"Soft Atheism"

Philip Kitcher hits many nails on the head. I like what he says about the reason to be skeptical of all religious beliefs.  Yes, this really is "the most basic reason for doubt" (or one of them):

The most basic reason for doubt about any of these ideas is that (when you understand words in their normal, everyday senses) nobody is prepared to accept all of them. Even if you suppose that Judaism, Christianity and Islam share some common conception of a divine being, the Hindu deities are surely different, the spirits and ancestors of African and Native American religions different again, and that’s before we get to Melanesian mana or the aboriginal Australian Dreamtime. It’s very hard to think that every one of these radically different conceptions picks out some aspect of our cosmos.

So asserting the doctrines of a particular religion, or family of religions, requires denying other contrary doctrines. However, when you consider the historical processes underlying the doctrines contemporary believers accept, those processes turn out to be very similar: Long ago there was some special event, a revelation to remote ancestors. Religious doctrine has been transmitted across the generations, and it’s learned by novice believers today. If the devout Christian had been brought up in a completely different environment — among aboriginal Australians or in a Hindu community, say — that person would believe radically different doctrines, and, moreover, come to believe them in a completely parallel fashion. On what basis, then, can you distinguish the profound truth of your doctrines from the misguided ideas of alternative traditions?

I also like what he says about rejecting religious doctrine while retaining the achievements of "religions at their best":

To sum up: There is more to religion than accepting as literally true doctrines that are literally false. Humanists think the important achievements of religions at their best — fostering community, articulating and supporting values — should be preserved in fashioning a fully secular world. That secular world ought to emerge from a dialogue between humanism and refined religion, one in which religion isn’t thrown on the rubbish heap but quietly metamorphoses into something else.

"Soft atheism," he calls this. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Are atheist accommodationists hypocritical?

Jerry Coyne finds philosophers very, very, very vexing when they try to reconcile science and religion.  He suspects it's always "political"--

In my estimation, all atheist philosophers who try to reconcile religion and science are doing so for political reasons—as are organizations like the National Academy of Sciences and the National Center for Science Education that engage in the same activity.  It takes a profound hypocrisy to try to reconcile for others things that you can’t reconcile for yourself.

Don't think so!  It's true that most philosophers (70%) are atheists, and that almost all accept science as an important source of knowledge.  But if you reject theism and accept science, it certainly doesn't follow that you reject theism because you accept science.  You might reject theism for reasons completely independent of the reasons you have for accepting science. In fact, I think that's the state of mind of many philosophers.  Many reject theism because of the argument from evil.  Or they reject theism because none of the usual arguments for God are successful, and they think the default, when it comes to a fanciful construct, is disbelief.  So although they accept no religious propositions themselves, it's genuinely an open question, for them, whether you could accept some, and yet accept all of science.

There's nothing at all unusual about philosophers wondering if A can be reconciled with B, but also rejecting A. Theist philosophers can reasonably wonder whether atheism and objective morality can be reconciled, but of course reject atheism.  That's a first class question for anyone who "does" metaethics--not a question just for those who accept the atheist starting point.  If there were a "political" aspect to the question, for theists, that wouldn't be bad either. Perhaps, though a theist, it bothers you to see your atheist friends being beaten up as morality-challenged.  So you care about and promote the idea that atheism can be reconciled with objective morality, even though the reconciliation plays no role in your own life. Hypocrisy? No, obviously not.

Is it any different when atheists try to stop their theist friends being beaten up as science-challenged?  Of course, if the effort is disingenuous, that's one thing.  Maybe you think your theist friends are science-challenged, and you're just trying to be nice.  But if not, not.  I think what some atheist philosophers believe is that a little bit of religion (certainly not all of it) can be combined with all of science, and that's what they insist upon--not more.  That's not hypocritical or disingenuous. In fact, it might even be the truth.

Faith

Michael Kelly's article about his daughter's marriage in the NYT Style section yesterday was a thing of beauty--try reading it without crying!  He starts with the horror of his daughter's rape 10 years ago and ends with this, on her abiding faith--

Ten years ago, bleeding and alone in the field where she had been left to die at 24, my daughter got up and stumbled to a house in the dead of night. She said later that she felt as if she had been “lifted up by God.” I asked somewhat bitterly where God had been 10 minutes earlier.

In the greatest testament of faith I have ever heard, she calmly replied, “He was there holding my hand.”

Now Eric has taken her hand in marriage, a union that is surely blessed by God.

There's something stupendous about being able to see things this way.  Stupendous, not stupid. To my mind, it's an expression of tenacity, determination, an abiding love of life.  You have to appreciate the psychological power of faith.  I don't have it, for philosophical reasons, but I can be glad for people who do.

Bullying

I've been on the road a lot in the last month, so away from a full-size computer. For rest and relaxation, I've been on Twitter quite a bit. Hey, it's fun compressing messages! Except some things are too complicated to talk about in tiny bursts. Like Bullying.  Someone started a Twitter hashtag, #FTBullies, meant to call attention to bullying at Free Thought Blogs. If you don't define your terms carefully, the accusation seems absurd.  If you do define your terms, then...well, yes, it certainly goes on at some of these blogs (not all) and of course at many other blogs as well.

So, definition time. I think bullying in this context is not aimed primarily at inflicting suffering. The point of it is not really personal, but to quickly excise certain claims that are deemed "beyond the pale." To accelerate the excision, the usual methods of persuasion--argumentation, evidence, reasoning--are set aside, and new methods are employed.  To bully a claim off the table, you do things like:  deleting comments, editing comments, mocking, straw-manning, piling on, insulting, and generally making life unpleasant for the person who made the claim.  They then withdraw, and the claim vanishes. Wonderful.

Now, it's kind of bad calling this "bullying" because bullying is always bad, by definition.  Non-rationally driving a claim off the table is occasionally just fine.  I don't think we need to spend time talking people out of just anything they might say. Sometimes speed is of the essence. Sometimes we don't want to dignify a claim, or the person making the claim, by putting a lot of time and energy into a rational refutation.  Back when I was blogging at Talking Philosophy, I once deleted the comments of some Holocaust deniers who dropped by for "rational debate." No thanks.  I've closed threads here when I thought people were saying things not worth discussing.  But it takes a lot for me to do that.  The last time I did so someone was challenging the idea that women are raped more than men. Not. Worth. My. Time.

