Building an argument on emotional biases happens, but that doesn’t make it true

Gene Roddenberry has often pissed me off. He didn’t invent the stereotype, but he certainly crystallized it in popular culture with his Star Trek character, Mr Spock. What is the end result of intelligence and education? Why, an emotionless robot who assesses impossible probabilities instantaneously in his head and denies love and friendship. It’s a caricature I run into all the time — I’ve lost count of the number of emails I’ve received informing me that True Scientists™ do not get angry about anything, and therefore everything I say is invalid. It’s annoying, but mainly what it tells me is that the correspondent doesn’t know any scientists at all.

Guess what, people? Scientists are human beings! We’re even aware of it, because there human/emotional/fun/expressive/imaginative things we like to do! This is also true of atheists, who contrary to popular opinion, are not grim and bloodless beings out to grind feelings out of existence. (You can imagine the kinds of fantasies about their existence that godless scientists hear all the time.)

The latest perpetrator of this idiotic and tiresome canard is that epitome of dull-witted mediocrity, the columnist David Brooks. And it’s not just the atheist scientists he snipes at, but a lot of other things, as you might guess from the presumptuous title of his latest column, The End of Philosophy. The reason for his argument? The amazing (to him) discovery that human beings are not rational, which leads him to conclude that reason isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

It seems Mr Brooks has just now discovered the work of Jonathan Haidt, who has found that many moral judgments are not the product of reason, but of emotional responses — the reasoning is after the fact, and is usually nothing but an exercise in rationalizing a decision that was already made. This is not surprising, an assessment which is not intended to denigrate Haidt’s work, which has done a good job of testing and affirming that idea. We are not rational actors, and we know this … even those of us who are supposed to don pointy ears and pretend to be a Vulcan.

Where Brooks falls flat on his face is his unthinking adoption of the naturalistic fallacy — the idea that if many of our moral decisions are the product of snap judgments built on emotional responses, then all that hoity-toity philosophy and thinking about what is good and what is right to do are irrelevant and wrong. Reason just doesn’t matter, emotion is primal and dominant, and therefore, this is the way we should think.

I would like to suggest some remedial reading in the philosophy of reason vs. emotion; I strongly recommend that classic treatise in the subject, Dr Seuss’s Green Eggs and Ham. It’s beautifully written and clear, and most of us — even us atheist scientists — learned the story in kindergarten. There seems to be a gap in Mr Brooks’ education.

That is the real problem here. You won’t get any argument from me that most moral decisions are built more on wishful thinking or disgust or blind prejudice — I will concede that point, and throw in many examples that I know about to support it further. The question is whether that is the best way to make decisions, and I would say that in many cases it is not, that it leads us astray, and that what this property of human nature tells us is that we need philosophy and reason even more to help us correct a flaw in our makeup.

It’s the same thing biologists have been saying since Darwin. Nature may be a bloody tyrant that is ruthless in its execution, but that does not imply that human beings must model their behavior after natural selection. Rather, what we should do as sentient beings is act to create a society that balances the harshness of evolution with a culture that tries to elevate virtues like reason and social justice and equality. Similarly, if emotion tells us to recoil from harmless behaviors, maybe we should counter that with practiced reason, rather than simply succumbing to our biases.

Maybe, if David Brooks were not embracing any excuse to justify his prejudices and were instead trying to think rationally, he would hesitate before saying stupid things like this:

The rise and now dominance of this emotional approach to morality is an epochal change. It challenges all sorts of traditions. It challenges the bookish way philosophy is conceived by most people. It challenges the Talmudic tradition, with its hyper-rational scrutiny of texts. It challenges the new atheists, who see themselves involved in a war of reason against faith and who have an unwarranted faith in the power of pure reason and in the purity of their own reasoning.

There’s that cartoon again. The atheists are not convinced of the purity of their reasoning — we know the human mind is flawed and easily twisted askew from reality. That’s precisely why we demand verifiable, empirical evidence for truth claims. It is not enough to simply say you know the answer and it is right, we expect you to show your work, and we’re going to reject claims, like those of faith, that insist on an unwarranted certainty of the possession of knowledge. The idea that humans are emotional and make choices on weak grounds is not at all antithetical to our goals, but instead explains why it is more important that we critically self-analyze and inspect all of these religious arguments with more skepticism.

I hate to admit it, but it’s also not a strike against Talmudic reasoning, which tries to ground decisions in law and tradition. That is also an ongoing effort to overcome the fallacies of the appeal to transient passions. (I would argue that the focus on old texts is invalid, however, so don’t imagine that I’ve gone soft on Judaism.)

