Sunspots 938

Things I have recently spotted that may be of interest to others*:

Computing: Gizmodo reports that a TikTok official may have lied to the US Congress (which is a crime), when he said that TikTok doesn't send user data to China.

Gizmodo on how artificial intelligence can do bad things.

NPR on detecting Artificial Intelligence creations from real ones.

Environment: The National Weather Service has released a video of major air pollution in New York City, mostly from fires in Canada.

History: (and Politics) A Conversation writer describes situations somewhat like the race to become President, with a Vice President running against a previous President.

Another Conversation writer discusses Cleopatra and the rulers (at least some were female) of Nubia.

Humor: (or something) Gizmodo reports that Ikea has developed a couch that folds up for a one-person carry, weighs about 22 pounds, and doesn't require screws, etc., to put together.

Politics: A Conversation writer sets us straight on the Espionage Act.

Science: An exhaustive study, reported in Nature, finds that people all over the world believe that there is a continuing moral decline. But the study reports that this decline is merely perceived, not actual.

A fascinating article in Science Alert discusses how parasites may alter the behavior of their hosts.

Sci-Tech Daily reports that curly hair may have helped early humans to survive.

A Conversation writer tells us all sorts of things about glass.

*I try not to include items that require a password or fee to view.

Thanks for reading.

Sunspots 803

Things I have recently spotted that may be of interest to someone else:

Christianity: Relevant reports that the Chinese government is removing crosses, and other items identifying Christianity, from state-approved churches.

Christianity Today reminds us that devotional books are not to be a substitute for the Bible. Thanks.

(And Politics) Ken Schenck discusses interpretation of the Bible, and considers how the US Constitution is interpreted by the Supreme Court. ("Originalism")

Environment: Relevant reports that September was the hottest September in history.

Ethics: A Gallup poll from June examines the acceptability (or not) of various behaviors. Marital infidelity was the behavior most unacceptable, to 89% of respondents. As FiveThirtyEight put it, it's hard to get 9 out of 10 Americans to agree on anything, but they seem to on this.

Health: (and politics) FiveThirtyEight tells us why we didn't learn much from President Trump's COVID illness.

Gizmodo reports that over 1,000 current and former Centers for Disease Control officials have asked that the CDC be given back its traditional role as leading the fight against COVID. The article closes by doubting that this will happen, at least not soon.

But the CDC has published a new study, documenting how much more serious COVID is, compared to seasonal flu.

Humor: Listverse tells us about 10 wacky names of towns in the US.

Politics: (or something) FiveThirtyEight on how the QAnon conspiracy theory hurts effective efforts to stop child trafficking and sexual abuse.

(And Religion) Relevant reports on a survey, which asked people from 9 different groups (white evangelicals, Hispanic protestants, unaffiliated, non-Christian, and more) about what issues were most important to them. White evangelical protestants were the only group that had abortion and terrorism among their top three issues, and were the only group that didn't list the COVID pandemic among their top three issues.

Science: NPR reports that there are mountains capped by methane frost on Pluto.

The graphic used in these posts is from NASA, hence, it is free to use like this.

Thanks for looking!

 

Don't try to legislate morality

Relevant has a fine essay, entitled "The Biblical Case Against Legislating Morality."

I suggest that you read it. I'll summarize. The author, Jasmin Patterson, does not believe that trying to get people to behave through legislation is effective. She has four reasons:

She says that legislating morality doesn't actually change people.

Jesus didn't use that approach.
In the discussion of that point, Patterson says she is not for letting people get away with, say, murder. She writes: "I recognize there is an inherent moral quality in declaring some things legal and illegal based on their impact on society, even if all people may not agree on where that moral standard comes from. But we need to evaluate whether laws are God’s primary method of producing morality and change in people. They are not."

She thinks that legislating morality actually pushes people away from Christ.

When Christians want to make their morality into the morality of the state, they are trying to do so for their own comfort.

Read Patterson. Thanks for looking at this post.

Sunspots 612

Things I have recently spotted that may be of interest to someone else:

Christianity: A Relevant writer says that our prayers probably should be simpler.

In Christianity Today, a short discussion of addiction to pornography, and how prevalent it is.

Morgan Busse repeats some classic, and needed, guidelines on what to say, or not.


