Moralist abandons morality

August 24, 2011 • 9:18 am

Joel Marks, a philosopher and scholar at The Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics at Yale University, has a very odd column in Sunday’s New York Times Opinionator: “Confessions of an ex-moralist.”  Once a firm believer in objective tenets of right and wrong, he’s now abandoned those, seeing no substantive foundation for morality,  Indeed, he sees belief in objective morality as akin to an unfounded faith in religion.  But in the end I think Marks really does have a morality; he just doesn’t call it that.

Marks starts with his former acceptance of the argument made by Plato in Euthyprho:

This would seem to be the modern, sane view of the matter. We have an intuitive sense of right and wrong that trumps even the commands of God. We have the ability to judge that God is good or bad. Therefore, even if God did not exist, we could fend for ourselves in matters of conscience. Ethics, not divine revelation, is the guide to life. That is indeed the clarion call of the “new atheists.” As the philosopher Louise Antony puts it in the introduction to a recent collection of philosophers’ essays, “Philosophers without Gods: Secular Life in a Religious World”: “Another charge routinely leveled at atheists is that we have no moral values. The essays in this volume should serve to roundly refute this. Every writer in this volume adamantly affirms the objectivity of right and wrong.”

But I don’t. Not any longer. . .

. . . A friend had been explaining to me the nature of her belief in God. At one point she likened divinity to the beauty of a sunset: the quality lay not in the sunset but in her relation to the sunset. I thought to myself: “Ah, if that is what she means, then I could believe in that kind of God. For when I think about the universe, I am filled with awe and wonder; if that feeling is God, then I am a believer.”

But then it hit me: is not morality like this God? In other words, could I believe that, say, the wrongness of a lie was any more intrinsic to an intentionally deceptive utterance than beauty was to a sunset or wonderfulness to the universe? Does it not make far more sense to suppose that all of these phenomena arise in my breast, that they are the responses of a particular sensibility to otherwise valueless events and entities?

. . . The dominoes continued to fall. I had thought I was a secularist because I conceived of right and wrong as standing on their own two feet, without prop or crutch from God. We should do the right thing because it is the right thing to do, period. But this was a God too. It was the Godless God of secular morality, which commanded without commander – whose ways were thus even more mysterious than the God I did not believe in, who at least had the intelligible motive of rewarding us for doing what He wanted.

So marks has abandoned morality, asseriting that he no longer sees, or calls, things “right” or “wrong.”  He’s abandoned the language of morality, and feel liberated by this decision.  He now sees himself as “amoral.”

Yet he’s not apathetic about things that concern him, especially his  bête noire: factory farming of food animals.  But given that he can’t say this is “wrong,” what does he do? This is his attitude:

For instance, I used to think that animal agriculture was wrong. Now I will call a spade a spade and declare simply that I very much dislike it and want it to stop. Has this lessened my commitment to ending it? I do not find that to be the case at all.

So instead of arguing that factory farming is wrong, he does this:

Instead I now focus on conveying information: about the state of affairs on factory farms and elsewhere, the environmental devastation that results and, especially, the sentient, intelligent, gentle and noble natures of the animals who are being brutalized and slaughtered. It is also important to spread knowledge of alternatives, like how to adopt a healthy and appetizing vegan diet. If such efforts will not cause people to alter their eating and buying habits, support the passage of various laws and so forth, I don’t know what will.

This sounds to me like a distinction without a difference.  What he’s trying to do is argue a form of utilitarianism here—that if someone becomes a vegetarian, the consequences are better, for animals, for the environment, and for people themselves.  He may not call that the “right” thing to do, but it’s what he sees as a way to increase well being.  And that’s exactly what Sam Harris sees as “objective” morality.  You can argue about whether Sam’s criteria are good ones, or whether they can be applied in many circumstances, but all Marks has done has rename “morality” as “those things that have good consequences.”  Indeed, he takes morality further into the realm of objectivity when he says that what people do depends on their understanding of “information”, which of course is exactly Sam’s point.  (He also realizes that he won’t convince everyone, even if they’re “agreed on all the relevant facts.”)

