"The right not to have my mind changed"

Good piece by Mark Rowlands over at Secular Philosophy. ((This site looks like it’s going to be a must-read; I hope they fix the RSS feed issues soon.)) Let’s tee up the problem:

The efforts of a young philosophy instructor – let us call him ‘Wayne’ – to acquaint his students with the wonders of philosophy of religion are stymied when one of his students complains to Wayne’s Dean on the grounds that his religious beliefs are being violated. ‘I have a right to my beliefs’, the student says. What the student seems to mean by this is other people have a duty to not criticize his beliefs. The right to believe is the right to be exempt from criticism.

All reasonable people would agree that this is absurd: as Mark put it, how can one person have the right to say “P” while everybody else is forbidden from saying “not-P”? But let’s take it a bit further: does one have the right not to have one’s belief changed? Mark invokes “Wilfred Sellars’ distinction between the space of causes and the space of reasons” to argue that forcible methods (“causes”) such as lobotomy and brain-washing are illegitimate while arguments (“reasons”) are acceptable. I think that’s right, but I’d suggest that human psychology is such that these two categories are not as neat as we might think. In what category does a blatantly false argument fall? As a practical matter, all beliefs are based on partial information, unless we are dealing with closed systems such as mathematics. A false formulation of “not-P” (based on an incorrect premise or invalid reasoning) may cause the believer to lose their belief “P”, even if the falsehood were discovered. (The idea might be “tainted”, or the form of “not-P” might lead them to suspect that other versions of the same argument might be true.)
So does a false argument fall into the “space of causes” or the “space of reasons”? Does intent matter?

"Honour killings conspiracy"

If this is true, things are even worse than I’d imagined:

Whole communities are involved in assisting and covering up “honour violence” in Britain, a new study says.
Informal networks of taxi drivers, councillors and sometimes even police officers track down and return women who try to escape, researchers claim.

When I first came to the USA, I was amused by the fact that I had to sign a document agreeing not to overthrow the government. Obviously no terrorist or anarchist would hesitate to sign such a document, would they? And since overthrowing the government is illegal, the document was surely redundant; by entering the USA, I was implicitly accepting that I was subject to US law.
Well, I think I’ve changed my mind about such “amusing”, “redundant” documents. How would it be if every immigrant to the UK was required to read and swear ((Ideally, read aloud, confirm understanding, and make a religious or secular affirmation.)) to a document which stated, quite explicitly, that “honour killings”, forced marriages, domestic violence, and various other forms of coercion against young women ((And men too.)) were absolutely forbidden, and that even to condone or conceal them would be a criminal offence. Come up with a catchy name that would make it easy to refer to in educational, law enforcement, and mass media contexts. (And ideally make it an EU-wide standard.) Encourage the moderate majority that (we are assured) exists in the South Asian community to promote the idea.
Would it help? Reportedly there’s an “honour killing” in England every month. (Perhaps many more.) It couldn’t really make things worse.
(See the International Campaign Against Honour Killings for more.)

"How lucky do you feel?"

My cousin Clive just forwarded this YouTube video to me. I think the author’s name is Greg Craven ((Here’s another video by him.)); the subject is the question of global warming and rational responses to it:

Now this kind of payoff matrix will be familiar to many, and in fact it’s the basis of the notorious argument for belief in God that we know as Pascal’s Wager. And many people (including me) regard Pascal’s Wager as a bullshit argument. So why isn’t this climate change argument equally bullshit?
The problem with Pascal’s Wager is not the structure of the argument; it’s the epistemic status of the propositions that are used. The payoff matrix is a perfectly reasonable and respectable way of organizing one’s thinking about actions and consequences. Ideally, you want to be able to assign probabilities to the various cells, but even if you can’t do that, it’s still useful. ((It might, for example, help you to decide which areas should be researched in order to develop the data needed to refine your probabilities. Row thinking or column thinking, as the video put it.)) For global warming, all of the contingencies, actions, and consequences represent concrete, real-world phenomena. Temperature goes up X, Y million hectares are inundated, Z million people are displaced. We can argue about the values for X, Y, and Z, but there is no serious debate about whether water, land, and people actually exist, nor about the basic physics of how melting polar ice translates into sea level. Pascal’s Wager, on the other hand, is all about belief in an unsupported fiction, one of many competing and mutually incompatible fictions.
Back to the video. The argument that it makes is sound, and modest; there are plenty of other arguments that could have been factored in. Many of the actions that we should take to address global warming are also needed to cope with the actual or impending shortages in oil, potable water, and other resources. One case which he does not consider – but should – is the “catastrophist” view that global warming is real, it’s inevitable, and no human action can mitigate its effects. If this is true, it would be rationally self-interested to consider a different payoff matrix, comparing the costs of futile response to global warming with the costs of small-group survival in the face of catastrophic collapse. Of course this is no longer a public policy debate…

Playing with my blog

After all, if I can’t play with my own blog, what can I play with?
I’ve been updating some of the plugins and widgets that I use to customize WordPress. While I was doing this, I decided to add a new feature which some of my colleagues at Amazon have been working on: “Context Links”. The idea is that a bit of Amazon JavaScript scans my HTML, looking for a few interesting phrases which can be linked to Amazon products. The phrases are marked with double underlines, and mousing over will trigger a small product popup.
In the past, I’ve tried various pop-over plugins, like the notorious Snap!, and the reaction has been overwhelmingly negative. The problem with Snap! is that every link triggers a pop-up with a thumbnail of the page, which really gets in the way if you simply want to click on a link. Hopefully Context Links will be more acceptable. The feature is still in beta, and I’m doing this more to help out my friends than anything else. (I’ve never been tempted to try to monetize my blog.) You won’t necessarily see any of the links: I get the impression that there is a lag between my changing the page and a new set of links being generated. (I’ll have to ask the author.)
The other big change that I made was to add in the All-in-one SEO Package, a plugin which rewrites the page titles, cleans up the meta tags, and generally does everything it can to make the site as clean as possible to Google and the other search engines. Right now, this is what Google sees: almost every entry is prefixed with “Geoff Arnold » Blog Archive » “, except for a few links to the old Movable Type entries which I’ve left in place. ((They’re duplicated in the new WordPress blog, but I can’t figure out how to easily forward the old URLs to the new pages, because the database keys don’t line up neatly.)) I’ll check agan in a few days to see if anything’s changed.

