Daniel Patrick Moynihan [D], one of the greatest politicians to never win the presidency, gives interview about his 1965 Moynihan Report. In the report he showed that the breakdown of the family was the primary cause of black poverty, not under funded schools. A Democrat, Moynihan admitted that his party went into denial mode. 40 years later the Democrats are still in denial mode, the rate of out of wedlock childbirths among blacks has more than doubled.

Moynihan: I was able to show a striking correlation between the rise and fall of unemployment and the rise and fall of things like married woman/husband absent – a number of new welfare cases, as we would come to call them. When you have higher unemployment, you will get broken families. About a nine-month lag was the most powerful interval. …

Then, in the late 1950s, it began to weaken, and in 1963 that correlation had disappeared. Suddenly, the unemployment rate for minorities – as well as everybody else – was going down; and the dependency rate, if you want to put it that way, was going up. Now, what was this all about? What was this all about? …

And the absolutely essential point to be made about The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, [is that] a year earlier, I could have confidently told you and showed you that [if] you got unemployment down, this problem went down. Suddenly, unemployment is going down, and this problem’s going up. The lines crossed.

(more…)

There are two main methods to attack an ethical system. The first is to attack its internal logical consistency. If an ethical system is not logically consistent, it must be rejected. If an ethical system passes the logical consistency test, then the second test is to appeal to its intrinsic beauty and goodness. For example, even secularly-minded people tend to believe that the Christian doctrine of “love your neighbor” as yourself is a beautiful ethical statement — even if they may disagree about how Christians apply this principle. But if a system of ethics are ugly, then they should be rejected. As Bertrand Russell pointed out, Nietzsche’s ethics were logically consistent, but they were also reprehensible.

Utilitarianism fails both of these tests.

The Short Version

• The Genocide Objection I submit that any ethical system that does not categorically prohibit slavery and genocide of minority groups should be immediately disqualified on the grounds that it fails the test for intrinsic beauty and goodness.

  While it is unlikely that slavery or genocide would maximize happiness (or preferences, …), it is theoretically possible. To paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, utilitarianism is two wolves and a lamb voting about what to have for dinner. Of course, there are utilitarian protections that make genocide more difficult than simply holding a vote. Many forms of utilitarianism give strong preferences extra weight, and the principle of declining marginal utility means that a preference to live counts for a heck of a lot more than a preference to kill. But all this does it make genocide and slavery more difficult. If the minority group’s “vote” counts ten times as much, then it means genocide will not happen unless the minority group is less than percent of the population. If they count one hundred times as much, then they must be less than 1% of the population. If they count for much more than this, then this form of utilitarianism is starting to seem suspiciously like having a right to life and a right to liberty. The leading utilitarian ethcists Peter Singer recognizes this when he says on page 94 of his book ‘Practical Ethics,’ that “if we are preference utilitarians we must allow that a desire to go on living can be outweighed by other desires.”

• Utilitarianism is irrational. For a belief to be held rationally, it must be held with logical consistency. This is clearly true in science. If Theory A implies B, then a scientist cannot rationally believe A while denying B. This principle is equally valid in ethics (for further explanation, here is an accessible introduction to logic, which includes belief logic).

  Utilitarians cannot do this, because if they were a member of an oppressed minority group, they would not willingly submit to their own death by genocide or their own enslavement. Thus they cannot accept all the logical consequences of their beliefs. This is not true for people who support an unalienable right to life.

This concludes the short case against utilitarianism. Below are some more objections.

The Test of Logical Consistency

• Collapse of Rule Utilitarianism. Rule utilitarianism has rules against the abhorrent practices that standard utilitarianism permits (such as slavery and genocide). But now we are no longer maximizing X or even the utility of X - we might be dramatically lowering them. If we find violations of human rights repellent, then rule utilitarianism partially collapses to natural rights ethics. Rule utilitarianism becomes a hodgepodge - it inherits its rules from other forms of morality, then tries to maximize happiness (or preferences, …). It is an inconsistent form of ethics, even by utilitarian standards.

