It's not the automation

 Kind of a cute premise by Frisco Uplink.

Step 1, invoke Star Trek, the Next Generation episode, "The Measure of a Man" (S02E09), where Picard argues that Data should be considered sentient, because holding him non-sentient risks creating a permanent underclass of disposable exploitable labor.

Step 2, argue that non-sentient supervisory software a la Uber goes the other direction: the supervisory software allows us to treat gig workers such as Uber drivers as disposable exploitable labor. According to the author, "Gig workers are precarious not only because they lack benefits, but also because the everyday bedrock of their work is determined by a black box algorithm designed to extract maximum profit for a distant corporation. . . . Software perfectly shields the humans profiting from this one-sided equation from confronting the personal toll it takes" on their disposable workers.

The author puts too much weight on the means, and the inversion fails. Indeed, TNG gets it exactly right. The decision to classify some beings as non-sentient is the critical act. Once we have decided that some beings are non-sentient, we'll find some means or another — lords of the manor, colonial administrators, overseers, supervisors, software — to efficiently exploit them. 

The bosses have always shielded themselves from the human consequences of their exploitation, and this alienation long preceded capitalism, although capitalism has refined alienation to its purest state (at least so far).

A final (?) note on New Atheism

Before I actually went to college to study economics, political science, and mathematics, I was strongly considering studying philosophy. Repeated contact with academic philosophers cured me of that notion, not because I thought that philosophy itself was useless but because I found academic philosophers to be uptight and annoying. There are no small few problems in economics and political science, but I would rather have lunch with an economist than a philosopher. And there's more math in economics; I like math.

I really like Existential Comics because the author is most decidedly not uptight and annoying. The author makes philosophy entertaining and fun, and he or she is a pretty good Marxist. Seriously: go read the comic from the beginning.

However, the commentary on today's comic is kind of annoying. It reduces New Atheism, a movement I was a part of for a decade, to a caricature. Like any good caricature, it has an element of truth, but only an element, and misses a lot of the complexity of the movement and the positive gains we made.

The New Atheist movement was a phenomenon of the late 1990s and 2000s; by the early 2010s it was defunct as a movement. I don't know anyone today who calls him- or herself a "New Atheist"; I don't remember PZ Myers having used the term for many years now.

The author of Existential Comics justly calls out Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens* for their anti-feminist bullshit. But as thousands of New Atheists have been complaining since 30 seconds after The End of Faith was published, Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens were not in any way, shape or form leaders of the New Atheist movement. The New Atheism movement by its very nature did not and could not have leaders. Sure we liked The End of Faith, The God Delusion, God is Not Great, and Breaking the Spell, but we also criticized the errors and weaknesses of these books. They were at best starting points, not ideological foundations.

*The author also mentions Neil deGrasse Tyson, but as far as I know, Tyson has never identified as a New Atheist. Curiously, the author does not name another noted New Atheist author, professional philosopher Daniel Dennett.

New Atheism was a movement primarily dedicated to demolishing the social, economic, and political privilege of religion. New Atheism was about criticizing religion as a popular phenomenon, not confined to dusty tomes with a readership in the high tens. The books mentioned above were important not because they codified any ideology (in contrast, say, to Marx, who, for better or worse, actually codified and established a lot of communist ideology). There is nothing in any of those books (except perhaps some cognitive science in Breaking the Spell) that would surprise any denizen of the Internet Infidels Discussion Board (atheist or religious). They were important because they were popular: they challenged the taboo against criticizing religion in public, and they got away with it.

But the whole point of New Atheism was that it did not depend on noted authors. If the critique against religion had been confined to The God Delusion, there would not have been such a thing as New Atheism. New Atheists such as myself were certainly inspired by these books, but New Atheism consisted of thousands of bloggers, discussion board participants, and other contributors to internet media who criticized religion in public. The whole point of New Atheism was to make atheism ordinary.

As best I can tell, New Atheism stopped being a movement in the early 2010s. There are a lot of reasons, but I think most of the reasons were consequences of our enormous success. We made atheism so respectable that anybody could be an atheist. You didn't need to be smart, you didn't need to be courageous, you didn't even need to be a particularly good person. The neckbearded fedora-wearing atheist trope is funny precisely because today, atheism is about as intellectually and socially challenging as not liking football. I don't actually know any neckbearded fedora-wearing atheists (and I know a lot of atheists), and I suspect the trope exists just as a stereotype mocking socially awkward men.

In the early 2010s, PZ Myers fought a losing battle against "Dictionary Atheism", arguing that atheism entailed a humanistic ethic of social justice. He failed, I think, precisely because we had done our work too well (not that it was a particularly tough intellectual job). The truth is that you don't need to hold any particular ethical stance to be an atheist; you need only realize that the truth claims made by religious people are just nonsense; from there, you can go a lot of places: Marxism, bourgeois liberal progressivism, Randianism, Republicanism, neoliberalism, whatever. It is one thing to push for one ethical ideology or another, but trying to restrict atheism to one particular ethical ideology is bound to fail.

The work of New Atheism was not without its flaws. From its beginning New Atheism comprised primarily older white middle-class straight cis-men. It was never about social justice in general. Although many New Atheist authors highlighted the misogyny and racism of traditional religions, it was never really about feminism and anti-racism. But in its heyday, New Atheism was also not about preserving traditional patriarchal and racial hierarchies. We picked one pillar of racist* patriarchy, i.e. religion, and chopped away, subjecting its social privilege to ruthless criticism. And we won, at least to the extent that religious privilege is no longer taken for granted nor exempt from public criticism — at least not among white middle-class straight cis-men. Other groups will, I think, have to tackle the issue of religion in their own communities themselves, sadly without any more support from privileged groups than for any other issue. But that's not because we were fighting for our own privilege, but because we were no more able to generalize the fight against one form of oppression that affected us as any other struggle taken up by dissident members of the elite. We didn't go too far; we didn't go far enough. But we did go somewhere.

*And capitalism: I came to communism through not only atheism but specifically New Atheist activism.

The lesser of two evils

I've seen Suicide Squad, and it sucked. Sam Kriss is not so charitable in his review, The Ho-Hum Squad: Jared Leto’s Joker and the evil of banality:

We could note how the lesser evil is always measured against the absolute worst that could possibly happen—nuclear war, the end of the world—while the act of refusing to settle for it is so rarely measured against all the actual wrongs that really do take place. These things are tolerable, and they’ll never end. It’s a cop-out, a refusal to ever think through what evil actually is.

Meaning and purpose

This is also how you do philosophy: good-humored nihilist Kevin Simler's A Nihilist's Guide to Meaning

I've never been plagued by the big existential questions. You know, like What's my purpose? or What does it all mean?

Growing up I was a very science-minded kid — still am — and from an early age I learned to accept the basic meaninglessness of the universe. Science taught me that it's all just atoms and the void, so there can't be any deeper point or purpose to the whole thing; the kind of meaning most people yearn for — Ultimate Meaning — simply doesn't exist.

. . .

Now, if [dancing and farting around] were the final word on the subject, I'd be perfectly content. Unfortunately, some of my favorite writers of recent years — Sarah Perry and David Chapman, in particular — can't seem to shut up about meaning. . . . What follows is my attempt at figuring out what people mean when they talk about meaning.

Wittgenstein's golden turds

Now this is how you do you some philosophy! wittgenstein: on the fritz:

Now I’m thinking about all of those photos of Wittgenstein squirming around in the same tweed jacket, looking like he’s been repressing the same orgasm since 1922. Or maybe the same shit. It’s hard to avoid the impression that Wittgenstein was the kind of man who had trouble going to the bathroom. Even his philosophical style is basically a monument to sweaty triumph over constipation—squeezing out one little golden turd after another.

Monty Hall Trolley Problem

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

Sorry Zach, but I enjoyed this joke twice: as an philosopher and as a statistician!

