The sorry state of higher education

By Massimo Pigliucci

In recent days two disconcerting articles crossed my computer screen, both highlighting the increasingly sorry state of higher education, though from very different perspectives. The first is “Ed Dante’s” (actually a pseudonym) piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education, entitled The Shadow Scholar. The second is Gregory Petsko’s A Faustian Bargain, published of all places in Genome Biology.

Let me start with the Shadow Scholar piece. It is a revolting account of how students — at both undergraduate and graduate levels — massively cheat their way to a degree by paying “Ed Dante” and others like him to write their papers, and in some cases even their theses, for them. It makes for very instructive reading, sometimes even amusing in a The Office-like way that makes you cringe and constantly tempts you to put the thing down because you can stand it no more.

There is much to be learned by educators in the Shadow Scholar piece, except the moral that “Dante” would like us to take from it. The anonymous author writes:

“Pointing the finger at me is too easy. Why does my business thrive? Why do so many students prefer to cheat rather than do their own work? Say what you want about me, but I am not the reason your students cheat. You know what's never happened? I've never had a client complain that he'd been expelled from school, that the originality of his work had been questioned, that some disciplinary action had been taken. As far as I know, not one of my customers has ever been caught.”

Perhaps, or perhaps his “customers” didn’t feel like reporting being caught to him. The point is that plagiarism and cheating happen for a variety of reasons, one of which is the existence of people like Mr. Dante and his company, who set up a business that is clearly unethical and should be illegal. So, pointing fingers at him and his ilk is perfectly reasonable. Yes, there obviously is a “market” for cheating in higher education, and there are complex reasons for it, but he is in a position similar to that of the drug dealer who insists that he is simply providing the commodity to satisfy society’s demand. Much too easy of a way out, and one that doesn’t fly in the case of drug dealers, and shouldn’t fly in the case of ghost cheaters.

As a teacher at the City University of New York, I am constantly aware of the possibility that my students might cheat on their tests. I do take some elementary precautionary steps, like phrasing questions for online assignments so that it isn’t easy to simply look up the answer on Wikipedia; or submit their papers to a nice piece of software the university provides that scans the web searching for sources from which paragraphs might have been lifted without acknowledgment, which results in a detailed automatic report to me on which specific sources were plagiarized and what percentage of the paper was cobbled together that way.

Still, my job is not that of the policeman. My students are adults who theoretically are there to learn. If they don’t value that learning and prefer to pay someone else to fake it, so be it, ultimately it is they who lose in the most fundamental sense of the term. Just like drug addicts, to return to my earlier metaphor. And just as in that other case, it is enablers like Mr. Dante who simply can’t duck the moral blame.

The second article about higher education that made me pause in recent days is also disconcerting, but for an entirely different reason. It’s an open letter to the president of SUNY-Albany, penned by molecular biologist Gregory Petsko. The SUNY-Albany president has recently announced the closing — for budgetary reasons — of the departments of French, Italian, Classics, Russian and Theater Arts at his university. Petsko’s response is both humorous and right on target.

Petsko begins by taking on one of the alleged reasons why SUNY-Albany is slashing the humanities: low enrollment. He correctly points out that the problem can be solved overnight at the stroke of a pen: stop abdicating your responsibilities as educators and actually put constraints on what your students have to take in order to graduate. Make courses in English literature, foreign languages, philosophy and critical thinking, the arts and so on, mandatory or one of a small number of options that the students must consider in order to graduate.

It just happens that I recently visited the University of Notre Dame, a prestigious private school where such constraints are indeed in place. There the philosophy department thrives, partly because the administration supports it financially (they have a whopping 38 faculty), and partly because every student at Notre Dame has to take a couple of philosophy courses to graduate.

But, you might say, that’s cheating the market! Students clearly don’t want to take those courses, and a business should cater to its customers. That type of reasoning is among the most pernicious and idiotic I’ve ever heard. Students are not clients (if anything, their parents, who usually pay the tuition, are), they are not shopping for a new bag or pair of shoes. They do not know what is best for them educationally, that’s why they go to college to begin with. If you are not convinced about how absurd the students-as-clients argument is, consider an analogy: does anyone with functioning brain cells argue that since patients in a hospital pay a bill, they should be dictating how the brain surgeon operates? I didn’t think so.

Petsko then tackles the second lame excuse given by the president of SUNY-Albany (and common among the upper administration of plenty of public universities): I can’t do otherwise because of the legislature’s draconian cuts. Except that university budgets are simply too complicated for there not to be any other option. I know this first hand, I’m on a special committee at my own college looking at how to creatively deal with budget cuts handed down to us from the very same (admittedly small minded and dysfunctional) New York state legislature that has prompted SUNY-Albany’s action. As Petsko points out, the president there didn’t even think of involving the faculty and staff in a broad discussion of how to deal with the crisis, he simply announced the cuts on a Friday afternoon and then ran for cover. An example of very poor leadership to say the least, and downright hypocrisy considering all the talk that the same administrator has been dishing out about the university “community.”

Finally, there is the argument that the humanities don’t pay for their own way, unlike (some of) the sciences (some of the time). That is indubitably true, but irrelevant. Universities are not businesses, they are places of higher learning. Yes, of course they need to deal with budgets, fund raising and all the rest. But the financial and administrative side has one goal and one goal only: to provide the best education to the students who attend that university.

