On the inconvenient truths about human sacrifice.

From Matt Bors.

A lot of what I post about is on sensitive issues, so I have come to expect the usual denial and obfuscation from my opponents. I expect a lot of denial on this issue also. Human sacrifice? HAR HAR HAR! Surely that’s a relic of past, ignorant ages!

Not really. We still practice human sacrifice and praise it, but we just do it without the pomp and circumstance. Human sacrifice happens when you know someone will die but you justify it as being for some higher purpose (be it religious, social, economic, or other). Those of you who have been reading this blog for a while may remember this example.

However, we need not restrict ourselves to this kind of example. The simple fact is that anyone who rejects the “do no harm” principle to the point that they find some number of deaths “justifiable” supports human sacrifice in some form. I am not saying that such a position is automatically invalid, but it does have the burden of proof, and “well, I think it’s justified” doesn’t cut it.

The problem is that people who support human sacrifice also refuse to admit that they support human sacrifice. This is understandable; anyone who would openly make such an admission would discredit emself as a normal human being. So they have to finagle, whine and bitch.

A good example of that is the commenting rules I applied for a while on the pro-abortion series. I asked people the following questions:

What maximum number of women dead from botched back alley abortions per year under an anti-abortion scheme do you consider a fair and just tradeoff to prevent all abortions that would happen under a pro-abortion scheme? (for anti-abortion people)

What maximum number of children afflicted with spina bifita/Tay-Sachs/leukemia/cancer/Downs Syndrome/etc a year born under a pro-choice scheme do you consider a fair and just tradeoff to prevent the distress of women who would not be allowed to have a child under a pro-abortion scheme? (for pro-choice people)

My reasoning behind these questions was two-fold:

1. To get my opponents to admit that they support the deliberate sacrifice of human beings for their goals.

2. To get them to quantify their support of human sacrifice, so we can advance the debate beyond rationalizations and get to the heart of the matter.

Of course my attempt failed. Some people claimed they were unable to answer because the question didn’t apply to them, and tried to finagle their position so it wouldn’t apply. Other people refused to consider the issue because it was too damageable for their position. Yet others simply didn’t answer. It’s the elephant in the room.

One person tried to return the question to me, asking me how many lives my beliefs are worth. But that’s a misfire, because I can always hit that one out of the park: the answer is, and always will be, zero. I don’t give a shit who you are or what you believe, no one’s beliefs are worth the lives of innocent human beings.

When I say, “do not impose harm,” I don’t mean “do not impose harm unless you’re not doing it to a specific person.” I also don’t mean “do not impose harm unless it’s on someone you don’t like or who you think deserves it.” I also don’t mean “do not impose harm unless it’s legal.” I mean “do not impose harm.”

One may reply, what answer do I expect? Do I expect an exact number? No, not really, but at least an order of magnitude. If it is justified to have people die for your beliefs, it would be nice to have an idea of how much death is warranted, and whether the current death rate is warranted.

And there are people who are able to be clear-headed about this and answer the question, such as Biting Beaver in this entry. We need more people with her high level of honesty. I still think her position is fucking disgusting and wrong, but at least it’s something we can debate. Without some kind of starting point, how can there even be a debate?

Let’s go back to the abortion question. If you are pro-choice, it is an incontrovertible fact (no matter how much you try to finagle out of it) that you support the birth of compromised children, some of which will die in horrible sufferings, and others who will experience lives of suffering. So how many child deaths are pro-choice policies worth? It’s a simple question that demands an answer.

Sure it’s uncomfortable to advocate the death of children, but if that’s the problem, then stop advocating positions that entail the death of children. And if you really believe that the pro-choice position is right beyond pragmatic considerations, then don’t be ashamed of its consequences and answer the question. It’s as simple as that.

Listen! If all must suffer to pay for the eternal harmony, what have children to do with it, tell me,please? It’s beyond all comprehension why they should suffer, and why they should pay for the harmony. Why should they, too, furnish material to enrich the soil for the harmony of the future? I understand solidarity in sin among men. I understand solidarity in retribution, too; but there can be no such solidarity with children. And if it is really true that they must share responsibility for all their fathers’ crimes, such a truth is not of this world and is beyond my comprehension. Some jester will say, perhaps, that the child would have grown up and have sinned, but you see he didn’t grow up, he was torn to pieces by the dogs, at eight years old. Oh,Alyosha, I am not blaspheming! I understand, of course, what an upheaval of the universe it will be when everything in heaven and earth blends in one hymn of praise and everything that lives and has lived criesaloud: ‘Thou art just, O Lord, for Thy ways are revealed.’ When the mother embraces the fiend who threw her child to the dogs, and all three cry aloud with tears, ‘Thou art just, O Lord!’ then, of course, the crown of knowledge will be reached and all will be made clear. But what pulls me up here is that I can’t accept that harmony. And while I am on earth, I make haste to take my own measures. You see, Alyosha, perhaps it really may happen that if I live to that moment, or rise again to see it, I, too, perhaps, may cry aloud with the rest, looking at the mother embracing the child’s torturer, ‘Thou art just, O Lord!’ but I don’t want to cry aloud then. While there is still time, I hasten to protect myself, and so I renounce the higher harmony altogether. It’s not worth the tears of that one tortured child who beat itself on the breast with its little fist and prayed in its stinking outhouse, with its unexpiated tears to ‘dear, kind God’! It’s not worth it, because those tears are unatoned for.

These questions apply to any issue where people’s beliefs entail suffering or death. Natalists blather on and on about how happy they are and how life is a gift, so we have to ask: how many horrible deaths is your happiness worth? It is a fact that perpetuating the life-system entails not only natural deaths but also horrible torture for billions.

Darwin’s Hamster talks about it on this video. His point is that for the debate on natalism to advance, natalists need to answer this question. Until they continue to refuse to answer, the debate will always remain stalled.

Darwin’s Hamster also points out that this question is no different from the atheist argument that religion harms people, and that therefore it is hypocrite for an atheist to agree with the atheist question but not the antinatalist question. You can’t point out the harms of religion and claim it’s a good argument while claiming that a look at the harms of natalism is a bad argument.

When faced with this question, natalists have to divert the issue and argue that death is just a fact of life and we should accept it, that we antinatalists are just whiners who want perfect lives. The trouble is that this is a straightforward lie: we humans are the ones producing this suffering, it is not a “fact of life,” it does not need to exist or have to exist.

But like pro-choice advocates, they must ignore the fact that we are the ones producing the suffering, that we are responsible for its existence and continuation. If they can silently reclassify suffering and death as an inevitability, they get themselves off the hook. It just happens, don’t you see? Babies just pop out of thin air, I’m tellin’ ya! They just appear and there’s nothing we can do about it! In the same way, capitalism is validated because human life just is a contest for survival and there’s nothing we can do about it (when in fact it is capitalism that creates most of these rigged “contests”).

