Rust Belt Philosophy

It's been about nine months since we last saw someone defend Roger Ebert's claim that video games aren't art, and since Ebert himself seems to have given up long before that I'm just going to go ahead and declare victory: video games are art, at least sometimes. But are they ever good art? And if not, why not? Paul Constant has some ideas:

"Video games still seem, to me, to be very branch-oriented. You're given a binary choice of yes or no, and the game responds to that choice. I've played around with and enjoyed free-roaming games like Grand Theft Auto, but the first thing I do when I play those games is I try to figure out where the ends of the world are. I feel my way around the boundary and figure out what's possible and what's not possible. Soon enough, everything feels very small and closed-off. And games that I've played which are more story-oriented have long cut-scenes that basically take the choice out of the player's hands, reverting back to movies.

I have no doubt that video games are art. And I have no doubt that they are genuine narrative devices. But the thing that makes them a unique and exciting medium, to me, is that you are the protagonist of the story, and your choices affect the narrative. Maybe I want too much choice, and that would make the game cease to be a game? I want a Batman game where I can play a manic-depressive Bruce Wayne who just decides not to fight crime, or decides to reveal his secret identity to the world. Or a crime game where I can try to become a legitimate businessman on the earnings from a big bank heist."

To a large degree, I can sympathize with what Constant is saying. One of my formative video game experiences was flying the airship around the globe in Final Fantasy VII and subsequently realizing both that I had obtained essentially unlimited freedom within the game and that unlimited freedom within the game is not as satisfying as the phrase "unlimited freedom" might otherwise have indicated. Within the realm of video gaming, there's very little that's more deflating than hitting the invisible wall around the city or the planet or whatever the game world consists of. Constant is right, however, to observe that this is an aesthetic criticism and so one that only makes sense insofar as we're talking about a work of art: waist-high fences break the fourth wall in all the wrong ways and so they almost always detract from one's ability to enjoy a video game aesthetically. Still and all, I can't help but wonder if the branch-orientation to which Constant refers is really a separate - and, in fact, mostly irrelevant - issue.

For one thing, video games aren't the only kind of art that suffers from being too small and closed-off. I myself often find this to be the case with interactive museum art, like stuff that requires you to push a button to activate it or allows you to rearrange it in some way or to climb through it or some such thing. The problem here is of the same family as the one that I run into when I watch a really predictable movie: it's not so much that the choices are limited in quantity, it's that they're limited in imagination or creativity. A game that allows for a relatively small range of possible actions but puts those actions into an interesting context can be very rewarding, as the Portal series shows. Nor is it always the case that open-ended video games always achieve the feeling that Constant is after. The Sims, at least for me, was way too open-ended, to the point where it was hard to find the motivation to do any particular thing at all, which is really very different than it "ceas[ing] to be a game." (Instead, I suspect that it ceases to be a coherent artwork, in that it lacks anything resembling a consistent theme or subject.) This was always the problem I had with the idea of Calvinball, was that I just figured I would have a hard time caring. Again, the open-endedness needs to work with the rest of the game in an interesting way in order for it to shake out right.

And, y'know, yeah: this is a tricky balancing act. But (as we've already seen once today) there are, shall we say, limits to the moral imagination that can be displayed in the "something bad happened, go fix it" kind of story. Not all video games are stuck in that mode of doing things, of course, but quite a few of them - including almost all of the really big ones - are, and that's a waste. Especially given the dominance of the let's-defeat-evil narrative in our culture, game developers have an amazing opportunity not just to show us what it would be like to do something else but to have us experience the feeling of participating in a different kind of story. Character-development-based stories (like Constant's manic-depressive Batman) or even just skewed-morality stories (like his business-man/bank-robber) would present new opportunities for gameplay innovation while resolving the closed-in feeling that many of us get from playing, essentially, the same damn game over and over again. I still think that these games would have to be branch-oriented in some sense or other, because programming if not human reality itself is branch-oriented, but it is most definitely not the case that the rescue-the-world story exhausts the kinds of branch patterns available to us. Gamers, too, could benefit from stretching their aesthetic horizons, but they can only do so if game makers provide interesting, creative games. Some games are like that, so Constant may not have exactly done his homework on this one, but he's at least right to say that the big sellers in the game industry have basically given up on trying to make good art, and that's just sad.

Remember Sheldon Richman? He's the idiot who thought that the brain couldn't be responsible for the mind because he can't sense neurological events and tried to distinguish between jobs and "real" jobs. Well, for his next trick he's going to try to convince you that liberals are hypocrites. Ready?

"In yet another reversal of his professed commitment to the rule of law, President Obama says he will sign the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which formalizes his authority to imprison terrorism suspects indefinitely without charge or trial.

Where is the 'progressive' outrage?"

Yeah, where is it? Except, y'know, at AMERICAblog, Salon, Slog, MotherJones, and, oh yeah, DailyKos:




So yeah, fuck you, Sheldon Richman, you partisan fuckin' slimeball hack.

(As a precursor: keep this post in mind when you read today's secondthird post, the one about video games, because I feel like there's going to be some synchronicity going on.)

When I saw The Tree of Life back in July, my very strong impression was that the movie glorified (indeed, was centered on the glorification of) a type of relationship that can only properly be described as abusive. That relationship was the relationship that the director, Terrence Malick, apparently believes we should have with his God. God, at least in the movie, really loves us humans - in fact, is the paradigm of love. But God also does terrible things to us and allows terrible things to happen to us, which naturally raises some questions about whether one needs enemies with friends like that. Malick's way of answering such questions is to insult and degrade the person asking them. Such people, he says, "only want to please [themselves and] have [their] own way. [They] find reasons to be unhappy." This, to me, was obviously wrong and only slightly less obviously insidious, but I spent most of that post focusing on the fact that Malick's message was thematically misanthropic (in that it trivialized legitimate human concerns). Thanks to Alex Pruss, however, I now have a chance to expose the misanthropy of Malick's skeptical theism in a more philosophical way.

Pruss, like Malick, is interested in responding to bad events that are apparently point towards the lack of a divine plan. Also like Malick, his "response identifies a good G such that it is clear that the occurrence of a good relevantly like G logically requires the permission of an evil relevantly like E [i.e., the bad event in question]." In particular, Pruss says, if

"1. G obtains [i.e., G happens] and
2. G outweighs E and
3. there is no alternative good G' [in the same context*] dissimilar from G that doesn't require anything nearly as bad as E and that would be more or approximately equally worth having.

...then G justifies E, and so if we have no significant evidence against the triple conjunction, we have no significant evidence that E is unjustified."

Or, in relatively plain English, if you can't have some good thing without having some other bad thing, you can still have the good thing. The good thing just has to be more good than the bad thing is bad, is all.

In those simplified terms, the argument is quite straightforward and actually pretty plausible. Quite honestly, it's very easy to think of good things that we can't have without also having some bad things but that we should have anyway. The death of a pet is pretty bad for most people, but you can't really have a pet without that pet dying at some point and for most people the experience of living with the pet in the first place will provide more joy than the sorrow caused by the pet's death. Medicine is another really good place to find examples of this: there are quite a few procedures that you can't really undergo without experiencing a non-trivial amount of suffering but that you will definitely want to undergo. The trouble for Pruss (and Malick), however, is that they need to explain the hard cases, not the easy ones that we can all think of.

