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Suppose I concede to Prinz that reason cannot settle differences in moral values and sentiments. Difference of opinion doesn’t mean that there isn’t a true or rational answer. In fact, there are many reasons why our cognition, emotional reactions or previous values could be wrong or irrational — and why people would not pick up on their deficiencies. In his article, Prinz uses the case of sociopaths, who simply lack certain cognitive abilities. There are many reasons other than sociopathy why human beings can get things wrong, morally speaking, often and badly. It could be that people are unable to adopt a more objective morality because of their circumstances — from brain deficiencies to lack of access to relevant information. But, again, none of this amounts to an argument against the existence of objective morality.

As it turns out, Prinz’s conception of objective morality does not quite reflect the thinking of most people who believe in objective morality. He writes that: “Objectivism holds that there is one true morality binding upon all of us.” This is a particular strand of moral realism, but there are many. For instance, one can judge some moral precepts as better than others, yet remain open to the fact that there are probably many different ways to establish a good society. This is a pluralistic conception of objective morality which doesn’t assume one absolute moral truth. For all that has been said, Sam Harris’ idea of a moral landscape does help illustrate this concept. Thinking in terms of better and worse morality gets us out of relativism and into an objectivist approach. The important thing to note is that one need not go all the way to absolute objectivity to work toward a rational, non-arbitrary morality.

even Prinz admits that “Relativism does not entail that we should tolerate murderous tyranny. When someone threatens us or our way of life, we are strongly motivated to protect ourselves.” That is, there are such things as better and worse values: the worse ones kill us, the better ones don’t. This is a very broad criterion, but it is an objective standard. Prinz is arguing for a tighter moral relativism – a sort of stripped down objective morality that is constricted by nature, experience, and our (modest) reasoning abilities.

I proposed at the discussion that a more objective morality could be had with the help of a robust public discourse on the issues at hand. Prinz does not necessarily disagree. He wrote that “Many people have overlapping moral values, and one can settle debates by appeal to moral common ground.” But Prinz pointed out a couple of limitations on public discourse. For example, the agreements we reach on “moral common ground” are often exclusive of some, and abstract in content. Consider the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, a seemingly good example of global moral agreement. Yet, it was ratified by a small sample of 48 countries, and it is based on suspiciously Western sounding language. Everyone has a right to education and health care, but — Prinz pointed out during the discussion — what level of education and health care? Still, the U.N. declaration was passed 48-0 with just 8 abstentions (Belarus, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Ukraine, USSR, Yugoslavia, South Africa and Saudi Arabia). It includes 30 articles of ethical standards agreed upon by 48 countries around the world. Such a document does give us more reason to think that public discourse can lead to significant agreement upon values.

Reason might not be able to arrive at moral truths, but it can push us to test and question the rationality of our values — a crucial part in the process that leads to the adoption of new, or modified values. The only way to reduce disputes about morality is to try to get people on the same page about their moral goals. Given the above, this will not be easy, and perhaps we shouldn’t be too optimistic in our ability to employ reason to figure things out. But reason is still the best, and even only, tool we can wield, and while it might not provide us with a truly objective morality, it’s enough to save us from complete moral relativism.

One of the interesting things Phil Plait did during his challenging TAM8 speech was to ask the 1300 skeptics in the room this question: How many of you here today used to believe in something — used to, past tense — whether it was flying saucers, psychic powers, religion, anything like that? You can raise your hand if you want to.

most pseudoscientific beliefs are not stupid. They’re just wrong.

the top reasons people believe weird things are not only understandable, but identical to the reasons most skeptics believe things: they are persuaded by personal experiences (or by the experiences of a loved one); or, they are persuaded by the sources they have consulted.

reasoning from visceral experience is a recipe for false belief.

I’m not suggesting that personal experience is an adequate basis for accepting paranormal claims (it isn’t) or that these claims are true (so far as science can tell, they’re not). I’m saying that, given their information and tools, many paranormalists have understandable reasons for belief.

However we label ourselves or others, we come up against the fact that people are complicated. Generalizations are doomed to inadequacy. But, I will suggest that the differences between skeptics and paranormal believers have less to do with innate credulity, and more to do with training and resources.

In determining how reasonable a persons actions are we have to look at what a normal person would do in the same situation.

The idea that women have rape fantasies have been perpetuated by men’s magazines, and pornographic movies and books. A certain segment of the male population is going to believe that such as a fantasy exists in the minds women. And sadly, though rare, it does exist in the minds of a few women, as hard as that is for most of us to accept. This fantasy obviously appeals to many men or they would not be watching these movies or buying these magazines, even normal men who would never commit a rape may harbor such fantasies. So, while the idea makes most people’s skin crawl it was “reasonable” for McDowell to believe that a woman could harbor this fantasy.

But, would a reasonable man act upon it? Everything within most of us shouts no. But, the truth is there are many couples who in the privacy of their homes act out fantasies include bondage fantasies. So, is it less reasonable that a man who has such a fantasy would, if he could find a woman that shares that fantasy act on it? The truth is that his actions may well be considered reasonable in the face of the facts as we now know them.

There are those who claim this man was a rapist ready to happen, and while I don’t necessarily disagree I also believe we will never know. There are probably thousands if not millions of people who have sexual fantasies both big and small that they have never acted upon. This man could have been one of them. On the other hand his enthusiasm in acting out this fantasy may well be an indication that he would have at sometime committed such an act on a woman he knew to be unwilling.

What is most disturbing is Stripe’s actions. By setting up the rape fantasy the way he did, by communicating with McDowell while pretending to be the victim, he set up a situation where the victim herself could not stop what was happening. No matter how many times she told McDowell to stop, how tearfully she begged, he was primed by Stripe to believe that this was all part of the playacting.

Let’s not forget Craig’s list. Until we make laws making it illegal for such ads as these to get posted there are going to be sites such as these who will make their money uncaring who gets hurt in the process. In fact, the more notoriety this site seems to get, the more people seem to want to use it.

Just on the rape fantasy for women part, a number of studies show it to be a fairly significant fantasy that about 1/3 to 2/3 of women have. Nothing can condone what he did, but it's easy to believe he may have thought she was okay with it. There are many people who play out bondage and torture fantasy and we can't judge them.

Well, it doesnt look like the Judge bought McDowell's story. He was sentenced to 60 years to life in prison. The same sentence that Stipe received.

It does say something of McDowell that he voluntarily changed his plea from "not guilty" to "guilty." From reviewing many reports on this case, it appears that, once he realized what really happened, he wanted to make this as easy on the woman as possible. His remorse at what he accidentally did must be mixed with the horror he knows he unwittingly created.Perhaps the real case yet to come is McDowell's teaming up with the woman in a civil case against Stipe, the real criminal.

Ruse’s somewhat surprising yet intriguing claim is that “before Charles Darwin, evolution was an epiphenomenon of the ideology of [social] progress, a pseudoscience and seen as such. Liked by some for that very reason, despised by others for that very reason.”

Indeed, the link between evolution and the idea of human social-cultural progress was very strong before Darwin, and was one of the main things Darwin got rid of.

The encyclopedist Denis Diderot was typical in this respect: “The Tahitian is at a primary stage in the development of the world, the European is at its old age. The interval separating us is greater than that between the new-born child and the decrepit old man.” Similar nonsensical views can be found in Lamarck, Erasmus, and Chambers, the anonymous author of The Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, usually considered the last protoscientific book on evolution to precede the Origin.

