Please humor my curiosity and answer the following survey questions (more questions after the fold). You don’t have to be a member of SHAFT to take the survey, only a visitor of this site.
Quite possibly. I do know though that some people identify as non-gendered, though admittedly, it’s a very, very small percentage, smaller than transgendered. Maybe “other” as well?
This is the problem I always run into with demographic polls. There are never enough options (like the political ideology question). I have a tendency to want many specific categories as opposed to too few/too broad.
Oh, I hope I didn’t seem like I was telling you how to run your poll. It was just a suggestion. I just realised my comment might’ve sounded like a command. Thanks for honouring it.
Right, I understand how restrictive survey questions can be. But if you make the responses too nuanced, with a ton of options, then it deters people from taking the survey.
Of course, I completely agree. I was just talking about my own neuroses.
Thank you. I’m grateful to have the third option.
Thank you, as well.
Jon,
on a far less serious note, you left viking off of both race and religious affiliation.
I think that is right, conservatives are certainly under-represented. I chose “other” because I really don’t identify as “conservative” through and through (at least in the complete American political sense of that word). But I am a traditionalist and readers of this blog would certainly identify me as a “conservative” on a number of issues (sexual ethics, abortion). But I am “liberal” on other issues. Really what I am is a Catholic, something which does not tidily fit into the contemporary political categories.
Is Hitchens a conservative? I know he is pretty hawkish on the war on terror.
This is an honest question, not a jab. Why are the political views from atheists so lockstep when they are supposed to be free thinkers? You’d think that there would be some conservative (socially, fiscally, foreign policy, whatever) atheists. Perhaps it is a function of 84% of the readers (so far) being under 34 (31% under 21 and I am guessing the other 53% are mostly in their 20s). Anyway, that might be worth a discussion – where are all the conservative atheists?
I wonder if Vince has voted yet. I think he would self-identify as Protestant (though he might eschew labels).
“Why are the political views from atheists so lockstep when they are supposed to be free thinkers?”
I don’t think that’s fair. Libertarians are very well-represented among atheists and are often at odds with the liberal atheists over fiscal issues. And over foreign policy issues, there is also disagreement among atheists. But it shouldn’t surprise people why atheists wouldn’t identify as conservative when for decades that political label has been associated with the religious right.
I’m not familiar with Hawkins other political beliefs, but on terrorism & Islam he does seem to adhere more to the conservative side of things. I chose “other” because I don’t identify as liberal – I’m a social anarchist / communist libertarian.
But is true that it seems that most atheists are on the left/liberal side of things. Personally I think that’s because once you remove religion as a motivating factor, it’s the side that makes more sense. While I disagree with atheist right libertarians on fiscal issues, I don’t know a single atheist, right or left (though certainly some few exist), who doesn’t support gay equality, a woman’s right to choose, and other traditionally liberal/leftist social views. It’s hardly fair though to at all say that atheists are “lock-step”. There is a huge amount of diversity and differences of opinion within the atheist community. If nothing else, the many differing opinions on how to go about dealing with religion should make that obvious. Furthermore, these stats are hardly an accurate sampling of atheists/secularists at large.
I’d take some convincing that political conservatives are “well-represented”, Jon, but I get your point. In fact, I think noted conservative commentator George Will is agnostic. So maybe on the libertarian front. But I had in mind more social issues. Is there an atheistic pro-life movement? Are there atheists organizing against gay marriage? etc etc
So I am not convinced that there is, as Craig suggested, a “huge amount of diversity and difference of opinion” among secularists / atheists, particularly on social issues. Let me weaken my claim (and this is actually what I intended). I was reacting to the atheists on this blog. I see very little (in fact, about none) diversity of social/political opinion on this blog. Maybe it is because I’m often the odd man out, but this blog seems pretty lockstep on social issues to me. It has been absolutely lock-step regarding gay marriage, the morality of homosexuality generally, and on contraception. It has been nearly lockstep on abortion (Jon leans a bit).
Again, this is not meant as a jab (at least not this time ). I don’t think diversity of opinion is, in itself, a good. It is just surprising that there is so little disagreement among SHAFTers on social / political issues when this group constantly touts its “free thinking” and anti-dogmatism. Really, am I the only one that has noticed a homogeneity of political opinion on this blog (my posts being the notable exception)? And am I the only one who finds this a little odd given the focus on free thinking? Do all free thinking people just naturally and inevitably come down in favor of gay marriage?
Craig has a response – he says that once you get rid of religion then leftist social views “just make sense”. Well forgive me, but I just have a hard time accepting that all the views you mention (pro-choice, gay marriage, etc) “just make sense” or are obvious to those who’ve not drunk the religious kool-aid. This comes as some surprise to atheists but social conservatives actually have non-sectarian arguments for their views, many of which are quite compelling.
As I said in my post, I suspect that the homogeneity of social / political opinion among SHAFTers has something to do with age. I suspect it also is caused by this being, mostly, an ex-Mormon atheist blog so there is some reaction to Utah’s very conservative culture. It also probably has something to do with the fact that, so far, 27% are either gay or bi (with another 8% being “other”, though I am not sure what other options there are – X gets with Y, or X gets with X, or X gets with both X and Y, doesn’t that cover it?). It is also likely a function of being in (or just out of) college. Nationally young people tend to be more liberal and that peaks in college and then they trend (typically) more conservative as they grow older. And you don’t get much diversity of political opinion at universities, so students are often not exposed to intellectual conservatism. Despite the promise that tenure would protect and promote diversity of opinion in the academe, I see virtually no diversity of social/political opinion in the American university. I saw a study a while back that the number of university profs who voted for Bush was a statistical zero. (I am not trying to argue the merits of a vote for or against Bush, but that is still surprising). And being pro-life in the academy makes me feel like a pariah.
Anyway, apparently I am the only one who has found this noteworthy, so feel free to move on.
The study showed that only 4% of academics self-idenified as “conservative”, while 40% of Americans at large self-identify in that way. Anyway, while USU’s faculty is more to the right of most American universities, I can’t imagine that I’ll get much argument against my claim that the American academe is tilted left (and in many instances way left). I’ve seen studies of philosophy professors that say that between 70-85% of them are atheists. Point is, intelligent theism is not well-represented, and neither is intelligent conservatism. Why this is the case is another debate. My point here is that college students are getting an uneven picture of the intellectual landscape, and that might cause them to be more liberal.
Dr. Kleiner, I did NOT claim that conservatives are well-represented among atheists, only that libertarians are. So where there is political diversity among atheists, it’s on fiscal, domestic, and foreign policy. But on social issues, there is little diversity—atheists are decidedly to the left.
my kind of response would be that there can be some correlations based on shared background/context.
As you said, Dr. Kleiner, this site is mostly ex-Mormon atheists. So, this context would probably produce similar experiences (and similar reactions to such experiences).
Similarly, I would say that the commonalities we see in atheists are from common experiences. You have talked about non-intellectual theism..well, a big deal is that we don’t often see or engage with intellectual theism in a day-to-day basis. But many people do grow up, or are raised in caustic environments, or they do engage with people who are anti-science, anti-gay, etc., etc., With these common experiences, wouldn’t it make sense that certain reactions would be common too?
also, self-selection. Groups naturally polarize, because it’s more fun (even if it’s stagnant) to talk to people you agree with than to bicker. (So, it would be obvious why this blog — or any other blog, for that matter — mostly skews to a particular group)
We are on the same page now. So is the homogeneity of opinion on social issues among atheistic “free thinkers” worthy of curiosity? Are there some dogmas beneath the veneer of “free thinking”? What is at work here? (I tried to identify some causes above). Am I really just supposed to believe that once people are weaned from the religious kool-aid that liberal social views simply fall into place as being obviously the most reasonable positions?
Contrasted to, say, atheism, which is just a lack of belief and nothing more, then yes, I think “free thought” has more oomph. A dogma? Maybe.
Firstly, free thought is not contextless. it is not free of anything. Rather, it is free from something specific…things which are seen as traditionally religious (and particularly negative). That is why I brought up common experiences. If people have experiences that impress upon them that religion is unduly constricting…then they want to escape that. They want to be *free* of that. So like the foundation, the freedom is from religion, so to speak.
I think that the kind of people who are likely to find religious traditions constricting (and to find that constriction bad) are the kinds of people who are going to hold socially liberal views. And I think that a lot of other correlations will arise. (e.g., as you pointed out, 27% are gay or bi.) It’s more of a case of, “If you’ve been burned by religion, and you are not convinced of the truth of religion that would justify such burning/sacrifice, then religious traditions won’t make as much sense.” That’s probably what is meant when people say “liberal social views fall into place as being the most “reasonable” position.”
I think the problem is that people don’t realize that logic/reason/etc., is just a tool. So they say, “Yeah, we’re all about logic,” but they don’t realize that if you start with different premises, you get different conclusions. So it’s not like one group is logical and another is illogical (at least, not on purpose, usually), but one group has one set of premises, and another has another.
I think the problem with that line of reasoning (however appealing it might be) arises directly when you ask that final question.
What set of authorities cause such similarity on social issues?
Well, I think you’d be hard-pressed to find (direct) authorities here.
Not to go back to the copout “when you stop drinking the koolaid, then these socially liberal beliefs will seem obvious,” but if the context of “free thought” is in reaction to the excesses or deficiencies of the previous religious environment (losing faith in those authorities, so to speak), then where else would one go?
I mean, considering what free thinkers are “freeing” themselves from, that means they must have had some reason to want to free themselves in the first place. So, what it seems to me is that…even when people had a religious framework (with religious authorities being the trusted authorities), their experiences chafed against those authorities (and eventually broke the perceived reliability of those authorities). I mean, if you have authorities talking about how gay relationships are disorderly, abominable, sinful, etc., etc., then the problem is that — without any authority at all — you can see that gay relationships don’t seem to be as destructive as people say, and, on the other hand, the alternatives seem to be EXTREMELY destructive (e.g., aversion, closeting, mixed-orientation marriages, shunning). I don’t know how to explain why that is the case (since it’s not the case for everyone), but I don’t think it’s because of an authority. Or at least, if it is from an authority, it’s from the authority of our friends, family members, etc.,
It’s not that the freethinker “dogma” is that “no religious authority could possibly be a genuine authority.” But more like, “Of course, they theoretically could, but we haven’t seen evidence of that. Our experience is to the contrary.” Of course, evidence is personal. We obviously see different things in different evidential lights, and we weigh them differently as well.
Andrew – I thought your last paragraph there was very well put. Excellent point. The Summa is stunningly logical, though parts of it proceed from premises or data that not everyone accepts.
Starting places really matter. I’ve often thought that something like “comportment” plays a huge role in where we end up. This comportment issue is one reason why I am always banging away on reductionism and talking up the many modes of truth disclosure, so that we don’t blind ourselves before we even try to see.
Let me see if I have a point in all this business about homogenous atheistic thinking:
“Free thinking” is typically defined as non-dogmatic thinking. But “dogmas” can arise outside religion. Might it be that many “free thinkers” have dogmas in spades? That condoms in Africa debate on this blog was a perfect example. One might recall that those who actually dared to challenge conventional opinion were called “murderers”. It was almost as if there was a refusal to even consider the possibility that condom programs do not slow the spread of AIDs (no matter what the evidence says, and the evidence was not on the side of condom programs).
So far if I have shown anything it is that people are often hypocrites. That is not news, just as it would not be news if you were making the same point about me. But I have a deeper point. Pointing out this ironically dogmatic thinking on the part of “free thinkers” both is and is not is not a criticism. We all have limited personal knowledge so we all have to have faith/trust in those we consider authorities. Everyone does this, it is unavoidable. We don’t all know all of the arguments or evidence on every side of every issue, and our understanding is finite. So we trust in authorities. Our trust (faith) in those authorities will often lead to us believing in “established opinions” (that is, dogmas). I am not here using “dogma” in a negative sense. So are dogmas (established opinions) necessarily bad? Might we say that it all depends on the authority? Believing established opinions (dogmas) from reliable authorities is a good idea, while believing established opinions (dogmas) from unreliable authorities is a bad idea.
There are too many examples here to name. But let’s take one where I think we will all agree. Claim that I am presuming we all take to be true: There is human caused climate change. Now I don’t really know the science. I’ve read a few books and seen a few documentaries, but I don’t really understand the science behind it. A few of you might, but most don’t. But we all accept this claim as an established opinion because we trust (have faith in) the authorities. Note that this appeal to authority is the most common argument against climate change deniers (non-scientists like me appealing to the consensus among scientists who I take to be authorities on the matter).
Again, this kind of “dogmatic thinking” is not a bad thing in itself, though I think it can be done in a way that is better or worse. I think it is possible to reflectively appropriate a “dogma” but it is also possible to unreflectively appropriate a “dogma”. Obviously I think the former is preferable. I am, in some ways, an extremely dogmatic thinker. I claim very little autonomy over my own mind. But I like to think that I reflectively appropriate those established opinions (dogmas) I receive from those who I take to be authorities. In other words, accepting an opinion as “established” does not mean that you refuse to take up arguments, that you refuse to seek an understanding of the established opinion, etc. Of course that is the stereotype, that people who defer to authorities simply turn their minds off. I am sure that some do this, but there is no necessity in it. My mind did not turn off when I became a Catholic. Your minds do not shut off even when you defer to the authority of climatologists on climate change. But maybe our minds do sometimes shut off, and then we become “dogmatic” thinkers in that ugly sense of the word. Perhaps that is the case sometimes on these social issues?
Point is, I think everyone has dogmas because all of us have to have faith in authorities (whoever they may be) to fill in the gaps of our own limited personal understanding. This is not a bad thing. To think you could discern everything for yourself and on exclusively your own powers is vanity. We should be on guard against that kind of vanity and the quick rejection of tradition that usually travels with it (chronological snobbery is usually one of the first symptoms of this modern vanity). I always find it remarkable how medieval philosophers tend to bend over backwards to show that past great thinkers would agree with what they are saying, while the modern tendency is to always be a revolutionary thinker who is making a clean break from what came before. Another way of putting this: I think the whole idea of “anti-dogmatic free thinking” springs from the worst of modern enlightenment vanity. It is, at best, seriously unrealistic. At worst, it is intellectual pride of the worst sort. I think we should wonder about everything, but I dislike the “question everything” motto. There is so much pride and vanity in that phrase.
Point is, the trick is not to reject authority and to avoid believing established opinions (dogmas). Rather, the trick is to have reliable authorities and to, ideally, reflectively appropriate the established opinions you receive from them. I actually think this is what most “free thinkers” really have in mind – don’t be mere sheep but instead reflectively appropriate your beliefs. And since free thinkers readily assent to authorities for established opinions in any number of spheres of their life and thought, what also seems to be entailed by the “free thinker” moniker is a judgment that no religious authority could possibly be a genuine authority (though that judgment itself is more often than not simply a “dogmatic” belief).
So here is a question: who are the authorities from whom free thinking atheists are receiving their established opinions (dogmas) on social issues? (Note: I am not hereby denying that many free thinking atheists have reflectively appropriated these dogmas and know the arguments, etc, just as I don’t think that social conservatives have necessarily unreflectively appropriated their dogmas. I think there are a few reflective people on each side and loads of unreflective people on each side).
I should point out that not all authorities can be easily identified. Culture or conventional opinion can function as an authority. As Plato points out in the Republic, art (broadly construed) can function as an authority.
I know that some of my students who think things like gay marriage and contraception are permissible have reflectively appropriated those ideas. But I also know that a great many of them are simply breathing what is in the air – moral relativism and a culture of sexual permissiveness. I think one must admit (and certainly anyone who teaches so sees loads of students in a Social Ethics course working through issues) that a lot of the socially liberal leanings of college students amount to “well, everyone these days thinks stuff like that is okay”. This is why the culture wars are so important – as Plato says, art and culture are the de facto shapers of souls and opinions.
the problem I perceive, though, is that everyone *doesn’t* think these things are ok (I guess that’s where you say, “Thanks to the culture wars.”) So, people still have to look at both sides and say, “OK, since there are two sides who are diametrically opposed, which side makes more sense to me.”
And for many of the people here (just to continue that theme), or for many people who may come to see themselves as ‘free’ thinkers, the issue is not that they are just going along with the attitude of moral relativism and sexual permissiveness because it is the default option…but rather, because (in their mind), the alternative has shown itself to be even more disastrous or disconnected. (Obviously, the other side could say the same thing. [And note that this gets to be even more subjective and personal. Perceived consequences can be construed on different levels.])
@Kleiner
Maybe you can share some non-religious reasons for being right on social issues. What reasons would an atheist have for opposing gay equality? I actually have met one, and he opposed it because he was an extreme homophobe. He thought it was “icky”, and opposed it solely because of that, not because he has a rational reason for it.
There is in fact, no good rational reason for opposing gay equality. It’s either blatant bigotry/prejudice, or religious dogma (a form of prejudice) that makes people oppose gay equality. The exact same situation applies to those who oppose(d) racial equality.
You also have to realise that to us, moral relativism (which you claim doesn’t exist) and sexual permissiveness are wonderful, positive things. For those of us who grew up in a repressive religious environment, we’ve learnt the inherent dangers of moral absolutism and repressive ideas about sexuality. How do you “know that a great many are simply breathing what is in the air…”? The fact that they don’t see a problem with them and don’t think it’s a big deal doesn’t mean they’re being mindless sheep who will believe whatever they’re told to believe.
Furthermore, you’re severely discounting how much influence and power traditional Christian ideas still have within our society. Women are still considered “sluts” if they have too many sexual partners (while men almost never are), homophobia is ubiquitous everywhere, and atheism is very much a taboo topic and a very maligned group. I don’t know a single atheist who hasn’t excruciatingly carefully thought out their belief system. Many of us have to completely revamp our beliefs from scratch after leaving religious communities. Certainly there are well-known figures in the atheist community like Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, but to suggest that we believe whatever they tell us to think is ludicrous. Most atheists are sceptics as well, and critically examine every claim, and make up their own decisions. I agree with some of what the aforementioned say, but disagree with a whole lot too.
