Experience Machine Survey

This semester I've added a new component to my class on the good life and the meaning of life: an attempt to discover the public's intuitions on 10-20 cases and thought experiments that drive philosophers' views in both areas.  In another month, I'll be putting the whole survey online.  But for the moment, your comments are welcome on the way we've formulated questions (2), (3), and (4). If you think the formulation is problematic in any way, pray tell.

The first question is based on Robert Nozick's famous Experience Machine thought experiment.

(2) Suppose there were an experience machine that could stimulate your brain so that you felt as if you were living any life you wanted.  You could choose whatever you wanted--the ideal life of a surgeon, an entrepreneur, an actor--whatever.  Brilliant and trustworthy scientists could program the machine to stimulate your brain so it seemed as if you were living that life.  After choosing to plug in, your body would wind up floating in a tank, but you would feel as if you were living just the life you wanted. You wouldn't remember plugging in--it would just feel as if life continued, only better.

Would you choose to plug in to the Experience Machine?  YES   NO

Comments about that formulation most welcome.

The next question is inspired by a paper by Felipe De Brigard.  The general idea is to compare people's willingness to plug in to secure happiness (the original scenario), with their willingness to unplug to secure happiness.  People are asked to believe they are already living a virtual life -- they plugged in many years ago, and their memory of doing so was erased.  Here's the way we've formulated this question--

(3)  Guess what?  You actually were given the choice in question (2) 10 years ago. You've been plugged in to the Experience Machine for all these years.  You chose an option called "normal life," which is why things haven't gone quite perfectly for you. In fact, you are plugged in right now. You are not looking at a real computer screen, but only experiencing an illusion generated by the Experience Machine. Brilliant life-forecasting scientists can tell you if your dreams will be fulfilled if you decide to unplug from the Experience Machine and start living a real life.  Suppose your dream is _______ (imagine the blank filled according to your personal dreams).  The scientists tell you that your dreams will be fulfilled if you unplug.

Would you choose to unplug from the Experience Machine?  YES   NO

The question has to say something about the real world people will be returning to and we've done that differently than De Brigard does.  In one version, he simply said life in the real world would be very different from life in the experience machine.  In another version, people were told they would get to be an artist living in Monaco. We've created a version that's more the mirror image of the original.  Like in the original thought experiment, the choice to change (now from the Experience Machine to reality) gives you the life of your dreams.

De Brigard found that people are as reluctant to leave the Experience Machine as they are to plug into it. He attributes that to "status quo bias."  That's what's making them refuse to unplug in the second scenario and refuse to plug in to begin with.  So much for Nozick's view that we want contact with reality, he thinks.

But I think our question is fairer, since it preserves the temptation to switch that was part of the original thought experiment.  Without that, status quo bias is being elicited more strongly in the second scenario. It's not fair, then, to reason that if it's behind people's reactions to the second scenario, it's also behind their reaction to the first.

Suppose people say NO to both questions.  Perhaps status quo bias is the reason, and Nozick was wrong about our desire for contact with reality. But there's another possibility.  Status quo bias could swamp people's reactions.  They just want life to go on as usual. They're change averse.  It's possible that they also do want contact with reality.  Do they?  Perhaps we can find out by offering a choice between two highly novel options, so there's no possibility of going on as usual.  That's the idea behind this choice--

(4) You've always wanted to go to Antarctica, and a wealthy benefactor has decided to pay for the $20,000 super-deluxe trip. At the last minute, the donor offers you a choice between the best real trip to Antarctica that money can buy, and plugging into the Experience Machine for an even more flawless trip.  It's all the same to the donor, as the cost to her is $20,000 either way.  She advises you that on the real trip, there are possible negatives that cannot be controlled.  You will take a ship from Peru to Antarctica, possibly experiencing sea swells. If you plug in to the Experience Machine, it will seem as if you are having a perfect trip. There will be no sea swells.  If you plug in, trustworthy scientists will unplug you at the end of the trip.  They will also erase the memory that you plugged in and it will seem to you as if you remember a real -- and perfect -- trip.

Would you choose the real trip or plug into the Experience Machine?  REAL    PLUG IN

Granted, if people think they start off in the real world, and they choose REAL here, they're preserving the status quo in some sense.  But not in an experiential sense.   So it seems to me this ought to reduce the role of status quo bias.  A good showing for REAL will at least strongly suggest that Nozick was right, and people do desire contact with reality.

That's what I'm thinking, anyway. Your thoughts about it welcome.

High Holy Days

The Jewish high holy days created an intriguing juxtaposition for me last weekend. On Saturday I gave a talk at a freethought conference and on Sunday went to Rosh Hashanah services with my kids. What a lovely opportunity for "compare and contrast"! (And there will be more this week--Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, is on Tuesday.)

The #1 theme of a sermon at a liberal Jewish temple is (I would say) self-improvement.  The rabbi is someone who exhorts you to get your priorities straight, to live a better life. We are to change our focus. We care too much about material things and money-making. We ought to concentrate on our families and on what really matters.  If any one theme comes up most often, it looks to me like it's the value of the sabbath--how we ought to slow down weekly, look inward, enjoy family and friends, turn off the computer.  After that, there's the theme of caring for the world as a whole--we should do more for the poor, for the environment, about injustice. 

Why does the rabbi get to exhort us all in this way?  Who is he or she to say how we should live?  Of course, the official answer is that the rabbi knows what God wants from us.  But it's not actually crucial--we can believe that to varying degrees or even not at all. The God business establishes the practice of having wise people exhort others to live better lives, but what really sustains it, I suspect, is that people like being exhorted to live better lives. We (and I include myself here) like the periodic experience of being asked to assess how life is going, reconsider priorities, make resolutions, especially if the reassessment takes place in a beautiful setting, with evocative music, and so on. 

At the atheist meetings I've been to a few times (as an invited speaker) there are some of the same elements--music, food, kids being educated, charity--but a noticeable absence of exhortation.  Perhaps I haven't visited enough times to make a generalization, but nobody gets up and tells everyone else they're too materialistic, or that they spend too much time at the computer. Nobody tells everyone else to spend more time with friends and family, or reading, or experiencing nature. Maybe some topics in the program implicitly transmit that message.  If a speaker talks about an environmental topic, attention gets shifted from shopping to the environment. But there isn't very much of the theme of self-evaluation and becoming better people.

There really couldn't be, because it's not easy for one person to get granted the exhorting role.  That can transpire despite a fair amount of godlessness (as there is in a liberal Jewish congregation), but if everyone's godless, and adamantly so, it's hard to suppress the question "Why should you exhort us?" I suppose there could be godless preachers.  Nietzsche wrote in a preaching style, literally commanding people to do this and do that.  (See the Gay Science for what must be the world's best atheist sermonizing.) But it's hard to imagine a Nietzsche figure preaching at a freethought meeting.  Exhortation to live a better life is "for them, not for us" ... I think that's pretty much the feeling.

I have no empirical evidence that it benefits people to be involved in holidays and rituals of self-examination, but I think it does benefit me, and I enjoy it!

Better to have existed than not at all?

A reader sent me the following question about eating "happy cows". I will not be able to get to this until tomorrow or Wednesday, but thought others might like to discuss in the interim.

If I may, I was wondering if I could get your take on a common objection concerning the raising of humanely treated animals, that the alternative is non-existence, and it's better for them to exist than to never have existed. Jeff McMahan says this claim is incoherent ("Eating animals the nice way"), but I'm struggling to understand why.

Suppose the cow Betty has experienced 100 net units of happiness, and one claims it is better for Betty to exist than to never have existed: because, if Betty never existed, she wouldn't have experienced any units of happiness at all. Thus the claim makes a comparison between existent Betty and non-existent Betty, claiming that the latter would have been worse off. Does the incoherency arise because, to say that non-existent Betty would have been worse off, we must assume that she would have somehow been an existing, non-existent individual who failed to experience any units of happiness?

-- Spencer Lo

My answer--

OK, so there's a defense of benign carnivorism that says we are helping Betty (taking her from worse to better) by creating her, giving her a nice life, and then painlessly killing her and eating her. We'd actually be harming Betty if we kept her in the hell of non-existence, so to speak, and didn't let her into the actual world.

