A couple of the leaders of the atheist blogsphere got into a dispute recently over the death of pastor Paul Jones.

It started with PZ Myers posting the blog entry, How Sad in which he wrote:

Paul Jones has died. I didn't know him, or even know about him, until his obituary was sent to me, but it's an utterly tragic life story. He was an ordained Baptist minister — there's a waste of a life right there — and his death was ironic and futile.

Hemant Mehta (a.k.a. Friendly Atheist) did not approve. In a post titled, How Sad, Indeed. He wrote:

Believing in God is not as bad as using God's name to advance your own political agenda. That doesn't mean belief in God is correct. But it doesn't imply a complete waste of time. We could all name plenty of religious people (current and historical) who have done wonderful things in the name of their God. It's petty to dismiss those good works because they were done in the name of a God we don’t believe in.

Fortunately, I have a theory of value that is perfectly applicable to these types of questions from which I can derive who (and to what degree) each writer is correct.

In fact, both writers are correct in their own way.

Imagine that there is a nurse who has decided to care for the health and well-being of an isolated community. However, she has come to believe (by whatever mechanisms allow people to believe in absurdities) that arsenic is a cure-all. She arrives with a lifetime supply of arsenic pills. Whenever somebody in the village expresses some discomfort or shows signs of any illness, she provides them with a little arsenic. Those who get better (as some of them certainly will – arsenic in small doses is not fatal but its effects are cumulative) then praise the nurse and the power of her medicine.

However, at the age of 52, this nurse has a tragic accident that takes her life.

This nurse has wasted her life. She has actually done worse than wasted her life. Let’s assume that there is an afterlife in which she learns the truth – that she really was poisoning the villagers and making them slowly sicker over time. If she truly cared about the welfare of the villagers, then this would be a tragic and heartbreaking discovery. She herself would come to the conclusion that, for the sake of those she cared about and, in her ignorance, were suffering harm at her hands, it would have been better for her to have died sooner – or to never have lived at all.

It does not matter that the villagers honored her and praised her, that they remembered her as a compassionate person always willing to come to the aid of those who were sick. It does not matter that she herself thought that she was doing something good. What matters is the fact that she was, in fact, doing harm.

This is the measure of a life.

We can argue that prayer, unlike arsenic, is not poisonous. It does no harm. Yet, ‘having no effect’ is not the same as 'doing no harm.' It matters whether the person is left better or worse off than she would have otherwise been.

We can imagine the villagers being given sugar pills instead of arsenic, generating a genuine placebo effect and giving them the (false) sense that they are actually being cared for. Willing to give the sugar pills a try, they put off seeking real medical care, allowing diseases to develop longer than they would have if this nurse had not given them false beliefs about its effectiveness. A few faithful might even watch their children die of diseases that could have been easily treated. In this case, even without poisoning the villagers, our nurse still made them worse off than they would have otherwise been.

She still would have reason to weep if, after death, she discovers the truth of her actions.

The obituary for Jones also said that he:

always found a way to provide for churches and charities as well as individuals in need.

Does this provide a way saving his life from having been a life without meaning?

Well, it depends in part on what type of charities he gave his aid to and the type of help he gave to people in need.

If he had limited his help to prayer then we are still left with a case like that of the nurse giving away arsenic pills (or placebos, as the case may be). It is the case of a person who produced no real-world good and may have done real-world harm.

However, even if he contributed to genuine charities – charities that did real-world good, we have two questions that we need to ask about the nature of these contributions to measure the value of his life.

First, what motivated these donations to charities?

The relevant test here would involve determining the answer to the question, "Would Jones have contributed to these charities if he did not believe that a God existed?"

If Jones was truly interested in the welfare of others then he would have cared about their welfare even in the absence of a God. He would not have been willing to abandon them to their own fates, watching them suffer with indifference, simply because no God existed to pat him on the head for his good deeds or threaten him with hell for his evil deeds. A person who responds only to these types of rewards and punishes cares nothing about other people – he cares only about his own welfare, and his concern for others only comes as a pretense.

However, if he would have been touched by the suffering of others even in the belief that no God existed – if he had genuine concern for their welfare of a form that did not depend on heavenly rewards or punishments – then he would have spent his life producing real-world good for real-world people in service to real-world people, not in service to am imaginary deity.

However, if the belief that no God exists would have turned him away from charitable work, we may assume that he real motivation was to please God or to buy a ticket to heaven, but that he cared nothing about the people around him. A person must be utterly lacking in compassion to stand around and do nothing while others suffer in a universe where no God exists.

This person, who spent his life serving God or avoiding hell, but who actually cared nothing about the people around him, has, indeed, wasted his life. The good he has provided was, at best, a fortunate side-effect of his actions – but was not a part of his intention or among his goals. He is like the person who, tripping over a shovel as he walks down the sidewalk, happens to crash into a child and knock him out of the way of an oncoming train. He deserves no credit for his actions – no praise – precisely because he did not desire the good that came from his actions. Not if, in the absence of the shovel, he would have watched the child get run over by the train with complete indifference.

Second, what were the opportunity costs of this devotion to charity?

Let us assume that, through a person's charitable activities, he raises $50 for religious efforts that do no real-world good (e.g., missionaries, churches, putting up billboards that say, "Why do atheists hate America?"), funding legislation to ban abortion or constitutional amendments to exclude homosexual unions from the definition of marriage), and $50 to charities that do real-world good (feed the hungry, treat the sick, provide shelter for the homeless, conduct research into any of a number of diseases, clean up the environment).

However, in the absence of his efforts, people would have otherwise contributed $75 to the latter set of charities.