That education simply must include the sciences, philosophy, literature, and the arts, as well as more technical or pragmatic offerings such as medicine, business and law. Why? Because that’s the kind of liberal education that makes for an informed and intelligent citizenry, without which our democracy is but empty talk, and our lives nothing but slavery to the marketplace. As Petsko puts it: “If I'm right that what it means to be human is going to be one of the central issues of our time, then universities that are best equipped to deal with it, in all its many facets, will be the most important institutions of higher learning in the future. You've just ensured that yours won't be one of them.” And this coming from a scientist. Amen to that.

Tunç’s Picks

By Tunç Iyriboz

Tea party, à l’allemande: New York Times article on Germany’s right wing pundit Thilo Sarrazin’s new controversial book: Deutschland schafft sich ab: Germany Does Away With Itself.

Angela Merkel’s related statement that “Multiculturalism has utterly failed”.

UC Davis psychology department page on the history of “Don’t ask don’t tell”.

Beauty. A Darwinian theory? Oh my. Dennis Dutton’s TED talk on that.

The Pope’s never ending confusing preoccupation with condoms.

Happy Thanksgiving from Liberaland.

Michael’s Picks

By Michael De Dora

* Newsweek has a roundup of newly elected GOP lawmakers who are science deniers, yet likely to hold top science and energy posts in the House.

* In related news, it turns out one-third of a Republican-initiated report questioning current climate science was plagiarized.

* Al Gore has admitted his previous support for corn-based ethanol subsidies was “a mistake.” As suspected, corn ethanol lobbyists are not happy.

* The United Nations has weakened in its defense of lesbians, gays and bisexuals, in this regarding execution.

* Apparently the Catholic Church now thinks condom use can be moral, so long as it is to prevent the spread of HIV to another person. I’d call it a very, very small step in the right direction.

* The headline says it all: “For Roman Catholics, a Renewed Interest in Exorcism.” Looks like the church will need many more of those aforementioned small steps.

* Derek Araujo writes that President Obama has left in place many Bush-era policies on faith-based initiatives.

* Does Wi-Fi harm trees? A new study apparently claims the answer is “yes.” I'm skeptical.

Podcast teaser: memetics!

By Massimo Pigliucci

In a forthcoming episode of the Rationally Speaking podcast Julia and I will finally take on memes and their study, the field of memetics. Meme, as it will be recalled, is a term introduced by Richard Dawkins in the last chapter of his 1976 bestseller, The Selfish Gene. Dawkins was trying to establish the idea that Darwinian evolution is a universal, almost logically necessary phenomenon, if certain conditions are satisfied. Particularly, any time there is a sufficiently reliable replicating mechanism, a fitness function, and limited resources, evolution by natural selection occurs.

Dawkins, however, couldn’t point to exobiological examples to reinforce the idea of universal Darwinism, since we don’t know (yet?) of any extraterrestrial life. He then turned to cultural evolution, renamed “ideas” as “memes” (in direct analogy with genes), and voilà, the field of memetics was born.

The staunchest defender of memetics is Susan Blackmore, author of The Meme Machine (you can find her recent article in the New York Times here), though the idea has also been warmly endorsed by Daniel Dennett, among others. Until recently, there was even a Journal of Memetics, but they closed shop, possibly because they discovered everything there was to discover about memes.

Serious questions can be raised about memes and memetics as a viable concept and field of inquiry. To begin with, how is this different from classical studies of gene-culture co-evolution, for instance those famously carried out in mathematically rigorous papers (as opposed to based on loose analogies) published by Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman at Stanford in the 1970s and 80s? Second, what, exactly are memes, i.e. what is their ontological status? Third, how do memes compete with each other, and for what resources? Is it even possible to build a functional ecology of memes, without which the statement that the most fit memes are those that spread becomes an empty tautology? Julia and I will explore these and related issues during the podcast, and we will take up some of your questions on all things memetic.

The all new 5-minute Philosopher videos

Well, I am so darn silly proud of this that I decided to make a short RS post of it. As some of you may know, I have occasionally produced a series of YouTube videos under the title "The 5-minute Philosopher." The idea was to reach out to people with some interest but little or no knowledge of the topic, and see if I could get them a bit more involved. So far there have been four videos, on "What is Philosophy?," "Neuroethics & the Trolley Dilemma," "David Hume, the jovial skeptic," and "Philosophy of Science, part I."

To my surprise, the series has been a pretty good success, with the installment on the nature of philosophy currently counting more than 23,000 hits. As you'll see if you check them out, the videos feature a brief introduction by yours truly, followed by a narrative on the specific topic, illustrated by more or less appropriate images that alternate on the screen "Ken Burns style." The videos were produced using Apple's iMovie.

But then I discovered Xtranormal, one of several sites where you can make your own animated movie by picking characters and scenes, writing the dialogue, and playing with camera angles and other effects. The result is the fifth movie in the 5-minute Philosopher series, a dialogue between the robots Hypatia (the smarty-pants one) and Simplicio (the curious but somewhat inept one), picking up where I left in episode 4 and further discussing philosophy of science. The dialogue, of course, has been the classic form of teaching philosophy from Plato to Hume, and it was fun to put together this one. I hope you'll enjoy it, and stay tuned for further episodes of the 5-minute Philosopher...

