…and this is a 
Sam Harris has published a piece in the New York Times decrying the appointment of Francis Collins to head the NIH. It's strong stuff; he points out that Collins isn't just a Christian, he's an active science-denier who has set aside whole blocks of scientific inquiry as inaccessible to study because they are a product of a divine being. As he asks at the end, "Must we really entrust the future of biomedical research in the United States to a man who sincerely believes that a scientific understanding of human nature is impossible?"
The strongest part of the essay, in my opinion, was that Harris directly quotes Collins' own words, and they are not encouraging. Most specifically, he includes the text of slides from a talk Collins gave at UC Berkeley in 2008:
Slide 1: "Almighty God, who is not limited in space or time, created a universe 13.7 billion years ago with its parameters precisely tuned to allow the development of complexity over long periods of time."
Slide 2: "God's plan included the mechanism of evolution to create the marvelous diversity of living things on our planet. Most especially, that creative plan included human beings."
Slide 3: "After evolution had prepared a sufficiently advanced 'house' (the human brain), God gifted humanity with the knowledge of good and evil (the moral law), with free will, and with an immortal soul."
Slide 4: "We humans used our free will to break the moral law, leading to our estrangement from God. For Christians, Jesus is the solution to that estrangement."
Slide 5: "If the moral law is just a side effect of evolution, then there is no such thing as good or evil. It's all an illusion. We've been hoodwinked. Are any of us, especially the strong atheists, really prepared to live our lives within that worldview?"
My jaw just dropped when I read that. It is breathtakingly vacuous. How does Francis Collins know any of that? Those conclusions are not anything we could draw from any scientific evidence, and there's the head of the human genome project throwing around quaint Christian dogma as if it were reasonable and valid.
That last one really irritates, too — it's the familiar anti-atheist canard that atheists cannot know any truly moral behavior, that the only genuine sense of morality arises out of obedience to an authority, especially an invisible but omnipotent authority. Collins is a man who does not trust the godless people in his communities because, to his mind, they are blind to good and evil.
I know evil when I see it. A priest taking advantage of his presumed moral authority to take young boys into the dark and private rooms of his church to rape them is evil, I think. Not because a god has whispered a rule into my head, but because I know that the successful relationships that build a cooperative network within the framework of my society are all formed on mutual trust, and that is a violation. We test these bonds of mutual support all the time, we rely on them, and we know from history that their loss contributes to social decay.
We also contain biological imperatives that strengthen those bonds. We know good when we see it, too: kindness, self-sacrifice, and charity move us, not because we are ordered to do so by an imaginary god, but because we can feel empathy for others, and yes, evolution has shaped individuals to respond with affirmation to actions that reinforce the community. That's how we survive and succeed.
I have to turn Collins' statement around against him. If god does not exist, if religion is a byproduct of the evolution of the mind, then there is no reason to obey him. It's all an illusion. You've been hoodwinked. Are you devout Christians really prepared to live your lives in reality? And if you aren't, why should we trust you in positions of power?
Politics
Comments
Posted by: Lotharloo | July 27, 2009 9:08 AM
Holyshit! That's so incredibly stupid. Why the fuck didn't God create everything from scratch with a big boom? Why the fuck he had to wait for evolution to do his magic?
And of course the big obvious question is how the hell does Collin know this? And where is his evidence for any of this?
Posted by: rickflick | July 27, 2009 9:09 AM
At first I was disappointed with Harris's essay. It did not seem like his feisty style. Then I reread the quotes.
Posted by: Rorschach | July 27, 2009 9:10 AM
Well,Collins has clearly gone off the deep end.The man is, or was, a great scientist, but it would seem that dogma has replaced the open scientific mind.
As opposed to the "weak" atheists? And that "worldview" would appear to be one big strawman.
Posted by: XD | July 27, 2009 9:13 AM
I'd love to have seen the audience reaction to that drivel.I wonder what his reaction would be if he was presented with the creation myth of another religion which had been framed in the same way?
Posted by: 386sx | July 27, 2009 9:13 AM
Shouldn't surprise anybody. There's all kinds of dumb crap over at the BioLogos page. Just pick a random page.
"Although in our materially focused culture we want to know how and when the stuff of the universe originated, this was of no interest to the ancient people; it is likely they never even thought to ask it."
Lol, yeah they probably could care less about that stuff back then. Probably too dumb or something. /sarcasm
Posted by: James Sweet | July 27, 2009 9:14 AM
Morality: It Only Counts If You're Being Threatened.
Posted by: MadScientist | July 27, 2009 9:20 AM
Yeah, way to go Sam!
The religious are often rather comical in a pathetic way. When faced with lack of evidence, or worse still mountains of evidence against your delusions, make up more shit to add to the mountains of bullshit.
@Rorschach: Collins has managed at least one big and well-known project - but is he in fact a scientist capable of understanding the work done or is he being credited with too much?
Posted by: Adam | July 27, 2009 9:22 AM
RAmen brother.
Posted by: Zeno | July 27, 2009 9:25 AM
I'd make a comment about Collins's contentions, but it's time for me to go out and prey on the helpless, innocent, God-fearing, and decent people of the world.
(The real Problem of Evil is why is its to-do list so long.)
Posted by: ice9 | July 27, 2009 9:27 AM
I agree with the analysis of this opinion, though it's necessarily indirect criticism of the job he will do. I'm tempted to offer the benefit of the doubt to people like Collins, caught between their philosophical commitments--which linger, depending on the environment and the relationships that define a person's emotional life--and the immediate requirements of a highly focused professional life. We expect (but are often denied) that a mainly superstitious, religious, and christianist American society will tolerate a competent person who happens to be an atheist; should we not offer the same toleration of a religious person? We have constitutional reasons to expect it, of course, but they have their own expectation (however unjustified).
Typically the competence comes first, followed by the evidence that perhaps a person isn't orthodox in religious perspective. I'm not sure I'm convinced of this in Collins' case, but what argument exists for evaluating his competence in this job before he's had a chance to do anything?
If in fact he is competent, or better than competent, can't that be perceived as a benefit to a secular society? The idiot religious who run our nation routinely fail to prevent their philosophical views from impairing their competence, even on the most basic questions. It is likely to be a long rough time before empty-headed fervor becomes a disqualification for office. A model of compartmentalization seems useful right now, to stop the bleeding caused by public sanctimony. Perhaps Collins will provide one of these models?
When my students figure me out, they are often puzzled because I maintain a rigid neutrality when I don't have to. Our subject matter presents frequent chances for opinion (of either species). They have been raised naive, and restraint in witnessing is a new concept; they assume (as they've been taught) that Satan doesn't hold back so they should not either. Most of them also seem to respect my competence, though, so we get a kind of philosophical tension that works well and, I think, doesn't trespass on their right to develop philosophical ideas on their own (and, one might hope, competence in that line of thinking, or at least consistency). Of course, they're young, and not yet in charge of an important government science agency.
Have I become an accommodationist?
Posted by: andyet | July 27, 2009 9:30 AM
>it's the familiar anti-atheist canard that atheists cannot know any truly moral behavior, that the only genuine sense of morality arises out of obedience to an authority, especially an invisible but omnipotent authority.
There has never ben a succesful, wide spread secuar moral code. Now as to why this is so, essayist and novelist Tom Wolfe in "Sorry but your soul just died" does a superb job of explaining:
>Nietzsche said that mankind would limp on through the twentieth century "on the mere pittance" of the old decaying God–based moral codes. But then, in the twenty–first, would come a period more dreadful than the great wars, a time of "the total eclipse of all values" (in The Will to Power). This would also be a frantic period of "revaluation," in which people would try to find new systems of values to replace the osteoporotic skeletons of the old. But you will fail, he warned, because you cannot believe in moral codes without simultaneously believing in a god who points at you with his fearsome forefinger and says "Thou shalt" or "Thou shalt not."
>Why should we bother ourselves with a dire prediction that seems so far–fetched as "the total eclipse of all values"? Because of man's track record, I should think. After all, in Europe, in the peaceful decade of the 1880s, it must have seemed even more far–fetched to predict the world wars of the twentieth century and the barbaric brotherhoods of Nazism and Communism. Ecce vates! Ecce vates! Behold the prophet! How much more proof can one demand of a man's powers of prediction?
>A hundred years ago those who worried about the death of God could console one another with the fact that they still had their own bright selves and their own inviolable souls for moral ballast and the marvels of modern science to chart the way. But what if, as seems likely, the greatest marvel of modern science turns out to be brain imaging? And what if, ten years from now, brain imaging has proved, beyond any doubt, that not only Edward O. Wilson but also the young generation are, in fact, correct?
>The elders, such as Wilson himself and Daniel C. Dennett, the author of Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life, and Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene and The Blind Watchmaker, insist that there is nothing to fear from the truth, from the ultimate extension of Darwin's dangerous idea. They present elegant arguments as to why neuroscience should in no way diminish the richness of life, the magic of art, or the righteousness of political causes, including, if one need edit, political correctness at Harvard or Tufts, where Dennett is Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies, or Oxford, where Dawkins is something called Professor of Public Understanding of Science. (Dennett and Dawkins, every bit as much as Wilson, are earnestly, feverishly, politically correct.) Despite their best efforts, however, neuroscience is not rippling out into the public on waves of scholarly reassurance. But rippling out it is, rapidly. The conclusion people out beyond the laboratory walls are drawing is: The fix is in! We're all hardwired! That, and: Don't blame me! I'm wired wrong!
>....some new Nietzsche will step forward to announce: "The self is dead"—except that being prone to the poetic, like Nietzsche I, he will probably say: "The soul is dead." He will say that he is merely bringing the news, the news of the greatest event of the millennium: "The soul, that last refuge of values, is dead, because educated people no longer believe it exists." Unless the assurances of the Wilsons and the Dennetts and the Dawkinses also start rippling out, the lurid carnival that will ensue may make the phrase "the total eclipse of all values" seem tame.
Posted by: Russell Blackford | July 27, 2009 9:30 AM
I've been blogging about this, too, as I see has Jerry Coyne. It looks like I'm the nicest of the three, though I'm sure that I'll have some of my usual commenters telling me how mean and unfair I am to poor Francis Collins (though on the gripping hand I was pleased to see the commentary begin with a kind note from Greg Egan).
Posted by: 386sx | July 27, 2009 9:31 AM
Behold the dumb lengths apologists have to go through to make everything turn out okay...
http://blog.beliefnet.com/scienceandthesacred/2009/07/different-types-of-origin-stories.html
"Although in our materially focused culture we want to know how and when the stuff of the universe originated, this was of no interest to the ancient people; it is likely they never even thought to ask it."
So, the ancient people were an incurious lot who were too dumb to think of asking where everything came from, so Jesus told them a bunch of fake crap so they wouldn't have fainting spells or something.
Posted by: Ray Ingles | July 27, 2009 9:31 AM
"If the moral law is just a side effect of evolution, then there is no such thing as good or evil. It's all an illusion."
You can't derive an "ought" from an "is", true... but you can derive an "ought" from an "is" and a desire.
Consider the game of chess. There are certain fundamental structures of chess that define it - the 'rules of the game'. An 8x8 board, 8 pawns per side that move in certain ways, two rooks per side that move in other ways, castling, the initial configuration of the pieces, etc. Now, when playing chess, there is no rule that you can't sacrifice your queen in the first few moves of the game. It's illegal to move your king to a threatened square, but it's perfectly acceptable by the rules to stick your queen in front of a pawn at the start of the game.
However, if you want to win the game, you shouldn't do that. There are almost no situations (at least, assuming evenly-matched opponents) where giving up your queen at the start will lead to your victory. Similarly, it's rarely a good idea to move your king out to the center of the board. It's usually a bad move.
Note words like "shouldn't" and "bad". They are value judgements. They prescribe 'oughts'. They are not part of the 'rules' of chess. From where do they come? They arise from the combinations of two things - first, the rules and structure of chess, and second, from the player's desire to win the game. They are strategic rules.
We have physical laws, and we have human desires. "Oughts" - strategic rules - morals - arise from those two things. Some basic game theory, and voila - cooperation, etc. I contend that I am ethical and moral, that people in general are ethical and moral, because the alternative is running naked in the woods fighting over scraps of food. That's not an "illusion" at all.
Posted by: Victor
|
July 27, 2009 9:32 AM
Anyone who claims to know "God's Plan" (slide 2) is perfectly capable of justifying anything. Turning that little voice in your head into the supreme ruler of the universe is a great coping mechanism.
Posted by: Joe | July 27, 2009 9:33 AM
PZ: all your readers should go to NYT, email the NYT article to friends, and recommend on the NYT website. Get traffic up.
I got news of this by e-mail from Sam Harris. I'd recommend getting on his e-mail list, too.
Joe
Posted by: Pierce R. Butler | July 27, 2009 9:43 AM
Has anybody yet found out where Collins stands on the issues where "morality" intersects with the actual work of the NIH?
By "morality" I mean, as the god-bothered interpret the word, sexual behavior.
Collins at least violates the stereotype of bibliolatrists by accepting evolution. Does he accept the right of human beings to have sex with humans of the same gender, and to receive health education geared to that orientation without censure or bias?
Does he agree that women have a right to control their own fertility, before or after an ovum has been fertilized? Will Collins encourage research to improve the efficacy and safety of contraception? Of abortion?
What about sexuality research and education? Will a Collins-run NIH accept sound proposals to study just what human sexual behavior is going on (such as the epidemiology of sexually transmitted infections), taboo under the Bush/Cheney regime? How about supporting explicit and age-appropriate campaigns on, say, condom usage?
Blatheration about sky ghosts and cosmic morality is inescapable: hearing it from yet another pulpit won't do much damage, and I expect the Collins variety to include enough vapid inanity that bubble-poppers such as our esteemed host might turn it into a net gain for skepticism.
But saddling the US with another term of prudishness and taboos in the lab and classroom would do substantial harm to our society and to struggling individuals that we cannot afford. Where does Collins stand?
Posted by: Lilly de Lure | July 27, 2009 9:46 AM
Really? Then what precisely was the point of all the highly elaborate creation myths produced by said cultures? Maybe its me, but the fact that so many people in different ancient civilisations went to such lengths to at least attempt to answer the question of the origins of the universe would suggest that quite a few people in those cultures thought to ask about it!
Posted by: CalGeorge | July 27, 2009 9:48 AM
Sam Harris has been fighting this fight for a while. Nature, 23 August 2007:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v448/n7156/full/448864a.html
Way to go, Nature. Your tolerance helped pave the path for this appointment.
Posted by: Kel, OM | July 27, 2009 9:49 AM
As an outsider, I'm really not seeing what the big deal is. Surely there's been some jumping the gun in regards to what Collins could do, why not wait and see whether such concerns are actually legitimate?
Posted by: Mixter | July 27, 2009 9:55 AM
This proves to me that it's official: Fundie Christians have declared war. They deny science and revise history in order to promote their worldview.
Mixter
Posted by: XD | July 27, 2009 9:56 AM
I'm kind of with you there, Kel. Collins' post is one of administration. As long as his beliefs don't interfere with it, he can believe whatever crazy shit he wants. But has anyone ever pressed him on issues which may conflict with his beliefs? Or have such questions not been asked out of 'politeness' and 'respect for his beliefs'? Scientists who work in fields which may be affected by his beliefs need to know, and until they know, they have a right to be concerned.Posted by: Omar Ali | July 27, 2009 9:58 AM
Re #11: It is a false view of history to imagine that the 20th century was somehow especially prone to mass murder and racked up those awesome body counts because they got Nietzche's telegram that "God is dead". The fact is, God has always been dead, and people have always been able to take advantage of that "inside knowledge". How was the death toll of 20th century wars greater per capita than it was in, say, the thirty year war (fought ostensibly FOR the so-called moral codes without which humanity becomes lost)?