In this case, the true effect of this person's efforts is to drain worthwhile charities of $25 that they would have otherwise gotten. This is not a person to be praised for the $50 that he gave to worthwhile charities that do real-world good, or the $100 in charitable donations that he actually made possible. This is a person who made the world worse off than it would have otherwise been, by costing charities that do real-world good $25 that they would have otherwise had.

In this case, we are talking about a life that was actually spent preventing good from being done more than it was a life spent doing good.

Finally, let us look at a more favorable case – one in which charities that do real-world good would have normally received $25. However, because of Jones’ hard efforts they received $50 instead. We would still have to weigh this gain against contributions that do real-world harm.

Many of the examples that I gave above are not contributions to waste-of-effort but harmless activities. They are contributions to activities that do real-world harm. If he spent effort promoting prayer or the teaching of creationism in the nation's schools, blocking homosexual marriage, fighting to outlaw early term abortions, and supporting the destructive policies of President George Bush because of these beliefs, these harms must be weighed against any good that might have come from the effect is efforts may have had in getting more money to charities producing real-world benefits.

It is true that the obituary does not actually give us enough information to decide which category Jones actually belongs in. The most important part of his life might well have been in giving real-world care to his friends and family. In fact, I would be willing to bet good money that Jones genuinely cared for his friends and his family and even strangers in ways that he would have continued to care for them even if no God existed. He would have still sought after their welfare. He might not have been all that political, and his contribution to the evils of religion we have seen over the past eight years in particular might have been minimal.

If this is the case, his life was not at all wasted. If this is the case, then he took care of the people he cared about and did little harm to outweigh the direct good that came from his actions. We may even call him a good man.

Or he may have been like our nurse, handing out poison and preventing the people he thought he was helping from getting real-world help that would have mitigated their real-world problems.

We simply do not know.

Yesterday, I started looking at the issue of buying and selling organs for transplant (e.g., kidneys). I looked at three considerations.

(1) The feeling of yuckiness at having a market in organs. However, we have to ask if the ‘yuckiness’ that people feel at the thought of a market in human organs is, perhaps, like the ‘yuckness’ people once felt (and some people still feel) towards interracial relationships. We have to ask whether this aversion to a market in organs is an aversion that people generally have many and strong reasons to promote, or whether it is an aversion that people have many and strong reasons to inhibit.

(2) Voluntary exchange among competent adults tends to fulfill the most and strongest desires of both participants. If it did not, then they would not engage in the trade. Realizing the desire-fulfillment consequences of trade we have reason to be averse to interfering in the voluntary exchanges of competent adults, including the exchange of cash for kidneys.

(3) However, markets, combined with large differences in income, create a situation where rich people can bid resources away from more highly valued uses (in terms of desire fulfillment) and into less highly valued uses. During a drought, unregulated markets allow rich people to bid water away from those who are dying of thirst to use in swimming pools, fountains, and watering their golf courses.

So, a market in organs such as kidneys would allow rich people to redistribute human organs away from the more highly valued uses (or, at least, equally valued uses) that poor people have for their kidney and towards the less highly valued uses (or, at best, equally valued uses) of the wealthy.

For example, if kidneys were bought and sold on a market, would a rich person with kidney failure be permitted to purchase two functioning kidneys? An unregulated market would allow this. To prohibit it would be to regulate the market.

Would wealthy people be permitted to purchase kidneys to keep them in storage just in case they might be needed at a later date – throwing them away once they have reached their expiration date? Allowing this would be an example of redistributing kidneys from poor people who have a more highly valued use for them, to rich people who values the kidney only as an insurance against possible future harm.

Assigning kidneys by lottery, rather than by willingness to pay, seems to respect the assumption that the poor people value their kidneys as much as rich people do, and that “willingness to pay” (or, more precisely, “ability to pay”) should not be used as a method for moving rich people to the front of the line (and poor people to the back).

However, rationing creates its own problems – it generates shortages.

How many hours would you work each week if the government prohibited people from paying workers? Let us say that the contribution of time to a company had to be completely voluntary, like the contribution of a kidney must be completely voluntary. I suspect that such a program would lead to an economic disaster. Nothing (or very little) would actually get done, and people would limit the work they did to that which would benefit themselves and their immediate family and friends.

We see this in the kidney market, where a prohibition on exchange leads to a severe shortage of kidneys, which has nearly 100,000 people in the United States alone suffering (and dying at the rate of 18 per day) for the want of a (market in) kidneys. It is not the case that, by allocating kidneys in the absence of price, the right and poor equally get to live. Rather, the current rationing system is one in which rich and poor equally get to suffer and (for some of them) die.

And let’s not kid ourselves. Even where the buying and selling of organs is prohibited, rich people have options that poor people do not have – from the luxury of being able to spend 30 hours per week on dialysis to the means to pay for it.

Our options are not limited to “completely unregulated market” or “outright prohibition on the selling of organs”. There is a wide range of options in between.

From a desire utilitarian perspective, there are moral facts. However, they are not always easy to discover. One of the things we may need to do to determine the moral facts is to allow a certain amount of experimentation. In this case, the experiments would involve allowing different states to try different methods for redistributing organs. One of the things that a desire utilitarian can all for is more data, which can then be used to help answer the question.

For example, allow a state to set up a system where the government pays money to the estate of a person who (1) signed up as an organ donor, (2) who died in a state in which her organs could be harvested, and (3) died of natural causes.

Such a law would almost certainly increase the number of organs available for transplant by increasing the number of people who sign up as organ donors. Taxpayers have many and strong reasons to support such a plan since it helps to ensure that an organ is available if the taxpayer (or somebody the taxpayer cares about) should ever need one.

