Neurath's Boat

Death penalty test cases

Philosoraptor presents one of those kinds of cases which is often used to justify the death penalty, a case where it is very difficult emotionally not to want a death by slow torture for the perpetrators. Certainly that's my reaction, and I'd even add the same for anyone who has an ounce of sympathy for the perpetrators. But I try to recognize that this is not very productive; burning hate does not tend to produce good public policy.*

It's pretty well established what's actually needed to help improve situations like this. Give women more power, and things like this happen less often; giving women more power seems to make just about everything better, based on comparative studies of various communities and societies, but in particular it definitely helps women. So we should be reaching out to women in the communities where these situations occur, doing what we can to increase their educational and economic opportunities and working to fight all of the oppression they are subject to, not just the most horrifying high profile headline-grabbing examples of oppression.

Further, even from the point of view of satisfying our emotions rather than public policy, the form of death penalty under discussion is virtually never that; the form of the death penalty which is under debate is supposed to be painless and humane. I'm not sure why it's more emotionally satisfying to subject someone to a painless death than to subject them to the horrible conditions in prisons. So I don't really see how test cases like this are particularly informative concerning the death penalty debate.

* One respect in which emotions are very bad guides; I'd like to think that I'd be no less horrified by the case if the victim were not an attractive young woman, but I'd be lying to myself. My emotional reactions are not as politically enlightened as my intellectual responses, though over time my intellectual responses do have some tendency to train my emotional responses to be a little less horribly embarrassing.

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Life update

I don't usually post things about my own life here, as I have another blog I never update for that purpose.  However, this item is of fairly huge personal significance, so I thought I should mention that I successfully defended my dissertation a couple of days ago.  I am now a Doctor of Philosophy.

Now I just need to get a bunch of papers published.  I did get a few recommendations on which things to extract from my dissertation and try to publish, and I will be trying to put together a paper on infinite complexity at some point in the near future.

The meaning of religious claims

P. Z. Myers has recently been in a bit of a flap over his claims that religious belief is foolish and irrational.  I've also been hanging around with Dan Dennett's goddaughter a bit, and Dennett of course pulls no punches when it comes to criticizing religion.  I have myself thought about the content of religious claims before, as I find it to be a profound puzzle how anyone can take them seriously, and recent events have gotten me back on that subject.

Most philosophers know that the old positivists were in the habit of dismissing religious claims as meaningless, devoid of cognitive content like the various metaphysical claims they so famously opposed.  In fact, that is slightly oversimplified, as they standardly distinguished between what they called mythological religious claims and what they called metaphysical religious claims.  The terminology may not be ideal, but I don't have any really good replacements, so I'll stick with their terms.

Mythological doctrines essentially involved treating the tales of gods and miracles as historical claims, which of course we have every reason to think are false.  This is the version of religious doctrine which Myers and Dennett so like to mock.  The positivists, on the other hand, paid virtually no attention to this interpretation of religious claims.  Partly this is because they saw religious philosophers as more prone to the metaphysical than the mythological, and partly this is because they saw many religious believers as equivocating between the mythological and the metaphysical, but I think there is more to it.

On the metaphysical interpretation, religious claims are, according to the positivists, devoid of cognitive content.  There is no test to determine whether the god of the philosophers, that metaphysical abstraction, exists or not.  It is very unclear what the claim that such a god exists even means; the religious philosophers themselves often emphasize the mysteriousness of the absolute.  The positivists argued that it's so hard to interpret the metaphysical religious claims because in fact they have no content at all; they aren't really saying anything which could be true or false.

Now, it is not clear why it would ever be a problem that people sometimes make meaningless noises.  We already knew that.  So a little appreciated question is why the positivists considered metaphysics to be in need of being attacked, of being criticized, if really it said nothing at all.  If it's all just babbling, wouldn't that make it harmless?  The reason the positivists thought otherwise is that they didn't think metaphysics lacked any content whatever.  According to the positivists, metaphysical claims encoded disguised values.

This is why viewing metaphysical claims as true or false was, according to the positivists, anything but harmless.  The encoding sought to put the values above criticism.  Since they were being presented as truths, the usual examination to which we subject values (contemplating what we really want and trying to coordinate our aims with one another and with those of other people) are ruled out; truths are not matters to be negotiated.  But since they weren't really truths, they couldn't be tested as truth claims usually are either; no such tests were applicable.  Thus, the metaphysical values could not be criticized at all, and it is this attempt to conjure up absolute values and shut down any possible challenge to them which the positivists found profoundly dangerous and harmful.

I think this explains why the positivists focused on the metaphysical aspects of religion.  We read polls that more than 90% of Americans believe in God in some form, and far more specific and empirically questionable claims are also endorsed by very large numbers.  But I think that's misleading.  It's questionable to me that a majority of those people really believe what they claim to, at least in the sense that they believe, for example, that ripe bananas are yellow or George W. Bush is president.  As Hume noted, no Christians act as if they believe they'll go to hell if they sin.  Very few of them will go to faith healers rather than doctors if they're sick.  Very few of them consult religious authorities on any factual questions about how the world works which are relevant to their lives.

