An ode to European virtues (or decline and fall of the [evil] american empire)

in a long essay on what geopolitics will look like in the future (Europe, China and the U.S. evenly fighting it out), Parag Khanna includes an “Ode to Europe” that is surprising not by the fact that it is perhaps overly rosy-eyed, but by the fact that is doesn’t seem all that far fetched. There is no conceptual discrepancy today describing the U.S. as a dying, violent and selfish dinosaur, while extolling Europe as the paragon of virtue, inclusiveness and gentle power. Would this ever have been a likely description at any point in human history up until now?

In Europe’s capital, Brussels, technocrats, strategists and legislators increasingly see their role as being the global balancer between America and China. Jorgo Chatzimarkakis, a German member of the European Parliament, calls it “European patriotism.” The Europeans play both sides, and if they do it well, they profit handsomely. It’s a trend that will outlast both President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, the self-described “friend of America,” and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, regardless of her visiting the Crawford ranch. It may comfort American conservatives to point out that Europe still lacks a common army; the only problem is that it doesn’t really need one. Europeans use intelligence and the police to apprehend radical Islamists, social policy to try to integrate restive Muslim populations and economic strength to incorporate the former Soviet Union and gradually subdue Russia. Each year European investment in Turkey grows as well, binding it closer to the E.U. even if it never becomes a member. And each year a new pipeline route opens transporting oil and gas from Libya, Algeria or Azerbaijan to Europe. What other superpower grows by an average of one country per year, with others waiting in line and begging to join?

on Humanism (richard norman interviewed)

From Philosophy Bites, a 10 min interview of Richard Norman author of On Humanism, on humanism. Most of the interview focuses on morality and whether or not you need a god to keep you good. There is not much meat, but that is why it is short. I’ve always been wary of “Humanism” myself just because of the name as it smacks of speciesism. But this interview put it in rather good light. mp3.

alain badiou on evil

I like what Alain Badiou says in this interview about evil not being something that can be derived from nature, but i wonder about his solution, making it all a mater of subjective perspective. His book on the subject (which i havent read yet) is Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil (Amazon). From the interview:

that the natural state of the human animal has nothing to do with Good or Evil. And I maintain that the kind of formal moral obligation described in Kant’s categorical imperative does not actually exist. Take the example of torture. In a civilization as sophisticated as the Roman Empire, not only is torture not considered an Evil, it is actually appreciated as a spectacle. In arenas, people are devoured by tigers; they are burned alive; the audience rejoices to see combatants cut each other’s throats. How, then, could we think that torture is Evil for every human animal? Aren’t we the same animal as Sencea or Marcus Aurelius? I should add that the armed forces of my country, France, with the approval of the governments of the era and the majority of public opinion, tortured all the prisoners during the Algerian War. The refusal of torture is a historical and cultural phenomenon, not at all a natural one. In a general way, the human animal knows cruelty as well as it knows pity; the one is just as natural as the other, and neither one has anything to do with Good or Evil. One knows of crucial situations where cruelty is necessary and useful, and of other situations where pity is nothing but a form of contempt for others. You won’t find anything in the structure of the human animal on which to base the concept of Evil, nor, moreover, that of the Good.

But the formal solution isn’t any better. Indeed, the obligation to be a subject doesn’t have any meaning, for the following reason: The possibility of becoming a subject does not depend on us, but on that which occurs in circumstances that are always singular. The distinction between Good and Evil already supposes a subject, and thus can’t apply to it. It’s always for a subject, not a pre-subjectivized human animal, that Evil is possible. For example, if, during the occupation of France by the Nazis, I join the Resistance, I become a subject of History in the making. From the inside of this subjectivization, I can tell what is Evil (to betray my comrades, to collaborate with the Nazis, etc.). I can also decide what is Good outside of the habitual norms. Thus the writer Marguerite Duras has recounted how, for reasons tied to the resistance to the Nazis, she participated in acts of torture against traitors. The whole distinction between Good and Evil arises from inside a becoming-subject, and varies with this becoming (which I myself call philosophy, the becoming of a Truth). To summarize: There is no natural definition of Evil; Evil is always that which, in a particular situation, tends to weaken or destroy a subject. And the conception of Evil is thus entirely dependent on the events from which a subject constitutes itself. It is the subject who prescribes what Evil is, not a natural idea of Evil that defines what a “moral” subject is. There is also no formal imperative from which to define Evil, even negatively. In fact, all imperatives presume that the subject of the imperative is already constituted, and in specific circumstances. And thus there can be no imperative to become a subject, except as an absolutely vacuous statement. That is also why there is no general form of Evil, because Evil does not exist except as a judgment made, by a subject, on a situation, and on the consequences of his own actions in this situation. So the same act (to kill, for example) may be Evil in a certain subjective context, and a necessity of the Good in another.

