Pop Quiz
March 27th, 2007 by Vicki Baker1. Consider the following statement:
“some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them….”
Sam Harris, The End of Faith, 2004 W.W. Norton & Co. (p. 53)
This statement is:
a. Completely true and self-evident. The sooner we can make a list of these dangerous propositions, and start killing people for believing them, the better.
b. Perhaps true, but completely irresponsible, given the reality of who is in charge of the largest stockpile of weapons in the world today.
c. Completely counter to the principles of the Enlightenment and the concept of freedom of conscience enshrined in our Constitution.
d. Ethics aside, it begs the question whether killing individuals for holding certain beliefs is a good way to rid the world of those beliefs.
d2. Not really representative of Harris’s views; there’s a lot of other stuff in the book that is very uplifting and inspiring.
e. A kind of weird zen koan, because it is a mirror image of the type of proposition Harris believes it may be ethical to kill people for believing.
f. A statement that is superficially provocative, yet reflective of conventional wisdom (when applied to Islam). Guaranteed to ensure lots of book sales, talk show appearances and speaker gigs
g. Any combination of the above.
h. None of the above.
Give a brief statement in support of your conclusion.
2. Compare and contrast Harris’ statement with this one:
“Some people are so dangerous that it is definitely unethical to sell them weapons. “
-me
What are the implications for US policy?
Note: Participation in the quiz is voluntary and will not affect your final grade.
March 27th, 2007 at 5:53 pm
My answer is d. The best solution is to kill Sam Harris, for having this horrible thought. Actually, isn’t this what war is, killing other people because of their/your beliefs?
March 27th, 2007 at 9:33 pm
Consider a religious Fundamentalist, whose proposition it is that all the people on her plane “must die a fiery death” with her, as well as the people on the ground where she plans to aim it, once she breaks into the cockpit.
I think it “MAY even be ethical” to use lethal force (kill) to stop this person from breaking down the cockpit door. Further, I think most rational people, in the post 911 world, would agree, Professor Baker.
March 28th, 2007 at 7:29 am
(h) None of the above. Killing another person is always unethical and evil. No matter what the circumstances.
In that situation, Ben, killing that fundamentalist would be an evil action. But give me a gun, put me there and I would do it, to save the other people on the plane and at the target from being killed. And for the rest of my life, I would have to deal with the deep-seated knowledge that I had done an irrevocably evil action in order to prevent a worse evil action from taking place. The lesser of two evils is still evil.
March 28th, 2007 at 7:33 am
Killing people for their beliefs has a long history. Google “martyr.” Putting so much value on a belief that one would kill one of those holding it is a sure sign that said belief is powerful. E.G: The death of MLK was the final nail in the segregation coffin.
But this is sidestepping the question of ethics in favor of practicality. Of course, in the Darwinian sense, these are siblings. Also, this response is only considering the first of the 2 provided “d” responses.
March 28th, 2007 at 11:24 am
Whoops, thanks for pointing out the typo. I changed the second d to d2.
Ben’s scenario of the hijacker presupposes that a crime has been committed - the hijacker has a weapon on a plane. Normal rules of law enforcement can be applied, though disrupting the networks that train and arm suicide bombers would be more effective.
What Harris is advocating here is the death penalty for thoughtcrime, not actual crime. The majority of people in certain countries feel that suicide attacks on civilian targets can be justified. Is it ethical to kill them for holding this belief? Or is there some better way to influence these belief-holders?
March 28th, 2007 at 8:42 pm
Here is the entire passage…
Excerpt from Sam Harris, The End of Faith
I don’t want good ol’ Sam to get thrown under the bus here, I don’t think he is advocating, just observing. Further, I think the term “ethical” often means different things to different folks. For example, *veal farmers* probably have a slightly different definition of *ethical treament* of animals than your average veterinarian.
March 28th, 2007 at 9:04 pm
“normal rules of law enforcement… disrupting the networks that train and arm suicide bombers”
As far as I know, these “normal…disruptions” commonly include firing guided-missiles at Jihad youth training sites. Or were you thinking along the lines of knocking on the door of Bin-Laden’s cave with a copy of the Book of Mormon and a smile?