We defer to climatologists on climate change because they’ve researched and presented overwhelming evidence supporting their theory. The climate change deniers haven’t. We defer to evolutionary biologists for the same reason. Very often we research the claims ourselves and decide for ourselves whether we believe what the authority in any specific field claims. That how science works, and that is how scepticism works. Of course it is impossible for every individual to become an expert at everything, so certainly we do accord those with specialised experience in a higher level of credence than others, especially if there is overwhelming consensus with their colleagues (as there is on climate change and evolution). It is not fair however, to call these things dogmas. A dogma is something which doesn’t change or modify itself when contradictory evidence comes along. This is not true about scientific theories. Nor it is generally true about our social beliefs. The growing trend of people supporting gay equality isn’t about following some fad, or following some authority figure, it’s about people realising that we’re people too who deserve complete equal treatment both under the law and socially. They realise that there is no non-bigoted reason to oppose complete LGBT equality.
Oh, and as turnabout is fair play, you dress up your beliefs in the cloak of philosophy, but to be honest, I see you as a dogmatic papist. You try to find outside reasons to justify your beliefs. Whatever brought you to Catholicism in the first place, you’re now unable to really see w/o the filter of Catholicism changing the view. Certainly that’s true for me of atheism and secularism as well, but I think that at least, I have physical provable evidence for why I believe what I do, and I’ve never seen any from any religion.
“There is in fact, no good rational reason for opposing gay equality. It’s either blatant bigotry/prejudice, or religious dogma (a form of prejudice) that makes people oppose gay equality. The exact same situation applies to those who oppose(d) racial equality.”
That comment is outrageously ignorant. Seriously, could a more “dogmatic” (in the negative sense) comment be made? NO rational reason to be against gay marriage? I won’t go into all of the arguments you ask for here, because we’ve gone through them before. I am certainly against things like housing discrimination and such things with gays. But I have made non-religious arguments against gay marriage on this blog. A search should find them (and I made an argument for why prohibition of gay marriage is not at all like the prohibition against inter-racial marriages).
This is also not the place to take up moral relativism. But if there is no moral absolute to which you could appeal, on what grounds can you force an American population that is consistently against gay marriage to accept it? If there is no objective morality, then might makes right. So leave it to a vote … and gay marriage has lost every single time.
You can accuse me of being a “dogmatic papist” if you like. But the fact is – and look on all of my past arguments on this blog – that I never make an appeal to religious authority to defend myself. Seriously, I don’t think I have done that one single time on this blog. I don’t just “cloak my beliefs” in philosophy. I make philosophical arguments. You may not be persuaded by them, but I really don’t think you can accuse me of making merely religious arguments.
Craig – I must say that I don’t much appreciate you calling me (even if indirectly) a bigot.
But, Craig, thank you for the performative demonstration of my point. Some liberal dogmas held by atheists are so sacred that calling them into question (with arguments or evidence) almost always results in someone calling you a bigot, a murderer, anti-science, or some other nasty slur. Now there’s some reasonable discourse for you!
If it looks like a duck and walks like a duck and sounds like a duck…
I’m quite certain I don’t appreciate your dehumansation of me by opposing my civil and legal equality more than you dislike being called a bigot. I have no desire to attack ad hominem, nor threadjack but I do refuse to give anyone a pass on gay rights. Anyone who opposes gay rights does so for bigoted, prejudiced reasons, which makes them, on gay rights, a bigot. It’s an ugly thing to be called a bigot, I know, but it’s uglier still to be discriminated against and treated as less than human because of who you are and are not able to love and be intimate with. So forgive me if I have no sympathy for the hurt feelings of those who don’t want to treat me as equal.
Just as there is no rational reason to oppose interracial marriage, racial equality, and gender equality, there is no rational reason to oppose LBGT equality. That is my point. Clearly you disagree, but you’ve not given a non-biased, non-religiously based reason for why homophobia isn’t based solely in bigotry. I reject the idea that LGBT people aren’t as deserving of equal treatment just as non-whites are. I’ve never heard a convincing argument to convince me otherwise, including yours.
I should not have called you a dogmatic papist, and for that I apologise. My point was that it seems to me that your philosophical arguments are based in and motivated by your Catholic religious beliefs, as is to be expected. I don’t find your arguments convincing partially because I see them stemming from that source.
As for whether I can justify why it is ethical for gays to be treated equally when I don’t believe in moral absolutes, (nor that might makes right), the way I justify it is because I believe that suffering is bad. It’s a subjective judgement, certainly, but I’ve never claimed to be totally objective about everything. Ethics/morality are subjective, but can be applied to society as a whole. I oppose homophobia on the same grounds that I oppose racism and misogyny – it’s unfair, it’s harmful, and it’s prejudiced. We can still have a functioning moral society and not have to appeal to objective god-given moralities. We ought to be able to reason out our moral system for ourselves, a system that does the least harm and treats the largest amount of people as fairly as possible. We don’t need a god to tell us what’s right and wrong. The problem with moral absolutes is that they tend to reflect the morals of whomever is telling you what that moral absolute is. That’s where moral relativity wins, it can evolve and adapt and improve itself. According to the moral absolutism of the Bible, we’d all be stoned a thousand times over, because it’s a ridiculous and barbaric set of morals. No one alive lives by Biblical morals. Catholic morals aren’t nearly so bad, but are still pretty horrifying to me, and not just because I’m gay.
For what it’s worth, I think there can be reasons to oppose homosexuality or gay marriage without appealing to religious dogma. Indeed, it could be argued that Kleiner’s objections to homosexuality are secular. I don’t want to put words in his mouth, but I think he’d make a natural law argument—that homosexuality is unnatural, that it violates the procreative purpose of sex/marriage. Now his argument is more sophisticated than I can do it justice, but the point is that this appeal to natural law is not reducible to “blatant bigotry” or “religious dogma.” It’s fundamentally a secular argument and one that does not require bigotry. Whether it’s a good secular argument is another issue. (For the record, I’m totally unmoved by it).
Another secular argument may be that homosexuality has negative effects. Suppose that some credible, landmark study demonstrated that homosexuals, by virtue of their homosexuality, make horrible parents. That would give someone a strong secular reason to oppose the ability of LGBT couples to adopt. Again, this argument against gay marriage needn’t be motivated by hate or religion, but by concern for children. It should be noted, however, that most studies show that LGBT parents are very capable parents (indeed, some studies go further and claim they make marginally better parents than their straight counterparts).
The last secular argument against gay marriage is that it may open the floodgates to the legal recognition of things like polygamy or marriage between siblings. This doesn’t actually worry me, because—as per the harm principle–I think most (if not all) consensual relationships are kosher. But it may legitimately worry others. I mean, are you comfortable with allowing father’s to marry their daughters (assuming the relationship is consensual)?
I am a bisexual, atheist liberal, and I do support gay rights. But I think it’s wrong to dismiss all opposition to gay rights as bigoted or religious. Secular arguments can be made against gay rights (and made in good faith). I just happen to think they’re bad secular arguments.
If I convince you of just one thing in this post, Craig, let it be this: Kleiner is no homophobe. Now, I don’t believe that you have accused him of homophobia (at least not explicitly), but I nonetheless feel the need to come to Kleiner’s defense on this point. I don’t think there’s a homophobic bone in his body.
Now, Kleiner isn’t beyond criticism. Just yesterday, for example, I gave him a hard time for finding Steve Martin funny ha ha. But it is unfair to criticize him as a “dogmatic papist” or religious bigot. This point isn’t really directed at you per se, Craig. I know you’ve retracted your “dogmatic papist” comment and never really called Kleiner a homophobe. But I’d bet some people on this blog would think he’s both, so I wanted to address that sentiment.
Thank you for coming to my defense, Jon. I always think it is silly when people have to defend themselves against charges of homophobia and bigotry in these debates by pointing out how many gay friends they have and all of this (which I could have done). Jon saved me from that ridiculous exercise. Thanks.
After a last word, I think I will let this conversation be. It went from a simmer to a rapid boil, and I don’t think much productive will come of it. I understand that this is a very sensitive issue. If I have not always handled it with the sensitivity I should here, I apologize. I strive to be simply philosophical about it, but perhaps that gives a sense of being heartless. I joked with Jon recently about what shirt I should wear to the Mormon Proposition movie. I think we settled on this: “I am straight and actually pretty narrow, but I try really hard to not be a giant prick about it”.
My last word: I think we should be careful to simply lump “gay rights” into one big bundle, as if it were just one issue that you were simply either for or against. When we do this, we end up treating any objection to any one of a family of issues as a “dehumanization”. That is wrong-headed. I support any number of gay rights issues (housing protections, workplace protections, etc etc). I just don’t support gay marriage (my argument is primarily a natural law arguments, as Jon noted). I think it is an extreme stretch to call it “dehumanizing” to oppose gay marriage. To oppose a particular desire satisfaction of a class of people is not, in itself, “dehumanizing”. I think every person has inherent dignity from the moment of conception to the time of natural death. I make no exceptions to that principle. I think GLB people deserve to be treated with every bit of dignity as every other person.
People are free to be gay, and I don’t stand in the way of gay people loving and being intimate with whoever they want. I just don’t think people have a right to govt recognition of their relationships. I don’t think anyone (gay or straight) has a “right” to govt recognition of their relationships, the govt should only get involved if there is some compelling state interest at stake. I would point out that gay people do not need government sanction to have long term relationships with each other. Being gay is not illegal. As to the issues that are most often cited by gay marriage advocates, it is already the case that gay partners can make end of life decisions for each other, have hospital visitation rights (which they ought to be able to do), and estate privileges. They don’t have this automatically (as a married couple would), but they just need to sign power of attorney statements.
Point is, I would entirely agree that opposition to certain gay rights issues is dehumanizing. I simply don’t agree that opposition to gay marriage is one of those. I understand that there is a difference of opinion on this issue, but I don’t think we should frame it as simply a “enlightened moral people” against “ignorant bigots” point.
Anyway, I officially step out of this conversation. I have other problems to deal with. Yesterday my 2 year old daughter was in here reading with me while I was on the computer typing on this blog. She likes to grab books off my shelf to page through them, and she grabbed a Foucault text. My older daughter always grabbed the Summa from Aquinas (I am not making that up, she would diligently flip through the pages for 20 minutes at a time … I was so incredibly proud). With the younger one grabbing Foucault off the shelf, I have more pressing issues here at home to contend with!
Just to clarify, what I meant was that there are no *good* secular reasons, and when someone uses such a bad reason (like the ones Jon gave), it’s almost always a front for deep-seated prejudice. It’s true I got a little worked up, and I responded more intensely than the situation warranted.
Also, I guess I use “homophobia” broader than some others do. I use it as an analogue to the broadest uses of “sexism” or “racism”. I don’t use it to necessarily mean an intense fear or hatred of gays.
seems to me that “good” is in the eye of the beholder. So, no “good” secular reasons really just translates to, “I don’t think it’s good,” which…doesn’t get us anywhere in showing that it actually isn’t good (or for the other side to show that it actually is good).
By “bad” arguments, I mean that not only am I unconvinced, but that every single argument against gay marriage I’ve ever heard has been debunked as either based on pure bias, on bad information, or an faulty assumptions.
Each of the secular arguments that Jon enumerates have been shown to be false. When someone holds to a false idea, despite having been shown contradictory evidence is closed-minded prejudice. Being unresponsive to evidence as to why gay marriage is good, fair, right, and in no demonstrable way harms secular society, is a type of bigotry. That is my argument. Both religious and secular arguments against LBGT equality are either totally false, or irrefutable (and therefore free of evidence) because they appeal to disprovable supernatural/religious ideas.
Andrew’s reply to my long post showed up above my long post, but I am responding to it:
Good points, and you might be able to explain some of the views of atheists in this way. But I am skeptical that this explanation will work for all the socially liberal beliefs held almost universally by free thinking atheists. Really, am I supposed to believe that the personal experience of every free thinker is such that they almost all end up being pro-choice, pro-contraception, typically sexually permissive (okay with pre-marital or non-marital sex), etc etc etc? Really, you’d think it would be the case that at least some portion of the free thinking community would be, say, pro-life. In other words, it sure seems like there is some lockstep dogmatic thinking going on. I rather doubt we’ll easily finger the authority here though. I think it is just the relativism of the culture and the prevailing view that desire satisfaction is always a good.
Even on the homosexuality issues I am skeptical of this “personal experience” argument, at least in many if not most cases. Now this blog is skewed, because 30% of the readers are GLB. But only about 4% of the general population is GLB (I know some advocacy research inflates that statistic to 10%, but most research shows that to be too high). Point is, most people are not going to have tons of personal experience with GLB people generally, much less GLB people in long term relationships.
But I would like to separate two issues. One is the general point that dogmatic thinking (believing established opinions because they come from authorities) is inevitable and not necessarily a bad thing. That is a general “meta-point” against the whole project of “free thinking”.
Another sub-issue, then, is the question of the origin of the moral opinions on social issues of atheists.
I could be right about the first issue even if I am wrong with parts of the second point.
Since free thought isn’t contextless, your first point doesn’t go as far as you think it does. It’s not “believing [any] established opinion because they come from authorities is bad”, so to point out that believing established opinions is inevitable and not necessarily a bad thing doesn’t make a meta-point against the whole project of free thinking at all.
I would address one point however,
“As to the issues that are most often cited by gay marriage advocates, it is already the case that gay partners can make end of life decisions for each other, have hospital visitation rights (which they ought to be able to do), and estate privileges. They don’t have this automatically (as a married couple would), but they just need to sign power of attorney statements. ”
This is only true in some states, and even in those states, the lack of complete legal equality makes it so that even these rights are often ignored and require lengthy and very expensive court battles to get fair and equal treatment. Even with POA statements and when the other little rights you enumerated work, because gays aren’t legally equal, often children are taken away from their parents during a divorce or when one partner dies because the other partner wasn’t legally allowed to adopt the children (such is the case in Utah, and many, many other places). Just for that reason alone, full and equal gay marriage is a necessity for gay people.
This is quite an interesting discussion that has developed.
Kleiner said, “Really, am I supposed to believe that the personal experience of every free thinker is such that they almost all end up being pro-choice, pro-contraception, typically sexually permissive (okay with pre-marital or non-marital sex), etc etc etc?”
To be clear, I am not completely pro-choice and more pro-life. I just have looser definitions than Kleiner does for particular instances and I don’t think that radical legislation against abortions is going to do much good.
I am for gay marriage, but I think that the government shouldn’t be involved with marriage at all. To me, all unions in the government’s eyes should be civil and have the same legal benefits across the board. I am unconvinced by Kleiner’s previous arguments against gay marriage. Personally, I think they are weak.
I am pro-contraception, and have not heard a good argument against it. Pre-marital and non-marital sex is fine by me, but I don’t want to go into the issue right now. Unfortunately I missed the condom conversation that Kleiner keeps talking about. I’ll have to look it up when I have some time. However, I can’t image that stopping the condom distribution would do much good either. Maybe Kleiner is right, and it isn’t doing a whole lot to stop the spread of disease, but I can’t image that it is doing more harm than good. More food for thought for another time I suppose.
A note about Kleiner’s “dogma” or whatever everyone was arguing about. In my personal views about him, he is heavily influenced by official Catholic thought. However, it appears that he tries to be thoughtful about it, which is great. While frustrating sometimes, I appreciate the input and dialogue. So far I remain unconvinced by his secular arguments except on the topic of abortion. (Honestly, I really hadn’t thought about the issue too much before hand and hadn’t formed an opinion on it besides a few particulars).
To me, it seems that cognitive bias and confirmation bias play a large role in Kleiner’s views (as with everyone). He agrees with the CC about these issues on a theological basis first and then mirrors the same views in more of a secular way to others. I don’t think he does this intentionally, but it’s hard to ignore. However, we all do this, so it’s not like he’s the only one in the wrong. At least he tries to be informed and draw conclusions in a philosophical way, even if he ends up at the same place as he started. It all ties back to preconceived ideas and where we get our “authority” from. I know that he doesn’t make authority claims from the pope in his arguments, but it’s not a far stretch of the imagination when he quotes various popes so often. For me, it’s hard to imagine a Kleiner that doesn’t agree with the CC on most things. I wonder what his views about divorce are. If I had to bet, I would say he’s against it. Anyway, I hope you don’t take this as an offense, Kleiner. I really appreciate your input on this blog. We need a differing view, even though you may not convince us very often. If you feel that I am extremely wrong about you, then please tell me. My observation an opinion on you is meant in the nicest of ways, I in no means intended to insult you.
I’m not sure this is really the right place for it, but it’s a fairly recent thread and I personally hate it when thread necromancers come along and comment on long-dead conversations (which is possibly what I’m doing). Since abortion has been passingly mentioned, I just have to get out this point I’ve had long simmering.
For every abortion thread, it is worth noting–primarily because many people apparently believe embryos grow completely without input in a hyperspace womb that has no real connection to the woman involved–that even if fetuses and embryos were in fact completely 100% equal to fully grown human beings (I don’t think they are), abortion would still be moral and anti-choice activism would still be women-hating garbage.
How can I say this?
Because by ordering a woman to bring a fetus to term, we grant fetuses a right we do not grant any living person: the right to use someone else’s body without their consent (i.e. the right to rape or the right to enslave).
If I’m a combination of Douglas Adams and Albert Einstein and you are the combination of Skeletor and Hitler and I need one of your non-vital organs to survive? I do not have the right to it. If I need your blood to survive? I do not have the right to it. If I need to rape your body and inhabit you for 9 months leeching the nutrients from your blood, bones, tissue, and other organs? I most certainly do not have that right.
But, suddenly if its a woman and a meaningless bundle of semi-tumorous cells, we’re all supposed to pretend like a massive new unheard of right is just “common sense” to “protect the babies”.
No, not even to live do FULLY FUNCTIONAL HUMAN BEINGS have this right.
And I think we’re only so susceptible on abortion because the notion that a woman is a full human being who has a right to her own body (i.e. the right to consent and the right to not be raped) is relatively new. Women are still treated as house-slaves in many religions, rape is woefully under-prosecuted and something a frighteningly large number of women have experienced at least once in her life, and we’re still accustoming ourselves to the idea of women in the workplace, the educational systems, and the military.
No wonder when someone says, hey a clump of cells has the right to enslave and use the bodies of women who dare sleep with men who aren’t you, the response of so many is “That sounds fair.”
I’ve never heard this argument before, and I think I like it.
That’s Judith Jarvis Thompson’s argument, right?
I think the counter I heard to that one is…the example of the violinist (or in your case, “the combination of Douglas Adams and Albert Einstein”) is not equivalent to the example of a pregnant woman.
