A Catholic leader in Scotland attacks same-sex marriage

Scotland is across the Irish Sea from the Dioceses of Dublin and Cloyne, but you'd think that Roman Catholic leaders all around that part of the world would keep quiet at the moment, except to express contrition and penitence on behalf of their severely discredited organisation. But no, here is the highest official of the Church in Scotland, Cardinal O'Brien, still wanting the state to enforce the Church's esoteric view of morality.

It's remarkable how Catholic spokespersons will claim to side with freedom of religion, separation of church and state, etc., when it suits them for public relations purposes. But it doesn't stop the likes of Cardinal O'Brien from agitating for the state to impose their specifically religious morality whenever they think they might succeed.

Again, you'd expect that maybe the Catholic Church would favour a live-and-let-live spirit these days, not meddling in politics, or in people's bedrooms, in return for us maybe going a bit easier on it. It could concentrate on what it sees as the spiritual welfare of its members. But no. The Church is still full of unpleasant moralists and theocrats.

Loss of faith - in the arguments for God

I've done a couple of debates with the godly this year: a (relatively) small one against Michael Jensen at Macquarie University back in March; and the big one on Tuesday night in which I joined with Tamas Pataki and Jane Caro against Archbishop Peter Jensen, Tracey Rowland, and Scott Stephens.

One point that I made in the latter, where I was the last speaker for the opposition, was the lack of faith shown by the Christian apologists in the traditional arguments for the existence of God. In fact, none of the four people I've debated this year has used these arguments in any concerted way.

On Tuesday night, there were, perhaps, some vague attempts to evoke (and I do mean evoke, not invoke) the traditional moral argument. These were never developed with any rigour, and didn't require rebuttal (our side would have had to do the other side's work to get the argument into a form worthy of rebutting). In fact, I think they came across more as complaints about the (supposed) moral malaise of secular societies.

Back in March, Michael Jensen did gesture at a transcendental argument based on the need to presume God in order to avoid radical scepticism, and we briefly skirmished about that. Generally, however, the Christian apologists I've encountered have abandoned philosophical arguments and concentrated on (a) the good things done for us by Christianity and (b) the supposed loss of value in societies without God. This is fairly weak, and I don't think it went down well with most of the audience the other night. It's really only going to appeal to people who already hold Christian organisations and moral views in high regard.

I assume that my interlocutors are just not convinced by philosophical arguments and have other reasons for their views, such as what they take to be the inherent plausibility of the gospel narratives. That's up to them, of course, but it weakens their position in debate. William Lane Craig is very formidable as a debater because he really seems to believe in the philosophical arguments, and is able to present them in a more-or-less logically valid form very concisely, quickly, and clearly, forcing his opponents to flounder around unpicking what's wrong with them, or else leave important parts of his presentations unrebutted.

Cardinal Pell relied almost entirely on a cosmic fine tuning argument in his debate against Dan Barker last year, and it didn't go well for him. But at least he had an argument for the existence of God. I went along on Tuesday night ready to debate the alleged cosmic fine tuning, but it wasn't required.

Apart from Pell, most of the Australian debaters don't seem to want to risk their positions on these sorts of arguments, even though it might be better for them tactically - it makes it look as if they don't actually have any good reasons to believe in God, which is pretty fundamental!

Again, it's up to the debaters what arguments they want to run. If they don't think these arguments are conclusive - which Peter Jensen seemed to concede in his summing up the other night - they are just being honest in not relying on them. I'm not saying they should change tack, and I'm certainly not trying to create a sort of witch hunt thread in which we pile on the individuals concerned. I'm just observing something that happened, or failed to happen, in a couple of debates that I've been involved in. Interesting ... or so it struck me.

Has anyone else had similar or contrasting experiences? How would you run the other side's case if you were handed the task?

IQ2 debate on "Atheists are wrong" - the results (Lions defeat Christians)

Pre-debate: 28.5% for the motion, 56% against, 15.5% undecided. Post-debate: 28.9% for, 66.3% against, 5.7% undecided.