March 28th, 2007 at 11:25 pm
I had struggled with the question posed by this post, but the additional context provided by Ben helped out.
Harris has given himself a big hedge in the quote. “it MAY BE ethical . . .” I’m trying to imagine what Harris himself would say in response to Vicki’s post. I suspect that it would be “h.”
I was somewhat tempted by the first half of statement “a,” but not the second half, because being convinced that “it MAY BE ethical . . .” doesn’t necessarily dictate that one should actually start killing anyone.
Proposition “b” is also tempting, but the second half of the statement might not be an important factor.
Proposition “c” didn’t work for me because I could imagine someone who is intent on (and proficient at) spreading the type of hate that could result in irreparable harm to millions. I suspect this is what Harris has in mind—someone who plans to do much more than just think dangerous thoughts.
I can buy the first “d.” I believe in the free marketplace of ideas. I don’t believe that there really are ideas that can be characterized in the abstract as that “dangerous.” Let good ideas beat bad ideas.
I’m close to agreeing with the second “d,” though the Harris quote might indeed be a logical spin-off of Harris’ writings as a whole. If there’s a dangerous meme on the loose and it’s likely (if promulgated) to pull down all of civilization, can one really do nothing? I’m not suggesting that there is any sure-footed way to recognize whether an idea could be this dangerous or whether the person thinking that dangerous thought could really effectively “launch” it.
I can agree with “e.”
What about “f”? Yeah, probably.
The bottom line for me, however, is whether Harris is running a thought experiment versus suggesting pragmatic advice. I suspect that he would say the former only.
As far as Question #2, it raises that same point about the extent to which we’re thinking of a person merely thinking dangerous thoughts versus someone who plans to act on such thoughts. I think that we should always act on pragmatic grounds—what are the real life consequences? As I already indicated, I don’t think proposition #1 is meant as a pragmatic rule, whereas Question 2 is (and should be).
March 29th, 2007 at 5:28 pm
Harris gets more interesting to me the more I read him.
There’s a large body of literature in anthropology and psychology on religious experience, starting at least since Wm. James’ “The Varieties of Religious Experience” - yet Harris makes very little reference to it. He apparently studied Buddhism and Eastern traditions for 11 years - on his own, not in an academic setting - and was a bodyguard for the Dalai Lama for a brief stint. (according to an article from the Washington Post which he reprints on his website: http://www.samharris.org/site/full_text/atheist-evangelist1/)
Yet the ethical insights of Buddhism - the idea of interbeing, avoidance of returning evil for evil, seem to have left him completely unmoved. In passages like this and other s where he emphasizes the the need to “shed blood in a war of ideas,” or justifies the use of torture, he seems to be totally in the sway of what theologian Walter Wink has called “The Myth of Redemptive Violence:”
“The Babylonian myth is far from finished. It is as universally present and earnestly believed today as at any time in its long and bloody history. It is the dominant myth in contemporary America…
The psychodynamics of the TV cartoon or comic book are marvelously simple: children identify with the good guy so that they can think of themselves as good. This enables them to project out onto the bad guy their own repressed anger, violence, rebelliousness, or lust, and then vicariously to enjoy their own evil by watching the bad guy initially prevail. This segment of the show – the “Tammuz” element, where the hero suffers – actually consumes all but the closing minutes, allowing ample time for indulging the violent side of the self.
When the good guy finally wins, viewers are then able to reassert control over their own inner tendencies, repress them, and re-establish a sense of goodness without coming to any insight about their own inner evil. The villain’s punishment provides catharsis; one forswears the villain’s ways and heaps condemnation on him in a guilt-free orgy of aggression. ”
http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/content/cpt/article_060823wink.shtml
Disbelieving in specific “myths” does not mean that our minds are free from mythic narrative structures which permeate our culture. Calling this re-telling of the myth a “thought experiment” doesn’t excuse it in my opinion.
