Intelligence and "Equality"

You're beating down strawmen. I have never heard any atheist claim that rights come from intelligence. I certainly haven't heard anyone claim that rights belong to only the most intelligent.

Daniel: "I have never heard any atheist claim that rights come from intelligence."

I'm sure you're right. But have you heard an atheist explain any other basis for rights beyond social consensus? If 51% of the population wants to murder and eat the other 49%, what moral argument can an atheist use to convince them that they shouldn't? Without God, morality is whatever the people with the most votes (or the most guns) say it is.

And that isn't just theory; it's recent history. So many communist revolutions have followed the same script in the past hundred years that only an atheist fanatic could know the history and not see the pattern.

I have heard an atheist provide a basis for rights that did not rest on social consensus. If you wish to hear it, I recommend you read Ayn Rand's "The Virtue of Selfishness."

I don't accept that godlessness has any baring on man's genocidal tendency. Sadly, genocide isn't purely recent. The Romans, Ghengis Kahn, French crusade against the gnostics, Muslims conquering South Asia, the British in Australia, the Belgiums in the Congo etc. all happened without modern atheism or evolutionary theory. Since the industrial revolution, the ghastly affairs have been more efficient, but the will is a hideous part of mankind, unfortunately.

The Hebrews even killed all the Canaanites, apparently at God's personal request. What moral argument could I use against that? The golden rule is the best any of us have, I think.

I don't know why I keep falling for these posts, so I'll try to make my point (again) as directly as possible.

Why should human life and well-being be valued? Because it feels like the right thing to do.

Does bothering to be good rather than selfless, from a humanist/consequentialist point of view, require a leap of faith? Sure. You need to make an unfounded gut-level assumption that people's well-being ought to be valued. (Ben "We should live" Bateman should know this as well as anyone). But the same is the case when one chooses to believe in God. At least with humanism we get what we want, not what we think some imaginary supernatural being might want. We get what is good for us, not what some misguided interpretation of the ramblings of an ancient tribal leader says is good for us.

As for where we draw the line... "intelligence" is a good answer, but this is not the "IQ" kind of intelligence Michael refers to here. By "intelligence" we mean self-awareness, a sense of "I". So the question is not whether some people should or should not have rights. It's which animals we should exclude from the "having self-awareness" list. The tricky questions raised by an intelligence-based valuing of life are not "should smarter people deserve more than dumber people". They are "should chimpanzees have human-like rights", "is it wrong to kill cows and eat them", and "at what point during the development of a young baby does killing mean killing a human being". I'm not claiming I have satisfactory answers to these questions. But I am saying that, if I were to be a good humanist/consequentialist, I would be a vegetarian, since there is no sharp way to distinguish between animal suffering and human suffering.

BM: How sure are you that all humans (even all "normal" humans) are self-aware? I personally am not convinced of it. I think most people only have flashes of self-awareness and live the rest of their lives in a reactive daze. The percentage of time spent in a self-aware state seems to vary, but I doubt many people are at 100%.

Bernardo: "Why should human life and well-being be valued? Because it feels like the right thing to do."

So if your feelings change, then does morality change with them? Is a human life worth less in, say, North Korea, where those feelings are very different from our own? The Chinese government feels that it makes perfect sense to kill Falun Gong members and sell their body parts, so under your theory it is moral for them to do so.

If morality is based only on our feelings, then morality is nothing at all.

The alternative is to say that morality does not depend on our feelings, that it is somehow beyond our convenient reach. Morality could reside in an old man in the sky, or in ancient traditions, or in an old legal document written by men in tights and wigs. However it's done, civilization depends on us putting morality "out there" beyond the reach of our passions. I don't think that any civilization has ever survived for long without it

BB: The way you say that suggests that it doesn't matter much where the morality comes from, just so long as it's "out of reach". What's illegitimate about the Chinese or North Korean setup then? Aren't their ideas about morality external too? I'm honestly not sure (I don't believe their being completely arbitrary); but I am sure that even if there were some external document or tradition which said that what they do is OK, it still wouldn't be OK.

Jez, the source of morality isn't irrelevant, but the content is far more important. The trouble with free-floating subjective morality is that the content always ends up being the same: raw, unrestrained human nature. Almost any external morality is better than that.

