spoonless | Ben Stein : no intelligence allowed

Ben Stein : no intelligence allowed

So, I finally got around to watching Ben Stein's movie "Expelled : No Intelligence Allowed". I guess since my last post ended with a Ferris Bueller quote, it makes a nice seguey into this one to mention his acting career got made from his role in Ferris Bueller's Day off, as the monotonous economics teacher, teaching a class full of bored drooling high school students about the Laffer Curve, Ronald Reagan's "voodoo economics", and repeating "anyone? anyone?" after every question regardless of the fact that nobody ever answered his questions.

Before I watched the film, I couldn't help but brush up on my knowledge of Ben Stein's life on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Stein

He was the son of an economics professor, but went to school for law. Became a lawyer and at one point was a professor of law at Pepperdine University. I knew that he had been a speech writer and lawyer for President Richard Nixon, but I had no idea that he had taught as an adjunct professor for a while at UC Santa Cruz (where I went to grad school) before he became a real professor at Pepperdine. That surprised me more than anything on his resume, given UCSC has sometimes been referred to by conservatives as "the worst school in America for leftwing indoctrination", and given how insanely conservative Ben Stein is. He must have found plenty of enemies there!

The most entertaining thing I found on his Wikipedia page, though, is that apparently--even though he's not an economist, many news outlets such as Fox News regularly ask his opinion on economics as though he's some kind of expert (presumably either because his father was an economist, or because he played an economics teacher in Ferris Bueller). For example, in August 2007, he appeared on Fox News with a panel of other "experts" where he proclaimed loudly and arrogantly that subprime mortgages were a wonderful "buy opportunity", dismissing fears that they might be unsafe. Peter Schiff was also there and disagreed strongly with him, saying that subprime mortgages and perhaps even the whole mortgage market was in danger of crashing. Stein and everyone else on the panel laughed at him saying "you must be a laugh riot at parties". Talk about putting your foot in your mouth!

Regarding Richard Nixon's involvement in Watergate, he defends him by saying:

"Can anyone even remember now what Nixon did that was so terrible? He ended the war in Vietnam, brought home the POWs, ended the war in the Mideast, opened relations with China, started the first nuclear weapons reduction treaty, saved Eretz Israel's life, started the Environmental Protection Administration. Does anyone remember what he did that was bad?

Oh, now I remember. He lied. He was a politician who lied. How remarkable. He lied to protect his subordinates who were covering up a ridiculous burglary that no one to this date has any clue about its purpose. He lied so he could stay in office and keep his agenda of peace going. That was his crime. He was a peacemaker and he wanted to make a world where there was a generation of peace. And he succeeded.

That is his legacy. He was a peacemaker. He was a lying, conniving, covering up peacemaker. He was not a lying, conniving drug addict like JFK, a lying, conniving war starter like LBJ, a lying, conniving seducer like Clinton—a lying, conniving peacemaker." - Ben Stein

The film Expelled is his defense of the Intelligent Design movement, where he lays out the case for a full-blown conspiracy among scientists who believe in Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. His central claim is that ID advocates within the science community are systematically identified and expelled from the rest of the community, never allowed to explore ideas that might contradict Darwin's great theory.

I have to admit--I sort of thought that I might watch this movie and get very angry. And I suppose I should be, because there are probably plenty of evangelical Christians who will watch it and think his investigative reporting is brilliant and his arguments against Darwinism are air tight. But for the most part, I just thought it was hilarious. I mean some of the antics in it were very entertaining, but so far from reality that it's hard to watch it and not think "OMG, that is so cute that he thinks that!"

The only part that made me kind of angry was the part where he visits the Nazi death camp, and has some tour guide explain to him how all of the Nazi's beliefs were based on Darwin's ideas. In scenes before that, he has drilled in to the viewer that the natural consequence of belief in evolution is to become a Nazi and engaging in forced eugenics and genocide. The theme of Nazis is woven from beginning to end of the film, but only the part where he actually visits the camp is creepy. The rest of it is more aimed at a metaphor for erecting a wall where science is on one side and religion is on the other, and if scientists ever stray over onto the religion side of the wall, they get shot. He mixes up his analogies though, because while they keep showing shots of Nazi guards on one side or another of a wall, they also keep cutting to shots of the Berlin Wall, which was erected by the Communists, not the Nazis. At the end there are a lot of shots of Reagan talking about freedom, while simulataneously Ben Stein is talking about academic freedom, and shots of the Berlin Wall falling down are interspersed. (I think the speech Reagan is giving is when the wall was coming down.) Very poetic, and interesting how he ties all 3 of those ideas of "freedom" together. But downright idiotic if you think about it in a larger context!

