Essential or Incidental?

I have a friend who decided a while ago that she doesn't want kids. She's got pretty sound reasons for not wanting to procreate, and she's always seemed happy with that decision. But recently she told me that she felt a pang of doubt when she saw a family sitting out on their patio, barbecuing and looking really cozy and happy together.

She confessed to me, "Now I'm starting to worry that I could be making the wrong choice, because I found the idea of being in that scene so appealing." My response: "Okay, imagine that same scene again, but instead of being there surrounded by your hypothetical children and husband, you're surrounded by your close friends. Now how do you feel about it?" She replied, "Oh. Actually, that feels just as good."

The thought experiment had revealed that she was reacting positively to the "Idyllic afternoon in the company of people you love" aspect of the scene, not specifically to the "Idyllic afternoon in the company of family" aspect. The latter is a subset of the former, of course, but she had erroneously assumed that the "family" component was a necessary condition of the scene's appeal to her, when in fact it was incidental. And it only became clear which components were necessary, and which incidental, by isolating them via thought experiment.

What I thought was interesting about this case is that it was a real-life occurrence of a problem researchers face all the time: you observe a phenomenon with a bunch of attributes -- say, A, B, and C -- and it's not clear which attributes are essential to the phenomenon, and which are irrelevant. Is A necessary and sufficient to produce the phenomenon, with B and C being totally irrelevant? Is the interaction between A and B the necessary cause? Would any one of the three attributes on its own be sufficient?

For example, if you observe that vegans tend to live longer than average, is that effect due to the lack of meat in their diets? The lack of all animal products? The higher amounts of plants in their diets? Is their veganism in itself completely irrelevant and merely correlated with some other feature that's responsible for the benefit, like higher levels of exercise? Or maybe the increased lifespan is caused by the combination of more plants and more exercise, and neither factor would be sufficient on its own?

If you're attuned to this problem of ambiguous causality, as good researchers usually are, you can try to isolate potential causes and study how the outcome changes when you change one factor at a time. But in your daily life, it's much easier to jump to conclusions without even realizing you're doing so, like my friend did.

The happy-family case study deserves particular mention, I think, because it's a special case of ambiguous causality, in which you form an overly-specific hypothesis instead of the correct, more general one. I touched on this phenomenon in an earlier post, in which I described a study where people were given the series of numbers "2, 4, 6" and asked to guess the rule that those numbers were following. Most people hypothesized something like "increasing even numbers" or "increasing by intervals of two", when in fact the correct rule was simply "increasing numbers." The evenness, and the intervals of two, were both incidental, the same way the family-ness of the scene my friend observed was incidental to the feelings it induced in her.

For a less contrived example, consider acupuncture. People found that sticking needles in specific "pressure points" prescribed by traditional Chinese medicinal theory helped alleviate pain, and they took that as validation of the pressure point theory. But when researchers tried sticking needles in other locations on subjects' bodies, they got the same effect. As far as science has been able to tell so far, the "pressure points" were incidental to the pain relief; the "sticking with needles" was the only essential component.

I have a suspicion that this fallacy might also come into play when people consider the effect of religion in their life. I've heard people describe how belonging to their church makes them happier, or makes them better people. But is the religiousness of the community essential to its beneficial effect? Or would any tight-knit community produce the same result? It's not necessarily obvious until you experiment with removing the component you thought was crucial -- although fortunately, as in the case with my friend, sometimes a thought experiment does the trick, and you can disentangle essential from incidental from the comfort of your armchair.

I got all excited when I couldn't find this phenomenon described on Fallacy Files, because one of my life goals is to discover a new fallacy or bias and get the privilege of picking its official name. But after I'd already daydreamed about what I was going to call it, I did a little more googling and discovered it might actually fall under the heading of an obscure fallacy that's already been coined: "Confusion of Essence and Accident," in which you "assume that some accidental feature or property of something essentially belongs to it." Alas, it looks like the world might have to wait a little longer before "Julia Galef's Totally Brilliant New Fallacy" is added to to the logic textbooks.

Michael's Picks

* Is the European economy being hurt by secularism? Stuart Varney and Father Jonathan Morris think so.

* President Obama has ordered hospital visitation rights for gay and lesbian couples.

* Nebraska lawmakers and abortion opponents want to use "pain" as a threshold for determining when abortion is acceptable; Jeff Schweitzer calls their bluff.

* A federal court has ruled that the National Day of Prayer in the U.S. is unconstitutional.

* A scholar of religion, Bruce Waltke, has resigned from Florida's Reformed Theological Seminary after endorsing the theory of evolution.

* A long feature piece on Paul Kurtz: "Redirecting a long life of godlessness."

* A controversial bishop has been fined $13,500 for denying the severity of the Holocaust.

* Stanley Fish argues, citing Habermas, that secular reason is missing something.

Podcast Teaser: The Anthropic Principle

Ever since I’ve heard of the anthropic principle (AP), many years ago, I thought that way too many smart people were endlessly going about a question akin to the old Scholastic issue of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. In our next podcast Julia and I will take on the baffling variety of anthropic principles and comment on some of the bizarre ideas surrounding the issue (there indeed is an issue, though I don’t think the AP makes any contribution to resolve it).

Apparently, the first person to think of something like the AP (though certainly not in the modern context, and not using that term) was Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-discoverer of natural selection with Charles Darwin. He wrote:

“Such a vast and complex universe as that which we know exists around us, may have been absolutely required ... in order to produce a world that should be precisely adapted in every detail for the orderly development of life culminating in

man.”

Wallace’s quote encapsulates what bothers many people about the AP: it seems to imply that life, and in particular human intelligence, is the pinnacle of creation, and that, by implication, there is a creator behind all the fuss. (Which of course immediately brings to mind Douglas Adams’ immortal quote: “In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.”) As we shall see, however, there is no necessary connection between various forms of the AP and intelligent design (ID).

