Pragmatic Progressive Ethics and Penny-wise Issues

by Gary Berg-Cross

The observation of being penny-wise but pound foolish probably covers lots of example of poor reasoning, some of it public that misses the big picture because of things like niggling adherence to narrowly interpreted dogma. We don’t conduct witch trials anymore, although there is still a non-enforced, minority belief that the devil is abroad and the anti-Christ may be with us.  It is reassuring to observe that we’ve slowly come to the realization that religious beliefs, such as from the Hebrew Bible, change as our knowledge and understanding of reality advances. Religious prescriptions, such as women’s rights or the inherent evilness of people, are not anchored in granite; and thus do not provide an ethical basis for establishing just & durable laws. Instead a good portion of society has come to understand that ethics and morality can be and are best

separated from religion. There is a pragmatic element to laws which are based on experience with lessons than come to be rationalized and mutually accepted.  These are then empirical, rational and institutionally vetted beliefs that in turn ground ethics and morality. As Ron Lindsay (A featured speaker at our regional WASHcon15 in Lynchburg, VA., October 2-4, 2015.) put it in Future Bioethics: OvercomingTaboos, Myths, and Dogmas  we want 

"a well-reasoned, pragmatic approach" with substance.

One might talk about this in terms of pragmatic ethics , a theory of normative, progressive philosophical ethics going back to ethical pragmatists, like John Dewey. The idea is that some societies have progressed morally in a way that is similar to scientific progress. Progress is based on inquiry into testing ideas.  Is no fault divorce a good idea?  Let’s test it and if it proves useful future generations can refine, build on or replace is as social principle.

So as we still find enemies enough and have institutional cruelty in some areas of society there is preponderance of pragmatic sense and we’ve seen some cultural progress on a large scale.  One example is growing acceptance of gay marriage.  But bucking the trend are some penny-unwise spots of resistance on very narrow symbolic grounds provided by a blend of religious, emotional and ideological roots. 

In the gay marriage case it is some free floating belief in the idea of the “sanctity” of marriage. Exhibit A might be from fundamentalist Kentucky county clerk Kim Davis (she had served a deputy role in that office for many years) who pitches a penny-narrow definition of a religious, civil right. Indeed the Davis family has a long history in Rowan County, Kentucky.  She ran her election campaign to replace her mother who was Rowan County Clerk before her.  Among Kim’s arguments for the office was efficiency - the public needed a seamless transition from mom Davis and Kim could provide uninterrupted services including for things like marriage licenses. This sounds ironic now, but daughter Davis was (narrowly) elected in 2014 to be County Clerk.

Now in office, rather than keeping her “civil (religious freedom) rights” to herself, she seems to feel privileged as a public official to pick and choose from ancient prescriptions as her guide to public behavior.  This seems surprising since she was elected to a public, secular office she know well and there are laws governing behavior. We expect that public officials will understand that to operate efficiently we have a pragmatic, modifiable Constitution that is not based on faith this side of the Enlightenment.  Our founders themselves realized that basing laws and governmental practices on religious beliefs would be ultimately unworkable at the public level. But Kim’s penny foolishness, like others, anchors itself in frozen, fundamentalist ethical judgement on things like marriage.  And as Ron Lindsey points out they can defensively externalize their own real dogmatism to attribute righteousness on others:

"Any attempt by humans to control and shape their lives in ways not previously contemplated by some religious tradition results in the claim that we are trying to 'play God.'"

Projection may not be the only psychological process going on here. Pragmatic agreements take time, effort and compromise.  They require "thinking slow" and critically and taking many things into account.  It is not at all playing God to do the hard work and getting agreement. So one suspects that selective “articles of faith” provide an unreasoned rationalization for "believer's"  distaste for things just can’t relate to and don’t like. It’s part of the take back America and “making America great again” slogan we hear as part of the cultural wars.

