DISQUS

I don't see why it should matter if you smoke pot, or that people "come out of the closet". The laws don't make sense. Each new president with a drug history that doesn't work to improve things needs to get the guillotine.

That said, the laws do exist, and because of that it makes people who do smoke pot lose some of my respect, because it means they may well be supporting some violence down through the black market distribution chain. (at least that is my default reaction)

There are only two real reasonable purposes I can see for prisons: The first is deterrence, and the second is to sequester dangerous people away from society. But being dangerous is a biological condition. Women aren’t dangerous, and old people aren’t dangerous., but some young, low status, unmarried men get very dangerous. The difference is entirely biological. And if the problem is biological, the solution can be biological. In fact, we already pretty much have this solution: it’s called chemical castration, and it virtually kills recidivism among sexual offenders. I know of no studies for its effects on other kinds of violent offenders, but the null assumption is the effects would be similar. Sexual offenses and other violent offenses stem from the same psychological pathway of impulses.

So here is a modern alternative to prison: If an offender is sentenced to, say, 5 years in prison, they will be offered the choice to either serve their time, or to remain free if they volunteer for the reversible regimen of feminizing chemicals for a time equal to their sentencing. Basically an updated form of probation for more serious crimes. Another option might even be total freedom in exchange for surgical castration.

While this type of option raises the cruel-and-unusual flag for some, the major concern it creates is the exact opposite for me: while it would no doubt prevent future crimes from the castrated person himself, the castration penalty is so non-threatening, so un-cruel compared to prison that it would probably also raise crime in the general population by serving as a “get out of murder free card” for many others. Pre-op transsexuals would basically get a free murder card. And many men, I’m sure, would gladly give up their own testicles for the murder of their choice.

The balance is probably still in favor of the castration option.

jlerner: "When one controls for socioeconomic status, American Blacks still under perform American Whites by nearly a whole standard deviation"

Ben Wechsler IV: "Interesting. So, relative to whites, blacks are extremely high achievers, doing much more with what they've got than white people."

No, because the first statement is in reference to background factors, not earned income. Controlling for IQ closes most of the B-W wage gap. So blacks and whites matched for IQ have similar occupational returns.

On the other hand, we see very different IQ outcomes for the children of blacks and whites of matched economic backgrounds. Black children from homes in the highest socioeconomic bracket have lower IQ scores than white children from homes in the lowest socioeconomic bracket. And their adult income reflects their IQ score virtually regardless of race or class background.

So this could be interpreted either as blacks underperfoming given initial socioeconomic advantages, or neither blacks or whites performing any differently than you would expect give initial IQ scores.

"Self-published?"

Figure 8 is the best piece of evidence offered on this question so far.

La Griffe is no piker, and the PISA numbers are all available to check online. Williams study isn't published until next month, so we can't evaluate it's methodology or know what data set was used. But it's hard to compete with the PISA data if we are asking how much cultural differences matter.

To the extent such campaigns do anything, it results in the opposite of what it's trying to accomplish, further ghettoizing male liberalism with the kind of effete, supplicant males females really don't like to choose. Among men who have a lot of sex partners, Republicanism and chauvinism are rampant, in part, because it serves as an honest signal of their capability of attracting women. Lesser men have to refashion their politics to please young single women, while attractive men don't need to. I suspect the hierarchy of male desirability looks like this:

Unattractive Pubs - Least desirable
Unattractive Dems - 2nd least desirable
Attractive Dems - 2nd most desirable
Attractive Pubs - Most desirable

And while men are more likely to tweak their politics to win over sexual partners, women are even more likely to conform their politics to their long term partner. So while these 'vote Dem, get laid' posters are rather cute, they better realize that it sets a precedent, and that Republicans could actually turn it around and cut even deeper, by suggesting that Democrat girls are just whores for sex and fun, while Republican girls are the valuable ones you invest in long term.

Also children are a good example of what I'm talking about. On average having chidren makes people slightly less happy. (the reason for this, by the way, seems to be the number of people having children out of wedlock) But lots of people really do become much happier, and find a lot of meaning by having children. Others think they will but don't. It may be difficult for many people to predict which category they will end up in. Genetic self-knowledge would correct this, and maximize potential meaning by improving a major life decision.

