Letter to a Lapsed Pagan II

[See Letters to a Lapsed Pagan - Index for full list of our correspondence]


Hi Tim

I think a better way to move forward is for me, in this second letter to you, is to directly answer your "WTF is desirism?" question from your first letter.

Given your second letter, although you did not intend it as a second letter as such, I do not think it right to give you homework or require you to look up unfamiliar terms (within reason). Apart from anything else, I hope our correspondence can be a standalone reference to these ideas.
So lets proceed.

Moral Language

First I want to add a point omitted from my first letter and one that nicely dovetails into the following explanation.

One of my concerns, as a sceptic, was the misuse and abuse of moral language, specifically and most often by those who presumed best qualified to use it, religious leaders.

I must emphasize that I am not only concerned with them, as the issue is broader than religions and not all religious leaders (and followers) are culpable. This is an important point but I will not repeat it. Please take it as read.

The issue is that all too often moral language is used to support immoral actions, such as prejudice, bigotry and violence. However too many critics seem to be disabled from using the same type of language, due to their interpretations of what they Moral Inquiry actually is, that, at the very least, they consider Morality not to be objective. They concede much by doing this and this has concerned me for quite a while. Such critics, if nothing else, still concede to religious claims taht thiersis the only basis for moral objectivity, even as any sensible person knows and argues that such theistic-based moral claims are,with respect to objectivity, at least false (or in my view, incoherent, and not even false). 

For a while my approach took to pointing out the many incoherencies and ignorance that no intellectually responsible person would endorse, let alone promote. To use their own supposed morality against them. The classic being “bearing false witness” which many of the theists I was concerned over committed, when they repeatedly misrepresented atheists as communists and immoral and so on. However, those and similar arguments. were either wilfully misunderstood or consistent with their view that we are not their neighbours!

Then I undertook a study of ethics, all of the classics through to much of the work of the present day. Here I was very surprised, as far from there being little to support objective approaches to morality, there were many and from different bases and assumptions. Indeed this is, as I often repeat, where all the action ethics seems to be nowadays. Part of the surprise was I did not get this from many scientific and other critics, who were more concerned to base their views on their own take of morality, including negative or nihilistic ones. Whilst quite a few are quite objective in their approach (as Sam Harris is), there are far too many who are not and either way, none communicated how much is really going on in ethics. The last few years has seen dramatic changes in public awareness but there is still much that has not been covered.

Anyway I sought to find the most empirically adequate explanation of the phenomenon of morality, one that explained more with less, had fewer errors and mistakes than competitors and this is where I discovered and challenged Desire Utilitarianism. Part of testing became for me to, reluctantly I must say, to become an advocate of this theory.

My experience has been that there are about 5 or 6 common criticisms (some from theists, the others from subjectivists and non-cognitivists) and it is clear to me, however often they are repeated that desirism can deal with them. There are many other criticisms and I too still have some but I am not going to second guess you. Lets see what you come up with.

Anyway the underlying goal was is to rehabilitate moral language, so none of us has any qualms about using it, as and where required, particularly and most often, to those who misuse and abuse such language.
In order to do this we need to get behind the language and see what it means. To see if there are empirically adequate referents for these terms,to reduce such terms to their references and analyse the implications of these references without recourse to moral language.

Prescriptions

So what do “ought”, “ought not”, “should”, “should not”, “good”, “bad”, “right” and “wrong” mean?

If one says “you ought not to X” and you ask “why?”, they might reply “because doing X is wrong” or “because X is bad”, These do not really answer the question. In fact these are three different ways of saying the same thing, that is expressing the same proposition. This proposition is a recommendation, it is action-guiding, or, to use the parlance, it is a prescription. This is the real answer to any of the three above responses.

Note at this stage we are not looking at just “moral” usage but in general. For example the same knife might be “good” in one context “sharp enough”, bad in another “dangerous to children” and “bad” in a different way in another context “too blunt to use”. The use of “good” and the two different “bad”s are all prescribing the usage of a knife, such that there are reasons to use it in situations when it is “good”, and reasons not to use it in situations when it is “bad”. And, note, the prescription is often implicit or tacit and inferred from the situation. Regardless of how implicit or explicit it is stated, there is a prescription being expressed.