There's a problem, though, if a blog community sets the parameters so that the permitted claims fall within a relatively narrow range, and a very wide range of claims are subject to being bullied off the table. That's my problem with some Free Thought Blogs, some of the time, but also with lots of other blogs. That's the thing about blogs--they tend to be micro-communities in which everyone agrees about the vast majority of what's up for discussion. They do tend to try to preserve ideological conformity by using bullying techniques a lot.  I've noticed that in many different blog communities--not just atheist blogs, but also blogs dealing with animal rights and also blogs about feminism.  This is observed, documented, and made much of in Cass Sunstein's book Going to Extremes: How Like Minds Unite and Divide.

The only reason it's worth observing that this sometimes goes on at some Free Thought Blogs and at other atheist blogs is that it's especially ironic, given that these blogs aspire to open, reasoned debate.  When a debate topic is within the narrow parameters of permitted disagreement people are plenty open and reasonable, but otherwise ... often not.

Will I be giving examples? No. I'm not naming names either. That's a fool's errand and a waste of time.  Please keep comments on a general level. What is blog-bullying? Is it always bad? Is it just a way of quickly excising "horrid" claims, or is there more to the psychodynamics?  That's the kind of thing I'm trying to talk about here.

The American Atheists' Harassment Policy

While we all wait to find out what the Supremes think of the Affordable Care Act, let's have a look at the Harassment Policy hammered out by American Atheists in the wake of the recent online brouhaha about such things.  Here's the core of the policy--

That all sounds exactly right. [Update10:10 am:  Is there stuff to quibble with? I just read this, and maybe so, but it strikes me as being mostly on the right track.]

Another part of the policy really ought to be removed. This is just plain silly:

You are encouraged to ask for unequivocal consent for all activities during the conference. No touching other people without asking. This includes hands on knees, backs, shoulders—and hugs (ask first!). There are folks who do not like to be touched and will respect and like you more if you respect their personal space.

What exactly is wrong with negotiating these things as we do the rest of the time--by paying attention to non-verbal cues?  It's better that way, most of us think.  We don't go through life constantly asking "I haven't seen you for a long time--may I hug you?"  Or "I'd like to show solidarity and sympathy--may I touch your arm as I say this next sentence?"  We don't, because (let us count the problems)--

(1) If we explicitly asked, then we'd put the person we want to touch/hug in the awkward position of having to say "no" if they don't want to be touched/hugged.  It would have been so much more thoughtful to notice the cues and not call attention to their sensitivity.

(2) If we had to explicitly ask, we'd ruin spontaneity--so most of us would just do less touching and hugging.

(3) If we asked, it would highlight what is better left subterranean--that touching has some mild sexual undertones, touching is ever so slightly intimate, touching can be gross to some people, some people may find me in particular gross.

If I were thinking of going to an American Atheists convention (to be honest, I am not), I'd find it off-putting to be told how to negotiate touching ("no touching other people without asking") or even just be "encouraged to ask for unequivocal consent." This crosses the line from what's the conference's business (all the stuff in the box above) to what's not.  It's up to me, I think, how I handle the vast number of decisions that are in the realm of etiquette, not law or even ethics.  I'd be appalled if a conference organizer issued instructions about what to say after belching, whether and when to hold doors for other people, when to address someone by their first name, etc.  It's paternalistic and infantilizing -- suitable for managing a bunch of 10 year olds, but not for running a conference attended by adults.

And no, it doesn't help that David Silverman has added that he wants people to have sex at American Atheist conferences.  There's something a little weird going on when it's seen as GRRRREAT!!!! for people to have casual hook-ups, but a serious infraction (worthy of being addressed in a conference policy) to touch someone without first asking permission. Yes, sexual touching without permission is a serious infraction (the boxed policy is all to the good), but mere casual touching and hugging between acquaintances?

I'm struck by the contrast with religious communities.  In a religious community, there is constant touching between acquaintances.  For example, the reform Jewish temple I attend (infrequently) is an extremely touchy place.  Before, during, and after the service you see constant physical interaction.  Ask permission? You've got to be kidding.  There is also a lot of synchronization--people stand up and sit down at the same times during the service. All this synching and touching is part of feeling collective joy, sorrow, etc.--all feelings evoked at times by a religious service. But sex? Well, it's kind of a special thing, reserved (at least ideally) for special relationships. It's a strange inversion to make a big deal of casual touching, putting it on a verbal-permission-only basis, while encouraging casual sex.  That sounds like a recipe for killing off solidarity in a community while ramping up private titillation.  With rules like that, I should think, "things fall apart, the center cannot hold."

***

Supreme court decision is now out.  It looks like ... YESSSSS!  Good news. More on that later.

Blaming the Victim?

What is it with the atheist online community in the summertime?  Last summer "elevatorgate" was endlessly discussed. This summer there's another brouhaha, also involving the treatment of women. Three years ago there was another interminable debate about very, very little.  You might be forgiven for suspecting that the no-God hypothesis leaves atheists with not enough "meat" on their plates, though it should be said that some atheists do manage to write on real topics, day in and day out.  I periodically criticize Jerry Coyne for some position or other, but he's always writing about something interesting.

Anyhow, I'm paying attention to the latest scandal for only one reason: because it's about the alleged sins of DJ Grothe, and listening to him on Point of Inquiry for a couple of years made me think the world of him.  His alleged crime, in a nutshell, is making this argument (I will number the steps for clarity):

 (1) Some people in the online atheist community have been talking about the mistreatment of women at atheist meetings out of proportion with how frequently mistreatment occurs.  It doesn't occur frequently at all, if you go by a survey of 800+ attendees conducted by DJ at The Amazing Meeting (TAM) last summer.

(2) This disproportionate talk of mistreatment may be scaring women away from further meetings (like this summer's TAM), and gratuitously so, given how frequently mistreatment actually occurs (see (1)).  Thus, the way people are trying to reduce mistreatment is interfering with the separate goal of increasing female representation at meetings.

