The snark was a boojum

While we're hunting for snark, I should mention that I still get comments such as the following:

Keep that comment moderation on, you little idiot

CURVEBALL!

altnation.com/forums/spirituality-philosophy/150951-judgment-day-final.html#post3771825

For God's sake

More about what you can say. The British Humanist Association was not allowed  by companies owning advertising space in railway stations to run an advertisement that said: "If you're not religious, for God's sake say so." This relates to the UK census - BHA is campaigning for people who are not religious to put down "No religion", rather than their cultural religion.

This was a decision by private companies, not a government agency, but the reason given was that ads worded that way would "cause widespread and serious offence"; this kind of reasoning is underpinned by a legal, political, and social climate in which offending religious sensibilities in the slightest has become taboo. Yes, there may be limits to how in-your-face advertisements in these sorts of public places should be ... but for God's sake that wording was nowhere near the limit.

Once again, we need a culture that looks far more favourably on robust freedom of speech.

And another "What can you say?" - Snyder v. Phelps

I haven't yet read the judgment of the US Supreme Court in this case, so I can only go on various reports, including a quite thorough Wikipedia article (which will, I don't doubt, grow in detail).

This is another case of religious fanatics demonstrating ... with legal repercussions. But on this occasion they ultimately prevailed by 8-1 (Alito J. dissenting) at the level of the highest court. It was found that their speech was constitutionally protected by America's First Amendment. The case involves, of course, the notorious Phelps family and its habit of picketing funerals for US servicemen in order to make their loony (oh noes, the snark-hunters will be after me again!) point that America is doomed because of its tolerance of homosexuality.

Loony or not, it's a point that the Phelps clan are lawfully entitled to make. Should they have been entitled to make it in the way they did? Without having all the detail - so I could change my mind, I suppose - my answer is "Yes." Yes, based on the facts as given in the Wikipedia article. In particular, they abided by lawful instructions from the police and did not conduct their protests (or whatever) in a way that disrupted the funeral concerned. Indeed, they were at sufficient distance that mourners were not necessarily even aware of them.

On these facts, I don't see how there was even a case to be argued. The matter should never have gone as far as it did. That's not to say I'm sympathetic to the Phelps clan - on the contrary, I have nothing but contempt for them, and I have nothing but sympathy for the mourners. But unless I'm missing something important, this is a clear-cut case where the litigation should have been thrown out from the beginning. Litigation is not the answer to every evil, and the US Supreme Court has done the right thing in reinforcing that message.

Still another "What can you say?"

According to this story in The Guardian, a Muslim extremist in the UK was convicted and fined for burning two large plastic poppies as part of a demonstration on 11 November - Remembrance Day - last year. Emdadur Choudhury, a member of an organisation called Muslims Against Crusades (MAC), burned the poppies as part of a demo that also involved chanting "British soldiers burn in hell" during the traditional one minute's silence on Remembrance Day. He was charged and convicted under section 5 of the Public Order Act, for burning the poppies in a way that was likely to cause "harassment, harm or distress" to those who witnessed it.

It's not clear how far any memorial services were actually disrupted by the demonstrators. If they were, I can't condone it, and I think the law should be able to do something about it. But in any event, that's not what Choudhury was charged with.

I'm against this law if it's going to be interpreted in such a manner. Burning the poppies to make a political or religious point, presumably about colonial imperialism or some such thing, seems to me to be something that should be permitted. I'd say the same about burning a flag at an anti-war rally. These are not my preferred ways to make a point, but people should be politically entitled to express their point, and their emotions, in a vivid and highly provocative way. Emotional upset from something like this should not count as "distress" for legal purposes.

Likewise, I should be permitted by the law to organise an anti-Islam rally and burn a Koran or an effigy of Muhammad at it. It's not my preferred way for someone to express opposition to Islam, but that doesn't mean it should be illegal. But if I lead such a rally, I shouldn't get to lead my marchers into a mosque and disrupt whatever peaceful activities are going on there.

Before someone asks me where I draw the line, I don't think there's a clear line that must be drawn here or here. It's a matter of judgment, with different values to be weighed up. I think the state needs some reasonable discretion as to where it draws its own line to protect events from disruption (and to deter provocations to violence and the like). There may be various policy considerations and they may vary from case to case.

But I do think that burning the artificial poppies should have been legal in this instance, and on the sketchy facts in the report Mr Choudhury shouldn’t have been convicted of a crime.

We ought to be consistent about this. If we want robust protection of freedom of speech, that will also apply to ugly forms of speech and/or to the speech of our opponents.

A different sort of "What can you say?" - Islam and evolution

While we worry about how and whether to write about tricky issues of metaethics for the folk in the public square, some people have a much bigger problem.

