Increasing Boredom

I've finally started reading Sam Harris's most recent book, The Moral Landscape. While I'm not Harris's biggest fan (I've always felt that he completely lacks the optimism and wit that make his peer Richard Dawkins so worth reading), I was still interested to see how one of the big New Atheist authors would handle my own area of specialization, ethics.

It's still too soon for me to make any pronouncements about that, having just scratched the surface of the book, but this endnote from chapter 1 leaves me skeptical about Harris's entire project:

...I am convinced that every appearance of terms like "metaethics," "deontology," "noncognitivism," "antirealism," "emotivism," etc., directly increases the amount of boredom in the universe. My goal...is to start a conversation that a wider audience can engage with and find helpful. Few things would make this goal harder to achieve that for me to speak and write like an academic philosopher.

As someone who spent two years working on a thesis that dealt with almost all of the concepts that Harris thinks so increase boredom in the universe, I obviously disagree with his assessment; but that's beside the point. There are two things that really bother me about this, and make me suspect that The Moral Landscape is going to be shallow and, itself, quite boring.

The first is that Harris seems to be completely missing the point of popular scientific and philosophical literature, which is to present complex ideas in such a way that audiences without an academic background in those areas can begin to understand them. One does not do that by avoiding the subject, but by writing about it clearly and as simply as possible (and, yes, with minimal jargon). Here's another reason I prefer Richard Dawkins. His recent book The Greatest Show On Earth, in which he presents the evidence that supports the theory of evolution, doesn't shy away from dense subjects like genetics, geology, etc. It tackles them head on, and Dawkins proves that he has a gift for writing about them in such a way that lay-audiences can grasp their relevance to evolutionary theory, even if we couldn't afterwards teach a class on the subjects. Harris is essentially saying that his goal is simply to avoid subjects that might bore the reader (or him). That's terrible popularizing.

It's also a double standard. When I took a course on the philosophy of mind in my first semester as a grad student, we read a lot of pure neuroscience (Harris's own area of research, and one that is of central importance in The Moral Landscape) early on. I found most of it deadly dull, but trudged ahead anyway because I needed to know it to understand the more philosophical (and to me, more interesting) papers we would be reading later on. Harris simply assumes that what is interesting to him is interesting to everyone, and that what isn't interesting to him isn't worth talking about, even if it directly impacts the thesis of his book. That's not true, and I'm willing to bet that it will leave his argument feeling insubstantial in the end.

The second problem with this is that it makes Harris sound like one of the religious people who have come in for such scathing criticism in his other work. Yesterday I linked to Jerry Coyne's thorough rebuttal to Mark Vernon's incredibly ill-informed article on evolution. I suspect that Vernon feels similarly about evolution as Harris does about moral philosophy. He recognizes that it's an important topic (if only because it's often held up as a problem for a position he's committed to defending) and feels compelled to pontificate on it, but all that research he would have to do to actually understand the subject is just so boring. There's nothing wrong with being dilettantish, if all you're concerned about is cocktail party conversation. But if you're going to present yourself as some sort of authority, you really ought to take the time to learn about your subject in detail, even the parts that don't interest you much.

I'm going to continue to read The Moral Landscape, hopefully with an open mind. It is, of course, possible that Harris is some kind of philosophical savant, and that he'll be able to present answers to questions that actual philosophers have been debating for centuries, despite finding the subjects too boring to meaningfully engage. However, I have a feeling that, in the end, Harris will be revealed to have taken a vital metaethical question for granted, and we'll see that he had another reason for refusing to engage with the subject: he has no good argument for his underlying assumptions.

They Want To Misunderstand

This article from the New York Times, about a group of biologists who set out to educate kids in the rural U.S. about evolution in honor of Darwin Day, has some good news and some bad news. It suggests that people in general aren't as aghast at the idea of their kids being taught about evolution as we might have suspected, but it also suggests that those who want the subject taught more widely are still making one small but important mistake.