The first modern author to raise AP-related issues was Robert Dicke in 1961. He noted that the current moment in the history of the universe is not a random sample of all possible historical moments, because the universe was inhospitable to life until relatively recently, and will be again in the distant future. Of course, this observation is rather trivial (a recurring problem with the AP), because it simply restates an obvious fact: life could not have been around before galaxies and planets were in a position to form, and it will not be around once the universe will be so old that stars will be too cold to support the thermodynamics of life. Duh.

It was Brandon Carter in 1973 that introduced the phrase Anthropic Principle, and who distinguished between a weak (WAP) and a strong (SAP) version. Here is the difference:

(Carter) WAP = “We must be prepared to take account of the fact that our location in the universe is necessarily privileged to the extent of being compatible with our existence as observers.”

(Carter) SAP = “The Universe (and hence the fundamental parameters on which it depends) must be such as to admit the creation of observers within it at some stage. To paraphrase Descartes, cogito ergo mundus talis est. [I think, therefore the world is such as it is.]”

Oh boy, you know we are in trouble when physicists paraphrase philosophers! Carter’s WAP is a truism: it simply says that we have a privileged (i.e., non-random) position in the universe as observers, in virtue of the fact that there can be observers at all only in a small section of space-time. To which the proper comment is: yup. Carter’s SAP, however, is also a truism, because he meant “must” simply as a logical deduction from the fact that we exist, not that we must somehow exist. Again, nothing controversial here, and Carter later regretted the use of both the words “Anthropic” (because he meant the idea to go for any sentient self-aware life form) and “Principle” (a bit too grand a name for the restatement of a pretty obvious truth).

The real trouble arises with the 1986 book The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, by John Barrow and Frank Tipler (the latter went on to write such nonsensical books as The Physics of Christianity). They also — very unfortunately — used the terms WAP and SAP, but defined them in crucially different, and much more questionable, ways from Carter. Here it goes:

(B&T) WAP: “The observed values of all physical and cosmological quantities are not equally probable but they take on values restricted by the requirement that there exist sites where carbon-based life can evolve and by the requirements that the Universe be old enough for it to have already done so.”

(B&T) SAP: “The Universe must have those properties which allow life to develop within it at some stage in its history.”

Notice here that Barrow and Tipler’s WAP is more restrictive than Carter’s, as it talks about carbon-based life forms, not just generic observers. This is often referred to as the (utterly unjustified) idea of “carbon chauvinism.” Also, they introduce talk of probability of cosmological quantities, as if we had any idea of what the respective probability distributions actually look like (we don’t). More importantly, the wording is ambiguous, because to say that the cosmological constants are “restricted” by certain “requirements” begins to smell suspiciously of intelligent design. Sure enough, it is hard not to interpret Barrow and Tipler’s SAP as a thinly disguised form of ID: why else must the universe be such that life has to develop?

But Barrow and Tipler aren’t done with the nonsense, proceeding to propose their Final Anthropic Principle (FAP): “Intelligent information-processing must come into existence in the Universe, and, once it comes into existence, it will never die out.” Wow. This is very much akin to Teilhard de Chardin’s “omega principle,” a semi-Christian mystical notion aimed at providing a scientific basis for the religiously inspired idea of immortality. Do I smell Templeton prize?

Of course the FAP is what famously led to Martin Gardner’s sarcastic proposal of the Completely Ridiculous Anthropic Principle (CRAP): “At the instant the Omega Point is reached, life will have gained control of all matter and forces not only in a single universe, but in all universes whose existence is logically possible; life will have spread into all spatial regions in all universes which could logically exist, and will have stored an infinite amount of information, including all bits of knowledge which it is logically possible to know. And this is the end.”

Ok, assuming you are not already hopelessly confused (for which state you would have plenty of good reasons), we got one more, John Wheeler’s Participatory Anthropic Principle (PAP): “Observers are necessary to bring the Universe into being.” Here we have moved from tautology (Carter) through wishful thinking (Barrow and Tipler) to just pure and simple bad logic: Wheeler’s principle obviously begs the question (i.e., it circularly assumes) of how is it possible for observers to be required in order to bring the universe into existence, and yet for those same observers to be part of that very universe. Unless, of course, the “observer” is actually a god existing outside space-time (whatever that means), in which case we are back to ID.

If this were the state of discourse concerning the AP, it would scarcely be worth bothering with. But recently a good number of high-level theoretical physicists jumped into the fray, including Steven Weinberg, Leonard Susskind and Lee Smolin. These are smart people, and we need to seriously entertain why exactly they are wasting neuronal power on any variant of the AP at all.

The answer is that of course discussions about the various APs do pick on one underlying serious question: why are the laws of physics the way they are? (Not to mention that old philosophical chestnut: why is there something instead of nothing?) And of course that’s precisely what fundamental physics is all about.

Still, one would not understand why people like Weinberg and co. bother with the AP if one did not grasp the real debate going on within the fundamental physics community these days: the one about string theory vs. possible alternatives to provide a “final theory of everything,” a theory that, presumably, would tell us why the fundamental physical constants do take the values that they do. [See our recent podcast on the problematic status of string theory for more.]

There are — to simplify grossly — essentially three types of answers currently on the table. String theorists hope that their theory will provide a unification of all forces of nature, a single equation with few if any free parameters, that will therefore show that the universe simply had to have the laws that it does, period. This will cut the legs out from under any non-trivial version of the AP (assuming that there is such a thing), because what sets the whole AP “argument” going is the (completely unproven) idea that the laws of physics and the physical constants could take any of an infinite number of values, thereby resulting in a spooky feeling once we realize that a tiny fraction of those values are compatible with us existing at all (though even that assumption has been questioned to some extent).

The second alternative is to invoke the multiverse, also a concept tightly related to string theory. This is the idea that there are infinite universes “out there,” each characterized by its own set of physical laws and constants. We just happened to be on one of those compatible with life, but this is now entirely unsurprising, as we obviously wouldn’t be having this discussion if our universe were incompatible with our existence. Notice, incidentally, that the multiverse is not at all the same thing as the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, with which it is so often confused: the latter simply says that our universe keeps splitting into an infinite number of sub-possibilities where individual events take a different course — but the laws of nature would be the same in all these universes, making the many-worlds interpretation irrelevant to discussions of APs.

