The beauty of the Daleks

by Massimo Pigliucci

RS collaborator Tunc Iyriboz, having a friendly chat
with a Dalek at New York ComicCon 2011

As I mentioned before, I’m making my way through the delightful (if somewhat redundant, in places) Doctor Who and Philosophy: Bigger on the Inside. This time I have been intrigued by chapter 27, penned by Clive Cazeaux and entitled “Beauty is not in the eye-stalk of the beholder.” The chapter is about aesthetics, and the author begins by admitting that he finds the Daleks beautiful. So do I.

Before we get to the meat (or, as the case may be, the metal) of the matter I need to explain who the Daleks are, for those poor souls who have not actually watched the good Doctor battling them. The Daleks are an ancient race of aliens that was once proud and hopeful, just like humans. But an all-out nuclear war with their neighbors, the Thals, changed both their external form and their character (via radiation-induced mutations). They are now entirely emotionless creatures, shaped like an octopus and encased in a metallic armor, whose only purpose is to “ex-ter-mi-nate” anything that is not a Dalek. We encounter them for the first time in 1963 (you may remember, that was the peak of the Cold War here on earth), and have been (briefly) seen last in the season finale of the 2011 series, “The wedding of River Song.” I’m sure they’ll be back for more.

In his essay, Cazeaux explores what it could possibly mean to find a Dalek beautiful (to a human being), and in so doing takes his reader through a panoply of philosophical understandings of beauty, from the “it’s just in the eye of the beholder” view (which is actually historically very recent) through Pythagoras’ and Plato’s idea that beauty was respectively the reflection of universal harmonies or of immutable Forms, and proceeding by way of Kant’s and Hegel’s takes on aesthetics.

Cazeaux is careful in distinguishing between “beauty in art” and “beauty in nature,” and he tells us that when he thinks the Daleks are beautiful he is speaking not from within, but from without the Doctor Who universe — in modern aesthetic parlance he is referring to the Daleks as beauty in art. Now, according to Kant, perception of beauty in nature is “higher” than perception of beauty in art, because he related aesthetics to our awareness of how our minds fit with reality (i.e., nature). Hegel held to pretty much the opposite position, getting his starting point by his contention that there is no distinction between the world and mind (he was an idealist). For him beauty in art was superior because it involves the perception of ideas, not of simple matter.

Problem is, I’m no idealist, so Hegel resonates very little with me. As for Kant, he certainly had a point about our perception of beauty having to do with how we relate to nature (and, therefore, of artistic beauty being derivative, though I wouldn’t use the term “lower”), particularly because aesthetic perception surely has to do with the way our brains work (and evolved).

Still, I was more interested in Cazeaux’s discussion of the concept of beauty for the ancient Greeks, and particularly for Plato. In this case, to find something beautiful means to be fascinated by that something as an object that one engages with (remember, again, that we are outside the Whoverse, or we would most definitely not find the idea of engaging the Daleks particularly appealing). But of course for the Greeks beauty was opposed to monstrosity, and it is much easier to think of the Daleks as monsters than as things of beauty. Cazeaux here cites the 13th century thinker Alexander of Hales, according to whom monstrosity is indeed opposite to beauty, but it is a necessary condition for the latter — just like according to some theologians evil is necessary in order to have good.

Again, though, while I find the Greek notion of the relationship between beauty and monstrosity pretty sensible, it is hard to imagine why one needs the latter in order to appreciate the former (for reasons similar to why the above mentioned theological defense against the problem of evil also fails to convince). Besides, the Daleks would definitely qualify as monsters in this case, and it wouldn’t make much sense for Cazeaux and me to say that we find them beautiful.

Cazeaux mentions what to me sounds like the best answer, but dismisses it as untenable. According to the formalism school in aesthetics, judgments of beauty refer only to the form of something, quite independently of its function. The Daleks, therefore, can be beautiful because of their smooth metal construction (and, in the latest versions, splendid colors), quite independently of the fact that they are out to get people for no particularly good reason. (Incidentally, apparently formalism is actually traceable to Kant.) Indeed, Cazeaux mentions an observation made by Adrian Wiltshire a few years ago, according to whom the Daleks look a lot like the flying city designed by the Russian Constructivist Georgii Krutikov back in 1928. I guess I better look up constructivism.

Cazeaux doesn’t like the formalist approach because it is a way to deny the nature of the Daleks: they become like sculptures, devoid of all their characteristics as monsters. (I find that to be in contradiction to his suggestion of examining the issue from outside the Whoverse, but okay.) Still, he doesn’t really give his readers a more palatable alternative, leaving us with the puzzling question of why people like him and me can find the Daleks to be beautiful. I’d like an evolutionary psychologist to give this one a try, just to be able to make fun of their just-so stories. Seriously, though, to say that beauty is “subjective” (in the eye of the beholder, and so on) doesn’t really solve anything, it simply acknowledges variation about aesthetic judgment without really telling us what the latter consists of. We clearly do find some things beautiful and others ugly, and this is by far not limited to the sort of objects that made a difference for our survival and reproduction in the past. I suspect aesthetics is eventually going to be a major area of development of a more complex theory of human nature, one that takes seriously both our biological roots and our unique ability to evolve culturally. But for now the question then remains: why, exactly, are the Daleks beautiful?

