Fun and games for the start of a new year at St Mary’s University in Halifax: a chant about the joys of raping underage girls (“o is for oh so tight” is one stanza).

The questionable cheer is based on the word YOUNG – “Y is for your sister … U is for underage, N is for no consent … Saint Mary’s boys we like them young.”

O you already have; “G is for grab that ass” is the other redacted one.

The students didn’t notice anything wrong with it, but now they do. Not noticing seems rather inattentive.

In response, the university is calling in an expert on bullying. (Uh oh – let’s hope it’s not Kristina Hansen aka “the wooly bumblebee”!)

Wayne MacKay, the former chair of a provincial task force on bullying, was appointed by the school after a video surfaced of a chant during frosh week activities at the Halifax university.

…

He was also called upon frequently to comment on the death of Nova Scotia teenager Rehtaeh Parsons. The provincial government has been focusing on raising awareness around sex and bullying following the death of Ms. Parsons, who attempted suicide after she was allegedly sexually assaulted by several young men at a party in 2011. The 17-year-old had been the victim of bullying and cyberbullying after the incident, according to her family.

The CBC’s The National had a segment on it last night. The reporter talked to a girl, who said cheerfully, “I’m not a feminist sort of person, so it doesn’t affect me personally.”

I was unaware that it was only feminists who object to rape.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Stephanie has a post about standards and how we decide whom to believe and related subjects. In it she links to a document that reveals some important background information.

So here we have to weigh Sarah’s word against that of Cornwell, now the former RDFRS executive director. This would be harder for me if Cornwell didn’t have a history of using falsehood to deflect negative attention from Dawkins. She did this in the forum debacle a few years ago. (Yes, that email has been verified with someone who worked for RDFRS at the time. No, the source of the verification is not Timonen.) She did this by privately “clarifying” that Paula Kirby wasn’t part of Dawkins’ foundation when people were baffled that Kirby would write something like “The Sisterhood of the Oppressed”, though Cornwell’s email states that Dawkins insisted that Kirby be included in the foundation. [ETA: Kirby herself has also claimed the association.] Given Cornwell’s history, I don’t see any good reason to think that when someone otherwise trustworthy says something about Dawkins that Cornwell contradicts, I should trust Cornwell.

The link under “forum debacle” is, as Stephanie says, to an email. The email reveals some secret relationships, which explain some things about the atheist and secularist movements – secret relationships among people who ran major organizations and held positions on the boards of other major organizations. The email sheds light on a lot of things – things which should never have been secret – conflicts of interest, in short. Undeclared nepotism, in short. And, probably, why Dawkins took such a ferocious dislike to Rebecca Watson.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

American Atheists posted a statement on Facebook a few hours ago in response to Sarah Moglia’s post at Skepchick.

A recent blog post by Sarah Moglia alleges that American Atheists President Dave Silverman acquiesced to a demand by Richard Dawkins in September 2011 that he choose between Rebecca Watson and Dr. Dawkins as speakers at the Reason Rally in March 2012.

American Atheists and Mr. Silverman do not condone, support, or participate in the practice of allowing potential convention speakers, or convention supporters, sponsors, or attendees, to blacklist or attempt to blacklist other potential speakers and attendees.

While Mr. Silverman does not dispute that an exchange with Dr. Dawkins took place in Miami in September of 2011, there was no acquiescence on Mr. Silverman’s part. At the time the exchange took place, Ms. Watson had not in fact been invited to speak at the Reason Rally, and that decision had already been made. The Reason Rally had many more requests from prominent atheists to speak than speaking slots to offer.

There’s more, but that’s the essence of it.

Fair enough. That’s consistent with what Sarah wrote, and it makes sense. Anyway, frankly – I probably would have done the same thing if I’d been in that position. I don’t feel like getting all judgey about it (and neither did Sarah, in the post). The point is that Dawkins shouldn’t have put him in that position, just as he shouldn’t have said “zero harm” and he shouldn’t have said “Dear Muslima.” It’s also that it’s a mistake to have idols. Fortunately the idols themselves are doing a bang-up job of convincing us of that.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

A guest post by the philosophical primate, extracted from a comment on Prison disagreed with him.

