Blogging as a path to self-knowledge

by Massimo Pigliucci

It is hard to imagine that I started blogging on August 1st, 2005, just a bit over seven years ago. And before that, Rationally Speaking had been a syndicated internet column for a number of years (it began in August 2000, to be precise — there must be something about late summer...), which makes — at last count — for a whopping 978 posts, 25,165 comments, and a total of 1,747,328 pageviews.

No, I’m not listing the stats in order to brag, but because of how humbled I am by the relative success over the years of something that I started for the same reason most people start blogs: to gratify one’s ego and to have an unimpeded platform to rant about things one cares about. Well, that may be a bit too harsh, actually. I am a university professor, and I care about teaching science and philosophy to others, so the blog began as a natural outreach effort to communicate with a public wider than my own students. That effort in turn had been catalyzed by my move to Tennessee in 1996, where I was promptly confronted with an attempt by the local legislature to introduce creationism in public schools. It was the shock of recognizing just what was routinely going on in the aptly named “Bible Belt” that made me take the first timid steps outside the ivory tower.

Blogging, however, soon became something much more interesting than just a new way to teach others. Indeed, it even became something more than just the experience of writing for a given public. The latter — which I have done and continue to do, and which has generated a good number of magazine columns and books — forces the writer to reflect on what he thinks in order to be able to explain it as clearly as possible (in essence, it’s another form of teaching). When you write, you are not just communicating your thoughts to others, the process of writing itself forces you to clarify in your mind what it is that you are thinking and why. Quite often, and quite literally, I think by way of word processing.

But blogging adds yet another layer, one that is usually missing when one writes for the print press, and that is only present in a limited sense while teaching (especially at the undergraduate or pre-college levels): feedback. See, blogs are highly interactive platforms, and even though there are plenty of useless comments, the occasional attempt at advertising commercial products, and even one or two death threats (been there, received that), a gratifyingly surprising number of my readers over the years have contributed very thoughtful, articulated, usually critical commentaries to whatever it was that I was writing.

This sort of feedback has sometimes forced me to re-examine some of my positions, to try harder to see what I was really thinking about certain subject matters, and occasionally even to change my mind. It is this unique combination of communicating one’s thoughts to others, being forced in the process to reflect on why one entertains those particular thoughts, and finally being sharply and intelligently challenged about the content of those thoughts that has turned my blogging into a long, sometimes hard, always welcome, and still ongoing process of self discovery and self knowledge.

As a result, I have just made available a new collection of essays, selected with two criteria in mind. First, they are among the most in-depth posts published at Rationally Speaking, all of them originally put out as multi-part series, each part being significantly longer than a typical op-ed piece. Of course, length per se is no assurance of quality, but it is also true that too often blog posts are so short that one only gets a glimpse into the subject matter and the author’s opinion about it. So, longer posts make for more serious intellectual engagement.

Second, the writings that I selected for the new collection concern topics about which either I changed my mind significantly, or represent instances where I started out with an opinion that was not well formed and yet about which I had deep intuitions, and the process of writing exposed, confirmed and elaborated upon those intuitions once the more sharply focused light of reasoned argument was aimed at them. Accordingly, each of the essays in the volume comes with a brief introduction to highlight why I included them and what impact writing (or reading) about each topic has had on my own thinking, my path to self-knowledge, if you will.

The subject matter covered here is varied, but the reader will easily pick up the common threads: all posts have to do with philosophical issues, particularly as they are informed by science. Whether we are talking about ethics, political philosophy, epistemology, or metaphysics, I believe that a philosophical understanding is paramount, but that such understanding simply cannot afford to ignore the best available scientific knowledge. I hope these entries — which have been edited and updated where necessary — will help people reflect on things and spur them to challenge others and be challenged in turn. As the motto of this blog says (quoting David Hume), “Truth springs from argument amongst friends.”

* The new collection, entitled Blogging as a Path to Self Knowledge is available in a variety of formats at Smashwords, and for Kindle at Amazon.

You may also like to take a look at three other e-collections along similar lines:

* Tales of the Rational: Skeptical Essays About Nature and Science (various formats / Kindle)

* Thinking About Science: Essays on the Nature of Science (various formats / Kindle)

* Rationally Speaking: Skeptical Essays on Reality as We Think We Know It (various formats / Kindle)

On A+, with a comment about Richard Carrier’s intemperance

freethoughtblogs.com/blaghag

by Massimo Pigliucci

The buzz is on: the third wave of atheism is on the march. It’s called A+, and it has a nice logo to go with it. A+ is the brainchild of Jen McCreight, a liberal blogger and “perverted feminist” (her words) who writes for Freethought Blogs, and rose to fame initially for her very funny “boobquake” stunt a couple of years ago.

Jen is concerned about issues that have worried me for some time too, particularly the fact that the atheist community seems to me to be rife with misogyny and very little concern for social issues (not even when it comes to the freedom of speech of other atheists, see the abysmally embarrassing failure of the petition on behalf of Alexander Aan).

As a reaction, Jen has proposed a new type of atheism, a third wave after the “intellectual and academic” beginnings and the confrontational “New Atheism.” She proposes an atheism concerned with social issues, where the light of reason and critical scrutiny is directed not just at debunking creationists but also to illuminating questions of injustice about gender, ethnicity and the like.

Here is Jen’s summary of the programmatic points for A+, in a follow up to her original post (see also endorsements by Greta Christina and Nelson Jones):

We are…

Atheists plus we care about social justice,

Atheists plus we support women’s rights,

Atheists plus we protest racism,

Atheists plus we fight homophobia and transphobia,

Atheists plus we use critical thinking and skepticism.

Perfect, I’m on board. But (you knew this was coming, yes?) I do have a couple of observations (before I get to Richard Carrier, as the title promises). One is historical in nature, the other philosophical.

Historically, what Jen, Greta and others are looking for already exists. It’s called secular humanism, and it has had (and continues to have) a huge impact on precisely the issues listed above. How huge? Well, just to cite an example, the UN Declaration of Human Rights is a quintessential humanist document, which has influenced international relations since its adoption in 1948.

Secular humanism has a long history, depending on how exactly one defines the concept, and it includes a series of Humanist Manifestos (the first one of which was published in 1933, the last one in 2003) that address precisely the sort of issues that A+ is concerned with, and then some.

So, my first point isn’t a critique of A+ as much as a reminder that, well, some of us (secular humanists) have been doing that sort of thing for almost a century (not I personally, I’m not that old...).

My second point is more philosophical in nature: I am skeptical that something like A+ can get off the ground — as much as I support its aims — for the simple reason that atheism is not a philosophy, and we should stop pretending that it is.

When atheists are concerned that their position is perceived as being only negative, without any positive message, they shouldn’t really be worried, but should rather bite the bullet: a-theism simply means that one lacks a belief in god(s), and for excellent reasons. It is akin to a-unicornism, the lack of a belief in unicorns. That lack of belief doesn’t come with any positive position because none is logically connected to it.

It is a similar situation for skeptics, who also often suffer being labeled as nay sayers without a positive message. If you are skeptical of, say, homeopathy, you don’t need a positive message qua skeptic: your job is to debunk the irrational and explain why that particular notion doesn’t make any sense (and may cost money and lives). End of story.

Now, skepticism does have a positive counterpart: it’s called science. If you wish to redirect former believers in homeopathy onto a better path to health you send them to a medical doctor who uses science-based medicine. This, however, does not require the skeptic herself to be a medical doctor (nor to play one on tv), it just requires that the skeptic be aware of the relevant literature and community of expertise.

So, what is the equivalent positive counterpart to atheism? Philosophy, obviously. But things get a bit more complicated than in the case of the skepticism-science relationship because different atheists may endorse different positive philosophies. Those like Jen and myself adopt a progressive liberal approach to social issues, i.e. we become secular humanists. But other atheists choose libertarianism, or Objectivism (yeah, don’t ask me why). And let’s not forget that — as much as we usually don’t acknowledge it — there are likely plenty of straightforward conservatives who are also atheists. This variety shouldn’t at all be puzzling, because atheism is not a social or political philosophy in its own right, it is a simple metaphysical or epistemic statement about the non existence of a particular type of postulated entity.

