…I would post a link to this.
I think I need a new blog. Obviously, this one does not inspire me anymore.
“A dream is the only instance when we apprehend our thoughts as external fact.”
- Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, quoted in the Introduction to Memories of the Future, xiii
“It is almost a truism that heresy, or exploratory theology, serves a useful purpose by forcing orthodoxy to formulate appropriate responses. The church without heresy may ultimately be in the greater danger of heresy.”
- Geoffrey Bromiley, Historical Theology: An Introduction, 26
“And to Robbe a poor man, is a greater Crime, than to robbe a rich man; because ’tis to the poore a more sensible damage.”
- Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 352 (ch. 27)
“We are fonder of spiritual sweetness than of crosses.”
- St. Teresa of Avila, Interior Castle, 40 (Third Mansion, ch. 1)
“If the answer to his suffering is to face it and challenge it to do its worst because he knows that when it has exhausted itself it has only touched the outer walls of his dwelling place, this can only come to pass because he has found something big enough to contain all violences and violations – he has found that his life is rooted in a God who cares for him and cultivates his spirit, whose purpose is to bring to heel all the untutored, recalcitrant expressions of life.”
- Howard Thurman, Disciplines of the Spirit, 84
“The mind naturally believes and the will naturally loves. As a result, lacking true objects, they must attach themselves to false ones.”
- Pascal, Pensees, S544/L61
One of my many brothers has a new blog, where he will discuss his two major interests: ants and the Chinese. Here.
Because it is very embarrassing to me to have mistaken Loftus for an interlocutor, I have created a new blog dedicated solely to interacting with his thoughts. I am in the process of transferring all of my reviews and commentary to that site. See the new blog here.
I don’t know what I was thinking, not waiting until Thanksgiving to post my dreary thoughts on prayer and thankfulness.
What am I most thankful for in life? The blog Futility Closet.
I pooh-poohed claims of divine intervention in the Chilean miner rescue here.
One topic related to supernatural intervention is the efficacy of prayer. Relatively recently, there was a statistical study of intercessory prayer, reported here, and summarized on Wikipedia here. In a rare instance of analytic philosophy becoming relevant, Richard Swinburne responded here. [Warning: for some reason, there are many typos in the pdf on Swinburne's site].
Swinburne points to a couple of dissimilar characteristics of traditional prayers and those used in such a study:
[W]hen we pray for another person, God knows far better than we do whether it will be best for that person and others affected by him, that he should recover immediately or later or not at all. Many Christians are aware of this when they pray for those in need that God would answer the prayer ‘as may be most expedient for them’; and a well-known prayer adds to this the clause ‘granting them in this world knowledge of thy truth, and in the world to come life everlasting’. No sign of all that in the secular orientation of the prayer used by those praying in the Benson study ‘for a successful surgery with a quick, healthy recovery and no complications’! God seeks better goals for all of us; and may well provide them for those prayed for despite the poverty of the petitionary prayer. After all, Christians believe that the salvation of the world was brought about partly by God’s failure to answer the prayer of his Son in the Garden of Gethsemane, ‘Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me.’
Although the form of their prayer might (dishonestly) suggest that they wanted the well-being of the patient for its own sake, that was not why they were praying. They were praying in order to test a scientific hypothesis.
While Swinburne can be jarring in his commentary in this article (“Some people badly need to be sick for their own sake”), and especially in his general work on the problem of evil (notoriously, Swinburne argues that much of our pain, including gratuitous pain, may be relevantly good for us and others), I think he tends to get at something right, so perhaps it’s good that someone is willing to be as jarring as he is on these matters.
On the one hand, I think that the strongest claims made by religious believers in favor of petitionary prayer are probably false, and very frequently morally evil. For example, confident prayer advocates give false hope to those who are suffering (including both those who suffer directly and those who suffer vicariously on behalf of loved ones). I think many religious believers who are not such advocates of petitionary prayer have experienced varying levels of this harm done by prayer advocates, from the fairly trivial to the severely damaging.
Why does this matter to the Internet? It clearly doesn’t, because garbage, no matter how excellent, just can’t “matter” to a trashcan. However, it matters to me, and it matters to such studies, because if someone is going to study prayer, they should probably get the concept of prayer, its intentions, its structure, etc., right. They shouldn’t take a Hitchens-like analysis (i.e. “man’s first attempt at medicine,” or something like that) and subject it to studies accordingly.