I think even for the religious rank and file, the religious claims are metaphysical in the positivists' sense.  The strange, crazy religious doctrines are value judgments of various kinds, disguised as truths.  Thus, they are not treated as truths by most of the believers in everyday life.  Still, they are presented as truths, and this disguise plays a vital role (insulating them from being seen as evaluative preferences, subject to negotiation).  Thus, criticizing them as truths still challenges them, and the religious will respond fiercely to any such challenge.  They will be all the more passionate about it since it is their values that they see as really under attack, but they have to defend the claims as truths in order to maintain the edifice of disguised values.

Of course, this diagnosis of what's going on does not immediately indicate what to do about it.  Since religious values are often deeply problematic, and confusing truths with values probably does have some tendency to foster other confusions about truth, I agree with Myers and Dennett that it would be profoundly preferable if more people could be freed from viewing religious claims as true in any sense.  But the fact that religious doctrines are not held for anything like the reasons most factual beliefs are held makes it hard to know how to question them; questioning their factual basis seems like it won't work very well unless the factual basis is actually relevant to the holding of the belief.  Still, other alternatives are not obvious either.

Thoughts inspired by David Charles Stove

I came across a book written by Stove the other day, and it was utterly horrifying.  I know some of my readers are well enough informed to question why this should be any surprise; surely he only wrote bad books, I can hear them thinking.  Indeed, my very first encounter with Stove was when I examined his attempted refutation of Hume's inductive skepticism.  That attempted refutation is sufficiently awful that I feel a little guilty about shooting fish in a barrel when I wrote a term paper criticizing it.  However, the book I just found was a collection of Stove's attempts at writing more popular essays, and disturbingly they do seem to have been somewhat popular.  It disturbed me enormously that the back cover had a favorable blurb from David Armstrong.  The two were apparently friends, but still, I don't see how anyone with a shred of self-respect could even hint at endorsement of the contents of the book.

I think one of the most revealing essays in the book, at least for philosophers, is Stove's criticism of Nozick.  Nozick was, of course, a well-known right-leaning philosopher, and the usual practice of right-wing nuts is to embrace anyone intellectually respectable who seems to agree with them in part, so it seems on the surface odd that Stove should bother to write an essay against someone who was in any way allied with him, when his enemies were so plentiful.  The explanation, however, is relatively straightforward.

Nozick really believed that coercion was wrong, indeed that it was pretty much the worst thing possible.  His libertarian views were founded on that basic principle, that coercion is just not acceptable, when it is performed by anyone for any reason, and so governments, like all other people and institutions, should be stripped of their coercive power as much as possible.  He was, in other words, clearly not one of the typical internet libertarians with wet dreams about how he'd lord it over everyone else with his arsenal of guns once the government stopped pestering him.

As a result, Stove thought Nozick was a pussy.  Admittedly, Stove didn't put it in (quite) such crude terms, but the terminology perfectly captures his intent; Stove was extremely misogynistic.  One of his essays in Against the Idols argues vigorously for the intellectual inferiority of women, and his prudishness (which also comes up in his criticism of Nozick) is also a common trait of misogynists (for those who think women are only for sex, "women are bad" and "sex is bad" tend to get bundled together).  Stove thought feminists and hippies and various other nefarious characters were corrupting the pure, manly intellectual standards of the academy and of political institutions, and clearly thought Nozick had too many such soft-headed, feminine inclinations.  Sure, Nozick said he liked free markets, but he was unaccountably squeamish about sending tens of thousands of soldiers to die and killing hundreds of thousands of foreigners in a dubious effort to slightly weaken the forces of communism worldwide.  Real anti-communists favored having a huge military and using it often, even if the military was hardly a bastion of free market practices and it was paid for by high, market-distortion-inducing taxes.  Real anti-communists were real men, you see.  Nobody who opposed the Vietnam War, as Nozick did, could have been a real man, and so no such person could be a real anti-communist.

I didn't intend this to be such a long post.  Still, it's clearly more relevant to the blogosphere than most of my writings, so maybe it's OK to ramble on a bit.

A book on the subject which seems rather good

Geoffrey Miller's The Mating Mind impressed me.  It was clearly intended for a general audience, and so light on the really detailed evidence, but Miller showed an awareness not shared by the other evolutionary psychologists I've looked at to recognize when his data wasn't all that and be cautious with his speculations.  His speculations were nonetheless fascinating and in many cases plausible.

In particular, I am attracted to his theory that humans might have evolved ethical behavior as a mating display.  Altruism obviously involves taking on costs for no apparent benefit, and it is less often noted that the same is true of punishment in most instances.  One of the depressing aspects of this theory, but also one of my reasons for finding it extremely plausible, is that it accounts for why people generally devote so little effort to making sure their generosity and punishments are directed at the most appropriate targets.  If we punish people to show off our surplus power, and perhaps our commitment to the community, we're going to want to punish unpopular people (harming popular people will have negative effects which would undermine the benefits of the display), but punishing people who are actually guilty, or whose behavior is likely to be usefully influenced by the punishment, would hardly matter at all.  That is a pretty good description of how people target their punishments.

Of course, I also take this as further evidence for utilitarianism.  The objections which are always considered so problematic for utilitarianism involve cases where utilitarianism gives answers that feel wrong.  If Miller's right about where our ethical feelings come from, my own inclination to think people shouldn't be putting so much faith in their unanalyzed feelings seems even more justified.