Silver's new book

I've been in a reading frenzy over the past few weeks, partly to make up for lost time - for a combination of reasons, I've been getting little reading done this year, at least by my standards.

Currently, I'm reading Lee M. Silver's new book, Challenging Nature, a defence of biomedical science, and biotechnology more generally, against more or less irrational attacks from both the right and left of politics. It's a goldmine of information, and Silver's thinking is sometimes more sophisticated than that of many philosophers and bioethicists who have considered the same issues. But he does sometimes overreach.

For example, early in the book, he attacks the belief in free will, as if such a belief must be unscientific. He doesn't seem to realise that most philosophers (though, to be fair, perhaps not most philosophers who have been publishing about the problem of free will in recent years) are compatibilists. I.e., we see free will and physical determinism as compatible.

[Note: since writing the above, I see that Silver does briefly describe compatibilism in an endnote, which shows the peril of commenting on a book halfway through reading it and the peril of not always checking the endnotes straightaway. That said, the popularity of compatibilism still provides one reason why it is unwise to criticise people for believing in free will unless their actual beliefs have been probed very carefully.]

On the compatibilist conception, free will is not the freedom to act in a way that somehow transcends physical nature, of which our brains and bodies are part. It simply means the freedom to act without being subject to certain kinds of coercion, manipulation, inner compulsion, etc.

I doubt that there is such a thing as free will in any absolute sense, i.e. we may sometimes know all the facts, with no additional fact of the matter in borderline cases that "this person is acting with free will" and "this person is not". It is just that there are various things we fear, which we see as impediments to acting as we would really like to: we fear people putting guns at our heads; we fear being overtaken by some psychiatric condition that drives us to act in ways that strike us as alien and would cause us trouble; we fear addiction to drugs, which could compel us to act in ways that, again, are against our current values; we fear being tricked into acting against our better judgment; we fear (not very seriously) the science-fictional prospect of a mad scientist taking over control of our personalities by wiring us to his damnable machine. On this conception of free will, I act freely whenever I act in accordance with my own values and beliefs, without being compelled by any of these feared things. It may be a matter of degree, as when economic circumstances may greatly limit my range of options - still, although we do fear poverty we don't usually interpret economic circumstances as taking away free will, exactly. This may be because they (usually) still leave a range of possible actions, rather than compelling one in particular. We can consider ourselves to be acting freely within the boundaries of having limited resources.

It seems to me that this is the only kind of free will worth having (as Daniel Dennett has argued, though Dennett might not agree with all my exposition above). The spooky contra-causal free will that metaphysical libertarians claim we possess does not even make sense to me, and Silver evidently feels the same way. However, I do think that we have free will in the worthwhile and meaningful sense ... at least most of the time, and at least to a large degree.

In short, people who - when asked - say that we possess free will are not necessarily claiming anything incoherent or mystical. If we want to find out how many have the spooky libertarian belief that Silver is deriding, we need to ask a different question. It is not enough just to ask people something like "Do you believe in free will?" I expect most people would answer yes, but would probably not have a metaphysically libertarian theory in mind, or even necessarily some version of compatibilism. They might mean little more than that they are not fatalists, who believe that human decisions are futile, or something of the sort.

Of course, if it turns out that the popular concept of free will is the spooky libertarian one, I am quite happy to be an error theorist about that concept. Unless things are different in the US - and, in fairness to Silver, maybe they are - I doubt that anything like this is meant by most of us when we use the expression in our ordinary lives. In fact, it looks to me like something dreamed up by theologians wanting to explain how there can be evil in the world when an all-powerful, perfect being is supposedly in charge - how could that being somehow not be responsible for evil? Answer: we act in ways that simply have no physical causes and cannot be traced back to the creative acts of God. Belief in free will does not entail commitment to anything as difficult and metaphysical (possibly even irrational) as that.

Gould on science and religion

With all the current controversy about Richard Dawkins' new book, The God Delusion, and the relationship between science and religion, I went back to my article on Stephen Jay Gould's book on the subject, Rocks of Ages, to remind myself what I said in the past.