In calling him a bully and a coward, I addressed Castro’s moral character, and expressed a character judgment. That has bugger all to do with retributive justice.

In fact, one of the aims of a legitimate, socially constructive penal system (which we do not have in this country) is that it offers those convicted of crimes the opportunity and resources to reform their character, to become better human beings. As you said, rehabilitation should be our aim, not retribution — and what is rehabilitation but character reform? But even in American prisons, for all their flaws, some people have used their time in prison to face their own past — not just their criminal actions, but the life history that led up to their criminal actions — and sought to overcome their problems and confront their guilt. In short, they’ve tried to become better human beings, tried to rehabilitate themselves. But becoming a better human being is difficult, and Castro appears to have been too much the coward to even contemplate such a struggle. Instead, he denied responsibility for his actions repeatedly, then escaped the consequences of those actions at the earliest opportunity. Thus, even the last action of his existence was morally blameworthy.

As Hume pointed out a few centuries back (in Enquiry, Section VIII, Part II), the whole business of making moral judgments absolutely requires that people’s behavior is caused by their character. When we judge that an action was not produced by a person’s actual intentions and predispositions — for example, in a genuine accident — we don’t assign moral blame. The fact that character is itself the result of a causal chain in no way negates the possibility of making moral judgments, or sensibly using concepts such as responsibility and blame. Were there reasons why Ariel Castro was a loathsome human being? Logically and psychologically, there certainly must have been: People develop, they don’t just spring into existence wholly formed. Do the causal forces that shaped Ariel Castro into a bully, a coward, and overall vicious person (in the classical sense of vicious, as opposed to virtuous) somehow expiate his responsibility for his actions? Not in the slightest.

Holding people responsible for their actions is not the same as retribution, and some of your arguments here seem to confuse this vital distinction.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Speaking of that Aja Romano piece (as I was yesterday) – she heard from a lot of Team Slime people, on her article and on Twitter. One was Aneris23, who tried to tweet her the right way of seeing things.

Aja Romano to Aneris

wait am I literally watching a guy debate semantics around the words “I want to kick you in the cunt”?

like of course he’s not serious, WHY IS HE DEFENDING A GUY WHO THINKS THAT’S AN OKAY THING TO SAY. like, before anything else, no.

 The he doing the defending is Justicar; the link “Aneris” gave is to one of Justicar’s many tedious self-important videos. So, curious about that particular bit, I took a look, and transcribed the relevant passage. It starts at about 5:40.

Ophelia Benson has been deriving a great amount of blog traffic and money from the hoggle [air quotes] cunt kick thing some of you may have heard about? [big sigh] She’s very keen on claiming that he threatened to kick her in the cunt but she’s conspicuously not keen on linking to the original article or putting it in – quoting him exactly, or in the context he said it. What he said was, he would get a sex change, and kick her in the cunt. Now he said this because he knows specifically that Ophelia will not take it as just hyperbolic internet trolling – I mean who’s really going to have sex reassignment surgery, just to kick Ophelia Benson? And, true to form, she ignores the sex change bit, says “oh my god, this man is threatening sexual violence, he’s threatening to come kick me in the cunt.”

How dare I, right? What a nerve.

“hoggle” later joined that exchange, to call me the Talking Prune and explain how right he was to rant about kicking me the cunt. I’m not sure Aja Romano will find that any more persuasive than she found “Aneris.”

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

So there’s this now – Sarah Moglia got a job as an Event Specialist with the Secular Student Alliance right after she graduated from college. Her first task was to help plan a tour for Richard Dawkins’ children’s book, The Magic of Reality. The first stop of the tour was in Miami.

Hours before the first event, there were people lining up outside the doors. As a member of the team, I was allowed in the auditorium before the event began. It was me, Dave Silverman (President of American Atheists), Elizabeth Cornwell (Executive Director of the Richard Dawkins Foundation), Sean Faircloth (then newly-hired Director of Strategy and Policy for RDF), and Richard Dawkins himself.