"But knowing why we are here, or what we are for, turns out to be terrifically useless in guiding our choices or framing our lives."

I think this is because you aren't looking at the question with sufficient granularity. If by 'why' you mean 'how' then, yes, the most general answer is because ma and pa had the sex, and then you could break down the hows of sex into as much information as you want (from the nervous system, to perceptual stimulus, to physiology, to hormones, to the base pair sequence that coded those hormones). At this most general level you are right that this doesn't give you much useful information. This could be telling you to go have sex with a woman, or reproduce, or reproduce with your mother -- none of which seem like they would be better choices than what your natural wants and not-wants could guide better (people already know they want to have sex, and in the case of gay or asexual people, who don't instinctively desire reproductive sex, the guideline would make their lives worse).

But at a deeper level of 'how' I think knowing all of your genes, and how they will react and have reacted in the past would be about the most useful information you could ever have about what decisions to make in your life. To use your own nerdy example, let's say bizarro world Will spends 10 years at kitten-eating school, and then another 5 years in the kitten-eating labor force before having a nervous breakdown and joining a PETA monastery where he can spend the rest of his life doing what he now realizes he wanted to do all along: pet kittens.

But with the correct amount of biological self-knowledge, Will could have saved himself 15 traumatic, wasted years and a nervous breakdown. He would have known beforehand that kitten-eating would upset him and why. With full genetic self-knowledge people could plan their lives for the maximum experience of "meaning" at the earliest possible age.(starting with their parents)

To a rough extent this already happens with our limited knowledge. People are similar enough that we can see things like money, accomplishment, deeper relationships, children, community, and religion, generally lead to more meaningful lives (children appear to be the only general false positive). So most people lay some sort of early groundwork to make one or more of these things happen.

Bryan Caplan's response is close to what I said, as I thought it would be.

I disagree with Caplan though that employer decisions already prove the BA is a trustworthy signal. He has a naive Beckerish view on the efficiency of markets (e.g. employers who racially discriminate would go out of business). As far as I know, no employers have ever collected data on IQ tests vs. humanities degrees. I think it's very doubtful that college is screening out "lazy" people in such a way that college wage premium is maximally profitable.

It's a very real possibility that the whole inflated BA system is based on bad, inefficient. and costly selection decisions by employers. If employers are acting a certain way before there is data to justify it, then I think there is a good possibility that they aren't acting on some indirectly obtained knowledge, but on habit and tradition. This is why good data really can improve markets.

Also...

"You can try jawboning Microsoft into switching to certification tests. But can we really believe that Murray has seen a profit opportunity that Bill Gates hasn’t?"

Gates is notorious for relying on IQ tests, so this was a bad example. Also I don't know how important college is in MS hiring decisions, but I think it hasn't been denied yet that technical degrees like engineering actually do usefully signal job-applicable knowledge, unlike, e.g., an English degree.

I understand Dr. Murray's dissatisfaction with the BA system, but the system is set-up in such a way, it seems, that any party that defects will injure themselves. This hurts his argument, because he is arguing for a more practical system, but the party that follows his advice will not be acting in a practical, self-interested manner.

This is why in previous articles he has hinted that lower ability people would get a bigger financial return from trade school rather than college. But since that isn't true, his argument is a harder sell.

Similarly he argues that employers would do better with a CPA type of exam than going by a degree. This could be true (And in fact certain ridiculous anti-discrimination laws might be one reason the system is so inefficient). But it could also not be true, as Bryan Caplan suggests.

So if it hurts the young person to defect, and if it hurts the employer to defect, this makes Murray's pitch a hard sell. He needs to more fruitfully come up with a plan about how things can change. And that will require appealing to those with the power to change it that it is in their best interest to do so.

Specifically, if he could convince employers that an IQ test or a CPA type exam would be the legally safest, most efficient, and most profitable route, the value of the BA for the low ability person would indeed drop dramatically.

Unfortunately this would overwhelmingly help rich, smart people at the expense of poor, stupid people. (if the BA system truly is currently elevating tons of underqualified dumb people into the ranks of the middle and upper middle class). And this undercuts what I think Murray has always wanted: the best deal for the left half of the bell curve.

