Before I go on, allow me to give the disclaimer that I am one of the authors to have contributed a chapter, in this case entitled “The Great Transition: Ideas and Anxieties.” This is my most concerted attempt to date to explicate the central ideas of transhumanism and suggest how we might best respond to them.

You can click on the image of the cover where it appears on Amazon’s site if you’d like to sample the contents, including the full contents pages. Or it should work if you click here to find the table of contents.

The authors are something of a who’s who of thinkers who have contributed in one capacity or another to the transhumanist movement or to discussion of emerging technologies and human enhancement in general. Many of these people would be widely regarded as coming from different factions or schools of thought, and some may not even like each other all that much, so this is going to be a diverse book. Contributing authors, apart from the two editors (and myself, obviously) include Nick Bostrom, Anders Sandberg, Martine Rothblatt, James Hughes, Laura Beloff, Aubrey de Grey, Ray Kurzweil, Damien Broderick… and many others of similar calibre, with claims to be intellectual leaders in this area.

I have not read the whole book – though I’ve read some of the reprinted material in earlier forms – so I can’t give it anything like an actual review. Also, at this stage it’s not possible to review it on Amazon, so you won’t find much guidance there (if you pay a lot of attention to Amazon reviews). But I’ve read a prospectus as well as the ToC, and I’m confident that this will be a very authoritative book, showing the depth of historical and current thinking in the field. If you’re interested in transhumanist thought, or more generally in debates over emerging technologies and the prospects of human enhancement, this is a volume that you probably should get your hands on.

The biggest news is that my co-authored book with Udo Schuklenk, 50 Great Myths About Atheism, is now complete and in the pipeline for publication in September. We’ve gone through the initial copyedit and have even settled on a cover (which we both love) with the good folks at Wiley-Blackwell. The book explores many libels, lies, half-truths, and distortions that relate to atheism and atheists, trying to give them their due whenever we spot a grain of truth or an aspect that is plausible. Udo and I also provide a long chapter about the rise of atheism and why we think it is now the most plausible answer to the God question.

Meanwhile, I have delivered the manuscript for Humanity Enhanced to MIT Press, where it is under contract. Stay tuned for more about this. I can’t, for example, as yet give you a planned date of publication. The book deals with the ethical and (more particularly) legal/political issues surrounding the emerging technologies of genetic choice. In doing so, it examines in detail many of the misgivings about these technologies based on such ideas as harms to autonomy, violations of the natural order, problems of distributive justice, and much, much more.

I am at earlier stages with a couple of other books, though it looks like I’ll soon be signing a contract for at least one of them. In both cases, much of the work is done, but there’s also a lot more to go (and let’s face it, many a slip so I won’t say more about that for now).

Over the (southern hemisphere) summer I’ve also had new pieces published in The Philosophers’ Magazine and Free Inquiry. Currently I’m working on a long book chapter about religion and politics, plus acting as one of the jurors for the Norma K. Hemming Award.

Upcoming speaking engagements include a couple (one already announced, one to be announced soon) at the forthcoming inaugural Newcastle Writers’ Festival (in which I am also somewhat involved in my role as chair of the Hunter Writers Centre)… and, hot off the presses, a talk at The Amazing Meeting 2013 in July.

The line-up of speakers for The Amazing Meeting has only just been announced, but from my viewpoint it looks fantastic. I say a bit more about it over here.

One response that this receives is a claim that the FEMEN protestors are being inconsistent. “How,” the rhetorical questions are asked, “can they be in favour of (or at least relaxed about) public nudity, while being against prostitution? How can you be in favour of sexual freedom in one context but not in another?”

There’s much to say about this. For one thing, being relaxed about, or even favouring, nudity may not be based on anything as broad, possibly amorphous, as “sexual freedom”. It may be based on some narrower or different (perhaps not clearly sexual at all) set of attitudes and values. At the same time, even if you do favour sexual freedom in the abstract, this does not imply that you will favour every practice that is associated with sexual freedom in our culture. You may value other things as well, and these may outweigh sexual freedom (however defined) in certain contexts.

In a post over at The Hellfire Club, I laid out some possible combinations of empirical and philosophical views – views that go with certain values and attitudes – which might lead a person, quite consistently, to favour nudity (and perhaps many other things such as striptease, some sorts of erotic or pornographic art or images, etc.) while disfavouring prostitution (and perhaps certain other things such as some other kinds of porngraphy). Such a position might be quite consistent, though unusual in our (or “my” or “your”) culture and experience. Perhaps it is based on a combination of beliefs, attitudes, etc., that we simply haven’t encountered to date.

