j a c k *

Absolutes of Innocence...

Like all fundamentalist ideologies, the American right is guided by moral absolutes.  Abortion is murder; homosexuality is evil; taxes and big government are always bad; terrorists hate America, etc.  To be able to support such absolutes, the faith-based epistemology has to be rooted in rigid and precisely defined categories.  For example, for the fundamentalist everyone is either a man or a woman, and the difference between the two can be clearly delineated.  The birth of natural transgender individuals is therefore understood not as a normal human state, but as a birth defect that should be corrected.

Often moral discriminations are based on changes over time.  For example, small children shouldn't drink alcohol whereas adults can.  For the fundamentalist these too have to be honed down to exactly discernible moments.  As I have previously argued, some of the resistance to gay marriage is the idea that the marriage event legitimizes sex.  Sex is completely wrong before the priest says "man and wife," and perfectly OK after (although not immediately after, of course).  Likewise opposition to abortion is based on finding a moment in time that can mark the start of life.  Since conception can be treated for all intents and purposes as instantaneous, unlike the long gestation period afterword, it acts as the all-important dividing point between inflexible moral categories.

It turns out, however, that nature doesn't actually have any of the hard boundaries that we as humans tend to perceive.  Apparently stable objects are fluid and ever-changing.  Species blend gradually from one to another, populations and genes overlapping in complex ways with infinite possible intermediate forms.  Science has even broken down the seemingly paradoxical distinction between waves and particles, and at last the Cartesian citadel -- the boundary between mind and matter -- is starting to show cracks.  Our best ontology is statistical.  No wonder the fundamentalist right hates science.

Liberal morality is, as one might expect, more reality-based.  It takes into account that reality has wrinkles and exceptions, and works instead to find a balance between a set of complementary principles.  These principles, developed carefully over time, may at times conflict over specific issues in which case judgment is required.  These conflicts may result in adjustment and revision, particularly as we discover new knowledge and develop new sensibilities.  But this is not, as Pope Ratzy recently opined, a "dictatorship of relativism" which "recognizes nothing definite and leaves only ones own ego and ones own desires as the final measure."

The so-called "culture of life" we hear so much about rests on the absolute and sharply defined boundary between that which is human life and that which is not.  That which is, is a priori valuable and must be preserved at all cost.  Abortion and euthanasia are clearly outlawed under such an ethic, since they destroy human life in some, albeit limited, form.  But what of capital punishment?  Clearly it also destroys human life, and the Catholic Church and the new pope have taken the consistent position of opposing state-sponsored homicide.

And yet, within the uniquely American version of this life cult, the virtue of capital punishment is an article of faith.  This presents a significant opportunity for those who would argue for liberal morality and Enlightenment ethics not only to emphasize an obvious inconsistency in the religious right's so-called morality, but to show the functional superiority of our supposedly "relative" system of ethics.

Judicial punishments of all kinds must advance justice.  The systems used to deal with criminal actions derives from what I like to think of as "the four R's."

1. Removal.  The first priority must be to get the perpetrator away from his potential victims.

2. Restitution.  Any harm that has been done should be undone as fully as possible.  Damage should be paid for, and anything stolen should be returned.

3. Rehabilitation.  The perpetrator should be, if possible, allowed to return to a useful, positive role in society.

4. Restraint.  The punishments for crimes should be effective at preventing future crimes of the same type.  (This is more commonly called "deterrence" by those without an overweening drive for alliteration.)

These principles are not "relative" in any way.  I would use the same standards judging how we as a nation deal with criminals as I would to how historical groups or other cultures do, and I would certainly apply the principles uniformly regardless of the criminal or the nature of the crime.  The analysis is simply not one of black and white, but of shades of grey.  We can evaluate capital punishment against these measures and see where it contributes to justice and where it does not.

1. Removal.  This is entirely a function of how quickly police and other law enforcement first responders act to interceded in situations which could be dangerous for either party.  It's possible that in self-defense some alleged perpetrators may be killed, and the justice system must decide on a case by case basis if the use of lethal force was justified, but the police are there to stop crimes, not execute people.