At this time (September of 2011), Dave Silverman was heading up the Reason Rally Committee. There was still quite a bit of planning and promotion that needed to be done, so Dave asked Richard, Elizabeth, and Sean to make videos to promote the Reason Rally. (The video Richard ended up making is still viewable.) Richard was standing behind the podium, and he asked Dave something along the lines of, “What exactly is the Reason Rally?” Dave started explaining it, and as he did, someone who was waiting in the line outside opened the door to peek inside and we could all hear a lot of noise. I rushed up the aisle and made frantic “shut the door” gestures at the people peeking inside, and they did. As I walked the ten feet back, I couldn’t hear everything Dave was saying, but I heard the name “Rebecca Watson.” Richard suddenly had a very angry look on his face and I heard him almost shout, “No, absolutely not! If she’s going to be there, I won’t be there. I don’t want her speaking.” and then Dave immediately replied, “You’re absolutely right, we’ll take her off the roster. It’s done.” Richard huffed for a moment, Dave continued to placate him, and then he made the video.

I was crushed. I couldn’t believe it. Richard Dawkins was my hero. I looked up to him as a beacon of truth and reason in a world of irrationality. I couldn’t believe he would act this way toward Rebecca.

Read the rest.

The point is, it’s crappy. It’s an abuse of fame and status and the kind of (intangible) power they confer.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

One of the things I hate more than some of the other things in The Great Community Wars is the cry of “get a JOB!!”

Like the cry quoted by Aja Romano in a Daily Dot piece on the latest front in The Great Community Wars, mockingly dubbed #tablegate.

Skeptics seized upon the discrepancies in Watson’s post and launched a heated backlash. One of the most outspoken critics of the incident was the ironically named Uberfeminist, a skeptics/atheists blog heavily focused on critiquing “American atheist social justice bloggers.” Uberfeminist believed Watson and Roth were trying to game Dragon Con by getting free attendance and then using their own panels to plug their table and merchandise:

Skepchick may say they’re not trying to make a profit, they’re trying to “break even” when accounting for the cost of making the trip happen. … Presumably the majority of attendees make this work by having a day job and saving money.

That’s far from the first time I’ve seen that stupid trope. It’s almost as popular as “real activists do real things, unlike those losers who write blog posts.” The two are closely related, of course, and about as vulgar and anti-intellectual as it’s possible to get. Yeah, get a job, John Keats – don’t lounge around writing poetry, do some honest work for a change.

Fuck that. People are allowed to try to make it work in other ways. People are allowed to put together a patchwork of partial jobs, to make a living by creating art, to make less money doing what they love instead of more money doing what they hate. People are allowed to do things that have little or no market value but a lot of non-market value. Just having a job isn’t the hallmark of virtue and merit.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

So Ariel Castro, the guy who kidnapped and enslaved three women, killed himself in his prison cell. (Or he was murdered and the authorities are just saying he killed himself. Who knows, but let’s go with the official story for now.)

Some moments from his life:

In court:

Castro appeared to blame the victims and accused them of lying about their treatment. He went on to say that none of the women was a virgin when he abducted them, that they wanted sex and there was “harmony” in the “happy household.”

Mm. That’s why there were chains; that’s why the windows were boarded up; that’s why Amanda Berry clawed the front door partly open and screamed for help.

At home:

Castro’s 1,400-square-foot home was reconfigured to keep their whereabouts a secret, FBI agent Andrew Burke testified. The back door was outfitted with an alarm, bedspreads and curtains obscured parts of the home and a porch swing was placed in front of the stairs leading to the rooms where Castro held the women and girl hostage.

Police also testified Castro would chain the women to objects, including a support pole in his basement.

In the room where Berry and her daughter were held, the doorknob was removed, a lock was affixed to the outside and a hole was cut through the door for ventilation because the windows had been boarded up from the inside, Burke said.

Cozy.

