Archive for the ‘Books’ Category

While browsing the Sam Harris website for some information to add to my recent post on The Moral Landscape, I came across a new essay that Sam had published, entitled Lying, which was available exclusively via Kindle.

At 26 pages long I was able to get through it before going to bed yesterday and it makes for an interesting read.

In the essay, Sam puts forward the case that you should almost never lie. It’s qualified with almost as there are times when normally immoral actions can be moral – for example, if you’re willing to kill in self defence, it seems silly to rule out lying as well. But for the majority of our life, lying is best to be avoided.

This is something most of us would follow anyway, but Sam concentrates his efforts in persuading the reader that white lies are equally an enemy to be avoided – something that most of us probably are guilty of (I’ll be honest, I certainly am).

Examples are things like telling a friend your busy when you actually don’t want to go to an event, pretending your friend doesn’t look fat in that dress, or not being honest about how you think the book they have just written is rubbish, or even as far as being honest when someone gives you a present that you actually don’t like.

A good example is this – you overhear a friend leaving a voicemail for someone else (that you don’t know) saying that she has had to cancel plans at the last minute because something has come up. You know this isn’t true, but you don’t call the person on it at the time. Still, every time they cancel you on because something came up in future, you are disinclined to believe them.

This is something that I can really relate to. Many friends I just won’t believe when they cancel me because they claim to be ill. Carl is a good example of this. Sometimes he probably is ill, but most of the time I just don’t believe him. Given that trust is a very valuable commodity, that really isn’t a position you want to be in.

Of course, sometimes white lies can actually just be code for something else, and we all know it. “I have no money” for example. It’s amazing how many people say this and then suddenly have money when we’re doing something they really want to do. But then, we all really know that saying that actually means “I only have limited funds in my budget so it has to be really good to make it worth it, and your event isn’t worth it.”

Another example of this is “I’m busy.” As Gijsbert says, we’re all busy people, what we mean when we say we are busy is “I have other priorities.”

Harris argues that it’s best to avoid these white lies, though. If your friend genuinely is fat, be honest, maybe it will inspire them to lose some way and be happier with their own body image. If your friend’s film script is genuinely awful, tell them, don’t let your friend waste more of their time on a project that isn’t going anywhere. It’s better to face short-term discomfort for the overall benefit of your friends.

It’s a good read. Not as great as the reviews claim, but interesting none the less. If you’re interested, you can find it in the Kindle Store.

EDIT: The essay is now also available in a PDF edition, for those that don’t want to download the Kindle software. Thanks to Aaron for the heads up.

Last month, myself and Elina attended a One Life session on Ethics, to tell the young people why they are wrong.

Specifically, about why I believe morality is objective, rather than subjective.

For many years previous to this I had argued that morality must be subjective – after all, without a god, what universal source is there to say what is right or wrong? This is the position that most non-believers take and ultimately forms quite a coherent world view – but does mean that you have to admit that in some ways, you can’t say what Hitler did was wrong because that’s only your subjective point of view and from his point of view, he was doing the morality right thing.

Of course, they should automatically lose the argument by resorting to Godwin’s Law, but it is something that has never sat particularly well with me.

However, after reading The Moral Landscape, the new book from Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith – the book which really got me passionate about atheism, it presented to me for the first time a worldview which makes coherent sense with objective morality without a god.

I didn’t entirely buy into it at first, but after a few months mulling the topic over, I have to hold my hands up and say that I believe Harris puts together the best argument and so I will hold my hands up and say I now beleive I was previously wrong about the nature of morality.

To give you an overview, Harris’ argument is this:

Morality is a human construct, but it’s actually about an observable fact.

When it comes down to it, the field or morality is about welfare. If you do something which is good for the welfare of others, it is a moral act. If you do something which is bad for the welfare of others, it is an immoral act. And if you do something which has no impact on the welfare of others it is an amoral act. Of course others actually includes yourself, and isn’t limited to humans, but it seemed like a more poetic term to use.

So, if we work on this basis, every act can be measured by it’s impact on welfare and then judged to be moral or immoral accordingly. How you define welfare is of course very complicated – but although it’s a hard concept to define, we all really know what we are talking about when we use the term.

Based on this then, we have an objective way to measure an action as moral or immoral. If it does more harm than good overall, it is a immoral action and if we did more good than harm then it is a moral action. Objectively.

This is great because you can now say “Hitler’s actions were objectively immortal” rather than just “I believe Hitler’s actions were immoral, in my subjective opinion.”

In fact, it’s clearest to see at the edges. Take an action, for example throwing acid in a woman’s face without cause – that is clearly wrong, not wrong in our Western society but OK in the correct cultural settings – it’s just wrong! Indeed, another advantage of objective morality is you can tell the cultural relativists to go fuck themselves when they say it’s OK for certain cultures to practice beating wives, stoning homosexuals and the horrific practice of genital mutilation because that’s their tradition.

