Rationally Speaking

On the bases for morality: an exchange

Massimo Pigliucci — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 18:39:02 +0000

[this is a post in two sections, the first by my friend Julia Gailef, a journalist, the second being my response, below]

I hope Massimo won't start regretting his generous invitation for me to co-blog with him (hi readers! great to be here!) if I kick things off by immediately and publicly disagreeing with him. He and I have been having a debate on moral philosophy for the last few weeks, and after the twentieth iteration of the same arguments we decided it makes sense to invite you all to weigh in, at the very least because we're tired of the sound of our own voices by now. Massimo asked me to lay out the debate, and then he'll follow up with his own post next week.

So, I agree with Massimo that moral reasoning is possible, given a set of initial axioms. (Axioms are the starting assumptions on which all of your moral judgments are based, like the concept of certain fundamental rights, or tit-for-tat justice, or protecting individual liberty, or maximizing total happiness). Where I disagree with him is over his belief that it is possible to use scientific facts to justify selecting one particular set of initial axioms over another.

Roughly speaking, Massimo starts with biological and neuroscientificfacts such as "Human welfare requires things like health, freedom, etc." and "Humans are wired to care about each other's welfare," and from these he derives the conclusion, "Therefore, it is moral to act in a way that increases those things which are necessary for human welfare." In my opinion, this is an example of what is sometimes called the naturalistic fallacy: telling me scientific facts doesn't tell me how to act on those facts, and the alleged point of moral principles is to tell me how to act. Science can tell me that if I want to make other people happier, then treating them in certain ways -- giving them health, freedom, and so on -- will accomplish that goal. But science can't tell me whether making other people happier should be my goal.

Alternately, you could use evolutionary biology and neuroscience to argue that being kind to others is the best way to maximize one's own happiness, thanks to the way our brains have become wired over the course of our evolution as social animals. I agree that there's some truth to this claim, but I deny that we can derive any moral principles from it -- it implies only an appeal to self-interest that happens, through lucky circumstances, to have positive consequences for others. (Furthermore, if your moral imperative takes this form, the implication is that if for some reason I were wired differently, then being unkind would not be immoral.)

The difficulty of deriving facts about how people ought to behave from facts about how the world is was most famously articulated by David Hume in his A Treatise of Human Nature (1739):

"In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remark'd, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary ways of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when all of a sudden I am surpriz'd to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is however, of the last consequence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, 'tis necessary that it shou'd be observ'd and explain'd; and at the same time that a reason should be given; for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it."

This is called the "is-ought problem", or sometimes "Hume's Guillotine" (because it severs any connection between "is"- and "ought"-statements). My understanding is that Hume is generally believed to have meant not just that people jump from "is to "ought" without sufficient justification, but that such a jump is in fact logically impossible. There have been a number of attempts to make that jump (here's a famous one by John Searle), though I've found them pretty weak, as have other people with much more philosophical expertise than me.

With that in mind, I can't see any way in which a claim of the kind Massimo is making -- "doing X increases human welfare, therefore X is the moral thing to do" -- could logically hold, unless you're simply defining the word "moral" to mean "that which increases human welfare," in which case the statement is tautologically true. But I'm not sure what we gain by simply inventing a new word for a concept that already exists.

Fortunately, even though I think the blade of Hume's guillotine is inescapably sharp in the philosophical world, I don't think it has the power to sever much in the real world. Because, thanks to some combination of evolutionary biology and social conditioning, I do enjoy being kind, and I do want to reduce other people's suffering -- and I would want to do those things even without a rational justification for why that's "moral." And I believe most people would feel the same way.

But if someone didn't care about other people's welfare, I couldn't accuse him of irrationality. He would be committing no fallacy in his reasoning, nor would he be acting against any of his own preferences. (If he wanted to increase human welfare and yet he knowingly acted in a way that reduced human welfare, then I could legitimately call him irrational.)

Massimo, I believe I've represented our disagreement accurately, but please correct me if I haven't! *thwack* Ball's in your court!

>> Massimo's response <<

I want to thank Julia, our new regular contributor to Rationally Speaking for an honest and clear presentation of her doubts about the possibility of moral philosophy. Judging from the comments to her post, a good number of our readers seem to agree with her position, which is essentially one of moral skepticism, inevitably leading to a morally relativistic position (although she says that she gets her own moral sense from the way she is wired as a social primate, she also admits that she could not honestly blame someone who acted differently and had no inclination to be kind to others or help human welfare).

First off, then, let me suggest that I don’t think anyone is really a moral relativist, not even Julia. Moral relativism, or moral skepticism, is akin to skepticism about the existence of the world: it may be ultimately impossible to conclusively refute in an air-tight logical manner, but no one actually lives in this way, and no one really believes it. (Bertrand Russell once famously said that he wished that all those people who deny the existence of a wall would get into a car and drive straight into the wall at a speed proportional to their lack of belief in the existence of said wall. I am not aware of the actual experiment ever having been carried out, but of course, as any good skeptic knows, even if the people in the car all died this would not prove the existence of the wall — though as Russell remarked rather drily, we would get rid of a number of bad philosophers... But I digress.)

Second, although this discussion is fascinating and I think useful for our readers, neither Julia nor I can possibly hope to settle in this context a complex issue that defines a whole field, that of metaethics, or the rational justification of ethical thinking. Despite the fact that both Julia and several of our readers are dismissive of philosophy as a type of inquiry (a rather curiously anti-intellectual position, in my opinion), I urge the rest of you to read this excellent introductory essay in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy to begin to dig deeper.

All of the above said, let me finally get to the meat of Julia’s essay. Let’s start with this business of “axioms.” During one of our discussions over dinner I brought up the idea of axioms in ethics to refute a point that moral skeptics never fail to bring up, despite its obvious weakness: ethical reasoning is fluff because there are no moral empirical facts. But the skeptics curiously seem to miss an obvious case study which reveals the hollowness of their position. There are in fact well established and unquestionably serious areas of human endeavor for which “facts” are irrelevant. Consider the entire field of mathematics, for instance. I hope no one here will suggest that mathematical reasoning is arbitrary or without foundations. And yet mathematical theorems are valid / invalid regardlessof any empirical fact abut the world.

This example should not be taken lightly, because it is a devastating objection to the moral skeptic, although we need to understand exactly what I am saying here. I am not suggesting that ethics and math are on the same footing, far from it. Rather, I am demonstrating beyond doubt that lack of empirical facts per se in no way precludes the ability of the human mind to reason rigorously about certain entities. It is an interesting philosophical (imagine that!) discussion whether mathematicians discovermathematical truths or they invent them, but in either case such inventions or discoveries are both rigorous and non-arbitrary.

It is of course true that the early 20th century quest for an ultimate, self-contained logical foundation for mathematics failed (see Russell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica) and was ultimately shown to be a mirage by Godel with his incompleteness theorem. Still, no one would argue that because of that mathematics is an arbitrary castle built on clouds. (Indeed, if we take that sort of skeptical position, then even Julia’s much touted empirical science gets into deep trouble, as rather ironically shown by Hume himself with his problem of induction.)

