Logic of Kindness

Religion is False.

PNRJ core principles, ethics, Logic of Kindness , , , ,

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

PNRJ core principles, ethics, Logic of Kindness , , , , , ,

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.

What is Religion?

PNRJ core principles, ethics, Logic of Kindness, tribal paradigm , , , , , ,

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

PNRJ cognitive science, core principles, ethics, inequality, Logic of Kindness, public policy , , , , , , , , ,


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.

Freedom and volition

PNRJ cognitive science, core principles, ethics, Logic of Kindness , , , , , , , , , ,

Oct 13 JDN 2460597

Introduction

What freedom do we have to choose some actions over others, and how are we responsible for what we do? Without some kind of freedom and responsibility, morality becomes meaningless—what does it matter what we ought to do if what we will do is completely inevitable? Morality becomes a trivial exercise, trying to imagine fanciful worlds in which things were not only other than they are, but other than they ever could be.

Many people think that science and morality are incompatible precisely because science requires determinism—the causal unity of the universe, wherein all effects have causes and all systems obey conservation laws. This seems to limit our capacity for freedom, since all our actions are determined by physical causes, and could (in principle) be predicted far in advance from the state of the universe around us. In fact, quantum mechanics isn’t necessarily deterministic (though in my preferred version, the Bohm interpretation, it is), but a small amount of randomness at the level of atoms and molecules doesn’t seem to add much in the way of human freedom.

The fear is that determinism undermines human agency; if we are part of a closed causal system, how can we be free to make our own choices? In fact, this is a mistake. Determinism isn’t the right question to be asking at all. There are really four possibilities to consider:

  • Acausalism: Actions are uncaused but inevitable; everything is ultimately random and meaningless.
  • Libertarianism: Actions are uncaused and free; we are the masters of our own destiny, independent of the laws of nature.
  • Fatalism: Actions are caused and inevitable; the universe is a clockwork machine of which we are components.
  • Compatibilism: Actions are caused but free; we are rational participants in the universe’s causal mechanism.

Acausalism

Hardly anyone holds to acausalism, but it is a logically coherent position. Perhaps the universe is ultimately random, meaningless—our actions are done neither by the laws of nature nor by our own wills, but simply by the random flutterings of molecular motion. In such a universe, we are not ultimately responsible for our actions, but nor can we stop ourselves from pretending that we are, for everything we think, say, and do is determined only by the roll of the dice. This is a hopeless, terrifying approach to reality, and it would drive one to suicide but for the fact that if it is true, suicide, just like everything else, must ultimately be decided by chance.

Libertarianism

Most people, if asked—including evolutionary biologists—seem to believe something like libertarianism. (This is metaphysical libertarianism, the claim that free will is real and intrinsically uncaused; it is not to be confused with political Libertarianism.) As human beings we have an intuitive sense that we are not like the rest of the universe. Leaves fall, but people climb; everything decays, but we construct. If this is right, then morality is unproblematic: Moral rules apply to agents with this sort of deep free will, and not to other things.

But libertarian free will runs into serious metaphysical problems. If I am infected by a virus, do I choose to become sick? If I am left without food, do I choose to starve? If I am hit by a car, do I choose to be injured? Anyone can see that this is not the case: No one chooses these things—they happen, as a result of the laws of nature—physics, chemistry, biology.

Yet, so much of our lives is determined by these kinds of events: How can Stephen Hawking be said to have chosen life as a physicist and not a basketball player when he spent his whole adult life crippled by amytropic lateral sclerosis? He could not possibly have been a professional basketball player, no matter how badly he might have desired to be. Perhaps he could have been an artist or a philosopher—but still, his options were severely limited by his biology.

Indeed, it is worse than this, for we do not choose our parents, our culture, our genes; yet all of these things strongly influence who we are. I have myopia and migraines not because I wanted to, not because I did something to cause it to happen, but because I was born this way—and while myopia isn’t a serious problem with eyeglasses, migraines have adversely affected my life in many ways, and while treatment has helped me enormously, a full cure remains elusive. Culture influences us even more: It is entirely beyond my control that I speak English and live in an upper-middle-class American family; though I’m fairly happy with this result, I was never given a choice in the matter. All of these things have influenced what schools I’ve attended, what friends I’ve made, even what ideas I have considered. My brain itself is a physical system bound to the determinism of the universe. Therefore, in what sense can anything I do be considered free?

Fatalism

This reasoning leads quickly to fatalism, the notion that because everything we do is controlled by laws of nature, nothing we do is free, and we cannot rightly be held responsible for any of our actions. If this is true, then we still can’t stop ourselves from acting the way we do. People who murder will murder, people who punish murderers will punish murderers—it’s all inevitable. There may be slightly more hope in fatalism than acausalism, since it suggests that everything we do is done in some sense for a purpose, if not any purpose we would recognize or understand. Still, the thought that death and suffering, larceny and rape, starvation and genocide, are in all instances inevitable—this is the sort of idea that will keep a thoughtful person awake at night.

By way of reconciling determinism with libertarian free will, some thinkers (such as Michael Shermer) have suggested that free will is a “useful fiction”.

But the very concept of anything being useful depends upon at least a minimal degree of free will—the ability to choose actions based upon their usefulness. A fiction can only be useful if beliefs affect actions. If there even is such a thing as a “useful fiction” (I’m quite dubious of the notion), free will is certainly not an example, for in order for anything to ever be useful we must have at least some degree of free will. The best one could say under fatalism would be something like “some people happen to believe in free will and can’t change that”; but that doesn’t make free will true, it just makes many people incorrigibly wrong.

Yet the inference to fatalism is not, itself, inevitable; it doesn’t follow from the fact that much or even most of what we do is beyond our control that all we do is beyond our control. Indeed, it makes intuitive sense to say that we are in control of certain things—what we eat, what we say, how we move our bodies. We feel at least that we are in control of these things, and we can operate quite effectively on this presumption.

On the other hand, different levels of analysis yield different results. At the level of the brain, at the level of biochemistry, and especially at the level of quantum physics, there is little difference between what we choose to do and what merely happens to us. In a powerful enough microscope, being hit by a car and punching someone in the face look the same: It’s all protons and electrons interacting by exchanging photons.

Compatibilism

But free will is not inherently opposed to causality. In order to exercise free will, we must act not from chance, but from character; someone whose actions are random is not choosing freely, and conversely someone can freely choose to be completely predictable. It can be rational to choose some degree of randomness, but it cannot be rational to choose total randomness. As John Baer convincingly argues, at least some degree of causal determinacy is necessary for free will—hence, libertarianism is not viable, and a lack of determinism would lead only to acausalism. In the face of this knowledge, compatibilism is the obvious choice.

