Socrates and the Moral Argument (Pt. I)

One family of arguments among the dozen or so which, taken together, make a strong case for the claim that theism is a better explanation for our experience of the world than is naturalism or, alternatively, that it's more probable that theism is true than that naturalism is true, are the arguments lumped under the heading of The Moral Argument. One version of this argument goes like this:

1. If there is no God then there are no objective moral duties.
2. There are objective moral duties.
3. Therefore, there is a God.

In this argument God is taken to be a transcendent, perfectly good moral authority who is able to hold us accountable for our actions. The argument is not a proof since when faced with it the skeptic has a couple of options:

A. He can reject the first premise and argue that even though there's no God there could still be objective moral duties.
B. He could accept the first premise but deny the second premise and thus embrace ethical subjectivism or nihilism.

Of course, if he accepts both premises he's logically bound to accept the conclusion.

The problem is that, as I argue in my novel In the Absence of God (see link at upper right of this page), either option he selects to avoid having to accept the conclusion creates difficulties. If he chooses A then it's incumbent upon him to show where objective moral duties could come from if not from a divine law-giver. Neither society at large nor the cosmos itself is a suitable source of moral value, and any moral duties the skeptic embraces are arbitrary choices.

If he therefore chooses B and embraces some form of subjectivism he has to recognize that his moral choices are simply an arbitrary preference or taste and that he must forfeit the ability to make judgments of anyone else's behavior which are also based on their own preferences which are no more right nor wrong than are his own.

This suspension of moral judgment may sound good to someone of a post-modern inclination, but only until one gets down to cases. If our moral duties are all subjectively imposed we can't say that a child molester or rapist, or even the torture of children is "wrong." The most we can say is that these things certainly seem wrong to us, but if they don't seem wrong to the person doing them then in what sense are they really wrong? The idea that these things are not really wrong for the person doing them is extremely difficult to live with consistently. The subjectivist option leads at best to moral egoism, i.e. the view that the right thing for me to do is whatever increases my pleasure and contentment in life, and at worst to moral nihilism, i.e. the view that nothing is really right or wrong in a moral sense.

But, the skeptic will reply, relying on God creates problems for the theist as well. One famous attempt to show that the theist is in no better position than is the skeptic with regard to a foundation for morality first appeared in one of Plato's dialogues (The Euthyphro) in which Plato has Socrates pose the following question to an interlocutor named Euthyphro: "Is something morally good because God commands it or does God command it because it is good?" This is called the Euthyphro Dilemma because it seeks to confront the advocate of the moral argument with two unpalatable choices between which he must choose.

If the theist chooses the first option, that good is whatever God commands, then presumably had God commanded us to be cruel, cruelty would be morally good, a state of affairs which seems to be at the very least counterintuitive.

If the second alternative is chosen, that God commands us to do what is good, then good seems to be independent of God, existing apart from God, and rendering God unnecessary for the existence of good or "right."

Over the next couple of days I'd like to explain why I think the Euthyphro Dilemma, for all it's popularity, doesn't do the work that some skeptics think it does. More tomorrow.

Failed Climate Predictions

Michael Bastasch at The Daily Caller has done a little digging and come up with a dozen or so past predictions of imminent environmental calamity made by reputable scientists and politicians.

Despite the fact that none of these dire predictions has come to pass we still hear the same sort of apocalyptic doom and gloom from numerous sources today. There seems to be something in human nature, a trait possessed in common among religious enthusiasts and some scientists, that makes predicting the eschaton nearly irresistible.

Anyway, here's a pastiche of the predictions Bastasch unearthed. The details can be perused at the link:

Ten years ago, the U.N. predicted we only had “as little as eight years left to avoid a dangerous global average rise of 2C or more.”

A group of 1,700 scientists and experts signed a letter 25 years ago warning of massive ecological and societal collapse if nothing was done to curb overpopulation, pollution and, ultimately, the capitalist society in which we live today.

Prince Charles famously warned in July 2009 that humanity had only 96 months to save the world from “irretrievable climate and ecosystem collapse, and all that goes with it.”

World leaders meeting at the Vatican issued a statement saying that 2015 was the “last effective opportunity to negotiate arrangements that keep human-induced warming below 2-degrees [Celsius].”

When France’s foreign minister Laurent Fabius met with Secretary of State John Kerry on May 13, 2014 to talk about world issues he said “we have 500 days to avoid climate chaos.”

The United Nations Foundation President Tim Wirth told Climatewire in 2012 that Obama’s second term was “the last window of opportunity” to impose policies to restrict fossil fuel use. Wirth said it’s “the last chance we have to get anything approaching 2 degrees Centigrade,” adding that if “we don’t do it now, we are committing the world to be a drastically different place.”

Even before that, then-National Aeronautics and Space Administration Goddard Space Flight Center head James Hansen warned in 2009 that Obama only “has four years to save Earth.”

“We have hours to act to avert a slow-motion tsunami that could destroy civilization as we know it,” Elizabeth May, leader of the Greens in Canada, wrote in 2009. “Earth has a long time. Humanity does not. We need to act urgently. We no longer have decades; we have hours. We mark that in Earth Hour on Saturday.”

In 2009 United Kingdom Prime Minister Gordon Brown warned there were only “50 days to save the world from global warming,” the BBC reported. According to Brown there was “no plan B.”

Rajendra Pachauri, the former head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said in 2007 that if “there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late.”“What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment,” he said.

Environmentalist George Monbiot wrote in the UK Guardian in 2002 that within “as little as 10 years, the world will be faced with a choice: arable farming either continues to feed the world’s animals or it continues to feed the world’s people. It cannot do both.”

The San Jose Mercury News reported June 30, 1989 that a “senior environmental official at the United Nations, Noel Brown, says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the earth by rising sea levels if global warming is not reversed by the year 2000.”

In any other science except climatology (and maybe evolutionary biology) this many failed predictions would discredit whatever theoretical models the predictions were based upon. Climatology, however, is apparently a privileged discipline. It's theories are not held to the same standard of predictive success as are other scientific theories. We might understandably wonder why that is.

The Eye

For about the last century or so Darwinian naturalists have cited the eye's design as evidence against the existence of an intelligent designer. This is surprising because the eye is an exquisitely engineered organ, but the argument of the Darwinians has been that there are several design flaws in the eye's structure that any competent engineer would have avoided.

One of the alleged flaws is that the rod and cone cells in the retina face backward rather than forward which would seem to minimize the amount of light that reaches them. As such, the eye seems to reflect sub-optimal engineering, and, the argument goes, since sub-optimal structures are what we would expect given that naturalistic evolution is a blind, rather haphazard process, they're the very opposite of what we would expect were the structure intelligently constructed by a competent designer.

As the short video below illustrates, however, the backward facing cells are actually an ingenious way to optimize vision and not a defective design at all.

The video also makes short work of the claim that complex eyes evolved over very long periods of evolutionary time by numerous successive short steps. In fact, the very earliest eyes found in the fossil record are just as complex as are the eyes found in organisms today. If eyes did evolve the process must have been very rapid and thus, it's reasonable to suspect, somehow intelligently directed.

Indeed, the only basis there can be for ruling out an intelligent agent guiding the process is an a priori commitment to metaphysical naturalism, but why privilege naturalism in such a way if there's evidence to suggest it may be wrong? Yet people do it all the time as this famous quote from geneticist Richard Lewontin reveals:

Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism [i.e. naturalism].

It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.

As Lewontin's declaration of fealty to naturalism illustrates, it's not science as such that conflicts with the notion of intelligent agency at work in biology. The conflict is one between two metaphysical worldviews, naturalism and theism. Lewontin is acknowledging that his choice to embrace naturalism is a subjective philosophical preference, a preference akin to a personal taste and not based on any empirical evidence at all. He embraces naturalism for no reason other than that he has a deep metaphysical, and perhaps psychological, aversion to theism.

Anyway, give the video a look:

So, Why Is it Wrong?

There's been a lot of talk in the news about sexual assault and other forms of abuse by men in positions of power who prey upon women in their orbit. The tacit assumption, pretty much universal in all the discussion, is that this is morally despicable behavior, and it is, but there's an irony buried in this assumption.

In a secular society comprised of people who have largely declared God to be irrelevant what does it mean to say that the behavior of these men is morally wrong? Having abandoned any transcendent moral authority to whom we are all accountable, must we not also give up the traditional notion that there are any objective moral norms and obligations?

It's certainly difficult, as even most secular thinkers have acknowledged, to see how there can be a standard of moral good without an adequate objective authority whose nature serves as that standard, and if there is no objective standard there really is no objective good, at least in the moral sense, and therefore no objective moral wrong.

