"Damion" on debates

One commenter, Damion, referred us to his Agnostic Popular Front blog - which is a running commentary on debates between religious believers and non-believers (or broadly analogous protagonists such as people with different views of biological evolution). So, I give him a hat tip - I didn't know about this resource, and I've got to say that it's an interesting one. It's not a place to discuss debates, since it doesn't have comments, but it's a creative use of the blog format, with information, and what seems like an informed opinion, on numerous debates dating back to the 1970s.

These are not all formal debates such as we've been talking about over the past week of so, but also include various less formal discussions, interviews, etc.

I could find it providing many hours of fascinating reading.

Dealing with William Lane Craig

Richard Dawkins' site has an interesting article by Lawrence Krauss relating to a recent debate that he had with William Lane Craig.

The thread that follows is also interesting. Richard himself has a comment in which he challenges the claim that Craig is a skilled debater. I'm going to disagree with Richard about that - from what I've seen, Craig is in fact very skilled in using his allocated time, judging how aggressive to be, maintaining a confident demeanour, connecting with his audience, and all the other things that make it appear that someone has "won" a debate irrespective of the quality of his arguments.

That doesn't necessarily mean he'd do well in a court of a law - though I expect that he would, in fact, tend to appeal to a jury. But he does very well in this sort of format. I'm not sure what good it does debating him. Someone who doesn't debate in this format day in day out, and who may not have the talent or training for it in the first place, will be seen as "losing" (and then, like Krauss, be subjected to well-meaning dissections from allies who want to tell him, "Ur doing it rong").

Still, interesting to see some further discussion of the merits of such debates.

The Daily Mash on AC Grayling

A bit of fun. :)

Hitchens on book burning and despicable responses

I'm glad we've still got Christopher Hitchens around to say stuff like this.

For what it's worth, I'm not a great fan of burning our enemies' holy books. But that doesn't justify responding with violence. Nor does it justify proposals to allocate the legal blame for the violence to the person who burned the holy book rather than the people who actually committed the violent acts.

Just sayin'.

Currently reading - The Secular Outlook by Paul Cliteur

I've read this previously in manuscript form - and even wrote a short blurb to go on the back. But it's nice nestling down with a copy of the published book.

It's not a quick read, because it's very dense with factual detail and argument. Cliteur doesn't allow you to breeze through chapters that contain a lot of optional asides, jokes, anecdotes, and so on. You actually have to focus on the paragraphs. That doesn't mean that the style is inaccessible or difficult - not at all, it's very readable - but this is a meaty book that asks for (and rewards) a certain amount of concentration.

Cliteur's aim is to describe and defend secularism, and particularly the freedom to criticise religion. He spends a considerable amount of the book examining religion's dark side and arguing that we must be free to expose this and challenge it. There's a lot in here, and I can imagine coming back to the book again and again as a resource.

Is science strictly objective?

One of the objections that I often receive when I claim that moral judgments are not strictly objective is that the same reasoning can be deployed to demonstrate that science is not strictly objective either. Apparently that is meant to be a reductio ad absurdum, as if we possess transcendental knowledge that science is strictly objective.

Someone made this point on my Facebook profile overnight, I've seen Sam Harris use the argument on various occasions, and I see it frequently in debates on the internet.

It actually opens up huge issues in scientific epistemology, and I can't deal with those here. But there are some oddities about the argument.

First, note that the claim that moral judgments are not strictly objective is continuous with the claim that other kinds of evaluations are not strictly objective. They may be rational and non-arbitrary, but they are not binding on all rational beings. It looks to me as if the argument for this is compelling when it comes to non-moral evaluations.

So forget about moral judgments for the moment. Are we going to insist that all our practices of evaluation are strictly objective for fear that saying anything to the contrary will undermine the authority of science? I fully agree that the things we evaluate have objective characteristics - but the point is that there's going to be some slippage in what we require of these things (how do their objective characteristics conduce to meeting our desires, purposes, and so on?). Strictly speaking, there is no "we" here. Even if the people in a small group form a community with, for the scope of the argument, a unanimity of purposes, etc., they will not have a unanimity with all rational creatures in the universe ... or even all rational creatures on Earth.

