Rust Belt Philosophy

Oh oh - I know what Andrew Sullivan is going to be this Halloween! He's going to be Winner Of The Social Lottery Man.*

"In general, money = power. The more of their own money people keep the more likely it is that the society will evolve the way its people want it to evolve, and not be coerced by some rationalist in government."

Since he's not an idiot, Sullivan supplements this highly abstracted argument by saying that governments need "to ensure that the game is not rigged, that private corporations do not gain too much power, that politics is not corrupted in this fashion, and that financial markets are robustly regulated and monopolies vigorously broken up." This addition, however, still does not suffice to connect his premise (money = power) to his conclusion.

If we take money to be a good estimate of power - and I guess we're specifically talking about the power to change society here, which is sort of an abruptly precise assumption to make - Sullivan's conclusion requires money to be approximately evenly distributed across society. It's true that low taxes will, on this argument, at least cripple the government in terms of its ability to drive social change, but that doesn't automatically mean that that power falls "the people." Nor, in fact, are corporations the only other complicating factor. They may or may not be significantly more of a threat than Sullivan takes them to be, but in either case there's still a factor unaccounted for by his analysis: population diversity.

Usually we think of diversity in terms of census demographics - age, race, ethnicity, religion, gender, and so on. In this case, falling back on that intuition is at least a good start: it's simply not the case that every demographic category is equally, or even nearly equally, wealthy. Even if every single person kept all of their money, Sullivan would in effect be arguing here for a society run by white Christian males. That this is the society we actually have is hardly a defense of such a position, especially given that Sullivan claims that his system supports the little people. The percentages are against the little people; this is, in fact, why they are the little people. If we could trust his "devolved," "closer to the ground" decision-making process to be demographically fair or just, we'd likely not need to have this discussion in the first place.

In addition to this problem - which has now become so widely recognized that less high-minded conservatives feel free to belittle it as "race warfare," to take one example, but which Sullivan manages nonetheless to treat as nonexistent - there's another insidious exception lurking. Who's to say that money will (or should) be distributed along party affiliation lines? Even if all of our standard demographic concerns could be satisfied, it might still be the case that money just so happens to gravitate disproportionately to members of one political party or ideology. This need not happen due to corruption - some political ideologies eschew wealth, for example, and so their followers may freely choose to dispense of what Sullivan would call their political power. Most (hopefully all) of us would hesitate to say that a poorer political party should be excluded from the table just in virtue of its (relative) poverty, especially when that (relative) poverty is a result of the core beliefs of that party, but that seems very much to be an unavoidable consequence of Sullivan's ideology.

There are many more reasons to adopt a more left-wing view than the one to which Sullivan subscribes, but these few objections represent some serious flaws in his thinking that have adverse real-world consequences. He may very well be right that his ideal would function better than the system we currently have in place, but that isn't exactly saying much. In order to criticize our political reality effectively, we must reach a thorough and well-founded understanding of why our social inefficiencies and injustices persist and not just point out that they persist.

*Which, when you really think about it, is a bit on the redundant side.

An oldie, but a goodie:

(Also, let me know if you get the title. I might be the only one who remembers this.)

Sigh - I go away for a few days and look what happens: everyone loses their damn minds.

"Stewart-Colbertism scorns extremism of all types, but especially conservative extremism, and most especially conservative extremism driven by ignorance or religious fundamentalism. It is mildly critical of liberalism, but mainly for failing to combat conservative bombast more effectively. It endorses, implicitly, whatever liberal consensus has managed to survive these past 30 years, but isn't terribly interested in the details. All this works well as humor, but as a sentiment shouted through a bullhorn to thousands stretched between the U.S. Capitol and the Washington Monument, it will translate into, well, judging other people for what they don't know. It will do so no matter how much everyone laughs. Indeed, the laughter will likely make it worse, because a rally puts its 'audience' behind the proscenium; the spectators and the performers are collaborators. A more legitimate (and probably more successful) political impulse would be to try to persuade the unenlightened that you have a better idea."

Timothy Noah, kindly pull your head out of your ass. If the right wing - especially the Tea People - could be persuaded rationally, they would have been by now. These are the people funding Food fucking Insurance, Timothy - rationality is not exactly their goddamn strong suit. And I say it's about damn time we start judging people for what they don't know. We have this thing, see, called "the internet," and it just so happens to be really really good at helping you learn things you don't already know. Like, for example, the text of the First Amendment.

"When Delaware U.S. Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell interjected this question in last week’s debate with her opponent Chris Coons, the audience—a law school audience—laughed and guffawed in derision. But the joke, of course, is on the audience: as everyone with even a modicum of understanding of the Constitution knows, the term 'separation of church and state' appears nowhere in the Constitution."

Oh ho ho! You're real fucking clever, Michael Paulsen! Except for how it's patently false that O'Donnell "admirabl[y] obsess[es]" over "the actual words of the Constitution." And how originalism is a hollow doctrine. And how the government absolutely can "prohibit religious exercise" (seen any gays stoned to death recently?). And how you're a transparent partisan apologist for imbeciles.

And speaking of imbeciles,

"The government should not be dictating to pastors and churches what they can and cannot preach about. Because of the Johnson amendment and an entire atmosphere of fear and excessive caution that have surrounded it, the crucial voice of the church in society has been muzzled for too long."

If you don't want churches to be subject to government supervision, Wayne Grudem, don't encourage them to appeal for special help from the motherfucking government. The government doesn't grant tax-exempt status just cause it's the nice thing to do, you asshole, it comes as part of a package complete with other rights and responsibilities. You don't like the deal? You're free to not fucking make it.

And finally, to top this whole thing off, there's this piece of utterly regrettable news.

"As this year's filmmakers and actors await the coming awards season, Zagat Survey has released The World's Best Movies, a new guide covering the top 1,000 movies of all time...

1) The Godfather (1972)

2) The Godfather Part II (1974)

3) Casablanca (1942)

4) Schindler's List (1993)

5) Lawrence of Arabia (1962)

6) To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)

7) Star Wars (1977)

8) The Wizard of Oz (1939)

9) Lady Eve (1941)

10) Singin' in the Rain (1952)

11) Rear Window (1954)

12) It Happened One Night (1934)

13) Citizen Kane (1941)

14) Shawshank Redemption (1994)

15) All About Eve (1950)

16) The Pianist (2002)

17) African Queen (1951)

18) Third Man (1949)

19) Finding Nemo (2003)

20) Dr. Strangelove (1964)"

Just another one for the files.

"The key concept here is radical capacity. The early human embryo has the radical capacity to think and laugh and pun; all it (he or she) needs is time and nourishment, no more: the actual and active second-order or radical capacity, written into its molecular and cellular constitution, to develop first-order, promptly usable capacities such as to learn a language here and now."

Despite the unique way in which he does so, John Finnis has done nothing here but find one more way not to generate a general prima facie argument against abortion. We know that some fetuses cannot in fact develop the ability "to think and laugh and pun" and we can detect that with pretty impressive accuracy. On Finnis's standards - and counter to, I dunno, all of biology - these are not human and are therefore excepted from any protections he might try to extend to humans. Not that this stops him from extending those protections anyway, of course...

