The How Dare You Move
I’m interested in this habit of theists and – what to call them – fellow-travelers of theists. People who aren’t theists themselves, but get all riled up at ‘materialist’ positivist etc etc etc arguments, and pitch fits about them. (Not Norm, of course! This is a different subject entirely.) The habit they have is to resort to a certain kind of moral outrage, and while doing that, to distort quite thoroughly what the posito-materialists say.
The certain kind of moral outrage in question is to say (in one way or another) ‘Are you calling me stupid?’
The thought seems to go like this (I say seems because they always leave out a lot of steps, so trying to figure out how they get from where we start to where they end up is part of the subject here): X is saying there is no good reason to believe God exists. X seems to think this is true. I think this is not true. Therefore, X thinks I’m stupid. Many other people also think this is not true. Therefore, X thinks they are all stupid. Therefore, X thinks she is better than everyone else. Therefore, X is arrogant, and trying to tell everyone what to do, and will prevent theist philosophers from getting job interviews.’
Now, the problem with this, as I see it, is that it often happens in the course of discussion, that one person will think one thing and another will think something else. X will think something is true, and Y will think it is not. Is the right move then for them to accuse each other of superiority and arrogance and trying to tell everyone what to do? Sometimes, no doubt; sometimes that is just the ticket, and ends the evening on gales of friendly laughter; but always? I would have thought no.
To put it another way, it ought to be possible, among grownups, to argue for an opinion without being told, simply because one has argued for it, that one is therefore judging everyone who doesn’t agree to be one’s intellectual inferior. Why do I think that ought to be possible? Because if it’s not, all discussion that is not of the most anodyne kind will grind to a halt, and we’ll all fall over and die of boredom. Or else the people who make this argument will be revealed as self-pitying passive-aggressive whiny bedwetters, and they will wish they had left well enough alone. That would be quite a good outcome, actually. I’ll give you an example from comments here, because I found it quite striking and exemplary [I’ll put the missing spaces in, because it’s so annoying to read without them]:
It seems to me that the tenor of Ophelia’s argument which centres on the truth about religion, intellectually arrived at, and therefore necessarily exposing the falsehood of religious belief, implies that in the future a would-be candidate for a professorship in philosophy whose writings argue strongly against OB’s views, would on that basis alone, judged to be the intellectual inferior of someone holding OB’s views.
See – the trouble with that is that it just boils down to saying X shouldn’t try to figure out the truth about religion, intellectually, and expose the [possible] falsehood of religious belief, because – that implies that in the future anyone who writes the opposite would be judged (by whom? when? how?) X’s intellectual inferior. I think the ludicrousness of that is obvious enough that I won’t bother to elaborate on it.
But it’s interesting, because symptomatic. That is of course what the O’Reilly-Limbaugh crowd (and the Pat Robertson crowd, and the similar crowds) are doing when they bark and gibber about elitists sneering at people of faith. It’s a moral blackmail move, and unfortunately, it works all too well. So it’s worth being presented with a particularly blunt and blatant example of it, so that we can see what it amounts to.
Saying that “there is no good reason to believe God exists.” is one thing.
Saying that religion is based on a “lie” is another.
I’ll give you a hint, you’ll tend to get believers more stirred up with the latter comment than the former.
Nobody knows. Some choose to believe and some choose not to. If it makes you mad when people act like they know, put yourself in your shoes when you act like you know.
Yes but the lie I’m referring to is that people know.
In most discussion it is pretty rare to claim you are better than someone else because you believe the evidence favour X over Y. Say, in science, where people can (normally) have competing views without running about asserting their intellectual superiority.
But, I have to confess, on this particular issue I do feel a certain superiority to theists. I wouldn’t say it was of the ‘I’m cleverer than you’ variety, but when you regard someone else as willfully ignoring all rational discourse (which many, but not all, theists do), you can’t help it. I feel a similar way to people that believe in homeopathy. I can understand the sorts of social and personal circumstances that give rise to it, and in many people I understand how they can continue to hold that view, but in a well educated person, who has thought about the issue, I have to conclude that there is something of a major failure of reason – which, in and of itself, is a conclusion that contains the asserton that my reasoning does not contain that failure.
I guess, ultimately, it is a difference of degree – it is understandable that someone else may differ in their conclusions about evolutionary psychology say, but I just cannot see how you can rationally believe in the existence of the Christian god.
“I have to conclude that there is something of a major failure of reason – which, in and of itself, is a conclusion that contains the asserton that my reasoning does not contain that failure.”
Yes. True. Clearly that is the problem. And as far as I can see there is no solution to the problem. People who make the ‘how dare you’ move would seem to be arguing that the solution is simply not to make such arguments at all. So – in any case where one side’s position rests on what appears to be a major failure of reason, there is inherent risk of implicit feelings of superiority/inferiority, and therefore, all such discussions should be taboo. So all positions that rely on failures of reason should, because they rely on failures of reason, go unquestioned.
I’m afraid I can’t accept that argument.
Well, eleven words don’t always quite do the work of argument. Hence my reply to ‘whaa’ on another thread – boiling down is not necessarily helpful.
Let’s be even more brutally honest. To describe FAITH as a “failure of reason” is a half-truth at best.
There are those who assert that their religious convictions are grounded in reason and evidence alone. But I’ve never actually met such a rare creature myself. Even the most cunning Jesuitical sophistry seeking to rationally justify religion does not entirely leave out faith as a component. And not faith in the sense of “hope” or “confidence” or any other wishy-washy alternate definition. By “faith” in this context, I mean (and *honest* believers also mean) believing something because one CHOOSES to believe it, without regard to the absence of evidence/reasons to believe. (Sometimes, faith even entails believing something without regard to the presence of counter-evidence/reasons to believe otherwise. But the absence of positive evidence is quite problematic enough, so let’s leave the presence of counter-evidence aside.)
Faith is not a mere failure of reason: Faith is the willful abdication of reason. Faith isn’t a mistake along the same lines as a logical error such as affirming the consequent. It is not simply an oversight of evidence that ought to be under consideration. Faith is the declaration that reason may be all well and good in other areas, but reason ends here where the believer says it does! No argument can conceivably be given for not adhering to the standards of reason on any given subject, because argument itself must adhere to rational standards. Otherwise, it isn’t argument – it’s shouting, empty noise, full of sound and fury, but signifying nothing.
Let me more-or-less directly quote various things I’ve actually heard people say along these lines:
“This isn’t about reason. You have to feel it.”
“Believing isn’t about reason or argument. You can’t argue about God because God is beyond all arguments.”