Unfortunately articles of faith, such as the earlier belief in witches, provide ready-made, emotion-laden explanations rather than reasoned one for when “bad” things happen in the new America. Recently we had Bill O’Reilly explain away the phenomena of mass shootings. It’s not guns or mental illness he argued but atheism. This taps into a cauldron of witchy beliefs common among fundamentalists and perhaps Kim— that morality derives from religion. It follows that: "Bible good", "atheists bad", since they lack any real basis for ethics or morality and live empty lives in pursuit of pleasure in this world.

Not all religious folk are like that and at least think through what is ethical for them and could step aside if religious values kept them from doing their jobs.  United Church of Christ's Rev. Emily C. Heath described how she handled the dilemma of private belief vs public service. She decided not to apply for a job with the Federal Bureau of Prisons because she of the death penalty, which went against her religious beliefs. As she observed:

"Religious liberty is guaranteed in this country. But that does not mean that every job needs to bend to your particular interpretation of your faith....If you really believe doing your job is violating your faith, then stepping aside would be a small price to pay for the love of the Gospel." 

But, unfortunately a rational stepping-aside approach is not what we see as faith intrudes into our civil processes.

You could hear more pragmatic takes from the WASHcon15 speakers:

·                     Ron Lindsay, Center for Inquiry President and CEO , 

·                     Julien Musolino, author and scholar 

·                     Tom Flynn, Executive Director Council for Secular Humanism 

·                     Dr. Andy Thomson, author and psychiatrist

·                     Dr. Jason D. Heap, United Coalition of Reason Executive Director , and 

·                     Linda LaScola, author and researcher .

Humanist’s Hippocratic Oath

by Gary Berg-Cross

Following the mortgage meltdown that prompted the current crisis were those theoretical constructs known as financial models Emanuel Derman and Paul Wlmott had an article that appeared in Bloomberg Business week called “The Modelers' Hippocratic Oath”

In the article they listed the oath and I thought it might be of interest and amusing to the Secular and Humanist community and adapted it slightly as a more pragmatic. Of course we have many obvious principles in the various Humanist Manifesto's but the oath is a bit more general and might be thought of as aimed at some thinking behind the principles as well as communication about such principles.

Humanist’s Hippocratic Oath

~ I will remember that I didn't make the physical or social world, and they don’t exist to make my musings and opinions look good.

~ Though I will use my knowledge and experience to boldly write about important issues, I will not be overly impressed by my attempts.

~ I will never sacrifice reality for elegant language and simplifications without explaining why I have done so.

~ Nor will I give the people who use my idea false comfort about their completeness and accuracy. Instead, I will endeavor to make explicit my assumptions and oversights.

~ I understand (and hope) that if done well my work may eventually have significant effects on my community, society and its economy, many of them beyond my comprehension.

 

And of course, "First do no harm."

 

 

Images

 

Hippocratic Oath: http://the-hippocratic-oath.soft32download.com/screenshot/

 

Do no harm: http://www.meandmydiabetes.com/2011/09/14/ron-rosedale-neurodegenerative-disease-hormones-and-diet/

 

 

 

Neutral Monism

By Gary Berg-Cross

My education was a bit deficient so I don’t remember running into the idea of neutral monism as part of my training in Psychology and the questions of world materialism and mind idealism.  A new book by Thomas Nagel is provocatively entitle:is provociisi “Mindand Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False.” It features a skeptical take on materialism, but a naturalistic and not theistic alternative. Nagel is well known for an interesting and influential 1974 paper called "What is it like to be a bat?" He used the bat view of the world to argue that phenomenological facts about consciousness are not so obviously reducible to physical facts. In his new book he argues that lack of progress in materialistically explaining  suggests he is right in rejecting naïve materialist explanations.  Early on Nagel defines materialism succinctly as follows:
 

Materialism is the view that only the physical world is irreducibly real, and that a place must be found in it for mind, if there is such a thing.  This would continue the onward march of physical science, through molecular biology, to full closure by swallowing up the mind in the objective physical reality from which it was initially excluded. (p 37)

I’m not convinced by Nagel’s anti-materialist arguments about the irreducibility of mind rather than matter, although I doubt reductionist approaches that try to explain everything in reductionist concepts. I like evolutionary explanations for the emergence of cognition and the related concept of consciousness.  But I did find the discussion of neutral monism stimulating, if only because I had missed its presence in thinkers I had studied. I also appreciated Nagel's conversational style and in Mind and Cosmos and his frank admission that his aim "is not so much to argue against reductionism as to investigate the consequences of rejecting it". This blog is not so much about that as a some intro to neutral monism.