"...what is wrong in principle with [personhood] positions is that they deny human equality, elevating various subrational animals of their choice above healthy young babies weeks, months, and years after birth, and above the deeply disabled mentally or physically."

...but on his own criteria this attempt is invalid. These "healthy young babies" to which he refers are, according to the "radical capacity" argument, not even human. Whether they are still above "subrational animals" is still an open question, perhaps, but it is at the very least an open question. Why Finnis fails to recognize this is anybody's guess; for my part, I can only mark one more tally on the long-running scorecard of anti-abortion theorists whose own stated views allow for abortions.

Oh, the burdens of being a blogger! This is normally not a meme to which I would give a second thought, but I'm contractually obligated to discuss this sort of thing, so here we go...

"I want to learn more about what New Atheists really believe. So I'm asking Moran a few questions, although other atheists (Myers, Coyne, Novella, Shallit, etc) are invited to reply on their blogs, and I will answer.

Here are the questions:

1) Why is there anything?

2) What caused the Universe?

3) Why is there regularity (Law) in nature?

4) Of the Four Causes in nature proposed by Aristotle (material, formal, efficient, and final), which of them are real? Do final causes exist?

5) Why do we have subjective experience, and not merely objective existence?

6) Why is the human mind intentional, in the technical philosophical sense of aboutness, which is the referral to something besides itself? How can mental states be about something?

7) Does Moral Law exist in itself, or is it an artifact of nature (natural selection, etc.)

8) Why is there evil?"

This whole thing is bullshit. Michael Egnor does not "want to learn more about what New Atheists really believe." If he did, he could just go read the several books and many articles that have already been written on these topics. As I said earlier, if not for my obligations as a blogger I wouldn't even bother with this transparent publicity stunt.

Since I'm so ill-pleased to have to do this, I'm going to cheat as much as I can and lean on the work that others have already done, starting with Ophelia Benson.

"...none of it includes the word 'god.'"

Again, if Egnor were serious in his quest for knowledge, this would be the beginning, middle, and end of the conversation. Do you really want to know the one unifying belief that stretches across all of the various brands of the so-called new atheism? It's that the word "god" isn't involved. That's it! Unsurprisingly enough, the New Atheism Federation doesn't exactly mail you packages full of brainwashing materials once you sign up so that we can all have a uniform response to questions like the ones Egnor poses. (There is, in fact, no New Atheism Federation. I know you all know this, but maybe Egnor doesn't and someone ought to point it out to him.) To challenge the myriad beliefs of any group based on an arbitrary subset of that group's beliefs is ridiculous for believers as well as skeptics, and in this case Egnor's failure to consider pluralism also amounts to

"an effort to shift the burden of proof to atheists, and in turn a concession that the burden of proof falls on those who make positive truth claims.

In that light, the real answer to all of those questions turns out to be the same answer: evidence will decide these questions if anything will. Period. Full stop."

The multitude of views within the atheist community is not an indication that atheism either has no answers or cannot have answers. Rather, it is merely the result of differing views of the evidence - including, of course, the view that the evidence is inconclusive.


It's no coincidence that Egnor's choice of questions is organized so as to create the impression that atheism is theoretically deficient in various ways.  In particular, the subtext here is that atheism is more theoretically deficient than the various -isms to which it has been proposed as an alternative.  Although Egnor never comes out and says as much himself, the result of this subtext is that readers come to expect atheism to offer solid, substantiated answers simply because other systems have already (claimed to) provide answers of that sort. Since that expectation will then go unmet, Egnor will have scored a rhetorical victory that is utterly decoupled from logical dialog: in effect, he will have convinced people of the utterly ridiculous notion that one cannot ever reject a contradictory and evidence-weak view unless one has a fully-constructed alternative. This is so transparently stupid a belief that nobody would ever fall for it if it were stated plainly - but then that's exactly why Egnor doesn't state it plainly. Nor is this sort of thing exclusive to Egnor. See, for example, this piece by Gary Hardaway:

"Atheists have an insoluble problem. If God doesn’t exist, human beings can have no special value. Who’s to say that we are more important than a baboon or a hyena or a one-celled amoeba.? We have no basis for saying that our lives have purpose, meaning, or significance. We have no solid ground for preferring one kind of community or government over another."

Or, in other words: you atheists are not allowed to disprove my theism unless you can speak in one compelling voice about what I should believe instead. Aside from the obvious problems of saying that belief in a contradiction is justified in the absence of (perceived) viable alternatives, Egnor's particular instantiation of this game just so happens to be substantially rigged.

"I will say [that #1] has always struck me as an odd question. The assumption seems to be that non-being ('nothing') is somehow more fundamental than being ('something'), and that we need an explanation of why there is being instead of only non-being.

But this supposition must be another strange intuition of the human species, because I see no evidence for it. We have never discovered non-being. Even the blackest depths of outer space are filled with a soup of quantum fluctuations. Perhaps non-being is impossible! I don’t know. But all the evidence we do have can only suggest that it is being that is more fundamental than non-being, in which case the whole question is wrong-headed."

Egnor's own response, that "God created the universe as a free act of creation," betrays this underhanded dealing. He perceives the need to ask the question precisely because he already believes in a creator; his very motivation for asking the question, in other words, is question-begging. This is not to say that none of the questions are worth answering or thinking about - some of them are - but it's useful to identify the thought processes that lead to questions being asked in the first place.

One of the meaningful questions that Egnor asks is about morality. Assuming that he means to ask about the mere existence of objective morality, atheism can certainly provide such a thing. It won't be a "law" in the same sense as, say, a political law where there's enforcement and therefore motivation for behavior, but it would be an inevitable set of conditions that describe behaviors and so lawlike enough. Even theists acknowledge this - see, for instance, Ed Feser's claim that there is some "sort of thing that, given our nature, can never in principle be good for us." Another meaningful question is about intentionality, but this question is so trivially easily answered that Egnor's pessimism starts to look pretty obviously like a front.

"Mental states are 'about' external objects in the sense that they create a simulation or representation of those objects, such that perturbations of the simulation accurately track the behavior of the external object."

And so on and so forth. Some questions have quite good answers and some questions are in fact quite bad questions, but professed ignorance in any or every instance is just not a problem. We don't need, for example, to know why the big bang happened (for any sense of "why") in order to know that it wasn't a four-sided triangle or a sentient, mobile garden gnome named Fredrick who lives in my back yard. This silly game wherein atheism is slandered because of its alleged inability to answer questions to the satisfaction of theists has got to stop. It is not a helpful way to go about forming knowledge and indeed creates an atmosphere antithetical to open-minded inquiry and truth-seeking. Those questions of Egnor's that need to be answered ought to be addressed on their own terms, not in order to play at appeasing theists.