Despite my reservations, I wish Jen and the others the best of luck with A+. As Jen put it, “I want to improve the atheist movement, not create a splinter faction or something. But it’s fabulous marketing-wise and as a way to identify yourself as a progressive atheist.” Count me in, I am a progressive atheist; otherwise known as a secular humanist.

And now to Richard Carrier. He too immediately endorsed A+ over at Freethought Blogs, but his language was so unnecessarily harsh that I almost called up my priest to ask him for some lessons on Catholic tolerance throughout the centuries (ok, that’s not actually true). I have had occasional epistolary encounters with Carrier, and they have left a seriously bad taste in my mouth. His intemperance with people who happen to disagree — even marginally — with his position is nauseating (just ask the editor of Skeptical Inquirer, who occasionally receives and promptly refuses to publish Richard’s letters about my columns).

Here are some excerpts from Carrier’s post about A+, just to give you a taste:

“There is a new atheism brewing, and it’s the rift we need, to cut free the dead weight so we can kick the C.H.U.D.’s back into the sewers and finally disown them, once and for all.”

“Anyone who makes a fallacious argument and, when shown that they have, does not admit it, is not one of us, and is to be marginalized and kicked out, as not part of our movement, and not anyone we any longer wish to deal with.”

“I do not think it is in our interests any longer to cooperate in silence with irrational people, when it is irrationality that is the fundamental root cause of all human evil. Anyone who disagrees with that is simply not someone we can work with.”

“We cannot hold our tongue and not continue to denounce their irrationality in any other sphere, because to do so would be to become a traitor to our own values.”

“This does not mean we can’t be angry or mean or harsh, when it is for the overall good (as when we mock or vilify the town neonazi); ridiculing the ridiculous is often in fact a moral obligation, and insults are appropriate when they are genuinely appropriate.”

“And if you are complicit in that, or don’t even see what’s wrong with it, or worse, plan to engage in Christian-style apologetics for it, defending it with the same bullshit fallacies and tactics the Christians use to defend their own immorality or that of their fictional god, then I don’t want anything to do with you. You are despicable. You are an awful person. You disgust me. You are not my people.”

It keeps going like this for quite a bit, but I think you get the point (if you don’t, uhm, we may have a problem, but I will not tell you that you are fucking evil, nor will I throw you out of my club — particularly because I don’t have one).

And here is the kicker: shortly after Carrier posted his rant, Jen McCreight herself tweeted the following:

“Finally had time 2 read Richard Carrier's #atheismplus piece. His language was unnecessarily harsh, divisive & ableist. Doesn't represent A+.”

I guess the new movement has already excommunicated someone, and that happens to be its most viciously vocal supporter so far.

p.s. Ron Lindsay of CFI just published a commentary on A+ where he hits most of my points, albeit phrased differently.

Guns and epistemology

2.bp.blogspot.com

by Greg Linster

I was on vacation with limited access to the Internet or television when the tragic Aurora shooting occurred. Hearing about the incident from afar didn’t dampen the shock in the slightest, especially since it was so close to my home in Denver. Since I was out of town, I missed much of the local conversation surrounding the shooting. However, when a tragic event like this occurs, it’s inevitable that the national conversation about guns and gun control will resurface. I was only in high school when the 1999 Columbine tragedy occurred (again, relatively close to my high school in Colorado Springs). It seems the gun debate just won’t go away.

Before I share my opinion on gun control, I feel compelled to air any potential biases that affect my beliefs. First off, I’m not particularly fond of guns (I don’t currently own one), but I’ve recently considered purchasing one for safety reasons. I must admit that I find guns intimidating and I don’t like the loud noise they make when fired (especially if I don’t have earplugs). Over the course of my life I have been to several shooting ranges and I have even been pheasant hunting too. However, shooting guns just for the fun of it doesn’t really have much appeal to me. There are countless other things I’d rather be doing with my free time.

I can’t remember exactly what prompted me to read it, but at one point during my freshmen year of college I read John Lott’s book More Guns, Less Crime. At the time, I found Lott’s overall argument very compelling, particularly his empirical work. Admittedly, I think I was, at least partly, also attracted to the contrarian conclusion he presented. More guns, less crime — it’s so counterintuitive and such a fun point to argue! To call my college ‘self’ sophomoric is perhaps an understatement.

Years later I learned that there are also academics who have pored over the same crime and gun data, but have come to the exact opposition conclusion. How can this be? Well, my initial thought is that at least one of our political parties (but perhaps both) doesn’t have an interest in the truth. Rather, they simply want to find evidence to confirm what they want to believe. In other words, they are guilty of committing confirmation bias, i.e., they have a conclusion in mind that they want to reach (e.g., guns cause less crime) and they look for data to confirm their belief and shun any evidence that goes against that belief. Given my predilection for liberty, I’m a fan of the second amendment, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that I was naturally and initially drawn to Lott’s work and unfairly dismissive of the counter arguments and evidence. In other words, I was guilty of confirmation bias.

So, do gun control laws reduce crime? It appears to me that there are three possibilities: they produce the intended effect, they produce an unintended effect, or they don’t produce an effect at all. The trouble is that I don’t know what the right answer is and I don’t think anyone else does either. I’m willing to bet that the people who claim to scientifically know the answer to this question have an idealogical axe to grind. Have you ever met anyone who is a passionate gun owner yet finds the scientific evidence against guns compelling? I didn’t think so and the same thing can be said of anti-gun folks as well.

On the surface of it, the gun control question appears to be a scientific one. But before we waste all this time quibbling over the statistical techniques “the other side” is using, we probably first ought to ask ourselves an important epistemological question. Is it really possible to scientifically know if gun control laws (or the number of concealed weapon permits issued) reduce crime? I just happen to think the answer is ‘no.’ There are far too many complexities and variables to account for when doing econometric work on crime, guns, and gun control laws.

If I’m correct, then where does that leave us? Well, I think it leaves us with economic logic and if there’s one thing I’m pretty confident is true, it’s that incentives matter, even to criminals. When the cost (or potential cost) of committing a crime is high, we expect to see less crime. Regardless of what one thinks about the current federal and state marijuana laws, imagine what would happen if being caught in possession of marijuana came with a minimum of a twenty year prison sentence and was strictly enforced (meaning that a police officer could randomly come to your home at any time to check on you). Many of us would find this type of infringement on our personal liberty unpalatable (a cost), but if you think that the number of people that would possess marijuana would decrease significantly (a benefit?), then you understand how incentives work.

Another interesting thing to note about marijuana is that the fact that it’s illegal hasn’t made it any more difficult for people to obtain. Again, making something illegal doesn’t necessarily make it costly. I suspect that today’s American teenagers may actually have an easier time scoring illegal drugs, like marijuana, than they do alcohol which is legal for a certain demographic of the population. It’s also worth remembering that there is a black market for illegal things and laws don’t magically stop criminals from engaging in commercial activity on the black market. Also, lest we forget, guns don’t mysteriously kill people, people do. Accordingly, I find the argument some people make for banning all guns to be absurd, but I also find the argument for the unimpeded right to own whatever type of firearms one wants equally absurd. I don’t think that Americans have a right to own rocket launchers (I agree with Michael’s point in his recent post about finding middle ground.)

So one way to reduce crime, according to economic logic, is to make the cost of committing a crime high. There are multiple ways of doing this and they don’t necessarily involve creating or enforcing laws — incentives actually work in many ways. Consider the following thought experiment: imagine you are a burglar and have the choice of going to a house where you know the homeowner doesn’t own a gun or the choice of going to one in which you know the homeowner has a gun. Which one would you choose to burglarize? If the answer isn’t obvious please don’t consider a career in crime. But would this line of reasoning really work with the likes of the Aurora shooter? Yes, even the Aurora shooter, lunatic that he is, responds to incentives. If he knew that there was a high probability that a moviegoer in one particular theater was armed and willing to shoot him, I bet he would have reconsidered his decision. He was crazy and evil, but apparently he wasn’t suicidal.

A natural follow-up question is: Why can’t stricter laws alone deter crimes by increasing the costs of crime? The answer, I think, is that they can, if only we were able to enforce them properly. Life, however, is full of trade-offs. If the punishment for committing a burglary were more severe and if there were a police officer assigned to patrol each and every street in America, then I suspect we would rarely ever see burglaries. This, however, would be pretty costly for the government, which brings up another interesting economics-related lesson, i.e., there is a cost to enforcing laws too and we must decide which costs are worth incurring and which are not. This may sound strange, but from a societal and economic perspective, the optimal number of burglaries is probably not zero (I think shootings are different due to the value of human life, but I’m sure some economist, somewhere, has extended the argument here before).