At the end, I think Marks makes clear that while abandoning the notions of right and wrong, he still thinks that some things are better to do than others because they have better consequences.  I don’t see a real difference between this and morality:

For one thing, I retain my strong preference for honest dialectical dealings in a context of mutual respect. It’s just that I am no longer giving premises in moral arguments; rather, I am offering considerations to help us figure out what to do. I am not attempting to justify anything; I am trying to motivate informed and reflective choices.

But “figuring out what to do” in cases like factory farming entails understanding the consequences, and that presumes value judgements, which come perilously close to morality.  That, again, is Sam’s point: if it’s better to have more rather than less “well being,” then actions that promote the former can be seen as moral.  And in many cases I think that’s right.  In his last paragraph, Marks gives away the game:

In the process my own desires are likely to undergo further change as well, in the direction of greater compassion and respect, I would anticipate – and not only for the victims of the attitudes, behaviors and policies I don’t like, but also for their perpetrators. But this won’t be because a god, a supernatural law or even my conscience told me I must, I ought, I have an obligation. Instead I will be moved by my head and my heart. Morality has nothing to do with it.

But why have more compassion and respect for people, if it’s not the right thing to do?  The telling thing, though is that he says that he’s going to be moved by his head and his heart.

His “head” is his secular and rational consideration of what consequences actions can bring.  If some consequences are more desirable than others, as in factory farming, that’s not much different from morality.

His “heart” is his evolved feelings about the right thing to do.  That is the part of our morality instilled in our ancestors by natural selection.

Together, the head and heart exemplify the rational and the evolved components of our feelings about what are the good versus bad things to do.  And that has everything to do with morality.

h/t: Eugene


Another sophisticated philosopher weighs in on evil

August 24, 2011 • 4:56 am

I wasn’t aware until recently that Oxford University Press published, in 2010, a short (93-page) back-and-forth argument between philosopher Dan Dennett and theologian Alvin Plantinga, Science and Religion: Are They Compatible? I’ve just polished off the whole thing, and, once again, I was profoundly unimpressed by the quality of modern “sophisticated” theology—at least as espoused by Plantinga.

Dennett is too well known here to need introduction, but Plantinga is in fact a well known and highly respected Christian theologian, as well as a professor at Notre Dame.  He was president of the western division of the American Philosophical Society, has six honorary degrees, won a Guggenheim Fellowship, and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.  Wikipedia lists twelve books among his “selected works.”  Nobody with those qualifications could be regarded as unsophisticated.

Yet in the book Plantinga argues strongly that evolution was guided directly by God to result in humans (who were of course made in his own image), asserts that “random” mutations could actually have been created by God to lead to humans, and approves of the idea of intelligent design as espoused by Michael Behe.  He also holds the view, shared by William Lane Craig, that the existence of the human rational faculty, and our ability to find out truth about the universe, cannot be explained by evolution but must instead be a result of God’s largesse.  I won’t go into that dumb argument since I’ve discussed it earlier, as has P. Z. Myers. 

I just want to mention briefly how Plantinga uses theology to rationalize the suffering and waste that accompanies evolution via natural selection.  Since he sees natural selection as being pretty heavily directed by God, he can’t simply fob this misery off on God’s having just jump-started the process and gone to lunch.  But Plantinga does recognize the problem, quoting Philip Kitcher: “When we envisage a human analogue presiding over a miniaturized version of the arrangement—it’s hard to equip the face with a kindly expression.”

Plantiga sees the suffering of humans and animals under natural selection as part of  the “so-called problem of evil.”   How does he rationalize this, since God’s pulling the strings here?  Thusly:

My own favorite response is the “O Felix Culpa” response, according to which all the really good possible worlds involved divine incarnation and atonement, or at any rate atonement. But then all the best possible worlds also involve a great deal of sin and as a consequence a great deal of suffering.  Some of this suffering is on the part of nonhuman creatures.  Christians think of suffering, both human and nonhuman, as due in one way or another to sin, although not necessarily to human sin; there are also Satan and his minions, who may, as C. S. Lewis suggests, be involved in one way or another in the evolution of the nonhuman living world.

