On land acknowledgments

2024-12-292024-12-22 PNRJ ethics, inequality, tribal paradigm colonialism, ethics, Haudenosaunee, history, imperialism, indigenous, Iroquois, land, land reform, morality, Native, Native American, United States, violence, war

Dec 29 JDN 2460674

Noah Smith and Brad DeLong, both of whom I admire, have recently written about the practice of land acknowledgments. Smith is wholeheartedly against them. DeLong has a more nuanced view. Smith in fact goes so far as to argue that there is no moral basis for considering these lands to be ‘Native lands’ at all, which DeLong rightly takes issue with.

I feel like this might be an issue where it would be better to focus on Native American perspectives. (Not that White people aren’t allowed to talk about it; just that we tend to hear from them on everything, and this is something where maybe they’re less likely to know what they’re talking about.)

It turns out that Native views on land acknowledgments are also quite mixed; some see them as a pointless, empty gesture; others see them as a stepping-stone to more serious policy changes that are necessary. There is general agreement that more concrete actions, such as upholding treaties and maintaining tribal sovereignty, are more important.

I have to admit I’m much more in the ’empty gesture’ camp. I’m only one-fourth Native (so I’m Whiter than I am not), but my own view on this is that land acknowledgments aren’t really accomplishing very much, and in fact aren’t even particularly morally defensible.

Now, I know that it’s not realistic to actually “give back” all the land in the United States (or Australia, or anywhere where indigenous people were forced out by colonialism). Many of the tribes that originally lived on the land are gone, scattered to the winds, or now living somewhere else that they were forced to (predominantly Oklahoma). Moreover, there are now more non-Native people living on that land than there ever were Native people living on it, and forcing them all out would be just as violent and horrific as forcing out the Native people was in the first place.

I even appreciate Smith’s point that there is something problematic about assigning ownership of land to bloodlines of people just because they happened to be the first ones living there. Indeed, as he correctly points out, they often weren’t the first ones living there; different tribes have been feuding and warring with each other since time immemorial, and it’s likely that any given plot of land was held by multiple different tribes at different times even before colonization.

Let’s make this a little more concrete.

Consider the Beaver Wars.

The Beaver Wars were a series of conflicts between the Haudenosaunee (that’s what they call themselves; to a non-Native audience they are better known by what the French called them, Iroquois) and several other tribes. Now, that was after colonization, and the French were involved, and part of what they were fighting over was the European fur trade—so the story is a bit complicated by that. But it’s a conflict we have good historical records of, and it’s pretty clear that many of these rivalries long pre-dated the arrival of the French.

The Haudenosaunee were brutal in the Beaver Wars. They slaughtered thousands, including many helpless civilians, and effectively wiped out several entire tribes, including the Erie and Susquehannock, and devastated several others, including the Mohicans and the Wyandot. Many historians consider these to be acts of genocide. Surely any land that the Haundenosaunee claimed as a result of the Beaver Wars is as illegitimate as land claimed by colonial imperialism? Indeed, isn’t it colonial imperialism?

Yet we have no reason to believe that these brutal wars were unique to the Haundenosaunee, or that they only occurred after colonization. Our historical records aren’t as clear going that far back, because many Native tribes didn’t keep written records—in fact, many didn’t even have a written language. But what we do know suggests that a great many tribes warred with a great many other tribes, and land was gained and lost in warfare, going back thousands of years.

Indeed, it seems to be a sad fact of human history that virtually all land, indigenous or colonized, is actually owned by a group that conquered another group (that conquered another group, that conquered another group…). European colonialism was simply the most recent conquest.

But this doesn’t make European colonialism any more justifiable. Rather, it raises a deeper question:

How should we decide who owns what land?

The simplest way, and the way that we actually seem to use most of the time, is to simply take whoever currently owns the land as its legitimate ownership. “Possession is nine-tenths of the law” was always nonsense when it comes to private property (that’s literally what larceny means!), but when it comes to national sovereignty, it is basically correct. Once a group manages to organize itself well enough to enforce control over a territory, we pretty much say that it’s their territory now and they’re allowed to keep it.

Does that mean that anyone is just allowed to take whatever land they can successfully conquer and defend? That the world must simply accept that chaos and warfare are inevitable? Fortunately, there is a solution to this problem.

The Westphalian solution.

The current solution to this problem is what’s called Westphalian sovereignty, after the Peace of Westphalia, two closely-related treaties that were signed in Westphalia (a region of Germany) in 1648. Those treaties established a precedent in international law that nations are entitled to sovereignty over their own territory; other nations are not allowed to invade and conquer them, and if anyone tries, the whole international community should fight to resist any such attempt.

Effectively, what Westphalia did was establish that whoever controlled a given territory right now (where “right now” means 1648) now gets the right to hold it forever—and everyone else not only has to accept that, they are expected to defend it. Now, clearly this has not been followed precisely; new nations have gained independence from their empires (like the United States), nations have separated into pieces (like India and Pakistan, the Balkans, and most recently South Sudan), and sometimes even nations have successfully conquered each other and retained control—but the latter has been considerably rarer than it was before the establishment of Westphalian sovereignty. (Indeed, part of what makes the Ukraine War such an aberration is that it is a brazen violation of Westphalian sovereignty the likes of which we haven’t seen since the Second World War.)

This was, as far as I can tell, a completely pragmatic solution, with absolutely no moral basis whatsoever. We knew in 1648, and we know today, that virtually every nation on Earth was founded in bloodshed, its land taken from others (who took it from others, who took it from others…). And it was timed in such a way that European colonialism became etched in stone—no European power was allowed to take over another European power’s colonies anymore, but they were all allowed to keep all the colonies they already had, and the people living in those colonies didn’t get any say in the matter.

Since then, most (but by no means all) of those colonies have revolted and gained their own independence. But by the time it happened, there were large populations of former colonists, and the indigenous populations were often driven out, dramatically reduced, or even outright exterminated. There is something unsettling about founding a new democracy like the United States or Australia after centuries of injustice and oppression have allowed a White population to establish a majority over the indigenous population; had indigenous people been democratically represented all along, things would probably have gone a lot differently.

What do land acknowledgments accomplish?

I think that the intent behind land acknowledgments is to recognize and commemorate this history of injustice, in the hopes of somehow gaining some kind of at least partial restitution. The intentions here are good, and the injustices are real.

But there is something fundamentally wrong with the way most land acknowledgments are done, because they basically just push the sovereignty back one step: They assert that whoever held the land before Europeans came along is the land’s legitimate owner. But what about the people before them (and the people before them, and the people before them)? How far back in the chain of violence are we supposed to go before we declare a given group’s conquests legitimate?

How far back can we go?

Most of these events happened many centuries ago and were never written down, and all we have now is vague oral histories that may or may not even be accurate. Particularly when one tribe forces out another, it rather behooves the conquering tribe to tell the story in their own favor, as one of “reclaiming” land that was rightfully theirs all along, whether or not that was actually true—as they say, history is written by the victors. (I think it’s actually more true when the history is never actually written.) And in some cases it’s probably even true! In others, that land may have been contested between the two tribes for so long that nobody honestly knows who owned it first.

It feels wrong to legitimate the conquests of colonial imperialism, but it feels just as wrong to simply push it back one step—or three steps, or seven steps.

I think that ultimately what we must do is acknowledge this entire history.

We must acknowledge that this land was stolen by force from Native Americans, and also that most of those Native Americans acquired their land by stealing it by force from other Native Americans, and the chain goes back farther than we have records. We must acknowledge that this is by no means unique to the United States but in fact a universal feature of almost all land held by anyone anywhere in the world. We must acknowledge that this chain of violence and conquest has been a part of human existence since time immemorial—and affirm our commitment to end it, once and for all.

That doesn’t simply mean accepting the current allocation of land; land, like many other resources, is clearly distributed unequally and unfairly. But it does mean that however we choose to allocate land, we must do so by a fair and peaceful process, not by force and conquest. The chain of violence that has driven human history for thousands of years must finally be brought to an end.

Why I celebrate Christmas

2024-12-222024-12-16 PNRJ core principles, current events, personal celebration, Christmas, holiday, religion, Rome, Saturnalia, solstice, Yule

Dec 22 JDN 2460667

In my last several posts I’ve been taking down religion and religious morality. So it might seem strange, or even hypocritical, that I would celebrate Christmas, which is widely regarded as a Christian religious holiday. Allow me to explain.

First of all, Christmas is much older than Christianity.

It had other names before: Solstice celebrations, Saturnalia, Yuletide. But human beings of a wide variety of cultures around the world have been celebrating some kind of winter festival around the solstice since time immemorial.

Indeed, many of the traditions we associate with Christmas, such as decorating trees and having an—ahem—Yule log, are in fact derived from pre-Christian traditions that Christians simply adopted.

The reason different regions have their own unique Christmas traditions, such as Krampus, is most likely that these regions already had such traditions surrounding their winter festivals which likewise got absorbed into Christmas once Christianity took over. (Though oddly enough, Mari Lwyd seems to be much more recent, created in the 1800s.)

In fact, Christmas really has nothing to do with the birth of Jesus.

It’s wildly improbable that Jesus was born in December. Indeed, we have very little historical or even Biblical evidence of his birth date. (What little we do have strongly suggests it wasn’t in winter.)

The date of December 25 was almost certainly chosen in order to coincide—and therefore compete—with the existing Roman holiday of Dies Natalis Solis Invicti (literally, “the birthday of the invincible sun”), an ancient solstice celebration. Today the Winter Solstice is slightly earlier, but in the Julian calendar it was December 25.

In the past, Christians have sometimes suppressed Christmas celebration.

