If God Is Dead...

... then as Will WIlkinson explains none of the things Ramesh Ponnuru is worried about here actually follow. As Will says:

Suppose you know that there is free will or that moral reasoning is not futile. Next, suppose you find that the universe is made out of only whatever the universe is made out of. What do you infer? You infer that free will and moral reasoning, which occur inside the universe (or as aspects of the universe), whatever they may be, are made possible because of whatever it is the universe is made out of. And there you are.

David Chalmers tackles some related issues in his relatively accessible paper "The Matrix as Metaphysics". One point to note is that even within the materialist framework we've experienced some rather stunning revelations as to what the world is made of. The discovery, for example, that matter is composed of atoms didn't lead everyone to freak out and say "oh my God! I used to think the kitchen was full of cookware but now I know it's really full of atoms!" Rather, the kitchen continues to be full of cookware, but the cookware is made of atoms.

Then you learn that the atoms are made of subatomic particles. That, in fact, the atoms are mostly empty space. That the subatomic particles obey the odd principles of quantum mechanics. All kinds of weird stuff. None of this, however, undermines your pre-existing knowledge of the macroscopic world. Pots hold water, but colanders don't. It's interesting to learn more about the ultimate nature of matter, but that doesn't make our everyday knowledge of the world endlessly renegotiable. Similarly, moral reasoning does in fact make sense -- people do it all the time.

Comments

Sometimes I use my colander if I would like a salad, and sometimes I don't want a salad. But moral reasoning, by definition, is the tool that you are supposed to use whether you like the outcome or not. In a materialist universe, I would have no reason to use moral reasoning if I disliked the outcome. Therefore it does not exist.

Posted by D Cook | July 19, 2007 9:01 AM

This does not seem to be a particularly strong answer since presumably the response would be to wonder on what basis we know that there is free will and that moral reasoning is possible.

The evidence at the end does not seem particularly compelling. People engage in reasoning about moral issues, but it does not follow that it makes sense if the reasoning is not based on anything. It makes no sense to argue that things are improving in Iraq as all indicators run in the other direction, but people do it all the time.

In fact theology has been full of people engaging in forms of reasoning that make no sense. So this is not something one should be able to slip by the theologically minded. (Or maybe it is something that is easiest to slip by the theologically minded). But one hardly seems to answer Ponnuru by begging the question that he raises.

The Chalmers argument has limitations of a similar sort. Chalmers is right that there are lots of weird ways the world could turn out to be that would turn out to be answers to the question of what a chair actually is. But it does not follow that there are no ways the world could be that would not require us to abandon some of our everyday concepts. And issues like free will and ethics seem to be better candidates than are things like chairs.

Posted by Lon | July 19, 2007 9:01 AM

The sooner humans come to terms with death as the end of everything they've ever known, with nothing more thereafter, the sooner the endless debate over what all this means can be dispensed with. It's all nothing more than you're born, you live and then you die. During the middle part just be cool and don't kill or maim or steal. The golden rule you might call it. If some situations seem cruel or unjust that's just the way it is. Life sucks for some and not for others. If your life is good try to help someone else. If it sucks hope they'll do the same for you. Quit watching the damn mortality clock and do something with yourself.

Posted by steve duncan | July 19, 2007 9:03 AM

This is Ponnuru's main argument, and it's stupid:

If it is true that the universe consists entirely and without remainder of particles and energy, then all human action must be within the domain of caused events, free will does not exist, and moral reasoning is futile if not illusory (as are other kinds of reasoning).

Apparently Ramesh Ponnuru knows exactly what "particles and energy" are, to the degree that he can be utterly certain of their complete determinism. He seems to have just taken Descartes' hypothesis of mechanism and pretended that it applies fully and comprehensively.

Now, what is interesting to me is the historical question. Matt is certainly right that people do moral reasoning. What I would suggest, though, is that contemporary secularism is (a) inextricable from religion as a concept and (b) historically dependent on a set of shared ideals about human nature which developed in liberal Protestant theology. Secularists hold to incredibly Protestant moralities.

That doesn't mean you "need God" to have an ethics, but it means that within the particular set of historical circumstances that produced the new secularism, people behave and think in ways that have a grounding in earlier liberal protestant thought and practice.

Posted by DivGuy | July 19, 2007 9:12 AM

I am not a religious person, not even in the "spiritual but not religious" sense. However, I am utterly baffled by people who find the death of God to be comforting. The French existentialists had it right; the death of God is nothing but terrifying. I find that the current atheist (or anti-theist, really) movement has spent far too little time taking their philosophy to its conclusions. Without God, there's no truth, moral or otherwise. The philosophical constructions people create to prove that there is seem to me to be pleasant fictions of exactly the sort atheists think God to be.

Posted by Freddie | July 19, 2007 9:16 AM

First Jonah Lucianne and now Ponnuru.

Matt must be paying the NRO to set up the fish in the barrel for him to shoot.

Posted by gregor | July 19, 2007 9:20 AM

Doesn't Ponnuru's argument run aground on the uncertainty principle? One of the fundamental principles of quantum mechanics is that the future can't be determined, as the movement of subatomic particles is probabilistic. Therefore there's no predestination in a quantum universe -- something one cannot say about a universe with a supreme being. The Calvinists, for example, would be shocked to find out that free will does exist.

Posted by Jeff Fecke | July 19, 2007 9:22 AM

If it is true that the universe consists entirely and without remainder of particles and energy, then all human action must be within the domain of caused events, free will does not exist, and moral reasoning is futile if not illusory

yes, that is true, and your conclusion is correct. now get over yourself.

Without God, there's no truth, moral or otherwise.

bullshit.

Posted by cleek | July 19, 2007 9:22 AM

_"This does not seem to be a particularly strong answer since presumably the response would be to wonder on what basis we know that there is free will and that moral reasoning is possible._"

Yes- but of course that's true _if God exists as well_. Go back and read the Euthyphro. (You should do it for other reasons, too- you can only barely consider yourself literate if you have not read it, for example.) Where you're done there, go read some Kant for a deeper and better worked out account of the problem. We do and should wonder on what basis we know that moral reasoning is possible or that free will exits (insofar as it does) but postulating God doesn't help answer these question _at all_ and it's a sign of not having thought very hard to think it does.

Posted by Matt | July 19, 2007 9:28 AM

Without God, there's no truth, moral or otherwise.

What is moral truth? More importantly, what is immoral truth?

I think Ponnuru just likes to justaexpose words in a manner that the resulting phrases sound profound but are ultimately meaningless.

May be he has been secretly advising George Bush on morality. For without Ponnuruan (il)logic, there would be no Iraq fiasco.

Posted by gregor | July 19, 2007 9:33 AM

I agree with Freddie that, at least for most people, the death of God is terrifying. Existentialism is there for a reason.

I think a moral sense is to a large degree innate, based on empathy and emotional responses.

If one is going to ignore the emotional component of it, and just focus on a logical basis for morality, then one can categorize different moral rules based on different premises, but not come to any absolute conclusion as to what is, or is not, moral.

I agree with everything steve duncan says above, except that my eyes are riveted to the mortality clock.

Posted by Jim W | July 19, 2007 9:39 AM

I have to admit that I'm not finding either Wilkinson's ("touch your nose") or Yglesias's ("we do it all the time") positive response to Ponnuru very satisfying. I don't have a philosophy background, though.

Posted by SomeCallMeTim | July 19, 2007 9:42 AM

Morality is part of metaphysics and so has only a tangential connection to the physical world. We're not going to get there by argument and reason. There are grave impediments to belief in Free Will, Morality, God etc. (Things like people who are born schizophrenics, infant mortality, the intractability of pedophilic behavior, etc.) You surmount these impediments or you don't.

Posted by Jeffrey Davis | July 19, 2007 9:46 AM

The French existentialists had it right; the death of God is nothing but terrifying.

The French existentialists thought everything was terrifying. If they thought God existed, they would have been freaked out by the idea of an all-powerful demon creating the universe on a whim, damning people to hell for daring to take pleasure in anything but him.

For that matter, I never understood how the existence of God is supposed to give us either free will or objective morality. God makes these "soul" objects that direct our actions. Whether we are controlled by brains or mystical souls, both those objects would have causal history, or be completely random--and why should uncontrollable randomness be called free will? God gives us a set of moral commands and says we must follow them. Who says we must follow God? God? If circular logic is all you need, you didn't need God for that.

Whether or not God exists, morality is subjective. It just so happens that either evolution or the whims of God has given us all roughly consistent subjective moralities. You can choose to be disturbed by the fact that either Nature-Red-In-Tooth-and-Claw or Giant-Sky-Demon have dictated our subjective moralities for us. But it's your choice to be disturbed. Unpleasant fictions are no more realistic than pleasant ones--it's an aesthetic choice, not a philosophical one.

Posted by Consumatopia | July 19, 2007 9:51 AM

I often hear people say that you can't prove or diprove the existence of God. That is true, as the evidence currently stands.

However, if God actually exists, he could easily announce his presence through any number of dramatic means (announcing his presence by writing words with clouds, levitating the empire state building, etc).
I'm sure this kind of evidence would be enough even for Richard Dawkins to prove that God exists.

There is no evidence, however (with the exception of a few old wives tales told recorded in some books). The silence is deafening.

Posted by Jim W | July 19, 2007 9:53 AM

Without God, there's no truth, moral or otherwise. The philosophical constructions people create to prove that there is seem to me to be pleasant fictions of exactly the sort atheists think God to be.
Posted by Freddie | July 19, 2007 9:16 AM

Pleasant fictions? I'd say you have it exactly backwards. Until God died he was a pleasant fiction of men. Paradoxically, in death he is more real then ever before, (kind of like Jesus in that respect). 117 years after Nietzsche pronounced God dead, we are able to see that the entity that died was not God himself but our conception of God up until now.

God is very much alive, he just doesn't look like anything painted on the ceilings of the Vatican.

Posted by Northern Observer | July 19, 2007 9:53 AM

Re: "For that matter, I never understood how the existence of God is supposed to give us either free will or objective morality."

I just discussed this with a Christian believer yesterday. According to him, this one needs to be filed under: it only seems nonsensical because we are too stupid to understand.

Posted by Jim W | July 19, 2007 9:56 AM

I don't have a philosophy background, though.

what do you need one for ? the existence of god does not need to be a philosophical question. it's a valid question to ask science; and science says: there's no evidence for a god, and there's no good reason to think there needs to be a god.

religious types always want to drag the question into the philosophical realm, where they can boil the whole thing down to "the meaning of knowledge", leaving nothing solid for anyone to hold onto, including themselves - forcing a draw, in effect. but, that's a cop-out. out here in the real world, look around, there is no god: no reason for one, no evidence of one, and plenty of evidence that religion itself is the product of power politics, demagoguery, and fear of the unknown.