Finally, we have Smolin’s controversial idea of cosmic natural selection (CNS), according to which universes with different sets of physical parameters keep being generated and compete for prevalence in the landscape of all possible universes. It has to be noticed that Smolin is one of the most vocal critics of string theory (see his excellent The Trouble with Physics), and that his bet is on a different approach known as loop quantum gravity.

There are many problems with Smolin’s idea of CNS, beginning with the obvious fact that it is not at all clear what the measure of fitness would be for CNS to get going (contra Smolin, in biology, fitness isn’t simply the rate of reproduction, it is the rate of differential reproduction, which implies competition for resources in a common environment — but parallel universes do not share a common environment, by definition). Another serious problem is that any theory of natural selection requires a mechanism of reliable inheritance, and again it is far from being clear how information about physical constants would be inherited from a parent to a baby universe. Moreover, that inheritance has to be imperfect so that variation may arise on which selection can act — and what would the mutation mechanism be, in the case of parallel universes? And what is the “mutation” frequency to new laws of physics, anyway?

There is much, much more that could be said about the AP, but we need to clear up yet another source of confusion before opening the discussion. Contrary to what is often stated, no version of the AP makes any testable prediction (which means that, whatever APs are, they're not science). The two alleged examples often brought up are Steven Weinberg’s prediction of the value of the cosmological constant and Fred Hoyle’s prediction of a particular resonance of Carbon 12, the element on which (terrestrial) life is based. The problem is that both predictions were actually based on standard science, with no need to consider the AP at all. Here I think the conclusive rebuttal goes to Smolin, who in a letter to Susskind puts it this way:

“The logic of [Weinberg-style] arguments is: A implies B; B is observed; B, together with theory C, implies D [therefore, A is true].”

Here A is any form of the Anthropic Principle or the Principle of Mediocrity, together with assumptions about priors, probability distributions on universes etc, plus our own existence, that leads to the conclusion that we should observe B.

B is that galaxies have formed. C is the theory of structure formation, D is that the cosmological constant is not too large.

The fallacy is not to recognize that the first line plays no role in the argument, and the prediction of D is equally strong if it is dropped. One can prove this by noting that if D were not seen, one would have to question the theory C [assuming the observation is correct, as it certainly is here.] One would have no reason to question either A or the assertion that A implies B.”

In other words, the AP adds nothing to the predictions made by good old-fashioned scientific theories, and our understanding of the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything therefore gains precisely nothing by the introduction of the Anthropic Principle. How many angels were dancing on that pin?

More on the future of philosophy of science

Reporting from the conference on the future of philosophy of science held in Tilburg, NL. (To be exact, writing this while on a train from Amsterdam to Rome, trying to get a flight back to New York while avoiding the Icelandic volcanic ash.)

While the topic of the conference was, in fact, specifically the future of philo-sci, in reality less than a third of the talks directly addressed the issue, the remainder simply being about someone’s current work in philosophy of science (interesting, but not the main point). My notes here focus on some of the presentations actually addressing the theme of the gathering.

Take, for instance, Francis Cartieri’s “Extending the Philosophy of Science: Forecasting and Science Policy.” The idea is that philosophy of science is one of the disciplines poised at the interface between science and the humanities, which means that it could contribute significantly to the area of science policy. After all, non-scientists who have to make decisions based on scientific input (e.g., politicians, and to some extent the general public) are not at all well versed in science, and may benefit from the mediation of people — like philosophers — who both understand the science and are concerned with its broader impact on society.

Related to the above talk was Fabien Medvecky’s “Economic Discounting at the Science-Policy Interface: A Fertile Ground for Philosophical Inquiry,” where the author pointed out that economics and its interface with science policy is also ripe for insights from philosophers of science. As Medvecky put it: “Although discounting has been a standard component of cost–benefit analysis for many years, it has increasingly become a point of debate — especially for those working on climate change — with much of the disagreement over discounting stemming from philosophical issues.”

A completely different take on the future of philosophy of science was presented by Mark Colyvan, with his “Philosophy of Mathematics as Philosophy of Science.” The idea is that philosophy of science should expand to include philosophy of mathematics, even though mathematics is not often considered a science (it is more akin to logic, after all). I must admit that this talk perturbed me, in the positive sense that it gave me much to think about. Colyvan presented us with the famous example of the collapse of the Tacoma bridge in the 1940s, arguing that a major explanation of what happens has to take into account not only the wind strength and the details of the construction of the bridge, but most importantly the fact that the bridge happened to have geometric characteristics that generated a harmonic amplification of the initial oscillation, an amplification that kicked out a positive feedback that continued until the bridge collapsed. The point is that the bridge would have collapsed (but of course not entirely) almost regardless of physical circumstances, such as the specific wind speed and the particular construction materials. That is, the major explanation for the catastrophe is mathematical in nature.

Why would such a conclusion be disturbing? Well, because I have always thought of mathematics applied to science as describing physical reality, not of explaining it. Colyvan didn’t actually call this causation, but he may as well, in some respects. I had a nice conversation about this over dinner with my colleague Paul Griffiths, and he convinced me that there are ways to avoid the spookiness of mathematics that these examples seem to strongly suggest, and I think he has almost convinced me (and therefore reassured me). But I need to cogitate more on all of this, so as soon as I get back to New York I’ll look for a book on the philosophy of mathematics.

Another talk I found very appropriate to the theme of the conference was by Kathryn Plaisance and Carla Fehr: “Philosophers Responding to Controversial Science: Lessons from Evolutionary Psychology and Behavioral Genetics.” This is along some of the same lines I argued in my own presentation: philosophers are in a good position to assess what Plaisance and Fehr called “controversial science,” be it evolutionary psychology (which has become a self-contained enclave within the much broader and more sound fields of ecological and behavioral genetics), or climate modeling vis-a-vis the global warming debate, or Intelligent Design nonsense concerning the never ending challenges to science education in public schools. As the authors put it, “critical engagement, as we see it, involves developing ‘interactional expertise’ and conceptualizing our labor in terms of overlapping academic communities rather than solely as a set of individual efforts.”

