Philosophy Talk: The Blog

Social Reality

posted by Ken Taylor

Our  topic this week is social realities.  I must admit that when I first brought the nature of social reality up as a topic for an episode of Philosophy Talk, the non-philosophers on our team all went  “huh?”   That phrase obviously doesn’t mean much to the person on the street.  But  social realities are all around us.  Think of cocktail parties, football games, bar mitzvahs, political rallies, and even nations.  These are all social realities.  

 And in connection with this sort of thing both parts of that phrase “social reality” are worth focusing on. All the things I just mentioned are things that really and truly exist.  They aren’t figments of anyone’s imagination; they’re real.  Really real.  Objectively real.   But at the same time, they're all made up entities, at least in a sense.   Cocktail parties exist only because a group of people get together and say “we're having a party now.”  People just sort of decide that these things are going to exist.  And so they do exist.  Seems kind of like magic.

It isn’t really magic,  but it is puzzling.  At bottom, social realities are just creations of the human mind.  Not individual human minds, but collections of human minds.   You can’t all by your little lonesome create a social reality.  Try it and you really will end up with something that’s just a figment of your own imagination.  But put a bunch of people together, let them exercise their imaginations together;  let them agree; and presto,  you’ve got a new social reality. 

What could, I suppose, make that sound a little like magic still is the fact that it takes at least two minds to make a social reality. If one mind can’t do it, why are two or more minds any better, you might ask.  Well the answer is that social realities are, by their very natures,  founded on agreement.   If a bunch of humans agree to create a club, then there is a club.  If a bunch of humans agree to form a nation, then there exists a nation.  And although clubs and nations are nothing but products of human agreement, they're not figments of our imagination.  To be sure they are products of our imaginations, but they’re real products, not mere figments.  Once we agree that they exist, they are  as objectively real as rocks and mountains.

Not only are things like clubs and nations real, they are  really important.  They have a huge impact on our lives.   We’re immersed in a universe of ever changing social realities.  And they play an immense role both in determining how we live and how well we live.   Our earliest forbears foraged on the savannah and huddled in caves. Civilizations have risen and fallen and with them, ways of life have come and gone.  Throughout these massive changes in the social world, the biological and physical worlds have changed too -- but not as radically, and mostly in ways that are more or less direct consequences of changes in the human social world. 

So the social world affects not only the way humans relate to one another, but also how we interact with the rest of the biological and physical world.   Science, for example, is really a complex social undertaking by which humans collectively seek to understand the physical, biological, and even the social world itself.

Now scientific understanding of the social world sounds like a good thing.  But it also sounds a bit like sociology or anthropology or maybe social psychology.  We’re philosophers.  Why should we philosophers worry about the social world?

Well for one thing, we want to understand just how the social world arises out the natural world.  

But wait a minute, you’re about to interject. You started out by saying that social realities are a creation of the human mind.  Doesn’t that suggest that the social world doesn’t arise out of the natural world at all?  In one sense yes; in one sense no.   The sense in which the social world is not part of  unaided nature is obvious.  The social world depends entirely on us humans and not on the blind and impersonal forces of nature.  But ultimately human beings are just parts of the natural world.  So the power of the human mind to create social realities must have its roots in human psychology, which must ultimately have its roots in human biology, which must ultimately have its roots in physics.

 This may sound a little reductionist.  Afterall, I  started out talking about the power of the human mind to create, almost out of nothing, all varieties of new social realities.  And now I seem to be suggesting that it all comes down to the chemical processes of the brain.   It’s definitely got to come from somewhere.   It’s not just magic.  And besides, even animals have some limited power to create social realities.  It would certainly be good to understand just what equips the human mind to build social realities of such a wide variety and just how those human capacities evolv ed from lower level capacities of social animals,

There’s obviously a lot to think about here.  Fortunately for us we had an excellent guest for this episode -- Berkeley’s own John Searle, author of Making the Social World. 

I should say that this program was recorded in front of live audience at the Marsh Theater – this time in Berkeley, California.  As a consequence, you won’t be able to join the conversation on air.   But you can join it here.   

Loyalty

posted  by Ken Taylor

Our topic this week is loyalty.  Loyalty binds people together.  Friendships, marriages, even nations are built on loyalty.  Try imagining a person who has no loyalty whatsoever to anything or anyone.   Such a person would be friendless, loveless, nationless.  She would feel no devotion to any higher cause or principle – like truth or justice.   She would not even be a fan of any sports team.   A life like that would be empty, devoid of many of the things that make us fully human.

Of course, loyalties are not all created equal though.   Loyalty to a sports team is a shallow form of loyalty.  Loyalty to a nation can sometimes demand too much.  Or think of the loyalty that some battered wives display to their abusive husbands.   There’s a misplaced loyalty if there ever was one. 

Loyalty goes hand in hand with trustworthiness.   If you can’t trust your spouse not to beat you or cheat on you, then your spouse doesn’t deserve your loyalty.  If you can’t trust your government not to send young men off to fight in fruitless, forlorn wars, then your government doesn’t deserve your loyalty.

That’s connected to something else.  Earlier I  said that loyalty unites and that’s a good thing.  But loyalty also divides. And that’s a bad thing.  For example, soldiers at war are driven to kill each other by their competing loyalties.   Or think of a parent who lavishes more toys on his/her children than they really need, out of a sense of loyalty and devotion, while entirely ignoring the needs of poor, abused, malnourished children around the world.  If he would just spend a little bit of his wealth elsewhere, he could do a tremendous amount of good.  But his loyalty has blinded him to the needs of others.