Massimo’s Picks

By Massimo Pigliucci

* Prospects for climate change legislation dimmer given the stubborn denial of the newly elected Republicans...

* ... Although climate scientists are organizing to fight back the misinformation.

* Philosophy Talk on various levels of reality...

* ... and on the idea of a university.

* An in-depth article on thought experiments.

* My interview with Chris Mooney, apparently a very popular download over at Point of Inquiry.

* The Amazon preview of my review of Harris’ new book. Stay tuned for the whole thing on Skeptic.

* George Carlin’s American Dream. As he put it, it’s called a dream because you’ve got to be asleep to believe it.

On Utilitarianism and Consequentialism

By Michael De Dora

Is everyone a utilitarian and/or consequentialist, whether or not they know it? That is what some people – from Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill to Sam Harris – would have you believe. But there are good reasons to be skeptical of such claims.

Utilitarianism and consequentialism are different, yet closely related philosophical positions. Utilitarians are usually consequentialists, and the two views mesh in many areas, but each rests on a different claim, so I shall try to deal with them separately. Utilitarianism's starting point is that we all attempt to seek happiness and avoid pain, and therefore our moral focus ought to center on maximizing happiness (or, human flourishing generally) and minimizing pain for the greatest number of people. This is both about what our goals should be and how to achieve them. Consequentialism asserts that determining the greatest good for the greatest number of people (the utilitarian goal) is a matter of measuring outcome, and so decisions about what is moral should depend on the potential or realized costs and benefits of a moral belief or action. This is largely about determining how to attain our goals, which are taken to be self-evident.

The first question we can reasonably ask is whether all moral systems are indeed focused on benefiting human happiness and decreasing pain. Jeremy Bentham, the founder of utilitarianism, wrote the following in his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation: “When a man attempts to combat the principle of utility, it is with reasons drawn, without his being aware of it, from that very principle itself.” Michael Sandel discusses this line of thought in his excellent book, Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?, and sums up Bentham’s argument as such: “All moral quarrels, properly understood, are [for Bentham] disagreements about how to apply the utilitarian principle of maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain, not about the principle itself.” That is, everyone agrees that the desirability of pleasure and undesirability of pain form the basis of morality. People just disagree about what to do from there.

But Bentham’s definition of utilitarianism is perhaps too broad: are fundamentalist Christians or Muslims really utilitarians, just with different ideas about how to facilitate human flourishing? Apparently the answer for Bentham is yes, but one wonders whether this makes the word so all-encompassing in meaning as to render it useless.

Yet, even if pain and happiness are the objects of moral concern, so what? As philosopher Simon Blackburn recently pointed out, “Every moral philosopher knows that moral philosophy is functionally about reducing suffering and increasing human flourishing.” But is that the central and sole focus of all moral philosophies? Don’t moral systems vary in their core focuses?

Consider the observation that religious belief makes humans happier, on average (for the record, I do not think this is the result of religious belief per se, but rather that welcoming social networks, often provided by churches, are at the root of such feelings of happiness). Secularists would rightly resist the idea that religious belief is moral if it makes people happier. They would reject the very idea because deep down, they value truth – a value that is non-negotiable.

Utilitarians would assert that truth is just another utility, for people can only value truth if they take it to be beneficial to human happiness and flourishing. Truth-seekers, the argument goes, believe truth will lead to a better society. However, I would seek out truth even if it did not necessarily guarantee a “better” society. I find myself very much sympathetic to the harm-based moral system proposed by Walter Sinnott-Armstrong in Morality Without God? But I, like many virtue ethicists, also believe certain characteristics and ideas – freedom, liberty, honesty, empathy, generosity, wisdom, and truth – are worth their own salt, and that we should follow and pursue them with little to no regard for what benefits might come. While I surely care about happiness and pain, I don’t see them as the be-all and end-all of moral concern.

This brings us to the second claim. We might all agree that morality is “functionally about reducing suffering and increasing human flourishing,” as Blackburn says, but how do we achieve that? Consequentialism posits that we can get there by weighing the consequences of beliefs and actions as they relate to human happiness and pain. Sam Harris recently wrote:

“It is true that many people believe that ‘there are non-consequentialist ways of approaching morality,’ but I think that they are wrong. In my experience, when you scratch the surface on any deontologist, you find a consequentialist just waiting to get out. For instance, I think that Kant's Categorical Imperative only qualifies as a rational standard of morality given the assumption that it will be generally beneficial (as J.S. Mill pointed out at the beginning of Utilitarianism). Ditto for religious morality.”

Again, we might wonder about the elasticity of words, in this case consequentialism. Do fundamentalist Christians and Muslims count as consequentialists? Is consequentialism so empty of content that to be a consequentialist one need only think he or she is benefiting humanity in some way?