The pregnant woman, by virtue of having sex, opens up the possibility (and, arguably should take the responsibility) of pregnancy. She tacitly consents to pregnancy.
(I for one do not think this is a convincing enough counterargument. I mean, contraception use in general shows that just because people voluntarily have sex does not mean that they tacitly consent to pregnancy. But still, just saying that some people would point out the dissimilarity here.)
Her argument, I believe, has been raised on this blog before (perhaps on the nun excommunication discussion?). I won’t get into objections to her argument here. But just to point something out – people interested in the “woman’s right to choose” should be cautious with this argument, because it is not as friendly to their position as they think. Thompson gets as much grief from pro-choicers as she does from pro-lifers. Why? Because on her argument abortion would be extremely limited – limited to cases where the women did not consent to the use of her body. Rape is the most obvious example. Thompson tries to make room for cases of failed contraception as well, but her argument there is much much weaker.
Studies that I have seen say that only 1% of abortions in the United States are from rape event pregancies. (And, it might surprise some to know that a Harvard study found that 75% of rape victims who were impregnated by the rape event choose to keep the child). Anyway, if you take the strongest argument from Thompson (rape cases where there clearly was not consent to let the unborn person use her body) you would go from around 850,000 legal abortions a year to 8,500. As a matter of political prudence, I would sign Thompson’s restrictions into law tomorrow (even though I think it is still an intrinsic evil to kill an innocent in the case of rape). Signing her restrictions into law would not be a total victory for the pro-life movement, but it would be a huge win.
Making Thompson’s argument also cedes a crucial moral point (Thompson concedes it even though she says she does not really believe it) – you concede that the unborn is a person with full moral status. What you say is that being a person does not give you the right to use someone else’s body (even if you need it to stay alive), but you cede the important point about the personhood of the unborn. That is another reason why many pro-choicers balk at this move. While Thompson still leaves the door ajar for some abortions, she gives up a lot of ground.
kleiner,
I for one don’t think that Thompson concedes that the unborn is necessarily a person. Her argument is simply that if it IS, that is morally irrelevant.
I think that her point for the lack of consent implied from contraception use still works. The argument is not primarily limited to rape cases then.
I think the issue is that you have to make the argument that people consent to pregnancy simply because they consent to sex (if you want to limit thompson’s argument mainly to rape). I think it’s clear that this is not the case, for better or worse.
“I propose, then, that we grant that the fetus is a person from the moment of conception” – Judith Thompson, from her article.
It is not that this point is morally irrelevant. Thompson’s argument is that granting the moral status of the unborn does not exclude abortion in all cases, as pro-lifers usually think. But it it does exclude the permissibility of abortion in any number of cases (cases where the woman did consent in some way to the use of her body). So it is not that the personhood point is morally irrelevant. Her argument is that it is not the argument ender that most pro-lifers (like me) usually think it is. You can grant it but still make room for some abortions (rape, maybe failed contraception).
We could go around on the contraception point, but I’d rather just offer up a thought experiment that gets to a problem in Thompson’s argument that is “older” than the contraception point anyway.
Imagine you have a 45 year old woman who is the sole caretaker of her elderly mother who has severe alzheimer’s disease. She lives in a really rural place, and there is no one else who can care for her mother. But she does not want this burden of caring for this person. She doesn’t want it, and did not ask for it. She just wants her freedom. So she leaves her mother to fend for herself. Her mother dies in a day.
Any problem with that?
Here is Thompson’s basic point: unless I fully consent to a burden, I am free to relieve myself of that burden at any time no matter what happens to others and no matter what rights those others may have. (If I do consent to a burden, then I bear the consequences of that consent and have moral obligations).
But sometimes life just gives over to us burdens and responsibilities that we did not “choose” (consent to). Does the fact that we did not choose them make them any less obligatory? I don’t think so. (Students who have taken my Contemporary Euro class or read some pomo philosophy will see Levinas all over this point). I say life is a foundational good. Do we just dump it by the side of the road because it infringes on some sense of personal freedom? Does the “I” always precede in priority the “thou” (the Other)? Is that our philosophical anthropology? Is freedom more important than life? Are our principles only for the sunny days?
Here is another way of making the point, that might grab those of you more interested in political science (political philosophy):
I think rights talk has to be seated in talk about goods. A right, properly understood, could not be in conflict with a natural good.
Thompson does not share this view of rights. She is working with a very modern (Lockean) understanding of rights, an understanding of rights that is stripped away from any real understanding of the good. This is a very modern temperament. In her defense, I think many (if not most) pro-lifers are working with the same Lockean view of rights, and the same crappy philosophical anthropology that travels with it.
Here ends up being the rub. When I say “persons have a right to life” I don’t understand “rights” in the same way that Lockeans do. This introduces a problem – since everyone is using the language of rights, it seems like we are saying the same things but we really are not. It is not that my view is couched in something religious per se, but it is seated in a metaphysical anthropology of natural goods and is very different from modern Lockean accounts (from which most of our contemporary political discourse springs). This introduces a semantic problem – how do we have a discourse when we have so much divergence in underlying views of human nature?
The solution: people need to take more philosophy classes so that we can have a more elevated and nuanced public discourse on these questions.
It is on this point about rights that, strangely, my views and the views of some on this blog might come close together. I think this will be particularly the case on economic questions and social justice questions.
I reject the claim from classical liberalism (think John Locke) that property rights are basic and inviolable. Rather, I think the goods of creation are first and foremost for common use (because food, water, etc are natural goods). So I believe that private property rights can be infringed upon for the sake of the common good and common use of goods. (This, because I say that rights have to be seated in an understanding of goods). Aquinas even argues that a starving man who takes someone else’s surplus food (assuming he has no other way to eat) is not actually stealing. He has a right to that food, and the person with the surplus does not have a right to the surplus (even if he “owns” it). This is why Robin Hood (I am just thinking of the legend of “stealing from the rich to feed the poor”) is a moral hero rather than a villain. He is not actually stealing, because the rich do not have a right to their riches when others are poor and hungry.
This sort of thing makes my Republican friends (especially tea partiers) absolutely cringe. But people on this blog with something of a socialist bent are probably applauding. (Read John Paul II’s “On Human Work”, he goes to town on libertarian capitalism there). But those of a more socialist bent on this blog are pretty well committed (whether they realize it or not) to this underlying philosophical anthropology – that community in some sense precedes the individual. It is an “I and thou” anthropology (to borrow a phrase from Buber), not a me me anthropology (not a Lockean phrase, but it might as well be). It is a relational ontology, to use a fancy turn of phrase (see Buber, Levinas, Heidegger, JPII, etc etc).
Here is the interesting thing: I actually think my view – on abortion and then economic justice – is totally consistent and springs from the same source (the same relational anthropology of person and community). I am skeptical that those who are pro-choice (say, attracted to Thompson’s argument) but who are bent more left on economic issues have as consistent a position. Instead, you might be pulling from two different, and frankly incompatible, views of human nature.
This is all probably a discussion for another day, and I know I put a lot out on the table here. But I thought it worth doing so. Things have been testy of late here between myself and few bloggers. I thought it worth finding some common ground (even if an abortion discussion was a very strange place to find it!).
You’re right that I do agree about everything you said about property rights and socialism. I definitely believe that the community often (maybe even most often) precedes the individual – but not always. I’m however not even the least bit convinced that my being a socialist means that I have to oppose abortion in order to be consistent. As I’ve mentioned before, the root of this is that I don’t see a foetus as something that has a right to life. It’s not a person. While I think a foetus does/should have some rights, I don’t believe it does/should have the same rights as me or you. That’s the difference of opinion I think you have to attack.
Furthermore, I don’t believe that a person necessarily has to stick with one specific philosophy for all of their beliefs. Though they are strongly informed by my socialist, humanist, atheist viewpoint, I choose my beliefs issue by issue; I don’t tow a philosophical or party line. To say that we’re pulling from incompatible views of human nature is, it seems to me, assuming that one view or the other is 100% objectively correct. I just don’t see how that’s possible or convincing.
Dr. Kleiner,
Again, I think that when Thompson says “I propose that we grant the fetus personhood,” this doesn’t mean anything other than “for the sake of argument, let’s grant this to show that it has absolutely no bearing on the argument.”
(I see your later point that if you take a viewpoint like you did (re: the starving man isn’t stealing, he has more right to it, etc.,), then this would not be impacted by Thompson’s argument.)
I think we agree here, Andrew: Thompson is clear in the article that she does not actually think the unborn is a person (though, if I recall correctly, she talks about how the issue is thornier than many think). But she concedes the point for the sake of argument. My point was simply this – Thompson’s argument is made on the presupposition that the point has been ceded. Many in the pro-choice community have been upset with her argument because any sign of retreat on that point is viewed as giving up something really important. If that is her game, then let’s play it (which is what I tried to do with my caretaker/alzheimer’s example above).
To Craig – fair point. If you do not cede the personhood of the unborn, then there is nothing wrong with abortion no matter what your other views. I did not mean to make the point overly tidy there (as if believing y in economic issues forces you to believe x in life issues). My point was this – the view of human nature (relational ontology / community and individual) that argues against Thompson’s argument (and the view of rights embedded therein) is a view of human nature that people on the left actually feel extremely comfortable with when it comes to other issues (economics, social justice, etc). Given your socialist proclivities – and the philosophical anthropology of individual-community embedded therin – I don’t think you should like Thompson’s argument (because her argument relies on a fundamental rejection of the view of community and person that you hold).
I must say that I entirely disagree with your view that you can shift positions on fundamental questions from issue to issue. That strikes me as, well, simply unprincipled. Now don’t get me wrong, it is not that we will have one really narrow view that excludes all others on the meaning of the human condition. I think we should have a comprehensive view of human nature and community. So don’t presume that I mean something narrow here. But human nature is what it is. It makes no sense to say that X is true of human nature when I am thinking about abortion but X is false of human nature when I am thinking about economics. Human nature is either X or not-X, it cannot be simultaneously both. Secular humanists who praise reason should be in on this whole avoiding contradictions thing. Either man is a relational and social animal or he is not. Human nature does not change situation to situation, does it? If it does, I have a hard time seeing how we’d have any ethics at all (and philosophers that deny human nature tend to not have an ethics).
Let me give an example drawn from your past posts. You hang your hat a lot on the harm principle. People prefer to avoid harm, so actions that cause harm to others without any general benefit are bad. Okay. But do you pick and choose when to apply that principle? What if, in order to justify a ban on gay marriage, I simply said “Oh, the harm principle does not apply here because that view is not always 100% correct. I take my view of human nature issue to issue, and I retrofit it to work with whatever political position I already hold and am hoping to justify.” That obviously looks wrong-headed, right? I think we should be really suspicious of people who re-engineer their view of what it is to be human in order to justify pet political positions. I say your political positions should fall out of a careful reflection on what it means to be human, what is good and bad for humans, etc. We should strive for comprehensive and consistent positions. There is plenty of inconsistency out there and we should be bothered by it. For instance, pro-lifers who talk about the inviolable dignity of every human life but who are then rabidly supportive of capital punishment. Those issues are not identical, of course (one is intrinsically evil and the other is not, one involves an innocent and the other does not), but you sure don’t hear much about the inviolable dignity of the life of the murderer when capital punishment comes up with many American religious conservatives.
You are usually pretty consistent, Craig, despite your odd attraction to calling yourself a “relativist”. You are really not a relativist, you seem to have a situational ethics rooted in the harm principle … which is to say you are pretty much a utilitarian. (I don’t mean to be name-calling, I am just trying to pin down your view on things). Your argument for gay marriage (not an altogether bad one, though I don’t agree with it) is basically this:
1) The harm principle is the driving moral measure of the rightness or wrongness of things, that which violates the harm principle is wrong, that which does not is permissible.
2) Prohibiting gay marriage harms people without any apparent benefit, so it violates the harm principle.
3) So prohibitions of gay marriage are wrong.
Wouldn’t it be just too slick for me to respond to that argument by saying, “Oh, but sometimes the harm principle just does not apply. I just think that is an issue to issue sort of a thing. Your principle might upset my political position here, so I insist that principles themselves are situational.” Doesn’t that move just preclude the possibility of principled discussion?
Get what I am saying? Let’s disagree, but let’s all be principled! Sort out your view of human nature and your moral principles and apply them evenly. If that means you end up not towing the party line on what “liberals” are supposed to believe, so be it. If you look at my politics, I am more conservative than conservatives and more liberal than liberals.
Yeah, I didn’t mean that I could/would say be a feminist and also be racist, and that that would be ok. I meant that no one is 100% consistent on every issue. For whatever reason, we all have issues where we diverge from whatever overarching political/social we otherwise have. You are correct in saying that my ethics are rooted in notions of avoiding harm. There are issues where that’s not really applicable. That was the point I was trying to make, badly apparently. I actually agree with what you said in your 3rd & 4th paragraphs.
Re: my attraction to calling myself a relativist, I’ve already once explained what I mean by that – which is obviously not what you mean when you use that term. I don’t think it’s accurate to say that I’m a utilitarian though. For example, no matter how positive the possible outcome, I think that torture is never justifiable.
One last thing, even if prohibiting gay marriage did actually have some social benefit (which it doesn’t), I’d still be pro-gay marriage. Just as I’d be pro-interracial marriage even if there were some benefit to prohibiting it.
I hadn’t realized that was someone else’s argument. I mostly thought of it on my own.
For the record, I don’t think zygotes, blastocysts, embryos, or fetuses are persons. I don’t have time right now to support that statement, because it would require a fairly in-depth discussion on developmental biology. I personally think the only way to really believe that this is a person is if you believe in souls at all, and that a clump of cells gains a soul the moment a sperm enters an egg.
Here is a story about a college instructor who was not renewed after a student complained about his teaching the Catholic / natural law view on homosexuality in a Catholic Studies course at University of Illinois:
Do free thinkers think it is wrong to have a person lose their teaching position for teaching the Catholic / natural law argument about homosexuality? I think you should be able to teach that argument in a number of philosophy or religious studies courses. I teach it in my Social Ethics course. But this guy was teaching it in a Catholic Studies course! You can’t teach Catholic views on controversial matters in a Catholic Studies course?!
I hear all sorts of fuss from atheists over the excommunication of that nun who approved an abortion. What about the intellectual excommunication of religious thinkers? The casual excommunication of religious intellectuals happens ALL THE TIME. It happens casually when their views are simply disregarded or – as in the case above in this steam – their arguments are ignored and they are simply called bigoted homophobes. Of course, in the case of this U of Illinois instructor, the intellectual excommunication was more severe.
The real question for me is was he simply teaching about it, or was he advocating it and teaching it as if it were the right way to think? There’s a big difference. One is simply communicating knowledge, the second is advocating discrimination at a publicly funded university. If the former, then he was wrongly terminated. If the latter, perhaps not.
PZ Myers at Pharyngula gives a good run-down of the situation, and a conclusion I agree with.
That is a useful distinction, Craig. Given the selections from the article, it sounded like exegesis and explanation instead of advocacy. But we are working from limited information.
That said, is it okay to advocate the view that homosexuality is morally permissible?
One more thought: I do not think you should equate even advocating a natural law view with advocating discrimination. To believe that a behavior is immoral is not identical to believing we should discriminate (in a narrow or a broad sense) against those who practice the behavior.
“To believe that a behavior is immoral is not identical to believing we should discriminate (in a narrow or a broad sense) against those who practice the behavior.”
True. But this isn’t something that happened just out on the street – it was done by a professor whose salary is paid, at least partly, by public monies. States where gay discrimination is illegal cannot afford to be employing professors who advocate anti-gay beliefs, just as they can’t be employing openly racist or sexist professors.
And I actually do think that when a public university professor says that homosexuality is immoral it is a form of discrimination. Perhaps a mild form. I also think that the “natural law view” is a form of discrimination and prejudice. It’s also, in my opinion, a ridiculous argument.
“That said, is it okay to advocate the view that homosexuality is morally permissible?”
Of course. The view that homosexuality is immoral isn’t equally valid to the view that homosexuality is moral (or rather morally neutral) any more than creationism is an equally valid idea to evolution. A biology professor who taught creationism would be fired. It’s a similar, if not exact same, situation.
Lastly, The professor in question was adjunct faculty, and as such, the uni had no requirement to keep him employed, even if his record had been spotless and his scholarship amazing. No great injustice has been done. He directly advocated the view that homosexuality was immoral, disgusting, and unsafe. (I read the e-mail he sent to the student). If a professor had advocated the opposite at BYU or perhaps at a Catholic uni, he’d be kicked out (as has happened).
Let’s all be honest about PZ Myers – the man is utterly incapable of speaking sensibly about religion. He has drunk so much of the neo-atheist kool-aid that anytime he comments about religion he sounds like a cross between a zealot and a buffoon. Most of the intellectually serious atheists I know keep their distance from him and his ilk.
But when I linked to the article, he started off with a surprisingly reasonable tone. Predictably, that did not last long. Have these neo-atheists read anything of what they critique? Myers wonders what Catholic teaching allows as far as sexuality goes — maybe he should read something to inform himself before ripping it? And while he rips Howell for his naive and stereotypical views of homosexuals, Myers happily trades off all sorts of stereotypes of Catholics (that Catholics don’t enjoy sex or see it as part of love since they are so guilty and restricted about it). This kind of business is just so stupid that it is not even worth discussing.
My undergrads who take my 1000 level Social Ethics course have a better understanding of the natural law than Myers has. Now let me say that some of his criticisms are valid criticisms against a certain kind of natural law that is seated entirely in biological categories. But few still espouse that version of the view. But his fairly standard objections fall way short of actually handling a more sophisticated natural law, and don’t even touch what is called the “new natural law”.
I am not saying there are no objections to those theories. My point here is not to defend the natural law as truth – my purpose here is to defend natural law as a perfectly legitimate and serious theory in moral philosophy. It rightfully has a place in the ethics curriculum of any philosophy program, and obviously has a place in a Catholic studies course (which is what this was). It is not a mere “personal prejudice” of “ignorant fools” that is being passed off as serious thought. But Myers is too ignorant of natural law moral philosophy to understand that – since he plays with a childish understanding of the view he thinks it possible to refute the view with obvious counter-arguments. I am always left to wonder about people who think they can dismiss views (like the natural law) that have been held by an astounding number of the greatest minds in the western tradition with such obvious objections — does Myers think that people like Aquinas simply did not think of these obvious objections?
