"Did you thank the Lord for that split-second decision?"

After a woman described how she left her now-destroyed house, narrowly escaping the Oklahoma tornado which would have killed her and her infant son if she had followed the family's standard procedure of waiting in the bathroom, Wolf Blitzer asked her whether she thanked God that she and her infant son weren't hurt. (The husband/father was safely out of town at the time.) This led to a mildly amusing moment when she responded that she's an atheist.



Just once I'd like to see a TV host ask someone who survived a natural disaster unscathed: do you blame God for the fact that it killed, maimed, and trapped other people?

(You can watch the full interview here — it's actually a very touching testament to the ingenuity and resilience and goodness of ordinary people.)

Robert Wright's self-contradictory attack on the "new atheists"

Robert Wright, who has a new best-selling book out called The Evolution of God, explains his problem with the "new atheists" -- an unfortunate term that presumably includes Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris (see below for the video version):

I think now it is more acceptable for intellectuals to openly ridicule religion than it was 15 years ago. But anyway, whatever the case . . . this bothers me, and it is part of the motivation for my writing th[e] afterword [in The Evolution of God]. And here's one reason it bothers me. In a way, at the root of that afterword is the belief that . . . being human is hard. . . . I think even harder is trying seriously to lead a moral life and be human.... If somebody is really making an earnest effort to lead a moral life, in the face of all the obstacles ... and really moral by our lights: they're decent, gentle people. They're trying to help. They're not going on jihads and killing people. It makes me just almost nauseous when someone walks up to them and say: "Don't you understand, the basis for this noble struggle is just not as intellectually sophisticated as I am?" OK? That just makes me sick. . . . But John, you do that! [He's talking to John Horgan. -- JAC] You're anti-religion! You want to wipe religion out!

I think that "nauseous" statement is wrong on a few levels.

First, I don't see how Wright could reconcile it with his comments in a diavlog between him and Joel Achenbach (again, scroll down for the video):

Achenbach: Is it not a fact that I asked you a straightforward question, I said -- these are the exact words -- "Bob, is there a God?" And you came up with this sort of Clintonesque answer ... "Depends on what the meaning of 'God' is," or something like that.

Wright: Well, don't you think it kind of does, Joel? I mean, for example, if you defined God as a laptop computer we could both just look around us and go, "Yeah, God exists." So it does depend on the definition.

Achenbach: First of all, it's the entity that's accountable for everything. OK? Has created everything and, ideally, cares about us.

Wright: No, wait, let me read exactly what you said on your little blog -- I mean your blog. You said: "We all know what we mean by God, which is someone who cares about us and has unlimited power." Now, I can tell you right away, that kind of God doesn't exist.

Achenbach: How do you...

Wright: Because if God cared about us and was omnipotent, could do anything, we wouldn't suffer as much as we do, Joel! So that one's easy: no, that kind of God doesn't exist.

Achenbach: OK, I'm glad we cleared that up.

Wright: For crying out loud! But you know, most gods that people have believed in for most of history have not been those kind. They have not been omnipotent. That's, like, this Judeo-Christian, this Abrahamic hang-up.

(Previously blogged here.)


Note that he doesn't just deny the Christian/Jewish/Islamic God's existence, but he also takes a distinctly pugnacious tone (it's "obvious"; the Abrahamic religions have a "hang-up," etc.).

He makes a similar statement in the same diavlog where he makes the above "nauseous" statement:

Horgan: Bob, let me just ask you, right to your virtual face: do you believe in a loving god?

Wright: Do I believe in the sense of having confidence that one exists?

Horgan: Just answer the question, Bob!

Wright: Well, the answer to that is no.*

* I've left in more discussion in the video below. If you watch the video, do you think he accurately characterizes what atheists necessarily believe about morality?