Simple truths

THE MYTH OF SIMPLE TRUTHS

In The Myth of Simple Truths, Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse claim a rather annoying sort of false equivalence between conservatives and liberals. According to the authors, both liberals and conservatives have reduced big complex questions to "simple truths" that are obviously right; those who deny these simple truths are not merely mistaken but stupid. But Aikin and Talisse themselves are mistaken on a couple of grounds. First, they create their own "simple truth," that questions are big and complex, and label those who deny this simple truth as foolish. Second, the authors don't give us any examples of big questions that one side or another has unjustifiably reduced to simple truths. They simply assert their position, but perhaps there really are simple truths. As Rob Corddry notes, the facts have a liberal bias. Some truths are simple, and some people can simply disregard them.

More importantly, Aikin and Talisse miss the point that conversation in a democracy is rarely if ever about the truth itself; the conversation is about the good. Facts and truth (or lies and bullshit) might be used to support one notion of good or another, but the conversation is not about what is true; it's about what is good. And if the good really is good, and if one view of the truth, however farfetched, supports that good, then why not use it? And if indeed the important questions really are complex, with defensible positions on both sides, a person will very naturally pick the side that supports his view of the good. It's the good that is important, not one version of the truth or another.

From my experience in academia, there are two categories of "big questions," which academics address: questions with simple truths that are hard to find and questions with no real underlying truth, questions that have a lot of defensible positions, but no way of consistently distinguishing between those defensible positions. The physical and biological sciences are of the first kind, the humanities are of the second; the social sciences (including economics) are kind of in-between, but lean more toward the humanities.

Neither of these categories really help Aikin and Talisse. First, the "truths" of science really are simple truths, and one either accepts them or is mistaken. The force of gravity* is proportional to the product of the masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance. This is as simple a truth as it gets; hard to get at, but now that we have it, it's just true. There's no nuance, there are no alternative defensible positions, at least none that matter to democracy. If you build your building without accurately taking into account the simple truth of gravity (and the simple truths of structural engineering), your building will fall down and people will die.

*Absent relativistic corrections that are small under ordinary circumstances, and more importantly don't fundamentally change the underlying relationship between gravity, mass, and distance.

On the other hand, the big questions of the humanities do not have any underlying truth. This position is not "relativism" strictly speaking, at least not truth relativism (which I assert is a contradiction in terms: by definition, "truth" is that which is not relative). Indeed it is a category error to even look for truth in the humanities. I don't mean by this position to at all deprecate the humanities; the humanities are not about trying to find the truth, they are about exploring what it means to be human, and the only truth about humanity is that we seem almost infinitely plastic. I think it is very important to talk about what it means to be human, but there's not truth about what it "really is" to be human.

The authors are trying, I think, to find a methodological explanation for the apparent polarization of the modern "democratic" republic. I think there is a methodological explanation, but theirs is indefensible (and if they

The real problem is, I think, that we are too focused the search for truth. The truth is important, but it's not everything. Most importantly, we mistake the conversation about the good for the search for the truth. These are two different, and equally important projects, but they are indeed different.

Decency

Decency, like all moral words, has a fundamentally subjective and socially constructed meaning. Decency is we think it is, and what we think it is is a product of social interaction. But just because its meaning is subjective and socially constructed doesn't mean it has no meaning. It does mean something: although we might disagree about the specifics, we can tell what is decent and what is not decent.

I think, for example, that people have to live with no home is not decent. That they have to beg for food is not decent. That they are not permitted to work — when there is manifestly much work undone — is not decent. That we are killing black people in our own country and brown people in the Middle East is not decent.

Others might think, for example, that we take from those who produce more and give to those who produce less is not decent. I disagree,

No matter: the point is not what specifically is or is not decent, the point is that the word decency does actual work in drawing distinctions about the world.

Decency is more fluid than good. I've written earlier that "I shouldn't, but ..." is incoherent. Shouldn't means don't. If someone actually does something, then they necessarily think they should do it. If they say they shouldn't but they do, then they are lying, bullshitting, confused, or so neurotic that they need the services of a psychologist, not a philosopher. Decency, in contrast, is not so rigid. Should and shouldn't come after we weigh the reasons; considerations of decency come before.

We can say, "This is not decent, but reasons." And the reasons might (or might not) be good reasons. It was certainly indecent to kill Nazis by the millions, because mass murder is, I think, uncontroversially indecent, but hey, they were Nazis. (And, I think, the analysis is symmetric: I think the Nazis and Germans believed that murdering millions of Jews, Gypsies, communists, homosexuals, and Slavs was indecent, but hey, reasons.) Similarly, whether or not someone thinks the economic constraints justify the indecency, it seems relatively uncontroversial that the way we treat food animals is clearly indecent.

The goal of civilization, I think, is or should be that we create a society where we can not just always act rightly but always act decently. A goal of universal decency might be asymptotic, but we should always at least be moving closer, to make our necessary indecency always rarer and always more fraught.

What I meant in my previous post, then is not to argue some specific concept of decency, but to talk about an attitude towards how we construct and implement not only our notions of decency but also when we make exceptions to decency. Hence, even when I completely agree with some religious people's specific constructions of decency, I profoundly disagree with how they construct that notion: that thus and such is decent or indecent not because we happen to subjectively feel it is so, but because God has so informed. Similarly with a monarchy, oligarchy, or even a republic: even if I agree, thus and such is decent (or we should make an exception to decency) because the king, or the bourgeoisie, or our elected representatives have so informed us... based, of course, on information only they can see.

As I noted, the specific institutions of a democracy are important, but democracy is more than just a set of institutions: indeed, no set of institutions, however carefully crafted, can be democratic if the people do not have democratic consciousness: the consciousness that the people themselves decide what is decent and when we must act indecently. Not the king, not the elite, not the trustees (and not the Party): the people themselves.

Religion and democracy

A couple of interesting articles: In Why the Left Needs Religion, Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig argues that religion as religion (not just people who happen to be religious) is an essential component to left organizing, citing Christian religious doctrines and practices that are frankly Marxian. In Not God’s Politics, Susan Jacoby disagrees with Bruenig, citing the... diversity... of religious ideology on the right and left, and the propensity of Christians to impose their religion on everyone, including non-Christians. Naturally I much prefer Jacoby, and while I know many Christians I'm happy to have as allies, it is because of their politics, not their religion. But I think there's a larger point that's deserves highlighting.

We on the left should not, I think, be too focused on implementing a particular political-economic regime, e.g. welfare capitalism, social democracy, democratic socialism, or communism. The regime does matter, a lot, but the regime is not the fundamental issue. The fundamental issue is to change how people see the world and each other, to change our political and social psychology. A particular political-economic regime might be the consequence of that change, or might be a means to effect that change, but a change in "human nature" must be the fundamental goal of the left. I don't mean to say we shouldn't think carefully about political and economic issue at the deepest level (I spend a lot of time thinking and writing about the economics and finance of communism), but these issues are not at the deepest level.

The fundamental struggle of the left is to inculcate the social psychology of democracy. We really like the word here in the United States; we are perhaps not quite so enthusiastic about the actual practice. Democracy is not about holding periodic elections, even with a comprehensive franchise and open candidacy. Democracy is not about letting people vote, it is about the people ruling. Elections are about people "choosing" our rulers; democracy is about people ruling themselves. Again, I want to say that although economic and political democracy is a regime, and requires specific kinds of political and economic institutions, the regime is not the fundamental, deepest, point; the deepest point is our social, cultural, political, and economic psychology, our consciousness.

Having sampled the Christian scriptures, the character of Jesus seems to me like a decent fellow.* But that's alarming right there: I have a favorable opinion of Jesus without believing for a second that the character or the narrative in which he appears has any sort of divine imprimatur. If you think Jesus is a decent character, why is that not enough to emulate him? What work does apotheosizing him do?

*I have much less familiarity with Islamic scripture. I wouldn't be surprised if apart from his egregious pedophilia, Muhammed (the man or the character of the narrator), given his time and place, was also rather decent. My point, though, is not the decency of the characters but the nature of religion.