I won’t spell out the possible details again here, you can check that post for yourself and make up your own minds how plausible it might seem.

I didn’t claim to have explicated the system of assumptions, beliefs, values, etc., of the real FEMEN. Perhaps FEMEN actually rationalises its moral and political positions on some other basis, such as some kind of antipathy to commercial transactions. Or perhaps it simply places a lot of weight on the value of attracting attention to its protests. Or perhaps the real FEMEN actually is inconsistent. My point was only that, given some logically consistent sets of beliefs, attitudes, etc., it is possible to be principled and consistent in being in favour of public nudity, and even about relaxing the laws against it, while being against prostitution, and against relaxing laws against it.

I’d actually go a bit further. I think that some people probably do hold to a combination of underlying beliefs, attitudes, etc., similar to what I postulated, and this would tend to entail a pro-nudity/anti-prostitution position. And perhaps I should add that, although I don’t really subscribe to that combination of underlying beliefs, attitudes, etc., I don’t think it’s wildly implausible. I suspect that there are probably plenty of pro-nudity but anti-prostitution people around, even if they don’t make a lot of fuss about it, and they might well have quite strong arguments for their position.

As a philosopher, though, I want to bring out a more general point. We ought to hesitate before we dismiss a position as internally inconsistent. It might seem that way based on assumptions that you tend to make, or which you find plausible. But it may not be on the basis of the assumptions being made by the person actually holding the position. There are probably more sets of possible underlying assumptions than any of us ever encounter from day to day. When examined, some of the unusual ones may be at least as plausible as those with which we are more familiar.

In the immediate case, you cannot assume that someone who opposes pornography (or some kinds of it) necessarily opposes people merely wearing sexy clothes or engaging in partial or entire public nudity. Likewise you can’t assume that someone who cheerfully goes nude at the beach is in favour of liberal laws on prostitution or pornography. It is going to depend on a lot of other things that they might defend or believe, or place value upon.

By similar reasoning, someone who opposes gun control laws and so appears to be “conservative” might have specific reasons that do no prevent this person taking “liberal” positions across a wide range of other issues – and this person might be principled and consistent. We could multiply many examples like this. We really need to know why people take the particular stances they do, which might turn out to be surprising yet impressive.

If we bear this in mind we might be more cautious before assuming that somebody is, in a wider way, an ally… or an opponent. It’s going to depend, and it comes down to the details of their reasoning and what they value. Some people doubtless do hold stereotyped sets of positions, perhaps based on tribal loyalty to a party or commitment to a common ideology. But I suspect that many individuals, including many ordinary educated (or not-so-educated) people, do not. They may have more plausible reasons for their combinations of views than is apparent. That might make them more interesting to talk to if we do so in good faith.

This book deserves a larger audience than it is likely to find in the rather expensive academic edition published by Routledge. Though Marks is an academic philosopher, there is little or no technical verbiage, and the text should be accessible to general educated readers. I suspect that a very similar book from a trade press, written by an author with more of a profile with the general public, could be a big seller in the mode of the most recent books from Sam Harris, but this one will probably find only a niche audience.

Meanwhile, there’s plenty of scope to discuss small aspects of this rather nice little book. Marks is a (de?)converted moral sceptic. He denies that any “metaphysical morality” exists, while thinking that many people actually do believe in such an elusive thing. This puts him on the path to being an error theorist, believing that huge numbers of moral judgments are ipso facto untrue simply because they contain terms that don’t refer to anything in the real world (“morally wrong”, etc.). For Marks, our judgments of what is right or wrong are ultimately grounded in subjectivity – what we actually care about, find admirable, or distasteful, or whatever – and there is no ultimate truth about what, for example, we should care about. Contrary to what is widely believed or assumed, Marks thinks, morality eventually rests on various subjective responses.

This is all fairly standard stuff from error theorists, moral sceptics, relativists, and the like. But Marks goes a step further and argues the case for moral abolitionism. He’d like us to stop using moral language such as “morally wrong”, or just “wrong”, much as non-religious people have largely abandoned talk of “sin” (and we have abandoned talk of “witches” in the literal sense of women with magical powers, etc.). Not only does all moral language fail to refer to anything in the real world, Marks thinks; he considers it positively harmful. Read Chapter 4, where he sets out his case for this position. Oh, and of course Marks is aware that some language with a subjective element needs to be used if we are to communicate at all. E.g. he has not expunged the word “desirable” from his vocabulary, though he acknowledges that nothing is objectively desirable.