Computing: Gizmo's Freeware reports on a Chrome browser extension that searches your Internet cache. In other words, it looks in what you've already looked at, rather than the entire web. Should be a big help in finding things you only partly remember, that you've already seen.

Google has made 819 typefaces available for free. One catch -- you can't download these to your computer, and use them in, say, Word. They are designed to be added to part or all of a web page.

Gizmo's also notes that a new version of Libre Office, a freeware substitute for Microsoft Office, is available for download.

Health: Scientific American reports that the dust mites that you may be allergic to cannot survive in a dry area, like, say, Arizona or Utah.

History: Listverse reports on 10 amazing items (or groups of items) of considerable value found with a metal detector.

Philosophy: Scientific American reports on research that shows that most people think that they are morally superior to others.


Politics: (And the environment) The Guardian reports that a house bill would, if adopted as law, sell a chunk of public land "as large as Connecticut." Please don't.

FiveThirtyEight on how Judge Gorsuch (if confirmed) and additional Supreme Court Justices appointed by President Trump might change previous decisions, such as Roe v. Wade/Doe v. Bolton.

Listverse discusses 10 problems with where and how we get our news. And "fake news" is on the list, but it's not the only problem.

Science: Scientific American discusses "strategic retreat" from rising bodies of water, caused by climate change.


Image source (public domain)

Losing our moral compass and elementary education

An eye-opening essay from a college philosophy professor with a second-grade child makes an interesting claim. That claim is that second-graders, and others, are taught that there are two mutually exclusive things: facts and opinions. (Also known as facts and beliefs.) Furthermore, they are taught that value claims are opinions. But classroom rules, such as "you shouldn't copy someone else's work" are value claims. So there is a logical mess imposed on children by their teachers, and the educational system, that most teachers don't perceive. And, says the author, it's no wonder that college students think that there are no moral absolutes -- they are all opinions.

The article gives examples of ideas that are both facts and opinions, and his examples are easy to understand, and convincing.

I think the man is on to something.

I'm not an expert on the Common Core, and I don't think the author is, either. He says that the Common Core standards impose this dangerous distinction. No doubt they do, but my understanding is that elementary students were taught such distinctions before the Common Core was ever thought of. It is important to understand when someone is stating an opinion which is not based on truth, such as, unfortunately, most of the advertisements on TV, for example.

The author teaches philosophy of religion at a public college. He says nothing about Judaeo-Christian beliefs, as such, in his article. Which, by the way, appeared on an opinion page in the New York Times.

Thanks for reading. Read the article.

Ender's Game: the movie

In the last post, I discussed Ender's Game, the award-winning book by Orson Scott Card. Ender, by the way, is from a rendering of the name of Andrew Wiggin by his sister, when she was small. It also can have another sort of meaning.

I have now seen the movie. Let's put it this way -- my wife liked it. It's a PG-13 film, for violence. There's no sex at all, and very little questionable language. We thought that the sound track was louder than it should have been, but have heard worse.

As would be expected, there were some deviations from the book. The most obvious one was the age of Ender, and the other battle school trainees -- they were 5 years, or more, older, than they were in the book, which actually makes more sense.

There were some other minor changes. The enemy species was called formics -- bugger was not used. The role of Petra Arkanian was magnified somewhat, which is a good thing. She was well played by Hailee Steinfeld. Asa Butterfield played Ender, the lead role, and did a good job, also, although we couldn't understand a few of his lines. Harrison Ford did a good job in an important role, and Viola Davis looked like she belonged in service in a future military.

There was even less religion in the movie than in the book. Ender's brother, Peter, was less important than in the book.

I don't wish to give away the plot, any more than in the last post, but will say that the theme, in the movie, is not so much relationships, and how they work, as it is war, and the morals of it. Is all fair in war? The book did deal with that, quite a bit. It was written before the war expense, fatalities and injuries, drone attacks, invasive data collection, and, depending on who is talking, torture, of the Bush 2 and Obama administrations, so was not a commentary on them, and the movie shouldn't be taken that way, either. There will be serious moral questions about war whenever one is fought or contemplated, and Ender's Game brings some of them to the fore.

Thanks for reading.

Sunspots 439

Things I have recently spotted that may be of interest to someone else:

Christianity: National Public Radio reports on preachers who handle snakes. There are some of them.

Computing: National Public Radio on how various companies (and perhaps the government) are finding out about us from our on-line activity.