The Test of Intrinsic Beauty and Goodness

• The Tortured Babies Objection. Babies have extremely low status under utilitarianism because they are not rational. At best they are granted minor value because they have a capacity to suffer - but since they are not self-conscious, even this capacity to suffer is limited. This justifies abortion and infanticide - which most utilitarians believe are ethical - but it also justifies selling babies to psychopaths who then torture them to death. Unlike slavery and genocide, you have only a very low hurdle to clear if you want to torture a baby.
• The Nasty Schoolchildren Objection. Perhaps slavery is unlikely. But consider a very routine example in which people gain happiness (or preferences, ….) at the expense of the few: teasing and bullying. If the whole class gets a good laugh at the expense of the child that does not fit in, then the sadness of the one child can easily be overcome by the pleasure of the many.
• The Nasty Gossip Objection. A group of people can gain happiness (or preferences, …) by spreading nasty gossip about someone behind their back. There is no need to factor in that person’s unhappiness because they do not even know about it. Sometimes gossip gets back to the victim, but oftentimes it does not. According to utilitarianism, this nasty gossip is ethical.
• The Objection From Evil Preferences. Utilitarianism does not distinguish between good and evil. My preference to torture my neighbor to death counts just as much as his preference not to be tortured.

  In practice utilitarianism usually makes the distinction; more people will be made sad by my neighbor’s death than happy. But it cannot guarantee it - after all, my neighbor may be a modern day Scrooge with more enemies than friends. Or he could be a member of a disliked ethnic or religious minority. Maximizing happiness is usually - but not always - the moral thing to do. The fact that they can differ means that something else other than happiness sets the moral standard. This is a strong argument that utilitarianism misses what really separates good from bad.

• The Separatness of Persons. Peter Singer observes in his book ‘Practical Ethics’ that the essence of utilitarianism is that it is universal; we should not only consider how our actions affect ourselves, we should also consider the preferences of others. But that leads to humans losing their individuality. Consider a world that consists only of a Christian and an atheist. The Christian wants his neighbor to go to church. Every Sunday morning the atheist must give equal weight to the Christian’s preference, so every other week he has to go to church (or attend half a service every week?) even though he doesn’t want to. Anything less would be immoral. Conversely, the Christian has to stay home from Church once a week because he has to consider how decision would affect his neighbor’s preferences. Utilitarianism forces each of them to become half Christian, half Atheist. But that is not what either person wants!

  We need an ethical system that is universal - that has the same rules for everyone - but that still respects what the liberal philosopher John Rawls calls the ’separateness of persons.’ A natural rights based ethics does this - everyone has the freedom to worship as they please (or not at all). Golden Rule ethics also does this - you might want your neighbor to go to Church, but not if means that you have to stay home. Instead, both will end out granting each other the space to make their own decisions.

• The Smart People Are Worth More Objection. If you only “count” in a utilitarian ethical system because you have a capacity such as self-awareness or rational thought, then logically you must give extra value to people who have more of this capacity. Conversely, you must reduce the value of people who have less of it. Utilitarians would like to keep things at three distinct categories: (1) fetuses and young infants who have little intrinsic value, (2) higher animals who have partial value (some utilitarians would eliminate this category) and (3) children and adults, who have the full intrinsic value. But adults are more rational and self-aware than children, and some adults are more rational and self-aware than other adults. Logically, adults should count for more than children, and smart adults should count for more than dumb adults.
• What is X? Utilitarianism has been around for almost 150 years and utilitarians still haven’t decided what they want to maximize: pleasure, happiness, dignity, preferences etc… Or conversely, what they want to minimize: pain, suffering, poverty, displeasure etc…
• Maximize the total? Or utility? Suppose that the X we want to maximize is wealth. What if a new policy would give $2 to a rich person while taking away $1 from a poor person? Now consider that X is not wealth, but happiness or freedom.

  Most utilitarians mitigate this problem with utility functions. Make it so that a dollar for a rich person counts less than a dollar for a poor person. This helps to reduce, but not eliminate, the chance that slavery or genocide would be justified. But now utilitarianism can no longer claim to maximize X. How much total X are you willing to sacrifice to create a more egalitarian distribution of X? Should you have some mild redistribution? Or go all the way to utility socialism? Winston Churchill once quipped that the goal of socialism is to make everyone equally miserable. Is that the goal of utilitarianism? If so, that is quite a reversal from trying to maximize happiness.