2. Restitution.  It's not possible, no matter how many fines are paid, nor how many humiliations the murderer suffers, to return the dead to life.  Executing the person responsible makes no difference in this regard.

3. Rehabilitation.  Capital punishment has nothing to offer in terms of returning an ex-con to civilian life.  It is actually quite counterproductive for that goal.

4. Restraint.  The best argument that capital punishment advocates can make is that at least they deterred one person from committing a second crime.  Beyond that there is very little evidence that killing killers actually stops other people from killing.  Everyone knows that murder is wrong and that if they are caught they will be punished.  No empirical study supports the hypothesis that the threat of death, relative to other types of punishment, acts as a deterrent for potential murders.

Everyone has a natural desire for revenge.  When we have been wronged we fervently wish to see the one responsible suffer in return, perhaps in an ironically symmetric way to the suffering they caused us.  But one 'R' that's not on this list is Retribution.  While it may be a normal urge, vengeance is not the province of a state system of justice.  While "tit for tat" may be employed in everyday social interactions, it cannot be enshrined as the model for a justice industry.  The state must look out for the welfare of all its citizens, so we have to devise a more modern set of principles.

There is a final principle we must address -- the 8th amendment's prohibition against "cruel and unusual punishment" (and "excessive fines" may also apply here, if you consider life valuable).  Given that capital punishment does little to further the purpose of justice, and may even undermine it, it's clear that this type of punishment is egregious and unnecessary.  It serves only vengeance, and vengeance is always cruel.

The right wing obsession with the death penalty is only the policy tip of a giant iceberg of violence.  You don't have to wade very deeply into the far right's publications and discussion boards to see it.  You find threats of violence against doctors, threats of violence against judges, defenses of torture, apologetics for internment camps, even prayers to God to inflict nasty diseases on prominent liberals.  What justifies the viciousness of the "culture of life?"  It hinges on guilt and innocence.  Another knife-edged, black or white distinction, innocent lives are to be preserved and protected at all costs, while the guilty deserve death or worse.  Recently for the extreme right, more and more people are getting on their naughty list.

But this absolutism leads to its own contradiction.  If executing the innocent is an absolute evil, and if the system of capital punishment sends even a single innocent person to their death, then the entire system itself must be evil.  With the wave after wave of new evidence showing significant numbers of convicts on death row have been falsely convicted, anyone who takes their commitment to preserving life seriously should be appalled.  Their own insistence on absolutes puts the right in this moral bind, already one with divides Catholics and evangelical Protestants.  Capital punishment and the state execution of the innocent can be a wedge issue inside the pro-life movement, and can work to split the Republican base.  We should be exploiting it.

The 8th amendment taken in broad terms declares America to be a merciful nation, not a vengeful one.  It counsels that if we can lessen punishments or treat the accused with greater compassion, we should.  This is a noble sentiment for a great country.  Within the bounds of the social goals and the ethical principles of justice, capital punishment is excessive and unnecessary, and should be abolished.

- jack*

Bene for Benedict...

BOULDER, Colo. -- The remains of up to 1,000 fetuses, mostly from a prominent abortion clinic, will be buried Sunday by a Roman Catholic church that has quietly received ashes without the clinic's knowledge for years.

Sacred Heart of Mary Church told The Denver Post this week it would stage the ceremony to mark the 32nd anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the U.S. Supreme Court case that legalized abortion in 1973.

Not CNN

With a new pope who's not shy about politicizing the pulpit, I wanted to revisit this story from January.  But my CNN link was bad.  Sometime between when I last looked at this article and now, the story was purged.  Perhaps they have a policy of deleting stories older than 3 months, you tell me.  Interestingly the Yahoo News link on this site has also expired.

