Skip to content

Posts categoriezed as morality

A rampage killer and the problem of “evil”

A rampage killer and the problem of “evil” published on 4 Comments on A rampage killer and the problem of “evil”

“The problem of evil” is the common term for a certain argument against the existence of God. Or at least, the existence of the so-called “omni god”: one who is omniscient (all-knowing), omnibenevolent (all-loving) and omnipotent (all-powerful). The argument goes, basically, that evil would not exist in a universe created by such a deity, because he would know about it, care about it, and be able to prevent it if he had these three qualities. For the purposes of this argument, “evil” is generally defined as suffering– pain and anguish, usually on the part of humans but sometimes in general. Responses to this argument, defenses of the belief that evil could exist in a universe created by such a god, are called theodicy. Generally an argument of theodicy will appeal to free will and assert that humans wouldn’t have it if we weren’t able to commit evil acts, and further that pain and suffering are certainly bad but they’re also the origin of virtues like compassion and altruism. Of course, not all pain and suffering is caused by human behavior– natural disasters are an enormous source for these, but they generally aren’t called “evil” because evil requires an agent. A person is needed to be evil and commit evil acts.

Arguments from either direction on this topic are not terribly convincing to me, in large part because I not only disbelieve in God but also in evil.

I believe in pain and suffering, certainly, but I believe that attributing them to evil explains precisely nothing. And that’s a problem, since it is frequently used to explain things, generally when the pain and suffering is particularly heinous, the speaker has no real idea why they have occurred, and the speaker is either the victim of this pain and suffering and/or sympathizes with the victims. It’s like a place-holder for the actual cause, but more importantly (and more significantly) it tends to stand in the way of identifying and articulating the actual cause. It essentializes the perpetrator of the heinous act, who is labeled the evil one, and therefore the explanatory buck stops with him/her. In order to portray this person as absolutely responsible for his or her act, the label of evil forestalls any explanatory circumstances in the mistaken belief that they would constitute exculpatory circumstances. This is why I call evil supernatural– it’s an idea that there’s some aspect of a person which is distinct and elevated from all causal factors which contributed to his or her behavior. I’m quite willing to say that people can be bad, be immoral, deliberately or mistakenly do things with disastrous consequences for others as well as themselves. But I won’t call them evil, because badness and mistakes can be explained while evil cannot.

Psychologist Roy Baumeister wrote a very important book called Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty, in which he articulates what he calls the “myth of pure evil.” The myth entails the following:

  • Evil is the intentional infliction of harm on people.
  • Evil is driven primarily by the wish to inflict harm merely for the pleasure of doing so (or for no reason at all). Harm inflicted by evil forces is gratuitous and therefore unjustified.
  • The victim is innocent and good.
  • Evil is the other, the enemy, the outsider, the out-group.
  • Evil has been that way since time immemorial.
  • Evil represents the antithesis of order, peace, and stability
These are the characterizations we give the things and the people we want to call evil, because we want to distance ourselves from them and signify at once that we a) are not capable of committing such acts ourselves, and b) certainly didn’t commit any such act in this instance. The worse the act in question becomes, the stronger this impulse is. Suddenly it’s not only permissible but obligatory to use any words of condemnation possible to describe the act and its perpetrator, even if they are not accurate. Recall when Bill Maher lost his job as host of Politically Incorrect because he refused to call the 9/11 terrorists “cowards”? He wasn’t by any means refusing to say that what they did was wrong, and that they are bad people, but he would not describe their actions as cowardly given that they knowingly and willingly were doing something that would necessarily lead to their deaths. But because Maher refused to feed the myth of pure evil, he was viewed as excusing it and therefore at least a little bit evil himself. Describing someone as evil as an explanation for their behavior is a kind of fundamental attribution error— it attributes all responsibility for the act to the nature of the person rather than his or her situation– and people who openly refuse to commit this error risk being viewed as sympathetic to the perpetrator and even to the act itself.
In this context, I want to consider the words of Colorado governor John Hickenlooper about James Holmes, the 24-year-old suspect of Friday’s mass shooting in Aurora:

Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper says the mass killing of a dozen people and wounding of another 58 at a movie theater may not have been political terrorism, but it was the act of a deranged, demonic person who wanted to create intense fear. The Democratic governor appeared on CNN’s “State of the Union” Sunday and says officers are getting a lot more evidence from suspect James Holmes’ apartment and are learning more about him moment by moment. Hickenlooper told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos on “This Week” that Holmes was diabolical and he would have found a way to create this horror even if he did not have access to guns. Hickenlooper says Holmes would have used explosives, poisonous gas or some other method to create the terror.

“Demonic?” Does Hickenlooper actually believe in demons, and that they caused Holmes to murder? I seriously doubt it, although if he does believe that he should be evicted from office as soon as possible. It certainly sounds as though he’s using the word to express the extent of his horror at the act, and it accomplishes that. But unfortunately it also accomplishes something else, an incorrect or at least far too hasty explanation for the killer’s actions. There is no way for Hickenlooper– for any of us– to know at this point whether Holmes is “deranged,” much less “diabolical.” Those two words create an interesting paradox, actually– if by “deranged” Hickenlooper means that Holmes is mentally ill, then that would effectively prevent him from being “diabolical,” since the myth of pure evil entails that the perpetrator commits his or her heinous acts with full knowledge and deliberateness, with a sound mind. That’s how we hold the person fully responsible, morally and legally. People with mental illnesses can certainly be responsible, but if mental illness drives a person to do something like go to a movie theater and open fire on its occupants then I think it’s safe to say that the person was not in full control of his or her faculties, however much thought he put into it beforehand. It is entirely possible to be both disturbed and calculating.

The last similarly horrible event that occurred in Colorado was the shootings at Columbine High School in 1999. Dave Cullen, the journalist who authored the book Columbine, has an editorial in the New York Times today advising extreme caution in interpreting the causes behind this one:

You’ve had 48 hours to reflect on the ghastly shooting in Colorado at a movie theater. You’ve been bombarded with “facts” and opinions about James Holmes’s motives. You have probably expressed your opinion on why he did it. You are probably wrong. I learned that the hard way. In 1999 I lived in Denver and was part of the first wave of reporters to descend on Columbine High School the afternoon it was attacked. I ran with the journalistic pack that created the myths we are still living with. We created those myths for one reason: we were trying to answer the burning question of why, and we were trying to answer it way too soon. I spent 10 years studying Columbine, and we all know what happened there, right? Two outcast loners exacted revenge against the jocks for relentlessly bullying them. Not one bit of that turned out to be true. But the news media jumped to all those conclusions in the first 24 hours, so they are accepted by many people today as fact. The real story is a lot more disturbing. And instructive. At every high school, college and school-safety conference I speak at, I hold up the journals left behind by the killers, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. The audience is shocked at what they learn. Perpetrators of mass murder are usually nothing like our conceptions of them. They are nothing like a vision of pure evil. They are complicated.