Hospitality:

The first police officer on the scene, Barbara Johnson, recalled for the court how she and another officer heard the pitter-patter of footsteps in a dark room where Knight and DeJesus were held.

When the captive women realized they were police, Knight “literally launched herself” onto an officer, “legs, arms, just choking him. She just kept repeating, ‘You saved us! You saved us!’ ” Johnson said.

The women were described as scared, pale, malnourished and dehydrated when they were rescued. Dr. Gerald Maloney, who was in the emergency room when the victims arrived, said Knight requested that no male physicians attend to her.

Dehydrated. He didn’t even let them have enough water.

Quite an epitaph.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

The Dawkins Foundation has been sprucing up its website lately, I gather. It has a projects page, with two sub pages, one of which is Our Resources Include You. It’s about team-building, I guess, and it starts with You, meaning all us readers, then it goes on to Dawkins and co.

Richard Dawkins, DSc, FRS: One of the most respected scientists in the world and the biggest draw in secularism, Richard Dawkins always generates impressive crowds when visiting North America. On his Fall 2011 tour he drew an enthusiastic crowd of 2300 at Eastern Kentucky University. This is a movement, and Richard Dawkins is the catalyst that galvanizes it. 

Um…that’s a sprucing up too far, that last sentence is. (The first sentence isn’t great either. “Most respected” is such a waffly description, and dubious for that reason. It’s PR-speak. That’s the point, that’s what the page is, that’s probably what the sprucing up is about, but all the same – crude PR-speak isn’t really a plus, especially not for a “movement” or project or whatever that proclaims itself as “for reason and science.” Dawkins wouldn’t introduce himself that way to colleagues, I should think, so he shouldn’t let his PR people introduce him to the rest of the world that way. It looks at the very least silly.)

That’s too long for a parenthesis. Back to the last sentence. THE catalyst? No no no no no no no. Don’t do that. Don’t obliterate everyone else that way. There are a lot of catalysts in this movement, they all contribute to the galvanizing, there is no one catalyst that galvanizes it all by himself.

Also, a factual item -

You. RichardDawkins.net is the most visited website in secularism. It is where secular innovation and secular ideas meet secular people who can and will take action. That’s you.

It’s not the most visited website in secularism. For instance – there’s Freethought Blogs.

Dawkins foundation:

Alexa Traffic Rank: 28,606  United States Flag Traffic Rank in US: 14,785

FTB:

Alexa Traffic Rank: 17,783  United States Flag Traffic Rank in US: 6,196

Just saying.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Malala Yousafzai opened the new Birmingham Library today.

How’s that for the best possible revenge? It’s not revenge at all, it’s just surviving and flourishing and being an inspiration to people who need that very thing, when ignorant warped bullies wanted her dead.

As part of the opening ceremony, Malala placed her copy of The Alchemist by Paolo Coelho in the library – the last book to go on the shelves. She has been given membership to access the archive.

Addressing the public, Malala said she was feeling very proud the building had been designed by a woman and the city was now her second home after her “beloved Pakistan”.

She said books were weapons to beat terrorism and “the only way to global peace is reading knowledge and education”.

“Books are precious,” she explained.

“Some books travel with you back centuries, others take you into the future. Some take you to the core of your heart and others take you into the universe.

“There’s no better way to explain the importance of books than to show even God chose the medium of a book to send his message to his people.

“This library will continue to enlighten future generations.

“It is written that a room without books is like a body without a soul. A city without a library is like a graveyard.”

Speaking of how Birmingham has become a home to her, Malala said: “This city is the beating heart of England.

“Birmingham is very special for me, because it was here I found myself alive seven days after I was shot.”

She said the “great people” of the city gave her moral support.

“This event proves this city loves me and I love it too.”

The BBC has a slideshow – the restored Shakespeare room is a knockout, as is the roof garden and the view of Brum from the roof.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Josh Official SpokesGay has a post at More Than Men about the time he was raped, titled Last Night. It gets your attention right away.

“Do you remember what I did to you last night?”

