Robert Talisse and I were just interviewed by Ann Fisher on NPR this morning. We were plugging our new book, Reasonable Atheism. The podcast of the show is available here, and a streaming video of the show is up here.
All posts by Scott Aikin
Discrimination by any other name
Roger Scruton is a serious philosopher. That's why I was disappointed to read his American Spectator article defending an English couple's right to refuse to allow a gay couple to share a room at their hotel (see the Guardian report). It's not that I was disappointed that Scruton would defend these folks (I expected that), but that I expected a good argument. Instead, I got the old canards.
Maybe that [laws prohibiting discrimination] is the only way to proceed, but it involves curtailing freedom in ways that can easily be resented.
Ah, prohibiting discrimination curtails the freedom of discriminators to discriminate. That is a very important freedom, indeed. And we must be very careful not to cause people the harm of feeling resentment. That's a much worse harm than not being treated as an equal.
We discriminate between people on grounds of their height, their age, their strength, their virtue, their looks.
Oh, the false analogy! The familiar, yet utterly irrelevant, old saw of the discrimination apologists. Yes, we discriminate on the basis of characteristics relevant to a job, opportunity, and so on. Isn't the burden of proof always on those who do the discriminating to explain why some characteristic is relevant? If there is a relevant connection between the characteristic and the opportunity, we don't call the decision 'discriminating,' but 'distinguishing.' Is there a relevant bit of distinguishing to be done with homosexuality?
The purpose of including sexual orientation in the open-ended "non-discrimination" clauses of modern legal systems is to overcome "prejudice," to normalize homosexuality…. It is, however, much more of a prejudice to think that matters of sexual conduct can, in this way, be simply placed beyond moral judgment — as though they were not, for ordinary people, the very essence of the moral life.
Ad populum, too. Everyone thinks it is unnatural and immoral, so that's evidence it is. But why think that these views are right?
It is one part of a considered religious morality that has stood the test of time.
But why does the fact that it is an old view make it a good one, yet? Surely at some point in time over the course of the long testings of time someone must have said that perhaps the view needs to be worked out in some detail. After all that time, all they have to say for the view is that it is old and keeps getting older… standing the test of time. Oh, but the times are changing.
THIS, IT SEEMS TO ME, shows what is really at stake in these disputes. They are not about human rights, or about the perennial conflict between liberty and equality. "Non-discrimination" clauses are ways of smuggling in vast moral changes without real discussion . . . . Sex, sexual orientation, and maybe soon sexual practices — so that the hotel keeper will no longer be able to discriminate against the person who happens to live as a prostitute.
And the slippery slope to running a flophouse for prostitution for a finale! Well, at least he didn't have the slippery slope to bestiality. And after having repeated the same old weak arguments for discrimination, has Scruton made any headway in helping this real discussion he wants to have? I'm sad to say I don't think so. Which, again, is too bad. Because he's the best thinker that conservatives have. That may be evidence as to just how bad-off the conservative case against gay rights is.
How not to defend yourself (gnu atheist style!)
For those of you who don't know, Rob Talisse and I have been posting about atheism and argumentative civility over at 3QuarksDaily. First, here; the follow up here. Our book, Reasonable Atheism is on the shelves now, too. In the blog posts, we've been trying to untangle the ugliness about the charge of 'accommodationism' among the atheists. Well, that angers the gnus, because they keep thinking that people are wagging their fingers at them about tone. And angry atheists don't like to be told to be nicer. (And, by the way, nothing about what we'd written was about tone, anyway. So…)
We criticized PZ Myers, of pharyngula fame, for making an error we see a lot: holding a person in contempt for believing something you think is false. The point is that there's a difference between being wrong and being stupid, and Myers makes the error all too often. He posted a comment on our first entry (Feb 7, 2011 10:36:49 PM) and said that there are 'irrational reasons'. But only people are irrational. Reasons are irrelevant, insufficient, poorly arranged, and so on. A person may be irrational for holding those reasons, but that's the point. He's making the error in spades there. We made the distinction again in the follow-up and even provided some examples. And then Myers defends himself with this:
Dear sweet goddess of academic loquaciousness, is the whole book written in that style? Is anyone going to be able to read it? Those three paragraphs nearly killed me with their preening opacity! And, near as I can tell, all they're doing is fussing over the conjunction of two words that they found incomprehensible.