One thing that humans do that only a few other things do—some animals, perhaps computers if we’re generous—is reason; we consider alternatives and select the one we consider best. When water flows down a hill, it never imagines doing otherwise. When asteroids collide, they don’t consider other options. Yet we humans behave quite differently; we consider possibilities, reflect on our desires, seek to choose the best option. This process we call volition, and it is central to our experience of choice and freedom.

Another thing we do that other things don’t—except animals again, but definitely not computers this time—is feel emotion; we love and hurt, feel joy and sorrow. It is our emotions that motivate our actions, give them purpose. Water flowing downhill not only doesn’t choose to do so, it doesn’t care whether it does so. Sometimes things happen to us that we do not choose, but we always care.

This is what I mean when I say “free will”: experiences, beliefs, and actions are part of the same causal system. What we are affects what we think, what we think affects what we do. What we do affects what we are, and the system feeds back into itself. From this realization I can make sense of claims that people are good and bad, that acts are right and wrong; and without it I don’t think we could make sense of anything at all.

It’s not that we have some magical soul that lives outside our bodies; we are our bodies. Our brains are our souls. (I call this the Basic Fact of Cognitive Science: We are our brains.) Nor is it that neuron firings somehow “make” our thoughts and feelings as some kind of extra bonus; the patterns of neuron firings and the information that they process are our thoughts and feelings. Free will isn’t some mystical dualism; it is a direct consequence of the fact that we have capacities for conscious volition. Yes, our actions can be ultimately explained by the patterns in our brains. Of course they can! The patterns in our brains comprise our personalities, our beliefs, our memories, our desires.

Yes, the software of human consciousness is implemented on the hardware of the human brain. Why should we have expected something different? Whatever stuff makes consciousness, it is still stuff, and it obeys the laws that stuff obeys. We can imagine that we might be made of invisible fairy dust, but if that were so, then invisible fairy dust would need to be a real phenomenon and hence obey physical laws like the conservation of energy. Cognition is not opposed to physics; it is a subset of physics. Just as a computer obeys Turing’s laws if you program it but also Newton’s laws if you throw it, so humans are both mental and physical beings.

In fact, the intuitive psychology of free will is among the most powerfully and precisely predictive scientific theories ever devised, right alongside Darwinian evolution and quantum physics.

Consider the following experiment, conducted about twenty years ago. In November of 2006, I planned a road trip with several of my friends from our home in Ann Arbor to the Secular Student Alliance conference in Boston that was coming in April 2007. Months in advance, we researched hotels, we registered for the conference, we planned out how much we would need to spend. When the time came, we gathered in my car and drove the 1300 kilometers to the conference. Now, stop and think for a moment: How did I know, in November 2006, that in April 2007, on a particular date and time, E.O. Wilson would be in a particular room and so would I? Because that’s what the schedule said. Consider for a moment these two extremely complicated extended bodies in space, each interacting with thousands of other such bodies continuously; no physicist could possibly have gathered enough data to predict six months in advance that the two bodies would each travel hundreds of kilometers over the Earth’s surface in order to meet within 10 meters of one another, remain there for roughly an hour, and then split apart and henceforth remain hundreds of kilometers apart. Yet our simple intuitive psychology could, and did, make just that prediction correctly. Of course in the face of incomplete data, no theory is perfect, and the prediction could have been wrong. Indeed because Boston is exceedingly difficult to navigate (we got lost), the prediction that I and Steven Pinker would be in the same room at the same time the previous evening turned out not to be accurate. But even this is something that intuitive psychology could have taken into account better than any other scientific theory we have. Neither quantum physics nor stoichiometric chemistry nor evolutionary biology could have predicted that we’d get lost, nor recommend that if we ever return to Boston we should bring a smartphone with a GPS uplink; yet intuitive psychology can.

Moreover, intuitive psychology explicitly depends upon rational volition. If you had thought that I didn’t want to go to the conference, or that I was mistaken about the conference’s location, then you would have predicted that I would not occupy that spatial location at that time; and had these indeed been the case, that prediction would have been completely accurate. And yet, these predictions insist upon such entities as desires (wanting to go) and beliefs (being mistaken) that eliminativists, behaviorists, and epiphenomenalists have been insisting for years are pseudoscientific. Quite the opposite is the case: Eliminativism, behaviorism, and epiphenomenalism are pseudosciences.

Understanding the constituent parts of a process does not make the process an illusion. Rain did not stop falling when we developed mathematical models of meteorology. Fire did not stop being hot when we formalized statistical dynamics. Thunder did not stop being loud when we explained the wave properties of sound. Advances in computer technology have now helped us realize how real information processing can occur in systems made of physical parts that obey physical laws; it isn’t too great a stretch to think that human minds operate on similar principles. Just as the pattern of electrical firings in my computer really is Windows, the pattern of electrochemical firings in my brain really is my consciousness.

There is a kind of naive theology called “God of the gaps”; it rests upon the notion that whenever a phenomenon cannot be explained by science, this leaves room for God as an explanation. This theology is widely rejected by philosophers, because it implies that whenever science advances, religion must retreat. Libertarianism and fatalism rest upon the presumption of something quite similar, what I would call “free will of the gaps”. As cognitive science advances, we will discover more and more about the causation of human mental states; if this is enough to make us doubt free will, then “free will” was just another name for ignorance of cognitive science. I defend a much deeper sense of free will than this, one that is not at all threatened by scientific advancement.

Yes, our actions are caused—caused by what we think about the world! We are responsible for what we do not because it lacks causation, but because it has causation, specifically causation in our own beliefs, desires, and intentions. These beliefs, desires, and intentions are themselves implemented upon physical hardware, and we don’t fully understand how this implementation operates; but nonetheless the hardware is real and the phenomena are real, at least as real as such things as rocks, rivers, clouds, trees, dogs, and televisions, all of which are also complex functional ensembles of many smaller, simpler parts.

Conclusion

Libertarianism is largely discredited; we don’t have the mystical sort of free will that allows us to act outside of causal laws. But this doesn’t mean that we must accept fatalism; compatibilism is the answer. We have discovered many surprising things about cognitive science, and we will surely need to discover many more; but the fundamental truth of rational volition remains untarnished.