Thoma

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Are you an author? Learn about Author CentralAs covered in the Wikipedia entry neutral monism is the philosophical/metaphysical view that:

 the mental and the physical are two ways of organizing or describing the same elements, which are themselves "neutral," that is, neither physical nor mental. This view denies that the mental and the physical are two fundamentally different things. Rather, neutral monism claims the universe consists of only one kind of stuff, in the form of neutral elements that are in themselves neither mental nor physical. These neutral elements might have the properties of color and shape, just as we experience those properties. But these shaped and colored elements do not exist in a mind (considered as a substantial entity, whether dualistically or physicalistically); they exist on their own.

It’s an exciting idea of continuity of reality rather than dichotomy and some faint versions of it were quietly posed in works by some of my favorite philosopher – James, Russell and Dewey as cited. 

OK, it wasn’t just my education. The ideas were probably too subtle for me to grasp when I dashed over their discussion of mind-body dualism. William James, for example, followed Peirce in developing Pragmatism as a way of getting beyond dualist debates on realistic materialism and idealism. 

According to an easy summary and readable source by David Pears (answers.com):

 the philosophy of mind adopted by Russell in his middle period was neutral monism, which denies that there is any irreducible difference between the mental and the physical and tries to construct both the mental world and the physical world out of components which are in themselves neither mental nor physical but neutral. He adopted this theory because he believed that there was no other way of solving the problems that beset his earlier dualism (see Russell's philosophy of mind: dualism). The book in which he developed the theory, The Analysis of Mind (1921), is an unusual one. The version of neutral monism defended in it is qualified in several ways and it is enriched with ideas drawn from his reading of contemporary works on behaviourism and depth psychology. The result is not entirely consistent, but it is interesting and vital especially where it is least consistent.

John Dewey followed James in seeing more continuity between mind and brain than a gulf. Like many my brief exposure to philosophy courses left me somewhere in the pragmatic camp with a healthy respect for reality-based materialism as the hull hypothesis. Dewey account of phenomena like intelligence does have a naturalistic basis that integrates biology & psychology as does Nagels’ new work.  But one is surprised to see have non-reductionist subjects of intentions and communication ala social psychology as front and center in Dewey’s new view. It is interesting to bump into some of these thinker’s metaphysical struggles to reconceptualize our view of nature to resolve the issues, even if one does not follow into a form of panpsychism with mind and consciousness everywhere and everytime in the universe. 

Images

 

Nagel: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Nagel

Mind-Body Dualism: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Dualism-vs-Monism.png

Something Monism: http://telicthoughts.com/category/philosophy/

Political Pragmatism and Philosophical Pragmatism

Pragmatism usually refers to a practical way of dealing with life. It's a very down to earth way of deaing with problems in a sensible and realistic fashion. Pragmatic approaches are often contrasted with decisions and actions based on ideological, highly abstract or theoretical frameworks. This difference may over dichotomize things as discussed in my article on the Binary Thinking Habit, but popular accounts often use a simple notion of pragmatism in discussing decision making styles. Thus, to a mixture of praise and frustration, President Obama’s governing style is often labeled politically “pragmatic”. One example of this was his approach to health insurance reform. The HC reform approach evolved from the government-sponsored language he used in campaign speeches, to a hybrid compromise that could be passed by both Houses of Congress. He was also called pragmatic to attempt to compromise with Republicans in extending unemployment benefits and providing some relief to the middle class when he gave up on a key campaign promise to roll back Bush-era tax cuts for the “wealthy”.

