Author: Ophelia Benson

And since you mentioned skepticism – explain something to me. This Intelligent Designer we hear so much about. It’s supposed to answer those questions that atheists and biologists and similar tiresome people can’t answer. But the thing about this Intelligent Designer character is that it raises a hell of a lot of questions that don’t arise if there’s no need to explain the Intelligent Designer. Surely finding the Intelligent Designer a satisfactory answer to questions while finding Designer-free answers unsatisfactory, relies on ignoring a great barnlike stack of questions that trail in the wake of the Intelligent Designer. The most obvious one of course is Okay smartyboots then who designed the Designer? But there are others.

The one that I’ve been pondering today is what did this Designer design humans for?

Amusement? Entertainment? Company? An experiment?

Maybe company. Since the Intelligent Designer is apparently a singular noun, and since monotheism is supposed (by monotheists) to be in some way superior to polytheism – more sophisticated and mature and sort of serious – therefore clearly the Intelligent Designer is solitary. So what does it do when it’s feeling chatty? There’s no other Designer to chat with. So it designs humans?

Doesn’t seem very likely, does it. Would we really be good conversation-companions for a Designer who had the skills, time, energy, and materials to design the universe? Billions of galaxies each with billions of solar systems? I don’t know about you, but I would feel pretty awkward if I got a dinner invitation from the Designer one fine day. ‘Hi, I feel like a good old natter, drop by the house tonight and we’ll talk.’ And the Designer would feel pretty let down if I did. I just don’t think we’d be talking quite on the same level, you know what I mean?

So if that were the reason, why not design something better? Quite a lot better? There would still be plenty of room to design something inferior enough so as not to be afraid of rivals – while having some possibility of some sort of conversation. But with us? Come on. What are we going to do, talk about football or tv with someone who designs galaxies and lice and supernovae and mangoes?

Actually, why not design something better anyway. Even if the reason for designing humans is not in order to have some pals in this big wide empty cosmos. Even if it’s for some other reason, why not something better? I know, the standard answer is free will. But that assumes that the Designer is somehow engrossed in our moral nature, and the truth is, that doesn’t seem very likely either, does it? Why would it be engrossed in that? Why would it be interested at all?

Of course the old idea was that the Designer created us in its image. But that doesn’t make a lot of sense either. In fact, frankly, it doesn’t make any. The Designer – or the deity, we might as well call it, since that’s what fans of the Designer idea really mean by it, except for Anthony Flew – the deity, then, is omnipotent, omniscient, benevolent – we’re told. As with monotheism, that’s supposed to be the sophisticated mature idea of deity: not the silly quarrelsome sexy all-too-human deities of the ancient Greeks or the Hindus, but a philosophical kind of deity that is Perfect. Okay but then we’re nothing like it and it’s nothing like us. So what did it do – design in weakness, limitation, incompetence, lacks of all kinds? Faults, flaws? Why? To see what we’d do? (That’s usually part of the free will defense. The deity wanted to see what we’d do, so it left us free, and told us not to eat this one piece of fruit, and then kicked back to watch.) So it’s an experiment then. Well…why do people find that consoling or satisfactory? One does have to wonder.

The slightly more modern version of the thought is that we’re here to represent Intelligence, or Mind. But the deity already does that – why bother with us? Maybe to see what this exciting stuff, Intelligence, looks like in a lesser entity? But that seems unconvincing. The deity has perfect Intelligence, as much of it as it’s possible to have. We don’t. So – is what we have even the same kind of thing? Isn’t this one of those cases where quantity and quality are mixed up together? The deity has enough Intelligence to design the universe. Jupiter, the Milky Way, earth, atoms, quarks, eyes, mildew. We don’t. Do we really have the same thing the deity has only in a smaller amount? Like soup? The deity has an ocean, we have a quarter-teaspoon?

I wonder if they ever talk about these things at the Discovery Institute. It’s in Seattle somewhere – do you realize I don’t even know where? But if they do talk about them, what on earth do they say? Maybe just the usual guff. The deity is beyond human comprehension, it’s ineffable, we can’t describe it in human terms, we can’t begin to answer such questions, it’s impious to try, blah blah blah. But then – oh well. You see the problem.

The Third Skeptics’ Circle is posted. Read, doubt, enjoy.

Last month Richard Posner said something similar to what Stanley Fish said, but Posner said it much more clearly.

For as a practical matter, chief executive officers do not enjoy freedom of speech. A CEO is the fiduciary of his organization, and his duty is to speak publicly only in ways that are helpful to the organization. Not that he should lie; but he must avoid discussing matters as to which his honestly stated views would harm the organization. (Judges also lack complete freedom of speech; as I mentioned in our introductory blog posting, I am not permitted to comment publicly on any pending or impending court case.) Summers must think that his remarks did harm the university, as otherwise he would not have apologized—for he apologized not for what he said, but for saying it.