E.g., if you're a Muslim in London you may find a lot of grief if you want to give a lecture to your co-religionists on the topic of "Islam and the theory of evolution" ... in which you plan to teach well-established science. You might find yourself getting outraged responses from members of your community, including what Chris Mooney would call "even, apparently, some death threats." You might, to put it another way, need to deal with a style of incivility seldom displayed by liberal atheists.

If so, perhaps you'd be wise to cancel the lecture and issue a public recantation of your "errors" - right? That's what Usama Hasan did, and I'm not going to blame him for doing what seemed needed to save his skin.

Look, I'm not an Islam basher, unless you count my sceptical attitude to religion in general ... and my denial of its authority.

I don't want to conceive of Islam as simply an enemy to be opposed by all possible means. It remains my hope that Islam can reform and adapt to secular modernity. It may be that not just some but most Muslims living in Western democracies have already embraced much in the way of liberal ideas (though it would be nice if they'd raise their voices and say so). But this kind of thing doesn't exactly give more hope. Where is the outrage from within the Muslim community that Dr. Hasan has been silenced and intimidated into a public recantation? Will we hear prominent Muslims condemning this? Will I be accused of "Islamophobia" for commenting on it?

Hoffmann on Pakistan

Over at Butterflies and Wheels, R. Joseph Hoffmann provides his reflections on the situation in Pakistan and particularly the recent assassination of Shahbaz Bhatti, the government leader for minority religious affairs.

I have nothing really to add to this, though I wish I did: I see no solution in sight for Pakistan, which seems to be spiralling ever more deeply into disaster.

Sunday supervillainy - visit the Hellfire Club

This image of Emma Frost and Sebastian Shaw (acted by January Jones and Kevin Bacon) is from the forthcoming X-Men: First Class, in which the Hellfire Club apparently have a big role to play as bad guys. The image first appeared, as far as I know, over at Empire Online.

"Tom Johnson" outed

Nothing to add to PZ's concise summary or Ophelia's first-hand account (and see all the links) ... but just in case you missed it. I think I said at the time of his first fess up, when much love and forgiveness was being offered, that I still didn't trust him. But that's history.

Edit: Hmmm, well I said this, which is not quite the same thing, or, rather, it's more specific. All the same ... Oh, and I think at that point he was (falsely) denying that he was a graduate student and claiming that that had been a lie to cover his tracks, so there actually were big revelations to come. But really, this guy's twists and turns make my head hurt.

Questions, questions

One commenter on the previous post wanted me to say a bit more about why I don't think religion can deliver objective prescriptivity any more than secular ethics can. That's a large question, so I'm not going to say a lot today. It would require a long post to nail it down. Also, there are many religious theories of morality. However, to give an idea, consider the sort of crude divine command theory that says something like, "Actions (and inactions) are morally obligatory if they are commanded by God."

This notoriously leads to the question of whether they are obligatory because they are commanded by God or whether God commands them because they are morally obligatory (on some other ground).

The former is a problem because somebody can ask why she should simply do whatever God tells her to do. After all, at this stage of the argument she can imagine God telling her to torture puppies, kill people, or whatever other horrible action you care to imagine. Surely our ordinary concept of morality cannot make these actions morally right or obligatory simply because they are commanded by a very powerful being. If a god commanded such actions, we'd be more inclined to think this was an evil god than that the actions were now morally obligatory. I concede, of course, that a powerful being might be able to offer us rewards for obeying its will or threaten us with punishments for disobeying, and that can give us a reason to obey. But this reason appeals to our desires (for rewards and for the avoidance of punishment). So acting in these ways is not objectively required - i.e. it's not required in a way that transcends our desires.

What if we say that God would not command such things because God only commands things that are already morally obligatory on some other ground? God isn't, on this approach, originating what is morally right and wrong, etc., but enforcing it. Again, the fact that God may be able to reward or punish us gives us an extra reason for acting morally, but (as above) it's not one that transcends our desires.

The question is then whether whatever else it is that makes acting in these ways morally obligatory can give us desire-transcendent reasons. But that "whatever else" is going to be something that's also available to an atheistic moral theorist. So the divine command theorist has no more resources available than atheistic theorists to find reasons that transcend our desires.

There's a lot more to say, not least because I've only discussed a crude theory of religious morality. So in the space of a blog post I'll just have to assert that more sophisticated theories will run into similar problems. Sooner or later, the theorist will have to be asked what reasons are available, and will be no better equipped than someone coming at the issue from a secular viewpoint to find reasons that transcend our desires.