One such case is the real-life case of Sue, the five-year-old in the following story:

"The girl’s mother was living with her boyfriend, another man who was unemployed, her two children, and her 9-month old infant fathered by the boyfriend. On New Year’s Eve all three adults were drinking at a bar near the woman’s home. The boyfriend had been taking drugs and drinking heavily. He was asked to leave the bar at 8:00 p.m. After several reappearances he finally stayed away for good at about 9:30 p.m. The woman and the unemployed man remained at the bar until 2:00 a.m. at which time the woman went home and the man to a party at a neighbor’s home. Perhaps out of jealousy, the boyfriend attacked the woman when she walked into the house. Her brother was there and broke up the fight by hitting the boyfriend who was passed out and slumped over a table when the brother left. Later the boyfriend attacked the woman again, and this time she knocked him unconscious. After checking the children, she went to bed. Later the woman’s 5-year old girl went downstairs to go to the bathroom. The unemployed man returned from the party at 3:45 a.m. and found the 5-year old dead. She had been raped, severely beaten over most of her body and strangled to death by the boyfriend."

This is very clearly in a different class altogether than the death of a beloved pet or the pain of having a cavity filled. Not only is the suffering involved in this story on a greater order of magnitude, there is - and this is the important bit - no indication at all that something good has come out of the rape and murder of a five-year-old girl. Pruss, however, believes that "it's fairly easy" to see that this story is an example of a justified evil.

"Let G be Sue's having forgiven E's perpetrator [i.e., her rapist and murderer]. We have no significant evidence against the [idea that E was justified], then. Granted, we may have significant evidence that G did not obtain in this life, though even that is probably a stretch, but we have no [sic] balance no significant evidence that G didn't obtain in an afterlife. My intuitions strongly favor (2)--there is a way in which forgiveness seems to defeat evil--but in any case we have no significant evidence against (2)."

Before getting into the real philosophy, observe the contortions through which Pruss goes in order to make the rape and murder of a five-year-old seem not so bad. It is, he says, "probably a stretch" to think that the five-year-old did not forgive her attacker in the midst of being raped and murdered - but, y'know, even if she didn't, well, then she probably got around to it after she died. Talk about your rose-colored glasses! This sort of thing is exactly why I don't think that philosophy should always "have [some] connection to the way people really live and think about their lives": there are some people who really live and think about their lives in ways that philosophers should roundly condemn, and this is a perfect example. If you're so optimistic that you find it plausible for a five-year-old to forgive her rapist while she's being raped, philosophers should be overjoyed to find that their work does not connect to the way you think about your life.

If you can bring yourself to set aside Pruss's momentary lapse into insanity, though, we can temporarily rescue his example by positing that Sue's mother and not Sue is the one whose forgiveness would - hypothetically - "defeat" the evil of her five-year-old daughter being raped and murdered. In that case, we can at least agree with Pruss that the good logically requires the evil, because you can't forgive somebody for something they didn't do; as such, we have the third item on Pruss's theodicy wish list. Since we've posited that the act of forgiveness happened, we also have the first item. As you might have guessed, then, the tricky philosophical question is what to do with Pruss's (2).

To remind you, and also to substitute constants for variables, Pruss's (2) says (in this case) that the goodness of Sue's mother's forgiveness is greater than the badness of Sue's rape and murder. (Interestingly, something very similar happens in The Tree of Life: at the end, the mother - funny how it's always a female, innit - forgives God for "taking" (i.e., for the death of) her child.) This premise - that the rape and murder was less bad than the forgiveness was good - is the one he thinks "we have no significant evidence against." This is such a brazen claim that it's hard to imagine that Pruss has even looked for such evidence, because as soon as you give the matter even the tiniest bit of thought it's nearly impossible not to see the evidence.

For utilitarians like myself, the evidence is not just obvious but borders on being decisive. That somebody raped and murdered Sue means that there was a vast amount of suffering introduced into the world, first and foremost for Sue but also for her family. That sets the bar rather high, and it's just not plausible to say that forgiveness clears that bar. While it's entirely likely that forgiving the murderer would save Sue's mother a great deal of future suffering, it would produce almost no actual good and so wouldn't even come close to outweighing the original suffering. Speaking as a utilitarian, then, there's no question that E outweighs G. But it would be equally difficult, I think, to come to a different conclusion on any other moral system. Raping and murdering a five-year-old girl, one would think, is far more disrespectful of human dignity than any act of forgiveness could be respectful of it, so Kant is out. Similarly, it doesn't seem like forgiving a terrible act requires more virtue than the vice displayed in the original action; indeed, in cases like this it might even be more virtuous not to forgive the wrongdoer (at least, if anyone could ever develop a coherent definition of what's virtuous). I mean, shit - even divine command theory would suggest that it would have been better had the five-year-old girl never been raped and murdered in the first place. Some of these systems provide stronger evidence than others, granted, but there isn't a single one of them on which it's even remotely plausible to say that the forgiveness outweighs the rape and the murder. But okay! Let's give Pruss even the benefit of this doubt, even though his only argument operates on intuition and he seemingly hasn't even bothered to look for other evidence. What we are left with, in that case, is deeply troubling, and should make even Pruss think twice about this entire line of thought.

If - contrary to all good sense - the goodness of Sue's mother's act of forgiveness outweighs the badness of her daughter's rape and murder, that can only mean that we have a moral obligation to rape and murder the five-year-old daughters of women who will probably eventually forgive us. After all, as Pruss himself says, any such act would be morally justified by the eventual forgiveness and the world would even be a better place overall.** If that's not absurd enough to make you want to reject his (and, accordingly, Malick's) view of God and morality, I cannot help you.

Again, the major strategic problem here is that Pruss wants to develop a moral theory that is distinctly misanthropic. The good things that he's talking about are experienced only mildly by people - that is, when they're experienced at all. The bad things, on the other hand, are always experienced by people, and  always make for really bad experiences. Any sensible theory of morality has to say that really bad experiences outweigh only mildly good ones (taking into account duration and so on), yet this is precisely what Pruss's theory denies. Even if Sue's mother forgave her daughter's rapist and murderer, there is nobody who would experience the goodness from her forgiveness to anywhere near the same degree that Sue and her mother (and probably even her murderer) experienced the badness of the original action. Yes, the act of forgiveness would metaphorically stop the bleeding to some degree, and it might even have some other nice effects. But only a lunatic would say that it outweighs the original suffering, and only someone trapped in (the mindset of) an abusive relationship would believe that it's better to withstand abuse than never to have experienced it in the first place. Allowing a woman's daughter to be raped and murdered just so that the woman can eventually learn to forgive the assailant is not possibly an act of love or kindness, and it's well past time that we figured that out.

*I add this to indicate that we're talking about a single scenario and the alternative versions thereof. We would not want this argument to compare G to every good thing, because then the easy examples would fail. For instance, the pain of having one's tooth filled would not be justified compared to every other good thing because there are really good things that we can have without suffering as much as we do while having a cavity filled. On the other hand, once you have a cavity - that is, once a context is specified - you can then determine that having the cavity filled gives you by far the best good and so the pain therefrom is justified.
**Actually, Pruss evidently believes in a moral system on which one is only obligated to want to maximize value (i.e., to do the best thing, howsoever defined). But it's trivial to derive this obligation with less wistful and more serious*** moral theories: if your obligation is to maximize value and, as Pruss suggests, value would be maximized by raping and murdering five-year-olds, well, there you go.
***I mean, c'mon. How can your primary moral obligation be to want something? "Gee, I'm really sorry, starving person on the street. I wanted to give money to charity this year, but I just sorta didn't. I know I could've done better, but I got the most important thing right, so oh well!"