That’s a bit different from what Fish said – especially in the part about ‘As a faculty member you should not give your president high marks because’ etcetera, which seems to assume that faculty members are going to give a university president ‘marks’ on exactly the same basis that a search committee is. But why would they do that? And is there any reason to think they would do that? Posner doesn’t make that bizarre assumption.

A university president might make provocative remarks because he wanted to change his university in some way, for example by encouraging greater intellectual diversity, or because he wanted to signal strength, independence, intransigence, or other qualities that he thought would increase his authority, or even because he wanted to intimidate certain faculty by seeming to be a “wild man.” But that explanation is not available to Summers, because of the apology.

Fish pretty much overlooked that possibility – that the wild man act could have been part of Summers’ perceived ‘job.’ Anyway, the CEO problem remains. It’s quite interesting. It’s similar to that much-repeated truism, that a corporation’s only responsibility is to maximise shareholders’ profits – a truism that has some very worrying implications for everyone other than that corporations’ shareholders (and even for them if they work for the corporation, or consume its products, or breathe the air in its vicinity). I didn’t really know that CEOs were explicitly required to ‘avoid discussing matters as to which his honestly stated views would harm the organization.’ I suppose I’ve always assumed they would be highly likely to avoid doing that, on account of wanting to maximise their own profits and all, but I didn’t think of it as being their duty. Duty. Hmm – I bet it’s not their duty in a sense that Kant would accept. But Posner isn’t Kant. But still – there is some ambiguity or vagueness hovering around all this, isn’t there? Even in Posner’s version. Clearly that avoidance can be seen as the CEO’s duty to certain people – shareholders, for instance. But can it be seen as the CEO’s duty, full stop? I wouldn’t have thought so. The CEO has duties in capacities other than the CEO capacity. As a citizen, for instance – or as a decent human being. Depending on what the organization is up to, the CEO might have a duty precisely to discuss matters on which her honestly stated views would harm the organization. A civic duty, as opposed to a fiduciary duty.

Whereas it’s another matter with the duty of a judge not to comment on pending cases. I have no problem with that (big of me, isn’t it) (never mind that, I’m just trying to figure this stuff out, here). But for one thing that’s a much more limited gag, and for another thing, it lacks the whole profit-motive, conflict of interest aspect. In short, the idea that CEOs have a duty to talk carefully seems to translate the interest of a small group into a general duty. Or to translate ‘duty’ into ‘what your employers want you to do’ – which can be what duty means, to be sure. ‘Here are your duties in this job.’ But it can also mean something much more general, and binding, and morally-based. Deontological doesn’t refer to employer expectations, surely?

Then again I suppose Posner could just be doing his ‘seeing everything from the point of view of an economist’ act. Or I could just be completely clueless. Bringing the organization into disrepute, I am.

Stanley Fish has an interesting take on the Larry Summers matter. (You don’t mind if I call him Larry do you? Everyone else does. I’m not pretending I know him, it’s just that it’s easier than trying to remember whether he spells it Laurence or Lawrence. Plus it sounds so much more friendly, and knowing, and American, and as if I might be important enough to know him, which I’m not.)

It is only if Summers’ performance at the January 14th conference (where he wondered if the underrepresentation of women in the sciences and math might have a genetic basis) was intentional — it is only if he knew what he was doing — that he can be absolved of the most serious of the charges that might be brought against him. And that is not the charge that his views on the matter were uninformed and underresearched (as they certainly were), nor the charge that he has damaged the cause of women in science (which he surely has), but the charge that he wasn’t doing his job and didn’t even seem to know what it was.

Hmm. It’s not absolutely clear why the last charge would or should be more serious than the second, for intance, or who would be bringing these conditional mood charges, or whether different parties bringing these charges might have different ideas of which ones are more important. But anyway –

Larry Summers is no more free to pop off at the mouth about a vexed academic question than George Bush is free to wander around the country dropping off-the-cuff remarks about Social Security or Islam…The constraints on speaking that come along with occupying a position have nothing to do with the First Amendment (there are no free-speech issues here, as there almost never are on college campuses) and everything to do with the legitimate expectations that are part and parcel of the job you have accepted and for which you are (in this case, handsomely) paid

Wait. Yes he is – more free to pop off at the mouth. Of course he is. Larry Summers isn’t elected, he’s not answerable to the populace as a whole, he’s not accountable in the same way. We didn’t hire Larry Summers. Somebody did, but we didn’t. So these ‘legitimate expectations’ – they’re the concern of Summers’ employers, not the populace at large. Sometimes those two groups have sharply differing expectations. Think whistle-blowers, think union organizers, think Mafia underlings who go to the police.

Those expectations (and the requirements they subtend) are not philosophical, but empirical and pragmatic. They, include, first and foremost, the expectation that you will comport yourself in ways that bring credit, not obloquy, to the institution you lead. That doesn’t mean that there are things you can’t say or things you must say. Rather, it means that whatever you say, you have to be aware of the possible effects your utterance might produce, especially if those effects touch the health and reputation of the university.