• The Three Mile Island Objection. Three Mile Island was a disaster, but some good came out of it. People became more aware of the risks of nuclear power. If Three Mile Island prevented unsafe nuclear plants from being built, and spurred research into safer nuclear power (or led to the end of nuclear power), then three mile island may have actually been a net gain for society. It has been decades since three mile island occurred and we still do not know whether it was a net gain or a net loss. In a chaotic system it is usually impossible to make long term predictions of the future.
• Hedonism One response to the problem of three mile island would be to focus on the immediately knowable consequences of an action. As Peter Singer puts it in ‘Practical Ethics,’ you discount the value of future happiness just as bankers discount the value of money in the future (this is the reason for interest - 200 hundred dollars ten years from now is worth the same as 100 dollars today). But for utilitarianism - which does not distinguish between good and bad desires - this approach leads directly to hedonism. If you have to choose between studying hard or partying hard, then utilitarianism would tell you to party hard.
• Power Corrupts. Most utilitarians dismiss the attacks on utilitarianism’ inability to create an objective calculation of the total utility as a straw man. They would claim that the important lessons of utilitarianism are the general principles that are shown to be ethical, not the minutia of whether action X results in a net increase in happiness (or pleasure, preferences, …)

  But consider slavery in early America. If utilitarianism could give an actual number for its utility, then abolitionists could run the numbers and (hopefully) prove enslaving an ethnic minority does not maximize happiness (or pleasure, preferences, …). But without an objective calculation this is not possible. Since slavery is at least theoretically possible under utilitarianism, racist whites could appeal to the general principle without an objective standard interfering.

  A good axiom in political theory is that you should design your political system with the realization that your worst enemy may someday assume power. Utilitarianism’ inability to create objective and transparent calculations opens a huge loophole that would justify oppression. By contrast a rights-based system is much more difficult to corrupt. It is easy to “know your rights” and that the government’s attempts restrict your speech or liberty are wrong.

• The Experience Machine. The philosopher Robert Nozick images a machine similar to a sensory deprivation tank. Once you are submerged it can give you any experience you could ever imagine or desire. Most people would not choose to go into the experience machine even though it makes you happy and satisfies desires. This undermines the validity of many forms of utilitarianism - it is not actually being happy or having desires satisfied that people really want.
• The Utility Monster Objection. Consider the Genocide Objection. There is a minority ethnic group that makes up 10% of the population. It is easy to justify genocide because they are “outvoted” 90% to 10%. Even if a few humanitarians disagree, it is still 80% to 20%. Of course, the soon-to-be executed ethnic group has much stronger feelings on the subject than the evil majority ethnic group. We can go a long way to preventing genocide by allowing the strength of a preference as a factor. But some people have stronger desires than others; utilitarianism could be held hostage to these utility monsters (as Robert Nozick calls them) who have obsessive preferences. Everyone else becomes sacrificed to the monster’s maw. The stoic poor family will have to sacrifice for the hysterical rich family that is upset because their Rolls Royce got a dent.

  We don’t have to give extra weight to strong preferences - but then it gets a lot easier to justify killing innocent people. Perhaps a compromise is possible; employ a utility function for the strength of preference. Strong preferences still count extra, but not as much. But to whatever degree we reign in utility monsters, we’ve made it that much easier to kill an innocent person. We’re caught between a rock (utility monsters) and a hard place (not being able to distinguish between good and bad preferences).

• The Scapegoat Effect. According to utilitarianism, there is only one role for punishment: deterrence. Punishing people deters future crimes, and thus maximizes happiness (or pleasure, preferences, …). But it doesn’t matter if the right person is punished. Whoever is punished will be unhappy regardless of their guilt or innocence. You can reasonably argue that an innocent person will be more outraged, and thus have a stronger preference. But the strength of preference will be overwhelmed compared to the deterrence value. This is particularly true when the crime is difficult to solve. In those cases, happiness (preferences, …) will be maximized by making a scapegoat out of an innocent person.
• The Secrets Objection. People in utilitarian societies will be aware of the scapegoat effect, which will lead to an inevitable mistrust of the laws and a general breakdown of society. Other breakdowns would start to happen. For example, people might stop working hard at their jobs knowing that utilitarianism, like communism, will guarantee them an income. More generally, utilitarianism is vulnerable to “gaming the system” for both good and bad. This is why many critics of utilitarianism have noted that it would only work if kept secret. People need to live their lives and make their choices based on a non-utilitarian system of ethics. Economists will recognize this objection: behavior is elastic and utilitarianism creates some perverse incentives.

