Us and Them and Murder: Islamophobic Terrorism

This morning I was greeted by two disturbing pieces of news. First, I read that a Muslim woman, dining at a TGI Friday's last week, found pieces of bacon shoved into the straw of her drink in what appeared to be a deliberate show of disrespect for her religiously-rooted dietary restrictions. The second piece of news was more extreme: Yesterday, three Muslim college students--two sisters and the husband of the elder sister--were murdered in North Carolina. The alleged perpetrator, Craig Hicks, described himself as an anti-theist who was openly hostile to religion.

Here is a brief glimpse at one of the victims, a dental student, who made this video to raise money for a missions project:



The motives for the shooting remain undisclosed, but if they prove to be bound up with Hicks' anti-religious stance, then I think we need to keep two things in mind: First, Hicks' atheism is no more the reason for his violent attack than Islam is the reason for 9/11. In both cases, the problem lies with a kind of ideological targeting of people based on group membership. While Islam can be and has been invoked to underwrite that sort of us/them ideology, other things can be and have been invoked as well--including Christianity and atheism. This fact never justifies sweeping generalizations about the group and its members. In fact, falling prey to such sweeping generalizations is the first step towards embracing the very us/them ideology that is the root problem.

Second, if Hicks targeted his victims because they were Muslim, then we ought to take very seriously the idea that what he did should be called an act of terrorism. Islamophobic terrorism. And even if it isn't terrorism, the ideological patterns of thinking that underwrite terrorism may have played a role: It is easier to kill people if you first ascribe to an ideology that dehumanizes them.

What is terrorism? In my academic work on the subject, I've argued that it has to do with how victims of violence are targeted. Terrorists operate from an us/them ideology that sees every member of an enemy group as a legitimate target. Terrorists may select targets based on strategic or symbolic considerations, but they don't discriminate based on their innocence--because all members of the enemy group are seen as guilty, simply because they belong to that group.

Hence, no one in the targeted group is safe. That's why terrorism terrorizes. Being an American is enough to make you a legitimate target in the eyes of Al Qaeda extremists.

This way of viewing terrorism connect the dots between ideas and violence: If you embrace an ideology that divides the world between "us" and "them," and you portray all of them as collectively guilty, then you are laying the groundwork for terrorist violence. And violence that is done because of this sort of ideological motive is different in kind from violence done for, say, personal gain or jealous rage.

Among other things, those who kill because of allegiance to an ideology of hate are harder to deter. If you see yourself as an agent of the Children of Light fighting a war against the Children of Darkness, you may be perfectly happy to sacrifice yourself for the cause. Threats of punishment won't hold you back.

And that's why the most chilling thing I read this morning wasn't the news report of the triple murder (although that surely chilled me deeply). Instead, it was a comment, posted on one of the websites recounting the TGI Friday's incident, that reads as follows:

We unfortunately MUST do to them that which they wish to do to us, all I wish to do is to work, provide a living for my family. worship how I wish, (or not) and enjoy life. THEY want CONTROL over my life and how I live. THEY want me to convert or die. THEY want to tell me what to wear, what to eat, and what to do everyday... They are like the current U.S. Government under Obama on Steroids. Lock and Load Real Americans.

Notice here the universal imputation of nefarious motives, the repeated invocation of THEM. And then the call to arms: Lock and load. THEY are a threat to US. WE have no choice but to load our guns and shoot them down.

And to think this diatribe was sparked by the story of a woman who wanted her dietary restrictions respected, and instead had the forbidden food all but shoved down her throat.

Adherents to this kind of ideology know that members of their own group aren't all the same: they're normal human beings who want to live normal human lives, with diverse values and interests. They worship in different ways (or not at all). Some want to stand on a soapbox and spread their faith; others just want to eat at TGI Friday's without having bacon shoved into their drinking straw. But instead of seeing the same humanity and diversity in the other group, those in the grip of divisive ideologies offer a sweeping portrait of what "they" want. And what THEY want is so bad for us that we have no choice but to treat them in ways we would never treat members of our own group.

The philosopher John Ladd, in an essay that has strongly influenced my thinking, finds in Nazism a kind of template for violent ideologies: Such ideologies begin with what he calls the doctrine of bifurcation: the world is divided between the chosen group and the "other" group. They then move onto a doctrine of moral disqualification. The others are in some way rendered less than human: they aren't like us, and so can be legitimately treated in ways that we couldn't otherwise justify. But that's not enough. Another key tenet of these ideologies is the notion of a group mission: Our welfare is threatened by THEM, and so we must, to bring good and right back into the world, knock THEM down--marginalize, oppress, or destroy. Lock and load.

This is the sort of pattern of thinking that enables terrorists to ignore questions of guilt or innocence, and so target civilians. It is the pattern of thinking that feeds cycles of ideological hatred and violence. And were it isolated to a rare comment on an occasional blog post, we could set aside acts of violence like the triple murder in North Carolina as just the actions of a lunatic.

But when the lunatic is acting out the implications of a worldview that is repeatedly endorsed in the public sphere--when there is a subculture that repeats and disseminates and encourages this kind of thinking--the lunatic becomes more than a lunatic. The lunatic is the agent of a cause, and terrorism is the means of pursuing it. This is why our public leaders and intellectuals need to be so very careful about what they say and how they say it--because even those who don't believe in bifurcating the world into the good and the bad, the light and the dark, sometimes find themselves falling into rhetorical patterns and arguments that play into dangerous ideologies of the sort Ladd describes (as Sam Harris has done more than once).

We can't and shouldn't stifle free speech and free expression. But we can model modes of expression that encourage cooperation rather than division, that resist the urge to absolutize any group. And when hateful and ideological speech proliferates, we can counteract it with speech of our own, speech that calls it out for what it is and highlights its dangers.

The vast majority of atheists are well-meaning, decent human beings who care about humanity and disavow us/them ideologies. But sometimes, us/them tropes are invoked by influential atheist figures (who themselves denounce extremism) in ways that fuel subcultures of extremism. People are drawn to the seductive simplicity of a world where enlightened atheists are locked in a (metaphorical) war with the benighted religious fools who threaten the welfare of us all. They indulge this simple worldview, usually just with heated words and self-righteous diatribes. But when enough people begin to say "lock and load," eventually someone does just that. When someone does, we must recognize the depths of the problem--but we should resist the urge to absolutize atheists or attribute to all atheists the ideological motives of the extremists.

And, just to be clear, let me repeat the preceding paragraph with one small change:  The vast majority of Muslims are well-meaning, decent human beings who care about humanity and disavow us/them ideologies. But sometimes, us/them tropes are invoked by influential Muslim figures (who themselves denounce extremism) in ways that fuel subcultures of extremism. People are drawn to the seductive simplicity of a world where enlightened Muslims are locked in a (metaphorical) war with the benighted unbelievers who threaten the welfare us all. They indulge this simple worldview, usually just with heated words and self-righteous diatribes. But when enough people begin to say "lock and load," eventually someone does just that. When someone does, we must recognize the depths of the problem--but we should resist the urge to absolutize Muslims or attribute to all Muslims the ideological motives of the extremists.

Or plug in "Christians," if you prefer.

