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July 27, 2010 – 3:53 pm

I apologize for the sparse original writing the last two weeks. Between going on a brief vacation to Chicago for the Pitchfork Music Festival and now getting mired in all the details and grunt work involved in packing and moving from the Bronx to Manhattan, the all important rhythm which enables my usual rapid fire blogging style to work has been effectively broken for the time being.

There are a number of reader comments I still want to address which have accumulated within the last few weeks (and even some left from my dissertation hiatus from blogging about philosophy and atheist topics and from late June). Be assured, many of you, that I am not ignoring you but just behind.

Anyway, in the meantime, I am deciding to officially take the rest of the month off since I am already not accomplishing much here (outside of Sunday’s new essay outlining some major positions in my theory of ethics) and since I foresee both moving and academic responsibilities nearly completely sapping all of my energies until Saturday.

But, never fear, I’ll be back with a vengeance Sunday for what should be an August filled with vigorous blogging.

In the meantime, this is our first official* “Your Thoughts” thread—an open thread providing you an opportunity to bring up Your Thoughts on whatever topics you would like to talk about with other Camels With Hammers readers. I want to make “Your Thoughts” threads a Tuesday tradition for at least the next five months at Camels With Hammers. Consider this thread a space for you to dictate the course of conversation on the blog, you can either go way off of the normal Camels With Hammers topics or raise issues on familiar Camels With Hammers topics that I have not yet. You can even feel free to shamelessly draw attention to your own blog by linking to and discussing something you posted there and bringing conversation about it over here.

For this first Your Thoughts? thread, though, I think it would be best to break the ice a little. So I think it would be great if readers might introduce themselves a bit. Who are you? What do you do? Where are you from? What makes you most distinctive and memorable? Of what are you proudest and of what are you most ashamed? What are your thoughts on philosophy and religion? How much formal training in philosophy do you have? Just talk about yourself. Whatever you want to talk about about yourself, just talk about it. Just make it about you. And about what everyone else says when they talk about themselves.

And you, the quiet lurker over there who never says anything–yeah, YOU, I am especially curious to learn about you, so chime in!

And then what first brought you to Camels With Hammers and what brings you back? What are Your Thoughts on possible site improvements? What are Your Thoughts on what I should
be sure to keep doing? Do you have any questions for me or about me? I’ll try to answer most questions, maybe in the comments below and maybe in a future post.

And, what else is on your mind? From now until at least Sunday when I formally return, bring up whatever you want to talk about here.

Your Thoughts?

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By Daniel Fincke | Posted in Featured | Comments (3)

My Perfectionistic, Egoistic AND Universalistic, Indirect Consequentialism (And Contrasts With Other Kinds)

July 25, 2010 – 2:15 pm

A consequentialist assesses the ultimate worth of all the various features of our ethical lives according to whether or not they bring about some specific intrinsic good or goods that the consequentialist judges to be of primary value. All the various valuable features of our lives have their ultimate value with respect to how they contribute in the end to this primary good or goods.

For example, if the consequentialist is a hedonist who thinks that pleasure is the one intrinsically good thing towards which we should aim, then all the other aspects of being a moral person—adhering dutifully to moral principles, having virtuous character traits and dispositions, genuinely caring about others’ well being for their own sakes—derive their morally praiseworthiness from the ways that they eventually, or in general, contribute to increases in pleasure. Utilitarianism is a form of hedonistic consequentialism.

The hedonistic consequentialist judges that if dutifully adhering to moral principles or having various dispositions and traits we consider virtuous or genuinely caring about others for their own sakes led to net losses of pleasure or to net increases in displeasure (pain), then we would not think of dutifulness, virtue, or other-directed motivation as good and desirable things the way we presently do. The only reason why we think so highly of these behaviors, dispositions, and attitudes in the first place, the hedonistic consequentialist argues, is that they contribute to pleasure.

Hedonistic consequentialism, which treats pleasure as the primary good to be maximized, is the most generally known and discussed form of consequentialism, but there is another major kind of consequentialism which I want to advance and that is what we can call perfectionist consequentialism. The perfectionist consequentialist thinks that the intrinsic good that all of our motivations, behaviors, dispositions, calculations, social institutions, formal codes, etc. should maximize is excellence rather than simply pleasure. Creating excellent people is more important than creating maximally pleased people.

Of course, quite often no choice is necessary between excellence and pleasure as being excellent is intrinsically pleasant itself (at least to an extent, even if in some cases, it is manifestly less pleasant overall in someone’s particular situation than being base would be) and often an excellence is an excellence at all to some particular extent because of its contribution to making life more pleasant. So, for a simple example, excellence at preparing delicious meals means excellence at creating pleasurable taste sensations with the food you make.

Consequentialists do not only differ from each other in terms of what good they take to be of primary importance but they also can differ in terms of their views on moral decision-making. There are three more key distinctions worth familiarizing ourselves with and on which I want to stake out clear positions.
The second, and, after the choice of primary good to pursue, the most general of the distinctions between consequentialisms to make is between egoistic consequentialism and universalistic consequentialism.

The egoistic consequentialist assesses all aspects of the moral and non-moral life in terms of how they contribute to his or her own achievement of the primary good towards which his consequentialism aims. So an egoistic hedonistic consequentialist would consider all proposed actions, virtues, proximate goals, etc. according to how well they promise to maximize his personal pleasure. And an egoistic perfectionist consequentialist would consider all proposed actions, virtues, proximate goals, etc. according to how well they promise to maximize her own attainment to excellence.

The universalistic consequentialist, by contrast, judges the value of proposed courses of actions, behaviors, dispositions, proximate goals, etc. by their expected contribution to the greatest number of morally relevant beings’ ability to have the primary, intrinsic good towards which her consequentialism aims. Thus, the universalistic hedonistic consequentialist judges the most moral actions, virtues, proximate goals, etc, to be those which maximize pleasure for the greatest number of morally relevant beings, whereas the universalistic perfectionistic consequentialist judges the most moral actions, virtues, proximate goals, etc. to be those which maximize the excellent thriving of the greatest number of morally relevant beings.

The third key distinction between consequentialists to make is between direct and indirect consequentialists.

A direct consequentialist thinks that not only should all the ethically relevant features of our lives be oriented towards maximizing the intrinsic good, but also that we should conceive of moral decision-making as primarily consisting of calculations by which we determine which courses of actions, which virtues, which proximate goals, etc. can be expected to produce the primary intrinsic good in the most quantities.

In other words, the direct consequentialist thinks that moral thinking requires explicitly thinking like a consequentialist and judging each option for action, virtue, proximate goal to pursue, etc. strictly in terms of how it will create the maximum amount of the primary intrinsic good. So, for the direct consequentialist, the most morally conscientious thinking about ethically relevant actions is explicitly calculative and specifically aims towards the greatest possible creation of the most important good for oneself (if one is an egoist) or everyone (if one is a universalist).

The indirect consequentialist, on the other hand, does not think that it is always ethically best for each individual to explicitly aim for the greatest quantity of the greatest good for himself or for everyone. The indirect consequentialist reasons that wherever the greatest good can be most successfully maximized by individuals not taking on a calculative, explicitly consequentialist attitude, but rather acting out of abstract concerns for duty itself or based on more partial emotions like love or from a devotion to particular intrinsically good things distinct from the primary intrinsic good, people should adopt these other sorts of motivations and means of forming moral decisions instead.

The indirect consequentialist is, therefore, concerned that the primary good is attained as much as possible, but not always that people directly aim for it in those cases in which aiming at it would somehow undermine their ability to actually attain the most successfully.

The fourth major distinction is between act consequentialism and rule consequentialism.

An act consequentist, in the most extreme possible formulation of the type, is one who thinks that we should make each choice based on a consideration of its immediate consequences for creating the intrinsic good. Taking the case of act utilitarianism, which concerns itself with maximizing pleasure, the extreme act utilitarian would always choose actions based on their actual expected pleasure return and based on no further concern for general duties or principles. So, if I were an extreme act utilitarian and I were working for a very wealthy person and I realized that I could steal $2000 from without either she or her dependents ever knowing the money is gone, ever missing it, or ever experiencing any other pain over its loss, I should then steal this money if it would make my life more pleasurable.

Of course, were I simply an egoistic, hedonistic consequentialist, only concerned with my own pleasure in the first place, I would make this choice regardless of whether it would eventually pain the woman from whom I stole, as long as it increased my personal pleasure.

But even were I a universalistic, hedonistic utilitarian who was concerned with creating the maximum pleasure for the maximum number of people, being an extreme act utilitarian would require me to judge stealing the money as morally necessary because it would create the outcome that would maximally increase the pleasure in the world (assuming all things were equal). If I am more pleased to have this $2,000 than the woman who does not even notice it is gone was to have it, say because it substantially improves my life for a month whereas it made no difference to hers, then the total collective pleasure among all the relevant moral beings has gone up and the intrinsically best outcome has, therefore, been achieved.

One might object that the extreme act utilitarian should still not steal the money because her guilty conscience would cause her more pain than the pleasures she can buy with $2,000 can compensate for. But that assumes that the extreme act utilitarian thinks what she does is wrong. But, as long as she considers the matter rationally and applies her extreme act utilitarian moral reasoning properly, she soothes her conscience when she realizes that she is actually doing the best thing for creating the greatest pleasure of the most people (or, if she is an egoist, she has done the best thing for her own pleasure) and that is, ultimately, all that morally matters.

Foreseeing the potential misery that such an ethics would repeatedly lead to, rule utilitarians (and some more reasonable shades of act utilitarians) judge that at least some rules of thumbs or nearly always unwavering principles must guide most of our ethically relevant actions, even when adhering to those rules of thumb or principles leads to short term dissatisfactions. The rule utilitarian reasons that a world in which people generally did not have general principles in place that forbade generally pain-inducing behavior like lying, cheating, stealing, murdering, etc., would be a less pleasurable world in which to live.

The rule utilitarian judges that even though there might be some cases in which one could get away with lying, cheating, stealing, murdering, etc. and both on the short and long term, one’s pleasure or the total pleasure in the world would increase, the principles which rule out these behaviors are themselves more important since were they to deteriorate, the result would be increases in general misery. So, the rule utilitarian upholds the principle and foregoes participating in what are usually harmful actions even when in those cases when refraining from them results in actual reductions in (both short and long term) total pleasure in the world and, even, increases the actual total pain in the world. So, for the sake of the general rule, the rule utilitarian sacrifices the actual achievement of what he takes to be the primary intrinsic good (pleasure). The rule utilitarian judges that overall more achievement of pleasure is possible in a world in which certain kinds of actions are nearly always forbidden and so refuses those actions on principle.

Where do I stand?

I am a consequentialist because I think that the ultimate determinant of the potential ethical value which anything whatsoever has for us, as humans, is the extent to which it will maximize human flourishing. Everything, from our virtues to our governments to our moral rules to our athletic achievements to our reason to our emotions to our interpersonal relationships to our professional relationships to our sexual relationships to our diets to our genes, ultimately contributes in any given instance to increasing or decreasing our total flourishing in power and is ethically assessable as relatively good to the extent to which it provides an increase and relatively bad to the extent to which it provides a decrease.