That’s what he asked when I woke, as if asking me to go to breakfast.

I kind of remembered. Then I turned over and felt the pain. He got me drunk, he drugged me, and he fucked me up the ass.

So Josh went right to the police and reported it and the guy was charged and convicted, right? Because that’s how it always works with rape? Like any other crime – you report it, and get justice? Right?

And I sure as fuck didn’t report it to the police. If you have to ask why, then take this opportunity to refill your drink and sit your ignorant ass down.

Report it? To the cops? Did you have a brain tumor for breakfast? Faggots can’t be raped. They’re sex fiends by nature and they never ever turn down the chance to take it up the ass. Because they’re faggots.

Had I reported this to the cops, I would have been put through what nearly all women suffer throughout the reporting process—if they even get past being laughed at or ignored. And the chances aren’t that bad that I’d get an extra rape or a beating for dessert.

Read the whole thing. And by all means discuss it there.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

A parable about dogs and conserving energy. Ok not really a parable, just an observation about dogs.

In one way Cooper is bad at folk physics – he never gets that if he’s standing or lying where I’m trying to go, that means I can’t go there. He never budges over of his own accord; I have to say “mooooooove” and then he does it not because he knows that’s what I mean but because he knows I’m telling him to do something and that’s the only thing he can think of to do. It works, but it’s crude.

In another way, as Gretchen Robinson just reminded me on Facebook, he’s good at it – when we’re at the lake or the Sound and I throw the ball far out into the water, he uses his folk physics. Not, admittedly, the way Gretchen said; he doesn’t run to the point on the beach closest to where the ball hit the water. No, he plunges directly in and then aims for the ball. But on the return trip, he does aim for the shore, not for me; he takes the short route, not the long one.

But then he immediately asks for the ball to be thrown again, and bang goes all that conserved energy. He could just as well swim away from the shore for awhile and then head back.

So never ask a dog to engineer a freeway for you.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Guest post by Marcus Ranum, originally a comment on Sam has to presume a great big ought:

To anticipate a possible counter-objection on this topic, which might attempt to dismiss the concerns of philosophers (such as Hume, Kant, Rawls, and Mill) regarding the topic of the is/ought problem as being perhaps obscure philosophical wanking (which I have sometimes seen likened to religion or theology) it is not a matter of counting the numbers of angels on the head of pins. This is the core issue in any discussion of morality: how do you argue that your individual views about right and wrong are not merely your opinion but are fact? Kant tries to do it with an extremely clever formulation of the golden rule.(1) Mill tries to do it with some ham-fisted handwaving about maximizing the common good(2) and Rawls makes some brilliant game-theoretic leaps to try to overcome the flaws in Kant’s categorical imperative(3).

We humans seem to limp along without an objective morality, basically surviving in societies in which self-interest is the norm and there’s a constant struggle for power – not justice: power. It seems to me that the search for morality is silliness; it ought to be pretty clear that all attempts to establish an agreement in principle amount to nothing more than reifying one person’s opinion as “right” – usually the person with the biggest stick. Harris fails to start with  moral nihilism as his default position and to move from there probably because he doesn’t really understand what he’s doing. He’s not really very well-educated when you come right down to it.

(1) Imagine that the world you live in is the world in which everyone acts as you do; therefore you should act well.  Objection: this is obviously simply Kant’s opinion; we can see that selfishness exists and therefore Kant is simply projecting his moral sense onto others.

(2) Objection: how do you know your idea of what the common good is is fact and not merely your opinion? I.e.: “the common good” presupposes you have a working morality, which is begging the question.

(3) Imagine that you construct the world you will live in, with no advance knowledge of your place in it; the argument is that a rational person will create the most fair world possible. Objection: this is actually an appeal to self-interest hidden behind smoke and mirrors; if you’re willing to assume that self-interest is the basis for morality you’ve actually scored an own-goal.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

I’m rummaging in the archives, locally and globally, for more on the Sam Harris Contest to Find the Genius Who Can Persuade Harris that he didn’t actually invent the new best only way to think about morality all out of his own head by thinking and taking some notes. My rummaging has turned up an article on Harris v Pigliucci at old B&W and under that a comment by Harris’s newly appointed judge, Russell Blackford.

