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Furcas comments on Theism, Wednesday, and Not Being Adopted - Less Wrong
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Huh. Do you need me to post a few dozen links to articles detailing incidents where Mormons did evil acts because of their religious beliefs? I mean, Mormonism isn't as inherently destructive as Islam, but it's not Buddhism either.
Anyway, even if Wednesday ended up living her life without once doing harm to others or to herself because of her beliefs, deconverting would still be a good idea: At the very least, theism will distort the rest of her priorities, because they will be in competition with delusion-based priorities like "I want to please God", and "I want my friends and family to go to the highest level of Heaven". Becoming an atheist would therefore allow her to put the right importance on her real priorities.
Do you have empirical evidence that Mormons are more likely to cause harm than atheists? (Let's say in the clear-cut sense of stabbing people instead of in the sense of spreading irrationality.) Mormons might do more bad things because their god requires it, but atheists might do more bad things because they don't have a god to require otherwise. They might be more likely to become nihilists or solipsists and not care about other people, say, acting purely selfishly. A priori, I have no idea which one is correct.
It seems that as a rationalist, you should be wary of assigning high probabilities here without direct empirical evidence. Especially since you presumably suffer from in-group bias. But perhaps you're aware of studies that support your view that religion is harmful in a simple sense?
(If you consider spreading religion inherently evil, then you have more reason to presume that Mormonism is harmful. You would still have to argue that the harm outweighs any possible benefit, but you'd have a stronger case for assuming that. However, by your comparisons to Islam and Buddhism you seem to mean plain old violence and so forth.)
Do you have empirical evidence that Mormons are more likely to cause harm than atheists? (Let's say in the clear-cut sense of stabbing people instead of in the sense of spreading irrationality.)
I'll claim that, yes, I do have such evidence. The Mormon Church funded many advertisements in favor of California Proposition 8 which denies civil rights to homosexuals.
Even accepting the premise that voting for the proposition was clearly wrong, that's a single anecdote. It does nothing to demonstrate that Mormons are overall worse people than atheists. It is only a single point in the atheists' favor. I could respond with examples of atheists doing terrible things, e.g., the amount of suffering caused by communists.
Anecdotes are not reliable evidence; you need a careful, thorough, and systematic analysis to be able to make confident statements. It's really surprised me how commonly people supply purely anecdotal evidence here and expect it to be accepted (and how often it is accepted!). This is a site all about promoting rationalism, and part of that is reserving judgment unless you have good evidence.
I really don't think a systematic analysis of the morality of Mormons vs. atheists exists, for any given utility function. That kind of analysis is probably close to impossible, in fact, even if you can precisely specify a utility function that a lot of people will agree on. To begin with, it would absolutely have to be controlled to be meaningful ― the cultural, etc. backgrounds of atheists are surely not comparable on average to those of Mormons.
I think this is an issue that rationalists just need to admit uncertainty about. That's life, when you're rational. Only religious people get to be certain most of the time about moral issues. A Mormon asked the same question would be able to say with confidence that the atheists caused more evil, since not following Mormonism is so evil that it would clearly outweigh any minor statistical differences between the two groups in terms of things like violent crime. If you believe in utility functions that depend on all sorts of complex empirical questions, you really can't answer most moral questions very confidently.
I think these two sentences are contradictory. If it is a point in favor of the proposition that atheists are better in some regard than Mormons, then it does something to demonstrate the general case, if only weakly.
Rationality is not about reserving judgment until ideal evidence is available. Rationality is incorporating all the evidence at your disposal. I agree that most of the evidence available is mixed and weak, so it shouldn't be overweighted, but it is still relevant.
I agree that this was not a good thing for them to do, but I don't think it falls into the "clear-cut sense of stabbing people".
I'm operating under the assumption that Wednesday won't grow up to do anything evil, since it's pretty unlikely. I think my friend and her husband have good genes and will be good parents; the remaining factors aren't quite so determinate.
It's not unlikely at all. We already know that her parents will commit one evil act: They're going to indoctrinate their daughter into believing a bunch of nonsense before she's even learned to read, rather than let her make up her own mind. And if Wednesday remains a Mormon, chances are that she'll do the same to her own children.