Actually, these figures from Twitter can't be quite right, as the second set of figures adds up to over 100, but presumably they are near enough to give a good idea what happened. Maybe we'll see slightly different figures for the debate later on. Or maybe the second group of figures contains more people if the first misses a few late arrivals. I really don't know.

Anyway, as the figures show, we had a pretty receptive audience for the speakers against the motion, which doubtless buoyed us. Still, nearly 30 per cent were prepared, before the debate started, to support a motion that "Atheists are wrong". Both sides received plenty of applause, though ours was louder. With 1200 enthusiastic people packed into Sydney's City Recital Hall, the debate had plenty of atmosphere.

The figure that matters with these debates isn't the ultimate number or percentage who support the motion, but which side of the argument produces the best shift in numbers. On the figures given, our godless team received a net 10.3 per cent of the audience (equivalent to two-thirds of the undecideds) shifting to us, while the speakers for the motion managed to get a net 0.4 per cent of the audience to shift to them.

As I think I've said before, debates like this don't necessarily prove anything. They can be won on the basis of tactics and imponderable factors, as much as on the merit of arguments. They do, however, create opportunities for reflection and discussion (as well as entertainment).

In this case, I think our ungodly team probably had better tactics on the night (as well as being correct of course!).

All in all, it was an enjoyable experience. It was great working with the people at IQ2, who were efficient, helpful and friendly at every stage, and I very much enjoyed teaming up with Tamas Pataki and Jane Caro. We all seemed to establish a good rapport with each other, which surely helped us.

Off for some debating!

Here! Back tomorrow, doubtless with more stuff about metaethics. In preparation for the latter, you might like to have another look at what Jean Kazez says about the Joel Marks piece - and the interesting thread that she has going. Even if you're with me so far, there are still some interesting points raised in her post and by her commenters.

Not so odd - Jerry Coyne on Joel Marks

Brother Coyne - sorry, Jerry, I couldn't resist! - has a piece on Joel Marks in which he describes the latter's contribution to Opinionator as "a very odd column". I hope that readers of this blog, where we often discuss issues in metaethics, will understand why I don't think it odd at all. Marks has embraced a perfectly respectable position in philosophical metaethics: what looks like a form of moral error theory, closely akin to the abolitionist position of Richard Garner.

There's some confusion to be cleared up here, and it's much the same confusion that is often shown by Sam Harris. When we talk about morality being "objective" we are not interested in whether people's moral choices have certain properties that are independent of our desires - of course they do. Thus, it may be that a particular choice will lead to the suffering of certain people or certain other sentient animals. Another choice may lead to certain pleasures or satisfactions for those affected, while causing them no pain or other harm. Nothing is controversial about this, but pointing it out won't take us far towards saying that there are objective moral requirements in the sense debated by metaethicists.

(Well, it might; it might lead us to moral naturalism. But moral naturalism gives a rather deflationary account of moral objectivity; and in any event it has to be argued for, which is easier said than done.)

We can get closer to what an objective moral requirement would be when we think - by contrast - about ordinary value judgments. Let's take the good (!) old car example again. When I say, "This is a good car," I mean something like, "This car has the properties that we desire in a car." If I say, "This car (my friend's Porsche, say) is a better car than mine," I mean that it has those properties to a greater degree (perhaps using some sort of weighting system to add up the relevant properties).

My friend's (hi! I know you're reading this!) Porsche really does have certain characteristics, as does my Honda. But am I inescapably bound to prefer her car to mine irrespective of my particular desires? No, I am not. The "goodness" of the car is parasitic not only on properties (such as its mass, various performance characteristic, etc.) that will be the same whatever our desires may be, but also on what our desires actually are. Someone whose desires differ from those of the majority cannot be forced, on pain of being just wrong about something, to prefer one car to the other. There is an important sense in which car-goodness is not an objective property. It is not Out There, independent of how we feel about the characteristics of cars. It can't prescribe how I act, for example in purchasing one car rather than another ... on pain of being just wrong if I act in some other way.