Wow. That we were hard to read is a defense? Seriously? I now know why Myers thinks that most sophisticated defenses of religious belief are totally stupid. He doesn't understand them, because he has no interest in reading hard things. A shame, really, that someone who stands for rational discourse and reason helping has no interest in responding to criticism with any.
Oh, and if we needed to make explicit the form of the fallacy, it's ad hominem abusive. Classic, baby, classic.
Berkeley’s Master Fallacy?
I'm currently teaching Modern Philosophy, and we are reading Berkeley's Three Dialogues. Philonous's presentation of what Gallois (1974 Phil Review) calls Berkeley's "Master Argument" (MA) was always particularly striking to me. The majority of my concern about the argument was along Bertrand Russell's line of resistance: there is a confusion between imagining, say, a tree independent of mind and holding that the tree, in imagination, is dependent on the mind. So I'm not sure the argument is sound. I still have that concern, but yesterday morning I found myself having another problem with the argument. Maybe NonSequitur readers can help me out here, because I, now, don't even think the argument is valid. But it can be revised. Here goes.
Here's Philonous's presentation of the MA (edited for space):
I am content to put the whole upon this issue. If you can conceive it possible for … any sensible object whatsover to exist without the mind, then I will grant it actually to be so….
Is it not as great a contradiction to talk of conceiveing a thing which is unconceived?…
Now, I've always understood the MA to be one that establishes the falsity of materialism (or non-mentalism) and the truth of idealism (as the two being mutually exclusive and exhastive options). That is, if you show the falsity of one, you've established the other. The MA is a demonstration that materialism is false. But as stated, it doesn't do so validly. Here's a formalized version:
P1) If it is possible to conceive of a sensible object w/o a mind, then it is possible that those things exist without minds.
P2) It is not possible to concieve of a sensible object w/o a mind.
C) It is not possible that there are sensible objects without minds.
Again, most folks object to P2. That still seems right to me. But even if you grant P2, the argument doesn't go through, because it's a fallacious form of inference: Denying the antecedent. That is, the form of the argument is:
P1) If P, then M
P2) not-P
C) not-M
This is craziness. Now, I think that there are two options for Berkeley-defenders to go here. The first is to say that C, because it's not explicitly stated, isn't the conclusion. But Philonous certainly seems to be convinced that he's shown not-M in the follow-up with Hylas. And in the Principles, Berkeley takes it that MP on P1 with P2 establishes the falsity of idealism:
[I]f you can but conceive it possible for … any thing like an idea, to exist otherwise than in a mind perceiving it, I shall readily give up the cause. (PHK 22)
Now, this seems clear that he does think that P2 establishes certain truths, specifically, the truth of materialism and the falsity of idealism. So I'm unsure that this first option is really a good interpretive one for Berkeley-defenders. But it seems plausible philosophically.
The second option is to read all those IF-clauses as ONLY IF-clauses. And so P1 should be, rather:
P1*) I will agree that Materialism is true ONLY IF it is possible to concieve of a thing existing independently of a mind.
P2, then, works just fine to show that Materialism is false, by Modus Tollens, now. So the other interpretive strategy is to read Berkeley's argument as needing a switch of antecedents and consequents.
This, by the way, seems even more philosophically plausible than the first option, as I think that P1* is much more plausible than P1. Just because materialism is concievable, it doesn't mean that materialism is true (as P1 runs); but if materialism isn't even consistently conceivable, then that counts as very good evidence that it's false (as P1* runs).
So this strategy saves the MA from the fallacy of denying the antecedent and has it with a more philosophically plausible first premise. The only problem: you have to take it that Berkeley mixed up necessary and sufficient conditions. When he's doing metaphysics. That's uncharitable, to say the least. Oh, and it also doesn't save it from the old Russell objection that P2 is just false.
Give me more absurdum on that reductio!
