Challenging the Evolutionary Challenge!

Justin Clarke-Doane puts forward an interesting argument in “Morality and Mathematics: The Evolutionary Challenge” (Ethics 2012) in an attempt to show "that there may be no epistemological ground on which to be a moral antirealist and a mathematical realist."

Braddock, Mogensen, and Sinnott-Armstrong respond here, concluding that "even if Clarke-Doane does show that some evolutionary arguments fail to distinguish morality from mathematics, a lot more work is needed" to support his conclusion.

Some of the best stuff I've read all week.

I think it goes without saying where my sympathies lie...

How to turn "religion" into an empty, meaningless concept

First of all, I want to make it clear that this blog is not intended to be one of those dime-a-dozen "atheist blogs." Not that there's anything wrong with them, but I do feel that the whole "God question" (as traditionally construed, the question of whether or not a personal, i.e. theistic God exists) is something that you deal with at one stage in your life, and then maybe poke at it once every now and then but, for the most part, you set it aside to focus on more interesting questions. Not only that, but there are some damn good atheist bloggers out there, who actually do tackle the God question on a regular basis and, you know, debate creationists and whatnot in a really entertaining and engaging fashion, and I don't want to compete with those guys or fit myself into a niche that's already well-filled by much brighter minds.

That said, I expect I'll probably be doing some of that aforementioned poking at the God question now and then on this blog, and this is pretty much one of those "pokes." Well, sort of. To be more precise, I'm dealing with the oft-heard silly claim that "atheism is a religion," specifically as it is spelled out in what is definitely one of the dumbest articles I've read this month. What a colossal mess.

The author's main argument is spectacularly weak, and hinges on the thesis that "if your [belief] system is about God—or about the non-existence of God—God is still at the center of the argument's 'aboutness.'" Because atheism is "about" God, at least in the sense that it is primarily the denial of the existence of God, that, um... makes it a religion. Yeah. Anything that is "about" God, in some broad sense, is somehow a religion. That's setting the bar pretty low, but whatever. Maybe by this logic, Marvel's Thor comics are holy scripture. I don't know.


Responding to the statement "If atheism is a religion, 'off' is a TV channel," the author makes the profound claim that "God is the TV. Religions are the channels. If it is off, maybe he's dead or disengaged, but at least you admit there's a TV." Well, does this mean that everything is a religion? Any old collection of beliefs is a religion? Is there any way at all to get away from that "TV" entirely? I mean, either you believe in God, or you don't. Even if you're an agnostic or a "fence-sitter" of some sort, that's still ultimately a non-theistic position (you're "unsure," at best, which is to say you still don't actually "believe" in God). Is the author saying that it's impossible not to be religious? If that's the case, if every set of beliefs counts as a religion, then no set of beliefs counts as a religion, because a religion is just synonymous with "any set of beliefs." The author makes a safe space for political libertarianism, of course, because that is "about liberty" just like "hockey is about mullets and pucks." So, alright, hockey's not a religion. Libertarianism isn't a religion. But even a hockey-playing libertarian either believes in God or doesn't, and so is religious! Buddhism isn't about God. If anything, it's about attaining a state of peace and tranquility in a world of impermanence and suffering, without any reference to God. Not a single one of the "Four Noble Truths" is concerned with God. Does that mean Buddhism is not a religion?

To be fair, I think the author's real targets are not atheists in general, but rather what I call "movement atheists." What are movement atheists, you ask? Well, pretty much anyone who makes a big stink out of fighting religion at every turn and promoting atheism as a "cause." The movement atheist is the adolescent cousin at Thanksgiving dinner who throws a shit fit when Grandpa says Grace. Granted, a lot of these people do admirable work promoting things like women's rights and LGBT rights, and combating efforts to introduce creationism into science classrooms, and I'm not going to shit on them for that. I just feel that a lot of this can be done (and, of course, is done) without dealing with God at all. As a result I'm not really outraged by the article in question; I just think it's a stupid and clumsy way of juggling concepts just to piss on some people the author doesn't really like.

