Say Anything Blog

Carrick and I were having a particularly productive spat on an admittedly antagonistic post of mine recently. Carrick took the time to type a thought out responce regarding his views on morality which I thought worthy of importing into a whole new post in order to keep the discussion going, minus the stigma of posting on one of Sparkie’s admittedly antagonistic posts. I’ve always felt that one doesn’t get good answers until they push a little. Well, Carrick stepped up. Thanks Carrick. Now to provide a response with a little more thought and class than I usually display… to practice reciprocity.

Sparkie, I don’t have too much time to go into the tenants behind an objective basis for morality, but it exists not the less.  The same is true (and is a related statement) that there is an objective basis to science.

While we understand that Carrick’s position is just a quick sketch, its usable. Also, we should make note that this view of science is contested, if not among scientists, clearly among the clergy, and many others, including Tom Kuhn (circa 1962. he hedged a bit in the late sixties.).

The fact is no statement in empirical science can be proven true beyond any possible doubt, yet there are true statements.  Empirical science is the process by which we beat around in the bushes, over time getting closer and closer to the “real” real.

True, but unjustified statements. The kicker is that lots of people feel that justification is needed. Also, empirical science has brought us phlogiston, ether, N rays, magnetic rays, and countless other fictions. The continuity and building on the past idea is true, but there is lots of rubbish that we throw away. Gradual arguments are nice, seem to make sense, but have the unsavory upshot of not being able to point to the content of our current theories that will not be thrown out. Who knows what we will disprove next? Also, objectivity is a wholly bogus notion. We have no ‘god’s eye’. Among scientists, the best we are going to get is intersubjective agreement. This falls well short of objective. Its real, but not the real real, so to speak.

The same is true for morality. For a given moral equation, there is objectively a best possible outcome and a worse possible outcome.  The “best” outcome is the one that does the most good and the worst is the one that does the most harm (by some measure).  What I’ve left intentionally ambiguous is the whom the good/harm is being done for/to. So morality thought about this way depends on the context in which it is being applied.

This is like a folk version of Mill. Also, how do you avoid the relativism? Where is the foundation or justification? Also, how far into the future do we let the repercussions roll? The causal upshots of our actions, be they individual or state actions, have seemingly infinite causal futures, do they not? On this basis, the embargoes against Saddam and Castro were probably immoral, were they not?

What we might do if we need only consider ourselves is very different than what we might do if a group of people are similarly affected by the action.  Put another way, an act of morality for an individual is different than the act of morality for a group (or a nation, or a planet).  This for example is why Jimmy Carter was a terrible president:  He conflated what was right for him to do (in his case, I am convince, what was “right” is what “felt good” to do), with what was right/necessary to do for the common good of the country.

Do you feel there is a difference in responsibility? Moral valence?

Thus you as an individual probably wouldn’t send 3000 soldiers to their death to protect you.  But you might send the same number if the lives of all Americans were similarly threatened.

I might, but then there would need to be a bona fide threat to all Americans.

That’s an example of a moral equation/dilemma that has a definite right answer and wrong answer to.

Clearly.

Briefly how one determines analytically what is the best approach to take is mostly an experiential one (what has worked in the past, the historical approach).  Generalizations of moral outcomes from a particular action to be our “code of ethics”, part of which is codified e.g., in our Judeo-Christian belief system, part of which is passed on as “lore”.

but what all these have in common is pretty minimal. which one is objective? for example… what is the objectively moral thing to do with the dead? bury them? burn them? harvest their organs? according to your theory we should do the thing that makes for the most ‘good’ and the least ‘bad’, perhaps construed as pleasure or pain… but that’s circular and you know it. you haven’t said what is good and what is bad. failing that, you are a relativist like me.

As time passes on, our ethics becomes more and more refined and our ability to predict the outcome from a particular choice gets better.

i disagree. our ethics is no more refined than it has been. this is especially fallacious when it comes to international policy. we gave up the ‘prediction’ programme in the 60s.

However, an act may always simultaneously be moral and unethical or immoral and ethical.