The philosophical lexicon is an old and funny web resource, and one of the most famous entries on it is the rhetorical strategy of "outsmarting" a dialectical opponent:
outsmart, v. To embrace the conclusion of one's opponent's reductio ad absurdum argument. "They thought they had me, but I outsmarted them. I agreed that it was sometimes just to hang an innocent man."
It's in reference to J.J.C. Smart's famous concession that Utilitarianism does entail that consequence, and so it should be just to do so. In my department, we regularly make reference to the move. Your view about perceptual justification entails external world skepticism? Embrace skepticism – you never really know anything! This view about justice requires that some people can be made slaves? Embrace slavery as just – of course there are natural slaves! Congratulations, you just outsmarted your critics.
A new case of outsmarting was just sent along to me by a colleague. It goes like this. Suppose that an asteroid is heading toward earth, surely to destroy it. Does libertarianism make room for the use of tax money to be used to destroy the asteroid and save the world? Or would that be excessively paternalistic about how we want to meet our end? Or would it be theft, nevertheless? The Onion did a spoof on how Republicans would reject the plan on the basis of how the government's actions would get in the way of a free enterprise solution. That was parody, but Sasha Volokh, over at the Volokh Conspiracy, has a different sort of reason, but of the same spirit and leading to the same conclusion:
I don’t speak for all libertarians, but I think there’s a good case to be made that taxing people to protect the Earth from an asteroid, while within Congress’s powers, is an illegitimate function of government from a moral perspective. I think it’s O.K. to violate people’s rights (e.g. through taxation) if the result is that you protect people’s rights to some greater extent (e.g. through police, courts, the military). But it’s not obvious to me that the Earth being hit by an asteroid (or, say, someone being hit by lightning or a falling tree) violates anyone’s rights; if that’s so, then I’m not sure I can justify preventing it through taxation.
Crooked Timber's already made the Poe's Law observation about this (too bad, because Poe's my thing these days), but this does seem the sort of reduction to absurdity that should make the full-bore libertarian hesitate. Even J.J. Smart has a moment "which makes [him] wonder whether after all [he] really is a utilitarian." Volokh, too, notes that "this does make me uncomfortable." Yeah, me too.
Nanny State Bingo
I've always been a bit put off by the Nanny-metaphor used by libertarian-leaning conservatives to evoke outrage over some policy of governmental overreaching. Regulations for salt in fast food? The "nanny-state" dictates what we eat and our salt-intake. Rise up, salt patriots! Raise taxes on unhealthy food? The "nanny-state" has instituted a fat tax, that nudges us away from the unhealthy foods we want and love. Fast food diners unite! I get it.
The point of the metaphor is that it invokes the paternalism of a caretaker who micromanages a youngster's day in a way that interferes with the child's growing autonomy. The child ends up healthy, but browbeaten. An overbearing Mary Poppins — "Smile Children. Eat your brussels sprouts and then we'll all sing a round of 'Row, Row, Row Your Boat!'" Sometimes, as George Lakoff said, it's all in the metaphors you use.
But now the "Nanny State" metaphor has come unhinged from that original usage. See, as a particularly weird example, Michele Bachmann's use of the metaphor in saying that tax deductions for breast pumps as medical supplies are evidence of nanny state:
I’ve given birth to five babies, and I’ve breastfed every single one of these babies. To think that government has to go out and buy my breast pump for my babies, I mean, you wanna talk about the nanny state — I think you just got the new definition of the nanny state.
First, why is the fact that she breastfed her children relevant? Is it that she's making a contrast between her breastfeeding and pumping? If that's her game, I"ll let working mothers the world over at her.
Second, tthe government isn't going out and buying the pumps. The people who use them are. The government then gives them a tax break — just as the government would give you a tax break for buying any medical technology. I thought Bachmann would be for tax breaks. Huh. But I don't see how a tax break ammounts to the same intrusion as a tax hike, like with the former. In those cases, the government nudges with taxation (a negative reinforcement) citizens away from harmful choices (salt and fat). In this case, the government incentivizes positively good choices. It doesn't mandate them and it doesn't punish those who don't take part. It just seems very different. On this model, isn't every government program nanny state? Meat inspection? Nannies who won't let us eat a little poo in our sausage! Law enforcement? Nanny police. Military protection? Nanny state with guns!