Now, Wright has publicly stated that he was raised devoutly Southern Baptist and rejected the religion. He's said he doesn't strictly follow any religion but is, at most, a "bad Buddhist." If he really believed that Abrahamic religion were essential to being good, presumably he'd still believe in it. But actually, he says that his sense of right and wrong comes from thinking about concrete facts in the world within a utilitarian framework.

Wright doesn't seem that different from Sam Harris, one of the "new atheists" he excoriates. (I don't think Harris is very concerned with disproving the existence of God, hence the scare quotes -- but that's how Wright and others refer to him.)

Both Sam Harris and Bob Wright reject Christianity/Judaism/Islam and prefer a vague Eastern mystical alternative. They both view the world through a modern/secular framework in which science tells a lot about the physical world but doesn't provide everything you need to live a meaningful life. They both recognize that a lot of evil has been done in the name of religion, and that Christian/Jewish/Islamic sacred texts include a contradictory mix of good principles (don't kill, don't steal, give to charity, etc.) and bad ones (advocating or at least condoning violence, slavery, prejudice, etc.).

The main difference I see is that Harris tends to see religion as the cause of things like the Crusades and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Wright thinks that's ridiculous because those conflicts were actually motivated by land disputes. Both of them are being far too confident that they know what would have happened in a world without religion. We'll never know what that counterfactual would have looked like. So I think it's futile to try to point to human behavior -- whether it's war or donating to charity or anything -- and say: "Aha, this was caused by religion! Gee, isn't religion good/bad/___?" Harris and Wright have each decided to adopt a posture -- Harris's being more anti-religion, Wright's being more pro-religion -- and they'll relentlessly interpret the facts to fit this stance.

I also take issue with Wright's language (in the first clip in this post) about how the "new atheists" hold themselves out as being on such a lofty intellectual level that the commoners should defer to their superior intellects. Maybe this is a fair critique of Dawkins's The God Delusion. But I don't think Harris (in The End of Faith) or Hitchens (in God Is Not Great) say anything of the sort. You don't even get that sense from reading between the lines of their books. Those books actually aren't written on an especially high intellectual level. They're easy, fast reads. (I say this as a very slow reader.) The M.O. of both authors is to collect a bunch of facts -- many of which are readily accessible and will be familiar to the average reader -- and make common-sense observations about them.

Another undertone to Wright's "nauseous" comment -- with its vivid language about the new atheists "walking up to" religious people and so on -- is that Harris and Hitchens are simply rude to write their books. (I'm picking on Wright, but many others have made this argument.) Well, the content of most nonfiction books that make persuasive arguments would be rude if you repeated it in the wrong company. If you've noticed that your co-worker has a lot of anti-war bumper stickers on their car, you probably won't tell them about all the great arguments made in the book you just read by Robert Kagan -- but Kagan still writes smart books about foreign policy that are worth reading.

I think it's quite common for people to have blunt discussions about what they like and don't like about this or that religion (or about those who don't subscribe to any religion). You might not choose to talk about it, say, at work, or even with certain close friends or family members, but maybe you'll have the conversations with other close friends or family members. I don't see what's wrong with writing books about these issues that people are going to think about and talk about anyway.

It's also too easy to forget the fact that criticizing religions -- even in a harsh or over-the-top way -- isn't unique to the "new atheists." It's done all the time by people of all religious stripes. The adherents of one religion will regularly criticize those of other religions. People within a religion will even criticize other followers of the same religion. And when there are criticisms being made out there in the world, they're probably going to be reflected in books if they're on enough people's minds. Whether you like it or not, Christians (for instance) are going to write books supporting their Christian views, secular humanists are going to write books supporting their secular humanist views, and so on.

Now, the fact that secular humanists enjoy this kind of freedom of expression along with religious people hasn't been true for most of human history. But we're not in most of human history; we're in 2009. It's inevitable now.