I am an indirect consequentialist though in that I think that there are many other intrinsically valuable things which it is better to focus on attaining for their own sakes if we are to attain maximal overall power. In other words, I think that in many cases, psychological reality dictates that we will function more excellently by focusing our explicit attention away from our own excellence, abstractly conceived, and towards the various intrinsically good projects in such a way as to treat them as of intrinsic value and primary importance to us.

While in general our maximal individual and collective thriving in power is our good, to attain this, in most situations we must be focused on more proximate ends as desirable in themselves in order to care enough about them that we indirectly make ourselves excellent. Our total power can only grow through the specific powers which embody it and these can only exercise themselves through the pursuit of particular goals which we take to be important enough and desirable enough for themselves that we can have adequate psychological motivation to invest ourselves in them.

I am a rule consequentialist insofar as I think that well-formed moral and legal codes of general conduct in matters of potentially severe interpersonal or civil conflict are both psychologically and socially stabilizing. And I think that the ultimate justification for moral and legal rules is their ultimate contribution to actual human flourishing. Even should adherence to such rules on some occasions lead to net detriments to human flourishing if the consequences of abandoning such rules (or a particular rule) altogether would be more detrimental to general human thriving, it is worth it to us to take the lesser hit and accept some avoidable actual failures.

Yet, even though I accept some degree of rule consequentialism in moral and legal decision-making and, therefore, acknowledge as a basic fact that much of our explicit moral and legal reasoning does concern judgments about greatest consequences (be they for pleasure or for excellence or other intrinsic goods), I also see a great deal of wisdom in incorporating into my moral thinking more Kantian-styled formalistic concerns about avoiding acting in practically contradictory ways.

While Kant would argue that we should never act in ways that involve formal contradictions, even when such actions would increase pleasure or decrease pain, I think that certain practically irrational actions are permissible when they are ultimately, in the total tallying of matters, justified by their contribution to our fundamental human thriving itself. I take it to be a practical and existential contradiction to act in ways that, ultimately, go against our own most fundamental conditions of thriving. That particular formal practical contradiction is the essential one to avoid, even if it means committing other practical contradictions to do it.

Other formally and practically contradictory actions (such as lying, bribery, theft, loan forgiveness, bank bailouts, etc.) are always on their own terms, strictly speaking, irrational actions and unworthy of us insofar as we are rational beings. But insofar as we are more than merely rational beings, sometimes our total functioning in the sum total of all our powers combined, and not just our flourishing functioning as rational, entails that we bite the bullet and do these things for the greater thriving.

Finally, we come to the question of whether I am an egoistic or a universalistic consequentialist. Whose thriving must we maximize and why? Do I only have ethical reason to pursue my own thriving such that it is irrational, even a practical contradiction, to pursue others’ well-being at my own expense? Or do I have a reason to subordinate my own thriving to the general thriving of a larger group of morally relevant beings—be they my community, humanity, other species, etc.?

Ultimately, I think that justifying my interest in a good is going to require, on the most fundamental level, reference to my own egoistic good. My own thriving is the most fundamental, instrinsic, and unavoidably objective good I have. If I do not at least minimally exist in the powers that constitute my being itself, then I literally am no good and can have no goods since I cannot be at all. And I fail to fully be, to fully realize myself precisely to the extent that I fail to thrive in my various powerful functional possibilities and, especially, in my potential for total power maximization with all my particular powers coordinating and amplifying for the greatest possible sum functioning.

So, I think that in the first instance we must be egoistic consequentialists. But I think that examination of the nature of our human powers, and what thriving in them substantively entails, indicates at least two key reasons why maximally fulfilling our egoistic ends of individual thriving necessarily involves contributing to the maximal thriving of others beyond ourselves.

There are two reasons for this. On the purely egoistic level, the development of our own powerful functioning depends to an incalculable extent on others’ flourishing. To maximally realize our potential, we need the conditions of stability and prosperity which others’ thriving creates and sustains for us and we need the cultivation of our powers by those already powerful who can advance us far beyond where we would ever have been in isolation and make it so that our own efforts can attain to even greater extents than would otherwise have been possible.

But not only does our thriving happen to benefit from the powers of others’ nurturing it but our thriving itself in innumerable areas happens in others’ thriving. The doctor has intrinsic powers to manipulate the body in numerous ways as she desires. But her most powerful functioning as a doctor is not to be able to simply manipulate a patient’s body for whatever ends she can but rather to maximally increase the unencumbered bodily flourishing of her patients. Her power functions in the body which is stronger and more capable as a result of her medicinal practice. Every leg she heals walks through her power, every life she saves lives on powered by her interventions in an indispensable way.

Great rulers are only great and only intrinsically powerful through the thriving of those they rule. Comedians can only be powerful if they can increase others’ laughter. Teachers’ powers to inform and engage students are limited compared to their powers to effect the world through their students’ eventual uses of the skills and information they teach.

And, finally, the ways in which we more powerfully thrive remotely, through others, and “outside” of our own bodies and minds when we empower others could be so great as even to justify sacrifice of our own bodies and minds altogether in tremendous deeds of self-sacrifice.  This is because, ultimately, I judge our intrinsic good and intrinsic interest in terms of our powerful functioning, not necessarily in terms of our own experiences of pleasure or our direct experience of our powerful effective functioning as it exerts effects we will never ourselves even know about.

For the above reasons, therefore, I am a perfectionistic, egoistic and universalistic, indirect consequentialist who sees a place for rule consequentialism and stricter, deontological moral formalism and virtue-based thinking in his moral judgments. I take the perfectionist excellence to maximize to be power and our intrinsic incentive to realize it to be the avoidance of the practical and existential contradiction according to our most fundamental nature that occurs whenever and to whatever extent we do not.

Your Thoughts?

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By Daniel Fincke | Posted in Atheistic Ethics, Atheistic Ethics, Contemporary Ethics, Contemporary Ethics, Ethical Pluralism, Ethical Pluralism, Ethics, Ethics, Featured, Metaethics, Metaethics, Moral Psychology, Moral Psychology, Morality, Morality, Philosophical Ethics, Philosophical Ethics, Teleology, Teleology, Virtues, Virtues | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (3)

On God Warriors

July 18, 2010 – 2:25 pm

At first I thought this was funny, figured it might make a good “Sundaily Hilarity”, but the longer I watched and the more I saw the pain this woman was causing her children and the obvious pain she was in herself, the clearer it became that there is nothing funny about this at all.

Clearly the majority of religious people are not remotely like this.  Clearly we all get angry and make fools of ourselves.  And clearly some people, including possibly this woman, have actual mental illness problems which will manifest one way or another, regardless of whether it is in a religious idiom or in some other one if they lack a religious idiom.  So, no, I don’t post this video or others like it to paint all religious people with the same brush or to blame religion for all the problems of mentally disturbed people.

But there are two things instructive about the video, that make it worth highlighting.

1. She could have said everything she said in a calm voice and it still would have been complete lunacy.  And a sizeable portion of religious people do say things quite like this on a daily basis and it helps sometimes to show people a mirror that makes clear what they sound like to the rest of us.

2. While psychological causation is complex, people who exploited this woman’s superstitiousness and tendency towards fantasy by encouraging her to read the Bible literally and to believe in all the superstitious entities found in that book (sorcerers, demons, witches, etc.) certainly did her no favors.  They may not be the sole reason that she’s a fanatical fantasist but they certainly played a contributory role in encouraging these intellectual and emotional habits as legitimate and in stocking up her imagination with crazy ideas to work with.

They actively cultivated her credulousness fantasies about her own powers (that she could “speak into existence” the things she wants to happen in the world if only she does it “in Jesus’s name”), where any one responsible and concerned with developing other people’s reason properly would have focused on aligning those around them with reality as closely as possible instead.

What I’m fundamentally getting at is this:  when you promote or condone or otherwise abet the power and social and/or political authority of religious institutions to teach people epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics, you are giving the vulnerable among us over to people who will teach them that their superstitious or otherwise irrationally grounded feelings and intuitions are legitimate sources of truth, who will then exploit that superstitiousness into accepting a metaphysics rife with fantasy beings, and who will structure their ethics around the interplay of these magical fantasy beings, with the result that some of these vulnerable people will vilify their fellow human beings as pawns of the devil or read events as the work of “dark siders”.

Yes, I know, that’s not what religion is to you. It’s a bunch of metaphors and symbols and ineffable sense of something inexplicably magnificent about the universe or whatever might transcend the universe.  To you it’s just accepting what you take to be a logical argument that there must be a source of all being and it must be distinct from the universe and whatever that is, it’s worth meditating upon and calling “God”.  The average believer needs to believe the metaphors or the noble lies so that she can tangibly grasp this philosophical point she wouldn’t otherwise get, that’s all.

I think that’s unacceptable.  If you really think the superstitions are false, if you clearly think this woman is a sad raver disconnected from reality and her family and anyone outside of her cultically closed religious community, then you should really reconsider whether it might not be worth it after all to dissuade your fellow believers of their literalist fantasies as a higher priority than defending them against atheists.  Maybe you should ask yourself whether your religious institutions on the whole do people’s understandings of epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics an actual service or a disservice—regardless of whether you and other especially smart believers have highly sophisticated accounts of epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics of your own.

Your Thoughts?

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By Daniel Fincke | Posted in Featured, Fundamentalism, Fundamentalism, Religion, Religion | Comments (5)

Moral Psychologist Joshua D. Greene and Experimental Philosopher Joshua Knobe

July 15, 2010 – 5:29 pm

Below is a great dialogue between Harvard psychologist Joshua Greene and Yale “experimental philosopher” Joshua Knobe laying out some of the basics of moral psychology. I took notes as I watched the video, summarizing the major points for myself and for your use, dear blogreader.  It will be easier to just watch the video, of course, and since what I offer is almost always mere summary with little analysis, reading my jottings may be entirely superfluous. But if you’d rather skim or read my summarizations and my occasional replies than watch a video that will take an hour or so to finish, by all means feel free to do that instead. Or also!

During the video they allude to information which can be found in the following links:

Brigard, Mandelbaum, and Ripley’s paper “Responsibility and the Brain Sciences”
Josh K. on Brigard, Mandelbaum, and Ripley’s paper
Inbar, Pizarro and Bloom’s paper “Disgust sensitivity predicts intuitive disapproval of gays”
Science Daily on Inbar, Pizarro and Bloom’s work
Josh G. (et al.), “An fMRI Investigation of Emotional Engagement in Moral Judgment”

Greene’s work is primarily on the sources of our moral intuitions in psychological factors.  What is interesting to distinguish is that he is not arguing from the “is” of how we form our intuitions to an “ought” that we should form them as we do but using psychology to do the opposite, to show us that some of our moral intuitions have undermining psychological causes.  For example, we have disgust responses that we take to be moral responses which, upon cognitive reflection, we would recognize are not morall justified.  Recognizing ways in which we systematically psychologically make unjustified leaps from disgusts to moral judgments alerts us to this sort of an error and avoid being swayed by it.

Why not consider all moral intuitions debunked once explained?