Thus, good and bad, right and wrong if they exist at all, must be subjective which means that they're dependent on one's inner feelings or preferences. If one person's feelings differ from another's, though, neither person is right nor wrong, they're just different.

This subjectivity expresses itself differently among the three main groups of people involved in these sex scandals.

First, there are the victims who, lacking any objective standard by which to assess what was done to them, simply allege their aversion and revulsion. For them what was done to them is wrong for no reason other than they were made uncomfortable, repulsed, harmed or frightened by it or the like.

Then there are the perpetrators. Lacking any objective reference point for their behavior, they intuit that there's nothing wrong with forcing themselves on a weaker individual as long as they can get away with it.

In other words, for these men, might makes right. Others may deplore what they do, society may choose to punish what they do, but if they can get away with it they're not doing anything wrong in any meaningful, moral sense, and, if they're powerful enough to be immune from social sanctions why should they care what society thinks? The sad truth is that powerful men often do get away with it, with the help of the next group, as the case of former president Bill Clinton illustrates.

The third group are the commentariat in the media and elsewhere who condemn what these men do, who suspect, perhaps, that there's something deeply wrong with sexual assault, but who can give no real reason for their suspicions. They may insist that people have a right not to be violated in such intimate ways, but upon reflection they may realize that such rights are simply conventions fabricated by society.

Having abandoned God they've also abandoned the ability to cite any truly objective rights. After all, what could it actually mean to say that it's morally wrong to violate a "right" if there's no ultimate accountability for what anyone does?

These are some of the same folks who pooh-poohed the allegations of women back in the 90s who testified of Bill Clinton's escapades and predations. Clinton's defenders insisted that "character doesn't matter in a president," only competence matters.

So, for this group, right and wrong are pragmatic. Nothing's really wrong except insofar as it harms the prospects of one's political party or, more cynically, if it can be used to harm the prospects of one's political opponents. Put differently, these people believe that whatever hinders their own political aspirations is wrong and whatever promotes them is right.

So, they'll ignore the odious behavior of the Clintons, Jeffrey Epsteins and Harvey Weinsteins of the world as long as it does no harm to their party, and they'll express moral outrage at the similarly odious behavior of their opponents if they can gain political advantage by so doing.

Thus, what the growing host of offenders in Hollywood, Capitol Hill, and corporate penthouses are alleged to have done is only wrong for the pragmatist because the members of the victim group are exposing the perpetrators in such a way as to harm their respective party's prospects among the vast numbers of unenlightened voters who still believe in objective moral values and who still believe that preying on women is objectively evil.

A Black Saturday Gift Suggestion

Yesterday I urged readers to consider my novel In the Absence of God (2012) as a Christmas gift for friends and family and mentioned in passing its companion novel Bridging the Abyss which came out two years ago.

Bridging is, in part, the story of the search for a young girl who has disappeared off the streets of Baltimore and is believed to have been abducted. Members of the girl's family as well as those involved in the search are forced to confront the tension between a secular view of life which offers no ground for thinking any act "evil" and the obvious evil of which some men are capable.

Here's an excerpt from the Prologue:

In 1948 philosopher W.T. Stace wrote an article for The Atlantic Monthly, a portion of which serves as an appropriate introduction to the story which follows in these pages. Stace wrote:

"The real turning point between the medieval age of faith and the modern age of unfaith came when scientists of the seventeenth century turned their backs upon what used to be called "final causes" …[belief in which] was not the invention of Christianity [but] was basic to the whole of Western civilization, whether in the ancient pagan world or in Christendom, from the time of Socrates to the rise of science in the seventeenth century …. They did this on the [basis that] inquiry into purposes is useless for what science aims at: namely, the prediction and control of events.

"…The conception of purpose in the world was ignored and frowned upon. This, though silent and almost unnoticed, was the greatest revolution in human history, far outweighing in importance any of the political revolutions whose thunder has reverberated around the world….

"The world, according to this new picture, is purposeless, senseless, meaningless. Nature is nothing but matter in motion. The motions of matter are governed, not by any purpose, but by blind forces and laws….[But] if the scheme of things is purposeless and meaningless, then the life of man is purposeless and meaningless too. Everything is futile, all effort is in the end worthless. A man may, of course, still pursue disconnected ends - money, fame, art, science - and may gain pleasure from them. But his life is hollow at the center.

"Hence, the dissatisfied, disillusioned, restless spirit of modern man….Along with the ruin of the religious vision there went the ruin of moral principles and indeed of all values….If our moral rules do not proceed from something outside us in the nature of the universe - whether we say it is God or simply the universe itself - then they must be our own inventions.

"Thus it came to be believed that moral rules must be merely an expression of our own likes and dislikes. But likes and dislikes are notoriously variable. What pleases one man, people, or culture, displeases another. Therefore, morals are wholly relative."

This book, like my earlier novel In the Absence of God, is a story of people living in the wake of the revolution of which Stace speaks. It's a portrait of a small slice of modern life, a glimpse of what it is like to live in a world in which men live consistently, albeit perhaps unwittingly, with the assumptions of modernity, chief among which is the assumption that God does not exist or is in any case no longer relevant to our lives.

A world that has marginalized the God of the Judeo-Christian tradition is a world which finds itself bereft of any non-arbitrary basis for forming moral judgments, for finding any ultimate meaning in the existence of the human species as a whole or the life of the individual in particular, and for hope that the human yearning for justice could ever be satisfied.

Modern man dispenses with God and believes that life can go on as before - or even better than before - but this is a conceit which the sanguinary history of the 19th and 20th century confutes. A world that has abandoned God has abandoned the fountain of goodness, beauty and truth as well as the only possible ground for human rights and belief in the dignity of the individual.

Modernity has in some ways of course been a blessing, but it has also been a curse. History will ultimately decide whether the blessings have outweighed the curse. Meanwhile, Bridging the Abyss offers an account of what I believe to be the only way out of the morass into which widespread acceptance of the assumptions of modernity has led us.

If you'd like to read more about either novel click on the link at the top of this page, and if you're looking for a gift for someone who likes to read and who thinks like W.T. Stace both Absence and Bridging might be just the thing. I hope you'll give them a look. They're available at Hearts and Minds Bookstore, a great little family-owned bookshop, and in both paperback and e-book at Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

A Black Friday Gift Suggestion

Is there someone on your Christmas shopping list you think might enjoy reading a novel which blends philosophy, religion, and a crime story all together on a college campus during football season? If so, you might consider giving them a copy of my book In the Absence of God.

I know the foregoing sounds like a shameless plug, but Absence encapsulates a recurring theme throughout our thirteen years here at Viewpoint. It's a fictionalized argument for the proposition that naturalism affords little or no basis for either moral obligation or ultimate meaning and renders a host of other human needs and yearnings absurd.

Naturalism, to put it succinctly, is an existential dead-end, for unless there is a God, or something very much like God, then life really is, as Shakespeare described it, a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing.

In the Absence of God is set on a mid-size university campus in New England at the beginning of the fall semester sometime in the early years of the last decade.

The main plot line involves a professor named Joseph Weyland who's forced by the events swirling around him, as well as the challenge presented by a young nihilist in one of his classes, to come to grips with the implications of his materialistic worldview. As he wrestles with the issues his materialism raises he's engaged in an ongoing series of dialogues with a colleague and friend named Malcolm Peterson, and also with the pastor of his father's church, Loren Holt.

Meanwhile, the campus has been terrorized by an apparent serial rapist, and several young student-athletes find themselves thrust into the role of both victim and pursuer of the person who's perpetrating these crimes.

Over the course of three weeks in late August and early September the lives of these students become intertwined with those of Weyland and Peterson in ways none of them could have foreseen when the semester opened.

In the Forward to the book I write this:

This is not a book about football, though it may at first seem to be. Neither is it a crime novel, though it ends that way. Nor is it just a book about people sitting around talking, although I'm sure some readers will think so.

In the Absence of God is a novel about ideas concerning the things that matter most in life. It's a tale of three different worldviews, three different ways of seeing the world and of living our lives in it. It's the story of how for a few short weeks in September these three views come into conflict on a college campus in New England and how that clash of ideas forces people on campus to think seriously about the implications of their deepest convictions.

It has been said that ideas have consequences and nowhere is this more true than in one's personal philosophy of life - one's beliefs about God.