Which leads me to one of the book’s long endnotes. Here, Marks discusses the fact that most of us now accept the subjectivity in judgments about beauty, artistic merit, and the like. So why not give up saying that “Movie X is good”, or “Y style of art is superior to Z style”, or that a specific joke is funny, or that certain people were great composers? I might add such judgments as that certain Hollywood stars are “sexy” or “beautiful” (they might not appear so to an intelligent warthog-like creature from a neighbouring galaxy!).

Marks is pragmatic:

However, were the heated arguments [about these issues]… to become a basis of universal discord, rampant persecution, and armed conflict, then, because so much suffering were caused by our mistaking something subjective for something objective, I might very well want to urge that we eliminate the aesthetic way of speaking that lent itself to this abuse.

Fair enough, I think, although there is a further question as to how we are able to have arguments that are often not heated, but calm and rational, about aesthetic issues such as Marks describes. Is it all like abstruse and vacuous theological talk (as Marks tends to think of moral debate), or is something more rational happening here? I think the latter, although I agree that, strictly speaking, aesthetic claims have an irreducible subjective element. They may depend on a shared subjectivity among the people in the conversation, but they do depend on subjectivity. I suggest that a further exercise for philosophers is to try to unpack how we are able to talk as sensibly and coherently as we do (so it seems to me) about these aesthetic issues, and also about issues relating to such “moral” matters as people’s “good” or “bad” characters.

Admittedly, there seems to be a widespread tendency for human beings to believe that objective values exist, so perhaps those of us who are sceptical ought to be able to say a bit about why this might be if objective values do not, in fact, exist. All the same, the idea of objective values seems odd when you look at it closely… or so it appears to me.

Meanwhile, I’ve been re-reading Nagel’s Equality and Partiality, mainly to try to get a better understanding this time round of Nagel’s complex views on distributive justice (which will play no further role in this post!). As I have before, I came across a passage in the Chapter 2 (the first substantive chapter after the introduction) where Nagel makes what seems to me a very weak attempt to defend the existence of objective values. The argument seems to go as follows:

P1. You cannot maintain an impersonal indifference to the things that deeply matter to you.
P2. You are much like others human beings in relevant ways.
P3./C1. You must come to regard the most important things (to you) as being objectively valuable. (From P1.? Or is this meant to be a separate point, with P1. as a kind of spare wheel in the argument?)
C2. Some things are objectively valuable (or are known to be objectively valuable) because you value them. (From P3./C1.)
C. Some things are objectively valuable (or are known to be objectively valuable) because other human beings value them. (From P2. and C2. by analogy.)

So the argument is supposed to show that there are some things that are objectively valuable, even though I don’t actually value them (at least in the first instance), namely certain things that other people value deeply. And so, I should treat those things as if I valued them. Presumably, this might include the lives and welfare of other people. Thus, even if I feel no sympathetic identification or concern for those people I should regard their lives and welfare as objectively valuable, and respond accordingly. This might then lead into something like a utilitarian moral system, though based on a sort of Kantian argument.

Surely, though, the above argument is a hopeless mess. P1. and P2. may well be true, but so what? P3./C1. does not follow from P1., if that is how the argument is supposed to work. Nor does P3./C1. seem like something I must accept without any deeper support for it. The fact is that we all value various things, and we may, in unreflective moments, simply see them as valuable. But it by no means follows that we must assent to the proposition that they possess objective value in any strong sense (e.g. that another rational being which fails to agree that they are valuable is making a mistake about the world).

I can go on intensely valuing all sorts of things (such as my own continued life and health, the safety and welfare of my loved ones, or whatever) without at all believing they are objectively valuable. So if P3./C1. denies this, it is simply false. Even if it were true, C2. would not follow. I.e., even if, as a matter of human psychology, I am forced to regard certain things as being objectively valuable, it does not follow that they really are objectively valuable.

So even if we accept the analogical step at C. (which I am prepared to do), the argument fails.

This argument, as I’ve presented it, is so bad that it is difficult to believe that it is what Nagel is trying to say. However, as far as I can work out he makes very similar errors in, for example, The Last Word. Furthermore, I’ve seen other Kantian rationalists present similar arguments to this, always, as far as I can work out, disastrously. I’m not sure what conclusions to draw from this. I’m tempted to say that many philosophers feel under so much psychological pressure to demonstrate the existence of objective values that they can fool themselves that even very weak arguments are actually strong. But who knows? Perhaps they’re saying something, or trying to say something, that I just don’t “get”.

Anyway, I won’t be buying a theory of objective values on the basis of anything remotely like Nagel’s approach.