Do you know what I like? I like it when people set up their whole argument on a rhetorical question that is in fact quite easily answered. You know, like this.

"Traditional religious views on slavery, women, and divorce have all changed dramatically, and in response to theological, moral and ethical reflection—not scientific advances. The old views still circulate on Main Street, but then so do Newton’s old ideas about motion. Two hundred years ago many, if not most, Christians in America believed that slavery was a part of God’s ordained social order. Now almost none of them believe this. And this revolution in thought was generated largely from within by informed Christian abolitionists.

How is it that 'science' is allowed to toss its historical baggage overboard when its best informed leaders decide to do so, even though the ideas continue to circulate on Main Street, but religion must forever be defined by the ancient baggage carried by its least informed?"

Because, you fool, nobody is saying that the Principia Mathematica is the word of God or an analogy for the word of God or a "literal metaphor" for the word of God or any of that rubbish. We can make a clean break with scientific mistakes because they were mistakes made by humans and humans, unlike perfect deities, are the sorts of things that make mistakes. You start admitting that the Bible is just another book written entirely by humans without any kind of divine help at all, Karl, and then we'll talk.

As some or all of you may know, San Diego is not particularly close to Pittsburgh, at least on the human scale. Galactically speaking I guess it's a different story, but for our purposes the distance is pretty significant. Flights between the two are therefore somewhat lengthy in nature. In my infinite wisdom, I decided to approach this problem by taking the first flight out, which left at around 6 am (or, in military time, oh-too fucking early hundred). That, however, meant arriving at the airport the night before and having myself a bit of a sleepover.

I did not exactly have a lot of company during my little sleepover.



On the plus side, there were no walkers on the right or standers on the left. If there's anything I really can't bring myself to care about despite the presence of regulatory signage, it's walkers on the right or standers on the left.



I mean, look at this: even the vacuum cleaner is lonely. Do you know how depopulated a place has to be in order for the appliances to feel lonely?

It wasn't all crushing desolation, though - I also got the chance to make some important discoveries. Like, for example, the fact that the Pittsburgh airport is run by TERRORISTS!!!


Oh, it says "chapel" also and the word "mosque" is written in a smaller font, but we all know that real American airports don't have mosques.



Discovery #2: there is such a thing as the mid-Atlantic office area of the mezzanine. Then again, I never did find the business whose name is so helpfully blacked out in that one picture, so maybe there isn't a mid-Atlantic area of the mezzanine and this sign was just a decoy.


This I just thought was far too suspicious. "Yes, you fearful people, come into my unmarked, probably soundproofed door in a remote corner of the airport." Being as it was about 1 am at the time when this picture was taken, captain Petee could not be reached to either confirm or deny this rampant speculation on my part.


I sort of feel like "CAUTION: ROOF" would have been sufficient. It's not like someone is going to read this sign and then think, "Oh, nuts! I was going to practice my gymnastic tumbling routine up there, but since it's slippery and all I'd better not."

Anyway, as it turns out the San Diego airport is significantly more aesthetic than the Pittsburgh airport is, so I took some pictures there as well. Also, it was daylight at the time, and that pretty much always helps.


I thought this was a nice statue to have in there, but there was also this really gimmicky thing with etched glass and light:



The gimmick is that the light would pass through the etchings and cast word-shadows on the wall, like so:


This would be a decent idea, except for (a) how really saccharine and ridiculous the words are ("the precious umbrella of life"?!) and (b) how I could only read about a quarter of them.

Elsewhere, some things hang from the ceiling in a way that marks them as art even though they look exactly like throwaway scraps.


They are indeed "floating in space," but does that make them worthy of display? It is a question that I have.


Unless I'm mistaken, these are also by that Breslaw woman, which raises the issue of why she bothers to hang throwaway scraps from the ceiling when she can produce half-decent stuff like this. Maybe - and I'm saying this as a total amateur in the art criticism world, but - she should just stick to the tapestries. Another interesting question is...


Although the interestingness of this question is not so much in its answer but in why anybody might feel the need to ask it. Here's one hypothesis: San Diegoans consider the rest of us to be dolts. Or: they hired a seven-year-old to write this placard. Your guesses, as always, are welcomed and encouraged.

My temporary roommate and I stayed not in the hotel that hosted the conference but in a rental house on the beach, which turned out to be a great idea and one that I would strongly recommend (at least, in the off-season). Ours was in...


...which is also the subject of the following bunch of shots.


We had a very small amusement park about four or five blocks away - pretty cool, actually.


Tempting as this was, I opted not to partake. It's sort of the same principle that would lead me to avoid cowboy-themed Chinese food: the one thing just doesn't go with the other.


Again, tempting, but I remain under the impression that a hurricane is precisely the sort of thing you want not to simulate.


This I should really have done. Alas.



Believe it or not, my relief at learning that San Diego had laid out a tsunami evacuation route for me was just slightly less than my distress at learning that I had to worry about tsunamis in the first place. Also, maybe this is just me, but isn't it sort of obvious where you go in case of a tsunami? Like, inland, and up if you can manage it?



The general layout of Mission Beach - at least, from what I saw - is that there are streets running roughly parallel to the shoreline and then progressively smaller streets cutting through those perpendicularly. For example...



To my mind, that's not even a full-size sidewalk, let alone something deserving of its own street sign. I saw one of these with a "Private Drive" sign poking out, to which the appropriate question is, what exactly do you think someone is going to drive down there? One-third of a car?

At any rate, the conference was held downtown at the Hilton something-or-other.


Notice the overcast sky. I think it followed me from Pittsburgh, but I can't say for sure.


Not a fan. I'm pretty sure that I understand the idea behind this, but it's just so unappealing. It sure was huge, though.


So the one side of the hotel looks out onto the water and I guess a little island or peninsula and then the city in the background - appropriate sorts of things for a hotel to look out on, right? And then the other side faces a shipping dock.



So scenic!

The conference itself looked like you'd expect a conference to look: lots of oldish people in business casual clothing sitting in chairs watching Power Point slides go by. I decided you all probably could live without that, so instead I wandered around downtown for a bit and took pictures of that.


Normally I wouldn't have included a picture of the inside of a frozen yogurt place, but I really like the way this one fell out, what with the woman being sort of at the base of the flower thing and also being turned away from the camera. A little less glare off the back wall and a little less clutter on the table and I'd be super-pleased with this image, but you've got to work with what you're given.


I walked around this whole building trying to find out why this staircase terminates in a wall of windows. No luck. There are other, more useful staircases, though, so that's a good thing.



Lastly, my traveling partner also took me on a little car tour of the general area, which is to say, beaches around the area.


The sun was totally freaking my camera out, so all of these shots are pretty much horrifically overexposed. It's not all that bad of an effect, though - certainly not one I'd seen before, anyway.



Shades of Icarus in that one.




One of these beaches was home to a bunch of seagulls and seals, which was a bit arresting. It was sort of like seeing the cows wandering around in Israel: you go, "Wait, I thought those were supposed to be in some kind of human institution. They can just wander around on their own like that?"


