Philosophy On The Mesa

I often hear people claim that religion provides a foundation or framework for morality. Well, it certainly isn’t a sufficient condition.

Army Spc. Jeremy Hall was a practicing Baptist until he lost his faith while serving in Iraq.

“His sudden lack of faith, he said, cost him his military career and put his life at risk. Hall said his life was threatened by other troops and the military assigned a full-time bodyguard to protect him out of fear for his safety.”

I had thought that a good shepherd seeks out and encourages a lost sheep to return to the flock, if only to protect his investment. But I guess I was wrong. A good shepherd just shoots the lost sheep.

And then we have this little gem from the “inflatable crisis doll” file.

“Webster Cook says he smuggled a Eucharist, a small bread wafer that to Catholics symbolic of the Body of Christ after a priest blesses it, out of mass, didn’t eat it as he was supposed to do, but instead walked with it.

Catholics worldwide became furious.   

Webster’s friend, who didn’t want to show his face, said he took the Eucharist, to show him what it meant to Catholics.

Webster gave the wafer back, but the Catholic League, a national watchdog organization for Catholic rights claims that is not enough.

 ’We don’t know 100% what Mr. Cooks motivation was,” said Susan Fani a spokesperson with the local Catholic diocese.  “However, if anything were to qualify as a hate crime, to us this seems like this might be it.”’

Walking off with a symbolic cookie is a hate crime, even when the motivation isn’t clear?

“It is hurtful,” said Father Migeul Gonzalez with the Diocese. “Imagine if they kidnapped somebody and you make a plea for that individual to please return that loved one to the family.”

Stealing a symbolic cookie is like kidnapping?

To make matters worse, Catholics are so upset about this that Cook is now receiving death threats. Does this remind you of one of those other religions so often in the news?

But the story doesn’t end here, because inflatable dolls are just so attractive. The master of “inflatable doll outrage”, Bill Donahue President of the Catholic League, has weighed in:

“For a student to disrupt Mass by taking the Body of Christ hostage–regardless of the alleged nature of his grievance–is beyond hate speech. That is why the UCF administration needs to act swiftly and decisively in seeing that justice is done. All options should be on the table, including expulsion.”

Intrepid blogger and biology professor P.Z. Meyers took Donahue and Catholics to task for turning cookie abuse into a hate crime, and now he is receiving death threats, while his university is receiving demands that Meyers be fired.

There are a lot of things I could say about this, but Myers is better at snark that I am, and I don’t want my President to receive demands for my dismissal.

 So let me just make a philosophical point. If a collection of ideas or commitments is to serve as a foundation or framework for moral conduct, it must provide its adherents with the proper motives for ethical conduct and a set of principles or narratives that enable people to make defensible judgments about the treatment of persons. If it doesn’t do this, it really can’t make a claim to be a foundation or framework for moral conduct.

There are some religious perspectives that, as foundations, are developing some very serious cracks.

An interesting case happening in Denmark: a religious organization (Faderhuset, the Father House, a Christian organization) has been reported as having encouraged its members to use physical violence and other harsh methods as the preferred form of discipline toward their children, based on selected quotes from the Bible. Cases are being investgated involving severe corporal punishment of small children. This in itself will make most of us cringe, but here comes the interesting moral issue: According to Danish law, corporal punishment of children is illegal (I haven’t checked what constitutes corporal punishment, but it sounds as if it is a very sweeping rule: no hitting, of any kind). But freedom of speech is also a very firmly established principle, as everyone knows who followed the “drawings” debacle. So what the legal system can do now is prosecute the individual parents for child abuse/neglect, but not the Fatherhus organization as such, because their “advice” to their members comes under freedom of speech and freedom of religion. So this becomes a question of moral responsibility rather than a legal issue: Should an organization that exercizes strong psychological influence on its members be held accountable for encouraging illegal activity, or should it be up to individuals whether they want to follow the “advice”? A question that reaches way beyond this particular case, and relates to cases of Internet websites advocating violence against certain people and groups.