Greene proposes a thought experiment: you can create two species.  One just like us except they were only interested in a small set of people closely related to them, using their resources only for those close to them while others farther away suffer.  Or you can create a species that spreads its love around and values the members of all its species equally and distributes its resources equally.  Greene thinks the former is what we are like and the latter is what we are not like.  And he argues that the latter would be the world we were going to create if we were ourselves going to create one of the two species.  He thinks this is a better world.  But he argues that it is not worth trying to change our deeply rooted psychological tendencies towards parochial preferences, which we have in this world.  Curiously, he is  therefore sketching a moral ideal which he does not actually want us to implement.  It is a moral ideal which, ironically, does not have normative force to morally command us to see it implemented, out of recognition of the limits of our psychological potential.  In this way, ought does not imply can for Greene.

Knobe then profers a most interesting challenge.  What if Greene’s own parents were offered two pills, one to make them Greene’s omni-benevolent altruists and one to make them normal humans with more concentrated love for their son.  What would Greene say his own parents should do, love him less while fulfilling his ideal or love him with partiality instead.  Greene expresses all the normal psychological responses, admitting it would be strange, weird, and painful, but follows through with the logical conclusion of his consequentialism that if his parents’ global benevolence made the overall world a much better place, he’d have to say that that’s the better choice and that they morally should take it (even at his personal expense as a child not as preferred by his parents as most human children while expecting to be preferred, being a normal child).  It “bristles against” his intutions for such parents to “neglect” their child by our ordinary standards but he won’t take that to mean it’s immoral that they do so, just “bizarre.”

Greene thinks that given the way our brains are, there will be no way to change from being locally preferring humans.  It would only happen with radical changes in our physiology.  What we can hope for is people who will at least decide to, say, buy an $800 if they could buy a $200 stroller and give $600 to charity.  He thinks if our culture and educational system reared these values such that we did not see it as so strange to care as much for those around the world as those close to us that we would get closer to this ideal. In this way, being educated about evolutionary psychology and the quirky ways we form our moral intuitions, if done systematically, could influence our intuitions into a more morally universalist mindset.

At 17:22 Greene talks about punishment.

2 views: Forward thinking, consequentialist take:  deterance, rehabilitation, and incapacitation.  “Punishing in hopes of making the future better.”

Retribution:  Someone’s done a bad thing and therefore deserves to suffer.

Greene is not a big fan of retribution.  When we understand human action better, desire for retribution goes away.  A hurricane does a lot of damage but you don’t want to make it suffer–it’s just a machine.  Should we start to recognize ourselves as mechanical systems, and really grasp the mechanical nature of our action stemming from physical events in our brain, retribution will lose its grip.  In this way some of our moral commitments will be undone.

Knobe argues though that even should we abstractly, intellectually realize that people are not free and responsible, we would still be chemically induced in our brain to feel strongly like the one who harms us must be punished.

Greene points out in reply though that Knobe has a study that actually shows people can overcome their immediate psychological responses.  They have an explicit approval but an implicit disapproval of gay kissing.  In Knobe’s study, he evaluated people’s views on things that may have been transgressive in an earlier time but now are seen as okay.  So they asked about interracial sex and gay people french kissing on the street.  100% of subjects said nothing wrong with interracial sex.  And they were less inclined to say straight couples were wrong for kissing on the street than to say gay men french kissing on the street was wrong.

Knobe points out that people are more likely to see side effects as intentional when they think of those side effects as being morally bad than when they think of them as being morally good.  So, they gave stories in which gay kissing and interracial sex are side effects to see whether people would call the actions in the stories that led to them as wrong.

In the example story, a record executive is warned that his videos will have the side effects of increasing interracial sex and public gay french kissing but he says, “I don’t care about that, I just want to make money, so I’m going to release them anyway.”  He releases them and they increase interracial sex and gay french kissing on street.  Did he encourage gay men to french kiss on street intentionally?  People with high dispositions to feel disgust say yes and those with a low disposition to feel disgust say no. So those with the high disposition to feel disgust subconsciously are seeing the french kissing as bad (therefore thinking the action which promotes it is intentional) even though consciously they do not think it is wrong.

I think Knobe’s experiment, at least as summarized here sounds as though it rather drastically is underdetermined by the evidence.  There is a huge assumption that because in some cases people are more prone to attribute intention when they think an action is wrong, and while people do seem more likely to associate disgust with wrongness, in this case there could be any other number of factors at work in their reason for thinking the record executive acted intentionally.

Greene makes an interesting point though when he notes, assuming Knobe’s experiment shows what he thinks it does, the difference between people’s subconscious disgust and their explicitly professed moral judgments need not be attributed to lies to the experimenters about their true feelings out of political correctness.  These are Cornell undergrads in the experiment.  Greene thinks that the vast majority of them not only would publicly say they’re not against gay sex but that they would even secretly vote in a gay-friendly way and otherwise act in accord with their abstract judgment and not their emotional reflexes.  It’s an example of people really changing their actions and not just saying the right thing to an experimenter.

So Greene asks if people can come to see gay kissing as fine even though it wasn’t thought so before, why can’t we comparably overcome our desire to punish out of a recognition of cognitive science?  Why can’t we react not with the desire to punish but compassionately as Greene has?

Knobe offers recent studies in which people were told to imagine a rape.  The person who did it had an injured pre-frontal cortex which completely caused the behavior and people were told that if they had the same injury they would do exactly the same thing.  People were then asked whether he is responsible?  Still most people said yes.  But Greene points out that not as many did as those who said the rape was wrong without including a tumor in the story.

In the abstract when people think of a world without free will, they see people as not morally responsible.  But when we tell a story about a particular person who commits the wrong, we hold him responsible.  The point is that abstractly we can grasp the unfariness of holding them responsible but when the example is personalized, we wind up reacting emotionally and want to punish.  We can grasp the point abstractly but just need to overcome our emotions.  They can see observe this conflict in the brain using cognitive neuroscience.  In the future, maybe these conflicts in the brain could be settled in the utilitarian favor.

Greene brings up the trolley example where we have to decide whether to let 5 people die or push 1 person to his death in order to save the other 5.  Watching their brains, scientists can recognize the two portions of the brain: more activity in the more cognitive portion of the brain when they opt for the consequentialist judgment over activity in the more emotional portion of the brain. There is a conflict between an intuitive response and a more reflective, considered response.

Going with our emotions is like using our camera on its regular, “point and shoot” settings.  Usually they work fine.  But sometimes when we need to make adjustments for an unusual situation, we need to put our camera into a manual mode and pay close attention to the peculiar factors at hand.  In unusual moral situations, our normal first reactions may not be reliable as they usually are.  We need to step back and evaluate.  The tension is between an efficiency in our ordinary moral settings and flexibility in our cognitive capabilities for reassessment.

In asking people whether they would push someone in front of a trolley to stop it from killing 5 people or whether they would pull a switch with a trap door to drop that person in front of the trolley, there is a different response from people to both scenarios.  60% say you should pull the trap door lever but only 30% would say you should push the person.  So, our emotions can’t be the final guide because they’re not responding to rational factors.

But the issue is not emotional per se. If our response was emotional but it led us to the right judgement then there’s nothing wrong with it being emotional.  If a response was cognitive but led us to the wrong judgment, it wouldn’t be better for being simply unemotional.

Emotions are essentially heuristics, precompiled programs, like the automatic settings on your camera. Usually the automatic settings are the best but it would be amazing if there was never a time you had to readjust your camera. Because it is an automatic setting, an emotion will sometimes lead you astray.

In a lot of kinds of circumstances, the emotions may be the better guide to responses.  Aesthetic judgments, for example, maybe should be guided more by the emotional response rather than by reference to a “top down” theory.

Ultimately Greene thinks there is no external fact about what is right or wrong but the best we can do is be consistent with our values as they are.  What leads Greene to prefer the cognitive, non-local perspective in preferring the world of universal love over the parochially loving one is a matter of consistency with his values and he can make arguments against the proponent of the more parochial theories but only in terms of the narrowness of their perspective.

Your Thoughts?

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By Daniel Fincke | Posted in Contemporary Ethics, Ethics, Featured, Metaethics, Moral Psychology, Philosophical Ethics, Philosophy, Psychology | Tagged , | Comments (0)

How Did Rational Arguments Persuade You Out Of Belief?

July 14, 2010 – 2:50 pm

One often hears the dubious claim that rational arguments cannot persuade any one to abandon their religious beliefs or their religious faith traditions.  I find when people perpetuate this idea they are usually trying to stop a debate that they find uncomfortable.  Sometimes people dismiss the possibility of rational persuasion in matters of belief because they are personally inherently uncomfortable with confrontation and conflict and/or easily frustrated with disagreements that last for more than a round or two of debate.  Others seem to want to use all the real psychological evidence about how our minds resist changing as their natural tendency as, implicitly, an excuse to hold on to their own prejudices and not reexamine them.

Others buy into the moderate feeling false humility that says that matters of religious belief are hopelessly subjective and impervious to rational progress.  They essentially become relativists about anything about which people have had religious beliefs.  Religious beliefs themselves have indeed always been based on subjective, irrational sources of belief—the unsupported claims of alleged prophets, ancient texts, communal opinion, etc.—and have always been inculcated through combinations of non-rational and irrational means, e.g., rituals, family identities, wildly arbitrary and subjective interpretations of emotional experiences, etc.

So debates between religions have always been, and always will be, futile precisely to the extent that they are about matters which have no rational support.  Insofar as religious believers posit beliefs that are in principle unjustifiable and subjective, and which were formed not rationally but through non-rational and irrational processes that bound them emotionally and practically to those unsupported beliefs, all they can do in “inter-faith dialogue” is assert one prejudice against another.

Now, people wrongly generalize that just because beliefs between religions boil down to irresolvable assertions of prejudices against each other, that all reasoning about the subjects religion treats and which are not amenable to strict scientific resolution must similarly be matters of bald subjective opinion.  They assume there can be no better or worse considerations from metaphysics, epistemology, history, morality, social or natural science that can give a fair-minded person reason to believe one way or another about religion.

But atheists explicitly refuse ourselves the right to faith-based beliefs that reflect merely our own prejudices and insist we have our reasons assessed for their rational merit and not be dumped in the bin of “subjective religious opinions” as though we, like the religious, were accepting arbitrary, unsupportable beliefs as a fact of life with which we were comfortable.  We do not accept articles of faith or fantastic and clearly implausible stories as justifications for belief, etc.

We claim rational reasons for our views and so they should either be rationally refuted or accepted.  Waving us away as inherently subjective just because our subject matter is religion or theism and religious people or theists routinely argue in unrepentantly subjectivistic ways is to unfairly dismiss us because of the behavior of our intellectual enemies which we explicitly repudiate.

And not only do most of us atheists repudiate non-rational and outright irrational bases for belief and think we have reasons deserving of a fair hearing for our disbelief or our lack of belief (depending on the atheist), but many of us feel rather sure that our atheism does not just stem from an anti-religious or anti-theist prejudice precisely because we rejected belief in God while we were devoutly religious people.

