Cops, the CIA, and Russia versus Ukraine

Welcome friends!

Lot’s of things going on right now that really deserve some comment such as the newly ascendent Republican Party’s attempt to do away with regulations on their Wall Street patrons and those anti-Islamization marches in Germany and the funny reactions to them in the media.  However, since this is my last post for 2014 I thought I’d take a little time out and look at some current events I’ve been avoiding mentioning not because I don’t think they’re important but because they don’t seem to involve the sort of conceptual confusion I’m driven to sort out.  In other words, I’m just not sure I have much to add to the conversation.  But that’s never really stopped me before, has it?  So let’s make a clean sweep of it.

How about those recent instances of the US police using deadly force in questionable circumstances generally involving our swarthier compatriots?  Let me start with a few rather obvious observations if I may and then proceed on to what I consider a more dubious line of discussion.

First, it seems to me pretty clear to me that we may have to revisit how we train our police force.  Policing is a tricky and dangerous business at the best of times but particularly so here in the US where an alarming number of people carry guns about and where even those who can’t manage to pass our laughably inadequate background checks for buying guns can easily pick one up whenever they like by simply breaking into any house on the block and taking one.  The police response to this quasi-militarized state of affairs has been to adopt a doctrine of overwhelming force (or shock and awe lite I suppose might be a good way to think about it).  This doctrine postulates that the best way to keep things under control during any sort of potentially violent confrontation is to watch for any hint of a problem and if any such hint is forthcoming to apply sufficient force to end the situation quickly before things get out of hand.  The theory sounds reasonable on paper but I’m not so sure about the practice.  The problem of course is that when we train people to act like this we run the risk that we may get some small percentage of disproportionate responses.  Someone looks sideways at a cop and end up getting dragged to the pavement and strangled.  I appreciate of course that if one’s ethics run strictly along consequentialist lines might argue one cannot really evaluate this sort of thing without looking at the other side of the equation: how many unnecessary fatalities has this hair trigger response policy prevented?  However, I guess I don’t feel that does it for me.  I can’t help but feel there’s some question of duty involved as well.  It seems to me the police are there to protect and serve and when they arrive at a disturbance and make a bad situation much worse by killing someone unnecessarily that’s just a rather significant problem for me.  I understand they may feel they were just trying to do their job and sometimes accidents happen but that’s where I suspect we may part company because I think a big part of their job is avoiding those sorts of accidents.  Police work is not just a matter of rushing in and trying to resolve a situation any old way and letting the chips fall where they may.  I suppose the implication is that I feel we should accept the risk of things sometimes getting out of hand in order to avoid situations where cops unintentionally end up playing the role of the out of control aggressor even if that leads to some innocent people getting killed from bad guys that the police have failed to neutralize in a timely fashion.  I know, that’s a tough one but there you have it.

Second, I think we really need some accountability when police screw up, which they are liable to do no matter what sort of policies or training we may have in place.  This is a serious business.  It’s one thing to argue the police didn’t intend to kill anyone so it’s not really murder it’s just something unfortunate that happened during a violent altercation.  It’s something else entirely to say that being involved in this type of unfortunate event is professionally acceptable for a police officer.  To me a member of the police force killing an unarmed civilian is like a commercial airline pilot flying his plane into a mountain or a cruise ship captain running his ship onto a reef.  Never mind the issue of criminal charges, can we at least agree that the police officers involved in these incidents should be invited to find more suitable employment?  Something requiring a little less judgment?  People rely on the police for protection from thugs and murders.  How can one rely on them if one suspects they might accidentally kill someone themselves?

Third, of course if there are grounds for suspecting criminal negligence or even worse intentional murder we need someone like the FBI to get in there right away, investigate the hell out of it, and either bring charges or give us some confidence that no one on the police force has gotten away with anything.  Again, we all need to have confidence in our police force.  

Now let me take a quick look at what I described previously as a somewhat more dubious suggestion, which is that racism is a significant component of this issue.  I’m sure the statistics will show that most of the unarmed people being killed by police are “black” as we say here in the US.  However, I think what’s much less obvious is what that signifies.  The unfortunate fact of the matter is that for one reason or another a disproportionate share of the violent criminals in our country also fall into this category so one would naturally expect them to account for a disproportionate share of people involved in violent confrontations with police.  On the other hand, although I don’t feel we have anywhere near as much overt racism about as there was when I was young, I think one must admit we do have a historical legacy of racism that has probably survived in local pockets here and there.  Even when we don’t have actual racism we may very well have the related phenomenon that I’ve referred to in earlier posts as “culturalism,” which of course can be highly correlated with race in many places.  Obviously, whenever you have the police coming from one cultural background and the people being policed from another you run the risk of all sorts of strange things happening.  It’s not just the issue that some police officers may come to believe that people from certain cultures or backgrounds are more likely to be involved in criminal activity and thus be tempted to treat them differently consciously or otherwise.  It can also involve more mundane factors like people from different cultures interpreting behaviors differently so for example where one culture sees a dignified response to arbitrary authority another culture may see a suspicious lack of compliance with a reasonable request.  I guess the most I’d be willing to say about this particular issue right now is that someone should be looking into it and trying to ensure the police treat everyone properly.  The US is a multiracial and multicultural society and we simply cannot afford to tolerate any nonsense along those lines.

Not much of an analysis?  Well, that’s what I’m talking about.  That’s why I didn’t do a post on it.  So let’s move on.  How about the recent report about the CIA torturing people?  Another big issue but again I’m not sure I have anything useful to add to the discussion.  Actually I thought we had put this torturing people for information business behind us sometime around the start of the eighteenth century when we determined it generally results in the tortured party either making things up or telling people what they think people want to hear.  Of course if torture doesn’t get you any reliable information there’s little point to getting into the thorny ethics of the matter.  I guess one might still want to talk about torture in non-informational contexts.  For example, one could get into the issue of whether it’s morally preferable to punish people for legal transgressions with some brief torture like getting walloped a few times with a whip versus an extended time out in prison, which tends to be our cultural preference, but that’s not really what we’re talking about here.  Anyway, to get back to the issue at hand, this notion of torturing people for information, it turns out the issue was apparently not consigned to oblivion many centuries ago as I thought; no, the CIA believes right now that torturing people is an effective way to get information.  They’ve apparently said as much to the US Congress in official testimony.  Damn.  I guess we’re going to have to do this the long way.

As far as the ethics of torturing people for information goes it seems to me we’ve got all kinds of things going on. One rather well known strand is the potential conflict between consequentialist and deontological (that would be duty based) ethical thinking relating to this issue.  A consequentialist may say of course it’s unfortunate that we would ever need to torture anyone but if doing so resulted in information that allowed us to prevent two other people from being tortured or killed or whatever then we’d still be coming out ahead in some sense.  The duty based argument would run more along the lines that it’s just wrong to torture people for information and it’s better to hold onto your ethical beliefs and let the chips fall where they may, including on top of other people, if the alternative is to sell your soul to the Devil to get all allegorical about it.  I don’t know the answer to that one.  Sounds complicated.  I probably lean toward the duty based approach myself because I just can’t help but feel if one gets too consequentialist one might end up engaging in all manner of questionable behaviors.  However, I also suppose there are other things going on.

Two other potentially relevant issues to me are that not all torture is equal and not all information is equally important so we probably have a lot of room for discussion relating to those issues.  Are we talking about torturing people in the sense that they’re uncomfortable at the moment but fine again later (including being fine in the head of course)?  That might still be unacceptable but it seems somehow less bad than if we were talking about permanent injuries or psychological scars.  As far as information goes I would think the potential value of the information might have some sort of significance.  Can we get the information some other way?  Do people’s lives depend on it?

