Ethics

Genie Scott of the NCSE gave a talk on “Creationism and Evolution: Current Perspectives” to a standing-room-only audience of several hundred at the ASU Physical Sciences building. This crowd came out to see her despite the fact that Jared Diamond was speaking at ASU at the same time, about his book Collapse. The lecture began with a few words about Bob Dietz, who was a strong supporter of evolution and critic of creationism, and showed a few slides of him and his book, Creation/Evolution Satiricon: Creationism Bashed. Genie gave an overview of creation science, comparing and contrasting it with evolution. She pointed out the logical flaw of the “two model approach” in assuming that evolution and creation are the only two possibilities and that falsifying evolution is all that’s needed to prove creationism. There followed a discussion of the Paluxy river mantracks, and how Glen Kuban’s work led even the Institute for Creation Research to stop using them as evidence that humans and dinosaurs lived together. She talked briefly about some problems with the ark story and the misidentification of geological features as fossilized arks (another example which creationists themselves have refuted). Genie described the NCSE Grand Canyon raft trips, pointing out how they teach both the evolution and creationist sides of the story, while the ICR raft trip only teaches the creationist version. She put up a photo of Steve Austin and his book Grand Canyon, Monument to Catastrophe, along with a photo of “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, pointing out that they should not be confused, even though the creationist Steve Austin does work on cold stone. (This reference worked well with the young audience–my expectation was for a comparison photo of Lee Majors as the “Six Million Dollar Man” as the joke.) She spent some time describing how the Grand Canyon is composed of thousands of layers of sediment which the creationists claim to have been laid down through repeated walls of water and sediment precipitation. This set the stage for Austin’s claims about the canyons around Mt. St. Helens, where a 30’ deep ditch was cut by water in seven days–thirty feet of unconsolidated ash and loose sediment doesn’t compare to four thousand feet of individual layers of shales, limestones, sandstones, etc. Since the event was at ASU, home of the Institute of Human Origins, she mentioned Donald Johanson tiring of correcting bogus creationist claims about Lucy’s knee joint. She then turned to intelligent design, or “creationism light,” which she described as consisting of only a single philosophical claim–that you can detect the evidence of things that are designed and are the products of intelligence, and in particular the product of a divine designer. ID has proposed two concepts for identifying design, Behe’s irreducible complexity and Dembski’s design inference. She described the Discovery Institute and the Wedge Document, and pointed out that there are many criticisms of Behe’s irreducible complexity and Dembski’s complex specified information on the web. The structure of the ID arguments, she argued, is the same as that of creation science–that evolution can’t do it, therefore it must be intelligent design. Michael Behe’s favored example of the bacterial flagellum was shown in an animated slide, and Genie pointed out that they like to use examples of complex systems where we haven’t yet developed full explanations, but they ignore other examples of apparently “irreducibly complex” systems where we do have full explanations, like the evolution of the mammalian ear (which she proceeded to illustrate). She gave a history of the intelligent design movement and its roots in creationism–covering the 1981 McLean v. Arkansas decision, Jon Buell’s formation of the Foundation for Thought and Ethics, and the publications of Thaxton, Bradley, and Olsen’s Mystery of Life’s Origin and Of Pandas and People. She described the science of the latter as awful, giving as an example its treatment of genetic distances between organisms based on cytochrome c, a demonstration that the authors don’t understand evolution (a topic discussed in the Dover case). Wesley Elsberry’s work on word counts of “creationis[t/m]” vs. “intelligent design” in the sequence of manuscripts that became Of Pandas and People was graphically depicted, showing the former dropping to zero and the latter increasing to the level of the former in 1987, after the creationists lost at the U.S. Supreme Court in Edwards v. Aguillard. She briefly commented on William Dembski’s draft of version three of Of Pandas and People, which used “sudden emergence” instead of “intelligent design,” and about the Discovery Institute’s move to a “teach the controversy” position which it has held for a few years, and its model policy for school boards to teach the “strengths and weaknesses” of evolution adopted by the Grantsburg, Wisconsin school board in December 2004. She listed seven states that have introduced anti-evolution legislation this year (Alabama, Indiana, Michigan, Missouri, Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Utah), promoting books critical of intelligent design and creationism (including Young and Edis’ Why Intelligent Design Fails, Pennock’s Intelligent Design Creationism and Its Critics, Forrest and Gross’s Creationism’s Trojan Horse, Miller’s Finding Darwin’s God, Shanks’ God, the Devil, and Darwin, Isaak’s Counter-Creationism Handbook, and her own Evolution vs. Creationism, which she was pleased to announce had just been reviewed in the New York Times Book Review. She showed a screen shot of Amazon.com listing her book with a sales rank of #284, though she noted this is an hour-by-hour rank and she had to wait until late on Sunday night to get the shot. In closing, Genie noted that Bob Dietz was a real scientific iconoclast who advocated views that were outside of the mainstream when he initiated them–that seafloor spreading occurs and is evidence of continental drift, that moon craters are asteroid impacts not volcanoes, that shatter cones are evidence of meteoritic impacts. He didn’t respond to criticism by starting a policy institute, hiring a PR firm, and lobbying to have his theories taught in public schools–he responded by doing scientific work, by doing research, by writing and presenting papers. That’s the work that needs to be done to get things taught in public school science classes. Afterward, there was a small reception outside the auditorium, and Genie was swamped with people asking questions for quite some time. I was surprised that there were no obvious creationists or intelligent design advocates–those who were present (I’m sure there were some there) kept their views to themselves. ...