In my own case, I was attending one of the most conservative evangelical biblical-literalist Christian colleges in the country.  I spent my high school years alienating my classmates with my incessant evangelism and opposition to sex ed and abortion.  In high school I ran an evangelistic monthly Christian publication out of my church which I distributed to all my friends in school.  I spent all my Sundays and Wednesdays in church growing up, all my summers from 11-21 attending and then working as a counselor at Christian indoctrination and conversion camps.  I took numerous theology and philosophical theology courses in preparation, I thought, to be a church history scholar.  I gladly and believingly adhered sacrificially rigorously to evangelical rules of ethical conduct.

Nearly all my emotional, social, moral, intellectual, and other psychological prejudices were clearly and unequivocally on the side of Christianity and yet I came out an atheist to my surprise and that of many others who knew me.

So I think it is simply false to say that we cannot reason against our presuppositions or our upbringings or our desires or other psychological and social determinants which strongly incline us to keep believing what we presently do out of inertia.

We can change our minds out of considerations of reasons.  We can find common ground with those with whom we disagree and reassess some of our most presently foundational beliefs to see whether they really make for a good foundation.  Numerous atheists are living proof that this is possible, including very famous and adamantly skeptical ones.  It is possible to embrace reason and skepticism, abandon faith, and change one’s mind.

And so I think it is not only a cop out to say these issues are rationally irresolvable but an unnecessary and immoral leniency towards believers that encourages them to persist in their choice to continue to adhere to unsupportable, prejudicial thinking as though it is the only possibility any human being ever has and as though atheists, especially the de-converted ones, are simply no more objectively correct in their views or objective in their methods of belief formation.

This is a longer preamble to a simple question than I intended, but here’s what I raise all of this to ask.  You readers who did de-convert for rational reasons, can you explain what arguments registered with you and why, what rules of reason and belief formation became important to you and why, and what you think we can learn from your experience if we are to develop more targeted methods of dissuading religious believers of false and irrationally adopted beliefs?

In short, what gets through rationally and why?

Your Thoughts?

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By Daniel Fincke | Posted in Atheism, Atheism, Christianity, Christianity, Featured, Personal, Philosophy Of Religion, Religion, Why I Am Not A Christian, Why I Am Not A Christian | Tagged , | Comments (22)

Towards Atheistic Religions (Or Away From Them, Depending On How You Define “Religions”)

July 13, 2010 – 10:24 am

In a rare occurrence, I am being taken to task for giving religion too much credit and atheists too little!  Here are the offending paragraphs I wrote on Friday:

I would say that various practices called religious, if stripped of all their dogmatism, traditionalism, literalism, and authoritarianism, can and do certainly coexist with and complement science in the overall scope of human lives.  There is a place for ritual, for myth, for shared community, for groupings oriented around concern for charity and ethical formation, for meditation, for metaphysical speculation, for rites of passage, for wonder and gratitude at nature, for solemnity, for pageantry, for ecstatic experiences, and for strong identification with previous generations of members of various institutions and one’s culture itself.

An atheism that abandons all those life-enhancing parts of the human experience and the human possibility because of their cultural and institutional associations with personal-God theism, faith, superstition, authoritarianism, and excessive traditionalism is one that would throw out a truly vital baby because it is presently drowning in some truly disgusting bathwater.  It is an easy mistake to make, but still a mistake

These paragraphs received this provocative retort from Jeff D:

The first paragraph of this quote from blogger Daniel Fincke is beautifully worded and offers some valid (perhaps even profound) insights, despite a fundamental bit of dishonesty that I’ll get to later on.

The second paragraph of the quote is just more of the same ol’, same ol’ piffle. I don’t know any atheists who “abandon” or denigrate “myth,” “shared community,” “charity,” “ethical formation,” “meditation,” “metaphysical speculation,” “rights of passage,” “wonder and gratitude at nature,” “solemnity,” “ecstatic experiences,” OR “strong identification with previous generations.” (I know quite a few atheists and even more theists who criticize some “ritual” as empty or silly and who criticize some “pageantry” as kitsch or phony.)

I don’t really know what it means to say that there is an “atheism” that denies anything other than a belief in the existence of deities.

It’s really interesting that the first paragraph in the quote refers to “various practices called religious,” and goes on to speak of stripping away “dogmatism, traditionalism, literalism, and authoritarianism.” All of these have been and can be aspects of religion, or of “various practices called religious.” But what about “superstition”? What about “irrational belief”? What about fierce determination to maintain and perpetuate such belief and to discourage or prohibit doubt, investigation, or inquiry? From where I sit, those are just as fundamental aspects of “religion” as “dogmatisim, traditionalism, literalism, and authoritarianism.” In fact, without superstitious belief, I’d say that a system of cultural ideas and relationships isn’t a religion at all.

I think this is the dishonest aspect of the quotation. And I think it’s odd that Daniel Fincke would do this, even by mistake, because judging from other posts on his blog site, I suspect that Mr. Fincke and I would agree about many, many things on the subject of religion, the nature of “faith,” etc. Maybe those two paragraphs only seem dishonest when removed from the context of the rest of Mr. Fincke’s post.

Superstition, and the reflexive favoring of belief (usually primitive, ignorant belief) over empiricism — consistently preferring the “will to believe” over the “desire to find out” — is what makes religion incompatible with science.

Fincke (in his blog review of Ms. Robinson’s appearance on the Daily Show) says that “religion knows nothing” but “does things.” Correct, as far as it goes, but I wish it were as easy as that. Religion also pretends to know, with great certitude, all sorts of things, many of them demonstrably untrue. Even Fincke would concede that.

What is the opposite of “guilt by assocation”? Virtue by association? Organized religion has been associated for so long with ethics, morality, and charity that it is extremely difficult for most human beings — at least in the part of the world in which I live — to imagine that ethics, morality, and charity could exist without religion. It’s been a standard argument of religious apologists for centuries. I don’t think it’s a valid argument. And I’m sick unto death of hearing it and reading it, even when it is twisted slightly and dressed up in eloquent prose, as in the second paragraph of that quotation.

In context, my goal in the criticized second paragraph which Jeff D quoted was to address the fact that many people hear atheists attack religion as incompatible with their rational understanding of the world. And yet because viscerally and emotionally to them “religion” means the various social, imaginative, ethical, and “spiritual” things I listed above, they reflexively balk at the opposition between religion and science/knowledge/rationality. To many people saying that you cannot be scientific and religious is like saying you cannot be a scientist and go swimming or you cannot be a scientist and go to your grandmother’s house.

Because in their minds, all these other good things are part of the religion package and, from a cultural standpoint, they are not specifically part of either a scientific or an atheist package. I think many people who do not really need the superstitious or authoritarian dimensions of religion and who either explicitly or implicitly eschew much of that, still see and define religion as an overall package of valuable parts of life. And so you have Catholics who are on the pill, who get abortions, who don’t attend confession or mass all that regularly and yet hang on to their Catholicism, even passionately.

They show up to hand over their babies for baptism and keep them in the church through first communion and confirmation, they will go to priests for advice about spiritual matters, they will sign up to have their wedding and their funeral with all the powerfully symbolic and moving ritual and pageantry of the Roman Catholic tradition for such ceremonies. There’s nothing kitsch or phony in most people’s minds about a Roman Catholic wedding, it’s the freaking gold standard in the West. And when they have old clothes to donate or are feeling charitable and want an infrastructure for finding charitable activities to get involved with, they go to the Church to get involved.

And when they are in the hospital, the priest is seen as a spiritual person, a wise and compassionate counselor, devoted to people and ethical principle, who just maybe might be able to help with his prayers. I mean, what could it hurt to have him pray for you? At least it calms the nerves and in playing along you might convince yourself you have a shot and hope is a good thing in life. And God is a word for their awe at the universe and sense of gratitude for it and hope within it.  It connects with their sense that something about the universe is grand and mysterious and beyond what they will ever fully comprehend.  It connects with both their sense that there are forces in reality that could obliterate them without their control and also their wonder that they exist nonetheless.

And all of this ties people to grandma and grandpa. And in America it is part of maintaining their identity as coming from Italian immigrants or Irish Catholic immigrants or Latin American immigrants, etc. Religious myths are casually engaged.  Religious ethics are adopted as they are useful.  The myths make for a shared imagination in the community and the rituals make for a shared life in the community. In certain contexts, everyone fantasizes along in the same only half-believed way that is not really clarified and in talking as though they believe, they sort of do. “Is this true? is it false? are there reasons to believe this stuff?” A whole lot of people either do not ask those questions or do not let themselves take them seriously.

And their superstitions still have serious serious limits. They indulge ghost fantasies (even those completely at odds with their actual faith’s beliefs because logical consistency just is not the issue—solace through whatever rationalization will calm their subconscious mind is all that matters really) and they carry lucky relics, but at the end of the day, they still mourn their dead as bitterly and hopelessly as anyone else.

Now, to most people all of this is just in a completely different universe from science and knowledge. They do not think that religiously based superstitious beliefs affect the law of gravity or can be used to get them out of having to pay their taxes or will fix their leaking roof. And most of them go to the doctor and not to faith healers.

So, the point is that they live an entire life that uses religion for what they can gain from it emotionally, socially, and ethically, etc., and they use science for what they can get out of it practically and, in some cases, intellectually.

They live this life of compartmentalized complementarity between religion and scientific modern living. When we skeptical atheists say they cannot they say, “but we do”.

Their cognitive dissonance either causes them no trouble or practical implications for most of their activities which require strict reasoning skills or they judge that the trouble it does cause is much less bad than the pain that would be involved in severing from religious communities or beliefs.  Fundamentalists, be they Evangelicals or Muslims, are religious propositionalists, by which I mean that they believe the Bible or the Koran is filled with true statements about the world primarily and so they have a harder time with this compartmentalization than Jews or Catholics do.  But for many religious people, the compartmentalization gives them the best of both worlds whereas they (wrongly) infer that atheism would demand they only get the best of one world.

Now, since what people mean by religion are all these things with all these practical benefits, when atheists speak broadly about having to choose between science and religion, I think people assume the choice is supposed to be between science and all the stuff they are getting out of religion because it’s all knotted up together.

So, what I was trying to say to such people is most of this good stuff you like about your religious experience is indeed good and can be made compatible with modernity and science if you give up on the notion that religion is teaching you truth. Religion has little to nothing to do with truth. The only truths in religion are mythic and even many of the myths are bad myths that should be abandoned or radically reunderstood.

My point was also not that that religion actually has been on the side of ethical progress or a better source of ethics than secular investigations into philosophical ethics which are based on reason and progressive responsiveness to evidence and growing knowledge. I am adamantly against religious authorities being taken as ethical authorities simply out of customary habit of seeing them as such. That’s what I lambast as authoritarian, traditionalistic, regressive, ignorant, etc.

What I am saying, in essence is that what is called “religion”—all these practical dimensions of life can be retained and reconciled with science if, or only to the extent that, people reject religion as a source of intellectual and moral authority. I am not trying to deny the plain reality that religion has historically also purported to know things. I am not trying to deny in the least that it has been dogmatic and superstitious. Religious institutions have used religious techniques and practices to cultivate pretty much all of humanity’s cognitive biases so that they could exploit those biases for their power over people. This is the depressingly undeniable history of religious institutions.

