debitage: part of the core tool and scraper tradition

debitage

13.8.05

Deep Ecology Vs. Ecology

Deep ecology seems to have a somewhat contradictory relationship with ecological science. It draws for support on an older form of ecology based on ideas of climax, equilibrium, and linear systems theory. One of the key elements of this view is that nature is "tightly coupled" -- that is, everything is connected to everything else, every organism and process has a vital role to play in upholding the stability and flourishing of the entire system. The concept of tightly coupled nature is used as a rationale for extending moral consideration beyond humans, and beyond even thinking animals that can be conceptualized as moral persons in the conventional sense, to all parts of the ecosystem. Ecology, we're told, shows that all things on the Earth form a sort of great community, which in turn implies that they have inherent moral worth. But it's an odd sort of community, since the inherent telos which natural objects and processes are said to be entitled to follow is defined as what they would do in the absence of humans. In other words, because nature and humans are tightly coupled, nature has rights. And the primary right that nature has is to be de-coupled from humans (or at least as de-coupled as is feasible). This is consistent with the classical liberal tradition of sovereign individualism, but not with our ordinary concepts of what constitutes a (human) community.

Deep ecology offers a second, intuitionist rationale for granting inherent moral worth to nature. We start with the premise that nature needs to be protected. Many people would argue that enlightened self- or human-interest would lead us to protect nature, since degradation of nature utimately hurts humans. Deep ecologists respond that such an anthropocentric rationale will not be sufficient to justify full protection of nature. They maintain that we could get away with a significant degree of degradation of nature before it created a net harm to humanity, and thus the only way to morally rule out that degradation is to give nature itself rights. Yet this justification for deep ecology presumes a more loosely coupled system. The more tightly coupled the system, the less able we would be to escape the consequences of our degradation, and thus the more environmental protection would be mandated by an anthropocentric view.

Stentor Danielson, 09:50, ,

10.8.05

How To Create A Law

Joe Carter has a post up outlining the Axiological Argument for God's existence. He summarizes it as the following syllogism:

1. If God did not exist, objective moral values and duties would not exist.
2. Objective moral values and duties do exist.
3. Therefore, God exists.

(Note that while Carter, as a fan of Pascal's Wager, is not averse to pragmatic/consequentialist arguments for beliefs, he specifically disavows the common pragmatic version of the axiological argument, which states that atheists do not act morally. He also disavows the epistemological version, which states that the content of the objective moral code can't be known without a direct revelation from God.)

Carter has little patience for those who reject the second premise. I think he's a little too quick to dismiss the possibility that one could be a true moral relativist. It's possible that, on the model of sports fandom, one could hold a strong attachment one's own subjective moral code and desire to get others to adhere to it -- even to the point of dishonestly using claims of moral objectivity -- without believing in objective morality. Nevertheless, Carter is right that there is hardly anyone who actually is a moral relativist, and hardly anyone would actually be willing to bite the bullet of becoming relativist in order to avoid accepting the existence of God.

The question, then, is whether the first premise is valid. In comments, Carter clarifies that the first premise is -- consistent with his overall humility with respect to philosophical arguments for God -- a sort of default option. Nobody has produced another plausible explanation for where objective morals come from. I am intrigued by Juergen Habermas's argument that morality is based on 1) the principles that are presupposed by the attempt to debate and persuade someone else, and 2) the principles that would be consented to by all parties affected if they were able to debate them in an "ideal speech situation." But I won't claim to be entirely convinced of that, or any other, explanation. So thus far Carter and I mostly agree.

Where we differ is whether God is an adequate default position. It does seem facially intuitive that law can come from a lawgiver. But I'm skeptical of whether a lawgiver can be responsible for objective law. The law-lawgiver model comes from human society. But in that case, it's clear that the law in question is necessarily subjective -- and indeed, we often point out the existence of the lawgiver in order to relativize the law. A law given by a human lawgiver is merely an expression of his or her will, albeit a will often rooted in a sincere belief that the law is consistent with the objective law. Insofar as pointing out the lawgiver is grounds for accepting the law, it amounts to two possible positions:
1) The lawgiver is powerful, and will punish you if you do not accept the law.
2) The lawgiver is someone we've already decided is smarter than us or has access to more information than us, so it makes sense to trust her or him to have discerned the correct morality.

Under option 1, the real bindingness of the law is beside the point. Force can be used to compel disobedience to anything. The Taliban's soccer-stadium massacres didn't somehow make it objectively morally required that women wear burkhas, though they did make it pragmatically self-interested to do so. Similarly, the fact that God will send you to hell for acting in a certain way does not make it morally binding to not act that way.