Michael's Picks

by Michael De Dora

* After the death of a 2-year-old Chinese girl who was run over by a car twice and then ignored by 18 passers-by, Chinese lawmakers are debating a law to punish passers-by who do not help people in obvious trouble.

* I recently argued on this blog that morality both can and should be legislated. Turns out the editorial staff at The Memphis Flyer agree. It also turns out that Andrew Sullivan was paying attention.

* Does state-mandated sexual education undermine parental rights? That’s what religious believers argue.

* Support for use of the death penalty on persons convicted of murder has hit a 39-year low in the U.S. after dropping from 64 to 61 percent, according to a new Gallup survey.

* How about this for a new blog: Occupy Philosophy, devoted to philosophical discourse on the Occupy movement.

* The number of four-year philosophy graduates has grown 46 percent in the last decade, surpassing the growth rates of programs such as psychology and history.

* We’re in the worst economy since the Great Depression, and what are Republicans doing? Cutting programs Americans desperately need to get through it, says Robert Reich.

* If you haven’t heard the story of Christopher Hitchens and Mason Crumpacker, click here right now.

The Varieties of Skepticism

All of us who are involved in the skeptics movement are regularly confronted with one of two reactions when revealing ourselves as skeptics: either that we are cynics or that, like the classic skeptics, we don't believe that anything is knowable.

In this episode, Massimo and Julia take us trough the history of skepticism. From its roots in ancient Greece, to Descartes, the last rationalist, to David Hume, the father of modern skepticism, and to today's skeptic movement. Also, is anything really knowable? How do we know that we really exist and are not residents of a cosmic holodeck?

Engineers vs intellectuals? How Timothy Ferris gets it spectacularly wrong

by Massimo Pigliucci

Timothy Ferris is a writer over at Wired magazine, and his byline boasts that he has been “called the best science writer in the English language” as well as “the best science writer of his generation.” Perhaps, though such virtuosity was hardly on display in a recent piece Ferris penned (okay, keyboarded) entitled “The world of the intellectual vs the world of the engineer.” It is a quasi incoherent rant about the evils of intellectualisms and the virtues of applied science. Ferris writes, I would argue as an intellectual, in one of the most intellectual of contemporary publications, about how the battle between intellectualism and science-engineering has been waged since the beginning of the printing press. The results are in - science/engineering won hands down - time to close the curtain on intellectualism.

Ferris engages in such a stereotypical piece of anti-intellectualism that Richard Hofstadter (the sociologist who authored the classic Anti-intellectualism in American Life) could have used him as a poster boy. Hofstadter defined anti-intellectualism as “a resentment and suspicion of the life of the mind and of those who are considered to represent it; and a disposition constantly to minimize the value of that life.” Indeed, Hofstadter even identified the precise category of anti-intellectualism to which Ferris’ rant belongs: instrumentalism, or the idea that only practical knowledge matters and should be cultivated. In America, the attitude traces its roots to the robber barons of the 19th century, as exemplified by the attitude of Andrew Carnegie about classical studies: a waste of “precious years trying to extract education from an ignorant past.” Of course this is the same Andrew Carnegie who established a university in Pittsburgh, donated money to public libraries, and founded the prestigious Carnegie Hall in New York City — all bastions of intellectualism of a high caliber.

But back to Ferris. He makes his case by cherry picking examples, distorting history, and simply ignoring what is not convenient for his thesis. We discover that Rousseau, one of the most influential philosophers of modern times (particularly when it comes to his analysis of the social contract, as well as his writings on education) was less than useless because, ahem, Robespierre, Hitler and the anti-vaccination crusaders are his “disciples.” You know a guy is short on arguments when he has to invoke Hitler to make his point, and that happens shortly after the beginning of Ferris’ “essay” (I use the term loosely because Ferris probably wouldn’t want his writing style to be compared to that of the inventor of the form, the French intellectual Michel de Montaigne). Things go rapidly down the drain from there.

Ferris’ complaint is becoming standard fare among scientistically inclined people: all the good stuff about modern society has been delivered to us on a silver plate courtesy of science and engineering (health care, mobile phones), while all the useless and even pernicious theories (Freudianism, Marxism) have come from armchair intellectuals. Time to throw the bums out and embrace our only savior, let’s close down humanities departments and give cart blanche to the scientists to help us achieve paradise on earth.

For Ferris, intellectuals only churn up destructive ideologies (communism, fascism), and he doesn’t forget to bring up the postmodernists, who hypocritically dismiss science as just another social construction while happily typing away their nonsense on the latest Apple computer.

Except, of course, that five minute of serious reflection should have made Ferris realize that he created a straw man with precious little correspondence to reality. To begin with, capitalism and democracies are also the result of “armchair speculations” by intellectuals, from Adam Smith to John Stuart Mill, not to mention the founding fathers of the United States of America. And part of the reason science is so well regarded these days is because of the preparatory groundwork work laid out by the intellectuals of the French Enlightenment, including some of Rousseau’s strongest critics, like Voltaire. While science has without a doubt made our lives more comfortable and last significantly longer, it has had relatively little directly to do with the development of the above mentioned ideas, which are the true backbone of the progressive society that Ferris praises so much.