Evaluations have an objective element, and they can be debated rationally. Eventually, however, evaluations are made relative to desires, etc., and in that sense have a subjective element. Outside of the sphere of moral judgment, this claim isn't especially controversial among educated people in culturally open societies. Do we now have to abandon this common understanding of non-moral evaluations for fear that we are undermining the authority of science?

That's one aspect that I haven't seen discussed. I'd like to know why a non-objective element in moral judgment is threatening to science but a non-objective element in evaluations more generally is not.

Here's another aspect. Imagine for the sake of argument that some kind of argument goes through to demonstrate that science is not strictly objective. Presumably the argument will have to be that our choices of scientific hypotheses and theories are actually something like evaluations. We evaluate scientific hypotheses against "values" such as explanatory power, parsimony, and track record in making novel predictions.

Ordinarily, we think of these as criteria for truth - or for likelihood of truth. Outside of science, we certainly do use them that way. But what if we do think of them as simply things that we happen to value? Well, yes - if you do think of explanatory power, parsimony, predictive record, and the like as things we just happen to value you'll turn science into something that is not objective.

What if you say that they are not things that we just happen to value but value for some other reason? Well, it might be that our reason is that they are indicators of likelihood of truth! In that case, the authority of science doesn't seem to be undermined after all. Sure, if we don't care about truth we won't use these criteria. But that in no way detracts from the fact that people who do use these criteria are discovering propositions that are likely to be true. And that gives science authority as a truth-seeking enterprise. Where's the problem?

Could we have some other non-arbitrary reason for valuing these particular things? Well, I can't immediately see what it would be. Nor do I see how we or any other rational beings in the universe really have much choice but to employ such criteria as explanatory power, parsimony, and predictive record. To call them "values", as if we have some real choice whether or not to value them, is misleading.

But all that said, there are many views in scientific epistemology. Perhaps there's some way of preserving science's authority, or much of it, while also claiming that it is not strictly objective, or that it only finds "empirically adequate" theories, not truths about the universe, or whatever. I don't really want to get into that today, and in all honesty I'd need to research the issue a lot further.

Without having done so, I take a straightforward scientific realist view. The criteria we use in science really are criteria of likelihood of truth and would be used by all rational beings that engage in science ... at least once they reach a certain stage of cultural evolution. That can be so without it following that our evaluations of cars, friends, people's characters, and so on are strictly objective.

But let's assume I'm wrong about science. Let's say, for the sake of argument, that my scientific epistemology is naive and false. In that case, perhaps science is also not strictly objective ... well so what? Perhaps that's an unwelcome conclusion. So?

You can't say that a metaethical view is false merely because a similar, but independently motivated, argument may (or may not) lead to an unwelcome conclusion in the field of scientific epistemology. The argument that moral objectivism is required on pain of undermining the authority of science is simplistic, illogical, and cuts no ice with me.

On moral evaluations

I have a piece over at the ABC religion and ethics portal, in which I discuss the process of evaluating things - hammers, cars, novels, tennis players, friends, fellow citizens, or people to have around - as a context for talking about moral evaluations.

As I've argued on this blog in the past, there's nothing spooky about evaluating things as "good" and "bad", although the concept is quite tricky once examined, and it may be that even ordinary judgments of good and bad have a (largely innocuous) fictional element: we work on the assumption that the people we're talking to have shared requirements of things, when even with the simplest things our requirements are not totally shared.

From a very strict point of view, there is no "we". From a practical point of view, however, our requirements as individuals are often similar enough that there's nothing much wrong with saying, "My Honda is a good car" or even "Abigail is a good person." For all intents and purposes, such statements, spoken in a context, can be simply true.

In very many actual contexts "we" can say without being too misleading that something is a good example of its kind - i.e. it has the characteristics that are needed for it to meet "our" requirements for things of that kind.