P1. We have free will only if we sometimes deserve to be praised or blamed for our actions.
P2. We do not deserve to be praised or blamed for our actions in circumstances where such praise or blame is unfair.
P3. Praise or blame for our actions is unfair unless we are causally responsible for our relevant actions all the way down.
P4. We are never causally responsible for our actions all the way down.
C1. Praise or blame for our actions is always unfair. (From P3. and P4.)
C2. We never deserve to be praised or blamed for our actions. (From P2. and C1.)
C3. ~(We sometimes deserve to be praised or blamed for our actions. (From C2.)
C. We do not have free will. (From P1. and C3.)

As I indicated in the earlier post, you can quibble with this formulation if you like; however, the fairness argument, properly formalised is deductively valid.

I accepted P4. for the sake of argument, and in any event I think P4. is actually true. Beyond that, I engaged in a certain amount of fencing, some of which, I think, casts (serious) doubt on P1. Whatever you think of either P4. or P1., however, there seems to be a real problem with P3., and this turns on the nature of “fairness”. I actually see no reason at all to accept P3. – it does not strike me as intuitively compelling, or even appealing, or as something that could be given any decisive intellectual support. To be fair(!), though, something like it appears, at least from my reading and interactions, to be rather popular.

Part of the problem with P3. is that there’s a mystery about what “praise” and “blame” really amount to. Perhaps on some conceptions of these things (error theories about praise and blame), sentences that praise or blame are always false. To keep this simple, let’s stick with praise. What if, when we praise someone for an act, we are stating (perhaps among other things) that the act complied with some objectively binding standard? If no such objectively binding standards exist, it follows that we are always saying something false when we praise somebody.

Again, what if, when we praise someone for an act, we are saying (perhaps among other things) that the person is causally responsible, all the way down, for a good act? If no one is ever causally responsible for an act all the way down, it follows, again, that we are always saying something false whenever we praise somebody.

But what if, when we praise someone for an act, we simply mean that the act is a good one in the sense of one that has such properties as to tend, relatively efficiently, to bring about the sorts of consequences favoured by the people involved in the conversation? In that case, we might often say something that is simply true. There might also be non-cognitive content to our praise, such as an expression of approval, but that content cannot be true or false – and there is going to be an interesting question about how such non-cognitive content can be unfair. Perhaps it can be, but we’d need to explore some arguments to see whether this makes sense.

I suspect, meanwhile, that praise involves both more and less than any than this. E.g., when I praise someone for an act I might be saying not just that the act is good (in the sense discussed above) but that the person is good. I.e., the person’s performance of the act has provided me with evidence that she possesses certain dispositions of character (courage, kindness, honesty, or whatever they may be) such as to be a desirable person to have around: such as to tend to act in ways favoured by me and the other people involved in the conversation, etc., etc.

If this is what expressions of praise really amount to, and if something analogous applies to dispraise or blame, then there is nothing necessarily unfair about praising someone for an act for which she was not causally responsible all the way down. Indeed, the fact that the action flowed from the dispositional structure of her character might support my words of praise or blame. The action did not happen at random, but was, to some extent, caused by the person’s character (even if this also had causes).

There is a huge body of academic literature on the words “praise” and “blame”, and what they mean, but at this stage someone who wants to run the fairness argument is already in trouble. P3. depends on a highly controversial idea, perhaps far detached from the thoughts of the folk, of what it is to praise or blame people. Or so it seems.

That’s troublesome enough, but P3. also depends on a controversial idea of fairness. The idea actually seems rather vague. Its essence seems to be an absence of bias, favouritism, patronage, nepotism, hostility, “bad vibes”, etc., in situations where, first, we are allocating/withholding benefits, rights, penalties, etc., and, second, the situation is such that exercising bias, favouritism, and so on, is somehow socially inappropriate or “bad”.

So Alice is not acting unfairly if she favours Bella as her lover rather than Clarice, even if Clarice’s good qualities might exceed Bella’s from some supposedly objective viewpoint. In a situation like this, bias, favouritism, idiosyncratic feelings of liking or attraction, “good vibes’, etc., are permitted (or so we usually assume), and fairness does not even enter into the picture.

In certain other situations, we think that bias, favouritism, etc., are not appropriate, and these are the situations where questions about fairness arise. But what does “fairness” then require? Well, the requirements will vary from situation to situation, as will the justifications that support them. In some cases, the requirements and the justifications will be deeply contested. For example, we tend (don’t we?) to think it fair that a person who is on trial in the criminal courts, or who is being sued in the civil courts, be given an accurate idea of what is alleged against her before she has to answer it. She should not be denied this because of bias, favouritism, hostility toward her from the judge, or the like.