Loyalties can also divide a person from herself.   Loyalty and devotion to your family, for example, can pull in one direction, while loyalty to  an employer can pull you in an entirely different direction. Managing such conflicting loyalties is no easy task. 

You could think that you just have to decide.  You have to decide where your highest loyalty lies.  Do you most  want to be a better parent or a better philosophy professor and radio host? 

But it doesn’t seem quite right to me that choosing between conflicting loyalties is a brute decision, a matter of simply deciding for yourself to whom or what you owe the higher allegiance.   There must be some principles --  some moral principles --  that tell you who and what you owe loyalty to and to what degree you owe loyalty.  Such moral principles should  help you resolve such conflicts on an objective moral basis. 

Speaking of abstract moral principles, though,  depending on your  moral outlook, the very idea of loyalty can seem morally problematic. Take utilitarianism, for example.   Its highest principle is that you should always act so as to produce the greatest good for the greatest number.    But it’s  actually pretty hard to make sense of the very idea of loyalty if you are a utilitarian – at least if you are a crude act utilitarian. 

To see why think about two people drowning.  You’re in a boat and can save only one of them.  One of them happens to be a Nobel Laureate who has discovered a cure for cancer.  The other happens to be your spouse.  Which one do you save? 

The obvious answer to me is that I’d save my wife.  But you’d have a hard time justifying that answer on utilitarian grounds.  That’s because utilitarian morality has a hard time justifying giving the kind of special weight to one’s wife that loyalty demands.  In deciding what to do, her well-being should count, to be sure, but  no more, and no less, in your calculations than the well being of any arbitrary person. 

That seems wrong to me.  But I have to admit that I have hard time putting my finger on just why.  My wife means a whole lot more to me than just any arbitrary other person.  But does my loyalty and devotion really morally obligate or entitle me to give more weight to her well-being than to the well-being other people? 

Consider a further test of just how much added moral weight loyalty endows my wife’s well being with.  Suppose it was a matter of saving my wife, while letting two other people or three or four other people drown.  Would I still be inclined to save her and let the others drown?

Here I feel something of a quandary – perhaps divided loyalties are tugging at me. On balance loyalty, and the special concern that goes with it, seem to me like very good things.  But loyalty can be taken too far and can demand too much.    And drawing the line is a tricky matter. 

Clearly,  we need some help sorting this all out.   And luckily for us, help is on the way, in the form of our guest, poet and philosopher, Troy Jollimore.  Troy has thought long and hard about loyalty, love, friendship and morality.   So it should be a fun episode.   If you’ve got the time,  give a listen.  Maybe even call in. 

The Philosophical Legacy of Charles Darwin

Today our topic is Darwin's Philosophical Legacy and our guest is the one man in best suited to help think this through. That would be Dan Dennett, author of many books inspired by Darwinian ideas. Dennett thinks that Darwin's idea of evolution through natural selection is both the single best idea that anyone has every had about life and how it works and also a deeply unsettling even "dangerous" idea. You can join the conversation by posting to this open blog entry.

The Post-Modern Family Values: Open Blog Entry

posted by Ken Taylor

It's pledge week on KALW, our host station.  And we're doing a live pledge show that will only be heard on that station and not on our affiliates  around the country.  But if you'd like to tune it, you can do so at 10am PST time, on KALW's Website  where the show is streamed live.   Join the conversation.   Of course, even if you can't hear a broadcast version of the show,  we will eventually put the streaming version up on our own  website, from which you can also purchase an downloadable version.

A couple of weeks ago, I started an open blog entry on pornography, so I thought I'd do the same for the Post-Modern Family.  Our guest today will be sociologist, Michael Rosenfeld, author of a The Age of Independence: Interracial Unions, Same-Sex Unions and the Changing American Family.   I've only read a bit of it,  but what I have read is fascinating.   He argues that increase in  same sex and interracial unions in America is due largely to the occurrence of a relatively new "life-stage"  -- the age of independence, he calls it -- during which young adults are single, co-mingled with one another in colleges, universities, and the work-force,  and, most importantly,  mostly free of their parents.   That's because more and more people go off to college in young adulthood, and go into the workforce at an age when earlier generations of their age cohort were living with or near their parents.  That gave earlier generations of parents more influence over their offsprings mate choices.   But that's been lost with the gradual rise of the age of independence as a distinctive life stage.    

As a sociological, demographic thesis this strikes me as extremely plausible and I doubt either John or I will challenge  Michael on that score.  But my question is what does this mean about the role of the family in society.   One used to think of a family as one of the primary means of transmitting values from generation to generation.   One might have thought, in fact, that that is one of the primary things that family is for.  Of course, it has other functions -- providing for its members daily material and psychological needs prime among them.   It also inculcates a system of binding ties between the old and the young such that the old care for the young in their age of dependency in such a way that the young feel permanently bound to the old and out of love and affection, more than mere "duty"  return the favor when the old are very old.    Families also traditionally provided central ingredients of our self-narratives -- the narratives in the telling of which we constitute ourselves thick identities, as particular people, with particular life stories. 

But can a family structure  which so radically weakens the normative ties between generations really do that identity constituting, value transmitting,  generation binding work? 

That's one of the questions I'd like to discuss with MIchael on the air.  

We'd love to have your input.    Leave a comment on this blog or call in or send us an e-mail.  

gotta run.