We don't yet know what motivated the killings of three young Muslims in North Carolina the other day. We don't know why Craig Hicks gunned them down. But there is a pattern of thinking in place in this country--sometimes articulated by self-described atheists, sometimes by self-described Christians, sometimes by others--that treats all Muslims as a single unit, characterizing them as an enemy that threatens us all and against whom we must be prepared to take up arms. When someone follows that call and strikes out against innocent members of the group, it is terrorism. Islamophobic terrorism.

If Hicks isn't an Islamophobic terrorist in the sense described here--and he may well not be--then there are others out there who have been primed to be just that. Some use the mistreatment of a Muslim woman in a restaurant as the occasion for a call to arms against the "Muslim threat"--as if the fact that she was treated with disrespect is proof that her kind are poised to ruin our way of life.

We can't address the danger that such ideologically driven individuals pose by treating them as nothing but isolated lunatics. We need to pay attention to the way that the ideas we permit and nurture in the public square can fuel our potential for terrorist violence.  

Sam Harris on Torture

Although Sam Harris's PhD is in neuroscience, he never left his undergraduate philosophy degree (from Stanford in 2000) far behind him. This has been clear from the time of his first major bestseller, The End of Faith. In that book--the first of the so-called "new atheist" bestsellers--Harris devotes a chapter to ethics, previewing what he later attempts (and, in my view, fails) to do in The Moral Landscape.

In that ethics chapter from The End of Faith, Harris even does a bit of applied ethics (by which I mean the discipline of thinking about particular moral issues and dilemmas in a rigorous way in the attempt to provide reasoned guidance in decision-making). Specifically, he focuses on the moral status of two controversial questions: the ethics of torture and the ethics of pacifism (spoiler: he thinks torture can be justified while pacifism is "flagrantly immoral").

This past semester I had my introductory ethics students read what Harris has to say on torture. I wasn't surprised to find some students convinced (at least initially) by what Harris says. In a manner characteristic of the new atheist writers, Harris tackles the ethics of torture with the kind of confident authority and eloquence that so effectively obscures the serious defects in his argument. This is not to say that Harris has nothing of value to say about torture. He makes some interesting and important points in the course of developing his unsound argument. But the main argument is nevertheless unsound on several levels.

It struck me as a useful exercise in critical thinking to assess with my students a piece of writing of this sort: writing in which word choices create false equivalences and authorial confidence masks a deep ignorance of relevant literature. And it also seemed that Harris's essay--and a consideration of what he overlooks--could serve as a useful springboard for deeper reflection on the issue of torture and the broader ethical issues it brings to light.

For the very same reasons, it seems worth addressing on this blog. But doing so adequately--especially in a way that affords us a deeper look at torture and surrounding issues with an eye towards broader ethical insights--would take more than a single post. In this post, then, I want to content myself with offering an overview of Harris's core argument and, as I go along, quickly identifying his main oversights. A deeper look into these oversights and their significance will have wait for later.

So, what is Harris's main argument? Harris focuses on the issue of torturing suspected terrorists for the sake of acquiring life-saving information (such as the location of a hidden bomb that will take untold innocent lives unless found and disarmed in time). This way of framing the issue--in terms of the so-called "ticking bomb" case popularized in recent years by Alan Dershowitz--may itself be problematic. David Luban has argued precisely that in the Virgina Law Review, because it treats a highly unusual scenario as if the moral status of torture in that scenario could be considered on its own, isolated from a consideration of the ethics of our broader policy (either secret or open) with respect to torture. Luban offers some quite interesting and useful remarks about the difficulty with such isolated consideration of the extreme-and-rare case. Harris seems utterly oblivious to any such difficulties. If he's aware of them, he ignores them utterly.

Moving on: Having focused in on the ticking bomb scenario, Harris begins his argument with the assumption--which he takes to be rather self-evident--that if the prospective torture victim is known to be guilty (and, presumably, to possess the needed information), torture is clearly justified.

This starting assumption is hardly as uncontroversial as Harris takes it to be. First of all, there are those who will balk at its consequentialist character--taking there to be something intrinsically wrong about the deliberate infliction of pain when such infliction is not merely foreseen as a side-effect of something one is doing but is an intended aim of one's action (even if it is intended not for its own sake but as a means to some more ultimate objective).

Second, there is the whole question of the relative efficacy of torture as compared to other forms of interrogation. If one is sufficiently consequentialist about these matters, what the ticking bomb scenario would do is justify that means of extracting the needed information that is most likely to produce the desired result. When, if ever, is it reasonable for us to suppose that torture is that most-effective means and so act accordingly? Harris doesn't even take up the question. He does concede that the probability of successfully extracting reliable information through torture may be low, but he fails to consider that this may mean there are other interrogation techniques with a higher track record of success (or with which trained interrogators have more training and experience, and so are better equipped to use effectively).

Of course, in order to explore such comparative issues, he'd need to conceptually distinguish between torture and interrogation. Harris never even attempts to do this.

In any event, Harris assumes that torture is justified if you've got a known terrorist in your clutches who has the information you need in order to save countless lives but who refuses to divulge it. The moral problem, for Harris, arises when we suspect but don't know for sure that the person in our custody is indeed a terrorist with knowledge of the whereabouts of the hidden bomb. In that case, Harris says that the moral problem is that we risk torturing an innocent person by mistake.

In fact, Harris's next error is in arguing as if this--the risk of torturing an innocent--is the only risk. He doesn't explore the risk of torturing someone who is indeed guilty of terrorism and involved in the bombing plot, but who lacks the relevant information. Torturing someone to extract information they don't possess is, in the ticking bomb case, not just a dangerous waste of time. The problem runs deeper. What lies behind the idea that torture can be justified in these cases is the assumption that increasing someone's suffering is more likely to break down their resistance to doing what you want. If they don't talk, you move from interrogation to thumb screws. If they still don't talk, you tighten the thumb screws. Follow this pattern with someone who doesn't have the information you want, and you are inflicting ever increasing amounts of suffering to no good effect. Continued escalation can lead to false information or death, but not to anything useful.

But all of this is preliminary. Harris's real argument begins only once he has swept a host of philosophical and practical problems under the rug in order to get to this premise: The main moral problem with torturing a suspected terrorist in order to gain life saving information is that the suspect might be innocent. His aim, then, becomes to challenge the view that "uncertainty about a person's guilt will generally preclude the use of torture." He challenges this view, interestingly enough, by arguing that "such restraint in the use of torture cannot be reconciled with our willingness to wage war in the first place."

Here it is important to pause long enough to remind the reader that Harris's discussion of torture is immediately followed up by an attack on pacifism. Harris's immediate conclusion with respect to torture is this: Either we give up on war, or we accept torture. By making it clear that we should not give up on war (that it would be "flagrantly immoral" to refuse to go to war in the right cases), Harris drives home his own broader conclusion, namely, that torturing people--even those who might be innocent--can be morally justified.

