Category: mortality

Oliver Sacks on the Sabbath—and his death

August 16, 2015 • 10:15 am

As most of you know, Oliver Sacks is in the process of dying. His metastatic cancer began in his eye, and then spread to his liver and now to other places. He doesn’t have long to live, and has documented his decline, and his thoughts on impending mortality, in three pieces in the New York Times. I posted on the first one in February, and another,called “”My periodic table,” appeared in February. In that one he matched the latter years of his life with the corresponding number of a chemical element in the periodic table. An excerpt:

I started a new sort of treatment — immunotherapy — last week. It is not without its hazards, but I hope it will give me a few more good months. But before beginning this, I wanted to have a little fun: a trip to North Carolina to see the wonderful lemur research center at Duke University. Lemurs are close to the ancestral stock from which all primates arose, and I am happy to think that one of my own ancestors, 50 million years ago, was a little tree-dwelling creature not so dissimilar to the lemurs of today. I love their leaping vitality, their inquisitive nature. [JAC: My colleague Anne Yoder is director of that Center and showed him around. Her post on the Duke Lemur Center Facebook page says this: “It was such an amazing 24 hours. He is every bit as kind, generous, and full of wonder as you could imagine.”]

. . . Bismuth is element 83. I do not think I will see my 83rd birthday, but I feel there is something hopeful, something encouraging, about having “83” around. Moreover, I have a soft spot for bismuth, a modest gray metal, often unregarded, ignored, even by metal lovers. My feeling as a doctor for the mistreated or marginalized extends into the inorganic world and finds a parallel in my feeling for bismuth.

I almost certainly will not see my polonium (84th) birthday, nor would I want any polonium around, with its intense, murderous radioactivity. But then, at the other end of my table — my periodic table — I have a beautifully machined piece of beryllium (element 4) to remind me of my childhood, and of how long ago my soon-to-end life began.

Today’s Times has a further installment, “Sabbath,” which shows how Sacks, and some other secular Jews, still hang onto old religious rituals. (He’s an atheist.) I don’t adhere at all to religious ritual—although I used to have a mezuzah on my lintel—but it’s fascinating to see what one one clings to at the end of life. I briefly thought that Sacks was being solipsistic, parading his illness before the public, but I instantly realized that he’s doing exactly what Hitchens was doing at the end of his life: these men are writers, and their first response to nearly everything is to put it into words for others. Perhaps that helps bring coherence to their thoughts, or even provides some solace, but what it certainly does do is give us unique insights about what it’s like to die. It’s sad, and it’s wrenching, but, as Bonnie Raitt said, it’s what we all go through.

An excerpt from “Sabbath”:

In December 2014, I completed my memoir, “On the Move,” and gave the manuscript to my publisher, not dreaming that days later I would learn I had metastatic cancer, coming from the melanoma I had in my eye nine years earlier. I am glad I was able to complete my memoir without knowing this, and that I had been able, for the first time in my life, to make a full and frank declaration of my sexuality, facing the world openly, with no more guilty secrets locked up inside me.

In February, I felt I had to be equally open about my cancer — and facing death. I was, in fact, in the hospital when my essay on this, “My Own Life,” was published in this newspaper. In July I wrote another piece for the paper, “My Periodic Table,” in which the physical cosmos, and the elements I loved, took on lives of their own.

And now, weak, short of breath, my once-firm muscles melted away by cancer, I find my thoughts, increasingly, not on the supernatural or spiritual, but on what is meant by living a good and worthwhile life — achieving a sense of peace within oneself. I find my thoughts drifting to the Sabbath, the day of rest, the seventh day of the week, and perhaps the seventh day of one’s life as well, when one can feel that one’s work is done, and one may, in good conscience, rest.

That’s so sad, and so eloquent. Goodbye, Oliver. You made the world a better place—by helping others who were troubled and by giving us glimpses into not only their minds, but yours.

oliver-sacks-600

Dan Dennett: misguided about free will, accurate about Templeton

January 13, 2015 • 10:31 am

I was originally going to write in the title that philosopher Dan Dennett was “wrong” about free will, but whether or not humans have “free will” seems to be a matter not of right or wrong, but of semantics—how we define the term. “Compatibilists” like Dennett, who see free will as perfectly consonant with a world in which all human actions and choices are predetermined by the laws of physics, conceive of the term differently from “incompatibilists” like myself, who see free will as incompatible with determinism.

