KappaThoughts: KappAgnostic



Text message conversation of the day:

My response might have been a little more devil-may-care than the question warranted (though I'm not sure how he expected me to respond to "Don't think; just answer"), but still, there's something to be said about sitting in the middle of opposed values systems. At least, I like to imagine that there's something to be said for it. Not that I think individualism and collectivism are as diametrically opposed as their names suggest, but the agnostic in me likes to pick and choose bits from both sides of almost any debate. Pulling the diamonds from the dross as they say. My friend here (will call him Daisy) would probably rightly tell me I'm a coward for taking that position (there's something undeniably risk averse about agnosticism) but refusal to take a side definitely has its advantages. The middle is a comfortable place to be ... at least until a conversation comes to blows.

And I do like the middle; maybe a bit too much. It's not that I don't have opinions; there are a number of contemporary debates that I won't hesitate to check off as "settled questions." Evolution is an established scientific reality and valid theory of the origin of species diversity. Homosexual behavior isn't any more morally relevant or ethically significant than heterosexual behavior. Picard was a better captain than Kirk. Other questions are a bit harder for me to come down on, though. The polar ends just leave too much middle space to explore. Do government safety net programs really provide a cumulative societal benefit when their poor implementation and policing seems to encourage their abuse? Does evil exist? Is it essential for morality to have an objective, absolute source? I go back and forth. There is a cowardice to that. Daisy takes the opposite approach, pounding ahead into unexplored territory before he's entirely sure that the arguments he's making carry any weight, smashing points up against counterpoints to see what survives the collision. It's not that he's bullheaded, he's less afraid of fight; even if its a fight that he knows he's going to lose. Me, I don't like losing. I prefer to rest on my intellectually superior, unattached laurels and let the world move around me. Agnosticism is good for that.



It's not all cowardice and smug assurance though. More often than not (particularly on the internet) agnosticism ends up being the tarred and feathered anathema, chased out of the conversation for its refusal to engage on the same level as those jockeying for their cause-du-jour (or cause-du-vie, to be fair). Good luck finding a true agnostic apologist. The internet favors strong opinions stated with conviction, the irony being that when one ventures onto a religious, political or philosophical debate thread and strongly states the opinion that all of this conviction may be misplaced, the response is generally less than enthusiastic. Conversations tend to polarize; intellectually honest agnostic positions aren't just trying to avoid confrontation or make nice when things get divisive, they're trying to point the conversation in a different direction. Which is why it's so frustrating to debate: intellectually honest agnosticism doesn't just undermine your position, it undermines your position and doesn't offer an alternative for you to attack in return. It bangs up against your arguments but doesn't present firm counterarguments. People want to know that they can know. A well-articulated agnostic position undermines that. If what one is looking for is surety, it leaves little ground to stand on.

Which is why, I think (despite the masochistic treatment of it above), even though it looks from the outside as cowardly, there is a real bravery to agnosticism's underlying assumptions. It's natural to move from one intellectual space into another; but holding oneself in flux between opposing or even (at times) complimentary positions on a complex issue takes a rare sort of courage. The courage of placing transition and migration over destination or arrival, of valuing the process more than the product and possibility over essence. It's not that agnosticism a superior epistemology, but an anti-epistemology or unepistemology. It's a space that exists after and under certainties. It's a space that says yes to the unknown and to unknowing, that says yes to the stranger, as dangerous as that can be; an admittedly dangerous space that I find myself uncomfortably occupying from time to time. Even so I can't help but find a legitmiate Agnostic attitude that isn't just trying to avoid thinking about the issues thrilling, because once your place of certainty has been undermined you have the rare opportunity to observe a world that seems, at least to me, a bit more open, exciting and new; full of possibilities, full of things to learn.

So, individualism or collectivism?

For now at least, I think I'll stick with Yes.

Kappajot: Moral Minds II

Having finished the first section of Moral Minds by Hauser, I want to take a moment and go over the basic thesis of the book and the philosophy that he's operating under.