So what are prescriptions? As hinted above, a prescription is a description of objects under evaluation, the reasons to act and the relation between them – as to whether the reasons to act are to realise or prevent the state of affairs that is the object of the evaluation.

Clearly many descriptions are not prescriptions, since if they do not describe objects of evaluation, reasons to act and the relations between them, they have necessarily failed to provide the components of a prescription. However descriptions that do contain these three components are prescriptions.

Like descriptions in general, prescriptions can be true or false (or cognitive), whether they are, or not, depends on the propositions stated by the prescription.  So the description of an object of evaluation, the reasons to act and the relations between them can be false, if either the reasons to act do not exist, or the relations between the reasons to act and the objects of evaluations are incorrect. If a prescription describes both reasons to act that exist and correct relations between these and the object of evaluations, then it is true.

If “good” does not express such a prescription then it is not a prescription and in contrary to general, common and typical usage, that is redefining good not to be a prescription does too much violence to any pragmatic meaning of the term.

Now if instead, one defines generic good to be about reasons for action to stop or prevent a state of affairs, one has inverted the meaning of good (and bad) and again has done too much violence to any pragmatic meaning of the term.

Given this, saying that a prescription that has reasons not to act (or refrain from acting) or reasons to prevent a state of affairs is good is a false prescription, since one has inverted the relation between reasons to act and the state of affairs for which those reason to act are about.

In short, a prescription is a way of describing value. So this gives us a robust, general, consistent but pragmatic definition of value or generic good to mean  “there are reasons to act of the kind to keep or bring a state of affairs in question” and disvalue or generic bad “that there are reasons to act of the kind to stop or prevent  a state of affairs in question”. These definitions are pragmatic in that this describes how the terms are used, as opposed to what they users think they mean.

Desires as reasons to act

The other way for a prescription to be false is if it refers to reasons to act that do not exist. That is in order for a prescription to be true it is necessary to refer to reasons to act that exist.

The only reasons to act that exist, as far as we know with our current state of knowledge, are desires. Desires are a type of brain state and the only brain states that motivate the agent to keep or bring about the state of affairs that is the object of the desire.

Desires themselves are neither true or false (cognitive) rather they are fulfilled or thwarted (or neither) depending upon whether the state of affairs that is the object of the desires is made or kept true; stopped or prevented from occurring, respectively. By contrast the only other equivalent brain state beliefs are cognitive, they are capable of being true or false (or undecided)

If a prescription contains any other reasons to act, these reasons to act do not exist and the prescription is false. If someone proposes a reason to act that is not a desire, it is up to them to show that it exists, if they cannot, then any prescription based on it is false.

Based on desires being the only reasons to act that exist, we can add a derivative definition of value to mean “such as to fulfil the desires of the kind in question” and disvalue to mean “such as to thwart the desires of the kind in question”.

Note in either form, that value is not intrinsic to any objective feature of the world, nor is intrinsic to any subjective feature of the world (such as a desire). It is extrinsic to both,that is value is relational not subjective nor objective. Nothing here stops us performing an objective examination of these relations as in any other empirical endeavour which can be mostly considered as finding and describing relations between different features of reality. It is this objective examination that I will pursue here.

Agent Reasons

Now my desires are my reasons to act. Your desires are your reasons to act. If I desire a state of affairs and you act, knowingly or inadvertently, directly or indirectly, to prevent or stop that state of affairs, the thwarting of my desire gives me a reason to dissuade you from so acting. And vice versa, if my actions thwart your desire. And so on for everyone else. 

Indeed knowledge of others’s beliefs and desires are very useful as they enable us to predict how others are going to respond to our actions. That is, these prescriptions, whether one to one, one to many, many to one, or many to many, are all predictions.

For example, if you tell me that Alice will not like it if I phi, you are giving me a prediction as a prescription, one based on your (accurate or not) understanding of Alice’s beliefs and desires (their reasons to act) as to how they are likely to respond if I phi. More explicitly you would be saying “Alice has a  reason to dissuade me from doing X, those reasons being that me phi’ing thwarts (what you believe are) one or more of Alice’s desires.”