That, then, is his broader argument. But in his focused discussion on torture his aim is the more narrow one of arguing that if we think war can be permissible, then we have to hold that torturing potentially innocent people can be permissible too. And why is that? Because war inevitably brings with it "collateral damage"--the deaths of innocents who are in the wrong place when the military installation is blown up, who end up in the crossfire when enemy soldiers are targeted, etc. Here's how Harris puts the point:

What, after all, is "collateral damage" but the inadvertent torture of innocent men, women, and children? Whenever we consent to drop bombs, we do so with the knowledge that some number of children will be blinded, disemboweled, paralyzed, orphaned, and killed by them. It is curious that while the torture of Osama bin Laden himself could be expected to provoke convulsions of conscience among our leaders, the unintended (though perfectly foreseeable, and therefore accepted) slaughter of children does not.

In other words, Harris's argument for torture purportedly piggy-backs on the justification for allowing collateral damage. If collateral damage is morally justified (given a certain probability of achieving a sufficiently good result), then torture will be justified (assuming a comparable probability of achieving a similarly good result).

But if Harris wants to piggy-back his case for torture on the case for collateral damage, it would make sense to look at how and when collateral damage has, historically, been taken to be justified. It would make sense, in other words, to try to show that the reasons why people have historically justified collateral damage are also reason that would, likewise, justify torture. There is, after all, an enormous body of literature on the ethics of war. There is, in fact, a "just war tradition" that has given rise to the so-called "just war theory," which has through the years served as the basis for much of our national and international policy-making and deliberations with respect to war. And, as a matter of fact, the just war theory has explicit things to say about collateral damage. There is, if you will, a conventional understanding of the conditions under which so-called collateral damage can be justified.

Sam Harris presumably never encountered this just war tradition and the body of literature surrounding it during his years as an undergraduate philosophy major. I say this because he makes no mention of it. None. He argues that torture is justified if collateral damage is, but at no point does he actually take up the classical justifications of collateral damage to see if, in fact, they transfer to torture.

As a matter of fact, they don't. Let me say that again: According to the classical just war conditions for the justifiability of allowing collateral damage, there is no parity between causing collateral damage in the pursuit of military aims and torturing a suspected terrorist to extract information. The conditions that are classically invoked to justify the former DO NOT justify the latter. So Harris' oversight here is a serious one.

It is made even more serious by the fact that Harris goes through the motions of looking for some relevant difference between torture and collateral damage that might be invoked to challenge the moral parity he attributes to them. He considers and nimbly refutes some very poor reasons for denying this moral parity. Perhaps he thinks that the standard just war position on collateral damage--which, if accepted, would undermine the purported moral parity with torture--is just as bad a basis for denying the moral parity as the bases he considers. But if so, he fails to say why. He fails to even take up the question.

In short, he says that A is like B--but fails to consider the standard account of B, which if accepted would render A unlike B. And he fails to consider this standard account, which would refute his thesis if it worked, even though he pretends to go through the motions of looking for considerations that might refute his claim that A is like B.

But if anything should be taken up in a philosophically serious attempt to show that A and B are morally equivant, it would presumably be the standard understanding of B, at least if, according that standard understanding, A and B are not equivalent at all. Failing to do this is either a serious philosophical failing in its own right (completely ignoring the clearest and most historically important basis for objecting to your thesis) or evidence of a profound ignorance of the scholarly knowledge that anyone making Harris's argument ought to have.

I should note that, even though I think the standard just war view here would, if acceptable, undermine Harris's purported equivalence between collateral damage and torture, I'm not at all committed to the standard just war position. I think it may very well be one we shouldn't accept. And if we don't accept it, the equivance between torture and collateral damage that Harris asserts would be restored--but for reasons that, I suspect, would make it much harder for Harris to make the case that war is justified even when it produces collateral damage. In other words, I think the strongest basis for challenging the just war tradition on this point is more likely to establish an equivance that tips the scales against BOTH collateral damage and torture than one that tips the scales in favor of both. But that is an issue for another time.

For now, I want to say this: In this post I've boldly asserted that Harris's claimed equivalence between collateral damage and torture would be undermined if we accepted the standard just war position on collateral damage. I have yet to explain why this is so. A full explanation will have to wait for a later post, but a brief account is warranted here. In brief, then, the just war tradition works out, in relation to collateral damage, the implications of something called the doctrine of double effect. This is a doctrine that lays out precise conditions under which it can be morally permissible to pursue an action that has both a good effect and a bad one. Among other things, the bad effect cannot be a means to the good effect (another crucial requirement is that the good effect outweigh the bad). In other words, the bad effect has to be an unintended, if foreseen, side-effect--that is, an effect the elimination of which would not prevent the good effect from being achieved.

This is what distinguishes bomb attacks with "collateral damage" from bomb attacks that directly target civilians in order to terrorize the population and thus weaken their resolve to continue the war. The latter is strictly ruled out on traditional just war grounds because the bad effect is in this case intended as a means to the good. Fire bombing of Dresden? Ruled out by traditional just war theory. Nazi bombing raids over London? Ruled out. Atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Ruled out.

What characterizes a legitimate case of "collateral damage," on just war theory, is this: If the innocent civilians could be evacuated from the site of a bomb attack on a military target, it would still be possible to perform the very same bomb attack for the sake of achieving the very same end result (taking out the military target). You don't need the suffering and death of the civilians in order for the bomb attack to achieve the military objective it is intended to achieve. The same cannot be said of the suffering of a torture victim that is pursued for the sake of extracting information. You can't torture information out of someone without causing them pain. Put bluntly, if you give them enough sedatives that the torture doesn't hurt them, it's not torture and the whole method of pursuing the goal has been abandoned. In the case of torture, you are pursuing the bad effect in order to achieve the good one.

You might think this distinction makes no moral difference. In other words, you might disagree with the weight of the tradition and the majority of scholars in the just war tradition. But if so, it is not a sign of impeccable scholarship to refuse to say why--to refuse to even acknowledge that there is such a basis for rejecting your thesis.

Progressive Religion vs. Fundamentalism, Part 2: A Slippery Slope?

Two Kinds of Religion

A few weeks back I offered the first post in a promised series--a series in which my aim will be to consider objections to the legitimacy of religion in general in the light of the distinction between progressive religion and fundamentalism.

In that first post my purpose was to explain what I have in mind by the two kinds of religion--not in rigorous philosophical terms, but in an accessible way that I hope is useful. As I made clear in that post, the distinction I have in mind is between ideal types. Actual religions can be more or less progressive, more or less fundamentalistic.

In brief, the key feature of fundamentalism is certainty: This creed, these texts, this leader or institution offers us the Truth with a capital "T"--that is, a deep and ultimate truth about the nature of reality (in theism, about the nature of God), and a decisive account of how we ought to live so as to be in harmony with this deepest reality (in theism, living in tune with God's nature and will). In fundamentalism an equivalence is asserted between the teachings of a particular book or other authority and the self-disclosure of the creator. The Bible is the Word of God. Hence, no distinction is made between doubting that the Bible is God's Word and doubting God's Word. Anyone who doubts the chosen holy book or prophet or clerical authority is thus an enemy of Truth.

In brief, the key feature of progressive religion is critical appropriation and living out of inherited worldviews and ways of life: A religious tradition, with its creeds and sacred narratives, its scriptures and its sacraments, is embraced on account of its perceived promise in helping us to grow in wisdom. It's a matter of trajectory. The religious tradition is seen as offering a powerful template for engaging with the world, one that promises ever deeper insight into fundamental truths about ourselves and the world if only we are open to having that template itself evolve in the light of what lived experience--our own and others'--teaches us.

