The Moral Perspective

A blog exploring ethics, politics, religion, and secularism.

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New home for The Moral Perspective

Here.

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Major changes to this blog

Readers, 

For nearly two years, I have been updating The Moral Perspective every weekday with articles, news, and essays on issues relating to ethics, politics, and religion.

I created this blog and conducted this work with three goals in mind. First, I wanted to track the progress of my own thinking on ethics, politics, and religion. Second, I wanted to help others to think more often and clearly, and be more informed regarding these issues. Third, I wanted to make sure I was writing on a consistent basis. I am of the mindset that you ought to devote at least two hours each day to writing; that's how you stay a decent writer, and become a better one.

In the past year, several things have changed. Most significantly, I have (happily) added several new job responsibilities, which require me to write, travel, and speak at public engagements more than I previously did. Unfortunately, this -- combined with trying to operate this blog as I have -- has cut into the amount of time I spent reading. This is not something I have been comfortable with. 

I have also slowly but surely developed a stronger interest in pursuing a longer-term project: writing a book on secularism and morality.

Therefore, in order to maintain my own happiness, The Moral Perspective is going to change. No longer will I update this blog every day. I might not even update it every week. In fact, for the near future I am most likely going to take a break from blogging here completely.

That doesn't mean I'm killing this blog for good. It just means a change from the past. I'll write when I want to write; I'll post when I want to post. After some time off, I might even change my mind and come back and change the nature of this blog. Perhaps I'll use it to launch my book. Who knows. But, for now, this change is necessary. 

I would like to give my most sincere thanks to everyone who has read this blog. I hope to see you again soon. 

Ethically yours,

Michael De Dora

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Ronald Dworkin, theorist on relationship between morality and law, dead at 81

Matt Schudel of The Washington Post has written a great obituary on a man who has influenced the thinking of a countless number of people on this issue (including me):

Ronald Dworkin, an innovative legal thinker who developed a novel interpretation of the moral underpinnings of the Constitution and who became respected in liberal circles for his writings on law, politics and hotly debated public issues, died Feb. 14 in London. He was 81 and had leukemia.

New York University, where Mr. Dworkin was a law professor, announced his death.

Mr. Dworkin, who also taught for many years at the University of Oxford in Britain, went against a century of legal thinking — including the theories of his two most important mentors — to develop a new concept of jurisprudence based on society’s widely shared notions of morality.

His idea of “law as integrity” held that jurists should interpret legal cases through a consistent set of moral principles. In other words, law and morality were inextricably linked, which was a subtle twist in legal thinking. Mr. Dworkin’s theories gained a wide following, particularly among social liberals.

“For many, Dworkin was something of a legal prophet who tried to invest legal interpretation with a sense of moral reasoning,” Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University, said Thursday. “His writings offered a new and transcendent view of the law — a view that will influence legal reasoning for generations.”

You can read the whole thing here.

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Why we should be more open to tenderness

Looking for some Valentine's Day reading? Philosopher Gordon Marino has penned an informative and thought-provoking essay for the New York Times in which he argues that humans should be more open to feeling what he calls "tenderness." 

Almost by definition, every culture cultivates certain qualities and feelings. In the United States, we lionize resolve, determination and resiliency. Although we have a strong nostalgic streak, we are a hard people who no less than the ancient Romans entertain ourselves with a steady diet of throat slitting and torture images that can only work to pound the tenderness out of us. Of course our TV tough guys always shroud their violence in some mollifying narratives that render their acts of slaughter righteous and emotionally satisfying. But for the most part in our culture, we leave the feeling of tenderness in a small pot in the mudroom. To feel tenderly is to feel vulnerable and vulnerability is not a favorite American dish.

When it comes to the humanizing sentiments, we Americans place placards in public schools and in general harp on the significance of respect. While I have all the respect in the world for respect, it is a chilly sort of feeling — if it is a feeling at all. Respect is a fence that prevents us from harming one another. But strengthening the ties that bind and make us human requires something more pliant, more intimate. We need to be visited by that weird and neglected angel that is the feeling of tenderness.

Indeed. Happy Valentine's Day.

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Shermer v. Pigliucci, round three

Recently author and prominent skeptic Michael Shermer contributed to Edge.org’s collection of essays on the question, “What Should We Be Worried About?”

