tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-62667516146605634382024-03-21T13:24:36.507-07:00The Amoral SocietyUri Harrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14423493981889189115noreply@blogger.comBlogger12125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6266751614660563438.post-9017393806177886872018-01-18T14:14:00.001-08:002018-11-18T01:11:13.510-08:00Articles<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Times New Roman; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; orphans: 2; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>Updated November 11, 2018</i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><i></i><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">I've just published a new essay at Quillette: <a href="https://quillette.com/2018/11/17/the-institutionalization-of-social-justice/">The Institutionalisation of Social Justice</a></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">If you enjoyed it, these are related articles of mine you might also like:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">1. From Quillette, July 2017:<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span><a href="http://quillette.com/2017/07/06/social-sciences-undergoing-purity-spiral/">Are the Social Sciences Undergoing a Purity Spiral?</a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">2. From Quillette, November 2017: <a href="http://quillette.com/2017/11/21/wilfrid-laurier-creep-critical-theory/">Wilfrid Laurier and the Creep of Critical Theory</a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><i><br /></i></b>
3. From Quillette, December 2017: <a href="http://quillette.com/2017/12/01/defence-jordan-b-peterson/">In Defence of Jordan B. Peterson</a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">4. From Quillette, December 2017: <a href="http://quillette.com/2017/12/09/white-women-tears-wilfrid-laurier-critical-theory/">"White Women Tears"--Critical Theory on Lindsay Shepherd</a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">5. From Quillette, December 2017: <a href="http://quillette.com/2017/12/18/activists-took-control-university-case-study-evergreen-state/">How Activists Took Control of a University: The Case Study of Evergreen State</a></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">6. From Quillette, January 2018:<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-family: inherit; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span><a href="https://quillette.com/2018/01/17/jordan-b-peterson-critical-theory-new-bourgeoisie/">Jordan Peterson, Critical Theory, and the New Bourgeoisie</a></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><u><span style="color: #000120;"></span></u><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">7. From Quillette, February 2018: <a href="https://quillette.com/2018/02/02/deep-dive-jordan-petersons-channel-4-interview/">A Deep Dive into Jordan Peterson's Channel 4 Interview</a></span><br />
<br />
8. From Quillette, February 2018: <a href="https://quillette.com/2018/02/17/thinking-critically-social-justice/">Thinking Critically About Social Justice</a><br />
<br />
9. From Quillette, May 2018: <a href="https://quillette.com/2018/05/15/can-liberalism-survive/">Can Liberalism Survive?</a><br />
<br />
10. From Quillette, May 2018: <a href="https://quillette.com/2018/05/28/munk-debate-perils-tribalism/">The Munk Debate and the Perils of Tribalism</a><br />
<br />
11. From Quillette, June 2018: <a href="https://quillette.com/2018/06/29/the-war-on-normal-people/">The War on Normal People--A Review</a><br />
<br />
12. From Quillette, August 2018: <span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="https://quillette.com/2018/08/17/a-closer-look-at-anti-white-rhetoric/">A Closer Look at Anti-White Rhetoric</a></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">13. From Quillette, October 2018: <a href="https://quillette.com/2018/10/11/do-advocacy-groups-belong-in-academia/">Do Advocacy Groups Belong in Academia?</a></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Thanks for visiting.<span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"></span><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span></span></div>
Uri Harrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14423493981889189115noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6266751614660563438.post-91677128970886585772017-11-12T16:13:00.000-08:002017-11-12T16:54:47.353-08:00Why Insights in Evolutionary Moral Psychology Help Resolve Long-Standing Meta-Ethical Questions<i>Also uploaded<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> <a href="https://philpapers.org/archive/HARWII-4.pdf">in pdf</a></span> at PhilPapers.org.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>See the first post in this series here: <span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="https://theamoralsociety.blogspot.com/2017/10/why-massimo-pigliucci-is-wrong-about.html">Why Massimo Pigliucci is Wrong About Moral Psychology</a>,</span> and the second post in this series here:<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> <a href="https://theamoralsociety.blogspot.com/2017/11/what-does-normativity-add-to-moral.html">What Does Normativity Add to Moral Discourse?</a></span></i><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><i><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span><br /></i></span>
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">Normative statements
are found in the<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instructions_of_Shuruppak"><span style="color: #0563c1;">earliest human literature</span></a></span>,
and they remain a central part of human discourse. Yet, pinning them down has
proven remarkably difficult. When we say ‘killing is wrong’ or ‘you ought to
help others in need’, we seem to be – as the label implies – comparing our
behaviour to a set of norms. But what are these norms, and how do we know them?</span><br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"></span></div>
<a name='more'></a><br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">For most of Western history,
they were widely believed to come from God, as commands. In fact, the idea of
behavioural norms and the idea of a powerful person to create and enforce them
fit so seamlessly together that it’s hard to imagine one without the other. And,
of course, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">revelation</i> is a
straightforward explanation of how people came to know these norms.</span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">Yet, as the progress
of science has made it increasingly difficult to believe God exists, people
continue to make and respond to normative statements. It seems that people are
referring to something other than God’s commands when making these statements,
but what?</span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">An answer might be
that norms exist without God in an objective realm. This raises a problem,
however. Since they are inaccessible to our senses, our only way of accessing them
is through reason. But reason must start with facts, which are all we can
access through our senses. (Excluding some form of transcendent intuition.)</span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">David Hume dashed this
method, though. Hume’s objection is, somewhat unfortunately, I think, often labelled
the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">is-ought gap</i> and explained as
‘one cannot derive an ought from an is’. This is a bit confusing; an ‘ought’ <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">is</i> a derivation. There’s no inherent
conflict between ‘is’ and ‘ought’. When I say, ‘he left half an hour ago, so he
ought to be here any minute’, I’m deriving an expected event from a known event;
the ‘ought’ represents the derivation. What Hume is really pointing out is that
we have no apparent method of deriving norms from facts. (Hence, it’s more
accurately described as the fact-norm gap.) We attempt it all the time in moral
discourse, but it’s not at all clear how it could possibly work.</span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">We see this problem at
work in Utilitarianism, arguably the most popular contemporary normative theory.
Utilitarianism holds that one ought to maximise aggregate net happiness. (Or a
slight variation hereof.) In other words, the norm to which all behaviour is
compared to is happiness-maximisation. But how could we possibly come to know
this?</span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">Utilitarianism was
initially developed by Jeremy Bentham out of an examination of human behaviour;
humans act to maximise pleasure and minimise pain, Bentham found. John Stuart
Mill later came to the belief that humans strive for happiness in a more
complex fashion than pleasure-seeking. More recently, many Utilitarians have
pointed to discoveries that some animals have sentience.</span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">These are all factual
claims, but there’s no apparent justification for thinking they say anything
about norms.</span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">(In fact,
Utilitarianism takes the observation that people seek <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">their own </i>happiness and infers that they ought to seek <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">aggregate</i> happiness, even at the expense
of their own happiness. Not only does it make an unjustified inference from
fact to norm, but it makes a subtle change, with important consequences.
Consider a man who faces the option of sacrificing himself in order to increase
aggregate happiness. Let’s assume he’s a Utilitarian, so he does it. But this
contradicts the initial fact from which Utilitarian norms were derived, namely
that people seek their own happiness. Which leads to the paradoxical situation
that after a two-way inference – first from facts to norms, and then back to
facts – we end up with the opposite fact of that which we started with.)</span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">There are surely more
sophisticated versions of Utilitarianism, but it’s difficult to see how any
such endeavour could possibly avoid Hume’s fact-norm gap. In fact, we could
take a knife and slice the theory of Utilitarianism into two parts, a factual
part and a normative part. There’s no apparent way to connect the two.</span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">This seems to rule out
the possibility of our normative statements referring to an objective set of
norms; we would have no way of knowing them even if they did exist, so they can’t
be what we’re referring to.</span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div>
<div align="center" style="margin: 0px; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">***</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">In recent years, moral
psychologists have attacked this question from a different angle. Instead of examining
how humans behave and trying to figure out what that says about norms, they
have examined how people <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">think about</i>
behaviour and norms; a second-order methodology.</span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">Jonathan Haidt’s<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Righteous-Mind-Divided-Politics-Religion-ebook/dp/B0076O2VMI"><span style="color: #0563c1;">research</span></a></span>,
in particular, suggests two very important insights. First, that normative
statements are reflections of people’s individual moral intuitions, not of an
objective set of norms. Second, that people strongly <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">believe</i> that their normative statements refer to objective norms. Haidt
found that people typically experience <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">moral
dumbfounding</i> when all their arguments for a particular norm are refuted;
they are unable to provide arguments for it, yet they refuse to abandon it.
More importantly, they are <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">surprised</i>
by this state of affairs.</span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">It seems that people
have a very strong tendency to believe that their normative statements are
objective. This makes sense pragmatically; people who believe their normative
statements are objective are likely to sound more convincing and less
self-serving. The irony is that people fool themselves as well as other people.</span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">This has some
important consequences for meta-ethical questions in moral philosophy.</span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">First, it’s important
to remember that philosophers are people too, and that the same self-delusion
presumably applies to them as well. When philosophers advance normative
theories, it’s likely that not only are they advancing their personal moral
intuitions, but that they <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">believe</i>
that they’re advancing objective normative truth. There’s nothing special about
philosophers in this regard; everyone believes that. This helps explain the
reluctance to give up the belief in objective norms, even after most
philosophers have given up God.</span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">Second, that normative
statements refer to a person’s moral intuitions. This is not a new position, it
dates back in some form to the ancient Greeks, typically referred to as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">relativism</i>. However, with modern
insights in evolutionary theory and cognitive science, it takes on a much more
sophisticated form.</span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">The standard model of
relativism goes something like this: moral intuitions are like ice-cream
preferences, some people like vanilla and some people like chocolate, and
there’s no objective norm dictating which flavour is better. This analogy is
misleadingly simplistic, for several reasons.</span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">First, flavour
preferences are presented as arbitrary; there’s no <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">reason</i> why someone should prefer one flavour over the other. This,
however, is not true of moral intuitions. The<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> <a href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2184440"><span style="color: #0563c1;">Moral
Foundations Theory</span></a></span> developed by Haidt and others, for example, explains
moral intuitions as modules that developed because they provided evolutionary
benefits, and whose function can be understood accordingly. This offers a
powerful combination of objectivity and relativism. Moral intuitions are
relative to an individual, but – because they evolved in all people as basic
modules – are highly generalisable. The generalisability exists because of
patterns of behaviour, not because norms are universal Platonic objects.</span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">Second, flavour
preferences are presented as singular decisions. This, also, is not true of
moral intuitions. People have multiple intuitions that often overlap. Consequently,
people are often choosing between <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">their
own</i> intuitions, thus leading to a much more complex situation.</span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">Third, flavour
preferences are presented as causally closed; there are no consequences to
choosing one flavour over another. This is not true of moral intuitions.
Actions have consequences.</span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">Fourth, flavour
preferences are presented as fully known; people know what each flavour tastes
like, and they know which one they prefer. Moral situations, however, often
contain incomplete information. People not only don’t always know the
consequences of their actions, sometimes they don’t even know their own
preferences.</span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">When adding in these
elements, the model becomes a much better representation of moral discourse.
People can share information about their different intuitions, as well as about
facts in general. People can negotiate and/or deter people from certain
choices, based on consequences. The four important aspects of moral discourse –
signalling, debate, negotiation, and deterrence – don’t require objective
norms. All they require is a shared physical space where actions have
consequences, and agents with incomplete information.</span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" style="margin: 0px; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">***</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">The implications of
people accepting this – as I think they eventually must, as science continues
to progress – is a change in moral discourse. Much as our discourse has
gradually changed to become nontheistic, so must it gradually change to reflect
the fact that people no longer accept objective norms. This means that instead
of people carrying out moral discourse under the guise of theorising about
objective norms, they simply engage explicitly in the four aspects of discourse
mentioned above. This would surely make moral discourse more effective, in much
the same way that it has become more effective without theism.</span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">Similarly, the
implication for moral philosophy is an abandonment of the search for objective
norms. Instead of a top-down process governed by attempts to derive these norms
through reason, it becomes a bottom-up process of observation and
generalisation, just like any other science. People have moral intuitions; they
are to some extent generalisable; they can be explained through non-moral
theories such as evolutionary theory. There’s no reason to think these
intuitions are <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">entirely</i> generalisable
into a single set of universal norms, but that’s not necessary for effective
science.</span></div>
Uri Harrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14423493981889189115noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6266751614660563438.post-59487878425922500292017-11-02T12:57:00.000-07:002017-11-02T12:57:07.736-07:00What Does Normativity Add to Moral Discourse?
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">In<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> <a href="https://theamoralsociety.blogspot.com/2017/10/why-massimo-pigliucci-is-wrong-about.html">yesterday’s post</a>,</span> I
attempted to defend moral psychology against criticism from philosopher Massimo Pigliucci.
The crux of his criticism is that moral psychologists are using their
scientific research to make normative moral statements, thus violating David
Hume’s is-ought gap. As a consequence, they are encroaching on the field of
moral philosophy. By way of analogy, Pigliucci compares the study of morality
to the study of mathematics and natural science, implying that normative
statements are theories of a moral realm, and that moral philosophers – unlike moral
psychologists – study it directly.</span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"></span></div>
<a name='more'></a><br />
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">My counter-argument is
that, while I think Pigliucci is correct in pointing out that moral
psychologists do on occasion violate the is-ought gap, this is simply due to imprecise
language, not to overextension of their field. The point is that moral
psychology challenges the notion that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">there
is</i> a moral realm, instead suggesting that normativity is a rationalisation
of personal moral intuitions, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">disguised</i>
as a moral realm.</span><br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">Although it seems to
me the evidence for this is very strong, I think it’s useful to address the
problem from a different angle and instead ask: does normativity add anything
to moral discourse? Or framed slightly differently: do moral philosophers really
contribute to moral understanding in the way Pigliucci suggests, or are they just
engaging in moral psychology themselves, albeit with less methodological soundness?</span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">***</span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">I suggest the answer
is the latter. The reason for this is that Hume’s is-ought problem works both
ways. Pigliucci points out that one cannot logically derive an ought from an is,
but the reverse is also true. This raises the interesting observation that – if
it is true that moral philosophers operate through normative theories – their theories
can have no logical bearing on the real world.</span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">This is probably why
theism struggled to separate God’s commands from His punishments. The claim alone
that one ought to do something is powerless, but when it is replaced by real
consequences (if you do X, then Y will happen to you) it becomes significant.
There’s no reason for this to be different for nontheistic moral philosophies. And
so, attempts to deduce behaviour from normative theories are doomed to fail – they
can never be logically valid.</span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">Moral
psychology gets around this problem by avoiding normativity altogether. What's emerging instead is a model of moral language as expression of moral intuitions based on common evolved
modules.</span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">The
long-term effect of this, it seems to me, is an elimination of normative morality. If people stop believing in a moral realm, there is nothing left
for normative morality to do. Instead, people can simply treat moral discourse
as the communication and negotiation of individual moral intuitions and individual
values in general, combined with other information. If we assume this is
already what’s happening, it’s simply a question of acknowledging it and making the process more effective.</span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
I<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">n hindsight, one can seemingly conclude that moral
philosophers have been expressing their moral intuitions when they’ve posited normative
moral theories, just like other people do, as we now know. But in studying this process in themselves, that makes them
proto-psychologists. But now that moral psychology has been established, is
there still a role for moral philosophers?</span></div>
Uri Harrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14423493981889189115noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6266751614660563438.post-75633230870259427122017-10-31T19:27:00.000-07:002017-11-12T16:45:56.506-08:00Why Massimo Pigliucci is Wrong About Moral Psychology<i>It seems to me in hindsight that this post may give the impression that Pigliucci's views are more rigid than they really are. It doesn't affect any of the arguments in this post, but Pigliucci has in other contexts expressed a much more flexible view than the rigid moral realism I read out of his article. See for example <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGQXdzu0Hf8"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">this YouTube video</span></a> on meta-ethics.</i><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><i><br /></i></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><i>See also a second post in this series here: <a href="https://theamoralsociety.blogspot.com/2017/11/what-does-normativity-add-to-moral.html">What Does Normativity Add to Moral Discourse?</a> and a third post here: <a href="https://theamoralsociety.blogspot.com/2017/11/why-insights-in-evolutionary-moral.html"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Why Insights in Evolutionary Moral Psychology Help Resolve Long-Standing Meta-Ethical Questions</span></a>.</i></span><br />
<i><br /></i>
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">Early last year,
Massimo Pigliucci posted<span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span><a href="https://platofootnote.wordpress.com/2016/02/08/the-problem-with-cognitive-and-moral-psychology/"><span style="color: #0563c1; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">a
blog essay</span></a> criticising aspects of cognitive and moral psychology,
especially the latter. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massimo_Pigliucci"><span style="color: #0563c1; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Pigliucci</span></a>
is a Professor of Philosophy at CUNY-City College and one of the most visible
contemporary academic philosophers. He’s also a scientist, which is relevant to
this particular issue. His post was inspired by <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/02/25/the-psychologists-take-power/"><span style="color: #0563c1; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">an
article</span></a> by philosopher Tamsin Shaw. I’m writing this in response to
Pigliucci’s post – rather than Shaw’s article – because I think he manages to
condense the important criticisms, while also adding some useful analogies.</span><br />
<a name='more'></a><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">His main criticism is
this: moral psychologists frequently make normative moral claims under the
guise of science. The problem, as Pigliucci points out, is that this violates David
Hume’s is-ought gap: no amount of knowledge about how people behave can lead us
to derive how they <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">ought to</i> behave. The
two are separate domains. What’s really happening, he suggests, is that moral psychologists
are interjecting their personal moral beliefs, without acknowledgement, to
bridge the gap.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">Pigliucci isn’t just
pointing out a logical fallacy and warning about its potential to mislead
people, though. He’s also objecting to what he sees as an attempt by moral
psychologists to encroach on the field of moral philosophy. For Pigliucci, it
seems, the domains of descriptive and normative morality map onto the fields of
moral psychology and moral philosophy, respectively, and each field should
stick to its area of expertise.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><br />
<div align="center" style="margin: 0px; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">***</span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">Pigliucci draws on a
couple of analogies to illustrate his criticism. First, he contrasts a
mathematician with someone studying <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">other
people</i> doing mathematics. The latter can never replace the former, he
argues. He also draws on a second analogy: a scientific argument between himself
and a creationist. While both parties may engage in similar psychological
processes, there is a significant difference, Pigliucci argues: his beliefs
correspond with <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">the facts</i>.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">These analogies illuminate
Pigliucci’s model of morality: normative moral statements are <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">theories of a moral realm</i>, just as
evolution and creationism are theories of the natural world. This implies two
things. First, that studying people engaging in morality, as moral
psychologists do, adds an intermediary to the study of morality. In other
words, moral philosophers study the moral realm <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">directly</i>, while moral psychologists only do so indirectly, through
other people. Second, some moral theories are truer than others, and moral
psychologists have no method of determining which ones. To do so, one must
study the moral realm directly and then compare it to various theories that
people hold.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">On this view, of
course, Pigliucci’s criticisms of moral psychology make sense. No psychologist would
dream of proposing mathematical or physical theories based on cognitive studies,
so why should morality be different? Why do some psychologists think they can
derive morality from studying the human mind, but not mathematics or physics?</span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><br />
<div align="center" style="margin: 0px; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">***</span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">The answer is that it’s
not clear Pigliucci’s model is correct. In fact, Pigliucci’s model <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">assumes</i> precisely the thing that moral
psychology disputes, namely that moral beliefs are theories of a moral realm.
Jonathan Haidt’s <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Righteous-Mind-Divided-Politics-Religion-ebook/dp/B0076O2VMI"><span style="color: #0563c1; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">work</span></a>,
in particular, demonstrates the extent to which people’s moral views are driven
almost entirely by moral intuitions, and that what people <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">think</i> are moral deliberations are really rationalisations of these
underlying moral intuitions. The potential implication, although Haidt doesn’t
explicitly draw it himself, is that there <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">is
no</i> moral realm; humans trick themselves into thinking their moral beliefs
are theories of an objective moral realm, perhaps so they sound more convincing
to others.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">Haidt’s examples of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">moral dumbfounding</i> provide strong evidence
that rationalisation-posing-as-rationality works even on the subjects
themselves. (People wouldn’t be dumbfounded if they knew they were
rationalising.) This suggests, at the very least, that we should be sceptical of
our belief in a moral realm, however obvious it seems.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">There is also a
different area of human activity that reveals a strikingly similar pattern:
religious mythology. Take the Jewish biblical prohibition on eating pork. Presumably,
this was developed as a social norm to avoid disease and/or to foster
community. But the Ancient Jews didn’t describe it as such. They described it
as a command from God. (And most likely believed that it was.) There are many
religious myths, across many different cultures, some much more elaborate than
this one. Which seems to demonstrate the propensity humans have for not only rationalising
their behaviour, but to believe the rationalisations they produce.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">Consider how poorly a
model of moral beliefs as a theory-of-a-moral-realm seems to work here. Do we
really want to label the belief that eating pork is morally wrong as true or false?
That seems to completely miss the point. Surely a much better model would be
that the moral belief that eating pork is morally wrong is a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">codification</i> of that society’s social
norms, embedded in a myth. In other words, the description is inward, not
outward. It just <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">appears</i> to be
outward. And that is essentially what Haidt is saying about individuals as
well. Our moral beliefs are descriptions of our moral intuitions, embedded in
rationalisation.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><br />
<div align="center" style="margin: 0px; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">***</span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">Morality-as-individual-preferences
is not a new philosophical view, it’s been around in some form since ancient
Greece. But the historical objection to it has been that it lacks the universality
that morality seems to have. This is addressed in the evolutionary aspect of
the work of Haidt and other moral psychologists. While a person’s moral views
are individual, describing his or her individual moral intuitions, those
intuitions have evolved to form universal modules, which can be acted on by natural
and social forces. </span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">The benefit of this
theory is that it combines a form of relativism with a form of universalism.