I'm not out to "defend" atheism, because I don't believe (as the author seems to believe,) that atheism is a "belief system." It's not. At best, it may or may not be an attribute of a given belief system, which is to say that your belief system and ontology (your personal catalog of "things that exist") may or may not include a personal God. Atheism, in my view, is a lot "smaller" than the author seems to think. The author is perhaps unwittingly giving atheists more credit than we deserve. One may not have a belief system at all. I don't feel that I do. This isn't a boast, but merely an admission; I don't personally feel that I can organize my own imperfect and incomplete hodge-podge collection of beliefs, hunches, perspectives, and suspicions into a perfectly organized, coherent system of any sort, and I sympathize with Nietzsche's famous "mistrust [of] all systematizers," and his claim that "the will to a system is a lack of integrity."

But none of this changes the fact that theism is still an unsubstantiated claim, an unwarranted doctrine among many. And if you recognize this, you're an atheist or non-theist. I'll give the author credit for taking a shot at the absolutely humorless, moralizing "movement atheists." But I dislike the author's attempt to water down and weaken religion by making it into just "anything that is about God."

This is a poor definition of religion. I don't believe there is any absolutely correct or final way of defining words and terms; language is, of course, mutable and conventional. But some definitions may be better or worse, or more or less complete, than others in some practical sense, for given purposes. A religion, as I understand it, is something which provides orientation to our comings and goings, which gives some kind of coherence or unity to our dealings with sense experience and particular states of mind; we might say that the person who haphazardly acts and reacts to life's events and stimuli is not properly "religious," even if he or she believes in a personal God, while the person who has a unifying stance towards existence as a whole has a religious sense. Religion isn't about what you believe or what you don't believe, but in how you live. I have, at times, found myself to be religious in this way, even as an atheist.

I think an atheist or theist can be religious. But neither atheism, nor theism, is itself a religion.

Is Free Will an Illusion?

An interesting collection of articles on the question of free will.

Mele's in particular strikes me as pretty weak. He points out a study which indicates that the "majority of people do not see having a nonphysical mind or soul as a requirement for free will." Well, so what? That's an observation about what "most people think," but not about what is actually the case. Any way you slice it, it's damn hard to make room for free will in a wholly naturalistic universe.

He also asks for "scientific evidence that [free will] is an illusion," shifting the burden of proof away from the believers in free will. This is always a silly and dishonest maneuver; no one has ever really "disproven" the existence of werewolves, but does that mean it's prudent to carry silver bullets with us every time we venture into the woods? It's not as though belief in free will is a "default" position, requiring no logical or evidential support. What we call free will in the traditional sense (that is, the power of a human being to "pull his or her own strings," in some sense, or to be the ultimate author of his or her own actions) is a sort of cultural artifact, something we come to believe in largely just because of, well, "what most people think," or "what we're told." I'm not convinced that just any person would come around to accept metaphysical libertarianism just by way of careful introspection or anything like that. I don't deny that deliberation and reflection occur, but I do contend that they occur within a larger causal context, and even introspective observation of our own deliberation and reflection would lead us, at best, to a feeling of uncertainty about the future, not that some future events can be things for which we are, as they say, "buck-stoppingly" responsible.

I'm also not convinced that the question of the existence of free will is a "merely academic" question, or something that has no bearing on practical activity. Both Einstein and Spinoza, for example, rejected the notion of free will and felt that without this dogma, a person can become more compassionate and understanding, and less prone to anger, envy, and hate. Einstein in particular felt that the rejection of free will "conduces to a view of life in which humor, above all, has its due place," and "prevents us from taking ourselves and other people too seriously."

What really intrigues me is why certain philosophers put so much time and effort into constructing some kind of "proof" or argument for free will. Is this really necessary? Is there any phenomenon which requires us to posit free will for explanatory purposes? I can't think of any.

I suspect that, like theism, metaphysical libertarianism is a doctrine to which people cling for largely emotional reasons; just as many people want to feel that there is an invisible, powerful, all-knowing being out there somewhere who always loves them very much, people want to feel that they are fully in control of their own lives, that they are the authors of their own vices and virtues, that they are "responsible" for their good deeds and deserve all the credit, and that their enemies are "responsible" for their bad deeds and deserve punishment.