Furthermore, our requirements won't be arbitrary - there's nothing arbitrary about what we usually want from hammers or cars or friends or even fellow citizens. We can have rich and quite rational conversations about this - and such conversations produce convergence and agreement in many, many cases.

With just that bit of slippage, creatures like us have a wealth of reasons to want hammers to be sturdy, cars to be reliable and fuel-efficient, friends to be loyal, and fellow citizens to be industrious and law-abiding (at least with respect to most laws, and we have a wealth of reasons for identifying some laws as more important for this purpose as others). There isn't even anything especially mysterious about our judgments of people's characters or of their choices in respect of actions that could affect others. Non-arbitrary, rationally defensible evaluations can be made of the kinds of things that we think of as falling in the "moral" domain.

As long as morality doesn't purport to be more than this, we can demystify it without debunking it.

What this won't get us, however, is a strictly objective morality. Whatever judgments we make do not compel all comers, regardless of their desire-sets, to act one way or another on pain of making a mistake about the world or something of the sort. Thus, when we think that moral judgments are special in this way - different from all other evaluations in being strictly objective - we make an error. To whatever extent that error is built into some of our moral language, that part of our moral language is systematically false (I've come to think that this won't be all or nothing, and I don't believe that John Mackie thought it was, either).

I don't go into the latter ideas in the ABC article. I.e., it doesn't explicitly address moral error theory. It does, however, show how evaluations in what we think of as the moral domain (the realm of character and choices) can operate much like our other evaluations - neither strictly objective nor merely arbitrary. The problem is that, very often, we really don't think that's good enough. We (or many of us, much of the time) want moral judgments to have more metaphysical grunt, and we don't want to be stuck with the kind of ambiguity and indeterminacy that pervades our evaluations of other things. Or so it seems to me whenever I discuss this with people out there in the forreal world.

Freedom of religion and belief - report to AHRC

The long-awaited report to the Australian Human Rights Commission, prepared by a working party looking at freedom of religion and belief in 21st-century Australia, has finally been released. So far, I've only glanced through it, though Chrys Stevenson has a damning review of it here.

From my quick look, the report looks more anodyne than anything else, as if the group involved was unwilling to say anything controversial, or to offend anyone, or to make recommendations that might rock the social and political boat. In a way, that's not a bad thing; this group was never going to say anything of great benefit to secularists, so perhaps the less it does say of any substance the better. All the same, enormous amounts of money and effort went into this whole exercise, with a couple of thousand submissions received from the public.

All in all, this looks like much ado about nothing. However, I need to read the report properly to see whether there's anything there to worry about ... or anything that might actually be helpful.

Terry Lane on freedom of speech

Over here, Terry Lane reviews a new book on freedom of speech in Australia. It seems that this is the usual case where the book's author is all in favour of freedom of speech except of course when it's what she regards as nasty speech.

Sunday supervillainy - The Hulk vs Dracula? WTF?

Marvel has the rights to its version of Dracula, and they're conducting a big push of late to build him up to be one of their major, major supervillains ... to rival the likes of Dr. Doom and Magneto.

They can sure do with an injection of truly competent villains in the Marvel Universe. For some time now, Magneto has been a brooding presence within the X-Men, where he operates as a very effective uber-powerful anti-hero. Even Dr. Doom, whose personality shows fewer redeeming features than Magneto's - he's much more an out-and-out megalomaniac and much less a guy with a genuine grievance - has signed up to join the Future Foundation (the successor to the Fantastic Four). That was apparently the idea of little Valeria Richards (the child of Mr. Fantastic and Invisible Woman), but her "Uncle Doom" seems to have jumped at it.

Evidently, the most competent and dangerous Earth-based villains have learned the lesson that it's smart to work with the heroes as and when it suits their interests. And the heroes are prepared to employ the power and brilliance that these guys can offer.

Interestingly, Dracula seems set to play the role of anti-hero as well - if I understand this correctly, the Hulk is going to run amok in one sub-component of Marvel's "Fear Itself" mega-event that's just cranking up, and only Dracula is going to be in the right place at the right time to do something about it.

You can work out for yourself what all this means for our contemporary concepts of heroism and villainy.