These need not be statements from rabid fundamentalists, but from the sweetest, kindest-natured and live-and-let-live believers you can imagine. But the statements still embody a willful abdication of reason. From where I sit, the only possible response to any such statements is to point out clearly that the speaker has left the fold of reasoned argument entirely – something like the following: “Oh yeah! And what are the reasons why I have to feel it? Can you possibly give me an argument for why I should believe this claim in the absence of any argument for it?” Or, “Explain what you could possibly even mean by saying God is ‘beyond all arguments.’ Whatever it means, are you declaring that to be a fair move in our discussion? Because my desire for you to give me money isn’t about reason or argument. It’s beyond all arguments. So give me your money! If you don’t buy that move when I make it, why should I accept it when you make it?”
These aren’t rhetorical questions. Okay, the tone is snarky. But what tool is left but mockery when someone has abdicated reason entirely? Clearly, further exercises of reason are not much of an option. That ship has sailed as soon as someone adopts ANY belief or claim as a matter of faith.
The reason this is so important isn’t simply that people who embrace faith will have ill-formed beliefs. Reason is not normative solely in the minimal sense that there are strictures within which it must operate or it is no longer reason. There is an ethical component to reason as well, because one’s beliefs are intimately connected to one’s actions. Some of one’s beliefs are themselves normative – beliefs about what is good and right, about whose life is valuable and why and in what manner (see abortion and euthanasia debates). And factual beliefs are also important, since how we understand the world in which we are acting shapes our actions every bit as much as our values and ends.
If one gives up reason in the formation of some of one’s beliefs, one gives up the only access to truth we have. Humans don’t have any perceptual capacity to immediately discern truth, the way we immediately discern color and shape (if the lighting is good and our eyesight is in good order). The closest we can get is to JUSTIFY our beliefs. Faith is not justification, it is the suspension of all standards for justification. Faith declares that some beliefs – these important ones right at the center of my world-view that shape how I see many other things – need not be justified at all.
If one’s beliefs cannot be justified, and if one’s actions are shaped and motivated by one’s beliefs, then one’s actions cannot be justified. Oh, the actions of the faithful might accidentally be consistent with justifiable actions – but that would be pure luck, really, and could just as well have turned out otherwise.
Those who live by faith are not intellectually inferior. One could even say that it takes a certain brilliance, or at least extraordinary mental flexibility, to engage in the mental gymnastics required to apply reason in most areas of life and then suspend it entirely on other areas. So this isn’t really about intellect. And to say that faith is a failure of reason or abdication of reason is just to name it, not to explain what’s WRONG with it. I think something stronger can be said.
Faith is a moral failing. The abdication of reason is the abdication of justification. When people stop even trying to rationally justify their actions in the world – when they decide to act from faith instead – then they might just do anything at all and call it right and good.
Bravo! (round of applause)
Second the round of applause.
“There is an ethical component to reason as well”
Exactly. As well as a cognitive component to moral commitments. And without them we’re lost, lost, lost.
Yes, what G said. And given that ‘faith’ is at the heart of what makes religion religion, and not just a party-game, does this mean we have a knockout blow in the previous debate with Norm?
Tactically, pragmatically, on an everyday basis, we might agree that there is not much problem with people being nice for bad reasons, so long as they’re nice. But, if we’re going to be rigorous about it, we HAVE to make the point that ‘faith’ is a really bad reason [sic] to do anything…
Of course, if we’re not going to be rigorous about it… ;-)
I want to post G’s comment as an article. I asked his permission a few minutes after he posted it. Of course, given that weird notice at the bottom of this page (which I tend to forget is there), I could just go ahead without waiting for permission…
But, I wouldn’t do that. If only because I want G to keep on commenting here.
Good idea. I really think it is one of the best sustained contributions that have appeared here in a long time. An altogether admirable taking of the bull by the horns.
Yep. Seems a waste to let it drift away in old comments. They’re impossible to keep track of. N&Cs themselves are searchable with google, but comments aren’t.
I’m reading Judge Jones again. Dang it’s fun.
“does this mean we have a knockout blow in the previous debate with Norm?”
Fun as it would be to say that (in fact, let’s phone the NYT and tell them we beat Norm so they can run a banner headline letting believers know they’re off the hook), it isn’t really the point, is it? “Faith is a moral failing,” G. stated so simply. Of course, not everyone will buy that, even if I happen to think it’s really indisputable, but when you get down to that level of the argument, it can bring such clarity. It’s one thing to wrestle with the idea that an unfounded belief system can have good effects as well as bad ones; it’s another to get around the notion that “my morality is grounded in a moral failing.”
I’m a scientist by training and formerly by practice. I now do work, among other things, to keep science curricula free from religious dogma. I’m also a practicing believing Christian.
I appreciate G’s post on how faith constitutes a moral failing because it enhances my understanding of OB’s side of her argument with Norm, and it helps me to understand all that I’m reading at this site.
However, I’m confused by it because I don’t perceive that my beliefs require mental flexibility. When I work with numbers and data and facts, reason and logic are my tools. When I browse iTunes looking for new music, I dispense with reason completely. When I deal with people in my work, I make decisions based on what feel like “gut instincts,” although I know that they involve lots of higher level processes, probably including lots of reasoning (though I have no way of confirming that this is so).
Now, through science I’m describing universal truths, and I have a high level of certainty in them — so much so that I’ll tend to use verbs like “know” and when discussing them.
– I know that matter can be converted into an amount of energy equal to the square of the speed of light
When I’m describing aesthetic judgments, I’m describing truths, but not (necessarily) universal ones. To be precise, I should use verbs like “think,” but sometimes I get sloppy.
– I think “Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters” is Elton John’s best song
– Hot Hot Heat is great in concert
When I’m synthesizing more information than I can analyze in a piece-by-piece stepwise fashion, I’m looking for universal truths (equally valid to all observers), but I’m often not communicating it aloud. When I am, I’ll tend to use a verb that describes my level of certainty.
– I feel like it’s going to rain
– I think I hit it out
– I know you’re lying
All of these are beliefs I hold. Obviously, the Category I beliefs are the most universal and most rigorously tested, but I couldn’t make it through so much as a day without Categories II and III. I suppose that it requires some mental flexibilty to adjust from analytical to aesthetic judgments and from robust empirical data sets to little or no data picked up on the fly. But I don’t think it’s anything unusual, and I certainly don’t think it’s morally culpable.
At times here, I feel like an 8-year old who wandered into a high school class. Maybe I’m over my head. Maybe I don’t understand the lingo. I’ll openly admit that my training in philosophy consists of church and a one semester intro class in college. But if any of you feel charitable enough to show me the errors in my reasoning, I’d appreciate it
I should have been more clear …
Some of the questions to which theists posit answers are, more or less, factual questions:
– How did the Universe begin? (a.k.a. what caused the big bang?)
– How did conciousness come to be? (was it a product of natural selection or did God have his finger on the scale?)
For the answers to these questions, we have very little or no evidence, and, thus, a lot of difficulty applying formal reasoning. However, the truths sought would be universal. I lump these in with my category III.