He has interviews with PZ Meyers, Richard Dawkins, Michael Shermer, and other great skeptics. If there is one thing that really impressed me about the movie, it was that he actually let them talk for a pretty long time. I was surprised at this, because at times, they appear to completely annihilate his arguments, or at least make him look foolish... and yet he doesn't cut it from the film. Those parts made me think he did a decent job at being an honest filmmaker and including what his opponents have to say--unfortunately, there are other parts where he is clearly being dishonest. The worst one, I think, is when he talks about winning the lottery of life. There's a catchy cartoon about a guy playing a slot machine. Stein claims that winning the lottery of life (creating the first few organic building blocks of life, out of inorganic materials) is like playing a slot machine and winning, and then playing 250 more slot machines and winning on every single one of them, all in a row. While I'm sure that's a powerful image for many people, it's completely dishonest because after all the scientists he interviewed about how life got started, I am sure that at least *one* of them explained to him how big the universe is, and how many galaxies there are out there. So his metaphor is completely dishonest in that it only shows one casino, not trillions of casinos all running simultaneously, where only in at least one of them this has to happen. In fact, he asks questions just like this, where I'm sure that was the answer given, but then he deliberately cuts that out of the movie and instead leaves the more emotional rants about how stupid creationists are.

In terms of Darwin's theory itself, namely that species form from previous species through natural selection, none of the ID advocates interviewed even attempt to give an alternative suggestion to that. Instead, it seems like what these people claim is just that somehow, there are some ingredients somewhere mixed in with life that supposedly can't be explained without recourse to "intelligence" designing them. None of them seem to realize that if this really were true, then there would be no more science to be done--that would be the end.

Overall, I thought it was definitely worth watching, if nothing else as a window into how really whacky conservatives like Ben Stein think about science, and how the intelligent design people in general think. And there is one big theme in the movie that I whole-heartedly agree with and enjoyed. And that theme is that people don't seem to realize just how incompatible religion is with Darwinism. He interviews scientists who explain how political correctness and the desire to win court cases has led scientists to mute what they say against mainstream religion and pretend that it is more compatible than it really is. This is absolutely true, and I think he does a great job at pointing it out. Unfortunately, his conclusion is that since they are incompatible, Darwinism must therefore be wrong. And also unfortunately, one of his main arguments, and arguably the strongest argument he has, for why it's Darwinism that must be wrong rather than religion, is that Darwinism naturally leads to genocide, while religion leads to happy happy joy joy. I say it's the "strongest" argument he has in a sort of tongue and cheek way, because while he does lay out an entirely plausible route through which Darwinism could lead a normal well-meaning intelligent person down the path to Nazism (through the intermediate step of Social Darwinism), it's not actually an argument for Darwinism being "wrong" in the sense of "not true". And he seems to ignore the obvious fact that the vast majority of people who believe in evolution are not Nazis (although he does warn several times that "I'm not saying belief in Darwinism *requires* you to believe in Nazism or that all Darwinists are Nazis"). But even the way he says that seems to suggest that he *mostly* believes that, or *almost* believes that which of course is total nonsense.

So overall, I think it has some important and true messages, but it also has some deeply dishonest and misleading messages. Oh, one more entertaining bit. Upon interviewing one scientist, who explains one plausible hypothesis for how the first organic cells may have formed--by "piggy-backing on crystals"--he stares at him with a stupid look and says "um, excuse me?? Did you say... *crystals*?" and then there's a flash to a shot of a wizard holding a crystal ball and smiling devilishly. Pure genius in the cinematography, although I really feel sorry for the person who watches it and thinks that's what the theory actually says.