And will is correct, 'wife' is the gender specific term for the concept:

"A wife is a female spouse, or participant in a marriage, or civil union or civil partnership."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wife

"This phrase presents something of a communication problem, especially with Kerry’s androgynous name."

So what? You lost me at the beginning. There are no drawbacks to 'Partner'.

The Mismeasure of Man. The whole enormous genre of behavior genetic/psychometric/sociobiology bashing propaganda.

TGGP,

Great Somalia link. The selected comparison drew some serious attention here, but I was mainly being glib.

For the most part I believe social organization comes from the bottom up, so an anarchist Sweden would in my opinion be a comparatively ordered society, just as East Germany was relatively functional compared to other Communist states. Both societies are filled with cooperative and capable individuals.

An anarchist society would function relatively well where the people themselves work, cooperate and organize spontaneously to a high degree (e.g. Japan; see Kristof on Kobe earthquake), and where threat from organized external violence is low; most likely due to the beneficence of a great state military power, as in the modern world, or from geographic isolation from others, as with the older Iceland. (unsustainable and externally predicated conditions)

But even with these conditions, such a society still would not live as well, or as fairly as under state government.

The moral justification is utilitarian.

Where is the empirical evidence my rights and safety are better secured under anarchism?

Sweden vs. (the artist formerly known as) Somalia. No contest.

But it remains that many European countries have become happier while becoming less religious. It’s not clear to me why the mechanism matters.

I agree with your main point, but of course mechanism matters. For instance, happiness in marriage has stayed the same over the last 30 years but that masks the changing dynamics of that happiness: married people talk to each other less than 30 years ago which lowers marital satisfaction, but they earn more household income than 30 years ago which raises it by a similar amount. The result is a wash, but it didn't have to be. Communication could have been more important and marital happiness would have gone down, or money could have been more important and happiness would have gone up.

Going back to the national comparisons, perhaps loss of religion does lower happiness, it's just that money more than makes up for it. It is certainly possible that happiness could have been higher still in every one of those countries if religious belief/culture had been preserved through whatever means.

If government policy A leads to a growth rate of 1000% and government policy B leads to a growth rate of 1%, you can't say B was a success (instead of a disaster) just because you are moving in a better direction.

You used the same fallacy thinking about immigration.

Micha,

Again, who belongs in the ingroup involves reasoning and facts about rights and capacities.

You can't cause "harm" to a rock, because a rock has no preferences. (Comment #46) "The environment" is also an abstraction without sentience and preferences.

See Comment #68 for animals.

Comment #52. What differs drastically are the facts known to people. The underlying cognition of human moral motivations is entirely similar.

I don't know of any time and place where a motivation of causing more harm was considered 'good' by local standards. In many instances harm is and has always been (often tragically) caused in perceived service of a greater prevention of harm.

Caledonian, you don't get much philosophy from a dictionary. Those entries don't contradict me, and neither do they clarify much at all. In the dictionary link 'morality' is defined as being 'moral' which is defined as "principles or rules of right conduct or the distinction between right and wrong". 'Right' is then defined as 'good', and then 'good' is defined as 'moral'! The dictionary gives you a circle of synonyms and assumes you can take from there.

Wikipedia, which does dissect the concept says: Generally speaking, morals are basic guidelines for behavior intended to reduce suffering in living populations.

peco,

if psychopaths take over the world and kill all other humans, does it change objective morality?


Read comment #52. Yes, it wouldn't "change" it, it gets rid of it.

More specifically, psychopaths, as intelligent, selfish actors would still use reciprocity, which provides a basis for cooperative behavior even between entirely self-interested agents ('you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours', 'mutually assured destruction', etc). But they wouldn't have the capacities which characterize the moral concept: fairness, empathy, altruism.


Micha,

The racist can make the following argument: All else being equal, satisfaction of one’s preferences, even aesthetic preferences, is a moral good.

See comment #52 and #72. This is not the definition of 'morality' in any society, it's the definition of 'selfishness', or 'immorality' if it means hurting others. The concept of morality inherently means something different: behaving in a fair way to reduce or not cause harm to others.


Because all of these arguments (Kant’s Universalizability, Mill’s Harm Principle, Spencer’s Law of Equal Liberty), while plausible and to various degrees persuasive, are not objectively provable through facts or logic.