Perhaps the talk that set the tone for the entire discussion though was Ronald Giere’s “Reflections on the Future of the Philosophy of Science, 2.0,” in which he picked up from a similar talk he gave in 1970 on the same general topic. Of course, Giere started out by admitting that it is perilous to make predictions about a field, particularly one related to science, and in fact listed a number of scientific advancements that affected philosophy of science immediately after his 1970 talk and that would have been pretty much impossible to predict then. Of one thing Giere was sure, though (and it is something I actually question): there ain’t going to be any more scholarship on the “foundational” problems in philosophy of science, the big picture stuff that gave us household names like Popper, Kuhn and associates. But as I pointed out in the discussion, it seems to me that, on the contrary, we should encourage young philosophers of science to again think broadly about foundational problems, and not just engage in the philosophical equivalent of Kuhn’s “puzzle solving” science.

Along similar lines to Giere’s talk, Leen de Vreese, Erik Weber and Jeroen van Bouwel presented on “The Primacy of Philosophy of Scientific Practice and its Consequences for General Philosophy of Science.” Here they argued for a move away from what they call general philosophy of science (the foundational problems mentioned above) and toward “a ‘practical turn’ in philosophy of science [that] will promote the primacy of a ‘philosophy of scientific practice,’” for instance through the study of concepts like causation and explanation not in general, but as they apply to specific problems in particular special sciences. Back to the big questions, yes, but via the indirect way they are pertinent to individual fields of scientific investigation.

Christopher Hitchcock gave one of the most stimulating talks of the meeting, one about which I disagreed almost slide by slide, but that nonetheless stimulated my little gray cells to a pleasurable degree. The title was “Intuitions, Experiments, and Analysis” and it turned out to be a critical assessment of philosophical intuitions, with a positive look at so-called experimental philosophy (the kind of philosophy where, for instance, laypeople are asked about their intuitions about ethics, mind, etc., in lieu of relying on the intuitions of a small number of professional philosophers).

I think Hitchcock needs to make a distinction between useful and not so useful philosophical intuitions and thought experiments. For instance, I find that David Chalmer’s intuitions about zombies, though famous, are in fact incoherent and completely unhelpful. But the sort of issues raised, for instance, by careful analysis of trolley problems in ethics are very useful in highlighting the differences between ethical theories (e.g., consequentialism vs. deontological approaches). Moreover, I am still not convinced that experimental philosophy is actually philosophy: it is certainly interesting to poll people about their ethical intuitions, for instance, but that’s an exercise in the sociology and psychology of ethics, it’s not going to address philosophical arguments.

Samir Okasha’s evening presentation on “Why does Darwin matter for Philosophy?” was both thought-provoking (as usual) and something I tend to disagree with on several levels. Samir’s fundamental point was that philosophers can learn much from science, and that there cannot be a philosophy of any kind that is not informed by science. Indeed, no disagreement there, but his examples came in two flavors, one of which is true but rather trivial, the second one from which I derived a very different lesson from what Samir, I think, intended.

The first category includes instances — even among very well known philosophers of the 20th century — where someone invoked science to make a point in, say, ethics or metaphysics or philosophy of mind, and in the process got the science fundamentally wrong. Samir’s examples included some major gaffe by Saul Kripke, for instance, and of course I can easily add the recent book co-authored by Jerry Fodor on Darwin as a spectacular failure in that respect. But the basic point is uncontroversial: if philosophers wish to talk about science or draw on science’s findings, they better get the science right.

The second class of examples in Samir’s talk is more interesting, and consists of instances where philosophers have arrived at conclusions that exactly parallel those of science. One of his best case studies was John Rawls’ “veil of ignorance,” a thought experiment that essentially says that the rational solution to the problem of how we should come to agree on what rules to use to build a just society is to randomize the playing field: if people don’t know ahead of time whether they’ll be rich or poor, beautiful or ugly, healthy or sick, they will agree to a social contract that maintains as much a spread of resources and opportunities among every member of society.

Okasha made the interesting observation that the veil of ignorance’s randomization process is analogous in important ways to Mendelian laws in genetics, where individual genes “cooperate” for the sake of the organism precisely because they all have about the same chances of making it into the next generation (they are affected by a “veil of Mendelian ignorance,” so to speak). Of course, just like in society, there are genes that try to cheat the system (they cause cancers in the latter case, global financial collapse in the first one), and safeguards have to be put in place to decrease their chances of succeeding (now, there is an argument against libertarianism!).

But why should the message of this sort of examples be that science can teach philosophers how to do their job? I’m pretty sure Rawls didn’t know much about genetics, and that his veil of ignorance was arrived at independently of any knowledge of science, which means something somewhat stunning: that philosophical analysis can yield logical discoveries that are applicable analogically to relevantly similar physical systems. This is not a naive revival of the old rationalist program according to which just thinking about stuff can yield reliable knowledge about the physical world. It is rather more subtle, as it hints at classes of phenomena that have both physical and logical components, where science and philosophy (or mathematics — see the spooky example of the Tacoma bridge above) can independently arrive at parallel truths. To me, that’s an excellent reason to feel invigorated as a philosopher!

Still, the opinion that the future of philosophy of science rests on interdisciplinarity was shared by most at the conference (including yours truly). Take for instance Michael Stoeltzner’s talk on “Philosophy of Science Between Rigorous Method and Interdisciplinarity.” The author argued that there are four reasons/venues for the importance of philosophy of science: “(i) [Philosophers] act on a specific level of a complex inner-scientific process, and, simultaneously, reflect upon the conditions of the process as a whole. (ii) They combine historical long-shots at the emergence of the scientific world-view with ahistorical close-ups tracking down a specific development in a particular science. (iii) Not only does the history of science represent an experimental laboratory for general claims, but it also influences the normative standards, in the same vein as the progress of any natural science. (iv) They, finally, can count on a certain inescapability of philosophy of science for the scientists themselves.” In other words, it’s not just philosophy, but history of science that are crucial to the understanding of science (and, therefore, to its future, especially in terms of the science-policy interface discussed above).