It's my hope that in reading this book you'll be stretched to think about things you perhaps hadn't thought about before, or that you'll at least think about your own beliefs in new and different ways. I hope that whatever your convictions about the matters taken up in this book may be, by the time you close its covers you'll agree that those convictions matter, and matter more profoundly than any other opinions you hold.

< /br> You can read more about In the Absence of God by following the link at the top of this page. it's available at my favorite bookstore, Hearts and Minds, and also at Amazon (paperback and kindle), where reader/reviewers have given it 4.5 stars, and at Barnes and Noble (paperback and nook).

I hope you'll consider putting it and/or it's companion novel Bridging the Abyss (about which more tomorrow) on your Christmas shopping list.

On Gratitude

Thanksgiving is a beautiful celebration because it reinforces gratitude - gratitude to family, friends, neighbors, and God.

It's been said that gratitude is the most fragrant of the virtues and ingratitude one of the ugliest of character defects. Those who are grateful for what others have done for them have about them a certain sweetness and loveliness not exuded by any other personality trait while those who take all their blessings for granted, or think of them as things to which they're entitled, or who are otherwise ungrateful for what others have done for them project a self-centeredness or ignorance that's thoroughly unpleasant to be around.

In fact, I suspect one reason many people are resentful of the protests that have of late accompanied every NFL pre-game national anthem is that the demonstrators seem to the average fan to be ungrateful for the many blessings this country has bestowed upon them.

These athletes have become fabulously wealthy, famous and beloved, they've reached a level of achievement that would've been impossible for them to attain in any other nation on earth, and yet they have so little gratitude that they refuse to show respect for the anthem that represents all the sacrifices that have made their success possible, all the principles from which they have benefitted and all the opportunities that they enjoy as Americans.

Whether ingratitude actually lies at the root of this disdain for the anthem or not, many fans probably intuit that it does and are understandably repulsed by it.

In any case, we all have much to be thankful for, and it would be good tomorrow on Thanksgiving Day to express our appreciation to, and for, those to whom we owe so much.

Here's a quick video that explains the history behind the first Thanksgiving celebrated by the Pilgrims in Massachusetts:

The Problem with Teaching Ethics

Ray Penning at Cardus Blog asks the question, "Can ethics be taught?" The answer, of course, is yes and no. Ethics, as the study of the rules that philosophers have prescribed to govern our moral behavior, can certainly be taught, but, although thousands of books have been written about this, I doubt that any of them have changed anyone's actual behavior. Part of the reason is that, as Penning observes:

Ethics courses that leave students with a bunch of “you shoulds” or “you should nots” are not effective. There are deeper questions that proceed from our understanding of what human nature is about and what we see as the purpose of our life together.

This is true as far as it goes, but the reason teaching such rules is not effective is that focusing on the rules fails to address the metaethical question of why we should follow any of those rules in the first place. What answer can be given to the question why one should not just be selfish, or adopt a might-makes-right ethic? At bottom secular philosophy has no convincing answer. Philosophers simply utter platitudes like "we wouldn't want others to treat us selfishly, so we shouldn't treat them selfishly," which, of course, is completely unhelpful unless one is talking to children.

The reply misfires when aimed at adult students because students will quickly, if only intuitively, discern that it asserts simply that we shouldn't be selfish because it's selfish to be selfish. The question, though, is why, exactly, is it wrong to do to others something we wouldn't done to us? What is it about selfishness that makes selfishness wrong?

Moreover, this sort of answer simply glosses over the problem of what it means to say that something is in fact "wrong" in the first place. Does "wrong" merely mean something one shouldn't do? If so, we might ask why one shouldn't do it, which likely elicits the reply that one shouldn't do it because it's wrong. The circularity of this is obvious.

The only way to break out of the circle, the only way we can make sense of propositions like "X is wrong," is to posit the existence of a transcendent moral authority, a personal being, who serves as the objective foundation for all our moral judgments. If there is no such being then neither are there any objective moral values or duties to which we must, or even should, adhere, and each of us is like an astronaut floating in space trying to decide which direction is up.

This lack of any real meaning to the word "wrong" is a major consequence of the secularization of our culture, and it's one of the major themes of my novels In the Absence of God and Bridging the Abyss (see links at the top of this page), both of which I heartily recommend to readers of Viewpoint.

Bad Options

Why does our politics always seem to present us with two very unsavory alternatives between which we either must choose or effectively opt out of the political process?

In the last presidential election we were offered, on the one hand, a corrupt, deceitful, mean-spirited, reckless and feckless liberal progressive, and, on the other, an odious, deceitful, politically reckless, emotionally immature businessman who boasted publicly of vile behavior towards women.

Next month the citizens of Alabama are offered a choice between, on one side, Roy Moore, a man who has been accused of imposing himself upon underage girls 38 years ago when he was 32, as well as stalking and assaulting older girls, and, on the other, Doug Jones who supports a legal right to kill babies up until the time they're being born.

Those who believe Moore's accusers but who also believe in redemption, might be inclined to extend him the benefit of that belief after the lapse of almost 40 years were it not for the fact that they believe he's lying about his innocence today. Whether he is or he isn't, I don't know, but many commentators are assuming that he is, and I have to say that at least some of his accusers sound credible.

Nevertheless, among those who are expressing disgust and moral outrage at the reports of sexual abuse of women, whether it's perpetrated by the host of Hollywood sleazes led by Harvey Weinstein or politicians like Roy Moore or Senator Al Franken, there's one group of people who have no credibility whatsoever on the issue - the group comprised of anyone who supported Bill Clinton in the 1990s when the allegations against him were as thick as mosquitoes in a swamp.

These weren't just allegations of youthful indiscretions, they weren't just one or two unsubstantiated or ambiguous charges that could've been misunderstandings, they were numerous, consistent and included a very credible accusation of rape.

Moreover, no one who supported Hillary in the last election has any ground upon which to stand when condemning any of the current crop of abusers for Hillary was herself instrumental in discrediting whomever among her husband's victims had the audacity to came forward to accuse him. Indeed, she led the effort to smear them.

When MSNBC host Mika Brezinski now declares twenty years after the fact, and after genuflecting toward Hillary throughout the 2016 campaign, that Bill Clinton was indeed a predator and that she's done with tip-toeing around the fact, one can only think that, as John Sexton at Hot Air points out, had Hillary actually won a year ago Mika and everyone else at MSNBC would've continued to fawn over the Clintons as much as ever.

One further point: Among the allegations that've been leveled against Senator Robert Menendez in recent years was that he has patronized under-age prostitutes in the Dominican Republic, yet liberals still seem much more eager to hammer senatorial candidate Roy Moore for his sins of 40 years ago than to pursue the relatively recent claims made against Menendez who is a sitting senator.

Why? Because Menendez is a Democrat and Moore is a Republican?

If that's the reason then how sincere are their declamations of outrage over the degrading treatment of women in our society? Apparently not very.

Naturalism, Utilitarianism and Egoism

Peter Singer is a philosopher at Princeton who has gained substantial notoriety for invoking his utilitarian ethical principles to justify infanticide and animal rights. In a piece at The Journal of Practical Ethics the editors interview Singer and question whether utilitarians can, or do, live consistently with their own ethical philosophy.

Here's part of the interview:

Editors: Frances Kamm once said...that utilitarians who believe in very demanding duties to aid and that not aiding is the same as harming, but nevertheless don’t live up to these demands, don’t really believe their own arguments....She concludes that ‘either something is wrong with that theory, or there is something wrong with its proponents’. What do you think about this argument? Why haven’t you given a kidney to someone who needs it now? You have two and you only need one. They have none that are working – it would make a huge difference to their life at very little cost to you.

Peter Singer: I’m not sure that the cost to me of donating a kidney would be “very little” but I agree that it would harm me much less than it would benefit someone who is on dialysis. I also agree that for that reason my failure to donate a kidney is not ethically defensible.... Donating a kidney does involve a small risk of serious complications. Zell Kravinsky suggests that the risk is 1 in 4000. I don’t think I’m weak-willed, but I do give greater weight to my own interests, and to those of my family and others close to me, than I should. Most people do that, in fact they do it to a greater extent than I do (because they do not give as much money to good causes as I do). That fact makes me feel less bad about my failure to give a kidney than I otherwise would. But I know that I am not doing what I ought to do.

This response raises several questions, but I'll focus on just one. Singer believes it's wrong not to give the kidney and he feels bad, he feels guilty, about not doing so, yet why should he? In what sense is his violation of utilitarian principles morally wrong? Indeed, why is utilitarianism morally superior to the egoism to which he admits to succumbing?