Now, you could criticize this argument.  About (1), you might say that the survey measured mistreatment at just one meeting, and that it was a singular meeting, coming (as it did) so soon after the elevatorgate controversy. About (2), you could say that it's only possible that all the talk is reducing attendance at this summer's TAM.  That's speculative, and DJ doesn't have proof.

Fine, criticisms like that wouldn't be untoward (which is not to say I find them conclusive). But instead what we see is piles and piles of ... horse excrement.  I don't really want to spend too much time wading through it, so will just pluck out a few examples.  One is the accusation that, by making claims (1) and (2), DJ is guilty of the sin of "blaming the victim."

This is just weird.  Surely it does sometimes happen that people talk about mistreatment of Xs out of proportion to how often it occurs, and this can scare away Xs.  Worrying about this -- and speaking out about it -- can't possibly be out of the question.  If that does sometimes occur, could it possibly be taboo to try to tamp down the excessive talk, to make a plea for proportionality?  No, it really can't.

And when you do point out disproportionality and worry about possible negative consequences, no, you're not "blaming the victim" within the usual meaning of that phrase. You're not blaming victims for being victims.  The blame has got to be about overgeneralization or extrapolation or spurious inferences.  Or perhaps the complaint is about other people, people who are not victims at all, who make it seem as if there are far more victims than there really are.  This worry about disproportional talk and overgeneralization is perfectly consistent with taking injustice to individual victims very, very seriously. All signs are that DJ Grothe does (and I certainly do).

Saying (1) and (2) should have been possible in a community of so-called "skeptics".  People who claim to care about reasoning and data should have taken notice of the survey data that was the foundation of DJ's argument. But no, it's seldom mentioned in the endless discussions at blogs. A rational debate about (1) and (2) could have taken place, but was instead pre-empted by all sorts of histrionics, like demands for DJ's resignation, accusations that he doesn't care about harassment, ludicrous charges about his being gay and being out of sympathy with women, etc. etc.

Good heavens. If I were a religious person, I'd keep close track of what passes for reasonable discussion at atheist blogs and I'd be laughing my head off.  As it is, I'm doing some laughing, but also shaking my head in disbelief. OK, back to trees ....

Conference Behavior

I think this is funny.  So you give a speech at a conference, and afterwards a couple comes up to you and hands you a business card, saying (essentially) "care to join us?"  For details and the card see here.   Question:  when should moronic behavior be treated as private vice, to be discouraged informally; and when should moronic behavior be proscribed by the quasi-legal standards of a community (official conference policy, in this case); and when should moronic behavior be flat out illegal?   Hmm.  This would be a fun case for someone who teaches sexual ethics (alas, I don't).

The Value of Prayer

Julian Baggini acknowledges the value of prayer, despite being a non-believer:

I do think that prayer, like many rituals, is something that the religious get some real benefits from that are just lost to us heathens. One reason is that many of these rituals are performed communally, as part of a regular meeting or worship. This means there is social reinforcement. But the main one is that the religious context transforms them from something optional and arbitrary into something necessary and grounded. Because the rituals are a duty to our absolute sovereign, there is strong reason to keep them up. You pray every day because you sense you really ought to, and it will be noticed if you don't. In contrast, the belief that daily meditation is beneficial motivates in much the same way as the thought that eating more vegetables or exercising is. Inclination comes and goes and needs to be constantly renewed.

Like Baggini, I can see how it could be valuable to  pray, but I'll go a step further--I can see how it could be valuable to think praying makes a difference (whether or not it really does).  Suppose someone you know has a serious illness, and you want to express concern.  I'm afraid "I'm thinking of you" doesn't convey quite the same thing as "I'm praying for you."  If you're praying, and you believe praying makes a difference, then you're not just thinking of the person, you're trying to help them.  It's better to try to help people than think of them, right? Sometimes we are in a position to pray, but can do nothing else.  We are too far away, the disease is too serious, whatever.  I have been in situations where I'd much rather be able to say "I'm praying for you."

I also think praying can be useful for the person suffering from an illness.  You'd think it could backfire. The patient might pray instead of getting all the advanced treatments. Yes, there are people who believe in prayer instead of medicine. But what I've observed (here in the religious heart of Texas) is that people who pray will also go to the ends of the earth to find a medical cure.  In fact, I believe there may be a connection, sometimes, between praying and aggressively trying to treat disease.  Prayer may sometimes give someone just the boost in hopefulness she needs to believe that further treatment might be helpful.  At least, that's how it seemed in the case of a woman I met about 15 years ago.  A mother of three young children, she prayed mightily for a cure for her breast cancer, while also seeing out every conceivable cutting edge treatment. (Sadly, she did not survive.)

You'd think maybe if a person believed God answers prayers, then she'd have to think God also causes diseases to begin with.  So she'd feel better in a way ("God may help me") but also worse ("God let me get this disease").   Could be--but not necessarily!   God is good, you might think.  The cancer is not God's doing--but the cure could be.

I couldn't possibly believe in the efficacy of prayer.  Come on--what God can cure, he could have prevented in the first place.  More overwhelmingly, it's impossible for me to believe in a God who let six million Jews die in the Holocaust, but is now on standby to help individuals with cancer.  Please. Still, it would be good in very tangible ways not only to be able to pray, but to believe it was beneficial.

The Believer's Atheist?

There's something just a little bit right about Ross Douthat's description of Christopher Hitchens as "the believer's atheist" in today's NYT.  Douthat says religious believers particularly liked Hitchens because of "his willingness to debate with Baptists and drink with Catholics and be comradely to anyone who took ideas seriously."  On a deeper level,

... many Christian readers felt that in Hitchens's case there had somehow been a terrible mix-up, and that a writer who loved the King James Bible and "Brideshead Revisited" surely belonged with them, rather than with the bloodless prophets of a world lit only by Science.

In a 2007 roundtable discussion with Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett (see hour 2, starting at 10 minutes, transcript here), Hitchens does say he wouldn't want faith to disappear. Maybe on some level he felt that way because religion is such a good friend of the imagination, but Hitchens gives a different explanation--

[CH] So, a question I wanted to ask was this: we should ask ourselves what our real objective is. Do we, in fact, wish to see a world without faith? I think I would have to say that I don’t. I don’t either expect to, or wish to, see that.

[SH] What do you mean by ‘faith’?