So…my employer right or wrong? Is that what he’s saying? Well, as a matter of fact, yes. Which is fascinating. Suppose Summers were the CEO of a tobacco company, testifying to a Congressional subcommittee, and he raised his right hand and swore that he did not believe that nicotine was addictive. He’d be doing that, no doubt, because of his awareness of the effects his utterance would produce on the health and reputation of his company. Good for the company – but not so hot from other points of view. ‘I was just doing my job’ is a pretty discredited defense these days. Enron executives were doing their best to do their jobs as they saw them, but sadly that involved shafting large numbers of employees and investors. Golly. Maybe ‘doing your job’ isn’t really the last word in moral responsibility. Walmart managers give their workers more to do than they can finish on their shifts, with the result that they are forced to work unpaid overtime – not occasionally and by accident but systematically and routinely. That seems to be the managers’ job, from the point of view of whatever next-level managers who are telling them to do it. Does that make it a good thing to do?

As a faculty member you should not give your president high marks because he expresses views you approve or low marks because he espouses views you reject. Your evaluation of him or her (now there’s a solution to Harvard’s problem) should be made in the context of the only relevant question — not “Does what he says meet the highest standards of scholarship?” or “Is what he says politically correct or bravely politically incorrect?” (an alternative form of political correctness) or even “Is what he says true?” but “Is he, in saying it (whatever it is) carrying out the duties of his office in a manner that furthers the interests of the enterprise?”

Ah. The interests of the enterprise. So – when employees of shipping companies dump oil into the ocean, when employees of chemical plants dump toxic sludge in rivers, when extortionists succeed in extracting large sums of money, when engineers in Detroit build ever larger more inefficient more murderous automobiles, when advertisers persuade gullible fools to buy those immense cars by telling them that otherwise everyone will think their penises are too small, when managers of poultry plants and garment factories hire immigrants and pay them less than the minimum wage because they can get away with it – the only relevant question is whether or not they’re carrying out the duties of the office in a manner that furthers the interests of the enterprise? That’s the only relevant question? Why? Why, exactly? Fish doesn’t say. Why doesn’t he? I don’t know. I find it rather baffling.

Well, [the ability to encourage difficult questions] may be the strength of the academy, but it is not the strength sought by search committees when they interview candidates for senior administrative positions. No search committee asks, “Can we count on you to rile things up? Can we look forward to days of hostile press coverage? Can you give us a list of the constituencies you intend to offend?” Search committees do ask, “What is your experience with budgets?” and “What are your views on the place of intercollegiate athletics?” and “What will be your strategy for recruiting a world-class faculty?” and “How will you create a climate attractive to donors?”

Yeah. So what? Fish is not the search committee, so why is he doing their talking for them? Why is he talking as if their point of view is the only one? Why on earth is he talking as if their point of view is the one we should all have? As if the interests of the people the ‘enterprise’ has an effect on are entirely beside the point – not just to the search committee, but to everyone? That’s the silliest argument I’ve seen in awhile. Morris Zapp would be embarrassed.

The Fifth Carnival of the Godless is posted. And I’ve been meaning to point out this post at Normblog for days. He points out what seem (from the available evidence, e.g. what the article reports) like rather dubious bits of reasoning in an article about the possible evolutionary basis for religion.

There is one quite convincing comment in the article though. It gestures at something I often think.

Childish belief is one thing, but religious belief is embraced by people of all ages and is by no means the preserve of the uneducated. According to Boyer, the persistence of belief into adulthood is at least in part down to a presumption. “When you’re in a belief system, it’s not that you stop asking questions, it’s that they become irrelevant. Why don’t you ask yourself about the existence of gravity? It’s because a lot of the stuff you do every day presupposes it and it seems to work, so where’s the motivation to question it?” he says. “In belief systems, you tend to enter this strange state where you start thinking there must be something to it because everybody around you is committed to it. The general question of whether it’s true is relegated.”

Exactly. We’re often told some variation on the theme ‘Millions and billions of people have believed this stuff for thousands of years, so there must be something to it.’ But that just becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, doesn’t it. Everybody looks around and says to herself, ‘By golly, everybody for miles around believes this crap, so there must be something to it, so I’d better shut up about the fact that I think it’s all fairy tales.’ We don’t have a clue how many people would have believed it without the shoring-up effect of all those millions and millions, so the argument isn’t worth much, is it.

Or to put it another way, if everyone believes because everyone else believes, then it could be that everyone believes only because everyone else believes, and no one believes independently of everyone else. No one believes because she already believes and would believe even if she’d been raised by wolves. So then why should anyone believe? Eh? I mean, what kind of argument is that? ‘Well all those other people believe!’ ‘Yes, but that’s only because people like you have been telling them “All those other people believe,” and pointing in this direction.’ It’s hollow. ‘Isobel believes because you believe.’ ‘Oh dear – but I believe because Isobel believes.’ ‘Err…’