One thing was obvious from the meeting itself: plenty of smart people are thinking about and are excited by the future prospects of philosophy of science, which is of course the main reason to think that the field does indeed have a bright future ahead.

On So-Called “Sin Laws”

In 1859, British philosopher John Stuart Mill wrote one of his seminal works, "On Liberty" (imagine having more than one!). In this essay, Mill weighs "the nature and limits of the power which can be legitimately exercised by society over the individual." He sums up his stance with this now-famous passage:

"The sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number is self-protection. The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community against his will is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or to forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because in the opinions of others to do so would be wise or even right. These are good reasons for remonstrating with him, or reasoning with him, or persuading him, or entreating him, but not for compelling him, or visiting him with any evil in case he do otherwise. To justify that, the conduct from which it is desired to deter him must be calculated to produce evil to someone else. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolutely. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign."

In short, your decisions over your life are yours alone. Unless you are causing harm to others, the government has no right to interfere in your business. It is acceptable, Mill said, to write a book condemning beliefs or behavior, laying out reasons for your position; but it is not, however, for the government to step in with its heavy arm. Written more than 150 years ago, how does this so-called "harm principle" hold up? To be sure, it has widespread implications, and I could probably write an entire book on the matter. However, in this essay I would like to contain our discussion to what are commonly called "sin laws."

One form of sin laws is smoking bans in certain public spaces. The reasoning is that cigarettes directly and negatively influence the health of other citizens via second-hand smoke, and so these citizens should be protected. Smoking bans have also extended to bars and restaurants -- a move many charge is an example of the government exceeding its bounds, telling private companies how to run their business. However, bars and restaurants are public spaces -- they depend on public usage for their business. Therefore, they fall under the domain of government, and the government has an interest in protecting its citizens from damaging cigarette smoke.

A more controversial form of sin law, however -- which I will focus on for the rest of this essay -- is "sin taxes," or fees levied on products deemed harmful to society. Examples include taxes on cigarettes, soda, and bottled water. Another example, one that recently sparked an argument between my friends and me, and which led to writing this piece, is the news that tanning salon customers will face a 10 percent tax under the new federal health insurance reform package.

But aren't these people merely harming themselves? Wouldn't Mill object to such laws?

Interestingly, the moves are not necessarily designed to change behavior (indeed, data on this seems inconclusive; I would love to see more). Rather, since empirical evidence shows these products -- cigarettes, soda, bottled water, tanning salons, and more -- are harmful to general human and environmental health, the idea being that their usage strains the societal system. And since this would impact everyone in the system, the users should help cover the costs.

A seemingly clear-cut case for us might be the tanning salon taxes. The U.S. currently spends about $1.8 billion on treating skin cancers each year. To help fund the $940 billion health insurance overhaul -- which will extend coverage but also have to handle costs on such cancers -- lawmakers tacked on a 10 percent tax on individuals receiving indoor tanning services. The initiative is expected to generate $2.7 billion over ten years; and doctors predict the tax will reduce future costs of treating skin cancers.

But this issue admittedly gets more entangled. Consider the recent situation in Washington State. To help close a $2.8 billion budget shortfall, lawmakers there boosted taxes on bottled water, soda, beer, and candy. The measure makes for about half of an $800 million tax package Democrats argued was needed to prevent drastic cuts in state services. As one assembly member said:

"We cut health care, we cut K-12, we cut higher education. It's going to be harder for your students to get into college. Your students are going to have crowded classrooms they didn't have before because of our cuts. But at some point, you cut so much you start to close down basic government services."

One might argue, after reading that quote, that these taxes are not directly going to cover the health care costs they are creating. This should be obvious from the start, for such taxes cannot be divvied up in such a way. The argument remains, however, that these taxes are not going to cover health care costs at all, and instead are going to fund different services; that is, cigarette taxes are not going to fund lung cancer work. But this is all needless. The costs of certain behaviors make it tougher for the state to fund basic services because state costs are being diverted to pay for the consequences of those behaviors when they could be spent in other areas. So, if a state is facing such drastic budget shortfalls, it seems reasonable to raise taxes on those products or behaviors that increase costs to help pay for essential services.

The crux of this line of thought is that because we are all being hit by health insurance and social costs, it seems a minor move to implement a small fee on the goods reasonably deemed to be the cause of those costs -- especially on the specific goods and products in mind, and therefore the specific users, too. What about other products such as bottled water? Americans can quite easily stop using plastic water bottles, which is terribly damaging to and costly for the environment, and substitute reusable water bottles. Hence, if you want to continue to hurt the environment, you help pay for it.

The most registered reaction to the arguments above is known as the "slippery slope argument." It usually sounds something like this: "Next thing you know they'll tax (blank)!" or “Next thing you know they'll ban (blank)!”

But the slippery slope argument gets us nowhere. In fact, I cannot think of another avoid-the-argument argument that works as well as the slippery slope. It sounds more like: "Oh, I don't like that. But I can't think of anything against it. So .. hey .. I've got it: now that they did that, there's a very slight chance they'll do this! So that is bad!"

Consider, for instance, that a friend seriously pondered whether the government might be a step closer to imposing a tax on -- or worse yet, outlawing -- high-heeled shoes because of the danger they pose to a woman's ankles. This person also wondered whether the government might next step in and do something about paper, which is apparently causing an epidemic of paper cuts. But again, the taxes on cigarettes, tanning salons, and soda, are based on empirical data showing they are very bad for human health (at least in their current mode of consumption). There is no empirical data to support the same claim for high heels. Is anyone really frightened the government might levy taxes on high heels for the every-so-often twisted ankle or for that matter, paper cuts?