Homo sapiens gut feelings are pretty much the same across all members of the species, unless you condition them differently. Imagine a society of civilized and moral lions in which some renegade lion thinkers made the relativist argument: Let's just make moral judgments based on how we feel. Humans are vain enough to imagine that their subjective moral feelings are unpredictable and mysterious, but I think we all know how civilized lions would act if they threw away their moral codes and decided to act on intuition: They would act like wild lions, and eat us if they could. Homo sapiens is pretty much the same way. Ask a wise Roman observed centuries ago: Homo homini lupus.

"What's illegitimate about the Chinese or North Korean setup then? Aren't their ideas about morality external too?"

No, they aren't. Those governments wield absolute power. They have no moments of "Gosh, it would be convenient to kill our political dissidents and sell their body parts for cash, but our morality forbids it." It's the opposite of, for example, the debate we have in the USA right now over torture, where the question is how much military intelligence we're willing to lose to uphold our moral principles. Communist governments don't worry about questions like that.

Do all moral relativists behave like wolves?
Is it moral ralativism that's the culprit in China?

To answer MW's question: IQ probably isn't that important from an evolutionary point of view. I dare say the presence of a range of IQ's is to the species' benefit, either intrinsically or because of some side effects of different IQ's.
Definitely a degree of humanistic compassion is a selected-for trait in our evolutionary niche (highly social, highly technological).

"Do all moral relativists behave like wolves?"

No, not if they're raised in societies that condition their moral impulses. That conditioning sticks around for a while, leading the relativists to believe that they can destroy the source of that morality without consequence. But that conditioning fades over time, and time brings new moral challenges that the conditioning wasn't designed to address.

Religion maintains morality like engineers maintain bridges and machinery. If you kill all the engineers, then you could probably use those bridges and run those machines for a while with only rudimentary knowledge of how they were built and how they work. But eventually the bridges will start to collapse and the machines will break down, and nobody will be left who knows how to fix them or replace them.

And that's not as fanciful a simile as it might seem. Communist revolutions regularly kill off or drive away all the educated classes, and then the country plunges into poverty as the leaders discover too late how vital those people were. In Zimbabwe right now, for example, communist thug Robert Mugabe has killed or driven away all the prosperous white landowners who were experts at farming, and now people are starving to death in a country that once exported tons of food.

Morality is complicated. It requires expert study and deep consideration. The major world religions have put in the time and effort required to produce sophisticated systems of moral thought. Believing that random non-specialists can produce on-the-fly results superior to the wisdom of centuries is as vain and foolish as the communist thugs who kill their intellectuals.

BB: What do we do with the apparently religiously-inspired moral violations? I agree that morality is complicated, and I agree with aquainting oneself with expert arguments. Lots of them.
However, I don't believe that I am uncommonly or unjustifiably vain in considering myself the moral superior to an Islamic terrorist, yet such a person would vigorously claim that he was applying centuries-old wisdom and complain that I was nothing a young upstart "making it up as I went a long".

See my comment above for examples of genocide. Note the ones which are Christian or Jewish in origin. I consider myself superior to those too. I don't mean to sound prideful, it's just I make it a rule never to exterminate a race, and so far I haven't come close to breaking it.

Am I wrong about my superiority?

jez: I think you and BB are approaching religion from two slightly different angles. It sounds to me that BB is primarily making a defense of religion as a foundation for social morality. You (jez) then brought up a more spiritual question basically asking "how do we deal with religious commands that aren't obviously centered around improving society?"

BB's simile was spot-on, but no, it doesn't attempt to address the question of which religion (if any) is actually right about God. I think his point is simply that Western Civilization owes its existence to its Judeo-Christian heritage. (Although I think the Anglosphere is qualitatively different from the rest of what is considered Western Civ.)

While I agree that the simile is excellent, I don't think that's what BB has been saying. He pointing out the dangers of refusing to recognise an external and untouchable moral authority. He hasn't mentioned Christianity or Western civilisation.

I wish to point out to him the dangers of latching onto an external authority. The biggest lapses happen imo when people surrender their own sense of moral judgement.

I think the culprit in the examples he mentions is an over-reliance on authority (ie dictatorship). I don't believe this is natural uncivilised or wild behavior: it is as unnatural as our own behavior in its own way. I don't believe communists do "what feels right", otherwise there would be no need for the detailed ideology.

Jez: "I don't believe that I am uncommonly or unjustifiably vain in considering myself the moral superior to an Islamic terrorist . . . Am I wrong about my superiority?"

But those are terrorists and not theologians. Even Islam has its own extensive body of moral thought and reasoning. Any system of morality can be corrupted, so it's irrelevant to a system's merit to point out that someone has corrupted it.