Another potentially relevant issue to me involves the characteristics of the victim.  If one really feels someone is withholding information that would help one prevent someone else being tortured or killed then that person isn’t really what anyone could reasonably call an innocent victim.  He or she would be complicit in some way in the torture or death that one is trying to get information to stop or avoid.  The implication that these people are guilty of something to some degree raises the issue of whether we’re able to maintain the conceptual distinction between torturing people for information and torturing people as punishment.  Is it more acceptable to torture someone for information if that person arguably deserves to be tortured because he or use is complicit in the torture or death of someone else?  If that’s the case then it seems to me there’s a lot riding on the degree of confidence one has that the person actually has the information in question and is holding out on one in the manner I just suggested.  So what about the case where one thinks someone might or might not have the information?  Where does one draw the line?

Listening to former Vice President Dick Cheney’s views on the matter really brought these issues home to me.  He was in the media recently spouting off about how he was more concerned about guilty detainees getting released to fight again than about detaining (and implicitly torturing) “a few that in fact were innocent.”  That pretty much turns on its head the so-called Blackstone’s Formulation, which proposes we should prefer ten guilty people to escape than for one innocent person to suffer.  Never heard of the principle?  Well, neither did I.  However, apparently it’s a principle that people who know about such things consider a bedrock of Western jurisprudence and that has been cited a number of times by the US Supreme Court.  And we’re not talking about an academic dispute here.  Innocent people are definitely involved.  The CIA torture report estimated that up to the twenty-five percent of the people we’re talking about may have been captured as a result of mistaken identity and one such fellow, Gul Rahman, actually died under torture.  One can’t help but wonder whether Mr. Cheney’s cavalier attitude toward apparently innocent victims like Mr. Rahman has to do with the fact that they are foreigners from the Middle East.  One suspects Mr. Cheney might revise his moral views if the innocent person being detained, tortured, and possibly accidentally killed were someone more like Mr. Cheney himself.

Well, I certainly can’t resolve anything right now.  My point is simply that this is a hugely complicated issue that needs some serious social debate.  Too bad we mostly tend to get sensationalism and political grandstanding.  We all know torture is wrong in some vague general sense but during an emergency when lives are at stake we somehow all contrive to be looking the other way although we sure raise a ruckus later on, don’t we?

Enough of that.  It’s giving me the creeps.  How about Ukraine?  Hey, I have no idea!  Sorry.  Obviously I feel countries should respect one another’s borders but on the other hand as a historically and geographically challenged American I have no confidence at all that I understand any of the considerations that play into this conflict.  I must admit I always thought Ukraine was a region of Russia but I suppose that’s because when I was growing up we tended to equate the entire USSR with Russia.  But still; Kiev isn’t Russian?  It’s in a different country where they speak their own language?  Seems strange.  Are we talking about real countries with real borders that have some sort of historical or intrinsic significance or did someone just make them up a few years ago?  As you can see I’m still struggling with the basic facts of the matter so you can forget about me thinking through any thorny territorial disputes.

Nevertheless, let me just review what I’ve gleaned from my rather casual attempt to keep abreast of the issue thus far.  We went from the USSR to Russia and Ukraine (and lots of other countries) but we somehow ended up with a bunch of ethnic Russians living in eastern Ukraine and some important Russian military installations being located in Ukraine, then we had some political turmoil resulting in the hasty and possibly legally questionable departure of Ukraine’s pro-Russian leader, then we may or may not have had ultranationalist Ukrainians telling the ethnic Russians to get the hell out, then we had the Russian Ukrainians (?) deciding they wanted to carve out their own little country or territory or whatever it is, then we had the Russian military trying to help them out but not wanting to admit as much of course, then someone shot down a commercial airplane, then ... OK, I have to stop; I’m getting one of my headaches again.  Look, I like Ukraine well enough given that I don’t know anything about the place and I’m trying to like Russia as well although they sure don’t make it easy, do they?  (And not just on this issue.)  I wonder, is to much to ask that they get together and come up with some solution that doesn’t involve embroiling the world once again in some ridiculous decades long territorial dispute?  It’s just too damned far away for America to sort it out and one shudders to think of the Europeans trying to sort out anything at all.  How about this?  Russia: remove your military, stop arming the separatists, and respect Ukraine’s borders.  Ukraine: create some effective protections or political institutions for your ethnic Russian population and make a deal with Russia so it can keep its naval installation or oil deal or whatever the hell it is they’re so agitated about.  We’re past that already?  Fine.  Just do it the old fashioned way and shoot one another.

Time for one more?  How about ISIS?   They sound like a bunch of murderous thugs to me but of course they’re not the first group of murderous thugs to come out of that part of the world.  I suppose if people in the region want some help fighting them we probably have a moral responsibility to help them out.  But we can’t sort out everyone on our own, can we?  I wish we could but there’s just not enough money and time in the world to do that.

Well, that’s my annual end of the year rubbage sale of unhelpful commentary on random news of the day.  Hmm, maybe I should end on a positive note.  How about the Nobel Peace Price going to Mala Yousafzai of Pakistan for her work getting local women some access to education and to Kailash Satyarthi of India for his work relating to child labor.  So gratifying to hear about someone trying to do something positive in that part of the world.  I salute you both!

That’s it for me for this year.  See you in the next.

References

Anthony Zurcher.  Cheney: ‘No problem’ with detaining innocents.  BBC.  December 15, 2014.  http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-30485999.

Greg Botelho.  Malala, Satyarthi accept Nobel Peace Prize, press children's rights fight.  CNN.  December 10, 2014.  http://www.cnn.com/2014/12/10/world/asia/nobel-peace-prize-awarded/index.html?hpt=hp_t2.

Merry Christmas 2014

Welcome friends!

It was a dark and stormy night.  Well, dark and cold anyway.  Yes, the winter solstice is upon us once again and that can only mean one thing: spring must surely follow.  Winter first of course.  But when the days begin to grow longer flowers and bunny rabbits are sure to arrive sooner or later.  Always a nice feeling, right?  Anyway, I’d like to take this opportunity to wish you all a very happy Yuletide season or as I guess they say now Christmas.

Yes, Christmas.  Such a complicated time for adults of a certain age and even more so for adults of a certain age who are humanists... Sorry but only selected archived (previous year) posts are currently available full text on this website.  All posts including this one are available in my annual anthology ebook series available at the Amazon Kindle Bookstore for a nominal fee.  Hey, we all need to make a buck somehow, right?  If you find my timeless jewels of wisdom amusing or perhaps even amusingly irritating throw me a bone now and then.  Thank you my friends!

Moral Relativism Revisited

Welcome friends!

I know last time I declared my intention to play the conservative game of ranting and raving until I feel faint and then swooning onto a divan but it’s just so damned boring I don’t think I can keep it up.  OMG!  I must think!  As a sort of remedial treatment I thought I might spend a few moments this time dabbling in something a bit more philosophical so I’ve decided to revisit the idea of ethical relativism.  It’s all related.  Aren’t social conservatives always banging on about moral relativism?  It’s not like I’m taking a week off to fly down to Mexico and drink myself into a stupor or anything like that.

So the other day I found myself leafing through a mildly entertaining little book entitled Fifty Philosophy Ideas You Really Need to Know by Ben Dupre, who from the biographical blurb appears to be a reasonably well educated guy but alas not a professional philosopher, and all the little two and three page summaries were going pretty much as I expected until I got to the entry on ethical relativism with the less than entirely obvious chapter title One Man’s Meat..., which I thought I had read previously on a website that shall go unnamed but which turned out to be something quite different.  Now ever since taking Philosophy 101 never mind how many years ago I’ve considered myself very much your typical ethical relativist so I assumed I knew where we were headed.  Wrong!  Turns out when some people talk about ethical relativism they have in mind something very different from what I have in mind.  If you’ve read my blog at all you’ll understand I couldn’t resist trying to straighten the issue out at least in my own mind.  I just don’t like confusion, especially involving words.  Makes it so difficult to know what one is even talking about.