And I'm not too worried about the possibility that Hitchens/Harris/Dawkins might hurt religious people's feelings. People who are easily offended by criticisms of religion aren't likely to read those books anyway. But to many people -- including people who are kept up at night wondering if they're evil for disagreeing with the faith of their family, and including gay people who wonder if they're going to go to Hell, and even including devout believers who simply enjoy reading an honest polemic from the other side -- the books might be quite welcome.

So, go ahead and criticize the "new atheists" for making specific points you disagree with. But don't criticize them just for harshly criticizing religion -- unless you're also going to criticize everyone else who does so. That includes a whole lot of Christians, Muslims, and Jews. And it certainly includes Bob Wright.

How Judges Think by Richard Posner

I'm reading How Judges Think, by the eminent judge, professor, and blogger Richard Posner. I highly recommend it to anyone who's interested in understanding what really drives judges' rulings.

Here are a few tidbits, all from the introduction:

• Ivan Karamazov said that if God does not exist everything is permitted, and traditional legal thinkers are likely to say that if legalism (legal formalism, orthodox legal reasoning, a "government of laws not men," the "rule of law" ... and so forth) does not exist everything is permitted to judges -- so watch out!

• [M]ost judges are cagey, even coy, in discussing what they do. They tend to parrot an official line about the judicial process (how rule-bound it is), and often to believe it, though it does not describe their actual practices.

• The secrecy of judicial deliberations is an example of professional mystification. Professions such as law and medicine provide essential services that are difficult for outsiders to understand and evaluate. Professionals like it that way because it helps them maintain a privileged status. But they know they have to overcome the laity's mistrust, and they do this in part by developing a mystique that exaggerates not only the professional's skill but also his disinterest.

More to come...

"Sex is the new God."

So says Danielle Pouliot (who, full disclosure, is my girlfriend) on her new blog, Little Miss Anthropy.

She explains:

Sex is worshipped; life revolves around It; we obsess over ways to please It (or, at least, someone who may give It to us); and we abandon the benefactor when things don't go our way.

As to that last point, there might also be a parallel going the other way: people may perversely cling to the "benefactor" when it/he/she abuses them.

Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart argue in their book Sacred and Secular that religiosity is inversely correlated with "existential security." That is, the more secure you are in your basic existence, the more likely it is that your existence is a secular one. (They concede that the United States is a glaring exception to this general rule, but they say it's just that -- an exception.)

They describe people with low existential security as

more vulnerable populations, especially in poorer countries, [that] chronically face life-threatening risks linked with malnutrition and lack of access to clean water; they are relatively defenseless against HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases, and against natural disasters; they lack effective public healthcare and education; and their life expectancies are low and their child mortality rates are high. Despite the spread of electoral democracy during the last decade, these problems tend to be compounded by lack of good governance, disregard for human rights, gender inequality and ethnic conflict, political instability, and ultimately state failure. (217-218)

Their empirical data from around the world show that these countries tend to be the most religious.

The problem of evil and animal suffering

My previous post talked about attempts to solve the problem of evil by appealing to free will. As I discussed, there are lots of general problems with that approach.

But you can make the problem of evil particularly acute by focusing on animal suffering. Let's assume there's no human being around to observe the animal, so that we rule out even a theoretical possibility that a human might learn some sort of lesson. For example, before humans even existed, there were animals experiencing pain. Can you reconcile this fact with the existence of a benevolent god?

A couple of logical but unappealing possibilities spring to mind. One is: "Animals simply don't have any awareness, feelings, etc., so their suffering isn't bad -- or, rather, it doesn't even make sense to talk about them suffering, just as it doesn't make sense to talk about a rock suffering."

At the other extreme: "Animals are conscious, they have free will, and they have souls. So, if God and evil are compatible on the theory that God gave us free will (so that we could be virtuous), then the same thing applies to animals."

I don't think most people find either of these extremes plausible. Most people seem to think animals are at least minimally conscious in that they can feel pain (for instance), but aren't as robustly conscious as humans -- they don't have free will or souls. (Of course, many philosophers prefer not to talk about anyone having free will or souls, but I'm trying to approach this in Christian-ish terms because of the problem of evil's salience within Christianity.)