Proving that the terrorist's morals are inferior to yours doesn't prove that Islam is inferior to whatever moral system you consider yourself to use. (Could we describe it as atheism atop a Judeo-Christian foundation?)

Jez: "I wish to point out to him the dangers of latching onto an external authority. The biggest lapses happen imo when people surrender their own sense of moral judgement."

Yes, of course there are dangers. A good example would be the Imperial Japanese whom we fought in WWII. Having an external source of moral authority doesn't guarantee success, but not having one guarantees failure.

Jez: "I think the culprit in the examples [Ben] mentions is an over-reliance on authority (ie dictatorship). I don't believe this is natural uncivilised or wild behavior: it is as unnatural as our own behavior in its own way."

We have a factual dispute there. There are two natural human states. The pre-civilizational state is tribalism: Nomadic extended families of 20-50 people, where those families form alliances or go to war with other families. It's not too far from the state of many of the native North Americans.

The natural state of civilized man is slavery or serfdom, where a single strongman rules with an iron fist over hundreds or thousands of subjects.

To demonstrate that this is the natural state, try picking a set of random times and places anywhere in the last 10,000 years, e.g. Caucasus Mountains, 2500 BC. I claim that, as a simple historical fact, an overwhelming majority of the people living in those places at those times will be living in prehistoric tribalism or despotic slavery.

"I don't believe communists do "what feels right", otherwise there would be no need for the detailed ideology."

I'm confused on what you're saying here. I see two possible meanings:

1) The content of communist ideology isn't: 'Do what feels right.' And that would be correct but irrelevant. Your moral system can start with any content at all. The communists had all sorts of moral ideals about egalatarianism, self-sacrifice, etc. But if you don't hook those morals to some fixed external point, then they'll quickly degenerate into brutality.

2) Alternately, maybe you mean that the behavior of actual communists is something other than "do what feels right." And that would be incorrect. The history of Communism includes acts of mind-boggling cruelty, brutality, and depravity on a colossal scale. If you aren't familiar with that history, then The Gulag Archipelago is a good place to start. I must admit that I couldn't make it past chapter four, but maybe your stomach is stronger than mine.

BB: "There are two natural human states..."
This is an interesting pov. It's true inasmuch as the universal freedoms enjoyed in the west within communities of such a large scale are historically unique. There were free men in antique civilisations too, although they were supported by slaves. Perhaps you could argue that the world is becoming a single community, and the westerners maintain their freedoms by enslaving poor easterners through economics. Myself, I think that's a kind of empty argument, unless you substitute some much weaker word for "enslaving".

I tend to think of it as more of a continuum than that, especially if you look at it through history as modern civilisations emerge from more primitive constructs. You can see it happening today as formerly colonised states come to grips with independence and deal with their tribal past.

"Having an external source of moral authority doesn't guarantee success, but not having one guarantees failure."
I think in your terms there are very few successes, principle among them being America. And I would argue that America is actually quite a pluralistic place. One of the things I admire so much about the declaration of independence is the opening line "We hold these truths to be self-evident...". Not "These truths are self evident, therefore..." or even "We believe these truths to be self evident". I read it as "For the purpose of this declaration, let's not argue about these things...". It means that you can subscribe to it even if you don't believe in a creator or whatever, so long as you don't feel the need to question "all men are created equal etc.".

jez: That's a really interesting point about "we hold"... that's a good way to think of it. Still, I wonder why any secular humanist would agree to such a thing? Just because that's how the majority flows right now so it's practical to go along?

MW: do you believe in god because it's a practical solution to Pascal's wager? I guess not, but it's just as likely as what you ask.

I mean, truthfully, all men are not created equal. There are differences in size, strength, wealth, intellect, temperament etc. even at birth. If you're a calvinist, you believe that the elect are chosen and known to god prior to their lives.

So I guess that neither of us really believes the declaration, bu it's still useful to hold it. I think it's because as a principle it maximises universal freedom, and that is an important and honorable thing. If you want a deeper "why", I could say it's because I enjoy freedom myself and I have empathy. But I really might as well say "just because," as eventually you would have to if I continued to ask "why?" about your god belief.

jez: "Created equal" doesn't mean equal in ability, it means equal in value and importance. Obviously we all have different strengths and weaknesses, but "created equal" means that in spite of that we each has equal worth. Our worth as human beings doesn't derive from our abilities, wealth, or power, but from our creation in God's image.