Also he seems such an idealist for a materialist. The idea that religious belief is THE motivator for phenomena like suicide bombers, for example. It may be necessary, but it is not sufficient. Yet people like Scott Atran who offer cultural, psychological, anthroplogical, or historical explanations for this type of behavior using real data, he dismisses as being “soft” on religion. By zeroing in on the one aspect of this complicated issue that we in the West have the least control over, rather than exploring other solutions to Islamofascism, he does indeed ensure that we will be spilling blood for many years to come.
March 29th, 2007 at 8:47 pm
Dawkins gently touches on why spiritual training is not necessarily required to make informed decisions about the natural world. I imagine the defense would work just as well for Harris too…
http://podcast.timesonline.co.uk/serve.php/872/oxfordfestivalricharddawkinspart1.mp3
http://podcast.timesonline.co.uk/serve.php/873/oxfordfestivalricharddawkinspart2.mp3
It was music to my ears when Dawkins so eloquently explained how religion and science do not mix. Saying how science has made bold theories about how the mind works to create grandiose ideas of such as God and Unicorns, whereas religion has made equally bold claims, HOWEVER these have consistently been proven FALSE. Further, science is willing to make adjustments based on discoveries, whereas religion lacks the ability to be modified (although Bart Erhman might beg to differ).
I believe that things like *spirituality* and faith can be boiled down (sorry, gross metaphor) to chemical reactions, horomones, biological processes, and other NATURAL phenomena.
March 30th, 2007 at 10:59 am
I’m not saying Sam Harris needs to get religion in order to be a moral person. I just observed that he seemed to have absorbed very little of the ethical teachings of the religious tradition he did study for 11 years, according to the Washington Post article. Also that he’s just as likely to be influenced by his own cultural baggage as anyone else when making sweeping generalizations not based on empirical evidence. Even scientists shouldn’t believe everything they think.
March 30th, 2007 at 11:44 am
Ben suggests that one can reduce faith to an analysis of its elements. This is missing the target by some orders (or dimensions). A living cell can be defined in terms of its component chemical elements, but this is a poor definition. Add a dimension to get the construction of molecules, some of which are complex. Add another to describe the interactions between molecules, and another to describe the overall behavior of the parts of the cell, the organelles. Each level requires a different approach to observation and understanding. Add another dimension to handle the way the cell interacts with others. You are now almost up to multicellular creatures.
You may note that, by the time you get to the 3rd or 4th order, the actual chemical elements are not quite so important. Case in point: Some thousands of species on this planet have green, copper-based blood. You’ve probably intentionally eaten some of them, without realizing the distinction. I’d bet money that some of them live in your house. There are yet fewer others whose blood is neither ferric nor cuprous.
But we’ve drifted from the thesis of this post: Examining whether a belief held should be a sentence passed.
March 30th, 2007 at 1:25 pm
I doubt that the copper blooded organisms I ate for supper have developed “faith” as we have. I have yet to be convinced that my emotions, feelings, and spiritual beliefs are not just chemical reactions and dopamines hitting my neurotransmitters, synapses, brain lesions etc. If we did start to reduce the brain to it’s lesser components, we would immediately lose things like personality, vision, hearing, emotions, and faith. Therefore the brain chemistry/psychology/physiology is what I look to for answers about why we act the way we do. (This also envelopes things like “religious evolution”). Maybe I am grasping at air here? However most of what I have read seems to point toward a biological (as opposed to cultural) basis for any human experiences, whether spiritual or not, which have yet to be fully explained.
While not perfect, it is still the only conclusion that my mind comes to, based on my current knowledge. To be more clear, I am saying that faith has a biological/chemical/metabolic/scientific basis, not a spiritual one. So maybe my original assertion should have been more along the lines of “I believe that things like spirituality and faith can be attributed to natural (scientific) processes, even if the exact science is still being examined”.