In other words, like fundamentalism, progressive religion reaches for profound truths about ourselves and reality that transcend what ordinary empirical inquiry gives to us. But while fundamentalism claims to have grasped these truths, equating them with the doctrines and practices and narratives of their religion, the religious progressive sees these doctrines and practices and narratives as instruments for progressively moving towards truths that, by their nature, may never be fully within reach.

The Slippery Slope Premise

A recurring challenge to progressive religion, especially in the last few years, is that there's something about even religion in its progressive forms that facilitates fundamentalism. If we endorse or legitimize progressive religion, we thereby endorse or legitimize a pattern of thinking or approach to life that opens the door to fundamentalist belief. You can't have one without the other.

Let's call this the slippery slope premise: There's a slippery slope from progressive religion to fundamentalism, not in the sense that every person who embraces the former is inevitably going to slide into the latter, but in the sense that if society lets the former in the door, the latter will slide in with it.
The most sweeping recent critics of religion (the "New Atheists" such as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris) have offered various reasons for thinking that this slippery slope premise is true, and have then made use of it to conclude that even if what they call "moderate" religion is in its own right harmless, it should be opposed because (in Dawkins' words) its teachings "though not extremist in themselves, are an open invitation to extremism" (The God Delusion, p. 306).

There's a sense in which my first book, Is God a Delusion?, was largely about this slippery slope argument. I wanted to delineate a way of being religious (which I perhaps unwisely sometimes called "true religion") that wan't touched by the New Atheist challenges. I responded to these challenges, in essence, by saying, "Here's a species of religion that doesn't have the vices you rail against; and your glancing efforts to show that 'moderate' religion provides succor to more extreme forms don't succeed in showing that the species of religion I have in mind does anything of the kind."  

But, of course, there are different ways to support a premise. Just because Dawkins and Harris haven't shown that progressive religion is "an open invitation to extremism," it doesn't follow that it's not. There might be better arguments for the slippery slope. In fact, there are probably different sorts of slippery slopes, in the sense of different ways in which endorsing one form of religion might inevitably advance the cause of another. Dawkins and Harris focus on what we might call logical slippery slopes: They think that you cannot consistently complain about or critique fundamentalism if you respect "moderate" religion. But perhaps there are slippery slopes that are less logical and more sociological, or perhaps psychological. What would be the arguments for those sorts of slippery slopes?  

While I hope to devote more attention to these questions in future posts, I don't want to do so here. Rather, for the rest of this post I want to consider what follows if you buy into the slippery slope premise.

Letting in the Bugs

If we accept the slippery slope premise as described above, should we conclude that religion in general ought to be opposed?

The New Atheists think so, but this is one of those places where they seem to be jumping to conclusions. Consider: What if the patterns of thinking that open the door to fundamentalism--and which are purportedly present even in progressive religion--are so deeply rooted in the human condition that there is no real hope of reducing their presence in human society? Our best hope, then, might be to channel those patterns into benign forms of expression. And what if progressive religion is the most effective way to do that?

In that case, promoting progressive religion could help reduce extremism even if it also legitimized a way of thinking found among extremists.

Or what if religion, in addition to having the harmful effect of promoting patterns of thinking that generate extremism, also has an array of positive effects? What if the negative costs of extremism can be overridden by religion’s benefits whenever the fundamentalist/progressive balance is weighted sufficiently on the side of progressivism? And what if such a progressive weighting is within reach?

In that case, legitimizing progressive religion might make the world a better place despite the negative side-effect of offering space for fundamentalism. To return to an earlier metaphor, perhaps it is true that if you open the door to progressive religion, fundamentalism will slip in, too. But likewise, when I let my dogs inside at night, bugs inevitably slip in with them. The opening for my dogs is wide enough, and my dogs slow enough, that sometimes a dozen insects pour in, attracted by the light, before I can get the sliding door shut again.

It hardly follows from this that I should forego the joys of pet ownership. Perhaps if I lived somewhere swarming with mosquitos carrying deadly diseases, the costs might outweigh the benefits. But even then, whether the costs outweigh the benefits might depend on whether there are steps one can take to minimize the number of bugs that pour through.

With my own dogs I've become quite adept at such steps. I avoid letting them out and in at twilight, when the mosquitos are most prevalent. When I let them in at night, I dim the lights inside the house, turn on a floodlight outside that attracts the bugs, open the door enough to call the dogs, shut the door quickly, and don't open it again until they're right there ready to come inside. Sometimes, I'm afraid to say, I almost nip off the tips of their tails sliding the door shut again.

Likewise, there may be strategies that we can take as a society to let in progressive religion while minimizing the number of fundamentalist bugs. If there is some sort of slippery slope--and if, as I believe, there are substantial and important contributions that progressive religion can make to society--then I think an exploration of such strategies is worth having.

And meaningful conversations about such strategies is hindered by polarizing language that throws all religion into a single basket, insisting on all or nothing.

An Interesting Critique from Someone Who Has Actually Read Harris's FREE WILL

I just looked at a review of Harris's Free Will, by Russell Blackford (a writer with a couple of PhD's, one in philosophy)--a review that doesn't help me overcome my aversion to reading the book.

Blackford comes at the book from the standpoint of someone who actually agrees with Harris's criticisms of the view Harris explicitly attacks--but complains about the book anyway, for reasons that are, I must say, disturbingly familiar. Blackford's complaint is summed up in the following passage:

Harris may, indeed, have isolated one tendency in the thinking of some philosophers and some ordinary people. Perhaps he has met people who think about free will in a way that matches up with his definition, and I'm sure some readers will find that the definition rings true for them (the evidence suggests, remember, that ordinary people do not all think alike about free will - and philosophers certainly do not).


But Harris does not claim to be attacking one tendency, perhaps a dangerous one, in ordinary thinking or the philosophical literature. Nor does he limit himself to claiming (against the evidence to date) that it is the dominant tendency.

As far as he is concerned, he is writing about the true conception of free will, and anyone who disagrees is changing the subject. They are not talking about free will, he thinks, but only about "free will" - about an intellectual construction of their own making. That is almost the reverse of the truth, and if anything it is Harris who wants to change the subject by insisting on his own pet definition.

I say this critique is disturbingly familiar because, well, it has the same basic form as my criticism of Harris's attack on religion in his first book, The End of Faith. Here is what I said in Is God a Delusion?:

Religion, for him, is about scriptural literalism...Religious moderates are therefore represented as people without the integrity of their convictions, people who are simultaneously unwilling to accept where literalism leads (because of the influence of modern insight and rationality) and unwilling to accept where modernity and rationality lead (because of nostalgic attachment to the text).

We aren't led to this conclusion unless we accept the equation that Harris makes between fundamentalism and religion. Harris never considers the possibility that fundamentalism may be the perversion...He blithely equates religion with fundamentalism, and the rest is easy: fundamentalism is irrational; it has no resources for transcending itself. If religious moderation is born out of fundamentalism, it can only be because these moderates can't stomach fundamentalism but are unwilling to follow reason to its conclusion.