Come with me, if you will, back to the ancient year of two thousand and nine, a year in which I wrote the following:

"As for pure athleticism, [sprinter Usain] Bolt and [swimmer Michael] Phelps should be one and two [on the AP's male athlete of the year voting] with 100% of the vote between them, the end. Everything else is politics.

All warmed up? Make sure you are. Otherwise you might pull a brain muscle trying to comprehend the results of the AP's female athlete of the year vote:

Serena Williams - 66
Zenyatta - 18
Kim Clijsters - 16
Lindsey Vonn - 15
Diana Taurasi - 14
Maya Moore - 13
Rachel Alexandra - 10
Bridget Sloan - 3
Jiyai Shin - 2
Erin Hamlin - 1

Once again for the sports-disinclined [those athletes' sports are, in order]: tennis, horse racing, tennis, skiing, basketball, basketball, horse racing, gymnastics, golf, luge. Note first of all that there are significantly fewer of these athletes than there were in the other list. Then puzzle over the increased presence of niche sports. Then, if you're really on top of things, you'll go check up on the two horse racing participants and learn that they're the goddamn horses. The horses. Not the riders - not the riders! Not the riders - we talkin' 'bout the horses."

You may think that the title of this post refers to the fact that I'm still not over Allen Iverson's infamous "practice" press conference,* but - well, actually, no, that's fair. But what I meant to refer to was this:


This image represents the BBC's "faces of the year 2011 [for] women" - notice anything kind of weird? Something, I dunno, sort of furry and ursine? 'Round about December? Y'know - the motherfucking panda bear?

Is this really the best we can do? It's not like the BBC struggled to identify twelve male humans whose faces they could use. It's also not like we had some sort of news shortage in 2011, where there was just nothing going on and so it's just really hard to find stories to refer back to. It's also not like the BBC artificially limited its selection in the way that many American news organizations might have by only sticking to domestic stories. And it's not even hard to find women in the headlines! Here are just some of the headlines from December that featured women:

Popular Brazil President Helps Women In Politics (the "popular president" is the woman in question)
2 women share 1st kiss at US Navy ship's return
Banks Wooing Wealthy Women CEOs Say This Time Is Different
Woman gets kidney after posting Craigslist ad
Women-only movie sparks debate, understanding
Meryl Streep's next project: A national women's history museum

And it's not like these aren't substantive stories. You've got civil rights, health care, religion, foreign affairs, the arts, economics, and plenty of opportunities to make insightful observations throughout. But no - they went with the panda bear. Was it even a special panda story? A panda story that was, somehow, different from every other panda story we've ever heard? Judging by the BBC's summary, no:

"Sweetie, along with her fellow giant panda Sunshine, was welcomed at Edinburgh airport with cheers and bagpipes after the pair's 11-hour journey from Chengdu in western China. Their arrival is the culmination of five years of lobbying by the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland and the British government. Even the four pilots wore kilts in the pandas' honour. The pandas are on loan for a decade at a cost of £600,000 per year. Zoo bosses are hoping that Sweetie will produce cubs during that time."

Right? That sounds like a pretty generic panda story to me!

Again, as a reminder to all the deranged anti-feminists out there: sexism is not dead. Hell, it's not even in hiding. We're much better about treating women right than we used to be, but there are still huge and embarrassing - not to mention dangerous and harmful - gaps. There are still real issues out there that women are dealing with and even solving. Maybe next year the BBC will shelve its boilerplate stories for one of those.

*"Not a game - not a game! Not a game. We talkin' 'bout practice."

Having just looked at self-interest in morality, let's continue with that topic and now turn to an example of (what is to me) philosophy at its worst.

"Some writers say having children is simply a very intimate and personal affair, so not the sort of thing constrained by morality. But I don't see the logic there--is there really a DMZ (demoralized zone), untouched by ethics? On other accounts, to say someone ought to have a child, or ought not, improperly limits their freedom, even if these are moral and not legal 'oughts'. But if moral 'oughts' limit freedom (do they?), they all do. What's so special about 'oughts' pertaining to reproduction?

Perhaps we can shed some light here by noting how we think about the ethics of self-preservation, and then connecting the dots between reproduction and self-preservation."

First of all, this writing is shit. I know that producing good prose should not come at the cost of producing bad philosophy, but this sort of "some people say x, others say y, let's ask lots of parenthetical questions and then eventually I'll ignore 90% of this stuff and just talk about whatever I want to talk about" approach is, well, shit. But also, what the fuck does Jean Kazez think she's talking about with that "connecting the dots between reproduction and self-preservation" stuff?

She begins with a series of thought experiments,* but as my readers know by now it is fallacious to use thought experiments in the absence of other argumentation. More specifically, it's fallacious to use thought experiments in the absence of other argumentation that might as well be used to replace the thought experiment itself - that is, other argumentation that makes the thought experiment useless. As a result, I'm not going to go through her thought experiments here. Rather, I'll just stick to the other arguments that Kazez provides, starting with this one:

"[A person] may not be wrong to make the sacrifice [of her life in exchange for others'], but it doesn't seem like she has to. In fact, [if she does think this] she's failed to appreciate her own right of self-preservation. She thought about the situation in a neutral, third-person way, but could have thought about it in a biased, first-person way. When our existence is threatened, we're entitled to that ... aren't we?"

"At a genetic level, and on a psychological level, having a child has much in common with self-preservation, even if it's not identical to self-preservation...On some level, having a child is surviving--at least that's how many people feel, and on a genetic level, there's a least a kernel of truth to their feeling...If reproduction is erstatz survival, the right to self-preservation applies (more or less) to reproductive decisions as well."

How a right (let alone a Right!) can apply "more or less" I have no idea, but that should be the least of Kazez's worries here. For one, it is outright false to say that "having a child has much in common with self-preservation" when it comes to genes. This is some straight-up early-'90s science fantasy bullshit, and Kazez should really know better than to try something like this in the year 2011. The idea of self-preservation is that you preserve, y'know, your self, and the correlation between one's self and one's genes is so loose as to be entirely useless in this kind of context - and that's before we consider the fact that each parent only contributes half of his or her chromosomes to his or her child! As such, even if we forgot everything we learned about human genetics over the past 30 or so years, Kazez could only be half-right at most,*** which to me puts this squarely on the "less" side of "more or less."

The crowning affront in this ongoing series of philosophically insulting half-baked arguments, though, is what Kazez says at the very end of her post:

"Now you might say: ignotum per ignotius (the unknown through the more unknown). Why is there a right to self-defense? Who knows, but any approach to ethics that says otherwise won't have much connection to the way people really live and think about their lives."

*My favorite? One in which someone has a "time-suspender." I mean, c'mon, get the fuck outta here with that nonsense.
**Whose name, incidentally, I have initially misspelled literally every time I've typed it thus far. What fun.
***For instance, this also assumes that all genes count equally in making up one's self (so that any collection of 23 chromosomes will automatically count the same as any other). I think that's obviously wrong even on the oversimplified genetic-determinist kind of theory that Kazez is promoting here: not all of your genes are even expressed, in all likelihood, and it would be flat-out stupid to say that all of the ones that are expressed contribute equally to the thing you want to preserve when you want to preserve your self.

When I read articles like this one, I almost feel like Eminem was talking to the author (instead of, y'know, being a misogynistic asshole): "You wan't what you can't have/Ooh that's just too damn bad/Don't touch what you can't grab." Y'see, in this case the author is one Daniel Finn, and what he wants is a way for virtue ethics to endorse selfishness.