On the other side of the divide were social conservatives like the great anatomist George Cuvier, who rejected the idea of evolution — according to Ruse — not as much on scientific grounds as on political and ideological ones. Indeed, books like Erasmus’ Zoonomia and Chambers’ Vestiges were simply not much better than pseudoscientific treatises on, say, alchemy before the advent of modern chemistry.

people were well aware of this sorry situation, so much so that astronomer John Herschel referred to the question of the history of life as “the mystery of mysteries,” a phrase consciously adopted by Darwin in the Origin. Darwin set out to solve that mystery under the influence of three great thinkers: Newton, the above mentioned Herschel, and the philosopher William Whewell (whom Darwin knew and assiduously frequented in his youth)

Darwin was a graduate of the University of Cambridge, which had also been Newton’s home. Chuck got drilled early on during his Cambridge education with the idea that good science is about finding mechanisms (vera causa), something like the idea of gravitational attraction underpinning Newtonian mechanics. He reflected that all the talk of evolution up to then — including his grandfather’s — was empty, without a mechanism that could turn the idea into a scientific research program.

The second important influence was Herschel’s Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy, published in 1831 and read by Darwin shortly thereafter, in which Herschel sets out to give his own take on what today we would call the demarcation problem, i.e. what methodology is distinctive of good science. One of Herschel’s points was to stress the usefulness of analogical reasoning

Finally, and perhaps most crucially, Darwin also read (twice!) Whewell’s History of the Inductive Sciences, which appeared in 1837. In it, Whewell sets out his notion that good scientific inductive reasoning proceeds by a consilience of ideas, a situation in which multiple independent lines of evidence point to the same conclusion.

the first part of the Origin, where Darwin introduces the concept of natural selection by way of analogy with artificial selection can be read as the result of Herschel’s influence (natural selection is the vera causa of evolution)

the second part of the book, constituting Darwin's famous “long argument,” applies Whewell’s method of consilience by bringing in evidence from a number of disparate fields, from embryology to paleontology to biogeography.

What, then, happened to the strict coupling of the ideas of social and biological progress that had preceded Darwin? While he still believed in the former, the latter was no longer an integral part of evolution, because natural selection makes things “better” only in a relative fashion. There is no meaningful sense in which, say, a large brain is better than very fast legs or sharp claws, as long as you still manage to have dinner and avoid being dinner by the end of the day (or, more precisely, by the time you reproduce).

Ruse’s claim that evolution transitioned not from protoscience to science, but from pseudoscience, makes sense to me given the historical and philosophical developments. It wasn’t the first time either. Just think about the already mentioned shift from alchemy to chemistry

Of course, the distinction between pseudoscience and protoscience is itself fuzzy, but we do have what I think are clear examples of the latter that cannot reasonably be confused with the former, SETI for one, and arguably Ptolemaic astronomy. We also have pretty obvious instances of pseudoscience (the usual suspects: astrology, ufology, etc.), so the distinction — as long as it is not stretched beyond usefulness — is interesting and defensible.

It is amusing to speculate which, if any, of the modern pseudosciences (cryonics, singularitarianism) might turn out to be able to transition in one form or another to actual sciences. To do so, they may need to find their philosophically and scientifically savvy Darwin, and a likely bet — if history teaches us anything — is that, should they succeed in this transition, their mature form will look as different from the original as chemistry and alchemy. Or as Darwinism and pre-Darwinian evolutionism.

Darwin called the Origin "one long argument," but I really do think that recognizing that the book contains (at least) two arguments could help to dispel that whole "just a theory" canard. The first half of the book is devoted to demonstrating that natural selection is the true cause of evolution; vera causa arguments require proof that the cause's effect be demonstrated as fact, so the second half of the book is devoted to a demonstration that evolution has really happened. In other words, evolution is a demonstrable fact and natural selection is the theory that explains that fact, just as the motion of the planets is a fact and gravity is a theory that explains it.

Cryogenics is the study of the production of low temperatures and the behavior of materials at those temperatures. It is a legitimate branch of physics and has been for a long time. I think you meant 'cryonics'.

The Singularity means different things to different people. It is uncharitable to dismiss all "singularitarians" by debunking Kurzweil. He is low hanging fruit. Reach for something higher.

finding counterexamples can, in general, weaken our confidence in our own arguments. Forms of reasoning that are good for solving logic puzzles but bad for winning arguments lost out, over the course of evolution, to those that help us be persuasive but cause us to struggle with abstract syllogisms. Interestingly, syllogisms are easier to evaluate in the form “No flying things are penguins; all penguins are birds; so some birds are not fliers.” That’s because we are more likely to argue about animals than A, B, and C.

The sort of faulty thinking called motivated reasoning also impedes our search for truth but advances arguments. For instance, we tend to look harder for flaws in a study when we don’t agree with its conclusions and are more critical of evidence that undermines our point of view.

As a teacher at the City University of New York, I am constantly aware of the possibility that my students might cheat on their tests. I do take some elementary precautionary steps

Still, my job is not that of the policeman. My students are adults who theoretically are there to learn. If they don’t value that learning and prefer to pay someone else to fake it, so be it, ultimately it is they who lose in the most fundamental sense of the term. Just like drug addicts, to return to my earlier metaphor. And just as in that other case, it is enablers like Mr. Dante who simply can’t duck the moral blame.

n open letter to the president of SUNY-Albany, penned by molecular biologist Gregory Petsko. The SUNY-Albany president has recently announced the closing — for budgetary reasons — of the departments of French, Italian, Classics, Russian and Theater Arts at his university.

Petsko begins by taking on one of the alleged reasons why SUNY-Albany is slashing the humanities: low enrollment. He correctly points out that the problem can be solved overnight at the stroke of a pen: stop abdicating your responsibilities as educators and actually put constraints on what your students have to take in order to graduate. Make courses in English literature, foreign languages, philosophy and critical thinking, the arts and so on, mandatory or one of a small number of options that the students must consider in order to graduate.

But, you might say, that’s cheating the market! Students clearly don’t want to take those courses, and a business should cater to its customers. That type of reasoning is among the most pernicious and idiotic I’ve ever heard. Students are not clients (if anything, their parents, who usually pay the tuition, are), they are not shopping for a new bag or pair of shoes. They do not know what is best for them educationally, that’s why they go to college to begin with. If you are not convinced about how absurd the students-as-clients argument is, consider an analogy: does anyone with functioning brain cells argue that since patients in a hospital pay a bill, they should be dictating how the brain surgeon operates? I didn’t think so.

Petsko then tackles the second lame excuse given by the president of SUNY-Albany (and common among the upper administration of plenty of public universities): I can’t do otherwise because of the legislature’s draconian cuts. Except that university budgets are simply too complicated for there not to be any other option. I know this first hand, I’m on a special committee at my own college looking at how to creatively deal with budget cuts handed down to us from the very same (admittedly small minded and dysfunctional) New York state legislature that has prompted SUNY-Albany’s action. As Petsko points out, the president there didn’t even think of involving the faculty and staff in a broad discussion of how to deal with the crisis, he simply announced the cuts on a Friday afternoon and then ran for cover. An example of very poor leadership to say the least, and downright hypocrisy considering all the talk that the same administrator has been dishing out about the university “community.”

Finally, there is the argument that the humanities don’t pay for their own way, unlike (some of) the sciences (some of the time). That is indubitably true, but irrelevant. Universities are not businesses, they are places of higher learning. Yes, of course they need to deal with budgets, fund raising and all the rest. But the financial and administrative side has one goal and one goal only: to provide the best education to the students who attend that university.

That education simply must include the sciences, philosophy, literature, and the arts, as well as more technical or pragmatic offerings such as medicine, business and law. Why? Because that’s the kind of liberal education that makes for an informed and intelligent citizenry, without which our democracy is but empty talk, and our lives nothing but slavery to the marketplace.

Maybe this is not how education works in the US. I thought that general (or compulsory) education (ie. up to high school) is designed to make sure that citizens in a democratic country can perform their civil duties. A balanced and well-rounded education, which includes a healthy mixture of science and humanities, is indeed very important for this purpose. However, college-level education is for personal growth and therefore the person must have a large say about what kind of classes he or she chooses to take. I am disturbed by Massimo's hospital analogy. Students are not ill. They don't go to college to be cured, or to be good citizens. They go to college to learn things that *they* want to learn. Patients are passive. Students are not.I agree that students typically do not know what kind of education is good for them. But who does?

students do have a saying in their education. They pick their major, and there are electives. But I object to the idea that they can customize their major any way they want. That assumes they know what the best education for them is, they don't. That's the point of education.