People also have reason to support such a policy to the degree that they have reason to be concerned with the size of their estate and what can be done with the money. This is a gift that they can leave their spouse or children (or parents) in the case of an untimely death – like life insurance without the monthly premiums.

The plan would also side-step the problem of markets redistributing resources away from poor people who have a higher valued use for the product but who cannot afford to outbid the rich person. We may assume that, after death, an individual will have no further use for these organs – that the only options left to the person who died would be low-valued uses.

One major reason not to adopt this policy is a feeling of ‘yuckiness’ associated with the selling of organs. However, there are enough people who report not having this sensation that we have reason to conclude that this is a learned reaction. We can choose whether to promote or inhibit this feeling of yuckiness. Since the feeling is one that tends to thwart other desires (or so it seems) it is a feeling that we have more and stronger reason to inhibit than to nurture.

Some readers brought up some interesting ideas concerning the ‘human dignity’ argument that I would like to address. However, given space limitations, I would like to make that the focus of tomorrow’s post.

I would like to see some state legislature experiment with this option and see if it does not improve the quality (and even the quantity) of life for some of its citizens.

This is just one idea. It is a mistake to think of this issue to be one in which only two options are available - a completely unregulated market and a complete prohibition on exchanging organs for other things of value. When we look at the issue and find problems with a particular solution, it does not automatically follow that, "We have aproblem here. We must completely prohibit a market in transplant organs." Another option is usually available - to design the law in such a way so as to avoid the problem without blocking the availability of transplant organs to recipients.

The main point being that when we step into a realm of moral uncertainty, we have reason to collect data by allowing different states to experiment with different methods to determine which actually helps to promote the life, health, and well-being of its people.

This is the 36th in a new series of weekend posts taken from the presentations at the Salk Institute’s "Beyond Belief: Enlightenment 2.0.". I have placed an index of essays in this series in an introductory post, Enlightenment 2.0: Introduction.

The last three presentations at Beyond Belief 2.0 had to do with whether people should call themselves atheists. It started with Sam Harris’ presentation where he discussed an earlier speech to the Atheist Alliance International, where he suggested doing away with that ‘A’ word. It continued through Jeff Hawins' presentation on selling atheism through atheist entrepreneurship – and the ‘atheist’ brand name simply carries too much negative baggage to be useful.

So, at the end of the conference, Beyond Belief 2.0 host Roger Bingham called upon Atheist blogger PZ Myers in the audience for some comments on what it is like being an open, uncloseted atheist.

On the off chance that a reader might not know Myers, he is the author of one of the more popular atheist blogs Pharyngula. In his (very conservative) home town he is known as the village atheists, but reports that he is not treated with any hostility. In fact, people complement him on his civility.

They think that I am one of the most courteous savages they ever met.

He went on to say that atheists should go ahead and label themselves as atheists.

I kinda reject the notion that we should not label ourselves as atheists. What we need to do is label ourselves as atheists and stand up in a civil manner in front of these people and have a conversation.

I pointedly reject this point of view.

I also reject the view that atheists should ‘change their name’ or treat the label of being an ‘atheist’ as something to be ashamed of – something that we should run from. I do not see this as a dilemma between abandoning the term ‘atheism’ or accepting the term under Myers’ terms. Rather, I support a third alternative, that I will get to later.

I have a question for Mr. Myers. If all we need to do is to stand up in a civil manner in front of these people and all of our problems will disappear, doesn’t this assume that for the past 150 years we have not been civil?

We have two options. Either atheists have been civil (or at least displaying the normal distribution of civility that we would find in the rest of the population), or atheists have for some reason spent the last 150 years being far less civil than non-atheists.

If atheists have displayed the normal range of civility over the past 150 years, yet people still have this negative view of atheist, then this suggests that the hostility towards atheists is not at all linked to our civility. If we display the normal human range of civility and others still hate us, then is it our obligation to be more civil than non-atheists just to be regarded as equal?

This is neither fair nor just.

The other result, of course, is that atheists have engaged in behavior that has been far worse, on average, than that of non-atheists and, as such, we have brought this hostility down upon ourselves. Yet, I want to see some evidence that this is the case. I want to see some proof that the negative view of atheists that has over half of the population refusing to vote for an atheist candidate is somehow the atheists’ fault.

In fact, Myers himself is expressing anti-atheist bigotry with these remarks. Myers himself is making judgments based on the false assumptions that atheists, overall, are a worse class of people compared to non-atheists, and if atheists would just improve their behavior and act like everybody else, we could be accepted in the community.

It doesn’t matter that Myers is an atheist himself. There is a great deal of evidence that shows how the victims of prejudice can adopt the attitudes of the bigots that dominate their society. In a racist community, the way in which the culture teaches white people to look down on blacks can also have the effect of causing black people to look down on (other) blacks. Cultural norms that see women incapable of holding positions of leadership can infect women to the degree that they, too, will only support a male leader.

And atheists, who see nothing wrong with atheism, can still harbor deep (and unconscious) sentiments that atheists tend to be people of low moral character and it is this low moral character that is responsible for their poor standing in the community.

Like I said, unless and until somebody provides me with hard evidence suggesting that atheists are of a lower moral character than non-atheists, and that hostility towards atheists are directly linked to this low moral character, I am going to assume – as all fair and just people should assume – that atheists are no different from non-atheists in these matters. I am going to follow the moral dictum of assuming that people are innocent unless proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.

Under this assumption, recommending that atheists can solve their image problem by becoming more civil is not only unfounded, it is a sign of bigotry. It is an even more pathetic form of bigotry when it is spoken by an atheist against other atheists.