However, I still have a hard time understanding the nature of at least one species of petitionary prayer, that which requests divine intervention into the course of otherwise mundane events. But it is interesting to note that probably most of those who do pray are in agreement with me on several of the main points, no matter what crazy leaders or blogs say. This leads me to think (1) that there is something which non-crazy prayer people fail to adequately express and (2) that there is something which I fail to understand.
“We should start imagining it or stop supporting it. It is not good to support things that you do not understand.” – Julian Assange
Every Thursday I read a paper copy of the New York Times while having a very early breakfast at a homey family restaurant. It is fun to learn about the world, albeit vaguely unsettling that the world is no better for one’s having so learned. But there are other benefits. For reasons mysterious, I find journalistic prose intrinsically amusing. But even if it wasn’t amusing, it delights me to find amusing content in a journalistic context. Here are today’s examples, with the humorous element in italics, and light commentary.
From Climate Change Doubt Is Tea Party Article of Faith:
“It’s a flat-out lie,” Mr. Dennison said in an interview after the debate, adding that he had based his view on the preaching of Rush Limbaugh and the teaching of Scripture. “I read my Bible,” Mr. Dennison said. “He made this earth for us to utilize.”
What is the inference here? God made the earth for us to utilize; if something was made for us to utilize, it is permissible for us to destroy it; therefore, we may destroy the earth. Next quote, from same article:
“Carbon regulation, cap and trade, it’s all just a money-control avenue,” Ms. Khuri added. “Some people say I’m extreme, but they said the John Birch Society was extreme, too.“
I thought about putting only the word “said” in italics. But here’s a link.
From Efforts to Prosecute Blackwater Are Collapsing:
“There are substantial difficulties in prosecuting cases committed in war zones,” the official said. “There’s problems with the availability of witnesses, availability of evidence, and the quality of the evidence. You also have claims of self-defense, which are generally difficult, although not insurmountable.” And self-defense is a more compelling argument in war zones, where many people are routinely armed.
I found this editorial remark amusing insofar as it is intended to be clarificatory.
From Coalition Forces Routing Taliban in Key Afghan Region:
Military and civilian officials say there are also signs of a crisis in command as Taliban leaders have struggled to maintain logistics and supply routes, suicide bombers have failed to turn up for attacks, and even senior commanders were showing reluctance to follow orders from their leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, to go in to fight the NATO onslaught in Panjwai.
Maybe the suicide bombers overslept?
When the Chilean miners were rescued, I read about it in the New York Times. The story went like this: Some humans came up with rescue plans, implemented those plans, and the plans worked. Then I logged onto Facebook and saw that many people were thanking not the rescue workers who devoted time and resources, but God. I thought to myself, somewhat sardonically and with a mind to antagonize friends, “What article did they read?” The newspaper of record failed to pick up on the divine intervention; yet several people I know personally, who are several countries away from the event, claim special access to what went on.
Steve Clarke writes an interesting post on the issue, discussing what it means to call the rescue miraculous but focusing particularly on what an argument for divine intervention might look like. I think he goes a little off the rails in saying that miracles “are typically invoked in religious contexts as reasons to believe that God exists.” I think it wouldn’t take to much investigation to discover that in religious contexts, in which God’s existence is taken for granted, miracles are invoked to inspire gratefulness to and awe of God. Only in secular contexts are miracles invoked as reasons to believe that God exists, especially by Christian apologists (e.g. William Lane Craig and Gary Habermas).
But my primary confusion in this area is what the claim of divine intervention looks like, or if there is such a claim being made at all.
I think there is a meaningful religious attitude which is something like thankfulness for the good and the beautiful around us. Something like this attitude, it seems to me, is encapsulated near the beginning of the Letter of James:
Don’t be deceived, my dear brothers. Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows. He chose to give us birth through the word of truth, that we might be a kind of firstfruits of all he created.
This passage comes in response to what we should not say, which is that when we are tempted to do evil, it is God who is tempting us. The letter says that evil temptations come from somewhere else – e.g. within our own persons, not the person of God.
Thus there is a picture of the world as created by God and as such fundamentally good, but infested by evil from sources either apart from God, or at least sources acting on their own, not as functionaries of God.
Thus it is that some religious believers might want to say that God is responsible for goodness in the world, without needing to claim that divine intervention has occurred in every good event.