Indeed, I think that ethics is in some sense on a firmer foundation than math, because we can use empirical data from evolutionary biology and cognitive science to provide us with relevant empirical facts in which to ground our enterprise. As I will argue in a minute, this is not at all an instance of Hume’s naturalistic fallacy.

To begin with, I define ethics as that branch of philosophy that deals with the maximization of human welfare and flourishing. I’m sure this will disappoint Julia and others, but I simply don’t understand what else they might possibly wish to include in a talk about ethics. Neither Julia nor I believe in morality as imposed by a god, for a variety of reasons, including the fact that there is not a shred of evidence in favor of the existence of any gods, but more importantly because of the decisive (again, philosophical!) argument known as Euthyphro’s dilemma, in which Plato showed that gods are simply irrelevant to the question of morality.

So yes, for me morality is neither arbitrary (the relativist position) norabsolute (the typical religionist position, though Kant also famously attempted to arrive at a logically necessary ethics via an entirely secular route — and failed). Rather, I think of morality as something that makes sense only for human beings and other relevantly similar species. By relevantly similar, I mean social animals with brains complex enough to be able to reflect on what they are doing and why they are doing it (that is, being able to philosophize!). As far as I know, Homo sapiens is currently the only such species on planet Earth, though of course there may be others elsewhere in the cosmos.

By definition, then, something is moral in my book if it increases human welfare and flourishing (I am leaving aside for the moment the issue of animal rights, which would be an unnecessary distraction at this point. Interestingly, consequentialists like Peter Singer have tackled that problem, and Julia presented herself to me once as a consequentialist — apparently without realizing that a moral skeptic cannot also coherently endorse a particular school of ethics. For the record, I incline toward virtue ethics.)

It is at this point that Julia accuses me of committing the naturalistic fallacy, that is of deriving an “ought” from an “is.” There are several issues to be considered here. First, contrary to what Julia maintains, it is not at all clear that Hume argued that the is/ought connection is impossible, he may simply have been saying that if one wishes to make that connection the project has to be pursued by explicitly unpacking how said connection works or can be justified. Second, of course, as much as I myself love Hume, I don’t think the guy was infallible, and generally speaking invoking authority truly is a logical fallacy.

To be as clear as possible, then, I define as moral an action that increases human welfare and/or flourishing (and yes, I’m aware that the latter two also need to be discussed and unpacked, but this is a blog post, not a treatise), and then ask biologists and cognitive scientists to provide me with some empirical points of reference so that my concept of human flourishing is based as much as possible on the so highly valued empirical data.

Here is where Julia makes a subtle, but revealing, shift: she writes that “science can tell me that if I want to make other people happier, then treating them in certain ways — giving them health, freedom, and so on — will accomplish that goal. But science can't tell me whether making other people happier should be my goal.” But ethics is not about what an individual may or may not want, it is about the species as a whole (and possibly beyond, see my comment on Singer above). Julia of course may reject the idea of behaving herself so as to increase human flourishing, but then she is by definition acting immorally (or at least amorally). She may shrug her shoulders and keep going with her life, of course, but most of us are going to think of her as immoral (she isn’t, by the way, she is one of the nicest people I’ve met).

What I’ve got so far, then, is a working definition of morality and some empirical evidence (from science) of what helps human beings flourish. Why do I need philosophy? Because biology provides us only with a very limited sense of morality, an instinct that there are right and wrong things. But that instinct was shaped — slowly and inefficiently — by a blind natural process that simply maximized survival and reproduction. Once human beings became able to reflect on what they were doing they immediately developed an enlarged sense of flourishing that is not limited to personal safety, food and sex. We also want to enjoy life, be free to explore opportunities, to speak our mind, to admire art, to pursue knowledge, and so on.

Our instincts become a less and less reliable guide when the circle of flourishing is thus enlarged. For instance, it is a universal moral intuition among human cultures that randomly killing members of your group is bad (psychopaths, or to put it as Julia does, people with a different wiring, are not exceptions, they prove the rule: we put them away whenever we encounter them). But natural selection probably also bred into us an instinctive distrust of outsiders. It has taken thousands of years of moral progress (not an oxymoron!) to slowly realize that there is no rationally defensible distinction between in-group and out-group, which means that we need philosophical reflection to build on our natural biological instinct and come up with the humanity-wide rule that it is wrong to randomly kill anyone, regardless of which group s/he happens to belongs to as a matter of accident of birth.

To summarize, then, I think that:

1. The objection that moral reasoning is not based on empirical facts is irrelevant, since there are other non-arbitrary human endeavors that are also so characterized and yet we do not reject them on those grounds(mathematics, logic itself).

2. I define ethics/morality as concerned with exploring the sort of behaviors that augment human (and possibly beyond human) welfare and flourishing. Since this is a definition, it cannot be argued for, only either accepted or rejected. And yes, definitions are tautologies, but they are nonetheless very useful (all of math can be thought of as a tautology, and so is every single entry in a dictionary).

3. Some empirical facts from evolutionary biology and cognitive science inform us as to where and why we have a moral instinct to begin with, and also about what sort of behaviors do in fact increase human flourishing. It is because of this that I can confidently say, for instance, that genital mutilation of small girls is wrong regardless of which culture practices it and why.

4. To move beyond the narrow sense of flourishing that generated our moral instincts we need to be able to reflect about these issues in a rational and empirically-informed manner. That is, we need to do science-informed philosophy (or what I call sci-phi).

One more thing: I really don’t think Hume would be upset with any of the above, and I believe he would invite me over for a meal (he enjoyed dinner parties) to amicably explore our differences of opinion. As he famously put it: “Truth springs from argument amongst friends.”

James Randi, global warming and the meaning of skepticism

Massimo Pigliucci — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 18:28:49 +0000

James “the Amazing” Randi is an icon of skepticism. The man has done more — over a span of several decades — to further the cause of critical thinking and to expose flimflammery of all sorts than arguably anyone else in the world, ever. That is why I was struck with incredulity and sadness yesterday when I read Randi’s latest take on global warming. He begins by stating that, contrary to scientists’ own self-image as almost preternaturally objective human beings, “religious and other emotional convictions drive scientists, despite what they may think their motivations are.” Well, true, to a point. Many philosophers and sociologists of science have said that before (and documented it), but your baloney detector should go up to at least yellow alert when someone starts a commentary on global warming with that particular observation.

The following paragraph is perhaps one of the most astounding I have ever seen penned by a skeptic. It reads in part: “some 32,000 scientists, 9,000 of them PhDs, have signed The Petition Project statement proclaiming that Man is not necessarily the chief cause of warming, that the phenomenon may not exist at all, and that, in any case, warming would not be disastrous.”

Wow, Randi fell for the old “thousands of scientists are against science” trick! First off, I’d like to see the 32,000 signatures (there is no link from the essay). Second, last time I checked, in order to be a career scientist youhave to have a PhD, so how come only 9,000 of the signatories did? Did the rest not manage to finish graduate school? But more importantly: were the 32,000 climate scientists? Because if not, then it doesn’t matter how many of them signed the petition. I can easily get thousands of medical doctors (are they “scientists”?) to sign a petition to the effect that evolution doesn’t occur, or an equivalent number of assorted PhDs to express doubts on quantum mechanics, and so on. Having a PhD in a particular field provides no expertise whatsoever in another field, and Randi, of all people, should have known this.