Entitled "Stephen Jay Gould on Science and Religion", the article was first published in Quadrant magazine in 2000, and a copy of it now sits happily on my website (it has also been anthologised, and it can probably be found on Quadrant's site as well). I can't really improve on what I wrote then. I still think that Gould was wrong in his claim that science and religion are "non-overlapping magisteria" that can never properly contradict each other; I'm still convinced that the problem was that he wanted to impose a narrow view of the proper scope of religion, confining it to a sphere of values (though allowing it to eat up the entire field of ethics). This is not tenable. Religions have always made claims that are open to rational investigation by science. This is their prerogative - they are encyclopedic explanations of the world and the human situation - but also a potential weakness if they make claims that later seem untenable when empirical evidence is gathered.

Some religious thinkers may, indeed, retreat to making only claims that seem immune to any sort of empirical investigation, but this is not religion's essence. Such a retreat is a very recent and culturally confined phenomenon, and it leaves religious worldviews eviscerated.

Spider-Man 3

For something a bit lighter, I've just read in Jason Rosenhouse's Evolutionblog that Spider-Man 3 will feature Sandman as its supervillain.

As a kid, I rated this character (who is not to be confused with the totally different character created by Neil Gaiman) among my favourite villains. He can turn his body to sand, or to solid rock, or a mixture, can take any shape, packs a helluva punch in his rocky form, and cannot be hurt by any amount of force (enough force can break rock, but he can just turn to sand and reform). There's scope here for some great special effects if it's done right.

I'm not such a huge fan of the Spider-Man movies - can pretty much take them or leave them - but this one might be a lot of fun.

What we eat

I'm currently reading The Ethics of What We Eat (published under a different title in the US) by Peter Singer and Jim Mason. I'll be reviewing this elsewhere, so I won't comment at length here.

The book brings home why I admire Singer so much - enormous effort must have gone into the research, and the whole thing is written in a way that is very understanding to people who don't meet the authors' view of what, morally speaking, might be the best food choices in all the circumstances. Ethical omnivores need not feel shrilly lectured to by the vegan authors, who are not going to demand total change in anybody's life, and less-ethical-than-we'd-like-to-be omnivores are allowed to ... well, simply wriggle in our seats, while also worrying about the cumulative picture building up to suggest we need to make some changes. And build up it does. This is advocacy of a very powerful kind, partly because of its relative gentleness.

Fukuyama on human dignity

As I re-read and ponder Fukuyama's Our Posthuman Future, I'm struck once more at how the workings of a powerful intellect end up producing lame conclusions on matters of policy.

Fukuyama's quest is to defend the idea that we all possess human dignity: some unique property that entitles each of us, equally, to a special moral respect that does not apply to the rest of creation. What, however, could such a mysterious property actually be? It could come from God, perhaps, if we share in some supernatural divine spark with our Creator, but that answer will not cut much ice in secular societies like Australia, or among secular people in a largely religious, but still pluralist, society like the US. No, Fukuyama needs a secular foundation for human dignity, but this is hard to find.

Indeed, the quest seems to be hopeless; I claim that there simply is no such thing as human dignity.

However, let's see what Fukuyama does with the problem. He thinks that what gives us our special moral worth is the fact that we are complex wholes with a range of capacities that exceed anything found among non-human animals - capacities relating to rationality, moral choice, sociability, sentience, consciousness, language, and so on. This is a richer range of elements than we see in the notion of Lockean personhood, with its emphasis on reason and self-consciousness, including a consciousness of ourselves as existing in time.

For myself, I want to argue that Lockean personhood is important, not because it grounds some mysterious quality of human dignity but because it is a necessary condition for anything to be vulnerable to certain kinds of harms to their interests. That vulnerability provides one basis for giving moral consideration to beings that possess it. Accordingly, if some non-human animals possess Lockean personhood they are at least good candidates for greater consideration than other animals that are sentient but not persons. What sort of consideration we feel we should give something will not depend merely on whether or not it gets over the threshold of Lockean personhood - it will depend on many other things, including the full range of its actual properties and vulnerabilities. But Lockean personhood is going to be a very important concept within any plausible moral system.