Complicated.

Evil is simple. Easy. Practically a write-off. And therein lies both its appeal, and its fundamental mistake.

Being good at slinging a ball around doesn’t make you a hero, part 327

Being good at slinging a ball around doesn’t make you a hero, part 327 published on 2 Comments on Being good at slinging a ball around doesn’t make you a hero, part 327

As the Penn State report is being reviewed, and people are talking about how a man could rape multiple children over a sustained period with the protection of his colleagues, I see explanations of “hero worship” and comparisons to the Catholic church again and again. I won’t say these explanations and comparisons are wrong– after all, Joe Paterno was a hero to many, and his handling of Jerry Sandusky’s behavior did amount to a cover-up and a refusal to allow the law to deal with matters. But I have a simultaneously more specific and more general suggestion for how to avoid such things happening again: stop treating people involved in athletics as role models. Stop treating people who are highly talented athletes or coaches as if they are somewhere therefore morally trustworthy. They are not, and should not be expected to be. They are simply entertainers, akin to singers, actors, or directors. A sporting event is a performance. There is no necessary moral component to performing well.

It is, of course, a form of performance that is incredibly tribal– and by that I don’t mean a fancy dance. I mean that team sports are a kind of entertainment that strongly encourages the formation of alliances on the part of people who have no real direct connection to whatever is happening on the field/pitch/diamond/rink/etc., but who will forge one out of whatever mental materials are available in order to invest themselves in the success of whomever they’re rooting for. That makes the performance far more exciting, because it’s hard to care about the result of a contest between two parties when you have no reason to favor one or the other. And rather scarily, there really is no limit to how deeply entrenched this feeling of investment can go– it can become quite literally an investment, as fans (short for “fanatics”) sink countless dollars into season tickets, jerseys and other paraphernalia, tuning into games via pay-per-view, playing fantasy versions of their favorite sport using their favored players, and so on. For the dedicated sports fan, there is no end of possibilities to pour oneself into support for the particular sports and particular teams that have been made part of that person’s identify. Most people see this as normal. It’s also ubiquitous– sports themselves may vary across the globe, but the value of sports, and the dedication of fans, really doesn’t. It’s rather like religion in that way.

And like religion, sport too often brings the opportunity to give moral esteem to people who have done nothing to earn it. At least in religion these are generally people who aspire to a moral status, but in sports they are simply those who have proven particularly physically adept and genetically fortunate. There is nothing about winning games and making lots of money that is generally understood to improve moral character– you’d think that after years of seeing professional athletes take up hobbies such as dog-fighting, domestic abuse, adultery, and casual bigotry, we’d more than aware of that by now.

People certainly idolize actors and singers, pretending that what they have to say about politics is relevant and that their romantic relationships somehow either reflect or determine the kind that the rest of us have. But we don’t hold them responsible for being good. We don’t assume they are any less likely to be criminals, let alone more likely to be Eagle scouts. Why do we do this to athletes and their trainers?

Here’s a suggestion: Let’s stop.

How to cash in on internet guilt giving

How to cash in on internet guilt giving published on No Comments on How to cash in on internet guilt giving

Note: In case, for some reason, it isn’t clear that I am not trying to disparage any of the people discussed here in the slightest, let me say that I am not trying to disparage anyone discussed here in the slightest. I’m going to describe a phenomenon and how I think it has worked or could work to their benefit, and how I think that happens.

Recently, I’ve seen some people being given a really hard time. Publicly, on the internet, where the world is watching. I don’t mean to diminish the amount of suffering any of them has experienced by comparison with the other two– that’s not the point. The point is that they’ve all been attacked in ways that witnesses recognize as obviously harmful, and what those witnesses have done in response.

  • Jessica Ahlquist is a high school student who realized that a prayer hung on the wall of her public school constitutes a violation of the First Amendment. She decided to sue the school district to have it taken down, and at that moment became hated by classmates, teachers, local politicians, and generally people who consider it a violation to have endorsements of religion removed from public schools. She received a deluge of harassment via Twitter and snail mail, including death threats. The sixteen year old endured a constant stream of hate both before and after she won her lawsuit last year, and probably still does today. A state representative called her an “evil little thing” on a radio show. That phrase was re-appropriated by humanists online who had been following Ahlquist’s story and sympathized with her, and placed on t-shirts sold to raise money on her behalf. The shirts raised $8,320 for a scholarship fund. A fund was also established to just donate money toward her education, which raised $48,353 in total (I don’t know whether that amount includes the t-shirt funding or is separate). 
  • Anita Sarkeesian, about whom I’ve written plenty already, began a Kickstarter project to do a video series on sexism in video games which was greeted with a furor not unlike that about the ending for Mass Effect 3. But in her case it was personal. The promotional video she did for the project was posted on Youtube, where it was blasted with sexist trolling. There were efforts made to cancel her account based on false allegations that it violated Youtube’s terms of service. Her Wikipedia page was defaced with sexist and racist language and  pornographic pictures, and– you could see this coming, right?– she received a torrent of insulting and hateful comments on Twitter, Facebook, some of which included threats of sexual violence. People who were already interested in her project were joined by those who were horrified to see the treatment it– and Sarkeesian herself– received. Ultimately Sarkeesian’s $6,000 Kickstarter project turned into a $158,922 one. 
  • Karen Klein is a 68-year-old bus monitor from New York whose bullying by a group of 7th-graders was caught on video and posted to Facebook, and then Youtube. In the video the students– four boys– call her fat and ugly, and basically suggest in all of the creative ways they can summon that she’s a worthless human being. The video of Klein spread like wildfire even though it’s commonly described as “hard to watch,” and Klein appeared on the Today Show to discuss her experience. A man named Max Sidorov (who doesn’t have any connection to Klein that I can tell) started a fundraising project on Indiegogo to send her on vacation. His initial goal was $5,000, but the project is currently at $677,046 and has nineteen days remaining. 

