Nagel on Dennett, with some further explanation from Lewontin

I am reminded of the Marx Brothers line: “Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?” Dennett asks us to turn our backs on what is glaringly obvious—that in consciousness we are immediately aware of real subjective experiences of color, flavor, sound, touch, etc. that cannot be fully described in neural terms even though they have a neural cause (or perhaps have neural as well as experiential aspects). And he asks us to do this because the reality of such phenomena is incompatible with the scientific materialism that in his view sets the outer bounds of reality. He is, in Aristotle’s words, “maintaining a thesis at all costs.”

Here. 

‘Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism.

It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.

The eminent Kant scholar Lewis Beck used to say that anyone who could believe in God could believe in anything. To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that Miracles may happen.1 [Emphasis in original.]

What if someone were to say that about the Bible? 

Our willingness to accept biblical teachings that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between faith and unbelief. We take the side of Scripture in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the existence of unsubstantiated just so stories in Scripture, because we have a prior commitment to Scripture's inerrancy. It is not that the methods and institutions of biblical study somehow compel us to accept only interpretations which are in accordance with the Bible's inerrancy, but on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to biblical inerrancy to create a method of biblical study that [produces explanations that are consistent with inerrancy, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, our commitment to inerrancy is absolute, for we cannot allow doubt to get its foot in the door. For anyone doubting the Word of God in any respect will end up doubting it in all respects.

Does abortion take a human life?

Does abortion take a human life? Well, it results in a death, and that death is the death of a member of the species homo sapiens, not canis familiaris or felis domesticus.

But does taking the life of a species member have the same moral gravity as taking the life of a two-year-old, as the hard pro-life line implies? Given that to get an abortion a mother stops providing a life support system for another life, with the potential for harm to herself in so doing, this is a relevant factor in decreasing the moral gravity of abortion. Another is the fact that the fetus, at least until very late in the pregnancy after most abortions have already taken place, this is another factor that, to my mind seriously mitigates the gravity of abortion. So I am disinclined to use murder rhetoric to talk about abortion. There is, I suppose a sense we could attach to the word "murder" which applies to any instance in which we take the life of a member of homo sapiens and there is not sufficient justification to support the action as at least morally equivalent to the alternative action. But I think the word has connotations that go beyond that definition, which I prefer to avoid.

At the same time, just because the biographical life of the fetus has not begun, and it only has its biological life, does that mean that nothing is lost in an abortion? I know the hard pro-choice position tries to defend this, but I cannot. I think there is a significant loss when something that develops through a natural process into a human person, and is a human entity, is destroyed. So, abortion is bad, though under conceivable circumstances it may not be wrong, in that the alternative action, carrying the pregnancy to term, may do more harm than abortion. But, I suspect, these cases are not in the majority. Most abortions, I think, are less moral than the alternative.

Nobody is going to be satisfied with this. 

Do people today assume a right to happiness? C. S. Lewis says we shouldn't.

Here. 

How many abortion question are there? Actually five

I actually think there isn’t one question of abortion (are you pro-life or pro-choice. There’s five (!). 

Here are the theses at issue:

1) Is abortion bad? That is, to it cost something from a moral standpoint that should require serious moral considerations in order to justify it? (I think obviously yes, but not everyone on the pro-choice side agrees).

2) Are abortions wrong? Here we are looking at it from the standpoint of moral decision-making. Under what circumstances, if there are any, are abortions justified from a moral standpoint.

3) Is anti-abortion legislation morally appropriate? In particular, should we be putting people in jail to prevent abortions? This issue determines whether the pro-life or pro-choice label can be applied, as I understand it.

4) Is anti-abortion legislation constitutionally feasible? You can give pro-life answers to 1-3, but then say that since Roe was rightly decided as a matter of Constitutional law, we would need an amendment to overturn it. Of course, pro-lifers typically think that Roe was the product of a departure from the One True Jurisprudential Theory, which is Scalia-style originalism. So if we get enough Scalia-style originalists on the Court, we should be able to get Roe overturned and then abortion legislation will be determined by democratic choice on a state-by-state basis.

5) Should we prioritize abortion as a reason for voting? I have heard the argument that even if I agree with the Democrats on all other policy questions, even if I think that the Democratic candidate is a decent guy (or gal), and I think the Republican candidate is the biggest jerk that ever walked this earth, I ought to vote for the Republican candidate in order to save those babies.

Just the facts, ma'am

At a time when we need facts the most, we have a President who has yet to affirm three indisputable facts: 1)  that he did not get the turnout for his inauguration that his predecessor Obama did when he was elected, 2) that Hillary beat him fair and square in the Popular Vote (even if you think the Electoral College is just great, claiming that Hillary only won the popular vote because of illegals voting is a refusal to come to terms with indisputable facts), and 3) am that illegal Russian interference in the US election took place, and was aimed at enhancing his election prospects against Hillary in hopes of either putting him in office or undermining the legitimacy of a Hillary Clinton presidency. Facts matter, and they matter now more than ever. And having a President who is not on speaking terms with facts is one of the most devastating features of the present crisis.

Daniel Dennett and the Skyhook ban

In an exchange on the Argument from Reason between myself atheist philosopher David Kyle Johnson, both in the volume C. S. Lewis’s Christian Apologetics: Pro and Con, and in a subsequent exchange I had with him in Philosophia Christi; there emerges a significant issue as to exactly what the argument from reason targets. In Lewis’s book Miracles he calls the target position naturalism, and he contrasts that with supernaturalism. For Johnson, naturalism is the view that the natural world is whatever makes up the universe. Hence, he says, “if a person believes that the mental is a fundamental element or property of that which makes up the universe, and believes that the mental is causally operating at the basic level, then that person is a naturalist.”