The students are in your class to get a good grade, any learning that takes place is purely incidental. Those good grades will look good on their transcript and might convince a future employer that they are smart and thus are worth paying more.

Just how many of your students do you think will remember the extensive complex jargon of philosophy more than a couple of months after they leave your classroom?

and our lives nothing but slavery to the marketplace.We are there. Welcome. Where have you been all this time? In a capitalistic/plutocratic society money is power (and free speech too according to the supreme court). Money means a larger/better house/car/clothing/vacation than your neighbor and consequently better mating opportunities. You can mostly blame the women for that one I think just like the peacock's tail.

If a student of surgery fails to learn they might maim, kill or cripple someone. If an engineer of airplanes fails to learn they might design a faulty aircraft that fails and kills people. If a student of chemistry fails to learn they might design a faulty drug with unintended and unfortunate side effects, but what exactly would be the harm if a student of philosophy fails to learn Aristotle had to say about elements or Plato had to say about perfect forms? These things are so divorced from people's everyday activities as to be rendered all but meaningless.

human knowledge grows by leaps and bounds every day, but human brain capacity does not, so the portion of human knowledge you can personally hold gets smaller by the minute. Learn (and remember) as much as you can as fast as you can and you will still lose ground. You certainly have your work cut out for you emphasizing the importance of Thales in the Age of Twitter and whatever follows it next year.

The theory of motivated reasoning builds on a key insight of modern neuroscience (PDF): Reasoning is actually suffused with emotion (or what researchers often call "affect"). Not only are the two inseparable, but our positive or negative feelings about people, things, and ideas arise much more rapidly than our conscious thoughts, in a matter of milliseconds—fast enough to detect with an EEG device, but long before we're aware of it. That shouldn't be surprising: Evolution required us to react very quickly to stimuli in our environment. It's a "basic human survival skill," explains political scientist Arthur Lupia of the University of Michigan. We push threatening information away; we pull friendly information close. We apply fight-or-flight reflexes not only to predators, but to data itself.

We're not driven only by emotions, of course—we also reason, deliberate. But reasoning comes later, works slower—and even then, it doesn't take place in an emotional vacuum. Rather, our quick-fire emotions can set us on a course of thinking that's highly biased, especially on topics we care a great deal about.

Consider a person who has heard about a scientific discovery that deeply challenges her belief in divine creation—a new hominid, say, that confirms our evolutionary origins. What happens next, explains political scientist Charles Taber of Stony Brook University, is a subconscious negative response to the new information—and that response, in turn, guides the type of memories and associations formed in the conscious mind. "They retrieve thoughts that are consistent with their previous beliefs," says Taber, "and that will lead them to build an argument and challenge what they're hearing."

when we think we're reasoning, we may instead be rationalizing. Or to use an analogy offered by University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt: We may think we're being scientists, but we're actually being lawyers (PDF). Our "reasoning" is a means to a predetermined end—winning our "case"—and is shot through with biases. They include "confirmation bias," in which we give greater heed to evidence and arguments that bolster our beliefs, and "disconfirmation bias," in which we expend disproportionate energy trying to debunk or refute views and arguments that we find uncongenial.

For example, John Searle famously appealed to intuition to challenge the notion that a computer could ever understand language: “Imagine a native English speaker who knows no Chinese locked in a room full of boxes of Chinese symbols (a data base) together with a book of instructions for manipulating the symbols (the program). Imagine that people outside the room send in other Chinese symbols which, unknown to the person in the room, are questions in Chinese (the input). And imagine that by following the instructions in the program the man in the room is able to pass out Chinese symbols which are correct answers to the questions (the output)… If the man in the room does not understand Chinese on the basis of implementing the appropriate program for understanding Chinese then neither does any other digital computer solely on that basis because no computer, qua computer, has anything the man does not have.” Should we take Searle’s intuition that such a system would not constitute “understanding” as good evidence that it would not? Many critics of the Chinese Room argument argue that there is no reason to expect our intuitions about intelligence and understanding to be reliable.

Ethics leans especially heavily on appeals to intuition, with a whole school of ethicists (“intuitionists”) maintaining that a person can see the truth of general ethical principles not through reason, but because he “just sees without argument that they are and must be true.”6

Intuitions are also called upon to rebut ethical theories such as utilitarianism: maximizing overall utility would require you to kill one innocent person if, in so doing, you could harvest her organs and save five people in need of transplants. Such a conclusion is taken as a reductio ad absurdum, requiring utilitarianism to be either abandoned or radically revised – not because the conclusion is logically wrong, but because it strikes nearly everyone as intuitively wrong.

British philosopher G.E. Moore used intuition to argue that the existence of beauty is good irrespective of whether anyone ever gets to see and enjoy that beauty. Imagine two planets, he said, one full of stunning natural wonders – trees, sunsets, rivers, and so on – and the other full of filth. Now suppose that nobody will ever have the opportunity to glimpse either of those two worlds. Moore concluded, “Well, even so, supposing them quite apart from any possible contemplation by human beings; still, is it irrational to hold that it is better that the beautiful world should exist than the one which is ugly? Would it not be well, in any case, to do what we could to produce it rather than the other? Certainly I cannot help thinking that it would."7

Although similar appeals to intuition can be found throughout all the philosophical subfields, their validity as evidence has come under increasing scrutiny over the last two decades, from philosophers such as Hilary Kornblith, Robert Cummins, Stephen Stich, Jonathan Weinberg, and Jaakko Hintikka (links go to representative papers from each philosopher on this issue). The severity of their criticisms vary from Weinberg’s warning that “We simply do not know enough about how intuitions work,” to Cummins’ wholesale rejection of philosophical intuition as “epistemologically useless.”

One central concern for the critics is that a single question can inspire totally different, and mutually contradictory, intuitions in different people.

For example, I disagree with Moore’s intuition that it would be better for a beautiful planet to exist than an ugly one even if there were no one around to see it. I can’t understand what the words “better” and “worse,” let alone “beautiful” and “ugly,” could possibly mean outside the domain of the experiences of conscious beings

If we want to take philosophers’ intuitions as reason to believe a proposition, then the existence of opposing intuitions leaves us in the uncomfortable position of having reason to believe both a proposition and its opposite.

“I suspect there is overall less agreement than standard philosophical practice presupposes, because having the ‘right’ intuitions is the entry ticket to various subareas of philosophy,” Weinberg says.

But the problem that intuitions are often not universally shared is overshadowed by another problem: even if an intuition is universally shared, that doesn’t mean it’s accurate. For in fact there are many universal intuitions that are demonstrably false.

People who have not been taught otherwise typically assume that an object dropped out of a moving plane will fall straight down to earth, at exactly the same latitude and longitude from which it was dropped. What will actually happen is that, because the object begins its fall with the same forward momentum it had while it was on the plane, it will continue to travel forward, tracing out a curve as it falls and not a straight line. “Considering the inadequacies of ordinary physical intuitions, it is natural to wonder whether ordinary moral intuitions might be similarly inadequate,” Princeton’s Gilbert Harman has argued,9 and the same could be said for our intuitions about consciousness, metaphysics, and so on.

We can’t usually “check” the truth of our philosophical intuitions externally, with an experiment or a proof, the way we can in physics or math. But it’s not clear why we should expect intuitions to be true. If we have an innate tendency towards certain intuitive beliefs, it’s likely because they were useful to our ancestors.