With most value judgments, there's not a lot of intellectual resistance to this analysis. But the situation tends to change with moral judgments. If someone says, "Torturing babies is wrong," she is likely to mean something much stronger than, "Torturing babies is painful for them." The latter statement is doubtless true, and it is true independently of my desires in the matter. But a sadist who goes ahead and tortures babies may be making no mistake about anything in the world (though likewise we make no mistake when we judge the sadist to be "evil").

There is a pressure, perhaps built into our language itself, to regard the "moral wrongness" of torturing babies as an objective property, in the sense that car-goodness is not: to regard it as a property out there in the world independent of our desire for babies not to suffer pain.

But of course there is no such "objective" property. The pain exists. Our desire that the pain not happen exists. The mismatch between the pain and our desires exists. It is rational for us not to torture babies. It is rational for us to attempt to prevent others from doing so, and to enact laws that deter others from torturing babies. All of that's fine. And yet, there is this pressure (where does it come from? I'm sure some of my opponents will attribute it to God ... but that has all sorts of problems) to want something more, and to believe that this "something more" actually exists.

We seem to want this further property of moral wrongness that is independent of desires. I.e., we want this propert to exist. We seem to find it difficult to admit that there is no such property.

We seem to want objective prescriptivity to exist, even though objective prescriptivity would be a very queer thing indeed, as moral error theorists point out. Or at least many of us seem to want this, and to be convinced that there is such a thing. And yet, no one has ever seen such a thing, and it is hard to understand how the concept is even coherent.
 
Joel Marks has reached a point in his life where he no longer believes in objective prescriptivity, in inescapably binding standards of conduct, or in morally evaluative properties ("moral goodness", "moral forbiddenness", etc.) that are independent of our desires. For Marks, the "goodness" of choices and actions had better be no more metaphysically rich than the "goodness" of a car: a kind of summation of whether they have the metaphysically ordinary properties that "we" (and this "we" is always, in practice, at least partly a fiction) want in choices and actions of that type.

It might be said with some truth that Marks is leaving morality behind. That doesn't mean that he is leaving goodness behind. He might still make choices and carry out actions that we regard as "good" - perhaps because they conform to our inherited standards, or because, in any event, they have the properties that we want such choices and actions to have. But he is living without what is sometimes called the moral overlay, the illusion of desire-independent objectively prescriptive properties out there in the world.

It that sense, Marks is, arguably living beyond morality, though he need not necessarily be living beyond making value judgments (as he describes the situation he even seems to be doing that, but I think that's a further step).

As I said at the start, I don't find any of this odd. It's a difficult concept to convey at less than book length to people who are not already familiar with it. But it's a genuine issue in metaethics, and the problems it raises are quite familiar to people working within the field. Marks may still live much as he did before, and we may still make value judgments about him - he can't escape being judged by others. We may judge him to be a "good" or "virtuous" man, if all we mean by that is that he has the dispositions of character that we want in a man. For all that, he's thinking about his choices in a way that most people don't when they imagine that there are inescapably binding moral requirements.

I'm not sure I've conveyed this well. It really is difficult to tease out briefly, and I don't think I've done very well in oral presentations in the past or even, necessarily, in previous blog posts like this one. But something really has changed for Marks. He's abandoned objective ethics - not the belief that there are properties of our choices that exist independently of our desires, such as whether or not a choice, when acted on, will produce pain, but, rather, the belief in objectively prescriptive properties such as the property of being inescapably forbidden.

The more important question, perhaps, is whether this change - this movement beyond morality as it's commonly conceived - really matters. Marks thinks it doesn't. I tend to agree. Actually, I think it helps us to see things more clearly, and to consider what we think moral systems are really for.

That question will not have a straightforward, literal answer, since moral systems were not consciously designed, so they are not literally "for" anything. Still, the question makes a kind of sense. We can ask how moral systems actually function, and we can ask what we actually want in a moral system, if we still want such a thing at all. This then starts to give us a basis to assess - and, where appropriate, even debunk - the traditional morality that we've inherited.

How much of our traditional morality will we still approve of when we've subjected it to radical scrutiny? Maybe some it has to go.

Sunday supervillainy - Odin and Galactus head to head

Odin and Galactus butt heads in The Mighty Thor # 5. The battle continues, in a new phase, in the next issue. Going on what is shown here, you'd think that Odin's headbutt is effective, but he actually gets the worst of it when the smoke clears and Galactus recovers quickly.