Of course, the next question is, “well how do you know what is right and wrong? Surely there are too many variables to take into account – it’s never that simple.” You’re right, it never is as simple as my example above, but that is beside the point. Just because it’s very tricky to work out what whether an action causes more harm than good, doesn’t mean it’s inherently subjective – it just means it’s very difficult to work out!

A lot of physics is also extremely difficult to work out, but it’s definitely objective (and I will be so bold to insist that that does include quantum mechanics). Similarly, just because we don’t have all the information just yet, it doesn’t mean that eventually we won’t be able to find the objective answers to the question or morality, and until then, we can give it our best educated guess.

And if we’re wrong, then we’re wrong. It’s not that it was moral to keep slaves when the slave trade was thriving – it was immoral back then as well, but people were just wrong about it. We still don’t have to blame them, because they didn’t know, just like we don’t blame people for being wrong about the world not being flat, but never the less, the world wasn’t ever flat, even when everyone knew it was.

Another common criticism is that if morality is objective, it can never change. This seems inherently wrong because morality has to change depending on circumstances – killing is wrong in cold blood, but acceptable in self defence. Another example would be that killing animals for food was acceptable thousands of years ago when you had to to survive, but now that you don’t have to, it’s not acceptable.

But this is a misunderstanding of the kind of objective morality Harris puts forward in his book. Objective facts can change. For example, my age is 25. That is an objective fact. But next year, my age will be 26 and that will be the same objective fact about my age – it’s just that time has moved on and things change. My age still remains objective.

Finally, another potential criticism of this somewhat utilitarian view is that it supports ideas that we would not agree with – as the old joke goes, nine out of ten people enjoy gang rape. That is to say, of course, the nine rapists enjoy it, and the one victim does not – the greatest good for the greatest many and all that.

This doesn’t hold up to any kind of examination of course – none of us actually want to live in a world where we could get gang raped at any time, even if nine of out ten times we would be the rapist and enjoy it (not that any of us actually would enjoy it of course, but hypothetically), we would spend our lives living in fear and so overall welfare would in fact decrease. Therefore such nonsense is not by any stretch of the imagine, tolerated under a utilitarian system.

Anyway, I’ve rambled on enough. Please give The Moral Landscape a read, it’s £12 on Amazon and I’ll happy lend you my copy if you’re too cheap to buy it. It really offers some fantastic food for thought and challenges an area of debate which I think many of us considered closed – of course nothing is closed given we claim to be the freethinkers and all.

I recently finished reading Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, which, after only a month at the top, has probably already knocked Nineteen Eighty-Four off the top spot of my favourite novels list.

Brave New World presents a dystopian future in which the idea of family has been completely removed. New humans are not born but are grown in bottles in giant hatcheries, before finally being decanted. Everyone is conditioned through gestation and childhood to be a certain class, and to be happy with that class. And if anyone ever is unhappy there is always soma – the happiness drug.

To be honest, though, I didn’t see what was so bad with the this future 😀 .

Throughout the book, I expressed to a few people this thought and they all responded with “wait until you get to the end – then you will see what a horrific vision of the future it is.” Well, I’m there now, and it still looks pretty good lol.

Ultimately, it probably isn’t a world in which we would choose. The characters in the novel have no freedom – they are born into a predefined class from which there is no escape and there happiness is shallow and superficial.

But then, if you were born into that world, you would actually be perfectly happy with it. It sounds horrible to be preconditioned from before birth to be a certain class, but imagine being truly satisfied with their job. I mean, I love my job, really love it, but I wouldn’t choose to do it if I didn’t have to, nor do I feel like I’m an important part of society – there are many other software developers out there that could do my job just as well. But what if I was conditioned to think I genuinely was an important cog? That might genuinely be nicer.

Furthermore, what exactly is superficial happiness? Isn’t that what we tell ourselves when we see someone who just seems too happy because they have money and fame and it’s all the stuff we want but can’t have so we tell ourselves that they aren’t really happy on the inside even though deep down we know that they actually are probably deeply contented 😉 .

And finally, there is soma. Some of the characters in the novel rebuked its use, but then, what is really wrong with it? Imagine we had a drug which could make us feel fantastic so that whenever we wanted to escape reality, we could just take it and all would be well.

Well, we do, and it’s call alcohol. There really isn’t an argument to be made for claiming that having soma in our society would be undesirable because it’s basically the same as alcohol but better, and side-effect free – and ultimately, most of us choose to go out and get wrecked, despite the very significant side effects.

All this is slightly tongue in cheek of course – no democracy, a class system, a religious cult-like worship of solidarity, none of this is desirable. But soma, sexual freedom and a focus on happiness are three things I’m very much down with.

The second book on my list was Terry Pratchett’s Nation. As I’m sure most of you are ware, Pratchett is an amazing writer, though I haven’t actually read one of his books since my childhood.

The novel follows the story of Mau, a child currently going through the initiation ceremony of his culture into becoming a man, only to find out that a great wave has wiped out his civilization. It is therefore placed on his shoulders to re-build The Nation.