I want to stress, I do not think that Myers intended to insult other atheists. What I am suggesting is that he has unconsciously adopted some anti-atheist bigotry that has worked its way into his subconscious and comes out (unintentionally) in the attitudes he adopts towards his fellow atheists. He has absorbed out of his community shades of the idea that atheists are responsible for their own poor social standing. He has adopted these attitudes without thinking about them – the way many of us adopt attitudes towards others.

We can imagine a member of the Jewish community in Germany in 1930s telling his fellow Jews, “What we need to do is label ourselves as atheists and stand up in a civil manner in front of these people and have a conversation. If we do this, then the Nazi menace will disappear.”

No, it will not.

Nor should we think that walking around with a scarlet ‘A’ on our clothes will end this bigotry. In Nazi Germany, the government required Jews to wear a yellow Star of David on their clothes. This had no effect on diminishing the anti-Semitism in Germany. Instead, the Nazis simply made their victims more visible targets. If America’s government were to require that atheists in America wear a scarlet A the way that German Jews were required to wear a yellow Star of David, this would seem to represent a major success for the ‘Out’ campaign that promotes this type of symbolism. Yet, in this comparison, we see that the symbol counts for nothing.

Nor can we abandon the name ‘Atheist’. Using the term (or not) is not even our choice.

Following the example above, we can imagine a Jew suggesting in 1930, “Perhaps we should abandon the term ‘Jew’. It has such negative connotations. Perhaps, in order to help us become more widely accepted in the German community, we should call ourselves something else – something like ‘Pre-Christians’ perhaps.

Do you really think that this would have done any good? The community targeting them would have continued to call them ‘Jews’ and would have continued to use them as a scapegoat for everything that was wrong with the community. If the community had decided to adopt the label ‘pre-Christians’ they would have done so only by sticking the same negative connotations on the new term that the old term carried.

Atheists do need to continue to use the term ‘atheist’. We need to identify ourselves as atheists and stand up and act in a civil manner. However, in addition to this, the one other thing that atheists must do if the rest is to have any effect is that atheists must get indignant over the insults and attitudes that people harbor towards atheists.

The anti-atheist bigot does not deserve our civility. The anti-atheist bigot deserves our condemnation and contempt. When the Christian writer says that there can be no morality without God and that without belief in an afterlife the atheist is at risk of raping, robbing, and murdering others with wild abandon, it is entirely inappropriate to give a civil response. The moral person does not answer, “I beg to differ with my most esteemed colleague on these matters. The evidence does not in fact support the conclusion that an atheist, who is not bound by religious morality, is at risk of performing these evils.”

The moral person says, “Mr. Smith, in declaring that his religion gives him special knowledge of and motivation to abide by moral truth, has just shown us that his religion instead has made him a hate-mongering bigot. He has just shown himself to be content to promote hatred and hostility towards others based on no evidence whatsoever, but based on the ‘faith’ that his religion alone glorifies the individual who condemns others who do not share his beliefs without any just cause to do so.”

When news anchors, bloggers, newspaper columnists, and politicians learn this lesson, then we may see a change in the attitudes towards atheists. History gives us more than enough examples of people who were, in all things, no less ‘human’ than their neighbor in civility and courtesy, still being subjected to the harshest bigotry and hatred. History gives us more than enough reason to scoff at the individual who says that all we need to do is to “stand up in a civil manner in front of these people and have a conversation.”

A debate over the value of life that I participated in with a couple of posts is continuing in the comments section of Evanescent's posting Ultimate Value and Morality and db0's posting on A Division by Zer0, Yet More Hypocrisy from Objectivists.

In this debate over the ultimate value of life, an important distinction is getting blurred between the quantity vs. the quality of life.

If life is the ultimate value the it would seem to follow that the longer a life is (the more life a person has had), the more value has been acquired.

Lets take two people – identical twins, separated by birth when people who traffic in sex slaves kidnaps one of the twins shortly after birth. The kidnapped twin, whom we shall call Longella, is sold on the black market to a criminal organization that engages is child prostitution, and the child grows up being abused (while her education is neglected). She is discarded on the streets of some third-world country shortly after reaching puberty, where she continues to live as a prostitute (since this is the only thing she knows) – being arrested several times and repeatedly raped. When she is no longer appealing to potential customers, she lives a hand-to-mouth existence as a homeless person on the streets until she dies at the age of 59.

Longella’s twin went to Harvard business school, where she was nicknamed ‘Shorty’ by her friends. She went on to form her own company, which was later bought out by Microsoft at a sum that put $5.7 billion into her own pocket. With that money she decided to pursue space travel. She founded a new business that established a hotel in space. Later, in a fully privately financed space venture, she became the first person to set foot on the moon since the Apollo missions. Unfortunately, during her second trip to the moon, a tragic accident resulted in her death. She was 58.

Furthermore, Shorty cultivated her love of space travel from a realization that the development of space is the best insurance against human extinction. Whereas she first came to see space travel as a mere tool – a means to human survival – it became an ‘end in itself’ for her, something that she valued for its own sake.

Now, if life was the only thing that has value, then it would seem that Longella has realized more value than Shorty, because Longella had 59 years of life while Shorty died at the age of 58. If life is the only thing that has value, and Longella lived longer than Shorty, then Longella realized more value than Shorty. If we had the capacity to choose which life to live, and life itself is the sole ultimate value, we should choose Longella's life. We would be irrational to choose Shorty's life – the life that realized less of what has ultimate value.

This, of course, is a patently absurd conclusion. Somehow, the "life is the ultimate value" theorist needs to provide us with an account whereby the Shorty’s life is better than Longella’s life.