Here’s what I know: if I had been unfortunate enough to be in the audience the night of the Aurora shooting, I would have desperately hoped that one of my fellow moviegoers had been armed. Similarly, had I been in the library at Columbine High School on the day of the shooting, I would have desperately hoped that the librarian was packing heat. The reason I’m generally not in favor of stricter gun control laws is a logical one, i.e., because I think criminals respond to incentives outside of the law.

It’s an indisputable fact that most legal gun owners never commit a crime with their weapon. Making guns outright illegal won’t necessarily stop the problem America is facing. Laws don’t stop evil people from doing evil things. The increasing mass violence in our culture is the symptom of a much larger problem, one which is simply outside the scope of this essay.  But please, let’s stop blaming it entirely on guns.

Friendly advice to skeptics

by Joan Roughgarden

[This is a guest post by my colleague Joan Roughgarden, one of the most prominent evolutionary biologists I have had the pleasure to meet. Joan is Professor (Emerita) of Biology at Stanford University and Adjunct Professor at the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology. She is the author of Evolution’s Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People (2004, UC Press, available also in Portuguese and Korean) and The Genial Gene: Deconstructing Darwinian Selfishness (2009, UC Press, also available this September in French). Her YouTube channel is “JoanKauai.” She is a co-editor of the journal founded by Massimo, Philosophy and Theory in Biology.]

Massimo’s recent post about skepticism inspired this distillation and extension on four issues: evolutionary psychology, objectivism, women, and religion. “Skeptics” refers here, as in Massimo’s sense, to contributors and readers of magazines like Skeptical Inquirer, to participants in blogs like Rationally Speaking, and to others whom Massimo identifies as comprising a broadly construed  “Community of Reason” (CoR).

Evolutionary Psychology

Massimo criticizes evolutionary psychology (EP) as a “science-informed narrative about the human condition.” In the blog thread, Brett, extending a rebuttal by David Pinsof, writes “I'm not aware of a single such critic who has given practical advice about how evolutionary psychologists could do their jobs better.” Here then is what EP should do.

Pinsof notes that EP is adaptationism, and yet adaptationism has well-known limits. The net strength of an adaptive selection pressure must exceed the reciprocal of the population size by an order of magnitude to evolve over genetic drift. An adaptive argument should not only show a bona fide benefit for some trait but also that the benefit is sufficiently large. Far fetched adaptive explanations as found in EP are ruled out by this well known population-genetic criterion. EP workers should deal with the magnitude of the selective advantage of any hypothesized adaptive function.

Pinsof claims that EP is “a way of testing the predictions entailed by theories from evolutionary biology (i.e. parental investment theory, reciprocal altruism, signaling theory, biological markets theory, etc.) on humans.” That would be nice, if true. To the contrary, EP assumes these forty-year old theories are correct and attempts to confirm them with data on humans, leading to a discipline riddled with confirmation bias. Sexual selection, parental investment, and the evolution of cooperation and altruism are controversial today in biology. Sexual selection’s premise of near-universal sex roles during mating has met many counterexamples including species with multiple genders, homosexuality, gender switching and sex-role reversal. Even textbook examples such as the peacock and the Bateman fruit-fly experiments have been reevaluated. Genetic analysis has further undercut sexual-selection theory in species such as the collared flycatcher. Behavioral ecologists have increasingly discarded sex-role expectations, placing them at arms length relative to a generic concept of sexual selection simply as “any form of competition for mates” (1,2). Wholesale alternatives to sexual selection are also becoming a possibility (3). Yet EP research seeks to discern classic sex roles within human behavior. EP workers should view behavioral ecology as a work in progress, not as settled science, and should entertain and test hypotheses alternative to those originating in the 1970s. They should not seek to “apply” behavioral ecology to humans, but instead to extend and if necessary, revise behavioral ecology with data from humans.

Objectivism

Massimo characterizes Ayn Rand’s philosophy of objectivism as “an incoherent jumble of contradictions and plagiarism from actual thinkers.” I think the appeal to skeptics of Ayn Rand’s philosophy is her ethics: the virtue of selfishness and rejection of altruism. Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene naturalizes Ayn Rand’s objectivist ethics and provides a seamless transition from evolutionary biology to normative human conduct resulting in what might be termed “evolutionary objectivism.”

The problem is that objectivist ethics may be unnatural after all. Is any animal purely selfish and devoid of cooperative and even altruistic, instincts, intentions and thoughts? Probably not. According to the 1970s framing, cooperation and altruism are selfishness in disguise (Dawkins), or are products of group selection, renamed multilevel selection by the Wilson’s (DS and EO). Skeptics invariably line up behind Dawkins and therefore seek to explain cooperation through limited devices such as kin selection and reciprocal altruism while viewing the Wilsons' as delusional or even over the hill.

The 1970s were a heady time. I was there. We young turks enjoyed exposing the naivety of “good-for-the-species” stories from nature-show narrators, seeing behavior as animal choices to fulfill evolutionary objectives rather than as uninterpreted instinct, and injecting evolution into ecology to bring an explanatory logic to otherwise arbitrary population properties and community structure. So it would be churlish to begrudge the glee of today’s social scientists and philosophers who have begun to play with the power of natural-selection thinking. But much has been learned since then and skeptics ought to pay attention.

It has become ever so clear that more altruism and cooperation occur in animal social activities than can be accounted for with kin selection or reciprocal altruism, and clear that serious doubt remains about the empirical plausibility of group selection even given its theoretical possibility. Instead, a third way can account for how cooperative behavior forms — through social construction of the individual phenotype. The creature that hatches from the egg or springs from the womb has yet to complete much of its development. It then develops morphologically and behaviorally in the company of others. This development culminates in an individual that possesses an evolutionary fitness. Individual-level natural selection selects for individuals who cooperate in their mutual development of a high individual fitness. I have analogized this process to teamwork in athletics in which training together leads to team winnings that underwrite the individual reproductive success of each teammate (4). Yet individuals on the team will not prosper if each does not perform to the best of their ability, nor if lovers cheat.

Today’s skeptics disappointingly project one side of an obsolete evolutionary debate as the basis for an ethical norm. In doing so, skeptics not only confuse is with ought, but are mistaken about what is.

Women

Badrescher observes that Massimo lists only one woman among the 15 CoR “leaders” he singles out. Mark Erikson adds that “there is serious work to do in the CoR on this [gender imbalance] issue.” Massimo replies that “I honestly couldn't come up with names [of women] that had the same visibility as those [men] I listed.”

The near absence of women in the CoR dialogue has two main causes, I think. First,
CoR members know what they want to hear, making it nearly impossible to advance alternative views. Men listen to men. They slap each other on the back with their tongues. Men regard another man as competent until proven otherwise, and men regard a woman as incompetent until proven otherwise. Volunteering to engage under these circumstances is difficult and usually a waste of time.

Second, the CoR project is inherently masculinist. It privileges Reason. Although evidence may show that people rarely make decisions rationally, by the CoR project they should. Reason is a goal, if not a fact. But is Reason a good goal, or more accurately, should Reason offer the sole guide to decision and action? Men are raised to think so. Men think through Reason they can control their bodies, overcome their emotions and manage the world.

Feminist scholarship, novels and art consistently highlight the body. A woman’s lived experience teaches that Reason cannot control the body. Periods come and go on their own, a baby grows on its own, tears flow on their own. Why fight it? It’s best to recruit one’s body as a partner to make decisions that make sense and feel right too. Male athletes may also come to this realization.

The CoR project should apply its critical acumen to itself. Is its emphasis on Reason reasonable? Could the evolutionarily refined lower brain be more reliable than the evolutionarily recent higher brain? A welcoming discussion on such questions and a general sense of openness will surely lead to more participation by women.