While both camps largely agree on determinism, they differ in how they conceive of moral responsibility. Many incompatibilists, including me, find the notion of “moral responsibility” meaningless in a world where one can’t choose to behave one way versus another. I do consider people responsible for their actions, for, after all, they do commit them, and something should be done about that. And I also think that punishing people for actions harmful to society is necessary to deter others, to help rehabilitate miscreants, and to preserve society from further harm until (or if) such people can be rehabilitated. But that doesn’t mean that criminals are “immoral” in the sense that they could have chosen to behave “morally.” My notion of “moral action” is simply “an action that helps society function harmoniously or increases well-being.” Whether or not you act “morally” is not something you can freely decide. If the notion of “moral responsibility” means anything, it means that in a given situation you could have decided to behave either morally or not.

But let’s put that aside, since many readers have already expressed their agreement or disagreement with compatibilism. Today I want to call your attention to a recent mini-essay by Dan Dennett in Prospect Magazine: “Are we free?”  Here’s the header that includes the subtitle:

Picture 1

When I saw that subtitle and read the article, I realized that what many compatibilists feel is this: science has nothing to say about free will.  I think this is because their argument is basically semantic, involving various definitions of “free will”; and sometimes, like Dennett in this article, they don’t even bother to define it. I don’t think they realize that their denigration of scientific studies of free will comes from their feeling that the issue is one that can be resolved only through philosophy. And so they are committed to criticizing every scientific study that undermines traditional notions of free will. Why bother? As I’ll show below, this is one of many ways that compatibilism resembles Sophisticated Theology™: both areas denigrate science as being incapable of resolving the Big Question.

My own definition of free will is a traditional notion, one expressed by molecular biologist Anthony Cashmore:

Free will is defined as a belief that there is a component to biological behavior that is something more than the unavoidable consequences of the genetic and environmental history of the individual and the possible stochastic laws of nature.

This is what is commonly called “dualistic” or “contracausal” free will, in which people can somehow, by processes that bypass physical strictures, change their behaviors and choices. In contrast, nearly every compatibilist has a different reason why we have free will, implicitly reflecting a different definition of “free will.” (I think the failure of many compatibilists to give explicit definitions of the term is that so doing would would expose the intellectual vacuity of their arguments. You’ll look in vain in Dennett’s piece for his definition of free will.) At any rate, the diverse and sometimes discordant ways that compatibilists explain why we really do have free will makes me think that the issue is by no means settled, even among philosophers.

Dennett’s article is really a review of a new book by Alfred Mele, a philosopher at the Florida State University. As Dennett notes, “Mele is the director of a $4.4m project, “Free Will: Empirical and Philosophical Investigations,” funded by the Templeton Foundation. (More on Templeton later.) Mele’s book is Free: Why Science Hasn’t Disproved Free Will, which came out in October. I haven’t read it yet, but Dennett gives a good precis, and, more important, his essay is more a reiteration of Dennett’s own views than a review of Mele’s, which is fine.

I’ll try to be brief. Dennett first criticizes and discounts (as does Mele) the scientific experiments attacking traditional notions of free will: Libet’s experiments as well as others showing that brain scans can predict decisions before the “decider” is conscious of having made them; studies showing that you can manipulate people’s sense of agency by psychological trickery, either by making them think they have agency when they don’t (as in people with various brain lesions) or by making them think they don’t have agency when they really do (Ouija boards); and, finally, studies showing, as Dennett says, that:

. . . there is the unrecognised influence on subjects’ decisions of contextual factors that shouldn’t be decisive, growing out of Stanley Milgram’s and Philip Zimbardo’s notorious experiments into authority and obedience with college students back in the 1960s and 70s.

The last point puzzles me; I don’t see why contextual factors should be ruled out a priori as “not decisive”. When an authority figure in a white coat stands over you and tells you to apply more voltage to a passive victim supposedly connected to a battery, why shouldn’t that affect your behavior? Nobody denies that environmental and social pressures can change how you behave.