Misogynists use the same “inevitability” gambit towards pornography and prostitution. So we have to ask, how many deaths of female prostitutes are justified in order to serve men’s supposed needs? Well, prostitutes are not really human, you see, so it’s better to just forget about it. So there is an inevitability argument, but also simple bigotry. Both will do equally well.

In a more abstract way, I also talked about a similar problem relative to God giving people free will. It seems to me to be a conclusive argument against Christianity that God giving us free will implies all the crimes people have committed in history, including all murders, wars, torture, rapes, and so on.

We can also ask, how many deaths of innocents are justified in order to maintain a State? Or how many deaths of workers are justified in order to maintain coal mines? People still die of coal mining accidents every week even in the most advanced countries. How many deaths at the hands of mafias and drug impurities are justified by the War on Drugs? And so on, and so forth.

The basic principle, I hope, is clear: if you are proposing a policy that entails innocent people’s deaths, you have the burden of proof to show that such a policy is worth it. For example, having hospitals entails many deaths due to lack of hygiene (hundreds of thousands of people die every year because of it), but it’s still better than not having health care. A decentralized system would probably be far healthier and less deadly, but if we simply compare hospitals to nothing at all, I think the choice is pretty clear. Sure it takes lives, but its primary purpose is to sustain life. The medical establishment, on the other hand… the less said about that the better.

So what’s the point of these questions? Am I just trying to shut people up and drive them away? No, the topic of my entries already does that for me, and besides that wouldn’t be very productive. This is not going to be a big surprise given the topic of this blog for these past months, but it obviously has to do with radicalism.

The prevalent utilitarian worldview tells us that human sacrifice is justified if the sacrifice is of some benefit to us, no matter how small (such as in our economist believing that horrible deaths are justified by relieving a headache). That is quite a trivialization of the right to life: your life may be worth as little as a headache, so it’s barely worth even considering. Like most economists’ constructs, the mockery of ethics used by economists serves ruling class interests and trivializes workers’ lives and values, and therefore is fundamentally anti-radical.

From the voluntaryist standpoint, I imagine all these questions are pointless, because a person who believes in any of these positions is not necessarily creating harm. A goose-stepping statist may not necessarily use violence against dissenters, or even support violence against dissenters (although eir statist belief still aids and abets the people who do the violence). So why should we attack the statist for eir belief? Ey’s “doing nothing wrong.”

Radical analysis tells us that it is possible for a person to voluntarily and harmlessly participate to a coercive and harmful system. One may work at some retailer or other and be completely ignorant that one’s work is subsidizing corporations that have financed or are still financing death squads (Chiquita, Dole, Chevron, General Motors, Ford, IBM… the list goes on and on). Admittedly this is unlikely to convince anyone to leave their job because, after all, we all need a job. But my point is that the actions of the worker are harmless, while serving a genocidal system.

So no, I am not saying that every single advocate of natalism, pro-choice, misogyny, statism or Christianity is committing harmful actions. Like all radical analysis, this is not about individual actions but about institutions and the harm they perpetuate on individuals. Because of their scope, institutions can magnify evil, bigotry or ignorance a million fold. One person cannot perform genocide, but an army can. Implicit in the concept of an army is not just a group of people but an ethic of obedience and violence, political aims, wages, buildings, weapons, provisions, an economy that can produce these things, and so on.

There can be no step taken towards making an equal and just society if one is unable to analyze existing institutions and their effects on society, as well as imagining institutions which are structured around egalitarian and just values. There can be no more fundamental principle for such a society than the principle that we should not impose harm. As Anarchism tells us, hierarchies are the root of the problem, and the goal of hierarchies is to exploit others for an elite’s benefit, no matter who the elite is.

As such, human sacrifice is only part of one extreme end of a spectrum that goes from genocide, to slavery, to exploitation, to alienation, to freedom. Our goal is to analyze institutions from the other end of the spectrum, that of individual freedom and social autonomy. The fact that some people openly support human sacrifice and its logic merely tells us that they are no friends of freedom.

In answer to the question “how many human lives can be justifiably sacrificed for your beliefs?”, most people will just hem and haw, argue that you don’t understand their position, that the question is not fair, that human sacrifice is worth it, and will basically do anything but answer the question. My answer is simple: zero.

To end on another quote from The Brothers Karamazov, which reiterates my challenge to my opponents:

“Tell me yourself, I challenge your answer. Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last, but that it was essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature—that baby beating its breast with its fist, for instance—and to found that edifice on its unavenged tears, would you consent to be the architect on those conditions? Tell me, and tell the truth.”

Come on people, tell me the truth. Can you do that?

Values are sacrifices.

All decisions have opportunity costs. Values, since they inform our decisions, therefore have opportunity costs through the decisions they inform. To take a simple example, the fact that I want to sleep when I am tired prevents me from staying up and doing other things. The fact that I value sleep, therefore, entails opportunity costs. Not sleeping would lead to a different outcome, but this outcome is lost because I judge it less desirable.

This may seem blindingly obvious but seems to be lost when we enter the realm of the abstract. Intellectual cowards refuse to confront the act of valuing and its consequences. They act as if values are essentially arbitrary and irrelevant to real life.

In that way, they act like religious people, who distinguish themselves from others by believing in this or that obscure theological principle. To the religious, values are arbitrary and irrelevant to real life. It really makes no difference when baptism should be performed or how much traditional interpretations of the Bible should be trusted. None of these things matter in real life. They just exist to maintain divisions between sects and to preserve a sense of identity within them.

Essentially they believe that professing a value is an issue of personal taste, and that our actions should be “pragmatic.” So they set up a dichotomy between valuing, which is purely in the realm of the imaginary or the personal, and actions to achieve those values, which must be “pragmatic” and be subject to no values, which in practice means that they should be subject to the standards of social success (whatever sells, whatever convinces, whatever can be said in public, no matter how false it is).

We observe this in organizations which supposedly pursue egalitarian ends but which do so in a hierarchical way. That is my main target here, and for good reason: a lot of arguments hinge around it, because practice is the best evidence we have of workability. And most of the time egalitarians don’t even try to prove their point by constructing egalitarian organizations, which shows their lack of commitment.

This also applies in economics. A capitalist organization is by definition one which is optimized for profit-seeking. By definition, a socialist organization cannot be optimized for profit-seeking. To claim that a socialist organization can compete, or should be able to compete, with capitalist organizations in a capitalist economy is to not understand what the terms mean. It is a deficit in understanding. By their very nature, socialist organization cannot outcompete capitalist organizations. To hold the value of equality means to reject the benefits of exploitation, and capitalism is predicated on exploitation. In order to win in capitalism, you must exploit the labor of others in many different forms.

The argument that socialism fails because socialist organizations cannot compete at the same level as capitalist organizations is a tautology: no organization can “succeed” within a given incentive system if it pursues a completely different standard of “success.” So what? That’s as trivial as telling us that a marathon runner will not win the 100m dash. Why should we expect otherwise? A capitalist organization would fail, too, if it had to meet the incentive systems of socialism. I can guarantee you as much.