Other questions are purely philosophical:
– Is there a greater purpose to our/my existence?
Excluding religious texts, we can have no evidence on this question. Reason is not possible. For this reason, I’ll lump this is with my category II.
The answers to these questions, of course, imply the existence or lack of existence of a god. But, for the factual questions, reason is not useful, and, for the philosophical questions, reason is pointless.
I think that this is what is meant by:
“This isn’t about reason. You have to feel it.”
AND
“Believing isn’t about reason or argument.”
I hope that this is helpful
Since no one else has yet jumped in, I’ll give this a probably lame try. Firstly, I appreciate what you’ve written and I think a voice such as yours, qualified the way you’ve done it, can be a useful one here.
“Excluding religious texts, we can have no evidence on this question. Reason is not possible.” The voices you mainly hear at B&W say reason is always possible. If we have no evidence, then we proceed as if there’s no evidence, not as if we’re suddenly in anything-goes land. You’ll hear some people claiming science is robbing religion of its place. I don’t think that’s true in a direct sense. The most helpful thing to bear in mind is that science has nothing to say about god (until or unless it uncovers something that points strongly in the direction of his existence – something, that is, other than the IDer’s claim that he is implied by whatever they say can’t be satisfactorily explained otherwise). Is there necessarily a good reason for saying the question of how the world began is fundamentally different from understanding how light works, so much so that it becomes a different category of question where all the normal yardsticks of reasoning suddenly cease to apply? You have the three categories that I’ll paraphrase as science, personal aesthetic taste and religion. No one will quibble with your right to aesthetic taste that you need justify to no one. But surely you can understand why one might ask why you’ve separated out those “big” questions into a category of “no evidence” or “no evidence possible,” rather than saying they are part of the same set of questions belonging to your first category, the scientific. Is it their “size” alone? There must be a great deal of rather minor research points (still) unsolved in all the sciences. Do you have a yardstick for determining which questions seem to be empirically unanswerable, or keep an open mind on those not yet answered? Saying “god” is not keeping an open mind, because it’s inserting something as a solution for which you have no evidence. Even though we may discuss the “moral failing” of faith by saying it’s abdicating reason, no one functions completely without reason, even the whackiest fundamentalists; if they didn’t, they couldn’t do anything as simple as open a door. Everyone, even the biggest “abdicator,” is making at least one important choice: where they draw that line beyond which they say it’s the problem of another being, who may or may not be what they think is telling them what to do. Maybe I should call it a circle, rather than a line. Why should a scientist draw a circle and say anything outside it is untouchable?
“The answers to these questions, of course, imply the existence or lack of existence of a god.”
If there were a good reason god was already on the bargaining table, yes. Our beef is that we’ve no reason to put him there, in the absence of all evidence.
In order not to drone on too long, I don’t know any reasonable atheists who would wish to deny you the possibility of perceiving certain things as insoluble cosmic mysteries to which a god seems the only explanation, no matter how wasteful of intellect they considered it. It’s when it goes beyond the private sphere that trouble starts. You’re obviously not a fundie, but the most moderate believers are important to the fanatics, in ways I hope are obvious enough not to have to repeat them here.
In conclusion, my best shot at answering your main questions can be summarised with the following questions to you:
a) are you sure it is appropriate and aids clarity to list a personal preference for Elton John as a truth?
b) can you define the yardstick by which things are included or excluded in the hypothetical circle I mentioned above, or is the yardstick a fuzzy one, and if so, how does the fuzziness express itself?
Fascinating debate! I’ve been following it here and on Normblog.
G’s comment was really interesting. Certainly, it is not the case the faith is grounded in reason or rationality. The willful abdication of reason? Possible. Faith shouldn’t pretend to be rational.
Personally, (and I say this a scientist who has faith, althought not a practising and established religion — I rejected organised religion, largely because of my feelings on the faith/morality issue), I am deeply uncomfortable with my beliefs which I know I cannot rationally justify. It’s a feeling, in many ways comparable to an emotion. One does not chose, on an obvious level, to feel particular emotions, and they aren’t rational. However, it is true that i chose to accept my faith. I question it, but I don’t try to stop having faith.
“Faith is a moral failing. The abdication of reason is the abdication of justification. When people stop even trying to rationally justify their actions in the world – when they decide to act from faith instead – then they might just do anything at all and call it right and good.”
Here’s where I beg to differ.
What is the rational justification for something being right? We have gut instincts about what’s good and what isn’t, but are they rational? I’m not convinced that concepts of right and wrong are derived purely from faith or lack of faith. That is, if something is morally repugnant to you, you’ll believe it is morally repugnant to the deity or deities that you believe in. It is quite simply, humanly impossible to believe that one’s deity/deities want us to behave in ways that we find completely and utterly immoral. It’s one’s concept of faith or God that changes, not one’s concept of morality.
I don’t think people of faith are intellectually or morally inferior to other people. I do think that faith is often used as a form of “justification” for acts that others regards as immoral, but they use faith for that purpose because they already believe that those acts are acceptable. So I think it’s not faith itself that is a moral failing, but faith can be used as a tool — not unlike many secular tools — used to “justify” atrocities.
–IP
Oh, yes. This is quite something. I would like to hear more from G, too.
Yes, I agree that faith is an abdication of reason. But reason is not the only or even provably a necessary arbiter of morality.
I’ll try to write some more on that in a bit.
“What is the rational justification for something being right? We have gut instincts about what’s good and what isn’t, but are they rational?”
I don’t think there can ever be a rational grounding for morality – ultimately it depends on a set of underlying principles or feelings (possibly universal, possibly not), and from these we argue rationally towards what will fulfill these instincts. Politics is a similar area.
But I don’t think that religion can claim to be like ethics or politics when it comes to making tangible and concrete truth claims about what entities do and do not exist.
Hey, Whaa, just one quick point – I don’t have any training in philosophy either (as any philosopher would corroborate in double-quick time). Well, not unless you count one undergraduate course in German philosophy, of which as far as I can remember I understood not one single word. I’m strictly an amateur.
P.S. And when I say I’m an amateur, I mean I don’t take this discussion to be philosophy (and neither would a philosopher). It’s just – you know – a discussion.
Maybe I should wait until this has its own thread, but I was slow getting back to Ophelia with my permission to publish (legally unnecessary, but it was nice of her to ask). But this is a thought-provoking discussion, and I can’t help but jump in.
Whaa? Thank you for your interesting and thoughtful contributions to the discussion. That said, here’s where I think you’re missing my point. Look to the examples of moral beliefs I cite: “beliefs about what is good and right, about whose life is valuable and why and in what manner…” Whether or not beliefs in this general area ultimately spring from rational considerations or originate in non-rational sentiments (or instincts, or whatever), there are two other ways in which they can still be rational, origins aside.
