Somewhat Abnormal

The Ethical Project

2012-02-10T08:49:00.000-08:00

I'm reading Philip Kitcher's book, The Ethical Project. Tim Dean has an extensive review of it at Ockham's Beard (starts here and goes on for several posts), so I'm not going to try to "blog the book." But I do want to make a few remarks.

Kitcher is quite the polymath, having written on everything from Finnegan's Wake to the philosophy of mathematics. Unfortunately, he isn't a very good writer - the book isn't one of those that grab you and pull you in. (And that's not just my opinion, several commenters at Tim's blog also found it to be a slog.) It is, however, worth the effort. Kitcher's approach is grounded in evolutionary theory, game theory (Kitcher has himself published papers on game theoretical simulations), anthropological and primate studies, and archaeological evidence.

The first surprise for me was that Kitcher sees ethics as a cultural phenomenon - not an instinct. The reason for its existence is to remedy "failures of altruism." For humans to live in large groups - and gain the benefits of division of labor, etc, that come with such groups - they needed to invent mechanisms that led them to be more altruistic than (for example) chimpanzees are. The goal of the first part of the book is to show how this could possibly have happened. He emphasizes that we will likely never know how it actually did happen; he only intends to refute the claim that "you can't get there from here", i.e., there's no way to derive ethics from evolution.

The second surprise was that Kitcher sees the invention of religion as a crucial step in this process. As rules for behavior developed it became necessary to invent some sort of supernatural enforcement for those rules. Most societies believe in a supernatural enforcer: not necessarily a god, though (he mentions one group that believes breaking the rules brings bad luck).

If he's right, then those who say "no morality without God" may, in fact, be correct - just not in the way they think!

Dumbfounded by Morality

2012-02-07T12:44:00.000-08:00

Jon Haidt on the reasons people give justifying their moral judgements:

So what’s really clear, you can see it in the videotapes of the experiment, is: people give a reason. When that reason is stripped from them, they give another reason. When the new reason is stripped from them, they reach for another reason. And it’s only when they reach deep into their pocket for another reason, and come up empty-handed, that they enter the state we call “moral dumbfounding.” Because they fully expect to find reasons. They’re surprised when they don’t find reasons. And so in some of the videotapes you can see, they start laughing. But it’s not an “it’s so funny” laugh. It’s more of a nervous-embarrassment puzzled laugh. So it’s a cognitive state where you “know” that something is morally wrong, but you can’t find reasons to justify your belief. Instead of changing your mind about what’s wrong, you just say: “I don’t know, I can’t explain it. I just know it’s wrong.”

So the fact that this state exists indicates that people hold beliefs separate from, or with no need of support from, the justifications that they give. Or another way of saying it is that the knowing that something is wrong and the explaining why are completely separate processes.

Child Sacrifice in Ancient Israel?

2012-02-01T10:17:00.000-08:00

I have occasionally come across the claim that ancient Israelites practiced child sacrifice. This is a popular idea on atheist websites - not surprisingly - but I have also encountered it in the scholarly literature. I've been skeptical about about it, but haven't taken the time to look into the evidence in detail. There is at least some evidence of it in the Bible: Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac can be interpreted as a story explaining why child sacrifice is no longer to be practiced.

Apparently the idea is still controversial among scholars and archaeologists. Here's a summary of a recent article that overviews the evidence (via Edward T. Babinski) and comes to a positive conclusion:

DANIEL VAINSTUB, "Human Sacrifices in Canaan and Israel," Beer-sheva 19 (2010), 117-204 (in Hebrew).
"The existence of infant sacrifices in biblical times both in the Canaanite culture and in Israel has been a matter of intense controversy in the scholarship of the last eight decades. Paradoxically, the more relevant data emerges, the wider the scholarly discensus grows. Some hold that the practice never existed among the Canaanites or the Israelites, while others aver that it was a deeply rooted practice both in the Canaanite homeland and the Punic cities of the West. Vainstub's comprehensive, interdisciplinary study of the issue includes an up-to-date survey of the divergent opinions concerning it and offers new insights based on an array of evidence, epigraphic, linguistic, artistic, and literary. The study highlights the significant degree of parallelism among the various sources, and comes to the conclusion that infant sacrifices to Baal by parents were indeed a strongly rooted custom in Bronze and Iron Age Canaan. The practice was taken over by the Israelites, and persisted until its abolition by Josiah. Later on, the practice was limited to the Phoenician coastal area until it was completely eradicated by the Persians there during the 5th century. B.C. Such sacrifices continued in the Phoenician colonies in the West for another 400 years."

And on the seventh day....

2012-01-29T07:48:00.000-08:00

Check out Andrew Bernardin's Culinary Commanments:

And finally, the Lord said, For six days shalt thou toil at thy sink and at thy stove. But on the seventh day, thou may use thy cell phone to cry out for pizza. And though that prayer will be answered, thou shalt be charged for it.

Best laugh all week - thanks, Andrew!

To Slurp Or Not To Slurp? That Is The Question....

2012-01-28T06:19:00.000-08:00

I want to look at one more argument, this time against moral relativism. It comes from a very nice article by Paul Boghossian. I like this article because it lays out its argument very clearly and is well-written, and because it brings in the parallel between morality and etiquette, which seems to me a very useful one that doesn't get enough attention.

Boghossian starts by noting that people today are relativists about motion (as in Einstein's theory of special relativity) but eliminativists about witches. That is, we think those who condemned and executed the "Salem witches" were just wrong about the existence of people with supernatural powers.

So, is morality more like relative motion, or more like witchcraft? If we give up on absolute morality, can we hang onto a relativistic version of morality, or should we just eliminate moral concepts and language? Boghossian claims that there's no coherent way to retain a relativistic view of morality.

The trouble is that while “Eating beef is wrong” is clearly a normative statement, “Eating beef is wrong relative to the moral code of the Hindus” is just a descriptive remark that carries no normative import whatsoever. It’s just a way of characterizing what is claimed by a particular moral code, that of the Hindus. We can see this from the fact that anyone, regardless of their views about eating beef, can agree that eating beef is wrong relative to the moral code of the Hindus.

I think there's a flaw in the argument here. “Eating beef is wrong relative to the moral code of the Hindus” is merely a descriptive statement if made by a sociologist writing a journal article, but if made by a Hindu father to his Hindu son, it might mean much more than that. You can't just take a phrase like that and abstract it from its context: with moral claims, context is crucial. In the context of a father giving his son a chewing-out, the same phrase might carry a heavy non-cognitive burden: "This is the way we do things and you had better act in accordance with it!"

(It carries the further implication, "If you eat beef, you are not a Hindu." Which is to say, "If you eat beef, you are no longer one of us." This shows the implied threat behind moral rules: disobey, and you will be ostracized.)

Basically, I don't think we can make a sharp distinction between moral claims that are absolute, and therefore normative, and those that are relative, and therefore merely descriptive. Relative claims can carry normative weight, too.

We can see this at work in the objection Boghossian considers: what about etiquette? Aren't we all relativists about etiquette? Don't we all accept that it's OK to slurp one's soup in China, but not OK to do so in Buckingham Palace?

The reason is that our relativism about etiquette does not actually dispense with all absolute moral facts. Rather, we are relativists about etiquette in the sense that, with respect to a restricted range of issues (such as table manners and greetings), we take the correct absolute norm to be “we ought not, other things being equal, offend our hosts.”

This norm is absolute and applies to everyone and at all times.

But there's a problem with this response. Why should we take “we ought not, other things being equal, offend our hosts” as an absolute norm? Why not take it, instead, as the goal in an end-relational sense? "In order not to offend your hosts (at Buckingham Palace) you ought not to slurp your soup."

Again, it all comes down to context. If I am visiting Buckingham Palace I will likely want to avoid personal embarrassment and want to avoid offending my hosts. On the other hand, if a UK political dissident is visiting Buckingham Palace and wants to create an embarrassing situation, he will follow a different dictate, "In order to offend your hosts (at Buckingham Palace) you ought to slurp your soup."

To my mind, this is a much more satisfactory solution. Etiquette is anchored to the social context, and purely practical questions arising from that context, rather than to some free-floating absolute morality that remains unexplained.

So why not morality, as well?

Opt-In Morality

2012-01-23T10:05:00.000-08:00

I was going to write some more comments on the discussion between Michael Ruse and Jason Rosenhouse, but all I could have said and more is covered in a terrific post by Tim Dean at Ockham's Beard. (Wish I'd thought of that blog name.) Tim seems to be espousing the same sort of solution I came to when reading Richard Joyce.

You can acknowledge that there is no binding, logically necessary or factually obligatory reason to be moral, but you can choose to be moral. And there are plenty of good non-moral or prudential reasons for doing so, such as that social living benefits us, and it’s a darn sight easier to live socially when there are rules of conduct. So you be moral.

Tim also has a review of Phillip Kitcher's new book, The Ethical Project. Kitcher apparently takes a similar approach, and grounds it in our evolutionary history. So there's another one for the reading list....

Wrap-up On Objective Morality

2012-01-20T07:54:00.000-08:00

To wrap up the series on arguments for and against objective moral values (that started way back in December), I have to say that I don't find the arguments on either side to be very compelling. I think the argument from disagreement might be the most promising one of the bunch, but it certainly isn't conclusive. The arguments for objectivism seem to me to be attempts to codify an intuition that moral values simply don't make sense unless they somehow exist "out there."

My intuition is the opposite: I don't see how moral claims can make any sense unless they are relative to some goal.

I'm not personally invested in one answer or the other. I think it would be very interesting if we could be sure that there were such things as objective moral values - I just don't see much hope for that view. It seems to me that if morals were like mathematics, we would see a lot more agreement about them than we do, and we would be able to identify the axioms from which moral judgements follow. In mathematics, there has been a tremendous convergence: nearly all mathematicians agree on the axioms and procedures and results. In morality, there has not, as far as I can see, been a similar convergence.

So my tentative conclusion is that there aren't any such things as objective moral values.

The Argument from Science

2012-01-17T09:47:00.000-08:00

The final argument on Reppert's list is an epistemological one:

IV. Argument from science:
1. What science cannot discover, mankind cannot know.
2. Science cannot discover which moral values are correct and which are not.
3. Therefore, mankind cannot discover which moral values are correct and which are not.
4. If we cannot in principle discover what moral values are right or wrong, then we ought to view them as subjective and not objective.
5. Therefore, we ought to view moral values as subjective and not objective.

Here, too, the theist will disagree right at step (1). But so will, for instance, Michael Ruse, who suggests three areas in which we can have non-empirical knowledge: mathematics, morality, and "philosophical meta-questions."

I have trouble with Ruse's argument here. Morality, of course, is the issue at hand, so we can't bring it in here as an example without being guilty of circular argumentation. As far as mathematics, I think philosophers tend to underestimate the extent to which it is based on experience. Jason Rosenhouse makes the same point in his response to Ruse. If we think of "science" in its most general sense as "conclusions based on evidence and reason," then mathematics seems to fall under it.

And likewise for philosophical meta-questions: any discussion of these either brings in our observations and experience, or else is an exercise in pure logic. Either way, the discussion is, in the broad sense, a scientific one.

(You might object that I'm stretching the meaning of "science" beyond reasonable bounds. But I think the argument requires a very broad definition, or else (1) is indefensible. For instance, I know that I have a deodora cedar in my front yard, even though I haven't done a scientific investigation of that tree, and even though "my front yard" may not even have a scientific meaning, in the strict sense.)

Under this broad definition of science, the argument turns into something like Hume's is-ought problem: there is no way to go from a descriptive account of what is out there in the world to a prescriptive account of what we ought to do.

Hume's view is famously controversial. Let's suppose, though, that we can successfully argue for premises (1) and (2). I think we still run into a problem with premise (4).

Let's suppose that some version of utilitarianism is the "correct" morality: there is some quantifiable "greatest good for the greatest number." But suppose that, even though this greatest good is objectively defined and in principle calculable, it is in practice too difficult to actually determine. The consequences of any possible action ramify to such an extent that it becomes impossible to determine what combination of possible actions is the "right" one to choose. In this case, "science" would be unable to determine which moral values are correct, and yet morality would be completely objective.

So it seems to me that even if we accept that morality is unknowable (3), we need not accept that it is also subjective.

Radford's Rule

2012-01-15T04:32:00.000-08:00

In honor of Ben Radford, I'm suggesting we define "Radford's Rule": When caught in a logical fallacy, just insist your logic is fine.

I've never heard of Ben Radford before, but apparently he's known as a debunker and skeptic. He blogs at Center for Inquiry. In a recent post on SkeptiXX, he picked apart a video in which 4-year-old Riley rants about the way stores market princesses to girls and superheroes to boys. Although many people pointed out the problems with Radford's piece, he first insisted he wasn't wrong, then belatedly issued a non-apology apology, in which he continued to insist on the following "syllogism" (yes, he actually called it a syllogism):

1) Most things girls play with are dolls;  2) Most dolls are pink things;  3) Therefore, most things girls play with are pink.

For everyone who has already spotted the problem with this argument, stop reading now and go outside and play. For Ben and anyone else who has difficulty seeing it, read on.

Try this argument, which has exactly the same form as Ben's:

1) Most adults in the US are women.
2) Most women in the US shave their legs.
Therefore, 3) Most adults in the US shave their legs.

Now, (2) may or may not be true, but let's assume it is for the sake of the argument. I hope you can see that (3) doesn't follow logically from (1) and (2). First of all, even though (1) is true, there aren't a whole lot more women than men. Secondly, all those non-shaving men count under "most adults", and there may be enough unshaven women to make up an unshaven majority.

I think what Ben probably has in mind is the classic syllogism:

All men are mortal.

All Greeks are men.

Therefore, all Greeks are mortal.

But it just doesn't work to replace "all" with "most." It's not longer a syllogism - it's now a probabilistic argument. And it's an invalid one.

To make it perfectly clear how the probabilities work, let's look at Ben's argument with some probabilities that I just made up. Let's say that 60% of girls play with dolls, and 60% of dolls are pink things. Also, let's assume that these are independent probabilities. Then the probability that a girl is playing with a pink thing is at least the product of the two probabilities: 0.6*0.6 = 0.36 or 36%. Clearly, we cannot conclude that "most things girls play with are pink."

Some folks on Ben's thread objected that you can't just make up numbers like that. But, IF the conclusion follows logically from the premises, THEN it must follow for any set of numbers you make up. So when I show that there is a set of numbers for which the conclusion doesn't follow, I am also showing that the logical structure of the argument isn't valid.

This is just basic logic, and I'm amazed that a well-known "skeptic" like Ben Radford isn't aware of these things. I pointed this out in a comment on his thread, and several other commenters did, too. But in his most recent post, he still says he "stands by" his logic.

Brilliant.

The Argument from Atheism

2012-01-13T06:32:00.000-08:00

Reppert's third argument against moral objectivity will obviously not be acceptable for the theist:

III. Argument from atheism
1. Probably, unless there is a God, there cannot be objective moral values.
2. There is no God.
3. Therefore, probably, there are no objective moral values.

Even among atheists, (1) is not necessarily accepted. This argument doesn't seem to gain any traction.

Way to go, Jim!

2012-01-12T09:36:00.000-08:00

Is this cosplay?

It seems to deserve a name all its own. Any suggestions?

(H/T Skepchick)

Queerness

2012-01-07T03:25:00.000-08:00

Reppert's second point against against objective moral values goes like this:

II. The argument from nonphysical realities
1. Probably, there are no realities that are not physical in nature; that is, that do not exist at particular places and times and are not complex states of fundamental physical particles.
2. If objective moral values exist, then there would be realities that are not physical in nature.
3. Therefore, probably, there are no objective moral values.

Reppert's argument is similar to Mackie's argument from the "queerness" of objective moral values. Mackie's version seems to me to amount to little more than an argument from personal incredulity: "Well, I don't see any way such bizarre properties could exist!"

Reppert's version has the virtue of being much more specific. However, it runs us into all the difficulties of providing a physicalist description of phenomena. Moral values are no longer quite so alone, quite so "queer." What about other non-physical realities, like thoughts, emotions, and sensations? All of these would fall to the same objection - or, if a physical realization can be provided for these entities, why couldn't one also be provided for moral values?

Or take the realm of logic and mathematics. We know that if A implies B and B implies C, then A implies C.We can't justify this intuition in a rigorous way - we can only take it as an axiom. (As the tortoise pointed out to Achilles.) However, mathematical logic seems to be completely objective: everyone who takes the trouble to study and understand the subject pretty much agrees on the results. It seems possible, at least, that morality is something like logic. Perhaps there is some set of self-evident axioms that everyone can agree on, from which all of moral thought follows logically.

The subjectivist can argue that, in fact, there is no such set of agreed-upon axioms, unlike in logic. But that's a different objection.

Against Moral Objectivism

2011-12-26T09:13:00.000-08:00

Victor Reppert also posted a list of arguments against the objectivity of morality. I'll look at these in the next few posts, as time and holiday events allow. Here's the first:

I. The argument from disagreement:
1. People and cultures disagree extensively about what is right and wrong.
2. Probably, if moral judgments were objectively true or false, people would not disagree extensively about what is right or wrong.
3. Therefore, probably, moral judgments are subjective.

This is the flip side of the argument from moral agreement. I don't think theists or moral objectivists would find this a very persuasive argument. The objectivist can claim that there is a common " moral core" - as we saw in the argument from moral agreement. While I think the evolutionary view is better at explaining the existing variety of moral codes, the objectivist is free to interpret the same evidence differently.

(Michael Ruse thinks morality evolved, but is nontheless objective. His argument doesn't seem very coherent, though, as pointed out by Jason Rosenhouse.)

Another objection: the theist can argue that true morality only comes from an understanding or acceptance of his/her preferred god, and those who have different moral codes are simply wrong.

A more difficult challenge for the theist (specifically, the Christian) is to explain how moral codes change over time. Christianity accepted slavery as part of the divinely ordained order of things for more than 1000 years. Yet today most Christians would say that slavery is wrong. (William Lane Craig is one who bites the bullet and says that Biblical slavery was not morally wrong. He also defends Biblical genocide - which is why Dawkins refused to debate him. I'm not finding the link to his Reasonable Faith post about slavery (he calls it "indentured servitude"), tho.) So how is it that God-based morality was so much in error for so long? But theists have potential answers to this challenge, too. (For instance "continuing revelation" or an evolving understanding of God's will.)

Unfortunately for the subjectivists, this might be the strongest argument they have.

A Christmas Treat

2011-12-25T07:31:00.000-08:00

As a holiday treat, I refer you to an honest-to-OCMOG Biblical scholar who explains that the divinity of Jesus is not a part of earliest Christianity.

But What About the Holocaust?

2011-12-22T02:09:00.000-08:00

Reppert's fourth argument is one that moral absolutists often raise.

IV. The argument from clear cases
1. If moral values are subjective, then even in clear cases of wrongness, we have to say that it is neither true nor false that an action was wrong.
2. But consider the case of someone inviting another person over for dinner, shoving that person into the oven, and then eating them as dinner. (Or the Holocaust, etc.)
3. Therefore, moral values are objective rather than subjective.

I think this makes more sense as an argument against relativism, rather than subjectivism. I don't see how this argument can be anything but circular, though. The second premise amounts to "X is (obviously) absolutely wrong." This is just an appeal to our moral intuition that some things, at least, are really wrong, and not just wrong according to some particular standard.

But that moral intuition is exactly the point in dispute: the relativist says the intuition is simply incorrect.

(We can also quibble that premise 1 confuses the issues of subjectivism and non-cognitivism. The cognitivist subjectivist, for example, agrees that moral judgements are subjective, but thinks they are capable of being true or false.)

Reppert's fifth argument is basically the same one, but turned around:

V. The argument from human rights.
1. If moral values are subjective, then there are no inalienable human rights. (A right in a moral obligation on the part of someone not to do something to you. If I have the right to free speech, that means someone has the obligation not to forcibly shut me up).
2. There are inalienable human rights.
3. Therefore, moral values are objective and not subjective.

Here the second premise is "X is (obviously) absolutely right." Again, it is an appeal to the very intuition that is in question.

Does anyone know if there's a non-question-begging way to formulate these arguments?

Are We Becoming More Moral?

2011-12-20T06:23:00.000-08:00

Reppert's third argument in favor of objective/absolute morality:

III. The argument from reformers:
1. If moral values are subjective, then moral codes cannot improve, since there is no objective standard by which to judge one code better than another.
2. But the work of people like Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks shows that moral codes can be made more just.
3. Therefore, moral values are objective rather than subjective.

The weak point here is in premise 2: how are we to decide if a moral code has become "more just"? There were many who opposed the civil rights reforms, who thought it was a move away from true morality rather than towards it. Likewise, there were many Germans who applauded the moral "reforms" of Naziism. The fact that it is possible for moral codes to change does not imply that they are improving. I think it would only be possible to claim that a particular reform has made things objectively more just if everyone agreed that that reform was an improvement - and this just returns us to the considerations of argument two.

The fascinating question of how moral codes change and why seems to get neglected by moral philosophers. There is a great discussion of the issue in Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue. MacIntyre says moral codes change when they encounter challenges (from encounters with other societies, or from considerations that arise internally) that reveal the existing code to be inadequate according to its own standards. (His view is reminiscent of Kuhn's view of scientific revolutions.)

Such a view of moral codes as constantly evolving and interacting doesn't rule out objectivism or absolutism, but neither does it require it.

Everyone Agrees...

2011-12-18T05:07:00.000-08:00

The second argument against subjectivism Reppert gives goes like this:

II. The argument from Underlying Moral Consensus:

1. If morality were a subjective matter, we would expect to find sizable differences of fundamental principles amongst moral codes.
2. But there is, in general, agreement concerning fundamental principles amongst moral codes.
3. Therefore, morality is objective rather than subjective.

I think this is legitimately an argument against subjectivism, though it could also work as an argument against relativism. We often consider things to be objectively true when everyone agrees they are true. If I see a tree over there, and everyone agrees there is a tree over there, then we take it as objectively true that there is a tree over there. On the other hand, if I see a tree over there, and no one else does, then people will assume I am having a hallucination, a vision, or some such.

I don't think either premise is true, though. If morality is an evolved behavior, then we might expect there to be a fair amount of convergence among codes, without this implying that moral codes must be objective. On the other hand, moral codes exist or have existed in the past that allow infanticide, human sacrifice, huge inequalities in social standing, torture, slavery, and on and on, so I think it's hard to find common fundamental principles that all moral codes adhere to.