Does that mean capitalism is inferior? Not in itself, no. All it means is that capitalism, like socialism, implies a certain set of values, and that an incentive system which does not reward those values will present a daunting obstacle. Capitalism is inferior because it operates on the basis of non-human values (like the profit motive and market forces) and causes widespread misery, not because it “works” or doesn’t “work.” Pragmatism is a piss-poor standard of truth. Systemic analysis is a much better standard.

I’ve talked about organizations, but the same thing applies to individuals. At the root of this fallacy is the belief that the “end justifies the means.” I discussed how this is part of the manichean worldview. Egalitarians who treat interpersonal relations as a struggle will tend to dissociate means with ends. They will preach cooperation but act competitively.

The opposite of “the end justifies the means” is “practice what you preach,” i.e. honesty instead of hypocrisy. Practicing what you preach is a great deal harder than dropping your principles whenever they become inconvenient, but it’s the only way to bring about what you want. We prefigure the new society, first in the imagination and then in reality, by representing its principles as closely as possible. Selling equality or peace by showing yet another example of hierarchy and competition in action gets us no closer to a peaceful world, because that’s what everyone else is already doing. If hierarchy and competition was the key to an egalitarian and peaceful world, the world would already be egalitarian and peaceful.

You can’t go half-way. If you believe in something, then cherish it and bring more of it into the world. If you don’t believe in something, then don’t bring more of it into the world. Bringing something into the world in the name of its opposite is just retarded.

Tolerance in morality.

A lot of the rejection of morality has been inherited from our attitude towards religious morality. We observe that religious morality is intolerant and leads to the persecution of innocents, that it is dogmatic and unjustifiable, that it makes people arrogant and self-serving. Therefore, people think that this means all forms of morality must be intolerant, dogmatic, unjustifiable, arrogant and self-serving.

There is a sense in which this objection is just obtuse. Everyone has some kind of moral system, whether implicit or explicit, but not everyone is arrogant and self-serving. Also, not all explicit moral systems are intolerant, lead to the persecution of innocents, dogmatic and unjustifiable (while I sometimes argue against utilitarianism, it does not fulfill at least three of these criteria).

Does a moral system entail intolerance of people who disagree? This is not obvious. Even from a purely pragmatic standpoint, it seems rather wasteful to actively oppose all those who disagree, even on the smallest points. It seems a lot easier, in general, to “live and let live,” although some issues may be too important to tolerate disagreement (e.g. on whether murder or assault should be permitted- the average cost per person is far higher than the average cost to maintain enforcement).

There are two ethical principles that apply here: equality and consent. The principle of equality means that any freedom or responsibility we create must apply to every individual in a society. The principle of consent means that one cannot be free if one is coerced into obeying or supporting organizations or institutions. What this means is that everyone must have equal freedom of thought, expression and action, and that, in case of disagreements, we must ultimately agree to disagree.

Tucker’s theorem, on the other hand, fixes a hard limit on tolerance: we must stop tolerating someone’s actions when they invade someone else’s values. This means that “freedoms” and “rights” which serve to hide invasion, such as the right to privacy and freedom of religion, should not be tolerated.

We cannot speak of tolerance in a vacuum; this should not be surprising, as any issue of ethics involves society as a whole. So in fixing this hard limit from Tucker’s theorem, we are imagining a balance of power in some hypothetical ideal society between institutions which seek to protect freedoms and rights, and individuals who perform actions which (we believe) attack those freedoms and rights.

Presumably these institutions are at least slightly more powerful than the individuals they protect (either in terms of force, of indoctrination or of incentives), or they could not accomplish their function. In reality, it is likely that, no matter how benign or evil they are, these institutions will always be a great deal more powerful than individuals, because otherwise they may have to stand idle against some crime on the basis that the criminals are more powerful than they are (granted, this still happens even in our societies to a certain extent, regarding mafias for instance).

These institutions, then, are powerful enough to apply Tucker’s theorem and to prevent invasion. But in doing so, they necessarily construct a default cultural position as well. To fight against invasion means, for instance, to prevent girls from being forced to wear burqas. Yet the father may very well reply that it’s part of his culture and that we should tolerate it. By affirming Tucker’s theorem and rejecting his misogynistic claim, we’re not only attacking an invader but also attacking a culture.

For people who are committed to multiculturalism and tolerance at all costs (up to the point of physical assault, and often even past that), this is unconscionable. A person’s culture, they say, must remain inviolate. But it’s important to put this in perspective: I am not talking about preferences in food or music, but rather about actions which attack some other person’s values. The Islamic fundamentalist has, through religious indoctrination, attacked his daughter’s rights ever since she was able to understand language, and the burqa is merely the culmination of these attacks. It will do us no good to simply state that the burqa is a choice and that our examination should stop at present time. So there is more than “culture” there.

So there are two issues here. The first is that the invading act is “just a cultural issue”: it isn’t, because that kind of abusive culture is only the surface manifestation, and repetition, of childhood abuse. The second is the belief in culture as sacrosanct: it isn’t, at least when culture leads to the imposition of harm.

Now someone may reply that my assumptions, including Tucker’s theorem, are themselves culturally biased. But this would be as obtuse as calling the law of gravity culturally biased. My premises stand or fall on the basis of their evidence.

It would be more accurate to say that the kind of society fostered by these ideal institutions will be culturally biased, just as the kind of society fostered by our current “justice” system is culturally biased. I have no problem acknowledging that. What we label invasion and not invasion is to a certain extent culturally motivated, but we must still do so. Therefore here there is another hard limit to tolerance. We must pass judgment on cultures using our own logical framework. The principle of equality, however, demands that we pass judgment not only on other cultures but on our own as well.

The principle of consent also puts a hard limit on tolerance, in that no one should be forced to cooperate in ways they oppose. Under a hierarchical business, the worker must cooperate with all assigned objectives, including morally repugnant ones, or ultimately face termination. Under a hierarchical society, a citizen must follow all laws, including morally repugnant ones, or face vengeance. This is why, in a hierarchical society, obedience is a virtue and critical thinking is a vice (unless it is watered down, like skepticism).

When talking about tolerance, people always bring up the paradox of tolerating intolerance. But as I’ve pointed out many times in this entry, tolerance is not unbounded in nature, but rather bumps upon many hard limits. So there is nothing contradictory about not tolerating intolerance; it really all depends on what kind of intolerance we’re talking about. Intolerance of invasive actions is beneficial for society as a whole. Non-invasive intolerance of innocent people is regrettable and disgusting, and should be opposed, but not violently. Invasive intolerance of innocent people must be opposed, violently if necessary.

So the “tolerating intolerance” paradox is only a paradox if you assume that tolerance is unbounded in nature. Once you acknowledge that there are these hard limits, then it’s not only logical but necessary to refuse to tolerate beyond those limits.

Refuting Alonzo Fyfe on: evolution cannot account for morality.