But never mind. What all this shows (and Dennett admits that some of those experiments have not been discredited) is that no scientific finding can refute the compatibilists’ claim that we have free will.  Even if, in the future, we could predict people’s actions and future decisions with perfect accuracy using very complex brain-monitoring and knowledge of neurology, compatibilists would continue to claim that we have free will. That’s because their notion of “free will” is a philosophical one, impervious to scientific refutation. So why bother going after the science?

So where does Dennett find free will? As he always has, he finds it in the notion that we are evolved, complex beings who reason: that is, we feel that we mull things over before coming to decisions about complex issues, and that this process of reasoning, which is an evolved part of our brain (supplemented with the environmental inputs of learning the consequences of actions), gives us free will. According to Dennett, it is this reasoning that makes us free, as opposed to decisions made when we’re constrained by other factors, like a person holding a gun to our head at the ATM and saying, “Take out $1000 and give it to me.” Without the gun, we would probably withdraw less money. The decision made at gunpoint, according to Dennett, is not “free.”

In other words, for Dennett free will lies in the ability to make reasoned as opposed to coerced choices.  This is supported by the two books he’s written on free will, and by statements that he makes in the Prospect article, like these (my emphasis):

It is a fact that when faced with actually tough decisions—about whether to intervene in somebody else’s crisis, for instance, or to go along with the crowd on some morally dubious adventure—we often disappoint ourselves and others with our craven behaviour. This sobering fact has been experimentally demonstrated in the Milgram and Zimbardo experiments and a host of milder, less traumatic experiments, but far from showing that we are always overwhelmed by context, these experiments invariably exhibit the capacity of a stalwart few to resist the enormous pressures arrayed against them. Is there a heroic minority of folks, then, with genuine free will, capable of being moved by good reasons even under duress? It’s better than that: you can learn—or be trained—to be on the alert for these pressures, and to resist them readily.

In other words, some people can make “responsible” choices, and those are the folks with free will. The others, well, they’ve been coerced. And there’s this:

. . . people can be manipulated into doing things they know better than to do; people’s introspective access to their own thought processes is far from foolproof, and you shouldn’t play poker if you can’t maintain a relatively inscrutable poker face. People who don’t know these home truths are perhaps too benighted, too naïve, to be granted full responsibility for their actions, but the rest of us, wise to these weaknesses in our own control systems, can take steps to protect our autonomy and be held responsible for doing just that. [JAC: That last statement comes perilously close to dualism.]

I think this line of argument is bogus. There is no difference, I think, in being coerced by threats or social pressure, and being coerced by our neurons, which are in effect billions of tiny guns pointed at our head. You don’t have the ability to decide to “take steps to protect your autonomy”, for some people can reason in a way that makes them do that while others can’t. It’s not a free decision.

Further, I think that members of some other species, like crows, elephants, and nonhuman primates, can reason and make “decisions” after some cogitation, even if their reasoning isn’t as complex as ours. Does that, then, make them “morally responsible”? If a dog attacks a human, mistakenly thinking that the human is a threat to the dog’s owner, do we hold that dog morally responsible? If not, why not?

In most cases people will indeed behave “responsibly,” for, after all, responsible behavior is behavior that endears you to society and enhances your well being. That’s precisely what our brains have evolved to do, as well as to process environmental information that is part of the evolved program. All we are doing when we make a decision is run a fixed computer program in our brain that has lots of different inputs, all of which yield a single output: the “choice.”

Some people’s decisions are better than others, and we say that those people are acting more “morally.” Others are “immoral”, perhaps because the reasoning process is faulty or because the reasoning process is sound but neglects important information. But in every case we’re running computer programs that have only a single possible output. How does that make us “morally” responsible? And where is the “freedom” in that? Whether it be guns, social pressure, or “reasoning” that feeds into our decisions, everything is constrained. We need to recognize that neurons and past experiences are just as coercive as guns. It’s just that their coercive properties aren’t as obvious as a Glock pointed at your skull.

We also need to accept that “reasoning” is just an evolved computer program run by the neuronal connections in your brain, modified by inputs called “experience.” In most cases reasoning gives a good outcome, for that’s why reasoning evolved. But sometimes reasoning doesn’t give a good or “responsible” outcome. We have no choice about that, or about how we reason.