Moreover, science itself has been the handmaiden and enabler of much pernicious ideology, beginning with the technological efficiency with which fascism and communism were able to kill tens of millions of people during the 20th century. Science is a tool in the hands of human beings, and it is our thinking about values that determines whether that tool is going to be employed to save millions of lives from smallpox or to weaponize the very same disease into a lethal carrier of death. And where are those values going to come from, if not through reasoned, “intellectual” reflection about what we care about and what we ought to do (or, perhaps more importantly, not do)?

I am certainly no friend of postmodernism, but even that somewhat misguided enterprise should not be dismissed out of hand. True, postmodern critics of science as a way of knowing do make fools of themselves, and they should rightly be chastised for that (though, let’s also remember plenty of instances in which scientists have said really silly things, as in the case of the astronomer who in 1957 predicted with confidence that humanity will never be able to put an artificial satellite in orbit around earth — a few months later Sputnik went up). But postmodern critique of power structures, both within science and in society at large, is spot on. Only a naive outsider could possibly imagine that the hall of science departments — where I have spent a good chunk of my life — are idyllic havens devoted to the search for truth. Yes, truth is being sought, but petty vendettas, systematic gender and ethnic discrimination, power plays, vanity plays, and other wasteful or destructive behaviors go on all the time, just as in any other human social activity.

No, Mr. Ferris, it is only in the misguided minds of anti-intellectuals like you that there would be a war going on between C.P. Snow’s two cultures, and it is your destructive type of anti-intellectualism that risks undermining our best efforts to build a better society. To put it as Kant (another giant of intellectualism) did, “Experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play.” And he wasn’t talking just about scientific theories.

What to make of the “European problem”

by Massimo Pigliucci

There has been much talk of late about the “failure” of the European system, with predictable and hardly repressed glee on the part of libertarians and right wingers alike to the effect that the financial turmoil across the Pond clearly and finally shows that the social-democratic approach to capitalism is bound to fail. Actually, that is precisely not the lesson to be learned from what has been happening lately. In fact, quite the opposite.

To begin with, of course, even if the European system is in trouble (and it surely is), there ain’t much to snicker about on this side of the Pond either. The US financial-political system is still going through a quasi-depression from which it is hard to see when it will recover, and as recently as three years ago it single handedly caused a worldwide financial collapse from which the rest of the planet is still reeling. So, please, my American friends, stop the patting of your own backs, because it is richly underserved.

Moreover, while in terms of the UN’s Human Development Index, the US ranks a (healthy, to be sure) #6, this is below Australia, Norway, Netherlands, Ireland and Canada (3 out of 6 of which are European countries), and slightly above New Zealand, Finland, Iceland, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Denmark, France, Sweden, and Spain (all except the first, European countries, though not all part of the EU). In terms of income equality (measured for instance by the Gini coefficient), the lowest disparity is found in Denmark, Japan, Sweden, the Czech Republic, Norway, Slovakia, Bosnia, Hungary, Finland, Ukraine, Germany, Slovenia, Croatia, Austria and Bulgaria (again, all European, except for the second one), while you have to go all the way down to #72 — right between Turkmenistan and Turkey — to find the good old US of A. Not much to brag about.

Anyway, back to the European crisis. It is most certainly not caused by “socialism,” partly because no EU country is purely socialistic, as difficult as this is for much of the American public to understand. European countries all have variants of the same system that the US has adopted (pace much right wing rhetoric): a social-democracy where a capitalistic system is kept in check by regulations and where there is a number of social nets in place.

No, the reason why Europe is in trouble is because it is not politically integrated. Europeans have known this for a long time, of course, but it is becoming painfully clear that one cannot have a common currency if there isn’t also a common economic policy, and one cannot have the latter without political integration. Of course, the creation of the Euro zone back in 1999 was supposed to be an important step toward political integration within the EU, a project that goes back at least to Giuseppe Mazzini’s “Giovine Europa” (link in Italian) movement established in 1834.

But two things happened: too many countries joined the EU too quickly, suddenly bringing in too much political and cultural disagreement (not to mention economic difficulties), largely from Eastern Europe. And the European Parliament has simply never been given sufficient supra-national authority to be able to establish coherent lines of political and economic action. In other words, Europe risks failure not because “the European way” doesn’t work, but because the European way hasn’t been pursued far enough quickly enough. The choice the EU countries now face is either to reverse what they have done over the past dozen years and go back to a loosely integrated EU, or to accelerate things forward as they should have done when Mazzini first envisioned it. I hope for the latter, but I fear the former.

This insanity of having a Union without sufficient integration is, of course, not limited to Europe alone. Look no further than the United States, where citizen’s quality of life, economic and job prospects, education, health care and the like are dramatically different depending on whether one happens to live in Alabama or Massachusetts, to take just two of the obvious examples. Indeed, it is often the case that you hear that the State of, say, Alabama, competes with the state of, say, Georgia, to lure business away, and does so by loosening regulations and/or by giving said business even more tax breaks than it already enjoys. This idiotic internecine game can only have one outcome: a rush to the lowest possible denominator in terms of business taxes, environmental and labor regulations, workers’ compensations, and the like. Everybody loses except large corporations that can play States against each other for their own greed.