The point of democracy, as an element of consciousness, is to act decently because we are decent; if we are not decent, we want to become decent.* If we act decently because some god demands we do so is to miss the fundamental point of democracy. More importantly, if we demand that others act decently not because they are decent, but because some god demands they do so, we don't just miss but actively undermine the whole point of democracy.

*What do I mean by "decent"? Good question. It's a vague word for a vague and complicated idea. I'll write more on this topic later.

One might argue that to persuade their readers to become decent is the Gospels authors' whole point, their real project. Perhaps so, but if that is their point, after almost two thousand years, they have decisively failed. And, I would argue, they have failed precisely because they have located the impetus to decency in the divine, rather than the human. I'm sorry, racist white European authoritarian neoliberal capitalism has captured a substantial fraction of nominal Christians, Christians who have in their homes an actual copy of the writings about the brown Middle-Eastern democratic communist, who say that what this brown Middle-Eastern democratic communist (supposedly) said is literally the most important thing in the world. If people actually believed what Jesus says, they would have greeted the writings of Marx with a collective, "Well, duh!" No, that's wrong: if people really believed Jesus, Christians never would have invented capitalism, and Marx would be known for his literary criticism. The fault is not in the content, so the fault must be in the location in the divine, not the human.

Democracy and communism are not about income equality or inequality. They are not about the Ministry of Planning or nationalizing the banks. Democracy and communism are about power, with the people taking power away from this or that self-selected elite, hereditary, economic, or theocratic, and wielding it themselves. Indeed, democracy is about abjuring power over others and privileging each person's individual power over him- or herself. By its very nature, no religion can ever give us that.

Science and philosophy: falsification

I'm simply going to state Karl Popper's claim and explain what it means. In further posts, I'll talk about the justification for his claim, and why we should care about the claim and its justification. If I feel like it, I'll talk about some weaknesses in Popper's case, and how they can be strengthened. However, that will require additional research that I would have to do in my copious free time. We'll see.

Popper's central claim is that a statement is scientific only if it is falsifiable. Note that this condition is necessary but not sufficient: a statement can, for example, be falsifiable and actually false, in which case it is not scientific. (Some might argue that Popper never says this, but it seems so trivial that if he really doesn't say so explicitly, it is uncharitable to believe he doesn't take it for granted.)

A statement is falsifiable if and only if there is an empirical observation that could in principle actually be observed that would render the statement false. If we do in fact observe a falsifying observation, then the statement is definitely false. However, if we bend over backwards to attempt to observe something that would falsify the statement, and we are unable to do so, we gain confidence in the truth of the statement; we can use probability theory (Bayesian or frequentist) to quantify our confidence. We can be certain that some statements are false, because we make a falsifying observation, but we can never be certain that any statement is actually true.

For example, take the statement, "Objects always fall when we drop them." This statement is falsifiable: if I drop something, and I observe it not falling, then the statement is definitely false. However, no matter how many times I drop something and observe it actually falling, I cannot be certain that things always fall when I drop them, everywhere on Earth for all time. The best I can do is say having observed things falling when I drop them many times, I have confidence in the statement, but if I were to ever actually observe a counterexample, then I would have to revise my theory.

In contrast, consider the statement, "God created the universe." The syllogism

1. If God had not created it, the universe would not exist
2. The universe exists
3. Therefore, God created the universe

is certainly valid, and (2) is confirmed by observation. But the syllogism is not falsifiable: if no universe exists, we could not observe that fact. (We are part of the universe; if the universe did not exist, neither would we.) Therefore, the syllogism is not scientific: we could not in principle observe its falsity.

In principle, Popper's claim is very straightforward; in practice it's a lot more complicated. Most importantly, we cannot evaluate statements independently: all statements depend on a theoretical context, the larger structure of a scientific theory, the construction of our measurement devices, and the nature of language itself. Hence, we cannot isolate single statements for falsification; instead we can only falsify larger theoretical constructs. The best we can say if we observe something that falsifies a statement within a theoretical context, then something in the context (including the statement) is false, but we can't be sure precisely what part of the context (or the entire context) is incorrect.

For example, I'm watching the Feynman lectures. Feynman talks about observations of the moons of Jupiter that falsified Newton's theory of gravity. Instead of modifying the theory of gravity itself, scientists changed the theoretical context by adding the premise that the speed of light is finite, with a definite value.

But this ambiguity does not damage Popper's central point. Popper does not give us any guidance on how to fix problems, he merely claims that if it is impossible in principle to have this particular problem, i.e. impossible to observe something contrary to the theoretical context, then whatever it is you're doing, you're not doing science.

Science and philosophy: Introduction

What is "science"? What makes one endeavor scientific and another endeavor non-scientific?

It's tempting to say that science is what scientists do. It's a tempting answer, because different kinds of scientists do a lot of different things. The way biologists do biology is very different from the way physicists do physics; if they are very different, why is it legitimate to label both as "science" but label mathematics or philosophy as "not-science" just because mathematics and philosophy are very different from physics and biology. It's also tempting because we can say that science is just another social category; to talk about science abstractly risks the fallacy of reification. In much the same sense being "American" is just what people in the United States happen to do; to talk abstractly about some essential "Americanism" that would be true regardless of what any Americans actually did would be nonsensical reification.

A lot of people, myself included, think that, unlike Americanism, there really is something essential about science, something essential that would be true even if everyone who called themselves "scientists" didn't do it. Moreover, it's important to think and talk about the essential nature of science because science, done "correctly," has immense social value; done incorrectly, science is useless or harmful. Furthermore, what actual professional scientists actually do is a vastly more rigorous version of a general mode of thought, a mode that everyone should employ, at least about some of their ideas and behaviors.

Of course, there are no other modes of thought, modes that are not science, that also have value; I do not advocate "scientism" in the sense that science is the only valuable mode of thought.

If there really is something essential about science, then philosophers are better-situated than scientists to talk about it. Paradoxically, if there is something essential about science, then it is possible that scientists do things scientifically out of habit or tradition, without reflection or specific intention. They could be doing things scientifically, but doing those things not because they know those things are scientific, but just out of habit. It might also be true that because science, as actually practiced, is socially situated, scientists do specific things that might be irrelevant or contrary to what is essentially scientific because of their social situation. It could take an outsider to discern which of those things really comprise the essence of science, and which are just arbitrary habits or extraneous social behavior. For example, I've worked with a lot of scientists. Many of them have no idea what statistical tests do or how statisticians actually interpret them; they just click a button in Stata or Excel, and if the p value is less than 0.05, they publish. The statistics are essentially scientific; the choice of 0.05 (or any other specific number) as the threshold of significance is not essential to science.

Again, I don't wish to deprecate the social aspects of science: scientists are part of society, and they have to fit their practices to the larger social context. Still, if there is such a thing as what is essentially science, it is still important to discern what is scientific and what is social.

Philosophers are also well-situated to talk about the essential nature of science because when doing actual philosophy (rather than "philosopholgy," the study of the somewhat arbitrarily constructed canon of philosophy) are the least susceptible to authority and privilege. A philosophical work stands or falls on its argument, not on the reputation or privilege of its author. Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia, for example, is "authoritative" on a version of Libertarianism not because he holds any particular power to define it, but because he makes good arguments (well, as good as can be expected) and has persuaded a lot of people that his version of Libertarianism makes sense.

In this series, I will be talking about the philosophy of science as a philosopher. I claim no special privilege to define the essential nature of science, or even to establish that there is such a thing as an essential nature of science: my work, like all philosophy, stands or falls on the persuasiveness of my arguments.