Shades of Voltaire!  The best possible world involves sin, suffering, and atonement.  But why is that? Wouldn’t a better world not have suffering and atonement?

Now animals presumably suffer because of the Fall—even though they didn’t do anything wrong!—and the evils produced by non-human causes (tsunamis, infectious organisms that kill children) are also the result of human sin.  But the worst part is Plantinga’s invocation of Satan; it’s almost as bad as his invocation of C. S. Lewis.  Presumably, then, some “sophisticated” theologians (as well as nearly 70% of the American public) believe that Satan is real.  “Sophisticated” theology appears in this respect to be resemble “folk theology”.

Catholics: dead pope’s blood will stop Mexican crime

August 23, 2011 • 9:33 am

One of the more loony episodes (and there are many) in the annals of the Catholic Church is this report from The Freethinker, “Catholics pin hopes on dead Pope’s blood to stem gang crime in Mexico.”  Yes, that’s right: a vial of the late Pope John Paul II’s blood is, with Vatican permission, going on a tour of Mexico in an attempt to stem unrest in that country:

An episcopal conference in Mexico has requested that the relic be sent over and, according to Vatican Radio, the “relic”will arrive in the country on August 17 before being taken to the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City.

A week later the vial of blood from the “blessed” Pope John Paul, a title he acquired posthumously after his successor Benedict XVI beatified him in May, will be taken on a pilgrimage to other Catholic dioceses around the country.

The relic will be accompanied by a statue of the late Polish pope, born Karol Wojtyla, with the intended message one of reconciliation.

Killings in parts of Mexico have shot up in recent years amid a military crackdown on organized crime and drug cartels which has sent soldiers onto the streets.

Mexican bishops, in a statement broadcast on Vatican Radio, said:

The reminder of John Paul II and the love he had for our country should push us to reinforce the faith of the Mexican people, at a time when our nation is undergoing profound social change.

Here is the grisly relic that will make Mexicans put down their guns:

Equally sickening is this statement: “Several vials of blood were taken from Pope John Paul II during the last days of his life in 2005.”  Amazing to think that they leached the old dude’s body for relics while he was still alive, though maybe that was just for medical use.

Grania Spingies of Atheist Ireland, who reported this bizarre Sanginary Tour to me, had this to say about it (she’s an ex-Catholic):

Oh man, how embarrassing.

On the whole I don’t bother to draw people’s attention to the stuff that Freethinker publishes every week, because it’s a never-ending stream of crazy. It gets a bit ho-hum after a while. But whenever Catholics try to claim that their religion is sophisticated and liberal and trying to move with the times, I find it useful to point to examples like this that prove that Holy Mother Church is still trying to stupefy the peasants with carnie tricks.

The classic response from Catholics to this is: “Well, we don’t have to believe in these bits”.

The response to that, is: “So why does the Vatican endorse this stuff then?”

The question comes down to this. Either these relics are dead flesh with supernatural powers or they are not. By endorsing and promoting such things to whomever is  superstitious enough to be impressed by them, while at the same time holding them as optional parts of the faith to the more educated and “sophisticated” believers, the Vatican betrays a level of cynicism that one should not expect from an institution that holds itself up as a high example of morality.

Newly found: the world’s oldest fossils!

August 23, 2011 • 5:27 am

The Earth is 4.54 billion years old.  How long did it take life to arise after that?  While there are tantalizing hints of life from Greenland dating back about 3.75 billion years ago (“bya”; these hints come from carbon deposits that may have been formed by living organisms), there’s nothing like a fossil to establish the existence of life.  And, of course, the earliest organisms were very simple, like bacteria.  Fossils of bacteria or any single cell—”microfossils”—are hard to detect in the rocks, for small particles, like carbon-encrusted mineral grains, can easily look like bacterial “microfossils.”