Particularly during the 17 ^th century, most Protestant sects, especially the Puritans, regarded Christmas as a Catholic thing, and therefore strongly discouraged their own adherents from celebrating it.

Besides, Christmas is very secularized at this point.

Many have bemoaned its materialistic nature—and even economists have claimed it is “inefficient”—but gift-giving has become a central part of the celebration of Christmas, despite it being a relatively recent addition. Santa Claus has a whole fantasy magic narrative woven around him that is the source of countless movies and has absolutely nothing to do with Christianity.

I celebrate because we celebrate.

When I celebrate Christmas, I’m also celebrating Saturnalia, and Yuletide, and many of the hundreds of other solstice celebrations and winter festivals that human cultures around the world have held for thousands of years. I’m placing myself within a grander context, a unified human behavior that crosses lines of race, religion, and nationality.

Not all cultures celebrate the Winter Solstice, but a huge number do—and those that don’t have their own celebrations which often involve music and feasting and gift-giving too.

So Merry Christmas, and Happy Yuletide, and Io Saturnalia to you all.

Moral progress and moral authority

2024-12-16 PNRJ core principles, ethics, Logic of Kindness, tribal paradigm Adam Smith, Bible, Catholic Church, Christianity, ethics, faith, history, Jerry Falwell, John Stuart Mill, Kant, Kinsey, Mar, Marx, Mary Woolstonecraft, morality, philosophy, Pope Ratzinger, progress, religion, Socrates

Dec 8 JDN 2460653

In previous posts I’ve written about why religion is a poor source of morality. But it’s worse than that. Religion actually holds us back morally. It is because of religion that our society grants the greatest moral authority to precisely the people and ideas which have most resisted moral progress. Most religious people are good, well-intentioned people—but religious authorities are typically selfish, manipulative, Machiavellian leaders who will say or do just about anything to maintain power. They have trained us to respect and obey them without question; they even call themselves “shepherds” and us the “flock”, as if we were not autonomous humans but obedient ungulates.

I’m sure that most of my readers are shocked that I would assert such a thing; surely priests and imams are great, holy men who deserve our honor and respect? The evidence against such claims is obvious. We only believe such things because the psychopaths have told us to believe them.

I am not saying that these evil practices are inherent to religion—they aren’t. Other zealous, authoritarian ideologies, like Communism and fascism, have been just as harmful for many of the same reasons. Rather, I am saying that religion gives authority and respect to people who would otherwise not have it, people who have long histories of evil, selfish, and exploitative behavior. For a particularly striking example, Catholicism as an idea is false and harmful, but not nearly as harmful as the Catholic Church as an institution, which has harbored some of the worst criminals in history.

The Catholic Church hierarchy is quite literally composed of a cadre of men who use tradition and rhetoric to extort billions of dollars from the poor and who have gone to great lengths to defend men who rape children—a category of human being that normally is so morally reviled that even thieves and murderers consider them beyond the pale of human society. Pope Ratzinger himself, formerly the most powerful religious leader in the world, has been connected with the coverup based on a letter he wrote in 1985. The Catholic Church was also closely tied to Nazi Germany and publicly celebrated Hitler’s birthday for many years; there is evidence that the Vatican actively assisted in the exodus of Nazi leaders along “ratlines” to South America. More recently the Church once again abetted genocide, when in Rwanda it turned away refugees and refused to allow prosecution against any of the perpetrators who were affiliated with the Catholic Church. Yes, that’s right; the Vatican has quite literally been complicit in the worst moral crimes human beings have ever committed. Embezzlement of donations and banning of life-saving condoms seem rather beside the point once we realize that these men and their institutions have harbored genocidaires and child rapists. I can scarcely imagine a more terrible source of moral authority.

Most people respect evangelical preachers, like Jerry Falwell who blamed 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina on feminists, gays, and secularists, then retracted the statement about 9/11 when he realized how much it had offended people. These people have concepts of morality that were antiquated in the 19th century; they base their ethical norms on books that were written by ignorant and cultish nomads thousands of years ago. Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13 indeed condemn homosexuality, but Leviticus 19:27 condemns shaving and Leviticus 11:9-12 says that eating fish is fine but eating shrimp is evil. By the way, Leviticus 11:21-22 seems to say that locusts have only four legs, when they very definitely have six and you can see this by looking at one. (I cannot emphasize this enough: Don’t listen to what people say about the book, read the book.)

But we plainly don’t respect scientists or philosophers to make moral and political decisions. If we did, we would have enacted equal rights for LGBT people sometime around 1898 when the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee was founded or at least by 1948 when Alfred Kinsey showed how common, normal, and healthy homosexuality is. Democracy and universal suffrage (for men at least) would have been the norm shortly after 1689 when Locke wrote his Two Treatises of Government. Women would have been granted the right to vote in 1792 upon the publication of Mary Woolstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, instead of in 1920 after a long and painful political battle. Animal rights would have become law in 1789 with the publication of Bentham’s Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. We should have been suspicious of slavery since at least Kant if not Socrates, but instead it took until the 19th century for slavery to finally be banned. We owe the free world to moral science; but nonetheless we rarely listen to the arguments of moral scientists. As a species we fight for our old traditions even in the face of obvious and compelling evidence to the contrary, and this holds us back—far back. If they haven’t sunk in yet, read these dates again: Society is literally about 200 years behind the cutting edge of moral science. Imagine being 200 years behind in technology; you would be riding horses instead of flying in jet airliners and writing letters with quills instead of texting on your iPhone. Imagine being 200 years behind in ecology; you would be considering the environmental impact of not photovoltaic panels or ethanol but whale oil. This is how far behind we are in moral science.

One subfield of moral science has done somewhat better: The economics of theory and the economics of practice differ by only about 100 years. Capitalism really was instituted on a large scale only a few decades after Adam Smith argued for it, and socialism (while horrifyingly abused in the Communism of Lenin and Stalin) has nonetheless been implemented on a wide scale only a century after Marx. Keynesian stimulus was international policy (despite its numerous detractors) in 2008 and 2020, and Keynes himself died in only 1946. This process is still slower than it probably should be, but at least we aren’t completely ignoring new advances the way we do in ethics. 100 years behind in technology we would have cars and electricity at least.

Except perhaps in economics, in general we entrust our moral claims to the authority of men in tall hats and ornate robes who merely assert their superiority and ties to higher knowledge, while ignoring the thousands of others who actually apply their reason and demonstrate knowledge and expertise. A criminal in pretty robes who calls himself a moral leader might as well be a moral leader, as far as we’re concerned; a genuinely wise teacher of morality who isn’t arrogant enough to assert special revelation from the divine is instead ignored. Why do we do this? Religion. Religion is holding us back.

We need to move beyond religion in order to make real and lasting moral progress.

More on religion

2024-12-092024-12-02 PNRJ core principles, ethics, Logic of Kindness, tribal paradigm holy texts, morality, punishment, religion, reward, selfishness

Dec 8 JDN 2460653

Reward and punishment

In previous posts I’ve argued that religion can make people do evil and that religious beliefs simply aren’t true.

But there is another reason to doubt religion as a source of morality: There is no reason to think that obeying God is a particularly good way of behaving, even if God is in fact good. If you are obeying God because he will reward you, you aren’t really being moral at all; you are being selfish, and just by accident doing good things. If everyone acted that way, good things would get done; but it clearly misses what we mean when we talk about morality. To be moral is to do good because it is good, not because you will be rewarded for doing it. This becomes even clearer when we consider the following question: If you weren’t rewarded, would you still do good? If not, then you aren’t really a good person.

In fact, it’s ironic that proponents of naturalistic and evolutionary accounts of morality are often accused of cheapening morality because we explain it using selfish genes and memes; traditional religious accounts of morality are directly based on selfishness, not for my genes or my memes, but for me myself! It’s legitimate to question whether someone who acts out of a sense of empathy that ultimately evolved to benefit their ancestors’ genes is really being moral (why I think so requires essentially the rest of this book to argue); but clearly someone who acts out of the desire to be rewarded later isn’t! Selfish genes may or may not make good people; but selfish people clearly aren’t good people.

Even if religion makes people act more morally (and the evidence on that is quite mixed), that doesn’t make it true. If I could convince everyone that John Stuart Mill was a prophet of God, this world would be a paradise; but that would be a lie, because John Stuart Mill was a brilliant man and nothing more. The belief that Santa Claus is watching no doubt makes some children behave better around Christmas, but this is not evidence for flying reindeer. In fact, the children who behave just fine without the threat of coal in their stockings are better children, aren’t they? For the same reason, people who do good for the sake of goodness are better people than those who do it out of hope for Heaven and fear of Hell.

There are cases in which false beliefs might make people do more good, because the false beliefs provide a more obvious, but wrong reason for doing something that is actually good for less obvious, but actually correct reasons. Believing that God requires you to give to charity might motivate you to give more to charity; but charity is good not because God demands it, but because there are billions of innocent people suffering around the world. Maybe we should for this reason be careful about changing people’s beliefs; someone who believes a lie but does the right thing is still better than someone who believes the truth but acts wrongly. If people think that without God there is no morality, then telling them that there is no God may make them abandon morality. This is precisely why I’m not simply telling readers that there is no God: I am also spending this entire chapter explaining why we don’t need God for morality. I’d much rather you be a moral theist than an immoral atheist; but I’m trying to make you a moral atheist.

The problem with holy texts

Even if God actually existed, and were actually good, and commanded us to do things, we do not have direct access to God’s commandments. If you are not outright psychotic, you must acknowledge this; God does not speak to us directly. If anything, he has written or inspired particular books, which have then been translated and interpreted over centuries by many different people and institutions. There is a fundamental problem in deciding which books have been written or inspired by God; not only does the Bible differ from the Qur’an, which differs from the Bhagavad-Gita, which differs from other holy texts; worse, particular chapters and passages within each book differ from one another on significant moral questions, sometimes on the foundational principles of morality itself.

