Category: morality

Peter Singer’s talk censored in Canada as shouting students accuse him of “euthanasia”

March 10, 2017 • 1:00 pm

I’m a a big admirer of philosopher Peter Singer, for he deals with philosophical problems affecting the real world, not with arcane stuff like compatibilism; and he really lives his philosophy, donating a substantial portion of his income to charity, not eating meat, and not wearing leather. His work on practical ethics, altruism, and animal rights has been immensely influential. And he’s just a nice guy, as I discovered from a brief correspondence with him.

But some people don’t think so because of Singer’s views on “euthanasia” of newborns, which is that it might be moral behavior to euthanize some hopelessly ill or deformed babies even after they were born—but soon after birth. This has led, as I have noted, to his de-platforming in several places, and even calls for his resignation from Princeton (see also here and here),  The protestors, who accuse Singer of “ableism” and calling for the killing of the disabled, almost always misunderstand or distort his position. Here are two interviews in which he’s clarified his position (see first and second links above):

Q. You have been quoted as saying: “Killing a defective infant is not morally equivalent to killing a person. Sometimes it is not wrong at all.” Is that quote accurate?

A. It is accurate, but can be misleading if read without an understanding of what I mean by the term “person” (which is discussed in Practical Ethics, from which that quotation is taken). I use the term “person” to refer to a being who is capable of anticipating the future, of having wants and desires for the future.  As I have said in answer to the previous question, I think that it is generally a greater wrong to kill such a being than it is to kill a being that has no sense of existing over time. Newborn human babies have no sense of their own existence over time. So killing a newborn baby is never equivalent to killing a person, that is, a being who wants to go on living.  That doesn’t mean that it is not almost always a terrible thing to do.  It is, but that is because most infants are loved and cherished by their parents, and to kill an infant is usually to do a great wrong to its parents.

Sometimes, perhaps because the baby has a serious disability, parents think it better that their newborn infant should die. Many doctors will accept their wishes, to the extent of not giving the baby life-supporting medical treatment.  That will often ensure that the baby dies.  My view is different from this, only to the extent that if a decision is taken, by the parents and doctors, that it is better that a baby should die, I believe it should be possible to carry out that decision, not only by withholding or withdrawing life-support – which can lead to the baby dying slowly from dehydration or from an infection – but also by taking active steps to end the baby’s life swiftly and humanely.

Q. What about a normal baby? Doesn’t your theory of personhood imply that parents can kill a healthy, normal baby that they do not want, because it has no sense of the future?

A. Most parents, fortunately, love their children and would be horrified by the idea of killing it.  And that’s a good thing, of course.  We want to encourage parents to care for their children, and help them to do so. Moreover, although a normal newborn baby has no sense of the future, and therefore is not a person, that does not mean that it is all right to kill such a baby.  It only means that the wrong done to the infant is not as great as the wrong that would be done to a person who was killed. But in our society there are many couples who would be very happy to love and care for that child.  Hence even if the parents do not want their own child, it would be wrong to kill it.

or this (NZZ is the Neue Zürcher Zeitung):

NZZ: Next week, you are due to receive an award for the reduction of animal suffering. This has provoked protests because you, allegedly, want to have disabled children killed. Is that true?

PS: There are circumstances where I would consider that to be justified, yes. For instance, when an extremely premature baby suffers from a cerebral hemorrhage so massive that it will never recognize its mother and smile at her. If such a child requires artificial respiration, almost all doctors would advise to switch the device off and let the child die. The artificial respiration is terminated because they do not want the baby to live. But if the child is already capable of breathing on its own, killing it requires a lethal injection. Why should it be morally relevant whether I switch off a device or give the child an injection? In both cases, I decide over the child’s life. [JAC: People often make a distinction here between a direct action that terminates life and an indirect action that allows life to end, but I consider that a distinction without a difference.]

NZZ: Would you also kill a new-born child with a mild disability?

PS: If the disability is compatible with a good quality of life, it should be possible to find a couple willing to adopt the child if the parents do not want it. Why should it be killed then?

In fact I agree with Singer here for cases in which a child is so horribly deformed or diseased that it will either die very soon or will be an intolerable burden on its parents—as with a baby in a vegetative state, or incurably demented. But people with, say, cerebral palsy or other handicaps, who can live decent lives and enjoy those lives, think—or deliberately misrepresent—that Singer is calling for the euthanasia of people like them.

He’s not. All you have to do is read what he’s written or said. It’s one of those moral positions that at first sounds repugnant but actually makes considerable sense. You can argue about it, of course, but what you shouldn’t do is demonize Singer for a well thought out view—or no-platform or censor him.

But that is exactly what happened to Singer on March 1 at an “Effective Altruism” Club at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, where a presentation of his TED talk was scheduled, followed by Singer answering questions via Skype. The topic wasn’t euthanasia, but effective altruism: how to do the best for humanity you can with your limited resources.