Of course, in the US this situation is somewhat mitigated by the presence of a Federal government with much stronger powers than the European Parliament (which is, of course, precisely what Republicans — in the pockets of big industry — desperately want to weaken). And that is what both the US and Europe can learn from all this: on the one hand, America’s fixation with “States' rights” is quaint and little more than an excuse to cave in to the demands of large corporations, leading to gross inequality for American citizens who happen to live in different states; on the other hand, Europe’s inability to make the final leap into full integration is exactly what has caused the current debacle to begin with. If only we truly had the United States of America and the United States of Europe both American and European citizens would be much better off.

Morality can — and should — be legislated

by Michael De Dora

Recently I have been watching the new Ken Burns documentary “Prohibition," which tells the story of the rise, rule, and fall of the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The five-and-a-half hour film series is fantastic in both its narrative and historical detail, and is well worth the watch for anyone interested in learning about the Prohibition era. However, I have discovered one flaw with the documentary.

The overarching message of “Prohibition” is that while the Eighteenth Amendment was “intended to improve, even to ennoble, the lives of all Americans, to protect individuals, families, and society at large from the devastating effects of alcohol abuse,” the attempt was an utter failure. Why? Because morality cannot be legislated. Or so the documentary seems to argue.

I have previously written on this blog on the relationship between morality and law. In December 2010, I discussed several factors that often determine when morality becomes law. In that essay, I argued that this happens depending on, among other factors, a) whether it is practical to encode a given ethical conviction into law, and b) the potential or real harm being caused by a given action. However, the question of whether morality can or should be legislated is a different, and even more, fundamental one.

It seems obvious to me that morality can be legislated. The amendment discussed by the aforementioned documentary is evidence enough. But the relationship between morality and law runs much deeper than one failed amendment. Indeed, this country’s foundational philosophical concepts — life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — are rooted in morality. So are fundamental principles found in the Bill of Rights, such as the right to freedom of speech and belief, the right to assembly, the right to privacy, and the right to a fair trial. This list continues on, from basic crimes like murder, rape, and robbery, to insider trading and so-called sin laws, like cigarette taxes or seat belt fines.

Each one of these examples is based on some prior moral notion about what is right or wrong, or what is good or bad. In short, as Barack Obama argues in his book, The Audacity of Hope (for reference, page 218, though I suggest you read the entire book), I propose that most law, either in spirit or letter, is nothing but encoded morality.

However, one could still ask here whether morality can be effectively legislated — whether laws relating to morality actually work. In some ways, this is an empirical question, to be determined on a case-by-case basis. You start with assumptions and goals about certain moral notions and the laws they logically entail, and then collect data from there. Did most people who drank before Prohibition stop? Were most people who might have drunk during Prohibition prevented from doing so? Do cigarette taxes dissuade people from smoking cigarettes, and recoup health care costs caused by smokers? Do seat belt laws save lives?

But this is not as easy a process as it might appear to be. That’s because some moral-political rights are simply not amenable to empirical study and calculation. For instance, we don’t limit or take away the right to free speech just because a person's exercise of that right led to deaths (the minor exception: if someone creates an imminent danger by yelling “fire!” in a crowded theater when there is no fire). Nor do we cancel murder trials and summarily execute people simply because strict court rules might have allowed a couple of people to get away with murder. These sorts of rights are as close as we come to absolute moral rules.

Still, we have to cross the is-ought gap, and face the question of whether morality should be legislated. My answer is yes. Broadly speaking, morality is the domain of one’s thinking — beliefs, attitudes, and feelings — about the well being of conscious creatures. It concerns right and wrong, good and bad, questions of how we should act toward one another, and the kind of people we should want to be. The legal realm (whether a piece of political legislation or a court decision) is where these beliefs, attitudes, and thoughts are societally enacted. In this sense, the connection between morality and legality is natural and inherent.

But there is another reason to enforce moral norms: if your conscience tells you some action may be causing great harm to society, you have both the right and, I believe, the duty to try to help or correct the situation, through both social and political means. In this sense, we should not be afraid of moralizing. Instead, we should be afraid of not moralizing. The consequence of not moralizing is unchecked harm. The consequence of moralizing is potentially a safer environment and perhaps even a more virtuous populace.

Yet, while I believe the relationship between morality and legality is both natural and acceptable, it can be problematic. I think there are at least two reasons why: a) the moral beliefs and values undergirding a given law can be false or unreasonable, or b) the law in question can be based on non-moral criteria.

The first condition is self-explanatory, though what makes for good reasons and good evidence is an entirely distinct subject, possibly for another essay.

The second condition was precisely the problem with prohibition. Alcohol consumption is not intrinsically a moral issue. It is an issue of preference, which is not a valid domain of law. Alcohol consumption only becomes a moral, and thus a legal, issue when it is abused and causes harm to others and/or society. When it does, we have laws to handle those situations. For instance, drunk driving is illegal and punishable.

It is important to be mindful of these two factors. We must ensure that we are encoding reasonable morality, but we also must ensure that what we are dealing with is an actual moral issue. Legislating preference is unethical and should be illegal, while legislating morality is, in theory, what we ought to do.

Podcast Teasers: Genie Scott on climate change denialism & The question of neuroskepticism

by Massimo Pigliucci

Very soon Julia and I will have our first ever returning guest on the Rationally Speaking podcast: National Center for Science Education’s executive director Eugenie Scott! Genie will be in New York on Sunday, October 23rd, to give a talk to New York City Skeptics on the topic of “Denialism of Climate Change and Evolution.”