Religion

Lance Bush writes “teaching children nonsense and bad ways of thinking is wrong, religious education by its very nature almost always entails this, and the atheist community should not shy away from saying so.” Bill continues, “sometimes one [encounters] situations where an entire field is full of hogwash, and skeptics specialize in saying this. For example, I dismiss what clergy have to say in general — I think the whole discipline is just defective, and I have little regard for what they have to say.’’ Massimo agrees with Bill, saying “the academy itself, of course, is far from perfect, and I don't think departments of theology (as opposed to, say, philosophy of religion) belong there. So yes, in those cases your skepticism is well grounded.” Marcus Morgan adds that an atheist should ask a spiritualist “if God is ‘knowable’ (knowledge is our highest level of rational satisfaction). If yes, then analyze their reasons and see if they constitute knowledge and decide whether you believe them. If no, and the spiritualist is also agnostic (believes in something that cannot be known) and [sic] all you can do is move on (fast).”

The CoR is relentlessly negative about religious people. I have two pieces of advice about this. First, demonizing religious people has produced a self-indulgent caricature intended for ridicule. Participating in a religious community is not about proving that God exists (whatever that might mean) but about sharing an experience. Part of the experience is identifying with a leader whose words offer guidance to navigating human dilemmas, part is seeing oneself as continuing an ancient tradition, part is enjoying friendship, part is finding others to count on in hard times, part is joining in community projects, part is finding a regular time to reflect on how to live more ethically, part is acknowledging the week’s mistakes and resolving to move on, part is being introduced to timely issues (yes, many churches and synagogues present talks with two “sides”), and so forth. The human need for this participatory experience is difficult to satisfy in secular circles, even in large cities, and is nearly impossible in rural locales. For many religious people, an element of faith is intertwined with their overall participatory experience. Yet the CoR mistakenly foregrounds only the faith element of religious life. What brings people back to church again and again is the participatory experience and what turns them away is a bad experience. The many people who do positively experience religious practice dismiss the CoR as ignorant (true) and not worth listening to (false). All the CoR’s other points, such as the importance of teaching evolution, are lost, shouted to the howling wind. My advice is: lay off the “prove there is a god” stuff. It’s irrelevant and counterproductive.

Second, theology does belong in a university just as say, engineering does. Theology is applied humanities. In 2005 I was invited to lecture in gender studies at Loyola University in Chicago, a Jesuit university. I noticed members of the lecture organizing committee from the theology department. I had never met a live theologian face to face. So I asked to extend my stay a day to meet theologians, to find out what they were like, what they did, and what made them tick. What I discovered was an interdisciplinary humanities program combining history, literary analysis, and philosophy. Their research products are often analyses, similar to the policy studies produced by social scientists. Cutting edge scholarship in theology is some distance from the positions taken by Roman Catholic church leadership. Nonetheless, official church positions do change in response to theological research but at a pace making plate tectonics seem reckless. I respected the intellectual thoroughness, inquisitiveness, patience and honesty I encountered. In 2007, the Loyola theology department organized a symposium that led to a book edited by Patricia Jung and Aana Marie Vigen. I was honored to contribute a paper to it coauthored with Patricia Jung on gender diversity in the Bible (5). Not only the philosophy of religion but also theology itself is an appropriate domain for skeptical methodology.

_____

(1) 2009, Roughgarden, J., Akçay, E., Do we need a Sexual Selection 2.0?, Animal Behaviour, doi:10.1016/ j.anbehav.2009.06.006  79(3):e1-e4.

(2) 2009, Shuker, D.M., Sexual selection: endless forms or tangled bank? Animal Behaviour, doi:10.1016/ j.anbehav.2009.10.031

(3) 2012, Roughgarden, J. The social selection alternative to sexual selection. Phil. Trans. Roy. Soc. B. DOI:10.1098/rstb.2011.0282

(4) 2012, Roughgarden, J. Teamwork, pleasure and bargaining in animal social behaviour J. Evol. Biol. DOI: 10.1111/j.1420-9101.2012.02505.x

(5) 2010, Jung, P. and J. Roughgarden. Gender in heaven: The story of the Ethiopian eunuch in light of evolutionary biology. Pp. 224-240. In: Jung, P. and Vigen, A. (eds.) God, Science, Sex, Gender. University of Illinois Press, Urbana, Illinois.

Superman Rises Some More (And Why That's Bad)

images2.wikia.nocookie.net

by Leonard Finkelman

After two years of writing a dissertation, I’m generally not a fan of continuity. Emerson was onto something when he advised that one should “speak now what you think in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again,” since “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.” Few experiences in my life have been more tedious than having to revise a section of chapter three because of something I’ve written in chapter four, then having to make changes to chapter one in turn because of the edits in chapter three (1).

In my last post, I extolled Superman’s virtues as a role model because of his moral perfection. This followed an earlier post wherein I off-handedly dismissed the character’s actions in the ending of Superman: The Movie as a crime against Man and Reason. I never intended any relation there. In retrospect, maintenance of a foolish consistency requires that I offer some further commentary, and so I offer this follow-up. Alas: despite my preference otherwise, I am a man who writes dissertations (2).

Last time, I argued that (in virtue ethics, at least) a perfect role model is preferable to an imperfect one, and so Superman should be a better role model than the more-popular Batman. Virtue ethics requires role models for us to imitate and a good life is one that includes continuous self-improvement; therefore, an attainable standard of excellence is actually worse than an unattainable one.

By that reckoning, the aforementioned ending to the first Superman movie — wherein Superman turns back time so that he can have a second chance at rescuing Lois Lane — ought to provide a perfect demonstration of why the character is such a good role model. The ability to go back in time at will sure would solve a lot of problems. I can’t go back in time. You can’t go back in time. How can my little mind’s hobgoblin take offense at Superman going back in time?

Similarly, I nearly started a row at one of Massimo’s periodic Meetups when I suggested that the beloved British spacetime traveler, Doctor Who, couldn’t serve as a good moral role model (3). Here’s a character with abilities that sometimes dwarf even Superman’s. Had my hobgoblin taken the night off?

I do think that this can all be made quite coherent. It just requires that we delve a bit deeper into moral philosophy. So strap yourselves in: we’re gonna make the jump to meta-ethics.

Immanuel Kant wrote in his Critique of Pure Reason that “the idea of an ought or of duty indicates a possible action,” and the vast majority of moral philosophers accept that the proposition “I ought to do such-and-such” implies the proposition “I can do such-and-such.” One’s moral obligations are therefore inextricably linked to her abilities: the less she can do, the fewer things she ought to do.

Far more controversial is the inverse of that last claim. If one can do more, does it follow that she should do more? I think there’s a case to be made along those lines. Consider one of the more famous works of philosophy written in the past century: Peter Singer’s “Famine, Affluence, and Morality” (4). In the essay, Singer asserts that “if it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it,” and this does seem like an intuitively appealing moral principle. It’s also not very far from the inversion of the last claim given in the last paragraph. The more one can do, the more bad she can prevent; therefore, she has more obligations than those who can do less.

Suppose we combine these two propositions: first, if one has fewer abilities, then she has fewer obligations; second, if one has more abilities, then she has more obligations. Intuitively, then, the number of obligations one has can be expressed as a ratio of abilities to restrictions. Heuristically, and very broadly: (things one should do) = (things one can do) / (things one can’t do).

I think this heuristic fits a number of moral intuitions that we tend to share. If I have an obligation that can only sometimes be fulfilled, then I’m only bound by that obligation a fraction of the time. We don’t place a heavy moral burden on the severely disabled; contrapositively, our sense of fairness is violated when those upon whom Fortune has smiled do little (5). It works well enough, so I’ll go with it.

Returning now to Doctor Who and Superman with Time Traveling Action: it strikes me that someone who can travel backwards through time at will is someone whose power is entirely unrestricted. This is more obvious in Superman’s case: a being with the demonstrated ability to prevent earthquakes, turn back tsunamis, deflect meteors, and prevent kittens from getting stuck up trees — all with a wink and a smile, no less — has the ability to prevent all evil when he has free reign over time and space (as volitional time travel would allow). Such a being would be omnipotent.

Here’s the thing about omnipotent beings: there’s nothing they can’t do (6). If the above heuristic correctly captures our system of morality, then human ethics is completely insufficient to capture the obligations of omnipotence: the omnipotent being’s number of obligations would be undefined in our system. Omnipotence therefore represents a limit, in the mathematical sense, for human morality. An omnipotent being is necessarily removed from our moral concern, just as a function that approaches a limit can never have a value at the limit (7).