In terms of morality, his proposition basically boils down to an argument for a "moral organ" or Moral Grammar that exists as part and parcel of the human condition. He is basically attempting to apply Noam Chomsky's theory of Language to Morality (that humans are born not as blank slate creatures, but with an "innate grammar" or instinct towards language that is then molded to the specific cultural language they are born into). For, Hauser, then, emotions like disgust, guilt, and moral pride are indicative of subconscious moral judgements that we all make on the spot and then justify post-hoc and apply to the particulars of whatever dilemma is being experienced. Morality, then, is not merely a cultural institution, nor is it an abstract ideal. It is an innate universal grammar exists as the bones of Ethical decision making to be fleshed out by the cultural context an individual is born into.

The first section focuses primarily on briefly sketching out the ethical schools of thought that he sees as relevant to his investigation of morality. He begins by contrasting Hume with Kant and then arriving at Rawls as the ethical paradigm that he feels best describes how we experience moral dilemmas and arrive at moral judgements, decisions, or actions.

The simplified versions of these three philosophies are as follows:

Kantian Creature: Moral Dilemma ---> Logical Evaluation ---> Moral Judgement
Humean Creature: Moral Dilemma ---> Empathetic Emotional Reaction ---> Moral Judgement ---> post-hoc Logical Justification
Rawlsian Creature: Moral Dilemma ---> Moral Judgement ---> Emotional Reaction/Logical Evaluation

For Hauser, the Rawlsian creature is most indicative of our experiences of moral decision making. As an example, we can logically justify why torturing a baby for sport is wrong (Kantian), we can also make the claim that torturing the baby is wrong because it feels wrong (Hume), but in both cases the emotion and the logical justification are not indicative of moral good, but a result of subconscious processes that dictate moral reasoning (Rawls). Good and bad, it seems, exist within us and influence our decision making on a very basic level.

As evidence for his position he cites the consistent emotional justification required to operate within a Kantian system (as a rule of thumb, people will follow rules of utility when asked to evaluate an ethical situation rationally, but will still experience moral disgust as a result of those actions. Or, to put it another way, Sophie's choice may be the only thing she morally able to do according to the rules of utility and rational ethics, but that doesn't assuage the sense of moral disgust and guilt she will carry with her.) Humean, ethics, Hauser believes, similarly misses the mark by placing too much weight on the moral emotions themselves. While emotions like disgust, guilt, and pride are indicative of the moral weight behind a choice, to use these emotions as a source of morality is to stray into a dangerous realm of absolute relativism. That empathy should be chosen as the preferred emotion behind what makes an action morally significant seems a bit arbitrary (why not selfish emotions? or what about instances of conflicting moral feelings?)

Possible objections as we move forward:

Placing the entire system of moral operation under the "veil of mystery."
Crowd dynamics, or how crowds overwhelm the moral implications of actions.
How does one determine the "Moral Grammar?"
Is the moral grammar objective? How do we claim it is objective if it "exists within us?"

All this and more as we continue to press forward. Expect relevant edits as I review the first chapter.

Kappajots: Moral Minds and Incomplete Nature

The wife knows me. This year, for Christmas she got me books and nerdy t-shirts. All of which just happen to revolve round the theme of combining contraries or resolving false dichotomies (here's looking at you Batman/Bruce Wayne graphic).

At the top of the reading list right now is Moral Minds by Marc Hauser and Incomplete Nature by Terrence Deacon. I've just barely cracked the bindings on both, but they seem to be exactly what I've been looking for. Each is written by a scientist who is arguing against the mechanistic assumptions inherent to materialism and (gasp) proposing alternatives. Dr. Hauser is a psychologist (evolutionary psychologist it would seem) so his willingness to acknowledge possible objective universals or give a place of primacy to the nonmaterial is a bit less surprising than Dr. Deacon, but both push their respective disciplines up against the limits of materialism, then press beyond it.

To back up, the past year has been largely transitional in both a personal and intellectual sense. It was my first year of marriage, my first year in a new career, a year in which I intellectually acknowledged my atheism or at least agnosticism for the first time, and a year where, for the first time, I had to deal with the intellectual consequences of living in a materialistic paradigm. Alot of firsts. The last, though, I have to say, has been the least satisfying. Materialism has a distinct advantage over the pentecostal/charismatic background that I was coming from in the sense that it paints an internally consistent picture of the universe (is descriptively sound), but it only took a month or two in the company of some smart folks to reach the limits of that description. Materialism very quickly runs headfirst into several explanatory problems that can't easily be shrugged off.