There is absolutely no question that Nietzche was prescient, but equally no question that he also expected that after all the sturm and drung, there WILL be a world and it will have values (and lack of values). Abandon the illusion that some particular illusion is all that holds the world together. Illusions come and illusions go. If we are an illusion prone species, we will presumably make new ones. But the ones that work best are the ones that we dont yet regard as illusions. Holding on to some of them AFTER they are known to be illusions just so that the "huddled masses" dont get confused is like ordering the tide to stop rising. It aint gonna happen. Go with the flow, in this case, to a post-skygod future(which I suspect will not be free of gods either...all things being full of gods, as pre-Nietzche I had presciently pointed out)..
Posted by: Abdul Alhazred | July 27, 2009 9:58 AM
Emphasis added. Not according to the Bible. It says the God forbade the tree of knowledge.Posted by: Pierce R. Butler | July 27, 2009 10:03 AM
andyet @ # 11: There has never ben a succesful, wide spread secuar moral code.
1) Please learn to spell, or at least to use spell-check.
2) Try to find out something about Western Europe and Japan, and other successful secular societies.
3) Nietzsche? Nietzsche? This is a step up from quoting the babble, or Ayn Rand, but still not at the reality-based level preferred here. Please try again, citing a more appropriate authority, such as, say, Lewis Carroll.
Posted by: XD | July 27, 2009 10:06 AM
@#24
Collins seems to believe that God is Satan.
Posted by: genecutter | July 27, 2009 10:07 AM
Sam Harris has also written a review on Collins' book, The Language of God:
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20060815_sam_harris_language_ignorance/
The more you learn about the way Francis thinks, the less comfortable you will be with him as NIH director.
Posted by: 386sx | July 27, 2009 10:08 AM
"... God gifted humanity with the knowledge of good and evil ..."
Emphasis added. Not according to the Bible. It says the God forbade the tree of knowledge.
Good catch dude. All of humanity was supposedly punished for that. Some "gift".
Mr. Collins is of course blissfully unaware that his theology is completely the opposite of the whole point of what his theology is supposed to be. Unless he reads this blog, though!
Posted by: Bill Dauphin, OM | July 27, 2009 10:09 AM
Parenthetically, I love it when I see this expression...
...in common discourse. I'm so hoping it will become a common usage.
Posted by: True_q | July 27, 2009 10:13 AM
F. Collins is one of the best known scientists in the world. But in fact his view of the universe is not a scientific one at all. That's really sad.
Posted by: CalGeorge | July 27, 2009 10:14 AM
CNN interview:
Q. What brought you, as an adult then, to faith?
Part of his answer is:
"...well, I changed my life plan from physical science to medicine, and when I went to medical school, the ideas about death and dying which had been rather hypothetical became very real..."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ml0FqyFYfrU
Same old, same old.
He also says that we get our sense of right and wrong from God. Very offensive.
Posted by: Marcus Ranum | July 27, 2009 10:17 AM
"If the moral law is just a side effect of evolution, then there is no such thing as good or evil. It's all an illusion."
Yes. And there's no free will, either. And true knowledge of anything is impossible, because it must be held in our fallible brains and filtered through our fallible senses. We're meat robots running complicated programs - one of which makes us think we're special, in spite of the obvious fact that we're not.
No choice, No responsibility, No good or evil, No point to any of it at all except for whatever the programs running in the meat robot tell us is important. The soul is not dead; it never existed at all. We are brought into life at random, out of random combinations, and leave pretty much the same way - at a time and manner selected for us by our surroundings.
I find that tremendously liberating. "Hold on and enjoy the ride" might be the only bon mot worth remembering.
Posted by: Knockgoats | July 27, 2009 10:17 AM
andyet,
So you're back with more of your crap - or rather, mostly poseur Tom Wolfe's crap and loony Friedrich Nietzsche's crap.
There has never ben a succesful, wide spread secuar moral code.
Yes there has: secular humanitarianism. Note that it is precisely as the hold of religion has declined that slavery, racism, the subjection of women and the exploitation of children have come to be seen as wrong; and the idea has taken root that all should have a right to freedom of speech and a degree of material comfort. Among rich countries, it is the most religious (the USA) that is also the most violent, and imprisons the largest proportion of its citizens.
you cannot believe in moral codes without simultaneously believing in a god who points at you with his fearsome forefinger and says "Thou shalt" or "Thou shalt not."
I know from personal experience that this is false. Also, see above.
Europe, in the peaceful decade of the 1880s, it must have seemed even more far–fetched to predict the world wars of the twentieth century and the barbaric brotherhoods of Nazism and Communism
Europe was peaceful in the 1880s (in the sense of having no large internal wars) because it was so busy carving up Africa, exploiting south Asia and Latin America, and preparing to carve up China. Moreover, it hardly took genius to see the potential for highly destructive future wars between industrialised states, with the examples of the American Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War fresh in memory; with extreme nationalist and racist ideologies flourishing; and with widespread class conflict.
The conclusion people out beyond the laboratory walls are drawing is: The fix is in! We're all hardwired! That, and: Don't blame me! I'm wired wrong!
How about some evidence, in place of this hysterical nonsense? Ah, but I'm forgetting: goddists, and self-important shits like Wolfe, don't need evidence - whatever they choose to assert is true.
Posted by: heliobates | July 27, 2009 10:18 AM
Except for the Greeks. And what have they ever given us?
Posted by: Hillary Rettig / www.lifelongactivist.com | July 27, 2009 10:18 AM
the lie that morality comes only from god, and therefore atheists lack it, is so outrageous and so malevolent that it reminds me of the Christians' traditional "blood libel" against the Jews - that they use the blood of innocents to make their Passover matzo. That libel was used to justify centuries of the worst imaginable oppression, and is still actually being used.
I recently donated a kidney to a stranger who happens to be a devout Christian. out of the whole experience, he said the thing that was most amazing was that "the most godly gift I ever received was from an atheist." he's a good man, and a smart one, I truly believe that he can't wrap his head around the idea that one can be good without god. I can't help but wonder at the degree of brainwashing that would create such a limited and, really, nonsensical world view, and the psychological conditions that would facilitate someone's adopting it. it's the old question about religion, but even more focused.
and, like many people here, i also wonder at how fragile the theists' sense of their own morality is that they feel they need help or support in enforcing it.
Posted by: David Marjanović, OM | July 27, 2009 10:24 AM
Despite not even mentioning it, comment 14 pwns comment 11 so completely that I don't think I need to add anything.
You see... unfettered, unmasked hedonism wouldn't be "the total eclipse of all values" for me. It would be much more similar to the Epicurean conception of happiness, for example. I would not actually find it fun to commit a chainsaw massacre.
Posted by: Jackal | July 27, 2009 10:27 AM
For those interested, here's the lecture from which the slides were taken: The Veritas Forum: The Language of God
Posted by: Ron Gove | July 27, 2009 10:31 AM
I am always quite befuddled by the "fine tuning" argument for god. I thought we were dealing with an omnipotent god here. That being so, why does it matter what the physics parameters are? God could have made us a plasma of hydrogen, or an intelligent block of granite; we could be pure "souls" floating around in an empty universe; the laws of physics are irrelevant as soon as one postulates that a supernatural thing started it all. Omnipotent means that ANYTHING is possible. To argue that god had to fine-tune the universe for us humans is logically equivalent to saying gos is not omnipotent and had to obey the laws of physics. Why worship a less than perfect god?
Posted by: Abdul Alhazred | July 27, 2009 10:31 AM
Is moral behavior somehow beneficial to the individual, or is it just the Big Guy making us dance?
If the former, it is rational.
Posted by: Bill Dauphin, OM | July 27, 2009 10:33 AM
David (@36):
Thanks for sending me back to re-read Comment 14. Somehow I had glossed over it the first time through, but now that I've taken a more careful look, I agree that it Wins the Internet™!
Posted by: XD | July 27, 2009 10:34 AM
Yup. Instead, the universe just looks like how we would expect it to if omnipotent gods didn't exist.Posted by: David Marjanović, OM | July 27, 2009 10:37 AM
And, of course, militaristic, nationalistic education throughout school. Education in terms of of peoples, hereditary enmity, treasons, victories, and glory. Education in terms of death, death, death, death, and death. WWI was really hard to avoid: large segments of the population had been drooling for it for decades.
"If I do good, I feel good. If I do bad, I feel bad. That's my religion."
– Abraham Lincoln
Posted by: Marcus Ranum | July 27, 2009 10:39 AM
Knockgoats writes:
Yes there has: secular humanitarianism.
Don't get into that argument; it's pointless. "Successful" over what period of time? And then define "success." It's pointless.
I know from personal experience that this is false.
You are correct. Since religious belief in morals is based on fictional desires of a fictional god, it's no less reasonable to say that you have your own fictional beliefs in your own fictional value system. That's easy.
Both religion and secular humanism fail on the morals question when you start searching for commonly-held beliefs. At least in theory if we all believed in the same god and all believed the same things about divine morals, then we'd never disagree about anything regarding this supposed morality. The same for secular humanists. If "morality" was susceptible to rational assessment then we'd succumb to rational arguments. Except that we have not, so far, come up with a rationalist refutation of selfishness. So - again - we can't agree.
The only conclusion that makes sense is that moral systems (faith based or rational) are only vague fictions that we follow when it's convenient for us to do so. I.e.: they aren't moral at all (unless you redefine "moral" to be 'whatever I want' in which case I think you're close to the point.)
andyet chooses his dates carefully:
Europe, in the peaceful decade of the 1880s
You mean the breather between the Franco-Prussian war, Austro-Prussian war, and WWI? The period in which all the great powers were eyeing eachother and jockeying for positions of advantage for when the inevitable big conflict started? The period of the biggest arms race held to date? That "peaceful" decade? That was a time-out.
The fix is in! We're all hardwired! That, and: Don't blame me! I'm wired wrong!
Obviously we're not completely hardwired since we appear to be capable of learning things that we didn't know about before. That requires a means for new "wiring" to be adopted on the fly. But your point is good - we learn a great deal from outside of ourselves; including social behaviors like religion, "morality", language, etc. How much responsibility can an individual be expected to take for such things, since (in the absence of choice) they are imposed from without? I've always found it interesting that we want to blame people for becoming killers or lawyers or whatever - in the face of the obvious question "how much choice did they have?" given upbringing, life opportunity, education, and other circumstances. Of course if you simplify things by realizing that "morality" is a fiction and so is free will, then blame goes out the window, too - but we can say we're programmed to assign blame anyway (which one can argue might be a side-effect of how we think in terms of intentionality in others).
Knockgoats writes:
How about some evidence, in place of this hysterical nonsense?
Actually, one would need evidence against those conclusions, since those conclusions follow from skeptically challenging the assumption that there are such things as morality and free will.
Posted by: Molly, NYC | July 27, 2009 10:46 AM
This is just sad. There are two things that disincline me from religious belief. The first, obviously, is the lack of evidence for its material claims--Jesus turned water into wine, you go someplace after you die, God gives a crap about your sex life, etc.
The other is the lack of evidence for its central moral claim: Essentially, that religion is worthwhile because if you believe despite the lack of evidence (AKA "faith"), you will be a better person--more honest, responsible, charitable.
If religious leaders had conspired over the last decade or so to disprove the latter (perhaps to further test everyone's "faith"), they couldn't have done a better job. (They were surely always corrupt, violent and sexually obsessed, but the Internet has made their lunacy and evil [for lack of a better word] harder to hide.)
Meanwhile, as non-believers have come out of the closet in increasing numbers, they mostly stand revealed as--honest, responsible and charitable.
Or at worst, not particularly destructive. Obviously, you don't see prominent atheists paying for crank and hookers with money they chiseled out of other atheists, or covering up child molestation by dint of their atheist credentials and with the aid of the vast atheist hierarchy, or flying jets into populated buildings in the Holy Name of Atheism. But they don't especially seem to go in for secular crimes (rape, burglary, e.g.) either. They're actually rather dull in that sense, as are their private lives (not to themselves, presumably--just that they aren't National Enquirer material).
Collins must know a lot of atheists. Is he really prepared to say to his colleagues--probably all exceedingly decent people (who, incidentally, fight human suffering for a living)--that they're morally lacking?
Posted by: Marcus Ranum | July 27, 2009 10:46 AM
Ray Ingles @#14 writes:
Consider the game of chess.
It's interesting that you chose, as an example workspace for your argument regarding morals, a game in which there can be only one winner and a loser.
Posted by: Peter Ashby | July 27, 2009 10:48 AM
Maybe when I've finished it I should send my copy of Marc D. Hauser's Moral Minds: how nature designed our universal sense of right and wrong? On second thoughts I'll keep it, no sense sending evidence to someone with an obviously closed mind. I learned that with the religious half of my family.
Posted by: Stephen Wells | July 27, 2009 10:49 AM
@Marcus: morality and free will are labels we apply to certain complex behaviours. Saying they don't exist is pointless. Investigating what they actually are (e.g. not magic) is fruitful.
Posted by: Spiro Keat | July 27, 2009 10:50 AM
Hey, leave Mr. Collins alone.
Your god fearing previous president and his xian chums gave the science based industries in my country a real boost by fucking up the USA based competition.
Posted by: Peter Ashby | July 27, 2009 10:51 AM
Dammit, can we have an edit button please? obviously it was Collins I was thinking of sending the book to, even if I forgot to state it to make the sentence grammatically correct.
Posted by: Thorne | July 27, 2009 10:54 AM
""... God gifted humanity with the knowledge of good and evil ..."
Emphasis added. Not according to the Bible. It says the God forbade the tree of knowledge.
Good catch dude. All of humanity was supposedly punished for that. Some "gift"."
Hold on a second! First you bash him for peddling his own brand of woo, then you bash him for not peddling someone else's brand of woo?"
Let's be consistent, please. It's obvious that he's not a biblical literalist. So it seems absurd to jump on him because he isn't!
Posted by: Thomas Lee Elifritz | July 27, 2009 10:56 AM
Chess - a game in which there can be only one winner and a loser.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draw_(chess)
Posted by: Ray Ingles | July 27, 2009 11:11 AM
Marcus Ranum @45: It's interesting that you chose, as an example workspace for your argument regarding morals, a game in which there can be only one winner and a loser.
The extension to non-zero-sum games should be obvious, but if you really want to see my homework, read this.
Posted by: Marcus Ranum | July 27, 2009 11:11 AM
Thomas Lee Elifritz nitpicks:
(..wikipedia link..)
Yeah, do you play for a draw whenever you sit down at a board? I trust I made my point.
Posted by: Knockgoats | July 27, 2009 11:14 AM
Marcus Ranum,
On average, you produce far more crap per posting that most goddists. I can't be bothered to go through it all, so I'll just pick out a few points.
Since religious belief in morals is based on fictional desires of a fictional god, it's no less reasonable to say that you have your own fictional beliefs in your own fictional value system.
What "fictional beliefs" do you take my moral judgements to be based on? The fictional belief that sentient beings have preferences, perhaps? The fictional belief that some ways human beings conduct themselves are more conducive than others to the minimisation of suffering and the maximization of human fulfilment? Do tell.