Social Forces

So how does one go about dissuading someone from an action that thwarts your desires?

What we are trying to do is change actions, but the only actions we can change are voluntary or intentional actions and these are the result of intentions. An intention is, at a minimum, a combination of a belief and a desire, but it is only desires that motivate, so in order to influence actions, one has to influence desire.

Still when people act to fulfil their desires, they do so given their beliefs and, if they have false beliefs, then one could address those false beliefs, using reason and argument. As we know this may or may not work (even if you are correct, and it sometimes works even if you are not!) mostly because their desire to believe overwhelms their desire for truth. Whether you succeed or not in addressing their beliefs, you cannot use reason to alter their desires.

However we can directly influence each others desires using rhetoric - emotive language - through social tools employing commendations and condemnations, praise and blame, honours and demerits, reward, penalties and punishments and behind these are physical tools such as of power, threats and violence, economic tools such as financial rewards and penalties, the legal tools such as (including threats of) civil actions and so on. Everyone, to various degrees, employs some of these and similar tools in their day to day and longer interactions amongst friends, families, colleagues, peers, businesses, strangers and so on. These all serve to change the social environment within which we seek to fulfil our desires, such that our desires are mutually and reciprocally moulding each other.

Now one can only mould desires that are malleable, those that can be modified by the environment. If they are not malleable, then they are unaffected by changes in the environment. So social forces can only be used to influence malleable desires.

Universal Prescriptions

As noted in my previous letter, morality is specifically to do with the  employment of the social forces such as praise and blame, reward and punishment in institutions of morality. What makes moral prescriptions different to prudential, familial, team, work and other prescriptions is, that regardless of how anyone does or does not define moral terms, they are universally prescriptive, they are universally applicable to everyone.

If these were not universally prescriptive, then one could imagine anti-abortionists saying, “we think abortion is murder and so will not have abortions, you do not think it is murder, so go ahead if you want to”. Similarly we do not say “We think bigotry is wrong, you do not, so go ahead and be a bigot” . Clearly this is absurd. It is inherent in usage that moral terms are universally prescriptive.

So given our definitions of value in general and that moral value is to do with universal prescriptions, what are moral values in this same framework?

Since the issue is universal applicability, we are looking at the  value of a desire with respect to everyone. That is a universally good (bad) desire is universally  good (bad) to the degree that it tends to fulfil the desires of everyone’s desires.  Remembering that prescriptions are also predictions, one could say that a universally good desire is one that, all things being equal, generally people have reason to encourage, (these reasons being their desires that this desire tends to fulfil). And a universally bad desire is one that, all things being equal, generally people have reasons to discourage, (these reasons being their desires that this desire tends to thwart). The means of encouragement and discouragement being the social forces, as employed by people generally. If such a prescription is true, it would be an accurate prediction of how people would in fact react.

All things being equal

Of course, in the real world, to various degrees, the distribution of desires in a population and the acceptable and unacceptable usages of the social forces, show that often things are not equal, that many institutions of morality are no operating on a level playing field.

However we both agree on one naturalistic fallacy (there are at least four others), that what is the case does not mean it ought to be the case. So there is no reason to justify things based on the way they are. So how can we  evaluate them?

Well we can evaluate any and all distributions of desires and variable usages of the social forces by comparing this to the all things being equal general situation. So we can say, that in comparison to that scenario, what the individual or group ought and ought not do – whether they listen to us or not (that is up to the effectiveness of the social forces, which we can discuss in a future letter, maybe).

We now have a means of evaluating any individual or group independent of matter of opinion, employing only matter of facts based, of course, only on still provisional and defeasible prescriptions as accurate enough predictions of what people want, all things being equal.

One last point, in this already long letter, is over whether there an implicit “should “ in comparing any scenario to an all things being equal  (or level plain field) scenario.

Actually there are two opposite questions here: one is “why should there be a level playing field?”(even if such universal prescriptions are accurate of it), the opposite question is “why should there not be a level playing field?” . On purely rational and objective grounds, there is no prior basis to prefer one unlevel playing field over another, so the level playing field is the natural default or null hypothesis to engage in such comparisons.