First, remember that non-rational does not mean irrational. Even beliefs deeply shaped by or wholly springing from aspects of human nature far removed from our capacity for reasoning can still be (or fail to be) justifiable. Even non-rational beliefs can be consistent or inconsistent with reason – can be justifiable or not. Treating some humans as fundamentally more valuable or worthy of respect and autonomy than others (as most religious traditions treat women) cannot be rationally justified. It especially cannot be justified to those on the bottom of this social order, although they may be manipulated or simply abused into accepting subordination anyway. But if such a belief springs from faith, the question of whether or not it is justifiable is taken off the table. It never reaches the table, actually. Hence the problem.
Second, the connection between beliefs and action is fundamentally a rational one. Moral beliefs, attitudes, principles, etc. can be put into action in a rational or irrational manner. For example, universality is a basic principle of moral reasoning: If an act is good (or evil), it is good (or evil) for anyone. The most common way of violating this basic principle of moral reasoning is to make oneself an exception: “Of course it’s wrong to borrow money without permission. But I’ll be able to put it back into the account in two weeks, and no one will ever know…” But another way of violating it, much more common in moral “reasoning” shaped by faith, is to make others an exception. Unbelievers and apostates are typically singled out for quite different treatment than persons belonging to the same or some similar religious group – in stark violation of the principle of universality. While it is legitimate to treat persons differently if they in fact have some morally relevant difference – children do not get the same respect for autonomy as adults, for example – differences in application of moral principles grounded in and determined by faith alone are rationally indefensible. Or rather, reason doesn’t enter into it: If a given believer or even a given group happens to apply their moral beliefs in a manner consistent with rational justification, that is as much an accident as whether or not the moral beliefs themselves are consistent with rational justification. They might just as well have been otherwise, because faith is entirely unconstrained by justification.
I think these considerations also speak to many aspects of the disagreements expressed by IrrationalPoint and Juan Golblado. What I don’t think I have addressed at all is Juan’s introduction of David Sloan Wilson into the discussion. I have other duties so I can’t spend to much time discussing that now, but it is worth pointing out that Wilson is not in any way discussing morality. He discusses the contrast between the rationality and adaptedness of beliefs about the world, but he is not addressing specifically moral beliefs. The passages you quote specifically and repeatedly emphasize facts (“factual reality” “factual realism”) and do not discuss values at all. There’s a reason for that: Cultural evolution as Wilson characterizes it is driven by group selection, which operates through both cooperation within groups and competition between groups. Such in-group/out-group dynamics are most decidedly not obviously or inherently moral. Sometimes “competition” means genocide. I think Wilson would be the first to warn against committing the naturalistic fallacy here: There may be a way in which practical truth trumps factual truth in terms of group-level reproductive success, but that in no way means that whatever leads to such reproductive success is GOOD. While I happen to believe (contra Wilson, I think) that there is a deep connection between evolution and moral value, it is very clearly not so simple a connection as that.
Oops. In a glaring editorial error, I very obviously mis-stated the traditional treatment of women in religion. It should’ve read: “Treating some humans as fundamentally more valuable or worthy of respect and autonomy than others (as most religious traditions place men over women) cannot be rationally justified.”
Thanks G. What I am talking about is where we bring morality and reason together, or fail to bring them together. That’s why I said, “reason is not the only or even provably a necessary arbiter of morality”.
Where Wilson comes in is where he says, “Rationality is not the gold standard against which all other forms of thought are to be judged. Adaptation is the gold standard against which rationality must be judged, along with all other forms of thought.”
If you will agree that we can substitute “other ways of justifying morality” for “other ways of thought”, we have some clear relevance for Wilson, whether you agree or not.
You say, “faith is the willful abdication of reason”, with which I fully agree. But you go on to say, “The abdication of reason is the abdication of justification.” And that I am disagreeing with, for the reasons Wilson gives for saying that “rationality is not the gold standard… adaptation is the gold standard”.
The reasons boil down to the fact that faith works. I don’t have a link to a survey about religious people living longer, earning more, etc. but you have probably seen them too. If you have read Darwin’s Cathedral you are in a position to evaluate Wilson’s evidence about its adaptedness over evolutionary time. Durkheim and others follow similar – though not the same – lines of thought.
It’s impossible to get rid of the relevance of evolutionary adaptedness for without it we wouldn’t be here. And so what I think is that leaves us in a position where we can’t say, “religion is irrational therefore it’s bad”. Unless you take Dawkins’ view that religion is not adaptive, and is just a parasite which has done more good than harm for the fitness of its carriers. It’s difficult to discover, never mind weigh, the evidence on that. Most of the people who have tried come down on Wilson’s side.
I would find it very satisfying to say, “forget religion because it’s irrational”, but I don’t think I can. I haven’t figured out how – given the argument and observations of Darwin’s Cathedral – I can say that. So I’m trying to figure out how to accomodate it. :)
Because I think it might be seen as derisive, I’m going to ditch the “Whaa?” moniker, and begin posting under my given name, Brendan
I’m really enjoying this discussion although I think it’s beginning to diverge into what I understand to be two separate discussions: faith in the existence of a higher power (the theist question), and the validity of a system of moral philosophy promoted by religion.
I’ll try to address both of these shortly…
In my post just above, in the next to last para where I was talking about Dawkins, I meant to say, “…just a parasite which has done more harm than good for the fitness of its carriers”. I reversed “good” and “harm”, thus reversing the meaning of what I intended to say.
G., I neglected to say this earlier but I think you would be in good company, including Wilson (and me fwiw) talking about a “deep connection between evolution and moral value”. But you seem in your last sentence to be implying some sort of determinism which I don’t think anybody is into.
Anyhow, it seems to me the question at issue is the role of reason in evaluating, or justifying, morality rather than aspects of the evolution of morality.
Juan, what you are saying requires a vast and dangerous oversimplification, one that Wilson does not endorse. I’ll try to explain why more clearly than before.
First, I’m not keen to agree that we can substitute “other ways of justifying morality” for “other ways of thought.” I have been talking about actual justification, not the ordinary everyday rationalizations people offer in defense of whatever it is that they want to be true or right. The two are not intersubstitutable. And the question of whether and how and under what circumstances rational justification is adaptive or maladaptive is separable, both in principle and in practice.
Facts and values are also separable, and it’s advisable to keep ’em separated. Wilson consistently addresses facts, saying that reason and emprical evidence and so on are not necessarily the only or the best standard by which we should judge factual beliefs. If you extend that to value beliefs without any hesitation or consideration, here’s what you get: By making adaptedness – i.e. group reproductive success – the ONLY standard for judging beliefs and actions, you have declared that any belief/action ever promulgated by any religious institution or group which resulted in more group members is GOOD AND RIGHT. If your moral theory puts a big fat stamp of approval on the Spanish Inquisition’s fine and noble “convert or die” tradition (or substitute any of a vast host of other examples), perhaps it’s time for a re-think. There’s a reason why Wilson repeatedly emphasizes facts and not values when he’s discussing this matter. He saw the danger of the naturalistic fallacy lurking everywhere down that path.