But I think there is more to it than that.  There is a significant viewpoint in philosophy and science which is very insistent on denying that the mental operates at the basic level. As I have indicated earlier, this thrust is largely responsible for the increased popularity of atheism since the publication of Origin of Species. The problem is, as I pointed out with the example of the rocks falling down on my head, for most of nature the mental is not thought to be anything that operates at the physical level, and it is widely held that nothing other than the initial position of the basic particles, whatever they and the laws that govern those basic particles, constitute a closed system of causation, and nothing other than these can determine where, for example, the particles in my left arm will be on Sunday morning. Thus even if I could truly say “I went to church on Sunday because I believe the teachings of Christianity and wanted to worship God,” I cannot explain the presence of the atoms and molecules in my body in ways that do not, in the last analysis, reduce down to the mindless movements of fundamental particles in accordance with the laws of physics. In the last analysis, the laws of physics, not the rules of conduct by which I live my life, govern the actions of the basic particles of my body.

When I wrote my book defending the Argument from Reason, I entitled it C. S. Lewis’s Dangerous Idea, obviously in response to Daniel Dennett’s book Darwin’s Dangerous Idea. Interestingly enough, Jim Slagle entitled his book about arguments of this sort The Epistemological Skyhook, which again makes reference to Dennett’s book. The reason for this is not hard to understand. For Dennett, Darwin’s dangerous idea is that in explaining the world, we must operate from the ground up, not from the top down, using cranes instead of skyhooks. As he explains:

Let us understand that a skyhook is a ‘mind-first’ force or power or process, an exception to the principle that all design and apparent design is ultimately the result of mindless, motiveless, mechanicity.

On the other hand,

A crane, in contrast, is a subprocess or special feature of a design process that can be demonstrated to permit the local speeding up of the basic, slow process of natural selection, and that can be demonstrated to be itself the predictable (or retrospectively explicable) product of the basic process, (p. 76, italics in original)

              Now, I was very surprised to see Johnson, in our most recent exchange, characterize Dennett’s resistance to skyhooks as an argument that divine minds are not causally operative. He writes:

For example, he takes naturalists’ arguments that divine minds are not causally operative to be arguments that human minds are not causally operative. This is especially clear when he quotes Dennett talking about Darwin. Reppert thinks that his skepticism about “meaning” entails that he is eliminating human mentality from the natural world; but Dennett makes I absolutely clear that he is talking about meaning “in the existentialist sense” (as in “the meaning of life,” or “the purpose of the world”). Darwin argues that the world was not designed for a purpose (like the creation of intelligent life) by an intelligent designer—not that it lacks mentality at the basic level.

            Dennett is an atheist, and of course a member of the “four horsemen,” of New Atheists: Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens being the others, but Darwin’s Dangerous Idea is not primarily an atheist polemic. The Darwinian critique of divine design is for the most part presupposed throughout the book. Instead, Dennett spends most of the book criticizing people who aren’t religious believers, but somehow are shy about applying the Dangerous Idea; people like Searle, Gould, Penrose, and Chomsky. They may be philosophical naturalists, but they fall into viewpoints that involve skyhooks, and thus they are inconsistent naturalists whose nerve has failed.Most importantly, Dennett insists on applying the Skyhook Ban to every area, including our understanding of mind.

            Long before Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, explicates the Skyhook Ban in an essay entitled “Why the Law of Effect Will Not Go Away,” where is explicitly applies the Ban to our account of the mind.

Psychology of course must not be question-begging. It must not explain intelligence in terms of intelligence, for instance by assuming responsibility for the existence of intelligence to the munificence of an intelligent creator, or by putting clever homunculi at the control panels of the nervous system. If that were the best psychology could do, then psychology could not do the job assigned to it.

            Well, what “job” is Dennett assigning to psychology? He claims that the social sciences, which are intentional in nature, depend on the science of psychology. But the task of psychology is to explain intelligence, and it has to explain in terms of a universe which at its base lacks intelligence. Whether we explain intelligence in terms of intelligent design, or by putting homunculi in the nervous system, (that is, providing a ground-level intentional explanation that does not appeal to a transcendent being), we would be committing what Dennett would later deride as a skyhook.

            What I have called C. S. Lewis’s dangerous idea, by contrast, is the idea that a consistent application of the Skyhook Ban to the mind undermines the very explanations that thinkers need to apply to their own reasoning in order for it to provide a rational foundation for what they believe. If none of our beliefs can be traced back to skyhooks, then reason is explained away. Thus, if the watchmaker is really blind, then Dawkins wouldn’t know that it. But since we do have knowledge, (a claim you can’t abandon without undercutting science) and we do form beliefs based on reasons, the skyhook ban cannot be fully and completely implemented.

S

Were the apostles really martyred? And what difference does it make?

Here. 

Repeal and Replace the Second Amendment???

Here's a defense of that, from the Leftist Nation.

Against the blind watchmaker

The title of one of Richard Dawkins’s books is entitled The Blind Watchmaker, but its subtitle is How the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a World without Design. The subtitle, it seems to me, makes a paradoxical claim. On the one hand, it maintains we ought to draw the conclusion that the world lacks design. On the other hand, the subtitle suggests that he has reached this conclusion through examining the evidence of evolution, but examining the evidence is a process designed to discover the truth. In fact, Dawkins is fond of contrasting his own methods for reaching conclusions with methods based on faith, which to his mind involve a lack of design. But if the world really is without design, how is this possible? Of course, it could turn out that the paradox is resolvable. But the attempt to ban teleology from the bioverse, but then to insist that one’s own convictions are justified because a kind of teleological explanation can be given for these convictions, is a fact that, at the very least stands in need of explanation.