First, let me just review moral relativism in the sense I understand it.  To me, the distinctive thing about ethics, the feature that makes it such a perennially interesting topic of conversation, is that there is no objective or shall we say scientific way to demonstrate the correctness of moral propositions.  In some cases one may be able to derive certain propositions from other propositions using logic, which I suppose would be objective.  However, that only gets one so far.  Like any logical system one has to start somewhere.  In the case of ethics I think if you go back far enough you’ll eventually arrive at some sort of fundamental proposition or set of propositions you feel just must be right.  Like many other people I believe that feeling derives from a sort of ethical intuition or emotion I believe some philosophers call one’s moral sense.  But if someone disagrees with you at that level you’re basically screwed in terms of your ability to engage them intellectually.  Let’s say you’ve worked your way back to a statement like, I don’t know, it’s wrong to kill someone for absolutely no reason whatsoever.  You may think you must have hit bedrock with this one and you’re preparing to work your way back up to some point of contention when the sociopath in the back of the room pipes up and says oh no I disagree, I think it’s perfectly fine to kill people for no reason whatsoever.  So awkward when that happens.  You’d really like to tell whoever it is to put a sock in it, right?  Hey buddy!  You’re wrong!  End of story!  Unfortunately, there’s no mutually accessible logical proposition or sensory data that can demonstrate to the person he or she is wrong in any sort of objective way that person would feel bound to accept.  You can try to work your way back further still of course maybe to something like mankind is a social animal in the hope that maybe the sociopath arrived at his or her annoying conclusion through some flawed bit of logic but my point is there’s no guarantee you’ll ever get to a point on which you can both agree.  Hence the relativism.

Now let’s think about how Mr. Dupre presented moral relativism in his little summary article.  He explained the relativism bit, which seemed fine, but he then continued on to associate moral relativism with the proposition that one cannot judge the morality of other people.  Because it’s all relative you see.  Thus, the way it was presented in this article moral relativism can be associated with a sort of flabby anything goes outlook on ethical issues (or to put it in a somewhat more flattering light a more open minded outlook on ethical issues than would otherwise be the case).

It was at this point my finely tuned intellect detected something was amiss.  Although I endorse the idea of ethical relativism I certainly don’t feel myself to be any more open minded about ethical matters than the next guy.  Not by a long shot.  If you’re doing something I think is immoral I’ll be happy to let you know about it.  I do it all the time.  I don’t necessarily expect anyone to obey my ethical dictates or whatever but I’m ready to talk it to death, that’s for sure.  Indeed, I think my readiness to engage people on ethical matters has led some people to describe me from time to time as a bit of what we call in this country a hard ass.  So what’s going on here?  Am I not understanding something important about ethical relativism?

Well, after a refreshing beverage or two and a few brief moments of consternation I determined the crux of the problem here must involve this notion one can start out with moral beliefs about something, read a bit of philosophy about how there is no objective interpersonally valid basis for determining what is moral, and end up being agnostic about whatever it was that you formerly had an opinion about.  I mean, just how is something like that meant to happen?  Well, I think the key to understanding why this story makes sense to some people is you have to imagine the protagonist is an ethical absolutist who supports the proposition that unless one can demonstrate one’s moral beliefs are objective and interpersonally valid in a way that is not relative to any particular person then one should give up those beliefs and get all flabby and anything goes on everyone.  That particular proposition is in no way inherent in moral relativism itself.

I think a good way to see what’s going on here is to take another concept that is defined relative to a particular person like taste for example.  Now I may think some food tastes good and you may not.  I don’t really have a way to demonstrate to you that whatever it is actually tastes good in some interpersonally valid way thus disproving your claim it tastes bad to you.  It’s not that kind of proposition.  I’m not even sure it makes sense to talk like that.  It’s not the normal way of using the word is it?  When we talk about something tasting good we mean relative to the particular person or group of people doing the tasting whether we say so or not.  It would be a pretty peculiar sort of statement indeed to claim something really tastes good to someone (as a member of the group of people bound to acknowledge the postulated objective way of determining what tastes good) even though that person is busy spitting it out in disgust.  However, and this is my main point, recognizing the relativistic dimension of what we mean by taste does not require one to become agnostic about how food tastes.  That’s ridiculous.  Either the food tastes good to me or it doesn’t.

It’s the same thing with ethics.  The fact I cannot find an objective basis for proving the superiority of my moral sentiments does not require me to become agnostic about those sentiments or about ethical matters in general.  I’m a person like anyone else and I have moral beliefs based on my moral sentiments and I can use logic to reason my way to other ethical propositions that might not otherwise be obvious.  So some things will appear moral to me and some things will not.  And we can talk about it.  Indeed, to take the argument a step further one’s ethical beliefs about what one ought to do if one determines other people are acting unethically don’t seem to me to be involved in any way.  An ethical relativist might subscribe to an anything goes sort of approach to other people acting unethically or a confrontational I’m not putting up with anything no matter how trivial sort of approach.  That’s a matter one needs to work out within the context of one’s own moral belief system.  We still have to get in there and discuss when it makes sense to talk and when it makes sense to start interfering with the behavior of other people.  It doesn’t just fall out of moral relativism.  That why I do so much talking about the liberal ethos and the significance of distinguishing activity one may believe is unethical and one wouldn’t do oneself but doesn’t involve having a significant effect on other people and therefore properly resides in the realm of personal liberty from activity that shares the former characteristic but also affects other people in a significant way thus creating an interpersonal conflict that may require one to take a more active role.

To summarize, I think the basic problem with the presentation of moral relativism in the little book I was reading is it viewed ethical relativism through the lens of an ethical absolutist and of course found it lacking.  What the discussion highlighted for me is not so much a problem with moral relativism as a problem with moral absolutism, which is that it puts unrealistic epistemological requirements on ethical propositions.  The only way to get where one needs to go under the moral absolutist perspective is to make something up, that is to declare something factually true because you believe it or would like it to be so.  That type of thinking presumably underlies the social conservative argument that religions are necessary for human society because only religions can provide a suitably objective basis on which to rest one’s absolutist ethical beliefs, the only alternative to which they believe is a flabby anything goes moral agnosticism.  Talk about getting one’s cart before one’s horse!  Hello!  Religion must be true because we think we need it to be true?  Hey, I think I need a glass of beer right about now but that doesn’t mean I’m justified in believing I have one in my hand.  But as I’ve pointed out before I suppose this must be why so many social conservatives get so agitated over seemingly inconsequential transgressions of their ethical codes.  The way conservatives see it denying the objective correctness of any part of their code throws the entire foundation of ethical behavior into question.  With conservatives it’s all about The Word.  Cut your hair incorrectly today and what’s next?  Murdering your neighbor and eating his brain?  Because for social conservatives those are the only alternatives: accept some code word for word as originally carved on a stone somewhere in the Middle East most likely or become a wild man with no ethical beliefs whatsoever.

So much less confusing to just appreciate ethical beliefs for what they really are, isn’t it?  Easier to discuss and hash out ethical differences where possible.  Less room for bullying and head chopping.  No need to pit one religion against another in a fight for global supremacy.  No need to make things up.  And we can all still fight for what we think is right.  So are we agreed?  Moral relativism yes.  Flabby anything goes moral agnosticism no.  Thank goodness for that.  Now maybe we can all start talking about ethical issues in a way that actually makes sense.  Wouldn’t that be a breath of fresh air?

Republicans Ascendant

Welcome friends!

Well, we’ve gotten another election out of the way here in the US.  This one was a particularly ugly and disheartening one for liberals and humanists alike as Americans handed control of the US Congress back to the social and economic conservatives of the Republican Party.  In honor of the inauspicious occasion I thought I might take a moment to assess where we are and what it all means.  Two questions spring to mind: What might we expect to see from the Republicans in the next couple of years?  What does the Republican victory tell us about the likely future tenor of politics here in the US over the next few years?