"When the pontifical council calls for stronger international oversight of the financial system, it speaks from common sense. Still, while the council can identify fraud as immoral, it hasn’t tried to say anything about where one should draw the line between immoral excess and moral profit-seeking in the finance industry. And it can’t. For it has no analysis of the moral exercise of self-interest in markets...The problem is clear: The founder of Christianity preached love of neighbor and told us that the greatest love was to lay down one’s life for another; self-interest wasn’t among the virtues Jesus encouraged."

And really, why should this come as a surprise? At least in the western tradition, selfishness is a vice by its very definition. To redefine it as a virtue, even just in some situations, would completely dismantle the entire framework of virtue ethics - which, conveniently enough, Finn himself demonstrates (my emphasis): "[T]he moral defense of the market," he says, "is based on the systemic effect of self-interest, which within the proper institutional and cultural conditions can conduce to the well-being of even the poor." I dunno about you, but to me that sounds an awful lot like leaving virtue ethics behind for a moral theory that's focused on consequences (i.e., what the effect of an action is, or what that action conduces to). The only way to keep this within the purview of virtue ethics as such, it seems, would be to say that it's sometimes virtuous to follow one's vices - but, again, that would pretty much throw virtue ethics as we know it out the window (and, of course, even then one would have to explain why the vicious action is sometimes the right one).

It's not, then, that Finn is wrong to want a moral theory that tells him when it's okay to be selfish. It is okay to be selfish sometimes, so in fact he'd be mistaken not to want such a theory. Where he goes wrong is in trying to bend virtue ethics to that task, especially given that his preferred set of virtues is one that the Vatican gets to define. Drawing thin lines is not what virtue ethics is good at, so if Finn wants to continue to draw his lines virtuously he can't exactly be surprised that he can't also draw them accurately.

They must have an awful lot of free time in Holland if this is what they get up to.

"Two Dutch TV hosts claim they ate chunks of each other’s flesh because they wanted to find out what human meat tastes like, all in front of a studio audience...A chef fried a hunk of Storm’s buttocks, and a piece of Zeno’s abdomen, both carved off earlier by a surgeon, in a pan with sunflower oil, skipping salt and pepper to preserve the meat’s natural taste."

If you ask me, that's pretty unappealing. But since there is - and I swear I am not making this up - a new philosophy of food program at the University of North Texas, I figured I would swing by their website to see what, if anything, philosophers said about this sort of thing. Summarized very briefly, apparently they've said this:

"Humans instinctually do not eat other humans. It fills most of us with horror and revulsion. Like incest, cannibalism is something people reject as repugnant but have a hard time giving good reasons why.

According to instinct and tradition, cannibalism is viewed as morally wrong..."

"I'm really more fearful of freezing [than global warming]. And I don't have any science to prove that. But we have a lot of science that tells us they're not basing it on real scientific facts. And we need to listen to more. I'm willing to listen for more. - Texas Republican Ralph Hall, who is the chair of... the chair of... Look. I don't have any way to let you down easily here. I'm just going to come right out and say it. He's the chair of the House science committee."

The way that philosophers say this, as you can see above, is that "people [feel such-and-such a way] but have a hard time giving good reasons why." Though that sounds a lot more respectable than "I don't have any [way] to prove that," there's no real difference between the two.

This, I think, is one of the reasons why feminism is so important. "Don't like abortions? Don't have one" may fit on a bumper sticker, but it's more than a mere slogan: there are lots of cases in which one individual's discomfort says nothing at all about what other people should or should not do. You won't catch me eating human rump fried in sunflower oil any time soon, but for the life of me I can't think of any really compelling reason why Dutch TV hosts shouldn't do so if they really want to. At least until the inevitable zombie apocalypse, a little bit of cannibalism every now and then probably just ain't no big thing.

In addition to the suspension-of-disbeliever dodge, one of the most popular defenses of religious belief on the part of (self-styled) sophisticated believers is that we skeptics can never really get our criticisms quite right because we're on the outside looking in. In the words of David Robinson (no, not the former Spurs center) and Stuart Miles,

"There are significant cultural and linguistic dimensions to this, but the untranslatable element can run as deep as the waters of baptism; in Jesus' teaching, no one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again...To feel the difference, of course, you would have to be an insider."

"distinction between religious and secular spheres [which it achieves by comparing] an 'iconic' image of Che Guevera [to] the sculpture of a Jain saint [and] two identical Chinese good luck pendants—the type hung from car rear-view mirrors—featuring Kuan-Yin, the Buddhist Goddess of Mercy, alongside Mao Zedong, leader of the Cultural Revolution. [These objects, they say, point to] the hazy boundary between religious faith and political or pop-cultural acts of devotion."

"James K.A. Smith's recent work on cultural liturgies might prompt us to ask whether rites such as university Frosh Week or Black Friday might also feature here. Such unexpected juxtapositions could startlingly show how such practices surely and pervasively shape our loves towards what is understood to be ultimate."

The conflation here should be obvious: that one is devoted (in some sense) to a thing does not mean that one understands that thing to be ultimate. Here the view-from-inside argument succeeds - but only because it correctly identifies a straw man that the other side has constructed by unwittingly taking their own premises to be paramount. To wit, although it is true within a religion that one's devotion is thoroughly bound up with one's understanding of the nature of reality and so it may seem natural for religious believers to assume that everybody works this way, outside of religions the same thing does not hold true. Whichever criticisms of religion rely on a distinction between it and secular culture, then, are not affected by arguments like the one above.

It's important to remember, though, that it isn't the view-from-inside argument that makes this so. Rather, the view-from-inside argument only gives us a sort of philosophical inspiration to look for ways in which the other side might be relying on its own background assumptions when it should be paying more attention to what we're saying. This distinction is of critical importance because it's typical for religious believers to toss out the view-from-inside argument as though it was sufficient in and of itself to make any kind of point - as though, in fact, saying anything more would actually undermine the point that the view-from-inside argument ostensibly makes. Robinson and Miles, for example, think that it is a matter "of course" that skeptics will never be able to understand religion and so will never be able to criticize it properly - and so they don't ever bother to say why this is the case, or even to give an example. Such tactics amount only to hand-waving, however, and cannot be taken seriously. Everybody sees the world differently, but this does not mean that we cannot distinguish truths from falsehoods or that the truths we find do not apply to all of us. In the absence of reasons to think that the skeptical view-from-"outside" is missing some specific relevant thing, there's no reason to even care.

...Michele Bachmann's supporters are the voice of reason.

"Brad Sherman, the pastor at Solid Rock Christian Church in Coralville and a Bachmann supporter, said he believed some evangelicals had expressed concerns [about Bachmann being a woman], and perhaps were throwing their support to another socially-conservative candidate as a result.

'I know it’s an issue to some people,' Sherman said. 'How many, I don’t know. It could be the big elephant in the room.'

But, he stressed, his interpretation of scripture indicated such concerns were misplaced."

Seriously, though, how fucked up are things when (1) people think that the most objectionable thing about Bachmann is her gender; (2) people are actually worried about a woman being president just because she's a woman; and (3) Michele Bachmann's supporters are more liberal than anybody about anything?