OK, let's put all that to the side for now. Let's assume for the sake of argument that Leibniz's best-of-all-possible-worlds theory is correct -- that is, suffering is justified in the long run by the existence of free will, because free will is a precondition for virtue, and freedom entails the freedom to cause harm. Let's also assume (since I think most people agree) that animals don't operate at such a sophisticated level: unlike humans, they aren't capable of attaining virtue by exercising free will.

Doesn't it follow that animal suffering is a greater evil than human suffering?

In a typical debate over the moral status of animals, someone on the pro-animal side will make the point: "Animals, like humans, can feel pain. That gives them moral status — even if they don't have human intelligence, humans still have a responsibility to avoid cruelty to animals when possible."

The response is then going to be: "Even if you're right that both humans and animals can feel those initial stabs of pain, that overlooks a crucial distinction. Only humans can intellectually reflect on the experience over time. We have this profound experience that animals don't have."

Those who make this latter point often seem to assume it's an argument for caring more about human beings. On the contrary, though, our ability to reflect and "build character" — take Anne Frank's poignant conviction in the underlying goodness of humanity, for instance — seems to mitigate our suffering. Animals are left merely having suffered, without gaining anything from the experience.

Does free will solve the problem of evil?

I've been enjoying Bertrand Russell's concise refutations of influential philosophical arguments in his book History of Western Philosophy. Here's Russell's refutation of Spinoza's theory that your misfortunes only seem bad from your self-centered perspective, but cease to be problematic when seen as part of the universe as a whole:

I cannot accept this; I think that particular events are what they are, and do not become different by absorption into a whole. Each act of cruelty is eternally a part of the universe; nothing that happens later can make that act good rather than bad, or can confer perfection on the whole of which it is a part.

Now here's his refutation of Leibniz's argument that there's a benevolent God who made this "the best of all possible worlds." Leibniz said the best possible world would contain free will, so God created a world with free will, which explains why bad things happen: they're human acts of free will. There are many obvious problems with this argument — for instance, there's a lot of bad stuff in the world that's not caused by human action. But Russell's refutation is particularly clever:

A Manichaean might retort that this is the worst of all possible worlds, in which the good things that exist serve only to heighten the evils. The world, he might say, was created by a wicked demiurge [i.e. a demon], who allowed free will, which is good, in order to make sure of sin, which is bad, and of which the evil outweighs the good of free will. The demiurge, he might continue, created some virtuous men, in order that they might be punished by the wicked; for the punishment of the virtuous is so great an evil that it makes the world worse than if no good men existed.

It's a commonplace to ridicule Leibniz's view that God has ensured that we live in "the best of all possible worlds." I mean, Voltaire made fun of it in his novel Candide, so it must be wrong. I'm guessing that people will balk at the "best of all possible worlds" idea when phrased like that, but if you phrase it more gently — "Things work out for the best" — it seems hugely influential.

I agree with Russell's response to Spinoza: cruel acts aren't transformed into good by being absorbed into the whole universe. This might be why I'm generally indifferent to religion. Unlike many secularists, though, I don't believe that cruelty and suffering are "just there" and don't have any larger meaning in the grand scheme of things. I don't have any more interest in an "It's all meaningless" view than in an "It's all for the best" view. What I do believe is that even if things that happen in the world do have some kind of ultimate meaning, the suffering is still there, and it shouldn't be rationalized away.

This explains the overwhelming instinct, cutting across political lines, that torture is just wrong, period. Even those who argue for exceptions to society's general "don't torture people" rule tend to rely on scenarios where the suffering caused by torture is far outweighed by preventing others from suffering -- the classic "ticking bomb," etc. This still implies that suffering itself is the basic unit that we're looking at in making moral assessments. So people are quibbling over a very narrow exception — maybe an important exception, but not one that calls into question the fundamental "torture is bad" consensus.