Work and the Self

This post was originally published back in January of 2008, when the episode on work -- which was actually recorded in October of 2007 -- first aired. I thought it would be interesting to republish it at the top of the blog as we re-air that episode.

posted by Ken Taylor

Today's episode was on Work. Our guest was Al Gini from Loyola University of Chicago. He's a philosopher by trade, the author of a number of books about work and the self, and the resident philosopher at WBEZ public radio in Chicago.

The episode was recorded a couple of months ago, back in late October, in front of a live, large and lively audience of students and faculty at Centenary College in Shreveport Louisiana. We were at Centenary for the better part of a week. We not only recorded today's episode there, but we also broadcast an episode on Philosophy and Literature live from Centenary's college radio station, KSCL, which has the singular distinction of airing our show twice per week. We also did a couple of other public events in connection with Centenary's First Year experience. Meeting with the students was especially fun. But we were also wined and dined, in very fine style, by many of Centenary's energetic and engaged faculty members. It was a delight getting to know you all.

We thank all the good folks at Centenary, the nation's smallest Division 1 school, for making this all possible. And I hope you enjoyed having us around as much as we enjoyed being around.

We'd like to do more of this sort of thing in the future -- as I think I've mentioned before. So if you'd like to bring us to a college campus near you, including your own, get in touch and let us know.

Since it's been a couple of months since we recorded the show, I have to admit that it's been about that long since I thought hard about the topic of the show. I listened to it as it was broadcast this morning and was reminded of many things that I thought at the time. I think I still think most of them. But in the rest of this post, I'll try out briefly a few follow-up thoughts.

I count myself very lucky in my own work. I mostly love being a professor of philosophy. I love doing philosophy for its own sake. I love teaching philosophy. And I love this public intellectual radio thing that I've stumbled into in the last few years. I enjoy almost everything about working at a top-flight university like Stanford, where I am surrounded by world class colleagues in just about every department and where I get to teach extremely well-prepared, disciplined and often highly creative students. I even admire the intellects and dedication of the people who do the necessary but less intrinsically rewarding task of administering this very fine place. I can sometimes hardly believe my good fortune in finding work to which I am so well suited, in a place where a love living, in a community whose values I mostly share and respect. To be sure, I do work very long hours -- especially in the years since I have been simultaneously chairing my department, trying to make a go of a certain radio show, and trying to keep my teaching and research more or less on track. The long hours aren't always happiness making -- both because some of what I have to do as department chair, for example, I could easily do without. But, more importantly, it's at times hard to keep work confined to its proper proportions. I am deeply committed to being an available and engaged father to my son and a supportive and present husband to my wife. Sometimes the demands of work and the demands of family come into deep conflict. So as much as I love my work, it's not as though I find it "cost free" or that I've found the magical formula for adjudicating the delicate balance between costs and benefits of work vs. non-work.

I said something during the episode that certainly could have been said more clearly about getting the proportions right. On the one hand, there's how much of the time available to one, one's work will take. There are only so many hours in a day, week, or life. How many of the hours of one's day will one allow one's work to consume? Work also consumes the self. And there's only so much of the self to go around too. What occurred to me as the conversation developed during the show was sort of a half-baked formula. Try to let one's work consumes no greater portion of one's available hours -- one's total temporal allotment, as we might call it -- than the proportion of one's self that one is willing to give over to one's work -- one's degree of self investment, as it were. The rough thought was just that, all things being equal, the more of one's self one "invests" in one's work, the more of one's total temporal allotment it will be worth investing in one's work. Correlatively, the less of one's self one invests in one's work, the less of one's total temporal allotment, one should invest in one's work.

Or so the thought went.

Two plus month's later, I'm not sure that I had a fully coherent thought or that the thought provides very much positive guidance as to how to adjust the balance between work and the rest of one's life. Even if the rough thought is right, it's surely only roughly right. Not every minute of one's life counts the same, for one thing. Hours spent doing sheer drudgery or delaying gratification can cost relatively less in terms of "self-investment" than is gained back in the moments in which one finally, if only briefly, reaps the reward.

One could spend one's entire life doing back-breaking, intrinsically unrewarding work, in service of a cause larger than oneself. Imagine a factory worker, with children to feed, clothe and educate, doing work that he finds mind-numbing. But he does it nonetheless, does it with pride and does it in a sense willingly, because he invest himself not so much in his work per se, but in what that work is instrumental to -- providing for his children and his wife. I think generations have taken deep and deserved pride in doing work like that.

Would their lives have been "better" had they been able to provide for their families by means of work they found more intrinsically rewarding, more intrinsically self-defining? In some sense, that certainly seems true. Certainly, all things being equal one would prefer intrinsically rewarding to intrinsically unrewarding work. But a life willingly given over to back-breaking, intrinsically unrewarding, work out of devotion to things larger than oneself seems to have a certain dignity and nobility to it that is not easily matched by a life spent doing only work that naturally "fits" the self, as it were.

Of course, I don't mean to romanticize back-breaking, intrinsically degrading work. Probably, nobody should have to do such things -- at least not without decent compensation. But to acknowledge this is not to deny the quiet dignity that is often displayed by those who find themselves stuck doing such work.