But we have this set of practices and parts of life which people love that for centuries have been most efficiently controlled and manipulated by false intellectual and moral authorities. They have exploited people’s natural cognitive errors, including their superstitiousness and their poor skills at discerning justified authorities from unjustified ones, exploited people’s fears, needs for community, ritualistic natures, etc., and used a range of practices for reinforcing their control over people.

Now, my point is this, we must insist that religious authorities and institutions be granted no special intellectual or moral authority beyond what they can justify according to reason. Unless they can show the truth of their beliefs, they must be abandoned as sources of knowledge.  Unless they can philosophically persuade that their view on a moral issue is correct, they must be morally rejected on that issue. Unless they dismantle their authoritarian structures of belief and institutional organization, they should be judged ethically as harshly as any other attempted tyrannies.

But we atheists need to be abundantly clear with religious people that we do not oppose ritual itself, traditional identities themselves, ethical community itself, meditation itself, hope itself, metaphysics itself, ecstatic experiences themselves, myth-making itself (as long as it is not confused for truth telling, but is understood as literature), etc.

Now, you can say, “Of course we don’t, atheists aren’t inhuman idiots!” Well, the point is that whether or not they should, many religious people do reflexively and prejudicially see an either/or between religion which contains all these sorts of non-cognitive, emotional, social, moral, and indeterminately speculative and imaginative parts of life on the one hand and rationality which is scientific and impersonal on the other.

For most religious people this either/or does not force a choice though.  They just think there are two different compartments that fit together in a whole human life. When they hear people say religion and science are incompatible, they hear us atheists saying we can only have cold impersonal logic and must reject all the rest of these parts of life. Of course they should not think we mean that and of course we should not mean that. There is nothing inherently irrational about the non-cognitive, emotional, spiritual, moral, social, and speculative parts of life. But they think that anyone attacking religion is attacking whatever cannot be produced in a laboratory or whatever is experientially known rather than mathematically formulated.

Now, I agree completely with Jeff D that all the goods people are equating with institutional religions are generally parts of human psychology and culture, each of which individually needs no necessary tie to those religions to be developed. In a great many cases people get ethical community, metaphysical speculation, meditation, ritual, ecstatic experiences, ties to past generations, hope, identity formation, philosophy, etc., from non-religious cultural and psychological sources.  And not only that, but in a great many cases, they get better versions of these things without religious institutions than they do with them.

But we atheists need to do several things. We need to affirm people that in the cases in which their religiosity is giving them all of these things well in practice that that’s great that they get those benefits and go on to clearly distinguish that what we are challenging is not their traditional identity that binds them to grandma but just the beliefs which are false. We need to affirm that we appreciate that they associate their religion with all the charity they do (or receive) through their church, but that that does not give them their religion the moral authority to claim that homosexuals should be forced into either celibacy or heterosexual relationships morally.

We need to affirm that we appreciate their correct point that science does not know everything but we need to remind them that that does not mean their priest knows anything that a scientist or a philosopher or they themselves could not know. We need to make clear that if they want metaphysics they can do philosophy, but they cannot just make stuff up or believe what ancient peoples just made up without evidence. We need to say we appreciate that their rituals or mediations or prayers calm their nerves and orient their minds, but that it is important that they not superstitiously make any choices which depend on those practices having magic power and that they not encourage their children and others to abandon proven methods of inference for false ones long surpassed.

In other words, people cling to religion for the good parts and accept the bad parts because of them, because in their minds they’re a total package that has to come together. So rather than target “religion” which for many people connotes all sorts of redeemable parts of life and turn people off, we need to relentlessly target faith (belief in what is either insufficiently proven or belief which ignores clear counter-evidence), dogmatism, literalism, traditionalism, ethical authoritarianism, intellectual authoritarianism, political authoritarianism, superstition, anti-intellectualism, irrationalism, wishful thinking, and all the other cognitive biases which religious institutions exploit.

And, secondly, I understand that atheism logically speaking is just the lack of belief in deities (though I would more specifically put it as “living without deities, usually because one lacks belief in them”) and, as such, has no other necessary implications for whether one adopts or neglects to adopt any of those other good (or bad!) things that are part of religions.

But atheists would do well to not only point out that you can personally have all the beneficial emotional, spiritual, ritualistic, speculative, traditional, identity-forming, etc., benefits people presently turn to religion for without actually having religion.  We atheists would also do well to recognize that part of what people love about their religions is their integration of all these things into a whole way of thinking, living, and having an identity.  What they think they need religion in specific to do is to unite all these things in life.

Powerful religions give people’s lives a sense of coherence because they interconnect their views of everything and tie them to their practices. It is because people associate their ethics, their personal identity, their familial identity, their meditative practices, their social network, etc. in deep ways with their religions that when forced to choose between religion and science they either punt the question and just compartmentalize or, when push comes to shove, they twist what they think science is so that it does not disrupt everything else that is balled up together.

So this is what is uncomfortable for atheists. As atheists, all that most of us are really worried about is that people be rationally scrupulous and morally good for moral goodness’s sake. And we see long legacies of people deliberately instituting religious practices—group understandings of ethics, group-based rituals, group-defining myths, group-shared meditations, etc. as tools for controlling and manipulating people through irrational means. There is nothing rationally necessary about not eating meat on Fridays. To make it a rule for the sake of making everyone share a common ritual is needlessly suffocating. It’s so arbitrary.

But if you do not lay down arbitrary rules, you lose the bonding effect it has on people. There is no rational reason to not eat meat on Fridays that has anything to do with the nature of meat and the nature of Fridays. But there are rational reasons to get everyone in a group to do the same ritual (or in this case the same ritual abstention) on the same day. It creates identity, community, loyalty, discipline, etc.

There are relatively rational ways though for atheists to establish rituals and a liturgical calendar, etc. The way to do that is to acknowledge that valuable things rationally deserve celebration and that it both trains and satisfies us emotionally to set up specific days of celebration for them. So, celebrating days in which we honor the earth, honor evolution, honor the solar system, etc. all as ways of reminding ourselves and future generations of our dependency on them is possibly a good thing to do. Maybe a rite of passage where 13 year olds have to have a pet monkey for a month so that they can learn to appreciate our shared ancestry.

Are you rolling your eyes yet, my fellow atheists? The challenge here is that human minds learn through rituals, symbolic rites of passages, holy days, etc. Religious institutions have no real reason on their side so they exploit whatever irrational messaging system they can get their hands on. If atheists want to compete with that, it might benefit us to develop our own irrational messaging systems that point people towards primary allegiances to scientific and philosophical truths and to scrupulously rational practices. We may just need to use the tools for irrationally persuading people to lead them to explicitly embrace reason and rational truths lest those same tools be used against reason and rational truths.

We do not need noble lies (myths which tell uncomprehending people a genuine philosophical truth, that is simply above their heads, in symbolic form which they are encouraged to think of as literal). That method of inculcating the truth in irrational people has failed for centuries since people have fetishized the symbols and let them resist reformulations as new truths were discovered.

But what we might need are noble atheist rituals, noble atheist communities, noble atheist meditative practices, etc. that train people through non-rational means to have explicitly, self-consciously, and truly rational practices and habits of thought and belief. This means, though, convincing atheists to work together and form an alternative community (or communities) to as a competing choice to religious institutions.

Some may call this religious atheism and others might say it’s an alternative to religion. This is semantics.

What matters is that an atheist community be defined by its scrupulous and unqualified rejection of faith (belief in what is either insufficiently proven or belief which ignores clear counter-evidence), dogmatism, literalism, traditionalism, ethical authoritarianism, intellectual authoritarianism, political authoritarianism, superstition, anti-intellectualism, irrationalism, wishful thinking, and all other cognitive biases. To the extent that religion means any of those things, atheists can have no religion.

But to the extent that religion means to people a community for ethics, meditation, philosophy, ritual, rites of passage, pageantry, hope, traditional identity, group-identity, solemnity, ecstatic experiences, gratitude and wonder at the universe, psychological support, charitable coordination, etc., then atheists should not be embarrassed to openly build such a “religious” community that provides atheists in common all these things in organized ways, but without any of the abusive irrationalism or authoritarianism of faith-based, theistic religions.

A lot of atheists will be squeamish about this. Some associate any group organizations with the worst possibilities for group-think and so refuse to join other atheists in this task because they think it can only lead bad places. Other atheists just do not care about community along atheist lines since they have other avenues for community in life. And other atheists will think since they personally can get all those other goods in life in an individualistic way, they have no need to associate with other atheists for them.

But if we as atheists do not imaginatively and rationalistically construct positive alternatives to religion for the numerous people who do turn to religion for its “full package” of beliefs, practices, ethics, and community, then we will lose those people to the inferior beliefs, practices, ethics, and community that authoritarian forms of religion offer.

So, what is it atheists? Do we only want to harp on the ways that we are skeptical, scientific, and a default negative with no other specific content necessary or do we want to risk adding to our atheism all the constructive stuff that would make for an “atheist religion” for those convinced that “religion” in some sense is a necessary good? Can we persuade them that they can have most or all of what they really want to DO with religion without any of the superstition, dogmatism, fideism, or authoritarianism? Should we even try?

Your Thoughts?

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By Daniel Fincke | Posted in Applied Ethics, Applied Ethics, Atheism, Atheism, Atheistic Ethics, Atheistic Ethics, Authority, Authority, Christianity, Christianity, Contemporary Ethics, Contemporary Ethics, Cultural Secularism, Cultural Secularism, Ethics, Ethics, Featured, New Atheism, New Atheism, New Atheism, New Atheism, Philosophy, Philosophy Of Religion, Religion, Religion and Science, Religious Moderates, Religious Moderates, Religious Secularism, Religious Secularism, Roman Catholic Church, Roman Catholic Church, Secularism | Comments (6)

How Our Morality Realizes Our Humanity

July 11, 2010 – 7:21 pm

In a previous post, I discussed the intrinsic connection between being and goodness and between functional activity and being.  I argued, for example that the various components of a heart need to function as a heart to be a heart and similarly that a human being must act morally to realize her humanity.  Specifically, I claimed that she does not realize her humanity to the extent that she fails to be moral (not, however, that she does not realize her humanity at all in such cases.) Eli raises the most immediately pressing question such an analogy raises:

This is a really thought provoking post. I would certainly agree that something can be considered to be x when it fulfills the function of x (a heart is only a heart when it pumps blood.) This idea of function becomes a little more problematic when you move outside the material realm and make the assertion that not acting morally makes you less of a human being. How is being moral so central to the purpose of being human?

I distinguish between ethics and morality, so let me first address the broader ethical framework in which I think morality fits.  And I will stick to humans since we’re all humans here.  Presumably.

Human ethics, as I see it, is simply about how to maximally thrive as a human being.  I think what a human being is is a specific set of highly complex, interrelated, mutually coordinating and amplifying functional powers, all of whose rudiments stem essentially from our specifically human genetics and which can take a great variety of different forms when they interact with a range of different cultures and other environmental variables.

We exist as a function of all our various powers as they are configured and coordinated in any number of ways at any given time.  Right now I am existing as a sitting, typing, breathing, philosophizing, writing, language-using human being.  And that’s not even the whole list, there are all sorts of powers at work in me at any given time and their total contributions constitute my existence at any given time.