I would hesitate to call that an evil act. If nothing else, evil requires the intention to do harm, where here the parents are almost certainly intending to do precisely what they believe is in the child's best interests.
If you're a Nazi and you take a pill that causes you to believe Jews are dangerous nonsentient vampires, is killing Jews thereafter less evil? Well, probably in that case all the evil moves causally upstream into the pill-taking. But that, I think, is the same thing we're saying about the pill that is Mormonism.
but the pill was administered you by your parents, who received one from their parents...
if the evil moves upstream to the pill-taking then all (or most) of the evil of mormonism moves upstream to Joseph Smith.
And of course there's no reason for it to stop there. For some reason we haven't explicitly talked about this here AFAICT, but if you're a materialist there's no hope of assigning ultimate evil to people anyway, and there's no point in trying. I'm not saying you disagree.
I don't know by what words to call it, but there is something that to me differentiates the moral qualities of Joseph Smith teaching Mormonism to his followers, and Wednesday's parents teaching it to her: Joseph Smith (I assign high probability) explicitly knew Mormonism to be false, and spread belief in it, knowing its likely consequences, in order to increase his own wealth, status, and opportunity for sex.
That is also the case we're considering in the context of this post -- someone who has evidence that Mormonism is false, but chooses to ignore this evidence for personal gain, and spreads belief in Mormonism by first spreading it in herself.
From one perspective, assuming that spreading lies for profit is actually wrong, that most people would see it on reflection as a less preferable option, and assuming that JS wasn't a mutant, he was mistaken about whether he improved his life by doing so.
fixed =)
Beyond that, I'd find it hard to call any insane person "evil." How do we blame somebody for receiving incorrect sensory inputs?
Of course, this gets into all kinds of analytic philosophy and the "social construction" of sanity. Which is precisely why I want us to be careful what we call evil.
By the same reasoning, an Inquisitor who tortured a woman to death because he was certain she was a witch and that witches are agents of the Devil did nothing evil. Well, whatever, call it 'harmful' instead of evil, if you like. The point is that religious beliefs make those who hold them do things that they would consider evil (or harmful) if they were better rationalists.
To quote Steven Weinberg: "With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion."
Except that torturing a woman because of a belief that she is a witch is not done for her sake.
Regardless, if we are going to judge all good-faith attempts to help somebody else evil unless the information therein imparted conforms to our present beliefs, then I suspect a great deal of the information we give each other (including on this site) will be judged as evil by the same standard in the future.
What, never? While I can't be sure of the actual (as opposed to professed) motivations of people who tortured alleged witches, I'm pretty sure that in some cases the ostensible purpose of the torture was to produce repentance and thereby save the witch's immortal soul. For someone who believes in immortal souls and heaven and hell and so forth, that could easily end up seeming like a transaction that benefits the torturee overall.
(I agree with your second paragraph, though I'm not sure anyone's doing quite what you describe.)
This exact reasoning was generally used to justify the torture of heretics (not witches) until they recanted. After all, no Earthly torture could ever be worse than eternity in Hell, so most versions of utilitarianism would allow anything that keeps souls out of Hell.
No, you're right, I'm sure there are cases in which torturers could at least rationalize that what they were doing was for the sake of the woman's soul.
I've often wondered, from my time as a Catholic: if I intentionally kill someone at the moment of their confession/absolution, such that their soul is perfectly clean and I have extremely good reason to believe (within this framework) that their soul will go to Heaven, would I not be making the truly ultimate sacrifice? If my soul then were to go to Hell, I would have been literally as altruistic as it is possible to be, so my soul should go to Heaven; knowing that, however, might make me go to Hell?
Which is why reasonable moral systems ought to be slow to categorize others' good-faith actions as evil--we never know what we are doing wrong. There's some chance that future civilizations will think of me as evil for eating meat--hell, they could think of our civilization as barbaric for consuming living beings at all, rather than synthesizing sustenance some other way.
Still, point taken.
Not the truly ultimate sacrifice from that perspective, no. I recommend Jorge Luis Borges's short fiction Three versions of Judas for further ideas along those lines.
I think the sort of evil act in question is more along the lines of "go about stabbing people" than "be honest with your children about your theistic beliefs and encourage them to adopt them too".