And finally, Brooks closes with a whole string of nonsense.

Finally, it should also challenge the very scientists who study morality. They’re good at explaining how people make judgments about harm and fairness, but they still struggle to explain the feelings of awe, transcendence, patriotism, joy and self-sacrifice, which are not ancillary to most people’s moral experiences, but central. The evolutionary approach also leads many scientists to neglect the concept of individual responsibility and makes it hard for them to appreciate that most people struggle toward goodness, not as a means, but as an end in itself.

He begins by approvingly citing Jonathan Haidt, whose work is describing the emotional basis of moral decision-making. Now he tells us that scientists are challenged and struggling. Mr Brooks: Jonathan Haidt is a scientist. Think about it.

Feelings of transcendence exist, and no one denies it. Those feelings seem to be rather easily triggered by a whole host of phenomena, from a focal seizure to a morning in ritual to a beautiful sunset. We don’t neglect the phenomenon, but it does seem to be a poor mechanism for achieving an understanding of physics. There is more to the universe than morality and feelings, you see, and what I would argue is not that emotions like those listed don’t exist or are unimportant, but that they have a place, and it is not as sufficient evidence for how the world works.

As for this strange idea that the evolutionary approach says nothing about individual responsibility…I have no idea what the man is talking about, other than that he is blithering ignorantly. I strongly urge that Mr Brooks try using his cerebral cortex in addition to his brain stem and hypothalamus when writing — that’s another of those areas where emotional prejudices need to be supplemented with reason and knowledge.

Crezi in Dumnezeu?

In Pharyngula’s ongoing campaign of world-wide internet poll domination, how could I resist an opportunity to crash a poll in Romania? Scroll down a bit and look on the left side of the page to find this one.

Crezi in Dumnezeu? (Do you believe in God?)

da, el ma calauzeste! (Yes, he is guiding me!)
52.1%
da, dar in felul meu (Yes, in my own way)
34.1%
nu exista (Doesn’t exist)
9.3%
nu, dar o forta superioara exista (No, but a higher force exists)
2.9%
nu, cred in altceva (No, I believe in another thing)
1.6%

9.3% isn’t bad, but perhaps that number will shift a little bit.

I’m also pleased to have learned my first few words in Romanian, and am now prepared to travel there and have a 5 second conversation about atheism.

So that’s what “Focus on the Family” means

James Dobson always seemed a little too obsessed with spanking and checking out penises to be entirely healthy, and now one of his employees has been outed as a pedophile.

Juan Alberto Ovalle, 42, thought he was corresponding with a girl under the age of 15, but instead it was undercover officers with the Jefferson County district attorney’s office, according to court documents.
Ovalle works for a Spanish-speaking arm of the Colorado Springs Christian group Focus on the Family and narrates Biblical text for CDs, according to Internet websites that sell the products.

“We’re shocked,” said Gary Schneeberger, a spokesman with Focus.

Schneeberger said the group “is beginning its own process of looking into the allegations” and that it “will work with authorities” if asked.

…Ovalle asked the teen specific sexual questions and told her about sex acts he would perform with her, according to an arrest affidavit. According to the affidavit, during one exchange, Ovalle asked: “Would you like to meet?”

What is it with these repressed, abstinence-only organizations that promote unrealistic views of sex? They seem to attract people with warped views of sexual behavior that violate reasonable patterns of respect for a partner.

It’s been five years, Paul Nelson!

Once upon a time, a creationist invented a brand new pseudo-scientific term, which he even presented at a scientific conference. It was a very, very silly idea called “ontogenetic depth”. I criticized the idea publicly and viciously, pointing out that the concept had no explanation, no methodology, and had produced no results, which prompted the creationist, Paul Nelson, to promise to present us all with a detailed explanation “tomorrow”.

We’ve been waiting for a little while for tomorrow to get here. Paul Nelson promised us an answer tomorrow 5 years ago.

Ever since, we celebrate Paul Nelson day every year on 7 April. Richard Hoppe jumped the gun and announced it last week, which is OK — Nelson did drag out the promises for quite a while, and the 7th was a somewhat arbitrary choice. Last year, I suggested a simple and appropriate way to commemorate the event.

In his honor, we should all make it a point to ask people “How do you know that?” today, and the ones who actually can explain themselves competently will be complimented by being told that they’re no Paul Nelson.

It’s kind of like the folk tradition of chasing away demons on certain days of the year, only what we do is terrify creationists by roaming about demanding that they fork over evidence, at which time they scurry away and hide. Have fun!

By the way, I said something else last year.

We’ll celebrate it again next year, I’m sure.