Humor: (or engineering) Wired reports, with photos and a video, on a pen made of magnets. It can do some interesting things, indeed.

Philosophy: The Skeptical Zone has a post considering moral behavior in chimpanzees, or at least in a single chimpanzee.

Politics: ABC News reports that North Carolina government workers can not make use of climate change projections, in planning for the future of the NC coast, because the state legislature has made it illegal to do so. If you don't like the science results, just make outlaw them. Right.



Image source (public domain)

The moral universe of Game of Thrones, as seen by Elizabeth Moon and Christianity Today.

George R. R. Martin is perhaps the best-selling author of fantastic literature of the last 25 years. His most popular work is a series, still incomplete, entitled “A Song of Ice and Fire.” That series is the basis for the popular HBO TV series, “Game of Thrones.” Martin has won several awards for his writing.

I try to deal with important works of fantastic literature in this blog, although I haven’t tried to touch on  vampire literature. Some years ago, I decided not to cover Martin’s work. My reason was that it didn’t affirm anything. Although there were sympathetic characters, their fate was often terrible, and there were some extremely evil characters, who seemed to be unpunished. (I’m sure that the series hasn’t suffered because I’m not following it!)

Two recent articles, not by me, bear on this matter.

The first is an excellent blog post by Elizabeth Moon, who has won awards in fantastic literature herself. Although it doesn’t directly consider Martin's creation, what triggered Moon’s post was a review of Martin’s work. Moon points out that there is a difference between moral complexity and moral ambiguity, and that although, say, Tolkien’s characters experienced moral complexity, what should have been done was clear. (See here for a discussion of Galadriel, for example.) But, says Moon, we are coming to the point where there's a lot of moral ambiguity:

“Moral ambiguity requires that there be no general good and bad–a chaotic, or amoral, universe–a universe in which the concepts of good and evil are absent, immaterial, and have no effect on characters’ motivation.”

As indicated above, I haven’t read all of Martin’s series, but Moon has succinctly put my unease about the series into words.

A recent article in Christianity Today points out the same thing I saw in my earlier post -- nothing is affirmed. (I claim no great wisdom here. It’s easy to get Martin’s world view, or at least that part of it.)

As the article puts it: “For Martin, realistic means his characters are complex, ‘gray,’ and morally ambiguous. There are no heroes in Martin’s books like there are in The Lord of the Rings. There is no echo of Calvin's description of human beings as ‘glorious ruins’ — broken, but still able to bear the Image of God. Martin's image focuses on the ruin, not the glory.”

Thanks for reading. Don’t read George R. R. Martin, or watch the series. Or, if you do, do so carefully.

Science as a basis for morality

Sam Harris is, according to a review of his latest book in The New York Times, an important New Atheist. I had never heard of him until reading the review. (I have the NYT's book reviews e-mailed to me every week. I ignore most of the books reviewed, of course. The book is The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values.)

According to the reviewer, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Harris's book makes the claim of his subtitle, that is, that science, and, apparently, only science, preferably neuroscience, can give us coherent values. I have not read the book, but suppose, judging from the subtitle, that Appiah has characterized Harris fairly. Appiah also has an important criticism:
But wait: how do we know that the morally right act is, as Harris posits, the one that does the most to increase well-being, defined in terms of our conscious states of mind? Has science really revealed that? If it hasn’t, then the premise of Harris’s all-we-need-is-science argument must have nonscientific origins.

Appiah goes on to say that, in fact, Harris is proposing a sort of utilitarianism, which is a venerable sort of ethics, but, as the history of ethical philosophy has shown, is not without some serious problems.

I think it's fair to say that science hasn't yet offered a scientific basis for a system of values -- what is right and wrong, and what should be be striving for (and against). It is also fair to say that other non-scientific attempts have not met with universal acclaim. I'll take the Golden Rule (Do unto others as you would have them do unto you, from Matthew 7:12) as my standard. It doesn't come from neuroscience.

Thanks for reading.

"Can Science Explain Everything? Anything?" by Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg is a Nobel laureate in physics, and the author of ten books, at least some of which are aimed at an intelligent lay audience. (It is possible that all of them are, but the only one I have read is his The First Three Minutes: A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe. Here's the link to the Amazon page on the book, and here is a link to a service I am not familiar with, namely Questia, through which, apparently, you can read the entire book on-line.) My impression is that Weinberg has been a highly qualified scientist, and also one who has thought deeply about the relationship between science and society. As nearly as I can figure out, he is a liberal Jew. I don't know whether he is a religious Jew or not.

