Ethical Priorities

Asking Ethical Questions in Ethics Classes Must be Done Ethically

I recently read in Brian Leiter's blog that, "Susan Dwyer (moral psychology, applied ethics, feminist theory), Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Maryland at Baltimore County has accepted a tenured offer from the Department of Philosophy at the University of Maryland, College Park, effective January 2009." Dwyer from UMBC to Maryland/College Park

I think I had heard the name of Ms. Dwyer before, but I didn't know who she was. Leiter thought she was worth promoting, or possibly she is a friend or working associate.

So, to familiarize myself with a philosopher I didn't know I looked up Dwyer, and clicked on her syllabi. There I found "PHIL 150 Contemporary Moral Issues." Listed under "Outline" was this:

"We will critically examine four controversial topics: Pornography and Free Speech; Euthanasia and Physician Assisted Suicide; Punishment and the Death Penalty; and Abortion. The class has two main aims: (1) to introduce you to some central concepts in ethical theory and moral reasoning; and (2) to help you begin to develop views about the aforementioned topics that you can articulate and defend."

Well, that sounds like a good outline of subjects that are worthwhile of ethical investigation by students. I remember as a young student many years ago investigating them, and from time to time I read something that gives me a new twist on what or how I understand the subject. Sometimes, my opinions are tweaked by what I read.

But directly below Dwyer's Outline is this:

"Among the questions we will consider are the following:
 Is pornography harmful?
 Should the state censor or restrict the publication of pornography?
 Do we have a right to determine the manner and time of our own deaths?
 Is it permissible for a doctor to kill a patient at that patient’s request?
 How is punishment justified?
 Should the death penalty be retained or abolished in the United States?
 What is the right to life?
 Is the human fetus a person?
 What is the relation between morality and the law?"

And I thought, "Wait a cotton pickin' minute. The epistemic emphasis on most of the questions is all wrong."

Asking if pornography is wrong, for example; it leaves open the question of whether its harm, real or imagined, gives one human the right to deny access to it to those he thinks are harmed by it. Why else ask the question? I mean, so what if it is harmful, what is the answer to the answer that it is harmful? The real question and answer are lost.

If my answer in that class was that pornography was not harmful, is someone going to argue with me? Are they going to ask where I got my information? What difference does my answer make, yes or no, until the basic question of whether ethics can do anything about it?

In any question of ethics (moral issues), "The first question that has to be answered, as a precondition of any attempt to define, to judge or to accept any specific system of ethics, is: Why does man need a code of values?
"Let me stress this. The first question is not: What particular code of values should man accept? The first question is: Does man need values at all—and why?"
“The Objectivist Ethics”; Ayn Rand; The Virtue of Selfishness

go to Ethics continued

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Rand, von Mises, Leiter, Dworkin, Wilkinson

Dworkin, Leiter, and Wilkinson are All Off the Mark;

"Blame It On Ayn Rand"

First, from today's NY Times, Jerry Dworkin (UC Davis) writes:

"For more than a decade, the former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan has fiercely objected whenever derivatives have come under scrutiny in Congress or on Wall Street. [ ] An examination of more than two decades of Mr. Greenspan’s recordon financial regulation and derivatives in particular reveals the degree to which he tethered the health of the nation’s economy to that faith. [ ] Time and again, Mr. Greenspan — a revered figure affectionately nicknamed the Oracle — proclaimed that risks could be handled by the markets themselves. [ ]

"Put this together with Keynes:
” . . . the ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back." and we get Ayn Rand as an important cause of the catastrophe we are in."

As it turns out, Brian Leiter of the Leiter Reports http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2008/10/jerry-dworkin-1.html quoted Dworkin, after which Will Wilkinson http://www.willwilkinson.net/flybottle/2008/10/10/blame-it-on-ayn-rand/ criticizes blaming it on Ayn Rand as the recipient of Keynes' "wisdom," claiming, "Surely the problem is that we didn’t Keynes it up enough! But Ayn Rand… Now there’s the intellectual force behind the status quo structure of American monetary and regulatory policy!"

Wilkinson was poo-pooing the ability of Ayn Rand to be behind anything, when, by calling her "the intellectual force behind" it all, is dismissive of Rand's intellectual ability to be of any force behind anyone or anything that matters. The problem was, he improperly attributed all of this to Leiter instead of to Dworkin.

So then, Leiter had to write: "Will Wilkinson, a former philosophy graduate student and libertarian zealot, has ripped into Jerry Dworkin's attributing Greenspan's disastrous economic policies to the influence of the pseudo-philosopher Ayn Rand as mere "hackery" (though Wilkinson attributes the offending view and the "hackery", oddly, to me, a "professional philosopher").

