Julia Sweeney – Letting Go of God

Julia Sweeney is an actress and writer who was on Saturday Night Live for four years and popularized the androgynous character, “Pat,” which spun a feature film, “It’s Pat.” She also wrote and starred in a previous one-person-show, “God Said Ha!” chronicling the poignant, hilarious, and tragic ordeal taking care of her brother battling cancer and her family who descended on her small home to help take care of everyone.

Finally, Sweeney “let go of god,” she allowed herself the full realization that religions are just human inventions to make sense of an impersonal universe, to feel better about our own mortality and, of course, to better control other human beings. As it is for many atheists, that felt like an incredible liberation. She was at first a bit surprised that after letting go of god she still wasn’t going around killing or robbing people; but then she realized that morality is a natural outcome of living in social groups, where without (socially taught and enforced) ethical principles we simply wouldn’t survive. [Read a review.]

There’s a five minute video at YouTube.

From last Monday

As you can read below, the dentists have taken false teeth into their own hands to help identify suicides. In addition to the forest surrounding Mt. Fuji, I visited two other natural wonders that turned out to be hot spots for jisatsu – a waterfall in Nikko (where the hear no / see no / speak no monkeys are carved) and the cliffs of Tojinbo overlooking the Japan Sea coast.
http://www.tojinbo.org/

KOFU, Yamanashi Pref. (Kyodo) The Yamanashi Dental Association has for six years been pushing a program in which identification tape is attached to false teeth to make it easier to confirm who committed suicide in a local forest.
The association began the project in February 2000 to identify bodies found in the dense Aokigahara forest at the foot of Mount Fuji, where many people commit suicide. The group felt that identification could be made more quickly if people had their names and prefecture codes attached to any false teeth they had.
Between 2000 and last March, Yamanashi dentists have put 1.5 × 4 mm transparent tapes on the false teeth of 5,380 people, each containing the person’s name and prefecture number.
The project has been supported by about 50 dental facilities in Yamanashi Prefecture. The cost of the procedure is covered by the association.
“Some university hospitals are employing the same method. Detailed studies (about their safety and durability) are required, but no major problems have been reported so far,” Kanayama said.
Unlike most other countries that have been using dental records for identification for several decades, Japan only began using them after the 1985 Japan Airlines plane crash on Mount Osutaka in Gunma Prefecture that claimed 520 lives. Some of the victims were burned or otherwise damaged beyond recognition.
“In the wake of that accident, the importance of using teeth to identify people involved in big disasters has been recognized by dentists’ associations across the country, and dental practitioners have become involved in this type of identification,” said dentist Noboru Kanayama, who has spearheaded the program.
Dentists in Japan now keep files of patient X-rays that can be used for identification.
“In many cases, teeth are used as the final proof” of identify, Kanayama said.
Since the program started, there have been two cases in which a body has been identified by the tape.
A man in his 60s who was found dead in Japan’s Southern Alps in July 2003 could not be identified by his belongings and neither his fingerprints nor a search on the police missing person database turned up any information.
It was the tape attached to his teeth that identified him.
In the other case, a man in his 70s whose body was found in the city of Fuefuki in November 2001 was identified within three hours.
“If medical institution codes and other information are added, the tapes will become more useful,” Kanayama said. “The popularization of the dental tapes will depend on who will bear the costs and what policy there should be on implanting them.”

Snow – day 3

 

November Film Review: C.R.A.Z.Y.

‘Crazy for thinking my love could hold you’, was the thematic song lyric that, like a needle stuck in the groove of an LP, replayed itself throughout the film, C.R.A.Z.Y.
Set in the turbulent 60’s and 70’s, the film follows a family coping with changing societal values and behaviors. Caught up in this period of transition, the two main characters of the film, a father and son, try to make sense of there intense relationship; a relationship that is complicated by Zach’s gender identity confusion. They each believe that their love for the other will allow Zach to ‘hold on’ to a traditional hetro- sexual identity.
Similarly, Gervais and Laurianne’s love for their five children was not enough for them to hold on to Raymond who eventually dies of an overdose
And in the same groove, the film asks if a love for God can help a person to ‘hold on’ through the worst times of one’s life. For Laurianne her faith sustains her through all her difficult times. By the end of the film Gervais was having doubts about the value of priests. And Zach struggles with his faith as he struggles with his orientation through most of the film
I liked the characters, the acting, the sets, the sound track and this film a lot.