Both religion and secular humanism fail on the morals question when you start searching for commonly-held beliefs.
What's secular humanism got to do with it? You might at least try reading what I wrote. However neither secular humanism nor secular humanitarianism needs the assumption that we should all agree on moral questions.
Except that we have not, so far, come up with a rationalist refutation of selfishness.
That's because there isn't one.
The only conclusion that makes sense is that moral systems (faith based or rational) are only vague fictions that we follow when it's convenient for us to do so.
No, it isn't. We know you're a selfish shit, because you repeatedly assure us this is so, but you're generalising unsoundly from that single case. The roots of morality lie in our evolved propensity for empathy, and dislike of inequity, which appear to be shared with many primates, and probably more widely. That is, most of us do actually care about others - although we are of course also self-interested. Rational, consequentialist moral systems are attempts to find systematic ways of reconciling our own preferences with those of others in equitable ways.
Actually, one would need evidence against those conclusions, since those conclusions follow from skeptically challenging the assumption that there are such things as morality and free will.
Actually, you need evidence for any claim unless its negation is self-contradictory. And you're not capable of more than adolescent pseudo-scepticism, Marcus - you're much too far up your own arse for that.
Posted by: Lynna | July 27, 2009 11:25 AM
Sam Harris's essay reads like a carefully edited and toned-down version of what probably started out as weapon's grade sarcasm.
Of course, Harris was correct to fit the tone of the piece to the venue in which it would appear. Still, I'd love to see a longer version on his website.
Posted by: knathon | July 27, 2009 11:27 AM
"it's the familiar anti-atheist canard that atheists cannot know any truly moral behavior"
PZ,
While I don't agree with Dr. Collins' stance, you don't seem to understand what he is arguing. Instead you are arguing against, yes a familiar anti-atheist canard, but against one that Collins would join you in disagreeing with.
Collins believes that the universality of a moral code in human beings is evidence of a god. By definition of the argument, if "atheists cannot know any truly moral behavior" then the moral code wouldn't be universal, and he would have no argument. What Collins is arguing here is that if we evolved a sense of morality, then there is not external good and evil in the absolute sense. I am not saying this is a good argument (I don't think it is), but what you are arguing doesn't really address his point.
Posted by: Thomas Lee Elifritz | July 27, 2009 11:30 AM
I trust I made my point.
You trust wrongly. 'Trust' isn't a generally accepted credible scientific method. Cross checking, reproducibility and calibration generally fall into the category of 'credible'.
Posted by: Bill Dauphin, OM | July 27, 2009 11:31 AM
Not to nitpick the nitpicking rejoinder to a nitpick, or anything, but...
Well, I'm no chess expert, but I did live through the era of Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky, during which competitive chess was often in the general news, and IIRC, at its top levels, players often do play for a draw, for strategic reasons. If you're ahead in a match, every drawn game gets you closer to the match win.
Not that the whole question in any way refutes Ray's original points @14.
Posted by: CJColucci | July 27, 2009 11:35 AM
Collins has said enough silly things that, in fairness, I think we should isolate the really silly from the not-so-bad. If you take science seriously and you're going to be religious at all, items 1 and 2 on his list are pretty much the bare minimum beliefs you have to have. Of course, you don't have to be religious at all, but unless you're making a global assault on religious belief as such, these beliefs are not loony, and they don't get in the way of real science. If the religion you want to adhere to is Christianity, in some form, 4 is also pretty much the bare minimum belief you have to have, and it, too, doesn't get in the way of real science. Not that there's any particularly good case for 1, 2, and 4, but if that's all there were, we could let it slide. Where Collins goes off the rails, and brings into question whether he can sufficiently compartmentalize his science and his religion, is 3 and 5. Those beliefs, unlike the others, can get in the way of real science.
Posted by: Marcus Ranum | July 27, 2009 11:38 AM
Ray Ingles writes:
The extension to non-zero-sum games should be obvious, but if you really want to see my homework, read this.
Very nice!
I think you've still got some of the usual problems inherent in trying to claim that game theory explains or results in common "moral" values. For example, TfT might lead us to a "moral" teaching of "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth" - and, as you know, games like Hawks and Doves could be used to argue that we should expect a percentage of a population to be criminal, and to simply accept it as inevitable.
As you say "no simple moral code will work everywhere" but that brings up the challenge of a society which thinks that child murder is "moral". It's not "moral" to you (as you yourself write "Harming innocent life is wrong, for example.") but genetic game theory causes male cats to do exactly that, when they encounter a defenseless female with new kittens.
You talk a good game on the game theory and then make flat-out assertions that "terrorism is immoral" and contradict yourself by asserting "No simple moral code will work everywhere." Well, which is it? Terrorism might be a form of TfT or it might be aggression. Who decides?
Ultimately, I don't see how game theory can support an argument for a common, shared set of moral values, because it's based on the individual's score over time. One might just as easily argue that game theory says that infecting your opponent with the idea of morality will influence their moves and make them easier to beat (that, by the way, is what I personally think is going on in some cases). We generally wind up with
selfishness = moral
which seems to me to be the evolutionary view. I do not consider it "moral" for you to take one of my rooks, though I consider it my "moral duty" to take yours.
I am also not sure you can dismiss reality as not being zero-sum; it's certainly too big and complex to boil down to a neat little game, but let me call to your attention that many behaviors we see appear to be predicated on a long-term awareness that, maybe, things are pretty much zero sum. Eat or be eaten, and whatnot. For all intents and purposes, we're in a limited playing field for all that it's very large.
Thank you for sharing the thought-provoking article!
Posted by: Rick Bogle | July 27, 2009 11:39 AM
Folks reading ScienceBlogs should pay more attention to Sam Harris.
Harris, writing in The End of Faith (Norton, 2004) observes:
"The fact that the universe is illuminated where you stand, the fact that your thoughts and moods and sensations have a qualitative character, is an absolute mystery…" (209)
He spells out an issue that many writers of the blogs here have a hard time with:
"The problem of specifying the criteria for inclusion in our moral community is one for which I do not have a detailed answer—other than to say that whatever answer we give should reflect our sense of the possibility of subjectivity of the creatures in question. Some answers are clearly wrong. We cannot merely say, for instance, that all human beings are in, and all animals are out. What will be our criteria for humanness? DNA? Shall a single human cell take precedence over a herd of elephants? The problem is that whatever attribute we use to differentiate between humans and animals—intelligence, language use, moral sentiments, and so on—will equally differentiate between human beings themselves. If people are more important to us than orangutans because they can articulate their interests, why aren’t more articulate people more important?" (177)
Posted by: John Scanlon, FCD | July 27, 2009 11:40 AM
Add my vote to the clamour of OM noms for Ray Ingles (#14). Any temptation to characterise Collins' spoutings (heretical as they are!) as a 'philosophical' position should be strenuously resisted, because Ray (or whoever he lifted his text from) has just shown what philosophy is about.
Someone should seriously campaign for putting that motto on the frickin' dollar bill (or at least the $5).
Posted by: Bill Dauphin, OM | July 27, 2009 11:42 AM
Maybe we should: The theists seem to get lots of mileage out of their teary apologies for these sorts of
momentary lapsesinadvertent revelations of their true nature.Ahh, but no... probably better to stick to reason-inspired common decency, I suppose. And I was so looking forward to the hookers and crank.
Posted by: Thomas Lee Elifritz | July 27, 2009 11:46 AM
I was very nice for two whole posts, the honeymoon is over.
"In God We Trust"?
Ha ahahahaha hahahaha ahahahahaha ahaha heh ... fucking rubes.
Posted by: John Scanlon, FCD | July 27, 2009 11:53 AM
was just me covering my arse in case this was an old chestnut from Hume or someone like that. Checked the link from #52, will read more later.Posted by: Christophe Thill | July 27, 2009 11:53 AM
Go to a group of little girls playing hopscotch, or little boys playing marbles. OK, first, make it clear that your intentions are good... Then ask them: "who created the rules of your games?" We know the answers, because it's already been done. "Adults", they will say, "parents", or sometimes even "the first humans" or "God". If you tell them that generations of children like them have refined the rules over time, and transmitted them by teaching them to slightly younger children playing with them, they'll have a hard time believing you. But it's still the truth.
Same thing for moral rules.
As an old bearded German guy said: "People make their own history, but they don't know they're making it."
Posted by: Pierce R. Butler | July 27, 2009 11:55 AM
In attempting to answer my own question @ # 17, I find people quoting a 1998 text (of which Collins was one of three authors) calling for “respect for [patient] autonomy” and “nondirective counseling” regarding abortion.
He also seems accepting of homosexuality, though perhaps leaving some room for moralizing with statements like "... sexual orientation is genetically influenced but not hardwired by DNA, and that whatever genes are involved represent predispositions, not predeterminations."
As yet, I haven't found anything about his attitudes on sexuality research or education. Still, it's encouraging not to have seen any major red flags so far...
It's also a plus factor for Collins that Denise O'Leary doesn't seem to like him!
Posted by: jennyxyzzy | July 27, 2009 11:56 AM
Russell Blackford #12
Huh. Russell's a Motie. Who knew?
Posted by: Felix | July 27, 2009 11:57 AM
Thorne #50
Hold on a second! First you bash him for peddling his own brand of woo, then you bash him for not peddling someone else's brand of woo?"
Let's be consistent, please. It's obvious that he's not a biblical literalist. So it seems absurd to jump on him because he isn't!
?
Ummm, no. He explicitly advocates the Christian God. Complete with Trinitarian dogma and everything. There is no christian teaching, creationist or progressive, that says God 'gifted' humanity with knowledge of good and evil. Collins is simply not talking about the Christian God when he says that. Maybe he has developed Collinsism, but then he is just lying when he says he's a Christian - because the very existence of Christ makes no internal sense whatsoever if you believe knowledge of good and evil was a divine gift. Collins is not being called out for not sticking to dogma, he's being called out for being inconsistent with his own stated beliefs and science. The best possible conclusion is that he's a very, very confused man.
Posted by: Felix | July 27, 2009 11:59 AM
What happened? OMG my comment went up without any error! Something has changed! The world is different! Testing...
Posted by: Marcus Ranum | July 27, 2009 11:59 AM
Knockgoats writes:
What "fictional beliefs" do you take my moral judgements to be based on? The fictional belief that sentient beings have preferences, perhaps?
I'm sorry, you misunderstood me. I didn't mean your beliefs were fictional -- just that, for all intents and purposes, you can assert them with just as much enthusiasm as one of the fideists. They assert that their beliefs come from their fictional god; you can just as easily assert that you got your beliefs from a box of cracker jacks and you're on equal footing.
The fictional belief that some ways human beings conduct themselves are more conducive than others to the minimisation of suffering and the maximization of human fulfilment? Do tell.
Hey, you won't catch me defending such a proposition, but if you think you can, or you want to take it on faith, be my guest.
You might at least try reading what I wrote. However neither secular humanism nor secular humanitarianism needs the assumption that we should all agree on moral questions.
My mistake on the misreading. I didn't realize there was such a yawning chasm of difference between the two. (eyeroll)
Maybe you can explain how it wouldn't? If we don't agree on moral questions, then everyone simply acts out of self-interest. One can appeal to enlightened self-interest, perhaps, but that begs the question of how you enlighten everyone and achieve agreement on what that enlightened self-interest is. Doesn't that necessarily follow?
Then, how do you address the frog and the scorpion problem: what about those who prefer self-interest or "it's my nature" over enlightened self-interest based on shared welfare? Typically, the response is to compel the scorpion to stop killing frogs, contrary to its nature. Again, there is no shared set of "moral" values, simply the strong enforcing their notion of common shared interest among the strong, upon the weak.
That's because there isn't one
I certainly haven't heard of one, either.
The roots of morality lie in our evolved propensity for empathy, and dislike of inequity, which appear to be shared with many primates, and probably more widely.
I see. So you're saying that our morals are in our genes? That sounds suspiciously like survival of the fittest morals, to me. :)
I think if we take empathy and then try to extend "Well, I sure wouldn't like to be killed. So - maybe - I can assume Bob over there wouldn't like it any more than I would." we might be able to come up with something extremely rudimentary as far as a moral system, but you're going to have to handle cheating and people who don't agree with it. How do you do that?
Rational, consequentialist moral systems are attempts to find systematic ways of reconciling our own preferences with those of others in equitable ways.
How's it working? Gotten past "do unto others as long as you don't get caught," yet?
Actually, you need evidence for any claim unless its negation is self-contradictory.
OK, how about the evidence you yourself offered? Namely that we appear to be hardwired to some degree or another by nature?
Posted by: Ray Ingles | July 27, 2009 12:03 PM
Marcus Ranum @60: You talk a good game on the game theory and then make flat-out assertions that "terrorism is immoral" and contradict yourself by asserting "No simple moral code will work everywhere."
I actually do address this, in the section titled 'An Objection'.
"Some would argue that developing such moral codes from practical consequences is a hopeless task, that reasoning out morals from the uncountable 'facts of nature' and our own desires is too big a problem to tackle, that no final moral code of Ultimate Truth could be developed... Newton's laws of motion are 'computationally intractable' for any set of bodies greater than three. We can't solve them completely for even the Earth/Moon/Sun system, let alone for the solar system with its myraids of objects whizzing around... And yet, we can still get space probes to Neptune (and, in 2015, Pluto). For many specific cases, there are very reliable solutions."
Even if you can't always be sure what's correct, it's often pretty easy to tell when something's incorrect. Even if I don't claim to know the optimal moral solution in all cases - and boy howdy I don't - I'm confident enough to put terrorism in the 'clearly wrong' column.
Male cats do indeed kill kittens... but we have substantially greater cognitive power than cats, and can see solutions and ramifications quite beyond their capacity. Cats aren't noted for winning a whole lot of chess games, either, let alone solving many of the real-world challenges humans wrestle with on a daily basis.
Posted by: 386sx | July 27, 2009 12:03 PM
Hold on a second! First you bash him for peddling his own brand of woo, then you bash him for not peddling someone else's brand of woo?"
Let's be consistent, please. It's obvious that he's not a biblical literalist. So it seems absurd to jump on him because he isn't!
Okay you're right. He believes what he believes, I guess! Right you are.
Posted by: Cosmic Teapot | July 27, 2009 12:04 PM
and that authority wants you to KILL, MAIM and DESTROY the infidels.
KILL, MAIM, DESTROY!
KILL, MAIM, DESTROY!
_____________<;,><_____________
Or just wait. GOD WILL TORTURE THEM FOR ALL ETERNITY WHEN THEY DIE!!! HA HA HA!
Posted by: andyet | July 27, 2009 12:07 PM
"it's the familiar anti-atheist canard that atheists cannot know any truly moral behavior"
That's not a true description. It isn't that atheists can't be moral, it's just that atheists have no meta-reason for being good.
Please, please, puhlease let someone claim that "self interest" provides sufficient motivation to be good. I love tearing that claim apart.
Posted by: Gordy | July 27, 2009 12:10 PM
Ray Ingles #14 - Superbly well explained! That was a pleasure to read :)
Posted by: Virgil | July 27, 2009 12:11 PM
For the umpteenth time PZ, please stop mis-stating that Collins has been APPOINTED!
He has been NOMINATED for the post, and will not be confirmed until after a senate hearing. Everyone should get off this board right now and WRITE YOUR SENATORS to demand that he be made to look like the duumbass that he is during the senate hearings!