The text above comes from a local news site which sadly has very little of the deferential, even reverential tone of the original CNN article.  The "mainstream" reporters from CNN appeared to feel that if something was done by Christians it was worthy of respect.  The local reporter took a more typical if lazy approach, reporting on who did what and quoting a person on each side of the issue without comment on the meaning or validity of either statement.  Ideally the reporter would attempt to answer the "why" behind the story in a useful way, for example pointing out how this is part of a published strategy by the pro-life movement to get fetal remains classified as human for the purposes of disposal.  It's just another wedge to lever early fetuses to the same legal standing as fully-formed people.

Here's a different way the story could be played:

BOULDER, Colo. -- A radical Christian sect has for years been using fetal remains in its private religious rites.  This Sunday the Sacred Heart of Mary Church intends to perform a ceremony using up to 1,000 fetuses in a grisly publicity stunt to mark the 32nd anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the U.S. Supreme Court case that legalized abortion in 1973.

People living near the church were shocked to find that human tissue had been acquired for religious observances.  "I knew they had a monument to the unborn, which is weird enough," said one neighbor, "but why did they take fetuses to pray over from people who didn't even know?  That seems medieval and obsessive."

The remains were obtained secretly from Boulder Abortion Clinic without the knowledge of its director, Dr. Warren Hern.  An outraged Hern promised to investigate who was responsible for misusing medical wastes and vowed that it would not happen again.

How would Christians react if a pagan religious sect had worked out a clandestine deal to get access to fetuses, and then used those materials as part of their rituals?  One could imagine the gnashing of teeth over the impropriety of such a practice, and it would be justified.  The only problem is that the evangelical right cannot see that the same arguments should apply to them.  The simple formula "how would you feel if that happened to you?" is a useful moral heuristic, but it has to be tempered with careful considerations of the differences between the real situation and the analogy, as well as the difference between what's right and what feels right.

Religions are allowed to handle dead bodies.  Historically the state has granted churches the right to dispose of the deceased, under proper licensing constraints, out of respect for the wishes of those belonging to the church to have the burial rites of their choosing.  The only difference really between a fringe cult and a mainstream church is that the latter has built up the implicit trust to handle the materials in a respectful and proper way as defined by the standards of the community.

But that could change.

If Catholic institutions like Our Mary of the Sacred Bleeding Virgin Mary Heart Church start abusing their license to handle human remains to make blatantly political points, perhaps that power should be managed more carefully.  After all, the right is granted only because the deceased specifically asked to be disposed of by their church.  Obviously none of the fetuses asked to be buried by this random sect, and more importantly none of the mothers asked these remains to be handled by the church.  We would not, for example, think it proper to allow a Catholic church to bury a dead Jew against their wishes.  Or for a mosque to hold services for a dead Catholic in absence of specific wishes one way or another.

Ah, but I've fallen into the wing-nut trap!  The rules of normal funerals don't apply since legally these are not people.  Fetuses from abortions are technically medical waste, and although subject to regulations about handling and treatment, they don't legally deserve the same respect as humans who might have wishes or family affiliations.  The wing-nuts hope to put me in the queasy bind of arguing either that fetuses have rights that need to be respected or that these wacky parishioners can do anything they want with abortion ashes, up to and including mixing them with coffee and drinking them with breakfast.

Sorry, it won't wash.  First of all, all discarded tissues that come from a specific individual are subject to privacy rights.  Medical professionals can no more give away fetal tissues to a third party than they could conscionably auction off your appendix.  Second, the right-wing God on Earth -- G. W. Bush -- has already laid the legal groundwork for fetal tissue to be treated differently from other tissues.  If science labs with genuine humanitarian goals cannot get these materials for carefully regulated study, then surely random private groups can't get them by stealth to satisfy their perverse theological imperatives.

For myself I don't care what happens to my body after I die.  Wrap me in newspaper and throw me in a ditch if that seems like the most prudent way to dispose of my carcass.  It won't bother me, I'll be dead.  It probably will matter to my survivors, however, and I expect that they will want to do something symbolic to mark my passing as is their right.  But please, don't ever let crazy religious zealots use my body -- dead or just brainless, my whole body or just my spleen or any other part -- as some kind of insane political football.  I wouldn't wish that on any part of me, or any part of anyone else.