Alonzo Fyfe is an atheist who writes extensively on the subject of ethics. His ideology is called desirism. Desirism is an ethical subjectivist view which holds that our “desires,” defined as any motivating factor, justify moral judgment. It also holds that people must impose their subjective desires on others by altering other people’s behavior.

My objective in this entry is not to refute desirism but rather to examine Fyfe’s argument concerning evolution. He contends that evolution cannot account for morality. His basic thesis seems to be that evolution is somehow inadequate to explain our ethical problems:

[T]he response [of evolution] ignores 10,000 years of human history filled with horrors beyond imagining, that evolution also invented the concepts of predator and parasite, that our evolved dispositions also contribute to such things as racism and rape…

“How are you going to keep me, my family, and those people I care about safe?”

In the face of this question, the answer, “Evolution” can be seen as . . . well . . . jaw-droppingly stupid.

I don’t understand why Fyfe thinks it’s an ethicist’s job to keep people’s families safe. Protection from crime and other hardships is a social function, not a job left to armchair theorizers. Perhaps I misunderstand his point here, but it doesn’t make much sense to me.

The first objection makes more sense, but does not help his case at all, since the objection must apply to his own ethical worldview as well. If desirism was true, then how could Fyfe explain “10,000 years of human history filled with horrors beyond imagining”? After all, people were following their “desires” and trying to “alter behavior” for those 10,000 years also. Indeed, a great deal of this horror was the result of trying to “alter behavior.”

From a social constructionist standpoint, the horrors of humanity are not unexplainable. People’s decisions can only be understood in relation to the institutional incentives they are presented with, and the more warped the incentives, the more warped human behavior will become.

Referring to the original quote he is debunking, Fyfe asks:

Are you saying that, thanks to evolution I do need to worry about people doing harm to me and those I care about because we evolved to be perfectly kind and altruistic creatures? Because I can think of few things so idiotic.

Seriously, this is how the quote above reads – as if to say that we have no reason to worry about evil because we are evolved to a point to have eliminated it.

It is easy to mislead people like Fyfe into thinking that evolutionary morality entails that we are perfectly kind and altruistic. This is the result of the overemphasis on altruism, which is understandable given that selfishness is considered the default assumption and evolutionary morality is proposed as an alternative to that morass. But certainly it is not true that we evolved to be “perfectly kind and altruistic creatures.” A human being is composed of innumerable motives, some of which pull against each other, and sometimes selfishness wins out.

Here is another part where Fyfe seems to slip into fundie mode:

We see in the news a mass shooting at a school or movie theater. Parents live in fear of their children being raped or murdered – or ending up on drugs or with some deadly venereal disease. We see whole populations living in fear and poverty under a dictatorship.

The accusation that evolution cannot account for morality is the claim that evolution fails to prevent these things – an accusation that is entirely true.

Here is another example, from a different entry:

Take, for example, the Holocaust. Did evolution prevent it? Answer: Obviously not. Can we count on evolution to prevent something like that from happening in the future? Answer: Of course not.

But this is a complete misrepresentation of evolution. Evolution is not a moral agent which can prevent a mass shooting, a rape, poverty, or the Holocaust. All these things are caused by moral agents. Evolution is a biological process which acts upon heredity. It has nothing to do whatsoever with preventing a crime. He seems to be confusing evolution with God. And indeed, everything he says makes sense if you replace “evolution” with “God” in these quotes.

He also commits the same error in earlier quotes where he says “evolution invented.” Evolution is not an agent that can invent anything. You might argue it’s a metaphor or a figure of speech, but since the topic is morality and moral actions it’s particularly important to be precise when we talk about actions here. This is incredibly sloppy writing at best.

Although what Fyfe may be trying to say here, and I could be wrong, is that the ethics that result from evolution applied to human beings fail to prevent mass shootings, rapes, poverty, or the Holocaust. But again, so would desirism. Desirism is no more a moral agent than evolution, and, as a form of subjectivism, can no more prevent these disasters than evolution.

Also, it is particularly curious that an ethical subjectivist seems to be making the blanket assertion that mass shootings, rapes, murders and poverty are undesirable. This would seem to go against his whole enterprise of disproving any objective, universal basis for moral judgments.

The fact is that Fyfe, like any opponent of intuitionism, must use intuitions in his reasoning in order to arrive at moral judgments. Fyfe is implicitly using his moral intuitions about murder, rape and poverty to make an argument from their existence. He is cutting off his own philosophical head. Here is another example:

Morality is fully and adequately accounted for by the fact that we are intentional agents with malleable desires.

Where do these desires come from, if not from evolution? Blank. He simply assumes they exist, and that they provide us with a justification to judge things like the Holocaust to be bad.

Fyfe’s rejection of evolutionary morality relies on Special Pleading, in that he treats ethical issues differently from issues of fact. Here is an example:

For one thing, this “deep sense of right and wrong” is often wrong. People have – or have had – a deep sense that interracial marriage or homosexual relationships are wrong. Many Muslims have a deep sense that creating depictions of Mohammed are wrong. They kill their own daughters in “honor killings” out of a deep sense that their daughter’s behavior was wrong.

But this is not an argument against evolutionary morality. To see why, consider the case of science. I know Fyfe and I both agree that science is our best method to find truths about natural law. And yet evolution, which seems to us obviously true, was only discovered in the latter part of the 19th century. Same for the germ theory of disease. Before that time, people had completely different, and often ridiculous, beliefs about the origins of the variety of life and the nature of disease. According to Fyfe’s reasoning, this should disqualify science as a valid method of inquiry. After all, scientific truths have often been wrong, sometimes massively wrong.

Yet Fyfe, equally clearly, is pointing us to one reason why people are wrong about their moral judgments: bias. Religion, for instance, functions by hijacking the individual’s moral sense and substituting it for obedience to a dogma and a church. Therefore it is not surprising that such suspension of morality leads to people being wrong, but this would seem to be an argument in favor of evolution accounting for morality, not against it. I don’t know why Fyfe thinks the opposite, because he doesn’t tell us.

Here is another quote:

Is homosexuality wrong? Well, to determine this we need to look at whether humans evolved a disposition to kill homosexuals and feel justified in doing so. If they have, then homosexuals deserve to die – at least according to the thesis “evolution accounts for morality.”

But this should be trivially easy for Fyfe to answer. Does he want to kill homosexuals? If he doesn’t, then the question automatically becomes moot (if he did, then we’d have to start by asking why).

More importantly, there’s no reason why Fyfe, as a subjectivist, should consider killing homosexuals to be bad; that we should be fair and care for others are a priori judgments that only make sense if intuitionism is true. Fyfe cannot demonstrate that desirism can account for such judgments in the absence of intuitions to that effect.

Like all forms of subjectivism, the concept of desirism suffers from many problems. For one thing, it cannot refute the fact that people may desire to do things which are (intuitively) clearly evil, such as murder, rape, and so on. Fyfe initially seems to have an “out,” since his position also includes social feedback:

Finally, we will add one more stipulation – that this “ought” refers not to C’s desires alone, but to what people generally have reason to praise or condemn. In this sense, where A says to B, “You ought to do X”, he plants a flag and says, “People, look here. Among you are many and strong reasons to praise those who would do X, and condemn those who would not do X.” If this is not true, his claim would be false.

