A Humanist Remembrance Day

It’s been quite some time since I’ve written anything on this blog, both because the first year of a PhD programme in political science is apparently a bit busy but also because I haven’t really felt the urge to ‘get anything out’, at least not in this format. I try hard not to be too trivial in what I post, and I’m not particularly interested in saying something that others have already said better in easily accessible formats. But I do think I have a few thoughts worth sharing now. I can’t vouch for them being particularly insightful, though. Treat them as prompts more than assertive claims.

Remembrance Day was on the 11 November. Veteran’s Day, its US analog, was also on the 11th. On these days and in the days prior, we encountered many stories of the acts of wartime courage committed by military personnel and we commemorated both the sacrifices that soldiers make and the traumatic horror of war, and in particular the two World Wars. But some of us were not fully comfortable with the way Remembrance is done. We worry that the celebration of veterans both glorifies war and pays only perfunctory respect to the reality of their experiences. We wonder if cloaking veterans in the mantle of heroism and glorious sacrifice obscures the true savagery of combat and produces enthusiasm rather than apprehension for conflict.

I’m going to remain largely agnostic, at least here, as to the validity of these concerns. Instead, I’m going to suggest a model for what I’d call a truly Humanist Remembrance Day.

A Humanist Remembrance Day would see us affirm the following principles and propositions:

1. We’re all affected by war. A recent article on Foreign Policy made the point that civilians in warzones are often just as familiar with battle as those fighting, and are often no less scarred or affected by it than soldiers; that they, too, are veterans. Yet even we here, safe and sound, are veterans of a sort. People of my generation or younger grew up in an age where images of war and security paranoia were everywhere. And they still are. As I discovered recently, it is hard to find a nineteen year old student taking an international relations course who is actually willing to hold out for the possibility of something like a democratic peace. I found one out of forty, in fact. In the years during which we are supposed to be most idealistic, these young people are cynics about the most noble idealism I could imagine. And while this isn’t quite the same as the cynicism of an actual veteran of the same age, I don’t think it’s just the sort of fashionable cynicism we all try to affect when we’re young. I think it truly comes from an absence of hope for a world ever free of war. Meanwhile, people of a slightly older generation grew up fearing nuclear holocaust. Those even older may have fought in Vietnam.

War touches all of us. It touches some of us a more profoundly and traumatically than it does others, and our experiences of it may vary, but we must engage with it as a people and as a society. War is something we all do, and not just those in the military or those trapped in the crossfire.

2. War is always a choice. That doesn’t mean that it might not sometimes be the right choice, nor that our other options might be truly unpalatable, but it is not something we simply find ourselves doing. It’s not a habit. It’s not some kind of determined phenomenon, at least not on a case by case basis. When we make war, as individuals and as groups, we’re choosing to initiate devastating violent courses of action. We all must bear some responsibility for the choice to war, and we must reflect on what that responsibility entails.

3. War is politics. War is an instrument of policy, even as it is also something deeply affective and emotional. As such, war is something we do in order to achieve a social outcome: some change to society, some change to government. As Humanists, we should be willing to make use of every political instrument available to us, including war, but we should also make use of all of our sciences and technologies to ensure that we choose the best tool for the task. And the more tools we have in the box, the better we can do this.

One example of this from my own research interests would be the potential of military assassination – aka ‘targeted killing’ – to permit particularly discriminating uses of violence that minimise the harm caused to non-combatants.

4. War is a human tragedy. It is a tragedy for everyone. We should mourn every loss of life in war, regardless of whose life it is. We can imagine a world in which our enemies were our best friends, where a different set of social structures, a different set of policies and politicians, and a different view of right and wrong simply did not lead to a conflict between us and them. Even if we adamantly believe that a war is justified, we must acknowledge that the conditions which make it just are contingent.

5. Our heroes are victims. As courageous as many of our most heroic veterans have been – those winners of Victoria Crosses and those people who risked their own life many times to save the lives of others – they are also victims of a terrible set of circumstances. Nobody should have to risk their life to save others. And those who have deserve our sympathy as well as our respect. We should remember this as we consider what sort of reception to give to those returning from war, and what sort of support services are available to veterans.

Well, that’s it for now. Feel free to add or contend these principles as you see fit.

Islam: no more essentially ‘fundamentalist’ than any other religion

I want to put to rest an annoying canard. Let me quote an exemplary phrasing of it, from Alom Shaha’s The Young Atheist’s Handbook:

‘Unlike Christian and Jewish doctrines, Islam demands unambiguously that Muslims accept the Qur’an as the word of God….The belief that the Qur’an is an eternal, immutable text endows it with a unique level of authority when compared to any other work of literature – if I can even be allowed to call it that. There has been no reformation in Islam, and it doesn’t look like there’s going to be one any time soon…because Islam is inflexible in its claim that the Qur’an is of divine origin. And in this sense, Islamic fundamentalism seems almost understandable, for how can you not be a fundamentalist if you have the word of God at your disposal?