Strange Behavior (Or: On Watching Sports—a follow-up to Tuesday’s show on basketball)

posted by Neil Van Leeuwen

Aristotle’s characterization of man as the rational animal will seem flattering, if you think about many behaviors we people engage in regularly. While many people in our society are overworked, short on knowledge, and pressed for time, many of us take time out to watch unusually tall individuals get together in groups to hurl a spherical object through a suspended ring. These tall individuals get dressed in outfits with shiny colors and are glorified for the ability to hurl the sphere through the ring. Whole buildings fill up with people who want to watch the hurling of the sphere and pay good money to do so, often sacrificing the valuable time and money they could have used for more sensible things like food and shelter.

Of course, I’m talking about watching basketball, which, when I put it in familiar terms, doesn’t seem strange at all. “Watching basketball isn’t irrational,” the indignant fan might reply, “because it brings entertainment!” But the indignant fan here is missing the point of my inquiry. My question is: why do humans get entertained by such a contrived and bizarre ritual? Or, what is the human mind such that it takes pleasure in the activity of watching sports competition?

So my question starts out as anthropological, but cuts very quickly to being psychological. To see how puzzling the phenomenon of sports watching actually is, let’s take the perspective of a Martian anthropologist and compare her impression of human sports watching to her impressions of other human activities. Keqen is the name of our anthropologist from Mars who comes to observe us humans.

When Keqen first comes to Earth she notices farming, which they don’t have on her planet. At first she’s puzzled at why humans spend so much time pushing around dirt and putting things in it. But when she sees how humans get food out of it and survive, her curiosity is satisfied. Next she’s puzzled by all the little pieces of colored paper we carry around in our pockets and make such a big deal out of. It seems odd that humans, who are so careless with other pieces of paper, should be so protective of the little colored slips. But Keqen soon realizes that these little slips act as symbols in a societal convention that allows humans to exchange goods and services across the whole society. Quite clever, she decides. Other things look more familiar to her, like the ritual of having young people who don’t know a lot sit down in a room and get knowledge from older people who know more. That makes sense, because the young people can then put the knowledge they glean to any number of purposes—even purposes not dreamed by the instructors themselves.

Keqen is so far quite impressed by humans. She notices that a good number of humans engage in various activities that keep their bodies healthy. They run; they swim; they ride a miraculous two-wheeled contraption that somehow doesn’t fall over when moving; and they even do this thing of running up and down a rectangular surface in groups throwing a ball around and trying to put it through a hole. The complexity of the last activity is a bit puzzling, but Keqen can easily explain why a rational animal would do it, since it results in increased health and fitness like the other activities. She decides to call these activities “fit-maker activities,” since making fitness is their obvious function—as far as she can tell. The people who do them are “fit-makers.”

When she notices that other people often gather around to watch people who are particularly good fit-makers, she has a ready explanation for this as well. “Why, they’re trying to learn how to do the fit-maker activity better themselves.” On closer inspection, however, this explanation falls to pieces. Many people, for example, watch the ball-throwing fit-maker activity and never even attempt to do it for themselves. Worse yet, some humans stay inside and get heavy watching the ball-throwing fit-makers on the flickering-image-box. If they were trying to learn it for themselves, presumably that’s because they want to be fit. So why do they stay home and get heavy watching it and never go outside?

So Keqen has a mystery. Why do humans watch the fit-maker activities? Her first attempted explanation doesn’t work, since too few of them bother to learn the fit-maker activities for themselves from watching them.

She tries a second explanation. Humans have a notion, which she has never well understood, of ‘beauty’. For them, things that are ‘beautiful’ are considered to be intrinsically worth watching, touching, smelling, tasting, hearing, or even just thinking about. Now, why humans have this particular notion is possibly the deepest mystery about them. But she’s willing to grant for the time being that they do have the notion and to consider that they watch the ball-throwing fit-makers because their motions are ‘beautiful’—whatever exactly that means.

But the ‘beautiful’ explanation fails as well. For Keqen’s other research reveals that humans actually have houses of things ‘beautiful’ they call “museums” that receive far fewer visitors than the buildings for watching fit-maker activities. If ‘beauty’ were what they were after, humans, she reasons, would spend far more time in the museums and far less time watching the ball-throwing fit-makers on the flickering-image-box. But that’s not the case. Furthermore, humans get excited just about numbers on printed paper—statistics—having to do with the fit-makers, which aren’t ‘beautiful’ at all. So whatever it is that gets humans excited about watching fit-maker activities, it can’t be ‘beauty’.

So Keqen tries a third explanation, already starting to get flustered. She has noticed that people who watch the fit-maker activities make approving noises when the people from their own area put the ball through the hole, or whatever they’re trying to do. Perhaps, she hypothesizes, the fit-makers are used when there is something two places are fighting over to decide who gets it. That would explain why people from one place or the other take such an active interest. Perhaps, for example, there is something that “New York” and “Philadelphia” both want, the possession of which will be determined by the outcome of the ball-throwing fit-maker activity between people from both of those places. Having just a few people fight, Keqen reasons, is in fact somehow more civilized than having the whole town fight, so maybe she can make sense of it that way.

But Keqen finds again that this explanation fails. The only thing that the outcome of the fit-maker activity determines is the right to engage in more such activities, ‘games’. And apparently the people want their ‘team’ to be able to go to more ‘games’. But that presupposes that people want to watch the fit-maker activity; it certainly doesn’t explain it. The fit-makers themselves who are watched have incentives like getting lots of the colored paper slips, but that doesn’t explain why people get so excited watching them. Keqen remains confused . . .

