Dinner table debate

Oh and how I love Stephen Fry. He's been blogging lately, which is a treat. Blessays, he calls them; you can access them from this site: http://stephenfry.com/blog/

In a recent blessay, "Getting Overheated," Fry writes of a dinner party at which he got into a debate with an American about global warming. It's well worth reading, mainly for some very good points he makes about intelligent argument and his reasons for taking action even in the absence of utter certainty. And he says some amusing things about Terry Pratchett fans that I managed not to take personally. Read it, do.

What struck me first in this article, though, is an observation Fry makes about the difference between the average Brit and the average American 'round the average dinner table (and this has nothing to do with whether the milk or the tea goes in first*):

I like to think I’m never vituperative or too ad hominem but I do know that I fall on ideas as hungry wolves fall on strayed lambs and the result isn’t always pretty. This is especially dangerous in America.... Americans are not raised in a tradition of debate and that the adversarial ferocity common around a dinner table in Britain is more or less unheard of in America. ... To a Briton pointing out that something is nonsense, rubbish, tosh or logically impossible in its own terms is not an attack on the person saying it – it’s often no more than a salvo in what one hopes might become an enjoyable intellectual tussle.... Americans really don’t seem to be very good at or very used to the idea of a good no-holds barred verbal scrap. I’m not talking about inter-family ‘discussions’ here, I don’t doubt that within American families and amongst close friends, all kinds of liveliness and hoo-hah is possible, I’m talking about what for good or ill one might as well call dinner-party conversation. Disagreement and energetic debate appears to leave a loud smell in the air.

Is this so? Americans unused to debate? Adversarial ferocity? Verbal scraps? This is not my experience, but I experience Americans as a Canadian, not as a Brit. Anyone else care to weigh in?

* Milk first is, my dear, non-U. And I can even tell you why: Poor quality tea cups could crack when filled with boiling water straight from the kettle as Orwell recommends. If it's, "Milk in first, Dinah, and save the crockery," then we know a thing or two about the quality of your tea service. The finest bone china requires no such manoeuvrings.

Can beliefs be immoral?

Does it matter what we believe? Is everyone is entitled to his or her own opinion? Or can beliefs be immoral? Some people think so.

W.K. Clifford, mathematician, says:

It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone to believe anything on insufficient evidence.

and:

Every time we let ourselves believe for unworthy reasons, we weaken our powers of self-control, of doubting, of judicially and fairly weighing evidence. We all suffer severely enough from the maintenance and support of false beliefs and the fatally wrong actions which they lead to.... But a greater and wider evil arises when the credulous character is maintained and supported, when a habit of believing for unworthy reasons is fostered and made permanent.

T.H. Huxley, biologist and Darwin's Bulldog, says:

It is wrong for a man ["or woman," said in an Eric Idle voice] to say he is certain of the objective truth of any proposition unless he ["or she"] can produce evidence which logically justifies that certainty.

Brand Blanchard, philosopher, says:

...that where great human goods and ills are involved, the distortion of belief from any sort of avoidable cause is immoral, and the more immoral, the greater the stakes.

The reason for the position of these thinkers is this: Our actions are guided by our beliefs. If our beliefs are mistaken, our actions may be immoral.

What do you think? Is it reasonable to apply the word immoral to a person's beliefs? Or must we reserve that term for actions? Or can we call a person's beliefs immoral only if their resulting actions are immoral? I don't know what I think.

(Acknowledgements to T. Schick Jr. and L. Vaughn for posing this question and collecting these quotations in their book How To Think About Weird Things.)

Great God in Boots!

I love the following quote from the Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, Vol. 1 (1967):

For two or three years...I was a Hegelian. I remember the exact moment during my fourth year when I became one. I had gone out to buy a tin of tobacco, and was going back with it along Trinity Lane, when I suddenly threw it up in the air and exclaimed: "Great God in Boots! -- the ontological argument is sound!"

Ontological arguments proceed from a priori premises (by reason alone) to a conclusion. The first version of the ontological argument for the existence of God was made by St. Anselm in the 11th century. He claimed that it is self-contradictory to state that God does not exist:
1. God is, by definition, a being greater than which nothing greater can be imagined.
2. Existence in reality is greater than existence only in the mind.
3. God must exist in reality; otherwise, God would not be that which nothing greater can be imagined.

(Thanks to wikipedia for this simplified version of the argument.)

Compelling though this argument has been, in one form or another, to many over the years, even Russell changed his mind before too long and of course became a famous atheist. (Or agnostic, if you prefer. Russell dithered a bit about how to best categorize his position. For other philosophers, Russell felt that agnostic was the more precise term: absence of belief in god rather than presence of belief in no god. However, he agreed that for the person in the street, atheist was the more meaningful label).

Many rebuttals to the ontological argument object to the notion of existence as a property. Attackers (including Kant) argue that considering existence as a property confuses the distinction between a idea of a thing and the thing itself. Other objections criticise the "truth by definition" in premise 1.

However, my point here is not to refute the argument. I just wanted to share with you this lovely image of the young crane (Crane?)-like Russell, strolling through Cambridge on an evening long ago, thinking about this argument, and then suddenly stopping and tossing his tobacco tin into the air in excitement as an idea took hold. Isn't that gorgeous? It's one of my favorite philosophical anecdotes (SO much more pleasant than Wittgenstein allegedly lunging at Popper with that bloody poker).

P.S.: For quite a nice write-up about the ontological argument and various objections to it, see this entry from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ontological-arguments/

Who threw that ball?

To paraphrase William of Occam: "All things being equal, the simplest solution tends to be the best one."

Now, William was a religious man; however, his principle (known as Occam's razor) is frequently used by atheists, scientists, and other clever people to argue against belief in god. Here's approximately how it goes: Existence is mysterious. God is mysterious. To explain existence by trotting out God is to simply to compound the mystery: we haven't actually simplified anything. And the added mystery is arguably even more mysterious because it asks us to lay aside reason (omnipotence? omniscience? AND omnibenevolence? In this world?). Surely a hypothetical creator requires an even greater explanation than the phenomena that it's meant to explain.

That's like saying, "Hm. Broken window. Wonder how that happened. I do see a baseball lying there in the broken glass, and y-e-s-s-s-s.... those are some 9-year-olds running away and whooping with laughter, but I have my doubts. Yes, I have my doubts. No one actually saw the ball leave the tip of their bat and crash through the glass, right? In that case, I'm gonna go for Tash. Tash was responsible for this, mark my words. Oh? You don't believe in Tash? Just because there's no evidence for his existence? Well, he's shy that way. It's part of his...."

Oh, that should do it. I think you get where I am going with this. Surely the simplest solution is the 9-year-olds, right? You all agree with me there? So why is it that for the most important of question of all, so many of us would rather choose the more mysterious and complex answer over the simpler, more reasonable, and scientifically sound alternative?