Remember that I’m approaching this all as a virtue ethicist. To recap, that means that I take it to be the case that moral virtue is type-relative, i.e., the word “good” is used differently when referring to good people and good dogs. People are all the same type of thing (at least in part) because they can share common concerns (8). Anything that doesn’t share our concerns isn’t the same type of thing that we are.

I can feel my hobgoblin tapping on my shoulder. He’s whispering in my ear, “Psst! You just wrote than an attainable standard of excellence is worse than an unattainable one!” He’s asking, “How could you have ever said that Superman, with powers and abilities far beyond those of other men, is a better role model than Batman?”

Very simply: the standard that Superman represents is practically unattainable, but not logically so (9), and this is why he can be considered the same type of thing as other people — at least until he starts flying fast enough to turn time backwards. That’s the point at which I’d say that Superman flies from the realm of human role model and into the realm of omnipotence. Even Aristotle was ambivalent about emulating anything in the latter realm (10).

In the end, this is why I’m offended by time-traveling Superman, and why I’d advise against turning to Doctor Who for moral guidance. These are beings whose infinite power elevates them above all human concern; consequently, they can’t be good role models for humans. Knock them down a few pegs, though, and the story changes.

Through it all, I hope that we can agree on one thing: Spider-man is pretty lame.

_____

Notes

(1) If you think that was tough to read, just think about how tough it was to live. Before going any further, I’d like to take this opportunity to thank my sister and brother-in-law, who recently provided the company and conversation that was not only a welcome distraction from dissertating but also the inspiration for these last two posts of mine.

(2) Yet here I stand blissfully free of any existential despair. That ad in the subway was right: philosophy works!

(3) My own preference is for Inspector Spacetime.

(4) Really: consider it. While I disagree with Singer’s ultimate conclusion — slavish devotion to a principle of utility strikes me as both irrational and unreasonable, and therefore not virtuous — I can’t deny that his paper has proved to be one of the two or three most thought-provoking works of philosophy I’ve ever read.

(5) Please register all political objections at your local polling station in November (assuming, of course, that you’re an American eligible to vote; if not, the odds that you agree increase exponentially, anyway).

(6) At this point, there would normally be a student of mine who pipes in with the question: “Could he make 2+2=5?” I prefer the answer most recently given by Richard Swinburne (among others): no, because that’s an impossibility, and to prevent one from doing the impossible does not impose any restrictions on her. Put it this way: if the only rule of Fight Club is that you can’t fight if 2+2=5, then there are no rules in Fight Club.

(7) This also provides an easy rejoinder to anyone who responded to my last post with the well-worn geekism that “Batman always wins.” Superman sometimes loses, and so is clearly not omnipotent. I am willing to grant, however, that Batman does have one thing over Superman.

(8) Kant’s categorical imperative uses this very idea to determine our moral obligations, as does Rawls’ veil of ignorance. What each of those heuristics asks of us is to imagine the entire range of concerns we might have under all practically possible circumstances.

(9) It’s logically possible that biotechnology could develop the means for humans to defy gravity (to some extent, at least), or see in the x-ray spectrum, or lift things with the proportionate strength of an ant. By contrast, can you imagine climbing the social ladder high enough to make $1 billion per year? “More realistic,” indeed!

(10) Aristotle didn’t believe in anything like the Abrahamic God, but his description of unmoved movers in De Caelo would be appropriated towards consideration of that deity by Jewish, Muslim, and Christian thinkers. While the theologians clearly endorsed adoption of the Unmoved Mover as the one true moral standard, Aristotle was less clear in Book X of his Nicomachean Ethics. Although he admitted that his unmoved movers (he posited several), as beings of pure thought, should be emulated on an intellectual level, he also admits that humans have other concerns; the life of philosophy is the best kind of human life, he argued, because is was the closest humans could come to divinity. But this is a case for philosophers, not the unmoved movers, to serve as humanity’s moral standard. (Seems like a good idea to me...)

Surprise! Naturalistic metaphysics undermines naive determinism, part II

James Ladyman

by Massimo Pigliucci

[The first part of this essay was published here.]

So, we have seen that Ladyman and Ross, in their book Every Thing Must Go (ETMG) are claiming that the only metaphysics worth doing is one that takes onboard all of the sciences, both physics and the so-called special sciences (from biology to sociology). We have also seen that their discussion is framed within the background of two broad issues: the critique of non-naturalistic metaphysics (which traces back at least to Hume and his “fork,” and of course to the logical positivists of the early 20th century), and the debate in philosophy of science between realists and anti-realists (remember: realism here means that scientific theories actually track truth about the world, while antirealism is the position that scientific theorizing has the more modest aim of being empirically adequate).

We are now ready to get to the heart of the matter, which consists of two major points: the implications of physics for metaphysics (including notions such as determinism), and the “third way” out of the realism-antirealism debate. Let me start with the latter, it will soon enough nicely connect to the former in an intellectually satisfying package (for me, at least, though I’m sure I will hear otherwise from some readers).

The view that attempts to steer a way between the Scylla of realism and the Charybdis of antirealism is often referred to as structural realism. The Stanford Encyclopedia article on the subject claims that this is “considered by many realists and antirealists alike as the most defensible form of scientific realism,” and it comes in two varieties: epistemic and ontic. Let’s get our initial look at structural realism by way of a summary by John Worrall, the guy who introduced the idea into the debate back in 1989. Worrall is talking about the shift — in 19th century optics — between Fresnel’s and Maxwell’s theories:

There was an important element of continuity in the shift from Fresnel to Maxwell — and this was much more than a simple question of carrying over the successful empirical content into the new theory. At the same time it was rather less than a carrying over of the full theoretical content or full theoretical mechanisms (even in “approximate” form) … There was continuity or accumulation in the shift, but the continuity is one of form or structure, not of content.

To put it in other words, realists are correct in the broad picture, but they are wrong about what carries from one successful theory to the other: new theories do not (necessarily) retain older theories’ description of unobservables (like ether), but rather their mathematical or “structural” content.

I must admit that the first time I heard about this I immediately thought about “obvious” counterexamples: seriously, the Copernican theory is structurally similar to the Ptolemaic one? Well, it turns out that it is, and S. Saunders has actually done the proper work to demonstrate it (besides, the example is likely not fair, since Ptolemaic astronomy was pretty much proto-scientific).

There are other prima facie problems with structural realism, for instance the fact that many theories in the special sciences are simply not framed mathematically (much of the theory of evolution, for instance), and it is therefore difficult to analyze their structure. Still, the work done by structural realists with physical theories quickly becomes pretty darn compelling, once one starts looking into it.

Ladyman himself, in work previous to ETMG, has helped distinguish between epistemic and ontic structural realism (note to the non-philosophically inclined: I know, it’s getting heavy; bear with me, the payoff at the end may be handsome...). The weaker form is the first one: here structural realism is interpreted as metaphysically neutral (i.e., concerned only with epistemology): it tells us that scientific theories describe the structure of the world, but it does not commit itself to the content of that world. You may remember the “shut up and calculate” brand of physicists who study quantum mechanics: they may be interpreted as antirealists, but they would also be at home within epistemic structural realism, insofar as they think that the equations describe the way the world is, but do not commit themselves to any metaphysical interpretation of what the world is made of.

The second form of structural realism, the ontic variety, is the one endorsed by Ladyman and Ross in ETMG, and it begins with the (reasonable, I think) point that one simply cannot divorce metaphysics from epistemology, and that whenever there is a conflict between the two, it is the latter that gets to occupy the driver’s seat. Ladyman and Ross explain their position by way of a Peirce-style (i.e., pragmatic) form of verificationism (distinct from the one that failed the logical positivists, though remember that L&R label their position “neo-positivism”). As they put it:

This verificationism consists in two claims. First, no hypothesis that the approximately consensual current scientific picture declares to be beyond our capacity to investigate should be taken seriously. Second, any metaphysical hypothesis that is to be taken seriously should have some identifiable bearing on the relationship between at least two relatively specific hypotheses that are either regarded as confirmed by institutionally bona fide current science or are regarded as motivated and in principle confirmable by such science.

Chew on that for a moment, but it basically means that the metaphysician doesn’t get to run wild without a way for the rest of us to square what he says with the best empirical knowledge we have about the world. No metaphysics without adequate epistemology. Seems sensible enough to me.