I think McMahan is saying* all that's sheer nonsense.  To help Betty, she's got to already exist.  If a being doesn't exist, we can't help her, can't make her go from a worse condition to a better condition. Likewise, we can't harm someone by creating her--she doesn't go from better to worse by coming into existence (even if her life will be full of pain).  Bottom line--we should reject all the helping and harming talk. 

This is very signficant, as we tend to think there are rather strong duties to help and even stronger duties not to harm.  So if we were helping animals by creating them, treating them nicely, and then eating them, that would create a pretty strong case for doing so. If we were harming animals by keeping them out of existence, that would create a pretty strong case for getting busy and breeding more of them.  So jettisoning all the helping/harming talk is a major step.

Now, even if we take that step, says McMahan, we're still left with some reason to keep breeding animals, treating them nicely, and eating them. That's because even if we don't help Betty by creating her, we can still say we do something good, assuming there will be a lot more happiness than misery in her life.  In fact, we do something good for Betty, since she's the one who will enjoy that relatively happy life.  We don't help her by creating her; we simply do something good, and it happens to be good that Betty enjoys.  As McMahan says (p. 3) "Since benign carnivorism by definition aims to cause animals to exist with lives that are good -- in which the good elements outweigh the bad -- it is plausible to say that the practice is good for the animals it causes to exist, even if the ultimate aim is to make them available for human consumption." 

Using terminology developed by Derek Parfit, McMahan later in the article says that our reasons to create animals are "impersonal" (p. 6). That is to say, they are not helping/harming type reasons, but just "doing good" type reasons. There's no victim if we don't create happy animals, and no beneficiary, in the sense of someone who winds up better off, if we do create happy animals. That then leads to the crux of the matter.  He says our reasons for benign carnivorism consist in "the human interest in eating meat, and whatever impersonal reasons one might have to cause animals to exist with lives that would be good for them."  He then says "In general, we assign little or no weight to impersonal reasons to cause individuals to exist." (p. 6)  We don't think we need to get to work and make more babies, for example, if we prefer to be childless. It's fair to say we'd be "doing good" if we made more people, but that doesn't make much of a case for making more people. It makes even less of a case for making more animals, since animals have less good in their lives (on McMahan's view).

My reaction to this: it's actually a major mystery why "we assign little or no weight to impersonal reasons to cause individuals to exist," so this seems like a very shaky way to respond to someone defending benign carnivorism.  Peter Singer doesn't respond to the argument this way, as he's a "total utilitarian" and does assign weight to these impersonal reasons. His very complicated discussion of this in Practical Ethics might be the thing to read next. 

Hope that was helpful!

* Article is HERE.

Feminine Faces of Freethought

I was thinking about live-blogging or live-tweeting yesterday's conference, but I'm actually not capable of walking and chewing gum at the same time--so to speak.  No need for a complete rundown, as there will be video of the whole conference soon, I hear. This is going to be mostly reactions to panels and talks, not summaries.

First up was a panel on secular parenting, featuring Jamye Carr, Anne Crumpacker, and Noelle George. Much sensible advise was dispensed, including the advice to encourage kids to ask questions and consult experts.  One issue several people discussed was the religious babysitter or relative. What do you do when Grandma starts witnessing to the kids?  Prohibit that, the panelists all seemed to agree.

I had an experience with my children a long time ago that makes me think it can sometimes be better to allow children to have more diverse influences. (I talked about this in a little essay I wrote for Free Inquiry.) My twins learned that people die one day when they were age three, and they found the news extremely upsetting. They were inconsolable -- and I mean really distraught. It so happens we left them with a babysitter that night, and they asked the babysitter what happens when we die.  She reassured them that we go to heaven, and they were vastly happier the next morning. The upsetness about death lasted for the next six months, and just being able to talk about the mere possibility that we survive in an afterlife was helpful.

Next up--well, me, talking about Alex Rosenberg's book The Atheist's Guide to Life, and the problem of intentionality (or "aboutness"), and meaning in life, and ... a lot of other stuff.  The powerpoint is here, if you're interested. I started my talk with a short prelude about solidarity vs. agreement. (You can have solidarity with people you disagree with ... etc. etc.)  I was a bit worried ahead of time that a philosophy of mind-heavy talk might not go over well, but I was delighted with all the discussion afterwards. Terrific, lively, lots of fun.

After lunch--at the Cosmic Cafe, an excellent vegetarian eatery!--there was a panel called "What Atheist Women Really Want."  I enjoyed Elyse Anders, a snappy speaker with very pink hair from Skepchick.  Bridget Gaudette of Secular Women is one of these people who keeps saying "I'm not a very good speaker" while being a very good speaker.  She's funny!

Next up, Noelle George, the operations manager for Foundation Beyond Belief,  talking on "Fifty Shades of Feminism."  I thought this was a terrific title, because there are many forms of feminism, but Noelle seemed to think not. Feminism is just one thing, she said: advocating equal rights for all genders (though feminists can advocate in different styles).  I beg to disagree here. There are liberal feminists, "difference" feminists, radical separatist feminists, Marxist feminists, ecofeminists--to name a few.  These are people with significantly different beliefs and goals.  A primer on these differences would be most helpful to address a very wacky belief that's taken hold in the atheosphere--the belief that secular women agitating for harassment codes are "radical feminists" or (what a word--who invented this, Rush Limbaugh?) "radfems". But no. What these women want is compatible with just about every form of feminism that exists--it's not the least bit specific to "radical feminism."

Noelle said we have a gender problem in the secular community and who could disagree, watching online craziness in the last year. I don't disagree! On the other hand, how big is the problem out in the real world? She said (roughly) "the numbers show we have a problem." 0f those who complain of being harmed, 56% are women.  This study is what she was referring to, I think, but it says two things, actually.  It says that 14.4% of women (but 11.4% overall) have "felt unwelcome, discriminated against, or harmed in the secular movement."  That's not a huge disparity. And then it says 55% of women (compared to 35% overall) have had "problems within the group."  A bigger disparity. I take it these problems are milder than feeling "unwelcome, discriminated or harmed."  I'm not 100% sure how we're supposed to interpret the last figure but certainly the bigger number is scarier. I'm pressing the question only because one woman, after the talk, expressed dismay, and said she was going to avoid national conferences.

[Note: I changed the last paragraph after pondering that study for another hour. I think my initial objection may have been based on misinterpreting the 55% statistic.]

Finally--possibly the highlight of the day--there was a diversity panel.  Being an academic philosopher, I tend to think of atheism mostly as an intellectual movement--it's all about the Dawkins's and the Harris's of this world. But the atheist movement is also a haven for all sorts of people who have actually been harmed, sometimes because of their non-conformity with religiously approved gender norms.  The people on this panel had some incredibly moving stories to tell. One in particular made me laugh and made me cry. A talk about female genital mutilation was very moving and informative.  I'm being a little vague about the personnel here as we were told some of the people on this panel were dealing with real world threats.

My daughter accompanied me to the event, which made it extra fun. It's always good for a 15 year old girl to hear the world "feminism" and she got to hear it roughly 100 times. She got some new jewelry out of the bargain too--a "surlyramic" necklace with an atom image.  All in all, a fun and interesting day.

Is Life Meaningless?

Links for my talk at Feminine Faces of Freethought.