Posted by cleek | July 19, 2007 9:56 AM

I have to admit that I'm not finding either Wilkinson's ("touch your nose") or Yglesias's ("we do it all the time") positive response to Ponnuru very satisfying. I don't have a philosophy background, though.

Perhaps you are looking for more profundity than necessary for the argument.

touch your nose proves the existence of free will. we do it all the time is just a statement of an observable and objective fact.

So free will and moral reasoning exist, irrespective of whether or not the universe consists entirely of energy and matter. Hence, Ponnuru's statement that without God there is no free will or moral reasoning is complete nonsense, commensurate with other proclamations made daily by the uberboys at the Corner.

Posted by anonymous | July 19, 2007 10:00 AM

Personally, my experience of not believing in (a) deity can be somewhat horrible, but I know plenty of fellow atheists who don't share my same troubles. Thing is, though, my personal experience of said horror has to do with the emptiness/meaninglessness of life aspect, and nothing to do with the "how can I make moral choices without a God to dictate my morality for me?" aspect. I've never once felt any kind of hitch in the continuity of my moral principles that coincided with a change in my religious or irreligious beliefs.

That our particular moral code happens to be derived in great part from our religious heritage is, as pointed out above, a particular historical fact, but it's not a necessary one, and I have trouble understanding, really trouble on a very deep human-to-human communication level of understanding, people who think that in the absence of some externally imposed (or, if you like, some internally created fiction of an externally imposed) code society will eat itself alive or whatever. (I have no beef with, nor trouble understanding, individuals whose personal experience is that without a religion to guide their moral code life would become existentially terrifying; my beef/incomprehension is of people who necessarily turn their personal experience/perception into a universal truth. I have trouble finding meaning in my life given the absence of God; I know lots of people who don't. The world is infinitely bigger than my tiny personal experience of it, a lesson frustratingly many people seem incapable of internalizing.)

The idea that morality is, basically, a mildly distasteful yet necessary thing we need to get through which we can be persuaded to embrace if properly incentivized - like a kid who finally commits to making straight As because his parents promised to buy him a guitar rig if he did - is, to me, profoundly uncompelling.

Posted by Quarterican | July 19, 2007 10:01 AM

Not sure if the Matt who replied to me is MattY or another, but the fact that there are good arguments against the line that Ponnuru is taking does not mean that the argument given is not a bad one.

I would also note that the two sources you suggest reading here are not particularly helpful. I assume that you point to the Euthyphro because it raises the question of whether things are good because God loves them, or whether God loves them because they are good. But in the post linked to above from Ponurro he makes explicit that that is not the stage at which he thinks that God is necessary for morality. So in reading the Euthyphro one would get an interesting discussion of a point not at issue.

Not clear whether your reference to Kant was meant to be approving or critical. Kant is someone who agrees with Ponurro on this issue, although I think unconvincingly. While he thinks that the content of morality is fixed independently of the existence of God, he did think that the possibility of it depended on the existence of God. But that was given as a transcendendent truth, I don't know that I have ever seen anything in him on the subject that rises to the level of an argument.

I should make clear that in this debate I think that Matt, or the Matts if they are different ones, are arguing for the right side. I am just not convinced they are doing a good job of it.

I do think that the answer lies in the fact that the addition of God gives one nothing in the explanation. But it is a mistake to think that the Euthyphro argument for this actually answers the point that Ponurro is making. (An argument that has been made more famously, if no more convincingly, in George Mavrodes "Religion and the Queerness of Morality"

Posted by Lon | July 19, 2007 10:12 AM

I would say that my main problem with the absence of a God is not really that it implies that life is meaninglessness, but rather that it implies the absence of an afterlife.

Suppose there was a God but we did not have souls that survived our death. Would anyone find that comforting? Not me.

As to the morality question, I agree with a lot of the commentors that belief in God doesn't provide any more satisfying logical basis for morality than unbelief.

But, what about its effects in the real world? Take abortion. A lot of believers base their opposition to abortion to the idea that life is sacred, even if it is only a blastocyst. For me, the morality of when its ok to abort a baby and when its not is much more difficult to figure out.

For example, I think its immoral NOT to abort a Downs Syndrome fetus. What about a baby with Downs Syndrome that was just born? I think that if the parents don't want it, it would be perfectly moral to kill it. My moral beliefs are based on trying to improve poeple's lives as they are lived, not in trying to preserve things that are "sacred". Obviously, most religious people think differently.

Posted by Jim W | July 19, 2007 10:13 AM

In a materialist universe, I would have no reason to use moral reasoning if I disliked the outcome.

This is only true with the hidden presumption that you're a scumbag. And scumbags will generally act unethically whether the universe is material, jello, or is God-infused.

To boil it down, your argument is: "I am a scumbag; ergo God exists."

Posted by jpe | July 19, 2007 10:14 AM

Perhaps you are looking for more profundity than necessary for the argument.

touch your nose proves the existence of free will.

For gawd's sake, how? Wilkinson instructs me to touch my nose and I do: free will. I instruct my hypothetical dog to play dead, and he does: free will, apparently. When my dog refuses not to crap inside, is this civil disobedience on his part or an indication that I ought not feed him Cheetos?

Posted by SomeCallMeTim | July 19, 2007 10:17 AM

Trying to rescue Cartesian-style free will through quantum indeterminacy is kind of silly; if you feel so metaphysically emasculated by determination, why should you suspect randomness will offer you greater "freedom?" And by this light rocks, &c. have free will. Better to find free will in the sort of structure that free-willed beings like us have.

It strikes me that conservatives all seem to be amenable to the idea that "if we're [evolved/composed of atoms/&c.] then we're no better than [animals/base matter/&c.]," without considering how one arrangement of matter might be qualitatively different than another. Among the ones who reject a material universe you get terrible anxiety about what that would do to their place in the world, among those who accept it, you get blithe genetic determinism.

The Calvinists, for example, would be shocked to find out that free will does exist.

Not true; predestination does not imply that God has prior control over your actions. It just means that you're going to Heaven or Hell based entirely on God's say-so, independently of your actions (which are free.)

Much Muslim theology, by contrast, takes the opposite tack: you are responsible and judged for your actions, which come about only because God wills them.

Now, what is interesting to me is the historical question. Matt is certainly right that people do moral reasoning. What I would suggest, though, is that contemporary secularism is (a) inextricable from religion as a concept and (b) historically dependent on a set of shared ideals about human nature which developed in liberal Protestant theology. Secularists hold to incredibly Protestant moralities.But that's kind of trivial, isn't it? If we're really materialists, then of course we should acknowledge that cultures don't spring up ex nihilo; they're what remains of the culture before, after technology, social conflicts, and so on have changed it. Inasmuch as we're Westerners and all previous Western cultures have been religious, of course our culture's ideas have a basis in religious ideas. But they're still secular ideas, just like we're still vertebrates.

Although I most definitely agree that where our ideas come from is very interesting in the specifics! Which I guess is what you meant.

Posted by Matthias | July 19, 2007 10:20 AM

Stupid html.

Posted by Matthias | July 19, 2007 10:26 AM

Morality is part of metaphysics and so has only a tangential connection to the physical world.

Morality has everything to do with the physical world.

That people feel inclined to look for abstract metaphysical absolutes is just a fact about the world, not a statement about the existence of the abstract metaphyiscal absolutes.

Consider as simple a rule as "don't kill," and try to figure out the metaphysical certainty behind applying it to eating fish or chicken, having an abortion, fighting in a war, pushing a fat man in front of a trolley, or being eaten by gigantic ant aliens from another galaxy.

Honestly, thinking of ourselves as simply a bunch of smart monkeys provides a lot of clarity.

Posted by Barbar | July 19, 2007 10:28 AM

I also find the cavalier attitude of many atheists to these questions puzzling. I do not believe there is a God, but, like Sartre and Freddie, I find this rather frightening. Moreover, if pressed I would have to acknowledge that I strive to behave morally because I feel like it. I do not find this satisfactory but it is all I have.

The recent wave of smug atheism has made me want to become religious out of spite.

Posted by BP | July 19, 2007 10:32 AM

(a) All should read Real Patterns, (b) Morality is a facet of the Wittgensteinian language-game.

Posted by sherifffruitfly | July 19, 2007 10:33 AM

The recent wave of smug atheism has made me want to become religious out of spite.

So it's almost as if you think religious belief is a matter of tribal identity rather than a connection with absolute metaphysical truths. Fascinating.

Posted by Barbar | July 19, 2007 10:35 AM

I should note that I think the above argument could be fixed if the first sentence was changed to "Suppose you know that there is pleasure and pain, and that ones actions affect the degree and distribution of these things" with the obvious changes to the rest to make it match.

The problem with the above is that they either assume the existence of things that are in doubt, or get around this by stating a willingness to employ the concepts to refer to whatever is out there in cases in which what is out there might make a very big difference.

Posted by Lon | July 19, 2007 10:39 AM

I do not believe there is a God, but, like Sartre and Freddie, I find this rather frightening.

frightening ?

i think it would be nice if there was a god (the kind, gentle, fatherly Christian god - not the jealous, spiteful, petty, dangerous monstrous Christian god). he'd be a safety net, cosmic concierge, guardian, etc.. it'd be like having the best sidekick ever.

but that fact that there isn't shouldn't be frightening - it should be liberating. you're in control of your life, you don't have to answer to an unpredictable, irrational, murderous, invisible god!

Posted by cleek | July 19, 2007 10:48 AM

I suppose that there's a kernel of truth in Ponnuru's argument if you focus on his choice of the term "reductive materialism;" if you are indeed a reductionist of a certain sort, applying the compositional fallacy to everything, then apparently-meaningful human behavior is just meaningless atomic behavior. And he's careful to say that not all atheists believe this, though the implication is that most of them do.

But of course almost nobody believes something so silly. You can't have a meaningful understanding of animals with just physics, or humans with just biology, or society with just psychology. There are people that try to do that, but they're regarded as kind of silly by serious scientists.

Posted by Matthias | July 19, 2007 10:54 AM

It seems that Michael Gerson-- and a couple of commenters here-- are arguing, "The only reason to be good is that God will punish you if you're not." Which sounds to me more like a lack of morality than the reverse.

[tangent] JimW says: "I just discussed this with a Christian believer yesterday. According to him, this one needs to be filed under: it only seems nonsensical because we are too stupid to understand."