But there’s no reason to expect that the intuitions which were true in the world of our ancestors would also be true in other, unfamiliar contexts

And for some useful intuitions, such as moral ones, “truth” may have been beside the point. It’s not hard to see how moral intuitions in favor of fairness and generosity would have been crucial to the survival of our ancestors’ tribes, as would the intuition to condemn tribe members who betrayed those reciprocal norms. If we can account for the presence of these moral intuitions by the fact that they were useful, is there any reason left to hypothesize that they are also “true”? The same question could be asked of the moral intuitions which Jonathan Haidt has classified as “purity-based” – an aversion to incest, for example, would clearly have been beneficial to our ancestors. Since that fact alone suffices to explain the (widespread) presence of the “incest is morally wrong” intuition, why should we take that intuition as evidence that “incest is morally wrong” is true?

The still-young debate over intuition will likely continue to rage, especially since it’s intertwined with a rapidly growing body of cognitive and social psychological research examining where our intuitions come from and how they vary across time and place.

its resolution bears on the work of literally every field of analytic philosophy, except perhaps logic. Can analytic philosophy survive without intuition? (If so, what would it look like?) And can the debate over the legitimacy of appeals to intuition be resolved with an appeal to intuition?

It is clear why this makes for rapid and powerful progress. For exploring the unknown, there is no faster method; this is the minimum sequence of steps. Any conclusion that is not an exclusion is insecure and must be rechecked. Any delay in recycling to the next set of hypotheses is only a delay. Strong inference, and the logical tree it generates, are to inductive reasoning what the syllogism is to deductive reasoning in that it offers a regular method for reaching firm inductive conclusions one after the other as rapidly as possible.

"But what is so novel about this?" someone will say. This is the method of science and always has been, why give it a special name? The reason is that many of us have almost forgotten it. Science is now an everyday business. Equipment, calculations, lectures become ends in themselves. How many of us write down our alternatives and crucial experiments every day, focusing on the exclusion of a hypothesis? We may write our scientific papers so that it looks as if we had steps 1, 2, and 3 in mind all along. But in between, we do busywork. We become "method- oriented" rather than "problem-oriented." We say we prefer to "feel our way" toward generalizations. We fail to teach our students how to sharpen up their inductive inferences. And we do not realize the added power that the regular and explicit use of alternative hypothesis and sharp exclusion could give us at every step of our research.

A distinguished cell biologist rose and said, "No two cells give the same properties. Biology is the science of heterogeneous systems." And he added privately. "You know there are scientists, and there are people in science who are just working with these over-simplified model systems - DNA chains and in vitro systems - who are not doing science at all. We need their auxiliary work: they build apparatus, they make minor studies, but they are not scientists." To which Cy Levinthal replied: "Well, there are two kinds of biologists, those who are looking to see if there is one thing that can be understood and those who keep saying it is very complicated and that nothing can be understood. . . . You must study the simplest system you think has the properties you are interested in."

At the 1958 Conference on Biophysics, at Boulder, there was a dramatic confrontation between the two points of view. Leo Szilard said: "The problems of how enzymes are induced, of how proteins are synthesized, of how antibodies are formed, are closer to solution than is generally believed. If you do stupid experiments, and finish one a year, it can take 50 years. But if you stop doing experiments for a little while and think how proteins can possibly be synthesized, there are only about 5 different ways, not 50! And it will take only a few experiments to distinguish these." One of the young men added: "It is essentially the old question: How small and elegant an experiment can you perform?" These comments upset a number of those present. An electron microscopist said. "Gentlemen, this is off the track. This is philosophy of science." Szilard retorted. "I was not quarreling with third-rate scientists: I was quarreling with first-rate scientists."

Any criticism or challenge to consider changing our methods strikes of course at all our ego-defenses. But in this case the analytical method offers the possibility of such great increases in effectiveness that it is unfortunate that it cannot be regarded more often as a challenge to learning rather than as challenge to combat. Many of the recent triumphs in molecular biology have in fact been achieved on just such "oversimplified model systems," very much along the analytical lines laid down in the 1958 discussion. They have not fallen to the kind of men who justify themselves by saying "No two cells are alike," regardless of how true that may ultimately be. The triumphs are in fact triumphs of a new way of thinking.

the emphasis on strong inference

is also partly due to the nature of the fields themselves. Biology, with its vast informational detail and complexity, is a "high-information" field, where years and decades can easily be wasted on the usual type of "low-information" observations or experiments if one does not think carefully in advance about what the most important and conclusive experiments would be. And in high-energy physics, both the "information flux" of particles from the new accelerators and the million-dollar costs of operation have forced a similar analytical approach. It pays to have a top-notch group debate every experiment ahead of time; and the habit spreads throughout the field.

Historically, I think, there have been two main contributions to the development of a satisfactory strong-inference method. The first is that of Francis Bacon (13). He wanted a "surer method" of "finding out nature" than either the logic-chopping or all-inclusive theories of the time or the laudable but crude attempts to make inductions "by simple enumeration." He did not merely urge experiments as some suppose, he showed the fruitfulness of interconnecting theory and experiment so that the one checked the other. Of the many inductive procedures he suggested, the most important, I think, was the conditional inductive tree, which proceeded from alternative hypothesis (possible "causes," as he calls them), through crucial experiments ("Instances of the Fingerpost"), to exclusion of some alternatives and adoption of what is left ("establishing axioms"). His Instances of the Fingerpost are explicitly at the forks in the logical tree, the term being borrowed "from the fingerposts which are set up where roads part, to indicate the several directions."

ere was a method that could separate off the empty theories! Bacon, said the inductive method could be learned by anybody, just like learning to "draw a straighter line or more perfect circle . . . with the help of a ruler or a pair of compasses." "My way of discovering sciences goes far to level men's wit and leaves but little to individual excellence, because it performs everything by the surest rules and demonstrations." Even occasional mistakes would not be fatal. "Truth will sooner come out from error than from confusion."

Nevertheless there is a difficulty with this method. As Bacon emphasizes, it is necessary to make "exclusions." He says, "The induction which is to be available for the discovery and demonstration of sciences and arts, must analyze nature by proper rejections and exclusions, and then, after a sufficient number of negatives come to a conclusion on the affirmative instances." "[To man] it is granted only to proceed at first by negatives, and at last to end in affirmatives after exclusion has been exhausted." Or, as the philosopher Karl Popper says today there is no such thing as proof in science - because some later alternative explanation may be as good or better - so that science advances only by disproofs. There is no point in making hypotheses that are not falsifiable because such hypotheses do not say anything, "it must be possible for all empirical scientific system to be refuted by experience" (14).

The difficulty is that disproof is a hard doctrine. If you have a hypothesis and I have another hypothesis, evidently one of them must be eliminated. The scientist seems to have no choice but to be either soft-headed or disputatious. Perhaps this is why so many tend to resist the strong analytical approach and why some great scientists are so disputatious.

Fortunately, it seems to me, this difficulty can be removed by the use of a second great intellectual invention, the "method of multiple hypotheses," which is what was needed to round out the Baconian scheme. This is a method that was put forward by T.C. Chamberlin (15), a geologist at Chicago at the turn of the century, who is best known for his contribution to the Chamberlain-Moulton hypothesis of the origin of the solar system.

Chamberlin says our trouble is that when we make a single hypothesis, we become attached to it. "The moment one has offered an original explanation for a phenomenon which seems satisfactory, that moment affection for his intellectual child springs into existence, and as the explanation grows into a definite theory his parental affections cluster about his offspring and it grows more and more dear to him. . . . There springs up also unwittingly a pressing of the theory to make it fit the facts and a pressing of the facts to make them fit the theory..." "To avoid this grave danger, the method of multiple working hypotheses is urged. It differs from the simple working hypothesis in that it distributes the effort and divides the affections. . . . Each hypothesis suggests its own criteria, its own method of proof, its own method of developing the truth, and if a group of hypotheses encompass the subject on all sides, the total outcome of means and of methods is full and rich."