Think of someone like Ralph McInerny (recently deceased). Eminent philosopher, widely published and regarded, taught at Notre Dame for some 50 years. Don’t you think he heard every one of these objections and more from his students over the years? If these were such slam dunk counter-arguments, then was McInerny simply blinded by dogma in his insistence of defending the natural law (see his great little book Ethica Thomistica)? That is just not a defensible position, insisting that a eminent philosopher ignores obvious and fatal objections to his views because he is drunk on dogma. (By the way, our visiting priest at St Thomas Aquinas parish right now has a PhD in philosophy under Ralph McInerny).
Here is the problem: Myers is a biologist. Why does he fancy himself an expert in moral philosophy? What if I started shooting off about theories in biology? It would be absurd, I am not a trained biologist. Attention new atheists: leave the philosophy to philosophers, and we philosophers will agree to leave the science to scientists. I cannot stress this strongly enough: Dawkins and Myers (to name two) are not philosophers. Most of the time they engage in philosophical debate, they look like fools. Daniel Dennett is a philosopher, and he rarely makes an ass of himself and he is not nearly as overheated as the other new atheists. I’m not saying non-philosophers should never do philosophy. But have a little humility for crying out loud.
Of course Myers mocks the use of the word “reality” – because Myers already assumes a reduced understanding of reality. This is one reason why materialists always presume a biological reading of the natural law: because they are the ones that have reduced everything to a materialism metaphysics (usually without philosophical argument, I might add). But natural law theorists mean something different by “nature”, it is a metaphysical category. Most of Myers’ objections are objections to a biological understanding of natural law, which is pretty uncommon these days.
Ultimately, though, you see Myers play his real hand, and what he does is intellectually excommunicate Howell. Why? Because Howell is an “ignorant fool“ who is “not very bright and doesn’t meet the intellectual standards I expect of UI professors”. On what does Myers base this claim? That the man is religious. Apparently on Myers view, it is impossible to be simultaneously religious and intelligent / philosophically serious. (One might see now why I am getting so exercised over this). Of course you get the standard ridiculous “dogma” charge. If Myers knew much of anything about natural law philosophy, he would know that the natural law is a moral philosophy based in natural reason, it is not a sectarian Catholic “dogma”. Aristotle held this view. Seriously, how uninformed is this guy?! And he echoes this assumption with the view that it is impossible for Catholic thought to be “serious philosophy”. On what does he base this claim? Nothing really, other than the standard atheist ejaculations about “dogma”. So, Myers, shall we remove from philosophy curricula: Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, Boethius, Abelard, Thomas More, John Henry Newman, Ockham, … … … …? If the natural law has not place in serious moral philosophy, should we not teach Aristotle’s ethics?
Let’s make it easier — people interested in being philosophically serious should avoid reading Myers’ verbal ejaculations on philosophy and religion. (I make no judgment on his qualifications as a biologist since, well, I am not a biologist. I wish Myers had the same humility to let philosophers judge philosophers). Is this “free thinking” – intellectually excommunicating an entire tradition of intellectual activity because of YOUR bias?
I won’t defend Howell’s own presentation of the psychology of roles in homosexual relationships. But I think the sexual complementarity argument is very potent. For anyone who wants to read something serious about it, read Pope John Paul II’s Theology of the Body. It is a masterpiece (and JPII was a phd moral philosopher, and the work is philosophically very astute).
I don’t care to get back into defending the natural law and all of the rest of it here. The purpose of my post was simply this plea: Do not intellectually excommunicate religious people simply because they are religious. If you want to be open minded and tolerant thinkers, then let as many ideas as possible into the debate, and don’t suppose that something is without merit simply because it comes from the mouth of a Catholic (or any other religious person).
On Craig’s most recent comment:
Craig, how much of the natural law have you read to arrive at the view that it is a “ridiculous argument”? Have you read Aquinas? Aristotle? If you want something more contemporary, read some contemporary defenses of the “old natural law” (Ralph McInerny) or read some new natural law (Robert George, Germain Grisez, Joseph Boyle). Here is all I would ask: slow down a bit. Don’t be so quick to dismiss substantive philosophical positions as “ridiculous”. I don’t expect you to agree with the natural law view. But I do expect you to agree that it is not “ridiculous”.
On advocating the view that homosexuality is moral in the classroom: I think your analogy is a mis-analogy. While young earth creationism has been totally discredited and disproven in the scientific community, the natural law has not been totally discredited and disproven in the philosophical community. It is still a live theory, with any number of extremely intelligent, widely published and respected contemporary philosophers defending it. So your analogy there really does not hold. Your argument is this: Since it is obviously true that homosexual acts are morally permissible, it is fine to advocate them. But it is not obviously true that homosexual acts are morally permissible, and indeed a notable minority of trained moral philosophers (along with a huge majority of the great thinkers in the western tradition) disagree with you. Point is, this is not a “the sky is blue” obvious point here, it is contested by reasonable people.
Yes, he was an adjunct faculty. Does this mean “no great injustice was done”? I was adjunct faculty last year, had I been canned for teaching John Paul II’s Theology of the Body in my Contemporary Euro Course, I would have called that a great injustice to academic freedom (and a really bad deal for me and my family). He had been teaching there for 9 years, so he was not just some temp (as if temps deserve less anyway). Do you hold that same view on the philosophy instructor that was not renewed at BYU since he defended gay marriage? Was no great injustice done there? I’m just guessing that you ripped BYU for that when it happened. (I know these cases were not identical, the BYU instructor wrote an op-ed rather than professing his point in the classroom).
You say you agree with Myers, but you don’t. Myers said he did not think Howell was advocating the view but explaining it, and that he went out of his way to say he was not condemning anyone.
I go back to this plea: Atheists, please refrain from intellectually excommunicating religious thinkers and from labeling philosophical positions that are associated with religious traditions (the natural law) as ridiculous. Doing these things harms dialogue, weakens your position (at least it makes your “free thinking” look incredibly hypocritical), and it lacks any sort of humility. Read and understand before you dismiss. Rarely are views held by great thinkers the sorts of things that are simply ridiculous and worthy of being dismissed out of hand in 4 sentence blog posts. Isn’t it possible to disagree without insisting that your opponents are idiots or assholes?
I can’t believe I just wasted 30 minutes of my life on a PZ Myers post. Never again.
I happen to agree with him on the dangerousness of religion (or more generally, on the idea that faith is a virtue). You might say, I’m part of that ilk.
I was comparing the professors arguments as written in that e-mail to those of creationism. They’re both equally based in lies and distortions of the truth. That’s all I was saying. You’re correct, I’m not familiar with more advanced (or whatever) forms of natural law. I was ridiculing whatever version that particular professor was using in his argument. It was ridiculous. After explaining natural moral law is (or whatever version he was teaching), he starts editorialising, and this is where he gets into trouble,
One example applicable to homosexual acts illustrates the problem. To the best of my knowledge, in a sexual relationship between two men, one of them tends to act as the “woman” while the other acts as the “man.” In this scenario, homosexual men have been known to engage in certain types of actions for which their bodies are not fitted. I don’t want to be too graphic so I won’t go into details but a physician has told me that these acts are deleterious to the health of one or possibly both of the men. Yet, if the morality of the act is judged only by mutual consent, then there are clearly homosexual acts which are injurious to their health but which are consented to. Why are they injurious? Because they violate the meaning, structure, and (sometimes) health of the human body.
This is why he should be fired. He’s telling students that gay sex is icky and homosexuality is immoral. That’s a perfectly reasonable reason to fire a professor at a public university.
“Here is the problem: Myers is a biologist. Why does he fancy himself an expert in moral philosophy?”
I don’t believe that he does. He simply express his opinion (vociferously) about any number of topics. What I understood from the post was that Myers said the professor wasn’t expressing hate speech, but he was “explain[ing] why homosexuality is wrong.” That’s the part I (and he) take issue with. Also note that I said I agreed with Myers conclusion, not everything he said. I often disagree with his opinions. But I also very often agree.
This is the conclusion that Myers wrote which I agree with:
Of course, part of the reason for his weird shortcomings is the fact that he’s a professor of religion who is spitting up Catholic dogma, and one big problem is that a respected major university is offering courses in Catholicism taught by its adherents as serious philosophy, rather than teaching it as cultural anthropology by someone who can maintain a little distance from its weird precepts. Kick Howell out, but send the Catholic theologians packing right after him.
I take a firm and extreme stance on the separation of church and state. Very firm.
“Let’s all be honest about PZ Myers – the man is utterly incapable of speaking sensibly about religion.”
That’s funny, he’s probably say the same thing about you.
“Isn’t it possible to disagree without insisting that your opponents are idiots or assholes?”
Yes, but it’s far less fun. I think that ridicule of religion is healthy and necessary. Also when someone acts like an idiot or asshole, it can be quite useful to call them such. For the record, I don’t think you’re either. While I’m not saying that you actually are one, you’re beginning to sound a lot like a tone troll, especially in your criticism of Myers.
Re: the BYU firing of the pro-gay professor, yes you are guessing. I think that it’s sad that he couldn’t voice his opinion w/o being fired. I think the culture and environment of BYU need to change. But I don’t think that BYU necessarily behaved unethically when it fired that professor. They had a legal right to do so. That professor certainly ought to have expected some sort blow-back for directly contradicting both the policy of the university and the doctrines of the church that paid his salary. It was regrettable that an openly pro-gay faculty member couldn’t be tolerated at BYU. But I think that BYU has a right to control who teaches there and what is taught. Of course, religious private universities handing out degrees equivalent to those at secular schools but not having academic freedom is another issue all together. But just as I think BYU had a right to fire that professor, so too did U of I have a right to fire an anti-gay professor, even if he was a Catholic who taught Catholic philosophy.
One last question, how is any idea or hypothesis disproven in the philosophical community?
To and for me (and quite probably to Myers) metaphysics is a waste of time. I don’t find metaphysical arguments convincing because they’re (in my view) not based on anything solid, measurable, provable or disprovable. They’re not empirical. I cannot and will not trust unempirical claims. In this I am fundamentally different from almost all religious people – a main reason why I’m an atheist. Unless you can show me real, hard evidence, I will not believe a thing, no matter how exciting, interesting, or provocative. Done that, tried that. It doesn’t work for me.
apparently, some html tags don’t work. There should have been some blocked quotes in there.
Kind of stream of consciousness here, sorry this is not well organized (not a lot of time this morning as my “honey do” list for the weekend is quite long).
Forgive my ignorance, but what is a “tone troll”? If it means that I am an advocate for an engagement of ideas that is fair and reasonable instead of rude, ignorant, and pigheaded, then I suppose I am one. Sadly, many of the new atheist provocateurs “argue” by throwing temper tantrums. Seriously, my 3 year old is less intemperate when I take away her lollipops. If it makes me a “tone troll” to call out bratty and childish intellectual behavior when I see it, then so be it. I am deeply saddened that a whole generation of atheists has as intellectual role models people like Myers and Dawkins. Far from developing intellectual virtue from imitating this crew, they are habituating intellectual vice.
Maybe you think it is less fun to have a debate that proceeds charitably and reasonably, a debate that seeks understanding before making rash judgments that are usually personal attacks instead of actual reasons and arguments. But if you argue that way, then I have to admit that is so much the less reason for people that debate with you to take you seriously. This is what Myers too often does – he calls others ridiculous but does not himself know what he is talking about, so in the end he is the one who looks the most ridiculous. Most of my theist friends shrug off these new atheists because they are so philosophically unsophisticated. Actually many of my intellectually serious atheist friends shrug these guys off as unserious participants in the conversation. Sometimes I think I ought to do the same. But the teacher in me pushes me in the other direction. I have come to realize that few atheists recognize this lack of sophistication, so I charge in where many of my friends just move on. You are all free to be atheists of course, but I do earnestly hope that you develop responsible intellectual habits. I am probably fighting a losing battle – blogs (the public square of the digital generation) do not reward thoughtfulness but instead reward irascibility.
Maybe Myers does not fancy himself and expert. Perhaps the trouble is that so many of his readers treat him as if he were one. As far as the capacity to speak reasonably about religion, would he say the same thing about me? I don’t know or care. Myers long ago ceased to be (if he ever was) a credible voice on anything pertaining to religion. What about SHAFTers – am I more fair to atheism that Myers is to theism? I certainly think so. (I was raised atheist and was militantly atheist through college and some graduate school. I know the atheist arguments very very well. If I can be allowed a moment of pride, I think I know the atheist arguments better than most atheists).
There is no need to even bring up separation of Church and state here. Natural law is a philosophical theory grounded in natural reason, it is not a religious view. Aristotle – not a religious thinker – holds a natural law view. The notion that this is a religious idea (and so would need to be censored in a hard and fast separation of church and state) just goes to show how far from understanding the natural law the atheist critiques here are! This was one of the main points from my post — the natural law is a substantive philosophical (not religious) view that deserves (I think demands) a place in any ethics curriculum. The idea that you would toss this out as “ignorant dogma” is just ridiculous. Again, to do so would mean removing Aristotle’s ethics from the philosophical curriculum. I hope that making that point makes it obvious how absurd the Myers position is here!!!
Can you show me “real hard evidence” that empirical proof is the only kind of proof? Can you empirically prove empiricism? No, you cannot. Most naturalists that I know make some kind of a pragmatic move here, but they do not demonstrate that non-scientific reasoning is impossible. One of the points I constantly harp on here is that science actually depends on non-scientific truths – for instance, a metaphysics that can justify the uniformity of nature. This is no knock on science, I am just pointing out that science cannot justify itself (from the point of view of her truth claims).
How are ideas disproven in the philosophical community? The most obvious answer: logic (one of Aristotle’s arguments against Platonic metaphysics is that it leads to an infinite regress). Or one might also demonstrate that a theory has some kind of fatal inadequacy (one of Aquinas’ arguments against Plato is that Plato’s theory can give no account of why we have a body). etc etc. But I grant that this is not that this is always easy.
By the way, I agree that BYU had the right to fire that lecturer. But I don’t think a public university has the same right. BYU is a private university and is not committed to academic freedom and free speech. A state university should allow all forms of expression on campus because the state should not be in the business of censoring ideas and expression. Wouldn’t “free thinkers” agree that state sponsored censorship is a bad idea?! I would allow for some minor amendments made to that principle to prevent hate speech on campus (since hate speech can be detrimental to other unique ends of the university). But Howell did not engage in hate speech, so should not have been fired even if he was advocating the view (and I don’t think he was, I think he was explaining it).
Here is an example: despite the fact that many more women attend college now than men, it remains the case that men are more successful in mathematics than women. Now there are many possible sociological explanations that could be provided here. But the former president of Harvard offered up the possibility that maybe, just maybe, men and women have brains that are wired differently so they are not actually equals in this area. This caused an enormous firestorm (he was eventually forced out of his position). But is that hate speech? What if it is true? As Peter Singer says, we should not base moral equality on actual equality, because actual equality might turn out to be empirically false. But shouldn’t we have universities where pursuing these politically unpopular ideas is allowed? Allow professors to explore ideas and make unpopular arguments. If the arguments suck, they won’t last long out in the hot sun of academic scrutiny.
Notice that “the man” here is on the side of the liberals. I guess censorship is okay so long as it tailors to your political and moral opinions? Come on.
This belongs in Jon’s upcoming post on the uniformity of nature:
Craig says: “. I cannot and will not trust unempirical claims.”
But you do! You trust in the uniformity of nature, and the uniformity of nature cannot be demonstrated empirically (says Hume). In fact, all of the empirical claims that you do trust depend on your trust in the uniformity of nature.
Everyone has metaphysical beliefs, it is impossible not to have them. Why do I say this? Everyone has beliefs about what is real and what is unreal. Everyone has beliefs about time and identity. Some people take the time to see that their metaphysical positions are defensible and consistent. Others do not. I am always stunned by how few materialists actually make arguments for their materialism. I pressed Huenemann on this a few years ago, and he admitted that most materialists he knows (including himself) pretty much just assume it as a starting point and never bother to actually think through the arguments.
A tone troll is someone who disregards the substance of an argument because they dislike the style in which it was said.
Good to know. Not sure if I am a “tone troll”. I tried to address both the substance of Myers’ arguments (I noted that his arguments might undermine a natural law couched in biological categories, but not other interpretations of the natural law) as well as the tone.
If the laws of nature were not uniform across the observable universe, we should expect the universe to look quite a bit different than it does. In some ways, the claim “The rules of physics hold everywhere” is not an assumption, but could theoretically be empirically falsified.
To be more precise, they may have started as an assumption at the very beginnings of scientific enquiry, but we’ve been continually testing that assumption since Newton wrote Principia. If, say, the gravitational constant varied in different places in the universe, we shouldn’t be able to predict the orbits of other planets, or distant galaxies should look/behave very differently, or they wouldn’t even be there because they wouldn’t be stable over eons. If the uniformity of nature didn’t hold, it could even be that life itself would not be possible.
If the rules of physics do indeed vary, they must do so at least at the scale of galaxies (that is, a galaxy has the same laws across its entire breadth, because if it didn’t, it would fall apart). But that same argument holds true at the level of galaxy clusters, because they gravitationally interact. And galaxy clusters form into vast fractal webs of galaxies. The entire observed universe doesn’t have little pocket “bubbles” with different rules, because the universe is one contained system. If it did have regions of different rules, what would happen at the interfaces of those bubbles? Weird, weird stuff, and we’d have likely observed it. That is, if a universe can even be stable for 13.7 billion years with microuniverses inside it.
My overall point is, I think Hume is wrong when he said the uniformity of nature could not be empirically demonstrated. It really couldn’t, in his time. We’ve seen and learned a lot since then. Even though it might still qualify as an “assumption”, it could in theory be empirically disproven. Read about the discovery of dark matter for a specific example that could be interpreted as a rigorous test of the uniformity of nature.
Also, people’s instinctive beliefs about how time works are totally wrong.
The fact that we can put an age on the universe at all (which is 13.75 ±0.17 billion years old) with as many significant figures as we have, seems to me to be a very strong argument in favor of the idea that the laws of physics are uniform across the observable universe (key word: “observable”).
I don’t think that claim is fundamentally axiomatic. It’s being tested all the time. I wonder what Hume would have wrote if he had known what modern cosmologists know.
You ought to have more than 2 options for gender.