“History supplies us with many examples where scientists were just plain wrong about certain matters, but ultimately discovered the truth through continued research” continues the essay. Another logical fallacy. Yes, the history of science has documented many blunders made by scientists, which usually are redressed by the built-in self-correcting mechanisms of science itself. But to imply that therefore the idea of human-caused global warming is another of these mistakes is like saying “Van Gogh was a great artist and he died penniless; I am penniless, therefore I am a great artist.” It is a non sequitur.

What sort of argument allows Randi to reach his conclusion about global warming? “The myriad of influences that act upon Earth are so many and so variable — though not capricious — that I believe we simply cannot formulate an equation into which we enter variables and come up with an answer.” Really? So Randi doesn’t think climate scientists are aware of the complexities posed by their own discipline? And they should give up building increasingly sophisticated climate models (which, by the way, don’t rely on “an equation”) because he thinks it’s too tough?

And then there is the often lurking ultra-optimism that so many climate skeptics display with no hint of contradiction: “Earth has undergone many serious changes in climate, from the Ice Ages to periods of heavily increased plant growth from their high levels of CO2, yet the biosphere has survived. We're adaptable, stubborn, and persistent — and we have what other life forms don't have: we can manipulate our environment. Show me an Inuit who can survive in his habitat without warm clothing... Humans will continue to infest Earth because we're smart.” So let me get this straight: we are not smart enough to model the changing climate, but whatever problem there is, we are smart enough to solve it. I guess what Walt Whitman used to say is true , great minds are large enough to accommodate contradictions.

But the real damning part of Randi’s essay comes when he says: “I strongly suspect that The Petition Project may be valid. I base this on my admittedly rudimentary knowledge of the facts about planet Earth. ... this my amateur opinion, based on probably insufficient data.” This is essentially saying that although Randi has no expertise whatsoever in a complex scientific field, together with very scant information on the specifics of the problem, he nonetheless “suspects” that the overwhelming majority of (PhD-holding) practitioners in that field have made a colossal mistake. So are we supposed to take his position seriously on authority alone (another logical fallacy)? And where does that authority come from? His undoubted ability to expose real nonsense like hand surgery?

Yesterday was a sad day for skepticism because Randi’s essay will now comfort legions of pseudoscientific “skeptics,” regardless of the fact that I’m sure this was not his intention. But what was his intention, exactly? If Randi were Penn & Teller, I would have a ready answer: it is the libertarian ideological bias of P&T that has led them more than once to talk real bullshit to their audiences about issues like global warming, environmentalism, world politics, and economics. But I do not know Randi’s political leanings, so I will not speculate further. My guess is that this is just classic Randi, who is known for occasionally shooting from the hip just to stir the waters a bit, with the honest intention of stimulating critical thinking. Except that these waters have been quite muddied already by big corporations who have been actively engaged in public deception about this issue for years , so that public opinion and politicians are already confused enough, almost to the point of paralysis. I really think this was an uncharacteristically bad target for Randi to choose.

More broadly, however, we need to pause and think carefully about the entire skeptical movement in light of episodes like this one. “Skepticism” in modern parlance indicates a science- or evidence-based approach to the examination of unusual claims, typically in the realms of the paranormal, astrology, alternative medicine and the like. More recently, skeptics have expanded their aim to include some controversial issues in science, under the reasonable position that science itself should not be exempt from critical analysis. Fair enough, except that science already has a large number of professional critics: scientists themselves (remember the peer review system?), as well as philosophers and sociologists of science. Moreover, while critical analysis of claims of the paranormal does not really require professional scientific expertise (indeed, Randi’s own spectacular career shows that the pertinent expert is more often a magician, since wannabe paranormalists often employ trickery to fool the public), actual science criticism does.

I am not suggesting that critical evaluation of science is a matter to be reserved only to people with PhDs. But I am suggesting that public figures like Randi, Penn & Teller, or Bill Maher (the Dawkins-award winner who thinks that vaccines cause autism and who is generally skeptical of “Western medicine”) are doing a huge disservice to both the skeptical movement and the public at large when they step into territory about which, frankly, they are simply not qualify to talk. The role of skeptics who are not professional scientists is to educate the public about critical thinking (Randi’s Foundation being one of the shiniest examples). This is done most effectively through the kind of public outreach — including spectacular demonstrations, tv shows and comedy sketches — that professional scientists don’t do because they don’t have the time and they are not good at it.

But these same people should remember that the mantle of “skepticism” does not provide one license to shoot from the hip and express a cynical attitude about anything and anyone. When we cross that line from positive skepticism into negative cynicism we do no favors to critical thinking, instead we undermine the whole notion and we make the public equally distrustful of serious scientists as they should be of Deepak Chopra. The public loses, and the Chopra of the world run laughing all the way to the bank.

Podcast Teaser: Love, a skeptical inquiry

Massimo Pigliucci — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 16:12:34 +0000

[from guest blogger and podcast co-host Julia Galef]

Hey there, rational readers! I’m honored to be Massimo’s guest blogger and co-host of the upcoming Rationally Speaking podcast for the NYC Skeptics. Since our second episode is scheduled to air the week of Valentine's Day, we couldn’t resist making that show's topic, “The Skeptic’s Guide to Love.”

I do realize that raising this subject risks fueling the widespread and irritating misconception that “skeptic” = “cynical killjoy,” which is the last thing I want to do. So, please let the record show that I am enthusiastically pro-love. (Also pro-kindness, pro-motherhood, and pro-puppies, in case anyone’s keeping track.)

And yet... just like other mysterious and unexplained phenomena (see: “consciousness“), love makes people reach for metaphysical explanations, and that makes me reach for my skep-tools. I've noticed that many people seem to think of love as some sort of immaterial essence that is either present or absent, such as the soul. To them, “love” isn’t just the name we give to a certain set of emotions, it’s another entity altogether, of which the emotions are merely a symptom. That’s why you hear people talk about how they do or don’t “believe in” love, or about whether love exists — again, similar to the way people talk about the soul.

However, as good skeptics, what do we do when faced with a mysterious and unexplained phenomenon? We look for explanations! Science has already found correlations between particular hormones and certain forms or stages of love. Dopamine is associated with romantic obsession, and oxytocin and vasopressin with long-term attachment. Evolutionary biologists also have some theories about why love developed (pair bonding was necessary to raise our helpless human young, for example).

But will science ever really be able to explain love? No matter how many correlations we find between brain activity and love, correlation is not causation. You could even argue that, just like other qualia, the actual experience of being in love is a subjective, private phenomenon that can never be studied scientifically because each occurrence of the phenomenon has only one observer.

An aside: scientists aren’t the only ones who have tried to explain love. Philosophers since the Greeks have also considered it their domain. Personally, I don’t think philosophy is equipped to contribute anything useful to the discussion. (You’re going to disagree with me on this one, aren’t you Massimo? Bring it!)