That's just as well, since Galactus is supposed to be a universal force somehow mediating between Death and Eternity, while Odin is, um, just the head of a local pantheon of gods - there are plenty of others in the Marvel Universe, with Zeus as the most obvious.

Atheists are wrong - so they say

Don't forget to come along if you're going to be in Sydney on Tuesday night!

That car-goodness example again - more on Joel Marks

I said that I was going to defend Joel Marks - at least on the essentials. Here goes. I'll deal separately (in a later post or posts) with the criticisms made by Jerry Coyne and Jean Kazez. For now, I just want to say why I think Marks has it basically right. (I see that he's writing a book on the subject - I'll be very interested to read it, especially as one of my own ambitions in the medium term is to write a book on the same issues.)

In sketching why I think that Marks is essentially right, I'm going to return to my favourite example, what it means to say, "This [pointing to my 2009 Honda Civic, perhaps] is a good car." The best idea I can come up with - assisted by philosophers before me - of what this means is, "This car possesses the set of properties that we want in a car." It's easy enough to see how the "goodness" of a car, if that is what car-goodness is about, can, in the right circumstances, motivate me to buy a certain car, to want to drive in or ride a certain car, and so on. The property of goodness already has my wants built into it.

But there are some important points to note about this. First, if my translation of "This is a good car" is correct, then I am not breaching Hume's law by going from "is" to "ought" without invoking a desire along the way. Hume didn't deny that you could do that. He thought that you can't go from "objective", desire-free is's to oughts. A property such as goodness, which has our wants or desires built into it, certainly can ground an "ought", and Hume knew this.

Second, if my translation is correct, car-goodness is not a property that is "out there", independent of our desires. Yes, the car may have the properties that we want in a car. But what those properties actually are will depend on us, and, more specifically, on what we do actually want in a car. If we change our minds about what we actually want in a car, then the car may cease to possess the summing-up property of car-goodness, even if there's a sense in which car itself hasn't changed (it is just as comfortable as it always was, has the same performance characteristics, the same fuel consumption, the same level of reliability, and the same underlying physical characteristics such as shape, mass, and so on). Whether or not the car possesses car-goodness - the property of having the properties that we want in a car - will depend on, among other things, our desires.

Third, strictly speaking there is probably no "we" here. There might be - it is possible that everyone involved in the conversation wants just the same thing in a car. In a very small group of like-minded car enthusiasts, that might be very close to being the case. But in practice, this "we" is likely to be a fiction. There may be a lot of agreement about what the people speaking and listening want, but it will not be total agreement, and the people who want some different combination of properties from the majority are not just wrong (in the way that someone can be just wrong about, say, the car's mass).

Despite these points, and doubtless other related ones, we find it very convenient to talk about whether or not a car is a "good" one. And yet, we all know, if we think about it, that this is pretty much a fiction, partly because "we" are a fiction - there just is no "we" who all have exactly the same wants in a car. Okay, in some social situations we might all want exactly the same thing in a car, but that is unlikely in practice even in a small group of people. On the internet, for example, it is vanishingly unlikely.

We all know these sorts of things, at least if we think about them, but it remains convenient to talk about a car being, or not being a "good" one. One reason for that is, despite everything I've said above, there is still a lot of agreement about what we want in a car (at least that is going to be so in many social contexts), so much so that is easiest to act on the basis that we really do agree on what is important and can sum it up reasonably unproblematically.

Of course, as is shown by real-world arguments between spouses or lovers about what car to purchase, there may be limits to the tacit consensus. But usually at least a rough consensus can be presumed. And there are reasons for this - given the kinds of organisms we are, given the way our societies are structured, and so on, it's not surprising that we want comfort and find similar things comfortable, that we want fuel economy, reliability and so on. It's more likely that we'll disagree about how to weight these various properties than that we'll disagree about them totally.

In the end, our judgments about the "goodness" of a car are not just arbitrary - not just anything is going to count as goodness in a car - but nor is car-goodness a property that is "out there" independent of our desires.