On May 31, 2001, an article that Weinberg had written for the New York Review of Books was published. I saved that article at about that time. As far as I can determine, it is no longer available freely on-line. The article has the title given in quotes in the title of this blog post. The article is available, at cost, or with a proper membership, here.

I wish to muse about the article.

Early in the article, Weinberg asserts that "There is no purpose revealed in the laws of nature." Soon after, he indicates that science declines to discuss the question of purpose in nature, although theology claims to look for such.

Much of the article is given to a discussion of the meanings of the words "explanation," "fundamental," "deduced," "principle," and "description." This is an important discussion, and Weinberg brings considerable insight, and, I believe, even some clarity to this discussion. He concludes that science can, indeed, explain some things. Then he moves to the question of whether science can explain everything.

Weinberg claims that there are some types of phenomena that science, or scientists, cannot explain. These include the following:

The results of accidents, wherein we cannot know all the initial conditions that led up to the accident. (Weinberg indicates, that, in these cases, if we did know all the initial conditions, we could explain the phenomenon.) He gives some examples, one of which is a comparison between the assassination of President Lincoln and the attempted assassination of President Truman. Weinberg says that we will never be able to explain completely why one assassination attempt resulted in a murder, but the other didn't.

He says that we cannot explain moral principles: "The moral postulates that tell us whether we should or should not do [some particular action] so cannot be deduced from our scientific knowledge."

He further says that we will never be sure how good our current explanations are.

Finally, Weinberg says that we cannot explain the most basic scientific principles, and does not believe that we will ever be able to do so.

He does not say so, but I would add to his list that we cannot explain why there is something, rather than nothing. This relates to the first statement from the article that I quoted, and it seems that Weinberg believes that that is another question that science is not going to be able to explain, although he doesn't say so explicitly.

Weinberg has by no means given up on science. He thinks that we should work toward finding a Theory of Everything. He does not seem to believe that, even if such a theory is found, it will explain everything. That is, we will only know that, whatever the equations of such a theory might be, we won't know why they are as they are.

Thanks for reading.

Three different kinds of Old Testament Law

I confess. I have a Facebook account, and most days, I post a verse or two from my daily Bible reading.

Recently, I posted Proverbs 16:8 Better is a little with righteousness
than great revenues with injustice. (ESV)

A commenter asked me which injustices the Bible was talking about in Deuteronomy 22.

I attempted an answer, thus:
Thanks, . . .

As I understand it, the Old Testament has three kinds of law, and they generally are not identified as such, namely Civic (such as how to divide the land between the tribes), Ceremonial (such as how to offer sacrifices) and Moral (such as the Ten Commandments, which are, I believe, all reaffirmed in some way in the New Testament. Civic and Ceremonial laws are not required of Christians, according to several parts of the New Testament. The Moral law is.

The first part of Deuteronomy 22 strikes me as mostly Civic -- how to get along with your neighbors, although it might be considered to be applications of the Golden Rule of Matthew 7:12, which seems to me to be a moral requirement for Christians. (It's sometimes hard to apply, because we don't always know what would be good for our neighbors, or for us.) I doubt if you were referring to the first part.

The second part of Deuteronomy 22 is various sexual prohibitions. They strike me as applications of the moral commandment of God to avoid sexual immorality.

As I see it, most of Deuteronomy 22 is not about injustices. Justice is important to God, therefore to us, but purity, integrity, and uprightness are also important -- in other words, living a life that pleases God. Although there are some injustices in Deuteronomy 22, such as raping a young woman in a field, much of that chapter is about living a life that pleases God. In other words, that one verse that I quoted doesn't cover all of what God wants us to be.

We can't live a life that pleases God without strongly desiring to do so, and we also can't do that without God's help. We cannot do this in our own strength.

I hope that answers your question. Others might have a better answer.

*    *    *    *

Actually, it turns out that the commenter was accusing God of injustice, but that's another story.

Fantasy and reality: George MacDonald's views

Some thinkers would feel sorely hampered if at liberty to use no forms but such as existed in nature, or to invent nothing save in accordance with the laws of the world of the senses; but it must not therefore be imagined that they desire escape from the region of law. Nothing lawless can show the least reason why it should exist, or could at best have more than an appearance of life.