But this only pushes back the problem from individual subjectivism to cultural relativism. What if one lives in a (intuitively) particularly evil culture, like Nazi Germany or modern Saudi Arabia? Fyfe has run out of safeguards at this point, and must concede that his ethical system provides no explanation for what he considers (intuitively) grossly wrong.

The morality of evolution.

(this is my parody of a CreationWise cartoon- this page has more of them)

I’ve been talking about the evolution of morality and what it implies for our ethical views. But the reverse topic, the morality of evolution, is also worth discussing. Christians in particular make pretty outrageous claims about why evolution should not be taught in schools. Not only are they wrong, but evolution actually should be praised for its virtuous nature as well as its truth and elegance as a theory.

Atheists and scientists always insist that evolution is morally and religiously neutral. Interestingly, that’s not at all what Darwin thought. Darwin’s life was surrounded by anti-slavery activism (his entire family was militant against slavery) and the inhumane effects of slavery around the world. His discovery of the theory of evolution was strongly motivated by a desire to fight against pro-slavery rhetoric, which was based on a ladder of races (with whites at the top, and blacks at the bottom), and he explicitly intended evolution to be a blow against such rhetoric (for more background, see Darwin’s Sacred Cause).

Unlike scientists today, it’s safe to assume that Darwin did not believe in the nonsense of being “value-neutral.” He knew that the truth and fighting for good went hand-in-hand. To claim that evolution has no moral consequences is to ignore the facts.

Many people deny those consequences because they believe that they lead straight to Social Darwinism. As a matter of fact, what we call “Social Darwinism” actually existed far before Darwin (and, as NoRemorseGER pointed out in the comments, Herbert Spencer, the leading figure of “Social Darwinism,” was actually Lamarckian). Darwin was fighting against an ideology (which at the time was called pluralism, because it claimed separate origins for each human race) which posited a ladder of species and human races. The “Social Darwinists” co-opted the language of evolution and added factors like mental diseases and poverty to species and race as measures of superiority or inferiority. This is the ideology that subtends the ideology of “scientific racism” today.

Darwin understood that compassion for other human beings comes through acceptance of common ancestry, through the belief that we are all related, one big metaphorical animal family. And it was well understood that belief in pluralism meant acceptance of slavery and prejudice. Current Christian dogma, based on God making Ham’s descendants black, falls straight into the pluralist category (then again, most Christians simply ignore the issue). In fact, a case could be made that Christians are so aggressive against evolution because evolution contradicts the dehumanizing teachings of the Bible, including its pro-slavery teachings.

Yet Christians argue that teaching evolution in schools leads to moral degeneracy, despair, and criminality, because evolution teaches children that life has no purpose and that there is no absolute morality. While both of these statements are true, they are also meant to be misleading. We don’t need absolute morality to be moral, and we don’t need life to have a purpose for us to be purposeful.

More importantly, without evolution there is no morality, period. Even amoebas cooperate, plants cooperate, and so do animal species all around the globe. Their morality may not be as complex or inclusive as ours, but that doesn’t make it any less of a morality. Without evolution, there is no sociability and no moral instincts.

Christians believe that evolution devalues humanity and drags humanity through the mud, but it’s rather ironic that Christians are the least likely to be humanist and to promote human values. Christians don’t actually value humanity, but they like to pretend they do. But besides that, it seems to me that there’s an equally valid perspective: not that humanity is devalued, but rather that other species are raised to their appropriate level.

I mean, it’s not like people have a high opinion of other species to begin with. We hunt them, we jail them in zoos, and we bulldoze their habitats. Let’s face it, we don’t have much appreciation for other forms of life, and on the whole it seems we’d rather kill them all. So it would be pretty good if people took evolution seriously and realized that all forms of life deserve to live on this planet as much as we do.

But most importantly, evolution serves as a counterpoint to the racism of religious pluralism, of “scientific racism,” and of paternalism. Despite the claims of some fanatics, who say that the Nazis were inspired by evolution (when actually they were inspired by Social Darwinism, which has nothing to do with evolution proper), no murder or genocide has ever been staged on the basis of evolution. In evolution, there is no such thing as an inferior or superior individual, race or species. The oft-quoted “survival of the fittest” refers to the fact that organisms that are most adapted to their environment (including other animals around them) tend to survive and reproduce more, but this standard of fitness is entirely dependent on context and cannot be used in any absolute sense, like advocates of Social Darwinism do.

Besides, it should be obvious to any egalitarian that, even if it could be proven that some people are inferior in some respect to others, such a proof would not disprove the premises of egalitarianism. Even if it was true that black children were less intelligent simply by virtue of being black (as per standard racist rhetoric), it would still be the case that they should receive the same level of education as everyone else. Our commitment to a fair society is driven by ethics and the facts about living in society, not capacities.

One can reject creationism and yet be repulsed by the concept of evolution. After all, blank slate theory is attractive to both sides of the spectrum, especially to dictators: if morality is not innate, then it can be molded to one’s liking through the indoctrination of children. Of course, we know that in reality this does not work, but that’s never stopped anyone.

Atheists need to stop letting their fantasy belief in “value-neutral science” and their fear of the shadow of Social Darwinism prevent any discussion on moral consequences of evolution.

Morality is not maintained by a government or laws.

As I discussed in my previous entry, when we’re talking about explanations as to what makes a person moral, the only currently credible alternative to supernatural monitoring (God watches you so you don’t do bad things) is what I call institutional monitoring (the government watches you so you don’t do bad things); both of these alternatives fail the test of reality and therefore are bad explanations.

The truth is that morality originates in the evolution of sociability. Studies of sociopaths have demonstrated that morality cannot exist without empathy and higher-level emotions, and studies of primates has demonstrated that moral principles exist natively in other species. Of course, the moral and ethical principles that we formulate are not mere translations of sociability instincts, any more than the fight-or-flight response can be translated into a modern treatise on hunting. Our principles are developed from the interaction of these instincts with other people and the world as a whole. We can call this “internal monitoring.” It is internal because it is developed from the individual’s values and principles, not from any external dogma.

The dichotomy between whether morality is externally-driven (either by God’s words or by the law) or internally-driven is most crucial to the atheist distrust issue. Positing that morality is driven by the law instead of God does not make atheists more trustworthy, because one is often in a situation where one is not monitored by an institution. Remember the scenario given in one of the studies:

Richard is 31 years old. On his way to work one day, he accidentally backed his car into a parked van. Because pedestrians were watching, he got out of his car. He pretended to write down his insurance information. He then tucked the blank note into the van’s window before getting back into his car and driving away.
Later the same day, Richard found a wallet on the sidewalk. Nobody
was looking, so he took all of the money out of the wallet. He then
threw the wallet in a trash can.