An article in Forbes by Todd Essig describes why raising so much money for Klein is so easy:

The genius of the “Lets Give Karen -The bus monitor- H Klein A Vacation!” page is the way it made use not of individual psychology nor group psychology but of emerging network psychology. It first created a psychologically aversive state and then provided a relatively frictionless path to feeling better. It’s impossible to watch the video and not feel poisoned and horrified. You watch it and inevitably feel compelled to do something, anything, to get rid of that horrible feeling inside. But what can one person do to improve the human condition? And then, right there on the side of the screen there’s a bright red-pink button shouting at you and everyone else, “CONTRIBUTE NOW.” With a single click you can join the network of the virtuous and be on your way to redemption.

No need to even pick up the phone. Just click, donate, feel good. Insta-altruism. Altruism creates a pleasant feeling in the person who gives as a result of having passed something tangible to the person in need, and that’s why we do it. Our feelings are triggered by the unpleasantness of witnessing someone suffering– even if not in real time– and improved by doing something to help them. End of story.

Except…well, all of the other stuff. Right? Even with the ability to help people instantly, there are certain triggers that make us more likely to instantly help some people rather than others. Neuroscientist Joshua Greene dug up some pretty interesting information on how people regard personal vs. impersonal moral dilemmas. He showed that according to our brain patterns, there’s a clear difference between our reactions to the two– that there’s evidence of a gut impulse which makes us pay more attention and be more sure about helping people in need who are right in front of us rather than distant, even if the distant party has a greater need. So it stands to reason that people are more inclined to help someone, even generously, when the evidence of that person’s suffering is right in front of your face. Greene theorizes that this tendency has evolutionary roots– that we simply didn’t have an adaptive incentive to empathize long-distance because it wasn’t necessary for our ancestors who only had to interact with members of their immediate group.

The internet certainly accomplishes making it seem as if people who are actually quite far away are in fact part of your immediate group, and therefore increasing the likelihood of you feeling the pull of sympathy when seeing them suffer, or seeing people act toward them in ways that would make you suffer. But the suffering–demonstrated or implied– needs to take a certain form in order to get a significant response, and here’s what I think the maximally effective form is:

  1. Be attacked. Have something horrible happen to you as a result of the deliberate actions of others, when you were either minding your own business or in pursuit of a goal that a select audience will find sympathetic. The target’s situation should be familiar or appeal to the audience’s sense of justice, but preferably both. 
  2. The target should be female. I’m sorry guys, but this seems to matter.
  3. The target should not be obviously well-off, so that it doesn’t seem as if she doesn’t need and wouldn’t appreciate financial help.
  4. Have someone set up a way for unconnected strangers who were made privy to this attack to help out financially. The easier the better, and it’s also better if that person is not the target. The fund-raiser should be as distantly connected to the target as possible. 
  5. Here’s what concerns me most– the distribution of the target’s experience, and the appeal by an objective third party, should not happen too often. Otherwise there’s a risk of desensitizing the audience and making them less willing to care, and hence to give. 
This last point is a big indicator of why internet guilt giving is not the solution to the suffering of most human beings. Even if we could videotape every last one as he/she is being attacked and made to suffer and post them all on Youtube, we would not succeed in getting most people perusing Facebook or Twitter in the morning to care. We would simply go into appeals-for-sympathy overload, and it would continue to not work as well for people who are suffering the most– and whose televised experiences Sally Struthers has narrated, which haven’t succeeded in providing for the care of children in third world countries by first world adults. 
I’m not trying to be cynical, and I’m not trying to shame. Really. Not even in the way Essig alludes to at the end of his article, which is to say

On one hand I say bravo. Karen Klein deserved a break. And she got one by winning the social media lottery. But on the other, for those who donated, those who may have taken an online simulation of human contact to be the same as the actual thing, I fear the benefit will be short-lived. I fear a crowd-sourced donation will feed the souls of those giving about as well as a Farmville harvest can feed someone’s body.

I can’t know this, of course, but I think this is the comment of someone who communicates online but doesn’t form relationships on it. The crops and animals you care for in Farmville are not real. The people you form relationships with online are. It might be tempting to focus the few dollars sent via Paypal and say “Relationship? That?” but that misses the point. The relationship is in what triggers a person to send that money in the first place, and the satisfaction he or she feels in having helped a real person in real life. Essig suggests that making such a donation is an act performed in lieu of helping someone in “meat space,” but I would say that this is actually evidence of the bias Joshua Greene describes– that in-person altruism is somehow superior to helping someone across a distance. There certainly isn’t any reason why a person can’t do both, or that his or her entire social life should be summed up in the decision to click a button and send a suffering stranger some cash.

Soul-starving? Souls are supposed to be immaterial, aren’t they? And yet the aid given by an online donation is tangible, based on real feelings and for the purpose of real benefit. I see nothing vacant or vacuous about that.

ETA: Hat tip to Dr. X

What’s wrong with “Don’t rape”

What’s wrong with “Don’t rape” published on 3 Comments on What’s wrong with “Don’t rape”

This post is about why I don’t like this sign:

Trigger warning: A detailed discussion of rape and morality to follow.
Maybe you’ve seen it making the rounds on Facebook or Tumblr. It’s popped up for me a few times, and each time I cringe, but don’t comment to explain why because I’m afraid that my comments will be interpreted to suggest that I disagree with it. I don’t, but I need to some room to say what my problem with it is.
First, I get what the sign (and the person holding it, though I have no idea who she is) is trying to say. The ever-present concern with advising women on how to protect themselves from being raped is that you run the risk of treating rape like a natural disaster. Like some act of God (no, I’m not going to delve too deeply into that) that is just going to happen, no matter what we do, but here are some measures you can take to make it less likely to happen to you. Like rape is a thing that happens; it’s not a thing that some people do to other people. That’s a really bad way to portray it, because it removes the agency from the rapists. If you hear someone complaining about blaming the victim, that’s what she’s talking about– all responsibility for a rape belongs on the rapist, and there are a lot of ways, some of them bizarrely well-intentioned, that end up placing at least some of it on the victim instead. She shouldn’t have been out drinking late. She shouldn’t have been so easy with other guys. She shouldn’t have allowed that guy to take her home instead of her boyfriend. He or she shouldn’t have committed a crime and gotten sent to prison– prison rape is a phenomenon that is often celebrated for males and ignored for females, and I’m not sure which is worse. Even for people who are rapists themselves– there were “jokes” flying around on Friday about Jerry Sandusky’s fate in prison after being convicted of child abuse, and also attempts to shame those making the jokes. The shamers understood that if you are willing to excuse rape under any circumstance, even or especially to laugh about it happening to someone who committed it himself, you detract from the seriousness of rape against every victim. You add a little bit of credibility to the claim that any of them deserved it, and that is unacceptable.
That’s clear and simple, or at least it should be. I prefer things to be clear and simple, as most people do. I favor simplicity to the extent that I think if you can’t explain something simply you probably don’t really understand it yourself, which is not a predominant view in academia but it does explain why my dissertation was short. So you’d think I would be a big fan of the sign above, but I can’t be, because this is a case in which ambiguity is really important. Ambiguity should always be cut out of the picture except when you can’t, and I think this is a time when you can’t. Here’s why:
Rapists don’t always know they’re rapists. So telling them “Don’t rape” will not work, because they don’t realize it applies to them.
Yes, really. In order to unpack that I’m going to need to compare rape to murder, but I hope it’s clear in which regards I think they’re similar and in which I think they are different. See, murder is wrongful killing. The dictionary says it’s illegal killing, but you and I both know that murder would still be murder even if it wasn’t against the law. We know what abortion foes are talking about when they call abortion murder, even if we don’t agree with them. We know what PETA means when it says that people who wear fur or eat meat are accessories to murder, even if we do one or both ourselves. Killing, however, is not always wrong and even abortion foes and PETA are aware of that. The same people who oppose abortion are often just fine with soldiers killing each other on the battlefield or being sent to the electric chair after receiving a death sentence, and they generally would not say no to a big juicy steak if you set one in front of them. The same people who refuse the steak, oppose all war, and regard the death penalty as abhorrent likely see nothing wrong with pulling the plug on someone in a persistent and final vegetative state, mentally. Possibly they would also regard it as acceptable to allow a person in constant pain with no solutions to end his or her life, though the war-mongering meat-eating abortion opponent might shriek in protest. Killing is not necessarily wrong.
Sex is also not necessarily wrong– you’re probably not enjoying the fact that I feel compelled to point this out, because sex should never be wrong. But sex with a child is wrong, and sex with an adult unwilling partner is wrong. It’s so wrong that a lot of opponents of both of these things want to claim that it’s not even sex, because it’s not “about” sexual desire. It’s about power, they say. I get why they say that, and I think it goes to the heart of what’s so wrong about sex without consent– it robs the victim of his/her ability to have control over his/her own body. It takes that control away, and places it squarely in the hands of the rapist. It makes the victim’s body simply a tool for the rapist to use, and in doing so the rapist utterly dehumanizes his/her victim. The rapist renders him/her a non-person, and the victim has to live with the fact of having experienced that for the rest of his/her life. Even if the victim can’t comprehend it at the time of the event, he/she will have this knowledge later. That’s why it’s wrong, even if the experience involves no physical damage or overt threat of such. That’s why it’s still rape even if the victim doesn’t emerge bruised and bloody, or was fourteen years old and not six. That’s why consent matters.
I apologize for saying what probably seems blatantly obvious, and you may think I’m insulting your intelligence just now. If that’s the case I really am sorry, but the fact remains that it’s not obvious to everyone. It’s not obvious to people who compare sex between people of the same gender to sex between an adult and a child or an adult and an animal, and it’s not obvious to rapists. Yes, they might get what’s wrong with leaping out of a dark alley and attacking some woman walking by, but that’s not how most rapes happen. Most rapes are called “acquaintance rapes” because they happen between people who know each other. People who have spent time together before, know each other’s names, may have even expressed an interest in dating. I don’t think that the men (usually men) in these situations who force sex on a woman generally think that what they’re doing is rape. They think it’s “rough sex,” or not even that– that the woman who said no, or was unconscious or very drunk at the time, or was underage but seemed like she wanted it, and had had sex before, was either a willing partner or a partner who didn’t need to be willing. And they apparently think this a lot:

If a survey asks men, for example, if they ever “had sexual intercourse with somone, even though they did not want to, because they were too intoxicated (on alcohol or drugs) to resist your sexual advances,” some of them will say yes, as long as the questions don’t use the “R” word. . . The men in your lives will tell you what they do. As long as the R word doesn’t get attached, rapists do self-report. The guy who says he sees a woman too drunk to know where she is as an opportunity is not joking. He’s telling you how he sees it. The guy who says, “bros before hos”, is asking you to make a pact. The Pact. The social structure that allows the predators to hide in plain sight, to sit at the bar at the same table with everyone, take a target home, rape her, and stay in the same social circle because she can’t or won’t tell anyone, or because nobody does anything if she does. The pact to make excuses, to look for mitigation, to patch things over — to believe that what happens to our friends — what our friends do to our friends — is not (using Whoopi Goldberg’s pathetic apologetics) “rape-rape”.

So the solution, as I see it, is not to say “Don’t rape.” Or rather, not to say just that. You absolutely have to say what rape is and what’s wrong with it as well, because some people really don’t know. And you have to say it often, and guys…you have to say it to your friends. You have to say it so that they don’t have a Pact, and don’t operate under the illusion that they do. It isn’t good enough to simply hate rapists and publicly wish for every horrible thing you can think of (including rape) to happen to them– that’s allowing the most obvious and acknowledged perpetrators of sexual violence to act as scapegoats for the rest, for the “accidental” rapists. It’s actually disturbing rather than touching to see explicit declarations of how much someone would like to punish a convicted rapist, especially a child molester, when they come from men who generally seem to regard women’s sexual consent…loosely. It suggests that their regard is more for women and children’s “innocence” than their autonomy. Hint: rape isn’t bad because it leaves a person tainted. It’s bad because he/she didn’t choose it. Yes, being raped can certainly make a person feel tainted, but that’s an artifact of both his/her control having been taken away and the bizarre, sad cultural construct of sexual purity which says that sex– especially virginity-removing sex– somehow permanently changes a person, usually a woman, into something…lesser. Something worldly, and therefore a little more profane and a little less sacred. Sex is necessary according to this thinking because we can’t make the babies without it (yet), but it lowers a person– especially if they have a lot of it, or enjoy it too much, or have no intention of making babies using it, ever. This is called puritanism, and it’s the friend of pastor and pornographer alike.

But I digress. Point being…we can’t just say “Don’t rape.” We may not be able to stop it altogether, like we’re not going to stop murder, but we can do a lot more toward that end by articulating what it is, why it’s wrong, and not accommodating the thinking that enables it.