This difficulty in distinguishing true bacterial fossils from simple inclusions led to a big scientific kerfuffle in 2002, when Bill Schopf claimed to have found the world’s oldest fossils, of cyanobacteria (once called “blue green algae”), in Australian rocks dated 3.465 billion years ago. That would have made them the world’s earliest fossils, but Martin Brasier, of Oxford, took exception, claiming that these were mere particles of heated graphite. There were even claims that Schopf had selectively published his data, leaving out photographs of the “bacteria” that didn’t look so bacterial.  You can read about the 2002 controversy here.  Time has come down on the side of Brasier, with most paleobiologists agreeing that the objects Schopf described were not living creatures.

Ironically, though, Brasier is the senior (last) author on a new paper by David Wacey et al. in Nature Geoscience (see report at the BBC here) that does show, pretty conclusively, the oldest known fossils on Earth, dated at 3.4 billion years old.  This makes them only a tad younger than the fossils claimed by Schopf but 200 million years older than the oldest reliable microfossils known up to now.  And the fossils described by Wacey et al. are much better documented  than were Schopf’s, demonstrating that prokaryotic organisms had already evolved only a billion years after Earth had formed.  These are also bacteria, of course, but their association with pyrites, and their morphology, also show that they were sulfur-metabolizing bacteria.

The new microfossils were found in a sandstone formation in Western Australia; the photograph from the BBC shows the study site, and notes that the new fossils were found at the base of these ridges:


Here are some photos of the microfossils from Figure 1 of Wacey et al.; I’ll add the caption below so you can see what’s going on (click to enlarge; clicking again makes it even bigger):

Figure 1.  Examples of spheroidal/ellipsoidal microfossils from the SPF (samples SP9D2, SPE1, SPV3a–c). a,b,e, Clusters of cells, some showing cell wall rupturing (arrows in a,b), folding or invagination (arrow in e). c,d,h, Chains of cells with cellular divisions (arrows). f,i–j, Cells attached to detrital quartz grains, exhibiting cell wall rupturing and putative escape of cell contents (arrow in f), preferred alignment of cells parallel to the surface of the quartz grain (arrows in i), and constriction or folding between two compartments (arrow in j). g, Large cellular compartment with folded walls (arrows).

As the authors note, “determining the biogenicity [biological origin] of putative Archaean microfossils is notoriously difficult.”  How do we know that these things are real remnants of bacteria and not just inclusions or artifacts?  There are several independent lines of evidence, none conclusive but together building a very solid case:

  • They look like cells, being cell-shaped, cell-sized, and forming chains of spheroids that look like chains of both well-established fossil bacteria and modern bacteria.  Some can even be seen “dividing” or expelling their contents after cell damage (see figure above).
  • The variation in size of the bodies is small—smaller than you’d expect if they were abiological inclusions.  A uniformity of size, however, is expected if they’re all members of one living species.
  • The cell “walls” of the microfossils, too, are of uniform thickness, unlike that of artifacts like silica grains coated with carbon.
  • The geochemistry of the bacteria and surrounding rock supports the idea that these are true organisms.  This involves not only the isotopic nature of the carbon, but the presence of nitrogen, a crucial biomarker, within the cell walls.

One of the more exciting features of these fossils is their co-occurrence with small grains of pyrite, a compound of sulfur and iron that is a byproduct of bacteria that metabolize sulfur.  This supports a biological origin not only because the tiny pyrite grains are found in conjunction with the microfossils, but because such grains are also seen in association with modern sulfur-metabolizing bacteria.

I judge the paper a very good piece of work: the authors are careful in their conclusions and state explicitly that no single feature of these objects prove that they’re bacterial microfossils, but that the total weight of evidence strongly supports that conclusion. I agree.  So we have the oldest fossils on earth, which means that simple life, not yet having the complexity of “true” cells, must have evolved well before 3.5 billion years ago.  And perhaps the earliest cellular life metabolized sulfur rather than oxygen.