Morality-as-evolved-behavior seems to have the capacity to explain the observed range of moral codes better than morality-as-objective-truth.

Rock Bottom In Philosophical Argument

2011-12-15T12:34:00.000-08:00

In a NYT article, Alvin Plantinga declares

“I think there is such a thing as a sensus divinitatis, and in some people it doesn’t work properly,” he said, referring to the innate sense of the divine that Calvin believed all human beings possess. “So if you think of rationality as normal cognitive function, yes, there is something irrational about that kind of stance.”

This has to be the worst philosophical argument ever. "You are a defective human being, so you cannot see the evidence I see." Can there be any clearer declaration that the speaker is lacking any serious argument and flailing desperately than to say that I have a special secret knowledge that my opponent lacks?

And this guy is supposed to be the top Christian philosopher of our time?

Higgs Non-News

2011-12-13T13:08:00.000-08:00

We interrupt your irregularly scheduled amateur philosophizing to bring you an unimportant bulletin from the world of science. Once again, the Higgs particle has not been sighted!

Yes, folks, you heard it here first - unless you heard it somewhere else first, in which case, not. After a summer of breathless excitement, followed by an autumn of suspenseful waiting, and then a week of wildfire rumors, the infamous Higgs particle has again failed to show up.

And that's actually sort of exciting.

Exactly in line with the rumors, the two big LHC experiments, ATLAS and CMS, both reported small excesses in events at an energy of about 125 GeV. These excesses are actually slightly more than what would be expected from a Standard Model Higgs particle. (See Matt Strassler's excellent post about what might be in store if there is more than one Higgs particle, or none.) Similar hints were reported earlier this year at 140 GeV - the new results conclusively rule out a Higgs particle with this higher mass. In fact, the whole range from 130 GeV up to 600 GeV has been ruled out, again as far as a Standard Model Higgs.

These excesses are still far too small to make any kind of a claim about a new particle being discovered. Disappointingly, the bumps in the two data sets are at slightly different energies - ATLAS at 126 GeV and CMS at 123 Gev. It will take months for the experiments to combine their data, but Phillip Gibbs at viXra has already done a quick-and-dirty combination, and even included Tevatron data.

So is this the first hint of an experimental detection of a Higgs particle, or will it all go away with more data? No one can say right now. Certainly, there will be an intense focus now on 125 GeV, and the data will be looked at in many different ways. By the end of 2012 there should be about five times more data - enough to conclusively rule the Higgs in or out at these energies.

Either way, we are entering a new era in our understanding of the structure of the universe. This is the beginning of the end of a 40 year long wait.

[Revised viXra link 12/17/11]

Wrong According to Whom?

2011-12-10T12:49:00.000-08:00

Here's Reppert's first argument against subjectivism:

I. The argument from Implied Practice

1. If ethics is subjective, then we should expect people to recognize that actions which they are inclined to think of as "wrong" are only wrong from their point of view.
2. But invariably, people view wrongs against themselves as actions that are really wrong.
3. Therefore moral values are objective and not subjective.

This is actually an argument against relativism, not against subjectivism. The issue is whether morality depends on one's point of view - is morality the same for everyone? I will interpret this argument with "subjective" replaced by "relative" and "objective" replaced by "absolute."

But if morality is relative to the social or cultural group, rather than to the individual, this argument doesn't work. The people with whom I interact on a regular basis are, by definition, part of my social group. If morality is just a group's implicitly agreed-upon restrictions on behavior, then of course I will expect those restrictions to apply to others in my group, and I will feel justified in being upset when those restrictions are violated.

What about the case where I feel wronged by someone from a different culture? The absolutist might claim that this proves morality is not relative to the group.

But the relativist can argue that this response is a result of how ingrained our sense of morality is. I will tend to assume that anyone with whom I come in contact is part of my social group and subject to the rules I am familiar with.

Furthermore, there are cases where we do make allowances for cultural differences. I might feel offended if someone cuts in line in front of me, but if I learn they come from a country where pushing to the front is standard operating procedure, I might think, "Oh, that's OK, they didn't know how we do it here." Or imagine that someone steals from me, and I later learn they come from a culture where all property is shared communally. Then I might not feel a sense of moral outrage at the act - though I would probably still want my property back.

Finally, there is no problem here under a non-cognitivist account of morality, either. For the non-cognitivist, moral disapproval amounts to saying, "I don't like what you did," or "Don't do that!" or both. When someone does something that hurts me, these would be very natural reactions, not requiring any sort of absolutism.

Absolute or Objective?

2011-12-07T16:37:00.000-08:00

A post at the Secular Outpost pointed me to an old post of Victor Reppert's, where he summarizes five arguments in favor of moral objectivity. I want to consider these arguments briefly.

First, though, I think Reppert has confused the subjective-objective issue with the relative-absolute issue. This SEP article explains the difference, but let's review it here:

If morality is objective, it is something that exists "out there in the world", independent of what anyone thinks or believes. The truth of a moral claim is fixed by objective facts.

Moral subjectivism, on the other hand, says that moral truth is fixed by some person or persons. The person could be the individual, the social group, or God. (So William Lane Craig is being inconsistent when he argues that morality is objective, yet subscribes to a Divine Command theory of morality: the latter ascribes morality to the desires of God, and thus it depends on a person's (God's) opinion. That's subjective, not objective.)

The other axis is relativism versus absolutism.

Morality is absolute if it is the same for everyone, everywhere, at every time.

Morality is relative if it depends on the person or the social context. As the SEP article says, "Stealing is wrong" could be true for one person and false for someone else, for instance, for someone from a different culture where stealing is an acceptable practice.

These axes are "orthogonal", in the SEP's words: it is possible for a moral theory to be subjective-relative, subjective-absolute, objective-relative, or objective-absolute.

What, No Tooth Fairy?

2011-11-17T09:21:00.000-08:00

When I started reading Oppy, I was interested in two things: (1) what he considered good arguments from the atheist side, and (2) what he thought was wrong or unconvincing about atheistic arguments. In contrast to Swinburne, Oppy sets a high standard for a good argument: he is only interested in arguments that are, or ought to be, rationally compelling to someone of the opposite persuasion. And he doesn't think any theistic arguments are compelling, so that saves half my work.

Oppy has strangely little to say about atheistic arguments. He spends a section (3.9) considering Quentin Smith's atheological argument from cosmology. (I don't think Smith's suggestion holds up from the point of view of physics, and Oppy doesn't think it holds up philosophically.) He has a whole chapter on arguments from evil. (I don't find these interesting or convincing, so I'm going to skip them.) And he addresses some general atheological arguments in his opening chapter in a discussion of agnosticism, and (350 pages later!) includes a discussion of Clifford's Principle in his conclusion. Also, in the first chapter, he deals with the Evil God arguments like the one used by Stephen Law in his recent debate with William Lane Craig. Apart from these, he only mentions atheological arguments in passing.

(Oppy states at the beginning of the book that he's not going to consider arguments that claim the very concept of an OCMOG is incoherent. He's saving these for another book.)

So there's no discussion at all of what I think is the strongest point in favor of atheism - what I think of as the Tooth Fairy Argument. The closest he comes to it when he addresses some general principles that the atheist might try to call on in those first and last chapters. Let's take a look.

The atheist might appeal to the principle that

in the absence of any positive evidence for the existence of x's, one is rationally required to believe that there are no x's.

Oppy claims that this principle is refuted by the lottery paradox. He asks us to consider a lottery in which an infinite number of tickets are sold, and only one ticket wins.

If I believe of each ticket that it won't win, then I shall be obliged to conclude that no ticket will win - that is, I will be obliged to believe something false.

According to Oppy, the existence of god(s) is like the lottery: we know that some existence proposition must be true, but since there are infinitely many such propositions (no god, god 1, god 2, etc) there is only an infinitesimal chance of any one of them being true. So the agnostic is justified in rejecting the "no god" hypothesis along with all the others.

Now, this is a very strange argument for Oppy to make, because it relies on making probability statements about an infinite set of possibilities. The problem is simply not mathematically well-defined. Elsewhere (in his chapter on fine tuning) Oppy shows himself to have a very sophisticated understanding of the difficulties of such statements. But here, without batting an eye, he allows the agnostic to cite the lottery paradox as if it were unproblematic.

He concludes his one-paragraph discussion like this:

Thus, for example, although there is no good reason to think that there are currently intelligent beings inhabiting the fifth planet of the Vega system, the correct view to have is simply that this claim is a very unlikely one.

That is, (complete) lack of evidence is not enough to make us disbelieve in something, it is only enough to make that something very unlikely.

I think this is correct in a strictly logical sense, as far as it goes. But I also think it doesn't go far enough. It's not just that we are lacking in evidence for a god, it's that we have positive reasons to believe that something like a god can't possibly exist. Rather than "intelligent life on Vega 5," the analogy should be "purple elephants on the planet Pluto." We know elephants can't exist on Pluto, because mammals need food, oxygen, and liquid water, and none of that is available there.

Likewise for gods. It's not just that we're lacking evidence for them: we have good reason to think that intelligence requires a complex neural system (or something like it - as in a computer). The evidence is both experimental and theoretical. Experimentally, all known intelligent beings have complex neural systems. And theoretically, the ability to process information requires some such system.

But according to theists, God doesn't have any neurons. He doesn't have a material body at all. In fact, the OCMOG has no moving parts. How then, can God be intelligent?

Gods are as unlikely as purple Plutonian pachyderms.

Why Change Your Mind?

2011-11-12T12:18:00.000-08:00

Suppose I have some belief. Under what circumstances should I change it?

A common atheist response is that we should reject any belief for which we don't have evidence. Graham Oppy calls this "Clifford's principle." Oppy thinks it's untenable.

Oppy starts off his book with a discusion of beliefs and their formation and revision. He approves of Harman's Principle of Conservatism:

One is justified in continuing to fully accept something in the absence of special reason not to.

Specifically, Harman says I shouldn't change my mind simply because my belief is not adequately justified (denial of the Principle of Negative Undermining). But I should change my mind if I have positive reasons for thinking my belief is no good (the Principle of Positive Undermining).

Oppy doesn't go into great detail on these principles, but I think what he is getting at is something like the following. We each have a complex network of interlocking beliefs. Many of these beliefs have never been critically examined (by me), and hence aren't adequately justified. For example, I believe Minsk is a city in Russia. I have never been to Russia, let alone Minsk, nor have I ever met anyone from there. I probably learned about Minsk from a book or a casual conversation, or possibly in school. According to Oppy, I should go on believing this, even though I do not have adequate justification. If someone comes along and says, "Minsk isn't in Russia, you idiot, it's the capital of Belarus!" or if I bother to look it up in an atlas, then I have reason to change my belief.

Most of our beliefs are like this. I believe a squirrel is a mammal, even though I have never seen one suckle its young. I believe water is composed of hydrogen and oxygen, even though I have never performed an experiment to prove this. I believe my father was born in Philadelphia, even though I have never seen his birth certificate. And so forth.

In this view, the atheist who says, "I never believe anything unless I have evidence for it" is saying something profoundly stupid. Such a principle would require a retreat to near total skepticism.

Oppy's position here is a sophisticated version of the religionist who says, "But you have faith, too!" And I think he's right. If "faith" means "belief without adequate supporting reasons," then we all have to have faith. Life is simply too short to completely, or even adequately, examine all of our beliefs.

This helps us understand why so many people have irrational beliefs, and why they are so hard to change. It is actually better (in an evolutionary sense) to continue to believe unsupported things than to jettison too many beliefs and be paralyzed into inaction. It may be that something like the Principle of Conservatism is built into our psychological makeup to prevent this kind of paralysis.

Arguing About Gods

2011-11-10T08:39:00.000-08:00

Graham Oppy's book, Arguing About Gods, is an odd one. Oppy, an atheist, says his aim is to survey the arguments for and against the existence of an "orthodoxly conceived monotheistic god," which I'm going to call OCMOG for short. He says right at the outset that he thinks it is not irrational to be theist, agnostic, or atheist. Not surprisingly, by the end of the book he has concluded that there are no really convincing arguments either for or against OCMOG.

Oppy spends most of the book on arguments for OCMOG. These he ably dismantles. (Anyone planning on debating William Lane Craig ought to memorize this book.) Why, then, does he think it is not irrational for a theist to remain theist or an agnostic to remain agnostic? The basic idea is that people start from different "priors" and have access to different evidence, so it is by no means surprising that they will come to different, and even incompatible, beliefs. And they can do so in a completely rational manner. (Not that they always do, of course.)

A rational agent will persist with the views she has until she is shown that she can improve her view by changing it.

So the question for the atheist is whether he has arguments that are rationally compelling to the theist, just as the question for the theist is whether he has arguments that are rationally compelling to the atheist. And Oppy thinks the answer is "no."

Although I agree that people can differ without being irrational, and I am willing to entertain the idea that that might even be true about the existence of God, I think Oppy sets the bar for rationality too low. I wonder if he would insist that astrology believers, UFO enthusiasts, and Bigfoot hunters make no mistakes of rationality.

The Resurrection of Jesus

2011-11-04T11:02:00.000-07:00

Keith Parsons has a post up on Secular Web responding to Stephen T. Davis's review of the book The Empty Tomb, to which Parsons contributed an essay. Parsons uses a lot of nice examples from recent history to illustrate how bizarre beliefs form and spread. He notes:

... aspects of the history of the Second World War are debated vigorously, sometimes fiercely, even though the events are massively documented and occurred within the living memory of millions of people. Often the only honest thing to say is that the evidence is compatible with various hypotheses. A fortiori we should be very circumspect in our conjectures about what happened nearly 2000 years ago in obscure circumstances.

Parsons mentions the hallucination hypothesis for the resurrection appearances (though he doesn't claim it is the only, or even the best, explanation). I have often felt that there is an even simpler explanation, that comes right out of the Bible:

¹³ Now that same day two of them were going to a village called Emmaus, about seven miles^[a] from Jerusalem. ¹⁴ They were talking with each other about everything that had happened. ¹⁵ As they talked and discussed these things with each other, Jesus himself came up and walked along with them; ¹⁶ but they were kept from recognizing him.
¹⁷ He asked them, “What are you discussing together as you walk along?”
   They stood still, their faces downcast. ¹⁸ One of them, named Cleopas, asked him, “Are you the only one visiting Jerusalem who does not know the things that have happened there in these days?”
   ¹⁹ “What things?” he asked.
   “About Jesus of Nazareth,” they replied.....

²⁵ He said to them, “How foolish you are, and how slow to believe all that the prophets have spoken! ²⁶ Did not the Messiah have to suffer these things and then enter his glory?” ²⁷ And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself.
²⁸ As they approached the village to which they were going, Jesus continued on as if he were going farther. ²⁹ But they urged him strongly, “Stay with us, for it is nearly evening; the day is almost over.” So he went in to stay with them.
³⁰ When he was at the table with them, he took bread, gave thanks, broke it and began to give it to them. ³¹ Then their eyes were opened and they recognized him, and he disappeared from their sight. ³² They asked each other, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he talked with us on the road and opened the Scriptures to us?”

Now, if you discount the idea that this was actually Jesus and the magical disappearance, this all seems very reasonable. Two followers were walking along and discussing Jesus's death (not implausible). They met a traveling rabbi who didn't look like Jesus (not implausible). They told him they were discussing the Messiah, and the rabbi began explaining the messianic interpretation of various scripture passages (not implausible). Later on, they reflected on this conversation and decided it was Jesus himself who had met them. This last step might strike some as implausible, but I think if there were already stories of Jesus's appearance circulating, it would actually be quite psychologically reasonable.

In this scenario we see how, without any dreams, hallucinations, or weird psychological experiences, Jesus's followers could come to believe that Jesus had "appeared" to them. This explanation might not work for all of the appearance stories, because it relies on the disciples having a predisposition to interpret experiences in terms of appearances of Jesus. Perhaps the first "appearance" was a dream or something. But it might help explain how, once the resurrection meme was in place, it spread so widely. We don't need to posit mass hallucinations, just people re-interpreting their very ordinary experiences in extraordinary terms.

2011-10-31T06:50:00.000-07:00

Having forced myself to slog through Swinburne, I thought I could give the whole area of arguments for God a rest. Swinburne admits that there are no valid deductive proofs of God's existence, and all his "good inductive arguments" for God seem pretty weak to me. But I keep running across atheists who claim either that there are reasonable arguments for God, or that the usual arguments for naturalism fail, or both. For instance, here's a curious article in Philo by atheist philosopher Quentin Smith. I like and respect Smith: he has published some very cogent counter-arguments to the arguments of William Lane Craig and other theists. So when he says that naturalists are naturalists for all the wrong reasons, I have an uncomfortable feeling that he's probably right.

Oddly, though, he doesn't (in this article) tell us what the wrong argument for naturalism is, nor what he considers the right argument. This he leaves to "other papers and books."

One book that is often mentioned favorably (by Smith, among others) is Arguing About Gods, by Graham Oppy. According to the Amazon reviews, Oppy - an atheist - concludes that neither side has arguments sufficient to convince the other.

To me, the naturalist arguments seem clearly superior. My questions are, what reasons do theists have to remain theists (it seems to me they don't have any), and why aren't the naturalist arguments strong enough to be convincing (as it seems to me they are)?

I guess I have to do some more reading....

Smart People Who Say Stupid Things (Again)

2011-10-21T11:17:00.000-07:00

Thanks to a post at TheSecular Outpost, I came across an article by Robin Collins on fine tuning, that explicitly discusses the procedure of "subtracting out" the knowledge that our universe supports life, which I mentioned in this previous post. It provides another example of how a smart person can say very stupid things when talking outside of their sphere of expertise.

Collins is discussing the fine tuning of the gravitational force relative to the electromagnetic force. Having argued for the life-allowing range of the gravitational constant, G, he goes on to attempt to determine the relevant comparison range of "allowable" values. He argues:

Given that the very idea of a constant of physics only makes sense within a set of laws of nature, and a set
of laws only make sense as instantiated in some universe, it makes no sense to talk about varying a constant
beyond its universe-permitting range. In other words, possible law structures can only exist if there is a
possible universe to instantiate them.

OK, let's suppose that's a reasonable approach. What then is the universe-permitting range of G values? Collins writes:

Although it is unclear exactly what the upper
bound of the "universe-permitting" strength of the gravitational force is, certainly if gravity were, for
example, a factor of 10^100 larger, a viable universe would be impossible: the gravitational attraction that a
single particle exerted on itself would result in a black-hole.

Um. There's so much wrong in this sentence that it's hard to know where to start.

1) In neither Newton's nor Einstein's theory of gravity do we include the gravitational attraction that a
single particle exerts on itself in the calculation. We find instead the force that all other masses exert on our particle.

2) A single point particle, all by itself, is a black hole regardless of the strength of gravity.

3) A black hole solution is a valid possible universe in General Relativity. A bit later Collins writes:

Does our "black hole
universe" consisting of no-space time qualify [as a permissible universe]?

Sorry, but a black hole is not a solution consisting of "no space-time." It is exactly the opposite: a solution describing the space-time around a mass. And black hole solutions are possible no matter the value of G.

4) Expanding and re-contracting universes are possible regardless of the value of G. The right-hand side of Einstein's GR equations is G times the energy-momentum tensor. Thus, increasing G is the same as increasing the density of energy-momentum in the universe. Standard cosmological models (like the FLRW models) are still valid, no matter how large we make the density. Admittedly, the larger you make the density, the sooner the universe will re-collapse. But that's still a possible universe.

5) Empty universes, where the right-hand side of Einstein's equation is equal to zero, are still possible for any value of G. Collins asks whether empty universes count, but doesn't give any answer. He just ignores the issue. But it's clearly important for his project of determining the range of G that permits universes: if we include empty universes, then all possible values of G result in possible universes.

Collins seems to be a very smart guy, judging by the earlier parts of this paper. Yet he doesn't seem to have bothered to understand the physics he's employing before writing his article. Didn't he bother to check with an actual physicist? Or maybe he did, but got bad advice? (He doesn't acknowledge any assistance in the paper.)

At any rate, it seems it's not just us physicists who assume all other fields are easy.

PZ Myers Comes Out

2011-10-19T06:29:00.000-07:00

As a Quaker!

Hee, hee!

Fine Tuning Supports Naturalism

2011-10-13T12:11:00.000-07:00

Garren's comments on the previous post got me thinking more about fine tuning. There are lots of reasons to dislike fine tuning arguments for God, but it occurred to me that we can turn the fine tuning argument around and show how it actually supports naturalism, not theism. Let me explain.

The usual fine tuning argument goes like this: Our universe is governed by natural laws that involve certain numerical parameters - the cosmological constant, the strength of the nuclear force, etc. Some of these parameters must lie in a very narrow range in order for life to exist:

PU = Possible Universes
FTU = Fine-Tuned Universes

So, given a naturalistic hypothesis (N) and general background knowledge (K), the probability of a fine-tuned universe is small:

P(FTU|N&K) = Area(FTU)/Area(PU) << 1

On the other hand, given the theistic hypothesis (T), we would expect the universe to be suitable for life: P(FTU|T&K) is not small, or at least not as small as P(FTU|N&K).

One of the (many) problems with this argument is that we can't assert that the probability is given by the ratio of the areas without making many additional assumptions: that the values of parameters 1 and 2 are randomly chosen from the space of all parameters, for instance. But that's not the objection I want to pursue. Rather, I want to point out that the probability envisioned in the fine tuning argument is a sort of prior probability that ignores some of our background information: namely, the fact that life actually exists. That is, we have to take (K) to mean "general background knowledge not including the knowledge that life exists."

But we actually do know that life exists (L), and it is perfectly legitimate to include this knowledge along with our other background knowledge. If we add this knowledge back in, then trivially P(FTU|N&K&L) = 1: under the naturalistic hypothesis, the only way that life can exist is for the universe to have parameters that allow the existence of life.

But that is not true if God exists! Indeed, under theism, there is no reason to expect that the universe will be fine-tuned.

Remember that God is, by hypothesis, omnipotent. That means that God could have caused life to arise by miraculous means, even in a universe that was not fine-tuned. Say, for example, that the universe had a value of the cosmological constant that caused it to expand too fast for galaxies to form. God could have prevented a galaxy-sized region from expanding in order to allow our Milky Way to form. Or God could have inserted a pre-made galaxy. Or he could have inserted an additional force that operated only within our galaxy and that countered the effects of the expansion. Or any number of other possibilities, because God can do anything.