Would ‘transgender’ suffice as a third option?
Quite possibly. I do know though that some people identify as non-gendered, though admittedly, it’s a very, very small percentage, smaller than transgendered. Maybe “other” as well?
This is the problem I always run into with demographic polls. There are never enough options (like the political ideology question). I have a tendency to want many specific categories as opposed to too few/too broad.
Oh, I hope I didn’t seem like I was telling you how to run your poll. It was just a suggestion. I just realised my comment might’ve sounded like a command. Thanks for honouring it.
Right, I understand how restrictive survey questions can be. But if you make the responses too nuanced, with a ton of options, then it deters people from taking the survey.
Of course, I completely agree. I was just talking about my own neuroses.
Thank you. I’m grateful to have the third option.
Thank you, as well.
Jon,
on a far less serious note, you left viking off of both race and religious affiliation.
And you also forgot “coffee drinker” off the religious affiliation question.
For the record, I would also like to be counted as a viking.
I’d also suggest that the USU relationship question could have more than a single response (e.g., alumnus & faculty) in addition to a “Staff” answer.
Wow, you have like…zero Protestants and zero conservatives on this site.
I think that is right, conservatives are certainly under-represented. I chose “other” because I really don’t identify as “conservative” through and through (at least in the complete American political sense of that word). But I am a traditionalist and readers of this blog would certainly identify me as a “conservative” on a number of issues (sexual ethics, abortion). But I am “liberal” on other issues. Really what I am is a Catholic, something which does not tidily fit into the contemporary political categories.
Is Hitchens a conservative? I know he is pretty hawkish on the war on terror.
This is an honest question, not a jab. Why are the political views from atheists so lockstep when they are supposed to be free thinkers? You’d think that there would be some conservative (socially, fiscally, foreign policy, whatever) atheists. Perhaps it is a function of 84% of the readers (so far) being under 34 (31% under 21 and I am guessing the other 53% are mostly in their 20s). Anyway, that might be worth a discussion – where are all the conservative atheists?
I wonder if Vince has voted yet. I think he would self-identify as Protestant (though he might eschew labels).
“Why are the political views from atheists so lockstep when they are supposed to be free thinkers?”
I don’t think that’s fair. Libertarians are very well-represented among atheists and are often at odds with the liberal atheists over fiscal issues. And over foreign policy issues, there is also disagreement among atheists. But it shouldn’t surprise people why atheists wouldn’t identify as conservative when for decades that political label has been associated with the religious right.
I’m not familiar with Hawkins other political beliefs, but on terrorism & Islam he does seem to adhere more to the conservative side of things. I chose “other” because I don’t identify as liberal – I’m a social anarchist / communist libertarian.
But is true that it seems that most atheists are on the left/liberal side of things. Personally I think that’s because once you remove religion as a motivating factor, it’s the side that makes more sense. While I disagree with atheist right libertarians on fiscal issues, I don’t know a single atheist, right or left (though certainly some few exist), who doesn’t support gay equality, a woman’s right to choose, and other traditionally liberal/leftist social views. It’s hardly fair though to at all say that atheists are “lock-step”. There is a huge amount of diversity and differences of opinion within the atheist community. If nothing else, the many differing opinions on how to go about dealing with religion should make that obvious. Furthermore, these stats are hardly an accurate sampling of atheists/secularists at large.
I’d take some convincing that political conservatives are “well-represented”, Jon, but I get your point. In fact, I think noted conservative commentator George Will is agnostic. So maybe on the libertarian front. But I had in mind more social issues. Is there an atheistic pro-life movement? Are there atheists organizing against gay marriage? etc etc
So I am not convinced that there is, as Craig suggested, a “huge amount of diversity and difference of opinion” among secularists / atheists, particularly on social issues. Let me weaken my claim (and this is actually what I intended). I was reacting to the atheists on this blog. I see very little (in fact, about none) diversity of social/political opinion on this blog. Maybe it is because I’m often the odd man out, but this blog seems pretty lockstep on social issues to me. It has been absolutely lock-step regarding gay marriage, the morality of homosexuality generally, and on contraception. It has been nearly lockstep on abortion (Jon leans a bit).
Again, this is not meant as a jab (at least not this time
). I don’t think diversity of opinion is, in itself, a good. It is just surprising that there is so little disagreement among SHAFTers on social / political issues when this group constantly touts its “free thinking” and anti-dogmatism. Really, am I the only one that has noticed a homogeneity of political opinion on this blog (my posts being the notable exception)? And am I the only one who finds this a little odd given the focus on free thinking? Do all free thinking people just naturally and inevitably come down in favor of gay marriage?
Craig has a response – he says that once you get rid of religion then leftist social views “just make sense”. Well forgive me, but I just have a hard time accepting that all the views you mention (pro-choice, gay marriage, etc) “just make sense” or are obvious to those who’ve not drunk the religious kool-aid. This comes as some surprise to atheists but social conservatives actually have non-sectarian arguments for their views, many of which are quite compelling.
As I said in my post, I suspect that the homogeneity of social / political opinion among SHAFTers has something to do with age. I suspect it also is caused by this being, mostly, an ex-Mormon atheist blog so there is some reaction to Utah’s very conservative culture. It also probably has something to do with the fact that, so far, 27% are either gay or bi (with another 8% being “other”, though I am not sure what other options there are – X gets with Y, or X gets with X, or X gets with both X and Y, doesn’t that cover it?). It is also likely a function of being in (or just out of) college. Nationally young people tend to be more liberal and that peaks in college and then they trend (typically) more conservative as they grow older. And you don’t get much diversity of political opinion at universities, so students are often not exposed to intellectual conservatism. Despite the promise that tenure would protect and promote diversity of opinion in the academe, I see virtually no diversity of social/political opinion in the American university. I saw a study a while back that the number of university profs who voted for Bush was a statistical zero. (I am not trying to argue the merits of a vote for or against Bush, but that is still surprising). And being pro-life in the academy makes me feel like a pariah.
Anyway, apparently I am the only one who has found this noteworthy, so feel free to move on.
For those interested, we discussed the political climate in the academe on the usuphilosophy blog a while back. Here is the link:
http://usuphilosophy.com/2010/02/23/some-reflections-on-liberalism-in-the-academy/
The study showed that only 4% of academics self-idenified as “conservative”, while 40% of Americans at large self-identify in that way. Anyway, while USU’s faculty is more to the right of most American universities, I can’t imagine that I’ll get much argument against my claim that the American academe is tilted left (and in many instances way left). I’ve seen studies of philosophy professors that say that between 70-85% of them are atheists. Point is, intelligent theism is not well-represented, and neither is intelligent conservatism. Why this is the case is another debate. My point here is that college students are getting an uneven picture of the intellectual landscape, and that might cause them to be more liberal.
Dr. Kleiner, I did NOT claim that conservatives are well-represented among atheists, only that libertarians are. So where there is political diversity among atheists, it’s on fiscal, domestic, and foreign policy. But on social issues, there is little diversity—atheists are decidedly to the left.
my kind of response would be that there can be some correlations based on shared background/context.
As you said, Dr. Kleiner, this site is mostly ex-Mormon atheists. So, this context would probably produce similar experiences (and similar reactions to such experiences).
Similarly, I would say that the commonalities we see in atheists are from common experiences. You have talked about non-intellectual theism..well, a big deal is that we don’t often see or engage with intellectual theism in a day-to-day basis. But many people do grow up, or are raised in caustic environments, or they do engage with people who are anti-science, anti-gay, etc., etc., With these common experiences, wouldn’t it make sense that certain reactions would be common too?
also, self-selection. Groups naturally polarize, because it’s more fun (even if it’s stagnant) to talk to people you agree with than to bicker. (So, it would be obvious why this blog — or any other blog, for that matter — mostly skews to a particular group)
We are on the same page now. So is the homogeneity of opinion on social issues among atheistic “free thinkers” worthy of curiosity? Are there some dogmas beneath the veneer of “free thinking”? What is at work here? (I tried to identify some causes above). Am I really just supposed to believe that once people are weaned from the religious kool-aid that liberal social views simply fall into place as being obviously the most reasonable positions?
Contrasted to, say, atheism, which is just a lack of belief and nothing more, then yes, I think “free thought” has more oomph. A dogma? Maybe.
Firstly, free thought is not contextless. it is not free of anything. Rather, it is free from something specific…things which are seen as traditionally religious (and particularly negative). That is why I brought up common experiences. If people have experiences that impress upon them that religion is unduly constricting…then they want to escape that. They want to be *free* of that. So like the foundation, the freedom is from religion, so to speak.
I think that the kind of people who are likely to find religious traditions constricting (and to find that constriction bad) are the kinds of people who are going to hold socially liberal views. And I think that a lot of other correlations will arise. (e.g., as you pointed out, 27% are gay or bi.) It’s more of a case of, “If you’ve been burned by religion, and you are not convinced of the truth of religion that would justify such burning/sacrifice, then religious traditions won’t make as much sense.” That’s probably what is meant when people say “liberal social views fall into place as being the most “reasonable” position.”
I think the problem is that people don’t realize that logic/reason/etc., is just a tool. So they say, “Yeah, we’re all about logic,” but they don’t realize that if you start with different premises, you get different conclusions. So it’s not like one group is logical and another is illogical (at least, not on purpose, usually), but one group has one set of premises, and another has another.
I think the problem with that line of reasoning (however appealing it might be) arises directly when you ask that final question.
What set of authorities cause such similarity on social issues?
Well, I think you’d be hard-pressed to find (direct) authorities here.
Not to go back to the copout “when you stop drinking the koolaid, then these socially liberal beliefs will seem obvious,” but if the context of “free thought” is in reaction to the excesses or deficiencies of the previous religious environment (losing faith in those authorities, so to speak), then where else would one go?
I mean, considering what free thinkers are “freeing” themselves from, that means they must have had some reason to want to free themselves in the first place. So, what it seems to me is that…even when people had a religious framework (with religious authorities being the trusted authorities), their experiences chafed against those authorities (and eventually broke the perceived reliability of those authorities). I mean, if you have authorities talking about how gay relationships are disorderly, abominable, sinful, etc., etc., then the problem is that — without any authority at all — you can see that gay relationships don’t seem to be as destructive as people say, and, on the other hand, the alternatives seem to be EXTREMELY destructive (e.g., aversion, closeting, mixed-orientation marriages, shunning). I don’t know how to explain why that is the case (since it’s not the case for everyone), but I don’t think it’s because of an authority. Or at least, if it is from an authority, it’s from the authority of our friends, family members, etc.,
It’s not that the freethinker “dogma” is that “no religious authority could possibly be a genuine authority.” But more like, “Of course, they theoretically could, but we haven’t seen evidence of that. Our experience is to the contrary.” Of course, evidence is personal. We obviously see different things in different evidential lights, and we weigh them differently as well.
Andrew – I thought your last paragraph there was very well put. Excellent point. The Summa is stunningly logical, though parts of it proceed from premises or data that not everyone accepts.
Starting places really matter. I’ve often thought that something like “comportment” plays a huge role in where we end up. This comportment issue is one reason why I am always banging away on reductionism and talking up the many modes of truth disclosure, so that we don’t blind ourselves before we even try to see.
Let me see if I have a point in all this business about homogenous atheistic thinking:
“Free thinking” is typically defined as non-dogmatic thinking. But “dogmas” can arise outside religion. Might it be that many “free thinkers” have dogmas in spades? That condoms in Africa debate on this blog was a perfect example. One might recall that those who actually dared to challenge conventional opinion were called “murderers”. It was almost as if there was a refusal to even consider the possibility that condom programs do not slow the spread of AIDs (no matter what the evidence says, and the evidence was not on the side of condom programs).
So far if I have shown anything it is that people are often hypocrites. That is not news, just as it would not be news if you were making the same point about me. But I have a deeper point. Pointing out this ironically dogmatic thinking on the part of “free thinkers” both is and is not is not a criticism. We all have limited personal knowledge so we all have to have faith/trust in those we consider authorities. Everyone does this, it is unavoidable. We don’t all know all of the arguments or evidence on every side of every issue, and our understanding is finite. So we trust in authorities. Our trust (faith) in those authorities will often lead to us believing in “established opinions” (that is, dogmas). I am not here using “dogma” in a negative sense. So are dogmas (established opinions) necessarily bad? Might we say that it all depends on the authority? Believing established opinions (dogmas) from reliable authorities is a good idea, while believing established opinions (dogmas) from unreliable authorities is a bad idea.
There are too many examples here to name. But let’s take one where I think we will all agree. Claim that I am presuming we all take to be true: There is human caused climate change. Now I don’t really know the science. I’ve read a few books and seen a few documentaries, but I don’t really understand the science behind it. A few of you might, but most don’t. But we all accept this claim as an established opinion because we trust (have faith in) the authorities. Note that this appeal to authority is the most common argument against climate change deniers (non-scientists like me appealing to the consensus among scientists who I take to be authorities on the matter).
Again, this kind of “dogmatic thinking” is not a bad thing in itself, though I think it can be done in a way that is better or worse. I think it is possible to reflectively appropriate a “dogma” but it is also possible to unreflectively appropriate a “dogma”. Obviously I think the former is preferable. I am, in some ways, an extremely dogmatic thinker. I claim very little autonomy over my own mind. But I like to think that I reflectively appropriate those established opinions (dogmas) I receive from those who I take to be authorities. In other words, accepting an opinion as “established” does not mean that you refuse to take up arguments, that you refuse to seek an understanding of the established opinion, etc. Of course that is the stereotype, that people who defer to authorities simply turn their minds off. I am sure that some do this, but there is no necessity in it. My mind did not turn off when I became a Catholic. Your minds do not shut off even when you defer to the authority of climatologists on climate change. But maybe our minds do sometimes shut off, and then we become “dogmatic” thinkers in that ugly sense of the word. Perhaps that is the case sometimes on these social issues?
Point is, I think everyone has dogmas because all of us have to have faith in authorities (whoever they may be) to fill in the gaps of our own limited personal understanding. This is not a bad thing. To think you could discern everything for yourself and on exclusively your own powers is vanity. We should be on guard against that kind of vanity and the quick rejection of tradition that usually travels with it (chronological snobbery is usually one of the first symptoms of this modern vanity). I always find it remarkable how medieval philosophers tend to bend over backwards to show that past great thinkers would agree with what they are saying, while the modern tendency is to always be a revolutionary thinker who is making a clean break from what came before. Another way of putting this: I think the whole idea of “anti-dogmatic free thinking” springs from the worst of modern enlightenment vanity. It is, at best, seriously unrealistic. At worst, it is intellectual pride of the worst sort. I think we should wonder about everything, but I dislike the “question everything” motto. There is so much pride and vanity in that phrase.
Point is, the trick is not to reject authority and to avoid believing established opinions (dogmas). Rather, the trick is to have reliable authorities and to, ideally, reflectively appropriate the established opinions you receive from them. I actually think this is what most “free thinkers” really have in mind – don’t be mere sheep but instead reflectively appropriate your beliefs. And since free thinkers readily assent to authorities for established opinions in any number of spheres of their life and thought, what also seems to be entailed by the “free thinker” moniker is a judgment that no religious authority could possibly be a genuine authority (though that judgment itself is more often than not simply a “dogmatic” belief).
So here is a question: who are the authorities from whom free thinking atheists are receiving their established opinions (dogmas) on social issues? (Note: I am not hereby denying that many free thinking atheists have reflectively appropriated these dogmas and know the arguments, etc, just as I don’t think that social conservatives have necessarily unreflectively appropriated their dogmas. I think there are a few reflective people on each side and loads of unreflective people on each side).
I should point out that not all authorities can be easily identified. Culture or conventional opinion can function as an authority. As Plato points out in the Republic, art (broadly construed) can function as an authority.
I know that some of my students who think things like gay marriage and contraception are permissible have reflectively appropriated those ideas. But I also know that a great many of them are simply breathing what is in the air – moral relativism and a culture of sexual permissiveness. I think one must admit (and certainly anyone who teaches so sees loads of students in a Social Ethics course working through issues) that a lot of the socially liberal leanings of college students amount to “well, everyone these days thinks stuff like that is okay”. This is why the culture wars are so important – as Plato says, art and culture are the de facto shapers of souls and opinions.
the problem I perceive, though, is that everyone *doesn’t* think these things are ok (I guess that’s where you say, “Thanks to the culture wars.”) So, people still have to look at both sides and say, “OK, since there are two sides who are diametrically opposed, which side makes more sense to me.”
And for many of the people here (just to continue that theme), or for many people who may come to see themselves as ‘free’ thinkers, the issue is not that they are just going along with the attitude of moral relativism and sexual permissiveness because it is the default option…but rather, because (in their mind), the alternative has shown itself to be even more disastrous or disconnected. (Obviously, the other side could say the same thing. [And note that this gets to be even more subjective and personal. Perceived consequences can be construed on different levels.])
@Kleiner
Maybe you can share some non-religious reasons for being right on social issues. What reasons would an atheist have for opposing gay equality? I actually have met one, and he opposed it because he was an extreme homophobe. He thought it was “icky”, and opposed it solely because of that, not because he has a rational reason for it.
There is in fact, no good rational reason for opposing gay equality. It’s either blatant bigotry/prejudice, or religious dogma (a form of prejudice) that makes people oppose gay equality. The exact same situation applies to those who oppose(d) racial equality.
You also have to realise that to us, moral relativism (which you claim doesn’t exist) and sexual permissiveness are wonderful, positive things. For those of us who grew up in a repressive religious environment, we’ve learnt the inherent dangers of moral absolutism and repressive ideas about sexuality. How do you “know that a great many are simply breathing what is in the air…”? The fact that they don’t see a problem with them and don’t think it’s a big deal doesn’t mean they’re being mindless sheep who will believe whatever they’re told to believe.
Furthermore, you’re severely discounting how much influence and power traditional Christian ideas still have within our society. Women are still considered “sluts” if they have too many sexual partners (while men almost never are), homophobia is ubiquitous everywhere, and atheism is very much a taboo topic and a very maligned group. I don’t know a single atheist who hasn’t excruciatingly carefully thought out their belief system. Many of us have to completely revamp our beliefs from scratch after leaving religious communities. Certainly there are well-known figures in the atheist community like Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, but to suggest that we believe whatever they tell us to think is ludicrous. Most atheists are sceptics as well, and critically examine every claim, and make up their own decisions. I agree with some of what the aforementioned say, but disagree with a whole lot too.
