The “context” doesn’t always make it better

When Libby Anne of Love, Joy, Feminism wrote this post about being an atheist but not working against religion, I started drafting a reply. But that was three weeks ago, and other things have taken up my attention in the meantime. Then Sam Harris posted this complaint about having his words (from The End of Faith) taken out of context in an image meme. And he provided what he considered to be the necessary context. The thing is, the context doesn’t actually make him look much better. I do think that religion in general is something that should be opposed, and some day I’ll get around to explaining why. But it is much more important that Sam Harris’s kind of atheism be opposed. I’ll give you the full passage, with the offending sentence in bold. Content note: violence, casual reference to torture, fear tactics targeting a non-Western religion.

The power that belief has over our emotional lives appears to be total. For every emotion that you are capable of feeling, there is surely a belief that could invoke it in a matter of moments. Consider the following proposition:
Your daughter is being slowly tortured in an English jail.
What is it that stands between you and the absolute panic that such a proposition would loose in the mind and body of a person who believed it? Perhaps you do not have a daughter, or you know her to be safely at home, or you believe that English jailors are renowned for their congeniality. Whatever the reason, the door to belief has not yet swung upon its hinges.
The link between belief and behavior raises the stakes considerably. Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them. This may seem an extraordinary claim, but it merely enunciates an ordinary fact about the world in which we live. Certain beliefs place their adherents beyond the reach of every peaceful means of persuasion, while inspiring them to commit acts of extraordinary violence against others. There is, in fact, no talking to some people. If they cannot be captured, and they often cannot, otherwise tolerant people may be justified in killing them in self-defense. This is what the United States attempted in Afghanistan, and it is what we and other Western powers are bound to attempt, at an even greater cost to ourselves and to innocents abroad, elsewhere in the Muslim world. We will continue to spill blood in what is, at bottom, a war of ideas.

Note on the above:
We do not have to bring the membership of al-Qaeda “to justice” merely because of what happened on Sept 11, 2001. The thousands of men, women, and children who disappeared in the rubble of the World Trade Centre are beyond our help – and successful acts of retribution, however satisfying they may be to some people, will not change this fact. Our subsequent actions in Afghanistan and elsewhere are justified because of what will happen to more innocent people if members of al-Qaeda are allowed to go on living by the light of their peculiar beliefs. The horror of Sept 11 should motivate us, not because it provides us with a grievance that we now must avenge, but because it proves beyond any possibility of doubt that certain twenty-first-century Muslims actually believe the most dangerous and implausible tenets of their faith.

Sam Harris, The End of Faith, cited by the author in On the Mechanics of Defamation

I hadn’t read The End of Faith before. Otago University’s copy is housed in a special collection of books on religious topics which for historical reasons is outside the campus and bothersome to get to. If I had read this passage before now, I would have held Harris in much lower esteem than I did up until he blogged it. Honestly, I’m mystified as to what part of the “context” he provides is supposed to make it any better to suggest it might ever be OK to kill people for their beliefs. Granted that a person’s beliefs motivate their action to an extent that nothing else does; still, belief in turn is contingent upon circumstances, as the gratuitously horrifying analogy Harris himself opens with should have demonstrated (what would have been wrong with Steven Pinker’s illustration of the same point, “Your car is being towed”?). One way belief can change is through rational conversation, albeit usually some time after the fact, but I can think of no strategy better designed to close the doors on rational conversation than to suggest you might be justified in killing your interlocutor for their beliefs. A more common reason for belief to change is that the new belief makes better sense of the believer’s life experience than the old one, but if the old one is “Westerners are evil and must be destroyed”, then a pronouncement like Harris’s is only going to confirm it.
There was a time when it was generally accepted that it was reasonable to kill someone for their beliefs. Then people changed their minds about that, and there’s a reason why that change of mind was called “the Enlightenment”. Yes, I know that Europeans used the gains they enjoyed from killing each other less to consolidate their power and go and harass the rest of the world. Nevertheless, Enlightenment sceptics didn’t go around killing Christians. Or suggesting killing Christians. Or saying it would be ethical to kill Christians if they couldn’t capture them. Considering what Catholics and Protestants as groups at that time earnestly believed they needed to do to sceptics, as well as to “witches” and each other, by Harris’s standards the sceptics’ conduct was needlessly and indeed foolhardily restrained. Does Harris – does anyone – think civilization would have been better advanced if they’d taken up arms?
Harris might answer that those are pragmatic considerations, bearing on the wisdom of saying that it’s ethical to kill some people for their beliefs rather than on whether it’s true. Harris and I have different views of what constitutes the ethical, of course. I agree with him that the basic measure of goodness is subjective well-being. And my view on subjective consciousness allows at least the theoretical possibility of aggregating and comparing well-being across multiple subjects (Harris’s view, that consciousness is irreducibly and unfathomably mysterious, would rule this out). But ethics is not just about what circumstances would, in theory, be best, if only they could happen. It’s about what actions on our part will bring about the best result. For this purpose there is no getting around the fact that you can’t measure well-being in practice. You have to factor your uncertainty, and other people’s uncertainty about you, into your calculations. In the end it works out to maximizing trust and minimizing fear. If someone is actively trying to kill you or other innocent people, killing them might in many tragic cases be the best you can do; but attacking first creates fear, not trust, and is therefore unethical. I can’t quite believe that actually needed saying.