Jim Wallis on the new christianity

Jim Wallis (wikipedia), a non-right-wing intelligent evangelical christian (no joke), was on the Daily Show (video) talking about how (his) religion needs to refocus on the environment, peace (Darfur) and ethics.  Refreshing. From the Friendly Atheist.

being polite vs. being silly

Now making a movie about tearing up the Koran is impolite and uncessary in my book. But rejecting a storey based on three little pigs for an award because it might offend muslims is plain silly.

It is the difference between slapping someone in the face (not so nice) and mistakenly stepping on their foot. No one wrote the three little pigs story in order to annoy muslims.

on insults (people, religions)

A senior Iranian lawmaker warned the Netherlands on Monday not to allow the screening of what it called an anti-Islamic film produced by a Dutch politician, claiming it “reflects insulting views about the Holy Koran.”

From the Religion News blog. The politician in question is one Geert Wilders. Now i understand that “we” in the “west” don’t mind overly much when people insult us. We tend to get over it. But it really seems to annoy many muslims to no end when we go about trying to insult them. I know we call it “the truth” but there are many ways of formulating the truth. What has ever happened to politeness?

political animals (dolphins, elephants and primates)

Short article at the NYT on current research on animal sociability and politics (surprisingly, DeWaal is never mentioned):

Dario Maestripieri, a primatologist at the University of Chicago, has observed a similar dilemma in humans and the rhesus monkeys he studies.

“The paradox of a highly social species like rhesus monkeys and humans is that our complex sociality is the reason for our success, but it’s also the source of our greatest troubles,” he said. “Throughout human history, you see that the worst problems for people almost always come from other people, and it’s the same for the monkeys. You can put them anywhere, but their main problem is always going to be other rhesus monkeys.”

Moral Minds

I just finished Marc Hauser’s book Moral Minds (2006) on “the science of morality”. It’s a good overview of the current state of the science and quite readable. He is trying to encourage scientists to look for innate, evolutionarily developed moral rules, somewhat like the gennerative grammar rules described by Chomsky. Hauser posits three moral creatures: a humean one that only relies on moral intuition and emotions; a kantian who relies exclusively on reason (Hauser sometimes lops the utilitarians into this category…) and a rawlsian who uses reason to assess a situation before using moral intuitions and emotion to evaluate it. Hauser prefers the latter.

There is, however, one big problem with the entire premise of the book, or rather with its conclusion: Nowhere to my knowledge does Hauser address the question of the moral bindingness of the evolutionary moral rules. Of course, this is not 19th century social darwinism where the laws of evolution were supposed to permit all sorts of inhumane societies. These are rules particular to our species, rules that fit and work, that have evolved alongside (actually ‘in’) living beings. These are therefore ‘good’ rules in the sense that they usually get us to do what is in our interest.

However, the meta-question is never raised as to how we can assess the goodness of the moral rules themselves.  There is no reason why we should go with them all the time. For one, our environment has changed and is rapidly changing, probably rendering some of the rules obsolete. For another, though some of the rules might have gotten us thus far, we might no longer find them very acceptable, i.e. they might conflict with other moral rules/intuitions or with our reason.

The last point bears a tad bit more explaining. In economics, it is well known that we humans have some intuitions that do not serve us well. We discount the future too much (exponentially), which causes us to buy into dangerous schemes, like, say, sub-prime housing loans. This is an innate, evolutionary intuition that has served us in the past when the future was indeed very uncertain. Now it simply gets us into trouble. It is very likely that we now have similar problems with our moral intuitions. What is important is that if enough people think through the situations they can explain to us why such and such a moral intuition is wrong so that once we understand what thy mean, we can work against, or perhaps even shed, the offending moral intuition.