"Some philosophers may know Mr. Wilkinson from his all-too-frequent appearances on Blogging-Heads TV. I think BHTV is great, but they really need to have better interlocutors for the philosophers on the show. And I certainly think Jerry Dworkin's point in the original post was apt."

So then, Wilkinson went back to his posting and crossed off "Leiter" replacing it with "Dworkin," after which he created a new posting which he titled: "Blame It on Gerald Dworkin for Blaming It on Ayn Rand."

In the second posting Wilkinson writes: "Both Dworkin and Leiter are very interested in the fact that I left grad school in philosophy, but neither has anything intelligent to say in defense of Dworkin’s risible claim about the roots of the financial crisis — a causal claim that has nothing much to do with philosophy. Leiter adds with his typical threatening charm that I am incompetent to interview philosophers on Bloggingheads TV. It’s interesting that none of the philosophers I have interviewed have given any indication of my incompetence, and clearly that can’t be because philosophers are especially gracious as a class. If either Dworkin or Leiter would like to appear on Free Will and discuss Ayn Rand, the causes of the collapse of the financial system, or any other topic, I would be delighted to have them on. If I fail to keep up competently with either of these genuinely accomplished scholars, they will be able to expose my failings in real time. I really mean this. Here is the invitation… Prof. Leiter, Prof. Dworkin: I would very much like to have a civil discussion with each of you on a set of topics of your choosing. But I would especially like to explore your thoughts on the role of ideology as a cause of the financial crisis."

But as you will notice, Wilkinson had nothing "intelligent to say [about] Dworkin’s risible claim about the roots of the financial crisis." What Wilkinson had to say the first time around was not intelligent. Whether the reader cares for Rand or not, she has influenced more economists, philosophers, and world leaders than can be named. Alan Greenspan was one of them.

I cannot speak to whether or not Greenspan's "faith" in the free market had anything to do with the impending fall of Wall Street and the irresponsible actions of Freddie and Fannie. I heard credible reports that ACORN [see Obama, Character, and American Exceptionalism] had much to do with forcing Freddie and Fannie to act in the irresponsible manner they did, by using their well-known tactics of harrassment to get mortgages for low-income people who should not have been able to otherwise buy homes.

The fact is, as a Randian myself, as on Objectivist, I do not see the objectibility in Objectivism's principles to tell business to "put its money where its mouth is," meaning, that accounting practices and owning enough capital in one form or another to back up the business dealings that businesses make with each other and for the benefit of stockholders.

In fact, Rand wrote: [see continuation Blame It On Ayn Rand ]

Note: I will be the featured speaker at the Center For Inquiry (CFI) meeting, October 16, 2008, in Portage, Michigan. The topic is "Atheism as a 'Religion' Protected by Courts According to the Establishment Clause" CEC


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The Free Assemblage of Metaphysical Naturalists is the SM of
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The Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism Blogger TM, and
Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism Blogger Extra TM are the educational arms of the LLC and are:

© 2008 by Curtis Edward Clark and Naturalist Academy Publishing ®

The Loss of Secularism in Naturalism, Part 1

Between the blocks of time I use writing this blog, answering questions on Yahoo Answers (under an assumed moniker,) and attending to the more mundane aspects of living such as feeding the wild animals right outside our back window, mowing the grass, preparing dinner for my partner and myself, attending AA meetings or watching 24 hour new networks or my favorite dramas, I read.

It has come to my attention that naturalism is a bigger deal in the world of academics than I could have imagined. I am not in formal academics; I have no "classroom" but this one and Yahoo Answers. Now I discover, through an article written by a local, esteemed philisopher that naturalism as a secular activity in academia was once the norm, whereas now it is being pushed out by the arguments of philosophical theists who argue that existence cannot be self-sufficient and the given.

Dr. Quentin Smith http://www.wmich.edu/philosophy/index.php?content=smith_faculty_profile writes that naturalist philosophers desire to search for knowledge for its own sake, going so far as to claim they want the truth "whatever the truth happens to be (e.g., be it naturalism or theism)." "The Metaphilosophy of Naturalism", http://www.philoonline.org/library/smith_4_2.htm

But, Smith writes, because academics in the second half of the 20th century had, for the most part, become secularized, that all of academia, aside from a few exceptions, was in the search for objective truth whether it turned out to be naturalism or theism.

"[D]epartments of theology or religion aimed to understand the meaning and origins of religious writings, not to develop arguments against naturalism."

As many of my readers are also users of Yahoo Answers, let me state that one of the big debates has been why the atheists assume such a large role in the Religion and Spirituality forum, and why the so-called philosophy students in the Philosophy forum often argued so vigorously for theist answers. The atheists in the R&S forum often made the claim, as did I, that even atheists have souls, that we have "spirituality," and that when not prodding the theists to make them angry, the goal was simply to set the record right, to state that theists didn't have all the answers, that religions were "set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit," as the American patriot Thomas Paine stated so boldly in his book, "The Age of Reason." (1794)

While all this and more may be true, it seems there is more going on being the curtains of academia that lead to the face off between the theists and the seculars. What this is, writes Smith, is apparently not even known explicitly by some of the academic seculars.