Option 2 seems more plausible. After all, God is usually said to be omniscient, so if anyone can discern the objective law, God can. But notice what this does -- it places the existence of the objective law prior to the lawgiving. In this case the lawgiver is not a creator of the law, but rather a trustworthy guide to an existing law. The origin of the law remains unexplained.

A final option might be to reject the human lawgiver model. God, we could say, creates the objective moral law in the same way that he created the objective physical world. This line of argument, however, turns the axiological argument into a special case of the cosmological argument ("if something exists, it must ultimately have been created by a supernatural being"). Thus the axiological argument is just as convincing as the cosmological argument -- which is to say, very convincing for Carter and not terribly convincing for me.

It's important to note here that "where do morals come from?" is a question for which ignorance is an acceptable answer. Compare it to the question of "what conduct is moral?" In that case, we have to make a choice. No matter how uncertain we are about what is right and wrong, we have to provisionally adopt one set of principles or another (even if only implicitly). Life is constantly demanding that we make choices, and without a moral viewpoint, we can't. On the other hand, insofar as Carter is right (and I think he is) to disavow the epistemological version of the axiological argument, the origin of objective morality is not a question that we're forced to take a position on. If it's true that atheists and people who believe in the wrong god can still ascertain what's moral, then there's no reason we can't say "I don't know yet" to the question of where morals come from.

Stentor Danielson, 09:17, ,

The Undefinable Difference

Hugo Schwyzer's most recent post illustrates one of the things that bothered me about Iron John: an insistence that men are different, combined with an unwillingness to name or otherwise clearly identify what characteristics make men different. Schwyzer is responding to a question asking what he likes about men. He begins his answer in roughly the direction I would go: I like people who exhibit qualities X, Y, and Z, and I've found men as well as women who have those qualities. But he goes on to imply that there's some undefinable difference, some je ne sais quoi about his male friends in particular:

Are there female friends in my life with whom I have shared similar experiences? Of course. But there are some days when it just feels so damned good to be out with the guys, sharing our suffering and our stories and our just-ran-for-four-hours-and haven't-showered-since yesterday morning smell!

For those of us who don't see much inherent difference between the sexes*, this kind of explanation isn't terribly helpful in understanding the other side's perspective. Any attempt to grapple with the claimed difference slips away through the "of course there are plenty of women like that" escape hatch.

Then again, that very slipperiness may be part of the point. As I mentioned in my post on Iron John, the "mytho-poetic" view of gender comes from a poetic, not a (social) scientific, standpoint. In this age of science, poetry (like the other humanities) defends its turf by claiming that its truths are not accessible in any other way, that -- like Gnostic enlightenment -- they can only be felt and experienced, never explained and reasoned about.

*My own list of things I like about men in particular would be limited to superficial things like "some beards look cool" and "I love the guys who sing the really really deep bass part in a capella."

Stentor Danielson, 07:06, ,

7.8.05

In Defense of Evolutionary Psychology

Jerry Fodor's review of a recent book criticizing Evolutionary Psychology contains some good points, but also claims that Evolutionary Psychology is invalidated by its use of an argument that ought to be completely unnecessary. Fodor has one important major point: that we can't assume that the details of any trait were directly selected for and optimized by evolution. Selection pressure is simply not that strong, so we have a lot of traits that are by-products of other adaptations. An evolutionary explanation requires more than a just-so story. This is more or less the root of my own objection to Evolutionary Psychology as it's currently practiced -- it assumes that the details of modern behavior were directly selected for.

But Fodor confuses the issue by bringing in the strange notion that to say that a mental characteristic is an adaptation, there has to be something somewhere -- whether it's our own unconscious, or "mother nature," or whatever -- that "wants" us to maximize our reproductive success. He points out, correctly, that any behavior could have a plurality of motivations, and that to explain a behavior one must first identify the motivation, then explain why that motivation exists. According to Fodor, Evolutionary Psychology explains our ordinary motivations by appealing to a deeper motivation for reproductive success.

Obviously postulating the necessary existence of a desire for reproductive success lying behind every mental adaptation is silly. But it's also unnecessary. There's a tendency to slip into teleological language when talking about evolution, and Fodor cites some examples from Richard Dawkins and others. But a mental propensity can evolve on the basis of its contribution to reproductive success without anyone anywhere wanting to be reproductively successful. All it requires is that the propensity in question in inheritable and has, among its effects, that it leads to greater reproductive success than the available alternatives.