Of course, I expect Hauser wouldn’t disagree. After all, this is just a different part of human brains taking over some of the moral workload. There is nothing un-evolutionary about it. However, not pointing this out makes the text sound like it is equating innate moral intuitions with THE GOOD. And that is just wrong.

Kant, Hume and the evolution of morality

There is a long post on the Illusive Mind blog defending an evolutionary morality against Kant. I do not particularly want to defend Kant, but i do want to raise a very sizable caveat: whatever “morality” evolution has given us isn’t by any means necessarily the “right” one!

Here is the synopsis of the article/post:

In this essay I will outline what I regard as the most successful attempt to explain the evolution of altruism. I will then illustrate some of the effects that an evolutionary account of moral behaviour has on cognitivist and noncognitivist theories of ethics. I will argue that evolutionary theory does not undermine Hume’s noncognitivism but supports it and casts doubt on Kantianism.

Where things go horribly wrong is when morality is reduced to “a question of desire” because we then have nothing to ‘get behind desires’ and assess them morally (unless you posit some kind of coherence theory, but that is no the case in this article):

The question of retaining moral judgements then is reduced to a question of desire. Do we want to utilise judgements whose agenda is the ongoing survival of the species (at the level of the gene) through a system of rewarding co-operation and punishing cheating?

In effect the morality we have inherited through evolution is taken to be ‘valid’ – except when we don’t like it. The exception is, in my opinion, befuddled; the first part of the above sentence is, however, very dangerous, committing something akin to an is/ought or natural fallacy.

The only alternative on offer is a purely rational ethics à la Kant, but even this is undercut by more primary evolutionary forces:

The only way to be objectively moral and avoid ‘evolutionary baggage’ from tainting our moral judgements seems to be to devote oneself completely to reason in a Kantian fashion. However, it is not a forgone conclusion that reason is above evolutionary pressures. In The Evolution of Reason, William Cooper argues, “the laws of logic emerge naturally as corollaries of the evolutionary laws” (2003, p.5).

In the end, one gets the impression that we are enslaved to the morality evolution thought up for us and are incapable of stepping out of it to evaluate our own moral intuitions.

Admittedly, evaluating our moral intuitions is no easy task. But what is often forgotten is that we are not alone working at that task. It might be impossibly solipsistic for me to want to morally evaluate my own moral intuitions (where would i stand in order to do so?); but it certainly is not very difficult for someone else, actually many other people, to do so.

The solution will likely be neither Humean nor Kantian. We must both use some moral intuitions to assess other ones but also reason through our moral intuitions and find instances where the intuitions clearly go wrong.

Atheist Ethicist on Jonathan Haidt

The Atheist Ethicist is critiquing Haidt. From what i can tell, i like this Haidt guy.

Basically, his claims were these:

Liberal morality can be understood as being grounded on two fundamental sets of principles – each of which can be related to some biological (evolutionary) trait. These are a prohibition on harm (founded on the evolutionary quality of kin selection), and the other is fairness or justice (founded on the evolutionary quality of reciprocal altruism). These values are premised on the idea that societies are made up of distinct individuals and the individual is the fundamental entity that makes up communities.

However, if we look at morality around the world, we find three more fundamental sets of values that liberals tend to ignore. These additional three foundations come from recognition that groups, not just individuals, have moral importance. In order to have a functioning group, we need more than principles concerning harm and justice. We need principles concerning loyalty, respect, and purity or sanctity.

Haidt also charged the liberal community with being opposed to diversity (or, at best, as lacking diversity). He pointed out that there was almost universal agreement in the room about certain (liberal) moral values, and that this has been obtained effectively by driving anybody who would hold a conflicting view out of the community. He pointed out how, at psychology conventions, the attendees make jokes about conservatives and create an atmosphere where somebody holding conservative values would feel very uncomfortable – would feel unwelcome.