In other words, Muslims are particularly likely to be ‘fundamentalists’ because it is embedded as an essential component of Islamic dogma that the Qur’an is the precise word of God, rendered in Arabic, and as such it can only be read literally.

This is a very wrongheaded argument. I’m surprised to see someone from a Muslim community making it. I mean, I can see how it seems reasonable at first, but it doesn’t take much to debunk it.

Let me explain why I think it’s a bad argument.

Well first of all, it’s not a valid inference. Let’s say that I am a Muslim and I believe that the Qur’an was dictated by God via the angel Gabriel, as is orthodox. Alright, well, I guess I’d better take the Qur’an seriously. But what is God saying? Should his words be taken literally? Maybe he’s actually speaking in allegory, or using metaphors in an attempt to convey his omniscient wisdom more fully and richly? Maybe he is deliberately speaking to a given historical context, and fully intends for future readers to try to understand how his words are meant to deliver abstract principles to that context, and to understand that we need to recontextualise those principles for our different social environment?

Basically, even if Muslims firmly believe that the Qur’an is the word of god, it doesn’t follow that the only way for Muslims to read the text is by its most literal, ‘shallow’ interpretation. All it means is that Muslims will pay very close attention to the wording, and treat it with reverence.

Second, it’s empirically false. As I’ve written in a few places on my blog (here and here and here) – and published, in a modest forum- there are many Muslims who are very pious and very committed to their identity as Muslims but who interpret their religion in quite liberal ways. They espouse acceptance of sexual or gender minorities, they call for a brand of democratic government very much like what we enjoy here, and they believe that the true message of the Qur’an is one of love, compassion, and peace.

You may think that it’s a bit of a stretch to read the Qur’an as such a gentle text, but of course, you don’t matter unless you happen to be a Muslim theologian who is trying to convince an audience. What matters is how actual Muslims read the Qur’an, and what they think it says.

Demonstrably, the suggestion that Muslims must be fundamentalists is neither good piece of reasoning nor a politically and historically informed claim.

As for the suggestion that the reason why there has been no ‘reformation’ in Islam is due to some tenet of dogma regarding the Qur’an? What rubbish! At what point in the ‘Muslim world’ has there ever been an analog to the Catholic Church? Hint: at no point. What would be reformed? Well, there has been reformation. The current brand of Islamist fundamentalism, traceable to the Wahhabi puritanism that took over what is now Saudi Arabia and has since spread all over the place was a reformation. What came before that? In a great many cases,* what preceded these fundamentalisms was a religion far more tolerant of community diversity than any Catholicism of pre-Protestant history, not to mention many Protestantisms since Martin Luther’s theological insurgency.

So yes, once again: there is nothing essentially more fundamentalist, or illiberal, or some other kind of monstrous, about Islam. If you’re curious about why it seems to be that Islamism is such a powerful force today, I suggest you look to fairly recent history, paying particular attention to the experience of autocracy and socio-economic upheaval experienced by many communities in the ‘Muslim world’ – annoying term – in the past few decades.

*Though certainly not all cases; it must be noted that Islamic history has its fair share of bigotry and massacre, even if a survey of it paints a far rosier picture than a similar survey of Christianity ever would

Nihilism and Privilege

It has been observed, in a discussion amongst my friends, that most moral nihilists appear to be very privileged, socially. They tend to be men, white, middle-class or higher, very well educated, and otherwise at – if not the zenith – a fairly substantial level of comfort and security.

This is an interesting observation, because it seems consistent with much of the social science scholarship I’ve read on sacred principles, morality, group identity, and political struggle.

There are two reasons why privilege might be, generally, a precondition for nihilism. One is the conditions of life and whether they allow for the time to be philosophical and abstract. If you’re working all day with your hands, and the availability of food, rest, and safety from violence is an ever-present concern, asking ‘what does it all mean?’ is just too self-indulgent. And the other is the pressing urgency of morality – understood as a community feature and process, rather than a sphere of enquiry – to political struggle. If your life is a struggle, you don’t have the ability to question your principles or closely-held beliefs. But we’ll also see this in non-liberal societies. In kinship-based societies or ones held by powerful nationalisms, people can’t question the principles that tie together the community and warrant in-group chauvinism. So we not only need economic privilege of a certain degree, but a liberal mode of subjectivity where the individual is the centre of personhood and moral activity.