So, under theism, the diagram looks like this:

That is, the probability of a fine-tuned universe under the theistic hypothesis is:

P(FTU|N&K&L) = Area(FTU)/Area(PU) << 1

Conclusion: given that we know that life exists, the probability of discovering we are living in a universe with parameters fine-tuned for life is much higher under the naturalistic hypothesis than under the theistic hypothesis.

What Kind of Atheist Are You?

2011-10-06T13:20:00.000-07:00

Roman Catholic philosopher Edward Feser asks what attitudes we atheists take toward religion. Usefully, he separates out the theoretical and practical sides of religion.

As far as the theoretical side - that is, the questions of religious beliefs - he sees three types of attitudes the non-religious might take:

1. Religious belief has no serious intellectual content at all. It is and always has been little more than superstition, the arguments offered in its defense have always been feeble rationalizations, and its claims are easily refuted.

2. Religious belief does have serious intellectual content, has been developed in interesting and sophisticated ways by philosophers and theologians, and was defensible given the scientific and philosophical knowledge available to previous generations. But advances in science and philosophy have now more or less decisively refuted it. Though we can respect the intelligence of an Aquinas or a Maimonides, we can no longer take their views seriously as live options.

3. Religious belief is still intellectually defensible today, but not as defensible as atheism. An intelligent and well-informed person could be persuaded by the arguments presented by the most sophisticated contemporary proponents of a religion, but the arguments of atheists are at the end of the day more plausible.

And as far as religious practice is concerned: rituals, morality, and (I would add) community, he likewise sees three possibilities:

A. Religious practice is mostly or entirely contemptible and something we would all be well rid of. The ritual side of religion is just crude and pointless superstition. Religious morality, where it differs from secular morality, is sheer bigotry. Even where certain moral principles associated with a particular religion have value, their association with the religion is merely an accident of history. Moreover, such principles tend to be distorted by the religious context. They certainly do not in any way depend on religion for their justification.

B. Religious practice has a certain admirable gravitas and it is possible that its ritual and moral aspects fulfill a real human need for some people. We can treat it respectfully, the way an anthropologist might treat the practices of a culture he is studying. But it does not fulfill any universal human need, and the most intelligent, well educated, and morally sophisticated human beings certainly have no need for it.

C. Religious practice fulfills a truly universal or nearly universal human need, but unfortunately it has no rational foundation and its metaphysical presuppositions are probably false. This is a tragedy, for the loss of religious belief will make human life shallower and in other ways leave a gaping void in our lives which cannot plausibly be filled by anything else. It may even have grave social consequences. But it is something we must find a way to live with, for atheism is intellectually unavoidable.

Feser plausibly sees P.Z. Myers and Jerry Coyne as A1 type atheists. But, he says, to hold this position, one must

...think it plausible that the greatest minds of entire civilizations -- Augustine, Aquinas, Maimonides, Avicenna, Averroes, Lao Tzu, Confucius, Mencius, Buddha, Adi Shankara, Ramanuja, et al. -- had for millennia been defending theoretical and practical positions that were not merely mistaken but were in fact nothing more than sheer bigotry and superstition...

On the theoretical side, I would put myself solidly in category 2. I can't imagine how intelligent, educated people today still cling to religion. Actually, I can imagine it, because I used to be one of them. But I find it hard to believe that after looking at all the arguments and evaluating them honestly, someone would conclude that, yes, an invisible person in the sky is more plausible than not.

On the practical question, I place myself somewhere between B and C. I think religion does address fundamental human needs, but I think it does it very imperfectly, and I don't see why we need to introduce supernatural entities to address those needs. (Some of the "greatest minds" Feser mentions didn't see a need for supernatural entities, either: Lao Tze and Buddha, for instance.)

Also, I don't think it's a tragedy that religion is false - I think we can get along fine without it. Maybe even better - but we will have to work on replacing religious institutions with non-religious institutions that address those same needs. We don't have those structures yet.

(Cross posted on Think Atheist.)

Should Atheists Read Aquinas?

2011-10-02T06:24:00.000-07:00

Reading some of the altercations between Jerry Coyne and Edward Feser has got me wondering: when do we need to delve deeply into the other side's arguments, and when is it OK (if ever) to give a simple answer and move on? Life is short, and I don't want to spend the rest of it reading a bunch of clap-trap just in order to debunk it. On the other hand, as True Skeptics™ we want a rational basis for what we believe - we don't want to dismiss some idea just because it interferes with our preconceived worldview. So we feel a certain obligation to look into the other side's arguments in detail. And if we fail to do our due diligence, people like Feser and William Lane Craig end up running circles around us.

So, here are some guidelines to help decide when enough is enough.

Know your audience; know your argument. It is, it seems to me, perfectly legitimate to address simple arguments for God with simple answers. Most believers don't believe because of some philosophically sophisticated argument of Aquinas or Craig. Rather, they are thinking something like, "Everything had to come from something." To this, it is enough to reply, "No, it didn't," or "Saying it came from God just pushes the problem back one step."

So it seems fine to write books or blogs that address the popular arguments for God while leaving out the philosophically sophisticated ones. If people like Feser complain about this, one need only point out that there are philosophically sophisticated answers already out there for those sophisticated arguments, and anyone who cares to do so can read up on them.

On the other hand, if you are addressing a particular argument for God, you had better understand the different versions of that argument, and the responses to them, and the responses to the responses, or you will end up with the taste of shoe leather in your mouth. It makes no sense to invent your own version of the Cosmological Argument and then proceed to knock that down - that's a classic straw man fallacy.

Triangulate. If prominent experts on the other side have abandoned a particular line of argument, it seems legitimate to ignore that line. If someone tries to argue that humans and dinosaurs lived at the same time because of the Paluxy footprints, I only need to point out that not even the Institute for Creation Research defends the Paluxy claim any more. Similarly, given the fact that theistic philosophers like Richard Swinburne and Alvin Plantinga have agreed that there are no valid deductive proofs of God's existence, I don't feel the need to pursue those any more. If Feser thinks he has rehabilitated Aquinas's cosmological proof and that all atheists need to read his book to find out how, well, fine: when he has convinced his fellow theists that he's done so, then I might look into it. Until then, I'm not going to waste my time.

Remember that the courtiers are sometimes right. PZ Myers has identified the "Courtier's Reply." In brief, the term refers to those who respond to the cry "The Emperor has no clothes!" with learned sneers, "He has apparently not read the detailed discourses of Count Roderigo of Seville on the exquisite and exotic leathers of the Emperor's boots..." and so forth.

But here's the thing: the courtiers are sometimes right. There are many highly educated and highly intelligent believers, and they have thought long and hard about their positions, and can defend them ably. When you run up against one of these, you should either shut your mouth or do the hard work of learning the real issues and responding to them. Giving a simplistic answer to a complex question is worse than giving none at all (see Know your audience above).

Atheists should respect the intelligence of their opponents. We think we have the better arguments. If we do, we should welcome the engagement with the best and the brightest among the theists.

Out of the Mouths of Babes

2011-09-27T12:26:00.000-07:00

My four-year-old is in a Christian Montessori preschool. I had concerns about this choice of school, but having met the staff and talked to them about their approach to religion, agreed to it. They don't do indoctrination; they talk about the parables of Jesus and try to draw out the kids on what they think they mean. Also, the school has a wonderful approach to conflict resolution: seeing a 10-year old boy bring a "peace rose" to a classmate almost brought tears to my eyes when I thought about my own elementary school experience.

But they do talk about Jesus, and this leads to some interesting conversations with my son while I drive him back and forth to school.

"Dad, is Jesus real?"

"Yes, he really lived."

"Then how come he could do things other people can't do?"

Good question, I thought. I told him that people sometimes make up stories about real people. He wanted to know what parts of the story I thought were made up. I mentioned walking on water and the resurrection.

"Dad, maybe Jesus was a zombie."

I think he's going to be OK.

(Cross posted on Think Atheist.)

Doing It Wrong

2011-09-23T02:54:00.000-07:00

A curious debate-by-blog has been spinning itself out, between some atheists who claim that modern genetic evidence conclusively rules out the Biblical story of Adam and Eve and the defenders of the faith. I'm all for atheists calling out the religious when their beliefs are contradicted by scientific evidence. It seems to me that this sort of debate didn't happen much during the last century: atheists pretty much ignored religious dogma and stuck to promoting knowledge of science (evolution, especially). So I was very interested in the current exchange. However, Jerry Coyne of Why Evolution is True seems hell-bent on showing us how not to go about it.

It began, more or less, with Jerry's comments on some media reports about evangelical Christians who have been attempting to address the issue of the scientific evidence and its implications for Christian doctrines, especially the existence of an actual Adam and Eve. Jerry correctly points out that "... the scientific evidence shows that Adam and Eve could not have existed, at least in the way they’re portrayed in the Bible."

But then Coyne goes on to poke fun at the evangelicals' attempts to address the scientific evidence. Now, I don't choose to spend my time poking fun at other people's beliefs, but I don't have a problem with others who wish to do so - I enjoy my daily dose of PZ as much as the next atheist. But I live in a country in which close to half of the citizens reject evolution. I think the message shouldn't be "Gee, look at those silly Christians struggling to fit their religious beliefs around scientific evidence." Instead, it should be "Hooray! You've finally admitted that Adam and Eve are mythical! Now go tell all your coreligionists, please."

From there things went downhill.

Michael Flynn responded to Jerry by noting that Roman Catholic theology, at least, doesn't require belief in a literal interpretation of "the mythos of Adam and Eve." He suggests a scenario in which Adam was just one of many ancestors of modern humans - one who also happened to be a common ancestor of everyone living today. In the National Catholic Register, Mark Shea applauded Flynn, and Edward Feser on his blog took the same tack.

Coyne fired back. His response is a good illustration of how an intelligent person can make fundamental mistakes when he goes outside of his area of expertise. A glance at any recent introduction to the Bible would have shown him that modern Biblical scholars recognize that the Bible is composed of a diversity of sources and is written in a variety of genres: history, poetry, myth, etc. For many, the Genesis story is a myth of origins, not a historical account. It should have been obvious, at any rate, that anyone who accepts the evolutionary account of human origins - as Roman Catholics now do - cannot also take the Genesis account literally.

Instead of congratulating them for recognizing the validity of evolutionary science, Coyne goes on the offensive, saying they are misinterpreting their Bible and "making stuff up" in order to reconcile it with their beliefs.

And if the language is figurative (and there’s no indication that it is: Shea simply realizes that the story [is] wrong in light of modern science), how does he know the event is real?

So, Jerry, you're now an expert on Biblical language?

Here, he falls into a common atheist error: telling Christians how they should interpret the Bible, and then telling them why that interpretation doesn't make any sense. You're never going to get anywhere that way!

Fundamentally, I agree with Jerry's point: these theologians are scrambling to reconcile their beliefs with the scientific evidence, and it doesn't make a pretty fit. But at least they're making the attempt - in contrast to so many believers who simply stick their heads in the sand, ignore all the science, and claim the Earth is 6000 years old. In fighting to keep real science in the schools, it is the latter, not the former, we need to worry about.

Finally, and unforgivably, Jerry fudges on the science. Flynn pointed out, correctly, that the question of a single couple that is ancestral to all modern humans is completely different than the question of mitochondrial Eve or Y-chromosome Adam. The most recent common ancestor of all currently living humans (MRCA) lived astonishingly recently, according to current models: around 2000-5000 years ago. Flynn, et. al., are supposing a picture in which Biblical Adam and Eve are ancestors of the whole of current humanity, though not the sole ancestors, so it is the MRCA that is relevant. Rather than admit that they are right about the biology, Jerry simply ignores all this.

(On the other hand, Flynn and Feser both talk a lot of garbage about the evolution of "sapience": I wish Jerry had spent his considerable resources ripping them a new one on that point.)

I like Jerry's blog, and I agree with him most of the time. But the thought of uninformed atheists expounding the true meaning of the Bible makes my skin crawl. Please stick to the biology, Jerry, and leave the Bible interpretation to those who know something about it.

Early Christian Religion Now Defunct

2011-09-22T01:26:00.000-07:00

The website, that is. Actually, it's been defunct for a long time, but I finally got my essays moved over to a new location. (You can also access them from the "Essays" tab on this site.) Some of the formatting got lost in the move - I'll try to fix it when I have some time.

If you had any links to the old site, please update them.

Book of Days

2011-09-08T13:42:00.000-07:00

Music video by Meredith Monk. Presented without comment.

Watch a Galaxy Form

2011-09-05T04:05:00.000-07:00

Sorry I haven't posted in a long time. I hope to start updating more regularly soon, but for now here's an amazing video. For decades, it has been a mystery how galaxies form, and the discoveries of dark matter and dark energy have to some extent made things more difficult. But now, a computer simulation that required 8 months of calculation on a Swiss supercomputer has produced a very realistic galaxy - for the first time.

And you can watch it right now!

Morality Institutionalized

2011-07-10T01:19:00.000-07:00

I think Joyce is right to say that we can't make any sense of categorical imperatives. But Joyce's solution - going on acting as if there were categorical imperatives - doesn't seem either desirable or possible.

Why not take a step backwards, and admit that morality is really an institution that we can choose to opt in to or out of? That is, we admit that "ought" statements have an implied "if," of the general form "You ought to do X if you want to abide by morality system Y." (Here I'm stealing a page from the end-relational theory of ought that Garren's been writing about over at Words, Ideas, and Things.)

But why opt in to a moral system? We recognize that there are benefits to opting in (e.g. the moral approval of others) and undesirable consequences of opting out (moral condemnation, punishment). Furthermore, we can never know all the consequences of our actions, so we need guidelines and principles by which to make choices in an uncertain world. A moral system gives us a set of guidelines for how to behave in social settings. We can recognize that abiding by a moral code doesn't always result in the ideally rational result, and still choose to abide by that code, because we hope it will yield a better result in the long term than will failing to abide by the code.

So it seems we can make a choice, based purely on practical rationality, to opt in to a moral system because it will in general be to our benefit to do so. This is basically what Joyce said about adopting a fictionalist attitude - but without requiring the doublethink of Joyce's approach.

What I like about this approach is that it takes us away from throwing slogans at those with whom we have moral disagreements - "Abortion is murder!" "Respect the rights of the mother!" - and instead focuses us on the goals the competing principles are intended to bring about. Maybe we can't agree on whether abortion is morally permissible, maybe we can't even agree on the principles by which to decide moral questions, but we can still try to find agreement on certain goals: fewer unwanted children? less sex outside of marriage?

Earlier I said I thought moral systems are a sort of instinctive legal system. We all accept (AFAIK) that legal systems are institutions. We don't expect all countries to have the same laws, and while we might think some country's laws are bad laws, we still accept that we are subject to those laws when in that country. Of course, some people choose to opt out of the system: break the laws. And then they are subject to the prescribed penalties.

Why can't we treat morality the same way? Why not recognize that different social groups have different moral systems? And that when one is engaging with such a group one might wish to abide by their moral system - or not, and pay the penalty.

Of course, this approach leads us smack into the question, "But then how can you condemn Hitler?" I'll try to address this in a future post.

"It will be a hell of a lot of fun"

2011-06-13T07:01:00.000-07:00

Is this going to be "the most exciting summer since 1974"? Possibly, if you're a particle physicist.

Last week, the CDF experiment at Fermilab reported some tantalizing evidence of a new, unknown particle. A few days ago, a different Fermilab experiment, called D0 (D-zero), reported the results of their independent check on the CDF result. D0's answer? Nothing there.

These intriguing result are showing up just as Fermilab prepares to shut these experiments down for good. At the same time, the LHC in Switzerland is gearing up to do similar work. So far, LHC doesn't see anything either, but it doesn't have enough data yet to say for sure.

What happens if LHC does see something? As Fermilab's Gordon Watts says,

If they do see it, then all the papers proposing different models will be scoured for their distinguishing features, and all of us experimenters will run off to try to compare them with data. Very little sleep will be had. It will be a hell of a lot of fun.

(nudge, nudge, wink, wink) Morality

2011-06-11T11:27:00.000-07:00

Richard Joyce first argues strenuously that categorical imperatives are fundamental to moral discourse. Then he turns around and argues strenuously that there is no rational basis for categorical imperatives. Finally, he spins once more and says it might be rational to act as if there were such things as categorical imperatives. This is what he calls the "fictionalist" approach to morality. All these sharp turns left me with a feeling of intellectual whiplash.

But let's follow him to the end: how can he claim that we ought to behave as if there were such a thing as morality?

Obviously, it doesn't make any sense to ask what we ought, in a moral sense, to do, having concluded that there is no such thing as morality. But that's not what Joyce is asking. He's asking what we ought, in a practical sense, to do.

One possible answer is, "Jettison the moral discourse entirely." Joyce writes,

For all I know, "Jettison the discourse" is the correct answer.... However, I do not think that it is the only candidate....

The reason is that acting according to a moral code might actually, for the most part, be beneficial in a practical sense for a given group of people. But those people cannot simply decide to believe in such a code - not, that is, if they have already concluded that morality doesn't exist. However, they can decide to act as if their moral code were real, act as if there were such things as categorical imperatives. In doing so, they are able to reap the benefits of a moral code without committing the logical error involved in accepting categorical imperatives as actual. This is what Joyce calls the "fictionalist stance."

The fictionalist thinks the correct answer is "Keep using the discourse, but do not believe it."

Joyce admits a problem with the fictionalist stance, namely, that we can't adopt it among people who actually believe in morality. To do so would be dishonest: we would be using the same terms, but in a different way. The alternative would be to preface any moral statement with some sort of disclaimer, to the effect, "I'm going to be talking as if I believe in morality even though I actually don't." One can easily imagine how effective this would be.

So, by his own admission, Joyce's solution only works if a group of Joycean fictionalists went off to an island somewhere and all agreed to adopt the fictionalist stance. Clearly, an impractical solution!

Worse, just imagine the kind of moral discourse that would take place on this island. "You really ought not (nudge, nudge, wink, wink) to rape that child."

I think there is a better response than this - which I'll try to sketch next time.

Practical Reasons and Moral Reasons

2011-06-06T06:48:00.000-07:00

Here (again) is Joyce's argument for a moral error theory as I understand it:

Moral language requires categorical imperatives.
Categorical imperatives cannot be legitimately questioned.
Practical rationality is the only source of statements that cannot be legitimately questioned.
But practical rationality cannot provide a basis for (moral) categorical imperatives.
Therefore, moral language is in error.

If you buy what Joyce has said so far, then (4) follows easily. Practical rationality, on Joyce's account, is agent-relative. Therefore, it cannot be a basis for categorical imperatives, which are absolute.

One way to avoid (4) is to object to Joyce's view of practical rationality. Joyce spends a whole chapter (Ch. 5) answering this objection. His approach is to "attempt a straight defense of practical instrumentalism [his version of practical rationality] by showing that the non-instrumentalist necessarily commits an error." The argument he uses is based on a "well-known" paper by Bernard Williams, "Internal and External Reasons."

Williams's conclusion is that something is a reason if (and only if), after a process of fully informed and correct deliberation, it would motivate someone to act in accordance with the reason. Williams thus denies that there are such things as "external" reasons. (In the lingo, "internal" reasons are those that are motivating, "external" reasons are those that are not.)

Joyce is more circumspect. He doesn't agree that Williams's conclusion applies to all reasons. But he does think it applies to the sort of normative reasons that are needed for moral language.

My objection is only with external reason claims that do not know their place - that overstep themselves by claiming to transcend all institutions.

Once again we see the importance to Joyce of the imperative that is categorical, that "transcends all institutions."

If we go along with Joyce's definitions and assumptions, then his error-theory conclusion is unavoidable. Joyce admits that he has not "proven" error theory - he has only tried to make it probable. His next move, though, is pretty weird: he tries to treat morality as a work of fiction. More on that next time!

Evading the Categorical Imperative

2011-05-31T10:16:00.000-07:00

Now let's return to the first step of Joyce's argument:

Moral language requires categorical imperatives.

Joyce considers three objections to (1.): morality could be institutional, or morality could be founded on hypothetical imperatives, or morality could be relative, rather than absolute. These are closely related, but Joyce considers them in different places.

"Institutional," in Joyce's usage, means something that one may or may not adopt. The rules of chess are an institution. I must adopt the rules of chess if I want to play in a tournament, but if I am playing against my 7 year-old nephew, I might intentionally make an illegal move (move into check, for instance, so that she can win). As we saw last time, Joyce thinks that practical rationality is the only normative system for which we do not have the luxury of being able to "step outside of the system."

Some philosophers (Joyce mentions Philippa Foot, but says she later abandoned this approach) have proposed that morality is really a system of hypothetical, not categorical, imperatives. Joyce's only response here is to refer back to his discussion of practical reason as the only non-institutional normative system.

Still later, Joyce considers Harman's relativistic view of morality. For Harman, different moral systems are like different frames of reference in physics: events can be viewed from any system, and no one system is privileged over another. If practical rationality is indeed agent-relative, and if morality can be founded on practical rationality, then it makes sense that the resulting system would be relative rather than absolute.

Joyce responds with the Nazi objection. When the Nazis were put on trial, no one thought it necessary to consider the facts from the point of view of the Nazi ethical system. The judges behaved as if their morality was the only correct frame of reference. Thus, Joyce argues, we do not in practice act as if morality were relative.

My first thought here is, "Well, yeah, but in other cases we act as if morality were relative." For instance, knowing that my friend Joe is Jewish, I have no difficulty saying "Joe ought not to eat that cheeseburger," even if I do not feel that I ought not eat one.

More broadly, I would say that our use of moral language is partly cultural and partly instinctive, and that it would be very surprising if it formed a logically consistent system. It is not surprising, then, if we find we have to modify something in our morality in order to make it logically consistent. Isn't this just what moral philosophers have been doing for centuries? Joyce would respond that to let go of the absolute quality of morality results in a system which is no longer recognizably a moral system.

Finally, I want to note that Joyce's Nazi response is merely argument-by-example, and so is pretty weak. My intuition is that most moral systems have some sort of inbuilt relativity. For instance, quite often there are different rules for "us" than there are for "them." Joyce's intuition is different, but he acknowledges that it is just an intuition, and would require much more research to establish with certainty.

To summarize, we can evade (1.) by saying that morality is an institution that we can choose to adopt. Equivalently (?), we can say that morality is a system of hypothetical imperatives of the form, "In order to act in accordance with moral system X, you ought to do Y." What results is a relative, rather than an absolute, morality.

The Trolley Odyssey of Homer

2011-05-27T13:18:00.000-07:00

I'm not a big fan of trolley problems but this is a fun introduction to them, with some fascinating twists and cameos by the Simpsons.