Recently, Pratchett has made more of his status as a humanist, in no small part due to the number of religious scumbags who fight against the use of stem cell research in medical research to cure debilitating illnesses such as Alzheimer’s, of which Pratchett is suffering from. This is very evident in the novel – it’s not anti-religious, but it makes the point, very elegantly, that religion is a human creation.

I found it a bit low level, though I think it’s technically a children’s novel, but very enjoyable none the less.

Since getting my iPad last month, and installing Kindle on it, I’ve gone back to reading some fiction. Not actually on the iPad, but it never the less seems to have inspired me.

Given the number of references I seemed to keep missing, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four seemed a good choice to start with and I found myself soon engrossed in the book. The plot, for those not familiar with it, looks at a dystopian totalitarian future in which The Party maintains total controls, not only over their subject’s actions, but also their thoughts.

It’s often used as the yardstick against which real-world regimes are measured, especially in today’s surveillance society which seems ever more encroaching and yet it definitely still a long distance away from the telescreens installed in every party member’s home, allowing the Thought Police to listen in to your home at any time, as presented in Orwell’s novel.

The book has quickly risen to one of my favourite novels of all time. For some reason, it seems to invoke a sense that despite malevolent efforts, true love can survive, even though in the novel itself, it actually doesn’t. Still, life would be boring if everything had a happy ending ;).

Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything is a book co-written by Steve Levitt and Stephen Dubner. It explores quirks of society and challenge some commonly held ideas about how the world works, providing better explanations.

For example, why do drug dealers most drug dealers live with their mothers? The answer is that they are earning less than they could make at McDonald’s. Drug dealing is a pyramid scheme at the people at the bottom are on less than minimum wage.

The most controversial chapter of the book looks at falling crime rates in New York. This is the shining example of broken window theory, as Malcolm Gladwell discusses in The Tipping Point. Dubner and Levitt show this is nonsense. Other cities in America that did not implement zero-tolerance also experienced this drop in crime. What fits the actual data far better is that it was a result of legalising abortion, which leads to would-be-criminals simply never being born.

Having recently read Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion I followed it up by reading one of Alister McGrath’s responses to the book, The Dawkins Delusion. McGrath opens the book saying he mainly intended it to be read by Christians wanting to be able to respond to the questions of friends who had recently read The God Delusion though also hoped that the odd open minded atheist would read it too.

After reading the critical response though I can’t help questioning whether McGrath actually read The God Delusion. For example he claims that Dawkins suggests that removing religion would end all violence. An idea Dawkins of course dismisses. He also seems to suggest Dawkins believes natural selection by evolution happens by chance. While most of The God Delusion is about God and religion, a hefty sum of it is Dawkins explaining how people misunderstand that evolution works by chance and indeed in reality, is the complete opposite of chance.

Also his critism of Dawkins’ discussion of the meme is interesting because he almost seems to go beyond the idea that the meme cannot be applied like this (which is perhaps a fair critism) to suggest the meme simply doesn’t exst. He seems to think of it as a hypothesis rather than a phenomenon that has simply been named. Perhaps he has never experianced a catchy tune, but if I was to take a while guess I would probably bet against that.

In the end, the book is simply a character attack. The criticisms that Dawkins insists rather than suggests things is far more overpowered by McGrath’s own convictions, insisting Dawkins is unquestionably a fundamentalist without any real argument to back up the claim while acusing Dawkins of doing the same thing. He goes to great lengths to call Dawkins a variety of names and insist his writing is unscientific without let up or discussion of anything else.

The book fails to provide any kind of counter arguments as McGrath set out to do. His constant repetition of the idea that Dawkins is a dogmatist doesn’t leave much room for answering the questions raised in The God Delusion or provide answers provide the generic theist argument of “because I know you’re wrong.” The unscientific methods of Dawkins are not disected, simply asserted as being wrong.

There is a constant repetition of the idea of Atheist fundamentalism, an idea that can’t really exist because there isn’t really such a thing as Atheism as that implies it is a belief and it isn’t, it is simply a lack of a belief. Therefore how you can be fundamental about not believing in God or gods is beyond me. Secondly, McGrath does what most moderates do in demonising fundamentalism. Even if this was an example of fundamentalism (which it isn’t) why is this obviously a bad thing? Fundamentalism means following one’s beliefs strictly, surely if you have a holy book written or inspired by God you should follow it? That is fundamentalism. It is obviously not a corruption of religion, the corruption is religious moderation, the picking and choosing (or as it could be described, secularising) of God’s holy word. This apparent attack on Dawkins actually turns out to be a complement (albeit unintentionally) that Dawkins has the convictions to stick by his beliefs (or lack of them) when analysed for what it really is.

Anyone who has read Dawkins writing I believe will see he is not as anti-religion as theists would have us belief. He isn’t interested in politics, in making people feel better or worse, in what impact things have on society – he is only interested in one thing, the truth. All other concerns are irrelevant, you only have to read one or two of his books to realise this is what he thinks and this surely shows he is the heart of a true scientist. He has no interest in being anti-religious, he is simply a scientist.

Which begs the question, what is going to happen when someone who is actually anti-religious moves against the lumbering giant of religion?