Alex Rosenberg, The Atheist’s Guide to Life: Enjoying Life without IIlusions 
Jean Kazez, Review of Rosenberg in Free Inquiry (August/September 2012)
Leo Tolstoy, A Confession 
Harry Frankfurt, The Reasons of Love 
Susan Wolf, Meaning in Life and Why it Matters 
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy – look up Intentionality; Causal theories of mental content
Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

Repudiate, Excoriate, Disassociate

A quick word about this.  PZ Myers' frustration is understandable, and that's a beautifully written rant, but Ron Lindsay did repudiate the savages.  He said "no one wants them in the movement."  That's repudiating; it's just not excoriating.  Must we excoriate?  I'm not so sure, as my impression is that the savages love the attention. They positively thrive on being excoriated. My view is that disassociation is much more important that excoriation.  I made that point in a comment at Talking Philosophy last week, so I'll just quote myself--

I think most hardcore bullies are not going to cease and desist because people disapprove of them. They see themselves as outlaws, so in fact the more people disapprove, the more fun they have being bad boys & girls. So I think it would make sense to think about other ways of responding. One issue, which is kind of tricky, is complicity and enabling. Many people go on talking to bullies even though they see them as bullies. I think people are often actually grateful to have a few sluggers on their ideological team–though wouldn’t admit it, if asked. The bully knows this, and so feels appreciated, though people may not express their appreciation openly. The continued interaction makes the bully feel like a respectable member of “the community” (whatever that might be). So one way of attacking the problem is for non-bullies to think more about who they consort with.

Eject bullies from your own “community”, don’t join communities that include bullies, don’t hang out with bullies, even when they’re off duty. Etc. Of course, you have to be aware of who’s a bully in the first place–which means no burying your head in the sand. I think this bully prevention strategy is actually more likely to stop bullying than highminded lectures about civility. As I say, bullies are outlaws–they positively enjoy their incivility and don’t care what others think. They do like attention and interaction, though. Take that away from them, and they really might disappear.

So here's my prescription:

1. If you are one of the savages yourself, take some time out for deep reflection. Is this really the way you want to spend your time?  Have you become the person you want to be?  Think about it.
2. If you participate in a forum in which significant bullying takes place, get out now.  You may only be functioning as an audience or sounding board for the bad actors, but your attention encourages them.  If you go further and assist--for example, by delivering links, screen caps, addresses, and the like--then shame on you.  
3. If you interact with and link to people who are involved in a forum where significant bullying takes place, then stop.  Your interactions send a clear message to bullies that they're not going to lose their seat at the table by being bullies, they're not going to lose the respect of respectable outsiders. Your attention is enabling bullies, even if you're not an active participant. 

As you can see, there are no examples in this post, and I'm going to have a strict policy of no examples in the comments.  Warning: I'll probably close comments at the end of the day, as I just can't get into discussions that start in September and go on until December.  I have these issues on my mind today, and with any luck I'll have other things on my mind tomorrow.

If you want to comment please focus on directly relevant, general issues like this --

• Am I right that disassociation is the key, not so much repudiation or excoriation?
• Are we complicit if we listen to, interact with, and link to people who are involved in a high-bullying website?
• What are the limits?  Say that A is a savage, B directly assists A, C links to and respectfully interacts with B. Now take D, who pals around with C, and E ...  It cannot make sense to continue this chain indefinitely, calling everyone with any connection to A, however remote, an enabler?  My prescription limits responsibility to A, B, and C. Is this a principled limit?

Solidarity

One of the reasons I'm looking forward to the "Feminine Faces of Freethought" conference on Saturday is that for once, I'm (presumably) going to be sitting in a room with women who are happy to make common cause with other women. Ever since I organized a talk on feminism at my junior high school, when I was 13 years old, I've been happy to do that.

Some women--apparently a non-negligible number in the "freethought" community--don't affiliate with other women in that way. At a recent meeting, Harriet Hall wore a T-shirt that said, in part, "I'm a skeptic, not a skepchick, not a 'woman skeptic', just a skeptic." In a recent blog post, Sara Mayhew applauds her--

The message of Dr. Hall’s shirt resonates with me because it addresses the most important thing to me about feminism and equality; that you can’t make assumptions about my thoughts, feelings, and experiences based on my gender. I don’t consider myself part of a subset of skeptics because I’m a woman. What I want is to be viewed as a human individual. My experiences aren’t going to be the same as yours just because we share the same gender.

Mayhew's post drew a furious response from a few feminists. That's too bad, because the fury makes you want to rush to Mayhew's defense, as if her statement were completely innocent. Surely it isn't.

Imagine a gay man wearing a T-shirt that says "I am not a gay skeptic, just a skeptic" or one who writes the equivalent of Mayhew's paragraph:  "I don't consider myself part of a subset of skeptics because I'm gay. What I want is to be viewed as a human individual."   Gay people are in fact a disadvantaged minority.  Gay people do have a set of common problems. If you refuse to identify yourself as a member of that minority, you do a little to make that group, and their undeniable disdvantages, invisible. Sure, it's understandable to want to be viewed as a human individual, but if you live in a world where gay people are discriminated against, as a group, then there's good reason for gay people to make common cause with each other.

Same goes for a black skeptic (or black philosopher, or black lawyer ... or whatever) who insists "I don't consider myself part of a subset of skeptics because I'm black. What I want is to be viewed as a human individual."  Sure, you want that. It would be great for each of us to be viewed as a human individual, if nobody "saw" race, gender, sexual preference, disability, etc. But for the time being, black people are a disadvantaged subgroup.  Blacks who say "I am just a human individual" now are letting down other members of that group, since all benefit when the group advocates for itself collectively.

Just like blacks share problems and gay people do, of course women do as well. Obviously women, as women, don't have the very same experiences.   But it would make sense if we at least shared dismay that there's never been a female US president, that all of the four horsemen of new atheism are men, that women are more likely than men to be raped and sexually harassed, that women in some countries can't vote or move around freely. Beyond that, it would make sense to take an interest in finding solutions to these problems.  Being female and disassociating from other women is like being black and disassociating from blacks, or being gay and disassociating from gays--all three reveal a lack of solidarity, and solidarity (when you're in fact a member of a disadvantaged group) is a virtue.

It was a happy cow

I adore Nicholas Kristof, and love the way he's taken up the cause of animals, but his column today does make me wonder if he's ready to think carefully about these things.  The howlers (as English philosophers used to say) are so obvious they're almost funny.

Kristof has a friend named Bob who raises dairy cows in relatively humane conditions, giving them names and calling them his "girls".  What happens, though, when they grow old?  Kristof tells a story about one of Bob's favorite cows, Jolly, that's supposed to reassure us --

When Jolly grew old and unproductive, he traded her to a small family farm in exchange for a ham so she could live out her retirement with dignity.

If only I were teaching Animal Rights this semester, I could have the fun of asking my students what's odd about that sentence.  (Whisper:  the ham, what about the HAM?)

The last paragraph is just as unreflective--

The next time you drink an Organic Valley glass of milk, it may have come from one of Bob's cows. If so, you can bet it was a happy cow. And it has a name.

IT has a name?  Either you can urge people to support farms with named cows or you can refuse to use personal pronouns for animals, but surely you can't do both!  (Aside: I'm mighty puzzled by the convention that animals are to be called "it". Aren't there very plainly male and female animals?)

OK, minor points.  Kristof is a good guy trying to support more humane methods of farming. I applaud him for that.  Gary Francione, predictably enough, doesn't. Here's Prof. Francione excoriating Kristof for his wrong-headed concern.

For Kristof and other welfarists, and this includes just about every large “animal protection” organization in this country, animals are things. They are not nonhuman persons. They are not members of the moral community. It is fine to exploit them as long as we torture them less than they would be tortured in an alternative situation; as long as we send them to slaughter with a name.

Well, that's right. Kristof does not think animals are persons, and that's probably because (if he thinks it through) he would reject the theory that sentience is sufficient for personhood.  It doesn't follow that animals are mere things or that they don't matter at all. They just don't matter in exactly the same way that persons like us matter.

Even if they matter in some intermediate, "somewhere between person and thing" way, there's still the question how we can possibly be justified in taking an animal's life, just for the pleasure we get from eating animal products.  The more I think about that question, the less I find it has any easy answer.   It's one thing if the pleasure in question is a small increment--like the difference between (say) Godiva chocolate and Hershey's. It's another if the difference is quite large--like the difference between eating in a school cafeteria and in a great restaurant.  Sad fact: I think for many people, a vegan diet would be like a lifetime of eating in the cafeteria. 

For someone like Francione, Kristof is a major enemy. He makes it seem like you can reconcile ethics with eating animals, just so long as you make enough humane reforms. This essay from Slate, sent to me by a reader (thank you!), makes clear how intense the fight is between abolitionists and other kinds of animal advocates.