To expand, materialism assumes as it's primary axiom that everything that exists or could potentially exist from bullets to trees to clouds to xrays to dark matter to is material in nature (ie that its made of detectable particles or energy). It concedes that there are potential material things that are beyond our technical ability to observe (say, strings of string theory, branes, dark matter particles or dark energy bosons) but assumes that this lack of ability is not because of an inherent nonmateriality but because of other qualities of these objects (very very small size, exotic particles, etc). It's been a phenomenal paradigm to operate the natural sciences within for a long time because of it's great predictive power in regards to natural events. Any energy or material relationship that can be quantified has and these quantitative laws both describe and predict the way things are going to behave down to tee.

The issue, though, that materialism quickly runs into is that it can't account for us. We, as conscious beings, and all of our ideation, are a huge blind spot that materialism has been trying to incorporate into itself for years.

For the first time, technology has developed to the point that we can crack open the skull and observe the brain as the mind thinks. Neural interaction, being an observable phenomenon has crashed into the material paradigm of scientific investigation. The implications of a strict materialistic view of the universe have been obvious for some time, but the current intellectual climate and emerging technologies have only served to underline them. Namely, if everything can be reduced to quarks, bosons, and their various interactions, does that mean that we ... not just our bodies, but our minds ... are made up of quarks, bosons, and their various interactions? If so, then how can we have any causal effect on the universe around us. How can we claim ownership over any of our thoughts or actions if, at the base, each neural impulse in our body is the result of a mechanistic exchange of energy between atoms?

How can the words on this page mean anything or refer to anything in a materialistic universe (or, two put it another way, how can ideas, morality, and language exist in a universe where without teleology ... where electrons are spinning and forces are interacting, but that is it)? Can an electron, or even a group of electrons refer to an apple or a shovel or anything really?

More formally, the arguments are framed this way.

In a materialistic universe everything is made up of material substances.
Ideas are not made up of material substances
Therefore, ideas don't exist or materialism is an incomplete theory.

Or,

According to materialism, everything that exists is made up of fundamental particles, energy, and laws. These interactions are the only causal effects.
Information exists as a representative system following these laws as well and composed of these particles.
Therefore, ideas cannot have causal effects in and of themselves, but only due to their constituent parts interacting.

You are composed of these mechanistic pieces following their laws as well
Therefore you can have no causal effects outside of the interactions of your constituent parts.

Therefore, free will doesn't exist or materialism is an incomplete theory.

(A note, I am admittedly poor at formal argumentation.)

To sidestep this problem, materialism has had to either go to great lengths to sidestep them with incomplete rebuttals that usually resolve themselves in mystery (see emergence) or accept materialism's incredibly unintuitive and unsound consequences (free will doesn't exist, ideas don't exist, subjective experience doesn't exist).

To get back to the topic at hand, these books both seem to be addressing this blind spot, but without conceding to dualistic or theistic viewpoint. Like I said, I've just cracked the spines, but I'm excited to see where they go.

I'll report back shortly.

Kappathought: Of Gingrich and Moral Authority

So Gingrich released this last week, just in time for the first round of Republican Primaries. It's a bit of a lengthy read, but what it boils down to is a fairly straightforward shot at engendering himself with the conservative religious vote (the main thrust of it being that "hating the gays" is a Religious Right of the religious right and any businesses or institutions they happen to manage). The obvious irony of positioning conservative Christianity as an oppressed minority in need of protection from a malevolent cadre of post-modern homos and their activist judges notwithstanding (Yes, yes Newt, we caught your subtle comparison of current administrative policies to slavery, Nazism and Communism ... well played sir) what really interests me about the piece is how it parses the declaration of independence and other quotes from the founding fathers as if they were Bible passages with the aim of concluding that Morality is Transcendent:

"... [The American Vision of Morality] requires citizens to regard justice as something that exists above positive law. The Declaration recognizes that standing laws may be flawed, and that it is the duty of American citizens to bring them closer to justice. Our political history represents an attempt to fulfill the promise of the Declaration. In our darkest hours, it has provided the nation with moral guidance." (Page 5 - Emphasis Mine)

And so Newt hits upon a legitimately interesting question: What is Morality? How does one distinguish it from Legality? Or to put it another way, is there a clear point of demarcation between natural and positive law? In either case, have we hit upon the whole of Moral obligation between the two?