Posted by: Bill Dauphin, OM | July 27, 2009 12:13 PM
Jennyxyzzy:
I knew!</smug>
Posted by: Omar Ali | July 27, 2009 12:19 PM
Why are you so hung up on what justification people use for being good? it seems to me that the rough proportions of "good" and "bad" people dont really change that much, but their stated reasons for why they behave so do. I am not saying all societies are equally "good or bad". Some are better organized than others and public behavior does vary (observe how people stone stray dogs and monkeys in Saudi Arabia and compare to the dog-loving public of the US).
Self interest may or may not provide justification for whatever standards of good you hold, but history and biology created those standards, not god. History and biology also created god to set up those standards in some places and they will create new ways to do it. Having lived in very religious Saudi Arabia (and read a good deal of history), I can assure you that the god version of these standards has some pretty horrendous examples on its side and things have definitely improved since godlessness became a little more common.
Posted by: Knockgoats | July 27, 2009 12:19 PM
It isn't that atheists can't be moral, it's just that atheists have no meta-reason for being good. - andyet
WTF is a "meta-reason"? Doing what Sky-Daddy says because Sky-Daddy says you should? Or because if you don't he'll
give you no pocket money this weektorture you for all eternity?Posted by: Prometheus | July 27, 2009 12:23 PM
So on Mondays we are all Fin de siècle ethnographers?
Dibs on Franz Boas.
*sigh*
Ethical systems (morals is probably the more appropriate description)that depend on supernatural impetus or origin are most often just some imagined celestial ratification of advantageous behavior. They are, by divine association, fixed and as a result will, through temporal attrition, become a system of absurdities. This is resolved by a mechanism to introduce elasticity before these systems schism or collapse. That mechanism is called "clergy" and that elasticity is called "interpretation"
Ethical systems that are based on behaviors observed to be advantageous and continue to rely on non-magical empirical observation are flexible (and often situational) hence they do not descend into absurdity.
The latter system is the most efficient.
Hence it is better (unless you just have some burning desire for justifying your recreational nihilism by saying they are both meaningless).
To return to the point of the thread:
Collins has stated that it is immoral to derive stem cells from in-vitro fertilized zygotes (souls). He has stated that it is moral to derive stem cells from zygotes that are produced by somatic transfer (no souls).
Summary: Sperm contain immortal souls.
Conclusion: Farrah Fawcett was a greater scourge than diphtheria.
Collins does not need to head an institution, he needs to be consigned to one.
Posted by: John Carrier | July 27, 2009 12:24 PM
It seems fairly silly to assume that a belief in God precludes one from being able to advance the scientific body of knowledge. After all, a great deal of the foundations of today's research stands upon the shoulders of work done by Christian monks. This seemingly Irrationality among Atheists appears to be in contradiction to the pragmatism of the secular humanists viewpoint.
Posted by: Matt Penfold | July 27, 2009 12:27 PM
Yes, it would be fairly silly.
Fortunately I am not aware of anyone who holds to such a view. Dawkins doesn't, PZ doesn't, Coyne doesn't. Harris doesn't, Dennett doesn't.
What is silly is your saying stupid things like this.
Posted by: Marcus Ranum | July 27, 2009 12:33 PM
Ray Ingles writes:
Even if you can't always be sure what's correct, it's often pretty easy to tell when something's incorrect. Even if I don't claim to know the optimal moral solution in all cases - and boy howdy I don't - I'm confident enough to put terrorism in the 'clearly wrong' column.
Yeah, I saw your section on objections. Obviously, I'm with the guys who say it appears to be a hopeless task. :D
I'm unconvinced that it's easy to tell when something is incorrect. For example, we saw that lots of people were tickled pink when the World Trade Centers were knocked to bits. Not just a few outliers, either: many, many people. It may be clearly wrong to you, but it isn't to them.
Of course, they're brain-addled by religion and educated to hate and so forth. We could say that their starting position is such that they cannot understand right and wrong; or we can compel them. But then we're stuck with a sort of circular definition of morality which is that it's what you've been raised/propagandized to believe is right.
Male cats do indeed kill kittens... but we have substantially greater cognitive power than cats, and can see solutions and ramifications quite beyond their capacity.
Wait - the reason cats do it is because it makes sense to kill off another male's kittens, to promote one's own genes, and to get the female into heat again sooner - so the male cat can get busy producing his own offspring. In terms of biology and game theory that is the right thing to do. Is it then "moral"? What if we found that the same kind of underlying principles are at work in human behaviors? Are they then "moral"? (Think: infidelity and rape)
Simply saying we have more cognitive power doesn't get us off the hook. It just means we may bullshit ourselves about how deeply the hook is set.
Cats aren't noted for winning a whole lot of chess games, either, let alone solving many of the real-world challenges humans wrestle with on a daily basis.
Cats are really really really good at being cats. They're not nice. But that's a problem for people who want to root their morality in natural behaviors and evolutionary game theory. It's not a problem for me or the cats.
Posted by: johnb300m | July 27, 2009 12:41 PM
all i have to say [about PZ's commentary] is AMEN!
Posted by: XD | July 27, 2009 12:47 PM
#82
Ignoring the poor grammar, I'm curious to know why you chose to capitalize those two words.
Posted by: John Carrier | July 27, 2009 12:54 PM
Dawkins: There are plenty of places where religion does not keep off the scientific turf. Any belief in miracles is flat contradictory not just to the facts of science but to the spirit of science.
Dennet I dont mind so much as he is not nearly as lazy as the rest of the big names.(Can find a quote if you want but hes good about not using a broad brush)
Harris at least does scientific work unlike the rest of them. He shoots his mouth off now and again. I can find the qoute if you demand one but hes alluded to such things more then once.
I would not dream of insulting this blog's magnanimous host by quote mining him. He is a busy man and likely has more important things than responding to the comment of a guest.
Never heard of Coyne. Sounds like an italian dish.
If you do not believe anyone here holds that view what is the problem with Collins' appointment? He seems to not have let his religious view stop him from contributing to science in a very positive way so far.
Posted by: Anonymous | July 27, 2009 12:54 PM
PZ--
I have been reading your blog for a long, long time, and it was one of the things that made me an atheist.
I wanted to thank you for posting this, because up to now I was unaware of Collins' position on biomedical research. I am a biomedical engineering student and wish to continue my education in biomolecular forces of cognition, which Collins appears to have decided do not exist. Will he therefore refuse to fund my future inquiries because he personally believes they will not be fruitful? What about research just in the next few years?
Scientific censoring based on religious opinion is abominable in every aspect, but I felt the need to comment on this particular area because it affects me personally.
Posted by: DiscoveredJoys | July 27, 2009 12:54 PM
I've noticed that as men get older (and it is more obvious in men) they either become quiet repositories of dignified wisdom or they become holders of disproportionate and extreme opinions.
You can probably think of recent examples of old professors saying unwise things about race, or you can read some well known SF writers who go appear to have gone doo-lally as they aged.
I suspect some politicians age the same way, but they are expected to be opinionated and this may mask their decline...
Collins, at 59, is only a year older than me. Is he going doo-lally, or am I?
Posted by: Knockgoats | July 27, 2009 1:00 PM
If you do not believe anyone here holds that view what is the problem with Collins' appointment? John Carrier
RTFP.
Posted by: Lynna | July 27, 2009 1:06 PM
The video posted on Jerry Coyne's site begins with the moderator stating that Jesus Christ is relevant at all levels. If Jesus is the Big Deciding Factor (and Collins knelt in the dewy grass to accept Jesus as his savior and Big Deciding Factor), and if morals derive from this Jesus-inflected God thingy, then I think some of the questions raised @#17 about the rights of women are answered (and not to the benefit of we women).
Collins can do whatever he pleases in the sanctity of his own patch of dewy grass, but to bring these beliefs into the realm of science and policy would be a disaster.
Posted by: Holbach
|
July 27, 2009 1:08 PM
I still will never take back what I said or think about that Collins character. The more that is discovered about this "scientist" in religious clothing, the more he maintains his stance on his nonsense.
Posted by: Prometheus | July 27, 2009 1:08 PM
#82 John Carrier
"It seems fairly silly to assume that a belief in God precludes one from being able to advance the scientific body of knowledge. After all, a great deal of the foundations of today's research stands upon the shoulders of work done by Christian monks. This seemingly."
It would be silly, if anybody was making that assumption.
That a belief in God, restrains, restricts and slows the advance the scientific body of knowledge, is pretty clearly demonstrable.
To wit: The Christian monk that set the advance of science back six hundred years by washing away Archimedes' "The Method" so he could re-use the paper for a spell book.
Imagine a world that had been performing integral calculus since 1187.
"Irrationality among Atheists appears to be in contradiction to the pragmatism of the secular humanists viewpoint."
Pragmatism is knowing is the difference between 'but for' and 'in spite of'. The Atheists seem to demonstrate that understanding. Where were you that day of class?
Posted by: Thomas Lee Elifritz | July 27, 2009 1:09 PM
I've noticed that as men get older (and it is more obvious in men) they either become quiet repositories of dignified wisdom or they become holders of disproportionate and extreme opinions.
You're right, I'm no longer going to stay silent about the modern extinction event, and the total corruption of the human race by retards without a clue. I'm going public.
You can probably think of recent examples of old professors saying unwise things about race, or you can read some well known SF writers who go appear to have gone doo-lally as they aged.
And from now on I'm publishing all of my scientific and position papers as both as epic poems, and in iambic pentameter hip hop music videos. That should get their attention. No more of those sissy 'whitey' papers.
Posted by: Matt Penfold | July 27, 2009 1:10 PM
Try reading what PZ and others have said. It is not what you think they have said.
I would add that since you have no idea who Coyne is, maybe you need to read a little more before commenting further.
Posted by: Lynna | July 27, 2009 1:17 PM
Why oh why does "The Language of God" presentation have to appear on "The Veritas Forum" ... does the Veritas Forum presents blather, lies, and My Old Grandma philosophy as veritas? Maybe it was for contrast, as in, see this is not-truth presented so you can see the difference? No. If you name your forum "Veritas" all your work is done.
Posted by: Matt Penfold | July 27, 2009 1:18 PM
I would like to add, for John Carrier's benefit, that it is not Collins' scientific achievements that are are the issue. I would have thought that was pretty clear from what PZ and others have said, but it seems to have escaped some people.
What is the issue is Collins' very public pronouncements on human evolution, and especially his views on human morality. They are at odds with the best scientific understanding for the origins of human morality.
Posted by: Ray Ingles | July 27, 2009 1:19 PM
Marcus Ranum - Cats are, indeed, really good at being cats. Humans, however, aren't cats and the solutions that cats are limited to don't necessarily apply to humans.
Cats don't have long enough horizons, for example, to consider the notion that another male cat might kill the kittens they sire. They are quite incapable of making a truce, say, where "I agree not to kill the kittens you sired if you agree not to kill the kittens I sire." That's a strategy they are simply incapable of devising, evaluating, or even being taught.
Humans, by contrast, can make such long-term reciprocal arrangements. Indeed, it seems our ability to do so is a primary reason we've been as successful as we have as a species.
Now, don't get me wrong - I don't think morality is anything like a solved problem, any more than, say, government is. As Churchill said, "[D]emocracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." Western democracy and generally-"Enlightenment"-ish values seem to me to be the best arrangement we've found so far. There are certainly those who disagree... but their arguments don't seem to be all that convincing.
The people who were celebrating the destruction of the WTC almost universally lived in regions of low standard-of-living, regular violence, limited technical capability, low education, and so forth. Forgive me if I doubt their judgement on this case, too.
Note also the Pinker article I link to in my essay - increasing secularism has been associated with decreased violence over at least five centuries. Western democracies are doing something right. And note that I explicitly invoke empirical solutions and 'rules of thumb' when analyzing moral questions.
Posted by: Prometheus | July 27, 2009 1:21 PM
#89 DiscoveredJoys
"I've noticed that as men get older (and it is more obvious in men) they either become quiet repositories of dignified wisdom or they become holders of disproportionate and extreme opinions."
Oh dear. I wonder which you imagine yourself to be gramps? Hmmmmmm.
The suspense is killing me.
Can I guess narcissistic repository of suppositories and be right on both counts?
Posted by: John Carrier | July 27, 2009 1:21 PM
"To wit: The Christian monk that set the advance of science back six hundred years by washing away Archimedes' "The Method" so he could re-use the paper for a spell book."
I call your accident and raise you a murder
Lavoiser
I was busy reading The Prince that day
Knockgoats, I had assumed that the commenters of this blog were more concerned with the general advancement of knowledge than one specific branch. While PZ may be relying on a self preservation instinct I doubt most of you work in the biological research field.
Has Collins demonstrated in the past an inability to get good use out of funds spent? If not what is the problem?
Penfold, just haven't heard of the guy thats all. A man can only read so much. I mean it would be unreasonable on my part to expect you all to have read Aquinas just to speak intelligent on the subject of faith and reason right?
Posted by: Holbach
|
July 27, 2009 1:26 PM
Good man Sam Harris! Printed the article to keep with my other examples of nonsense run amuck.
In the meantime, Collins defends himself:
My god made the Universe
My god made me
My god got me this job with the NIH
My god is causing all this bullshit ridicule against me for mixing science with irrationality.
Er, wait, that last one I don't know if I can blame it on my god. If it can do the first three, can it also do the fourth one? Not a chance!
Posted by: Bill Dauphin, OM | July 27, 2009 1:43 PM
I'm no expert on cats, evolution, game theory, or formal ethics, but I'll hazard a layman's commonsense response to this:
Cats also don't build any structures, or large-scale systems, that are essential to their well-being as a species. In the technological world — hell, in whole sweep of human history during which humans have been collaborating to hunt large animals, build buildings and fixed communities, and perform planned food production — humans are, and increasingly so over time, dependent on collaboration for survival. So propagating one's genes becomes a more complex proposition than simply maximizing the relative number of times you swap gametes.
If altruism is "the deliberate pursuit of the interests or welfare of others or the public interest," and the interest or welfare of each individual is increasingly dependent upon the interests or welfare of others or the public interest, then it beging to be fairly obvious that altruism is an expression of self-interest, rather than in conflict with it.
How can it ever be in and individual's interest to sacrific itself for the good of the community? Well, because each individual is broadly better off in a community in which individuals are willing, under certain circumstances, to sacrifice for others.
Keep in mind, too, that many such individual sacrifices are relatively low in cost compared to the benefits of living in a community of people willing to make such sacrifices: The tiny sacrifices you make under the heading of common courtesy — waiting your turn, giving others the right-of-way at intersections, opening and/or holding doors for others, etc. — cost individuals an almost unmeasurably small amount of time and energy per instance; the cost to individuals in terms of wasted time and energy would be vastly greater in a society in which nobody made those sacrifices.
Similarly, measurably larger concessions to the common good have measurably larger paybacks: If my willingness to pay slightly higher taxes leaves me living in a community with better schools and roads and public safety and parks, then my "sacrifice" was, viewed in the broadest sense, also an act of self-interest.
Even when the sacrifice is the ultimate, it can be seen as an expression of self-interest: Every individual benefits from a community in which some individuals are willing to die to defend the community, enforce social laws, and rescue others from peril... including even the individuals who are willing to die in those causes, most of whom will not be called upon to make that sacrifice despite their willingness to do so.