Earlier in the week 14-year old Heather D’Aoust, Scripps Ranch (north of San Diego), grabbed a claw hammer, attacked her mother, and succeeding in bludgeoning her so severely that she died the next day. If you go back a few days to a previous article, you’ll find that neighbors described the mother as devoted to her daughter, and that the daughter was a shy girl. Her father argued in court Thursday that his daughter is sick and needs help. However, the court decided to try her as an adult, with the possible sentence of 30 years in prison. The legal part of this story is a web of rules about charging juveniles as adults, and about criminal adults who are deemed to be mentally incompetent, but apparently there is some doubt about what might happen to a juvenile charged as an adult who is found to be mentally incompetent. In the article (link above) we hear from her father and her lawyer why she should be considered a child with a mental issue, but we hear very little about why the court made their decision, other than it was “closely examined,” and that 48 juveniles have been charged as adults by the court since 2001. The greater picture is that we have seen an increase over the last 15-20 years in the tendency to charge older children who commit serious crimes as adults, under the assumption that at that age they know “right from wrong,” and they should be held accountable (a deontological argument), and in addition, they are a danger to society (a utilitarian argument). Coincidentally, I read in a European newspaper that one of the large political parties is proposing a lowering of the age where kids can be charged as adults to 12-14, so as not to give young violent gang members a free pass. But I doubt that they intend to cast the net so wide that it covers family disputes with tragic endings.

So there really are two issues here: The general tendency of charging juveniles as adults, and Heather’s specific situation. Throw into the mix that some people suspect there is a political motive (“tough on crime”) behind the court’s decision. I’d hurry to say that what we, as readers, can glean from this can only be generalities, since we don’t know everything the court knows about Heather and the family dynamics (and whatever is irrelevant to the court is none of our business, anyway), and we may not know more until the preliminary hearing, supposedly in September.

Be that as it may, I’m interested in the principles involved: Should a juvenile be considered an adult by the sheer force of principle, due to the severity of her crime? Or should it be her underlying mindset that determines her court status? Her action shows a clear intent to harm—but is it the intent of a child, or an adult? Which leads to the general question what purpose punishment is supposed to serve; Heather’s father and her lawyer seem to think the main purpose is to rehabilitate her, but most people these days view punishment as a matter of (1) deterrence, (2) protection of the public, or (3) a simple matter of retribution. On the personal level, this is a tragic family situation. On the social level, it looks as if  it may become a case study that allows us to examine some of our basic assumptions about justice.

Our esteemed colleague and my good friend Professor Larry Hinman  from University of San Diego was interviewed in the San Diego U-T yesterday about the arrest of former drug dealer, now Carmel Valley wife-of-executive Marie Walsh. Walsh, then Susan Marie LeFevre,  ran away from a Michigan prison and a 10-20 year sentence for selling heroin in 1974, and vanished into thin air. Now it turns out that for 32 years she’s been living a decent and productive life on the right side of the law. So what does this mean? Should she have to go back and serve the rest of her time, plus the added charges for being a fugitive, or should her obviously rehabilitated 32 years make a difference?

USD’s Hinman said it’s easy for people to feel so much empathy for LeFevre.

“It sounds like she’s led a good life, maybe even an exemplary life since then, and we feel that should count for something,” he said. “And she was young when she committed these crimes . . . and what she did is not the same thing as shooting someone or stabbing someone.

“On some level, we want to believe our judgments are accurate because we can all imagine her as one of our neighbors. And if this is true, what does that say about our judgments about our neighbors? Could we be mistaken about them, too?”

I’ll bet Hinman said a lot more, which SDUT didn’t print—such as how well this case illustrates the fundamental difference between a consequentialist and a deontological world view: If you are a utilitarian/consequentialist, you will of course want her time behind bars minimized, maybe to a few years of probation, or perhaps simply reduced to “time served” (which was one year), because no good consequences will come of dragging her back to prison, away from her family and her community, since she is no threat to anybody, and she has so thoroughly redeemed herself. On the other hand, the deontologists among us will point out that (1) she committed a crime and was sentenced for it, and all the good behavior in the world isn’t going to nullify that, so her punishment should fit her crime; and (2) she has not been rehabilitated inasmuch as she has lied about her past to everybody, which shows fundamental disrespect for other people (treating them as merely a means to an end); and (3) we can’t universalize letting her off the hook—especially since others caught after escaping, who aren’t living in nice neighborhoods with wealthy spouses, will indeed be held accountable.  Not that our opinion will have any great impact—she is headed back to Michigan to serve at least 6 ½ years, maybe with an additional 5 ½ years, according to the SDUT, and nobody is asking us.  But it makes for a good philosophical discussion of justice, redemption and clemency—and it fuels the ongoing discussion about the relevance of rational vs. emotional arguments…

Brian Boyd’s essay in the American Scholar on the evolutionary origin of art and narrative is speculative but nevertheless interesting on a variety of levels. He argues that art and storytelling are adaptations.