[Massimo’s note: well, philosophy isn’t suppose to “explain” things in the manner in which science does, it is supposed to reflect on things and analyze their meanings for the human experience.]

Finally, what if we could explain love scientifically — would that change our attitude towards it? Would the knowledge that this transcendent feeling is generated by the presence of a particular chemical in our brain detract from the transcendence? And if we were forced to admit that the concepts of “soulmates” or “true” love are nonsensical, would we love less deeply?

Massimo and I have our own thoughts on the matter, of course, but we want to hear yours. Leave us your comments below, dear readers, and we look forward to discussing them in Episode #2 of Rationally Speaking: The Podcast!

-Julia

Podcast Teaser: Why rationality?

Massimo Pigliucci — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 22:35:17 +0000

Dear readers, Rationally Speaking is soon going to be (also) a podcast, produced by New York City Skeptics, and co-hosted by Julia Galef and yours truly. Before each (initially biweekly, starting at the end of January) episode we will publish a “teaser” like the one below, introducing the topic of that episode and inviting comments from our readers. Your comments will provide us with additional food for thought, and the most interesting ones will be read and discussed during the show.For our inaugural episode, we’re going to kick things off by asking: Why is “speaking rationally” a worthwhile goal, anyway? It’s not self-evident, at least not to many people. Human beings certainly don’t seem made for it. Aristotle may have famously dubbed us “the rational animal,” but cognitive science tells a different story, with plenty of evidence that our brains blithely flout logic all the time and are excellent at rationalizing our irrational decisions after the fact.So why fight our irrational natures? After all, some people argue that irrationality can make us happier, at least in certain situations. There’s also a widespread attitude that even if irrationality has some negative consequences, it’s nevertheless inextricably linked to the best parts of our humanity: love, passion, and creativity. From this standpoint, “rational” is synonymous with “cold, soulless, dispassionate” — in other words, Vulcan.What do you think — are reason and emotion at odds? Are there downsides to being rational, and if so, are they necessarily outweighed by the upsides? And even if you personally choose to strive for rationality, should you try to make other people more rational as well? What if their irrationality makes them happy?Leave your thoughts below, and we’ll pick the most interesting comments to discuss in Episode #1 of Rationally Speaking: The Podcast!

Inverted qualia

Massimo Pigliucci — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 14:43:02 +0000

A couple of months ago I attended a lecture by Saul Kripke at CUNY’s Graduate Center. Kripke is one of the most influential philosophers of the late 20th century, someone who you simply have to go see give a talk if you have the chance, on the sole basis of his legendary status. As in many such cases, it is not unlikely that one is going to be disappointed, given the extremely high expectations. Sure enough, Kripke was not at his best that day, and his legendary extemporaneous style of lecturing fell short of the mark, resulting in an interesting, but somewhat chaotic and hard to follow talk. Still, I’ve seen the genius at work. Which reminded me of the problem of inverted qualia, about which Kripke has an ongoing disagreement with other philosophers of mind, chiefly Colin McGinn.

What on earth are “qualia,” and what’s so problematic about having them inverted? Daniel Dennett famously said that qualia is “an unfamiliar term for something that could not be more familiar to each of us: the ways things seem to us” (think of colors, or sounds, or taste). He also added that qualia is “one of philosophy's most virulent memes,” and although I don’t buy into the whole memetics spiel, I must admit that he has a point.

The problem of inverted qualia goes back to John Locke, who asked us to imagine a situation in which we wake up one day and — without any physical change having occurred in the world or in our brain — we suddenly perceive colors in a different way: what used to be red now gives the sensation formerly known as green (and vice versa). Ok, one might say, cute little thought experiment, but who cares? We are supposed to care because the inverted qualia argument allegedly shows that secondary qualities (like colors), and particularly first person “phenomenological” experiences of said qualities, do not depend on a particular physical substrate in the brain, i.e. they have no physical basis.

What? Well, here is the actual formal argument, as far as it goes:

Premise 1: If X is possibly false, then X is not necessary.

P2: It is conceivable that the relationship between qualia and physical states of the brain be different from what it actually is.

P3: What is conceivable is possible.

Conclusion 1: Qualia are therefore not identical with brain states.

C2: Also, qualia are not physical.

Got that? That’s the beauty of analytic philosophy: its arguments can be expressed in a formal fashion, which is meant to make as clear as possible what one’s premises and conclusions are, so that others can fairly examine them and either accept them or knock them down one by one. (For comparison, try doing the same with anything by Derrida or Foucault, good luck.)

With the case in question, we could of course attack any or all premises. I am going to let P1 stand, because it does actually tell us that if something is logically possible then it is physically possible, and I do believe that the set of physical possibilities is nested within the set of logical ones (though one could of course argue that that depends on which type of logic one is using, etc.).

P2 is tricky: yes, it is conceivable that the relationship between qualia and physical states of the brain be different from what it actually is, all one has to imagine is different physical properties of light, or different chemicals perceiving light falling on our retinas, or a different type of signal transduction in the brain. But the crucial part of the inverted qualia argument is not just that the relationship between qualia and physical states could be different, it is that qualia could be inverted with no physical change at all with respect to the way things are at the moment. That, I maintain, is impossible. In other words, we certainly could have brains wired in a way so that what to other animals looks red would look green to us, but that can only be accomplished by a physical change in the way the brain works (indeed, we do have empirical examples of something like this: the bewildering phenomenon of synesthesia).

P3, as appealing as it superficially is, is also highly debatable. I can conceive, for instance, of a universe with different physical laws, like a different gravitational constant. But that doesn’t guarantee that such a universe is possible: there may be very good reasons, unknown to modern physicists, why such a universe could actually not come into existence. This is a fascinating area of inquiry, concerned with the relationship between logical and physical possibility. But it’s treacherous territory, and if I were a non-physicalist, I wouldn’t stake too much on it. (This is, of course, why I don’t buy David Chalmers’ silly arguments about zombiesand the hard problem of consciousness.)

What about the conclusions, then? Obviously, all we need to do is to refute one of the three premises and we are done, the conclusions no longer follow. Still, I’ll probably buy into C1, if we modify it thus: qualia are not necessarily identical with the particular brain states we happen to have. Different brain states could generate the same qualia, depending on the complex pathways connecting the physical objects in the external world, their perceivable properties, and the evolutionary history and physical makeup of our own perceptual systems.

C2, on the other hand, I think is simply daft: qualia are not physical? Really? So why do we need physical objects, physical eyes, physical neurons, and so on, to perceive them? Alter any of the above, and our perception of qualia changes, a really strong reason to believe that qualia are in fact physical. (Similarly, the minimally reasonable position about consciousness is what some philosophers refer to as the “no ectoplasm clause”: however consciousness works, it’s grounded in a functional physical brain; take the brain away, you’ve got no more consciousness.)

So, whatever disagreement Kripke and McGinn are still having about inverted qualia, I doubt it matters in the long run: secondary qualities are better and better explained by neurobiology and cognitive science, and philosophers should make use of such explanations to inform the many interesting debates still open in philosophy of mind.