This practical politics has lead some to ask what values Obama really has. His pragmatism makes various stances seem unprincipled, hard to define and predict. Is he focused on the economy, or terrorism on managing government? What won’t he compromise on?

According to University of Chicago political scientist William Howell, Obama often starts with some "clear policy views," for the longer term, but they may not be clear to casual public scrutiny because "they're conjoined with a recognition that presidential power is contested ... and he gets very pragmatic very quickly." Such political pragmatism is often described as one that recognizes here-and-now “realities”. But what are realities and how do they different from political positions?

Obama's Mideast speech was described by some as pragmatic since it recognized US limitations along with democratic yearnings evidenced by what has been called an Arab Spring. But the speech also repeated his position that Israel-Palestine peace negotiations must acknowledge the 1967 borders as a starting point 1967 borders. This is politically practical in the sense that Obama’s position represents a general consensus. Reflecting this he has already secured the political backing of the United Nations, European Union and Russia. But to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu this policy is not grounded in reality as he sees it. He frames the issue differently, a process discussed in my blog on Towards Understanding Rationality and its Limits Regarding Complex Issues . Netanyahu would prefer to ground things on new “demographic facts on the ground”. The 67 border lines do not take into account what Netanyahu called "demographic changes that have taken place over the last 44 years," This includes an estimated 500,000 (illegal as discussed in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_settlement) Israeli settlers living on West Bank land. These settlements represent an occupation which the US and most others do not recognize and to many it represents a manufactured, force based outcome dictated by an occupation plan of a greater Israel.

One problem with trying to get practical results is opponents can see the possible path you can take and attempt to block it. Political pressure can be brought to accept "facts on the ground”. So are we pragmatic to deal with facts on the ground such as this or facts based on terrorist stances whether national or group? Such perceptual differences in reality are part of the challenges and dangers for what some call practical approaches and inquires into reality – political or otherwise.

Another is that problems and decisions may involve multiple issues and so one may need a coldly calculating meta-practical approach to decide how to tradeoff various positional strengths the reality of which is hard to know. In reality pragmatic approaches involve inquiry and analysis to understand what truthfully has worked, is working and will work. In pragmatic theory truth can neither be separated from the specific context of an inquiry, nor can it be divorced from the interests of the inquirer (Obama and Netanyahu for example). Understanding past analyses, the habits of the culture and persons involved are all part of a complicated analysis that makes something practical or not. For all these reasons it is easy to see why pragmatic policies are hard.

But are Obama’s approaches to things like health care, budget, and the creation of a 2 state solution really pragmatic? In a traditional, shallow sense they are part of a uniquely American political approach called political pragmatism. This philosophy was observed by Tocqueville during his American journeys which he described as a philosophy that says, 'if it works, we don't really care why.' As such it is a rejection of a purely /theoretical and ideological approach to solving political problems. To a European it was a new form of politics using means-tested facts and grounded reality. This still represents a recognizable American value and bears some relation to the broader, formalized pragmatic philosophy that originated in the US a bit later in the 19^th century by Charles Sanders Peirce and William James. These are 2 philosophers that Americans should be proud of and know more about. Some of the background story for their story and the whole American pragmatism movement is covered Louis Menand’s enjoyable book: The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America. The book argues that the Civil War swept away the slave civilization of the South, but the brutality of an uncompromising ideological struggle also damaged the whole intellectual culture of the North. It took nearly half a century for Americans to develop a set of ideas, a way of thinking that would help them cope with the resulting conditions of “modern” life. That struggle, especially the philosophical struggle is elucidated by Menand’s book as he explains how the philosophy of pragmatism grows out of it.