Had Harris offered, at the start of the book, a narrow stipulative definition of "religion," and said that he was only attacking religion in that very narrow sense, I would have praised the book for identifying a dangerous phenomenon and explicating precisely what made it so dangerous. But instead, Harris allows his attacks to sweep indiscriminately across anything that calls itself religious...

Apparently intellectual vices are hard to shake off. Or maybe when a fallacious way of reasoning works once (works in the sense of launching you to fame and fortune), there's little incentive to abandon it.

Sam Harris writes about free will. Oh goody.

Note: This is not a review of Sam Harris's newest book, Free Will, which I haven't yet read. It is, rather, an account of why I dread having to read it.

After completing his PhD in neuroscience, Sam Harris--a former undergraduate philosophy major and my least favorite new atheist--has, it seems, chosen to continue his career as an unusually prolific and influential undergraduate philosopher.

I say "continue" because his first major book, The End of Faith (and its follow up "Letter to a Christian Nation"), tackled a core topic in the philosophy of religion--"What is faith, and is it a virtue?"--and his second major book, The Moral Landscape, tackled a core topic in moral philosophy: "Is there an objective standard for morality, and if so what is it?" Now, in his newest book, Harris turns to the perennial philosophical question of whether human beings possess free will.

This is a question I struggle with. I struggle with understanding the concept of free will (What do we mean by "free will," and under what conditions could we be said to have it?) and with the range of formidable arguments for divergent positions on the issue. When I read new theoretic accounts/defenses of free will (such as Stewart Goetz's admirable effort in Freedom, Teleology, and Evil), I do so as something of a hopeful skeptic. I'm looking for an understanding of freedom according to which it can be shown to operate as a coherent third alternative to (a) being determined to act by prior causes or by the weight of reasons for action, and (b) acting simply at random or arbitrarily. But I have not yet found such an account (my reasons for remaining unconvinced by Goetz appear in my Religious Studies review of his book). At the same time, I live my life as a practical believer in the reality of such a third alternative, because I don't know how to make sense of my experience as an agent--especially as a moral agent--in other terms.

In short, this topic interests me both as a human being and as a philosopher. So what can we expect from Harris's new book?

In his previous books, Harris demonstrated great eloquence and even greater confidence in the correctness of his own views, while largely failing to do what philosophers are trained to do in graduate school--namely (a) display an understanding and appreciation of the relevant philosophical literature and (b) carefully develop one's position in conversation with the best arguments one has found for opposing views. In short, they were books on philosophical topics written by someone with only an undergraduate philosophy degree...and they read like books on philosophical topics written by someone with only an undergraduate philosophy degree (albeit someone with a sharp intellect and talent as a writer).

Now it's clear from recent comments that not every reader of this blog will regard Harris's propensity to ignore what professional philosophers have had to say on these topics (especially those with opposing views) as a vice. But since I do, my expectations of this new book aren't all that high.

I don't expect Harris to lay out the range of possible nuanced views on free will clearly and completely and then locate his own position within this range. I don't expect him to faithfully engage with the best arguments for views different from his own, comparing the relative strengths of the arguments for these alternatives. I don't expect him to have gone through the literature to determine whether the arguments he develops have already been made, nor whether they have already been criticized...and if so to engage with those criticisms. I don't expect him to anticipate objections to his arguments that haven't yet been made by others, to develop those challenges as powerfully as he can and then respond to them.

I do expect him to display supreme confidence, despite his failure to do any of these things, that his own position is correct.

In other words, I expect the book to be very annoying.

Nevertheless I'll likely read it for the following reasons: First, I hope that his writing abilities will enable him to present his newly acquired knowledge of neuroscience in a manner conducive to deepening my understanding of this topic. Second, I expect that he will present an energetic argument from these neuroscientific starting points, one that might possibly introduce something new to the traditional philosophical arguments against free will. Third, the book is short, and so the investment of time isn't great. Fourth, it's likely to be far more widely read--and hence far more likely to shape popular thinking about this philosophical topic, including the thinking of my students--than will any of the articles and books on free will written by professional philosophers.

And in the end, I'll need to grudgingly thank Harris for precisely this reason: He'll succeed in generating wider interest in and dialogue about an important philosophical topic in a way that others, with less popular appeal, simply can't hope to do. He will have used his formidable platform to spark deeper philosophical reflection about free will than might otherwise occur. Maybe he'll motivate some readers to dig deeper into the topic, to explore what others have to say.

But that doesn't mean I look forward to reading it.

If anyone has actually read the book already and can disavow me of my grim expectations, I might treat the forthcoming task of reading the book as less onerous--and so might procrastinate less about it. But I'm not put at ease by the recent Scientific American blog review by John Horgan, "Will this Post Make Same Harris Change His Mind About Free Will?" (a blog review which, by the way, makes at least one crucial philosophical mistake that I may address in my next post).

Human Decency Across Ideological Divides: The Case of Penn Jillette

Penn Jillette (of the entertaining magic duo "Penn and Teller") wrote a blurb for Dawkins' The God Delusion in which he called it "true like ice, like fire." Beyond this, I've not had any exposure to his thoughts on religion--just a vague knowledge that he's an atheist. But when Robin Parry over at Theological Scribbles posted a video message (below) from Jillette, calling it "refreshing," I was intrigued enough to check it out.



I find Jillette's message moving and thought-provoking--and it touches in various ways on themes that are central to this blog. So I thought I'd repost it here and solicit thoughts/reaction from my readers.

In his blurb for Dawkins' book, Jillette says, "If this book doesn't change the world, we're all screwed." I can't say I agree with that, but I do think that if we can't find ways to understand and appreciate each other across the divisions created by different understandings of the world (and ways of living in it), we are all screwed. It may be for this very reason that I don't hold out much hope for the new atheist books changing the world in a positive way. In this brief video, Penn Jillette models for me--in a way that Dawkins, at least in the pages of The God Delusion, does not--the capacity for the kind of understanding and appreciation that we all need to have.

And he expresses this capacity despite being convinced that he has the truth--and that, by implication, the man who proselytized him is wrong ("I know there's no God," he says quite emphatically at one point in the video). Jillette has convictions--he thinks he knows--on matters about which I am pretty sure there is nothing like knowledge to be had. And yet I don't find in him--at least in this personal moment--the kind of dangerous ideological conviction (with its concomitant in-groups and out-groups) that I too frequently hear coming from Sam Harris at one pole and Pat Robertson or John Piper (who likes to excommunicate by tweet) at the other.

While resisting the allure of certainty about our worldviews--either by being agnostic in one form or another, or by holding "lightly" to one's beliefs in the way that Allen Stairs describes (a lightness that, I think, depends on a consciousness of one's fallibility)--seems to be one way of avoiding dangerous ideological division among people, I wonder if Jillette in this video message is modeling another way. And if so, how should we characterize it?