For this reason, evolution is entirely consistent with a plurality of motivations. Ceteris paribus, having lots of sex will lead to geater reproductive success than having less sex. Now, imagine a population in which some people have a gene that leads them to find sex distasteful, other people have a gene that makes sex lots of fun, and a third group has a gene that makes them believe that having sex will keep the moon from falling. And let's assume that genes 2 and 3 create motivations whose strength is such that they lead their holders to have the same amount of sex, whereas the people with gene 1 are motivated to have much less sex. In this situation, the people with gene 1 will fail to pass it on to their descendants, whereas genes 2 and 3 will each be passed on to an equal number of descendants. Within a few generations, there will be hardly anybody left with gene 1. But because genes 2 and 3 produce behaviors that are equivalent in terms of promoting reproductive success, they will continue to be passed on in equal amounts. Our population will have evolved two different motivations for sex, neither of which entails anyone or anything "wanting" anyone to have reproductive success. There are further questions to be asked about why it was genes 2 and 3 that were present in this population, as opposed to, say, gene 4 which would have also motivated people to have lots of sex. But to explain why genes 2 and 3 persisted while gene 1 did not needs to refer only to their behavioral effects, not to their content or to some unattached motivation for reproductive success.

Stentor Danielson, 23:35, ,

Birth Control And Cloning

Elizabeth Anderson has been writing a series of posts arguing that freedom as non-domination (being free of the arbitrary will of others -- in Fiskean terms, the lack of Authority Ranking relationships) is as, if not more, important than the more common conception of freedom as access to a large set of options. In her latest post, she illustrates the contrast with an analogy to a bridge:

It's worse, from the perspective of freedom, to be deprived of a critical opportunity by the arbitrary exercise of another's will, than to lack it due to natural causes or lack of technological development. It's worse to be unable to cross an unnavigable river because others arbitrarily forbid one from using the bridge, than because the technology for building a bridge at that point is lacking. In the first case, one lives in a state of subjection to others; in the second, one is merely technologically poor.

She then goes on to derive from this concept the princple of common carriers, which says that people offering a public service (e.g. bus companies) may not discriminate between customers. She then applies this principle to the question of religious pharmacists refusing to dispense birth control. By refusing to dispense birth control, a pharmacist is exercising arbitrary domination over a woman -- and access to a more helpful pharmacist at another store isn't a solution, as the possibility of domination, not merely its actual use, is sufficient to infringe on freedom.

While the common carrier principle seems to capture something important, there are a variety of criticisms that could be made of it as it stands -- for example, why does it not apply on the buyer's side as well, thus prohibiting boycotts? Isn't the possibility of going out of business altogether dominating as well? Nevertheless, I'm going to focus here on the validity of her distinction between restrictions based on another's will, and restrictions based on natural or technological limits. I think the boundary between those two types of restrictions is far fuzzier than it appears at first glance.

To maintain the distinction, one must adopt a relatively naive view of how technological progress is made, in order to make technological restrictions politically and morally innocent. One could assume that science is advancing as rapidly as possible, and focusing on the most important questions. Or one could assume that advances are wholely dependent on unpredictable flashes of genius.

In reality, though, scientific advance is in a large part due to social choices. Governments, research institutions, and individual scientists make countless decisions, based on various social criteria, about what research to fund and carry out. It seems that these decisions can be just as much a source of domination as direct denials of existing technology. Imagine sitting by Anderson's river, with a bunch of engineers who -- because of some irrational prejudice against you -- refuse to do the necessary calculations to come up with a bridge design that would allow you to cross.

In the birth control example, while I don't know the history, I would be very surprised if there weren't a number of people who could have researched birth control, but declined to because they thought contraception is immoral. The fact that one research team eventually did come up with a formula is no more consolation, in Anderson's schema, than the fact that a woman turned down at CVS could get her prescription filled at Walgreen's.

As it happens, today we face a similar dilemma: cloning. There are numerous people who would like to take advantage of cloning technology. However, there are numerous bans and proposed bans that would stifle the research necessary to make human cloning possible. These bans are justified on the same sort of basis that allowing pharmacists to refuse to give out birth control is -- a moral objection to how the technology could, or would, be used. By the common carrier principle, it's impermissible for research labs to refrain from researching cloning.

Stentor Danielson, 14:26, ,

DC Statehood Again

In the discussion of voting rights for Washington DC that I linked to in the previous post, Brett Bellmore responds to the point that not everyone in DC works for the government by saying that the rest of them are on welfare, and thus have the same vested interests. As it happens, I can live with disenfranchising anyone who's on welfare. Since the 1996 "reform," there's hardly anyone left on anything that fits the classical image of give-money-to-poor-people welfare. Today's welfare queens are: 1) Midwestern agribusiness, 2) defense contractors (mostly located in the South), and 3) CEOs and other corporate higher-ups in general. Hmmm, I wonder which party most of those folks vote for ...

Stentor Danielson, 10:14, ,