Does this mean that these bacteria were members of the Archaea, primitive single-celled organisms that often inhabit extreme environments, rather than members of true “bacteria”? Many biologists think that organisms with “true cells” (members of the Eukaryota, like us) are more closely related to the group Archaea than to true bacteria.  As far as I can see, we can’t determine whether the cells of Wacey et al. are real bacteria or Archaea. (Note that although the authors call these “Archaean microfossils,” that does not mean they are members of the biological group Arachaea—only that they occurred during the eon that geologists call the “Archaean,” which lasted from 3.80-2.5 bya.)  But never mind for the nonce—they’re still the oldest indisputable forms of life known on Earth.

I am very curious, though, why this paper was published in Nature Geoscience rather than a higher profile journal like Science or Nature itself.  Both of those journals publish findings that are far less significant than this one, and this finding certainly deserves a berth in the very highest-profile journals. It is, after all, a report of the oldest known life on Earth.  I suspect there are some editorial dynamics here that we don’t know about.

_________________

Wacey, D.,M. R. Kilburn, M. Saudners, J. Cliff, and M. D. Brasier.  2011.  Microfossils of sulphur-metabolizing cells in 3.4-billion-year-old rocks of Western Australia.  Nature Geoscience online: doi:10.1038/ngeo1238

Kitteh contest: Winston

August 23, 2011 • 4:33 am

Diane G. is a regular here, and she entered her lovely tabby, Winston, who seems to be a bit of a narcoleptic.  Anyway, here’s what Diane has to say about him:

Five months after losing our last cat, two of us approached the third member of the household about our severe case of kitteh withdrawal.  “We have enough pets,” he grumped. So my daughter and I outvoted him, and a few days later a certain kitty at the local pound caught our fancy. According to the tag on his cage he had been trapped, was perhaps about 2 years old, and “appeared to be socialized.” When I picked him up after the mandatory neutering, he was groggy, feverish, emaciated, and sporting a wicked case of pound flu. Here he is, shortly after we brought him home, with Mr. We-Have-Enough-Pets:

In those early days Winston was mainly cuddly and sneezy, but after a course of antibiotics and TLC his true impitude began to emerge.  He has a great fondness for dragging soft items from the basement all the way up the stairs, through his kitty door, and into the main living quarters, something I figured out after wondering how on earth golf-club head covers kept appearing in the family room.  The bounty has since included four fuzzy slippers, two stress balls, the odd piece of foam rubber, a hand towel, and countless stuffed animals; eventually we learned to play our part by taking armfuls of his treasures back downstairs for him to rediscover and haul up again.

Among his more amazing talents are Cute Sleeping (see above) and Cute Sitting, preferably in armchairs, always favoring the right arm, though he makes do if he finds the chair already occupied:

Somehow the 8lb 3oz waif we brought home managed to gain five pounds in four months.  We’d had trouble coming up with a name for him at first; suddenly a raft of new ones suggested themselves (Goodyear? MetLife? Hindenburg?).   He is now becoming acquainted with the ”Stimulo”cat dish.

Despite his current tubbiness, he’s turned into a healthy little dynamo, zipping up and down his cat tree and pouncing on bugs and the occasional bare foot.  Oddly, though, he appears to have a sort of visual deficit; while he can spy a moth on the ceiling, he will also run into doors and walls and occasionally executes a spectacular long jump when he realizes he’s about to run headlong into a sleeping dog.

Naturally we are all besotted with him, as perhaps you can tell by this short little music-video my daughter, Liz, made.

Cat scan contest

August 22, 2011 • 2:49 pm

Just a reminder: you have exactly 9 days—until August 31—to submit your cat scan for consideration.  There are only two entries to date, and if numbers stay small, your chance of winning is larger; but remember that I need at least ten entries before the winner gets an autographed hardback of WEIT.  Fewer than that will garner the winner a paperback.

Crank up the scanner, grab your felid, and see what you can produce.