Richard Carrier and Tom Wanchick have begun a debate over at the Internet Infidels site. Wanchick gives six arguments for Christian theism, one of which is the following “moral argument”: But what makes us obliged not to mistreat humans? After all, if naturalism is true, “a human being is a biological animal,"[16] as naturalist Julian Baggini admits. But unless humans have unique moral worth not had by beasts, it seems objective moral truth wouldn’t exist. It wouldn’t, for instance, be immoral to rape or kill, for animals do so to each other regularly with no moral significance.[17]When somebody says “it seems,” that may be an indication that there isn’t a solid argument. Here, for instance, Wanchick says that unless humans have unique moral worth distinct from all animals, there is no objective moral truth. The conclusion clearly doesn’t follow without additional premises. The more obvious conclusion from the premise that humans are not the unique holders of moral worth is that animals also have moral worth, that mistreating and abusing them is wrong, and perhaps that it is immoral to kill animals for food–this is the conclusion drawn by many vegetarians and vegans. Moral worth is a distinct concept from moral responsibility, so the fact that animals don’t respect each others’ moral worth doesn’t make them morally blameworthy. One can have moral worth and rights that deserve to be respected without having the capacity for moral reasoning or responsibility. Paul Draper pinpoints the problem such properties would cause for naturalism: “every human being has a special sort of inherent value that no animal has, and every human has an equal amount of this value. Such equality is possible despite the great differences among humans, because the value in question does not supervene on any natural properties. It is a nonnatural property that all (and only) humans possess."[18] The great naturalist philosopher J.L. Mackie, and myriad others, agree.Mackie’s “queerness” argument certainly does carry some weight as an argument against the objectivity of moral properties. This argument about equality, however, I find less convincing. I would argue that the inherent value that is “equal” is that we recognize a set of individual rights for those who meet certain minimal criteria of personhood (or sentience, consciousness, capacity for pain, or whatever are the minimal features which give rise to such rights), and it is those rights which are equal, and are so for social and economic reasons. In fact, the actual value any one person has (for themselves and others) does vary from person to person based on natural properties. Unfortunately, to defend naturalism, Draper and Mackie (like Carrier) have to absurdly deny that humans have such unique inherent worth.[19] Carrier even says some animals are more morally valuable than certain humans in virtue of their superior intellect, rationality, etc.[20] But such positions are obviously false. Humans have moral worth not found in animals, regardless of their comparative capabilities, and the failure to recognize this is simply a lack of moral insight.There is no argument here except bare assertion: “such positions are obviously false.” Those who advocate animal rights would question Wanchick’s capacity for moral insight, and since Wanchick supplies no evidence or reasons to support his position on this issue, there is no reason to prefer his position to theirs. But since these moral properties obviously do exist in human beings and aren’t natural, they must have a supernatural source. And since moral properties exist only in persons, the source of moral properties must be a supernatural person.Again, Wanchick has proceeded by bare assertion–“these moral properties obviously do exist in human beings and aren’t natural”–that’s two assertions, neither of which he has offered any support for. He then asserts that “moral properties exist only in persons,” again without argument. I have some ideas about how such an argument could be constructed, though most of them involve non-objective meta-ethics, which would not support Wanchick’s view. I don’t think that Wanchick actually believes that “moral properties exist only in persons”–surely he would agree that there are particular actions that are objectively wrong, such as an axe murder. But an axe murder is not within a person, it is an action in the natural world, and for it to be objectively wrong is for that action to have moral properties. If Wanchick agrees with this, it undermines this entire argument. If he disagrees with it, then he owes an explanation for how his view is not a form of subjectivism. The moral order, then, is evidence of a supernatural person who grounds moral truth. Additionally, at least some moral truths are necessary, and thus their foundation must be a necessary being grounding moral facts in all possible worlds.[21]Wanchick finishes up with more bare assertion, throwing in his “additionally” remarks without any justification or argument. I’m not sure if this is the worst of Wanchick’s six arguments, but it’s quite feeble.