Unlike cats, humans don't devour their neighbors' children because, also unlike cats, we see those children as not only competitors for genetic survival but also collaborators in our genetic survival. IMHO, what defines moral behavior in humans is the cognitive ability to recognize the interests of others and of the whole community as expressions of self interest; immoral behavior is defined by the refusal (since we all possess the ability) to include others'/communities' interests in one's calculations of self-interest.
Simplistically, that's essentially the hoary Golden Rule®... except that god ain't got nuttin' t' do wid it!!
Posted by: Paul | July 27, 2009 1:46 PM
Has he been in a position to decide which branches of medicine should receive government funding before? As far as I can tell his whacky biological beliefs are mostly confined to special pleading for homo sapiens morality and in treating sperm+egg as the equivalent of a human being. I don't think those issues were relevant when as head of the HGP. They are a lot more relevant as head of the NIH.
Posted by: Ferrous Patella | July 27, 2009 1:47 PM
Good gods, the man verbed "gift"! I say we call for his head!
Posted by: Feynmaniac | July 27, 2009 1:50 PM
I'll repost (with some changes) a comment I made on another thread that relevant to discussion of where we get our morality from:
I encourage you to read this interview: Is Morality Innate and Universal?. The analogy of morality with language is made. Language in children is picked up very quickly and has many universal features across the globe so we are forced to conclude humans have a universal grammar. This is pretty much well established. Similarly, humans tend to pick up morality fairly quickly and despite superficial differences between cultures on what is right and wrong their moralities have much in common*. There is some flexibility because different lifestyles are going to require different strategies. What's good for hunter-gathers is not necessarily optimal for an agrarian society or modern Westerners.
Finally, when it comes to morality people usually don't consciously invoke the Ten Commandments, Kant's category imperative, utilitarian principles, etc. They make their decisions quickly and unconsciously. The reasons they give are usually after-the-fact rationalizations. All this suggest that we are born with an innate capacity for morality. This is a huge simplification and I don't want to give a false impression that's it's established. However, it has recently become an active area of research and has much data to back up the basic claims.
Now I don't want to strain the language analogy, but many ask the question: "If there's no God, who determines what is right and what is wrong?". Well if there is no God who decides what's grammatically correct? That sounds like a silly question, but it's not much different. Sure we are told over and over that God exists and we get our morality from him. The people who say it probably honestly believe it, but the problem is their actions contradicts this. Fundamentalist claim to get their morality exclusively from the bible, but how many of them would find nothing wrong with eating shell fish, working on the Sabbath, eating pork, etc. See how many of them could name the Ten Commandments. The more liberal Christians are a little more honest and say they are just influenced by it. But both are getting their morality from elsewhere. So to answer the question, we get morality the same place we get our grammar: a mixture of innate faculties and social agreed upon rules.
I'll just end by paraphrasing Sartre: morality is a human thing and we don't need a God to dictate it to us.
____
* I remember seeing a poster showing several world religion had some sort of golden rule. However, this was saying more about human nature than it was saying about the religions.
Posted by: John B Hodges | July 27, 2009 1:51 PM
Many clerics have repeated the "blood libel" against unbelievers, that only religion offers any basis for ethics.
They have it backwards. Religion offers no basis for ethics. Religious morality consists of obeying the alleged will of God, as reported by your chosen authority. But obedience is not the same as morality. If believers wish to make war or keep slaves or oppress women, they need only persuade themselves that their god approves. This seems not to be hard, and no god has ever popped up to correct them.
Understanding evolution does provide a basis for ethics. Some animals are social animals, who survive by cooperating in groups. Humans are the most social of any, cooperating in groups that include millions.
Morality serves to maintain peaceful and cooperative relations among group members. If you want to maintain peaceful relations, don't kill, steal, lie, or break agreements. Do not do to others what you would not wish done to you.
Understanding the evolution of social animals gives us a simple standard for judging our neighbors. A "good" person is a desirable neighbor, from the point of view of people who wish to live in peace and raise families.
We cannot expect universal agreement on this standard, but we can expect it to be widely popular across all human societies and cultures.
I might add also, specifically for Christians, that since the time of Paul, Christians have not actually followed either the Law of Moses OR the ethical teachings of Jesus, and have rarely even pretended to try. Most don't even KNOW what Jesus taught about ethics, much less attempt to FOLLOW it. See
http://www.godlessgeeks.com/LINKS/JesusEthics.htm
Posted by: frog | July 27, 2009 2:00 PM
I'm not sure that Collin's statement is anything to be upset about -- precisely because it's so vacuous as to be trivial. Except, of course, as the reflection of a pre-19th century psychology of Collin's.
Since none of his statements reflect differences in the real world -- they are all changes in a spiritual world that have no effects in the real world, since in the "real world" all this soul talk is mediated via physical phenomenon without any measurable effect of the "soul" -- it's just meaningless jabber.
At worst, it might be meaningful if we were were anywhere close to having a full neuropsychology which bridge the gap from neuroscience to actual consciousness -- but we're obviously centuries away from that if it's even possible (which I'm not sure it is).
So, let the idjits be idjits about the trivial. The practical danger is only in terms of his big fat mouth leading other idjits down the garden path of idjitry -- I don't think the political strength is there to avoid that unfortunate reality.
Posted by: Knockgoats | July 27, 2009 2:02 PM
I call your accident and raise you a murder
Lavoiser - John Carrier
Assuming you mean Lavoisier, his execution on trumped-up charges at the age of 50, while tragic, probably made little difference to the progress of science - and in any case, it was not the responsibility of atheists. His accuser was Marat, who said (in his Plan de Législation criminelle, second section)
"As long as the atheist only reasons, let him live in peace; but when, instead of keeping himself to the sceptical attitude, he declaims, when he dogmatises, when he seeks to obtain proselytes, becoming from that moment sectarian, he makes a dangerous use of his liberty, and he ought to lose it."
Atheists remained a persecuted minority throughout the French revolutionary period.
We could add to the accident, the deliberate Christian destruction of the library of Alexandria, accompanied by the murder of the mathematician and philosopher Hypatia - reputedly by the charming method of scraping her living flesh from her bones with sharpened oyster shells. Christian compassion and respect for knowledge at their finest. Most of the treasures of ancient Greek thought that remain to us were, admittedly, saved at one point by Christians - or rather, Nestorian heretics, who fled from savage persecution by their doctrinally orthodox brethren to the safety and comparative liberty of Muslim Baghdad, carrying these treasures with them.
Posted by: Prometheus | July 27, 2009 2:02 PM
#100
"I call your accident and raise you a murder
Lavoiser"
Destroying the only copy of a scientific work to make copies of abundant prayers is not an 'accident'. It is a decision.
And an inferior scientist(Marat)arranging the murder a superior one (Lavoisier) isn't germane to your argument.
You can't raise on a gold watch with a wooden nickle especially when you didn't ante in the first place.
You stink at this.
P.S. You do know Machiavelli was excommunicated don't you?
Posted by: A Recovering Catholic | July 27, 2009 2:12 PM
Wow, America's got some problems I tell ya.
Posted by: Knockgoats | July 27, 2009 2:22 PM
How can it ever be in and individual's interest to sacrific itself for the good of the community? Well, because each individual is broadly better off in a community in which individuals are willing, under certain circumstances, to sacrifice for others. - Bill Dauphin
Doesn't work, Bill. I'd be better off, in terms of inclusive fitness, if everyone else is prepared to sacrifice themselves, while I am not - but am able to convincingly appear to be so except when actually called upon to do so. While morality is rooted in our innate predispositions to empathy and equity, which evolved under selective pressure, we cannot derive morality from self-interest, either as normally defined (getting what I want), or as maximising inclusive fitness (and note that these two are not the same - in the words of a dead friend of mine "I'm prepared to be a slave to my gonads, but not to my genes!") - unless "what I want" happens to be the good of others or the community. For most of us, this is a part of what we want - but other parts, self-interest in the narrower sense, conflict with it, hence the frequent conflict between what we want to do, and what we feel we should.
Posted by: Prometheus | July 27, 2009 2:31 PM
Knockgoats, do you think self sacrifice (as opposed to giving that appearance) is necessarily a product of acculturation rather than an aspect of a broader evolutionary strategy?
Posted by: John Carrier | July 27, 2009 2:38 PM
Knockgoats, do you ascribe to there being a malicious intent behind the Method's destruction? If not then by definition it is an accident. Don't be a troll. We can both easily copy and paste the crimes of religion and secular humanism all day long. I was merely addressing your broad brush of declaring religion to be nonconstructive to science.
Machiavelli was excommunicated, so? I'm not catholic and don't even believe the pope has any mystic powers so what do I care?
My only argument is that many of the posters here are being irrational about the appointment of Collins.
Posted by: XD | July 27, 2009 2:45 PM
Talking about the loss of knowledge due to religion has reminded me of the Wikipedia page on book burning I was reading the other day. Not all of the book burnings mentioned are due to religion, but most are.
If you value knowledge at all, reading that page will make you want to weep.
Posted by: frog | July 27, 2009 2:58 PM
Knockgoats: Doesn't work, Bill. I'd be better off, in terms of inclusive fitness, if everyone else is prepared to sacrifice themselves, while I am not - but am able to convincingly appear to be so except when actually called upon to do so.
KG, you forget however the other side of the equation -- enforcement. If cheaters are penalized, the values shift -- and there is evidence of a tendency among at least some humans to punish cheating over-and-above their rational self-interest.
My criticism of the "morality can be derived from fitness" is that fitness under-determines morality -- fitness can only eliminate or constrain the possible set of moralities, but it can't determine anything within a very broad space.
But fitness is much more complicate than what appears on first glance for qualities that have implications over iterated games on the the geological time frame; species as a whole go extinct, radiation rates can be involved...
We can't argue this with words -- you either have a good mathematical description or you don't. You answer the question from the mathematical description, not via verbal arguments.
Posted by: Tulse | July 27, 2009 3:01 PM
What evidence is there of a universal moral code? In some cultures it was considered moral to eat one's defeated enemies, whereas others demanded honorable treatment of one's foes. In some cultures homosexuality was the norm, in others in has been considered grounds for capital punishment. Some cultures value equality of the genders, and it others women have been considered property. In some cultures abortion is considered anathema, whereas other cultures practice infanticide. Some cultures have argued that all people have equivalent rights, whereas others have had slaves. In some cultures it is taboo to reproduce with a blood relation, whereas in others it is encouraged. Etc. etc. etc.
I'd love to know what this allegedly "universal" moral code is, and how one can determine it in the face of this kind of counter evidence.
Posted by: Ray Ingles | July 27, 2009 3:02 PM
Knockgoats: It's a lot harder to be a Villain With Good Publicity in reality than in fiction. :->
Posted by: frog | July 27, 2009 3:07 PM
Tulse: I'd love to know what this allegedly "universal" moral code is, and how one can determine it in the face of this kind of counter evidence.
You forgot the biggest counter-evidence of all -- the evidence of sacrificing one's own children (in Levantine derived cultures, such as Carthage, and cues of it in the holly babel -- who bans something that no one ever does, repeatedly and loudly?). That one undermines all muttering on either side of a determined morality -- even more than the lack of universality in the incest taboo.
I'm sure the Carthagenians loved their children -- it only makes sense if they had an unusually strong attachment to them. The Romans threw them in the trash bin -- no child sacrifice there!
Posted by: Bill Dauphin, OM | July 27, 2009 3:25 PM
KG:
Maybe it's a failure of understanding on my part (not an unlikely possibility, I confess), but I don't think we're in as much disagreement as it may superficially seem. You say...
...and to me empathy sounds like the ability to understand, at a fundamental level, the interests of others; equity sounds like the willingness to value the interests of others as equivalent (or at least nearly so) to one's own individual interests; and the selective pressure you mention sounds like what I meant in pointing to collaboration's essential role in the survival and propogation of humankind.
All of which is to say, I'm provisionally willing to accept your argument as a reasonable restatement of my own, in different terminology.
I suspect (and feel free to correct me if I'm wrong) that your intent is to ward off any potential L-word-arian co-option of my position: "See, he admits that everything comes down to self interest!" But the distinction is that L-word-arians deny the interdependency of each individual's interests with the interests of other individuals and the collective interests of the community. It is that awareness of interdependency — for which I'm happy to accept innate predisposition[..] to empathy and equity as a synonym — in which (IMHO) human morality inheres.
Sure. By their very nature, empathy and equity require a relationship between self and other. Total selflessness would render empathy and equity just as meaningless as would total selfishness. There's a no doubt complex and subtle (and possibly situationally fluid) optimal balance to be sought between individual interests and other/community interests; I suspect the daily struggle for morality is to conform our behavior as closely as we can to that optimum.
All that said, I think you, Ray, and I are ultimately on the same side in the thread: While we differ in terms and may (or may not) differ in details, we all assert that human morality — our reluctance to devour our neighbors' offspring, for example — is rational, and a product of evolution, and not dependent upon any absolute supernatural rulebook.
Posted by: Feynmaniac | July 27, 2009 3:38 PM
I already provided this link in #105, but I'll do it again:Is Morality Innate and Universal?. The author would call it a "universal moral grammar". The book goes into further details about how during certain moral thought experiments people across different cultures answer questions very similarly. There are indeed differences between cultures, but some of this flexibility has to do with different lifestyle. What's optimal for hunter-gatherers isn't necessarily optimal for people living in modern industrialized nations.
Despite the superficial differences, the morality of different cultures are similar.
Posted by: frog | July 27, 2009 3:47 PM
Feynmaniac: Despite the superficial differences, the morality of different cultures are similar.
It's a reasonable supposition that the moral grammar is universal -- but that implies fairly little about morality itself. Just as it's an at least partially supported hypothesis that there is a universal grammar for language -- but no universal grammar itself.
All you say by saying grammar is that the idea of morality comes from some universal structures in the human brain -- but those structures can be incredibly flexible, implying that at best you can eliminate some possibilities -- but can in no way predict the morality that those structures create even in a given environment, except in the loosest sense. The Chomkian grammars don't predict specific languages, do they? They only eliminate what we can't think of anyway!
I don't think that's what Collins et. al., or even BD (?) mean by a universal morality. If this universal grammer can produce statements like "It is moral to sacrifice your beloved children in times of trouble" or "You must sleep with your sister if you are terribly high-ranking", while still producing the current concensus moralities for the US, European countries and the ME, it must be a very generic grammar indeed.
Posted by: Brian Rapp | July 27, 2009 3:56 PM
What total rubbish. Good and evil are human constructs and their definitions are completely subjective. When a religionist applies the label "evil", he is usually implying a supernatural origin. So yes, it is all an illusion. Why would anyone who doesn't worship an invisible sky faerie have a problem with that? We're not the ones who have been hoodwinked.
It's disgusting that this guy is the government's public face for science. I keep wondering if another Dark Age isn't inevitable. The level of stupid seems to be ever increasing among the general public.
Posted by: comfychair | July 27, 2009 4:08 PM
I had to stop reading at Slide 2. Anyone with even a slight understanding of what evolution is and what it can do given enough time will know that eventually, evolution will build something smart enough to figure out the process of how it got there. I know this, and I'm a non-college educated unemployed auto mechanic living in the backwoods of Mississippi, for fuck's sake. Does that mean I'm better qualified to be head of NIH?
Posted by: Marcus Ranum | July 27, 2009 4:10 PM
Bill Dauphin, OM, writes:
If altruism is "the deliberate pursuit of the interests or welfare of others or the public interest," and the interest or welfare of each individual is increasingly dependent upon the interests or welfare of others or the public interest, then it beging to be fairly obvious that altruism is an expression of self-interest, rather than in conflict with it.