The conflict and exclusion of alternatives that is necessary to sharp inductive inference has been all too often a conflict between men, each with his single Ruling Theory. But whenever each man begins to have multiple working hypotheses, it becomes purely a conflict between ideas. It becomes much easier then for each of us to aim every day at conclusive disproofs - at strong inference - without either reluctance or combativeness. In fact, when there are multiple hypotheses, which are not anyone's "personal property," and when there are crucial experiments to test them, the daily life in the laboratory takes on an interest and excitement it never had, and the students can hardly wait to get to work to see how the detective story will come out. It seems to me that this is the reason for the development of those distinctive habits of mind and the "complex thought" that Chamberlin described, the reason for the sharpness, the excitement, the zeal, the teamwork - yes, even international teamwork - in molecular biology and high- energy physics today. What else could be so effective?

Unfortunately, I think, there are other other areas of science today that are sick by comparison, because they have forgotten the necessity for alternative hypotheses and disproof. Each man has only one branch - or none - on the logical tree, and it twists at random without ever coming to the need for a crucial decision at any point. We can see from the external symptoms that there is something scientifically wrong. The Frozen Method, The Eternal Surveyor, The Never Finished, The Great Man With a Single Hypothcsis, The Little Club of Dependents, The Vendetta, The All-Encompassing Theory Which Can Never Be Falsified.

a "theory" of this sort is not a theory at all, because it does not exclude anything. It predicts everything, and therefore does not predict anything. It becomes simply a verbal formula which the graduate student repeats and believes because the professor has said it so often. This is not science, but faith; not theory, but theology. Whether it is hand-waving or number-waving, or equation-waving, a theory is not a theory unless it can be disproved. That is, unless it can be falsified by some possible experimental outcome.

the work methods of a number of scientists have been testimony to the power of strong inference. Is success not due in many cases to systematic use of Bacon's "surest rules and demonstrations" as much as to rare and unattainable intellectual power? Faraday's famous diary (16), or Fermi's notebooks (3, 17), show how these men believed in the effectiveness of daily steps in applying formal inductive methods to one problem after another.

Surveys, taxonomy, design of equipment, systematic measurements and tables, theoretical computations - all have their proper and honored place, provided they are parts of a chain of precise induction of how nature works. Unfortunately, all too often they become ends in themselves, mere time-serving from the point of view of real scientific advance, a hypertrophied methodology that justifies itself as a lore of respectability.

We speak piously of taking measurements and making small studies that will "add another brick to the temple of science." Most such bricks just lie around the brickyard (20). Tables of constraints have their place and value, but the study of one spectrum after another, if not frequently re-evaluated, may become a substitute for thinking, a sad waste of intelligence in a research laboratory, and a mistraining whose crippling effects may last a lifetime.

Beware of the man of one method or one instrument, either experimental or theoretical. He tends to become method-oriented rather than problem-oriented. The method-oriented man is shackled; the problem-oriented man is at least reaching freely toward that is most important. Strong inference redirects a man to problem-orientation, but it requires him to be willing repeatedly to put aside his last methods and teach himself new ones.

anyone who asks the question about scientific effectiveness will also conclude that much of the mathematizing in physics and chemistry today is irrelevant if not misleading. The great value of mathematical formulation is that when an experiment agrees with a calculation to five decimal places, a great many alternative hypotheses are pretty well excluded (though the Bohr theory and the Schrödinger theory both predict exactly the same Rydberg constant!). But when the fit is only to two decimal places, or one, it may be a trap for the unwary; it may be no better than any rule-of-thumb extrapolation, and some other kind of qualitative exclusion might be more rigorous for testing the assumptions and more important to scientific understanding than the quantitative fit.

Today we preach that science is not science unless it is quantitative. We substitute correlations for causal studies, and physical equations for organic reasoning. Measurements and equations are supposed to sharpen thinking, but, in my observation, they more often tend to make the thinking noncausal and fuzzy. They tend to become the object of scientific manipulation instead of auxiliary tests of crucial inferences.

Many - perhaps most - of the great issues of science are qualitative, not quantitative, even in physics and chemistry. Equations and measurements are useful when and only when they are related to proof; but proof or disproof comes first and is in fact strongest when it is absolutely convincing without any quantitative measurement.

you can catch phenomena in a logical box or in a mathematical box. The logical box is coarse but strong. The mathematical box is fine-grained but flimsy. The mathematical box is a beautiful way of wrapping up a problem, but it will not hold the phenomena unless they have been caught in a logical box to begin with.

Of course it is easy - and all too common - for one scientist to call the others unscientific. My point is not that my particular conclusions here are necessarily correct, but that we have long needed some absolute standard of possible scientific effectiveness by which to measure how well we are succeeding in various areas - a standard that many could agree on and one that would be undistorted by the scientific pressures and fashions of the times and the vested interests and busywork that they develop. It is not public evaluation I am interested in so much as a private measure by which to compare one's own scientific performance with what it might be. I believe that strong inference provides this kind of standard of what the maximum possible scientific effectiveness could be - as well as a recipe for reaching it.

The strong-inference point of view is so resolutely critical of methods of work and values in science that any attempt to compare specific cases is likely to sound but smug and destructive. Mainly one should try to teach it by example and by exhorting to self-analysis and self-improvement only in general terms

one severe but useful private test - a touchstone of strong inference - that removes the necessity for third-person criticism, because it is a test that anyone can learn to carry with him for use as needed. It is our old friend the Baconian "exclusion," but I call it "The Question." Obviously it should be applied as much to one's own thinking as to others'. It consists of asking in your own mind, on hearing any scientific explanation or theory put forward, "But sir, what experiment could disprove your hypothesis?"; or, on hearing a scientific experiment described, "But sir, what hypothesis does your experiment disprove?"

It is not true that all science is equal; or that we cannot justly compare the effectiveness of scientists by any method other than a mutual-recommendation system. The man to watch, the man to put your money on, is not the man who wants to make "a survey" or a "more detailed study" but the man with the notebook, the man with the alternative hypotheses and the crucial experiments, the man who knows how to answer your Question of disproof and is already working on it.

religion becomes its own secular catalyst, or, rather, secularization itself is the result of religion. This approach will mature in the most elaborate formulation of what Habermas calls the “linguistification of the sacred,” in volume two of The Theory of Communicative Action. There, basing himself on Durkheim and Mead, Habermas shows how ritual practices and religious worldviews release rational imperatives through the establishment of a communicative grammar that conditions how believers can and should interact with each other, and how they relate to the idea of a supreme being. Habermas writes: worldviews function as a kind of drive belt that transforms the basic religious consensus into the energy of social solidarity and passes it on to social institutions, thus giving them a moral authority. [. . .] Whereas ritual actions take place at a pregrammatical level, religious worldviews are connected with full-fledged communicative actions.

The thrust of Habermas’s argumentation in this section of The Theory of Communicative Action is to show that religion is the source of the normative binding power of ethical and moral commandments. Yet there is an ambiguity here. While the contents of worldviews may be sublimated into the normative, binding of social systems, it is not entirely clear that the structure, or the grammar, of religious worldviews is itself exhausted. Indeed, in “A Genealogical Analysis of the Cognitive Content of Morality,” Habermas resolves this ambiguity by claiming that the horizontal relationship among believers and the vertical relationship between each believer and God shape the structure of our moral relationship to our neighbour, but now under two corresponding aspects: that of solidarity and that of justice. Here, the grammar of one’s religious relationship to God and the corresponding community of believers are like the exoskeleton of a magnificent species, which, once the religious worldviews contained in them have desiccated under the impact of the forces of secularization, leave behind a casing to be used as a structuring shape for other contents.