A Third Test: Why Be Ethical?

This is a difficult test for any atheist system of ethics. Utilitarianism is not like Ayn Rand’s egoism, or a liberal system of social contract theory. In those cases self-interested people recognize they can further their self-interest by cooperating to form a government with laws and police force. But utilitarianism frequently demands sacrificing your self-interest for others. Why should an atheist do this?

• Evolution and the moral sense. Evolution is the most popular method of reconciling atheism with morality. Humans are a social animal. We succeed through cooperation. Evolution has given us a moral sense to further this cooperation with others. But the ultimate motivation for this is to pass on as many genes as possible. So what if you don’t want to pass on as many genes as possible? Why should you then be ethical? Or what if you your best rational assessment is that in a particular case, you can best maximize your ability to pass on your genes by not cooperating? Our moral sense evolved because it is a good guideline, not because it is always correct.
• Peter Singer. Peter Singer attempts to provide a reason in his book Practical Ethics. He observes that societies reflect what most of their members want. And if most people to be ethical then society “wants” to be ethical. And societies have the power to reward individuals with social esteem. This brings us back to self-interest as the basis for ethics: we should not merely be self-interested in order to get a reward from society.

Further Reading

• Here is a critical Review of Practical Ethics by Peter Singer
• Here is another “Why I am not a utilitarian” list.
• If you recall from the beginning of the article, there are basically two tests for ethical systems: rational ethical beliefs must be able to be held consistently, and they must have a sense of beauty of goodness. The Golden Rule (treat others as you want to be treated) passes both of these tests easily. It consistency can be proven in formal logic. The logician Harry Gensler does this in his book An Introduction to Logic. Intuitively this makes sense because at its heart the Golden Rule is a consistency principle: treat others as you want to be treated. The fact the Golden Rule is found in nearly every religion in the world also testifies to its beauty and goodness. One final note: an overly literal formation of the Golden Rule - the letter rather than the spirit - leads to absurd results, such as masochists being allowed to hurt others. The proof of the Golden Rule mentioned above was of a sophisticated formulation that avoids these problems.
• If you are interested in a book that both defends natural rights ethics and attacks modern utilitarianism, then I highly recommend Moral Theory by David Oderberg.

Easy Books on Economics

Start with these two books on economics. If you only read one, then I would recommend that liberals read Sowell and conservatives read Krugman.

• Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell. No math, no graphs, but plenty of meat. Sowell is from the conservative school of economics called monetarism.
• Peddling Prosperity by Paul Krugman. There are three good reasons to read this book about the liberal school of keynesian economics. The first is that you need to give them a chance to make their case. The second is that you can use this book to criticize the far left - ‘even liberal economists like Paul Krugman support free trade.’ The third reason is that the book is a short 180 pages.

Learn Economics With Just a Few Short Articles

Here are a few articles written in plain English that will give a fairly comprehensive sweep through all of economics. If you don’t want to bother with a book, stick to these.

• Price Gougers Should be Shot? Price is one of the most elegant and beautiful methods through which the “invisible hand” regulates free markets.
• Speculators. The “invisble hand” uses speculators to correct an incorrect price, or to encourage conserving a scare resource. This happens automatically without consumers even being aware of the fact that they resource is even becoming scarce - what could be easier?
• The Law of Unintended Consequences. When the government creates policies that interfere with the invisible hand, bad things happen. Tragically, the bad effects are often concentrated on the people that the policy was supposed to help.
• The Division of Labor. We all know that technology makes our lives better. What is less well appreciated is that technology often does its work by making it so that it takes fewer workers to make the same amount of goods. This results in economic trauma to the workers who lose their jobs, but it lowers the cost of living. The fact that we are wealthier today is powerful evidence that this process is a net gain to society.
• When the Invisible Hand Fails. There are a few areas when free markets do not work. This includes environmental issues (external costs) and national defense (public goods).
• Licenses Restrict Competition. Here is agreat article by Mary Ruwart, a former Vice-Presidential candidate from the libertarian party making the standard (and frequently valid) libertarian talking point about how licensing schemes restrict competition and hurt small businesses. New York taxis are her major example. Get the other side of the story here Sometimes the real world is too complicated for simplified economic models.
• Three Economic Myths. If there are just three lesson that I would like to see people take from economics, these are it.