If only more Creationists realized how that applied to evolution... [/tangent]

Posted by Eric | July 19, 2007 10:59 AM

I just think that people are much, much too quick to dismiss the enormous consequences of the death of God. I think a person like MY seems to generally believe that you can live in a classical Western worldview but just jettison God. But, look-- whether you all like it or not, the idea of God has been one of the fundaments of the Western worldview for several thousand years. And I think, if you follow the threads of reasoning to their logical conclusions, you have to be a Rorytian if you are an atheist. I don't think (and its clear some of you disagree) that you can have absolute values without God.

I also think that this subject demonstrates a weakness of the blog format. I'm not a blog hater, but I do think that in discussions like this, which require depth instead of breadth, the blog format is a little lacking.

Posted by Freddie | July 19, 2007 10:59 AM

the whole quantum indeterminacy thing is a red herring with respect to free will. if there's nothing outside the material, our "decisions" are the result of material processes, not some metaphysical soul or will. it doesn't matter if there's some indeterminacy in the input, or even in our internal decision processes, because you still can't get outside the process for any sort of "free" will or decision. look at it this way: you input numbers into a computer for calculation. even if the numbers are the result of some indeterminacy, and thus unpredictable from the computer's perspective, the result of the computer's calculation is still determined. similarly, even if there's some glitch in the computer's calculations, so that it reaches the "wrong" result, that still doesn't give the computer freedom.

none of this matters, because we feel like we decide and new revelations won't change how we feel. but to think our decisions really aren't determined is silly if you believe in science. this doesn't mean they can be predicted, which is why it doesn't feel determined to us or observers. (we are all unique biological functions calculating away on the input of the universe; while doing the calculation (deciding), you don't know where it's going to end up, so it feels like you have some control (and you do, since you're the function and only that function would do what you do).)

Posted by dj superflat | July 19, 2007 11:01 AM

(dj superflat just posted something almost identical to this, but this might be a little easier to respond to)
Maybe somebody can explain free will in an non-supernatural universe to me, because I don't understand how it's possible (and I'm an atheist). I'm a total layman at this metaphysical stuff, but here's how I see it (and I look forward to having any holes in this reasoning pointed out): Consider the state of the universe at some past time (t0), and the present moment (t1). What is it that determined the state of the universe at t1? It seems like the only factors that could be involved are 1.) the state of the universe at t0, 2.) quantum randomness, and 3.) supernatural intervention from outside the universe. Free will can't be part of 1.), since t0 could be before I was born, or for that matter before the sun condensed out of interstellar matter. Nor does it seem like it can be part of 2.), that being the whole point of randomness. So, if you deny 3.), how can you accept free will?

Note that none of this applies to moral reasoning, I find moral reasoning to be perfectly compatible with an atheistic universe. Even if free will is a fiction, it's useful enough that we can continue to order our society around it.

Posted by OhioBoy | July 19, 2007 11:05 AM

Re: "I don't think (and its clear some of you disagree) that you can have absolute values without God."

I agree with this. On the other hand, I'm not sure if its logical to have absolute values WITH God either. I'm willing to listen to a convincing argument. That's not to deny that a lot of people use their belief in God as the (illogical) basis for their values.

As for Eric's point that God provides morality through a carrot-and-stick mechanism. My understanding is that this goes against a lot of Christian thought (particularly of the Evangelical variety), wherein its just one's belief and acceptance of God that determines one's fate, rather than one's actions. Belief in God is supposed to lead to good behavior through some unspecified mechanism (notwithstanding evidence to the contrary in today's politics).

Posted by Jim W | July 19, 2007 11:09 AM

That people feel inclined to look for abstract metaphysical absolutes is just a fact about the world, not a statement about the existence of the abstract metaphyiscal absolutes.

I don't think you and I share the same notion of what metaphysics mean. Metaphysics (for me) is simply that which is opaque to inspection: other minds, morality, etc.

Posted by Jeffrey Davis | July 19, 2007 11:09 AM

This sort of discussion always makes me think people are announcing, "Without God, I would murder, steal and rape. A lot. I want to murder, steal and rape. I feel no compunction against those things. I don't think they're wrong or counterproductive. I don't think they'd reduce me to a compulsive bestial non-functional monster. I'd be doing all that stuff right now, if I weren't afraid that God would send me to hell."

And I think in some cases, that's exactly what people are saying: their fear of God really is the only reason they don't go on a rampage. Considering the bloodthirstiness that Ramesh Ponnuru has displayed on occasion, let's not jump to the conclusion that he's simply stating a (flawed) intellectual argument. He may be telling us a deep psychological truth about himself and those like him.

Posted by Jim Gardner | July 19, 2007 11:10 AM

"you're in control of your life, you don't have to answer to an unpredictable, irrational, murderous, invisible god!"

The lack of a god does not necessitate that you are in control of your life.

Free will is just God's replacement. God had the right to punish you for antisocial behaviour because he was god. Society has the right to punish you for antisocial behaviour because you have free will. We couldn't dump god until we had a way to do his job without him. We are nowhere near being able to run a society without personal responsibility and punishment, so we are stuck with the free will illusion for some time.

Posted by Njorl | July 19, 2007 11:11 AM

OhioBoy: obviously it depends on how you define free will.

Roughly speaking, I think a agent has free will if it is intelligent and capable of controlling itself!

This may be horribly unsatisfying to many people because it is not an absolutist definition. That is, every real agent faces limitations -- limited intelligence, limited self-control. But worrying about the fact that absolute free will cannot exist in the real world strikes me as very silly.

Posted by Barbar | July 19, 2007 11:12 AM

whether you all like it or not, the idea of God has been one of the fundaments of the Western worldview for several thousand years

and what about the Eastern, and African worldviews ? do they not have the same basic morals that you seem to want to attribute to the idea of the Christian God ?

I don't think (and its clear some of you disagree) that you can have absolute values without God.

i don't know what you mean by "absolute values". but if you're talking about basic morality, that's easily explained by evolution: basic morality is one mechanism that's evolved in us on our way to becoming the gregarious, interdependent, social animals that we are today. aggressive murderous cannibalism (as you find in spiders, for example) isn't compatible with social animals with slow-developing children, but a deep revulsion to the killing of members of our immediate social group is.

Posted by cleek | July 19, 2007 11:14 AM

worrying about the fact that absolute free will cannot exist in the real world strikes me as very silly.

Worrying about the fact that, while I think of myself as an independent agent, I'm actually a self-delusional fool who is a slave to destiny, no more able to control my life than an asteroid can control its orbit? That doesn't seem silly to me. Not that it's unresolvable, the Stoics I think did a pretty good job of explaining how to live in such a universe, but it hardly seems like an irrelevant issue.

Posted by OhioBoy | July 19, 2007 11:22 AM

I'll chime in from the Buddhist position: There are no gods, therefore, morality. With gods, you can do whatever you want, and the god can punish or forgive you.

Without gods, there is strict Karma (action and consequence): as you sow, so shall you reap. Piss into the wind and get wet. Sugar for sugar and salt for salt. Do and thou shalt be done by.

Determinism enforces morality in this scheme, but I don't know how it is affected by quantum uncertainity and Godel undecidability...

Posted by M. Peachbush | July 19, 2007 11:27 AM

Jim W, you probably should change your example from Down Syndrome to Tay-Sachs or Trisomy 13. The severity of Down Syndrome varies greatly, and in general, does not make for "a life not worth living."

Posted by Brock | July 19, 2007 11:28 AM

The lack of a god does not necessitate that you are in control of your life.

of course it does. the decisions we make are our own. they can be influenced by other factors (society, the weather, superstition), but they're still our own.

what i meant about the lack of god being liberating was that without god watching over our shoulders, influencing the world for or against us, killing or sickening us for opaque reasons, laying traps and tests for us - all depending on his own capricious and unknowable mind - we are free to see the world as it is, and to take responsibility for the things we do. we don't have to try to figure out what god was telling us when he set our house on fire, we can just learn not to leave candles burning.

We are nowhere near being able to run a society without personal responsibility and punishment, so we are stuck with the free will illusion for some time.

i hope it didn't sound like i believe otherwise. of course there are pressures on the decisions we make, but they aren't supernatural.

Posted by cleek | July 19, 2007 11:31 AM

"What I would suggest, though, is that contemporary secularism is (a) inextricable from religion as a concept and (b) historically dependent on a set of shared ideals about human nature which developed in liberal Protestant theology. Secularists hold to incredibly Protestant moralities."

Except that Western Protestant secularism is not exactly Weberian industrial capitalism in that it only formed in the Protestant West. Korea, Japan and Turkey all formed their own forms of secularism, for instance, from outside Christiandom. This isn't to say that there was no philosophical influence from the West (just as the West did not natively come up with the entire idea of the modern, functioning nation-state, which was partly influenced by the Jesuits' notes on Ming China), but it wasn't based on Protestant morality either. You seem to arguing a line of cultural determinism. Ponnuru, for one thing, is Indian-American and a convert to Catholicism, both of which don't fit that cleanly into the Protestant Western experience.

Personally, I find it more comforting that over time fewer people in the West or whatever find a basis of morality in religion or political religion (fascism, communism, anarchism). The legacy of anti-Semitism in Europe, for example, is an outgrowth of Christian theology, especially the story of the Jesus's martyrdom. Similarly, the French existentialists blamed the Death of God partly for the horrors of the two world wars, yet Christian moralism (as opposed to morality) played a huge role in crafting the tribalism behind those wars and the Holocaust. The Nazis, despite being somewhat secular, wore belt buckles that read "God is on our side." I find the idea of personal responsibility and reason to be more liberating than religion and the idea of God. I found the idea of a god to be oppressive and limiting and was happier once I gave up pretending to believe in it. When you believe that there is a god and that god defines morality, you are inherently limiting the moral possibilities before you without really questioning them.

For instance, in 12th-century Catholic Europe, if you took the idea of god as fact and that god's will was transmitted to you via the interpretations of the Papacy and your local priest and they told you Jews were evil and needed to be killed in pogroms, you would automatically be limiting yourself to immoral options. Historically, the majority of people probably haven't believed that there is a single god for all of us, but a single or group of gods for everyone and that those who do not follow your god are immoral. Believing in a universal god is a totalistic enterprise.

Posted by Reality Man | July 19, 2007 11:32 AM

Worrying about the fact that, while I think of myself as an independent agent, I'm actually a self-delusional fool who is a slave to destiny, no more able to control my life than an asteroid can control its orbit?

How quickly we slide from an absurd "absolute free will" (I can create my abilities and interests and actions independently of anything else in the universe, including physical laws and history) to "self-delusional... slave... no more able to control my life than an asteroid can control its orbit." Hmm, do you think there's any middle ground there?

Posted by Barbar | July 19, 2007 11:33 AM

Wow -lots of responses. I'd just like to point out that WW begs the question, as far as Ponnuru is concerned.
Further, there's a tremendous difference between finding out that "free will exists" or that "moral reasoning is not futile."
Eventually, libertarian philosophy is going to have to give way to the facts of neuroscience.