As Michael Stipe said, “I’ve said enough.” Let me now give my thoughts on this last issue:

Why free-will compatibilism resembles Sophisticated Theology™:

  • Both redefine old notions (Biblical literalism or contracausal free will) and claim nobody believes in them any more. Like scripture is for Sophisticated Theologians™, so is free will for compatibilists: both have become metaphors for more recent notions.
  • The definitions of free will, like that of Sophisticated Gods, are concocted post facto, after compatibilists have decided in advance that their task is not to find the truth, but to buttress a conclusion they want to reach (i.e., we have free will)
  • Both set humans aside as special—different from other animals (souls or free will)
  • In both cases academic doyens (theologians or philosophers) feel that it’s dangerous for the public to know the truth (about God or about determinism).
  • Both groups need some sense of free will to “sustain our sense of moral responsibility”
  • There are as many versions of compatibilism as there are conceptions of God (and no general agreement on them), so advocates can always say to critics, “you’re not attacking the best argument.”
  • Both dismiss science as either irrelevant or inferior to philosophy for solving the Big Question at hand (free will or the existence of God).

Cute, eh? The parallels, however, reflect something more than coincidence. They reflect, I think, the fact that compatibilists set out, like Sophisticated Theologians™, not to follow the truth where it leads, but to buttress a preconceived notion—”we must have free will at all costs”.  To get there, both camps simply redefine terms, so that both “God” and “free will” become notions that don’t correspond at all to how they’ve been understood through history. Compatibilists will say this is okay, but to me it’s like saying, “Jerry Coyne loves dogs—if you redefine dogs as ‘members of the Felidae’.”

But let me give Dan kudos for the ending of his piece, in which he calls attention to the fact that Mele, and the collaborators on his “Free Will” initiative, are somewhat compromised by being funded by Templeton:

So it is important to note that Mele’s research, as he scrupulously announces, and not in fine print, is supported by the Templeton Foundation. In fact, Mele is the director of a $4.4m project, “Free Will: Empirical and Philosophical Investigations,” funded by the Templeton Foundation, almost certainly the most munificent funding of any philosopher in history. The Templeton Foundation has a stated aim of asking and answering the “Big Questions,” and its programmes include both science and theology. In fact, yoking its support of science with its support of theology (and “individual freedom and free markets”) is the very core of its strategy. The Templeton Foundation supports, with no strings attached, a great deal of excellent science that is otherwise hard to fund. The Foundation supports theological and ideological explorations as well, and it uses the prestige it garners from its even-handed and generous support of non-ideological science to bolster the prestige of its ideological forays. It could easily divide itself into two (or three) foundations, with different names, and fund the same research—I know, because I challenged a Templeton director on this score and was told that they could indeed, but would not, do this.

Alfred Mele is in an unenviable position, and there is really nothing he can do about it. Was his decision to stay strictly neutral on the compatibilism issue a wise philosophical tactic, permitting him to tackle a more modest project, demonstrating the weakness of the scientific argument to date, or was it a case of simply postponing the more difficult issue: if, as science seems to show, our decision-making is not accomplished with the help of any quantum magic, do we still have a variety of free will that can support morality and responsibility? The Templeton Foundation insists that it is not anti-science, and demonstrates this with the bulk of its largesse, but it also has an invested interest in keeping science from subverting some of its ideological aspirations, and it just happens that Mele’s work fits handsomely with that goal. And that, as I persist in telling my friends in science whenever they raise the issue, is why I advise them not to get too close to Templeton.

Now that’s good advice!

h/t: Barry

Daniel Fincke: morality is objective

September 1, 2014 • 8:29 am

Several of the talks at the Pittsburgh Atheist/Humanist meetings were excellent, and I hope to have time later to discuss one or two more. But first I want to say a few things about Daniel Fincke’s talk, titled “Empowerment Ethics.”  Daniel (I don’t know if he goes by “Dan”), as you may know, is a philosopher whose website at Patheos is called “Camels with Hammers.”