If this is the kind of thing New Pope will endorse, perhaps people will get tired of the constant, brazen over-assertiveness and wish for a return to the subtleties of Pope Classic.

- jack* 

Moral Machine...

Suppose you have a set of cards, each with a letter on one side and a number on the other.  There are four cards on the table in front of you with the following showing: C, 3, F, 7.  If we demand that any card with an F on one side has a 3 on the other, which cards do you have to turn over to assure that it's true?

Many people get this wrong.  They know they have to turn over the F because if it doesn't have a 3 on the back then the requirement fails.  But some also flip the 3 looking for another F.  In fact the other card to turn is the 7, since an F there would also fail.  The value on the back of the C and 3 cards don't matter.  Deceptively simple tests like this make pseudo-intellectuals say arrogant things about how ordinary people can't reason.  In fact everyone has a powerful ability to reason, sometimes intuitive and untrained but nonetheless efficient and affective.  Given a few nudges in the right direction these natural talents can make hard problems seem like child's play.

The puzzle above above can be transformed into a logically identical problem that everyone can solve without even thinking.  Suppose you're in a bar and you can see either how old someone is or what they are drinking.  The four people you see are: a root beer drinker, an old man, a whiskey drinker, and a teenager.  The rule is that if someone is drinking alcohol they must be 21 or older.  Which people do you have to "turn over" (either checking what they are drinking or checking IDs) to assure the rule is being followed?  The answer is obvious: the whiskey drinker and the teenager.  The other two are irrelevant.

People who mistakenly turn over the 3 in the card-turning puzzle would never dream of asking the old man what he's drinking in the bar, even though the two actions are logically identical.  The problem is that the human brain is not a generalized problem-solving device.  Instead it consists of what neuroscientists call "modules" which, while very powerful, are fairly specialized in their abilities.  The trick is getting the problem into a form which allows the specialized modules to operate.

Notoriously lazy thinkers, mathematicians always look for shortcuts to turn hard problems into easy ones.  For example, proving that a particular type of operation is NP-complete (difficult for computers) is hard to do in general, but a standard shortcut is to transform the problem into one that has already been proven in the laborious way by someone else.  Often this is something from graph theory, like node coloring or "the traveling salesman," since these provide convenient visual metaphors informing the construction.  The human visual cortex has remarkable computational ability, able to detect complex patterns and relationships even in imagined scenes.  Being able to visualize a math problem is often the first step toward solving it.

Visual stimuli come at us in real time and have to be resolved quickly.  We cannot carefully and rationally consider if the outline we detect is a lady or a tiger; we sense it instantly and feel the answer in our gut.  Moral problems have the same kind of urgency.  If we wait too long to decide if we have been gypped, or if we react with insufficient force, the moment passes and we lose the opportunity to make an appropriate response.  Given the time-sensitivity of detection and response, it makes sense that we have brain "circuits" dedicated to those functions.

Among the obvious modules for vision, movement and language, the evidence indicates that we have an innate capacity for social morality -- in particular detecting cheaters.

This is illustrated by the example.  Starting from a purely symbolic problem, it was first transformed into a visual one (card flipping) which made it somewhat easier.  The real gain was made by transforming the abstract puzzle into a question about social conformance.  Given a reasonable rule that everyone has to follow and a set of examples, we can easily determine if the rule is being broken or not.

Many of these transformations are built into our culture.  The golden rule, for example, can be thought of as a simple heuristic -- a problem-solving tool -- for transforming a hard problem into an easier one.  It's hard to know, in any given situation, the right way to treat another person.  The golden rule proposes that instead of trying to solve it directly we transform it into an easier one.  Just imagine yourself in the same situation and see what you would want, then do something at least that good for the other person.  It's not foolproof, but it provides a kind of minimum standard of behavior that even small children can readily solve.  For adults with well-formed opinions about what we think is right for ourselves, the golden rule acts as a test of decency that rises with our abilities to think out the consequences of our own actions.