[CH] Well I don’t think it’s possible, because it replicates so fast, faith. As often as it’s cut down, or superseded, or discredited, it replicates, it seems to me, extraordinarily fast, I think. For Freudian reasons, principally to do with the fear of extinction, or annihilation

[SH] So you mean faith in supernatural paradigms?

[CH] Yes, the wish. Wish thinking.

[RD] Then why would you not wish it?

[CH] And then, the other thing is, would I want this argument to come to an end, with all having conceded that …

[SH] You wouldn’t like to retire and move on to other stuff?

[CH] ‘Hitchens really won that round, now nobody in the world believes in God’? Now, apart from being unable to picture this, I’m not completely certain that it’s what I want. I think it is rather to be considered as sort of the foundation of all arguments about epistemology, philosophy, biology, and so on. It’s the thing you have to always be arguing against, the other explanation.

[RD] It’s an extraordinary thing. I don’t understand what you’re … I mean, I understand you’re saying that it’ll never work, I don’t understand why you wouldn’t wish it.

[CH] Because, I think, a bit like the argument between, Huxley and Darwin. Sorry, excuse me, Huxley and Wilberforce, or Darrow and William Jennings Bryan, I want it to go on.

[RD] Because it’s interesting.

[CH] I want our side to get more refined, and theirs to be ever more exposed. But I can’t see it with one hand clapping.

If you watch the video, you'll see the other three find Hitchens' stance peculiar.  They want religion to be slayed altogether, whereas Hitchens wants religion to stick around to be slayed and then slayed some more. 

**

Sadly, Douthat quickly goes off the rails.

At the very least, Hitchens's antireligious writings carried a whiff of something absent in many of atheism's less talented apostles--a hint that he was not so much a disbeliever as a rebel, and that his atheism was mostly a political romantic's attempt to pick a fight with the biggest Tyrant he could find.

Ha! As disconcerting as it may be to Douthat, Hitchens was both: a disbeliever and a rebel. There's no incompatibility there.  He genuinely thought there was no deity and enjoyed the battle over religion. Douthat must know this is a little polemical maneuver on his part. Hitchens' atheism must be nothing but rebellion because--well, because God exists, and we all really know it. 

It gets worse.  Hitchens once asked Douthat at a party what it would prove if Jesus did rise from the dead. This strikes me as a perfectly good question.  Even if you granted a lot of Christian hocus pocus, how would you justify the rest of the hocus pocus--like the idea that everyone else gets to be saved as a result of Jesus's crucifixion and resurrection?

But no, the question can't be taken as a legitimate challenge to Christian doctrine.  The question is no challenge to Christianity, Douthat thinks, but rather a sign that atheism is actually a religious dogma.

It's a line whose sheer cussedness cuts to the heart of Hitchens's charm. But it also hints at the way that atheism--especially a public and famous atheism--can become as self-defended as any religious dogma, impervious to any new fact or unexpected revelation.

So--Christian doctrine all really makes obvious sense, if Jesus rose from the dead.   Only (um) it doesn't.

When push comes to shove, I guess Douthat's got to insulate himself from the proddings of a Christopher Hitchens, since he thinks

rigorous atheism casts a wasting shadow over human hope and endeavor, and leads ineluctably to the terrible conclusion of Philop Larkin's poem "Aubade'--that "death is no different whined at than withstood."

What a bleak picture!  But it's surely just nonsense.  All the meaning in life is not bound up with catching a train to eternity (I must make my case briefly here--see my first book for a longer argument!). In fact, nobody really thinks "no meaning without eternity" except when they're engaging in religious apologetics.  So nobody should take seriously Douthat's ludicrous suggestion that Hitchens was an implicit believer--

Officially, Hitchens's creed was one with Larkin's. But everything else about his life suggests that he intuited that his fellow Englishman was completely wrong to give in to despair.

The argument seems to be this--

(1)  Atheists must despair.

(2) Hitchens wasn't full of despair.

(C) Hitchens wasn't a true atheist.

I'll leave it for the reader to identify the problematic premise.

Atheists Untrustworthy, Study Says

art by Tracy Emin

See here.  The strange thing is that not only do religious people trust atheists less, according to this study, but atheists trust each other less too.  Is there any way to make peace with this?  Maybe we can, by focusing on the word "trust".  To trust someone you have to have a pretty confident idea about what they'll think and do in various situations.  Both religious and unreligious people tend to know far fewer atheists, so know less about what they'll think and do.  Furthermore, I think religious people are more conventional and conformist.  An atheist is more likely to take a novel or even alarming position on some matter of ethical debate.  That's a little scary--just the opposite of trust-inducing.  Moral of the story--if you're a sober, morally middle-of-the-road atheist, it's especially important for you to wear the atheist label openly.  I'll go first--"I am an atheist, and I believe in helping people, keeping promises, being nice, voting in elections, etc."  My moral outlook is about the same as that of my liberal religious friends--in fact, I see no obvious difference.  Go ahead and trust me!

What Science Can't Know

This short column by theologian Keith Ward generated a sprawling discussion at atheist blogs over the weekend. Let's see if I can summarize the discussion in less than 10,000 words, and maybe clear up a few things.

Ward's main assertion was this:  "many religious statements are naturally construed as statements of fact...."  More precisely, they're naturally construed as purporting to be statements of fact.  You can't state a fact if it's not a fact--so the "purporting" part is important.  Like (Ward's example): "Jesus healed the sick, and rose from death." Obviously, we can all agree only that this purports to state a fact.  So that's stage 1 of the argument:  religious statements purport to be fact-stating.

Stage 2 is this:  "A huge number of factual claims are not scientifically testable."  Why?  "Many historical and autobiographical claims, for instance, are not repeatable, not observable now or in the future, and not subsumable under any general law."   Somebody a long time ago saw something, and told someone else, and we've been playing whisper down the alley for 2,000 years.  Science can't go back and confirm or disconfirm.  According to Ward, whether we believe the report--for example, about Jesus healing the sick--will depend on "general philosophical views, moral views, personal experience and judgment."