I had given my own talk earlier, and during the Q&A someone asked me whether, because of my penchant for using science and rationality rather than faith, I nevertheless had a faith-based ethics system. (It’s a good question.) I said no, it wasn’t based on belief in something for which there was no evidence (my conception of “faith”) but simply a preference—a judgment call based on what I think would create a more harmonious and just society, and some of those judgments are informed by evidence. In the end, though, my view that a harmonious and just society—like Sam Harris’s view that the most moral society maximizes well being—is at bottom a preference. People hate that, but it’s what I do believe.  I still don’t believe there is any such thing as an objective ethical judgment, though of course I believe that ethics rests heavily on empirical observation: what helps vs. what hurts people, and how societies function under different moral codes. But your criteria for what makes one thing moral and another not cannot, I think, be objective.

Others differ, and think morality is objective, one of them was Fincke, who in his 20-minute talk outlined his vision of “empowerment ethics,” which seems to be a quasi-utilitarian form of ethics along the lines of Sam Harris’s.  (I may be doing him a disservice, but I’m remembering the best I can).

Fincke claimed that yes, ethical judgments are objective.  What are the criteria for such judgments? Finke said it was “human flourishing”: whatever is more moral is that which allows for the most human flourishing.  This criterion was supposed to be objective, though Fincke didn’t define what “human flourishing” is. He also emphasized—and here I agree with him—that ethical judgments must be based on rational thought as far as possible, and that they must be consistent within a person: you cannot, say, that it is never moral to embezzle, and then cheat on your taxes.

Now this sounds good to people, and many agreed with him. Why I think they did is simply because for most moral judgments there is no disagreement among most people. We don’t hurt children or animals or anybody unnecessarily, we don’t steal, and so on. Much of that common feeling may be based on moral judgments that are instinctive because they are evolved: they allowed our ancestors to live in harmonious bands. (That doesn’t mean, of course, that they’re good behaviors now.) But there is no unanimity among people in two instances: religion-based morality and the “hard cases.”

Religions, of course, differ strongly in what they consider moral and immoral. Many Catholics see homosexuality as immoral, and the Church sees homosexuality as a “grave sin.”  Catholics also see divorce and contraception, as immoral. Many Muslims think it’s immoral for women to drive, go to school, or show their faces. How do you convince them that human flourishing overrides these dictates? I think it does, but they would simply claim that that is not so, for those moral dictates are given by God, and the best society is the one that obeys God’s rules. In other words, if those dictates were disobeyed, society would not flourish. (God might even destroy it, or send hurricanes!)

Now you can say that this is an irrational view, because it’s based on faith, but try convincing religious people that they are objectively wrong about that.

The more difficult cases are when religion isn’t involved, and in the Q&A I asked Dan to answer three questions.

If morality is objective, what is the objectively more moral action in these three cases:

1. Is it more moral for you to keep all your money or to save lives by giving away to Third-World charities everything you have beyond what you really need to live?

2. Is it more more moral to kill 1000 chimpanzees to save a maximum of 100 human lives?

3. Is it moral to torture someone if you think there is a 50% chance by so doing you will save 10,000 human lives?

I don’t think you can give an objective answer in any of these cases, for we simply cannot weigh “flourishing”.  How do we value a chimp life versus a human one? We don’t know exactly how much chimps suffer, or how sentient they are; and does that matter anyway?  Why is Fincke (and the rest of us) not acting immorally if flourishing would be maximized by giving away most of what we have and don’t need? (Saving a life, after all, which you can do by feeding poor kids in, say, Africa, is the best way to help people flourish with the least effort.) And as for torture, well, you can always say that torturing someone, even if it saves 10,000 lives, would brutalize society, and so reduce flourishing. But how do we know that? We can’t do the experiment, or look at other societies who do torture, because they differ in many other ways from ours, and at any rate, we could, as Alan Dershowitz thinks, put stringent legal controls on who should be tortured and how—controls that other countries don’t have. (Dershowitz thinks we should have “torture warrants.”).

There are other hard cases. Is ethnic profiling of terrorists on plane flights immoral if it would save lives? What about abortion? Is it immoral to allow a woman to abort an infant in the third trimester? How do you answer such questions objectively? I have my own answers (for example, I think abortion should be allowed on demand), but I couldn’t say that that is the objectively moral thing to do. I could argue that our society is better when such abortions are allowed, but a religious person could say that a third-trimester fetus is sentient and could be removed from the mother and have a life and that in the end that individual would be glad it wasn’t aborted.  It comes down, I think, to what kind of society you prefer.  After all, how do you balance the various aspects of “flourishing,” one against the other (keeping your wealth versus saving children, or killing chimps versus saving human lives)? That, too, was a problem with Sam Harris’s view: there are various ways to judge “well being,” and how do you weigh them one against the other?