The point, of course, is that once you start doing your political thinking just with catchwords, you lose sight of the core metaphors they got their power from. Did 'nanny state' just jump the shark?
Straw Men, Weak Men, and Hollow Men
John and I just published our essay on varieties of the straw man fallacy, "Straw Men, Weak Men, and Hollow Men," over at Argumentation. Here's the link to the paper.
Low expectations
Bill O'Reilly will be interviewing President Obama before the Superbowl. O'Reilly doesn't want us to expect too much from him. Interviewing the President is, like, hard. For one, you've got all these rules about being respectful. You don't get to cut the President's mic if you don't like what he's saying, or interrupt him and call him a pinhead. Well, that's it:
That's because the rules are different when it comes to interviewing the president of the United States. . . . For example, he is addressed as "Mr. President." No one says "Yo, Barack, how you doin'?" There is a respect for the office that formalizes all conversation.
Right. You don't open with 'Yo.' But the point is that you don't undermine the dignity of the office, instead of make some lame attempt at racializing the president. Seriously, 'Yo'. Yo. Right, so were the president Irish, you make a big deal about not starting your conversation with President O'Malley with "Blarney!" or asking where he keeps his leprechauns. Methinks the pundit doth protest too much.
Regardless, O'Reilly prepares us for a subpar interview and a round of critical beatings of his interview. Instead of preparing his questions, he's preparing his rationalizations.
I fully expect to get hammered after the interview. Depending on how you feel about the president, the questions will either be too soft or too intrusive.
Nope. False dilemma. O'Reilly can't even rationalize properly. The questions will not be either too soft or too intrusive. They will be too improperly formed. Too ideologically obtuse. Too pandering to an audience on the other side of the camera and not to the person to whom they are posed. Too… Fox. And they will be insufficiently intelligent, serious, or intelligible. They will be exactly what we expect from Bill O'Reilly. Which means that our expectations will be low. Just as O'Reilly has asked us to set them. Except for different reasons. Oh well, at least we're all prepared for his journalistic failure. The only problem is that too many will blame the President and his office for O'Reilly's failure, not the interviewer. Sheesh, if O'Reilly knew already that this interview wouldn't portray him in a good light, why did he agree to it in the first place? Doesn't the President know that O'Reilly is important and that interviewing Presidents is hard on him and puts his career in danger? It is such a sacrifice, you know, interviewing a President when you know that you just can't win.
I won’t forget to place roses on your grave
Tu Quoque arguments, it seems to me, have a statute of limitations on when the first of the two inconsistent acts can be relevantly inconsistent with the second. (See my long article in Informal Logic for the full story) For example, someone may express appropriate surprise at the fact that the altarboy later became an atheist when he was a grownup, but that's not inconsistency in the relevant sense for an accusation of hypocrisy. The two acts need to be close enough in time for them to be relevant to each other. And so it's usual when someone runs an argument from inconsistency, she will say something like:
Person S says we should not do X, but then she turns right around and does X.
The important thing is that S turns right around and does it. If she did X years ago, perhaps S has learned her lesson. Or she's changed her mind. Or maybe the facts regarding X have changed. X may be the best option, nowadays. The lesson: with charges of hypocrisy, time's relevant.
With that in mind, let's look at Jonah Goldberg's commentary on the (albeit grudging) praise of Ronald Reagan's presidency from liberals. This is part of a trend he sees. Barry Goldwater, after being demonized by LBJ, was later portrayed as an "avuncular and sage grandfather type." William F. Buckley, too, went from being called a Nazi to later being an actual defender of liberalism. Reagan, now:
As we celebrate the 100th anniversary of his birth, the Gipper is enjoying yet another status upgrade among liberals. Barack Obama took a Reagan biography with him on his vacation. A slew of liberals and mainstream journalists (but I repeat myself) complimented Obama’s State of the Union address as “Reaganesque.” Time magazine recently featured the cover story “Why Obama (Hearts) Reagan.” Meanwhile, the usual suspects are rewriting the same columns about how Reagan was a pragmatist who couldn’t run for president today because he was too nice, too reasonable, too (shudder) liberal for today’s Republican party.