We know, to a high degree of certainty, that human beings are capable of volitional action. I contend that this is all the freedom we need—perhaps even all we could ever have. When a comet collides with Jupiter, and we ask “Why?”, the only sensible answer involves happenstance and laws of physics. When a leaf falls from a tree, and we ask “Why?”, we can do better, talking about evolutionary adaptations in the phylogenetic history of trees. But when a human being robs a bank, starts a war, feeds a child, or writes a book, and we ask “Why?”, we can move away from simple causes and talk about reasons—desires, intentions, beliefs; reasons, unlike mere causes, can make more or less sense, be more or less justified.

Psychological and neurological experiments have shown that volition is more complicated than we usually think—it can be strongly affected by situational factors, and it has more to do with inhibiting and selecting actions than with generating them, what Sukhvinder Obhi and Patrick Haggard call “not free will but free won’t”; yet still we have volitional control over many of our actions, and hence responsibility for them. In simple tasks, there is brain activity that predicts our behavior several seconds before we actually consciously experience the decision—but this is hardly surprising, since the brain needs to use processing power to actually generate a decision. Deliberation requires processing, not all of which can be conscious. It’s a little surprising that the activity can predict the decision in advance of the conscious experience of volition, but it can’t predict the decision perfectly, even in very simple tasks. (And in true real-life tasks, like choosing a college or a spouse, it basically can’t predict at all.) This shows that the conscious volition is doing something—perhaps inhibiting undesired behaviors or selecting desired ones. No compatibilist needs to be committed to the claim that subconscious urges have nothing to do with our decisions—since at least Freud that kind of free will has been clearly discredited.

Indeed, evolutionary psychology would be hard-pressed to explain an illusion of free will that isn’t free will. It simply doesn’t make sense for conscious volition to evolve unless it does something that affects our behavior in some way. Illusions are a waste of brain matter, which in turn is a waste of metabolic energy. (The idea that we would want to have free will in order to feel like life is worth living is profoundly silly: If our beliefs didn’t affect our behavior, our survival would be unrelated to whether we thought life was worth living!) You can make excuses and say that conscious experience is just an epiphenomenon upon neurological processes—an effect but not a cause—but there is no such thing as an “epiphenomenon” in physics as we know it. The smoke of a flame can smother that flame; the sound of a train is a sonic pressure wave that shakes the metal of the track. Anything that moves has energy, and energy is conserved. Epiphenomenalism would require new laws of physics, by which consciousness can be created ex nihilo, a new entity that requires no energy to make and “just happens” whenever certain matter is arranged in the right way.

Windows is not an “epiphenomenon” upon the electrons running through my computer’s processor core; the functional arrangement of those electrons is Windows—it implements Windows. I don’t see why we can’t say the same thing about my consciousness—that it is a software implementation by the computational hardware of my brain. Epiphenomenalists will often insist that they are being tough-minded scientists accepting the difficult facts while the rest of us are being silly and mystical; but they are talking about mysterious new physics and I’m talking about software-hardware interaction—so really, who is being mystical here?

In the future it may be possible to predict people’s behavior relatively accurately based on their brain activity—but so what? This only goes to show that the brain is the source of our decisions, which is precisely what compatibilism says. One can easily predict that rain will fall from clouds of a certain composition; but rain still falls from clouds. The fact that I can sometimes predict your behavior doesn’t make your behavior any less volitional; it only makes me a better psychologist (and for that matter a more functional human being). Moreover, detailed predictions of long-term behaviors will probably always remain impossible, due to the deep computational complexity involved. (If it were simple to predict who you’d marry, why would your brain expend so much effort working on the problem?)

For all these reasons, I say: Yes, we do have free will.

Defending Moral Realism

PNRJ core principles, ethics, Logic of Kindness , , , , , ,


Oct 6 JDN 2460590

In the last few posts I have only considered arguments against moral realism, and shown them to be lacking. Yet if you were already convinced of moral anti-realism, this probably didn’t change your mind—it’s entirely possible to have a bad argument for a good idea. (Consider the following argument: “Whales are fish, fish are mammals, therefore whales are mammals.”) What you need is arguments for moral realism.

Fortunately, such arguments are not hard to find. My personal favorite was offered by one of my professors in a philosophy course: “I fail all moral anti-realists. If you think that’s unfair, don’t worry: You’re not a moral anti-realist.” In other words, if you want to talk coherently at all about what actions are good or bad, fair or unfair, then you cannot espouse moral anti-realism; and if you do espouse moral anti-realism, there is no reason for us not to simply ignore you (or imprison you!) and go on living out our moral beliefs—especially if you are right that morality is a fiction. Indeed, the reason we don’t actually imprison all moral anti-realists is precisely because we are moral realists, and we think it is morally wrong to imprison someone for espousing unpopular or even ridiculous beliefs.

That of course is a pragmatic argument, not very compelling on epistemological grounds, but there are other arguments that cut deeper. Perhaps the most compelling is the realization that rationality itself is a moral principle—it says that we ought to believe what conforms to reason and ought not to believe what does not. We need at least some core notion of normativity even to value truth and honesty, to seek knowledge, to even care whether moral realism is correct or incorrect. In a total moral vacuum, we can fight over our values and beliefs, we can kill each other over them, but we cannot discuss them or debate them, for discussion and debate themselves presuppose certain moral principles.

Typically moral anti-realists expect us to accept epistemic normativity, but if they do this then they cannot deny the legitimacy of all normative claims. If their whole argument rests upon undermining normativity, then it is self-defeating. If it doesn’t, then anti-realists need to explain the difference between “moral” and “normative”, and explain why the former is so much more suspect than the latter—but even then we have objective obligations that bind our behavior. The difference, I suppose, would involve a tight restriction on the domains of discourse in which normativity applies. Scientific facts? Normative. Interpersonal relations? Subjective. I suppose it’s logically coherent to say that it is objectively wrong to be a Creationist but not objectively wrong to be a serial killer; but this is nothing if not counter-intuitive.

Moreover, it is unclear to me what a universe would be like if it had no moral facts. In what sort of universe would it not be best to believe what is true? In what sort of universe would it not be wrong to harm others for selfish gains? In what sort of world would it be wrong to keep a promise, or good to commit genocide? It seems to me that we are verging on nonsense, rather like what happens if we try to imagine a universe where 2+2=5.

Moreover, there is a particular moral principle, which depends upon moral realism, yet is almost universally agreed upon, even by people who otherwise profess to be moral relativists or anti-realists.

I call it the Hitler Principle, and it’s quite simple:

The Holocaust was bad.

In large part, ethical philosophy since 1945 has been the attempt to systematically justify the Hitler Principle. Only if moral realism is true can we say that the Holocaust was bad, morally bad, unequivocally, objectively, universally, regardless of the beliefs, feelings, desires, culture or upbringing of its perpetrators. And if we can’t even say that, can we say anything at all? If the Holocaust wasn’t wrong, nothing is. And if nothing is wrong, then does it even matter if we believe what is true?