Now maybe what you’re saying is simply that what people BELIEVE to be right and good is a product of selection and adaptation. Well, of course. No disagreement here. And indeed, as Wilson points out, what people BELIEVE about the real world is shaped in the same way. But the world does not conform to those beliefs, neither morally nor factually. Truth matters – and we don’t have any reliable access to truth through any means but justification. Truth is not necessarily the only thing that matters, pragmatically speaking: As Wilson points out, means other than rational justification can lead to reproductive success for individuals and groups. But you are over-hasty – much hastier than Wilson ever is – if you say that because adaptiveness matters truth doesn’t matter. Truth cannot simply be equated to adaptiveness. If you don’t think the difference is important, let me pose an example to highlight the difference: Medical quacks constitute an extremely successful subculture who have been expanding their numbers and economic resources by leaps and bounds. By Wilson’s standards, their beliefs are highly adaptive. So who would you rather have treat you for cancer, an iris-reading homeopath or a trained oncologist?
G. I think the argument you make about the inquisition or the medical quack confuses adaptiveness with momentary success or apparent success. There’s no fooling natural selection. You either survive or you don’t. But I’m not talking about “might makes right” or something like that.
Let’s look for a moment at what people believe is right and good. The incest taboo is an excellent example. If you have enough knowledge and pay enough attention you can arrive at the same conclusion through observation and deduction. But we don’t in fact have to do that, and our remote ancestors could not have done that. But those creatures who practised incest did not send forth descendants into the present day. There are by and large no incestuous hominids among our ancestors because incest by and large doesn’t produce healthy children. As a result, we have built-in circuitry that causes us to avoid incest without knowing why.
That looks to me like an example of morality untouched by reason.
Juan, there is a distinction to be made between “might makes right” and “long-term reproductive success makes right” – barely. But I don’t see how the latter is morally superior to the former. You cannot make adaptiveness, or indeed any other any other contingent fact about the way the world is, into the standard by which we judge the way the world ought to be. It is a fundamental category mistake – and an old mistake at that, commonly called the naturalistic fallacy.
If you didn’t find my examples persuasive because of their “momentary success,” I’ll give you an example that cannot be denied on that score: Your conflation of “adaptive” and “good” declares that the overt and covert oppression of women by nearly every religious tradition in the world, in the present and going back for a few thousand years, is right and good by definition because those religious groups (or more broadly, the entirety of those cultures, including their religions) are clearly successful by any adaptive measure.
Confuse is and ought, and you treat the way things are as the way things ought to be. You have yet to explain what you are saying in any way that doesn’t reduce to this basic confusion. And don’t blame this on Wilson, because he never confuses is and ought. I’ve read Darwin’s Cathedral quite carefully, more than once through.
G. you’re not dealing with the example I gave you. The incest taboo. That is morality operating without recourse to reason. It is not theoretical but actually in operation. We rely on it. If someone had convinced all our would-be ancestors that the incest taboo should be ignored because it was irrational — and it was irrational — we wouldn’t be here. Would we?
“we wouldn’t be here but for religion”
That may be so; as was pointed out, this is not a point on which all have agreed. But just as agreeing that Darwinian evolution is the best explanation for our appearance in the world doesn’t mean we are then bound to proceed with social Darwinism, so, too, we can ditch things that we don’t believe in, even if we do accept that having previously believed in them helped our ancestors survive. There is at least one sense in which belief is not a conscious choice; you either believe or you don’t. I couldn’t believe no matter how dire an omen that were to be for my long or short-term survival. Our species is clearly capable of producing viable members with both tendencies, belief and non-belief.
I certainly couldn’t make myself believe in supernatural stuff, either, Stewart. And I don’t think it’s good for us to keep doing it. But I want to understand how it works because it does work and has worked for quite a long time.
G., here is something from Wilson that is at least consistent with the notion that reason is not necessary for morality. I think you will agree that he considers morality as part of culture and I suppose you would too.
Sorry, that extract was from p32 of Darwin’s Cathedral.
Is the incest taboo the result of religion? The bible is certainly somewhat ambiguous on the question. I thought it was biologically hard-wired, and mostly only transgressed if people grow up apart so that the brain doesn’t get the opportunity to learn that someone is kin.
Juan, I never denied that a moral precept originating in evolution could be consistent with reason. But the incest taboo isn’t moral BECAUSE it’s adaptive. If that were the case, every belief or behavior that has ever belonged to a thriving culture would necessarily also be moral, including beliefs and behaviors leading to the widespread oppression of women. Another example is the widespread oppression of religious dissenters by the Catholic Church, which had quite the long history of success long before the Inquisition and hardly counts as momentary or temporary despite your unsupported dismissal of it as such.
A belief or behavior can be adaptive and moral – or maladaptive and moral, or adaptive and immoral, or maladaptive and immoral. The argument you’ve given for the universal claim that every adaptive belief or behavior must also necessarily be moral consists in a single example. A universal claim isn’t supportable by examples alone, and certainly not by a single example. If you have nothing to say against the clear counter-example I have offered, then I have just given you reason to reject or at least modify your universal claim. Instead, you’ve simply ignored that counter-example and the entire argument of which it was a part.
I take it that you believe the incest example to be some sort of counter-example to some universal claim I am making. It is not. It is only a counter-example to your oversimplified restatement of my claim. When you wrote before that reason is not necessary for morality, I responded in some detail that I did not believe that reason was necessary for the formation of moral beliefs. I followed by arguing that determining whether those moral beliefs were true (or plausible, or defensible) still requires reason. Nothing you have said since counters that conclusion or adds anything to your original argument.
Let me repeat. Reason is NOT necessary for the formation of moral beliefs. Moral beliefs, like any beliefs, arise from all sorts of processes – and like factual beliefs, moral beliefs that stick around for a long time are probably adaptive in some way. (This adaptiveness is of course tricky to prove, which Wilson takes great pains to keep in mind so his account doesn’t descend into the morass of evolutionary psychology’s just-so storytelling.) But reason IS necessary for us to ever have any assurance that our moral beliefs are at all correct, to the extent that we can ever have any assurance about such a thing. After all, your own conviction that the incest taboo is good comes from what? A reasoned argument about how important avoiding incest is for having healthy offspring. The incest taboo is rationally defensible, which is why you think it’s such an excellent example of cultural adaptation producing a true moral belief/behavior in the first place. But that in no way implies that every other adaptive belief or behavior will also turn out to be rationally defensible. Unless you intend to argue that sexism and religious repression are rationally defensible?