Findings

Today was a day off work, for me. And so, I went searching for our required reading, ‘The End of Faith’, by Sam Harris. I am certain I will be finished reading it long after the discussion is over! I wanted to share with you two gems I did find on my travels today.

One is from the Canadian magazine (eh?) ‘The Walrus’. (Dec/Jan) It is a photo essay, entitled, ‘Our Weekly Bread’, photographed by Peter Menzel; interviewed by Faith D’Aluisio. It is a wonderful depiction, of what families, from all over the world eat in a week. I felt a sense of curiousity & connection from reading it. There are pictures of each family…& what they eat.

The other is from the November issue of Harper’s. It is an article by Marilynne Robinson on ‘The God Delusion’, entitiled, ‘Hysterical Scientism: The Ecstasy of Richard Dawkins’. Her thesis being, “If it is fair to speak globally of religion, it is also fair to speak globally of science.”

Sharing is good!

(Partial) News item from Yamanashi, Japan

Read an article yesterday out of Yamanashi, the neighboring prefecture to Shizuoka where I was living and working until not long ago. Will include the first 25 words and see how you guys would complete the sentence. Later in the week I’ll post the entire article along with some commentary.

The Yamanashi Dental Association has for six years been pushing a program in which identification tape is attached to false teeth to make it easier….

Ethics and morality

What are Ethics and Morality?:
The terms ethics and morality are often used interchangeably — indeed, they usually can mean the same thing and in casual conversation there isn’t a problem with switching between one and the other. Strictly speaking, though, morality is used to refer to what we would call moral standards and moral conduct while ethics is used to refer to the formal study of those standards and conduct. For this reason, the study of ethics is also often called “moral philosophy.”

One writer describes the difference like this:

The word “ethical” refers to ethics, a theory or system for dealing with morality. It also is often used in the positive sense, such as when we speak of ethical practices in medicine. The difference between the two is subtle: “moral” implies conformity with some established code of behavior or accepted notions of right and wrong, while “ethical” implies a need to deal with difficult questions of rightness and wrongness that may not have stock answers in accepted moral codes. Thus, we can think of ethics as the set of processes by which we decide what is right and wrong, and morality as a set of more or less clear statements regarding what actually is right and wrong. Morals can be the outcome of ethical reflection, although often morals are simply taken as givens because we are taught from childhood what constitutes right and wrong.

Another provides a good review of the topic here.

Meta-ethics, Normative Ethics, and Applied Ethics

Metaethics talks about the nature of ethics and moral reasoning. Discussions about whether ethics is relative and whether we always act from self-interest are examples of meta-ethical discussions. In fact, drawing the conceptual distinction between Metaethics, Normative Ethics, and Applied Ethics is itself a “metaethical analysis.”

Normative ethics is interested in determining the content of our moral behavior. Normative ethical theories seek to provide action-guides; procedures for answering the Practical Question (”What ought I to do?”). The moral theories of Kant and Bentham are examples of normative theories that seek to provide guidelines for determining a specific course of moral action. Think of the Categorical Imperative in the case of the former and the Principle of Utility in the case of the latter.

Applied Ethics attempts to deal with specific realms of human action and to craft criteria for discussing issues that might arise within those realms. The contemporary field of Applied Ethics arouse in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Today, it is a thriving part of the field of ethics. Numerous books and web-sites are devoted to topics such as Business Ethics, Computer Ethics, and Engineering Ethics. (See the Bioethics Center for an example of activities in the area Medical Ethics).

I remember that Freshman students in introductory philosophy classes usually thought that a discussion of”moral” was going to be a discussion of sex and whether it is moral to do “it” on the first date. I always insisted that any discussion of sex should wait until we had developed a finely-tuned moral vocabulary. And besides I was (and am) opposed to sex by anyone younger than I.