A capitalist in socialist's clothing

The problem, I think, is that Miya Tokumitsu does everything she can to avoid criticizing capitalism (a charge I think the author would vehemently deny). Capitalism makes all virtues, however we loosely define "virtue", about profit (and if it can't make a virtue profitable, it makes it a vice). "Do what you love" (DWYL) is no exception. Instead of a criticism of how capitalism has corrupted what is arguably the defining virtue of humanity, the emotional and social power of labor, Tokumitsu sees DWYL as the defining characteristic of capitalism, and therefore not a human construct. Her interview, Why ‘Do What You Love’ Is Pernicious Advice, carries on this theme.

The fundamental point of the interview comes near the end: "[O]ne of the things I want to do is celebrate the job that just pays the rent." But just paying the rent, not DWYL, is the fundamental capitalist virtue. It is the essence of alienated labor, a concept Marx writes quite a bit about. When you work just to pay the rent (and notice "rent", paying the parasitic landlord class), your labor is literally alienated, cut off, detached, made external. Working just to pay the rent reduces our work to the "cash nexus". I see nothing at all wrong with Marx's goal, to make labor "not only a means of life but life's prime want." All of us should be doing what we love; the fact that we cannot is a failure of capitalism; it is not that doing what we love is itself disreputable.

Of course, capitalism does try to digest every virtue and make it about cash, and DWYL is no exception. Tokumitsu talks about how capitalism tries to corrupt DWYL: the corporate PR fakery, standards that employees should always look like they're happy, the want-ad insistence that candidates be "passionate" about janitorial work, the idea that if you're doing what you love, you should not expect to be paid in actual money. But Tokumitsu draws the wrong conclusion from these attempts: capitalism is trying to assimilate, corrupt, and ultimately destroy the fundamental virtue of socialism. Socialists can certainly resist the corruption of this virtue, and critics can certainly argue that corrupting the virtue of DWYL produces more, not fewer, contradictions, but arguing that we should do away with the virtue entirely, and accept absolutely alienated labor as the ultimate standard of good would do nothing but hand capitalism an unearned victory.

Socialist theoreticians should, of course, valorize the proletariat, whose labor is absolutely alienated. But we should valorize the proletariat and the alienation of their labor not because alienated labor is the best form of labor. Instead, we should valorize the proletariat because the absolute alienation of their labor is, as Marx argues, the fundamental contradiction the resolution (sublation, aufheben) of which produces revolutionary consciousness.

See also: In defense of "Do What You Love"

This video will make you angry

The autonomous individual

What does it mean to be an "autonomous" person? This is a riddle, in Adorno's sense.

Briefly, Adorno argues that philosophy is not like science. Philosophy does not ask "questions" with "answers" in the scientific sense of the word. Philosophy does not ask questions like, "What is the charge on an electron?" with answers like, "1.602176565(35)×10⁻¹⁹ coulombs." Philosophy deals in riddles — negations, contradictions — which cannot be "answered" but must be "sublated" or negated again. A riddle is a negation: "When is a door not a door?" The response sublates the riddle, negates the negation: "When it's ajar." The whole system, riddle and response, dissolves the contradiction of the riddle, and, when nontrivial, creates a new level of meaning, or at least destroys a delusion. Adorno does not, however, argue that riddles are in any sense transcendental, that they have nothing to do with science; instead, science (broadly conceived), in addition to answering questions, poses or creates riddles; without science, there would be no riddles for philosophers to untangle.

Every individual's consciousness is constructed by his or her family, society, and culture. A person who develops without any human society does not develop any consciousness at all; consciousness, personality, is not by itself something latent in infants, in the same sense that a plan for their bodily development is latent in their DNA.* We have certain propensities latent in our physical neurology: the development of language, of empathy, of reason, and perhaps some instincts (or perhaps not), but there is not an actual personality latent in an infant mind; there is at most only the propensity to develop some personality.

*Yes, I know that the environment plays a crucial role in the development of the individual phenotype. But the difference between physical development is, I claim, substantively different from mental development. There is nothing at all in mental development even vaguely similar to the phenotype's genetic "latent plan."

Saying that individual consciousness is socially constructed is not, of course, to say that the development of any individual consciousness is predictable, even if it were, at root, deterministic. Development is far too complicated to be predictable in the same sense that the positions of the planets of the Solar System are predictable. But predictability is not the issue: the issue is construction of consciousness from the "outside."

So, if consciousness is constructed, if it is ineluctably social, cultural, what does it mean to be autonomous? If my consciousness is constructed by the prohibitions and compulsions of my society, in what sense am I ever anything other than radically unfree? Given that, how can we ever distinguish between a free and an unfree society? If a slave's psychology could be constructed such that he wanted to be a slave (and why could it not?) would he still be a slave?

There is also the problem of a critique of society and culture: the critic's own consciousness, the fundamental basis of his or her critique, is a construction of society and culture: all criticism is from the "inside"; it can never be from the "outside." Or at least not radically outside; every critique is from the inside of some society and culture. A judgment that a society is good or bad is not the judgment of an individual consciousness; it is the judgment of a society of itself.

Similarly, what about an individual's self-judgment? When I feel pride or guilt, about myself, where does that judgment come from? Whose judgment is it? My own? Society's? Can any judgment of myself be anything but society's domination of the self? Even this post is American capitalist culture, which constructed the consciousness and personality of that possibly fictitious thing called "Larry," questioning itself. Why should any resolution not be simply tautological?

The problem of autonomy is, I think, the true "hard problem" of consciousness. (What passes for the "hard problem" in contemporary philosophy, i.e. how can non-conscious matter form consciousness, seems to me, after years of study, to be a scientific question with an answer, or just a pseudo-problem.)

Coercively harming a minority

miller (a.k.a. trivialknot) asks the question (regarding Christmas music): "[I]f [some social] gain requires coercively harming a minority, is it truly worthwhile?"

"Harm" and "coercion" are subjective terms: we cannot talk about "harm" without talking about how a person feels about something; we cannot talk about coercion without talking about will and consent, so their will can be coercively violated without their consent. These terms are also morally loaded. "Harm" is morally unacceptable negativity; coercion is morally unacceptable force. So the question as its stands is trivial or circular: unacceptable actions are unacceptable. In a morally neutral sense, a person is harmed if and only if they subjectively feel that they have been harmed, and they are coerced if and only if they subjectively feel that they have been coerced. The only way to detect harm and coercion is to ask people. (We also need to discover whether or not the objectively determinable actions they claim to have been harmful or coercive actually occurred.)

We could, of course, define harm and coercion objectively. However, such an objective definition would include and exclude actions as harmful and coercive only according to our a priori moral beliefs about actions. The best we can do with objective definitions is to talk about consistency, not correctness. Thus, miller's question would be, "Is ubiquitous Christmas music substantively similar to other things we consider coercively harmful (morally unacceptable), and substantively different from things we do not consider coercively harmful (morally acceptable)." Ubiquitous Christmas music cannot intrinsically be coercively harmful; in a morally neutral sense, it is coercively harmful if and only if people subjectively feel like they are being coercively harmed. In other words, we cannot examine the objective characteristics of ubiquitous Christmas music, ignoring how people feel about it, and come to a moral determination.

(You may disagree with the above paragraph. Most philosophers who advocate deontic and objective moral philosophy would disagree. I would welcome any argument that's less circular than "subjective moral philosophy is not objective," or, "subjective moral philosophy is contradictory when interpreted objectively.")

There are also the subjectively reflective definitions of "coercion" and "harm": I believe you have been coerced or harmed if you subjectively feel you have been coerced or harmed, and I subjectively feel you have been coerced or harmed, and both of us believe so in an objectively consistent way (i.e. I believe that all objectively similar actions are also coercive or harmful). Again, we can still have a morally neutral reflective definition: the reflective definitions just distinguish between actions that a some people consider coercive or harmful, and actions that almost everyone considers coercive or harmful. For example, a lot of people believe that affording secular (non-religious) marriage to gay people is neither coercive nor harmful, even if a lot of religious people feel coerced or harmed by secular gay marriage. There's an argument that people who feel coerced or harmed by secular gay marriage do not feel like they are coercing or harming Muslims, for example, by eating pork. However, this objective inconsistency can be eliminated by admitting that in a morally neutral sense, eating pork does coercively harm Muslims, and so what?

