debitage: part of the core tool and scraper tradition

debitage

8.9.06

No Posting

I'm off to New York for the weekend. In the meantime, I give you some amazing paper art.

Stentor Danielson, 13:17, |

7.9.06

Palmerton Community Festival

It's that time of the year again -- I'm getting a whole bunch of hits from people searching for "Palmerton Community Festival." So let me take advantage of my apparent power by telling you to go buy cookies from the Holy Trinity Lutheran Church stand, and make sure all your trash makes it into an actual trash can so as to make things easier for the Boy Scouts.

Stentor Danielson, 13:39, |

5.9.06

Can You Love The Sinner But Hate The Sin?

In discussing gay rights, it's inevitable that the anti-gay rights person will invoke the principle of "love the sinner, hate the sin." And it's almost as inevitable that the pro-gay rights person will deny that LTSHTS is possible.

I understand the powerful appeal of denying LTSHTS. All reasonable participants in contemporary political discourse generally agree -- and I'm not about to dispute it -- that it's wrong to hate anyone, with the possible exception of Stalin-scale monsters. So if hating what someone does necessarily entails hating the person, it becomes untenable to continue hating the act.

As a psychological proposition -- that hating an act will cause the hater to eventually direct his or her hate toward the person who commits the act -- LTSHTS-denial strikes me as dubious. It may be true in many cases, as humans are often weak, but it's hardly inevitable. Our impression of its prevalence is doubtless inflated by many people who invoke LTSHTS dishonestly, in an attempt to dodge justified accusations that they hate the sinner. I would also argue that our culture actively fosters an inability to LTSHTS (think of the way we dehumanize criminals). What's more, if LTSHTS-denial is a psychological proposition, then our ethics become captive in a weirdly pragmatist way to psychology. After all, a purely psychological denial of LTSHTS proves not that the conduct in question is actually morally right, but rather that we ought to consider it morally right for reasons independent of its actual rightness.

As a philosophical principle (a principle of logic), LTSHTS-denial is also dubious. The logical implication of a categorical denial of the possibility of LTSHTS is that all conduct is permissible, since to oppose any conduct is to hate it, and to hate it would be to hate the person who commits it. Clearly this conclusion is unacceptable. Unless the only people we care about are a small elite of the very powerful, showing love to anyone (and certainly love, even at a minimum level, to everyone) entails desiring restrictions on others' conduct, and hence opposition to some acts. Take feminism (from whence comes much LTSHTS-denial in the gay rights case) as an example. Anti-feminists frequently charge that feminists hate men. But feminists reply (rightly) that while they hate patriarchy (as a system) and they hate oppressive acts carried out by men, they do not hate the men themselves -- if anything, they love men more than many forms of anti-feminism. What is this, if not LTSHTS? One proposal might be that it's possible to oppose the sin without hating it. Hate, we could say, is a particularly emotional and visceral sort of opposition. While this may be true, it doesn't solve our problem. I can imagine no standard of viscerality that would classify ordinary anti-gay rights views as hate without also including much of the justified anger that feminists express toward patriarchy. Or perhaps we could say that not all things that are wrong are sins. A sin is something that is wrong because it violates God's law. This would get secular moral theories off the hook of not being able to hate wrongdoing without hating the wrongdoer. But I see no reason why, psychologically or philosophically, it should be possible to love the committer of secular injustice while hating the secular injustice itself, but impossible to LTSHTS.

But perhaps we can restrict its domain. Perhaps something about the gay rights case makes LTSHTS inapplicable there, while it is applicable in cases such as patriarchy. There is a certain sense in which you cannot fully love a person while hating a false sin. Loving a person means wanting what's best for them. Obviously, if you have a false idea of what's best for them due to misclassifying one of their actions as a sin, you are unable to want what's actually best for them. But misguided love, bad as it may be in many instances, is different from hate.

Since there are sins (in the broad sense of "wrong acts"), and since (almost) no person is deserving of hate, we should continue to LTSHTS. This includes hating the sin of dishonestly or incorrectly claiming to LTSHTS when one actually does hate the sinner, and hating the sin of incorrectly determining which acts are sins.

Stentor Danielson, 21:29, |

3.9.06

Understanding Versus Caring

On the basis of a focus group, David Suzuki thinks the big hurdle to taking action on climate change is that people don't understand how climate change works. After his focus group participants went through a great deal of hand-waving and confusing climate change with the ozone hole, he concludes:

People don't get it. This is a big problem, because if people don't get it, then they don't really care, so politicians and CEOs don't really care, and status quo rules the day.

This sounds very plausible, and it's become a key tenet of modern environmentalism (perhaps because environmentalism, more so than other modern social movements, is so explicitly wedded to science). The problem is that it isn't true -- plenty of research has demonstrated that increased education does not lead to increased environmental concern*. This is not to say that knowledge is unimportant, but that it plays an instrumental, rather than motivational, role -- knowledge tells you how to fix the problem, not whether you should try to fix it in the first place.