You would need to differentiate those for all of us or provide an example.

Pretty much this is the same thing that happens in physics:  As we push our knowledge base further with new experiments, we always find “warts” in our existing theories.  These don’t overthrow our original theories, they just get refined with the new knowledge.

incorrect, as i pointed out above. no one believes in phlogiston, ether, etc. anymore.

I think the same thing happens with ethics.

woah woah woah. is ethics a science? wishful thinking.

Older theories of ethics get replaced with new, more refined ones, but the foundations of the old ideas don’t get tossed out, they just get tweaked.

and we will eventually get objective ethics? what percentage of our current ethics is objective, were you to guess? how will we know if a given tenet will be discarded or proven immutable? are we talking real real?

This happens to be the basis for moral conservatism by the way:  We mostly have things right in our ethics, but we recognize a need for flexibility as new circumstances unforeseen by our ancestors arise.  And so forth (out of time)…

Big disconnect there. If that’s the method we use with science, we’d be nowhere. It strikes me that if we can overthrow the ancestors theories with ones that work better, and are totally different, then we will. Also, you ignore the other sciences. Why physics?

The bottom line is that moral relativism is every bit as wrong as social relativism applied to science.  It is just an excuse for not doing the hard work of figuring out what your best moral option is given a particular moral dilemma.  There is an absolute framework for defining good and evil, it will never be known exactly, but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist or that we shouldn’t strive to realize it.

I think you are being honest about everything but the existence of good and bad. I look at those as normative ideals, not as objective parts of reality.

Take, for example, a gas efficient car. When we get one with 1000mpg rating will it be the gas efficient car? No. when we get to 5000mpg will that be THE GAS EFFICIENT CAR? No. We will improve. It is an ideal that we strive towards, building on improvements, but never reaching. The form of the perfect gas efficient car need not exist in the heavens for us to work towards gas efficiency.

Also Carrick… physics is practiced around the globe. Granted it is a european phenomenon originally, and until almost the 19teens (there was a bright Japanese guy before then, and maybe one Indian one). Morality, if we use your provided explication, as corrected overtime by the global community… must involve a minimal amount of content. Do no kill, do not lie, and maybe feed your kids until they can feed themselves. If we add to much more, there is no consensus, no intersubjective agreement, no objective content. Does your concept of objective morality include more than that?

Lastly, I just want to know why it has to be objective? What’s wrong with the ideal, the gas efficient car, having a non-existent status? It still does the same work doesn’t it?

The point of terrorism is to cause terror, sometimes to further a political goal and sometimes out of sheer hatred. The people terrorists kill are not the targets; they are collateral damage. And blowing up planes, trains, markets or buses is not the goal; those are just tactics. The real targets of terrorism are the rest of us: the billions of us who are not killed but are terrorized because of the killing. The real point of terrorism is not the act itself, but our reaction to the act.

And we’re doing exactly what the terrorists want.

It’s time we calm down and fight terror with antiterror. This does not mean that we simply roll over and accept terrorism. There are things our government can and should do to fight terrorism, most of them involving intelligence and investigation…

But our job is to remain steadfast in the face of terror, to refuse to be terrorized. Our job is to not panic every time two Muslims stand together checking their watches. There are approximately 1 billion Muslims in the world, a large percentage of them not Arab, and about 320 million Arabs in the Middle East, the overwhelming majority of them not terrorists. Our job is to think critically and rationally, and to ignore the cacophony of other interests trying to use terrorism to advance political careers or increase a television show’s viewership.

The surest defense against terrorism is to refuse to be terrorized. Our job is to recognize that terrorism is just one of the risks we face, and not a particularly common one at that. And our job is to fight those politicians who use fear as an excuse to take away our liberties and promote security theater that wastes money and doesn’t make us any safer.

Some of the conservative commentators here on SA are obviously the biggest victims of terrorism stateside. They see enemies everywhere. M_z, r108, Neiman, many Churchs, many labor Unions, Presidents, and other figures and groups… have joined with al Qaeda in the quest to scare and control you.