That aside, Harris’ argument is that one cannot adhere to a certain conception of morality without believing it is beneficial to society. I once made a similar argument on this blog. This still seems somewhat obvious to me as a general statement about morality, but is it really the point of consequentialism? Not really. Consequentialism is much more focused than that. Consider the issue of corporal punishment in schools. Harris has stated that we would be forced to admit that corporal punishment is moral if studies showed that “subjecting children to ‘pain, violence, and public humiliation’ leads to ‘healthy emotional development and good behavior’ (i.e., it conduces to their general well-being and to the well-being of society). If it did, well then yes, I would admit that it was moral. In fact, it would appear moral to more or less everyone.” Harris is being rhetorical – he does not believe corporal punishment is moral – but the point stands.

An immediate pitfall of this approach is that it does not qualify corporal punishment as the best way to raise emotionally healthy children who behave well. But that is not the point. Massimo disagreed with Harris, and so do I, for a different reason. The virtue ethicists inside us would argue that we ought not to foster a society in which people beat and humiliate children, never mind the consequences. There is also a reasonable and powerful argument based on personal freedom. Don’t children have the right to be free from violence in the public classroom? Don’t children have the right not to suffer intentional harm without consent? Isn’t that part of their “moral well-being”?

If consequences were really at the heart of all our moral deliberations, we might live in a very different society. There are countless other examples to illustrate this. Again, we wouldn’t admit religious belief was moral just because it made people happier or lead to more flourishing. Try two more examples: what if economies based on slavery lead to an increase in general happiness and flourishing for their respective societies? Would we admit slavery was moral? I hope not, because we value certain ideas about human rights and freedom. Or, what if the death penalty truly deterred crime? And what if we knew everyone we killed was guilty as charged, meaning no need for The Innocence Project? I would still object, on the grounds that it is morally wrong for us to kill people, even if they have committed the crime of which they are accused. Certain things hold, no matter the consequences.

We all do care about increasing human happiness and flourishing, and decreasing pain and suffering, and we all do care about the consequences of our beliefs and actions. But we focus on those criteria to differing degrees, and we have differing conceptions of how to achieve the respective goals – making us perhaps utilitarians and consequentialists in part, but not in whole.

About Objectivism, part IV: Politics

By Massimo Pigliucci

[Part I of this series was on Objectivist metaphysics; Part II on epistemology; and part III on ethics]

Well, here we are, at the end of my mini-series concerning Objectivism, the philosophy originated by Ayn Rand. According to Objectivists themselves, their politics stems directly from their ethics, as it should be if ethics is to be of actual value in the guidance of life, as opposed to a purely academic exercise. Not surprisingly, considering the many problems we have seen when examining Objectivist ethics, I will find plenty to take issue with when it comes to Objectivist politics.

According to The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought, by Ayn Rand et al., laissez-faire capitalism is “the only moral social system,” a conclusion that they derive from their conception of rights, to which therefore we need to turn. Objectivists recognize one fundamental right, to life, and a small number of derived rights, including to liberty, to property and to the pursuit of happiness. Objectivists are very clear about the fact that they think of these as rights to action, not to specific outcomes (so, of course, you have a right to pursue happiness, but not to a guarantee of being happy).

There is a large and sophisticated philosophical literature on rights, which is predictably largely ignore by Objectivists, including serious analyses of whole sets of rights that Objectivists simply do not recognize (almost without argument): expansive human rights, group rights, and a fortiori animal rights.

Rights, of course, are a human construct, so technically speaking there is no such thing as “natural” rights. At most there are natural desires (to life, property, happiness, and so on), and which of these — if any — we codify into rights is a matter of human reflection and agreement. It follows that it is hard for the Objectivist to claim a sharp line dividing certain kinds of rights from other kinds, a problem that often affects a philosophy whose main trust is that there are objective ways to precisely carve human reality.

Consider, for instance, the idea of a right to pursue happiness. To begin with, of course, we could easily get embroiled on exactly, or even approximately, what “happiness” might mean. Surely, to a considerable degree, the word means different things to different people. Moreover, are we talking of the emotional status, or of a more intellectual contentment with one’s achievements and quality of life (what the ancient Greeks called eudaimonia)? But more importantly, why should we have a right to it, meaning that society at large should be organized as to maximize the likelihood that we can, in fact, pursue happiness?

Don’t get me wrong, I agree that we should have that “right,” but I don’t see a reasonable way to distinguish it from, for instance, a right to education. I’m pretty sure that most people would desire that too, and certainly everyone would benefit from it. And education is not an outcome (the right isn’t to getting a degree, or passing an exam), it is an action that leads — under proper circumstances — to a favorable outcome.

By far, the weakest point of the Objectivist conception of rights is that they limit themselves to what are called negative rights, and dismiss anything that philosophers classify as positive rights. Negative rights are so-called because they are defined by what you have a right to be defended against by other people’s (or the government’s) interference, and they of course include all the rights discussed above: right to life and property, but also freedom of speech, of worship and protection from violent crime. Positive rights are more expansive, and therefore loathed by Objectivists. They include the right to education, health care, retirement benefits, housing and a minimum standard of living.

The problem is that — again as plenty of philosophers have pointed out — negative rights often become meaningless unless they are accompanied by positive rights. The obvious example is the pursuit of happiness: you may have that (negative) right, but without (positive) rights to education, decent wages, healthcare, etc. chances are that you might be unable to pursue happiness in any meaningful way. The negative right becomes hollow, and almost a mockery of the whole concept of rights. (Similar considerations apply to the rights to property and even to life: with negative rights only, you may end up barely alive and possess close to nothing under a wide range of scenarios made possible by laissez-faire capitalism.)

