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PhilGoetz comments on Rationality Quotes Thread October 2015 - Less Wrong
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Lewis spent much of his life writing books that were supposed to help people persuade other people to convert, and it is quite certain that nearly all of the pestering Lewis was familiar with was done in the name of his own God. I find it unlikely that, if an army of Lewis clones were made rulers of England, they would allow gay marriage, prostitution, and polygamy.
The name of the book is God in the Dock because it is about accusations against God--and this is most properly an accusation against the Christian (or Jewish, or Muslim) God. It would be hilariously ironic if Lewis were not using it that way.
How does that constitute the tyranny which he described?
Speculations on how Lewis might be corrupted by such power are not useful. What would happen if an army of Phil Goetz clones were made rulers of the US?
ETA: One might also compare and contrast the writings of Lewis (who did not become a tyrant), with, say, Mein Kampf (written by someone who did).
Speculation about "an army of Lewis clones" is not (direct) speculation about Lewis becoming a tyrant, but about Lewis honestly implementing his principles. His principles say that some things we consider good are bad and need to be enforced (unless you actually do think Lewis would permit gay marriage and polygamy if he ran the country).
When there we have it. To you, and to Phil Goetz, a moral belief implies an imperative to make everyone conform to it, had one only the power to do so. The implication is so unconscious and axiomatic to you, that when you and he read Lewis saying how he thinks people should live (and he would indeed be against gay marriage, prostitution, and polygamy), you immediately imagine him imposing it on everyone, and pointing to the unwelcome result as a refutation of Lewis. Of course, the result is only unwelcome to you and Phil because you do not agree with Lewis on how people should live. But then, how will an army of Jiro clones rule, or Phil Goetz clones?
The briefest acquaintance with Lewis' writing, including the quote in question, would indicate that this is antithetical to both his written views and his life. He was an Oxford don, who once refused an honour in order not to be drawn into politics. But if you do not see a gap between "this is how people should live" and "people should be compelled to live so" then you will not only fail to make any sense of Lewis, you should on no account be allowed such power over anyone.
It's true that Lewis separated religious and secular law, but presumably Lewis would want laws against, for instance, murder. It's hard to consistently believe that we should have laws against harmful things, have a skewed idea of what constitutes "harmful things", and not want laws against them.
One possible response is that the harmful things only harm oneself, but Lewis believed that such things harm society, not just oneself. Another possible response is that as a practical matter, it would be a bad idea to ban such things, but that only lasts as long as it's practical--such principles would not lead to the conclusion "we should not ban gay marriage" but rather "we should only ban gay marriage if we can get away with it".
fnord
There it is again. You think it inconsistent to think a thing harmful, and let people do it. Would you ban alcohol?
C.S. Lewis wrote a great deal about how he thought people should live, and why, yet did not lift a finger to compel them. In this, he follows the example of He who Lewis believed the Father of us all. You do not understand this. Well, I do not pretend to write better than Lewis.
BTW, to talk of "banning" gay marriage is tendentious, presupposing that it is and always has been a thing that can only fail of existence by being "banned". What has actually happened in recent years is that there was no such thing recognised by church, state, or anyone, that a demand for social recognition of same-sex unions has developed, and that in various places, secular marriage has been so extended.
I think it's inconsistent to think a thing harmful, and let people do it anyway, given that
1) you don't consider personal freedom good in itself or you don't think the gain to personal freedom balances out the harm, and 2) it's practical to ban it
I wouldn't ban alcohol, because of points 1 and 2. Note that if by "harmful" you mean "harmful, in the net" #1 is equivalent to saying that alcohol isn't harmful.
I am skeptical that Lewis believed #1. I find it hard to think that Lewis believed that divorce is harmful by itself but has enough good effects to more than balance out the harm.
And refusing to ban things based solely on #2 would mean only conditionally refusing to ban them. If you don't want to ban divorce based on #2 and society changed so that you could ban divorces without nasty side effects, you should then ban it.