"Friends don’t let friends commit, or condone, evil."

Over at Secular Philosophy, Dan Dennett points out the opportunity for clarity which the death sentence of the Afghan student, Sayed Parwiz Kambakhsh provides.

The time has come for Muslims to step up to the plate and demonstrate that Islam is a great faith that has no need for violence or intimidation to maintain the loyalty of its congregation. And we outside Islam must make it crystal clear that we cannot respect or honor a religion that would consider blasphemy a capital crime, no matter how ancient the tradition from which this decision flowed. Muslims who support – or refrain from condemning – the conviction and sentence of Kambakhsh must be made to realize that they share responsibility for bringing dishonor to their cherished heritage, and if we non-Muslims do not speak out, we too must share in the blame. Friends don’t let friends commit, or condone, evil.

There are plenty of people in the west who have written off all Muslims as evil enemies. Ed Brayton blogged about a particularly egregious example of this today. A “breathtakingly stupid woman named Dorris Woods” who is a trustee at the College of the Siskiyous in California, is objecting to the creation of a course in Arabic and Middle East history, saying

“We know all we need to know about Arabs and Islam. They are our enemies pure and simple. There is no getting away from that. They have declared war on the United States and they are committed to our destruction.”

Obviously this blanket categorization is absurd. ((It’s also illogical: if “Arabs and Islam” are at war against us, it would seem prudent to learn about them in order to be prepared.)) Yet it provokes a momentary pause, a hesitation, because there is a widespread feeling that there is something “other” about Islamic values: a subjugation of the individual to social orthodoxy from which we have only recently freed ourselves.
The Kambakhsh affair ((In the interests of full disclosure, it’s worth mentioning that, according to the Guardian, the charge against Kambakhsh is actually a tactic to get at his brother, a journalist who has exposed the unsavory activities of certain Afghan warlords. This should not distract us from the legal and moral issue involved; I have a sinking feeling that some Muslim “spokesmen” will try to do so, however.)) throws this into sharp focus in a way that even the Salman Rushdie fatwa did not. This is not a matter of a distant, raving ayatollah posturing for domestic consumption: we’re dealing with the power of a (supposedly friendly) state being exercised in support of clerical rules. The charge is the purest of thought-crimes: the accused simply read material which was deemed blasphemous. Any Muslim who fails to condemn this is simply confirming the fear which underlies the bigotry of Dorris Woods and her ilk.
There is a minor issue of language to be considered. Apart from the ancient split between Shia and Sunni, Islam has resisted the proliferation of labels to indicate which branch of a particular religious tradition a believer identifies with. Logically, I’d hope that Muslims who oppose the criminalization of freethought (including apostasy) would identify themselves as “Reform Muslims”, in contrast to their “Conservative” or “Orthodox” counterparts. However there are some obvious problems with this terminology….

Another dubious milestone

From the Comments page on this blog’s dashboard:

Akismet has caught 30,138 spam for you since you first installed it.
You have no spam currently in the queue. Must be your lucky day. 🙂

This came after I’d bulk-deleted 265 comments, trackbacks and pingbacks which Akismet had identified as spam, pushing me over 30,000. I hit 20,000 back on June 25 last year, which means that since then the spam has been rolling in at over 45 comments a day.

Christian dentists?

WTF is going on in the UK? According to Terry Sanderson in CiF:

In an obscure little debate in the House of Lords last week, the Bishop of Carlisle, Graham Dow ((We’ve encountered him before, here and here. He’s clearly a lunatic, but that doesn’t prevent him from speaking in the House of Lords.)), let slip in passing a few of the things that are going on between the church and the government that maybe we ought to know about.
Dow revealed that the government had, for more than two years, “been in conversation with church leaders about the possibility of the church providing extensive welfare services, rather in the way that the church plays a major part in education”. Part of this, apparently, is a 20-year contract for “Christian groups bidding to deliver dentistry”.
Not only does the bishop envisage the church taking over welfare provision with the use of public money, he doesn’t want that provision to be regulated. “Church projects of course would be audited, but not controlled. My opinion is that, recently, we have been building a society that is very low on trust and very high on inspection and control,” said his reverence.

Exhausted, but in a good cause

I had forgotten how tiring it can be to drive. Back home in Seattle, it’s so rare for me to get behind the wheel of a car that each spell of driving (courtesy FlexCar) is over before I’ve had a chance to register any stress or discomfort. But on this visit to Massachusetts, I’ve been driving all the time ((Often at what I would refer to as an “ungodly hour” were it not for the fact that all hours are equally devoid of deities!)). My shoulders are remembering that odd posture where you keep your arms raised for hours at a time… it’s weird.
Anyway, all of this is in a very good cause: helping my daughter to recover from Tori’s birth four weeks ago, while getting Tommy to his day care, doctors’ appointments, and so forth. So here are two iPhone pics of Tommy and Tori from the last couple of days. As you can see, Tommy is prepared for next Sunday’s big game…
Tommy Tori