Check out that couple in the background. Y'think maybe the mood was spoiled by all the seals barking all the time? "Dearest, I love you with all-" "ARF! ARF!" "..."


So that's San Diego: good if you like intensely sunny beaches or comically narrow streets, bad if you have a particularly acute fear of hurricanes or tsunamis or glow-in-the-dark pirates. Next up I'm thinking about doing one at Phipp's conservatory here in Pittsburgh, but that depends on me actually getting my ass over there.

Judging by his book, Daniel Sulmasy needs to have his eyes checked .

"...parties to discussions about death with dignity appear to mean different things by dignity. The key to understanding these apparently conflicting uses of the word dignity is to recall the distinction...between attributed dignity and intrinsic dignity."

Maybe if Sulmasy had some kind of professional reassurance that people do frequently employ "dignity" differently, he'd believe his eyes. As it is, he's putting a whole lot of work into what is ultimately a doomed project.

"...dignity is in its fundamental moral sense defined simply in terms of being human.  Now, of course, this kind of argument depends on the exhaustiveness of the list of candidate properties, but at least it puts the burden of proof on those who oppose assigning priority to the intrinsic sense to come up with the alternative property.  And if it's not one on my list, you may say well, age or size or IQ, whatever other property you want to give, to define the fundamental worth or value of a human being.

So what sorts of candidate properties have been proposed? Well, some have argued that human dignity in its most fundamental moral sense depends upon the amount of pleasure or pain we have in our life."

If I can be tactful for just a moment, this is not, strictly speaking, true - nobody I have ever heard of has "argued that human dignity...depends upon the amount of pleasure or pain" in a life. None. The reason Sulmasy feels the need to say something so blatantly untrue traces back to his distrust of his eyes: in saying this, he has already assumed that "dignity" means "the value...that a human being has." While this is indeed his definition, it is certainly not the definition used by the death-with-dignity folks. Seeing, in this case, really should have been believing.

He produces a marginally better argument a bit later, but it's still not one that we should find terribly compelling. In what I take to be the dominant Christian mode of argumentation, Sulmasy begins with an almost irritatingly banal claim and proceeds to claim that his whole position follows easily - indeed, almost obviously - from that banal claim:

"...consistency is at least a necessary condition of an argument, even if we wouldn't — we would quickly add that it's not sufficient...

First, I think the concept of a moral term implies that it has universal meaning. That's a position acknowledged by both Kant and utilitarians like Hare. Second, it means making it an objective argument that morality is subjective which is internally self-contradictory. And third, to say that human dignity is subjective is to claim that one person can never reliably recognize the dignity of another person because I can never know exactly what any of you think human dignity means until you've told me what it means. But I think we all recognize dignity or value in each other before any of us opens our mouths. And so I think human dignity can't be a purely subjective notion.

Thus, all the argument from consistency would claim is that a fundamental human dignity must therefore be something that we have simply because we're human."

The experiential effect of this writing style is the impression that a denial of the conclusion entails a similar denial of the very first premise mentioned - in this case, consistency. To drop the tact, I find this writing style to be an extremely reliable hallmark of blatant sophistry, which is an expectation not in any way defrayed by the argument above.

Sulmasy is responding here to the notion that dignity is something one decides for oneself, that, to assume something about aesthetics, dignity is an essential aesthetic concept; I find this to be by far the most sensible usage of the concept and am not dissuaded at all by this material. To start with, Sulmasy's first objection (which spills over into his "second") again begs the question about what "dignity" means. Whether or not dignity has a subjective component is the question under consideration here, so he cannot simply assume the view that he likes and then call others self-contradictory. His second ("third") objection is an argument from consequences and, as a result, a bit hard to take seriously. Moreover, in a largely homogeneous society this concern disappears entirely: to the extent that Random Citizen A and I share ideas about value, I can in fact reliably recognize dignity in that person because that person's notion of dignity will match my own.* While it would be an empirical matter to determine the actual closeness of these matches in practice, it seems unlikely that things are really so disastrous as Sulmasy makes them out to be - and, of course, it wouldn't affect the meaning of the word even if they were.

Even granting all of his arguments doesn't lead to his desired conclusion. Let's say, just for the sake of argument, that consistency requires us to use "dignity" in a way that doesn't require an entity to have beliefs about its own dignity or even the capacity for such beliefs. Why, then, should we be forced to conclude that dignity just is humanness? (How, moreover, are we even defining "human"?) Sulmasy says some things about valuing the severely retarded, but then why should we also not value very intelligent non-humans? Surely most dolphins and chimpanzees and so on are just as smart as, if not much smarter than, humans with massive mental incapacities - on what basis would we exclude them from this concept? Sulmasy offers no answers because, of course, he has none.

At this point, you will be unsurprised, I think, to learn that this fellow - who, yes, is the guy from yesterday's post - teaches at a divinity school and is a friar. To be perfectly honest, I am becoming more than a little confused about what gets taught at divinity schools. Feel free to correct me if this is wrong, but I don't feel like these errors are particularly subtle. Heck, I don't even feel like my objections are original or revolutionary or new. His arguments don't support him, the literature doesn't support him, the course of history, arguably, doesn't support him, yet he plainly feels as though he's really onto something. From where does he draw such confidence? Perhaps this is what is meant by identifying oneself as a "man of faith," that one must always learn to distrust one's eyes: when it appears that people mean different things, they in fact mean the same thing; when every sign points to a belief being incorrect, that belief must actually be right on the money. Although Sulmasy is of course entitled to whichever mode of reasoning pleases him best, I would beg him to at least refrain from subjecting the rest of us to the results of his inverted vision. Our health care system is screwed up enough as it is, thank you very much.

*Interestingly, even the "failures" here are enlightening and important. Sulmasy pretends that it's unacceptable to ever misattribute dignity to someone or to misunderstand that person's concept of dignity, but those cases can be very valuable opportunities to broaden one's concept of dignity and to more fully understand the breadth of human imagination. Sulmasy himself, for instance, is badly in need of such an experience.

As Jon Stewart might ask, sane or not sane?

"At issue is Rand Paul's college days, where, as part of a relatively harmless hazing ritual, he tied up a female student and made her pray to 'Aqua Boddha', and was apparently a lot more of a skeptic regarding Christianity.

Which is all fine by me. I mean, the hazing thing is insipid, but most college fun time activities are insipid. But I'm not a Kentucky Republican. Kentucky Republicans want Rand Paul to love Jeeeeeesus as much as they do, which is why his opponent hinted at skepticism and idolatry, and Rand freaked right the fuck out and went straight to quoting the Bible while studiously not denying he did any of that shit in college.

The Potato Heads of the world think I should maybe be upset about Conway's line of attack. Which I would be, but only if it opened up a whole new line of attack in politics for people not being Christian enough to hold office. But it didn't. It followed in the grand tradition of Republican attacks of the last 50 years."

The point Bryan Lambert is making here, if I can make a very brief paraphrase, is that turnabout is fair play. But then there's Leah Libresco's take on the issue.