What are the implications of this? Well, I can think of a few. First of all, nihilism is not sustainable. If we collectively hold that nothing matters, we will fall apart as a community. Yes, we might still pursue mechanisms of personal security and interest aggregation, but the sorts of cultural commonplaces that give us meaning in our lives will eventually dry up. Anomie will consume us. Luckily, I don’t think this is even possible simply because I think that people are, usually, unable to actually be true nihilists. But we should be willing to think utopian for a moment, to imagine certain ideal states of affairs that follow from our moral reasoning. In following that reasoning, we come to the conclusion that nihilism is not desirable except perhaps to provide a critical voice by a few tragic philosophers. Second, we can see that many of our liberal principles have the potential to lead to nihilism once they are generalised and once the aspirations they entail are achieved throughout society. We want liberal subjectivity, liberal personhood, enormous socio-economic freedom, and a political system that represents our will as people, while avoiding a tyranny of the majority. But how can we achieve this sustainably?

This inexorably returns me to the idea of deliberative democracy. Only with ongoing public discussion over meaning can we maintain our cultural commonplaces while still achieving our liberal values. We must accept the importance of Principles, of sacred values, in keeping our community safe and free. That doesn’t mean we should abandon critical discussion over them, but it does mean that we need to keep some ideas special: not immutable but nevertheless central and univeralisable.

The Skeptics Movement and Terrorism

I’m being ‘interviewed’ by a friend of a friend. Via email. My interviewer’s project is on:

…“marginalia on skeptical thinking” in which I will interview and interrogate different thinkers who adopt various postures in regards to science as a means of knowing, skepticism as a means to philosophical inquiry, and doubt as a part of a dialectical project.

Skepoet (his internet handle) is interviewing me because my friend touted me as an unusually well informed thinker and writer on issues of terrorism, religious extremism, and security within the Skeptics Movement. While it seems as though Skepoet will likely want to take the discussion into quite philosophical territory, his first question was simple and practical:

What do you think the key problems are there with a lot of the assertions one sees about terrorism from [Skeptics such as] Pat Condell or Sam Harris?

My answer was very long-winded, and will almost certainly be truncated and edited when Skepoet posts it on his blog. However, I also think it functions well as a stand-alone essay that is well suited to the themes of my blog. So here it is in full:

Terrorism and the Skeptics

So the Skeptics are a fairly well informed bunch when it comes to international goings-on. They – we – read the news and enjoy discussing events of significant political or human importance taking place in the Middle East or in Europe, and so-on. And so, of course, Skeptics read about stuff which reasonably carries the label ‘terrorism’. It is the interest of the Skeptics to address and combat bad critical thinking and its harmful consequences, particularly as an apparent result of religious doctrine. Terrorism, as we encounter it, thus seems to be the perfect exemplar of flawed, religious beliefs leading to terribly harmful consequences. And it has escaped no-one’s notice that most of that stuff we call terrorism, insofar as it is reported in our mainstream media, is done by Muslims, and often justified in explicitly Islamic language. This is the context within which we should understand the perspectives of intellectual leaders of the Skeptics community such as Sam Harris.

The Sam Harris School, in which I think we can include Pat Condell along with quite a few other Skeptics, seems to hold the following views on terrorism:
1. Terrorism is caused by extremist, irrational beliefs, usually of a religious character.
2. Islamic scripture and doctrine is essentially conducive to terrorism, to a greater degree than other religion’s texts and doctrines; a moderate Muslim is simply not a very pious Muslim, and is not practicing their own faith in a committed way.
3. Islam as its widely practiced today is particularly conducive to terrorism, with adherents comprising ‘death cults’ and espousing violent cultural chauvinism.
4. Terrorists, by virtue of their extremism and commitment to irrational religious doctrines, cannot be reasoned or bargained with, and should be dealt with via hawikish counterterrorism policies.

All of these views are undermined, to varying but generally substantial degrees, by the history and social science scholarship on terrorism, extremism, religious fundamentalism, and the intersections between ideology and violence. They are undermined in ways that should be understandable to anyone, and their flaws should be apparent to more than just experts in the field.

I will explain how this is the case.

1. There is a robust debate amongst experts as to the causes of terrorism, but that debate has, almost comprehensively, taken it as a given that relevant factors include political freedom, economic development, social structure, government effectiveness, and human security. For at least three decades, scholars on terrorism have considered both ‘underlying’ and ‘proximate’ causes, and specified a relationship between background forces that make terrorism more likely, and ‘triggers’ which push a person or a community into using terrorism. Now, of course these factors influence one-another in complex ways, and the religious or ideological beliefs held by members of a society both influence and are influenced by all these other things. Notably, though perhaps largely as a result of methodological concerns and as a legacy of behaviourism, religion is treated by many experts as epiphenomenal or as an intermediate factor which is caused by other things and serves only to enable immediate moral justification for action. It isn’t often assigned a causal role at all. While I won’t  endorse  this position, I will say that there is overwhelming evidence to suggest that our beliefs concerning legitimate targets and forms of violence, and on tolerance of difference within our community, are strongly shaped by precisely those material and structural forces I previously named. This brings me to number two.