As martlet reports, a group of students interrupted the presentation, standing in front of the stage, making noise, and accusing Singer of ableism. Ultimately, it sounds as if the talk was simply inaudible. As martlet noted:

Prior to the event, a candlelight vigil was set up in the main SUB hallway in honour of the the Disability Community Day of Mourning, which was coincidentally on the same day. A chalkboard with the names of disabled victims of filicide — murder by one’s caregiver or family member — stood on display for passersby to see.

As people slowly entered the auditorium, a small group of students stood on stage with a microphone and read out a list of names of disabled people killed throughout 2016 and 2017.

“People who were their caregivers, who were meant to provide stability and care and love, decided these people weren’t worthy of life,” said Tareem Sangha, one of the students on stage.

Effective Altruism attempted to begin the TED Talk at 3:30 p.m., but were temporarily deterred by the resounding vocal response from the protesters. After a few minutes, they proceeded anyway, with the video’s captions on and sound amplified to compensate.

. . . What began as two conflicting defenses of free speech soon hindered discussion of any kind, as the Effective Altruists and protesters battled with the volume to deafening proportions. Protesters used a megaphone to read prepared text to the audience, and numerous audience members shouted back at them to leave.

One protester even temporarily unplugged the adapter connecting Effective Altruism’s computer to the projector before fleeing out the side door of Cinecenta. The club was able to quickly start the video back up with a replacement adapter.

All the while, Singer’s TED Talk and Q&A continued, and the room grew cacophonous. Shouts of support for Singer’s free speech were met with chants of “eugenics is hate” and “disabled lives matter,” and neither side showed any signs of backing down.

“It’s a trainwreck,” said one student in the audience. “I wanna leave, but if I leave now, [the protesters] get their way.”

. . .Despite the stated focus on the effective altruism movement, Singer was in fact asked to address his views on euthanasia, but his answer was inaudible over the din of the auditorium. Though the club did record a portion of the event, the recording of Singer’s answer has not been made publicly available as of yet.

You can see a video of the disruption by clicking on the screenshot below. What you’ll see is a bunch of entitled whiners trying to censor Singer’s speech. It’s reprehensible:

 

There was also a change.org petition calling for the de-platforming of Singer because he was advocating “the killing of people with disabilities.” That is a disingenuous summary of his views. (The petition got only 89 signers.)

Will the University of Victoria do anything about this, like disciplining the protestors, or even issuing a statement in favor of free speech? I haven’t found such a statement.

I am sick to death of students trying to censor those whose views offend them, and in this case Singer’s views should most certainly be heard. There was a time when such protests would arise over assisted suicide, an act now legal in several U.S. states and other countries. Society has progressed. We need to consider whether infants of the kind Singer discusses might also constitute an intolerable and unnecessary burden on society, so that they should be allowed to die. It’s surely worth discussing.

h/t: Jiten, Barry

Hitchens-disser Larry Alex Taunton says that atheists can’t be moral, and there’s no culture without Christianity

January 26, 2017 • 9:00 am

Hemant Mehta (“the Friendly Atheist”) is all over atheist news like white on rice (or, as they say, “like ugly on a frog”), so I usually avoid posting on the same things he does. But in this case I’ll make an exception. As Hemant notes in a post from Monday, Senator Jeff Sessions, Trump’s candidate to be Attorney General, has some weird (or should I say “mainstream”) views on atheists. In an earlier post, Hemant noted that Sessions, during his confirmation hearings, had this exchange with Democratic Senator Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (Hemant’s emphasis):

WHITEHOUSE: Does a secular attorney have anything to fear from an Attorney General Sessions in the Department of Justice?

SESSIONS: Well, no… and I use that word in the 90,000-foot level. A little concern I have that we as a nation, I believe, are reaching a level in which truth is not sufficiently respected, that the very idea of truth is not believed to be real, and that all of life is just a matter of your perspective and my perspective, which I think is contrary to the American heritage…

We are not a theocracy. Nobody should be required to believe anything. I share Thomas Jefferson’s words on the memorial over here: I swear eternal hostility over any domination of the mind of man. And I think we should respect people’s views and not demand any kind of religious test for holding office.

WHITEHOUSE: And a secular person has just as good a claim to understanding the truth as a person who is religious, correct?

SESSIONS: Well… I’m not sure. [Long silence]… We’re gonna treat anybody with different views fairly and objectively.

That’s clearly ridiculous, since if anything secular people, not adhering to unevidenced superstitions, surely have a better claim to understanding the truth than do religionists.

But put that aside. Let’s move on to Larry Alex Taunton. Remember him? He’s the Christian author who wrote the misguided, tendentious, and probably duplicitous book The Faith of Christopher Hitchens: The Restless Soul of the World’s Most Notorious Atheist, arguing that, at the end of his life, Hitchens was flirting with becoming a Christian. That book has been thoroughly debunked (see here, here, here, here, here, and here, for example), and nobody with two neurons to rub together believes what Taunton said.