The incoherence of free will

Massimo Pigliucci — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 20:16:22 +0000

I recently re-read a classic piece by J.L. Mackie (April 1955), entitled “Evil and Omnipotence,” a stupendous philosophical essay about why theologians like Richard Swinburne are forced by their belief in an omnipotent, omnibenevelont and omnipowerful god into incredible and rather painful feats of mental gymnastics. One of Mackie’s minor points in the essay is that the so-called “free will defense” for the existence of evil in the world is problematic because the concept of free will itself is incoherent. Although, sometimes accusations of incoherence are thrown around a bit too easily in philosophy, I think this one has the potential to stick. (Mackie goes on with a devastating critique of the free will defense, a critique that remains effective even if the core concept should in fact prove to be coherent.)

Philosophically speaking, I still think that the best treatment of free will is the one given by Dan Dennett in his Elbow Room, which is a delightful book to read in its own right. Nonetheless, one may wonder whether the concept that emerges from Dennett’s analysis is in fact what most people would recognize as “free will.”

Of course, both words making up the term have the potential to be problematic, since it is not necessarily clear what we might mean by “will.” However, for the purposes of this discussion I will simply say that the will — insofar as human beings are concerned — is whatever set of motivations (and underlying neurological mechanisms) are behind the fact that we do certain things rather than others or, indeed, that we do anything at all. (Indeed, patients affected by severe damage to their amygdalas, for instance, seem to loose the will to do anything, likely because they've lost any emotional attachment to themselves and to things in the world: just like David Hume famously predicted, without emotions “It is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.”)

Moreover, I do not see a problem in, for instance, the Aristotelian concept of “akrasia,” or weakness of the will. Some people find it contradictory, because if I end up doing something out of my own volition — like eating a piece of chocolate cake — I cannot simultaneously claim that I did this “against my will,” because I knew that eating chocolate cake isn’t healthy. However, any human being who has struggled with food, sex, and other desires can make perfect sense of the idea of a weak will that makes you act against your own best interest even when you know perfectly well where such interest lies.

Anyway, back to the “free” part of free will. The obvious question is: free from what? That’s where coherence quickly becomes a problem. Unless you are a dualist — a thankfully dying breed among philosophers — you can’t possibly mean free from causal interactions with matter/energy, i.e. independent of the laws and materials of the universe. The will, whatever it is and however we like to conceptualize it, is grounded in the biological activity of our neurons. And last time I checked our neurons are made of matter, exchange energy (in the form of electrical currents and chemical reactions), and are subject to the laws of physics. So if that’s what you mean by “free,” it’s a no starter.

The next popular argument for a truly free will invokes quantum mechanics (the last refuge of those who prefer to keep things as mysterious as possible). Quantum events, it is argued, may have some effects that “bubble up” to the semi-macroscopic level of chemical interactions and electrical pulses in the brain. Since quantum mechanics is the only realm within which it does appear to make sense to talk about truly uncaused events, voilà!, we have (quantistic) free will. But even assuming that quantum events do “bubble up” in that way (it is far from a certain thing), what we gain under that scenario is random will, which seems to be an oxymoron (after all, “willing” something means to wish or direct events in a particular — most certainly not random — way). So that’s out as well.

It now begins to look like our prospects for a coherent sense of free will are dim indeed. If it ain’t random-quantistic or independent from causal interactions with the rest of the world, in what sense is it “free”? But if the will is not free, are we then not simply lumbering robots at the mercy of a mechanical, uncaring universe? (Or, worse yet, puppets in some god’s hands?) This conclusion strikes most people as intuitively deeply unsatisfactory. Moreover, wouldn’t that mean that human behavior would be predictable, at least in principle, if reductionist/mechanistic science became sufficiently advanced? That also strikes many as clearly off the mark.

One possible response is that, frankly, if the conclusions of a rational analysis go against your deepest held intuitions, so much the worse for your deepest held intuitions. But of course we also know that there are in fact non-deterministic physical systems (the time of decay of an individual atom, for instance), and we even know of perfectly deterministic systems whose behavior is for all effective purposes impossible to predict (chaotic, i.e. highly non-linear systems whose status at any given point in time is highly sensitive to initial conditions). So having a will that is causally connected to the rest of the physical world does not imply that our behavior is rigid or predictable.

Still, does that mean that we are in fact lumbering robots, whose illusion of being free is a combination of our ignorance of the causal web within which we are embedded and of our limited ability to compute our own future status? I think the best answer here comes from research in the cognitive sciences, which increasingly points to (at least) two levels of decision making in the brain: on the one hand, we now know that our subconscious makes a lot of decisions before we are consciously aware of them (think of those experiments showing the time-delay in electrical potential between when a muscle is being activated to perform a given action and when the subject becomes aware of having made the decision to perform that action, for instance). On the other hand, consciousness still seems to be a bit more than just a “rationalizing” process, taking on instead the role of high-level filter, or moderator, of unconscious brain processing (e.g., we can still stop an ongoing action if our conscious attention becomes focused on it).

What all of this seems to suggest is that the undeniable feeling of “free will” that we have is actually the result of our conscious awareness of the fact that we make decisions, and that we could have — given other internal (i.e., genetic, developmental) and external (i.e., environmental, cultural) circumstances — decided otherwise in any given instance. That’s what Dennett called a type of free will that is “worth having,” and I consider it good enough for this particular non-dualist, non-mystically inclined human being.

On the difference between science and philosophy

Massimo Pigliucci — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 14:00:55 +0000

Attentive readers of this blog may have noticed that those who post comments to my entries often show two interesting and complementary attitudes: a fundamental distrust of (if not downright contempt for) philosophy, coupled with an overly enthusiastic endorsement of science. Take, for instance, my recurring argument that some (but not all!) of the “new atheists” engage in scientistic attitudes by overplaying the epistemological power of science while downplaying (or even simply negating) the notion that science fundamentally depends on non-empirical (i.e., philosophical) assumptions to even get started. Since my personal career, first as a scientist for 27 years, now as a philosopher, has been marked by experience in both fields, and moreover by a strong belief that the two enterprises are complementary and not adversarial, I feel it is time to make some extended comment on this general issue.

It is perhaps appropriate to tackle the problem at the end of 2009, the year that marks not just the 150th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (and the 150th anniversary of the publication of the arguably even more momentous On Liberty by John Stuart Mill), but also the 50th anniversary of C.P. Snow’s famous essay “on the two cultures,” on the intellectual divide between the sciences and the humanities.

In his essay, Snow (rightly) chastised what he saw as an unjustifiable attitude of intellectual superiority on the part of people from the humanities’ side of the divide: “A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's?” Indeed, it ought to be indefensible that someone is considered ignorant for not having read Shakespeare, and yet the same charge is unthinkable when it comes to fundamental scientific concepts, like the second principle of thermodynamics.

But the problem cuts equally deeply on the other side, just consider the following quote from physicist Steven Weinberg (in his Dreams of a Final Theory): “The insights of philosophers have occasionally benefited physicists, but generally in a negative fashion—by protecting them from the preconceptions of other philosophers ... Philosophy of science at its best seems to me a pleasing gloss on the history and discoveries of science.” Here Weinberg makes the all-too common mistake of thinking of philosophy as of an activity whose entire worth is measured by how useful it is to solve scientific problems. But why should that be so? We already have science to help us solve scientific problems, philosophy does something else by using different tools, so why compare apples and oranges? By the same token, why not ask why art critics don’t produce paintings, for instance, or editors write books?