So a phrase like, “Thank God for rescuing the Chilean miners” will on this view be something of a metaphor, or otherwise non-literal image, but not within Clarke’s framework. It might express, “Thank God for giving us a world with the potential for salient and beautiful instances of goodness.”
A couple of curiosities accompany this understanding of religious thankfulness for good events. The first is that there is a question about why God’s injection of goodness into creation extends to the Chilean miners and not to the victims of the Holocaust. To me, there seems to be something suspicious about attributing the one to God, but not the other. This issue might translate into a form of the problem of evil. A second curiosity is that every “Thank God” becomes equivalent. In each case of thankfulness, we are really just thanking God for the possibility of goodness which, every now and then, actualizes. But it seems as if thankfulness to God for events is quite particular. It matters (to the thankful) that these people were benefited at this particular time.
So, I suspect that most cases of religious thankfulness are in fact positing divine intervention as part of the event reported in the New York Times. I am (so far) incapable of believing this, and my incredulous stance extends to parallel instances of survival from car accidents, illnesses, and other dangerous situations. The facts of the case never include the divine intervention. Divine intervention seems to just be what some people posit in addition to the facts of the case, which does not make sense to me on even a conceptual level.
However, I can at least understand, and maybe experience myself 1% of the time, the more general, but also more philosophical and even more mystical, attitude which expresses gratefulness to God for goodness itself and beauty itself (and, if you like, truth). And so this gratefulness may arise within one whenever a particularly salient example of virtue, aesthetic brilliance, simplicity … emerges. I think this kind of gratefulness not only coheres, perhaps surprisingly, with secular experiences of natural scientists and mathematicians, but has good fit with both philosophical conceptions of God and the more living concept of God coming out of religious traditions, and most clearly in contemplative and instructional texts, like the passage from James cited above.
As for the two curiosities detailed above, the first would be handled however the problem of evil is handled – and in any case, it might follow from our other concepts that God’s responsibility for good works differently than his responsibility for evil, and that the former is the proper object of gratefulness. The second issue seems to be just a matter of biting the bullet and saying, “Yes, all instances of thankfulness are the same.” However, there is still room for joy over the particularities of cases. Moreover, I suspect that how salient a particular case of goodness is will affect the intensity of the gratefulness. Thus it is that our attitudes and beliefs about a good event for which we are thankful may be meaningfully distinct.
EDIT: In light of Bilbo’s comment, it is clear to me that some of my language about the “facts of the case” is too strident. I mean (or I now mean, and feel like I meant…) something more like “the facts which are detailed in available reports.” Of course someone might say I have just excluded via definition divine intervention from the facts, because of course divine intervention isn’t observed, much less reported, in the usual way. I may have committed this error, but I don’t know how to not commit it. Other than the kind of inferences detailed above (e.g. that the very possibility of good events comes from God) I don’t know how one comes to believe there was divine intervention in the event itself. It could be that one goes through reasoning similar to that detailed by Steve Clarke in the link above, but I think that will suffer from problems he mentions.
See here.
The second graph from Gallup shows that younger Americans, less of whom are dependent on morality, nevertheless favor it even more than the elderly. Even a majority of Republicans find wickedness distasteful, although they aren’t quite as willing to avoid it.
Klein notes that these preferences are the opposite of those expressed by the fiscal commission and the elite consensus.
A few weeks ago Stephen Colbert testified before congress. Several commentators suggest that this made a mockery of congress, although I’ve yet to see an argument for the initial seriousness of congress, which is purchased through a form of bribery called campaign financing.
The highlight of this hearing was probably Colbert’s application of The Parable of the Sheep and the Goats.
Here is an excerpt from the world briefing in the NYT this morning:
A provincial leader who claims to have been abducted by space aliens and was backed by top Russian officials for another term as president of the World Chess Federation was re-elected Wednesday. … Kirsan N. Ilyumzhinov, … the Kremlin-appointed leader of Kalmykia in southern Russia, defeated Anatoly Karpov, the former world champion, 95 to 55, at the federation’s meeting in Khanty-Mansiysk. Mr. Karpov and his longtime rival, Garry Kasparov, had accused Mr. Ilyumzhinov of presiding over the game’s decline during the 15 years he has led the federation. They also accused him of mental instability. Mr. Ilyumzhinov has said he met with extraterrestrials in yellow suits at his Moscow apartment and that chess comes from outer space. He has also been accused of corruption and human rights abuses, and has been linked to the killing of a journalist.