2. Islam isn’t a thing. While there is undeniably bellicose language within Islamic texts, the meaning of those texts is determined solely through human interpretation. Why do so, so many Skeptics seem not to realise this? Some argue that certain kinds of statements terms are harder to interpret in a way that supports liberal values, and are more likely to lead to chauvinism or violence, but there are so many examples of even the most bloodthirsty or misogynist of biblical passages being ‘contextualised away’ by Christians here in North America and the UK which should be immediately available to recall. Many skeptics tend to look upon this process of contextualisation with contempt, noting that these passages are plainly awful and that theological gymnastics are a pathetic attempt to deny the obvious evil of the dogma in question. Other Skeptics argue for some kind of exceptionalism, suggesting that Christianity has a liberal tradition which Islam lacks, perhaps because Islam is hundreds of years younger and just hasn’t had its reformation yet. Well, the first argument is not only narrow-minded but ironic: Skeptics who see biblical literalism as more sound or apt are engaging in amateur theology of their own, and in the process are endorsing the notion that there are certain interpretations of religious texts which are more authoritative or accurate. I think this happens because we come from a tradition in which texts contain fairly clear arguments, penned by philosophers who make full use of modern language to ensure that their ideas are as unequivocal as possible precisely because they are committed to the kind of analytic reason which serves as the foundation to the Skeptics’ ideology. As for the second argument…

3. There are many examples of Muslim groups whose message appears very liberal and tolerant, as well as very pious.There are groups such as Imaan or al-Faitha, which campaign for greater acceptance for LGBT persons within Muslim communities on the basis of extensive theological argument. There are political parties such as Hizb al-Wasat, whose platform endorses liberal democracy of a type quite similar to what we enjoy here, in religious langauge and with reference to religious norms and principles. I published an article last year on Islamic norms and liberal democracy, as it happens. Anyway, the point is that while there is undoubtedly a powerful, global conservative movement in Islam, and while most Muslim communities in Asia, Africa, or the Middle East – and their young diasporas in Europe – would not be what I’d call liberal, this does not mean that those Muslims who are liberal are necessarily any worse at being Muslim. Nor does it mean that Islam just hasn’t yet had its reformation. Remember what I wrote earlier about religious beliefs being strongly shaped by material and structural forces? One doesn’t need to spend long comparing the conditions of primarily Muslim countries to Canada, the US, or the UK to see why something other than a failure to reach the requisite theological epoch could be behind Islam’s apparent conservatism. At the same time, one is likely to find greater similarities between Islam and Christianity as its practiced in, say, many African countries, compared to similarities between Christianity there and Christianity here. Again, this is not an argument for crass material determinism – and the powerful conservative religious movements amongst US Christians and British Muslims alike would be two prima facie confounding examples – but for the recognition that belief systems aren’t objects that endure unaffected by the world in which they dwell, exerting causal influences but receiving none from elsewhere.

4. I’ll make this short, since I appear to have rambled and ranted quite a lot. Terrorism is not some kind of extension of religiously driven rage, nor is it the inevitable and cathartic shucking of shackles by the colonised. It is a strategic response, an attempt to connect means to ends in an appropriate and efficient way. Without a doubt, individuals committing acts of terrorism believe that the harm they cause is justified, and thus from our perspective they are likely to be quite ‘extreme’ in their beliefs. WIthout a doubt, the moral principles by which those who use terrorism justify their actions are quite often expressed in religious langauge, and makes reference to the grievences – whether legitimate or not – of the colonised and the oppressed. But if terrorists didn’t think that terrorism would serve their goals, they wouldn’t be terrorists because they wouldn’t use terrorism. We might very reasonably think that the cost of bargaining with groups that hold highly illiberal social goals is too high, but there is no necessary reason why we should come to that conclusion. We might decide, after careful consideration of its associated benefits and costs, that hawkish counterterrorism is the best way to go, but that decision should be both contextually contingent and tentative. It may be a tired maxim, but very often, violence begets more violence.

The Clergy of Civic Religion

Imagine a sacred document. It lays forth the morally righteous principles around which our community should be organised. It is to these foundational principles that our particular laws and practices should adhere, and no one of them should contradict these principles.