"I'm horrified to see a Democrat implying that a candidate who is not a Christian or who has ever disparaged Christianity is unfit for public office.  There is no religious test for office in the United States.  One may only consider the policies a candidate endorses, regardless of what religious feelings (if any) motivate those positions."

Just for the sake of symmetry, it seems like Libresco's argument can be summarized thusly: don't be a dick. For my own part, I am ambivalent on this topic. (You may have guessed this from this post's membership in my "Tuesday throwdown" series, as that is the theme of said series.) On the one hand, yeah, don't be a dick. On the other hand, isn't that the problem that we're having with, say, Obama? That he isn't nearly enough of a dick?

If I'm trying to study and you're yelling into your phone about anything - or if I hear you yelling into your phone about your skanky non-skanky thing costume - I cannot rule out stabbing being a thing that happens.

Forgive the tragically awful title and unusually casual nature of this post, but I'm still pretty jet-lagged and I missed out on about a hundred pages of reading and I haven't actually found the right thing to link to yet and and and...waaaah, basically.

So I'm at the bioethics conference, right, and there's this panel on dignity. Some of you may remember dignity as a (bio)ethical concept, but probably most of you won't - that's okay, that's what links are for. Basically, all you need to know is that a lot of philosophers think that dignity is coherent and useful and a bunch of other philosophers think that it's incoherent or at least useless. (Shocking, I know.) So there's this panel and one of the speakers has this idea about how to make dignity into a not-useless concept, which I myself find implausible but hey, that's why I'm at the conference, right? (Well, right enough.) This guy says, in his line of thinking, that the entire history of value has been wrong, that rather than focusing on intrinsic value as opposed to instrumental value we should have conceived things as having intrinsic value as opposed to attributed value.

Now, that may sound reasonable, but if so it's probably only because you're unfamiliar with the terms, so let me help with that: intrinsic value is, by definition, value that inheres in things; instrumental values are, likewise, those values that adhere to things as a result of circumstances. For example, paper money could never be intrinsically valuable as legal tender because its value as legal tender comes from a whole big sociocultural structure. There are lots of questions about what could be intrinsically valuable, but the distinction is usually pretty readily accepted: values that just are don't come from anywhere and values that come from somewhere don't just exist. But this guy, whose name I can find if you're really all that interested, thinks that this is somehow the wrong dilemma. As a replacement dichotomy he offers intrinsic values, which are pretty much the same, and attributed values, which are ones that we humans attribute to things. (And yes, he himself used the word "attribute" in the definition. Don't blame me for that one, I know better.) Already this is quite a bizarre thing for him to do, because he actually doesn't believe that those are the only kinds of values; unlike the clean partitioning of values that the intrinsic/instrumental system achieves, this guy is forced to invent something called the inflorescent (sp?) value, which immediately makes this a trilemma. But the much bigger issue is that attributed values can also be - and, in fact, are on his system - intrinsic values.

Recall that this guy is a member of the "all humans have dignity" crowd, which means that he believes that every human thing has value intrinsically. But he also attributes value to humans in virtue of their humanity - again, he's a member of the "all humans have dignity" crowd. The humanness of humans, then, is both an intrinsic and an attributed value on his system; some dichotomy that turned out to be. Add to this whole disaster the fact that his proposed system brings him no closer to a coherent account of dignity - I think I might make this point in a post tomorrow, just to prove that I can write about this topic intelligently and not, as now, in an addled and scattered fashion - and the whole thing starts to look really very amateurish. That, however, begs the question: how'd this guy, the amateurish one, end up presenting his paper (book, actually, I think) at a professional bioethics conference? Look forward to the answer to that question tomorrow.

So I'm going to the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities conference in San Diego starting tomorrow, but I'll be back on Monday. In the meantime, enjoy - or don't - this video of our democracy falling apart.

Following on today's earlier post, it's time for another edition of My Culture Is The Only Culture, which apparently is the new hit show over at The Public Discourse. Episode 1 of My Culture Is The Only Culture ran just a few days ago when Hadley Arkes reassured us that it was okay to police angry-sounding speech so long as the angry-sounding speech in question was coming from an out-group. Today we see the other side of the coin: that it's okay to enshrine opinions in law if those opinions are coming from an in-group.

"...in a regime where the people are free to make their own laws, as in a representative democracy, the customs of the people count 'far more in favor of a particular observance, than does the authority of the sovereign,' for while an individual cannot make law, 'yet the whole people can.' Custom is an expression of reason and will made by the whole people with their repeated actions over time, and since an expression of reason and will is a promulgation of law, custom is a promulgation of law, with the same binding force."

Neat, huh? I bet you didn't know that every single custom of a society was endorsed "by the whole people" of that society. Very probably there's some trickery happening with the quantifiers in that last sentence - too many sentences of the form "an x is a y" tend to signal a problem in the logic - but the much bigger problem here is that RJ Snell is explicitly calling for a majoritarian rule-making system wherein mere popularity counts as the same kind of evidence as anything else.

Aside from the familiar objection that such systems are in theory and practice biased against the participation of minority groups, Snell also fails to take real human behavior into account when he formulates this argument. Actions taken by humans within societies are not, as a rule, "expression[s] of reason and will" - at least, not in any meaningful sense. Straight people, for example, get to employ their reason in support of their will when it comes to seeking a mate, but until very recently everyone else had to employ their reason against their will just in order to assure their own safety. Depending on how nitpicky Snell wants to get - and he may want to get very nitpicky, given that he's a professor of philosophy - this may technically still count as an "expression" of the will for him, but it would be a fantastically hard-headed position to take to say that there's no substantive difference between being safe in one's sexual identity and having to hide one's sexual identity just in order to stay alive.

This distinction, the gap between practicing a custom eagerly and practicing it out of coercion, is apparently lost on Snell. It may well be true historically speaking that no or marginally few same-sex couples put themselves forward for marriage and no or marginally few straight people spent their time arguing for an expansion of the institution, but that is shoddy evidence at best that those people were expressing their will and reason at the time. Moreover, even someone as blinkered as Snell should be able to tell that the situation now is not the same as the situation used to be. By his own criteria, the exclusion of same-sex couples from marriage is not a modern custom even if it was one for the entire rest of human history: not only have we ceased repeatedly acting in such a way as to exclude same-sex couples from marriage, we now have first-person testimony from vast segments of the population that their continued obedience to this atavistic tradition is against their will and that the tradition itself offends their reason. Thus neither of Snell's necessary criteria are satisfied: marriage inequality is neither enacted by the whole people in repeated actions nor is it an expression of the reason and will of the whole people.

That his argument fails on its own terms is nothing more than a confirmation of the disastrous flaws that one invites by propounding a political philosophy that values cultural fixity as highly as Snell's does. Custom, defined as the mere habits of the majority, is plainly not a good basis for law in and of itself even when the majority happens to be the entire group; a fortiori, it cannot possibly be the case that, as Snell claims, "a good custom is a rationally binding law." Tradition is a weaker basis still, as tradition fails even to make a check on the present circumstances of the society but instead only refers to past states of affairs. And if we have any luck at all, that's exactly what Snell's undemocratic, self-undermining train wreck of a worldview will soon be: an artifact of the past.