From the Objectivist’s exceedingly narrow view of rights it logically follows that their ideas about the proper role of government are equally narrow: police, armed services, and courts of law, and that’s about it. Even some of my Objectivist friends (oh yes, I do have some!) grudgingly admit that those restrictions simply won’t do. We need regulatory agencies to control, for instance, the quality of our air and water, or of our food, or the functionality of our sources of energy (especially nuclear plants, but also oil drilling operations). If simply left to the “wisdom” of the market, countless people would suffer, become ill, or die before the companies responsible for whatever bad practice were forced out of business, even under the best (and often entirely unrealistic) assumptions about the efficiency of market forces.

[I should note at this point that I am not advocating any more government intervention or regulation than is strictly necessary. I am neither a socialist nor a communist — terms that many Americans confuse despite the stark differences between the two ideologies. But I am most certainly glad that the government, using my tax money, takes care of all sorts of things that I don’t or can’t do, and that I sure as hell wouldn’t trust a private company to do.]

It should also come as no surprise that Objectivists find themselves defending specific political actions that are, in my opinion, bizarre and often unethical. To begin with, Objectivists consider the environmental movement to be hostile to technology and therefore to humanity itself (as stated by Rand in "The Anti-Industrial Revolution," published in Return of the Primitive.) This is a bizarre claim, at best a silly confusion between environmentalists and Luddites, and really deserves very little commentary.

Objectivists are also opposed, naturally, to public education, antitrust laws, and even child labor laws (on the latter, see Ayn Rand as cited by Anne Wortham in The Other Side of Racism. Ohio State University Press). One can see the logic: if laissez-faire capitalism is the only moral social system, then anything that limits in any way the degree of laissez-faire is immoral. Setting aside for a moment the ugliness of a world where children have to work under whatever circumstances “the markets” set for them, even Adam Smith — you know, the guy who gave us the basic theory of capitalism and the idea of an “invisible hand” in his An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations — realized that one cannot trust human nature and do without regulations entirely.

The basic idea of laissez-faire capitalism, of course, is that we let businesses and private interests in general compete with each other. We set in motion a system analogous to natural selection (the invisible hand), and at the end of the process, only the “best” will be left standing. There are three fatal flaws to this approach: first, even if everything works as laissez-faire capitalists say it will, the quantity that ends up being maximized by the invisible hand is economic efficiency, not happiness or justice, or social welfare (in the broad sense of the term). Second, the process is (ironically) exceedingly inefficient, just like natural selection (which, incidentally, is not an optimizing process, only a satisficing one — it results in the minimal outcome that is compatible with the objective). Lots of resources, and more importantly lots of lives, are going to be squandered before “the best” emerges. Thirdly, competition works — as any ecologist would tell you — only when there are many small players of roughly equal strength in the arena. But players in a capitalist game are allowed to buy each other, becoming larger and larger, and fewer and fewer, until we are left with the sort of plutocracy that currently controls the United States of America, the most capitalist country in the world, and the one Western nation with the highest degree of social inequality, crime and poverty. Nicely done.

Perhaps we should remember the words of Adam Smith, when he said that “As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for its natural produce.” A pretty accurate prediction of what is unfolding before our own eyes.

Podcast teaser: Carol Tavris on everybody making mistakes, except us...

By Massimo Pigliucci

It will be our pleasure at the Rationally Speaking podcast to have Carol Tavris as a guest. She co-authored with Elliot Aronson the delightful Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts.

The book is about the incredible ability of the human mind to rationalize events and beliefs so that we, personally, always end up being better than average at being right. The basic idea is that cognitive dissonance is a powerful engine of self-justification, as the authors put it, because we absolutely need somehow to square our most dearly held opinions with the nasty tendency of some facts to contradict them. (This reminds me of the famous disclaimer on the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, to the effect that in any case in which the Guide and reality are at odds, reality is to be blamed...)

As Carol and her co-author make clear throughout the book, this isn’t just an interesting academic problem, it affects all spheres of our lives, from politics to religion, from our personal relationships to the (mal)functioning of our system of justice. Take the case of pharmaceutical companies lavishing an estimated $22 billion in gifts to physicians in 2003 alone. Shouldn’t that make our medical practitioners a bit uncomfortable about essentially being bought to push on us drugs that may not do much good, or that at the very least may not be better than cheaper generic alternatives? Not to fear, leave it to our good doctors’ rationalizing engines to convince themselves that they are completely uninfluenced in their decisions by the presents they receive from Big Pharma.

Or consider the very well known tendency of people who fall in love to seek confirmation that the other person is the desperately sought “other half” of their own selves (a metaphor that goes back to Plato’s Symposium and a rather funny theory of love propounded in that dialogue by the playwright Aristophanes). Not only do we find plenty of signs to confirm our hopes, but we systematically ignore all the conflicting information that might otherwise alert us to trouble down the road. If things do turn sour, our brain doesn’t skip a bit and immediately concocts perfectly reasonable narratives to coherently explain the whole thing — previous statements, hopes and expectations suddenly forgotten or reinterpreted through a new filter. Anything except admitting that we could have possibly being wrong all along.