This scenario was designed to trigger belief in supernatural monitoring, and thus associate this behavior (which is incompatible with supernatural monitoring) with atheism. But we could also say the exact same thing about institutional monitoring. In the scenario, an atheist Richard would reasonably have felt no more threat from a government agent than from God. Truthfully no one is monitoring him in this scenario except himself.

You may also have already noted that there is an equivalent to being an atheist in the case of institutional monitoring: being an anarchist. While anarchists cannot simply ignore the threat of jail or murder in the same way that atheists can ignore the threat of Hell (once they have been sufficiently deprogrammed, anyway), they lack belief in the law as sufficient moral grounds in the same way that atheists lack belief in religious dogma as sufficient moral grounds.

The funny thing is that most anarchists are anarchists for moral reasons; anarchists are by and large people who have given great consideration to their moral principles and who have concluded that the State is the enemy of the good. Therefore accusing anarchists of being immoral is a dead end. Anarchists are subject to the same moral instincts that everyone else is, they’ve just decided to not be hypocrites about the fact that they are part of the workings of an evil society.

Institutional monitoring cannot be valid for the same basic reason that supernatural monitoring cannot be valid: because they concern themselves with the enforcement of dogmatic orders, not morality. Morality is based on logical reasoning applied to values, and orders are to be obeyed without reasoning or justification. In the case of religion, the supposed moral rules from God were written by humans to serve the interests of their religion. In the case of government, the supposed moral rules are written by the power elite to serve its interests. In both cases, the rules do not apply to those in power and their friends.

For the ruling class, “the rule of law” isn’t a means of protecting you or your liberty. It’s a means of enforcement, a critical way of protecting their own power and wealth.

There are further problems with institutional monitoring. For instance, most of us believe that there is such a thing as a bad law (although I have met some people who profess that such a thing does not exist, a position which I have a hard time calling anything nicer than clinically insane). Presumably this is why “the people” are allowed to approve or repel some laws within the limits imposed by the system. But how does one decide whether a law is bad? There must be a prior moral principle that lets one do this, and whatever this moral principle is, it must be more fundamental than the laws themselves (again in an analogous manner to the fact that there must be a prior justification for us to accept a religious text as valid). So the law cannot be the source of morality.

We also have an origin problem. If the law is the source of morality, then how did the law come to exist in the first place? Why would “bad” people decide to harness themselves to a “good” standard? I am not saying this is impossible, but there needs to be an explanation, and, as far as I know, none has been given.

Finally, as I pointed out in my previous entry, people who are altruistic out of a fear of punishment are being dishonest in their actions and don’t really feel compassion or empathy for those they help, otherwise they wouldn’t need the threat of punishment to be altruistic in the first place. People who act morally because it’s the right thing to do are morally superior to people who pretend to act morally under threat of punishment.

So we have to clearly put both supernatural and institutional monitoring in the same category, that of external motivation, and internal monitoring as being the opposite of both. We need to clearly point out that internal monitoring is primary, and the external ones are secondary, because we adopt them on the basis of some personal principle or value.

We also need to clearly point out that our beliefs about the moral or immoral nature of others is, to a large extent, a self-fulfilling prophecy. When we think everyone around us is a criminal, and therefore rely on punishment and hatred to motivate morality, you end up with an incarceration society like North Korea, the US, China or Russia. Surely we can’t blame the population of these countries as being particularly evil, since most of the incarcerations are for political prisoners (and I count the War on Drugs in that category). We end up with societies where power is expressed through violence and coercion, instead of persuasion or reciprocity. Of course this is all tied together with capitalist power and government power; where punishment and hatred motivate morality, there must be an elite which tells people who to hate and how to punish.

Internal motivation is self-reinforcing; external motivation destroys interest and diversity. Internal motivation drives positive change; external motivation drags down positive change. Internal motivation drives our desire for fairness and freedom; external motivation drives authoritarian systems.

You may have noted that my analysis of the internal/external dichotomy is closely tied to the “humans are innately evil” premise, as well as the cooperation/competition dichotomy. It is clear to me that external motivation is closely linked to the “humans are innately evil” premise, because there would be no need for any external motivation for morality if man was innately moral. This is why all religions and political worldviews have some form of “original sin” or “natural flaw”; they have to sell you an imaginary disease before they can sell you the imaginary cure.

The link with cooperation/competition may seem less obvious, but cooperation is linked to the view that humans are not innately evil, and competition with the view that they are. You’d be more likely to promote cooperation as the way to accomplish tasks if you believe the people around you are basically good, competent, and so on, and you’d be more likely to set people against each other so they keep each other’s evil in check.

This all brings us back to evolution. Fundamentalist believers cannot understand morality because they deny evolution, so they bite their own cognitive tails and keep turning in endless fallacious circles. Without acceptance of evolution, there’s just no hope for anyone to understand how morality works, and we just have to forget about convincing those people to treat atheists like human beings. If they come to that position eventually, it’ll have to be for personal reasons.

Believers in supernatural monitoring have a pat answer not available to believers in institutional monitoring, that God “wrote” the laws of morality in our “hearts.” This argument is not very coherent and I have yet to hear any Christian explain what this means and how we can distinguish it from the result of the evolution of sociability (technically I believe it is impossible to deduce that anything is supernatural, but they should at least try to address the issue). In my opinion, this is just an ad hoc rationalization meant to preempt evolution.

Many believers of institutional monitoring, on the other hand, also believe in evolution, and mainly just ignore it when it comes to moral or ethical issues. They have to ignore it because it would otherwise clash with their fundamental belief that man is corrupt and must be controlled. They believe that crime is an issue of personal responsibility, when in fact we also have a shared responsibility for crime. Our actions are far more influenced by the social context than the social context is the result of our actions.

Liberals (a category that includes most atheists, especially those who use the institutional monitoring argument) especially are forced to believe in a kind of moral hodge-podge; people are basically trustworthy and good, but they’re stupid, short-sighted and selfish enough to do bad things unless they’re monitored by those better than them. The trouble is, it’s the institutions doing the monitoring that are making people stupid, short-sighted and selfish, but to admit that would mean to reconsider the very system that makes liberalism possible, so liberals can’t do that.

How can they be so insane as to posit that the very institutions which create evil are saving us from evil? Love of one’s oppressors and hatred of those who want to help seems to be a pretty common theme in human behavior: Stockholm Syndrome, battered wives, fascist populism as an economic position, the support for organized religion against secularism, pro-democracy movements, the love for cop shows, the constant striving for success in an evil society, and in general the mania of liberals for surrendering everything to corrupt bureaucrats and the mania of conservatives for surrendering everything to sociopathic corporations.

Distrust as the explanation for anti-atheist prejudice.

If you have an interest in atheism, you have probably read about a study about anti-atheist prejudice done by Gervais, Shariff and Norenzayan, based on the hypothesis that the prejudice is motivated by distrust. This hypothesis was confirmed.