Practically Rational

2011-05-25T13:21:00.000-07:00

Jumping over point (1.) of Joyce's argument, let's take a look at point (3):

(3.) Practical rationality is the only source of statements that cannot be legitimately questioned.

This can be broken into two pieces:

3a. Practical rationality cannot be legitimately questioned.
3b. There is nothing else that cannot be legitimately questioned.

Joyce spends some time arguing for (3a), but the basic point is quite simple. The question, "Why should I care about practical rationality?" simply makes no sense. It amounts to asking for a reason I should care about reasons. This is obviously incoherent.

Oddly - given how central it is to Joyce's argument - he says very little about (3b). He merely points out that the argument in the previous paragraph doesn't work when "practical rationality" is replaced by any other normative system. Maybe this is enough, but it seems to me that such an important point needs more than a one-sentence support. (Of course, it may be that I am misrepresenting his argument in making (3b) so central.)

Anyway, it seems we could avoid moral error theory if there was something other than practical rationality that could not be legitimately escaped. I don't see much hope for this escape route, though.

However, I wonder if we were to take the view of morality that I've been promoting - a social system that imposes constraints on individual behavior - could we argue that, while it is possible to logically step outside the moral system, there is no way to do so practically? That is to say, we are necessarily part of a society, and so are subject to the moral system of those around us, whether we like it or not. (Unless I am alone on a deserted island for the rest of my life - in which case there is, arguably, no need for morality.)

Joyce goes on to analyze practical rationality.

An agent S is practically rational to the extent that she is guided by her subjective reasons.

And,

S has a subjective reason to X if and only if she is justified in believing that S+ (S granted full information and idealized powers of reflection) would advise S to X.

The main take-away from this definition, for my purposes, is that practical rationality is agent-relative.

The Moral Game

2011-05-19T14:27:00.000-07:00

(Note: this post got lost in the Blogger meltdown. Sorry that it is out of order.)

The Prisoners' Dilemma (Mackie's version):

Two soldiers (let's call them Amy and Bob) are on guard at separate posts. They both hear noises indicating that the enemy is coming. They each have to decide: stick to their post, or flee? If they both stick to their posts, they have a good chance of surviving. If they both flee, the enemy will overrun their position, and they might be captured or killed. If one runs and one stays, the one who stays will probably die, but the one who runs has a good chance of getting away while the other guard holds them off.

What should the guards do? Cooperate (i.e., stay) or defect?

We can analyze their options with the help of the following table:

		Bob's Choice
		Cooperate	Defect
Amy's Choice	Cooperate	(2,2)	(4,1)
Amy's Choice	Defect	(1,4)	(3,3)

The entries in the table are the preference Amy and Bob respectively assign to each outcome: (1,4) indicates this outcome is the best for Amy (1) and the worst for Bob (4).

If Amy doesn't know what Bob is going to do, she will reason like this: "Suppose Bob decides to defect. Then my choices are to cooperate and probably die (4), or defect (3) and run the risks of the enemy overrunning our position. So I should choose to defect.

Now suppose Bob decides to cooperate. If I cooperate too, then we have a good chance of surviving (2). But if I defect, I have an even better chance of surviving (1). So I should decide to defect."

Bob reasons the same way, of course, so both decide to defect. Both have chosen rationally, but the outcome is sub-optimal. From a global perspective, both of them cooperating is clearly preferable.

This simple example from game theory helps us understand how moral systems might have evolved. Individuals with a disposition to cooperate can end up with a better chance of surviving than individuals acting purely from their own self-interest. This is the hook that evolution can latch onto to promote cooperation.

A more detailed game theoretical analysis shows that when the situation is repeated many times - rather than the one-off situation described above - cooperation can actually be rationally justified.

And this is just the situation we find ourselves in. Every day, we make thousands of decisions whether to cooperate and do what morality dictates - keep that promise, pay for that coffee, obey that traffic signal - or to defect.

And most of us, most of the time, decide to cooperate. But is this rational behavior?

Humean's Fake: Joycean Error Theory

2011-05-17T14:24:00.000-07:00

I've been reading The Myth of Morality, by Richard Joyce. Joyce is a proponent of moral error theory: He thinks that when we use moral language we are simply in error, because there are no such things in the world.

His argument centers on the idea of the categorical imperative. A hypothetical imperative has the form, "If you want to achieve A, you ought to do X." This sort of statement is uncontroversial: there is no doubt that such statements are sometimes true. Kant thought, and Joyce agrees, that categorical imperatives are central to moral thought. Categorical imperatives make the claim, "You ought to do X," without any "if..." clause. Such claims are absolute.

As I understand it, Joyce's argument runs as follows. (He lays out his argument very nicely, but this is my formulation of it, not his.)

Moral language requires categorical imperatives.
Categorical imperatives cannot be legitimately questioned.
Practical rationality is the only source of statements that cannot be legitimately questioned.
But practical rationality cannot provide a basis for (moral) categorical imperatives.
Therefore, moral language is in error.

(2.) is simply a consequence of the definition of a categorical imperative. Joyce gives each of the other points careful consideration. In the next few posts, I will look at how he deals with attempts to deny each of them.

Boo on You! Non-Cognitivism and the Moral Instinct

2011-05-10T07:10:00.000-07:00

Non-cognitivism in ethics is the idea that moral claims are really just expressing the speaker's attitude towards something. "Abortion is wrong," for example, amounts to "Boo on abortion!" The attitude expressed is, roughly, "I approve/disapprove of this and you should, too." But the moral claim is itself the expression of the attitude - it is not the claim that one has that attitude. That is, a moral claim is non-propositional: it doesn't have any content that is capable of being true or false.

Cognitivist philosophers respond that we seem to think moral claims have propositional content. They support this by considering the way we use moral language. Consider the claim, "If killing animals is wrong, one shouldn't eat meat." It doesn't make any sense to translate this as, "If boo on killing animals!, one shouldn't eat meat."

I think the cognitivists are probably right: when we make moral claims, we think we are making a statement that is capable of being true or false. (Whether we are right to think so is another matter.) But it seems to me that once they have considered and dismissed non-cognitivism, cognitivist philosophers forget all about the non-cognitive aspect of morality.

In the last post I gave a sketch of morality as an evolved social system that limits the actions of individuals by means of social pressure. If this view is at all correct, it is easy to see why there is a large non-cognitive component to moral claims. A strong expression of disapproval of doing X, and the resultant peer pressure to refrain from doing X, lies at the root of the moral system. (Together with the positive version: expressing strong approval of an action.)

It's harder to understand why there might be a cognitive component to morality. It seems like evolution could have given us a purely emotional response that would serve to enforce the group norms.

Let's see if the linguistic analogy helps us here. Consider "It's wrong to say, 'I am going the store to.'" Here "wrong" is not used in the moral sense, but it plays a similar role. It certainly expresses disapproval. But it also implicity invokes the rules of grammar: "It's wrong to say, 'I am going the store to,' because in English the preposition comes before its object." Notice that in grammar, the rules arise (originally) as generalizations about actual usage. They are not imposed by some linguistic authority - though various institutions (dictionaries, textbooks) might take on that authority at a later time.

It seems to me that moral claims are also two-pronged: they express approval/disapproval, but they also implicitly invoke general rules that it is assumed are accepted, or at least known, by all. "Murder is wrong" thus has the cognitive content "Murder is a violation of the generally accepted rules of behavior."

The Moral Instinct

2011-05-07T11:40:00.000-07:00

I've been trying to educate myself about ethics, metaethics, and moral philosophy, and so far I feel like I haven't encountered an approach that really makes sense of it all. But I thought I'd try to take a first pass at putting down some of my thoughts on the subject.

Let's start by asking what sort of beast morality is. I come up with something like the following:

A1. A moral system is a social structure that imposes limits on the actions of individuals who are part of a given social group. These limits are enforced by a system of rewards and punishments. Rewards include praise and increased social status, punishments range from shame to shunning to ostracism to death.

Thus, morality acted as a legal system, back before laws and punishments were formalized and written down. But morality is more than just a system of rewards and punishments, it is internalized through feelings of pride, guilt, etc.

If we ask what is the origin of such moral systems, the answer seems pretty clear: evolution. Humans, like other primates, are highly social animals. Our survival depends to some extent on our ability to cooperate with each other. Just as we have evolved an innate capacity for language, we have evolved some innate capacity for moral behavior: not just the external rules of the system, but the internal emotions that result when the rules are obeyed or disobeyed. Presumably, this sort of behavior gave a better survival rate, so that groups with stronger moral institutions (and containing individuals with stronger moral feelings) out-competed other groups. Let's summarize this as

A2. Morality evolved as a way of subordinating the interests of the individual to the interests of the group.

Clearly, different cultures have implemented widely varying sorts of moral systems. I take it that what we have evolved is a basic instinct for conforming to the group morality. The specific content of that morality differs from culture to culture, and is learned. Here the language analogy is useful again: we have some innate capacity for language, but the specifics of vocabulary, grammar, etc., are learned.

All this seems rather obvious and straightforward. But it is already enough to answer some of the big questions that moral philosophers ask. In fact, it makes the search for a true account of morality look rather pointless. Why, given A1 and A2, would we expect any one "correct" moral system? That's like asking what's the correct grammar for a language to have, or what's the ideal legal system.

Here the language analogy seems to break down, however. When we hear, "Throw your father down the stairs his hat," we think, "How charming!" but when we hear of a practice like female genital mutilation, we say, "That's just wrong."

But there is a reason our response to other moral systems is different from our response to other languages. That is just what a moral system is: a system of deciding what is right and what is wrong. So we should not be surprised that we have an instinctive - maybe even irrational - response to other moral systems.

Taking on P.Z. Myers

2011-04-22T06:48:00.000-07:00

Hmm, maybe this blog would be more popular if I had more octopi...

This amazing image is from the most recent Scientific American. As if that weren't cool enough, this critter confuses predators by disguising itself as a flounder.

Isn't that a bit like a spider disguising itself as a strawberry?

On The Problem Of Worldviews...

2011-04-17T06:42:00.000-07:00

And the hovertext:

% of universe the meek shall inherit, by volume: 0.00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000003%

Theists and Atheists Agree...

2011-04-15T06:33:00.000-07:00

Alexander Pruss of Prosblogion seems to have found an argument that theistic and atheistic philosophers agree on. From the comments:

So it looks like there are a number of people who have published on this, and all the papers that I've so far looked at basically agree that the following are not all true:
1. Evolution occurred pretty much as science describes it.
2. Naturalism is true.
3. Moral realism is true.
4. We have moral knowledge.

I don't understand all the arguments that lead up to this conclusion well enough to know whether to agree with it or not, but it's rather a fascinating conclusion if true.

Alexander, being a theist and a moral realist, naturally takes (3) and (4) to be true, and so concludes that either (1) or (2) is false - he then opts for naturalism being false.

I don't know enough about the whole realism/anti-realism debate to have a firm position, but I'm leaning anti-realist at the moment, so the argument doesn't present a real problem for me. But it seems to be a real problem for someone like Sam Harris, who is a naturalist and a moral realist. I don't think he would want to deny (4), either. From what I understand, he thinks that science can discover moral truths. So I wonder how Sam would respond to this argument.

But then, Sam thinks that discussions of metaethics and deontology only add to the amount of boredom in the world, so probably he wouldn't bother.

Southwest Airlines' New Advertising Slogan

2011-04-11T05:42:00.000-07:00

"Cheaper because we have less overhead."

God and the Big Bang

2011-04-03T04:50:00.000-07:00

I used to wonder why Christians didn't make a big deal of the Big Bang. After all, it was at least one case of a "prediction" of Christianity that had been confirmed by science. Or so I thought at the time.

I found that, on the contrary, many Christians disbelieved the whole Big Bang idea and adamantly opposed it. Strange.

More recently, I have come to realize that the Big Bang is not actually a theory of how the universe began; rather, it is a theory of how the universe has changed over time. It is astounding that we can now describe the history of the universe back to 13.7 billion years ago, when it looked dramatically different than it does today. But if you try to push back further, then we have every reason to believe that our theories break down, and no reason to trust their predictions beyond a certain point.

The idea that the universe began in a singularity, which was also the beginning of time itself, is really no part of the Big Bang model (though it continues to appear in popular presentations of the theory).

This point is made in a well-thought-out paper by Hans Halvorson and Helge Kragh. (Hat tip: ex-apologist) They make a lot of other good points, too, and the whole thing is worth a read, but I was particularly struck by one thing. They ask what would happen to the theist's argument for God from the Big Bang if the theory were disproven. Would the failure of the Big Bang undermine theism? Of course not! Even if we knew the universe existed prior to the (moment we refer to as the) Big Bang, the theist could claim that God had created the universe at an earlier time, or that God had created an eternally existing universe. Then they say:

The point is that insofar as the failure of the big-bang model would not undermine theism, so the success of the big-bang model does not support theism.

This, I think, is a very important point. And it is one that is devastating for many of the conventional arguments for God.

The basic principle is this: if X is evidence for God, then ~X ("not X", the negation of X) must be evidence against God. Or to put it another way, if X and ~X are equally consistent with the God hypothesis, then neither of them can provide an argument for God.

Swinburne, for example, claims that the constancy of physics across time and space is evidence for God. Why does an electron here on earth have the exact same mass, charge, and spin as an electron in a distant galaxy? This constancy calls out for an explanation (says Swinburne) - and the explanation is God.

But suppose that one of the many experiments looking for changes in the fundamental constants was successful. Suppose, for instance, that we found the electron's charge was changing over time. Would Swinburne take this as evidence against God? I suspect he would not. But if the God hypothesis is equally consistent with constant electric charge or changing electric charge, then constant charge cannot be evidence for God.

On a larger scale, theists often ask what is the origin of natural laws themselves. But if regularity in the operation of nature is evidence for God, then lack of regularity - randomness - in its operation must be evidence against God. And quantum mechanics shows that, at the most basic level, nature is random and unpredictable. So quantum mechanics is evidence against God!

I don't really think that quantum mechanics is a good argument against God. By the same token, I don't think the regularity of physical laws, or the constancy of particular physical parameters, or the Big Bang singularity (if there was one), are evidence for God.

The Brontological Argument

2011-03-30T16:15:00.000-07:00

PhilosophyBro's take on Anselm. (Warning, bad words ahead.)

Atheists Need Better Nicknames

2011-03-17T10:01:00.000-07:00

Thanks to the incomparable Rebecca Watson, I recently learned of a new argument for the existence of God due to Christian YouTube personality Venom Fang X. And I immediately thought, "Wow. I wish I'd thought of the the name Venom Fang X."

I mean, just look at the pathetic atheist nicknames out there:

Come on, folks! We can't compete with Venom Fang X with nicknames like these! Let's get those atheist brains in gear and come up with some good names! (But "Skepchick" is pretty cool, you've got to admit.)

Satan Is Born

2011-03-14T06:49:00.000-07:00

I haven't had much time for blogging recently, so let me point you to this essay. The basic idea: early Judaism didn't have any concept of heaven or hell or Satan (as we understand him). All these concepts crept in through the influence of pagan religions, prominently Persian Zoroastrianism. Take a look, it's pretty cool stuff.

Swinburne Is Wrong Even When He's Right

2011-03-04T06:05:00.000-08:00

Over at the Secular Outpost, Bradley Bowen is taking a whack at Swinburne, too. In the third part of his series, he mentions Swinburne's claim that there are no sound deductive proofs of God's existence. He quotes Swinburne's argument from his earlier book, The Coherence of Theism, in support of this claim.

You should read the argument yourself at the linked page, but as I understand it, it goes as follows:

If the existence of God were a logically necessary truth, then any statement that follows logically from God's existence would also be a logically necessary truth.
Thus the negation of any such statement would be logically incoherent.
When we look at these negated statements, they are not obviously incoherent.
Therefore, the existence of God must not be a logically necessary truth.

It would certainly be convenient for us atheists if there was a nice knock-down argument against deductive proofs of God. So I would like to be able to go along with Swinburne here. Unfortunately, the argument seems to fail.

Let's try out the same argument on a different topic. Let us suppose that the basic theorems of arithmetic are logically necessary. Now, take any statement that follows from the basic theorems: Fermat's Last Theorem, for instance. The negation of that statement is, of course, false. Here is the negation:

The equation aⁿ + bⁿ = cⁿ has a solution for some integers a, b, and c, and some integer n greater than 2.

Now, that statement is certainly not obviously incoherent. Indeed, no one knew whether it was true or false for over 250 years. By Swinburne's argument, then, the basic truths of mathematics must not be logically necessary.

So, why does Swinburne think that the negation of a necessarily true statement should be obviously incoherent? It beats me.

Intuitively, it seems unlikely that any such a sweeping argument against deductive proofs of God's existence will be successful, any more than deductive disproofs of God's existence.

There's No Such Thing as the Bible...

2011-02-24T17:11:00.000-08:00

...and there never has been, says Timothy Beal. This is the point I tried to make in this essay, but Beal is professor of religion at Case Western Reserve University and has written a whole book about it, so if you don't believe me, check him out.

(H/T James McGrath)

Newton the Heretic

2011-02-21T16:06:00.000-08:00

Isaac Newton spent about five years laying down the foundations of calculus as well as those of modern physics. He spent the next twenty pursuing alchemy and theology.

In his typical thorough way, Newton delved deep into the writings of early Christians. He must have read nearly everything that had been written during the first three centuries of Christianity. And he couldn't help noticing that the doctrine of the Trinity, a foundation of orthodox Christianity for over a thousand years, was only propounded and made official in the fourth century.

Europe was still suffering the aftershocks of the Protestant Reformation, and England wavered between Catholicism and Anglicanism, the supporters of each demonizing the others as heretics. But both sides accepted the doctrine of the Trinity as a necessary component of Christian faith. Just try to imagine what it would have meant, in this climate, for someone to question such a basic dogma.

As a member of Trinity College, Cambridge, Newton was required to become ordained in the church. This would have meant a public affirmation of the doctrines of the Anglican church, including Trinitarianism. An unmarried man with no family, there was no plausible reason for Newton to avoid ordination. In the late 1660's, Newton began looking for a new job. But then, in 1669, he was appointed to the Lucasian chair of mathematics. Isaac Barrow, Newton's predecessor in this position had sought, and obtained, exclusion from the ordination requirement for the Lucasian professor - an effort in which he had had the support of none other than Newton himself! Newton was thus able to retain his professorship without damage to his conscience.

Newton, secretive as always, wasn't about to trumpet his conclusions to the world. He did, however, write up for himself a paper on "Two Notable Corruptions" of scripture: two passages that, while appearing in the translations used in Europe and England, nevertheless were absent from some of the earliest manuscripts as well as from the writings of the early Christian fathers. One of these, 1 John 5:7, was the crucial passage that announced

For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one.

...the only place in the Bible that seems unambiguously to declare the Trinity. This passage is now recognized by New Testament scholars as an interpolation - a later addition to the text - for essentially the same reasons Newton cited. Most modern translations omit the verse, or at least insert a footnote remarking that it is missing from some early sources.

Newton did show the paper to some close friends, who encouraged him to publish it. But Newton hated the controversies that had arisen over his rather tame publications on optics - there was no chance he would confront the firestorm sure to ensue if he questioned the Trinity!

A few others among his acquaintances probably knew of, and even shared, Newton's Arian views. During his lifetime his heresy was suspected. But, as he never openly declared his views - and later in life even took to supporting churches and making other nods toward conventional piety - no action was taken against him. In contrast, William Whiston, a close friend who did take the dangerous step of going public with his Arianism, was removed from his professorship in 1711.

After his death, Newton's admirers so thoroughly whitewashed his religious beliefs that it was only in the 20th century that they were once again uncovered by historians.

Sean's Challenge

2011-02-10T09:25:00.000-08:00

Sean Carroll of the incomparable Cosmic Variance blog has asked his readers to give their best guesses about the probability of some current speculations/theories in fundamental physics. I can't resist:

1. Inflation - 75%

     This should be some number between 50% and 100%. Since I have no idea what it should be, I'm going with Sean's value because he's much smarter than I am. There are plenty of reasons to like inflation: it explains why the universe is so flat, homogeneous, and isotropic: no mean feat. But the requirements on the inflaton (the particle that provides the phase transformation that drives inflation) seem oddly narrow. Back when Guth introduced the inflationary model, it seemed that the Higgs field could play the role of the inflaton. But now we know that's not possible, so the model is not as economical as one would like.

2. Supersymmetry - 10%

    Since I did my Ph.D. thesis on supersymmetry, I'm sorry to give this such a low value. But I don't see any really compelling reason to think SUSY is out there, and, of course, there's no experimental confirmation so far.

3. String theory - 0.01%

    String theorists have had three decades to some up with some definitive predictions, and so far, nada. I don't expect this to change within my lifetime. String theory is, possibly, interesting math. But it doesn't seem to be anything more.

4. Some form of Higgs boson - 99.9%

   I'm surprised at the low values given this in Sean's poll. Something has to play the role of the Higgs in the Standard Model. I'm allowing 0.1% for the possibility that some mechanism I can't imagine would give us the Standard Model without incorporating anything (particle or condensate) that could reasonably be interpreted as playing the role of the Higgs. Modest of me, I know.

5. Large extra dimensions - 0.0001%

    They require string theory. But string theory doesn't require them. Nuff said.

6. WIMP dark matter - 80%

    As pointed out in the comments on Sean's post, this is oddly specific, given the "Some sort..." and "Any..." of the other options. Some sort of particulate dark matter I put at 99%. I mean, we've SEEN it. But what form that dark matter should take is still very much up in the air. WIMPs (for the uninitiated: weakly interacting massive particles) are the most likely possibility.

7. Any non-cosmological-constant explanation for cosmic acceleration - ??

    I don't understand the question. The evidence to date indicates that dark energy, whatever that is, behaves just like a cosmological constant. Sean seems to be asking if the value of that constant has an explanation, other than "it just is." Or is he asking if the value doesn't behave like a cosmological constant; for example, does it change over cosmological time? If it is the former, I expect that, some day, we will have a deeper explanation for whatever the value turns out to be. If it is the latter, I have no clue.

On The Human

2011-02-05T07:08:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Luke, I just discovered the humanist website On The Human. They have a number of very cool articles, and some interesting comments from readers. Here are two to whet your appetite:

A downer: The Disenchanted Naturalist's Guide to Reality, by Alex Rosenberg, on why life is meaningless.

An upper: Morals without God? by Frans de Waal, on the evolution of morality.