***

Enough Martian anthropology. My claims are that (i) human minds, in a quite widespread fashion, have a psychological property of gaining enjoyment from taking in sports and that (ii) it is quite mysterious what that property all involves and where it came from. Feel free to offer your own explanation in the comments, but I’m skeptical about any simple story’s doing the trick. The right thing to say as a start about why humans like watching sports is that it activates many different centers of enjoyment all at once, and that’s what’s so appealing about it.

None of the explanations that Keqen attempted was sufficient on its own to explain sports watching, but all of them hint at part of what is so appealing. In watching professional basketball, one observes a certain virtuosity of movement that one can attempt to develop in one’s own game. But there’s also a certain beauty in the virtuosity observed, which may not be the beauty of a Monet painting, but still adds appeal to watching sports competitions. And there may not be much reward at stake for people watching sports competitions, but if one of the teams playing is from your school or city, it sure feels that way. Why that is is a whole different question.

A complete explanation of why humans like watching sports will probably have many more components still, all of which would need to be sketched out and argued in detail. But the basic idea is this: sports somehow manage to have a combination of elements that activate many centers of excitement in the human brain at once. Does that make them worth watching? Probably—at least once in a while.

Self-Deception and the Problem with Religious Belief Formation

posted by Neil Van Leeuwen

A quote: “He who eats the bread and drinks the cup with an unbelieving heart eats and drinks judgment upon himself.” This line is from the communion liturgy of the Church I grew up in—the Christian Reformed Church of Grand Rapids, Michigan. The word “judgment” in the quote is a way of saying damnation to Hell. The word “unbelieving” refers to disbelief in the core metaphysical doctrines of the Church. The effect of regular repetition of lines like this in the service is to strike fear in the person who may be questioning such doctrines. Fear in turn squelches inquiry and creative thought. I was only eight years old when I first heard that line and understood what it meant.

The point of this blog is not to criticize religious beliefs. I think many are wrong, many right, and many we just can’t know about. My focus is rather on the character of the belief formation process inherent in much religious practice. The phrase “belief formation process” will refer broadly to the way that beliefs in a human mind come about, are maintained, or are extinguished (or not). We all have beliefs, which have to get there somehow.

I choose this focus because I suspect my experience with the Grand Rapids CRC is representative of what goes on in a much broader spectrum of religions. This topic is also timely for Philosophy Talk, since we’re approximately halfway between our show on the existence of God and our upcoming show on the intelligent design argument. I also think that although particular religious beliefs have been much discussed and criticized, there still needs to be clearer discussion and criticism of the mental pathways by which such beliefs characteristically arise and are maintained. My view is that the a-rational nature of the religious belief formation process is pernicious and ultimately more destructive than any individual religious belief, or system of beliefs, taken by itself. That process critically involves self-deception.

There is, to start, a beautiful thing about being human. We’re equipped with senses, capacities for reasoning and logical comparison, and an imaginative faculty for generating new ideas. The beautiful thing is that just by our getting up in the morning and walking around the capacities we have compel us to the generation of new knowledge and more subtle beliefs. The data that come to our senses because of our daily actions spark our reasoning capacities to call out for explanation; our imagination answers with the generation of ideas that, if all goes well, provide answers. This is how detailed knowledge of nature—individual plants and animals, and systems of them—has come about in so many diverse human societies. The particular answers and beliefs will come and go—if one belief doesn’t work, another takes its place—but the beautiful thing is the process and the nature we have that allows us to participate in it. Let’s call this the healthy belief formation process; it’s driven by curiosity.

The process of religious belief formation stands in stark contrast. Let’s return to the quote I started with. There’s no doubt that the repetition of such threatening lines has played a role in the formation of many religious beliefs. But how? Those lines provide no evidence of their claims. Why should they bring about belief?

The first thing to note is the vilification of unbelievers. Those with an unbelieving heart will be judged, for, presumably, they’ve done something (morally?) wrong. The vilification of unbelievers threatens exclusion from the group to anyone on the fence. And then there’s the fear of Hell that’s engendered. The net effect of the vilification and fear is that a desire to believe comes about in the mind. “ . . . eats and drinks judgment upon himself.” I certainly had such a desire in my youth.

Once there is a desire to believe the metaphysical doctrines of the religion, the mind is ripe for self-deception. Self-deception has essentially two components. First, a person forms a belief in violation of his usual standards of evidence and judgment—what philosophers call epistemic norms. Second, a desire with content related to the content of the belief causes the deviation from the healthy belief formation process. Because vilification, fear, and desire bring about the religious credence—while that credence is at odds with usual standards of judgment—the process by which religious beliefs come about is one of self-deception. (For a similar view, see this piece by Georges Rey.)

A religious advocate might respond that I’ve gotten it all wrong, that it’s direct encounter with the spirit of God that brings about religious belief. But then why is religious practice so full of methods that have the precise effect of establishing credence by a-rational means? The singing, the chanting, the repetition of lines that vilify unbelief, the stress on believing only on faith? Surely the existence of such methods is no coincidence. And even if some have been touched by something divine, surely there are many who formed their religious beliefs in response to the constant pressures of liturgy. And that’s the religious belief formation process I’m talking about.