What you've just done is redefined altruism to be nothing more than self-interest. I.e.: I need others in order to survive, so for my own sake I'd better be nice to them because they are useful to me.
I'm totally OK with the view that "morality" is enlightened self-interest. But then "right" and "wrong" are meaningless since we're taking only the perspective of the individual. If we say that the collective will decide, then - unless there is complete agreement - someone gets coerced, somewhere.
I think that what winds up happening when we try to come up with an atheistic "morality" based on self-interest or evolved feelings of fairness, or whatever, you wind up with something that is nonsensical or that ultimately rests on assertions like "terrorism is bad." That's as indefensible as the faith-based version.
Feynmaniac writes:
Finally, when it comes to morality people usually don't consciously invoke the Ten Commandments, Kant's category imperative, utilitarian principles, etc. They make their decisions quickly and unconsciously. The reasons they give are usually after-the-fact rationalizations. All this suggest that we are born with an innate capacity for morality.
Might it not suggest as well that we're born innately selfish and have a capacity for bullshitting ourselves about it later?
OK, OK... Just kidding. Is this in reference to the studies where they did the tests on how people would react regarding thought experiments involving throwing people off bridges in front of trains and things like that? (The trolley problem: http://arjewtino.com/2008/the-trolley-problem-and-other-questions-of-morality/) I did find it interesting that most people would rather see more deaths if they could keep their hands clean by inaction, than fewer that weren't immediately 'their fault' What's interesting to me, again, is what it shows about the collective's ability to meaningfully assign moral value to someone's actions at a given point in time.
Posted by: Marcus Ranum | July 27, 2009 4:22 PM
Bill Dauphin, OM writes:
While we differ in terms and may (or may not) differ in details, we all assert that human morality — our reluctance to devour our neighbors' offspring, for example — is rational, and a product of evolution, and not dependent upon any absolute supernatural rulebook.
For what it's worth, I agree as well. Because my neighbor's offspring look like they'd taste really gross.
I'd differ slightly from your way of putting it, namely that human morality is rational, influenced by the individual's experiences and ultimately a product of evolution*, not dependent on any absolute supernatural rulebook.
"experiences" leaves the door open for learning and socializing. In other words the Yanonmamo father who kills his firstborn male child is being "moral" It also leaves open the question of starting conditions; the morals of the upper class are indeed different from those of the poor.
As I look at that, I think "that's so flexible, it's useless."
(* ultimately all life is influenced by evolution so this is redundant but worth saying)
Posted by: Prometheus | July 27, 2009 4:38 PM
"For what it's worth, I agree as well. Because my neighbor's offspring look like they'd taste really gross."
You have that backwards. It is moral if you restrain yourself and eat only the ugly ones.
Posted by: frog | July 27, 2009 4:45 PM
Prometheus: You have that backwards. It is moral if you restrain yourself and eat only the ugly ones.
But fitness demands you eat the beautiful ones who are more of a threat to your own success (unless your children are unusually beautiful and likely to be mate choices -- the usual approach is the gator approach and just eat any you don't immediately recognize as your own).
Posted by: Bill Dauphin, OM | July 27, 2009 4:55 PM
No, what I've done is assert that self-interest, when properly understood and broadly enough defined, gives rise to altruism. Not quite the same thing.
You're perilously close, it seems, to declaring that right and wrong are only meaningful concepts if they're defined by something external to people's interests... and that could easily be mistaken for endorsing the idea of some external, absolute lawgiver.
What I'm suggesting is that self-interest necessarily incorporates collective interests, and if I'm right about that, then subordinating some of one's strictly individual interests to the larger interests of one's fellow humans isn't coercion; it's a pro-survival adaptation.
This assertion you seem to be making (whether it's the one mean to be making, I couldn't say) that anything other than strict personal autonomy must be coercive veers distressingly close to L-word-arianism.
Posted by: michael J | July 27, 2009 5:07 PM
I used to have a similar view of the world and I guess that a lot of Christians do as well. One day I realised that I was making stuff up, that what I thought (and Collins is saying) is not part of any religion, I was just trying to rationalise a belief in God.
A brain is more flexible when you are younger but I wonder if Collins will ever debate some of his ideas about morality to a wider audience.
Posted by: 'Tis Himself, Quel Dommage
|
July 27, 2009 5:07 PM
People get coerced all the time. I joined the Navy in the 1960s because it was a better situation than being drafted into the Army and sent to Vietnam. I was coerced into the Navy rather than being coerced into the Army. I am coerced into going to work every day because I have an expensive habit called "eating." The sellers of food coerce me into spending my money to buy their food, they don't give me the food for free. I'm coerced into paying taxes, into paying for auto insurance, and all kinds of coercion. It's a dog eat 'Tis world out there.
Posted by: Siamang | July 27, 2009 5:14 PM
Slide 5: "If the human eye is just a side effect of evolution, then there is no such thing as dark or light. It's all an illusion. We really cannot see. We've been hoodwinked. Are any of us, especially the strong atheists, really prepared to live our lives within that worldview?"
What fucking bullshit.
Posted by: Prometheus | July 27, 2009 5:15 PM
#127 Frog
"....the usual approach is the gator approach and just eat any you don't immediately recognize as your own."
Like I said, I only eat the ugly ones....or the runt, if I become frightened by loud noises or rapid movements..
Posted by: frog | July 27, 2009 5:18 PM
BD: You're perilously close, it seems, to declaring that right and wrong are only meaningful concepts if they're defined by something external to people's interests... and that could easily be mistaken for endorsing the idea of some external, absolute lawgiver.
I thought everyone understood that -- that yes, if you're talking just about self-interest, that's not what most mean by morality. But that can not be mistaken for requiring an external law-giver, since there's no evidence of such, and is an unnecessary component.
What I'm suggesting is that self-interest necessarily incorporates collective interests, and if I'm right about that, then subordinating some of one's strictly individual interests to the larger interests of one's fellow humans isn't coercion; it's a pro-survival adaptation.
I seriously doubt that. Unless you turn self-interest into something trivial, self-interest is distinct from collective interest. For example, sexual reproduction, as far as I know, is a collective interest -- it's the only reasonable explanation I've ever read. The only reason that it's at all common despite the fact that it's not in the organisms self-interest, is that the organisms are historically constrained from reproducing parthogenetically -- there's no way for most organisms to clone themselves, or even evolve in that direction. It only required that sexual reproduction be in the organisms' self-interest for a short period in life's history for it to become fixed -- after that, higher order effects can explain it's propagation. Species that have both methods (such as C. elegans) generally clone most of the time -- when you have a choice, it's almost always more sensible to clone fitness-wise, with a rare roll of the dice at a combination.
Collective interests are at a longer time scale than self-interest. They can't directly go against self-interest on the shorter time scale without some system of constraint, but they don't have to be the same. Neither determines the other, they loosely constrain what configurations they can combine in, and demand some historical contingencies to appear. They are different.
Posted by: Anonymous Coward | July 27, 2009 5:31 PM
This is... spectacularly unbelievably incomprehensible. How did Collins get that post in the first place? Did he buy it? Or was he appointed by a phenomenal idiot?
Posted by: Feynmaniac | July 27, 2009 5:37 PM
frog,
How so? If there was indeed a universal moral grammar then we could, at the very least, set constraints what people would deem what actions are moral.
Chomsky's universal grammar doesn't attempt to. It merely attempts to explain language acquisition and the general principles of grammar found in all languages.
I think a similar thing could be said about the universal moral grammar.
You could pretty much say the exact same thing about the linguistic universal grammar that produces such (seemingly) different languages as English, Spanish, Chinese, Navajo, etc. However, as Steven Pinker points out "a visiting Martian scientist would surely conclude that aside from mutually unintelligible vocabularies, Earthlings speak a single language"(The Language Instinct, pg. 232).
For a comprehensive treatment of the subject see Universal moral grammar: theory,evidence and the future.
_ _ _ _
Marcus,
That's part of the evidence for the idea.
That wasn't always the case. If the choices were to pull the lever and have 1 person die or refrain from pulling and have 5 people die then most would act and pull the lever. When the situation was to push the fat man in front train to stop it and thereby save 5 lives but killing the fat man most people chose inaction then.
Posted by: Anonymous Coward | July 27, 2009 5:46 PM
"a visiting Martian scientist would surely conclude that aside from mutually unintelligible vocabularies, Earthlings speak a single language"
Of course, there are no Martian scientists, and it is well known that from falsehood follows everything, including but certainly not limited to truth. But even if we substitute "Planet X that we haven't discovered yet that contains scientists" that statement rests on some dubious assumptions on both Terrestrial languages, "Martian" languages, and possibly (if the "Martian" isn't a linguist) on how willing "Martians" are to comment on things that are outside of their own field of study.
Posted by: frog | July 27, 2009 5:53 PM
Feynmaniac: You could pretty much say the exact same thing about the linguistic universal grammar that produces such (seemingly) different languages as English, Spanish, Chinese, Navajo, etc
I guess we pretty much agree then. The question in terms of how it's couched is what are the implications of a "universal grammer of X".
If it's used to eliminate the unthinkable -- then I don't see the practical application. For morality, by definition any morality produced by humans follows the universal grammar of morality.
It won't give us a tool to differentiate bad moralities from good moralities -- any more than Chomsky could be used to differentiate inhuman but humanly used languages from human languages -- since none of the former can exist.
It's purely a research tool. But the question that the Collinses, etc, want answered is prescriptive -- they want to be able to say "X is moral or immoral" when X is believed by some to be moral. They want a rock upon which to differentiate good morality from bad morality.
A universal Chomskyian grammar is basically useless as a tool to learn a language -- since you already have it embedded in your mind, the best thing to do is immerse yourself in a language for practical uses. However, as an academic tool -- to analyze languages or structure artificial languages, it's quite useful. But who wants an "artificial morality"? I guess it'd be useful for our AI posters...
Posted by: DLC | July 27, 2009 6:01 PM
Right... Collins better bet one hell of a paper-pusher.
He's not much of a scientist or a thinker.
Sorry, I just can't frame it any better than that.
Posted by: frog | July 27, 2009 6:04 PM
Thank you coward for reminding us that gedankenexperiments must be tied to a hypothetically possible real experiment -- otherwise, you open up a pandora's box of masturbatory possibilities.
Posted by: Bill Dauphin, OM | July 27, 2009 6:13 PM
frog:
Are you deliberately misunderstanding me, or am I just communicating that poorly?
But I'm explicitly not talking about what "most mean by" self-interest. Instead, I'm suggesting that what "most mean by morality" actually arises from self-interest... but only once you come to a deeper, more expansive understanding of the latter term. There are many situations, for instance, in which I could steal and get away with it. A superficial understanding of self-interest would suggest that I should do it, for the sake of the immediate gain... but a larger view tells me that I derive more benefit from living in a society where people in general don't steal that I would from any benefit I might derive from whatever I might steal.
KG might suggest that my true interests would be served by stealing myself while pretending to be virtuous, in the hopes that other's won't steal and I'll get the best of both worlds (I think that's what his previous comment suggests)... but I have to assume that if I can come to that conclusion, so can everyone else, leading to a world in which everyone not only steals, but lies as well. No, for the collective interests to actually also serve my individual interests, I must be prepared to behave in the same way I expect others to behave.
Which is to say, the aforementioned Golden Rule®, some form of which is at the heart of virtually every moral code. But I've arrived at it from consideration of interests, rather than from some external moral absolute.
You asserted that right and wrong (which I take to be roughly synonymous with moral and immoral, respectively, in this context) become meaningless terms if they're reduced to "mere" self-interest. But in my formulation, self interests are of a kind with human interests generally (including self, others, and the collective). So what is it that you're imagining as a source for notions of right and wrong if it's neither humans' interests on the one hand nor an external moral absolute on the other hand? No doubt you have a gripping hand to offer us, but you can see how, in advance of that revelation, your denial of the former source might be taken as an endorsement of the latter.
Posted by: frog | July 27, 2009 6:42 PM
BD: KG might suggest that my true interests would be served by stealing myself while pretending to be virtuous, in the hopes that other's won't steal and I'll get the best of both worlds (I think that's what his previous comment suggests)... but I have to assume that if I can come to that conclusion, so can everyone else, leading to a world in which everyone not only steals, but lies as well. No, for the collective interests to actually also serve my individual interests, I must be prepared to behave in the same way I expect others to behave.
No, I think we have a genuine failure to communicate here -- on both sides.
I'm saying that without watering down self-interest, self-interest is simply not equivalent to common interests. For example, yes -- from a purely self-interested point of view, you should cheat insofar as you don't get caught or undermine the social image of "virtuousness".
That's what is always discussed in realpolitik approaches -- lie, cheat and steal, and hope the "balance of power" keeps the system from deteriorating to the point where we're all doomed. Pretend ("propanda") to be virtuous, and hope that the demands of keeping up the lie in the end produce a little of it as truth, enough to keep us from sliding into oblivion.
In what way would your behaving "right" beyond creating the illusion of your behaving "right" keep others from coming to the conclusion that they should lie about being good? We see that kind of behavior in nature all the time of cycles of signalling systems that are "lies" and ways to "keep 'em honest". They don't look like morality at all -- they look like more like "try to lie, but try to keep from being lied to". In the end, it does produce some honesty -- but surely not what we call "morality", any more than the behavior of machiavellian nations.
So what do we have on the gripping hand? WWPD?
Well, I suggest we look at the objective collective interests. They are tied to self-interest -- if the collective interests don't appropriately protect self-interest, they will be unstable -- and an impossible morality is not a morality at all. Self-interest must be consistent with but does not determine the collective interest. They are two different levels of explanation and behavior. (Vis-a-versa is true as well).
It's a tough problem, particularly since even that will at best give us an ensemble of possible moralities that are possible within a given environment. And the math of the whole thing is so messy as to lead one to surrender.
So in part we have to simply accept that our best approximation is going to be arguments about specific elements of morality, informed by history and aesthetics. It will be contingent and far from optimal. There will never be a final answer, but it will be an ongoing argument for the ages.
That's the breaks. We use objectivity where it is available -- but certain problems will never give us sufficient data & theory to ascertain an objective, complete solution. We have to use our best guess, largely informed from our subjective experience.
We have to recognize that it lies on our puny shoulders -- we shoot for the best, and recognize that we will always fail.
Posted by: frog | July 27, 2009 6:49 PM
propanda == propaganda.
Get preview fixed, PZ!
Posted by: Ichthyic | July 27, 2009 6:54 PM
A superficial understanding of self-interest would suggest that I should do it, for the sake of the immediate gain... but a larger view tells me that I derive more benefit from living in a society where people in general don't steal that I would from any benefit I might derive from whatever I might steal.
This is part and parcel of the way the "prisoner's dilemma" has been used to analyze the evolution of social behavior in animals, for one example.
I would really recommend a general text that traces the history of the study of animal behavior, as it will assist in seeing how terms like "atruism" are actually applied and tested within various social organizations, and the difference between evolved "quid-pro-quo" style altruism vs. altruism evolved via kin selection (like eusocial insects, where you can model exactly when self-sacrifice would be most beneficial wrt fitness).
I used to teach this using Alcock's book, and I'd still recommend it:
http://www.amazon.com/Animal-Behavior-Evolutionary-Approach-Eighth/dp/0878930051
I think anyone interested in the evolution of social behavior would find that an excellent introduction.
past that, as usual I would recommend reading WD Hamilton's "Narrow Roads of Gene Land", especially the first volume, which details (with reprints of the original papers) what went into the development of current research regarding the evolution of social behavior.