But these principles are vaguely worded in many places, and are often expressed in a tone that is archaic; they are in the language of another era, in many respects. It is a difficult challenge to find ways to apply those principles to the situations we face today, and we must find a way to overcome that challenge and do so effectively, lest we stagnate. Besides, it was the intent of those who set forth the principles that we should not take them wholly literally, but that we bear in mind the more abstract values contained and articulated within them.

Hence we have a class of experts who interpret those principles, and tell the rest of our community what they mean for today’s world, and today’s dilemmas. These experts must be special people: they must undergo a long training, and must exhibit a deep reverence for the underlying truth and legitimacy of our sacred document and the principles written on it. While anyone can and should have conversations about the principles amongst themselves, they should still respect and usually defer to the authority of the experts. If ever those experts seem corrupted, then we definitely have a crisis of faith.

Are we talking about priests or Supreme Court judges? Are we talking about the bible or about the constitution? And if we could be talking about both, what precisely is the difference?

A primer for Steven Pinker’s ‘Better Angels of our Nature’

This is for the March book club of the BC Humanists, and is simply a collection of links to things related to Steven Pinker’s excellent book ‘The Better Angels of Our Nature’.

First of all, here is a summary of all salient arguments and the most original and interesting data Pinker adduces to support his conclusions that we are spectacularly less violent now than we ever have been before, and that this decrease in violence is due to the growth of the state, the expansion of market networks, and the spread of Enlightenment values. If you need a refresher for this long book (or if you didn’t read it but still want to come to the club), this is your first stop.

Here is a review of the book from the marvelous Peter Singer, and a follow-up blog post by a NY Times writer, both with some mild but poignant criticisms.

Here are some harsher reviews, including one I think is a bit besides the point with its critique, and a brief jab at Pinker’s methodology for his statistical analyses.

Here is an interview of Pinker by Sam Harris - whom I find endlessly sophomoric and irritating, but who is perfectly fine here, largely due to restricting his questions to short prompts that allow in none of his personal character. Another interview of Pinker, a bit more speculative.

For people interested in reading a bit more on the relationship between institutions of power in society, such as the state, and violence, you could check out one or two of my previous blogposts on the subject, the former being very on-topic and the latter being more about theories explaining why people carry out political violence..

We are what we believe – but let’s pretend otherwise.

A common – and laudable – theme of secularist discourse is the separation of belief and the believer. In short, that ‘we are not our ideas‘. A  sharp little discussion of it I recently read has moved me to contribute my own thoughts here, but the controversy over the Jesus and Mo’ cartoons in London, and the subsequent passing by the LSE’s student union of what amounts to a law against blasphemy, are highly related. The argument goes something like this:

A person’s beliefs can be criticised and even ridiculed without violating their right to hold that belief, or their basic rights to dignity and safety. A person’s ‘self’ is separate from any set of propositions they hold to be true. Thus attacking such propositions as wrong or absurd should not be construed as insulting or degrading.

To quote:

Hating ‘the belief’ that someone holds is to hate something that can be discarded by the person in question….Thus hating ‘the belief’ is entirely seperate from hating ‘the believer.

This argument is based on highly problematic ontological grounds. Basically, it presumes that a self exists independent of the ideas about the world that collectively comprise one’s understand of meaning and value. While it’s true that my self image and the foundations upon which I measure mine and others’ worth are unlikely to to be affected by my investment in, say, the existence of the Higgs-Boson (though this may not be true for some physicists), it is not true that there is anything more to my sense of self than beliefs.

The origins of identity are contentious, and there is robust debate over the priority of differentiation (cf. Stuart Hall, Charles Taylor, Judith Butler), the validity of a group/individual dichotomy (cf. Tajfel and Turner, Barth, Bourdieu), and of the primacy of some identities over others (eg developmental psychology). However, one conclusion occupies a point of near-consensus amongst scholars, researchers, and philosophers of identity: it is socially determined.

If identity is socially determined, then we gain our sense of self by testing our ideas about ourselves against what other people seem to think about us, and by seeking to confirm or affirm particular beliefs within a social or intersubjective context (cf. Grossman).

There are some beliefs which almost everyone is likely to want to hold about themselves. Most people want to believe that they are smart enough, perceptive enough, or aware enough not to form horribly wrong conclusions about their world. Most people, even if they’re willing to admit being wrong about important parts of their ideological or cultural systems – and that requires a significant existing level of security and underlying affirmation – want to believe that they aren’t stupid or deserving of derision and contempt for having held wrong beliefs.