And so, no one takes the position: "Hey, go ahead and torture as much as you like! It's sure to be a net plus in the end — it'll be a learning experience, or it will be a ringing affirmation of our own free will, or something." Well ... no one applies this to human beings. But it's regularly applied to God. Bizarrely, God is held to lower moral standards than humans are.

UPDATE: Church of Rationality remarks on that last sentence: "John Althouse Cohen puts in another application to Bartlett's Familiar Quotations..."

UPDATE: Continued here.

"Is there a God?" And what's wrong with punching a robot? And can an atheist truly enjoy Thanksgiving?

I agree with just about everything Robert Wright says in this excellent discussion of whether God exists:



That's Robert Wright -- whom I've blogged repeatedly -- and Joel Achenbach, who writes the Achenblog.

Here's a transcript of the whole conversation, via Bloggingheads.

Does science prove God doesn't exist?

That's what they're talking about in this roundtable discussion by Christopher Hitchens, Steven Pinker, and other notables. Naturally, the answers are all over the map.

Since I'm on quasi-hiatus, I don't have time to delve into this. I want to return to the topic in depth later.

For now, I just want to highlight a couple responses that seem right to me:

Keith Ward says:

It is almost commonplace in physics to speak of many space-times, or of this space-time as a 10- or 11-dimensional reality that dissolves into topological foam below the Planck length. This is a long way from the sensationalism of Hume and Comte, and from the older materialism that insists on locating every possible being within this space-time. Some modern physicists routinely speak of realities beyond space-time (e.g., quantum fluctuations in a vacuum from which this space-time originates). And some physicists, such as Henry Stapp, Eugene Wigner, and John von Neumann, speak of consciousness as an ultimate and irreducible element of reality, the basis of the physical as we know it, not its unanticipated by-product.

It is simply untrue that modern physics rules out the possibility of non-physical entities. And it is untrue that science has established a set of inflexible laws so tightly constraining and universally dominating that they exclude the possibility of other forms, including perhaps non-physical forms, of causal influence that we may not be able to measure or predict. It is more accurate to say that fundamental laws of nature are seen by many physicists as approximations to an open, holistic and flexible reality, as we encounter it in relatively isolated and controlled conditions. ...

It is not science that renders belief in God obsolete. It is a strictly materialist interpretation of the world that renders belief in God obsolete, and which science is taken by some people to support. But science is more ambiguous than that, and modern scientific belief in the intelligibility and mathematical beauty of nature, and in the ultimately "veiled" nature of objective reality, can reasonably be taken as suggestive of an underlying cosmic intelligence. To that extent, science may make a certain sort of belief in God highly plausible.

And Mary Midgley says:

What is now seen as a universal cold war between science and religion is, I think, really a more local clash between a particular scientistic worldview, much favored recently in the West, and most other people's worldviews at most other times.

Of course, those other views differ hugely among themselves. Some center on Godhead; some, such as Buddhism and Taoism, don't use that idea at all. But what they all do is to set human life in a context. They don't see our species as sealed in a private box that contains everything of value, but as playing its part in a much wider theatre of spiritual activity—activity that gives meaning to our own. Scientism by contrast (following suggestions from the Enlightenment), cuts that context off altogether and looks for the meaning of life in Science itself. It is this claim to a monopoly of meaning, rather than any special scientific doctrine, that makes science and religion look like competitors today. ...

Scientism ... emerged not as the conclusion of scientific argument but as a chosen element in a worldview -- a vision that attracted people by its contrast with what went before -- which is, of course, how people very often do make such decisions, even ones that they afterwards call scientific.

The point about scientific imperialism has applications beyond theology, particularly the problem of free will, which I'll get back to. If I feel like it.

Needless to say, I'd be happy to see any counterarguments to the above quotes -- feel free to suggest some in the comments.