Sigh. I seem to be really fascinated by conspiracy theorists lately. I may have to make another post about the Books-on-Tape I've been listening to this month, called "The Rise of the Fourth Reich : How Secret Societies Threaten to Take Over America". Totally batshit crazy guy wrote it, and ties together every conspiracy theory known to man, from 9/11-truth, to UFO's, to perpetual motion machines, to JFK, to the Illuminati, to Hilter using a body double to fake his own death, to the CIA being filled with Nazis and putting Floride (aka "Prozac" according to him) in the water to pacify everyone into obedience to Nazi control, to NASA being founded by Nazi occultists who time all of their launches meticulously according to astrological signs. Anyway, more totally nuts stuff, but for some reason it's a hard book to put down. Perhaps in some ways only slightly crazier than Ben Stein is.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

But why can't you have a scientific study of normative questions? And any sort of scientific study presupposes an answer to certain normative questions. In particular, if you want to say, "my experiment shows that we should believe theory A rather than theory B", then you presuppose that there is some notion of what we "should believe".

Of course, answering these sorts of questions is outside the scope of the experimental method, but lots of science proceeds in other ways - just consider the methods of evolutionary biology (lots of which proceeds through observation and/or computer modeling), mathematics (which proceeds primarily through pure reasoning and logic), theoretical physics (which proceeds by modeling and considering the notions of good explanation) and so on.

And thus, I think the relevant areas of philosophy (epistemology and ethics) are in fact amenable to scientific study, though it's clearly a somewhat broader view of science than you take.

Also, while some religious claims are about "how to live our lives, what we should cherish or fear, why there's a universe", there are other religious claims about what someone did two thousand years ago, how the universe came into existence, what the relation is between desire and suffering, and what happens to consciousness after death, which I think even you can agree can be studied by standard scientific methods. (FWIW, I think "the scientific method" is a bit of a red herring - there are many methods that are scientific, and there is no one model that even all core scientific inquiry follows.)

But why can't you have a scientific study of normative questions?

I think you can have a scientific study of social norms, and get a nice model for how norms form and where they are rooted in specific properties of the brain and in specific long-existing social institutions and structures.

And I also think that you can have a scientific study of which norms lead to which consequences. For example, you could study whether releasing a certain type of gas into the air is going to increase or decrease the number of living species. But the basic values, like "let's try to preserve life" I don't think can be studied other than in the first sense. In other words, they're not questions that science can provide a convincing answer one way or another.

Where

catithat and I disagree, I think, is that he seems to think people get those values from religion. Whereas I think religion is a combination of pre-existing values and random noise, mostly random noise.

I haven't watched it yet, but you might be interested in this video about moral realism. Though I think Mark told me it wasn't as good as his first one on the site (which I also haven't watched).

Thanks!

I'm about halfway through watching it--so far it's not jumping out at me as being particularly enlightening, but I am definitely learning some things about the way philosophers think about these things from it.

But this site looks really cool, I should probably come back here and watch more of these videos.

Here's a specific example of a question I do not think science can answer:

How many kittens lives is worth one human life?

Or, perhaps more cynical, how many lives of poor people is worth the life of one rich person?

I think these are things that just come from people's basic intuitions and aesthetic sense. It's going to have a different answer in different cultures, and I'm not convinced there is one right answer that all cultures will converge to.

Do you intend to deny that any purely normative question has any answer beyond a descriptive one about what people of a particular culture (or perhaps, particular people) find intuitive? What about a normative question like "should the observation of ten remissions out of eleven in the treatment group, versus three remissions out of eight in the control group, make us more confident in the claim that the treatment is helpful?" That is a purely normative question. Some people (most scientists and statisticians) have the intuition and/or aesthetic sense that the answer is "yes". Other people (those who are more impressed with anecdotes than statistics) seem to have an intuition that the answer is "no". Are you saying that we can't do anything more than just describe these intuitions? There is nothing to be said in favor of the "yes" answer?

Maybe the questions you pose are questions that we won't be able to answer, but it might just be because they are far too complicated and rely on too much information that we don't really have. Compare - "is Lucy (the individual whose fossilized remains were found in Olduvai Gorge) the ancestor of any currently living individuals?" Also, the questions you pose presuppose that the right way to think of morality is in terms of a notion of value of lives - many ethicists argue that actions are the things that are fundamentally right or wrong, rather than deriving their status from a summation of the values of the outcomes. If they're right, then your questions would be like "what is the viscosity of the ether that the earth drags as it orbits the sun?"