First the good news:

The group’s small-town hosts took their own precautions. A high school principal in Ringgold, Va., sent out permission slips so parents could opt out of sending their children to the event (two did).

Only two sets of parents opting out of letting their kids learn basic science is, all things considered, pretty good. Yes, it could have been better (it could have been zero), but it still has to have been fewer than what the event's organizers, and maybe even the principal, were expecting. Maybe I'm too hopeful, but what this suggests to me is that the teaching of evolution is not actually as controversial as its shrillest opponents would have us believe.

Speaking of those opponents, though, some educators may still be making it too easy for them to go on willfully misrepresenting the theory of evolution. I think the most important step educators can take in making evolution clear to younger students is that there is no intentionality behind it. Of course phrasing it that way would open up a philosophical can of worms that teachers, understandably, would not want to deal with. Still, I think explanations like this don't go far enough in making the point:

Dr. [Craig] McClain, who wrapped up his Nebraska-Montana tour at a middle school on Monday, found himself explaining how giant squid evolved. 

“Smaller squids get eaten by everything,” he said. “It’s not a very good lifestyle to have.”

Hopefully McClain went on to make it clear that the change in squid size was driven by the fact that smaller squids died off, while their larger neighbors survived to pass on their genes to future generations, resulting in a larger population overall, and that this process played out over millions of years. Given that evolution's theistic critics love to claim that evolution happens by "random chance," and that change in species would require a driving intentional force, the above response doesn't go far enough. It leaves it open for some shifty apologist to say "What makes more sense--that the squids got bigger because they wanted to, or because God wanted them to?"

I don't know what McClain's full answer was, or what came before, so I don't want to suggest that he wasn't doing his job properly. But I have heard evolution's staunchest defenders talk about this subject in ways that are too ambiguous. When a large portion of your audience is primed to misunderstand you, you have to work harder.

Observe!

In a new post at his blog Why Evolution Is True, Jerry Coyne takes apart the work of yet another scientist with New Age leanings writing for the Huffington Post. Since I've spent the last two days going after the religious tendency to use subjective experience in dubious ways, it's only fair that I point to a more secular ideology based on the same thing.

The post Coyne is critiquing is nothing new if you've read even a paragraph of someone like Deepak Chopra. It's a mangling of quantum mechanics which takes the technical notion of "observers" to mean "humans looking at things" (see Sokal and Bricomont's Fashionable Nonsense for a more thorough discussion of this common mistake), then assumes that anything true of subatomic particles must be true of all sorts of macroscopic objects. It then concludes that since reality is a construct of (human) observers, there's no reason it can't go on indefinitely.

I once applied for a job at a "natural foods" grocery store, and while waiting on an interview there, I overheard a hilarious conversation. Two young hippies were sitting at a table drinking Naked fruit juice and loudly talking about how all disease is imaginary, and if you can stop believing doctors and "the government" when they tell you you're sick, you'll become immortal. The passion with which they were discussing this nonsense was funny, but I also have to admit that I was a bit envious. What must it be like to really and truly believe that we're in complete control of reality? Surely it's more than a little intoxicating.

I feel the same way when I read peddlers of quantum nonsense. I think that some of them are cynical, and just pushing this stuff on readers who don't know any better (and don't want to), but still, for those who do believe, what a different life it must be. Of course it will end the same way as mine--the inevitabilities of disease or old age will put a permanent stop to our continued observations, and no amount of positive thinking will be able to stop it.

But I confess that I sometimes wonder, in the meantime, which of us is having a better time.

Living Subjectivism

Yesterday, I wrote about the importance to religious believers of arguing from personal experience. Peter Kreeft's "Twenty Arguments For the Existence of God" has several arguments which hinge on appealing to our perceptions of the world in order to prove that God exists. One, the Argument From Degrees Of Perfection, goes so far as to conclude that there must be an objective facts about value judgments, and one of those objective facts is God's existence.