Posted by berger | July 19, 2007 11:35 AM

Hmm, do you think there's any middle ground there?

Describe it, then people will take a shot at knocking it down. Maybe they won't be able to.

Posted by SomeCallMeTim | July 19, 2007 11:35 AM

Elaborating a bit... does your dog have more free will than an asteroid? Obviously yes. Do you have more free will than your dog? Obviously yes. The question isn't "do I have free will" but "do I have *enough* free will."

Posted by Barbar | July 19, 2007 11:37 AM

Damn, it's been two hours and we haven't solved philosophy yet. Perhaps if we simplify things:

1) Is the universe deterministic?

2) Do we have free will?

3) Does God exist?

4-6) What bearing do the answers to these questions have on each other?

I guess we have to answer 4-6 first so we know which order to tackle 1-3. Bonus points for defining free will, and deciding whether a God proved to exist through this process would be likable (or terrifying if disproven).

Posted by drlemaster | July 19, 2007 11:39 AM

Well, gee, "obviously yes" is a convincing argument. Let's see: "Does God exist. Obviously yes." And suddenly Ponnoru is back in the game.

Posted by SomeCallMeTim | July 19, 2007 11:40 AM

Another thing, secularism in Europe did not grow organically solely from inside Protestantism, but throughout the (proto-)liberal thinkers as a philosophical basis for violence control. Locke's secularism was pretty much a form of cultural and moral relativism that basically Muslims believe in the Qu'ran, Christians believe in the Bible, Jews believe in the Torah, you can't prove any system of religious belief superior to another and thus have no right to violently force anyone else to believe in your god either. Enlightenment thinkers were horrified at the effects of the Wars of Religion that plagued European soil, the persecution of religious minorities in Europe such as Jews, Anabaptists and atheists, the constant fighting between European powers and the Ottoman Empire that were partly based on religious tribalism, etc. Not wanting oneself, those around one and innocents in general was a powerful motivator for questioning the whole god concept in Europe.

Posted by Reality Man | July 19, 2007 11:43 AM

> Worrying about the fact that, while I think of > myself as an independent agent, I'm actually a > self-delusional fool who is a slave to destiny, no > more able to control my life than an asteroid can > control its orbit? That doesn't seem silly to me

Its silly if it makes you question your independence in well-proven areas.
In the context of your own life, you can
still decide whether to pick your
nose. Whether that decision was caused, in the
universal scope, by a butterfly fluttering its
wings in Brazil is...interesting, I suppose, but
not of any particular concern.

Posted by Raj | July 19, 2007 11:45 AM

..."the kind, gentle, fatherly Christian god - not the jealous, spiteful, petty, dangerous monstrous Christian god) "

Based on the way this universe operates, God #2 might very well be out there.

As for the main topic, I still don't get why the existence of God is necessary for free will. Then again, I'm not quite sure what "free will" really means in the first place. I get randomness. I get determinism. What's "free will," except for a black box drawn around phenomena we don't want to investigate?

Posted by AlanC9 | July 19, 2007 11:45 AM

Well, gee, "obviously yes" is a convincing argument.

Why don't you explain to me how asteroids and dogs have the same amount of free will? Or how you can't tell who has more freedom, you or your dog?

Here are some helpful counter-arguments (I apologize for not elaborating into 30-page mathematical proofs):

1. Dogs can be said to have wants and desires. Asteroids cannot.

2. If a dog is hungry and wants to eat, it can engage in behavior designed to satisfy its goal. An asteroid cannot.

3. People can articulate their desires and reflect on them, even sometimes changing them. Dogs cannot.

As I said before, this whole issue is puzzling only because people insist on absolute freedom. Think of yourself as a glorified monkey and the puzzles go away.

Posted by Barbar | July 19, 2007 11:46 AM

The recent wave of smug atheism has made me want to become religious out of spite.

There's been a recent wave of smug atheism? I must have missed it. I saw a minor surge (three books worth) of defiant, or perhaps desperate, atheism, but can't recall seeing any smugness.

Posted by dob | July 19, 2007 11:52 AM

If you believe in the Hindu philosophers' construct of God, all this debate becomes kind of trivial.

If it is beyond the capacity of the human mind to fully know God (the finite cannot comprehend the infinite, according to the Hindus, and, therefore, God can be described by humans only in terms of what it is not and not what it is), all the statements made by humans about what follows from the existence of God are just speculations.

I think that to my personal intellectual satisfaction, no one has been able to improve upon the Hindu philosophers' construct of God.

Posted by gregor | July 19, 2007 11:55 AM

1) Is the universe deterministic?

yes

2) Do we have free will?

not if you mean "I can create my abilities and interests and actions independently of anything else in the universe, including physical laws and history" (quoting Barbar at 11:33). the fact that the universe is deterministic (and i'll add, self-contained) makes this impossible.

in the sense that our brains can come up with ideas faster than we can identify, in real time, all the inputs that went into forming those ideas, then sure. just like essentially everything else people do, free will's an illusion based on incomplete knowledge and high-level interpretation. but we interpret that illusion as reality and live our lives based on that interpretation.

3) Does God exist?

no

4-6) What bearing do the answers to these questions have on each other?

the answer to 3 makes all further questions and conclusions about "god" irrelevant at least, and fantasy at best.

Posted by cleek | July 19, 2007 11:56 AM

For example, I think its immoral NOT to abort a Downs Syndrome fetus. What about a baby with Downs Syndrome that was just born? I think that if the parents don't want it, it would be perfectly moral to kill it. My moral beliefs are based on trying to improve poeple's lives as they are lived, not in trying to preserve things that are "sacred". Obviously, most religious people think differently.

Wtf, immoral? Why is it immoral, care to make an argument? If we could, should we abort all autists too? How about all children with mental retardation?

Really, I urge you to visit your local special-ed school for a day to get a claerer picture of what you're talking about.

Btw, I'm as atheist as it gets and think god is a meaningless and generally unhelpful concept.

Posted by novakant | July 19, 2007 11:56 AM

basic morality is one mechanism that's evolved in us on our way to becoming the gregarious, interdependent, social animals that we are today. aggressive murderous cannibalism (as you find in spiders, for example) isn't compatible with social animals with slow-developing children, but a deep revulsion to the killing of members of our immediate social group is.

Evolution, among other things, predisposes one to rape. I just don't think turning to evolution for the roots of morality is worthwhile.

Posted by Freddie | July 19, 2007 11:58 AM

"Worrying about the fact that, while I think of myself as an independent agent, I'm actually a self-delusional fool who is a slave to destiny, no more able to control my life than an asteroid can control its orbit? That doesn't seem silly to me. Not that it's unresolvable, the Stoics I think did a pretty good job of explaining how to live in such a universe, but it hardly seems like an irrelevant issue."

Let's say that when you were five your parents told you that light was a particle, that light and electricity are related and that your brain runs on electricity. You would grow up believing that. Now say at eight your parents told you that light was a wave. You would have to change your prior assumptions for the physical scientific basis for your existence. Then at ten your parents told you light behaves sometimes like a wave, sometimes like a particle, but we don't have a perfect understanding of this. In the grand scheme of things, how would this all really change your day-to-day life? You can't make light obey whatever you want it to obey. If you want to become a writer, fall in love, join the military, have sex, become celibate, eat only meat, become a vegetarian, have kids, stay childless, etc. you can make those decisions without knowing whether or not you have complete free will. If we had complete free will I would will myself to grow huge wings from my back so I could fly, but our free will is bounded by the realm of physical possibility. Is it really conducive to improving your happiness from one day to another if you found out that humanity on average had, say, 15% more free will than you had assumed? If you are happy in life, so be it. If you aren't, be mature enough to stop blaming this on a lack of god and try to fix your own life. If we don't have free will, so what? If you discover this, all it does is add new information to your life. If it causes you to alter your behavior, then that in itself brings into question the whole idea of "there is no free will."

Posted by Reality Man | July 19, 2007 11:58 AM

Well, gee, "obviously yes" is a convincing argument. Let's see: "Does God exist. Obviously yes." And suddenly Ponnoru is back in the game.

"Obviously yes" means that we can observe it - look there, right before your very eyes! The asteroid not only follows the same path every x years but does not have any particular opinions about its path or goals which it's trying to fulfill by it - no opinions or goals at all, really. Your dog has goals and maybe even opinions, though not terribly cultured ones, and her actions are performed to bring them about. And you have goals and opinions, some of them contradictory, and reason and so on, and you can act to enfurther them just as they are, and you can also critically examine your goals and values and opinions with reference to reason and each other, and, through that process, come up with new and better goals, which you'll then pursue through your actions.

That's all that free will means. If you want, ex ante, for "free will" to be supernatural by definiton, you can certainly choose to define it that way - but in order for us to have a meaningful discussion about it, you'd have to show why it's desirable, as opposed to the above definition, which obviously is.

Now show me God.

Posted by Matthias | July 19, 2007 11:59 AM

I forgot to add: is there anything more silly than a sentiment like "Oh my God, what about the possibility that I have no control over the words I'm typing right now, they're being created by destiny, and to make me even more distressed I actually believe I control what I am saying and thinking, so not only am I a slave but I am also SELF-DELUDED. Oh the agony and distress! What can be done, what can be done?"

Posted by Barbar | July 19, 2007 11:59 AM

I forgot to add: is there anything more silly than a sentiment like "Oh my God, what about the possibility that I have no control over the words I'm typing right now, they're being created by destiny, and to make me even more distressed I actually believe I control what I am saying and thinking, so not only am I a slave but I am also SELF-DELUDED. Oh the agony and distress! What can be done, what can be done?"

Posted by Barbar | July 19, 2007 11:59 AM

Why don't you explain to me how asteroids and dogs have the same amount of free will? Or how you can't tell who has more freedom, you or your dog?

Oh sweet jeebus. A very serious, thoughtful, argument that has never been made in such detail or with such care. I eagerly await MY's second book, Liberalism: From Feuerbach to Free Will.

The uncomfortable truth is that, as drlemaster indicates, these are largish topics unlikely to be dispensed with in a blog post, or even in comments.

Posted by SomeCallMeTim | July 19, 2007 12:05 PM

Evolution, among other things, predisposes one to rape. I just don't think turning to evolution for the roots of morality is worthwhile.

You're right to reject the naturalistic fallacy, but:

1) That isn't necessarily the case about rape (though that's a discussion in itself), and

2) The argument is not a moral theory itself ("this is the way we evolved, therefore, this is the way we should act") but an account of how we arrived at moral theories. Obviously moral statements are true or false regardless of how we came to believe them (excluding self-referential moral laws we might come up with for fun.) Regardless of whether our moral intuitions came from evolution, or divine revelation, or the halls of philosophy or whatever, we should find whether they're true or not by engaging them with reason and empathy.