Metaphysical thinking, which for Habermas has become untenable by the very logic of philosophical development, is characterized by three aspects: identity thinking, or the philosophy of origins that postulates the correspondence between being and thought; the doctrine of ideas, which becomes the foundation for idealism, which in turn postulates a tension between what is perceived and what can be conceptualized; and a concomitant strong concept of theory, where the bios theoretikos takes on a quasi-sacred character, and where philosophy becomes the path to salvation through dedication to a life of contemplation. By “postmetaphysical” Habermas means the new self-understanding of reason that we are able to obtain after the collapse of the Hegelian idealist system—the historicization of reason, or the de-substantivation that turns it into a procedural rationality, and, above all, its humbling. It is noteworthy that one of the main aspects of the new postmetaphysical constellation is that in the wake of the collapse of metaphysics, philosophy is forced to recognize that it must co-exist with religious practices and language: Philosophy, even in its postmetaphysical form, will be able neither to replace nor to repress religion as long as religious language is the bearer of semantic content that is inspiring and even indispensable, for this content eludes (for the time being?) the explanatory force of philosophical language and continues to resist translation into reasoning discourses.

metaphysical thinking either surrendered philosophy to religion or sought to eliminate religion altogether. In contrast, postmetaphysical thinking recognizes that philosophy can neither replace nor dismissively reject religion, for religion continues to articulate a language whose syntax and content elude philosophy, but from which philosophy continues to derive insights into the universal dimensions of human existence.

Habermas claims that even moral discourse cannot translate religious language without something being lost: “Secular languages which only eliminate the substance once intended leave irritations. When sin was converted to culpability, and the breaking of divine commands to an offence against human laws, something was lost.” Still, Habermas’s concern with religion is no longer solely philosophical, nor merely socio-theoretical, but has taken on political urgency. Indeed, he now asks whether modern rule of law and constitutional democracies can generate the motivational resources that nourish them and make them durable. In a series of essays, now gathered in Between Naturalism and Religion, as well as in his Europe: The Faltering Project, Habermas argues that as we have become members of a world society (Weltgesellschaft), we have also been forced to adopt a societal “post-secular self-consciousness.” By this term Habermas does not mean that secularization has come to an end, and even less that it has to be reversed. Instead, he now clarifies that secularization refers very specifically to the secularization of state power and to the general dissolution of metaphysical, overarching worldviews (among which religious views are to be counted). Additionally, as members of a world society that has, if not a fully operational, at least an incipient global public sphere, we have been forced to witness the endurance and vitality of religion. As members of this emergent global public sphere, we are also forced to recognize the plurality of forms of secularization. Secularization did not occur in one form, but in a variety of forms and according to different chronologies.

through a critical reading of Rawls, Habermas has begun to translate the postmetaphysical orientation of modern philosophy into a postsecular self-understanding of modern rule of law societies in such a way that religious citizens as well as secular citizens can co-exist, not just by force of a modus vivendi, but out of a sincere mutual respect. “Mutual recognition implies, among other things, that religious and secular citizens are willing to listen and to learn from each other in public debates. The political virtue of treating each other civilly is an expression of distinctive cognitive attitudes.” The cognitive attitudes Habermas is referring to here are the very cognitive competencies that are distinctive of modern, postconventional social agents. Habermas’s recent work on religion, then, is primarily concerned with rescuing for the modern liberal state those motivational and moral resources that it cannot generate or provide itself. At the same time, his recent work is concerned with foregrounding the kind of ethical and moral concerns, preoccupations, and values that can guide us between the Scylla of a society administered from above by the system imperatives of a global economy and political power and the Charybdis of a technological frenzy that places us on the slippery slope of a liberally sanctioned eugenics.

When we ask whether human beings are altruistic, we want to know about their motives or intentions. Biological altruism explains how unselfish behavior might have evolved but, as Frans de Waal suggested in his column in The Stone on Sunday, it implies nothing about the motives or intentions of the agent: after all, birds and bats and bees can act altruistically. This fact helps to explain why, despite these evolutionary theories, the view that people never intentionally act to benefit others except to obtain some good for themselves still possesses a powerful lure over our thinking.

The lure of this view — egoism — has two sources, one psychological, the other logical. Consider first the psychological. One reason people deny that altruism exists is that, looking inward, they doubt the purity of their own motives. We know that even when we appear to act unselfishly, other reasons for our behavior often rear their heads: the prospect of a future favor, the boost to reputation, or simply the good feeling that comes from appearing to act unselfishly. As Kant and Freud observed, people’s true motives may be hidden, even (or perhaps especially) from themselves. Even if we think we’re acting solely to further another person’s good, that might not be the real reason. (There might be no single “real reason” — actions can have multiple motives.)

So the psychological lure of egoism as a theory of human action is partly explained by a certain humility or skepticism people have about their own or others’ motives

There’s also a less flattering reason: denying the possibility of pure altruism provides a convenient excuse for selfish behavior.

The logical lure of egoism is different: the view seems impossible to disprove. No matter how altruistic a person appears to be, it’s possible to conceive of her motive in egoistic terms.

The impossibility of disproving egoism may sound like a virtue of the theory, but, as philosophers of science know, it’s really a fatal drawback. A theory that purports to tell us something about the world, as egoism does, should be falsifiable. Not false, of course, but capable of being tested and thus proved false. If every state of affairs is compatible with egoism, then egoism doesn’t tell us anything distinctive about how things are.

s ambiguity in the concepts of desire and the satisfaction of desire. If people possess altruistic motives, then they sometimes act to benefit others without the prospect of gain to themselves. In other words, they desire the good of others for its own sake, not simply as a means to their own satisfaction.

Still, when our desires are satisfied we normally experience satisfaction; we feel good when we do good. But that doesn’t mean we do good only in order to get that “warm glow” — that our true incentives are self-interested (as economists tend to claim). Indeed, as de Waal argues, if we didn’t desire the good of others for its own sake, then attaining it wouldn’t produce the warm glow.

Common sense tells us that some people are more altruistic than others. Egoism’s claim that these differences are illusory — that deep down, everybody acts only to further their own interests — contradicts our observations and deep-seated human practices of moral evaluation.

At the same time, we may notice that generous people don’t necessarily suffer more or flourish less than those who are more self-interested.

The point is rather that the kind of altruism we ought to encourage, and probably the only kind with staying power, is satisfying to those who practice it. Studies of rescuers show that they don’t believe their behavior is extraordinary; they feel they must do what they do, because it’s just part of who they are. The same holds for more common, less newsworthy acts — working in soup kitchens, taking pets to people in nursing homes, helping strangers find their way, being neighborly. People who act in these ways believe that they ought to help others, but they also want to help, because doing so affirms who they are and want to be and the kind of world they want to exist. As Prof. Neera Badhwar has argued, their identity is tied up with their values, thus tying self-interest and altruism together. The correlation between doing good and feeling good is not inevitable— inevitability lands us again with that empty, unfalsifiable egoism — but it is more than incidental.

Altruists should not be confused with people who automatically sacrifice their own interests for others.

first question we can reasonably ask is whether all moral systems are indeed focused on benefiting human happiness and decreasing pain.

Jeremy Bentham, the founder of utilitarianism, wrote the following in his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation: “When a man attempts to combat the principle of utility, it is with reasons drawn, without his being aware of it, from that very principle itself.”

Michael Sandel discusses this line of thought in his excellent book, Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?, and sums up Bentham’s argument as such: “All moral quarrels, properly understood, are [for Bentham] disagreements about how to apply the utilitarian principle of maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain, not about the principle itself.”

But Bentham’s definition of utilitarianism is perhaps too broad: are fundamentalist Christians or Muslims really utilitarians, just with different ideas about how to facilitate human flourishing?

one wonders whether this makes the word so all-encompassing in meaning as to render it useless.

Yet, even if pain and happiness are the objects of moral concern, so what? As philosopher Simon Blackburn recently pointed out, “Every moral philosopher knows that moral philosophy is functionally about reducing suffering and increasing human flourishing.” But is that the central and sole focus of all moral philosophies? Don’t moral systems vary in their core focuses?