Challenges to Economics

Before even getting onto the articles, economics can only tell us what is good for the economy. It can tell us that there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch for the middle class, because taxing the wealth will result in fewer jobs. But it can’t tell us whether or not we should go ahead and do this because we need to help the poor. That is a separate decision that falls in the realm of morality.

• Economics and Ideology. This is an excellent post on a liberal blog about the (conservative) ideological biases of economics professors. It is a good post, but what makes it valuable is the high quality of the comments. I strongly recommend reading them all.
• Economics and the Irrational Man. A frequent criticism by the left is that free market supports are mistaken in their assumption that people are rational decision makers who can be trusted to make good decision. There is a grain of truth to this criticism, but voters are even more irrational than consumers, and government power corrupts more absolutely than corporate power. In other words, we can’t simply assume that the government will do a better job, it may be even worse.
• Weaknesses of Keynesian Economics. The more liberal school of keynesian economics has had some powerful challenges to free markets. Over time keynesian economics has moderated into a monetary (i.e. Federal Reserve) policy of managed inflation and abandoned most of its interventions into markets.
• Imperfect Competition and Classical Economics. This argument claims that economic analysis is invalid because it assume perfect competition, which does not occur in the real world.
• Consensus Among Economists Polling data of economists to see what they do and do not agree on.

Europe Versus the United States

Comparing Europe to the United States puts the theory into practice. European countries generally have extensive social welfare safety nets, nationalized health care, and more heavily regulated industries than the United States - all of which is financed through higher taxes. If free markets are best, the United States will “win.” If they are not, then Europe will “win.”

• Not The Hidden Unemployment Defense!. Europe has a higher unemployment rate than the United States, leading the left to claim that hidden unemployment explains the difference. But Europe has even more hidden unemployment than the United States (as would be expected because its safety nets make it easier to be a discouraged worker).
• The Myth of the Productive Europe. The left holds up the high hourly productivity of some European countries. But a closer look reveals problems with this. Even in hourly productivity, the United States is outpacing Europe.
• Is Social Democracy a Viable Model for Europe’s Future? The opening salva in a long running debate about Europe’s productivity. Read all the comments, they are some extremely good ones. See Quiggon’s response here and Cowen’s follow up here. This should keep you busy for a while.

Economics Blogs
Here are some good economics blogs:

• Greg Mankiw Who would have thought that a Keynesian would have my favorite economics blog? Greg Mankiw is a wonderful writer with a lot of common sense. He is a staunch supporter of free markets despite being from within the Keynesian school.
• Marginal Revolution Probably the most popular Austrian economics blog. Austrian economics is the most strongly free market oriented school of economics.
• Brad DeLong’s Semi-Daily Journal. The leading liberal economist on the blogosphere. From the Keynesian school. You need to keep up with what he has to say.

Further Reading

• Amazon List on Economics. Here is list of books about economics on amazon. If you find it helpful, please vote to give it positive feedback so more people will see it.

In 1989, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama wrote a famous essay called The End Of History in which he claimed that there were no more ideological challenges to [classical] liberal democracies. Sure, there would be tyrants and war and suffering, but they would be peripheral issues. democracy had won the final battle with the fall of communism.

Fukuyama was wrong. In this remarkable essay, The Ideological War Within the West, John Fonte describes the new ideology that challenges [classic] liberal democracy: transnational progressivism. Some of the major points include: the group (gender, race, sexual orientation) become more important than the individual. Then the groups are divided into oppressor groups and victim groups (with immigrants automatically belonging to victim groups). Oppressor groups are forced by the government to make sacrifices in order to ensure proportionalism between the various groups.

It is not the politics of moral relativism (The United States is just as bad as the rest of the world), it is a politics of moral inversion (the United States is oppressing the rest of the world). In this new cold war, the secular European Union has replaced the atheist Soviet Union.

“a little or superficial knowledge of Philosophy may incline the mind of man towards Atheism, but a farther proceeding therein doth bring the mind back again to Religion” — Francis Bacon

Here is an amazon list for self-study in philosophy. Each book is slightly more advanced than the next. Buy them all and work your way down the list. It has a reasonable balance between books advocating theism versus atheism, and relativism versus objective truth. If you liked this list, please give it a helpful vote (upper right hand corner).