When I choose a car, do I really need to measure its car-goodness? Not really. All this talk about "goodness" is socially convenient, but in the end I can simply choose the car that has the properties that I want in a car (as well as being affordable and so on, if we don't count those as properties of the car). I can go through life not thinking in terms of car-goodness, as long as I am clear on what I want in a car (including how much weight I place on such things as reliability, comfort, fuel economy, various aspects of performance, and so on). I can weigh all this up without ever even needing to use the word "goodness", much as the word may provide a convenient way of speaking in social situations.

I don't see the need to abolish the word "good" when speaking of cars, but nor, strictly speaking, do I need to use it when considering what car to buy. It's all good (as it were!). But if I thought that my own judgments of goodness were rationally binding on everyone else - that "goodness" is like mass, a property that is independent of our desires, and about which someone can be just factually wrong - then I'd be making a mistake.

When it comes to moral language, such as the language of moral forbiddenness, moral permittedness, etc., this may likewise be socially convenient, but there seems to be a much greater tendency for people to think that these are properties which are "out there", independent of our desires, that people can be just wrong in a way that they can be about a car's mass, that judgments of these things are binding on others with different desires (values, hopes, fears, etc.), on pain of being just mistaken. All of this, I suggest, is an illusion.

Not only that, Joel Marks is quite correct that I can go through life without needing the language of moral forbiddenness, etc., when making judgments about how I will live my life, what laws I will support and so on. I can think more directly about what courses of action or laws, etc., have the properties that I want in such things (such as the property of being likely to achieve my own ambitions, the property of conducing to the happiness of my loved ones, the property of not adding to the world's suffering, and so on). I can weigh all this up quite directly without having to invoke further properties of moral forbiddenness, and so on, which sum over these other properties.

Marks is also correct that it may, in many cases, be more effective to get people to change their minds about some course of action if we discuss the objective properties of the course of action (such as its propensity to cause or ameliorate suffering) than if we use language such as "morally required" or "morally forbidden". Perhaps there are also cases where the latter language is just too convenient to forgo, or where it is just too complicated and inconvenient trying to speak in some other way. That might be so, for example, when we are speaking to young children. But if we are aware of the issue, we may be better placed to make rational decisions for ourselves and to persuade others to make what we regard as "good" decisions.

There's a lot more to say, of course. It's no wonder that Marks wants to write a whole book on the subject - and that I do, too. But I do think that Marks is essentially correct, and I agree with the point that Jean Kazez (I think it was) made on the earlier thread that it's no criticism of Marks that he goes on making much the same choices as he used to. Of course he does - just as I would go on choosing the same cars whether or not I naively believed that there was an objective property of car-goodness "out there", independent of my desires. When he does so, however, he may see more clearly what he is actually doing, and this may help him make better (!) decisions and be more persuasive when he tries to influence the decisions of others.

We'll doubtless get to some criticisms in the comments, and in later posts, but I think that Marks is basically on the mark.

Joel Marks on philosophical amoralism

More to come on this topic. For the moment, I just want to draw attention to this piece by Yale-based philosopher Joel Marks in which he describes how he came to be a philosophical amoralist (along the lines of Richard Garner).

Jerry Coyne and Jean Kazez have both commented on the piece rather critically (the former some time ago now). As you might expect, I'll be (essentially) defending Marks. However, the two critical posts that I've linked are well worth reading and discussing.

More tomorrow, but feel free to get some discussion going.

Note: I'm going to take off moderation for now, except on old threads, and see what happens - whether the spam level is deal-withable. As James Sweet suggested in a thread yesterday, things are now more manageable for us all without David Mabus annoying us. I'll enable the word recognition thingie to see if it weeds some rubbish out.

Legal Eagle on the Malaysian "solution" decision

This is a more detailed and accurate analysis than my very quick hot-off-the-presses one. So rely on it instead. I endorse many of its reflections. (The main correction needed to be made to mine is that Justice Kiefer adopted a similar analysis to that of Chief Justice French, as opposed to the "jurisdictional facts" analysis of the other four judges in the majority on the disposition of the case).