Posted by Matthias | July 19, 2007 12:09 PM

So claiming that you have more freedom than your dog is like claiming that there is a tradition of liberal fascism from Hagel to Whole Foods? Well fuck me. I hope you have a smart dog.

If you need to read a book on the subject, I strongly recommend "Elbow Room" by Daniel Dennett.

Posted by Barbar | July 19, 2007 12:09 PM

Barbar, I feel like you're missing my point (which is only fair, because you obviously feel like I'm missing your point). You keep giving many reasons why we appear to have free will, which I don't dispute. Asteroids were perhaps an unhelpful example, so consider computers. Computers can certainly appear to have free will; a computer chess program, for example, will certainly appear to freely choose the Tarrasch defense or whatever, but in fact it did not, it was merely blindly and helplessly following instructions that had been preprogrammed into it. So the question is, am I, or am I not, different from a computer in any meaningful way? That seems like an important question to me, even if, ultimately, it won't really impact my daily life.

Reading some more comments, I guess people will want me to justify my assertion that whether or not I am different than a computer is an important question, which is fair, since that seems just as self-evident to me as "We have free will" seems self-evident to MY. Certainly the reason that Ponnuru (who started this whole discussion off, after all) would give is that, if humans are not fundamentally different from computers, than our whole moral system falls apart, because then killing a person isn't distinguishable from destroying a computer. But mainly, determining the truth about the universe simply seems like something that we ought to do. Determining whether we are fundamentally different than computers seems as important as determining whether the world is flat or round was to the ancient Greeks. It made absolutely no difference to the lives of anyone alive at the time whether the world was flat or round, and it certainly may have seemed like a pointless debate to many of them, since they were never going to travel a mile from their birthplace regardless. But truth matters, at least to me.

Posted by OhioBoy | July 19, 2007 12:09 PM

The uncomfortable truth is that, as drlemaster indicates, these are largish topics unlikely to be dispensed with in a blog post, or even in comments.

Right. I mean, blogs (and blog comments) tend to look for answers that can be boiled down to a thousand words or less. I'm afraid that this question, which has been turned over by the greatest minds in history for quite some time, is not going to be resolved by a blog-comment zinger.

Posted by Freddie | July 19, 2007 12:10 PM

"Evolution, among other things, predisposes one to rape. I just don't think turning to evolution for the roots of morality is worthwhile."

That depends whether you think we're closer in terms of evolution to chimpanzees or bonobos. A recent article in "Foreign Affairs" notes that for decades geneticists believed we were most closely related to chimpanzees, which tend to live in loosely constructed male-dominated societies that value extreme individualism and violence. Recent studies have made scientists wonder if we are just as closely related to bonobos, which tend to live in close-knit, matriarchal societies that tend to be less violent and more cooperative. Bonobos tend to react with horror, revulsion and compassion upon seeing another of their number hurt or attacked, unlike chimpanzees. There are recent neurological studies that suggest we evolved to feel an innate sense of revulsion at seeing another human in pain, which would make evolutionary sense because we are social creatures who depend on one another for our survival. Rape, after all, is an act of violence that disrupts social harmony. I am pre-disposed to wanting to put my penis in hot women, but I would feel bad about myself for doing that to women who wouldn't want it. I would feel physically ill if I cheated on a math test in third grade, which is a much less grave offense. Even in ancient Greece, although raping your enemies' women was seen as heroic, raping a fellow Greek was already seen as a grave offense.

Posted by Reality Man | July 19, 2007 12:12 PM

1) That isn't necessarily the case about rape (though that's a discussion in itself), and

2) The argument is not a moral theory itself ("this is the way we evolved, therefore, this is the way we should act") but an account of how we arrived at moral theories. Obviously moral statements are true or false regardless of how we came to believe them (excluding self-referential moral laws we might come up with for fun.) Regardless of whether our moral intuitions came from evolution, or divine revelation, or the halls of philosophy or whatever, we should find whether they're true or not by engaging them with reason and empathy.

I see what you mean. I do think that looking to evolution for the measure of morality is a waste of time. And I also think that, whether or not we think that evolution predisposes us to do anything that we consider morally repugnant now, I think anyone can see that the process of evolution could lead us to be predisposed to behavior that we consider repugnant.

Posted by Freddie | July 19, 2007 12:14 PM

Evolution, among other things, predisposes one to rape. I just don't think turning to evolution for the roots of morality is worthwhile.

yes, and eating and breathing also lead to choking. i urge you, for your own sake, to stop eating. and breathing.

Posted by cleek | July 19, 2007 12:17 PM

So the question is, am I, or am I not, different from a computer in any meaningful way?

OhioBoy: I think you're getting to the heart of the matter.

Some people think that the difference between you and the computer lies in objectively measurable skills such as perception, memory, pattern recognition ability, general intelligence, the ability to move around, and so on.

Others think that it must lie in the type of material stuff you're made of, or in the blessing you've received from God (the granting of free will and soul), or in some other ineffable mysterious quality.

I'm personally in the former camp, as you can probably tell.

Posted by Barbar | July 19, 2007 12:19 PM

"Barbar, I feel like you're missing my point (which is only fair, because you obviously feel like I'm missing your point). You keep giving many reasons why we appear to have free will, which I don't dispute. Asteroids were perhaps an unhelpful example, so consider computers."

According to what we know of string theory, the universe as we observe it does not exist, meaning existence does not existence. If you do not exist, then the question of whether or not you have free will does not exist in the first place and is meaningless. However, we might all be deluded into thinking we exist, just like we might all be deluded into thinking we have free will. Does that really change your life? Just chill out and have a Coke.

I, on the other hand, do exist. HAHAHAHA!

Posted by Reality Man | July 19, 2007 12:20 PM

I just don't think turning to evolution for the roots of morality is worthwhile.

then where does morality come from? you say above that you're not religious. yet you refuse to believe that it comes from the same natural causes that created the brains that control what we do.

so, where does it come from and where is it located?

Posted by cleek | July 19, 2007 12:22 PM

yes, and eating and breathing also lead to choking. i urge you, for your own sake, to stop eating. and breathing.

Man. You are a skilled rhetorician. I bow before your superior deductive power. Really, that's so deep. It works on so many levels.

Dumbass-- eating and breathing are processes that, in their execution, can through error lead to choking. Rape and genocide are things we consider morally bankrupt that can fulfill the evolutionary drive. If you dispute that that is the case, I ask whether or not it is plausible that conditions could arise where the most fit organism could be one that rapes or commits genocide. I certainly can imagine where those things could help fulfill the fundamental evolutionary goal, prolonging your DNA through reproduction.

As for the "we have an evolutionary moral intuition", I'll ask you for what portion of human history we have acted in accordance to current moral edicts. (It was certainly in the basic moral intuition that miscegenation and homosexuality were immoral, for quite some time.) The vast proportion of human history is on my side.

Posted by Freddie | July 19, 2007 12:24 PM

so, where does it come from and where is it located?

It comes from social agreement. It is a human creation.

Posted by Freddie | July 19, 2007 12:25 PM

Computer scientists also theorize that someday computers will become self-aware and develop intelligence and thus something akin to free will. Then again, would you need to feel superior to such a computer like how you feel superior to plankton? In essence, an intelligent computer would be a data point in the "biology is not destiny" column.

Posted by Reality Man | July 19, 2007 12:26 PM

Freddie, your revulsion at rape and genocide comes from evolution just as much as rape and genocide do.

Posted by Barbar | July 19, 2007 12:27 PM

Freddie, what do you think about allowing labor to cross national borders freely, thereby letting poor people from all over the world to greatly increase their standards of living by coming to the US and Europe?

Oh I see, evolution still has a hold on you.

Posted by Barbar | July 19, 2007 12:32 PM

Freddie, your revulsion at rape and genocide comes from evolution just as much as rape and genocide do.

I think statements like this demonstrate ignorance to just how long evolution takes. There was a time not long ago at all, as evolutionary time goes, when rape and genocide were not considered against moral intuition. Again, as of 50-60 years ago, people would tell you that there is a natural, inherent revulsion to the idea of black/white sexual relationships. Evolution takes millenia. Morality is the product of a social contract, agreed to by people. It has no referent to anything extra-human at all. Including evolution.

Posted by Freddie | July 19, 2007 12:32 PM

I think we have a winner!

From cleek's comment:

2) Do we have free will?

not if you mean "I can create my abilities and interests and actions independently of anything else in the universe, including physical laws and history" (quoting Barbar at 11:33). the fact that the universe is deterministic (and i'll add, self-contained) makes this impossible.

in the sense that our brains can come up with ideas faster than we can identify, in real time, all the inputs that went into forming those ideas, then sure. just like essentially everything else people do, free will's an illusion based on incomplete knowledge and high-level interpretation. but we interpret that illusion as reality and live our lives based on that interpretation.

The key matter is defining what free will is. Free will, even as an illusion produced by cognitive processes, is still a useful concept. We still want to hold people responsible for their actions, even if we think their brains deterministically made the choices behind the actions, because the consequences of responsibility are, of course, part of what the brain was mechanistically computing when it arrived at its conclusions. Whether free will exists in some dualistic non-material fashion is really irrelevant to the role that the concept of free will plays in human society.

Posted by JB | July 19, 2007 12:36 PM

"Rape and genocide are things we consider morally bankrupt that can fulfill the evolutionary drive."

We're still waiting for your evidence that rape and genocide are natural outgrowths of evolution more than choking. Genocide depends on the existence of the state to be an a priori necessity to carry out genocide. The state as we know it is a human construct with variations across time and space. The Aztec Empire, for instance, engaged in mass slaughter via human sacrifice, but the Aztec religion caused the need for enemy tribes/groups to exist in perpetuity because of the permanent religious need for future human sacrifices. Cortes, backed by the Spanish state, had a different view (bordering on proto-lebensraum, which is somehow in Firefox's spellcheck) and found that pretty much killing off the Aztecs was desirable. What role did biology play in having one group be violent but try to prevent wiping out the Other and one group to decide to wipe out the Other? States are violent because they come into being in a sea of anarchy, what Hobbes called "the state of war." The question is if it is the combination of anarchy and tribalism or evolution are a bigger determinative factor in leading to genocide.

Posted by Reality Man | July 19, 2007 12:38 PM

If we define a "caused" or "determined" outcome as one that it is an inevitable consequence of a prior condition, and an "uncaused" or "random" outcome as one that is not, all outcomes are either caused or uncaused, either determined or random. There is no other logical possibility. Ponnuru seems to think that there's a third class of outcomes, "freely-willed" outcomes, that are somehow neither caused nor uncaused. But the idea is just logically incoherent.