From the Archives: The Parable of the Spaceship

Last week, my philosophy of religion class considered pragmatic arguments for religious belief--including the arguments articulated by William James (especially in The Will to Believe). It so happens that the view of "faith" that I defend in Is God a Delusion? is very influenced by James's pragmatic approach. At one point, as I was writing the chapter on faith for the book, I wrote up a kind of parable that was intended to capture the Jamesian picture of our human predicament as it relates to religious belief (slightly modified to include, as part of the pragmatic dilemma humans confront, an important thematic distinction in my book, namely Plutarch's distinction between "religion" and "superstition"--or what might be better called the religion of hope and the religion of fear). The parable ended up not making it into the final book, but I did post it on the blog back in 2008, before the book even came out. Since many current readers of this blog have likely never seen it, and since it has bearing on what we've been doing recently in my class, I reprint it now:

Imagine that you abruptly wake up to find yourself on an enormous spaceship. Earth appears through one of the viewports as a diminishing globe—only less blue than it looks in the photos you’ve seen, as if you’re looking at it through a brownish film. You have no idea how you got here. You begin to explore, opening doors at random. You find a kitchen, an exercise room, several bedrooms, and other rooms with strange equipment. Some doors are locked.


As you explore, you begin to meet others who, like yourself, have no memory of how they got here. The first people you meet are a middle-aged woman named Jane, who reminds you of your favorite aunt, and a young man named Paul. Together you follow the sound of voices to what looks almost like a classroom. A dozen people have gathered there. You join them. More people trickle in, until your numbers swell to about fifty.

Eventually, several groups of intrepid explorers head off to see if they can learn more. Your own explorations are interrupted by a scream. Following the sound, you find a smashed-in door leading to a deep shaft. At the bottom is Paul, his neck obviously broken.

Having no way to reach him, you gather in the classroom with others who were close enough to hear the scream, and you await the return of the rest. After a time, one of them—whom you’ve learned is a college student named Joe—returns. He says he’s done a complete circuit of every level and found nobody else, certainly nothing like a crew. “If there are space aliens flying this thing, they’re hiding behind the locked doors.”

But then, a few minutes later, Jane returns, full of excitement. “I’ve met them!” she announces. People gather around. “Well, I didn’t actually see them. It’s like they exist in another dimension. But they were able to…talk to me…sort of. What they did was make pictures in my head. From what I could gather, there’s been some kind of catastrophe. A nuclear war, maybe. I think the aliens were studying Earth when it happened and decided to save as many of us as they could. There are dozens of ships, and they…beamed us up. I guess the process is disorienting. Wipes your short-term memory. Anyway, we’re being transported to a new home. They’ve used their technology to make the ship as comfortable as they could. But some doors are locked for our safety. We shouldn’t try to go in them.” Jane pauses and shrugs. “That’s it. And I’m not sure I got it all right. It was weird, all these pictures in my head.”

Her story elicits considerable heated discussion. Jane is shocked to hear about Paul’s fate, but takes it as evidence that her visions were honest. Someone points out that her experience sounds suspiciously like hallucinating. Someone else asks if she’s ever taken LSD, which elicits a few chuckles. Jane looks away, turning red, but doesn’t answer.

More explorers return without much to report. And then a frazzled young man, Chris, stumbles in. His story is similar to Jane’s, but with important differences. “They were getting in my head, man. Putting pictures there. Forcing me to see stuff I didn’t want to see. It’s like, I saw explosions, all over the planet. And then their ships were swooping down and suckin’ people up with beams of light. They destroyed the planet, man. Alien invasion! And now they’ve snagged a few of us and they’re taking us to some other place. We’re gonna be zoo exhibits.”

Jane shakes her head. “No, no. You’ve misunderstood.”

“This is nuts,” says Steve, a chemistry professor. “Space aliens? I doubt it. This is some kind of experiment. Someone perfectly human has built this thing to test our psychological reactions or something. These…visions…are probably some sort of post-hypnotic suggestion.”

As hours stretch into days, people stake out bedrooms and establish routines. Steve leads a cadre of “investigators” in a systematic exploration of the ship. They map and describe it, and eventually call a meeting where they report their discoveries. One significant discovery is a room where they can regulate the ship’s temperature, humidity, and light levels. They also note that some of the unlocked rooms contain dangerous machines. “Joe nearly got electrocuted,” Steve explains. “And the nearest kitchen is running low on food. We’re gonna need to find some other food source pretty soon.”

“But what does it mean?” you ask. “Why are we here? Are we zoo specimens taken by hostile aliens, or refugees rescued by friendly ones? Or lab rats in some experiment?”

Joe shrugs. “Who knows? All we can do is describe what this place is like. If you want to know what it all means, ask the mystics over there.” He points to Jane and Chris.

“The mystics are idiots,” Steve snaps. “If we’re gonna survive we need to figure this out.”

“Maybe we can’t,” says Jane.

“Yes, we can. There’s a perfectly…human explanation for all this. We just need more information. We need to break down those locked doors.’”

“No way, man!” Chris rises to his feet, looking fierce.

“Chris is right,” says Jane. “They’re locked for our safety.”

“So says mystic Jane.”

“But remember what happened the first day. That young man who broke his neck.”

“Paul was a reckless idiot. We’ll be careful. We’ve got to figure out what’s going on.”

“I’ve told you what’s going on. They talked to me.”

“Convenient that they only talked to you.”

“Chris, too. Maybe only some minds are receptive.”

Steve rolls his eyes. “Let’s suppose they did communicate with you. Some kind of woo-woo ESP. Why should we trust them? They sucked us from our homes.”

“To save our lives.”

“So says mystic Jane. Mystic Chris has a different interpretation, as I recall.”

“If we need more information,” Jane says, “let’s try to communicate with them again. I was in that room with all the pillows—the meditation room—when they first contacted me. Let’s go back there, try talking to them.”

“A waste of time,” Steve huffs. “If they exist at all, they obviously can’t or won’t do more than put pictures in the heads of a couple of screwballs.”

Jane sighs in frustration. “It’s hard to understand them, but I think they exhausted their ability to affect our dimension when they altered the ship to make it suitable for us. But that doesn’t mean they’re not helping. They can still get the ship to its destination. The drive systems operate in both their dimension and ours.”

“How convenient.” Joe shakes his head. “If you’re right, they might as well not exist as far as life on this ship is concerned. If we’re going to deal with that, we need to help ourselves. Let’s figure out how the ship works, what the dangers are, how to control them. I’m with Steve. We gotta start breaking down doors.”

“They’ll kill us, man,” Chris says. “Just like they took out Paul. You start going where they don’t want us to go, they’ll get mad. They’ll blast us. Not just you. These bastards are nasty. They’ll take it out on all of us.”

“Yeah, right,” says Steve.

“I’m serious, man. We gotta keep these buggers happy. We’re in their power. You start opening doors, I’m gonna have to stop you, man.”

“Just try it.” Steve looks around the room. “Who’s with me?” he says again.

And now, finally, the moment is here. You have to decide what to do. Do you join Steve and start breaking down doors? Do you join Jane in the meditation room? Do you join Chris in trying to stop Steve? Do you decide to ignore all of them and head to the kitchen for some soup?

Let’s suppose you like Jane. She seems a decent person, and her story of what is happening is certainly more attractive than Chris’s. If she’s right, then going to the meditation room with her might uncover some new insight. And so you decide to go, in the hope that her story is on the right track, that there are benevolent aliens guiding the ship, aliens you can trust.