If my vague "studies have shown ..." doesn't do it for you, consider an issue that the public manifestly does care about: terrorism. It's a bit hard to maintain that understanding is a necessary prelude to political concern when half of the American public thinks Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11.

Or perhaps Suzuki should look at his own focus group results. A few paragraphs earlier in his article, he says:

The majority felt that global warming was a pretty important problem and they were concerned about it.

* That is, increased education about environmental issues doesn't lead to increased environmental concern. Overall level of formal education, regardless of subject, is actually a fairly robust correlate of environmental concern (independent of income). This suggests that the driving force is not knowledge, but rather the culture of academia and the professional world. The culture of these social spheres makes environmental concern one element of what constitutes a "good person."

Stentor Danielson, 22:08, |

Speaking Of Animal Rights ...

In the process of writing that last post, an idea occurred to me about an issue I dealt with a month ago: can someone consistently reject meat on animal rights grounds, and oppose animal testing, yet still accept medical treatment that was developed through animal testing. In my previous post, I focused on the relative strength of the boycott effect in the meat vs medicine cases, concluding that the boycott was less likely to reduce the amount of animal suffering in the latter case. But I think there's also a question of differential framing that means the question of boycotts is also less relevant in the medical treatment case. For reasons I won't get into (and don't entirely understand), the use of animals for food is framed as a personal issue, while animal testing is a political one. Food is seen as regulated by individual consumer choice, in which boycotts are a key weapon. Political (in the conventional sense) struggle is limited to the most egregious forms of factory farming, such as chicken debeaking. Change is seen as coming through widespread change in attitudes and habits. On the other hand, animal testing is concieved of as a political struggle, in which the main, and most effective, weapon is agitation for a social/legal decision against the practice. An individual-level boycott is beside the point when you anticipate that the boycotted-against thing will soon be banned. Hence the sunk costs argument will weigh in favor of accepting treatment.

Stentor Danielson, 01:50, |

Thinking The Unthinkable About Scientific Progress

Orac's recent rant* against animal rights supporters raises an interesting blind spot in debates over morally controversial research. Like most staunch defenders of animal testing, he points out the many scientific and medical advances that we have made through animal testing. He asserts his own efforts to avoid "unnecessary" suffering on the part of the lab animals he uses, where suffering (presumably) becomes "necessary" when any way of avoiding it would limit what we are able to learn. More interesting is that he reminds me (in the course of rebutting it) that animal rights proponents claim that the same advances could be made without harming animals. All animal experimentation is "unnecessary" in exactly the same sense as I inferred Orac used the term. They're unwilling to say that many new treatments may be delayed or never developed, and that that's a price worth paying to protect the animals who would otherwise suffer in the labs.

From animal testing to stem cells to the repatriation of Native American remains, the moral imperative of the advance of science is never questioned, except by those who are opposed to science. Nobody seriously considers whether, while the advance of science is ceteris paribus a very good thing, in some cases the costs of achieving some non-trivial knowledge might unfortunately be too high. So animal rights proponents insist that equal results can be achieved through cell cultures and computer models, President Bush declares that the existing stem cell lines are plenty, and repatriators tell inspiring stories of the research bonanzas that follow repairing relationships between archaeologists and tribes. (By what I'm sure is sheer coincidence, my own judgment is that the desirability of restriction is highest, and the negative impacts on scientific progress lowest, in the case of repatriation, and conversely in the case of stem cells). The only people willing to entertain the possibility of a slowdown in scientific progress as the price of serving other ethical goals are people like Vine Deloria Jr who have little regard for science in the first place.

As counterexamples to my thesis, we could certainly come up with scenarios where ex hypothesi huge advances in understanding may be gained from horrifying Nazi experiments. So it's true that neither the pro-research nor anti-research sides is aiming at the total maximization of scientific progress without regard to the ethical cost. What's really happening, then, is that neither side is willing to admit to a reduction in the socially-established default or baseline rate of scientific progress. Certain ethical principles, such as constraints on directly killing innocent humans, are so deeply embedded that to violate them in the name of research is unthinkable, and thus they do (usually unconsciously, or consciously but self-evidently) constrain the rate of progress. But once this rate, minimally constrained by consensus ethical principles, is established as the status quo, proponents of further restrictions are unwilling to admit that their proposals would reduce that status quo rate.

*I call it a mere "rant" because he indulges in a good deal of guilt-by-association-with-your-extremists, one of my least favorite rhetorical strategies. And he amusingly declares that animal rights views are not based on reason, while offering in support of his own animal-noblesse-oblige view the ironclad contention that it's "ridiculous" to belive otherwise.

Stentor Danielson, 00:36, |