But Taunton’s animus against atheism is again on view again in a piece he wrote for (of course) at Fox News. In this case Taunton uses Sessions’s statements to argue that atheists cannot be moral. In Taunton’s piece, “Why Jeff Sessions as our next attorney general should reassure, not alarm, all Americans“, Taunton says this (my emphasis):

As a student of history, no doubt Senator Sessions also knows that secular regimes, lacking any belief in laws beyond those they manufacture, alter, and violate at will, were responsible for the deaths of no less than 100 million people in the Twentieth Century alone.

That’s more than all religious wars from all previous centuries combined.

That is because atheism unquestionably exacerbates the evil in our nature. And if Christianity doesn’t make you good—strictly speaking, from a theological perspective, none of us are—it makes you better than you might otherwise be.

I am reminded of novelist Evelyn Waugh’s famous quip, made in response to someone drawing attention to his all-too-obvious faults: “Without supernatural aid, I would hardly be a human being.”

All of this is at the heart of the Senator’s remarks: If one does not believe in a Lawgiver, how can we be sure he will acknowledge any law at all? The point isn’t that the secularly-minded cannot be morally outstanding people; the point is that there is no logically compelling reason to be anything other than entirely selfish.

I mean, if there is no God to judge you in the next life for your actions in this one, why not do preciously as you want to do?

Americans should be comforted by the knowledge that the man who might become the highest law enforcement officer in the country believes that some laws are absolute and inviolable no matter what the cultural zeitgeist of the moment is; because sometimes the zeitgeist says slavery is OK and Jews should go to concentration camps.

Comforted? We should be scared that the highest law official of the country might want us to answer to laws from the Great Lawgiver in the Sky rather than from our own legislatures. (By the way, I do believe in a Lawgiver. It’s called Congress.) God’s laws, may, for instance, differ from secular law on issue about abortion, about gays, about censorship, and so on.

Further, anyone who claims that Nazism was an atheist regime, for instance, doesn’t know what they are talking about. And really, wasn’t it a Christian view that demonized the Jews in Europe, leading to the death of six million of them? It’s extremely bizarre to blame secularism for the Holocaust, to say the least.

Finally, if you’re moral for religious reasons, that’s not logic compelling you to be moral. It’s fear—or rather, a misguided notion that if you don’t obey God, you’re going to fry. If that’s not a selfish reason, I don’t know what is.

Taunton continues.

. . . The Cultural Left’s romance with secularism is naïve at best, malicious at worst. History demonstrates where that worldview all too often leads.

The moral and intellectual sensibilities of the West are still running off of the accumulated capital of a rich Judeo-Christian heritage.

But watch out. When the fumes in that tank are spent, tyranny cannot be far away.

As T.S. Eliot rightly observed, “If Christianity goes, the whole culture goes.”

My response: Scandinavia.  Christianity has largely gone there, but, last time I looked, there was still plenty of culture.  Now of course Taunton could argue, as religionists love to do, that even the morality in nonbelieving countries is a vestigial remnant of Christianity, but I don’t believe it. Denmark has been largely without religion for several generations, and yet the morality remains. And does Taunton really think that only Christianity, as opposed to other faiths, is a guarantor of morality?

Taunton’s motivations for his odious book are clear: he hates secularism, couldn’t abide the fact that Hitchens was facing death without wavering in his atheism, and therefore made up a story to support Taunton’s preconceptions—and perhaps to make a quick buck on the side. The man is odious.

taunton
Taunton

 

Michael Shermer and Robert Wright on evolution and “purpose”

January 6, 2017 • 11:45 am

Here we have Michael Shermer and Robert Wright discussing the issue of “purpose” in evolution—something I studiously avoid because it’s not only a useless discussion, but also gives fodder to religion. I’ve written about Wright’s teleology (he might reject the word, but there it is) quite a bit, and it seems to me that—in his recent works—he’s constantly trying to smuggle some form of teleology into a naturalistic process by talking about evolution’s “purpose”. I see nothing to gain from such philosophical discussion. Where is the empirical evidence for “purpose”? If there isn’t any beyond pure naturalism, why persist?

I believe Wright’s motivation is that his religious background keeps him from fully accepting materialism. He may say he’s an agnostic, but he has a vestigial organ of teleology.

Wright’s problem is that he studiously avoids being explicit about what, exactly, is the “force” that he calls “meta-natural selection” that is propelling evolution. He maintains that it isn’t God, and perhaps he doesn’t even know what it is (he skitters from aliens to brains in vats to morality to the evolution of intelligence). But he seems to believe that there is a sign of “purpose” in evolution: a purpose instantiated in the fact that evolution has produced not only a hyperintelligent species (us, of course), but one that has created a “mega brain”: the Internet.