This brings us to another commonly heard counter-argument: "the government shouldn't tell us what to do." Perhaps the aforementioned backlash is coming from somewhere else -- say, a rejection of everything the government does (except that which helps, of course). This again avoids the issue. But, to the point, one cannot reject government action out of hand, for the government takes many actions that influence our lives everyday, some good, some bad. Instead, we need to discuss the merits of each particular case.

Still others will worry we are moralizing. Even Mill wrote that:

"The likings and dislikings of society, or of some powerful portion of it, are thus the main thing which has practically determined the rules laid down for general observance, under the penalties of law or opinion."

There is a problem if our laws are based on preferences, on likes and dislikes. However, I do not think we should be worried about morality influencing our laws, for our laws and morality cannot be separated. Our moral beliefs and values -- whether religious or secular -- are about how to deal with the suffering, happiness and welfare of sentient, conscious creatures on Earth, which means they will surely influence social and public policy. President Barack Obama admitted as much in "Audacity of Hope," noting that our laws are but a codification of our morality. The point becomes that it is fine to moralize so long as the moral views are supported by reason and evidence.

Still, we must realize the difference between certain actions taken to cure a societal ill. Mill states that men should live "without impediment from our fellow-creatures, so long as what we do does not harm them even though they should think our conduct foolish, perverse, or wrong." For the cases above, the government has taken certain steps to protect, at a baseline, other citizens from the harms of others. The government has also taken certain steps to recoup costs put on the system by citizens acting questionably. What the government has not done generally is ban products, unless they are absolutely dangerous to human health. Instead, if we collectively believe certain actions are "foolish, perverse, or wrong", we can continue to grant such actions allowance -- with perhaps a higher price tag or controlled usage -- but also write blog posts and books, and start campaigns detailing their downsides in an attempt to slow their use. This is liberty guided by real world considerations.

That last idea -- liberty guided by reason and evidence -- is important to note because uncritical adherence to principle can leave us blind to nuance. Consider marijuana. Marijuana has been under the thumb of the law for decades -- but why? Mostly because orthodoxy and tradition hold that it is a dangerous drug akin to cocaine and others. Yet marijuana is absolutely less harmful than cocaine -- and even cigarettes and alcohol. So why outlaw it? Here we come back to the point: our laws should be guided by reason and evidence by way of case-by-case evaluations -- not by broad stroked, handed-down moral traditions. Apply critical inquiry to each case before us and we just might get somewhere.

PZ Myers is a witless wanker who peddles pablum

No, not really, but I got your attention, yes? On the other hand, these are precisely the words used by PZ in a recent post, aimed at criticizing Michael De Dora’s observations about a recent debate in Knoxville, TN on the wording of a biology textbook.

Let me start with a full disclosure: Michael is a friend, and of course one of the contributors to this blog. But this post has little to do with that, it deals with the substance and the tone of PZ’s remarks, both of which are highly relevant to the quality of discourse within the atheist community (currently, pretty low), something I deeply care about.

First the form. PZ’s post reads like it was written by an intemperate teenager in the midst of a hormonal rage. Among other things, he calls De Dora “witless,” “wanker,” “wishy-washy,” and “sloppy-thinking”; he accuses Michael of engaging in “cowardly intellectual dishonesty” and of using a “quisling” approach. So that we are crystal clear on just how low these ad hominem (a logical fallacy!) attacks go, let me refresh your memory about the dictionary definitions of some of these terms:

Quisling = a traitor who collaborates with an enemy force occupying their country;

Wanker = a person who masturbates (used as a term of abuse);

Wishy-washy = feeble or insipid in quality or character, lacking strength or boldness;

Witless = foolish, stupid, to such an extent that one cannot think clearly or rationally.

If PZ thinks that this sort of language belongs within any thoughtful writing about rational discourse, he really needs to look up the dictionary definitions of rational, thoughtful and discourse. Then again, it is precisely this sort of theatrics that apparently makes him so popular, as nothing gets people’s attention on the internet so much as shouting as LOUDLY as possible, regardless of the vacuity of what one is actually saying.

And speaking of content, what was so witless, wanky, wishy-washy, and witless about De Dora’s post? Oh, he dared question (very politely, and based on argument) one of the dogmas of the new atheism: that religious people (that’s about 90% of humanity, folks) ought (and I use the term in the moral sense) to be frontally assaulted and ridiculed at all costs, because after all, this is a war, and the goal is to vanquish the enemy, reason and principles be damned. Michael had simply noted that the recent controversy in Tennessee was a bit less clear cut than usual: while of course creationism doesn’t have a leg to stand on, and of course biology textbooks should teach evolution without apologies, De Dora also noted that using the word “myth” when the book refers to the biblical story of creation was an uncalled for breach of the principle of separation of Church and State (if invoked in the context of a biology class in a public school). Therefore, on that narrow technical ground, and on that ground only, the creationist who complained had, in fact, a point.

Contrary to PZ’s invective, acknowledging this point is in no way a cowardly act of intellectual dishonesty. On the contrary, it is a paragon of intellectual honesty because one is able to maintain the nuance that is necessary in distinguishing positive science education from gratuitous religion bashing. (And please, do note that I’ve got plenty of credentials in the department of religion bashing, but I try to do it in what I consider the appropriate manner and context.)

In yet another example of his sledge-hammer approach to discourse, PZ states that De Dora’s contributions in several recent writings have been “notable only for their fuzziness and willingness to accommodate any nonsense from religious BS artists.” If by fuzziness one means subtle reasoning, well PZ can certainly not be accused of that. But nothing I have seen written by Michael in any way “accommodates” religious nonsense, on the contrary, he is very clear in his rejection of religion in general and creationism in particular. It is the principle of Church-State separation that is at issue, as well as the ethics of insulting people’s beliefs for the sake of scoring cheap rhetorical points with one’s own converts.

The other point that Michael raised, and that PZ loathes, is the one about the epistemological boundaries of science. I have written on this recently, so I will not revisit the issue except to add two quick points: first off, I really wish that scientists who write about philosophy would bother to take epistemology 101, that way they would avoid embarrassing themselves with naive statements about the proper domain of scientific inquiry. Second, surely we can agree that the epistemology of science is an area where we can have a reasonable exchange without having to resort to labeling our interlocutors witless, wankers and the like, yes?