Take, for instance, this year’s annual Animal Rights National Conference, which was held in Alexandria, Va., last month. After an abolitionist petition to ban HSUS from the conference failed, abolitionists tried sponsoring an independent seminar in protest of HSUS’s involvement. The hotel where the conference took place then attempted to shut down the abolitionists’ competing seminar (apparently at the main conference organizers’ behest). It’s this dust-up—not any of the myriad practical strategies of reform discussed during the four-day conference—that has earned the bulk of the attention in animal rights circles.

The rest of the article is well worth reading.

Misogyny and the Meaning of Life

Next week at the Feminine Faces of Freethought conference in Dallas I'm going to be talking about the meaning of life. Specifically, I'll be talking about an argument in Alex Rosenberg's book The Atheist's Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life without Illusions -- to the effect that life is totally meaningless.

But first I plan on saying just a bit about the misogyny wars that have been raging lately in the atheosphere.  The question bouncing around in my head is: why?  Why so much friction about so little -- since the dispute is about relatively small things like how to treat each other at conventions?  I have a little theory about that.  Hope to see you at the conference!

P.S. This was longer as of 5 seconds ago, but thought better of it. If you subscribe, maybe you got the longer thing by email. When all is said and done, all that talk just repulses me, and I didn't want it at my blog. 

Drunken "Consent"

Jeremy Stangroom asks an interesting question over here.  "Suppose somebody says this to you--

I want to want to have sex with you, but I never want sex unless I’m high or drunk. I can’t relax and I don’t enjoy it. But look, I’ll start drinking, and hopefully there will come a point where my inhibitions are sufficiently lowered and I’m relaxed enough so that we can go ahead. But realize I’m not consenting right now to have sex with you later, I’m simply telling you that I’m making the choice to drink in the hope that I will come to want sex later on. If that happens, I’ll let you know, but it might not. 

This person then starts drinking, ingests some ...  amount of alcohol (i.e., past the point at which under normal circumstances you would consider it wrong to have sex with them), and then tells you they are ready to have sex with you."  Is there anything wrong with going ahead?  A bunch of assumptions we're supposed to make come next--have a look over there.

Let's make this more manageable by putting it all in the third-person.  John wants to have sex with Mary.  Mary merely wants to want to have sex with John, and makes the speech above.  The odd thing about the speech is that at first, Mary more or less tells John that she does want to have sex with him, but she's simply not ready yet.  That seems to be the import of her telling him that she has to be high or drunk to want to have sex. In essence, she's saying to him "My reluctance at the moment has nothing to do with you. In principle, I do want to have sex with you.  But I want to be able to control whether we stop or go, at every point in time." OK, fine ...

But then Mary shifts gears, telling John he has to wait for consent that may or may not come later on.  "But realize I'm not consenting right now to have sex with you later."   This sounds like more than wanting to maintain moment to moment control.  She actually wants John to think there's been no consent yet, and consent may come later on, at the point when she's drunk -- or may not.

Well, no!  Imagine it's like this--

John wants to sell his motorcycle to Mary. Mary wants to want to buy, but she's nervous about it, so suggests they go to a bar, where she will have a few beers in the hope that she will start wanting to buy the motorcycle. She's adamant that consent for the sale hasn't been granted yet, but says consent may (or may not) be given in the bar.

John should certainly decline this plan. You need mutual consent for a major sale, and he won't be able to secure it.  Likewise, you need mutual consent before sex, and John won't be able to secure genuine consent from someone who's inebriated.

Now, there are times when we don't really need mutual consent, because the activities in question are too trivial.  Here's another John and Mary story--

John wants to go on the roller coaster with Mary. Mary only wants to want to go on the roller coaster with John, but doesn't want to. She suggests they go to the Green Beer Booth first.  She has a few beers, then says "let's do it!" 

Fine. He doesn't have her consent before getting on the roller coaster with her, but doesn't need it--the activity is too trivial.

I take it that in our society we see having sex with someone as more like buying a motorcycle from them and  less like going on a roller coaster together.  That's why the drunken willingness that's sufficient in the roller coaster scenario just won't do when the issue is whether to have sex.  Is that silly or irrational?  Hardly!  Sex involves bodily penetration, risk of pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, emotional risks, and so on.

Poor Mary and John! If she really can't consent to sex without being inebriated, I think she's going to have to remain celibate.  And he's going to need to find another partner.

"I am an animal"

There's a movie about the life of PETA president Ingrid Newkirk, called "I am an animal."  Saying "I am an animal," in that context, is an expression of ethical solidarity with animals.  In my course on animal rights, I use the term "animalism" to encompass all who give more-than-traditional status to animals, whether rights advocates, utilitarians, or people with other perspectives.  So "I am an animal" is an expression of animalism, as I use the term.

There's a position in metaphysics that says each of us can truly say "I am an animal." This is the view that the lifespan and persistence conditions for me are the same as for a particular organism--the one now sitting in my chair.  On that view, I came into existence before my mental life did, and I may very well go out of existence after my mental life does. It so happens, the standard name for that metaphysical position is "animalism".

So--metaphysical and ethical animalism.  Do they just coincidentally have the same names and make us utter the same sentence?  Or is there some real connection between the two? Sometimes I share my thoughts in progress here, and sometimes I just share my questions in progress! 

What is Civility?

There's been a lot of discussion about that question at atheist blogs recently and I've had a growing sense that a lot of people are on the wrong track. They focus too much on decorum--politeness, name-calling, and the like. Civility has something to do with decorum, but the essence of it is something else.  I like what Robert Talisse and Scott Aikin say about civility in a recent post at 3 Quarks Daily.

In order to get a clearer view of what argumentative civility is and why it is important, we need to begin by saying something about why we argue.  Argumentation is the process of articulating our reasons for holding our beliefs.  The point of articulating our reasons is to put them on display so that they may be examined and evaluated.  When we argue specifically in response to disagreement, we supply our reasons for the purpose of demonstrating to our interlocutor their strength, and the comparative weakness of the reasons that support opposing views.  Argumentation hence has within it the idea that one should believe only what the strongest available reasons support; it is, again, the activity of supplying reasons for the purposes of testing and evaluating them.  This means that arguers are committed to the possibility of finding that their reasons are weaker than they had initially thought or that their opponent’s case is in fact stronger than expected; and when one’s reasons come up short, one may have to revise one’s belief.  Unless conducted against the background commitment to the possibility of revising one’s views, argumentation is pointless.

We now are able identify civility in argument with tendencies that enable the exchange of reasons among disputants. Chief among these concerns the need for those who disagree to actually engage with each other’s reasons.  This requires arguers to earnestly attempt to correctly understand and accurately represent each other’s views.  For similar reasons, arguers must also give a proper hearing to their opponents’ reasons, especially when the opponent is responding to criticism.  In addition, when making the case for their own view, arguers must seek to present reasons that their opponents could at least in principle see the relevance of.  We can summarize these ideas by saying that civility in argument has three dimensions: Representation, Reception, and Reciprocity.

The essence of incivility, then, is failing to engage with someone's reasons. Of course, rudeness tends to drown out engagement with reasons, but rudeness isn't the heart of incivlity.

Talisse and Aiken have gone for "3 Rs" and so have I, in my comment policy.  Mine are "be reasonable, be relevant, and be respectful."  I think this covers more or less the same ground as their more technical-sounding requirements.

Most of the time I find commenters here as civil as I could want. Things tend to degenerate only when I venture into the land of atheism--that's when we get into endless comment threads that go nowhere. One of the reasons these threads tend to be uncivil--remember, civility is engagement with reasons--is because it seems the atheosphere (pardon the hideous term) is full of people who have stories to tell about what was once done to them in some previous setting. They see a post with some connection to their stories, and they think "now's my chance to unload."  And then it gets even worse--they get angry if they're denied the chance to unload.  So they start off with "core" incivility--they don't offer a relevant, reasonable response to the post; and then move on to just plain rudeness.