So, what’s your favorite story of rationalization — obviously indulged in by someone other than you? What would you like to ask Carol during the podcast?

About Objectivism, part III: Ethics

By Massimo Pigliucci

[Part I of this series was on Objectivist metaphysics, Part II on epistemology]

Well, in this 4-part essay on Objectivism, we have arrived at where the real fun begins: first by considering Objectivist ethics and then — in the next and final installment — its implications for Objectivist politics. Let us clear the air of a common misunderstanding about Rand and followers: when they talk about selfishness being their chief moral value, they do not mean what most of us mean by that term. Of course, that is a recurring problem with Objectivist writings: one can reasonably ask why on earth Rand should make prominent use of a very common word while attributing to it a very different meaning from the one commonly accepted. This sounds like either an attempt to confuse things from the beginning (though I’m sure that wasn’t her goal) or at the very least, a sloppy practice that ends up in endless and useless disputes. Oh well, so much for achieving philosophy’s goal of clarifying rather than muddling things.

So, what did Rand mean by “selfishness”? In her view, the term refers to a particular form of rational egoism, “To live, man must hold three things as the supreme and ruling values of his life: Reason, Purpose, Self-esteem” (from The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought, 1989). Peikoff’s Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (1991) further clarifies: “[Objectivism aims at] the recognition and acceptance of reason as one's only source of knowledge, one's only judge of values and one's only guide to action.”

All right, I’m all in favor of reason (I mean, just look at the title of this blog), and I certainly think that we need to give purpose to our lives in order to be more than just biological reproductive machines (not that there is anything wrong with the latter, within limits), and I suppose self-esteem is broadly speaking a good thing (though too much of it leads to unbearable degrees of pompous self-importance). But for these to be the “supreme values” of one’s life seems to be a stretch and to neglect other important aspects of human existence. What about, for instance, love and friendship? I suspect that they don’t make the pantheon of Objectivist ethics because in some form or other they would conflict with rational self-interest. See, when John Galt (the pompous protagonist of Atlas Shrugged, one that clearly had no trouble with self-esteem) says “I swear — by my life and my love of it — that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine” one suspects that the guy will have some trouble picking up chicks who might be interested in more than a one-night stand, and that other people might agree to have business relations with him, but certainly not to call him a friend.

Other ethical values that have a hard time squeezing into the Objectivist view of morality are things like justice and fairness — unless they get to be redefined in terms of rational self-interest. For an Objectivist, any attempt to level the playing field by guaranteeing access to resources (like education or health care), or by, god forbid, redistributing resources through taxation, is anathema for the simple reason that within the Objectivist system it is hard to justify ethical duties to others, outside of “live and let live.” But the unexamined assumption behind that attitude is that people own their moral selves, in a way that is actually very difficult to justify.

Let me trying to explain this carefully, because it is a point that potentially undermines the entire Objectivist ethics, and yet it is something that I have never seen one of my Objectivist friends even consider. In my experience, the main attraction of Objectivism is the idea that a human being is a moral island of his/her own. I ought to be able to make my own decisions about my own life in absolute freedom, because that is the purest and most noble sense in which I can be truly human. Bullshit, any decent undergraduate student in ethics would quickly be able to respond. It is very hard to see in what sense we “own” ourselves independently of a particular societal (and even biological) background.

Consider the following example (which I adapt from Michael Sandel’s excellent book, Justice). Is it right to tax Kevin Garnett for his high earnings as a basketball player? In 2008-09 he was the highest paid NBA player, with the Boston Celtics giving him a whopping $24,751,934. I assume that the answer for Objectivists and most Libertarians alike would be that we have no right to take any of this away from Garnett, because the guy earned his money in a (quasi) free capitalist society, so he deserves it. “Deserve” here implies some sense of moral desert, and not just the result of luck. Nobody “deserves” to win the lottery, as glad as they may be to pocket the money if they happen to hold the winning ticket.

But let us unpack how it is, exactly, that Garnett (I’m not just picking on him, the same could be said for anyone’s salary, in any activity, including my own) deserves that compensation? Because he is an excellent basketball player that brings in money for its franchise, obviously. Right, but he is able to do so for a number of complex reasons, most of them having precious little to do with moral desert. Most obviously, of course, Garnett just got lucky at the genetic lottery: had he had a different combination of genes, he wouldn’t have been able to play professional basketball. Second, he owes his success also to his teammates, coach, and the remainder of the large number of people that make professional basketball possible. I mean, he didn’t build all that, right? Third, he has been lucky at what I shall call the “cultural lottery” as well: had he been born in a different time or place (say, medieval Europe, for instance) all his skills would not have earned him much other than forced labor as a serf, the common destiny of most people of the time. But, you might say, he has worked hard at honing his skills, day after day and year after year. While some moral philosophers (John Rawls, for instance) would say that even that is the result of natural propensities and societal environments for which it is hard to claim ownership, I won’t go that far. My point is that Objectivists drastically overestimate the independence of individuals from society, as well as the ability of the individual to overcome or take ownership of his/her natural abilities.

This is why Objectivists make a big deal out of the philosophically exceedingly murky concept of free will: for rational self-interest to be ethical in any sense (as opposed to simply instrumental to getting what one wanst), I have to assume that everyone completely owns responsibility for both his failure and his successes. But that is simply and obviously not the case, regardless of what one thinks of the concept of free will itself.