Also, the questions you pose presuppose that the right way to think of morality is in terms of a notion of value of lives - many ethicists argue that actions are the things that are fundamentally right or wrong, rather than deriving their status from a summation of the values of the outcomes. If they're right, then your questions would be like "what is the viscosity of the ether that the earth drags as it orbits the sun?"

I think this part only furthers my point. These questions cannot be settled by science, that's why you have philosophers of ethics weighing in on them trying to sort things out. Not only do I not think science can answer "how many kittens is one human life worth?" but I don't think it can even answer "which is the better ethics--deontological or utilitarian?". I think there are parts of our brain involved in giving us both deontological intuitions *and* utilitarian intuitions, and we use different ones at different times. You can do countless surveys of how many people respond which way to different trolley problems phrased in different ways, and you can learn interesting things about how people think. But what you won't learn from that is which people are "right" and which people are "wrong" if any.

Your question about whether evidence should inspire belief is a repeat of an earlier thread you and I had... although it does seem to keep coming up, so I think this is probably the most important and interesting philosophical disagreement you and I have. I think you phrased it in an even more clever and insightful way this time than last. And it definitely gives me a sense for why you think the way you do about ethics. But it's not the way I think--my intuition is that you are disguising a question about "is" as a question about "ought" through clever wording... but I will have to think about how exactly to answer it. Will get back to you soon after thinking about it more.

I agree that surveys and the like will only tell us what people think, and not what they should think. But I'm thinking of philosophy as part of science here. Conceptual analysis is an important part of science, just as it is in philosophy. If you're going to study speciation, or gravity, or HIV, then you have to answer questions like "what does it mean for individuals to be of different species?" and "what is mass?" and "what does it take for someone to count as having AIDS?" Philosophers are asking "what does it mean for something to be right or wrong?", and the methods we have for answering these questions are basically all the same. Of course, scientists don't need to have correct and complete answers to those questions to do all their research, but analyzing the weaknesses of particular approximate answers that people use at a given time is an important part of the methodology sometimes. It's just that in philosophy, it's central at almost all times.

And yes, I think that the issue about the normativity of epistemology is one of the most important ones for showing people that they really are committed to there being some objective norms, regardless of what sort of moral skepticism they might think they're committed to. Once they admit some sort of objective normativity, then moral realism isn't any more spooky (though of course, it doesn't get any direct support from realism about epistemology).

Do you intend to deny that any purely normative question has any answer beyond a descriptive one about what people of a particular culture (or perhaps, particular people) find intuitive?

Almost, but I'd prefer to rephrase it in my own way.

I deny that normative questions are objective. I think normative questions only have answers with respect to either a single subject, or a group of subjects who have some kind of shared goals, values, or intuitions about right and wrong. This group, in principle, could be as large as "the entire human species" for some questions, although I am unaware of any such question for which that's true. I'm open to the possibility that if somebody thought hard enough, they might be able to come up with one. But for most every day normative questions, they are either culturally relative or individually relative.

What about a normative question like "should the observation of ten remissions out of eleven in the treatment group, versus three remissions out of eight in the control group, make us more confident in the claim that the treatment is helpful?" That is a purely normative question.

I disagree that this a purely normative question. I think you can factor it into two parts, one of which is normative and the other of which is positive. The positive question is whether the observation makes it more likely that the treatment is helpful. And the normative part is to what extent we should react by feeling confident.

There is of course, the question of whether we are capable of choosing how we react to new evidence. But I think either way you answer that, you can still say that the question of whether it's right or wrong that we react that way is subjective, and unrelated to whether the conclusions we would draw are really more likely to be true given the premise or the evidence.