Posted by: frog | July 27, 2009 7:12 PM
Icthy:
Any good references on the evolution of sex -- not in the particulars, but how the hell it could have become the only reproductive method in some lineages? What are the arguments in the field? Models?
Posted by: tmaxPA | July 27, 2009 7:19 PM
Marcus@43:
You make it sound as though that were a bad thing. I'll go further: moral systems MUST BE only vague hypothetical claims ("fictions" if you will) that we follow when we follow and we don't when we don't. Any other form would be immoral, and thus contradictory.
Moral systems are not for guiding your actions (that's called a conscience). They are for communicating about those (and others') actions; a framework for discussion, not a scalpel for dissection, if you will. It's not like you learn morals and so thereby construct a conscience; quite the opposite. You have a conscience, and from it you derive a "moral system".
This is why it can be recognized factually that rational morals are in fact moral, while faith-based morals end up being both arbitrary (dietary laws) and immoral (sexual oppression).
All that any of us can do is obey the 'divine decree' of our personal 'deamons', while honestly and openly interacting with others. Mistaking your conscience for a deity is an obvious, and dangerous, pitfall that should exclude you from having anything useful to say about morality.
Posted by: frog | July 27, 2009 7:44 PM
tmax: Mistaking your conscience for a deity is an obvious, and dangerous, pitfall that should exclude you from having anything useful to say about morality.
What about those folks who have multiple "consciences"? That one place where this discussion falls down -- it takes an agricultural viewpoint, where apparently people, in general, seem to develop one dominant voice in their heads -- I guess associated with the development of a bureaucracy and a dominant central state.
That doesn't appear to be the case universally -- ergo, pre- and early- agricultural societies have multiple gods, or a diffuse divinity. They also often have very confusing legal codes that excuse behaviors depending on the current state of "possession" in the community and individuals, with weird laws that appear arbitrary because they're about controlling the "possession" state of the community, or defining the borders of the community within which those states are recognized (they obviously differ from group to group).
Do we call their ways of talking about what the voices in their heads say morality? Is that agricocentrism? We often ignore what are today marginal cases, but were throughout human history probably the norm.
Posted by: Pierce R. Butler | July 27, 2009 9:11 PM
Feynmaniac @ # 135: ... as Steven Pinker points out "a visiting Martian scientist would surely conclude that aside from mutually unintelligible vocabularies, Earthlings speak a single language" ...
Which in itself assumes an tin-eared Martian linguist unable to distinguish between "sung" tonal languages (e.g., all three major "Chinese" languages) and the crude grunting of certain western barbarians.
As for Collins, if I could ask him but one (triune) question, it would be whether he believed there are such thing as souls, sin, or efficacious prayer; how such beliefs would affect his decisions; and the implications of whatever answer he might give the preceding query in regard to the first query.
It's nice to imagine him falling to his knees, so overcome by the triunity of this challenge that the next day he announces his denunciation of superstition. And it's no more of a ridiculous fantasy than imagining any Senator questioning his epistemology ("faith") at any hearing.
Posted by: Eric | July 28, 2009 12:39 AM
I HAVE been living my life within that worldview with the caveat that there IS indeed good and evil - but it comes from the actions of men not the agents of aether. What is my other choice? Fantasy?
Posted by: Jennifer B. Phillips | July 28, 2009 12:49 AM
@Frog,
I'm not "Ichthy", but I'm a big fan of the teleost, if that carries any weight. A good place to start may be Marlene Zuk's book Riddled with Life which has a lot of discussion about the evolution of sex. It's a few years old, but should provide some primary research author names, etc. Also, here's a pubmed search page with some reviews that may be
useful
Posted by: Jennifer B. Phillips | July 28, 2009 12:59 AM
Oh, and this guy, too.
Posted by: Kel, OM | July 28, 2009 12:59 AM
All science points to morality being innate. This view that we are inherently selfish goes against the cold hard facts of observation.Posted by: Rorschach | July 28, 2009 1:45 AM
Liked this bit from the article :
Natural abortions,anencephaly,psychopathy,bullets or tumours in frontal lobes turning pleasant grannys into sex maniacs,the list goes on,not even talking about the christians filled with all this moral sense who crusaded around Europe and burned and slaughtered everyone they could get their hands on...
It's all too ridiculous.
Posted by: Feynmaniac | July 28, 2009 6:11 AM
It's hard to tell on the internet sometimes when people are being facetious. So in case some people weren't, the "Martians" in my Pinker quote @ #135 are irreverent. The point that was being made was that despite superficial differences of languages there are many universal features. This isn't an "assumption", but a pretty well established theory in linguistics. The best argument for a universal grammar, in my mind, is the argument from poverty of the stimulus. The book I cited,The Language Instinct, deals with the subject in depth and you are free to read it here.
Posted by: Knockgoats | July 28, 2009 8:55 AM
Bill Dauphin@119,
I think there is a difference in our positions. If I read you correctly, you think it cannot be in my self-interest to steal or murder, because it is better for me to live in a society where such behaviour is rare than one where it is common. But that it is therefore not in my self-interest to steal would only follow if my doing so influenced others so as to make theft so much more common that this change outweighed the advantage I gained. If this is not the case, then the fact that I can see that everyone else can make the same calculation is simply irrelevant - they can do so whether or not I start stealing myself.
Let me try to clarify my own position on the relationships between self-interest, evolution and morality, so you and others can assess it.
First, we need to distinguish at least 3 variants of "self-interest":
1) Hedonic self-interest. This is about maximising the extent to which I feel good. We could distinguish different subvarieties, depending on whether I take the longer term into account but even if I'm very prudent, this is still hedonic self-interest.
2) Genetic self-interest. This is about maximising my inclusive fitness. It need not correspond with either of the others.
3) Goal-attainment self-interest. This is about maximising the extent to which I achieve my top-level goals (those which are not pursued purely as subgoals of some other goal). If I am a purely selfish person (in everyday terms), this will coincide with hedonic self-interest. If, however, I want others to flourish, enjoy life, etc. as a top-level goal, it will not. Note that if I want others to enjoy and not suffer only because (say) I like to hear children laughing merrily and dislike hearing them scream in agony, that's still within hedonic self-interest. It comes near to being tautological that we are self-interested in this sense: if something is a top-level goal, we seek to attain it if we have the opportunity to do so. (Contra von Mises and Rothbard, though, we don't always seek to attain our "most pressing" goal first, because much of what we do is determined by habit and/or external stimuli.)
Now, natural selection can only push organisms in the direction of (2) - genetic self-interest (and incidentally, isn't even guaranteed to optimise that). There are arguments from evolutionary game theory that show it is very unlikely to make social organisms maximisers of (1) - that is, that it will ensure that some of their top-level goals are "unselfish" in the everyday sense. (Neoclassical economists - even those as sophisticated as Ken Binmore - tend to indulge in what I call the "neoclassical shuffle", shifting between senses (1) and (3) in attempting to justify their models.) The main proximate mechanisms natural selection has fashioned to make us unselfish are empathy, and inequity aversion. The former certainly exists in other social mammals, and a form of the latter exists in other primates (no-one has yet shown conclusively, AFAIK, the full sense of inequity aversion in non-humans, in which unfairness to others is resented - but high-ranking non-human primates do sometimes appear to intervene to prevent bullying). Empathy, and inequity aversion, are the chief evolutionary roots of morality - their existence, together with that of language, explains why we have moral systems at all. There seems no point in calling something morality unless its dictates sometimes, at least, conflict with hedonic self-interest.
In the human case, as has been noted, systems of morality are socially inculcated both by example and by explicit instruction; and vary considerably across cultures, but still tend to have certain features in common. Some of these systems will tend to produce greater human fulfilment, and some will tend to produce more stable societies - but note that these do not necessarily coincide - so we can't, if we care about human fulfilment, just say that whatever "works" in social terms is an acceptable moral system. (I note that many moral systems include a claim that "You ought to obey X" - where X is either another person or group of people, or the law, or a sacred text. My own moral system rejects such claims as independent principles, although there may be good reasons to follow them based on other principles, and I see them as examples of the parasitism of the powerful.)
Nor can any moral system be expected to provide answers to all possible moral dilemmas; as I've noted elsewhere, evolved emotional capacities are the roots of morality, but nothing guarantees that our emotions will be consistent - say I see a friend in a dispute with someone I dislike, but see that in this case, my friend was in the wrong: loyalty pushes me one way, equity the other.
In the human case also, we can reflect on the moral systems we are brought up in, and are generally prompted to do so by some conflict within the system, between the system and our self-interest, or between the system and our "gut reaction" of empathy, inequity aversion, "yuck", or whatever. This is the point at which rationality becomes important: we can criticise a moral system both as internally inconsistent, and in terms of the results of following it, or the failure of its supposed adherents to do so. A common move of the philosophically inclined, but one I am convinced is mistaken, is to try and come up with a modified system that will give us unambiguous answers in all cases.
A last point, on cross-cultural judgements. I see no problem at all in saying both "Systems of morality are socially constructed" (as long as we recognise that they are not constructed ex nihilo, but on the basis of our evolved capacities and propensities), and (say) "Slavery in the Roman Empire / antebellum South / wherever was wrong." Any moral judgement is made from within a particular moral system, and if I didn't think my current moral system was better than that of the Roman elite ("better" in the sense of being more likely to promote my non-hedonic goals, those that seek the flourishing and fulfilment of others), I'd adopt theirs. Of course it would be foolish to say that the Romans should have provided everyone with free internet broadband, but we can judge that they could have abolished slavery.
Posted by: esmith 4102 | July 28, 2009 11:01 AM
Mr. Collins would do well to read and take to heart this critical comment made by Ibn al Haytham in the tenth century of the Islamic world:
“Therefore the seeker after the truth is not one who studies the writings of the ancients and following his natural disposition puts his trust in them but rather the one who suspects his faith in them and questions what he gathers from them, the one who submits to argument and demonstration and not to the sayings of a human being whose nature is fraught with all kinds of imperfections and deficiency. Thus the duty of the man who investigates the writings of scientists, if learning the truths is his goal, is to make himself an enemy of all that he reads and applying his mind to the core and margin of its content attacking it from every side. He should also suspect himself as he performs his critical examination of it so that he may avoid falling into either prejudice or leniency”
Posted by: Bill Dauphin, OM | July 28, 2009 12:33 PM
KG:
Maybe. Probably. I'm not 100% convinced, but I'm quickly coming to the conclusion that, owing to me having no formal training in evolution, game theory, or philosophy, I simply lack the vocabulary to properly express my thoughts... and potentially to correctly understand the counterarguments, as well.
Maybe the individualized examples have somewhat obscured the point: I'm not imagining current-day individuals making right/wrong judgments based on this sort of conscious calculation; rather, I'm suggesting that the reason humans have broadly shared, ubiquitous (I'll stop short of saying universal, but only just) agreement that stealing and murder are wrong in the first place is that, over evolutionary time, individuals living in communities most of whose individual members don't steal or murder have succeeded, thrived, and propagated at a greater rate than individuals living in communities where most people steal and murder.
That said, I've acknowledged all along that my thoughts about this are untrained and intuitive... and I'm mindful of how much real science turns out to be counterintuitive. So I'm going to swim over to the ladder, haul myself out of the deep end, and try to learn something from the ongoing game of Marco-Polo.
Posted by: Knockgoats | July 28, 2009 1:16 PM
Bill,
Yes, your individualised examples did mislead me! Stated as in #156, I've no basic disagreement with what you're saying, although once you get into relations between genes and culture, and particularly the effects of reputation, the handicap principle and punishment, the dynamics get fiendishly complicated!
Posted by: Steven Sullivan | July 28, 2009 2:46 PM
Slide 3: "After evolution had prepared a sufficiently advanced 'house' (the human brain), God gifted humanity with the knowledge of good and evil (the moral law), with free will, and with an immortal soul."
This is basically what the Pope decided Catholics were allowed to believe, decades ago when the Church made its first peace with evolutionary biology. Except the Pope just called it the 'soul'. The soul is supposed to be the piece of Sky Daddy within us, and thus our moral compass. Every sin tarnishes our 'soul'. I sat through 12 years of this poetic silliness through grade and high school.
Anyway, again, from a perspective of someone who has actually worked at the same places as Collins (not knowing him directly, but knowing some who worked for him), and knowing his work record, the anti-Collins blog hysteria still seems outlandishly disconnected from reality to me...a lot of carts being put before horses. Sam Harris' essay was more measured than some of the rants being posted here and elsewhere, and it was fine as far as it goes (pointing up the goofiness of religious beliefs), but it's all rather necessarily *speculative* as regards to what Collins *would actually do as NIH head* (which is not a post unlimited power to apportion grant money by fiat, btw). Harris did not and could not point to instances where Collins' rather pedestrian American Christian beliefs actually contaminated his science (or his administration of a rather large science project), so he's left to denounce the fact that Collins is...religulous.
We have no evidence so far that Collins would suddenly stop compartmentalizing, much less turn into the batshit crazy fiery-sword-wielding zealot character being constructed online by some people who should know better. If he does I'll be happy to take my 'told you so's' but right now, I'm just not seeing it. Francis Collins may not be the bestest ever pick for NIH head from an atheist POV, but Francis Collins != Ken Ham or even Michael Behe, OK?
Posted by: CapgrasDelusion | July 28, 2009 5:36 PM
Posted by: rickflick on July 27, 2009 9:09 AM
At first I was disappointed with Harris's essay. It did not seem like his feisty style. Then I reread the quotes.
I'm a huge, huge fan of Harris (my favorite of the Four Horsemen) and I agree that he seemed a bit restrained here, but this may be because he's really used Collins as a punching bag (a vastly deserving one, no doubt) many times in the past, including this great much more feisty (and humorous, though deeply serious as Sam tends to be) review he wrote of Collins' book a few years ago now:
The Language of Ignorance
Here's a good quote from it:
"Here, we learn that the waterfall was frozen in three streams, which put the good doctor in mind of the Trinity
It is at this point that thoughts of suicide might occur to any reader who has placed undue trust in the intellectual integrity of his fellow human beings. One would hope that it would be immediately obvious to Collins that there is nothing about seeing a frozen waterfall (no matter how frozen) that offers the slightest corroboration of the doctrine of Christianity. But it was not obvious to him as he knelt in the dewy grass, and it is not obvious to him now. Indeed, I fear that it will not be obvious to many of his readers.
If the beauty of nature can mean that Jesus really is the son of God, then anything can mean anything. Let us say that I saw the same waterfall, and its three streams reminded me of Romulus, Remus and the She-wolf, the mythical founders of Rome. How reasonable would it be for me to know, from that moment forward, that Italy would one day win the World Cup? This epiphany, while perfectly psychotic, would actually put me on firmer ground than Collins—because Italy did win the World Cup. Collins alpine conversion would be a ludicrous non sequitur even if Jesus does return to Earth trailing clouds of glory."
Posted by: frog | July 28, 2009 6:34 PM
KG: "Slavery in the Roman Empire / antebellum South / wherever was wrong."
See, here's where universalism starts setting you down the garden path. In the South, one can reasonably argue that slavery was a completely unnecessary and self-destructive cruelty -- we can see that because the South could function after the end of slaver, Brazil was able to eliminate slavery a few decades later, ....
