Tag Archives: Morality

A Guide to Reality, Part 15 (the End, or Maybe Not Quite)

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The final chapter of Alex Rosenberg’s The Atheist’s Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life Without Illusions is “Living With Scientism”. Rosenberg defined “scientism” in his first chapter as a worldview that isn’t merely consistent with atheism, but is:

the worldview that all us atheists (and even some agnostics) share…[It’s] the conviction that the methods of science are the only reliable ways to secure knowledge of anything; that science’s description of the world is correct in its fundamentals; and that, when “complete”, what science tells us will not be surprisingly different from what it tells us today…Science provides all the significant truths about reality, and knowing such truths is what real understanding is all about [6-7].

Anyone who accepts scientism as Rosenberg explains it may well be an atheist, since there is no scientific evidence for the existence of God or gods. But the idea that all atheists accept Rosenberg’s version of scientism is clearly false. Rosenberg’s scientism is an extreme example of what might be called “nothing-but-ism”. The universe is nothing but subatomic particles. Everything can ultimately be explained in terms of those particles and their interactions. In Rosenberg’s words, physics fixes all the facts.

Yet one can deny the existence of God or gods but believe without contradiction that there are ethical truths and that some higher-level phenomena cannot be reduced to physics. Rosenberg himself calls attention to so-called “secular humanists” who may be atheists but who also “treat the core morality we share as true, right, correct and really morally binding on us” [277]. Rosenberg, of course, thinks that morality, as well as meaning and purpose, are all illusions.

He has an answer, however, for anyone who wonders why someone with his beliefs would bother getting out of bed in the morning:

Luckily for us, Mother Nature has seen to it that most of us, including the secular humanists, will get up most mornings and go on living even without anything to make our lives meaningful. The proof is obvious. There is nothing that makes our lives meaningful, and yet here we are, out of our pajamas [280].

Natural selection (aka Mother Nature) has made human beings generally capable of surviving and reproducing. Some of us do better at the components of being alive and some do worse, as should be expected. Anyone who worries too much about the meaning of life can look to religion, philosophy or science for answers, although there aren’t any answers to be found, since life has no meaning. Fortunately, we who need special assistance getting out of bed can seek medicine from psychiatrists or conversation with therapists, either of which may rewire our brains and relieve our suffering. As science progresses, it will become easier for psychological problems to be addressed. But we should remember that:

Your neural circuits, and so your behavior, may get modified as a result of the therapy, but it is an illusion that the change results from thinking about what the therapist said and consciously buying into his or her diagnosis. In therapy, as in everything else in life, the illusory content of introspective thoughts is just along for the ride [286].

With respect to morality, Rosenberg endorses what he calls “nice nihilism”, the view that moral distinctions have no basis in reality (that’s the nihilist part), but most people behave morally anyway as the result of natural selection (that’s the nice part). He points out that moral disagreements usually concern facts, not values. For example, some argue that capital punishment is morally acceptable because it’s a significant deterrent. But that’s a question that can be answered by looking at statistics. Some moral disagreements result from conflicting ethical ideals. In those cases, there are no “right” answers. 

Rosenberg argues that scientism is most consistent with tolerance toward other people’s ethical views and willingness to question our own. We shouldn’t assume that people who disagree with us are evil; they’re simply misinformed. And since scientific conclusions are almost always subject to revision, we should admit that our own scientifically-informed ethical views may be mistaken.

As Rosenberg points out, most scientists (not all of whom accept Rosenberg’s brand of scientism, of course) are on the political left. As evidence, he could have cited a 2009 poll showing that 81% of American scientists are Democrats or lean that way, while only 12% are Republicans or lean right. (These numbers shouldn’t be a surprise, since scientists tend to know about science, and therefore about reality, which has a well-known liberal bias).

Furthermore, Rosenberg thinks that anyone who accepts scientism should oppose retributive punishment and favor political egalitarianism. In his view, there is no free will, so nobody is really responsible for the painful things they do or the pleasant things they accomplish. He concludes that prisons should resemble hospitals: sick people (criminals) should be treated and seriously infectious people (those can’t be rehabilitated) should be quarantined. Meanwhile, society’s goods should be distributed rather evenly. None of this should be done for ethical reasons, since ethics is an illusion, but for practical or prudential reasons. For example, people with lots of money can interfere with the operation of free markets, which tend to benefit society as a whole (of which we are a part), so it makes sense to redistribute some of their wealth.

Rosenberg concludes with the suggestion that we consider emulating the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus. He was ahead of his time in believing that everything in the universe, including our minds, is made of atoms. He also thought that pleasure and pain are the best guides to what’s good and bad or right and wrong. He didn’t favor riotous living, however. As Rosenberg explains:

A tranquil self-sufficient life along with your friends was the key to securing the good and avoiding evil…The tranquility he commended requires that we not take ourselves or much of anything else too seriously…. Epicureanism encourages a good time [313].