But then, stop and think for a moment: If we know this—if it’s so obvious to just about everyone that the Holocaust was wrong, so obvious that anyone who denies it we immediately recognize as evil or insane (or lying or playing games)—then doesn’t that already offer us an objective moral standard?

I contend that it does—that the Hitler Principle is so self-evident that it can form an objective standard by which to measure all moral theory. I would sooner believe the Sun revolves around the Earth than deny the Holocaust was wrong. I would sooner consider myself a brain in a vat than suppose that systematic extermination of millions of innocent people could ever be morally justified. Richard Swinburne, a philosopher of religion at Oxford, put it well: “it is more obvious to almost all of us that the genocide conducted by Hitler was morally wrong than that we are not now dreaming, or that the Earth is many millions of years old.” Because at least this one moral fact is so obviously, incorrigibly true, we can use it to test our theories of morality. Just as we would immediately reject any theory of physics which denied that the sky is blue, we should also reject any theory of morality which denies that the Holocaust was wrong. This might seem obvious, but by itself it is sufficient to confirm moral realism.

Similar arguments can be made for other moral propositions that virtually everyone accepts, like the following:

  1. Theft is wrong.
  2. Homicide is wrong.
  3. Lying is wrong.
  4. Rape is wrong.
  5. Kindness is good.
  6. Keeping promises is good.
  7. Happiness is good.
  8. Suffering is bad.

With appropriate caveats (lying isn’t always wrong, if it is justified by some greater good; homicide is permissible in self-defense; promises made under duress do not oblige; et cetera), all of these propositions are accepted by almost everyone, and most people hold them with greater certainty than they would hold any belief about empirical science. “Science proves that time is relative” is surprising and counter-intuitive, but people can accept it; “Science proves that homicide is good” is not something anyone would believe for an instant. There is wider agreement and greater confidence about these basic moral truths than there is about any fact in science, even “the Earth is round” or “gravity pulls things toward each other”—for well before Newton or even Archimedes, people still knew that homicide was wrong.

Though there are surely psychopaths who disagree (basically because their brains are defective), the vast majority of people agree on these fundamental moral claims. At least 95\% of humans who have ever lived share this universal moral framework, under which the wrongness of genocide is as directly apprehensible as the blueness of the sky and the painfulness of a burn. Moral realism is on as solid an epistemic footing as any fact in science.

Expressivism

PNRJ cognitive science, ethics, Logic of Kindness , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Sep 29 JDN 2460583

The theory of expressivism, often posited as an alternative to moral realism, is based on the observation by Hume that factual knowledge is not intrinsically motivating. I can believe that a food is nutritious and that I need nutrition to survive, but without some emotional experience to motivate me—hunger—I will nonetheless remain unmotivated to eat the nutritious food. Because morality is meant to be intrinsically motivating, says Hume, it must not involve statements of fact.

Yet really all Hume has shown is that if indeed facts are not intrinsically motivating, and moral statements are intrinsically motivating, then moral statements are not merely statements of fact. But even statements of fact are rarely merely statements of fact! If I were to walk down the street stating facts at random (lemurs have rings on their tails, the Sun is over one million kilometers in diameter, bicycles have two wheels, people sit on chairs, time dilates as you approach the speed of light, LGBT people suffer the highest per capita rate of hate crimes in the US, Coca-Cola in the United States contains high fructose corn syrup, humans and chimpanzees share 95-98% of our DNA), I would be seen as a very odd sort of person indeed. Even when I state a fact, I do so out of some motivation, frequently an emotional motivation. I’m often trying to explain, or to convince. Sometimes I am angry, and I want to express my anger and frustration. Other times I am sad and seeking consolation. I have many emotions, and I often use words to express them. Nonetheless, in the process I will make many statements of fact that are either true or false: “Humans and chimpanzees share 95-98% of our DNA” I might use to argue in favor of common descent; “Time dilates as you approach the speed of light” I have used in to explain relativity theory; “LGBT people suffer the highest per capita rate of hate crimes in the US” I might use to argue in favor of some sort of gay rights policy. When I say “genocide is wrong!” I probably have some sort of emotional motivation for this—likely my outrage at an ongoing genocide. Nonetheless I’m pretty sure it’s true that genocide is wrong.

Expressivism says that moral statements don’t express propositions at all, they express attitudes, relations to ideas that are not of the same kind as belief and disbelief, truth and falsehood. Much as “Hello!” or “Darn it!” don’t really state facts or inquire about facts, expressivists like Simon Blackburn and Allan Gibbard would say that “Genocide is wrong” doesn’t say anything about the facts of genocide, it merely expresses my attitude of moral disapproval toward genocide.

Yet expressivists can’t abandon all normativity—otherwise even the claim “expressivism is true” has no moral force. Allan Gibbard, like most expressivists, supports epistemic normativity—the principle that we ought to believe what is true. But this seems to me already a moral principle, and one that is not merely an attitude that some people happen to have, but in fact a fundamental axiom that ought to apply to any rational beings in any possible universe. Even more, Gibbard agrees that some moral attitudes are more warranted than others, that “genocide is wrong” is more legitimate than “genocide is good”. But once we agree that there are objective normative truths and moral attitudes can be more or less justified, how is this any different from moral realism?

Indeed, in terms of cognitive science I’m not sure beliefs and emotions are so easily separable in the first place. In some sense I think statements of fact can be intrinsically motivating—or perhaps it is better to put it this way: If your brain is working properly, certain beliefs and emotions will necessarily coincide. If you believe that you are about to be attacked by a tiger, and you don’t experience the emotion of fear, something is wrong; if you believe that you are about to die of starvation, and you don’t experience the emotion of hunger, something is wrong. Conversely, if you believe that you are safe from all danger, and yet you experience fear, something is wrong; if you believe that you have eaten plenty of food, yet you still experience hunger, something is wrong. When your beliefs and emotions don’t align, either your beliefs or your emotions are defective. I would say that the same is true of moral beliefs. If you believe that genocide is wrong but you are not motivated to resist genocide, something is wrong; if you believe that feeding your children is obligatory but you are not motivated to feed your children, something is wrong.