Shermer’s answer: “The Is-Ought Fallacy of Science and Morality.” 

That article prompted philosopher of science (and friend) Massimo Pigliucci to respond with an essay of his own, in which he explains why Shermer’s position on the relationship between science and morality is unsupportable. 

And now Pigliucci's response has prompted Shermer to pen a response of his own in which he seeks to "restate (his) argument for a scientific foundation of moral principles with new definitions and examples." For example: 

But what is the foundation for why we should care about the feelings of potentially affected moral agents? To answer this question I turn to science and evolutionary theory.

Given that moral principles must be founded on something natural instead of supernatural, and that science is the best tool we have devised for understanding the natural world, applying evolutionary theory to not only the origins of morality but to its ultimate foundation as well, it seems to me that the individual is a reasonable starting point because, (1) the individual is the primary target of natural selection in evolution, and (2) it is the individual who is most effected by moral and immoral acts. Thus:

The survival and flourishing of the individual is the foundation for establishing values and morals, and so determining the conditions by which humans best survive and flourish ought to be the goal of a science of morality.

Here we find a smooth transition from the way natureis(the individual struggling to survive and flourish in an evolutionary context) to the way itought to be(given a choice, it is more moral to act in a way that enhances the survival and flourishing of other individuals).

I am told Pigliucci will have another response up next week. Round four, here we come.

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Hitler vs. Stalin: who was worse?

This past weekend I decided to finally look through all of the articles I had saved over the past couple years on my chosen iPad reading application, Pocket. One particularly interesting find was a January 2011 essay in The New York Review of Books, in which Timothy Snyder, a professor of history at Yale University, compares the murderous regimes of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin. Here are the first three paragraphs:

As we recall the Red Army’s liberation of Auschwitz on January 27, 1945, sixty-six years ago today, we might ask: who was worse, Hitler or Stalin?

In the second half of the twentieth century, Americans were taught to see both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union as the greatest of evils. Hitler was worse, because his regime propagated the unprecedented horror of the Holocaust, the attempt to eradicate an entire people on racial grounds. Yet Stalin was also worse, because his regime killed far, far more people—tens of millions, it was often claimed—in the endless wastes of the Gulag. For decades, and even today, this confidence about the difference between the two regimes—quality versus quantity—has set the ground rules for the politics of memory. Even historians of the Holocaust generally take for granted that Stalin killed more people than Hitler, thus placing themselves under greater pressure to stress the special character of the Holocaust, since this is what made the Nazi regime worse than the Stalinist one.

Discussion of numbers can blunt our sense of the horrific personal character of each killing and the irreducible tragedy of each death. As anyone who has lost a loved one knows, the difference between zero and one is an infinity. Though we have a harder time grasping this, the same is true for the difference between, say, 780,862 and 780,863—which happens to be the best estimate of the number of people murdered at Treblinka. Large numbers matter because they are an accumulation of small numbers: that is, precious individual lives. Today, after two decades of access to Eastern European archives, and thanks to the work of German, Russian, Israeli, and other scholars, we can resolve the question of numbers. The total number of noncombatants killed by the Germans—about 11 million—is roughly what we had thought. The total number of civilians killed by the Soviets, however, is considerably less than we had believed. We know now that the Germans killed more people than the Soviets did. That said, the issue of quality is more complex than was once thought. Mass murder in the Soviet Union sometimes involved motivations, especially national and ethnic ones, that can be disconcertingly close to Nazi motivations.

You can keep reading here.

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Pope Benedict XVI is stepping down

Breaking news from the New York Times:

Citing advanced years and infirmity, Pope Benedict XVI stunned the Roman Catholic world on Monday by saying he would resign on Feb. 28 after less than eight years in office, the first pope to do so in six centuries.

After examining his conscience “before God,” he said in a statement that reverberated around the world on the Internet and on social media, “I have come to the certainty that my strengths, due to an advanced age, are no longer suited to an adequate exercise” of his position as head of the world’s one billion Roman Catholics.

Given that I believe this Pope has acted both unethically and illegally, in the process causing a great deal of harm to many people, I should be glad he is retiring as head of the Catholic Church. And, on balance, I am. 