We even may all agree on the utilitarian ideal of “maximum well being” or “maximum flourishing,” but different people will weight different aspects of these criteria differently. In the end, I still think it comes down to preference and a judgment call, and for me that involves what you think is the best behavior for individuals and societies to be well off. Some of one’s judgments are empirically testable in principle, but the criteria for what is moral, and how to weigh different facets of those criteria, still seem to me in the end to be subjective and not objective.

Objective ethics is a view that is gaining traction, and I wish I could get on board. But I have yet to be convinced that, say, anything involving animal rights can be judged objectively, except for easy cases like sacrificing ten mice to save a thousand humans.

This doesn’t get religious people off the hook, of course. Although they may claim that their ethics are objective—and superior—because they’re based on God’s dictates, virtually every religious person picks and chooses which of God’s dictates to obey.  Christians do not, as the Bible mandates, kill adulterers, those who work on the Sabbath, or adulterers. That, too, is picking and choosing based on some extra-Biblical notion of what is right. And that, to me, seems to me no more objective than my own secular ethics.

 

~

 

The moral obligation to drink coffee?

May 3, 2014 • 8:18 am

I have to confess that I sometimes read HuffPo, but just for the articles—not the pictures! Seriously, folks, I do peruse two sections, “Food” (a perennial topic of interest to me) and “Travel” (ditto). And in the food section I found this weird headline and the article below it: 

Screen shot 2014-05-03 at 7.56.08 AM

What? Science tells us we have a moral obligation to drink coffee? Even Mormons? What’s that about? Well, of course, science doesn’t give us any moral obligations, but merely tells us the consequences of our actions. The judgement call on what to do then must come from somewhere else.  And here are the “immoral” consequences of not drinking coffee:

While the health benefits of caffeine are under constant debate and scrutiny, professors at the University of Washington, the University of Arizona and the University of North Carolina have found a new argument in favor of consuming more of the stimulant. According to their research, published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, caffeine can help employees resist pressure from higher-ups do unethical things at work.

Unfortunately for most of us, sleep deprivation is becoming more and more common as workers work more and more hours, the professors acknowledged. And according to earlier research, sleep deprivation increases unethical behavior.

“When you’re sleep deprived at work, it’s much easier to simply go along with unethical suggestions from your boss because resistance takes effort and you’re already worn down,” David Welsh, an organizational behavior professor at the University of Washington, explained in a release. “However, we found that caffeine can give sleep-deprived individuals the extra energy needed to resist unethical behavior.”

In a world where unethical behavior could mean a $6 billion trading loss or even jail time, ensuring ethical behavior should be a priority for workers and employers alike.

Fine.  People who aren’t awake are susceptible to making bad judgements and can more readily be persuaded to do unethical stuff. (Of course, this all comes from a psychology experiment I haven’t read, probably based on undergraduates.) Regardless of what the original research says, though, the “moral obligation” stuff is crap. What about the moral obligation to get enough sleep so you don’t need that coffee? What about the moral obligation to avoid filling your body with too much caffeine that could hurt you? Those are alternative strategies.

But while PuffHo is pondering moral obligations, how about the moral obligation to pay your writers? As we know, PuffHo uses a slave-labor type of contributor, one who is willing to write for free to get whatever exposure PuffHo provides, while Ariana Huffington and her minions reap the profits (AOL owns the site, and Ariana is Editor-in-Chief). I know because they asked me to write for them, and when I found the stipend was $0 I told them to stuff it.

Coopting writers in this way is unethical behavior. AOL, Huffington, and the few wage earners of PuffHo profit from writers who desperately want attention and are willing to take nothing for it. What that does is drive down the stipends for other writers who depend on their skills to make a living.  If Slate and Salon can pay (and they don’t pay much), so can PuffHo; and writers should simply say “bucks or nothing.” In fact, I’d go so far as to say that anyone who writes for PuffHo for free is being taken advantage of (that’s polite verbiage for “a sap.”)

And I suppose I’m unethical to read the site, too, which gives the place traffic that line the pockets of the owners.