Too far from food

Too far from food published on No Comments on Too far from food
What my brain does when it hears the word “steak”

Beatrice Marovich has a fascinating essay at Religion Dispatches called “Eat, Pray, Kill: The Basic  Brutality of Eating,” in which she writes about the ethical quandaries of food in the context of secular morality and religious traditions. It’s fascinating to me both because of the sheer number of different perspectives she manages to cover while following the twisting topic of whether there is an ethical argument to be found, secular or religious, in favor of eating meat, but also because of the jarring awareness it provokes of the kind of cultural context in which a person could write such an essay. A cultural context, that is, of being far from food.

The kind of distance I’m talking about when using the word “far” is geographic– most Americans do not live anywhere near where the majority of the food they consume is produced. But it’s also informational– most Americans do not know very much about what’s in the food they consume, or how it was produced. That’s by necessity to some extent, but it’s also by design. The food we eat is artificially colored and flavored, decorated with pictures of quaint, casual, spacious farms from which it didn’t come, delivered to us out of season from distant lands, filled with chemicals we can’t pronounce, and in general modified within an inch of its non-life into appearing and tasting like something it isn’t. Just reading that previous sentence makes me feel like a curmudgeon, as if these facts are so ordinary and basic that they hardly bear mentioning. But Michael Pollan, who is mentioned in Marovich’s essay, spent more time than anything else in his books discussing the duplicity of large-scale food corporations and the enormous power they wield in perpetuating such, in cooperation with the government. They quite simply do not want us to know what’s in the food, or how it got there. We might demand that it be cleaned up or produced more ethically, or stop eating it altogether. And that all costs money. From the corporations’ perspective, it’s better for us just not to know.

It’s for this reason that the primary question of how to eat ethically continues to be, and is treated in Marovich’s essay as, the matter of eating meat or not. Ethics are about avoiding harm, right? And avoiding harm with regard to food means not killing animals and eating them, right? Weeeelll…..no. Actually it’s a great deal more complicated than that. There’s also the carbon footprint– how much damage is caused to the environment in order to produce this meal? And the blood footprint, which constitutes the sum total of suffering and death involved in getting that meal to you, is about far more than whether that meal is composed solely or mainly of dead animal. What about the animals whose existence was threatened or ended in the process of collecting the non-meat components of your dinner? What about the well-being of the workers who did the collecting and processing, packaging, shipping, and serving? The vast majority of us are food consumers but not producers– we don’t kill the meat we eat. So why should that be the only part of the process of consumption for which we hold ourselves morally responsible? Oh yes…because it’s the most obvious. It’s almost impossible to avoid, and for many of us avoiding it is the last thing we’d want because the presence of meat is either anathema or obligatory in a good meal. That doesn’t mean it’s the only consideration, or even necessarily the most important one.

These are things that are easy to forget when we’re far from food. But what is it like to be close to food?

When Louis recalls first becoming a bloodsucker in Interview With a Vampire, his memory is of having fled his own home in horror at the thought of needing to kill humans to survive, and he is discovered by his amused maker living off the blood of rats in the sewer. It would have been impossible for Louis to become a vegetarian, but you get the impression that he would have done so if he could. Gradually Louis is convinced that dining on humans instead is not only tastier and more dignified but entirely acceptable, because humans are petty, finite, lesser creatures. Most of us never have to encounter a similar shock as children at the thought that we are being asked to eat the flesh of the same creatures we anthropomorphize constantly in books, TV shows, movies, video games, etc. Or at least. any shock that does occur is mild considering that the meat of those animals doesn’t look like those animals, and sometimes doesn’t even look like meat. Almost nobody has to go out into the barn and and slaughter a pig for Sunday ham, or learn how to most efficiently slice a chicken’s throat, and the rarity of anyone doing such things anymore has gone mostly unnoticed. It has just been part of the distancing.

Being close to food seems to inspire ritual, and Marovich’s essay is mostly focused on that, having been inspired in large part by a presentation at Columbia University on religion’s general relationship to animals, which she in turn narrows into a discussion on meat. Food is a thing that is consumed into our bodies (which is kind of bizarre when you think about how rarely that happens otherwise– there’s medication, and that’s about it), there are concerns about purity and pollution, which of course is religiously relevant…goodness, could it be any more religiously relevant, without being sex? But ritual purity and hygienic purity are not quite the same thing, and neither are ritual pollution and actual pollution. A religious rule regarding the avoidance of eating some particular kind of food might be based on actual poisonous or otherwise unsafe properties, or it might be based on poisonous or unsafe properties that the food used to have when the rule was originally devised by doesn’t necessarily any longer, or it might be based on that food’s associative properties as unfit to introduce into the human body. Meat was necessary for our ancestors to eat, and they had to find a way to clearly and firmly articulate what kind of meat was acceptable, and how it must be slaughtered in prepared, in order to make it safe to eat both physically and psychologically. Hence, ritual.

Sustainable farmer Joel Salatin’s TED talk in 2009 was framed in very religious terms:

Salatin is a devout Christian and makes no attempt to hide it. When interviewed about slaughtering chickens for Michael Pollan’s book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Salatin talks about how nobody on his farm slaughters everyday because it’s desensitizing, and claims that priests recognized this concern and spoke against the same people performing continuous slaughter for that reason. Salatin definitely makes the sustainable production of meat and produce a sacred mission, and speaks of it passionately as his calling, his attempt to do service to animals and the earth by acknowledging their interests and the continuous roles they serve for each other– cows and pigs eating grass, chickens following in the path of the livestock and eating the insects attracted to their waste, and contributing their own waste to the land which produces more grass to feed more livestock. It’s for this reason Salatin describes himself as a “grass farmer”– grass, he proposes, is the beginning of everything, the link that is missing in the current CAFO and factory farm production of chickens and cows who are raised solely or primarily on grains, growth hormones, and fat.

That’s not a model that requires a farmer of a particular faith, or really any faith at all, but it does introduce a notion of sacredness that I find very useful– a model of doing things that is very important for reasons that aren’t immediately obvious, for a deep-seated and satisfying purpose. That’s a form of ritual which is repeated not because it’s ritual, but because it remains relevant, remains sacred. A ritual created by someone close to food. We can’t all be anywhere near that close, but we can listen to those who are.