Yet I am not as overjoyed about the news as many of my secularist friends appear to be. During his tenure, Pope Benedict XVI arguably did more harm to the undeserved positive image of the Catholic Church than all of the prominent atheists combined. In the coming weeks, I'm sure we will hear in the coming weeks that the Church is bound to pick someone who is younger and has broader appeal. But Pope Benedict XVI was extraordinarily successful at pushing people away from the Catholic Church mainly because he was an accurate representative of the Church's current role in the modern world. The last thing the world needs right now is a candy-coated Pope who will make people forget that the Church spends most of its time and energy not making the world a better place, but advancing Middle Age theology.

Of course, one could argue a new Pope might move the Church forward on a range of issues. But remember: this is an institution which still opposes modern realities like birth control and sex before marriage and abortion -- even in cases of rape, incest, and the mother's life being at risk. For good measure, it also opposes equal rights for gays and lesbians, and secular government. So forgive me if I don't see much reason to hold out much hope that radical, positive change is coming anytime soon. 

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White House pushed on drone warfare

Earlier this week, NBC News leaked a confidential memo from the U.S. Justice Department which concluded that the White House can order the killing of American citizens if they are considered to be "senior operational leaders" of the terrorist organization Al Qaeda or an associated force -- even if there is no information which links the supposed leader to an active plot against America. 

News of the 16-page memo set off a heated national debate regarding governmental secrecy, the limits on executive power, and the merits of drone warfare.

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney tried to calm the debate by stating: 

"These strikes are legal, they are ethical and they are wise," Carney said. The government takes "great care" when deciding where and whom to strike, he added.

Yet both public and political pressure on the White House has only increased, forcing the administration to announce it will give Congress its memos backing drone warfare. 

Since this debate is now bound to continue, it's worth keeping in mind -- especially in light of Carney's comment that the strikes are both legal and ethical -- that the question of whether drone strikes are legal is entirely separate from the question of whether they are ethical. As Kevin Jon Heller wrote last month:

I still want to resist an idea that seems to underly all of the responses to my post: namely, that we cannot (or at least should not) consider collateral deaths caused by drone strikes to be immoral as long as those strikes were legal.  I strongly disagree with that idea; I think it is possible — indeed important — to insist that the drone program is profoundly immoral even if no individual drone strike ever violates the laws of war.  There is a vast philosophic literature on the difference between legality and morality, which I do not have time to discuss here. … Suffice it to say that very few people are such thoroughgoing positivists that they believe legality and morality are coterminous, even if they disagree dramatically with each other concerning the particulars of the difference. Two obvious examples: “pro-lifers” don’t consider abortion to be moral even though it is legal, while the pro-euthanasia crowd doesn’t consider assisted suicide to be immoral simply because it is almost always illegal.  Both groups simply reject the morality of the laws in question.

 Let's hope -- or, rather, make sure -- this gets due coverage in the coming months. 

You can read about my views on this subject here

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The Catholic Church has lost moral credibility

That's what Frank Bruni argues in this fantastic new op-ed in the New York Times. Bruni cites in support of his thinking several devastating examples of the Church's hypocrisy on moral issues, including the continuing sexual abuse scandals and the recent case of a Catholic health care outfit arguing, contrary to Catholic doctrine, that a fetus is not a person in order to evade a medical malpractice lawsuit: 

... the church has simultaneously reserved the right to behave just like any other institution, leaning on legal technicalities, smearing victims and demonstrating no more compassion than a tobacco company might show. “In the name of Jesus,” Anderson told me, “they do things that Jesus would abhor.”

They do things erratically, that’s for sure. From my extensive reporting on the sexual abuse crisis in the 1990s, I don’t recall any great push to excommunicate priests who forced themselves on kids. But when Sister Margaret McBride, in 2009, was part of a Phoenix hospital’s decision to abort an 11-week-old fetus inside a 27-year-old woman whose life was gravely endangered by the pregnancy, she indeed suffered excommunication (later reversed).

So a fetus matters more than the ravaged psyche of a raped adolescent? And Sister McBride deserved harsher rebuke than a rapist? It’s hard not to conclude that a church run by men shows them more mercy than it does women (or, for that matter, children).

