Quiz Mar 3

T 3 - MP 17-18; Report: Jessica, Camus: Myth of Sisyphus/Sartre: Existentialism Is a Humanism.
LISTEN

1. Who was Charles Guiteau, and what was his legal defense? 312

2. What is the rate of racial disparity in incarceration? 317

3. What are the two dimensions by which we normally understand and explain others'behavior? 321

4. Why is "therapeutic justice" a misnomer? 326

5. Stephen Morse says the real issue is what? 334

6. What do compatibilists say about freedom and responsibiilty? 340

7. Why can we not intervene with responsible agents until they commit crimes? 348

8. How does Morse summarize his objections to Hard Incompatibilism (HI), and with which Christian apologist does he concur? 355




DQ

• Would you have voted to acquit Guiteau? Would you have supported his sentence?
• What rationale for punishing people with demonstrable brain defects would you endorse, if any?
• Is "he can't help it" always, never, or sometimes ("situationally") relevant to the determination of a person's responsibility and guilt?
• Do you expect that we will resolve the "cognitive dissonance" in our criminal justice system in the "not so distant future"? 327 What conditions would enable that resolution?
• What's new about "New Determinism"?
• Do you have any DSM mental disorders that you'd care to share? If so, or if not, do you think that has any bearing on your personal responsibility for acts you've performed or ever will?
• Is the legal concept of a responsible person reasonable? 335
• Do you agree that the proponents of radical change must always bear the burden of proof? 339
• Is a person by definition NOT a "biological machine" capable of executing contracts? 342
• 
  

Exciting news: Dan Dennett and I have agreed to a book debating our respective views on free will, moral responsibility, and criminal punishment—building on our @aeonmag exchange. It will be w/ @politybooks and priced for the mass market. Looking forward to it @danieldennett!

— Gregg Caruso (@GreggDCaruso) February 29, 2020

What Exactly is Faith?

"Faith is taking the first step even when you don't see the whole staircase" - Martin Luther King Jr.

Faith is so often associated with religion that it is often used synonymously with worship. For the religious, it illustrates their devotion to the god or gods in which they place their spiritual bets on. One can often observe even atheists referring to faith in this capacity. While no one objects with this thought process, one could argue that faith is much more abstract that most give it credit for. In terms of how it is applied currently, faith is broad spectrum whereas as religious faith is specific.  After all, one cannot utilize any of the common senses to find faith. If anything, it serves as a sixth sense. A sixth sense so innate that all manner of life, be it flora or fauna, have access to it.

 Now a quick disclaimer:

I write this with no intention of bashing religion. Instead, think of this just like the square/rectangle situation. All squares are rectangles but not all rectangles are squares just as All religion is a kind of faith but not all faith is religious

Given the Christian near-monopoly in America, one can assume that they are the religious within this specific text.

Now, more often than not, one can hear a Christian refer to unfortunate circumstances as God testing his or her faith. All hardships are seen this way as the perceived lord almighty determines your allegiance. I have a severely Christian friend who says that one cannot be truly faithful to God until he can look at his best friend and announce their inevitable damnation for not believing as he does. This came as quite a shock, but it can be explained with this: often the religious perceive the existence of their eventual afterlife to be as real as the life they live now. Whereas, we have faith in the sun rising tomorrow and they have pearly gates to enter after their life’s conclusion. The difference between religious faith and faith in general is the use of personification. Religious faith is given this power, much like the Force in Star Wars, where the user must be “at one” or obsessively devoted for it to work properly. Hence, when bad things happen as they always do, the religious were simply not as strong in their faith as they should have been. For those who happen across luck in their life, they see this as an abundance of faith and thus proclaim to have a personal relationship with God. 

Faith in its purest form serves more as a foundation for motivation rather than a personified force. 

For this example, I will explain using plants. As a sapling grows, it has faith in the nutrients within the soil , faith in the water from above and below, and has faith in the Sun to give it energy. This is less of a personification and more of a survival instinct. When it loses faith in one of the three, it will cease to thrive.The point of this example is to prove that while faith is innate, it grows when fed with certainties. We know the sun to rise every morning set every night. We know the air to be breathable, and we know that we are born, we live,and we die such as all life forces on earth. Each of us have a different certainties that we have faith in within our lives, and that is not a religious thought, that's just life.