 

The good and bad of humanity

December 15, 2013 • 6:03 am

It is a truism of both religion and biology that humans are simultaneously selfish and altruistic.  The faithful say the selfishness comes from original sin and the goodness from God, while the biologist imputes our selfishness to evolution (for how better can you ensure propagation of your genes than by taking care of yourself and your kin first?); and, as for altruism, cooperation and kindness, they’re probably partly derived from adaptive reciprocal altruism evolved when we lived in small social groups, and partly from  a cultural overlay of expanded cooperation derived from reason (we now see that we don’t occupy any privileged position relative to others in society).

Regardless, I saw both traits demonstrated this week.  Last Saturday afternoon I parked my car in front of my building at work; I usually use it on the weekends and then leave it at work in case I need to use it during the week.  On Wednesday I looked out the window of my lab (I can overlook the car, which is nice) to see a huge dent in the front fender on the driver’s side. Going down to investigate, I saw that it was indeed a large, fresh dent, which I photographed this morning.

photo 140

But I also found a note stuck in my door handle.

The note said this (I’ve redacted names and phone numbers):

“Hi,

I saw the guy hit your left front fender in the snow. It was a [model and make of car redacted], with the Illinois plate [license plate number redacted].   Best of luck.

—name redacted

[phone number of person who wrote note redacted]. That’s all I saw, but feel free to call if you want.”

So while I was enormously peeved that someone had dinged me and run off, I was touched that a passerby took the time to take down the license number and description of the car and leave it for me, along with his phone number.

I called the number, which turned out to belong to a medical student here at the University. He reported that he saw the guy hit my car while backing out in the snow, and then get out of his car and inspect the damage to both his SUV and mine. At that time the student told him, “You know, you should leave a note for the owner.” The dinger said, “Yeah, I guess I should,” but the student suspected he wouldn’t.  So he took out a pen and wrote all the information down on a piece of paper, which he later put on my car when he returned and found no note from the malefactor.

I reported it to my insurance company and the University police, which ran the plates of the car that hit me and identified the owner. They also filed a formal report with the state of Illinois (I guess hit and run, even if it doesn’t hurt someone, violates some law or other).  My insurance company will fix the damage for nearly free, (I have to pay a small deductable). I don’t know what will happen to the miscreant who hit me and ran: probably nothing except that my insurance company will force his to pony up for the damage to my car.

This is about the fourth time this has happened to me in my life, and only once has someone left a note—a woman visiting from California, and the damage was so minor that I didn’t do anything about it. But it’s a truly vile act to damage someone’s property and then abscond without taking responsibility.  They do it because, of course, they think they can get away with it.  But this guy didn’t, thanks to a kind and observant student.

It’s a slow news day, so I’m reporting this, but it does show what we all know: some people are jerks and others go out of their way to be helpful. The next time you’re on the bus and an old person gets on, don’t be one of those who keeps your sit or pretends not to notice. Stand up and let the older person sit down.

If you’ve had experiences with really nice strangers, report them below (car-bashing jerks or others can also be reported).

When did morality and moral responsibility begin?

August 21, 2013 • 9:30 am

Readers here will know that, being a determinist, I’d prefer to dispense with the term “moral responsibility,” replacing it with the simply idea of “responsibility.” That’s because I don’t think we have dualistic free will that would allow us to decide between doing “right” and “wrong”. If that’s the case, then why add the adjective “moral,” which implies that one does have a choice?

And, as most of you know, I don’t think this omission would overthrow society. We’d still put people in prison for bad behavior (but for sequestration, rehabilitation, and as deterrence, but not for retribution), and could also praise them for good behavior—for praise is an environmental effect that can change someone’s behavior or impel others to act well—but we would be less likely to see people as good or bad by “choice”. And the prison system would be run more humanely, involving studies about the best way to change people’s behavior or the best way to deter other people’s latent criminality.

What I’d like to ask here, though, is when humans supposedly became morally responsible—if that’s what you believe.

We always hear that “unlike humans, nature is amoral.” You can’t say that the actions of animals are moral or immoral—they just are.  When a male lion invades another group and kills the cubs, when a chimp tears another chimp to bits, those are just bits of nature, and aren’t seen as wrong.  And the amorality of nature is touted even by those who realize that our primate relatives show rudiments of morality, making it likely that some of our moral instincts were inherited from our pre-hominin ancestors.  So why, when a stepfather kills his stepchild (something that, presumably is not something he decides to do “freely”), that is morally wrong, but when a lion does it, or a chimp kills an infant, it’s just nature, Jake.