The paradox is certainly not Dawkins’s alone. Bertrand Russell maintained that we were products of forces that had no prevision of the end they were achieving, and that we were accidental collocations of atoms, yet insisted that, if it were to turn out that God did exist, God was in fact remiss for providing us insufficient evidence for his existence, again implying that human beings are the sorts of beings who can choose one belief over another believe because the evidence for one is better than the evidence for the other.

One apparent resolution to this paradox is to make the point that the design Dawkins professes to be absent from the world is divine design, coming from a being transcendent to the universe. What he does not intend to deny, perhaps, is human design, functioning within the physical universe and having no transcendent source. 

However, this response is not sufficient. To understand why, we have to look at what causation looks like in a world without design. Consider what happens when I am at the bottom of a mountain and rocks are falling down the mountain in an avalanche. Will the rocks avoid my head because they want to spare me, or hit me because they think I deserve to get my head smashed in? No, they will blindly follow what the laws of physics require that they do, given their trajectory and velocity. If physical determinism is true, the laws and facts, which are blind to purposes of any kind, guarantee all future states. Any even that occurs other than those which the laws and facts require would be, in fact, in a significant sense, miraculous. But what if the physical level is not deterministic, on the basis of some quantum mechanical indeterminism? Even there, a cause which introduces design at the basic level of analysis still introduces a miracle to the blind universe.

One could reply that one pattern of movement on the part of basic particles is the acceptance of evidence, while another pattern of movement of basic particles is the rejection of evidence. But evidence is not a fundamental force in the universe, at least as understood by science. The basic causes of the universe operative in the universe, at least according to standard science, operate blindly, with to quote Russell, no prevision of the end they are achieving.

Indeed the impetus toward atheism in over the past 160 years has been powered by Darwin’s theory of evolution and the plausibility of replacing explanations in terms of design with design-free explanations, the idea that time, chance variation, and natural selection can produce results that might appear on the face of things to be the result of intelligent design. Indeed, Dawkins remarked, reportedly, remarked to A. J. Ayer that “although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.” In the intellectually fulfilled atheist world, it is still possible to talk about “design” in the biosphere, but that design-talk is not literally true, since such design claims are merely placeholders for an account in terms of blind forces such as random variation and natural selection.

Darwinian biology replaces or promises to replace design explanations with non-design explanations in it diachronic explanations of how rational agents come into existence, going from no life at all, to one-celled living things, to animal life, and finally to the transition from animal life to humans with the mental capacities we possess. But this leaves us with a puzzle. It looks as if evolution has brought into being creatures who act for reasons. But does that mean that natural selection and random variation have brought into existence a kind of causation that is not blind? Prior to the arrival of humans, or whoever the first beings in the universe are who act for reasons, causation in the universe was blind, according to the standard model. But new kinds of causation do not just pop into existence. So, the materialist picture has to be that, in the final analysis, no one really acts, or thinks, or believes anything for a reason. Hence the process that produced the mind of Richard Dawkins, and the atoms and molecules in Dawkins’s brain when he concludes that everything is the work of a “blind watchmaker” are equally blind. On the face of things, this would tend to undercut the claims of people like Dawkins that their scientific beliefs, unlike the beliefs of, say, creationists, are formed by evidence and therefore are more justified than those of their opponents. If they are really consistent in their understanding of the world, they have to conclude that their own beliefs are caused in the same blind way as those of the creationists. Just as claims about the design of, say, the human eye are not literally true, claims that an agent has concluded anything based on evidence, should, if people like Dawkins and Russell are right, are also not literally true.

There is at least an apparent conflict between the claim that the world proceeds, at its base, in a non-purposive manner, and the claim that there are rational agents who form beliefs on the basis of rational evidence. Arguments that attempt to show that a) this conflict is real and not merely apparent, and b) it constitutes a reason for rejecting in which all causation is ultimately blind, can be regarded as versions of the argument from reason.

Hard Determinism

The hard determinist doesn't say we don't make choices, but they just say that we don't know the causes of our actions, and if we knew them, we would realize that the ultimate reason why we did this and not that had to do not so much with a choice of our own, but instead has to do with a series of events going back to, say, the Big Bang. Once the Big Bang banged, whatever happened after that had to happen, given the laws of physics. If that is really true, are people still responsible for their actions? 

No more punting to impeachment!

Unfortunately, the Justice Department punts to impeachment as a reason why a President can't be indicted. Given the partisan nature of the last two impeachments, I think this punt is a mistake. A free and independent Justice Department is our best defense against a truly rogue President (had Spiro Agnew become President, that would be an example we could all agree on). If there's a case to be made against a President, he should be indicted and go through the court system like any other citizen. It would be hard even for partisans in the House and Senate to avoid removing an indicted and convicted President.

The autonomy objection to religious morality

The autonomy objection to religious morality puzzles me. If you think there is a perfect being who loves you, and who has some clues as to how to live a better, more moral life, would you be foolish not to take them? On the other hand, if no such being exists, that would be another matter.

On hypocrisy

If there are high moral expectations on people, and people think they can benefit from appearing to others as if they meet those high expectations (whether they do or not), that of course opens the door for hypocrisy. The only sure cure for hypocrisy is to lower your standards to such an extent that most people meet the standard easily. But then, you have low moral standards. Is that a good thing?