Here, this guy apparently knew what I was trying to say all along…
http://retina.anatomy.upenn.edu/~rob/natspir.html
Oh joy! Looks like I found some homework for the class (myself included)…
http://www.naturalism.org/faithsci.htm
March 30th, 2007 at 2:50 pm
Ben: I’m not arguing that there is a supernatural basis to faith in the supernatural. I’m suggesting that such faith is a by-product of sociological evolution. An intellectual tonsil that may have had some useful function, but it is now more of a hindrance than help to the progress of our kind. Superstition institutionalized, petrified in our social matrix.
It is as useless to try to describe faith in terms of neurotransmitters as it is to describe a cell by an inventory of its atoms. One cannot understand the life cycle of a forest if one is determined to define it by its individual trees. Nor can you if you are ignorant of said trees, but it is an issue of scale.
I regularly suggest that everyone arguing on this blog should read Boyer’s “Religion Explained”, an anthropological look at the evolution of faith.
March 30th, 2007 at 4:56 pm
Okay I see that there are more variables here than I could have imagined, athough I knew there were already plenty. At faith’s basest level (whatever that may be), I imagine science is still very involved. As we move into consciousness, other things start kicking in, like the morphology of the organ itself, pathways, ways of creating thoughts, brain activity. Then even to things like instincts, id, ego, folktales, superstitions, stories, experiences, genetics, environment. Ya I kind of get it, I think. Do I still need to turn in my homework?
March 31st, 2007 at 6:07 am
Ah, grasshoppah, when you have understood the difference between reading the owner’s manual, and learning how to drive the car, you have taken the first step to the path to enlightenment.
April 2nd, 2007 at 3:02 pm
Anybody have any spiritual gems to refute these fine gentlemen, or do we all agree?
Dawkins on Science and Faith…
“If you accept the idea that God intervenes in the physical world, don’t there have to be physical mechanisms for that to happen? Therefore, doesn’t this become a question for science?”
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2007/04/hiding_from_religious_reality.php
Harris on the Bible…
Well, there’s clearly a spectrum of confidence in the text. I mean, there’s the “This is literally true, nothing even gets figuratively interpreted,” and then there’s the “This is just the best book we have, written by the smartest people who have ever lived, and it’s still legitimate to organize our lives around it to the exclusion of other books.” Anywhere on that spectrum I have a problem, because in my mind the Bible and the Qur’an are just books, written by human beings. There are sections of the Bible that I think are absolutely brilliant and poetically unrivaled, and there are sections of the Bible which are the sheerest barbarism, yet profess to prescribe a divinely mandated morality—where do I start? Books like Leviticus and Deuteronomy and Exodus and First and Second Kings and Second Samuel—half of the kings and prophets of Israel would be taken to The Hague and prosecuted for crimes against humanity if these events took place in our own time.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17889148/site/newsweek/
June 2nd, 2007 at 6:45 am
H. Sam Harris continues to prove himself self-refuting, and therefore, irrelevant. If it were morally possible for an atheist to be a hypocrite, he certainly would be one of the best.
For the atheistic evolutionist, is should be clear that war is merely a survival mechanism to acquire resrouces from a weaker opponent through violence. This is what natural selection has trained us for … so we cannot condemn it on any level. If the USA is in Iraq for oil, then good.
If we are selling weapons to Pol Pot, Hitler, or any number of “evil” men, for political positioning or cash or whatever we think we will gain, it cannot be wrong. It is simply an action, because for Harris and other atheists, there is really no such thing as evil. Indeed, Harris should know that the religious mind is the unavoidable result of evolution, and therefore is a “good” thing for survival. Which means, according to him, he should kill himself … because the prevelance of a belief in a god (recognizing that atheism is a religion) has met with such great success, he might need to die for promoting atheism. He is morally retarded, and his atheistic faith promotes unintellectual mumbo-jumbo.
June 2nd, 2007 at 6:58 am
Evo’s lost and gave up on the debate years ago. They have resorted to name calling and labeling the opposition as evil demons, worthy of death. They rely on strong arm tactics to protect their religion. Evo’s are any thing but, disciplined minded people. They are the worst dogmatic, fundamentalist, extremist, on earth! They have returned to their gorilla mental roots. To take over by brute force. Killing or enslaving God’s children. They want the planet of the apes!