With respect to the first question I think it makes the most sense to look at the issues the Republicans have been doing the most talking about recently.  On that basis I suppose the primary objective of the new Republican Congress will be to get the US into an assuredly quite expensive and most likely rather dubious ground war in Syria.  .. Sorry but only selected archived (previous year) posts are currently available full text on this website.  All posts including this one are available in my annual anthology ebook series available at the Amazon Kindle Bookstore for a nominal fee.  Hey, we all need to make a buck somehow, right?  If you find my timeless jewels of wisdom amusing or perhaps even amusingly irritating throw me a bone now and then.  Thank you my friends!

Economic Conservatism Chinese Style

Welcome friends!

I thought this time out I might as well complete my thoughts from last week.  In case you can’t remember back that far or have chosen to forget, which would be entirely understandable, I was discussing how I spend most of my time fighting the good fight against the two headed monster of conservatism here in the US but I realize each head of our domestic monster has a foreign counterpart that’s both uglier and meaner.  Last time I talked about social conservatism in majority Muslim countries, which makes our own domestic social conservatism look like tiddlywinks.  This time I thought I might say a few words about the strident economic conservatism coming out of the authoritarian market state that is contemporary China, which I suppose in some ways must represent an alluring albeit as yet unattainable Shangri-La for economic conservatives here in the US.

I suppose if you’re a relative old timer like me and you haven’t been following the news very closely for the past several decades you may have a little trouble visualizing contemporary China... Sorry but only selected archived (previous year) posts are currently available full text on this website.  All posts including this one are available in my annual anthology ebook series available at the Amazon Kindle Bookstore for a nominal fee.  Hey, we all need to make a buck somehow, right?  If you find my timeless jewels of wisdom amusing or perhaps even amusingly irritating throw me a bone now and then.  Thank you my friends!

Social Conservatism Muslim Style

Welcome friends!

I was just thinking the other day how everything is relative.  Take conservatism for example.  I’m always railing against the two headed monster of conservatism that dwells here in the US.  But each head of our domestic monster has a corresponding foreign head that’s twice as ugly and twice as mean.  Of course, maybe it’s not an appropriate comparison.  I’m living here so I’m mostly concerned with the monster in my backyard.  People in other countries can do whatever they want as far as I’m concerned if only they remember to stay far, far away and not try to fly a plane into my house.  But maybe that’s unrealistic.  Trade, transportation, and communications have evolved to such an extent that I suppose in some ways we’re all basically living in the same great global village.  There’s a scary thought.  Maybe I do have to keep an eye on the two headed monster of foreign conservatism as well.  But I don’t like it.  No siree; I don’t like it one little bit.

Well, let’s take social conservatism first.  Now when I think of social conservatism run amok I tend to think mostly of conservatives in those predominantly Muslim countries in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East because they seem to me to exemplify a certain particularly virulent form of social conservatism that doesn’t mince words when it comes to opposing the liberal ethos that underlies our American way of life and the ways of life of many of our liberal comrades around the globe as well.  (The corresponding locus of foreign economic conservatism must be the authoritarian market state that China has become, but let’s do one thing at a time, shall we?)  If you think American conservatives are at odds with the liberal ethos you should check out an article I read the other day about the results of a survey someone took a few years ago of attitudes in the Muslim world.  A clash of civilizations you say?  Well, I don’t know anything about that.  It seems to me we’ve got plenty of conservatives right here who think along the same general lines as our bearded foreign friends.  And there are plenty of Muslims both here and abroad who don’t subscribe to the sort of rabid social conservatism that is the subject of my post today.  If you think my beef is with Islam you’re barking up the wrong tree buddy.  I’m talking about the historical struggle between liberals and humanists on one side and social conservatives on the other.   

The article in question covered so many interesting results; where to begin?  Well, here’s a funny one.  Many of those who responded to this survey supported the adoption of sharia (i.e. Islamic religious law).  At the same time many also claimed to support political democracy at least over the alternative of relying on a strong leader... Sorry but only selected archived (previous year) posts are currently available full text on this website.  All posts including this one are available in my annual anthology ebook series available at the Amazon Kindle Bookstore for a nominal fee.  Hey, we all need to make a buck somehow, right?  If you find my timeless jewels of wisdom amusing or perhaps even amusingly irritating throw me a bone now and then.  Thank you my friends!

The Surprising History of the Republican Party

Welcome friends!

I found myself in a bit of a quandary this week.  I thought at first I might do a little something on that conservative nut job who’s been running around the woods of rural Pennsylvania killing random police officers as part of his own personal war of liberation against the federal government of the US.  Personally I put a good deal of the blame on the Tea Party and its rabid anti-government rhetoric.  It’s probably asking a lot but could we please all try to put a little thought into what we say?  I know most conservative politicians and pundits are just saying whatever they can to stir people up, get themselves or their candidates elected, and shave a bit off their taxes or whatever, but do they know there are some awfully malleable and credulous people out there who take their hateful anti-government rants seriously?  It’s just so unfortunate and yet so damned predictable.  Now that I’m thinking about it I suppose it’s the domestic version of what must go in the Middle East every day.  Just as crazy talk by certain Muslim clerics inevitably leads various bearded hotheads and nut jobs to hide in the desert chopping the heads off little kids so crazy talk by the Tea Party here in the US leads various rural hotheads and nut jobs to hide in the woods shooting random police officers and federal employees.  Nobody intends this sort of thing to happen, of course, but everyone knows it will.  And how about someone murdering people who put their lives on the line every day trying to protect his sorry ass from violent jerks like, well, like himself for example?  You’d think they’d deserve some respect but I guess what comes to mind for these anti-government types is hiding in the shrubbery and shooting them in the back.  But hey, what can I say about that sort of thing that I haven’t already said a million times?  The Tea Party will thrive as long as people here in the US keep buying what it’s peddling and according to the news stories I’ve read on the likely direction of the next batch of Congressional elections people here in the US just can’t get enough of the stuff.  Yes indeed, I suppose the Age of Aquarius is well and truly over.  We’re in the Age of the Conservative Nut Job now.  Hey, that’s funny.  I might have to write up some lyrics for that.  I’m picturing a music video with a pack of assorted fat cats (CEOs, stock brokers, bank officials), a team of corrupt Republican politicians, and a horde of impoverished and educationally challenged countryfolk standing in a circle holding hands and singing about doing away with democracy in favor of the magic of the unfettered marketplace or maybe even of complete anarchy.  In the final scene they all pull out assault rifles and machine guns and start shooting wildly in every direction.  It ends with one of those cat screech sound effects and maybe a baby crying in the distance.

But no, just as I was thinking of doing something on that I read an article dealing with the history of the Republican Party.  I know, that doesn’t sound very interesting, does it?  I almost wasn’t going to read it, but I did, and it was actually so damned amusing that I thought I should say a few words about it.  It made me think how we’re all stuck in the brief moment of our own lifetimes, aren’t we?  It really takes some effort to realize that things weren’t always as they are now nor are they likely to remain as they are now in the future.  Take the Republican Party for example... Sorry but only selected archived (previous year) posts are currently available full text on this website.  All posts including this one are available in my annual anthology ebook series available at the Amazon Kindle Bookstore for a nominal fee.  Hey, we all need to make a buck somehow, right?  If you find my timeless jewels of wisdom amusing or perhaps even amusingly irritating throw me a bone now and then.  Thank you my friends!

Send In The Clowns

Welcome friends!

I read one of the funniest things I’ve read in a long time the other day so I thought  I might as well share it this time out.  I’ve been so heavy and serious lately I feel it’s high time I lightened up a bit.  The piece was about how most people here in the US feel the current Congress is the worst in their lifetimes.  Wait, that’s not the funny part.  The funny part is that voters have apparently determined to address this thorny issue by voting in additional Republicans thus allowing them to gain control of both the House and Senate.  It’s funny because the obvious and direct cause of most of the dysfunction in Congress over the past several years has been the Republican Party itself, so one can’t help but wonder how these voters are connecting the dots if, indeed, they perceive any dots at all and have any interest in connecting them.  Really, I want to know how voting in additional Republicans will render Congress more functional.  Do you know?