Nonconsequentialist moral theories

I think there is some connection to consequences in many nonconsequentialist ethical theories. For example, people who look to God's commandments typically think that God is pretty smart, and that the reason God commands what he does it that the consequences will be the best in the long (eternal) run.

Support for Trump: The Conservative Shibboleth

Nowadays, the shibboleth for conservatism is support for Trump.

Judges 12: 1-15 12, 4 Then Jephthah gathered together all the men of Gilead, and fought with Ephraim: and the men of Gilead smote Ephraim, because they said, Ye Gileadites are fugitives of Ephraim among the Ephraimites, and among the Manassites.

5 And the Gileadites took the passages of Jordan before the Ephraimites: and it was so, that when those Ephraimites which were escaped said, Let me go over; that the men of Gilead said unto him, art thou an Ephraimite? If he say Nay;

6 Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him, and slew him at the passages of Jordan: and there fell at that time of the Ephraimites forty and two thousand.

Any real convictions?

Does anyone doubt that Trump would support abortion on demand, open borders, and socialism if it benefited him personally to do so?

The simplest explanation for everything Trump does is in terms of his ego. 

Are morals objective?

The question is whether, if you are asking whether something is right or wrong, whether claims about that can be correct or incorrect. It is true that everyone has their own views about what is moral and what is not. But people have their own views about things like whether there was really a moon landing, or about whether vaccines should be avoided because they cause autism, or whether Trump withheld aid to Ukraine because he was trying to obtain and advantage against Biden in  his re-election campaign. Nevertheless, i think we would all agree that some has to be right about these claims, and someone has to be mistaken. The same is true about the question of whether an omnipotent being actually exists. Some very reasonable and intelligent people take opposite positions on this question, but I think most of us would say that either there is one or there isn't. 

But what about questions of what is right or wrong. This can include vexed questions about whether abortion is justified, and under what circumstances, whether we ought to have the death penalty or not, whether animals have rights which give  us a reason to stop eating meat, whether premarital sex, or  homosexual sex, or extramarital sex is wrong, etc. But is also a moral question as to whether it is acceptable, was the case in America before the civil war, to bring people over to our country and keep them as slaves, or whether it is acceptable to allow discrimination in the area of restaurants or housing, or whether is acceptable to use sexual harassment as a way of maintaining male domination in the workplace, or indeed whether it is acceptable to invite someone over for dinner, shove them in the oven, and cook them as dinner. Unless moral objectivity is true, then all of these concerns are simply relative to individual preference of societal preference. 

The writings of Josephus

Here. 

How would you answer someone who questions the heart of ethics?

 According to the BBC guide to ethics, "At the heart of ethics is a concern about something or someone other than ourselves and our own desires and self-interest. Ethics is concerned with other people's interests, with the interests of society, with God's interests, with "ultimate goods", and so on. So when a person 'thinks ethically' they are giving at least some thought to something beyond themselves." But someone might question why we ought to give any consideration to anything beyond ourselves. How would you reply to someone who raises that question about ethics? 

Explaining reasoning away

People rightly fear that we will interpose a God-explanation where a scientific explanation might be provided which would provide us with more prediction and control over the event in question. But in reasoning, if we interpose nonrational explanations to account for our reasoning, we are in fact explaining reasoning away. If we say that I believe in evolution because of the evidence, but then the explanation I provide for coming to hold this belief is a bunch of irrational neurons blindly following the laws of physics or acting on blind and brute quantum-mechanical chance, I am saying that in the last analysis I didn't really come to believe that evolution is true because there is good evidence that evolution is true. I cannot really say "I followed the evidence, and those creationists didn't." Both of our beliefs were caused in the same irrational way.

Need to impeach

The Democrats want impeachment, but the Republicans need it.

The paradox of Dawkins' title

The title of one of Richard Dawkins’ books is entitled The Blind Watchmaker, but its subtitle is How the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a World Without Design. The subtitle, it seems to me, makes a paradoxical claim. On the one hand, it maintains we ought to draw the conclusion that the world lacks design. On the other hand, the subtitle suggests that he has reached this conclusion through examining the evidence of evolution, but examining the evidence is a process designed to discover the truth. In fact, Dawkins is fond of contrasting his own methods for reaching conclusions with methods based on faith, which to his mind involve a lack of design. But if the world really is without design, how is this possible? Of course, it could turn out that the paradox is resolvable. But the attempt to ban teleology from the bioverse, but then to insist that one’s own convictions are justified because a kind of teleological explanation can be given for these convictions, is a fact that, at the very least stands in need of explanation.

Trump and the Seven Deadly Sins

I think some of Trump's statements make virtues out of what Christians describe as sins. I recently told me class that I used to think Richard Dawkins was the most arrogant person in the world, until Donald Trump became President. C. S. Lewis called Pride, not abortion, the complete anti-God state of mind.

 http://merecslewis.blogspot.com/.../pride-leads-to-every... 

He has had some good words to say about greed as well.

https://www.ncronline.org/news/opinion/distinctly-catholic/seven-deadly-sins-donald-trump

Dualism persists in the science of mind

According to this study. Though people like Dennett dismiss people like that as "mind creationists."

Politically Correct Scrooge

One of my daughters went to the customer service counter of a local grocery store and said "Merry Christmas." The woman at the desk replied "Hanukkah started yesterday." So my daughter said "Happy Hannukah." Then, the clerk replied "And then there's Kwanzaa."

In other words, Bah! Humbug!