Wright also claims that his notion of “purpose” doesn’t posit an intelligent agent, yet some of his ‘suggestions’ do indeed involve such an agent (aliens, “something that started natural selection,” and so on). He also mentions at one point that human “purpose” involves a “moral calling”, but what can “call” one to morality except for an agent? Why not just say that morality is a combination of evolved sentiments and a cultural overlay? “Calling,” of course, simply oozes notions of religion.

Wright’s failure to pin down what he means by purpose, or even to give evidence that there is any “purpose” (“something larger than us”) behind the appearance of humans, is what keeps getting him in trouble—at least with me. If you watch him equivocate, wiggle around, and avoid specificity as he talks to Shermer, you’ll sense my frustration. I don’t see any reason to try to smuggle the notion of purpose into a purely materialistic process. And his attempt is even quasi-theological in the sense that it points to human exceptionalism (with respect to both intelligence and morality) as pointers to a “purpose”. But there’s no reason to think that our uniquely high intelligence wasn’t simply a result of natural selection (and then accelerated by the interaction of genes with culture)—an evolutionary one-off, like the evolution of feathers or an elephantine trunk.

One thing you can discern from listening to this 75-minute video is that Robert Wright is literally obsessed with me: he mentions me (and not favorably!) over and over again, and even tries to enlist Michael in dissing me (Shermer won’t have it). He even implies that I was a coward for not “debating” him on his videocast. But, as I’ve told Wright, I don’t like his hectoring, bullying, interrupting style with people he dislikes; and, more important, I prefer to write competing takes and let readers sort it out in the quietude of thought. In general, I tend to avoid debates, though I will answer questions or sometimes have “conversations.” Wright says he doesn’t have time for correcting me in writing (though he has). So be it.

There’s also some New Atheist-dissing from time to time, but you can hear that if you have the stamina to make it through this video. Around 55 minutes in, Wright not only exculpates religion from terrorism, but says that we’ll get nowhere by attacking religion per se. Shermer gives him some pushback.

Here is the website’s list of discussion pointers:

1:31 Bob’s NY Times article on evolution and purpose
23:23 Was evolution likely to produce the Internet?
37:52 The counter-entropic role of life
44:32 Is moral progress built into history?
49:56 Social and political dimensions of moral progress
56:34 The psychology of terrorism
65:50 What can we do to fight tribalist impulses?

h/t: Felipe

University of Virginia students and faculty object to the University President using quotes by its founder, Thomas Jefferson

November 22, 2016 • 11:11 am

It was only a matter of time before one of the greatest Presidents and statesmen this country ever had, Thomas Jefferson, came under the Knife of Offense because he owned slaves.  And indeed, that was a terrible form of oppression, one that caused Jefferson himself some cognitive dissonance, but he kept his slaves till he died, and of course fathered children by one of them. But he also called slavery an “abominable crime.” Many famous people engaged in morally repugnant activities, but I think we have to understand them, though not excuse them, as adhering to “regular behavior” at the time. And we shouldn’t, I think, let these flaws completely efface the good works such people did.

But now, as reported by The Washington Post, reason.com, and the University of Virginia (founded by Jefferson) student newspaper, the Cavalier Daily, University of Virginia students have told the University’s president that they didn’t like his use of a Jefferson quotation in emails to the faculty

Several professors on Grounds collaborated to write a letter to University President Teresa Sullivan against the inclusion of a Thomas Jefferson quote in her post-election email Nov. 9.

In the email, Sullivan encouraged students to unite in the wake of contentious results, arguing that University students have the responsibility of creating the future they want for themselves.

“Thomas Jefferson wrote to a friend that University of Virginia students ‘are not of ordinary significance only: they are exactly the persons who are to succeed to the government of our country, and to rule its future enmities, its friendships and fortunes,’” Sullivan said in the email. “I encourage today’s U.Va. students to embrace that responsibility.”

The temerity of President Sullivan! And if that weren’t enough, she’d quoted Jefferson before. From the Post:

It wasn’t the first such email quoting Jefferson that Sullivan had written to the student body. As The Washington Post’s Susan Svrluga reported, a week earlier she sent one out after someone scrawled the word “terrorists” on the door of a dorm room where two Muslim students resided.

In that letter, Sullivan advocated peace on campus, writing, “Thomas Jefferson was the first American president to wrest power from an opposing party, yet he also provided a potent precedent for the peaceful transfer of power and the healing of a divided nation.”

Well, there’s nothing in either email about slavery, but merely quoting a slaveowner (who happened to have written the Declaration of Independence and the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom) was enough to arouse the Perpetually Offended.  Noelle Hurd, an assistant professor of psychology at the University, drafted an open letter to the President, which was cosigned by 469 people:

Dear President Sullivan,

We are writing in response to the e-mails you have sent out to the university community in regards to civility in the current political climate. We appreciate you taking the time to acknowledge the issues facing our community and to encourage unity and inclusivity. We also wanted to take the opportunity to provide you with some constructive and respectful feedback regarding your messages.

