The smoking gun

January 19, 2011 • 7:27 am

Yesterday I mentioned the discovery of a “smoking gun” in the Catholic Church’s abuse scandal: a 1997 letter to Ireland’s bishops from the late Archbishop Luciano Storero, described as “Pope John Paul II’s diplomat to Ireland. ”  Storero’s letter instructed the bishops not to report sexual abuse cases to secular authorities, but to keep it in the Church.  Yesterday I couldn’t find the letter online, but alert reader Hempenstein did (it’s available here as a pdf file).  Click to enlarge:

And why shouldn’t the bishops report abuse to Irish authorities? The real reason, of course, is because it’s terribly damaging to the Church and its authority.  But the letter says this: “The text, however, contains ‘procedures and dispositions which appear contrary to canonical discipline and which, if applied, could invalidate the acts of the same Bishops who are attempting to put a stop to these problems. If such procedures were to be followed by the Bishops and there were cases of eventual hierarchical recourse lodged at the Holy See, the results could be highly embarrassing and detrimental to those same Diocesan authorities.”

Translation:  Don’t report child abuse to nonreligious authorities because it might result in your being embarrassed at the Vatican; and it could even hurt your career.

If we use Sam Harris’s moral calculus here, the Vatican is weighing the well-being of abused children against potential embarrassment and career damage to priests and bishops, and the Holy See decided that the scales weigh heavier for the latter.  And that’s immoral.

What strikes me is that both Catholic and accommodationist bloggers (at least the ones I read—excluding Andrew Sullivan), often the first to decry discrimination against women and minorities, are strangely silent on what the Church has done to children, and on how the cover-up reaches to the highest level of the Vatican.

Kitteh contest entry: Butter

January 19, 2011 • 5:19 am

Another shelter cat whose life was saved, this time thanks to owners Steve and Terri. Here is Butter, an awesomely fluffy Himalayan entered in the Big Kitteh Contest.  This is his story:

Found by a State Trooper near I-25 in Cheyenne, Wyoming—where he was  barely surviving on grasshoppers for at least a month—this extra furry Himalayan came to the Humane Society.  His adoption photo named him “Shnozzle”, and showed him wearing a big blue ribbon to try to make him presentable, even though he was close to death.  But we had been chosen (by the kitteh sign of a headbutt on the forehead); we brought him to Colorado, where we had to deal with the sequelae of his rough adolescence—both anal glands had to be removed due to recurrent infections, an intestinal blockage required emergency care, and his FHV infection (acquired while in contact with other cats in the shelter) mandates a lifetime of management with lysine and antibiotics to keep outbreaks under control.  The struggle for this little scrapper was worth it, as this picture demonstrates.

We renamed him “Butter” not only because he loves butter and he is the color of butter, but he butts his head repeatedly to communicate (i.e., he´s a butt-er).  On bad days, he´s head-butt, butt-head, you name it.  While it is tempting to think the flat aspect of his face was due to extreme head-butting, it is actually the culmination of an intelligent design mechanism that began in the 1930s and sadly continues to this day.  Due to a fondness for baby-like faces, their designers continue to breed maladaptive noses, making breathing more difficult.

I’ve since received several more photos of Butter.  Here’s the adoption photo of “Schnozzle” that persuaded Steve and Terri to take him.

And a couple others (click to enlarge):

The Vatican stepped in it

January 18, 2011 • 12:57 pm

According to the Associated Press, there’s now proof that Vatican was complicit in covering up child abuse:

DUBLIN – A newly revealed 1997 letter from the Vatican warned Ireland’s Catholic bishops not to report all suspected child-abuse cases to police — a disclosure that victims groups described as “the smoking gun” needed to show that the Vatican enforced a worldwide culture of cover-up.

The letter, obtained by Irish broadcasters RTE and provided to The Associated Press, documents the Vatican’s rejection of a 1996 Irish church initiative to begin helping police identify pedophile priests following Ireland’s first wave of publicly disclosed lawsuits.

The letter undermines persistent Vatican claims, particularly when seeking to defend itself in U.S. lawsuits, that the church in Rome never instructed local bishops to withhold evidence or suspicion of crimes from police. It instead emphasizes the church’s right to handle all child-abuse allegations, and determine punishments, in house rather than hand that power to civil authorities.