Both people and societies can have different moralities, depending on their environments/experiences,
yet these can still be understood through a universal framework. This seems to
me to be a far superior explanatory tool to the view of morality as theory of a
moral realm. In that view, there really is only one degree of freedom:
ignorance. When dealing with different societies or people in radically
different environments, this seems hopelessly inadequate.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><br />
<div align="center" style="margin: 0px; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">***</span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">What are the
consequences of rejecting Pigliucci’s model of morality? Well, it reverses the
accusation. If we assume that moral deliberation is really a process of
rationalising one’s moral intuitions, as opposed to theorising about a moral realm,
then moral philosophers are actually <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">doing</i>
moral psychology. They’re essentially describing their cognitive state. The only
difference is that they’re doing it less methodically, and with a population
size of one. In other words, if moral philosophers are to stick to their field
of expertise – theorising about the moral realm – and moral psychologists are to
stick to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">their</i> field of expertise –
describing how people engage in morality – there’s nothing left for moral
philosophers to do.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">There is merit in
Pigliucci’s main claim, though. Moral psychologists clearly do make normative
moral claims on occasion. Since people have a tendency to produce normative
statements as rationalisations, that’s understandable. But it’s also a problem,
as normative statements can’t be logically derived from descriptive statements,
as Hume suggested, which harms the validity of the science. The solution, I think,
is to simply strive to avoid normative language as well as unacknowledged value
assumptions. It’s a question of precision.</span></div>
<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike>Uri Harrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14423493981889189115noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6266751614660563438.post-44054248592164898882017-08-20T18:21:00.000-07:002017-08-20T18:47:24.569-07:00The Rise of the Religious Left<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">A few months ago, a student
protest at Claremont McKenna College in California got out of hand. The
protestors shut down a scheduled lecture and question-and-answer session titled
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The War on Police</i> by Heather Mac
Donald, a prominent critic of the Black Lives Matter movement. </span><br />
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">According to
journalists <a href="http://claremontindependent.com/protesters-shut-down-black-lives-matter-critic-threaten-student-journalists/">covering the event</a>, protestors blocked the entrances, ordered white male students
observing the protest to leave, threatened journalists, and yelled ‘fuck the
police’ at campus security officers. To add to all of this, a group of white protestors
were observed pushing an elderly white professor while screaming ‘fuck white
supremacy’. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">Immediately following
the protest, College Vice President Peter Uvin issued a statement declaring its
methods unacceptable. This was followed by <a href="https://www.cmc.edu/news/message-from-president-chodosh-on-heather-mac-donalds-athenaeum-talk">a similar statement</a> by College President Hiram Chodosh. Claremont McKenna <a href="https://www.cmc.edu/news/student-conduct-process-statement">later </a><a href="https://www.cmc.edu/news/student-conduct-process-statement"></a><a href="https://www.cmc.edu/news/student-conduct-process-statement"></a><a href="https://www.cmc.edu/news/student-conduct-process-statement">disciplined seven students</a> for their actions.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"></span><br />
<a name='more'></a></div>
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">Claremont McKenna is
part of a consortium of colleges, The Claremont Colleges. David Oxtoby,
President of Pomona College, another college in the consortium, <a href="http://claremontindependent.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/OxtobyEmail.png">sent an email</a> to Pomona students the day after the protest emphasising the
importance of free speech.</span><br />
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">The Claremont Colleges
rank highly on The Heterodox Academy’s <a href="https://heterodoxacademy.org/resources/guide-to-colleges/top-50-liberal-arts-colleges/">list of liberal arts colleges</a> most committed to free speech and viewpoint
diversity. The statements by Uvin, Chodosh, and Oxtoby show why.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">But what might the
argument be against allowing Mac Donald to speak? Three Pomona students <a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_y6NmxoIBLcZJxYkN9V1YfaPYzVSMKCA17PgBzz10wk/edit">wrote an open letter in response to Oxtoby</a>, laying out their reasons. (It has
been co-signed by 24 additional students.)</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">The letter is
interesting because it’s written by what appears to be two first-year- and a
second-year student, given their listed graduation dates, while being full of
formulations that seem very characteristic of ethnic- and gender studies
programmes. (The three students specifically identify as black.) It’s likely
they are largely passing on ideas they’ve been taught, as the terminology and
ideas are so distinctive.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">As such, it provides
outsiders a window into ethnic- and gender studies courses at universities,
something that otherwise appears so opaque.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">The letter is too long
to quote in full, but there are some important sections that I want to
highlight. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">First, a criticism of
Oxtoby’s desire to protect free speech: </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 0px 48px; text-align: justify;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">Free speech, a right many freedom movements have fought for, has recently
become a tool appropriated by hegemonic institutions. It has not just empowered
students from marginalized backgrounds to voice their qualms and criticize
aspects of the institution, but it has given those who seek to perpetuate
systems of domination a platform to project their bigotry.</span></i></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">Second, a rejection of
the notion of objective truth, directed at Oxtoby’s mentioning of the
‘discovery of truth’ as one of the missions upon which Pomona was founded. (And
which free speech is partly directed towards.):</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 0px 48px; text-align: justify;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">Your statement contains unnuanced views surrounding the academy and a
belief in searching for some venerated truth. Historically, white supremacy has
venerated the idea of objectivity, and wielded a dichotomy of ‘subjectivity vs.
objectivity’ as a means of silencing oppressed peoples. The idea that there is
a single truth--’the Truth’--is a construct of the Euro-West that is deeply
rooted in the Enlightenment, which was a movement that also described Black and
Brown people as both subhuman and impervious to pain. This construction is a
myth and white supremacy, imperialism, colonization, capitalism, and the United
States of America are all of its progeny. The idea that the truth is an entity
for which we must search, in matters that endanger our abilities to exist in
open spaces, is an attempt to silence oppressed peoples.</span></i></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">And finally, an
expression of their ultimate goal:</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 0px 48px; text-align: justify;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">Protest that doesn’t disrupt the status quo is benign and doesn’t
function to overthrow systems of oppression, which is the ultimate goal.</span></i></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">There are several
other elements in the letter, including the notion that some speech ‘projects
violence onto the bodies of … oppressed peoples’ and that engaging Mac Donald
would be debating black people’s right to exist.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">Nevertheless, I think
the three sections I mentioned are the most important, because they combine to
articulate an alternative worldview to the one Oxtoby expressed in his email.
(Which is roughly known as the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Enlightenment</i>
worldview or the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">scientific</i>
worldview.)</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">The core ideas in this
alternative worldview is that: 1) there is no objective truth, only a
collection of subjective truths, 2) the ultimate goal is to overthrow all
systems of oppression, so that every person’s truth has equal space to exist,
3) rather than pursue a non-existent objective truth, the goal of speech is to
facilitate the overthrow of systems of oppression by allowing oppressed people
to speak, but not oppressors.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">Hence, Heather Mac
Donald by criticising the Black Lives Matter movement is suppressing black
people’s ability to criticise the systems oppressing them, and by defending the
police she is justifying their role as oppressors. Pointing to the discovery of
truth as justification for her to speak is meaningless, because <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">there is no objective truth</i>. The only
question one should ask is whether she is criticising the oppressed or the
oppressors, and that determines whether she should be permitted to speak.</span></div>
<br />
<div align="center" style="margin: 0px; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">***</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">The basic worldview the
Pomona students are expressing emerged as a school of thought in Frankfurt during
the early 1930s, known as <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/critical-theory/#3">Critical Theory</a>.
It originated within the Marxist tradition, and can be viewed as an extension
of Karl Marx’s ideas of structural oppression to culture and epistemology.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">A central part of
Marx’s work is his historical analysis, outlined in <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/">the Communist Manifesto</a>. He argued that power differences between societal
groups has gradually decreased, as new systems have replaced older ones – from slavery
to feudalism to capitalism. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">At each step, the most
oppressed groups became less oppressed. Marx extrapolated this development to
communism, a system where no one would be oppressed, and he developed economic
arguments to demonstrate the inevitability of capitalism’s collapse into
communism. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">In this sense, Marx is
within the liberal tradition, regarding individual human freedom as the highest
good. (Which represented a substantial departure from previous religious
worldviews.) He departed from the classical liberals though in his idea of
freedom. They believed individual freedom was maximised in a society where only
physical force and fraud were restricted. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">To Marx, labourers in
a capitalist system weren’t free, because they were unable to escape the
limitations of their class, regardless of any explicit use of physical force or
fraud. Their oppression was structural. In other words, it was <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">the system</i> that was restricting their
freedom, not the actions of any particular person.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">During the 1930s,
though, it had become increasingly clear that capitalism was unlikely to
collapse into communism. The socialist movement inspired in part by Marx had led
to the formation of the modern welfare state, but it was becoming increasingly
accepted that socialism should occur <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_liberalism">within the framework of capitalism</a>, rather than replace it.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">For dedicated
Marxists, the question was why people were unwilling to overthrow the system
that was oppressing them. The Critical Theorists suggested that Marx had
underestimated the extent to which cultural and epistemological norms play an
active role in the perpetuation of capitalism.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">Capitalism created a
culture of ‘false needs’, spread through mass marketing, making people
dependent on material items they didn’t need in order to keep up appearances,
thus perpetuating capitalism as a system, supported by the growing,
status-seeking middle-class. This locked them into a system of competitiveness and
materialism, and alienated them from their true nature, including their
sexuality. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">(Marx had written on
how capitalism alienated labourers from the products of their labour, and had
also written on how ideology prevented people from overthrowing capitalism.)</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">Just as importantly,
capitalism worked in coordination with a particular kind of epistemological
system, positivism, both of which came to power during the Enlightenment. Positivism
is roughly the idea that facts are ‘out there’ in the world, and that it’s the
job of intellectuals to describe them. This made intellectuals naturally
conservative, since there’s seemingly a contradiction between describing the
world as it is, and changing it into something else. (This too, Marx had
touched upon.)</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">Their response to the
latter issue was to develop a competing methodology to positivism, called
Critical Theory. It took as its starting point the idea that intellectual
activity should criticise systems of oppression with the purpose of
overthrowing them. (And thus liberating people oppressed by these systems.)
Unlike positivism, it’s a normative methodology. The goal of overthrowing
systems of oppression is taken a priori, it’s not something to be discovered or
questioned.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">Critical Theory had
significant influence on the New Left movement that arose during the 1960s, in
large part due to Herbert Marcuse’s bestselling book <a href="https://www.marxists.org/ebooks/marcuse/one-dimensional-man.htm">One-Dimensional Man</a>. He also published the essay <a href="http://www.marcuse.org/herbert/pubs/60spubs/65repressivetolerance.htm">Repressive Tolerance</a>, where he argues that Nazism could have been avoided if
democratic tolerance was withdrawn earlier, and that society is in a state of
emergency due to the shortened distance between word and action, so that
suspension of free speech and free assembly is justified. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">He argues that, given
this state of affairs, there should be no tolerance for the right (the
oppressors), and full tolerance for the left (the oppressed and their defenders),
in both word and action:</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 0px 48px; text-align: justify;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from
the Right and toleration of movements from the Left. As to the scope of this
tolerance and intolerance: ... it would extend to the stage of action as well
as of discussion and propaganda, of deed as well as of word.</span></i></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 0px 48px; text-align: justify;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">…</span></i></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 0px 48px; text-align: justify;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">The small and powerless minorities which struggle against the false
consciousness and its beneficiaries must be helped: their continued existence
is more important than the preservation of abused rights and liberties which
grant constitutional powers to those who oppress these minorities.</span></i></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">This essay provides,
in my opinion, a valuable insight into the mindset of the far-left (and to a
lesser extent, the not-so-far-left), despite it being fifty years old.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">Critical Theory was
joined during the 1970s by postmodernist and poststructuralist philosophies,
which address similar issues, and with which it’s often conflated. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">As a rule, the
Critical Theorists were less explicitly relativistic (they were reluctant to
deny objective truth outright – Marcuse affirms it, at least in principle),
while being more focussed on the normative aspects. Later ideas drew on
elements from both. The label, though, is less important than the methodology.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">Replacing positivism
with a critical theory that denies – or at least disregards – objective truth,
has significant consequences for one’s academic activity, depending on how far
one is willing to take it.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">If the goal of
academic activity is to overthrow power structures, not to search for objective
truth, it’s meaningless to assess a theory’s validity according to ‘the facts’.
Theories are not true or false, they are oppressive or non-oppressive. And
likewise, criticisms of said theories are not true or false, they are effective
or ineffective in facilitating overthrow.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">A good, albeit
extreme, demonstration of this idea is feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray’s <a href="http://www.physics.nyu.edu/sokal/dawkins.html">assertion that</a>
Einstein’s E=mc<sup>2</sup> equation is sexed because it privileges the speed
of light over other speeds, and that fluid mechanics has been underdeveloped by
physicists because physics is masculine and thus privileges rigid, solid
things. Einstein and physicists in general are perpetuating a system of
oppression through their theories, and therefore must be criticised. The
question isn’t whether her assertion is true, but whether it’s effective.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">A further consequence
is that the validity of a criticism is proportionate to the amount of oppression
being overthrown. Consider a portion of the Pomona letter:</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 0px 48px; text-align: justify;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">We, Black students, exist with a myriad of different identities. We are
queer, trans, differently-abled, poor/low-income, undocumented, Muslim,
first-generation and/or immigrant, and positioned in different spaces across
Africa and the African diaspora.</span></i></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">There are presumably
some heterosexual black students, but they aren’t mentioned in the list of
identities. Why? Because heterosexuals aren’t considered an oppressed group and
therefore don’t add validity to the argument. In fact, as an oppressor group
they might even detract from the argument. The same goes for Christian and
middle- and upper-class students. These people also have an identity, but they
aren’t mentioned because they aren’t oppressed groups and therefore don’t add
validity to the argument.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">Listing these
identities also does little to address the topic of Mac Donald’s speech, but it
reflects the extent to which the students view the validity of their argument as
depending on the amount of oppression they can appeal to.</span></div>
<br />
<div align="center" style="margin: 0px; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">***</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">Critical theory has
played an important role over the past fifty years in the coalescing of the
social justice movement, by providing an intellectual foundation for it to
build around. Partly due to this foundation, a number of disparate movements –
socialism/anti-capitalism, ethnic rights movements, feminism, LGTB+,
environmentalism – have coalesced into a single movement.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">The benefit for each
movement is that they now closely support each other. The Pomona letter is a
good example of this, emphasising various LGBT+ identities while disparaging
capitalism in a letter aimed at a critic of Black Lives Matter. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">The downside for them is
that they have effectively become branches of the social justice movement, and must
act accordingly, which means sometimes setting their own interests aside for
what is perceived as greater oppression. For example, <a href="https://areomagazine.com/2016/12/29/why-i-no-longer-identify-as-a-feminist/amp/">it has become frowned upon for feminists</a> to criticise treatment of women in
Muslim communities, as Muslims are considered an oppressed group and therefore
can’t be criticised. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">Shedding some people,
especially classical liberals, from the various individual movements was an
inevitable consequence of the coalescing of the social justice movement, but
overall it has become a very powerful force. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">In fact, the
combination of an intellectual foundation in Critical Theory, which treats its
central goal – the overthrowing of power structures – <span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>as a priori (meaning it must be taken on
faith), and a broad movement of people willing to set their personal and group
interests aside to achieve it, makes for something very much like a religion.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">Add to that a set of
practices that sacralise the overthrowing of power structures by preventing
questioning of it, and a powerful supporting narrative that draws on genuine
philosophical uncertainty (the question of objectivity and subjectivity), and I
think the best way to describe the social justice movement simply <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">is</i> as a burgeoning religion.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">As Andrew Sullivan
wrote in an article <a href="http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/03/is-intersectionality-a-religion.html">describing a video of the protest</a> that shut down a scheduled speech by social
scientist Charles Murray at Middlebury College in Vermont:</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 0px 48px; text-align: justify;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">And what I saw on the video struck me most as a form of religious ritual
— a secular exorcism, if you will — that reaches a frenzied, disturbing
catharsis. When Murray starts to speak, the students stand and ritually turn
their backs on him in silence. The heretic must not be looked at, let alone
engaged.</span></i></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">A <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMsi61OtkE4">YouTube video of a speech</a> by psychologist Jordan B. Peterson at McMaster University shows how a small
minority of fervent students can control a situation.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">This is especially
true when moderate people are sympathetic to the ideas of the social justice
movement. As a student <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/07/opinion/discord-at-middlebury-students-on-the-anti-murray-protests.html">later said of the Murray incident</a>:</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 0px 48px; text-align: justify;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">I fully believed that Middlebury should
honor its institutional commitment to academic freedom and debate by letting
Charles Murray speak. But I also believed that students’ voices should be
integral to this dialogue and so I planned to protest before the talk and ask
Murray tough questions in the Q. and A. that followed his presentation.</span></i></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 0px 48px; text-align: justify;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">My plans changed when I arrived at the
event and sat next to an activist friend. When Murray began his speech, she
said, protesters would stand, turn their backs on him, read a statement in
opposition, and then do a few chants. I was hesitant, but when the protesters
began to read their statement, many of the students in the room stood with
them, me included.</span></i></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">While committed
members of the social justice movement still make up a small portion of the
population, even at universities, their religious approach grants them
significant influence. Because of their shared intellectual foundation and
language, they present a united front, and their fervour is intimidating to
moderate people. As a months-long investigation into the state of free-speech
at elite Boston-area private school Tufts University by The Foundation for
Individual Rights in Education <a href="https://www.thefire.org/fire-investigative-report-alarming-free-speech-climate-at-tufts-a-warning-to-students-at-all-private-campuses-video/">noted</a>:</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 0px 48px; text-align: justify;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">Students have been systematically investigated, interrogated by police,
and punished by Tufts for speech the university claims, generally, to permit.
What’s more, numerous students told us the campus climate is “toxic” for free
inquiry, with a passionate but small and exceptionally like-minded student body
attempting to silence “offensive” or disfavored speech — even reporting it to
administrators and police, or characterizing it as a literal act of “violence.”
</span></i></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 0px 48px; text-align: justify;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">These mutually reinforcing phenomena create a perilous combination for
students who want to speak their mind at Tufts: Open disagreement isn’t just
“social suicide” — it can get you in serious trouble.</span></i><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"></span></i></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">If a small minority of
people can wield such influence, imagine what could happen if the movement
grows larger. Is that a genuine possibility?</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">The answer, clearly,
is yes. In fact, after having spent the past few decades coalescing into a
single movement, while simultaneously gaining an increasing foothold within
academia, the social justice movement has matured to the point where it has <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">already</i> begun to make significant inroads
in Western society at large, with developments occurring quite rapidly.</span></div>
<br />
<div align="center" style="margin: 0px; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">***</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">Last month, public
radio station KPFA in Berkeley <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/24/us/richard-dawkins-speech-canceled-berkeley.html?_r=0">cancelled an event</a> where evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins was to promote his
new book, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Science-Soul-Selected-Passionate-Rationalist/dp/0399592245">Science in the Soul: Selected Writings of a Passionate Rationalist</a>, because of his
past comments criticising Islam. The station’s event coordinator told the New
York Times that he couldn’t recall in his three decades at the station any
other live event it hosted being cancelled because of its content. (KPFA hosted
Dawkins in 2015.)</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">The New York Times
article contains a quote by </span><span lang="EN" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">the executive director of the Arab
Resource and Organizing Center, which had emailed the station before the
cancellation:</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 0px 48px; text-align: justify;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">“KPFA is a progressive institution in
the Bay Area, and an institution that reflects social justice,” she said in a
phone interview on Saturday. “It isn’t required to give such anti-Islam
rhetoric a platform.”</span></i></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">In its defence of the
cancellation, KPFA <a href="https://kpfa.org/blog/statement-decision-cancel-richard-dawkins-event/">in a blog post</a> mentioned three of Dawkins’s tweets it deemed offensive, and included
the following statement:</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 0px 48px; text-align: justify;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">We serve a broad and diverse community, including many Muslims living
under threat of persecution and violence in the current political context.
Islamophobic rhetoric stokes that threat.</span></i></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">Dawkins <a href="https://richarddawkins.net/2017/07/letter-to-kpfa/">in his own response</a> questioned why it’s fine to criticise Christianity, but not Islam. Why should
the religious ideas he’s criticising depend on the people holding them?</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">The implied answer by
KPFA is that Muslims are an oppressed group, and therefore their beliefs may
not be criticised because doing so reinforces their oppression. The paradox is
that while <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">American</i> Muslims might be
oppressed, Islam has <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam">approximately 1.8 billion followers worldwide</a>, is the world’s fastest growing major
religion, and is the majority religion in 49 countries. Not being able to
criticise one of the world’s most influential belief systems is deeply
problematic, but this doesn’t seem to have been a consideration for KPFA in its
pursuit of social justice.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">Earlier this month, Google
engineer James Damore was fired after an internal memo he wrote <a href="http://gizmodo.com/exclusive-heres-the-full-10-page-anti-diversity-screed-1797564320">was leaked to technology </a><a href="http://gizmodo.com/exclusive-heres-the-full-10-page-anti-diversity-screed-1797564320"></a><a href="http://gizmodo.com/exclusive-heres-the-full-10-page-anti-diversity-screed-1797564320">website Gizmodo</a>, which labelled it an ‘anti-diversity
screed’. An article at CNN.com reported it as Damore claiming that <a href="http://money.cnn.com/2017/08/07/technology/google-anti-diversity-memo-engineer/index.html?sr=twCNN080817google-anti-diversity-memo-engineer0850AMStory">women are not biologically fit for tech roles</a>, an article at Fortune.com called
it an <a href="http://fortune.com/2017/08/05/google-viral-engineer-women/">’anti-woman screed’</a>, and an article at Time.com called it an <a href="http://time.com/4890901/google-fired-james-damore-diversity/">‘anti-diversity tirade’</a>. Even <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/the-pernicious-science-of-james-damores-google-memo/">more dispassionate articles</a> addressing the science behind Damore’s claims focus almost
entirely on his references to gender studies.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">Yet, it’s clear from
reading the memo that gender differences were not primary concerns for Damore.
