world (using, of course, only black and white materials.) If it is actually possible to explain everything in the world in terms of physical facts, Mary knows everything there is to know.
Presumably, though, if Mary is then let out of the room, she will learn something new: namely, what it is like to see, for instance, red.
The underlying concern in both cases is that mental phenomena seem to have these subjective properties - "qualia", in the jargon - that you just can't get at with any quantity of physical knowledge. It's difficult to see how any set of physical facts could possibly lead to knowledge about what a mental phenomenon is like.
Of course, the way that philosophy works is that a lot of very smart people - Dawkins's buddy Daniel Dennett, for instance - have come up with really brilliant reasons why we shouldn't think that Mary learns anything new at all when she leaves her room. But it's not like the case has been closed, and my only real problem was with Dawkins acting like it was.
For my own part, I have physicalist sympathies, and I get the impression that monism generally is on the rise these days. But I am by no means confident that I could ever know what being a bat is like for a bat, and I think that's a real dilemma.
Tuesday, December 19, 2006
Sloppy Metaphysics
Ugh...
It's not even that consciousness couldn't be artificially created. If, for instance, consciousness is just an emergent property of brains set up and functioning like our own, then there's no reason, in principle, that we couldn't replicate the necessary conditions to give rise to consciousness artificially. That's not the way robots or artificial intelligence work, though. And why should they? It seems pointlessly complicated to try to create a robot that functions mechanically the way we do, since all we're really after in a robot is the functionality of responding in the desired way to stimuli we provide.
In fact, the prospect of artificially inducing consciousness seems like an awfully good incentive not to take the consciousness-inducing strategy with a robot, since then you get into precisely those sorts of thorny ethical issues.
Far from being extracts from the extreme end of science fiction, the idea that we may one day give sentient machines the kind of rights traditionally reserved for humans is raised in a British government-commissioned report which claims to be an extensive look into the future.Sure, but so what? We're not 50 years away from conscious robots. We might be 50 years away from robots that seem to all outward appearances to be conscious, but that's not the same thing.
Visions of the status of robots around 2056 have emerged from one of 270 forward-looking papers sponsored by Sir David King, the UK government’s chief scientist. The paper covering robots’ rights was written by a UK partnership of Outsights, the management consultancy, and Ipsos Mori, the opinion research organisation.
“If we make conscious robots they would want to have rights and they probably should,” said Henrik Christensen, director of the Centre of Robotics and Intelligent Machines at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
It's not even that consciousness couldn't be artificially created. If, for instance, consciousness is just an emergent property of brains set up and functioning like our own, then there's no reason, in principle, that we couldn't replicate the necessary conditions to give rise to consciousness artificially. That's not the way robots or artificial intelligence work, though. And why should they? It seems pointlessly complicated to try to create a robot that functions mechanically the way we do, since all we're really after in a robot is the functionality of responding in the desired way to stimuli we provide.
In fact, the prospect of artificially inducing consciousness seems like an awfully good incentive not to take the consciousness-inducing strategy with a robot, since then you get into precisely those sorts of thorny ethical issues.
Friday, December 15, 2006
Sloppy Metaethics
Ilya Somin admirably refuses to concede ground to Jeff Jacoby on the relationship between atheism and moral relativism*, but fails to call B.S. on the argument that:
*I think the real disagreement is about moral skepticism, but who's counting?
What society loses when it discards Judeo-Christian faith and belief in G-d is something far more difficult to replace: the value system most likely to promote ethical behavior and sustain a decent society. That is because without G-d, the difference between good and evil becomes purely subjective. What makes murder inherently wrong is not that it feels wrong,but that a transcendent Creator to whom we are answerable commands: "Thou shalt not murder...."If the reason you don't kill somebody is that you're scared of what God will do to you, you're not acknowledging an objective moral truth, you're just being bullied around. The real question is whether God is enforcing a preexisting normative law, or whether He's making arbitrary demands of the people unfortunate enough to be answerable to Him. In neither case does God do any actual metaethical work.
*I think the real disagreement is about moral skepticism, but who's counting?
Wednesday, September 13, 2006
God's Not Carrying His Metaethical Weight
I think liberals tend to get excited about things like an "Evangelical Author [who] Puts [a] Progressive Spin On Traditional Faith" because they get so frustrated with conservative Christians always righteously claiming the moral high ground by appeal to their religious beliefs. I, for one, was initially pretty excited to get a copy (autographed!) of Jim Wallis's book. I didn't get very far through it, though, before I came to the conclusion that putting a lot of stock in progressive Evangelicals is probably a mistake for at least two reasons.