We are incredibly disappointed in the use of Thomas Jefferson as a moral compass. Thomas Jefferson owned hundreds of slaves. Other memorable Jefferson quotes include that Blacks are “inferior to the whites in the endowments of body and mind,” and “as incapable as children of taking care of themselves.” Though we realize that some members of our university community may be inspired by quotes from Jefferson, we also realize that many of us are deeply offended by attempts on behalf of our administration to guide our moral behavior through their use.

In the spirit of inclusivity, we would like for our administration to understand that although some members of this community may have come to this university because of Thomas Jefferson’s legacy, others of us came here in spite of it. For many of us, the inclusion of Jefferson quotes undermines the messages of unity, equality, civility, and inclusivity that you are attempting to convey. We understand desires to maintain traditions at this university, but when these traditions threaten progress and reinforce notions of exclusion, it is time to rethink their utility. Thank you for your time.

I presume that means that we should no longer quote the Declaration of Independence, for it too was written largely by Jefferson. And remember that Darwin, though an abolitionist, saw blacks as inferior to whites, so we shouldn’t quote The Origin, either, should we?

As the Post further reports, at least one signer said that quoting Jefferson was sufficient to “undo progress.” I don’t believe that for a minute; it’s just cant from the Regressive left:

Politics professor Lawrie Balfour, who also signed the letter, said that a simple mention of Jefferson is enough to undo progress — a cycle that’s oft repeated during her decade and a half with the school.

“I’ve been here 15 years,” Balfour told the Cavalier Daily. “Again and again, I have found that at moments when the community needs reassurance and Jefferson appears, it undoes I think the really important work that administrators and others are trying to do.”

Here’s Sullivan’s in response to the letter (my emphasis):

In the long-standing tradition of open discourse, UVA faculty, staff, and students are free to express their opinions, as they did in a letter to me last week. I fully endorse their right to speak out on issues that matter to all of us, including the University’s complicated Jeffersonian legacy. We remain true to our values and united in our respect for one another even as we engage in vigorous debate.

Words have power. To quote any person is to acknowledge the potency of that person’s words. In my message last week, I agreed with Mr. Jefferson’s words expressing the idea that UVA students would help to lead our Republic. He believed that 200 years ago, and I believe it today. Quoting Jefferson (or any historical figure) does not imply an endorsement of all the social structures and beliefs of his time, such as slavery and the exclusion of women and people of color from the University.

We respond to the challenges of our times, and equity and inclusion are urgent leadership issues today. UVA is still producing leaders for our Republic, and from backgrounds that Mr. Jefferson could not have anticipated in 1825, when he wrote the words that I quoted. Today’s leaders are women and men, members of all racial and ethnic groups, members of the LGBTQ community, and adherents of all religious traditions. All of them belong at today’s UVA, whose founder’s most influential and most quoted words were “. . . all men are created equal.” Those words were inherently contradictory in an era of slavery, but because of their power, they became the fundamental expression of a more genuine equality today.

I think that’s a good response.  Remember that morality has changed, as Steve Pinker documented so well in The Better Angels of our Nature. What is considered unacceptable by today’s lights was often acceptable in the past. That doesn’t mean that if someone thought hard and long about slavery back then, and witnessed it, that they should have been okay with it. What it means is that morality is not only biological but cultural, and the cultural part, which changes over time, is transmitted to us from our parents, peers, and other important figures. If they tell us that slavery is okay, as many did in Jefferson’s day, then we’ll be brought up thinking that it’s okay, and it would be hard to think your way out of it—just as it’s hard to think your way out of long-inculcated religious beliefs and moral strictures. Now that we’ve realized that slavery is not okay, it has become unacceptable to own slaves or speak about other groups the way Jefferson did.

We have to remember these issues before we begin demonizing figures of the past. And we have to balance their indoctrination by their milieu against the genuine good that people like Jefferson did. It’s simply unacceptable to ban any quotes by Jefferson because they undo progress. They don’t. One can hold progressive views on some issues (i.e., Jefferson’s views on religious freedom, which are now part of American law) and ones now seen as immoral on other issues.  Words like those below are the crying of spoiled children, even if they be faculty; and they’re a failure to recognize that the world, especially when we consider the values of the past, is complicated.

For many of us, the inclusion of Jefferson quotes undermines the messages of unity, equality, civility, and inclusivity that you are attempting to convey.

 

Proof that the scriptures are man-made and don’t convey God’s word

August 16, 2016 • 9:30 am

When you read this I’ll be over—or, if something goes wrong, in—the Atlantic. If all goes well, Grania will have done the Hili dialogue; please her a hand for repeatedly filling in for me when I’m traveling.

I woke up about 2 a.m. in the Warsaw airport hotel and this idea suddenly popped into my head. Usually, genius ideas I have in the middle of the night are forgotten by morning (and rightfully so!), but I still remember this one. I’m throwing it out here because I can’t remember anybody making this claim before, though given the tortuous history of theology, someone surely has.