And it’s hard to keep track: just when is the church of this world, and when not? It inserts itself into political debates, trying to shape legislation to its ethics. But it also demands exemption: from taxes, from accountability, from health care directives.

And in the Colorado wrongful-death case, the hospital suddenly adopted the courts’, not the church’s, definition of life. Only now, with that argument already made, is Catholic Health Initiatives saying it made a moral error.

A district court rejected Jeremy Stodghill’s wrongful-death claims. He and his lawyer, Beth Krulewitch, have appealed to the state’s Supreme Court.

One final verdict is already in. On the charge of self-serving hypocrisy, the church is guilty.

Of course, one could argue that the Church lost its moral credibility, well, centuries ago. Still, it's nice to see the case being made in the pages of a prominent newspaper such as the New York Times. Remember, there are many people who consider themselves Catholics yet who are not aware what the Church is doing in their names. Articles like the one above can help to make some of these people aware of the Church's actions, and push them to either leave the Church, or else demand reform. Or so we can hope ...

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A beautiful defense of academic freedom

In case you were not already aware, over the past couple weeks my alma mater Brooklyn College has been at the center of a controversial debate regarding academic freedom. In brief, the school's Political Science Department announced that it would be sponsoring, along with several campus groups, an event on February 7 featuring the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which aims to stop what it considers the Israeli oppression of Palestinians. 

The event drew fiery criticism from a range of prominent people. Lawyer Alan Dershowitz claimed the school was engaging in anti-Israel propaganda, and urged for the inclusion of pro-Israel voices, or else cancellation of the event. The New York Daily News agreed with Dershowitz. New York State Assemblyman Dov Hikind called for Brooklyn College President Karen Gould to step down. And perhaps worst of all, state and local lawmakers, such as the hypocritical City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, threatened the school's funding over the event. 

In response this criticism, Gould strongly defended the school's right to hold events which include challenging and controversial points of view, noting that sponsorship does not equal endorsement. Brooklyn College professors, such as Corey Robin and Samir Chopra, also came to the defense of their school's right to academic freedom. And, more broadly, media outlets such as the New York Times and writers such as Glenn Greenwald articulated why attacks on the school were wrong-headed.

But today, perhaps the most prominent figure expected to comment on this story finally has: New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. And his remarks are, at least in my opinion, a beautiful defense of academic freedom:

Well look, I couldn’t disagree more violently with BDS as they call it, Boycott Divestment and Sanctions. As you know I’m a big supporter of Israel, as big a one as you can find in the city, but I could also not agree more strongly with an academic department’s right to sponsor a forum on any topic that they choose. I mean, if you want to go to a university where the government decides what kind of subjects are fit for discussion, I suggest you apply to a school in North Korea.

The last thing that we need is for members of our City Council or State Legislature to be micromanaging the kinds of programs that our public universities run, and base funding decisions on the political views of professors. I can’t think of anything that would be more destructive to a university and its students.

You know, the freedom to discuss ideas, including ideas that people find repugnant, lies really at the heart of the university system, and take that away and higher education in this country would certainly die.

As Brian Leiter asks, "Will the other miscreants from Dershowitz to City Councilman Fidler now recant? They've been whacked by both the Mayor and the New York Times, as well as the rest of the civilized world."

We shall see. You can follow Corey Robin for updates.

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Catholic hospital reverses itself, says it was morally wrong to argue fetus is not a person

On Jan. 24, I posted about two news articles which revealed that, in an effort to evade a malpractice lawsuit, lawyers representing a group which owns a Catholic hospital in Colorado have been arguing, contrary to Catholic doctrine, that a fetus is not a person. 

Today, weeks after the story attracted widespread attention and criticism, it appears that the group, Catholic Health Initiatives (CHI), has changed its tune:

"In the discussion with the Church leaders, CHI representatives acknowledged that it was morally wrong for attorneys representing St. Thomas More Hospital to cite the state's Wrongful Death Act in defense of this lawsuit. That law does not consider fetuses to be persons, which directly contradicts the moral teachings of the Church."

It will be interesting to see if and how this announcement will change the outcome of the case. I'll keep you updated as everything moves forward. 