First, as a practical issue, it's not obvious to me that you can entirely divorce any sort of progressive Evagelicalism from its basically misogynist roots in the Christian tradition. It's not just that Christian history consists of many centuries of misogynist interpretation of scripture and text, it's also that much of that raw material is basically misogynist to begin with. How one might go about persuasively chipping away at the more unenlightened aspects of the Bible isn't clear. At the same time, though, an ethical framework built up from the Bible as-is just won't be suited to supporting a thoroughly progressive outlook.
Second, I think secular liberals who flaunt their newfound Christian allies over-enthusiastically implicitly concede too much of the metaethical argument to their religious opponents. Much of the tension between the religious right and the secular left derives from the suggestion that secularists aren't just immoral, but are actually fundamentally amoral, at least ideologically. Much of the force of the charge that liberals are "Godless" derives from the underlying assumption that without God you just can't make meaningful moral statements about the world.
Needless to say, I think this is very wrong and I think that liberals should be careful not to indulge arguments or impulses to that effect.
The fact is that God just doesn't do any metaethical work. If you follow any given ethical guideline in the way you live your life, God enters into your decision-making process either 1) because you think God wants you to follow the ethical guideline - in which case you still have to explain why God's preferences possess any normative significance, presumably by appeal to some metaethical principle prior to God - or 2) because the ethical guideline itself is in some way prior to God, and God just sort of enforces the rules - in which case you don't need God to have morality. In either case, ethics stand alone, without the need for any religious support.
There's nothing weird about propositions that are both secular and normative. Nothing, at any rate, that makes them weirder than, say, abstract mathematical propositions or, for that matter, metaphysical propositions. More to the point, though, if atheists are doomed to moral skepticism without God, religious individuals are no better off with Him. It concedes too much to the opposition to suggest otherwise, and it undermines the relative appeal of secular liberal ideology.
Is it better, on balance, to have Evangelicals emphasizing poverty and the environment instead of gay marriage and abortion? Probably. I just wouldn't throw my lot in with progressive Evangelicals without clearly delineating the point at which my sympathy for their project ends.
First, as a practical issue, it's not obvious to me that you can entirely divorce any sort of progressive Evagelicalism from its basically misogynist roots in the Christian tradition. It's not just that Christian history consists of many centuries of misogynist interpretation of scripture and text, it's also that much of that raw material is basically misogynist to begin with. How one might go about persuasively chipping away at the more unenlightened aspects of the Bible isn't clear. At the same time, though, an ethical framework built up from the Bible as-is just won't be suited to supporting a thoroughly progressive outlook.
Second, I think secular liberals who flaunt their newfound Christian allies over-enthusiastically implicitly concede too much of the metaethical argument to their religious opponents. Much of the tension between the religious right and the secular left derives from the suggestion that secularists aren't just immoral, but are actually fundamentally amoral, at least ideologically. Much of the force of the charge that liberals are "Godless" derives from the underlying assumption that without God you just can't make meaningful moral statements about the world.
Needless to say, I think this is very wrong and I think that liberals should be careful not to indulge arguments or impulses to that effect.
The fact is that God just doesn't do any metaethical work. If you follow any given ethical guideline in the way you live your life, God enters into your decision-making process either 1) because you think God wants you to follow the ethical guideline - in which case you still have to explain why God's preferences possess any normative significance, presumably by appeal to some metaethical principle prior to God - or 2) because the ethical guideline itself is in some way prior to God, and God just sort of enforces the rules - in which case you don't need God to have morality. In either case, ethics stand alone, without the need for any religious support.
There's nothing weird about propositions that are both secular and normative. Nothing, at any rate, that makes them weirder than, say, abstract mathematical propositions or, for that matter, metaphysical propositions. More to the point, though, if atheists are doomed to moral skepticism without God, religious individuals are no better off with Him. It concedes too much to the opposition to suggest otherwise, and it undermines the relative appeal of secular liberal ideology.
Is it better, on balance, to have Evangelicals emphasizing poverty and the environment instead of gay marriage and abortion? Probably. I just wouldn't throw my lot in with progressive Evangelicals without clearly delineating the point at which my sympathy for their project ends.
Saturday, August 05, 2006
Relativism Run Amok
Since when did libertarians get so wishy-washy?
Now, parents can, if they so choose, pull their children out of the public school system and impose upon them any manner of ridiculous notions by sticking them in alternative educational environments. The government, however, has no obligation to subsidize such behavior. This is particularly true in the case of the evolution controversy, as the only reasons to reject evolution are religious.
But really, it's the relativism that's the problem - you just can't take it seriously. I, after all, am just as sure that I am right about school choice as libertarians think themselves to be. Is it better that the government impose one idea of what's right - in this case, school choice - on all children? It cuts both ways.