Moral Minds: The Evolution of Human Morality

Incest, infanticide, honour killings – different cultures have different rules of justice. But are we all born with a moral instinct – an innate ability to judge what is right and wrong? Could morality be like language – a universal, unconscious grammar common to all human cultures? Eminent evolutionary biologist Marc Hauser and philosopher Richard Joyce take on these controversial questions in impressive new tomes, and to critical acclaim. But could their evolutionary arguments undermine the social authority of morality? Is biology the new ‘religion’?

The link takes you to an interesting audio file in which the above questions are discussed. Language: English and ‘Strine!

And go here for the Moral Sense Test.

Feelings, gods and reason

You probably all remember reading Plato’s Euthyphro [for a quick review go here] in which Socrates asks the question, “Is a thing right because the gods say so, or do the gods say so because it is right?” The relationship between the gods and the good is teased out in the dialogue with Socrates arguing that morality is logically prior to religion.
All this may be summarized in the following argument:
(1) Suppose God commands us to do what is right. Then either (a) the right actions are right because he commands them or (b) he commands them because they are right.
(2) If we take option (a), then God’s commands are, from a moral point of view, arbitrary; moreover, the doctrine of the goodness of God is rendered meaningless.
(3) If we take option (b), then we have admitted there is a standard of right and wrong that is independent of God’s will.
(4) Therefore, we must either regard God’s commands as arbitrary, and give up the doctrine of the goodness of God, or admit that there is a standard of right and wrong that is independent of his will, and give up the theological definitions of right and wrong.
(5) From a religious point of view, it is undesirable to regard God’s commands as arbitrary or to give up the doctrine of the goodness of God.
(6) Therefore, even from a religious point of view, a standard of right and wrong that is independent of God’s will must be accepted.
Even St. Thomas Aquinas leaves morality independent of religion. “Conscience is the dictate of reason…,” he writes.

All of this leads to what the philosopher James Rachels calls the minimum conception of morality: “morality is, at the very least, the effort to guide one’s conduct by reason – that is, to do what there are the best reasons for doing- while giving equal weight to the interests of each individual who will be affected by one’s conduct.”

Martha Nussbaum in the earlier link in closes her excellent discussion of emotions and morality with this: “We can hold that many emotions are valuable parts of the moral life without giving implicit trust to any that have been shaped in imperfect and unjust social conditions – judging, with Aristotle and Adam Smith, that emotions can be good guides as elements in a life organized and examined by critical reflection. [emphasis added]

Snowing in Nanaimo

 

C.R.A.Z.Y.

This month’s movie discussion will open early next week and I hope many have seen this 2005 French-Canadian prize winning movie. It’s crazy.

“A middle-class teenage misfit living in ’70s era Montreal dreams of abandoning his familiar hometown surroundings to seek a brighter future in director Jean-Marc Vallée’s character-driven drama. A sexually-confused Christmas Day baby who likes to march to the beat of his own drummer, Zachary Beaulieu (Marc-André Grondin) nevertheless longs to live up to his old-fashioned father’s (Michel Cote) decidedly more traditional expectations. As Zachary seeks solace in the sounds of Pink Floyd and David Bowie, his mother assures him that he’s bound for greater things and testosterone-fueled siblings raise hell around the house. Despite feeling bound by his comparatively normal surroundings, the revelations provided by David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” allows the disheartened Zachary the luxury of dreaming.” ~ Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide

Original position

Professor Hinman hosts the best online source of material on ethics at his UCSD site Ethics Update. In his glossary the ethics/morality distinction is stated:

Morality. “Morality” refers to the first-order beliefs and practices about good and evil by means of which we guide our behavior. Contrast with Ethics, which is the second-order, reflective consideration of our moral beliefs and practices.

Ethics. The explicit, philosophical reflection on moral beliefs and practices. The difference between ethics and morality is similar to the difference between musicology and music. Ethics is a conscious stepping back and reflecting on morality, just as musicology is a conscious reflection on music.