When I introduced myself within this course, I wrote "I understand faith to be something that everyone must have to reach any type of clarity". I wrote this with my broad definition in mind, thinking nothing of it. While in class, I quickly realized that my words were associated with religion specifically, which makes sense given it's a class about Atheism, but the difference in understanding weighed on my mind thus I will now explain what I said further.

We must have faith in aspects of our lives to be successful. We must trust that those around us live just as complicated lives as us, and thus the ones who support us expect that support back. We must have faith that our hard work here will assist us in earning our degrees later, and we must have faith in our ability to somehow utilize what we've learned to land our "dream job", if such a thing exists. Having that faith in others and in ourselves is astronomically important because faith fuels motivation and motivation fuels us. If we have no motivation to better ourselves or to reach a level where we are comfortable, we will never have clarity. 

Thus: A➜B, B➜C, and A➔C, Where A is faith, B is motivation, and C is clarity.

At the philosophy conference

Greetings from chilly Chicago



where there must surely be something better to do tonight than attend a philosophy conference...



My badge boldly declares "my pronoun"...



I'll go downstairs in a bit to deliver my latest reflections on what we can learn from the friendly, good-spirited, lifelong philosophical antagonism between two great philosophers - a pragmatist and an idealist - who didn't let their divergent ideas diminish their humane mutual respect. That's kinda what we were talking about in class Thursday with Ben, isn't it?

Do I get extra credit for walking right past the Yazoo booth at Gate 25 without stopping, when I boarded the plane for Chicago?



UPDATE, 2.27.  Our session went well, last night. And the SAAP session this morning was good too. And then I ran into Dan Dennett, thanked him for his many good books, and gave him my free drinks coupons for tomorrow night. (I'll not be here then.) He seemed grateful - as befits the author of "Thank Goodness"...

And then a nice walkabout in the Loop and Millennial Park (and past the historical marker indicating that my hotel, Palmer House, is historic (c.1925 "the world's largest), followed by a terrific lunch of blackened catfish at Miller's Pub. (Highly recommend the "War Pigs Foggy Geezer" hazy IPA.)

Now, catching the Dewey Lecture "How I am an Aristotelian"... The speaker just said "Plato, bless his heart..."

Looking forward to seeing Martha Nussbaum and Philip Kitcher in a bit. Should be home by midnight, Southwest Airlines and Uber willing.

Agnostic-"the social network for atheists, agnostics, and skeptics"

FYI-

Agnostic is a non-profit and non-prophet community for people who are naturally good without any gods. Our members have a wide range of views about what the site should be about. For some, it's a place to nurture humanist or non-religious principles. For others, it's a place to recover from a religious past or to reaffirm one's non-theism.

We hope to provide a safe place for people to share their thoughts and opinions, get involved in secular causes, keep up with news, and even meet others. We are not an anti-religion website.

Note: we share members and content (e.g., groups and posts) with our sister site at https://humanist.com. Members can hide their profile from agnostic.com on the bottom of their settings page.

We want to be defined by principles and not what we don't believe. 

Black Freethinkers by Christopher Cameron

Some questions raised earlier in our class about the relationship between African Americans and atheism made me rethink my original choice of Anthony Pinn's systematic presentation of a black humanistic theology (a book-length project that I still totally recommend). Instead, I now think it's worth taking a step back toward the simpler but no less important effort of affirming the real existence of black "irreligiosity"--that is, the absence of strong religious feeling or belief among African Americans--throughout history. This effort is compellingly made by a recent publication by Dr. Christopher Cameron entitled, Black Freethinkers: A History of African American Secularism (2019).

Cameron has recently given talks sponsored by the American Humanist Association about his book. 

Cameron certainly covers a lot of history in this text, from slavery up to our contemporary moment, but the thesis guiding his exploration is fairly straightforward. He argues that the historical and, more generally, scholarly record is skewed toward black belief, not simply because there are numerically more black theists than atheists but because of the "assumption that atheism and other forms of nonbelief are the preserve of whites" (ix). A related assumption is "that black people are naturally religious and that the black church has always been at the center of the black community" (x). (Some might be disappointed to hear that there is in fact no religious "bone" with which all black people are born.) Cameron's project is aimed at upsetting these assumptions, and it serves as both a historiographic intervention and an advance in the re-theorization of black (ir)religion away from the dominance of Christianity.

As said, Cameron covers a lot of history. I want to focus on three of the several periods he covers.