I’m a prophet. We’ll have another chance next year, too.

Wingnut meltdown imminent

President Obama speaking to the Turkish press:

I’ve said before that one of the great strengths of the United States is, although as I mentioned we have a very large Christian population, we do not consider ourselves a Christian nation or a Jewish nation or a Muslim nation. We consider ourselves a nation of citizens who are bound by ideals and a set of values.

This is going to be fun.

Guess why the economy is a mess?

Isn’t it obvious? It’s all the atheist’s fault! Some goober named David Lebedoff has an article in the Strib that claims that the whole source of the problem is all those amoral, atheistic people who don’t believe in an afterlife.

If you only go around once, then the main thing is to have fun. If you start by admitting that from cradle to tomb it isn’t that long of a stay, then life is a cabaret, old chum, and so, by the way, is Wall Street. There is a bumper sticker favored by some of the recently rich that proclaims “he who dies with the most toys wins.” This is indeed the moral philosophy of those who believe that death is the final closing bell. Materialism, hedonism and Stairmasters are what people do until the clock stops ticking.

I had no idea that Wall Street was run by atheists, or that the government was run by atheists, or that Christians and Jews and Moslems were never, ever interested in material possessions (I just knew that whole Prosperity Gospel thing was a weird confabulation of my imagination).

But, speaking as a fairly strong atheist, I have to protest. The absence of an afterlife means that this life is all I’ve got, and I’d like to live it well — there are no do-overs or second chances. I don’t have the excuse that “God would never allow harm to come to the planet” or “Jesus will forgive my sins and let me live in paradise”. If I screw up now, that’s all there is. I also share normal concerns that even after I die, I want my kids (and grandkids, if such should happen, although I’m much too young for that yet) and friends to live good lives. Not believing in a magical afterlife doesn’t change that, and actually tends to make things like preparing for the future, being a good steward of my resources, educating future generations, etc., even more important.

Mr Lebedoff is a victim of a failure of comprehension. He doesn’t understand atheists at all, and he imagines in his simple-minded way that we’re all mindless hedonists rushing to burn out fast.

By the way, that phrase, “he who dies with the most toys wins”, makes no sense to most atheists. He who dies is dead, full stop. Toys don’t matter at that point.

Temporary full-time job opening in cell and microbiology at UMM

Full-Time, One-Year Faculty Position in Biology

University of Minnesota, Morris

The University of Minnesota, Morris seeks an individual committed to excellence in undergraduate education, to fill a full-time, one-year position in biology beginning August 17, 2009. Responsibilities include: teaching undergraduate biology courses including an introductory level cell biology course for majors (with lab), an upper-level microbiology course for majors (with lab), and contributing to other courses that support the biology curriculum. Excellent fringe benefits and a collegial atmosphere accompany the position. The standard teaching load is twenty credit hours per year.
Candidates must be at least A.B.D. in cell biology, microbiology, or a closely related field by August 17, 2009. Experience and evidence of excellence in teaching undergraduate biology is required. (Graduate TA experience is acceptable). Preference will be given to applicants having the Ph.D. in hand. 

The University of Minnesota, Morris (UMM) is one of the top public liberal arts colleges in the nation. As one of five campuses of the University of Minnesota, UMM has a unique mission and offers the best of both in the world of higher education–a small, close-knit campus complemented by the power of a world-renowned research University system. UMM is located 160 miles WNW of Minneapolis in a small (5000) rural community.  Our student body is diverse (16% students of color) and academically well-prepared, with 63% earning an ACT comprehensive score of 25 or higher and over 50% drawn from the top 25% of their high school classes.  Our faculty have received 33 of the University system’s highest teaching award and are very active in research and publication.  To learn more about the University of Minnesota, Morris visit our website at http://www.morris.umn.edu.

Applications must include a letter of application, resume, transcripts, a teaching statement with evidence of teaching effectiveness, and three letters of reference. Send applications to:

Biology Search Committee Chair
Division of Science and Mathematics
University of Minnesota, Morris
Morris, MN 56267-2128

Applications will be accepted until the position is filled. Screening begins April 17, 2009. Inquiries can be made to Ann Kolden, Executive Office and Administrative Specialist, at (320) 589-6301 or koldenal@morris.umn.edu.
The University of Minnesota is an equal opportunity educator and employer.  We are committed to the policy that all persons shall have equal access to its programs, facilities, and employment without regard to race, color, creed, religion, national origin, sex, age, marital status, disability, public assistance status, veteran status, or sexual orientation.  To request disability accommodations, please contact Sarah Mattson at 320-589-6021.