A psychology researcher has controversially claimed that stupidity is causally linked to how likely people are to believe in God.

I love it when ‘researchers’ search for stupidity’s causal nexus!

Lynn and his two co-authors argue that average IQ is an excellent predictor of what proportion of the population are true believers, across 137 countries.

Sample size? Check.

Lynn pointed out that most children do believe in God, but as their intelligence develops they tend to have doubts or reject religion. Similarly, as average IQ in Western societies increased through the 20th century, so did rates of atheism…

...

The researchers’ claims of a direct causal link have drawn criticism from others in intelligence research, who argue their conclusions are too simplistic. London Metropolitan University’s Dr David Hardman said: “It is very difficult to conduct true experiments that would explicate a causal relationship between IQ and religious belief. Nonetheless, there is evidence from other domains that higher levels of intelligence are associated with a greater ability - or perhaps willingness - to question and overturn strongly felt intuitions.”

Even this guy, who acknowledges the complex array of causal factors at work, and therefore disagrees with the study, still agrees that atheists are smarter and have stronger wills. Hmmm.

But maybe this study has some sort of a bias. After all, they weren’t gaging the fancy and advanced manner that the fervently religious can come to know and believe in pure hogwash! That sort of technically nuanced self-deception has to be handicapped for so we can straighten out this bias.

April 27th, 2008

Alyaksandr Lukashenka has attacked critics of the government’s plans to build a nuclear power plant in Belarus, describing them as “enemies of the people”…

Hmmmmm.Another thorn in the flesh! Can we get Putin to vote for an embargo? I think not. Perhaps Randy Grapes will proffer us another attack plan in a few days. Oh, and you-know-who is a good buddy of Lukashenka.

Perhaps it is even of some solace to Paul Joyal that his testicles served to halt, however temporarily, the development of Iranian nukes.

? An odd article, to say the least.

Well well well. I did a post on this thug a year and a month ago. He’s the man that the movie ’Lord of War‘ was based on. Then, I pointed out that it is bizarre that we employ a terrorist to fly weapons in and out of Iraq. From that post:

...the Bush administration has hired at least one company tied to Bout’s network for the war effort in Iraq. ...Air Bas, a company tied to Bout and his associates, was flying charter missions under contract with the U.S. military in Iraq. Air Bas is overseen by Victor Bout’s brother, Serguei, and his long-time business manager, Richard Chichakli, an accountant living in Texas; in the past, payments for Air Bas have gone to a Kazakh company that the United Nations identifies as “a front for the leasing operations of Victor Bout’s aircraft.”

Now it turns out he will be extradited to the US to stand trial because he was arming the FARC. If only we had arrested him before, instead of hiring him… The amount of terror and bloodshed that would have averted is unknown… but no doubt it is significant. This is the guy who armed Charles Taylor, the fighters in Sierra Leone, the Taliban, and countless other people. Look here, here, and here.

Between November 2007 and March 2008, Bout agreed to sell to the FARC millions of dollars’ worth of weapons—including surface-to-air missile systems ("SAMs"), armor piercing rocket launchers, AK-47 firearms, millions of rounds of ammunition, Russian spare parts for rifles, anti-personnel land mines, C-4 plastic explosives, night-vision equipment, “ultralight” airplanes that could be outfitted with grenade launchers and missiles, and unmanned aerial vehicles. Bout agreed to sell the weapons to two confidential sources working with the DEA (the “CSs"), who represented that they were acquiring these weapons for the FARC, with specific understanding that the weapons were to be used to attack United States helicopters in Colombia…

As described in the Indictment, during a covertly recorded meeting in Thailand on March 6, 2008, Bout stated to the CSs that he could arrange to airdrop the arms to the FARC in Colombia, and offered to sell two cargo planes to the FARC that could be used for arms deliveries. Bout also provided a map of South America, and asked the CSs to show him American radar locations in Colombia. Bout said that he understood that the CSs wanted the arms for use against American personnel in Colombia, and advised that the United States was also his enemy, stating that the FARC’s fight against the United States was also his fight. During the meeting, Bout also offered to provide people to train the FARC in the use of the arms.