Slavery, Cameron emphasizes, was an immense experience of suffering that challenged the idea of God among black people. Not every African American responded to their plight by seeking refuge, rescue, or escape from any god--Christian or otherwise. In fact, it is well-documented that Christian missionaries worried about the noticeable trend of black alienation from religion because of slavery. That slavery made some African Americans less likely to believe in any god became an argument in abolitionist discourse (3-4, 10-11). Among enslaved persons whose belief in God was challenged by slavery, Cameron counts Frederick Douglass. Douglass certainly used Christian rhetoric in his prominent speaking and writing endeavors, but it seems that his personal conception of god was distant from traditional understandings. This "heterodoxy" was enough for Cameron to consider Douglass a freethinker, if the atheist label is too hard a sell. Cameron recounts an episode during which Douglass, while at an American Anti-Slavery Society meeting, provoked criticism for thanking human beings rather than just God. Douglass said, "It is only through such men and such women that I can get a glimpse of God anywhere" (32, italics added).

Frederick Douglass, a black freethinker, said once, "I bow to no priests either of faith or of unfaith. I claim as against all sorts of people, simply perfect freedom of thought" (32).

The Civil Rights era is especially problematic when it comes to black religiosity. Typically, the movements against racial oppression, being prominently led by religious leaders like MLK, get broadly brushed as Christian. In truth, many African Americans of a variety of religious and non-religious persuasions worked with and alongside these movements. Civil Rights was no more exclusively Christian (or theist) than it was exclusively black. Cameron supports this alternate take by emphasizing the involvement of Black Power personalities like Stokely Carmichael, Lorraine Hansberry, and James Forman. Forman rejected theism outright and described what he took to be its negative pacifying effects on African Americans (120). Although Carmichael was a Marxist atheist, he took a more diplomatic and pragmatic approach. He felt that being an influential activist meant that "any talk of atheism and the rejection of God just wasn't gonna cut it" (131-32). For someone like Hansberry, whose artistic focus perhaps gave her a bit more freedom and openness, it was possible to express atheism--still quite taboo in black communities--in her characters. Beneatha in A Raisin in the Sun (for an immediately relevant scene, skip to view 29:25-31:00) is an outstanding example.

Describing Beneatha as “me, eight years ago,” Hansberry openly claimed atheism, while respecting and empathetically accommodating religious imagination: “this is one of the glories of [humanity], the inventiveness of the human mind and the human spirit; whenever life doesn’t seem to give an answer, we create one. And it gives us strength. I don’t attack people who are religious at all . . . I rather admire this human quality to make our own crutches as long as we need them. The only thing I am saying is that once we can walk, you know—then drop them” (152). Lorraine, I couldn't agree more!

As more recent examples of black freethought and atheism, Cameron concludes his book with figures such as critically acclaimed but woefully underappreciated science fiction author Octavia Butler and the more well-known Alice Walker. Both incorporated religiously deviant ideas into their literature and spoke openly about their beliefs. Walker was even awarded the 1997 prize for Humanist of the Year (165-66, 169).

Octavia Butler said, “At the moment there are no true aliens in our lives . . . no gods, or devils, no spirits, angels, or gnomes. Some of us know this. Deep within ourselves we know it. We’re on our own, the focus on no interest except our consuming interest in ourselves . . . our only help is ourselves and one another” (165).

Cameron further distinguishes this most recent period by describing the growth of institutional and organizational support for black irreligion. Organizations like African Americans for Humanism, Black Atheists of American, and Black Nonbelievers, are steadfastly working to ensure that African Americans who choose atheism have soft places to land outside of the traditional church, which yet functions as one of the most identifiable sources of social support for black people.

Hopefully, with the work of Cameron and others, we can attend with greater sensitivity to the presence black freethought and atheism--both of yesteryear and today.

Below is a video of another talk given by Dr. Cameron. Enjoy!

Questions:

What is the thesis or main idea driving Cameron's historical project?

Who are two figures that exemplify black freethought or atheism?

Discussion:

How have you understood the relationship between black identity and religion? What would you say about how it is popularly represented?

How does the experience of Beneatha from A Raisin in the Sun resonate (or not) with your own experience of expressing atheism at home?

The struggle for greater institutional and organizational support for black atheism raises this issue also for atheists of every background. How can we do better to provide community for those seeking alternatives to "church"?

Religious persecution in China

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/21/opinion/sunday/chinas-religion-xi.html

Though many people are aware of the several million Muslims currently held in "re-education camps" in China, it is slowly becoming apparent that the Chinese government is deterring people from many faiths that may negatively affect the propagation of the country's civil religion.