We will ask Genie the extent to which the (obviously derogatory) term “denialism,” famously used by New Yorker writer Michael Specter in the title of his book about crazy beliefs in America, should be applied and by what criteria. In the case of climate change, of course, several notable skeptics have been, well, skeptical of the notion, including Michael Shermer (who has since changed his mind), Penn & Teller (who have since softened their stance), and James Randi (who I have criticized openly).

The second episode of the podcast will be about a mounting degree of “neuro-skepticism,” i.e. skepticism about the many claims being made by neuroscientists based on fMRI studies. We have tackled a narrow portion of the issue in our interview with Cordelia Fine about neurosexism, the tendency to unduly extrapolate from small numbers of methodologically questionable studies to grand conclusions that just happen to confirm entrenched cultural notions about the differences between men and women.

More recently, an interesting article in Slate by Ron Rosenbaum broadens the criticism by reviewing a number of pop-science books about increasingly bolder claims by neuroscientists, as well as the ever more widespread criticism of such claims. Clearly fMRI-based neuroscience is not pseudoscience, but even mainstream science has made unwarranted and exaggerated claims before (think of studies “demonstrating” the racial inferiority of certain ethnic groups, for instance), sometimes with dire consequences for the rest of us. So it makes sense to take a closer look at what is being said in this area and on what bases.

New 5-minute Philosopher video: reflective equilibrium

by Massimo Pigliucci

Ever wondered how to think like a philosopher? Today we are going to take a look at one of the fundamental tools of the philosophical toolbox, something called reflective equilibrium.

Let’s suppose that you believe in the inerrancy of the Bible. Suppose you also think morality comes from God. And further suppose that you maintain that it is immoral to kill children if they curse their parents. Then you read the following in Exodus 21:17: “He that curseth his father, or his mother, shall surely be put to death.”

Now, if you are concerned about the coherence of your beliefs, you have several moves at your disposal. You could admit that the Bible is not infallible, and that God may not have meant what Exodus attributes to Him. Or, you could abandon the idea that morality comes from God. Lastly, you could agree that yes, after all it is all right to kill children who disrespect their elders. In considering any of these options, and actually adjusting your set of beliefs about morality, divinity and children’s behavior, you have engaged in an exercise of “reflective equilibrium.”

The idea of reflective equilibrium was introduced by Nelson Goodman in his book “Fact, Fiction, and Forecast.” Goodman was not concerned with morality, but with the validity of one’s thinking. Goodman’s suggestion was that we justify our rules of reasoning based on how those rules fare when confronted with a range of instances of what we believe are correct inferences. If an inferential rule yields unacceptable results, we may decided to discard that rule no matter how it may have seemed like a good idea at the start.

The most famous application of the principle of reflective equilibrium is found in John Rawls’ highly influential “A Theory of Justice.” Rawls proposed to apply Goodman’s approach to adjusting our sometimes conflicting moral beliefs, just as in the hypothetical case of the Bible and disrespectful children mentioned before. Whether or not one agrees with the outcome of Rawls’ particular analysis of justice as fairness, the reflective equilibrium approach should be compelling to anyone seriously interested in, well, reflecting on her own beliefs.

Turns out that a similar approach had been used in philosophy of science by Pierre Duhem as a way to debunk the commonplace idea that science is about direct empirical testing of theories. Duhem, in a book published in 1908 (La Théorie Physique), pointed out that if there is a disagreement between a theory and the empirical evidence one cannot automatically reject the theory, because scientific theories are complex statements that include many assumptions and sub-theories. The existence of a disagreement between theory and evidence tells us that something is wrong, but not what. It could be that the core theory — say, the Copernican system — ought to be rejected. But it could also be that some adjustment to the theory would resolve the discrepancy (for example, Kepler’s modification of the original Copernicanism to account for the fact that the planets go around following elliptical, not circular orbits). Indeed, it may even be the case that the data is wrong, because of a malfunction of the instrumentation, or an error of interpretation.

The 20th century philosopher W.V.O. Quine extended Duhem’s thesis, arguing that whenever there is a discrepancy in our understanding of the world, one could potentially change any of all the interconnected statements that constitute our web of knowledge to account for the discrepancy. Famously, Quine held that even logic itself may have to be altered if it turned out that there were enough problems caused by its application, all of it done through continuous rounds of reflective equilibrium.

The idea of reflective equilibrium is therefore one of the most powerful in philosophy, as it embodies a quintessentially philosophical approach to problems of all kinds. It is also applicable in everyday life, of course, and can be used to introduce everyone to what it means to think philosophically. The crucial thing to remember is that the equilibrium is not meant to be static: new evidence and new ideas constantly enter the system, and a wise person keeps adjusting her beliefs accordingly. Try it, it’s a refreshingly liberating exercise.

New Rationally Speaking podcast: Rebecca Goldstein

Our guest Rebecca Newberger Goldstein joins us to talk about Baruch Spinoza and Kurt Gödel, the subjects of her books "The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel" and "Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew who Gave Us Modernity."  The topics include the idea of "Spinoza's God" and his concept of a theory of everything, their views on the limits of reason and objective reality, Gödel's theorems and its repercussions in philosophy and mathematics, and his legendary friendship with Albert Einstein.  She also talks about  her novels and her experience of being both a novelist and a writer of non-fiction works.