Again, we tend to think that parents should give their various children roughly equal opportunities for happiness and success in life over time, and that any blatant lapse from this is “unfair”. We don’t want a mother or father, or the combination, to show blatant favouritism to a particular child. However, a parent may normally show bias, favour, etc., toward her own child, vis-à-vis other people’s children.

In some familiar cases, things get more complicated. What if I am working out what rates of pay to give my employees? There may be a problem if I do this based on personal bias, favouritism, patronage, whim, nepotism, etc. But it does not follow that I should pay them all equally. Fine, so how should I pay them? Should I pay my employees on the basis of their respective developed skills; on the basis of the responsibility that they have willingly taken on within my enterprise; on the basis of their average or daily productivity, as individuals, compared to similar employees in the enterprise (which may bring in issues of diligence, industriousness, etc.); on the basis of what employees with similar skills, records, etc., are likely to be paid by other enterprises (within the same labour market); or some mixture of all this (in which case, how do I measure and weight these things?); or something else? These questions weigh heavily on the minds of wages negotiators, industrial arbitration tribunals, etc., and they often develop pay fixation principles that are of at least some local assistance.

So… if I praise you as having performed a good act, or as being a generally good (or morally virtuous) person, or for having certain good dispositions of character, or having made a good judgment, or anything of the kind, am I under any obligation to be fair? Well, perhaps these important judgments should not be made on the basis of whether or not I like you (or have a family connection with you, or some such thing). They should, perhaps, be based on general criteria that I would apply to others, irrespective of personal feelings, familial loyalties, or the like. But that does not tell me what criteria I should actually use!

I take it that a claim that I am, first, in a situation where fairness is relevant (I should not exercise bias, favouritism, etc.), and, second, that I should use certain specific criteria (not others) in handing out benefits and rewards, will require something like a utilitarian justification. Of course, in many circumstances there is much conventional wisdom that may be worth deferring to about when fairness is (and is not) relevant, and about what criteria should be used to make judgments and to grant benefits, apply penalties, etc. There may be some merit in not trying to review these from scratch, using explicit utilitarian criteria. Either way, to say that I acted fairly is more or less to say that I applied the criteria that were relevant (whatever they were), in a situation that called for them (i.e., in a situation where I was not entitled to act on bias, favouritism, etc.), and (if this has to be said separately) without distortion from my personal feelings toward an affected person, etc.

Nothing at all follows from this that I must praise or blame people only if I find virtue or fault with them all the way down. People can genuinely make mistakes, act badly, show poor judgment, evidence a vicious character – or the opposites of any or all of these – without being causally responsible for their actions, judgments, characters, etc., all the way down. When we appraise them, we act fairly if we apply appropriate standards to the facts in evidence, without being biased by whom we like or dislike, the wish we could help or hinder the individual, etc.

Whatever, exactly, the ideas of praising and blaming really amount to, it is not at all obvious that they can be done fairly only if the people being appraised were responsible all the way down for their actions, judgments, and characters. Accordingly, P3. is not an attractive premise at all… and hence the whole argument is in trouble.

I’d love to see a similar argument that does not (in the view of its author) fall prey to this problem.

P1. We have free will only if we sometimes deserve to be praised or blamed for our actions.
P2. We do not deserve to be praised or blamed for our actions in circumstances where such praise or blame is unfair.
P3. Praise or blame for our actions is unfair unless we are causally responsible for our relevant actions all the way down.
P4. We are never causally responsible for our actions all the way down.
C1. Praise or blame for our actions is always unfair. (From P3. and P4.)
C2. We never deserve to be praised or blamed for our actions. (From P2. and C1.)
C3. ~(We sometimes deserve to be praised or blamed for our actions. (From C2.)
C. We do not have free will. (From P1. and C3.)

You can question whether the step at C3. is really needed, and you might want to rephrase something in the above to make sure this is all able to be represented in your favourite system of propositional calculus. However, at the end of the day you’ll find that it’s a deductively valid argument. So the only question is whether you accept its premises – if you do, you are intellectually committed to accepting the conclusion.

You’ll come across arguments that seem to go something like this (either expressly or implicitly), whether in the formal literature on the subject or in informal discussions on the internet and elsewhere. So, should we deny the existence of free will, based on something like this argument? (By all means, offer your improved version of it.)