...the whole anti-gay-rights movement is full of idiots.

"Do I have blood on my hands?

Major gay rights groups are saying so. Each of us who opposes gay marriage, they say, is responsible for the terrible and tragic suicides of gay teens that recently hit the news [but some]
pieces of the puzzle...don't seem to fit the 'it's homophobia pulling the trigger' narrative."

That's Maggie Gallagher, desperately trying to avoid both responsibility and comprehension. She succeeds, of course, only in the latter.

"In 2001, gay teens in Massachussetts were almost four times more likely to have attempted suicide (31 percent vs. 8 percent). In 2007 -- after four years of legalized gay marriage in that state -- gay teens were still about four times more likely to attempt suicide than nongay teens (29 percent vs. 6 percent).

Whether you are looking at their faces or looking at the statistics, one thing is clear: These kids need help, real help. They should not become a mere rhetorical strategy, a plaything in our adult battles."

Wow, shocking - the zeitgeist in Massachusetts failed to be immediately and permanently altered by a court decision. When's the last time that happened? Also, I dunno if you noticed this, but 6 goes into 29 closer to five times than four; like I said, the whole comprehension thing is not Gallagher's strong suit.

You almost have to wonder how she managed to confuse homophobia with the mere absence of marriage equality. I mean, anti-queer sentiments exist in people's heads and aren't subject to any kind of legal oversight, whereas marriage laws exist on paper and have to fit in with our overall political schema. As such, only one of those two is necessary for bullying, and it's not the one that's been fixed in Massachusetts for four years. All of this is pretty much obvious, so, as I said, you almost have to wonder what's going on here. But then you remember that Gallagher is a sophist and a hack and has no conscience and that pretty much clears it all up.

D'you know how sometimes you read something and you just think to yourself, "Now that can't be right"? There are just some things that don't sound right even after they've been extensively proven, like (for some people) how 0.9999... equals 1. And then, of course, there are the things that don't get extensively proven.

"[John Haught] uses sentimentality to persuade, and it’s a babyish trick.

…if the universe is encompassed by an infinite Love, would the encounter with this ultimate reality require anything less than a posture of receptivity and readiness to surrender to its embrace?

Same thing – attempted persuasion via sentimentality. Why infinite Love? Why not infinite Hate?"

When Ophelia Benson quoted that line from Haught's God and the New Atheism, it just didn't seem right. So I went and I googled it and found this.

"So, if the universe is encompassed by an infinite Love, would the encounter with this ultimate reality require anything less than a posture of receptivity and readiness to surrender to its embrace? How is it that the new atheists think they can decide the question of God’s existence without having opened themselves to the personal transformation essential to faith’s sense of being grasped by an unbounded love? Clearly the new atheists are looking for a shortcut and a direct, objectifying access to what believers regard as unapproachable apart from the surrender of faith."

And still I didn't think this could possibly be Haught's actual argument. I mean, are you kidding me? That first question about having "a posture of receptivity" is just a total non-sequitur. So I went and looked it up on Google Books and wouldn't you know it, that is in fact Haught's actual argument.

"...in our ordinary human experience it is other personal subjects that matter most to us, and no amount of scientific expertise can tell us who they really are. Would it be otherwise with God, whom believers experience not as an ordinary 'It' but as a supreme 'Thou'? If God exists, then interpersonal experience, not the impersonal objectivity of science, would be essential to knowledge of this God...So if the universe is encompassed by an infinite Love, would the encounter with this ultimate reality require anything less than a posture of receptivity and readiness to surrender to its embrace?"

First and foremost, this whole thing makes me want to propose some kind of hard limit on the ratio of rhetorical questions to declarative sentences in philosophical works. Seriously, this is bullshit writing and it makes analysis way more difficult than it really needs or ought to be. I think there are some substantive complaints to be made about this even despite that difficulty, but still, c'mon.

The main problem that I see with this section of Haught's book is that he blatantly switches his standards halfway through. At first he talks about how to know "who [people] really are." Notwithstanding the challenges attached to that knowledge, which Haught has of course not addressed at all, it's pretty safe to say that knowing who is a different kind of thing than knowing that. In particular, knowing who God or your buddy Steve is is different than knowing that God or your buddy Steve exists in the first place. Even if we grant that who-knowledge requires openness or receptivity or whatever, I think we can all agree that knowledge of a person's existence can be achieved quite easily without recourse to any kind of emotional connection whatsoever. Haught, therefore, errs in starting off with a string of premises about knowing who and ending up with a conclusion about knowing that.

A fuller response to Haught could easily go into his mistaken belief that moral character can only be appraised by emotional interaction - surely passive observation counts for something - but his equivocation on "know" is sufficient reason to reject his argument. Before we go around asking what God might be like or how God might prefer to be approached it's only reasonable to ask whether there is such a thing as God in the first place. Contrary to his conclusion, this argument of Haught's doesn't help to answer that question even in the slightest.

Or, "Here's another joke people probably aren't old enough to get." Ah, well - it's worth trying, at any rate...

Keeping in mind the fact that Americans don't know shit about religion, it may be wise to inquire as to what their ignorance has led them to believe. According to Paul Froese and Christopher Bader, those beliefs come in four flavors.

Bachelor number one!

"The Authoritative God. When conservatives Sarah Palin or Glenn Beck proclaim that America will lose God's favor unless we get right with him, they're rallying believers in what Froese and Bader call an Authoritative God, one engaged in history and meting out harsh punishment to those who do not follow him. About 28% of the nation shares this view, according to Baylor's 2008 findings."

Bachelor number two!

"The Benevolent God. When President Obama says he is driven to live out his Christian faith in public service, or political satirist Stephen Colbert mentions God while testifying to Congress in favor of changing immigration laws, they're speaking of what the Baylor researchers call a Benevolent God. This God is engaged in our world and loves and supports us in caring for others, a vision shared by 22% of Americans, according to Baylor's findings."

Bachelor number three!

"The Critical God. The poor, the suffering and the exploited in this world often believe in a Critical God who keeps an eye on this world but delivers justice in the next, Bader says."

Bachelor number four!

"The Distant God. Though about 5% of Americans are atheists or agnostics, Baylor found that nearly one in four (24%) see a Distant God that booted up the universe, then left humanity alone." 

You do notice, don't you, which God is missing? Why, it's the Evidence-Based God, of course! Tell you what, at this rate that guy's never gonna get a date.

Anyway, of the four gods on offer, it's interesting that two of them are focused exclusively on what will happen (1 and 3) and one of them has pretty much no connection at all to things happening (4). Those three pretty clearly aren't going to help any as models for morality, right? Hard to be a role model when you either don't do anything at all or only do things that are epistemically unavailable to the audience for whom you're supposedly modeling. As for the remaining one, the Benevolent one, it can very easily turn into the Spineless one, as Leah Libresco notes.