Again, if we define coercive harm in a morally neutral sense, then by definition saying that some action requires coercive harm (in the subjectively reflective sense) is not saying that it is therefore, and for that reason only, morally unacceptable. We would have to add the statement as a premise, not a conclusion. However, adding the premise entails unresolvable contradictions in our present physical circumstances.

It is not (perhaps not yet) the case that everyone can have and do everything they want, and people who don't get or do what they want have a tendency to feel coercively harmed, especially when they don't get what they want because other people with superior power (either numbers, privilege, or violence) do get or do what they want. So we have to make trade-offs entailing morally neutral coercive harm: trade-offs are a physical necessity. Of course, if we can choose between harming no one and harming someone, most people (besides sadists) would agree the former is preferable. But a lot of social choices, including not only whether to play Christmas music ubiquitously for a month or two but also most criminal and property law, requires trading off coercive harm against some people to benefit others.

Let's consider a trade-off with, to most 21st century Americans, a subjectively obvious answer: chattel slavery of black people. The existence of chattel slavery requires unambiguous subjectively reflective coercive harm to slaves. The slaves themselves feel coercively harmed, and if free white people were in the same situation, they would feel coerced and harmed, so at some level they agree that slavery is coercively harmful. On the other hand, the abolition of chattel slavery requires unambiguous subjectively reflective coercive harm: the owners of slaves feel are harmed by the coercive deprivation of their property, and most 21st century Americans consider deprivation of property by force to be coercively harmful. (One could argue that people cannot be property, but "property" is just as subjective as "harm" and "coercion"; by deciding that people cannot be property, one embeds the moral judgment in the definition a priori. As a subjectivist, I think that embedding moral judgments in language is perfectly fine, so long as we're honest and upfront about it and do not pretend to be objective.) If we have the moral premise that if X entails coercively harming someone, then X is wrong, then both the preservation and abolition of chattel slavery is wrong. We could, of course, have the moral premise that if X is wrong, then its imposition is coercively harmful, and its abolition is not coercively harmful. But that renders the first premise vacuous: wrong things are wrong. Or we could say that when we have two choices that are coercively harmful, we have to just decide between them on some other basis.

And that is precisely what we did with chattel slavery, and what we do with Christmas music. Both alternatives are, in a morally neutral, subjectively reflective sense, coercively harmful (and the imposition of music can be a form of torture, arguably worse than the imposition of pain). We simply have to choose between them. How we do so is a matter for scientific inquiry; how we should do so is a matter of philosophical and political theoretical inquiry.

Marx on Alienation

In his early writing, Karl Marx analyzes the concept of alienation. Marx adopts a Hegelian methodology in his analysis. To both Hegel and Marx, history is a dynamic dialectical process. A dialectical stage begins with a negation, a contradiction, and then proceeds to a resolution of the contradiction, i.e. the sublation, transcendence, or, from Feuerbach, “the negation of the negation” (Marx, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts” 108). The original negation is not erased, but instead transformed (Tucker, Notes xli). Marx theorizes that alienation, especially the alienation of the worker (and capitalist) from the social activity of production, constitutes a negation, one which Marx believes will be sublated or transcended by the advent of communism. In his analysis, Marx claims, contra Hegel and others, the material basis of alienation, explores the specific material character of alienation, and locates the potential sublation of alienation in the sphere of practice.

Marx argues that Hegel’s account of the dialectical process must be transformed from an idealistic basis to a materialistic basis. Marx holds that Hegel has the dialectic “standing on its head [and] must be turned right side up again” (Marx, Afterword 302). Marx reads Hegel as saying that an actual idea creates the material reality of, e.g., family and civil society. Instead, Marx argues that Hegel inverts subject and object: actual material human beings create the ideas of family and civil society (“Contribution” 17-18). Marx holds that our social relations are not fundamentally in the human mind but in the material world. Dialectical contradictions arise when the material economic conditions conflict with the social institutions apropos to earlier economic conditions (“Marx on the History” 2). Although Marx follows Feuerbach’s lead in inverting this reading of Hegel, Marx extends Feuerbach’s materialism. In “Theses on Feuerbach,” of Marx claims that Feuerbach does not conceive of human activity itself as material (143). Marx argues instead that human activities, including thought and social relations, are also material (145). Richard J. Bernstein argues that Hegel unifies the material and the ideal in Geist (29-30), so too does Marx unify the physical and the ideal in the material.

After locating the dialectic in the material, Marx characterizes the specific nature of alienation in the material social relations of production under capitalism. In “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts,” Marx argues that capitalism inverts the relationship of humanity to labor, from the existence of worker for his or her fulfillment in labor, to the use of labor for the existence of the worker. Because of this inversion, labor under capitalism becomes institutionally alienated in four distinct ways. First, the product of labor becomes not merely objectified – Marx argues that it is humanity’s intrinsic nature, our species being, to produce objects, to exert our will on the natural world (75-76) – and not only expropriated, but taken to become actively hostile to the worker, not fulfilling but diminishing her- or himself, sometimes to the point of loss of reality, literal starvation, and death (71-72, 74). Second, capitalism alienates the worker from the labor process itself. Not just the product but the activity of producing no longer belongs to the worker; the worker becomes essentially a machine programmed by those who have purchased his or her labor power (75). Third, because, as mentioned above, it is our species being to be active, engaged, producers, Marx argues that by alienating workers from their product and process of production, capitalism thus alienates workers from their species being (76-77). Finally, capitalism alienates individual people from each other (77). When producing for a wage, the workers and the consumers of the workers’ products no longer interact with each other – they no longer create a social relationship. Marx argues that if labor were not alienated, one who produces for another would have “the direct and conscious satisfaction that [his or her] work satisfied a human need” (qtd. in Bernstein 48). By alienating labor, capitalism transforms production, the most intimate and personal relationship between human beings and nature, other human beings, and humanity itself, into an impersonal, bestial activity.

Marx argues that alienation must be resolved in the material, practical world, not merely the world of ideas. Marx asserts that “Social life is essentially practical,” not ideal, and that labor’s alienation, the contradiction between humanity’s actual practice of production under capitalism and production’s essential human purpose, must be resolved in practice (“Theses” 145). Marx opposes his views specifically to those of Proudhon: in “Society and Economy in History,” Marx condemns Proudhon for invoking mystical, nonsensical phrases to explain history and its development (136). Instead, Marx asserts that our ideas follow, not precede, our actual social relations: the “whole inner organization of nations [and] their international relations” are just “the expression of a particular division of labor” (139-140). Marx argues that our ideas are not eternal; they are always tied to material reality: “economic categories are only abstract expressions of . . . actual relations” (140). Marx concludes that Proudhon believes that only the categories, the “isolated thoughts,” need be changed to revolutionize society (140-141). In his condemnation of Proudhon, Marx implies that the opposite must be true: to change our ideas, we must change the physical reality. As Marx describes in “The German Ideology,” we must proceed from the “first premise of human history,” which is not the existence of eternal categories or ideas in the mind of God, but “the existence of living human individuals” and their physical, material nature. According to Tucker, Marx does not condemn ideas per se, but believes that ideas, theory, can “assist” changes in practice (Introduction xxxii). But, for Marx, physical existence and physical practice, what we actually do, remains primary. It is therefore practice – guided by theory – that must change to sublate the alienation of labor, to negate the negation constituted by alienation.