What do you think we're trying to prove with facts and logic? I'm trying to prove facts about humans. And, in fact, the success of those civil rights movements and the proven persuasiveness of the ethical arguments you list, among other things, do indeed demonstrate factual truths about human morality: it is altruistic. Human beings selflessly desire the well being of others when those others are perceived as the "ingroup".

Your racist argues that black appearance justifies unfairness, but there is ample reason to believe that is not the genuine source of his mistreatment. The same history would have created the same outcomes if the skin colors were reversed. Historical circumstances created an unfair arrangement which was then necessarily justified and maintained with false facts to appease the moral instincts.

The civil rights movement provided the images and arguments that contradicted the false facts. If outgroup status was justified by false claims about the humanity and capacities of blacks, the images of dogs attacking the defenseless, and reasoned black pleas for empathy and equal treatment were indeed factual rejoinders to those justifications.

Comment #68 deals with this further, as does Peter Singer's The Expanding Circle. Who belongs in the ingroup involves reasoning and facts (mediated by emotions) about rights and capacities.

Micha,


Perhaps racism or misogyny is simply an aesthetic preference.


Indeed, this is a common and unpersuasive racist argument without any moral meat whatsoever. It directly contradicts logical and biological notions of fairness. The racist argument certainly has no relationship with the necessary definition of morality. The racist can hate but cannot hate because it is 'good'.


In what sense is racism or mysoginy “unreasonable” if you’ve presented no factual (i.e. reasoned) basis for equality?

These arguments are well known and were very common during the 20th century, why do I need to retread them here? Powerless groups were able to gain rights, not by force of might but by appealing to the moral instincts of the dominant groups with honed logic and superior facts.

Peco, I don't consider these particularly difficult questions. I should emphasize though, that I don't see how any of this has much to do with the arguments I've made about the objectivity of ethical answers. This is kind of a tangent, but since you addressed me I'm answering to be polite.


Should they be treated as non-human for moral purposes?

"Treated as non-human" is a loaded phrase. I do not, for instance, believe psychopaths should lose rights, nor do I believe they should be given any more license to cause harm. But we can certainly think differently about their actions for similar reasons that we don't believe a man-eating tiger or a volcano are 'immoral'. That's about as far as that goes.


If psychopaths are morally treated like tigers, does that mean that anyone who disagrees with specific (reasonable) moral principles is a moral tiger?


No, there is a large difference between poor reasoning or factual incorrectness and psychopathy. If people with normal moral capacities deny the importance or existence of these capacities, they still have them.


If the FLDS people are moral tigers, how can you say what they do is wrong?

No one has provided any evidence that the FLDS is composed of psychopaths, and it is highly unlikely. But if true then moral judgment specifically would be difficult. *shrug*

Do you believe this is damaging to something I've argued here?



If there is a large group of moral tigers, are normal humans moral tigers to them?

The premise is that they don't have moral capacities and we do, so no. It is an inside morals looking out description.

How does it have a biologically rooted meaning?

Because people in every culture understand 'good' to mean something more than just reciprocity (where the powerful hurting the powerless would not be 'wrong') and including concepts like 'fairness' that recognize exploitation as a wrong.

... but you could also say that you don’t prefer doing good things.

Absolutely. People can certainly do this can't they. What I have argued is that they can't redefine 'good' to mean something it doesn't inherently mean.


Do all humans know it? If not, should the humans who don’t be treated (morally) like tigers or wolves


Seems about right, if metaphysical. Psychopaths do indeed appear to lack normal genetic moral instincts.

Whatever evidence or logic you present me with, can I still not reasonably say, “Sorry, men are just more important than woman, whites are just more important than blacks.”

No, you obviously can't! In what sense is it "reasonable" if you've presented no factual (i.e. reasoned) basis for the moral distinction? 'Good' has a coherent, biologically rooted meaning, and any justification based on facts will not be consistent with that meaning.


Are you referring to any facts here other than common usage?

'Common usage' is a faulty way to put it. See comment #52; we're not talking about the Merriam-Webster College English Dictionary definition of a word but the pan-psychological human knowledge of a concept. Without the biologically rooted concept there would be nothing to put a word to.