Consider his summary of the memo at the beginning of <a href="https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles-Ideological-Echo-Chamber.pdf">the document</a>, titled TL;DR:</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 0px 48px; text-align: justify; text-indent: -18pt;">
<span style="font-family: "symbol"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="margin: 0px;">·<span style="font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font: 7pt "Times New Roman"; margin: 0px;">
</span></span></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">Google’s political bias has equated
the freedom from offense with psychological safety, but shaming into silence is
the antithesis of psychological safety. </span></i></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 0px 48px; text-align: justify; text-indent: -18pt;">
<span style="font-family: "symbol"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="margin: 0px;">·<span style="font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font: 7pt "Times New Roman"; margin: 0px;">
</span></span></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">This silencing has created an
ideological echo chamber where some ideas are too sacred to be honestly
discussed. </span></i></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 0px 48px; text-align: justify; text-indent: -18pt;">
<span style="font-family: "symbol"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="margin: 0px;">·<span style="font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font: 7pt "Times New Roman"; margin: 0px;">
</span></span></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">The lack of discussion fosters the
most extreme and authoritarian elements of this ideology. </span></i></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 0px 96px; text-align: justify; text-indent: -18pt;">
<span style="font-family: "courier new"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="margin: 0px;">o<span style="font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font: 7pt "Times New Roman"; margin: 0px;">
</span></span></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">Extreme: all disparities in
representation are due to oppression </span></i></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 0px 96px; text-align: justify; text-indent: -18pt;">
<span style="font-family: "courier new"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="margin: 0px;">o<span style="font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font: 7pt "Times New Roman"; margin: 0px;">
</span></span></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">Authoritarian: we should discriminate
to correct for this oppression </span></i></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 0px 48px; text-align: justify; text-indent: -18pt;">
<span style="font-family: "symbol"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="margin: 0px;">·<span style="font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font: 7pt "Times New Roman"; margin: 0px;">
</span></span></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">Differences in distributions of
traits between men and women may in part explain why we don't have 50%
representation of women in tech and leadership. </span></i></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 0px 48px; text-align: justify; text-indent: -18pt;">
<span style="font-family: "symbol"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="margin: 0px;">·<span style="font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font: 7pt "Times New Roman"; margin: 0px;">
</span></span></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">Discrimination to reach equal
representation is unfair, divisive, and bad for business.</span></i></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">(There’s a section
titled ‘reply to public response and misrepresentation’ before the summary, but
it appears to have been put in later.)</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">There is a bullet point
dedicated to gender differences, and their discussion takes up a good portion
of the memo, but it’s clearly not his main focus. He makes it clear both in the
memo and <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/video/2017/08/14/fired-google-engineer-james-damore-i-was-pointing-out-problems-at-google.html">in an interview</a> that he thinks the main problem at Google is that people are
afraid to speak out against the social justice ideology that has come to
dominate Google, and that the associated policies are becoming more extreme, in
part <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">because</i> people are afraid to
speak out against them.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">Damore is arguing for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">more</i> diversity, not less. He points to
the same problem that <a href="https://heterodoxacademy.org/">The Heterodox Academy</a>, co-founded by psychologist Jonathan Haidt, has emphasised. Essentially,
that an unchallengeable and overzealous focus on gender- and ethnic diversity above
all else leads to institutions full of people that look different but think
alike, because it gradually pushes out anyone who doesn’t view the world
through a framework of structural oppression. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">Even worse, it can
actually increase tensions by activating an oppressor-victim narrative that
increases hostility, Haidt and psychologist Lee Jussim argued in a <a href="http://www.businessforum.com/WSJ_Race-on-Campus-05-06-2016.pdf">Wall Street Journal article</a> that Damore linked to in his memo. As Haidt <a href="http://righteousmind.com/where-microaggressions-really-come-from/">wrote in a</a><a href="http://righteousmind.com/where-microaggressions-really-come-from/">blog post</a> commenting on a paper by two sociologists on the dangers of
microaggression training (which Damore suggests in his memo is part of Google’s
diversity training):</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 0px 48px; text-align: justify;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">The key idea is that the new moral culture of victimhood fosters “moral
dependence” and an atrophying of the ability to handle small interpersonal
matters on one’s own. At the same time that it weakens individuals, it creates
a society of constant and intense moral conflict as people compete for status
as victims or as defenders of victims.</span></i></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">As a response to what
he views as an overzealous, ideologically driven attempt to remove outcome
disparities, Damore suggests that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">some</i>
outcome disparities with respect to gender may be due to biological differences.
(He titles the section on gender differences ‘Possible non-bias causes of the
gender gap in tech’.) In other words, it’s possible that outcome disparities
are not entirely due to structural oppression, and that treating them as such
while refusing to accept alternative explanations may do more harm than good.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">The fact that this
caused such an outcry demonstrates the point that Steven Pinker made at the
beginning of <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Blank-Slate-Modern-Penguin-Science-ebook/dp/B002XHNM5S">The Blank </a><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Blank-Slate-Modern-Penguin-Science-ebook/dp/B002XHNM5S"></a><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Blank-Slate-Modern-Penguin-Science-ebook/dp/B002XHNM5S">Slate</a><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"></i>:</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 0px 48px; text-align: justify;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">My goal in this book is not to argue that genes are everything and culture
is nothing—no one believes that—but to explore why the extreme position (that
culture is everything) is so often seen as moderate, and the moderate position
is seen as extreme. </span></i><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">(Kindle
loc. 71-73)</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">While most mainstream
liberals, including those in the media, would probably say <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">in principle</i> that both genes and culture play a role in various
outcomes, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">in practice</i> when someone
like Damore suggests that outcome disparities may not entirely be due to
culture (i.e., structural oppression), they are treated as heretics.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">In fact, Pinker might
as well have been writing about a large portion of the early Damore media
coverage when he wrote:</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 0px 48px; text-align: justify;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">The taboo on human nature has not just put blinkers on researchers but
turned any discussion of it into a heresy that must be stamped out. Many
writers are so desperate to discredit any suggestion of an innate human
constitution that they have thrown logic and civility out the window. </span></i><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">(Kindle loc. 92-94)</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">The fact that this is
not a university, but Google, whose parent company, Alphabet, is the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_public_corporations_by_market_capitalization">world’s second most valuable </a><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_public_corporations_by_market_capitalization"></a><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_public_corporations_by_market_capitalization">company</a>, with 72,000 employees, demonstrates the
extent to which the social justice movement has moved beyond academia. And as
Damore implied in the interview I linked to, the situation is very similar at
other large technology companies.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">This suggests that
some of the world’s most valuable and influential companies are now training
their employees to believe that output disparities are <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">entirely</i> due to structural oppression, are implementing
increasingly aggressive policies to overthrow these systems of oppression, are
teaching employees through microaggression training that words are a form of
violence, and are teaching them that criticism of social justice beliefs is not
tolerated, regardless of any appeal to facts. It’s not quite at the level of
Tufts yet, but it’s clearly moving in that direction.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">For now, these
arguments are focussed on identity groups, but it’s only a matter of time
before they move on to narrower and narrower groups and then eventually
individuals. Even if you manage to forcefully eliminate output disparities
between large groups, there will always be subgroups that are below the mean,
until you’re eventually at the individual level. Once you’ve established the
idea that outcome disparities are due to structural oppression, and that
criticism is unacceptable, communism is the inevitable result.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">This is why the Google
situation – with its silencing of dissenters, shaming of privileged groups, and
forceful removal of systems of oppression – is so eerily recognisable to anyone
with even a vague familiarity with the communist regimes of the past century;
it’s the same basic idea, just in its early stages.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">There’s no mystery
here. Marcuse saw in the 1960s that identity groups were the path to overthrow
capitalism.</span></div>
<br />
<div align="center" style="margin: 0px; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">***</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">But why does the
social justice movement continue to grow? In an age where most religions are on
the retreat, what makes this one different?</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">The reason is that while
the social justice movement – with its a priori intellectual foundation that
subordinates debate and inquiry, powerful myth, sacralising rituals, and
fervent followers – bears many resemblances to other religions, it’s not just another
monotheistic religion like Judaism or Christianity. Rather, it’s the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">liberal analogue</i> to monotheism.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">What are the main
differences between liberals and conservatives?</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">Haidt, who has spent
decades researching moral and political psychology, <a href="https://www.samharris.org/podcast/item/evolving-minds">appearing on author Sam Harris’s podcast</a>, gave a rough description (starting at
01:02:09, lightly edited for clarity):</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 0px 48px; text-align: justify;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">So, I take part in a lot of discussions, I’m invited to all sorts of
lefty meetings about a global society and… you know… the left usually wants
global governance, they want more power vested in the U.N., I hear a lot of
talk on the left about how countries and national borders are bad things,
they’re arbitrary. So, the left tends to want more of a universal… I’m just
thinking about the John Lennon song… this is what I always go back to, Imagine.
Imagine there’s no religion, no countries, no private property, nothing to kill
or die for, then it will all be peace and harmony. So that is sort of the
far-leftist view of what the end state of social evolution could be.</span></i></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 0px 48px; text-align: justify;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">Now, is that possible, is it consistent with our evolved nature? Now ,
here’s the other side. The other side, the conservative view, is that we are
fundamentally more groupish, more parochial creatures, and to have global
governance, and one giant country, or one giant community of all Earth would be
a nightmare, it would be chaos, it just wouldn’t work. Far better to have
authority at the lowest level possible, at all times, and build up with nested
structures. So for conservatives, a country ends up being a very reasonable
basic building block, and they would not want as much of a global society. They
certainly would want international law, they would want treaties, they would
want all sorts of things.</span></i></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 0px 48px; text-align: justify;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">So I think this is kind of case where if you have a blank slate view, or
a very positive view that our basic nature is love and cooperation, and it’s
only capitalism that screwed it up, you’re going to want a kind of John Lennon
view of the future. Whereas, if you start with Edmund Burke, who talks about
the little platoons of society, we develop into families, so conservatives are
really focussed on the family as lower level institutions. And if you focus on
making those strong, and then you think of some sort of a legal and social
architecture, that allows multiple families and communities and states and
countries to work together with a minimum of friction, I think that’s much more
workable.</span></i></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 0px 48px; text-align: justify;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">So getting a correct view of our evolutionary heritage and the psychology
that resulted from it, I think is very helpful. It doesn’t tell us what’s right
or wrong, but I think it does tell us which way is more likely to work. And if
you see us as products of multilevel selection, with a deep, deep tribalism,
that suggests you’re probably better off going for the Burke way, and having
groups that are composed of groups and finding ways for them to work together,
rather than the John Lennon way, which is let’s erase all group boundaries, let’s
erase divisions of nation and everything else, and just have one giant planet,
I just don’t think that’s likely to work, as with the communist societies, it’s
making assumptions about human nature, that end up… people just refuse to live
that way, and it’s a disaster.</span></i></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">There’s a bit of an
imbalance here, as Haidt was comparing a more radical liberal viewpoint to
moderate conservatism in the context of problems with the social justice
movement, which naturally makes the latter seem more reasonable than the former.
In general, though, Haidt used to be a liberal and <a href="https://heterodoxacademy.org/2016/01/07/new-study-finds-conservative-social-psychologists/">now considers himself a centrist</a>, so he doesn’t favour one or the other.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">Nevertheless, it
provides a valuable insight into the main difference between liberals and
conservatives, in my view: their desire for structure. Liberals want to remove
structure, and conservatives want to preserve, or even strengthen it. (Where
structure here refers to institutionalised patterns of behaviour.) And, as
Haidt implies, radicals want it even more so than moderates. In fact, if one
were to fit people along a political spectrum, all the way from
ultraconservative to radical liberal, this would likely correlate strongly with
the amount of desired structure in society.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">The labels are more
descriptive than they’re sometimes given credit for. Liberals want to free
people from the restrictions of societal structures and allow them to act
unrestricted as diverse individuals. This was true of the classical liberals,
who wanted to remove the restrictions on commerce and beliefs placed on people
by feudalism and The Church. It was more true of Marx, who wanted to free
people from the restrictions of capitalism, and even more true of the Critical
Theorists and postmodernists, who wanted to free people from the restrictions
of cultural, epistemological, and linguistic norms.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">It's important to
distinguish objective from consequence, especially when dealing with the latter
two. When looking at communist regimes or the Damore situation, it <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">seems</i> like Marxists and Critical
Theorists want to place restrictions on people; to force them into ideological
and behavioural uniformity. But when reading Marx or Marcuse, it’s clear that’s
not their goal. Rather, they genuinely seem to desire the type of sandlot
society that Lennon sings of in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Imagine</i>.
A society where everyone is entirely free to do as they want, liberated from
all the restrictions of societal structure.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">When communists point
to the communist regimes of the past century and say ‘that’s not real
communism’, I think they’re being sincere, and that the totalitarianism of
these regimes was not what Marx envisioned.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">Conservatives, on the
other hand, want to conserve structure: families, local communities, nations,
and private property. As Haidt suggests, they are operating under different
assumptions about society and human nature. It’s not that conservatives are
against individual freedom, it’s that they believe that structure is necessary
for society to function, and that that necessarily places restrictions on
people. Evolutionary theory, to some extent, replaces traditional religion in
offering an account of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">why</i> structure
exists and is necessary.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">Studies show that
liberals and conservatives <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/02/studies-conservatives-are-from-mars-liberals-are-from-venus/252416/">differ on a variety of preferences</a>, including their preference for participating
in hierarchical structures. Unfortunately, as psychologist José Duarte <a href="http://www.joseduarte.com/blog/scientific-american-column-on-duarte-et-al">points out</a>, many of the models used in these studies embed liberal terminology
(often <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/thick-ethical-concepts/">thick moral concepts</a> like <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">social dominance</i>
and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">authoritarianism</i>) and caricatured
questions, which means that while they may be predictive, their interpretation
and communication has a liberal framing.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">The subtle implication
being that preference for less hierarchy is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">good</i>,
implying that conservatives are less good than liberals, and radical liberals
best of all. Which, as Haidt’s speech above demonstrates, is nonsense. If
hierarchies – or any social structure – are to be evaluated, it should be on
their function, not on some a priori morality.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">Another difference is <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openness_to_experience">openness to </a><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openness_to_experience">expe</a><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openness_to_experience">rience</a>. Liberals tend to be more open than conservatives. (Although
Duarte has <a href="http://www.joseduarte.com/blog/i-was-denied-admission-to-a-phd-program-because-of-my-perceived-political-views-reflections-of-a-sellout-how-diversity-would-strengthen-social-science">suggested</a> that the questions may be biased.)</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">Understanding that
liberals and conservatives differ primarily on their desire for structure helps
explain the difference in appeal between monotheism and the social justice
movement. Monotheism is built around a set of eternal moral laws that apply to
a variety of behaviour. This, of course, is appealing to someone who desires a
structured society. But why the religious aspect? Because it ties the belief
system into a supernatural account, thus eliminating the need for appealing to
facts. Conservative monotheists don’t have to explain the utility of a given
societal structure, they can point to God’s commands as something that
supersedes any functional account.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">The same is true for
liberal social justice followers. Their desire to remove structure can be
grounded in the moral narrative that humans are naturally free (blank slates),
and that it’s the highest moral imperative – known a priori – to free them from
the oppression that civilisation, the Enlightenment, capitalism, gender roles,
and other oppressive structures has placed on them. Also here, there is no need
to discuss the function of any given structure, because ‘oppression’ is always
wrong, and this belief supersedes any fact.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">The religious appeal
is conceivably stronger on the far ends of either side of the spectrum. For a
person especially averse to uncertainty, the eternal laws of monotheism are
likely especially attractive, because they allow that person to rationalise his
or her discomfort by saying ‘it’s not me that’s rigid, it’s society that’s
corrupt’. And for a person especially averse to structure, it allows that
person to rationalise his or her discomfort by saying ‘it’s not me that can’t
conform, it’s society that’s oppressive’.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">A <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4200272/92-Berlin-left-wing-activists-live-parents.html">study</a>
of left-wing protestors arrested on suspicion of politically-fuelled offences
in Berlin showed that 92% lived with their parents, and a third were
unemployed. This offers some plausibility that people attracted to radical
liberalism and a desire for radical overthrow of ‘systems of oppression’, might
be people who have an especially difficult time conforming to society, perhaps
due to a high degree of openness.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">It’s possible that, at
least on the far ends, psychological traits toward or against structure may be
more important than care and empathy, for instance.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">While Haidt doesn’t
address this specifically in <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Righteous-Mind-Divided-Politics-Religion-ebook/dp/B0076O2VMI">The Righteous Mind</a> to my recollection, he demonstrates convincingly how
prevalent rationalisation is in people’s thought processes. Radical liberals
may think they’re acting out of empathy (because it sounds much more heroic, or
perhaps because they aren’t aware of their psychological traits), but a
significant driver might be a psychological trait towards openness that drives
them to want to remove structure in society.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">The same, of course,
might be true of ultraconservatives. A significant driver of trying to
implement a highly structured society might be a psychological trait towards
certainty, although they might think they’re doing it for the good of society,
and/or according to God’s will.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>(Both extremely high and extremely low
openness <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openness_to_experience#Personality_disorders">correlate with personality disorders</a>.)</span></div>
<br />
<div align="center" style="margin: 0px; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">***</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">Haidt briefly mentions
that communism failed because people refused to live like that. It’s more than
that, though. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">Economist Ludwig von
Mises <a href="https://mises.org/library/economic-calculation-socialist-commonwealth">explained that communism must fail</a>, because a communist society lacks something
critical: information. Communism eliminates trade, since it removes private
property and tells people where to work. But when people trade they aren’t just
trading products and labour, they’re also trading information about their
preferences, and when this no longer occurs there’s no way for producers to
know what to make, and so eventually you end up with a society where people’s
desires are unfulfilled and there’s a spiral into misery. (And people’s desires
aren’t arbitrary, they have evolved to form a system that also addresses environmental
pressures.)</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">In other words,
communism didn’t just fail because it went against human nature. It also failed
because capitalism forms a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">structure</i> that
helps society function.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">This is a theoretical
argument. Perhaps the best example of the fundamental shortcomings of communism
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">in practice</i> was demonstrated by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khmer_Rouge">Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge</a>.
After seizing power, the Khmer Rouge forcefully relocated millions of
Cambodians from the cities to rural areas, where they were to form a classless,
agricultural society. Private property was confiscated, money abolished,
religion banned, books burned, merchants and intellectuals killed, anyone
suspected of subversive activity executed, institutions closed, families broken
up, language changed to delete class references, and culture changed to remove
traditional signs of deference and to force social activities like eating
together at all times.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">It was perhaps the
most comprehensive attempt at social engineering ever recorded. There was a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide">nationalist and racial </a><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide">element involved</a>, leading some scholars to suggest that it resembled fascism more
than pure communism. This certainly adds to the horror of the event, but doesn’t
negate its significance as an example of the fundamental shortcomings of
communism, I think.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">In attempting to
create a classless society, the Khmer Rouge forcefully eliminated all the
structure that allowed Cambodian society to function. What might have seemed
like systems of oppression to the Khmer Rouge were vital societal structures.
In the span of four years, more than two million Cambodians died, out of a
total population of eight million.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">What’s especially
telling about Cambodia is that there was an element of anti-intellectualism and
counter-Enlightenment ideology more reminiscent of newer forms of Marxism
(including Critical Theory) than original Marxism, and which seemingly made the
situation even worse. (Many of the Khmer Rouge leaders studied in Paris during
the 1950s, and participated in French Marxist groups.) The rejection of urban
life was apparently based on a desire to return to the ‘old ways’. (A parallel
to the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Noble Savage</i> myth.) Suspected
intellectuals were killed, including people with glasses, and modern medicine
was forbidden.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">Which to a large
extent demonstrates that the more extensively one identifies and overthrows
‘systems of oppression’, the more extensively one tears away the structure that
makes society function.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">So where did Marx go
wrong? Why have communist regimes <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_Communist_regimes">been </a><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_Communist_regimes">disa</a><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_Communist_regimes">strous</a>, in many cases playing out in very similar ways to Cambodia? It <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">does seem</i> that Marx’s historical
analysis is accurate, that society has become less oppressive. After all,
there’s a reason we don’t allow slavery any more. And if society has gradually
become less and less oppressive, surely it makes sense to extrapolate it all
the way to zero?</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">The answer, I think,
lies in what we mean by oppression. Marx is operating within the liberal
tradition, where the highest value in society is individual freedom, and
oppression refers to restrictions on individual freedom. The classical liberals
focused on person-to-person restrictions of freedom in force or fraud, Marx on
economic restrictions, and the Critical Theorists and postmodernists on
cultural, epistemological and linguistic restrictions. And, of course, all
these things <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">do</i> place restrictions on
freedom.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">But they’ve forgotten
or dismissed the most important restrictor of all: nature. The fact that humans
are unable to fly like birds restricts our individual freedom. The fact that we
have to eat every few days or die restricts our freedom. And so on. So, one
cannot simply remove all structure through social engineering because the
restrictions society places on us are often derived from the restriction nature
places on us. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">Capitalism places
restrictions on us, but it does so in order to satisfy the restrictions that
nature places on us. One cannot simply eliminate it. The same is true of
epistemology and language. It is certainly restricting for schools to teach
that some beliefs are false, or that some statements are more grammatically
correct than others, but these restrictions derive from the restrictions that
nature places on knowledge and language as tools for navigating the world.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">And there is no way to
step outside of nature, because that would mean there’s something else to step
into, which in that case would be part of nature. Therefore, any structural
change must take into account the restrictions nature places on society. In
many cases, they have evolved biologically or culturally to address these
restrictions, sometimes in non-obvious ways. (As Mises demonstrated with the
price-setting mechanisms of capitalism.)</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">Marx was partly right
– there <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">is</i> a structural progression
where human freedom is gradually increased. But it occurs within the framework
of natural constraints, which means that societal structure is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">refined</i> rather than eliminated. In fact,
that might simply <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">be</i> the definition
of societal progression – the refinement of it its structure, i.e.,
institutionalised patterns of behaviour. As the structure becomes more complex,
people have more freedom, yet this occurs within the structural constraints
that allows society to function, which includes effectively addressing its many
natural restrictions.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">This is why both
liberals and conservatives play a vital role in societal progression. Liberals strive
to remove structure, while conservatives strive to keep it in place. But
because they both do so <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">selectively</i>,
they can each focus on different areas. The result being that liberals pull
apart the structure that is most oppressive, while conservatives hold together
the structure that is most necessary. Sometimes they might conflict head on,
but when they don’t, the structure is refined in a way that is less oppressive
without losing its necessary function, with the additional freedom allowing for
a more complex society.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">The problem occurs
when one side becomes too strong. When liberals become too strong, structure is
torn apart and society is unable to function, the results of which Cambodia and
the many communist regimes are examples of. When conservatives become too
strong, structure becomes rigid and society is unable to function, the results
of which theocracies are good examples of.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">We are now in a
situation, I believe, where liberalism has become too strong. The main reason
is that there’s a religious asymmetry. It’s no longer acceptable in Western
society to appeal to conservative religion, i.e., monotheism in a public
argument, as a result of the past few centuries of scientific resistance.