Newton and the Squirrel

2011-02-03T06:50:00.000-08:00

Since I've been blogging about him....

Is God Simple-Minded? (Swinburne Pt. 2)

2011-01-31T13:41:00.000-08:00

Swinburne spends pages and pages arguing for the existence of God, but most of his discussion boils down to one claim: God is simple. He argues that when the background evidence is taken to be purely trivial logical knowledge, the probability of a hypothesis is determined mainly by its simplicity. It is clear that the universe itself is quite complex. If we have a choice, then, between taking the universe itself as our fundamental postulate and taking God as our fundamental postulate we should (the argument goes) prefer the simpler hypothesis.

The idea that God is simple has a long history in theology. Usually it is taken to mean that God has no moving parts: he is a unity, not something that can be decomposed into sub-units.

Considering how central it is to his whole program, Swinburne spends remarkably little time defending this claim. He only gives one argument to support it, that goes like this: If God had any finite amount of power, then that amount of power would require some sort of explanation. So an infinite amount of power - omnipotence - is a simpler hypothesis than any finite amount of power. He argues similarly for infinite knowledge and infinite freedom for God to do as he wills.

Now, I am tempted to question this argument, but even if we grant it, how does it follow that God is a simple entity? Maybe the God hypothesis is simple in this one (or these three) respects - it need not be true that he is simple in other respects. As an analogy, consider the spatial extent of the universe. It might be true that the hypothesis of an infinite universe is simpler than a finite universe (I'm not convinced that it is, but let's allow it). But the universe itself remains a very complex thing.

On the contrary, we have very good reasons to believe that an intelligent entity must be complex. An electron is simple: it can be described by its mass, spin, charge, and state of motion. But it isn't intelligent. An amoeba has a certain amount of intelligence: it is able to respond in a rudimentary way to external inputs. But it is already a very complicated entity. It has organelles that convert energy, transcribe DNA into RNA, and RNA into proteins, and so forth. An insect is far more complex again, yet has very limited intelligence and often very rigid behavior.

It is only when we get to organisms with highly complex nervous systems - birds and mammals - that we find problem-solving abilities and other aspects of true intelligence.And humans have, pound for pound, more brain than any other animal.

Likewise with non-living things: a crystal is simple, but it is not intelligent. A computer can beat me at chess and perform other "intelligent" tasks - but it requires a very complex internal structure to do so. Computers do not yet have anything like human-level intelligence, but if some day they do, I'm pretty sure they will be still more complex than today's computers.

So we have very good reasons to think that the higher the intelligence, the more complex the entity. It seems logical, then, that infinite intelligence would require infinite complexity.

But if God is highly complex, then, by Swinburne's criterion, God is highly unlikely.

God vs. the Tooth Fairy (Swinburne, Pt. 1)

2011-01-25T07:26:00.000-08:00

One of the complaints leveled agains the New Atheists is that they are unaware of the more sophisticated theological arguments about God. So as not to fall prey to this myself, I decided to read The Existence of God by Richard Swinburne. I could spend months blogging my way through his arguments, but others more competent than I have already been there, so I'm going to limit myself to a few comments.

Swinburne baldly states that there are no good deductive arguments for the existence of God. Kudos to him for the honesty to admit that.

He does think that there are good inductive (that is, probabilistic) arguments for God, and he thinks that collectively they make the case that the existence if God is more likely than his non-existence. But for each argument individually, he only makes the much weaker claim that the argument makes God's existence more likely than it would be without the argument.

He calls the latter type of argument a good C-inductive argument, and with a bit of Baysian analysis he shows that what you need in order to have a good C-inductive argument is
P(e/h,k) > P(e/~h,k),
where
e = the evidence under consideration,
h = the hypothesis, and
k = general background knowledge.

It is easy to come up with a good C-inductive argument for something that clearly isn't true. Take the tooth fairy, for instance. Let's let e be the evidence in favor of the tooth fairy's existence: all those coins that kids find under their pillows in place of teeth. And let's let h be the hypothesis that an invisible, non-human being exists who goes around replacing teeth with coins at night. And let's take k to be "mere tautological background evidence." (This is what Swinburne typically chooses for k.)

Now, it is clear that P(e/h,k) = 1. Because if the tooth fairy exists, then we will necessarily see the evidence e, for that is built into the very definition of the hypothesis h. And if the tooth fairy doesn't exist, well, then it might be true that kids will still find coins under their pillows (because their parents put them there), but it's not true of strict logical necessity, so we will have P(e/~h,k) < 1. So Swinburne's condition P(e/h,k) > P(e/~h,k) is fulfilled, and this is a good C-inductive argument for the tooth fairy.

None of this is to say that there's anything wrong with what Swinburne is saying here. It's just to point out what an extremely weak form of argument he's taking as the basis for his arguments for God.

A final comment on Swinburne's practice of taking k to be "mere tautological background evidence." By this he means only things that are tautologically true, like facts of logic and mathematics. By choosing this k, Swinburne makes it illegitimate to bring in any facts from our own experience about what sorts of entities actually exist in the world. In this way Swinburne turns what is usually an uncontroversial choice into a powerful tool in his favor.

To see how he employs this tool, let's jump to Appendix A where he replies to Mackie's critique. Mackie writes that

All our knowledge of intention-fulfillment is of embodied intentions....

and so "there is nothing in our background knowledge that makes it comprehensible" that God should be able to act directly in the universe to fulfill his intentions, as Swinburne claims he does.

Swinburne responds

Mackie has not taken seriously my intention ... to start without any factual background knowledge ... and so to judge the prior probability of theism solely by a priori considerations, namely, in effect, simplicity.

Now, if I were trying to convince someone that the Tooth Fairy doesn't exist, a large part of my argument would revolve around the complete lack of evidence that invisible, intelligent creatures exist. After all, arguing on the basis of past experience is the foundation of inductive reasoning. And how else to go about proving a negative?

According to Swinburne, we can't use this argument against (his argument for) God - simply because Swinburne has chosen a different set of background knowledge. Hmmm....

Who Discovered Universal Gravitation?

2011-01-18T18:09:00.000-08:00

Isaac Newton, duh.... That's what Westfall says:

The discovery [of universal gravitation] was Newton's, and no informed person seriously questions it.

Oddly, though, Westfall's own presentation doesn't appear to provide much support for such a strong statement. Let me explain.

When Hooke wrote to Newton in 1679, he referred to his (Hooke's) system of the world that he had published in 1674, and asked for Newton's opinion of his hypothesis that orbital motions are compounded of a tangential movement and an attraction toward the center. This letter seems to have been an important impetus in reviving Newton's interest in the motion of the planets.

Hooke's 1674 work contained a remarkable paragraph:

This depends on three Suppositions. First, That all Coelestial Bodies whatsoever, have an attraction or gravitating power towards their own Centers, whereby they attract not only their own parts, and keep them from flying from them, as we may observe the earth to do,but that they do also attract all other Coelestial Bodies that are within the sphere of their activity ... The second supposition is this, That all bodies whatsoever that are put into a direct and simple motion, will so continue to move forward in a streight line, till they are by some other effectual powers deflected and bent into a Motion, describing a Circle, Ellipsis, or some other more compounded Curve Line. The third supposition is, That these attractive powers are so much the more powerful in operating, by how much the nearer the body wrought upon is to their own Centers.

Westfall makes a couple of points about this passage. First, he claims that Hooke "did not truly hold a concept of universal gravitation, although it is obvious that he was beginning to break through the limitations of earlier ideas of particular gravities specific to each planet." Even if Westfall is right about this not yet being a thoroughgoing concept of universal gravitation, it is still a remarkable passage, because the comet incident proves that as late as 1680 Newton was still not thinking in terms of universal gravitation.

But Westfall goes on to say that "the most remarkable aspect" of the passage is that "For the first time, it correctly defined the dynamic elements of orbital motion." In fact, it proclaims both "Newton's First Law of Motion": "all bodies whatsoever that are put into a direct and simple motion, will so continue to move forward in a streight line" and, in some form, "Newton's Second Law of Motion": "till they are by some other effectual powers deflected."

It's hard for me as a physicist to read this, and Westfall's acknowledgment that Hooke had it first, and not think that Hooke deserved rather more credit than he has gotten for setting Newton down the right path. It is not until after this time that Newton begins to talk of a centripetal (rather than centrifugal) force. And it is only after this time that he began to ask his astronomer friend, Flamsteed, whether the motion of Jupiter sped up as it approached Saturn and slowed down as it passed beyond (as it would if Jupiter were affected by Saturn's gravity as well as the Sun's). And it is only after this time, in the Principia itself, that he finally applied the same laws of gravitation and orbital motion to comets that he developed for planets (reversing himself on Flamsteed's comet theory).

On some points I find Westfall convincing. Hooke's own complaint missed the mark: he claimed that Newton had learned of the inverse-square law from him, but Westfall demonstrates that Newton had already considered an inverse-square law of some sort back around 1666 or so. And it's clear that, whatever grasp of gravitation and laws of motion Hooke had, he didn't have the mathematical tools necessary to prove, e.g., that the inverse-square law results in elliptical orbits. Newton, with his (still unpublished) calculus techniques, could plunge right in and solve all sorts of mechanics problems, once he correctly identified the key laws.

So it seems to me that Newton owed a lot more to Hooke, both for the concept of universal gravitation (even if Hooke hadn't completely grasped it himself) and for the "dynamic elements" of the laws of motion, than he ever acknowledged.

Of course, I'm probably wrong about this, since I'm not informed and Westfall is. I guess I'll have to read Westfall's other book, Force in Newton's physics, when I'm done with this bio, and see if I can figure out what he means.

Blackford on Harris

2011-01-15T10:33:00.000-08:00

Russell Blackford points out what's right, and what's wrong, with Sam Harris's The Moral Landscape.

Sometimes Harris seems to think that the course of conduct which maximizes global well-being is the morally right one because “morally right” just means something like “such as to maximize global well-being.” But this won’t do. It’s no use telling somebody (we’ll call her Alice) to act so as to maximize global well-being on the ground that this is the morally right thing to do, while also telling her that “morally right” just means “such as to maximize global well-being”: the upshot is that Alice is told to act to maximize global well-being because this will maximize global well-being! That’s circular. If she is more committed to a goal such as maximizing her own well-being, or that of her loved ones, than to maximizing global well-being, she is not thereby making a mistake about anything in the world. Nor is she doing anything self-defeating, if she maximizes her own well-being, or that of her loved ones, whenever these conflict with maximizing global well-being.

Newton's Mistakes

2011-01-06T06:21:00.000-08:00

As Newton attempted to escape from problems of mathematics and mechanics, others kept calling him back. Hooke, who had continued to work on the problem of orbital motion, wrote to Newton in 1679 to encourage him to send something to the Royal Society. In his reply, Newton discussed an experiment to detect the rotation of the earth by dropping an object from a tower. Since the top of the tower is moving faster than the surface of the earth (because it is moving in a larger circle), the falling object should land to the east, in the direction of rotation.

This much is correct. But Newton went on to sketch the path the object would follow if it could penetrate the earth, showing it as a spiral toward the center of the earth. Hooke caught the mistake, and suggested instead that it would follow an elliptical path.

Newton, annoyed that he had been caught, admitted the error, but then claimed (correctly) that, if the gravitational force were taken as constant, the path would not be an ellipse but rather a cloverleaf shape, in which the points of minimum and maximum distance from the center are about 120 degrees apart. Hooke agreed, but said he had not been thinking of a constant gravity, but of an inverse-square law. This correspondence would be the basis for Hooke's later charge of plagiary against Newton.

In November of 1680, a comet appeared, heading toward the sun. In mid-December, another comet appeared, moving away from the sun. The Royal Astronomer, John Flamsteed, suggested that the two were the same comet. Here Newton made his biggest blunder of all. He wrote to Flamsteed and argued that Flamsteed was wrong about the two comets. Amazingly, although Newton had solved the problem of orbital mechanics a year before, he made no attempt to apply his equations of planetary motion to the comet's path.

Flamsteed had suggested that some sort of magnetic force deflected the comet as it passed the sun, and Newton made a similar assumption in his reply. Both men assumed that comets obeyed different laws than planets: planets were permanent members of the solar system, while comets were strange visitors with a dynamics all their own.

This shows beyond a doubt that Newton was not yet thinking in terms of universal gravitation in 1680. But Hooke's letters and the discussions surrounding the comet(s) had re-invigorated his interest in problems of mechanics. He plunged back into the study of problems of motion, and, for once, managed to complete the project he had begun. That project produced the most amazing scientific treatise that the world had ever seen, the Principia.

Newton Jumps the Shark

2010-12-30T16:04:00.000-08:00

The telescope made Newton famous and brought him that increase of his acquaintance that he feared. Far from rejoicing in the questions and challenges that other scientists - notably Hooke - posed to his theory of light, he was irritated by them and responded impatiently and rudely. Newton, who had been elected a fellow of the Royal Society a year earlier, now (in 1673) threatened to withdraw his membership.

With his mathematical writings it was the same story. Others questioned his methods, and rather than treating these questions as part of the normal scientific give and take, Newton got offended and claimed he would "let what I write ly by till I am out of ye way." Indeed, he said he was going to put philosophy aside and "prosecute some other subjects."

What were these other subjects that had grabbed Newton's attention? They were two: alchemy and theology.

Newton's obsession with alchemy, which lasted many more years than did his brief fascination with mathematics, seems strange to us from the viewpoint of the 21st century. It helps to remember that two of his known correspondents on the subject were that master experimentalist Robert Boyle and the arch empiricist John Locke. In 1672, the idea that chemical substances contained spiritual principles and could, under the right circumstances, vegetate and grow, was not so obviously unscientific as it appears today.

Newton obtained his alchemical writings from a secret network about which we know very little today. Many alchemists hid their names, publishing under pseudonyms. Newton referred to them in his writings by initials alone. Newton amassed a vast collection of alchemical manuscripts over a period of more than 30 years.

He was not just reading about alchemy, though: he built his own laboratory, with an impressive variety of furnaces to produce the various levels of heat he needed for his experiments. In spite of the length of time he spent on these investigations and his copious notebooks, it is not so clear what his goal in all this was. Producing gold appears very rarely as a target. A more definite goal was something he called "sophic sal ammoniac." At one point in his notes he becomes very excited at the idea that he has succeeded in producing this mysterious substance.

I perfected the ideal solution. That is, two equal salts carry up Saturn. Then he carries up the stone and joined with malleable Jupiter also makes X [a star symbol I can't reproduce here] and that in such proportion that Jupiter grasps the scepter. Then the eagle carries Jupiter up. Hence Saturn can be combined without salts in the desired proportions so that fire does not predominate. At last mercury sublimate and sophic sal ammoniac shatter the helmet and the menstruum carries everything up.

The passage gives you a feel for what alchemical writing was like: coded, allusive, and mysterious. Surely, a man of Newton's intelligence and skills would not have wasted his time for three decades on complete nonsense! To him, it must have meant something: what that was, we can no longer recover.

Newton the Odd Duck

2010-12-27T13:16:00.000-08:00

One might have expected that Isaac Newton, country bumpkin newly become scholar, would have been eager to publish his discoveries in science and mathematics and make a name for himself.

One would have been wrong.

Though he wrote up his discoveries in essays in his notebooks, and on occasion seemed to be writing a paper for publication, he avoided disseminating his work to an astonishing, even incomprehensible degree. His invention of infinitesimal methods (calculus), his essay on "The lawes of Motion," his optical experiments, all languished in his desk drawers.

He seems, indeed, to have had little human contact of any kind apart from his long-time roommate, John Wickins, and the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, Isaac Barrow. Years later, Wickins described Newton as someone so obsessed with his studies that he often forgot to eat and sleep. On the rare occasions he went to the public dining-hall, he went with "shooes down at Heels, Stockins unty'd, surplice on, & his Head scarcely comb'd." He never, as an adult, had a romantic relationship with a woman.

He was, in short, a nerd.

One might deduce from his lack of interest in publishing his work that he was simply uninterested in fame or in other people's opinions of him.

One would be wrong.

The incident that finally led him to put some of his work out in public view was the publication, in 1668, of a mathematical book of Nicholas Mercator that included the infinite series for log(1 + x). Newton suddenly saw himself being scooped on all his wonderful mathematical discoveries, and hastily put together a treatise on infinite series. He passed this on to Barrow, but forbade him to send it to anyone else. Finally, Newton gave Barrow permission to send the paper on to John Collins, a man who made it his business to facilitate communication among British mathematicians. Only when Collins reacted favorably did Newton allow the paper to be disseminated further. But when Collins and Barrow wanted to publish it as an appendix to Barrow's forthcoming book on optics, Newton drew back.

Thus a pattern was set. Newton would drop hints about his discoveries, begin to write them up, then put them aside and refuse to publish them. But let a challenger appear, and Newton would rush forward to claim priority. So by his own refusal to publish he became embroiled in priority disputes: notably with Leibniz over the calculus and with Hooke over the law of gravity.

Collins and Barrow continued to encourage Newton's mathematical investigations. Barrow asked him to annotate a Latin translation of a Dutch book on algebra, and Collins asked him to derive a formula for calculating the interest on an annuity. Collins wanted to publish Newton's formula, and Newton agreed, "soe it bee without my name on it. For I see not what there is desirable in publick esteeme, were I able to acquire and maintain it. It would perhaps increase my acquaintance, ye thing which I cheifly study to decline."

Newton's claim to be uninterested in the British pastime of "increasing one's acquaintance," i.e., social climbing, is rather ironic, knowing as we do how tenaciously he was to grasp at fame in the not too distant future.

His mathematical work began to attract notice, but what really brought him to prominence was his invention of the reflecting telescope. Around 1669, his optical studies led him to realize that telescopes built of lenses will always suffer from a blurring due to the fact that different colors of light refract differently. A telescope built with mirrors instead of lenses would not suffer this drawback. Newton's 6-inch long reflector was more powerful than a 6 foot refractor.

The Royal Society, England's scientific society, got wind of the telescope, and, in 1671, Barrow brought it to them. Newton was swept up in a flood of adulation, and sent the Royal Society a paper on his optical investigations. The telescope and the paper brought Newton, finally, into the international scientific limelight.

Faculties of Other Experiences

2010-12-19T10:42:00.000-08:00

"But I have wondered if there might not be colleges and faculties of other experiences than yours, and whether even now, in the far corners of other continents, powers not yours are being brought to fruition." Charles Williams, Shadows of Ecstasy

The more I think about it, the more I am convinced that those three guys are right.

In Terry Pratchett's A Hat Full of Sky, a witch's cabin is inhabited by a invisible creature the witch calls Oswald. At least, she thinks it is. Whenever she puts a fork in amongst the spoons, the drawer rattles, pops open, and the fork leaps over into the correct spot. If something gets dropped, a dustpan and brush appear and magically sweep things up. If Miss Level (the witch) mixes some salt together with the pepper, Oswald will happily (so she surmises) spend an afternoon sorting the salt grains from among the pepper.

Given the phenomenon Pratchett describes, it's hard to think of any hypothesis that would cover it, other than that of an invisible, intelligent agent. If we had numerous instances, well documented, of such occurrences, we would have to conclude that incorporeal intelligent beings exist.

But we don't.

In Williams's story, there is an uprising of Africans who wield powers not understood by European science. They are able to prolong life far beyond the normal human lifespan. They can exert a sort of mind control on others.

In Williams's day, it might have still seemed possible that some remote group in Africa had developed an alternate "technology," one based in supernatural rather than natural causes. Today, having made contact with numerous such remote groups all over the world, and having discovered no technologies that make effective use of supernatural forces, it's hard to believe that such skills exist anywhere.

It's not that "colleges and faculties of other experiences" don't exist: nearly all human groups make attempts to manipulate the supernatural forces of their systems of belief. It's just that they don't work: appealing to the supernatural is not an effective way of getting things done.

2010-12-17T13:04:00.000-08:00

OK, I usually don't like to brag, but it's not often that you get props for being a bookish nerd. Thanks to aNadder, I discovered the BBCs list of 100 books: you're supposed to bold them if you've read them and italicize them if you've partially read them. Here goes:

1. The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
2. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
3. His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman
4. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
5. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, JK Rowling
6. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
7. Winnie the Pooh, AA Milne
8. Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
9. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, CS Lewis
10. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
11. Catch-22, Joseph Heller
12. Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
13. Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks
14. Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
15. The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger
16. The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame
17. Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
18. Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
19. Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Louis de Bernieres
20. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
21. Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
22. Harry Potter And The Philosopher's Stone, JK Rowling
23. Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets, JK Rowling
24. Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban, JK Rowling
25. The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien
26. Tess Of The D'Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
27. Middlemarch, George Eliot
28. A Prayer For Owen Meany, John Irving
29. The Grapes Of Wrath, John Steinbeck
30. Alice's Adventures In Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
31. The Story Of Tracy Beaker, Jacqueline Wilson
32. One Hundred Years Of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez
33. The Pillars Of The Earth, Ken Follett
34. David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
35. Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl
36. Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson
37. A Town Like Alice, Nevil Shute
38. Persuasion, Jane Austen
39. Dune, Frank Herbert
40. Emma, Jane Austen
41. Anne Of Green Gables, LM Montgomery
42. Watership Down, Richard Adams
43. The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald
44. The Count Of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas
45. Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
46. Animal Farm, George Orwell
47. A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
48. Far From The Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy
49. Goodnight Mister Tom, Michelle Magorian
50. The Shell Seekers, Rosamunde Pilcher
51. The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett
52. Of Mice And Men, John Steinbeck
53. The Stand, Stephen King
54. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
55. A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth
56. The BFG, Roald Dahl
57. Swallows And Amazons, Arthur Ransome
58. Black Beauty, Anna Sewell
59. Artemis Fowl, Eoin Colfer
60. Crime And Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
61. Noughts And Crosses, Malorie Blackman
62. Memoirs Of A Geisha, Arthur Golden
63. A Tale Of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
64. The Thorn Birds, Colleen McCollough
65. Mort, Terry Pratchett
66. The Magic Faraway Tree, Enid Blyton
67. The Magus, John Fowles
68. Good Omens, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
69. Guards! Guards!, Terry Pratchett
70. Lord Of The Flies, William Golding
71. Perfume, Patrick Süskind
72. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Robert Tressell
73. Night Watch, Terry Pratchett
74. Matilda, Roald Dahl
75. Bridget Jones's Diary, Helen Fielding
76. The Secret History, Donna Tartt
77. The Woman In White, Wilkie Collins
78. Ulysses, James Joyce
79. Bleak House, Charles Dickens
80. Double Act, Jacqueline Wilson
81. The Twits, Roald Dahl
82. I Capture The Castle, Dodie Smith
83. Holes, Louis Sachar
84. Gormenghast, Mervyn Peake
85. The God Of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
86. Vicky Angel, Jacqueline Wilson
87. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
88. Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
89. Magician, Raymond E Feist
90. On The Road, Jack Kerouac
91. The Godfather, Mario Puzo
92. The Clan Of The Cave Bear, Jean M Auel
93. The Colour Of Magic, Terry Pratchett
94. The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho
95. Katherine, Anya Seton
96. Kane And Abel, Jeffrey Archer
97. Love In The Time Of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez
98. Girls In Love, Jacqueline Wilson
99. The Princess Diaries, Meg Cabot
100. Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie

This, the actual BBC list, is quite a bit different from aNadder's list. Whoever did the alterations included some whole series (Eg. Harry Potter, His Dark Materials) on the list, which perhaps make sense (as well as making room for some more books). But, while adding The Chronicles of Narnia, they left on THe Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, which is part of The Chronicles of Narnia, so it's a somewhat incoherent list.