War on terror? Why was this guy working for us after he had illegally moved so many AK-47s into the Niger river delta that the price dropped from $250/gun to $70/gun?

The US Army and other defence agencies insisted they had no responsibility to scrutinize 2nd tier subcontractors.

Oh. Of course! The army has no responsibility to make sure that they don’t give our tax money to people like this.

How does that make you feel? Safe? Did you know that we employ people like this to help us in the GWOT? A man who says that

the United States was also his enemy, stating that the FARC’s fight against the United States was also his fight.

Thoughts?

GAZA, May 20 (Xinhua)—Palestinian movement Islamic Jihad on Tuesday promised that it will commit itself to Gaza ceasefire in the same degree Israel sticks to.

Reciprocity, ain’t it a bitch. This news comes out because Israel has promised to retaliate for rocket attacks after Bush leaves. Should Israel abide by the ceasefire, or add fodder to the Jihadis fire?

Are we just effing kidding ourselves here? Like we are going to find a mystery salve after 2500 years?

And why is Hamas the terrorists and not the PLO? Doesn’t the PLO have its origins in the midst of WW2 Nazism and the ‘final solution’? We are to believe that Fatah (i.e. the PLO), who has their origins in a multinational Jew death pact, is the one who will bring peace with Israel? That’s what everyone but the ‘terrorists’ urge. Make sense to you?

Dutchy says Bush’s “days of fingerbanging ol’ Mary Jane Rottencrotch (Saudi Arabia) through her pretty pink panties” should be over… but Saudi Arabia remains one of Bush’s favorite ’pets‘.

As President George W. Bush wraps up his trip to the Middle East, controversial Dutch lawmaker Geert Wilders, a passionate supporter of Bush and the U.S. war on terrorism, called on him to drop his “double agenda” in the region by ending support to Islamic states like Saudi Arabia.

I recently attempted to highlight some of the problems in the front page argumentation here at sayanything. Apparently, my presentation asked for too much attention or acumen on the part of the reader for my point to have been conveyed succinctly and clearly, despite my efforts. I recieved such responses as:

I guess I just don’t speak moron.

Let’s pause here for a second and meditate on this comment from Pilgrim. Anyone who frequents this site knows that a popular thing for the Republican commentators at sayanything to bash on is the dailykos and their lack of rationality and overabundance of emotional appeals and contradictory, self-serving ‘puff’. Given this is such a popular theme for these commentators to rail on, one would think that my effort to help them iron out their inconsistencies and outright contradictions would have been welcomed. After all, these commentators purport to uphold rationality in the face of emotional appeals, do they not?

Since my efforts were perhaps a bit too succinct and demanded a bit to much rationality from this rational crowd (c.f. Pilgrim’s above comment for example), I will make an effort to recast the entire argument so that I can make it clearer and get my point across. I will make a better effort at communication, for the future interests of Pilgrim, so he might save himself from looking like a dailykos commentator; an irrational, emotional, flip-flopper.

Let me try to recast my recent post in a slightly less ‘moron’ manner.

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Rational people often employ something called logic when they make arguments. A typical argument has premises and a conclusion, which, hopefully, is entailed in the premises. If the conclusion is correctly entailed by the premises, we call that a valid argument. Formal logic is the study of inference in a purely formal or symbolized manner. An example of this would be a ‘modus tollens’ argument which runs as follows:

Premise 1: P→Q.

Premise 2: ~Q

Conclusion: ~P.

We can flesh this out with a real life example. One might argue that:

Premise 1: If Islam is a religion of peace, then pious Muslims are peaceful.

Premise 2: Its not the case that pious Muslims are peaceful.

Conclusion: Its not the case that Islam is a religion of peace.