But it’s more complicated than that. What they found was that people distrust atheists because of “the belief that people behave better if they feel that God is watching them” (which they call supernatural monitoring). Six different studies, measuring different variables, falsified various other explanations for the distrust. They also found that the importance of God in one’s life predicted the level of distrust that someone experienced.

The supernatural monitoring criterion explains why religious believers trust each other, but not atheists:

Individuals may trust people from a variety of outgroups—including, perhaps, people from other religions—more than they would trust an atheist. After all, somebody of a different (even competing) religion would still believe in some form of supernatural surveillance. Consistent with this prediction, the predominantly Christian samples in the aforementioned polls tend to prefer Muslims, Mormons, and Jews to atheists.

Some of the studies used something called the conjunction error (where a person sometimes think it is more likely for a person to have two attributes instead of one, even though the probability is always lower) to gather subconscious impressions of distrust. They presented a little story and asked people if the person in the story was more likely to be one of various categories (such as atheist). Here is one such story:

Richard is 31 years old. On his way to work one day, he accidentally backed his car into a parked van. Because pedestrians were watching, he got out of his car. He pretended to write down his insurance information. He then tucked the blank note into the van’s window before getting back into his car and driving away.
Later the same day, Richard found a wallet on the sidewalk. Nobody
was looking, so he took all of the money out of the wallet. He then
threw the wallet in a trash can.

Naturally, there is a strong emphasis on whether the person is being watched. Because pedestrians are watching, he pretends to write down his insurance information, but because they can’t know if he wrote anything or not, he doesn’t write anything. No one is looking when he gets the wallet, so he steals all the money. These actions are associated with atheists, because atheists believe that when no one is watching them, no one is watching them, therefore they will do whatever they feel like doing.

As hypothesized, participants were significantly more likely to commit the conjunction error for an atheist target than for either a Christian target or a Muslim target… The atheist target did not significantly differ from the rapist target.

That’s right, atheists were evaluated to be as untrustworthy as rapists. It’s hard to make sense of this result, but the researchers explain it by saying that rapists have proven by their actions that they cannot be trusted, and as such also invoke distrust.

The result of these studies, however, raises some questions. Do Christians believe they are being watched at every moment, or do they only believe that all their actions will be judged at some point? The latter seems more likely.

Either way, this does not really make any sense from the standpoint of Christian dogma. After all, Christian belief hinges upon forgiveness for one’s sins. It does not matter what one does, as long as one is saved by believing in Jesus as the messiah. Cheating someone’s car insurance and stealing someone’s wallet are not actions for which God judges you, as long as you are saved. So why should a Christian be less likely to commit them?

This opens a larger question: what is the justification for a Christian to do good at all? I’ve debated this point before and I’ve been given the answer that anyone who loves God will naturally follow its commandments. But this doesn’t make any sense. The fact that you love something doesn’t mean you will obey it slavishly. The relation between God and humans is as that of a father and a child, and it’s impossible to believe that a child of any age should obey eir father slavishly, even if ey loves eir father.

But these things are obviously not in people’s minds, so we should try to understand how they’re really thinking. What do they actually believe is happening?

We know that Christian dogma is crafted so that it stunts people’s moral development and keeps it at a child-like level (command/obedience). In the child model, the parents must always watch over the child to ensure that ey does not hurt emself or others. A child who is not being watched is a child that represents a threat to emself and others. The analogy, I think, is obvious; a parent cannot trust a toddler without supervision any more than we can trust atheists. But consider also that the latter is an even worse model, since atheists are said not just to be amoral, but to be immoral; if you don’t watch over them, they will definitely hurt others.

Of course, this would be an unconscious model. I don’t think Christians are actually comparing atheists to toddlers in their minds, or God to parents. Indeed, it seems extremely hard for them to see this analogy at all, even though they speak of atheism as a “rebellion,” in the same way that one might speak of a teenager’s attitude towards eir parents. Atheism is also described as a form of immaturity, a temporary phase, a form of depression or low self-esteem, a form of ingratitude, a form of laziness, a desire to justify violence; all of these things are also associated with teenagehood (on the other hand, because atheism is associated with a higher level of competence, the stereotypes against teenagers’ intellect are not applied to atheists).

This is clearly the consequence of the child model, because the teenager is hated for trying to break out of the child model, like the atheist is hated for trying to break out of the religious obedience model. The more a parent identifies emself as a caretaker instead of an authority figure, the more likely ey is to accept eir child’s independence; in the same way, fundamentalists, who believe in God as an authority figure, are less likely to accept the expression of human values.

Alison has also pointed out that the same is true of the church environment, which serves a secondary function of behavior monitoring. In this case, however, strong peer pressure is the main motivator, not authority; one dresses, believes and talks as everyone else does in order to stop drawing their disapproval. This is an example of horizontal collectivism (rule-enforcement by equal peers), which we label with the word “culture” (e.g. “corporate culture”) instead of vertical collectivism (rule-enforcement by hierarchy). In practice, both feed on each other, as the elite in a hierarchy make the rules that influence the culture, but those rules are themselves influenced by the culture in which they are created.

So how do believers see atheists? Remember the scenario which was associated with atheists. Atheists, in their mind, will do evil if they can get away with it. They take the quote “if God does not exist, then everything is permitted” quite literally, even though it’s just a kooky hypothetical. Also, from debating many of them, they also often believe that the atheist is only consciously moral because ey (consciously or unconsciously) follows religious dogma, or because ey is being watched. This is the only way they can reconcile the belief that atheists are going to Hell with the belief that “good people” don’t go to Hell: it must be the case that atheists are not “good people.”

From this, we can identify two fundamental premises to atheist distrust. The first is that humans are innately evil. If this was not the case, then humans would not need supernatural monitoring in order to be trustworthy, and atheists would do the right thing whether they were being observed (and thus constrained by guilt or punishment) or not. The second is that supernatural monitoring (in whatever form) improves behavior to a high degree. If supernatural monitoring did not have a moralizing effect, then there would be no reason for believers to trust each other either.

I have already written on the “humans are innately evil” premise in numerous entries, because it provides fuel for statism, religions, and any other ideology which seeks to control human beings. Behind every attempt at control is a lie, and behind every attempt at mass control is the lie of innate evil, always in the background, the hidden gun held to your head: let us have power, or you’re as good as dead because everyone around you is untrustworthy.

In fact, we’ve known ever since Kropotkin published his observations of animal cooperation in Mutual Aid in 1902 that cooperation is primordial in animals, including humans, and that the sense of moral behavior evolved along with sociability in a great number of species, especially primates. More than a hundred years of studies since then, especially on babies and small children but also on adults, has proven that humans are naturally moral (see for instance The Brighter Side of Human Nature, which is basically a compendium of studies on the question).

As for supernatural monitoring, well, the positive relation between religiosity and crime in entire societies is pretty well documented, as well as the fact that seculars have always been at the forefront of egalitarian social movements. There have also been a few studies in individuals, which have found no significant difference in behavior between the religious and the irreligious. This all contradicts the claim that supernatural monitoring makes people a great deal better, or even better at all.