To put it differently, if Singer chooses to be a utilitarian and donate the kidney while someone else chooses to be an egoist and keep his kidneys, why is either one right or wrong? Given Singer's naturalism, what does it even mean to say that someone is morally wrong anyway? On naturalism there's no moral authority except one's own convictions and no accountability, so in what way is keeping one's kidneys an offense to morality?

Elsewhere in the interview, Singer notes that his ethical thinking is based on the work of the great 19th century ethicist and utilitarian Henry Sidgwick and mentions that,

Sidgwick himself remained deeply troubled by his inability to demonstrate that egoism is irrational. That led him to speak of a “dualism of practical reason” — two opposing viewpoints, utilitarianism and egoism, seemed both to be rational.

In other words, the choice between them is an arbitrary exercise of personal preference, although Singer doesn't agree with this because he believes evolution affords grounds for rejecting egoism. It's hard to see how this could be the case, however, since blind impersonal processes cannot impose moral duties. Nor is it easy to see how acting against the trend of those processes can be morally wrong. How is one doing anything wrong if he chooses to act contrary to the way mutation and natural selection have shaped the human species? Why should he accept the ethical results of evolutionary history any more than we accept the physical limitations imposed on us by gravity when we go aloft in an airplane or hot air balloon?

The only reason we have for not putting our own interests ahead of the interests of others - as in the example of the kidney - and the only rational reason we would have for feeling guilt over our failure to consider the needs of others is if we believe that such failures are a transgression of an obligation imposed upon us by a transcendent personal moral authority. Singer lacks such a belief and can thus give no compelling explanation for his feelings of guilt nor any compelling reason why one should be a utilitarian rather than an egoist.

Future Shocks

In a sobering column at The Federalist Robert Tracinski reminds us of ten crises that Americans, and indeed the world, will likely be facing over the next few months and years.

Here's his first five with a brief explanation:

The National Debt
Above everything else there is the specter of the national debt and the unsustainable long-term cost of middle-class entitlements.

Our entire political status quo, in terms of the balance between free markets and the welfare state, is financed with massive amounts of debt, and at some point we won’t be able to keep borrowing our way out of the problem. There will be a reckoning, and when it comes it will be all the more traumatic because we have put it off so long.

The Wreckage of Obamacare
I have recently encountered a number of businesses and non-profit organizations that are reeling from the effects of rising health insurance costs, which are forcing them to raise their prices or lay off workers. Obamacare upended the entire health system on the promise that it was going to solve this problem. Instead, it made it worse. Health-care costs are spiraling out of control because of a program that didn’t work but that nobody can manage to get rid of.

Slow Growth
No wonder this is an era of slow economic growth. America’s post-World War II growth averaged between 2 and 3 percent. For the past 15 years, it has been under 1 percent. This is a crisis because slow growth breeds stagnation and hopelessness. A return to 4 percent growth, or more, would provide a vibrant economy full of opportunities and allow us to grow our way out of our massive debt. But it would take radical change to get us there.

The Revival of Fascism and Communism
If these crises are going to force us to seek out new political solutions, what are we being offered? Some who claim to be on the Right, if only the “alt-right,” are trying to revive white nationalism and fascism, both in our own back yards and in Europe. Just to keep the horror balanced, some on the Left are attempting to revive Communism under the banner of a violent, intolerant “anti-fascism.”

Campus Totalitarianism
All of this starts in the very institution that ought to be stamping out intolerance and authoritarianism: higher education. Instead, universities are leading the way toward a regime of totalitarian groupthink led by fanatical student mobs.

His last five include North Korean nukes and terrorism. He doesn't mention Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons and the consequences that will entail, but he does discuss regional conflict in the Middle East between Iran and Saudi Arabia. You can read more about what Tracinski says about all of this at the link.

He concludes his column with these words:

...we could and probably will find ourselves someday facing difficult and costly wars and violent internal conflict while mired in a debt crisis that we’re not able to grow our way out of. If all of these crises do not hit at once, at least some of them will. When that happens, what are we going to need above all else? We’re going to need to draw upon and reinforce the values and norms that make it possible to solve these problems, and to keep from killing each other in the process....

Above all, we need to focus on the importance of ideas, values, and norms as bulwarks against the forces that are about to drive us to chaos. When the chips are really down—and it can get far, far worse from here—it might not be much of a comfort to know that the grandstanding creep in the Senate (or the White House) has your party’s initial after his name....

Altruism and Psychological Egoism

Here's a question for your Thursday rumination: Does genuine altruism exist in human beings? By this I mean, do human beings, or better, can human beings, act for the benefit of others if there's no benefit in the act for the doer? Do we do what we do for others only because we believe, if even subconsciously, that there's some benefit in the act for us?

Before you answer you should read a brief essay written some years ago by Georgetown philosophy professor Judith Lichtenberg on just this question.

Lichtenberg notes that psychological egoism (PE), the view that all our actions - including those ostensibly done for others - are really done for self-benefit, is impossible to falsify. This means that one cannot imagine a circumstance which, if it obtained, would show PE to be wrong. The inability to think of such a circumstance means that the theory can't be tested, and this is, in fact, a detriment. Immunity to testing is a weakness in a theory, not a strength.

Lichtenberg might have also mentioned that PE is ultimately based upon circular reasoning. To see this consider the case of Wesley Autrey which she discusses in the beginning of her piece. Autrey risked his life in 2007 to rescue a man who had fallen onto the subway tracks in New York City as a train bore down upon him.

To the question, what was in it for Autrey? the PE might reply that Autrey hoped for a reward, either monetary, psychological or perhaps even eternal, for his act of heroism. Suppose, though, that upon being interviewed Autrey denied that any of those considerations ever entered his mind. He didn't have time to think, he attests. He saw the man fall, he saw the train approach, and he reacted.

The PE might then resort to this fallback position: "There must have been some self-benefit in saving the man that Autrey felt, if only subliminally." If asked why there must be such a motive, the PE can only answer, "because saving the man is what he did, and everything people do they do in their own self-interest."

In other words,

1. We always act for our own benefit
2. Cases where people seem to act genuinely for others only seem to be altruistic. There's always a self-beneficial purpose buried somewhere in the person's motivations.
3. We know there must be a self-beneficial motive driving the person's act because we always act for our own self-benefit.

This is a circular argument and circular arguments are logically invalid. Thus, although PE may seem formidable, it's ultimately based on fallacious reasoning, and if PE is fallacious then perhaps altruism is not the illusion that some philosophers have claimed it is.

Anyway, read Lichtenberg's column and see what you think.

Astonishing Hypothesis

Naturalism is the view that everything about us, our bodies and our thoughts, our brains and our mental sensations, can all be explained by, or reduced to, physics and matter. Nobel-prize winning biologist Francis Crick, in his book The Astonishing Hypothesis, describes the view this way:

‘You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll’s Alice might have phrased it: ‘You’re nothing but a pack of neurons.’

Nobel-Prize winning physicist Steven Weinberg describes the implications of his naturalism as follows:

...the worldview of science is rather chilling. Not only do we not find any point to life laid out for us in nature, no objective basis for our moral principles, no correspondence between what we think is the moral law and the laws of nature ... we even learn that the emotions that we most treasure, our love for our wives and husbands and children, are made possible by chemical processes in our brains that are what they are as a result of natural selection acting on chance mutations over millions of years.

And yet we must not sink into nihilism or stifle our emotions. At our best we live on a knife-edge, between wishful thinking on one hand and, on the other, despair.

The twentieth century mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell pretty much agrees with Weinberg:

Such, in outline, but even more purposeless, more void of meaning is the world which Science presents for our belief. Amid such a world, if anywhere, our ideals henceforward must find a home.

That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins - all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand.

Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built.

Note that both Weinberg and Russell see clearly that their view leads either to the Scylla of nihilism or the Charybdis of despair. The only way to avoid these bleak consequences is through "wishful thinking," by which is presumably meant the belief that naturalism is wrong. Why that belief is "wishful thinking," though, is hard to understand since there are very good reasons for thinking that naturalism is indeed wrong.

In any case, naturalism is itself not a product of scientific analysis. There's no preponderance of evidence in its favor. It's simply a metaphysical preference embraced by those who can't abide the notion that theism might be true. Nevertheless, that aversion to theism is so strong that it beguiles brilliant people like Crick, Weinberg and Russell into wrapping their arms around a view of life that drains it of all hope, meaning, and moral significance.

When centuries from now historians look back at this period in our cultural story, I wonder if they won't think how odd it is that anyone would have preferred that naturalism be true rather than that it be false.