The natural world has its laws, and no man must interfere with them in the way of presentment any more than in the way of use; but they themselves may suggest laws of other kinds, and man may, if he pleases, invent a little world of his own, with its own laws; for there is that in him which delights in calling up new forms--which is the nearest, perhaps, he can come to creation. When such forms are new embodiments of old truths, we call them products of the Imagination; when they are mere inventions, however lovely, I should call them the work of the Fancy: in either case, Law has been diligently at work.

In the moral world it is different: there a man may clothe in new forms, and for this employ his imagination freely, but he must invent nothing. He may not, for any purpose, turn its laws upside down. He must not meddle with the relations of live souls. The laws of the spirit of man must hold, alike in this world and in any world he may invent. It were no offence to suppose a world in which everything repelled instead of attracted the things around it; it would be wicked to write a tale representing a man it called good as always doing bad things, or a man it called bad as always doing good things: the notion itself is absolutely lawless. In physical things a man may invent; in moral things he must obey--and take their laws with him into his invented world as well.

- excerpted from George MacDonald, "The Fantastic Imagination," in A Dish of Orts, 1893, Public Domain.

The Sharing Knife books: finding lessons there

My apologies to Lois McMaster Bujold, but I spent quite a bit of time reading her four Sharing Knife novels, which aren't short, and I'd like to muse some more about them.

The theme of the books is reconciliation. Here's Paul on that subject:
1 Corinthians 12:13 For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and all were made to drink of one Spirit. (All scripture quotations from the ESV.)

There is reconciliation even more important than two groups of people becoming reconciled to each other, though:
2 Corinthians 5:20 Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.

Getting your priorities right is illustrated.
In the fourth book, a wagon train is about to be attacked by a powerful malice, with its slaves. The Lakewalkers tell the farmers with them to run for cover. But some of them don't want to go.
"The wagons are all we have!" cried Grouse.
"You can't stop to defend things." (The Sharing Knife, Volume Four: Horizon. (New York: Eos, HarperCollins, 2009, p. 209. Grouse is a minor character. Dag is the one who answers him.)
Another man, a smith, is asked if he would rather save his wife or his anvil.

Mark 8:37 For what can a man give in return for his soul?
Luke 12:20 But God said to him, ‘Fool! This night your soul is required of you, and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’

There is love and fidelity in marriage.
There are a number of happy married couples in the book, including the main characters, Dag and Fawn, but many others, some who have been married for a long time, like Fawn's parents, or Mari and Cattagus, are examples of long-term commitment, and unselfish love for another. (Mari is Dag's aunt, and, until he stopped patrolling, his most recent patrol captain.)

At one point, Dag is approached by a woman, who asks him to be unfaithful to Fawn. He doesn't even consider this, but refuses immediately. Cattagus is disabled, and unable to go on patrol when his wife does, but he and Mari are obviously in a mature spousal love relationship. Dag and Fawn have a number of conversations, throughout the four books. Except when Dag doesn't tell Fawn that he knows she is pregnant right away, there is no hint of dishonesty between them.
The Bible is full of admonitions and examples about this.

There are several examples of moral choices. Some characters make the right choice, some do not.

There is love for the natural world, without worshiping it. Dag shows Fawn his favorite place, a spot on the lake where there are lots of waterlilies. Fawn tells him that she loves milkweed flowers. These plants become part of their wedding cords, objects worn for the duration of a marriage by Lakewalkers.

I believe that stewardship of the natural world is part of God's plan for humans.

There is unselfish service to others. The Lakewalkers, who patrol their own lands, and those of the farmers, for malices, are usually considered to be some sort of freaks, cannibals, and the like by the farmers. The farmers are seldom grateful for this service, and many of them don't even believe it is necessary.

Dag, and other Lakewalkers with healing ability, often give of their time and energy, even putting their lives at immediate risk of being groundlocked, to fix injuries and diseases. Dag and Arkady do this not only for Lakewalkers, but for farmers.

There is a conflict between good and evil.
The evil beings, malices, attack at unexpected times and places, and in unexpected ways. They are able to subvert farmers, even Lakewalkers, to be their slaves, aiding their evil purpose, which is to destroy all that is alive and good. They use their slaves, without regard for their safety, or even their lives. This is much the way that the devil operates, according to the Bible.
As Paul put it:
Ephesians 6:10 Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might. 11 Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil.