I am whatever I am doing at the moment.  This is the existentialist dimension of my thought.  Where I am a Nietzschean existentialist rather than a Sartrean sort, is that I interpret what “I am doing” to essentially mean “what my component powers are doing”.  Whatever my emotions are doing, whatever the numerous cognitive faculties in my brain are doing, whatever the rest of my body is doing, etc., all function together to make me “occur”.  I am the resultant function of all of those more basic functions.  They are wholly constitutive of me.  There is no remainder left of “me” (except conceptually) if you take them all away.

Now to apply the heart analogy, just as the heart has a characteristic function which it needs to carry out in order to be a heart in the doing of heart activities, so all of our cognitive and emotional powers have characteristic functions through which alone they are realized.  My memory is not a memory to the extent that it cannot remember, my love is not a love to the extent that it does not love, my computational skills are not computational skills to the extent that I cannot compute, etc.  To the extent that my brain functions to remember, to love, and to compute, I am a remembering, loving, and computing being.  And to the extent that it does not do those things, I am not those things.

If I am not born with a specific functional capability or do not have much of a particular kind of ability there is not much I can do by way of actualizing my humanity in that specific way or to an extent that someone else might (assuming there are no technological fixes by which I can remedy my deficiency).

But to the extent that I have a functional capability at all and to the extent that through a combination of its “natural” strength and my exercise of it in practice I can make it more powerful.  I have a power with potential which can be realized.

But what if I do not want to realize my potential?  Why must I do that?  What does this have to do with ethics?  Ethics is, presumably about norms for how we should function: how we should realize our potential for action in particular circumstances and in the broader projects of our lives.  How do these insights answer those questions?

The first thing I would point out is that since my being is constituted by its very powers, to outright destroy all of them would be to destroy myself.  To be myself, I must exist through my functional powers.  They are my existential precondition.  They must function for me to function and therefore, I have an intrinsic interest as me, that they function.  I take this to mean that I have a norm, a guiding principle, which comes from this existential precondition.

But that does not mean I need all of them to function.  For one thing, I have more functional possibilities than I could ever realize.  I can, for example, theoretically develop any of a long list of possible skills but in practice must choose to devote my energies to some rather than others because time and resources are limited.  I might opt to develop 18,250 skills to the level possible from one full day’s training if I do nothing every day for the next 50 years but train in a new skill each day the whole day.   But I could never that way realize any one of those skills the way that someone with a more modest handful of skills and hundreds or thousands of days of training will realize them.  So, for this reason, among others, there must be choices made and trade offs accepted with respect to our powers, we cannot maximally realize all our powers simultaneously.

But are there any norms to guide us in choosing which functionalities to focus on developing and which ones to either moderately or minimally attend to, neglect altogether, or, even, outright expunge from ourselves to whatever extent possible?

Let’s start with the easiest one, functional tendencies we should eradicate from ourselves as much as possible.  These are things we could do, or are inclined to do, which harm ourselves or others with not enough benefit to other functional powers of ourselves or others to net an overall increase in human flourishing and/or pleasure in the world.  If I have a tick that makes me scratch my eyeballs until I bleed, I should want to extirpate that functional tendency as best and as fast as I can.  It only damages my other functions in which I am embodied and through which I express and increase my overall power.

I can neglect other functional possibilities.  I might be able to develop into a highly skilled backgammon player or rock climber or musician and, yet, find that the energy and effort involved in these pursuits might take away from other projects which could function on so greater a level with my full attention as to make my life an overall more powerful one.  If redirecting my focus to backgammon, rock climbing, and musicianship significantly diminished primary powerful pursuits without sufficient compensation for them in replacement power realized, it’s not worth it.  For other people those functional possibilities might be more central to their own most powerful lives than they are to mine.

How do I go about deciding which functional powers to maximize and in what ways?  My natural talents give me clues about how I might function relatively powerfully in a way that draws on what is already “well-working” within me.  My interests also give me a clue as to what parts of myself I will enjoy developing enough that I will put in the necessary dedication to make myself powerful with respect to them.

I take it to be that since being is inherently good, maximally being is inherently greatest. My ideal is to become as powerful as I can, as highly functioning overall–with the combination of all my distinct functionalities taken together functioning with as many “units” of power (however this might be informally measured) as possible.

But whither morality?  Why is being a moral human being a necessary and centrally constitutive part of being a fully powerful human being?  There are several reasons.

1. I am an Aristotelian in the sense that I think that our various moral virtues are moral powers.  Like Aristotle I think we have various inclinations, which I call functional possibilities, which we naturally find ourselves experiencing.  I am inclined towards anger, I have the functional possibility of realizing myself through the emotion of anger. So in order to figure out the extent to which I should do this I must ask myself, “If I function at full anger what will this do to my other functional powers?  What will it do to my overall sum functional power?

Well if I am so seething with anger that I destroy relationships that are beneficial to my pursuits of my various powers, then I have harmed my own ability to fully actualize.  If I am so consumed with anger and let it function at full blast such that all I am is a seething manifestation of unbridled rage, then I can hardly concentrate on a game of chess or on a paying job or on love of friendship or, even, on the cognitive tasks involved in acting upon my anger in ways that satisfy my ends (be they merely selfish ones or just ones).

So, anger needs to be dialed back, usually quite a bit and always at least somewhat, so that there is room for parts of me to flourish too.  Anger is good for helping motivate my desire for justice when it functions as a response to injustice.  Anger is good for helping me change my own course when I do something that should make me angry with myself.  In those cases I become angry and express myself through, and am embodied in, my anger.

But I should only function as angrily as is productive to the development of the more directly productive powers within me, those functionalities which produce results which reflect greater power in me and extend my power further out beyond myself.  And, quite often, anger tends to be counter-productive to my larger purposes in life and to thwart my other powers.  So, it must be a power used with precision so that it only enhances and never diminishes my overall power.

And a similar account of the rightful feeling and expression of all the emotions can be made.  Each moral virtue involves a well calibrated emotion which ably functions to make me feel towards any given thing an emotion that rightly corresponds to the thing’s objective value (or values) to me, to my associates, and to humanity (and animals and valuable things) at large.  To respond to the world with emotions which lead to the proper orientation towards action is a power humans are capable of.  When we respond with the most productive emotions, this is, therefore, intrinsically good for us as an intrinsic expression of one of our functional powers through which we can manifest ourselves as human.

So, morally appropriate emotions, properly calibrated to objective value in the world, express a functional power and, therein, realize my humanity and so are intrinsically good for me.

2. My functional power extends beyond the limits of my body.  When I help build a building, my powers as a builder continue to function for as long as the building stands.  And for as long as another building I constructed in a shoddy way wreaks havoc on its occupants, I continue to function poorly.  This is why, out of a proper desire to express myself through excellent outward manifestations (an emotion we call pride), we should take pride in our work.  It is our outward expression through which we function, sometimes long after we are gone even.

When I teach you a skill, I function through your skill every time you use it.  If I teach you ideas my mind functions outside my body through your mind every time you think those thoughts.  And when they are true thoughts which you accept and which, based on their truth, lead you to more truths and to more powerful effects in the world based on those truer understandings of the world, my mind functions through that whole process.  My power plays a role in all those further developments insofar as I was an indispensable link in that chain of causation.

For me to empower people is to multiply my own power by infusing them with my power (metaphorically—nothing New Agey and mystical going on here, there is no bullshit Secret) such that forever more (or at least for a while more) it functions with their power and becomes a part of their power.

The greatest rulers are the greatest sources of empowerment for their peoples.  We take a crude, weakling’s and tyrant’s view of power when we imagine power as the destruction and debilitating subordination of one’s rivals or of one’s people (or of another people). To have real “world power” means to really power the world.  Thomas Edison is the master of the modern universe.  His inventive powers function throughout the world every night.  Everything we ever do which requires light bulbs has a contribution from a man long dead.  That’s power.

And rulers whose laws lead to fertile grounds, sound infrastructure, and flourishing people find themselves efficacious in all the food and institutions and thriving, powerful human lives which are all traceable to their shrewd lawmaking.  Every time you express your freedom of speech to your own benefit as a human being, feel the power of the authors of the First Amendment flow through you.

So, no matter what our capacity, be we builders, teachers, writers, rulers, parents, humanitarians, doctors, citizens, lovers, friends, plumbers, inventors, computer programmers, sanitation workers, chefs, cooks, etc., performing our tasks well in the ways that our roles are best able to aid and empower other people, allows us to function powerfully through their further successes.

And, of course, a great part of morality obviously entails our contributions to other people’s lives and empowering them as we would have them empower us (to suggest a slight modification of the Golden Rule).  So, in performing these sorts of actions to the best of our ability too, there is often a great deal of morality through which we realize our humanity as maximally as we can.

3.  Morality requires of us in many cases a commitment to principles which are inconvenient and on the short run do not aid our direct, maximal, individual flourishing according to our most prized powers.  Sometimes, principles of fairness or generally beneficial codes for behavior would thwart our immediate purposes.  Such overriding moral principles are justifiable to us because as human beings, it is our empirically observable nature to be materially, emotionally, culturally, politically, intellectually, and socially utterly dependent on a well-functioning social order if we are ever to maximally realize a great number of our powers.  And this should make us properly humble and appreciative of the enormous extent to which we not only function in and through others but also others also function in and through us.

Our fundamental dependence on such orders gives us a rational reason to prioritize principles which uphold that order even to our immediate detriment.  It is usually irrational in practice to undermine that foundation.  In these cases, strong powers of reason and commitment to moral principle are crucial human powers through which we can flourish even as we preclude ourselves from other forms of flourishing we might prefer in that instance.   The net result, I think, actually usually increases our total functional power in these cases, after all, insofar as our self-restraint helps to keep a thriving social order thriving.  Moral citizens can take pride in this contribution to society.

So, this is a third way in which to function morally is to function powerfully humanly.

And, as a “bonus”, when we temperately uphold the principles which uphold the social order, in the long run, those benefits again have the potential to make us more powerful than had we played a role in unraveling of the social fabric (or a crucial piece of it) for short term gains, only to find it not there for us later on when we needed it next.

4.  So far, I have focused on motivations for morality that refer eventually back to the conditions of our own flourishing according to our own powers.  We can also, of course, be motivated morally (I think) by love and investment in others for their own sake.  Sometimes (and probably usually morally ideally) we should empower others not out of explicit thought for how our own power can flourish through theirs as a result, but we should (and do) empower out of intrinsic love of those we empower for their own sakes.  In such a case, I think we realize certain powerful and powerfully efficacious social virtues and, through them, our humanity.

Your Thoughts?

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By Daniel Fincke | Posted in Contemporary Ethics, Contemporary Ethics, Duty, Duty, Ethics, Ethics, Featured, Historical Ethics, Historical Ethics, Historical Philosophy, Intellectual Virtues, Intellectual Virtues, Love, Love, Metaethics, Metaethics, Moral Psychology, Moral Psychology, Morality, Morality, Nietzsche, Nietzsche, Philosophical Ethics, Philosophical Ethics, Philosophy, Teleology, Teleology, Virtues, Virtues | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (8)

Why Progressive Interpretations Of The Old Testament Still Do Not Justify Its God Morally

July 11, 2010 – 4:48 pm

In reply to this video on various immoral things outright commanded in what is supposed to be God’s law in the Old Testament, Loyal writes:

Militaristic non-Christians often seize upon the many difficult passages where God is condoning morally repugnant acts.

