Author: Ophelia Benson

It occurs to me that Sam Harris could have helped his case if he had stated his core claim more fully from the outset. His core claim omits the very thing that makes morality non-obvious and disputatious*.

His core claim is

For those unfamiliar with my book, here is my argument in brief:

Morality and values depend on the existence of conscious minds – and specifically on the fact that such minds can experience various forms of well-being and suffering in this universe. Conscious minds and their states are natural phenomena, of course, fully constrained by the laws of Nature (whatever these turn out to be in the end).

Therefore, there must be right and wrong answers to questions of morality and values that potentially fall within the purview of science.

Yes but. Yes but you left the difficult part out.

Morality and values depend on the existence of conscious minds and on the fact that each mind is separate from all others.

The fact that each of us can directly experience only our own suffering and well-being is why we need morality and values at all; without that it would all be straightforward, like hunger prompting us to find and eat food.

Morality isn’t about “if you’re suffering, try to stop.” We already know that! Morality is about “you’re fine but those people over there are starving, you should share your food with them, with the result that you are hungrier and they are rescued from starving.” And then about arguments over dependency and causation and responsibility and proximity and 50 million other things, many of which benefit from scientific input but few of which are simply settled (or in Harris’s word, determined) by science.

Harris should have included that in his argument in brief all along.

*Update: I think that’s not really the right word. I think that word applies to people who like to dispute, as with “litigious.” But “disputable” wasn’t exactly what I meant…so I used disputatious anyway, despite knowing it wasn’t really right. The really right word doesn’t exist, so I bent one, thus possibly creating confusion. Language is tricky. (No one has emailed me to say that’s the wrong word…I just felt like saying.)

Poor Ireland, it must be so disconcerting.

The phenomenal economic boom over the past two decades, and the secularization that came along with it, allowed Ireland to think it was no longer what it once was: a backward land dominated and shaped by the Roman Catholic Church. But as the economy has crashed, the Irish have come face to face with their earlier selves, and with a church-state relationship that was and in many ways still is, as quite a few people in the country see it, perversely antimodern.

It’s perhaps similar to being suddenly transported from a cosmopolitan liberal coastal city to a parochial conservative religious town in the hinterland.

Only worse.

As secularism advanced in other parts of the world, successive popes relied on Ireland as a bulwark and pushed Irish leaders to keep the church in the country’s structure. In 1977, Prime Minister Garret FitzGerald noted that in a private meeting, Pope Paul VI stressed to him “that Ireland was a Catholic country — perhaps the only one left — and that it should stay that way” and that he should not “change any of the laws that kept the republic a Catholic state.” That continues to this day, according to Ivana Bacik, a senator for the opposition Labor Party who has been a leader in the effort to extricate the church from the state. As she put it, “In no other European nation — with the obvious exception of Vatican City — does the church have this depth of doctrinal involvement in the affairs of state.”

By what right? In other European nations, laws are generally changed or not changed by the legislators or people of those nations, not by different ones. It’s odd that the nation of “Vatican City” thinks it gets to tell the Irish PM what laws to change or not change. Odd but not surprising.

Last summer, there was talk of a plan to divest the church of its control of state-financed schools, but when I asked a Department of Education and Skills spokeswoman last month what the department was doing, she gave me only the Catholic Church’s current position — that there is need for “reflection” on the issue — and actually referred me to the church for further information.

Or reflection.

Alex Davenport went to the Science Museum (the one in South Kensington, you know), and found the 5th floor devoted to quackery.

It matters because the SM is supposed to promote science and understanding, not fuel an ever increasingly tiresome debate between those that painstakingly research and collect data and those that appear to pick any old idea then try to convince people it works.

That’s what I would have thought.

The homeopathy stand tells the case study of a girl who had allergies from the age of 3-5 (what are these allergies?) and they say that she was cured by homeopaths.  That’s right, they categorically state that homeopathy helped her.

Yikes.

A museum staffer did a blog post in response, with an official statement from the museum.

In our ‘Living Medical Traditions’ section of the Science and Art of Medicine Gallery we take an anthropological and sociological perspective on medical practices. We reflect patient experience in a global setting. We do not evaluate different medical systems, but demonstrate the diversity of medical practices and theoretical frameworks currently thriving across the world.

Our message in this display is that these traditions are not ‘alternative’ systems in most parts of the world. Instead they currently offer the majority of the global population their predominant, sometimes only, choice of medical care. We do not make any claims for the validity of the traditions we present.

Well not in the sense of having banners saying “This stuff really works!” – but what about that stand that says homeopathy cured a child of allergies? That looks like a claim for validity to my untutored eye. David Colquhoun was entirely unconvinced. So was Simon Singh. So were lots of other people.

More via Martin Robbins.

Does Mary Midgley give Richard Dawkins a percentage? She certainly should. She’s making a full-time career of telling him to stop doing things he doesn’t do.

Midgley’s new book continues her many years of taking neo-Darwinists to task because, she says, they distort the legacy of the great English naturalist who inspired them.

Yes, many years. Many, many years. More than thirty of the bastards. She was told she had it all wrong the same number of years ago, but her new book continues the same old bullshit she was told was all wrong all those years ago. I’d say she owes Richard a cut.

And what’s this crap about “distorting” Darwin’s “legacy,” anyway? Does she think Darwin wrote a gospel? Does she think Darwin’s work is supposed to be frozen in amber so that everyone can stand around and admire it, along with the work of Albert the Good and Gladstone and Isambard Kingdom Brunel? Darwin was a scientist. His work was and is supposed to be expanded, corrected, falsified, improved, used, stretched out of shape. It’s not a sculpture or a carpet, it’s a theory; it doesn’t need to be protected from the breath of the nasty modern sciencey types with their iPods and blue jeans and tendency to swear. Those nasty modern sciencey types are Darwin’s colleagues; he has a lot more in common with them than he has with obstinate one-idea (and that a wrong one) Midgley.

Midgley argues that the neo-Darwinist perspective rests on an ethos of free-enterprise competition distorted by “the supposedly Darwinian belief in natural selection as a pervasive, irresistible cosmic force” that operates in social and metaphysical realms as well as in physical, biological ones. It results, she writes, in “unbridled, savage competition between the genes” that operates with mythic force within any individual body.

Apparently she has learned nothing since 1979, the date of the original (widely-derided) paper. Her legacy is serenly undistorted – for what that’s worth.