Signed by the late Archbishop Luciano Storero, Pope John Paul II’s diplomat to Ireland, the letter instructs Irish bishops that their new policy of making the reporting of suspected crimes mandatory “gives rise to serious reservations of both a moral and canonical nature.”

Read more at the link.

So much for the benign nature of mainstream, non-fundamentalist faiths.  This is the governance of the Catholic Church; are people still going to assert that “regular” religion is not harmful?

“The Bible is not a textbook of science”

January 18, 2011 • 5:49 am

An alert reader sent me a very short YouTube video of Francis Collins, NIH director, explaining the coexistence of science and evangelical Christianity. YouTube has blocked embedding of the video, presumably because it came from ABC News, but you can see it here.

Collins gives the money quote when the interviewer presses him on how he sees Biblical accounts of creation:

Interviewer:  Genesis would lead us to believe that the earth is six thousand years old. And it would lead us to believe that God created two human beings—one out of the rib of the other.  It’s pretty explicit stuff.

Collins:  We interpret it as explicit these days.  It is not a textbook of science!  It would not have suited God’s purposes to lecture to his chosen people about radioactive decay, and such things as DNA.  What God was trying to teach us through those words is the nature of God and the nature of humans—and that comes through loud and clear.

A bit later, Collins asserts:

. . . once you’ve accepted the idea of a God who is the creator of all the laws of nature, the idea that God might at unique moments of history might decide to invade the natural world, and suspend those laws,  doesn’t become, really, a logical problem.  And certainly the Resurrection is the most dramatic example of that:  where God became man, walked on this earth, was crucified, and then, after death, was resurrected—that, for me, is the cornerstone of my faith. And it doesn’t present a real problem, as a believer, as long as I’ve already acknowledged that God is God.

This is embarrassing stuff, even more so coming from America’s most prominent scientist.  Quick thoughts:

  • The correct translation of the frequent claim that “The Bible is not a textbook of science” is this: “The Bible is not literally true, except for those places where I say it’s literally true.”
  • Why is Collins so sure that he knows what God intended when “writing” the Bible, especially since other Christian sects disagree?
  • How does Collins know exactly which parts of the Bible are “not science” (i.e., fiction) and which parts are?  If Genesis and Adam and Eve are “not science”, why is the Resurrection “science”?  There’s precisely the same amount of empirical evidence—i.e., zero—for each of these stories.

I’d be delighted to get good answers to the last two questions.  Perhaps someone who agrees with Collins, like Uncle Karl Giberson, could weigh in here and explain.