For the purposes of this discussion, I assume that most people have at least some idea of what science is, if not of the intricacies of the epistemological and metaphysical problems inherent in the practice of science (and there are many: as Daniel Dennett put it in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, “There is no such thing as philosophy-free science; there is only science whose philosophical baggage is taken on board without examination.”) Science, broadly speaking, deals with the study and understanding of natural phenomena, and is concerned with empirically (i.e., either observationally or experimentally) testable hypotheses advanced to account for those phenomena.

Philosophy, on the other hand, is much harder to define. Broadly speaking, it can be thought of as an activity that uses reason to explore issues that include the nature of reality (metaphysics), the structure of rational thinking (logic), the limits of our understanding (epistemology), the meaning implied by our thoughts (philosophy of language), the nature of the moral good (ethics), the nature of beauty (aesthetics), and the inner workings of other disciplines (philosophy of science, philosophy of history, and a variety of other “philosophies of”). Philosophy does this by methods of analysis and questioning that include dialectics and logical argumentation.

Now, it seems to me obvious, but apparently it needs to be stated that: a) philosophy and science are two distinct activities (at least nowadays, since science did start as a branch of philosophy called natural philosophy); b) they work by different methods (empirically-based hypothesis testing vs. reason-based logical analysis); and c) they inform each other in an inter-dependent fashion (science depends on philosophical assumptions that are outside the scope of empirical validation, but philosophical investigations should be informed by the best science available in a range of situations, from metaphysics to ethics and philosophy of mind).

So when some commentators for instance defend the Dawkins- and Coyne-style (scientistic) take on atheism, i.e., that science can mount an attack on all religious beliefs, they are granting too much to science and too little to philosophy. Yes, science can empirically test specific religious claims (intercessory prayer, age of the earth, etc.), but the best objections against the concept of, say, an omnibenevolent and onmnipowerful god, are philosophical in nature (e.g., the argument from evil). Why, then, not admit that by far the most effective way to reject religious nonsense is bycombining science and philosophy, rather than trying to arrogate to either more epistemological power than each separate discipline actually possesses?

Another common misconception is that philosophy, unlike science, doesn’t make progress. This is simply not true, unless one measures progress by the (scientific) standard of empirical discovery. But that would be like accusing the New York Yankees of never having won an NBA title: they can’t, they ain’t playing the same game. Philosophy makes progress because dialectical analysis generates compelling objections to a given position, which lead to either an improvement or the abandonment of said position, which is followed by more critical analysis of either the revised position or of the new one, and so on. For instance, ethical theories (moral philosophy), or theories about consciousness (philosophy of mind), or about the nature of science (philosophy of science), have steadily progressed so that no contemporary professional philosopher would consider herself a utilitarian in the original sense intended by Jeremy Bentham, or a Cartesian dualist, or a Popperian falsificationist — just in the same way in which no scientist today would defend Newtonian mechanics, or the original version of Darwin’s theory.
It is also interesting to note that the process I just described may never reach and end result, but neither does science! Scientific theories are always tentative, and they are always either improved upon or abandoned in favor of new ones. So how come we are willing to live with uncertainty and constant revision in science, but demand some sort of definitive truth from philosophy?

Now why is it that so many people take sides on a debate that doesn’t make much sense, rather than rejoice in what the human mind can achieve through the joint efforts of two of its most illustrious intellectual traditions? I think the answer here is no different from the one available to Snow fifty years ago: people in the humanities are afraid of cultural colonization (which is actually the expressed agenda of scientistic thinkers like E.O. Wilson, see his Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge), while scientists have been made arrogant by their recently acquired prestige and enhanced financial resources, so that they don't think they need to bother with activities that don’t bring in millions of dollars in funding every year.

It’s a rather sad, and indeed positively irritating, state of affairs, which is being fought by a handful of activities (usually, though not always, initiated by philosophers), like my own “sci-phi” effort, or like the Permanent Observatory on Integration between the Human and Natural Sciences in Italy. It’s an uphill battle, especially in an era of ever increasing academic specialization, not to mention the ease with which people can now customize their intellectual experiences online, reading only the sort of things they are already interested in, or authors with whose positions they already agree. Which is actually one of the things that make this particular forum somewhat unusual and, to me at least, stimulating. So fire away your opinions, let the sci-phi discussion begin!

David Chalmers and the Singularity that will probably not come

Massimo Pigliucci — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 14:44:47 +0000

David Chalmers is a philosopher of mind, best known for his argument about the difficulty of what he termed the “hard problem” of consciousness, which he typically discusses by way of a thought experiment featuring zombies who act and talk exactly like humans, and yet have no conscious thought (I explained clearly what I think of that sort of thing in my essay on “The Zombification of Philosophy”).

Yesterday I had the pleasure of seeing Chalmers in action live at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He didn’t talk about zombies, telling us instead his thoughts about the so-called Singularity, the alleged moment when artificial intelligence will surpass human intelligence, resulting in either all hell breaking loose or the next glorious stage in human evolution — depending on whether you typically see the glass as half empty or half full. The talk made clear to me what Chalmers’ problem is (other than his really bad hair cut): he reads too much science fiction, and is apparently unable to snap out of the necessary suspension of disbelief when he comes back to the real world. Let me explain.

Chalmers’ (and other advocates of the possibility of a Singularity) argument starts off with the simple observation that machines have gained computing power at an extraordinary rate over the past several years, a trend that one can extrapolate to a near future explosion of intelligence. Too bad that, as any student of statistics 101 ought to know, extrapolation is a really bad way of making predictions, unless one can be reasonably assured of understanding the underlying causal phenomena (which we don’t, in the case of intelligence). (I asked a question along these lines to Chalmers in the Q&A and he denied having used the word extrapolation at all; I checked with several colleagues over wine and cheese, and they all confirmed that he did — several times.)

Be that as it may, Chalmers went on to present his main argument for the Singularity, which goes something like this:

1. There will soon be AI (i.e., Artificial Intelligence)
2. There will then soon be a transition from AI to AI+
3. There will then soon be a transition from AI+ to AI++

Therefore, there will be AI++

All three premises and the conclusion where followed by a parenthetical statement to the effect that each holds only “absent defeaters,” i.e., absent anything that may get in the way of any of the above.

Chalmers was obviously very proud of his argument, but I got the sense that few people were impressed, and I certainly wasn’t. First off, he consistently refused to define what AI++, AI+, or even, for that matter, AI, actually mean. This, in a philosophy talk, is a pretty grave sin, because philosophical analysis doesn’t get off the ground unless we are reasonably clear on what it is that we are talking about. Indeed, much of philosophical analysis aims at clarifying concepts and their relations. You would have been hard pressed (and increasingly frustrated) in finding any philosophical analysis whatsoever in Chalmers’ talk.