The argument goes something like this: We notice that things vary in their characteristics, and those variations can be thought of as falling along points on a continuous spectrum. We often make value judgments about a thing based on its position on the spectrum for one of its characteristics. And we can extrapolate from those judgment-making behaviors that there is a fact of the matter at which we're trying to arrive.

This isn't entirely unreasonable. There often is a fact of the matter about whether our perceptions reflect reality, so the assumption that there could be a fact of the matter about our value judgments isn't totally unjustified. Anyone who has ever had a passionate argument about music, art, food, etc. should be able to grasp the reasoning here. If we don't, at some level, think that our judgments are right, what's the point of such arguments?

But that we behave as if there's a fact of the matter doesn't guarantee that there is, and the rest of the argument should make that clear. It continues, and here one can't help but think of the ontological argument, that we also make value judgments about beings. And if there is a fact of the matter about those value judgments, that means that there must be an objective standard against which they are being made--in other words, there must be at least one perfect being. That perfect being is God.

You may want to counter that the argument goes off the rails here--that nothing as grandiose as a perfect being is needed to explain why we value people who treat us well over people who treat us poorly. Kreeft responds that this is further proof of his point, for if there were no fact of the matter, if all value judgments were subjective, we would feel no compulsion to argue. "You can speak subjectivism," he says, "but you cannot live it."

That reply presents a false dichotomy, though. We "live subjectivism" all the time. We might argue about our tastes, and really want to convince others that they should share our tastes. But that doesn't require an objective truth, or at least not an objective truth about value. I might argue that you should appreciate my favorite band because I want you to support them by buying their albums. I also might just like a good argument.

This argument has the same problem that I pointed out about apophatic theology in  an earlier post; to the extent that it sounds good at all, it only sounds that way as long as you're talking about the right things. Point to an area of easy consensus, like whether it's better to be loved or not, and nobody's going to complain too much if you conclude that, yes, it's really better to be loved than not.

The problem comes when you start trying to "live objectivism" about less high-minded topics. For example, if I like cold beer and you like warm beer, we couldn't put it down to different tastes. One of us must have the wrong tastes. The same goes for any value judgment you can think of. The Beatles or The Rolling Stones; chocolate or vanilla; cats or dogs; Halo or Call of Duty. If you can't live subjectivism, then there's an objective fact of the matter in every case. Does anyone actually believe that?

Of course my incredulity doesn't prove anything. Kreeft could always just bite the bullet and say that, yes, absurd as it may seem, there really is a right answer to every question of value, no matter how trivial. But again, consider the consequences of that. Not only would there be a fact about whether warm beer is better than cold beer; there would be a fact about whether a 51.02309340923475 degrees Fahrenheit glass of beer is better than a 51.02309340923474 degrees Fahrenheit glass of beer. Don't even think about saying that there could be a range of right answers dependent upon the ability of beer tasters to actually detect differences. That would be living subjectivism.

That we value some things more than others proves only that we do, in fact, value some things more than others. It doesn't prove that some of our values are right and others wrong, and it certainly doesn't prove that a perfect being exists somewhere out there to validate some of our values and invalidate others.

An Important Difference

Last night, Sam Harris tweeted a link to a debate he had participated in a few years ago on the subject of religion's role in the end of the world. The debate itself is mostly awful, as these things tend to be, with the moderator helping Harris's opponent pile on him to the point that a frustrated audience member finally cries out "You're the moderator!" I'll link to the first clip, though, for the sake of a reference:



Something interesting did emerge in the course of the debate, though, namely the extent to which Harris's religious opponent seems to rely on his own personal experience as his most important source of evidence, and the extent to which his compatriot the moderator is instantly willing to accept that experience as better evidence than any of the statistics Harris offers in return.

Of course we already knew that this was true of religious people to some extent. Powerful personal experience of the numinous does, in my mind, serve as some evidence in favor of religious belief, even if it is vastly outweighed by counter evidence from philosophy and science. But if one accepts what one takes to be one's most important convictions entirely on the basis of such evidence, we shouldn't be surprised to find him privileging that same sort of evidence in all cases.