The focus on the alienation of labor makes clear that the conflict between capitalism and communism is not one of pragmatic efficiency but of the essential nature of humanity. Marx is not arguing here that communism or socialism is a way to produce more stuff than capitalism. Instead, Marx proceeds from a radically different view of the essence of humanity than does capitalism. Capitalism proceeds from the view of humanity as isolated individuals, whose relations are necessarily hostile, e.g. Hobbes’ “war of all against all,” or Rand’s fundamental “precondition of civilized society” as the “right to self-defense” (qtd. in “Civilization”) which can only blunt natural human hostility. Marx instead proceeds from the view of humanity as still individuals, but as social individuals, whose relations are ideally communal and mutually beneficial. The isolated individual is the negation of social humanity; the negation of negation will happen only when the negation of isolation is sublated into social production.

Works Cited

“Civilization.” The Ayn Rand Lexicon. The Ayn Rand Institute. 2014. Web. 17 Sep. 2014.

Bernstein, Richard J. “Praxis: Marx and the Hegelian Background.” Praxis and Action: Contemporary Philosophies of Human Activity. Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 1971. 11-83. Print.

Marx, Karl. Afterword to the Second German Edition. Capital. Vol. 1. By Marx. Tucker 299-302.

---. “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.” Tucker 16-25.

---. “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1877.” Tucker 66-125.

---. “Marx on the History of His Opinions.” Tucker 3-5.

---. “Society and Economy in History.” Tucker 136-142.

---. “Theses on Feuerbach.” Tucker 143-145.

Tucker, Robert C. Ed. The Marx-Engels Reader. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 1978. Print.

---. Note on Text and Terminology. Tucker xxxix-xlii.

Why I didn't study philosophy

When he's careful, Massimo Pigliucci can write some kick-ass philosophy. Unfortunately, he's often not careful. In his recent article, The return of radical empiricism, Pigliucci tries to attack scientism, a.k.a. "radical empiricism," but instead does nothing more than string together a series of logical and rhetorical fallacies, failing even to define his central term. I started a detailed rebuttal of Pigliucci's article, but it got too depressing. The article is just too arrogantly stupid, and it's incomprehensible that a professional philosopher could write such drivel.

Pigliucci is, unfortunately, not an exception: that's the problem that I saw in philosophy in general. I studied philosophy on my own for about ten years. I don't hold this study as evidence of any particular expertise; I just mean to say that I didn't make a completely uninformed decision. When I finally decided to go to college, I was originally going to study philosophy. But literally every philosopher I interacted with — just the ones I liked — displayed the same sort of arrogant stupidity when his (philosophy is almost thoroughly male-dominated) views were challenged. Sturgeon's Law is one thing, but the fetid stench of insufferable condescension and incompetence of even the best philosophers was simply too much to bear. So I switched to political science and economics. Even when economists are dead wrong, and even when they're doing their best to be mean to their opponents, they don't display the stupidity and ineptitude of a philosopher with a position and no argument.

Fundamentalism

"Fundamentalism" and its derivatives are perhaps the least useful words when discussing religion. Atheists do not object to fundamentalist Christianity or fundamentalist Islam primarily because they're fundamentalist; we object primarily to Christianity and Islam. Fundamentalism in this context usually just means more Christian or more Muslim, i.e. more bad; similarly, moderate Christianity or moderate Islam usually just means less bad, which better than more bad, but still bad. The problem in the world we New Atheists struggle against is not "fundamentalism"; we struggle against religion.

(More precisely, New Atheists struggle against a specific kind of religion. Human language is somewhat fluid, and people attach words to concepts willy-nilly, without philosophical precision; the word, "religion," is no exception. We are, on the whole, pretty clear about what kind of religion we object to: the idea that God exists, imposes moral duties, obligations and prohibitions, on human behavior. Given that a metric assload of people actually use "religion" to mean just this idea, our use of "religion" to denote the exact same idea does not seem at all confusing or ambiguous.)

I don't even know what "fundamentalism" really means. It has an ostensive definition: when attached to Christianity, "fundamentalism" just means all the things that that Christians use to distinguish self-described "fundamentalists" from "non-fundamentalists." (Similarly, mutatis mutandis, for Islam.) As a New Atheist, I am not particularly interested in theological disputes. Analytically, though, fundamentalism is used in three main ways, to denote the idea that someone believes:

1. X is true and worthy of promulgation
2. Some text should be taken literally
3. X is inerrant

I am a fundamentalist in all three senses. I believe that communism, atheism, evolution, anthropogenic climate change, are all true and worthy of promulgation. I might change my mind that one or another were true, but today I think they're true, and worthy of promulgation. Everyone does this. I do not object because Christians believe something is true; I object because they believe Christianity is true. I believe that my textbooks should be taken literally, not metaphorically. When my economics textbook describes a relationship between the quantity of hats demanded and produced and the price of a hat, I believe they are talking literally about actual hats, actual dollar bills (or euros, etc.), actual factories, and actual people buying and wearing hats. Again, I don't object to Biblical literalist taking something literally, I object that they are taking the Bible literally.

The third meaning is a little more subtle. I believe the data are inerrant, but I want to be very careful about what I mean here by "inerrant." Inerrant does not mean veridical. Inerrant means that if the data appear contradictory, I must repair the contradiction by altering my belief about something other than the data. For example, if I am weighing bricks, and I my scale reports the weight of a brick as 10¹² kg, then I have a contradiction between my experience of putting the brick on the scale and the scale. I cannot resolve this contradiction by denying the data: I cannot deny that I lifted the brick, and I cannot deny that the scale reported 10¹² kg. I must resolve the contradiction by changing my beliefs not about the data but about the world. Perhaps I performed the measurement incorrectly. Perhaps the scale has changed so that it is no longer measuring weight or reporting the measurement in the same way it was a moment ago. There are, of course, a lot of elaborate ways scientists use to resolve contradictions in the data, but the one way that is absolutely forbidden is to say that because the data contradicts my ideas about the world, the data does not exist or should not be taken literally. (I cannot, for example, say that the scale is measuring the brick's happiness.)

In a deep sense, I mean exactly by the inerrancy of the data what Biblical literalists mean by the inerrancy of the Bible. They do not mean that if there is an apparent contradiction in the Bible, that the proposition is both true and false. Instead, they believe that they must add an interpretation that resolves the contradiction. Similarly, when the data from the double slit experiment contradicted data from our ordinary experience of of rigid objects, we had to add quantum theory to our interpreation of the world to save the data. No matter what our a priori ideas about the world happen to be, if the data contradict those ideas, it is the ideas that must change, not the data.

The change in focus of anti-atheist polemic* from religion to "fundamentalism" — when it is not just outrageous lies and (thanks, Dr. Coyne!), and Dr. Loretta Graziano Breuning is a flat-out liar) — seems at best confused and at worst intentionally misleading. We object to "fundamentalism" only to the extent that "fundamentalist" something-bad is usually worse than "moderate" something-bad. That something bad is, in the sense noted above, religion.

*I do not object to polemic per se. Obviously, I believe that specifically anti-atheist polemic is incorrect.

In defense of "Do What You Love"

Yes, you "should"* do what you love, as your career and your profession. True, not everyone gets to do what they love, but that is a social failure, not a personal one. Marx's chief complaint against capitalism is that even when it's working "perfectly," it alienates workers from both the product and from the process of production. Both the product and the work are no longer valuable in their own right; they are just an instrument for the capitalist to accumulate more money, and for the worker to earn wages to consume. A communist society, as Marx declares in Gotha, can occur only after, among other things, "labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want." The problem is not that the workers' sacrifice is not sufficiently rewarded, the problem is the sacrifice itself. Instead, We should strive for a society where everyone can do what they love. In the meantime, those who are privileged enough to actually be able to do what they love have no cause to feel guilty or ashamed for just doing so.

If you'll forgive using normative language to talk about just doing what you want.

Doing what you love is a positive privilege: it is something that everyone should have, but only a few actually do have. It is not a negative privilege: it is not something, such as the ability to break the law with impunity that no one should have but some do, such as the ability to break the law with impunity. Similarly it is not, at least in the ideal case, something, such as "leadership," that if a few have it, others are necessarily excluded. Doing what you love is like being able to go almost anywhere without fear: as a white man, I have this privilege; women and people of color do not. The way to correct this privilege is not to force everyone to live in fear, but to eliminate the fear that those without the privilege have to live with. The cure for any positive privilege is not to condemn the privilege, but to extend it to everyone.