For instance, let’s consider the Bible, because this is the holy book in greatest favor in modern Western culture. Should we use a law of retribution, a lex talionis, as in Exodus 21? Or should we instead forgive our enemies, as in Matthew 5? Perhaps we should treat others as we would like to be treated, as in Luke 6? Are rape and genocide commanded by God, as in 1 Samuel 15, Numbers 31, and Deuteronomy 20-21, or is murder always a grave crime, as in Exodus 20? Is even anger a grave sin, as in Matthew 5? Is it a crime to engage in male-male sex, as in Leviticus 18? Then, is it then also a crime to shave beards and wear mixed-fiber clothing, as in Leviticus 19? Is it just to punish descendants for the crimes of their ancestors, as in Genesis 9, or is it only fair to punish the specific perpetrators, as in Deuteronomy 24? Is adultery always immoral, as in Exodus 20, or does God sometimes command it, as in Hosea 1? Must homosexual men be killed, as in Leviticus 20, or is it enough to exile them, as in 1 Kings 15? A thorough reading of the Bible shows hundreds of moral contradictions and thousands of moral absurdities. (This is not even to mention the factual contradictions and absurdities.)

Similar contradictions and absurdities can be found in the Qur’an and other texts. Since most of my readers will come from Christian cultures, for my purposes I think brief examples will suffice. The Qur’an at times says that Christians are deserving of the same rights as Muslims, and at other times declares Christians so evil that they ought to be put to the sword. (Most of the time it says something in between, that “People of the Book”, ahl al-Kitab, as Jews and Christians are known, are inferior to Muslims but nonetheless deserving of rights.) The Bhagavad-Gita at times argues for absolute nonviolence, and at times declares an obligation to fight in war. The Dharmas and the Dao De Jing are full of contradictions, about everything from meaning to justice to reincarnation (in fact, many Buddhists and Taoists freely admit this, and try to claim that non-contradiction is overrated—which is literally talking nonsense). The Book of Mormon claims the canonicity of texts that it explicitly contradicts.

And above all, we have no theological basis for deciding which parts of which holy books we should follow, and which we should reject—for they all have many sects with many followers, and they all declare with the same intensity of clamor and absence of credibility that they are the absolute truth of a perfect God. To decide which books to trust and which to ignore, we have only a rational basis, founded upon reason and science—but then, we can’t help but take a rational approach to morality in general. If it were glaringly obvious which holy text was written by God, and its message were clear and coherent, perhaps we could follow such a book—but given the multitude of religions and sects and denominations in the world, all mutually-contradictory and most even self-contradictory, each believed with just as much fervor as the last, how obvious can the answer truly be?

One option would be to look for the things that are not contradicted, the things that are universal across religions and texts. In truth these things are few and far between; one sect’s monstrous genocide is another’s holy duty. But it is true that certain principles appear in numerous places and times, a signal of universality amidst the noise of cultural difference: Fairness and reciprocity, as in the Golden Rule; honesty and fidelity; forbiddance of theft and murder. There are examples of religious beliefs and holy texts that violate these rules—including the Bible and the Qur’an—but the vast majority of people hold to these propositions, suggesting that there is some universal truth that has been recognized here. In fact, the consensus in favor of these values is far stronger than the consensus in favor of recognized scientific facts like the shape of the Earth and the force of gravity. While for most of history most people had no idea how old the Earth was and many people still seem to think it is a mere 6,000 years old, there has never been a human culture on record that thought it acceptable to murder people arbitrarily.

But notice how these propositions are not tied to any particular religion or belief; indeed, nearly all atheists, including me, also accept these ideas. Moreover, it is possible to find these principles contradicted in the very books that religious people claim as the foundation of their beliefs. This is strong evidence that religion has nothing to do with it—these principles are part of a universal human nature, or better yet, they may even be necessary truths that would hold for any rational beings in any possible universe. If Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and atheists all agree that murder is wrong, then it must not be necessary to hold any specific religion—or any at all—in order to agree that murder is wrong.

Indeed, holy texts are so full of absurdities and atrocities that the right thing to do is to completely and utterly repudiate holy texts—especially the Bible and the Qur’an.

If you say you believe in one of these holy texts, you’re either a good person but a hypocrite because you aren’t following the book; or you can be consistent in following the book, but you’ll end up being a despicable human being. Obviously I much prefer the former—but why not just give up the damn book!? Why is it so important to you to say that you believe in this particular book? You can still believe in God if you want! If God truly exists and is benevolent, it should be patently obvious that he couldn’t possibly have written a book as terrible as the Bible or the Qur’an. Obviously those were written by madmen who had no idea what God is truly like.

The afterlife

2024-12-012024-11-23 PNRJ cognitive science, core principles, ethics, Logic of Kindness afterlife, Christianity, death, grief, Heaven, Hell, Islam, Jesus, Muhammad, neuropsychology, neuroscience, Pascal's Wager, religion, The Princess Bride, transcranial magnetic stimulation

Dec 1 JDN 2460646

Super-human beings aren’t that strange a thing to posit, but they are the sort of thing we’d expect to see clear evidence of if they existed. Without them, prayer is a muddled concept that is difficult to distinguish from simply “things that don’t work”. That leaves the afterlife. Could there be an existence for human consciousness after death?

No. There isn’t. Once you’re dead, you’re dead. It’s really that unequivocal. It is customary in most discussions of this matter to hedge and fret and be “agnostic” about what might lie beyond the grave—but in fact the evidence is absolutely overwhelming.

Everything we know about neuroscience—literally everything—would have to be abandoned in order for an afterlife to make sense. The core of neuroscience, the foundation from which the entire field is built, is what I call the Basic Fact of Cognitive Science: you are your brain. It is your brain that feels, your brain that thinks, your brain that dreams, your brain that remembers. We do not yet understand most of these processes in detail—though some we actually do, such as the processing of visual images. But it doesn’t take an expert mechanic to know that removing the engine makes the car stop running. It doesn’t take a brilliant electrical engineer to know that smashing the CPU makes the computer stop working. Saying that your mind continues to work without your brain is like saying that you can continue to digest without having a stomach or intestines.

This fundamental truth underlies everything we know about the science of consciousness. It can even be directly verified in a piecemeal form: There are specific areas of your brain that, when damaged, will cause you to become blind, or unable to understand language, or unable to speak grammatically (those are two distinct areas), or destroy your ability to form new memories or recall old ones, or even eliminate your ability to recognize faces. Most terrifying of all—yet by no means surprising to anyone who really appreciates the Basic Fact—is the fact that damage to certain parts of your brain will even change your personality, often making you impulsive, paranoid or cruel, literally making you a worse person. More surprising and baffling is the fact that cutting your brain down the middle into left and right halves can split you into two people, each of whom operates half of your body (the opposite half, oddly enough), who mostly agree on things and work together but occasionally don’t. All of these are people we can actually interact with in laboratories, and (except for language deficits of course) talk to them about their experiences. It’s true that we can’t ask people what it’s like when their whole brain is dead, but of course not; there’s nobody left to ask.

This means that if you take away all the functions that experiments have shown require certain brain parts to function, whatever “soul” is left that survives brain death cannot do any of the following: See, hear, speak, understand, remember, recognize faces, or make moral decisions. In what sense is that worth calling a “soul”? In what sense is that you? Those are just the ones we know for sure; as our repertoire expands, more and more cognitive functions will be mapped to specific brain regions. And of course there’s no evidence that anything survives whatsoever.

Nor are near-death experiences any kind of evidence of an afterlife. Yes, some people who were close to dying or briefly technically dead (“He’s only mostly dead!”) have had very strange experiences during that time. Of course they did! Of course you’d have weird experiences as your brain is shutting down or struggling to keep itself online. Think about a computer that has had a magnet run over its hard drive; all sorts of weird glitches and errors are going to occur. (In fact, powerful magnets can have an effect on humans not all that dissimilar from what weaker magnets can do to computers! Certain sections of the brain can be disrupted or triggered in this way; it’s called transcranial magnetic stimulation and it’s actually a promising therapy for some neurological and psychological disorders.) People also have a tendency to over-interpret these experiences as supporting their particular religion, when in fact it’s usually something no more complicated than “a bright light” or “a long tunnel” (another popular item is “positive feelings”). If you stop and think about all the different ways you might come to see “a bright light” and have “positive feelings”, it should be pretty obvious that this isn’t evidence of St. Paul and the Pearly Gates.

The evidence against an afterlife is totally overwhelming. The fact that when we die, we are gone, is among the most certain facts in science. So why do people cling to this belief? Probably because it’s comforting—or rather because the truth that death is permanent and irrevocable is terrifying. You’re damn right it is; it’s basically the source of all other terror, in fact. But guess what? “Terrifying” does not mean “false”. The idea of an afterlife may be comforting, but it’s still obviously not true.

While I was in the process of writing this book, my father died of a ruptured intracranial aneurysm. The event was sudden and unexpected, and by the time I was able to fly from California to Michigan to see him, he had already lost consciousness—for what would turn out to be forever. This event caused me enormous grief, grief from which I may never fully recover. Nothing would make me happier than knowing that he was not truly gone, that he lives on somewhere watching over me. But alas, I know it is not true. He is gone. Forever.

However, I do have a couple of things to say that might offer some degree of consolation:

First, because human minds are software, pieces of our loved ones do go on—in us. Our memories of those we have lost are tiny shards of their souls. When we tell stories about them to others, we make copies of those shards; or to use a more modern metaphor, we back up their data in the cloud. Were we to somehow reassemble all these shards together, we could not rebuild the whole person—there are always missing pieces. But it is also not true that nothing remains. What we have left is how they touched our lives. And when we die, we will remain in how we touch the lives of others. And so on, and so on, as the ramifications of our deeds in life and the generations after us ripple out through the universe at the speed of light, until the end of time.