I’ve probably mentioned before, but I might as well review.  I think there are two primary features of the current Republican Party that make it the mighty engine of dysfunction that it has become... Sorry but only selected archived (previous year) posts are currently available full text on this website.  All posts including this one are available in my annual anthology ebook series available at the Amazon Kindle Bookstore for a nominal fee.  Hey, we all need to make a buck somehow, right?  If you find my timeless jewels of wisdom amusing or perhaps even amusingly irritating throw me a bone now and then.  Thank you my friends!

Beauty and the Beast

Welcome friends!

I just remembered a newspaper article that caught my eye a few weeks ago so let me say a few words about that before I forget about it.  It was somewhat interesting to me because it brought to mind that vexed nexus of the beautiful and the good, or the bad, as the case may be.  You know, beauty is truth, truth beauty, and all that rot.  Plus it involved guns.  And you know how Americans love guns.

So let’s first just do a quick summary of the article.  It appears a certain minor television actress named Shannon Richardson from the great state of Texas (where else?) was recently sentenced to eighteen years in prison for sending letters contaminated with the deadly poison ricin to the President of the US, the then mayor of NCY Michael Bloomberg, and the then director of an organization called Mayors Against Illegal Guns, Mark Glaze.  The text of the letters set forth Ms. Richardson’s thoughts on the thorny issue of gun control:  “You will have to kill me and my family before you get my guns.  The right to bear arms is my constitutional God-given right.  What’s in this letter is nothing compared to what I’ve got planned for you.” ... Sorry but only selected archived (previous year) posts are currently available full text on this website.  All posts including this one are available in my annual anthology ebook series available at the Amazon Kindle Bookstore for a nominal fee.  Hey, we all need to make a buck somehow, right?  If you find my timeless jewels of wisdom amusing or perhaps even amusingly irritating throw me a bone now and then.  Thank you my friends!

Respect My Authority!

Welcome friends!

Tough couple of weeks, right?  With all the mayhem going on in the world I hardly knew which way to turn, but after a feverish five minutes of careful consideration I decided it might be most appropriate to say a few words about the recent social unrest in Missouri.  (For my foreign friends, we’re talking about one of those sparsely populated conservative states in the vast wilderness between the west and east coasts of the US in what people here somewhat facetiously call the heartland of the country, somewhere near Kansas or Nebraska I should imagine.)  If you’ve been out of touch with the News from America for the past few days it’s another one of those cases where a cop has gunned down an unarmed young man and race may or may not have been a factor, which isn’t really all that unusual, but I think I’ve only talked about race relations once before so maybe this is another good opportunity.  I was tempted to talk a bit about Richard Dawkins latest attempt to enlighten us via oracular “tweet,” this one involving a supposed moral mandate to abort fetuses with disabilities, but maybe I’ll save that one for another time.  I just did a post on a funny Richard Dawkins tweet and it seems that could very easily become a full time job if I let it.  I also thought briefly of saying something about the Arabs and Israelis murdering one another (and one another’s kids) in Gaza but really that’s just more of the same isn’t it?  It’s a tragedy of course, but apparently they’re going to do what they’re going to do, the future be damned.

So let’s just have a quick recap of what we’re talking about this time out.  Apparently we had a couple of what we used to call dead end kids walking down the middle of the road in some lost city out on the prairie somewhere, a cop drove by and told them to get to the side, one thing led to another, and the cop ended up shooting one of them six times including twice in the head... Sorry but only selected archived (previous year) posts are currently available full text on this website.  All posts including this one are available in my annual anthology ebook series available at the Amazon Kindle Bookstore for a nominal fee.  Hey, we all need to make a buck somehow, right?  If you find my timeless jewels of wisdom amusing or perhaps even amusingly irritating throw me a bone now and then.  Thank you my friends!

Rape and Women Laughing in Public

Welcome friends!

I noticed a couple of interesting articles relating to rape the other day so I thought I might as well discuss those this time out, particularly since I previously made such a big deal about conservative politician Todd Akin’s attempt to distinguish what he characterized as legitimate rape from other presumably less than entirely legitimate forms of rape.  (August 30, 2012).

The first article was about a little controversy author Richard Dawkins managed to get himself into by claiming that “date rape is bad” but “stranger rape at knifepoint is worse.” ... Sorry but only selected archived (previous year) posts are currently available full text on this website.  All posts including this one are available in my annual anthology ebook series available at the Amazon Kindle Bookstore for a nominal fee.  Hey, we all need to make a buck somehow, right?  If you find my timeless jewels of wisdom amusing or perhaps even amusingly irritating throw me a bone now and then.  Thank you my friends!

Real Economics II

Welcome friends!

I had a few additional thoughts about those distributional issues I raised in my last post so maybe this time out we can do yet another follow-up post.  Sorry about that.  But that’s half the fun of talking things out, right?  The way one thing leads to another?

My additional thought was that last time when I said I doubted anyone could take seriously the sort of utility discussed within economic theory and hence within conservative social philosophy I may have failed to take into account the potential differences in the fundamental moral senses of liberals and conservatives.  I probably should have said I doubted any liberal could take that sort of utility seriously because upon further reflection it occurs to me maybe some conservatives do.  The reason I think so is it seems to me an important difference in the fundamental moral perspectives of liberals and conservatives involves the degree to which we are all the same or different.  Most liberals, starting from the belief that at some level we’re all pretty similar, would naturally recoil from any ethical theory implying the desires of any one person should dominate those of everyone else.  Many conservatives, on the other hand, starting from a conviction vast differences exist between people, may very well not have the same reaction.

Now you may have noticed that in our society, as in most societies relying mostly on a market based system of allocating resources, the most trivial material desires of the wealthy outrank even the most desperate needs of the poor.  I suppose that rather unsightly phenomenon must be one of the great underlying ethical issues of our age.  Is it a problem or isn’t it?  Hmm, well, that’s a tough one.  You can probably guess which way I lean but I do appreciate there are a lot of issues involved and I’m certainly not going to resolve those issues today.  In this post I would simply like to point out if one were to wholeheartedly support the status quo, as many conservatives are wont to do, then one would need some sort of ethical proposition implying there is something pretty special about rich folk that renders this result morally acceptable no matter what ethical theory one may choose to adopt.  I’ve mentioned before there are plenty of different approaches one might take to attaching the necessary significance to the desires of rich people.  One might talk about the issue in terms of their rights or their merit or what have you.  However, if one were going with a utilitarian framework then I suppose one’s concept of utility would have to allow that rich people’s desires might just be associated with a lot more utility than those of other people.  In other words, it occurs to me the distinctive type of utility used in economic theory is probably the only type of utility that would make utilitarianism palatable to many conservatives. 

When it gets to the close intellectual relationship of economists and conservatives the interesting wrinkle that has always fascinated me is that although economists espouse the requisite form of utility they back away from actually arguing fulfilling rich people’s desires generates more utility than fulfilling the desires of other people.  No, economists are satisfied to step back and say merely that fulfilling the needs of rich people may be associated with greater levels of utility or may not.  Now as I’ve suggested before this would obviously be a troubling result for anyone who really took this form of utilitarianism seriously because it implies one cannot address any of the potentially ethically troubling situations involving conflicting needs, wants, and desires, such as occur for example in the distribution of resources.  Indeed, one could only invoke one’s utilitarianism when thinking about one person in isolation which, of course, is a situation I think many people probably suppose doesn’t really require any ethical theory at all.  That would be a rather funny form of utilitarianism, wouldn’t you say?  I suppose if that were the type of utilitarianism one really supported then at the very least one would have to come with some additional ethical propositions to handle all the ethically significant cases involving resolving conflicting desires.  Otherwise we’re talking about a whole lot of indifference.  (For the economically literate note we would be talking not only about indifference between Pareto optimal outcomes but also between a Pareto optimal outcome and any non-Pareto optimal outcome that implied a different distribution of resources because one could never know if the associated costs were worth it or not.  Pretty much the only conclusion one could make would involve moving between a given non-Pareto optimal outcome and a Pareto optimal outcome implying the same distribution, in which case one would obviously do better with the Pareto optimal outcome.)