I read Ward as allowing here that someone like me is going to reject Jesus healing the sick as having occurred, because I'm philosophically disinclined to believe in miracles.  But someone open to the possibility of miracles might think there really is a reliable chain of reports going back to Jesus healing the sick, and so may think "Jesus healed the sick" not only purports to be fact-stating but states a fact.  At any rate, our reasoning about this long ago event falls at least partly outside the domain of science.  That's the main assertion in the column--Ward is not here trying to defend specific Christian beliefs.

Stage 3 gets much more exciting. Now Ward says that "God created the universe for a purpose" purports to be fact stating as well, and says that science has nothing to say about that. "The physical sciences do not generally talk about non-physical and non-law-like facts such as creation by God."

My take on all this is--  Stage 1, check.  Stage 2, check. Stage 3, groan.


Jerry Coyne (11/6) reacts very differently.  Stage 1, check.  Stage 2, groan.  Stage 3, groan.  Stage 2 doesn't pass muster because --

All “facts” must be empirical facts, susceptible to empirical investigation, confirmation by several lines of evidence, and the possibility that the claim can be falsified.  That goes for the claim that Ward was in Oxford the night before he wrote this [this is an example of Ward's].  There are many ways to investigate that question, including eyewitness accounts, travel receipts, videos, and so on.

He then issues a challenge to Ward--

I challenge Ward to give me just one reasonably well established fact about the world that comes from “general philosophical views, moral views, personal experience and judgment” without any verifiable empirical input.

Coyne's response strikes me as being off the mark for two reasons:

First, the challenge is odd.  That quoted bit from Ward was merely an allowance that a person's receptivity to testimony about past events will depend on their general philosophical views, etc.  He never said those views and judgments could be formed "without any verifiable empirical input."  In fact, most people will form those views with input.  My "no miracles" view is partly based on my observations, and someone else's "yes, miracles" view will probably turn partly on their observations.  Ward's point is only that these views, whatever they are, will influence whether a person believes testimony about the long ago event of Jesus healing the sick.

Second, Coyne's paragraph about "facts" is perplexing.  What are these "facts" that must be "susceptible to empirical investigation, confirmation by several lines of evidence, etc."?  If by "facts" he means states of affairs in the world, then all that's obviously false.  Ward could sneak into Oxford unbeknownst to anyone.  That state of affairs doesn't hinge on anyone being able to confirm it.

What Coyne really seems to mean is something like "known facts." But known by whom?  A fact known by all of humanity might need to be "susceptible to empirical investigation, confirmation by several lines of evidence," etc. We're not going to put Ward's trip to Oxford into the common repository of knowledge unless it measures up to those kinds of intersubjective standards.  But someone could personally know about the trip with much less ado. Like Ward, for example, and he could share that knowledge with anyone who has good reason to trust his veracity.  It would be extraordinary if nobody could ever know any facts in the absence of "confirmation by several lines of evidence," etc.


Now the plot thickens.  Jim Houston, a blogger at Talking Philosophy, passed along Coyne's challenge to Ward, who said he'd never said anything like that. Ward reiterated his points from stage 2 of his argument, giving an example of "personal knowledge" that can't meet scientific standards.  His father told him, and him alone, something on his death bed.  Since he has good reason to trust his father, he can know X, but it doesn't follow that X should wind up in the common repository of knowledge.  It's not susceptible to enough scientific corroboration for that.

Jerry Coyne responded here, saying "A 'fact' is not a fact if all the evidence supporting it has vanished or is inaccessible."  Further down, he writes--

I repeat again for philosophers like Ward and Houston: factual claims are not facts.  It is possible that Ward’s father was a double agent, but I won’t accept its truth until there are independent ways to show that.

(Not to be fussy, but I don't think either Ward or Houston are professional philosophers. One's a theologian and the other is a philsophy blogger.)

He then excoriates people who come to the defense of theists like Ward--

Increasingly, I find philosophers like Houston presenting claims of theologians like Ward sympathetically.  It’s almost as if there’s a bifurcating family tree of thought, with philosophers and theologians as sister taxa, and scientists as the outgroup.  That seems strange to me, as I understood that most philosophers are atheists.  I’m not clear why I’m attracting increasing opprobrium from philosophers, though one reason may be their irritation that I am encroaching on their territory.

And then we get some more scolding--

Back in the old days of the Greeks, philosophy was supposed to be part of a well-rounded life; now any scientist who engages in the practice is criticized for treading on the turf of professional academic philosophers.  Suck it up, I say to these miscreants.

Finally, the challenge is repeated, despite the fact that it has no connection to anything Ward said, as Ward already explained--

And I invite readers again to give me just one reasonably well established fact about the world that comes from “general philosophical views, moral views, personal experience and judgment” without any verifiable empirical input.

Let's skip the challenge, because, as I said, it's a red herring.  Furthermore, I think very few philosophers see much of their reasoning as being entirely a priori -- free of "any verifiable empirical input." Third, to understand how philosophers make progress and "establish facts" would take deep involvement in the discipline. You can't answer this challenge effectively in the space of a comment at a blog, or even a lengthy post.

I already responded above to the business about facts.  Discussing Ward, stage 2, becomes hopelessly confused and confusing if we don't carefully distinguish facts (states of affairs in the world), from knowledge-claims.  I also think we need to distinguish personal knowledge claims from knowledge that's the common possession of humanity--stuff that goes into science and history books.  I know what my father said to me in private conversations he can't remember, like Ward knows what his father told him.  We all (uncontroversially) have lots of unsharable, not-scientifically-confirmable knowledge like this.

So what's left is Coyne's puzzlement that atheist philosophers come to the defense of people like Ward.


Well, it's like this:  when I teach a philosophical argument, I take my task to have two parts.  First, I've got to fairly represent the argument, capturing exactly what the philosopher had in mind.  It's a deep-seated occupational habit, I think, to take this duty very seriously, and try to execute it without regard to whether I'm for or against what the philosopher is arguing for.  So: we've got to understand what Ward's saying, before we object.  Second, it's a sacred duty to be adversarial--strongly inculcated by the guild of philosophers.  We need to figure out if there are problems with an argument (whatever we think of the conclusion), and if so, exactly what they are.

In light of all that, if Coyne misrepresents Ward and misidentifies the problem with his argument, a good philosopher is going to say so--even if, ultimately, they're closer to Coyne's intellectual outlook than to Ward's.