Now the idea of ethics—a codified set of rules to which we adhere for various reasons, usually as a form of societal glue—clearly was concomitant with the rise of human society and language.  But much of our morality is surely based on evolution. I’m not saying that those evolved principles are the right ones to use today: clearly in many cases, as with xenophobia, they aren’t.  But some of them remain salubrious, including reciprocal altruism, shame, guilt, and so on.  So why can we do wrong but chimps can’t?

In other words, is it really true that all of nature, including primate societies, must be seen as amoral, while human actions must be judged by this thing called “morality”?

Why, if a male lion has no more choice about killing step-cubs than a human does about killing stepchildren, do we hold the human morally responsible but the lion not? (The ability of humans to foresee consequences and take in a variety of inputs seems to me irrelevant here).  Should we punish cub-killing lions, given that they cause enormous pain and terror to the cubs and their mothers?

Robin Ince on why we don’t need religion

August 12, 2013 • 7:34 am

On his eponymous website, Robin Ince—comedian, writer, and co-host of the popular “The Infinite Monkey Cage”—has a nice piece on “Do we need religion to be a decent society“?  He’s an atheist, so of course the answer is “no!”.  The post is actually Ince’s notes for a debate he had two days ago:

On Saturday, I took part in an Intelligence Squared debate at Wilderness festival. The debate was “The world needs religion, just leave God out of it”. For the motion were Selina  O Grady and Douglas Murray, against, Peter Atkins and Myself. 

I am glad to say we won.

I won’t summarize Ince’s points in detail, but was pleased to see that he agrees with me on two points. The first is that religious societies aren’t the most functional ones, despite the frequent claim that religion brings societal health:

…why does the USA have murder rates five times worse than Japan and Sweden (the Republic of Ireland is only about 40% worse) , incarceration almost 10 times worse than Sweden, a higher suicide rate amongst the young (and as Al Alvarez wrote in his study of suicides, The Savage God, the more religious the nation is the less likely it is to declare suicide as cause of death), The US has Twice the mortality amongst under fives than Japan and Sweden, Rep of Ireland is slightly less than USA on under 5 mortality, and let us not forget the statistics on sexual disease and abortion, number one for gonorrhea, number one for syphilis and number one for abortion, and we are not talking by a little bit, we are talking 40 to 50 times more than Japan and Sweden. Thank goodness the USA has religion, or imagine what state it would be?

If religion has lauded powers of altruism, empathy and community, surely the most religious nation on the rich nation list should not be so low on the successful qualities of life scale?

In fact, as sociologists have demonstrated, there’s a strong negative correlation between societal health and religiosity. Now this is a correlation, not a demonstration of causation, but other studies suggest that it is causal in this way: when people get more disenfranchised and poorer, when income inequality rises and free medical care declines, when incarceration and venereal disease increase, and so on, societies become more religious. And that increase in religiosity follows in time the decrease in societal health, suggesting the direction of causality.

Second, and also like me, Ince sees social reform as the solution to religion:

Before we go running to the advertising agency and ask them to brainstorm this godless religion of delight and get it up on the billboards, we should look at where so much of societies problems may come from, and that seems to be inequality far more than lack of dogma, tribalism or religion.

While Sweden and Japan and are amongst the four nations with lowest income inequality, the USA is the highest. Sweden and Japan are the lowest on the health and social problems list , while the USA is, by some long way, the highest. This is true on child well-being too. Religion sounds like a nice thing for a nice society, but the evidence is just not there. Values can exist without religion as their anchor.

Religion is a much easier answer than the politically and economically difficult issue of creating a more equal society.

Ince ends this way—precisely the way I finish many of my talks on the problem of religion and how to dispel it:

Religion may have once been the opium of the masses, but can’t we build a better world where the opiates and illusions are not required at all.

On that issue Marx had it right. I’d like to see somebody make a tee-shirt that said, “No, religion is not here to stay.”

h/t: several readers who pointed Ince’s piece out to me.