I choose this argument because it is often made here on sayanything and, moreover, it is a valid argument form. Unfortunately, that’s not all that’s needed. In addition to a valid form, the argument must relate to the world in a certain way. The premises must be true. IF (A) the argument is valid & (B) the premises are true, THEN (C) the argument is sound. (If we formalize the sentence in bold, we get the following conditional where the antecedent is a conjunct: (A & B) → C). If its obvious that the above argument is valid, but if someone wishes to deny that it is sound, the burden is on them to pick the premise which they believe does not relate to the world in the appropriate manner, namely their burden is to choose a premise they believe to be false. What one needs is a counterexample to render the premise false. In the case of the above argument, one may choose premise 2 as being false, on real world evidence such as this. So, even though the argument form is valid, we find problems in the way in which it is related to the world. In short, we find counterexamples to premise 2, thereby rendering premise 2 false - the argument might be valid, but it is unsound.

In my recent post on Pilgrim’s lack of rationality, I exploited a modus tollens argument:

Premise 1: P→(R&~R)

Premise 2: ~(R&~R)

Conclusion: ~P

Where P = Pilgrim is correct and R = its good when UW students suppress others’ freedom of speech. So, making the appropriate replacements and boldfacing the operators, we have:

Premise 1: If Pilgrim is correct then (its good when UW students suppress others’ freedom of speech and its not the case that its good when UW students suppress others’ freedom of speech.)

Premise 2: Its not the case that (its good when UW students suppress others’ freedom of speech and its not the case that its good when UW students suppress others’ freedom of speech.)

Conclusion: Its not the case that Pilgrim is correct.

Now, we have seen above that this form of argumentation is valid, but we need to go a bit further. We need to prove that the premises are true if we want the argument to be sound.

(1)Premise one rests on competing claims that Pilgrim has made in two of his recent posts. To be charitable, we will assume that Pilgrim is correct - that gives us P (Which I am making an effort to disprove here). He has made two claims. The first one I have formalized as R. This is the claim that its good when UW students suppress others’ freedom of speech. We have evidence for attributing this claim to Pilgrim here. In the post, Pilgrim refers to the suppression of the Phelps’ right to free speech the “feel good moment of the day” and also closes with ”Good for the students at UW.” Thus, we can see that the attribution of R to Pilgrim is supported. We have also attributed ~R to Pilgrim. ~R amounts to the claim that its not the case that its good when UW students suppress others’ freedom of speech. We attribute that to Pilgrim on the basis of another recent post. In that post, Pilgrim is complaining that a UW student suppressed the free speech of another and claiming, moreover, that its bad. He says, “Their tolerance extends only to themselves and their politcal point of view.” He effectively condemns the suppression of a student who had placed 4,000 crosses on the green in an act of free speech. (And he spells political wrong.) On this basis, we find premise 1 to be sound.

(2) Premise two is what is referred to as an analytic truth or a tautology. We need not look for examples in the world to know that R=R. Furthermore, we need not look for examples in the world to know that ~(R&~R). A&~A, for example, would amount to the claim that ‘I am a human and I am not a human’. Because A and ~A are ‘mutually exclusive’, we know that any conjunction of them will be false. Hence the contents of premise 2: Its not the case that R and ~R. Premise 2 is a tautology - its as true as saying R=R, its effing obvious.

(Conclusion) Remember in the beginning when we said that we will assume that Pilgrim is correct to be charitable? Well, the introduction of that assumption has led is to a contradiction which allows us to negate that assumption. Thus we have ‘Its not the case that Pilgrim is correct’ or ‘~P’.

Now we have seen that the premises of my argument entail the conclusion in a valid manner and, moreover, we have seen that they are true premises. I hope that this extended effort to communicate the nuances of YOUR OWN arguments has been of aid to you Pilgrim. Hopefully, if you keep stuff like this in mind, you will be able to better deflect accusations such as, “You blog like the emo cream puffs over at dailykos.” It seems to me that someone who has ‘front page privileges’ over here would make an effort to steer clear of vulnerability to such accusations. After all, this isn’t the dailykos is it?