We have been told again and again since November, albeit by parrot-like pundits, that the GOP is the party that appeals to people with strong morals.  As evidence we are presented a small handful of fringe social issues.  These have some emotional power, especially among a specific subculture who have been perverted to respond to these issues and very little else.  But the moral equation has been overloaded and stretched to incredulity.  In fact the Democratic platform is far more genuinely moral across the broad spectrum of political policy issues.  Turning the tables on the GOP, it appears, may be a matter of transforming the perception of the raw inputs in a way that people's natural moral computations can operate correctly.

Morality, like all other processes of the human nervous system, is based on computation.  Computation requires taking what we perceive and casting it into the types of problems that we are good at solving.  There's been a lot of focus in politics lately in trying to appeal to voter's emotions.  Positive campaigns appeals to their hopes, negative campaigns to their fears.  I think there's enormous potential in appealing to their reason.  Not the abstract reason of logic and mathematics, but the gut-felt rationality of clear moral conclusions.  The key is providing the right heuristics for decoding the political landscape into everyday moral situations.  Not a trivial task, but one which could be perhaps a way out of a more and more intractable morass.

- jack*

Sierra High...

Last time I went downhill skiing was as a kid, let's say around 1979, which gives my efforts at skiing this last weekend something of a Rip-van-Winkle quality.  Here's a short list of things that have changed in the last 26 years:

1) Snowboards

Snowboarders are ubiquitous.  Every other person on the mountain has both feet strapped to a single board instead of two.  I must say that despite how cool any individual snowboarder manages to be, the activity itself looks quite dorky.  Especially when they unstrap one boot to limp sideways onto the lift and back to the top of the hill where they plop on their butts to do their straps up again.

On the other hand the snowboarders have the advantage in the lodge since their boots are more flexible than any downhill ski boot.  They can almost walk normally while we have to perform that characteristically awkward goosestep.

2) Lifts

The lifts are fast -- really fast.  And they carry four people instead of the two or perhaps three of my day.  The interesting things about the fast lift technology is that no one seems to worry about ganging together to share the resource.  In the old days we'd cry out "single!" and hope that another unpaired person from back in the line would come forward to get to the top sooner so we could avoid the stigma of being a lone person using a chair that could hold two.  With fast chairs (and short lines) I felt no shame taking a whole 4-wide chair to myself.

3) Equipment

The skis I had in the '70's were at least as long as me, narrow, straight and had a grove down the middle, I guess for stability.  The skis I got at the rental shop were stubby, no taller than my chest, with blobby spoon-shaped tips and perfectly flat along the bottom.  My friend told me they had a "hyperbolic" shape which would make them easier to turn.  The bindings had numeric settings which the technician simply adjusted to my weight and boot size without having to do any fiddling.

They glided across the snow like I had some kind of natural effervescence.  I skied the best I have ever done after a quarter century.  I was gawky and nonathletic in those days, and it's taken my until middle age to realize that I have some physical talents.  But could it really be me that I was really that much better after all those years of not practicing?  I blame the technology.

What hasn't changed:

1) Mountains

The Sierra Nevadas are some of the most amazingly beautiful mountains I have ever seen.  That includes the Rockies, the Alps and the Appalachians.  Some of those ranges may have a lock on sheer majesty, on certain days, but on any clear day in the Sierras you more more plain beauty than you can find in bigger or older mountain ranges in a week.  And Saturday was very, very clear.

2) Community

People still think nothing of detaching their very expensive ski equipment, leaning it against a rack or just jamming it into a snow bank, and walking into the lodge.  Somehow I figured in the 21st century there would be rows of ski lockers, or boards would have cables or chains to lock to poles like bicycles.  Not only the skis themselves, but backpacks, boots and jackets would be left unattended while their owners got a beer or ate nachos smothered in something that resembled an elastic orange polymer.  Overall the feeling continues to be one of cooperation as a community of users of a shared resource, not of competition to somehow get more enjoyment or better gear than someone else.