What exactly is wrong with this process? First, it’s at odds with the healthy belief formation process. It stagnates and undermines the healthy process just when it could be most beneficial to reflecting on our core beliefs and values. Fear, not curiosity, is the driving force. By representing as evil disbelief in any of a long and specific list of doctrines, the factors involved in the religious belief formation process cause us to disengage with the normal and healthy creative process of belief generation and revision. Persons attending a religious ceremony are made to fear the prospect that something else might strike them as true. The mind loses its flexibility. Consider some examples. How else could the belief that the earth is at the center of the universe persist for so long in the face of Galileo’s new evidence? How else could members of a church that canonized a woman, Joan of Arc, for her leadership hold the belief that women are categorically unfit to lead congregations? Why do evangelicals who have seen pictures of the changed color of the peppered moth believe natural selection has never occurred? How else should we explain the belief at high levels in the Catholic Church that it’s wrong to teach about and distribute sexual protection in a South Africa crippled by AIDS? Responsiveness to reality is needed here. But that’s precisely what the religious belief formation process lacks. The beautiful thing about the human mind is undermined.

Why else do I think the religious belief formation process itself is worse than any particular belief? As I’ve been stressing, I think the healthy belief formation process is central to our humanity; it’s a tragedy for that to be undermined. But as importantly, human actions take on a vicious and inflexible character when they are driven by beliefs that are unresponsive to reality. The problem with Crusaders and Jihadists is not primarily that they think their enemies are evil; it’s that their beliefs are unresponsive to being moved by the simple humanity of their victims. One belief can explain a skirmish, but it takes a degenerate, self-deceptive belief formation process to explain the systematic maintenance of a set of beliefs underlying a Crusade. Other examples are abundant: the Inquisition, the longtime inability of the Catholic Church to respond appropriately to child molestation by its clergy (how could we fire someone ordained by God?), and the malicious condemnations of Jerry Falwell (and those who listen to and act on them), to name a few. All these cases involve false beliefs that would have been changed by a simple bit of responsiveness to reality if they hadn’t been insulated by the religious belief formation process. Dogmatically held beliefs give rise to destructive behaviors. The further danger is that acceptance of such a degenerate belief formation process can spread and lead to wider corruption of our cognitive economy.

So what of the intelligent design argument, the argument that posits an intelligent creator to explain the ordered complexity of life in the natural world? It’s fine; these criticisms don’t touch it. I don’t think it ultimately works; nor does it fall in the domain of science. But I wish all religious thinking had such a rational character. The reasoning involved in that argument is an instance of the healthy belief formation process in action. We’d all be better off if religious people thought so rationally all the time.

What, finally, of faith? I know of two ways in which the word “faith” is used—one pernicious, one laudable. At its worst, “faith” is used rhetorically to bring about a-rational, unreflective credence in what the “wise” men of the Church would have you believe. I think I’ve said enough already to indicate what I think is wrong with this kind of “faith.” But the word is also used in another sense. Faith in this sense is the action-guiding confidence that good will come about if we pursue goodness uncompromisingly. Having this kind of faith is consistent with uncertainty about what the good, in terms of outcome, will ultimately be. And, despite what religious leaders may suggest, having this faith is also consistent with active questioning of religious dogma. In short, faith in this sense is not opposed to intellectual curiosity.

Why Believe (or Disbelieve) in God?

posted by Ken Taylor

Today's show is about the existence, or non-existence, of God.     Our guest will be Walter Sinnot-Armstrong.  This is Walter's second appearance on Philosophy Talk.  He did a great job on our episode about moral dilemmas.   And we're pleased to have him back.

I gather, from our research team's pre-interview with Walter, that he  is a die-hard atheist.   He thinks that there is ample reason to doubt God's existence and no good reason to affirm god's existence -- at least if one means the all powerful, all loving, all knowing god, existing outside of space and time.   Since it's a season of religious, and quasi-religious holidays,  we thought it might be fun to actually reflect on the rationality, or lack thereof, of the religious beliefs that lie behind the celebration of such holidays. 

I'm going to post a long thread about today's topic after the show  It's a topic I've thought a great deal about for a long time.  I grew up in an intensely religous family and  in my youth,  I myself was a pretty intense and sincere believer.  When I was in my midteens,   though, something happened and I began to have serious  doubts.  I went on to Notre Dame where I met lots of very reflective and caring Catholics, whose religious belief played a major role in what sometimes seemed to me incredibly exemplary lives of service and compassion.  With my then girlfriend,  I would often go to high Mass.  That was a moving experience.    For a brief period,  I even contemplated converting to Catholicism.   That now seems like a distant past and another self to me.

But enough about me.  I opened this thread to find out what some of you think.   I invite you to weigh in with your own reaons for belief  or disbeilef.    If your  comments are succint and well argued,  we may have a chance to get to them on the air today.

So have at it, folks!  But be warned,  we will delete comments that violate the spirit of reasoned and cooperative inquiry and will also ban those who violate from posting any further.

Saints, Heroes, and Schmucks Like Me.

posted by Ken Taylor

Thanks to Susan Wolf for an interesting discussion of  Saints, Heroes and the Well-lived Life.  The episode certainly  prompted lots of response from listeners.  We must have set a record for questions submitted via e-mail.  There were also more callers than we could get to.