But we know the rest of the story!
June 2nd, 2007 at 12:30 pm
“If the USA is in Iraq for oil, then good.”
I think that kind of sums up our differences. I have learned to accept a worldly view, where other humans, such as those in “foreign” countries, come under the umbrella of peace and harmony. These “others” are actually just like us, if you think hard enough, please at least give it a try.
June 2nd, 2007 at 12:51 pm
Gee, Anthony L., you’ve got an extremely narrow view evolution, certainly nothing like the view of any serious evolutionary biologist or psychologist. The most striking fact about highly evolved species is that they are rampantly cooperative. Is there antagonism and competition? Absolutely. But to focus only on the strife is to miss out on the ubiquitous examples of collaboration. It is so obvious that huge disputes rage on the proper level of selection, some (David Sloan Wilson and, recently, E. O. Wilson) advocate group selection. To be a serious evolutionist, one simply can’t be obsessed with the idea of “dog versus dog.”
Further, your claim that atheists are immoral is pure bigotry. I can guarantee you there is no evidence that atheists live less moral lifestyles than Believers. Check out prison populations, divorce rates or any other indicator and you will come up with nothing to substantiate your position.
On the other hand, open your eyes to the religious fundamentalist miscreants that currently hold power at the White House. They say things like “In want it, therefore it’s mine” when they eye things like Iraqi oil. Is that based on a high moral principle? Is that principle a principle on which people can rely in order to get along with each other?
Truly, you don’t need to believe in God to believe in the golden rule.
June 6th, 2007 at 11:48 am
In response to Ben’s
[Dawkins on Science and Faith…
“If you accept the idea that God intervenes in the physical world, don’t there have to be physical mechanisms for that to happen? Therefore, doesn’t this become a question for science?”
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2007/04/hiding_from_religious_reality.php
Surely this is just strict-materialist talk. Dawkin’s is here assuming a God confined within the material world. A super-natural God transcends the material, therefore doesn’t need a physical mechanism to operate on the physical.
June 6th, 2007 at 10:13 pm
Okay, maybe that’s why no miracle have been filmed or documented (by science). We aren’t talking about pancakes that look like *Moses* either. A God that doesn’t interact with Earth or Humans because he is “supernatural”. I like where you are going, but you might enjoy being atheist even more!
June 7th, 2007 at 6:05 am
I’m perfectly willing to accept “Moses’” definition of a God that is “super-natural”, i.e: Doesn’t interact with the natural, measurable, material universe.
Of course, this definition implies that the authors of the Bible couldn’t have been contacted by this God any more than anything measurable might have been.
If this God interacts with the physical universe, then there must be a mechanism that would be provable by science.
One difficulty is explaining this to people who believe that thought (or the spirit) is a supernatural force, and therefore not subject to the laws of physics. God, they can claim, interacts though the spirit.
February 3rd, 2008 at 12:59 pm
This statement is very similar to what church authorities thought during the Inquisition of the middle ages. They believed that the heresies of that time were a threat to their entire culture, which is partially correct because of one specific group of heretics called Albigensians who believed that the physical body is bad and were against the propogation of the human race. Therefor, it is very logical for them to want to extinguish these beliefs as soon as possible. However, it was mishandled and got out of control.
It is true that some propositions are very dangerous, but they are only dangerous if acted upon. Everyone should be free to believe what they want, but if those beliefs lead to the harming of others or their property, then yes, they should be punished according to their crime and that includes death. The radical Jihadists are allowed to believe that westerners are evil and should die and what-not. Once thay act upon these beliefs, they shoud be punished. In this aspect, I support the war on terror because these radicals have killed innocent people and should be put to death for it, anyone else who supports them should also be punished.
I believe this statement is too extreme because of the fact that if we did put this into use, it would get out of hand and innocents would be killed.