You may have noticed that neither conservatives nor economists espouse quite the level of indifference one might reasonably expect a serious supporter of the relevant form of utilitarianism to demonstrate.  Indeed, quite the contrary.  Most of them tend to get rather agitated if anyone mentions anything having to do with redistribution.  I think it’s reasonable to suggest something else must be going on.  However, I suppose we shouldn’t be too hasty in our speculations about what that something may be.  The possibility I concentrated on last time was that conservatives and economists don’t sincerely endorse the relevant form of utilitarianism at all but instead support the status quo distribution on some unexpressed and entirely different ethical basis and only talk about the particular form of utility they talk about because doing so displaces discussion of other conceptions of utility that other people, such as liberals, might find more ethically compelling.  However, after thinking about it a bit more I now wonder if perhaps I was being a little too cynical.  I suppose another possibility is at least some conservatives actually do sincerely support this form of utilitarianism but because of its limited practical significance they augment that theory with some unrelated ethical premises just to get them where they need to go.  Like what you ask?  Well, at the very least I suppose one would need to attach some independent value to upholding the status quo to escape the anomie of complete indifference.  You know, if we can’t tell what we have stinks or not we should just keep it because it’s what we have.  That sort of thing.  It’s fine in isolation I suppose but a little awkward if you’re trying to discuss things with someone holding an ethical theory that does have implications for resolving interpersonal conflicts.  Basically you’d be saying something along the lines of my own ethical theory implies I don’t know what would be better but in such situations I give precedence to the status quo and it doesn’t really matter to me how you or anyone else thinks about it or that your suggestions are just as likely as not to improve matters even under my own underlying ethical system.  It’s a little weird if you think about it.  I guess one must just really love that status quo.  Of course, one might always go further and add any number of value premises to address the many situations in which the necessary information on utility is not forthcoming.  Actually I suppose the need for additional value premises is much the same as last time.  If one restricts oneself strictly to the type of utility used in economics one can’t really can’t say much about anything at all.  Should we stay or should we go?  I don’t know.  What’s changed is in this case I’m suggesting conservatives might be holding these additional value premises in addition to the relevant form of utilitarianism rather than instead of the relevant form of utilitarianism as I postulated last time.

Figuring out if any economists and conservatives sincerely support the type of utility we’re discussing here is obviously an enormously difficult task because of course one can’t just walk up and ask them.  At least that’s been my experience.  With conservatives it’s all about misdirection, bait and switch, double meanings, false leads.  Honestly, it makes one’s head spin.  However, here’s a simple thought experiment that might work.  You’re familiar with thought experiments in the context of ethics, right?  You imagine a counterfactual state of the world to isolate the implications of a given ethical proposition and see how you feel about it.  So let’s see.  Imagine you lived in the first half of the twentieth century.  In Germany.  (Why?  Because it’s easy.)  Let’s say you were omniscient so if something existed then you knew all there was to know about it.  Yes, you were very special.  Indeed, you even knew the amount of utility (as conceived of by economists) different people derived from fulfilling their desires.  One day you considered the case of that great bugbear himself, Adolph Hitler, and you discovered he was one of those superconductors of utility that is allowed for under the type of utility discussed within economic theory.  Indeed, you determined that fulfilling his preternaturally strong desire to kill off various groups of people generated higher levels of utility than the combined utility that would be generated by fulfilling his victims’ desires to survive.  So would it have been socially optimal to maximize utility in this case?  Would it have been ethical to get behind Hitler and support him in his famous struggle?  In other words, would Hitler have been in a comparable situation to rich people whose trivial desires trump the more vital desires of poor people because (maybe) they just get a lot more utility from fulfilling their trivial desires?  Yes?  OK, well then you do indeed have a sincere interest in the form of utility discussed within economic theory.  I’m sorry I doubted you.  No?  That’s basically the case I discussed last time.  If you’re not really interested in maximizing that type of utility then you shouldn’t talk as though you are.  Someone will think you’re up to something.  Can’t say / won’t say / situation is logically impossible?  Hmm.  Yeah, I’m not sure you think utility actually exists.  Forget about the supposed difficulties in measuring or inferring utility, I think you must be using utility as just a funny way to talk about your perspective on the ethical implications of allowing a single person in isolation to do what he or she wants.  In that case you could do us all a big favor and just talk a little more clearly.  Don’t blather on about utility.  Just say what you think and maybe add something like, look I’m not interested in resolving situations involving people with conflicting desires.  That’s not what I’m talking about.  I don’t have any opinion on how that should play out.  Or, if you do want to address those issues then just talk about whatever values you’re using to address those situations.

I know what you’re thinking: conservatism is complicated, isn’t it?  Sometimes I wish they could just talk plainly and honestly about they believe.  But what would be the fun in that?

Real Economics

Welcome friends!

I read an article the other day that got me thinking about distributional issues once again.  I know, doesn’t seem to take much, does it?  Why can’t I just accept things as they are?  Why am I always rethinking things that have all been hashed out and resolved long ago?  Why am I not a conservative?  Well, gosh, I don’t know.  Maybe because I think these issues are important and there’s a lot of room for improvement?  Ready for another go around?  OK then, let’s get to it!

Now did you see the article about the rather alarming number of suicides that were associated with the so-called Great Recession ushered in a few years about by conservatives’ ongoing love affair with Wall Street tycoons and by their unalterable conviction nothing bad can ever come from unregulated markets?  Apparently the economic downturn led to at least an additional ten thousand people offing themselves in the US, Canada, and Europe alone.  You know, that’s the type of thing I’m talking about.  Economic matters are important.  People die from economics.  That’s what makes the intellectually lazy, wooly headed, laissez faire, whatever happens happens, half-assed social philosophizing of conservatives so damned irritating to liberals like me.  Whatever happens happens just isn’t good enough.  When people lose their jobs and their livelihoods that’s a humanitarian crisis or it can be one anyway depending on how much wealth the people involved have socked away and how well they’re able to weather the storm.  For many people it’s a pretty big issue.  We should be thinking about it like the outbreak of a war or the advent of some new disease.  And distributional issues are a big part of it because when economic calamities happen we generally just let all the hardship fall on the unfortunate few, don’t we?  We could rally as a society and look out for one another in cases like this.  We could spread the hurt around a little so we all come out of it all right.  But that’s not how it usually plays out.  Not by a long shot.  It’s more like every man and woman for himself or herself.  And we all thank our lucky stars it’s the other guy whose number came up and not ours.

But hey, we don’t have to be talking about people killing themselves to see the importance of distributional issues.  Indeed, I read another interesting article about some research that found one’s “emotional well-being” goes up with income but the main effect takes place in a range up to about seventy-five thousand dollars after which additional income doesn’t really add all that much.  I must say that comports rather well with my own observations and life experience.  I mean, it’s kind of hard to exude a whole lot of emotional well-being when you’re wondering where you’re going to get your next meal or where you’re going to sleep for the night or what’s going to happen to your kids or whatever.  Did you ever notice that?  Those are the sorts of things that can really set one on edge.  But once one scrapes together a little something then hey presto emotional well-being suddenly becomes a lot easier to come by.  Indeed, after a while it becomes more a matter of maybe I’ll buy this or maybe not or maybe I don’t really need it or oh I’m just not really sure if I want that or not.  For most people I suspect getting a bit of additional money is very, very important at certain levels of relative economic power but becomes a lot less important at other levels.