I'm not opposed to Fukuyama providing a richer range of elements - some of these may be important, though not for the reasons that he appears to think. One good reason is that they may create new vulnerabilities. For example, a person with a moral sense may be vulnerable to being torn apart psychologically in ways that may not apply to all Lockean persons. That may influence how we should treat such a person - for example, we can think of horribly cruel choices that people can be confronted with in which they are coerced or manipulated to act against their deepest moral beliefs. That is a vulnerability that a human being might have but which might not apply (though I don't totally rule it out) to any non-human animals that we know of, even if they are Lockean persons.

As far as I can see, Fukuyama does not make this point - or anything like it. Instead, he seems to see some objective moral value in the complex range of human capacities, without needing to invoke the vulnerabilities that these capabilities lead to. In particular, he places a great deal of emphasis on the value of the full range of human emotions - he will be suspicious of any technology that reduces that emotional range.

This way of looking at things creates all sorts of problems. The most obvious, as Fukuyama realises, is that it is not a theory of equal human dignity, since these capacities are present in human beings to varying degrees and of course some of them are deficient (or altogether missing) in some human beings - e.g. very young children and people suffering intellectual disability or dementia. It is no good saying, as Fukuyama wants to do, that it is impractical to make discriminations because it is actually all too easy to make them with some degree of accuracy, at least in respect of such things as reasoning ability, linguistic skills, and moral virtue. We doubtless do value all these things that Fukuyama refers to, but they don't confer a mysterious human dignity (indeed, we would value them in some new species that might turn up) and they certainly cannot underwrite equal human dignity.

It gets worse. Such criteria are no more able than criteria to do with sentience, or to do with Lockean personhood, to explain why any moral worth should attach to an early embryo, or why, as Fukuyama argues, we should heavily regulate embryo research. Fukuyama realises this, of course, and he has to fall back on notions of potentiality to develop into a being with the necessary attributes for human dignity. But this immediately raises all the same problems that accompany the claim that an embyro is a (merely) potential Lockean person. Potential to be morally considerable at some later time does not give any basis for moral considerability now.

Furthermore, the theory has no bite if it is meant to be used to oppose human reproductive cloning, as no one proposes that we use cloning to create children with less than the normal human capacities and complexity. The theory might be helpful in ruling out some kinds of genetic engineering, but again no one much wants to engineer children who are less capable and complex than normal children. The aim is more likely to be to produce greater than normal complexity and capacities of the kinds that Fukuyama values so much.

In short, the theory has shortcomings as a theory of (equal) human dignity. Worse, even if it could otherwise be made to work it would not take Fukuyama to the sorts of policy positions that he finds attractive.

There is much to admire in Fukuyama's writings. He is often clear-headed, and he certainly writes with considerable surface lucidity (any confusion and unclarity is largely hidden below the easily-readable prose). But he appears to be committed to moral beliefs and policy prescriptions that simply don't follow from his philosophical arguments, with the result that Our Posthuman Future often seems to be one giant non sequitur. It is worth reading for its clear-headed discussion of why it makes sense to believe in something like "human nature", and why it is difficult to move from there to belief in "human dignity". The conclusions, however, are a squib. Fukuyama should have concluded that there is no property of human dignity, whatever has been thought in the past, and that our moral and legal norms must be justified (to the extent that they can be at all) on some radically different basis.

Human enhancement and the religious worldview

Though he does not take the stance of a religious believer, Francis Fukuyama is deferential to religion and its interests. In Our Posthuman Future, surely one of the most influential of the many post-Dolly bioconservative tracts, Fukuyama discusses why religious believers in the Abrahamic tradition might oppose a whole raft of technologies, including but not limited to postulated forms of genetic enhancement. Broadly, the use of these technologies is inconsistent with a certain worldview in which God acts through nature to produce human beings with certain characteristics such as morality, free will, and faith. Within this picture, "natural norms" such as sexual reproduction and the family (as understood in some traditional way) are products of God's will.