Beyond Good and Evil

"My demand of the philosopher is well known: that he take his stand beyond good and evil and treat the illusion of moral judgment as beneath him. This demand follows from an insight that I was the first to articulate: that there are no moral facts. Moral and religious judgments are based on realities that do not exist. Morality is merely an interpretation of certain phenomena — more precisely, a misinterpretation."
-Friedrich Nietzsche

As I see it, what I call nihilism is primarily just the honest acknowledgment that one does not know "right from wrong," in any deep, metaphysical sense. One may know one's own emotional reaction to a given phenomenon (you may react with disgust and disapproval at the notion of, say, willful murder or some particular instance of cruelty) but this says more about your own constitution than it does about the phenomenon in question. We shouldn't mistake our own emotional reactions to phenomena as indicators of moral truth, though this is not to say that we should treat these reactions as irrelevant, or just ignore them. When we react with great disgust and disapprobation upon witnessing or hearing about some event, we "misinterpret" the phenomena in question by assuming that these sentiments highlight some objective "moral fact."

While an objective morality may be out the window, I don't think this means that we ought to abandon ethics, so long as we consider "ethics" to mean something like "dealing with the question of how to live best." The question of how to live and act is perpetually relevant, and this is so even in the absence of genuine free will or final, static answers to such a question.

This is pretty impressive. Alabama pastor Aaron Fruh argues that if you're in favor of gay marriage, you're the one who's bigoted, malicious and hateful. The intellectual gymnastics required to come to this sort of position must be exhausting.

I guess the best thing to do when you're supporting policies and ideas that involve the oppression and persecution of other individuals or groups is to pretend that you're the one who's really being oppressed and persecuted.

Beyond the Zero

I've decided to play around with a blog of my own, in which I intend to ramble and pontificate about philosophical and political issues that interest me, and also discuss comic books, video games and other perfectly nerdy things.

First, some explanation is in order. My girlfriend has been encouraging me to start a blog for some time now, and after quite a bit of hemming and hawing, as they say, I thought to myself, "Who's going to care about the half-baked ideas of a pedantic, twenty-something philosophy student who spends far too much time thinking and reading about things he really isn't qualified to talk about?" Well, I suppose if it's self-consciously half-baked and more or less aware of its own shortcomings, this blog could be a bit of fun, and won't take itself too seriously.

Secondly, an outright confession is warranted. I am, for all intents and purposes, a nihilist. Not the pissy, brooding, "Ve vant ze money, Lebowski!" sort of nihilist, but rather one who has come to happily but tentatively accept uncertainty, ignorance and impermanence after a great deal of serious, well-intentioned (and ongoing) inquiry. The way I see it, there is probably no personal God, no objective morality, no free will, no epistemic certainty (outside of pure tautologies,) no afterlife, and no real purpose or meaning to existence. But, in my view, this is not "bad news." It's nothing to be gloomy about. On the contrary, the rejection of these foundational concepts can be experienced as liberating, and can expand the scope of love, happiness, and (above all) humor. My philosophical project, if anything, is to show that we can make admirable sense of our existence without the traditional concepts that have been relied on to give it meaning. As Camus observed, "Accepting the absurdity of everything around us is one step, a necessary experience: it should not become a dead end. It arouses a revolt that can become fruitful." Nihilism (or, as I like to call it in polite company, "provisional moral and ontological agnosticism") is a starting point, not a destination.

Major philosophical influences in this area include Hume, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Wittgenstein. To round out a "top ten," in no particular order, I'd probably also include Russell, Rorty, Heraclitus, Quine, and William James. I have an inclination towards, and interest in, pragmatism, naturalism, anti-foundationalism, perspectivism, and fallibilism. I'm also a big fan of Hellenistic philosophy, and feel that the ancient Stoics, Epicureans and Pyrrhonian Skeptics had something worth saying about how to live. Ideas of which I am highly critical include moral realism, moral rationalism, libertarianism (both political and metaphysical,) theism, and conservatism. But I'm always willing to listen, and if a good case can be made for any of these, I'll be the first to consider it.

Hopefully, this gives you some general idea of where this blog is going. Stick around. Let's have fun!