In symbols:

To disprove p: one uses the tautology (p → (R ∧ ¬R)) → ¬p, where R is any proposition and the ∧ symbol is taken to mean “and”. Assuming p, one proves R and ¬R, and concludes from this that p → (R ∧ ¬R). This and the tautology together imply ¬p.

See here for background on the following substitutions:

1) Let ‘p’ equal ‘Pilgrim is correct’.

2) Let ‘R’ equal ‘its good when UW students suppress free speech’.

To disprove p or ‘Pil is correct’: one uses the tautology (p → (R ∧ ¬R)) → ¬p, where R is ‘its good when UW students suppress free speech’ and the ∧ symbol is taken to mean “and”.

Assuming p, one proves R and ¬R, and concludes from this that p → (R ∧ ¬R).

If Pil is correct then its good when UW students suppress free speech and its not good when UW students suppress free speech.

This and the tautology together imply ¬p.

If the assumption that Pil is correct leads to a contradiction, then Pil is not correct.

Pil is not correct.

I saw that Ben Stein thread. It was… disappointing. And so, I just wanted to make a few broad observations.

First, Dougee holds that the bible is 100% literal truth. I would like to note a few things in response to that. First, the bible tells us that the earth is at the center of the universe and doesn’t move. Second, the bible
contradicts itself internally. Anyone who reads it with attention knows this. Of all the various, conflicting accounts of Jesus’s death, which one is literal truth?

Second, science is associated with the commies, the watermelons, and the Maoists. One forgets that we kicked all their asses… with science.

Third, and most problematically, it has been claimed that without religion, there is no morality. I would just like someone to back that up in a substantiative manner. It strikes me that obscuring the truth is immoral. Also, does one need fear of eternal pain in order to be coerced into treating others well? That’s what this amounts to. What’s wrong with being moral just for the sake of doing the right thing? Treating others well? Would you not treat others well if tomorrow it was discovered without a doubt that God does not exist?

Fourth, I would like to quote Spinoza on this one, a man of science and a man of God, one of the brightest people of all time, IMO. The man who wrote an argument for liberal republicanism in 1670, a worn copy of which was in Locke’s library when he penned the political theory that led to the formation of this country:

So long as men act simply from fear they act contrary to their inclinations, taking no thought for the advantages or necessity of their actions, but simply endeavoring to escape punishment or loss of life.

I believe that a triangle, if it could speak, would say that God is eminently triangular, and a circle that the divine nature is eminently circular; and thus would every one ascribe his own attributes to God.

He who has a strong enough why can bear almost any how.

Before the effect one believes in different causes than one does after the effect.

-Friedrich Nietzsche

Alright, we have four cases to make here. Let’s be short and sweet:

1) Liars - Here I have in mind Toot and Bat. Their most recent, blatant fibbing can be viewed here and here. Intentional of not, it was posted. If ‘Liar’ is to strong… we’ll just have to settle for misrepresenters of truth or some other analogue.

2) Pedophile apologists - Well well. Recent events involving more religious fanatics who get their rocks of by marrying and raping girls who are well neigh the legal age to consent… have led Rob to come to their defense. Now we are hearing cries of ’return these children to their families‘.

3) Fascism - Whether or not you knew it or cared, a fascist coalition government was elected four days ago in Italy. While many view it as a sad step backwards and a strike against free society, two of our very own commentators (r108 & chief) are just giddy over the developments. See for yourself. Chief even had the gall to call it a victory of right over wrong.

4) Anti ME Democracy - Within days of authoring a call for ME democracy and the dissolution of the tribal system, BatOne has expressed his contempt for the results of a ME election of great importance that was forced on Palestine by pressure from Bush and Condi. Not only that, he lied in an effort to support Rob (see #1). Rob, the owner of this blog, has called an effort at diplomacy with the newly democratically elected leaders of Palestine ”nauseating”. Meanwhile, Bush and Condi back ‘terrorists’ in Palestine, and meet with them regularly. “Nauseating.”
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Edit: Oh, and Pilgrim ain't that cool either. And he's a fuzz. Rob says fuzz are a bummer, man.