And, of course, the most important lesson: Freedom from evil comes only at the cost of a life.
There is no analogy worthy of comparison to the death and resurrection of Christ, the perfect sacrifice for sin, certainly not anything in these books that is so worthy. And there is no hint of a resurrection in them. However, the books do put forth a system wherein the only way to kill a malice is for part of a dying human's ground to be placed into a sharing knife, and that knife be used on the malice.

Thanks for reading. Read the Bible!

The post introducing these books is here. This post is on the theme of the books. This post is on ground, a unique aspect of Bujold's subcreation. A post, on religion in the books, is here.

Moral robots?

A recent book review is evidence that there are people (so far, not computers!) who are thinking about how to build a moral sense into robots, or teach them one.

Primatologist Frans de Waal has presented evidence, here and elsewhere, that non-human primates have at least a rudimentary moral sense.

See also this post, on the question of moral agency, which is the ability to make moral decisions.

Thanks for reading.

Moral Agency and Moral Considerability: Do Animals have these?

I have done a Google search, and found that I can't find a good summary of two academically-oriented papers on crucial questions for ethics, namely, "Can non-human animals have ethics?" and "How should we treat non-human organisms?" Here's such a summary, taken from my on-line syllabus (I retired in 2005) in bioethics.

Richard A. Watson and Moral Agency
A Summary of Richard A. Watson's "Self-Consciousness and the Rights of Nonhuman Animals and Nature" (Environmental Ethics 1:99-129, Summer 1979. Also see Google Books for the article on-line.):

Moral Agency
Rights don't make sense unless the entity granted rights can also fulfill reciprocal duties. The Golden Rule suggests reciprocation as an ideal. So does Kant's Categorical imperative (Act only in ways that could be adopted as general moral principles).
To earn rights, one must be a moral agent--an entity capable of performing moral duties, and, in fact, carrying out these duties.
The requirements for moral agency, Watson writes, are:
(1) self-consciousness,
(2) capability of understanding moral principles about rights and duties,
(3) freedom to act either according to or opposed to given principles of duty,
(4) understanding of given principles of duty,
(5) physical capability (or potentiality) of acting according to duty, and
(6) intention to act according to or opposed to given principles of duty. (p. 101)
Moral agents can act opposed to duty. This does not make them any less a moral agent, but may cause them to be deprived of certain rights.
Humans can assign rights to corporations, animals, etc., but that does not make such an entity a moral agent.
(The Wikipedia has an article on moral agency, but the Wikipedia, itself, claims that the article has some serious weaknesses.)

Four arguments for giving rights to nonhuman animals and nature
1. Ecological. If something is part of the living world, it has a right to exist.
Watson disagrees with this, and with Leopold's Land Ethic, because it is deriving value from fact, ought from is.
2. Prudential. We should treat animals as if they had rights, so that we won't treat humans like we treat animals.
Watson says that this just says treat animals as if they had rights, which is not the same thing as saying that they do.
3. Sentimental. Sentience (conscious of sense impressions) imparts rights.
Watson says "why?" The animal rights movement, he says, hasn't really proved anything. They are asking us to help animals avoid unnecessary suffering. He agrees, but doesn't agree that animals have rights. We have a duty not to cause needless suffering.
4. Contractual. Human beings should treat the property of other human beings as if it had rights.
Corporations are not responsible, he says. Humans are, and one of their duties may be to treat a corporation, or an animal, as if it had rights, but that is not the same as saying that they do have rights.

Self-Consciousness and Moral Agency
The author says that some chimpanzees (and presumably bonobos-that species wasn't recognized when the article was written), gorillas (probably orangutans and perhaps gibbons), dolphins, (probably whales), elephants, dogs, pigs, and maybe cats and some other animals are sometimes moral agents. That is, there is adequate behavioral evidence that they have self-consciousness, capability of understanding moral principles, free will, understanding of specific duties, physical capability, and sometimes the intent to act with respect to moral principles. Frans de Waal has argued, here, and in his books, such as Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved, that there is evidence that non-human primates have a moral sense.