Before we get to that, note a couple of points. The argument does not proceed straight from: “The world is deterministic” to “We don’t have free will.” It doesn’t even move, in a more sophisticated way, straight from: “The world is a mix of determinism and randomness” to “We don’t have free will.” That seems to be an advantage. It does not simply beg the question against theories that are compatibilist about determinism and free will (or about “a mix of determinism and randomness” and free will). Rather, it offers richer (purported) insights into how we understand free will, and if we accept these (purported) insights we might then be intellectually compelled to reject compatibilist approaches.

Conversely, note that the argument depends very much on a philosopher’s conception of free will. That may also be a strength. Philosophers are better placed than most to understand how free will has been conceived of in philosophical debate over the years and centuries. For example, they may be more familiar with the literature than scientists. If the argument shows that we lack free will, as thus understood, that is an important outcome.

Nonetheless, there may be other conceptions of free will that are not caught by the argument. What if it turns out that, when ordinary people who are not philosophers claim to have free will, they actually mean (and convey to each other) something that is rather vague and messy? Perhaps one of its primary components is merely a denial of fatalism. Or perhaps it is a denial of both fatalism and any related doctrines that involve our experienced choices being bypassed or overridden, so as to lack causal efficacy. For example, epiphenomenalism would have such an effect, even if it’s not a theory that the folk are specifically familiar with. If, as things turn out, that is really what ordinary people are trying to convey when they use the (perhaps inapposite) term “free will”, then they might not accept P1, at least not without a lot of caveats, qualifications, etc. For them, P1. might miss the point.

That said, P1. does sound rather plausible (doesn’t it?), so there is much to explore if somebody wants to reject it while also claiming that human beings have free will in some interesting sense. It seems to me that there is a lot more to be said here, but I’ll leave it for another time.

P4. is a crucial premise. It is basically a way of denying that we have libertarian free will, though again there is more to be said. Note, however, that the argument as a whole is not an argument against libertarian positions, as libertarians are likely to deny P4. Against them, I am assuming that P4. is true, and I’d support it with arguments about the world being a mix of determinism and randomness in a way that seems to preclude, if not free will (after all, there are accounts of free will that are compatible with this as far as it goes), at least ideas of ultimate self-determination and the like. The argument, then, would need to be supplemented with some further argument for P4. before it could persuade a free-will libertarian. As the argument stands, without that supplementation, it begs the question against libertarian positions on the free will question.

The drift of the argument, then, is that we cannot reject ideas of ultimate self-determination and the like while also maintaining the existence of anything that ought to be called “free will”.

So compatibilist ideas are not being rejected in P4., taken by itself. The argument is supposed to persuade compatibilists to become incompatibilists – the question is not begged against compatibilism.

Where, then, does the argument go wrong? Perhaps some compatibilists will argue that P1. is beside the point or even false, because it is not getting at what is really bugging the folk when they talk about free will (as evidenced in cultural history and contemporary popular culture). In that case, they may criticise much of the contemporary discussion of free will by analytic philosophers for having lost contact with what was bugging ordinary people in the first place. I feel some sympathy for this, as, perhaps, is evident over here, but much work would need to be done before we could be confident about this approach one way or the other.

I’ll set that aside. Meanwhile, I think an equally troubling problem arises with P3. Frankly, I see no reason at all to accept this premise. Nonetheless, it appears to have intuitive appeal for many people and to enjoy some popularity. In my next post, I’ll focus squarely on P3., asking whether we should accept it and the conception of fairness that it implies.

Thanks, all. As you were!

I started on this exercise in response to an anonymous reviewer for Wiley-Blackwell, which will be publishing my co-authored book with Udo Schuklenk, 50 Great Myths About Atheism. The idea put to us by the reviewer was that Gaukroger has demonstrated the vital role of Christian theology in assisting the consolidation of science in early modern Europe. I must say that I’m not totally convinced.

As its title implies, the first volume covers European intellectual history from the rise of neo-Aristotelian natural philosophy in the 13th century, through developments in the 16th and early 17th centuries, involving Copernicus, Galileo, Hobbes, Gassendi, Kepler, Descartes, and others, to the spectacular flowering of science in the work of Sir Isaac Newton, Robert Hooke, and many others in the late 17th century.

Obviously, all these men appeared in cultures that gave them the intellectual and other resources for their work, but when you trace through the detail of what motivated them, how they influenced each other, and so on, not much of that has to do with Christianity. What most comes across is their fascination with experiments, thought experiments, and each other’s ideas, and in many cases their joy-cum-obsession with the new tools that had become available to them in the form of scientific instruments, precision crafted experimental apparatus, and increasingly powerful kinds of mathematics.