On Hunter Biden

How are board members selected in most companies. Do they need experience in the field? Is it wrong for them to be chosen because of their knowledge of the American political system, or for knowledge of American law? His being Joe's son probably had something to do with his being selected, but does it follow that Burisma was seeking illicit favors from the then vice-President? And, does it follow that he got any? To make these claims requires further evidence.

Abortion and Anarchism

I knew someone who thought abortion was wrong, murder actually, but opposed laws against abortion because he was an anarchist and opposed laws. Was he some kind of a hypocrite?

Would you give up the rule of law to end abortion?

By the way, those looking to Trump to save us from abortion, are you willing to give up on the rule of law to save the unborn? If the only way to stop abortion was to set up a right-wing dictatorship and shut down the Constitution and the electoral process, would you be willing to go that far? If you had to choose between making abortion illegal but putting an end to our system of government, or allowing the right to choose abortion but allowing our electoral process, which would you choose?

Pope Francis warns of a "culture of hate" which reminds him of the rise of Hitler.

Here. 

Today is C. S. Lewis's birthday

Kant on lies

 Kant holds a strict position on lying, maintaining that it is always wrong even in the most plausible of cases, such as when you are confronted by a homicidally minded person concerning the whereabouts of someone you are hiding. If you apply the Categorical Imperative, can you come up with an alternative view of lies in which some lies might be justified? 

Here is an attempt.

Can you use natural law to oppose homosexuality, but not use natural law to oppose contraception?

Here is a simple question. Can you accept the natural law argument against homosexuality, explained here, without also accepting the natural law argument against contraception. The former argument is popular even amongst Protestants and Catholics who are not strict adherents of Humanae Vitae. But the anti-gay argument and the case for Humanae Vitae are structurally very similar. So the natural law argument looks like a package deal to me.

Christian counselor comes out, opposes conversion therapy

Here. 

My debates on SB 1070

It's remarkable how current the debate concerning SB 1070 nine years ago is. I posted on that issue quite often. Here. 

Gay Marriage and the Tax Exempt Status of Churches

Beto's O'Rourke's kind of political correctness (wanting to take tax exempt status away from churches who take a stance against gay marriage) is going to hurt the Democrats badly if it takes over. It doesn't really respect equal rights, if you insist that gay people are "being who they are," then religious people who find homosexual conduct morally unacceptable are being who they are, and you can't end one kind of discrimination by supporting another. Having an opinion and expressing it does not deprive anyone of their rights.

Stealing and murder

Here is an interesting ethical question. Suppose Smith knows for sure that if he steals $1.000,000, Jones will not murder Williams. But if he does not steal $1,000,000, then Jones will not murder Williams. If he steals, of course he's a thief, but if he doesn't steal, does that mean he's an accessory before the fact to murder? See what trouble you get into when you ask questions like this to a philosopher?

Why is there no law requiring paid medical leave for pregnancy?

Why is there no law requiring paid medical leave for pregnancy? 

The reason is that Americans believe in capitalism, and they at least one of the major parties is highly resistant to doing anything that exercises control over businesses. In the 1990s we actually had to pass a law to require businesses to provide UNPAID medical leave to employees, and most Republicans voted no on the Family and Medical Leave Act. But of course, they also want to discourage women from getting abortions. Go figure. 

If there is no God, is free will possible?

•But what if God doesn’t exist? Does that mean we have free will? Well, a lot of people who don’t believe in God think that, instead of having a soul distinct from our bodies, we have instead simply a body which is a conglomeration of physical  particles. And what physical particles do, they say, isn’t determined by anyone’s will, it is determined by the laws of physics. Given the laws of physics and the positions of the atoms, some people think everything is predictable from there. There are theories in physics which have gotten away from this kind of determinism at the physical level, but if the universe is only the matter in it, then a person’s choice cannot be the final determiner of what they do.  

If materialism is true, libertarian free will is excluded, and I maintain that compatibilist free will is highly problematic given materialism, since it relies on the idea on the idea of acting for a reason, but in the final analysis, if materialism is true, that never happens. The physical state of the world,  not the reason, determines what we do. 

Abortion and "socialism"

I should make a key distinction here. I was using the term "socialism" in the way Republicans like to use it, where they treat any expansion of role of government in social welfare as socialism. This is the ostensible grounds, for example, that Mitch McConnell is killing all the legislation coming from the Democratic House of Representatives--it's socialistic. This argument was used when I was a child and conservatives such as Ronald Reagan were arguing against Medicare. If you think you can expand social welfare, and maybe raise taxes to make sure this is funded, without being accused of socialism, then fine. I don't think this is really socialism, but it is called socialism when it is opposed by people like McConnell.  What I was really arguing is that outlawing abortion is going to require a strengthening of the welfare efforts of government. In order to make sure that the children who are born who would not have been  born otherwise are given a real chance in life, taxes will probably have to go up. 

I think there is a governing philosophy on the conservative side that suggests that what government is primarily there to do is protect people from violence. So, for example, terrorists, who can kill you, have to be stopped by government, but if we use government to make sure people are protected from disease, which can also kill you, that's socialism and we ought to do that as little as possible. Hence, it's a good thing to make sure women don't get abortions, since that is a violent treat to fetuses, but once the mothers carry their children to terms we will cut funding for any effort to make them better able to take care of those children. It is simply a fact that for many families to survive, both parents have to work, yet the legislation that required employers not to fire women for getting pregnant was sponsored by Democrats like Hillary Clinton, not the pro-life Republicans. But such legislation was considered an interference with the free market, and most Republican senators opposed it. I mean what are women supposed to do, give up their jobs so they can go have their kids? I suppose if you think the woman’s place is in the home, barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen, you are OK with this. I am not.