Posted by Mixner | July 19, 2007 12:41 PM

Ponnoru's point, if I understood it, is that you can have a viable system of ethics without theism, but that you do have to have some sort of metaphysical underpinning. You can't just take science (say, physics and biology) and found a system of ethics on that. I'm surprised this is even controversial, since it's pretty standard philosophical doctrine that you cannot reason from "is" (e.g., science) to "ought". Wilkinson has not refuted Ponnoru at all (unless Ponnoru is really making the claim that you need a supernatural metaphysics), he's just assuming some sort of metaphsical order underlying the physical order of the material universe, but still a part of it- something that Spinoza and the Stoics and perhaps some others did in the past.

Re: The sooner humans come to terms with death as the end of everything they've ever known, with nothing more thereafter, the sooner the endless debate over what all this means can be dispensed with.

Why should we when we do not know that to be a fact? Certainly not in the same way we know, say, the velocity of light, or even the age of the Earth (about which there is some small level of uncertainty).

Re: I would say that my main problem with the absence of a God is not really that it implies that life is meaninglessness, but rather that it implies the absence of an afterlife.

The two are not logically connected. It's possible to believe in the existence of God, but no afterlife (in fact, orthodox theology teaches precisely that about animals), or to believe in an afterlife but no God (Buddhism and some other reincarnational afterlife systems, for example).

Posted by JonF | July 19, 2007 12:42 PM

Freddie, your revulsion at rape and genocide stems from empathy, which has been created by evolution. Empathy is not 40 or 50 years old.

How wide should the circle of empathy be? OK, this is not determined by evolution, and is probably best described as a human social construction. But it's an error to categorize bad things as coming from evolution and good things as coming from social agreements.

Posted by Barbar | July 19, 2007 12:42 PM

eating and breathing are processes that, in their execution, can through error lead to choking.

very good, Freddie. you could also say that the evolution of the combined windpipe and esophagus predisposes one to choking. and like the fact that people rape (and murder), it's orthogonal to the idea that our basic morals are evolved.

I'll ask you for what portion of human history we have acted in accordance to current moral edicts.

current? i thought we were talking about "absolute" morals. make up your mind.

our basic morals (don't murder, don't steal, etc), which nearly all cultures and all religions share, and which are present to some degree in all social animals, are most certainly evolved. there's really no other explanation. we don't eat our young, we don't kill members of our social group, we don't steal from those same members, etc. - and if we do, we're punished, if caught.

as for current morals... it's perfectly obvious that ideas of what's right and what's not (in morality as well as in literature and the styles of women's hats) can be passed along through culture.

It was certainly in the basic moral intuition that miscegenation and homosexuality were immoral, for quite some time.

of course the ancient Greeks, among others, disagree. so, that particular "basic moral intuition" is either arbitrary and cultural or pretty easily overridden by culture.

Posted by cleek | July 19, 2007 12:44 PM

"Again, as of 50-60 years ago, people would tell you that there is a natural, inherent revulsion to the idea of black/white sexual relationships."

The Ancient Greeks held the Ethiopians up as the ideal of female beauty. Sudan, where Arab-on-African genocide is taking place, historically had tons of intermarriage between Arabs and Africans, which is why the genocidaires are asking for identity cards a la Rwanda before killing people. Like Rwanda, Arab and African have become more or less class labels that were altered to fit into what became the hegemonic European discourse on race. The Polish Jews killed in the Holocaust were rather Europeanized or whatever, but the discourse of anti-Semitism made Christian anti-Semites repulsed at the idea of an interfaith relationship. The European view of race came into being bounded by time and space, mostly with the Iberian conquest of the Americas.

Posted by Reality Man | July 19, 2007 12:46 PM

There's a sense in which rape and genocide are the products of our evolution, in that if we do something, we necessarily have the capacity for it (and the capacity for the capacity for it, and so on down the line), and some iteration of "the capacity for the capacity for..." finds its basis wholly in our bodies, which find their basis in evolution. But that's incredibly trivial.

Similarly the universe gives rise to a lot of bad sub-parts of it, but we still have to find our justification for anything in it, because the universe is all there is and if it wasn't it wouldn't be the universe.

We are beings with the capacity for good and capacity for evil. Obviously those capacities have a cause in history of the material universe. But that doesn't excuse us from our actions. Free will 1, genetic determinism 0.

Posted by Matthias | July 19, 2007 12:51 PM

It comes from social agreement. It is a human creation.

hmm. i sure didn't see that one coming.

then would you say that all the other animals (ex. bonobos, above) who behave as if they were following a moral code quite like our own created their own morals out of whole cloth and passed them along socially ?

do goats tell each other not to kill their kids ?

Posted by cleek | July 19, 2007 12:51 PM

The question is if it is the combination of anarchy and tribalism or evolution are a bigger determinative factor in leading to genocide.

As I've said, I don't need to prove that anything morally repugnant is currently predisposed to by evolution. I only need for you to admit that there could arise conditions whereby things we find reprehensible could satisfy our evolutionary goals. I use the example of rape because I think it's extremely easy to see how that might be the case: raping a woman could impregnate her. Impregnating her fulfills the evolutionary drive towards procreation.

Here's the rub: you aren't going to get anyone to agree to what is or is not an "inherent moral revulsion." What starts out as a method of moral certainty-- do what evolution tells you to do-- ends up with just more disagreement. There are conservatives who will most certainly tell you that there is an inherent revulsion to homosexuality. The best that you can do is say, "No, there isn't." And, really, you've got to give it to them-- if homosexuality is evolutionarily fulfilling, why has it been taboo for the vast majority of the world's people over the vast majority of the world's history?

I think there are a couple ways to wiggle out of that question, but neither is satisfying. First, you could say that, if you look at the big picture, homosexuality must be fulfilling some evolutionary purpose, because we have evolved to have it. But if you've moved the goalposts that wide, what is not morally permissible under evolution? Theft, murder, greed, deception-- all of these things are still with us. If we can't exclude homosexuality (or anything else we don't condemn) because it hasn't been eliminated by evolution, we can't exclude any behavior we don't like.

The other thing to say would be, well, evolution works in ways we don't understand. We can't see now why evolution has permitted these things to survive, despite our moral revulsion against them, but eventually evolution will lead us to moral truth. But that's no different than the "God works in ways we can't understand" solution to the problem of evil. What isn't good for the goose isn't good for the gander.

I think you guys are just looking for comfort and certainty in the latest craze as a grand unifying scheme of everything, evolution. But grand unifying schemes of everything have very poor track records in human history. And even those that seem like they'll never be challenged have a way of eventually falling aside. Just ask religion.

Posted by Freddie | July 19, 2007 12:54 PM

"then would you say that all the other animals (ex. bonobos, above) who behave as if they were following a moral code quite like our own created their own morals out of whole cloth and passed them along socially ?"

It's not always clear where certain dividing lines are. Psychologists still have nature vs. nurture arguments. The truth is that things like science and anthropology are not neat enough to make such clear distinctions at this point (or maybe ever). In the Jewish religion it was immoral to eat shellfish. For the Portuguese, this wasn't an issue (I'm assuming). There do seem to be certain moral codes that have wider cultural currency than others, such as being against murder, rape and theft.

Posted by Reality Man | July 19, 2007 12:57 PM

Freddie, you seem to be assuming that people are saying that our moral heuristics should be: "is it evolved? Then it is good!" But I don't see anybody saying that. Nor do I see them saying that we should trust our moral intuitions without analysis. Rather I assume that they are saying that - because it's the more charitable interpretation - we can find in evolution the capacities which allow us to be moral.

(Which I think is kind of trivial. But.)

Of course, if anybody actually is giving a normative theory based on evolution, rather than a positive account of where we got our morals from, I'd encourage them to speak up so we can know who they are.

Posted by Matthias | July 19, 2007 1:00 PM

Freddie, you seem to be assuming that people are saying that our moral heuristics should be: "is it evolved? Then it is good!" But I don't see anybody saying that. Nor do I see them saying that we should trust our moral intuitions without analysis. Rather I assume that they are saying that - because it's the more charitable interpretation - we can find in evolution the capacities which allow us to be moral.

Really? I certainly got the impression that they were arguing just that. If so, you're right. But, as you say, "we can find in evolution the capacities which allow us to be moral" is pretty weak tea.

If that is what people are saying, then I withdraw my objections.

Posted by Freddue | July 19, 2007 1:02 PM

There do seem to be certain moral codes that have wider cultural currency than others, such as being against murder, rape and theft.

Right. This has always been an "us" and "them" thing. It's bad to kill one of us, but much more acceptable to kill one of them. (9/11 was the greatest tragedy of all time, the Iraq war is unfortunate.)

Freddie, evolution is an explanation for how things (including morality) came to be, whereas morality is a guide for how to behave. I'm struggling to see the dramatic tension between these two that you suggest.

Posted by Barbar | July 19, 2007 1:04 PM

There do seem to be certain moral codes that have wider cultural currency than others, such as being against murder, rape and theft.

There are certainly common threads, but these are very bad examples. Rape as we define it was certainly not universally disapproved of. And all cultures have defined wrongfully taking as wrong and wrongfully killing as wrong, that's tautologous.

Posted by Matthias | July 19, 2007 1:05 PM

The dilemma is: is Ponnuru stupid or very stupid?

First, "free will" is an abstract construct that may be used to define another construct, "morality", or not. He thinks that it has to. So far, so good.

Second, he thinks that the notion of free will does not apply to actions that can be predicted. This is dubious. We can predict actions of people we know, and some of these actions we deem moral, some not, some neutral. I guess, the idea is that we cannot predict those actions with certainty.

However, an agent in universe describe by contemporary physicists cannot ever be in possession of the full data needed for the prediction, would he/she get the data, storing it and processing would be impossible.

It is only God, if one exists, that can be reasonably postulated to make unerring predictions. So if the ability to predict is the problem, it is theists that are in trouble, not atheists. If you stop here, you agree that Ponnury is VERY stupid, because he raises a red herring that does not support his contention. Moreover, a college education person will surely know that some literature on the subject already exists and that something should be checked before spouting such nonsense (just feed "free will morality" to a search engine).

In any case, theists can cheerfully formulate a theology of morality without any reference to predictive powers of abstract agents or God. Predictive powers of the agents (of moral/immoral actions) do matter of course, and they are always limited.

What is clearly necessary is some model of decision making, and by necessity, this model has to be considerably detached from our physical and astrophysical knowledge. But this is true even when we investigate decisions of ants. And even with ants, we can predict their actions only in a statistical sense, as in "95 percent of ants following a scent trail will not stray from it further than 1 inch".