Now--just looking at the normative part of the question, I would agree that it seems like it must be a pretty universally shared intuition that to become more confident about something being true, when it is more likely to be true... is something that is almost always good. It indicates that your brain is "functioning well" and that you're doing a good job of mapping reality. And I think the universality of that comes from the fact that it is almost always easier to achieve other goals when you have a more accurate representation of reality in your head. Not to mention, some people, like presumably you and I, place some intrinsic value on learning and knowledge, and regard that as a worthy goal in and of itself, even if it doesn't help with attaining any other goals. There are other people do not share an appreciation for knowledge and learning nearly as much, and for them the utility of accurately representing the world is far less, although it still helps with a lot of their more primary goals. For them, I expect that there are more situations where it's not as important for them to react to new evidence in a purely Bayesian way. There may in fact be utility they get out of reacting in a different way... so in some cases, it could be a net negative for them if they buy the statistics.

Overall, taking the purely normative part of the question, I think it comes close to universal among agents immersed in an environment, since modeling their environment accurately is tied strongly to so many other things that the agent regards as "good"... like achieving goals and avoiding getting killed. But I think it fails to be quite universal, and there is still an element of subjectivity to it. In most other cases of ethics, I feel like there is a much greater subjectivity involved.

I think you can factor it into two parts, one of which is normative and the other of which is positive. The positive question is whether the observation makes it more likely that the treatment is helpful. And the normative part is to what extent we should react by feeling confident.

I think you should be careful about this factorization. It seems like a good one at first, but I think we should question what "more likely" means. As a matter of fact, the treatment either is helpful or it isn't - so if "likely" is talking about physical chance, the chance is already either 1 or 0 and it stays that way, so nothing gets more or less likely as a result of the observation. If "likely" is about frequencies, then it doesn't even enter into the question - again, either the treatment is helpful or it isn't, and the observation doesn't affect anything.

So you have to come up with some other meaning of what "likely" means here. The most natural one is some notion of "evidential probability", which is supposed to be a notion of probability given some evidence. But if that's what you're going to say, then I don't know what that might mean other than what someone's beliefs should be if they have the relevant evidence. If it's not that, then it seems that you're positing some primitive notion of evidential probability that isn't directly connected to anything else.

Of course, you could just go my way and say that "likely" here is a Bayesian probability, and that to say that an observation makes something more likely for someone is to say that that person should become more confident in that thing.

But maybe there's some other understanding of "more likely" that I'm missing, which is not normative, and also refers to something that can change as a result of evidence, in a way that chances and frequencies don't.

Of course, you could just go my way and say that "likely" here is a Bayesian probability, and that to say that an observation makes something more likely for someone is to say that that person should become more confident in that thing.

I do think of "likely" as meaning a Bayesian probability, although I would have not used the words "should become more confident" there. Those who believe in Bayes' assumptions do become more confident about something that can be inferred through Bayes' theorem.

So the normative question really boils down to the question of "should one be a Bayesian"? I don't know if he still has it there, but for a long time

gustavolacerda had his Religion on Facebook set to "Bayesian". I got a real kick out of that, and I do think there is sometimes something faith based about it.

But I also think there is something objectively true about Bayesianism. Namely, that if you did an experiment and put a Bayesian side by side an agent using some other epistemology, each in the same environment, the Bayesian will be able to make more accurate predictions and end up with a more accurate model of the environment at the end of the day. I think this is something testable, and positively verifiable (of course you could never test all possible environments, but you can at least get a good idea of how well Bayesians do compared to other epistemologies for a wide variety of environments).

But Bayesian epistemology is aimed at a specific goal--namely, being able to make accurate future predictions based on past observations. In principle, you could program an agent to not have this goal--it could have other goals. And perhaps for its goals, making predictions doesn't matter. Maybe its goal is simply to kill itself after running for 5 minutes, regardless of what its environment is. For that agent, that represents a good life, and is the ultimate good. Who is to say that the agent is "wrong"? That's what it was programmed to do.

Note that even for a robot whose goal is to kill itself after 5 minutes, it still needs to be a Bayesian (or otherwise rational and reasonable) in order to achieve its goal. It needs to form some sort of relatively accurate representation of what things in the world might be able to kill it, and what things won't, and then act in ways that maximize the likelihood that it will run into something that will kill it.