Moral Considerability
An article by Kenneth Goodpaster in the Journal of Philosophy, 75:308-325, 1978, "On Being Morally Considerable," examines the question "What sort of entities must be taken into account in making moral decisions?" Goodpaster's answer, in brief, is "living things."
Why? Because, he says, they have interests, that is, things that they need. He includes water for plants as an example. Goodpaster does not claim that we cannot kill plants, or even animals, for food, or that we can't do research on them, or that we can't protect ourselves against harm from them (for example by pulling weeds from a garden) but says that we must consider the interests of other living things when we are making decisions that would affect them.
W Murray Hunt criticized Goodpaster in an article in Environmental Ethics (2:59-65, 1980) "Are Mere Things Morally Considerable?" Hunt suggested that inanimate objects might also be given moral considerability. Goodpaster replied, in part as follows: "I continue to believe that "being alive" is the only plausible and nonarbitrary criterion of moral considerability." Kenneth E. Goodpaster, "On Stopping at Everything: A Reply to W. M. Hunt," Environmental Ethics 3:281-284, Fall 1980. Quote is from p. 284. He also quoted Joel Feinberg ("The Rights of Animals and Unborn Generations," in William T. Blackstone, Ed., Philosophy and Environmental Crisis, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1978, p. 51) as saying that "a being without interests is a being that is incapable of being harmed or benefited, having no good or 'sake' or its own . . . a being without interests has no 'behalf' to act in, and no 'sake to act for." (quoted on p. 282 of Goodpaster)

Thanks for reading. I hope this may be useful to someone.

Christopher Paolini's moral fabric: Eragon

Christopher Paolini recently turned 23 years of age. He is the author of Eragon and Eldest, two big, and pretty good, books of fantasy. Eragon: Inheritance, Book One (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003) will soon be released as a movie.

I wouldn't say that Paolini has written ground-breaking fantasy, but few people have -- it's well-crafted, and a good read. In a lot of ways, he reads like a cross between J. R. R. Tolkien and Ursula K. Le Guin -- the elves are human-like, but immortal, and mostly hidden from humans, and have their own language, an old, magical language; there are dwarves, living underground, and unfriendly to other races; magic has rules, and must be taught; great care must be exercised in performing magic. There are some original elements -- dragons can't speak aloud, for example, and there are at least two intelligent species that are unique to Paolini's books. Religion, and worship, are described. Tolkien didn't do that.

I don't have any idea how the plot of the movie corresponds with that of the book, and, even if I did, I wouldn't give away any details. I prefer to consider the moral fabric of Paolini's books.

Every author has a world view. Here's an apparently secular take on what a world view is. Here's a definitely Christian take on the same topic (using worldview, not world view). The two are similar. They both say that a world view answers such questions as where the universe came from, what (if anything) is the difference between right and wrong, and what happens to humans when they die. It is also true that many people don't have a consistent world view -- they haven't carefully worked out answers to these questions. I don't know what Paolini's world view is, but I have gotten some hints from reading his books. This post presents some of what I learned about Paolini from Eragon. It is also true, of course, that an author's characters may have a different world view than the author, herself. Eragon is fiction, after all.

There is a definite sense of right and wrong. The Empire is evil, and Eragon's step-father is good.

Some of the characters question how bad things can be allowed to happen and challenge whatever gods may exist, because they have happened. (p. 91, 131)

". . . This magic -- for it is magic -- has rules like the rest of the world. If you break the rules, the penalty is death, without exception. Your deeds are limited by your strength, the words you know, and your imagination." (p. 139) Brom, Eragon's first teacher, also makes clear, and Eragon experiences at various points, that magic is not practiced without a cost -- at least some temporary tiredness, at most, death. It takes one's strength to use magic.

There are evil spirits in the world, that can possess humans, using them for their own ends. (p. 144, 437)

". . . Keep in mind that many people have died for their beliefs; it's actually quite common. The real courage is in living and suffering for what you believe." (p. 197) Brom speaking.

At least some religions are evil. On p. 247-8, one such, requiring human sacrifice, and spending too many resources on trivial matters, is described.

In the chapter "A Clash of Wills" (pp. 347 - 353) Eragon is very upset at Murtagh, who decapitates a slaver during a battle, while he is lying on the ground, seriously injured. Eragon thinks that the man should have had a chance, even though slavery is monstrous.

Eldest is more explicit on what I take to be Paolini's world view. I posted on that book here.

Thanks for reading!