Posted by piotr | July 19, 2007 1:05 PM

"As I've said, I don't need to prove that anything morally repugnant is currently predisposed to by evolution. I only need for you to admit that there could arise conditions whereby things we find reprehensible could satisfy our evolutionary goals."

You've been moving the goalposts all over the place throughout this conversation whenever it is convenient. Your critique seems to be devolving into whining that we aren't born into Utopia.

"I think you guys are just looking for comfort and certainty in the latest craze as a grand unifying scheme of everything, evolution. But grand unifying schemes of everything have very poor track records in human history. And even those that seem like they'll never be challenged have a way of eventually falling aside. Just ask religion."

Grand unifying schemes like communism and political Christianity were prescriptive ideologies that said the follower knew the truth and could thus enforce it on others. Those who find some evidence for an innate thing akin to morality in human biology are looking for empirical evidence to explain what already is. The truth of the matter is that for centuries humanity in general has tried to find a way to control rape, at least on the domestic front. Even the Book of Leviticus, which says that rapists have to marry their victims, intended that marriage to be a form of payment and punishment against the rapist. It just wasn't a good form. Evolution is about the general, with the specific that is deemed bad by the group tending to die off. If one wacko thinks it serves his evolutionary impulse (even on a subconscious level) to rape as many women as possible to spread his seed, he's going to find himself very quickly imprisoned or killed. Guess what, he probably just won himself a Darwin Award.

Posted by Reality Man | July 19, 2007 1:08 PM

"There are certainly common threads, but these are very bad examples. Rape as we define it was certainly not universally disapproved of."

True, such as certain tribes in New Guineau in which older males rape younger ones. However, just as the existence of Kim Jong-Il doesn't prove that communism is the general trend of political life today, those societies that did not fit the general trend on rape don't invalidate the trend. I think it's safe to say raping someone's wife or daughter was in general has been a good way to get their husband or father to kill one.

Posted by Reality Man | July 19, 2007 1:14 PM

I don't believe knowledge of evolution should prescribe our morality, but I do think it should inform it. It does this to the extent that it reveals to us the truths about human nature.

Case in point. There seems to be a sort of political correctness agenda out there, such that women who have sex with underage men should be punished to the same degree as men who have sex with underage women. A knowledge of human nature, specifically of gender-specific sexual strategies, should reinforce what our common sense is already probably whispering in our ears: this is nonsense.

I'm sure that in most cases, the underage guy is to be envied, and the overage woman deserves no punishment. The idea that rules and punishments should be symmetrical across the sexes is ridiculous.

Posted by Jim W | July 19, 2007 1:20 PM

Rather I assume that they are saying that - because it's the more charitable interpretation - we can find in evolution the capacities which allow us to be moral.

what i'm saying...

we exhibit certain behaviors, some of which are deeply seated and are common to all social animals and violation of which causes revulsion - these are evolved. and, evolution has given us the ability to label behaviors as "moral" (meaning "concerned with the judgment of the goodness or badness of human action and character"). so we label those deep-seated, social-animal behaviors as "moral". but we also label other behaviors as moral, and we put them into our bag of morals along with the built-in ones - things like fear of homosexuality and fear of different skin color which aren't common to all cultures in all times. these are passed socially.

so, evolution gives us basic morals and the ability to create new, arbitrary, morals. it gives us the desire to obey them all, though we obey the built-in ones more than the add-ons, it seems. it doesn't "allow" us to be moral. rather, it allows us to define things we already do, because we've evolved to need to do them, as moral, which is a shorthand for "these things are necessary for society to work. be a good member of society and obey them. violate them and you will be punished."

Posted by cleek | July 19, 2007 1:22 PM

It might seem that taking a Harvard philosophy degree to the problems of everyday morality is a bit like attacking a nut with a meat cleaver.

But when the meat of the nut is so perfectly preserved and exposed, the approach is amply justified.

Especially in light of the discussion which has followed.

Posted by serial catowner | July 19, 2007 1:23 PM

We are evolved creatures, so our capacities for morality - and our capacities for doing totally awful stuff - are evolved capabilities. This gives no normative grounding, and it can't without retreating into the basest vitalism.

From way back:

If we're really materialists, then of course we should acknowledge that cultures don't spring up ex nihilo; they're what remains of the culture before, after technology, social conflicts, and so on have changed it. Inasmuch as we're Westerners and all previous Western cultures have been religious, of course our culture's ideas have a basis in religious ideas. But they're still secular ideas, just like we're still vertebrates.

Absolutely. But doesn't this invalidate most of the new secularism, which argues that secularism and atheism are actually the product of a completely objective relation to univocal "science" that cannot prove God, and thus our universal reason pushes us to atheism?

Once we start working from historical materialism, we have to qualify Dawkinsian atheism practically out of existence.

Posted by DivGuy | July 19, 2007 1:27 PM

so, evolution gives us basic morals and the ability to create new, arbitrary, morals.

So you see, my complaints were justified, Matthias.

Again, Reality Man-- you have nothing at the end except to say "it is obvious" or "it is clear". You say that the prohibition against rape is the norm, and that counter examples are just exceptions. I don't think that is historically justifiable. More to the point, I find it a bizarre notion of "true morality" that requires a numerical advantage for the societies that reinforce your beliefs over those that don't.

Posted by Freddie | July 19, 2007 1:28 PM

we exhibit certain behaviors, some of which are deeply seated and are common to all social animals and violation of which causes revulsion - these are evolved. and, evolution has given us the ability to label behaviors as "moral" (meaning "concerned with the judgment of the goodness or badness of human action and character"). so we label those deep-seated, social-animal behaviors as "moral". but we also label other behaviors as moral, and we put them into our bag of morals along with the built-in ones - things like fear of homosexuality and fear of different skin color which aren't common to all cultures in all times. these are passed socially.

What I'm disputing is that group (a) has any useful content whatsoever. As discussed, "murder" and "theft" are defined as wrongful killing and wrongful taking, and thus are tautological and worthless as content. Certainly, widely varying moral systems define what is wrongful among different killing and different taking in diverse ways.

You're trying to revive morality out of cheap vitalism - trust me, it's been tried, it doesn't work.

Posted by DivGuy | July 19, 2007 1:31 PM

However, just as the existence of Kim Jong-Il doesn't prove that communism is the general trend of political life today, those societies that did not fit the general trend on rape don't invalidate the trend. I think it's safe to say raping someone's wife or daughter was in general has been a good way to get their husband or father to kill one.

Well, if he didn't ask you to rape her, which is what I meant. The Mosaic law on the-crime-translated-as-rape, as you point out, was that you had to pay restitution to the father and marry the daughter, because you had robbed him of a virgin bride to give away.

Even now a lot of people want to excuse rape if it didn't occur by a complete stranger jumping out of the bushes or whatever. The feminist idea that all partners need to be enthusiastically consenting is, like all feminist ideas, fairly recent.

This is a tangent to free will and morality in a material universe, though, I guess.

Posted by Matthias | July 19, 2007 1:34 PM

So you see, my complaints were justified, Matthias.

i have no idea how you can possibly get from what i wrote to "is it evolved? Then it is good!" it's just ridiculous.

Posted by cleek | July 19, 2007 1:35 PM

Is this the Harry Potter thread?

Posted by blah | July 19, 2007 1:36 PM

i have no idea how you can possibly get from what i wrote to "is it evolved? Then it is good!"

Your argument is that if it is evolved and universal, it is good. Otherwise, the "deeply seated" moral judgments that characterize all cultures (and apparently lots of animals, too) could just lead us down the path of immorality, and thus it would be effectively immaterial for normative reasoning whether a capacity or judgement is evolved.

Posted by DivGuy | July 19, 2007 1:40 PM

Absolutely. But doesn't this invalidate most of the new secularism, which argues that secularism and atheism are actually the product of a completely objective relation to univocal "science" that cannot prove God, and thus our universal reason pushes us to atheism?

Well, I don't think the historical origin of atheist ideas affects their standing vis-a-vis reason any more than the historical origin of our moral ideas (evolutionary, cultural, whatever) affects how they stand vis-a-vis reason and empathy. So we can still say: looking at the available evidence and using my reason, God doesn't exist. And the following moral beliefs I have can be justified like so. Which is different from saying I have these moral beliefs and I came to them from pure contemplation, sitting on the top of a mountain until I was enlightened. (Which Dawkins might claim, for all I know. Harris sounds like kind of an asshole, so I wouldn't be surprised if he claimed something that arrogant.)

Similarly, the historical origin of our idea of the natural numbers is hey, there's one cow, and then there's two cows, and then there's three! But when mathematicians say that the natural numbers are derived from set theory they're not lying; they're just not making a historical claim.

Posted by Matthias | July 19, 2007 1:54 PM

Your argument is that if it is evolved and universal, it is good.

The people Freddie seems to be trying to argue against simply claim that the foundations for our moral sense come from evolution. Obviously if our moral sense comes from evolution it seems quite unlikely we have access to absolute moral truths, right? But as humans we still believe in our morality and believe we can convince others of it.

Posted by Barbar | July 19, 2007 1:57 PM

What I'm disputing is that group (a) has any useful content whatsoever. As discussed, "murder" and "theft" are defined as wrongful killing and wrongful taking, and thus are tautological and worthless as content.

1) i didn't define them that way, you did.

2) but if we stick with your definition "wrongful", we have to note that "wrongful" is not atomic, it's really a reference to a set of rules to determine if the action was justified or not.

murder isn't simply killing a human. for there to be murder, the victim needs to be innocent with respect to the killer (otherwise, it's revenge or self-defense or war). the determination of innocence requires an evaluation of the victim's prior actions - had the victim harmed the killer in some way? harm needs to be evaluated, too. and then you need to see if the harm was justified. etc.. yes, you can probably get lost in an infinite set of definitions, probably even recursively. but, people don't do that - we cut off debate after so many levels down, on everything, not just murder (ex. we don't evaluate the whole decision tree in chess, either). at some point, we conclude that the killer was justified or not.

in modern times, we have courts to patiently and deliberately sift through these levels to try to determine guilt or innocence as best as is humanly possible, but we do quick versions of this, automatically, in our heads, all the time. and i see no reason why this capability isn't evolved. it seems clear to me that we evolved the ability to make quick determinations of "wrongful" because people will end up killing each other and we, as a society, need to be able to decide who deserves punishment and who doesn't. the rules regarding "wrongful" help bind and maintain society.

You're trying to revive morality out of cheap vitalism

forgive my ignorance of the terms... but Wiki tells me this has something to do with qi and prana... ?

