Common Sense Atheism

James Lee took hostages at the Maryland headquarters of the Discovery Channel, made some demands, and was shot dead by police. He was also a human trafficker. According to his MySpace page, he was also an atheist.

Some theists have been happy to draw a connection from his atheism and his “Darwinism” to his terrorist act. P.Z. Myers shot back with some contrasts between this atheist terrorist and some religious terrorists.

Alonzo Fyfe would like us to imagine what would have happened if James Lee had been a Christian or a Muslim demanding that the Discovery Channel air more shows favorable to creationism. It’s a pretty safe bet that many atheist blogs would have written something to the tone of “See how evil religion is, that it is responsible for stuff like this!”

Fyfe reminds us:

As atheism becomes more and more common, more and more acts such as this will be put in atheist terms and fewer will be put into religious terms… If [a] society is substantially religious, then these type of people will wrap their acts in religious terms. If their society is mostly atheist, they will wrap their acts in atheist terms.

If it is bigoted to generalize about the evils of Darwinism because someone does something evil while citing Darwinian reasons, then it is bigoted to generalize about the evils of religion because someone does something evil while citing religious reasons.

Right?

Robert Price, from his introduction to The Empty Tomb:

We do not hate the Bible… We do not seek to debunk it, for it is not bunk, any more than the Iliad or Beowulf is bunk…

When we attack the arguments of apologists, we believe ourselves to be doing the same sort of thing our Classicist colleagues would be doing if they had to reckon with an eccentric movement of apologists for the Olympian gods, zealots who wanted to convince people they must believe in Zeus and Achilles. Classicists would rally to the cause precisely because they loved the old texts and did not want to stand by and allow them to be distorted and made to look ridiculous by grotesque demands that they are literally true!

The ethical theory I currently defend is desirism. But I mostly write about moraltheory, so I rarely discuss the implications of desirism for everyday moral questions about global warming, free speech, politics, and so on. Today’s guest post applies desirism to one such everyday moral question. It is written by desirism’s first defender, Alonzo Fyfe of Atheist Ethicist. (Keep in mind that questions of applied ethics are complicated and I do not necessarily agree with Fyfe’s moral calculations.)

In the last week, Luke has provided us with two cases of people trying to give us a moral theory in which they start off with a short list of “that which has value.”

Massimo Pigliucci tells us that morality “deals with maximization of human welfare and flourishing” – by definition.

Scott Clifton says a particular action is moral or right when it somehow promotes happiness, well-being, or health or it somehow minimizes unnecessary harm or suffering or it does both.

They are going to call “moral” anything that promotes what is on their short list, and “immoral” anything that subtracts from what is on their short list.

Any time somebody starts off with a list of this type, their theory is going to fail.

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Two of my absolute favorite philosophers.

I wish every philosophy book would open with a list of the author’s philosophical positions. This would make the book much easier to understand. Many times, I’ve been confused by a book and set it aside only to find out later that the reason for my confusion was that the author wasn’t using a correspondence theory of truth, or something basic like that. (This is why I often prefer secondary literature to primary literature in philosophy: secondary literature usually makes a greater effort at clarity.)

I’ve noticed this at Common Sense Atheism, too. My readers often leave comments that they are confused by what I’ve said, and it’s because they don’t know the hundreds of prior assumptions under which I’m operating.

Thus, in an effort to be more clear, I’ll try to illuminate my current philosophical positions.

Epistemology

From my epistemology flows everything else.

The continuous failure of intuition, first philosophy, testimony, subjective experience, and authority-based systems of knowing leads me to be highly suspicious of them. These systems are also undermined by recent discoveries about the capabilities and limits of human psychology. In contrast, the massive success of science leads me to suspect that methods condoned by science are the most successful methods of knowing we have discovered yet. This approach tends toward naturalized epistemology: I think philosophy will be most productive when it functions as an extension of successful science, rather than as a kind of “first philosophy” that works “before” or “above” science. And of course I endorse fallibilism. Even our best scientific theories sometimes fail.

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