Second, Chalmers did not provide a single reason for any of his moves, simply stating each premise and adding that if AI is possible, then there is no reason to believe that AI+ (whatever that is) is not also possible, indeed likely, and so on. But, my friend, if you are making a novel claim, the burden of proof is on you to argue that there are positive reasons to think that what you are suggesting may be true, not on the rest of us to prove that it is not. Shifting the burden of proof is the oldest trick in the rhetorical toolbox, and not one that a self-respecting philosopher should deploy in front of his peers (or anywhere else, for that matter).

Third, note the parenthetical disclaimer that any of the premises, as well as the conclusion, will not actually hold if a “defeater” gets in the way. When asked during the Q&A what he meant by defeaters, Chalmers pretty much said anything that humans or nature could throw at the development of artificial intelligence. But if that is the case, and if we are not provided with a classification and analysis of such defeaters, then the entire argument amounts to “X is true (unless something proves X not to be true).” Not that impressive.

The other elephant in the room, of course, is the very concept of “intelligence,” artificial or human. This is a notoriously difficult concept to unpack, and even more so to measure quantitatively (which would be necessary to tell the difference between AI and AI+ or AI++). Several people noted this problem, including myself in the Q&A, but Chalmers cavalierly brushed it aside saying that his argument does not hinge on human intelligence, or computational power, or intelligence in a broader sense, but only on an unspecified quantity “G” which he quickly associated with an unspecified set of cognitive capacities through an equally unspecified mathematical mapping function (adding that “more work would have to be done” to flesh out such notion — no kidding). Really? But wait a minute, if we started this whole discussion about the Singularity using an argument based on extrapolation of computational power, shouldn’t our discussion be limited to computational power? (Which, needless to say, is not at all the same as intelligence.) And if we are talking about AI, what on earth does the “I” stand for in there, if not intelligence — presumably of a human-like kind?

In fact, the problem with the AI effort in general is that we have little progress to show after decades of attempts, likely for the very good reason that human intelligence is not algorithmic, at least not in the same sense in which computer programs are. I am most certainly not invoking mysticism or dualism here, I think that intelligence (and consciousness) are the result of the activity of a physical brain substrate, but the very fact that we can build machines with a degree of computing power and speed that greatly exceeds those of the human mind, and yet are nowhere near being “intelligent,” should make it pretty clear that the problem is not computing power or speed.

After the deployment of the above mentioned highly questionable “argument,” things just got bizarre in Chalmers’ talk. He rapidly proceeded to tell us that A++ will happen by simulated evolution in a virtual environment — thereby making a blurred and confused mix out of different notions such as natural selection, artificial selection, physical evolution and virtual evolution.

Which naturally raised the question of how do we control the Singularity and stop “them” from pushing us into extinction. Chalmers’ preferred solution is either to prevent the “leaking” of AI++ into our world, or to select for moral values during the (virtual) evolutionary process. Silly me, I thought that the easiest way to stop the threat of AI++ would be to simply unplug the machines running the alleged virtual world and be done with them. (Incidentally, what does it mean for a virtual intelligence to exist? How does it “leak” into our world? Like a Star Trek hologram gone nuts?)

Then the level of unsubstantiated absurdity escalated even faster: perhaps we are in fact one example of virtual intelligence, said Chalmers, and our Creator may be getting ready to turn us off because we may be about to leak out into his/her/its world. But if not, then we might want to think about how to integrate ourselves into AI++, which naturally could be done by “uploading” our neural structure (Chalmers’ recommendation is one neuron at a time) into the virtual intelligence — again, whatever that might mean.

Finally, Chalmers — evidently troubled by his own mortality (well, who isn’t?) — expressed the hope that A++ will have the technology (and interest, I assume) to reverse engineer his brain, perhaps out of a collection of scans, books, and videos of him, and bring him back to life. You see, he doesn’t think he will live long enough to actually see the Singularity happen. And that’s the only part of the talk on which we actually agreed.

The reason I went on for so long about Chalmers’ abysmal performance is because this is precisely the sort of thing that gives philosophy a bad name. It is nice to see philosophers taking a serious interest in science and bringing their discipline’s tools and perspectives to the high table of important social debates about the future of technology. But the attempt becomes a not particularly funny joke when a well known philosopher starts out by deploying a really bad argument and ends up sounding more cuckoo than trekkie fans at their annual convention. Now, if you will excuse me I’ll go back to the next episode of Battlestar Galactica, where you can find all the basic ideas discussed by Chalmers presented in an immensely more entertaining manner than his talk.

Cable news: who cares?

Massimo Pigliucci — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 00:57:24 +0000

The recent news coming out of the perennial war of ratings among cable news channels was shocking, I tell you, just shocking: CNN, which three decades ago invented the whole business of cable news, is now dead last in terms of prime time viewership!

The numbers speak clearly: in October, CNN averaged 211,000 daily viewers aged 25 to 54 (the people who matter, because they have money and the inclination to buy what the advertisers sell), against 221,000 of HLN (formerly known as Head Lines News, ironically, a CNN spinoff!), 250,000 of MSNBC, and a whopping 689,000 for Fox.

Things don’t look any better for good old CNN if we look at the performance of individual anchors: Anderson Cooper’s show was dead last at 211,000, while Keith Olbermann was at 295,000, and Bill O’Reilly beat everyone at 881,000 (this is total viewership, regardless of age bracket — notice that O’Reilly is particularly popular with the old white male cantankerous crowd...). The only consolation for Cooper, but not for CNN, is that Lou Dobbs could interest only 162,000 viewers with his cheap populism and anti-immigration rants.

Now, we could be spending our time decrying the fact that Americans seem to have a strong preference for opinionated editorializing (be it Obermann or O’Reilly) over real solid news. Except of course that CNN hasn’t offered real solid news in a long time. Or we could bemoan the fact that a vitriolic ideologue like O’Really totals almost three times more viewers than the equally ideological but far less vitriolic and infinitely more sane Obermann.

But that would be missing the real story. Let me give you some othernumbers for comparison, so that we can put things in proper context. The total adult population of the United States is 231 million, which means that even O’Reilly is not actually followed by more than 0.4 percent of the population. The daily readership of the much dreaded (by O’Reilly) New York Times is about 1 million, the audienceship of the beleaguered (by Republican-led budget cuts) National Public Radio is a whopping 6.5 million daily. For crying out loud, even Jon Stewart’s Daily Show beats O’Reilly hands down, with an average viewership of over 2 million, and a peak performance of 3.6 million!

So the real question is: why do we give a damn, as a nation, about what O’Reilly, Obermann, Dobbs, and company say? Why do these people have the power to affect national debates about health care, wars, and the environment, while clearly more reasoned voices actually get much more attention, and when the overwhelming majority of Americans are paying no attention at all?

The latter, of course, is the answer. Yes, O’Reilly’s power derives in part from the dollars that advertisers “invest” on his programs, and in part from the fact that we live in a society where those who shout — even when they are a small minority — get to dictate the terms of the “discussion” to the rest of us (witness the inane spectacle of last summer’s “town hall meetings”).