Gaukroger sees his central question as being why a large-scale, successfully legitimating consolidation of science took place in Europe in the 17th century (and thereafter) – when science tends to be fragmented and stop-start, with long periods of stagnation, whenever it has appeared in a promising form in other times, places, and cultures. He answers that the natural philosophy of the Scientific Revolution was attractive to many thinkers in the 17th and 18th centuries precisely because it appeared to have promise for the renewal of natural theology.

There may be something in this, although before I go on let’s pause to note it is very different from saying that there was something about Christianity that made it inherently pro-science in the first place. Gaukroger does not appear to maintain any such thesis (and nor, as far as I know, does the anonymous reviewer that I mentioned).

Indeed, Gaukroger notes that there was a considerable tradition within ancient and medieval Christianity of opposition to natural philosophy (and hence anything resembling science), seeing it as distracting or even idolatrous. Nothing in his books seems to give late medieval scholasticism much credit for the rise of science (it appears that whatever science it produced in the 13th and 14th centuries was not fruitful, and stagnated much like in other cultures that showed promising beginnings in scientific thought, such as China and medieval Islam). Indeed, even Aristotle’s form of natural philosophy was initially resisted by the 13th-century Church, although the synthesis produced by Aquinas was later given the Church’s endorsement.

Renaissance natural theology was largely an attempt to reconcile Aristotelianism with theology, which may well have been intellectually fruitful in some ways, but the Church was harsh to anyone who drew conclusions that strayed beyond orthodoxy. If anything, Christianity seems to have acted more as a hindrance than otherwise to free inquiry into the phenomena of the natural world (though, of course, even resistance can sometimes be inspiring).

Late in The Emergence of a Scientific Culture, Gaukroger discusses the (largely British) phenomenon of physico-theology: the attempts by some theologians, scientists (as we’d now call them), and philosophers to reconcile theology with what was emerging from science, or even to use scientific findings to support or revitalise theology. He writes interestingly of thinkers, such as Ralph Cudworth, who embraced a version of the atomist view of the natural world that had become popular within science, while attempting at the same time to modify it and to include it in their metaphysical systems. Gaukroger then deals at some length with others who attempted to reconcile scientific theories of the formation of the Earth with the Genesis account of creation and the biblical chronology of history. He puts an impressive enough case that in the 1680s and 1690s, especially in the UK, there was a widespread view that natural philosophy could be used as a source of evidence for God.

But none of shows that the successful consolidation of science in the 17th and 18th centuries had much to with Christianity. On the face of it, I’d have thought that the successful consolidation of science at this point in history owed more simply to its unprecedented theoretical successes, the causes of which were contingent and complicated – perhaps having to do with some of the personalities involved, perhaps with non-religious aspects of European culture, perhaps with breakthroughs in mathematics and scientific instrumentation. And perhaps with other things. I don’t see any densely argued case for giving much credit to religion.

About the most that could be said with any confidence is that, back in, say, 1600, orthodox theology might have looked like a very formidable barrier for science to overcome. After all, as Gaukroger says in The Collapse of Mechanism and the Rise of Sensibility, “Christianity … had traditionally laid claim to universal competence in all matters of understanding the world and our place in it, most notably in its Augustinean version”, but as he immediately adds this claim was decisively weakened during the seventeenth century. Despite the terrible execution of Giordano Bruno in 1600, for a mix of sins in the eyes of the Church, and the persecution of Galileo not long after, Christianity did not do all that much to block the rise of science in the second half of the century.

Given Christianity’s longstanding claims to universal epistemic competence, it is no wonder that it came into conflict with Aristotelian natural philosophy and later with early modern science, personified by Galileo. These stood to draw their own conclusions and to challenge theology’s authority.

Thus, Gaukroger is doubtless correct when he makes much of the issue of the relationship between the epistemic authority of Christianity and that of natural philosophy (or science). He says, I think justly, that the issue of the relationship between “the kind of understanding of the world that natural philosophy provides, and that provided by Christian revelation and natural theology” was a pressing one in Christian Europe from the beginning of the 13th century, when Aristotelian texts and doctrines were introduced into the intellectual culture.

Given the intellectual hegemony of Christianity, it can be argued that the ability of science to consolidate itself depended on its relationship with Christian thought. On this hinged the ability of science to establish itself in the late 17th and early 18th centuries “as a permanent and integral feature of Western intellectual life” (The Collapse of Mechanism and the Rise of Sensibility).

During this period, as Gaukroger reminds us, it was widely understood as a requirement for natural philosophy that its theories be compatible with shared assumptions in Europe about morality, our place in the world, and religious thinking in general. In the upshot, science conformed – to some extent, it avoided heresy by carefully defining its field of inquiry as the natural world (while drawing a sharp boundary with the supernatural world), and to some extent it produced theories that ultimately appealed to the actions of God, as we find in the work of Newton.