Woman is fired from her teaching position for Secular views

http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/religion/2010-05-29-fired28_st_n.htm

This woman was fired for her teaching position for expressing secular views outside of the classroom. Her lack of belief in God was the only reason for her termination.

Spring is coming

One Tiny Beautiful Thing

When the big picture keeps getting darker, it helps to zoom in.

...As Ash Wednesday approaches, I find myself thinking again and again of that ordinary miracle, that commonplace resurrection, that everlasting antidote to the temporary perfidy of a red-faced man hollering out his hour on the national stage. For Lent this year, I would like to give up the news — I would like to give up the president himself for Lent this year — but life in a democracy does not afford such luxuries.

Instead of giving up something for Lent, I’m planning to make a heartfelt offering. In times like these, it makes more sense to seek out daily causes for praise than daily reminders of lack. So here is my resolution: to find as many ordinary miracles as a waterlogged winter can put forth, as many resurrections as an eerily early springtime will allow. Tiny beautiful things are bursting forth in the darkest places, in the smallest nooks and deepest cracks of the hidden world, and I am going to keep looking every single day until I find one. Margaret Renkl

Complexity

The Human Condition pic.twitter.com/fourQHxGCT

— Philosophy Matters (@PhilosophyMttrs) February 22, 2020

Meaning here and now

Again anticipating our next read-

...Can [the New Atheists] make a case for atheism without devolving into bigotry? Can their non-belief offer ethical critique of the world as it is? James Baldwin provided one avenue, but are there others?

...we can turn to the philosopher Martin Hagglund, whose book makes an impassioned case for secular faith which, at its logical conclusion, leads to the most ideal life via socialism. It is precisely because of his non-belief that the urgency to act justly in the world becomes all the more necessary. 

For Hagglund, it is our very mortality and transience that makes life worth fighting for, not the promise of a heavenly hereafter. It is in the here and now, in this world, where we find and make meaning. In order to do that, we must first engineer the material conditions to maximise our time so we can pursue our true calling. For Hagglund, socialism born out of secular faith provides the answer...

Asad Dandia 

A lovely light

Happy birthday Edna St. Vincent Millay, who wrote Christopher Hitchens's favorite lines:

“My candle burns at both ends; / It will not last the night; / But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends — / It gives a lovely light!”

Sam Harris's Moral Landscape

In response to Heather's post of Sam Harris's TED Talk below...

Sam Harris' first book, The End of Faith, ignited a worldwide debate about the validity of religion. In the aftermath, Harris discovered that most people - from religious fundamentalists to non-believing scientists - agree on one point: science has nothing to say on the subject of human values. Indeed, our failure to address questions of meaning and morality through science has now become the most common justification for religious faith. It is also the primary reason why so many secularists and religious moderates feel obligated to "respect" the hardened superstitions of their more devout neighbors.

Harris tears down the wall between scientific facts and human values, arguing that most people are simply mistaken about the relationship between morality and the rest of human knowledge. Harris urges us to think about morality in terms of human and animal well-being, viewing the experiences of conscious creatures as peaks and valleys on a "moral landscape." Because there are definite facts to be known about where we fall on this landscape, Harris foresees a time when science will no longer limit itself to merely describing what people do in the name of "morality"; in principle, science should be able to tell us what we ought to do to live the best lives possible.

...we already know enough about the human brain and its relationship to events in the world to say that there are right and wrong answers to the most pressing questions of human life. Because such answers exist, moral relativism is simply false - and comes at increasing cost to humanity. And the intrusions of religion into the sphere of human values can be finally repelled: for just as there is no such thing as Christian physics or Muslim algebra, there can be no Christian or Muslim morality. g'r

“Anyone who wants to understand the world should be open to new facts and new arguments, even on subjects where his or her views are very well established. Similarly, anyone truly interested in morality—in the principles of behavior that allow people to flourish—should be open to new evidence and new arguments that bear upon questions of happiness and suffering. Clearly, the chief enemy of open conversation is dogmatism in all its forms."

“We must continually remind ourselves that there is a difference between what is natural and what is actually good for us. Cancer is perfectly natural, and yet its eradication is a primary goal of modern medicine. Evolution may have selected for territorial violence, rape, and other patently unethical behaviors as strategies to propagate one’s genes—but our collective well-being clearly depends on our opposing such natural tendencies.”  

“Meaning, values, morality, and the good life must relate to facts about the well-being of conscious creatures—and, in our case, must lawfully depend upon events in the world and upon states of the human brain. Rational, open-ended, honest inquiry has always been the true source of insight into such processes. Faith, if it is ever right about anything, is right by accident.” 