Meanwhile, appealing to liberal religion, i.e., social justice, is perfectly
acceptable. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">Concepts like (social)
justice, oppression, diversity, and equality are taken a priori, with no
requirement that their reference is clarified in relation to the natural world
or that they conform to scientific knowledge. They get to end arguments in the
way that monotheistic concepts used to, with no further questions asked. In
fact, they often get to overrule appeals to science, for example through moral
outrage and sophistry. All this used to be something monotheism could rely on,
but not anymore.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">The best way to judge
the balance between liberals and conservatives is to ask who has the moral high
ground. Clearly, in public debate, that has shifted very strongly towards
liberals.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">This needs to change,
or Western society is in danger of being torn apart. There are three things
that must occur, I think.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">First, an insistence
on not letting science, especially social science, be taken over by
emancipatory methodology, such as that of Critical Theory. Science <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">must</i> be free of a priori beliefs, or it
cannot function properly.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">Second, conservatives
need to reclaim their sacred mission, which is as protectors of history,
culture, and other societal structures. These things have been left almost
entirely to liberals, <a href="http://quillette.com/2017/05/17/bald-men-fighting-comb-arguments-classical-tradition/">especially radical liberals</a>, with the result being <a href="http://www.mindingthecampus.org/2017/07/liberal-talking-heads-turn-against-the-west/">an</a><u> </u><a href="http://www.mindingthecampus.org/2017/07/liberal-talking-heads-turn-against-the-west/">increasingly </a><a href="http://www.mindingthecampus.org/2017/07/liberal-talking-heads-turn-against-the-west/"></a><a href="http://www.mindingthecampus.org/2017/07/liberal-talking-heads-turn-against-the-west/">severe attack on Western history, culture, and values</a>. Rather
than protecting Western culture, radical liberals have been attacking it. But
it’s not their job to protect it; that’s the job of conservatives. Expecting
otherwise is foolish. The job of liberals is to question, challenge,
deconstruct, and eliminate. If there’s no one defending, everything is
eventually going to be torn down.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">Third, conservatives must
avoid falling into a classical liberal position. Because liberalism, especially
radical liberalism, sometimes turns on itself, it’s tempting for conservatives
to adopt a classical liberal position and essentially try to ‘out-liberal’
liberals. For example, by pointing to restrictions on free speech and silencing
of oppression in liberal environments. This is worthwhile pointing out, but
liberals will always ultimately win a debate where liberalism (i.e., human
freedom) is taken a priori as the highest value. Conservatives should embrace
the idea that liberalism and conservatism are equally important activities in
ensuring robust societal progress.</span></div>
Uri Harrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14423493981889189115noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6266751614660563438.post-64249574079018882672017-05-08T18:22:00.000-07:002017-07-28T14:35:43.789-07:00Why I'm an Amoralist<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><i>This is my most recent attempt at an article on morality. My views are still developing.</i></span><br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><b><i><br /></i></b></span>
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">Introduction: The Transition from
Theism to Atheism Was a Framework Transition</span></b></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">Theism
was central to human thought from the very beginning of recorded history. From
our earliest texts, it’s evident that humans viewed the world through a
framework of powerful persons shaping nature to their purposes and requesting specified
behaviour in return. Not until the 18<sup>th</sup> century did this framework begin
to come under serious challenge, as a mounting body of scientific evidence
offered a plausible alternative for the first time. Since then, theism has
gradually declined in popularity in favour of an atheistic framework where nature
is described entirely through impersonal physical regularities. </span></div>
<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">In
hindsight, it’s easy to see why theism was so dominant for so long. Humans
evolved mechanisms for dealing with </span>social situations, which are the most
complex things we encounter in our daily lives, and those mechanisms include
frameworks that allow us to parse social situations effectively. We assign
intentions to other people, categorise their moods, and project their
expectations for us. This forms the basis for much of human thought and action.
It’s understandable that humans, when faced with complexities in nature, would attempt
to apply the same type of framework. </div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">It's
important not to overlook the role frameworks play in intellectual development.
Without observations, of course, there is no content to our beliefs, but we
order those observations through frameworks. No amount of observations of an
erupting volcano automatically shifts our categorisation from ‘angry’ to ‘magma
discharge’. The observations must be accompanied by a shift in framework from
one set of categories to another. With theism, it appears our frameworks
shifted gradually through a succession of increasingly impersonal frameworks;
from pantheism to polytheism to monotheism to atheism.</span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">This
brings us to morality. There are two interesting things about the transition
from theism to atheism here. The first is that morality was closely tied to
theism, being defined historically as the behaviour which the powerful persons
requested of humans. This means that the transition from theism to atheism left
an explanatory gap; how do we define morality if there are no persons in nature
to request behaviour of us and punish us for disobeying?</span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">The
second is the extent to which morality, like theism, is tied to a specific
framework, and consequently cannot be properly addressed at the level of
observations. Frameworks order our observations. This means that observations
alone cannot change our frameworks. They can suggest that we need a better
framework, if they accumulate in a way that appears awkward, but they cannot
themselves change the framework; that requires conceptual work. So the first
question we need to ask is: does morality, like theism, work through a
framework?</span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">Morality, Like Theism, is a Framework
for Categorising Observations</span></b></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">Consider
a few typical moral situations: 1) I see someone push an old lady aside and I say
‘that is wrong’, 2) I see someone donate to charity and I say ‘that is good’, 3)
I see a homeless man and I say ‘that is an injustice’, 4) I see an unpleasant
person get into trouble and I say ‘that is just’, 5) I see a financial crisis
and I point to the banks and say ‘they are responsible’, 6) I see people living
in poverty and I say ‘they are victims’. </span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">To
make things more straightforward, I’ve described these situations in a way that
distinguishes observation from moral judgement. This makes it simpler to
identify the framework by examining the judgement. In reality, morality takes
on a variety of forms, and isn’t always as straightforward as these situations.
For our purpose here, though, I think they suffice.</span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">So,
what can we say about our moral judgements? There seems to be a clear pattern:
they are all variations of legal terms. More accurately, they seem to fit into
three category pairs, which conform to the way a court functions. First, there
are terms that refer to compliance to a defined set of laws, and are
essentially synonymous: right/wrong, good/evil, and virtue/vice. Second, there
are terms that refer to the assignment of guilt, also synonymous:
guilty/innocent, responsible/irresponsible, and perpetrator/victim. Finally,
there are terms that refer to the appropriate measure of punishment:
justice/injustice, and fairness/unfairness.</span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">This
is so accurate, I think, that we can <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">define</i>
the first part of morality accordingly: morality is the categorisation of
observations according to a court framework. </span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">It
certainly makes sense to be suspicious of this, because it’s not clear which
court, if any, we’re referring to. But as we saw with theism, we can’t just
stop using a framework, we have to replace it with another framework. But how
do we figure out which one? We first need to identify which observations we’re
referring to. What are we <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">trying to</i>
describe through our moral framework? This is not immediately obvious, since
there are so many diverse moral situations. Let’s consider some theories.</span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">Theory #1: Morality Describes
Individual Preferences</span></b></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">One
common theory, which has become more popular with the growth of atheism, is
that morality describes our individual preferences. There is some appeal to
this, because it’s clear that people with different personality types, for
example, sometimes reach different moral judgements. However, there are two
problems. </span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">First,
it doesn’t seem to make any sense to describe our individual preferences
through a court framework. We can prefer summer to winter, or strawberry to
vanilla. But it doesn’t make sense to describe these preferences as wrong or
guilty or unjust. It seems implausible that people would ever start using a court
framework to categorise individual preferences. Why would they? And it seems
even more implausible that such a categorisation would become almost universal
across a variety of different human societies. </span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">Second,
there’s the problem of moral knowledge. If morality was a categorisation of our
individual preferences, it’s unclear how religion could work the way it does,
where people look to priests or scripture for moral guidance. The same applies
to the way children are typically raised, being taught moral judgements by
their parents. In all these situations, there appears to be communication of
information about the world, not just teaching people about their own
preferences. </span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">Theory #2: Morality Describes Social Norms</span></b></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">A
second common theory is that morality describes the social norms of a given
society. This appears to solve the problems of the first theory. It <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">does</i> make some sense to categorise
behaviour as wrong or guilty or unjust relative to the social norms of that
society. And it explains how religion and children’s moral education work: they
teach the social norms of their society. And because social norms can vary
among societies, it explains why different societies have different moralities,
for example that some societies regard conquest as highly virtuous, while
others don’t.</span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">This
is better, but it still doesn’t completely solve the problem of moral
knowledge. Consider the case of people in the 18<sup>th</sup> century arguing
that slavery is morally wrong. If morality were just a description of a
society’s norms, it’s difficult to make sense of this. Or consider the case
where a society voluntarily adopts another society’s morality. For example, there
were several occasions in European history where conquering pagan nations
adopted the Christian beliefs of the nations they conquered. Similarly, in the
18<sup>th</sup> century, France rapidly adopted a number of wide-ranging social
changes, inspired by occurrences in England. </span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">All
these situations suggest that people are able to hold the social norms of their
society up against something else. There doesn’t seem to be any other way to
explain how they would prefer another society’s norms over their own when
exposed to them. There must be some standard they are comparing them both to in
deciding which one they prefer, something that extends beyond their own social
norms.</span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">Theory #3: Morality Describes a
Society’s Relation to its Environment</span></b></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">The
apparent existence of moral knowledge motivated us to move from morality as a
description of individual preferences to morality as a description of the social
norms of an entire society, yet it seems that this is not enough. It appears
that we must move to something larger than an individual society. But what?</span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">Let’s
consider how morality arose. This stretches back far beyond recorded history,
so there is no way to know for sure, but there are some clues, at least. First,
as mentioned previously, it seems that morality has historically been closely
tied to the belief in powerful persons in nature. They set the laws for human behaviour
and punished breaches. It also seems clear that earlier theistic systems were
less abstract and thus more closely tied to natural objects than later systems.
Volcanoes required humans to pay tribute, and erupted if they didn’t. Buffalo
required humans to hunt sparingly, and withheld offering themselves up for food
if they didn’t.</span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">This
seems to suggest the answer we’re looking for. Morality is not a categorisation
of behaviour according to individual preferences, nor to a society’s social
norms, but to its relation to its <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">environment</i>.
Social norms follow from this relation, and individual preferences follow from social
norms. Which explains why humans would adopt a court framework. When combined
with a belief that nature is full of persons, it’s easy to see why this would
also extend to ascribing it court-like properties, inferred from simple human
tribunal processes.</span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">It
also explains why morality is so universal. Just as theism is the extension of
a social framework to nature, so morality can be seen as the extension of a
tribunal framework to nature. Of course, it’s possible that both theism and
morality evolved in a single human society and then spread, but it’s not an amazing
coincidence if it didn’t. It seems quite plausible that almost any human
society, given how central a social framework is to human behaviour, would
develop some kind of theistic, moral framework when faced with the complex and
punishing nature of its environment.</span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">And
this explains why societies would sometimes voluntarily replace their social
norms with others, and also why people within a society may rebel against the norms
of their society: the standard they are comparing their social norms to is their
environment. (Which may, of course, include other human societies.) This <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">is</i> moral knowledge; information about a
society’s environment interpreted through a court framework.</span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">Definition of Morality and Examples</span></b></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">We
can now articulate a full definition: morality is the use of a court framework
to structure the relation of a society to its environment into laws,
responsibilities, and appropriate measures of justice, and within which human
behaviour is evaluated.</span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">Let’s
see how this works through a few examples.</span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">A
pantheistic society learns over time that overhunting buffalo leads to
scarcity, which leads to starvation. It doesn’t possess the modern framework
that we would use to describe the situation, so it develops a moral framework
that fits into its general theistic framework: the buffalo request that humans
do not overhunt, and if they do the buffalo become angry and refuse to offer
themselves up for food. Overhunting is wrong (it breaks the moral law), while
hunting carefully does not. If humans are responsible for breaking the law, the
buffalo serve justice by not offering themselves up for food. In this
situation, what we would describe as a ‘requirement of nature’ (not
overhunting) is interpreted through a moral framework, which then carries
through to social norms and individual preferences (individual members of
society feel that overhunting is wrong).</span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">A
monotheistic Jewish society learns over time that eating pork leads to severe
illness or death. It doesn’t possess the knowledge of germs that we would use
to describe the situation, so it develops a moral framework that fits into its
general theistic framework: God requests that humans don’t eat pork, and
becomes angry if they do and punishes them with illness or death. Eating pork
is wrong, and this is enforced through social norms and carries through to
individual preferences (people ‘feel guilty’ if they eat pork, i.e., they feel
that they have broken a moral law). What we in modern terms would describe as a
requirement of nature (not eating pork because pigs carried lots of germs then)
is interpreted through a moral framework.</span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">A
modern secular society discovers that industrialisation has led to poor working
conditions in factories and is creating unrest. It continues to use a moral
framework for historical reasons, even after having relinquished its theistic
beliefs, so it describes this through what’s left of a moral framework:
inequality is ‘wrong’ and justice occurs when it is corrected. Social norms
follow from this, and individual preferences from these (people ‘feel guilty’
about inequality, i.e., they feel that they have broken a moral law). This can still
function like the earlier moral frameworks, as long as people don’t question it
too deeply. </span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">Of
course, moral laws do not arise suddenly to describe particular problems. They
carry over from earlier moral systems. There’s no question, for example, that
modern secular morality inherited a lot from earlier Christian beliefs.
Nevertheless, we can see how morality transforms to fit new societal problems.
For example, there has clearly been a shift over the past few centuries,
undoubtedly associated with increased urbanisation due to industrialisation,
away from an individualistic view of morality and towards a collective view,
which has increasingly resulted in the use of ‘society’ as a moral agent. Thus,
for example, one can say that it is an ‘injustice’ that a person is poor or
homeless, not necessarily because of the actions of any individual person, but
rather due to the actions of society as a whole. This surely is an adaptation
to the fact that human interactions are different in an industrialised society.
We still use the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">framework</i> of a legal
system, though.</span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">Morality is not the Best Method for Doing
What It Does</span></b></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">Having
satisfied ourselves that these examples demonstrate that our definition of
morality is accurate, we can move on to the next question. We first determined
that morality was the application of a moral framework to order observations,
but until we knew what those observations were, we couldn’t say anything about
whether a court framework is the best framework for doing so. We now have: the observations
we are ordering are those pertaining to the relation between a society and its
environment. So, is a court framework the best framework for ordering these
observations? The answer, in my opinion, is no. </span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">We
have better frameworks, for example in economics. Take communism. Communist
societies have consistently experienced disastrous results. From a moral
perspective, this is difficult to explain. Morality played a significant role
in the argument <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">for</i> communism, more
specifically the belief that inequality is morally wrong. So how does one
explain its failure? One could try to adopt a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">different</i> morality in trying to explain communism’s failures, for
example the libertarian perspective that it is morally wrong to seize private
property. The explanation then is that communism fails because it is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">evil</i>. But few people accept libertarianism
in all situations, so then you have to account for exceptions. You also have to
tie this into functional descriptions about human society. And you have to
accept morality as a bald assertion, meaning that it cannot be justified
further. And, of course, if you’re an atheist, you have to explain why you are
using a court framework without believing that an actual cosmic court exists.</span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">Contrast
that with the explanation proposed by economist Ludwig von Mises. He explained
that communism must fail, because a communist society lacks something critical:
information. Communism eliminates trade, since it removes private property and
tells people where to work. But when people trade they aren’t just trading
products and labour, they’re also trading information about their preferences,
and when this no longer occurs there’s no way for producers to know what to
make, and so eventually you end up with a society where people’s desires are
unfulfilled and there’s a spiral into misery. And people’s desires aren’t
arbitrary, they have evolved to form a system. </span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">In
this sense, society is analogous to an organism like the human body. Humans
have evolved behaviour that combines to form a system able to continuously
address environmental pressures as they occur through the transfer of resources
and information. Eliminating trade shuts down the system, except for a few
top-down pathways. This means that environmental pressures aren’t addressed and
build up in the system until it collapses. The human body is a calibrated
system of functions that have evolved to address environmental pressures as
they occur, thus keeping the body healthy. The same applies to a human society.
A moral framework based on moral laws and measures of justice can't possibly
describe the complexities of a human societal system in the way that a
functional framework can. There’s a level of sophistication in a functional
framework that simply doesn’t exist in a moral framework. There is no need to
appeal to morality here; it’s purely descriptive, and all of it verifiable, at
least in principle.</span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">Other
social sciences offer similar frameworks, and evolutionary theory is also a
powerful functional framework, although one that works in the longer term.</span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">A Functional Framework Allows Us to
Easily Solve Persistent Moral Problems</span></b></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">Not
only can be better address particular examples with a functional framework
rather than a moral framework, but we can solve persistent moral problems as
well.</span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">Take
the relativism vs. universalism problem. A persistent belief in moral
philosophy has been that moral statements need to be universal, in other words
that they must apply to everyone in all situations. Yet, studies of different
societies, both in ancient and modern times, have revealed major differences in
moral beliefs between societies. In other words, moral beliefs appear to be
relative to different societies. This seems problematic. If morality is
relative to a person or society, then, as we saw previously, moral knowledge is
impossible, and we can never judge other people’s morality against our own.
Yet, if morality is universal, then at least some societies’ morality must be
wrong. But wrong relative to what? Evolutionary theory resolves this easily.
Societies have different environments, and thus develop different moralities
accordingly. Moralities are relative. But environments, and their relation to human
societies, adhere to physical laws, and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">these</i>
are universal. This is quite typical for physical descriptions, perhaps the
best known being Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. Distances are relative to
each observer, and there is no privileged position, but spacetime intervals are
universal.</span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">Consider
another moral problem: individualism vs. collectivism. An argument in moral
philosophy, dating back at least to Plato and Aristotle, has been about whether
morality is about furthering the goals of individuals or collectives. (Not to
be confused with the previous question; individualist moralities can be stated
universally, e.g., ‘everyone should maximise their own happiness’, and
collectivist moralities can be relative to particular societies.) Evolutionary
theory also easily resolves this problem. Humans act individually, but they
have evolved collective behaviour that is part of their desires. It is neither
possible nor necessary to separate them.</span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">A
third problem, somewhat related to both the previous problems, is the class problem.
The question is whether different moralities apply to different members of a
society, and if so how one determines it. It has been a common feature across
human societies to categorise people into groups and hold them to different
moralities: priests, kings, slaves, children, men, women, and others.
Evolutionary theory, and to a lesser degree, economics, answers this easily.
Society specialises into classes when this allows it to better deal with its
environment. The most obvious being men and women, which is a long-term
specialisation of behaviour. There’s no need to try to fit this into a moral
framework; it’s much better explained through a functional framework based on
science.</span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">Possible Objections</span></b></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">The
most common objection when someone tries to bridge the apparent gap between
moral- and descriptive statements is logical: the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">naturalistic fallacy</i>, also known as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">David</i> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Hume’s is-ought problem</i>.
This problem, I believe, is widely misunderstood, because it conflates morality
with agency (or if one prefers, normativity). Moral statements describe the
relation between a society and its environment, with the environment originally
being thought of as having personhood and acting like a legislator and judge.
In other words, morality is external to the decisionmaker; it’s information
about the world. There’s nothing structurally different about the statements
‘stealing is wrong’ and ‘stealing leads to social instability’, except that in
the first case the consequences of a breach are unstated. Neither of these
statements are normative. In both cases, one must separately add the statement
‘I shouldn’t steal’. </span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">The
reason for the confusion, I think, is that the term ‘wrong’ is often implicitly
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">defined</i> as ‘I shouldn’t’, thus
conflating the two terms. This is an error, in my opinion. It seemingly stems
from a desire that originated in late Christianity to make morality <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">logically necessary</i>. Theologians were
not satisfied with morality being laws determined and judged by God, as had
traditionally been the belief. They wanted morality to be part of a logical
system, in accordance with the rationalist spirit of the time. Stealing is not
just wrong because God says so; it’s wrong by logical necessity and can be
stated in a logical proof. This idea has carried over to later secular
philosophy. In fact, with the disappearance of God it seems to have become even
more prominent. The desire is for a ‘cheat sheet’; a logical proof for certain
human behaviour. This, I think, is asking too much of morality. Like most
rationalist approaches that seek logical necessity, all it does is conflate two
terms; what appears to be logical necessity is really tautology. And like most
rationalist approaches, this just leads to confusion and does nothing to
advance actual knowledge.</span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">There
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">is</i> a genuine agency problem, related
to how we align normative and descriptive statements, which arguably leads into
the mind/body problem; the central problem in philosophy. (A possible answer
could be that normative statements are projections of behaviour, based on
incomplete information, since this is the way the words ‘should’ and ’ought’
are used in other contexts. There are still problems with this answer, though.)
But there is no need to conflate morality with this problem.</span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">A
second objection, closely related to the first, is practical: that replacing
moral statements with descriptive statements changes how people approach
decisions, because descriptive statements are not <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">binding</i> in a way that moral statements are. The idea is that moral
statements have some type of special status. (Albeit one that philosophers
struggle to define; it’s a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">feeling</i>
that moral statements are special in some sense.) This, I think, is just a
consequence of conflating morality with agency, resulting in an implicit
assumption that there is some kind of hypothetical moral statement that
describes logical necessity for human action, yet which humans somehow do not
necessarily act according to. Once one untangles morality and agency one
realises that this is nonsense. Moral statements have no special status; they
are statements of functional relations between behaviour and consequence.
Whether they are set by God or by a society’s environment doesn’t change their
basic structure, so there’s no reason it should fundamentally change the
decision-making process. Besides, the idea of logical necessity in human
decision-making is anachronistic; a vestige of a pre-scientific view of human
behaviour.</span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">A
third possible objection is emotional: that something is lost by replacing
moral statements with descriptive statements. The idea is that there’s a
certain magic to moral statements that descriptive statements don’t possess;
that the power of moral statements is in their irreducibility. This is
essentially the same argument as one might make against atheism; that replacing
person(s) with impersonal physical regularities makes the world less exciting.
This is true to a degree, I think, but it’s irrelevant. If persons in nature
don’t exist, then they don’t exist. And likewise, if a cosmic court doesn’t
exist, then it doesn’t exist.</span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">Conclusion: Why I’m an Amoralist</span></b></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">And
this brings us, finally, to the initial topic: amoralism. </span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">I
consider myself an amoralist because I reject the use of a court framework to
describe the environmental relations of a society, in the same way that I
consider myself an atheist because I reject the use of a person-based framework
for describing nature. These two things are not only historically related,
their rejection follows the same path: the replacement of an anachronistic,
anthropomorphic framework with one based on science. </span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">In
practice, that means reframing moral statements in functional terms. Whether
amoralism ultimately becomes the norm is a question of utility: are functional
frameworks able to make better predictions about the world, including human
behaviour, than moral frameworks? I believe that they are, and that this will
be increasingly confirmed in the future.</span></div>
<br />Uri Harrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14423493981889189115noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6266751614660563438.post-20675386841634844202017-03-26T18:27:00.001-07:002017-07-06T21:20:29.788-07:00UpdateI realised I needed to clarify and substantiate my thoughts. I've been putting my energy into that, rather than writing blog posts.<br />
<br />
I've also just started a twitter account: <a href="https://twitter.com/safeortrue">https://twitter.com/safeortrue</a>Uri Harrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14423493981889189115noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6266751614660563438.post-87097711396128830392016-12-19T07:21:00.001-08:002018-05-15T04:51:01.213-07:00Personal Story: How I Came to Have a Problem with Contemporary Morality<div style="margin: 0px 0px 12px;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><i>This is an article where I recall my experiences realising something was wrong with the culture.</i></span><br />
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><i><br /></i></span>
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">By the time I realised something was wrong, it was clear to
me that it had been building for a while. I had no recollection of feeling anything
unusual as a teenager, or even as late as my mid-twenties, so it must have begun
sometime after that. Probably soon after, as I had recently turned thirty and
it had clearly been building for some time. That was as much as I could narrow
it down. </span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 12px;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">But what was it? Looking back, I could roughly identify four
stages of development.</span></div>
<a name='more'></a><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">First, a gradual change in my consumption of various media and
entertainment products. I began to turn away from the things I had enjoyed in
my younger years: movies, television, books, music. I also began to actively seek
out products outside the mainstream. At the time, I didn’t think much of it,
beyond the fact that I was getting older and wanted to spend more time on other
activities.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">Then, as this continued, I began to notice a palpable
discomfort, not only during the increasingly rare times that I consumed these
products, but also in my everyday life: movie billboards on the street, music
videos playing at the gym, conversations with everyday people. The things I had
tried to avoid were gradually making their way into every part of my life, and
with it came an increasing discomfort that had begun to follow me around.