And we now get to ontic structural realism, the position endorsed by Ladyman and Ross, and which is beginning to convince me (with some reservations here and there). This is how they themselves put it:

Ontic Structual Realism (OSR) is the view that the world has an objective modal structure that is ontologically fundamental ... According to OSR, even the identity and individuality of objects depends on the relational structure of the world. ... There are no things. Structure is all there is.

Hence the title of the book: Every Thing Must Go! Now, before you go all New Agey or Buddhist on me, please note that Ladyman and Ross derive their metaphysics from the best physics available. The details are fascinating, and in themselves make the book a must read, but essentially their claim is that all currently viable theories in fundamental physics — including quantum mechanics, string theory, M-theory and their rivals — have in common principles like non-locality, entanglement and such, which point toward the surprising conclusion that “at bottom” there are no “things,” only structure.

Yes, I know, you are going to ask “structure of what?” “relations among what?” and so on. And the answer appears to be that those are the wrong questions to ask. Fundamental physics seems to do away with objects, and indeed, it does away with yet another old chestnut of metaphysical speculation: causality!

Causality has been a troubled concept since Hume’s famous deflating analysis of it, but quantum mechanics — and, again, all the other currently viable candidate physical theories — simply tell us that at the lowest level of analysis the concept breaks down, it doesn’t do any work for the physicist. Philosophers have noted for a while now that fundamental physicists talk about laws and mathematical descriptions, but they don’t talk about causes very much, if at all. And modern physics explains why: at bottom, there are no causes.

But wait a minute! Are Ladyman and Ross telling us that causes and objects are illusory? Is this yet another instance of people claiming that things that we think exist and play a crucial role in our understanding of the world do not actually exist? Are we to do away with tables and people, just like some pundits these days want to argue that free will, consciousness, morality and so on, are illusions, because none of them have a place in fundamental physics? Are Harris, Rosenberg and other modern nihilists right after all??

Nope, they are not. (Here begins the payoff of all the hard work we’ve done so far.) Let’s take causality first. According to Ladyman and Ross it is a concept that is eliminated in fundamental physics, but needs to be retained by the special sciences (from biology to economics). That’s because causality makes sense only in systems for which there is temporal asymmetry (a before and an after), and that — while not being the case for physics — is very much the case for the special sciences. L&R do not treat the concept of causality as an “illusion” to be dispelled once the special sciences are reduced to physics, because no such reduction is in the cards.

But why not? For the same reason that “things” must go at the fundamental level but need to be retained at the level(s) of analysis of the special sciences. Let’s take the standard example of a table. It is fashionable these days among the scientifically literate to shock us by saying that the “table” right in front of our noses doesn’t “really” exist (and of course, neither does our nose, or ourselves), because physics tells us that the apparently solid object is actually made of things like protons, neutrons and electrons (or quarks, or strings, you pick, it doesn’t matter). But this, according to ontic structural realism, is still a pretty limited way of looking at the issue. At bottom there are no things, and hence not even protons, quarks or strings, there are only structures. These structures generate patterns, and science is in the business of describing such patterns. At one level, the pattern can best be captured by talk of protons and electrons; at another level (i.e., for material science, and of course for our everyday experience) they are captured by objects like tables. Tables, then, are not illusions at all, at least no more than protons and electrons are illusions; rather, they are the most appropriate way to describe a certain stable pattern.

The same goes for causality: when historians, economists, biologists and so on talk about “X causing Y” they are simply deploying a concept that is useful for capturing patterns that are affected by time asymmetry, and that are no more or less illusory than patterns at any other level of analysis of reality. The only difference between physics and the special sciences, according to Ladyman and Ross, is that the former is concerned with patterns that have for all effective purposes a very very large domain of stability (both in space and time). Biologists, instead, are concerned with patterns that have local stability both in space (earth-bound, for now) and time (the duration of the life of an individual, or of a species).

The surprising upshot of all of this is that physicalist reductionism — the idea that all the special sciences and their objects of study will eventually reduce to physics and its objects of study — is out of the question. And it is out of the question because of a metaphysics (ontic structural realism) that is based on the best physics available! If you are not blown away by this you may not have caught the thing in its entirety and may want to go back and re-read this post (or, if your philosophical and physical chops are adequate, ETMG).

This has all sorts of implication for those increasingly popular (and, I think, annoying) statements about determinism and reductionism that we keep hearing. Turns out that they are based on bad physics and worse metaphysics. There is no fundamental determinism for the simple reason that there is no fundamental causality, and that “cause” is a conceptual tool deployed by the special sciences that has no counterpart in fundamental physics, and so it cannot be reduced to or eliminated by the latter.

This doesn’t mean that all is fine and clear in ETMG or with ontic structural realism in general. There are still plenty of open questions to be worked out (I hinted at one above: what are we to make of scientific theories that do not deploy math? Which structures are conserved there?). But the satisfying picture emerging from all of the above is this: a) metaphysics has to be based on epistemology, and it cannot do without taking physics very very seriously; b) the special sciences — while obviously compatible with physics (which sets their universal boundaries) — retain an enormous amount of independence from it and cannot be reduced to it; c) we still have a lot of work to do, both within philosophy and within the special sciences, to make sense of the world.

One last parting shot, about a topic that the astute reader may have noticed I have bypassed so far: if every thing is gone and we only have mathematical structures and relations, what is the ontological status of mathematical objects themselves? Here are the only relevant quotes from Ladyman and Ross that I could find:

OSR as we develop it is in principle friendly to a naturalized version of Platonism. ... One distinct, and very interesting, possibility is that as we become truly used to thinking of the stuff of the physical universe as being patterns rather than little things, the traditional gulf between Platonistic realism about mathematics and naturalistic realism about physics will shrink or even vanish. ... [Bertrand Russell] was first and foremost a Platonist. But as we pointed out there are versions of Platonism that are compatible with naturalism; and Russell’s Platonism was motivated by facts about mathematics and its relationship to science, so was PNC [Principle of Naturalistic Closure] -compatible. 

Wild stuff, no? Now I don’t feel too badly about having written in sympathetic terms about mathematical Platonism...

Michael's Picks

by Michael De Dora

* The website Skepchick is running a series in which men speak out against hate directed against women in the secular and skeptic movements. I was invited to participate, and gladly accepted. You can read my entry here. 

* Should there be restrictions on watching pornography and other mature content in public? That’s the question the New York Times takes up in this interesting article. 

* People For the American Way released an updated edition of its fantastic pamphlet 12 Rules for Mixing Religion and Politics, with a foreword by Bill Moyers.

* Kenan Malik does an interview with The Browser in which he makes just about as much sense as possible on the issue of religion and morality.  

* A doctor in Washington who fought for passage of the state’s assisted suicide law is now preparing to use it. 

* For a long time, moral beliefs and values have been either rejected as unfit for political discussions, or else thought of as the domain of far-right religious groups. But that’s changing, says philosopher Julian Baggini. 

* What does a killer think? For some insight, take a look at this fascinating article, written by Columbine author Dave Cullen, on the mentality of killers.

* Should our judgment of art take into account the moral and political merit of the artist and his or her message? Or should we judge art through something other than our moral and political filters? Dhanuka Bandara proposes some answers.

Superman Rises

by Leonard Finkelman

There are two sorts of people in this world: those who draw arbitrary distinctions and those who don’t (1). Through thirty years of geek living, I’ve come to see the world through one particular bipolar lens. My view is that the arbitrary distinction most worth drawing is the one between Supermen and Batmen (2).

Those in the Superman camp tend to hold an optimistic view of human nature (Nietzsche notwithstanding). They believe that we’re all fundamentally kind and helpful, and always open to self-improvement. Despite the character’s alien background, Superman stands as this camp’s role model because Superman is a moral saint: he exemplifies all the best traits that a human can have, even if no human can ever hope to have them all.

By contrast, the Batman camp is pessimistic about humanity. Those in this camp tend to believe (to quote one of my favorite sitcoms) that people are “bastard-coated bastards with bastard filling,” and that it’s only through a great deal of discipline and training that our intrinsic fear, loathing, and selfishness can be overcome. These pessimists see Batman as their role model specifically because he’s a moral human rather than a moral saint: the character has shortcomings, but so too do we all. His is an attainable standard.