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Why atheists should care about poverty

Walker Bristol, a political philosophy student at Tufts University, wrote recently on the Huffington Post that atheists -- especially those who identify as New Atheists -- should focus less on buying billboard space and more on combating social inequality:

Social justice is achieved through an alliance between sister causes. Not only must the atheist movement begin to openly care about and fight against class inequality and poverty, but they must do so by breaking down the divides between themselves and religious communities that share the same goal. The Foundation Beyond Belief, in facilitating philanthropic giving for humanist organizations, already sponsors a Poverty and Health charity each quarter, a beneficiary category which almost always receives the most donations of each of those supported by FBB. Local humanist organizations such as Atheists Helping the Homeless in Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas have also taken a lead in fighting economic inequality on the local level. But our national leaders continue to pour funds into self-righteous billboard campaigns rather than improving quality of life for those whose economic turmoil leaves them without access to the education that might improve their critical thought. And as long as that's the case, the rest of society will continue to look on atheists with scorn, and potentially fruitful relationships with the religious will be shattered.

Thought it should be a compelling argument on its own, Bristol doesn't simply posit that many people are suffering from the consequences of social inequality and that atheists should try to help them (remember, atheists believe that humans, not God, are ultimately responsible for improving the world). Bristol also proposes that doing social justice work would help to positively change the image of atheists, who are widely considered to be cold-hearted people.

So, just in case you're the kind of atheist who doesn't care about social inequality, perhaps you're the kind who cares about changing what people think of atheists. Either way, now have you have a good reason to perform social justice work.

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Should some people matter more than others?

In the past couple decades, prominent philosophers and social critics such as Peter Singer and Jeremy Rifkin have forcefully argued that humans must work to discard traditionally narrow, tribal thinking and extend their moral concerns to humans beyond just family, friends, and neighbors (as well as non-human animals). 

For example, Singer writes in his book "The Expanding Circle":

“If I have seen ... that from an ethical point of view I am just one person among the many in my society, and my interests are no more important, from the point of view of the whole, than the similar interests of others within my society, I am ready to see that, from a still larger point of view, my society is just one among other societies, and the interests of members of my society are no more important, from that larger perspective, than the similar interests of members of other societies.”

But author Stephan Asma says there are serious problems with this position. As he wrote recently on the philosophy blog of the New York Times:

All this sounds nice at first — indeed, I would like it to be true — but let me throw a little cold water on the idea. ... All people are not equally entitled to my time, affection, resources or moral duties — and only conjectural assumption can make them appear so. (For many of us, family members are more entitled than friends, and friends more entitled than acquaintances, and acquaintances more than strangers, and so on.) It seems dubious to say that we should transcend tribe and be utilitarian because all people are equal, when the equal status of strangers and kin is an unproven and counterintuitive assumption.

Singer’s abstract “ethical point of view” is not wrong so much as irrelevant. Our actual lives are punctuated by moral gravity, which makes some people (kith and kin) much more central and forceful in our daily orbit of values. (Gravity is actually an apt metaphor. Some people in our lives take on great “affection mass” and bend our continuum of values into a solar-system of biases.  Family members usually have more moral gravity —what Robert Nozick calls “ethical pull.” 

You might have noticed that Asma is simply appealing to the fact that humans do value certain people over others. The real question is, "should we?" Asma answers with a firm "yes," and defends what he refers to as "favoritism" on the grounds that it is beneficial to individual human flourishing. 

... my case for small-circle care dovetails nicely with the commonly agreed upon crucial ingredient in human happiness, namely, strong social bonds. A recent Niagara of longitudinal happiness studies all confirm that the most important element in a good life (eudaimonia) is close family and friendship ties — ties that bind. These are not digital Facebook friends nor are they needy faraway strangers, but robust proximate relationships that you can count on one or two hands — and these bonds are created and sustained by the very finite resource of emotional care that I’ve outlined.

Here's the thing: I accept the notion that close relationships are integral to leading a good life -- but that does not mean I reject the arguments put forth by Singer and Rifkin.

As I see it, we should readily accept that humans are bound to practice some form of "favoritism," and cherish our relationships with those who we deem as favorites. However, I believe we should also recognize that while a couple of people might provide us with great meaning and happiness, there exist many people outside of one's favorites who are capable of experiencing happiness and suffering, and these people are deserving of our moral concern. Of course, the question "How much moral concern should we give to such people?" is a very tough one to answer, but for the moment, I think it's fair to say "more than they have received throughout history." 