I think serious opposition to abortion to include a willingness to step up to the plate a support those struggling families who abort babies for economic reasons. Something is wrong with our society if a woman finds herself in a situation where she has choose, as a student of mine once told me, between adequately caring for a child she already had, or carrying her pregnancy to term. And I think that means a willingness to step up to the plate via government, and a willingness to pay more in taxes to make sure that my former student's dilemma arises as infrequently as possible. Otherwise, I have to regard the "pro-life" commitments of Republicans as a mere political football to keep their voters in the fold, not as a genuine commitment to human life.

America is not a pro-life country. The idea that a woman has the right to do as she chooses with her own body is intuitively appealing to lots and lots of people. While this mind-set exists, there will be abortions, and if they are outlawed, they will occur illegally. (If abortion is outlawed, only outlaws will get abortions, but there will be plenty of outlaws). Those convinced against their will will be of the same opinion still. People who don't want to see abortions can remonstrate on ethical grounds, and they can strongly support sex education including contraceptive information even if a case for abstinence is made, and they can support pro-child public policies that reduce the occurrence of unwanted pregnancies. 

Want to outlaw abortion? Are you ready for some socialism?

If abortion is outlawed, then women who would have aborted will carry their pregnancies to term. Many of these are getting abortions because they can't afford children. Or they will give them up for adoption, making it likely they will end up in the foster system. If you do that, there will be more mouths to feed for people who can afford it least. Won't the government have to expand the welfare state to take care of these children?

If so, it seems to me that you can't both believe that abortion should be outlawed, and also believe that socialism or anything like it is a terrible thing. The idea that private charity will take up the slack seems to me to be a pipe dream. The pro-life movement may have the consequence of moving us more quickly in a socialist direction than Bernie Sanders could ever dream.

gay marriage and discrimination

There is an important sense in which the very concept of marriage is a discriminatory one--that is, we choose certain intimate relationships as worthy either of government sponsorship or of church sponsorship. Marriage means something more than that we will not forcibly prevent someone from having that kind of relationship, something we do in pedophilia cases (and,  yes, we used to do with some homosexuality cases through sodomy laws). But we choose certain relationships, in virtue of their permanence, or for some other reason, to say that if you are in one of those you can file married filing jointly, you can have community property, you can transfer your wealth to that person when you die no questions asked, you can get spousal social security benefits, etc. etc. etc . And we do that for some relationships and not others. When we call something a marriage, we say that it is something more than a hookup or even a shackup, it's something we as a society, or a government, or a church, should support. When you accept same-sex marriage, you eliminate being of the opposite sex as one of the requirements for sponsorship. When it comes to church sponsorship, one church was sponsoring gay marriages as far back as 1969, others, such as the Roman Catholic or Southern Baptist churches, or even the United Methodist Church, still won't do it.   But if you literally thought that all relationships were equal, you would be eliminating marriage, not making it equal. 

By the way, I have notice that legislatures are moving to change abortion laws in anticipation of a reversal of Roe v. Wade, but are not doing the same thing with the Obergefell decision. I wonder why that is. This seems to me like the dog that didn't bark. 

Donald Trump and our monarchophobic founders

A simple question: Does Donald Trump understand his position as the head of one of three coequal branches of government? Or does he assume that he is somehow our sovereign? The President of the United States is powerful, to be sure, but our monarchophobic put founders limits on the position. All Presidents, I am sure, have been tempted to overstep those boundaries, and some have lurched us in the direction of an Imperial Presidency. When I heard his Republican acceptance speech in 2016, my thought was "You're just the President. You can't do all that, even if you are elected." In two and a half plus years since the inauguration, I have yet to see a glimmer of understanding of his constitutional role. He seems to think that the US Government is his to run in the same way that the Trump Organizations are his to run, since he is the CEO. Sorry, our founders didn't set America up that way.

Nothing to see here, just fact of geography

So says Bertrand Russell. This would be a deterministic universe, to be sure.

Physical science is thus approaching the stage when it will be complete, and therefore uninteresting. Given the laws governing the motions of electrons and protons, the rest is merely geography—a collection of particular facts telling their distribution throughout some portion of the world’s history. The total number of facts of geography required to determine the world’s history is probably finite; theoretically they could all be written down in a big book to be kept at Somerset House with a calculating machine attached which, by turning a handle, would enable the inquirer to find out the facts at other times than those recorded. It is difficult to imagine anything less interesting or more different from the passionate delights of incomplete discovery. Bertrand Russell, What I Believe, 1925,

Should Russian interference have been investigated? Why in the the world not?

Worries about the origin of the investigation seem to imply that somehow we shouldn't have investigated the Russian interference in our election and whether anyone whose candidate benefited from the interference had conspired with them. There was interference by the Russians, it was designed to help Trump, it did help Trump, Trump kept denying that it was happening and welcomed, and welcomed, and welcomed the fruits of that illegal interference.

 It's not an awful thing for there to be a "cloud" over a President's administration, it's called oversight. What Trump has endured is nothing compared to what Nixon had to deal with, or Bill Clinton, who faced an investigation that started with looking into land deals in Arkansas and ended up, well, you know where it ended up.

 I think the most important questions arising from Mueller have to do with the interference itself, and what we need to do about it. Republicans are implying by their actions that the interference was not disturbing, and even the continuation of that interference is not disturbing. (One has to wonder what they would say if the Russians helped put Hillary in, instead). I have seen people say that it's not such a bad thing so long as it digs up dirt on Hillary and the Democrats. That seems to be the view of Trump himself, and seems to be widespread in the Republican party, although they don't normally put it so bluntly. (Maybe it would be a good idea to force them to put it so bluntly). Or does this kind of interference endanger our very system of government? 