Still, though, I don’t recall thinking too deeply about this. My behaviour was
mostly reflexive and I was preoccupied with other things. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 12px;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">After a while, my discomfort morphed into anger. I began to
feel that I was under attack; that my discomfort was being <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">caused</i> by someone with a deliberate agenda and a systematic
approach. In hindsight, while I don’t recall much conscious reflection, the
pieces were starting to fall together in my subconscious. I began to sense that
there was a pattern to all this; that all the disparate aspects of the culture surrounding
me were pushing in the same direction. A direction which I now perceived as an
attack. So I began lashing out. In discussions with friends and family. On the
internet. But mostly in my own head. </span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 12px;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">And then, finally, things started to crystallise. I realised
that this was not just as an emotional problem, but an intellectual one. My
attention turned from lashing out to looking for answers: who is driving all of
this, and what are they trying to accomplish? I had some ideas, of course, but
they were quite fragmented; I was still searching for an overarching theme. It <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">seemed</i> to me that there was such a
thing, an invisible hand pushing all of contemporary culture in the same
direction, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it was.</span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 12px;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">One day I had a moment of clarity. I was watching Hostel 2, a
horror movie about a group of youngsters caught and sold for torture. In
hindsight, there was nothing special about this movie; it could have been any
of a number of mainstream movies. As I was watching, it suddenly dawned on me: this
whole thing is a façade. The filmmakers didn’t just develop a plot and then sneak
in a few moral messages, I realised. It’s the other way around. The moral
message <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">is</i> the plot, and everything
else is built on top of it, to give it the appearance of entertainment. </span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 12px;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">I realised this because at that moment the moral message became
clear to me: a full-blown condemnation of masculinity. Every aspect of the
movie, I now saw, was carefully chosen to support this underlying message. The
superficial plot. The musical cues. The choice of actors. The symbolism. All carefully
designed, with a thin layer of entertainment placed on top. Having realised
this, my world began to change. I started noticing the same pattern throughout
the culture. </span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 12px;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">What I had previously vaguely sensed I now saw in detail. And
it was everywhere, from movies to television to music to fashion to
advertising. The way in which heroes and villains were assigned certain
characteristics. The way in which plots would play out karmic justice. The way
in which imagery and music were used to stimulate emotional responses. It suddenly
seemed so carefully designed and co-ordinated. It couldn’t <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">really</i> be co-ordinated, or even deliberately designed, I thought,
yet there was the appearance of co-ordination. And it became even more apparent
as I started noticing developments. </span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 12px;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">It was as if every movie season, every television season,
every fashion season, followed a co-ordinated trend. As if they were moving
down a path. Things people thought were cool or fashionable weren’t just
arbitrary creations by cultural influencers. They were parts of a clear trend,
with each step building on the previous. A trend that, while it may have been
going on for a while, seemed to me to have undergone a phase shift in the early
2000s, causing me to feel under attack in a way I hadn’t previously.</span></div>
<div align="center" style="margin: 0px 0px 12px; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">***</span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 12px;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">My focus gradually shifted towards the people involved. I
lived in Europe, so my basic notion of the culture was that it was ‘American’. I
knew that movies were made in Hollywood, but had not thought too deeply about
it beyond that. Yet as I looked more closely things began to emerge. </span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 12px;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">On the surface, the culture appears quite diverse. The faces
of the culture, singers and actors, come from a variety of different
backgrounds, and it shows. But singers, especially very popular singers,
usually do not write their own songs, and actors certainly do not write their
own scripts. They are merely presenting what someone else has written. To
understand who is driving the culture one must look to the people behind the
scenes: writers, producers, directors, and executives. </span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 12px;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">And what one finds here, I discovered, is a very homogenous
group. Almost exclusively people who come from white, middle- or upper-class
homes on the American coasts, especially New York and Los Angeles, and who
predominantly have graduated from a small set of upscale universities. Many are
Ashkenazi Jews, despite making up a tiny portion of the population. This was an
eye-opener for me. But why does it matter? Because, I realised, this explains
the remarkable degree of co-ordination that appears to exist in the culture. </span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 12px;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">There is no <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">deliberate</i>
co-ordination of the culture. Rather, it’s the enactment of a particular belief
system, a belief system that is dominant in this segment of society. Because
such a large portion of cultural influencers share it, they can build off each
other’s work without ever having to communicate. And because they effectively
control the culture, they function as gatekeepers, ensuring that when people
from other backgrounds want access to cultural influence, only those who share
their belief system are allowed in.</span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 12px;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">But why was there this systematic attack on masculinity? What
was it in their belief system that was causing this? I had noticed something strange
about some of the cultural products. They had a certain feel to them. It wasn’t
just that these products were promoting certain beliefs; it was more than that.
They seemed <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">personal</i>, in a way I
couldn’t quite explain. This was most evident in a certain type of movie that
had rapidly gained popularity. Notable examples were Kill Bill, Kick Ass, and Sin
City. </span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 12px;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">What made these movies interesting, I felt, was that they embodied
the spirit of the culture, yet did so more openly and more extremely than other
cultural products. They were characterised by a very particular theme. The
villains were men, typically given very stereotypical masculine traits, both
physical and behavioural, exaggerated to make them seem unlikable and stupid. The
heroes were women, typically assigned balanced traits to make them seem likable
and resourceful. </span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 12px;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">The plots would typically be the following: the men start out
by harming the women, brutally and without justification, after which the women
regroup and resourcefully set out to revenge themselves, the movie ending with
the men beaten up and humiliated. Now, one might naively expect these movies to
be made by women, but that was not the case at all, I noticed. In fact, not
only were they almost exclusively made by men, they were almost exclusively <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">watched</i> by men. And not just any men, a
certain segment of men. The same segment that made them: white middle- and
upper class young men. </span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 12px;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">But why? The clue lay in how they responded to these movies.
It wasn’t entertainment for them. The emotional stimulation was too intense for
that, and the symbolism too overt. Rather, it seemed to me more like a sense of
obligation. Like they were willing themselves through the movies and were rewarded
at the end with a feeling of relief. These movies were devices, I realised.
Devices for self-flagellation. Young men would go to the cinema, would identify
with the villains through their overtly masculine traits, and then would
project on to them as they wronged the female protagonists and were ultimately
punished for their actions through physical harm and humiliation. </span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 12px;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">All of it supported by intensely graphic imagery and immersed
in unequivocal symbolism. There was nothing subtle about any of it. And so
these young men would leave the cinema saturated from emotional stimulation, but
having achieved release. At least for a moment, until whatever it was that had
made them crave release found its way back inside them. There was something so
very strange about this whole thing. Yet at the same time, so very familiar.</span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 12px;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">It was a cycle of guilt and self-flagellation, a distinct
characteristic of many religions. But there was no religion at work here, at
least none that I could see. Yet given the homogeneity of the cultural
influencers, there’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">something</i> about
their belief system that’s causing them to do this, I realised. The narrative of
these movies, of men wronging women and eventually being punished for it, seemed
like something they had internalised during their upbringing and were now
enacting. </span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 12px;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">It was undoubtedly a common narrative in this segment of
society, functioning almost like a religious myth. But why had it become so
popular among that group of people, and more importantly, why did the men in
this group have such a deep sense of guilt that they experienced such release from
enacting it in graphic detail?</span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 12px;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">The reason for this narrative having such power in that group
was that it reflected something much deeper, I realised. At the core of the
belief system that dominated this segment of society was a gender-related
slant. There was no other way to perceive it, especially when held up against
modern developments in evolutionary psychology. Men seem to have much stronger
tendencies toward certain types of behaviour: individualism, competitiveness,
power-seeking, risk-taking, and aggressiveness, while women seem to have
stronger tendencies toward collectivism, collaboration, altruism, restraint,
and passivity. And there is no real mystery why these tendencies exist, they
are well-explained by evolutionary theory. </span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 12px;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">Yet it seems clear that the belief system that dominates in
this segment of society regards the former as sinful at worst and tolerable at
best, while it regards the latter as virtuous. This, I found, is reflected
throughout the language and practices of this group of people. Altruism and
collaboration, especially, are treated with veneration, while individualism and
competitiveness are treated with suspicion or even outright hostility. </span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 12px;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">It’s no mystery, then, that men raised in this environment
intuitively recognise a conflict between the belief system thrust upon them and
some of their deepest biological tendencies, and as they come into maturity and
these biological tendencies strengthen find the conflict morphing into a deep
sense of guilt. Nor is it a mystery that they recognise that their masculinity
is at the centre of the conflict and that their guilt is tied to it. And so,
finally, it’s no mystery that they so piously embrace the narrative of the foolish
and unjust man punished for his sins by the wise and virtuous woman. It gives
them a concrete image to project onto as they search for ways to find release
for their guilt. </span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 12px;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">This also explained why I noticed a shift in the culture
around the early 2000s: the first generation of people raised in an environment
entirely governed by this belief system, from parents to teachers to peers,
started coming into positions of influence in the culture. And while popular
culture had long before begun inserting these beliefs into their entertainment
products, evident throughout the 80s and 90s, this seemed to me to mark a time
in the culture where the beliefs increasingly became the product itself, with
entertainment becoming a secondary consideration. </span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 12px;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">Culture used to be this way, of course, when Christianity
ruled the Western world, so this was in some sense a return to earlier times.
As Christianity had gradually lost its hold on the culture there seemed to me
to have been a period where it was less agenda-driven, or at least where there
wasn’t a single, dominant agenda, and where entertainment was the main focus. Now
it seemed to me that the culture had shifted to again being driven by a single
agenda; under the complete control of a single belief system. And now every new
movie, every new television show, was an opportunity for cultural influencers
to nudge society one more little step in the direction they wanted, with no
real resistance. </span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 12px;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">And following that development seemed to me to be an
increasing sense of guilt and self-flagellation among men. It had become a
vicious cycle. As these beliefs pervaded the culture men were increasingly
feeling a deep-seated guilt about the masculinity, which in turn lead them to
themselves echo the beliefs, as part of an attempt to acknowledge and thus find
relief for their guilt. As a consequence, the self-flagellation devices made
their way through the culture, finding their way in more subtle forms into an
increasing number of cultural products, which further perpetuated the cycle.
And it seemed to me that this procedure was expanding to other areas. </span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 12px;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">While masculinity was still the primary marker of guilt, ethnicity
became a secondary marker, thus allowing the cultural influencers to draw white
women into their circle of guilt. Perhaps most notably illustrated when Quentin
Tarantino, the most influential cultural driver of the aforementioned movies on
masculine self-flagellation, started making movies like Django Unchained and
Inglourius Basterds. His success, I thought, was first and foremost due to an
ability to sense building cultural trends and bring them to the forefront, presented
through over-the-top graphic imagery. </span></div>
<div align="center" style="margin: 0px 0px 12px; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">***</span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 12px;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">As I was in the midst of this process, another event was
underway: the 2008 US Presidential Elections. Despite not living in America, I
had a long-standing interest in American politics. Part of what distinguishes
American politics from that of most other countries is that it’s more
philosophical, which I found made for interesting debates. So, I followed with
interest. </span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 12px;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">The initial coverage and early debates were somewhat lacking
in substance, I thought. Yet as the primaries progressed something strange
happened. The media coverage shifted from a mostly dispassionate coverage of
the candidates to an increasingly passionate support of Obama. But this didn’t
seem to me to have much to do with his policies. His policies, even more so
than his opponents’, were quite vague, and that didn’t change much as the
campaign wore on. </span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 12px;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">This was a bit puzzling to me at the time, and I began to
feel a certain discomfort. I would open a newspaper or turn on CNN and there
would invariably be a report on Obama, brimming with enthusiasm, with just
enough restraint to give it a veil of objectivity. But it was clear what the
media thought; it shone through in the words they used, the images they showed,
the issues they emphasised. </span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 12px;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">And this was even more true of the European media, I found.
They seemed to know even less about Obama’s policies than their American
counterparts, yet their coverage would be full of pro-Obama articles attempting
to explain how Obama and his policies would benefit America and the world.
This, of course, carried over to the population. I noticed that social
gatherings would frequently contain enthusiastic conversations about Obama,
where people would reference his various policies as the reason for their
support, yet upon question they had no real idea of the content of his
policies, nor of his opponents’. </span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 12px;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">I quickly realised during these conversations what was going
on: people’s support for Obama had nothing to do with his policies. They were a
means of rationalising people’s real reasons for supporting Obama, not just to
other people but to themselves as well. The real reasons seemed clear to me: a
combination of Obama’s ethnicity and the enthusiastic support of cultural and
academic influencers. Yet, for most of these people, those were not acceptable
reasons for supporting a political candidate, so they used policies as
rationalisation. This led to something of a charade, both in private
conversations and in the media. </span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 12px;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">In some ways, Obama’s election was consistent with what I had
noticed in the culture: the subtle use of morality and guilt as a tool of
persuasion. As his campaign went on there seemed to be an increasingly
emotional attachment. There would be video clips of him delivering a speech in
his stilted and slightly awkward manner, during which the camera would pan to
the front of the audience to show young white college students sobbing
uncontrollably. </span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 12px;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">When he was elected, there were reports of college students
throughout America marching all night chanting his campaign slogan over and
over. But what I now noticed went beyond morality itself. There was an attempt
to rationalise the morality; to make it <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">seem</i>
rational. And this was not just movie directors and screenwriters and the like.
This was news media. It was intellectuals. People who, unlike those in the
entertainment industry, defined themselves largely through a commitment to truth.
Yet there was something very <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">untruthful</i>
about these rationalisations.</span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 12px;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">I realised that this was just the tip of the iceberg; that the
rationalisation I noticed during the Obama campaign was just one of an array of
methods that secular moralists use to promote their moral beliefs under the
guise of science and reason, thus creating the illusion that secular morality
is more scientific than it actually is.</span></div>
<div align="center" style="margin: 0px 0px 12px; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">***</span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 12px;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">As I began to piece all this together, the feelings of anger
and discomfort that I had felt for a while came to a head. Finally, I realised
what it was that was bothering me: an inner conflict. A conflict that stemmed
from trying to reconcile my observations with a belief that I was only vaguely
aware that I held. I now understood what it was, as it upon reflection came to
the forefront of my awareness. </span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 12px;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">It was a model; a categorisation of society into two groups
of people: religious and rational. There was some history to this. I grew up in
a mildly religious home and attended moderately religious schools for a number
of years. My exposure to religion was mild enough to not impose itself on me, yet
enough to give a basic idea of what it was about. I wasn’t impressed.
Fascinated with science, I recall myself shaking my head in religious classes.
I declared myself an atheist in my early teens and my parents allowed me to
move to a secular school. </span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 12px;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">And I never really looked back. In hindsight, it’s clear I
held on to a certain categorisation of people, formed during my childhood. Religious
people were irrational, emotional, prone to misuse of reason and science to fit
their beliefs, and driven by notions of guilt and sin. Meanwhile, secular
people were rational, unemotional, placed reason and science above any
particular beliefs, and were driven by a commitment to truth. </span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 12px;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">I had gone through much of my life secure in this belief. And
while I had been aware that my economic views differed from most intellectuals,
I had held to the unquestioned belief that it was just a question of rational
discourse. For people free of irrational beliefs, everything can be resolved through
rational argument, I had assumed without deeper thought. But I now came to
realise that this model was an illusion. There can be no agreement on those
types of issues when beneath a thin layer of science and reason are seemingly irrational
moral beliefs. Even less so when that layer of science and reason is manipulated
to support those moral beliefs. </span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 12px;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">This is what had bothered me so much about Obama’s campaign.
I had waited for a policy discussion, armed with my own ideas on government and
economics. But it never came. Instead, intellectuals had simply avoided it
entirely, engaging in an emotional and morally-driven process covered under a
thin veneer of rational discourse. I now realised that this would <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">always</i> be the case. There would always
be another symbol to rally behind, a new moral battle to fight, more guilt to
provoke. And through all of this society would continue down the path it’s
heading, as government keeps growing and feelings of guilt and self-hatred deepen.</span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 12px;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">Meanwhile, science and reason would be held up as justification
for all this. It was a red herring, I now saw all too clearly. When push came
to shove, when issues came close enough to core moral beliefs, science and reason
would morph into tools of manipulation for most intellectuals, regardless of
their claims to the contrary.</span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 12px;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;">There was something very, very wrong with this whole thing, I
thought. This wasn’t what I signed up for when I declared myself an atheist all
those years ago. And so, I was forced to reassess my model of society. I did
not, as I had previously believed, belong to the group of people I had
mistakenly labelled as rational. This group, I now realised, was engaged in a
systematic attack on my values, with morality and guilt as its tools, and a
veil of science and reason as its cover. In fact, for all its criticism of
religion, it was remarkably <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">like</i>
religion itself.</span></div>
Uri Harrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14423493981889189115noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6266751614660563438.post-12787799865566509742016-12-09T07:08:00.001-08:002017-11-21T12:29:00.987-08:00Where Does Leftism Lead?<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Leftism holds enormous
influence over Western society. Most of our central institutions, from academia
to the media to the entertainment industry, are dominated by people who
identify as leftist (or an equivalent label such as liberal or progressive). To
take one example, </span></span><a href="http://heterodoxacademy.org/2015/09/14/bbs-paper-on-lack-of-political-diversity/"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="color: #0563c1; font-family: inherit;">a recent US study</span></span></a><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> shows that left-leaning academic
psychologists outnumber their right-leaning colleagues by a ratio of 12:1, and
that an explosion has occurred over the past 25 years which shows no sign of
slowing down.</span></span><br />
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Given their influence,
and since activism seems to be an integral part of leftism, meaning that
leftists are typically interested in </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">changing</span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;">
society, this raises an important question: what do they want to change society
into?</span></span></div>
<a name='more'></a><br />
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">For those not on the left,
this is a pressing matter, especially given recent developments that push
society in a direction many find deeply concerning.</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">For a lot of these
people, leftism ultimately leads to communism. Partly because it has done so in
the past, and partly because communism seems like the logical conclusion of
central leftist goals, for example ‘achieving equality’ and ‘fighting
oppression’.</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I would argue, though,
that communism doesn’t fully capture all aspects of leftism, especially those
related to cultural issues. It also doesn’t explain why leftism has such a hold
on so many people, even after communism has failed so disastrously. Friedrich
Nietzsche suggested that leftists were driven by resentment, and this idea is
still popular, but I find it highly implausible. After all, many leftists are
quite wealthy and in positions of significant power.</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">In this article, I propose
a different answer, one that I believe better captures the full extent of
leftism, while also explaining why it is so seductive.</span></span></div>
<br />
<div align="center" style="margin: 0px; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">***</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Several years ago, I
encountered the belief system known as spiritualism. As I read some of its
literature, I was struck by how much it resembled leftism, beneath the
superficial differences. </span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Leftism, unlike most
belief systems, does not have a set of explicit core ideas. Rather, it’s a movement
based on partially defined beliefs and appeals to emotion, so identifying its
core beliefs is not easy. Yet I found in spiritualism a set of ideas that seemed
to tease out some of the fundamental elements of leftism.</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The core idea in spiritualism
is that humans fundamentally consist of an eternal spirit</span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">, </span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;">which is reincarnated again and again in different forms. Consequently,
physical characteristics, including gender, ethnicity, class, and ability,
conceal a person’s true nature. Therefore, rising above these physical
characteristics is the main measure of achievement. Eventually, it is thought
that a person can let go entirely of physical form and return to </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">oneness</span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> with other spirits. In such a
state, there is no judgement or competition or envy or hatred or even sex; only
Platonic love. (A similar idea is held in some Eastern religions, most notably
Buddhism, where the final state is known as </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">nirvana</span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;">.)</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The main differences
between spiritualism and leftism are obvious. Leftism rejects the idea of an
afterlife, and it doesn’t use overtly religious terms like ‘spirit’ or ‘nirvana’.
Aside from that though, there are striking similarities. Firstly, there’s the
belief that humans have some kind of </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">inherent
equality</span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;">, and that physical characteristics conceal it by wrongly
differentiating people. Secondly, there’s the belief that stripping away those
physical characteristics allows the inherent equality to shine through.
Thirdly, there’s the belief that once that occurs, humans will live in a state
of utopian undifferentiation (i.e., equality).</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Essentially, leftism
is the attempt to create nirvana </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">on Earth</span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;">.