Well, my eyes glaze over whenever I see a complaint about “scientism”. But surely Massimo is right this time, at least on the main point. The Moral Landscape conspicuously fails to derive any “oughts” from “is’s” in the sense that philosophers mean. In order to get started, Sam has to presume a great big “ought” which relates to how we ought to maximise well-being in some sense of the latter. I suppose you could concede that, but then say his overall point stands because it’s just obviously true that we ought to maximise well-being in the requisite sense. But it’s not obvious at all. It’s a substantive, highly controversial claim. You really can’t say that failing to agree with it is analogous to adopting some sort of radical epistemological scepticism (complete with deceiving demons, brains in vats, the radical unreliability of our senses, and the like). That’s just not so. You might as well say that refusing to agree with the claim that there is a God is analogous to radical epistemological scepticism.

Exactly.

I think Harris just took it as given without realizing that he was doing so, and then when a lot of people pointed it out to him after the book was published…well I don’t know: he didn’t understand their point, or he doubled down, or whatever, but he didn’t accept that that was what he had done.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Hm. You would think people who design and build large buildings would know how to figure out how to do it without ending up with a lethal giant magnifying glass.

A new London skyscraper dubbed the “Walkie Talkie” has been blamed for reflecting light which melted parts of a car parked on a nearby street.

Martin Lindsay parked his Jaguar on Eastcheap, in the City of London, on Thursday afternoon.

When he returned about two hours later, he found parts of his car – including the wing mirror and badge – had melted.

Oops. So if people pause in a nearby spot to chat about the prospects for Wolverhampton Wanderers (as people do), they might burst into flames?

Unsettling.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Sam Harris has improved his contest somewhat, in response to some of the reaction. He added an FAQ.

9. With you as the judge, how can we trust that the best attack on your thesis will see the light of day?

Having now fielded several accusations that this contest will be rigged—if not by design, then by my own ignorance and bias—I reached out to the philosopher Russell Blackford for help. Russell has been one of the most energetic critics of The Moral Landscape, and I am very happy to say that he has now agreed to judge the submissions, introduce the winning essay, and evaluate my response. I trust that everyone will consider this a hopeful development.

Of course, only I can judge whether I find the winning essay persuasive enough to trigger a change in my position (and the larger prize). But if I’m not persuaded, I’ll have to give an argument saying why not, and Russell will be there to see that I do this without dodging any important issues.

That’s good. That last clause is especially good – because I have never yet seen a response from Harris that fails to dodge all the important issues, apparently without his even being aware of it. Russell will be in a position to make him aware of it before he publishes. That’s good.

Mind you, I’d think it was even better if it were Patricia Churchland doing it, not least because she too has a PhD in neuroscience, and because her book Braintrust is what Harris should have written but didn’t. But still, this is good.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

More on The Harris Challenge*, aka here’s a time when I agree with Russell Blackford.

Sam Harris

Please change my mind and take my money.

Russell Blackford

I doubt that anyone could put better criticisms of ethical naturalism than you’ve already seen from me in less than 1000 words

SH

I can’t remember, have you addressed my “worst possible misery for everyone argument”?

RB

I may not have addressed that particular para or so – but I don’t think it achieves very much. /1

In reverse order -

RB

If it’s the worst possible misery for everyone, including me and my loved ones, I have a PRUDENTIAL reason to obviate it. /2

What if I have the choice of making myself or a loved one 3 units less miserable or someone else 5 units less miserable? /3

Am I objectively bound in the nature of things to take the second choice? I don’t see it.

RB

In short, we have a reason to ameliorate misery insofar as we care. We are not objectively bound to in the nature of things.

Precisely. And Harris seems to be utterly blind to that, and unable to take it in when people spell it out to him.

Yet there are many people who persist in thinking his book was a bold new theory of morality, that got everything right.