Moreover, if there’s no afterlife there can be no Hell, and Hell is literally the worst thing imaginable. To subject even a single person—even the most horrible person who ever lived, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, whomever—to the experience of maximum possible suffering forever is an atrocity of incomparable magnitude. Hitler may have deserved a million years of suffering for what he did—but I’m not so sure about maximum suffering, and forever is an awful lot longer than a million years. Indeed, forever is so much longer than a million years that if your sentence is forever, then after serving a million years you still have as much left to go as when you began. But the Bible doesn’t even just say that the most horrible mass murderers will go to Hell; no, it says everyone will go to Hell by default, and deserve it, and can only be forgiven if we believe. No amount of good works will save us from this fate, only God’s grace.

If you believe this—or even suspect it—religion has caused you deep psychological damage. This is the theology of an abusive father—“You must do exactly as I say, or you are worthless and undeserving of love and I will hurt you and it will be all your fault.” No human being, no matter what they have done or failed to do, could ever possibly deserve a punishment as terrible as maximum possible suffering forever. Even if you’re a serial rapist and murderer—and odds are, you’re not—you still don’t deserve to suffer forever. You have lived upon this planet for only a finite time; you can therefore only have committed finitely many crimes and you can only deserve at most finite suffering. In fact, the vast majority of the world’s population is comprised of good, decent people who deserve joy, not suffering.

Indeed, many ethicists would say that nobody deserves suffering, it is simply a necessary evil that we use as a deterrent from greater harms. I’m actually not sure I buy this—if you say that punishment is all about deterrence and not about desert, then you end up with the result that anything which deters someone could count as a fair punishment, even if it’s inflicted upon someone else who did nothing wrong. But no ethicist worthy of the name believes that anybody deserves eternal punishment—yet this is what Jesus says we all deserve in the Bible. And Muhammad says similar things in the Qur’an, about lakes of eternal burning (4:56) and eternal boiling water to drink (47:15) and so on. It’s entirely understandable that such things would motivate you—indeed, they should motivate you completely to do just about anything—if you believed they were true. What I don’t get is why anybody would believe they are true. And I certainly don’t get why anyone would be willing to traumatize their children with these horrific lies.

Then there is Pascal’s Wager: An infinite punishment can motivate you if it has any finite probability, right? Theoretically, yes… but here’s the problem with that line of reasoning: Anybody can just threaten you with infinite punishment to make you do anything. Clearly something is wrong with your decision theory if any psychopath can just make you do whatever he wants because you’re afraid of what might happen just in case what he says might possibly be true. Beware of plausible-seeming theories that lead to such absurd conclusions; it may not be obvious what’s wrong with the argument, but it should be obvious that something is.

Religion is False.

2024-11-242024-11-16 PNRJ core principles, ethics, Logic of Kindness Daniel Dennett, heroism, prayer, religion, super-human beings

Nov 24 JDN 2460639

In my previous post I wrote about some of the ways that religion can make people do terrible things. However, to be clear, as evil as actions like wiping out cities, torturing nonbelievers, and killing gays appear on their face—as transparently as they violate even the Hitler Principle—they might in fact be justified were religion actually true. So that requires us to ask the question: Is religion true?

Recall that I said that religion consists in three propositions: Super-human beings, afterlife, and prayer.

Super-human beings

There is basically no evidence at all of super-human beings—no booming voices in the sky, no beings who come down from heaven in beams of light. To be sure, there are reports of such things, but none of them can be in any way substantiated. Moreover, they only seem to have happened back in a time when there was no such thing as science as we know it, to people who were totally uneducated, with no physical evidence whatsoever. As soon as we invented technologies to record such events, they apparently stopped occurring? As soon as it might have been possible to prove they weren’t made up, they stopped? Clearly, they were made up all along, and once we were able to prove this, people stopped trying to lie to us.

Actually it’s worse than that—even before we had such technology, merely the fact that people were educated was sufficient to make them believe none of it. Quoth Lucretius in De Rerum Natura in 50 BC (my own translation)}:

Humana ante oculos foede cum vita iaceret

in terris oppressa gravi sub religione,

quae caput a caeli regionibus ostendebat

horribili super aspectu mortalibus instans,

[…]

quare religio pedibus subiecta vicissim

opteritur, nos exaequat victoria caelo.

[…]

sed casta inceste nubendi tempore in ipso

hostia concideret mactatu maesta parentis,

exitus ut classi felix faustusque daretur.

tantum religio potuit suadere malorum.

Before, humanity would cast down their eyes to the ground,

with a foul life oppressed beneath the burden of Religion,

who would show her head along the regional skies,

pressing upon mortals with a horrible view.

[…]

Therefore religion is now pressed under our feet,

and this victory equalizes us with heaven.

[…]

But at the very time of her wedding, a sinless woman

sinfully slain, an offering in sacrifice to omens,

gone in order to give happy and auspicious travels to ships.

Only religion could induce such evil.

Yes, before Jesus there were already scientists writing about how religion is false and immoral. I suppose you could argue that religion has gotten better since then… but I don’t think it’s gotten any more true.

Nor did Jesus provide some kind of compelling evidence that won the Romans over; indeed, other than the works of his followers (such as the Bible itself) there are hardly any records showing he even existed; he probably did, but we know very little about him. Modern scholars can still read classical Latin; we have extensive records of history and literature from that period. One of the reasons the Dark Ages were originally called that was because the historical record suddenly became much more scant after the fall of Rome—not so much dark as in “bad” as dark as in “you can’t see”. Yet despite this extensive historical record, we have only a handful of references to someone named Yeshua, probably Jewish, who may have been crucified (which was a standard method of punishment in Rome). By this line of reasoning you can prove Thor exists by finding an epitaph of some Viking blacksmith whose name was Thad. If Jesus had been going around performing astounding miracles for all the world to see—rather than, you know, playing parlor tricks to fool his gullible cult—don’t you think someone credible would have written that down?

If there were a theistic God (at least one who is morally good), we would expect that the world would be without suffering, without hunger, without harm to innocents—it is not. We would expect that good things never happen to bad people and bad things never happen to good people—but clearly they often do. Free will might—might—excuse God for allowing the Holocaust, but what about earthquakes? What about viruses? What about cancer? What about famine? In fact, why do we need to eat at all? Without digestive tracts (with some sort of internal power source run on fusion or antimatter reactions, perhaps?) we would never be hungry, never be tired, never starve in famine or grow sick from obesity. We limited humans are forced to deal with our own ecological needs, but why did God make us this way in the first place?

If a few eyewitness accounts of someone apparently performing miracles are sufficient to define an entire belief system, then we must all worship Appollonius of Tyana, L. Ron Hubbard, and Jose deLuis deJesus, and perhaps even Criss Angel and Uri Geller, as well as of course Jesus, Muhammad, Buddha, Krishna, Herakles, Augustus Caesar, Joseph Smith, and so on. The way you explain “miracles” in every case other than your own religion—illusion, hallucination, deceit, exaggeration—is the way that I explain the “miracles” in your religion as well. Why can people all around the world with totally different ideas of which super-human beings they’re working for nonetheless perform all the same miracles? Because it’s all fake.

Prayer

Which brings me to the subject of prayer. The basic idea is that ritualized actions are meant to somehow influence the behavior of the universe by means other than natural law or human action. Performing a certain series of behaviors in a specific sequence will “bring you luck” or “appease the gods” or “share in the Eucharist”.

The problem here is basically that once you try to explain how this could possibly work, you just end up postulating different natural laws. The super-human being theory was a way out of that; if Yahweh somehow is looking down upon us and will do what you ask if you go through a certain sequence (a password, I guess?), then you have a reason for why prayer would work, because you have a sensible category of actions that isn’t either nature or humans. But if that’s not what’s happening—if there’s no someone doing these things, then there has to be a something—and now you need to explain how that’s different from the laws of nature.

Actually, the clearest distinction I can find is that prayer is the sort of action that doesn’t actually work. If something actually works, we don’t call it prayer or think of it as a ritual. Brushing your teeth is a sequence of actions that will actually make you healthier, because the fluoride remineralizes your teeth and kills bacteria that live in your mouth. Inserting and turning the ignition key will start a car, because that is how cars are designed to work. When you remove certain pieces of paper from your wallet and hand them over to a specific person, that person will give you goods in return, because that’s how our monetary system works. When we perform a specific sequence of actions toward achieving a goal that actually makes rational sense, nobody calls it a ritual anymore. But once again we’re back to the fact that “supernatural” is just a weird way of saying “non-existent”.

And indeed prayer does not work, at all, ever, period. There have been empirical studies on the subject, and all of the at all credible ones have shown effects indistinguishable from chance (including a 2006 randomized controlled medical trial) In fact telling sick people they’re being prayed for may make them sicker, so please stop telling people you’re praying for them! Instead, pray with your wallet—donate to medical research. Put your money where your mouth is.

There’s some evidence that prayer has psychological benefits, and that having a more positive attitude can be good for your health in some circumstances; but this is not evidence that prayer actually affects the world. It’s just a placebo effect, and you can get the same effect from lots of other things, like meditation, relaxation exercises, or just taking a sugar pill. Indeed, the fact that prayer works just as well regardless of your religion really proves that prayer is doing nothing but making people feel better.