And instead of it being a personal journey, it is one that is enforced on
society.</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Assuming this is true,
does it provide us with a framework for understanding why leftists act as they
do? I think it does.</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">For example, it
explains the left’s current preoccupation with transgenderism. Canadian
psychology professor Jordan Peterson, who has been under attack by leftists for
questioning recent initiatives related to transgenderism, including legally
mandating the use of a large number of gender pronouns, </span></span><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrKvLO523oM"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="color: #0563c1; font-family: inherit;">has remarked</span></span></a><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> that the push for gender pronouns is seemingly not being
driven by transgender people, but by leftists. From a nirvana-on-Earth perspective,
this makes sense. Gender differentiates people and is therefore wrong (i.e., it
conceals people’s true nature), and by pushing for gender pronouns and
generally promoting transsexuality as a key issue leftists blur gender lines, eventually
working toward an elimination of gender altogether. It’s not about transgender
people, it’s about undifferentiation.</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">It also explains why,
for much the same reason, leftists have drifted again and again toward communism,
despite its disastrous results. Some people having more wealth or power than
others is wrong, because it differentiates people. Even if society as a whole
is better off, in fact even if </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">every
single person</span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> is better off, it’s still wrong because ultimately wealth and
power do not matter; undifferentiation (i.e., equality) is what matters.</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Similarly, it explains
why leftists seem so set on globalisation and breaking down national
boundaries. The European Union being the prime example. Nations differentiate
people and are therefore wrong.</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Finally, it explains
why leftist thinkers like Jacques Derrida believed that </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">categorisation</span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> is wrong. This is a prominent theme in
postmodernism, which has defined much of recent leftist thought, and extends to
related issues like </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">judgment</span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> and </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">truth </span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;">and</span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> reason</span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;">. These ideas are also central to Buddhism: the belief that
human thought </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">imposes</span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> differentiation
on an undifferentiated reality, and that rising above differentiation is the
ultimate goal. (There are many parallels between postmodernism and
spiritualism/Buddhism; the concept of </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">alienation</span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;">
being another example, which suggests that humans have become separated from
the source.)</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Now, of course, there
are different degrees of leftism, and people often have more than one
motivation for their actions. And leftists would undoubtedly give other reasons
for their actions in, for example, pushing for globalisation. They probably
believe these reasons themselves. But what we’re trying to get at is the core
element in leftism; the common denominator of all the different actions that
leftists take. The answer seems clear to me: they are driven by a deeply held
belief that differentiation is wrong, a belief that they themselves may not
even be fully aware of. </span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">But wait a minute. It
seems crazy that millions of people, many with intellectual backgrounds, would hold
something like that as their core belief, even if it is implicit. </span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Actually, when we look
at the origins of leftism, it’s not that crazy.</span></span></div>
<br />
<div align="center" style="margin: 0px; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">***</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Leftism emerged out of
Christianity during the 18</span><sup><span style="font-family: inherit;">th</span></sup><span style="font-family: inherit;"> and 19</span><sup><span style="font-family: inherit;">th</span></sup><span style="font-family: inherit;"> Century, as a
consequence of intellectual and social developments. Ostensibly, a central part
of this was the transition from a supernatural view of the world to a natural
one. When we look closer, though, this was only partly the case. </span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Christianity has two major
supernatural elements: God and the human soul. Yet while the former was largely
removed from our models of the world, replaced by scientific laws, the latter
was not. We simply changed its name, instead referring to it in terms such as </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">inherent equality</span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;">. As leftism emerged
out of Christianity as the dominant moral belief system, it shed the idea of
God and an afterlife, while relabelling the notion of the soul in nontheistic
terms. In fact, this relabelled notion of the soul </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">is</span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> the central element in leftism, leading to a systematic attempt
to remove differentiation (i.e., to create equality) among people.</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">This explains why
leftism seems so much like spiritualism. Christianity without God very nearly </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">is</span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> spiritualism (reincarnation aside). Instead
of people shedding their physical bodies upon death to join God and each other in
Heaven, they shed their physical bodies to join together in an undifferentiated
union. And when you further remove the notion of an afterlife you get a
nirvana-on-Earth utopia, which is what leftism seems to strive for.</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">It also explains why
leftism is so seductive, especially in a post-Christian world. It really does </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">seem</span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> like humans are inherently equal,
that beneath our differences there is some kind of identical object that we all
share. How else can one explain the remarkably similar and coordinated ways that
humans act, across different cultures, ethnicities, and genders?</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Add to that how
leftism leverages a powerful human emotion, empathy, by framing the quest for
undifferentiation as the elimination of suffering (which Buddhism also does,
although on a personal level), and then further add the appeal of coming
together around a common cause, and you have a very alluring proposition.</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Leftism works much the
same way as religions do, except it hides its religious elements below the
surface, and thus appears to not be a religion. This makes leftists think they
can have their cake and eat it too. They get to practice what is essentially
religion while denouncing traditional religion, especially Christianity, as
unscientific.</span></span></div>
<br />
<div align="center" style="margin: 0px; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">***</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">What does science actually
say about leftism? The same thing it says about traditional religion. Just as
science shows that despite the </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">appearance</span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;">
of the world being created by God, scientific laws provide a better
explanation, it shows that despite the appearance of humans being inherently
equal, scientific laws provide a better explanation. Humans appear remarkably
similar because they are made up of similar biological processes, and these
processes have evolved to produce coordinated behaviour. But there is no
inherent equality; it’s physical processes all the way down. Trying to strip
away physical differences to get at the inherent equality inside gradually
removes everything that makes humans and their society what it is, until
ultimately there is nothing left. </span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Two humans are no more
</span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">inherently</span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> equal than two apples are;
they’re equal to the extent their components are, and different to the extent
they aren’t. Thinking otherwise is anachronistic Platonism. </span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">This explains why
communism has repeatedly failed so disastrously, and why a nirvana-on-Earth
that attempts to go even further by removing national, ethnic and gender differences
would do even worse. These elements serve a purpose: they allow for a dynamic,
competitive, and specialised society that can adapt effectively to environmental
pressures.</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">There is good reason
to always be a little sceptical of scientific theories. They are, after all,
provisional. That said, the past 400 years of scientific discovery has
systematically built a broad and coherent framework for describing and predicting
the world, including human behaviour, one that has proven remarkably successful.
Leftism conflicts with this framework. Because leftism is so widely held among
scientists, especially social scientists, the conflict has been downplayed. Scientists
have generally only challenged the more extreme leftists, those who view the
world as being entirely a social construct concealing an underlying reality of
inherent undifferentiation. But there is a reason these people believe what
they do; they are taking leftism to its logical conclusion. Scientists need to
challenge leftism in full, with the same vigour they challenge traditional
religion.</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">This is not to say, of
course, that there’s anything wrong with empathy and altruism. They are
powerful mechanisms that have evolved for good reason. The problem is leftism,
the belief that humans are inherently equal and that consequently physical
attributes are superficial and concealing and should be corrected. </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">This</span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> is what needs to be challenged, not
through activism and angry rhetoric, but through science. And the purpose of
doing so is to eventually replace leftism with a better model of societal
function, one that is based on science.</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">This is a sensitive
topic, and getting it wrong could have serious consequences. But there are two
reasons, I think, for pursuing this. Firstly, treating truth as a goal in
itself has been so beneficial for society historically, even when challenging
established beliefs, that doing so here also is likely to be beneficial. And
secondly, the disastrous effects of leftism in the past when it has been the
dominant, unopposed belief system suggests that not challenging it could have terrible
consequences for Western society, especially as traditional religion, which has
typically been the main opposition to leftism, continues to lose influence.</span></span></div>
Uri Harrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14423493981889189115noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6266751614660563438.post-76596004375773952372016-12-03T11:44:00.000-08:002017-07-06T20:25:53.102-07:00We Need to Change Social Science<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>Here’s a (spaced
out for easier reading) passage from my article The Amoral Society, where I say
something about how I believe leftism pervades the social sciences:</i></span></span><br />
<i></i><br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 0px 48px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">There are four basic ways in which
this takes place. </span></span></div>
<br />
<a name='more'></a><br /><br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 0px 48px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Firstly, there’s the way in which scientific
authorities and organisations promote morality to the public. Common examples
are: Popular scientific figures engaging in moral debates or writing moralising
newspaper commentaries flaunting their scientific authority. Scientific
organisations mixing morality into their practices, such as the Nobel Committee
giving out their Peace Prize, essentially a morality award, in between science
awards. Scientific conferences holding side-sessions promoting certain moral
views. None of this makes the moral discussions or awards themselves
scientific, but by utilising scientific figures and/or a scientific backdrop it
gives the </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">impression</span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> that they are.
While this is intended to promote certain moral beliefs to the public, the
side-effect is that it also creates the impression </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">within</span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> science that these beliefs are more scientific than they are,
especially since those figures and organisations carry a lot of weight among
rank-and-file scientists. </span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 0px 48px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Secondly, there’s the way in which scientific
terminology and moral terminology overlap. For example, words like ‘bias’,
‘discrimination’ and ‘equality’, words which have distinct scientific meanings,
have secondary moral meanings. This not only give moral judgements the illusion
of being scientific, but also can lead to equivocation between the scientific
and moral meanings, making it difficult to separate the science from the
non-science. An extension of that is using scientific </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">naming practice</span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> for moral terminology, as in words like
‘xenophobia’ and ‘homophobia’. The ‘phobia’ suffix is normally used to denote
mental illness, but these are purely moral judgements. </span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 0px 48px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Thirdly, there’s the tendency among scientists
and other intellectuals to </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">selectively</span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;">
appeal to scientific facts and principles to support their moral beliefs. This
creates a bias both inside and outside science. </span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 0px 48px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">And fourthly, there’s the way in
which peer-pressures and sensitive environments exist in areas that touch upon prevailing
moral beliefs, steering scientific inquiry away from certain topics and thus
biasing scientific output accordingly. For example, people will commonly applaud
scientific research that sets out to support prevailing moral beliefs, even
when it fails (‘fighting the good fight’), yet only begrudgingly acknowledge
research that sets out to disprove prevailing moral beliefs when it succeeds,
and excoriate it when it fails. While sufficiently well-proven research can
overcome almost any amount of resistance, as history shows, the reality is that
science is difficult and often works through build-ups of vague hypotheses and incomplete
observations. If the requirement for any scientist that challenges prevailing
moral beliefs is perfectly documented research in order to avoid peer-condemnation
and career-harm, there won’t be a lot of scientists challenging prevailing
moral beliefs. Good science requires a fertile environment where ideas can be
advanced and built on gradually. And most students, of course, notice this
before choosing their career path. Those students who already have strong
beliefs in line with prevailing morality will be drawn toward the social
sciences, not just in a quest for truth, but as a vehicle to </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">promote</span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> their beliefs. Meanwhile those
students who don’t have these beliefs will recognise the social sciences as hostile
and go into other fields, which leads to a vicious circle.</span></span></div>
<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span>Uri Harrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14423493981889189115noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6266751614660563438.post-87618340688112480462016-12-03T10:18:00.000-08:002016-12-03T10:18:01.441-08:00Morality is neither an external object nor a personal preference, it’s a simplifying framework<div style="text-align: justify;">
<i><span style="font-family: inherit;">
I originally posted this on philpapers.org on 27 October. It provides a brief overview of my view on morality.</span></i></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The central question in meta-ethics, and arguably all of
ethics, is the question of what moral statements refer to. Several candidates
have been proposed, including Platonic objects, natural objects, commands, and
personal preferences. The answer, I suggest, is that it is none of these.
Rather, morality is a framework. We see this by looking at common moral terms:
‘right’ and ‘wrong’, ‘justice’, ‘guilt’, ‘responsibility’, ‘blame’, and
‘rights’. These terms all have something in common: they are legal terms. Since
morality dates to prehistoric times, it’s easy to see where this could have
come from: prehistoric societies observed nature acting in a ‘court-like’ way –
for example punishing them for overhunting – and inferred that this was a
larger version of their own tribunal processes. Thus, we can define morality as
an anthropomorphic framework based on the analogy of a human court, applied to
human behaviour and its relation to nature. The framework persisted through
human religious history, with various gods being the lawmaker and judge. </span></span></div>
<a name='more'></a><br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"></span><span style="line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">This presents a problem: human society has worked hard to
eliminate non-natural objects from our model of the world,</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"> replacing them with
natural descriptions. Assuming we don’t </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">really</span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;">
believe nature is a giant court, the question is how we replace morality with a
natural description. To do this, we need to look at what we are trying to
describe through the framework, at a more detailed level than simply our
relation to nature. There are two ways to get at this, and they lead to the
same result, it seems. Firstly, we can treat morality as an attempt to describe
patterns in our behaviour, for example the way human societies encourage or
discourage certain behaviour through social pressures or punishment, and look
for the most general description. Secondly, we can treat morality as an attempt
to describe our emotions – or what one might call our ‘moral intuition’ – and
look for the most general description, i.e., the ‘highest good’. They lead to
the same path because evolutionary theory shows that </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">all</span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> our behaviour, including our emotions, has evolved as
mechanisms to support human survival. Evolutionary theory demonstrates, even
more clearly than what would have been apparent to prehistoric societies, that
nature regulates human behaviour. Nature doesn’t ‘punish’ us according to a set
of moral laws, it adjusts our behaviour through natural selection when we are
unfit for it. And there are no fixed court-like laws; when the environment
changes so must we. </span></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"></span><span style="line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Replacing
morality is similar to replacing theism. We adopt a natural (i.e., functional)
framework for describing human behaviour and its relation to nature, and use
gaps where we don’t know. This is a better approach because it provides us with
a methodology for finding out: empirical investigation. We need to give up the
(implicit) idea that when we make moral statements we’re conveying laws of a
giant court, revealed to us through a mystical process of moral intuition.
There is no such thing. Instead we must accept that when we make moral statements
we’re synthesising our underlying emotions and other knowledge into general
descriptions of human behaviour and its relation to nature. And once we realise
that, it’s better to give up the simplifying framework so we can utilise
empirical methods and fit it together in a single framework with our non-moral
knowledge, where especially knowledge of evolutionary theory is helpful. This
does require a different approach to communication and reflection. We are no
longer passing along commands or court-like laws when we communicate on these
issues. Instead, we are sharing information about other people’s behaviour and
about nature, just as we would any other factual description. The important
thing to realise is that to recast moral statements we need to unpack them into
two parts: a set of underlying emotions and factual knowledge, and an </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">interpretation</span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> of those into a moral
framework. We need to preserve the former while replacing the latter. </span></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><br /></div>
Uri Harrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14423493981889189115noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6266751614660563438.post-61502024777157191232016-10-25T23:16:00.000-07:002017-07-06T21:18:42.634-07:00The Amoral Society<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>This is a long article I wrote on morality, also put up on philpapers.org. My views have developed a bit since.</i></span></span><br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><b><i><br /></i></b></span>
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Introduction</span></span></b></div>
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">In the early 1990s a new cultural narrative emerged. It
started out in cult movies such as Léon and Nikita, made its way into
blockbusters like Kill Bill and Sin City, and then spread to television, music,
and even advertising. What distinguishes this narrative is that it centres
around men being physically harmed and humiliated by women. As the narrative has
evolved, the depiction of physical harm and humiliation has become increasingly
celebratory and graphically detailed. Typically, it occurs through the
following plot device: The villains are men with well-defined masculine traits,
both physical and behavioural, often exaggerated for effect. The heroes are
women with well-defined feminine traits. The men start out by harming the
women, brutally and unjustifiably, after which the women regroup and set out to
revenge themselves, ending with the men being beaten up and humiliated in
graphic detail. The plot is typically supported by overt symbolism, alongside music
and imagery intended to provoke intense emotional reactions, bordering on
overstimulation. The most interesting thing, though, is not the narrative
itself, but its producers and viewers. They are almost exclusively men. Why?</span></span><br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Like any culture, contemporary Western culture repeats a
small number of narratives over and over with slight variations: The physically
unimpressive hero who defeats the powerful villain. The alliance of selfless
heroes who collaborate to defeat the selfish villains. The aggressive and
overconfident man who is eventually humbled. The victimised woman who
overcomes. The businessman who ultimately is punished for his greed. There is a
pattern to these narratives that extends beyond superficial gender-based
attributes: a </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">set of values</span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> that aligns
almost exactly with gender. Research in psychology suggests that men typically
have stronger tendencies toward individualism, competitiveness, confidence, and
aggressiveness, while women typically have stronger tendencies toward altruism,
collaboration, humility, and restraint. Yet, heroes are almost always
altruistic, collaborative, humble, restrained, and physically unimposing, while
villains are almost always individualistic, competitive, confident, aggressive,
and physically imposing. Often the behaviour and attributes of the villains are
exaggerated for effect: they are selfish, hypercompetitive, overconfident, and
overaggressive, sometimes to the point of absurdity. The opposite never occurs:
villains are never overly altruistic, overly collaborative, overly humble, or
overly restrained.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">By studying these cultural narratives, we can derive our
underlying moral belief system: Altruism is morally superior to individualism. Collaboration
is morally superior to competition. Humility is morally superior to confidence.
Restraint is morally superior to aggressiveness. Now, of course, we didn’t
invent this. It goes back at least to Judaism, perhaps best illustrated by the
story of David and Goliath, which contains many of these elements. Yet, it seems
we’ve drawn out this aspect of Judaeo-Christian morality while eliminating the
rest. And so, as religion is disappearing from Western society these narratives
have become the sole focus of our culture, making them more and more intense. Consequently,
men have picked up on this, at least implicitly, and are realising that there
is a connection between being a man and being immoral. They start to feel
guilty not only for what they do, but for what they are, and this strengthens
as they come into maturity and their tendencies develop. They recognise that
their masculinity is at the centre of the conflict and that their guilt is tied
to it, which explains the new cultural narrative: it is both an embrace and an amplification
of the established cultural narratives. They identify with the male villains
through their overtly masculine traits and project onto them as they are
punished and humiliated, with the female characters serving as a device for
maximal humiliation, the whole experience amplified through overt symbolism and
intense emotional stimulation. When it’s over, they can leave the theatre or
turn off the television exhausted from overstimulation, but with a feeling of
release. For all our notions of having left religion behind there is something
strangely religious about this process. It is self-flagellation.</span></span><br />
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">This isn’t the only noteworthy societal development.
Something else has been going on for a while, in another area of society: government
keeps growing. In fact, it has been growing so consistently and for so long
that it invites the uncomfortable observation that we seem to be moving closer
and closer to communism. Communism has already been tested in several
societies, and the results were universally catastrophic. Millions of people
died of starvation. Millions more were killed by the regimes for voicing
opposing beliefs. Secret police and surveillance systems were set up to monitor
people. People were forbidden from leaving and were shot for trying. So why are
we seemingly moving in this direction? It’s not just increased redistribution
of resources, it’s all aspects: Increased regulation. Increased surveillance.
Increased limits on free speech. And while we’re not there yet, it seems that
we’re seeing many of the outcomes of communism, just to a lesser degree,
including economic stagnation and limits on personal freedoms.</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The explanation is tied to the moral belief system we just
uncovered. If altruism is morally superior to individualism, it follows that in
a situation where one person has more resources than another, the morally
correct behaviour is for that person to share the difference between them. And
this will </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">always</span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">be</span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">the</span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">case</span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> when one person has more than
another. Since government is the enforcer of society’s moral beliefs, this
explains not only why government has grown, but why it consistently keeps
growing: communism follows necessarily from the belief that altruism is morally
superior to individualism. This also explains why many intellectuals were so
enthusiastic about communism when it was first developed, and even after its
failures started to present themselves. They intuitively felt that communism
followed necessarily from their moral beliefs. Of course, intellectuals no
longer talk about communism as an ideal, given its disastrous results. Instead,
they have adopted an incremental approach, focusing on one issue at a time
while refusing to discuss the long-term outlook. But since our underlying moral
beliefs haven’t changed we’re still moving in that direction, we’re just not
talking about it anymore.</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">This leads to a third strange issue in contemporary Western
society: an apparent lack of scientific interest and progress on these issues. Millions
of people have died because of communism. Where is the body of research
examining what went wrong, asking why so many intellectuals were so convinced
of its future success, questioning whether there is a core belief somewhere
that is false? Where is the research examining why there has been a virtually
unbroken growth in government over the past hundred years, and what happens if
that development is extrapolated? Where is the body of research studying why so
many young men are feeling alienated by Western society, not just a superficial
acknowledgement but a study of the underlying causes? Where are the studies of
the cultural narratives of contemporary society and how they tie into the
promotion of specific moral beliefs? It’s not just a lack of research on these
issues. When someone does address them, typically someone from outside
academia, the response from within academia is often vitriolic. A good
illustration of this is Ayn Rand’s persistently popular novel Atlas Shrugged.
Whatever one thinks of the quality of the novel or the philosophical system it
expounds, the fact that so many people, especially young men, find it so deeply
moving should be a clue that there’s </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">something</span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;">
here worth studying. Yet responses by people who should be taking this
phenomenon as an opportunity to study and learn, moral philosophers and
psychologists, have almost exclusively been attempts to disprove it. And doing
so without making any attempt to understand, or even acknowledge, the
criticisms of contemporary morality that form the basis of this novel and which
clearly is driving much of its appeal. What happened to the scientific ideal
that one should always look to prove oneself wrong? It’s no surprise that moral
philosophy has made virtually no progress in the 150 years since it reached a
dead end with Karl Marx. How could it, if moral philosophers are unwilling to
question their core beliefs? </span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">It is sometimes asked why the social sciences don’t make
progress the way the physical sciences do. The answer is invariably that it’s
because the social sciences deal with much more complexity. I disagree. There’s
plenty of complexity in the physical sciences as well. The answer, I believe, is
that progress in the social sciences is being blocked by moral beliefs. More
precisely, the social sciences are pervaded by moral beliefs to an extent that not
only disincentivises research into areas that potentially challenge them, but to
an extent that prevents social scientists from even asking questions.</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">There are four basic ways in which this takes place. Firstly,
there’s the way in which scientific authorities and organisations promote
morality to the public. Common examples are: Popular scientific figures engaging
in moral debates or writing moralising newspaper commentaries flaunting their
scientific authority. Scientific organisations mixing morality into their
practices, such as the Nobel Committee giving out their Peace Prize,
essentially a morality award, in between science awards. Scientific conferences
holding side-sessions promoting certain moral views. None of this makes the
moral discussions or awards themselves scientific, but by utilising scientific
figures and/or a scientific backdrop it gives the </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">impression</span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> that they are. While this is intended to promote certain
moral beliefs to the public, the side-effect is that it also creates the
impression </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">within</span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> science that these
beliefs are more scientific than they are, especially since those figures and
organisations carry a lot of weight among rank-and-file scientists. Secondly,
there’s the way in which scientific terminology and moral terminology overlap. For
example, words like ‘bias’, ‘discrimination’ and ‘equality’, words which have
distinct scientific meanings, have secondary moral meanings. This not only give
moral judgements the illusion of being scientific, but also can lead to equivocation
between the scientific and moral meanings, making it difficult to separate the
science from the non-science. An extension of that is using scientific </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">naming practice</span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> for moral terminology, as
in words like ‘xenophobia’ and ‘homophobia’. The ‘phobia’ suffix is normally
used to denote mental illness, but these are purely moral judgements. Thirdly,
there’s the tendency among scientists and other intellectuals to </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">selectively</span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> appeal to scientific facts
and principles to support their moral beliefs. This creates a bias both inside
and outside science. And fourthly, there’s the way in which peer-pressures and
sensitive environments exist in areas that touch upon prevailing moral beliefs,
steering scientific inquiry away from certain topics and thus biasing scientific
output accordingly. For example, people will commonly applaud scientific research
that sets out to support prevailing moral beliefs, even when it fails
(‘fighting the good fight’), yet only begrudgingly acknowledge research that
sets out to disprove prevailing moral beliefs when it succeeds, and excoriate
it when it fails. While sufficiently well-proven research can overcome almost
any amount of resistance, as history shows, the reality is that science is
difficult and often works through build-ups of vague hypotheses and incomplete
observations. If the requirement for any scientist that challenges prevailing
moral beliefs is perfectly documented research in order to avoid peer-condemnation
and career-harm, there won’t be a lot of scientists challenging prevailing
moral beliefs. Good science requires a fertile environment where ideas can be
advanced and built on gradually. And most students, of course, notice this
before choosing their career path. Those students who already have strong
beliefs in line with prevailing morality will be drawn toward the social
sciences, not just in a quest for truth, but as a vehicle to </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">promote</span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> their beliefs. Meanwhile those
students who don’t have these beliefs will recognise the social sciences as hostile
and go into other fields, which leads to a vicious circle.</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">All this is held together by a relatively small and
tightly-knit group of influencers. Take the culture. On the surface, it appears
quite diverse. The faces of the culture, singers and actors, come from a
variety of different backgrounds, and it shows. But singers, especially very
popular singers, usually do not write their own songs, and actors certainly do
not write their own scripts. They are merely presenting what someone else has
written. To understand who is driving the culture one must look to the people
behind the scenes: writers, producers, directors, and executives. And what one
finds here is a very homogenous group. Almost exclusively people who come from
white, middle- or upper-class homes, and who predominantly have graduated from
a small set of upscale universities. This explains the remarkable degree of
co-ordination that appears to exist in the culture. There is no </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">deliberate</span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> co-ordination of the culture.