Biased ! = wrong

Biased ! = wrong published on 2 Comments on Biased ! = wrong

Let me say this, right from the start: I love biases. No, I don’t love that they exist, but I think they’re endlessly  fascinating. I love thinking about them, identifying them, figuring out where they come from. Studying biases is how I came to the realization that the way we generally think about human reasoning is mistaken. Humans are not rational creatures who occasionally succumb to a bias which perverts their ordinarily sound, logical thought processes. We are creatures who are practically made of bias, for whom attempts at objectivity (or as close as we can get to it) are counter-intuitive and require effort. A 2003 paper by psychologists Martie Hasleton and David Buss on biases in social judgment begins:

Humans appear to fail miserably when it comes to rational decision making. They ignore base rates when estimating probabilities, commit the sunk cost fallacy, are biased toward confirming their theories, are naively optimistic, take undue credit for lucky accomplishments, and fail to recognize their self-inflicted failures. Moreover, they overestimate the number of others who share their beliefs, demonstrate the hindsight bias, have a poor conception of chance, perceive illusory relationships between noncontingent events, and have an exaggerated sense of control. Failures at rationality do not end there. Humans use external appearances as an erroneous gauge of internal character, falsely believe that their own desirable qualities are unique, can be induced to remember events that never occurred, and systematically misperceive the intentions of the opposite sex

…to give just a few examples. Approaching the matter from an evolutionary standpoint, they then go on to suggest that these biases are not necessarily “design flaws,” (maladaptive traits) but actually features. A suggestion they make in that paper to agree with psychologists Leda Cosmides and John Tooby remains, in its simplicity, one of my favorite things to quote: “[An evolutionary perspective] suggests that the human mind is designed to reason adaptively, not truthfully or even necessarily rationally.”  What does that mean in practice? Well, that understanding the world as it really is, and thinking about it in the most logical possible way, is not necessarily the most efficient way to get your genes into the next generation. Rather, the specific lies we tell ourselves actually make it easier for us to get food, avoid being killed, find mates, and reproduce. If this is the case, we should expect to see people lying to themselves constantly…and we should expect to find ourselves doing the same.

That’s kind of a discomfiting thought. But you get over it. Reading Mistakes Were Made, But Not By Me, for example, had me grinning (though occasionally ruefully) to notice examples of self-justification bias and other means of avoiding cognitive dissonance that I’ve been guilty of numerous times. It still doesn’t remove the sting of being accused of bias by others, especially people who believe that sufficient to discredit what you’re saying. And that is what I’ve been getting to in this post.

See, Ben Radford has a very good essay up today at SheThought about the various accusations of bias he has received on behalf of virtually every group he has written about based on something someone found objectionable in his articles. Most recently it has been complaints about his discussion of a soon-to-be-published book for children called Maggie Goes on a Diet, accusing him of bias for not denouncing the book (before reading it, by the way– none of these commentators have had the opportunity to read it yet) as harmful to young girls’ health and self-image. Radford remarks

I don’t mind the criticisms, it’s the bias accusations that annoy me, and it’s instructive to briefly analyze them. When I question claims about aliens and UFO photographs, critics assert that the only logical reason I would do so is because I have a bias or agenda as part of a government conspiracy to keep the truth from the public. When I question claims about alternative medicine and homeopathy, it’s not because I have researched it and know a lot about it, but because I’m being paid by Big Pharma. When I question claims made by psychics, critics say it’s because I have a bias toward protecting the scientific status quo—or that if I were to accept the reality of psychics it would devastate my worldview. And when I question claims about the links between media images and eating disorders, it can’t be because I know something about it—having studied it for years and written a book about the mass media—but because I hate fat people.

Whether Radford actually is biased against fat people, or whether Maggie Goes on a Diet is, is not the point here. As I said the book isn’t out yet, but you can read his article about the protest against for Discovery here and the rest of his reaction to criticisms at the link above.

The point here is that we all have biases. And there is no harm in pointing them out– in fact, it’s always instructive and useful to do so. However, the simple fact of having biases does not make someone wrong. It might provide some useful psychological information in terms of why they’re wrong…or why they’re right. But it doesn’t tell you which one they actually are. From one of my favorite Ed Brayton posts:

Everyone is biased. If one’s bias leads them to make fundamental errors in reasoning, then point out the errors in reasoning. If it leads them to ignore relevant data or distort the nature of the evidence, then point those things out specifically. If you can’t do either of those things then the accusation of bias doesn’t tell you anything about the validity of the claims being made. This is merely a cognitive shortcut to dismiss someone out of hand rather than engage the arguments being made. So here’s the quote from CS Lewis that sums this up perfectly:  “You must show that a man is wrong before you start explaining why he is wrong… Suppose I think, after doing my accounts, that I have a large balance at the bank. And suppose you want to find out whether this belief of mine is ‘wishful thinking.’ You can never come to any conclusion by examining my psychological condition. Your only chance of finding out is to sit down and work through the sum yourself… If you find my arithmetic correct, then no amount of vapouring about my psychological condition can be anything but a waste of time. If you find my arithmetic wrong, then it may be relevant to explain psychologically how I came to be so bad at my arithmetic…”Spot on. And very useful. The point is that you must first engage the argument on its own terms. Once you’ve defeated the argument, then it’s reasonable to point out that the inaccuracy of the claims may have been due to bias, or wishful thinking, or fear. But until you defeat the argument, you’re not really saying much of anything.

The phenomenon of the petty tyrant

The phenomenon of the petty tyrant published on No Comments on The phenomenon of the petty tyrant

Researchers at the Stanford Graduate School of Business decided to examine the relationship between status and power in how people treat each other. So they organized a study that involved telling participants they would be working on a business exercise with another student, and randomly assigning each participant a role in the project with a different rank, from a low-status “worker” role to that of a high-status “idea producer.” In these exercises the participants were to give orders to their partners with varying degrees of respect conveyed, some orders being more demeaning than others. What the researchers found was that participants with the power to order their partners around but comparatively low status were more likely to issue demeaning orders than those with higher status:

The experiment demonstrated that “individuals in high-power/low-status roles chose more demeaning activities for their partners (e.g., bark like a dog three times) than did those in any other combination of power and status roles.” According to the study, possessing power in the absence of status may have contributed to the acts committed by U.S. soldiers in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in 2004. That incident was reminiscent of behaviors exhibited during the famous Stanford Prison Experiment with undergraduate students that went awry in the early 1970s. In both cases the guards had power, but they lacked respect and admiration in the eyes of others, and in both cases prisoners were treated in extremely demeaning ways. Fast said that he and his colleagues focused on the relationship between power and status because “although a lot of work has looked at these two aspects of hierarchy, it has typically looked at the isolated effects of either power or status, not both. We wanted to understand how those two aspects of hierarchy interact. We predicted that when people have a role that gives them power but lacks status — and the respect that comes with that status — then it can lead to demeaning behaviors. Put simply, it feels bad to be in a low-status position and the power that goes with that role gives them a way to take action on those negative feelings.”