I was also asked to recommend some books that define and discuss such concepts as objective prescriptivity, motivational internalism, etc. - i.e., the sort of language I was tossing around in the previous post. The ideal book here would be a well-written undergraduate-level metaethics textbook. Unfortunately, I don't know what I'd recommend. I suspect that a lot of courses in this area would depend on a collection of readings more than a text. Can anyone help out with this question?

A commonly used undergraduate text that goes beyond metaethics into wider areas of foundational moral theory is James Rachels, The Elements of Moral Philosophy. This is very clear and accessible and covers a lot of ground, but it's maybe not advanced/specialised enough for the particular purpose. Also, I have misgivings about relying on it, because Rachels pushed his own views pretty hard and tended at times to deal with simplified versions of views that he didn't like (doubtless in good faith - see above where I myself deal with a rather simple version of religious morality). All in all, the Rachels book is a good starting point, and I do recommend it, but it should be taken with at least a small grain of salt. Its criticisms of subjectivist moral linguistics and of social contract theory, for example, appear to me not to meet these approaches at their strongest and/or to make controversial assumptions.

More specialised metaethics texts that I've encountered tend to be aimed at a level that's too advanced. I'm still trying to think of a book that falls nicely in the middle.

If you've got a solid background already, a good approach would be to plunge straight into The Moral Problem by Michael Smith and then The Myth of Morality by Richard Joyce. These disagree with each other, since one author is a moral realist of a kind and the other is an error theorist. Although my views are closer to Joyce's, all three of us actually agree on a lot of things, especially about how the issues should be framed. However, be warned: both books are densely written. They require concentration and a fair bit of prior familiarity with moral philosophy.

Currently reading: Atheism, Morality, and Meaning by Michael Martin

I'm a third of the way through this book, which attempts to establish the superiority of an atheist worldview to a Christian worldview when it comes to providing an objective morality and a meaningful life. So far, the author has been trying to establish a non-religious basis for moral objectivism. He's going to go on and try to show that there's no good religious basis for it.

If I were reviewing the book at length, I'd have many of the same objections to it as I have to The Moral Landscape. Once more, that doesn't mean it's a bad book; it simply means that (in many cases) the most interesting things that a moral philosopher can say about a book of moral philosophy relate to possible objections.

So at this stage, let me just say once again that the ordinary conception of morality is like the proverbial carpet with a bump in it. Morality can't be all the things that it normally looks like it is. If you try to remove the bump, you'll shift it somewhere else. In this case, Martin offers a system that he claims gives us an "objective" morality. It gives us moral properties that are out there in the world. Fine, it's a complicated sort of moral naturalism (based on Objective Observer theory). But he accomplishes this at the expense of throwing away motivational internalism and, more importantly, objective prescriptivity. He explicitly disclaims these.

The result is that the "objective moral properties" don't actually bind anyone to do anything. Somebody who is not mistaken about any of the non-moral facts, or indeed about any of the moral facts that Martin offers, and who makes no mistakes of reasoning, may, depending on her desire set, go ahead and do whatever she wants, perhaps muttering, "What is that to me?"

So, yes, you can have your objective moral properties if you're prepared to accept that there's no objective prescriptivity (and you can abandon motivational internalism for good measure). But in doing so you merely move the bump in the carpet. It's objective prescriptivity that really matters - without this, morality is not rationally binding on anybody. When error theorists claim that first-order moral judgments (or at least thin first-order moral judgments) are tainted with error, it's because they see these claims as being or including claims about objective prescriptivity.

So, again, yes, you can a system with objective moral properties but no objective prescriptivity. You might think that objective prescriptivity is so metaphysically peculiar that it can't be what is meant in ordinary moral discourse, so you're prepared to give it up or to say that it was never part of our moral discourse all along. I beg to differ - it looks to me as if it's right there at the centre of everyday moral thinking, and that everyday moral thinking is, to that extent, philosophically problematic. A system such as Martin's offers only an ersatz moral objectivity: it may have objectively existing natural properties, even though they're rather contrived ones, but morality does not end up being objectively binding on anybody.

But of course, religion can't provide objective prescriptivity either. It can also provide only an ersatz version of moral objectivity. One of the (possibly) disconcerting truths that we just have to live with is that objective prescriptivity is not a feature of the universe - and in fact when you push hard enough on the idea it doesn't even seem to be coherent.

And yes, I'm quite happy to say this in the public square on occasions when it's possible to explain it properly. I do agree with Jean Kazez that it's not the sort of thing that you can necessarily describe in a brief newspaper article - unlike the things you can say about science/religion (in)compatibility. Even this blog post (which will be read by a few hundred people at the most) is going to be rather cryptic for those who are not familiar with the terms I've been throwing around. But it's still worth making the point when the opportunity arises, for those who are prepared to think about it.