Positive privilege becomes problematic when people attach other attitudes to it. I have been able to do what I love my whole life, and I have mostly been relatively well-paid for doing so. But I have not had this privilege because I am extraordinary or in any way better than anyone else; I was just lucky. My privilege is not evidence of my innate superiority, either of ability or character. I was born white, male, American; I was well-fed, well-educated, and socialized with middle-class manners; I had a talent and love for a field, computer programming, that for a long time was highly in demand.

Not everyone agrees. In In In the Name of Love, Miya Tokumitsu believes that doing what you love is selfish and exploitative. But Tokumitsu is long on condemnation and short on quality analysis. For example, she holds up Steve Jobs as an epitome of doing what you love. She quotes Jobs' 2005 Stanford graduation speech:

You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.

According to Tokumitsu, this quotation indicates that Jobs was "portraying Apple as a labor of his individual love," which "elided the labor of untold thousands in Apple’s factories." But there's a lot of distance between Jobs' words and Tokumitsu's interpretation. Maybe other evidence shows that Jobs really does, as Tokumitsu puts it, violently erase the contributions of thousands of engineers, designers, and factory workers to making Jobs' love a reality, but there's no evidence that Jobs doing what he loved, or framing his own work as a labor of love, is the cause of that violent erasure.

Tokumitsu also assumes that only the elite's "creative, intellectual, socially prestigious" work can possibly be lovable. All else is "repetitive, unintellectual, undistinguished." But this characterization only betrays Tokumitsu's ivory tower elitism. (Tokumitsu holds a Ph.D. in art history, but I'm unable to determine his or her own job; dollars to donuts it's neither repetitive nor unintellectual.) There's no intrinsic reason that any human labor must be repetitive or unintellectual, nor any intrinsic reason why creative, intellectual work should be valued more than any other: the "antithesis between mental and physical labor" (Gotha) is not, according to Marx, intrinsic, but an artifact of capitalism. I know construction workers who love construction, plumbers who love plumbing; I can even imagine factory work, properly constructed, can be rewarding and fulfilling. Perhaps there are some jobs that are unlovable (cleaning other people's toilets comes to mind), but those jobs should not be glorified; they should either be done by machines, shared democratically rather than economically, or at least paid extremely well. I would happily be a janitor for $100,000 per year, and I would clean toilets with love.

In A Life Beyond ‘Do What You Love’, Gordon Marino offers an explicitly Kantian critique. According to Marino, doing what we love is only one dimension in our thinking on our choice of work. Marino references Martin Luther King's metaphor of length, breadth and depth: our own desires, service to the community, and service to the "transcendent." It would be a mistake, argues Marino, to accept as "faith that my likes and dislikes or our sense of meaning alone should decide what I do [emphasis added]." But Marino's analysis doesn't work. First, "service to the community" is neither opposite nor orthogonal but part of doing what you love. We are inherently social; we are not social because of some external moral norm. I presently work as a writing tutor not because I love reading the work of unskilled writers, but because I love helping hundreds of writers every year become more skilled, more sophisticated, and more expressive. What I love is service to the community. And (with apologies to Dr. King) the notion of service to the "transcendent" is nonsensical. The only coherent, existent thing that can demand "obedience and the willingness to submerge and remold our desires" is the ruling class du jour.

Yes, it is possible to trivialize and coopt "do what you love." Capitalism is notable for trivializing and coopting everything. But just because capitalism has trivialized and coopted marriage and family, as Marx and Engels observe in the Communist Manifesto, does not mean that we should stop partnering and having children. It is notable that both Tokumitsu and Marino do not offer any evidence that popular culture actually trivializes the idea of doing what you love: it is the concept itself they charge is trivial hedonism.

But it is a mistake to interpret "do what you love" as mere hedonism, as just the expression of "likes and disklikes." The ethos is do what you love (and love what you do), not do what you like. To love something is to dedicate everything you have and more to it, and to do so because you want to. And love is to cherish everything, not just the pleasant bits. To love something requires the highest discipline. Love requires sacrifice, but it is the sacrifice of the lower to the higher. But it is your own higher and lower, not the judgment of some self-styled philosophical or theological authority.

Marino interprets (fairly, I think) Tokumitsu's essay as saying that "the 'do what you love' ethos . . . degrades work that is not done from love." But it's true: work, indeed anything, not done from love really is degrading. No, we should not ignore or erase those who cannot do what they love, but neither should we glorify doing what you hate. That some must do what they hate should shock our conscience, should arouse our righteous indignation. Yes, we must sometimes do things because they must be done, however much we may hate it, but that is a problem to be solved, not a condition to be excused, much less glorified. Whether man or nature enslaves you, to dedicate anything, much less everything, to what you hate is slavery.

We need to build a society where everyone can do what they love, a society where labor is "life's prime want." As much as capitalism tries to trivialize it, "do what you love" is fundamentally subversive, even revolutionary. It is the antithesis of Christian slave morality, work for God (i.e. His representatives in the ruling class); it is the antithesis of work to live. It is the highest ideal and the liberation of all humanity.

Belief, disbelief, and/or lack of belief

I saw "What Atheism Really Means" by Mike Dobbins when it came out last month. I chuckled and moved on because Dobbins makes a pointless and irrelevant distinction. But then 3quarksdaily picked it up, so I suppose the editors there are as ignorant as Dobbins about basic philosophy. In his article, Dobbins argues that the definition of atheism as lack of a [positive] belief in God is insufficient, and argues that the stronger definition as disbelief in God is more appropriate. However, Dobbins' objection is irrelevant, because it ignores or conflates different social contexts where various definitions of atheism operate: prosaic, philosophical, and political.

In an prosaic social context, I am happy to use Dobbins' stronger definition: I definitely say that I disbelieve in the existence of god. In this context, I am using the social definition of "god": the sort of being that characters such as Yahweh, Jesus*, Allah, Krishna, the Buddha*, Ngai, etc. purportedly represent. None of these entities actually exist; I believe that these characters are fictional on the basis of evidence and reason. I might be mistaken, of course, but I definitely do believe, and I would rationally defend that belief, that they do not actually exist. In a prosaic context, I agree with Dobbins: the facts warrant a statement of definite disbelief.

*To the extent that explicitly deistic attributes are essential to these characters. In a similar sense, the character of Abraham Lincoln in Benjamin P. Thomas's Abraham Lincoln: A Biography represents a real person, whereas the character of Abraham Lincoln (Benjamin Walker) in the film, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter is fictional.

However, things get a lot more complicated when philosophers consider an idea. Many atheists, myself included, have studied a considerable amount of philosophy, and there are many philosophers who have examined and defended atheism at the highest professional academic level. In a philosophical context, the precise meaning of words becomes critically important; the unqualified word, "god," becomes unacceptably ambiguous. The sense noted above, beings like Yahweh, etc., i.e. beings with personality, desires, preferences, and who intervene in the physical world to effect their will, is only one sense. There is also the deistic god, a god who sets the world in motion with a set of physical laws and then does not intervene further. This sort of god is not so much disbelieved as dismissed. While it would be nice to know, even if such a god existed, it would have so little impact on my daily life that in the absence of any evidence (even if such evidence could be adduced) deciding one way or the other is a waste of time. Finally, there are the "gods" of Sophisticated Theology™. For example, Jerry Coyne (who reads Sophisticated Theology™ so I don't have to), quotes David Bentley Hart's book, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss:

To speak of “God” properly, then . . . is to speak of the one infinite source of all that is: eternal, omniscient, omnipotent, uncreated, uncaused, perfectly transcendent of all things and for that very reason absolutely immanent to all things. God so understood is not something poised over against the universe, in addition to it, nor is he the universe itself. He is not a “being,” at least not in the way that a tree, a shoemaker, or a god is a being; he is not one more object in the inventory of things that are, or any sort of discrete object at all.