In that way, at least, moral and factual beliefs have a lot in common: Reason is not necessary to the formation of factual beliefs about what exists in nature, how it works, etc. But rational justification is damn sure necessary for us to ever get it right – or rather, for us to ever have any basis for any confidence that we may have gotten some of it right. Hence, science.
The only other support you offer for your claim is quoting Wilson. But I am quite certain that Wilson does not in fact endorse the naturalistic fallacy you are making, and absolutely nothing you’ve quoted – including the latest passage – suggests otherwise.
As I said before, I think Wilson is largely right about the mechanisms of cultural change and the adaptiveness of religion. And I am not denying that culture evolves. Nor am I denying that moral beliefs are a part of culture. I am simply denying your bizarre assertion that every moral belief of that has ever stuck around in a culture is somehow true or right or good because, well, clearly it’s adaptive. If you aren’t making that claim, we aren’t disagreeing. But I STILL haven’t seen you deny that you are making that claim, nor have you modified it in response to my criticisms, nor have you responded to those criticisms in any substantive way.
G said it far better, but I was having thoughts along those lines, far more simplistically. We have a pretty good idea why we evolved in such a way that incest seems an almost automatic taboo. But had there been no biological reason reproducing with close kin was ultimately detrimental, we probably wouldn’t have that taboo, nor any morality forbidding it and might be saying “What a weird idea, what difference does it make whether the person with whom you have children is your sister or not?” It isn’t “right” morality in any absolute sense, but it’s hardwired into us that it’s bad reproductive strategy and the way it enforces itself is by making itself distasteful. Then (and, I suspect, only then) do we add the layer of “morality” to it.
Have I committed any great fallacies in the above, G?
I’d like to go back to something IrrationalPoint says;
“I’m not convinced that concepts of right and wrong are derived purely from faith or lack of faith. That is, if something is morally repugnant to you, you’ll believe it is morally repugnant to the deity or deities that you believe in. It is quite simply, humanly impossible to believe that one’s deity/deities want us to behave in ways that we find completely and utterly immoral. It’s one’s concept of faith or God that changes, not one’s concept of morality.”
This strikes me as exactly the opposite of the case. In Weinberg’s words “To get good people to do evil takes religion”.
Or am I being slippery again?
i haven’t read all the comments, just noticed PM’s comment on the incest taboo. PM is right, its hardwired, take a look at the back of Steven Pinkers ‘blank slate’ a taboo on incest is a human universal, not even a near universal.
All right, G., you say, emphatically, “ Reason is NOT necessary for the formation of moral beliefs.“
But your central point started out as saying that “Faith is the willful abdication of reason.” and “Faith is a moral failing. The abdication of reason is the abdication of justification.” However, that assertion is based on an equivocation: “what tool is left but mockery when someone has abdicated reason entirely? Clearly, further exercises of reason are not much of an option. That ship has sailed as soon as someone adopts ANY belief or claim as a matter of faith.“
That ship has sailed as soon as someone adopts ANY belief or claim as a matter of faith.
You are equating any participation of faith in the construction of morality with the “willful abdication of reason”, i.e. the complete non-use of reason. That is not what (most) religious people do. They are doing something that is hardly different from relying on the incest taboo. They are saying, “it feels right and it seems to work so I’m going to do it that way”, and that’s exactly how the incest taboo works.
I have not been arguing that any adaptive trait is good merely because it is adaptive. I have been arguing that we have many adaptive traits, including aspects of our moral systems, in which reason has played no role whatsoever in bringing about. Many of those traits are also ones which most people rationally think are good ones and which most people feel to be good ones. And therefore reason is not a necessary component of the good (even if it is a necessary component of this conversation!). But it does not follow that reason has no role to play in bringing about good and/or adaptive traits. Nor does it follow that every adaptive trait is something we want to hang on to. I think you are mistaken in attributing either of these positions to me.
I must confess I’m not entirely following this debate, but further to Rob, if the incest taboo is hardwired, and religion has integrated that instinctual taboo into its moral code (although, as I say, the Bible is a little ambiguous on this), any adaptive advantage conferred by this moral code (qua incest taboo) is entirely supervening on the existent biological trait.
PM, the discussion about the incest taboo (at least mine when I introduced it) is not about religion integrating it and therefore gaining adaptive advantage.
I introduced it as an example of the fact that our moral system grows out of evolved biases and as such is not based on reason. I used this to counter G.’s assertion that “as soon as someone adopts ANY belief or claim as a matter of faith” (his emphasis) they have abdicated reason and show that in fact all of us “abdicate reason” in this way and there is nothing any of us can do about it short of performing neuro-surgery and DNA modifications which we don’t even know how to do.
“Many of those traits are also ones which most people rationally think are good ones and which most people feel to be good ones. And therefore reason is not a necessary component of the good (even if it is a necessary component of this conversation!).”
Wait a minute. If most people rationally think these traits are good ones, then how is reason not a necessary component? If it’s not a necessary component, why did you say most people rationally think so?
But don’t forget, “… and which most people feel to be good ones.”
Reason is usually there, certainly with me, but it doesn’t have to be there. And anyhow, thinking or feeling that the trait is a good one is not necessary for the trait to be there and serve us well.
The incest taboo is good; it did not originate through reason; and we rely on it without recourse to reason. That’s the point. That’s how we humans work.
Ethicists and biologists, psychologists and people like us may use reason to examine it, evaluate it. But many people will never stop to consider it. And they don’t have to in order to be fully human, fully functional, and just as good as anybody else.
When it comes to shaping our society, I’m going to make extensive use of reason and I’m not likely to work with or give a big role to anybody who doesn’t. But that’s a different matter, and anyhow, being religious doesn’t keep someone from making extensive use of reason.
Juan,
Have you never encountered or heard or read people insisting on moral convictions that 1) have no rational justification that the insisters can cite and 2) result in harm to other people? I have, often. People who insist on moral convictions that they refuse to question can and do perpetrate horrors. You seem not to have noticed that…?
Why do you say that?
Yes, of course I have.
Juan, I understand your position much better now. But I still fail to see why you think you your position is an argument against or contrary to what I’ve written. I never said that the willful abdication of reason is a universal event, for any person or institution or culture: In fact, in my original argument I quite clearly talked about believers circumscribing some sub-set of beliefs as the area governed by faith, attributing the following attitude: Faith is the declaration that reason may be all well and good in other areas, but reason ends here where the believer says it does!
The rhetoric about “someone has abdicated reason entirely” and “that ship has sailed” is in the context of arguing with the faithful about their faith beliefs! You are plucking that paragraph completely out of context. The very next paragraph starts with “The reason this is so important..,” where I focus on why reason is crucial: Because if rational justification does not play a role in morally important beliefs and behaviors, both value beliefs and morally relevant factual beliefs, the faithful might call any heinous thing just and right.