There are very few partially-reads - though to be honest I cheated a bit on this, and left out On The Road, which I started but couldn't get past the first few pages. (And this from someone who War and Peace cover to cover. Unabridged, too.) I also left out Gone With the Wind, which I just started yesterday when I was desperate for something to read, and which I have only read about three pages of.

OK, so maybe I should have written "book addict" instead of "bookish nerd"?

Newton as Grad Student

2010-12-15T12:11:00.000-08:00

When we left Isaac Newton, he had just graduated from college - "commenced Bachelor of Arts," as the terminology of the day put it - and obtained a scholarship so that he could continue his studies. He had taken no formal courses and passed no exams. He had pursued a course of study completely his own, with, as far as can be told, no formal instruction or even any significant advice from the faculty of Trinity College. He had, nonetheless, managed to master the most advanced mathematics that was in existence, working his way through Descartes's mathematical works page by painstaking page.

Graduation meant little to Newton - he continued his idiosyncratic studies without concern for recognition or advancement. He pressed on, inventing new techniques to push his mathematical understanding further. He developed infinite series that approximated known functions, and used them to calculate those functions to unprecedented accuracy. He invented infinitesimals, that he called "fluxions," and laid the basis for the differential and integral calculus. He even developed a version of what is now known as "the fundamental theorem of calculus": that differentiation and integration are inverse processes; one undoes what the other does. He had far surpassed anything accomplished by any other mathematician in the world. He was completely unknown, 24 years old, and one year past his college commencement.

As suddenly as he had picked up mathematics, he laid it down and turned to other things. He began his studies of optics and of motion. He bought a prism and began studying the properties of colored light. But the plague struck, and Newton fled to the country to his mother's house in Lincolnshire. He had to wait several years before he could obtain a second prism and perform the experiments that would solidify his theory of light.

He turned to the study of motion, and began an investigation of the properties of circular motion. From this investigation he concluded that the acceleration of the Moon about the Earth was related to the acceleration of an object falling near the Earth by the ratio of their distances squared, "pretty nearly." It was about this time (1666) that the famous apple incident occurred, if it occurred at all.

The years 1665-1666 are called Newton's anni mirabiles, his miraculous years, in which he developed his theory of light, of motion, and of the calculus. In fact, he had only begun the work that would, much later, become fully developed theories. But his accomplishments were nonetheless miraculous. As Richard Westfall puts it,

In 1660, a provincial boy ate his heart out for the world of learning .... Six years later, with no help beyond the books he had found for himself, he had made himself the foremost mathematician in Europe and the equal of the foremost natural philosopher.

For similar experiments on the nature of light, Christiaan Huygens was being sought after by the kings of Europe. As yet, no one knew the name of Isaac Newton, nor what he had accomplished.

Exorcize Your Car!

2010-12-02T07:20:00.000-08:00

Your car breaks down: who do you go to? The mechanic, who will try to fix a mechanical flaw, or the priest, who will exorcise the car demons?

According to some people, scientists must exclude supernatural explanations on philosophical grounds. This is known as the principle of methodological naturalism. Interestingly, the claim comes both from scientists, who declare it a philosophical prerequisite for doing science, and from religious folks, who see it as a philosophical bias that prevents scientists from ever recognizing supernatural causes.

A recent paper by the philosophical trio of Maarten Boudry, Stefaan Blancke, and Johan Braeckman
suggests that science requires no such bias. Supernatural explanations are not excluded on philosophical grounds; rather, such explanations simply have not worked out in practice. The authors call this view pragmatic methodological naturalism: we look for naturalistic explanations because that type of explanation has been successful in the past. (See also Jerry Coyne's comments on the article here.)

To go back to the car example: I think everyone, whether religious or not, chooses to take the naturalistic route when their car breaks down. It's not a matter of anti-supernatural bias (since the priest does it too, even if he adds a prayer to the procedure), it's just a pragmatic consideration. We have experience with the mechanical approach being successful, as we do not for the exorcism approach. We have reason to believe that we understand pretty well how a car works - or at least the mechanic does - and so we have a theoretical basis on which to expect a naturalistic approach to work. We don't have a similar basis for thinking that getting rid of the car demons will solve the problem.

I think this is correct: science doesn't need to exclude supernatural explanations from its consideration, it only needs to apply the same criteria to those explanations that it applies to naturalistic ones. At one time, thunder and lightning was thought to be caused by the gods. Now we have a better explanation in terms of electric charges and dielectric breakdown. Supernatural explanations for floods, droughts, illness, the diversity of life, the motion of the planets, and so forth, have likewise been abandoned. The problem is not that supernatural explanations cannot be considered, it's that they just don't work.

So why is it that even many scientists think that science must a priori exclude supernatural explanations? As supernatural explanations have been increasingly replaced by natural explanations, proponents of the supernatural have beaten a retreat, and now hide behind some insulating barriers. Boudry &co. point out that, when confronted with example of poor "design," Michael Behe has replied that the Designer's reasons and intentions are unfathomable. For Behe, good design is evidence of a designer but bad design is not counted as contradictory evidence. He is apparently not bothered by the blatant double standard he employs. (Boudry et. al. also mention that this type of immunization strategy is typical of pseudoscience: think of the psychic who, when given a chance to prove that he can bend spoons with his mind under controlled conditions, suddenly finds that the vibes are so bad that he can't perform.)

Rather than offering claims that are demonstrably wrong, then, the proponents of the supernatural have turned to offering explanations that are unfalsifiable. It is not that supernatural claims are intrinsically untestable. Jesus said, "You can say to this mountain, 'Go, throw yourself into the sea,' and it will be done." (Matthew 21:21) That's a testable claim - and it fails the test, every time. So, instead, people offer the sort of explanation that can't be proven wrong, because it is untestable. But these sorts of claims are intrinsically unscientific: if it can't be tested, it's not science.

The failure of supernatural explanations, and the success of natural ones, has resulted in increasingly crummy versions of supernatural explanation. So much so that many scientists now have the impression that untestable explanations are the only possible form of supernatural explanation. But that's not true: it's just that the testable versions have been tried, and found wanting.

Foxtrot on XKCD

2010-11-24T07:32:00.000-08:00

Bill Amend, creator of the Foxtrot comic, draws a guest comic that channels XKCD surprisingly well. Turns out Bill is a former physics geek. Who knew?

Isaac Newton as a college kid

2010-11-23T14:02:00.000-08:00

I am currently working on not one but two new courses so I will be posting less frequently. However, when I have time and something interesting to write about I hope to continue the blog.

One of the new courses is going to be based around a history of physics, so I am reading Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton by Richard Westfall. Newton came from a wealthy family, but his relationship with his mother and stepfather seems to have been somewhat strained. When he went off to college (Trinity College at Cambridge), he seems to have had little financial support from home. As a result, he went as a "subsizar." Subsizars were at the very bottom of the social scale at Cambridge. They had to do chores and errands for the other students: cleaning their boots, emptying their bedpans, and such fun stuff.

Newton seems to have had few friends (not surprising for someone in his social position) and little interest in the gambling, drinking, and prostitutes that many students spent their time on. He does mention going to the tavern on occasion, but only after he had gotten his B.A. He plunged himself into books instead.

The curriculum was crusty and antiquated when Newton arrived. In principle, one studied the classics, meaning that you studied Greek so that you could read Aristotle. In practice, everyone knew that graduating was a formality once you were in. Newton's notebooks from his college days show that he started reading the standard texts, but soon left off without bothering to finish them. Instead, he started off on an unsanctioned path of study of his own invention. He read Galileo, Robert Boyle, and Thomas Hobbes. He devoured Descartes, and began writing comments on him and others in a notebook he labelled "Quaestiones quaedam Philosophcae," pointing out ways that Descartes's theories could be tested by simple observations.

He figured out a way out of his lowly status, too. He began lending money to other students, and recorded these loans meticulously in a notebook. He did not record any interest paid on these loans - but presumably received some, for soon he was hiring other students to do the menial tasks he was supposed to do for others.

Graduation was not a problem, but what to do after it was. There were "elections" to scholarships for further study, held only once every three or four years. Newton's chance came up in 1664. His curious program of study didn't bode well for the outcome, however. His tutor took him to the newly appointed Lucasian professor of mathematics, Isaac Barrow. Barrow quizzed him about Euclid - but Newton had skipped Euclid, and worked his way painstakingly through Descartes's mathematical writings instead. Barrow never thought to ask Newton about Descartes - presumably one who understood so little of Euclid would have no knowledge of the newer, higher math. And Newton was too shy to mention it himself.

Nevertheless, Newton was given the coveted scholarship. How this happened is a mystery. Perhaps Barrow saw something of Newton's genius, and pushed him through. Perhaps someone else came to Newton's rescue, playing his patron. Certainly he would never have obtained the scholarship without someone supporting him from within the college. And without that support, Newton would not have been able to continue his studies. He most likely would have had to return to his family estate and play the landed gentleman role, overseeing the crops and the cattle. To that unknown benefactor, the world owes a great debt.

2010-11-07T13:55:00.000-08:00

Direct link because you can't see the whole picture here.

Freaks of Nature

2010-11-06T12:51:00.000-07:00

I just finished reading Evolution, Me, and Other Freaks of Nature, an enjoyable Young Adult novel about a girl caught between her convictions and her church. On the recording I listened to, author Robin Brande interviewed biologist and author Kenneth R. Miller, on whom she modeled the main teacher character in the book, Ms. Shepherd. Ms. Shepherd, like Miller, is both a scientist and a person of faith.

The interview made me think again about something that seems to me a big problem for anyone who thinks they can reconcile modern science and Christianity; namely, that evolution is a process that necessarily involves a tremendous amount of suffering. I can understand that, logically speaking, there is no problem with saying that evolution is the means by which God chose to create life on earth, including human life. But evolution's creative engine is the violent death through starvation or predation of most of the individual organisms that have ever lived. How do you reconcile that with the loving Christian God? I don't recall ever finding an answer to that, in Miller's book or anywhere else.

So, recalling that I had a copy of Finding Darwin's God on my bookshelf, I pulled it out to see what I could find. A section entitled "No More Mr. Nice Guy," begins like this:

Of all the concerns expressed by Christians with respect to evolution, the strangest, the least logical, the most bizarre is the idea that evolution is too cruel to be compatible with their notion of a loving God.

OK, this sound very promising: Miller is going to proceed to explain why this complaint is illogical and bizarre, right? Well, let's see.

Miller says we need to keep two things in mind. First, "cruelty is relative." He points out that his lobster dinner is a cruel death from the point of view of the lobster, but just a good meal for him. Second, "we cannot call evolution cruel if all we are really doing is assigning to evolution the raw savagery of nature itself. The reality of life is that the world often lacks mercy, pity, and even common decency.... Evolution cannot be a cruel concept if all it does is reflect the realities of nature...."

Well, but why not? It seems to me that all Miller has done is to re-state the problem. Life is cruel and frequently involves violent, painful death. Why would a loving, kind, God choose this as her means of creation? Saying that this is just the "reality of nature" doesn't answer the complaint in the least.

From here, Miller goes on to point out that contemporary research into the evolutionary origins of altruism shows that what we often think of as the "good" behaviors can arise out of evolution as well. Fair enough, but it doesn't have anything to do with the original complaint.

OK, so is the objection illogical? Let's try to lay it out as a logical argument from the point of view of a Christian who accepts evolution.

God created life on earth.
Life on earth arose through evolution.
Therefore, God chose evolution as his means of creation.
Evolution involves the suffering and death of living creatures.
Therefore, God chose a means of creation that involves suffering of living creatures.

How can Miller resist this argument? (1) is a basic assumption in Christian thought, and I don't think Miller would try to deny this. (2) is well-established scientifically and clearly accepted by Miller. You could object to (3) by saying God didn't have any choice in her means of creation - but this would deny God's omnipotence. Miller also clearly recognizes that (4) is true. So I don't see any way Miller can resist the conclusion (5).

The only response I know of to this argument is along the lines of "Sometimes suffering is necessary so that a greater good can come about." Miller doesn't make any attempt at such an argument, but it is a common response to the problem of evil. But does it make any sense in this context? I don't think so: surely, if God is omnipotent, and if her goal was to produce intelligent, moral, beings, she could have just zapped all of us into existence - plants, animals, humans, and all - without going through all the pain of millions of years of evolution.

Ayn Rand Is Always Right!

2010-10-26T08:54:00.000-07:00

Back by popular demand! (OK, Jeremy asked about it.)

How to annoy a philosopher and other wise advice from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.

The Many Worlds Interpretation Is NOT Deterministic

2010-10-19T10:32:00.000-07:00

It seems that quite a few philosophers have gotten an erroneous idea about the Many Worlds Interpretation (MWI) of quantum mechanics, namely that it is a deterministic interpretation. Even the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy makes this incorrect claim. So, I feel I ought to set the record straight.

The classic definition of determinism is that, given the way the world is at some time, plus the laws of nature, the future is completely fixed. Now, in one sense, this definition is clearly satisfied by the MWI. If, by "the way the world is at some time," we mean the quantum state of the universe at that time, and by "the future" we mean the quantum state of the universe at some later time, then the MWI is indeed deterministic. For the MWI takes the quantum state to be all that there is, and the unitary evolution of the quantum state to be the complete dynamics of the state. And that evolution is deterministic: there is one and only one state at a future time, and it is completely determined by the quantum state at the earlier time. (Here I am omitting the very serious difficulties of this approach, including the dubious nature of such an entity as "the quantum state of the universe" and the even more dubious assertion that that state evolves in a unitary fashion.)

But this sense of "determinism" is completely useless for normal philosophical discussion.

The problem is very easy to see in the famous example of Schroedinger's cat. Let's assume that some quantum process yields a 50-50 chance of outcomes A and B, and we rig up some equipment so that if outcome A happens then a vial of poison is smashed and the cat dies, but if outcome B happens, then the cat lives. And all of this takes place inside a perfectly impenetrable box, so that we have no way of determining the outcome until we open the box. Then, according to the rules of quantum mechanics, the cat will be in a superposition of alive and dead states until the box is opened.

In the MWI, an experiment like this has a determinate outcome: that the quantum state evolves into two branches, one with a live cat and one with a dead cat. But in the real world we don't see such superposition states. We see a live cat or a dead one. The MWI solves this by invoking decoherence, yada, yada, yada, so that the two branches are effectively split into different worlds that never interfere thereafter.

But now you see the problem: the future, in the normal sense of the word, involves the cat being either alive or dead, not both. And the MWI does not determine which future we will see. Indeed, from the point of view of the MWI, there is not even any sense in asking which outcome actually occurred, because both actually occurred, in different "worlds."

So in the case of the cat, the future (in the normal everyday sense) is undetermined. But it's much worse than this: anything that occurs because of quantum effects has an indeterminate outcome. But in the MWI, everything that occurs at all occurs because of quantum effects. So (almost) everything is indeterminate.

(The sole exceptions would be those events that occur with 100% probability: outcomes that are represented by operators for which the quantum state of the universe is an eigenvector. But, given that the wave function splits every time a quantum event occurs, we can be sure that none of the events of ordinary interest will have the state of the universe as an eigenvector.)

The thing is, even though the MWI has restored determinism of a sort to the description of the universe, it completely fails to predict what we will see in our particular future. John Earman says that the MWI exhibits ontological determinism, but at the price of "radical epistemic indeterminism."

Clearly, though, it is the indeterministic aspect that is relevant for most philosophical concerns. For example, in discussions of free will the question is often asked, "Could I have done otherwise?" And the MWI gives the emphatic answer, "Yes!" Because not only could I have done otherwise, but in some other "world" I did do otherwise. Austin missed his putt, but in some other world where the quantum events in his brain fired the neurons in a different way he made the putt.

Maybe it is possible to continue to do philosophy while keeping in mind the ontological viewpoint of the MWI - though I have to say I doubt it. But it would at least be a very different philosophy than what we have now, and all of the classic discussions would have to be revisited in light of that ontology.

Beliefs Don't Matter (as much as you think)

2010-10-14T12:35:00.000-07:00

We atheists spend a lot of time and energy addressing the beliefs of religious folks. But many people are religious, or at least go to a church or synagogue or mosque or something, not because of beliefs, but for reasons that we could call "social."

Jerry Coyne of Why Evolution Is True discusses an article by Philip Kitcher, a Columbia philosophy professor:

Kitcher distinguishes what he calls the “belief model”—the form of faith that is initially built on truth claims about God, Jesus, Mohamed and the like—from three other forms of what he calls the “orientation” model: the forms of faith that begin with a person identifying secular goals and beliefs that he shares with others, and then choosing a faith that properly frames these goals.

I think this is an important point that is often missed: as someone said, you can't rationally argue someone out a belief they weren't rationally argued into. (Or something like that.) And for most people, this must be the case. Most people follow the religion they were brought up in - it is a cultural issue, not a rational one.

It's an easy mistake to make, I think, because we are so used to thinking of religion in terms of beliefs. If you learn that someone is a two-seed-in-the-spirit predestinarian Baptist, you immediately ask, "What do they believe?"

But if we broaden our view and look beyond Western Christianity, we find there are many religions that are more interested in what you do than in what you believe. Strangely, in talking about non-Christian religions we often implicitly acknowledge the fact. We have no problem with the idea of "non-religious Jews," or people who are "culturally Jewish" without being "observant." When was the last time you heard of a "non-religious Christian"? Or heard someone say, "I'm culturally Christian, but I'm not observant"?

So, while New Atheist-type books and blogs may be very valuable in reaching a certain segment of the population, they may be missing an even larger segment. We need more secular versions of what the churches offer: communities with shared goals and values. Some existing groups - Quakers, Unitarian Universalists, and Ethical Societies - are based more on shared values than on shared beliefs, though of course the first two still involve some elements of religious belief. How do we build secular versions of these communities?

It's an interesting and important discussion, and I encourage you to read about Kitcher's article at the link above and at Russell Blackford's blog. (I linked the first post in a series: you can find the rest of the series in his sidebar.)

The Relativity of Wrong

2010-10-06T07:57:00.000-07:00

In a previous post I argued that scientists choose their theories, not on the basis of which one is more likely true, but on the basis of which one gives a better approximation to reality.

Via a comment on Cosmic Variance, I came across an essay by Isaac Asimov that makes a similar point.

The young specialist in English Lit, having quoted me, went on to lecture me severely on the fact that in every century people have thought they understood the universe at last, and in every century they were proved to be wrong. It follows that the one thing we can say about our modern "knowledge" is that it is wrong. The young man then quoted with approval what Socrates had said on learning that the Delphic oracle had proclaimed him the wisest man in Greece. "If I am the wisest man," said Socrates, "it is because I alone know that I know nothing." the implication was that I was very foolish because I was under the impression I knew a great deal.

My answer to him was, "John, when people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together."

The basic trouble, you see, is that people think that "right" and "wrong" are absolute; that everything that isn't perfectly and completely right is totally and equally wrong.

However, I don't think that's so. It seems to me that right and wrong are fuzzy concepts, and I will devote this essay to an explanation of why I think so.

A No-Brainer?

2010-10-02T08:32:00.000-07:00

This post is part of my series on physicalism.

When I started reading about physicalism I thought, "This is going to be a no-brainer - a piece of cake - a clear shot at an open goal - a badly mixed metaphor." After reading these two books, I am impressed with the difficulty of the task. I think I understand a little better, too, how people like Trent can be so skeptical of the whole operation.

The issue with defining "physics", so that we can know what to reduce everything down to, seems almost a red herring. After all, if we could show that mental processes reduce down to events at the neural level, I don't think it would matter all that much (to philosophy) which definition of "physical" was taken to underlie the neural level. The biggest problem here is one that is glossed over briefly by Poland and sidestepped entirely by Melnyk: namely, the problematic nature of the ontology of quantum mechanics. If the wave function cannot be consistently interpreted as an actual, physical object (as I would argue), then it can't be the foundation for ontology for everything else. Poland waves such worries aside and says these things are for the physicists to worry about: whatever they come up with as the basic ontological entities are fine with him. But what if those basic entities can only be defined in term of large-scale, macroscopic quantities and measurements, as quantum mechanics seems to do? Then physicalism might justifiably be accused of circularity.

The more important point, it seems to me, is the issue of "realization." These two authors agree that supervenience is too weak, and identity theses are too strong. If realization gives a coherent account of how higher-level things are related to (reducible to) lower-level things, then something of real importance has been achieved. And this achievement is independent of the issue of what sort of physics is at the base of it all.

Finally, is realization physicalism (or something like it) is actually true? It is not so clear what, exactly would count as evidence in favor of, or against, physicalism. Melnyk spends two chapters considering the question and looking at the evidence, such as it is. He points out that some phenomena that might have turned out to be clear evidence against physicalism - psychokinesis, for example - have not panned out so well. On the other hand, more positively, every sort of mental activity seems to be associated with some sort of brain activity (e.g. as revealed in functional MRI investigations). He notes, too, that as recently as 1925 a prominent philosopher, C. D. Broad, could doubt that chemical phenomena were reducible to underlying physical laws, whereas now it is clear that the rules of quantum mechanics explain much of chemistry.

In short, physicalism has suffered no decisive defeat and has scored many major victories. This alone doesn't settle the matter, of course., and dualists and theists will continue to assail the physicalist position.