"I think of being gay as a part of identity that doesn't carry moral weight, like a preference for a certain color, or a fondness for umami.  The reason God wouldn't ask you to change these attributes is because they're irrelevant to your ability to follow moral precepts, not because God loves you just the way you are.  There are plenty of attributes that might be ingrained and might be a part of your identity, but must be rejected because they are poisonous."

Go too far with the touchy-feely stuff and suddenly you've lost the entirety of negative morality (that is, things not to do or be). Small problem, that.

The problem here is the same problem as always: if God is like us only better, God would be intervening in our lives for the better all over the place. We, after all, are like us and we intervene in our lives for the better on a not-irregular basis, so if God is like us only better we could only expect quite a lot of positive intervention from it. Since there is no such intervention, it follows relatively cleanly that there is no thing like us only better hovering around out there. But, of course, religion isn't about facts and findings, it's merely "the way we tell the stories of the world around us." Social scientists know this; atheists know this; even some religious people know this. It's when story-telling gets confused for fact-finding that problems arise. Why people resist this idea so much is a mystery to me: would you really marry someone just because of how well the two of you got along on a game show?

As much as I gripe about the knee-jerk fawning that happens whenever a dead white guy shows up in a philosophical article, there is one benefit to knowing the big names: you identify someone's school of thought with a single word.

"...the religious fundamentalists are correct: without God, there is no morality. But they are incorrect, I still believe, about there being a God. Hence, I believe, there is no morality.

Why do I now accept hard [i.e., amoral] atheism? I was struck by salient parallels between religion and morality, especially that both avail themselves of imperatives or commands, which are intended to apply universally. In the case of religion, and most obviously theism, these commands emanate from a Commander; 'and this all people call God,' as Aquinas might have put it. The problem with theism is of course the shaky grounds for believing in God. But the problem with morality, I now maintain, is that it is in even worse shape than religion in this regard; for if there were a God, His issuing commands would make some kind of sense. But if there is no God, as of course atheists assert, then what sense could be made of there being commands of this sort?"

Joel Marks, the author of this woefully confused piece, is a Kantian - you can tell by his conspicuous use of the word "imperative." Or, rather, he was a Kantian. Now he's just a sap.

In some sense this goes back to my first metaphilosophy hint - Marks clearly thinks he's being very clever with this "no commander" stuff, and any time you start to feel that clever you really need to sleep on it. Now, I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with his core argument: the non-existence of a commander implies the non-existence of commands as surely as the non-existence of Tea People implies the non-existence of flagrantly stupid Tea People rally signs. But commands aren't the lingua franca of morality and so Marks, like the theists with whom he now identifies, is wrong to conclude that morality depends in any way on commands.

Whether that wrongness says anything about the categorical imperative is something I cannot say; I was never too impressed with Kant to begin with, so maybe I'm not the best one to ask. Either way, it's relatively straightforward to demonstrate that Marks has gone about twelve steps too far in this argument. Where he would draw an "analogy to Darwinism" - which, by the way, "Darwinism"? Really? - by appealing to "selection (by the natural environment, culture, family, etc.) of behavior and motives (‘moral intuitions’ or ‘conscience’) that best promote survival of the organism" in order to remove the explanatory power of morality, I would make my comparison to mathematics, for two reasons.

First, the merely technical: no ethicist needed to explain our behavior and motives in the first place. Those are scientific phenomena and while philosophy can of course inform science in various ways it cannot answer scientific questions. That Marks thinks he has won some kind of victory by eliminating the explanatory "recourse to Morality," then, means either that he doesn't really understand what he's talking about or that he's intentionally going after some of the lowest-hanging fruit available to him. Second, and more importantly, the concept of a metaphysical moral command is pretty obviously a bad concept. Again, look to math: could it be possible for someone to command that one plus one equal anything other than two? Alternatively, does the fact of one plus one equaling two require someone to have commanded it? I sincerely hope that Marks doesn't think so, yet apparently he feels as though commands are more appropriate in the moral realm. The fact that it is objectively quite bad for oneself to have one's face punched in until one's skull shatters, fatally piercing one's brain has nothing whatsoever to do with commands or imperatives or anything of the sort. How could it? Not even if God existed and commanded us to engage in lethal face-punching-in would that stop it from being bad, so what exactly is Marks supposed to be proving?

By limiting his thinking to "thou shalt," he has managed to utterly misunderstand morality. A key question in ethics, and I think the question that underlies this line of thought, is: why should I be good? On one level, this is asking something purely practical: what will being good do for me? As we noted late last week, morality is (sadly) not so tightly bound to happiness that one can rely on a strategy of pure do-goodery. Accordingly, it's fair to ask what, if anything, we can rely on morality for. The analogy with math couldn't be better: it's entirely reasonable for a person to want to know how u-substitution integrals will help them, yet it would be a massive, mind-bogglingly stupid error to say that u-substitution integrals are bogus just because they won't necessarily make some random person's life better. Viewed differently, the question could mean: why is it the case that we say that people should be good? This, however, is merely a linguistic question for which, happily, there is another nice analogy with math. While one plus one will necessarily equal two, "one" plus "one" needn't equal "two"; we could, in other words, have named "two" "three" or "four" or "yellow-bellied sapsucker." Similarly, the truth of "one should be good" follows just as a matter of the way we have chosen to define the words. Maybe this was a mistake - maybe we thought at one point that being good would consistently accomplish some goal or other - but that doesn't change the answer to the question. It's a tautological answer and therefore not very informative, but that just means that the question wasn't a particularly helpful question. Once again, it would be a terrible mistake to say that there's something wrong with 1+1=2 just because someone found an unenlightening question to ask about it.

To bring this back to Marks, he seems to want to know why it makes sense for us to have any motivation to do good and avoid bad - hence, I reason, his preoccupation with commands. But, as we've just seen, commands are and must be irrelevant to moral reality just as they are to mathematical reality. Indeed, they're so irrelevant that it's almost nonsensical to talk about commanding a moral truth. Still and all, we do (typically) actually have motivations to the effect that we want to do good and avoid bad, and facts call for explanations. The problem for Marks, and the source (I think) of his troubles, is that neither of the philosophical questions on offer is capable of providing the explanation he seeks. Either he'll get a somewhat basic primer on the contingent nature of language or he'll get a lesson in that contingency, thus leading him to think that there is no explanation at all and so no morality at all.

I can only suggest that the moral (ha!) of this whole ridiculous story is that one must be aware of the kind of questions one wants to ask. No matter what impression you might get from reading the literature, not all philosophical questions are good questions (see e.g.). Moral facts are, well, facts - try to phrase any other fact as a command and see how far you get. (Seriously - I've got a comments section, give a whirl.) If Marks cannot see that "x is bad" or "you ought to do y" are not imperative statements, the failure is quite obviously his and not morality's.