I think you are misinterpreting my argument and the scope of my claim that faith is a moral failing. I argue that faith is a moral failing because, insofar as faith instead of rational justification shapes morally important beliefs and behaviors, those beliefs and behaviors will turn out to be morally justifiable only by accident, and many will not be. The phrase “Faith is a moral failing” does not stand alone to be interpreted however you want: It is the conclusion of an argument which explains exactly why and how faith is a moral failing.
To use a classic B&W example, if someone believed as a matter of faith that there is a pink ceramic teapot in orbit around the moon, nothing in my argument would suggest that this person’s faith is a moral failing – because that particular belief has no moral relevance or potential relevance. It would still be a silly and irrational belief, of course, but not a moral failing. But many (if not most) central religious beliefs have considerably more impact on moral matters than orbiting teapots. To pick a more outre but clear example, whether Kali has 6 arms or 8 arms is morally irrelevant, but whether or not she demands human sacrifice matters a good deal.
I am not saying that I bear no responsibility for your initial misinterpretation of my position: Some of my phrasing is rather broad and rhetorical. That’s fine. But you continue to argue against positions I have not taken long after I’ve clarified and corrected. I responded to your initial misunderstanding by clarifying and explaining. I explicitly wrote – and repeated – that I do not in fact believe that reason is necessary for the formation of moral beliefs. And you kept arguing against me on that basis. You ignored my clarification. Instead, you looked back over what I’d written for quotations to support your interpretation, and to do so you had to take phrases out of context, entirely ignoring things stated clearly before and after those snippets.
In contrast, I have accepted your corrections. You have (finally) said that you are not equating adaptiveness and rightness, and I take you at your word. My interpretation of what you’d written was mistaken, then. Even though I think it was a reasonable interpretation based on what you wrote, I’m not going to go hunting back through what you’ve written to keep arguing the point: You’ve either changed your mind or clarified your position, and so I have no further argument with you on that score. Fini.
Please do me the same courtesy if you are going to continue this discussion.
G., My first post here said, “reason is not the only or even provably a necessary arbiter of morality.”
And I have pursued that same point ever since. I hope you see that. I have also been figuring out where I stood as I went along. Like others, I was very favorably impressed with your post to begin with and I still think it was an admirably clear and well constructed statement of a certain position, so much so that it aided me in clarifying my own thinking about the matter. I’m sorry that I have not been able to have the same effect.
But I certainly haven’t been picking through your post to find something to disagree with or to find something I can defeat.
I take your main point to have been about faith being an abdication of reason and that being an abdication of justification of a moral system. The idea of faith being an abdication of reason resonates with me. But I’m not sure now that it is necessarily true even if it is true a lot of the time.
What I didn’t agree with from the beginning was the second part of what I took to be your basic point — that not engaging reasoning meant a failure to engage seriously with the issue. And I set out to examine other ways of engaging with things other than through reason. The first thing that came to mind was the statement by Sloan Wilson about rationality not being the gold standard but rather adaptation being the gold standard against which rationality must be evaluated. (I used his words to make the point because they were already there, not because I agreed with everything else he said. I’m not sure about group fitness at all and I don’t think it is necessary for the rest of his thesis though it is central to him.)
I take your statement “Faith is the willful abdication of reason… The abdication of reason is the abdication of justification.” to be a justification for placing religion completely beyond the pale, for saying anybody who makes a decision about morality based on their religious feelings is doomed to moral failure. You do in fact say, “faith is a moral failing”.
I mean, I would like to dismiss religion in just that way because I would like to see it dead and gone, out of the way so we can get on with constructing a working world without it. But… we have to see how it actually works and I don’t think “moral failing” captures that. I think how it works is more along the lines of how the incest taboo works, or to give other examples, in slightly different areas, along the lines of how violence or deceit work for us. Both those things are characteristic of the human race and things we say we don’t like about ourselves. But they are part of us. To get rid of them, we can’t just say, “OK, that’s it”. We have to come to terms with them.
If this is true about religion then we can’t dismiss it. In fact, we have to – in a certain way and to some extent – (gasp!) respect it — perhaps to some extent as we honor our soldiers and wink at a little white lie. We have to view it as a resource and examine constructively the role that it has played and continues to play. I think it serves us less and less well today, and is even slowly dying because it is based on a suspension of disbelief which is becoming less and less tenable. I think today’s rise in extremism is an indicator of that path.
I’m all in favor of hammering away at the fact that belief in supernatural things is something people do because they want to. I don’t want to soft-pedal the negative, but neither do I want to ignore or deny the positive. And the positive is not confined to saving lives because ‘God’ told you to do it. The far more important positive, culturally, is the way religion has supported social cohesion because that’s something with which we need all the help we can get.
But I’ve gone very far afield and can’t afford to spend any more time on this particular post so I’ll leave it as it is, incoherent though it may be.
Thank you, Juan, for your thoughtful continuation of the discussion. I see much more clearly what you’re getting at, and I see where the real disagreement lies. Allow me to see if I can meet you half way.
You wrote: What I didn’t agree with from the beginning was the second part of what I took to be your basic point — that not engaging reasoning meant a failure to engage seriously with the issue.
Well, yes and no. What I said was both less and more than this: If one gives up reason in the formation of some of one’s beliefs, one gives up the only access to truth we have. Humans don’t have any perceptual capacity to immediately discern truth… The closest we can get is to justify our beliefs. Faith is not justification, it is the suspension of all standards for justification… If one’s beliefs cannot be justified, and if one’s actions are shaped and motivated by one’s beliefs, then one’s actions cannot be justified.
Faith isn’t simply a matter of not “engaging seriously with” moral or factual issues. Faith eschews justification entirely. That simply is how faith works. If reasoned justification is involved in the formation or evaluation of beliefs and behaviors, those beliefs and behaviors are not examples of faith.
However, religions are far more than simply sets of faith-based beliefs.* I certainly agree with you that understanding the origin of religion (and more broadly, human religiosity) is important, and I never said or even implied that religion could be dismissed or is trivial. By arguing that faith is a moral failing, I am not simply pooh-poohing religion. In fact, I think religion is a very serious matter indeed – as serious as a car bomb, or the blood of an Afghan educator who dares to teach girls, or the charred corpse of an Indian widow.
I fully agree that religion in the broadest sense, and even specific moral or factual beliefs, can be useful – and that usefulness, however characterized, is quite likely an important part of why religions exist. So? That does not in any way impact my assessment that faith is a moral failing: What is useful to a majority or politically domininant minority within a group or culture might in fact be detrimental to everyone else. The standard of usefulness – or adaptedness, or any of the sundry variations on pragmatic standards that might be cited – is quite different from any moral standard. I fully realize that every moral and immoral impulse humans have is at some level or another the result of selective processes – from our basic instincts for pity and aggression to the cultural evolution of complex phenomena like religion. But none of that is really relevant to my specific claim that faith is a moral failing.