It may well be that without emotion, facts would never motivate us; but emotions can warranted by facts. That is how we distinguish depression from sadness, mania from joy, phobia from fear. Indeed I am dubious of the entire philosophical project of noncognitivism, of which expressivism is the moral form. Noncognitivism is the idea that a given domain of mental processing is not cognitive—not based on thinking, reason, or belief. There is often a sense that noncognitive mental processing is “lower” than cognition, usually based on the idea that it is more phylogenetically conserved—that we think as men but feel as rats.

Yet in fact this is not how human emotions work at all. Poetry—mere words—often evokes the strongest of emotions. A text message of “I love you” or “I think we should see other people” can change the course of our lives. An ambulance in the driveway will pale the face of any parent. In 2001 the video footage of airplanes colliding with skyscrapers gave all of America nightmares for weeks. Yet stop and think about what text messages, ambulances, video footage, airplanes, and skyscrapers are—they are technologies so advanced, so irreducibly cognitive, that even the world’s technological superpower had none of them 200 years ago. (We didn’t have text messages forty years ago!) Even something as apparently dry as numbers can have profound emotional effects: In the statements “Your blood sugar is X mg/dL” to a diabetic, “You have Y years to live” to a cancer patient, or “Z people died” in a news report, the emotional effects are almost wholly dependent upon the value of the numbers X, Y, and Z—values of X = 100, Y = 50 and Z = 0 would be no cause for alarm (or perhaps even cause for celebration!), while values of X = 400, Y = 2, and Z = 10,000 would trigger immediate shock, terror and despair. The entire discipline of cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy depends upon the fact that talking to people about their thoughts and beliefs can have profound effects upon their emotions and actions—and in empirical studies, cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy is verified to work in a variety of circumstances and is more effective than medication for virtually every mental disorder. We do not think as men but feel as rats; we thinkandfeel as human beings.

Because they are evolved instincts, we have limited control over them, and other animals have them, we are often inclined to suppose that emotions are simple, stupid, irrational—but on the contrary they are mind-bogglingly complex, brilliantly intelligent, and the essence of what it means to be a rational being. People who don’t have emotions aren’t rational—they are inert. In psychopathology a loss of capacity for emotion is known as flat affect, and it is often debilitating; it is often found in schizophrenia and autism, and in its most extreme forms it causes catatonia—that is, a total lack of body motion. From Plato to Star Trek, Western culture has taught us to think that a loss of emotion would improve our rationality; but on the contrary, a loss of all emotion would render us completely vegetative. Lieutenant Commander Data without his emotion chip should stand in one place and do nothing—for this is what people without emotion actually do.

Indeed, attractive and aversive experiences—that is, emotions—are the core of goal-seeking behavior, without which rationality is impossible. Apparently simple experiences like pleasure and pain (let alone obviously complicated ones like jealousy and patriotism) are so complex that the most advanced robots in the world cannot even get close to simulating them. Injure a rat, and it will withdraw and cry out in pain; damage a robot (at least any less than a state-of-the-art research robot), and it will not react at all, continuing ineffectually through the same motions it was attempting a moment ago. This shows that rats are smarter than robots—an organism that continues on its way regardless of the stimulus is more like a plant than an animal.

Our emotions do sometimes fail us. They hurt us, they put us at risk, they make us behave in ways that are harmful or irrational. Yet to declare on these grounds that emotions are the enemy of reason would be like declaring that we should all poke out our eyes because sometimes we are fooled by optical illusions. It would be like saying that a shirt with one loose thread is unwearable, that a mathematician who once omits a negative sign should never again be trusted. This is not rationality but perfectionism. Like human eyes, human emotions are rational the vast majority of the time, and when they aren’t, this is cause for concern. Truly irrational emotions include mania, depression, phobia, and paranoia—and it’s no accident that we respond to these emotions with psychotherapy and medication.

Expressivism is legitimate precisely because it is not a challenger to moral realism. Personally, I think that expressivism is wrong because moral claims express facts as much as they express attitudes; but given our present state of knowledge about cognitive science, that is the sort of question upon which reasonable people can disagree. Moreover, the close ties between emotion and reason may ultimately entail that we are wrong to make the distinction in the first place. It is entirely reasonable, at our present state of knowledge, to think that moral judgments are primarily emotional rather than propositional. What isnot reasonable, however, is the claim that moral statements cannot be objectively justified—the evidence against this claim is simply too compelling to ignore. If moral claims are emotions, they are emotions that can be objectively justified.

Against Moral Anti-Realism

PNRJ cognitive science, core principles, ethics, Logic of Kindness , , , , , , , , , ,

Sep 22 JDN 2460576

Moral anti-realism is more philosophically sophisticated than relativism, but it is equally mistaken. It is what is sounds like, the negation of moral realism. Moral anti-realists hold that moral truths are meaningless because they rest upon presumptions about the world that fail to hold. To an anti-realist, “genocide is wrong” is meaningless because there is no such thing as “wrong”, much as to any sane person “unicorns have purple feathers” is meaningless because there are no such things as unicorns. They aren’t saying that genocide isn’t wrong—they’re saying that wrong itself is a defective concept.

The vast majority of people profess strong beliefs in moral truth, and indeed strong beliefs about particular moral issues, such as abortion, capital punishment, same-sex marriage, euthanasia, contraception, civil liberties, and war. There is at the very least a troubling tension here between academia and daily life.

This does not by itself prove that moral truths exist. Ordinary people could be simply wrong about these core beliefs. Indeed, I must acknowledge that most ordinary people clearly are deeply ignorant about certain things, as only 55\% of Americans believe that the theory of evolution is true, and only 66\% of Americans agree that the majority of recent changes in Earth’s climate has been caused by human activity, when in reality these are scientific facts, empirically demonstrable through multiple lines of evidence, verified beyond all reasonable doubt, and both evolution and climate change are universally accepted within the scientific community. In scientific terms there is no more doubt about evolution or climate change than there is about the shape of the Earth or the structure of the atom.

If there were similarly compelling reasons to be moral anti-realists, then the fact that most people believe in morality would be little different: Perhaps most ordinary people are simply wrong about these issues. But when asked to provide similarly compelling evidence for why they reject the moral views of ordinary people, moral anti-realists have little to offer.

Many anti-realists will note the diversity of moral opinions in the world, as John Burgess did, which would be rather like noting the diversity of beliefs about the soul as an argument against neuroscience, or noting the diversity of beliefs about the history of life as an argument against evolution. Many people are wrong about many things that science has shown to be the case; this is worrisome for various reasons, but it is not an argument against the validity of scientific knowledge. Similarly, a diversity of opinions about morality is worrisome, but hardly evidence against the validity of morality.