h/t: Moto

Harris responds to Blackford

January 18, 2011 • 5:33 am
Yesterday I called attention to Russell Blackford’s review of Sam Harris’s new book, The Moral Landscape, which asserts that one can use science to judge the morality of different behaviors.  Sam responded in an email to me that, at my request, he’s allowing me to post.  Sam emphasizes, though, that this is a personal email and not a polished piece meant for publication.  (Nevertheless, Sam’s emails are as polished as most people’s books!)  If you haven’t read Russell’s piece, or my post from yesterday summarizing it, it might be salutary to do so before reading Sam’s reply, which is below the line.
_______
I just noticed your blog post about the Blackford review. At some point, I’ll have to respond to all of this at greater length. But, briefly, in response to your core points:
  • How do we actually measure well being?; for that is what we must do to make moral judgments.  The metric for well being of a person, or an animal, must differ from that of groups or societies, yet they’re to be put on a single scale. In some cases, of course, it’s easy; in others, seemingly impossible.
This is simply not a problem for my thesis (recall my “answers in practice vs. answers in principle” argument). There is a difference between how we verify the truth of a proposition and what makes a proposition true. How many breaths did I take last Tuesday? I don’t know, and there is no way to find out. But there is a correct, numerical answer to this question (and you can bet the farm that it falls between 5 and 5 million).
  • Given that, how do we trade off different types of well-being? How do you determine, for example, whether torture is moral? In some case, as Harris pointed out in The End of Faith, torture may save innumerable lives, but there’s a societal effect in sanctioning it.  How do you weigh these?  How do you determine whether the well-being of animals outweighs the well-being we experience when eating meat?
These are all interesting questions. Some might admit of clear answers, while others might be impossible to resolve. But this is not my problem. The case I make in the book is that morality entirely depends on the existence of conscious minds; minds are natural phenomena; and, therefore, moral truths exist (and can be determined by science in principle, if not always in practice). The fact that we can easily come up with questions that are hard or impossible to answer does not challenge my thesis.
  • There are behaviors that we see as moral, or at least not immoral, that Harris’s metric nevertheless deems immoral.  We favor our children and family, for example, over other people.  According to Harris, we shouldn’t do this unless it increases universal well-being.  Don’t give money to your kids—give nearly all of it to poor Africans who need clean water and medicine.  Yet people do not condemn others for giving their kids a marginal benefit in lieu of tremendous benefits to strangers.
Admittedly, I did not spend as much time on this issue as I could have — but the answer here seems pretty straightforward. There may be many equivalent peaks on the moral landscape: on some everyone might favor their friends and family to a degree that is compatible with universal well-being; perhaps on others everyone is truly impartial. No doubt there will be other regions lower down on the ML where people are highly biased towards their nearest and dearest, at a significant cost to everyone. Perhaps there are also regions where everyone is truly impartial, but their impartiality functions in concert with other factors so as to degrade the well-being of everyone. Every possible weighting of us-vs.-them can be represented in this space, along with all other relevant variables — and each will have consequences in terms of the well-being of everyone involved. Yes, there will be worlds in which some very selfish people make out rather well while causing great misery to others. And yes, it could be impossible to convince these people that life would be better if they behaved differently. But so what? These won’t be peaks on the landscape, and it will still be true to say that movement upwards toward a peak will be constrained by the laws of nature.
Blackford (along with everyone else) has gotten bogged down in the concepts of “should” and “ought.” We simply don’t have to think about morality in these terms. Yes, we feel certain moral imperatives — I can be overcome by remorse, for instance, and feel that I “should” apologize for something that I’ve done. But this is just a folk-psychological way of talking about my experience in relationship to others. What if my apologizing in this instance would create an immensity of suffering for everyone on earth? Well, then, I “shouldn’t” do it. And if I still felt a nagging sense that I still should apologize, I “should” ignore this very feeling. Whether we feel that we should do something, or can convince others that they should do it, is all but irrelevant to the question of whether we will be moving up or down on the ML (modulo the psychological cost of living with nagging feelings of “should”).
I’ve discussed this a fair amount in my public talks. Yes, it is possible for our moral intuitions to be misguided — and we need to learn to ignore certain framing effects. In this case, however, it is also possible that we are responding to the fact that the situations are not actually the same. If pushing a person is just BOUND to have a much bigger effect on us than flipping a switch–well, then, we have to take this effect into account. Needless to say, we could concoct a trolley problem that made this nonequivalence undeniable: just imagine a version in which the man you were being asked to push had the opportunity to plead for his life and show you pictures of his wife and children…
  • According to Blackford, Harris fails to give a convincing reason why people should be moral.  Blackford notes:

If we are going to provide [a person] with reasons to act in a particular way, or to support a particular policy, or condemn a traditional custom – or whatever it might be – sooner or later we will need to appeal to the values, desires, and so on, that she actually has. There are no values that are, mysteriously, objectively binding on us all in the sense I have been discussing. Thus it is futile to argue from a presupposition that we are all rationally bound to act so as to maximize global well-being. It is simply not the case.

Again, this totally misses the point of my argument. And the same annihilating claim could be made about any branch of science. There are no scientific values that command assent in the way that Blackford worries morality should. Why value human well-being? Well, why value logic, or evidence, or understanding the universe? Some people don’t, and there’s no talking to them. The fact that some people cannot be reached on the subject of physics — or use the term “physics” in ways that we cannot sanction — says absolutely nothing about the limitations of physics or about the nature of physical truth. Why should differences of opinion hold any more weight on the subject of good and evil?

_________________________

I believe Sam is preparing a comprehensive reply to some of the criticisms of his book, so by all means continue this dialogue in the comments, refraining—as always—from invective.

Blackford reviews The Moral Landscape

January 17, 2011 • 12:36 pm

Brother Russell Blackford has written a longish review of Sam Harris’s The Moral Landscape for The Journal of Evolution and Technology.  (He also discusses it more briefly at his Metamagician website.)  As you know, Harris’s thesis is that science gives us a way to determine if actions are moral: they’re moral if they increase the well-being of society as a whole.  In other words, contrary to conventional wisdom, you can derive “ought” from is—if you can measure well-being.