If you've been reading my blog, you probably know I have a specific example in mind. My "Backlash Against Feminism" post talked about abusiveness toward a specific group of women (and supporters of women)--the X's, shall we say. Someone came along and said--wait, I'm not an X, and I've been abused too!  This is basically like reading a post about the abuse of wives and commenting, "But wait, I'm a husband, and I've been abused too!"  The comment would only make sense if someone were alleging that only wives get abused. And why would anyone say that?  Likewise, why would I say that the X's are the only people ever treated abusively?  It's especially strange, because I've written previous posts about non-X's being treated badly. There was nothing in my post and there is nothing anywhere in this blog to suggest I have the view that X's are the only people who have been treated badly in the atheosphere.

The X's are being treated badly, and I think it's strange (very strange) not to be willing to say so, and say it emphatically, and protest it, and take the time to understand why it's happening and how it can be prevented. (I like Phil Plait's "take" on that subject, over at Skepchick.)  I don't think every time the treatment of the X's comes up we should allow the subject to quickly be changed to other transgressions.   Not only is that rapid change of subject an injustice to these women, but if I write a post about the X's, it just does not engage with my argument and my reasons to divert the subject to a Y.  It is, in the truest sense of the word, uncivil.

What fun ...

... I've not been having, since I posted my blog about the backlash against feminism in the "atheosphere".  Not to be unoriginal, but we really aren't in Kansas anymore.  Moral of the story: watch who you talk to, because there are people out there who basically act like mad dogs (with apologies to mad dogs). They bark, scratch, bite, beg to be petted, whine, and them bark some more.  When you finally lose patience and try to rein them in, they get even madder. Worse, they're talking dogs, so they can go away and tell lies about you.  My mantra now: no mad dogs, no mad dogs!  I will be more careful about who I allow to comment in the future, and will moderate more strictly when the topic requires it.

"I wish my mother had aborted me"

"Aeolus" sent me an article from the Guardian with that very puzzling title. The author, Lynn Beisner, says she's tired of all the abortion deliverance stories that pro-lifers like to tell.  They seize upon accounts of people who were nearly aborted, but whose mothers changed their minds.  She writes--

What makes these stories so infuriating to me is that they are emotional blackmail. As readers or listeners, we are almost forced by these anti-choice versions of A Wonderful Life to say, "Oh, I am so glad you were born." And then by extension, we are soon forced into saying, "Yes, of course, every blastula of cells should be allowed to develop into a human being."

Beisner tries to counter abortion deliverance stories, and the argument based on them, by saying her case is just the opposite -- she thinks her mother should have aborted her.  Her mother had a terrible life and gave her a child a terrible life as well, though she says she's come to be happy in the last 12 years. You have to read the article to see how moving this is--I won't try to summarize.

I like the anti-pollyanna tone of this article, and it's worth knowing that not every mother heroically overcomes adversity.  But truth be told, giving examples of lives that shouldn't have started isn't the best way to counter the "argument from gladness": the argument that moves from "I'm so glad you were born" or "I'm so glad I was born" to "aborting this pregnancy would be wrong." That gladness is a very hice thing, but nothing really follows from it about abortion.

Think about it.  I'm glad I was born.  Had my mother had an abortion, I wouldn't have been born.  But there are lots and lots of other precursors of my birth besides her not having an abortion--things that had to be that way, or I wouldn't have been born. Another precursor is that my parents didn't go to a movie on that fateful night. And they didn't use contraception.  And they spent 15 minutes washing the dishes. Because the exact timing of conception alters which sperm meets the mother's egg, there are actually zillions of precursors to any particular person existing.  Lots of things had to be that way for me to wind up existing and being glad I exist.

If I say my gladness means my mother would have been wrong to have an abortion, I'll also have to say she would have been wrong to eliminate any of the other precursors. The fact that I'm glad I exist will mean she had to skip the movie, and had to skip contraception, and had to wash the dishes for just 15 minutes. But all that's absurd.  Surely nobody's obligated to do the vast number of things that imperceptibly make it so that one eventually-ever-so-glad person comes into the world, rather than another person or no one at all.

It's certainly more dramatic and compelling to counter deliverance stories with tragic stories like Beisner's.  But here's the thing. Very, very few people are not glad that they exist.  If the gladness argument made any sense, someone contemplating an abortion would at least be able to reason: my eventual child will almost certainly be glad she was born, so I shouldn't have an abortion.  It's crucial, then, to see that it doesn't make sense ... ever, at all.

The fact that I'm glad I exist tells us literally nothing about what my parents should and shouldn't have done many moons ago, when all the events were transpiring that eventually brought me into existence.  I suppose that's sort of surprising. The gladness argument seems rather appealing at first. That's why the deliverance stories are a good marketing device for pro-lifers. But scratch the surface and you actually find something barking mad. There's no way we're all obligated to do whatever it takes to create exactly those people who will eventually exist, just because they'll be glad they exist. 

The Backlash Against Feminism

Jen McCreight has a long post today about the backlash against feminism within the atheist-skeptic (AS) movement.  I think she's right that there's a backlash, but it would pay to dissect it dispassionately, and not overstate how big it is and who's a part of it.

By a "backlash against feminism" you might think what's meant is that a lot of people have been challenging the positions of atheists and skeptics on issues affecting women--like abortion, contraception, child marriage, oppressive religious institutions, and the like.  But no. Lots of people at atheist blogs write about those issues, and I don't believe I've ever seen any kind of revolt against them.

The backlash is not about general issues pertaining to the status and treatment of women. It's entirely (from what I can see) about interactions between men and women at AS blogs and conferences.  It's a very small bit of land that's being fought over, relatively speaking.  These are the kinds of things igniting all the fires--

• Is it, or isn't it, OK for a man to (in so many words) proposition a woman in a hotel elevator at 4 in the morning? 
• Is it, or isn't it, OK for a couple to give their "swinger's card" to a speaker after she's finished presenting at an AS conference?
• Is it, or isn't it, OK for people to protest against actions of a group using parodies of jewelry created by a member of the group? 
• What kinds of codes ought to be put in place to protect women from harassment at AS conferences?
• How much time/energy should bloggers put into discussing the issues above?
• Is it possible for excess attention to these things to backfire, scaring women away from the AS movement, instead of increasing participation?

Now, there are people who take a skeptical position on all these things. They think it's OK to proposition women in elevators at 4 in the morning, etc. etc. etc.  But it pays to distinguish two types of skeptics. 

The respectable skeptic may be on board with all substantive feminist goals, but they lean very liberal on sexual issues and libertarian-ish on rules and codes. They may also have distinctive positions on purely empirical matters, like how often harassing incidents occur, and what the impact is of discussing them at blogs. Their views on what will advance the status of women may also be distinctive. It strikes me as inflammatory and distorted to accuse these people of misogyny, or even of being anti-feminists.  Even if some of these people dress their views in provocative clothing, underneath it all they do not have troubling attitudes toward women. 

The second group is another matter. These are people who are seized by a desire to attack women when there's the least hint of a question about male behavior at blogs and conferences. The notion of codes being imposed on their behavior sends them into a rage.  These are the people whose existence you have to find surprising ... and very disturbing.  At the very least, they're seriously lacking in empathy. Some of them even seem to feel an awful lot of hatred. I don't know how numerous they are, but too numerous--and their ranks seem to be growing too.

Why bother making all these distinctions? Just to be accurate and truthful, but there are also repercussions to worry about. One worry I have is that group 1-ers will wind up being driven away as a result of the misrepresentations.  Why shouldn't they be a part of an atheist-skeptic movement that's committed to social justice? Furthermore, I think those misrepresentations tend to incite the people in group 2. Granted, they're easily incited, and their behavior is their own responsibility, but still: the more group 1-ers are maligned, the more group 2-ers respond by going after individual women and men in a hateful fashion. I've noticed this pattern over time--it's something that needs to be taken seriously.

That's all very general.  No examples of group 1-ers or group 2-ers, no links, nothing about where I stand.  But it's a beautiful day in Dallas.  Only 90 degrees!!!!!!  Plus new kitty wants to play.  That's enough for the moment.

Little Kitty

This is our new little kitty, a cat of three names, since we haven't decided yet. She's either Harriet, Soji (short for Sojourner), or Arietty (of Borrowers fame).  Awww!