~B mentions a thought experiment that we discussed earlier in the year, it comes from John Rawls’ s Theory of Justice and is usually known as the original position. The idea of the original position is perhaps the most lasting contribution of John Rawls to our theorizing about social justice. The original position is a hypothetical situation in which rational calculators, acting as agents or trustees for the interests of concrete individuals, are pictured as choosing those principles of social relations under which their principals would do best. Their choices are subject to certain constraints, however, and it is these constraints which embody the specifically moral elements of original position argumentation. Crudely, the rational calculators do not know facts about their principals which would be morally irrelevant to the choice of principles of justice. This restriction on their reasoning is embodied, picturesquely, in Rawls’s so-called veil of ignorance, which occludes information, for instance, about principals’ age, sex, religious beliefs, etc. Once this information about principals is unavailable to their agents, the plurality of interested parties disappears, and the problem of choice is rendered determinate. (Because each individual’s trustee has the same information and motivation as every other individual’s trustee, the original position is a situation of choice, not of “negotiation” between a plurality of distinct individuals.) According to Rawls, agents so situated would choose two principles of justice, lexically ordered, affirming the equality of basic rights and an approach to social inequalities governed by the difference principle, according to which inequalities are unjust unless removing them would worsen the situations of the worst-off members of society. Original position argumentation is an example of contemporary contractualism, involves a pure-proceduralist approach to the determination of moral principles, and is framed by reflective equilibration with widely agreed principles of public morality. It also illustrates the pragmatism of Rawls’s approach to political theorizing.

• 1. Reflective Equilibrium
• 2. Pure Proceduralism
• 3. Veil of Ignorance
• 4. Rawls’s Pragmatism
• Bibliography
• Other Internet Resources
• Related Entries

- from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Consistent?

“If we want to draw conclusions about ethics – as well as make predictions about what a given person or society will do in the future – we cannot ignore human intentions. Where ethics are concerned, intentions are everything.” [p. 147, The End of Faith]

“A rational approach to ethics becomes possible once we realize that questions of right and wrong are really questions about the happiness and suffering of sentient creatures.” [p. 170, The End of Faith]

Are these two statements consistent?

1. consequences are everything
2. intentions are everything

Harris and morality

Sam Harris writes:

“One of the greatest challenges facing civilization in the twenty-first century is for human beings to learn to speak about their deepest personal concerns—about ethics, spiritual experience, and the inevitability of human suffering—in ways that are not flagrantly irrational. Nothing stands in the way of this project more than the respect we accord religious faith. Incompatible religious doctrines have balkanized our world into separate moral communities, and these divisions have become a continuous source of human conflict. The idea that there is a necessary link between religious faith and morality is one of the principal myths keeping religion in good standing among otherwise reasonable men and women. And yet, it is a myth that is easily dispelled.”

And I think he is quite correct about the challenge as well as the diagnosis. His prescription:

“Clearly, we can think of objective sources of moral order that do not require the existence of a law-giving God. In The End of Faith, I argued that questions of morality are really questions about happiness and suffering. If there are objectively better and worse ways to live so as to maximize happiness in this world, these would be objective moral truths worth knowing. Whether we will ever be in a position to discover these truths and agree about them cannot be known in advance (and this is the case for all questions of scientific fact).”

In the above Harris is clearly advocating a consequentialist approach to morality, and in doing so is in a long line of philosophers. Compare this approach with the approach implicit in the recent discussion by Muslim clerics in Cairo. They were meeting to discuss the morality of female genital mutilation. The head guy, according to the BBC report, said that fgm was not required because he could find no instances reporting that the Prophet had performed the procedure on any of his females! Now that is an example of a non-consequential moral position. No matter the suffering; no matter the loss of pleasure – no, the procedure is to be judged by looking to a prophet from the distant past. No attempt to ban the procedure. In an attempt to provide an objective scientific foundation for morality Harris argues:

“But if there are psychophysical laws that underwrite human well-being—and why wouldn’t there be?—then these laws are potentially discoverable. Knowledge of these laws would provide an enduring basis for an objective morality. In the meantime, everything about human experience suggests that love is better than hate for the purposes of living happily in this world. This is an objective claim about the human mind, the dynamics of social relations, and the moral order of our world. While we do not have anything like a final, scientific approach to maximizing human happiness, it seems safe to say that raping and killing children will not be one of its primary constituents.”

In an editorial in The Boston Globe [Published: October 30, 2006] Harris wrote:

The truth is that the only rational basis for morality is a concern for the happiness and suffering of other conscious beings.

The symptoms and the diagnosis are right. Is the prescription right?