We defer to climatologists on climate change because they’ve researched and presented overwhelming evidence supporting their theory. The climate change deniers haven’t. We defer to evolutionary biologists for the same reason. Very often we research the claims ourselves and decide for ourselves whether we believe what the authority in any specific field claims. That how science works, and that is how scepticism works. Of course it is impossible for every individual to become an expert at everything, so certainly we do accord those with specialised experience in a higher level of credence than others, especially if there is overwhelming consensus with their colleagues (as there is on climate change and evolution). It is not fair however, to call these things dogmas. A dogma is something which doesn’t change or modify itself when contradictory evidence comes along. This is not true about scientific theories. Nor it is generally true about our social beliefs. The growing trend of people supporting gay equality isn’t about following some fad, or following some authority figure, it’s about people realising that we’re people too who deserve complete equal treatment both under the law and socially. They realise that there is no non-bigoted reason to oppose complete LGBT equality.
Oh, and as turnabout is fair play, you dress up your beliefs in the cloak of philosophy, but to be honest, I see you as a dogmatic papist. You try to find outside reasons to justify your beliefs. Whatever brought you to Catholicism in the first place, you’re now unable to really see w/o the filter of Catholicism changing the view. Certainly that’s true for me of atheism and secularism as well, but I think that at least, I have physical provable evidence for why I believe what I do, and I’ve never seen any from any religion.
“There is in fact, no good rational reason for opposing gay equality. It’s either blatant bigotry/prejudice, or religious dogma (a form of prejudice) that makes people oppose gay equality. The exact same situation applies to those who oppose(d) racial equality.”
That comment is outrageously ignorant. Seriously, could a more “dogmatic” (in the negative sense) comment be made? NO rational reason to be against gay marriage? I won’t go into all of the arguments you ask for here, because we’ve gone through them before. I am certainly against things like housing discrimination and such things with gays. But I have made non-religious arguments against gay marriage on this blog. A search should find them (and I made an argument for why prohibition of gay marriage is not at all like the prohibition against inter-racial marriages).
This is also not the place to take up moral relativism. But if there is no moral absolute to which you could appeal, on what grounds can you force an American population that is consistently against gay marriage to accept it? If there is no objective morality, then might makes right. So leave it to a vote … and gay marriage has lost every single time.
You can accuse me of being a “dogmatic papist” if you like. But the fact is – and look on all of my past arguments on this blog – that I never make an appeal to religious authority to defend myself. Seriously, I don’t think I have done that one single time on this blog. I don’t just “cloak my beliefs” in philosophy. I make philosophical arguments. You may not be persuaded by them, but I really don’t think you can accuse me of making merely religious arguments.
Craig – I must say that I don’t much appreciate you calling me (even if indirectly) a bigot.
But, Craig, thank you for the performative demonstration of my point. Some liberal dogmas held by atheists are so sacred that calling them into question (with arguments or evidence) almost always results in someone calling you a bigot, a murderer, anti-science, or some other nasty slur. Now there’s some reasonable discourse for you!
If it looks like a duck and walks like a duck and sounds like a duck…
I’m quite certain I don’t appreciate your dehumansation of me by opposing my civil and legal equality more than you dislike being called a bigot. I have no desire to attack ad hominem, nor threadjack but I do refuse to give anyone a pass on gay rights. Anyone who opposes gay rights does so for bigoted, prejudiced reasons, which makes them, on gay rights, a bigot. It’s an ugly thing to be called a bigot, I know, but it’s uglier still to be discriminated against and treated as less than human because of who you are and are not able to love and be intimate with. So forgive me if I have no sympathy for the hurt feelings of those who don’t want to treat me as equal.
Just as there is no rational reason to oppose interracial marriage, racial equality, and gender equality, there is no rational reason to oppose LBGT equality. That is my point. Clearly you disagree, but you’ve not given a non-biased, non-religiously based reason for why homophobia isn’t based solely in bigotry. I reject the idea that LGBT people aren’t as deserving of equal treatment just as non-whites are. I’ve never heard a convincing argument to convince me otherwise, including yours.
I should not have called you a dogmatic papist, and for that I apologise. My point was that it seems to me that your philosophical arguments are based in and motivated by your Catholic religious beliefs, as is to be expected. I don’t find your arguments convincing partially because I see them stemming from that source.
As for whether I can justify why it is ethical for gays to be treated equally when I don’t believe in moral absolutes, (nor that might makes right), the way I justify it is because I believe that suffering is bad. It’s a subjective judgement, certainly, but I’ve never claimed to be totally objective about everything. Ethics/morality are subjective, but can be applied to society as a whole. I oppose homophobia on the same grounds that I oppose racism and misogyny – it’s unfair, it’s harmful, and it’s prejudiced. We can still have a functioning moral society and not have to appeal to objective god-given moralities. We ought to be able to reason out our moral system for ourselves, a system that does the least harm and treats the largest amount of people as fairly as possible. We don’t need a god to tell us what’s right and wrong. The problem with moral absolutes is that they tend to reflect the morals of whomever is telling you what that moral absolute is. That’s where moral relativity wins, it can evolve and adapt and improve itself. According to the moral absolutism of the Bible, we’d all be stoned a thousand times over, because it’s a ridiculous and barbaric set of morals. No one alive lives by Biblical morals. Catholic morals aren’t nearly so bad, but are still pretty horrifying to me, and not just because I’m gay.
For what it’s worth, I think there can be reasons to oppose homosexuality or gay marriage without appealing to religious dogma. Indeed, it could be argued that Kleiner’s objections to homosexuality are secular. I don’t want to put words in his mouth, but I think he’d make a natural law argument—that homosexuality is unnatural, that it violates the procreative purpose of sex/marriage. Now his argument is more sophisticated than I can do it justice, but the point is that this appeal to natural law is not reducible to “blatant bigotry” or “religious dogma.” It’s fundamentally a secular argument and one that does not require bigotry. Whether it’s a good secular argument is another issue. (For the record, I’m totally unmoved by it).
Another secular argument may be that homosexuality has negative effects. Suppose that some credible, landmark study demonstrated that homosexuals, by virtue of their homosexuality, make horrible parents. That would give someone a strong secular reason to oppose the ability of LGBT couples to adopt. Again, this argument against gay marriage needn’t be motivated by hate or religion, but by concern for children. It should be noted, however, that most studies show that LGBT parents are very capable parents (indeed, some studies go further and claim they make marginally better parents than their straight counterparts).
The last secular argument against gay marriage is that it may open the floodgates to the legal recognition of things like polygamy or marriage between siblings. This doesn’t actually worry me, because—as per the harm principle–I think most (if not all) consensual relationships are kosher. But it may legitimately worry others. I mean, are you comfortable with allowing father’s to marry their daughters (assuming the relationship is consensual)?
I am a bisexual, atheist liberal, and I do support gay rights. But I think it’s wrong to dismiss all opposition to gay rights as bigoted or religious. Secular arguments can be made against gay rights (and made in good faith). I just happen to think they’re bad secular arguments.
If I convince you of just one thing in this post, Craig, let it be this: Kleiner is no homophobe. Now, I don’t believe that you have accused him of homophobia (at least not explicitly), but I nonetheless feel the need to come to Kleiner’s defense on this point. I don’t think there’s a homophobic bone in his body.
Now, Kleiner isn’t beyond criticism. Just yesterday, for example, I gave him a hard time for finding Steve Martin funny ha ha. But it is unfair to criticize him as a “dogmatic papist” or religious bigot. This point isn’t really directed at you per se, Craig. I know you’ve retracted your “dogmatic papist” comment and never really called Kleiner a homophobe. But I’d bet some people on this blog would think he’s both, so I wanted to address that sentiment.
Thank you for coming to my defense, Jon. I always think it is silly when people have to defend themselves against charges of homophobia and bigotry in these debates by pointing out how many gay friends they have and all of this (which I could have done). Jon saved me from that ridiculous exercise. Thanks.
After a last word, I think I will let this conversation be. It went from a simmer to a rapid boil, and I don’t think much productive will come of it. I understand that this is a very sensitive issue. If I have not always handled it with the sensitivity I should here, I apologize. I strive to be simply philosophical about it, but perhaps that gives a sense of being heartless. I joked with Jon recently about what shirt I should wear to the Mormon Proposition movie. I think we settled on this: “I am straight and actually pretty narrow, but I try really hard to not be a giant prick about it”.
My last word: I think we should be careful to simply lump “gay rights” into one big bundle, as if it were just one issue that you were simply either for or against. When we do this, we end up treating any objection to any one of a family of issues as a “dehumanization”. That is wrong-headed. I support any number of gay rights issues (housing protections, workplace protections, etc etc). I just don’t support gay marriage (my argument is primarily a natural law arguments, as Jon noted). I think it is an extreme stretch to call it “dehumanizing” to oppose gay marriage. To oppose a particular desire satisfaction of a class of people is not, in itself, “dehumanizing”. I think every person has inherent dignity from the moment of conception to the time of natural death. I make no exceptions to that principle. I think GLB people deserve to be treated with every bit of dignity as every other person.
People are free to be gay, and I don’t stand in the way of gay people loving and being intimate with whoever they want. I just don’t think people have a right to govt recognition of their relationships. I don’t think anyone (gay or straight) has a “right” to govt recognition of their relationships, the govt should only get involved if there is some compelling state interest at stake. I would point out that gay people do not need government sanction to have long term relationships with each other. Being gay is not illegal. As to the issues that are most often cited by gay marriage advocates, it is already the case that gay partners can make end of life decisions for each other, have hospital visitation rights (which they ought to be able to do), and estate privileges. They don’t have this automatically (as a married couple would), but they just need to sign power of attorney statements.
Point is, I would entirely agree that opposition to certain gay rights issues is dehumanizing. I simply don’t agree that opposition to gay marriage is one of those. I understand that there is a difference of opinion on this issue, but I don’t think we should frame it as simply a “enlightened moral people” against “ignorant bigots” point.
Anyway, I officially step out of this conversation. I have other problems to deal with. Yesterday my 2 year old daughter was in here reading with me while I was on the computer typing on this blog. She likes to grab books off my shelf to page through them, and she grabbed a Foucault text. My older daughter always grabbed the Summa from Aquinas (I am not making that up, she would diligently flip through the pages for 20 minutes at a time … I was so incredibly proud). With the younger one grabbing Foucault off the shelf, I have more pressing issues here at home to contend with!
Just to clarify, what I meant was that there are no *good* secular reasons, and when someone uses such a bad reason (like the ones Jon gave), it’s almost always a front for deep-seated prejudice. It’s true I got a little worked up, and I responded more intensely than the situation warranted.
Also, I guess I use “homophobia” broader than some others do. I use it as an analogue to the broadest uses of “sexism” or “racism”. I don’t use it to necessarily mean an intense fear or hatred of gays.
seems to me that “good” is in the eye of the beholder. So, no “good” secular reasons really just translates to, “I don’t think it’s good,” which…doesn’t get us anywhere in showing that it actually isn’t good (or for the other side to show that it actually is good).
By “bad” arguments, I mean that not only am I unconvinced, but that every single argument against gay marriage I’ve ever heard has been debunked as either based on pure bias, on bad information, or an faulty assumptions.
Each of the secular arguments that Jon enumerates have been shown to be false. When someone holds to a false idea, despite having been shown contradictory evidence is closed-minded prejudice. Being unresponsive to evidence as to why gay marriage is good, fair, right, and in no demonstrable way harms secular society, is a type of bigotry. That is my argument. Both religious and secular arguments against LBGT equality are either totally false, or irrefutable (and therefore free of evidence) because they appeal to disprovable supernatural/religious ideas.
Andrew’s reply to my long post showed up above my long post, but I am responding to it:
Good points, and you might be able to explain some of the views of atheists in this way. But I am skeptical that this explanation will work for all the socially liberal beliefs held almost universally by free thinking atheists. Really, am I supposed to believe that the personal experience of every free thinker is such that they almost all end up being pro-choice, pro-contraception, typically sexually permissive (okay with pre-marital or non-marital sex), etc etc etc? Really, you’d think it would be the case that at least some portion of the free thinking community would be, say, pro-life. In other words, it sure seems like there is some lockstep dogmatic thinking going on. I rather doubt we’ll easily finger the authority here though. I think it is just the relativism of the culture and the prevailing view that desire satisfaction is always a good.
Even on the homosexuality issues I am skeptical of this “personal experience” argument, at least in many if not most cases. Now this blog is skewed, because 30% of the readers are GLB. But only about 4% of the general population is GLB (I know some advocacy research inflates that statistic to 10%, but most research shows that to be too high). Point is, most people are not going to have tons of personal experience with GLB people generally, much less GLB people in long term relationships.
But I would like to separate two issues. One is the general point that dogmatic thinking (believing established opinions because they come from authorities) is inevitable and not necessarily a bad thing. That is a general “meta-point” against the whole project of “free thinking”.
Another sub-issue, then, is the question of the origin of the moral opinions on social issues of atheists.
I could be right about the first issue even if I am wrong with parts of the second point.
Since free thought isn’t contextless, your first point doesn’t go as far as you think it does. It’s not “believing [any] established opinion because they come from authorities is bad”, so to point out that believing established opinions is inevitable and not necessarily a bad thing doesn’t make a meta-point against the whole project of free thinking at all.
I would address one point however,
“As to the issues that are most often cited by gay marriage advocates, it is already the case that gay partners can make end of life decisions for each other, have hospital visitation rights (which they ought to be able to do), and estate privileges. They don’t have this automatically (as a married couple would), but they just need to sign power of attorney statements. ”
This is only true in some states, and even in those states, the lack of complete legal equality makes it so that even these rights are often ignored and require lengthy and very expensive court battles to get fair and equal treatment. Even with POA statements and when the other little rights you enumerated work, because gays aren’t legally equal, often children are taken away from their parents during a divorce or when one partner dies because the other partner wasn’t legally allowed to adopt the children (such is the case in Utah, and many, many other places). Just for that reason alone, full and equal gay marriage is a necessity for gay people.
This is quite an interesting discussion that has developed.
Kleiner said, “Really, am I supposed to believe that the personal experience of every free thinker is such that they almost all end up being pro-choice, pro-contraception, typically sexually permissive (okay with pre-marital or non-marital sex), etc etc etc?”
To be clear, I am not completely pro-choice and more pro-life. I just have looser definitions than Kleiner does for particular instances and I don’t think that radical legislation against abortions is going to do much good.
I am for gay marriage, but I think that the government shouldn’t be involved with marriage at all. To me, all unions in the government’s eyes should be civil and have the same legal benefits across the board. I am unconvinced by Kleiner’s previous arguments against gay marriage. Personally, I think they are weak.
I am pro-contraception, and have not heard a good argument against it. Pre-marital and non-marital sex is fine by me, but I don’t want to go into the issue right now. Unfortunately I missed the condom conversation that Kleiner keeps talking about. I’ll have to look it up when I have some time. However, I can’t image that stopping the condom distribution would do much good either. Maybe Kleiner is right, and it isn’t doing a whole lot to stop the spread of disease, but I can’t image that it is doing more harm than good. More food for thought for another time I suppose.
A note about Kleiner’s “dogma” or whatever everyone was arguing about. In my personal views about him, he is heavily influenced by official Catholic thought. However, it appears that he tries to be thoughtful about it, which is great. While frustrating sometimes, I appreciate the input and dialogue. So far I remain unconvinced by his secular arguments except on the topic of abortion. (Honestly, I really hadn’t thought about the issue too much before hand and hadn’t formed an opinion on it besides a few particulars).
To me, it seems that cognitive bias and confirmation bias play a large role in Kleiner’s views (as with everyone). He agrees with the CC about these issues on a theological basis first and then mirrors the same views in more of a secular way to others. I don’t think he does this intentionally, but it’s hard to ignore. However, we all do this, so it’s not like he’s the only one in the wrong. At least he tries to be informed and draw conclusions in a philosophical way, even if he ends up at the same place as he started. It all ties back to preconceived ideas and where we get our “authority” from. I know that he doesn’t make authority claims from the pope in his arguments, but it’s not a far stretch of the imagination when he quotes various popes so often. For me, it’s hard to imagine a Kleiner that doesn’t agree with the CC on most things. I wonder what his views about divorce are. If I had to bet, I would say he’s against it. Anyway, I hope you don’t take this as an offense, Kleiner. I really appreciate your input on this blog. We need a differing view, even though you may not convince us very often. If you feel that I am extremely wrong about you, then please tell me. My observation an opinion on you is meant in the nicest of ways, I in no means intended to insult you.
I’m not sure this is really the right place for it, but it’s a fairly recent thread and I personally hate it when thread necromancers come along and comment on long-dead conversations (which is possibly what I’m doing). Since abortion has been passingly mentioned, I just have to get out this point I’ve had long simmering.
For every abortion thread, it is worth noting–primarily because many people apparently believe embryos grow completely without input in a hyperspace womb that has no real connection to the woman involved–that even if fetuses and embryos were in fact completely 100% equal to fully grown human beings (I don’t think they are), abortion would still be moral and anti-choice activism would still be women-hating garbage.
How can I say this?
Because by ordering a woman to bring a fetus to term, we grant fetuses a right we do not grant any living person: the right to use someone else’s body without their consent (i.e. the right to rape or the right to enslave).
If I’m a combination of Douglas Adams and Albert Einstein and you are the combination of Skeletor and Hitler and I need one of your non-vital organs to survive? I do not have the right to it. If I need your blood to survive? I do not have the right to it. If I need to rape your body and inhabit you for 9 months leeching the nutrients from your blood, bones, tissue, and other organs? I most certainly do not have that right.
But, suddenly if its a woman and a meaningless bundle of semi-tumorous cells, we’re all supposed to pretend like a massive new unheard of right is just “common sense” to “protect the babies”.
No, not even to live do FULLY FUNCTIONAL HUMAN BEINGS have this right.
And I think we’re only so susceptible on abortion because the notion that a woman is a full human being who has a right to her own body (i.e. the right to consent and the right to not be raped) is relatively new. Women are still treated as house-slaves in many religions, rape is woefully under-prosecuted and something a frighteningly large number of women have experienced at least once in her life, and we’re still accustoming ourselves to the idea of women in the workplace, the educational systems, and the military.