I'm not convinced that religious believers of any kind must reach such a strong conclusion and thus reject the technologies in question as contrary to their concepts of God's will and human dignity. Certainly Fukuyama does not present a tight argument to that effect, and it may well be possible to reinterpret the religious tradition in ways that are much more sympathetic to supposedly "unnatural" technologies ranging from birth control to genetic enhancement. Indeed, the widespread discomfort with these technologies - among religious believers and others - may result more from a discomfort with changing what seem to be essential "givens" in the background of our lives, e.g. the connection between sex and reproduction. This is, in a nutshell, the theory of background conditions, which I have referred to frequently in this blog.

Still, it may be that there is a religious worldview, or at least a religious sensibility, according to which human enhancement and so on are almost inevitably objects for moral repugnance. Someone with this worldview or sensibility may reject many practices in contemporary society, including contraception (for example), even if it places her and those who depend upon her at a disadvantage in many ways. I'll refer in this entry to "the religious worldview", but with the warning that there may well be other religious worldviews available and that, in any event, religious doctrine is always open to reinterpretation.

Fukuyama does not necessarily share the religious worldview, although he seems keen to defend a secular equivalent. But even if the religious worldview is incorrect and no secular justification can be given for anything similar, he provides the materials for a policy argument something like the following:

1. If we allow human enhancement, it will be widely practised. (This seems to be assumed and to be plausible.)
2. If human enhancement is widely practised, those who do not practise it will place their children at a relative disadvantage. (Again, this seems to be assumed and to be plausible.)
3. If human enhancement is widely practised, people who have the religious worldview will (nonetheless) not practise it. (This follows from Fukuyama's discussion of the religious worldview.)
4. If human enhancement is widely practised, people who have the religious worldview will place their children at a disadvantage. (From 2. and 3.)
5. If we allow human enhancement, people who have the religious worldview will place their children at a disadvantage. (From 1. and 4.)
6. If people who have the religious worldview place their children at a disadvantage they will come under social pressure to act in ways that are contrary to their worldview. (Assumed. I think this is plausible.)
7. We should not act so as to create a situation where people who have the religious worldview come under social pressure to act in ways that are contrary to their worldview. (Assumed.)
8. (Therefore) We should not allow human enhancement.

I think that this argument is valid. Accordingly, it is a sound argument if its assumptions are true. It does seem to me that all the assumptions made are near enough to being true that we should accept them - I don't think that any quibbling will undermine the argument, as opposed to requiring it to be phrased more carefully. The one important exception is line 7.

It is one thing to be opposed to the persecution of people with religious beliefs, or even to wish that people with certain religious beliefs be exempted from some laws that would intrude oppressively on their practices - practices that may be of overwhelming subjective importance to them and may do no great harm. But how far must we go to prohibit and "nip in the bud" new practices that may end up putting people with the religious worldview under social pressure to act in ways that are contrary to their worldview?

This strikes me as an enormously important question, in a world where more and more practices are likely to be rejected by people with the religious worldview - often to the detriment of those people themselves, or those close to them such as their children. People with the religious worldview may have cause to fear, but can the rest of us allow ourselves to let them have a kind of veto over our practices and technologies? I suggest not - being required to relinquish practices and technologies that we find valuable, based on this sort of solicitude to people with the religious worldview, is something that we have every reason to fear, even if we have some other reason for disliking a particular practice. Freedom of religion does not extend to ensuring that adherence to the religious worldview will never have a downside in new social circumstances or that its adherents will never come under pressure to act against it or reinterpret it.

The kind of argument that I have analysed above should not make us feel inclined to defer to the wishes of religious believers, and it should have no influence on the formulation of public policy.

Two million before Christmas?

As I write, Second Life is reaching 1.5 million registered accounts - 50 per cent growth from just over a month a go. SL has its problems, but in a few years we may reach a point where almost everyone in the more privileged social strata of the more privileged countries has an account with SL or whatever competitors come along, whether or not they use it much, just as we all have e-mail and chat accounts.

I see this technology becoming more and more convenient and immersive, whatever the current performance problems for SL itself. I can't imagine it not becoming an increasing part of our lives in future years.

SFS roundtable on science fiction criticism

The current issue of Science Fiction Studies has an interesting "roundtable" on the current state and possible future of science fiction criticism, with contributions by many of the journal's editorial consultants.