Steve Clarke has an interesting post about Obama’s appointment of Cass Sunstein, who has advocated for active government involvement in pushing against conspiratorial beliefs. Read the post for details on Sunstein’s proposals. The relevant contemporary conspiracy theory is the claim that the U.S. government was somehow involved in bringing down the twin towers.
Clarke questions the efficacy of government efforts at “cognitive infiltration” on two grounds. First, conspiracy theorists “are able to explain away (to their own satisfaction at least) … alternative viewpoints.” Second, government involvement may only “strengthen … the case for there being government cover-ups of conspiracies.”
I think the first reason is not unique to conspiracy theorists. Competent advocates of substantive positions, if presented with an alternative, generally come up with explanations for why some people believe the alternative. This is true even of mainstream viewpoints. So for example, naturalistic evolutionary biologists generally have explanations for why some dissenters accept the theory of intelligent design. These explanations account for (to their own satisfaction) the beliefs of opponents.
Thus, I would replace Clarke’s first reason with the following. Conspiracy theorists are part of a broader subset of theorists, which is just the group of theorists who hold positions contrary to the consensus of experts in the relevant domains (9/11 – engineers, demolition experts; design – biologists; JFK assassination – historians? Feel free to make suggestions here; etc.). It is worth noting that mainstream consensus may constitute a “conspiracy” – 9/11 is a case in point, as the plot to bring down the towers by crashing airplanes into them was as surely a conspiracy as anything.
Let’s call such theorists Gadfly Theorists. Gadfly theorists are more irksome than mere gadflies because they have developed fairly coherent, rigorous accounts to support their theories. Yet they remain gadflies because they are bucking the theoretical status quo – the consensus of experts. So why will government infiltration fail to convince Gadfly Theorists and their many Internet followers? It is not just because they can explain away the opposition – anyone can do that. Rather, it is because they have abandoned a crucial adjudicating procedure in empirical inquiry – respect for the relevant scholarly community. Typically, minority opinions are led by a few people with approximately relevant credentials (e.g. Behe for Intelligent Design; Richard Gage for 9/11 controlled demolition theory), and then legions of non-specialists who have accepted their minority views. What Sunstein thinks the government should try to combat are the legions of non-specialists, who traffic mostly on the Internet.
But I submit that this is impossible, because the reasons for non-specialist non-mainstream belief are, at bottom, mysterious. I do not know of any general rational way of acquiring beliefs in areas I am not expert in other than absorbing and then accepting the consensus of experts. If someone denies, say, a principle of particle physics, I can’t imagine any possible rational grounds according to which I could adopt the denial as my own, apart from becoming an expert and reaching the same conclusion independently.
In my own experience, this is born out quite consistently. Those of my non-expert friends who are nevertheless followers of Gadfly Theorists (perhaps they should be called Lay Gadfly Theorists… Gadflay Theorists?) have, for reasons fundamentally mysterious to me, deferred to experts who go against expert consensus. The typical progression of a conversation with Gadflay Theorist is as follows:
(1) Gadflay makes non-mainstream claim X.
(2) Consensus Joe asks, “But why should I reject the consensus?”
(3) As evidence, Gadlfay cites the set of all arguments for non-mainstream claim X.
(4) Consensus Joe picks one argument from (3) at random, finds publicly available thorough rejection of claim in relevant expert community, shows his lay research results to Gadflay.
(5a) Gadflay re-cites the set of all arguments, but minus argument addressed in (4)
or
(5b) Gadflay explains away expert rejection via additional non-mainstream claim X1 (e.g., experts are involved in a cover-up)
or
(5c) Gadflay simply refuses to accept consensus opinion over authorities which give him the evidence in (3)
or
(5d) Gadflay cites a response from a favored Gadfly Theorist to the evidence cited in (4).