Epicurus also argued that death is nothing to fear. There is no such thing as immortality, so death is the end of our existence. Since we no longer exist when we are dead, we have no reason to fear death (although the process of dying may be very uncomfortable, as Epicurus realized)..

When I started writing about Rosenberg’s book almost two years ago, I thought it would be an interesting experience, but didn’t anticipate taking so long to get through it. (You never know if you’ll enjoy reading a book a second time, even if you really enjoyed it the first time.) This was going to be my last entry on this topic, but a few final thoughts may be appropriate. Not tonight, however, unless they’re yours.

It

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I finally got around to watching Her, also known as “that movie where the guy falls in love with his computer”.

It was like being trapped in a futuristic greeting card. Which doesn’t mean it’s a bad movie. It’s an excellent movie, but not easy to watch. It’s disturbing. And also provocative.

Theodore lives in downtown Los Angeles. It’s the near future, one that is amazingly pleasant. Future L.A. is extremely clean, with lots of big, shiny buildings and terrific mass transit, but seemingly uncrowded. Theodore has a job in a beautiful office writing very personal letters for people who can’t express their feelings as well as he can.

But Theodore is lonely and depressed. He’s going through a divorce and avoiding people. One day, he hears about a new, artificially intelligent computer program, brilliantly designed to tailor itself to the customer’s needs. Theodore assigns it a female voice, after which it gives itself the name “Samantha”.

It’s easy to understand how Theodore falls in love with Samantha. It’s intuitive and funny and loving, a wonderful companion that’s constantly evolving. Besides, it does a great job handling Theodore’s email and calendar.

Complications eventually ensue, of course, but in the meantime, Theodore and Samantha get to know each other, spending lots of time expressing their deeply sensitive feelings. It’s very New Age-ish, although the two of them can’t give each other massages and can’t go beyond what amounts to really good phone sex.

Watching Her, you are immersed in a loving but cloying relationship in which one of the entities involved expresses lots of feelings but doesn’t actually have any. That’s my opinion, of course, because some people think a sufficiently complex machine with really good programming will one day become conscious and have feelings, not just express them. 

Maybe that’s true, but I still lean toward the position that in order to feel anything the way living organisms do, whether the heat of the sun or an emotion like excitement, you need to be built like a living organism. A set of programming instructions, running on a computer, even if connected to visual and auditory sensors, won’t have feelings because it can’t really feel.

Although the movie is built on the dubious premise that Samantha can always say the right thing, appropriately displaying joy, sorrow or impatience, perfectly responding to whatever Theodore says and anticipating all of his emotional needs, there is no there there. 

I don’t mean to suggest that Theodore is wrong to cherish Samantha. It’s an amazing product. But when he and it are together, he’s still alone. He’s enjoying the ultimate long distance relationship.

Two Brechtian Commentaries on the Way of the World

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Although they’ve been attributed to him, there is no evidence that the German playwright Bertolt Brecht wrote the following words (in German or English):

The worst illiterate is the political illiterate. He doesn’t hear, doesn’t speak, nor participates in the political events. He doesn’t know [that] the cost of life, the price of the bean, of the fish, of the flour, of the rent, of the shoes and of the medicine, all depends on political decisions. The political illiterate is so stupid that he is proud and swells his chest saying that he hates politics. The imbecile doesn’t know that, from his political ignorance is born the prostitute, the abandoned child, and the worst thieves of all, the bad politician, corrupted and flunky of the national and multinational companies.

On the other hand, he did write the words below (in German). They’re from the Threepenny Opera‘s “Second Threepenny Finale”, also known as “Wovon lebt der Mensch” or “What Keeps Mankind Alive”:

You gentlemen who think you have a mission
to purge us of the seven deadly sins,
should first sort out the basic food position,
then start your preaching! That’s where it begins.
You lot who preach restraint and watch your waist as well,
should learn, for once, the way the world is run:

However much you twist, whatever lies you tell,
food is the first thing, morals follow on.
So first make sure that those who now are starving
get proper helpings when we all start carving.

What keeps mankind alive? The fact that millions
are daily tortured, stifled, punished, silenced, oppressed.
Mankind can keep alive thanks to its brilliance
in keeping its humanity repressed.

It’s not as catchy as “Mack the Knife” or “Alabama Song”, but it’s still pretty good.

There Are Values and Then There Are Values

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People got a lot of letters from Isaiah Berlin, the philosopher and historian of ideas. The New York Review of Books published a review several months ago (I’m behind on my reading) of the third volume of Berlin’s letters, covering the years 1960 to 1975. There’s one more volume to go.