More simply put: there is no reason why a person cannot have his or her favorite people, and also feel significant amounts of empathy for, and do their part to help, starving and disease-ridden children around the world.

After all, isn't another "important element in a good life" basic health? 

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The secret to happiness

The following quote is taken from Bertrand Russell's book The Conquest of Happiness (1930), a fabulous work in which Russell mixes philosophical analysis and practical thinking in order to help people cure unhappiness and find happiness. 

"The secret to happiness is this: let your interests be as wide as possible, and let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile."

I know many people will reply, "easier said than done." However, I would urge you to at least try keeping this thought in your mind as you go forth each day into the world, and see if it at all changes your behavior. You might be surprised by your findings. 

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A more basic sense of justice

I've just found on CNN.com an article exploring in more depth the research I mentioned in yesterday's post, which involves primatologist Frans de Waal and other scientists exploring through the study of chimpanzees whether humans are uniquely fair:

You might think of "morality" as special for humans, but there are elements of it that are found in the animal kingdom, says de Waal -- namely, fairness and reciprocity. His latest study, published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests that chimpanzees may show some of the same sensibility about fairness that humans do.

The popular belief that the natural world is based on competition is a simplification, de Waal says. The strength of one's immune system, and the ability to find food, are also crucial. And many animals survive by cooperating.

"The struggle for life is not necessarily literally a struggle," he said. "Humans are a highly cooperative species, and we can see in our close relatives where that comes from." ...

De Waal isn't sure that his monkeys have what a philosopher would call a "concept of justice" in an intellectual sense. But the emotional reactions researchers have observed indicates that there is, at a more basic level, a sense of justice among them.

The article also includes some pushback from other scientists: 

So, does this mean that chimpanzees show the same sense of fairness as humans? Keith Jensen of the University of Manchester, who has conducted similar experiments in the past, isn't so sure. His results did not show that chimpanzees have a sense of fairness.

Jensen is concerned about the results of this new study because it's not clear that the responders knew that they could reject offers. None of the participants, human or chimp, ever rejected the offers of their partners.

"The fact that responders never rejected nonzero offers suggests that they were not sensitive to unfairness but were only motivated by getting food for themselves, regardless of the intentions of the proposers or the consequences for them," he said in an e-mail.

You can read the full article here. 

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Study sheds light on origins of human fairness

In an interesting follow to last week's post on the question of whether humans are uniquely violent (the answer: probably not), I have just come across a new study which explores the question of whether humans are uniquely fair (the answer: absolutely not).

Here is the abstract:

Is the sense of fairness uniquely human? Human reactions to reward division are often studied by means of the ultimatum game, in which both partners need to agree on a distribution for both to receive rewards. Humans typically offer generous portions of the reward to their partner, a tendency our close primate relatives have thus far failed to show in experiments. Here we tested chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and human children on a modified ultimatum game. One individual chose between two tokens that, with their partner’s cooperation, could be exchanged for rewards. One token offered equal rewards to both players, whereas the other token favored the chooser. Both apes and children responded like humans typically do. If their partner’s cooperation was required, they split the rewards equally. However, with passive partners—a situation akin to the so-called dictator game—they preferred the selfish option. Thus, humans and chimpanzees show similar preferences regarding reward division, suggesting a long evolutionary history to the human sense of fairness.

You read some news coverage of the study here.

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Meet ... Michael De Dora

Recently I sat down for a video interview with Christopher Brown for his podcast, Meet the Skeptics. The podcast serves to introduces the skeptic community (i.e., people interested in scientific inquiry, especially as applied to pseudoscientific and paranormal beliefs and issues) to its public leaders. I qualify as director of public policy for the Center for Inquiry, an organization that advances reason, science, and secular values, and which has an affiliate called the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry.

In our discussion, Chris and I spoke about a range of things, including my deconversion from Catholicism, my time at FOX News (no, really), and my current work advocating for rationalism on Capitol Hill and at the United Nations.

You can listen or watch the interview here.