"Opprobrium"?  Well maybe, just a bit.  Because running through some of Coyne's posts is an intermittent skepticism about the value of philosophy. And yet this whole debate about Ward makes it clear why philosophy is so valuable.  To discuss all these things productively, we need to have a good grip on: facts, claims, knowledge-claims, evidence, scientific knowledge, empirical knowledge, a priori knowledge, etc.. Whose job is it to sort out how we think about and talk about all of those topics?  It's the job of a (wait for it) ... philosopher!

In fact, all this confusion about facts (and the irrelevant "challenge") distracts attention from what's really wrong with Ward's view.  I think what's really wrong with it is that while he does show there could be facts (states of affairs) that are known about by some people, but not susceptible to scientific confirmation, he does nothing to show any of these science-eluding facts are "religious facts."

There are lots of good philosophical arguments establishing interesting categories of science-eluding facts*, but also good philosophical arguments establishing that these are not about gods or souls or miracles and such.  So: atheism will win in the end, I think, but we don't need to be sloppy about what Ward really said, or discredit everything he said, to make that case.

* Reading suggestion:  Frank Jackson, "What Mary Didn't Know"

The Confession of Joel Marks

Joel Marks is a recovering moralist, as he confessed a couple of days ago at The Stone. What I find especially notable about his column is the way it's reminiscent of other confessions--especially Tolstoy's (excerpts here). Only Marks's journey is in the other direction--from belief to disbelief, and what's at issue is objective morality. Here's a very Tolstoyan passage:

A friend had been explaining to me the nature of her belief in God. At one point she likened divinity to the beauty of a sunset: the quality lay not in the sunset but in her relation to the sunset. I thought to myself: “Ah, if that is what she means, then I could believe in that kind of God. For when I think about the universe, I am filled with awe and wonder; if that feeling is God, then I am a believer.”

But then it hit me: is not morality like this God? In other words, could I believe that, say, the wrongness of a lie was any more intrinsic to an intentionally deceptive utterance than beauty was to a sunset or wonderfulness to the universe? Does it not make far more sense to suppose that all of these phenomena arise in my breast, that they are the responses of a particular sensibility to otherwise valueless events and entities?

So someone else might respond completely differently from me, such that for him or her, the lie was permissible, the sunset banal, the universe nothing but atoms and the void. Yet that prospect was so alien to my conception of morality that it was tantamount to there being no morality at all. For essential to morality is that its norms apply with equal legitimacy to everyone; moral relativism, it has always seemed to me, is an oxymoron. Hence I saw no escape from moral nihilism.

The dominoes continued to fall. I had thought I was a secularist because I conceived of right and wrong as standing on their own two feet, without prop or crutch from God. We should do the right thing because it is the right thing to do, period. But this was a God too. It was the Godless God of secular morality, which commanded without commander – whose ways were thus even more mysterious than the God I did not believe in, who at least had the intelligible motive of rewarding us for doing what He wanted.

And what is more, I had known this. At some level of my being there had been the awareness, but I had brushed it aside. I had therefore lived in a semi-conscious state of self-delusion – what Sartre might have called bad faith. But in my case this was also a pun, for my bad faith was precisely the belief that I lacked faith in a divinity.

In the three years since my anti-epiphany I have attempted to assess these surprising revelations and their implications for my life and work.

Now have a look at Tolstoy's Confession.  Very similar.

Why am I pointing this out?  Because I think the genre is compelling but deceptive.  The convert presents himself (or herself) as traveling from darkness into light, and the sheer drama makes us think--yes, yes, yes, that's the light!  The story line of revelation is no substitute for good arguments.

**

Another tack. I argued here a while back that it's a very bad idea for atheism to conjoin itself with any particular metaethical theory, but particularly with the so-called error theory about morality.  Marks has become an error theorist.  All moral claims, on his view, are in error.

But suddenly I knew it no more. I was not merely skeptical or agnostic about it; I had come to believe, and do still, that these things are not wrong. But neither are they right; nor are they permissible. The entire set of moral attributions is out the window. Think of this analogy: A tribe of people lives on an isolated island. They have no formal governmental institutions of any kind. In particular they have no legislature. Therefore in that society it would make no sense to say that someone had done something “illegal.” But neither would anything be “legal.” The entire set of legal categories would be inapplicable. In just this way I now view moral categories.

Certainly I am not the first to have had thoughts like these, and today the philosopher Richard Garner in particular is a soul mate. Nor has there been a shortage of alternative conceptions of morality to the one I held. But the personal experiment of excluding all moral concepts and language from my thinking, feeling and actions has proved so workable and attractive, I am convinced that anyone who gives it a fair shot would likely find it to his liking.

Actually, no, I would not find it to my liking--as I said here.  I think there's a great deal we wish to say in ordinary and extraordinary situations that can't be said at all, or at least can't be said as well, without moral vocabulary.

For example, when I visited Anne Frank's house in Amsterdam this summer, there were many things that needed to be said and thought.  I thought it was wrong that this Jewish girl had to hide for years, just because she was Jewish, and that someone betrayed the family, and that she then died an unimaginably miserable death in a concentration camp.  Marks and Garner want me to say "it wasn't wrong, and it wasn't not wrong and it wasn't right and it wasn't not right...." All of these moral concepts are out the door, like the category of the taboo (credit for analogy:  Richard Joyce) is a relic of past thinking.

This should become the conjoined twin of atheism?

**

Never fear, Marks suggests, we can still oppose and support the things we wish to oppose and support--

For instance, I used to think that animal agriculture was wrong. Now I will call a spade a spade and declare simply that I very much dislike it and want it to stop. Has this lessened my commitment to ending it? I do not find that to be the case at all. Does this lessen my ability to bring others around to sharing my desires, and hence diminish the prospects of ending animal agriculture? On the contrary, I find myself in a far better position than before to change minds – and, what is more important, hearts. For to argue that people who use animals for food and other purposes are doing something terribly wrong is hardly the way to win them over. That is more likely to elicit their defensive resistance.

Instead I now focus on conveying information: about the state of affairs on factory farms and elsewhere, the environmental devastation that results and, especially, the sentient, intelligent, gentle and noble natures of the animals who are being brutalized and slaughtered. It is also important to spread knowledge of alternatives, like how to adopt a healthy and appetizing vegan diet. If such efforts will not cause people to alter their eating and buying habits, support the passage of various laws and so forth, I don’t know what will.