This is not to say that some apparently unlevel playing fields can be rationally and empirically justified, but such justifications must presume a level playing in order to make such successful argument. What I have found is that all the justifications for unlevel playing fields rely upon additional and unsound assumptions and/or formal and informal fallacious reasoning. That is I have only seen unsound, invalid and poor arguments to justify unlevel playing fields, in other words they are not rationally and empirically justified.

Finally

Ok this letter is longer than planned and reflects some issues that I have been debating elsewhere. I could have provided a short paragraph description of desirism as I have done elsewhere and might do again if you request. Still there is enough meat here for you to get your teeth into and examine sceptically. Please fire away!

The Abuse of Social Forces

A common and entirely misleading misunderstanding over desirism is over the desire to torture and similar desires. We will use the desire to torture as an exemplar here.

The desire to torture is a necessarily as well as directly desire thwarting desire, since it requires the thwarting of the victim’s aversion to pain.  Without such thwarting of the victim’s aversion to pain it is not torture.

Consider the torturer who, considerately, gives a pain killer to the victim, so that the victim’s aversion to pain is not thwarted, then surely this defeats the object of the torturer's desires (whether for fun, information, control, fear or otherwise), since the state of affairs that is the target of the desire is not fulfilled, as the state of affairs requires that the victim’s aversion to pain is thwarted. (Other desires of the victim are also directly thwarted, as whilst they are being tortured they are not able to pursue the fulfilment of their other desires, however that can also achieved by imprisonment alone, no torture required, however it is the desire to torture we are considering here)

The main confusion is over the distribution of this desire in a population.  If the desire to torture is present, then either the torturer’s desires is thwarted or the victim’s is. When it is absent, neither types of agent’s desires are thwarted. So it makes no difference how many or how few have this desire, it is still a necessary and directly desire-thwarting desire.

Note this is not always the case, for some desires its presence tends to fulfil other desires, whereas its absence does neither, or worse, tends to thwart other desires. For example a desire for charity or a desire not to harm others.

Another mistake we need to clear up is that the torturer and those who support or are even entertained by this act often have other desires, for which the desire to torture is a means to fulfil those other desires. In such case, those desires can and must be independently evaluated to see if they tend to thwart or fulfil other desires (or neither). If the only means to fulfil those other desires is through promoting or not inhibiting (making it permissible) the desire to torture, then the conclusion is that those are desires that tend to thwart other desires, that is generally people have reason to inhibit such other desires too.

However there is another confusion, over the employment of the social forces. We will investigate that here.

This is usually a response of the form of using the social forces to promote a desire to be tortured, usually in some sub-set of the population. There are a number of issues with this.

First an aversion to pain is not malleable. Whether one provides pharmaceutical (such as pain killers) or genetic modifications, these both defeat the desire to torture itself. What is required is for people to have desire to have their aversion to pain thwarted. Such a desire is a desire thwarting desire with one notable exception. And note this exception does not apply to other similar desires, making this not the best exemplar of its class. However an extension of it servers to make useful point.

There are some circumstances where some people  get “sexually turned on” by having pain inflicted upon them “masochists” and others enjoy inflicting such pain “sadists”. As I understand it, there are limits as to what pain is inflicted and is acceptable. This still looks on the surface like torture but has a significant difference to the general desire we are discussing, namely that it is done by consenting adults and with specific limits. As odd or even disgusting their sexual pursuits might appear to the rest of us, they only seek for it to be permissible and morally neutral, neither to be promoted or inhibited. Indeed there is no reason generally for people to either promote or inhibit such acts between consenting adults.

We can extend this idea. Let us suppose we are a different species where the only way to conceive is through the infliction of pain on each other in the act of sex. Sex without the pain does not lead to conception but is enjoyable. Leaving evolutionary considerations aside, it would be the case the members of that species generally have reason to promote torture and the desire to be tortured in that circumstance. Given this, there would be no need for contraception in that species. Still scientists could have a role here, to discover a way to conceive without inflicting pain on one another. Should there be such a discovery, then then would be no reason to promote torture and the desire to be tortured anymore, and plenty of reasons to promote this discovery. No doubt, there might be some traditionalists, but that would be their choice. The point is that for no desire, even one that is necessarily directly desire thwarting, does it necessarily follow that generally people have reasons to inhibit it. Anyway we are not that species.

