Friday, December 17, 2021
Standardized tests to get IN to college? Standardized tests INSTEAD of college.
Thursday, December 9, 2021
Bringing morality into politics?
As far as reading material that addresses these issues, the first that came to mind was a 2011 speech by Elder Oaks called “Truth and Tolerance”:
https://speeches.byu.edu/talks/dallin-h-oaks/truth-and-tolerance/
Basically, he identifies one of the two key fallacies that your students are making (and the way you worded your inquiry suggests you already understand all of this, so I’m a little embarrassed to be writing to you “sharing” my thoughts—but, hey, you asked for it :)
1. First, as Elder Oaks points out, it’s a fallacy to assume that we “can’t legislate morality” since all laws (all of them) legislate morality. Every single one. Laws against theft are legislating the morality of “thou shalt not steal.” Laws against murder are legislating the morality of “thou shalt not kill.” Laws providing government assistance are legislating the morality of helping the poor. Laws against slavery are legislating the morality of racial equality (etc. etc.).
So the question isn’t, “Should we legislate morality?”—we already know the answer is “yes”—but “Which morality should we legislate?” For Latter-day Saints, Section 134 gives clear guidelines on this (as do the rest of the scriptures, but just in a less direct, concise way).
2. The second fallacy is the idea that some people get their moral insights (and, by extension, their beliefs about which morality we should legislate) from religion while others do not, and that it’s somehow illegitimate to bring religious values into politics. This is a critical error.
The reality is that everyone gets their morals (and therefore their ideas of which morality we should legislate) from religion, i.e., faith. As Paul pointed out, faith is knowledge of the unseen and since moral truths are completely invisible, then what we know about morality is entirely a matter of faith. Science is the realm of the empirical (the seen) and can give empirical knowledge, but the most important truths, such as truths about morals, are non-empirical. No scientist ever looked into a microscope and said, “Hey, will you look at that? It’s wrong to torture innocent children!” or looked at a test tube and said, “I’ve just found out that we should be compassionate!” We know such moral truths (and much else) by the faith which precedes scientific investigation.
Anyone who says otherwise is deceiving themselves, but boy are they trying hard and getting good at this self-deception. My friend Michael Shermer, for instance, once sent me a long article he wrote arguing that we can get morals from science because we can see that “Humans everywhere seek to survive and flourish and therefore we should do what helps human flourishing and survival.”
This is bad reasoning because he’s engaging in the futile task of trying to derive an IS from an OUGHT. Philosopher David Hume showed this was impossible over two centuries ago, but it’s also just basic common sense. Every rational person knows that it’s absurd to say, “It IS the case that men abuse their wives therefore men OUGHT to abuse their wives” or “it IS the case that humans are greedy therefore we OUGHT to be greedy.”
If we used Shermer’s logic, then we would need to conclude that we OUGHT to commit every evil act because it IS the case that humans do commit every evil act (genocide, rape, murder, cruelty, etc.). Sorry, but Hume was right: IS has nothing to do with OUGHT.
So Shermer saying “It IS the case that humans survive and flourish therefore we OUGHT to promote human survival and flourishing” is no more empirically valid than saying, “It IS the case that COVID-19 viruses survive and flourish and therefore we OUGHT to promote COVID-19 survival and flourishing” (actually, we OUGHT to do the opposite, which is why Shermer got vaccinated). IS has nothing to do with OUGHT and therefore science (the realm of IS) can’t even begin to shed light on morality (the realm of OUGHT).
And it’s not just Shermer. Pretty much every atheist begins their appeals to a scientific basis for morality with, “If we can just agree that…” but this “just agree” is where the leap of faith comes in. What are we agreeing on, and how do we know it? They’ll say something like, “If we can just agree that we should maximize human well-being…” or “If we can just agree that we should respect human rights…” or “If we can just agree that compassion is better than cruelty…” but these are all appeals to non-empirical assumptions for the “agreement.” They are all taking a leap of faith before the scientific investigation even begins.
Atheist Steven Pinker’s claim that, “I don't want other people to hurt me so I shouldn’t hurt others” is no more scientifically valid than saying, “I don’t want other people to hurt me so I should kill and control others to prevent them from hurting me.” And, in fact, the latter statement is far more justified and common from a Darwinian point of view: those most successful in reproducing their genes throughout history (e.g., Ghengis Kahn) were those who were the most ruthless in killing and controlling other people. The most successful reproducers throughout history have made the Kahn survival calculation, not the Pinker one, and it has paid off big time. So why should we heed Pinker instead of Kahn? There’s no good reason except that we know through faith (i.e., intuitions) that the Kahn survival strategy is morally wrong and the Pinker survival strategy is morally right-. You simply can’t get that knowledge by conducting experiments in a laboratory, observing nature, or reading a biology textbook. All other “science gives morals” arguments are based on the same faulty reasoning. Nietzsche understood this, but current-day atheists do not (or, more likely, pretend not to).