One thing that every liberal Christian or Jew admits is that the morality laid out in the Old Testament (and, for liberal Christians, much that appears in the New Testament, like the existence of hell for those who reject Jesus as Savior and heaven for those who don’t) are to be ignored—that most Biblical morality no longer applies.  So, for instance, we no longer agree with these views of right and wrong, which the Wikipedia article on “ethics in the Bible” summarizes conveniently:

Elizabeth Anderson criticizes commands God gave to men in the Old Testament, such as: kill adulterers, homosexuals, and “people who work on the Sabbath” (Leviticus 20:10; Leviticus 20:13; Exodus 35:2, respectively); to commit ethnic cleansing (Exodus 34:11-14, Leviticus 26:7-9); commit genocide (Numbers 21: 2-3, Numbers 21:33–35, Deuteronomy 2:26–35, and Joshua 1–12); and other mass killings.Anderson considers the Bible to permit slavery, the beating of slaves, the rape of female captives in wartime, polygamy (for men), the killing of prisoners, and child sacrifice. She also provides a number of examples to illustrate what she considers “God’s moral character”: “Routinely punishes people for the sins of others … punishes all mothers by condemning them to painful childbirth”, punishes four generations of descendants of those who worship other Gods, kills 24,000 Israelites because some of them sinned (Numbers 25:1–9), kills 70,000 Israelites for the sin of David in 2 Samuel 24:10–15, and “sends two bears out of the woods to tear forty-two children to pieces” because they called someone names in 2 Kings 2:23–24.

Blackburn provides examples of Old Testament moral criticisms such as the phrase in Exodus 22:18 that has “helped to burn alive tens or hundreds of thousands of women in Europe and America”: “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,” and notes that the Old Testament God apparently has “no problems with a slave-owning society”, considers birth control a crime punishable by death, and “is keen on child abuse”.Additional examples that are questioned today are: the prohibition on touching women during their “period of menstrual uncleanliness (Lev. 15:19–24)”, the apparent approval of selling daughters into slavery (Exodus 21:7), and the obligation to put to death someone working on the Sabbath (Exodus 35:2).

There are, of course, many more. Abraham and Isaac aren’t even mentioned!

These days nobody feels obliged to carry out such commands.

There are several ways to get around this rejection of Biblical morality; the first two assume that the Bible was somehow either the Word of God or divinely inspired by God.

  • God didn’t really mean what he said; it’s all metaphor. But that won’t wash because even if you see the Bible as just “divinely inspired,” these simply aren’t metaphors, but “historical accounts” of what God commanded or wanted and what his adherents did. There’s no rational way to construe it otherwise.
  • God did mean it, but times have changed; God dictated a morality appropriate only for Biblical times, but the times they have ‘a changed. This won’t wash either, and for several reasons. If God’s own morality is unchanging, and was laid down only once, but now no longer applies due to changing times, then anything goes; there is no longer any religious guidance for how to behave. And why would the rules change, anyway? If you could be killed for gathering sticks on Sabbath, why did that stricture go away? If slavery was okay in first-century Palestine, why is it now not only not okay, but morally reprehensible? Why did homosexuality suddenly become acceptable in God’s eyes? What changed?
  • My view: the morality “dictated by God” was really a reflection of a morality held by humans.  Those who accept Plato’s Euthyphro argument already realize that human morality must precede Biblical morality since God’s approval of an action can’t possibly be the sole criterion for determining whether it’s “right.” But the fact that the vast majority of Christians abjure Biblical morality like that above, combined with the fact that that “Biblical” morality was enforced Biblical times, can mean only one thing: God’s commandments were really made up by humans. It follows that we must not only reject the idea that Bible is the absolute Word of God a beneficent God whose laws were unchanging, but also accept that that morality was constructed by humans. In both cases the argument for morality based on Scripture fails.

Now we nonbelievers know this already. The priors for humans making up the Bible are surely higher than the priors for some Palestinian scribes channeling the word of a God who never left any evidence for His existence. (This is, of course, irrelevant to the issue of whether Jesus or Moses really existed as non-divine beings.)

I’m absolutely sure that religionists will say that my argument is naive, but who is more naive than someone who not only believes a book that has already proven to be wrong in many parts and a human construction in others, but also thinks their own scripture is the right one, invalidating, say, the Qur’an and the Bhagavad Gita? Who is more naive than someone who claims to prove definitively that humans can go to Heaven but dogs cannot?

Even neglecting the Euthyphro argument, which I consider one of the greatest contributions of philosophy to everyday human life, the fact that Biblical morality not only no longer applies, but is largely considered to be immoral, must certainly mean this: the precepts of behavior laid out in scripture were applicable only to their time, and were therefore constructed by humans. This, of course, completely destroys the argument that without the Bible, “Western” civilization would degenerate into anarchy and immorality. For if humans could make a workable morality for two millennia ago, they can surely construct one that works in our day.