This exception aside what is at issue here is affecting people without their consent, especially when a desire to torture is considered as an exemplar for other desires, up to and including a desire for genocide, is that still generally people do not have reasons to promote such a desire.

Still people can use and abuse the social forces.

One could imagine a society where a sub-set of the (human) population are given the choice to be tortured or be killed. In that case they do have reasons to promote a desire to be tortured given the alternatives. But there are obvious moral issues over such alternatives. Unfortunately I find it impossible to imagine any benign alternative that would lead to such people choosing to promote a desire to be tortured against their consent. But let us imagine there is such a benign alternative and it can be promoted by the social forces such that a desire to be tortured is installed in this sub-set of the population, including by the sub-set themselves.

So does this now change the original desire to torture (not this new desire to be tortured) from being a necessarily and directly desire thwarting desire into a desire fulfilling desire, in virtue of this successful application of the social forces?

No. What we are now evaluating is the application of the social forces themselves. We are asking whether generally people should use the social forces this way. That is are the social forces being used as a means to promote a desire that tends to fulfil other desires or a desire that tends to thwart other desires? In this case, the use of the social forces to promote a desire to be tortured is a means to fulfil a desire to torture, which is a desire that generally people have reasons to inhibit.  So in this case, the use of the social forces this way is to be condemned, generally people have many reasons to inhibit the use of the social forces this way.

When seeking to establish whether a desire is to be promoted or inhibited generally, it is not only the current  distribution and strength of the population (or an ad hoc selecting of a population to support a pre-ordained conclusion) that needs to be discounted as confounds, but also how the use of the social forces could be possibly abused. The establishment of what generally people have reason to promote and inhibit is independent of both of any distribution of desires  and any application of the social forces. To repeat the old adage “two wrongs do not make a right”.

Indeed in the past and in many cases in the present, the social forces have and are being abused by the differential power and authority of one sub-set of the population over the rest, often by successfully convincing the rest that this is in their interest. So, when evaluating a population, we are often evaluating their use of the social forces (actual or imagined, as in the above example), by comparing what their social forces are promoting and inhibiting versus what generally people have reason to promote and inhibit.

Remember, the establishment of what desires generally people have reasons to promote and inhibit is a description and prediction of how people will respond to the fulfilment of the desires under consideration. It is in virtue of a desire tending to thwart other desires that the thwarting of these other desires are the reasons the people have to inhibit the desire, it is in virtue of a desire tending  to fulfil other desires that the fulfilling of these other desires are the reasons that people have to promote the desire. This remains the same regardless of how the social forces have been abused and serves to identify whether the social forces are being abused.

So one cannot change a desire that generally people have reasons to inhibit into a desire that generally people have reasons to promote, by the use of the social forces. One can promote a desire that generally people have reasons to inhibit by the use of the social forces, but then generally people have reasons to condemn such use of the social forces. 

Motivational Externalism and Reasons Internalism

In a debate in the comments of a previous post, Richard Wein thinks my position is inconsistent over internalism and externalism. This post is an answer to Richard Wein to explain why it is consistent.

One might ask how it is possible to be a motivational externalist and a reasons internalist? Can one consistently take both positions?

This looks puzzling unless one realises this is possibly why philosophers went to the bother of making the distinction between these two types of internalism and externalism in the first place. That is the conclusion of inconsistency is based is based on thinking that the reasons internalism/ externalism distinction is same distinction as motivational internalism/externalism. They are not, at least as I understand them, as I intend to show here.

I will state these philosophical positions in the terms that I use which will make it obvious why I have these philosophical positions and why they are consistent.

Motivational Internalism and Externalism

Motivational internalism says that if an agent has knowledge of reasons to act that exist then this entails that they have the accompanying reasons to act - that, is they already have reason to act in accordance with such reasons to act. This is clearly false,  the fact that there are reasons to act that exist does not imply that the agent to whom this knowledge is being given has those reasons to act.