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein grew up in White Plains, New York, graduated summa cum laude from Barnard College and immediately went on to graduate work at Princeton University where she received her Ph.D. in philosophy. In 2008, she was designated a Humanist Laureate by the International Academy of Humanism, and was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by Emerson College. Currently she is a Research Associate in the Department of Psychology, Harvard University. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the coveted MacArthur “Genius Award.” She was named Humanist of the Year 2011 by the American Humanist Association, and she was given the "Freethought Heroine Award" by the Freedom From Religion Foundation in 2011. In addition to her non-fiction works, she is the author of a number of novels, including "The Late-Summer Passion of a Woman of Mind" and "The Dark Sister." Her latest work is "Thirty-Six Arguments for the Existence of God."

Rebecca's pick: "The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined."

Michael's Picks

by Michael De Dora

* Researchers say they have found that “the people most likely to choose utilitarian solutions to [moral] dilemmas were also the most likely to be callous, manipulative, and apathetic about the value of life.”

* Neuroscientists are attempting to redefine evil as a scientific concept. Is this trend reasonable? That’s the question Ron Rosenbaum discusses on Slate.

* The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has released another insignificant report on how Catholics should think about important political issues in light of church teachings.

* Is there anything wrong with being over 50 years old and pregnant? Lisa Miller explores the debate in a feature article in New York Magazine.

* Ralph Nader condemns drone strikes, arguing that they are only causing more chaos in unstable regions of the world.

* Susan Jacoby writes about Richard Dawkins’ new book The Magic of Reality, which she calls “the first book by a prominent member of the ‘new atheist’ generation to address the urgent task of how to help children distinguish between myth and reality.”

* The Supreme Court recently heard oral arguments in what could be a landmark case on religion and civil rights.

Podcast Teasers: Philosophical counseling & SETI

by Massimo Pigliucci

No, we are not doing an episode on the connection between philosophical counseling and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, though that would certainly make for an amusing installment of the Rationally Speaking podcast! More sensibly, we are about to tape two episodes, one per topic.

On the first count, we will have my CUNY colleague Lou Marinoff, a philosopher at City College and author of the best-selling “Plato, Not Prozac!: Applying Eternal Wisdom to Everyday Problems.” Lou is also a founder of the American Philosophical Practitioners Association, so who better than him to chat about this recent trend to use philosophy as a type of talk therapy? Now, despite the provocative title of Lou’s book, the idea is actually not to replace psychiatric medications with chats about the ancient Greeks. Rather, as he puts it in the introduction to the volume, you should take your medications if you really need them, but once your brain is back to a normal functionality you will likely still be faced with the same existential problems that plague most human beings. And that’s where philosophy might help.

The second episode is going to be completely different, as Julia and I will take on the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence and ask whether it is solid science, pseudoscience, or something else (spoiler alert! I’ll argue that it’s something else...). I have always been a fan of SETI since I was a kid, and remain so. But it does make sense to ask what the theoretical foundations and empirical evidence are that justify a multi-decade research program, and what we think its chances are of succeeding.

So, as usual, please post your comments and questions, and we will do our best to address them while comfortably sitting in our Greenwich Village studio...

The ethics of scientific inquiry and public discourse

by Massimo Pigliucci

The header of the Rationally Speaking blog says that we try to respect the principles of the Enlightenment, particularly the idea of the Marquis de Condorcet that a public intellectual is someone who devotes himself to “the tracking down of prejudices in the hiding places where priests, the schools, the government, and all long-established institutions had gathered and protected them.” Clearly, we are hoping to contribute meaningfully to society by means of our writings, which is to say that in a sense we are engaged not just in an intellectual quest, but an ethical one. And that is why I found a recent article by Lawrence Torcello (published in Public Affairs Quarterly, vol. 25, issue 3) particularly thought provoking.

Torcello addresses the ethics of scientific inquiry and public discourse about science. He starts out with a famous quote by W.K. Clifford that is often cited by skeptics: “It is wrong, always, everywhere, and for anyone to believe anything on insufficient evidence” (from his essay on “The Ethics of Belief,” published in 1879). Strong stuff, and Torcello immediately — and rightly, I think — points out that while there is much to be commended in Clifford’s statement, it is a bit too absolutist and it requires justification. For instance, obvious exceptions can easily be found in aesthetic, and possibly even moral judgments. It makes little sense to say that my belief that Beethoven was the greatest composer who has ever lived is wrong because it is based on insufficient evidence, even if you happen to think that the one entitled to that honor is instead Mozart. Likewise, although I have made clear several times that I do not think moral judgments are arbitrary, I also do not think that they come down to straightforward matters of sufficient evidence.

Torcello, however, also defends Clifford by pointing out two possibilities: first, a tendency to believe regardless or in spite of evidence, even when it is concerned with trivial beliefs (e.g., astrology) may engender a habit of mind that leads to a similar lack of critical thinking in more important matters (e.g., Iraq has weapons of mass destruction). Second, beliefs are rarely just a private matter because we live in increasingly interconnected societies where people influence others’ opinions via a variety of means, from direct conversations to social networks (and, yes, blogs).