Occasionally an experiment will seem to show a positive effect of some prayer or superstition, but these are clearly statistical flukes. If you keep testing things at random, eventually by pure coincidence some of them are going to appear related, even though they actually aren’t. If you run dozens and dozens of studies trying to correlate things, of course some of them would show up correlated—indeed, the really shocking thing, the evidence of miracles, would be if they didn’t. At the standard 95% confidence level, about 1 in 20 completely unrelated things will be statistically correlated just by chance. Even at 99.9% confidence, 1 in 1000 will be.

This same effect applies even if you aren’t formally testing, but are simply noticing coincidences in your daily life. You are visiting Disneyland and happen to meet someone from your alma mater; you’re thinking about Grandma just as she happens to call. What a coincidence! If you add up all the different possible events that might feel like a coincidence if they occurred, and then determine the probability that at least one of them will occur at some point in your life—or at least ten, or even a hundred—you’d find that the probability is, far from being tiny, virtually 100%.

And then even truly rare coincidences—one in a million, one in a billion—will still happen somewhere in the world, for there are over 8 billion people in the world. A one in a million chance happens 300 times a day in America alone. Combine this with our news media that loves to focus upon rare events, and it’s a virtual certainty that you will have heard of someone who survived a plane crash, or won $100 million in the lottery; and they will no doubt have a story to tell about the prayer they made as the plane was falling (nevermind the equally-sincere prayers of many of the hundred other passengers who died) or the lucky numbers they got off a fortune cookie (nevermind the millions of fortune cookies with numbers that haven’t won the lottery). The human mind craves explanation, and in general this is a good thing; but sometimes there is no rational explanation, because the event was just random.

I actually find it deeply disturbing when people say “Thank God” after surviving some horrible event that killed many other people. I understand why you are glad to be alive; but please, have enough respect for the people who didn’t survive that you don’t casually imply that the creator of the universe thinks they deserved to die. Oh, you didn’t realize that’s what you’re doing? Well, it is. If God saved you, that means he didn’t save everyone else. And God is supposed to be ultimately powerful, so if he is real, he could have saved everyone, he just chose not to. You’re saying he chose to let those other people die.

It’s quite different if you say “Thank you” to the individual person who helped you—the donor of your new kidney, the firefighter who pulled you from the wreckage. Those are human beings with human limitations, and they are doing their best—even going above and beyond the moral standards we normally expect, an act we rightly call heroism. It’s even different to say “Thank goodness”. This need not be a euphemism for “Thank God”; you can actually thank goodness—express gratitude for the moral capacities that have built human civilization and hold it together. Daniel Dennett wrote a very powerful peace about thanking goodness when he was suffering a heart problem and was saved by the intervention of expert medical staff and advanced medical technology, which I highly recommend reading.

Religion as a source of morality

2024-11-172024-11-10 PNRJ core principles, ethics, Logic of Kindness atheism, Bible, Christianity, Hitler, Qur'an, religion, Stalin

Nov 17 JDN 2460632

After that brief interlude of politics and current events, I now return to my previous topic: Religion.

I am an atheist (among other things). To avoid confusion, allow me to explicate further: I do not believe in any sort of divine being, supernatural entity, or mystical force. I do not believe in super-human beings, immortality, or prayer. I accept neither Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Mormonism, Taoism, Shinto, Sikhism, Jain, Scientology, Wiccan, astrology, Greek religion, Norse religion, nor any other religion or faith-based belief system. I do not believe in Yahweh, Jesus, Allah; Vishnu, Brahma, Shiva; Zeus, Apollo, Athena, Ares; Tyr, Wodan, Thor, Freyja (It’s amusing to note that our days of the week are named primarily after these Norse gods: After Sun-day and Moon-day, we have Tyr’s-day, Wodan’s-day, Thor’s-day, and Freyja’s-day. How Saturn’s-day (a Roman god) got in there, I’m not sure. A historian might be able to explain this.); Amen-Ra, Anubis, Hathor, Bastet; Amaterasu, Sarutahiko, Inari; nor any other god, deity, or divinity. While I have read several of the texts believed holy by various religions, including the Bible, the Qur’an, and the Bhagavad-Gita, and would be open to reading more, I consider them works of literature written by human hands with human flaws.

I believe in science, in rationality, in the observable and the verifiable. I accept the evidence from neuroscience which shows that human consciousness and identity does not survive death; as such I have neither hope nor fear for an afterlife, only hope for life and joy and fear of death and pain. While I recognize that God’s nonexistence cannot be proven with logical certainty, I see so little evidence for divine beings that I believe quite strongly that these things do not exist, about as strongly as I believe that the Earth is round, that humans and chimpanzees share a common ancestor, and that unicorns and fairies are fictional. In some rarified philosophical sense I am “agnostic” about all these things, but in the same sense I am “agnostic” about nearly everything. In practical terms I believe many things to be true, and am quite confident in many of these beliefs. My answer to the question “Do you believe there could be a God?” is the same as that of Richard Dawkins: “Yes, but there could be a Leprechaun!” (The exact statement, “There may be a Leprechaun”, and its context can be found in around time-stamp 7:15.} The standard “cannot be disproven with logical certainty” is absurdly weak, and applies just as well to Amaterasu and Thor as it does to Jesus.

There is something strange about the word “atheist”, as Sam Harris has remarked; we generally do not define people by what they don’t believe. We feel little need to call people “non-racists” or “non-astrologers”, nor do we typically specify people as “non-Keynesians” or “non-utilitarians”. While I agree with this observation, the general expectation in our society is that people will hold to a particular religion, usually Christianity, Judaism, or Islam; and when asked, “What is your religion?” I need an answer; for these purposes, I use the word “atheist”. Sometimes I will also use “rationalist” or “secular humanist”, but these terms are not as familiar to most people; other times I will say “I have none”, but this too leads to confusion. Like it or not, “atheist” is the word most people are familiar with. (And there definitely are people who identify as “anti-racists”.)

Because I am an atheist, I’m sure my arguments for why religion cannot be the source of morality will be viewed with suspicion. Of course an atheist wouldn’t think that morality can come from religion; he doesn’t believe in religion. And this is part of it, certainly: I do not think we should base our morality upon ideas that are not true, and I do not think that religion is true. But that’s not the only reason; I have plenty more.

Good and bad believers and nonbelievers

Your next thought might be that I will deluge you with examples of religious people doing terrible things, often in the name of their religions. There certainly are plenty of examples, especially in Christianity and Islam, but also for Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and just about everything else. Even Jain, renowned for its nonviolence, has its examples of people who have refused to treat their sick children on the grounds that it would harm the parasites or bacteria. Jehovah’s Witnesses and Christian Scientists have refused blood transfusions that could have saved their lives or the lives of their children. Such things are hardly as evil as the Crusades or suicide bombing, but they are still deeply immoral, and the fact that they could come from religions of nonviolence should give us pause.

But of course there have been evil things done by atheists; apologists are fond of mentioning Josef Stalin and Pol Pot, who were most definitely atheists, but because his evil is more widely acknowledged—the Hitler Principle—they tend to also throw in Adolf Hitler, whose religious affiliation was much more complex. Hitler officially affiliated himself with the Catholic Church, publicly insisted he was Catholic, and spoke of God and Christianity often; and yet people who knew him privately often acknowledged that he was not really a devout Christian. Even if Hitler was in fact a closet atheist, most of the Nazis considered themselves Christian (mostly either Catholic or Lutheran), and proudly carried crucifixes and wore belts saying Gott mit uns, “God with us”. But of course this is not an argument against Christianity; if anything it is an argument against Nazism, or against abusing Christianity in the support of fascism. Almost everyone agrees with this; but why is it that so few will admit that for the same reasons, Stalin’s evil is no argument against atheism? Millions of atheists around the world agree that Stalin was an evil man. Moreover, Stalin believed the Earth was round; does that make round-Earthers evil? Hitler loved dogs; does that make dog people evil? “Someone bad believed X” is a very poor reason to believe that X is false; in fact, if just as many good people also believed X, the fact that so many people believe X is prima facie reason to think that X is true. Almost everyone, good and bad, believes the Earth is round; that’s reason to think the Earth is round!

There is an important point to be made that religion could justify acts commonly regarded as evil. If a powerful, wise, and benevolent God really did give us commandments, it would be our duty to obey those commandments, even if we didn’t understand their purpose. If people in other cultures really were servants of evil incarnate, it would make perfect sense to kill them. If people with other beliefs really would suffer eternal pain for what they believe, it would make perfect sense to capture and torture them until they convert. If homosexuality really were a crime as bad as murder, it would make perfect sense to outlaw it. Moreover, beliefs like this are remarkably mainstream in religion; even most moderate religious people, if pressed, will agree that they think people who don’t believe the right religion will suffer eternal pain. In fact, the real question is how religious people can justify not torturing infidels. If I honestly believed I could save you from eternal pain by causing some temporary pain, I would feel strongly obligated to do so. Do religious people really believe what they say? If so, why do they act the way they do? If not, why do they keep saying it?

Sometimes religious moderates make excuses about “autonomy”, but this cannot work. Consider the following analogy. Suppose I were about to drink a vial of deadly poison, which would cause me a long, agonizing death. I was doing this not because I was suicidal, but because I honestly believed that the vial contained a medicine that would make me healthier and happier. You, on the other hand, know better; the vial is poison, and if I drink it I will surely suffer and die. Given that you are in a position to stop me, what would you do? Would you stay your hand out of respect for my autonomy? If you have any sense at all, you would not. Whatever my life projects may be, they will fail if I die of this poison; I am not being rational. My autonomy is better served by your coercion, and once I realize that the vial contains poison, we will both understand that.