Posted by cleek | July 19, 2007 2:09 PM

Don't really have the time to comment just now, but let me just say: Freddie - so far you haven't entirely been understanding what people have been arguing, and you don't sound *overwhelmingly* familiar with evolution, past a certain point. Now, that's not a horrible thing: I'm grossly, grossly ignorant, as is everybody else, with just teeny degrees of variation. But you should keep it in mind - it'll save wasted effort arguing things that we're not.

"So you see, my complaints were justified, Matthias."

How? Certainly it seems like it was more than *just* the most basic capacities (ie, the brainpower to construct, on a {ugh, hate to say it} blank slate, human moralty) - but . . so? That still doesn't get one to 'What is (via evolution), is right.' Language is messing us up here, I think.

" More to the point, I find it a bizarre notion of "true morality" that requires a numerical advantage for the societies that reinforce your beliefs over those that don't."

Like here, for example - perhaps you're taking "true morality" to refer to a transcendentally, in-the-eye-of-the-universe objectively 'right' morality: I don't think that's what's being said (or at least, it's not being considered sufficient to establish that. The idea here is that the widespread nature of certain traits - across our species, and indeed (to a degree) out to other species) suggests that there may be a biological basis for them (not some sort of odd popularity contest). Beyond morality, for example, we note that all known human societies involve language, hence . . .

Now, that's not definitive, and it doesn't necessarily tell us at what level that biological basis might be. Generally we have the neurological *equipment* for reading & writing, but it's pretty clear that this is a kind of second-order basis (if not all that distant); it's been cobbled together from other capacities. That we use spoken language, otoh, seems pretty likely to be a much more direct matter. (But if literacy had spread everywhere really early on, though, we might be left with the impression that both seemed equally . . . etc.)

Ach, back to work . . .

Posted by Dan S. | July 19, 2007 2:10 PM

Your argument is that if it is evolved and universal, it is good.

it certainly is not.

i'm saying there are some behaviors that we call moral that are good. i am not saying that a behavior is good because it is evolved.

obviously, there are evolved behaviors which are counter to society - things which are beneficial to an individual at societies expense, for example. theft is certainly good for the thief, if he gets away with it. it's obviously bad for the victim, and for society as a whole. i would never claim theft is moral, or even 'good' on balance. likewise, suicide is generally bad for everyone involved, but we've evolved that, too.

Posted by cleek | July 19, 2007 2:19 PM

cleek and dan,

Certainly, our capability to form normative judgements is an evolved capability. So is our capability to slaughter members of a society we deem alien, and our capability to form a normative judgement that justifies the slaughter is again evolved. (We certainly see the use of normative reasoning to justify injustice throughout the history of human culture.)

I have no idea where this gets you. Evolved capabilities are the result of evolution. How we evaluate normative judgements in public discussion can't rest on evolution, though, because it simply gives us the capabilities to judge.

Not every judgement is right - many judgements are contradictory. I don't think there's a transcendent law that justifies judgments, but I think that we have to be ok to live in the space where these judgements both must be made and must be questioned. Evolution is a pretty weak addition to the discussion - it doesn't help us make judgements or help us question judgements.

Posted by DivGuy | July 19, 2007 2:25 PM

"Is this the Harry Potter thread?"

It could be. Voldemort, for example, may well have been born with a (genetic?, developmental?) difference in his brain that leaves him with intelligence and a theory of mind, but apparently no (evolved) empathy . . . . so . . .

Posted by Dan S. | July 19, 2007 2:32 PM

I think there is a case to be made that, to a large extent, evolved behaviours are good. That is, if you define a "good" behavior to mean a behavor that contributes to a stable, functioning society.

Selfishness is a case in point. There's a myth out there that if only people would be less selfish then we would all be better off. However, if most of us adopted the ideal put forth in the New Testament, which involves a lot of selflessness and turning of the other cheek, etc., then we might find ourselves in a lot of trouble. All it would take are a few bad apples, and it would be like setting wolves among the sheep.

Basically, evolved traits have endured because they work. Yes, modern society is different from that of hunters and gatherers in many ways, but I'm sure that a lot of similarity remains.

We are on the doorstep of "designer babies" and if we start selecting out "bad" traits like selfishness, then watch out.

Posted by Jim W | July 19, 2007 2:32 PM

If you resist the temptation to murder someone because God does not want you to murder some rather than because you have decided you should not murder, that's fine. This, however, does not imply that the existence of God is necessary for you to come to the decision.

Posted by gregor | July 19, 2007 2:34 PM

Evolution is a pretty weak addition to the discussion - it doesn't help us make judgements or help us question judgements.

on the contrary, evolution created humans and everything we can do, including make judgments, normative, incorrect, or otherwise. everything we are and everything we can do is the result of evolution. evolution even gave us the ability to think our way into tricky philosophical problems - problems made tricky by our own incomplete understanding of how our brains work.

you might think it's "weak" but there is no evidence of anything else.

Posted by cleek | July 19, 2007 2:36 PM

Jim -

Your point is either contentless or wildly objectionable.

Sure, some aspects of our social arrangement are good, and some are, generally speaking, evolved.

But this isn't the best world, right? Darfur isn't part of the best possible world, and neither is a family in Round Rock that just lost their son to the war in Iraq and aren't sure they can pay for their daughter's health care. There's a gabillion things we want to see change. There's no evidance I can see that these things are more or less in line with "evolution" - do you really think that we have a state of nature that's qualitatively better than the world at large?

Posted by DivGuy | July 19, 2007 2:39 PM

on the contrary, evolution created humans and everything we can do, including make judgments, normative, incorrect, or otherwise. everything we are and everything we can do is the result of evolution. evolution even gave us the ability to think our way into tricky philosophical problems - problems made tricky by our own incomplete understanding of how our brains work.

Granted. How does all that help me to form, practice, or challenge a moral judgement? I'm claiming it doesn't.

Posted by DivGuy | July 19, 2007 2:41 PM

One of the big issues in evolution is the free loader problem. There may be a trait that is good for the group as a whole, such as people becoming less selfish, violent, or what have you. The problem is, as long as there is the possibility that a small number of people will lack these traits, then they will be able to take advantage due to their comparative ruthlessness.

This is important to keep in mind when you look at traits like selfishness, jealousy, the tendency to divide people into in-groups and out-groups, etc. Life and reproduction is inherently a competitive business at a certain level, and (short of us all becoming passive zombies) we will always need to have the motivation that causes us to watch out for our own interests, and seek vengeance on those who cross us.

One of the problems I have with Christianity (other than the fact that its not true) is that it seems to want us to disavow a big part of our humanity, that part that seems "base". This also seems to be the criticism of Christianity I've seen from people like Nietzche and Menken.

Posted by Jim W | July 19, 2007 2:50 PM

"Granted. How does all that help me to form, practice, or challenge a moral judgement? I'm claiming it doesn't."

Agreed! (Well, maybe in some very specific circumstances, but not generally, I would think). We're mostly talking past one another, although Jim's sorta in-between - the question on this end is the source of morality, not the practice of it.

I do think that this (the morality is probably an evolved thing to some degree) can be one starting point for a nontheistic, non-supernatural way of *thinking* about morality - but in terms of *doing* it? Probably about as practically helpful as the idea that morality comes from God, give or take a bit?

Posted by Dan S. | July 19, 2007 3:00 PM

How does all that help me to form, practice, or challenge a moral judgement?

help? you were born with all the tools you need - they're right between your ears. IMO, that's like asking how evolution helps you know how to talk or to understand what has been said to you. you just do it, because your brain evolved in a way that lets you do it.

forgive me if i'm not up to speed on the philosophical side of these arguments. formal philosophy has never been of much interest to me. i'm more of a pragmatist.

Posted by cleek | July 19, 2007 3:08 PM

Evolution is a pretty weak addition to the discussion - it doesn't help us make judgements or help us question judgements.

Um, since the primary alternative theory explaining morality is this "God made morality" viewpoint that Ponnuru advocates, I'd say that the theory of evolution does indeed help us question certain moral judgments. An evolved morality engenders more skepticism than a divine morality. Ponnuru tries to turn this into an indication that God exists, which is silly but many people find this sort of logic convincing.

Posted by Barbar | July 19, 2007 5:35 PM

Go back and read the Euthyphro. (You should do it for other reasons, too- you can only barely consider yourself literate if you have not read it, for example.)

Next you can tell us how you can't have a serious conversation with anyone who hasn't read 'The Color Purple.' Sheesh.

Posted by EpicureanQuaker | July 20, 2007 12:11 AM

As for Eric's point that God provides morality through a carrot-and-stick mechanism. My understanding is that this goes against a lot of Christian thought (particularly of the Evangelical variety), wherein its just one's belief and acceptance of God that determines one's fate, rather than one's actions. Belief in God is supposed to lead to good behavior through some unspecified mechanism (notwithstanding evidence to the contrary in today's politics).

Ah, but you're ignoring the understanding that everyone in Heaven will be perfect, but that some will be more perfect than others. Although contemporary Christianity has tried to sweep 'acts' under the rug, it is still recognized that faith gets one into Heaven, but one's standing therein is determined by some formula, in which heavy weight appears to be given to successful Earthly conversions. So eternal beachfront property is the impetus for moral behavior, it seems. Which, I dunno, sounds kinda immoral.

Posted by EpicureanQuaker | July 20, 2007 1:14 AM

Re: "So it's almost as if you think religious belief is a matter of tribal identity rather than a connection with absolute metaphysical truths. Fascinating."

Fascinating but increasingly among Christians. The very notion of "absolute metaphysical truth," more and more, considered a quaint relic at best and a gross perversion of religion at worst. Missing this evolution in Christianity probably means you're getting your ideas about Christianity only from TV.

We're seeing, these days, an extremely sectarian, parochial sort of atheism -- a kind of fundamentalist atheism. Both believing and non-believing fundies seem to think that the word "God" refers to some kind of lesser djinni. You can easily poke apart any concept when you're allowed to define the concept yourself.

This atheism is a wholly reactive rejection of a particular narrow set of sectarian notions that produces a correspondingly restrictive opposite point of view. This narrow, nominal atheism is weak tea.

The God in which they do not believe is a very particular kind of God. I don't believe in that God either, but I am not an atheist.

Maybe in jello-based universe, God is jello....

Posted by Russ | July 20, 2007 10:14 AM

Well, yeah, the atheists don't have much interest with the non-fundie concepts of God. Why should they? Other concepts of God don't get in their way much.

And I wouldn't be at all surprised if someone like Dawkins doesn't appreciate beliefs like yours, Russ. I'm pretty much in the same boat -- I understand what the fundies believe, but I don't think I understand what you believe.

Posted by AlanC9 | July 20, 2007 5:56 PM