I don’t have any delusions that making the case for the basic immorality of faith settles the matter. Everyone is not just going to give up on this religion nonsense and get one with living rationally now that I’ve settled that. But I still think I’ve got a good case, and it does matter. Some people might even see what I’m saying and take it to heart. Ya never know. It could happen. Hope springs eternal, etc.
A final thought: You cite one positive effect of religion as social cohesion, but I think you maybe ought to re-read Wilson. The dynamics of group selection are a good deal more important to assessing what is positive and negative than you seem to realize. Cohesion for a given group is almost always a matter of differentiation from other groups. Every aspect of cultural selection has to be recognized as having a powerful “us vs. them” component because cooperation and competition always work together: Selective advantage is relative – it is always one group’s advantage over competing groups.
Tribalism is no great positive force in human affairs, I think you’d agree. But it seems to be the theoretically necessary price to be paid for any social cohesion religion may create. And I think the facts bear out the theory on this one in spades.
*Footnote: Some forms of buddhist thought and neo-pagan practice actually have few or no faith components, and “religious” institutions such as the Unitarian Universalists explicitly reject dogma of any kind. But I know buddhists, pagans and unitarians who are also atheist materialists, so any definition of religion that includes these traditions definitely ain’t what we’re talking about here.
Great post G. I’ll respond asap.
I think that the excellent and clear statement you you have quoted from yourself amounts to the same thing as the shorter extract I was using.
If one gives up reason in the formation of some of one’s beliefs, one gives up the only access to truth we have. Humans don’t have any perceptual capacity to immediately discern truth… The closest we can get is to justify our beliefs. Faith is not justification, it is the suspension of all standards for justification… If one’s beliefs cannot be justified, and if one’s actions are shaped and motivated by one’s beliefs, then one’s actions cannot be justified.
Is truth only available as a logical conclusion? If so then reason is obviously required to get to the truth. But is truth also a dog’s cringe and whine when confronted with a person who has regularly mistreated it? If so then reason is just as obviously not required to get there. The dog could conceivably be mistaken, misled by the smell of the clothes the person is wearing, for example. But then the logical process could be misled by the imperfect information with which it is working.
What is the truth of the incest taboo? Is it only in the theory that joins the fMRI track of that feeling at work with the genetic evidence that offspring of incestuous relationships are by and large not as fit as others? Or is there also truth in the aversion to, or lack of interest in, incest that most people have?
It seems to me inescapable either that the person who relies on the incest taboo without bothering to justify it has access to truth or – if truth is defined in such a way that they don’t have access to it – that they don’t need access to the truth in that particular instance to live a full, successful, satisfactory life and to justify their actions in that context.
That’s one objection. The other is that even if we were to stipulate that relying on the incest taboo in the absence of any rational evaluation/justification of it is a moral failing, it doesn’t follow that the person who relies on the incest taboo in that way lives the entireity of their life in similar disregard of reason. And likewise, someone who says they will never let a penny of their tax dollar be spent on teaching their child that the world was not created in six days by a god who rested on the seventh, may well (logically could, at least) never make another irrational decision in their life. Now it may be that you didn’t actually mean that any faith-based moral decision irretreivably polluted the moral system of the person who took that decision. But in that case, your statement would not be one in favor of the position that any good that religion did was rendered invalid by the unprovability/unfalsifiability of the underlying system that led to the good. And maybe it wasn’t. In the context I took it to be that.
It seems to me that your argument can’t be used against everyday moral decisions or any other everyday decisions, but it can be used to say that you can’t expect success in any project to change or even describe reality without using reason, and someone who reserves the right to eschew reason at any point of his chosing is unpredictable and therefore not a good person to work with. So a faith-based approach to personal morality might not be objectionable, but a faith-based approach to legislation would.
I would like to respond to two other paragraphs in your post.
Tribalism is no great positive force in human affairs, I think you’d agree. But it seems to be the theoretically necessary price to be paid for any social cohesion religion may create. And I think the facts bear out the theory on this one in spades.
I think this is an important point. I think a lot of the ongoing ‘clash of civilizations’ is a clash between tribalism, on the one hand, and contemporary collective modes of social organization, which allow for much greater participation by individuals as individuals, on the other. And clearly religion is right there in the middle of it although perhaps not, as appears on the surface, at the forefront of it. And thanks for coming up with that! An inchoate thought like that has been going around in my head for the past several weeks. Longer, perhaps. There’s an essay on First Monday (of all places!) about tribal aspects of al Qaeda and Islamist terrorism in general which got me started in that direction.
Having said that, tribalism served us well for many centuries, millenia even. Like religion I think it is a practice whose time has gone, but not for everybody and not all at once. And probably not all of it. There will be aspects that we will keep, and like an endangered species, we will want to make sure that we never lose the record of it because there will probably be a time when we will want to know more about it: e.g. “how did a tribal society handle this problem?”
The other one:
You cite one positive effect of religion as social cohesion, but I think you maybe ought to re-read Wilson. The dynamics of group selection are a good deal more important to assessing what is positive and negative than you seem to realize. Cohesion for a given group is almost always a matter of differentiation from other groups. Every aspect of cultural selection has to be recognized as having a powerful “us vs. them” component because cooperation and competition always work together: Selective advantage is relative – it is always one group’s advantage over competing groups.
I don’t rely on Wilson for this. I don’t rely on Wilson for the incest taboo example either. I used Wilson’s words at the beginning because they convey part of what I wanted to convey. Later on you said Wilson wouldn’t agree with what I was saying and I gave you an extract from him which I thought was consistent with what I was saying, but I took that as just parenthetical. Also, I don’t think group selection is necessary to explain the phenomena that Wilson has isolated and focused on. I think cultural evolution may be sufficient. I don’t deny the possibility of group selection, either, but I don’t think the case has been made. I don’t have the support of any authority for what I’m saying. It’s just my own synthesis, for whatever it’s worth.
Social cohesion is necessary for human social life. Social life is never based on the entire population unless the population is tiny. Groups within the population are necessary, and yes cohesion requires identifying the group as separate from the whole and/or from other groups. The “vs.” is variable though, say on a continuum between “with ‘us and them’ together we can get it done”, on the one hand, and “it’s either ‘us or them’, one of us is going to die”, on the other.
You start off talking about group selection and then switch to cultural selection in a way I don’t understand. Maybe you meant to say “group selection” again where you said “cultural selection”.
I wrote a long=-ish response that was eaten by an unreliable internet connection, and for the first time in months I failed to make sure I had a comment saved elsewhere before hitting submit. I’ve probably taken far too much of my time with this anyway. It’s been fun, but I do have lots of other work to do.
Frankly, Juan, I couldn’t follow the first two sections of your response anyway. I still don’t know what your objection to my position really is, and so I can’t very well answer it. If you want to continue what seems to have become a discussion just between the two of us at a later time, just click the “G” to get my e-mail address.
Regards,
G