The way to do this, of course, is to change the definition of 'life'. It requires saying something like, "When I say that a being is alive, I mean more than that its heart is beating and its brain is functioning. I being is not alive in the sense that I am talking about unless the following is also true . . ." followed by an account of what is allegedly required for "life is the ultimate value" to be true.

This has two implications.

First, it requires abandoning one of the primary arguments used to try to prove that life is the ultimate value. This is the argument that, "Life is essential for value to exist; therefore, life is the ultimate value." This argument uses the term 'life' in its traditional English-speaking sense of being alive. When Shorty died, value for her ceased to exist. However, Longella continued to value for another year. Longella acquired more of that which is necessary for value to exist than Shorty did so, on this argument, Longella’s had more 'ultimate value' then Shorty.

Of course, we already had a reason to abandon this argument. It says that life is essential for value to exist. It also says that life is the ultimate value. So, the argument states that life is essential for life to exist. This is true. However, it is also true that my toaster is essential for my toaster to exist. If my toaster ceased to exist, then it would no longer be the case that my toaster exists. The advocate of 'life is the ultimate value' who uses this argument needs to show how 'life is necessary for life to exist' demonstrates that life is the ultimate value, but "my toaster is necessary for my toaster to exist" does not demonstrate that my toaster is the ultimate value.

Second, the strategy of changing the definition of 'life' leaves us with no account of what it is exactly that makes one life better than another. We are now being told that Shorty's life is better than Longella's life because Shorty's life contained more life than Longella's, even though Longella lived longer.

One important conclusion that I want to draw from this example is to deny that all human activity either does nor should direct itself towards maximizing the number of seconds that one is alive. In evaluating different options, it is quite reasonable to sacrifice "number of seconds alive" in one case in order to realize something else of value. We do it all the time, and a great deal of argument will be required to show that we should not to so.

What can 'life' possibly mean in a context that would allow us to conclude 58 > 59?

Until we are given a definition of 'life' in this context, we have not been given a theory of value. We have only changed the words being used to discuss value. In effect, the “life is the ultimate value” theorist has merely changed the spelling of the word 'value' to 'l-i-f-e' without telling us a thing about what it is.

All he does is tell us, "Of course life is the ultimate value. 'Life' means 'ultimate value' and anybody who denies that the ultimate value is the ultimate value is just an idiot unworthy of our time and attention.”

Which is about as meaningful as telling us, "Of course God exists. 'God' means 'the greatest thing that exists' and anybody who denies that the greatest thing that exists actually does exist is just an idiot worthy of our time and attention." This argument certainly proves that God (under this new definition) does exist. It tells us nothing about what God’s properties are. And it gives us absolutely no reason to believe that 'God' as originally described (as an entity that created the universe, knows everything, and cares about us) actually exists. Using this to assert that it proves the existence of 'God' in the traditional sense is simply invalid reasoning.

The same is true with an argument that says that 'life' means 'ultimate value'.

If 'life' in Objectivist-speak means the same thing as 'life' in English, we are lead to the absurd conclusion that the rational person would choose Longella's life over Shorty's life. So, 'life' in Objectivist speech much mean something different from what 'life' means in English. This means that, until the Objectivist has given us the English equivalent of whatever 'life' means in Objectivist-speak, he has not given us a theory of value. He might as well be telling us that 'woweiu' is the ultimate value. Unless and until he tells us the English equivalent of 'woweiu', he is not telling us anything at all.

'Life' as the term is understood in English is not 'the ultimate value'. This would imply that every decision we make should be evaluated according to its impact on the number of seconds we are alive. What should I have for breakfast this morning? Taste does not matter. Only 'effect on the number of seconds we are likely to live' matters. Who should I marry? Love does not matter, only 'who will contribute to my greater longevity' matters.

The Objectivist, of course, will tell us that, according to Ayn Rand, taste and love does matter. But this only goes to the conclusion that when objectivists talk about 'life' they are using Objectivist-speak and not English. They are using a term that looks like a common English word, and in fact they invite us to draw the conclusion that they are, in fact, using the common English word. Yet, this option – that 'life' in the English language sense is the only thing that matters, would then contradict their assertion that taste and love matter. The only way that 'taste and love matters' can be made compatible with the claim that 'life is the only thing that matters' is to be using 'life' in some non-traditional (and yet undefined) way.

The fact is, Ayn Rand contradicted herself. Attempting to make sense of her claims that 'life is the only thing that matters' and 'taste and love also matter' is like trying to make sense of the claim that 'Jesus, God, and the Holy Spirit are three distinct entities' and 'There is only one God'.

Rand herself said, "If your argument leads to a contradiction, then check your premises. At least one of them must be mistaken." And, indeed, one of her own premises is mistaken.

The proposition that 'life' (in the English language sense) is the only thing that matters’ is false. As the comparison between Longella and Shorty above suggests, we are willing to sacrifice life in order to obtain other goods. This only makes sense to the degree that there are 'other goods' that are more valuable than life.

The proposition that 'life' (in Objectivist-speak) is the only thing that matters is empty. It is like saying 'woweiu is the only thing that matters'. Unless and until the Objectivist has given us an English-language equivalent to 'life' in Objectivist-speak, or taken some other action to define the term, it is meaningless, and statements using the term are empty.

Democratic Presidential Candidate Hillary Clinton’s stand on the “gas tax holiday” does not reflect well on her presidency at all. An article on CNN, Obama camp out with new gas tax ad, Clinton camp fires back tells of the specifics of this dispute, and it shows Clinton willing to promote harmful fictions in her pursuit of power.

The proposal on the table is to suspend the Federal gasoline tax for the summer in order to keep gasoline prices down and to save the American gasoline buyer some pain at the pump when they fill their vehicle.