Quizzes Feb 25, 27

T 25 - MP13-14 (Scroll down for *Th 27)
LISTEN

Reports: Cooper, On Humanism; Ben, Identifying parallels between social oppression and control by religious institutions with "Woke Culture". [To be rescheduled: Crystal, Nietzsche]

1. The idea of justice without retribution evokes what pressing questions? 236

2. According to Waller we can use scientific understanding of human behavior to do what? 238

3. Changing an agent's future behavior can focus on what? 241

4. What approach to crime "can meet our highest moral standards"? 247

5. What is the thesis of neuronaturalism? 252

6. The picture of the brain as a nexus of neural activity helps explain why each of us is what? 255

7. What kinds of causes typically have a "strong causal invariance relation with their effects"? 261

8. A "limited free-will view" has what advantages over pessimism? 266

DQ

•  COMMENT: "Free will skepticism cannot deny the reality of our experiences: we feel in charge..." 236
• Who's right, Dennett or Waller?
• Are some individuals "destined to a life of crime"? 242
• Should individuals ever "receive a psychiatric label"? 246
• Is there anything "mindblowing" to you about neuronaturalism?
• Should mental deliberations viewed (somehow) objectively resemble "clockwork"? 257
• Are most people "theory-lite" and thus less committed to (for instance) metaphysical dualism than we might have predicted? 258
• 
  

(Alva Noë, former student of Hilary Putnam, educated at Harvard and Oxford, is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. The focus of his work is the theory of perception and consciousness. In addition to several books on consciousness and perception, he wrote Infinite Baseball: Notes from a Philosopher at the Ballpark. I met him last year at my annual Baseball in Literature and Culture Conference in Kansas.)








NOTE: This is an excerpt from the two-part, 60-minute DVD. http://www.thinkingallowed.com/2fcric... A noted scientist discusses free will, consciousness, attention and memory and their relationship to the human nervous system. In a wide ranging discussion, Crick points out that the hypothesis that the brain is the seat of consciousness has not yet been proven. Francis Crick, Ph.D., received the Nobel Prize in 1962 for the discovery of DNA's central role in the process of genetic reproduction. He is author of Life Itself, What Mad Pursuit and The Astonishing Hypothesis.
==
*Th 27 - No class, but read & post comments on MP 15-16
LISTEN



1. Nadelhoffer and Wright are focused on the potential ramifications of free will skepticism from what standpoint? 270

2. Francis Crick says "who you are is nothing but" what? 287

3. Do the authors of ch 15 think most people's attitudes towards free will are likely to change anytime soon? 294

4. The "clockwork" aspect of the classical Newtonian universe seems to imply what about life? 300

5. What is "weak emergence" and what can it underwrite? 304

6. What conclusion about absurdity and freedom would be hasty, and what existentialist theme seems refuted by modern physics and cosmology? 306

DQ

• Could free will be a "positive illusion"? In general, do you think there can be good reasons for affirming beliefs that aren't strongly supported by evidence and research?
• COMMENT on one or more of the survey studies in ch 15.
• What do you think of Crick's argument in The Astonishing Hypothesis?
• Do Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Camus, or Sartre induce "existential anxiety" in you? 293
• Do you predict a widespread loss of belief in free will among yourself and/or your peers in the future?
• Is emergent free will at the macroscopic level of the human scale enough to vindicate ideas like purpose and choice, even if there's no use for such concepts at the microscopic level of fundamental physics?
• What do you think of Sean Carroll's "poetic naturalism"? (see below)

How can we explain consciousness? Pioneering physicist and humanist, Sean Carroll describes how Physics can explain what it is to be conscious. How do life and meaning emerge from physical stuff? Sean Carroll argues that the universe is made of stories, not atoms. Watch the full talk https://iai.tv/video/the-poetry-of-th...

Sean Carroll's Mindscape podcast: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/


“The strategy I'm advocating here can be called poetic naturalism. The poet Mureil Rukeyser once wrote, 'The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.' The world is what exists and what happens, but we gain enormous insight by talking about it -- telling its story -- in different ways."

Poetic naturalism is a philosophy of freedom and responsibility. The raw materials of life are given to us by the natural world, and we must work to understand them and accept the consequences. The move from description to prescription, from saying what happens to passing judgment on what should happen, is a creative one, a fundamentally human act. The world is just the world, unfolding according to the patterns of nature, free of any judgmental attributes. The world exists; beauty and goodness are things that we bring to it.” 