I am glad you admit that they are morally repugnant acts and neither morally permissible or, worse, morally necessary on account of God’s approval.  But you have already in the first sentence begun to dissimulate when you use the word “condone” whereas in the Bible we read God not condoning but commanding morally repugnant acts from genocides, to infanticides, to the stoning of children, homosexuals, people who work on the Sabbath, etc.  The list of morally vile things that God, according to the book you think is divinely inspired, commanded includes nearly every basic type of immorality we know of.  God even threatens to make people eat their own children in that book.

So, before we get any further, how can a morally perfect God ever command a genocide or cannibalization of one’s own children?

You say that atheists “seize” on these actions like we are trying to pick on some minor point and make more out of it than it is.  But that’s not the case.  We’re not just playing games of “gotcha!” here.  You have a thesis that a morally perfect and omnipotent God inspired the Bible and that the will and historical deeds of this morally perfect God are revealed in the Bible.  Now, there has to be positive evidence for this claim.  You, in what follows, will simply take it for granted that the God described is in fact morally perfect and try to give the most moral interpretation of what He does in the Bible you can for each point.

But what you will have to demonstrate in order to prove that the Bible describes the deeds and will of a morally perfect and omnipotent divine being intervening in history is (a) that each thing he did was not minimally morally acceptable but the most morally perfect thing he could have done and (b) that the hypotheses that the God of the Bible is a fictional character projected by barbaric human minds and reflecting all their own moral failures and intellectual weaknesses is not a more plausible interpretation of the relevant data.

However, I believe that this is done without taking into account the broader scope of the Bible and human history. (It also ignores the incredible focus on social justice- taking care of those who were powerless, such as widows, orphans, and aliens, and redistribution of wealth through the year of jubilee to prevent chronic generational poverty.)

And Hitler was a vegetarian who only wanted to be an artist and who was ever so kind to his secretaries, why does everyone want to focus on the genocides?  It’s such a narrow focus!!

God takes a primitive and brutal society

Wait—why were they primitive?  If God is a perfect moral being why not make human beings with morally and politically non-primitive and non-brutal society?  Why not set them up from the outset with a functioning moral and legal code?  You make it sound like God got called in on a job that was going bad but which He had nothing to do with.  This is supposed to be the omnipotent creator of the universe, right?

and begins the process of bringing them into line with His original design for creation. Those morally repugnant commands can often be explained as modification of common practices into something more in line with God.

That’s unacceptable.  You are talking like this is not an omnipotent deity.  Or do you think your God is not omnipotent?  What harm would it have done the people to institute a democracy instead of a theocracy?  What harm would it have done the people to institute egalitarian attitudes about male and female relationships?  What harm would it have done to command them not to stone their disobedient children?  What harm would it have done to command the people to stop stigmatizing and murdering homosexuals?

You are trying to tell me that the Almighty God, morally perfect and absolutely omnipotent is just a Cass Sunstein fan who goes out of his way to intervene in history only to make a specific tribe of barbarians just a little bit bit better through slight nudges towards moral Enlightenment.

What is more likely?  That a slightly more advanced barbaric culture than its neighbors has just pulled itself up towards enlightenment through its own slowly evolving moral imagination or that an all powerful, morally perfect God gave them their moral and legal code that is rife with, as you put it yourself, moral repugnance.  Where does the hypothesis that there is anything but moral repugnance come in?  Just because it is a bit less moral repugnance does not indicate in the slightest that what we are dealing with is moral perfection.  A morally perfect God would give a morally perfect law.  That’s simple logic.  There is no way to infer, “this morally repugnant law is a bit less morally repugnant than it’s neighbors, therefore it must come from a morally perfect source”.  The clear and logical inference is that it came from a  bit less morally repugnant source.  That’s it.

The only reason you advance such a ludicrous interpretation of the evidence is out of religious conditioning to accept the hypothesis that the God in the Old Testament is a morally perfect God.

There is no reason to think that barbaric humans, if given a moral code enforced by God could not be just like any modern day humans.  We have not evolved that much in the last 3,000 years. We are basically the same “model” they were then.  Any one of our babies put into a time machine and sent back to be born in those times would likely come out just as barbaric as they were and any of their babies raised in modern civilization would wind up just as (er, relatively) civilized as we are.  The issue is culture.  And culture comes as much from the moral and legal law as anything.  And God was intervening to shape these ancient people and so rather than give them a more perfect moral and legal law, one which at least knows as much as we figured out without divine intervention—slavery is wrong, sexism is wrong, homophobia is wrong, authoritarian political structures are wrong, domestic violence is wrong, etc.—you want me to believe that this morally perfect and omnipotent being gave them a code filled with animal sacrifice and slavery and capital punishment for the most trivial offenses and, even, outright morally fine things?

Without your faith commitment, which is a deliberate and willfully committed to prejudice, why in the world would that be the most compelling available interpretation?

Take the example of the rapist of a virgin be required to pay a severe fine and marry the woman.  If an unmarried woman was raped, she would be considered unmarriable.

So, Loyal, imagine you are God and you can tell humanity anything you want.  Would it be that raped women are used up and impure and unmarriable?  You are an omnipotent and morally perfect being and rather than write one word in your big, huge literary and legal intervention into history, you don’t say a word to rebuke people treating raped women like tainted unlovable garbage?

If I were all powerful and had the chance to write a book for humanity, on the first page it would read, “if a woman is raped, it takes nothing away from her desirability whatsoever—nothing from her beauty, nothing from her purity, nothing from her intelligence, nothing from her moral virtue, nothing from her dignity, nothing from her worth, nothing from her charm, nothing from her physical and technical abilities, and nothing from her ability to flourish fully as a human being or to contribute fully to the rest of humanity.”  That would go on page one.

I would not write, “Because I understand you human beings have wretched misogynistic views that consider women to be chattel and economic structures which force them into dependency on male benefactors, I am going to accommodate your abusive depravity from which all you men are benefiting BUT if you rape a woman, you have to marry her so that she does not starve.  That’s where I put my foot down.  You are allowed to see her as defiled, damaged goods, because, well, there’s no teaching you stupid people yet.  You will figure out how to treat people better some day later, but that’s not my job.  And, what’s that?  You mean you find it dehumanizing to be forced to marry a man who raped you?  Lady, you can eat and you have a roof over your head, I’m only God here, not a miracle worker.  Stop your fucking complaining and acknowledge my moral perfection.”

Any book that claims to be the work of a morally perfect being has to say something like what is in the first paragraph if it is going to convince me of its morally perfect authorship and any whiff of the attitude in the second paragraph is proof to me that a morally perfect being by no means is doing the commanding.

A single woman could not support herself in that society and would be a social outcast. The requirement that a stiff fine be paid served as a deterrent and restitution to the offended family and the marriage of the woman (in a time when very few married for love, but by arrangement) guaranteed that the woman would live a life of less suffering. The law took a bad situation and made the best of it.

When God’s given lemons he forces rape victims into perpetual subordination to their rapists by making them their husbands and sole source of economic well-being.

God was not content to leave His people in that moral situation. Saving His children may have started with revealing himself, providing land, and giving a rudimentary code of law to a bunch of shepherds in the middle east, but it did not end there. It was a process.

An omnipotent God can only give a rudimentary code of law?  If it’s so admittedly rudimentary, why not infer the obvious fact about its authorship—that it came from rudimentary minds?  Give me one reason to infer a morally perfect and infinitely knowledgeable being wrote a rudimentary law code that does not have to do with sheer force of will to believe against logic and evidence?  You are arguing for outright absurd conclusions out of a faith-based prejudice.

In Jesus, the process continues. He taught things like (I am paraphrasing here), You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth’ [equitable justice], but I tell you to love your enemies and do good to those who do evil to you so that you may be like your father in heaven who loves all his children. And he taught that you have heard that it was said ‘whoever divorces his wife must give her a certificate of divorce’ [he could not remarry her later, this prevented capriciousness and gave some measure of security to women], but I tell you that you were given this law because your hearts were hard (Matt 19:8, Mark 10:5); Divorce is not for your convenience but because of to take into account that this world is screwed up and your spouse may at some point refuse to keep the covenant of marriage. God joined you together, you should not tear yourselves apart.

Later, as God’s saving work progressed into non-Jewish areas, God taught though Peter and Paul that His children were not only Jews, but all people. The work of breaking down ethnic and cultural barriers began.

We have seen hints of Gods longer-term goals throughout the Bible. His desire for all humanity to know him is demonstrated when Elijah took care of a non-Jewish widow during a famine, the inclusion of Rehab (a non-Jewish prostitute) and Ruth (a non-Jew) in the lineage of King David and Jesus, the sending of Jonah to preach to the Assyrians, Jesus’ healing of the Roman centurion’s servant, and many others.

The use of God’s early efforts to move the moral center of a barbaric society as evidence for a bad God ignores His overall work.

Jesus says he comes to fulfill the law, he says that not a word of the law will pass away, etc., etc.  To this day, Christians the world over, including you, do not treat the Old or the New Testament as cultural landmarks since superseded as humanity has progressed.  You claim special revelation.  Special, divine guidance.  Human societies all over the world have progressed in naturalistically explicable ways, with no need for supernatural interventions.  The fact that you can trace moral progress from the Old Testament to Jesus to the New Testament does not give any evidence that any thing other than normal means of progress and standard, run of the mill cultural, social, economic, and psychological factors were at play.

Plato represents as great a leap forward in human understanding as the world has ever seen, far advanced beyond anything in the Bible, and yet that represents no reason to think he was supernaturally inspired.  We take Socrates’s claims to that effect completely unseriously as literal truth claims.  They are quite interesting for their literary, psychological, and cultural value, but there is and should not be no religion based around the non-human sources of inspiration Socrates claimed for himself.  And there should be no more religion based around the supposed divinity of Yahweh or Jesus.

Finally, we still have Christians with barbaric hateful attitudes towards gays.  We even have some proposing laws to have gays killed with the biblical death penalty.  Tell me, Loyal, if God is really behind all the moral progress in the world, why are Christians as a class behind non-Christians in morally embracing gays as morally good and praiseworthy people and their homosexuality as capable of ethically excellent love and physical expression?

Is it that he still doesn’t think His people can shed their prejudices?

Maybe then it’s not a good thing to be one of His people.

Your Thoughts?

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By Daniel Fincke | Posted in Atheism, Atheism, Bible, Bible, Christianity, Christianity, Divine Intervention, Divine Intervention, Faith, Faith, Featured, God, God, Jesus, Jesus, Religion, Religion, Why I Am Not A Christian, Why I Am Not A Christian | Comments (8)

I Am Not Militaristic.

July 11, 2010 – 4:37 pm

In reply to this video on various immoral things outright commanded in what is supposed to be God’s law in the Old Testament, Loyal writes:

Militaristic non-Christians often seize upon the many difficult passages where God is condoning morally repugnant acts.