However, Rome is a completely different case. There was no industrial technology that could take the place of enslaved human flesh. At best, you can say you hate the place & time -- but reducing it to "morality" seems silly. It clearly wasn't self-destructive cruelty -- but a necessary cruelty of the technologies available.
This is like claiming that "stealing" is almost always considered wrong. I don't even see how the term can cover both modern property concepts and pre-agricultural societies. At least unless it is so watered down that "stealing" only means taking something away from someone who is currently using it.
Universalism, without consideration for the realities and difference of time and place, is just a losing game. There are precious few universals that aren't either fairly small (almost trivial) propositions, or so abstract as to be primarily research tools, with limited practical application.
Yes, all humans have a language, and something we can call a moral sense. So what? Unless the theory says something very specific about what language or morality will be used under a set of circumstances, it is irrelevant to the question under discussion here -- namely an objective, scientifically derivable morality.
Posted by: John B Hodges | July 29, 2009 3:58 AM
To Knockgoats #154: You say that empathy and "inequity aversion" (a sense of fairness) are the reason why we have morality at all. I would add that another large reason is what economists call "the discipline of continuous dealings". That is, the desire to maintain a long-term trading relationship.
"What IS ethical?" and "Why BE ethical?" are two DIFFERENT questions. Whatever answer you give to the first, you still have to answer the second; different answers to the first affect what answers are plausible for the second. Whatever theory of ethics one may propose, skeptics can ask "Why should I care about your theory? Why should I be ethical by that definition?"
Most people are very fond of their self-interest, by one or more of your three definitions, so if you can justify ethical behavior by self-interest, that is probably your safest bet. Other motivations may include compassion, kinship, and even the desire to have and maintain a larger meaning for one's life.
If we define "health"as the ABILITY to survive, then the top-level goal favored by natural selection would be "promote the health of your family", where "family" is "all who share your genes, to the degree that they share your genes". Also called inclusive fitness. Raising a family is a long-term project best pursued in a society of peaceful and cooperative neighbors, with which one maintains peaceful and cooperative relations. So the basic "social-contract" concept of morality: if you want to maintain peaceful relations, don't kill, steal, lie, or break agreements. More generally, follow the golden rule, as a general, habitual, policy.
See my essay, "Atheist foundations of Ethics", at http://civic.bev.net/atheistsnrv/articles/definition.html
Posted by: Knockgoats | July 29, 2009 6:05 AM
Rome is a completely different case. There was no industrial technology that could take the place of enslaved human flesh. At best, you can say you hate the place & time -- but reducing it to "morality" seems silly. It clearly wasn't self-destructive cruelty -- but a necessary cruelty of the technologies available. - frog
That's often said but remains contentious. Slavery seems to have been much more widespread in the Roman empire than in the earlier Maurya Empire in India, or the contemporary Han Empire in China - where it did exist, but appears not to have been central to the economy. Its spread in the Roman Empire occurred as rich landowners dispossessed peasant farmers and brought in slaves to farm their estates (the dispossessed migrated to Rome, where they received the public dole). Slavery was certainly highly profitable for the slaveowners, but that does not show it was an economic necessity as you claim. There were individuals who advocated its abolition, notably Seneca and the Hellenised Jewish philosopher Philo. The Romans had technology that could have replaced considerable slave labour - most notably watermills; it's arguable that technological stagnation was a result of slavery.
Unless the theory says something very specific about what language or morality will be used under a set of circumstances, it is irrelevant to the question under discussion here -- namely an objective, scientifically derivable morality. - frog
No such thing is possible. You can't get an "ought" from an "is". Moral systems can be rationally criticised on scientific grounds, but not scientifically derived.
John B. Hodges@161,
You say that empathy and "inequity aversion" (a sense of fairness) are the reason why we have morality at all.
No exactly. I say these are the proximate mechanisms fashioned by natural selection to make us, to some extent, unselfish in the everyday sense - that is, taking the welfare and preferences of others into account beyond anything that would serve our own interests.
I would add that another large reason is what economists call "the discipline of continuous dealings". That is, the desire to maintain a long-term trading relationship.
This desire could lead to a prudent calculation not to cheat, but is compatible with complete selfishness; it certainly affects the content of moral systems, but if this were all - if we did not feel empathy and inequity aversion - there would be no morality.
If we define "health"as the ABILITY to survive, then the top-level goal favored by natural selection would be "promote the health of your family", where "family" is "all who share your genes, to the degree that they share your genes".
Invading the land of unrelated strangers and exterminating them (or perhaps keeping fertile women as slaves and impregating them) would, if they are weak enough compared to you, favour your inclusive fitness. Would it be moral? Assuming your answer is "no", you agree with me that morality cannot be derived from considerations of inclusive fitness.
Posted by: Kausik Datta | July 29, 2009 9:38 AM
Commenting on the Sam Harris article, St. Kenneth of Miller has dissed PZ on NYT; but he was careful not to NAME names... because of course PZ is "He Who Must Not Be Named"...
Posted by: frog | July 29, 2009 1:48 PM
kg: That's often said but remains contentious (Re the necessity of slavery in Rome)
That's sufficient for my purposes -- as opposed to the American South, were there's no contention that slavery was simply short-sighted and cruel, with no "necessity" whatsoever than enriching a small cabal while impoverishing the region as a whole.
In the Roman case, one best stops at a sociological analysis as best as one can; moralizing about it has little implication for today and is fraught with anachronism. On the other hand, moralizing about slavery in the US has clear implications for today, and involves a very similar society with some fairly clear economic and social conditions.
It's like the difference between moralizing about cannibalism among Eurasian tribes in the neolithic, and moralizing about a cannibalistic cult in LA in the 1960s.
No such thing is possible. You can't get an "ought" from an "is". Moral systems can be rationally criticised on scientific grounds, but not scientifically derived.
Hmm, that was my point exactly. The desire by the Collinses and even those who argue for a "rational" morality is to be able to hang the "ought" from an "is". You can attack it as logically fallacious -- or by pointing out that the ises themselves don't give you a determinate ought. I'm fairly sure that they are co-dependent; that issues of scale of explanation are ultimately isomorphic with issues of types of explanation.
I think my explanation may be a little less clear -- but is more powerful, in that it also shows what you can get from an is regarding an ought.
Posted by: John B Hodges | July 29, 2009 3:16 PM
To Knockgoats #162- Since empathy and equity aversion can themselves be derived from inclusive fitness in a social species that survives by cooperating in groups, (as has been observed in other primates, for example), we have a distinction without a difference. As to your question re. taking land and/or slaves from weaker tribes, that was in fact the way we lived for most of our history as a species, indeed we lived that way into historical times. (Arguably, we continue today. Consider the record of U.S. imperialism, and the righteous/patriotic support it receives. Ref. the book OVERTHROW by Stephan Kinzer.) Morality, by the social-contract conception, is a matter of maintaining peaceful and cooperative relations with your neighbors, so, trivially, agressive war is not moral. Historically morality has applied only to your interaction with members of your own group, or others with which your group was at peace.
Recall the distinction I made between the questions "What IS ethical?" and "Why BE ethical?" Inclusive fitness and its epiphenomena can provide sufficient motivation for ethical self-restraint for much of the people much of the time, but not for all of the people all of the time; morality is not always or necessarily self-enforcing. That's why we have law, police, courts, reputations, and why religions make the attempt to motivate morality with invisible consequences. Perpetual war with neighboring tribes may have been the norm in the past, but with the continuing development of science and technology, peace has gotten a whole lot better, and war has gotten a whole lot worse. The effort to suppress crime within societies has never been fully successful, and the effort to establish world peace likewise, but the stakes have been rising strongly in modern times. The invasion of Iraq, for example, has probably been (and will be) unprofitable to the whole of U.S. society, but highly profitable to the wealthy elite who control the Republican party and many Democrats. We have not yet made for ourselves a "just, equitable, and sustainable society", not yet found a way to achieve collective rationality.
Summing up; morality can indeed be derived from inclusive fitness, for a social species that survives by cooperating in groups. One can say that "honesty is the best policy" for most of the people most of the time. What cannot be done is to motivate (by inclusive fitness, or indeed any other way we've found so far) universal adherence to moral norms by all the people all of the time.
Posted by: John B Hodges | July 29, 2009 3:29 PM
To Knockgoats #162 on a separate topic. David Hume did not claim to have proven that "you cannot derive an ought from an is", he said he did not see any way to do it, and asked those who did it to kindly explain. Certainly you cannot do it by simple logical deduction.
You can, however, avoid the problem by restricting yourself to hypothetical oughts, the "practical syllogism" of Aristotle: "If you want X, then you ought to do Y", because Y is a necessary or efficient method of achieving X.
Although values are subjective- we call something "good" because we believe it will satisfy our desires- and relative to goals chosen by individuals- everything "good" is good TO somebody FOR something- nevertheless ETHICAL SYSTEMS can be objective and scientific, if they are constructed entirely, repeat, entirely, of hypothetical oughts, AND the ultimate goal of the system is objectively measurable. Doing Y will, or will not, objectively lead to X; one can investigate scientifically whether Y or some alternative Z will be more effective. So, for example, "If you want to maintain peaceful and cooperative relations with your neighbors, don't kill, steal, lie, or break agreements."
Posted by: frog | July 29, 2009 5:48 PM
Hodges: Doing Y will, or will not, objectively lead to X
No. Not for the general case. Outside of some simple problems of mechanics, you can, at best create an ensemble of possibilities, a distribution. Usually, you can eliminate some of the space as being completely impossible.
If I have three balls in orbit around each other, and poke at one, what will happen? I can't know in the same way that I know for two balls. I can solve the problem numerically for some level of approximation over some time period; I can eliminate some possibilities -- but I have a certain enforced ignorance about the evolution of the system.
Social problems are much, much harder. You usually can at best develop heuristics -- and that is not "objective knowledge" but just general decent guesses that may approximate the truth of the matter to some extent. They are extremely sensitive to the history of the observer, unlike "objective knowledge".
Remember, in the social sciences correlations of 0.5 are considered awesome results!
Posted by: Knockgoats | July 29, 2009 6:00 PM
Since empathy and equity aversion can themselves be derived from inclusive fitness in a social species that survives by cooperating in groups John B. Hodges@162
They're not the same kinds of thing: empathy and equity aversion are emotions, inclusive fitness is not. Of course the capability to feel them arose through natural selection, hence (at least when they arose), having that capability contributed to inclusive fitness - as I think I said above.
Summing up; morality can indeed be derived from inclusive fitness, for a social species that survives by cooperating in groups.
No, it can't. Or there would be circumstances in which genocide and rape were right.
As to your question re. taking land and/or slaves from weaker tribes, that was in fact the way we lived for most of our history as a species, indeed we lived that way into historical times. John B. Hodges@162
I know. What I asked was whether you consider it moral.
John B. Hodges@166,
Nothing there I disagree with.
Posted by: frog | July 29, 2009 6:22 PM
KG: No, it can't. Or there would be circumstances in which genocide and rape were right.
And, indeed, there are many cases were people have and do believe that genocide, murder, rape, and cannibalism are moral.
On the other hand, there are also cases where people believe that murdering their own children is "moral".
Which shows that "inclusive fitness" is neither sufficient nor necessary to even tell us what people actually believe is moral. And it obviously doesn't tell us what meta-morality should be, since then murdering most of the human race in order to replace them with your spawn (and a large enough cohort of others to avoid inbreeding) would be among the most moral thing one can do. Hitler's immorality would then be his attempting something that would fail -- not the thing in itself, since success would have validated it as "moral"; in other words, if he had gotten either the US or the Soviets on board, it would have been moral by "inclusive fitness" criteria for the winners.
Posted by: John B Hodges | July 29, 2009 8:38 PM
Knockgoats #168 and Frog #169- I have long known that philosophy is difficult to discuss via email; you think you've been clear, but misunderstanding persists.
I draw your attention again to the distinction between "What IS ethical" and "Why BE ethical". When I say that morality can be derived from inclusive fitness, I am not saying they are the same, nor that "Whatever promotes inclusive fitness" is therefore moral, under all imaginable circumstances. (Not merely all present or likely or possible circumstances, but all imaginable, as you seem to be assuming.) The desire to promote the health of one's kinfolk is a motive that can support ethical behavior in a range of likely circumstances. Specifically, in the circumstances where we evolved, living in hunter-gatherer tribes and later in agricultural communities, the needs of your family could motivate you to maintain good working relations with the other members of your tribe/community, as your way of making a living requires cooperating with the larger group.
This motive gives you a standard for judging your neighbors, that a "good person" is a desirable neighbor from the point of view of one who seeks to promote the health of their extended family. Such a neighbor would be one who themselves sought to maintain peaceful and cooperative relations with their neighbors, e.g. with you.
Of course we can imagine scenarios where crime pays, war pays, genocide pays. But it is generally true that for most people most of the time, it doesn't, and in fact it pays them to try to suppress crime, war, genocide; battlefields are not good places to raise kids.
Re. Frog #167- Most ethical systems historically have been heuristics, rules of thumb. "Honesty is the best policy", "Five abstinences and five observances", "The Golden Rule", and so forth. Precisely because the future is not predictable with mathematical precision. Why would you expect ethical systems to be mathematically provable "for the general case", i.e. for all imaginable circumstances, when they never have been? Accumulated lessons of experience can still be "scientific", even if they do not come up to the standard of Newtonian mechanics.
Posted by: frog | July 29, 2009 8:55 PM
Hodges:
Are you just saying that moral systems are consistent with our evolutionary history? If that's the case, then I don't think you'll get any disagreements. In a sense, it's trivially true -- anything we think is/must be consistent with our evolutionary history.
I just don't think it tells us very much, particularly since we're only half-assed hacks, so "our evolutionary history" is consistent with moralities that are against our fitness in any sense (and with conventional contemporary morality) -- as I pointed out, Western civ is to a large extent built out of a tradition that involved sacrificing one's own first-borns.
Why would you expect ethical systems to be mathematically provable "for the general case", i.e. for all imaginable circumstances, when they never have been? Accumulated lessons of experience can still be "scientific", even if they do not come up to the standard of Newtonian mechanics.
I'd be careful there. Heuristics are good engineering practice -- but I wouldn't call them strictly "scientific". They're not anti-scientific either, they're just a different category of tools. For science, one wants theories -- not just accumulated lessons of experience, but mathematical theories that accurately explain a certain, well-defined realm.
I have nothing against heuristics -- and if you read up-thread, you'll see I argued that moralities must be heuristics constrained by science and informed by the arts. But they're not scientific in themselves -- and heuristics imply a certain amount of subjectivity (using good judgment which is partially an intuitive talent).
We just have to be careful how we use our words -- it's dangerous to claim that something is "scientific" when it's really a rule-of-thumb, or claim clean objectivity when it's considerably subjective. People have a tendency to get killed when some confuse those matters.
Posted by: Mariano | July 29, 2009 10:52 PM
FYI: I have posted some interesting information on Collins at these URLs:
http://atheismisdead.blogspot.com/2009/04/john-horgan-and-francis-collins.html
http://atheismisdead.blogspot.com/2009/05/new-atheists-on-francis-collins.html
Posted by: Knockgoats | July 31, 2009 8:22 AM
FYI: I have posted some interesting information on Collins at these URLs:,/I> - Mariano@172
No you haven't. I can tell that by the lie in your blog title.
Posted by: Ichthyic
|
February 7, 2010 4:23 PM
no, you are blogwhoring, and if, as you imply, you are the Mariano above, you are sockpupetting.
both bannable offenses.
run along, little troll.