A Quick and Dirty Introduction to Philosophy

The French existentialist and atheist Albert Camus once said that there is but one question in philosophy: the question of suicide - whether life is worth living. Camus may have oversimplified but he was on the right track. The story of philosophy is that of an ongoing war between people who believe in objective truths and skeptics who deny them.

One of the main tools of those who believe in objective truths is rationalism, the construction of mathematical-like proofs to answer Big Questions like the existence of God and the meaning of life. The main tool of their opponents is skepticism. The essence of these skeptical challenges is that the philosophical proofs are not clear and well-defined like real mathematical proofs, and this fuzziness creates the wriggle room that leads to invalid conclusions. David Hume was the first important philosopher to realize this. Hume and other skeptics belonged to a school of thought called empiricism. They believed that knowledge comes from experience. This includes life lessons, and the knowledge from your senses, but it also includes scientific observation. Empiricism is the philosophers’ equivalent of “I only believe what I can see with my own two eyes.”

Immanuel Kant agreed with Hume’s skepticism, but still believed that we could gain objective knowledge of the world through thinking alone. One example of this is mathematics. Once mathematics established the principle, the door would be opened to find objective knowledge in other areas of philosophy. The empiricist were skeptical (of course) - they certainly agreed that mathematical proofs required tremendous intellect and thought, but they believed that mathematical proofs were tautologies - things that are true by definition. This means is that the knowledge gained from mathematics is simply the result of how the initial definitions are chosen. In the philosophical world this means that rationalist proofs are also the result of choosing the initial definitions.

Mathematics became one of the main fronts in the battle between the rationalists and the empiricists. It was not until Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead created a rigorous proof in which they showed that mathematics can be deduced from logic that the debate was settled. Mathematics is true by definition (although there are a few issues - Bertrand Russell’s paradox threw the foundations of mathematics into disarray, and the axiomatic system that is currently used to repair the damage creates some wriggle room).

The second important consequence stems from the developments in logic that resulted from Russell and Whitehead’s proof (another philosopher and mathematician, Gottlob Frege, did similar work). The logic they created is powerful enough to capture philosophical arguments. Translating these arguments into logical form proved the skeptics correct; they contained hidden premises, invalid deductions, and a lot of plain old nonsense.

Thus we come to the point where most introductions to philosophy end. The old proofs had to be torn down, paving the way for a new age of reason, atheism and moral relativism. Humanity was finally free to make its own way in the world.

Absurd Conclusions From Skepticism

One problem with skepticism is that it leads to absurd conclusions. In addition to the non-existence of God, skepticism leads to conclusion that objective ethics do not exist. Stealing is not wrong, murder is not wrong, slavery is not wrong, and torturing babies is not wrong. If they were wrong, then how could you prove it? Where are these “objective ethics?” If you believe in these invisible objective ethics, then why not also believe in the Easter Bunny and Santa Clause?

Perhaps it is just a harsh and regrettable fact of life that there is no God and there are no objective ethics. This is the problem that existentialists like Camus grappled with - no wonder they contemplated suicide! But this existential dilemma is only the beginning. The next logical step in the skeptical path was to doubt the reality of physical world around us.

When you look at a tree it appears that you are seeing something external to yourself. But with a moments reflection it becomes clear that what you are seeing is actually an image inside your own head. If you pinch yourself, you may feel pain in your arm, but it too is a thought inside your head. The brain is merely locating the sensation of pain on your arm, just as it also locates the tree in space by making it appear external to you. The lesson is that all we can ever know is the contents of our own brains.

Science is no help bridging the gap between us and the physical world. It tells us that the pictures in our head are the result of photons bouncing off of external objects and striking the retinas of our eyes. But we have no more logical grounds to believe in the external reality of photons than we do in the external reality of trees - our only source of knowledge of photons is pictures in our heads. The best that science can do is tell us how the rules for the pictures inside our heads behave.

If all we know is the content of our own brains, then there is no logical basis to presume that there really are things like trees or photons. The only thing we can logically conclude is this: pictures of trees in our heads exist when we have pictures of trees in our heads. This leads to the classic problem: if a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? The conclusion of empiricists is that not only does the tree not make a sound, but that it doesn’t even exist!