*Update: previous discussion yesterday.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Because of new relevance, my review of The Moral Landscape for Issue 53 of TPM. Posted at ur-B&W April 16, 2011.

Sam Harris asks an interesting question in the introduction, after laying out his central (and not really controversial) claim that questions about values are questions about the well-being of conscious creatures. “Is it possible,” he asks, “that certain people are incapable of wanting what they should want?” Of course, he answers; there are always people who get things wrong. But that question doesn’t exhaust the difficulties that arise in moral discussion, yet Harris separates it out as if it did. The really hard question, which he generally gives short shrift, asks “is it possible that there are many people who are incapable of wanting what other people want?” In other words is it possible that many people do just fine at wanting what they should want for themselves and fail only at wanting what they should want for other people? Yes it is, and this is why the world is not a happy Utopia of people adding their bliss together to make a sum of Megabliss. The owl’s well-being is to eat the mouse, and the mouse’s well-being is to dodge the owl. We have an impasse.

It is surprising that Harris doesn’t put more emphasis on competition, on rivalry and scarcity and zero-sum games and prisoners’ dilemmas, on exploitation and labour and hierarchy, on the fact that more well-being for me is not the same as more well-being for you, let alone for everyone, and that this fact by itself is enough to make morality contentious and difficult. He does address these issues eventually, but not until well into the book, and then only briefly and somewhat perfunctorily. The emphasis is all on insistence that “the well-being of conscious creatures” is pretty much all we need to consider.

He does tell us some interesting things in the process, though, such as that “neuroimaging has also shown that fairness drives reward-related activity in the brain, while accepting unfair proposals requires the regulation of negative emotion.” That is a hopeful observation – but it is vulnerable to the familiar fact that humans are brilliant at rationalization, which means among other things that we know how to understand “fairness” in such a way that it maximizes our own well-being at the expense of other people. Tax-cuts for the super-rich make a tidy example of that, since one can view both sides of the debate as defining “fairness” in their own favor. (Michael Moore performed this dialectic in one of his films: on being told that his new book had just hit the New York Times best-seller list he said, “Oh! Well now I believe in tax-cuts for the rich.”)

The depressing truth that Harris never really confronts is that no one really wants to maximize the well-being of everyone. Economies depend on not doing so: cheap labour is the engine that drives various economic miracles and tigers. Lip service is paid to the idea of eradicating poverty, but meanwhile all sorts of visible and occult mechanisms make sure that there will always be plenty of poor people around. Rich countries subsidize their own cotton farmers at the expense of desperately poor African counterparts. Where is the brain reward for the feeling of fairness then? Africans are far away, and easy to ignore, so their immiseration doesn’t interfere with the well-being of prosperous Europeans.

This isn’t an issue of not understanding that morality is about the well-being of conscious creatures. It’s an issue of not caring, of selective attention, of studied ignorance, of institutions, regulations, habits, expertise – it’s a myriad of things. It’s easy to get people to agree that well-being is good; the hard part is getting them to agree on what that implies they should do, and getting them to do it.

Harris spends most of the book hammering home the point that morality is about the well-being of conscious creatures, which means he spends far too little time considering the difficult questions that arise even if everyone agrees on that. He also frequently treats those questions as easily settled, for instance when he says, “I think there is little doubt that most of what matters to the average person – like fairness, justice, compassion, and a general awareness of terrestrial reality – will be integral to our creating a thriving global civilization and, therefore, to the greater well-being of humanity”.

Almost halfway into the book he does suddenly admit the difficulty – “population ethics is a notorious engine of paradox, and no one, to my knowledge, has come up with a way of assessing collective well-being that conserves all of our intuitions”. He then quotes Patricia Churchland saying, “no one has the slightest idea how to compare the mild headache of five million against the broken legs of two…” Quite so, and this acknowledgement should have come much earlier and been woven into the discussion throughout. Because it isn’t, the first part of the argument seems much too quick and effortless. If it were that simple, the reader keeps thinking, why wouldn’t everyone just do it?

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)