This reminds me of work done by social psychologist Roy Baumeister on the subject of self-esteem. He wanted to find out if it’s really low self-esteem that encourages people to bully each other, as the prevailing story went in the 1980’s. The goal was to discover, as he put it, the relationship between self-esteem and “violence and oppressive actions that so often are tangential or even contrary to the rational pursuit of material self-interest.” What he and colleagues discovered was that in actuality, high self-esteem can cause this kind of violence– if it is coupled with an artificially high sense of one’s own status. When that impression of high status is challenged, a person’s ego is threatened and aggression against the challenger can be the result:

Our main argument . . . does not depict self-esteem as an independent and direct cause of violence. Rather, we propose that the major cause of violence is high self-esteem combined with an ego threat. When favorable views about oneself are questioned, contradicted, impugned, mocked, challenged, or otherwise put in jeopardy, people may aggress. In particular, they will aggress against the source of the threat. In this view, then, aggression emerges from a particular discrepancy between two views of self: a favorable self-appraisal and an external appraisal that is much less favorable. That is, people turn aggressive when they receive feedback that contradicts their favorable views of themselves and implies that they should adopt less favorable views. More to the point, it is mainly the people who refuse to lower their self-appraisals who become violent.  

One might surmise that people are not exactly keen to lower their self-appraisals. So it’s natural to expect that many would attempt to maintain a favorable image of themselves by discouraging expressions that disagree with that view. This can be done by punishing those who have expressed such disagreement or instilling sufficient fear in them that they are unwilling to do so.  Thus is a petty tyrant made: people with power but not much status attempting to make up for such by exerting that power to punish all who oppose them!  Or who say anything remotely negative about them. Or who fail to exercise the proper deference to their authority. Or who look at them funny.

Ken at Popehat used the Stanford (Graduate School) experiments yesterday to describe TSA workers who abuse their authority, and the unwillingness of so many to do or even say anything about it.  Under the headline “Today’s TSA: Even Petty Power Corrupts. Perhaps ESPECIALLY Petty Power,” he writes:

TSA agents are poorly paid, work in nasty conditions, and have little status. Yet they have, within their petty fiefdoms, tremendous power to humiliate and demean. And God, do they ever use it. The fact that this is a recognized psychological phenomenon explains, but does not excuse, any more than it excuses police abuse and bureaucratic indifference. Nor does it excuse the leaders of the TSA and the Department of Homeland security, who have decreed a feckless facade of security theater that is calculated to lead to this result, all in the name of promoting unquestioning compliance.

How does one stop a petty tyrant, or prevent one from being created? Two ways, that I can see:

  1. Don’t give them power, thus cancelling the “tyrant,” or 
  2. Give them recognizable status to be respected, thus cancelling the “petty.”
This is of course a chicken and egg problem. When people recognize appalling abuse of power exercised on a regular basis by those to whom it has been allocated, they will abandon recognition of any status for the group to which the abusers belong. When people who have been given this power observe that they are not being accorded status, they have a motivation to abuse. The only way out is for those who have authority over the potential petty tyrants to both keep a tight rein on the means by which they may exert power and ensure that such power is only wielded for just causes. Crack down hard on the former student hall monitors who, upon observation, can be witnessed as being in it for the ability to wield power. Don’t hire them if possible, don’t give them the opportunity to be abusive while employed, and fire them if caught doing so. When this procedure is not followed, it is to all of our detriment.

Nor does it help to simply instruct people to give respect– the most that can be elicited is a grudging, fearful, and at most temporary silence. As soon as people are out of earshot and/or under cover of anonymity, the doubt and mistrust will return, now exacerbated.  The reasonable person must instead be presented consistently with the impression that the power being asserted over him/her is appropriate, effectively used, and not open to abuse as punishment for lack of respect of the person wielding it. There is no helping the fact that some people will disdain anyone presuming to exert power over them, no matter what. But it remains the responsibility of those doing so to be consistent and fair, not personal, regardless. That is how respect for status is earned and maintained, and petty tyranny avoided.  

Coulda been, shoulda been, never woulda been

Coulda been, shoulda been, never woulda been published on No Comments on Coulda been, shoulda been, never woulda been

Apparently October 9th is National Pro Life Cupcake Day. Did you know? It’s a day when pastries become  political…poor pastries. Pressed into service on behalf of highly controversial issue which doesn’t have, so far as I can tell, any direct connection to wax paper wrappers and frosting. But, one might ask, how is this joyous holiday celebrated? Well…

Here’s how we celebrate: once a year, on October 9th, we would bake as many birthday cupcakes as humanly possible and hand them out for free wherever we can.  When people asked whose birthday it is, we tell them these cupcakes are for celebrating the birthdays of every person who never gets to have a birthday.  People respond in all ways – from refusing the cupcake, to sharing about abortions they’ve had in the past and the regret they carry, to just wanting to know more.

Amanda Marcotte offers up some lovely snark in response:

But really, they’re selling the whole “never will get a birthday” thing short!  After all, there are many, many, many more potential people that never come into existence than just those who may have been but for an abortion. After all, there are children you never had because you use contraception (to be fair, anti-choice activists are also against that).  But there are also children you didn’t have because you didn’t have sex in the first place.  Not fucking is clearly murder in these cases. Every time you’re ovulating and you elect to go to bed alone, you have deprived someone of a birthday!  So women like Lila Rose and Jill Stanek, who claim that contraception is a sin and therefore expect us to believe they simply use abstinence to keep from having babies, are also horrible deprivers-of-birthdays with all that abstaining. Stanek is in her 50s and has only one son, I do believe, meaning she’s deprived approximately 400 children of their chance to have a birthday. That’s a lot of cupcakes!

All I can think of this quote from Richard Dawkins’ book Unweaving the Rainbow:

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.

 Have a cupcake.

Is empathy enough?

Is empathy enough? published on 1 Comment on Is empathy enough?