How much more true this must be, if infidels will suffer eternal suffering. If you honestly believe that Hell awaits all nonbelievers, then you must think that nonbelief is the most terrible of all poisons. You should be convinced that I am completely irrational, acting against all my own interests. You should be willing to do almost anything to change my mind—up to and including torturing and killing me, since you profess to believe that death is not the end. If you truly believed in Hell the same way I believe in cyanide, you would feel obligated to convert all nonbelievers by literally any means necessary. In this sense the Crusades and suicide bombing are not bizarre aberrations; they are the direct rational consequence of truly believing what holy texts actually say.

It is an incredibly disturbing yet undeniably true fact that the books which are most widely considered the source and font of morality (the Bible and Qur’an) are in fact full of rape, slavery, murder, and genocide—and these acts are not merely depicted but condoned. I believe the most chilling example, Deuteronomy 20:16, will suffice: “However, in the cities of the nations the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes.” That goes beyond genocide—it is something even worse than that, where not only the men, women and children are slaughtered, but so are the cats, dogs, cows, and goats. It is the absolute and total destruction of all sentient life—which is almost the exact opposite of morality.

There are people who still believe exactly what the holy books say, and it makes them do or say terrible things. In the United States in 2014, a Christian pastor sincerely argued that gay men should be put to death. Make no mistake: He didn’t come up with that out of thin air. He read it in the book. He even properly cited his source (Leviticus 20:13). This man is most likely not a psychopath—he just actually believes what most self-identified Christians claim to. Many news reports put “Christian” in scare quotes when describing this man, but they have it exactly backwards; read the Bible, and you will see that he believes in it more truly and thoroughly than 99% of so-called “Christians” ever have. He is the most honest and devout Bible-believing Christian I have ever heard of. If you do not see that, you desperately, desperately need to read the Bible, cover to cover, for it is not the book you think it is. And no, you can’t just say the Old Testament doesn’t count—if so, why include it at all?—according to Jesus himself in the Bible itself, the Old Testament laws are not supposed to be changed in the slightest until the end of the world (Matthew 5:18). It honestly couldn’t get any more unambiguous: The Bible says to kill gay men, and this is meant to be a universal law for all time. If that disturbs you—and of course it does—your problem isn’t with me; it’s with the Bible.

If you are not willing to commit such horrific acts at the behest of ancient books, then you must not really believe that eternal suffering awaits me—at least not with any confidence. Maybe you suppose it to be so, or maybe for some reason you want people to think you believe it, or maybe you are simply so accustomed to repeating it that you never bothered to consider whether you actually believe it. I think most religious people are in precisely this condition—they don’t actually believe that infidels will suffer eternal torment. Why they keep saying it, I’m not entirely sure; but this proposition simply doesn’t fit the behavior of most religious people. Knowing that most people are basically rational, I am forced to conclude that there is a kind of deception (perhaps self-deception) involved in anyone who contends that Hell awaits all nonbelievers but doesn’t try to torture me until I repent.

But this means that if I want to argue against mainstream religion, I can’t simply point out that some religious beliefs can lead to obviously immoral actions, because the beliefs that lead to immoral actions are almost always beliefs that aren’t sincerely held by mainstream religious people. People may say things that would have those logical consequences, but for the betterment of us all they cordon off these statements from their actual behavior. Even people who say “Abortion is murder” don’t usually treat abortion doctors the way they would treat serial killers—and the few who do we rightly call “fanatics”. Even people who say “gay people go to Hell” don’t actually advocate the murder of homosexuals.

Trump Won. Now what?

2024-11-102024-11-07 PNRJ current events, politics, tribal paradigm Donald Trump, election, fascism, immigrants, Kamala Harris, LGBT, Project 2025

Nov 10 JDN 2460625

How did Trump win?

After the election results were announced, one of the first things I saw on social media, aside from the shock and panic among most of my friends and acquaintances, was various people trying to explain what happened this election by some flaw in Kamala Harris or her campaign.

They said it was the economy—even though the economy was actually very good, with the lowest unemployment we’ve had in decades and inflation coming back to normal. Real wages have been rising quickly, especially at the bottom! Most economists agree that inflation will be worse under Trump than it would have been under Harris.

They said it was too much identity politics, or else that Black and Latino men felt their interests were being ignored—somehow it was both of those things.

They said it was her support of Israel in its war crimes in Gaza—even though Trump supports them even more.

They said she was too radical on trans issues—even though most Americans favor anti-discrimination laws protecting trans people.

They said Harris didn’t campaign well—even though her campaign was obviously better organized than Trump’s (or Hillary Clinton’s).

They said it was too much talk about abortion, alienating pro-lifers—even though the majority of Americans want abortion to be legal in all or most cases.

They said that Biden stepped down too late, and she didn’t have enough time—even though he stepped down as soon as he showed signs of cognitive decline, and her poll numbers were actually better early on in the campaign.

They said that Harris was wrong to court endorsements by Republicans—even though endorsements form the other side are exactly the sort of thing that usually convinces undecided voters.

None of these explanations actually hold much water.

BUT EVEN IF THEY DID, IT WOULDN’T MATTER.

I could stipulate that Harris and her campaign had all of these failures and more. I could agree that she’s the worst candidate the Democrats have fielded in decades. (She wasn’t.)

THE ALTERNATIVE WAS DONALD TRUMP.

Trump is so terrible that he utterly eclipses any failings that could reasonably be attributed to Harris. He is racist, fascist, authoritarian, bigoted, incompetent, narcissistic, egomaniacal, corrupt, a liar, a cheat, an insurrectionist, a sexual predator, and a convicted criminal. He shows just as much cognitive decline as Biden did, but no one on his side asked him to step down because of it. His proposed tariffs would cause massive economic harm for virtually no benefit, and his planned mass deportations are a human rights violation (and also likely an economic disaster). He will most likely implement some variant of Project 2025, which is absolutely full of terrible, dangerous policies. Historians agree he was one of the worst Presidents we’ve ever had.

Indeed, Trump is so terrible that there really can’t be any good reasons to re-elect him. We are left only with bad reasons.

I know of two, and both of them are horrifying.

The first is that Kamala Harris is a woman of color, and a lot of Americans just weren’t willing to put a woman of color in charge. Indeed, sexism seems to be a stronger effect here than racism, because Barack Obama made it but Hillary Clinton didn’t.

The second is that Trump and other Republicans successfully created a whole propaganda system that allows them to indoctrinate millions of people with disinformation. Part of their strategy involves systematically discrediting all mainstream sources, from journalists to scientists, so that they can replace the truth with whatever lies they want.

It was this disinformation that convinced millions of Americans that the economy was in shambles when it was doing remarkably well, convinced them that crime is rising when it is actually falling, convinced them that illegal immigrants were eating people’s pets. Once Republicans had successfully made people doubt all mainstream sources, they could simply substitute whatever beliefs were most convenient for their goals.

Democrats and Republicans are no longer operating with the same set of facts. I’m not claiming that Democrats are completely without bias, but there is a very clear difference: When scientists and journalists report that a widely-held belief by Democrats is false, most Democrats change their beliefs. When the same happens to Republicans, they just become further convinced that scientists and journalists are liars.

What happens now?

In the worst-case scenario, Trump will successfully surround himself with enough sycophants to undermine the checks and balances in our government and actually become an authoritarian dictator. I still believe that this is unlikely, but I can’t rule it out. I am certain that he would want to do this if he thought he could pull it off. (His own chief of staff has said so!)

Even if that worst-case doesn’t come to pass, things will still be very bad for millions of people. Immigrants will be forcibly removed from their homes. Trans people will face even more discrimination. Abortion may be banned nationwide. We may withdraw our support from Ukraine, and that may allow Russia to win the war. Environmental regulations will be repealed. Much or all of our recent progress at fighting climate change could be reversed. Voter suppression efforts will intensify. Yet more far-right judges will be appointed, and they will make far-right rulings. And tax cuts on the rich will make our already staggering, unsustainable inequality even worse.

Indeed, it’s not clear that this will be good even for the people who voted for Trump. (Of course it will be good for Trump himself and his closest lackeys.) The people who voted based on a conviction that the economy was bad won’t see the economy improve. The people who felt ignored by the Democrats will continue to be even more ignored by the Republicans. The people who were tired of identity politics aren’t going to make us care any less about racism and sexism by electing a racist misogynist. The working-class people who were voting against “liberal elites” will see their taxes raised and their groceries more expensive and their wages reduced.

I guess if people really hate immigrants and want them gone, they may get their wish when millions of immigrants are taken from their homes. And the rich will be largely insulated from the harms, while getting those tax cuts they love so much. So that’s some kind of benefit at least.

But mostly, this was an awful outcome, and the next four years will be progressively more and more awful, until hopefully—hopefully—Trump leaves office and we get another chance at something better. That is, if he hasn’t taken over and become a dictator by then.

What can we do to make things less bad?

I’m seeing a lot of people talking about grassroots organizing and mutual aid. I think these are good things, but honestly I fear they just aren’t going to be enough. The United States government is the most powerful institution in the world, and we have just handed control of it over to a madman.

Maybe we will need to organize mass protests. Maybe we will need to take some kind of radical direct action. I don’t know what to do. This all just feels so overwhelming.

I don’t want to give in to despair. I want to believe that we can still make things better. But right now, things feel awfully bleak.

What is Religion?

2024-11-032024-10-27 PNRJ core principles, ethics, Logic of Kindness, tribal paradigm afterlief, afterlife, God, prayer, religion, supernatural, Zeus

Nov 3 JDN 2460618

In this and following posts I will be extensively criticizing religion and religious accounts of morality. Religious authorities have asserted a monopoly for themselves on moral knowledge; as a result most people seem to agree with statements like Dostoyevsky’s “If God does not exist, then everything is permitted.” The majority of people around the world—including the United States, but not including most other First World countries—believe that it is necessary to believe in God in order to be a moral person. Yet little could be further from the truth.