Of course no human enterprise can ever get off the ground without input garnered from personal experience. But the value of science is that it gives us a set of tools for refining that kind of experience. This is why repeatability is vital to the scientific enterprise. If only one person is ever able to perform an experiment, we shouldn't put as much stock in it as if every competent individual who performed it had the same results.

This is why when Harris says that a single well-designed opinion poll of people in Gaza would be of more value than the personal experiences that his opponent continually cites, he's absolutely correct. It can be hard to accept that one's experiences might not be a perfect mirror of reality, but that's exactly why we shouldn't stick our fingers in our ears and pretend that they are, oh yes they are! At least if what we really care about is getting at the truth and not just maintaining our sense of smug self-satisfaction.

The Apophatic Theology of Indie Games

According to apophatic (or negative) theology, God is ineffable, beyond the boundaries of human language. As such, the only meaningful way in which we can speak of God is to say what God is not. While this sort of theology has become a refuge for some modern day Christian thinkers (most notably Karen Armstrong), its roots go at least as far back as the Neoplatonic philosopher Plotinus. And now Michael Thomsen, in a piece for IGN, has applied it to indie games.

Like hipsterism, 'indie' is a state of mind better defined in terms of what it isn't. 'Indie' isn't Bobby Kotick, Wii Fit, Gears of War, or Nathan Drake. 

I like the idea of describing indie games apophatically. It gets right to the heart of how vapid and puffed-up most of the indie scene is.

Here's the problem with apophatic theology: it only works as long as everyone brings the right presuppositions to the table. In his article "God is the Question," apophatic apologist Mark Vernon writes

Whatever God might be, God is not visible: God's invisible. Whatever God might be, God cannot be defined: God's ineffable. Nothing positive is said. But nonetheless something is said of God.

Well, something is said if you've already accepted a certain fundamentally mystical idea of divinity. If you haven't, you might wonder whether speaking of God in this way actually draws a distinction between the divine and the non-existent.

There's a bigger problem, though. The apophatic view of God falls apart if you start not-saying the wrong things. We can all rub our chins and ruminate on the mystery of the ineffable, but we'd look rather silly smoking our pipes and holding forth on God's fundamental ungerbilness or unforkness.

Take another look at that list of things Thomsen says indie games aren't. Does that actually tell us anything meaningful about them? Of course it doesn't. What could it actually mean to say that a video game isn't Nathan Drake? It's a category error, like asking what purple sounds like. I realize that Thomsen was being tongue in cheek, but that doesn't mean we can't glean some insight from his comments. The indie scene, as celebrated in forums like IGF, is just like the God of apophatic theology: an artifical construct, meaningful only to those who have the right set of presuppositions.

Having said as much, though, we indie game skeptics (and there don't seem to be many of us) open ourselves up to the same claim that snarky Christian apologists often make against atheists: "Why spend so much time arguing against something you don't believe exists?" The answer is simple, though. Believing in something that doesn't exist can have negative effects.

Thomsen is right when he says that "in film and music ['indie' is] a wheezing stereotype long since discredited." By aping the same posture as indie rock and indie movies, indie games have inherited the same disease. Most of them pander every bit as blatantly as their mainstream counterparts, just to a different audience.

It's that pandering that's the real problem, and the reason that I'll keep being skeptical about indie games (and movies, and music). Take away the enablers who demand more pretension and forced quirkiness, who desperately want to define themselves negatively against some (equally imaginary) mainstream, and games will get better. What things aren't doesn't matter--what they are is everything.

"Unphilosophical"

Scott Stevens, Religion and Ethics Editor of ABC Online (that's the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, not the American Broadcasting Company) has written a piece called "The Poverty Of the New Atheism," the content of which it should be easy to discern from the title. As with most such pieces, Stevens is unable to discuss the ideas of the New Atheists without spending most of his time criticizing their delivery. In fact, he's so focused on the tone of Dawkins et. al. that he forgets to even make an argument.