If we want to describe a robot as having anything like "beliefs" or "goals" rather than just arbitrary sentences stored in memory, then it has to respond to stimuli in certain ways. If you're not appropriately responsive to evidence, then you're not even having beliefs - your internal sentence-states must be described as something else, like imaginations or suppositions or desires, or perhaps just lists. My suspicion is that once we understand this notion of "appropriately responsive", we'll see that you just don't even count as a believer unless you do something approximately Bayesian. Then, this would give us an objective ground for Bayesianism - to count as a believer at all one needs to be approximately Bayesian, and to be an ideal believer, one should be as perfectly Bayesian as possible.

We might then take a similar approach to rationality about actions. In order to count as someone who has goals or desires, one needs to respond to the world and interact with it in particular ways. If you never seek to change anything about the world, then it seems hard to describe your internal states as desires, rather than suppositions, imaginations, or whatever. In order to count as someone who acts, you have to behave approximately in accord with expected value decision theory. And therefore, to count as fully rational, you should act as perfectly in accord with this theory as possible.

Perhaps some similar ground could be drawn for morality. And this would explain why things like rocks and trees don't count as rational or irrational, moral or immoral - they don't act in ways that count as having beliefs or desires or anything of that sort, so nothing makes these norms binding on them.

Obviously, there are lots of holes in this story and I don't know how to fill them in, but I suspect that something like this is at the foundation of all normativity.

I'll concede the point about the robot who's goal is to die in 5 minutes. I could try to come up with more and more absurd examples of agents without need for modeling their environment, but that gets far enough from the examples we know in real life (like people) that it's somewhat silly to base any decisions on what language to use on them.

If you're not appropriately responsive to evidence, then you're not even having beliefs
...
to count as a believer at all one needs to be approximately Bayesian, and to be an ideal believer, one should be as perfectly Bayesian as possible.

Depending on how you mean this, this actually sounds very radical. Although interesting. Given this view, what would you say to someone who claims to believe things on faith? Faith doesn't seem to be even a logical possibility in this way of thinking about it. And I'm somewhat sympathetic to that, although I think it might really piss of a lot of "people of faith" to hear that. Especially the more adament ones who argue that you're not a "true believer" unless you have faith. It sounds like you are saying exactly the opposite. You are not a true believe if you have any faith whatsoever!

In response to this and the other point, one of the things that has to be part of the story is an explanation of how something can be "close enough" to count as belief, while still being wrong in some way. And this explanation has to work in a way that distinguishes among the many systems that are "good enough", which ones are better. (I claim that the Bayesian picture will turn out to be the core that defines this set, but it could well turn out to be something else, though it will be some sort of relation to evidence.)

Presumably what this ends up with is a story where if you take everything on faith, then you don't count as believing - you're just a book or a computer memory, which will story whatever inputs it gets, regardless of whether they represent anything accurately. But if some amount of things are accepted on faith, that won't be enough to destroy the whole system. Presumably, the people who believe religious things on faith still have lots of beliefs about other things that are appropriately related to evidence, about things like whether there's a table in front of them, or what color the sky is.

Anyway, because of the margin of error, it won't be a tautology that any particular belief is responsive to any particular piece of evidence, though it will be a tautology that in general beliefs will be responsive to some sort of evidence. The way you get a notion of goodness out of this will be like much of our apparently non-normative use of the word. A good knife is something that cuts smoothly and easily, though many things that don't cut smoothly and easily will count as knives to some extent because they manage to cut in some way. Similarly, a good chair will support someone sitting on it very well and comfortably, while many things will count as chairs in virtue of doing it not so well.

Ok, that sounds reasonable (about being "close enough" to count as belief while allowing for some variation).

A good knife is something that cuts smoothly and easily, though many things that don't cut smoothly and easily will count as knives to some extent because they manage to cut in some way. Similarly, a good chair will support someone sitting on it very well and comfortably, while many things will count as chairs in virtue of doing it not so well.