The use of the word “militaristic” to characterize all who “seize upon the many difficult passages where God is condoning morally repugnant acts” is to imply, palpably falsely, that there is a direct correlation between using these texts to evaluate the moral worth of the Bible on the one hand and “militarism” on the other hand.  Whether or not actual militaristic non-Christians like, say, General Mao liked using the immorality in the Pentateuch to criticize Christianity is irrelevant.  There is nothing inherently militaristic about raising serious moral objections to a book for which divine authority is claimed.  That is perfectly within the range of free and peaceable, and I would argue vitally necessary, discourse.

If what you mean to do is to tar outspoken atheists such as myself as militaristic because we refuse to quietly, passively, and non-confrontationally allow religious ideas to go unchallenged in suitable public and private forums, then you are attempting to slander people, turn others against them based on a false and ugly characterization of their intentions and their actions, and to, in effect, force them into silence.

Unless you can find me any calls for the violent imposition of atheism or the legally coercive prohibition of religion and implementation of atheism as law of the land that come from either me or Andrew Skegg, I would appreciate it if you did not associate us with violent attitudes.

What you have is a rationally, but never physically forceful opponent in the contemporary Anglo-American activist atheists whom you besmirch unjustly with the word “militaristic”.  And we will not be bullied into silence with insulting mischaracterizations of our behavior.  We argue on grounds of moral and intellectual conscience without raising a fist or any other weapon.  This is our legal right and many of us see it as a moral and intellectual duty.

You do not have to like us.  You are more than welcome to marshal whatever arguments against the merits of our positions that you think are true and persuasive.  You are more than welcome to make fun of something we say if you find it absurd and you think the rhetorical tactic is the best way of getting others to recognize the absurdity.

But don’t outright lie about us and try to bully us into silence by trying to equate vocal insistence on rational investigation with violence.

In the next post, I will gladly resume the civil and spirited debating of ideas which characterizes this blog.  In particular I will explore Loyal’s substantive and interesting arguments that atheists misunderstand or, worse, deliberately ignore important other considerations which might allow for the repugnant practices found in the Old Testament to be read as truly the word of a morally perfect God.

Your Thoughts?

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By Daniel Fincke | Posted in Atheism, Atheism, Featured, New Atheism, New Atheism, New Atheism, New Atheism | Comments (8)

Why I Think Theistic Religion’s Psychological Grip Can Be Weakened Or Broken

July 10, 2010 – 2:03 pm

In a recent comments section, Gregory Wahl argued to me that religion is so deeply rooted in psychological needs, specifically the longing for immortality, that there is an inherent limitation to the ability of all my philosophical arguments to dissuade the faithful.  As this line of reasoning goes, they do not believe for intellectual reasons but emotional ones and so intellectual reasons can make no decisive impact on whether they believe. I countered that while of course some people will forever be psychologically impervious to rational dissuasion, others are not and I write for those “with ears to hear” and do not worry about those I could never hope to affect.

In reply, Gregory offers a few quotes:

I admire your efforts and enjoy reading your essays. But here’s a good example of what you’re up against — three excerpts from theologian John Haught’s book Deeper Than Darwin:

“If, in the ultimate depths of nature, we were to unearth an aimless, impersonal materiality, we would then have to yield to cosmic pessimism. And we would have to acknowledge the ultimate futility of all scientific exploration as well, since our intelligence will then have met the impenetrable obstruction — the absolutely unintelligible. Such a finale would mock mercilessly all our efforts to understand the universe.”

“In every death, a center or cluster of experience dissolves. So unless somewhere there is permanence, and unless this permanence is able to redeem all perishing, evil ultimately wins out over goodness, and the world in the end is absurd. The stream of perishing must flow toward something that saves it all from final nothingness; there must be something that gathers up, and holds in eternal memory, the great cosmic epic.”

“Since, in humans, the universe has awakened to consciousness, and evolution has now become conscious of itself, it is inconceivable that any truly cosmic redemption would tolerate the suffocation of the very consciousness to which the universe has been straining so mightily to give birth. Unless our experiences are somehow preserved in their immediacy and fullness, our anxiety about death remains without redress; and then the cosmic pessimists will have had the last word.”

Sure, but I don’t think these kinds of responses to certain philosophical premises are an eternal problem of unshakable human psychology.  Haught’s take on meaning and intelligibility are all rooted in 19th-Century constructs.  The whole idea that without God we will plunge into nihilism is an invention of the 19th-Century, it was all a hysterical response to a sea change in Western understanding.  Nietzsche saw this very famously in his “death of God” story.  What he also realized though was that this problem of a nihilistic reaction to atheism was not an inevitable response to it rather was a threat to those inculcated in monotheism’s absolutism about values.  Monotheism denigrates the value of everything else one might “deify” or value, it opposes pluralism and forces there to be only one supreme valuable thing.

So that’s why many monotheists have this desperate fundamentalist reaction when modern knowledge and culture displaces their central belief, meaning orientation, and value-center.  But this is not an inevitable universal psychological condition.  Haught is psychologically the product of his religion, he is not describing the experience of a Chinese atheist or even a post-Christian/nearly-atheist Scandinavian who is far further along on the way in extricating himself from religious dependency.

What atheists need to do is to shake loose of Sartrean nihilism which swallows this Christian dialectic whole rather than genuinely represents an atheist rejection of the faith.  And atheists need to stop misreading Nietzsche as teaching them to embrace nihilism.  These Sartrean existentialist and pseudo-Nietzschean forms of atheism buy into the false dilemma Christians like Tolstoy sold 19th-20th Century atheists whereby the only two intellectual options were nihilism or monotheism.   This is why Nietzsche insisted that atheists needed to “create new gods” and new values and advance an affirmation of the real and of life.  He was worried that the only other paths available to the Western mind if we did not do this would be the dying Christianity which would not last long or the nihilism that comes in Christianity’s wake as the natural dialectical outcome of its collapse, given the way it structures meaning.

This is why self-conscious atheists need to get our act together and start building secular ways of meeting religious needs for meaning, ethics discussion for the common man (not just for university classrooms), metaphysical insight (of the real kind, not the bogus religious fantasies), ritual, community, meditation, purpose, etc.  All of this exists without religion.  None of these good things really depend on the gods that were not actually there anyway.  People are psychologically disposed and ready to have all of this.  It simply is human nature.  We have these parts of our experience before religion or else we would not have been able to invent religious institutions and beliefs in the first place.  By “before” I don’t mean chronologically, of course, but logically and psychologically.

Psychologically we are ritualistic, meditative, speculative, fearful, social, meaning-having, ethically networked creatures and these traits just come to be more or less bound up as necessarily religious to the extent that they have historically been realized in mutually influencing interactions with religious institutions, texts, traditions, and practices, etc.  Because there are centuries of cultural formation that have shaped us to associate certain forms of expressions of our natures with religion, people start to think of religious beliefs or explicitly religious institutions as inherently inextricable from human nature.  But those same traits that have been developed in institutional religious contexts can be separated from them and all of them developed quite differently and successfully apart from them.  They are existentially and psychologically more basic than religion and can and have been in innumerable different religious, non-religious, and irreligious ways across human history and human cultures.

So what we need are secular forms through which people can readily understand and satisfyingly actualize their needs for wonder, awe, gratitude, ethics, metaphysics, purpose, meaning, ritual, rites of passage, mediation, singing, dancing, community, practical identity, imagination, charitable activity, idealism, life affirmation, hope, connection to tradition, sense of control in life, safety, connection to larger mission, etc.  When people’s full natures have well-developed contexts for expression and development, then their minds will be quite happy and they will find the notion that they need a God for all this confusing and bizarre.

I am one of those people who feels this way naturally—in the sense that I have felt it throughout my life in a way that has not hinged on either my formerly devout theism or my presently convinced atheism.  When I was a Christian I had a clinically depressed, devout Christian friend whose naturally occurring, brain-based psychological difficulties manifested itself in the form of so great a despair over the fear that there was no God that she became suicidal.  I remember telling her that I just didn’t get it, because even though I devoutly believed at the time, I realized that even were there no God I would still be inherently connected to what I care about.  It would still inevitably matter to me.  I would still love the people I love, love the activities I love, and love the pursuit of ideals (even though some of their contents would change).

What was occurring there was that I had, quite naturally, what William James might call a “healthy” religious soul, the kind that is naturally disposed to life-affirmation, and my friend had a “sick” religious soul, the kind that is naturally wracked with spiritual conflict.  Or, in simpler terms, she was diagnosably, clinically depressed and, despite normal very rough emotional periods, I just wasn’t.  And, in fact, now that I am the atheist, I am still an optimist and instinctively life-affirming, and even though my friend has long since overcome her atheistic tendencies, she still has a dark sort of religiosity which is keenly tuned in to misery of the world.  The religious symbols to which she gravitates are ones of suffering.  For example, the primary meaning of Christ on the cross for her is that the divine participates in suffering with us.  Her most central religious virtue is compassion and identification with the suffering of all sentient beings.  Her religion is fascinating and deep and emotionally and ethically rich and largely explicable as the result of a relentless psychological dialectic and process of mutual influence according to which her brain’s natural inclinations and her cultural religious forms are constantly reshaping each other in her mind to create her way of thinking and living.  And a similar story could be told about me, I am sure.

And millions of people are like me and find that when they deconvert from religion and reorient their thinking, they feel much the same (or better) without the God beliefs.  Happy people will stay happy as long as they find the outward cultural forms in which to express themselves and have their needs met.  Since a great many of those needs are at present either partially or, in a few cases, wholly fulfilled through religious activities, people will just need more secular replacement outlets for them.   But with the right outlets, there will be no trauma over losing the unnecessary beliefs bound up with the particular character of their present outlets for fulfilling those needs.

And the depressed will remain.  Depression is just natural.  And some atheists will express their depression in a philosophical nihilism, just as my despairing Christian friend did at one point.

But the more that people’s lives are constructed in wholly secular ways that meet all their personal and social psychological needs presently met through religion, the more they express themselves holistically through secular means, and the more that they simply come to take the falsehood fantastic religious belief as obvious, the less they will feel any threat of nihilism from the thought that there is no God.

It is for these reasons, as much as any other, that I am so passionate about atheist activism and incorporate this so prominently into my blog.  I think it is really important that we do everything we can to stave off both explicit nihilism and the desperate, violent, reactionary intellectual, moral, and political fundamentalism that so fears modernity as a form of nihilism that it itself starts negating everything modern and becomes the worst, most death-loving form of nihilism of all.  As Nietzsche warned, the will cannot but will and if the only thing it has to will is nothingness, then it will go ahead and will nothingness.  I want to be part of the task of giving people more constructive, real things to will, starting with truth and goodness and community.

Your Thoughts?

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By Daniel Fincke | Posted in Atheism, Atheism, Atheistic Ethics, Atheistic Ethics, Christianity, Christianity, Cultural Secularism, Cultural Secularism, Featured, New Atheism, New Atheism, New Atheism, New Atheism, Nietzsche, Nietzsche, Philosophy Of Religion, Psychology, Psychology, Religion, Religion, Religious Secularism, Religious Secularism, Secularism, Social Psychology, Social Psychology, Social Sciences, Sociology, Sociology | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (14)