Consider the observation that religious belief makes humans happier, on average

Secularists would rightly resist the idea that religious belief is moral if it makes people happier. They would reject the very idea because deep down, they value truth – a value that is non-negotiable.Utilitarians would assert that truth is just another utility, for people can only value truth if they take it to be beneficial to human happiness and flourishing.

. We might all agree that morality is “functionally about reducing suffering and increasing human flourishing,” as Blackburn says, but how do we achieve that? Consequentialism posits that we can get there by weighing the consequences of beliefs and actions as they relate to human happiness and pain. Sam Harris recently wrote: “It is true that many people believe that ‘there are non-consequentialist ways of approaching morality,’ but I think that they are wrong. In my experience, when you scratch the surface on any deontologist, you find a consequentialist just waiting to get out. For instance, I think that Kant's Categorical Imperative only qualifies as a rational standard of morality given the assumption that it will be generally beneficial (as J.S. Mill pointed out at the beginning of Utilitarianism). Ditto for religious morality.”

we might wonder about the elasticity of words, in this case consequentialism. Do fundamentalist Christians and Muslims count as consequentialists? Is consequentialism so empty of content that to be a consequentialist one need only think he or she is benefiting humanity in some way?

Harris’ argument is that one cannot adhere to a certain conception of morality without believing it is beneficial to society

This still seems somewhat obvious to me as a general statement about morality, but is it really the point of consequentialism? Not really. Consequentialism is much more focused than that. Consider the issue of corporal punishment in schools. Harris has stated that we would be forced to admit that corporal punishment is moral if studies showed that “subjecting children to ‘pain, violence, and public humiliation’ leads to ‘healthy emotional development and good behavior’ (i.e., it conduces to their general well-being and to the well-being of society). If it did, well then yes, I would admit that it was moral. In fact, it would appear moral to more or less everyone.” Harris is being rhetorical – he does not believe corporal punishment is moral – but the point stands.

An immediate pitfall of this approach is that it does not qualify corporal punishment as the best way to raise emotionally healthy children who behave well.

The virtue ethicists inside us would argue that we ought not to foster a society in which people beat and humiliate children, never mind the consequences. There is also a reasonable and powerful argument based on personal freedom. Don’t children have the right to be free from violence in the public classroom? Don’t children have the right not to suffer intentional harm without consent? Isn’t that part of their “moral well-being”?

If consequences were really at the heart of all our moral deliberations, we might live in a very different society.

what if economies based on slavery lead to an increase in general happiness and flourishing for their respective societies? Would we admit slavery was moral? I hope not, because we value certain ideas about human rights and freedom. Or, what if the death penalty truly deterred crime? And what if we knew everyone we killed was guilty as charged, meaning no need for The Innocence Project? I would still object, on the grounds that it is morally wrong for us to kill people, even if they have committed the crime of which they are accused. Certain things hold, no matter the consequences.

We all do care about increasing human happiness and flourishing, and decreasing pain and suffering, and we all do care about the consequences of our beliefs and actions. But we focus on those criteria to differing degrees, and we have differing conceptions of how to achieve the respective goals – making us perhaps utilitarians and consequentialists in part, but not in whole.

Cuteness is a pretty silly criterion by which to assign moral status, though. It's not as if unappealing animals are less intelligent or less sensitive to pain.

And if you have any trouble seeing the absurdity of basing moral judgments on cuteness, it helps to try out the principle in other contexts. (Is it worse to abuse a cute child than an ugly one?)

But I think the biggest reason that different examples of hurting animals for pleasure elicit different reactions from people is not about the types of animals involved, but about the types of pleasure.

One objective difference people might cite is the fact that a desire to eat meat is “natural” while a desire to watch kittens being crushed is not. Which is true, in the sense that our species did evolve to eat meat while a fetish for crushing kittens is an aberration. But using naturalness as a criterion for moral rightness is a dubious move. First, it seems rather arbitrary, from a logical perspective, which is why it's often referred to as the naturalistic fallacy. And second, it would justify some pretty unsavory “natural” urges, like rape and tribalism, while prohibiting other “unnatural” urges, like the desire to wear clothing or to refrain from having children.

The closest thing that I can find to a morally relevant distinction between industrial farming, dogfighting, and crush videos is this: While it’s true that all three acts cause animal suffering in order to give people pleasure, the nature of that tradeoff differs. The consumers of crush videos and dogfighting are taking pleasure in the suffering itself, whereas the consumers of industrially-farmed meat are taking pleasure in the meat that was produced by the suffering. From a purely harm-based perspective, the moral calculus is the same: the animal suffers so that you can experience pleasure. But the degree of directness of that tradeoff makes a difference in how we perceive your character. Someone whose motive is “I enjoy seeing another creature suffer” seems more evil than someone whose motive is “I want a tasty meal,” even if both people cause the same amount of suffering.

And I can certainly understand why people would want to call a crush video enthusiast more “evil” than a person who buys meat from industrial farms, because of the difference in their motivations. That's a reasonable way to define evilness. But in that case we're left with the fact that a person's evilness may be totally unrelated to the amount of harm she causes; and that, in fact, some of the greatest harm may be caused by people whose motivations seem unobjectionable to us. Apathy, denial, conformity; none of these inspire the same outrage as sadism, but they've caused some pretty horrible outcomes. And if you believe that it's wrong to make animals suffer for our pleasure, but you reserve your moral condemnation only for cases that viscerally upset you, like dogfighting or crush videos, then you're falling prey to the trap that Isaac Asimov famously warned us against: “Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right.”

His answer is that both utilitarianism and deontology inherited the ideas of right, wrong and duty from Christianity, but endeavored to do without Christianity’s own answers to those questions: the law is given by God and the duty is toward Him. Taylor says that Mill, Kant and the like simply absorbed the Christian concept of morality while rejecting its logical foundation (such as it was). As a result, utilitarians and deontologists alike keep talking about the right thing to do, or the good as if those concepts still make sense once we move to a secular worldview. Utilitarians substituted pain and pleasure for wrong and right respectively, and Kant thought that pure reason can arrive at moral universals. But of course neither utilitarians nor deontologist ever give us a reason why it would be irrational to simply decline to pursue actions that increase global pleasure and diminish global pain, or why it would be irrational for someone not to find the categorical imperative particularly compelling.

The situation — again according to Taylor — is dramatically different for virtue ethics. Yes, there too we find concepts like right and wrong and duty. But, for the ancient Greeks they had completely different meanings, which made perfect sense then and now, if we are not mislead by the use of those words in a different context. For the Greeks, an action was right if it was approved by one’s society, wrong if it wasn’t, and duty was to one’s polis. And they understood perfectly well that what was right (or wrong) in Athens may or may not be right (or wrong) in Sparta. And that an Athenian had a duty to Athens, but not to Sparta, and vice versa for a Spartan.

But wait a minute. Does that mean that Taylor is saying that virtue ethics was founded on moral relativism? That would be an extraordinary claim indeed, and he does not, in fact, make it. His point is a bit more subtle. He suggests that for the ancient Greeks ethics was not (principally) about right, wrong and duty. It was about happiness, understood in the broad sense of eudaimonia, the good or fulfilling life. Aristotle in particular wrote in his Ethics about both aspects: the practical ethics of one’s duty to one’s polis, and the universal (for human beings) concept of ethics as the pursuit of the good life. And make no mistake about it: for Aristotle the first aspect was relatively trivial and understood by everyone, it was the second one that represented the real challenge for the philosopher.