Here is another example of how PZ gets it horribly wrong:

“Somebody says the universe appeared magically a few thousand years ago, I guess that has to be a valid answer on the test question, ‘How old is the universe?’. To actually state that it is about 14 billion years old, and make such an answer a necessary part of the student's grade...why, that is philosophy or theology, and not to be discussed in science class.”

Wow, I counted at least four gross mistakes in just this one paragraph, a pretty high rate for a self-appointed defender of evidence-based rationality: 1) in the course of this discussion De Dora never said or implied that young-earth creationism is a valid answer to a test question; 2) he has also never argued that a student who gave that answer instead of the scientifically grounded one should somehow get a pass; 3) Michael has never said that this is a philosophical or theological issue (PZ is referring to a different statement by De Dora, about the epistemological boundaries of science, see comment above, but that statement cannot reasonably be construed in the way PZ unreasonably construes it); and 4) of course these issues should be discussed in a science class (here I do disagree with Michael), but no discussion is helped in the least by referring to what half of your students deeply believe as “myth.”

PZ finally goes on to criticize the Center for Inquiry itself, the organization for which De Dora works, as being guilty of giving a soapbox to a “milquetoast marshmallow” and of standing for the Church of Fatuous Incompetence. Which, as CFI’s Ron Lindsay drily observes, is a bit ironic: “I find it remarkable that in the space of a few months, CFI is alleged to have been taken over by ‘atheist fundamentalists’ and then by those who are wishy-washy about religion. Was there a coup and then a counter-coup of which I was unaware? Both aspersions, of course, lack empirical support, and it is regrettable to see them being made by two learned individuals, Paul Kurtz and PZ Myers, who claim to base their beliefs on evidence.”

And that is precisely why I bothered to write this post. It isn’t a matter of defending a friend, who is perfectly capable of doing so himself. Or to attack PZ personally — I never met the guy, and I occasionally enjoy his antics. But this to me represents the latest example of an escalation (downwards in quality) in the tone and substance of the discourse on atheism, and I blame this broadly on the rhetoric of the new atheism (the only “new” aspect of which is precisely the in-your-face approach to “reason”). With few exceptions (mostly, Dennett), what we have seen in recent years is much foaming at the mouth, accompanied by a cavalier attitude toward the substance, rationality and coherence of one’s arguments. And now we have seen a new low consisting of childish insults to a fellow atheist and writer who is clearly fighting the same battle as the rest of us.

I am often told by my non-activist friends (pretty much all of whom are agnostics or atheists themselves) that the problem with the new atheism is that it looks a lot like the mirror image of the sort of fundamentalist rage that we all so justly abhor. I always shrugged at this accusation as being overblown and missing the point, after all we — unlike them — are on the side of reason and true human compassion. Now I’m not so sure.

The future of philosophy of science

I am in Tilburg, Netherlands, for a conference on the future of philosophy of science. Ah!, you might say, and what would that look like? I hope to write at least another entry or two in the course of the next few days to give you a flavor of what some of my colleagues here think, but let me start with my own views (not because they are better, but just because I have easy access to my own notes...).

Noted (and notorious) physicist Richard Feynman once quipped that “philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds,” thereby encapsulating both scientistic arrogance toward a non-scientific discipline and a pernicious misunderstanding that many scientists have about philosophy.

Let me start by noting that the point of ornithology is most definitely not to be useful to birds, but that despite the fact that birds live their entire lives without even knowing of the existence of ornithology, we as human beings value that particular activity for its intrinsic rewards — both aesthetic and in terms of accrued knowledge and understanding about the world. It is also hard not to point out that the very survival of many bird species may, in fact, partially depend on the research conducted by ornithologists, particularly those interested in conservation biology and whose work informs the decisions of regulatory agencies concerned with species extinction. So much for an ironically flawed analogy, Mr. Feynman.

More seriously, I see the future of philosophy of science along three major lines of inquiry: as an independent discipline that studies scientific reasoning and practice; as a discipline contiguous to theoretical science; and as a crucial simultaneous watchdog and defender of science in the public arena. The first role is rather traditional for philosophy of science, the latter two are more recent developments, and are still very much evolving.

Philosophy of science started out as an independent field of inquiry into how science works, and has been practiced as such for most of the 20th century. This aspect of the discipline is of no particular concern to scientists, unless they wish to inform themselves about what’s “under the hood” of science itself. Contrary to popular perception, philosophers have made much progress in this area, though of course progress in philosophy does not arise from settling empirical questions (that’s science, you know), but rather from the increasing clarification of conceptual issues.

One such issue is the so-called problem of induction, first formulated by David Hume. Induction is the type of reasoning from specific examples to general statements about the world that characterizes much of scientific practice. Hume’s question was how, exactly, do we know that induction is a reliable rational tool. As it turns out, the common answer — often given by scientists themselves — will not do. That answer is that induction “works” (a statement usually accompanied by a visible smirk by self-professed “pragmatists” who can hardly be bothered with philosophical hair-splitting). But how do we know that induction works? Well, obviously, because it has worked in the past. Ah, yes, but that answer is itself a form of induction, which means that we are now justifying induction inductively, thus engaging in circular reasoning (a logical fallacy). Oops.

As it turns out, Hume’s question has spurred decades of thoughtful discussion, which have resulted in a number of ingenious attempts at solving the problem of induction. The most famous (and failed) attempt, of course, was Popper’s idea that scientific hypotheses cannot be proven true, but can be falsified. The issue of induction is not yet settled, but progress has been made in the sense that a number of proposals have been examined, some of which have been found wanting to the point of being essentially discarded, while others are still at least partial contenders and are being constantly refined (for a good introductory discussion of several of these ideas see James Ladyman’s Understanding Philosophy of Science).