It gets even more basic than that: for Rand, the ultimate value is survival, and human beings are the only animals that can make conscious decisions about it. While I certainly agree witht the latter statement, and I don’t deny that survival is the sine qua non of everything else in life, it’s just too darn simple. Yes, we want and need to survive, but even that is simply not possible for highly social animals without a substantial contribution from the rest of society — without which, in the immortal words of Hobbes, life would have “No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, [there would be] continual fear, and danger of violent death: and the life of man [would be], solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short” (Leviathan, 1651, ch. 12). It is hard to imagine how Objectivist ethics would lead to the kind of polity that most of us take for granted these days: a place where our rights and wants are balanced with other people’s, where we have obligations to our fellow human beings and they have obligations toward us, where we enjoy not only arts and letters, but also friendship and love.

Next time, the conclusion: Objectivist politics (ouch!).

Michael’s Picks

By Michael De Dora

* Philosopher Russell Blackford has written an excellent and relevant essay on science, philosophy, and scientism, on his blog Metamagician and the Hellfire Club. 

* The lawmaker who might chair the U.S. House Energy Committee says we need not worry about climate change, because God promised Noah he would never destroy the Earth again.  

* A coalition of religious leaders and veterans is calling on the U.S. military to revise its rules on conscientious objection to war, to allow soldiers to object for moral reasons. 

* New Scientist has released a special report on science and morality, featuring essays from Peter Singer, Sam Harris, Patricia Churchland, Paul Bloom, and more. 

* In the same vein, NPR Science Friday recently hosted Harris, Lawrence Krauss, Steven Pinker, and Simon Blackburn, for a discussion on science and morality. 

* I just finished an engaging, educational, and concise (159 pages) book on moral relativism called, well, Moral Relativism, written by political and social theorist Steven Lukes. Highly recommend it. 

* Ever notice athletes wearing unusual-looking garb around their necks and wrists? The necklaces and bracelets are said to better athletic performance. But Power Balance bracelets, among those commonly worn, were recently put to the scientific test, and guess what? They failed. 

* A fascinating video documentary about the construction of the Empire State Building. 

Massimo’s Picks

By Massimo Pigliucci

* Primatologist Frans De Waal responds to his critics about the relationship between science and religion. While De Waal is usually sharp, in this case methinks there is a bit of fuzzy thinking going on.

* The new Rationally Speaking podcast is out: guest Joshua Knobe talks to Julia and me about experimental philosophy. Highly enjoyable, though I still think that this is cognitive science informed by philosophy... not philosophy.

* I just reviewed on Amazon the delightful Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error, by Kathryn Schulz. Definitely recommended.

* Chris Mooney interviews yours truly over at Point of Inquiry.

* What do you know: there is no evidence that multivitamin supplements do us any good, and in some cases may be harmful. Save your money and your kidneys.

* My recent book, Nonsense on Stilts, has been picked as Christmas suggestion by the London Review of Books (and stay tuned for the just announced Korean translation...).

* Philosophers as the focus of a photographic book? Strangers things have happened, you know.

* Do children have rights? A philosophical investigation.

* My recent talk on teaching philosophy in science classes, using the example of evolutionary hypotheses about the origin of religion.

About Objectivism, part II: Epistemology

By Massimo Pigliucci

[Part I of this series was on Objectivist metaphysics]

For a philosophy named Objectivism, epistemology is foundational, since the possibility of objective knowledge is an inherently epistemological question. In this regard, Rand and her followers are surprisingly ambiguous. For instance, conscious of the obvious fact that human beings continually make errors of judgment, observation and reasoning, they agree that one cannot actually be certain of any proposition one utters. Oh? From when, then, comes any claim of objective knowledge? Well, as Leonard Peikoff put it in his Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, any proposition is “certain” if the available evidence supports it, i.e., it is certain within a particular context.

But this is pretty close to wanting your cake and eating it too. Any sensible epistemologist would simply say that said proposition is made more or less probable by the available evidence, and that this judgment may change if the evidence (the “context”) changes. No claim of certainty is warranted. The problem, of course, is that rephrased this way the Objectivist idea becomes unsurprising while at the same time undercutting any broad claim to objective knowledge.

Rand spends a lot of time rejecting religious and mystical claims, on grounds very similar to that adopted by the (failed) previous school of logical positivism in mainstream philosophy. While I certainly agree with Rand that faith is not a short-cut to, but rather a short-circuit of knowledge, the idea that one can reject claims about the supernatural on grounds that “nothing has been said” is, again, reminiscent of the logical positivists’ verifiability criterion — which famously and ironically undermined logical positivism itself. (It works like this: “nothing that cannot be verified makes sense.” “All right, then, how do we verify the latter sentence?”) In the case of Objectivism, it seems fair to raise the “nothing has been said” objection to Objectivist utterances such as “consciousness is identification,” which is a cardinal point of Objectivist epistemology.