Now, we have two options. Either the supply of gasoline is elastic (responds well to differences to price), or it is not. There is, of course, a range of options in between. However, if both of these end points are bad, then any place in the middle is equally bad.

Let us assume that the supply of gasoline is not elastic. If this is the case, then a lower price will result in increased demand. When demand increases for a scarce product, prices go up. This is precisely why gasoline prices are going up now – because demand has increased and supply has not kept up. This strongly suggests that we are in a period of maximum capacity. We may assume that the current price of gasoline reflects the point at which demand matches supply. (Rising prices suggests that we are actually at a point where demand exceeds supply.) So, the market response to a reduction in the gasoline tax would be to raise prices to the point that demand again matches available supply.

The result will be no gain to the consumer. The gain, instead, will go to the oil companies, who will be able to pocket money that now goes to the government.

That’s one end of the spectrum.

The other end of the spectrum is that the supply of gasoline is elastic and will respond to price. This means that the market will not respond to tax holiday by raising prices but, instead, will raise its supply output to match the existing demand. Setting aside the fact that if the gasoline industry was in a position to do this then prices would not be rising today, this suggests that Clinton’s solution to the problem of gas prices is increased gasoline consumption. Fossil fuel use is a leading contributor to greenhouse gasses. Clinton, then, is advocating that the government spend billions of dollars to promote the burning of fossil fuels, to the detriment of future generations.

But, future generations do not vote and cannot vote against Clinton. In order to secure the Presidential nomination, it seems, Clinton is more than happy to do harm to those who do not have a vote (future generations) in order to buy the support of those who do vote (current generations).

Any place between these two end points (determine by the degree to which gasoline supplies can be increased to match increased demand) is simply a trade off between ‘profits for oil companies’ (to the degree that gas supplies cannot go up any further) and ‘promoting greenhouse gas emissions’ (to the degree that gas supplies can be increased to meet the increased demand).

Now, either the Clinton camp is aware these facts, or they are not. Neither option flatters the Clinton campaign.

If they are not aware of these facts, then Clinton has surrounded herself with a bunch of ignorant fools – and we do not need ignorant fools running White House policy for another four years.

The other option is that the Clinton campaign team has taken a poll that has told them that a gas tax holiday proposal is a vote getter. In spite of the fact that they know that the plan will do no good – that it will actually do more harm than good – most people do not have a sufficiently in-depth understanding of economics to see through to the likely outcomes. They think that this proposal will save them money, and they are all for saving money. Rather than educate us on the economic facts of the matter so that we can better promote our values, they seek to perpetuate and actively promote our ignorance – by telling us that these fictions are true. In their quest to win the election, they do not care about the harm that uneducated people will do to themselves by following policies they know will do more harm than good.

From a political campaign perspective, the choice is simple. It takes a lot of energy to educate the public. It would take a lot of effort to go out and teach the people the economic facts that say, “If you go along with this proposal, either you will be handing your money to the oil companies or doing greater harm to future generations. You will probably just be handing your money to the oil companies.” It takes much less effort to say, “You’re absolutely right. If we suspend the federal gasoline tax for the summer all of that money that the government otherwise collects in taxes will end up in your bank account with no adverse consequences.”

To be fair, I need to mention that the Clinton Administration seeks to combine this gasoline tax holiday with a windfall profits tax on oil companies in order to compensate the government for losses in revenue. Where are the oil companies going to get this money? Well, they’ll get it by raising the price of gasoline to cover the additional cost – by an amount approximately equal to the reduction in taxes. So, people still pay the gasoline tax to the federal government. Only, the tax goes through the oil companies on the way to the government.

Assuming that the ‘windfall profits tax’ on oil companies matches the lost revenue from the gasoline tax. The result is no net effect on the people buying gasoline. They will pay just as much at the pump, and the money will be divided up as it is now, only the method of dividing up the money has changed. The change is one that gives the people the false impression that something was done (that consumers are getting relief and the evil oil companies are being punished) when, in fact, nothing had changed.

This, in itself, is problematic in light of the assertion coming from the Clinton campaign that:

"That’s a critical distinction in this race between, in Senator Clinton, someone who understands the pain that middle class and working class families are feeling…and Senator Obama, somebody who just doesn’t seem to understand that middle class families are hurting, working class families are hurting and that they need relief," Clinton Communications Director Howard Wolfson said.

The misinformation campaign extends not only to telling the people falsehoods about the effectiveness of their own plan, but maligning somebody who is telling the people the truth. It is one thing to be dishonest to the people. It is another when that dishonesty extends to telling people that they should distrust somebody who is being honest with them (on this issue).

It causes one to wonder if a Hillary Clinton administration would act like the Bush administration in sending out the attack dogs to malign the character of anybody with a voice who dares to tell the people the truth about administration policies.

To be fair, of the three principle candidates for the Presidency, Republican nominee John McCain’s position is by far the worst. McCain has no wind-fall profits tax that will replenish government revenue. Instead (assuming that gasoline prices are inelastic) McCain’s proposal will have the simple effect of reducing government revenues by several billion while increasing oil company profits by a like amount. It causes one to wonder how much the energy company lobbyists are ‘investing’ in lobbying the Republican Party for a gas tax holiday for the consumer.

This, then, highlights another problem with Clinton’s mis-education campaign. Lying to the people on the effects of the gasoline holiday, she would then have to get a bill through congress. This bill would then be subject to political compromise. Republican obstructionists could threaten to hold up the bill until certain concessions are made – concessions that would mean the federal government getting less money (and being forced to endure the risks of a national infrastructure that would be left unrepaired as a result of this policy. At the same time, the oil company executives (and lobbyists) will be the sole beneficiaries and oil company stockholders getting more.