In my talk I list a number of other issues concerning the foundations of science about which philosophers have made progress, including the distinction between the (often a-rational) context of discovery vs. the (largely rational) context of justification of scientific theories; the Duhem-Quine thesis that undermines falsificationism; the idea of theory-ladeness of observations (which therefore cannot simply be assumed to be neutral arbiters allowing discrimination among rival theories); the underdetermination of theories by the data (which has found a spectacular example in the ongoing floundering of string theory); and the ongoing debate between realists (who think that scientific theories in some sense really describe the world as it is, at least approximately) and anti-realists (who think that scientific theories are merely empirically adequate, but in no meaningful sense “true”), again a discussion that finds important applications in real science, particularly in quantum mechanics, where various schools of (realist) “interpretation” of the theory are battling it out amongst themselves and against the (antirealist) “shut up and calculate” approach.

The second area of development of philosophy of science is what philosopher Hasok Chang (in his book Inventing Temperature) labeled “the continuation of science by other means.” This is a joint effort between philosophers and conceptually minded theoretical scientists, which has flourished in both fundamental physics and in evolutionary biology (not to mention in math, though I don’t think of math as a science).

To mention just a few examples from the field with which I am most familiar, evolutionary biology, our understanding of important concepts such as species, natural selection, genetic drift, levels and targets of selection, and the distinction between “selection of” and “selection for” are all instances where science itself has benefited from the input of philosophers. To zero in on just one specific case, Samir Okasha’s book on the levels of selection is the most lucid discussion of the mathematics and theory behind group selection that I have seen in a long time, and his argument that species selection is possible while clade selection is incoherent ought to be considered by any serious biologists interested in macroevolution.

The third area where I see an interesting future for philosophy of science is in what I broadly term “science criticism.” The term has an unfortunate connection with certain postmodern approaches and with the so-called “strong programme” in the sociology of science that has been famously (and — largely — justly) been mocked by Alan Sokal with his famous hoax perpetrated at the expense of the editors of Social Text.

But it seems to me that serious philosophy of science ought to reclaim science criticism as a legitimate area of inquiry that also provides an important service to society at large (which, ironically, was also the aim of the mostly misguided postmodernist critique of science). Science is important not so much because of its intrinsic value in satisfying human curiosity, but because it provides answers to practical questions — ranging from how to cure cancer to how to annihilate entire cities (the latter obviously illustrating the dangerous dark side of the scientific enterprise). That is why so much taxpayer money goes into science, not to satisfy a small group of biologists’ obsessive curiosity about, say, the sexual habits of a particular species of moths.

But scientists themselves should not be the only guardians of the huge societal resources that go into science, nor the only ones to make decisions about how to use the outcome of their work. Yes, there are politicians who hold the purse and can push that fatal button to launch the atomic strike, but politicians are not particularly knowledgeable about either the practice of science or the ethics of scientific discovery.

Enter serious philosophy of science, a discipline grounded in the humanities, and yet practiced by people who also have to develop an in-depth understanding of science — both the process and its outcomes. Philosophers, working together with (not in opposition to) scientists, have a huge role to play in furthering societal dialogue about science, including both criticism and defense of science. Let me briefly mention one example of each type.

My colleague Jonathan Kaplan has been an intelligent critic of some practices and assumptions common in medical genetic research, where much that concerns the general public is done using either questionable methods or debatable assumptions about the complex issue of the interaction between nature and nurture. Jonathan discusses, for instance, what we mean when we talk about a “genetic” disease — such as phenylketonuria — which happens to have a relatively simple environmental cure (stay away from phenyl-alanine, which is clearly stated on every can of coke you drink). His type of nuanced discussion ought to be part of both the decision making process about funding of medical research, as well as of how the results of such research are explained to the general public and applied in medical practice. It’s not that the philosopher becomes the ultimate arbiter of worth, but it can hardly be argued that thoughtful contributions by people external to medical research, and yet familiar with its methods and assumptions, have nothing of value to bring to the table.

As an example of philosophy coming to the defense of science, of course, I only need to point to the many crucial contributions of philosophers in the ongoing debate about creationism and intelligent design. This is a societal, not a scientific controversy. But precisely because of that, it is all the more important as it has practical consequences for the public education of the next generation of citizens (not to mention for the continuing funding of evolutionary biological research). In this context, I only have to mention that Judge John E. Jones III, who presided over the famous Kitzmiller v. Dover case in 2005, relied heavily in his decision against the teaching of intelligent design on the arguments advanced by two philosophers, Barbara Forrest and Robert Pennock. The Judge concluded that ID has no standing in public education because of three factors:

“(1) ID violates the centuries-old ground rules of science by invoking and permitting supernatural causation;

(2) the argument of irreducible complexity, central to ID, employs the same flawed and illogical contrived dualism that doomed creation science in the 1980’s;

(3) ID’s negative attacks on evolution have been refuted by the scientific community.”

Of these, the third argument relies on the results of scientific research, but the first two are inherently philosophical (the first one is about the proper epistemic domain of science, which does not extend to the supernatural; the second one relies on a logical fallacy, contrived dualism).

Last year was the 150th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, a milestone for the scientific and naturalistic understanding of the world. But it was also the 50th anniversary of C.P. Snow’s essay on the two cultures, focusing on the counterproductive divide between science and the humanities. It seems to me that modern philosophy of science is the discipline best suited to productively bridge that divide, rooted as it is in a humanistic understanding of the sciences.

Julia's Picks

* In episode #6 of the Rationally Speaking podcast, Massimo and I dive into the world of fluffy thinking.

* What do philosophers believe? David Chalmers conducted a comprehensive survey of philosophers from 99 universities. I was surprised to learn that the majority believe there are objective truths in ethics and aesthetics.

* A send-up of infographics.

* More interesting results on the way we instinctively make physical analogies to abstract concepts.

* Why is so much philosophy so tedious?

* Daniel Kahneman gives a great TED talk on the difference between how we experience happiness and how we remember it.

* Through a series of very cleverly-designed experiments, researchers deduce how ants navigate in the desert.

* You may have heard about the Amazonian tribe that "doesn't count higher than 5". Here's an in-depth discussion of how they think about numbers.