Rand and her colleagues also rejected the long-lasting distinction between analytic and synthetic statements in philosophy. An analytic statement is true by virtue of its meaning, like “A bachelor is an unmarried man,” or the less obvious “The sum of the angles of a triangle is 180 degrees” (the latter is analytic because it turns out that having a total of 180 degrees in angles is part and parcel of being a triangle). The truth of a synthetic statement, on the other hand, generally depends on external, empirical evidence. For instance, “All bachelors are unhappy (presumably because they are unmarried),” or All mammals have a four-chambered heart.”

While things got complicated once Kant got hold of the analytic/synthetic distinction, such distinction is similar to that previously made by Hume between a priori and a posteriori propositions, which according to him are the only two types of propositions that make any sense. Here is how he expressed what became known as Hume’s fork, in his An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding:

“If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.”

I must admit a lot of sympathy for this sentiment. But back to the analytic/synthetic distinction: as I said, Kant improved on it (no need to go into the details now, but you can get the run down here). Then, in a famous paper published in 1951, W.V. Quine claimed to have demonstrated that the notion of analytic propositions is untenable, and that therefore the distinction between the two types has to be rejected. This paper is much more widely cited than it is understood (again, a summary can be found here); still, while Quine’s basic argument is highly technical, it hinges on the idea that the concept of analytic statements is in turn based on the concept of synonymy (because, for instance, “bachelor” and “unmarried man” have to mean the same thing if the phrase “a bachelor is an unmarried man” is to be meaningful). Quine claims that we don’t have a sufficiently clear explanation of synonymy (according to his rather stringent and idiosyncratic criteria of “clear” and “sufficient”), so the whole house of cards crumbles. I have never been convinced by this argument, and like many philosophers I know, I acknowledge Quine and swiftly proceed to ignore him: to me “bachelor” and “unmarried man” are unproblematically synonymous, and the truthfulness of that sentence is known a priori because it depends only on meaning and not on facts about the world. Period.

Now, why do we care about any of the above in the context of Objectivism? Because it too rejects the analytic/synthetic distinction, since it wants to deny the possibility of a priori knowledge. I’m not sure why some people are so set against a priori knowledge, but logic and mathematics are darn good examples of it, and I for one wouldn’t want any epistemology that didn’t take logic and mathematics seriously and as distinct from the natural sciences.

Another positivistic sounding notion in Rand’s epistemology is the rejection of emotions as a type of cognition. Indeed, Peikoff went so far as to state that “emotionalism” is synonymous with irrationality (I wonder if he checked with Quine before claiming that something is synonymous with something else). This sort of attitude has been common in philosophy since Plato (read: nothing new in Objectivism), with the notable exception of Hume, who was one of the first philosophers to seriously play up emotions as both a source of certain kinds of knowledge (particularly moral judgment) and as actually guiding reason rather than being controlled by it. Modern philosophy of mind and cognitive science are producing a much more nuanced understanding of the necessary integration of emotional and cognitive functions in the brain, without which, human knowledge and in fact the human condition itself, would not be possible.

Perhaps the most curious part of Rand’s epistemology was her contention that sensory perception is valid in an axiomatic sense. Since perception is a physiological function, according to her it comes without error, which led Rand to bizarre statements such as that optical illusions are conceptual errors, not errors of sight — as if “sight” were somehow clearly distinct from the brain’s conceptualization of what we see. The reason perception had to be perfect is that Objectivism is a kind of empiricism, relying on the notion that all our knowledge is ultimately based on the senses, just like the classical British empiricists (Hume, Locke and Berkeley) had maintained (though Objectivists actually have a problem with Locke, and presumably Hume, since they acknowledge the imperfection of the senses).

But by the time Rand was writing, philosophers in general, and epistemologists in particular, had gone way past a simplistic distinction between empiricism and rationalism, acknowledging the existence of both empirical and non-empirical knowledge, as well as getting down to analyzing the many ways in which both sensorial perception and reasoning can go wrong (which means giving up the dream of purely objective knowledge). That work continues today, and bleeds into similar work in the cognitive sciences (see, for instance, this fascinating article on the philosophy and physiology of delusions), from what I can see with precisely zero contribution from Objectivism.

Next time: Objectivist ethics (oh boy).

Michael’s Picks, special post-election edition

By Michael De Dora

* After retaking the House, Republicans are mapping out their agenda of less spending. The Tea Party and economists both disagree with the GOP’s plan. Tea Partiers say it’s not enough; economists say it makes no sense.

* Perhaps people were correct to expect a civil war between Republicans and Tea Partiers. And it’s not just about economic policy, it’s about power: Republicans think the Tea Party cost them control of the Senate.

* William Saletan argues that Democrats didn’t lose the battle of 2010. He says they won it – by passing the health insurance reform package.

* The Pew Forum has a voting breakdown based on religious affiliations. One interesting observation: the religiously unaffiliated voted overwhelmingly for Democrats (66-32), while white Protestants went the other way (69-29) for Republicans.

* On that note, maybe Democrats can partially blame their Congressional losses on a lack of outreach to America’s faith-based community.

* Derek Araujo writes that state court judges are the overlooked causalities of the 2010 elections, (more on this issue here and here). Which leads to an obvious question: why are judges up for election in the first place?

* Chris Wilson asks: could mathematicians do a better job redrawing Congressional districts than could legislators?

* A Web site spells out what Obama has done so far (fair warning: the site’s name includes a curse word).