[R]eligious faith appears to be neither necessary for one to act prosocially nor sufficient to ensure such behavior; in fact, there is virtually no connection one way or the other between religious affiliation or belief and prosocial activities.
The Brighter Side of Human Nature, Alfie Kohn, p79-80

As atheists already know, people who are moral because it’s the right thing to do are more honest in their altruism than those who pretend to act morally under threat of punishment:

[C]hildren who come to believe that their prosocial behavior reflects values or dispositions in themselves have internal structures that can generate behavior across settings and without external pressures. By contrast, children who view their prosocial conduct as compliance with external authority will act prosocially only when they believe external pressures are present.
(cited in The Brighter Side of Human Nature, p92-93)

These premises also invoke an origin problem. If humans are innately evil, then why would they voluntarily adopt a religion which forces them to do good through supernatural monitoring? Why wouldn’t they rebel against it, as religious people claim atheists are doing today? How could religion survive, let alone flourish?

Now, morality originates in the evolution of sociability. The problem is that the fanatic believers who distrust atheists also do not believe in evolution, so trying to explain this to them is a futile endeavor. You may remember I’ve identified this as the Creationist Paradox. Trust is a necessary part of cooperation; one cannot just be cooperative in the abstract, but one must cooperate with actual individuals, which requires us to believe their commitments as they believe ours.

The examples of low- and high-trust employment given in the study were waitressing and daycare work. Now, the latter example seems rather strange, since it involves child abuse. If it’s true that such work is high-trust and that thus only religious people should be hired for it (according to believers’ responses), what should we make of endemic child abuse by priests? Aren’t they benefiting from supernatural monitoring as well? Or are they all somehow immune to it, and, if so, what makes them immune and not other believers? Is it a centuries-old conspiracy to get atheists into the priesthood so they can rape children and drag organized religion down the gutter?

And how is waitressing a low-trust job? Seriously, I think any job where people handle my food is pretty high-trust by definition.

Furthermore, given the previous definitions of trustworthiness, wouldn’t a low-trust job be a job where one is always watched or supervised, and wouldn’t a high-trust job be a job where one acts without being watched or supervised? While I agree that waitressing is more watched than daycare work, I don’t think either are very representative (how about hockey players and truckers? just putting that out there).

So what are the implications of this study? Presumably we should be using the results to help us understand how to eliminate prejudice against atheists. First, we find that prejudice against atheists is qualitatively different from homophobia, so using the same strategy as the LGBT movement (which seems to be the new vogue) is counter-productive.

Second, we find that atheists are targeted for prejudice for moral reasons, not for epistemic reasons, and the solution is not to deploy argumentation against the existence of God. It seems, rather, that the solution lies in arguing morality and ethics, something I’ve always promoted. Cognitive dissonance works very well in deconverting someone, but unless you plan to deconvert everyone (a dismal prospect indeed), we have to pay close attention to the issue of distrust, and therefore the issue of morality. Unfortunately, the issue of morality is one that current atheists are ill-equipped to address.

This is exemplified by the study’s conclusion. Gervais, Shariff and Norenzayan’s position is that government takes the place of God in secular societies, and that institutional monitoring is a replacement for supernatural monitoring. They are unable or unwilling to grasp that monitoring is not a precondition for morality, and that it is more plausible that ethical people are the cause of more ethical institutions, not the reverse.

Furthermore, the law is no more a standard of morality than religious dogma, and institutional monitoring is no more effective than supernatural monitoring. Not only that, but it is not clear at all that both fulfill the same role: God can “watch” anything, but human institutions cannot. So even if the point we’re supposed to take away is that institutional monitoring gives people as much confidence in their own superior morality as supernatural monitoring does, it is not clear why this is the case.

Their final conclusion that cooperation is guaranteed by either of these forms of monitoring (and that therefore institutional monitoring is better because it does not lead to atheist distrust) is downright absurd. Rather, history and current events teach us that there is no greater cause of war and civil strife than supernatural and institutional factions. We have to wholly reject such beliefs as authoritarian twaddle.

Morality comes from evolution, empathy and learning how to living in society, not from external factors. That principle has to be made clear before we can make any progress at all against atheist distrust.

The Creationist Paradox

(from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal)

It is a common belief in Christian apologetics that atheists somehow have no grounds for morality, or that only Christians can justify “absolute morality” or “absolute truth,” and that this is a decisive argument against atheism.

To this, there are many valid and fatal responses:

* One can argue that they simply assume that no secular philosophy can justify morality, which is an argument from ignorance.
* One can point out that when Christians are pressed on any moral rule in the Bible, they will immediately retreat to moral relativism (“that rule was only for those people at that specific time!”), thus proving that Christians don’t have an absolute morality.
* One can argue that even if true, it would only justify those assumptions of Christianity that make morality possible, not all of Christianity.
* One can point to the moral track record of Christianity, both in the Bible and in real life.

What I do want to talk about here, however, is a sort of paradox that arises from the refusal to acknowledge evolution.

As I’ve pointed out many times on this blog, morality resulted from the evolution of social structures and the necessity for hardwired rules to override the short-term interests of the individual. We know that sociopaths, who are born without hardwired moral rules, hurt others at will for their own short-term interest, without any guilt or realization of having done wrong.

Now, consider that Creationists constantly remind us that they refuse to believe in evolution not only on factual grounds but also on moral grounds; that if we teach school students they evolved from other animals, they’ll eschew moral values and become criminals.

This might seem as a contradiction of the fact that evolution is the basis of morality. But that’s the paradox: because they don’t accept evolution, they can’t understand where morality comes from, but because they don’t understand morality, they can’t accept evolution!

This is only a paradox in theory. In reality, people reject evolution first, because they are taught that believing in evolution is sinful. The moral issues come afterwards and, I think, mainly come into play as a way to explain how atheists can still appear to be moral. They’re really borrowing from the Christian worldview, doncha know.

A popular argument against the problem of evil is to point out that atheists have no standard on which to declare what is good and what is evil, thus “proving” that they are borrowing from the Christian worldview. This is the one argument they cannot stop using. They use it again and again, at every opportunity and at all opportunities.

So the question we must ask is, why do they hold on to it so much? What is the big secret they are hiding? Like 90% of religious tactics, it’s an act of projection, but also an act of personal insecurity.

They know that they are basically relying on a moral vacuum, that the Bible is not a reliable guide, and this is proven by how fast they go back to moral relativism whenever the Bible is challenged on any moral issue. Furthermore, they were indoctrinated to believe that without moral absolutes they would go apeshit and kill everyone. Therefore they are scared shitless of themselves, because they know they really have no moral absolutes and faith alone is keeping them from becoming monsters.

Their only viable solution, from a psychological perspective, is to project their failings on their opponents and preserve the illusion that their faith rests on a solid foundation. This is why it is absolutely essential that they keep maintaining the belief that the atheists are the ones who are relativists.