All this, however, is not so much Christian theology nurturing science as simply not proving to be such a formidable barrier as first appeared. To some extent, it was a matter of science accommodating itself to Christianity. To some extent, it may, indeed, have been certain theologians welcoming the findings of science as a resource for theology. But to some extent it may simply be that Christianity had lost much of its intellectual hegemony for totally different reasons – partly, perhaps, because of the disastrous Thirty Years’ War, and partly because of extensive contact with other cultures in the New World and the Far East, which also tended to undermine absolutism and certainty.

Despite Gaukroger’s extensive scholarship, there’s still a story to research and tell here – a story about how Christianity increasingly lost its intellectual authority, and why it was, perhaps, increasingly less in a position to hinder the rise of science and competition from other epistemic rivals.

I’m glad I had my attention drawn to these books. I began reading them to see what they have to say about the interaction between early science and Christian theology. But, although that is a recurring theme, it does not dominate the discussion by any means, and much of the fascination is simply in getting a consolidated and detailed account of how science developed, hypothesis by hypothesis, contributor by contributor, step by step, in its early centuries, and how it interacted with much else, such as the broader literary and intellectual culture of Europe. Taken together, The Emergence of a Scientific Culture and The Collapse of Mechanism and the Rise of Sensibility form an extraordinarily scholarly and exhaustive account of what was going on during a crucial period in intellectual history, as high medieval culture gave way to early modernity, and then the Enlightenment era.

[This post is based on a series of posts over on my personal blog.]

[Pssst: Check out my books at Amazon. Not least Freedom of Religion and the Secular State.]

At an earlier stage of the book, Leiter has argued that both Kantians and utilitarians have reasons to tolerate religious views and practices that they disapprove of. So far, so good – although Kantian and utilitarian moral theories are controversial, and I’d be looking for a rather different basis for toleration myself (I actually ground it in what I think many people, including many religious people, can see as the point or role of the institution of the state … but let’s skip over that).

Very well, let’s stipulate that there is some moral basis for tolerating religion, particularly in the sense of not bringing organised political power to bear (with fire, swords, police cars, jails, and so on) in an attempt to suppress it, even if we’re talking about a form of religion that we dislike. But Leiter wants to know whether we should be doing more than that, perhaps based on a claim that religion merits respect in some strong sense.

Here he offers what seems to me a useful discussion of respect. He leans on some terminology from Stephen Darwall, distinguishing between recognition respect and appraisal respect. Recognition respect is what I would simply call “respect” – i.e. recognising something’s properties that ought to be taken into account in some way, and moulding your behaviour so that you actually do take them into account in whatever is the appropriate way. Appraisal respect is more like deciding that something is worthy of esteem. (I’ve made a similar distinction many times, without being aware of Darwall’s 1977 article that Leiter refers to. I’m not the only one, as, irrespective of terminology, these different conceptions of respect are frequently discussed in one way or another. In an endnote, Leiter observes that Darwall’s views have changed since the 1977 article, but that need not detain us.)

Let’s all concede that religion has certain properties that we’d better take into account in some way, perhaps by not making it a political issue whether a particular religion ought to be imposed by the power of the state or whether certain religions ought to be suppressed by state power. Thus, we could agree that we ought to give religion recognition respect, which will then make us circumscribe our behaviour in certain ways. These ways might be important if they make the difference between whether or not we live in a society with bloody religious persecutions. All the same, the effect on our behaviour as individuals may be slight. The appropriate level of recognition may not be demanding in how it constrains our behaviour, at least for most of us.

It does not follow that religion per se merits any esteem, or anything similar that might motivate us to treat it with special deference or solicitude. Does religion (again, religion per se, not some particular, especially “nice” religion) merit appraisal respect, i.e. we ought to appraise it as meritorious, worthy of esteem, and so on? I don’t see why, and neither does Leiter. Religion may have its good side, but it also has a dark side. Taken as a whole, it is not obviously something that is worthy of our esteem, or even something that is all to the good.

For Leiter, it follows that there is no requirement, above and beyond his basic argument for toleration, to give religion any special rights. It is in the same boat as other matters of individual conscience, deserving no more (though no less) deference by the state. Although I argue for religious toleration from a different philosophical viewpoint, I think Leiter is clearly right on the basic issue here.

[Pssst my Amazon author’s page, and the link to Freedom of Religion and the Secular State.)