The contrary and correct view is that of motivational externalism. This allows that an agent can be aware of reasons to act that exists but these may not be their reasons to act and so they are not motivated to act on them.

Reasons internalism and externalism

Reasons internalism says that only reasons to act that are internal to the agent can motivate the agent. A reasons externalist says reasons to act that exist that are not reasons of the agent can motivate the agent.

Since any agent seeks to fulfil the more and stronger of the desires they have, if they do not have such desires – reasons to act- then those reasons are not internal to them and they will not be motivated to fulfil them.

So I am a reasons internalist.

Consistency

Motivational externalism says that there are prescriptions that agents can be aware of that do not motivate. True when considering the descriptive (cognitive) meaning of a prescription.

Reasons internalism says that unless reasons to act are, in one way or another, internalised, that is made part of the agent’s internal reasons to act, then they will not have any reason to act. True when considering the motivating (non-cognitive) meaning of a prescription.  The process of internalisation being the social forces of praise and blame, reward and punishment.

So both positions are correct and consistent, that is that motivational externalism is true and reasons internalism is true.

WTF is Morality?

This is my first Letter to Tim McGregor and is in reply to his first letter to me WTF is desirism? I am keeping an updated index of our letters in Letters to a Lapsed Pagan – Index. I suggest you read his letter first so that I do not need to repeat what he has already said.

Hi Tim

You asked “WTF is desirism?” and how it compares to your tentative understanding of morality has led you to a form of utilitarianism.

First, there is no reference to desirism (actually it was over the entry “Desire Utilitarianism” – I had not baptised it with the new name then) in Wikipedia due to their policy on what can be regarded as entries in that encyclopaedia.

Still Desirism aka Desire Utilitarianism is a well known theory in online atheist circles.

Much of it was tested in the most popular rational and free thought forum of the recent past, the internet infidels forums. Alonzo Fyfe, the originator of this theory, then launched his own blog the Atheist Ethicist. This blog has been in and out of the top 20 atheists blogs over the last few years.

Luke at CommonsenseAtheism, a new entry into the top 20 atheist blogs, has also become an advocate of this theory.

And I have been writing about it the last two years, although have never consistently pushed this blog for high readerships (and if I had I doubt I would have reached the heights of either Alonzo’s or Luke’s blogs, not just because I don’t have time).

Many other bloggers and commenters have at one time or another endorsed this theory but only us three have been consistent advocates of it. In spite of its general awareness and references to it in online atheist circles this is not regarded as sufficient for a Wikipedia entry.

Now whilst there is considerable overlap in the online atheist and sceptical communities, there are quite significant differences too, so I am not surprised that you had not come across it before. And this leads into how I want to engage with you in these letters, as one sceptic to another.

As we both well know, the sceptical movement developed to fill a gap in two popular areas of human interest – paranormal phenomena and alternative medicine. There was no need to have a sceptical movement in other domains since it was already part and parcel of them, but in these areas it was absent (although, as we all know too well, it is also mostly absent in more areas than we realised, such as finance).

In these two areas, relevant past knowledge and discoveries and their implications were completely ignored, that is the rational and empirical standards that existed elsewhere, however provisional, progressive, dynamic and defeasible - let us call them for short “epistemic norms” - were absent. These epistemic norms were being ignored and broken in spite of the main and strong grounds to justify them and sceptics stepped in point this out.

There were three aspects to this.

The first was to reassert the epistemic norms that exist elsewhere and which, far more often that not, showed that the knowledge claims in these two areas were false. Some were satisfied merely to point out the intellectual negligence, recklessness and  irresponsibility that were required to believe in alternative medicine and the paranormal.

Others sought or answered the charge of “so what, what’s the harm?” by showing the harm, both direct and indirect, that could be caused by denigrating such hard won epistemic norms in other areas. They showed the dangers to physical, financial, emotional and mental health of the ill, the disturbed and the bereaved caused by Big Placebo and New Ageism.