Suppose you go with Jane. Suppose that while you’re sitting in the meditation room, silently asking for the aliens to speak to you, you experience a momentary glimmer of something. It feels like someone is there, except that you can’t see or hear anything. Jane, meanwhile, is ecstatic. “They’re talking!” she says. “They’re worried about Steve and Chris. They don’t want anyone to get hurt.”

The feeling you have might just be the power of suggestion. Jane might be hallucinating. For all you know, Steve might be right about things, or Chris. There’s no evidence that clearly speaks one way or the other. But you’ve sensed something. You trusted Jane enough to follow her to the meditation room, and it produced what felt like contact with someone. You could shrug and walk away. Go get soup. Maybe Jane’s delusion is just rubbing off on you. But you hope otherwise.

You turn to Jane. “What’s it like? Talking to them?”

“Wonderful,” she says. “They want to know us, to be our friends. And it makes it so much better, knowing they’re there and mean us well. You know? It’s all so frightening, otherwise.” She sighs. “Do you hear them at all?”

“I thought, maybe, a little.”

She smiles. “It’s a start. Keep listening for them. In the meantime, just know you can trust them.”

Let’s suppose you do just as she says. Suppose that you orient your life aboard ship in terms of Jane’s teachings, in the hope that she’s right. You decide, out of hope, to live as if her teachings are true. But since her teachings are about benevolent aliens who are looking out for the denizens of the ship, orienting your life in terms of those teachings means trusting the aliens Jane says are there.

And this means rejecting Chris’ claims about nasty aliens that need to be appeased on pain of retaliation. While it doesn’t mean blocking Steve and his group from finding out what they can about the ship, and while it certainly doesn't mean rejecting their findings, it might mean taking seriously the idea that the locked doors are locked for a good reason. But mostly, it means two things: continuing the practice of listening for their voices in the hope that a relationship with them will be possible, and finding some comfort in the promise that the ship is taking you, in the end, to a safe harbor.

And here is the question: Could a morally decent, reasonable person follow this path? If you apply the reasoning of Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris to this parable, the answer would seem to be no. After all, Jane is training people to believe beyond the evidence, and therefore priming them to become followers of Chris and his extremism. Right?

Or have Dawkins and Harris missed something important?

Morality, Religion, Bifurcating Ideologies...and Sam Harris's New Book

Earlier this week, in my philosophy of religion class, I offered a brief review of the questions and controversies surrounding the relationship between morality and religion--a topic that I wanted to touch on in class but (as I was making the difficult decisions one has to make when designing a course) decided not to spend extensive time on.

Because theists so often argue that one cannot have morality without God--or at least that one cannot have any kind of objective morality which can provide normative guidance across interpersonal and cultural divides--it makes sense for atheist thinkers, especially those who believe in an objective morality, to attempt to establish a secular foundation for objectively binding moral standards. Thus, it is no surprise that Sam Harris, the "original" new atheist, would turn his attention to this task.

A few months back I offered my reflection on Sam Harris's efforts to pursue this task in a TED talk. Now Harris has released a book on the topic, The Moral Landscape, developing his claim that science can offer an objective foundation for ethics. Just today, Michael Ruse--a philosopher I greatly respect and author of numerous works in the philosophy of science, (including Darwinism and its Discontents and his most recent book, Science and Spirituality)--offers his take (down) of that book in Religion Dispatches.

Many of the points Ruse makes are similar to those I raised in relation to Harris's TED talk--but Ruse is quicker to highlight Harris's deeper agenda, which is (yet again) to trash religion and people of faith. "To say that religion is a bit of an obsession for Harris," Ruse comments, "is rather like saying Hitler had a bit of a thing about the Jews." Ruse is himself an atheist who wrangles repeatedly with creationists and ID theorists, but he's what William Rowe (the atheist philosopher of religion) would dub a "friendly atheist"--that is, his attitude is one of skeptical but respectful critical engagement with people of faith. I think, like me, Ruse is greatly troubled by the kind of bifurcating ideology--the us/them divide and the villifacion on those on the other side of it--that characterizes so much of the contemporary debate about theism and religious faith.

Often, the issue of morality is invoked by religious fundamentalists to villify atheists: There can be no morality without God, they argue; and hence, atheists must be amoral. The reasoning here is terrible, of course. Even if you think that the existence of objective moral truths in some fashion or another depends on the existence of a God, it hardly follows that atheists can't be deeply moral. Suppose there is ongoing uncertainty about the underlying physics that explains the force of gravity--and suppose that in a debate about this underlying physics, one side in the debate has the right answer. It doesn't follow that those on the other side of the debate don't believe in gravity (let alone that they behave as if it doesn't apply to them).

Ruse, in his review of Harris's new book, seems to worry that Harris is taking a page out of the religious fundamentalist's book--trying to argue, in effect, that religious people can't be genuinely moral because they misconceive the foundations of morality. In fact, Ruse seems to be concerned that pursuing this kind of villification of religious believers is a basic driving purpose behind Harris's book.

How else do we explain Harris's utterly gratuitous 15-page attack on Francis Collins, the head of the NIH who also happens to be Christian--an attack that seems entirely out of place in a book that's supposed to be about the foundations of morality? As one reads his review, one can almost see Ruse blinking in astonishment. If your purpose is to explain the foundations of morality in terms of scientific facts, why ignore G.E. Moore's arguments that this cannot be done (in terms of what Moore calls the naturalistic fallacy) while devoting more than a dozen pages to trashing a scientist who has, buy all accounts (except, perhaps, the accounts of those religious conservatives who want to ban stem cell research) led the NIH with distinction?

In fact, as I argued when Harris first called Collins unfit to lead the NIH in the pages of the New York Times (simply because of Collins' Christian faith), there is a very disturbing similarity between Harris's denunciation of Collins and traditional religious denunciation of heretics. Now, it seems, Harris wants to go further: Belief in God not only disqualifies one from being fit to lead an organization such as the NIH; it fundamentally compromises one's ability to lead a moral life.

To be fair, I have yet to read Harris's book and I am going simply off of Ruse's review. Perhaps Harris's argument is not quite so hostile to religion as all of that. But, of course, having read his other books I'm prone to think Ruse's characterization is right. And if it is, then Harris is once again recreating atheism in religious fundamentalism's image--this time by taking the fundamentalist argument that atheists can't be moral and inverting it to apply to religious believers.

I think the issue of how morality and religion intersect is an important one. But I think it is crucial that we explore this and related issues without the sort of hostile us/them thinking that puts those with different ideas into a morally disabled "out-group."  This is not to say there is no truth to the notion that certain ways of thinking can have morally pernicious effects. After all, I just argued in my most recent Religion Dispatches article that allegiance to a doctrine of biblical inerrancy can threaten our capacity for empathy and compassion. But there's a difference between focusing on specific ways of thinking (making a concrete case that their implications are damaging and inviting critical response), and pursuing an agenda of ideological disqualification in which an entire group of diverse human beings is cast beyond the pale--be it Muslims, or Christians, or Jews, or Hindus, or atheists. If any way of thinking has morally pernicious effects, this surely does.

Is Harris guilty of this? I'll decide for sure once I've read his book. But whatever is the case with Harris, let us agree that neither theists nor atheists have a corner on being moral, and neither theists nor atheists have a unique claim on harboring ideas with questionable implications for our prospects of living the most virtuous life we are capable of. In the struggle to understand what it means to live a good life--and the place of religious faith and respect for science in that struggle--bifurcating ideologies only impede progress.