And, while we're here, let's pause to compare this kind of religiosity to the suspension-of-disbeliever kind of religiosity that people are always saying is the "real" or "authentic" kind. I think it's fairly obvious that the two are not the same - I mean, I dunno about you, but when I go to movies and see a natural disaster or an alien invasion, I don't then turn around and expect political candidates to offer their opinions on those fictional events. And yeah, evangelical Christians are only a portion of all Christians, who in turn are only a portion of all religious believers. But when your sect can make the national news because of your sexist position towards a presidential candidate and acting congressperson, it's more than fair for other people to comment on that sect and its practices as though they mattered. It's good for all of us that Bachmann is never ever ever going to get elected president, but it's far from ideal that part of her failure is going to be due to bigoted religious idiots like the ones in this story.

At this point, we're all pretty much inured to the Ben Franklin quote about how those who would sacrifice liberty for safety deserve neither. It's not that he's wrong, necessarily, or that the lesson is any less compelling than it was when people started quoting him en masse after the passage of the Patriot Act, but we've just heard it so many damn times by now. But what if we were to trade liberty for something else? Something like, say, prosperity?

"Even though we are in the midst of a quite severe (and long-lasting!) economic downturn, we are still a society of extreme abundance. An economist friend of mine recently pointed out that the US produces 1 billion units of clothing per year. The number could even be 100 billion; I can’t remember for sure. But it was simply massive.

I’m glad we produce a lot. I think that is a partial fulfillment of the creation mandate, and that it is good, not evil. However, I suggest that we could get by with producing less of some things in order to produce more of other things."

If this were a featured post I'd be more pedantic about the details of this line of thought,* but the overall shape is pretty unobjectionable:

"We need more people devoted to serving those in need. We need more people devoted to the causes of fighting large global problems, like extreme poverty and corrupt leadership. Many of these things cannot in themselves be done at a profit, but can and must be done."

Matt Perman, though, would like you to know that he's not anti-capitalist even though he agrees that some of the things we need to do can't (realistically) be accomplished without losing money. And, again, the overall shape is fine: as he says, non-profits have a place within a capitalist system, too. But there's just one little thing that he seems to have forgotten - see if you can spot it.

"We need to be a society of both excellent businesses and great non-profits.

This is not anti-capitalistic, but is precisely the freedom that capitalism upholds and champions. Start the organization you want to start, not looking to the government to keep you afloat but rather...your own efforts and ability to produce things of value. Capitalism is about freedom, and starting non-profits is just as much in line with capitalism as starting for-profits.

What I’m saying is that we are at a point as a society where the enormous wealth we have created virtually demands that we give much more consideration to using that wealth not to buy more things and enhance our own positions, but rather to fund those who are meeting the types of essential needs that cannot be met at a profit."

The missing link, at least for me, is the gap between having the freedom to get something done and actually getting something done. Perman, as you can see, believes that there is a (probably moral) demand "to fund those who are meeting...essential needs," but he can't bring himself to endorse any way of responding to that need that actually guarantees its fulfillment. For him, essentials like food and shelter can apparently only be provided if people freely choose to provide them; the government, which runs on compulsorily obtained tax dollars, cannot be involved. Since this is my blog, I'll ask the obvious question: why?

Why turn down government aid? Why arbitrarily say that people only get to eat if other people will freely provide for their food? What the hell kind of moral response is that? "I'd sure like to make sure that you get fed, and that guy over there just bought his eighth Ferrari, but, gosh, I just can't bring myself to approve the government taxing him to buy you a sandwich." And, to be perfectly honest, I don't think that Perman even knows whether this is feasible - whether, that is, we plausibly can freely provide for everyone's needs. Obviously we have enough money to do this and we can imagine scenarios where this happens, but hypothetical scenarios are going to be pretty cold comfort to people who, for instance, can't afford the basic health care that could save their lives.** So much of our wealth is bound up with companies and individuals who will never freely give it away that it's even questionable whether the rest of us do have the money to accomplish the things that Perman is talking about. Why, in the face of all of this, would he go out of his way to reject the best known solution for accomplishing the goal that he's set for us?

Rather than going over all the possible answers in depth, I just want to point out that this argument - which I think we can all agree is confused at best - echoes many of the themes that recur on this blog. There's the (often religious) insistence that freedom just as such is of great and even surpassing value; there's the caritas/tzedakah thing; there's the knee-jerk retreat to capitalism and capitalistic methods (or even just to the name "capitalism" as a sort of smokescreen); the utter inability to understand morality in a coherent way; and, of course, there's an inexplicable and ultimately self-defeating antagonism towards the idea of a government actually governing. Because Perman doesn't go into any real detail I can't say which, if any, of those things is primarily responsible for his misguided but well-intended reasoning. But I can say that all of them are echoed in his thought, and that in and of itself is reason to think that he has fallen under the sway of some truly philosophically regrettable ideas. Trading freedom for safety is one thing, but to my mind it's those who wouldn't trade freedom for prosperity who deserve neither.

*E.g.: 1 billion units of clothing works out to a little over 3 units of clothing per US citizen. Maybe that's not actually so unreasonable, when you look at it that way.
**Let alone to provide them with the education they would need to appreciate the role of health care in saving their lives, let alone to provide them with the kind of neighborhood in which one can become well-educated, let alone...

"Black boxes pervade every aspect of computer design because they employ three distinct abstractions, each offering tremendous advantages for programmers and users. The first has already been described: a user needs to know only what a program does, so he need not repeat the programmer’s labor of understanding how it does it. The same is true for ­programmers themselves, who need to know only what operations the computer is capable of performing, and don’t need to concern themselves with how it performs them."

This, for example, is absolutely false. Knowing how a computer works is not always necessary for writing minimally functional code, but it's wildly inaccurate to say that programmers "don't need to concern themselves" at all with the way that computers work. For instance, many programs need to be able to operate under heavy computational stress - say, because many people are using the program at once or because the program is being asked by a single user to do many things at once. Understanding computational efficiency, however, requires one to understand (at least in simple terms) how a computer works - how it stores data, how it manipulates data, how it presents output to users, etc. Google's programmers, for example, could certainly have written a working search engine without knowing the first thing about how computers work. But it would be ridiculous to suggest that they've written a search engine that not only works but performs quickly and efficiently even when used by millions of people at a time in an ever-changing environment all without concerning themselves with the way that computers work. Like anything else, computers have physical limitations and quirks, and it's absolutely false to say that programmers never need to think about these things.

Also false? This nonsense:

Not too long ago I used to post regularly about the anti-evolution doofuses over at Reasons To Believe, but then for some reason they sort of fell off of my radar. Well, as of today they're back, and it sort of feels like coming home. Coming home, that is, to a bunch of idiots.

"Here we will review the data analysis process used by the authors to explain why the data [related to human phylogenetic trees] doesn’t show the expected results and we’ll observe the assumptions and the process used to deal with contrarian data. (The assumptions are underlined so that you can identify them clearly.) We’ll see that the authors conclude evolution is true despite the fact that the majority of the data doesn’t fit the evolutionary hypothesis."

Should Patricia Fanning's assertion prove accurate, evolutionary theory would indeed have at least a semi-serious problem. The whole point, after all, is to have the theory fit the data, so if (as Fanning alleges) people believe the theory despite the data that'd be an issue. Luckily for us, though, she underlines the problematic assumptions, so they're easy for us to find:

"Assume evolution is true...Assume that rhesus monkeys were the first of the five species to emerge in the species tree...Assume that genes acquire mutations in a clock-like fashion...Assume that the theoretical species tree is correct...[and assume] that orangutans emerged ~16 million years ago and that the generation time for the species is 20 years."