David Brooks has an interesting essay in the New York Times called The Limits of Empathy. In it he discusses the wealth of research published lately on how empathy works as a psychological response, and makes a case that it can’t and shouldn’t be considered the true foundation for morality. This is because the reaction of empathy doesn’t always kick in when it ideally should, to the extent that it should:

Empathy orients you toward moral action, but it doesn’t seem to help much when that action comes at a personal cost. You may feel a pang for the homeless guy on the other side of the street, but the odds are that you are not going to cross the street to give him a dollar. There have been piles of studies investigating the link between empathy and moral action. Different scholars come to different conclusions, but, in a recent paper, Jesse Prinz, a philosopher at City University of New York, summarized the research this way: “These studies suggest that empathy is not a major player when it comes to moral motivation. Its contribution is negligible in children, modest in adults, and nonexistent when costs are significant.” Other scholars have called empathy a “fragile flower,” easily crushed by self-concern.

And when it does, it is shockingly biased:

Moreover, Prinz argues, empathy often leads people astray. It influences people to care more about cute victims than ugly victims. It leads to nepotism. It subverts justice; juries give lighter sentences to defendants that show sadness. It leads us to react to shocking incidents, like a hurricane, but not longstanding conditions, like global hunger or preventable diseases.

All of this is true. Our sense of affective empathy (empathy as an emotional reaction) is most easily provoked when confronted with suffering of people who are like us and familiar to us.  That group includes family most immediately, but can extend toward members of virtually any group who are better known and more like us than those who are not.  Neighbors over non-neighbors. People who go to the same church over those who don’t, or don’t go to church at all. People of the same color vs. another race, people from the same town/state/country before foreigners. Bros before hos*. Preferential empathy isn’t antipathy, it’s important to note…but it can turn into it, given that allegiances with some people tend to create enemies out of the others.

Still, I find that a kind of odd criticism of empathy– that it isn’t all-encompassing, therefore it can’t be a good moral foundation. Psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen, best known for his work on autism, has written that having a deficient theory of mind (the term for our capacity to recognize and understand the thoughts and goals of others) makes it harder for people with autism to experience affective empathy.  But that certainly doesn’t make them into psychopaths.  Instead, it can lead to the creation of a more explicit, removed form of empathy– one based on broad notions of justice rather than being moved by the suffering of someone specific. I find it entirely fitting to use “empathy” as a term for this because the belief that it’s wrong to punish or reward people unequally for the same acts (for example) requires a sense of fairness, and a sense of fairness comes out of an ability to put oneself in the place of someone who is treated unfairly.  This is called the simulation theory of empathy– understanding what a person is thinking and feeling by approximating their situation as best as you can, drawing on your own experiences.  When your theory of mind is just that– a theory– this is how empathy works for you. Cognitively, rather than as an intuitive response.  This way of thinking might have the advantage of provoking people toward a consistent theory of justice, one which isn’t as subject to the biases discussed above.

Brooks concludes:

Think of anybody you admire. They probably have some talent for fellow-feeling, but it is overshadowed by their sense of obligation to some religious, military, social or philosophic code. They would feel a sense of shame or guilt if they didn’t live up to the code. The code tells them when they deserve public admiration or dishonor. The code helps them evaluate other people’s feelings, not just share them.

This is absolutely true. But from what I can tell, that is empathy, if it starts with a consideration for how others must feel and think. We all build our own codes– from scratch possibly, but for the vast majority of us something more like an amalgamation of those developed from people who came before us, cobbled together and modified as we’ve seen fit. If that codification is centered around being fair and not causing suffering, then it seems right to call it empathy-based.

*If ever an expression merited an immediate karmic punishment from the universe….

Suppositions

Suppositions published on No Comments on Suppositions
Human nature, by Junior Lopes

Here are a few…let’s call them suppositions I’ve reached in the process of doing a very cultural degree program followed by a very cognitive one:

1. Perspective always matters. None of us are truly objective, because we speak from a perspective by necessity. But by seeking out and being informed by the perspectives of others, we can come closer to objectivity. The truly objective is that which is true or existent independent of our perspectives, however, and cannot be determined by simply adding up subjective views. If nine out of ten people think Beck is the best musical artist ever, that’s useful information. It does not mean that Beck is objectively the best musical artist ever. You can’t vote on the sex of a rabbit, etc.

2. Perspectives often differ as a result of distributions of power. The more powerful often speak more loudly and are easier to hear. Power may come from many sources–sheer numbers, monetary wealth, physical strength, influence, and so on. While the perspectives of the less powerful are important because they can include insights that are simply overlooked by the powerful, they are not right simply by virtue of being relatively powerless. If you added up all of the kinds of non-privilege in the world and found them all existing in one person, that person would not be the wisest human being ever. But he/she would probably have a hell of a story to tell, and it’s one we should hear.

3. There is such a thing as human nature, but we are not biological robots. We are both natured and nurtured. Biological determinism and strict social constructivism are both telling partial stories which are thereby incorrect stories. A person who thinks a trait of the human mind is more biologically determined than you do is not necessarily a biological determinist, and a person who thinks the trait is more shaped by society is not necessarily a strict social constructivist. People who focus on culture tend to fixate on difference while people who focus on cognition tend to focus on commonalities. This does not make them enemies, but collaborators (that is, if they’re willing to be). “Biological” and “neurological” do not mean “permanent,” and “cultural” does not mean “easily/quickly mutable.”

4. Nor do those classifications mean the abdication of responsibility or legitimization of normativity.  Our minds are built by both biological evolution and the culture around us, and saying that a certain trait is adaptive no more confirms that it is good than does saying something is a message sent by society.  Neither evolution nor society have “wants.” They are both complex forces that shape people without purpose. We as individuals take what we’re given and decide what to do with it. We don’t hand responsibility over to either force, but share it with them. Free will– the kind of free will worth wanting– is created in the exchange.

These are all very general “planks” of my thinking about how minds work, but I thought it important to jot them down because holding these suppositions says a lot about what I do or don’t find surprising, likely, or moral. For example, you’re not likely to arouse outrage in me at the idea that rape is an evolutionarily adaptive trait. It might be completely untrue, but the very idea won’t offend me because I know that doesn’t remotely mean that rape is good, prudent, or hard to avoid committing. I’m already very familiar with the idea that war, sexual deception and jealousy, religion, and more biases than could possibly be conceived may well be adaptive, and those possibilities are interesting in terms of their explanatory value but hardly threatening. And to return to Stephen Pinker-think, nothing we discover about the human mind is going to legitimize rape.  If someone claims otherwise, they’re doing science wrong. Or not doing it at all.