But problems seem to have grown up about our understanding of what is pragmatic. Current political pragmatism is to the philosophy of pragmatism a bit like what Social Darwinism is to Darwin’s theory of evolution. It has some connection, but it is a loose application of some simple expressions of core ideas. without a validated theory and can lead in problematic directions. The family of ideas called pragmatism was concerned with broad theories of meaning, truth and reality and how a person comes to know. At its core is an emphasis on the practical consequences of a person or a group holding a belief. The question of what happens in the future is essential. Consequences are the behavioral and observational means we use to evaluate the truth of that belief. This simple focus on the practical helps evade many earlier metaphysical and epistemological problems discussed in Western philosophy. That’s good, since American don’t like endless debate on philosophical issues. So belief is something like an hypothesis. It is true if it brings about a satisfactory result in a particular inquiry or investigation. The truth of Darwin’s theory of evolution is measured by what it can be applied to and the results it secures. Obama’s push for a 2 state solution isn’t Newtonian Physics, but to a pragmatic philosophy it might be tried on to see how useful it is. Of course it is easier to test the validity of falling bodies than of establishing states and peacefully controlling borders. As I asked before, is a pragmatic approach practical for such types of issue? It’s complicated, but as we are all concerned with better outcomes it behooves us to understand the world in practical terms by their implications as well as the validated consistency of their predictions. As a philosophical stance Pragmatism helps clears away some of the philosophical underbrush, but the reality of the world and especially the social world represents real challenges for a practical philosophy. Which is a long, humbling way to say that what is called pragmatic politics may be better than a purely unvalidated, ideological approach; but is far from the approach to knowledge, truth and meaning that philosophical pragmatism espouses.

Towards Understanding Rationality and its Limits Regarding Complex Issues

Rwahrens recently penned an article on this Blog addressing what he called real challenge for Democrats and “progressive voters” – should they support Obama for a 2nd term, or should they send a message to a party and president who is not being progressive enough. Rwahrens presented what seems a reasonable argument that Progressives should agree on one thing: “beating the Republican Party and preventing them from getting into office” For example he pragmatically cited the damage that a Republo-Conservative tide could effect which should override “every single other issue you may have.” It also makes reasonable arguments, including historical precedents such as what happened when moderates were beaten by ideological conservatives. But it is also true that some of the assumptions can be challenged. I’m not writing here to fight this specific battle, which is obviously an important one, but rather to briefly (very briefly) frame some of the problems that make it difficult to reach objective conclusions on such issues. The questions concerns conceptualization of truth and objectivity and why we think certain things (x, y, z) will happen if we have a or b. Well it is usually complex and there is a threefold mix of rational, empirical and pragmatic elements in all such arguments that make the pursuit of good judgment difficult.

All 3 elements (rational, empirical and pragmatic) are part of the humanist tradition, but the type of reasoning we call rational is probably a good place to start. The pre-Socratic Greeks, starting with Thales, gave us a style of natural/rational explanation of phenomena. History notes that Anaxagoras brought philosophy and the spirit of rational inquiry from it start in Ionia to Athens where it developed further. Much later the Enlightenment humanists built of this idea and its products using what they called reason and logic to create moral and ethical systems. This was not just armchair philosophy as they advanced the proposition of using reasoning as a progressive tool to effect good in society. It is natural for modern day humanists to pursue a rational system of inquiry to advance the good in and through the political realm. The Secular Coalition, for example, commits to:

“ promoting reason and science as the most reliable methods for understanding the universe and improving the human condition. Informed by experience and inspired by compassion, we encourage the pursuit of knowledge, meaning, and responsible ethical codes…” http://www.secular.org/

