An ethic of truth.

During the French Enlightenment some of the most powerful thinkers of the day were trying to move beyond religious thinking and toward a rational worldview. One in particular, Denis Diderot, wrote that "we need an ethic of truth for there is nothing more dangerous than to deceive ourselves about the nature of the world". Further, in a naturalistic and atheistic ethics, the only ethical criteria are pleasure and utility.¹ So what can we get out of this idea?

We can get a simple rubric to think about ethics. It won’t necessarily pass philosophical muster, and it may not defeat theistic bigotry, but it might help us think through some of our day to day ethical conundrums without resorting to "my invisible friend told me” or “it’s just obvious”.

	Pleasurable	Unpleasant
Useful	Mitzvah	Vaccines
		Miser
Hindering	Smelling the roses	Sin
	Heroin

The first simple case is where things are useful and pleasurable, the mitzvah case. These are the things that are unambiguously good. The canonical example seems to be getting pregnant. It’s fun and useful. That being said I don't think they were having the overpopulation problems that we are when that canon was written. The second simple example is something that is "anti-useful" and also unpleasant, the sin case. Smashing yourself (or anyone really) with a hammer for no reason. It causes harm and reduces utility. But these cases are too obvious to bother explaining.

The two grey areas are only slightly more problematic. In the first grey area (unpleasant but useful) you can understand the spectrum of possibilities starting with something like vaccines. There is no fun to be had there, but it is clearly useful. Doing your chores or going to the gym are other examples. This utility over pleasure idea can obviously be taken too far. We do not all train to be Special Forces on the off chance we need to defend the nation. We do not route every last dollar into savings and investment.  The second grey area is the mirror image of the first. The case where things that are pleasant but reduce utility. This can be seen on a scale from smelling the roses, which is has long been understood to be a net positive; to freebasing cocaine, which I understand is enormously pleasant, but does have meaningful downsides. We can make sacrifices of utility for pleasure, and do so all the time. Sometimes spending that extra dollar on something that you can’t possibly justify is the right thing to do. Life needs to be enjoyed, and sometimes you have to do unpleasant things to make that possible, but you miss the point of hard work if you don't get to enjoy anything.

Most of us take each of these mixes too far from time to time. We eat too much, we spend too much time at work, we imbibe too much, or penny pinch to the point that it causes upset. Each of us has our vices and the point is not to eliminate them, but to understand the costs and keep our overall long term goals in mind when we make choices. And this rubric of utility and pleasure is meant to help tally the score.

You may have noticed some room for confusion here. For example what if you really like going to the gym and you go so much that you miss out on important things? Is that too much pleasure or too much utility? What if the down side to eating too much is that I get sick? Wouldn't that be pleasure and its opposite fighting it out?  Because we haven't defined our terms pleasure and utility, it has sounded like stuff-we-want and other-stuff-we-want. Simply stated Pleasure is feeling good and Utility is the power to change things. These definitions are probably question begging, but too bad. If you have the philosophical sophistication to tear down concepts like utility and pleasure, then you have issues that I am not addressing here.

There is in these kinds of problems a conflict between the now and the future. There is what you want to do right now (eat chips and watch TV) and what you will wish you had done looking back from tomorrow (gone to the gym). But the reason that you will have wished that you went to the gym is because future you is better off in that case. Thus the chicken and egg problem is perpetual with utility and pleasure, which is fine you just have to pick where you start and end the story.

At the end of the day this is just a specific way to draw up pro/con lists. It is an idea that helps clarify problems. There are, undoubtedly, conundrums that this idea does not help illuminate. And in those cases you would want to use a different interpretation of events to help figure out what you thought was right and what was wrong. But that is another story. 

I hope you find this idea helpful, and its explanation amusing. And I hope that you are now glad that you read this, as opposed to looking at funny pictures on Reddit.  

¹ The last two sentences are basically a paraphrase from this lecture. Birth of the Modern Mind. Which is itself referencing D'Alembert's Dream.

Why we should have Atheist Ministers (Part 1 of N)

The simple version is this: ministers provide services that atheists currently cant get. And in a series of posts I mean to outline what those services are, why we could use them, how to provide them safely, and so on. Today I am going to start with this question: "Who do you go to to help you understand what you believe?"

If you are not inclined to philosophical thought, which is an inclination most people are blessed to be without, then certain ethical, moral and complex pragmatic problems seem vague and intractable. Or even worse they seem like a mix of clear certainties and unanchored opinions. For example most conversations about sexual ethics or the goodness of public policy. I am hard pressed to think of where an atheist could turn to have these questions addressed (not answered, addressed). I've tried to look for secular sexual ethics and found literally nothing. When people talk about it at all, people seem to have no clear ideas, unless they are (anti)religious ideas. And are you going to look to political parties to tell you which policies are right and which are wrong? They will tell you, but it’s a mix of self-righteous assertion and political spin. Or how about the media? Those bastards are beyond useless. So is there anyone who you trust to have thought about these kinds of issues? Do your friends have such a person?

If you're actively church going, then you have a person to go to. A minister. That minister's beliefs are grounded in foundational texts to which you subscribe. And you don't have to take his word as gospel when it comes to welfare policy, but they might be able to frame your questions. You may not like the way religions have handled this responsibility to date. But if you were an atheist when you hit puberty I bet you would have been deeply relieved to have someone you trusted who you talk to. I know it would have saved me a lot of time in high school.

Now you might say "This is exactly what we as atheists are avoiding. Priests and ministers are authoritarian's with values I don't respect and wouldn't trust." But if you consider the general case as I have carefully chosen to describe it, you might see a different possibility. Religious ministers have a mission rooted in theological texts. In order to maintain their credibility they must seem to remain devoted to their foundational texts and the entities presupposed by those texts. What if there was a minister who's "foundational texts" where contemporary research and secular culture? You would have a ministry of science.

A minister of science's mission would be to provide a congregation with an effective and rational understanding of the world as it was empirically knowable. And god knows, with all the flip flopping about the goodness of eggs, red wine and running shoes, we could all the help. An atheist minister would not be offering interpretations of the Bible but interpretations of the research. Someone who would do the reading that you don't have time to do, and the thinking that seems too muddy to bother with and make an honest argument for and against things on secular, ethical, rational grounds.

Taken by itself, this one service sounds more like science journalism than anything else, and that isn't an unfair way to characterize this one service. But as I add other points of service for a secular ministry, it will make more sense. 

And feel free criticize, I need help seeing the other side of these kinds of arguments.