Finally some seek to show how, in spite of there being not a jot of evidence for many of these claims, many still happily promote the bogus claims and other happily want them to be promoted. Why do people want to believe in the bogus, both producers and consumers, why and how are they willing to sacrifice truth on the altar of comfort? Why are rhetoric and sophistry promoted as virtues not vices? They showed all the ways that cognitive and affective biases and distortions of reality are taken advantage of, very often in an entirely self-deluded way, by the gullible.

For a long time sceptics did “not do god”. That was a long known bankrupt path to knowledge, discredited by philosophers and scientists over many centuries, popular only amongst the ignorant. Indeed the grandfather of modern scepticism, certainly of the sceptical movement, Martin Gardner, is a theist, specifically a fideist, which is quite compatible with being the great sceptic and debunker that he is. Still, I am sure he would agree, that over real-world claims, “we have no need of that hypothesis”.

Now other theisms have had much in common with the alternative medical practitioners and their patients, the psychic readers and their clients, but to the degree that those theists made empirical and disconfirmable claims, this was already covered by the sceptics movements in these aforesaid areas.

This all changed after September 11th 2001. This led, amongst other things, to the birth of the “New Atheists”, although there is nothing new in terms of content that I have read from them.  What is new is that now they are both atheists and sceptics and that sceptics now “do do god”. That the sceptical and atheist “movements” are far more aligned and have far more common cause than prior to the 21st century.

In particular, certain theists make many other claims that are not covered by the traditional areas of scepticism, particularly in the area of morality. Many sceptics take the more than reasonable approach that you do and I did, that if god does not exist – and the evidence for that is overwhelming - then any conclusions based on such a false belief fails because it is unsound.

Still some theists disregard such obvious truth and proceed as if god exists and their interpretation of what their god is can and should be imposed on the rest of us. They can make all sort of regressive moral claims than can and does have deleterious affects on our society. This brings up the second and third themes of the traditional sceptics movement. Over the harm these beliefs can cause and why people believe what they do.

Why do I not dismiss theistic-based morality as you do? Well actually I do but I also hold that this is not sufficient to deal with the issues at hand. This has led to another related problem, in that supposed  backwater of philosophy, ethics. This is well aware of the problems of the latter two just mentioned strands of scepticism in this area. You cannot answer the question of the harm that some moralities do, by coming up with a definition of harm which is not question begging. You cannot answer the question of why some believe what they do without seeing what the consequences of such beliefs are, but, again, one needs to determine those consequences without circular reasoning.

The issue is that there is a naivety that infects the New Atheists and 21st century sceptics, not remotely by any means fatally, but that the ethical issues are rarely well considered and very often quite out of date.

The problem is that many have an ill considered view of morality, thinking it is either subjective, relative, non-cognitive or evolved (or even all four) but these positions have been both defended and demolished just as effectively as any traditional moral objectivism, not just divine command theory which as ethicists well know, is actually a species of ethical subjectivism - despite the numerous, incoherent and plaintiff claims of theists to the contrary. And still many people falsely believe that without god there is morality, including many scientists! (Who obviously and mostly conclude that such morality does not exist).

For example, it was a mystery to me why there has been such stimulation as well as controversy over Sam Harris TED talk on science and morality. This is not to say he is correct in his approach, I do not think he is, neither are the Brights.

This is because in ethics all the action in the last 30 odd years, is in moral realism of many varieties, both reductive and non-reductive naturalisms, both desire-based and non-desire-based theories. Pretty much all the leading writers in this field are making arguments within this area not against it. Of course there are a  few subjectivists and non-cognitivists but even they end up arguing for a pragmatic moral realism, whether it is Mackie, who calls his approach Moral Subjectivism (with quite a number of reservations) and that right and wrong are invented or Hare who are argues that moral terms are not truth-apt but universal prescriptions. From multiple meta-ethical positions (where only rational and empirical inquiry are allowed on discussing what morality is) their approach and others all tend to towards a preference satisfaction type of utilitarianism. (In this sense, Tim, you are definitely in the right space).

This can also be seen in the largest ever survey of philosophers, where if you exclude philosophers of religion, there is still a majority of atheists philosophers who support moral realism.