In fact, when they talk about such fundamental disagreements in morality, anti-realists don’t have very compelling examples. It’s easy to find fundamental disagreements about biology—ask an evolutionary biologist and a Creationist whether humans share an ancestor with chimpanzees. It’s easy to find fundamental disagreements about cosmology—ask a physicist and an evangelical Christian how the Earth began. It’s easy to find fundamental disagreements about climate—ask a climatologist and an oil company executive whether human beings are causing global warming. But where are these fundamental disagreements in morality? Sure, on specific matters there is some disagreement. There are differences between cultures regarding what animals it is acceptable to eat, and differences between cultures about what constitutes acceptable clothing, and differences on specific political issues. But in what society is it acceptable to kill people arbitrarily? Where is it all right to steal whatever you want? Where is lying viewed as a good thing? Where is it obligatory to eat only dirt? In what culture has wearing clothes been a crime? Moral realists are by no means committed to saying that everyone agrees about everything—but it does support our case to point out that most people agree on most things most of the time.

There are a few compelling cases of moral disagreement, but they hardly threaten moral realism. How might we show one culture’s norms to be better than another’s? Compare homicide rates. Compare levels of poverty. Compare overall happiness, perhaps using surveys—or even brain scans. This kind of data exists, and it has a fairly clear pattern: people living in social democratic societies (such as Sweden and Norway) are wealthier, safer, longer-lived, and overall happier than people in other societies. Moreover, using the same publicly-available data, democratic societies in general do much better than authoritarian societies, by almost any measure. This is an empirical fact. It doesn’t necessarily mean that such societies are doing everything right—but they are clearly doing something right. And it really isn’t so implausible to say that what they are doing right is enforcing a good system of moral, political, and cultural norms.

Then again, perhaps some people would accept these empirical facts but still insist that their culture is superior; suppose the disagreement really is radical and intractable. This still leaves two possibilities for moral realism.

The most obvious answer would be to say that one group is wrong—that, objectively, one culture is better than another.

But even if that doesn’t work, there is another way: Perhaps both are right, or more precisely, perhaps these two cultural systems are equally good but incompatible. Is this relativism? Some might call it that, but if it is, it’s relativism of a very narrow kind. I am emphatically not saying that all existing cultures are equal, much less that all possible cultures are equal. Instead, I am saying that it is entirely possible to have two independent moral systems which prescribe different behaviors yet nonetheless result in equally-good overall outcomes.

I could make a mathematical argument involving local maxima of nonlinear functions, but instead I think I’ll use an example: Traffic laws.

In the United States, we drive on the right side of the road. In the United Kingdom, they drive on the left side. Which way is correct? Both are—both systems work well, and neither is superior in any discernible way. In fact, there are other systems that would be just as effective, like the system of all one-way roads that prevails in Manhattan.

Yet does this mean that we should abandon reason in our traffic planning, throw up our hands and declare that any traffic system is as good as any other? On the contrary—there are plenty of possible traffic systems that clearly don’t work. Pointing several one-way roads into one another with no exit is clearly not going to result in good traffic flow. Having each driver flip a coin to decide whether to drive on the left or the right would result in endless collisions. Moreover, our own system clearly isn’t perfect. Nearly 40,000 Americans die of car collisions every year; perhaps we can find a better system that will prevent some or all of these deaths. The mere fact that two, or three, or even 400 different systems of laws or morals are equally good does not entail that all systems are equally good. Even if two cultures really are equal, that doesn’t mean we need to abandon moral realism; it merely means that some problems have multiple solutions. “X2 = 4; what is X?” has two perfectly correct answers (2 and -2), but it also has an infinite variety of wrong answers.

In fact, moral disagreement may not be evidence of anti-realism at all. In order to disagree with someone, you must think that there is an objective fact to be decided. If moral statements were seen as arbitrary and subjective, then people wouldn’t argue about them very much. Imagine an argument, “Chocolate is the best flavor of ice cream!” “No, vanilla is the best!”. This sort of argument might happen on occasion between seven-year-olds, but it is definitely not the sort of thing we hear from mature adults. This is because as adults we realize that tastes in ice cream really are largely subjective. An anti-realist can, in theory, account for this, if they can explain why moral values are falsely perceived as objective while values in taste are not; but if all values are all really arbitrary and subjective, why is it that this is obvious to everyone in the one case and not the other? In fact, there are compelling reasons to think that we couldn’t perceive moral values as arbitrary even if we tried. Some people say “abortion is a right”, others say “abortion is murder”. Even if we were to say that these are purely arbitrary, we would still be left with the task of deciding what laws to make on abortion. Regardless of where the goals come from, some goals are just objectively incompatible.

Another common anti-realist argument rests upon the way that arguments about morality often become emotional and irrational. Charles Stevenson has made this argument; apparently Stevenson has never witnessed an argument about religion, science, or policy, certainly not one outside academia. Many laypeople will insist passionately that the free market is perfect, global warming is a lie, or the Earth is only 6,000 years old. (Often the same people, come to think of it.) People will grow angry and offended if such beliefs are disputed. Yet these are objectively false claims. Unless we want to be anti-realists about GDP, temperature and radiometric dating, emotional and irrational arguments cannot compel us to abandon realism.

Another frequent claim, commonly known as the “argument from queerness”, says that moral facts would need to be something very strange, usually imagined as floating obligations existing somewhere in space; but this is rather like saying that mathematical facts cannot exist because we do not see floating theorems in space and we have never met a perfect triangle. In fact, there is no such thing as a floating speed of light or a floating Schrodinger’s equation either, but no one thinks this is an argument against physics.

A subtler version of this argument, the original “argument from queerness” put forth by J.L. Mackie, says that moral facts are strange because they are intrinsically motivating, something no other kind of facts would be. This is no doubt true; but it seems to me a fairly trivial observation, since part of the definition of “moral fact” is that anything which has this kind of motivational force is a moral (or at least normative) fact. Any well-defined natural kind is subject to the same sort of argument. Spheres are perfectly round three-dimensional objects, something no other object is. Eyes are organs that perceive light, something no other organ does. Moral facts are indeed facts that categorically motivate action, which no other thing does—but so what? All this means is that we have a well-defined notion of what it means to be a moral fact.

Finally, it is often said that moral claims are too often based on religion, and religion is epistemically unfounded, so morality must fall as well. Now, unlike most people, I completely agree that religion is epistemically unfounded. Instead, the premise I take issue with is the idea that moral claims have anything to do with religion. A lot of people seem to think so; but in fact our most important moral values transcend religion and in many cases actually contradict it.