The Moore Matter

One of the most temperate and perspicuous analyses of the Roy Moore matter, in the midst of a jungle of intemperate screeds and silly apologias, is a piece written by Jazz Shaw at Hot Air.

Roy Moore, the Republican candidate in Alabama for the U.S. Senate, has been accused by a woman of having a sexual encounter with her 38 years ago when she was 14 and he was 32. If true, Moore would be guilty of statutory rape since 14 is under the age of consent in Alabama.

The details are available elsewhere, but a couple of things about this story are of particular interest to me. One is the rush to condemn Moore simply on the basis of the woman's allegation, and the second is the failure of the media to treat similar allegations against a Democrat senator with equal reprehension, or any reprehension at all.

Jazz Shaw's essay expresses my first concern better than I could. Here are some highlights:

We have one camp of people who claim that the original Washington Post story, combined with a few bits of follow-up material, are sufficient for a conviction in the court of public opinion and Roy should be run out of town on a rail, preferably covered in roofing material and chicken plumage. Another group has already determined that this was a politically motivated hit job by the WaPo, the accuser is lying and everyone should get behind Moore on this.

Both of these positions have a series of glaring flaws in them which I’m seriously hoping can be at least acknowledged, allowing a bit of reason to prevail....

Jazz Shaw goes on to discuss the flaws before concluding with this:

So am I saying Roy Moore is innocent? Absolutely not. For all I know he’s guilty of precisely what his accuser is claiming. Or perhaps he really never did know her. I don’t know. And the main point I’m making here is… you don’t either unless you were there. We simply need more information. Unfortunately, that’s not stopping a lot of people with very visible platforms from making up their minds already. Steve Bannon is declaring Moore free of guilt and blaming the Washington Post. Conversely, Max Boot at USA Today declares this a reason for the entire GOP to disband, going further in arguing that, the presumption of innocence applies to criminal defendants, not political candidates.

Can we all pause for a moment, re-read that last statement from Max and be just a little bit... horrified? The presumption of innocence is indeed a cornerstone in criminal cases, but his conclusion means that any accusation which isn’t immediately refutable with solid evidence which would stand up in court is sufficient to derail a political campaign, end someone’s career, wreck their marriage or any of the other penalties which arise from a conviction in the court of public opinion. Is that truly the standard we’re going to aspire to?

And if it is, and we’re going to apply it to Roy Moore, will we also apply it to George Takei? [Takei] has been accused of awful things by a male model and actor. Much like Moore, this is a single accuser who provided very detailed accounts of when, where and how it happened. (And many are saying those details lend credence to the accusations against Moore.) But he has flatly denied the claims, similarly saying that he has no memory of meeting the actor. And yet that interview he did with Howard Stern ... certainly makes it sound as if forced, unwanted sexual contact was nothing new for him. Shall we convict Takei now as well?

This will all take time to sort out, assuming that there is enough information out there to come to a mostly definitive conclusion. And if that means it takes until after the Senate election, so be it. There are still ways to remove a sitting Senator found to be culpable in such things. But the point is, if you’ve already made up your mind one way or the other, you’re engaging in mob behavior without sufficient evidence to justify your conclusions. And that’s not healthy for society, to say nothing of this one specific case.

What else is bothersome about this sordid episode is the difference between how a Republican senatorial candidate accused of sexual impropriety is being treated and how Democrat senators are treated. Senator Robert Menendez is currently on trial for corruption, but you would hardly know it from the media coverage.

Moreover, when asked whether Menendez should be removed from the Senate if found guilty prominent Democrats refuse to answer. Even more analogous to the Roy Moore situation, however, is the fact that Menendez was accused by a woman of having sex with her when she was an underage prostitute in the Dominican Republic (though this is no part of the current charges).

The accusation was retracted under peculiar circumstances (the girl suddenly refused to press the matter further), but the point is that there's no appetite at all in the media for pursuing these allegations against Menendez even as the allegations against Moore are receiving round-the-clock coverage and his reputation is being forever damaged.

Perhaps it deserves to be, but, if we're going to set aside the presumption of innocence in Moore's case and accept a priori the claims of the woman who was allegedly assaulted by Moore almost 40 years ago, why do we not do the same in the case of Senator Menendez? Is it because Moore is a Republican and Menendez is a Democrat?

Update: Another woman has now come forward to claim, credibly, in my opinion, that Moore assaulted her when she was 16 and he was in his thirties. It's not looking good for Mr. Moore.

On Veterans' Day

Today is Veteran's Day so I thought I'd repost something I wrote for previous Veteran's Days:

National Review's Quin Hillyer reviews two books apropos for this Veteran's Day. One of the books, Damn Few: Making the Modern SEAL Warrior, by Rorke Denver with Ellis Henican, describes the brutal training undergone by men who aspire to be SEALs. The second book, Cold Days in Hell: American POWs in Korea, by William C. Latham recounts the many acts of courage and endurance demonstrated by American POWs in Korean prisoner of war camps in the early 1950s.

Hillyer discusses Denver's book first:

Where this book fully captivates is in its description of the process of creating a SEAL in the first place. We may know, intuitively, that the training (and winnowing-out process) is incredibly arduous, but the details still astound.

Despite Denver’s assurances that SEAL training stays just on the right side of “the fine line between tough and torture,” his descriptions of “the random acts of instructor violence” — “more random and more violent every day” — are enough to give pause to any reader. Forced swims in 52-degree Pacific surf, on next to no sleep after days of physical abuse, “sand and salt water in your eyes, ears, nose, and mouth,” followed by paddling sea races so intense that participants hallucinate: It’s enough to make one cringe just to think about them.

To read about this training, and then to read about the missions for which the training prepared the SEALs, is to understand that the warrior’s life is not one of video-game glamour but of grit and pain — pain borne, as Denver goes to great lengths to emphasize, by real human beings with real fears and real families.

Hillyer then turns to Latham's account of a different kind of heroism:

The privations suffered by many of the POWs matched some of the horrors of World War II’s Bataan Death March. In one particularly horrific incident, a Korean major nicknamed “the Tiger” summarily executed a lieutenant, Cordus H. Thornton, for the offense of having too many of his men “fall out” of a forced march because of severe exhaustion, grievous injuries, and rampant dysentery.

In one prison compound, “typhus, hepatitis, and pneumonia spread throughout the camp, and the doctors soon found themselves treating more than 350 cases a day, with very limited success.” Day after day, more would die, with one historian writing that “here were the bodies of America’s finest young men, covered with filth and lying in stacks in a hostile country.”

In the midst of these horrors, numerous incidents that Latham recounts involved heroic acts of mercy and courage: men carrying each other despite Korean (or Chinese) orders to abandon them; other prisoners sneaking around camp, at mortal peril if caught, to forage for extra food or medical supplies for the wounded. Chief among these heroes was a chaplain, Father Emil Kapaun, whose ministries to the sick and suffering, despite his own serious infirmities, went far beyond the ordinary call of duty.

Particularly riveting was Latham’s description of Easter Sunday 1951:

Kapaun openly defied Communist ideology by celebrating an ecumenical sunrise service in the ruins of a burned-out church. Holding a makeshift crucifix, Kapaun wore his priest’s stole, as well as the purple ribbon signifying his pastoral office, and recited the Stations of the Cross. Most of the men in the officers’ compound attended, including Catholics, Protestants, Jews and atheists.

While the Chinese guards watched nervously, Kapaun ended the service by leading the men in song; “America the Beautiful” echoed from the surrounding mountains, still blanketed by snow. The officers sang at the top of their lungs, hoping the music would reach the other prisoners at Pyoktong.

Two months later, Kapaun was dead. He received the Congressional Medal of Honor posthumously last April.

In addition to these books I would add a favorite of my own, Unbroken, the story of Louis Zamperini, written by Laura Hillenbrand. Zamperini was an Olympic distance runner who became a bomber pilot in WWII. His plane crashed into the Pacific during a mission and Hillenbrand recounts his absolutely astounding tale of human endurance and survival. He and another crewman were afloat for over forty days on a tiny life raft in the vast ocean only to be "rescued" by Japanese soldiers and sent to a POW camp on the mainland where he and thousands of others were held for years, all the while subjected to unimaginable deprivation and suffering.

As Hillyard says in his concluding sentence, on this special day each year we should thank God for putting such men and women in our midst.

P.S. Louie Zamperini passed away on July 2nd, 2014. He was 97.

Why It's Hard to Trust the Media

Prominent investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson gives a brief presentation in this video of why every news consumer should be very leery of what they're consuming. It was once the case that news outlets strove for objectivity realizing that though it may be impossible to be completely objective and disinterested in what they report, nevertheless, it was an ideal they should set for themselves and their profession.