Skepticism gets even stranger. Not only do trees stop existing when you stop looking at them, but other people stop existing also. They are only pictures in your head, not as other conscious beings with an independent existence. Everyone else is just a zombie-like picture in your head doing a clever imitation of self-consciousness (right down to the brain activity on the CAT scan). This belief is called solipsism - we are absolutely alone in the world, with no company except the images and thoughts that flitter through our brains.

This still does not take us to the end of the road. David Hume pointed out that there is no logical basis to think of us as having a “self.” That is merely another thought that goes into our heads. And furthermore, there is no logical reason to believe that we even think. The idea that we think is itself just another thought that goes into our heads. Instead all there are is a bunch of thoughts that pop into our head, including ones that give us the illusion of thinking and a sense of self. And finally, there is no reason to even assume that we’ve been existing or that we have a past. Our memories are merely one more thought that has popped into our heads. There is no logical ground for presuming that the past actually happened.

Even the staunchest skeptics refuse to go to where the logical conclusions of their beliefs take them. They all drop out somewhere along the way. David Hume believed in external objects and other conscious minds besides his own; he just didn’t think there was a logical reason to do so. Immanuel Kant tore down many of the rationalist proofs for the existence of God, but he was a devout Christian who also believed in objective ethics. In some ways, Kant was the first philosopher to recognize the force of skepticism and tried to find new solutions. GE Moore led the charge of the realist movement that tried to rescue the reality of external objects, and although he never quite succeeded he still believed in the reality of his own two hands more than he believed in all the sophisticated philosophical arguments against them. Almost all skeptical philosophers have had strong moral and political beliefs - most of them were socialists, particularly in the early 20th century. And yet, most of these philosophers maintained that belief in God was irrational.

Skepticism is Self-Refuting

Another problem with skepticism is that it is self-refuting. The classic example is logical positivism, which says that either there is a true/false test to verify an argument, or it should be rejected as nonsensical. But considerer the principle itself: there is no true-false test to verify its validity, so it should be rejected as nonsensical.

Logical positivism is the most extreme example, but David Hume’s philosophy is also self-refuting:

“If we take in our hands any volume: of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask does it contain any abstract reasoning containing quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.”

Hume’s Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding does not contain abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number (i.e. it is not a book of math), and it does not contain experimental reasoning (i.e. it is not a science paper publishing the results of experiments), so it should be committed to flames. The best defense that the skeptics offered was that people should take their advice literally, burn their skeptical works, and then forever set aside nonsensical ideas about God and ethics. But this does not change the fact that they are using a logically invalid means to reach that conclusion.

When a proposition is self-refuting it needs to be weakened or rejected. Logical positivism was weakened into a school called pragmatism, in which you assign a hypothetical “cash value” to the Big Questions of philosophy. Things that really are nonsensical have a cash-value of zero; things that are important (but still can’t be given a true/false test) have a high cash-value.

After Skepticism

There are many different approaches available to philosophers in the post-skeptical world. Immanuel Kant was the first philosopher to recognize both the force of skepticism and that it led to dead ends. He took a “transcendental” approach, which basically says that we can only have certain truths about ourselves and our own mental states because of certain background assumptions, such as the fact that we live in a community with other people. A modern philosopher named Ludwig Wittgenstien echoed that them with his private language argument, which basically says that language is only possible if you have a community of people who attach public meanings to things like colors and objects. In other words, in order to talk about the color “red” we need a community of people who can point to it and say “red.” These are complicated arguments - Kant and Wittgenstein are probably the two most difficult philosophers to understand - and have remained controversial.

A second approach is to recast the old rationalist proofs into logically valid forms. In the world of objective ethics, the logician Harry Gensler has a proof of the Golden Rule. Another example of this is the ontological argument for the existence of God. Immanuel Kant famously attacked the original ontological argument by claiming that “existence is not a predicate,” by which he meant that saying “John exists” is not like saying “John is tall.” Existence is not a property of something like being tall, or blue, or shiny. The formal logic of Russell and Frege confirmed Kant’s suspicion, but Alvin Plantinga has modified the ontological argument into a logically valid form that escapes these attacks.