Both Morality and Legality govern the way that we interact with one another, but coming from different directions and derived from different sources. Legality is, obviously, an external institutional system. It is objective (after a fashion) and inherently negative in the sense that its primary function is the allowance of certain behaviors towards others and ourselves. Legality is about what you can and cannot do. Ideally, it's aim is the protection of the individual or a group from other individuals or groups by externally imposing standards of behavior that are only valid or applicable actions insofar as they are enforced or enforceable.

Morality is something else entirely, though. Morality is the positive affirmation of a value or set of values that comes with self-limiting consequences.

To illustrate: in order to drive a car in the US, you must, legally, have current valid auto insurance. The reasons for the law are obvious, by driving you are automatically placing others at a certain level of risk of financial or personal damage. Auto insurance mitigates that risk. The rationale might make moral sense .... or might not ... but either way you must comply if you want to drive. The law exists to protect the life and finances of the individual whether or not you agree with the rationale. You cannot refuse to comply and participate in the community of drivers ... or if you do, it's at the risk of reasonable level punitive response.

On the other side of the spectrum, some might say that having auto insurance is a moral imperative as well as a legal one if they place a high value on protecting the community. Or they might be on the other side of the fence and say that forcing a consumer to purchase a product (auto insurance) is immoral because it doesn't allow for freedom of personal choice (if they place high value on that). In either case, the law is structured to ignore moral opinion in favor of pragmatic policy.

Newt's prescription goes on to classify natural law (divine law in his terminology) as personal and the other as institutional, but that's less about an attempt to actually say something about morality than to arrive at his conclusion (that church and state are best kept separate so long as the government isn't telling people to treat those they disapprove of with the same level of humanity they reserve for right minded people). The emphasized statement in the quote above, though, suggests a disturbing position on the relationship between morality (or justice in his terms) and law. The idea seems to be that moral action (justice) is self evident and obvious ... and that it should be the end of each individual to try and craft the legal system towards the moral ideal (to bring the personal to the level of institution).

While it is a given that we should all try and make a better world, the assumption that we do this by bringing "standing laws ... closer to justice" bothers me for a few reasons.

1. Morality, being self-limiting, is only valuable insofar as it is not obligatory. Or to put it another way ... forced goodness is not goodness, it's just compliance. No one praises you for having auto insurance. Legality, for all of its complexity tends establish the minimum acceptable behavior in order to participate in society. To expound beyond that is to start a process of pushing towards a level of authoritarianism that literally makes it impossible to be "good."

2. Morality is not self-evident. As a positive system (one that is self-limiting based on valued ideas) you will encounter a variety of moral ideals. Some people will value the individual self above all, others family, some more abstract ideas like "life" or "humanity", some personal freedom, others equity. Placing primacy on any of the former will yield different set of imperatives ... or similar sets that are applied differently. There are general agreement among most systems ... like not harming your neighbor, but there is also a wide divergence on how those ideals should be implemented on a day to day level.

3. Every legal system should undergo scrutiny in an attempt to make it "more just," but that scrutiny shouldn't be an attempt to draw a more perfect triangle, per se, but to create a system with more utility. There will always be axioms at the base of every legal system; ours being "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" and "majority rule, minority right" among others. It is not the goal of the legal system and those scrutinizing it to try and change those axioms, but to operate as best as it can within them.

Which gets to corporate, objective morality ... but we'll save that for another day.

Suffice it to say, that while Newt isn't trying to write an ethical treatise here, his political pandering does betray a certain disturbing idea at the base of his thinking: namely, by extrapolation he seems to be saying to his base; the law should be what you want it to be, or ... by extension ... the law should be what I want it to be.

Which is frightening indeed.