Sometime around the middle of the the last century, however, journalists began to reason that since objectivity was attainable only in a perfect world, which this world is not, they may as well forget about trying to achieve it and instead use their platform to promote their own personal views.

Thus, journalism morphed into advocacy and propaganda, and the news consumer was left unsure of what was fact and what was simply the journalist's own opinion and bias. Journalists came to see themselves as evangelists for the causes most dear to them, which in the case of the elite news outlets were mostly liberal causes, and they coupled their evangelistic zeal with a post-modern, pragmatic view of truth.

Pragmatism holds that what's true and right is what works to promote or achieve one's goal. Thus, if one's goal is the success of a particular political party then whatever tactics bring about the election of one's favored candidates and the defeat of the opposition's candidates are justified. Objective facts don't exist anyway, on this view, and traditional moral assumptions are obsolete and need not get in the way.

Here's Attkisson's take on how the media has squandered and lost the public's trust and confidence:

Family and the Class Divide

One of the troubling sociological trends in our society has been the growing gap between the upper and lower classes, and an important fact researchers have discovered about this gap is the shift in attitudes among members of the lower socio-economic class toward marriage.

This is not a new topic here at Viewpoint but a recent piece by Glenn Stanton reminds us of the disturbing trend occurring among the low-income segment of our population, a trend that's found, by the way, among all racial groups. Here are some key excerpts:

Just 70 years ago, social mobility and protection from poverty were largely a factor of employment. Those who had full-time work of any kind were seldom poor. Fifty years ago, education marked the gulf separating the haves from the have-nots. For the last 20 years or more, though, marital status has increasingly become the central factor in whether our neighbors and their children rise above, remain, or descend into poverty. The research is astounding.

Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute explains in his important book “Coming Apart: The State of White America” that in 1960, the poorly and moderately educated were only 10 percent less likely to be married than the college educated, with both numbers quite high: 84 and 94 respectively. That parity largely held until the late 1970s.

Today, these two groups are separated by a 35 percent margin and the gap continues to expand. All the movement is on one side. Marriage is sinking dramatically among lower- and middle-class Americans, down to a minority of 48 percent today. No indicators hint at any slowing. It’s remained generally constant among the well-to-do. This stark trend line led Murray to lament, “Marriage has become the fault line dividing America’s classes.”

Jonathan Rauch writing in the National Journal, certainly no conservative, notes that “marriage is displacing both income and race as the great class divide of the new century.” Isabel Sawhill, a senior scholar at the center-left Brookings Institute, boldly and correctly proclaimed some years ago that “the proliferation of single-parent households accounts for virtually all of the increase in child poverty since the early 1970s.” Virtually all of the increase!

We spend fortunes on various programs to rescue poor women and children who are drowning in the quicksands of impoverishment, but the remedy for poverty is almost incredibly simple and inexpensive:

Professor Bill Galston, President Clinton’s domestic policy advisor and now a senior fellow at Brookings, explained in the early 1990s that an American need only do three things to avoid living in poverty: graduate from high school, marry before having a child, and have that child after age twenty. Only 8 percent of people who do so, he reported, will be poor, while 79 percent who fail to do all three will.

These disturbing family-path trends are unfortunately true for millennials, as well.

One troubling aspect of this problem is that millennials are increasingly failing to follow Galston's prescription:

A recent report on this topic focusing on millennials reports that 97 percent of those who follow the success sequence—earn at least a high-school diploma, work, and marry before having children—will not be poor as they enter their 30s. This is largely true for ethnic minorities and those who grew up in poor families. But sadly, fewer millennials are keeping these things in order, compared to their Boomer and Xer forbearers.

It's astonishing, given the human predilection for personal well-being, and the enormous emphasis placed on well-being in our modern world, that so many people are spurning the most reliable means of achieving it:

A consistent and irrefutable mountain of research has shown, reaching back to the 1970s and beyond, that marriage strongly boosts every important measure of well-being for children, women, and men. Pick any measure you can imagine: overall physical and mental health, income, savings, employment, educational success, general life contentment and happiness, sexual satisfaction, even recovery from serious disease, healthy diet and exercise. Married people rate markedly and consistently better in each of these, and so many more, compared to their single, divorced, and cohabiting peers.

Thus, marriage is an essential active ingredient in improving one’s overall life prospects, regardless of class, race, or educational status.

Only 4 percent of homes with a married mother and father are on food stamps at any given time. But 21 percent of cohabiting and 28 percent of single-mother homes require such public assistance. Likewise, 78 percent of married people own their own home—a central goal in achieving the American Dream—while only 41 percent of cohabiting adults and 44 percent of singles do. Data indicates that marital status boosts home ownership more than home ownership increases marital opportunities.

Even women entering marriage between the conception and birth of their first child, regardless of class, education, and race, benefit from a greater standard of living by the following percentages.

• 65 percent over a single mother with no other live-in adult
• 50 percent over a single mother living with a non-romantic adult
• 20 percent over a single mother living with a man

The economic and other benefits to children of growing up in an intact family are profound, and when there are several generations of children raised in such families those benefits are compounded by having two sets of grandparents who have the financial wherewithal to provide assistance to their children and grandchildren with mortgages, cars, college tuition, as well as counselling and guidance through the vicissitudes of life.

The benefits of marriage also extend to men who become fathers:

The advantages of growing up in an intact family and being married extend across the population. They apply as much to blacks and Hispanics as they do to whites. For instance, black men enjoy a marriage premium of at least $12,500 in their individual income compared to their single peers. The advantages also apply, for the most part, to men and women who are less educated. For instance, men with a high-school degree or less enjoy a marriage premium of at least $17,000 compared to their single peers.

Marriage generates wealth largely because marriage molds men into producers, providers, and savers. Singleness and cohabiting don’t. Nobel-winning economist George Akerlof, in a prominent lecture more than a decade ago, explained the pro-social and market influence of marriage upon men and fathers: “Married men are more attached to the labor force, they have less substance abuse, they commit less crime, are less likely to become the victims of crime, have better health, and are less accident prone.”

Akerlof explains this is because “men settle down when they get married and if they fail to get married, they fail to settle down.” This is precisely why every insurance company offers lower premiums on health and auto insurance to married men. Settled-down men also work more, earn more, save more, and spend more money on their families than on themselves. They boost the well-being of women and children in every important way.

It's tragic that the belief that the traditional two-parent family is obsolete or unnecessary has gained currency today. From the fact that it's not perfect nor as prominent as it was fifty years ago, however, it doesn't follow that it's either unnecessary or obsolete. It still remains the best soil in which to grow flourishing men, women and children and a strong, prosperous society.

Craniopagus Twins

There's a fascinating account by David Klinghoffer at Evolution News of twin sisters who were born eleven years ago in Canada with conjoined skulls and brains.

According to a Canadian television documentary the girls' brains "make them unique in the world. Their brains are connected by a thalamic bridge, connecting the thalamus of one with that of the other. The thalamus acts like a switchboard relaying sensory and motor signals and regulating consciousness.

As Klinghoffer notes, though, the title of the documentary, Twin Life: Sharing Mind and Body, is misleading because although Tatiana and Krista Hogan of British Columbia share a range of senses and can move parts of each other’s bodies, their minds, their personalities, seem to be separate. Klinghoffer writes:

Neurological studies have stunned the doctors. Tatiana can see out of both of Krista’s eyes, while Krista can only see out of one of Tatiana’s. They also share the senses of touch and taste and the connection even extends to motor control. Tatiana controls 3 arms and a leg, while Krista controls 3 legs and an arm.

Amazingly, the girls say they also know one another’s thoughts without needing to speak. “We talk in our heads” is how they describe it.

But here’s the main point. Insofar as the mind subsumes the personality, these girls do not share a mind. Though together all the time, by physical necessity, their spirits are distinct, with “very different personalities.”

Despite their unique connection, the twins remain two distinct people. Tatiana is talkative, outgoing and high-strung, while Krista is quieter, more relaxed and loves to joke. But she has a temper and can be aggressive if she doesn’t get her way.

A materialist who believes that immaterial minds don't exist might argue that the girls don't seem to share the same "mind" because they don't entirely share the same brain. If the two girls had only a single brain between them then, the materialist could argue, they would have the same personality, etc. Moreover, the fact that they can "read each other's mind," at least partially, suggests that their "minds" are not completely separate anyway.