Lewis actually said he didn't want to ban divorce, but his rationale could equally apply to banning murder--it's incoherent.
I don't think I understand your argument about #1. Surely there's a difference between thinking
and thinking
For instance, suppose someone believes the following things:
That appears to me to be a coherent position; someone whose position it is will disapprove both of drinking alcohol and of prohibiting it. And it seems to me that there's no particular impossibility in supposing that Lewis held a position like this regarding same-sex sex and divorce, or that he would have held a similar position on same-sex marriage if the question had come up and he'd taken it seriously.
(I don't hold such a position regarding alcohol consumption, same-sex sex, same-sex marriage, or divorce, but I think I do regarding lying for small-scale personal gain and callous indifference to the troubles of one's neighbours.)
"Harmful on net" means "after you balance the harm against the good, it is harmful".
The first part of that doesn't work by itself, since Lewis believes in compulsion for, for instance, anti-murder laws.
And the rest of it means that if you became convinced that the side effects of prohibition weren't as bad as you originally believed, you would then support prohibition. The question then becomes "would Lewis think there are really bad side effects to not allowing same-sex marriage". I doubt it.
I understand what "harmful on net" means, and I'm not sure why you think I don't. The point is that there are different things that might or might not be "harmful on net", and you need to not mix them up, and I think you are mixing them up. Specifically, "is drinking alcohol harmful on net?" and "is being allowed to drink alcohol harmful on net?" are very different questions, because of the things I listed that are functions of whether people are allowed to drink alcohol more than of whether they actually do.
I'm afraid I don't understand what argument you're making. It appears to have the form "Such-and-such a proposition about alcohol prohibition is wrong, because C S Lewis believed in compelling people not to commit murder" and I don't even understand how anything of that form could be right -- because there are potentially relevant differences between drinking alcohol and committing murder. (Examples: most people who disapprove of drinking alcohol think that murder is much, much worse; empirical evidence suggests that prohibiting alcohol is liable to result in a very large black market in alcohol, while prohibiting murder results in only a small black market in murder.)
[EDITED to fix a trivial typo in the foregoing paragraph.]
Yes, or at least almost. (Well, not me because as I said above I wasn't describing my own position on alcohol. But someone who holds that position would indeed switch to approving of prohibition if they decided that the side effects of prohibition and the badness of the compulsion itself didn't outweigh the harm done by drinking. The bit in italics is why I say "almost" rather than an unqualified "yes".)
I don't know what Lewis would have said about same-sex marriage if the question had been put to him in such a way as to get it taken seriously despite his society's general presumption against the idea. For what it's worth, I think he probably would have opposed same-sex marriage (perhaps arguing that it is simply impossible for two people of the same sex to marry, and that calling anything a same-sex marriage is an abuse of language), but if not then it would probably have been on grounds of freedom rather than of bad side effects of prohibition. (You can prohibit certain classes of marriage without needing much intrusion into individuals' lives; it's hard to see how there'd be scope for a big black market in same-sex marriages; any precedents established by the prohibition would probably also be ones Lewis would have been inclined to approve of.)
It may be worth noting that I am not Richard Kennaway and am not necessarily arguing for the same position as he is.
Richard, this is not what I believe, but rather what Lewis almost certainly believed, as evidenced by how all Christians, everywhere, throughout all history up to Lewis' time, have behaved. It would be an astonishing coincidence if the one Christian we were talking about were the one secretly willing to grant religious freedom to non-Christians.
(Yes, religious freedom includes the right to polygamy and prostitution.)
In fact I have several times explicitly stated the same thing you wrote here, as a critique of Eliezer's outline of CEV, which assume (without even noticing it) that a moral belief implies an imperative to propagate itself.
I prefer to determine what Lewis almost certainly believed by looking at what he certainly wrote. The very quote that started this discussion is explicitly saying the opposite.