Rather, it’s the enactment of a belief system that is dominant in this segment
of society. Because such a large portion of cultural influencers share it, they
can build off each other’s work without ever having to communicate. And because
they effectively control the culture, they function as gatekeepers, ensuring
that when people from other backgrounds want access to cultural influence, only
those who share their beliefs are allowed in. The same applies to government. Politicians
are quite diverse, but politicians are just the faces of a political apparatus.
Many of those behind the scenes come from the same type of background as the
cultural influencers. The same is true of academia, and while business has
historically been in opposition to government, that has changed as technology
companies have replaced old industrial companies. This means that business
leaders also increasingly come from the same background as the other branches
of society. Hence they share their moral beliefs and consequently offer less
resistance to their agenda, including the expansion of government. This is illustrated
by the fact that in recent US elections, the richest counties, a good proxy for
business leaders, have mostly supported Obama. When held together, this
explains why society is moving along its current path so smoothly. Society is increasingly
led by a single, homogenous group of people, who are raised according to the
same beliefs, go through the same universities where these beliefs are
reinforced, and travel in the same groups where they are further reinforced. And
the effect of the gatekeeper role they maintain is that there is almost no way for
people to gain influence without sharing these beliefs.</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">People have noticed this, and opposition is spreading. The
Tea Party and Donald Trump’s support are examples of it. People have recognised
that the moralising in the culture is becoming more intense; that going to a
movie or tuning into prime-time television increasingly feels like sitting in a
sermon. They’ve realised that there’s a systematic attempt to drive societal
change through the culture, an attempt that seemingly has intensified. They’ve
also noticed that government keeps growing and the power of the establishment
keeps increasing. And finally, they’ve become increasingly sceptical of the
mainstream media and of the scientific community, and for good reason. When
someone opens the newspaper and sees an op-ed piece by a group of scientists,
full of impenetrable scientific-sounding phrases, moralising on social issues
and calling for new government programmes, and then on the next page sees an
op-ed piece by another group of scientists, also full of impenetrable
scientific-sounding phrases, warning about climate change and calling for
government regulations, is it any wonder that that person is suspicious? How
can you trust anything that the scientific community says when you can never
know where the science ends and the morality begins? Especially when scientists
themselves don’t seem to know, or even care? To a large portion of the
scientific community, science and the prevailing morality is just one big
entangled ball of beliefs, making resistance to any part of it not just
unscientific, nor just immoral, but both. And so, people are looking around and
seeing society become increasingly immersed in guilt and finger-pointing and
moral accusations, while government is ever-growing, promising to rectify it
all. And seeing scientists, who claim to be objective, at the forefront of a
lot of it. And they are starting to wonder about this, starting to realise that
there is something decidedly </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">unsecular</span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;">
about all this, and starting to ask questions.</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I am convinced that if something doesn’t change we are headed
for disaster. There seem to be two possible scenarios: </span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">In the first scenario, we continue down our current path. The
culture takes the final step in the direction it’s been heading, as the
moralising becomes full-blown propaganda. Government continues to grow,
imposing limits on free speech and passing measures to punish opposition
through the justice system, concealed under vague and ever-expanding moralistic
terms like ‘hate crimes’. In the social sciences, peer-pressure continues to
mount until opposing views are no longer just regarded as false, but as immoral
and harmful, while a growing sensitivity make certain topics uncomfortable to
even discuss, let alone challenge. Business increasingly becomes an extension
of government, partly due to the imposition of regulations and punitive
measures, but even more so due to a shared belief system that drives them
toward the same goals. The people in charge, an ever-tightening group with
shared moral beliefs, refuse to discuss where society is headed and instead
focus on incremental changes argued for in intense moral language. Until
eventually, there’s a tipping point. The branches of society have become so
entwined that the people in charge decide it would be more efficient to run
them together. And as society has started to collapse they can use that as an
excuse. From here, we know what the result will be. As long as communism
follows necessarily from the moral beliefs of the people in charge, this is
where we will eventually end up, even if it’s not deliberate. It’s just a
question of how we get there.</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">In the second scenario, the resistance builds up and explodes,
purging the current group of people from power as it becomes apparent that
society is headed toward disaster. But then what? What fills the void left by prevailing
morality? There seems to only be one possibility, religion. There are two basic
forms this society could take: extreme or moderate. An extremely religious
society would be able to block the move to communism, of course, as we see in
some Middle Eastern countries, but at the cost of extreme religion, which makes
for an even worse society than communism. A moderately religious society may be
able to temporarily stop the trend, but if it’s moderate that means allowing
opposing views, including atheism. And herein lies the problem: the prevailing
morality is simply more convincing than religious morality, once appeals to God
no longer end an argument. Without appeals to God, the moralities must stand on
their own. And here, prevailing morality outmanoeuvres religious morality. What
has made prevailing morality so successful is that it takes a very simple
message, that altruism is morally superior to individualism, and repeats it
over and over from a multitude of different angles, using a variety of
intellectual and emotional devices. Religious morality, by comparison, is
incoherent. There are so many laws, so much interpretation, so many
inconsistencies, so much disagreement, that’s it’s no match for prevailing
morality. As soon as specific issues come into play, religious morality
invariably loses the debate to prevailing morality. So even if society were to
take a step backwards to a moderate version of religious morality, we would
very quickly find ourselves back where we are now: headed down the path to
scenario one. In fact, we saw a version of this in the 1980s, led by Ronald
Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, as a response to economic issues in both America
and Europe. But as soon as those were met, we were back on the path. There’s a
reason religious morality has gradually faded over the past few hundred years.
If it offered a better alternative to prevailing morality we would never have
gotten here in the first place.</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">There must be another way. Prevailing morality has us on
course for disaster, but there is no going back to religion. We need to move forward,
but how? The answer lies in a better understanding of morality. To understand
morality, we need to go back. As far back as we can.</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Analysis</span></span></b></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">As human society developed, our models of the world improved,
a process that stretches back as far as we can trace. Early societies seem to
have had animist models. In an animist model, natural objects have humanlike
decision-making ability: Trees decide to shed their leaves. Clouds decide to
rain. The sun decides to rise. Volcanoes decide to erupt. Buffalo decide where
to roam. Then we started to develop polytheistic models. In a polytheistic
model, natural objects are inanimate. Instead, they are controlled by category gods:
The god of thunder controls the weather. The sea god controls the sea. The god
of knowledge controls knowledge. Eventually, we moved to monotheistic models.
In monotheism, everything is controlled by a single god, who sets the world in
motion and intervenes on occasion, typically to cause large-scale events like
earthquakes. More recently, we have moved toward atheism. In atheism, there are
no gods. Everything in the world is governed by natural laws.</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The reason for this process is knowledge. As we developed, we
gradually discovered that natural objects follow predictable patterns: Trees
shed their leaves seasonally. Clouds rain in accordance with the wind and other
factors. The sun rises predictably by the time of year. This removes the need to
posit decision-making. If objects always act in the same way, there are no
decisions to be made, it just appears that way to the uninformed. So, the
decision-making in our models moved upward over time, toward increasing
generalisation, as we discovered predictability in the world from the bottom
up. Eventually, this process was formalised in the 17</span><sup><span style="font-family: inherit;">th</span></sup><span style="font-family: inherit;"> Century as
science, and we soon thereafter achieved a set of general laws that seem to
make everything in the world predictable, removing the need to posit
decision-making anywhere.</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">This wasn’t an entirely linear process, though, nor was it
driven only by intellectual progress. Human history is full of situations where
beliefs were enforced by societies on other societies. Take the spread of
Christianity through Europe, replacing various animistic and polytheistic
beliefs. These societies didn’t discover Christianity through an intellectual
process, they had it presented to them by the Romans, in some cases even forced
upon them. But </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">why</span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> did the Romans
choose Christianity as their religion over their previous polytheistic beliefs,
and why did primitive European societies accept it? Why did a very similar
transition occur with Islam in the Middle East? One only has to look at some of
these earlier religions to realise it: Christianity (and Islam) offers a much
more complete and consistent description of the world. Polytheistic religions
are full of fragmented and barely plausible myths. Gods emerge from armpits of
other gods. Gods are licked into existence by a giant cow. Christianity, in
comparison, provides a reasonably consistent description of the world, without
many of the obvious gaps that characterise these earlier religions. This makes
it both easier to communicate and easier to accept. Convincing people to
abandon Christianity in favour of a religion where gods grow out of armpits or
are licked into existence by a giant cow would be a lot harder than the
reverse, even when using force. The former transition conflicts with our
aesthetic sensibility in a way that the latter doesn’t. </span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Morality followed the development of our models. It was
assumed that, as part of their decision-making, natural objects set and
enforced laws governing human behaviour. Volcanoes required humans to pay a
tribute and would erupt if they didn’t. Clouds required humans to dance and would
only rain if they did. Buffalo required humans to hunt respectfully and only
offered themselves up as food if they did. This meant, of course, that when we
stopped assigning decision-making to these objects the morality also
disappeared from them. If a volcano is believed to follow predictable natural
patterns it makes no sense to pay it a tribute. So in polytheism, the category gods
set and enforce morality in their respective domains. And in monotheism, God is
the sole lawmaker and enforcer of morality. Ancient Jews, for example, believed
that God required them to refrain from eating pork, and would punish them if
they disobeyed. </span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Consequently, morality became increasingly consolidated. For
an animist, morality is highly fragmented, as there isn’t necessarily alignment
between the various lawmakers. The volcano doesn’t co-ordinate with the cloud before
making its requirements. Humans just try to do the best they can in a volatile
and unpredictable world. This is still true in polytheism, albeit to a lesser
extent. One can be reasonably certain of consistency in, say, the moral law in
respect to volcanoes, earthquakes and rainclouds, since they are now set and
enforced by the same category god, the nature god, but one can’t be certain of
consistency between, say, the nature god and the war god. They may simply make
conflicting moral requirements of us, and we would have to try and navigate it
as best we could. In fact, polytheistic myths </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">are</span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> full of disagreements between the various category gods. </span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">This inconsistency disappears with monotheism. God now sets
and enforces </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">all</span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> the laws, and there
is a belief that they are consistent, even if it doesn’t always appear that way.
However, during early monotheism the laws themselves are still highly fragmented
and specific. Judaism has hundreds of very specific laws, covering everything
from which foods to eat to how to behave during social interactions. And there
is no real attempt to tie them together. It’s just a long list of God’s
commands. So while there may be a belief in consistency, in practice there are
inevitable conflicts. This leads to a problem. If two moral laws contradict
they can’t both be universal. But then what are they? It’s easy to see how this
would lead to a lot of angst among religious authorities in dealing with these
conflicts as they arose. Naturally, as time passed, and especially as
Christianity emerged, there was a gradual attempt to synthesise all these laws
into a small number of moral principles. By late Christianity, this synthesis had
started to settle on principles like ‘love thy neighbour’ and ‘do unto others
as you want done to you’, with the actual laws in the Bible regarded as
contingent.</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">And then with the success of science in the 17</span><sup><span style="font-family: inherit;">th</span></sup><span style="font-family: inherit;">
and 18</span><sup><span style="font-family: inherit;">th</span></sup><span style="font-family: inherit;"> Centuries there was another intellectual step: the attempt
to separate morality from God. Which, of course, was made much easier now that
morality was believed to consist of a small number of principles, rather than
hundreds of commands. These God-independent moral principles were typically referred
to as natural rights. The idea being that morality is a property of nature, rather
than a set of commands, and therefore can be identified and described much like
any natural object without appeal to God. When atheism caught on a century
later, this idea was already widely accepted and it was simple for atheists to
remove reference to God altogether. Now completely removed from God, secular
morality moved even further toward synthesis, most clearly illustrated in the
work of Jeremy Bentham, who suggested that morality was reducible to a single
quantity: aggregate net pleasure. It also moved toward an increasingly broad
definition of rights and justice, best exemplified by the work of Karl Marx.</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">So, what’s the problem? Well, where is morality? It’s not
just that we haven’t found it yet, it’s that it’s unclear what we could
possibly be referring to. Is it a special kind of subatomic particle that only humans
contain, interacting with all our other particles? Maybe something that emerges
when regular particles interact in specific ways? This doesn’t seem to make
much sense. Yet, it </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">seems</span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> like we’re
referring to something. And not just to our personal opinions, but to something
outside ourselves. If we weren’t, we wouldn’t get so worked up about moral arguments,
it seems. What do we </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">mean</span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> when we
argue about right and wrong, or about injustice, or about rights?</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Let’s take a step back in time to our animist society. Say they
have the belief that overhunting is wrong, and that failure to comply will
result in the buffalo refusing to offer themselves up for food. From a modern perspective,
we would say this is silly. Why? Because we now have a natural explanation for it:
if society overhunts, the buffalo become scarce. Most likely, they learned this
the hard way. But they don’t describe it in those terms, because they don’t
have our modern model of the world. They have a model where buffalo make
humanlike decisions, and so they describe the situation accordingly. They may
even have constructed narratives around this. Maybe they believe their
witchdoctor was visited by the spirit of the head buffalo, who told him this.</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Let’s move on to our early monotheist society. Say they have
the belief that eating pork is forbidden by God, and that failure to comply
will be punished by sickness or death. Again, from a modern perspective we
would say this is silly. Why? Because we have a natural explanation: pigs
carried germs during that time that could make humans very sick. But, of
course, this society had no understanding of germs. They believed that God
caused people to get sick when they disobeyed Him. So, naturally, when they saw
people consistently getting sick from eating pork they inferred that these
people were disobeying one of God’s laws, and wrote it into the Bible.</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">These examples suggest that when we make moral statements we
are actually describing a natural phenomenon, but are doing so </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">through our prevailing model</span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;">. But we no
longer believe in gods, so how does that apply to our current situation? Let’s
look at the terms that form typical moral statements: ‘right’ and ‘wrong’,
‘justice’, ‘rights’, ‘blame’, ‘guilt’. These terms have something in common. They
are courtroom terms. This explains our model: we are trying to describe some
part of the world through the framework of a court. And what we’re trying to describe
we can also see when we look back at the evolution of morality: human behaviour
and its relation to nature. Adding these two together gives us a </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">definition</span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> of morality: morality is the
attempt to describe human behaviour and its relation to nature through a court
framework.</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">This gives us a new perspective on what occurred during the
naturalisation of morality in the 17</span><sup><span style="font-family: inherit;">th</span></sup><span style="font-family: inherit;"> to 19</span><sup><span style="font-family: inherit;">th</span></sup><span style="font-family: inherit;"> Century: we
removed the lawmaker, but preserved the court. Certain aspects have certainly
changed from religious morality to secular morality. The notions of rights and
justice have been emphasised and broadened, while the focus on particular laws has
been diminished, but this doesn’t change the overall fact that secular morality
has carried over the court framework from religion. And from a scientific
perspective, this won’t do. It’s not impossible to imagine an actual cosmic
court governing human behaviour, even one without a lawmaker. The Vedic
religions arguably have something like it. The problem is that the intellectual
process that has led us to gradually replace our anthropomorphic models with
more accurate scientific ones clearly requires us to replace the cosmic court
in the same way we’ve replaced the cosmic lawmaker. Few, if any, secular moralists
actually believe that a cosmic court exists, they are just acting </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">as</span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">if</span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">it</span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">did</span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> through their moral beliefs. </span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">But if there is no cosmic court, what governs human behaviour
and its relation to nature? There was no answer to that question when secular
morality was being developed, but there is now: evolutionary theory. According
to evolutionary theory, human behaviour has evolved to form a system whose most
general function is species-survival, which it achieves through adaption to its
environment. Now that we know this, it’s easy to see why the court framework
(i.e., morality) has been an integral part of our beliefs for so long: it
provides a good </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">approximation</span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> of
human behaviour and its relation to nature. Why? Because nature has a
corrective function that makes it seem like a court. Ancient human societies presumably
found themselves engaging in tribunal processes and then inferred that nature
is just a larger version of it. It </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">seems</span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;">
like the buffalo are punishing humans with starvation when they overhunt, or
that God is punishing humans with illness when they eat pork. More broadly, it
seems like nature is punishing humans with social disarray when they engage in
killing, or stealing, or adultery. Add to that the fact that humans tend to
feel bad when they engage in these activities, and it’s easy to see why humans would
adopt the belief of nature as a cosmic court that punishes law-breaches, laws that
humans have built-in knowledge of through their ‘moral intuition’. And this
approximation works very well, which is why it has prevailed for so long. Evolutionary
theory shows why it is only an approximation, though. Nature doesn’t ‘punish’
us for law-breaches, we have evolved mechanisms that steer us away from
behaviour that is detrimental to species-survival. </span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">And while it’s a good approximation, morality breaks down
when used beyond the context it was developed in. And the further it gets from
that context, the more pronounced these breakdowns become. Which is good to
know, because this is how intellectual progress works. By pushing our
descriptions as far as we can, we see where they break down and then can figure
out how to replace them with better ones. And the three problems we covered in
the introduction do just that: they are situations that morality is unable to
account for, but that are well-explained by functional descriptions informed by
evolutionary theory. In that sense, they function as experiments that test the
applicability of these two models. Let’s take a look at each of them.</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">First, the problem of male guilt and self-flagellation. What
has essentially happened over the past half century is that, as secular
morality has become the dominant belief system in certain segments of the
population, we’ve run a social experiment. Children have been raised almost
entirely in a bubble of secular morality. Their parents, their teachers, their
friends, and their culture have almost exclusively instilled in them secular
moral beliefs. And what has happened is noteworthy: widespread feelings of
alienation, guilt, and self-flagellation among men raised in these environments,
as evidenced in the culture. How does secular morality account for this
phenomenon? Well, it seemingly is forced to say that men simply have more sinful
tendencies than women, and that they are right to feel guilty about them. A
moral framework doesn’t allow for a more sophisticated account, all it allows
for is a set of court-like laws and judgements of innocence or guilt, which is
what we’ve just given. A functional description informed by evolutionary theory,
on the other hand, not only explains why men and women have different
tendencies, but also why those differences are a major reason humans exist
today at all: men and women are functional specialisations that allowed humans,
and many species before them, to function more effectively and thus better
adapt to their environment. Because of this specialisation, men have stronger
tendencies toward certain types of behaviour: individualism, competitiveness,
risk-taking, and aggressiveness, while women have stronger tendencies toward altruism,
collaboration, restraint, and passivity. It makes no sense to declare altruism
morally superior to individualism, or vice versa. They were both functions that
contributed to human survival. When we present it like this it makes secular
morality look even more silly, for if altruism is morally superior to
individualism, when did it become this way? If we say it was always the case,
then we are led to the position of having to accept that not only did humans
consistently act wrongly, but doing so is the reason we exist at all. If we say
it became so at a point in time, say 2500 BC., then we not only have to posit
something seemingly quite arbitrary, but we also must account for the fact that
people, especially men, evolved deep-seated tendencies before it became wrong
who now suddenly are acting wrongly. The problem goes away once we give up
morality. There’s no need to try to explain how a cosmic court changed its laws,
the requirements for human behaviour are set by the environment, and change if
the environment changes. Of course, the extent to which it has </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">actually</span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> changed is the topic of our
next problem.</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Second, the failures of communism. Communist societies can also
be viewed as an experiment, a test of a certain belief system by implementing
it wholeheartedly and then seeing what happens. And what happened was
remarkable. Communist societies consistently experienced disastrous results,
far too consistently to declare it an accident. The question is why. First,
let’s ask how secular morality accounts for what happened in communist
societies. The most common beliefs before communism was implemented was that if
it failed it would be due to at least one of two things: incompetent leadership
or unmotivated workers. This belief persisted even after the reports of
societal disarray in the Soviet Union began to emerge. There was such a strong
belief in the ‘beauty’ of communism as a societal model that it was thought
that the flaw must be in the implementation. Understandably so. There just
doesn’t seem to be any way for secular morality to account for the failures of
communism. One could respond by saying that there are other factors that drive
a society’s success beyond acting morally, but what does that mean? If there
are things that take precedence over moral beliefs, then what are moral beliefs
really? At best, this leads to a lot of contortions. Let’s set aside our moral
framework and try to explain this through a functional framework. An early explanation
for the failures of communism came from Ludwig von Mises. He showed that the
flaw was not in the implementation of communism, but in the model itself. He
explained that communism could never work, regardless of how competent the
leaders are and how motivated the workers are, because a communist society
lacks something critical: information. Communism eliminates trade, since it
removes private property and tells people where to work. But when people trade
they aren’t just trading products and labour, they’re also trading information
about their preferences, and when this no longer occurs there’s no way for
producers to know what to make, and so eventually you end up with a society
where people’s desires are unfulfilled and there’s a spiral into misery. Clearly,
there’s a level of sophistication here that doesn’t exist in a moral framework.