On the other hand, a proponent of mind/brain dualism - the belief that we are comprised of both a material brain and an immaterial mind - might reason that the very different nature of the girls' personalities points to something else about them that's not established, or at least not completely established, by their brains. That they share much of their brain in common with each other but possess disparate personalities suggests that something other than the brain is responsible for their personalities.

Their case is certainly compatible with the dualist view, but doesn't seem to provide conclusive evidence for it. In any event, here's the documentary of the girls made several years ago. The girls and their family are very remarkable people:

Killing the Philosophical Spirit at UTSA

Alfred MacDonald, a grad student in the philosophy department at the University of Texas San Antonio, has provided us empirical evidence of where bisexuals stand in the favored hierarchy of groups in the postmodern progressive university.

According to an article in The Federalist, MacDonald has evidently learned the hard way that members of any racial, ethnic, religious, or sexual group are strictly forbidden by the stringent rules governing political correctness to say anything even mildly critical of members of any group ranked higher than they in the PC pecking order.

After class one day, MacDonald got into a conversation with some other grad students in which the topic of Islam came up, and he expressed, as he later put it, that “I was bothered that I could be killed in ten Muslim countries.” MacDonald is bisexual, and there are in fact Muslim countries in which homosexuality is punishable by death.

MacDonald's infraction led to him being called on the carpet by the head of the philosophy department, a department which supposedly wears the mantle of free and open thinkers from Socrates to Voltaire.

When the chair, Eve Browning, refused to tell him by e-mail what the meeting was about he decided to record it. The transcript of their meeting reveals MacDonald to be a somewhat troubled and mediocre student, but what's fascinating about it is how Kafkaesque the exchange is between Browning and MacDonald, especially when they start discussing the Muslim fiance.

Bear in mind as you read it that the offended parties in this are all adults. They're professors and grad students, not elementary school children.

After some introductory remarks Browning gets to the point:

EVE BROWNING: Well, the reason why we’re meeting and why I asked to meet is that several faculty and several other graduate students have expressed concerns about things you’re doing in class and out of class, and the nature of the concerns ....There’s a concern about your having made some inappropriate comments to other graduate students…

ALFRED MACDONALD: I don’t talk to anybody and I haven’t in a long time.

EVE BROWNING: Sorry?

ALFRED MACDONALD: I don’t talk to anybody. I don’t know what inappropriate comments I made.

EVE BROWNING: Well this was an episode in professor Chen’s class or afterwards …

ALFRED MACDONALD: I don’t have that class.

EVE BROWNING: What?

ALFRED MACDONALD: I don’t have that class.

EVE BROWNING: Well… the complaint came from him about this partic-

ALFRED MACDONALD: I don’t even know who that is. Professor Chen? Like C-H-...

EVE BROWNING: Shunwu Chen?

ALFRED MACDONALD: I don’t know who that is. I have no idea how I could’ve… I’m not even registered for his classes, you can check. I’m in two of Almeida’s classes, and Josh’s…

EVE BROWNING: … so it was a conversation you had with a couple of other students that you weren’t originally part of, and you joined it, and the topic of… the topic of one student being engaged to a Muslim came up, and it was alleged that you made offensive comments about Islam to that student -- and this is all, I represent this all as alleged because I wasn’t there....

ALFRED MACDONALD: ....I don’t even know. I’m totally mystified. I really don’t talk to people -- at this program -- much at all.

EVE BROWNING: You don’t recall the topic of a Muslim fiance ever coming up?

ALFRED MACDONALD: That yes,...I said that I was bothered that I could be killed in ten Muslim countries. I’m bisexual. So they’d definitely do that in the ten countries where I would be -- you know.

EVE BROWNING: Doesn’t that strike you as an inappropriate thing to say about someone’s fiance?

ALFRED MACDONALD: I wasn’t talking about the fiance. The fiance could have whatever interpretation of the religion that they want....it wasn’t about the fiance, it was about the religious practices in those countries.

EVE BROWNING: How is it appropriate to bring that up in connection with someone’s fiance?

ALFRED MACDONALD: They brought it up. The Islam part.

EVE BROWNING: And you brought up the threat to your life as posed by this fiance?

ALFRED MACDONALD: No. We got to the subject of Islam, not the fiance.

EVE BROWNING: Do you understand how someone would find that offensive?

ALFRED MACDONALD: How someone would FIND that offensive, yeah; how they could perceive it, yeah; yeah, I mean, if I…

EVE BROWNING: It’s a confusing comment to me because Muslims do not all live in countries in which bisexuals are executed. Muslims live in the United States--

ALFRED MACDONALD: Sure.

EVE BROWNING: --Muslims live in France, Muslims live in every country in the world -- it’s the fastest growing world religion.

ALFRED MACDONALD: Yeah, one of my good friends at the university is Muslim.

EVE BROWNING: And do you tell him that you object to his religion because there are places on earth where gay, lesbian and bisexual people are discriminated against, including your own country?

ALFRED MACDONALD: Well, “her.” And my verbiage was “killed” not “discriminated against.” I mean, Death penalty’s pretty severe.

EVE BROWNING: What does that have to do with her being engaged to a Muslim?

ALFRED MACDONALD: Nothing. I wasn’t talking about the engagement to the Muslim. I was talking about Islam in that particular moment.

EVE BROWNING: Well, let me just say that kind of thing is not going to be tolerated in our department. We’re not going to tolerate graduate students trying to make other graduate students feel terrible for our emotional attachments.

This is a ludicrous exchange and surprisingly full of non-sequiturs on the part of a chair of a philosophy department, but it gets worse. Her next tactic is to appeal to threats:

EVE BROWNING: And, if you don’t understand why that is, I can explain fully, or I can refer you to the Behavior Intervention Team on our campus which consists of a counselor, faculty member, and person from student affairs who are trained on talking to people about what’s appropriate or what isn’t.

ALFRED MACDONALD: I just won’t bring anything up about Islam again. That’s pretty simple. Although I’m not sure what you mean by.... what do you mean by “it won’t be tolerated?” Like I’ll be straight up prevented from registering? Or the team that you mention, the behavior intervention team, they’re going to do something or… what exactly is the penalty for breaking that, assuming that I’m in some other situation where I say something that someone else finds offensive and you...

EVE BROWNING: We’d put it either before the behavior intervention team or the student conduct board and ask them to make a recommendation.

ALFRED MACDONALD: Ask them to make a recommendation? What does that mean?

EVE BROWNING: Whether they would refer you for counseling; whether they would recommend that you be academically dismissed; they would assess the damage. They would probably try to speak to the students who are complaining and the faculty that are complaining and make a recommendation. In any case…

ALFRED MACDONALD: And this is over… I thought that UTSA was a public university with first amendment protections? So I could be dismissed for stuff like that? Just…

EVE BROWNING: Making derogatory comments? Yes.

The dialogue continues for some time in this vein, finally concluding with this exchange:

EVE BROWNING: Those are things that would get you fired if you were working in my office. The Islam comment would get you fired.

ALFRED MACDONALD: ...Would it really get me fired to say that I could be killed somewhere?

EVE BROWNING: In that situation as you’ve described it, absolutely yes.

ALFRED MACDONALD: How?

EVE BROWNING: Don’t even ask. It’s clear you’re not taking my word for it. I don’t care to convince you. If I can’t persuade you that it’s in your interest to behave in ways that other people don’t find offensive and objectionable, then at least I’ve done my job.

ALFRED MACDONALD: Well I know that it’s in my interest. I’m just trying to understand the reasoning.

EVE BROWNING: You don’t have to.

ALFRED MACDONALD: Well, this is a truth-seeking discipline!

Well, Mr. MacDonald is a bit naive about that last point. Philosophy is obviously not a truth-seeking discipline at UTSA. Truth, at least the notion of objective truth, is an outmoded concept in some precincts in the contemporary academy. Nowadays, at places like the University of Texas, apparently, a bisexual student can get drummed out of the philosophy department simply for observing that bisexuals are executed in many Muslim countries which is, of course, manifestly true, but in a post-fact world there are some things one is simply forbidden to criticize and one of those sacrosanct topics is Islam, whether what one says about it is objectively true or not.

I wonder what Dr. Browning would have said had Mr. MacDonald asked her to explain to him what he said that was false, and if nothing was false, why, in a philosophy graduate program, true propositions are verboten.

I also marvel at how fragile these UT students and professors must be that they need to be insulated from any speech that might hurt their feelings. These are adults, after all, but they must possess the delicate psyches of children if Mr. MacDonald's assessment of the Islamic world caused them so much pain and grief.

Can Science Survive Postmodernism?