“Carl faced his death with unflagging courage and never sought refuge in illusions. The tragedy was that we knew we would never see each other again. I don’t ever expect to be reunited with Carl. But, the great thing is that when we were together, for nearly twenty years, we lived with a vivid appreciation of how brief and precious life is. We never trivialized the meaning of death by pretending it was anything other than a final parting.” 

“At each moment, who we are and how we behave is a choice that we individually make. The challenges are real; the opportunities are incredible.” 

The trick is to think of life as a process rather than a substance. When a candle is burning, there is a flame that clearly carries energy. When we put the candle out, the energy doesn’t “go” anywhere. The candle still contains energy in its atoms and molecules. What happens, instead, is that the process of combustion has ceased. Life is like that: it’s not “stuff”; it’s a set of things happening. When that process stops, life ends.” 

“"Poetic naturalism accept[s] that values are human constructs, but den[ies] that they are therefore illusory or meaningless... The meaning we find in life is not transcendent, but it's no less meaningful for that.” 
― Sean Carroll, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself
g'r

Freethinkers

Recommended:

Can Science Answer Moral Questions?

For those interested, here is a TED talk by Sam Harris, where he argues that science can serve as a foundation for our moral judgements. I think he has some compelling arguments, but I'm curious to know what all of you think.

1st Amendment & Atheism

https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/483575-80-year-old-atheist-wins-lawsuit-against-kentucky-is-allowed-to

This article is about a man who won a case in court arguing for his ability to have controversial statements on his vanity license plate.

Identifying as an atheist can still be a dangerous act in the modern era

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/27/world/gretta-vosper-jimmy-lai-zarifa-ghafari.html

This is an article about a mayor in Beijing who identifies as an atheist, and the consequences that occur as a result of that.

Punishment Deserved

Ken Lay, close friend of both presidents Bush, Jeffery Skilling, and a group of other inglorious bastards managed the most massive fraud scheme in American history with Enron Corporation. Investors lost over 70 billion dollars and 30,000 employees lost their jobs and pensions. Enron traders purposely created havoc in the distribution of electricity in California at great social cost. When a forest fire shut down a major transmission line into California, cutting power supplies and raising prices, Enron energy traders celebrated. "Burn, baby, burn. That's a beautiful thing," a trader sang about the massive fire.

Do they deserve punishment? Perhaps they had no control over their choices to lie, cheat and steal. Their behavior can be explained wholly naturalistically; it was determined. Psychologists can offer various internal reasons for their behavior, and criminologists can explain their behavior based on external factors and organizational behavior. They were convicted of various crimes, but if their choices were determined, did they lack “free will,” and did they deserve punishment?

Pereboom and Caruso (chapter 11) argue that free will skepticism rules out retributivism, which is punishment based on the principle that an offender deserves to be punished. They favor and present an excellent discussion of the utilitarian justifications for punishment, deterrence and rehabilitation, but give short shrift to the deontological justification for punishment, which I think merits more attention.

Retributivism justifies punishment in terms of moral concepts of rights, desert, moral responsibility and justice, not social utility. It seeks the just punishment, not the socially useful punishment; i.e., the punishment the criminal deserves. It is punishment society has a right to inflict, and the criminal has a right to demand. This goes back to the social contract. We yielded some of our natural freedoms to a sovereign power that acts as a repository and administrator of those freedoms. The civil society requires that we voluntarily follow the rule of law, but not all will, so punishment is necessary to ensure that we maintain the civil society. Kant uses a debt metaphor. Some will seek to “withdraw” from the repository of freedoms some of that which they have yielded. Punishment is the “just desert” required of the criminal to repay their “debt to society.” Kant said that the criminal “must first be found deserving of punishment before any consideration can be given to the utility of this punishment for himself or his fellow citizens…. The law concerning punishment is a categorical imperative ….”

Perhaps the question comes down to what we mean by “deserving of punishment.” I think Pereboom and Caruso dismiss it too easily. The fact that our choices are the result of heritable traits and social causes does not mean that under some theoretical concept of free will we cannot be found to deserve punishment for criminal acts. It means we need to evaluate carefully, and as Kant said, first, whether an individual deserves punishment, and thereafter, using utilitarian thinking, determine what that punishment should be. I would posit that the moral justification for punishment is deontological, and the aim or goal of punishment is utilitarian.