But it is us who let them do it, largely through apathy. Progressives in this country could count on an overwhelming majority of votes if the majority of eligible voters bothered to vote. A few weeks ago, instead, even in New York City — where there are more political activists than in almost the entire rest of the country combined — a tiny fraction of voters turned out for a runoff primary that for all effective purposes decided the election of a crucial political post like that of City Comptroller.

Republicans know this and act accordingly. Years ago the Christian Coalition devised their “12.5% strategy” to control the country. They reckoned that less than 50% of Americans go to vote, and that the fraction is about half that at primaries, which means that a candidate only needs half again of that (i.e., slightly above 12.5% of the total) to win the primary, which often means winning the general election. It worked, until recently, when the Obama machine turned out unprecedented numbers of minorities and poor to vote during the last presidential election.

Americans are so full of themselves that one of their favorite mantras is that they are “the best democracy in the world,” while actual comparative sociological studies show that the US only ranks below the middle of the pack in terms of quantitative measures of democracy (including, of course, voter participation). As the near certain reelection of Michael Bloomberg as mayor of New York City next week attests — despite the fact that the guy shamefully overturned a term limits law that would have barred him from running a third time — this is simply, the best democracy that money can buy. And what do we do about it? Instead of getting mad and throwing out the clowns, the ideologues and the rich people who think of politics as their personal pastime, we change the channel and watch reruns of Two and Half Men. We truly deserve, then, the little we get from our political class.

On the scope of skeptical inquiry

Massimo Pigliucci — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 01:42:35 +0000

There has been much discussion lately on this blog and elsewhere about the relationships among skepticism, atheism, and politics. I have roundly criticized Richard Dawkins for extending scientific skepticism into areas that are more properly the domain of philosophical analysis, as well as Penn and Teller and Michael Shermer for doing the same with politics to support their libertarian views. Of course, even a cursory reader of this blog will easily find my own pieces about religion and politics, which may make it seem like I’m a sinner throwing stones at my fellow skeptics.

In reality, this debate has been going on for decades, and it has at times involved some of the great figures of skepticism. Just think of Paul Kurtz’s struggle to balance his own organizations, the Council for Secular Humanism (which publishes Free Inquiry) and what is now known as the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (which puts out Skeptical Inquirer), organizations that most certainly not always see eye to eye when it comes to mixing skepticism, religion and politics. Michael Shermer, on the other hand, has been criticized on his own multi-author blogfor not making a distinction between scientifically defensible notions and political positions. And of course, Penn and Teller’s absurd denial of global warming, and recent Dawkins award winner Bill Maher’s insane criticism of “western medicine” complete this increasingly messy picture.

Before continuing, therefore, let me be clear about what it is I am trying to do . I am most definitely not seeking to tell people what to write about and what to stay away from. Not only would that be futile, but it is contrary to the spirit of open inquiry that I hold as one of my highest ideals. Besides, as I mentioned earlier, I can easily be seen as a repeat offender on this very blog, and coherence is another ideal I hold pretty high (despite one of my favorite quotes by Walt Whitman: “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes”).

What I am attempting is a serious discussion of the differences and commonalities among the three areas pertinent to the topics in question: (scientific, or evidence-based) skepticism, atheism, and political philosophy. This blog is about all three because those are my interests and because I am presumptuous enough to think that I have something relevant to say in those domains. But I am in fact continuously switching among three not automatically interchangeable hats: (former) scientist, (current) philosopher, and politically-minded intellectual. All of that said, let the game begin!

First, let me define what I mean by skeptical inquiry, atheism and political philosophy. Skeptical inquiry, in the classic sense, pertains to the critical examination of evidential claims of the para- or super-normal. This means not just ghosts, telepathy, clairvoyance, UFOs and the like, but also — for instance — the creationist idea that the world is 6,000 years old. All these claims are, at least in principle, amenable to scientific inquiry because they refer to things that we can observe, measure and perhaps even repeat experimentally. Notice, of course, that (some) religious claims do therefore fall squarely within the domain of scientific skepticism. Also in this area we find pseudohistorical claims, such as Holocaust denial, and pseudoscientific ones like fear of vaccines and denial of global warming. Which means of course that some politically charged issues — like the latter two — can also pertain properly to skeptical inquiry.

Second, let us turn to atheism. Once again: it is a philosophical, not a scientific position. Now, I have argued of course that any intelligent philosopher ought to allow her ideas to be informed by science, but philosophical inquiry is broader than science because it includes non-evidence based approaches, such as logic or more broadly reason-based arguments. This is both the strength and the weakness of philosophy when compared to science: it is both broader and yet of course less prone to incremental discovery and precise answers. When someone, therefore, wants to make a scientific argument in favor of atheism — like Dawkins and Jerry Coyne seem to do — he is stepping outside of the epistemological boundaries of science, thereby doing a disservice both to science and to intellectual inquiry. Consider again the example of a creationist who maintains in the face of evidence that the universe really is 6,000 years old, and that it only looks older because god arranged things in a way to test our faith. There is absolutely no empirical evidence that could contradict that sort of statement, but a philosopher can easily point out why it is unreasonable, and that furthermore it creates very serious theological quandaries.

Lastly, let’s consider political philosophy. Again — just like with atheism above — it would be silly for a political philosopher to reject pertinent empirical claims: we do have some evidence from the social sciences and from history about what happens when certain economic or political systems are seen at work in human societies. But political philosophy is fundamentally a matter of values: one starts with certain “rights” for instance that one thinks ought to be safeguarded, and then builds the best political/economic system that is likely to do the job. Talk of rights is, again, philosophical in nature, not empirical. One can (and should) defend what one means by “rights” and why one considers certain rights to be more fundamental than others. But all such discussions largely transcend empirical evidence (which, again, should not be ignored).
If the distinctions above are so clear, why, then, do we keep running into the mess with which I started this essay? Because the three areas in question do have a common underpinning, as illustrated by the diagram accompanying this article: atheism, skeptical inquiry, and political philosophy are all exercises in critical thinking and rational analysis. The differences among them is in the relative role that philosophical and scientific/empirical considerations play in each case.

That is why, for instance, I can coherently say that Penn and Teller are wrong about their libertarianism and about their position on global warming: in the first case, I am talking about philosophy, in the second about science. There is, of course, much more leeway in the first than in the second case. That’s also why there is no contradiction in me praising Bill Maher for his political views and yet thinking of him as a hopelessly inept commentator when it comes to his opinions on medicine. To consider one more example, this is also how I can agree with Dawkins’ and Coyne’s philosophical positions (and disagree with “accommodationists” like Ken Miller) and yet distance myself from them on the ground that I think they are stretching the tools of science beyond what is reasonable.

All of this may seem confusing and perhaps even an irrelevant exercise in hair-splitting, but it is in fact what makes discussions within the skeptic community — and society at large — so interesting and delicate. By all means, let’s continue to argue about atheism, politics and UFOs. But let us be mindful of the fact that the types of arguments and evidence that are pertinent to one area do not necessarily carry over to another one. Which means that people should refrain from using the venerable mantle of skepticism to engage in silly notions like denying global warming or the efficacy of vaccines. That’s an insult to critical analysis, which is the one thing we all truly cherish.