Micha,

And where is it written that to be moral one cannot be selfish and unfair?

As I have argued many times in this thread, it is written in the definition of morality itself, which is in turn written into the genetic code of human beings.

You are confusing the word 'good' for the concept of 'good'. Just because a sociopath says killing me for fun is "good" doesn't mean anything at all. He can just as easily say a tuba is a chair, or an elephant is a penguin. But as soon as he's forced to define "chair", we will readily understand he is talking about the large, low-pitched brass instrument and not the piece of furniture you sit on.

It's the same exact thing for 'morality'. As soon as he defines morality as "causing others pain for my own amusement" he is necessarily automatically defining something else entirely. The concept of morality inherently means something different: behaving in a fair way to reduce or not cause harm to others.

These premises were laid out most nakedly in comment #52. The concept of morality is genetically hardwired into the evolved brain of human beings, and it has a logical meaning.



But at the end of the day, if his preference for misogyny is great enough, and you cannot convince him that he will be worse off from his own perspective if he doesn’t take your advice, the argument is over.

This is irrelevant to the objectivity of morality, since the same thing can be said for factual issues in general. If he wants to say/believe the moon is made of bacon, there is absolutely nothing I can do to "make" him change his mind except present evidence and logic that refute his claim.

Similarly, if he wants to argue that oppressing women is "good" he necessarily has to A) Define 'good' - which has a factually correct and factually incorrect definition, and B), if he defines it correctly (which he isn't according to your own scenario), show how the facts of his sex-biased system are consistent with fairness and well being - which he couldn't do as well.

But even granting that, TGGP’s conclusion still stands; ultimately, the preferences that you and I share, and that you are think are “objective”, are only objective in the sense that a significant majority of humans share those preferences. Sociopaths, Vikings, sadists, masochists, and others with strange, minority preferences could honestly say they disagree and we would have nothing to say to rebut them other than, “Too bad, let’s fight.”

Regardless if they are sociopaths or vikings, and regardless if they can establish their way by force, they still couldn't disagree correctly from an ethical standpoint.

A sociopath can correctly argue 'I'm going to kill you for fun', but could not correctly argue 'I'm going to kill you for fun because it's good' because he would then require a rational argument for why human wellbeing has been fairly increased at the expense of my suffering. This argument could not be made, because the murder was factually selfish and unfair.



Again, you are assuming that society should give equal weight to the interests and suffering of women as it does men.


No, I am arguing that societies that don't are necessarily built on factually wrong ideas about women.


Our choice of how much weight to give to the interests of non-human animals relative to our own is not a question that can be answered by appealing to the objective universe.

I disagree; animal rights must rest on the same analytical foundations that we take human rights from. The ethics of animal treatment depend on four factual issues: a) which capacities are the basis for rights, b) how do these capacities vary, c) how does variation in capacity map on to variation in rights, and d) what capacities do certain animals have.

Then why do you insist upon using it? Questions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ aren’t meaningful


That's not what I said. They are meaningful because humans exist.


...we have to turn to right and wrong.

Those are both normative descriptors. They are describing the same thing.


It is right for wolves to be cooperative, and wrong to be individualistic

Again normative terms are meaningless outside of the human context. It isn't 'right' or 'good' for the sun to be hot or grass to be green, they just are.


You don’t seem to understand that a system of morality doesn’t need to address anyone’s interests or wants at all

I don't "understand" this because it's false. Without human beings and human interests there is no one to generate a "system of morality". It is meaningless outside of the human context where it evolved.


A code that permits casual rape is theoretically possible, and you must address that theoretical contingency without saying “it’s immoral”.


If it is possible that some human society would believe casual rape is good, then this would be a society with factually wrong beliefs according to the necessary definition of 'good' or 'right'. I am not a cultural relativist - their society is based on factually wrong social and political ideas that are failing their people.

I'm not just asserting that "it's immoral" I'm telling you there are biological facts about rape and it's psychological consequences for women that make it wrong according to the necessary human definition of 'wrong'.

If human beings, as a species, were extremely different genetically and behaviorally from what they are now, then "rape" might be "good". But we aren't. Either way, ethical reasoning is necessarily based in facts about humans.