Morality, Religion & Philosophy: January 2006 Archives
Although I'm not a Catholic, it sounds to me as if Pope Benedict's recent encyclical about love is on the money (at least based on this summary).
In the 71-page document "God is Love," Benedict explored the relationship between the erotic love between man and woman, referred to by the term "eros," and the Greek word for the unconditional, self- giving love, "agape" (pronounced AH-gah-pay).He said the two concepts are most unified in marriage between man and woman, in which a covetous love grows into the self-giving love of the other, as well as God's unconditional love for mankind. ...
"Here we are actually dealing with a debasement of the human body: no longer is it integrated into our overall existential freedom; no longer is it a vital expression of our whole being, but it is more or less relegated to the purely biological sphere," he said.
The Pope also made some important points about the different roles of churches and governments.
He rejected the criticism of charity found in Marxist thought, which holds that charity is merely an excuse by the rich to keep the poor in their place when the wealthy should be working for a more just society.While the Marxist model, in which the state tries to provide for every social need, responded to the plight of the poor faster than even the church did during the Industrial Revolution, it was a failed experiment because it couldn't meet every human need, he wrote.
Even in the most just societies, charity will always be necessary, he said. ...
Benedict stressed that the state alone is responsible for creating that just society, not the church. "As a political task, this cannot be the church's immediate responsibility," he said. ...
"We do not need a state which regulates and controls everything, but a state which ... generously acknowledges and supports initiatives arising from the different social forces and combines spontaneity with closeness to those in need," he wrote.
Interestingly, that sounds a lot like President Bush's "faith-based initiative" that is attempting to loosen the red tape that often hinders the involvement of American religious charities in government-sponsored programs.
Let's say some scientist develops an artificially intelligent program that, to a layman, can interact in a human-like manner and seems to be as intelligent as a human. To the scientist, the program is no more than a set of instructions in a text file that can be modified at will, compiled, copied, deleted, and so forth. The scientist does not perceive the program to be "alive" or even "intelligent" in any meaningful sense, because at any instant the program is simply responding to its inputs in the way the programmer has designed it to. To the layman the program may appear to be intelligent, personable, and self-aware, but to the scientist this appearance is just a facade.
Is there a substantial difference between the program and a human? Is the only difference that someone knows how the program works, but no one knows how a human works? If they behave the same, are they the same? Or is there more to humanity than appearance? If someone were capable of "programming" a biological human, would that put the human and the computer program on the same level?
How would a secular materialist morally distinguish between the program and a human? Is it cruel for the scientist to terminate the program every night before he goes home? Is it cruel for him to tweak the program and prod it to see how it responds to various stimuli? A self-aware program might very well be designed to feel anguish at the prospect of being turned off, but is that anguish "real" or morally substantial? If it is real, is it ok for the programmer to tweak the program so that it no longer feels such anguish? How is that different from a cult leader who convinces his followers that if they drink the kool-aid they'll be taken up to live on a comet?
If such a program can react in a human-like manner, can we use it as a torture simulator? Perhaps our interrogators need to experiment to find the most reliable methods for extracting truthful information from prisoners. We don't want to cause undue pain to actual humans, but perhaps we could torture a sufficiently human-like program and see how it reacts.
What's more, in order to improve this program we will certainly need to perform experiments on it to verify its operation and test its limits. We will need to duplicate it, put it into confrontational situations, create families and groups of human-like programs and watch them interact, and so forth. To the scientist who wrote the program, these permutations will probably be morally irrelevant, but the layman observing the process will likely encounter situations that appear to be quite troubling. Are they?
Although I have libertarian sympathies I'd label myself more as a conservative than as a libertarian, mainly because I just don't think pure libertarianism can work. Why? Because humans aren't rational and we very often do things that aren't in our best interests, and when a critical mass of society lives miserable lives because of their own poor choices it's certain to bring the rest of us down as well. The externalities are unavoidable. Case in point: a significant percentage of people simply can't handle their own finances -- this article is about the UK, but I'm confident the situation is even worse in the US.
A debt-fuelled spending splurge at Christmas is set to push thousands of individuals into crisis and cause record bankruptcies in coming months as consumers struggle to pay off credit cards. According to the accountancy firm Grant Thornton, at least 20,000 people in England and Wales will become insolvent by the end of the quarter in March, and 66,000 individuals by the end of 2006. Both figures would be the highest since records of personal debt began 45 years ago.Shoppers are thought to have been tempted into splashing out more than they could afford on food and presents at Christmas and on bargains in the new year sales. After a slow start retailers reported brisk business in December, and the bill for Christmas is almost certain to top the £10bn of 2004. The spree comes as personal insolvency surges at an annual rate of more than 30 per cent. Citizens' Advice Bureaux are reporting "huge numbers" of debt calls, and the Consumer Credit Counselling Service predicts bankruptcies will double in the next few years.
If people can't even handle credit cards, why do libertarians think they can handle, say, addictive drugs? Well, many libertarians don't, but respond to the philisophical difficulty by dismissing it and abandoning anyone who can't handle themselves to their own folly. But few people would argue that returning to an age of debtors prisons would be more desirable than a few governmental restrictions on borrowing and lending.
The key is "a few". Any regulations can go overboard, and bureaucracies have a tendency to expand to attempt to control anything they can get the budget for, so there's a fine line to walk to find the optimal level of liberty. I think we could do with a lot less regulation than we have now in most areas, but there are some that could do with a little more public oversight.