Besides, it's nearly five hundred years since the Thirty Years War knocked the stuffing out of Christian proselytisation by the sword, and the imperative to force people into belief, or at least practice, has been declining ever since. Further history here.
The fact that they no longer tell people to convert or die does not mean they grant freedom of religion. I'm not aware of any society with a Christian majority that has ever refrained from enforcing its moral rules on the rest of its society. I am aware of probably hundreds, if I added them up, throughout history, that have done so. Find me a dozen counterexamples and I'll listen.
Yes, most Christian societies have laws against murder, then again so do most non-Christian societies.
I assume Phil means that Christian-majority societies have tended to enforce not only Christian rules that are widely shared among non-Christians, but also Christian rules that are not. Phil, would you care to clarify?
Well, all the examples cited in this thread are also widely shared among non-Christians.
From talking about C.S. Lewis, the conversation has now floated up to the outer edges of the atmosphere.
The United States currently has a Christian majority. And to the best of my knowledge, a large majority of people in charge of the government in all Western countries are currently Christians. That is certainly true of the present Supreme Court in the United States which legalized gay marriage, which is currently composed of six Catholics and three Jews.
If being majority Christian means being tyrannical, the USA is currently a tyranny, and so is every other Western country.
In which case what does this have to do with C.S. Lewis?
The US is majority Christian, but not majority alieving-Christians.
I don't think that is true? There is a huge contingent of evangelicals (last I checked, a bit under half of Americans believe in creationism), it only takes a few non-creationist but religious Christians to get to a majority.
I believe, at this point, that it might be helpful to quote from "Dignitatis Humanae", an official Vatican document on the subject of religious freedom:
To elaborate slightly:
Now, I'm not saying that all denominations of Christianity have an equally strong stance in favour of religious freedom (I've heard about some extremely militant modern Protestant groups, particularly in America). But this is strong evidence that there is a rather large group of Catholics who do believe in the idea of religious freedom; and if Lewis had done so as well, then he would hardly be alone in this stance.
(Dignitatis Humanae was published about two years after Lewis' death)
And yet the Catholic Church and its members still work to ban birth-control in countries where it thinks that's possible.
I don't care what they say they do. I care what they do.
I don't see what that has to do with religious freedom. They're not stopping anyone from being muslim, or protestant, or atheist.
No country permited gay marrige until about 20 years ago and western countries haven't permitted polygammy for millenia. Are you saying they were all tyranical?
It's "tyranny" in the sense that Lewis describes: using force to be a moral busybody.
It may not be tyranny if by tyranny if your definition of tyranny requires a certain amount of being a moral busybody, and just a little bit isn't enough to count as tyranny. I suspect that this is the definition you're using, but Lewis's definition doesn't contain a quantity threshhold.
IIRC, "God in the Dock" is the title of just one of the essays in the book, and many (most? all?) of the others aren't particularly about "accusations against God". The quotation in this thread, I think, comes from one of the ones that isn't.
The quotation is from "The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment", which can be found by itself online.
BTW, anyone searching out the book should beware that there are two versions, one a subset of the other and not including this essay. The shorter volume is "God in the Dock: Essays on Theology", which is the first section of the longer, "God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics", also published under the title "Undeceptions: Essays on Theology and Ethics".
The essay called "God in the Dock" actually has little connection with its title. It is about the difficulties he found presenting the Christian faith to modern (i.e. of 1948) unbelievers of the working classes, based on his experiences in teaching soldiers in the R.A.F. These difficulties are mainly about wide differences in cultural and intellectual background.
The closing sentences of the essay may have wider application:
The book is a collection. Lewis did not choose the title.
(The title is taken from the title of one of the essays. It was published well after Lewis died, so I assume he didn't intend them to be a book at all.)
It would still be hilariously ironic if Lewis made such an observation, and didn't explain how he and his God are not such moral busybodies. It would be another example to add to my list of examples of people whose criticism of others is accidentally truer criticism of themselves.