Or, To Put Harris’s Fallacy In A Form That He Would Definitely Recognize: Religion Can’t Be A Ca
Iberio Ralda
Of the various things that critics of the New Atheists find annoying about them\u2014and here I speak from personal experience\u2014this ranks near the top: the air of rationalist superiority they often exude. Whereas the great mass of humankind remains mired in pernicious forms of illogical thought\u2014chief among them, of course, religion\u2014people like Sam Harris beckon from above: All of us, if we will just transcend our raw emotions and rank superstitions, can be like him, even if precious few of us are now.
Many of our critics also worry that if we oblige people to choose between reason and faith, they will choose faith and cease to support scientific research. If, on the other hand, we ceaselessly reiterate that there is no conflict between religion and science, we can hope to cajole great multitudes into accepting the truth of evolution (as though this were an end in itself). Here is a version of this charge that, I fear, most people would accept:
Or, To Put Harriss Fallacy In A Form That He Would Definitely Recognize: Religion Cant Be A Ca
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As a fellow neuro-scientist, I am happy to use information I gain from the study of my material pertinent to my profession and any other information that impinges on how human beings work and how things affect their health and well-being. I am happy to use that information to improve the fairness of my moral judgements. I am happy to concede that the increasingly sophisticated socialization of human beings is in large part due to genetic influences resulting from evolutionary processes. I am not willing to concede that there are not other influences at work or that morality is entirely, universally and uniformly objective, even given total knowledge of all the scientific discoveries made so far. While I may be genetically, socially, developmentally and environmentally programmed to start with the first premise you ascribe to Harris's schema I still consider it to be a value judgement. If it were not, then every society would be identical in what it prescribed as "moral".
Perhaps, however, an even more narrowly restricted principle would dothe trick: whenever the assumption that a positive existential claimis true would lead one to expect to have grounds for its truth, theabsence of such grounds is a good reason to believe that the claim isfalse. It might then be argued that (i) a God would be likely toprovide us with convincing evidence of Her existence and so (ii) theabsence of such evidence is a good reason to believe that God does notexist. This transforms the no arguments argument into an argument fromdivine hiddenness. It also transforms it into at best an argument forlocal atheism, since even if the God of, say, classical theism wouldnot hide, not all legitimate God-concepts are such that a beinginstantiating that concept would be likely to provide us withconvincing evidence of its existence.
Chapter one, "A deeply religious non-believer", seeks to clarify the difference between what Dawkins terms "Einsteinian religion" and "supernatural religion". He notes that the former includes quasi-mystical and pantheistic references to God in the work of physicists like Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking, and describes such pantheism as "sexed up atheism". Dawkins instead takes issue with the theism present in religions like Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism.[11] The proposed existence of this interventionist God, which Dawkins calls the "God Hypothesis", becomes an important theme in the book.[12] He maintains that the existence or non-existence of God is a scientific fact about the universe, which is discoverable in principle if not in practice.[13]
He then turns to the subject of morality, maintaining that we do not need religion to be good. Instead, our morality has a Darwinian explanation: altruistic genes, selected through the process of evolution, give people natural empathy. He asks, "would you commit murder, rape or robbery if you knew that no God existed?" He argues that very few people would answer "yes", undermining the claim that religion is needed to make us behave morally. In support of this view, he surveys the history of morality, arguing that there is a moral Zeitgeist that continually evolves in society, generally progressing toward liberalism. As it progresses, this moral consensus influences how religious leaders interpret their holy writings. Thus, Dawkins states, morality does not originate from the Bible, rather our moral progress informs what parts of the Bible Christians accept and what they now dismiss.[20]
On 3 October 2007, John Lennox, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford, publicly debated Richard Dawkins at the University of Alabama at Birmingham on Dawkins' views as expressed in The God Delusion, and their validity over and against the Christian faith.[39][40][41]"The God Delusion Debate" marked Dawkins' first visit to the Old South and the first significant discussion on this issue in the "Bible Belt".[42]The event was sold out, and The Wall Street Journal called it "a revelation: in Alabama, a civil debate over God's existence."[43][44] Dawkins debated Lennox for the second time at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History in October 2008. The debate was titled "Has Science Buried God?", in which Dawkins used a form of an Eddington concession in saying that, although he would not accept it, a reasonably respectable case could be made for "a deistic god, a sort of god of the physicist, a god of somebody like Paul Davies, who devised the laws of physics, god the mathematician, god who put together the cosmos in the first place and then sat back and watched everything happen" but not for a theistic god.[45][46][47][48] Several days later, in a public debate in Inverness, Scotland, John Lennox used this part of Dawkins' speech out of context claiming that "Dawkins now believes that a good case can be made for deism", which Dawkins refuted in his conference in Atlanta, describing Lennox as insincere.[49][50]
But what are people to do when faced with the information that we are, well, screwed? It is definitely in our interest to confront the true nature of the challenge, but then we owe it to everyone involved to face it, and then act.