I would discourage you, dear reader, from turning to Hollywood for any sort of moral guidance; still, one need only to look at box-office receipts to see which camp has more followers. I’ve even heard apparently cogent arguments as to why this is appropriate. “Superman is too perfect,” say many of my fellow geeks. “Nobody’s perfect; nobody can relate to Superman.”

It’s true: there are no moral saints and it’s doubtful that there ever could be. It’s true: we owe our imperfection to deep-seated drives that must be overcome through willpower and discipline (if at all). But my allegiance on this matter should be clear (see attached photo), and I’d be a poor philosopher (or perhaps a good political commentator) if I didn’t make some attempt to justify that allegiance (3).

The relevant question here is one about the importance of role models. Certainly, not every moral theory recognizes any need for particular exemplary people. Deontological ethics demands only that people follow moral rules determined a priori; in principle, even the proverbial stepchild of wild wolves ought to be able to figure those rules out. Consequentialist ethics can also dispense with exemplars: when the only standard for moral right is the increase of utility, actors matter less than actions. Existentialist theories place greater value on the actor, but that actor is meant to determine moral right for herself; following another person’s example would only undermine whatever rational struggle the existentialist has undergone. In virtue ethics, however, the role model takes on unmatched importance.

In my own dealings with virtue ethics, I find it helpful to bear in mind the work of biological taxonomy. After all, the moral theory is most clearly associated with Aristotle (4), and Plato’s star pupil is often (inappropriately) blamed for what many evolutionary biologists see as an archaic practice (5). In classifying organisms into species, taxonomists first identify a type specimen which is meant to serve as a sort of standard against which other organisms are measured; those deemed sufficiently similar to the type specimen are then considered members of the same species. Virtue ethics defines virtues relative to types. This is why the virtue ethicist’s choice of role model is so vitally important. According to the theory, a person is judged as good or bad by their similarity to or dissimilarity from a standard role model.

The question at hand, then, is whether Superman or Batman — the moral saint or the moral human — serves as the better moral type specimen. Nobody’s perfect, so it can’t be the moral saint, or else none of us will ever measure up. Batman it is! Atomic batteries to power; turbines to speed!

Before we go and start practicing our best emphysema-addled voices, however, let’s pause to take stock of what it means to say that “nobody’s perfect.” We all accept it as a truism. But is it an explanation or an excuse?

In everyday discourse, we tend to see the difference between explanations and excuses as purely semantic. If I’m late for an appointment, for example, and say that the reason for my being late was a badly delayed train, your inclination to accept that reason as an explanation or to accuse me of using it as an excuse will depend largely on how charitable you are. Still: the difference is there. Appropriately enough, it has to do with moral content.

Strictly speaking, explanations are devoid of any moral content. If I offer the delayed train as an explanation of my being late, then I’m not asking for any judgment one way or another. I’m merely detailing the cause of my lateness, and any moral content — praise or (more likely) blame — is added by others (you might say, for example, that I should have left earlier and deserve blame for that, and my explanation doesn’t militate against that). But if I offer the delayed train as an excuse of my being late, then I am asking for judgment of a sort. I am saying, in effect, that the delayed train is the cause of my being late, and that because of this fact I should be absolved from moral responsibility for the result.

The bottom line: excuses pardon actors from responsibility; explanations do not.

Meanwhile, back in Gotham City...

If we accept Batman as an appropriate role model — that is, as a standard of virtue — then the fact that no human is actually a moral saint excuses us all from trying to attain that higher standard of moral perfection. Since the purpose of a role model is to set a standard against which we judge ourselves, an imperfect role model (such as Batman) make imperfection exemplary. If I occasionally have lapses of judgment, or sometimes act selfishly, then that’s okay; in fact, since I ought to imitate Batman — who has similar lapses himself — then I’d be doing something wrong if I wasn’t imperfect to some degree (i.e., the degree to which Batman is imperfect). Using Batman as a role model therefore treats “nobody’s perfect” as an excuse: I failed to be a moral saint, but our moral standard isn’t a moral saint, so I shouldn’t bear any responsibility for my shortcoming.

Maybe this sounds hopelessly confusing. If it does, that would be because it is. (Go figure.)

The argument that Superman isn’t a good role model because he’s too perfect is very simply self-contradictory in the only moral context wherein role models mean anything. In virtue theory, the role model sets a standard that should be imitated by all other members of the same kind. That would mean that any role model is by definition a moral saint: the role model sets the standard for morality. Virtue theoretical role models are for all practical purposes perfect.

Batman is certainly a more tempting role model because his is an attainable standard, and many of our sins would be forgiven if the bar for moral perfection were lowered to a more human level. Everyone can be a saint when saints are made human (6).

But there’s something to be said for a standard of moral perfection sufficiently high that reaching it is a practical impossibility. After all, what’s left to do once one attains moral perfection? Does she hang up her tights, lock up the Batmobile, and call it a day? That seems anti-climactic (7).

Indeed, one of the primary points that Aristotle makes in his exposition of virtue ethics is that the quest for truth and justice is a never-ending one. As he wrote in the Nicomachean Ethics: attainment of moral perfection requires “a complete life. For one swallow does not make a summer, nor does one fine day; and so too one day, or any short period of time, does not make a man blessed and happy.” The good life is incomplete as long as it’s being lived.

At no point in our lives should we ever stop trying to be better people. That nobody is perfect should therefore only ever be an explanation, and never an excuse: I’m not a moral saint for such-and-such a reason, I may deserve some level of blame for falling short, and so I’ll pick myself up and try again. This is what the adoption of Superman as a role represents: a moral standard to pursue throughout one’s life, with the hope that one has come as close as one can despite the knowledge that one will never quite get there.

Look: I don’t want to denigrate the Batmen of my arbitrary dichotomy too much; after all, there are worse choices for a role model (see note 7). But, like Kant, I am continually filled with wonder by the starry heavens above and the moral law within, and to be a Superman is to bring the one closer to the other.

Notes

(1) Apologies to Parmenides, who was either trivially right or empirically wrong (the worst kind of wrong!), but fun to read in either event.

(2) Words are ephemeral, weightless; it’s due to that fact alone that our shared information network hasn’t collapsed under the weight of the commentary that followed the shooting in Aurora (and, to a disgracefully lesser extent, the one in Milwaukee). In light of the cultural context in which the Aurora shooting took place it may be tempting to read this essay as an attempt to pile on. I did originally intend to publish this essay in coincidence with the release of “The Dark Knight Rises,” but decided to delay after the tragedy. This essay is meant to be my final word on a debate that I’ve been having with fellow comic book enthusiasts for decades now; there’s nothing I can say about the recent spate of mass shootings that hasn’t already been said by thinkers more and less competent than myself.

(3) I recognize that there are those among you who have no truck with discussions of moral obligation or any ethics broader than cultural etiquette. There are others among you who think that all philosophical questions were settled by Sam Harris when he conveniently skipped the past three centuries of philosophical progress. To those of you in both camps, I say: thanks for reading this far, and no hard feelings, but your blood pressure would benefit immensely if we parted ways here, and I’d certainly recommend reading that last link.

(4) Apologies to modern virtue ethicists such as Philippa Foot, Rosalind Hursthouse, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Martha Nussbaum, but it’s not as if any of them would deny that they’re carrying Aristotle’s torch.

(5) Sources that fancy themselves more enlightened will forgive Aristotle his purported sins against theoretical progress and blame Carl von Linné (aka Carolus Linnaeus) instead for what is known as typological essentialism. Those sources are wrong. Taxonomy’s intrinsic type-essentialism is most directly due to the influence of Hugh Edwin Strickland, a staunch typological creationist whose rules of biological nomenclature were adopted by the British Science Association in 1842.

(6) I was raised Catholic, so I know how that line would seem nonsensical to someone who believes in saints, but let’s not go there today.

(7) It also seems to be Spider-man’s solution to every single problem. I’m not a fan.

Surprise! Naturalistic metaphysics undermines naive determinism, part I

by Massimo Pigliucci

Throughout last semester several students at CUNY’s Graduate Center, a colleague, and I have spent some time navigating the complexities of James Ladyman and Don Ross’s Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized (which also contains essays co-authored by David Spurrett and John Collier). The book is not for the faint of heart, but it has given me much food for thought, which Julia and I will soon explore further in a forthcoming episode of the Rationally Speaking podcast featuring Ladyman as a guest (I should also add that James contributed to an edited collection on the philosophy of pseudoscience that I just finished putting together with the help of Maarten Boudry which will be published next year by the University of Chicago Press).