Sam Harris on Objectivity in Ethics

Earlier today my teaching assistant called my attention to a TED talk by Sam Harris (author of the atheist bestsellers The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation) in which Harris supports objectivity in ethics--by arguing that science can (eventually, with the help of neuroscience) answer ethical questions. You can find a video of the talk here. Since what follows is my reaction to the talk, you may want to read what I say after having viewed the talk itself.


First, let me say that there is much in the talk that I agree with, especially when Harris talks about what objectivity in ethics implies and what it doesn't. Many of the points he makes are similar to ones I routinely make in my classes. For example, I often point out to my students that to say that a moral claim is objectively true is not the same as saying that moral principles don't admit of exceptions. And I often note that even if there are objective standards of human welfare, it doesn't follow that there is only one way for an individual or community to flourish. I've even used the example of physical health that Harris himself invokes to clarify this point.


And when Harris contrasted the conservative Muslim practice of requiring that women's bodies be covered with America's commercial exploitation of women's bodies, I found myself recalling a paper I recently received from a Muslim student in my business ethics class, in which the student carefully exposed the problems associated with the exploitation of women in advertising and the use of unrealistic ideals of female beauty to sell beauty products, and then made an argument for a cultural practice of modestly covering women's bodies as a solution to these problems--as, in effect, a way for women to be taken seriously as persons rather than being judged by how they look. While my extensive marginal comments raised a range of objections and challenges to his argument, I saw both of us groping towards the same kind of middle ground that Harris was pursuing, albeit each of us laden with our respective cultural backgrounds and so coming from opposite sides of the spectrum that Harris vividly depicted with his extreme images.


But despite a number of points of agreement, I have two broad worries about Harris's line of thinking as developed in this talk. First, while he makes the (to my mind rather obvious) point that we can learn much about the conditions of human flourishing and prospects for flourishing through scientific study of human beings, he leaps without argument from this observation to the conclusion that science can answer moral questions about what we ought to do and what ends or goals are worth pursuing.


He clearly makes this move because he is operating on the (unstated) assumption that what is right is what maximizes human flourishing (a species of utilitarianism). But utilitarianism is hardly an uncontested moral theory. And we can rightly ask with some skepticism whether he really thinks science can demonstrate that the utilitarian principle is correct—as opposed to, say, a deontological alternative which posits the intrinsic moral rightness of certain acts apart from their impact on human flourishing, or an egoistic alternative which holds with Ayn Rand that there is no non-indexical good, that the only good is my good or your good, and that only my good can be a reason for me to act (leading to the view that the right act for me is whatever makes me the happiest, regardless of how it affects others).

In short, while scientific study of the conditions of human flourishing is clearly relevant to answering moral questions, what one does with those scientific discoveries will be a function of moral precepts that do not themselves seem to be amenable to the same sort of scientific investigation. As such, to say that science can answer moral questions is problematic at best. Harris certainly hasn't offered any powerful reasons to think so in this talk.

My second problem goes beyond what is most obviously on display in this talk, having to do with worries about the ideological agenda into whose service Harris's claims about objective moral truth are being put. Harris rightly points out that religious demagogues typically embrace the same kind of moral objectivism he endorses, but they put it in the service of their own ideological agendas (and he expressed discomfort with being in the same camp as these demagogues).

The way I’d describe this is as follows: these demagogues adopt the view that there are objective truths in ethics in part for the sake of identifying an “out-group” of individuals and/or communities who are agents of objective evil, thus seeking to justify an in-group/out-group ideology which renders permissible the suspension of norms of moral decency with respect to members of the out-group. In effect, the good is threatened by the out-group, thereby justifying radical action on the part of the in-group in defense of the good. The out-group must be defeated, or it will be the victory of evil.


While Harris does not emphasize in this particular talk his own ideological opposition to religion, it remains as an obvious subtext—and in other writings that ideology becomes explicit and deeply unsettling, insofar as it precisely resembles in FORM the kind of ideology he rightly denounces when it is wedded to religious zealots. That is to say, Harris is not merely an atheist. He doesn't just think that religious believers are mistaken, nor is he apt to say that religion's moral track record is "mixed." For him, religion is evil and a source of evil, and those who are religious are, in his language, "on the wrong side of an escalating war of ideas," one in which he thinks the very survival of humanity depends on the defeat of the religious side by the secular atheist one. Replace "atheism" and "religion" in this ideology with "Christianity" and "Islam," or with "Catholic" and "Protestant," and you can pretty quickly see that it is the same ideology of religious intolerance that has caused so much horror in history, only with all of religion now cast in the camp of the infidel or heretic, and atheism wearing the shining raimant of orthodoxy.

To put it simply, this kind of in-group/out-group ideology depends upon the premise that there is an objective moral truth, because it distinguishes the chosen group from the other group in terms of who has this truth and who poses a threat to it. That certainly doesn't mean that objectivitism in ethics inevitably entails in-group/out-group ideology (how could one say that such ideological thinking is objectively bad if one denied objective moral truth?). But if, like me, you think that such ideologies really are bad, then the defense of ethical objectivism for the sake of vindicating such an ideology will be a cause of deep distress. And I worry that this is exactly what is going on in Harris's case.

On the basis of years working in the field of nonviolence theory and cooperation and conflict studies--both in my academic work and in more practical terms as a facilitator for Alternatives to Violence Project workshops in prisons and other settings--I have become convinced that the deepest moral truths have to do with how we should resolve conflicts with those whose hopes, aims, and values conflict with our own. And I have become especially convinced that one of these deep moral truths is that we should address such conflicts on the basis of a recognition of shared humanity and a with a commitment to bridging the gap of difference so as to make possible mutual understanding and empathy in the face of profound disagreement and conflict--as opposed to, say, anathematizing those who disagree with us, or calling for their deaths or for their exclusion from full participation in the community.


In other words, I think one of the deepest (objective) moral truths is that when we are convinced we have the moral truth and we come into conflict with someone who we are convinced lacks it, and our conflict turns precisely on this difference, we have an obligation to value and affirm the humanity and integrity of the one we think is dead wrong. And part of that obligation is to listen as charitably as we can to their lived experience--including those elements of their experience which lead them to hold the view we find so misguided. Another part of that obligation is to honestly share who we are and what we stand for in a way that has the possibility of inspiring empathetic understanding rather than defensiveness.


And as I see it, one of the greatest impediments to this kind of engagement is the kind of in-group/out-group ideology that is so easy for most human beings to fall into, and which Harris himself is constantly lapsing into with respect to (western) religious communities. That he does so is not, I think, a matter of serious debate (I point out various ways in which it happens in Is God a Delusion?, as well as in a Religion Dispatches essay a while back in which I respond to his strident opposition to Francis Collins' appointment to head the NIH). The real question is how one is to respond to it.

I must confess to an ironic tendency to respond to it by lapsing into an in-group/out-group ideology with respect to those who resist or succumb to in-group/out-group ideologies. But I see this tendency as an objective moral evil. And seeing it at such is one of the things that helps me in the struggle to resist it.