Through her decision to promote myth for the sake of political expediency, she takes away the people's ability to protect themselves from demagogues such as John McCain - somebody obviously willing to exploit a myth in order to transfer more money into the pockets of oil company executives. She gives him cover by supporting, rather than challenging, the fiction on which McCain's policy was built.

This is just one policy in this election. However, this policy does give us a suggestion as to the moral character of the camps - of what they want to accomplish and how they are willing to accomplish it. Character is important. Character tells us something about how a candidate will treat us in the future.

This is the 35th in a new series of weekend posts taken from the presentations at the Salk Institute’s "Beyond Belief: Enlightenment 2.0.". I have placed an index of essays in this series in an introductory post, Enlightenment 2.0: Introduction.

The Beyond Belief conference came to a close with two short presentations from people who seemed to be there just to observe the conference. One of those observers was Jeff Hawkins is the founder of two computer companies, Palm and Handspring, and the designer of many computing products including the PalmPilot and Treo Smartphone.

Hawkins was given a short (5-minute) opportunity to make a point about entrepreneurship.

Here’s the relevance. We have had two days of people talking about Enlightenment 2.0, and a lot of intelligent speakers presented a lot of intelligent ideas. Those ideas, according to Hawkins, are worthless without entrepreneurship.

He reported how, as a successful business person, people often come up to him with good ideas. They hand their ideas to him and he agrees that this is a good idea. He then looks at the presenter. The problem, he suggests, is not with the idea. It’s with the presenter. “You are not the type of person who can make change happen.”

Talk about brutal honesty.

We tend to think that, “If I have a good idea, the idea will sell itself. All I have to do is build it, and people will come flocking. All I have to do is sign up to create a blog, start presenting my ideas, and soon millions of people will come flocking over to listen to what I have to say, and carrying those ideas out into the world to make change.”

It won’t happen that way.

I have been struggling to come to terms with my own shortcomings in this area for a long time. I have my ideas, but I am not the type of person who can make change happen. I am far too shy and far too docile – too introverted – to do actually bring about change. I can imagine what it would be like to be the type of person who can make change happen. But, can I actually do those things?

Look at this blog and tell me if this looks like the work of an entrepreneur.

Being an entrepreneur is a special type of skill. It is a talent that needs to be cultivated and grown. It requires that a person take an honest look at himself or herself and ask, “How am I going to be the type of person who can make change happen?” It requires more than just a to-do list. It requires adopting the personality of a person who can effect change – a person who does the types of things that make change happen with the same skill that one rides a bike.

Try riding a bike by following a to-do list of when to pedal and when to turn the wheel? You’ll never get anywhere.

All of this makes perfectly good sense, as far as I can tell. Yet, when I think about applying it to a specific instance, I see that Hawkins misjudged some crucial elements of the culture that he was talking to.

Hawkins seems particularly interested in the question of how to sell atheism. He said that it is not a good idea to put a huge target on one’s chest and announce that one is here to bring down the biggest competitor on the block. That competitor will summon the resources at his disposal and squash you the instant it sees you as a threat. With its vast resources, there is nothing you can do to stop it. He suggested that directly challenging religion was a poor idea.

In this blog I am not at all concerned with promoting atheism. I do not think the product is particularly valuable. It is true, perhaps, but a lot of true claims are not particularly valuable. Converting a person to atheism does not automatically make him a better person. This is because atheism does not come with a set of moral guidelines.

However, I am interested in presenting a defense of desire utilitarianism. I defend it because I think it is the best theory of value available.

But here is where the problem was. I am not seeking to sell desire utilitarianism the way that Hawkins might sell a palm pilot or a Treo Smartphone. Desire utilitarianism is a theory of value. Its purpose is to explain and predict components of the phenomena of evaluation. It is a theory in the same way that evolution is a theory of the diversity of life. Evolution explains the changes that we have seen appearing in living organisms on the Earth over time.

The type of phenomena that desire utilitarianism explains includes why we have three different moral categories for action (prohibited, permitted, and obligatory), why negligence is a moral crime, why the actions of a bad Samaritan are not wrong, why particular claims about causation and intention are taken as legitimate ways of deflecting blame (are considered valid excuses), why moral statements appear to be propositions (because they are propositions), and why praise and condemnation have the roles they have in morality.

No other theory does a better job of accounting for these elements.

In this culture – in the culture where theories are presented and defended or defeated based on their ability to explain and predict real-world events, it is perfectly legitimate to walk up to somebody and say, “You are wrong.” I get it all the time. The task is not to try to gather customers to desire utilitarianism the way that one would sign up subscribers to a phone service. The task is to show that the theory actually does do a better job of dealing with real-world observations than any other theory.

The Discovery Institute, for example, treats theories like products to be bought or sold on the market place. They are ‘selling’ a product called ‘Intelligent Design” and they are, in fact, using all of the tools that are used to market a kitchen appliance. They have no interest in truth or the ability to explain and predict real-world events. All they care about is signing up subscribers.

What disappointed Hawkins is that Beyond Belief 2 did not discuss a marketing strategy. There were some remarks pointing in that direction. However, for the most part, the speakers presented a theory and then backed it up with evidence for believing that the theory does a better job of explaining and predicting real-world events than rival theories. In the academic world, you do sell your product by walking up to your neighbor and saying, “You’re wrong and here is the evidence to prove it.”

Furthermore, evidence claims are respected within that community.