Let's begin with a sense of the problem. Imagine that one day your bank or telephone company puts all of your transaction or phone records up on a Web site for the world to see. Imagine, more realistically, that the company without your permission simply sells your records to another company, for use in the latter's marketing efforts. A broad consensus would agree that posting to the Web site is undesirable. Many people would also object to the sale of personal information without the customer's permission.
Assuming that there can be significant problems in the protection of personal information, the next question is to ask what institutions in society should be relied upon to address such problems. This paper examines the chief institutions for protecting personal information. One institutional solution is to rely on the market. The basic idea is that the reputation and sales of companies will suffer if they offend customers' desires about protecting privacy. An opposite institutional approach would rely on government enforcement. The basic idea is that enforcement of mandatory legal rules would deter companies from abusing people's privacy.
The structure of the paper is as follows. Throughout the paper, in order to make the analysis easier to follow, examples will be drawn from a hypothetical "Internet Commerce Association" (ICA), whose members sell products over the Internet. Part I lays out the pure market and pure government enforcement models for protecting privacy, showing how either markets or government could in theory assure the desirable level of protection for personal information. Part II highlights the important market failures and government failures that make it unlikely that either markets or government, acting alone, will do as good a job as we would like of achieving both privacy and other social goals such as efficiency.
Market failure can be defined with respect to either the human rights or contractual approaches to the protection of personal information. Under the human rights approach, the goal is to protect individuals' right to privacy according to the moral theory that defines the right. A pure market model will fail to the extent that it protects privacy less well than is desirable under the moral theory. Under the contractual approach, the primary goal is to understand what well-informed parties would agree to, if there were no costly hurdles to their reaching an agreement. A pure market model will fail to the extent that it protects privacy less well than these parties would have agreed to, if they were fully informed and had some equality of bargaining power. The focus of the discussion here will be on market failure under the contractual approach.5
The cost and ineffectiveness of monitoring logically leads to over-disclosure of private information. Consider the incentives facing a company that acquires private information. That company gains the full benefit of using the information, notably in its own marketing efforts or in the fee it receives when it sells the information to third parties. The company, however, does not suffer the full losses from disclosure of private information. Because of imperfect monitoring, customers often will not learn of that use. They will not be able to discipline the company efficiently in the marketplace for its less-than-optimal privacy practices. Because the company internalizes the gains from using the information, but can externalize a significant share of the losses, it will have a systematic incentive to over-use private information. In terms of the contract approach, companies will have an incentive to use private information even where the customers would not have freely bargained for such use.
Industry will incur a variety of costs in complying with the government regulation. It would not be accurate, however, to say that all costs incurred by industry are a measure of governmental failure. Where privacy rules are well drafted, the government regulatory system will have net benefits compared to a system without regulation. That is, the gains resulting from compliance with the regulations will outweigh the costs incurred by the company in molding its behavior to the regulation. For regulation of ICA members, a particular disclosure rule might have relatively small costs to industry, such as the cost of placing the privacy disclosure forms on their Web site. The rule might also have relatively large benefits to consumers, such as if the disclosure enables a significant number of customers to choose a level of privacy protection that they prefer. In considering this sort of net-beneficial rule, governmental failure arises to the extent that a different rule would have even lower compliance costs for industry or even greater benefits for consumers.8
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