Which brings us back to the two fallacies: since morals can’t be known empirically, then they can only be known through revelation, i.e., “moral intuition,” and since this is non-empirical knowledge, then we are knowing moral truths through faith, i.e., “religion.” Everyone gets their morals from religion, no matter how “secular” they believe themselves to be, ergo, the idea that we “shouldn’t bring religion into politics” is absurd because it would mean excluding all morality from politics and yet all law, as Elder Oaks pointed out, is an implementation of someone’s idea of morality
Just this past week Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor fell into this error, when she claimed that it was somehow illegitimate to oppose abortion because believing the fetus is a life is a "religious issue." It’s true that believing that an unborn child is a person is a religious belief, but so is the belief that slaves were people—does she believe, then, that the Supreme Court shouldn’t have overturned the Dred Scott or Plessy rulings? Would she have excluded all of the 19th century anti-slavery arguments from public discourse since virtually every abolitionist organization in America was explicitly Christian? The essence of personhood is not something we find out through scientific investigation, nor is the idea that persons have rights. These are non-empirical truths known only by religious means—faith—and nobody is seriously considering excluding morality from laws, and therefore, by definition, they can’t be in favor of excluding religion from consideration in the making of laws.
All the best --
Tuesday, November 16, 2021
Enchantment and Morality
Friday, November 12, 2021
Disrupting Higher Education with Assessment
Monday, November 1, 2021
The Virgin Birth, the Male Birth
Tuesday, October 26, 2021
Hard writing means easy reading
Tuesday, October 12, 2021
Smoking and Socialism
Tuesday, October 5, 2021
The New Orthodoxy summarized in two slogans
Friday, October 1, 2021
The Boy Who Wolf Cried
Sunday, September 19, 2021
How's this for a grand sounding claim?
Film Review: A Hidden Life (2019)
Tuesday, September 14, 2021
Power and Free Speech
Friday, September 3, 2021
Popper or Bayes?
Sunday, August 29, 2021
Stimulus for Tests
It’s for this reason that so many bright minds, such as Nobel Prize winner Paul Romer, have hammered home the importance of an efficient testing system. If testing were widespread enough, that would be a terrific substitute for lockdowns, closures, and masking. A possible proposal: instead of having the government send out stimulus checks with no strings attached, why not make them contingent on weekly testing? That is, you go to a testing booth (perhaps private contractors?) and in exchange for your getting tested for Covid, the government releases the check. That would both have the stimulative effect they are looking for by sending out the checks, but also have much of the epistemic “cure” for the virus that we are looking for.
Wednesday, August 11, 2021
1619 Project and Conservatism
Wednesday, August 4, 2021
Genetics, corn, and free will
Thursday, July 22, 2021
Vaccines and Crying Wolf
Wednesday, July 14, 2021
Why We Don’t Have Self-Driving Cars
Tuesday, July 6, 2021
Social Darwinism
Tuesday, June 29, 2021
Postmodernism: A Strategy for the Imposition of the New Orthodoxy
Summarizing the problems of the two ostensible public philosophies
Philosophical conservatism cannot make a distinction between fashion and falsehood.
Sunday, June 20, 2021
Bipartisan Fascism
Monday, June 14, 2021
Civility as Status Quo Bias?
Friday, June 11, 2021
The Uniting Error of Philosophical Progressivism and Conservatism
Tuesday, June 8, 2021
I, We, and Government
Saturday, June 5, 2021
Why the Old Orthodoxy is Preferable to the New
Tuesday, June 1, 2021
My Heuristic of Movie Analysis
Thursday, May 27, 2021
On the Pandemic
Thursday, May 20, 2021
Systemic Racism
Thursday, May 13, 2021
Epistemology and Chronology
Epistemology of the Future: Today’s orthodoxy adheres to an epistemology of the future. The idea is that things are always on an upward course and so newer is necessarily better by virtue of being closer to the future. Reject old ideas and institutions (the American Founding, Great books) and embrace whatever is the latest, since it’s necessarily the greatest (tech companies, wokism). The key to being correct on any given issue is simply identifying trends: see which way the winds are blowing and then conform to those fads. In a Darwinian sense, there is continuous improvement so being closer to the future means being more correct.
Epistemology of the Present: I prefer the epistemology of the present, which evaluates ideas and institutions on the basis of reason and evidence. Truth is independent of age, and we determine belief based on visible evidence in the here and now, as in science.
This shouldn’t be controversial, and if people thought about it, they would agree that a present, scientific, rational approach is better than the epistemology of the past or the epistemology of the future, but it’s remarkable how much those mistaken epistemologies have captured our public consciousness, probably because each one easily attaches to narratives justifying our two political tribes.