In other words, there is a direct relationship between the way we treat a person’s beliefs and the way they build and sustain their self-image as an individual both worthy of and in possession of respect and dignity. It is an unsustainable naivety to believe that you can hate some beliefs without hating those who hold them. It is undeniable that public expressions of bigotry will make the targets of their vitriol feel bad. It is also undeniable that public mockery or sustained attacks upon certain sets of beliefs – ‘religious beliefs’ let’s call them, solely for their particularly important role in explaining the world and selfhood to those who hold them – will also make people feel bad.

But it’s a good naivety, at least institutionally. If we want to have a society in which people feel free to express themselves, and in which people are universally subject to the same standards of recognition, then public reason must be secular reason, and public expression must be as close to unlimited as is possible (exceptions could be made for direct incitements to violence).  By ensuring that every idea is open to critical analysis, we ensure that society as an entity has its own self-awareness, and the people who comprise it are able to subscribe to a standard which, at least potentially, is blind to class, race, age, gender, or any other particular identity: reason.

In other words, separating belief from the believer is specious. But useful. Because Enlightenment.

Discourse, Insult, and the Doctrine of Double Effect

A recent row over the decision of the UCL Atheist, Secularist, and Humanist Society to use for their Facebook ‘pub social’ event page an image of Muhammad and Jesus sitting next to one-another at a pub, taken from the delightful Jesus and Mo’, and the subsequent request by the student’s union that the picture be taken down following a complaint, has got me thinking about one particular problem of pluralistic society:

In a pluralistic society, many forms of expression will offend somebody. How do we balance freedom of expression against our desire to foster a sense of mutual respect and recognition in our community?

Now, I am strongly anti-censorship. I think that prohibiting certain kinds of expression is a very dangerous move with the potential to lead to seriously diminished democratic freedoms and a degradation of the very discourse we should seek to protect. I’m willing to see incitements to violence outlawed, but beyond that I find limits on freedom of expression to be too slippery a slope.

But just because something shouldn’t be outlawed doesn’t mean that it isn’t morally wrong. The fact is, people feel safer and more comfortable in a conversation if they don’t feel as though other participants are deliberately trying to cause them insult or offence. This shouldn’t result in any hostility towards arguments, but it should lead us to be cautious about how we express our disagreement or even our anger at the beliefs and actions of others. We should not shy away from saying ‘this is bad’ but we shouldn’t stick out our tongues while saying it. Or, to provide an example, we should feel comfortable criticising the reaction many people seem to have over the depiction of Muhammad without shouting ‘Nyah nyah, look at my picture of Muhammad drinking an alcoholic beverage made from pig’s blood!’ solely with the intent of provoking feelings of grievance.

One clue as to how we can make moral assessments about our expression might be to employ an important part of Just War Theory: the Doctrine of Double Effect. Very generally and minimally speaking, it states that if a bad effect is foreseeable but not intended, the act that causes it is not wrong. For example, the ‘terror bomber’ who bombs a factory in order to kill its workers and create fear is committing wrong, but the tactical bomber who bombs the factory to render it inoperable is not doing wrong, even if the deaths of workers are likely. One is in the clear if one can answer ‘yes’ to the question ‘if the bad effect didn’t happen, would my goal still be served?’

In the case of this picture, I suspect the goal wasn’t morally wrong. It was posted for internal consumption, was thematically related to a social event to be held at a pub, and is the sort of thing this community finds clever and amusing. Whether it offended and insulted or not is unrelated to these reasons.

Of course, you might say that theories of justice in war are not so applicable outside of that context. This is a good argument – and an even better one might be to problematise the Doctrine of Double Effect itself, for suffering of any type is bad, whether intended or not – but I think it strikes a pragmatic balance here. It allows us to protect forms of expression while still allowing us to condemn things which seem aimed only at causing particular people hurt. It condemns deliberate provocations without condemning the provocative, so to speak. It may be difficult to assess the motivations behind another’s expression, but this rule can at least help us consider our own actions:

An act of expression is not morally wrong for causing offence when its intended effect is not specifically or solely to offend.

More on Capital Punishment

I was thinking more about capital punishment after it came up in a conversation last night, and decided to give another look at a post I wrote a few months ago on the subject. There I came across a quote from a friend in favour of capital punishment for certain offences, and I have decided to write a little bit more about why I think that my friend’s attitude is wrong-headed. The first time around I addressed the concept of moral dessert (rather shallowly) but did not focus on some of the other potentially problematic aspects of what my friend was saying. I hope to do that this time around.

To review, what my friend said was:

Anyone who brutally murders people without any expression of remorse or will to repentance is telling us that they do not value life, including their own. Notice I speak of someone who sees no wrong in their murdering another. Such a person implicitly forfeits their right to life by so unsympathetically taking the life (lives) of another (other).