One of the ideas Berlin argued for in his letters and elsewhere during his long career was “value pluralism”, the view that there is no one ultimate value. Instead, there are many values, some of which can conflict in ways that cannot be easily resolved (there is no “right” answer). Liberty and equality are two such values.

In Berlin’s words, from the review, value pluralism is:

The conception that there are many different ends that men may seek and still be fully rational, fully men, capable of understanding each other and sympathizing and deriving light from each other.

Nothing is less popular today than to say that there is no millennium, that values collide, that there is no final solution, that one can only gain one value at the expense of another, that whatever one chooses entails the sacrifice of something else—or that it is at any rate often so. This is regarded as either false or cynical or both, but the opposite belief is what, it seems to me, has cost us so much frightful suffering and blood in the past.

John Banville, the author of the NYRB review, writes:

[Berlin] was keenly aware of the potential destructiveness of ideas, “ideas about what relations between men have been, are, might be and should be,” which in time become transformed into visions of a supreme good, and therefore a supreme goal, in the minds of leaders, “above all of the prophets with armies at their backs.” 

Ideas can be dangerous or beneficial, and also mistaken. Although he vigorously campaigned to “ban the bomb”, the great philosopher Bertrand Russell once supposedly said “I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong”. But would Russell have accepted death if ending his life resulted in global nuclear disarmament? (That’s not a likely scenario, of course, but it’s the kind of question philosophers have to deal with.)

So how much importance should we attach to our most favored values if we accept value pluralism and simultaneously recognize that our values might not be the best ones? I don’t know the answer to that, but it brings me to an article called “How To Win Your Next Political Argument” from New York Magazine.

The thesis of this article is that there are better ways to win an argument than by citing facts or by being confrontational. People will just dig in their heels if you hit them with too many facts or make them feel threatened. It’s better to get your opponent to try to explain his or her position, since people often can’t explain their position even to their own satisfaction and will thereby become less confident that they know what they’re talking about.

Another recommended tactic is to “change the frame”, which means appealing to values your opponent holds dear, not necessarily your own. So, us left-wingers are said to focus on “care/harm” and “fairness/cheating”, while right-wingers are equally attached to “loyalty/betrayal”, “authority/subversion” and “sanctity/degradation”. If you want to convince a Republican that Edward Snowden was justified in releasing government secrets, you’re going to have to keep in mind that “betrayal” and “subversion” are big concerns for Republicans.

I was coasting along through this article until I got to the end, at which point the author presents an example of how to argue in favor of gay rights with a right-wing opponent. For example:

“I think my main reason in favor of allowing gay people to be scout leaders is that I have some gay friends who were Boy Scouts growing up, and who seriously treasure the lessons they learned during that time.”

What a load of mealy-mouthed crap! I suddenly thought of the Sophists, the ancient Greeks who were somewhat unfairly criticized for teaching their students how to argue successfully in favor of any position at all. Plato claimed the Sophists were mere hired guns (swords?) with no respect for the truth and no principles of their own. 

It’s a good idea to tailor your argument somewhat to meet your opponent’s concerns, and it’s an excellent idea to recognize that values can conflict and none of us own the truth. On the other hand, I especially enjoyed what Isaiah Berlin had to say about the Republican Party in 1964:

I wonder…whether Goldwater followers are not simply the old 20 percent … who were isolationists during the war, did not want to go to Europe but to Japan towards the end of it, supported McCarthy and McCarran [both paranoid anti-Communists], and are in fact the old combination of Southern “Bourbons,” Texas industrialists, Catholic bigots, Fascists, lunatics, political neurotics, embittered ex-Communists, unsuccessful power-seekers of all kinds, as well as rich men and reactionaries, in whom America has never been poor…. This is the optimistic view.

Brutal honesty has its place too.

How Religious Persecution Was Justified by the Church

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Continuing on through J. B. Schneewind’s The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Modern Moral Philosophy, I came to the section on the 17th-century philosopher Pierre Bayle. He was a Huguenot (a French Protestant) who lived the last 25 years of his life in Holland as a refugee from religious persecution.

One of Bayle’s books, published in 1686, was written in response to a single passage in the Bible: A Philosophical Commentary on These Words of the Gospel, Luke 14.23, ‘Compel Them to Come In, That My House May Be Full’. Here’s how Bayle explains his decision to write it:

A French Gentleman … having fled for Refuge into England … told me, as we often discoursed on the Subject, That among all the Cavils with which the Missionaries [monks, priests, etc.] had pestered him, none appeared to him more senseless, and yet at the same time more thorny and perplexing, than that drawn from these words of Jesus Christ, “Compel them to come in”, in favor of Persecution, or, as they termed it, the charitable and salutary Violence exercised on Heretics, to recover them from the Error of their Ways. He let me know how passionately he desired to see this Chimera of Persecutors confounded: And fancying he observed in me not only an extreme Aversion to persecuting Methods, but something too of a Vein for entering into the true Reasons of things; he was pleased to say, he looked on me as a proper Person for such an Undertaking, and urged that, succeeding in it as he expected, I should do great Service to the Cause of Truth, and indeed to the whole World. 