3) Kids

I loved the snow as a kid.  I loved playing in it, sinking into piles of unknown depth, shaping it into men or missiles.  I loved coming in from the cold to get warm and dry by the fire, watching the snow fall in cottony swirls, the fluffy drifts accumulating to soften every sharp feature and loud noise.  Although the experience of being a child is gone, I now have the opportunity to share snow with my daughter, and play and get warm and watch it fall along with her and our other friend's children.  The feeling is just as rich and pleasurable on this side of the generational divide.

- jack*

Bash, Break, Borrow, pt II...

When you start your own startup you don't get many vacations.  But here I am getting a second one in almost as many months.  Actually it's just a weekend in Tahoe for which I'm leaving on Friday, which equals a total of one day (two if you think that both weekend days should be your own) off.  Still, given the time I've spent at this since 2001 I'm starting to feel like the President, who for all the events of his 4+ years has built a legacy mostly of being the President who has spent the longest time on vacation.

Who gets to be President of the United States to spend most of their time relaxing at the ranch?  Answer: someone who doesn't care.

None of these people care about government.  Not about good government, anyway.  The things they care about -- whatever they might be -- rely on government NOT functioning in an optimal matter.  They talk down the U.S. brand.  They borrow like there's no tomorrow, and maybe there isn't -- for them.  And they trash the process itself.  Nuclear option...?  What kind of rational legislator talks about utterly demolishing their own legislative process?  We were smugly assured that when the Republicans took back the executive branch that "the adults were back in charge."  What happened to that?

It's becoming increasingly clear that we have all been acting on false premises.  We have been thinking somehow that the regime in power is trying, even if we disagree with their positions, to carry out their role as defined by the constitution.  The evidence is to the contrary.  Let's consider the most salient aspects (as suggested by S. Newberry):

The regime maintains power by bashing all opposition, in opposition to democratic ideals.  Gone are the normal process of debate and deliberation, where competing ideas and ways of thinking are subjected to public airing based on their merits or even their base emotional appeal.  Elections for the GOP today consist mostly of making fun of their opponents.  Trash talk, ridicule and one-upmanship are the key elements of strategy.  Bashing works because the bullied feel that they deserve it in some way and work to make up the difference.  The GOP is anti-democracy.

The regime breaks the normal relationship between truth and action.  Not only does debate about power become marginalized by petty personal attacks, any attempt to base policy on real measurement is also under attack as "partisan."  Ideas are rated by how much they connect to party ideology, not how well they comport with reality.  The few empirical elements of GOP policy are relegated to scripted talking points that have been focus-group tested and carefully managed to the point that they have detached from any real meaning and become free-floating sound bites that might or might not relate the policy or reality.  Breaking this association is anti-democratic again, because although truth is really global and universally accessible, it can be made powerless by redefining all truth as personal, relative and selfish.  The GOP is anti-reason.

The regime squanders the common good by borrowing against it.  This is the most vicious and perhaps the signal act of a governing party that doesn't care to govern.  Given the custody of the commonweal, they choose to exploit it.  They spend now against the full faith and credit of the U.S., with no concern about maintaining that faith or credit, nor how future generations will pay back their massive debt.  And this reveals the real goal -- to destroy.  For the advancement of the commons is the mission of Federal government.  There can be no other, for that is really the only thing that we as Americans share together.  To squander and waste and abuse the commons will, eventually, destroy the ability to govern at all.  The GOP is anti-American.

They want to stop the process of politics by merit.  They want to smash the links between measured reality and policy.  They want to mortgage America so we are helpless in the face of our creditors.  There is war in this country, and some of us are just waking up the the fact that everyone who actually lives and works here is considered the enemy.

- jack*