I have heard variations on this position from a few other people, including people who like this friend generally show a consistent and strong commitment to humanist values. And on the surface, it seems to be in keeping with a focus on advancing an ethic that calls for human life to be treated as an object of great value.

Until you stop to think about it.

In a sense, this position requires us to use the killer’s values rather than our own. We infer from the killer’s actions that she doesn’t value life (which may or may not be true). We derive from this that we should act in accordance with the killer’s lack of concern for her own life, according it the same [lack of ] value. Does this mean that it is morally acceptable to kill someone if (we believe that) she does not value her own life?

This reminds me of the classic question of whether a person can sell herself into slavery. If we believe that every person should be entitled to a set of properly basic and universal rights, then those rights obtain whether or not the rights-holder wants them. But let’s be charitable and remove from my friend’s position the part about the killer not valuing her own life. Does keeping the rest make it better?

One immediate thought on a relevant analogy: does an unrepentant thief lose all right to own property of her own? That seems like an odd position to advance. Maybe murder is a special kind of wrong act? Let’s say that it is. We’re still left with problems.

Consider the subject of this position: a person who ‘brutally murders people without any expression of remorse or will to repentance’. Presumably this subject occupies a special category apart from other killers, in order to lose the right to life, which is only something that happens to some killers. The term ‘murder’ here smuggles in certain assumptions, such as that the homicide in question was not an act of justified self-defence, or otherwise morally permissible, but it isn’t a terrible word choice. In the end, of course, we have to have a standard for what constitutes murder. But nevertheless, when confronted with an unrepentant killer, I think we have only two possibilities that explain their lack of remorse:

1. She believes that the killing was morally justified because it was either self-defence or another kind of righteous act, such as an honour-killing to avenge an insult or discipline a wayward family member, or taking the life of a cheating spouse in a crime of passion that the killer feels was morally permissible, or perhaps even an execution of someone who has implicitly forfeited their right to life by unsympathetically taking the life of another;
2. She believes that the killing was morally justified because when she desires to kill someone, it is not ever wrong – in short, some kind of psychopathy.

Should a killer of the first type occupy a special category? I say no. The fact that the killer believers her actions to be morally justified out of self-defence or righteousness suggests that she has a real sense of morality, possesses the capacity for ethical calculations or feelings of empathy or sympathy, and is simply operating off of a different set of value judgements than the ones we are using when we call her act ‘murder’. As humanists, I think we have an obligation to recognise the vast plurality of moral systems currently held by the vast plurality of people who together comprise humanity. While we are certainly entitled to advance our own moral arguments, there doesn’t seem to me to be any way to non-arbitrarily select a subset of people who disagree with them in favour of a different set of moral views and call them so vile as to deserve death.

Consider the example of the terrorist bomber, who sees the victims of her attack as legitimate targets in a war, either because those victims are in her perspective actual combatants or because she views her ends and the probability of attaining them as justifying the means. Would you expect remorse from this person? Probably not, unless you also succeed in convincing her to change her mind about many other aspects of her value system and political views. Does our failure to persuade her to change her mind render her right to life forfeit, when if we could make a better argument such that she did change her mind, she could keep her right to life? That seems an absurd thing for a humanist to believe.

What about killers of the second type, who are not so much specifically unrepentant as generally unrepentant, and who think that morality just doesn’t apply to them? It does seem to me as though these people could more easily be said to occupy a discrete category independent of our success or failure to convince them to change their minds about their actions. No matter how well we argue, such people will never feel remorse.

Except this is a mental illness. It’s a terrible mental illness that poses a great danger to both those who suffer from it and to anyone around them. But what kind of humanist advocates for the killing of the mentally ill?

Even if I accept the notion of moral dessert for the sake of argument, I just can’t find any merit to this position on capital punishment.

We need a more nuanced definition of religion.

[Or, as I might prefer to say, 'Religion is NOT the opposite of atheism.' And a beliefs-centred definition of religion is insufficient for our analytical and political goals.]

‘It’s a delusion’, comes the pronouncement. ‘Nothing but superstition.’

This appears to be the attitude that many activists within the humanist and atheist movement have towards religion. Consider the following quote by Greta Christina, in one of her favourite (and in my opinion, excellent) essays:

Religion is ultimately dependent on belief in invisible beings, inaudible voices, intangible entities, undetectable forces, and events and judgments that happen after we die. It therefore has no reality check.

A few short paragraphs later, she clarifies this understanding of religion:

The thing that uniquely defines religion, the thing that sets it apart from every other ideology or hypothesis or social network, is the belief in unverifiable supernatural entities.