Now, it may well be that the majority of claims people make about morality are to some extent based in their religious beliefs. The majority of governments in history have been tyrannical; does that mean that government is inherently tyrannical, there is no such thing as a just government? The vast majority of human beings have never traveled in outer space; does that mean space travel is impossible? Similarly, I see no reason to say that simply because the majority of moral claims (maybe) are religious, therefore moral claims are inherently religious.

Generally speaking, moral anti-realists make a harsh distinction between morality and other domains of knowledge. They agree that there are such things as trucks and comets and atoms, but do not agree that there are such things as obligations and rights. Indeed, a typical moral anti-realist speaks as if they are being very rigorous and scientific while we moral realists are being foolish, romantic, even superstitious. Moral anti-realism has an attitude of superciliousness not seen in a scientific faction since behaviorism.

But in fact, I think moral anti-realism is the result of a narrow understanding of fundamental physics and cognitive science. It is a failure to drink deep enough of the Pierian springs. This is not surprising, since fundamental physics and cognitive science are so mind-bogglingly difficult that even the geniuses of the world barely grasp them. Quoth Feynman: “I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.” This was of course a bit overstated—Feynman surely knew that there are things we do understand about quantum physics, for he was among those who best understood them. Still, even the brightest minds in the world face total bafflement before problems like dark energy, quantum gravity, the binding problem, and the Hard Problem. It is no moral failing to have a narrow understanding of fundamental physics and cognitive science, for the world’s greatest minds have a scarcely broader understanding.

The failing comes from trying to apply this narrow understanding of fundamental science to moral problems without the humility to admit that the answers are never so simple. “Neuroscience proves we have no free will.” No it doesn’t! It proves we don’t have the kind of free will you thought we did. “We are all made of atoms, therefore there can be no such thing as right and wrong.” And what do you suppose we would have been made of if there were such things as right and wrong? Magical fairy dust?

Here is what I think moral anti-realists get wrong: They hear only part of what scientists say. Neuroscientists explain to them that the mind is a function of matter, and they hear it as if we had said there is only mindless matter. Physicists explain to them that we have much more precise models of atomic phenomena than we do of human behavior, and they hear it as if we had said that scientific models of human behavior are fundamentally impossible. They trust that we know very well what atoms are made of and very poorly what is right and wrong—when quite the opposite is the case.

In fact, the more we learn about physics and cognitive science, the more similar the two fields seem. There was a time when Newtonian mechanics ruled, when everyone thought that physical objects are made of tiny billiard balls bouncing around according to precise laws, while consciousness was some magical, “higher” spiritual substance that defied explanation. But now we understand that quantum physics is all chaos and probability, while cognitive processes can be mathematically modeled and brain waves can be measured in the laboratory. Something as apparently simple as a proton—let alone an extended, complex object, like a table or a comet—is fundamentally a functional entity, a unit of structure rather than substance. To be a proton is to be organized the way protons are and to do what protons do; and so to be human is to be organized the way humans are and to do what humans do. The eternal search for “stuff” of which everything is made has come up largely empty; eventually we may find the ultimate “stuff”, but when we do, it will already have long been apparent that substance is nowhere near as important as structure. Reductionism isn’t so much wrong as beside the point—when we want to understand what makes a table a table or what makes a man a man, it simply doesn’t matter what stuff they are made of. The table could be wood, glass, plastic, or metal; the man could be carbon, nitrogen and water like us, or else silicon and tantalum like Lieutenant Commander Data on Star Trek. Yes, structure must be made of something, and the substance does affect the structures that can be made out of it, but the structure is what really matters, not the substance.

Hence, I think it is deeply misguided to suggest that because human beings are made of molecules, this means that we are just the same thing as our molecules. Love is indeed made of oxytocin (among other things), but only in the sense that a table is made of wood. To know that love is made of oxytocin really doesn’t tell us very much about love; we need also to understand how oxytocin interacts with the bafflingly complex system that is a human brain—and indeed how groups of brains get together in relationships and societies. This is because love, like so much else, is not substance but function—something you do, not something you are made of.

It is not hard, rigorous science that says love is just oxytocin and happiness is just dopamine; it is naive, simplistic science. It is the sort of “science” that comes from overlaying old prejudices (like “matter is solid, thoughts are ethereal”) with a thin veneer of knowledge. To be a realist about protons but not about obligations is to be a realist about some functional relations and not others. It is to hear “mind is matter”, and fail to understand the is—the identity between them—instead acting as if we had said “there is no mind; there is only matter”. You may find it hard to believe that mind can be made of matter, as do we all; yet the universe cares not about our incredulity. The perfect correlation between neurochemical activity and cognitive activity has been verified in far too many experiments to doubt. Somehow, that kilogram of wet, sparking gelatin in your head is actually thinking and feeling—it is actually you.

And once we realize this, I do not think it is a great leap to realize that the vast collection of complex, interacting bodies moving along particular trajectories through space that was the Holocaust was actually wrong, really, objectively wrong.

Against Moral Relativism

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Moral relativism is surprisingly common, especially among undergraduate students. There are also some university professors who espouse it, typically but not always from sociology, gender studies or anthropology departments (examples include Marshall Sahlins, Stanley Fish, Susan Harding, Richard Rorty, Michael Fischer, and Alison Renteln). There is a fairly long tradition of moral relativism, from Edvard Westermarck in the 1930s to Melville Herskovits, to more recently Francis Snare and David Wong in the 1980s. University of California Press at Berkeley.} In 1947, the American Anthropological Association released a formal statement declaring that moral relativism was the official position of the anthropology community, though this has since been retracted.

All of this is very, very bad, because moral relativism is an incredibly naive moral philosophy and a dangerous one at that. Vitally important efforts to advance universal human rights are conceptually and sometimes even practically undermined by moral relativists. Indeed, look at that date again: 1947, two years after the end of World War II. The world’s civilized cultures had just finished the bloodiest conflict in history, including some ten million people murdered in cold blood for their religion and ethnicity, and the very survival of the human species hung in the balance with the advent of nuclear weapons—and the American Anthropological Association was insisting that morality is meaningless independent of cultural standards? Were they trying to offer an apologia for genocide?

What is relativism trying to say, anyway? Often the arguments get tied up in knots. Consider a particular example, infanticide. Moral relativists will sometimes argue, for example, that infanticide is wrong in the modern United States but permissible in ancient Inuit society. But is this itself an objectively true normative claim? If it is, then we are moral realists. Indeed, the dire circumstances of ancient Inuit society would surely justify certain life-and-death decisions we wouldn’t otherwise accept. (Compare “If we don’t strangle this baby, we may all starve to death” and “If we don’t strangle this baby, we will have to pay for diapers and baby food”.) Circumstances can change what is moral, and this includes the circumstances of our cultural and ecological surroundings. So there could well be an objective normative fact that infanticide is justified by the circumstances of ancient Inuit life. But if there are objective normative facts, this is moral realism. And if there are no objective normative facts, then all moral claims are basically meaningless. Someone could just as well claim that infanticide is good for modern Americans and bad for ancient Inuits, or that larceny is good for liberal-arts students but bad for engineering students.