Torcello is particularly concerned with what he amusingly — and, again, rightly — calls “pseudoskepticism.” This is the abuse of the word skepticism to describe the activity engaged in by people who deny climate change, evolution, HIV causing AIDS, or who maintain that vaccines cause autism (all, except partially for the issue of evolution, are issues that are not simply academic or educational in nature, but have major import for the welfare of our society). Torcello points out that actual skepticism is about positive inquiry and critical thinking, as well as proportioning one’s beliefs to the available evidence (not to mention being willing to alter those beliefs if and when the evidence changes significantly). Pseudoskepticism, on the contrary, makes a virtue of doubt per se, regardless of other considerations, and is therefore irrational.

The centerpiece of Torcello’s article borrows John Rawls’ concept of public reason and extends it not just to matters of social justice (as Rawls originally did), but to the ethics of scientific inquiry and public discourse about science. Rawls was concerned with the negative influence of sectarian ideologies (religious or political) on deliberation in a multicultural society. He suggested that all discourse about justice and fairness should be conducted using a public, neutral, discourse, avoiding sectarian language or at least “translating” the latter into the former. For instance, you may be against abortion because of your religious beliefs, but to argue in the public square that abortion is immoral because god disapproves of it is a non starter, considering that people who believe in other gods or no gods at all (not to mention those who believe in your same god but interpret his mandates differently) will simply not engage at that level. This doesn’t mean that your ideological positions shouldn’t inform and guide your public positions, but it does mean that you need to translate your concerns into forms that public reason can deal with. For instance, you could say that it is immoral to take an innocent person’s life, and then you need to be prepared to argue the criteria for personhood, and so forth.

Torcello sees the principle broadened to public discourse about science, which is also often twisted by ideological commitments, again of a religious or political nature. This puts a moral burden of sorts on anyone engaging in discussions about science to get, at the very least, the facts right, which includes a fair representation of the degree of consensus among scientists themselves on whatever topic is at hand (e.g., no spurious list of signatures of “scientists” who reject evolution, or an acknowledgment that weather forecasters are not actually atmospheric physicists).

The paper ends with three recommendations that are worth careful consideration by the skeptic community. Quoting directly from Torcello (p. 208):

(1) Ethical obligations of inquiry extend to every voting citizen insofar as citizens are bound together as a political body;

(2) It is morally condemnable to put forward unwarranted public assertions contrary to scientific consensus when such consensus is decisive for public policy and legislation;

(3) It is imperative upon educators, journalists, politicians and all those with greater access to the public forum to condemn, factually and ethically, pseudoskeptical assertions without equivocation.

The latter point, of course, beautifully encapsulates what skepticism is at its best.

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Doctor Who and the philosophy of personal identity

by Massimo Pigliucci

i.telegraph.co.uk

Anyone who knows me also knows that in the past few years I got inescapably hooked on the British scifi series Doctor Who, though I’ve actually watched only the reboot version, which started in 2005 and is now in the 6th season. It is actually the longest (though not continuously) running scifi show ever, having started on 23 November 1963 (at 5:16:20pm, GMT, to be precise — time matters for a show based on time travel).

For those unfortunate souls who know nothing about it, the Doctor (as he is known on the show) is (almost, as it turns out) the last of an ancient race known as the Time Lords, and he jumps back and forth throughout space-time by means of a device called the TARDIS (which stands for Time And Relative Dimension In Space. It’s bigger on the inside! And it looks like an old fashioned police box, as a disguise). He has all sorts of fantastic adventures, often involving one or two human companions who come along for the ride. And running, lots of running.

Naturally, I am currently reviewing a collection of essays of philosophy for the public called Doctor Who and Philosophy: Bigger on the Inside, published by Open Court and edited by Courtland Lewis and Paula Smithka. But this isn’t the review of the book (which will eventually appear in Philosophy Now). Instead, I’m going to focus on one of the chapters, by Michael Hand, entitled “Regeneration and resurrection,” where the author takes on the logical possibility of resurrection in an afterlife, using it as a springboard to talk about the thorny metaphysical issue of personal identity (there are several other chapters in the book devoted to personal identity, by Patrick Stokes, Greg Littmann, Richard Hanley, and David Kyle Johnson, but I won’t comment on those).

Before we get into the thick of it, you need to know that the Doctor has an interesting characteristic: from time to time, he “regenerates.” Regeneration is something that Time Lords can do a finite number of times (twelve, to be precise), and which they undergo when their current incarnation is mortally wounded (which has happened a number of times over the almost half century of the show). They emerge from the process with some interesting characteristics: first, their physical appearance is different, and dramatically so; second, their personality is more or less slightly altered; third, they retain their memories of past incarnations. The current Doctor, played by Matt Smith, is the 11th such incarnation. (My favorite Doctor so far is David Tennant, the 10th incarnation, though I certainly appreciated Christopher Eccleston, number nine.)

It is by examining the concept behind regeneration that Hand begins his investigation of the logic of resurrection (of which Time Lord regeneration seems to be a subtype) and more broadly the metaphysics of personal identity.