Must we read letters from our past selves?

My daughter wrote letters to her future self when she was about 8 years old. She had noticed that perfectly nice kids sometimes turn into grumpy teenagers, and she wanted to tell herself not to do that. Now that she's 15, she refuses to read these letters. She thinks her 8-year-self has nothing to teach her.  Possibly cute, but something of a dolt -- I think that's about how she sees her past self. I personally think her 8-year-old self was a genius, and want her to get a hearing.

Her ... wait a second!  The standard metaphysics says a person is a single entity about whom different things are true in the past and the future.  My daughter is an entity such that once she wanted to avoid teenage grumpiness.  Now the very same entity doesn't want to avoid teenage grumpiness.  A subtly different view sees persons as collections of temporal stages. One stage of my daughter wanted to avoid teenage grumpiness. The stage that exists right now doesn't want to.

So this is my question: does the temporal stage story have a different upshot with respect to my daughter's problem than the standard story?  If people exist in stages, do we have past selves in an especially robust sense?  Can we wrong our past selves by not listening to them (that's stage talk) more than we can do wrong by not caring about what we used to want (that's standard metaphysics talk)? Does picking one of these theories or the other make a difference to how I ought to counsel my daughter?

Don't know yet -- I'm just thinking aloud.  Truth is, I don't want to figure this out so I can counsel my daughter (I already have:  READ THOSE LETTERS!) I just want to know if different theories about the self are really different enough to generate different life decisions. Or they all just rival "ways of thinking" about the world, with no palpable consequences?

Next on my personal identity reading list--Eric Olson's What Are We? and David DeGrazia, Creation Ethics.

Feminine Faces of Freethought

If you'll be in the Dallas area, please consider attending Feminine Faces of Freethought, a conference being held on September 15, under the auspices of the Dallas Fellowship of Freethought.  More info here.  The program (as it stands so far) reads--

Women of Reason--Dallas presents Feminine Faces of Freethought, a conference featuring women speaking about topics that affect the freethought community as a whole.

Join us for a day of talks by

• Noelle George, coordinator of Volunteers Beyond Belief and founder and past president of SECULAR Center;
  
• Dr. Jean Kazez, author of Animalkind, The Weight of Things, and the blog In Living Color;
• Elyse Anders, blogger at Skepchick, founder of Women Thinking, Inc, and leader of Hug Me! I'm Vaccinated;
• Bridget Gaudette, Co-Founder and Vice President of Outreach of Secular Woman;
• Dorian Mooneyham, blogger at http://transandgodless.blogspot.com and youtube.com/transandgodless;
• Anne Crumpacker, author of the blog Socratic Mama;
• and other members of the freethought community.

Panels include  

• Secular Parenting,  
• Diversity in the Freethought Movement,  
• and What Atheist Women Really Want.

My talk is going to be on a very Big topic.  In fact, on the meaning of life.  I'll be talking about "preservationist" atheists, who think we can dump God, and retain lots of other nice elements of our world view, like the self, free will, objective morality ... and life's meaningfulness; and "revolutionary" atheists, who think our reasons for dumping God have lots of other ramifications, and force us to give up on all or most of those goodies. Alex Rosenberg, in his new book The Atheist's Guide to Reality, proves to be the ultimate revolutionary atheist. To see just how revolutionary he is, you have to dig into his argument for life's meaninglessness. He thinks life has no meaning because people have no desires or purposes -- indeed, they don't even have contentful thoughts.  Talk about radical! I shall be explaining why he's wrong and casting my lot with the preservationists.

The talk connects with my review of Rosenberg's book in the current issue of Free Inquiry; and also with my book The Weight of Things: Philosophy and the Good Life; and also with a course I've been teaching at SMU for the last 10 years; and with work I've done in the philosophy of mind. My topic has nothing directly to do with women and secularism, but never fear--I do have a more or less feminine face, so I will fit into the program. (Joke.) Furthermore, I'll be showcasing the ideas of some female philosophers and highlighting some issues in women's lives. I share the goals of the conference organizers -- advancing the role of women in the secular movement.

Pink Boys, Blue Girls

Yesterday's New York Times Magazine had an interesting article by Ruth Pradawer about boys who like to dress like girls ("pink boys" is the phrase the author uses).  Parents get much more concerned about these boys than about girls who want to dress like boys.  Why is that?  One reason is because their futures are less conventional. The author writes--

The studies on what happens in adulthood to boys who strayed from gender norms all have methodological limitations, but they suggest that although plenty of gay men don’t start out as pink boys, 60 to 80 percent of pink boys do eventually become gay men. The rest grow up to either become heterosexual men or become women by taking hormones and maybe having surgery. Gender-nonconforming behavior of girls, however, is rarely studied, in part because departures from traditional femininity are so pervasive and accepted. The studies that do exist indicate that tomboys are somewhat more likely than gender-typical girls to become bisexual, lesbian or male-identified, but most become heterosexual women.

One of the experts interviewed by Pradawer has a different interpretation of why "pink boys" are worrisome for parents, but "blue girls" (a phrase never even used in the article) aren't--

These days, flouting gender conventions extends even to baby naming: first names that were once unambiguously masculine are now given to girls. The shift, however, almost never goes the other way. That’s because girls gain status by moving into “boy” space, while boys are tainted by the slightest whiff of femininity. “There’s a lot more privilege to being a man in our society,” says Diane Ehrensaft, a psychologist at the University of California, San Francisco, who supports allowing children to be what she calls gender creative. “When a boy wants to act like a girl, it subconsciously shakes our foundation, because why would someone want to be the lesser gender?”

This doesn't ring entirely true to me. People can desperately want to have a girl, and be thrilled with the girliness of their girls, yet be anxious when boys start doing "girl" things.  That doesn't mesh with the notion that girliness is undesirable in boys because it's viewed as inferior, period.

No, what people (many, anyway) don't like to see is girliness in boys; it's not a question of girliness in general.  For some reason masculinity seems more fragile. Forgive the crude analogy, but masculinity and femininity seem sort of like chocolate and vanilla. Chocolate (femininity) is the more durable flavor. You can add vanilla to chocolate, and it still tastes like chocolate. 

Adding chocolate to vanilla, on the other hand, makes it no longer vanilla. Masculinity has to be scrupulously protected or it disappears.  That's how we perceive it, anyway ... but based on what?  The first paragraph might shed a lot of light--perhaps "pink boys" really are much more different from other boys than "blue girls" are from other girls.  That's why we think of small deviations from "pure masculinity" as major differences, to be guarded against diligently.  (What a lot of stress for boys who are drawn to "feminine" things, and for their anxious parents.)

Sure to help me think about these things is Charlotte Witt's new book The Metaphysics of Gender, arriving courtesy of Amazon any day now.  We published a review written by Asta Sveinsdottir in The Philosophers' Magazine (you can read it here).  A longer review by the same author is at NDPR.

Short Story, Manque

Too bad I'm not a short story writer. I think I recently encountered material for a good story.  Alas, all I can do is relate this as an anecdote. 

I went to see The Dirty Projectors last weekend with my husband and 15-year-old daughter.  They were performing at the Kessler Theater in Oak Cliff, which is a very small, consummately cool venue, where it's hard to blend into the crowd. My daughter felt age-conscious because she was too young and was sitting with her aged parents.  I felt age-conscious because I'm one of her aged parents.  We sat on the balcony, which has one row of upholstered chairs on two sides and a few rows at the back. 

As we looked around for age-mates (and found none), my daughter and I started to focus on a couple in their 40s about 15 feet away, sitting in the comfy chairs.   He was grey haired and pudgy, with a potbelly and wearing shorts, but his face suggested that once he had been as good-looking and cool as the Kessler crowd. His equally pudgy wife kept stroking his thigh, suggesting that to at least one person, he was still hot.  I told my daughter this man probably still felt 18 inside, and no doubt had been to tons of great concerts in his day. I reminded her (for the zillionth time) of the fact that I once crashed a Jefferson Airplane concert (or was it my friends who crashed it -- memory fades, I think maybe I had a ticket).  You can't judge people by externals, blah, blah, blah. Anyhow, watching this couple soothed our worries about age. If this couple could enjoy the show, so could we.