"Naturalists passively watched as realist versions of theism [ ] began to sweep through the philosophical community...", in effect, developing the very arguments for creationism that will lead to the death of naturalism if we naturalists don't wake up and begin taking back the epistemic high road.

Realist theists may be identified in this context as anyone who proposes a rational theory of creationism or intelligent design. Rational theism, according to Phillip E Johnson in his book, "Reason in the Balance," is true knowledge (!), starting with the belief of God as the Creator. "Theistic realism relies on a God that is real, personal, and acting in the world through mechanistic creationism." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theistic_realism

To demonstrate how low the realist theists believe naturalism has gone, and perhaps not without some validity if we are indeed losing ground to their arguments, a site called "the evangelical outpost" (sic) http://www.evangelicaloutpost.com/ finds plenty to laugh at concerning their opposition.

"Christian thinkers ranging from the profound to the banal have argued that philosophical naturalism is internally inconsistent and contradictory," it posts, calling naturalism a "naked emperor." http://www.evangelicaloutpost.com/archives/001271.html "But we Christian critics now have a handful of unwitting allies in our cause. A small group of atheist philosophers, including Daniel Dennett and Brian Leiter, have instituted a new organization that will prove to be our best ally in the effort to expose the self-refuting philosophy: [ ] The website provides such a parody of naturalistic ideas that it couldn't be anything other than an elaborate prank."

Yet I assure you it is no "elaborate prank." The esteemed list of contributors to the site, called The Center for Naturalism http://www.centerfornaturalism.org/ would convince anyone of that. (They are listed on the home page.)

"Naturalism is the understanding that there is a single, natural world as shown by science, and that we are completely included in it," states the Center. That much is probably as easy to accept for the theists as for any atheist. But the next words are hardly the words of science, but of a type of humanism that seems more like the victim falling on his sword rather than as a leader in scientific thinking.

"Naturalism holds that everything we are and do is connected to the rest of the world," says the Center, without any scientific description of that "connection." It could just as easily refer to the butterfly effect. "Each of us is an unfolding natural process [ ] and seeing just how we are caused gives us power and control, while encouraging compassion and humility."

Is this an apologetic for what naturalism in science is supposed to be?

I was never under the impression that this was the nature of naturalism. My understanding of it is that it is the scientific view that existence is self-sufficient, the given, describable in axiomatic concepts and defendable as the default position versus some theory of ex nihilo where "nothingness" was at one time the condition of existence. My understanding of naturalism has nothing to do with social policies "encouraging compassion and humanity." While those may be outstanding values to encourage in the proper conditions, it strays far from a black-and-white, concretized description of naturalism as an epistemological position derived from logic.

Everytime some young student in Yahoo asks where the world or the universe came from, whether challenging the naturalists or seeking a sincere answer, the question automatically takes the default position that "nothingness" was once the conditon of the universe.

There are contradictions inherent in this default position, and for the rest of the week it will be the task of this blog to uncover those contradictions. In the mean time, until tomorrow, let me paste the definition of Naturalism from the Dictionary of Philosophy. http://www.ditext.com/runes/index.html This definition was written by B.A.G. Fuller, a Harvard professor whose clarity of grammar and syntax rivals that of Thomas Jefferson, and is just as often as difficult to digest on the first reading.

"Naturalism, challenging the cogency of the cosmological, teleological, and moral arguments, holds that the universe requires no supernatural cause and government, but is self-existent, self-explanatory, self-operating, and self-directing, that the world-process is not teleological and anthropocentric, but purposeless, deterministic (except for possible tychistic events), and only incidentally productive of man; that human life, physical, mental, moral and spiritual, is an ordinary natural event attributable in all respects to the ordinary operations of nature; and that man's ethical values, compulsions, activities, and restraints can be justified on natural grounds, without recourse to supernatural sanctions, and his highest good pursued and attained under natural conditions, without expectation of a supernatural destiny."

This has always been my working definition of naturalism, and I see nothing in it that refers even implicitly to an apologetic for its nature, and certainly nothing even remotely close to being social policy for compassion and humanity.

"And how," asks Quentin Smith, "have naturalist philosophers reacted to what some committed naturalists might consider as 'the embarrassment' of belonging to the only academic field that has allowed itself to lose the secularization it once had? Some naturalists wish to leave the field..."

That does not surprise me. What surprises me is that naturalism has lost the secularization it once had.

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