First, I must deal with the fact that in American culture, it is widely considered taboo to criticize religion. A level of criticism which would be unremarkable in other fields of discourse is viewed as “shrill”, “arrogant”, “strident”, “harsh”, and “offensive”.

For instance, I believe the following:

The Republican Party is overall harmful.

Most of Ayn Rand’s Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal is clearly false.

Did you find that offensive? I presume not! I’m sure many people would disagree with me on these things, but hardly anyone would seriously argue that I am being aggressive or intentionally provocative.

Indeed, if I chose less controversial examples, people would find my words positively charitable:

The Nazi Party is overall harmful.

Most of Mao Tse Tung’s The Little Red Book is clearly false.

Now, compare some other beliefs I have, also about ideologies and books:

Islam is overall harmful.

Most of the Bible is clearly false.

Suddenly, I’m being “strident”; I’m being an “angry atheist”, “intolerant” of religious believers—yet I’m using the same words! I must conclude that the objection of atheist “intolerance” comes not because my criticisms are genuinely harsh, but simply because they are criticisms of religion. We have been taught that criticizing religion is evil, regardless of whether the criticisms are valid. Once beliefs are wrapped in the shield of “religion”, they become invulnerable.

If I’d said that Muslim people are inherently evil, or that people who believe in the Bible are mentally defective, I can see why people would be offended. But I’m not saying that. On the contrary, I think the vast majority of religious people are good, reasonable, well-intentioned people who are honestly mistaken. There are some extremely intelligent theists in the world, and I do not dismiss their intelligence; I merely contend that they are mistaken about this issue. I don’t think religious people are evil or stupid or crazy; I just think they are wrong. I respect religious people as intelligent beings; that’s why I am trying to use reason to persuade them. I wouldn’t try to reason with a rock or even a tiger.

I will in future posts show that religion is false and morally harmful. But of course in order to do that, I must first explain what I mean by religion; while we use the word every day, we are far from consistent about what we mean.

There’s one meaning of “religion” that often is put forth by its defenders, on which “religion” seems to mean only “moral values”, or else “a sense of mystery and awe before the universe”. Einstein often spoke this way, which is why people who quote him out of context often get the impression that he is defending Judaism or Christianity:

I cannot conceive of a genuine scientist without that profound faith. The situation may be expressed by an image: science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.

But in the original context, a very different picture emerges:

Even though the realms of religion and science in themselves are clearly marked off from each other, nevertheless there exist between the two strong reciprocal relationships and dependencies. Though religion may be that which determines the goal, it has, nevertheless, learned from science, in the broadest sense, what means will contribute to the attainment of the goals it has set up. But science can only be created by those who are thoroughly imbued with the aspiration toward truth and understanding. This source of feeling, however, springs from the sphere of religion. To this there also belongs the faith in the possibility that the regulations valid for the world of existence are rational, that is, comprehensible to reason. I cannot conceive of a genuine scientist without that profound faith. The situation may be expressed by an image: science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.

Here, “religion” comes to mean little more than “moral values” or “aspiration toward truth”. In my own lexicon Einstein’s words would become “Fact without value is lame; value without fact is blind.” (I would add: both are the domain of science.)

Einstein did not believe in a personal deity of any kind. He was moved to awe by the mystery and grandeur of the universe, and motivated by moral duties to do good and seek truth. If that’s what you mean by “religion”, then of course I am entirely in favor of it. But that is not what most people mean by “religion”.

A much better meaning of the word “religion” is something like “cultural community of believers”; this is what we mean when we say that Catholicism is a religion or that Shi’a Islam is a religion. This is essentially the definition I will be using. But there is a problem with this meaning, because it doesn’t specify what constitutes a believer.

May any shared belief suffice? Then the Democratic Party is a “religion”, because it is a community of people with shared beliefs. Indeed, the scientific community is a “religion”. This sort of definition is so broad that it loses all usefulness.

So in order for “religion” to be a really meaningful concept, we must specify just what sort of beliefs qualify as religious rather than secular. Here I offer my definition; I have tried to be as charitable to religion as possible while remaining accurate in what I am criticizing.

Religion is a system of beliefs and practices that is based upon one or more of the following concepts:

Super-human beings: sentient beings that are much more powerful and long-lived than humans are.
Afterlife: a continued existence for human conscious experience that persists after death.
Prayer: a system of ritual behaviors that are expected to influence the outcome of phenomena through the mediation of something other than human action or laws of nature.

Note that I have specifically excluded from the definition claims that the super-human beings are “supernatural” or “magical”. Though many people, even religious people, would include these concepts, I do not, because I don’t think that the words supernatural and magical carry any well-defined meaning. Is “supernatural” what doesn’t follow the laws of nature? Well, do we mean the laws as we know them, or the laws as they are? It makes a big difference: The laws of nature as we know them have changed as science advances. 100 years ago, atoms were beyond our understanding; 200 years ago, electricity was beyond our understanding; 500 years ago, ballistics was beyond our understanding as well. The laws of nature as they are, on the other hand, are by definition the laws that everything in the universe must follow—hence, “supernatural” would be a funny way of saying “non-existent”.

I think ultimately “supernatural” and “magical” are just weird ways of saying “what I don’t understand”; but if that’s all they are, they clearly aren’t helpful. Today’s magic is tomorrow’s science. If Clarke’s Third Law is right that any sufficiently-advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, then what’s the point of being magic? It’s just technology we don’t understand! In fact I prefer the reformulation of Clarke’s Law by Mark Stanley: Any technology, no matter how primitive, is magic to those who don’t understand it. To an ape, a spear is magical; to a hunter-gatherer, a rifle is magical; and to us today, creating planets from dust and living a million years are magical. But that could very well change someday.

Similarly, I have excluded the hyperboles “omnipotent” and “omniscient”, because they are widely considered by philosophers to be outright incoherent, and in no cases are they actually believed. If you believed that God knows everything, then you would have to believe that God knows how to prove the statement “This statement is unprovable” (Gödel’s incompleteness theorems), and that God knows everything he doesn’t know. If you believed that God could do anything, you would have to believe that God can put four sides on a triangle, that God can heal the sick while leaving them sick, and that God can make a rock so big he can’t lift it. Even if you restrict God’s powers to what is logically coherent, you are still left trying to explain why he didn’t create a world of perfect happiness and peace to begin with, or how he can know the future if there is any randomness in the world at all. Furthermore, my definition is meant to include beings like Zeus and Thor, which were sincerely believed to be divine by millions of people for hundreds of years. Zeus is clearly neither omnipotent nor omniscient, but he is a lot more powerful and long-lived than we are; he’s not very benevolent, but nonetheless people called him God. (In fact, the Latin word for God, deus and the proper name Zeus are linguistically cognate. Zeus was thought to define or epitomize what it means to be God.) My definition is also meant to include non-divine super-humans like spirits and leprechauns, which similarly have been believed by many people for many centuries. The definition I have used is about as broad as I could make it without including things that obviously and uncontroversially exist, like “sentient beings other than humans” (animals?) or “forces beyond human power and comprehension” (gravity?) or “energy that animates life and permeates all things” (electricity?).

I have also excluded from my definition of “religion” anything that is obviously false or bad, like “believing things with no evidence”, “denying scientific facts”, “assenting to logical contradictions”, “hating those who disagree with them”, or “blaming natural disasters on people’s moral failings”. In fact, these are characteristic features of nearly all religions, and most religious people do them often; recall that 40% of Americans think that human beings were created by God less than 10,000 years ago, and note also that while the number has fallen over the decades, still 40% would not elect an atheist President, despite the fact that 93% of the National Academy of Science is atheist or agnostic. In the US, 32% of people believe in ghosts and 21% believe in witches. Views like “When people die they become ghosts”, “evolution is a lie” and “Earthquakes are caused by sexual immorality” are really quite mainstream in modern society. But criticism of religion is always countered by claims that we “New Atheists” (we are certainly not new, for Seneca and Epicurus would have qualified) lack philosophical sophistication, or focus too much on the obviously bad or ridiculous ideas.

Furthermore, note that I have formulated the definition of religion as a disjunction, not a conjunction; you must have at least one of these features, but need not have all of them. This is so that I can include in my criticism beliefs like Buddhism, which often does not involve prayer or super-human beings, but except in its most rarefied forms (which really aren’t recognizably religious!) invariably involves concepts of afterlife, and also New Age beliefs, which often do not involve afterlife or super-human beings but fit my definition of prayer—wearing a rabbit’s foot is a prayer, as is using a Ouiji board. It is incumbent upon me to show that all three are false, not merely that one of them is false. Of course, if you believe all three, then even if I only succeed in discrediting any of them, that is enough to show you are mistaken.

Finally, note that what I have just defined is a philosophy that, at least in principle, could be true. We can imagine a world in which there are super-human beings who control our fates; we can imagine a world in which consciousness persists after death; we can imagine a world where entreating to such super-human beings is a good way to get things done. On this definition, religion isn’t incoherent, it’s just incorrect. My point is not that these things are impossible—it is that they are not true.

And that is precisely what I intend to show in upcoming posts.

More on Free Will

2024-10-272024-10-22 PNRJ cognitive science, core principles, ethics, inequality, Logic of Kindness, public policy choice, circumstances, crime, free will, GDP, GDP per capita, Hannah Arendt, operant conditioning, poverty, psychology

Oct 27 JDN 2460611

In a previous post, I defended the existence of compatibilism and free will. There are a few subtler issues with free will that I’d now like to deal with in this week’s post.

The ability to do otherwise

One subtler problem for free will comes from the idea of doing otherwise—what some philosophers call “genuinely open alternatives”. The question is simple to ask, but surprisingly difficult to answer: “When I make a choice, could I have chosen otherwise?”