Well, actually, it doesn't cut at all.
P.S. - Why all these references to Darwin? The debate isn't about Darwin, it's about evolution. Darwin was a man; evolution is a set of ideas. Darwin contributed many of those ideas, but the only reason I can think of to frame the debate as about him is that you don't want to engage the actual ideas.
Creationists, after all, are just as sure that they are right about Darwin as evolutionists think themselves to be.Phonics-based instruction is controversial because the data are mixed. Evolution is controversial because some people reject the fundamental premises of scientific inquiry.
Of course, in education, Darwin is just the beginning: Is phonics-based instruction the right or wrong way to teach reading? Should American history be taught in a “traditional” way that focuses on the nation’s great achievements, or is it right to focus on the country’s flaws? What amount of time should students spend studying fine art instead of, say, physics? Is it wrong for a student newspaper to run an article critical of the school’s principal? And so on…
Clearly, when it comes to countless disputes in education, what is truly right or truly wrong is very difficult to know. With that in mind, we must answer the question: Is it better that government impose one idea of what’s right on all children, or that parents be able to seek freely what they think is right for their own kids?
Now, parents can, if they so choose, pull their children out of the public school system and impose upon them any manner of ridiculous notions by sticking them in alternative educational environments. The government, however, has no obligation to subsidize such behavior. This is particularly true in the case of the evolution controversy, as the only reasons to reject evolution are religious.
But really, it's the relativism that's the problem - you just can't take it seriously. I, after all, am just as sure that I am right about school choice as libertarians think themselves to be. Is it better that the government impose one idea of what's right - in this case, school choice - on all children? It cuts both ways.
Well, actually, it doesn't cut at all.
P.S. - Why all these references to Darwin? The debate isn't about Darwin, it's about evolution. Darwin was a man; evolution is a set of ideas. Darwin contributed many of those ideas, but the only reason I can think of to frame the debate as about him is that you don't want to engage the actual ideas.
Saturday, July 29, 2006
He Earned His Hormones Fair And Square
I'm not a sports person, but sports do provide plenty of opportunities to examine our ideas of justice, fairness, and desert. So, springboarding off of my earlier post on the doping charges being leveled against Tour de France winner Floyd Landis, I want to talk (read: gripe) a little bit about the way we typically think about deserving something.
Landis's defense:
What difference, exactly, does it make whether Landis's high levels of testosterone are the result of a regimen of drugs or just a natural fact of his physiology? Insofar as higher levels of testosterone give Landis an advantage over his competitors, it seems like those levels are unfair and undeserved. What makes Landis so special that facts about his physiology totally beyond his control make him "deserve" anything at all? That testosterone didn't literally fall out of the sky...but it might as well have.
Now, in the case of sports, you can sort of wave this talk away as pointlessly academic because, after all, you can just treat sports as ways of evaluating whose natural physiology is best suited to such-and-such activities. That works because the outcome of a game is just precisely insofar as the winner has abided by the rules. (This is part of the reason I find sports so inconsequential and, therefore, boring.)
Most of the rest of the world isn't like that; the outcome of an event typically has implications for the welfare of at least one person. Frequently, as in the case of many government activities, the outcome has very significant implications for the well-being of many individuals. In terms of the concept of "desert", though, the analogy to sports survives entirely intact.
We tend to think things like, "Mr. Jones earned his money because he's a smart, capable, hard-working individual. He deserves the things he has." And once we tie an asset (e.g., money) to the idea of desert, we become increasingly disinclined to see that asset redistributed. "What did that poor person do to deserve Mr. Jones's money?"
Well, nothing. That poor person certainly didn't earn Mr. Jones's money. But, then, neither did Mr. Jones. Mr. Jones didn't earn his intelligence or his capability. For that matter, he didn't earn his work ethic, either. Those are all characteristics that are inherited through genes or sculpted by external forces. Nobody chooses to be hard-working, at least not ultimately. Such a choice, in any event, is itself going to be the result of entirely accidental facts about one's physiology or environment. To put it another way, you can't choose to choose to be hard-working.
Desert, as a concept, often plays a very useful role because it inclines us to set up institutions that allow for very large degrees of autonomy and privacy. At the margins, though, we run into cases in which by infringing upon the demands of the concept of desert we can create a situation that is, on balance, more just. In such cases it's useful to remember that desert is a useful idea, but not an intrinsically valuable one.
P.S. - There is an unfortunate use of the word "desert" that allows us to say things like, "All people deserve to be treated with respect." I think those statements are true, but they seem to use a somewhat different definition of "desert" - one less tied up with the idea of "earning" something - than the one I'm referring to above.