UPDATE: I was expecting this post to be controversial, but I'm surprised that some of the commenters are taking issue with the very premise that this is a real debate. For example:

You say that a lot of people think that science is incompatible with God. I'm not so sure about that; it depends on what you mean by incompatible. I am an atheist, and all the atheists I know are very careful not to say that "science disproves God." (Again, the title of your post.)

Well, I'd have to do some more searching through the books of Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and John Allen Paulos to see if they have explicitly made that specific assertion.

But here's one: there's a book by Victor Stenger, a philosophy and physics professor, called God: The Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist.

Another example, though not as explicit: Richard Dawkins's recent best-seller The God Delusion has a chapter entitled, "Why God Almost Certainly Does Not Exist." Directly under that chapter heading is a quote from Thomas Jefferson beginning, "The priests of the different religious sects dread the advance of science as witches do the advance of daylight...." Now, aside from the qualifier "almost certainly," I think it's pretty clear what he's getting at.

I've also been in numerous classroom discussions and everyday conversations in which people have expressed this view.

More broadly, there's been a recent spate of popular books attacking religious views and the belief in God. These books tend to pit God against science. I haven't sorted through all the details of which authors positively state that science entails that God does not exist, rather than coming close to saying so but hedging it a little. But the idea that science is incompatible with the existence of God is clearly out there, and it's taken seriously by a lot of people. Whatever your position is on whether God exists, I don't see the point in denying that this debate exists!

Ah, look, an old man in the clouds.

What is that supposed to evoke?

Fortunately, it looks like he's going to comfort and protect us.

And he's going to gaze serenely into the distance as he summons a few graceful fighter jets.


(Via Talking Points Memo.)

UPDATE: Instapundit links to this, and adds:

"HE'S GOING TO COMFORT AND PROTECT US." Well, that's what Presidents are for these days, I guess . . . .

Two-sentence refutations of profoundly influential ideas

Continuing with Bertrand Russell's chapter on Descartes in The History of Western Philosophy, and also moving on to the other great rationalists Spinoza and Leibniz...

As the heading says, I've been looking for two-sentence refutations of profoundly influential ideas. This little project stems from my visceral revulsion at the debate trick in which people -- not in everyday conversation, but professors or other public experts -- respond to ideas they disagree with by saying, "Well, the problems with that are well-known, but there's no time to explain all that now." No! If you think that some position that's on the table is seriously mistaken, you should want to convince people of this as efficiently as possible. If you can't explain it right now, you can't expect anyone to believe you based on those mysterious arguments behind the curtain.

Russell is really good at avoiding this problem; here are three of his two-sentence refutations:

1. Refutation of Descartes's famous "I think; therefore, I am" argument:

The word 'I' is really illegitimate; he ought to state his ultimate premise in the form 'there are thoughts.' The word 'I' is grammatically convenient but does not describe a datum.

(This is a well-worn objection. Russell may have been cribbing from William James, who wrote that we should say, in the third person, "It's thinking," just as we say, "It's raining," so that we don't make Descartes's mistake!)

2. Refutation of Spinoza's theory* that your misfortunes only seem bad from your self-centered perspective, but cease to be problematic when seen as part of the universe as a whole:

I cannot accept this; I think that particular events are what they are, and do not become different by absorption into a whole. Each act of cruelty is eternally a part of the universe; nothing that happens later can make that act good rather than bad, or can confer perfection on the whole of which it is a part.

3. Refutation of Leibniz's we-live-in-the-best-of-all-possible-worlds argument based on free will:

A Manichaean might retort that this is the worst of all possible worlds, in which the good things that exist serve only to heighten the evils. The world, he might say, was created by a wicked demiurge, who allowed free will, which is good, in order to make sure of sin, which is bad, and of which the evil outweighs the good of free will.