Making analogies to good knives and good chairs initially sounds like a great starting point for some kind of objective values. But I see a lot of problems with that. I think these examples appear to work well because there is a particular function or purpose that is built into the intension of concepts like "chair" or "knife". It's not much of a simplification to say that a knife is defined as something which is intended to be used for cutting, and that a chair is defined as something which is intended to be sat in. There are a lot of different arrangements of molecules that could satisfy those requirements, making them a better or worse chair or knife. But all of this is because you have a specific purpose in mind. I think it's only ever possible to say that something is "good" if you can answer the question "good for what?" The same object might be good for sitting in but bad for cutting, or good or bad for any number of other purposes. But what is the purpose of an object? Whatever a particular sentient being, or some social group, or some society wants it to be. Whatever satisfies their needs, desires, goals, etc. So it seems that there is just as much relativism and subjectivity that creeps in as with any kind of statement about good or bad.

That means that the same object can be a good chair and a bad knife. It isn't just good or bad full stop. Having a certain set of mental states might make one a good believer (because the states are responsive to the evidence in appropriate ways), but that doesn't by itself make you a good person. Similarly, a set of actions might make you a good agent. This program won't really get an answer of what makes a good person unless you have some notion of what it is to be a person (which of course could be very different from being a good human being - I take it that "human being" is a kind of biological concept, while "person" is a concept that could apply to animals, robots, or aliens just as well as to humans).

Note - none of this is about what anyone wants. It's just about the meanings of words. It might be the case that no one wants knives, but certain things will still be good or bad knives. Or as Alanis Morrisette sings, you might have 10,000 very good spoons when all you need is a fork - your desires and subjectivity don't enter into the evaluation at all, just what it is to be a spoon.

Of course, on some further level, we choose certain concepts to be interested in, but once we're interested in the concepts of belief and action, nothing about our wants or needs as individuals or a society is relevant to what makes someone a good or bad believer or agent.

So--it sounds like when you say "P is a good X" you're just saying that some particular P fits our concept of X very well. Q may only approximately fit into some concept X, and therefore Q is a poor X. That makes sense, and it does explain how if you insist on certain properties being included in a definition of an agent or a believer, then you'd be able to objectively measure whether someone was a good agent or a good believer. But somehow, I'm unable to see how this would help in bridging the gap between is and ought.

Lets say Mr. Wrong likes to cheat and lie, sleeps around on his wife, and beats his kids... while Mr. Right stays faithful, is an honest guy, and is good with kids.

Then you could say that Mr. Wrong is a good liar, a good cheater, a good philanderer, and a good domestic abuser. While Mr. Right is a good father and a good husband.

But the problem is, you've just moved all of the normative parts of everything into the definitions of the concepts "liar", "cheater", "philanderer", and "abuser" all having negative normative judgements built in. And father and husband are also concepts that have certain normative expectations built in, of which you aren't a good example if you don't meet those expectations. I don't see how this helps anyone decide whether it is good or bad to lie or cheat, to beat your kids, etc. It just shows that if you have some concept of someone who is supposed to act a certain way, they can either be a good example of acting that way, or a bad example of acting that way. It doesn't seem to tell us anything about how we should actually act. Do you think it does somehow?

I think the way this sort of thing would have to work is to think about the more general types of actions that these fall under. Kant pointed out that lying is a type of talking, but it's clear that it has to be a deviant type. If all (or most) talking was lying, then talking would no longer be able to serve its purpose, and lying wouldn't either. It is essential for lying to work that most other speakers are telling the truth, or at least for the audience to have the reasonable belief that this is true. Kant famously came to the conclusion that all lying is therefore always wrong, including the standard anachronistic example of lying to the Nazis about the fact that you have Anne Frank hidden in your attic. Of course, on the version of this picture that I'm talking about, goodness and badness come in degrees, so it's possible to claim that there's something wrong with lying to the Nazis in this case, but there would be far more wrong in telling the truth (if we could fill in some other norms that come from more general action types).

We can do a similar thing to say why cheating is generally wrong, and breaking promises (if that's the way to understand what a philanderer is doing). The abuse case, and responding to the Nazi objection about lying, would depend on some sort of analysis of the general notion of what it is to be a rational agent, and I don't really see how it's going to work yet. I'm more convinced in the belief case than in the action case, and so I'm more certain that we can use this sort of method to give an objective account of the norms of epistemology than the norms of ethics. But I think it might be able to work.

I think the way this sort of thing would have to work is to think about the more general types of actions that these fall under. It is essential for lying to work that most other speakers are telling the truth, or at least for the audience to have the reasonable belief that this is true.