Luke 14:23 was interpreted by the authorities (most famously, by St. Augustine) as one of the strongest (and possibly the strongest) biblical justification for religious persecution. It’s part of the Parable of the Great Banquet or Great Supper:

Then [Jesus] said unto him:

A certain man made a great supper, and bade many:
And sent his servant at supper time to say to them that were bidden, Come; for all things are now ready. And they all … began to make excuses.
The first said unto him, I have bought a piece of ground, and I must needs go and see it: I pray thee have me excused.
And another said, I have bought five yoke of oxen, and I go to prove them: I pray thee have me excused.
And another said, I have married a wife, and therefore I cannot come.
So that servant came, and showed his lord these things. Then the master of the house being angry said to his servant, Go out quickly into the streets and lanes of the city, and bring in hither the poor, and the maimed, and the halt, and the blind.
And the servant said … it is done as thou hast commanded, and yet there is room.
And the lord said unto the servant, Go out into the highways and hedges, and compel them to come in, that my house may be filled.

For I [Jesus] say unto you, that none of those men which were bidden shall taste of my supper.
And there went great multitudes with him: and he turned, and said unto them,
If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.

Being forced to toe the religious line, by whatever means possible, was supposed to be for a sinner’s own good, but a story about “a certain man” who makes his invited guests show up for a banquet, without any mention of violence, is an amazingly weak justification for imprisoning, torturing or executing anybody. 

Bayle responds from an ethical point of view. He argues that “persecution cannot bring about the sort of inner religious devotion that would alone be pleasing to God”: 

He announces … that his mode of interpreting the [Biblical] text is entirely new. Leaving textual criticism, philology, history and mysteries entirely aside, he bases his reading on just one principle: “any literal interpretation which carries an obligation to commit iniquity is false” [281-282]. 

Since religious persecution was “iniquitous, unjust and destructive of any moral order in society”, Bayle concluded that Luke 14:23 couldn’t possibly justify such behavior. The Catholic officials who were persecuting the Huguenots must have misinterpreted the Bible.

I don’t know if Bayle ever responded to another passage that was used to justify religious persecution. That’s Leviticus 24:16:

And he that blasphemeth the Name of the Lord, he shall surely be put to death, and all the Congregation shall certainly stone him: As well the stranger, as he that is born in the land, when he blasphemeth the Name of the Lord, shall be put to death.

It’s not a parable and doesn’t seem to demand much in the way of interpretation, except for what it means to “blaspheme” or what constitutes a “congregation”. In cases like that, maybe Bayle would have responded this way: the religious authorities should have assumed God was talking to someone else, namely, the ancient Israelites.

That’s a point Spinoza made in his Theological-Political Treatise, first made public in 1677: 

But with regard to the ceremonial observances which were ordained in the Old Testament for the Hebrews only, … it is evident that they formed no part of the Divine law, and had nothing to do with blessedness and virtue, but had reference only to the election of the Hebrews, that is, … to their temporal bodily happiness and the tranquility of their kingdom, and that therefore they were only valid while that kingdom lasted. 

When others are speaking, it’s presumptuous to assume that you’re part of the conversation! A generalization like “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the Kingdom of God” may apply to all rich men (and even rich women), but when God said unto Moses: “Write thou these words: for after the tenor of these words I have made a covenant with thee and Israel”, it doesn’t seem he was talking to the rest of us. Assuming that you’re going to give any credence at all to the words attributed to God or Jesus in the Bible, why further assume that when God commanded Moses or when Jesus said “compel them to come in”, they were giving instructions to you?

Here’s a bit more about Pierre Bayle (from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy):

His life was devoted entirely to scholarship, and his erudition was second to none in his, or perhaps any, period. Although much of what he wrote was embedded in technical religious issues, for a century he was one of the most widely read philosophers. In particular, his Dictionnaire historique et critique was the single most popular work of the eighteenth century. The content of this huge and strange, yet fascinating work is difficult to describe: history, literary criticism, theology, obscenity, in addition to philosophical treatments of toleration, the problem of evil, epistemological questions, and much more… Said Voltaire: “the greatest master of the art of reasoning that ever wrote, Bayle, great and wise, all systems overthrows.”