I still think that physicalism is clearly the most reasonable view - simply because of the complete lack of evidence for anything that is not physically realized. In this it is just like atheism: show me the evidence for your god, and perhaps I'll believe in him. (Or her.) (Or it.)

More About Physicalism

2010-10-02T07:34:00.000-07:00

This post is part of my series on physicalism.

Some important points about Poland's and Melnyk's versions of physicalism:

The scope of physicalism. According to Poland (p.227),

The theses of physicalism apply to all natural phenomena and all claims to truth and knowledge concerning the natural order.

This leaves one wondering what, exactly, constitutes the "natural order." Poland lists

...physical, chemical, and biological phenomena, ... the psychological, the social, the moral, the aesthetic, and the commonsense world of our everyday experience.

However, he excepts purely abstract realms such as mathematics.

Melnyk is (again) more specific, saying that physicalism applies to everything that is either contingent or causal. The existence of a god who is not contingent (because he is a necessary being) but who causally affects, or is affected by, the world, would refute Melnyk's physicalism. (It seems that such a god would not refute Poland's version, as god is presumably outside of the natural order.) Mathematics, being composed of necessary (i.e. not contingent) truths that have no causal efficacy, is exempt here as well.

Realization physicalism entails supervenience. That is, the physical facts about the world determine all objective facts about the world.

But supervenience by itself is not enough to guarantee the kind of physicalism that we want. And supervenience doesn't entail realization physicalism. Thus, realization physicalism is a stronger claim than supervenience.

Physicalism is reductionistic. I was surprised to learn that "reductionism" is a bad word among philosophers. I thought that reduction was the whole point of science: to find explanations of things in terms of simpler, more fundamental things. Melnyk spends a whole chapter (cutely titled "Physicalism and R*d*ct**n*sm") discussing in what sense realization physicalism is, and in what sense it is not, reductionistic. He argues that it is reductionistic in the "core sense." The core sense, briefly, is that all higher-level facts have an explanation in terms of physical facts and necessary truths (such as logical and mathematical truths).

However, realization physicalism does not satisfy what Melnyk calls the "received sense" of reductionism, namely that each higher-level type is identical with some physical type. And Melnyk's version of physicalism is stated in terms of functional, not physical, types. In particular, a functional type can be one that satisfies a purely logical condition. (An example would be the computer program considered earlier.) While realization physicalism requires that all actual instances of such a higher-level type are realized physically, it does not identify the higher-level type with those instances, or the collection of all possible such instances, or anything like that.

Other Errors To Avoid: Poland writes (p.41)

[T]here is good reason to avoid such views at that everything is completely physical, physics is the one true theory, physics describes and explains everything, the only ... legitimate methods of inquiry are those of physics, and everything is best understood from the perspective of theoretical physics.

I have to agree with him here - except for the last one, which is self-evidently true.

Non-physical Things Exist!

2010-09-24T10:33:00.000-07:00

This post is part of my series on physicalism.

Physicalism doesn't deny the existence of the non-physical. Indeed, the whole point of physicalism is to explain the non-physical in terms of the physical - and one doesn't try to explain things that don't exist.

I reject as false the view that every attribute is a physical attribute. (Poland, p.188)

Melnyk calls this "retentive realizationism." He reserves the option of "going non-retentive" if necessary, however. For example, he says, if it turns out that "life" cannot be explained as a functional property of physical systems, then the physicalist can deny that "life" exists, and replace it with some appropriate (physically realized) functional property that does exist. This is not as radical as it sounds. He points out that anyone objecting to this move would have to show that, in addition to such functional properties as being able to take in sustenance and transform it into parts of the body, and being able to reproduce, there is something called "life" that is real, while at the same time being above and beyond any such functional properties.

The difference is between explaining something and explaining it away. Take ghosts, for example. If you believe in ghosts, then you might explain them by saying, "Ghosts are the manifestation of spirits of the dead." If you don't believe in them, you might explain them away: "Ghosts are psychological effects brought about by a deep emotional connection with someone who has died."

Physicalism is in the business of explaining the non-physical, not explaining it away. Consider, for example, a chemical compound that is made of (realized by) some combination of atoms, or an organ - say, a liver - that is composed of some collection of cells. To say that the compound, or the liver, is so composed is not to say that it doesn't exist! Rather, the physical realization allows us to explain why the compound has the chemical properties it does, why the liver functions as it does, on the basis of the underlying structure of atoms/cells and their, more fundamental, properties.

Computers and Minds

2010-09-17T16:38:00.000-07:00

This post is part of my series on physicalism.

I like the computer program example so much I want to expand on it beyond what Melnyk says.

Take two computers, one a PC and one a Mac, that are both running some program (say, Windows 7). The two have different processors that must be programmed with different machine languages, so the actual physical events that occur in each computer will be quite different. Yet, if the programming and compiling has been done correctly, the two will be functionally equivalent. The two screens will look the same, and the same changes will occur when I click on the same icon on each.

Even if we were unaware of the details of the program the two computers were running, a careful investigation would reveal the existence of certain groups of physical processes that correspond to particular subroutines of the program in both computers. Thus, the physical-level description could be used to explain why the two computers were behaving in the same way.

But the existence of a physical-level explanation doesn't invalidate an explanation at the level of the program itself. The same phenomena can be described in terms of IF-THEN statements and FOR loops. Realization physicalism says both types of explanation are valid.

This makes a terrific analogy for understanding the physical realization of mental phenomena like thoughts, emotions, or qualia. There is no way that the physical events occurring in my brain when I look at a red wall are the same as the events occurring in your brain when you look at the same wall. But I see no reason to doubt that there might be a functional equivalence of some sort between the events in the two brains, in a similar manner as between the two computers. It might even be possible, at some point in the future, to analyze the patterns of neural activity and identify groups of processes that correspond to particular aspects of the visual experience. These patterns could then be used to explain why the two people were having a similar experience.

Here, too, the existence of a physical-level explanation doesn't invalidate the explanation of mental phenomena at the level of mental events. ("The baby reached for the pacifier because it wanted something to suck on.") Physicalists don't deny the truth of mental causation any more than they deny that the billiard ball moved because it was struck by the cue ball. The existence of another description of both balls at the level of neutrons, protons, and electrons doesn't invalidate the causal efficacy of the cue ball. Rather, it explains it. And in the same way, the (postulated) physical realization of mental events explains (rather than denies) mental causation.

This is not to claim, of course, that science is at a point where it can prove the physical realization of mental phenomena. But the idea doesn't seem ridiculous on its face. The burden of proof, rather, lies with anyone who would claim that it is impossible for such mental phenomena to be physically realized.

A Sudden Realization...

2010-09-16T07:18:00.000-07:00

This post is part of a series on physicalism.

The concept of realization is central to the physicalism program for both Poland and Melnyk. As it is more clearly laid out and (I think) more useful, I will follow Melnyk's version.

For Melnyk (p.26)

Every object is either an object of some physical kind or a physically realized object of some functional object kind.

The same goes for properties and events: they are either physical or physically realized. The physical, as we have seen, is for Melnyk simply that which is describable in the proprietary language of fundamental physics. But what does it mean for something to be physically realized?

For Melnyk, higher-order types are functional types that are defined via an associated condition. A lower-order object (or property, or event) realizes a functional type if and only if it meets the associated condition.

This is a fairly abstract definition, and it would be really great to have an example here. Melnyk gives a few:

Examples of functional object kinds plausibly include can openers, digestive systems, and cells.... Examples of functional properties plausibly include transparency, having currency, and being an analgesic.... Examples of functional event kinds plausibly include storms, births, and extinctions.(pp.21-22)

Unfortunately, he neglects to explain what the associated condition is for each of these examples. Perhaps the associated condition for being a can opener is "having the ability to open cans"?

At any rate, we can now say what it means for something to be physically realized:

A token x of functional type, F, is physically realized if and only if (i) x is realized by a token of some physical type, T, and (ii) T meets the associated condition for F solely as a logical consequence of the distribution in the world of physical tokens and the holding of physical laws. (p.23)

Here, again, it would be great to have an example or two, but unfortunately Melnyk doesn't provide any. So let me try to interpret this statement.

A can opener is an object of functional type in that it is capable of opening cans when wielded by a human (with some conditions of the human's strength, size, and mental ability presumably required). Note that "can" and "human" are not definable in purely physical terms, so they are (I think) non-physical in Melnyk's view.

The type "can opener" is physically realized if there is some configuration of atoms that meets the condition of being able to open cans, and does so purely by virtue of the physical properties of the atoms of which it is composed.

The can opener is a bad example, because probably no one doubts that can openers are physically realized. Later, Melnyk gives a really interesting example: a computer program.

A computer program is about as non-physical as something can be. It's an abstract set of processes relating some inputs to some outputs. It's really a mathematical function of a particular sort, though we don't usually talk about it that way. You can, of course, write it down, or type it into your computer so that it is stored in memory, but that doesn't make the program physical any more than writing down your thoughts makes them physical.

A computer program is a great example of a functional type. A particular computer can be said to be running the program if the the physical bits of the computer act according to a certain pattern: they are "related to one another in mathematically specifiable ways." (p.40) In Melnyk's language, those mathematical specifications are the associated condition, and any computer that meets that condition is realizing the computer program.

This, I think, provides an ideal example of what physicalism is all about. It doesn't deny the existence of abstract, non-physical things such as computer programs. But it claims that all actual instances of such things are physically realized.

It's OK To Admit You Don't Know

2010-09-14T07:02:00.000-07:00

In the previous post I pointed out some difficulties with the idea of basing physicalism on current physical theory. Poland takes a different approach: he says physicalism should be based on the true physics, whatever that may be. Can we do any better with this approach?

It is important for Poland's program that there be determinate physical bases for physicalism.

By "determinate bases" I mean classes of entities that are well defined: for any entity, there is a fact of the matter as to whether it is included in the bases of the system or not.... Vacuous or indeterminate content, therefore, undermines the significance of physicalist doctrine.... (pp. 147-148)

Yet, Poland claims that it is not necessary that we know what the true physical bases are. It is enough to have a general definition of physics, so that we can recognize it when we see it. By basing physicalism on a general characterization of physics, rather than on any specific physical theory, Poland hopes to avoid the problem of the changing nature of physical theory.

Although our knowledge of the physical bases changes with physical theory, the actual bases themselves do not. And although current theory provides the best estimate of what is in the domain of physics and thus in the bases, it neither provides the content of physicalist theses nor determines their fate. (p. 166)

This seems to me to be a reasonable approach. (Melnyk clearly doesn't think so, but his objection seems to me to miss Poland's point.) In fact, Melnyk and Poland seem to be making a similar point: that it is the cart of physicalism, not the horse of physics pulling the cart, that is the focus of their philosophy. Realization physicalism is about how higher-level theories are related to lower-level theories, not about providing the specifics of the realization for every specific case.

I wonder if it would be better to drop the "physicalism" and just call it "realizationism." After all, if we were able to demonstrate that mental phenomena are realized at the level of neurophysiological processes (say), that would be a more than sufficient accomplishment for the program. It would hardly be necessary to further reduce the neurophysiological processes to the fundamental physical theory of the moment to declare success in a physically-based explanation of mental phenomena.

At any rate, I now need to tell you what "realization" means. I will turn to this task next time.

What Are The Error Bars On That?

2010-09-06T07:53:00.000-07:00

I have been summarizing the physicalist views of two authors, Jeffrey Poland and Andrew Melnyk. In this post, I give my own opinions about Melnyk's view. Caveat lector!

Melnyk thinks that physicalism should take as its basis the current consensus physics of practicing physicists. At first I thought this a reasonable approach, but the more I thought about it the less I liked it. I see two very serious problems with it:

- What if the best current theories of physics are not even logically consistent with each other?
- What if the ontological basis of current physics is itself problematic?

On the first point, I think many physicists would agree that General Relativity (GR) and current particle physics theories (especially the Standard Model - SM) are logically inconsistent. This is a big problem for Melnyk, because he says the attitude that we should take toward physicalism is the "scientific realist (SR) attitude," that is, to "assign the hypothesis a higher probability than its relevant rivals." (p. 227) But if two theories are logically inconsistent, then we can't assign their joint probability as anything other than zero.

(Some might argue with my characterization of these theories as inconsistent. However, it is easy to see that, historically, there have been many times when our best physical theories were logically inconsistent: for instance, around 1900 Maxwell's electrodynamics was inconsistent with Newtonian mechanics. So physicalism must at least recognize the possibility that, at some given time, a fundamental inconsistency might exist in the physical theory basis.)

On the second point, I would say that we are in exactly this situation with respect to quantum mechanics. The ontological status of the quantum wave function (or state vector) is a matter of considerable dispute. Does it represent something physical, or does it represent our state of knowledge? The latter is my own view, but this seems to create a huge difficulty for physicalism: If all large-scale phenomena are based on (realizable as) quantum phenomena, and quantum phenomena are only understandable as probabilities of certain large-scale phenomena (output of sensors, counters, and other experimental apparatus), then physicalism is in very great danger of circularity.

I don't know what to do about the second problem - this seems like a very serious problem to me. But I have a suggestion about the first. I think Melnyk is simply wrong about the SR attitude being the view of practicing scientists. After all, how could we physicists simultaneously endorse GR and the SM while acknowledging their inconsistency? I think scientists' (or at least physicists') attitude is better described as the "good approximation (GA) attitude." That is, GR provides a good approximation to how the universe works at the largest scales, and the SM provides a good approximation at the smallest scales. Physicists - in spite of what they might themselves say - are not actually interested in whether a theory is true. They are interested in whether it works.

In fact, they have to be. Let me explain. I'll ignore GR for the moment and pretend that all we need for a fundamental theory of physics is a theory of particles and their interactions. Now, the Standard Model consists of some equations that contain various parameters that must be experimentally determined: the speed of light, Planck's constant, the electron's charge, the masses of the quarks, and so forth. Let's suppose that there is a true theory of the universe that is exactly the equations of the SM with some values of those parameters. Let's call that theory SM-true. Our current theory has the same equations, but with some "best fit" values of those same parameters. Call that theory SM-bf.

Now, the probability that SM-bf and SM-true are the same theory is precisely zero. There is zero chance that the specific values that we have deduced from experiment are identical to the true values. It is like trying to hit an infinitesimally small bull's-eye with an infinitely thin dart. (Mathematically, the true value is a set of measure zero in the space of possible parameters.) Certainly, the relevant rivals of our SM-bf would include other SM-like theories with other values of those parameters. But the probability of each of those rivals is zero, too! So the SR attitude is useless in deciding among these rivals.

If you go look up the values of those parameters, you will see them listed with experimental uncertainty after the value. These are what we sometimes call the "error bars." What those uncertainties mean is this: we have no confidence that the parameter takes on the exact value listed, but we have high confidence that the true value lies within the range specified by the value and the experimental uncertainty.

I think endorsing a theory by taking the GA attitude should mean that we believe the universe will behave approximately as described by the theory, where "approximately" means "within the range of expected outcomes as determined by the range of experimental uncertainty in the parameters of the theory, as long as the values of relevant external parameters are within a specified range." Here "external parameters" refer to physical values that are characteristic of the particular situation in question, rather than parameters appearing in the theory. External parameters might include relative velocity, center-of-mass energy, and so forth.

By taking the GA attitude, we can endorse a theory even if we are sure (by reason of logical inconsistency, for example) that it is not a true theory. Thus, we can say that GR is a good approximation at large values of some external length parameter, and SM is a good approximation at small values of that parameter, while not claiming that either one is (or is an approximation to) a true theory.

Melnyk mentions the possibility of treating physicalism as approximately true (p. 225), but dismisses it on the grounds that notions of approximation to the truth are "notoriously hard to explicate satisfactorily." But, given the difficulties of Melyk's own account, and given the fact that physicists have to deal with approximations to the truth all the time, and have developed tools for doing so quantitatively, I think that this must be a more promising avenue than his own.

Physics is Fundamental!

2010-09-02T13:49:00.000-07:00

This post is part of a series on naturalism.

In realization physicalism, as described by Poland and Melnyk, everything that exists is either physical, or is realized by a physical property or system. As a physicist, I at first found this starting point very attractive. Of course, physics is at the base of everything! And of course, we should take it as our starting point for our philosophy! (I'm starting to think there's a serious problem with this idea, but I'll save that for a later post.)

But what does it mean for something to be physical? Here Poland and Melnyk part company in an intriguing way.

We start with an apparently fatal dilemma for physicalism. Suppose that by "physics," we mean "physics as currently understood by practicing physicists." Then we have a problem: current physics, as any physicist will admit, is incomplete at best, and inconsistent at worst. Sure, it does a terrific job of approximating what the universe does, but there's very small likelihood that it is a true description of the world. Historically speaking, the best physical theory has turned out, over and over again, to be incorrect. New theories replace old theories all the time: what justification do we have to think that our current best explanation is any different?

But if physicalism is based on a theory of physics that is not true, then physicalism cannot be true, either.

Suppose, though, that we don't base physicalism on the current theories of physics. Then what do we base it on? Some future physics, that (we hope) will be an exactly true description of the world? Even if we had any expectation that we might some day reach that lofty goal, we do not know today the content of that future theory. So physicalism has no determined content: everything reduces to a physics that we know nothing about.

This is known as Hempel's Dilemma, and Poland and Melnyk grasp different horns.

Poland asks why we should believe that physicalism only has determinate content if there is a specific physical theory on which it is based. He points to determinism: philosophers have no trouble accepting that determinism is a meaningful concept, even if it does not refer to a specific deterministic physical theory. Poland argues that, similarly, physics is a meaningful term, even if we don't have a specific physical theory in mind.

If there is a true physical theory that correctly describes the reality that current physical theories purport to describe, then, regardless of whether we ever hit upon such a theory, it and the reality it describes exist and constitute the physical bases required by physicalist theses. (p. 162)

Physics, according to Poland, is

the branch of science concerned with identifying a basic class of objects and attributes and a class of principles that are sufficient for an account of space-time and of the composition, dynamics, and interactions of all occupants. (p. 124)

Poland thinks the dilemma is a false one. He thinks the cart of physicalism can be hitched to a horse called "physics," so defined, rather than to any specific physical theory.

Melnyk firmly declares that physicalism should be defined in terms of current physics. He also agrees that current physics has very little chance of being true. Thus, physicalism so defined has very little chance of being true. He then makes a rather strange move: he says that we can nevertheless endorse physicalism. A physicalist can "comfortably live with the result that physicalism has a very low probability."

To be a physicalist is to take the same attitude - whatever that attitude is - toward the hypothesis of physicalism that those who have broadly realist and antirelativist intuitions take toward what they regard as the best of current scientific hypotheses. (p.225)

Thus, "physicalism is viewed as no more and no less than a scientific hypothesis," (p. 226) and so should be held to the same standard as scientific theories. These theories do not have a high probability of being true - they are constantly being refined and replaced, after all - but they are "the best we have so far." So, too, for physicalism.

But what happens when physical theory changes? Then, Melnyk says, physicalism as currently defined will have to change, too. The new physicalism will not strictly speaking be the same as Melnyk's physicalism (which is defined in terms of today's physics), but it will be a closely related view that retains the same structure as Melnyk's physicalism. Melnyk allows us to change horses without changing the cart of physicalism.

I will leave you to ponder these two approaches: next time I will give my own take on them.

Hauser’s Mistakes

2010-09-02T13:45:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Matt of Atheism: Proving The Negative, I have learned that Harvard's Marc Hauser, whose book I blogged about recently, is being investigated for possible fraud involving his research. Since I spoke highly of his book, I felt I should pass on the information.

A Gripe

2010-09-01T11:39:00.000-07:00

We interrupt your irregularly scheduled discussion of naturalism to complain a bit.

Why can't philosophers learn how to use examples? When I'm teaching my physics classes, I can hardly say five sentences without feeling the need to throw in an example to illustrate whatever it is I'm talking about. There's nothing like a good, clear example to show what the abstract terms mean and how they are used in practice. But philosophers are capable of going on and on for hundreds of pages of the most abstract stuff without a single example.

I noticed this while reading about free will. Practically the only example I ran across was Austin's putt. (Certainly the most over-analysed event in sporting history. That's another thing about philosophers: once they get hold of an example they worry it to death.)

In the two books on physicalism that I'm reading it's just as bad. Melnyk is the better of the two: he occasionally describes a useful example. I'll report on one or two of these in upcoming posts.

But Poland goes on about "function" and "causality" and "instantiation" and "tokens" and so forth, never pausing to give an illustration of what these terms mean in real life. And when he does give an "example," it's so abstract as to be nearly useless. For instance, in describing how the same sort of explanation is used for natural regularities as for exceptions to those regularities, Poland gives the following "example". (And no, I am not making this up. It's on p. 220.)

For example, if an exception to a causal regularity is a case in which the antecedent, but not the consequent, attribute is instantiated, some other attribute being instantiated instead, then such an exception is explained via an account which clarifies the relations between the attribute(s) realizing the antecedent non-physical attribute and the attribute(s) realizing the non-physical attribute that replaced the expected consequent non-physical attribute and which explains how those relations between the physically-based attributes realize the relation between the two actually occurring non-physical attributes.

Thank you so much, Professor Poland.

We now return to your irregularly scheduled discussion.

Naturalism, Materialism, Physicalism, Oh My!

2010-08-31T08:00:00.000-07:00

This post is part of a series on naturalism. The first post is here.

I noted in that post Trent Dougherty's complaint that he couldn't find a decent defense of naturalism anywhere.

Has anyone given a decent academic case for naturalism? The closest I can recall is Melnyk's in his Material Manifesto. Maybe David Papineau's closure argument could be generalized. I think naturalists just assume it's all going to work out. It just seems utterly hopeless to me.

Despite Trent's complaints, I had little trouble finding serious philosophical defenses of naturalism. I am working my way through two of them: Physicalism, by Jeffrey Poland, and A Physicalist Manifesto, by Andrew Melnyk. Trent seems to have read the latter (though he got the title wrong), but gives no clue about what he found lacking in its presentation.

I am going to try to summarize the approaches taken by Poland and Melnyk. But first, why "physicalism" rather than "naturalism"?

According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, naturalism "has no very precise meaning in contemporary philosophy." It suggest a commitment to natural, as opposed to supernatural, entities and explanations. But, the SEP notes, "the great majority of contemporary philosophers would happily accept naturalism as just characterized," without necessarily accepting such ideas as being able to reduce mental phenomena to physical phenomena.