To me, 5a-5d all constitute the destruction of a rational engagement between Consensus Joe and Gadflay. I’ll go through why I think this, in order:
(5a) This route is possibly dishonest, and reveals that Gadflay’s goal is really just to find any route, whatever it is, which will convince Consensus Joe of X. Whenever you catch Gadflay doing this, it is important to press Gadflay to say whether he thinks the argument addressed in (4) still stands. For example, one argument given by 9/11 truthers is that there is a broad set of experts who accept the relevant non-mainstream view X. It is fairly easy to show that the movement’s claims in this regard are both baseless, and disturbingly dishonest and manipulative. Gadflay may point out that the Gadfly Theory may still be true, though the movement habitually lies about sources. Remember, Gadflay is correct here, but should nevertheless be pressed to admit that his argument has been weakened. Furthermore, as a matter of encouraging epistemic virtues, one should ask Gadflay to introspect and find out why the defeat of the argument addressed in (4) doesn’t seem to bother him.
(5b) This path will almost certainly result in Gadflay being backed into a corner, at which point he may either resort to (5c) or (5d), or trickily resume with (5a). For example, non mainstream 9/11 theories are notorious for breaking down at the level of their wider implications. Once one backs away from the narrow focus on the web of claims in engineering, it becomes clear that the alternative story doesn’t fit with what we know about the rest of the world. For example, the lack of evidence for the extensive planning and interference required for any controlled demolition hypothesis constitutes a failure for the theory’s implications to obtain. For this reason, many 9/11 truthers, including Richard Gage, make the highly irrational (if prudent) move to avoid non-engineering claims altogether. But once Gadflay has refused to acknowledge the importance of the failure of his theory’s implications to obtain, rational discourse is impossible. So (5b) will probably signal the end of conversation. Alternatively, Gadflay may actually have an additional set of arguments to support X1, at which point the progression restarts. (Note that this move is very suspicious, as it would require the rejection of an additional arena of expert consensus!)
(5c) This move seems to me to be what is really going on in many debates with Gadflays. Because Gadflay is not an expert, he must, at some point, be simply privileging a Gadfly Theorist or small group of Gadfly theorists, over all experts who create consensus. Whether or not he makes this explicit determines whether or not he has given response (5c). We cannot prove Gadflay is thinking in this way, although we could challenge him to show exactly how he is comparing equivalent but contrary claims between experts and Gadfly Theorists. Yet, if expert consensus addresses the relevant issue directly, Gadflay simply must be privileging his theorists over the consensus.
(5d) This is surely the most rational of Gadflay’s options. While it does signal the end of rational discourse, it is not immediately obvious why this should be so. Say the Gadfly Theorists have claimed that the twin towers fell at such-and-such velocity, a claim parroted by Gadlfay in (3). Consensus Joe picks this argument out for (4), and finds that the claim is both inherently ridiculous (perhaps it is based on selective Youtube clips) and widely refuted directly. Gadflay may reply that Gadfly Theorists have changed the claim to something either wholly different, or narrower. For example, perhaps there is one particular angle from which, for a small period of time, a tower appears to be falling at some velocity consistent with controlled demolition. Consensus Joe has two options. First, he may note that the trend seems to be that the Gadfly Theorists move the goalpost, or merely retreat, until further refutation, to non-addressed claims when their original claims are addressed, or construct challenges that are in some way unanswerable (e.g. some inexplicable feature of an enormously complicated event, about which sufficient evidence is just not available). Consensus Joe may say, “This just pisses me off,” and leave. Or, perhaps more cordially, Consensus Joe may attempt to find an instance of this new claim being addressed in the expert literature. If it is addressed, then Consensus Joe may collapse this process into (4), and force Gadflay into (5c). If the new claim is not addressed, then Consensus Joe is in quite the epistemic pickle. He must either find some good explanation for why it is not addressed (perhaps by emailing an expert within the consensus), seek to find an answer on his own (perhaps in the same email, or by becoming an expert himself), or find some reason for not caring. On the latter, there is at least one reason not to care, which is that there are an infinite number of claims not addressed by the scholarly community. Gadfly Theorists must explain why some claim in particular deserves to be addressed. It seems to me that un-addressed bits of evidence are only worthy of being addressed insofar as they either refute the consensus or support an alternative. Thus, my recommendation to Consensus Joe is that he accept that the new retreating un-addressed claim does count as evidence for the Gadfly Theory. He may then move on and continue to discuss X, using the format detailed above. It could be, after all, that the Gadfly Theorists will initiate some sort of paradigm shift, or change very much like it. Presumably Einsteins and Newtons look like Gadfly Theorists, for about three seconds before the scholarly community begins to adopt their non-mainstream views. However, it remains unclear how Gadflay can have any justification for following them before the consensus shifts.