Which brings me to the scientific-empirical side of reasoning and logic. We now know more about the limits of human rationality and reasoning. It is deeply flawed and subject to leveraging by all kinds of biases. Indeed the American Pragmatists like Peirce, James and Dewey, who built on Kant’s critique of reason (pure reason ends in irresolvable paradoxes), were all over this limitation in the late 19th and early 20th century. Humans reasoning, as given to us through the building blocks of our animal evolution, is in practice, often limited and not strictly logical. Our reasoning includes adaptive heuristics that offers quick and compelling judgments, which ignore details that are too hard to compute. Indeed cognitive studies have shown that much of thinking depends on emotion, and that people’s rationality is bounded by limitations of attention and memory. This means for example, that we find it difficult to employ all relevant facts. For one thing facts and asserted arguments are not passive, objective things. People are actively trying to make their case and using selective facts, shading issues and fuzzing up arguments all the time. We live in a dynamic mix of half truths and manufactured positions. We often have to rely on external fact checking because, to paraphrase Twain, much of what we are exposed to in the media just ain't so. This inability to handle all the uncertainly and complexity that we find in our culture means we focus on some details/facts and avoid or dismiss others. We are aware of this in debates on complex topics, but often in debate we aren’t sure of why reasonable arguments, based on empirical evidence, do so poorly in persuading others. Can’t we see the facts, for example, of what a Conservative administration has done (2000-2008) and just extend the inferences to current and future situations? Well yes, but mechanistically it requires lots of assumptions and long lines of reasoning that can be challenged along the way. It is an inexact science and subject to influence by the intents of the reasoner.


Another way of speaking about such reasoning (and reasoning in general) is that it is practical and serves our pragmatic purposes. A tool for this pragmatism is to frame issues and using metaphors to organize our thought. This idea has been developed by the linguist George Lakoff, who argues that most (if not all) thought is based on unconscious metaphors that are usually physical in nature. So when arguing about the economy we heard then Fed Chairman Greenspan talking about “headwinds” slowing down recovery. This grounds us in the idea of resistance, but what exactly is the nature of these headwinds? They are certainly an uneconomic item. The familiar metaphor allowed him to ignore real economic details but give us a sense that we understand what is going on. Beliefs on complex issues, such as economics or politics, are largely determined by the metaphors in which these ideas are framed. Facts are organized to serve the purposes of frame designers and they influence how we feel about them. We see this in some of the arguments used in the Wisconsin union collective bargaining dispute. Actions by the executive, that seem extreme by one standard, are framed as powerful action to avoid fiscal disaster. Increasingly, such political arguments are understood in terms of physical conflict, struggle, disaster and war or sports metaphors –e.g. They shot down my argument, He couldn’t defend his position, or She attacked/tackled my theory. These are all motivating metaphors which can push rational argument to the back of the bus.

This view of our rational abilities is humbling. It further undermines the Enlightenment ideal of conscious, universal, and dispassionate reason based on logic. It even challenges an easy scientific formulation that empirical facts combined with reasoning gives us a privileged view of the world. This is possible, but it requires great discipline since we are attracted to compelling arguments that offer a good story (as previously posted on the Meme idea). Such narratives do make sense based on our experience, but these too are shaped by a non-logical process. To make sense of the world we inevitably see things from a particular point of view. This point of view includes the many experiences and biases accrued over our lives and is hardened into beliefs that serve our immediate needs. Beliefs and opinions are further shaped into belief systems by our cultural experience, exposure to stories and as member of political groups and parties. In most conversation these selective, easy to communicate and attention-getting, subjective experiences and judgments tend to be dominant over purely objective experiences.

Which I guess brings me back to the recent blog on “beating the Republican Party and preventing them from getting into office”. How do we decide? We are rarely isolated and reflective enough to have an objective base, but it may be possible to expose the issues involved, the relevant data and the chains of reasoning over time. It takes time and we need tolerance in our conversation to avoid continued conflict between formulated and preprocessed perception of reality. This is especially true in complex situations such as political topics which are generated from frame models of reality. This is not to criticize the Humanist tradition of rationalism, science or empiricism. Indeed these are important. It is just that these aren’t enough, without being integrated together into a system that deals with the imperfections of human cognition. These remain part of a larger systematic solution which includes a sustained effort to understand. Understanding rather than debate for its own sake is a useful goal and part of real process of inquiry. Open inquiry in turn depends on critical thinking, some tentativeness if not doubt and pragmatic ways of resolving uncertainty.