On one hand, the answer seems obviously “yes” because, when I make a choice, I consider a set of alternatives and select the one that seems best. If I’d wanted to, I’d have chosen something else. On the other hand, the answer seems obviously “no”, because the laws of nature compelled my body and brain to move in exactly the way that it did. So which answer is right?

I think the key lies in understanding specifically how the laws of nature cause my behavior. It’s not as if my arms are on puppet strings, and no matter what I do, they will be moved in a particular way; if I choose to do something, I will do it; if I choose not to, I won’t do it. The laws of nature constrain my behavior by constraining my desires; they don’t constrain what I do in spite of what I want—instead, they constrain what I do through what I want. I am still free to do what I choose to do.

So, while my actions may be predetermined, they are determined by who I am, what I want, what experiences I have. These are precisely the right kind of determinants for free will to make sense; my actions spring not from random chance or external forces, but instead from my own character.

If we really mean to ask, “Could I (exactly as I was, in the situation I was in) have done otherwise (as free choice, not random chance)?” the answer is “No”. Something would have to be different. But one of the things that could be different is me! If I’d had different genes, or a different upbringing, or exposure to different ideas during my life, I might have acted differently. Most importantly, if I had wanted a different outcome, I could have chosen it. So if all we mean by the question is “Could I (if I wanted to) have done otherwise?” the answer is a resounding “Yes”. What I have done in my life speaks to my character—who I am, what I want. It doesn’t merely involve luck (though it may involve some luck), and it isn’t reducible to factors external to me. I am part of the causal structure of the universe; my will is a force. Though the world is made of pushes and pulls, I am among the things pushing and pulling.

As Daniel Dennett pointed out, this kind of freedom admits of degrees: It is entirely possible for a deterministic agent to be more or less effective at altering its circumstances to suit its goals. In fact, we have more options today than we did a few short centuries ago, and this means that in a very real sense we have more free will.

Empirically observing free will

What is really at stake, when we ask whether a person has free will? It seems to me that the question we really want to answer is this: “Are we morally justified in rewarding or punishing this person?” If you were to conclude, “No, they do not have free will, but we are justified in punishing them.”, I would think that you meant something different than I do by “free will”. If instead your ruling was “Yes, they have free will, but we may not reward or punish them.”, I would be similarly confused. Moreover, the concern that without free will, our moral and legal discourse collapses, seems to be founded upon this general notion—that reward and punishment, crucial to ethics and law (not to mention economics!) as they are, are dependent upon free will.

Yet, consider this as a scientific question. What kind of organism can respond to reward and punishment? What sort of thing will change its behavior based upon rewards, punishments, and the prospect thereof? Certainly you must agree that there is no point punishing a thing that will not be affected by the punishment in any way—banging your fist on the rocks will not make the rocks less likely to crush your loved ones. Conversely, I think you’d be hard-pressed to say it’s pointless to punish if the punishment would result in some useful effect. Maybe it’s not morally relevant—but then, why not? If you can make the world better by some action, doesn’t that, other things equal, give you a moral reason to perform that action?

We know exactly what sort of thing responds to reward and punishment: Animals. Specifically, animals that are operant-conditionable, for operant conditioning consists precisely in the orchestrated use of reward and punishment. Humans are of course supremely operant-conditionable; indeed, we can be trained to do incredibly complex things—like play a piano, pilot a space shuttle, hit a fastball, or write a book—and, even more impressively, we can learn to train ourselves to do such things. In fact, clearly something more than operant conditioning is at work here, because certain human behaviors (like language) are far too complex to learn by simple reward and punishment. There is a lot of innate cognition going on in the human brain—but over that layer of innate cognition we can add a virtually endless range of possible learned behaviors.

That is to say, learning—the capacity to change future behavior based upon past experience—is precisely in alignment with our common intuitions about free will—that humans have the most, animals have somewhat less, computers might have some, and rocks have none. Yes, there are staunch anthropocentrist dualists who would insist that animals and computers have no “free will”. But if you ask someone, “Did that dog dig that hole on purpose?” their immediate response will not include such theological considerations; it will attribute free choice to Canis lupus familiaris. Indeed, I think if you ask, “Did the chess program make that move on purpose?” the natural answer attributes some sort of will even to the machine. (Maybe just its programmer? I’m not so sure.)

Yet, if the capacity to respond to reward and punishment is all we need to justify reward and punishment, then the problem of free will collapses. We should punish criminals if, and only if, punishing them will reform them to better behavior, or set an example to deter others from similar crimes. Did we lose some deep sense of moral desert and retribution? Maybe, but I think we can probably work it back in, and if we can’t, we can probably do without it. Either way, we can still have a justice system and moral discourse.

Indeed, we can do better than that; we can now determine empirically whether a given entity is a moral agent. The insane psychopathic serial killer who utterly fails to understand empathy may indeed fail to qualify, in which case we should kill them and be done with it, the same way we would kill a virus or destroy an oncoming asteroid. Or they may turn out to qualify, in which case we should punish them as we would other moral agents. The point is, this is a decidable question, at least in principle; all we need are a few behavioral and psychological experiments to determine the answer.

The power of circumstances

There is another problem with classical accounts of free will, which comes from the results of psychology experiments. Perhaps the most seminal was the (in)famous experiment by Stanley Milgram, in which verbal commands caused ordinary people to administer what they thought were agonizing and life-threatening shocks to innocent people for no good reason. Simply by being put in particular circumstances, people found themselves compelled to engage in actions they would never have done otherwise. This experiment was replicated in 2009 under more rigorous controls, with virtually identical results.

This shows that free will is much more complicated than we previously imagined. Even if we acknowledge that human beings are capable of making rational, volitional decisions that reflect their character, we must be careful not to presume that everything people do is based upon character. As Hannah Arendt has pointed out, even the Nazis, though they perpetrated almost unimaginable evils, nonetheless were for the most part biologically and psychologically normal human beings. Perhaps Hitler and Himmler were maniacal psychopaths (and more recently Arendt’s specific example of Eichmann has also been challenged.), but the vast majority of foot soldiers of the German Army who burned villages or gassed children were completely ordinary men in extraordinarily terrible circumstances. This forces us to reflect upon the dire fact that in their place, most of us would have done exactly the same things.

This doesn’t undermine free will entirely, but it does force us to reconsider many of our preconceptions about it. Court systems around the world are based around the presumption that criminal acts are committed by people who are defective in character, making them deserving of punishment; in some cases this is probably right (e.g. Jeffrey Dahmer, Charles Manson), but in many cases, it is clearly wrong. Crime is much more prevalent in impoverished areas; why? Not because poor people are inherently more criminal, but because poverty itself makes people more likely to commit crimes. In a longitudinal study in Georgia, socioeconomic factors strongly predicted crime, especially property crime. An experiment at MIT suggests that letting people move to wealthier neighborhoods actually makes their children less likely to commit crimes. A 2007 report from the Government Accountability Office explicitly endorsed the hypothesis that poverty causes crime.

Really, all of this makes perfect sense: Poor people are precisely those who have the least to lose and the most to gain by breaking the rules. If you are starving, theft may literally save your life. Even if you’re not at the verge of starvation, the poorer you are, the worse your life prospects are, and the more unfairly the system has treated you. Most people who are rich today inherited much of their wealth from ancestors who violently stole it from other people. Why should anyone respect the rules of a system that robbed their ancestors and leaves them forsaken? Compound this with the fact that it is harder to be law-abiding when you are surrounded by thieves, and the high crime rates of inner cities hardly seem surprising.

Does this mean we should abandon criminal justice? Clearly not, for the consequences of doing so would be predictably horrendous. Temporary collapses in civil government typically lead to violent anarchy; this continued for several years in Somalia, and has happened more briefly even in Louisiana (it was not as terrible as the media initially reported, but it was still quite bad.) We do need to hold people responsible for their crimes. But what this sort of research shows is that we also need to consider situational factors when we set policy. The United States has the highest after-tax absolute poverty rate and the highest share of income claimed by the top 0.01\% of any First World nation—an astonishing 4%, meaning that the top 30,000 richest Americans have on average 400 times as much income as the average person. (My master’s thesis was actually on the subject of how this high level of inequality is related to increased corruption.) We also have the third-highest rate of murder in the OECD, after Mexico (by far the highest) and Estonia. Our homicide rate is almost three times that of Canada and over four times that of England. Even worse, the US has the highest incarceration rate in the world. Yes, that’s right; we in the US imprison a larger portion of our population than any other nation on Earth—including Iran, China, and Saudi Arabia.

Social science suggests this is no coincidence; it is our economic inequality that leads to our crime and incarceration. Nor is our poverty a result of insufficient wealth. By the standard measure Gross Domestic Product (GDP), an estimate of the total economic output a nation produces each year, the United States has the second-highest total GDP at purchasing power parity (China recently surpassed us), and the sixth-highest GDP per person in the world. We do not lack wealth; instead, we funnel wealth to the rich and deny it from the poor. If we stopped doing this, we would see a reduction in poverty and inequality, and there is reason to think that a corresponding reduction in crime would follow. We could make people act morally better simply by redistributing wealth.

Such knowledge of situational factors forces us to reconsider our ethical judgments on many subjects. It forces us to examine the ways that social, political, and economic systems influence our behavior in powerful ways. But we still have free will, and we still need to use it; in fact, in order to apply this research to our daily lives and public policies, we will need to exercise our free will very carefully.

	What we still have t… on The CBO report on Trump’…
	What we still have t… on What is the cost of all t…
	What we still have t… on Reflections on the Index of Ne…
	What we still have t… on Ancient plagues, modern p…
	You call this a hobb… on In defense of slacktivism

Human Economics

Cognitive development economics: Understanding the mind in order to feed the world

Year: 2024