Blackford’s piece is a bit long, and suffers from a lack of concrete examples, but it’s very good.   While giving Harris’s book an enthusiastic thumbs-up, he points out several problems. Below I’ve put a combined list of both Blackford’s and my own problems with Harris’s thesis (yes, I have read the book):

  • How do we actually measure well being?; for that is what we must do to make moral judgments.  The metric for well being of a person, or an animal, must differ from that of groups or societies, yet they’re to be put on a single scale. In some cases, of course, it’s easy; in others, seemingly impossible.
  • Given that, how do we trade off different types of well-being? How do you determine, for example, whether torture is moral? In some case, as Harris pointed out in The End of Faith, torture may save innumerable lives, but there’s a societal effect in sanctioning it.  How do you weigh these?  How do you determine whether the well-being of animals outweighs the well-being we experience when eating meat?
  • There are behaviors that we see as moral, or at least not immoral, that Harris’s metric nevertheless deems immoral.  We favor our children and family, for example, over other people.  According to Harris, we shouldn’t do this unless it increases universal well-being.  Don’t give money to your kids—give nearly all of it to poor Africans who need clean water and medicine.  Yet people do not condemn others for giving their kids a marginal benefit in lieu of tremendous benefits to strangers.
  • Humans draw strong moral distinctions between different situations that have seemingly identical consequences (e.g., the trolley problem and the organ-donation problem).  But perhaps Harris would respond that our morality is simply misguided here.
  • According to Blackford, Harris fails to give a convincing reason why people should be moral.  Blackford notes:

If we are going to provide [a person] with reasons to act in a particular way, or to support a particular policy, or condemn a traditional custom – or whatever it might be – sooner or later we will need to appeal to the values, desires, and so on, that she actually has. There are no values that are, mysteriously, objectively binding on us all in the sense I have been discussing. Thus it is futile to argue from a presupposition that we are all rationally bound to act so as to maximize global well-being. It is simply not the case.

I generally agree with Russell’s take: Sam’s book is very good, and you should definitely read it, but it doesn’t solve all our moral problems.  In fairness, I think Harris realizes this, and even alludes to it several times in his text.  The virtue of The Moral Landscape is that it draws an implicit link between why we have a moral sense (it has evolved both genetically and culturally) and how that understanding should lead us to behave.  The book will make you think, and think hard.  And the writing is, as usual with Harris, terrific.  But Blackford succinctly summarizes the book’s weakness:

Harris is highly critical of the claim, associated with Hume, that we cannot derive an “ought” solely from an “is” – without starting with people’s actual values and desires. He is, however,  no more successful in deriving “ought” from “is” than anyone else has ever been. The whole intellectual system of The Moral Landscape depends on an “ought” being built into its foundations.

__________

Curiously, I found Steve Pinker anticipating Harris’s main point nine years before The Moral Landscape.  On pp. 274-275 of The Blank Slate (2002), Pinker criticizes Leon Kass’s contention that the cloning of human beings is morally wrong simply because it induces immediate and visceral repugnance:

The difference between a defensible moral position and an atavistic gut feeling is that with the former we can give reasons why our conviction is valid.  We can explain why torture and murder and rape are wrong, or why we should oppose discrimination and injustice.  On the other hand, no good reasons can be produced to show why homosexuality should be suppressed or why the races should be segregated.  And the good reasons for a moral position are not pulled out of thin air: they always have to do with what makes people better off or worse off, and are grounded in the logic that we have to treat other people in the way that we demand they treat us.

Experimental acid trip, ca. 1956

January 17, 2011 • 5:58 am

This video, from the mid-1950s, is pretty amazing.  A normal middle-class woman volunteered to be filmed after taking 100 micrograms of LSD as part of a research project conducted by Sidney Cohen at the Los Angeles VA hospital. The acid trip ends at 6:04, and then there’s a discussion with Gerald Heard, a philosopher.  Do listen to him, too.

If, like me, you came of age in the Sixties, you’re going to laugh.

“I wish I could talk in Technicolor.”

Put her in a beaded headband and a fringed vest, and it could be 1966!  The woman’s reactions are absolutely representative of what I saw in my friends so many times in college, and occasionally experienced myself.

It’s impossible to describe in words—though many have tried—the shifting of perception, the apprehension of  tremendous beauty in everything, and the feeling of oneness with the universe induced by this drug. Would that it were possible for everyone to try it, as this woman did, taking pure, commercially produced product under professional supervision.

Read more about Cohen and Richard Alpert’s studies of LSD here.