There is a moral dimension to the function of punishment in our society, and it is directly related to our written social contract, the Constitution, which provides that no state shall deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. Due process of law requires that a man be found deserving of punishment before it can be inflicted, regardless of social utility.

Move on

What would (Bill Murray's) Phil Connors say? What about Aristotle?

no way pic.twitter.com/gLk6zM6yIp

— What Is It Like to Be a Philosopher? (@CliffordSosis) February 20, 2020

Holy Land going out of business?

Better organize your field trip quickly if you don't want to miss it (the Ark in Kentucky apparently can wait)...

Florida’s “Holy Land Experience” Theme Park Will Fire Nearly All Employees

The Holy Land Experience, a Christian theme park in Orlando modeled after Jerusalem, appears to be going out of business.

The theme park plans to lay off nearly all of its employees — pretty much everyone involved in the stage shows — by April 18. It’s part of a plan to move “away from entertainment,” which makes you wonder what, exactly, that leaves for visitors.

In total, according to the Federal Worker Adjustment & Retraining Notification document sent to the city of Orlando, 118 jobs will be eliminated.

The restructuring comes as a result of a “corporate wide ministry reorganization.”

That means they’re even firing Jesus. (Atheists didn’t even have to lift a finger!)

What’s left behind (ha) is a museum and other “education attractions” that show visitors biblical artifacts, a model of ancient Jerusalem, and all those other things kids just can’t wait to see... (continues)

Thus Spake Fritz Nietzsche

More Existential Comics featuring Nietzsche...

And if you're still having trouble remembering how to pronounce that name, listen for it:



Fritz does not play well with others:

Enjoy every sandwich

BLT
by Barbara Crooker

Enjoy every sandwich.
—Warren Zevon, talking with David Letterman about his terminal
lung cancer shortly before his death.

Here’s how to make a great sandwich:
country white bread lightly toasted,
contoured with mayonnaise, leaf
lettuce spilling over the borders,
overlays of tomatoes, train tracks
of bacon leading straight
out of town. No need for road
maps, potato chips, or pickles.
Yes, winter is waiting, just over
the horizon. But right now, I’m
going to sit in the sun and listen
to birdsong. I’m going to eat
every crumb, every plottable
coordinate, now, while I can.


“BLT” by Barbara Crooker from Some Glad Morning. University of Pittsburgh Press © 2019. 

WA

In Love WIth Life, Nothing to be Frightened Of...

Also mentioned in class Tuesday:

In Love With Life: reflections of the joy of living and why we hate to die. John Lachs provides us with a philosophy of living and a framework to apply to the most basic and critical issues we face. He enables us to see things in new and expansive ways. Fundamental ethical choices such as suicide and euthanasia, the trying and often meaningless circumstances of modern life, confusions of ends and means, and just being tired of it all - these concerns all come under Lachs's discerning eye. He advocates confronting the complexities of life head on, with courage and persistence. Only through our own efforts and activities can we place our experiences in new and broader contexts, enabling us to find release from despair and frustration and to derive the most out of even the worst situations. Lachs shows that the good life involves joyous energy to the end. In Love with Life will help readers tap life's resources to face inescapable sadness, loss, and death. This is a book for everyone who has ever wondered how to reconcile the pervasive joys and frequent doubts that life presents to all of us. Thoughtful readers will find both inspiration and tough-minded virtue in this book. g'r

From an old post:

I now teach a Philosophy of Happiness course at Middle Tennessee State University. Lachs is the reason why. Like David Hume ("be a philosopher but be still a man") he radiates a sane life-work balance. Be a philosopher, even be a Stoic and a Pragmatist, but stay human and be happy. Love life to its very end.

In 2008, my Dad was diagnosed with late-stage leukemia. In his waning days that summer he picked up and annotated the inscribed copy of Lachs’s In Love With Life: reflections on the joy of living and why we hate to die (Vanderbilt, 1998 ) I’d given him in much earlier and healthier days. Dad wrote that it “took on much greater significance when thoroughly digested in 2008.” He died that September.

Lachs: “The lesson is clear. Love life so long as there is something worth loving… But at some point, wanting more life runs into the chill reality that the kind of life we can get is no longer worth the cost. This does not mean that we surrender our love of life. As in a broken love affair, we give up the loved one, not the love. With anguish or with quiet resignation, we face the fact that the days of love are gone.”
Dad: “Well expressed!”
Lachs: “All it takes to overcome tiredness with life is to open open our eyes. The world is throbbing with energy and promise, and if we can view it as kin to us, as our home, as in some sense ours, its movement will forever hold our gaze. The fascination abides even if we are too weak to do much more than see what happens next. We need simply to immerse ourselves in the energy of life all around us, as fish do swimming in the throbbing sea.”
Dad: “great!!”