The lights went down and a warm up band (Wye Oak) started to play.  A short time into their set, we started hearing loud voices over where the middle-aged couple were sitting. Everyone around us started focusing in that direction.  We could see pushing and shoving and the voices got louder. Then a fight broke out, and we could see a guy slam someone into the wall.  My immediate thought: Aurora. I'm ready to drag my daughter down to the ground. But quickly Security came in and dragged someone away. The middle aged couple's seats were empty now.  Ten minutes later, the wife came back to collect her purse. Everyone was murmuring--people were passing along accounts of what had happened.

When Wye Oak was done playing, a definitive story was passed around: someone had leaned against the middle-aged guy's chair, and he'd freaked out. Somehow or other the two had gotten into a fist fight and the couple had been evicted from the theater.

In the short story that I won't be writing, because I don't have the skills, it's all about the wife --how she feels going to this youthful venue in the first place, the hand she keeps on her husband's thigh, and especially her trip back in to collect her purse.

Somehow it's about age. Maybe it's about how we -- my daughter and I -- looked to the wrong people to deal with feeling out of place.  Because they turned out to be not just out of place, but kicked out of the place. I think there's a story here, not just an anecdote, but (sadly) not one I have the skills to write!

Oh yeah, the concert.  I like The Dirty Projectors, but not as much as my daughter and husband do.  I agree with a line in a Pitchfork review--something to the effect to that they're enjoyable to listen to but don't get inside your head.  There's something zig-zaggy and jazz-like about them, and non-melodious.

Why Philosophy Helps

Massimo Pigliucci has written a fine post today about irrationality and bad behavior in the so-called "community of reason."  Having regularly followed atheist blogs for about 5 years now, this strikes a deep chord with me. I'm much less familiar with "real world" skeptic/atheist groups than Massimo is (I imagine they're much better), but I am continually amazed by the online shenanigans. Massimo has done an excellent job of listing the sins.

One of Massimo's constructive proposals is "more philosophy."  I've been thinking the same thing lately, because I find the philosophically-trained members of the atheist/skeptic community, as a group, less guilty of the various sins in Massimo's list. Of course, it doesn't follow they're "the fairest of them all". Individual non-philosophers can be just as (or more) sagacious and fair-minded. Some philosophers are less sagacious and less fair-minded. But on the whole, people who study/teach/write philosophy seem to be (on average) more reasonable and reflective.  (Wouldn't it be nice to have some X-Phi data to back that up?)

Which makes me wonder -- why does philosophy help?  Some of the reasons are obvious, but some aren't.  Starting at the less obvious end--

(1) I started out in philosophy as a student of the history of philosophy. So I've spent insane amounts of time reading Kant, Hegel, Plato, Aristotle, etc.  Back in the day, I used to periodically wonder what the point was. If only I'd been studying science, instead of spending hours and hours of my life reading Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit (twice!), trying to figure out what Aristotle said, and so on.  But these days I see a huge payoff, not just in terms of substance (Hegel and Aristotle said some smart things!), but in the state of mind that results from all that difficult exegesis.  After hours, months, years of reading painfully difficult texts, you develop the habit of working hard on understanding what others are saying. The pay off, for members of the "community of reason," is a willingness to work hard to "get" another's meaning, rather than rushing immediately into combat. 

(2) Half, or more than half, the work of philosophy is to "problematize" the seemingly simple and easy.  Any philosophy problem worth thinking about is vastly more complex than immediately meets the eye.  So one benefit you get from studying/teaching/writing philosophy is appreciating the difficulty of problems -- being less prone to premature pretend solutions. Lots of the sins in Massimo's list are sins of premature solution (so to speak).

(3) One of the things I like most about teaching philosophy is that in a philosophy class people with hugely different viewpoints are expected to sit in a room together and discuss matters politely and reasonably.  In my animal rights class, vegans talk to hunters--without anyone going berserk. In my course on the meaning of life, religious students talk about life with atheists--all in a mode of mutual respect.  In a contemporary moral problems class, if you're skilled, you can get pro-life and pro-choice students to talk to each other calmly, and even see eye-to-eye on some issues.  This is great preparation for being part of an inclusive "community of reason," one in which nobody's sent into exile just for the "crime" of accommodationism, thinking one way or another about sexual harassment policies, etc.

(4) Then there are the more obvious benefits.  In any philosophy program, you will take classes on logic and critical thinking, developing debate skills that ought to innoculate you against the various diseases of internet debate--all the wanton straw-manning, ad-hom-ing, etc. etc. In the heat of debate we can all succumb, but after studying philosophy one is at least more aware of the ideal we should aspire to.

(5) And of course in philosophy one studies the great issues that are central topics for atheists and skeptics--the existence of God, the relationship between religion and morality, the nature of science, free will, and so on.

This list of benefits might convince someone to take a philosophy class (one hopes!), but it has another purpose.  A new school year is about to begin.  I know that a philosophy professor or two reads this blog.  We are particularly vulnerable, as a group, to "what's the point?" type thoughts.  Well, there you are.  What we do in philosophy classes helps people becomes better citizens of the "community of reason."  I believe this is really true, and I find it motivating.

And now I'll get back to preparing for the fall semester--no, it's not too soon.

The Creation Evidence Museum

Here in Texas, creationists lurk everywhere, so it seems reasonable to try to understand how they think. A place called the "Creation Evidence Museum" is an hour and a half from Dallas, right near Dinosaur Valley State Park.  At the park you can see dinosaur track fossils in a the bed of a shallow stream --very cool.  A man by the name of Carl Baugh created the museum close by in 1994, presumably to educate visitors from the park who might reason "dinosaurs existed long before humans, so the Bible is not entirely true."  Baugh's position is that dinosaurs and humans actually existed at the same time. 

I've always been curious about the museum, ever since we visited the State Park way back when (a memorable trip, because I contracted a terrible case of poison ivy).  When my kids started asking questions about creationists earlier in the summer, I decided it was time to check it out. Yesterday we made the journey--a party of six in all.  It was one of those hotter than hell Texas days, but we fearlessly set out, armed with sunscreen and an extensive de-contamination kit (four books by Richard Dawkins).  OK, I lied about the sunscreen.

So yes (we were told), dinosaurs and humans existed at the same time.  The museum has a couple of pieces of evidence for this-- a rock with a dinosaur footprint as well as a human footprint   Also: a little clay pitcher with a baby dinosaur-shaped handle, dated 1250 AD and found in Mississippi.  There were dinosaurs not just in earliest biblical days, but in the middle ages!  Also: an image of a dinosaur in a Peruvian bas relief, indicating that dinosaurs were also in South America not so long ago. (Some images here.)

What fun!  We got to hear a lecture on the geologic column by Mr. Baugh himself, which was all very interesting. His team of "geologists" was present, and they seemed to have some very impressive "credentials".  They inserted themselves here and there, reporting on their "excavations", demonstrating their "sensitivity" to the possibility of fraud, asking "penetrating scientific questions", etc.  You will have noticed a lot of scare quotes in the last two sentences. Let us not belabor the obvious.

A fair number of the people in the room (40 in all) appeared to be part of the magic show.  It was a little difficult to say, looking around, who were the performers and who they were performing for.  We came away quite curious about the state of mind of Baugh and Co.  To what extent are they sincere true believers, and to what extent are they involved in a deliberate fraud?  Presumably they do believe in creationism.  But do they really believe in the whole dog and pony show they're putting on to get others to believe in creationism too? Or is the show a noble lie, so to speak--with the ends justifying the means (in their minds)? If they don't know they're talking nonsense, should they know?

Well anyway, it's sort of a fun thought, isn't it?  Dinosaurs in America in the middle ages. Dinosaurs off-stage, throughout the bible.  I'm tempted to go look up the Leviticus dietary code, and see which instructions could possibly be construed as saying whether or not humans are permitted to eat Tyrannosaurus burgers. Surely if there had been dinosaurs around, they would have loomed rather large (literally) and that would have been covered. Plus, one wants to have a closer look at pre-historic cave paintings. Early people were obviously fascinated with mega-fauna. What, no dinosaurs?

