debitage

14.7.07

Atheist Wishful Thinking

Atheists often (correctly) point out that many religious people justify their belief based on wishful thinking. It would be really nice if there was a loving and powerful God who had planned your life out for a purpose and will take you to heaven in the end. Unfortunately, I've seen atheists turn right around and make a wishful thinking argument for their own position. (This post isn't the clearest example, because while both Brent Rasmussen and RickU hint at the atheist wishful thinking argument, neither of them directly makes it. But it was that post that reminded me that I'd seen this argument used more directly elsewhere.)

The atheist wishful thinking argument is a spinoff of the Problem of Evil. The atheist wishful thinker says that if God does exist, then the existence of evil (either worldly evil or hell) proves that he's a jerk, and therefore not worthy of worship. So far so good -- we can debate the pragmatic merits of refusing to grovel before a powerful yet evil entity, but it's not illogical to stand on principle and refuse to praise a being you find to be evil. Where the argument becomes illegitimate wishful thinking is when the non-praiseworthiness of God becomes a reason not to believe. But of course something's evilness is no reason to think it doesn't exist -- after all, I still believe that George W. Bush, global warming, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers exist. And many religions through history have in fact held that at least some of their gods were immoral and deserving of at most placation and fear.

This is part of a larger phenomenon of narrow vision among many atheists -- the idea that the choice is between orthodox Christianity and atheism (or at least that any religion is going to be based on the paradigm of orthodox Christianity with the names of the gods and prophets changed). It's an understandable narrowness given the pool of people that Western atheists are going to end up arguing with (and many of those people hold the same false dilemma). But it's important to recognize that an argument against orthodox Christianity is not necessarily a general argument for atheism, because the objection may have no grip on an alternative religion. Indeed, given the diversity of religions, I find it hard to imagine anyone could come up with a positive argument for atheism that would rebut them all. So the argument for atheism must remain negative -- the combination of Ockham's Razor and the failure of any pro-religion argument so far to meet the burden of proof.

Stentor Danielson, 17:48, |

11.7.07

Population

William Moseley says that it's overconsumption, not overpopulation, that's the main culprit behind environmental degradation. I more or less agree with him, but I have three concerns about the article.

1. Moseley refers to the popular I=PAT theory -- environmental Impact is the result of Population, Affluence, and Technology. For I=PAT to make sense, the T has to encompass "social technologies" like institutional arrangements (e.g. the tragedy of the commons) and access to one resource rather than another (e.g. poor people degrading their resources because they've been shut out of other options to make ends meet). But this point is not often brought out, leading T to be interpreted in the sense of "stuff that comes out of an R&D department."

2. Moseley ends his article by saying "It's time population control came off the top of the environmental agenda." As far as I can tell, population control is nowhere near the top of the modern environmental agenda. The key issues of environmentalists today all fall under A or T -- organic and local agriculture, more efficient or sparing use of fossil fuels, clean energy, etc. The drivers behind increased use of contraceptives in the third world are feminists, and their motivations put population control a distant second to women's rights.

3. Obviously Moseley had no control over the illustration they chose for his article, but it's still obectionable -- a fat face staring out of a map of the US. While I admit to using the fat = overconsumption visual device in cartoons in the past, I think it's one that should be retired. It perpetuates the idea that fatness is about irresponsible overindulgence, gobbling up food without self-control. This ideology leads to prejudice against and blame of fat people.

Stentor Danielson, 20:18, |

10.7.07

Studying People Like Yourself

In the academics_anonymous LiveJournal community, ne_pas raised concern about a percieved growing tendency in the social sciences and humanities to find it at best surprising and at worst inappropriate for a member of one group to study another group. I think we need to distinguish three senses in which you might question someone else's decision to study people unlike themselves, because discussion of the first two senses tends to crowd out consideration of the third.

1. The motivational sense: "It directly affects me, or people I identify with" is a pretty obvious and understandable motivation for choosing a subject area. It's so obvious that people often become befuddled when they can't explain someone's choice of study in these terms (especially if there's an obvious personally-relevant topic of study for that person).