Landis's defense:
Sounding more defiant than the day before, eyes flashing and voice steady, Floyd Landis looked into the cameras Friday and said he would prove he "deserved to win" the Tour de France.
In his first public appearance since a urine test showing a testosterone imbalance cast his title into doubt, the American said his body's natural metabolism - not doping of any kind - caused the result, and that he would soon have the test results to prove it.
What difference, exactly, does it make whether Landis's high levels of testosterone are the result of a regimen of drugs or just a natural fact of his physiology? Insofar as higher levels of testosterone give Landis an advantage over his competitors, it seems like those levels are unfair and undeserved. What makes Landis so special that facts about his physiology totally beyond his control make him "deserve" anything at all? That testosterone didn't literally fall out of the sky...but it might as well have.
Now, in the case of sports, you can sort of wave this talk away as pointlessly academic because, after all, you can just treat sports as ways of evaluating whose natural physiology is best suited to such-and-such activities. That works because the outcome of a game is just precisely insofar as the winner has abided by the rules. (This is part of the reason I find sports so inconsequential and, therefore, boring.)
Most of the rest of the world isn't like that; the outcome of an event typically has implications for the welfare of at least one person. Frequently, as in the case of many government activities, the outcome has very significant implications for the well-being of many individuals. In terms of the concept of "desert", though, the analogy to sports survives entirely intact.
We tend to think things like, "Mr. Jones earned his money because he's a smart, capable, hard-working individual. He deserves the things he has." And once we tie an asset (e.g., money) to the idea of desert, we become increasingly disinclined to see that asset redistributed. "What did that poor person do to deserve Mr. Jones's money?"
Well, nothing. That poor person certainly didn't earn Mr. Jones's money. But, then, neither did Mr. Jones. Mr. Jones didn't earn his intelligence or his capability. For that matter, he didn't earn his work ethic, either. Those are all characteristics that are inherited through genes or sculpted by external forces. Nobody chooses to be hard-working, at least not ultimately. Such a choice, in any event, is itself going to be the result of entirely accidental facts about one's physiology or environment. To put it another way, you can't choose to choose to be hard-working.
Desert, as a concept, often plays a very useful role because it inclines us to set up institutions that allow for very large degrees of autonomy and privacy. At the margins, though, we run into cases in which by infringing upon the demands of the concept of desert we can create a situation that is, on balance, more just. In such cases it's useful to remember that desert is a useful idea, but not an intrinsically valuable one.
P.S. - There is an unfortunate use of the word "desert" that allows us to say things like, "All people deserve to be treated with respect." I think those statements are true, but they seem to use a somewhat different definition of "desert" - one less tied up with the idea of "earning" something - than the one I'm referring to above.
Wednesday, July 26, 2006
Fortunately For Me, I Don't Care
Harvard economics professor Jeffrey Alan Miron responds to the Senate's abortion vote on Tuesday this way:
This is a basic case of the fallacy of division. The mistake is thinking that because the collective opinion of the majority is muddled that the opinion of each individual member of the majority is similarly muddled.
It's not that there's nothing whatever to this compromise business, it's just that it's kind of a cop-out of the actual ethical question to just cut straight through to the compromise. There's no question that life is easier if you haven't got moral beliefs, or refuse to let them enter into the picture, so I can see the appeal of trying to abstract away from people's differing views. The fact, however, is that most people do have such moral beliefs and it's rarely productive or wise to act as if they don't or that they won't be important.
Abortion is an issue where imposing one policy on the entire country is disastrous. There are passionately held positions at both ends of the spectrum, yet most of the population falls squarely in the middle. Imposing policy at the federal level generates polarization and acriminony that is desctructive of a civil society. Leaving abortion policy to the states allows for different outcomes in different places, which means a broad fraction of the population can feel its views have at least been heard.That's all fine, I guess, provided that you have no substantive moral or political views on abortion itself. Yes, the majority of the population "falls squarely in the middle" of the debate, but that majority consists of individuals, each of whom has his or her own preferred set of abortion laws. The catch is that it's unlikely that any of those individuals actually believes that abortion ought to have a different legal status in each state; it's much more likely they each think that each state ought to enact his or her preferred set of abortion laws.
This is a basic case of the fallacy of division. The mistake is thinking that because the collective opinion of the majority is muddled that the opinion of each individual member of the majority is similarly muddled.
It's not that there's nothing whatever to this compromise business, it's just that it's kind of a cop-out of the actual ethical question to just cut straight through to the compromise. There's no question that life is easier if you haven't got moral beliefs, or refuse to let them enter into the picture, so I can see the appeal of trying to abstract away from people's differing views. The fact, however, is that most people do have such moral beliefs and it's rarely productive or wise to act as if they don't or that they won't be important.
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