Trouble is, while Reagan was alive, liberals didn't have too high an opinion of him:
[My] favorite comes from Madame Tussauds Wax Museum in London, which in 1982 held a vote for the most hated people of all time. The winners: Hitler, Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and Dracula.
Now, first, note that these are cases where we're looking at things said in 1982 and 2011. Almost thirty years difference. Second, note that these inconsistencies are ones distributed over a group, Liberals, not individual people. Regardless, it's almost as though Goldberg isn't paying attention to the subtext of these retrospectives: that despite the fact that liberals disagreed with these conservatives, liberals could nevertheless see their virtues as people in retrospect. And one of the reasons why those virtues are worth mentioning now is that current conservatives so clearly fail to have them. I take it back. Goldberg gets that part:
[S]o much of the effort to build up conservatives of the past is little more than a feint to tear down the conservatives of the present.
But, for some reason, he thinks instead this is a point he's scoring on liberals by showing how they're inconsistent. Again, in cases where time's changed the variables, sometimes what you've inveighed against earlier becomes the best choice. Ask any liberal: would you take Reagan or Buckley over Palin or Goldberg for a decent conversation about government and political norms? You know the answer. Goldberg thinks this means that liberals think that the only good conservative is a dead conservative. He's missed the point. The point, instead, is sadly that all the good conservatives are dead.
Now that gets me heated
Christopher Orlet, over at the American Spectator, has a few things to say about what gets him riled up these days. There aren't many, but two that stand out are:
About the only thing that gets me heated these days is my Bubblespa footbath. (I recommend the model with toe touch control.) That and being told by politicians, professors and anchorwomen how to behave.
No, this is not an ad for footbaths. At least, I don't think it is. Instead, Orlet is using his footbath as a way of showing that he's normally calm — footbath-excitement is usually tepid. But being told how to argue breaks that calm. Even the calm that can be achieved by a footbath. You see, it's a rhetorical device. You cast yourself as the minding-your-own-business everyman who loves footbaths, and then you portray yourself as just not being able to stand some imposition on what kind of rhetoric you can use. How disruptive of our calm lives to be reminded of the importance of civility.
Again, I'm no great champion of civility. It is possible to argue well and be mean. In fact, some matters require that we are mean, especially when the issue is significant and our interlocutors are vicious and in need of shaming. But there are moral reasons why we must have our defaults set on civility first. The most important reason is to avoid making the exchange of ideas toxic to the point where even those with good ideas don't want to enter the fray. In discourse theory we call the outcome of those circumstances "error amplifications" and "hidden profiles" — increased group confidence in erroneous commitments and social pressures against correcting them. Since we want truth, we've got to make the discussion welcoming. That's just how it goes, and so the duties of civility must be exercised.
Would Orlet be moved by these sorts of reasons for civiity? Well, if you sweetened the pot a little:
But men are stubborn animals. We may pretend to be more sensitive … , if it means we might get lucky more often
I see.
Well, what does Orlet think would happen were he to enforce this rule on liberals, too?
Just this morning, I heard someone on NPR say, "We need to really tackle these issues." I was immediately overwhelmed with the desire to sprint down the aisle and clothesline the director of marketing. Unfortunately, she stiff-armed me and rolled on to paydirt, by which I mean the ladies room.
Hm. This is just weird, now. Golly. Editors, anyone?
Let's ignore that, for the moment, and see where Orlet sees the requirements of civility leading us:
Since Tucson, editors have been having a "conversation" about banning more words from their newspapers, which pretty soon are going to read like The Poky Little Puppy, containing all 26 politically correct words and no more. . . . [N]ow they have to adopt the language of a tea party. And not The Tea Party either, but a real, doily and lace tea party.
So civil dialogue is like children's literature and tea-party frou-frou. False analogy, leading to false dilemma. But given the way that Orlet argues, the alternative might be an improvement. The Poky Little Puppy isn't on the make with the people he's arguing with, and I don't think you call going to the bathroom 'rolling to paydirt' at a tea party (or in most any company). Maybe some, just a little, civility (that is, civilizing) would be good for Orlet. But don't tell that to him just yet. Let him enjoy the footbath.