 “Art is a form of cognitive play with pattern…Our adult compulsion for the cognitive play of art—from tribal work songs to tradesmen’s transistors to urbanites’ iPods—allows us to extend and refine the neural pathways that produce and process pattern in sonic, visual, and kinetic modes, and especially in sociality.”

Art makes us smarter, as a species, because it enhances our capacity for complex pattern recognition. The cognitive play of art—both its production and consumption—influences differential survival rates thus conferring a reproductive advantage on those who participate.

And why do we engage in this cognitive play? In a word, pleasure.

It’s the pursuit of pleasure, at least of the kind that is produced by pattern recognition, that explains the emergence of human intelligence—so much for Plato’s campaign against artists and religion’s campaign against pleasure.

Perhaps this is what Mill had in mind when he argued that the higher pleasures are to be valued more highly than the lower pleasures.

I guess good sex guided by the Kama Sutra must be better than unaided good sex.

This is interesting but troubling. In criminal trials, juries are supposed to convict only if the evidence suggests the defendent is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.

Apparently, there is empirical data indicating that jurors are far too willing to settle for a lesser standard–guilty given the preponderance of the evidence. When jurors think it is more likely than not that a defendant is guilty they are willing to convict, except when other jurors speak up and argue for the not guilty verdict.

Mark Kleinam identifies the problem with this:  “Note the scary implication: twelve jurors, each of whom thinks that someone is probably, but not certainly, guilty will tend to find that person guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.”

No wonder we have so many false convictions. That makes the work of The Innocence Project vital if our legal system is to function properly.

Fun discussion over at “The Garden of Forking Paths” about new studies concerning hard determinism. If I can extricate myself from grading papers, I’ll put a post together about it–in the meantime, enjoy this link: http://gfp.typepad.com/the_garden_of_forking_pat/2008/02/why-reading-def.html

It took 50 generations of robots evolving from basic light-sensitive wheeled mechanisms to something much more sophisticated—but now the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology can boast of having created four groups of robots who have evolved into light-consuming and communicating entities. Three out of the four groups will alert the other robots when they “find food.” The final group has developed robots who will lie about the food source, telling the others that it is poison, and then eat it all themselves. And if that isn’t enough, some robots have evolved into heroes who will alert others to danger and die saving the others. In The God Delusion Richard Dawkins (The Selfish Gene) calls human altruism a “precious Darwinian mistake.” So does this mean that any evolving, communicating entity will travel along the same path as we humans have? Here is a quote from the original report summary:

 “We conducted repeated trials of experimental evolution with robots that could produce visual signals to provide information on food location. We found that communication readily evolves when colonies consist of genetically similar individuals and when selection acts at the colony level. We identified several distinct communication systems that differed in their efficiency…. Under individual selection, the ability to produce visual signals resulted in the evolution of deceptive communication strategies in colonies of unrelated robots and a concomitant decrease in colony performance. This study generates predictions about the evolutionary conditions conducive to the emergence of communication and provides guidelines for designing artificial evolutionary systems displaying spontaneous communication.” 

So the “liars” were unrelated to the others, while communication went smoothly if the individuals were genetically similar. Without having read the entire report I will jump to the conclusion that the “heroes” came from the genetically similar groups. But does this prove that Dawkins is right (Moriae, weigh in!), or that this is no “mistake” at all—that self-sacrifice will happen, because being a member of a colony fosters genuine selflessness? Then again, maybe the researchers at the Swiss lab have merely reinvented an ant hill…

On Dec,6, 2007 I posted a story from Austria about Matthew Hiasi Pan (”Hearts and Minds of Chimps”) who was about to be sold into an unknown future. Matthew Hiasi is a chimpanzee, and supporters have argued that he should be granted human status, as opposed to being legally classified as a thing. In Austria there are only those two legal options. Some of you may have wondered what happened to him: In mid-January the Austrian Supreme Court decided against Hiasi: He has been found to be a thing, with no rights. His British mentor is taking the case to the European Court of Human Rights. The trouble with the court ruling seems to be that the court has decided against making a distinction between “humanity” and “personhood.” It goes without saying that Hiasi is not a human being, genetically, but being a “person” requires (among other characteristics) the capacity for meaningful communication, a sense of purpose, and self-awareness, characteristics that apes share with us at least to some extent, as the stories of Washoe, Koko, Kanzi and Panbanisha have shown us. Even Kant finally came to the conclusion that there ought to be an intermediate category between a person and a thing (although he didn’t include animals in that category). Apparently it is too much of a challenge for the Austrian Supreme Court to consider the possibility of partial personhood.