They hacked into voter rolls in all 50 states, for crying out loud. What if, next time they did it, they "unregistered" a bunch of people so they couldn't vote? In my view, the real issue isn't collusion (whatever that means), or even obstruction. It is what I call dereliction.

 If Bush, after 9/11, and resisted clear evidence that it was al-Qaeda that attacked us, and refused to do anything to keep it from ever happening again, would that not be upsetting if not impeachable (especially if we couldn't figure out whether Bush was somehow under the sway of bin Laden for business reasons), even if Bush is this behavior broke no criminal laws? OK, nobody died in the cyberattack, just as nobody drowned in Watergate, but do we care about the independence of our electoral system?

 In my opinion, the Democrats, and we as citizens, do best if we keep the cart and the horse straight. They have to start with Russian interference and the complete failure of the Trump campaign and administration to deter it or prevent it in any way. These are undeniable facts. After that, we can raise the question of conspiracy or obstruction.

Libertarianism, soft determinism, and hard determinism

When people hear the term "soft determinism" it sounds as if we are determined more softly on soft determinism than on hard determinism, but this is not the case. Indeterminism is the view that given the past, there are two possible outcomes. However, even with indeterminism there are things that can influence the will, but they don't determine it.  A hard determinist can agree that the immediate cause of a person's action is their motive for their action, but then they point out that the persons state of motive is also an event that is caused by previous events, and that these events go back before the agent was born. A soft determinist will agree, but soft and hard determinists differ on the originating cause of the action is relevant to moral responsibility, or whether we should just look at the immediate cause and leave it at that. 

Imagine two possible worlds.

World 1) Smith contemplates murdering Jones, but thinks better of it and refrains.

World 2) Smith murders Jones. 

If indeterminism is true, then the difference between World 1 and World 2 is a matter of the undetermined choice on the part of Smith. Given the past, prior to the decision, Smith can choose to murder Jones or choose not to murder Jones. 

If soft determinism is true, the difference between World 1 and World 2 does not occur when Smith makes his choice. Something prior to the choice (the laws of nature and the facts concerning the position of the atoms in the world, or maybe something God decided to do before the foundation of the world) guaranteed that Smith would murder Jones. But, soft determinism says that in spite of this, in World 2, Smith is to blame for murdering Jones because the immediate cause of Smith's action is his own desire to kill Jones. The soft determinist points out that the murder didn't take place against Smith's will-he wasn't forced to do it. Hard determinists and indeterminists say point out the fact that his action is still the inevitable result of past circumstances outside his control. The soft determinist says "So what?" 

If Hard Determinism is true, then the difference between World 1 and World 2 is some event or set of events outside the control of Smith, AND that, once we realize that, we must realize that Smith is not really responsible for committing the murder. We may need to modify his behavior, but the idea that there is some retribution that he deserves, either in this world or in the next world, is an idea that makes no sense.

Burden, burden, ....

Who has the burden of proof when discussing God? Here. 

To my mind, who you are trying to persuade. You have the burden of proof if you are trying to prove something to someone who isn't persuaded.

Why religion is not going away and science will not displace it

Here. 

It takes some superficial readings of history to think otherwise.

Does God out-abort Planned Parenthood?

From atheist philosopher and blogger Jonathan M. S. Pearce; 

No one is really a fan of abortion in and of itself, but it is useful a procedure for any number of reasons, and the fetus is often merely a group of cells or something that has no personhood and feels no pain. God has designed and created human beings, in some manner, and appears to love abortion, even though his denizens don’t. Anywhere up to three-quarters of fertilized eggs are naturally, spontaneously, aborted. They either fail to implant or are rejected by the body, or undergo other such problems.

This amounts to perhaps billions of individual blastocysts or embryos over time. God doesn’t appear to lift a virtual finger to stop this. 

But this does raise an interesting question. On the assumption that human personhood begins at conception, combined with the belief that God is that creator of nature, doesn't that mean that Planned Parenthood is a distant second behind the Almighty as an abortionist? 

Of course, there is no proof of God's existence

The textbook that I use in Introduction to Ethics uses as an argument against the Divine Command theory the idea that there is no proof of God's existence. Of course there is a lot of debate about these arguments for God, and there is an atheist side to the discussion. What bothers me in the text is its assumption, without talking about any of the arguments, that of course there's no proof of God's existence. This is a popular belief in our culture, typically arrived at with no real study. 

Why Trump is a Racist

Here. 

I don't use this accusation lightly, and am fully aware that people throw the term around too loosely. But, sorry folks, it really does apply to the 45th President of the United States, and there is no getting around it. If you are accepting him as either passable as President, or at least preferable to, say, the pro-choice position of the Democrats, at least be aware of the price you are paying in supporting a racist as President of the United States.

Human rights and philosophical naturalism

The Declaration of Independence says "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." But what if we have no creator? Then shouldn't it say "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are evolved equal, that they are endowed by evolution with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." An obvious howler. 

But is this a false dilemma? 