My own contribution slips in a complaint that some science fiction criticism makes the mistake of treating science fiction as just another field of popular culture, more or less interchangeable with others.

However, that is not the main thrust of my argument. I argue that science fiction has been made possible by the widespread (though by no means universal) acceptance of two theses:

First, we inhabit an incomprehensibly vast universe whose origins lie deep in time. Our beginnings as a species are temporally remote and our final destiny unknown.

Second, all known social and cultural forms, including those we have experienced in our own lifetimes, are mutable.

Not all science fiction fully embraces these theses - some sf displays a degree of resistance to them, whether intentional or merely incidental and perhaps unconscious, as when people in future societies seem to show concerns and psychological characteristics that resemble those of current Westerners. Still, the genre could not exist without the development of these great ideas over the last few centuries - especially with the nineteenth century's double-whammy encounter with Darwinian evolutionary theory plus the process of rapid industrialisation and accompanying social change.

Another contributor, Nicholas Ruddick, makes a similar point: "I understand sf as an unprecedented literature emerging from the Darwinian revolution, and expect the good stuff to grapple with the predicament of the human species in a scientifically conceived universe." He suggests that the best science fiction of the Golden Age (the late 1930s to late 1940s when science fiction developed as a self-conscious genre under the editorial guidance of John W. Campbell) showed this kind of awareness.

Finally, I identify a third thesis about the human situation that is addressed (but sometimes resisted, rather than embraced) in much current science fiction:

Third, we, as individuals or a species, are technologically alterable, and may even be superseded by our posthuman mind-children.

I suggest that science fiction critics need to grapple seriously with this last claim on something like its own terms. Critics need not, of course, have personal opinions one way or another about the truth of the third thesis - which is highly controversial. In that sense, it is not like first two theses, which I think any educated person must now accept. However, scholarly critics of the genre should be aware of it, and be able to explicate how it appears, is endorsed, resisted, qualified, or complexified (or some or all the above) in science fiction texts.

Engagement with the three theses I've identified would give science fiction criticism a heart of its own, rather than being just the application of critical practice to one more area. Without this kind of focus, there is a risk that, as still another contributor (Brooks Landon) puts it, we may lose sight of the possibility that "science fiction might truly be a different way of constructing and interrogating our lives."

Website update.

My website has been pretty stable for a long time now, partly because nothing much has changed in my life of late to the extent of requiring much change to the way it is represented on the site.

It's been nice to have enough news this month to justify some small tweaks, which I made recently, though there's still no need for any major overhaul.

Why do bad ideas persist?

In my current article in JME, some of which has previously appeared on the Betterhumans website, I examine the theory of background conditions - the idea that all human cultures assume the existence of basic conditions in the background of human life that are beyond our choice, though they form the context for our choices.

According to the theory, these background conditions to choice are perceived to be timeless truths. Some of them, in fact, are clearly not true (such as the assumption of male superiority), while some others are true only to a limited extent (the relationship between sex and repoduction), or may not be true in the future if it sees the emergence of a radically different technological context (for example, it may no longer be true that human beings are mortal in the same sense as we always have been, or that work is necessary in the same sense as we've experienced historically). When the background conditions, as understood in a culture, are threatened, whether by practices such as gay sex or by new technologies such as IVF or human cloning, at least some people will feel that what is happening is "unnatural", and will themselves feel threatened.

I'm about 90 per cent convinced that this theory is onto something, though it would be nice to devise some ways that it could be empirically tested. Ordinary social observation certainly provides a lot of data that it can make sense of, but it would be good to have more precise data.

If the theory is true, it might show why there is so much essentially irrational resistance to harmless, or even beneficial, practices and technologies that are stigmatised as somehow "against nature". I certainly don't think it provides a basis for legislatures to ban those practices and technologies, or for rational people to give their support to feelings of disapproval. If we come to the conclusion that the theory of background conditions is true, it can (in part?) explain the "yuck factor", and perhaps the persistence of bad ideas about sex and reproduction, but it should not be interpreted as a justification for what it explains.