Great!! indeed. Lachs has opened my eyes, to immediacy and to so much else over the years. He is a quintessential humanist, personifying an infectious love of life while repudiating false solace in overly-simple answers to its persistent, inequitous existential riddles. He embodies, enjoys, and demonstrates the liberty of a free mind and heart for whom work and play converge in philosophy.

He’s the right kind of Stoic, not the sort who ridicules positive thinking, disparages optimism, and counsels a general attitude to life of indifference (see Oliver Burkeman’s The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking). Lachs knows we don’t have to “chase after enjoyable experiences,” we just have to be ready to catch them when they come. More
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Also,
Nothing to be Frightened Of  by Julian Barnes

...a memoir on mortality that touches on faith and science and family as well as a rich array of exemplary figures who over the centuries have confronted the same questions he now poses about the most basic fact of life: its inevitable extinction.

If the fear of death is “the most rational thing in the world,” how does one contend with it? An atheist at twenty, an agnostic at sixty, Barnes looks into the various arguments for and against and with God, and at the bloodline whose archivist, following his parents’ death, he has become—another realm of mystery, wherein a drawer of mementos and his own memories (not to mention those of his philosopher brother) often fail to connect. There are other ancestors, too: the writers—“most of them dead, and quite a few of them French"—who are his daily companions, supplemented by composers and theologians and scientists whose similar explorations are woven into this account with an exhilarating breadth of intellect and felicity of spirit.

Deadly serious, masterfully playful, and surprisingly hilarious, Nothing to Be Frightened Of is a riveting display of how this supremely gifted writer goes about his business and a highly personal tour of the human condition and what might follow the final diagnosis. g'r... quotes...

“Life versus Death becomes, as Montaigne pointed out, Old Age versus Death. ” 

“The notion of redefining the deity into something that works for you is grotesque.” 

“To die from 'a draining away of one's strength caused by extreme old age' was in Montaigne's day a 'rare, singular and extraordinary death.' Nowadays we assume it as our right.” 

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And speaking of Montaigne,

How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in one question and twenty attempts ["essays"] at an answer by Sarah Bakewell. g'r... quotes...

“If you don’t know how to die, don’t worry; Nature will tell you what to do on the spot, fully and adequately. She will do this job perfectly for you; don’t bother your head about it.” 

“In dying, he now realized, you do not encounter death at all, for you are gone before it gets there.” 

“The trick is to maintain a kind of naïve amazement at each instant of experience - but, as Montaigne learned, one of the best techniques for doing this is to write about everything. Simply describing an object on your table, or the view from your window opens your eyes to how marvelous such ordinary things are. To look inside yourself is to open up an even more fantastical realm.” 

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And one more thing, a propos Jamil's remark that there's something inescapably special and unique about our species both collectively and individually. This is from the new dystopian novel by Gish Jen that I'm reading now, The Resisters:

"...even if we returned to the dirt and the wind and the rain like the plants and the animals, we had a bigness in us. Something beyond algorithms and beyond Upgrades-- something we were proud to call human. Or so it seemed to me."

The time: a not-so-distant future. The place: AutoAmerica. The land: half under water. The Internet—the new face of government—is "Aunt Nettie": a mix of artificial intelligence, surveillance technology, and pesky maxims. The people have been divided, and no one is happy. The angel-fair "Netted" still have jobs and literally occupy the high ground, while the mostly coppertoned "Surplus" live on swampland if they're lucky, on the water if they're not. 
     The story: To a Surplus couple—he was a professor, she's still a lawyer—is born a Blasian girl with a golden arm. At two, Gwen is hurling her stuffed animals from the crib; by ten she can hit whatever target she likes with a baseball; her teens find her playing happily in an underground Surplus league. When AutoAmerica re-enters the Olympics—with a special eye on beating ChinRussia—Gwen attracts interest. Soon she's at Net U, falling in love with her coach and considering "crossing over," even as her mother is challenging the AutoAmerican Way with lawsuits that will prove very dangerous.
     An astonishing story of an America that seems only too possible, and of a family struggling to maintain its humanity in circumstances that threaten their every value—even their very existence. g'r