I would suggest this result implies public policy should probably focus on getting as many people as possible to incomes approaching seventy-five thousand dollars.  I mean, it’s fine if some people go over, but in terms of overall happiness we’re probably not getting as much bang for the buck in those cases.  Of course, that’s not really how we typically think about economic policy in this country, is it?  Or let me put it this way, when was the last time you heard someone discussing the best approach to getting the most people possible to income levels around seventy-five thousand dollars?  No, our conversation about economic policy seems to be running on an entirely different track.  On the one hand we have plenty of people who want to just talk about total GNP and GDP and XYZ and whatnot with the implication it doesn’t really matter too much where it all goes because distributional issues either don’t really matter or have already been satisfactorily resolved.  Then we have the people who think the point of economic policy should be to ensure a handful of people can become enormously rich because in their estimation that’s what life is all about.  Those are the people who are so fascinated by metrics such as how many billionaires we produce compared to other countries.  People like me who would just like to live in a society where as many people as possible are happy don’t really have much to do with economic policy here in the US.  I suppose that explains why despite our relatively high third place ranking in terms of average net worth, which is just total wealth divided by total population, we basically stink in terms of median net worth, which is the wealth of the person exactly in the middle of our wealth distribution such that half the population has more and half less.  We’re not so bad in terms of average wealth because our economic policy wonks are concerned about total wealth creation.  We stink in terms of median wealth because our policy wonks don’t really care where the wealth goes.  Or maybe stink is too harsh a word.  I’m sure there are plenty of countries that manage to do an even worse job of looking after the little guy than we do.  Let’s just say we rank surprisingly low given our overall level of economic development.  Oh, you thought America was Number One?  Yeah, sure, we’re Number One right after Australia, France, Italy, United Kingdom, Japan, Switzerland, Finland, Norway, Singapore, Canada, Netherlands, New Zealand, Ireland, Spain, Denmark, Taiwan, Sweden, and Germany.  Yep.  The median citizen is better off in any of those countries than here in the US.

I suppose you know or can guess I put a lot of the blame for this unfortunate state of affairs squarely on conservatives and their ideological enablers the academic economists.  Why bring economists into it?  Because of their risible insistence on confining their attention to that subspecies of “utility” that has the curious quality of not being defined relative to a given individual but of being presumed to exist in some objective and interpersonally valid sense.  When one works with that particular definition of utility knowing two people are about as happy as they can be turns out to be irrelevant.  The real issue is thought to involve not how each person feels relative to how they might feel but how the feelings of one person compare to those of another.  In the twisted and confused ethical world of academic economics it’s not people who are important, it’s disembodied utility.  Forget about trying to make everyone as happy as possible given a particular level of resources.  With the type of utility economists talk about the socially optimal thing to do might very well be to sacrifice everyone else if doing so happened to suit the desires of some superconductor of utility.  I think it’s safe to say that’s a version of ethical utilitarianism only an academic economist could take seriously.

But do they take it seriously?  Yes, interesting question.  A well known feature of economic theorizing is that even though these types of interpersonal utility comparisons are presented as ethically relevant there is fortunately no accepted way to actually get the information one would need to make them!  In other words, it’s an ethical theory whose utter implausibility is saved by the fact it cannot be implemented anyway.  So why be interested in such a theory at all?  Well, as I have suggested many times before I suspect the answer is that economists don’t really have any sincere interest in that sort of utility.  They support it because it supplants and thus negates other more ethically relevant forms of utilitarianism that might get people thinking about distributional issues and get in the way of their policy prescriptions.  Why focus on a negation of philosophically serious utilitarianism?  Because one has ethical theories that are incompatible with serious utilitarianism one doesn’t care to discuss explicitly.  The academic focus on the peculiar sort of utility I just described is basically a rather elaborate way to shut down the social conversation about the important economic issues associated with the distribution of resources.  You know I’m always happy to discuss anything with anybody so the idea people may want to discuss distributional issues from different perspectives doesn’t bother me at all.  But you know what does?  Talking funny to prevent other people from discussing issues when discussing those issues could lead to a lot more happiness in this world and in some cases a lot fewer dead people as well.  That’s just irritating.  So let’s set aside academic economics and the conservative ideology it supports and discuss some real economic issues for once, shall we?

References

How much do you need to be happy?  Jeanne Sahadi.  CNN Money.  June 5, 2014.  http://money.cnn.com/2014/06/05/news/economy/how-much-income-to-be-happy/index.html?iid=HP_LN

America’s middle class: Poorer than you think.  Tami Luhby.  June 13, 2014.  CNN Money.  http://money.cnn.com/2014/06/11/news/economy/middle-class-wealth/index.html?hpt=hp_t2

Cost of Great Recession: 10,000 + lives.  Alanna Petroff.  CNN Money.  June 12, 2014.  http://money.cnn.com/2014/06/12/news/suicides-recession/index.html?iid=HP_LN

World Cup 2014

Welcome friends!

Hey everyone, I just realized this is a World Cup year!  Did you know?  Oh, really?  Well, I was thinking of talking about something a bit more serious this week but what the heck, I’ll get back to my usual fare next time (and I promise you not about religion and social conservatives; it’s high time I got back to my other old adversaries the economic conservatives).  This time out let’s just have a little fun and talk about the big tournament.

Now I suppose it might strike some people as vaguely humorous that someone could be blindsided by the World Cup... Sorry but only selected archived (previous year) posts are currently available full text on this website.  All posts including this one are available in my annual anthology ebook series available at the Amazon Kindle Bookstore for a nominal fee.  Hey, we all need to make a buck somehow, right?  If you find my timeless jewels of wisdom amusing or perhaps even amusingly irritating throw me a bone now and then.  Thank you my friends!

Religion and Nature Revisited: The Template Problem II

Welcome friends!

I think this time I’d just like to finish my discussion from last time about what I was calling the template problem.  If you recall I was arguing in that post that religious people tend to view things through the prism of a sort of implied template of divine perfection and that doing so leads them to imbue any number of things with ethical significance that secular humanists tend to see as outside the scope of ethics.  This time I thought I’d take a look at this template idea in the context in which both religious and secular people would agree we’re talking about ethics, which in case you’ve never read my blog before would be when the actions of one person have a significant effect on another person and we end up with an interpersonal conflict that needs resolving.

This time I’m talking mostly or perhaps entirely about explicit ethical propositions relating to how one should interact with one’s fellow humans.  You can find propositions of this sort in both religious and secular ethics.  In a sense I suppose one could say it’s implied by the very idea of ethics, which is basically a template for how one believes one ought to behave in different situations.  Thus, in this case, it’s obviously not the presence or absence of a template that’s the issue.  However, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s irrelevant either.  In this context it’s the significance of the template for one’s ethics that matters, as well as the question of how the template relates to the natural world.  Both of these issues give rise to a number of interesting differences in how religious folk and secular humanists tend to think and talk about ethics.  (To avoid confusion I should point out that according to the way I’ve just framed this issue explicit directions on how people should behave when not having a significant effect on other people, which one quite frequently finds in religious systems, belong with my previous post despite the fact that in that post I was mostly discussing an implied template.)

In a religious system what typically makes ethical propositions valid or correct or whatever you want to call it (don’t get all philosophical on me now) is that they recommend behavior that corresponds to a template of correct behavior that is thought by religious folk to exist as a sort of cosmic given.  That’s what ethics is in a religious context.  Acting ethically means following God’s commands.  I think it must be this feature of the religious view of ethics that makes religious people so prone to what seem to secular humanists as exaggerated responses to seemingly minor moral issues and that are always pulling the more spiritually inclined among us toward fanaticism and extremism.  Because of the way religion frames the notion of ethics it can be very difficult if not impossible to revise or reconsider the template once it becomes established, which pretty much does away with the need for any sort of discussion or dialogue with those holding opposing views.  Even more weirdly to a secular humanist all the elements of this sort of template tend to take on equal weight or moral significance.  That’s because under the religious perspective if you give up the template you’re really giving up the entire basis of morality.  Cutting your hair a certain way (if that happens to be in the template) has the very same ethical standing and significance for a religious person as, say, not murdering your neighbor and eating his or her brain.  If you’re willing to ignore the template in one case then why would you pay attention to it in another case?  It just wouldn’t make sense for someone thinking about ethics in a religious context.  This leads religious people to adopt a very distinctive all or nothing sort of thinking when it comes to ethics and to come out with the sort of slippery slope arguments that seem to be their stock in trade.  (If we let people cut their hair any way they like then what’s next? Allowing people to murder their neighbors and eat their brains?)