Each of these assumptions, Fanning correctly observes, has the effect of paring down the range of valid phylogenetic trees. As in many technical fields, evolutionary scientists use math to generate a wide array of (broadly speaking) possible phylogenetic trees and then use that as the basis for their investigations. However, that's not where things end: the initial set of possibilities only reflects the most basic knowledge of the field and so can be improved upon by adding in more information. Fanning calls each such piece of additional information an "assumption," but it'd be closer to the truth to say that they're findings. To take the easiest example of this, it's not like we're just guessing at the generation time for orangutans. Rather, it's based on lots of observation - in other words, on data. When Fanning draws a distinction between the "data" of the algorithmically derived phylogenetic trees and the "assumptions" about how biology works, she is therefore trying to split a hair too fine. Although scientists certainly use detailed premises to limit the range of plausible phylogenetic trees, these premises are based on data as well and so hardly warrant the pejorative label "assumption."

In a way this is like playing cards. We know very well which five-card hands are possible using a standard deck, and so we can pretty trivially generate a list of those possible hands. But if we are dealt a hand and we know the identity of one or more of the cards - or even what the identity can't be - then we can eliminate lots of possibilities and so end up with a more accurate guess about what kind of hand we have. This is why it's important to have a good dealer: if I get even a flash of your cards, I have all kinds of information about which kinds of hands you could have. (For instance, if I see you get both a red and a black card, I know that you aren't going to end up with a flush.) That this information would then become a premise in my reasoning would hardly be problematic; indeed, it would be a problem if I ignored it and continued to pretend that the entire range of mathematically possible hands was possible in the case in question.

This isn't one of the absolute most basic distinctions in epistemology, but it's close: premises are not always assumptions. It certainly is possible to start a line of reasoning with a purely speculative premise, but there's a real difference between doing that and doing what scientists do when they take evolution to be true. I'm not surprised that one of the Reasons To Believe crowd made this kind of mistake, but that doesn't detract in any way from the sheer idiocy of saying that a naive mathematical model should never be sharpened because the sharpening process happens using premises.

Okay, I promise this is the last NBA post for a while. It's just - yay!



Not only that, the Lakers lost! Kobe is in the L column, and all is right with the world.

The government, we are always told, cannot and does not create ("real") jobs. As a result, people get upset when the government provides jobs. But then, as it turns out, they also get upset when the government doesn't provide jobs:

"Yes, people need assistance, and the government can provide that safety net to those who really need help. However, we do no favor to anyone who is perpetually receiving assistance when they are capable of doing work or giving back to the community in some meaningful way.

True compassion requires us to take charity a little more personally than to expect government to do the work."

Randy Hicks - whose name I swear I did not make up - believes that "big government" is bad because of the way that it supplies mere handouts. What people need instead, he believes, is "assistance [that] is based on relationship and a deeper knowledge of individual’s need." I'm not sure why he thinks that the government is incapable of providing that kind of help, but okay, let's just go with it. But then it's only fair to ask what happens when the government tries to give people work, isn't it?

Work, for example, like protecting the environment...

"Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota wants to padlock the E.P.A.’s doors, as does former Speaker Newt Gingrich. Gov. Rick Perry of Texas wants to impose an immediate moratorium on environmental regulation.

Representative Ron Paul of Texas wants environmental disputes settled by the states or the courts. Herman Cain, a businessman, wants to put many environmental regulations in the hands of an independent commission that includes oil and gas executives. Jon M. Huntsman Jr., the former Utah governor, thinks most new environmental regulations should be shelved until the economy improves."

...or conducting scientific research...

"In its proposals for science agencies that support university research, the House Republicans' measure makes even deeper cuts than the version the committee issued earlier last week. The earlier proposal would have kept the National Institutes of Health at its 2010 level of $31-billion, and raised the National Science Foundation by 5.2 percent over its 2010 amount of $6.9-billion. The version issued Friday proposes bringing the NIH back to its 2008 level of about $29.4-billion and setting the NSF's budget $150-million below its 2010 level."

...or building and maintaining highways...

"It's an outrageous tale: The federal government spends one out of every $10 in transportation aid on wasteful projects such as refurbishing a giant roadside coffee pot and constructing turtle tunnels.

That's what Republican lawmakers have said repeatedly in recent weeks in the Senate...

...But no transportation aid was spent on the coffee pot's $100,000 restoration, said Olga Herbert, executive director of the Lincoln Highway Heritage Corridor. The money was raised entirely from preservation and civic organizations and local supporters.

'We did not use any of this $300,000 award for anything to do with the coffee pot,' she said. 'It's interesting that nobody from [the senate] called me about this.'"

...or providing basic reproductive health services...

"Everybody goes to clinics, to hospitals, to doctors, and so on. Some people go to Planned Parenthood. But you don’t have to go to Planned Parenthood to get your cholesterol or your blood pressure checked. If you want an abortion, you go to Planned Parenthood, and that’s well over 90 percent of what Planned Parenthood does."

...or even just making art:

"The National Endowment for the Arts distributed $1.4 million in special 'stimulus' grants to 37 private nonprofit 'arts' organizations located in the city of San Francisco...The money for special NEA stimulus grants was tucked away on page 57 of the final text of the $787[sic]-page stimulus bill.

After President Obama signed that monstrosity, many Americans adopted the mantra: Read the bill!

Now they should read where the money in the bill went."

Gee - that sort of makes it seem like they don't actually want the government to help people "giv[e] back to the community in some meaningful way." Oh, they're okay with having a safety net (except, y'know, when they're not), but nothing more than that! Because, y'know, the government can only make people dependent on handouts and never creates jobs, except for when it does create jobs and actually helps people be self-sufficient, but that doesn't count cause they aren't real jobs, because, uh...nobody knows. And that's why the gubmint is bad. Or something.

Steven Landsburg, whom we have seen before, seems to me to have a very odd definition of "miser":

"In this whole world, there is nobody more generous than the miser—the man who could deplete the world's resources but chooses not to. The only difference between miserliness and philanthropy is that the philanthropist serves a favored few while the miser spreads his largess far and wide."

I mean, I have a box of matches and so could pretty easily deplete the world's resources by driving about and lighting things on fire. Does the fact that I choose not to make me a miser? Presumably not.

Much though it pleases me to dither about definitions - I am, after all, a philosopher by training - I'd much rather talk about that second part, the part about how misers are better than philanthropists. (Technically I suppose that Landsburg has not actually said this, but it's much more plausible than his actual claim about who is the more generous.) The reason I would rather talk about the second part is that I'm also a trained mathematician, and it sure looks to my mathematician's eye as though Landsburg has oversimplified things somewhat. A great deal of his position reduces to claims like this one:

"What could be more generous than keeping your lamps unlit and your plate unfilled, leaving more fuel for others to burn and more food for others to eat? Who is a more benevolent neighbor than the man who employs no servants, freeing them to wait on someone else?...Instead of digging coal for [a miser who does not heat his or her home], some would-be miner is now free to perform some other service for himself or someone else."

Likewise, Landsburg says, people who have the money to employ others but do not do so leave those people free to be employed elsewhere; people who could afford to buy things but do not do so leave those things free to be bought be others; and so on. Conversely, when you consume goods or otherwise use economic resources, those resources are not free to be used by others. Seems straightforward enough - except, of course, that it actually isn't.

In part the problem with this argument is that not all manners of economic consumption are equally self-centered. We certainly can buy things in a way that's needlessly selfish, thereby removing resources from the economy that would be better used elsewhere; it is, for example, always frustrating to see a city build a new sports stadium instead of improving the actual living conditions of its citizens (especially because new sports stadiums are almost never needed in any sense of the word). But it's hardly wasteful in the same way to employ someone, especially if - as is often the case currently - that individual would not otherwise have work. To equate the two, as Landsburg does, is therefore at least a little on the disingenuous side.