This is a very long post. I have not reviewed it before posting. Any corrections of minor errors, grammatical or otherwise, are appreciated.
Corrections of major errors will be taken with the usual hostility…
Isabel Kershner and Ethan Bronner have an article in the NYT this morning titled (in the paper edition) “Palestinian Man is Killed in Jerusalem While Peace Talks Hit Snag on Settlements.”
The article paraphrases Netanyahu as saying that “the moratorium [on West Bank settlements] was a gesture aimed at making it easier for the Palestinians to enter direct talks,” but that since the Palestinians failed to “take advantage” of the gesture, walking out now would show they are “not serious about peace.” It seems to me that the clear reiteration by the Israeli government that the halting of settlements was both impermanent and symbolic is an admission of not being “serious about peace.” I’m not sure what it would mean to “take advantage” of a non-commitment to ceasing illegal activity.
The article then states a common view that “Efforts by the Obama administration to get Mr. Netanyahu to extend the freeze have so far been rejected.” Aside from public statements immediately followed by assurances that the U.S./Israel relationship is “special,” what are these “efforts”? We’re familiar with what “efforts” mean in other arenas reported on by the Times – e.g. tariffs against Chinese goods, sanctions against Iran, the invasion of Afghanistan. What have the “efforts” been to get Netanyahu to extend the freeze? I can think of one U.S. effort to help Netanyahu continue settlement activity – the continuation of massive military aid to Israel. A good article would give examples here. Remarkably, the Times itself had reported the administration’s stance in 2009 that efforts (in the sense of actions) are not on the table, whereas “largely symbolic” pressures – i.e. soothing words – are well underway. Has anything changed since then?
The article includes a completely irrelevant paragraph about the internal feelings of the director of the Anti-Defamation League.
Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, who was at the meeting with Mr. Abbas, said by telephone that he was impressed by two things: that the Palestinian president referred to Mr. Netanyahu as “my partner” and that he appeared to be seeking a way to stay at the negotiations even if some building began. On other issues, like Jerusalem and naming Israel a Jewish state, Mr. Foxman said Mr. Abbas did not please him.
What is the significance of this passage? Who cares about what words make Abraham Foxman tingle, or what gives him displeasure? Why does the article not describe the pleasure levels of any equally irrelevant leading American-Palestinian advocates? Was it because none were at the meeting? If so, why is that?
The article also fails to mention that Israeli settlements are in violation of international law, a grounding for the leading complaint of Palestinian leadership. This should be contrasted with leading Israeli complaints cited in the article, e.g. that the Palestinians demand an extended ban on illegal settlements.
I have always hated pennies, so it was with pleasure that I followed Tyler Cowen’s link to the video below.
I think the takeaway line is, “So every year, American taxpayers pay 70 million dollars to have the opportunity to lose a billion dollars in productivity costs.” This fellow claims that he nickels are worse than pennies, but he fails to note that nickels fulfill one of his criteria for usefulness, i.e. they are not excluded as acceptable currency in certain common exchanges, such as (some) vending machines and parking meters.
“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem”… for advertisers
Today I was reading this article on the persistence of mental health stigma. My reading was interrupted by this insert from the omnipresent Google Ads:
It struck me how creepily well-suited this ad is for its target market, many members of which suffer from paranoid delusions. This reminded me of the pure evils of the advertising industry, which in turn reminded me of one of my favorite comedy routines by Bill Hicks, which is too vulgar to post.
Robert Fisk writes a characteristically cheerful and encouraging article in his Independent column. In comparing civilians killed intentionally by the bad guys and accidentally by the good guys, he writes,
And yes, I know the arguments. We cannot compare the actions of evil terrorists with the courage of our young men and women, defending our lives – and sacrificing theirs – on the front lines of the ‘war on terror”. There can be no “equivalence”. “They” kill innocents because “they” are evil. “We” kill innocents by mistake. But we know we are going to kill innocents – we willingly accept that we are going to kill innocents, that our actions are going to create mass graves of families, of the poor and the weak and the dispossessed.
This is why we created the obscene definition of “collateral damage”. For if “collateral” means that these victims are innocent, then “collateral” also means that we are innocent of killing them. It was not our wish to kill them – even if we knew it was inevitable that we would.