Okay, tell me where I’m wrong.

titiaan_abraham_izaak_grt

Reader beefs at reader

April 19, 2016 • 1:00 pm

On my recent post, “Is there a ‘meaning to life’ for nonbelievers“?, there was some good discussion, but a goddie tried to interpolate him/herself into the discussion in response to the comments.

First, reader jblilie said this:

Posted April 12, 2016 at 10:08 am

I think I agree [with] all that you said.

The things I enjoy make my life meaningful to me. There is nothing else as far as I can see.

I fail to see how abasing one’s self before some overlord provides a “better” “meaning” to one’s life than the things you mentioned.

Maybe their meaning is: If I do these various rituals and abstain from X, Y, and Z, then I get to live forever after I die — and that’s the purpose in my life.

The odious Rick Warren gives the game away in the Title of his most famous book. They find a purpose in their life by boot licking their god. (“I found my Special Purpose!!!!” and “The new phone books are here!”)

And then the goddie, reader “ajmgw,” attempted to post this response, which I’m putting above the fold:

The question of meaning is valid, but must be understood in a different way. How can meaning come from a mindless process, no guidance just time and chance? In that kind of a world an atheist cannot give a justification for a difference between good and evil. If we are simply pond scum, the result of mindless processes over millions and billions of years, who decides what is right and wrong? The atheist cannot explain the existence of mind and morality. In order to do so they unwittingly must borrow from the Christian Worldview. As Greg Bahnsen said, “Like a petulant child they sit on their father’s lap and they reach up and slap his face.” According to the atheistic worldview, right and wrong are the results of chemical processes in our brains, a by product of survival of the fittest inherited from our common ape-like ancestors. In that case one doesn’t even have free will, but the chemical processes are in control.

The response encapsulates basically every misconception about atheists and morality that exists. If you want to discuss what this reader said, go ahead; I’ve informed him/her that the responses will be on this page and in the comments, and I’ll allow him/her to address the comments if the person has something substantive to say.

But note that the commenter makes a sharp a distinction between “free will” and “chemical processes.” Ajmgw is clearly one of those who has a dualistic notion of free will. Maybe the compatibilist readers can educate the commenter on how that form of free will is simply wrong, and the REAL kind of free will—the one we want, the one worth having—is perfectly compatible with a morality reflecting chemical (and evolutionary) processes.

We’re pond scum! I prefer to think of us as Joni Mitchell described it in Woodstock:

We are stardust, we are golden
We are billion year old carbon
And we got to get ourselves back to the garden.

Of course stardust doesn’t give us morality, either. . .

 

 

The Princeton dilemma: what do we do about Woodrow Wilson?

November 27, 2015 • 1:20 pm

If you’ve followed these pages, you’ll know that, among the welter of college protests, student activists at Princeton have asked for expunging the name of a Princeton icon, Woodrow Wilson, from its infrastructure. Wilson was not only president of Princeton, but President of the United States, and apparently a progressive one. But he was regressive in an important respect: he was an unrepentant racist, and as President took deliberate actions to disenfranchise black government employees. Because of this, the protesting students at Princeton, many of them black or minority, have asked for changes in the name of the school’s elite Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, of its residential part, Wilson College, and for a public admission of Wilson’s racist legacy. (The New York Times reported on this issue on November 22.)

In a major editorial three days ago, “The case against Woodrow Wilson at Princeton,” the Times‘s editorial staff took sides with the protestors. Without discussing Wilson’s positive accomplishments as President of both Princeton and the U.S., the editorial concluded:

In a few short years, Mr. [historian Eric] Yellin writes, the Wilson administration had established federal discrimination as a national norm.

None of this mattered in 1948 when Princeton honored Wilson by giving his name to what is now called the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Black Americans were still viewed as nonpersons in the eyes of the state, and even the most strident bigots were held up to public adulation. This is certainly not the case today.

The overwhelming weight of the evidence argues for rescinding the honor that the university bestowed decades ago on an unrepentant racist.

The counterargument, one made by my colleage Geoffrey Stone at the University of Chicago Law School, is that Wilson was a man of his time, and most white men of his time were, by and large, also racist. In a piece at PuffHo, “Woodrow Wilson, Princeton University, and the battles we choose to fight,” Stone not only argues that we should judge Wilson by the mores of his time, but also enumerates Wilson’s progressive contributions:

During his presidency of Princeton, Wilson renewed and reinvigorated the institution. In only eight years, he increased the size of the faculty from 112 to 174, paying special attention to both teaching and scholarly excellence.

Wilson also made progressive innovations in the curriculum, raised admissions standards to move Princeton away from its historic image as an institution dedicated only to students from the upper crust, and took strides to invigorate the university’s intellectual life by replacing the traditional norm of the “gentleman’s C” with a course of serious and rigorous study. As Wilson told alumni, his goal was “to transform thoughtless boys . . . into thinking men.”