It seems clear that Hart's definition of god is not the sort of... concept?... that I can have any belief one way or another regarding existence. To be philosophically rigorous, the stronger, definite statement of disbelief is too narrow to encompass all these different definitions of "god"; the broader, and admittedly weaker, definition of "atheism" as a lack of positive belief succinctly covers all these cases.

In addition to ambiguities in the meaning of "god," there are also ambiguities and subtleties in the word "believe." In a philosophical sense, a person can believe or disbelieve only propositions, i.e. statements that can coherently be either true or false. (Philosopher Theodore Drange explores this concept in some depth in his 1998 article, "Atheism, Agnosticism, Noncognitivism.") If "God exists" is a proposition, then I can definitely disbelieve it. However, if "God exists" is not a proposition, as Hart seems to claim, then I can neither believe nor disbelieve it. In a similar sense, I can neither believe nor disbelieve the statement, "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously," nor can I believe or disbelieve emotitive sentences such as "Yay!" or "Boo hoo!" Again, confronted with a vast range of ways that theists present the propositional status of "God exists," I can be both precise and compact only by asserting that I lack a positive belief about the existence of God.

In addition to senses of god that are not propositions, there are senses that are propositional but cannot be known. To illustrate this principle, consider the statement, "There is [present tense] a ninja hiding in the room." First, this statement is hard to prove: ninjas are, by definition, far more skilled at hiding than I am at detecting them. More importantly, though, even if I discover a ninja in the room, he or she is ipso facto no longer hiding. Neither discovering nor failing to discover a ninja, therefore, is evidence for or against the proposition. While the statement is propositionally, semantically, and even scientifically unproblematic, it is fundamentally unknowable by definition. While I might be able to come to a definite belief on indirect evidence (it seems unlikely that any ninja would want to hide in my office), if I am going to be rigorous (or if I am considering a statement where indirect evidence is unavailable), I have to simply deny any belief.

Another philosophical subtlety comes from the way that scientific naturalists such as myself view knowledge. First, in the scientific naturalist account, without exception, all knowledge — i.e. all propositional statements about reality — is always provisional. All knowledge is conditioned on evidence, and any individual human as well as all human society, has at any time only a small, finite subset of the very large and possibly infinite body of available evidence, and all knowledge, therefore, is subject to revision given new evidence. Because all knowledge is provisional, it's unnecessary to explicitly condition knowledge statements with provisionality. The sentence, "I believe (or know) that two bodies experience an attraction described by general relativity, which can be closely approximated at low densities as a force proportional to the product of the masses divided by the square of the distance," does not gain any additional meaning by adding provisos noting that further evidence might change my opinion. Because there are no statements about reality that are believed non-provisionally, we don't need to distinguish between provisional and non-provisional beliefs, and the linguistic distinction is dropped as redundant. In my own writing, I try to avoid the word, "certainly," replacing it with "definitely," but my vocabulary was shaped by convention, not scientific rigor, so I occasionally err. To the obtuse or unaware, unconditioned statements about knowledge sometimes appear to be stating facts with certainty rather than definiteness. Thus, even towards conceptions of gods that I disbelieve, I definitely disbelieve, i.e. I have made a decision, but I do not certainly disbelieve.

A more important consideration, however, requires looking a little more deeply into how scientific naturalism works. Because all knowledge is provisional, it is always statistical, at least conceptually. (I have to egregiously simplify here, but I hope to capture an essential feature about scientific knowledge.) In a statistical model, we create a "null hypothesis," which represents a default belief about the world, and an "alternate hypothesis" which represents the negation of the null hypothesis. For example, I might say that the null hypothesis is that the average height of men in the United States equal to 179 cm, and the alternate hypothesis is that the average height is not equal to 179 cm; on average they are either shorter than or taller than 179 cm. Note that the null hypothesis is probably not precisely correct; even if the average height is very near 179 cm, it is probably not exactly 179.000000000 .. 000 cm (we can measure length very precisely). (This imprecision is not really problematic; close enough is close enough, and if I'm designing a car or a house, for instance, I don't need to know the average height to nanometer precision.) In addition to being not precisely correct, the null hypothesis is usually not directly provable, it is only disprovable. If I measure the height of 300* men, and find that their average height (sample mean) is 180 cm, with a standard deviation of 10 cm, then I know with about 95.8% confidence that the average height of all men is not 179 cm. Note that I do not know that the average height of all men is 180 cm; I have "proven" (provisionally) only the alternate hypothesis, which is that the average height is not 179 cm. The best I can say is that I have good evidence for now considering 180 cm to be the new null hypothesis when talking about the height of American men.

At this sample size, the different between the normal and t distributions is negligible.

This method impels a curious terminology that any competent professor of statistics will impress on her students: you say you reject the null hypothesis or you fail to reject the null hypothesis; you do not, on pain of durance vile, ever say you accept the null hypothesis. Similarly, you say you have sufficient evidence to conclude that the alternate hypothesis is true, or you have insufficient evidence to conclude the alternate hypothesis is true; you never say you conclude that the null hypothesis is true. Strictly (very strictly) speaking, therefore, a scientific naturalist never actually believes the currently specified description of the world, a systematic collection of null hypotheses; she believes, instead, that she has insufficient evidence to conclude that the world is different from this current specification.

Note that "insufficient evidence" applies equally to edge cases as well as to non-edge cases. In the above example, if I had measured the height of only 250 men, I would be only 94.3% confident that I can reject the null and conclude the alternate hypothesis (that the average height was not 179 cm) was true. Because by convention I will reject only if I am 95% confident, I will fail to reject the null and conclude that I have insufficient evidence to conclude that the average height is not 179 cm. Similarly, if I find the average height of my sample to be 179.1 cm, I will be only 56.2% confident that the null is false, but I will still just say that I have insufficient evidence. (If I measured 30,000 men, however, a sample average of 179.1 would give me 95.8% confidence to reject the null.)

In practice when we repeatedly test and fail to reject some specification of the world, especially when our failure to reject is not borderline, we have good reason to believe the world really is at least very close to the specification. Still, when pressed, and in ambiguous or uncertain circumstances, scientific naturalists tend to retreat to "insufficient evidence" semantics.

I hope you'll forgive me, gentle reader, when I tell you we atheists really don't care that much anymore about the philosophical subtleties I have wasted so much of your time describing to you. As far as most atheists are concerned, the philosophical and scientific debate is over, decided. No matter what definition of "god" you choose (that is not intentionally metaphorical nor does unacceptable violence to the meaning of the word, "god"), your definition is meaningless, non-propositional, unknowable, or rejected by the evidence. We make a nod to the philosophical subtleties by making the most general statement — we lack a positive belief about god, which includes disbelief in some definitions of "god" — when concision is more important than detail.

Atheism is not primarily a philosophical position; it is a political position. Our position is that all god talk (that is not intentionally metaphorical) is not just nonsense, but pernicious nonsense. Religion is not just a weird thing that some people do in private; it has profoundly negative effects on our societies, cultures, and nations (and what positive effects it might have would be at least as good, and usually better, if the god talk were eliminated). We define atheism broadly not just as a nod to the philosophical subtleties, but also to be as inclusive as possible to people who reject god talk for a variety of reasons, with various degrees of philosophical sophistication. We want to include as an "atheist" someone who is not particularly interested in philosophy, who just doesn't know whether or not Yahweh and Jesus are real, but who finds offensive and absurd, as we do, the notion that, for example, the leader of an organization of supposedly celibate men, an organization that has gone out of its way to protect and defend men they know have raped children, has anything whatsoever legitimate to say about how consenting adults employ their genitals or women employ, or refuse to employ, their uteruses. If you can say only that you lack a positive belief about god, and that people who say they do have any sort of positive belief thereby gain no moral or scientific authority whatsoever, you're one of us.