The bigger problem, though, is that the fundamental question is not really whether resources are free to be used in the best way. Rather, the question is how those resources are actually used. Call the optimal value of any given resource O and any sub-optimal value of that same resource S - it's trivial, then, to show that resources cannot be used optimally if someone consumes them in a sub-optimal way; put in crude mathematical terms, the expected value that those resources would generate is just (1*S) + (0*O), or S. (1 because, having been used already, there's a 100% chance that they were used in a sub-optimal way; 0 because, having been used already, there's a 0% chance that they were used in an optimal way.) In order to succeed, Landsburg's argument would have to demonstrate that there is a higher expected value for those same resources when "misers" don't consume them. However, all we know from his argument is that O > S (because, by definition, the optimal value is greater than any sub-optimal value) and that miserliness increases the probability of O to some extent. This is far from sufficient, however: if it turns out that the increase in the likelihood of O is relatively small, it could easily be better overall to just use the resources. To put that in clearer terms, yes, it's possible that rich people who don't create jobs will actually help out overall by allowing better jobs to be created elsewhere - but it's also possible that rich people who don't create jobs will only succeed in guaranteeing that more people are unemployed needlessly.

None of this is to say that we need not be concerned with how we consume economic resources, that, in other words, rich people should just throw money around aimlessly. To the contrary: I think that it's obvious that we do need to concern ourselves with that, and I think it's fairly obvious that we can know which choices are overall better than others. But note that it is actually Landsburg's position to deny this. When people specifically choose the targets of their beneficence, he derides this as "serv[ing] a favored few." Rather than taking this kind of approach, it's far more plausible to say that there is a real fact about who ought to benefit from economic resources - who, in other words, most need or could most use things like food or housing or even consumer electronics. Whether this sort of thing creates economic inefficiencies is really beside the point, because if we want to talk about which use of a resource is best (or even just most generous) then we are exceeding the bounds of what economics can tell us. I agree that miserliness leaves resources free to be used in other ways, but we cannot forget that miserliness also leaves people free to starve. Miserliness is not always (in fact, is probably not ever) the worst option, but it is also far from always being the best.

In the last post, I admitted that my skill at chess was enough to save me from total embarrassment but not much higher than that. Turns out that the same thing is more or less true when it comes to quantum physics; I'm not much for the hard sciences to begin with, but quantum physics is some seriously confusing shit even for people who really study it. And, at least according to one physicist, it may get much worse before it gets better - because, as it happens, it may never get better.*

"Dramatic developments in cosmological findings and thought have led some of the world’s premier physicists to propose that our universe is only one of an enormous number of universes with wildly varying properties, and that some of the most basic features of our particular universe are indeed mere accidents—a random throw of the cosmic dice. In which case, there is no hope of ever explaining our universe’s features in terms of fundamental causes and principles...

[T]wo theories in physics, eternal inflation and string theory, now suggest that the same fundamental principles from which the laws of nature derive may lead to many different self-consistent universes, with many different properties. It is as if you walked into a shoe store, had your feet measured, and found that a size 5 would fit you, a size 8 would also fit, and a size 12 would fit equally well. Such wishy-washy results make theoretical physicists extremely unhappy. Evidently, the fundamental laws of nature do not pin down a single and unique universe. According to the current thinking of many physicists, we are living in one of a vast number of universes. We are living in an accidental universe. We are living in a universe uncalculable by science."

The upshot of this, according to theists, is that religion must be considered a legitimate belief. The way our universe operates, they say, "cries out for explanation," which can in the end might as well be a creator who has intentionally fine-tuned some kind of universal constants somewhere along the line in order to ensure that life is possible. After all (they continue), if the evidence available to us cannot ever give us all the answers, then even atheistic explanations must be taken on faith. Of course, there are a whole slew of well-known problems with this reasoning, most of which reduce to the fallacy of thinking that the only options are atheism or a very tightly-defined brand of theism. Underneath all of that, though, is something verging on a good point: what exactly are we supposed to do when "the data cries out for explanation" but also fails to specify one?

One option, of course, is to say that all explanations are plausible so long as they aren't ruled out. In the case of the universe's basic structure and fundamental physical behavior, that would mean saying that it's okay to believe in an atheistic multiverse but also that it's okay to believe in some sort of generic deism (or that we live in a simulated universe, or...). I'm not sure how much I like that, though. For one thing, when (or if) we run up against this sort of pervasive, deep, permanent ignorance, it makes me nervous to think that we even know what all the options are. Again, it's pretty easy to say which things aren't options - we know, for instance, that the universe wasn't created by a five-sided square or by an omnipotent being that briefly inhabited the body of a Jewish carpenter - but, especially given that this is an incredibly esoteric subject, once we open the floodgates I become very nervous that we can even come close to getting the right answer.

This, incidentally, is more or less the same thing that Alan Moore says in the supplementary materials to his excellent** From Hell. Criminology is in many respects a natural analog for philosophical problem-solving, and the case of Jack the Ripper (which is the subject of From Hell) is a canonical example of a crime that we will almost certainly never be able to figure out. We have lots of evidence, both in the specific case and about serial killers generally, and most Ripper-ologists agree that we can narrow down the suspects to a relatively few people, but we don't even know that "Jack the Ripper" was a single person - or, if there was only one individual who used that name, that he or she was responsible for any of the murders associated with it. The fact that we are nonetheless tempted to try to figure out who Jack the Ripper was indicates to me that mysteries do not just cry out for explanation. Instead, it sure looks like they cry out for specific kinds of explanation - the identity of a single Jack who was responsible for all the murders, say, or a mathematical substrate to the multiverse that explains everything we see. These are not just any old explanations, you'll note: they're elegant explanations, they offer an immediately compelling story about the thing that they explain, and they eliminate the need for further investigation. Is it really plausible, do you think, that we should expect to get all three of those things when we find "data [that] cries out for explanation"? Presumably not - but those three things (and possibly more) are what we look for nonetheless.

This, perhaps, is the sort of thing that led Arthur Conan Doyle to write that it is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data: no matter who's doing the theorizing, there are going to be biases that artificially limit the options that they consider. If, as one theist says in response to this story, "the takeaway should be that truth is the goal of inquiry," then that must mean both advancing towards truth and not retreating from it. Yet Doyle's maxim holds true precisely because every theory that is proposed is effectively a retreat from truth unless there is some way that we can test it. The reason for this is that every such theory threatens to stop us thinking about the subject before we have even done the basic due diligence of listing out all the options, and so threatens to stop us looking for an answer that may well be within our power to obtain. Science has surprised us in the past and will do so again in the future, and so I'm not convinced that this really is the absolute dead end that people are making it out to be. But if it is, that by no means provides us with license to believe whatever we like and it certainly doesn't succeed in bringing religion up to the level of science. Just as it's fallacious to doubt your knowledge on the basis of hypothetical facts that hypothetically lie outside your knowledge, it would be mistaken to pick an idea out of a hat on the presumption that you're never going to know more anyway. If there are facts that cry out for explanation but withhold all possibility of rational explication, the only right move is to let them cry.