Wilson also attempted (unsuccessfully because of the resistance of alumni) to curtail the influence of social elites by abolishing the upper-class eating clubs, appointed the first Jew and the first Catholic to the faculty, and helped liberate the university’s board of trustees from the grip of tradition-bound and morally-conservative Presbyterians. Given that record of achievement, it’s easy to understand why Princeton has chosen to recognize Woodrow Wilson as one of its greatest and most influential presidents.

. . . As President, Wilson oversaw the passage of a range of progressive legislation previously unparalleled in American history. Among the bills he signed into law were the Federal Reserve Act, the Federal Trade Commission Act, the Clayton Antitrust Act, the Adamson Act, which for the first time imposed a maximum eight-hour day for railroad workers, and the Keating-Owen Act, which (before it was held unconstitutional by the-then-very-conservative Supreme Court) curtailed child labor. Samuel Gompers, the most visible labor leader of the time, described Wilson’s achievements as a “Magna Carta” for the rights of the workingman.

Among his other accomplishments, Wilson, over bitter opposition from anti-Semites, appointed the first Jewish member of the Supreme Court – Louis Brandeis, and offered his Fourteen Points and his strong support of the League of Nations in the hope of promoting international peace and averting future world wars.

Unlike the Times, though, Stone also looks at the other side, arguing that “Wilson’s support of racial segregation was deplorable.” Let me add here that Stone is a progressive himself, a liberal, and someone who’s been mentioned as a possible Supreme Court Justice, though that’s unlikely given the relatively young age of conservatives currently on the court. Whatever you may say about Stone—and I’m an admirer—he’s neither racist nor reactionary. And yet, he claims, “Wilson should be judged by Princeton, as he has been judged by historians, not only by the moral standards of today, but by his achievements and his values in the setting of his own time.” If we judged Wilson solely by today’s standards, then tributes to many other famous American figures would also need to be removed from the public arena:

After all, if Woodrow Wilson is to be obliterated from Princeton because his views about race were backward and offensive by contemporary standards, then what are we to do with George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, and Andrew Jackson, all of whom actually owned slaves? What are we to do with Abraham Lincoln, who declared in 1858 that “I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races,” and that “I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people”?

What are we to do with Franklin Roosevelt, who ordered the internment of 120,000 persons of Japanese descent? With Dwight Eisenhower, who issued an Executive Order declaring homosexuals a serious security risk? With Bill Clinton, who signed the Defense of Marriage Act? With Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, both of whom opposed the legalization of same-sex marriage?

And what are we to do with Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who once opined in a case involving compulsory sterilization that “three generations of imbeciles is enough”? With Leland Stanford, after whom Stanford University is named who, as governor of California, lobbied for the restriction of Chinese immigration, explaining to the state legislature in 1862 that “the presence of numbers of that degraded and distinct people would exercise a deleterious effect upon the superior race”?

And what are we do with all of the presidents, politicians, academic leaders, industrial leaders, jurists, and social reformers who at one time or another in American history denied women’s right to equality, opposed women’s suffrage, and insisted that a woman’s proper place was “in the home”? And on and on and on.

Not having any personal connection to Princeton (other than my affection and respect for its current president), I don’t really care one way or the other whether Princeton erases Woodrow Wilson from its history—except to the extent that such an action would inevitably invite an endless array of similar claims that would both fundamentally distort the realities of our history and distract attention from the real issues of deeply-rooted injustice in our contemporary society that we need to take seriously today. This, quite frankly, is not one of them.

As Stone implies, women could make an equally strong case for the removal of names of figures who would, by today’s lights, be seen as misogynistic or sexist.

I don’t really have a dog in this fight, but I can see points on both sides. Were I a black student, I’m not sure I’d be happy being around the name “Woodrow Wilson” given his racism, which was not only deep, but on which he was able as President to act, ruining (as the Times editorial recounts) the lives of many black people. On the other hand, if we’re to judge historical figures in light of today’s mores, and (as Steve Pinker shows) those mores have grown ever more liberal, inclusive, and progressive, then you’re going to have to completely revamp our institutions. Do we take Lincoln off the five-dollar bill and slaveholder George Washington off the single? Do we blast the face of Thomas Jefferson off Mount Rushmore? How racist or sexist must someone be before we bow to the demands of the offended that we efface them from history, or at least from public adulation?

If Wilson was simply a racist who expressed his views in public, I’d side with Stone. But he actively injured black people through his racism, and that’s different. On the other hand, Jefferson, Washington, Jackson (on the $20 bill), and many “founding fathers” actually kept black people in bondage, which is even worse.

So I throw this one to the readers: should Princeton get rid of the honorifics bestowed on its former President? And how far should we judge historical figures and their legacy according to our ever-expanding circle of morality?