If instead all we mean is that particular acts are perceived as wrong in some societies but not in others, this is a factual claim, and on certain issues the evidence bears it out. But without some additional normative claim about whose beliefs are right, it is morally meaningless. Indeed, the idea that whatever society believes is right is a particularly foolish form of moral realism, as it would justify any behavior—torture, genocide, slavery, rape—so long as society happens to practice it, and it would never justify any kind of change in any society, because the status quo is by definition right. Indeed, it’s not even clear that this is logically coherent, because different cultures disagree, and within each culture, individuals disagree. To say that an action is “right for some, wrong for others” doesn’t solve the problem—because either it is objectively normatively right or it isn’t. If it is, then it’s right, and it can’t be wrong; and if it isn’t—if nothing is objectively normatively right—then relativism itself collapses as no more sound than any other belief.

In fact, the most difficult part of defending common-sense moral realism is explaining why it isn’t universally accepted. Why are there so many relativists? Why do so many anthropologists and even some philosophers scoff at the most fundamental beliefs that virtually everyone in the world has?

I should point out that it is indeed relativists, and not realists, who scoff at the most fundamental beliefs of other people. Relativists are fond of taking a stance of indignant superiority in which moral realism is just another form of “ethnocentrism” or “imperialism”. The most common battleground of contention recently is the issue of female circumcision, which is considered completely normal or even good in some African societies but is viewed with disgust and horror by most Western people. Other common choices include abortion, clothing, especially Islamic burqa and hijab, male circumcision, and marriage; given the incredible diversity in human food, clothing, language, religion, behavior, and technology, there are surprisingly few moral issues on which different cultures disagree—but relativists like to milk them for all they’re worth!

But I dare you, anthropologists: Take a poll. Ask people which is more important to them, their belief that, say, female circumcision is immoral, or their belief that moral right and wrong are objective truths? Virtually anyone in any culture anywhere in the world would sooner admit they are wrong about some particular moral issue than they would assent to the claim that there is no such thing as a wrong moral belief. I for one would be more willing to abandon just about any belief I hold before I would abandon the belief that there are objective normative truths. I would sooner agree that the Earth is flat and 6,000 years old, that the sky is green, that I am a brain in a vat, that homosexuality is a crime, that women are inferior to men, or that the Holocaust was a good thing—than I would ever agree that there is no such thing as right or wrong. This is of course because once I agreed that there is no objective normative truth, I would be forced to abandon everything else as well—since without objective normativity there is no epistemic normativity, and hence no justice, no truth, no knowledge, no science. If there is nothing objective to say about how we ought to think and act, then we might as well say the Earth is flat and the sky is green.

So yes, when I encounter other cultures with other values and ideas, I am forced to deal with the fact that they and I disagree about many things, important things that people really should agree upon. We disagree about God, about the afterlife, about the nature of the soul; we disagree about many specific ethical norms, like those regarding racial equality, feminism, sexuality and vegetarianism. We may disagree about economics, politics, social justice, even family values. But as long as we are all humans, we probably agree about a lot of other important things, like “murder is wrong”, “stealing is bad”, and “the sky is blue”. And one thing we definitely do not disagree about—the one cornerstone upon which all future communication can rest—is that these things matter, that they really do describe actual features of an actual world that are worth knowing. If it turns out that I am wrong about these things, \I would want to know! I’d much rather find out I’d been living the wrong way than continue to live the same pretending that it doesn’t matter. I don’t think I am alone in this; indeed, I suspect that the reason people get so angry when I tell them that religion is untrue is precisely because they realize how important it is. One thing religious people never say is “Well, God is imaginary to you, perhaps; but to me God is real. Truth is relative.” I’ve heard atheists defend other people’s beliefs in such terms—but no one ever defends their own beliefs that way. No Evangelical Baptist thinks that Christianity is an arbitrary social construction. No Muslim thinks that Islam is just one equally-valid perspective among many. It is you, relativists, who deny people’s fundamental beliefs.

Yet the fact that relativists accuse realists of being chauvinistic hints at the deeper motivations of moral relativism. In a word: Guilt. Moral relativism is an outgrowth of the baggage of moral guilt and self-loathing that Western societies have built up over the centuries. Don’t get me wrong: Western cultures have done terrible things, many terrible things, all too recently. We needn’t go so far back as the Crusades or the ethnocidal “colonization” of the Americas; we need only look to the carpet-bombing of Dresden in 1945 or the defoliation of Vietnam in the 1960s, or even the torture program as recently as 2009. There is much evil that even the greatest nations of the world have to answer for. For all our high ideals, even America, the nation of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”, the culture of “liberty and justice for all”, has murdered thousands of innocent people—and by “murder” I mean murder, killing not merely by accident in the collateral damage of necessary war, but indeed in acts of intentional and selfish cruelty. Not all war is evil—but many wars are, and America has fought in some of them. No Communist radical could ever burn so much of the flag as the Pentagon itself has burned in acts of brutality.

Yet it is an absurd overreaction to suggest that there is nothing good about Western culture, nothing valuable about secularism, liberal democracy, market economics, or technological development. It is even more absurd to carry the suggestion further, to the idea that civilization was a mistake and we should all go back to our “natural” state as hunter-gatherers. Yet there are anthropologists working today who actually say such things. And then, as if we had not already traversed so far beyond the shores of rationality that we can no longer see the light of home, then relativists take it one step further and assert that any culture is as good as any other.

Think about what this would mean, if it were true. To say that all cultures are equal is to say that science, education, wealth, technology, medicine—all of these are worthless. It is to say that democracy is no better than tyranny, security is no better than civil war, secularism is no better than theocracy. It is to say that racism is as good as equality, sexism is as good as feminism, feudalism is as good as capitalism.

Many relativists seem worried that moral realism can be used by the powerful and privileged to oppress others—the cishet White males who rule the world (and let’s face it, cishet White males do, pretty much, rule the world!) can use the persuasive force of claiming objective moral truth in order to oppress women and minorities. Yet what is wrong with oppressing women and minorities, if there is no such thing as objective moral truth? Only under moral realism is oppression truly wrong.