I have mentioned civilian casualties before, especially in Afghanistan, here and here. In the second link, note that in some cases, civilian casualties appear to be very much on purpose, including the subsequent cover-up.
The Fisk quote expresses my basic view. I think it is morally obscure to differentiate between two forms of actively killing a family when there was full awareness of such consequences in both cases. The moral story we tell ourselves is that when civilians die in an air-strike, it was morally justified by the good cause. What is interesting, and as far as I know never mentioned, is that this is exactly the justification for every politically or religiously motivated atrocity. Except in cases of pure sadism (say, a serial killer), no one kills just for fun. No one, for example, flies planes into buildings just for fun. Rather, people fly planes into buildings because they think the ensuing civilian deaths (doesn’t matter who, or how many) are worth whatever they take to be their noble cause (say, opposing American foreign policy, or trying to draw the West into an apparent war with Islam).
If we think civilian casualties can be justified by good causes, then we cannot coherently criticize the bad guys for their methods. We only have grounds to object to their cause. An apologist for state violence might think something like, “Consciously acting in a way that will result in the destruction of the bodies of innocents is justified by democracy promotion in Afghanistan.” Apologists for terrorism employ the same reasoning, but replace what comes after “justified by.” They might fill in “resisting occupation,” “establishing Islamic law,” “making enough money to eat,” “defeating the west,” or whatever.
I don’t think there has been serious discussion of the actual moral equivalence implied in the reasoning about civilian casualties. The self-serving fantasies of just war theorists never do the trick, because either (1) everyone is implicitly condemned or (2) everyone is implicitly justified.
There is at least one substantive difference between Us and Them with respect to civilian casualties, and it is important to acknowledge this difference, because it has an emotional hold on apologists for state violence. Because we have fancy things like an air force, our murder of civilians has a lottery structure: Usually, we know with certainty that, given the collection of stuff we do on purpose (e.g. invade Afghanistan, use drone strikes, etc.), innocents will be killed. However we usually don’t know who or exactly how many (although given experience, prediction is possible). For the bad guys, there is still a kind of lottery structure (e.g. who knows who or how many will be on the targeted bus?), but sometimes there is one difference: there is a goal of killing civilians.
Notice that it seems like the good guys could in principle still achieve their goals without killing a single civilian (arguably, they could achieve their goals better – the military spokespersons talk about killing civilians as a strategic, not a moral mistake), whereas if the bad guys failed to kill any civilians, they might see this itself as a failure in their mission.
But this is a superficial analysis. The bad guys don’t really have an ultimate goal of killing civilians. As for the good guys, killing civilians is a means to an end (say, the withdrawal of American troops). Both agree, notice, that the cost is “worth it.” If the insurgents in Afghanistan thought they could make the U.S. withdraw by dancing around in a circle, they would. Similarly, if the U.S. could achieve its goal by passing out candy, that would be the policy. But in both cases, deliberate actions which are known to cause civilian casualties have been deemed strategically necessary, and therefore morally justified.
John at Philosophical Disquisitions is writing a nice series on the “skeptical theist” response to the problem of evil. (For more reading – and listening! – see also some of the links posted by Luke at Common Sense Atheism, including a brief post by Alexander Pruss). The term “skeptical theist” could apply to anyone who argues that, due to our cognitive limitations, we don’t have the requisite knowledge for making at least one step in certain arguments from evil. The skeptical theist usually tries to establish some principle of epistemic humility (e.g., we don’t have adequate knowledge of future goods resulting from evils; we are cognitively inferior to God; we don’t know the details of other possible worlds; etc.) and therewith show that the argument from evil, even if in fact successful, can’t be rationally accepted by us. For all we know, evil could constitute evidence that God does not exist, but as human beings we are not in a position to know it.
Generally, the difficulty for skeptical theist responses is that the purported principles of epistemic humility tend to entail various implausible forms of human ignorance. We think that we know certain things about evil, God, and the world. It is hard to show how we can hold onto this knowledge but exclude knowledge purported in problems of evil. The project of the skeptical theist thus comes off as ad hoc. The methodology tends to look like this: How can we develop a principle of epistemic humility that excludes X and only X piece of knowledge about God and evil?