Since those two sentences give you the gist of the argument, I don't think it'd be breaking my two-sentence limit to add his next sentence as elaboration:

The demiurge, he might continue, created some virtuous men, in order that they might be punished by the wicked; for the punishment of the virtuous is so great an evil that it makes the world worse than if no good men existed.

Back to refutation #2 (cruel acts aren't transformed into good by being absorbed into the whole universe): I absolutely agree with this, and I hope it shapes my worldview. It's probably a big part of why I'm so indifferent to religion.

I do not take the view, which many secularists take, that cruelty and suffering are just there and don't have any larger meaning in the grand scheme of things. I don't have any more interest in an "It's all meaningless" view than in an "It's all for the best" view. What I think is that even if there's some sort of cosmic significance to everything in the world, the suffering is still there, and you can't rationalize it away. The fact that X hurts someone is, on the face of it, a reason to conclude: X is bad.

This explains the overwhelming instinct, cutting across political lines, that torture is just wrong, period. Even those who argue for an exception to society's general "don't torture people" rule tend to rely on scenarios where the suffering caused by torture is far outweighed by preventing others from suffering. This still implies that suffering itself is the basic unit that we're looking at in making moral assessments: we want the least possible of it! So people are quibbling over a very narrow exception -- maybe an important exception, but not one that calls into question the fundamental "torture is bad" consensus.

And so, no one takes the position: "Hey, go ahead and torture as much as you like! What, does that make you queasy? Don't worry! It's sure to be a net plus in the end -- it'll be a learning experience, or it will be a ringing affirmation of our own free will, or something." Well ... no one applies this to human beings. But it's regularly applied to God. The fact that God is held to lower moral standards than humans are is ... interesting.

Turning to #3 from the list: It's a commonplace to ridicule Leibniz's theory that God has ensured that we live in "the best of all possible worlds." I mean, Voltaire made fun of it in his novel Candide, so it must be wrong. I have the sense that people will balk at the "best of all possible worlds" idea when phrased like that, but if you phrase it more gently, e.g. "Everything works out for the best," it's still hugely influential.

OK, so the above Leibniz and Spinoza theories are closely related. You could group both of them under "It's all for the best." That's the basic thrust. Well, there's one oddity about this kind of outlook that I don't understand:

If it is true that suffering is justified in the long run by our ability to learn from it, or because this follows from our having free will (since free will, which is a precondition for virtue, entails the freedom to hurt people) ... and if you don't believe that animals operate at such a sophisticated level ... then doesn't this mean that the uniquely human ability to remember and reflect on pain weighs in favor of treating animal pain as more of a cause for concern than human pain?

Sorry to cram so much into one sentence there. But you see what I'm getting at, right?

In just about any debate over the moral status of animals that I've ever seen, a key point is always: "Well, how about the capacity to feel pain? Isn't that morally significant, and don't we share it with animals?"

The response is then going to be: "Hold on, there's a big distinction between humans and animals. We might all -- humans and animals -- be able to feel the initial stabs of pain. But only humans can intellectually reflect on that experience later on."

Well, that really seems to mitigate the suffering of humans. Meanwhile, animals are left merely having suffered without gaining anything from it.

That's all disingenuous for me to say! Because I don't necessarily accept those premises. As I said, I don't believe in justifying human suffering through cosmic mitigating factors. I'm just saying that if you do, you should follow your view to its logical consequences.

At the risk of loading the issue: if Anne Frank's poignant conviction in the underlying goodness of humanity can somehow mitigate the horror of the Holocaust, then that should decrease our concern for the mass killing of humans relative to the mass killing of animals. Of course, other factors might still support caring more about humans than animals. But to the extent that you rely on Spinoza/Leibniz-style justifications of human suffering, this weighs on the other side of the scale.

As always, please explain in the comments if I've gone horribly wrong in my thinking here.

* In my "modern philosophy" course in college, we enjoyed the part where we got to Spinoza and all of the sudden it became like we were studying a self-help book. [back]