No wonder when someone says, hey a clump of cells has the right to enslave and use the bodies of women who dare sleep with men who aren’t you, the response of so many is “That sounds fair.”
I’ve never heard this argument before, and I think I like it.
That’s Judith Jarvis Thompson’s argument, right?
I think the counter I heard to that one is…the example of the violinist (or in your case, “the combination of Douglas Adams and Albert Einstein”) is not equivalent to the example of a pregnant woman.
The pregnant woman, by virtue of having sex, opens up the possibility (and, arguably should take the responsibility) of pregnancy. She tacitly consents to pregnancy.
(I for one do not think this is a convincing enough counterargument. I mean, contraception use in general shows that just because people voluntarily have sex does not mean that they tacitly consent to pregnancy. But still, just saying that some people would point out the dissimilarity here.)
That is Judith Thompson’s argument. You can read her uber-anthologized article (“A Defense of Abortion”) here:
http://spot.colorado.edu/~heathwoo/Phil160,Fall02/thomson.htm
Her argument, I believe, has been raised on this blog before (perhaps on the nun excommunication discussion?). I won’t get into objections to her argument here. But just to point something out – people interested in the “woman’s right to choose” should be cautious with this argument, because it is not as friendly to their position as they think. Thompson gets as much grief from pro-choicers as she does from pro-lifers. Why? Because on her argument abortion would be extremely limited – limited to cases where the women did not consent to the use of her body. Rape is the most obvious example. Thompson tries to make room for cases of failed contraception as well, but her argument there is much much weaker.
Studies that I have seen say that only 1% of abortions in the United States are from rape event pregancies. (And, it might surprise some to know that a Harvard study found that 75% of rape victims who were impregnated by the rape event choose to keep the child). Anyway, if you take the strongest argument from Thompson (rape cases where there clearly was not consent to let the unborn person use her body) you would go from around 850,000 legal abortions a year to 8,500. As a matter of political prudence, I would sign Thompson’s restrictions into law tomorrow (even though I think it is still an intrinsic evil to kill an innocent in the case of rape). Signing her restrictions into law would not be a total victory for the pro-life movement, but it would be a huge win.
Making Thompson’s argument also cedes a crucial moral point (Thompson concedes it even though she says she does not really believe it) – you concede that the unborn is a person with full moral status. What you say is that being a person does not give you the right to use someone else’s body (even if you need it to stay alive), but you cede the important point about the personhood of the unborn. That is another reason why many pro-choicers balk at this move. While Thompson still leaves the door ajar for some abortions, she gives up a lot of ground.
kleiner,
I for one don’t think that Thompson concedes that the unborn is necessarily a person. Her argument is simply that if it IS, that is morally irrelevant.
I think that her point for the lack of consent implied from contraception use still works. The argument is not primarily limited to rape cases then.
I think the issue is that you have to make the argument that people consent to pregnancy simply because they consent to sex (if you want to limit thompson’s argument mainly to rape). I think it’s clear that this is not the case, for better or worse.
“I propose, then, that we grant that the fetus is a person from the moment of conception” – Judith Thompson, from her article.
It is not that this point is morally irrelevant. Thompson’s argument is that granting the moral status of the unborn does not exclude abortion in all cases, as pro-lifers usually think. But it it does exclude the permissibility of abortion in any number of cases (cases where the woman did consent in some way to the use of her body). So it is not that the personhood point is morally irrelevant. Her argument is that it is not the argument ender that most pro-lifers (like me) usually think it is. You can grant it but still make room for some abortions (rape, maybe failed contraception).
We could go around on the contraception point, but I’d rather just offer up a thought experiment that gets to a problem in Thompson’s argument that is “older” than the contraception point anyway.
Imagine you have a 45 year old woman who is the sole caretaker of her elderly mother who has severe alzheimer’s disease. She lives in a really rural place, and there is no one else who can care for her mother. But she does not want this burden of caring for this person. She doesn’t want it, and did not ask for it. She just wants her freedom. So she leaves her mother to fend for herself. Her mother dies in a day.
Any problem with that?
Here is Thompson’s basic point: unless I fully consent to a burden, I am free to relieve myself of that burden at any time no matter what happens to others and no matter what rights those others may have. (If I do consent to a burden, then I bear the consequences of that consent and have moral obligations).
But sometimes life just gives over to us burdens and responsibilities that we did not “choose” (consent to). Does the fact that we did not choose them make them any less obligatory? I don’t think so. (Students who have taken my Contemporary Euro class or read some pomo philosophy will see Levinas all over this point). I say life is a foundational good. Do we just dump it by the side of the road because it infringes on some sense of personal freedom? Does the “I” always precede in priority the “thou” (the Other)? Is that our philosophical anthropology? Is freedom more important than life? Are our principles only for the sunny days?
Here is another way of making the point, that might grab those of you more interested in political science (political philosophy):
I think rights talk has to be seated in talk about goods. A right, properly understood, could not be in conflict with a natural good.
Thompson does not share this view of rights. She is working with a very modern (Lockean) understanding of rights, an understanding of rights that is stripped away from any real understanding of the good. This is a very modern temperament. In her defense, I think many (if not most) pro-lifers are working with the same Lockean view of rights, and the same crappy philosophical anthropology that travels with it.
Here ends up being the rub. When I say “persons have a right to life” I don’t understand “rights” in the same way that Lockeans do. This introduces a problem – since everyone is using the language of rights, it seems like we are saying the same things but we really are not. It is not that my view is couched in something religious per se, but it is seated in a metaphysical anthropology of natural goods and is very different from modern Lockean accounts (from which most of our contemporary political discourse springs). This introduces a semantic problem – how do we have a discourse when we have so much divergence in underlying views of human nature?
The solution: people need to take more philosophy classes so that we can have a more elevated and nuanced public discourse on these questions.
Sorry for the string of posts!
It is on this point about rights that, strangely, my views and the views of some on this blog might come close together. I think this will be particularly the case on economic questions and social justice questions.
I reject the claim from classical liberalism (think John Locke) that property rights are basic and inviolable. Rather, I think the goods of creation are first and foremost for common use (because food, water, etc are natural goods). So I believe that private property rights can be infringed upon for the sake of the common good and common use of goods. (This, because I say that rights have to be seated in an understanding of goods). Aquinas even argues that a starving man who takes someone else’s surplus food (assuming he has no other way to eat) is not actually stealing. He has a right to that food, and the person with the surplus does not have a right to the surplus (even if he “owns” it). This is why Robin Hood (I am just thinking of the legend of “stealing from the rich to feed the poor”) is a moral hero rather than a villain. He is not actually stealing, because the rich do not have a right to their riches when others are poor and hungry.
This sort of thing makes my Republican friends (especially tea partiers) absolutely cringe. But people on this blog with something of a socialist bent are probably applauding. (Read John Paul II’s “On Human Work”, he goes to town on libertarian capitalism there). But those of a more socialist bent on this blog are pretty well committed (whether they realize it or not) to this underlying philosophical anthropology – that community in some sense precedes the individual. It is an “I and thou” anthropology (to borrow a phrase from Buber), not a me me anthropology (not a Lockean phrase, but it might as well be). It is a relational ontology, to use a fancy turn of phrase (see Buber, Levinas, Heidegger, JPII, etc etc).
Here is the interesting thing: I actually think my view – on abortion and then economic justice – is totally consistent and springs from the same source (the same relational anthropology of person and community). I am skeptical that those who are pro-choice (say, attracted to Thompson’s argument) but who are bent more left on economic issues have as consistent a position. Instead, you might be pulling from two different, and frankly incompatible, views of human nature.
This is all probably a discussion for another day, and I know I put a lot out on the table here. But I thought it worth doing so. Things have been testy of late here between myself and few bloggers. I thought it worth finding some common ground (even if an abortion discussion was a very strange place to find it!).
You’re right that I do agree about everything you said about property rights and socialism. I definitely believe that the community often (maybe even most often) precedes the individual – but not always. I’m however not even the least bit convinced that my being a socialist means that I have to oppose abortion in order to be consistent. As I’ve mentioned before, the root of this is that I don’t see a foetus as something that has a right to life. It’s not a person. While I think a foetus does/should have some rights, I don’t believe it does/should have the same rights as me or you. That’s the difference of opinion I think you have to attack.
Furthermore, I don’t believe that a person necessarily has to stick with one specific philosophy for all of their beliefs. Though they are strongly informed by my socialist, humanist, atheist viewpoint, I choose my beliefs issue by issue; I don’t tow a philosophical or party line. To say that we’re pulling from incompatible views of human nature is, it seems to me, assuming that one view or the other is 100% objectively correct. I just don’t see how that’s possible or convincing.
Dr. Kleiner,
Again, I think that when Thompson says “I propose that we grant the fetus personhood,” this doesn’t mean anything other than “for the sake of argument, let’s grant this to show that it has absolutely no bearing on the argument.”
(I see your later point that if you take a viewpoint like you did (re: the starving man isn’t stealing, he has more right to it, etc.,), then this would not be impacted by Thompson’s argument.)
I think we agree here, Andrew: Thompson is clear in the article that she does not actually think the unborn is a person (though, if I recall correctly, she talks about how the issue is thornier than many think). But she concedes the point for the sake of argument. My point was simply this – Thompson’s argument is made on the presupposition that the point has been ceded. Many in the pro-choice community have been upset with her argument because any sign of retreat on that point is viewed as giving up something really important. If that is her game, then let’s play it (which is what I tried to do with my caretaker/alzheimer’s example above).
To Craig – fair point. If you do not cede the personhood of the unborn, then there is nothing wrong with abortion no matter what your other views. I did not mean to make the point overly tidy there (as if believing y in economic issues forces you to believe x in life issues). My point was this – the view of human nature (relational ontology / community and individual) that argues against Thompson’s argument (and the view of rights embedded therein) is a view of human nature that people on the left actually feel extremely comfortable with when it comes to other issues (economics, social justice, etc). Given your socialist proclivities – and the philosophical anthropology of individual-community embedded therin – I don’t think you should like Thompson’s argument (because her argument relies on a fundamental rejection of the view of community and person that you hold).
I must say that I entirely disagree with your view that you can shift positions on fundamental questions from issue to issue. That strikes me as, well, simply unprincipled. Now don’t get me wrong, it is not that we will have one really narrow view that excludes all others on the meaning of the human condition. I think we should have a comprehensive view of human nature and community. So don’t presume that I mean something narrow here. But human nature is what it is. It makes no sense to say that X is true of human nature when I am thinking about abortion but X is false of human nature when I am thinking about economics. Human nature is either X or not-X, it cannot be simultaneously both. Secular humanists who praise reason should be in on this whole avoiding contradictions thing. Either man is a relational and social animal or he is not. Human nature does not change situation to situation, does it? If it does, I have a hard time seeing how we’d have any ethics at all (and philosophers that deny human nature tend to not have an ethics).
Let me give an example drawn from your past posts. You hang your hat a lot on the harm principle. People prefer to avoid harm, so actions that cause harm to others without any general benefit are bad. Okay. But do you pick and choose when to apply that principle? What if, in order to justify a ban on gay marriage, I simply said “Oh, the harm principle does not apply here because that view is not always 100% correct. I take my view of human nature issue to issue, and I retrofit it to work with whatever political position I already hold and am hoping to justify.” That obviously looks wrong-headed, right? I think we should be really suspicious of people who re-engineer their view of what it is to be human in order to justify pet political positions. I say your political positions should fall out of a careful reflection on what it means to be human, what is good and bad for humans, etc. We should strive for comprehensive and consistent positions. There is plenty of inconsistency out there and we should be bothered by it. For instance, pro-lifers who talk about the inviolable dignity of every human life but who are then rabidly supportive of capital punishment. Those issues are not identical, of course (one is intrinsically evil and the other is not, one involves an innocent and the other does not), but you sure don’t hear much about the inviolable dignity of the life of the murderer when capital punishment comes up with many American religious conservatives.
You are usually pretty consistent, Craig, despite your odd attraction to calling yourself a “relativist”. You are really not a relativist, you seem to have a situational ethics rooted in the harm principle … which is to say you are pretty much a utilitarian. (I don’t mean to be name-calling, I am just trying to pin down your view on things). Your argument for gay marriage (not an altogether bad one, though I don’t agree with it) is basically this:
1) The harm principle is the driving moral measure of the rightness or wrongness of things, that which violates the harm principle is wrong, that which does not is permissible.
2) Prohibiting gay marriage harms people without any apparent benefit, so it violates the harm principle.
3) So prohibitions of gay marriage are wrong.
Wouldn’t it be just too slick for me to respond to that argument by saying, “Oh, but sometimes the harm principle just does not apply. I just think that is an issue to issue sort of a thing. Your principle might upset my political position here, so I insist that principles themselves are situational.” Doesn’t that move just preclude the possibility of principled discussion?
Get what I am saying? Let’s disagree, but let’s all be principled! Sort out your view of human nature and your moral principles and apply them evenly. If that means you end up not towing the party line on what “liberals” are supposed to believe, so be it. If you look at my politics, I am more conservative than conservatives and more liberal than liberals.
Yeah, I didn’t mean that I could/would say be a feminist and also be racist, and that that would be ok. I meant that no one is 100% consistent on every issue. For whatever reason, we all have issues where we diverge from whatever overarching political/social we otherwise have. You are correct in saying that my ethics are rooted in notions of avoiding harm. There are issues where that’s not really applicable. That was the point I was trying to make, badly apparently. I actually agree with what you said in your 3rd & 4th paragraphs.
Re: my attraction to calling myself a relativist, I’ve already once explained what I mean by that – which is obviously not what you mean when you use that term. I don’t think it’s accurate to say that I’m a utilitarian though. For example, no matter how positive the possible outcome, I think that torture is never justifiable.
One last thing, even if prohibiting gay marriage did actually have some social benefit (which it doesn’t), I’d still be pro-gay marriage. Just as I’d be pro-interracial marriage even if there were some benefit to prohibiting it.
I hadn’t realized that was someone else’s argument. I mostly thought of it on my own.
For the record, I don’t think zygotes, blastocysts, embryos, or fetuses are persons. I don’t have time right now to support that statement, because it would require a fairly in-depth discussion on developmental biology. I personally think the only way to really believe that this is a person is if you believe in souls at all, and that a clump of cells gains a soul the moment a sperm enters an egg.
Was not sure where else to post this:
Here is a story about a college instructor who was not renewed after a student complained about his teaching the Catholic / natural law view on homosexuality in a Catholic Studies course at University of Illinois:
http://www.news-gazette.com/news/university-illinois/2010-07-09/instructor-catholicism-ui-claims-loss-job-violates-academic-free
Do free thinkers think it is wrong to have a person lose their teaching position for teaching the Catholic / natural law argument about homosexuality? I think you should be able to teach that argument in a number of philosophy or religious studies courses. I teach it in my Social Ethics course. But this guy was teaching it in a Catholic Studies course! You can’t teach Catholic views on controversial matters in a Catholic Studies course?!
I hear all sorts of fuss from atheists over the excommunication of that nun who approved an abortion. What about the intellectual excommunication of religious thinkers? The casual excommunication of religious intellectuals happens ALL THE TIME. It happens casually when their views are simply disregarded or – as in the case above in this steam – their arguments are ignored and they are simply called bigoted homophobes. Of course, in the case of this U of Illinois instructor, the intellectual excommunication was more severe.
The real question for me is was he simply teaching about it, or was he advocating it and teaching it as if it were the right way to think? There’s a big difference. One is simply communicating knowledge, the second is advocating discrimination at a publicly funded university. If the former, then he was wrongly terminated. If the latter, perhaps not.
PZ Myers at Pharyngula gives a good run-down of the situation, and a conclusion I agree with.
That is a useful distinction, Craig. Given the selections from the article, it sounded like exegesis and explanation instead of advocacy. But we are working from limited information.
That said, is it okay to advocate the view that homosexuality is morally permissible?
One more thought: I do not think you should equate even advocating a natural law view with advocating discrimination. To believe that a behavior is immoral is not identical to believing we should discriminate (in a narrow or a broad sense) against those who practice the behavior.
“To believe that a behavior is immoral is not identical to believing we should discriminate (in a narrow or a broad sense) against those who practice the behavior.”
True. But this isn’t something that happened just out on the street – it was done by a professor whose salary is paid, at least partly, by public monies. States where gay discrimination is illegal cannot afford to be employing professors who advocate anti-gay beliefs, just as they can’t be employing openly racist or sexist professors.
And I actually do think that when a public university professor says that homosexuality is immoral it is a form of discrimination. Perhaps a mild form. I also think that the “natural law view” is a form of discrimination and prejudice. It’s also, in my opinion, a ridiculous argument.
“That said, is it okay to advocate the view that homosexuality is morally permissible?”
Of course. The view that homosexuality is immoral isn’t equally valid to the view that homosexuality is moral (or rather morally neutral) any more than creationism is an equally valid idea to evolution. A biology professor who taught creationism would be fired. It’s a similar, if not exact same, situation.
Lastly, The professor in question was adjunct faculty, and as such, the uni had no requirement to keep him employed, even if his record had been spotless and his scholarship amazing. No great injustice has been done. He directly advocated the view that homosexuality was immoral, disgusting, and unsafe. (I read the e-mail he sent to the student). If a professor had advocated the opposite at BYU or perhaps at a Catholic uni, he’d be kicked out (as has happened).
Let’s all be honest about PZ Myers – the man is utterly incapable of speaking sensibly about religion. He has drunk so much of the neo-atheist kool-aid that anytime he comments about religion he sounds like a cross between a zealot and a buffoon. Most of the intellectually serious atheists I know keep their distance from him and his ilk.
But when I linked to the article, he started off with a surprisingly reasonable tone. Predictably, that did not last long. Have these neo-atheists read anything of what they critique? Myers wonders what Catholic teaching allows as far as sexuality goes — maybe he should read something to inform himself before ripping it? And while he rips Howell for his naive and stereotypical views of homosexuals, Myers happily trades off all sorts of stereotypes of Catholics (that Catholics don’t enjoy sex or see it as part of love since they are so guilty and restricted about it). This kind of business is just so stupid that it is not even worth discussing.
My undergrads who take my 1000 level Social Ethics course have a better understanding of the natural law than Myers has. Now let me say that some of his criticisms are valid criticisms against a certain kind of natural law that is seated entirely in biological categories. But few still espouse that version of the view. But his fairly standard objections fall way short of actually handling a more sophisticated natural law, and don’t even touch what is called the “new natural law”.