Well, there are a couple of other options. One would be skepticism about the idea of human rights in general. States can give or withhold rights as they choose, and there is no moral fact (which is what the Declaration points to), that requires states to guarantee that our rights are respected. Thus, the right not to be taxed without representation, or the right not to be enslaved, is in the hands of whoever has the biggest guns. To accept this is to basically reject the moral foundation of what has energized us ethically over the past century in movements such as the Civil Rights movement. The other option is a kind of robust ethics in a naturalistic universe where the moral fact that states ought not to deprive citizens of certain rights is grounded in something somewhere in Plato's heaven. How such a moral fact can effectively be a deciding factor in someone decision to respect or violate someone's rights is something I have never understood. Jefferson thought he could argue for unalienable rights on the basis of how we as humans were brought into existence--that is, by Nature's God (A Christian God, just not a trinitarian God). If instead we were spat up by a blind watchmaker evolutionary process, then that argument goes out the window. The King can just say "I have the power, you don't, the Redcoats are coming, and if they win, you never had those rights in the first place." Apart from an appeal to God, how do we make the case that we don't just happen to have the rights we have because we won the wars we needed to win? How do we argue that it is not the case that if rights are being denied by some government, then they do not really exist at all? What are the moral consequences not just of atheism, but of naturalistic atheism, which rules out such things as Platonic forms, Aristotelian inherent purposes, laws of Karma, etc. on the same basis that it rules out God?

A problem for the divine command theory

How do we decide which god to obey?  Well, we ought to obey a god who exists, so maybe we can rule out Zeus on that account. What if Zeus, Apollo, Aphrodite and company did exist.  What if each of them told us to do different things. Then what? (A famous Greek play, the Oresteia, is devoted to just that question). We should probably rule out Lucifer, but why? Because Yahweh is more powerful than he is, and created him? Are we saying might makes right? 

The answer would seem to be that we should obey Yahweh and not Lucifer because Yahweh is good and Lucifer is not. But the divine command theory says that what makes an act good is that God commanded it. But if what we mean when we say "Yahweh is good" is that Yahweh does what Yahweh wants Yahweh to to do, this doesn't sound as if it amounts to anything. Lucifer, I take it, does what Lucifer wants Lucifer to do. It could indeed turn out that paying attention to Yahweh's commands is the best way to decide what actions are right. But it doesn't follow from that that God's commandments make something right. If God is good by nature God might know what is right and command what is right, but God doesn't make something right by commanding it. This is a problem for the divine command theory. 

Is relativism the pathway to tolerance?

Relativism is supposed to be the pathway to tolerance, yet it tolerates intolerance if the culture accepts it. In fact, one of the things that differentiates mainstream Western culture from other cultures around the world is the value we place on tolerance. From the attack on Valentine's Day in Indian culture, to the rigidity of Japanese business culture, to the one child policy in China, to the oppression of women in Saudi Arabia, to the tolerance for rape cultures throughout the world, for example in Korea, to the practice of female genital mutilation in parts of Africa, we see practices in foreign cultures that do not respect human rights and are not tolerant. If our multiculturalism pushes into relativism, though, we are forced to say that there is nothing really wrong with the intolerant practices. To stand up for tolerance, you have to believe in an objectively binding moral law, something that hangs together nicely with theism, but fits with atheism only if you work very hard to get it to fit, a la Erik Wielenberg.

Relativism and Rape

A redated post.


I had a teacher at Arizona State who told me that in one culture rape is considered perfectly OK, so long as you do it at the right time. In the morning, it's forbidden. In the afternoon, it is frowned upon. At night, it is perfectly OK, since a woman who is away from the protection of her husband is asking for it. (He never said which campus fraternity he was referring to).

If cultural relativism is true, the rules of that culture, with respect to rape, are justified. There is no "court of appeal" that is over and above that culture and out culture that would permit us to say that their views on rape are wrong and ours are right. For us to suggest that they are "really" wrong in permitting rape is to elevate the rules of our culture to a kind of cosmic status they cannot have. It is to be intolerant.

Objectivity and provability

Before black swans were discovered in Western Australia, people believed that all swans were white. We had no proof that black swans existed. Nevertheless, the objective fact was, and is, that there were black swans in Western Australia. Objectivity is about what is real, not what we can prove. 

God, for example, might really exist, but have provided us with no proof of his existence sufficient to convince all reasonable persons. But his objective existence (or nonexistence) does not depend on it being provable either way. 

Chesterton beat me to it

I have been using the reductio ad absurdum "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are evolved equal, and that they were endowed by evolution with certain unalienable rights, that among these rights are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." 

It seems as if G. K. Chesterton beat me to it by a few decades. 

“The Declaration of Independence dogmatically bases all rights on the fact that God created all men equal; and it is right; for if they were not created equal, they were certainly evolved unequal. There is no basis for democracy except in a dogma about the divine origin of man.”

― G.K. Chesterton

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/229497-the-declaration-of-independence-dogmatically-bases-all-rights-on-the

It comes from What I Saw in America.

Aw, shucks.

Homosexuality and celibacy

The Catholic Church teaches that there is nothing wrong with being a homosexual, but if you are homosexual, you ought to live a celibate life. But some within the Church don't really understand the church's teaching. What the Church rejects is the idea that sexual relationships are essential to human happiness and human identity. If one has to have a sexual relationship with someone you love in order to be who you are, then wouldn't it follow that Jesus and Paul were not who they truly were, since both lived celibate lives?

I realize that the Catholic Church, on this issue, is asking people of gay orientation to suppress a powerful human instinct, and instinct supported very strongly by our Valentine's Day culture.  Still, it would be a mistake to say that the Catholic Church's teaching oppose that person's identity. It may oppose how that person may want to express that identity, but does not oppose the identity itself. 

That said, sometimes the people who teach in Catholic schools don't get anything right when it comes to Catholic teaching.