Today, friends (and whoever else is reading my blog), I feel as incongruously proud and (somewhat more congruously) excited as any other intellectual who has found the peak of his or her discipline. Observe!

"I am predisposed to think that real and uncompromising atheism, whose intrinsic 'metaphysics' is real and uncompromising naturalism, always requires some element of magical thinking in all three of the classical or 'critical' philosophical realms: ontology, epistemology, and ethics. But even if that is an unjust assumption, it seems to me hardly debatable that no purely naturalistic approach to ethics has ever succeeded in producing anything resembling a compelling or attractive moral imperative."

If you feel like you've encountered this particular brand of self-satisfied bullshittery before, it's probably because you have - this is David Hart, who was featured here previously in the context of his man-crush on Nietzsche and his old-person-crush on baseball. This, however, takes the proverbial cake - and for all I care, he can eat it, too. There is simply no valid line of argument that goes from "theory x is dissatisfying (to some percentage of people)" to "theory x is false."

One could choose to attack Hart's argument on its epistemological grounds: it would be incredible if he really knew that only theism is or has ever been or could ever be morally "compelling or attractive." That kind of claim implies a vast and detailed knowledge of the intimate lives of humans throughout history and a level of success in predictive psychology that would be orders of magnitude above the success that anybody else has ever had in analyzing the human mind. Moreover, Hart never even bothers to explain what he means by "compelling or attractive," thus further complicating any effort to make his view seem realistic. Those kinds of complaints, however, are too pedestrian when compared with the grand design that Hart wants to lay out: they'll work as strictly formal rebuttals, but there's something aesthetically dissatisfying about settling for victory as a mere formality in this case. Luckily for me, there is in fact another road to travel.

A bit earlier in his piece, Hart correctly identifies the question as being "whether one needs God in order for the good to be good." Translating this from Hart's natural stifling pompousness, he wants to know that a coherent, complete, and accurate picture of well-being can be constructed without reference to a deity. Philosophers both professional and amateur, however, have known the answer to this question for quite a while: invoking God as the ground of morality turns morality into just another set of preferences. We may have no choice but to bend to this particular set of preferences or else risk grave personal* harm, but that doesn't make those preferences right or good any more than it changes morality for a larger child (or, for that matter, country) to impose its preferences on a smaller one. Hart, if he weren't so far up his own asshole all the time, would very probably know this.

In addition to his critical Euthyphro failure, Hart also never bothers to connect his question about the ontology of the good to his childish preoccupation with feelings. The unspoken assumption here is that the One True Morality will, in virtue of its One Trueness, produce "a movement of good will" in any (or maybe every) person who believes in it. But let's be serious: it isn't like Christianity has had a sterling track record of motivating good behavior. Motivating some behavior or other, yeah, but that ain't exactly what Hart needs here, as it proves pretty much unequivocally that Christianity produces its motivational power not from any One Trueness it has** but from the same sources as any other set of beliefs - promise of reward, threat of harm, perception of truth and a related sense of obligation, and so on. The problem with Hart's intuition about One Trueness and feelings isn't that it fails specifically for Christianity but rather the opposite, that it doesn't just fail for Christianity. No belief system motivates or even can motivate good behavior just in virtue of being true; truth, much like goodness, is causally inert; just like we can't deduce the actual moral structure of the universe from the observed world of cause and effect because no observed effect could ever be caused by a moral law, we certainly can't detect the presence or absence of an actual moral structure just by checking up on the observed world of cause and effect. The vision of reality that Hart is promoting is one in which our minds (more likely, souls) sit like spiders on a vast web, just waiting on the right pattern of vibrations. Those vibrations that signal truth are the ones we move towards, he seems to think, whereas we ignore the rest. This is such a wildly fantastical and altogether implausible ontology that it would be surprising if anybody even gave it a second thought - which, I very strongly suspect, is why Hart avoids mentioning it explicitly. You can't have a second thought, after all, if you don't have a first.

The bottom line here is that humans have a tremendously awful track record in terms of following the good, usually precisely because they feel so strongly that they're in the right. If Hart really believes that we all come installed with some kind of resonant moral frequency that inexorably draws us towards virtue and away from vice then he badly needs a crash course in history - or just to wake the hell up. The good will remain the good no matter how any of us feel about it or indeed if any of us feel anything about it at all. If Hart and his friends can't find it in themselves to behave without anybody keeping tabs on them, that says volumes more about them than it does about the nature of morality.

*And if you believe the thing about the sins of the father, familial.
**Which, duh, because it doesn't have any in the first place.

Y'know, when I wrote that thing about how it's okay to be into religious-type activities even if you don't have any religious-type beliefs because you can (at least I can) partition the behaviors from the historically concomitant ideologies, I thought to myself, "Gee, I wonder how many people are really going to need to read this. I mean, it's sort of obvious, isn't it?" Incredibly, it just so turns out to be not obvious at all, at least for some people.

"Atheist spirituality, such as it is, has almost nothing in common with traditional religion. So far as I can tell, it refers simply to the notion that atheists, no less than theists, can look at nature and be impressed."

That's Jason Rosenhouse, and he's reacting to people like Cathy Grossman who seem very much to say that atheists can't feel things like awe. While Rosenhouse is of course correct in believing that atheist "spirituality" - a term that I, like Dale before me, would really like to phase out - includes (or, maybe more accurately, is capable of including) natural awe, I'm a little disappointed that he draws the line there. In fairness, this was certainly not the main point in his article and so maybe he brushed by it without giving it too much thought, or maybe he was trying to summarize the views of some other person or people. Either way, I for one am not actually okay with the idea that atheism ought to confine one's deep emotional reactions to objects of nature. Whether that denial alone is sufficient to spin out my whole system can be an open question, but there is certainly something wrong with this kind of marking of territory.

On a totally different subject related only by virtue of the theme of this post, I will of course be attending the Rally to Restore Sanity/March to Keep Fear Alive this October 30th and I hope to meet all of my US readers there. (Others are welcome, too, of course, but just a bit less likely to show up, I would think.) For some reason or other, I had pretty much forgotten about the whole culture of fear thing that serves as the object of derision for Colbert's half of the rally - and then I went to see Meghan McCain speak.

Meghan McCain, for those who don't know the name, is the daughter of senator, presidential campaign loser, and massive sell-out John McCain; that was strike one against her. She is also a bit of an airhead. Having been brought to campus by a local Rainbow Alliance chapter, McCain proceeded to give a long talk about, essentially, how great the Republican party is. That was strike two. Strike three was when she told the audience - and I'm paraphrasing here, but there wasn't exactly a hell of a lot of subtlety or complexity - that she was in favor of continuing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan indefinitely because she was afraid of terrorists. She, in other words, wants not only to keep fear alive but to let it drive policy, which is such a tremendously awful idea that I'm not capable of expressing it this early in the morning.

So as you go about your weekend, dear reader, keep this in mind: every so often it's worth saying something you believe can safely go unsaid. The world is a very big place full of very unreflective people and somebody may need to hear it.