Arizona Congressman J.D. Hayworth (in his sixth term, if you can believe it) has come out near the top of legislators who have received campaign contributions from “Indian tribes and others connected with disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff." I actually agree with Hayworth that he should feel under no obligation to return donations from the tribes, and I agree with many of the stances he has taken supporting them, especially with regard to the case of Cobell v. Norton. This is a case that has been going on since 1996 (with underlying issues going back to the 19th century), when Elouise Cobell of the Blackfeet Nation of Montana filed a federal lawsuit to get a proper accounting of what the Department of Interior (DOI) has been doing with funds collected from leases of land held in trust for American Indians. In the course of the lawsuit, it has been found that the DOI intentionally destroyed records (and allowed others to be destroyed by the elements) and covered it up, did not maintain records with proper security (which led to DOI websites being removed from the Internet as a result of an injunction). On the other hand, Hayworth has held multiple fundraisers in sports stadium skyboxes owned by Abramoff, the value of which he failed to report to the Federal Election Commission, for which he refunded money to two tribes and filed amended FEC reports. If specific evidence of other failings along these lines–or of actual bribe-taking–is found, Hayworth should be nailed to the wall. The fact that he has had extensive involvement with Abramoff is itself reason to scrutinize his dealings carefully, as it’s a sign that he is either a poor judge of character or doesn’t care about who he associates with (it could be either, since he isn’t the sharpest blade in the drawer and is one of the biggest blowhards in Congress). When Hayworth first ran for Congress, he signed up for a dialup account at Primenet, the Arizona ISP where I worked at the time. His campaign manager said that if he won the election, he would be sure to remain a Primenet customer for quite some time. Shortly after his election, the account was cancelled.

Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission was quoted in the Washington Post about the Kitzmiller v. Dover decision: “This decision is a poster child for a half-century secularist reign of terror that’s coming to a rapid end with Justice Roberts and soon-to-be Justice Alito,” said Richard Land, who is president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission and is a political ally of White House adviser Karl Rove. “This was an extremely injudicious judge who went way, way beyond his boundaries–if he had any eyes on advancing up the judicial ladder, he just sawed off the bottom rung.” Apparently Mr. Land believes that 1965-2005 in the United States was something like Robby Berry’s “Life in Our Anti-Christian America." Timothy Sandefur rebuts Land’s nutty comment at The Panda’s Thumb. UPDATE (February 6, 2007): An updated link for Robby Berry’s “Life in Our Anti-Christian America."

You’ve got to hand it to the Amish. At least they are consistent, unlike the vast majority of the IDiots out there who poo poo the notions of evolution while at the same time readily partaking in its fruits–medicine that would be impossible were it not for our understanding of germs and genetics. But not the Amish, who let their kids get polio rather than question “The Word.” I’m not sure what you’d call them, but you can’t call ’em hypocrites.