I am not saying there are no objections to those theories. My point here is not to defend the natural law as truth – my purpose here is to defend natural law as a perfectly legitimate and serious theory in moral philosophy. It rightfully has a place in the ethics curriculum of any philosophy program, and obviously has a place in a Catholic studies course (which is what this was). It is not a mere “personal prejudice” of “ignorant fools” that is being passed off as serious thought. But Myers is too ignorant of natural law moral philosophy to understand that – since he plays with a childish understanding of the view he thinks it possible to refute the view with obvious counter-arguments. I am always left to wonder about people who think they can dismiss views (like the natural law) that have been held by an astounding number of the greatest minds in the western tradition with such obvious objections — does Myers think that people like Aquinas simply did not think of these obvious objections?
Think of someone like Ralph McInerny (recently deceased). Eminent philosopher, widely published and regarded, taught at Notre Dame for some 50 years. Don’t you think he heard every one of these objections and more from his students over the years? If these were such slam dunk counter-arguments, then was McInerny simply blinded by dogma in his insistence of defending the natural law (see his great little book Ethica Thomistica)? That is just not a defensible position, insisting that a eminent philosopher ignores obvious and fatal objections to his views because he is drunk on dogma. (By the way, our visiting priest at St Thomas Aquinas parish right now has a PhD in philosophy under Ralph McInerny).
Here is the problem: Myers is a biologist. Why does he fancy himself an expert in moral philosophy? What if I started shooting off about theories in biology? It would be absurd, I am not a trained biologist. Attention new atheists: leave the philosophy to philosophers, and we philosophers will agree to leave the science to scientists. I cannot stress this strongly enough: Dawkins and Myers (to name two) are not philosophers. Most of the time they engage in philosophical debate, they look like fools. Daniel Dennett is a philosopher, and he rarely makes an ass of himself and he is not nearly as overheated as the other new atheists. I’m not saying non-philosophers should never do philosophy. But have a little humility for crying out loud.
Of course Myers mocks the use of the word “reality” – because Myers already assumes a reduced understanding of reality. This is one reason why materialists always presume a biological reading of the natural law: because they are the ones that have reduced everything to a materialism metaphysics (usually without philosophical argument, I might add). But natural law theorists mean something different by “nature”, it is a metaphysical category. Most of Myers’ objections are objections to a biological understanding of natural law, which is pretty uncommon these days.
Ultimately, though, you see Myers play his real hand, and what he does is intellectually excommunicate Howell. Why? Because Howell is an “ignorant fool“ who is “not very bright and doesn’t meet the intellectual standards I expect of UI professors”. On what does Myers base this claim? That the man is religious. Apparently on Myers view, it is impossible to be simultaneously religious and intelligent / philosophically serious. (One might see now why I am getting so exercised over this). Of course you get the standard ridiculous “dogma” charge. If Myers knew much of anything about natural law philosophy, he would know that the natural law is a moral philosophy based in natural reason, it is not a sectarian Catholic “dogma”. Aristotle held this view. Seriously, how uninformed is this guy?! And he echoes this assumption with the view that it is impossible for Catholic thought to be “serious philosophy”. On what does he base this claim? Nothing really, other than the standard atheist ejaculations about “dogma”. So, Myers, shall we remove from philosophy curricula: Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, Boethius, Abelard, Thomas More, John Henry Newman, Ockham, … … … …? If the natural law has not place in serious moral philosophy, should we not teach Aristotle’s ethics?
Let’s make it easier — people interested in being philosophically serious should avoid reading Myers’ verbal ejaculations on philosophy and religion. (I make no judgment on his qualifications as a biologist since, well, I am not a biologist. I wish Myers had the same humility to let philosophers judge philosophers). Is this “free thinking” – intellectually excommunicating an entire tradition of intellectual activity because of YOUR bias?
I won’t defend Howell’s own presentation of the psychology of roles in homosexual relationships. But I think the sexual complementarity argument is very potent. For anyone who wants to read something serious about it, read Pope John Paul II’s Theology of the Body. It is a masterpiece (and JPII was a phd moral philosopher, and the work is philosophically very astute).
I don’t care to get back into defending the natural law and all of the rest of it here. The purpose of my post was simply this plea: Do not intellectually excommunicate religious people simply because they are religious. If you want to be open minded and tolerant thinkers, then let as many ideas as possible into the debate, and don’t suppose that something is without merit simply because it comes from the mouth of a Catholic (or any other religious person).
On Craig’s most recent comment:
Craig, how much of the natural law have you read to arrive at the view that it is a “ridiculous argument”? Have you read Aquinas? Aristotle? If you want something more contemporary, read some contemporary defenses of the “old natural law” (Ralph McInerny) or read some new natural law (Robert George, Germain Grisez, Joseph Boyle). Here is all I would ask: slow down a bit. Don’t be so quick to dismiss substantive philosophical positions as “ridiculous”. I don’t expect you to agree with the natural law view. But I do expect you to agree that it is not “ridiculous”.
On advocating the view that homosexuality is moral in the classroom: I think your analogy is a mis-analogy. While young earth creationism has been totally discredited and disproven in the scientific community, the natural law has not been totally discredited and disproven in the philosophical community. It is still a live theory, with any number of extremely intelligent, widely published and respected contemporary philosophers defending it. So your analogy there really does not hold. Your argument is this: Since it is obviously true that homosexual acts are morally permissible, it is fine to advocate them. But it is not obviously true that homosexual acts are morally permissible, and indeed a notable minority of trained moral philosophers (along with a huge majority of the great thinkers in the western tradition) disagree with you. Point is, this is not a “the sky is blue” obvious point here, it is contested by reasonable people.
Yes, he was an adjunct faculty. Does this mean “no great injustice was done”? I was adjunct faculty last year, had I been canned for teaching John Paul II’s Theology of the Body in my Contemporary Euro Course, I would have called that a great injustice to academic freedom (and a really bad deal for me and my family). He had been teaching there for 9 years, so he was not just some temp (as if temps deserve less anyway). Do you hold that same view on the philosophy instructor that was not renewed at BYU since he defended gay marriage? Was no great injustice done there? I’m just guessing that you ripped BYU for that when it happened. (I know these cases were not identical, the BYU instructor wrote an op-ed rather than professing his point in the classroom).
You say you agree with Myers, but you don’t. Myers said he did not think Howell was advocating the view but explaining it, and that he went out of his way to say he was not condemning anyone.
I go back to this plea: Atheists, please refrain from intellectually excommunicating religious thinkers and from labeling philosophical positions that are associated with religious traditions (the natural law) as ridiculous. Doing these things harms dialogue, weakens your position (at least it makes your “free thinking” look incredibly hypocritical), and it lacks any sort of humility. Read and understand before you dismiss. Rarely are views held by great thinkers the sorts of things that are simply ridiculous and worthy of being dismissed out of hand in 4 sentence blog posts. Isn’t it possible to disagree without insisting that your opponents are idiots or assholes?
I can’t believe I just wasted 30 minutes of my life on a PZ Myers post. Never again.
I happen to agree with him on the dangerousness of religion (or more generally, on the idea that faith is a virtue). You might say, I’m part of that ilk.
I was comparing the professors arguments as written in that e-mail to those of creationism. They’re both equally based in lies and distortions of the truth. That’s all I was saying. You’re correct, I’m not familiar with more advanced (or whatever) forms of natural law. I was ridiculing whatever version that particular professor was using in his argument. It was ridiculous. After explaining natural moral law is (or whatever version he was teaching), he starts editorialising, and this is where he gets into trouble,
This is why he should be fired. He’s telling students that gay sex is icky and homosexuality is immoral. That’s a perfectly reasonable reason to fire a professor at a public university.
“Here is the problem: Myers is a biologist. Why does he fancy himself an expert in moral philosophy?”
I don’t believe that he does. He simply express his opinion (vociferously) about any number of topics. What I understood from the post was that Myers said the professor wasn’t expressing hate speech, but he was “explain[ing] why homosexuality is wrong.” That’s the part I (and he) take issue with. Also note that I said I agreed with Myers conclusion, not everything he said. I often disagree with his opinions. But I also very often agree.
This is the conclusion that Myers wrote which I agree with:
I take a firm and extreme stance on the separation of church and state. Very firm.
“Let’s all be honest about PZ Myers – the man is utterly incapable of speaking sensibly about religion.”
That’s funny, he’s probably say the same thing about you.
“Isn’t it possible to disagree without insisting that your opponents are idiots or assholes?”
Yes, but it’s far less fun. I think that ridicule of religion is healthy and necessary. Also when someone acts like an idiot or asshole, it can be quite useful to call them such. For the record, I don’t think you’re either. While I’m not saying that you actually are one, you’re beginning to sound a lot like a tone troll, especially in your criticism of Myers.
Re: the BYU firing of the pro-gay professor, yes you are guessing. I think that it’s sad that he couldn’t voice his opinion w/o being fired. I think the culture and environment of BYU need to change. But I don’t think that BYU necessarily behaved unethically when it fired that professor. They had a legal right to do so. That professor certainly ought to have expected some sort blow-back for directly contradicting both the policy of the university and the doctrines of the church that paid his salary. It was regrettable that an openly pro-gay faculty member couldn’t be tolerated at BYU. But I think that BYU has a right to control who teaches there and what is taught. Of course, religious private universities handing out degrees equivalent to those at secular schools but not having academic freedom is another issue all together. But just as I think BYU had a right to fire that professor, so too did U of I have a right to fire an anti-gay professor, even if he was a Catholic who taught Catholic philosophy.
One last question, how is any idea or hypothesis disproven in the philosophical community?
To and for me (and quite probably to Myers) metaphysics is a waste of time. I don’t find metaphysical arguments convincing because they’re (in my view) not based on anything solid, measurable, provable or disprovable. They’re not empirical. I cannot and will not trust unempirical claims. In this I am fundamentally different from almost all religious people – a main reason why I’m an atheist. Unless you can show me real, hard evidence, I will not believe a thing, no matter how exciting, interesting, or provocative. Done that, tried that. It doesn’t work for me.
apparently, some html tags don’t work. There should have been some blocked quotes in there.
Kind of stream of consciousness here, sorry this is not well organized (not a lot of time this morning as my “honey do” list for the weekend is quite long).
Forgive my ignorance, but what is a “tone troll”? If it means that I am an advocate for an engagement of ideas that is fair and reasonable instead of rude, ignorant, and pigheaded, then I suppose I am one. Sadly, many of the new atheist provocateurs “argue” by throwing temper tantrums. Seriously, my 3 year old is less intemperate when I take away her lollipops. If it makes me a “tone troll” to call out bratty and childish intellectual behavior when I see it, then so be it. I am deeply saddened that a whole generation of atheists has as intellectual role models people like Myers and Dawkins. Far from developing intellectual virtue from imitating this crew, they are habituating intellectual vice.
Maybe you think it is less fun to have a debate that proceeds charitably and reasonably, a debate that seeks understanding before making rash judgments that are usually personal attacks instead of actual reasons and arguments. But if you argue that way, then I have to admit that is so much the less reason for people that debate with you to take you seriously. This is what Myers too often does – he calls others ridiculous but does not himself know what he is talking about, so in the end he is the one who looks the most ridiculous. Most of my theist friends shrug off these new atheists because they are so philosophically unsophisticated. Actually many of my intellectually serious atheist friends shrug these guys off as unserious participants in the conversation. Sometimes I think I ought to do the same. But the teacher in me pushes me in the other direction. I have come to realize that few atheists recognize this lack of sophistication, so I charge in where many of my friends just move on. You are all free to be atheists of course, but I do earnestly hope that you develop responsible intellectual habits. I am probably fighting a losing battle – blogs (the public square of the digital generation) do not reward thoughtfulness but instead reward irascibility.
Maybe Myers does not fancy himself and expert. Perhaps the trouble is that so many of his readers treat him as if he were one. As far as the capacity to speak reasonably about religion, would he say the same thing about me? I don’t know or care. Myers long ago ceased to be (if he ever was) a credible voice on anything pertaining to religion. What about SHAFTers – am I more fair to atheism that Myers is to theism? I certainly think so. (I was raised atheist and was militantly atheist through college and some graduate school. I know the atheist arguments very very well. If I can be allowed a moment of pride, I think I know the atheist arguments better than most atheists).
There is no need to even bring up separation of Church and state here. Natural law is a philosophical theory grounded in natural reason, it is not a religious view. Aristotle – not a religious thinker – holds a natural law view. The notion that this is a religious idea (and so would need to be censored in a hard and fast separation of church and state) just goes to show how far from understanding the natural law the atheist critiques here are! This was one of the main points from my post — the natural law is a substantive philosophical (not religious) view that deserves (I think demands) a place in any ethics curriculum. The idea that you would toss this out as “ignorant dogma” is just ridiculous. Again, to do so would mean removing Aristotle’s ethics from the philosophical curriculum. I hope that making that point makes it obvious how absurd the Myers position is here!!!
Can you show me “real hard evidence” that empirical proof is the only kind of proof? Can you empirically prove empiricism? No, you cannot. Most naturalists that I know make some kind of a pragmatic move here, but they do not demonstrate that non-scientific reasoning is impossible. One of the points I constantly harp on here is that science actually depends on non-scientific truths – for instance, a metaphysics that can justify the uniformity of nature. This is no knock on science, I am just pointing out that science cannot justify itself (from the point of view of her truth claims).
How are ideas disproven in the philosophical community? The most obvious answer: logic (one of Aristotle’s arguments against Platonic metaphysics is that it leads to an infinite regress). Or one might also demonstrate that a theory has some kind of fatal inadequacy (one of Aquinas’ arguments against Plato is that Plato’s theory can give no account of why we have a body). etc etc. But I grant that this is not that this is always easy.
By the way, I agree that BYU had the right to fire that lecturer. But I don’t think a public university has the same right. BYU is a private university and is not committed to academic freedom and free speech. A state university should allow all forms of expression on campus because the state should not be in the business of censoring ideas and expression. Wouldn’t “free thinkers” agree that state sponsored censorship is a bad idea?! I would allow for some minor amendments made to that principle to prevent hate speech on campus (since hate speech can be detrimental to other unique ends of the university). But Howell did not engage in hate speech, so should not have been fired even if he was advocating the view (and I don’t think he was, I think he was explaining it).
Here is an example: despite the fact that many more women attend college now than men, it remains the case that men are more successful in mathematics than women. Now there are many possible sociological explanations that could be provided here. But the former president of Harvard offered up the possibility that maybe, just maybe, men and women have brains that are wired differently so they are not actually equals in this area. This caused an enormous firestorm (he was eventually forced out of his position). But is that hate speech? What if it is true? As Peter Singer says, we should not base moral equality on actual equality, because actual equality might turn out to be empirically false. But shouldn’t we have universities where pursuing these politically unpopular ideas is allowed? Allow professors to explore ideas and make unpopular arguments. If the arguments suck, they won’t last long out in the hot sun of academic scrutiny.
Notice that “the man” here is on the side of the liberals. I guess censorship is okay so long as it tailors to your political and moral opinions? Come on.
This belongs in Jon’s upcoming post on the uniformity of nature:
Craig says: “. I cannot and will not trust unempirical claims.”
But you do! You trust in the uniformity of nature, and the uniformity of nature cannot be demonstrated empirically (says Hume). In fact, all of the empirical claims that you do trust depend on your trust in the uniformity of nature.
Everyone has metaphysical beliefs, it is impossible not to have them. Why do I say this? Everyone has beliefs about what is real and what is unreal. Everyone has beliefs about time and identity. Some people take the time to see that their metaphysical positions are defensible and consistent. Others do not. I am always stunned by how few materialists actually make arguments for their materialism. I pressed Huenemann on this a few years ago, and he admitted that most materialists he knows (including himself) pretty much just assume it as a starting point and never bother to actually think through the arguments.
A tone troll is someone who disregards the substance of an argument because they dislike the style in which it was said.
Good to know. Not sure if I am a “tone troll”. I tried to address both the substance of Myers’ arguments (I noted that his arguments might undermine a natural law couched in biological categories, but not other interpretations of the natural law) as well as the tone.
If the laws of nature were not uniform across the observable universe, we should expect the universe to look quite a bit different than it does. In some ways, the claim “The rules of physics hold everywhere” is not an assumption, but could theoretically be empirically falsified.
To be more precise, they may have started as an assumption at the very beginnings of scientific enquiry, but we’ve been continually testing that assumption since Newton wrote Principia. If, say, the gravitational constant varied in different places in the universe, we shouldn’t be able to predict the orbits of other planets, or distant galaxies should look/behave very differently, or they wouldn’t even be there because they wouldn’t be stable over eons. If the uniformity of nature didn’t hold, it could even be that life itself would not be possible.
If the rules of physics do indeed vary, they must do so at least at the scale of galaxies (that is, a galaxy has the same laws across its entire breadth, because if it didn’t, it would fall apart). But that same argument holds true at the level of galaxy clusters, because they gravitationally interact. And galaxy clusters form into vast fractal webs of galaxies. The entire observed universe doesn’t have little pocket “bubbles” with different rules, because the universe is one contained system. If it did have regions of different rules, what would happen at the interfaces of those bubbles? Weird, weird stuff, and we’d have likely observed it. That is, if a universe can even be stable for 13.7 billion years with microuniverses inside it.
My overall point is, I think Hume is wrong when he said the uniformity of nature could not be empirically demonstrated. It really couldn’t, in his time. We’ve seen and learned a lot since then. Even though it might still qualify as an “assumption”, it could in theory be empirically disproven. Read about the discovery of dark matter for a specific example that could be interpreted as a rigorous test of the uniformity of nature.
Also, people’s instinctive beliefs about how time works are totally wrong.
“That is, if a universe can even be stable for 13.7 billion years with microuniverses inside it.”
Come to think of it, we wouldn’t be able to say how old the universe was at all.
One additional (last) afterthought.
The fact that we can put an age on the universe at all (which is 13.75 ±0.17 billion years old) with as many significant figures as we have, seems to me to be a very strong argument in favor of the idea that the laws of physics are uniform across the observable universe (key word: “observable”).
I don’t think that claim is fundamentally axiomatic. It’s being tested all the time. I wonder what Hume would have wrote if he had known what modern cosmologists know.