The purpose of her essay is ultimately to argue that religion is uniquely armoured against criticism, in contrast to other ideologies, and that armour is provided by the unverifiability of religion’s teleological claims. In her own words:

Religion, and its unverifiability, actively promotes the idea that the invisible afterlife is more important than the life we know exists….What matters isn’t disease and death in this life. What matters is the next life. What matters is God’s will…which therefore, by the horrible freakish paradox of the armor of God, gets priority.

Another popular figure in the atheist movement, PZ Myers, has a similar view of religion. He sums it up in an unusually vitriolic fashion in one recent blog post:

Religion is not some mild happy recreational activity; it is a poison of the brain that taints the vast majority of humanity. It is bad shit….we’ve got the moderate academic types who like to tell us it’s mostly harmless and we’ll never be able to get rid of it, anyway; to them I’d say that, as people who are supposedly dedicated to learning the truth, you ought to be the first to deny religion because a) it’s wrong, and b) it’s a fallacious way of learning about the world.

Both Greta Christina and PZ Myers have written many excellent things analysing and critiquing the harms of certain religious beliefs, and I consider them both to be highly respectable and worthy members of the movement. And their definition for religion is certainly in line with common-language usage of the term, viz., that religion is (1) a set of immutable or dogmatic beliefs about the world that (2) posit and invoke supernatural (that is, ungoverned by normal physical laws as we know them) entities which (3) carry metaphysical authority, and can thus specify right conduct or command obedience. Let’s call this the Supernatural Propositions (SP) definition.

As far as serving as a tool for identifying a set of ideologies with effects on society that they, I, and many others would probably classify as bad, it’s not a bad definition. It is, in a sense, the opposite of atheism. But it informs certain overall goals, too. Consider  Greta Christina’s overall thesis in her essay on the goals of the atheist movement:

For many atheists, the primary goal of atheist activism is to reduce anti-atheist bigotry and discrimination, and to work towards more complete separation of church and state. Their main goal is to get people to see atheists as happy, ethical, productive members of society, with full and equal rights and responsibilities. They want to counter myths and misconceptions about atheists. And they see angry, confrontational, firebrand atheists as feeding into those myths, and alienating religious believers, and thus making everyone’s job harder.

But not all atheists see this as their main goal.

For many atheists, our main goal is persuading the world out of religion….Many of us don’t just want a world where believers and atheists get along and let each other practice their religion or lack thereof in peace. Many of us want a world where there’s no religion.

Here is where I think that the SP definition is starting to lose its efficacy. Focusing on the propositional aspect of religion helps us identify specific claims that can be falsified, or specific epistemologies that can be criticised, but it fails to specify a good target for activism with the goal of total elimination.

There are two reasons for this. The first reason is that dogmatic sets of beliefs commanding metaphysical authority are not unique to religions describable by the SP definition, but are components of other ideologies which we might also charactise as harmful. Dogmatic Leninism or Randianism might arguably evince similar ‘unverifiability’ in its basic doctrine, lack any ‘reality check’, and specify similarly absolutist versions of right and wrong, or of natural law, etc – just like (3) in the SP definition. If we view (1) and (3) in the SP definition as non-unique to religion, then we are left with only the bit about supernatural entities. While we can dream of educating everyone so well in the methods of scepticism that they stop believing in such absurd things, this isn’t really our main goal. Actually, it’s a means to an end, and that end is to minimise (1) and (3): dogmatic beliefs about right and wrong which aren’t amenable to negotiation, discourse, or alteration.

In short, the stuff people like me, hopefully you, Greta and PZ hate most about religion under the SP definition is the stuff that is non-unique to it.

This brings us to the second problem with the SP definition, which is that it doesn’t give us a social account of religion. As I argued rather more pedantically in a previous blog post, belief and practice are mutually constitutive. In plain language: what a person believes and what a person does are mutually reinforcing. Furthermore, when we look at the appeal that religious practice seems to hold for people, we see that it is not merely the comfortable explanation of the unknown through supernatural propositions, but identity-building activities that foster a sense of community, give meaning to interpersonal relationships, and offer a structure to life which informs daily habits.

These things which we call religion offer deeply satisfying, perhaps even necessary narratives that go beyond ideas – important ideas that comprise a frame of reference for one’s experience of the world – and into real social goods. Destroying religions thus means destroying entire ways of life, with all the complexities and fundamental identities they contain.

I’m one of those ‘moderate academic types’ lampooned by PZ Myers. I don’t think it is even possible to do this. I don’t think these things called religions can be extracted from their cultural contexts and eradicated. But I do think that beliefs in interventionist supernatural powers can be eradicated. Which leaves us with a very important point – those of us who use the common-language, SP definition for religion, anyway:

We need a more nuanced definition of religion.