I must not be seeing what you're getting at here. Are you trying to argue that right and wrong come from whether someone is behaving the way everyone else is (like, if everyone else is telling the truth and you're not you must be the wrong one)?

No, that is a misunderstanding. Lying and telling the truth aren't symmetric here. If everyone else is telling the truth and you are lying, then it's possible for your lie to have the intended effect. But if everyone else is lying and you're telling the truth, then (since everyone realizes that most people are lying) it would be impossible for your truth-telling (or lying for that matter) to have the intended effect. In order for lying to work it is necessary that most people be telling the truth. In that sense, lying is parasitic upon truth-telling. Lying is (in some very minor sense) self-undermining, whereas truth-telling is self-reinforcing.

I don't think there is anything moral built in to our notions of "rational agents". Being rational will make you better at being able to achieve your goals, and it can also help you figure out what subgoals need to be achieved in order to attain a more longterm or general goal. But it doesn't help you pick fundamental values.

A lot of metaethicists seem to think that by understanding reasons for action and practical rationality, we'll have made a lot of progress towards understanding morality. They are both systems of norms governing our actions (which makes them more similar than either is to reasons for belief and epistemic rationality), even though they are clearly different, as you point out. However, practical rationality is clearly going to play a role in deciding particular moral judgments on the basis of fundamental values, whether or not practical rationality clarifies what those fundamental values are. But Kantians (and presumably whatever group it is that I'm aligning myself with in this discussion) do think that rationality can give us the fundamental values, by seeing which sorts of actions are self-undermining in the sense I said lying was.

You might find the entry on moral realism in the Stanford Encyclopedia useful, though I don't think it gives especially strong defense of the position, and instead lays out arguments on all sides. For a defense of a very different sort of moral realism, you might see this review of a book on the topic. I don't really know what books in metaethics have been written for a more general audience though.

In that sense, lying is parasitic upon truth-telling. Lying is (in some very minor sense) self-undermining, whereas truth-telling is self-reinforcing.

You seem to be assuming some kind of Kantian-like principle of universalizability here. There's nothing self undermining about a few people lying amidst a crowd of truth tellers. The only thing that would be self undermining is if everyone did it. Actually, even that isn't self undermining since, pretty much everyone *does* lie some of the time. I guess the only way for it to be undermining is if everyone lied almost all the time.

So the argument that lying is wrong here stems from the assumption that the actions which are wrong are those which, if adopted by everyone, would lead to some kind of unravelling of society. Usually when I speak of something being morally wrong I'm thinking about relative to my individual morals... in which case, I don't think universalizability should come into play at all. If on the other hand you ask me to evaluate what is wrong from a societal standpoint, as a cultural relativist, then yes... universalizability comes into play. But the fact that it matters whether you're thinking in terms of an indvidual perspective or a cultural perspective just highlights the relativism of it.

Thanks for the links, I will read them when I get a chance--I may have read the Stanford Encyclopedia entry before, I can't remember.

And speaking of holes, in my explanation of how I view it, I think there may be a big hole in that I said we can know that being a Bayesian leads to more accurate predictions because you can run a Bayesian side by side a non-Bayesian in a controlled experiment and see that the Bayesian does better. But it seems like there is some circular reasoning going on there, since in order to conclude anything from that, you'd have to be a Bayesian in the first place. I think this may be the "problem of induction" rearing its ugly head. Although I'm not sure that my way of looking at norms is any more or less susceptible to that. In some ways, I think I'm a bit of a coherentist in that I know my brain works a certain way, and I have a coherent description of how it works, and everything I experience and think seems to hang together in a certain way... but whenever I try to explain what that way is, I have to start somewhere.

One of the problems I see with your description of belief, is that if the very idea of belief does really entail being a Bayesian, then I'm not sure how you can consider that a norm that is good or bad... how can linguistic tautologies be good or bad?

Of course, I blink and you two start having a fascinating conversation.

Now I have to set aside some time to chew all this over!

Currently the most sophisticated input I have is that clearly the number of kittens a human life is worth is proportional to the number of times that person can masturbate; at least, according to God.

Please, think of the kittens.

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