Imponderable II: Free Will

I began the first Imponderable by bagging on Jim Flynn’s ideas about free will. I’m terribly sorry to give an unbalanced impression of Flynn, who is a first-rate political theorist, but I’m going to have to do it again. Some day I will do a political blog post which pays proper tribute to Flynn’s immense positive contributions to human understanding. For now, I’m afraid Flynn’s very clarity and force of expression make him the best starting-point for exposing the confusion in the traditional Western concept of free will.

The concept of free choice is perfectly coherent and easily stated. Free choice, to the extent that it is real, would be an uncaused cause. It is the opposite of what we call an epiphenomenon. A good example of the latter is the reflection of a tree in a pond: if you cut down the tree, the reflection disappears; but if you drop a rock on the reflection, the tree is unmoved. An epiphenomenon is all effect and no cause. If free choice exists, the present self has a genuine choice between (at least) two alternatives and creates a future that would not otherwise have existed. If we decide to pick up hitchhikers as an act of charity at a greater risk to our lives, the world will be different: more hitchhikers will get to their destinations quicker and some extra lives will be lost. Free choice breaks the flow of the world from past to future and thus the result is what philosophers call “metaphysical discontinuity”.

Jim Flynn, Where Have All the Liberals Gone? p. 265

Imponderable I: Morality

Let’s suppose that in the year 2115 neurologists tell us that they’ve figured out how the brain actually understands things. What would that mean? Precisely that they can explain it in terms of components that do not themselves understand.
Perhaps they tell us:

Here’s how the mind understands. The mind is composed of three components, the blistis, the morosum, and the hyborebus. The blistis and the morosum have nothing to do with understanding; the part that understands is the hyborebus.

We don’t have to know what these things are to know that they’ve failed. This cannot be an explanation of understanding, because it simply transfers the problem from the “mind” to the “hyborebus”. It’s like explaining vision by saying that the optic nerve brings the image from the eye to the brain, where it’s projected on a screen that’s watched by a homunculus. How does the homunculus’s vision work?

Mark Rosenfelder, Understanding the Chinese Room

This will be the first of a series of six or seven articles, aimed at explaining things that are fundamental to human experience (or so we think) and which boggle the mind when we try to analyse them: meaning, consciousness, knowledge, the self, free will, morality. The trouble, I believe, is not that these things have no explanation, nor even that we can’t comprehend the explanation. The trouble is drawn out by the quote above. We don’t have a problem applying it to most things: we can all accept that a car doesn’t have a smaller car under its bonnet driving on a little treadmill to make the big car go, and that if it did it wouldn’t explain anything because you’d still have to ask what makes the little car go.
But with the Imponderables, as I shall call them, our intuitions run the wrong way.

A science of morality? My thoughts on Sam Harris

(Originally published 26 July, 2011, as a Note on my Facebook.) 
After a frustrating delay, the University of Otago's library has finally got around to acquiring a copy of Sam Harris's The Moral Landscape.  Having been champing at the bit for months, reading only such excerpts as Harris has chosen to present on the internet, I can at last comment on it from a position of knowledge. 
Harris's basic thesis can be summed up as follows:

• Moral values are synonymous with the well-being of conscious creatures.
• Science can, in principle, determine what actions will enhance or diminish the well-being of conscious creatures. 
• Therefore, science can, in principle, determine moral values. 

Harris's title is carefully chosen: there may, he says, be many peaks on the moral landscape, and he is not claiming to prescribe a simple formula for right living.  Most of the other criticisms of the thesis that will no doubt have occurred to you from my brief summary are covered in the book, which (I can assure you) is well worth reading.