So nothing has changed, and everything has changed. For while my desires are the same, my manner of trying to implement them has altered radically. I now acknowledge that I cannot count on either God or morality to back up my personal preferences or clinch the case in any argument. I am simply no longer in the business of trying to derive an ought from an is. I must accept that other people sometimes have opposed preferences, even when we are agreed on all the relevant facts and are reasoning correctly.

What does "it's wrong" do that "I don't like it and want it to stop" doesn't do?  It says that the state of affairs itself makes my dislike correct and appropriate.  For example, the awful suffering of young Anne Frank, and her being tormented just for being Jewish, is such as to make my dislike the only appropriate reaction.  If it were all a question of liking and not liking, I'm afraid we'd have to live with the strange diversity of human likes and dislikes.  Anne Frank's betrayer liked betraying her and her family. I think people are more likely to stop killing people for being Jewish, stop tormenting animals for profit, if they do have the notion of their likes and dislikes being either grounded in reality or ungrounded.

Analogy--suppose I am taking a math class, and the teacher tells us at the beginning of the semester that there are no mathematical truths. There are just answers to problems that she likes very much, and she's eager to have her students share her likes and dislikes.  She then tries to inculcate these preferences.  Will the students do as well, now that they lack the concept that math problems have right answers?  My guess is no--that particular meta-mathematics will alter performance.

The X-phi crowd will have to test this out, but I would hypothesize that people who accept the moral error theory will reach different and worse conclusions about moral questions.  And note--to test that hypothesis, we don't get to take people who have been completely imbued with conventional morality, and see if changing their metaethics makes a difference. We're going to have to round up some very young children and see what happens after we tell them that moral matters have to do with likes and dislikes, not with what's really right and wrong.  I suspect that metaethical theories have real world impact.

**

Ah, but moral realism must be rejected, because it involves "deriving ought from is", and that's a terrible mistake.  This is where things get interesting and difficult. It's unfortunate to see this Humean adage (you can't derive "ought" from "is") turned into a one sentence resolution of the entire philosophical debate about the nature of morality.  Must run and do Saturday morning chores, but here's food for thought--statements about consciousness cannot be derived from statements about brain states.  It takes quite a bit of philosophy of mind to see this, but they can't. That's no reason to think consciousness isn't real.  In fact, we know (first hand) that it is real. Moral facts could be genuine, even if not derivable from any other facts.

Today's Talk

Let's not have another conversation about all "that", but this may interest commenters on my "Feminism and Atheism" post.

Today I gave a talk at the Fellowship of Freethought in Dallas, which meets one Sunday morning every month in a church-like manner, complete with potlock lunch, activities for kids, social justice initiatives, activism, and music.  This month's meeting theme was the now famous elevator-gate brouhaha.  My SMU philosophy department colleague Justin Fisher gave an opening presentation that included a clip from Rebecca Watson's YouTube video about elevator guy, and Richard Dawkins' notorious reaction at Pharyngula.  His take on it: privilege can blind men to the experiences of women, whites to the experiences of blacks, and so on.  A heavily white, male community needs to be as sensitive as possible to these issues, if it wants to become more diverse.  Two other speakers gave presentations designed to increase sensitivity.  A band called The Faithless Companions provided the perfect musical interludes, including a very funny song called 'Taylor, Latte Boy."  Next up, on screen,  this hilarious rebuttal song and "Hot Girl in the Comic Shop"--with a lot of relevance to the issues at hand. So--lots of good humor.

My talk was intended to get away from DawkinsandWatsonology and explore the question why there's a gender imbalance at atheist meetings--since that debate, starting at the Global Atheist Convention in Dublin, was the backdrop for the whole kerfuffle.  But what with a verdict about Dawkins being presupposed--privilege blinded him--I kind of had to say a little about that.  Who would want to disagree with the general point that people ought to be more aware of privilege and unprivilege, and how these things color our perceptions?  Not me.  But I'm not entirely happy with dismissing Dawkins as just blinded, rather than trying to understand what led up to his assessment of Watson.  I think the gender debate that started in Dublin was probably relevant.

Anyhow ... the main goal of my presentation was to talk about the gender imbalance question.  The powerpoint I used is below, and I think from the slides you can get a reasonably good idea what I said. You'll want to pause the slides now and again, because they move pretty fast. I tried adding narration, but it sounded so terrible I had to abandon ship. Instead:  a little strumming from John Fahey. Certain readers of this blog will see that I found their input and links they provided very useful. Thank you!



There's a survey at the end of the presentation, and here are the results:

All (45)--15 say zero bad, 27 say slightly bad, 3 say more than slightly bad
Women only (19)--4 say zero bad, 12 say slightly bad, 3 say more than slightly bad
Men only (26)--11 say zero bad, 15 say slightly bad, 0 say more than slightly bad

As I said at the start--the idea isn't to start another big elevator-gate conversation, but just wrap up.  Comments are open, but please bear that in mind!

Feminism and Atheism

"Atheist meetings?  No thanks, cuz I don't like the ... " [fill in the blank]

I've been mostly internet-less in England and Amsterdam for the last two weeks, but still a bit plugged in thanks to my Kindle. I've continued to follow Elevator-gate just a bit, and this morning (up very early because of jet lag) I got to have a more thorough look-around.

Rebecca Watson is still being bombarded with sexual and sexist insults at ERV. Ophelia Benson is saying it's intolerable to attack a woman with sexist epithets.  Some people, like Russell Blackford, think the epithets are bad, but not that bad ... etc. etc.  A lot of people are no longer talking to a lot of people over Elevator-gate.  There are shifting alliances, blah-blah-blah....

I've been invited to speak about Elevator-gate at a local skeptics' group--and more generally about atheism and feminism.  So now I have an official reason to think more about this, and I'm no longer just a run-of-the-mill obsessive-compulsive. (Phew, that's a relief!)