Susan has a point.   There is more to living well than slavishly  and  single-mindedly devoting oneself to moral perfection -- either of oneself or of the world.  I want a life filled with goods of all sorts -- many of them non-moral.  I want  moments in which I contemplate beauty, even if by such contemplation I achieve nothing for the world at large and merely  elevate myself above the mundane demands of the everyday.   I want to perfect my abilities as a philosopher and use them to  plumb the depths of the deepest philosophical mysteries, even if through my exploration the world remains as morally imperfect as can be.   I want to explore the heights of erotic pleasure with my deepest love, to tend my roses, to spend idle hours in the company of those I hold dear  or even merely in solitude. If morality were to ask, but not demand -- since we're talking about supererogation and not "mere" duty -- that I forgo the pursuit of such goods and devote all of my energies to pursuit of  moral perfection, either of myself or the world, I would refuse the offer.

  There are times, of course, when morality demands personal sacrifices, large or small,  of us.   When morality calls in this way,  I hope that I can find it within myself to answer.  There is surely  something to the idea that the demands of morality (purport to)  override any non-moral demands.  Someone who would let another perish  that he could easily save,  just so that he might continue to enjoy even the best imaginable, once in a life time sort of meal,  cares too much for his own pleasure and too little for morality.
 
On the other hand,  the presumed  overridingness of morality is more complicated than many allow.   In particular,  I don't think that the demands or morality are rationally inescapable as, say, Kantians would maintain.  But that's a complicated issue that I don't want to explore in depth here.

But back to supererogation.  As I said,  I agree with Susan Wolf that one needn't as  a general rule give up the pursuit of all non-moral goods for the sake of a single-minded and slavish devotion to morality.  Still, it seems to me that she does inadequate justice to the pull of the supererogatory upon us.  The  supererogatory isn't  something  toward which morality is indifferent.  The supererogatory  isn't a domain of  "take it or leave it"  sorts of matters.  The supererogatory often concerns matters of great moral significance.   These aren't, it  seems to me, the sort of things that one can greet with a shrug of the shoulders.  That's because they have some call on us, even if we aren't obligated or duty-bound to do what is supererogatory.

Suppose, for example, I really and truly could do some great moral deed, perhaps even a heroic deed.  But suppose that I choose not to out of a preference for some non-moral good.  Though I may not have done anything morally wrong,  it seems to me that I am less than fully morally admirable.  It is perhaps not quite right  to say that I can be blamed for not doing what was supererogatory but not required.  But it's also not quite right to say that my failing to do what was merely supererogatory was a matter of moral indifference. The supererogatory exercises some moral pull on us, even if it does not obligate us.  Preferring  non-moral goods  over non-obligatory moral  goods is not quite like the preferring  jazz over opera.   The latter is of no moral significance.  But the former strikes me as  deeply morally significant.

I'm not quite sure, though, exactly how to characterize that moral pull.  It's not quite right to say that we are entitled to blame or punish those who refuse to do supererogatory acts that it is within their power to do.  What seems more appropriate is a kind of disappointment either in ourselves or others when we turn away from the supererogatory.  At a very minimum,   we do not greet such "failures"  with mere shrugs of the shoulder, as if they were of no moral moment.

Some moral theorists reject  the existence of the supererogatory.  One reason for that, I suspect, is that they think there is no way to accommodate the standing pull of the putatively supererogatory with its status as merely optional.    Such approaches give too much weight to some of the requests of morality and too little weight to all non-moral goods.   These approaches elevate morality into something of a despotic and  hegemonic ruler over our lives.   On such approaches, it is as if  our lives are first given over to morality and only after morality has extracted its due from us are our lives given back over to us.   Something like this thought, I think, is behind the idea that at least the commandments of morality are overriding.  But if you add the thought that even the supposedly  supererogatory partakes of  the imperial majesty of morality, you might quickly be led to reject the very idea of the supererogatory.  Morality becomes set of inescapable commandments  (together with a set of "permissions") all the way down.  The "above and beyond" simply disappears.

Though I don't quite no how to articulate it,  there must be a middle ground between the view that morality is hegemonic and the view that the merely morally good but not morally required does not partake of the full  "majesty" of the  morally required.   Two things indicate that our common sense morality at least implicitly recognizes the existence of such a middle ground.   First, there is the very fact that we do esteem heroes and saints as ideals.  Second, there is the fact that our attitude towards "non-heroes" who enjoy both the opportunity and the capacity to step in but, nonetheless, refused to do so  involves more than a  mere shrug of the shoulders.  Though there are many circumstances in which we don't blame or punish such people, there are many circumstances in which our admiration diminishes, in which we think less of the person who "failed" in this way and express various forms of disapprobation toward them.

Of course,  as we said on the show, there may be times when extraordinary acts are indeed morally required.  And one might be tempted to say that the only time we can legitimately  disapprove those who fail to do something heroic is when it is required.  But this just repeats Susan Wolf's mistake, on my view.  The  merely morally good,  but not required does not have the same pull on us as the morally required does.  But it doesn't follow that it has no pull on us, that we need be merely indifferent to its absence.  Depending on the circumstances, when we forgo some moral good in preference for some non-moral good, there is always room for regret or disappointment or shame.   Not only is there room, but to feel no such regret or shame or disappointment strikes me as a form of moral blindness.

What follows.  Not that we are all called to give our all only for morality.   But it does follow that the morally good is always present to us as an outstandingly worthy option, an option that we may rationally prefer to forgo, but always at some costs.  Feelings of regret, shame or disappointment are ways of recognize such a cost as a cost.