It would certainly be a fun exercise for a high school critical thinking or science class: how do we know that dinosaurs did not live at the same time as humans?  We discussed this during the car ride back, and only once needed to consult the decontamination kit (there's a great section on dating techniques in The Greatest Show on Earth). We discovered two great truths on the trip:  you're never far from a Starbucks, even in the bowels of Texas. And: there really is a town called Venus, Texas, and they really are fussy about their speed limit. Ahem.

When we got home we discovered that Mr. Baugh is considered a disreputable young earth creationist, even by other young earth creationists. Ouch!  We also discovered that he was once featured on The Daily Show and that he is fond of The Flintstones.  Enjoy!

First Contact (2)

So (I was asking, here)--when do we make first contact with our children? Did they exist way back when they were developing in the womb, or do they come into existence only once they are conscious selves or full persons? I'm not quite at the "full conviction" stage yet, but I'm finding Eric Olson very persuasive. His book The Human Animal: Personal Identity without Psychology is a thing of loveliness--clear, novel, interesting, and ever so subtly funny.  (I even like the dedication: "to unemployed philosophers"!) A short version of the core argument is here, and there's a very interesting and amusing interview with Olson here.

Obviously something very important happens when a fetus starts to have conscious feelings--probably some time between 20 and 30 weeks.  Another important milestone is when an infant or child starts to have the capacities we associate with personhood--self-awareness, rationality, and the like.   It's only at that point that a being exists who can remember its past experiences and/or in other ways maintain a continuous mental life.  The dominant view of personal identity, the psychological view, says that something even more monumental happens as these important mental powers set in: a whole new entity comes into existence.  Before one of these crucial mental milestones, only an organism existed, but not my son, not my daughter.

No doubt it makes good sense that we see these milestones as extremely significant, but should we really think of them as ontologically significant--i.e. as moments when something new pops into existence?  Olson says no.  Each of us is an organism, an animal, and we start to exist soon after conception.  More on all of that when I've finished his book ....

And now for something new.  I'm visiting the Creation Evidence Museum in Glen Rose, Texas today. Perhaps I'll come back with something to say about it.

Complaining about Sexism

Greta Christina says complaining about sexism and other forms of oppression is a Catch-22: if we don't complain, the problem remains invisible, but if we do complain, we

... get accused of “playing the victim card.” We get accused of making up the marginalization, or exaggerating it, or going out of our way to look for it, or twisting innocent events to frame them in this narrative of victimhood, or trying to manipulate people into giving us our way by scoring sympathy points we haven’t earned.

If wish I could just agree and move on.  Here's the part I do agree with. Yes, it's risky complaining about sexism. You can have a completely well-founded complaint, yet find things just getting worse if you complain.  I've had this dilemma myself.  Recently I was at a philosophy seminar and a male participant did something to me I considered sexist*. I thought about discussing the incident here or elsewhere, but complaining does tend to elicit skepticism.  Are you sure you read that right?  Are you being overly touchy?  Complaining about sexism also seems to trigger outbursts of sexist rage in some quarters -- I'm talking about the secular blogosphere now.  So you have to weigh your options before you complain.  Sometimes you can't raise consciousness or rectify anything by complaining. Sad but true, and yes, that's frustrating.

Here's why I can't just agree with Greta Christina and move on.  But first--a tad more expression of solidarity.  Women need to stand up for each other at least in the sense of jointly acknowledging that there are still major problems for women in all sorts of contexts.   There's something to the old lefty rule that you don't cross a picket line.  Questioning Greta Christina here is a bit like crossing the feminist picket line...

But I have to do it. While it's frustrating that complaints are sometimes greeted with excessive skepticism and even sexist rage, it's certainly not true that everyone should take every complaint at face value.  Sometimes people actually do exaggerate, misread situations, judge them by inappropriate standards, etc.  Sometimes it's ambiguous or debatable what qualifies as appropriate behavior in a certain situation.   If I had talked about the incident in the seminar room at this blog, it wouldn't have been fair to expect universal assent.  Right?  Right!

If you read the rest of her post, you'll see Greta Christina is trying to use the Catch-22 theory to defuse criticism (from people the likes of me, in fact). That just doesn't work.  Though it's generally true that complaints about sexism elicit excessive skepticism and criticism, any specific complaint does have to hold up under critical scrutiny. You can't write off your critics as just putting you under a frustrating Catch-22.

Bet you're curious about the incident in the seminar room!  If I talk about it publicly I'm going to do it here.  I'd urge women in the secular community to create a similar forum. It's a great way to amass a lot of data, and stop individual women from having to endure the sexist rage backlash.  That's clearly a reality (if you follow these things, you'll know that's true), and nobody's exaggerating about it. 

* I should clarify, to protect the innocent: the guilty party was not a member of my own department.

First Contact

Ultrasound of twins at 6 weeks (not mine, fyi!)

Question of the week (for me) -- when do people have first contact with their children? I may have seen mine very early on, when I was only about 6 weeks pregnant. I saw two blobs on an ultrasound image, anyway. But was that them--Becky and Sam? 

One thing seems pretty clear--it's not until 20 weeks gestation (very roughly, and at the very least) that a fetus starts to be conscious, so there are no "selves" on the scene before then.  Whatever I saw on the ultrasound at 6 weeks, it wasn't a self.

Another thing seems clear--it takes some pretty advanced properties (e.g. self-awareness) to be a full-fledged person.  It's doubtful that there's a person on the scene until some point after birth.  So whatever I saw on the ultrasound, it was neither a self, nor a person. 

That doesn't directly answer the question, though.  Granted what I saw via ultrasound wasn't a self or a person, it could still have been one of my kids -- i.e. one of my kids before they became selves or persons.

One line of thinking says that makes perfectly good sense.  Over time, we take on and lose lots of properties.  One and the same individual will be a child over part of his lifespan, but an adult over another part.   You're a non-parent for the first many years of your life, and then perhaps become a parent.  You can start off not being an American citizen, and then become a citizen. At some point you may become a lawyer or a doctor or a novelist. 

The fact that a property is profoundly important, making you in some sense who you are, once you have it, doesn't mean that it's literally an essential property--one that you can't exist without.  Not all of our important attributes are "born again" attributes--ones that make a new entity exist, once they come on the scene. So it's not out of the question that the very same individual existed as a zygote, later becoming a self, and still later becomes a person ... an adult, a parent, a citizen, a lawyer, etc. 

Another line of thinking says that once a locus of consciousness (a "self") comes on the scene, there's a new entity there that didn't exist before. Selfhood is indeed a "born again" property: when it emerges, a whole new entity emerges. Or you might say no to that, but yes to personhood being that sort of property.  You might think that whenever a person comes on the scene--a locus of self-awareness--a new entity exists. The old entity--the fetus, immature infant, whatever--is replaced by a numerically different entity, a second entity. 

On the second view, Sam only existed when his locus of consciousness existed (or his locus of self-awareness), so I didn't have first contact when I saw his heartbeat on the ultra-sound image. That wasn't Sam, and the other blob wasn't Becky.

The first view says the change from being a fetus to being a self or person is like metamorphosis.  When a caterpillar becomes a butterfly, one entity isn't replaced by a second entity. This is just change.  Butterflies might be ever so proud of being able to fly (if they could think about it), but they have to live with the fact that once they were caterpillars. Similarly, as profound as it is to be a person or self, selves and person were once upon a time zygotes.

The second views says the change from being a zygote to being a self, or from being an immature infant to being a person, is more like the moment in the fairytale when the frog become the prince.  The prince is (presumably) a whole new entity, not the same entity with new properties.  Only with human development, we have a better scientific understanding of how the dramatic changes takes place. The brain matures to the point that the "lights" are on, and then later the brain supports the power of self-awareness.

The first view is associated with the "animalist" account of personal identity--the view that says humans are essentially organisms.  The second view is associated with the Lockean psychological continuity account of personal identity, the one that most philosophers today accept.  I'm leaning toward ...

No, I won't say!  More on these things later in the week.