*Please note, when you read this quote, that I don't even know that what it says is true. From what I can make out, the idea of a multiverse is a sort of mathematical prediction, which sure sounds to me like the evidence is pointing towards a specific conclusion even if it's a conclusion that we don't know how to test empirically. But I'm nowhere near sure of that, so...
**This is redundant, isn't it? "Alan Moore's excellent..."?

"I confess that atheism often strikes me as not only false but a laughable philosophy, fit only for the licentious or the idiotic...but others have found something compelling there, and I, for one, know enough about my own intelligence to know that it's quite possible that I could be. wrong. You might try to treat theism the same way.

Then again, you may just that smart that you never error [sic] intellectually, and thus can trust your beliefs and demonize your opponents' beliefs with absolute confidence."

This sort of thing is more than a little ironic coming from someone who had already admitted that he couldn't be bothered to read what I was actually writing, but the general character of the argument is, I think, not an uncommon one. I'm too brazen in my analyses, these people think, and I should really be more respectful. Who knows - if I am, I might even change my mind! Regular readers, I hope, know enough to recognize this as a simple falsehood; the vehemence with which I write is intentionally adjusted to match the wrongness of the position I'm criticizing, and at any rate it's easy enough to find comment threads that demonstrate my ability to engage with opposing views without rejecting them out of hand. But here Blair is expressing a fallacy that I find all too common, so I figure I'll take a post to try to explain why we don't need to be impressed or deferential towards any random philosophical (or other) position that happens to be supported by a bunch of people with lots of letters after their names.

Although Blair didn't stick around long enough to tell me more about what he meant, it seems to me that the crucial phrase is this one:

"[W]henever I find myself indulging too much in contempt of atheism, I call to my mind the serious and gifted philosophers- much more gifted than myself- who have been atheists and I attempt to moderate my contempt."

There are a number of ways to parse this appeal to "serious and gifted philosophers," but none of them makes for a convincing argument.

Probably the most obvious of these is the something-I-don't-see argument. Speaking as a very amateur chess player, I know full well what it's like to engage in an intellectual competition against a vastly superior foe and just get walloped by something that I had never seen coming. There are, however, at least two very important differences between using the something-I-don't-see argument in the context of chess and using it in the context of philosophy. The first of these differences is that you'll eventually learn for sure whether the other chess player has seen something you haven't and, having found out, you can then go back and figure out just what that thing was. Indeed, we (humans; not we very amateur chess players) make regular progress in figuring out which (series of) chess moves are weak or strong and we almost certainly will, one day, solve the game altogether. When it comes to philosophy, on the other hand, the game almost never ends within one's lifetime; at least if you go by what happens in academia, some legitimate philosophical debates have been going for thousands of years and show no sign of slowing down. The consequence of this (and the second relevant difference) is that one cannot have the same good reason for trusting the something-I-don't-see argument in both chess and philosophy. In chess, the good reason is that one knows with certainty that there are possibilities that are dangerous to one's success that one has not fully considered. In philosophy, however, one does not know this; at most, one wouldn't know that there aren't such possibilities. This means that the something-I-don't-see argument in the context of philosophy is necessarily an argument from ignorance: "There is much that I don't know, therefore I could - in some way totally unknown to me - be wrong." Since we know that this is a fallacy, we shouldn't be very convinced by the something-I-don't-see argument in the context of philosophy. (We'll see more about this in today's third and final post, so if you want a more in-depth explanation you won't have to wait long.) It's one thing if you know that there are avenues of thought that you haven't explored because, like Blair, you're too lazy or stupid to go out and read them, but in that case you've got bigger problems than the something-I-don't-see argument.

You may have noticed, however, that my interpretation of the something-I-don't-see argument basically didn't refer at all to people being "serious and gifted" chess players. In fact, this omission was intentional: it's more than common for two very bad chess players to play each other and worry (rightly) about the something-I-don't-see argument even though they both know that the other is far from a master-level player. The important thing in this case is knowing that you're missing part of the picture, not worrying whether your opponent sees the whole thing. So as to better account for this phrase, one might also understand Blair to be saying something like this: very smart people disagree with me, so their arguments must be very smart, and it is not wise to be very confident in the face of a very smart argument. Problem is, each step of this argument is wrong.

First of all, very smart people can say very stupid things, even on subjects they know well. I'm sure you have your own favorite example of this, but if you need a reminder you can just look at almost any featured post of mine. We've seen more stupid arguments from philosophy professors than I care to count, so it's hardly convincing to appeal directly to the intelligence of one's interlocutors. (Again, if you don't actually read what they say, then maybe it makes sense to go for the next best thing. But, y'know, read what they have to say and then you won't have that problem.) Even if the arguments in question are intellectually impressive, though, that doesn't necessarily mean that they're good. Complexity and subtlety in an individual's prose certainly do make for a very imposing read, but an argument can be complex and subtle and also dead wrong.* Indeed, we have pretty reliable empirical evidence that creative, intelligent thinkers are just as creative and intelligent when it comes to covering up the truth as they are when it comes to revealing it. It is, therefore, not always necessary to tread lightly around arguments that could only have come from a smart person. And, in fact, even if the argument itself is very good** it is still fair in some scenarios to be confident that it is also wrong. "Very good," after all, does not mean "perfect," so if you can find a definite flaw in an otherwise very good argument then you'd be fully justified in rejecting that argument.*** And, of course, it does nothing to add that many smart people believe the same thing, for what escapes one PhD may escape them all.

A third possibility for saving Blair's position rests in his self-deprecation. Perhaps, that is, the important thing is not that other people are smarter but that Blair is less smart. Aside from the obvious and snarky response,**** the problem with this argument is that it's either radically skeptical or useless. I mean, yeah, it is true that we find lots of old ideas to be absurd in light of what we now know, and it's natural to think that we could likewise be clinging to ideas that are going to look absurd in a couple hundred years. But what, exactly, are we supposed to do about that? We might downgrade our certainty across the board, maybe, but it would be totally nonsensical to respond to this line of thought by becoming more skeptical with respect to our beliefs but no more skeptical with respect to things that other people believe. They, too, are relying on more or less the same background knowledge that we are, so it would be silly to say that we have a better chance of being wrong than they do in the case that said background knowledge turns out to be wrong. So if we're going to respond to this at all, we can't respond to it in such a way that all of a sudden only theism (e.g.) becomes more likely. A sinking tide, as we know, lowers all boats.

So, as far as I can tell, there's no really good reason to be deferential to views which you oppose - at least, so long as you can comprehend them and respond appropriately. For example, for all of my contentiousness on philosophical issues, I am very wary when it comes to trying to out-think computer scientists (or, y'know, real chess players) in their area of expertise. I know from experience that I'm just not a very good programmer, so if a bunch of computer science experts tell me that this thing should be done in that way (and if I can't see a tremendously obvious problem with it), I'm liable to believe them. But if you're in this kind of situation with respect to philosophy, why would you try to compete with expert philosophers anyway? Again, we'll see more about this in the next post, but there's no shame (or irrationality) in professing agnosticism in an area where you yourself cannot discern truth from fiction, even if other people claim to be able to. But there is something wrong with insisting that everybody else must share your weakness, as Blair very well may have done. Not being impressed with (e.g.) theistic arguments should not stop one from treating them with the same intellectual honesty that one brings to more realistic arguments, of course, but there is just no good reason that I can see for taking seriously those ideas that one has good reasons for dismissing.

*To continue with the previous analogy, chess players denote complex and subtle and also dead wrong moves with "?!".
**In chess notation, "!".
***In chess notation, "!!".
****"Maybe he's just an idiot and the rest of us don't have to worry."