This is the question Denyse O'Leary addresses in a column at Evolution News. Here are a few excerpts from her answer:

The intellectual costs of metaphysical naturalism are rising rapidly.

Traditional “modern science” naturalists viewed supernaturalism as the chief danger to science. To permanently exclude the supernatural, post-modern naturalists have gone well beyond their forebears. They have thrown away reason, which is problematic because reason points to a truth outside nature. They have reinvented reason as an evolved illusion rather than a guide to truth. And, in a cruel but inevitable irony, they liberated superstition from modern science’s jail.

For those who believe in it, reason has always provided a check on superstition. But post-modernists, who dismiss reason as a form of oppression and evidence as unnecessary to high science, cannot simply dismiss such fields as astrology and witchcraft. If everyone’s truth is as true as everyone else’s truth, scientists must lobby for their truths as an interest group in a frenzied market.

The populations most affected by post-modernism tend to be more superstitious than those that resist post-modernism. They are also much more likely to dismiss academic freedom. Contemporary science conflicts are beginning to reflect these shifts....

We hear that objectivity is “cultural discrimination” (or sexist), Newtonian physics is exploitative, mathematics is a “dehumanizing tool” (if not white privilege), and algebra creates hurdles for disadvantaged groups. And mavericks in science are a problem because they tend to be wealthy, white, and male....

We might have guessed blindly that post-modernism (anything goes!) would lead to more academic freedom. So why is it not working out that way? The problem is that post-modernism is not about freedom as such. It is the assertion that there is no truth to be sought, no facts to be found, that are true for everyone. Everyone is entitled to feel as they wish.

There's more at the link, but here's her point: If there's no truth to be found through a reasoned exchange of ideas, if indeed the very idea of objective truth is an anachronism, if one's truth is merely what one feels strongly, if truth is defined as whatever works to help one group achieve its goals and purposes, then rational debate is just a waste of time.

So is any recourse to objective evidence and facts to support one's claims. One side must simply impose its ideas on all others by dint of intimidation and the exercise of raw political power. Might makes right.

In the late Medieval period whoever ruled the land determined the religion his subjects would follow. That principle, stated in Latin as cuius regio, eius religio (Whose region, his religion) in the post-modern era could be stated as cuius regio, eius scientia.

In such an intellectual climate science is no longer about discovering truth about the world, rather it's little more than a species of ideological politics.

In an environment hostile to open-minded inquiry, an environment deeply contrary to that which nurtured science from the 17th century through most of the 20th, science cannot thrive. And if science withers so, too, will technological advance.

Unless we get over our post-modern aversion to objective truth we may well find that we're living during the high water mark of scientific discovery and progress, and the marvelous tide that has made our lives so much healthier and more comfortable than those lived by our ancestors may soon begin to drain away.

Matthew Arnold's famous poem Dover Beach described the ebb of religious faith, but what he says about religion in the modern age may be just as apt for "The sea of science" in the post-modern era:

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Be Careful What You Wish for, Millennials

An annual report from the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation used YouGov polling data to assess American attitudes toward socialism and communism. What they found is that more millennials in the United States said they would rather live in a socialist society than said they preferred capitalism.

Among millennials, 42 percent would prefer to live in a capitalist society, while 44 percent said they would rather live in a socialist society. Seven percent opted for communism and the same percentage said they preferred fascism. In other words, 58 percent of millennials want to be less free, and 14 percent of those wish to live under a totalitarian tyranny.

The only comfort, if one can call it that, in this survey is that it also showed that most people truly don't know the difference between capitalism, communism, fascism and socialism.

There's a well-known story, probably apocryphal, about a college prof whose students yearned to see socialism established here in the U.S. The prof agreed and suggested they start by implementing it in their class.

The students weren't sure what he meant so he explained: On previous tests there had been a lot of grade inequality since some students had A's and B's and some had D's and F's. The students with high grades, the prof declared, should feel guilty since they're privileged by being smarter and having better study habits than the low achievers who can't help that they're not as smart and were raised in an environment that failed to inculcate good study habits and a desire for academic success.

So, the prof informed his students, on the next test anyone who has a B or higher will have points subtracted from his or her score and given to those who had failed. That way everyone would have a C. Everyone would be equal and happy in the new socialist-run classroom.

Actually, the high-achievers didn't think they'd be happy at all because the new system sounded grossly unfair, but they kept quiet at first because they didn't want their classmates to think they were selfish and uncompassionate toward the less fortunate.

On the other hand, this idea sounded great to the low-achievers, but the high achievers, being smarter than their classmates, quickly realized there'd be no point in studying for the tests since everyone would get a C whether they studied or not. Then they thought a little further and realized that since no one would study there'd be no A's and B's at all. In fact, it was quite possible that no one would even pass the exam. Everyone might fail. They'd all be academic equals, but they'd all be equal failures.

When they mentioned this to the prof he nodded and replied, "But that's how socialism works."

Not only is socialism unfair, not only does it not work (especially in a nation with a substantial underclass), but it also breeds selfish, ungrateful citizens. Here's a video that explains why:

Maybe the reason so many millennials say they like socialism is not because they understand what it does to an economy and to the character of the people who live in the system, but because they liked Bernie Sanders, and he was a socialist. He was promising free tuition, free healthcare, free everything. How he'd deliver on those promises they might not have understood, exactly, but when you're feeling the Bern maybe you don't much care.

Why Mind Matters

Raymond Tallis at The New Atlantis discusses the devastating assault on philosophical materialism that began in the 1970s when American philosopher Thomas Nagel explored the question, "What is it like to be a bat?"

Nagel argued that there is something it is like to be a bat whereas it does not make sense to say that it is like something to be a stone. Bats, and people, have conscious experience that purely material objects do not have, and it is this conscious experience that is the defining feature of minds.

This experience, Tallis observes, is not a fact about the physical realm:

This difference between a person’s experience and a pebble’s non-experience cannot be captured by the sum total of the objective knowledge we can have about the physical makeup of human beings and pebbles. Conscious experience, subjective as it is to the individual organism, lies beyond the reach of such knowledge. I could know everything there is to know about a bat and still not know what it is like to be a bat — to have a bat’s experiences and live a bat’s life in a bat’s world.

This claim has been argued over at great length by myriad philosophers, who have mobilized a series of thought experiments to investigate Nagel’s claim. Among the most famous involves a fictional super-scientist named Mary, who studies the world from a room containing only the colors black and white, but has complete knowledge of the mechanics of optics, electromagnetic radiation, and the functioning of the human visual system.

When Mary is finally released from the room she begins to see colors for the first time. She now knows not only how different wavelengths of light affect the visual system, but also the direct experience of what it is like to see colors. Therefore, felt experiences and sensations are more than the physical processes that underlie them.

Nagel goes on to make the claim, a claim that has put him in the bad graces of his fellow naturalists, that naturalism simply lacks the resources to account for conscious experience. Tallis writes:

But none of the main features of minds — which Nagel identifies as consciousness, cognition, and [moral] value — can be accommodated by this worldview’s [naturalism's] identification of the mind with physical events in the brain, nor by its assumption that human beings are no more than animal organisms whose behavior is fully explicable by evolutionary processes.

One might wonder why naturalistic materialists are so reluctant to acknowledge that there's more to us than just physical matter. What difference does it make if an essential aspect of our being is mental? What does it matter if we're not just matter but also a mind? Indeed, what does it matter if we are fundamentally mind?

Perhaps the answer is that given by philosopher J.P.Moreland. Moreland makes an argument in his book Consciousness and the Existence of God that naturalism entails the view that everything that exists is reducible to matter and energy, that is, there are no immaterial substances. Thus, the existence of human consciousness must be explicable in terms of material substance or naturalism is likely to be false. Moreland also argues that there is no good naturalistic explanation for consciousness and that, indeed, the existence of consciousness is strong evidence for the existence of God.

Nagel, an atheist, doesn't go as far as Moreland in believing that the phenomena of conscious experience point to the existence of God, but he comes close, arguing that there must be some mental, telic principle in the universe that somehow imbues the world with consciousness. There is nothing about matter, even the matter which constitutes the brain, that can account for conscious experiences like the sensations of color or a toothache. There's nothing about a chemical reaction or the firing of nerve fibers that can conceivably account for what we experience when we see red, hear middle C, taste sweetness, or feel pain. Nor is there anything about matter that can account for the existence of moral value.

If it turns out that naturalism remains unable to rise to the challenge presented by consciousness then naturalism, and materialism, will forfeit their hegemony among philosophers, a hegemony that has already been seriously eroded.

Read the rest of Tallis' article at the link. It's very good.