**

Recap of the whole story, and then some comments--

So... there's an atheist conference in Dublin, this past June.  One panel is about atheism and women, and the first speaker is Paula Kirby--video here. The moderator raises the question why there are fewer women than men at atheist conferences.  Kirby offers the view, based on "my years of being part of all this" that she hasn't seen men holding back women.  She also says she's offended by the idea that women would be put off of atheism, and the atheist movement, because it's male dominated. Surely women aren't that easily frightened.

Later at the Dublin conference, there's another panel on communicating atheism, and both Rebecca Watson and Richard Dawkins are speakers--video here.  Watson puts the topic of the panel on hold in order to respond to the question discussed by the previous panel--why fewer women in atheist-land?  She rejects what Kirby has said as an argument from "ignorance" and an argument from "privilege" and claims that the explanation is (at least partly) that women get mistreated by men.  To support this, she offers anecdotes--sexist rubbish from emails she's received from atheist men.

Still later at the Dublin conference, something happens to confirm Watson in her belief that women get mistreated by men at atheist conferences--she gets hit on in an elevator at four in the morning, despite having said, in the guy's hearing, that she's tired and wishes to go to bed; and also despite her message on the panel. When she gets home she puts a video on You Tube, which begins with a mention of Paula Kirby, and talks about the elevator incident -- video here.

She later speaks again at a CfI conference, refers back to the Dublin women's panel, and covers examples of harassment by atheist men, and also mentions the elevator incident.  She's even more explicit than in the elevator video that the issue is why there are fewer women in the atheist movement.  She tells the student leaders that this sort of overt sexism keeps women away--"that's why they're not coming out to these events."  She also responds to reaction to her elevator video from a student activist named Stef McGraw.  McGraw had said that there was nothing wrong with elevator guy's overture--her post is here.  Watson says McGraw is "ignorant about feminism" and doesn't know the most obvious things from Feminism 101.  Sexual interest is one thing, sexual objectification is another.

Later still, Richard Dawkins makes a dismissive comment about the elevator incident--here and then again here.  And then, in turn, Watson dismisses him in a post called "The Privilege Delusion"-- here.  "Thanks, wealthy old heterosexual white man!" she writes, and promises to stop buying his books.  After that, the flood of comments for and against Watson begins, including a torrent of just the sort of sexual and sexist commentary she initially brought up in Dublin.  It gets uglier, and uglier, and uglier...

**

Now for the comments (numbered, even!)--

(1) There's no excuse at all for the sexual and sexist backlash against Watson. It's inappropriate, disproportionate, inarticulate, and just plain ugly.  Nothing she did or said justifies it, period.

(2) As much as Watson makes a legitimate point about misogynistic rhetoric that's been directed toward her, she's gratuitously dismissive toward people who see things differently.  She dismissed Kirby as "ignorant" and "privileged"; McGraw as "ignorant of feminism"; and Dawkins as too wealthy, old, heterosexual, white, and male to understand.

PZ Myers has defended Watson on grounds that she was "civil" to McGraw and "polite and respectful" to Kirby, but he confuses the question of delivery with the question of content. Yes, her delivery is pleasant and in fact funny.  She doesn't froth at the mouth.  But the content is insulting.  Instead of engaging with the ideas of people she disagrees with, she finds fault with the people themselves--they're too ignorant, too privileged, too unfamiliar with feminism 101, too wealthy, too whatever.

While I was away, some folks at Butterflies and Wheels raised the question how philosophers (like me) can be rattled by Watson's combativeness.  Aren't philosophers combative too?  Yes--very combative.  But the rule is that one engages with ideas--it's off limits to dismiss a position as due to your interlocutor's ignorance or privilege or sex or age, or whatever it might be.

But, but, but... isn't it true that some people really are too benighted to "get it"--that they really do need to take Feminism 101?  It's true, but dismissing someone in that fashion is a last resort, and certainly not permitted in direct debate between peers.  Since Watson was responding to Kirby, McGraw, and Dawkins as peers, it was inappropriate to write them off in the way she did. 

(3)  Let's get back to the original question--why are there fewer women than men in atheist circles?  Kirby's answer is essentially just negative: men are not holding back women.  Watson says the opposite--male sexism and sexual harassment keep women from coming to atheist events.  The message I see all over the internet is that feminists must agree with Watson.  But no, surely not.  As a feminist, I do care about the role women play, and whether it's justly or unjustly attenuated.  I am interested in causes and explanations, and don't feel "beyond male vs. female" in the way Kirby seems to.  But it doesn't follow I have to buy Watson's view of what makes the atheist community less hospitable for women than for men.

It could be that women are scared off by the prospect of dealing with sexism and sexual harassment.  But there are lots of other possibilities.  Perhaps the people you meet at atheist meetings argue too much--in their zeal to be ultra-rational and skeptical, maybe they don't know when to stop.  Maybe the immense value attached to candor in the atheist movement stops people from properly valuing tact and diplomacy.  Maybe people personalize debates too much.  In fact, the issue could be even deeper.  Perhaps women don't identify as atheists as often as men, and when they do, they identify as conciliatory, "live and let live" atheists.  So they're bound to be less interested in atheist activism. If that's a factor, the atheist movement would have to change in fundamental ways to increase female involvement.  You might have to examine some very basic things about the atheist movement, not just sexual and sexist antics that are extrinsic to it, to give women an equal role.

**

To speak a little more personally--I'm just one woman, and it's not clear to me which of my attitudes are gender-related and which aren't, but  Watson is quite wrong about what makes me reluctant to come out to atheist events.  I don't want any contact with neanderthal debaters like you see at many atheist blogs. It's got nothing whatever to do with fearing overt sexism or sexual harassment. I just don't want to run into Kevin, who wrote this about me at an atheist blog a little while back (with no complaint from the moderator)--

Jean: Let me clue you into something.
You’ve failed.
You will never win.
You cannot put the genie back in the bottle.
Live with failure every single minute of every single hour of every single day of the rest of your life.
I have no use for someone of your “intellect” telling me what I can or cannot say or learn.
And you will have to live with that abject failure forever.

Since the atheist blogosphere is full of Kevins, I'm a little reluctant to get any closer to "movement" atheists.  I suspect more women would feel like me about this than men, and so--I'd like to suggest--it's not just overtly sexist epithets we should be worried about, as feminists.  The whole style of interaction at atheist blogs is a problem.