But we can go further than Mises went. Instead of regarding people’s preferences
as our starting point, we can take a step further back. We can treat human
society as a system and preferences as effects of environmental pressures. Humans
have evolved behaviour that combines to form a system able to continuously
address environmental pressures as they occur. Behavioural preferences are just
what’s visible. Eliminating trade shuts down the system, except for a few
top-down pathways. This means that environmental pressures aren’t addressed and
therefore build up in the system until it collapses. We can compare human
society to other systems, for example the human body. Imagine a group of
doctors deciding to shut off the arteries in a human body and instead insert
blood manually to each organ because they thought it was unjust that some
organs received more blood than others. This would be disastrous. Why? Because
the human body is a calibrated system of functions that have evolved to address
environmental pressures as they occur, thus keeping the body healthy. The same
applies to a human society. Trying to force it to conform to a court framework with
a set of moral laws and measures of justice is ludicrous. Such a framework can't
possibly describe the complexities of a human societal system in the way that a
functional framework can. </span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Third, the suppression of science. We can also treat the
social sciences as an experiment. What would secular morality say about
suppression of science by secular moral beliefs? Well, secular morality would
have to say that that’s impossible. After all, secular morality is implicitly
based on the notion of a cosmic court, and it’s difficult to imagine such a court
having laws that conflict with the facts. So it’s not even a consideration for
social scientists that their moral beliefs are suppressing science. If you
hold, say, that altruism is the highest virtue, and this is something you feel
intensely, how could any facts possibly contradict it? And if you hold that no
facts could possibly contradict your moral beliefs, you don’t have to worry
about suppressing science when you promote your moral beliefs and attack others
for holding different ones. In your view, they are two different realms. Yet,
clearly there </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">is</span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> suppression of
science going on in the social sciences, and this disproves the idea of secular
morality and science being separate realms. A secular moral framework can’t
account for this. A functional framework, on the other hand, has no problem explaining
it. From this perspective, moral beliefs are simply descriptions of the world,
albeit imprecise ones. So, like any other description, they are subject to
testing and potential falsification. And if attempts to do so are suppressed,
then that is no different from any other scientific situation where challenges
to a prevailing description are suppressed. Of course, once one recognises that
a functional framework is better than a moral framework for describing the
world, one would want to replace the moral framework altogether. But if one </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">does</span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> have a situation where a set of
moral beliefs are held above challenge, as has been the case in the social
sciences, then it’s easy to explain why this would lead to suppression of
science, which is exactly what we see.</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The future</span></span></b></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">We’ve seen that a group of influencers are trying to reshape
society to fit their moral beliefs. We’ve also seen that morality in general is
a simplistic framework for describing human behaviour and its relation to
nature, and that it breaks down in important situations, illustrating how
disastrous it would be if this continues. Given that human society seems to
consistently move toward a better model of the world, I think it’s a given that
sooner or later morality will disappear, just as theism did. What will an
amoral society look like, and how will the transition occur? We can look to the
transition from Christianity to atheism as a guide, since many of the same
issues apply to this transition. Let’s look at how each of these three
important areas of society will be affected: culture, government, and science.</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Moralising is a huge part of contemporary culture. Is an
amoral culture even possible? Yes, I believe so. Once it becomes widely
accepted that morality is a simplification, </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">and</span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;">
the manipulation devices in the culture become more widely known, there will be
no going back. Just as Western culture was once full of theism and now isn’t. There
is already a counterculture building against the prevailing morality, aided by
the growth in YouTube and other alternative media outlets, and it will continue
to gain support as people feel alienated by the increased moralising of
mainstream culture, I think. In practice, there will be two main changes:
Firstly, a wider variety of narratives, rather than the same ones repeated over
and over. Secondly, a move away from plot-justice and other moralising devices:
designating characters as heroes and villains, assigning them particular
attributes, rewarding or punishing them accordingly. Instead, narratives will
be more descriptive, more about exploring people’s situations, feelings, and
motives without moral judgement. Plenty of cultural products claim to do so,
but don’t, mostly because most cultural influencers are blind to their own
moral beliefs. What amoral narratives </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">really</span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;">
look like will become more clear in the future, I think, as they start to
emerge. This may seem unrealistic. After all, people today </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">seek</span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">out</span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> narratives that
reinforce their moral beliefs. Why would they start doing the opposite? For the
same reason people used to seek out theistic narratives, but now increasingly
don’t. Once people stop </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">believing in</span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;">
God, theistic narratives just seem anachronistic, even if they are emotionally
appealing. Likewise, once people stop believing in morality, moralising
narratives and devices will just seem anachronistic and manipulative, even to
people who share the authors’ goals.</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Morality has historically played a large role in the
activities of government. Contemporary governments redistribute resources and
make laws in accordance with prevailing moral beliefs, just as Christian
governments used to enforce Christian beliefs. Is an amoral government even
possible? It seems difficult to imagine morality being removed from government,
but that could have been said about theism 300 years ago. Since then, Western
societies have all implemented a separation of church and state. The lesson
learned is that you don’t have to have a population of atheists to remove
theism from government. In fact, you don’t need </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">any</span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> atheists. All you need is a general understanding that theistic
differences cannot be resolved through argument. The same applies to morality.
Contemporary politics is immersed in moral arguments. Even people who disagree
with the particular moral arguments of their opponents accept the premise that
politics </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">should be</span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> resolved through
moral arguments, they just disagree on what they should be. To disturb this,
all it takes is a few people challenging it. When someone says ‘this is wrong’
or ‘that is an injustice’ as part of a political argument, one can simply ask
‘what do you mean by that?’ or ‘how do you propose we settle it?’. Even if one
stops short of amoralism, it should be clear that moral arguments can’t be
settled any more than theistic arguments can, at least not without recasting
them in functional terms. This leads to two options: either to make morality
voluntary or to make the force explicit. I think both will occur to some extent.
Government will get smaller, as some of its current activities will become
voluntary, but there are some things, in my opinion, that cannot be made voluntary,
due to the interconnected nature of human behaviour within a society. What will
happen here is we’ll move from morality-based argumentation to agreement-based
argumentation, for example from ‘this behaviour is morally right’ to ‘the
majority agrees to do this’. This may seem like a subtle change, but it will
have large consequences, I think, because it will force political debate to
become about facts and negotiation, rather than about moralising and emotional
manipulation. And it will also make it easier for people who disagree with the
majority to go elsewhere without feeling that they’re doing something wrong. It
also means there is nothing special about a government anymore. It’s no longer
a moral enforcer, it’s just an arbiter, and there’s nothing in principle
stopping other organisations from performing some or all its activities, if
they can do them better. We already see a movement in this direction, in the
form of libertarianism. Technically, libertarianism is a minimalist moral
theory, not an amoral theory, but the idea is roughly the same: to combat the
enforcement of morality through government.</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Academia has historically performed two functions: describing
the world and rationalising prevailing belief systems. We can see this going
back at least to Judaism. The Bible, for instance, is an attempt to fit
together broad, religious beliefs with observations of the world. And both
Judaism and Christianity have long traditions of religious debate, trying to
fit their beliefs to the requirements of the world. In hindsight, we can see
that these two processes are trying to do the same thing, describe the world,
from two different angles: a top-down approach based on very broad beliefs, and
a bottom-up approach based on observations. This is important to understand. We
don’t gradually fill out empty spaces in our description of the world as we
gather observations. Rather, we overdescribe, filling out our model with very
speculative beliefs, sometimes in contradiction with each other, and anchored
to strong emotional attachment. But this is not clear at the time. In fact,
Christians for a long time held to a belief that has later been labelled ‘non-overlapping
magisteria’, the idea that some of our beliefs are beyond scientific treatment,
even in principle, and therefore that religion and science address
fundamentally different aspects of the world. What happened, though, was that
as science progressed it increasingly intruded on what had traditionally been
the domain of religion, until finally there was a realisation that they </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">were</span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> describing the same thing, and that
science provided the better description. The transition also faced a lot of
resistance. While in hindsight it seems that Christianity is essentially just a
description of the world, people raised in a Christian environment were
emotionally attached to their beliefs and resisted any attempt to challenge
them, or even to treat them scientifically. Finally, the transition wasn’t
seamless. What characterised society after centuries of Christian dominance is
that all aspects of it were immersed in Christianity: terminology, social
practices, and institutions. This meant there was a long process of gradual removal.
How does all this relate to our current situation? Well, it seems that the
physical sciences have made a full transition from religion to science. There
are no parts of the physical sciences where scientists have deep emotional
attachment (beyond people’s natural resistance to give up on theories they have
invested a lot of time in), nor is there a belief that anything in principle is
beyond scientific treatment. The situation in the social sciences is quite
different, though. They </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">are</span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> pervaded
by a set of beliefs with deep emotional attachment and which are held to be
beyond scientific treatment: moral beliefs. And we </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">are</span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> seeing a gradual chipping away at these beliefs by science,
most notably evolutionary biology, psychology, and economics. Eventually, if
history is our guide, there will be an acceptance in the social sciences that
they are describing the same thing, and that science is doing it better.
Presumably, there will be much resistance, but eventually there will be a split
into people who accept science and those who are unable to and withdraw from
it, as we saw with Christianity in the split between philosophy/science and
theology. Theologians effectively distinguish themselves from regular
philosophers and scientists by positing theism as their premise to which
everything else must fit. There is an analogue to that in secular morality,
what is typically known as ‘continental philosophy’, a belief system that tends
to hold that secular morality is fundamental and that science must conform to
it. Most social scientists, however, do not explicitly acknowledge the
distinction, wanting to have it both ways. Presumably, that will change, as it
did with theology in the sciences two hundred years ago. Then all that is left
is the gradual process of weeding out morality from the social sciences.</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Possible objections</span></span></b></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">What if I’m wrong? Let’s go through some possible objections.</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Objection #1: Amoralism
is just a moral system in disguise, individualism.</span></span></i></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">This is analogous to the objection that atheism is just
another religion, which is false. The reason atheism is not just another
religion is that it doesn’t only remove belief in God, it </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">replaces</span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> belief in God with something else: scientific description.
There’s a categorical difference between scientific description and belief in
God, because scientific description is subject to empirical examination and is therefore
part of a large and well-integrated body of empirical knowledge, which it must
fit into. The same applies to amoralism. It doesn’t replace one moral system
with another, it replaces moral systems with scientific description. But
because morality is a deeply-ingrained framework, we automatically assume that
everyone else also must have such a framework, even if they claim not to; that
it must just be hidden somewhere. It’s the same phenomenon that leads some religious
people to assume that atheists must have a god hidden somewhere that they’re
not talking about. It takes a mental leap to realise that one is perceiving the
world through a framework and that that framework is not given. </span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Which brings us to the second point, that from the
perspective of a contemporary social scientist this probably looks like a particular
</span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">type</span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> of morality, namely
individualism. The social sciences are immersed in opaque terminology that has
built up over time to insulate the underlying moral beliefs from challenge, and
people are emotionally invested in keeping it this way. When someone proposes that
morality reduces to patterns in the functional behaviour of individuals (and
their relations to other natural objects), and therefore that individuals are a
more accurate unit of analysis than groups, it’s bound to be met with
resistance. But that just shows how much prevailing moral beliefs conflict with
actual science. Science’s success over the past 400 years is largely due to a
consistent attempt to explain phenomena by reducing them to collections of
smaller and simpler processes. Chemists don’t accuse physicists of ‘individualism’
when they suggest that chemical processes can be reduced to interactions
between subatomic particles. A claim that morality, or any cultural phenomenon,
cannot be reduced, in principle, to interactions between individuals (and other
natural objects), goes against the entire scientific worldview that has built
up over the past 400 years. Ultimately, theories are judged on their ability to
make successful predictions, and if it’s discovered that there are aspects of
human behaviour that are beyond functional description (and thus prediction) then
one would have to reject, or at least significantly modify, amoralism. But a
very large body of scientific knowledge suggests that that is unlikely to be
the case, in my opinion.</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">There is an important distinction between saying that
morality reduces to descriptions of individuals and their interactions, and
saying that people should strive toward individual goals, for example pleasure
or wealth-accumulation. We can call the latter ‘naïve individualism’. That </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">is</span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> a moral theory, and it’s not what I’m
suggesting, of course. In the broad sense, people do seek to satisfy their
desires, since they can’t step out of their bodies, but those desires include
altruistic and collaborative behaviour. There’s no reason to suggest otherwise.</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Objection #2: We don’t
have to give up morality entirely, we can preserve a more moderate version that
is bounded by practical and scientific facts as they become known.</span></span></i></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">This is analogous to the theistic argument of not giving up
God entirely, but just gradually removing Him from our descriptions to fit
scientific discoveries. This process, as discussed earlier, is one that has
been going on for thousands of years. At some point, though, we realised that
we were just using gods to fill gaps in our knowledge, and adopted a framework
where there are no gods, just functional descriptions with gaps where
necessary. There is no reason to continue that process with morality, as
science gradually chips away at it. We can already recognise that it’s just an
approximate framework and replace it with the correct framework, thus improving
the scientific process </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">and</span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> avoiding
any more social disasters.</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Objection #3: Without
morality, people won’t care about anyone but themselves and society will
collapse into a dog-eat-dog world.</span></span></i></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">This assumes a very naïve view of human behaviour, in my
opinion. It’s a carryover from religious morality, which essentially splits
human desires into two categories: cardinal desires and spiritual desires. Cardinal
desires need no encouragement, humans are automatically drawn to them, and they
are therefore morally neutral or sinful. Spiritual desires need encouragement,
either through the promise of an afterlife or through being recognised as a
‘good person’, and they are therefore virtuous. The actual categorisation of
desires as cardinal or spiritual almost perfectly follows gender lines, as
we’ve seen earlier. It made sense in ancient times where men were the main
decision-makers in society and religion was written mainly for them, especially
if there was a tendency in those societies for men with extreme masculine traits
to dominate society (i.e., warlord societies). In those societies, a moral
system that restrained masculine traits and encouraged feminine traits would
serve as a good balance to prevent things from getting out of control, even if
it wasn’t deliberately designed as such. That moral split has carried over to
secular morality, but it doesn’t make sense in modern times. For most men, and
even more so for women, the idea that individualism, competitiveness, and
aggression are built-in desires, while altruism, collaboration, and restraint
need to be encouraged, is simply not true. They are </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">all</span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> built-in desires that have evolved over time, although they are
distributed unevenly. There’s no reason to think that people will stop being
altruistic, collaborative, and restrained once they accept the idea that there
is no cosmic court. People who feel empathy when they see a homeless person
aren’t going to stop doing so because they no longer believe in a cosmic court.
What it will do is prevent people from suppressing their desires because they
think they’re violating a cosmic law. </span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Objection #4: Without
morality, everything is permissible and society will collapse into nihilistic
lethargy. </span></span></i></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The assumption here is that we make judgements by checking a
given situation against a set of moral laws, and if there are no moral laws to
check against, we can never make judgements and therefore everything is ‘permissible’.
But this is nonsense. We do have to give up the idea of making </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">moral</span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> judgements, since we have to give
up the idea of moral laws, but we make judgements all the time that have
nothing to do with morality. What I am arguing against is the belief, inherited
from religion, that a subset of human desires and behaviour have a special
status, namely that they are ‘moral’, i.e., regulated by a set of cosmic laws. </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">All</span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> our desires and behaviour have
evolved as biological mechanisms, and there is no need for a categorisation
into ‘moral’ and ‘non-moral’. Giving up morality doesn’t mean giving up
judgement, it means giving up the </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">interpretation</span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;">
of judgment as something that must be in accordance with a set of moral laws. Consequently,
the actual judgement becomes clearer. It means going from a judgement like
‘that person is morally wrong’ to ‘my desires differ from that person’s
desires, and I should act accordingly’. In other words, judgement becomes more
factual and action-oriented, as opposed to vague and emotionally-oriented. Or
more accurately, the emotions are made explicit in the first case, whereas in
the second case they are entangled in the judgement.</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Objection #5: People
need morality for their lives to have meaning.</span></span></i></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The assumption here is that people need to have a purpose in
their lives, and that that purpose should be to be a good person. Without that
purpose, the idea goes, it doesn’t matter what you do, because you have nothing
to work toward. That is a teleological view of human behaviour, and it doesn’t
match how people behave, in my opinion. People are driven by biological
mechanisms. Part of that is using reason to process information and set goals,
but reason itself cannot set goals. This is where morality comes in. It gives
us the </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">impression</span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> that there is some
outside purpose that we can use as a starting point and then work our way down
to particular behaviour, but it’s really the other way around: we generalise
our particular emotions and behaviour into moral laws. Once one accepts this, the
replacement of morality with a functional description is not a problem. It’s
simply a better generalisation.</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Objection #6: Amoralism
is just WRONG!</span></span></i></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">There’s no question many people feel very strongly about
their moral beliefs. Those emotions exist. The purpose of amoralism is not to deny
or try to remove them, it’s to change the </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">interpretation</span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;">
of them. What I have proposed in this paper is that morality is a simplifying framework
for describing functional patterns in human behaviour, including our emotions, and
their relation to nature. This doesn’t say anything about the emotions
themselves. Does an emotion, say empathy, becomes less powerful if one
interprets it as a biological response rather than as an intuitive recognition
of a cosmic, moral law? I don’t think it does. What amoralism changes is not so
much how we feel about certain situations, but how we think about how </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">other</span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">people</span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> feel about those situations. When there is no cosmic law to
refer to we can no longer say that other people are wrong for feeling
differently. We can provide them with information to make them realise that
it’s in their interest to act a certain way, or in some cases force them to do
so, but if they don’t have a certain emotion then they don’t have that emotion.
</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Objection #7: Amoralism
is elitist, therefore it’s wrong.</span></span></i></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I don’t accept the term ‘elitist’. It has a negative
connotation, which means that it’s a conflation of a description and a moral
judgement, and I don’t accept the moral judgement. It’s based on the implicit
belief that it’s wrong for some people to have more power or resources than
others, but this is a belief that is not in accord with reality. Society
requires an uneven distribution of power and resources to be dynamic and thus
be able to respond effectively to environmental pressures. The environment sets
certain requirements, and some people have abilities that meet those
requirements better than others. A fit society is one that is able to shift
power and resources to those people, thus amplifying their abilities.</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Objection #8: You can’t
reject a belief system that was instrumental in the abolishment of slavery and
in women’s rights.</span></span></i></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">There’s no question that secular morality was instrumental in
the abolishment of slavery and in women’s rights. Throughout much of human
history the belief was that various groups of people were fundamentally
different: men and women, aristocrats and farmers, Europeans and Asians and
Africans and native Americans. It seemed that way because they are different on
the outside. Men and women are physically different. People of different
ethnicities have different skin colour and other physical traits. Aristocrats
and farmers talk and act and dress differently. So it </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">seems</span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> like they really are categorically different. Secular
morality challenged this. First by challenging the distinction between
aristocrats and farmers, eventually leading to a breakdown of the class
structure that had been prevalent in Europe through the middle ages. Then by
challenging the distinction between ethnicities, eventually leading to the
abolishment of slavery. And then finally by challenging the distinction between
men and women, eventually leading to women’s rights. Roughly speaking, one could
say that secular morality made a claim that humans were more equal than they
appeared, and that this was proven when they were given the chance to prove it.
This is a big part of why secular morality became so popular. There’s no reason
to deny any of this. The point is that it’s irrelevant. Just as it’s irrelevant
that Christianity helped end human sacrifice and tribal warfare. As science progresses,
we develop better descriptions of the world, which in turn allows us to deal
with it better. Those two things go together. Therefore, secular morality will
be replaced by amoralism, I believe. </span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Objection #9: Science
proves that freewill is an illusion, and therefore inequality is unjust.</span></span></i></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">It’s a common assumption across the political spectrum that (lack
of) freewill and altruism are tied together. The idea is that if people don’t
have freewill, they aren’t responsible for their wealth and therefore don’t
deserve to have more of it than anyone else. It’s an idea that is widely alluded
to in the social sciences, often under the guise of derivative theories, but is
rarely stated directly. Perhaps the best example of this is the work of John
Rawls. In my opinion, this issue is a prime example of how social scientists
selectively take observations and theories that support their moral beliefs and
then present them as science, rather than conduct an unbiased search for truth.
Let’s examine the issue, going directly at its core rather than at derivative
theories.</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The argument goes like this:</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">(1) It is unjust if people are punished or rewarded for
something they weren’t responsible for.</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">(2) Having more resources than someone else is a form of
reward, and having fewer is a form of punishment.</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">(3) Being responsible for something requires acting freely.</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">(4) Science proves that people don’t act freely.</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">(5) Therefore, no one is ever responsible for anything.</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">(6) Therefore, it is unjust for anyone to be punished or
rewarded for anything.</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">(7) Therefore, it is unjust for anyone to have more resources
than anyone else.</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">When we write the argument out like this we see that
something is not quite right. If it’s unjust for anyone to be punished for
anything, do we want to shut down all our jails? Of course not, that would lead
to chaos. The issue here is that humans have historically interpreted the world
through a moral framework, where concepts like freewill, responsibility, blame,
guilt, and justice are tightly connected, so removing one of them warps the
entire framework. If you just declare freewill an illusion and remove it from
the framework, everything else falls apart, and the framework is unable to
describe anything. Removing the concept of freewill without addressing the
concept of justice serves only one purpose: activism. It provides a tool for
people who want to remove resource inequalities under the guise of science. Now,
science is hard, and you can’t expect people to solve problems immediately, but
the extent to which this issue hasn’t even been challenged in the social
sciences is a consequence of their bias, in my opinion. </span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">What </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">is</span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> the answer?
Once we accept that morality is an interpretation of underlying, functional
behaviour, the problem goes away. ‘Justice’ is a term we use to describe
behavioural patterns that humans have evolved to correct behaviour detrimental
to societal well-being. ‘Freewill’ is a term we use to describe corrective
accuracy, i.e., the extent to which we can narrow down our correction to
particular causes or have to treat someone as a black box. These terms work
well in everyday situations, but break down when we take them beyond that, for
example into political philosophy. In these instances, we need to replace
morality with a functional framework. The worst mistake we can make is to
half-unravel morality by removing freewill but leaving justice unaddressed.
Trying to implement something like that would lead to collapse.</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">So no, accepting that freewill is an illusion, which science
seems to suggest, should not lead to removal of resource inequalities. On the
contrary, a functional framework without freewill allows for a better
understanding of why resource inequalities </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">do</span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;">
exist.</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Objection #10:
Naturalism is false, and therefore so is amoralism.</span></span></i></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Amoralism, as I’ve presented it in this paper, relies on two
main claims: 1) that the world consists entirely of many small, simple processes,
which combine to form complex processes, with the combination process itself
explained by evolutionary theory, and 2) that morality is a simplistic attempt
to describe some of this by use of a court analogy. The first claim,
naturalism, is not particular to this paper; it’s a widely-held belief based on
hundreds of years of systematic scientific discovery. The second claim </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">is</span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> particular, so I’ve devoted most of this
paper to explaining it. But what if the first claim is false? It’s certainly
possible. There are some strangely difficult philosophical and scientific
problems that, in my opinion, should at least give one pause before declaring
naturalism true, despite the abundance of scientific evidence. And if
naturalism is false maybe there really is a cosmic court. The problem, though,
is that not only does one have to show that naturalism is false, one also has
to explain the two phenomena covered in this paper: male alienation and the failures
of communism. If there is some cosmic law dictating that altruism is the
highest virtue, why do we see the two aforementioned phenomena? They seem to be
so much easier explained through a simple functional framework: individualism,
competitiveness and other related behaviour are necessary functions for a
robust and dynamic society; that has been true throughout human evolution and
is still true today. Why would a cosmic court dictate laws that are so much in
conflict with how nature works?</span></span></div>
<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span>Uri Harrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14423493981889189115noreply@blogger.com3