Therefore, as much as I'd like to, I can't say that Stevens commits an ad hominem fallacy when he calls the New Atheists "unphilosophical," because to call it a fallacy would imply that Stevens has made an error in his reasoning. He hasn't, because he's not reasoning so much as lashing out.

There seems to have been an innate sense among atheists that the Promethean quest to topple the gods demands a certain seriousness and humility of any who would undertake it. Hence those atheists worthy of the name often adopted austere, chastened, almost ascetic forms of life - one thinks especially of Nietzsche or Beckett, or even the iconic Lord Asriel of Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy - precisely because our disavowed idolatrous attachment manifest in practices and habits and cloying indulgences, and not simply in beliefs (this was Karl Marx's great observation about the "theological" dimension of Capital).

By comparison, the "New Atheists" look like sensationalist media-pimps: smugly self-assured, profligate, unphilosophical and brazenly ahistorical, whose immense popularity says rather more about the illiteracy and moral impoverishment of Western audiences than it does about the relative merits of their arguments.

In short, Stevens is all for criticism of religion so long as one does it with a proper attitude of reverence for what one is criticizing. This is nothing new--it's become quite the popular sentiment in liberal Christian circles since the New Atheists' rise to fame. But it's not an argument. It has nothing to do with what Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens and Dennet have said, and everything to do with how they have said it. Stevens does go a bit farther than previous critics, though, in directing some scorn at the New Atheists' readers, as well. (So is Stevens also illiterate, or has he not read any of the books he's criticizing?)

But for all this abuse to constitute a fallacy, Stevens would have to be using it as a counter argument, and as nearly as I can tell, he's not. He yammers on about Marx for a bit, but it's just paragraphs of throat clearing.

But Marx's critique of religion has an unexpected twist, a barb in the tail that implicates [the New Atheists] by exposing the deeper complicity concealed by their cynicism. For, to be "dis-illusioned" in Marx's sense is not heroically to free oneself from the shackles and blinders of religious ideology and thus to gaze freely upon the world as it truly is, as Dawkins and Harris and even Hitchens would suppose.

Rather, to be "dis-illusioned" is to expose oneself to the anxiety of the bare, unadorned fact of one's existence, to live unaided beneath what Baudelaire called "the horrible burden of Time, which racks your shoulders and bows you downwards to the earth".

Being one of the New Atheists' illiterate readers, I barely feel qualified to comment, but it seems to me that Marx's "dis-illusionment" is precisely to "gaze freely upon the world as it truly is." Unless Stevens is suggesting that exposing "oneself to the anxiety of the bare, unadorned fact of one's existence" is somehow to construct another illusion to replace the religious illusion one has cast aside.

This still isn't an argument, though. It's just a contrast, and a confused one at that. Stevens accuses the New Atheists of cynicism, but praises Marx for recognizing that the world as it truly is, is a pretty terrible place. Illiterate though I may be, I have at least read Dawkins, and his message is that life gets better when you cast off religious illusions, not worse. What's really bowing us downwards to the earth is not reality, but the delusion that an omnipotent, omniscient being is judging us every moment of every day. The good news is that we all have the innate capacity to see through the delusion, if we want to use it. That's not cynicism--if anything, it's too optimistic.

Stevens, on the other hand, thinks that getting rid of illusions should leave us with nothing but misery. Why? His concern with being philosophical might have prompted him to offer an argument, rather than insults and appeals to Marx. Stevens, it seems, is not even unphilosophical--he's just angry and, yes, cynical. That doesn't make him wrong, of course--it just makes him uninteresting.

Oversimplifying Abortion

Apparently a creationist website called Uncommon Descent is attempting to get 25 influential atheists (some may say the 25 most influential) to answer a list of grossly oversimplified questions about what rights, if any, fetuses and newborn babies have. Seriously, go read that list of "five simple questions," for which UD is only willing to accept yes or no answers. The fact that anyone thinks such questions are simple goes a long way in explaining the vitriol fundamentalists spew at anyone who sees abortion as a viable, morally acceptable action.