For instance, the Ethics is famous for Aristotle’s list of the virtues (see Table), and his idea that the right thing to do is to steer a middle course between extreme behaviors. But this part of his work, according to Taylor, refers only to the practical ways of being a good Athenian, not to the universal pursuit of eudaimonia. Vice of Deficiency Virtuous Mean Vice of Excess Cowardice Courage Rashness Insensibility Temperance Intemperance Illiberality Liberality Prodigality Pettiness Munificence Vulgarity Humble-mindedness High-mindedness Vaingloriness Want of Ambition Right Ambition Over-ambition Spiritlessness Good Temper Irascibility Surliness Friendly Civility Obsequiousness Ironical Depreciation Sincerity Boastfulness Boorishness Wittiness Buffoonery</t

How, then, is one to embark on the more difficult task of figuring out how to live a good life? For Aristotle eudaimonia meant the best kind of existence that a human being can achieve, which in turns means that we need to ask what it is that makes humans different from all other species, because it is the pursuit of excellence in that something that provides for a eudaimonic life.

Now, Plato - writing before Aristotle - ended up construing the good life somewhat narrowly and in a self-serving fashion. He reckoned that the thing that distinguishes humanity from the rest of the biological world is our ability to use reason, so that is what we should be pursuing as our highest goal in life. And of course nobody is better equipped than a philosopher for such an enterprise... Which reminds me of Bertrand Russell’s quip that “A process which led from the amoeba to man appeared to the philosophers to be obviously a progress, though whether the amoeba would agree with this opinion is not known.”

But Aristotle's conception of "reason" was significantly broader, and here is where Taylor’s own update of virtue ethics begins to shine, particularly in Chapter 16 of the book, aptly entitled “Happiness.” Taylor argues that the proper way to understand virtue ethics is as the quest for the use of intelligence in the broadest possible sense, in the sense of creativity applied to all walks of life. He says: “Creative intelligence is exhibited by a dancer, by athletes, by a chess player, and indeed in virtually any activity guided by intelligence [including — but certainly not limited to — philosophy].” He continues: “The exercise of skill in a profession, or in business, or even in such things as gardening and farming, or the rearing of a beautiful family, all such things are displays of creative intelligence.”

what we have now is a sharp distinction between utilitarianism and deontology on the one hand and virtue ethics on the other, where the first two are (mistakenly, in Taylor’s assessment) concerned with the impossible question of what is right or wrong, and what our duties are — questions inherited from religion but that in fact make no sense outside of a religious framework. Virtue ethics, instead, focuses on the two things that really matter and to which we can find answers: the practical pursuit of a life within our polis, and the lifelong quest of eudaimonia understood as the best exercise of our creative faculties

&gt; So if one's profession is that of assassin or torturer would being the best that you can be still be your duty and eudaimonic? And what about those poor blighters who end up with an ugly family? &lt;Aristotle's philosophy is ver much concerned with virtue, and being an assassin or a torturer is not a virtue, so the concept of a eudaimonic life for those characters is oxymoronic. As for ending up in a "ugly" family, Aristotle did write that eudaimonia is in part the result of luck, because it is affected by circumstances.

&gt; So to the title question of this post: "Is modern moral philosophy still in thrall to religion?" one should say: Yes, for some residual forms of philosophy and for some philosophers &lt;That misses Taylor's contention - which I find intriguing, though I have to give it more thought - that *all* modern moral philosophy, except virtue ethics, is in thrall to religion, without realizing it.

“The exercise of skill in a profession, or in business, or even in such things as gardening and farming, or the rearing of a beautiful family, all such things are displays of creative intelligence.”So if one's profession is that of assassin or torturer would being the best that you can be still be your duty and eudaimonic? And what about those poor blighters who end up with an ugly family?

he argues that these revised theories coincide with a particular form of consequentialism, which is a theory in the same broad family as utilitarianism. If Parfit is right, there is much less disagreement between apparently conflicting moral theories than we all thought. The defenders of each of these theories are, in Parfit’s vivid phrase, “climbing the same mountain on different sides.”

Parfit’s real interest is in combating subjectivism and nihilism. Unless he can show that objectivism is true, he believes, nothing matters.

When Parfit does come to the question of “what matters,” his answer might seem surprisingly obvious. He tells us, for example, that what matters most now is that “we rich people give up some of our luxuries, ceasing to overheat the Earth’s atmosphere, and taking care of this planet in other ways, so that it continues to support intelligent life.” Many of us had already reached that conclusion. What we gain from Parfit’s work is the possibility of defending these and other moral claims as objective truths.

one would think that libertarians could make a distinction between evidence-based interpretation of reality (global warming is happening), and whatever policies we might want to enact to avoid catastrophe. Qua Qua libertarians, they would obviously resist any government-led effort at clean up, especially if internationally coordinated, preferring instead a coalition of the willing within the private sector

there certainly is plenty of room for reasonable discussions and disagreements about how best to proceed in confronting the problem. On the other hand, there doesn’t seem to be much room for reasonable disagreement about the very existence of the problem itself. So, what gives, my dear libertarians?

. In the case of major libertarian outlets, like the CATO Institute think tank, the rather unglamorous answer may simply be that they are in the pockets of the oil industry. A large amount of the funding for CATO comes from private corporations with obvious political agendas including, you guessed it, Exxon-Mobil (remember the Valdez?). No wonder CATO people trump the party line on this one.

The second reason, however, is more personal and widespread: libertarianism is committed to the high moral value of private enterprise

it follows naturally (if irrationally) that libertarians cannot admit to themselves, and even less to the world at large, that the much vaunted private sector may be responsible — out of both greed and downright incompetence — for a major environmental catastrophe of planetary proportions. The industry is the good guy in their movie, how then could they possibly have done something so horrible?

hat’s the problem with ideology in general (be it left, right, or libertarian), it provides us with thick blinders that very effectively shield us from reality. Of course, no one is actually free of bias, yours truly included. But a core principle of skepticism and critical thinking is that we do our best to be aware (and minimize) our own biases, and that we ought to open ourselves to honest criticism from different parties, in pursuit of the best approximation to the truth that we can muster.

But, Hor points out, Page 340: to give legislative effect to a norm which stems almost exclusively from Christian or Muslim beliefs does appear to be a curiously misguided decision. Take the example of the prohibition against eating pork — certainly a tenet of Islam and Judaism. No one would even suggest that we enact a law banning the consumption of pork in Singapore, even for Muslims, no matter how strongly these two religious communities feel about it.

With reference to the constitutional guarantee of equality before the law, Hor explains that this provision requires that, Page 340: law must not be “arbitrary”; there must be a “rational nexus” or “reasonable classification” between what the law targets and the purpose for which it is laid down.

Laws must be tested for “fit” and “weight”, he said. With respect to the former, the question is whether the classification of the target persons affected by the law fits the intended purpose of the law. As for “weight”, the question is whether whatever the problem the law purports to deal with is real and serious enough to justify the intervention of criminal sanction. Or is it mostly capricious?

decision to retain 377A is gravely problematic on both fronts. It does not fit very well at all. . . . If, as we have seen, the legislature was acting in some manner on the antipathy of certain segments of society towards homosexual activity, then the non-inclusion of women in 377A is a very huge omission indeed — more than half our population and presumably half of all homosexual activity.&nbsp; It would be akin to subjecting half all our cars to a certain speed limit rule based on the colour of the car.

The element of “weight” is no less shaky. Can the sole purpose of accommodation of sectarian sensibilities ever be weighty enough to justify the criminalization of private sexual conduct between consenting adults? If the answer is “yes”, then it is hard to imagine for what earthly purpose the equal protection clause was written into the Constitution for. It is not the case that the Legislature has made a judgment that 377A activity is sufficiently harmful to society to attract criminal sanctions. . . the speech of PM Lee shows a clear belief that it is not so harmful — but 377A was to remain for, apparently, the sole purpose of appeasing those who disapprove.

It is not difficult to see that if the desire to accommodate a disapproving segment of society is reason enough, that would result in the evisceration of equal protection. . . Equal protection is about protection against prejudice, and if the government does not buy into the substantive arguments (of those who disapprove) for criminalization, then those putative reasons become, as far as the government is concerned, prejudice.