The weakness of this approach is that all a proof does is show that if the premises are true, then the conclusion must also be true. So the debate shifts to the premises. Consider the following logical argument.

premise 1: all redheads are smart and good looking
Premise 2: Justin is a redhead
Conclusion: therefore Justin is smart and good looking.

The logic is valid, but the first premise is suspicious! But breaking an argument down to its premises eliminates a lot of the “wriggle room” that exists when judging the argument as a whole. And sometimes it is difficult to challenge even the premises.

Another approach is to employ tools from the philosophy of science to philosophy itself. Techniques such as Bayesian statistics allow you to “weigh” the value of evidence and determine probability that a hypothesis (e.g. the existence of God) is true. A good example of this approach is taken by Richard Swinburne in his book The Existence of God, in which he weighs evidence such as the whether or not the Big Bang could have happened without a cause (if it had a cause, that cause is probably God, but if it didn’t have a cause, then there is no evidence for God from the Big Bang). The weakness of this approach is that you must still arbitrarily assign a value to each piece of evidence, so people on different sides of the debate can assign different values and reach opposite conclusions. But much as logical proofs clarify the terms of a debate by concentrating on premises, Bayesian statistics allows you to clarify the terms of the debate by focusing on individual pieces of evidence. There is a lot less wiggle room when you break things down atomically.

Ethics

Here are some articles about ethics.

• The Machinery of Natural Rights.
• The Golden Rule. The world’s most powerful ethical principle.
• Why I Am Not a Utilitarian. And here is a more theoretical article on the subject - a critical review of Practical Ethics.

In 1976 Cambridge anthropologist Jack Goody published Production and Reproduction, an attempt to explain why monogamy prevails in the temperate zones while polygyny prevails in the tropics. Goody concluded that the decisive factor was male participation in agriculture: “Monogamy is most likely to be found with male farming and generally polygyny [is] the least likely (though limited polygyny [the Islamic variety] is common); the reverse occurs with female farming.”

Surprisingly, it turns out that the earliest human societies, the hunter-gatherers, are almost as strongly monogamous as contemporary Western societies. The reason seems to be the division of labor–men as hunters, women as gatherers. Both sexes are productive, and their efforts combine to form an efficient economic unit. The drift into polygamy seems to occur when former hunter-gatherers adopt early agriculture–”horticulture” “gardening,” as the anthropologists call it. During the horticultural stage, farming is regarded as women’s work. Men tend to be unproductive. They either cling to the lost privileges of a hunting society (”leaning on their spears,” as one wag put it) or maintain political power through the tribal hierarchies. Women do the heavy gardening and are therefore more economically productive. This leads to an imbalance between the sexes, which encourages polygamy. Only when animals are harnessed to the plow do men again become the principal producers, and monogamy reasserts itself.

Read the full article here.

I accidently deleted this post when reorganizing this blog, so my apologies in advance for the double post.

Few areas in Sweden are worse hit by the current troubles than Malmö, the nation’s third largest city. According to some estimates, the rapidly growing Muslim immigrant population may turn Malmö into a Muslim majority city within about ten years. It will be the first major Scandinavian city to enjoy this honor, although perhaps not the last. Native Swedes are leaving the city in droves, as crime is rampant and the police publicly admit they don’t control all parts of the city. There are now gangs in Malmö specialized in assaulting old people visiting the graves of relatives. Robberies have increased with 50 % in Malmö only during the fall of 2004. The city is descending into general chaos. Fights in the city’s movie theatres have become a recurrent problem. Numbers released in January 2005 indicate a sharp rise in the number of rape charges in Malmö. Thomas Anderberg, responsible for statistics at the Malmö Police, says there was a doubling of the number of reported rapes by ambush in 2004, following what was already a decade of steadily increasing numbers of sexual crimes. “I think that’s great news,” says Anna Gustafsson, head of the Domestic Violence Unit at the Malmö Police. She suggests that the increase is due to the fact that women who otherwise wouldn’t press charges for rape now choose to contact the police. In other words, Gustafsson claims that we are dealing with a “technical” increase, not a real one. However, national statistics reveal that reported rapes against children have almost doubled in Sweden during the past ten years. The number of rape charges per capita in Malmö is 5 – 6 times that of Copenhagen, Denmark. Copenhagen is a larger city, but the percentage of immigrants is much lower.

Is Swedish Democracy Collapsing?