We expect evidence claims to be respected everywhere. At the same time, organizations like the Discovery Institute are treating ideas like products to be sold on the marketplace. They are not ‘defended’ in the sense of providing evidence why they are true or false. They are ‘sold’ by linking the product to positive values and by linking competitive products to negative values.

We saw this principle applied to the movie “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed”. This movie attempted to link their product, intelligent design, to positive values – God and country. It attempted to link the competing product to negative values – Hitler, Stalin, the Holocaust, and similar evils. It did not even attempt to carefully define what the two products were, and offered no defense of Intelligent Design or refutation of evolution in terms of evidence. It focused exclusively on marketing intelligent design, not proving it.

So, we have two cultures which treat propositions in two entirely different ways. One culture treats propositions like products which are marketed and sold like toothpaste and hairspray. With marketing a proposition, you measure the things that can be said in its defense by its persuasive power – by whether the claim increases sales. The other culture treats propositions as claims about the world. When proving propositions, you measure the things that can be defense by whether it actually supports the truth of a proposition – by whether it increases the chance that the proposition is true.

The problem is that, if the first group is constantly evaluating ways to improve sales, and adopting claims based on that test, it is only reasonable to expect that they will be constantly increasing sales over time. The second group – the one that evaluates ideas in terms of truth – can expect to constantly struggle against the steadily improving marketing skills of their competitor.

Hawkins made one claim against the different ideas that think there is a lot of reason to question. Speaking about the fact that people once widely believed that the world was flat, they now believe it to be round, and the reason for the change is because there was money to be made sailing around the earth. He was wrong on a number of accounts. If you could find a way to make money off of evolution, he said, then it too would come to be universally accepted just as the round earth is now accepted.

Hawkins is wrong on two accounts. The first is that the earth was known to be round since the days of the ancient Greeks. The debate that Columbus had with the scholars of his day was not over the shape of the earth, but with its size. Scholars at the time said that the Earth had a diameter of about 24,000 miles – Columbus said it was about 14,000 miles (and that the East Indies were just over the western horizon). Columbus was an idiot – who managed to get lucky in stumbling into the Americas where he thought China should be.

More importantly, Hawkins was wrong to think that you can’t make money off of evolutionary theory. Evolution is the foundation for all of biology, which in turn is the foundation for all of medicine, agriculture, and environmental studies.

At the same time, the real dispute that the Church had with science in the 1600s was whether the Earth or the Sun was the center of the solar system. The Sun-centered solar system has come to be widely adopted. Yet, I cannot think of many ways in which the difference between the two could be explained in terms of profitability.

Hawkins made two true and important claims.

First, the idea that truth will always conquer myth and fiction is, itself, a myth. Truth requires that people actually take the effort to defend it.

Second, it takes a particular set of personality traits to affect change. It takes a willingness to act and a talent in getting people to pick up the cause and join in the action.

A well marketed fiction can well win the day – as it does in most parts of the world, and that is something for us to be worried about. That is something that should be teaching us to do a little bit more than sit back, enjoy our casual lives, and expect truth to win out on its own without any effort on our part.

According to an article on MSNBC Online, the most important issue on America’s mind this election (at least at the moment) is high gasoline prices. People want the government to do something to lower the price of gasoline. And candidates are responding with plans to lower prices – mostly by lowering or suspending the government’s tax on gasoline during the summer.

The problem with this scheme is that, if the government eliminates the tax, then demand will increase. Increased demand (without an increase in supply) means that the price will go up to where demand equals supply – which is about where the price is today. Meaning, the result of this move is that the money that would otherwise go to the government, will go to the oil companies instead.

Ultimately, however, the moral problem here is that the actual cost of gasoline is much higher than people seem willing to pay. Those who argue for gas prices to be lower are advocates of a system that tax the poor and tax future generations - making them worse off - so that they can drive their vehicles. The people who are forced to suffer the costs are those who do not have a political voice. They are starving in another country where they cannot afford food, or they are members of a future generation too young to vote or not yet born.

Fossil fuel consumption is the leading contributor to global warming. Global warming is a subsidy – a 'wealth transfer scheme' - that transfers wealth away from those who will suffer its ill effects (future generations) to those who are causing the problem. Future generations will pay that cost in terms of the destruction of coastal properties, higher death rates due to extreme weather, disease, and and heat-related deaths, loss of property, and even the destruction of whole (low-lying) countries. If we were to pay for the gasoline we used ourselves – pay an amount that would compensate future generations for the harms we will otherwise force them to endure, we would be paying far more than we do now.

The best way to force people off of gasoline (and fossil fuels in general), and onto alternatives such as walking, riding a bike, using public transportation, buying locally-produced goods that do not need to be shipped half-way around the world, is to raise the price. There is no better incentive for getting people to reduce the amount of an activity than by making it more expensive to do so.

Unfortunately, this solution comes with another problem. It is problem that I discussed even in the first days of this blog. The very wealthy (the ‘aristocracy’) has the power to bid essential goods and services away from the poor.

I illustrated this problem in the days after Hurricane Katrina hit in discussing 'price gounging' accusations against people charging as much as $20 for a bottle of water. John Stossel argued that ‘price gouging’ was a good thing – that high prices helped to ensure that water was going to its most highly valued uses and not to lesser-valued uses (uses for which people were not willing to pay $20 per bottle).

I told a story about two women bidding on a bottle of water. A poor woman wanted the water in order to give it to her sick child. A rich woman wanted the water to use it to shampoo her pet poodle. In the free market, $20 to the rich woman has a significantly lower 'opportunity cost' than $20 for the poor woman. The rich woman has stacks upon stacks of $20 that she can spend on other things – the loss of one $20 bill is insignificant. The poor woman has very few $20 – the l