Monday, May 10, 2021
Anti-Racism, Anti-Communism
Friday, May 7, 2021
Secession: Why it Might Happen, Why it Might Succeed
Why it might succeed: the new orthodoxy is fundamentally self-contradictory. It is at once radically in favor of expanding state power (to achieve “social justice,” to “end racism,” to “enforce gender equality,” to “achieve socialism”), but at the same time radically opposed to the violent means by which state power is enforced (police and military), and radically opposed to the forces of unification that hold a nation together (e.g., patriotism, national symbols, common education). This means that they will expand state power to enforce their orthodoxy, even as they weaken the power of enforcement and the desire of the public to comply.
This is the first time that I am aware of in human history where this paradox has existed. Nationalism, Socialism, and militarism generally go together (as with Hitler, Stalin, and Mao), but they are fundamentally at odds in the new orthodoxy. Tribe-left is hostile to nationalism and militarism, but supportive of socialism.
The first attempt at secession (1861) didn’t succeed because Lincoln was at once wanting to expand state power to end slavery (a correct use of expanded state power to achieve social justice), but also willing to use the ultimate means of enforcement of state power (the military) and the symbols of nationalism (as in the Gettysburg Address) to achieve his goals. Our current tribe-left has no such consistency meaning they could fail where Lincoln succeeded.
Thursday, May 6, 2021
Low vs. High Decouplers
Monday, May 3, 2021
Applying Conspiracy vs narrative to the climate change debate
Friday, April 30, 2021
Collectivism vs. Individualism
Monday, April 26, 2021
The problems with conspiracy theories
- 1. Vanity: They operate on the false assumption that a cabal of wicked people are oppressing the rest of us, and only the “heroic” conspiracy theorists can see through the illusion. It is self-congratulatory and makes the conspiracy theorist the hero in his own narrative. Although there is absolute good and absolute evil, people are rarely absolutely good or evil. It’s generally not helpful to think in terms of the completely good guys (us) vs. the completely bad guys (them, e.g., the conspirators).
2. Collusion: they require thousands (perhaps millions) of people to cooperate in a lie, without any of them ever leaking their participation in this lie. Real conspiracies unravel quickly as people come clean (e.g., John Dean in Watergate).
3. Facts: Senator Moynihan once pointed out that everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. The biggest problem of conspiracy theories is that they deny facts. While it is common for millions of people to come up with a mistaken narrative that ignores or misinterprets facts (e.g., that the New Deal ended the Great Depression), it is extremely unlikely that millions of people would cooperate to lie about facts. Every conspiracy theorist must also rely on “new facts” to debunk the “old facts,” but wouldn’t the new (marginal) facts be at least as problematic as the old (mainstream) facts they are trying to debunk? It’s self-defeating (like trying to put out fire with a flamethrower). So we can disagree about how we interpret the rise and fall of GDP (Tax cuts? Public investment? Charismatic leadership? Expanded trade?), but it’s unwise to disagree with the GDP numbers themselves. Once we do that, we have jumped from the realm of legitimate debate (disagreement of interpretation/narrative) and into the realm of illegitimate conspiracy theorizing.
Friday, April 23, 2021
Humility and Science
Tuesday, April 20, 2021
Three Keys to Civil, Productive Debate
Below are three rules that seem to help discussions of controversial topics remain civil and productive: commonality, charity, and humility.
- 1. Commonality: Identify, emphasize, and leverage whatever it is you agree on. Even if people disagree about means (on how to help the poor or get to heaven), they generally agree about ends. Focus on that agreement.
- 2. Charity: Don’t work to “destroy” or “own” the person you are talking to. Reframe it in terms of a partnership: you are both working together to get at the truth. Give your discussant the benefit of the doubt and assume they are operating in good faith.
- 3. Humility: Be willing to learn and even change your mind. Hopefully, your discussant can learn something from you, but be willing to learn something from them. So important is this third one that it has some sub-steps:
- a. Separate what’s certain from what’s not. There are a few things that we are certain about, but almost everything else is, in the words of Thomas More, “capable of question.”
- b. Only debate what’s uncertain (empirically open). It’s OK to be closed-minded about something we are certain about (e.g., that it’s wrong to torture innocent children), but “fixed, final” truths are few and unempirical. Everything else is open to debate and able to be altered as we become aware of more empirical evidence.
- c. On those uncertain points, make sure to put truth (what’s right) ahead of victory (who’s right)
Monday, April 19, 2021
Two Moral Facts
1. It is wrong to steal
2. We are obligated to help the less fortunate Sadly, many of us tend to deny one or the other of these moral facts in the name of political ideology. Many in tribe blue, for instance, claim that it’s OK to steal as long as it’s done democratically or by the government, while many in tribe red deny our obligation to help the less fortunate on the grounds that the poor “deserve it” or that there is a “virtue to selfishness” (e.g., Ayn Rand). Far better than denying these two moral facts is to recognize and harmonize them, and this, I think, can only be done in a classical liberal order with voluntary charitable giving.