In a secular humanist system, on the other hand, ethical propositions take the form of a template of correct behavior because that’s just how ethical propositions work, but ethics isn’t defined in terms of a correspondence with an external template and that’s a big difference.  Under the secular perspective we make up our own template whenever we think about ethics.  To figure out if a given proposition expresses something one would accept as ethical one needs to relate that proposition to one’s moral sensibilities though some chain of reasoning that may be short or long depending on the proposition.  Under this perspective ethics is not about following the orders of a particularly authoritative external agent; it’s about thinking through for oneself what one believes one ought to do and then using one’s reason to develop the implications of that belief.  (Well, OK, I suppose one might view ethics in that case as following one’s own orders or following the orders of one’s moral sense and intellect, but it’s not really the same thing as following the orders of an external agent, is it?  And of course a secular humanist might have ethical beliefs about following orders from an external agent but that’s also a different issue.  The idea that following orders in that context is ethical would not be based on the notion that following those orders defines what it means to be ethical; it would be based on the fact that one’s ethical beliefs imply that one should follow those orders, which is a whole different kettle of fish.)  Because of the way secular humanists conceive of ethics they are typically quite willing to reconsider and potentially revise particular ethical propositions in response to new information or arguments (or I suppose changes in their moral sentiments if that were to happen) and they tend to have little difficulty attaching rather greater ethical significance to some propositions than to others.

Another interesting difference in the operation of the template in the religious and secular contexts is that the relationship of the template to the natural world seems to me to be different.  For religious people locating the template and understanding its ostensible relationship to the natural world can be surprisingly tricky.  Indeed, I’m not at all sure all religious people are even on the same page on this one.  On the one hand, the religious template of behavior can be seen as external to humanity in the sense that the validity of the template and the associated ethical propositions do not depend on what anyone thinks about them.  Indeed, inserting one’s own feelings into the matter amounts to just so much hubris according to this common religious view.  On the other hand, I’ve also seen the argument that since the same entity that ostensibly made the template of correct behavior also ostensibly made the world, including humanity, this template must be built into people or even into the external world.  This leads to the idea that every one is truly good at some level; it’s just that some people have trouble seeing their inner light.

For secular humanists locating the template and figuring out how it relates to nature is a lot easier.  It’s certainly not floating about in the ether external to human reason.  Indeed, from the secular perspective it only makes sense to talk about the template from the perspective of someone having a given moral sense and supporting a given ethical theory.  In general people everywhere seem to have rather similar fundamental moral sentiments probably because if you go back far enough you’re just talking about the sorts of beliefs that allow humans to function effectively as social animals.  That’s why we can discuss ethics and often reach at least some level of agreement on which way to go, eventually.  But there’s no mechanism to ensure that will always be possible because reason and logic only get one so far and what ultimately matters, moral sensibilities, are not intellectual artifacts like reason and logic but aspects of the natural world more akin to human emotions.  They’re part of the natural world and as such are prone to the variation and mutability that is the hallmark of the natural world.  Thus, it’s always quite possible we might encounter people who do not share our fundamental moral sensibilities and who consequently will not be swayed by our notion of what is right.  In that sense the potential for conflict is pretty much built in to the secular humanist way of thinking about ethics.

Ironically, I think the recognition of the limitations of ethical philosophizing and the constant threat of overt conflict makes those who adhere to secular ethics less prone to actual conflict.  In my experience they just tend to try harder to reach some basis of commonality with those starting out with different views.  Religions, which tend to suppress conflict in an intellectual sense by doing away with the need for discussion and debate and often by simply assuming everyone is really the same on the inside, seem to me to be more prone to leading their adherents into actual conflict because religious people often get stuck at the stage of getting other people to accept the template as a divine artifact.  This can be a bit of a problem because differentiating one ostensibly divine artifact from all the other ostensibly divine artifacts is just not really all that easy to do, never mind the related issue of trying to convince people who believe there is no such thing as a divine template.  So the religious idea of generating an ethical society tends frequently to devolve into trying to get enough political or perhaps even military power to force everyone else to obey the one true template of behavior.

Actually, the potential diversity of moral sentiments in the secular context also seems somewhat interesting to me considering my previous argument that secular humanists tend to appreciate and accept natural variation in many situations in which religious people do not.  Here we’ve clearly gotten to a realm in which diversity is not a good thing even for secular humanists.  Indeed, this switch in attitudes about the value of diversity gets to the whole basis of the liberal ethos.  Diversity along many dimensions is natural and can even be considered good or at least not too bad.  We certainly don’t want to banish all diversity from the world as though it were some sort of generic evil.  However, when we get to ethics we’re in a whole different place.  We’re talking about interpersonal conflicts in which both people can’t have their way and although we hate to get involved we kind of have to if we’re going to live socially the way humans developed over time to live.  So for example diversity in our thinking about the acceptability of murder is not really acceptable.  We have to sit down and tackle the unpleasant and complicated task of how different people think about killing people in various situations and come up with something we’re willing to argue is ethical.  But we want to minimize the situations in which we have to take up that sort of thing.  Two people not liking the same haircut doesn’t make the grade.  Sorry, but I think we can preserve a little natural diversity there.  Being offended by an ugly haircut just doesn’t rise to the level of significant effect that would require ethical debate.  My larger point is that to understand this type of thinking one has to come from a place where one perceives a tradeoff between diversity and freedom on the one hand and the need for ethics on the other.  If you start from the religious perspective it’s all too easy to not even understand the issue.  It’s way too easy to just say, look, the haircut is incorrect.  It doesn’t correspond to the template of divine perfection.  We should ban it.  There is no tradeoff; there’s only right and wrong.

I suppose that last point brings up yet again the specter of so-called moral relativism, which is something I think people tend to get rather confused about and I’ve written about before.  (See my post on Secular Humanist Ethics from February 3, 2011.)  Under the secular perspective we need to reference a particular ethical theory to talk about morality.  Morality isn’t just floating around the natural world like a rare butterfly waiting to be discovered.  We have to decide what it is.  The fact I recognize that if my system of ethics doesn’t make sense to you because you don’t share my fundamental moral sensibilities doesn’t mean I think it’s fine if you do things your way and I do things my way, not when we’re talking about issues of true ethical significance like murdering people.  If you’re doing something to someone I think is unethical then I’m basically involved whether I want to be or not.  Yes, it’s all relative; but that doesn’t mean it’s not real or it doesn’t matter to me or you or to any other particular person.  We can duke it out if we must but we’re going to have to come to some sort of resolution.  I suppose the confusion in this context must come from conflating two contexts in which one might discuss ethics: the context of personal responsibility and adherence to one’s own ethical beliefs and the context of philosophical talk about the ultimate basis of ethics and the fact different people may support different systems of ethics.  One can’t just switch contexts back and forth like a crazy man or woman and expect to maintain any idea of what one is talking about.

Well, I think I’ve probably beaten this topic into submission, at least for now.  So let me just end with a humble plea: I think the world would be a much more reasonable and peaceful place if we gave up the notion of divine templates and commands from on high and just started talking about what we all think is ethical and why we think that.  And for goodness sake let’s try to restrict our discussions to things that really matter.  But fear not.  Losing one’s religion doesn’t mean losing one’s ethics; it just means reconsidering the basis of one’s ethics.  You will always have every reason to do what you know you ought to do, so please set your mind at ease on that point.