Well, I may not be one of the 25 most influential living atheists, and I'm definitely not going to play by UD's rules, but I am going to answer the questions. Let's just get this out of the way upfront, though:

I realize these questions are designed to make abortion rights supporters look like monsters, but I'm also hoping that giving reasonable answers to unreasonable questions will help expose the intellectual deficiency and/or dishonesty behind the way a segment of the pro-life side tries to frame the debate.

(a) Do you believe that a newborn baby is fully human? This one's actually easy. Of course a human baby is fully human. But wait..."fully" human? Why "fully"? Given the context of these questions, the inclusion of that word seems to suggest that there could be such a thing as a half-human, or maybe a quarter-human, and further that such an entity might have a different moral status than a full human.

The only way I would consider giving a different response to this question is if the context were evolutionary, and we were speaking hypothetically about a transitional form between humans and a new species that evolved from humans. But then the question would be irrelevant. Species divisions are arbitrary and man-made, and there's often quite a bit of argument about which species a given specimen belongs to. So maybe a newborn human baby could be closer to a non-human species than either of its parents, but it's hardly a yes or no question.

(b) Do you believe that a newborn baby is a person? I loathe this question. The argument over what constitutes personhood is a huge quagmire that is, in my opinion, best avoided even when doing ethics. I vastly prefer to leave everyone to her own definition and look for solutions that work no matter what that definition is. This is why I love Judith Jarvis Thompson's defense of abortion. Rather than arguing over whether fetuses are persons, she simply concedes that they are (on whatever definition of "person" you prefer) then argues for why abortion is still morally permissible. 

That said, I tend to view personhood as falling on a continuum between the ability to experience flourishing and suffering, and the lack of said ability. As with all these "simple" questions, there's no easy answer, so I won't give one. Instead, I'll just say that I think it's possible for babies to be more or less persons.

(c) Do you believe that a newborn baby has a right to life? My position on rights is that talk about them is meaningful only within a legal context. You have rights only to the extent that your society grants them. Of course we can argue about whether granting more or fewer rights is in a society's best interests, but convincing me that rights are inherent to human beings would require a truly brilliant bit of metaphysical reasoning.

So technically my answer to this question is "If we're talking about America, then yes, I believe that a newborn baby has a right to life, because it is granted under American law." But let's remember that there's a huge ceteris paribus there, and if a baby is born with no chance to lead a productive life (that is, with no chance to experience anything approaching a reasonable degree of flourishing), then it has less of a right to life than a baby born with a normal capacity for flourishing. Still, I want to make it clear that I see this as an entirely legal question, and not a moral one.

(d) Do you believe that every human person has a duty towards newborn babies, to refrain from killing them? This one actually is simple: absolutely not. Having given that answer, though, let's quibble a bit about semantics. How does the questioner define "killing"? Is he referring to murder, or any action that would directly cause the end of the baby's life? If it's the latter, then it's easy to think of examples in which "killing" a baby is morally permissible, e.g. taking a child with no chance to ever breathe on its own off of life support. If it's murder, then I would still say "no," but with the caveat that it's much harder to think of actual world examples in which I would say such an act is morally permissible. In terms of possible worlds, though, it's much easier. Imagine a possible world in which you could travel back in time and murder Hitler in the crib. Would you have a moral duty to do so? I say you would.

(e) Do you believe that killing a newborn baby is just as wrong as killing an adult? This question comes with the same semantic quibble as (d). If we're talking about causing an end of life, then there are medical cases in which "killing" is not morally wrong, and may even be morally required. If we're talking about murder, then yes, I think a newborn baby has the same rights (again, using my legalistic definition of "rights") as an adult. It's not inconceivable to me that there could be a case in which murdering a baby is the moral thing to do, but I don't know of any such cases in the actual world as it exists at this moment.

My answers to these "simple" questions aren't as important as pointing out how messy and difficult the questions actually are. Only someone firmly in the grip of dogma (religious or otherwise) could think otherwise.