Barry Arrington (the current owner of the blog, Uncommon Descent – the former “playground” of William Dembski, advocate of “Intelligent Design”) is a lawyer who seems to regard his finest hour when he acted for some victims families in the wake of the Columbine massacre.
Regular readers of Uncommon Descent (come on, admit it – it’s not just me) may have noted Barry’s singular style of posting “gotcha” questions and using the answers and his ability to control what appears on his blog to bolster his claim of “crickets”. (No complaint from me – ID is a lost cause as a philosophical view so whatever Barry does cannot make any difference in the real world – whether he allows discussion or limits it, the hollowness of ID shines through). The latest post, Eric Harris Was Just Paying Attention, seems to blend Barry’s contribution to Columbine with his predilection for the gotcha.
Asks Barry:
Why should our Übermensch refrain from hurting other people to achieve his selfish desires.
Commenter Mark Frank deals very eloquently with Arrington (please take the time if you can to read Mark’s comments) and RDFish/aiguy also contributes eloquently.
But I have to reproduce in full this masterly comment from Reciprocating Bill:
I’m always amused (and amazed) by the cartoonish portrayal of human experience that invariably accompanies eristic “challenges” such as this. In that cartoon, stick figures with no relationships and no histories either act upon self-interested calculations or conform themselves to objective, moral guidelines, fearful of the riding crop of eternal consequences. Those who reject God and his objective values do so because they wish to take what they want from others. To fully embrace the logic of naturalism is to become indistinguishable from that of a psychopath. (Or, it should; never mind that none of this actually occurs.)
Fortunately, the reality of human experience is different. Human beings are born into and participate in social worlds that are both cognitively and emotionally deeply interpenetrating, entering into what Andrew Whiten called “deep social mind.” Infants as young as 42 minutes imitate the facial gestures of adults – remarkable because they’ve never before seen a face and have yet to see their own. Mirror neurons encode the actions of others and the infant’s own actions identically, laying a neurobiological foundation for understanding and empathizing with others. Infants and mothers jointly attune themselves to the topography of their pre-verbal interactions, tracking “vitality affects” (per Daniel Stern) and sharing a form of joyful, mutually sustained and modulated affective attunement that in adulthood may be seen in joint activities as diverse as joint musical improvisation and good sex. In the latter months of the first year infants follow the gaze of adults to external objects, an innate skill that is quickly folded into thousands of episodes of shared joint attention that are crucial to human enculturation and language learning. Toddlers as young as 18 months understand and sympathize with the preferences of others, even when they differ from their own. Children at play enact countless simulated dramas in which fair play is argued and negotiated (can you count the number of times you heard “That’s not fair!” as a kid?). Out of all this emerges theory of mind, sensitivity to the beliefs, desires, affects and sufferings of others, skillfulness in “social chess” (the ability to negotiate and navigate social alliances and contracts), and the capacity for experiencing guilt (and being shamed) within one’s own community. These skills and capacities sculpt the human brain from birth and are among the foundations for filial love, pair bonding and community identification, altruism, and moral reasoning.
We all, theist and philosophical naturalist alike, emerge from and live within like social networks, and we all derive our capacity for pro-social behaviors and moral reasoning from those experiences, not from a coat of philosophical or religious paint applied after the fact. And, like it or not, this human sociality has a long history, specifically an evolutionary history of at least several million years duration, atop of which have accrued briefer and more varied histories of cultural invention.
Psychopaths display grave deficiencies in the deployment of this deep sociality. A large number of studies indicate that psychopaths exhibit subtle cognitive and affective abnormalities seen in language processing, cortical maturational lags, hemispheric imbalances, frontal lobe dysfunction, abnormalities of the deployment of attention, and states of chronic under-arousal. They have an attenuated experience of anxiety and fear and are abnormally physiologically unresponsive to punishment and painful stimuli, differences observable in galvanic skin response and accelerations in heart rate in experimental settings. Lack of social controls, emotional lability, restlessness and inattentiveness, impulsiveness and irritability may be identified in a subpopulation of children as early as age three years. Robert Hare observed that children who eventually become psychopaths as adults come to the attention of teachers and counselors at a very early age and continue their antisocial careers through latency and adolescence in the face of every attempt to socialize them. Something is awry in those children and adults they become. Absence of empathy for and attunement with the experiences of others is a defining characteristic, as codified in the Psychopathy Checklist (WJMs dictionary-driven misapprehension not withstanding).
“Why shouldn’t a metaphysical naturalist do exactly what he pleases even if it hurts another person?” Because it hurts other persons, Barry, and those of us who grew up in an adequate social milieu devoid of the profound deficits of the psychopath find that a good enough reason.
I’d like to chime in at Uncommon Descent but at least I’m curious as to where Barry finds his objectivity, his superior grasp of morality, his justification for some objective source for social norms. Can anyone help?
ETA
Hat-tip to Kantian Naturalist for spotting this.
I agree it is semantics.
A related word is with a similar issue is “purpose” .
One usage for “purpose” applied to a mechanism is to say it was created to suit some agent’s purpose.
But if “purpose” refers to what the mechanism does, it is not meant in that sense. Instead, it is just a word we use in describing the mechanism and its history in evolution. It is not meant to suggest that there was some agent who designed it to have that purpose.
I think changing the meaning of “design” or “purpose” to suit his needs is one of the fallacies that BA commits in the linked post at UD.
I would go a half-step further and say that you’ve identified a conceptual error at the heart of the ID movement.
The ID argument rests on an equivocation, where “design” means both “the purposiveness manifestly exhibited by living organisms” and “the intended purpose of that kind of living organism”. That’s equivocation, pure and simple — those are different concepts, and they play quite different roles.
If there’s any good argument that gets you from one concept to the other, I’m not aware of it. The standard argument that one finds in Aristotle is faulty, because it reverses the quantifiers. (Briefly, you can’t get from “for all x, there is a y” to “there is a y for all x”.)
More precisely, we can see why the quick move from one to the other is utterly hopeless. The concept, “purposiveness manifested by organisms” is part of a good phenomenology of life — it is a precise description of how living things are disclosed to us in our experience of them. The latter, “the intended purpose of that organism” is explanatory — it tells us how it came about that living things are as they are.
The conflation of the two is a Dirty Trick. Too much of the explanation is read back into the description; the explanans is conflated with the explanandum. Once that’s done, there’s no conceptual space left over for competing explanations — which is precisely why naturalistic explanations of biological teleology strike them as not merely wrong, but as so absurd as to be not even wrong. And since the design explanation is “obvious”, there’s no need to prove its epistemic mettle in contrast with other explanations.
This is why design theory is an intellectual fraud.
A very nice argument. I foresee tome-length attempts at rebuttal in your near future. For some reason, the initials KF and VJT came to mind.
SeverskyP35,
Thank you! But I can’t imagine anyone there will take any notice of my analysis. I presented here for the benefit of those outside of that echo chamber.