The fact that Sam Harris’s talk has stirred such responses is indicative of how out of alignment and out of date many sceptics and scientists are as to where ethics now is and why it is now there. I suspect that many harbour a suspicion of science based morality dictating to everyone what is right and wrong. However, I will only assert for now, that anyone with a humanistic sensibility has nothing to fear from such results.

In future letters I will directly develop and defend desirism but for now I would say it can be considered a variant of preference satisfaction (note that desirism is only a consequentialist but not utilitarian theory, unlike both naive economic and sophisticated philosophical preference satisfaction) and within moral realism – that prescriptions are truth-apt and some are true.

However I want to finish this latter by answering the question I juxtaposed against your question. WTF is morality?

I am a sceptic about the whole enterprise we could call Moral Inquiry, as a distinct enterprise from Rational and Empirical Inquiry. As a sceptic I have found the idea of such a distinct domain with its own entities, rules of inference, special logic, grammars and psychologies all fail. There is no such thing as Moral Inquiry and even as many  are correctly sceptical of some of the claims of Moral Inquiry, they are not sceptical enough and retain unsound assumptions as they, say, reject (correctly) classical  moral realism, but (incorrectly) accept moral subjectivism, relativism or non-cognitivism. There are indeed truths in all these positions, and valid criticisms of the others, but they all fail due to the fallacy of hasty generalisation. They all fail because they think they are trying to explain something that does not exist, Moral Inquiry. The challenge in talking to anyone on this topic is over what hidden assumptions they presume is required.

The best way to approach this is to assume that there is only Rational and Empirical Inquiry and nothing else. This applies not just to meta-ethics but also descriptive, normative and applied ethics. Having just dismissed Moral Inquiry, what remains?

There is no domain called Morality with a capital “M”, but there is still topic of study called morality, amenable to rational and empirical inquiry. What is this morality with a lower case “m”, if you will? 

This is a common and near-universal feature of social reality – the institution of morality – an institution in the same sense that language, money, marriage and football are social institutions. This institution employs the social forces of praise and blame, reward and punishment, in promoting what is praiseworthy and inhibiting what is blameworthy. We can look to see how internally efficient (in the application of such forces) and externally effective (in the consequences of such forces) any such institution is. We can look to see how what is praiseworthy and blameworthy are determined and explained in such institutions and as to whether all or any are empirically adequately explained, and as to whether that makes any differences.

This is the topic that desirism provides, in my view, the most empirically adequate explanation for. Desirism is a theory based on the least controversial existing theories in related domains, specifically social, cognitive and philosophical psychologies and quite consistent with what we know from biology and society. Desirism is a provisional and defeasible explanation of morality with a lower case “m”, whilst also explaining why people are mistaken in thinking there is something called Moral Inquiry, distinct from rational and empirical inquiry. It better deals with all three features that any good sceptic would cover, over epistemic norms, over harm and over psychologically distorting  motivations than any other theory I have seen.

So, how do we proceed from here? Unfortunately Blogger has broken my indexing and search and there is no sign they are going to fix it. (That is the topic for another post,  for now, if one is starting a blog, do not use blogger). Instead here is Luke’s index into some of my writings relevant here. I have a post  Desire Utilitarianism Online Resources, (for which I need to add Luke’s index into my own posts!).

If you really want some guidance (and bearing in mind some these links might have content that has been revised in the light of criticism), then I suggest what really seeks to get a morality with a small “m” are my posts The Evolutionary Basis of Desire and Beliefs, The Cultural basis of Desires and Beliefs and The Unified Basis of Desires and Beliefs. (Note I called desirism then desire consequentialism). Interesting, Alonzo has just written a great and more compact single post that says very much the same The Emergence of Morality.

Finally there is more you say in your first post than I have addressed here. Specifically over the strengths and weaknesses of your utilitarianism but I see you are aware of the main issues. Whether these letters should be written in parallel or be responses to each other we can decide later. Either you can examine the posts I suggest and respond or I can directly address your utilitarianism in your first letter or give a direct answer as to what desirism is in the second letter. Either way, I hope this will be an interesting and fruitful discussion.