2. The epistemological sense: This is the classic insider/outsider problem -- can an outsider ever really understand the thing they're studying? On this question I think pretty much everyone agrees that both insiders and outsiders have useful perspectives.

3. The political sense: In studying a group, you're setting yourself up to in some way speak for them, producing authoritative representations of their situation. But speaking for some group becomes ethically/politically sticky when there is a power differential between your group and the group you're studying. One of the key techniques of oppression is that the oppressor claims the right and the ability to speak for the oppressed -- white people have long been the ones making the official pronouncements on what black people are all about, men get to define womanhood, abled doctors are the source of information about the disabled, etc. The voices of the oppressed are crowded out, either by being overtly excluded (eg denying members of some group a place in academia) or by being drowned out because the oppressor group's voice is amplified by their financial, status, and other types of resources. The ability to speak for and define oneself is a key right claimed by liberation movements. Thus, to study a group that is oppressed relative to you is in some way to perpetuate the oppressor's claim to speak for the oppressed. This is not to say that members of oppressor group can never study the oppressed -- after all, oppression is multidimensional and your study may still be a net oppression-reducer. But concern about the politics of speaking for others is still a real concern.

My dissertation research raises questions about studying others in the first two senses, since I'm a Pennsylvanian with no experience of wildfire* studying what people in New Jersey and New South Wales think about wildfires. But it doesn't raise questions in the third sense, because Pennsylvania vs New Jersey, the US vs Australia, and people with vs without wildfire experience are not significant axes of oppression or power differential. And on many of potential power axes, I'm actually an insider with respect to my study population -- we're both largely white, middle-class, and from a semi-rural background.

For my other research project, on community involvement in Superfund cleanups**, however, there is a political question. For our Waukegan case study, one important part of our study involves looking at the views of the Latino community. So I am to some degree a white person speaking for a group of Latinos. However, that alone doesn't revoke my right to do this study, because I would argue that the net effect of the study is to reduce oppression. At the moment, the Latinos in Waukegan have very little voice of any sort, and are often spoken for by whites who (while in my experience invariably well-meaning) lack broad, systematic knowledge of what Latinos think about the harbor cleanup. Our research, being based on listening to the Latino community, is able to both speak more authentically for them as well as pave the way for their voices to be heard more loudly and directly in the cleanup process itself (in Waukegan and hopefully elsewhere). Or at least that's the theory by which I would claim a right to do research on people of another race in this situation.

As for whether this concern is increasing, I would suspect that it is for all three senses. The growing diversity of the academy means that many areas of study now have more people who can study them due to personal connection (including areas of study that didn't even exist until the academy had a critical mass of directly involved people). With respect to the epistemological sense, I think we're increasingly recognizing how deeply culture shapes our understanding of the world, with the result that the special insights of insiders are gaining prominence relative to the insights of outsiders. And in the political sense, the moral/political shift associated with the rise of "identity politics" has brought questions of speaking for others to the forefront.

*Judging from the conferences I've been to, I think I'm the only person studying wildfires in the US who isn't a former firefighter.

**Which I'm in one sense more of an insider to, having grown up in a Superfund site. I even wrote a paper (.doc) on my hometown for an Environmental Justice class long ago, which I may one day revise into something publishable.

Stentor Danielson, 01:40, |

9.7.07

(for some reason Blogger won't let me click in the Title box to write a title)

It's not the foaming-at-the-mouth crazies that scare me the most. It's the people who can very calmly and rationally explain their consistently immoral position:

I do not want my grandson to know about homosexuality, I do not want him to hear about homosexuality, or see it in the media. I do not want him to meet any homosexuals, or play with children of homosexual guardians.

At least with the crazies, you can hope that one day they'll stop and think things through reasonably and realize the error of their ways. But what hope is there if they've already calculated the bottom line and yet don't grasp that it leaves them morally bankrupt?

Stentor Danielson, 01:43, |