Intergenerational Obligations and the Rope of Lives

posted by Ken Taylor

Yesterday on the show,  John came up with a really nice metaphor.   He compared a generation to a small strand in a long rope.  Each strand is closely intertwined with a number of other nearby strands, but mostly  the strands don’t make direct contact with each other.  If you think of the rope as growing over time,  the metaphor captures a very nice fact about  relationships among the generations.  No one strand lasts very long, for example.  But the rope endures by having new strands begin where other strands have left off.   I like the  metaphor a lot and want to use it to explore a little bit further how we  might think of intergenerational obligations.

We can divide the generations up into three sets:  those that wholly precede us on the rope,  those that partly overlap with us, and those that wholly follow us.  It seems pretty clear that  how we think about our obligations to another generation depends partly on which set that generation falls into.  Our obligations, if any, to generations that wholly precede us will certainly differ from our obligations to generations that overlap or wholly follow us.  Another  important factor, I think, is the kind of  rope we're talking about --   whether the roped together generations form a family, a nation, or a school, say.

It’s tempting to believe we can have no obligations to generations that wholly precede  our own,  whether  they are generations of one’s own family,  one’s own nation, or one’s own school.    After all, they are dead and so, you might think, beyond all harm and benefit.   I think there is something right about this at it stands.   

Both Aristotle and Confucius  would disagree, I think and not entirely without  reason.  You can, for example,  tarnish someone’s reputation long after they are gone.  That plausibly is a kind of harm.  Similarly, breaking a promise to one’s dead mother, to preserve  a cherished family heirloom, say, seems like a bad thing and maybe even a harm of some sort to the dead mother.

It seems right to say that when you break a promise to a dead person or do something to (unjustly) tarnish the reputation of the dead you may have done something wrong.   But what seems less clear to me is that you’ve actually done something  wrong to the dead person.  At any rate,  it clearly doesn’t follow from the mere fact that you’ve done something wrong,  that you’ve done something wrong to the dead.

To see why it doesn’t follow, consider John’s rope.  It seems to me that you can have -- and maybe in some cases ought to have --  an attitude toward the rope as a whole  and toward your own present role in “extending” the rope. I don't see why just those atttitudes might not be the source of many obligations, without  those obligations having to be obligations to any past or future generations.  By analogy, think of one’s whole life and one’s attitudes toward that life at any given stage of that life. We tend to think of any moment in our lives as one moment in a temporally extended life.  Many of our attitudes are attitudes toward  our lives as a whole – rather than being attitudes toward  particular stages of our lives.  To be sure, attitudes toward our lives as wholes may entail various attitudes toward the various stages of our lives.   If I want my life as a whole to go well, then at earlier stages I may have to make certain efforts that will only bear fruit at later stages of my life.  But my point is that it would be wrong to simply reduce our lives to a sequence of stages and then to insist that our attitudes are all directed at particular life stages, with there being no attitudes that are direct to our lives as wholes.

The analogy strains a little bit when we get to the rope, because the rope is a series of connected but distinct lives.  Still,  it seems as though we might  sometimes have attitudes  toward the rope either as a whole or at least toward large  segments of the rope that extend forward and backward  beyond our own strands.   When we think of our own individual lives as tied up with the history of a family or of a nation or of  a school or even of  a neighborhood, we are to some extent  viewing  our lives as part of one strand on a  rope of connected  lives.

Now suppose that I do view my life as one life among a set of interconnected  lives and suppose that, in effect,  I give myself the task of perserving  and extending the rope by which I am connected to  lives gone by and lives still  to come.  I thereby commit myself to preserving and extending the rope, but not because I owe it to anyone to do so --  most especially not because I owe it to  the dead  and probably not because I owe it  to the yet to  be born.  But the important point is that as long as I am committed to preserving and extending the rope, then it can be wrong not to take certain actions, even if I do no “harm” to any past or future person when I fail to take the requisite actions.

Notice that we may find the rope handed down to us from our ancestors  to be in many ways unlovely.  We might therefore  set ourselves the task of radically altering the  future trajectory of the rope.   If, for example,  our ancestors were a slave-holding,  xenophobic, marauding people, who disrupted everything they touched,  the rope as we find it might contain division and conflict. We certainly wouldn't  owe it to them to continuing weaving  the rope together in ways that respect who and what  they were.   The rope is an inheritance that we may do with as we would, guided by no normative lights save our own.   Or so it seems to me.  If that is right,  it is wrong to think of ourselves as "obligated" to past generations.

I think something similar can be said about future generations.  We don’t owe it to future generations to pass on the rope in any particular shape.  In a sense, we do not stand in “direct moral community” with not yet  existent generations.   And the same holds, by the way, for no longer existent ones.   By this I mean that neither wholly past nor wholly future generations can make any  direct moral claim on us because we are not  in direct  dialectical engagement with them at all.   Nonetheless, in viewing  our lives as bound together by John’s rope, both with lives that have already wholly  elapsed and with lives  still to come, nothing prevents us from  commiting  ourselves to continuing  the rope in ways that honor or respect the past or in ways that will  provide an inheritance of a certain sort to those yet to come.  Indeed,  seeing our lives in this way  is  one way of endowing our lives with meaning and with a certain narrative  coherence. 

I’ve gone on way too long about generations that wholly precede or follow our own.  So I think I’ll stop now and post this as it stands.     I’ll save for another post some thoughts about generations that partly overlap our own.  Here things are quite different and quite a bit more complex.  That's partly because we are in more or less direct dialectical engagement and moral community with such generations.  They do make direct demands on us and we make direct  demands on them.   It was this kind of thing that Norman Daniels talked about on our show during the time we had him on.  But more about that in my next post.