The first question asked by Hand is whether resurrection is logically possible. This is obviously not the same as asking whether it is physically possible, since plenty of things do not contravene logic while still being impossible in our particular physical universe. Asking about the logic of a concept is, in part, to ask whether the concept is coherent. Prima facie, resurrection faces two possible logical objections, according to Hand: one is related to personality changes after resurrection (or, in the Doctor’s case, regeneration); the other to the physical constitution of the resurrected body.

According to Christian lore, for instance, when the good guys are going to be resurrected at the end time they will get to live in a paradise where nobody does nasty things to anyone else and all is bliss. Setting aside the sheer boredom of such a place (just compare Dante’s Paradiso with his much more captivating Inferno to appreciate my point), this presents a problem. As Hand points out, the resuscitated people will have to have undergone a significant change in personality to make eternal bliss work, because it is simply not human nature to get along perfectly with everyone else, for eternity. But if, say, our editor Phil makes it to paradise (he won’t, he’s an atheist, even though he is a nice guy), and has to undergo a significant personality change in order to get there, then in what sense will it still be the Phil I know? For instance, if certain versions of the Christian “eternal bliss” are correct, there won’t be martinis to be found anywhere in the joint, and I simply can’t imagine Phil-now being able to stand such place, much less to agree that it is a “paradise” in any meaningful sense of the word.

The second problem Hand identifies is rooted in the Christian idea that the resurrection will involve a reconstitution of one’s physical body (just like the Doctor’s regeneration). The problem is: where will all the necessary atoms come from? You see, the way the biosphere works, most of the atoms in our bodies are recycled, having been through countless other bodies before (mostly not of fellow humans, but possibly some did come from other members of Homo sapiens). When God will reassemble everyone, what happens to all those people (presumably a large number) who were made of partly overlapping sets of atoms? Well, you may say, but God isn’t bound to use the exact same atoms, he could build replicas of the bodies using spare atoms taken from somewhere else. Indeed, but then we wouldn’t have the same bodies, and there seems to be a strong sense in which we are who we are in part because of our particular physicality. What gives?

In thinking along these lines, we have just touched on two of a number of ideas about what constitutes personal identity: continuity of personality and bodily continuity. But Hand points out that neither of these are knock down arguments against the logical possibility of resurrection (or, more importantly, the logical consistency of Doctor Who episodes!). Fans of the show seem to have no trouble “recognizing” the Doctor from one incarnation to the other, regardless of the fact that his personality is measurably different, and also that his body is clearly not the same. These judgments are shared by most people in real life: we know of plenty of instances in which an accident, or a disease, dramatically alters someone’s personality, and yet we say that he is “not the same” only in a metaphorical and somewhat poetic sense. Moreover, our bodies are certainly not made of the same atoms as the bodies we had when we were younger (and we surely don’t look the same either, if enough time has passed!), and yet — again — we don’t say that we and our younger selves are different persons.

A third major concept of personal identity (other than character and physicality) is based on memory: we are a given person because we have certain memories. Here, however, Hand confronts us with an episode of Doctor Who (Journey’s End, part of the 2008 season, with David Tennant playing the leading role) whereby an accident gives us a replica of the Doctor. The replica is, obviously, made of different atoms, and displays a slightly different personality from the original. But his memories (and accompanying emotions) are exactly the same as those of the “real” Doctor. Indeed, one of the Doctor’s companions, Rose Tyler, objects that the replica is not, in an important sense, the Doctor. Most people would, I think, agree that Rose is right, which throws a huge monkey wrench into the whole singularitarian idea of “uploading” one’s mind into a computer — a process that could potentially be repeated ad infinitum while the “originals” could be kept alive: clearly, we don’t end up with immortality of an individual, but with a mental cloning process. (One of my favorite objections to singularitarians is to ask them whether they would agree to be killed once their minds were uploaded: if they truly believed that “they” would survive the uploading process, they should readily agree to the “termination” of the original. Somehow, I doubt any of them actually would.) Of course one doesn’t need to unsettle singularitarians in order to make the point: we think of people who have lost large chunks of their memories because of accident or disease as the same “person” as before, at least to a large extent.

But hold on a minute here! If physical continuity, personality, and not even memory are necessary to speak of someone being a particular person, what on earth grounds the very idea of personhood? One possibility, not explored in Hand’s essay (but discussed in several of the others in the same collection) is that personal identity requires spatiotemporal continuity. In this sense, we all are four dimensional “worms” extending in space-time, accounting for the fact that I am the same person I was as a child, even though all the atoms in my body are different, my personality has somewhat changed, and I don’t recall much of that time of my life. That being the case, the Doctor is now in trouble: because he can jump from one space-time coordinate to another, he is not a continuous “worm,” but rather a set of unconnected fragments scattered around space-time. Does that mean that it is not regeneration, but rather time travel, that is logically incoherent? To ponder that question you’ll have to read the chapters that Peter Worley, Philip Goff, William Eaton, Gred Littmann, Bonnie Green & Chris Willmott, Paula Smithka, and Simon Hewitt contributed to The Philosophy of Doctor Who (yes, philosophers apparently have a lot to say about time). Or you could just watch any episode of the series, like The Long Game, where the Doctor (Christopher Eccleston) explains: “Time travel’s like visiting Paris. You can’t just read the guidebook. You’ve got to throw yourself in — eat the food, use the wrong verbs, get charged double, and end up kissing complete strangers... or is that just me?”