Nevertheless, certain skeptical theistic principles do seem generally plausible. For example, it seems plausible that we would not have direct access to the mind of God. Yet if we don’t have sufficient access to blame God for evil, then how do we manage to have sufficient access to praise God for good? Or to talk about God’s nature at all? The theologian and apologist might appeal here to revelation – we know exactly (and only) what God has revealed to us, which does not include God’s reasons for allowing horrendous evils. This strikes me as deeply implausible, since the problem of evil seems to follow exactly from principles alleged to be revealed – that God is good and powerful, that evil is opposed to God’s character, that certain events (e.g. gross injustices, murder…) are horrendous evils, etc.
I think that skeptical theism as a stand-alone response to the problem of evil will always run into reductio problems of this sort. It seems impossible to develop an independently plausible principle of epistemic humility which will only cover those pieces of knowledge required for evidential arguments from evil.
However, there is a certain kind of skepticism, in conjunction with outside knowledge, that might do the trick. Take for example an illustration used in skeptical theist literature: the child who doesn’t know why her parent gives her a painful vaccination. I don’t think it’s sufficient to say that the child merely submits to ignorance. What is really going on (maybe not really, but in our philosophical fantasy land) is that the child has some pieces of knowledge – e.g. that her parent is trustworthy and loves her – which in a way cover her ignorance of the reasons for the vaccination.
If you don’t feel the force of this subtle feature, consider an alternative scenario: A child is strolling along and someone comes and sticks a needle in her arm. Clearly, assuming the child has beliefs, the child would be justified in evaluating this situation as … unseemly. It is only in light of other information – approval and guidance of a parent, knowledge of the parent’s love, etc. – that the child’s ignorance remains insufficient to justify a belief in say, the wickedness of her parent.
Lucky for me, this directs our consideration toward what I think is possibly the only viable (first personal) response to the problem of evil, for a person to remain rational in her theism. The theist must have greater confidence in God’s goodness than confidence in the gratuitousness of horrendous evils. This leaves open the question: what counter-evidence to apparently gratuitous evils is there regarding God’s character? I suspect that, if God exists, confidence in the proposition that God is good will depend heavily on religious experience (not just of the ineffable mystical kind, but including experiencing the apparent effect of God’s life in other people, etc.). There might be abstruse metaphysical arguments combining reasons both why probably God exists and if so is necessarily good; in my view those exercises are not only vaguely annoying, but inconclusive in virtue of their philosophical nature.
I think this strategy (which, due to its first personal nature, might justify the theist, but not necessarily be enough to convince the atheist) can still be described as a skeptical theist strategy – perhaps a mixed strategy. We are ignorant of God’s reasons for evil. Because we are ignorant of God’s reasons, horrendous evils constitute evidence against his goodness (and therefore, hopefully, his existence). Because evils constitute evidence against God’s existence in virtue of being evidence against his goodness, the theist requires stronger evidence of God’s goodness. In this way, the theist covers her epistemic limitations with respect to apparently gratuitous evils.
I recall something similar to this being argued by Plantinga somewhere, where (I think) he says that the epistemic warrant of the theist might simply be in some sense stronger than her warrant with respect to the plausible defeater in the evidential argument from evil. But I can’t remember the name of the article.
The astute reader may notice that I have left certain implicit claims un-argued for. For example, I think there is a sense in which, even if we can’t expect to know the reasons for gratuitous evils, or the ultimate consequences of a world like ours, these things can still constitute prima facie evidence against God’s goodness. I think my alternative vaccination cases draw this out intuitively. Also, it is not clear that, in light of her ignorance, the theist needs the evidence for God’s goodness to be, strictly speaking, stronger than the prima facie counter-evidence. Perhaps there is some principle whereby prima facie evidence under certain conditions of ignorance is less weighted while nevertheless constituting evidence. “As far as we can tell…” is weaker than other formations, such as “We know that…” or “We strongly believe that…”.
This morning I was reading the brief piece in Huffpost (via Feminist Philosophers) about federal judge Virginia Phillips’ ruling that the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy is unconstitutional. The article paraphrases attorney Paul Freeborne as follows: “Freeborne had argued the policy debate was political and that the issue should be decided by Congress rather than in court.”
Is this a real, let alone coherent legal principle? What does it even mean that a debate is “political,” and therefore not a matter for the courts? Surely civil rights in general is a political issue with policy implications. Does this have legal relevance?
The chances that there is a legal scholar in my infinitely large readership is pretty high, so I’ll await expert opinion.