Clint Bolick and Alan Dershowitz have written two very different–yet only occasionally directly contradictory–rememberances of Chief Justice William Rehnquist. Bolick, in a piece distributed by the Goldwater Institute and published in the Arizona Republic, describes Rehnquist as a conservative, moderating influence on a liberal court, advocating state’s rights, school choice, and presiding over a court that has been “usually (though less frequently lately) siding with individual liberty over state power.” Dershowitz, on the other hand, in a piece published on the Huffington Post, describes Rehnquist as a bigot who enjoyed racist and anti-Semitic jokes, who defended the “separate but equal” doctrine in Plessy v. Ferguson as a law clerk for Justice Jackson, and who began his legal career as a Republican thug who obstructed African-American and Hispanic voters at Phoenix polling places. Bolick gives a more nuanced view that actually addresses more of Rehnquist’s work on the court (though less than I would have expected), while Dershowitz emphasizes evidence of Rehnquist’s personal character which mostly derives from before he was on the Supreme Court. I was surprised that Bolick didn’t mention some of the recent cases (such as Raich v. Ashcroft and Kelo v. New London) where Rehnquist voted for liberty (and was unfortunately in the minority). Yet I have no doubt that there is accuracy in both descriptions. Bolick has in the past seen people as defenders of liberty who have done much to destroy it, such as former Attorney General John Ashcroft. Dershowitz alternatively takes courageous stands in defense of liberty and crazy stands which oppose it. One area where I was less than impressed with Rehnquist was on religious liberty, specifically for nonbelievers. He (like the majority) went the wrong way on Elk Grove v. Newdow (the Pledge of Allegiance “under God” case) and (unlike the majority) the wrong way on the McCreary County v. ACLU case (Ten Commandments display in a Kentucky courtroom which included a written statement that the display was “in remembrance and honor of Jesus Christ, the Prince of Ethics”).

Denyse O’Leary (an appallingly bad journalist who blogs in favor of Intelligent Design) wrote that she won’t become an internal critic of ID because she opposes the “academic fascism” of ID critics. I find that an appallingly weak justification for being a propagandist. Internal criticism tends to strengthen the quality of arguments and evidence, not weaken them–unless, of course, what you’re advocating is false. Einzige (2006-12-09): Are there any pro-IDers who are critical of other pro-IDers? ...

Here’s an interesting essay/review from The New Yorker about Harry Frankfurt’s On Bullshit, Simon Blackburn’s Truth: A Guide, and the difference between liars and bullshitters (the former care about the truth but want to lead away from it, the latter have complete disregard for truth). Historical Comments Einzige (2006-12-09): This section resonated with me:"How would one defend philosophers like Hegel or Heidegger from the charge that their writings are bullshit? Not, Cohen says, by showing that they cared about the truth (which would be enough to get them off the hook if they were charged with being bullshitters under Frankfurt's definition). Rather, one would try to show that their writings actually made some sense."As a part of trying to better understand and appreciate Max Stirner I picked up a copy of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. My copy has a line-by-line analysis of the text by some philosopher--at least I presume he's a philosopher. I was struck by the fact that this guy's "analysis" was just as incomprehensible as Hegel's discourse. I gave up on it after about 20 pages. Go ahead and call me a moron, I guess. ...

An, uh, interesting excerpt from Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s Democracy: The God that Failed: “In a covenant concluded among proprietor and community tenants for the purpose of protecting their private property, no such thing as a right to free (unlimited) speech exists, not even to unlimited speech on one’s own tenant-property. One may say innumerable things and promote almost any idea under the sun, but naturally no one is permitted to advocate ideas contrary to the very purpose of the covenant of preserving private property, such as democracy and communism. There can be no tolerance towards democrats and communists in a libertarian social order. They will have to be physically separated and expelled from society. Likewise in a covenant founded for the purpose of protecting family and kin, there can be no tolerance toward those habitually promoting lifestyles incompatible with this goal." ...