Materialism and physicalism are sometimes used synonymously. Materialism is sometimes taken to imply that only matter truly exists. Since Einstein discovered that E = mc^2 over 100 years ago, it is hard to believe that anyone would make this claim today. In contemporary understanding, matter and energy are interchangeable; they are, in fact, two aspects of the same thing. Thus, the materialist should at least expand the physical basis to include energy (or perhaps the energy-momentum tensor). Too, the term "materialism" has a variety of other uses, including Marxist and eliminative, which is perhaps why those writing about materialism in the current sense prefer the term "physicalism" (even though my spell checker doesn't think it's a word).

Physicalism, very roughly, is the idea that everything that exists is in some sense dependent on a physical substrate. But how to make this more precise? In what sense should higher-order phenomena (anything from a chair to the concept of justice in the mind of Antonin Scalia) depend on the purely physical facts about the world? Philosophers have proposed many different types of dependence.

Identity: Everything that exists can be identified with some subset of the physical world.
Definition: Everything that exists can be defined in the language of physics.
Derivation: The laws of the higher-order sciences can be derived from the laws of physics.
Supervenience: Any possible world that is physically indiscernible from the actual world is, in fact, completely indiscernible from the actual world.

While each of these captures some aspect of the physicalist thesis, Poland and Melnyk agree that none of them is completely satisfactory. Some are too strong: it seems highly unlikely that any purely physical system can be identical to the concept of justice in the mind of Antonin Scalia. Others are too weak: the indiscernibility requirement of supervenience can't guarantee that non-physical facts can be explained in terms of physical facts.

A better formulation, according to both authors, is given by realization physicalism: everything that exists is either physical, or is realized by a physical property or system.

That means we need to answer two questions. What does it mean for something to be physical? And what does it mean to be realized by something physical?

Next time: Physics is Fundamental!

Trent Doesn't Get Naturalism

2010-08-28T04:17:00.000-07:00

Trent Dougherty of Prosblogion writes:

I just can't take naturalism seriously. That is, I can't take seriously any view that entails either the proposition that some contingent fact occurred for no reason or that in essentials, the universe (or world or nature or whatever you want to call it) couldn't have been relevantly different from the way it in fact is. And if I had to accept some set of contingent facts as brute, I'd be strictly guided by the number of types and tokens and parameters postulated by a theory. I also find implausible impersonal accounts of a necessary ground in some "natural" force or fact.

...the fact is I try extremely hard to take seriously all positions, especially rivals to my own views.... I read every academic book I can find defending atheism.... But when it comes to "Scientific Naturalism" in its many and varied forms, I draw a total blank. The Dennet/Dawkins/Hitchens/Harris stuff is a total loss. But there's not much better.

Trent's post really gave me a jolt. I've been an atheist for many years, primarily on the basis that there is simply no good evidence for a god of any sort, let alone the sort of god that Christians or other religious people propose. But if it's reasonable for atheists to ask theists to defend their worldview, then certainly turnabout is fair play: it's reasonable for theists to ask atheists to defend their worldview, too. But, surely, the picture can't be as grim for naturalism as Trent claims?

So I decided to look into it, both for my own benefit, to develop a more coherent personal worldview, and so that I can defend that worldview if I ever run into someone like Trent: intelligent, educated, highly sophisticated philosophically, and theist.

My intuitive understanding of naturalism was in terms of reductionism: all phenomena are, at root, physical phenomena. But there are phenomena we all experience that are not obviously reducible to physical phenomena: mental phenomena like ideas and perceptions. One need not be an atheist to think that mental phenomena are of a different order than physical phenomena. For instance, a Cartesian dualist might hold that there are embodied spirits, while denying the possibility of disembodied spirits.

On a naturalist account, mental phenomena reduce to brain phenomena, brain phenomena reduce to interactions among neurons, interactions among neurons reduce to biochemical processes, and biochemical processes reduce to physical processes among protons, neutrons, and electrons. But how is this reduction to be achieved? And what, if any, reason is there to accept this view as opposed to any other view?

Next time: Naturalism, Materialism, Physicalism, Oh My!

Moral Anti-Realism

2010-08-26T06:15:00.000-07:00

This post is part of a series on theories of ethics: first post, second post.

Moral anti-realists deny that moral values are mind-independent. We have already encountered one version of anti-realism: non-cognitivism, which claims that moral statements are not the sort of things that can be true or false, rather, they are ejaculations roughly equivalent to "Boo!" or "Yuck!"

The flip side of this is moral error theory, associated with J. L. Mackie. Error theory is a cognitivist theory - moral statement are capable of being true or false - but the error theorist claims that, in fact, no such statements are true, because they all reference things (moral values) that don't actually exist.

The moral error theorist stands to morality as the atheist stands to religion. (SEP)

Finally, there is ethical subjectivism, that holds that moral facts exist but are mind-dependent in some way: morality is about mental attitudes rather than about objective moral entities that exist "out there." One version of subjectivism is moral relativism: moral truths are relative to the individual, or to the group to which the individual belongs. However, it is possible to be subjectivist without being relativist, and vice versa.

This completes the overview of the main approaches to ethics. I can't resist adding some comments of my own here.

There seems to be - in the sources I have looked at, at least - considerable tension between prescriptive approaches to ethics (how should one go about making moral decisions) and descriptive ones (how do people actually go about making moral decisions). Some ethical theories (utilitarianism, for example) are clearly intended prescriptively, while others (error theory) just as clearly are not. All these are lumped together under the label "metaethics." It seems to me that these ought to be two completely different disciplines.

On the descriptive side, I have been reading Moral Minds, by Harvard's Marc Hauser. His approach (and that of the researchers he cites) promises to be a game-changer in descriptive ethics. He describes numerous experiments in which people are presented with moral questions (e.g. the famous trolley problems) and must decide what actions are permissible, obligatory, or forbidden. He relates cases of people with various mental impairments and discusses how these illuminate models of moral decision-making. He argues for a Chomskian approach. We are born with some innate ability to learn language, but the specifics of the language we learn are shaped by the linguistic environment in which we grow up. So with morality: we are born with some innate moral capacities, but the specific morality we end up with is shaped by the cultural environment. Whether or not his view turns out to be fruitful, it seems certain that we will learn more about how moral decisions are actually made by way of experiments of this sort than by the armchair speculations of philosophers.

But where does this leave us as far as the prescriptive side of the issue? Does learning about how people make moral judgments help us decide how people ought to make moral judgments? It seems we have here a meta-version of Hume's is-ought problem: no amount of research on how moral judgments are made will tell us how they ought to be made.

Naturalism self-destructs?

2010-08-19T19:53:00.000-07:00

A claim frequently expounded by theists is that naturalism is self-defeating: the claims of naturalism, if true, would prevent anyone from ever knowing that they were true. Anthony Flew devotes a chapter of Atheistic Humanism to this claim.

He quotes J. B. S. Haldane:

I am not myself a materialist because if materialism is true, it seems to me that we cannot know that it is true. If my opinions are the result of chemical processes going on in my brain, they are determined by the laws of chemistry, not those of logic.

Flew says Haldane later repudiated this line of reasoning. Nonetheless, let's try to lay it out logically.

Naturalism is self-defeating, version 1 (NSD1):

My opinions are either the result of chemical processes or logical processes.
If naturalism is true, then my opinions are the result of chemical processes.
Therefore, if naturalism is true, my opinions are not the result of logical processes.

The problem here (Flew points out) is with (1.). This is a false dichotomy: there is no reason to think that the result of chemical processes cannot also be the result of logical processes. It's like saying, "Why trust the output of that computer when you multiply two numbers with it? It's just the result of electronic processes, so it can't be the result of mathematical rules!" The mistake here is that the electronic circuits of the computer have been set up precisely so that they implement mathematical rules. There is no conflict between the physical description (electrons) and the logical description (multiplication).

Flew goes on to say that Popper gave a different version of Haldane's argument.

...if "scientific" determinism is true... we believe it,not because we freely judge the arguments or reasons in its favour to be sound, but because we happen to be so determined (so brainwashed) as to believe it....

Flew elaborates that the question has now become

...whether we could by any means have believed other than we did. Unless we could we cannot take credit for having, as rational beings, judged that these beliefs are true.

Let's call this

Naturalism is self-defeating, version 2 (NSD2):

If naturalism is true, the world is deterministic.
If the world is deterministic, then our beliefs are determined by things outside our control.
If our beliefs are determined by things outside our control, then we could not have believed otherwise than we did.
If we could not have believed otherwise than we did, then our beliefs are not the result of a rational judgment.
If our beliefs - specifically, our belief in naturalism - are not the result of a rational judgment, then there is no rational reason to go on believing in naturalism.

The reader will notice that this is, essentially, a version of the Consequence Argument. The issue of naturalism has become an issue of free will.

Flew appears to accept this version of the argument:

...naturalism is in this way refuted in as much as such a naturalist can be taken, as surely he must be, to be claiming nothing more nor less than to know that his scientifically grounded naturalism is nothing more nor less than true.

I find this sentence confusing and cluttered, so let's redact the unneccessary verbiage:

...naturalism is in this way refuted in as much as such a naturalist can be taken to be claiming to know that his scientifically grounded naturalism is true.

In his Epilogue to the chapter, however, Flew clarifies that this is only the case if the words "explain naturalistically" are taken to mean an explaining away of the phenomena. For Flew, on the contrary,

...explanations of the physical aspects of the behavior of these organisms in terms of physical causes are not necessarily irreconcilable rivals to explanations of other aspects of that behavior in irreducibly different terms.

It seems to me, though, that Flew concedes too much. NSD2 fails on several counts. First of all, Premise (1.) is simply false: our best accounts of the fundamental workings of the physical universe are not deterministic. Secondly, even if Premise (1.) should somehow turn out to be true, the rest of the argument suffers from the same issues as the Consequence Argument - specifically, the fatalism fallacy.

So, I don't see any reason to accept either version of NSD.

Moral Realism

2010-08-15T13:32:00.000-07:00

Moral realism makes the claim that moral statements are about actual, objective facts about the world, and that some moral claims are in fact true, independent of what country or social group you are from.

For a realist, moral facts are as certain as mathematical facts. ("Moral Realism," The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

If "Stealing is wrong" is a true statement, then stealing is wrong for all people at all times. It is not wrong for some people or some groups and OK for other people or other groups. This is in contrast to moral relativism, which claims that moral statements may be valid for some groups but not for others.

The truth or falsity of moral judgments, or their justification, is not absolute or universal, but is relative to the traditions, convictions, or practices of a group of persons.

We can all agree that there are, in fact, many different and incompatible moral/ethical systems in the world ("descriptive moral relativism"). But most of us would like to think that there are some moral truths that are universally valid. "It is wrong to torture innocent children," for example. If we discovered a culture that tortures children for amusement, the relativist would find herself in a tight spot: if morals are relative to the culture, and this culture accepts torture of children, then on what basis can the relativist condemn this torture?

Moral realists insist that some things, like torturing children, are really, really wrong, independent of the culture or the individual's beliefs.

Some realists think that moral properties can be described in terms of some objective features of the natural world. This is called ethical naturalism. For instance, utilitarianism says that morality seeks the "greatest good for the greatest number of people." Assuming that the "greatest good" can somehow be quantified, this makes moral decisions reducible to calculations involving objective properties of the world.

For other realists, moral properties really exist but are irreducible properties. These are the non-naturalists. For instance, ethical intuitionists hold that humans have an intuitive grasp of right and wrong, and this intuition is not reducible to any natural features of the world (like pain and pleasure, for example).

Some other realist theories:

Certain theistic theories, such as natural law theory.
Deontological ethics: Right and wrong inhere in actions themselves, rather than in their consequences. For example, if killing is wrong, then killing Hitler is wrong, even if it would save millions of lives.
Virtue ethics: Doing right consists of striving for excellence in all of one's roles: as (possibly) a parent, as a worker, as a citizen.

Flew: Basic Limiting Principles

2010-08-10T13:53:00.000-07:00

The recent passing of Anthony Flew led me to pull a book off my shelf that had sat there, unread, for some time: Atheistic Humanism. I had tried to read it some years ago, but hadn't found it compelling enough to continue. Reading it today, I still find myself wondering how someone who is saying things so obvious could become so famous. But, having experienced many Internet discussions in the meantime, some arguments seem to stand out enough to be worth repetition.

For instance: Flew (crediting a 1949 paper by C. D. Broad) calls attention to the "basic limiting principles" [which he abbreviated BLPs: I detest abbreviations, so will write it out instead]. These are more "familiar and more fundamental than any of the named laws of physics." An example (mine, not Flew's): an object, dropped from rest, falls toward the earth, not away from it. This is a matter of everyday experience, and one need not know General Relativity, or even Newton's inverse square law, to appreciate it. But here's Flew himself:

Suppose, for instance, that there has been yet another security leak in Washington.... Then everyone, or almost everyone, assumes that some hostile agent has had some form of direct or indirect sensory access to the top-secret material that is now secret no longer. It never seriously enters most people's heads that that material might have been telepathically or clairvoyantly read by an agent who at no time came within normal sensory range. That information can be acquired without the employment of the normal senses is thus precluded by a basic limiting principle.

Suppose, again, that there had actually been an explosion in the nuclear power station at Three Mile Island. No one, or almost no one, would have suggested that this might have been a case of sabotage by psychokinesis.

Atheists (Flew notes) are often accused of naturalistic dogmatism. According to these critics, atheists choose a starting point that rules out the supernatural. Theists, being more open-minded, allow the possibility of supernatural explanation. But Flew responds:

Yet it is simply grotesque to complain, in the absence of any such decisive falsifying evidence, that these appeals to the basic limiting principles and the named laws of established physics are exercises in a priori dogmatism. For what "a priori" means is prior to and independent of experience. But in both these kinds of cases [i.e., the insider leak and the nuclear explosion quoted above] we have an enormous mass of experience supporting our present beliefs and our present incredulities.

If your car won't start, who do you take it to? The mechanic, on the assumption that there is a mechanical or electrical problem, or the priest, on the assumption that it is infested with demons and needs exorcism? Our actions prove that we - theists and atheists alike - make the naturalistic assumption all the time. It is an assumption based, not on dogma, but on a wealth of collective experience: the basic limiting principles.

I Never Metaethics I Didn't Like

2010-08-09T08:48:00.000-07:00

One of the challenges atheists face from theists is on the foundations of ethics. Of course, theists themselves face problems on this score. But it is an important issue and worth some attention, in my opinion. I know next to nothing about the philosophical approaches to ethics, so I will begin with some very basic stuff: classifying the different approaches to ethics that are out there, a discipline known as metaethics.

If you had asked me a couple of weeks ago, I would have guessed that the most fundamental distinction in metaethics is the one between moral realists and moral anti-realists. Realists hold that moral facts are mind-independent facts, objective properties about the real world. Anti-realists, on the contrary, think moral facts are subjective, or are matters of convention among a group of people.

There is, however, a still more fundamental distinction; between the (unhelpfully named) cognitivist and non-cognitivist approaches to ethics. Cognitivists hold that moral claims, say, "Eating meat is wrong," are propositions: statements that might be true or might be false, but about which it is meaningful to argue whether they are true or false. For some cognitivists (anti-realists), the truth or falsity might be a matter of subjective opinion or group convention; for others (realists), it might be a matter of objective fact. But for both, moral statements can be meaningfully given the labels "true" or "false," at least with respect to a person's beliefs.

Non-cognitivists, then, deny that moral claims can be true or false, or that they say anything about anyone's beliefs. Rather, moral statements express opinions, or are prescriptive. On the former view (known as emotivism), "Eating meat is wrong" is simply a way of saying "I disapprove of eating meat - and you should, too!" Or, as it is sometimes put more briefly, "Boo on eating meat!" The prescriptivist view says something similar, but emphasizes the "you should, too!" part: moral statements are imperatives; commands that should be obeyed, not just by the speaker, but by everyone. Non-cognitivists are necessarily moral anti-realists.

Non-cognitivism is similar to some anti-realist cognitive accounts, as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy points out:

It is useful to contrast non-cognitivism with one particular variety of cognitivism in order to more clearly present what the non-cognitivist is claiming. Various versions of cognitivist subjectivism equate moral properties such as rightness with the property of being approved of by some person or group. To be right is to be approved of by the speaker, or the speaker and her friends, or the members of the speaker's society, or everybody...

But this by itself is not sufficient to make the position non-cognitivist. This variety of subjectivism agrees with one of the positive non-cognitivist theses (that moral utterances conventionally express non-cognitive attitudes), but it does not agree with either of the essential negative non-cognitivist claims (that the judgments don't express beliefs and/or that they are not truth-apt)....

A simple example gets the idea across. One can express dislike of something by saying that one dislikes it. This is the way that a cognitivist subjectivist thinks we express moral attitudes. But one can also express dislike of something by booing or hissing. This is much like the way some non-cognitivists think we express moral attitudes. The latter way of expressing an attitude is different from the way cognitivist subjectivists think we express moral attitudes because it expresses the attitude without saying that we have the attitude.

Thus, for the non-cognitivist, moral statements are not claims about the beliefs or values of the speaker or of some group, they are merely speech acts that express approval, or disapproval, or that encourage conformity with some norm.

Problems arise for the non-cognitivist when simple moral statements are part of longer sentences. From the Wiki page:

Eating meat is not wrong.
Is eating meat wrong?
I think that eating meat is wrong.
Mike doesn't think that eating meat is wrong.
I once thought that eating meat was wrong.
She does not realize that eating meat is wrong.
Attempts to translate these sentences in an emotivist framework seem to fail (e.g. "She does not realize, 'Boo on eating meat!'"). Prescriptivist translations fare only slightly better ("She does not realize that she is not to eat meat").

This is called the embedding problem. It seems that, at least in the way they are normally used, moral claims express more than mere (dis)approval.

The Usefulness of Useless Debate

2010-07-29T08:25:00.000-07:00

Before I was barred (without any explanation) from posting, I used to spend a lot of time over at Crosswalk Forums, often debating evolution and the age of the earth. At first I thought that there was so much evidence in favor of the accepted scientific view that I would certainly be able to convince the doubters. But I soon realized that there were many ways people evaded the inevitable. Some just buried their heads in the sand and denied the evidence, or said it was unreliable, or faked, or whatever. But others were actually thoughtful, and even well-informed. One in particular was studying biochemistry, and knew much more about genetics than I do. Yet he refused to give up his anti-evolution stance.

Still, it was an interesting intellectual exercise to try to present the evidence in the clearest possible way. And, I thought, even if I wasn't convincing any of my debate opponents, maybe some of those lurkers were getting something of a clearer view of science and its methods.

Just around the time I got banned, someone else posted a poll asking how many forum participants had gone from young-earth creationism (YEC) to evolution/old-earth, and vice versa, as well as who had not changed their stance. Of course, there were many YECs who had remained YEC, as well as those who had been and remained convinced of evolution.

What really surprised me, though, was that there were more who had become convinced of evolution through participation in the forums, than had gone the other way. This in spite of the fact that every argument I posted was immediately inundated with links to, or arguments from, Answers in Genesis and the like.

So I feel strongly that, no matter how useless the debate seems, no matter how unyielding our debate opponents may be, this kind of debate makes an impact.

The Outsider Test For Faith

2010-07-22T09:37:00.000-07:00

John Loftus, of Debunking Christianity, has proposed that believers take what he calls "the outsider test for faith" (OTF). It is really a very simple idea: that, to be intellectually honest, one should apply the same standards for evaluating one's own beliefs that one applies to others' beliefs. If you want to know the truth, you can't start by assuming that what you already think is the truth. You have to start by being skeptical of what you already think, and looking for ways to test it.

The authors of Triablogue: The Infidel Delusion don't seem to get it. In a lengthy response to the book, The Christian Delusion, the three authors each respond to John's chapter on the OTF.

Steve Hays begins by asking why a test for religious faith? Why not an Outsider Test for belief in general? As John responds on his blog, he in fact proposes that very thing. The Outsider Test simply asks for a default position of skepticism with regard to any claim. What about an Outsider Test for math? an Outsider Test for physics? An Outsider Test for chemistry? An Outsider Test for biology?

In fact, this is just what we have. If you propose a new theory in physics, you can't just expect other people to believe it. You have to examine it skeptically, look for its weak points, and propose tests. And guess what? It works! Russian physicists agree with American physicists about the Standard Model of Elementary Particles. Chinese chemists agree with French chemists about the rates of chemical reactions. Australian biologists agree with Japanese biologists about the theory of evolution. And so on.

This, of course, is a great contrast to religion, where one's beliefs track closely with where you were raised. Hmmm.

There's a good reason we need something like the Outsider Test to examine beliefs. It's a psychological phenomenon known as confirmation bias. According to Wikipedia, this

is a tendency for people to favor information that confirms their preconceptions or hypotheses, independently of whether they are true.As a result, people gather evidence and recall information from memory selectively, and interpret it in a biased way. The biases appear in particular for emotionally significant issues and for established beliefs.

People are not naturally rational, logical thinkers. We tend to stick to our preconceptions, no matter how much evidence we encounter that opposes them. The genius of the scientific method is that it counters confirmation bias by, first, requiring anyone proposing a new idea to examine that idea as an outsider would, and, second, having other people (who might be less inclined toward confirmation bias) check that idea. As a result, there is widespread agreement among scientists about fundamental theories.

But it's not just scientists. Anyone attempting to establish any claim has to do something like the outsider test: examine the claim skeptically and according to the same standards you use for other claims, and see if it holds up. Historians, for instance, spend a lot of time talking about methodology: deciding what standards should be used to establish claims. In history, you don't have the luxury of doing lots of experiments to see whether your results confirm your theory, so you need to be very careful to establish clear standards.

The Triablogue authors complain that the Outsider Test is biased from start toward atheism or agnosticism. But that's not true at all: it's only a way of asking that the same standards be applied when looking at your own beliefs that you use when looking at others' beliefs. If you accept the healing miracles of Jesus as evidence of his divinity, do you also accept the healings of Asklepios as evidence of his divinity? (There are dozens of first-person accounts of such healings that have been unearthed at the temple of Asklepios at Epiduaros, whereas we only have four, dependent, non-eywitness accounts for Jesus, so the evidence is certainly more secure for Asklepios than for Jesus.)

Here the Triablogue authors bite the bullet and say, yes, they believe in the miracles of other religions (Really? All of them?) and that they are the acts of evil demons. But now we have to take the Outsider Test to another level: if Asklepios healed many people, and the God of the Bible killed people in floods, wars, and plagues, then what makes you so sure that your God is the good guy and the other the bad guy? What standard do you use to judge? And are you applying that standard evenly to all religions?

For these questions, the Triablogue authors have no response.