I must admit that the title of the first chapter — “In defense of scientism” — did not dispose me well toward the book. I think the term scientism ought to be reserved for what it has traditionally indicated, an unwarranted over reliance on science (yes, there is such a thing), or the thoughtless application of science where it doesn’t belong (ditto), and it pisses me off to no end when philosophers actually use it as a positive term (as, most egregiously, in Alex Rosenberg’s so-called Atheist’s Guide to Reality). However, I got past the initial annoyance, and started to appreciate the (complex) arguments made by Ladyman, Ross and their occasional co-writers. Indeed, by the end of the book it turns out that Every Thing Must Go is, among other things, a pretty good argument against the sort of scientism that worries me, and in particular against the nowadays very popular physical reductionism espoused by the likes of Rosenberg, Harris & co. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Before we get to the heart of the matter there are two background issues within which Everything Must Go (henceforth ETMG) needs to be understood: one is the post-positivism return of a metaphysics increasingly decoupled from physics (and science more broadly), the other is the debate among philosophers of science concerning realism and anti-realism when it comes to interpreting scientific theorizing.

Background, 1: metaphysics and naturalism. Metaphysics, of course, is one of the traditional branches of philosophy, taking its name from the fact that Aristotle’s work on the subject was traditionally catalogued after (“meta”) his stuff on physics. The scope of metaphysics is nothing less than an understanding of the nature of the world, an objective increasingly shared with the sciences, particularly physics. And that, of course, is where the trouble started. David Hume famously advanced the notion that books that do not present empirical evidence or mathematical reasoning are, shall we say, not terribly useful, and the resulting “Hume Fork” has often been seen as a direct attack on traditional metaphysics. Here are the crucial quotes from his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding:

“All the objects of human reason or enquiry may naturally be divided into two kinds, to wit, Relations of Ideas, and Matters of Fact. Of the first kind are the sciences of Geometry, Algebra, and Arithmetic ... [which are] discoverable by the mere operation of thought ... Matters of fact, which are the second object of human reason, are not ascertained in the same manner; nor is our evidence of their truth, however great, of a like nature with the foregoing. ... 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.”

Ouch. During the 20th century, a frontal attack on metaphysics was carried out by the logical positivists, a movement linked to the so-called Vienna Circle of thinkers (most prominently featuring Rudolf Carnap). Famously, positivists thought that metaphysics isn’t even wrong, it’s just meaningless, in part because it fails their famous verifiability criterion, the idea that a statement is meaningful only if there is a way to determine its truth.

While it is often said that logical positivism fell victim of its own verifiability criterion (which is not itself verifiable), that’s a bit too simplistic. What happened was that a series of thoughtful and in-depth critiques (by the likes, for instance, of Karl Popper, Hilary Putnam, Willard Van Orman Quine  and Thomas Kuhn) increasingly and convincingly showed the inadequacy of the positivist stance.

That’s where Ladyman and Ross come in. They actually label their position “neo-positivism” (a bold choice, in modern philosophical circles) and set it straight against currently going analytical metaphysics, which they provocatively label (with a nudge to Hume) “neo-scholasticism.” For Ladyman and Ross there simply isn’t going to be any metaphysics without taking on board all of science, and particularly physics. Indeed, they redefine the very goal of the metaphysician as that of making coherent sense of the various pictures of the world emerging from physics and the so-called special sciences (the latter referring to everything but physics, from chemistry and biology to psychology and economics). By the end of ETMG they had me pretty much convinced on this point, with one caveat: for them a coherent picture of science can emerge solely from a unification of the sciences, while I am content with coherentism, whether it comes about by unification or by recognizing and characterizing what John Dupré has famously referred to as the “disunity of science.” (Turns out, in my opinion, I think Ladyman and Ross’s own conclusions point more toward a mild form of disunity  than toward unity, and unity is most certainly not going to be achieved, according to them, by way of simple reduction of the special sciences to physics. More on this in the next post.)

Background, 2: realism vs anti-realism in philosophy of science. The second bit of background necessary to appreciate ETMG has to do with a fascinating debate that has unfolded in philosophy of science over the last several years, between so-called realists and anti-realists (more recently referred to, somewhat confusingly, as empiricists).

To put it very briefly, a realist is someone who thinks that scientific theories aim at describing the world as it is (of course, within the limits of human epistemic access to reality), while an anti-realist is someone who takes scientific theories to aim at empirical adequacy, not truth. So, for instance, for a realist there truly are electrons out there, while for an anti-realist “electrons” are a convenient theoretical construct to make sense of certain kinds of data from fundamental physics, but the term need not refer to actual “particles.” It goes without saying that most scientists are realists, but not all. Interestingly, some physicists working on quantum mechanics belong to what is informally known as the “shut up and calculate” school, which eschews “interpretations” of quantum mechanics in favor of a pragmatic deployment of the theory to solve computational problems.

There are several interesting arguments for and against both positions, so much so that I have often found myself standing on neutral ground in this regard, until a third option gradually shaped up, an option that we will take up next time, because it is the one actually defended by Ladyman and Ross, and which provides much of the philosophical structure in ETMG.

Perhaps the two best arguments in favor of anti-realism are the underdetermination of theory by the data and the pessimistic meta-induction. The first one says that the empirical evidence available at any given time will always under-determine (i.e., will not be able to completely discriminate between) alternative theories. Perhaps the best way to picture this is to plot some points on a standard X-Y axis and then fit a curve to them. If you think of the points as data and of the curve as the theory explaining them, you will immediately realize that there is literally an infinite number of curves that can equally well fit the data: the points under-determine the curve. But, you say, surely by adding new data I will eliminate many of those other curves from competition, thus approaching the “true” function. You will, but the new set of data is still going to be fit adequately by an infinity of “theories,” and so on. Okay, the next line of defense for the realist is to do what scientists often do and invoke criteria like simplicity and elegance to choose among the available curves (some of which will be horribly complicated). Yes, we can go that route, but now we are introducing extra-empirical, indeed downright aesthetic, criteria. Which is fine, but not something you can justify on scientific grounds (pragmatic considerations do help — but that is the point of the anti-realist: that science is after what works, not what is true!). Incidentally, the current debate over string theory — which comes with a “landscape” of 10 to the 500 different configurations! — may be a spectacular confirmation of underdetermination.

The second argument in favor of anti-realism is the pessimistic meta-induction. This is the idea that all past scientific theories have eventually been discarded as wrong or flawed in some significant way. Applying inductive reasoning to future scientific theories based on such past experience, it seems that there is no basis on which to argue that currently accepted theories have any better chance of being true.* The standard counter to this objection is that successive scientific theories approximate the truth better and better, but even this faces problems: first, without access to a “God’s eye view” of Truth, how can we tell? Second, there are pretty convincing examples of theories that represent radical rethinking on the part of scientists, not just incremental improvements (think of Ptolemy to Copernicus, of course, but also of the conception of space and time in Newton vs Einstein).

The best argument in favor of scientific realism is known as the “no miracles” argument, according to which it would be nothing short of miraculous if scientific theories did not track the world as it actually is, however imperfectly, and still managed to return such impressive payoffs, like, you know, the ability to actually send a space probe to Mars. Even so, the anti-realist can reply, we know of scientific theories that are wrong in a deep sense and yet manage to be empirically adequate, Newtonian mechanics perhaps being the prime example.

The above is just a very brief sketch of the debate between realism and anti-realism in philosophy of science, as people on both sides have come up with a fascinating series of moves and counter-moves in logical space throughout the past decades. A good summary of it can be found in Ladyman’s textbook in philosophy of science, for readers interested in digging in a little deeper. All in all I do agree with Ladyman that the realist position seems to have the upper hand, but only slightly so, and taking seriously the anti-realists provides a refreshing bath in epistemic humility.

Next time: the third option, the advent of naturalistic metaphysics, and the surprising consequences all of this may have for the way you see the world...

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* I talked about the pessimistic meta-induction at TAM a couple of years ago, and Richard Dawkins approached me afterwards to let me know that — clearly — the Darwinian theory is the obvious exception to the meta-induction, thus displaying a surprising amount of ignorance of both the history of biology and the current status of evolutionary theory. Cue the onslaught of incensed comments by his supporters...